june something day 11

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Day 11: What would make you leave a fandom, or prevent you from getting into it in the first place?

I tend to shy away from getting too involved in fandom these days. While I don't regret my time being involved in Smallville fandom and I got to meet a lot of great people, the drama and the ship wars definitely left a toll and has me kind of skittish since.

So I usually just read fic and follow a few people with similar interests and call it a day. It's pretty easy to do on Tumblr. I am not on Reddit or Discord or anything so it is easy to avoid interacting with a more general audience and limit it to people who enjoy and ship the things you like.

Drama, ship wars, and the types of discourse that happen are definitely what would keep me away though. I don't want any part of that. I would only leave a fandom completely if I lost interest in the canon and didn't want to participate anymore. I did that with Smallville- dropped the show for a year after "Doomsday" pissed me off, and mostly stayed away from the fandom. I used to have an icon that legit said something like, "smallville fandom- home of the neverending wank". It was fitting. I think I was in a better place when I got back for sure though.

Comments

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Speaking of Doomsday, I read this fic that was posted before Season 8 aired and it was a take on Doomsday that more closely followed the comics. I'll have to send you the links (unfortunately, it's spread out in forum format, but I might turn into a PDF) because it was SO GOOD. I still don't get why Smallville chose the most convoluted way to do the Doomsday story.

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Oh, nice! I would love the link if you have it, please and thank you in advance. I don't get it either. I mean, I know they couldn't kill Clark off, but it was a weird route, and then suddenly flipping Davis's character at the end was also strange. It could've been worse too- the rumors back then were that they were thinking of making Davis a bartender and having him be with or at least be interested in Lois.

[brokenhighways]

Navigating KSite is impossible but I read it using this rec post: https://summerofclois.livejournal.com/10979.html

I think they should have just killed him and had him come back. Instead they... subverted it and had Lois disappear and then reappear. So annoying. I like the idea of Davis being DD, but once they did that retcon nonsense with the ship... it just became too convoluted. I wished they'd just made Davis slowly erode from good to bad and then we have an epic battle. I remember reading that they tried to show Davis and Clark not liking each other to build up to the finale, but... They were barely in any episodes together...

On the flip side, somehow their take on Doomsday was better than Snyder's CGI mess in BvS.

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Oh, that is helpful. Thanks!

They could've but considering they've killed him before, including to start that season, it probably wouldn't have had much of an impact. And doesn't Doomsday come back in the comics anyway? Davis being DD could've been more interesting than it was, though the weird retcons especially with the pilot was a strange decision.

I remember reading that they tried to show Davis and Clark not liking each other to build up to the finale, but... They were barely in any episodes together...
True, they wasted a lot of time with that Chloe/Davis plot. She had better chemistry with him than she did with Jimmy but still, it was silly to give her all his screentime when he was supposed to be one of the biggest Superman villains there is only to barely interact with Clark.

Yikes, that says more about how bad BvS was than anything positive about Smallville.

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I think Smallville is the only Superman canon to give Doomsday a human identity and for good reason. Doomsday is basically an unstoppable killing machine. That's its only motivation and purpose. It has no free will or thought process. It was built to just kill whatever it sees and yes, it comes back whenever it dies and its immune to the last thing that killed it. Ascribing that to a human character is a lot. Davis Bloome should have been a complete psycho and not a sweet paramedic who falls in love with Chloe. Him being a paramedic didn't make sense either now I think about it... I feel like Smallville lost sight of what a villain is and wanted to be all shades of grey about it, at least until season 9 with Zod.

The Smallville writers were trying to cash in on a classic Superman story, but their Doomsday is basically Elseworlds at this point. Having Clark bury him under the Earth didn't make much sense either. I guess the idea was that Doomsday could potentially break free and they'd battle again? It doesn't really make sense. They could have called him something else and less people would have been disappointed.

In BvS, Doomsday is basically an afterthought and cheap (well, expensive in this case lol) way to kill Superman. Lex frees Doomsday to kill Superman (for reasons that are never really explained). Lex also manipulates Batman into trying to kill Superman, so maybe it was a backup plan? It was just plonked on at the end of the movie, though.

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That makes sense. Davis was supposed to be a bartender when they were going to have him be with Lois or have something with Lois, and then they moved it to Chloe, and changed him to a paramedic, and even the former doesn't sound right. Like you said, Smallville rarely goes with the "pure evil villain" archetype. They tend to prefer characters with shades of gray. Even with Zod, they gave him his moments. If they had make Davis more evil, his flip in the finale after he was separated from Doomsday would've made more sense, or at least make him more manipulative rather than sweet and sincere, which is really how he came off for most of the season.

Yeah, they could've just sent him to the Phantom Zone? He had a shot to come back from there and they could've fought again in the future. I know they had Tess destroy the crystal but that was the plan that made the most sense still. It definitely was them using a familiar name to draw attention though. On a grander scale, the MCU did that with the Civil War plot, taking a storyline that was more well known in the comics and try to adapt it and it just didn't work there either.

Huh, I knew that Lex controlled Doomsday and that is what killed Superman and his manipulation but that was it. Kind of weird and random, when Doomsday tends to be its own plot for most Superman canons. The MCU just made me tired of heroes fighting each other so I couldn't bring myself to watch it.