(THERE ARE TOTALLY SPOILERS FOR MAN OF STEEL IN HERE)
If you look over the last few posts in this blog reaching all the way back to September, you'll notice a couple of themes which sort of overlap. They're basically:
A) People are hungry for (and are producing) new and interesting takes on old stories, probably due to the absolutely bonkers amount of media available in modern life.
B) Many big budget movies and games of a genre that frequently paint the protagonist (and the player) as a shining beacon of heroism have started to question that role. See: DMZ, Zero Dark Thirty, Spec Ops: The Line.
It's pretty obvious how these themes can overlap, and together they add up to a lot of media that are primarily concerned with deconstructing whatever it is they're depicting. This means critically examining aspects or tropes of a work that people usually take for granted and trying to apply them to something more closely resembling reality. The result usually is not-strictly speaking-fun, though when done well it can be quite engaging. In some cases it can even perform a necessary function, as when Spec Ops managed to make a lot of video game players and creators realize that maybe making games where the central mechanic is shooting people in the head as realistically as possible isn't the best way to depict heroism.
As far as comics go, the gold standard for deconstruction was Watchmen. It presented an alternate universe where superheroes exist as a fact of life, eventually being outlawed as vigilantes, and these heroes were in turn depicted as people who turned to that life due to ridiculously messed-up personalities. The comic also featured Dr. Manhattan (the blue guy in the picture up there), the only character in this altered history with actual superpowers. He's depicted as a god in the story, and his mere existence is enough to tip the scales of the Cold War in the 80s much farther than they ever went in real life. A character in the book remarks, "The superman exists, and he's American." Later he admits that this statement was altered from its original content, with "superman" standing in for his original phrasing, "God".
So, Man of Steel.
