Man of Steel hit theaters a couple of weeks back, and its well on its way to becoming a blockbuster, because we love nothing more than watching feminine men dress up in tight body hugging muscle spandex that accentuate the weiner.

90% of the costume budget went into designing that huge cockpocket.

Also, the Nolan formula of turning comic book heroes into Shakespearean characters has been a huge success, bringing these characters from nerdville to mainstream. Superhero movies have hit cult status, and everyone’s a Batman expert or a Joker groupie these days, what with all the knowledge they assimilated from a grand total of 0 comics and 0 DCAU movies.

Man of Steel is another one of those realistic superhero movies, as indicated by Nolan’s involvement in the production. You can tell it’s realistic from the fact that Superman has finally figured out the complicated concept of an underwear, and exactly where it is supposed to be worn.

But if the producers are to churn out a realistic version of Superman, the audience has the right to refute suspension of disbelief and look at Superman from a realistic POV.

Superman’s greatest adversary is Lex Luthor, who has engaged Superman in some epic battles not only in the funny pages, but in the big screen and on TV as well. He is one of the greatest villains in comic book history, and the makers of Man of Steel have paid a glowing homage to him in the movie by leaving him out of it altogether.

Non-superpowered and non-extraterrestrial villains have no place in  realistic reboots.

Everyone knows Superman/Lex Luthor are like Batman/Joker, or Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader, or Stone Cold/Vince Mcmahon. The Yin and the Yang. The Dark and the Light. But this is the tricky part that everyone has got mixed up. Unlike the other examples, the. Superman/Lex Luthor rivalry is not as clear cut black & white as it seems. Superman is actually the bad guy and Lex Luthor is the misunderstood hero, that is, if you look at it realistically from the POV of anyone over 13 years of age. Here is why you are accidentally cheering for the wrong guy in the most iconic feud in comic book history.

1. Rooting for the home team
The Australian cricket team, back in the 90s, had Waugh, Gilchrist, Mcgrath, Ponting, Warne, Bevan and a bunch of other supermen that made Team Australia a cricketing giant.

Ricky Ponting with a life sized replica of Team Australia's testicles.

The Indian cricket team had Sachin and Sachin’s bat. And some other guys who sort of stood around on your TV screen. Sure the Aussie team was the epitome of invincible badassery, but you still supported Sachin and his rag-tag group of clowns, despite them trudging from defeat to defeat. Some bonds are bigger than a win-loss record.

Superman, for all his fancy powers and fabulous dress sense, is an alien, a foreigner. He was born on Krypton and ended up on Earth completely by accident-because Superman’s dad wanted to protect him. He did this by putting baby-Superman inside an unmanned rocket and blasting him into outer space, because that’s how safety works on Planet Krypton.

"Just remember to fasten your seatbelt if the rocket flies into a black hole, son."

Lex Luthor is one of us, a human, born and brought up under our planet’s blue skies. He shares all our strengths and attributes, like our incredible capacity for assholery, as seen in his plans for world domination. He also shares all our human weaknesses.

Excessive hairfall being one of them.

He understands us, and we are supposed to understand him. Sure he's not perfect like Superman, he is flawed, complex and ambiguous, but most of all, he's family, and that's why you are obligated to cheer for Lex Luthor.

What makes the Rocky series so great? Or Star Wars? Or even Lagaan? It’s about the underdog going up against the odds, in a long shot where nobody thinks he’ll win. We identify with the underdog because the underdog is an everyman, nothing remarkable or extraordinary about him, except the will to win. On the other side you have the top dog, the all powerful franchise player who has every resource at his disposal, and simply steamrolls over weaker opposition without any strategy.

In the DC universe we have one character who was handed all his Godlike powers from birth, which he did absolutely nothing to earn, and which he occasionally uses to impress his gloryhunting girlfriend.

We can all sleep better knowing this man is protecting us.

On the other hand you have a common man, just like any other, with no powers, using innovation and creativity to battle an infinitely more powerful opponent. Which one are you cheering for, people? And what does that say about you? You would rather support the guy who was born with everything over the guy who had to fight for everything. That’s a great example to set for your kids.

"I'm sorry you weren't born with supernatural gifts, baby. That makes you a loser."

Lex Luthor, the bald 50-something completely normal scientist who wouldn't even beat Rajpal Yadav in a fistfight, hangs in there with the world's greatest superhero by building nuclear weapons, biotechnological gases, powerful exoskeletons, robots, superhero clones and a whole bunch of other stuff. When you think about it that way, you just can't not admire this man for doing so much with so little.

Lex Luthor trying to take over the world using goddamn cakes! CAKES!

Superman, with his powers of super-speed, flight, heat vision, freeze breath, X-ray vision, healing factor and all around invincibility, fights his enemies in a way that puts all these superpowers to optimal use-

There are innumerable fights where Superman literally forgets a crucial superpower until the last minute when he's about to lose, or sometimes gives up on the fight altogether. The guy is an clearly an example of over-privileged idiot who's just barely stumbling from victory to victory owing to his inheritance. If there was ever a sign of a guy being gifted way beyond the grasp of his own tiny comprehension, it is this-

3. A matter of who has the bigger balls
Superman as already mentioned, has powers that render him pretty much invincible. Even if he is exposed kryptonite, it's still pretty hard to kill him now given immunity developed after all the times Lex shoved a shard up of kryptonite up Superman's ass.

