can’t stop thinking about how in 5x19 lena genuinely thought she deserved to be screamed at by kara because she’d done something wrong and kara was mad, and that’s probably how those situations were handled in the luthor household.

not only that, but she was so desperate for ‘forgiveness’ that she actually offered for kara to scream at her. she offered to go through that trauma again, because she thought it was only fair that she did if there was the slightest chance that kara might want her back.

So, my brain going off in random directions again. This time with Supergirl and the not particularly well handled Kara/Mon-el romance arc again.

And.

I think I'm on to something about how that ship could have been fixed to work better.

So, they don't hook up in S2. Mon-El has to unlearn bad behaviors in regards to misogyny and Kara has to unlearn her childhood prejudices about Daxamites. It's not easy for either one of them and they both screw up. Kara has to realize she's in the wrong about things and make those up to Mon-el, so it's not just Mon-El being shown to make apologies, grow, and change. They become friends by the end of S2 and have been demonstrated to have made each other better people for having forged that friendship.

Then, to avoid Mon-El having to leave the show, instead of his mom killing his dad and the atmosphere of Earth getting seeded with lead (there is a reason we don't want lead in our water!!! it's still dangerous to humans!!!), Mon-El and Kara save his dad, imprison his mother, and the Daxamites leave to go establish a new homeworld somewhere relatively nearish but not already populated by another species. Maybe leave behind a ship for Mon-el so he can join them later if he wishes, but ultimately his dad respects that Mon-el isn't ready to rejoin his people yet.

If there is to be any ship-teasing between Kara and Mon-el in this modified S2 then it doesn't happen until the big finale with the fight against Mon-El's mother. And both of them are taken aback by the realization there's sparkage there.

S3 is where the ship teasing would begin in earnest and culminating in the two of them getting together at mid-season. Having established a hard-won friendship, showing they're both able to bring out the best in each other without needing romantic motivation first, and giving Mon-El some better characterization than he got in S2 would have made an S3 romance between them way more believable than their weird on/off/on/but now i must go thing that we got in S2. And by bumping Kara/Mon-El down a season, that'd give Kara/James time to actually do their relationship justice before having them mutually break up to stay friends instead.

It'd also be interesting for Argo City to have eventually joined the Daxamite colony once it was revealed that Kara's mom was alive after all. It would have made for some fun background tension and even plots taking place entirely off Earth where Kara and Mon-El have to deal with the tension between the peoples of Krypton and Daxam trying to cohabit the same world. Delve into some of the backstory between both peoples - was Daxam originally a colony of Krypton that struck independence? That would certainly make for an interesting level of nuance in the struggle for creating a fair form of leadership for their now joint colony. Especially when the World Killer thing starts happening - if that was a cult that spanned both Krypton and Daxam but at first appears to be just a Kryptonian thing?

Give me the intrigue. :D

Anyway, canon Kara/Mon-El got strangled by the red string so badly, they never really had a chance to develop any real on screen chemistry. (Not helped by Kara and Lena making heart eyes at each other every chance they got.) But the ship could have been really interesting if it had been given a chance to really breathe and develop more naturally.

I really need more fun Kryptonian biology to mess with in fic but I'm short on ideas right now.

Common-seeming fanons I've seen and liked:

purring

happiness = literal floating

either intersex or just sexes/genders that don't translate into standard "human" versions

inhumanly bright eyes

Also I still really love the whole "Kryptonians psychically soulbond with just literally anyone they love" thing, though alas that is not a thing I see on the reg. ALAS.

Anyway all of these are fun but I need mooooore and I also need to make them all Kon's problem. Like, just all of them. Possibly also Match's. Meanwhile Kara facepalms in the background and Clark gets reamed by Karen over how he didn't think to give his teenage clones sex ed. CLARK WHY THEY'RE LITERALLY YOUR CLONES.

Clark: technically Match is Kon's clone--

Karen: Go talk to your kids about sex.

Clark: I would rather go to the Phantom Zone, thanks.

