erin // 28 // my gifs
about me
  • headspace-hotel

  • you know how when you go out in the middle of the woods, your phone loses internet service? that is because the trees naturally protect you from the evil dark energy rays generated by influencers and twitter opinions. follow for more information about the beauty of nature

  • I’m staying at a cabin with my mom like we do every year and there’s usually no service, but there is wifi now and I need to try to pretend there isn’t

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  • luthwhore

  • my hot take about the series finale of smallville, a decade too late, is that the character we are presented at the end of the show isn’t lex. and i don’t mean this in some tinhat conspiracy theory way or in a “the show writers ruined his characterization” way—i mean literally, on the page, the person we are presented with at the end of the show is a completely different person than the one who died.

    like. lex died. the real lex dies. we know this is an objective fact within the smallville universe. after michael rosenbaum left the show, lex was killed off. the show runners could have chosen to leave him alive off-screen, but they did not. he died.

    then the show decided to bring him back from the dead via cloning. except… that’s not how cloning works. they did not bring back the original lex luthor. they created a new person, via cloning, who had the same DNA as lex.

    now briar, you may say, he has lex’s memories and personality! so doesn’t that mean he is lex? and i think that question is philosophically complicated, but if you look at it from a purely scientific point of view… no. the original lex is still dead. this new person may have all lex’s memories, and he may even believe he is lex, but critically—the original lex is still dead.

    but even if you argue that having lex’s memories is enough—that even if the original lex is still dead, this still has all of his memories and personality (arguably), so even if he is not the original, he is still lex from a character perspective—he doesn’t even have that at the end of the show! they give him amnesia! he has no memories!

    think of it this way (and i am showing my age with this metaphor, but bear with me): you buy a CD. then the CD gets lost, or stolen, or broken. you then burn a copy of that CD. it is not the original, but it still has all of the same songs on it. the sound quality is a little off, and you don’t have the case for it, but it’s still mostly the same. but then the CD gets corrupted somehow, and now none of the songs will play. do you still own that CD? i would say, definitively, no.

    which means that at the end of the show, what we are left with is not the original lex returned from the grave. he isn’t even a copy of the original lex who is indistinguishable from the original. he may look like lex, he may sound like lex, he may even act a little like lex, but functionally? the character we are presented with is little more than a stranger with lex’s face.

  • luthwhore

  • i am glad to see this resonated bc i have been complaining to my friends about what i’ve been calling “the lex luthor ship of theseus problem” for months and i felt like i was going crazy

  • ruby-took

  • Yes. Yes, yes, YES! This made everything related to Lex that came before completely pointless, and it felt incredibly disrespectful to his character. It’s... If they were going to go this route, what was all the previous characterisation even for? It’s bad enough that they botched the villain arc as badly as they did (and they did botch it up about as badly as it was humanly possible to botch it up), but this feels just so...wrong. It’s just wrong and horrible. Who thought that this would be satisfying in any way, shape or form?

    I will forever be baffled how this show managed to create a fantastic character like Lex - nuanced, layered, incredibly complex, and just all round fun to watch - and then ended up screwing his character arc up this badly.

    • you're right and it makes me beyond fucking sadto think our Lex is dead and dust with no chance of ever being okay or happy againwhile everyone acts like his evil clone is himI HAVE to believe Darkseid restored Lex’s soul into the clone bodyit's far too bleak otherwisethere has to be hopeeven though i disregard canon after s4i am a ''Lex’s soul was put in the clone's body'' trutherfor my sanitySmallvillesv metasmallville lb