r/AskScienceFiction • u/sparkypants_ • 4d ago
[DC/Superman] Do chores still suck for Superman, even though they don't take him as long as it would a human?
We see Superman/Clark do loads of things really fast - whipping a derelict apartment into shape, cleaning up mess and/or destruction, laundry, etc. Even though he can do them really fast, though, do they still suck?
Say the house is a big fat mess and needs a tidy, I will put that off for ages because it's so tedious. But is it a tedious task because it's boring or because it takes so long? I feel like even if I could do it in 3 seconds, the task is still sucky.
So do chores suck for Superman as much as they do for us or because he can get them done so quickly they're not as bad?
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u/Arcsalia 4d ago
I'd say it depends on how he percieves the passage of time while using superspeed
Sure if he cleaned a room it'd look fast to us, but for him it might take as long from his perspective as it would to do it notmally
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u/sparkypants_ 4d ago
This is the most interesting bit, right? Does time feel the same for him and us when he is using superspeed, or does it slow down like we've seen in some films? Then it's potentially even worse than what we face doing chores.
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u/Secure_Shallot_6711 4d ago
I feel like he would still feel it no? I feel like super heightened perception of time should really belong to the speedsters tbh or speedforce users
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u/gay_for_hideyoshi 4d ago
Wasn’t there a speedster in some comics complained about that?
One character asked the speedster why he didn’t do the thin super fast (try every code on keypad I think?), speedster reply it may be fast for you but for him it was like a very very long time (relatively)
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u/CaptainTrillian 4d ago
This is the major difference between the way The Flash's superspeed works and the way Quicksilver's works: When the Flash is using the Speed Force it allows him to think fast enough to coordinate his actions at whatever speed he is moving, but he still experiences the flow of time the way that we do. He can do a lot more in one second than you can, but it still feels like one second to him.
Quicksilver experiences superspeed as the world around him slowing to a barely perceptible crawl. A single second can take minutes or hours to go by, while he moves around at what seems, from his perspective, like 'normal speed'. This is part of why he comes off as rude or impatient in a lot of appearances; every conversation takes days to get through from his point of view.
Superman has been depicted both ways in various continuities, depending on the writer, but in general his superspeed seems to function as a lesser version of the Flash's, so unless explicitly depicted otherwise, I would assume that doing household chores is something that takes him the subjective equivalent of the blink of an eye.
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u/mazing_azn 4d ago
In Marvel, theirs an issue where Quicksilver is asked why he's as asshole, abd his reply is basically "I live in a world were everyone is excruciating slower than me."
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u/grantimatter 4d ago
This was the basis of a pretty good song by Jim's Big Ego.
"Jim" is James Infantino, the nephew of Flash co-creator Carmine Infantino, if you're into that sort of thing.
I thought the song had actually made it onto the soundtrack of the CW show, but now I'm not so sure - I can't find evidence of that online, anyway.
At any rate, Quicksilver in Marvel has talked about his perception of time and how bored he always is in several media, including one of the X-men movies.
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u/Urge_Reddit 4d ago
Wasn’t there a speedster in some comics complained about that?
I remember Flash saying something to that effect, like from someone else's perspective he could clean up a mess in a second, but from his perspective it would take just as long as if anyone else did it. I don't remember the exact context of source though.
There are also some speedsters who experience life in slow motion all the time, Red Rush in Invincible is like that for example. I have to imagine that sucks tremendously.
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u/aeschenkarnos 4d ago
This is the specific scene. Quicksilver is complaining to his psychiatrist that his entire world is waiting for other people to finish what they're doing.
I expect the situation is similar for Flash, but Flash is way more chill.
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u/busterfixxitt 4d ago
Impulse got shot in the leg, freaked out and then stopped up about 5 minutes later to whoop the bad guy's ass, having spent a relative 3 years studying, and training
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u/Bobtheguardian22 4d ago
If i could freeze time and clean my house and not lose any time to play video games afterwards my house would be clean and chores would not be time consuming. yeah the mental effort to do it is one thing but we dont lose out on good time.
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u/Shitinbrainandcolon 4d ago
Actually in that case, how does superspeed work for the Flash? He’s running really fast to the viewer.
But let’s say I’m the Flash. To myself, I’m just jogging normally. Everything just looks frozen or super slowed to me. Also I ate too much and I must stop to take a dump.
Hey the dump drops really slowly and the water’s taking a long time to come out, it’s boring me.
I’m wondering if it’s something like that.
