Quote Originally Posted by Agent Z View Post
Why is this flaw one he shouldn't have?
Because people don't actually do any literary analysis.

Clark has almost always been really bad with family relations. He's just not good at it and struggles to connect with people who're related to him. Must be hard to spend your entire life thinking you're the last of your kind, building your entire self-image with that fact, and then finding out that you're not actually alone. Is that a great feeling? I'm sure it must be, but it's one Clark rarely knows what to do with and it always takes him time to find his stride when it comes to family.

And I could go down the list of characters Clark has been related to (or thought he was) and how he treated them badly. But we can just look at Conner's early years and see the same pattern that played out with Kara, Mon-El, etc. And not only did Clark keep Conner at a distance and have almost no interactions with him for a long ass time, he left the kid under the authority of a skeevy talent agent Clark had never met, who clearly had ignoble intentions and a jailbait daughter with intentions of her own that most fathers would be at least a little wary of. But Clark thought it was perfectly okay to let this naive kid go off with a dude who only cared about making money off Conner's "S."

Clark is bad at being a father/family patriarch. That is what the page has told us for eighty years. It wasn't until Jon that Clark was written as a good, Rockwellian father. But that doesn't fit the narrative everyone has in their heads about Superman being a paragon of virtue with no "real" flaws worth noting.

Young Justice wrote Clark correctly, with an eye towards his actual character and not the legend he's become in our culture. People just dislike the notion that Superman isn't perfect and has some serious character flaws.