my hot take about the series finale of smallville, a decade too late, is that the character we are presented at the end of the show isn’t lex. and i don’t mean this in some tinhat conspiracy theory way or in a “the show writers ruined his characterization” way—i mean literally, on the page, the person we are presented with at the end of the show is a completely different person than the one who died.
like. lex died. the real lex dies. we know this is an objective fact within the smallville universe. after michael rosenbaum left the show, lex was killed off. the show runners could have chosen to leave him alive off-screen, but they did not. he died.
then the show decided to bring him back from the dead via cloning. except… that’s not how cloning works. they did not bring back the original lex luthor. they created a new person, via cloning, who had the same DNA as lex.
now briar, you may say, he has lex’s memories and personality! so doesn’t that mean he is lex? and i think that question is philosophically complicated, but if you look at it from a purely scientific point of view… no. the original lex is still dead. this new person may have all lex’s memories, and he may even believe he is lex, but critically—the original lex is still dead.
but even if you argue that having lex’s memories is enough—that even if the original lex is still dead, this still has all of his memories and personality (arguably), so even if he is not the original, he is still lex from a character perspective—he doesn’t even have that at the end of the show! they give him amnesia! he has no memories!
think of it this way (and i am showing my age with this metaphor, but bear with me): you buy a CD. then the CD gets lost, or stolen, or broken. you then burn a copy of that CD. it is not the original, but it still has all of the same songs on it. the sound quality is a little off, and you don’t have the case for it, but it’s still mostly the same. but then the CD gets corrupted somehow, and now none of the songs will play. do you still own that CD? i would say, definitively, no.
which means that at the end of the show, what we are left with is not the original lex returned from the grave. he isn’t even a copy of the original lex who is indistinguishable from the original. he may look like lex, he may sound like lex, he may even act a little like lex, but functionally? the character we are presented with is little more than a stranger with lex’s face.
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I had a vague idea to do another comic for my angel AU, despite how much I hate doing comics. The reasons were two fold: I have a few panels in my head that I'd really like to draw and I feel like it's a fun intro to the AU. The problem is that this led me down a mental rabbit hole.
Since my AU was started well before S2, it was working off the general assumption that Aziraphale and Crowley didn't know each other as angels. Or, if they did, they didn't get the chance in the AU bc angel!Crowley was off hiding in the cosmos when he otherwise would have been socializing in some way. So this is reflected in the fic. They meet for the first time in Eden.
But the moment where they canonically do meet would happen in my AU. So now I'm consistently tempted to go back and rewrite the first fic in the series (which is also the one I feel like I could improve the most). But I never rewrite fic. I just let them stand as is and I don't want to break that habit in a series, especially, because that could have a cascade effect.
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