Dear Smallville Fandom...
So your show is over now. Welcome to being a closed-canon fandom.
It's not the end of the world. I stopped watching Smallville 6 years ago and I'm still active in the fandom. I discuss it with people; I consume fanworks; I produce fanworks. I'm still in love with my OTP from the show and I think I always will be.
Please, please, please, don't all drop out of the fandom just because the show is over now. If I'm still around six years later, don't you think you can hold out for another year or two at least? I still have more I want to write. I still have more I want to read and watch.
For the sake of your favorite characters, pairings, and themes, and for my sake, please don't just give up on the fandom now that you don't have the show anymore. Closed-canon can be a great place to live. It means you know everything, and you can build your fanworks on a solid, unshifting foundation. You can poke through canon at a more leisurely pace while you work, not worrying about what might come barreling at you next week. You've got the whole house built, and now you can move in and decorate it.
Welcome to closed-canon world. I hope you join me and stay for a while.
That said, I did watch the finale, because, well, finale, and also because I'm on duty for sv_ledger and I get to spend today reading reviews of it anyway, so better to have seen it myself.
Well, this episode was so much not written for me that it's almost silly for me to comment on it. It bears no relation to the 3 seasons of Smallville I do follow, or to the parts of the DCU that I've started caring about in the last year. So I will keep this brief. (It's also mostly negative, though I try not to be.)
I still loathe the rhetoric of destiny the show uses, and the discussion of good and evil as characteristics inherent to a person. I'm not sure why they started using so much Christian metaphor in the dialogue. And I continue to disagree with these heroes who "don't kill people" based on such narrow definitions of "don't" and "kill" and "people" that it's like those fundamentalists who preserve their virginity for marriage by having lots of anal sex. (Though to be fair, maybe these heroes don't claim to not kill people? They didn't say that in this episode, at least.)
Taken as new characters in a new show, Clark and Lois did have some cute moments.
Mainly the structure felt off to me, though, and I didn't have a lot of emotional impact from it. I kept thinking, "wait, what's going on? and why do I care?" and "that's not very realistic." And then Clark killed Darkseid and flew into space and Apokolips just... backed away? and the Omega symbols disappeared? and I couldn't figure out why. And then they ran down a quick little checklist of "iconic moments" making sure to collect every one and then it was over. Except if they actually said the word Superman I missed it. And it relied less on what the show had set up and more on what you already knew from other sources.
So now let's talk about Lex!
Okay, say you're writing a show, and these are your options.
1. An enmity between Clark and Lex that is based on their previous years of friendship, love, desire, pain, betrayal, and loss. They have a destiny together, two sides of the same coin, two people who measure themselves by each other and know how much they helped create each other.
2. An enmity between Superman and President Luthor where Clark is basically over Lex and Lex doesn't even remember ever having met Clark before.
I think the choice is obvious, don't you? #2 carries soooooo much more epic dramatic potential.
Oh wait, maybe not...
Except actually it gets even worse. For one thing, in my definition, Lex is dead and this new Lex isn't the same individual. I mean, what continuity of identity is there? A new body with implanted memories doesn't cut it for me. Was there a brain transplant? I thought Lex was blown up. Did Darkseid grab his soul from the afterlife and stuff it in the new body? That could be inferred, but it's never actually stated in the text.
In fact, after new-Lex loses his memories, the episode doesn't show Lex and Clark interacting again or commenting on each other. So how do we even know they're enemies? Well, we know it from the comics and the movies!!!!1111!!!eleventyone. Uh, but we don't know it from Smallville. Having started his life, as far as he remembers, in a little room watching Apokolips bearing down on him and then Superman saving the world, President Luthor may think Superman is the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, the greatest thing since sliced bread, all that and a cherry on top. And Superman may think President Luthor has the best policies of any president ever and is doing a bang-up job, gosh golly gee whiz, he's so happy to see this version of him in office.
I mean, canon doesn't actually say otherwise.
So I'll be going back to my 3 seasons of SV and my fanworks, and I hope you will still be in the fandom with me.
This entry was originally posted at http://ciaan.dreamwidth.org/42088.html. Please comment here or there.
