How interesting, Caroline. I'm the one who keeps complaining about Clark's lunkheadedness and about his unfairness and even cruelty to Lois when he keeps deceiving her about his double identity. This time around, however, I seem to be a lot less angry at him, whereas the four other FoLCs who have commented before me seem to be quite upset at Clark:
Tahu:
I hope he'll come to senses before the press conference will take place and I hope Lois will kick his butt for his being a lunkhead and not talking sooner about his ideas.
Laurach:
I wonder if Lois will recognize Superman's writing style as Clarks. Maybe she can bat him on the head with a kryptonite bat and stop his madness.
Tank:
What we do have to have though is more on why Clark isn't telling Lois that he is Superman. We need to be reminded and have his reasons strengthened in our minds. It's inevitable that since he isn't becoming a normal mortal man that he'll give himself away sometime while they are together. Also, since he wants to spend his life with her we have to know how he plans to keep her from ever knowing, and why he feels he needs to do that. I know that Clark might think that because there will be no more Superman, that Lois doesn't need to know that the absent Superman was him.
Sheila:
I'm just over Clark! He doesn't ever plan to tell Lois!
So a lot of people seem to disapprove of Clark more than they usually do. I myself think that Caroline is merely taking a few things about Clark Kent/Kal El to their logical conclusion and forcing us, and even more importantly,
him, to really think about them.
Kal El is an orphan from Krypton who was adopted by Jonathan and Martha Ken as well as by the entire planet Earth. His adoptive parents gave him an Earth name, and so Kal El became Clark Kent. But Clark Kent, while looking so deceptively, perfectly human, is really in his bones and his flesh an
alien. Like other adopted children, and like other children who are different one way or another, Clark has discovered his differences little by little. Discovering that you are different and that there seems to be no help for it is a cruel, unmerciful thing, perfect at inducing angst and anxiety in adolescents.
Let me say a little something about myself here. As a child, I realized with horror that I did not fit in either among my relatives, the fervent Pentecostalists, or among the people that my parents wanted me to like, the smug Swedish Missionary Society people. I hated going to church and I always kept squirming throughout the services, just waiting for the axe to fall, as it were. I felt that when I was in church, all the perfect people around me must
sense that I was different. I just waited for the pastor or someone else in church to suddenly stare at me, point an accusing finger at me, and proclaim to the whole congregation: "There is a stranger among us! There she is! She is not one of us!"
And somehow I think that something like this is what Clark keeps fearing, too. He fears that someone will blow his cover, expose him to the world, and accuse him of being irreconcilably
different from everyone else.
And Clark is a lot more different than I ever was, and he has to be scared of exposure
all the time. Me, I was scared for an hour and a half every Sunday, but Clark can never relax, never feel that the danger of horrible exposure is over. And while I could hope to find other people more like me somewhere else (and I couldn't even be sure I could never find anyone among the Pentecostalists or Swedish Missionary Society people), Clark can
never reasonably hope to find other Kryptonians on Earth. Wherever he goes, he has to fear that sooner or later, someone will call his bluff and prove to the world that Clark Kent is an alien to this world.
Then there is his role as Superman. Clark has taken it upon himself to altruistically help other people, people who are
not like him, people who are true sons and daughters of the Earth. Every time Clark puts on his heroic spandex and flies off to help other people, he increases the risk that the person he himself tries to be, Clark Kent, will be exposed as not human. Clark is not paid for constantly rendering services to humankind, and indeed he risks expulsion from humankind for his troubles.
Even though Clark is not human, he thinks and feels just like a human. And we humans are good at telling ourselves that there is a miracle cure somewhere, something that will take care of all our troubles. A book which is popular among the students at the school where I work is about a teenaged girl, whose slightly alcoholic and unemployed single mother keeps spending her little family's dwindling resources on things she has seen on TV Shop. Surely
that magical vacuum cleaner from TV Shop will clear away all the dust and detritus from her apartment and make her strong and clean and optimistic and suddenly able to deal with all the vexations and annoyances of life and lay bare a yellow brick road underneath all the trash, which will lead her to the land of happiness!
Clark, too, has figured out who will be his saviour. Not TV Shop, but Lois Lane. If he can only make her love
him, that is, Clark Kent, instead of Superman, then he can forget about being born Kal El and having powers and abilities that set him apart from other people and turn him into a freak and a stranger to this world. If he can make Lois Lane
believe in Clark Kent, and prefer him over Superman, then he can make the rest of the world believe in his make-believe human persona, too. And then he can be - not an alien. And then he can fit in.
I think Clark is being anything but reasonable here. But at the same time, he is being so, so
human precisely because he isn't human. Can't we sympathize with his fears of being exposed and rejected? And Clark has more to hide than most of us. And he is also being more altruistic than most of us.
Clark's attempt to give up being Superman is doomed to fail. This time, when he chose to make out with Lois instead of flying off to do heroics as Superman, no one was killed or even injured. But what if someone really had been killed? That person's death would have hung like a spectre between Lois and Clark. I can see Clark subconsciously blaming Lois for making him abandon and forsake those who need his superhuman services.
I'm convinced of one thing myself: we do the most crazy things because we believe that we
need to do them in order to fit in. And we are prepared to make the most unreasonable sacrifices to win the approval or love of others. Sometimes, like this time, we don't even ask the other person if she or he
wants us to sacrifice the things we are giving up for their sake.
Another thing strikes me too, as I read this. In the LnC universe, Superman routinely shows up at emergencies and provide help, and he never asks for help or rewards. And pretty soon, people just take him for granted. If he really stops being Superman, people will blame him not because he is not doing the job he has been hired or paid to do, but because he will no longer be fulfilling other people's expectations!
Well, Caroline, I love how your story demonstrates how Clark is vulnerable and fragile and brave and deliriously happy and caring and selfish, and how he is so utterly human in his alienness. He actually gets my goat a lot
less here than he usually does. The reason for that is that in other stories he doesn't let his confusion about his own self get out of hand, and so he can pretend that he is absolutely, perfectly normal, and so he doesn't have to think about and come to terms with who he really is. I love that he is going to have to ask himself a few hard questions in your story, and he is going to have to find a way to reconcile Clark Kent with Kal El, and a way to reconcile Clark Kent and Lois Lane with Superman. And he is going to have to look at Lois, too, and see all the things that she will have to reconcile to be with him, too. Because a relationship between two people is never just about one person's needs. And learning to understand and honor the needs of the one you love in an intimate relationship may be every bit as hard as being Superman to the world - which does
not mean that Superman should hang up his cape in order to give his attentions to his loved one.
This is a wonderful story, Caroline.
Ann
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)
Wow. I'm kind of glad I'm always late, because this means there's always more to read. Yum.