And Jon probably got The Talk from Ultraman, the poor bastard. Ughhhhh.

please do tell about why woman of tomorrow sucks i love reading your takes they’re always so well written

Sure! And thank you for throwing me this bone because WOOF

(btw it's totally fine for people to like Woman of Tomorrow, and I can even see why! This is just my experience with it that I wish was talked about more)

Quick context: Woman of Tomorrow is about a space farmgirl named Ruthye who seeks revenge on Krem, a guy who killed her dad. Supergirl guides her on this journey so they can learn lessons about grief and revenge.

The biggest flaw of the comic is the narrative prose. Ruthye's dialogue is a rambly, over-indulgent, stylized mix of an attempt at medieval Shakespearian speak, but then in the last few issues the writer remembers she's a farmgirl so he decides she should suddenly say "ain't" more often and speak in double negatives to sound a bit more Southern. I can enjoy wordy comics! But Ruthye's dialogue and narration is blatantly excessive purple prose. So many scenes would hit harder with a less-is-more approach while still being stylized and characteristic. Sometimes the narrations pairs nicely with the art to create layered irony, but most of the time it feels like it's disregarding the comics medium altogether.

The other thing about Ruthye's narration is that it holds the story back. I get that the narration is Ruthye writing from the future, but the way it's done gives us a very passive relationship with the events of the story. We don't get to be with the characters in the action heavy moments because we're reading caption boxes of Future Ruthye rambling about poetry recounting The Battle of Capes. I'm not experiencing grief or dread with the characters, I'm being told about it. All of Ruthye's narrative rants boil down to "Supergirl is really badass, sad and kind. I promise this is deep." and "here's how my farm girl experience is relevant to this". Ruthye also speaks in glowing admiration, idealization and worship of Supergirl; it makes it really hard to get to know Kara in a humanizing way. I'm sure the purple prose hits differently for others, but I personally think the story would have more room to breathe without it.

You know how people like saying "Superman is boring because everything is too easy for him, he's too powerful" yeah that's Woman of Tomorrow. The conflict Kara faces are not challenges to her character, they're inconveniences. The resolutions to each story don't feel clever or earned. Kara just knows where to find the murdered purple aliens, Kara just happens to have a silver age-reference magical horse that can outrun the suffering-ball Krem throws at her, Kara just toughs out 10 hours in the green sun. Why be a smart storyteller when you can just give your heroine the upper hand every single time? There could've been a great bonding moment where Ruthye uses her famer-smarts to build shade for Kara, she could've crafted a salve to protect Kara's skin. But I guess having her guard Kara from dinosaurs is ok. Kara helps of course, even though she's dying because she's so cool, badass, sad, kind, etc.

Kara's internal conflict is that she was hoping that taking Ruthye on this journey would teach the farmgirl a lesson about revenge, but has Kara herself learned to move on? She's still thinking about Krypton after all. The problem with how this is presented is that it's not a flaw that we get to see evolve with the story. We see Kara act mopey, get an origin story flashback and then Kara tells us this- in hopes it'll recontextualize everything you've read before. By the time we make it to the end, the characters act like they've learned so much and I'm just standing here wishing I got to see all this growth they're talking about.

At the heart of it, I feel like Woman of Tomorrow represents the side of Super-fandom that wants to see the Kryptonians deified by the narrative. They hate seeing Kara do silly girly rom-com teenager things, she needs to be SERIOUS and EDGY and SAD and ALONE but like a god would be and not how a young woman would be that way. How else will boys take her seriously? Don't forget to remind the reader that she's STRONGER than her boy scout wholesome cousin! There's potential in a short revenge story about young girls finding hope in seeing a role-model woman survive loss, but not like this.

"You don't think I could've solved all those problems? C'mon I'm Supergirl." I sure love seeing female characters be badass girl-god legends who don't get to be humanized by being unflatteringly flawed people. Anyway the better Supergirl grief+revenge story is "Supergirl: Being Super". I don't think it's perfect because it misses the crucial difference between Kal and Kara among other things- but as a story about a teenage heroine learning how grief shapes her and those around her, it's way better.

Woman of Tomorrow's art is stellar though lmao would get a copy just as an artbook to reference.

