I was just thinking about how much death Lena has witnessed in her life, not just at the hands of her family, but the death of her family. She’s seen every one of them die, her birth mum, Lex, Lillian, and probably Lionel too. I was wondering your like- thoughts on how witnessing all that affects Lena as a person? :)
oh, i have so many thoughts on this. and i wish i’d answered with them sooner so you actually could’ve seen them!!
to lena, loss is obviously inevitable. but more important than that, it’s something she believes she has a personal hand in.
when lena’s birth mom dies, lena grows up thinking it was her fault. she registers her dissociation as a character flaw, not a trauma response. she sees it as her being innately depraved, rather than a scared child in an impossible situation. and given how lena is raised - it isn’t surprising in the slightest that she connected the wrong dots.
flash forward to when lena’s a bit older: lionel dies of alcoholism. there were so many things that drove him to addiction but the underlying factor of it all is stress. stress from luthor corp, from his marriage, from lex, from the media, all of it. it’s no fault of lena’s - lionel is a grown man and can make his own choices. but lena’s a malleable child growing up in a household where she is constantly hearing that everything is her fault. she is the problem. she is to blame.
so lionel dies and in lena’s eyes - maybe it’s on her. maybe it’s the same poison that killed her mom.
flash forward again, and lex goes fully mad. as we know, it happens after lena had tried so desperately to pull him back to earth. at twelve-years-old, she’s carrying this burden on her shoulders - painstakingly wondering if her failure is the reason he killed so many innocent people. and at this point, she isn’t even a teenager yet, yet she feels like there is so much blood on her hands.
from here, lena is trying so hard to do the right thing. blend in, keep her head down, be good. and because of this - she is so easily influenced. she follows andrea around like a stray puppy, the same way she latched onto mercy graves. she’s searching for scraps anywhere she can. because she knows at a moments notice, it can (and will) be all ripped away.
by the time lena’s in her early 20s, she’s somewhat well adjusted. at least, in the sense that she outwardly appears to be functioning. but everything she does is still driven by guilt. it’s pushed by a desperation to make amends for crimes she didn’t commit, and achieve forgiveness for things that were never her fault. she wants to cure cancer, save the world, and work with supergirl because after a life surrounded by loss - she needs to prove to herself that she is more than all that.
simultaneously, she’s unable to form a real relationship with anyone. she tries to push kara away, yet immediately overshares about her past and adoption with her. she says she wants to “be the luthor that shares her home with a super” but comes off as untrusting and short with supergirl. lena is in this constant push-pull with kara/supergirl because she’s in a constant push-pull with herself. for every urge she has to get closer to her and finally experience something real, there’s an even stronger reminder that she can’t have that - it’ll only be taken away.
this is only reinforced when jack dies and again, it feels like lena’s fault.
lena proceeds to tell kara that death does strange things to her family, then shares a story about her mom dissociating after lex’s arrest. she was cleaning his room as if he’d just been away on a business trip. later, in season 4, lena talks to brainy about how she puts the emotions she can’t deal with in little boxes that she locks away and pushes down. it’s clear that lena learned this kind of compartmentalization from lillian, likely starting when she was four-years-old. she’s never been able to let it go - because her circumstances keep telling her that this behavior is necessary.
ultimately, recurrent loss, self blame, and an inability to cope with grief has prevented lena from keeping meaningful relationships in adulthood. in some instances, she might be able to form them, but she isn’t able to keep them. she doesn’t know how - it goes against every protective mechanism she’s ever built for herself.
and i think this is a big part of why things blow up so badly with kara. obviously, it isn’t the complete picture. but to lena, the loss of her trust in kara at the end of s4 was the equivalent of another death, and more blood on her hands.
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