It's not the end of the world. I stopped watching Smallville 6 years ago and I'm still active in the fandom. I discuss it with people; I consume fanworks; I produce fanworks. I'm still in love with my OTP from the show and I think I always will be.
Please, please, please, don't all drop out of the fandom just because the show is over now. If I'm still around six years later, don't you think you can hold out for another year or two at least? I still have more I want to write. I still have more I want to read and watch.
For the sake of your favorite characters, pairings, and themes, and for my sake, please don't just give up on the fandom now that you don't have the show anymore. Closed-canon can be a great place to live. It means you know everything, and you can build your fanworks on a solid, unshifting foundation. You can poke through canon at a more leisurely pace while you work, not worrying about what might come barreling at you next week. You've got the whole house built, and now you can move in and decorate it.
Welcome to closed-canon world. I hope you join me and stay for a while.
That said, I did watch the finale, because, well, finale, and also because I'm on duty for sv_ledger and I get to spend today reading reviews of it anyway, so better to have seen it myself.
Well, this episode was so much not written for me that it's almost silly for me to comment on it. It bears no relation to the 3 seasons of Smallville I do follow, or to the parts of the DCU that I've started caring about in the last year. So I will keep this brief. (It's also mostly negative, though I try not to be.)
I still loathe the rhetoric of destiny the show uses, and the discussion of good and evil as characteristics inherent to a person. I'm not sure why they started using so much Christian metaphor in the dialogue. And I continue to disagree with these heroes who "don't kill people" based on such narrow definitions of "don't" and "kill" and "people" that it's like those fundamentalists who preserve their virginity for marriage by having lots of anal sex. (Though to be fair, maybe these heroes don't claim to not kill people? They didn't say that in this episode, at least.)
Taken as new characters in a new show, Clark and Lois did have some cute moments.
Mainly the structure felt off to me, though, and I didn't have a lot of emotional impact from it. I kept thinking, "wait, what's going on? and why do I care?" and "that's not very realistic." And then Clark killed Darkseid and flew into space and Apokolips just... backed away? and the Omega symbols disappeared? and I couldn't figure out why. And then they ran down a quick little checklist of "iconic moments" making sure to collect every one and then it was over. Except if they actually said the word Superman I missed it. And it relied less on what the show had set up and more on what you already knew from other sources.
So now let's talk about Lex!
Okay, say you're writing a show, and these are your options.
1. An enmity between Clark and Lex that is based on their previous years of friendship, love, desire, pain, betrayal, and loss. They have a destiny together, two sides of the same coin, two people who measure themselves by each other and know how much they helped create each other.
2. An enmity between Superman and President Luthor where Clark is basically over Lex and Lex doesn't even remember ever having met Clark before.
I think the choice is obvious, don't you? #2 carries soooooo much more epic dramatic potential.
Oh wait, maybe not...
Except actually it gets even worse. For one thing, in my definition, Lex is dead and this new Lex isn't the same individual. I mean, what continuity of identity is there? A new body with implanted memories doesn't cut it for me. Was there a brain transplant? I thought Lex was blown up. Did Darkseid grab his soul from the afterlife and stuff it in the new body? That could be inferred, but it's never actually stated in the text.
In fact, after new-Lex loses his memories, the episode doesn't show Lex and Clark interacting again or commenting on each other. So how do we even know they're enemies? Well, we know it from the comics and the movies!!!!1111!!!eleventyone. Uh, but we don't know it from Smallville. Having started his life, as far as he remembers, in a little room watching Apokolips bearing down on him and then Superman saving the world, President Luthor may think Superman is the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, the greatest thing since sliced bread, all that and a cherry on top. And Superman may think President Luthor has the best policies of any president ever and is doing a bang-up job, gosh golly gee whiz, he's so happy to see this version of him in office.
I mean, canon doesn't actually say otherwise.
So I'll be going back to my 3 seasons of SV and my fanworks, and I hope you will still be in the fandom with me.
This entry was originally posted at http://ciaan.dreamwidth.org/42088.html. Please comment here or there.