"This kryptonite dildo needs to be a little longer to hit all the right spots."

But despite all that, Superman still felt the need to hide behind a fake identity. Yes, the man who cannot be killed still feels vulnerable enough to hide behind an alternate identity. And not just any identity. He went to such great lengths to divert all suspicion that he ended up becoming this-

"Obviously I -- I-- am -- er -- NOT Superman --"

The guy could have been a suave billionaire playboy or a soldier. But apparently those identities weren't inconspicuous enough in a world where there is an alien invasion and mutated monsters showing up every month.  So instead he decided to inflict a level of self-humiliation only thought possible on MTV Roadies, in order to appease his identity paranoia.

Now you could say that Superman, being a superhero, has to go undercover because that's just what superheroes do. Let's think about it for a minute. Superman is 1 of the top 3 superheroes in the world, the other 2 being Batman and Spiderman. Batman keeps his identity a secret because his whole gimmick is to scare the shit out of people by dressing up as a giant bat. Behind anonymity, he is fear and terror. Without it, he's just a strange guy in a black leather suit, possibly with a BDSM fetish.

Though that sort of a Batman movie would make for some great porno.

Spiderman is a teenager, and teenagers have to go to school, and deal with all sorts of authority troubles. Besides, if they found out his identity, the government would probably lock him up in a juvenile detention center. Peter Parker also has an aunt who was born in the Jurassic age, and he is smart enough to know he can't protect her from the bad guys if his identity is known.

Hell, he can't even protect her from falling down the stairs at night.

But if you look at normal superheroes like Iron Man and the Fantastic Four and X-Men, they don't really give a shit, despite having far less superpowers than the Man of Steel. They live in their big-ass building, which have kick-ass security measures, but are still broken into anyway. Superman on the hand, doesn't even have to rely on weak man-made construction, he's got the goddamn Fortress of Solitude to thwart of any attacks.

He apparently uses it only to get chicks drunk before date-raping them.

Luthor, despite having a rap sheet longer than that of the entire Mumbai underworld, goes by no aliases. He is not known as Chotta Lex or Takloo , but simply Lex Luthor. No dual identity, no bullshit. The man's on the Wanted list of not just every country on this planet, but also on planets of other universes! But does he bother with a wig or a complicated double life?

Does this look like the face of a man who gives a fuck?

Hell, he even had the balls to run for President using his own name. If you can't grasp the sheer ball-power required to do that, think of it in real world terms- Osama Bin Laden walking into USA and openly contesting as an independent candidate.

"As part of my manifesto, I promise to send women back into the kitchen."

So on the one hand we have a hero who is afraid to show his face, and on the other a villain who stands by everything he does. No question about who's got the bigger balls here.

Unlike Batman or other superheroes, Superman isn’t really a universal do-gooder. Despite his trans-universe adventures, he’s more of an American hero. Which is not to say Batman and co. aren’t, they are heroes who are American. Superman is an American hero. He represents what America sees as good. Which is not always a bad thing, this writer loves all American exports to the world-

God bless the US of A!

But then someone with Superman’s powers, doing exactly what a government dictates, the same government that led the west into not 1 but 2 wars in the last 10 years.

Imagine a Superman acting as a soldier of the American government, deployed against some hapless third world country whose army looks like this-

Here seen planning the war strategy that involves Voodoo magic, human sacrifice and naked dancing.

But that will never happen, you say. Superman will never be evil for the sake of his government, you say. This is just the conspiracy theory of an over-bored mind, you say. Well of course you are right, as is indicated by the time Superman finished his superhero career and switched to the decidedly non-political stance of a covert American spy, supporting an anti-communist uprising in South America.

Oh and it doesn't end there. His political leanings create a full blown nuclear crisis with Russia, and fucks up the entire US of  A. Yes, not only does he antagonize the biggest European superpower, he also ruins the country he’s supposed to protect.

"I should have just gone with Wonder Woman."

But that’s still not the end of it. In the same story, Superman, in search of new ways to top his government funded douchebaggery, takes a trip to Gotham City and almost kills everyone’s favorite superhero...

And that's not the only time Superman has acted as a tool of American propaganda, he's been at it for over half a century!

So what are our other options? There’s Lex Luthor, with his plans of world domination.

Although he is extremely generous with the deadlines.

No, not really. Lex Luthor is the misunderstood hero. A closer look at his motivations show that he is not fighting the world, just Superman. And why? Because he wants to protect the world from extra terrestrial threats, like a super-powered super-stupid anti-communist fanatic. Even in an alternate timeline where Superman grew up in Russia due to his spaceship landing a few hours later than the original timeline, Lex Luthor became President of America and went all Narendra Modi on the country, saving it from the brink of self destruction and making it prosperous again. 

The only thing left standing between him and the redemption of America was Twilight.

In case you were wondering what happened to Superman in that story, he became "the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact" and helps his Russian government take over the whole world. Now that it's established that Superman will be a government bitch as long as they offer him a citizenship, one can only wonder what would have happened if his spaceship had landed at the wrong country at the wrong time. For example-

Der Supermensch- Fighting for Truth, Justice and the Genocidal Way.

Or even worse-

"What a great team!" -said no one ever.

When you think about it, even if Lex Luthor is a complete asshole, we are still better off cheering him.