Art for my (still in progress) Supergirl Captain America AU! In which Alex cross-dresses to go to war and Kara is mistaken for a super soldier. (And a heck of a lot of other stuff; it is taking forever to write!)
This one got rather long! But that’s what AUs do (Also, don’t feel you need to restrict prompts to Kalex and E2, I am happy to contemplate anything. Ahem, supersanvers & MJY in particular :P)
Alex could not look away. Her chest caught tight, like parachute silk suddenly strained to bursting with wind. The waterfall tumble of golden hair, the ducked head and shy smile, the blueness of her eyes beneath dark lashes, the creamy softness of her skin. How was Alex supposed to breathe in the face of that. And her kindness, the warm press of her hand as Alex made her confession.
Alex Danvers knows what rock bottom looks like, and this isn’t it. But still, getting fired and blackballed by your mob-connected boss is not really ‘success’. Reality TV has not ever been part of the plan. But it’s time to make a change, and Knives and Fire: National City is her best chance at making it.
The fact that it will piss off her mom? Even better.
Ever since the explosion that took her parents from her, Kara Olsen has been struggling to find out where she belongs and what she’s meant to do with her life. But everything she pursues seems to end in failure. Working on her boyfriend’s taco truck seemed to be the answer, but without an infusion of cash and some new ideas, the taco truck is doomed.
Going on Knives and Fire: National City is a harebrained scheme to save it. And the prospect of public embarrassment when Kara inevitably fails again is mortifying. But what else is there? Just giving up?
This season on Knives and Fire: Knives! Fire! and Dreams. 8 young chefs come together to prove themselves in the oven of destiny. Bonds will be forged, remade and tested, but in the fires of competition, what you truly find is yourself.
Since a few people were confused in the tags on this post I thought I’d explain.
Six Sentence Sunday is a writing thing where, on Sunday, you post six sentences from an unfinished work. It can be a new fic, a new chapter of a WIP, or even something you’re not sure you’ll ever post.
Choose an excerpt from any section (and it doesn’t have to be six sentences) and post it, letting people know what it belongs to or indicating that it’s something you’re working on.
People get a preview of what’s coming. You get some feedback on what’s there. If they like it, you might get some reblogs that will generate more interest in your story or you as a writer.
You can find loads of examples by searching for this on tumblr (sometimes tagged “Sunday six”)
Six sentences of my Supergirl Captain America AU, currently in progress! My first drafting procedure is writing things out of order, so these do not go together at all (and are not arranged in order either), but hopefully give a sense of it:
2. “It got on you,” the dark-haired woman says, eyes wide, looking at the vial Kara had broken when she’d been careless, when her strength had come back, “the super soldier serum.”
37. “Lesbianism isn’t classified as a mental illness anymore,” Alex says one day, metal hand clenched tight around a shopping bag of what looks like far more vegetables than she’d gone to the market for.
51. It’s only to Lena that Kara haltingly admits she needs to eat more than what is provided in the usual soldier’s rations—and once she’s given more food she starts filling out, growing larger breasts she needs to bind, getting enough muscle that her real figure is almost as toned as the padded suit she wore for shows, that her fellow soldiers start looking at her differently.
54. “Was that your first kiss since 1945?” Cat asks once they’ve escaped, and Kara can’t answer, thinks of watching Alex press her lips to other women’s in that bar, of those lips pressed to her forehead, her hair, thinks of the cat she hurt as a teenager when she tried to pet it, of crying for a week after and not telling Alex why, of eating rations with her hands when she was particularly anxious as the other soldiers laughed at “how hungry” she was.
77. “Do you want different pronouns?” Lucy asks, and Kara has no idea what that means but something about the careful way that Lucy says it makes her pause.
96. Clark wears their family’s crest proudly on his chest, as he should, while Kara can barely stand to look at it, to see the symbol that had once adorned her family’s clothing, that she and Alex had sketched again and again as teenagers, reminding themselves what they were looking for—a baby, a child, and then, as too much time passed, a teenager.
This is your friendly reminder that shipping Kara/Alex doesn’t mean you’re “erasing” adoptive families. You’re talking about a hypothetical dynamic between two specific fictional characters, one that you understand involves a departure from their canon relationship. You aren’t talking about anyone else’s real family, or invalidating their family. I know that the vast majority of Kara/Alex shippers fully support the canon written dynamic and only want to engage in the romantic shipping in a fanon context, and you don’t deserve to be told that you don’t value or are purposefully sexualizing a sibling relationship. You are not. You are discussing a “what-if” scenario where the “what if” is “what if they saw each other differently?” You are, more than likely, picking up on tropes between the two of them that are heavily romantically coded, and while it’s an interesting thought experiment and a wildly positive thing in the context of mass media to see a relationship like that given the same weight as a romantic one–you are not a creator of mass media, and you are not fundamentally altering or disrespecting the canon text by interpreting it differently. That is one of the core tenets of fandom: The canon stands. And, shockingly, you can hold more than one interpretation of a text, even if the two (or three, or four) interpretations conflict.