Been thinking about Lena after she kills Lex, and like... sure, fandom and Lena herself like to think that she's a stone cold manipulator, able to con anyone into thinking she doesn't have a heart, but Sam and Kara both know that she's literally mush on the inside. Which implies to me that Lena wears her emotions on her sleeve.

Which in turn implies that she would have been physically unable to hide the fallout of her decision to kill Lex and the truth that's revealed to her in doing so.

Which gives me the idea that Lena wasn't this cold hearted bitch leading Kara on for months over that summer, but rather that simply-- no one was there to see her falling apart.

It's not that hard to rationalize. Kara avoids her, because every time they're together she knows she needs to tell Lena but can't bring herself to do so. Lena lets her, because she can hardly stand the sight of Kara anyway. And the other superfriends, well... Kara was her main point of contact with them anyway. If Kara is avoiding her, there's little reason to expect the others might be filling in.

It all makes me very angry on Lena's behalf. She would have been read like an open book if anyone had given half a shit about her, but instead she was left to fester and stew in her own anger and hurt and misgivings until she got to her boiling point and had forsaken all human connection.

And for those who argue maybe the shock of learning Kara's secret in the way she did was enough to literally shut off her emotionality so that she didn't/couldn't show her true feelings-- if that were the case it STILL would have been noticeable. Kara would have noticed the sudden change from "mush on the inside" to "I am totally closed off to you."

So either way you look at it-- the superfriends and Kara in particular did Lena dirty and this is a hill I'm willing to die on.

I saw a post going around DC tumblr yesterday and it gave me the spite I needed to write this meta that I’ve been sitting on for a while. I will have the comics I use here listed at the bottom of this post.

Fact is, Kara calling Kon an abomination in the New 52 makes sense for that version of him as well as her Kryptonian upbringing.

Now before you jump to conclusions about what I’m about to say, we need to have a bit of a history lesson. A Kryptonian history lesson. Over 200,000 years ago, the Kryptonians perfected cloning and started keeping three clones in stasis of all Kryptonians so that there would be the ability to replace failing body parts or protect people from injury. Apparently, this went off without a hitch for 100,000 years because 100,000 years later (making this happen about 100,000 years ago), there was a 1000 year war as to whether or not this was ethical and whether these clones should count as individual people with rights [1]. There is SO much more that happens in this (including an Oedipus plot??) and afterwards that eventually leads to the explosion of Krypton, but this is the minimum needed for this post.

Now at this point in time, Kon is a genetically modified clone of the CEO of Cadmus Industries. While he isn’t a direct clone, which makes him differ from the clones of the clone banks of Krypton already, his purpose for existing is not to help heal or aid in the health of his genetic source. These things are enough to mark him as different from your standard Kryptonian clone. 

We also know that the issue where Kon gets his name originally specifically hails back to this specific Superman origin and history of Krypton as there are visual and factual call backs to it [2]. One of these callbacks is a Kryptonian Genetic Matrix. Specifically, the one in which Clark was created [1]. As we move forward in the versions of Kon to Teen Titans (2003) by Geoff Johns, we see Kon move even closer towards the idea of a Kryptonian child and further from the idea of clone [3]. He is revealed and retconned to be the son of Lex and Clark.

Now there is no meaning of the name Kon given until the New 52 except for the history of the second house of El and the relation of Clark’s who had the name before the explosion of Krypton [2]. In the New 52, Kon is given a meaning. ‘Abomination’. This name is given to him by Kara when they meet and she lashes out at him [4].

However, in the New 52 Kon is completely different, he is no longer Clark and Lex’s combined clone. He is a clone of Jon Lane Kent. A clone created to get stable genetic material to save Jon’s destabilizing body [5]. This is a complete shift of both Kon’s purpose  and his genetic makeup. This shift firmly places him within the idea of clone that was prevalent on Krypton. The type of clone that caused a war that lasted a 1000 years. A war that the fallout of destroyed Krypton. To Kara, who grew up on Krypton, and would have learned of this war in her history books, Kon was representative of the entire reason she no longer had her home. 

I want it to be noted that we don't always equate names with their meaning. We may pick them because of that, or we may pick them because they belong to relatives as we see with Kon before the New 52. I was unable to find a source for the popular meaning of Kon pre-New 52, “family of choice.”

