James Gunn isn’t backing down on his controversial Jor-El twist, and Superman fans are furious. The debate started after a viral post from Comicodigy asked a pretty fair question: “Clark spent his life believing his parents sent him to protect Earth and that Kryptonians were protectors. Shouldn’t Kara have told him the truth at some point since she is traditionally older than Clark and would have remembered Krypton?”
Fans immediately jumped in with theories. One Facebook comment read, “From what I heard they’re giving Kara the Golden Age origin where she was born and raised on a surviving chunk of Krypton. So she’d have never met his parents.” Another argued, “Lex has staged a fake Kryptonian invasion before, so I’m leaning more towards the message being manipulated. Either way is cool tho, give us something fresh.”
Then came the more cynical responses: “She was only a kid herself when she left, while it seems that this version of her character was usually hammered and off world in later years, so wasn’t there to tell him much anyway.” Fans also reminded everyone that Kara traditionally arrives years after Clark because of the Phantom Zone, making her appear younger despite being older.
That might have been the end of it, until Gunn himself decided to weigh in. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Gunn doubled down on his version of Superman’s origin. When asked about the controversial Jor-El change, he didn’t sugarcoat his response: “They’re s**t out of luck!”
So what’s his reasoning? Gunn claims the Jor-El twist is essential to Clark’s emotional journey: “That’s the whole point of the movie, that Superman thinks he is doing something because it is his destiny and his Kryptonian parents have set him out to do this thing, and along the way he discovers through the love of the people who are actually his parents that he’s doing these things not because of someone else, but because of himself. It’s like taking accountability in the deepest way possible that his morality is not based on some figure outside of himself, but on his own choices. I think it’s really beautiful in that way, and I’m not gonna change that.”
But many fans aren’t buying it. As one angry post pointed out, Clark was raised by the Kents for 30 years. Does Gunn really expect us to believe that a garbled 30-second hologram from Jor-El was more important to Superman’s moral code than decades with his human parents? And if Gunn’s goal was to make Superman “more human,” maybe having David Corenswet’s Superman get beaten to a pulp for most of the film was already enough?
James Gunn also doesn’t see Jor-El as evil, explaining, “I don’t really even think of Jor-El and Lara as being totally evil. They just have this mindset that humans are less than what they are. We’re sea turtles to them. They’re just trying to keep the Kryptonian genes alive.” That’s… umm, different?
Supergirl’s new backstory isn’t helping the controversy either. Gunn confirmed she’s based on Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, saying, “She was on a piece of Krypton that drifted away from the planet, and she lived there for the first 14 years of her life. Where she watched everyone around her die. So she’s a much harsher and more f**ked up Supergirl than you’ve been used to thus far.”
In Tom King’s version, Zor-El sends Kara to space using his brother’s ship design, but Gunn seems to treat her arrival on Earth as pure coincidence. Fans are already poking holes in that logic: of all the planets in the universe, her ship just happens to land on the same one as Superman?
The backlash isn’t slowing down, and Gunn’s blunt “tough luck” attitude isn’t winning him many fans. Maybe Superman doesn’t need Jor-El to be rewritten into a genetic elitist. Maybe Gunn should have left that Bradley Cooper hologram in the Fortress of Solitude where it belongs.
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