obsessed with how in supergirl 2026 the trope was changed from grumpy man finding and then begrudgingly adopting a teenage girl to a grumpy woman begrudgingly adopting a teenage girl
There's a lot (a lot) I hate about franchises; I love the kinds of works that get franchises made out of them, but pretty much invariably despise the franchise itself. I've always tended to dislike fanon, and at least that's free-range organic social pressure to accept whatever headcanons it's coalesced around, most of the time. Some company's focus-tested proclamations of authority are 100x worse.
That said, the single most aggravating, contemptible way that a franchise can operate—and always seems to do, sooner or later—is to insist that the works that make it up can't actually stand on their own strengths. It might seem like this character or that had a whole arc that resolved by the end of the show or the film or whatever, giving every impression that the future's going to be brighter and the character's growth will allow them to finally move forwards as a person and in their life, soon.
But a franchise will almost always look at a satisfyingly resolved arc with hope for the future, and see it as a problem. The argument is almost always, "okay, it might have seemed like they had all that growth and are going to move forwards after the story, but they didn't really, and the story wasn't actually complete. You'll have to watch Trek Wars Before Time XVIII: 2 Warp 2 Hyper, Part III to get what you need to really understand what was going on in that first one thing you liked."
And the prequels/sequels/whatever that work for me, the ones I can really love, are the ones that don't modify resolved character arcs that way. Lord of the Rings immeasurably expands on The Hobbit without suggesting that Bilbo's growth didn't really happen or that he'd need to keep repeating it for some reason. He's a minor presence in LOTR but he's very much the Bilbo from the end of The Hobbit, not the beginning.
My big fear with Rogue One is that it would sand my OT blorbo Anakin Skywalker down into generic fanboy one-dimensional Vader or he'd be much more ROTS-adjacent than OT-adjacent, without the mix of horror, menace, pathos, and occasional (terrifying) cringe that I think defines the character of the OT. Keeping Anakin to a few appearances without pushing his growth backwards or forwards for where he should be at that point, and including the quirks of his OT characterization ("don't choke on your aspirations" as an echo of "apology accepted..." <3), made it possible for me to also love Rogue One for its own sake and characters— there was no insistence that the arcs and resolutions of a completely different work that has been over for ages only seemed satisfying as a big fake-out in order to prop it up. It props itself up!
In fact, Rogue One draws on the conclusive, hopeful cohesion of the OT to underscore its own themes and arcs. When the injured Cassian asks if anyone heard and Jyn assures him someone did, we not only know from other scenes in the film that the Rebellion has heard, we've got the OT in the back of our heads, and the unbending commitment of the OT Rebellion to fighting the Empire. Rogue One doesn't say "maybe they aren't really," it says "maybe this is how they got that way." The very completeness of the OT is treated as a strength, not a problem.
This isn't an argument that Lucasfilm is The Good Franchise that doesn't pull the "lalala what arc" nonsense; it does the obnoxious franchise shit all the time. Rogue One specifically, though, steps carefully to avoid framing anything in the OT (or the prequels, for that matter) as incomplete, as any kind of fake-out that somehow needed Rogue One decades later to truly succeed as a story. Even the explanation for the fault in the Death Star design doesn't carry the sense of "this missing detail needed to be fixed" so much as an opportunity for storytelling that wouldn't disrupt the OT.
But "it seems like they finally learned X but actually they didn't" or "it seems like their future is hopeful... but actually it's bleak and full of suffering so that we can keep looping through the same story beats," or even the same for "it may have seemed like a satisfactory long-finished tragedy but sike here's your blorbo back"? Hate it, hate it, hate it.
To me, the most compelling scene in the new Supergirl was when Kara speaks with her father after seeing that he is making her an escape pod. The dialogue is in Kryptonian. And that is the most poignant and elegant dialogue in the film to me. Kara's lines and the emotion put into her saying to him, "I am only one tiny life," and her calm, clear articulation of her vision of herself being allowed to die beside her people and her mother and father was so profound and existential. And when he explains why they need to her live, you know she would agree. The price, the sheer weight, the endless gravity of that is so obvious.
I am honestly not used to that depth in these superhero films. Both her desire and that of her parents felt so authentic. That conveyed tragedy and profound love. An impossible situation. A critical, defining experience. That was the heart of her character to me. When she flew up into space to scream in silence, that was a compelling image. That dialogue, though, hit me deep in my soul. This film would have been worth it for that exchange alone for me. I just can't think of anything I've seen that was like that before.
I just love how Supergirl isn't really about the revenge or the dog or anything that goes on at all. Its about two grieving girls trying to keep going in diffrent ways and teaching each other how to survive with the weight of it all while also inspiring each other to be better people. Its about not letting your past overtake your future. Its about prioritizing yourself instead of being fuled by your trauma. Its about being good no matter what.
I said this before and I don’t care. WINTERWIDOW makes me wanna die (in a good way). Their story is just so beautiful and painfully saaaaad. I’m so overwhelmed (in a good way).
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
romaincrisis
