At the end of our fifth game of Super Mario Party Jamboree, my partner and I sat there, hands tightly gripping our Joy-Cons waiting for the results. By now, we’d grown accustomed to the seemingly random ways the game decides to dole out bonus Stars to players who underperformed. Toad provided a single star to the CPU-controlled Rosalina for landing on the most event spaces in the matchup. Luigi, whom I was playing as, and Princess Daisy, controlled by my partner, got nothing. It was down to the both of us, and the tension was palpable.

Finally, the adorable Toad announced its decision: Daisy got the W, eking out a victory by having more coins than Luigi. As much as it hurt to resign to the clutches of defeat after 90 minutes of emotional highs and hilarious lows, it didn’t sway me from wanting to load up another one of Jamboree’s colorful, nuanced boards for another go.

That feeling of unbridled multiplayer joy despite the total bollocks that can keep you from claiming victory is a distillation of what Jamboree is all about. Every board and its unique mechanics make for nail-biting scenarios for photo finishes, betrayals, and unexpected moments. Jamboree’s minigames are mostly fun, even if they are spread thin among its many modes. And while some of the genuinely inventive swings at adding to the Mario Party package fall short of being as complete and endlessly replayable as the traditional experience, they still make for a fun distraction for when players want to mix things up.

The earliest version of Superman was straight-up evil.

Before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold the character to DC, they were a pair of 1930s high school students with a fanzine called Science Fiction, which featured a dystopian short story called “The Reign of the Superman.” It wasn’t really about the Superman we know, but instead, a man who becomes evil after acquiring superpowers.

“The Reign of the Superman” was a one-off story that ended in tragedy, but it may have taught Siegel and Shuster a valuable lesson: the dissolution of one’s morals isn’t a repeatable formula. To bring readers back over and over again, heroes needed to be reliable. They needed a code of ethics. They needed morality.

For nearly a century, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (known collectively as “The Trinity”) have represented what it means to be a hero and laid out the rules for everyone else to follow. So it’s worth interrogating where their morality comes from and how it’s changed over the decades. Batman famously doesn’t kill — except he used to and sometimes still does. Superman isn’t always the beacon of righteous justice we imagine. And Wonder Woman, well, let’s just say Wonder Woman is complicated.

But when you look closely at the evolving and shifting morality of DC’s Trinity, one thing becomes clear: It’s never been as fixed as you might think. From rewritten origin stories to changing cultural norms, the morality of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman can feel as malleable as Clayface on a hot summer day. But while there’s no clear ethical arc carrying our heroes from evil to good (or good to evil), the many changes they’ve experienced along the way reveal a surprising amount about the nature of superheroism itself.