And now to exorcise Smallville out of my system...

[ladymirth]

How the fricking hell did I get hooked on Smallville?!

 

Smallville, for crying out loud! I have despised this show successfully for six whole years! And stuck to my beloved Lois and Clark, where only one ship is allowed on the fair, untroubled waters of that little fandom, providing me with comfort and sanctuary when the many and varied shipping lines of the Jupiterian Harry Potter fandom get too scary for me to handle.

 

And now, I get sucked into the incredibly frustrating enigma that is Smallville.

 

Okay, so I admit, I was wrong. It’s actually quite a watchable show, well-scripted and appropriately suspense-driven, able to placate even the most vociferous Superman canon-freak willing to give it half a chance. It’s a completely different genre from Lois and Clark, which was a romantic action comedy, while Smallville is a science-fiction action-adventure. Therefore, they must be judged in and viewed through completely different criteria. The special effects are very well done, as opposed to the rather cheap ones in LnC, but LnC was a 90s show, after all. Tom Welling holds up the long-standing tradition of Supermen whose extreme good looks compensate for their lack of acting talent. (Chris Reeves could act, but not til after the Superman movies.) The Judas-like evolution of Lex’s character is well-thought out and even appealing for the Anakin Skywalker geeks and bad-boy-redeemer-type females.

 

However, I have no idea why the writers created a character who could have passed for a really great Lois Lane at every angle, and then named her Chloe Sullivan.

 

And then, when the Lana-lovers and canon-freaks are butting heads and formulating wild theories about how Chloe was suddenly going to morph into an alliteratively named tough-talking city-girl, (which might have actually been a sensible thing to do, assuming the writers were able to pull it off) they throw in the actual Lois Lane in the mix. Who turns out to be a snooty high-school drop out, drifter cum squatter whose only attributes are her military brat martial arts moves and the testosterone level of a WWF prize fighter. Next to their all-too-obvious attempts to Katie Holmsiefy Kristin Kreuk, we merely end up getting progressively irritated at both characters. There is something very wrong in a world where Lois Lane ends up as Lana Lang’s sidekick.

 

So now, it’s become a Mills-and Boon Choose Your Own Romance type game show. *Insert cheesy game show host voice here* Who do you want Clark Kent to be with?  The Kirsten Dunst-like girl-next-door who has been the girl of his dreams from childhood? The faithful best friend waiting for her hero’s head to turn? Or the Harry met Sally type love/hate rapport between two people who are polar opposites but may well develop into the love of a lifetime? Find out in your next episode of Beverly Hills 90210…er, pardon Smallville episode! Or the one after that. Or possibly the one after that. Well, we can’t make any promises but somebody will certainly be together by the time our very own series-killing frog-eating-clone-and-amnesia arc rolls around! (Re: Lois and Clark, Season three) Or the viewers get fed up and decide to watch Frasier instead, whichever comes first.

 

The true pity is that it used to be a really great show. There were some truly brilliant moments in the early seasons, and a lot of fun besides, teen angst and freak-of-the-weeks notwithstanding. But then, the writing team decided to join the Teen Angst Fest and pander to the shipper parade.

 

If it were just one ship, it would have been fine. It’s one thing to accept that Lana Lang was Clark Kent’s first love in canon, or even that smallville could use it’s own  prerogative to deviate from canon and promote Lana as true love of his life. So, basically, for those who tune in to see a sci-fi show with some cool villains and super powers, we could care less who’s gonna end up with whom. So we’d even put up with Lex/ Clark if it doesn’t get in the way of the show.

 

But then they start trying to string on all the shippers! The Clanas, the Cloisers, the Chlarks, the Chimmys, the Lois/ Olivers (Lollie? Loliver?), the Martha/ Lionels, the Lana/ Lexs…it’s like Spooksville 90210! It would be funny, even with the scary cat-fighting on the Smallville boards that make the Pumpkins versus OBHWF wars in the HP community look rather tame, if it wasn’t so detrimental to the characters. Clark’s rapidly becoming a obsessive-possessive jealous maniac, Lana is set to be a pure pain in the ass who can’t seem to make up her mind to either let Clark go or stick to him like duct tape and kick him out of his hero complex, and Chloe’s becoming plain pathetic. Oh, and Lois is….still there.

