I initially wrote this in a forum I've today re-purposed for my "saving animals" activities. I liked my thought process, though, so I'm capturing the essay and reposting it here before it gets deleted from the forum.
As always, my mind wandered off down a random track yesterday and I was thinking about Superman and the Fortress of Solitude which in recent years has become grand central station for anyone who wanders north.
Lex Luther and General Zod have been in and out of that place like they have the deed. And how many times has it been destroyed and defaced and made useless?
In fact, for being the last of his kind, Kal-El has to put up with a lot of Kryptonians. How is a Superman to find peace in a Fortress of Solitude that provides anything but Solitude?
The answer is that he needs to move his fortress to someplace it won't be found. Which means it can't be on Earth, because as long as the Fortress is on Earth, super-villains like Lex Luther will find ways of tracking Superman's alpha waves which will lead them straight to the fortress, even if he buried it deep in some desert in the middle of nowhere.
The best location for the Fortress of Solitude would be the sun. Now, that might seem a bit drastic and ridiculously hot, but you have to consider that Kryptonians were supposed to be the most advanced society that ever existed. Their technology allowed them to visit distant galaxies. Surely that technology could be used to create a Fortress that orbited as a satellite near enough that it would be impossible for humans to reach and virtually impossible to detect. And as far as Superman goes, we know he gets his strength from the yellow sun, so going to the Fortress near the sun would be a total energy infusion for him.
Of course, a Fortress near the sun during his Smallville flightless years would be uselessly too far away, but consider how in Superman II and Superman Returns, people just waltz right into his Fortress all come as they may, and is there any security?
You would think there would be some sort of anti-neural de-stimulater holding beam for humans or a kryptonite defense system if a non-El Kryptonian were detected.
It just seems to me that for all the planning Jor-El did, his security for the Fortress sucks. And yes, I'm aware that in some of the comic books, Superman has a security force of androids in the Fortress. But I've never seen a security force in any of the movies or television shows, and it just seems absurd that you could call something a fortress if anyone can just wander in and start playing with crystals and get all the answers they want about anything they ask and the advanced computer system from another world doesn't even bother to request an identity.
Just something to think about.
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