#but as you shouldve guessed by now my thought process goes beyond the leather jacket as you put it and i hope that even if you dont agree

[halion-halion-aito]

kon might have had "independence" but that was so bad for him...he was a child and went through so much in his 1994 solo because his whole life revolved around being superboy and he didnt have a proper support system. its literally stated in that book that what he needed was a life outside of superheroing and staying w martha kent allowed him to heal and realize he has worth outside of the mask. thinking of him as two separate characters is such a shallow way of looking at him and shows u have no understanding of the themes in his books

oh dear, have you by any chance read my answer?

what i copied and pasted is:

the independence bit you brought up is something i soo love about it!! also bc not only bis independence, but the way he lived it in itself was a big theme. the way he lived this big autonomy like a fantasy, like you said, but then he found out he was more than that… left to himself. that he did have a good relationship with clark but, we must admit, he wasn't as present as he could've been. that the agony of the last issues came from everything that was built up in the previous part of the run- he'd spent so much time being free that he lost the direction he had. and in the end he broke down

how was i supposed to be clearer than that?

if you think my issue was him having been living with martha and john you didn't understand a thing i said. to be true, i actually appreciated that bit a lot!! it was the finale of his solo and i remember from the first time i read it a sense of catharsis

the problem is that goeff johns didn't elaborate shit on what had happened before. a nice thing to do would have been, and let me rewrite the exact words i wrote already,

to witness a process of healing, i think. like seeing the way he would have rebuilt himself finding out who he really was, growing up and stuff.

seeing the way he would have lived a new life, rebuilt himself after he broke down, learned to know himself not anymore as a child superhero star, but as conner. kon. the name is a whole other thing that i overthink about a lot, but that's not the point (it does tie in this, but i don't wanna make it any longer)

instead, geoff johns threw in the whole mess this stupid retcon that deviated completely from the meaning of kon's journey until then and the foundations of his character.

i mean, you talk about "a life outside of the mask", and we did see him go to school from time to time, but after geoff johns took over the entirety of his internal dilemma was about his legacy, rather than who he would be - this is a conclusion that came a tiny bit too late, considering that stepping out of the superheroing world was a step he was meant to have made already

and this is what i mean when i say i feel like they're completely different character; because i feel like none of kon's previous experience reflect themselves in his post-2003 incarnation, and i firmly believe that a person's experiences are the thing impacting their personality the most, so can you really say that a character who feels like he hasn't had those experiences is really the same character? it's simpler than it sounds actually. but i hope you finally get what i mean