This is all to say that there is Kryptonian canon and history that is acknowledged even in the New 52 (shocking for the New 52 I know) that explains these behaviors and contextualizes these names and meanings.

[1] Action Comics (1938) Annual #2

[2] Superboy (volume 4) # 59

[3] Teen Titans (2003)

[4] Superboy (Volume 6) #6

[5] Superboy (Volume 6) #19

This post by @heretherebedork got me wondering about why commentary doesn't work. This isn't just a BL thing but a universal writing thing. I think since 2016 this making commentary thing has increased in all media over all. A lot of that has to do with evolving political landscape of the world in both good and bad directions. But nothing I can say or do about that. What I am interested in is why sometimes it works and other times it doesn't.

It works in Gotham Knights, Agents of Shield, even Cutie Pie to a degree and then there are shows built upon the political landscape like The Eclipse and Not Me. It doesn't work in Supergirl, Doctor Who (13th Doctor's run), and just about most shows that try.

For me the ages of the characters on Gotham Knights, Legacies, The Eclipse, Cutie Pie make it work. With GK and LGS, they are American teens and irl a lot of Gen Z are like that and so it becomes about reflecting real life. For comparison, when TVD came out the cultural consciousness made it possible to succeed in a way it won't today. Same with Twilight. Cutie Pie and The Eclipse has the PC built into them with the gay marriage and anti-authoritarian thing respectively. Same for Not Me.

But if you look at Supergirl, it came from the comics, comic have been PC or ahead of their time a lot of the times, but as a show it's 'lessons' fall flat. Compare the Alien Immigrants storyline in Supergirl with a similar but better anti-inhuman one from Agents of Shield. The difference is when Supergirl did it, it was a one season and done thing. Whereas Agents of Shield built it up slowly over the course of multiple seasons. AoS also gave multiple opposing views on it from members of the team. Supergirl had all it's main cast agree that it's bad to treat alien's badly. Some of it is baked into the character dynamics from the get go. The Supergirl team leaders were Hank, an alien himself and Alex, Supergirl's sister. While AoS's team leader was Coulson someone with experience in spy work and someone who understands people.

On the BL side, like I said the ones that do it well get away with it because of the basic premise. The ones that fail like War of Y, which I would argue didn't fail completely, Step by Step, which has the Supergirl problem, do so because of weak writing. With WoY, given the subtitles and overall quality I didn't expect much. The Commentary has stilted dialogue but so does the rest of the show. Same with House of Stars. It fails but doesn't stand out as egregious.

To Conclude: Some advice as an author,

if you are going to include PC into your story either bake it into the premise or don't make it stand out.

Also it's always good to have opposing views, good and bad. Try to make things as round and without edges as possible.

The characters should be talking to each other, not to the audience. or worse, at the audience.

Don't rely on woke points to propel your story.

It's a story, a narrative first, commentary second.

Not good but “correct” ending? That’s quite the stance

so i'm gunna preface all of this by admitting a) I still haven't seen all of the show (i'm missing a couple of episodes basically from 3/4/ and quite a bit from 5) and that b) it's been a while since I last watched the parts of the show I HAVE seen so. Bear with me

But yes. I absolutely believe this was the Correct ending for the CWSG's version of Kara. like I said, from the get go, the Kara we're introduced to struggles with her dual lifestyle. Becoming Supergirl makes her feel free and confident. She's EXCITED by being able to use her powers and be more of herself instead of hiding all the time. Kara's regularly confronted for being a bad liar - both by the show going 'haha isn't this silly' and by the characters - and personally I view her hard line of "you lied to me" that she draws with other characters comes from her extreme dislike of the fact that she's lying about herself. She comes out to at least one character every season except maybe 3? And every time her behavior with those characters transforms into Kara becoming more comfortable and more herself. And no matter how you view Kara's relationship with Lena, the reveal and the aftereffect is the big push through the season both plot and character-wise