 

Let it be said, however that I have no idea what an actor of John Glover’s caliber is doing on this show. At the very least, he should be on Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince as Scrimgeur.

 

I heart Lionel Luthor. It’s too refreshing to have a villain who’s not exactly the devil incarnate nor a psychotic megalomaniac. Psychotic megalomaniacs lack style, and are woefully predictable. Lionel is just a crafty old lion of a street fighter, who makes his namby pamby boy wonder wannabe son look like a definite step down on the evolutionary ladder. 

 

To me, the real mysteries of Smallville lie not in the plot lines but in the character evolvements. Why did they want to kill off Jonathan? Does Lana actually choose her boyfriends by standing in front of a mirror and going: “mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest psychotic freakazoid of them all?”. What do script writers have to inhale in order to pair off the baddie of the story with the hero’s mother? What’s that you say? Hamlet and Electra? Wonderful, as long as it’s a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy you’re filming and not a teen-oriented sci-fi fantasy TV show.

 

And lastly, Lois Lane and Green Arrow?!?!

 

I don’t need a crystal ball to see frog-eating clones and megalomaniac wedding-crashers in our future.

 

Here’s an eerie fact though. Remember the plot idea the writers of Lois and Clark had come up with as a continuation of “Family Hour” for Season Five? The foundling baby was going to turn out to be originally from Krypton who would have freak growth spurts that made him age from infant to fully grown man in days, and then finally leave Lois and Clark for New Krypton. Which idea was sufficiently lame enough that even the hard-core FoLCs breathed a sigh of relief that the series was terminated before it could sink to such horrible depths.

 

The same plot was used, more or less, in the Smallville Season Four episode “Ageless”. Only this time, the baby took Lana to be its mother. Thereby spending one entire episode promoting a One Big Happy Clana Family concept.

 

And one and a half seasons later, she’s engaged to Lex and having his baby.

 

How many shippers do they have on the writing team, anyway? Does anybody even like this show, anymore?

 

Y’know what? I’m going to stop binge-watching Smallville once and for all and forget I ever heard of Tom Welling, Kristin Kreuk and Erica Durance. There is only one Clark Kent and Lois Lane, and that’s Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. Chloe Sullivan does not exist. Perry White is a paternal newspaperman of integrity and not a drunk paparazzi man with the sensitivity of an iguana. Smallville is a quiet town in Kansas, with a distinct dearth of mutant psychos. Metropolis is a city on the West Coast, far away from Smallville. Lois Lane is a driven, perfectionist, celebrated journalist who would never dream of mooching off a kindly farm couple in her life. Jonathan Kent is alive and well, and has no political aspirations. Lex Luthor is evil, through and through, and a megalomaniac who got exposed and squashed like a bug under a concrete beam. Lois is Clark’s only love and they are happily married, as they were always meant to be.

 

*Looks at Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman* Yep. I’m home. =)

 

 

 

 

Comments

[annabtg.livejournal.com]

I like this rant, Hasini. :D

OT, who are the Pumpkins?

See ya,
Anna.

[ladymirth.livejournal.com]

The Pumpkins are Harry/Hermione shippers who used to congregate en masse at Pumpkin Pie Org, it being one of the first ever exclusive H/Hr fansites. They waged fierce war upon the One Big Happy Weasley Family shippers (H/G, R/Hr) during the pre-HPB era.
It got pretty ugly, at the end, esp when HBP came out and conquered all remaining rebel factions that foretold that H/Hr would happen in canon, eventually. A goodly part of the H/Hr shipping community, angered by the comments of Emerson the Webmaster of Mugglenet during the post-HBP interview, finally withdrew from the HP fandom altogether, and migrated to other parts such as the Doctor Who and X-Files fandoms, where they were more kindly treated. Unfortunately, they also left a large number of fics abandoned and unfinished; consequntly, their literary legacy will forever be lost to the HP community.

