Going back to my opinion that pilight is a jerk --
I find pilight's view of superheroes toxic in trying to police what a superhero is or isn't, primarily because pilight's views are in terms of defining what a superhero isn't, what a superhero shouldn't be, what a superhero can't be -- and pilight's view is that superheroes (and Sliders) should never be whatever ireactions thinks they are because pilight doesn't like me. pilight is regularly belittling my views despite the fact that pilight shares them.
Because, I dunno, I was critical of pilight's ideas for rebooting Sliders and thought it was absurd to pick up off of "The Seer." Shame on me for looking at stories from the perspective of the average TV viewer! One could argue that Sliders Reborn is then a hypocritical work, except Reborn was made for a diehard audience and the Redux was my pitch for a general audience revival.
When I rambled about how I thought the Season 3 monsters could be integrated into the Season 1 - 2 style of Sliders, pilight told me my ideas were too much like MacGyver, shouldn't be used for Reasons -- but when asked how pilight would use the Season 3 monsters, pilight laid out a proposal that was no different than mine, which means pilight's issue with my opinions is that they're my opinions.
And then there's the tactic of pilight's analysis -- it's wholly in terms of negative definition. Superheroes aren't this. Sliders isn't that. It's anti-creativity; pilight looks at something that exists and subtracts from it rather than adding to it. It's an argument style that isn't about exploring different points of view, but redrawing boundaries so that any opinions from people pilight doesn't like are outside what pilight deems acceptable.
The eliminative method for fiction is destructive. If a character having personal goals (like getting home) disqualifies them as a superhero, then characters who aren't superheroes include Spider-Man (he goes looking for crime to photograph himself doing it to sell the pictures and pay his rent), Iron Man (Stark Enterprises earns money), the X-Men (fighting to survive their own future genocide), the Flash (gets paid by local hospitals as part of an ambulance service), Green Lantern (toy salesman), Aquaman (trying to protect his home from water pollution), Green Arrow (Queen Industries earns money) -- which means that pilight's process of defining superheroes entirely in terms of which ones don't count is so flawed as to be worthless, useless and incompetent.
There is a futile foolishness to declaring that fictional characters should be reduced to selflessness or any one specific trait. Drama is about conflict and if characters are granted only a single characteristic, there are no opposing forces within the character, no contradictions, no points of view. It's a simplistic, clumsy concept of writing characters and stories presented by people who are only ever inclined to tear things down and have no ability (or interest) in building things up.
The only requirement of a superhero is that they have an ability that the characters around them don't. Even superpowers aren't necessary; Batman technically has none, and his power is represented through usually mundane aptitudes operating at peak performance. The sliders also have abilities and advantages in that they are visitors who can sidestep consequences of each world they leave behind, making them free to do things others can't.
The sliders have ideas and perspectives the characters around them lack, matched with the ability to cheat normal narrative rules in that they have experienced madness, horror and death, but the nature of the sliding concept means they can survive anything, even their actors being fired and their show being cancelled.
And, to wrap up the last time I will ever bother to directly address pilight unless I get some apology for all of the above:
Defining characters in terms of what they aren't is a dead end for creativity and criticism.
It is a route taken by people who attack other people's ideas because they have none of their own.
Your means of reviewing fiction is toxic.
Your approach to analyzing superheroes is ineptly idiotic.
Your Sliders reboot ideas are terrible.
And also -- y'boring.