#gunnverse

Krem and the Brigands. you don't need your woman-led superhero movie to have a conflict involving child sex-slaves when that's nowhere in the original text btw. IF the girls had been directly involved in the plot, or given any kind of identity outside of Child Sex-Slaves it could have been used as an interesting commentary, but that's not what happened and instead it just felt weird and out of place to me.

Lobo. he did not need to be there at all. you could edit him out of the movie entirely and almost nothing would change. the only scene where he did anything of significance was incapacitating a guy so that Kara had time to recover from Kyrptonite poisoning, which, again, was completely unnecessary. he's on half of the merchandise and advertising, and for what? all it tells me is that they didn't think that Supergirl alone would be enough reason for people to be interested. I know that Tom King originally wanted him to be included in the WOT comic, but it is so much better without him.

Ruthye. I really missed her narration. I think in order to understand and really feel for Ruthye you have to have read the comic because, while I think the actress did a great job, we as the audience aren't actually shown much that allows us to connect with her. we see her family killed by Krem and the Brigands, but we aren't really given a reason why other than "because the Brigands are evil!" which, okay sure, but why them? We know that her dad forged weapons, but that's... pretty much all of the context that we're given. I think that if we were given something akin to her narration from the comic, it would not only allow the audience to connect with her more, but it would also make the story as a whole more cohesive.

breaking the pattern a bit here, but I do also want to talk about the racism for a second. we see only two families that appear humanoid in the same way that Kara is. the first is Ruthye's family, who we see for no more than five minutes before they're killed by the Brigands, and the second is the couple that betray Kara and Ruthye in the hopes that their daughter will be returned to them. both of these families are POC (Ruthye's family is Asian, the other family is Black), and both of these families are killed to further Ruthye's/Kara's story and development. personally, I can't really say that I think this was done intentionally, but at best it's just shitty and biased writing.

Kara, Krypton, and Argo CIty. if you want your Supergirl to be chronologically younger than your Superman, you cannot use Argo City as your origin. the fact that Kara was born before the destruction of Krypton is important to understanding who she is as a character and as well as understanding how vastly her relationship to her culture differs from Clark's. if the fact that she was born after the rest of Krypton had been destroyed had been used in any way other than to tell us that she's younger than Clark, I would have understood it more. I think that there are stories you could tell with that, but none of them were present here.

1. I loved how female centered it was. The main characters were OBVIOUSLY Kara and Ruthye, they weren't after thoughts in their own movie, especially Kara.

2. Followed up from that first point, I keep seeing people talk about how much screen time Lobo got, and how he ruined the movie, how he just HAD to save her, etc, but I don't think that's true. He doesn't even show up until like half an hour into the movie, disappears for long jumps of time, and then gets like a minute on screen when he is there. He in no way has "more screen time" than either of the female leads. As for saving Kara, he does so ONCE, and then she proceeds to kick ass, beat the fuck out of an entire group of pedophiles not once but TWICE, adter repeated exposure to kryptonite, which mind you put Clark in a coma.

3. That needle drop was awful. Absolutely terrible. There are people who liked it, I'm just not one of them. Immediately took me out of the scene. It should have been Call Me by Blondie, or otherwise some other Blondie song. She was wearing one of their shirts for half the movie, they should have been included. I stand by that.

4. The fact that Krem and the Brigands were pedophiles did not get enough weight. The sheer horror of it was not given room to breathe, and because of that it feels a bit tonally inconsistent. The scene where Kara and Lobo are fighting the Brigands when the deal fell through with the girls parents had WAYYYYY too much of a "badass/cool" fight scene with a kind of humorous undertone. This was WILDLY inappropriate for a scene where young girls are running for their lives to avoid being kidnapped, raped, and used as brood mares.

5. Ruthye is so fucking cool. She is going to be one badass lady when she grows up. I love her dearly.

6. Krypto looked naked without his cape. Give him his cape back!

7. Clark and Kara's reunion was so fucking awkward I relate so hard. They're both so cute I love them.

8. I keep hearing that the movie changed a lot of Kara's backstory, which I can say nothing about, but one thing I do know that irritates me is that she should be technically older than Clark, but physically younger than him. It was like getting whiplash when her monologue went "that was 8 years before I was born." Hello???