#the superfriends: damn she's in the torment nexus? that sucks...hope she gets out...thoughts and prayers 🙏

[moistvonlipwig]

🔥do you have any more for the cw's supergirl bc the last one was so so so so funny and real and true

thank youuu i had to think about this one though bc to be honest i saw this ask and the entirety of cw supergirl disappeared from my brain. but now i have remembered things to be salty about. looping in @yourlocalegotisticalqueerishere who also asked. anyway this one is not quite so funny unforchy, it's more morbid as hell?? but um i think the way the show/the superfriends handled the aftermath of crisis is genuinely really disturbing.

@sideguitars and i have talked a lot about this and i touched on it in my fic which everyone should go readies right now :3 but basically. the result of crisis is that everyone in the arrowverse (except a select few people - barry, kara, kate kane, the legends of tomorrow lady i legitimately forgot her name, j'onn, lex, ryan choi, technically the wellses who are stored instead nash (?), jennifer pierce, & lastly lena due to lex's deal with the monitor) dies. and when the world is "reset" j'onn flies around restoring a lot of the main characters' memories but not all of them. in practice, all the shows treat this less like our beloved characters have literally died and been replaced and their replacements have 'our' versions' memories in their heads as well, and much more like restoring memories effectively brings our dead versions back to life. let us proceed with the assumption that this is more or less what is happening, because that is how the shows act.

now there are 2 ways to read the morality of this action of restoring memories, which notably happens multiple times without consent from the person involved. #1 is that the new versions of these characters are people in their own right and deserve to live. through this reading, restoring 'our' versions is a violation of these people, tantamount to murder; it is overwriting their inconvenient experiences with the experiences of people our characters like better. there is no material difference, in this reading, between what j'onn does to the people whose memories he restores and what lena does to eve in s5 when she puts hope in her brain. through this reading, the superfriends are pure villains. you could imagine a superhero movie with this very plot, in fact: a sympathetic supervillain from another universe that got erased trying to replace people from this universe with people from their own.

#2 is that our versions of these characters, for whatever reason, deserve to live more than the new versions (or versions from any other earths). through this reading, it is justifiable to restore people's memories without consent, but anyone who is not restored is effectively being allowed to die, an act of criminal negligence by a band of so-called superheroes. the limits of who gets chosen to have their memories returned then become morbidly fascinating. on supergirl -- which is the only show that crisis really affects at all, frankly (besides arrow i guess but who gives a fuck), so it's kind of the only one where any of this matters -- we know for a fact that j'onn restores alex, nia, brainy, kelly, and clark and probably lois and maybe m'gann also i forget tbh. i think it is reasonable to assume he also restored james. i certainly hope he did! but we know he did not restore, say, cat grant, or andrea rojas, or william dey, or other people outside their immediate circle.

which raises questions like: why kelly? because she is alex's girlfriend of a few months? because she is james's sister? well, what about mama olsen? did they restore her memories? surely not remembering lex luthor torturing her son would change her significantly. what about alex's fake latina ex-girlfriend, maggie sawyer? does she not get her memories back, on account of being merely the ex, not the current girlfriend of supergirl's sister? and so on.

but of course the biggest crime by far is that the superfriends do not know that lex made a deal with the monitor for lena's survival and they believe she perished. and they do nothing to bring her memories back. this is despite the fact that she is unquestionably the number one person affected by the change to the universe. please consider that the biggest change to earth-prime from earth-38 is that lex luthor now never went evil, is friends with the supers, and is still in charge of luthorcorp. obviously this has a trickle-down effect on many people's lives, but i would think it obvious that the person most impacted is his little sister who he abused and manipulated for her entire life (per s4), who was left to deal with the fallout of his going evil and, oh yeah, who recently had to kill him. and now suddenly he is back in her life and has power over her and he remembers every way that she (rightfully) betrayed him. in fact i think it is not at all a stretch to say that lex's primary motivation in how he set up earth-prime was gaining more control over lena (which is why it's interesting and speaks to a lingering ember of humanity and love in lex that he lets her keep her memories at all).

and for some reason none of the superfriends are like. hey maybe lena, our former friend whose last action before her (apparent) death was helping to save three billion people at the superfriends' behest, deserves to live and know the full truth of who her brother is and what their relationship has been. alex even tries to argue that kara shouldn't tell lena about any of their history at all because then lena might be mad at kara for all the lying and that would, you know, suck for kara personally. which, like, i guess kara wanting to tell lena the truth is a step up from that load of horseshit, but again, none of you considered restoring her memories? you're just going to let her stay dead? after alex, j'onn, and kara all agreed in 5x08 that lena was not a lost cause and could still be saved? lmao. okay.

and then once they realize lena has her memories we again have the issue of like. why is it that alex and kara get to have THEIR support systems restored but lena doesn't? again. lena is the one whose life has been MOST overturned by crisis. she is the one currently under her abuser's thumb -- her abuser who is the only one who apparently bothered to consider saving her life, and who is the only non-superfriend she knows who also remembers their previous earth. which, keeping in mind that as far as she knows all the superfriends were down to kill her in 5x08 with a nuclear fucking missile, means that she has literally nowhere safe to go.

like. one of her best and most supportive friends was sam arias. and to be fair s5 seems dead set on pretending sam never existed with the exception of 5x13. but if she wanted to go to sam, it wouldn't be the same sam with knowledge of earth-38. andrea, also, isn't the same andrea. they make it a point to show us she has a different backstory. even lillian isn't the same lillian, and, i mean, lillian was indeed abusive to lena, but earth-38 lillian was more on her side than earth-prime lillian is. lena has literally no one. she has her abusive brother and her former friends who lied to her for years and tried to kill her (as far as she knows) and that's it. but alex gets her girlfriend of a few months back. and kara gets her cousin back. because what kara and alex want matters, and what lena needs does not matter. and then the superfriends are all Shocked and Appalled that lena goes back to lex. which like. i don't love that as a story beat either, but i put it to you: where the fuck else was she supposed to go?

anyway i could rant about this all day long lol but basically it points to how profoundly unconcerned the superfriends were with lena's status as lex's first and primary victim, which really undermines their later claims that they're lena's new and better family. and it also points to how little the show itself cared about the psychology of abuse victims (particularly female ones) that this was never factored into how they wrote the reconciliation between lena & the superfriends. and more broadly the whole thing suggests a frankly eerie self-centeredness on the part of the superfriends that makes all their moral posturing seem hollow. no matter which way you read the morality of restoring people's memories post-crisis, the superfriends (mostly kara, j'onn, and alex tbf) acted callously, selfishly, and without care for the very people they were supposed to protect. and, as always, lena luthor suffered for it.