i think that one of the most difficult aspects of writing a long-running series must be staying true to the characters you’ve created, and that doesn’t necessarily mean staying true to what you first planned for them.
even if at first they are mostly a reflection of your choices, in time, those characters will be influenced by the actor who is playing them and their natural chemistry/gravitation towards other actors, which isn’t necessarily planned. if you’re a good enough writer, much like a parent, i think you let yourself learn from your character about your character, even if that means giving up some control and re-strategizing storylines which no longer fit their development.
i think if you don’t stay connected to the fans, you might lose sight of who your character has become, because it’s easy to cloud them with the vision you primarily had. i’m not saying this is an easy job - there’s a reason so many fandoms start pushing the boundaries of canon.
in supergirl, lena luthor is first meant to be a 3 episode arc character. she was probably not supposed to have chemistry right off the bat with supergirl, and she wasn’t supposed to steal our hearts quite so effortlessly like she did. katie’s acting did that. so maybe they had the idea of making kara and lena best friends because at the time they didn’t see that the way those two women gravitated towards each other had the potential for more. either way, i don’t think s2 supercorp was ready to be more than just friends. it was so beautiful seeing them open up to each other and trust each other despite where they come from. it was raw, and it was enough.
season 3 is when i think shit starts hitting the fan, because even if kara is still getting over an admittedly great story and heartbreaking split with mon-el, she starts getting even closer to lena, and scenes grow less platonic. until lena starts dating james, that is. i never understood that pairing. to me, it seemed like the first big time that the writers overlooked who their characters were, because it seemed a bit random. like it was just Some Dude who would squash the hopes of supercorp shippers, and Some Woman who would make james have a love interest. it didn’t seem to take into account their personalities.
in season 4, lena grows more protective of kara and, eventually, less wary of supergirl. i got the feeling that some scenes had been written in the kara+lena vibe, then simply shot with james instead. they had two women with great chemistry that, after two seasons of iNtEnSe FrIeNdShIp, could not have stayed platonic if they’d had the amount of screen time they deserved. so after a rather dry season in terms of kara and lena, but a rich development between supergirl and lena, we obviously get entirely destroyed by none other than lex luthor. let me point out that i never understood why they made lex (superman’s greatest enemy) such an important part of the series, when it’s supposed to be the story of kara growing into her own, superhero wise. makes even less sense when lena is supposed to get growth outside of her family as well.
season 5 delved into all the drama and problems everyone had seen coming, but in all the wrong ways. i mean, firstly, it made no sense for kara to keep things from lena this long. she told winn in the first episode, james and alex already knew, told nia within weeks of knowing her and even mon-el, a dude from another planet who she didn’t even fully trust at first, knew about her secret identity. the only thing that would make sense would be for kara to be so absolutely terrified of losing lena, she couldn’t bear to change anything about what they had. and the nature of that fear seems too passionate to be platonic as well. which is ironic, considering that i think they used lena’s oblivion about kara as a rift between them - they could never grow into a romantic relationship if lena didn’t know this key piece of information, and kara would never be able to be around long enough when half of the life she lives is hidden from lena.
anyways, back to season 5. you see lena as heartbroken as you’ve ever seen her, because the person who gave her hope in humanity was also not as perfect as she’d thought her to be. suddenly, the writers ramp up the (ex) lover energy, because the people who care more about The Breakup plot point are supercorp shippers. we watch an entire season that is more dramatic than mon-el’s departure by about a gazillion and we also watch as those two women struggle to not make their decisions about each other. season 5 was rich in gay energy, but not because the writers were planning on turning supercorp into something real. it was simply due to the fact that it gave them more drama, and more audience.
maybe even enough audience that it made sense to get kara and lena to work as an unspoken couple in season 6. there was no secret between them anymore, so no way to hold them back. but the writers would be damned if that meant they would have kara and lena actually talk about it.
so we got this limbo. throughout the years, the writers and showrunners have gaslit the audience so much that we simply have no hope for an actual worthy wrap up of the show and its protagonist’s relationships.
it’s just so sad to think all of this could have been prevented if the people who make decisions had listened to their audience. maybe it wasn’t always supposed to be lena and kara endgame. maybe those two characters weren’t supposed to work so well together or fall in love. but they have. and it seems really dumb that a show that has otherwise relatively good lgbtq+ representation became so messy because the writers drew the line at the protagonist.
i mean, imagine how beautiful it would have been to make one of the greatest sapphic love stories out of a relationship that hadn’t even been planned. even richer when you think that kara could have simply been an unlabeled superhero. they didn’t owe anyone an explanation about her sexuality at all. she fell in love, not to fill some representation quota, but because it just happened. supergirl had the potential for something beautiful. because its showrunners couldn’t see past their original visions of the characters, we got a legitimate mess instead.