#also me saying melissa did incredible stuff in her personal life isn't tongue in cheek or anything

[handlewithcharacter]

I was reading your tags for Kara/Lena and Drarry and got so curious about the supergirl fandom what happened??? Was the supergirl actress homophobic?? The one who was in glee and that’s why she wasn’t?!?

OH MY GOD OKAY I AM SO SORRY FOR WHAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN

The place? San Diego Comic Con. The year? 2017. Everything seems normal. Casts of shows are doing interviews, cracking jokes, it's a good time. And then the Supergirl cast are interview by MTV. And Jeremy Jordan sings a little musical recap of the previous season, in which he jokes that Kara and Lena are just friends. Well, I say joked...he very enthusiastically insists they're just friends. It is, shall we say, tactless. The cast seems surprised but are all laughing to various extents. Later on in the interview they're asked about shipping, and Jeremy Jordan says he's probably going to get some hate for his having "debunked Supercorp." Melissa Benoist tells him that he's "very brave."

Thus ends the part of this story that physically takes place at Comic Con 2017, but the real drama is just getting started.

(the page break is here for dramatic effect, but also because this somehow got very long)

You have to understand, anon, this is in between the second and third seasons of Supergirl. Karamel (Kara and Mon-El) were season 2's highly divisive power couple and the Karamel stans were making it everyone's business to know they had come out of the season on top. And you'd think they'd be in the midst of a great ship war with Karolsen (Kara and James) who decided to just be friends at the start of the season, but nope! No, their big enemy was the Supercorp fans. It was heated. It was tense. There was a block list that got circulated.

I'd say the Supergirl ship wars were the worst I'd ever encountered, but I would go on to join the Timeless fandom, and learned the very hard lesson of why small fandoms and ship wars should not mix. That being said, I'd put the Supercorp/Karamel drama as worse than the Clexa/Bellarke drama, if that helps put things into context for you at all.

So, suffice it to say, the internet was in upheaval over this.

Since I was firmly on the Supercorp side of the Supercorp/Karamel divide at the time, I can't say with much certainty how Karamel shippers reacted, though I assume they were pleased with themselves. But Supercorp fans were not okay. See, anon, I don't know when you started your journey into fandom, but in case it was after this, 2017 was a much different time. Lesbian ships weren't really shipped with the intention of them becoming canon since it was only recently that lesbian ships had started becoming canon, and wlw fandom spaces were all still reeling from the Great Lesbian Purge of 2016, in which roughly 40% of the canon queer women on television were killed off during the television season. (To this day I will watch shows and a queer woman will unexpectedly die for seemingly only shock value, and I'll be horrified, until I see the date the episode aired. Spring of 2016? Yeah, that tracks. Deep sigh. Lost another one to the Bury Your Gays.) Lesbian ships did not have the strength in canon that straight ships had, or the mainstream nerd appeal that gay male ships had. Not only did you have to contend with bitter ship wars, you had to contend with everyone telling you that you shouldn't be shipping the ship in the first place, that having a vested interest in a ship that would never happen was a lost cause and a question of sanity. To be a fan of a wlw ship was to be shut down at every single turn when you weren't even asking to go down the road and were just looking to see a potential view.

(Supercorp was far from the only ship to ever have to put up with this. If you take a look at fandom history, you'll see this countless times. Heck, the Xena fans who wanted Xena to end up with Ares were very determined that the lesbians would not overtake their show.)

But for some people, Supercorp was their first wlw ship. Their first queer community. Their first validation that it wasn't wrong to look at the main character of an incredibly popular show and wonder what it would be like if she kissed her same-gender best friend. I sincerely hope, anon, that whatever flavor you may favor, you have found that kind of validation in your media. It's liberating.

And now here you had Jeremy Jordan and Melissa Benoist "debunking" the myth that Kara and Lena could ever have feelings for each other. In all ways except physical, it was like the Supercorp fandom had just participated in the ice bucket challenge. And, whether it was as part of the Supergirl fandom or elsewhere, the Supercorp fans had already been through hell. It got ugly. Then there were memes. Then there was a lot of hate tweeting. Then there were people yelling about the hate tweeting. Mostly everyone was just a weird mix of angry and sad. These were two actors, two of the leads on this show, engaging in this behavior. It was a gut punch when everyone was already down.

Friday night, Jeremy Jordan releases an apology. It's not really an apology. It's an "I'm sorry you're upset" with a lot of condemnation and self defense. It has the general vibes that we'd describe in 2023 as "it's not that deep," but instead of addressing it to the fans, he condescendingly addresses it "Hey Kids."

Yeah, he'd spend the weekend regretting that.

Sunday, Jeremy Jordan would put out another apology. It was a sincere one this time, admitting he messed up and didn't truly understand the implications of what he was saying or the deep roots of homophobia in fandom culture. Most people accepted this - he was an idiot who made a mistake. Time would tell if he made it again. (Spoiler alert: he did not.) Some people, however, are still mad.

And then there was Melissa Benoist. Mind you, I don't think she personally acknowledged any of this at all. But her publicist sent out a statement (according to the fact checking I'm doing as I write this, it was in a private email to a fan, who then posted the response to tumblr) that Melissa was a proven ambassador of LGBT acceptance, as shown by her work on Glee. Uh, yeah. So that became a meme.

This, more or less, is where our story ends, unless you count a since-deleted Blind Item put out by TVLine that may or may not have been about the cast of Supergirl (but was heavily speculated to be about the cast of Supergirl) in which someone overheard two actors fighting before an interview the following day about one of their behavior, that ended when the other said "I just can't talk about this right now." (I am so bummed I cannot link this article, anon, you have no idea.) (The leading theory was that Katie McGrath, who of course came to Supergirl already having amassed a sizable queer following from her role in Merlin and also possibly her role in Dracula, gave Mr. Jordan a piece of her mind about what was and wasn't acceptable to say to a queer fan.)

And that's my tale. In addition to the season they were promoting, the cast of Supergirl would go on to do four more seasons and manage to get out of the Arrowverse without overstaying their welcome or being cancelled unceremoniously. And they moved on. Jeremy Jordan went back to New York, where he returned to Broadway and Off-Broadway and he's soon to be Off-Off-Broadway in the premiere of The Great Gatsby: the Musical. He also along the way ended up playing one of Hallmark's very first gay main characters. Katie McGrath went on to be a bisexual character on an Irish show, do the audiobook narration for a lesbian period romance novel, and is a masked evil lady in the new John Wick tv show. And Melissa Benoist went on to do a lot of incredible things in her personal life that don't necessarily belong in this little essay I've written here.

Genuinely, I wish everyone in that cast all the best.

Anon, I am so sorry this got as long as it did. I hope this answered your question!