And for a time, peace reigned within the waters of the HP community, except for those parts where the barbarian hordes of HMS WolfStar provoked a rebel uprising against the WotcherWolvie shippers, which culminated in a series of border skirmishes which were largely ignored by the majority of the fandom.

This fandom is a scary place to live in, sometimes.

[annabtg.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info!

I'm fairly new to the HP fandom, and then I'm only on FF.net and a couple of LJ communities, so I've stayed out of the flamewars. Thankfully.

See ya,
Anna. :)

[starrylites.livejournal.com]

Spooksville 90210! HAHAHA! Oh, I shall use that now. That's amazing.

We share the same frustrations with Smallville, every one of them. You voiced everything I've just never bothered to right down. I will admit that I have just started to watch Smallville and I had to throw any and all forms of canon out of my head and just laugh at it. It's a comical thing for me now. Not funny, per se, Lois & Clark is truly funny and entertaining, but Smallville and how seriously it takes itself is comical

Spooksville 90210...I think I have a new name for the show!

[ladymirth.livejournal.com]

*Bows*

I'd like to take credit for it, but Spooksville is also the name of a series of children's books written by Christopher Pike (the guy who wrote The Last Vampire).

Lois and Clark forever!!

[katshakespeare.livejournal.com]

*giggles* A lot. Then -- *giggles some more*

I -- don't know what else to say.

The Judas-like evolution of Lex’s character is well-thought out and even appealing for the Anakin Skywalker geeks and bad-boy-redeemer-type females.

That's a brilliant BRILLIANT sentence.

I agree about writing an awesome character like Chloe, almost Lois Lane-ish, then introducing the real Lois Lane. BUT -- DC put SO many restrictions on Lois's character that she was only intended for 4 episodes before they got the rights to pull her in quasi-full-time. DC just bought Chloe, which I find REALLY interesting, and I'm curious as to what they're going to do with her in the comic books.

As for Erica's Lois, I LOVE her (and I'm sorry that you don't). :/ She cracks me up and her chemistry with TW is spot-on and I HATE DC for being stupid about the Clois stuff and the SV people for being OBSESSED with KK!Lana because *vomits* I can't handle it.

That being said, I love LnC for what it is, and I love SV for TW and ED and not for canon or Clois because then I would get too angry too often and I don't need that. I just need to stare at TW and throw things at the TV when he broods over dang Lana Lang ;)

LOVE your rant though, seriously.

[ladymirth.livejournal.com]

Well, this is a surprising turn of events! I was mentally squatting under a make-shift bunker in anticipation of a possible barrage of rotten cyber vegetables coming my way. Some people find tolerating other's view points severely trying. You have restored my faith in human rationality. =)

It's not so much Erica Durance's portrayal of Lois Lane, rather than the way the writers have written her. They made her drop out of high school, get kicked out of college, mooch off the Kents and finally set it up so that despite Chloe's hard work, Lois would be the one who gets the guy AND her cousin's dream job in the end. Just so she had an excuse to stay on in the series and not thinking about how it would refect upon her character.

Plus, Teri Hatcher's Lois Lane was tough, but it had a soft, feminine core just visible enough to balance out her hard- as- nails exterior. Her transformation into a more rounded, softer and deeply womanly character later in show was, therefore quite well set up. I fail to see the femininty in Erica Durance's Lois. I'm not an old-world person who thinks women aren't appealing unless their somehow soft and squishy, I'm just saying a heroine isn't appealing unless she has some sort of vulnerability, tenderness or need for the hero.

And irritant number 1: Lois is largely used as comic relief, in very distinct contrast to Lana and Chloe, who both have major parts to play around Clark.

I was afraid if I stayed hooked on Smallville any longer, I'd turn into a Chlark shipper. And that would have been blasphemous!

Oh, I get you about the staring at Tom Welling part. Why else did yo think I'd be able to sit through five straight Seasons in a row? In the category of model-turned-actors, Ashton Kutcher, who? *drool*

Glad you liked my rant, though! =)