#but my hand is cramped up and sore after spending the entirety of yesterday drawing arknights fanart

[thegirlwhofellfromthestars]

some thoughts about aspcts of hal and kara's relationship with regards to their relationships with their parents specifically and how that'd effect their interactions

disclaimer: this is largely me unintelligbly rambling and based off personal interpretation and stuff i remember, as well as me incorporating some headcanon in how i portray kara's family in particular (though i'll definitely alert people when we go into headcanon territory). also tw for discussions/mentions of child abuse.

...i feel like it's safe to say that hal has a really, really strained relationship with his family. we see during the parallax run his perceptions of his family versus the reality - a sort of thing about neglect and abuse and cracking under the weight of expectations while also feeling unimaginably trapped in your own childhood trauma. and a big part of his character arc is trying to grow and heal from it, but sometimes things just fall the fuck apart. while that has been retconned (and imo that's... an issue in and of itself), it's definitely the version i tend to go with because i feel like it means a lot and contributes a lot of understanding to the context of hal jordan, the character.

kara's relationship with her family is a bit weirder in that it's very much inconsistent across continuities. her original, pre-crisis parents were clearly very good, loving parents to the point they allowed their daughter to remain with her foster family because they didn't want to pressure her into choosing. later continuities tend to portray her family as outright abusive, while others tend to have her mother be the more strict one and her dad be the more overtly loving, laid-back one.

as for where my personal headcanon falls: i tend to have it be in the middle. while i think her parents' relationship with her isn't exactly perfect - in particular, that there's some stuff they're just going to struggle with for a long time, possibly forever, when it comes to kara's being autistic and how that might clash with kryptonian culture - and they'll make fuck-ups, it's not really a pattern of abusive behavior and they are truly well-meaning and care about her. i think between the two of them allura is probably the one who struggled on some level with really understanding some of the neurodivergent traits kara had and trying to resolve them rather than understand them, but not from a place of malice, and it wasn't extreme enough to the point that they couldn't try to talk it out.

"lucia," you're probably saying, "where the fuck does the brotp ever's interactions come into play?!"

WELL.

i think that sort of contributes to hal's simultaneous caution and understanding of kara's grief. while i think he's only really started to grapple with his own projections and downplaying of his own childhood trauma, kara's relationship with her parents had comparably less baggage than his but also the sheer weight and drasticness of what's happened is so awful. her parents, no matter how imperfect they were, are dead, and she loved them, and the fact that they're dead fucking sucks. in some ways, hal sort of feels like he's similar to kara's parents in the whole "trying to unlearn the stuff from your own upbringing and background that you took for granted".

so much of parallax's motivations are tied up in personal grief and that his concerns and fears and anger and upset were dismissed when honestly his desire to do something about it came from an understandable place. hal's already working on repairing his fuck-ups, and he sees this kid and thinks, "i really, really don't want her to go through the same things i did when i felt like her. maybe there are things she was taught about herself as a person that are wrong. i don't know, i wasn't there, but this is a kid who needs a place where she knows that it's okay to not be okay."

i think hal really knows how to communicate with kara better than he thinks he does - he probably second-guesses himself about it, with trying so hard to better himself as a person after what he did and wondering if it all means that much. but i think having an adult in the situation who'd try to reach out to her quietly - especially one whose experiences aren't wholly different than hers - leaves a tremendous positive impact on her.

this is all to say i need to draw or write a scene where she's sort of cranky and hal quietly grabs her a juice box of apple juice and she accidentally says, "thanks, dad" in response but it is played for all the gut-wrenching "OH G-D, WHY" factors it has.

#lucia.txt #i WOULD have drawn something for them or doodled something #but my hand is cramped up and sore after spending the entirety of yesterday drawing arknights fanart #you're all fucking welcome. have me yelling into the void #hal jordan #kara zor-el #hal & kara