For all of the writing's faults, the one line they did manage to make through the entire season is Kara's struggle with her dual identity. I don't even like calling it "secret" because I think they do actually a decent job of showing that Kara views - or at least wants - her life not as a secret but rather two halves that she can't seem to make fit together. How much of that throughline is Melissa Benoist's understanding and evolution of Kara as a character (the famous interview at the end where she admits to apparently pitching Kara's ending makes me suspect it was quite a bit) and how much of that was actual show projection, I don't think we'll actually ever know. But for this version of Kara that we sat with through 6 seasons of TV with, anything else for a character arc would've just felt static imo. If CWSG can say it's about anything, it can say it's Kara's journey of self discovery.

i do have massive respect for dc just going "fuck it everyone who's Weird is a meta, doesn't matter the source doesn't matter if they're an alien, it's all just Meta don't worry about it" i think that very neatly solves it

kara knowing what otp means just doesnt feel right

do you think J’onn was able to sense from the beginning that Brainy wore inhibitors? What do you think that confrontation would have been like, if he knew, and he and Brainy had talked about it?

OMG Rachel, I never even thought about that!!!

I think maybe J'onn would be wary at first, or upset because he doesn't understand and is afraid of Brainy hurting his "daughters" but then when he learns that Brainy's own family did that to him, he'd be so upset and want to help Brainy! And mentor him like he has Kara and Alex.

What do you think???

thinking about how the first time lena “there are many l’s in my family’s names but none of them stand for love” luthor heard that her crush l-worded her was through said crush’s boyfriend during an alien invasion.

i mean, can you imagine the absolute breakdown she must have needed to store in her little mind boxes? the way she probably spent the entire crisis trying to get herself not to think of those words and what they meant, because they couldn’t be true, could they?

mon-el was from another planet, they probably used the word differently there. he hadn’t grown up with the luthors, he probably didn’t know how precious those four little letters could be, how dangerous it was to just toss them around like he did.

emotionally privileged people tended to banalize it, forget just how much a declaration like that can mean to someone who’s never had it. and he was with kara, so of course he had it.

can you imagine just how heavy each second until they got the daxamite invasion under control must have been for lena? and what an absolute shot in her heart it must have been like to know that it ended with her having to send her best friend’s boyfriend away.

because even if kara had loved her before (and in her mind, that was a big if), she certainly didn’t anymore. not after this.

lena must have been desperate to see kara, to hug her and cry with her and just hold her in her arms because she was so sorry and no amount of apologies would get kara to not let her go and leave her behind, but they’d survived! they’d survived, and things like this make you want to be with the ones you love.

but kara wasn’t there.

kara retreated into herself, and left lena alone to replay the sound of mon-el’s words and the look on kara’s face during every interaction they’d had, trying to find any sign of those words in the blue of her eyes.

and eventually, of course, she gave up.

how could she have ever succeeded, when she hadn’t even been taught what to look for?

☕️ on Supergirl!!

(Perusing my tea shelf, what shall I choose for Supergirl... ^_^ )

Okay, so the Cult of Rao was a plot line that I don't really feel got utilized to it's full potential. It touched on big topics like cultural appropriation and the way cult leaders pick and choose the bits of religion they like to create their new and 'correct' religious way. But because it focused so hard on the cult gone wrong aspect, I think it failed as a criticism of cultural appropriation.

Rao was both the star around which Krypton revolved and the deity which Kryptonians worshiped. True worshipers of Rao were known as Raoists in the comics and it would have informed a not insignificant about of the culture Kara was raised in before Krypton was destroyed. Thus it would have to be very upsetting for her to see the religion of her childhood have the trappings slapped on top of a cult that was very... Christian underneath the Kryptonian veneer.

This was an opportunity to Kara to open up about her own feelings about her people's religion and faith. Was it an open religion to all beings, Kryptonian or otherwise? Was it a Kryptonian and Daxamite only thing, largely closed to other species? We don't really get a lot about Kara talking about her Kryptonian heritage in terms of cultural practices - most of it has to do with her family specifically. Which is fair, she was very young when her world died and would have known her family's practices fairly well, but not necessarily the parts of her world's culture her parents chose not to embrace or regional variations... she was geared towards following her father into the physical sciences, after all. She wasn't going into anthropology or religious studies. And having this cult showing up could make her uncomfortable with herself too over just the sheer amount of Kryptonian culture that she's simply incapable of keeping alive on her own.

