Another print for @clexacon done… Maybe I’m a little excited.
LENA LUTHOR: RESHAPING A LEGACY
The name Luthor leaves footprints all over the corridors of power across the country, but nowhere moreso than in National City, where the family first established itself and made much of its fortune. Senators whisper it in frustration, judges mutter it in disgust, prison wardens spit it with disdain, criminals with a degree of awe.
Lena Luthor wants you to know, she wants no part of it.
We’ve met at an open-air café in the downtown Market District, not far from Luthor’s notoriously chic loft on the waterfront. She’s friendly and direct, poised and confident. A far cry from the guarded black sheep I was expecting. She’s dressed down and ordered a nicoise salad and some sparkling water, and she fiddles a lot with her ponytail, which keeps coming loose.
The first thing she seems eager to get out of the way is that she is Not Like Other Luthors. Indeed, she’s careful to pay respects to her brother’s brilliance and her parents’ insistence on teaching her a thousand and one things that she would need to know to survive in a world where her name would be as much a curse as the fortune that came with it would be a blessing. She talks about coding classes, science camp, but also Survival Scouts and marksmanship lessons –yes, that’s right, she can fire both a gun and a bow and arrow and is apparently quite accurate with both– and literature and fencing and finance and chess. She waves dismissively when I use the word genius to refer to her. She says she was just educated very, very well.
Why is it that every werewolf book is this weird testosterone fueled alpha male/female romance thing?
Like guys. Werewolves are family groups. They are basically big ol’ dog families. Your werewolf family wouldn’t be made up of alpha males fighting each other for dominance and subjugating females.
If there was a werewolf in your neighborhood, they’d be that family of 10 kids always roughhousing outside and their house is the one all the neighborhood kids go to hang out at because Mr. Werewolf and Mrs. Werewolf are the Cool Parents that their kids find really embarrassing.
“Wait…Emily? Aren’t she and her whole family…you know?”
“Don’t believe everything you’ve heard; worst thing that’s ever happened over there is the twins teething on visitors’ shoes.”
Here’s the thing, though.
While the notion of the “alpha wolf” is indeed misguided, being based on observations of wolves in captivity, the dominance thing does happen. And it’s not just the adult males; adult females do it too – but it’s only a thing when wolves who aren’t related by blood end up sharing a habitat.
So consider: by some happenstance, two unrelated werewolf families end up living across the street from one another. Of course they’re not going to start brawling in the streets – they’re civilised people, after all – but that urge to show the other pack who’s boss comes out in other ways, resulting in the two clans getting, like, weirdly competitive about everything.
Imagine the Hallowe’en displays.
Are you trying to tell me that the most hardcore ride-or-die PTA mothers are probably actually werewolves?
“We’re settling this through the old ways, Helen.”
“Spiked silver chains on the night of the blood moon?”
“The spring bake sale, Helen. Turn it down a notch.”
“Fine. But when they taste my lemon squares you’re going to wish we’d gone with the silver chains, Jessi.”
Meanwhile, across the room.
“You know what I like doin’ Rob?”
“What’s that Bill?”
“Peeing out of doors.”
“Me too, Bill. But I thought you just married into the whole werewolf thing.”
Question of Smoke 