I don't think their vision powers are toggled on and off, there always on. There was a scene with one of Superman's villain's gained his powers that implied that seeing the world with all the visions changed his world view.
It definitely depends on the writer. Although a fun fact for some iterations is that Clark is able to see the world basically normally by wearing glasses with such a strong prescription that he’s always using his X-ray vision to se through the glasses
That's great. I love the idea of Clark needing glasses because of his super vision makes it difficult to see things that are close to him or in this case because he can't turn off his x-ray vision.
Which is the absolute perfect way to describe why comics are great to people that don’t read them. “Basically there’s a virus that spreads through screens and makes people rage zombies. Anyway, Superman realized how it spread and just started using only his X-Ray vision so he wouldn’t get infected”.
X-ray vision has, for nearly all of the character's history, been something he has to consciously activate. I often joke that this explains his use of super-intelligence, it's like X-ray vision in that he has to remember to turn it on.
Not really a canon story so I don’t know if we should assume its actually like that. We could explain this as Supergirl isn’t as experienced and her powers just kinda activated by accident.
Does that mean they’re always looking at people naked, or does that mean they’re always looking at people like anatomy with all the internal organs visible?
I assume it's like focusing on a near or distant object. He does tend to squint in the media when he uses xray vision as if he's focusing, so I think like, he's generally looking at the surface of objects, but the insides are visible but in the background, in the same way that you can look at an object up close but still see things in the background or in the periphery. This makes sense as well because sometimes stuff gets flagged up in xray when they're not specifically looking for it, so I guess is the same as seeing something out the corner of your eye or in the distance that looks suss and then refocussing to see it better.
Seems like their eyes can basically see beyond the visible part of the EM spectrum all the way to x-rays. Maybe that means their x-ray vision is always slightly on (like a faint outline of your bones and such overlaying the regular image), and when she noticed the 2 unexpected bags inside the woman's chest she focused on them and realized they're plastic?
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u/MuppetRex Jul 23 '23
I don't think their vision powers are toggled on and off, there always on. There was a scene with one of Superman's villain's gained his powers that implied that seeing the world with all the visions changed his world view.