can i just say that i’m a slut for supergirl angst? like, kara zor-el remembers krypton. she’s not removed from it, like clark. every person she ever knew, everyone she ever passed on the street, went to school with is dead. the first boy she had a crush on in school- dead. the first girl she kissed, red-faced and young and embarrassed- dead. yorin, a student in her father’s lab who would keep sweets for her in his pockets.
dead
(she spends 3 months doing the calculations; her birthday is september 22 in earth time. this is what she tells her foster-parents when they ask why she’s holed up in her room, doing complex astrophysics.
krypton was destroyed in february and she mourns silently and alone)
the culture, too. she tries to teach clark kryptonese but he can’t buzz the words correctly in his throat, he can’t twist his tongue around the syllables all the way and he sounds wrong. she tells him the name Rao with reverence and he repeats it with flat incomprehension and she wants to cry and rage because she was supposed to teach him these things. she was supposed to pass krypton on to clark, but she’s twenty years too late.
her angst about not protecting her cousin is valid, but it makes more sense that she’d feel more about not being able to teach clark his heritage. clark may be superman, but kara is the last daughter of krypton.
Bonus:
Not even the sky is the same here on Earth. Everything is too yellow and blindingly bright. Her eyes have grown accustomed to the light, but there is a reason she like sunsets and sunrises the best.
She doesn’t know how to explain the animals that existed on Krypton. Oh, she tries, but there are just no words. None that can describe the breadth of diversity that was Kryptonese flora and the fauna because they’re too different, too alien to truly understand their beauty without experiencing it.
(”No, it was more like…It’s so…”
“I guess you kinda had to be there, huh?”
“Yeah. I guess.”)
Even the landscapes are beyond description. She tried painting a few a couple times, but the closest she got was only an echo of the real thing. A child’s memory that faded along the edges before her talent could catch up.
And even if she could draw the sharpest image of her planet, it would still be missing the sound and touch of the place. The way the air tasted and the feel of the dirt between her fingers. She doesn’t know how to capture the way the rain trickled down in a storm or how the winds sang against the spires of Argo and Kandor. And then there was the hum. Everywhere on the planet, there was always this slight vibration that she can’t quite describe, like a constant heartbeat thrumming from the ground all the way to her fingertips.
It’s not just the people, but the physical place that Kara misses. The one place that Kara will always belong to without question, where she doesn’t have to fight for the right to exist or justify her place in that world. It was her birthright. Her home.
Krypton.
She says the word as if doing so would breathe life back into it, as if her repeating it is the only way it can stay alive. It only exists now in softened images in her mind, in poisoned fragments of rock that are lethal to touch, and in the broken family links of the House of El.
Kara Zor-El, last true child of Krypton. There will be no one else after she is gone.
no one asked you kay
what the fuck no why get these feelings away from me
Interesting thing to note: of the times we’ve heard Kryptonian on this show, it’s always been Kara or J’onn speaking it. Clark understands but is never shown to speak it (which is a typical language thing with 2nd gen bi-cultural kids).
Just more things to think about in fannish spaces, since the show seems to have abandoned Kara’s Kryptonian backstory and how it informs her character in the narrative these days.
Eh it was okay. Great vfx but little else was there in the premiere.
Also Supergirl is like, completely ignored in there and they are just
pretending that it’s just Superman who exists. But yeah, loads of
Kryptonian culture and stuff will get explored
LOL of course Supergirl is ignored. I am used to being disappointed where people paying attention to Supergirl is concerned.
Anyway, thanks for the heads-up; I might check it out! I am there for more exploration of Kryptonian culture. (Unless of course I don’t like it in which case I will completely ignore and make up my own!)
Yo has anyone watched the pilot of “Krypton”? I’m kind of thinking about it only bc I want more stuff to base Krypton headcanons for Supergirl on but am kind of leery of it being not alien enough and full of love triangles.
Question of Smoke 