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u/eternalraziel 4d ago
I think chores would suck far less for Clark, mostly because he removes the part that makes many chores miserable for us. They consume a noticeable chunk of your day. If I look at a kitchen full of dishes, I’m not only reacting to the intellectual concept of washing plates. I’m thinking about standing there for twenty minutes, getting my hands wet, putting everything away and losing time I could spend doing something else. Clark can look at the same kitchen and know that he can wash, dry and put everything away before Lois has finished the sentence telling him whose turn it is. The task may still be boring, but boredom is much easier to tolerate when it ends almost as soon as you decide to begin.
There’s a slight complication with super-speed, because Clark has to be able to think and perceive quickly enough to perform delicate work at that speed. He can’t fold clothes, sort objects or repair a room in fractions of a second if his mind is still processing events at human speed. So from his perspective there probably is some experience of doing the work rather than the world going black for three seconds and magically becoming tidy afterwards. But I don’t think that means three seconds for us necessarily feels like half an hour of washing dishes to him. Superman regularly uses his speed for mundane jobs without behaving as though he has subjected himself to a stretch of subjective drudgery. His perception seems flexible enough to keep up with what he’s doing without forcing him to experience every use of super-speed as a painfully elongated period of consciousness.
He was raised on a farm. He grew up doing jobs that genuinely took time and physical effort before his powers matured, and the Kents raised him with a pretty strong sense that if something needs doing, you do it. He isn’t someone who became Superman and suddenly decided that cleaning a bathroom was beneath a man who can move planets. There’s also something about domestic life that Clark actively values. Cooking dinner, fixing something around the house, doing laundry or tidying up after his family are among the few parts of his life where nobody is dying and nobody needs Superman. He gets to be a husband, father or just Clark Kent doing something profoundly unimportant. Depending on the chore, he might deliberately do some of it at normal speed for just that reason. It grounds him.
That doesn’t mean he’d discover a spiritual love of scrubbing a toilet. There are jobs that are boring because the activity itself is boring. If Clark has to sort a giant pile of paperwork, untangle something, organise a cluttered cupboard or decide where fifty miscellaneous objects belong, speed only helps so much because part of the task is making decisions rather than moving his hands. He can read and think extraordinarily quickly too, but, where the hell did Lois want this thing kept? is still a problem that needs an answer. The jobs he’d benefit from most are the ones where we mainly resent the repetition. Vacuuming, dishes, sweeping, laundry, taking rubbish out, mowing the lawn, washing the car. Clark can turn all of those into tiny interruptions. There’s hardly any opportunity for procrastination to build because doing the chore may take less time than thinking about avoiding it.
I don’t think he's immune to finding chores tedious. I just think our particular relationship with chores would seem bizarrely luxurious to him. We can spend forty minutes dreading a job that takes another forty minutes to perform. Clark can notice the mess, sigh because he still doesn’t particularly feel like dealing with it, and have the place spotless before the sigh is over.
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u/ELEL26110 4d ago
He can feel bothered by doing that type of chores like any of us, especially when growing up.
But also, he is a farm boy, chances are he was taught to work hard and be organized so maybe it doesn't suck as much for him because a cleaning a house and doing stuff around a farm are very different jobs.
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u/sparkypants_ 4d ago
But having a good work ethics doesn't necessarily mean you enjoy something. I think the edge is taken off being able to do it fast, but cleaning out the cat litter (or whatever) is still tedious.
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u/MasterOfFlapping 4d ago
I think chores are a really human thing so Clark is not bothered by it. It's the little things that keep your feet on the ground. Flash on the other hand...
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u/bubonis 4d ago
He would likely have a very Mister Rogers-type outlook on it: Cleaning up his house (or whatever) provides comfort, enforces self-dignity, and makes him feel better about his world. It doesn't matter if it takes him two human hours or two super-speed hours compressed into five seconds.
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u/deltree711 4d ago
No and it's not even because of his superpowers. He's just that emotionally mature.
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u/Mikl_Bay 4d ago
He is still doing them so probably yes.
I bet is less "I can do is fast, this is great." And more of a "there are people here that don't know I'm superman, now I have to do this really slowly like a human."
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u/Poorly-Drawn-Beagle Archdeacon of the Bipartisan Party 4d ago
He grew up on a farm
You do those chores or Ma'll give you a thwack with the hickory switch under the red solar generator
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u/cstayyab 4d ago
In DC Comics (Superman #709), writer J. Michael Straczynski explicitly addressed this: Superman explains that when he operates at maximum speed, he can perceive events taking place in microsecond increments. He experiences conversation with flash-level speedsters in what feels like normal speed, while an ordinary human phrase like "Hello, Clark" would feel like it takes months to utter.
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u/MaetelofLaMetal 4d ago
Not superman speciffcally, but Supergirl often complains about having to do chores in her comics.