Second, “erasure” is a social justice term applied to groups that face systemic societal oppression, and claiming “erasure” is in fact appropriating the term in order to give their personal squick discursive weight where it doesn’t have any. Is it personally irritating? Maybe. Is it possibly something they’ve had to deal with people insinuating about their family at multiple points in their lives, and they just don’t want to hear about it? Sure; and it’s basic decency to respect their wishes to not have people trying to talk to them about things that upset them.
Do adoptive families face systemic oppression that can include things like: Markedly shorter lifespans for people from that group, due to lack of housing, job, or economic prospects (e.g., do people not want to hire them, work with them, house them, etc. because they’re adopted?); entire conservative institutions dedicated to “protecting the family” from them; face potential firing, physical or sexual harassment, or even murder because of their status–so often that it’s necessary to create legal statutes specifying violence based on those characteristics as “hate crimes”; pathologization and attempts to forcibly institutionalize and “treat” them; or ban from engaging in activities or institutions considered benefits, privileges, or duties of “full citizenship” in society, like military service (however you may feel about that), marriage, or (pointedly) adoption?
No.
Are people mean to them for it? Yes. Do people bully them for it? Yes. Do people insinuate things about their families? Yes, and I suspect that’s part of the reason for the reaction some people with that background have. But the necessary implication of “erasure” is that the group in question is also systemically oppressed. And that’s not true in this case.
You’ve got to understand
that I was only looking out for you
You’ve always looked out
for me
I need you faith, Alex.
More than that S, more than that cape…More than anyone’s.
You wanted to know if I
have faith in you…I do. I always had. You’ve always had the heart
of a hero, Kara. Way before you put on that S.
I may not need Superman to
be a hero, but…I’ll always need you.
Com’here. No thinking,
just hugging.
I was afraid…of losing
you. And I can’t lose you!
Kara…you’re my sister.
And I love you. No matter what.
Have faith in me…like I
have in you.
But what am I gonna do
without you?
You don’t need me. You
never had.
But you still took care of
me anyway.
Yeah and look how great
you turned out. I love you.
I love you too.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry
for everything. I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you were less
to me than Clark. You’re the only reason I ever felt at home on this
planet.
I’m just better when we
are together.
Me too.
I’m here. Always.
I do know how it feels to
keep a part of yourself shut off…to keep it inside. And I know how
lonely it can make you feel. But Alex…you’re not alone.
I can’t do this without
you.
You don’t have to.
“All those little moments
brought the two of them there, right in that instant.
All the fights, the tears,
the smiles, the people they met…Those who became family, those they
fell in love with… Everything else seemed to disappear, in the sky
of National City. In that moment it was just the two of them, just
like it started, all those years ago. Because no matter what
happened, no matter who they met, it had always been them: Kara and
Alex against the world. Always destined to reach that moment in time.
Sisters…best friends…Soulmates. And ready to start a new
adventure: the best one.”
Once again I commissioned @ohnoafterlaughs a piece and as always she delivered. And HOW did she deliver. This beautiful piece is hers so if you like it, go tell her! She’s amazing.
Who follows me knows how obsessed I am with Alex and Kara Danvers. I couldn’t resist from asking her to draw them. I just love them and their relationship so much! So here it is, I hope all the other Kalex fans out there enjoy it as much as I do.
Nine minutes actually. And oh, what a glorious nine minutes they were. (I actually edited out all the flashback bits for a few other people, but here’s a link to that file for anyone else who wants it)
But I AM gonna disagree with you on the episode as a whole, because I loved it.
Don’t get me wrong, it was really shitty writing, and it’s telling which characters this show chooses to kill off, but I really liked the character-building it did for young Kalex, and what it means for present-Kalex.
From a writer’s perspective, it’s given me a literal shit-ton of new bits and pieces to pull a hundred new story ideas from.
And from a fan’s perspective, I’m actually really glad the episode wasn’t just Alex being heartbroken over Maggie for forty minutes, and instead used that time to show us that their connection and their love for one another was something they wanted, something they chose.
Their relationship wasn’t built from the circumstances of their living arrangements.
Alex wasn’t just following her mother’s orders to love Kara.
And Kara didn’t find a home in Alex just because she was scared of being alone, and Alex was a convenient option.
I liked this episode because it reaffirms that Alex and Kara chose to be what they are. No body forced them, and it wasn’t reactionary.
They wanted this. They wanted them.
I just don’t think anything could’ve been more beautiful than that.
Plus it gave us this wonderful little exchange:
16-year-old Kara: “Normal for humans. I’m literally bulletproof.”
Question of Smoke 