Lena Morality Meta: Action Vs Inaction

morepopcornplease:

Believe me, I love it when an influx of Lena Luthor meta floods my dash. But I think we’re missing the point of Lena’s backstory, beyond Lena’s frightening-yet-hilarious outlook of equating childhood trauma with evil.

When she exposits about her mother’s death, she focuses on how 4-year-old Lena reacted: she didn’t call for help, she didn’t try to save her mother. She just watched.

In Lena’s eyes, to do nothing is to be a complicit bystander to evil.

That’s why shes doing the Harun-El trials: she has a good chance of curing cancer, and diminishing the divide between humans and aliens (SYNDROME STYLE!!). To not take those chances is to be complicit in letting cancer thrive and to compound the world’s divisiveness.

What I like most is that this POV matches up with Lena’s choices in previous seasons: if she did nothing to help Sam and defeat Reign, she would personally hold herself responsible, regardless of the ethics of how Lena went about it.

In the past I viewed her moral outlook as on Good vs Evil, Lena VS her Luthor family genes. But now? I think the SG writers have narrowed it down to be: Lena’s moral dilemma is Action vs Inaction.

Frankly it’s a welcome change of pace from the moral dilemma of proving herself to be “Not Like Her Family,” which was getting tired. Now it’s much more aligned with what I always imagined Lena’s outlook to be: The Ends Justify The Means. It makes her a fitting contrast for Supergirl, as they each try to save the world, meaning we’ll get some delicious conflict down the road (meaning more Kara-Lena centric plots)

It also means I really hope Alex gets to drop another HP reference when she awkwardly tells Lena: “I think you’ve got a… a Saving-People-Thing??” Because in her ambitions to save people, Lena might be causing more harm than good.