The United States has a history of commodifying cultures that aren't heavily Christian the way main stream US culture is. We treat Native American dress as a costume appropriate for Halloween parties, ignore the cultural impacts of minorities where they can't be whitewashed (Elvis stealing the music - and dance style - of Black America and getting famous off it is a great example), the treatment of other nations food staples as 'weird and exotic'... the trivialization of some non-Christian religions while others are demonized.

The Cult of Rao could have been an excellent opportunity to say something meaningful about cultural and religious appropriation, to really hammer home how much it harmed Kara as this ongoing plot beyond just a handful of episodes tied to the World Killer arc. To show that it wasn't harmful just because it became an excuse for these people to do violence, but because the religion of Rao was being treated as a fad. Her people's cultural identity watered down, turning her people's spiritual practices into the next yoga obsession, stripped of all history or understanding of the significance behind the practices save for what makes it more catchy to the people appropriating it.

I wish you’d write a fic where Kon and Linda became a Flamebird and Nightwing duo as was originally planned back in the New Krypton arc

I would LOVE that but also Kon would def be the one getting Flamebird and Linda would def be the one getting Nightwing, I don't make the rules, that's just how it is.

Also, like, any bonding between any version of those two I'm all for, gimme ALL of that. Just full-throttle Kryptonian battle couple, whether it's shippy or not.

Kara should've been in a happy relationship at the end of the series. I don't care if it was going to be Lena or Mon-El, I love both ships, and she clearly showed to care deeply for both. But she truly deserved happiness and romantic fulfillment. I know not everyone needs to be in love to be happy, but she'd explicitly stated multiple times that it was an important element in her life. And leaving her alone for absolutely no reason was both cruel and frankly depressing, not to mention completely nonsensical.

Yes I still haven't moved on from this show at all.

What are six Supercorp arcs from the series you wish the show would’ve expanded on or just done in a different way? And how would you have written them?

Hm. 6 is a lot of arcs. But I'll give it a stab...

1) Cadmus. Ive always felt that they were built up more than they followed up with. I would have loved for them to be a big bad, rather than a b-plot bad. With Lena playing a big part in taking them down.

2) Lex. How the show handled Lex was such bullshit. Even before Supergirl became the Lex Luthor show, the writers' biggest mistake was making him a villain for Kara rather than allowing him to remain Lena's villain. Because that's what he always should have been.

3) Rift. I think I've talked this one about half to death, so I probably don't have to go into anymore detail, but yeah. They went kind of screwy with Lena's reaction and her Non Nocere angle, where I think it would have been more impactful if they had kept the fallout more emotional and internal to Kara and Lena as characters. Like, it should have been the undercurrent of the season, not the catalyst for someone going evil.

4) Crisis. This one is easy-- keep Lex dead and not merge/rewrite the realities. The continuity was absolutely ruined by Crisis and I'll never forgive them.

5) Children of Liberty. I feel like this one was disappointing because they took a very real and valid issue and turned it sideways to mimic current events. The writers tried to loop Guardian into the plot there, and ultimately failed to make the angle engaging whatsoever.

6) Red Daughter. There was no fallout for this one. Kara absorbed Red Daughter and absolutely nothing came of it. She didn't change, in either personality or abilities. So what was the point? Idk. I think they could have utilized Red Daughter in a more meaningful way while she was alive too. I would have liked her to have room to grow as a person, rather than being treated as a prop to support Lex's plans of world domination. Maybe let her interact with Lena more. Maybe let her have doubts in Lex and start breaking away from him even before she learns the whole truth about him. Let more of Kara's personality/identity emerge to shift her allegiance to the side of good, and let her disagree with Lex's methods, if not his purpose.

----

This being said however, I don't think there's been a single arc since S2 that I've 100% been okay with, that I don't think I couldn't have done better. That might be a little egocentric of me, but it's the truth. I'm really good at seeing an idea and immediately expanding on it to suit my likes and dislikes to create content I wanna see-- canon be damned.