Businessmen don't really like getting showed up, so Superman's mere existence would set him off because Superman is "trying" to "steal" his role of being Metropolis's "hero"- of being the only one they need.
I don't know. I don't think a normal businessman would see it that way. Lex Luthor does, but that's because Lex Luthor is a megalomaniac who, far more than most tech billionaires, sees a particular city as 'his.'
That kind of megalomania is not
normal. Not even for billionaires. It isn't usually so noticeable in this quest because Lex is the viewpoint character and he's good at lying to himself about how mentally healthy he is. But it's there.
Also, Superheroes totally have "what measure is a non-human" going on- they really do care less about anything they don't consider to be a real person. I don't wanna get into a whole thing, I just thought it was really crappy Superman didn't just fight off Brainiac and made him Earth's problem for no reason.
...In this continuity?
Superman was literally beaten unconscious with a crowbar and dragged off the planet against his will.
How the fuck is this his fault?
Are you... even reading the same quest as the rest of us?
Like, it doesn't matter what we think- all that matters is what the characters think. Also, since we're supposed to be playing as Lex Luthor, we should think about it like he would.
That sounds like a great way to lose your sense of reality within the context of the quest.
You are not, in objective fact, under
any obligation to share the viewpoints of
any fictional character, including and perhaps
especially not Lex Luthor.
What Measure Is A Non-Human literally has a sub-page for The DCAU.
The DCAU at this point spans many hundreds of hours of fictional content, and TVTropers are obsessive-compulsive. Tropers will routinely catalog isolated individual incidents of something happening
once in a show, regardless of whether it's part of the recurring patterns of the show.
And to illustrate that, there are roughly ten concrete, specific, well-justified examples from
the entire DCAU, and half of them are either bad examples, or not an example of
a superhero exercising this trope.
If the best you can do is to
assert evidence exists on a page that as far as I can determine you may not have read and certainly didn't read with a critical eye, then I'm not sure what you think you're talking about here.
I think that this "established fact" of yours is a figment of your imagination. Unless, of course, you're seriously arguing that, say, a tele-operated drone or a mindless zombie is the moral equivalent of a sapient being.
The Batman Beyond robot girlfriend which is the worst case of this...
Yeah, but read with a critical eye, the person who treated the robot girlfriend as something subhuman
wasn't a superhero.
Tropers will often apply shit like this when it's being done by a secondary character, or even a villain, or when it's the narrative tone of the show and not the characters
in the narrative doing it.
And, as you note, this is a stack of about ten-ish cherrypicked examples from an entire gigantic body of work.
