OSPod Episode 126: Ostracism, Superman, and Red and Blue Geographically Aligned!

In the 2025 Superman movie, James Gunn gave Lex Luthor the simplest possible motivation: he just hates Superman. No childhood trauma, no ideological disagreement, no sympathetic backstory. Nicholas Hoult plays him as a rich guy who cannot stand that there is someone better than him, and the movie never once asks you to feel sorry for him. Red called this the movie's secret weapon—while Superman stays uncomplicatedly good, Luthor carries all the pettiness and obsession, and the contrast makes both characters work better than they would have if the villain had been given pathos.

What Superman's Villain Reveals About His Hero

Red and Blue spent the episode working through why this Superman movie felt like it had been made specifically for them. Both have long argued that Superman does not need to be dark, conflicted, or morally compromised to be interesting—he just needs to be a good person trying his best. The movie confirms this by giving Superman no real arc of behavioral change. Instead, his journey is one of internal realization: he thought he was being Superman because his Kryptonian parents wanted him to, but when he meets them and sees their actual intentions (which are, in his words, "speciesist" and "unthinkable"), he understands that being this kind of person was his idea all along.