#actually idk if there's any alien invasions in metropolis

[businesstiramisu]

For an American with an internet connection, I manage to grow up with some pretty big gaps in my pop cultural awareness, and one of those was DC superheroes (Marvel too, until the MCU became a thing when I was in high school)

Like, I was aware that Superman and Batman are characters, and even that they live in the cities of Metropolis and Gotham. I just always assumed that those were fictional analogues for New York City and Chicago, respectively. (As the two Big US Cities, and I guess as a kid I thought Chicago was really dark and gloomy? which visiting it as an adult hasn't really been my experience but w/e).

But last month i got into batfam fanfic and learned that no, NYC and Chicago totally exist in the DC universe, and Metropolis and Gotham (plus a bunch of others with boring names) are entirely fictional with no real world geographic counterpart. Also I was entirely wrong about their approximate locations.

Gotham is in New Jersey, which, sure, explains why it's so cursed.

But Metropolis? IT'S IN FUCKING DELAWARE

most famous on here for tumblr collectively refusing to believe it's a real state?!?!

IRL it's mostly relevant as a corporate tax shelter!

I just can't wrap my head around the concept of Delaware having any important cities. IRL its biggest town is Wilmington, population just under 70k. Which, like, not tiny, but still smaller than every city i've ever lived in. (It's basically a surburb of Philly that just happens to be across the state border.)

Placing Metropolis in Delaware automatically downgrades it in my mind from "important enough city to be the stage for alien invasions" to "what the fuck is Lex Luthor doing there, why doesn't he take the tax break and put his HQ in a real city like a normal billionaire"

[roseandgold137]

(uploading this as its own post)

Two versions with and without background <3

basically her origin (which has pretty much stayed the same since I made her like. Three years ago now oh my god) is that, during a school trip to lexcorp, she gets separated from her class and who not during an evacuation bc it’s metropolis and they have regular alien invasions there idk.

all those rocks? The heart? That’s platinum kryptonite. That’s her heart. According to some of my dc encyclopaedias and also Google platinum kryptonite permanently gives humans kryptonian powers - as is the case with Gotham Girl. While mi-sun (sunny is her nickname) is separated from her group, she stumbles into the labs that are restricted from public view and finds all manners of kryptonite.

being a curious child that just ended up in a weird ass room with weird ass rocks, sunny feels herself drawn to the platinum kryptonite. And maybe, if she hadn’t walked towards it, she would have been fine, but at that moment the fight that she was supposed to be evacuated because of collides with the side of lexcorp and the room sunny is in is completely destroyed. The box that was housing the platinum kryptonite shatters, and the pieces of platinum kryptonite pierce sunny’s chest and lodge in her heart.

(Fun fact: her name was originally going to be Shard bc of the shards of platinum kryptonite in her heart)

obviously this isn’t a very healthy thing, and sunny is unconscious for hours while everyone is frantically searching for her and assuming she might have died during the collision. Either way, sunny wakes up and kinda… isn’t fazed? She feels like she should be way worse off, but she can’t even see any marks of the explosion on her - at worst, she feels a little dizzy, but even that fades.

Mi-sun goes back to the orphanage (yes she’s an orphan I forgot to mention that further up but let’s be real. When is a character not an orphan. There’s a limited number) and basically acts as if nothing’s wrong, bc as far as she’s concerned nothing really is.

meanwhile, lex has realised that despite being able to recover all of his other kryptonite pieces, the platinum kryptonite is mysteriously missing. And, lo and behold, who was the last person seen in the room by the cameras before everything exploded?

It doesn’t take long for lex to locate sunny and it takes even less time for him to realise that she has been affected by the platinum kryptonite, and his plans change from get the kryptonite back to get the child and study the effects. Mi-sun, obviously not very keen on becoming a lab rat and still not fully realising what’s happened, runs and runs and runs and - since when could she run this much? And why isn’t she actually running on the ground? And, oh, now she’s flying. That’s great.

Of course now that she has begun flying all of her other new powers decide that it’s the best time to activate. And boy do they activate. As in she immediately starts the whole sensory hell and glowing yellow eyes as seen above. She can’t handle this (obviously, bc she’s been a normal human child up until this point) and crashes into an island.

that island is Hawaii. I wonder who she could meet there. Maybe it’ll even be someone that can relate to not wanting to be luthor’s home experiment.

Kon (who’s probably in his early twenties) finds this raggedy looking child and tries to offer his help. He gets a facefull of eye lasers instead. Initially he thinks that it’s a trap and mi-sun is intentionally attacking him, but eventually he realises that she’s really just having the worst day ever of all time and again, offers to help

this time he doesn’t get a face full of lasers and once mi-sun calms down enough to explain what she thinks happened, Kon decides to bring her to the fortress of solitude to investigate further. There, they run some tests and confirm that yes, the platinum kryptonite is in her heart, and no, they can’t safely remove it and it really seems to be the only reason she survived at all, so removing it could just kill her.

Kon calls Clark and Kara in to help, and they start planning how to handle these issues with Luthor and mi-sun herself, but sunny doesn’t involve herself in the conversation

reminder that she is a child, and is only about fourteen, and like any fourteen year old child in this kind of situation, she’s fucking terrified. She’s just been told that lex luthor does indeed want to keep her as a science experiment and that the thing that’s keeping her alive could also easily kill her. And so she runs again, because that’s the only way she’s ever known how to deal with her problems, and she’s never tried to touch her feelings with a ten foot pole

this is an objectively bad decision and now that she’s essentially been turned into a kryptonian by the platinum kryptonite, the green kryptonite that lex loves to employ has every effect on her as it would have on superman. She narrowly evades capture but she’s significantly weakened. Lex corners her, and it seems like the chase is over, but Kon swoops in and quickly cuts that short. Clark and Kara take on lex’s army of drones and Kon gets sunny to the safety of his Hawaii home

(He didn’t bring her to the frotress of solitude bc she’d already run from there once and he needed to calm her down again, and a massive echoey ice palace is not really the greatest place to achieve that)

eventually Kon officially takes on a mentor role for her and is her kind of not really dad, and sunny helps found the next iteration of young justice with various other new heroes, but that’s her origin yeah 👍