#national city awkward baby totem bearers club

[swashbucklery]

aslkdf;aslsa;lfja;j are the totems just going to force every single superfriend to do therapy work one by one? Are we going to get an entire 6B of deep and nuanced character work, namely Kara being pushed to work through her complex relationship with emotional intimacy that keeps her at arms length from the things she wants most of all?

[swashbucklery]

your gauntlet idea is cool except that the scene starts after her date had already dumped her and left, so it def wasn't about that, esp when the new pieces of info fixed on what kara did *after* she saved the plane. but agree that the point is about kara finding balance in her life and stuff

Anon I mean this as respectfully as possible but, like. While technically all content posted publicly on the internet is potentially open to peer review, I very much did not ask for it in this particular case.

But since you've brought it up: it’s OK if we disagree! I’m still happy with my original idea and I’m happy to elaborate!

What we know from Nyxly passing her trial is that the point of the trial is to push the recipient to think outside the box, and that it specifically resists the conventional logic that courage = violence. We know this in part because of how Nyxly succeeds (having an honest conversation with her brother about how deeply it hurt to be betrayed), as well as from the effects of the courage totem on people around it. Alex became more bold and aggressive, sure, but for J’onn, courage meant expressing a lot of the emotions he normally keeps to himself and reminding his friends how much he cares about them. For Brainy, courage meant being bad at math sometimes. So we know that whoever attempts the gauntlet, the test of courage will ask them to do the thing that requires the most courage for them personally.

The reason I’m so into Kara’s totem challenge is because it’s a callback and I think/hope a really intentional one. In that situation in the first time, when Kara was the version of herself from the beginning of the show, the hardest and most courageous thing to do absolutely was to save the plane (in the first iteration) and to save the plane + the citizens of the city (in the second iteration).

And the real answer is that we don’t know what Kara would have to do to succeed at the courage totem’s gauntlet, and only time will tell if the show gives us the answer or not. But the theory I like the best is that the thing that they’re trying to highlight - and this is speculation, but they did some very heavy foreshadowing, anon - is that for Kara right now, saving the world isn’t a test of her courage anymore.

And that’s okay! It’s actually super rad and it’s because she’s grown as a superhero for the past 6 seasons! So even though it’s hard and scary, it’s something she’s really good at. Saving a crashing plane, stopping a robbery in progress, being Supergirl, none of those are tests of her courage because that’s a role that she’s comfortable in.

So going back and looking at the two failed test iterations, we see that the answer is not save the plane and it’s not save the plane + tons more people and I think that’s because the thing that’s hardest for Kara now is something entirely different. And maybe it’s neither thing - maybe it’s staying on the wing and integrating Kara Zor-el and Kara Danvers and Supergirl altogether, because that’s another thing that Kara’s struggled with, and that would be another good test that would tie a few elements of the series together.. But I wonder if it’s going back and trying again at another hard thing for her, which is being vulnerable with other people, and that’s the theory that makes me the happiest.

[swashbucklery]

OKAY sorry i stopped to make some macaroni and cheese ANYWAY ::chinhands:: is this a complex meditation on the nature of courage and the common conflation of courage as violence? For MOI?

Also are we just supposed to assume that all iguanas are the dragon who disguises himself as an iguana now? Why was he at the museum does he work there?

[swashbucklery]

Also Will working through his traumatic event!! Sometimes courage means confronting our past and NOT building a mind control robot about it!! ASKING TO BE EMBEDDED WITH THE SUPERFRIENDS we’re doing it we’re doing itttt