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thatsjustsupergirl · 7 years

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Random but I'm still peeved about the Alex/Kara argument in 2.02. Especially the part where Alex claims to have given up a career in medicine to protect Kara. I mean, I'm not sure if that's bad writing or Alex IC blatantly ignoring reality because Alex was not gonna graduate due to academic probation plus she was in jail for at least public intoxication if not a DUI (I can't remember if she got arrested before putting the keys in the ignition or not). 1/

She wasn’t exactly ‘days away’ from graduating med school or anything. Now Alex may have taken the job with J'onn to protect Kara but I’m pretty sure J'onn made the offer to throw a lifeline to a drowning Alex not to protect Kara. But the whole protect-Kara angle really doesn’t hold water since Alex didn’t give Kara even an ounce of potentially life-saving information that she learned at the DEO. Nothing about Kryptonite or secret anti-alien agencies who could blackbag her. 2/

It feels more like Alex enjoyed the leverage of knowledge even while Kara expressed dissatisfaction with her own life. (Did she like lying to her sister? Probably not. Was there a selfish satisfaction to knowing more the Kara, to being part of something bigger? Yeah, I think there was a bit.) 3/

But outside of the influences of redK Kara would never pick apart an argument like that IC but IDK it seems like a very significant character flaw that fandom tends to ignore which is disappointing because the selfishness plays so well off Alex’s deepseated guilt and sense of duty. Alex!Discourse usually focuses on her relationship with Eliza or making her a martyr for her sister which does as much disservice to the nuance of her character as it does to write Kara only as a space puppy. 4/4

This ask made me so happy.

I just finished my S2 talk time project a few days ago and then went back and rewatched the pilot, and let me tell you it is very easy to forget just how much progress Alex and Kara have made, because wow is it jarring to see them at the start of S1 where Alex is so much worse at emotional vulnerability and amped up on passive-aggressive snark.

I really loved that scene in 2x02, which I have written about before, because it highlights all of those flaws without taking away from the fact that Alex still makes a valid point that Kara needed to hear.

Nobody is perfectly consistent in how they express themselves. Ever. People are chaotic and messy and complicated, and they find ways to rationalize bad choices to themselves. They find ways to rationalize good choices, too. They forget about the emotions that motivated a decision over time, or their relationships change and suddenly a memory is recolored into something that isn’t quite reality anymore. A person’s internal logic or truth is not always *the* truth. But none of that means they are “out of character” the second there is a mismatch.

It just means they’re human.

And you hit the nail on the head: Alex was not telling the objective truth in 2x02, but she might well have been telling a truth she believed. Alex has spent years inventing excuses to justify her life choices and coming up with lies to tell her sister and her mother to keep them off her back. At some point the truth and the fiction are going to start blurring in her mind, at least a little. That’s just how our brains work.

Plus, we’re talking about a woman who was so confident she could beat a polygraph that she didn’t even break a sweat about having no time to prepare. The mental self-trickery that requires is insane. Alex Danvers is good at lying to others, but she’s even better at lying to herself.

So, when it comes to Kara and the complicated relationship they have as siblings? Alex can absolutely be petty, and mean, and hurttful. That doesn’t mean she loves Kara any less. It doesn’t negate all the things she does that are generous or compassionate or selfless.

What it does is make her a well-rounded character. Just like how Kara is more well-rounded for being impulsive and self-centered and stubborn in addition to all of her good qualities.

To return to your point about that period in Alex’s life where she was struggling and J’onn pulled her out: yes, she was absolutely giving Kara a revised interpretation of events. Alex’s memories from 1x17 were not actually things she spoke out loud during that interrogation. (At least, I am 99% confident she was not sharing all of her personal failings in explicit detail, especially since long-winded rambling is not part of a polygraph.) So Kara, as far as we know, still remains in the dark about the exact depth of her sister’s issues. And Alex clearly doesn’t ever want her to find out, because that would be damaging on a wayyyyy worse level than her occasionally being an asshole when they fight.

But, within that scene from 2x02, do we know for sure that Alex is lying? We can’t see into her head, after all. Maybe she genuinely believes she would’ve clawed her way out of her funk eventually and gone into medicine if J’onn hadn’t intervened. Maybe she legitimately wanted to be a doctor even though she was a depressed, self-loathing mess and on the verge of failing out. Maybe she only said yes to the DEO because she was afraid Henshaw would blackmail her or her family, or get Kara carted off to some creepy government lab if she turned him down.

All of that, however, does not negate your point, which is that once she got to the DEO, that choice became about her. Not her family, not her sister. Just her.

For possibly the first time in her adult life.

That had to be powerfully liberating. And I agree, it probably gave Alex some immense satisfaction to know that while she might not have Kara’s superpowers, she could still be out there in the world kicking alien ass anyway. We also know she felt good about the fact that her coworkers and her boss recognized her efforts and her talents, and that she was happy to find a space where that was even possible. Those were not things she’d ever had before. And yeah, she guarded them rather selfishly.

I am iffy, however, on criticizing Alex for not telling Kara about Kryptonite and such, because it’s one of the very first things she and J’onn explain to Kara in the pilot ep. (I’m also iffy because Clark knew Kryptonite existed for way longer than Alex did, and he never told her about it either!) And I don’t think Kara would’ve needed a warning about “secret anti-alien agencies,” at least not prior to her decision to start superheroing. Given that strange men showed up at their house when she was a kid and her foster dad changed jobs almost immediately thereafter and her family was constantly afraid she’d be taken away, I have a feeling Kara was already aware of that risk, at least on some level. You’ll note that she never questions the motivation behind Alex’s “never do something like that again” in 1x01, even though Alex is extremely harsh and hurts Kara’s feelings.

tl;dr: Alex, like the rest of us, has her flaws. She has a nasty tendency toward repressing or hiding negativity at her own expense, in part because she’s afraid to disappoint her loved ones, but also because her sense of empathy runs deep and she doesn’t like seeing others suffer. She can be passive-aggressive. She loses her temper in immature, ugly ways.

None of this means she’s a bad person. She’s usually a very good person! But it also doesn’t mean that we get to handwave the ugliness away as “shitty writing” just because it presents a challenge as far as understanding her character.

#alex danvers #danvers sisters #long post #my meta #anonymous #asks

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