Supergirl the TV show

[james_davis_nicoll]

Is it becoming a distaff harem comedy?

Comments

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

What is a distaff harem comedy?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Instead of it being a guy slowly accumulating a collection of would-be girlfriends/wives, it is a woman accumulating a collection of would-be boyfriends.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Ah.

She does seem to be lacking in friends who are also women, doesn't she?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Indeed, which is somewhat odd for a show which would actually need to work hard to not pass the Bechdel test every episode.

[abigail-n.livejournal.com]

Well, she has a sister whom she's close to, and has developed a strong mentoring relationship with her female boss.

She doesn't have any female friends of her own age, but then she only has one friend of her own age period. You can fanwank that by saying that a person with her secret to hide, and her rather complex history, would have trouble getting close to people. But probably it's just the TV convention whereby most people's social circle doesn't reach into the double digits.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as of the pilot, it seems like Kara just didn't have *any* friends at all, besides her sister or Winn (a work friend).

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

More friends would mean more actors to pay and more continuing characters for the audience to remember. As it is she only has three coworkers who do anything more than fill space, and the Secret Government Agency employs two named people and a bunch of extras.

[undomielregina]

If it helps, there's already a genre term for that in Japanese fandoms, because they're increasingly common (and have been around for decades now, almost as long as harem comedies themselves.) There, you'll generally see them called reverse harems.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

We haven't even seen Jerry the Merboy or Brainiac 5 yet.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The Flash is going to be in an episode towards the end of next month, maybe they'll go there...

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Unlikely to be anything much. It will be a "Flash travels to Earth-3 (from his point of view" thing, so it's unlikely to be something that occurs often enough to consider it an official relationship.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me, this seems to be yet another way the Arrow/Flash team is sticking it to Warner Brothers for restricting them in what characters they can use due to the film franchise plans. Even though they're prohibited from using any of the Big Trinity characters and their major supporting characters/villains, they've been shoving enough references in to make it clear what they think of that.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I see no reason for the Flash to travel to another world to meet Supergirl, or vice versa. Green Arrow is far enough away that he doesn't drop in casually; why not the same for Supergirl?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Uh, whether you see a reason or not, it's already been announced. Episode 18, called "Worlds Finest".

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've heard; I'm just unclear why they need more than a good road map to travel between the settings.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry for the misunderstanding. It's because there's no trivial way to fit Supergirl into the Arrowverse directly.

On Supergirl, Superman has been a known public figure for a decade and has fought supervillains, so the idea of superhumans/superpowers is well established in the public consciousness. On Arrow/Flash/Vixen/Legends, superhumans are just starting to come to the public's attention. The shows have gradually revealed that such things have been there, but they've been operating in secret, behind the scenes. There isn't a way to easily justify why people would be utterly befuddled at the idea of the Flash when there's been a world-famous someone, an alien aside from that, in a bright blue and red costume flying around fighting other super-powered characters for a decade, nor why Superman wouldn't show up to assist with things like having a small army of super-strong lunatics overrunning Starling City, a situation so bad the government was prepared to essentially nuke the city to stop it.

It's simply easier to have a parallel world than try to fit the two together.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I am enlightened. I don't watch Arrow so I hadn't taken that into account. Thank you.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Dick Malverne, her token "normal earthling" boyfriend.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Quite right. On reflection, I think the merboy was Jerro rather than Jerry.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

And where is good old Jerro now? Is there an "edgier" Bronze or Dark Age version?

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, he was just sort of quietly forgotten back in the mid-'70s.

[seawasp]

Or Comet!

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Did Supergirl not knowing that "Bronco Bill" was her horse make that a non-consensual relationship?

[seawasp]

Hm. I dunno if it would make it non-consensual, but it certainly is a case of concealing some pretty important information from your partner. Not as bad as failing to tell them you had AIDS or some other STD, maybe, but still I'd say that's a hell of an omission.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

"He's the only boyfriend I've had who isn't jealous of my relationship with my horse. Funny he never wants to meet him, though."

[seawasp]

"Supergirl began to suspect something when her boyfriend mentioned how mouthwatering the hay smelled today..."

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

"She began noting he seemed not to be interested in any position except variations of the cowgirl."

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Kara's urban apartment looks impractical for a horse - but fine for Streaky the Super-Cat.

How long can a housecat conceal its Kryptonian superpowers? Or perform occasional superheroics in front of the human with whom it lives without the human figuring out its secret identity? An embarrassingly long time, in the Silver Age...

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Wasn't Streaky actually an Earth cat who acquired super-powers by ingesting some bizarre variant of Kryptonite or something? I'm pretty sure that was his original origin, anyway. I don't remember how they explained his powers if and when he appeared in the short-lived Krypto TV cartoon and/or comic book they produced five or six years ago.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Yes. Unlike Krypto, who was a Kryptonian dog - that makes sense, right? - Streaky was an ordinary Earth cat. Occasionally he'd play with a ball of string wrapped around a piece of X-Kryptonite, a bizarre kind of kryptonite that granted superpowers to Earth people and probably shouldn't have been left laying around forgotten in the basement of an orphanage. When he acquired his powers he leapt to the conclusion that a superpowered cat needed a secret identity and a cape; he was as smart as a human while the empowerment lasted. When it wore off, awkwardly, he was just a cat again and couldn't remember that he needed to recharge from that particular cat toy. So Streaky's appearances were intermittent.

(Why do I remember this and not my college mathematics? My brain has curious priorities.)

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

UK television is holding back the second half of the season to April. Apparently British viewers don't like the US habit of having the odd break in a series.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that brings back memories, of the Babylon-5 and/or Buffy days. Yeah, our season would start in the fall, they'd start later, but then not have the various breaks, and often show the final episodes before they aired in the US, reversing the usual spoiler concerns.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Don't think Buffy in the UK ever overtook the US. At least from season 4 onwards, a season would start on Sky TV in January and by May would only be a week behind. But you have to remember that back then, popular shows would often get two UK premieres. Sky - a satellite channel - would get first broadcast rights and then one of the "terrestrial" channels would show the series about a year later. Indeed, Buffy didn't really take off on UK television until the BBC started showing it. Sky had stopped showing it because it wasn't getting the viewing figures they'd like. Once it became popular on the BBC, Sky started again.

Made for problems at British cons when having Buffy panels, as half the audience had only seen what had been on the BBC.

Babylon 5 was an oddity. It's first showing in the UK was on Channel 4, a terrestrial channel. There was no satellite showing. After Channel 4 started showing season 3 in 1996, the American network decided to hold back the showing of the final five episodes and tried to persuade Channel 4 to do the same. Channel 4 said they were not contractually obliged to do so and those episodes went out about six weeks before the US showings. I'd seen a couple of them by the time I was at the 1996 Worldcon in Los Angeles, where one of the treats was JMS showing teasers of the episodes I'd just seen. After that, the US network made sure Channel 4 couldn't show episodes before they were shown in the US.

I think the first show that regularly got shown on a UK channel just days after the US showing was FlashForward in 2009.