Supergirl & The Fans
By: Hannah Austin
Tags: Supergirl, The Cw, TV Shows, Fans, LGBT

When show runners plug their ears to lgbt fans asking for respect

It’s not uncommon for a show to have problems with it’s fandom nor is it uncommon for fandoms to dislike the storylines a show is telling. What is rare, however, is for a show to either purposefully anger their fandoms or be so disconnected from their audience they push them to the point of boycotting and creating petitions for their voice to be heard. This is the issue CW’s Supergirl has been having within the past month.

After a half a season of treating their once groundbreaking LGBTQ+ characters as background props and an out of the blue relationship forced onto the main lead without any buildup at all, fans had had enough. They began a boycott to make a point. They wanted to be given not just the canon LGBTQ+ representation that they have been promised but also, they wanted the baiting of Supercorp, a ship between the two characters of Kara and Lena, to either stop or be followed through with.

Since the promotion for season 5 of Supergirl began, fans were promised that Kara and Lena’s relationship would be the emotional center of it. And to the most part, it was. Except the fact that scenes between the two that used to be only up to mere interpretation to be perceived as romance, became much more blatant that it wasn’t only fans noticing. Romantic undertones were blatant in every interaction. Romantic music played in the background of their scenes. Their “friendship” was being compared to other canon couples on the show such as Brainia (Brainy and Nia) and Dasen (Alex and Kelly). The final scene of the mid-season finale was a direct parallel from the character of Andrea Rojas looking at a photograph of her boyfriend to Lena and Kara looking at the same photograph of themselves together. On multiple occasions throughout the first half of the season, Alex questioned Kara about the things she was doing for Lena because she was “just a friend”. It felt as though the question of something more between them was on the tip of the show’s tongue. Until they returned for the back half of the season in January, that is.

All of the sudden, in a scene at the end of the eleventh episode, Kara and William Dey, a character who was just introduced this season, and we knew nothing about other than he was a rather bad investigative reporter, avenging the death of his best friend, who decided he needed to be a jerk to Kara as a coverup for some unknown reason, share a look and things suddenly become awkward. In the promo for the next episode, he is asking her on a date and Kara says she hasn’t “felt like this in a very long time” — a line that ultimately seemed to be omitted from the episode. This caused an outrage; it was the last straw. A large portion of the audience was fed up. It wasn’t only the Supercorp fandom, but the general viewing audience wasn’t a fan of it either. Many complained it felt forced and was out of nowhere. Although fandom responses were the biggest. They had sat through an entire half of a season where William was taking away Nia Nal’s screen time by doing everything she could have done the same way. In fact, Nia has been missing from 5 episodes so far this season. Kelly Olsen had been missing for a couple and then since returning in January, has only had about a minute and a half of screen time combined! The forced storyline between Kara and William was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the fandom revolted.

Supergirl has long since had issues with its LGBTQ+ rep. In season 3, there were many issues had with how the show ended the Sanvers relationship (Alex Danvers and Maggie Sawyer) after barely giving the then engaged couple any screen time that season. Throughout all of it’s seasons Supergirl has also been guilty of killing off background LGBTQ+ characters, with three of the six of them dying in brutal ways (and a fourth turned into part of a big brain) in the same episode of which they first appear. There are many other issues with the shows treatment of LGBTQ+ characters, like erasure of comic canon lgbt characters, for instance, and use of negative tropes for others. Needless to say there has been a long list of reasons for the shows LGBTQ+ fans to begin fighting for the show to treat them and their representative characters better.

Beyond that this season regressed on the great foundation that season 4 had set for their LGBTQ+ rep and threw out all of the stories for the world’s first ever Transgender superhero, Nia Nal, and cut her screen time from that of a main cast member to that of a recurring background character. Nia wasn’t the only one to go through that treatment, however. Kelly Olsen, a lesbian of color in an interracial relationship, has as well. Kelly has gotten even less screen time and story than Nia; with her screen time averaging around 30 seconds an episode in the least few episodes. Even the show’s second lead, Alex Danvers, has been affected by this. While she still has the second most screen time on the show, she has not had a substantial storyline of her own so far this season, her place being only that of supporting every other character’s storyline.

Supergirl is one of the very few shows on television to have the majority of their fandom be LGBTQ+. Since season one Supergirl’s fandom has been made up of mostly LGBTQ+ people or of large wlw ships, at the least. So one would think that the showrunners would be focused on ensuring that they treated that fandom with the utmost respect. That has sadly not been the case. Rather than be straight with their fandom they have opted to lie about how much screen time the canon LGBTQ+ characters would get and to bait the non-canon LGBTQ+ shippers.

All of that culminated in the boycott of the show which has seen the show go from around 900 thousand live viewers on premiere nights to 600 thousand. Now that plummet is not fully due to fan boycotts, a large part of it is just that casual viewers dislike the current storyline so much that they rather tune in to something else. While casual fans have given up on the show the LGBTQ+ fans have not. Rather than give up on it, they have buckled down to start fighting for it. A petition was created to bring more attention to the negative treatment of the shows LGBTQ+ characters and fans. The goal of this petition is to put pressure on the writers and show runners to change the show for the better.

There is something to be said about a show like Supergirl, one that has been nominated for GLAAD’s, being so guilty of mistreating their LGBTQ+ characters. When a show promotes itself as a groundbreaking history making show for the LGBTQ+ community, isn’t it then the fans rights to fight for the show to follow through on their word and listen to their LGBTQ+ fans and tell LGBTQ+ stories? If you agree with this sentiment, I wholeheartedly suggest you sign the petition that I and other lgbt fans put together for the betterment of Supergirl’s LGBTQ+ representation.

http://chng.it/h56Y65bJ