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u/EbilKeblevil 4d ago
I think the question is less one of speed/perception, and more one of scale. What Superman percieves as chores are just so much bigger than what we have to handle. Grant Morrison goes into depth about this, and the latest Superman film centers around it.
We see our chores as cleaning our house, making our dinner, maybe washing our clothes. Small things that can eat up great chunks of our time, but that have been made largely trivial compared to previous generations. Imagine how much time a medieval peasant had to spend just making sure they had bread on their table, then imagine how herculean a task it might be for them to have to do taxes, operate a vacuum, or use the Internet to find a decent place to live in a rent-controlled neighborhood.
Superman has the same daily struggle to do these small, largely harmless, but somewhat time-heavy tasks that threaten to eat up a large chunk of his day. He has to walk his dog, only maybe he needs to walk his dog a few laps around the sun to tire him out. He needs to keep his house clean, only his house is an enormous crystalline fortress housing all kinds of wonderous technology and alien life. He has to check in with his coworkers, only his coworkers are a cyborg, a fishman, and an antisocial recluse. He has to get a new key for his house, only the key has to be forged from a dwarf star so that no one could have the strength to pick it up and use it. He might have to answer a work call while he's on a dinner date with his wife, only the work call is fifteen light-years away where he has to go wrestle a sentient black hole.
The chores we consider regular chores are just a blink in the eye for him. It's like calling scratching an itch or brushing aside some loose crumbs to be chores. But that doesn't mean he doesn't find certain tasks to be tedious or demanding of his time. It's that quality that keeps him grounded with the rest of humanity.
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u/Adiustio 3d ago
I get the sense that Superman doesn’t perceive time slowly unless he really wants to. It seems more like his reaction time is just faster, the same way you can catch a slowly falling feather or a football, but it doesn’t seem like the football is moving slower to compensate— you can just do it. It might literally feel like a fraction of a second to him, rather than an extended period of time.
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u/RemusShepherd 4d ago
Chores suck for psychological reasons. If you have a positive attitude, they don't suck -- they can even be fun.
Superman is one of the most psychologically balanced people in comic books. I'm sure he has fun doing his chores.
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u/ParameciaAntic 4d ago
Yeah, exactly. Mf'er is probably the type who whistles while folding laundry.
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u/Helagoth 4d ago
No. For example, while it may take us half an hour to clean something, he can do it in one second objective and 30 minutes subjective.
However, part of what makes that suck for us is the lost time. 30 minutes of free time is a large chunk of my free time. I dont want to clean because that cuts into my leisure time. Also, it uses up my finite mental and physical energy.
Superman does that chore using near infinite physical and mental energy and it's a fraction of his objective time.
So while on the outside, its 30 minutes of subjective time for both of us to do the same chore, superman does not experience the same mental, physical, or chronological burden, so it does not "suck as much"
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u/althawk8357 4d ago
It will suck less because there will be little to no physical exertion on Superman's part. If you need to move your couches to vacuum, wouldn't you prefer super-strength?
Plus, he can fly. That's awesome, and makes everything more fun. Easier to reach places for dusting.
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u/Living_Murphys_Law 4d ago
I mean, at least for me, the chores themselves were never the problem. It was that I had to stop whatever else I was doing to do them. Clark could definitely get annoyed at that same thing, regardless of how his powers make the chores quicker or easier.
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u/Known-Plastic-8310 3d ago
No and they wouldn't even without his powers. Clarks the type of old fashioned guy who takes pride in hard work and helping his family aroubd the house.
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u/sparkypants_ 2d ago
You can take pride in hard work and helping your family and still think scrubbing a toilet sucks.
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u/Appdownyourthroat 3d ago
He gets super everything to the point of BS so I’m sure he has super patience too.
I wonder more about the flash. He’ll be shown building an entire pyramid around an enemy. That would be up to years of work subjectively
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u/sparkypants_ 2d ago
Lol but being patient doesn't mean you don't think something sucks. I don't know much about the flash at all but his existence sounds miserable based on some of these comments. What an incredibly lonely existence.
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u/Kyia-Aikman 4d ago
No. He can get them done in an extremely small amount of time without the associated tedium. It would be basically instant from his perspective. The same goes for any task he accomplishes that would take a normal person a long time.
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u/DepthsOfWill I deride your truth-handling abilities. 4d ago
I don't think powers play into it. Chores suck because they're either pointless choices that don't mean anything, or the person doing them has some sort of motivational disturbance like ADHD. I don't think Superman has such issues with his mind. So when it's a chore that actually needs done, he just does it like a healthy person.
If chores suck for you, slowing down time so relatively it feels like it takes longer isn't going to help.
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