A Few Thoughts on Kara & Mon-El (Supergirl)

Yep, another Supergirl post (can you tell I have Crisis on the brain?), but this one is looking back a bit. On the whole, I enjoyed Mon-El while he was on the show, and there was stuff I liked about him and Kara, but ultimately, I feel like this was a pairing that was never quite as interesting as it had the potential to be (some Kara/Mon-El spoilers.)

I was really interested in Mon-El and his interactions with Kara when he first showed up – maybe in part because I can sometimes be blind to love/hate ships right up until the moment they go there, so I didn’t realize he was introduced to be a love interest. But I digress. Back to Mon-El’s introduction. While I don’t know a lot about comic Superlore, I was intrigued by the idea of Daxam, a planet in the same system as Krypton that was destroyed along with it. Mon-El has a similar journey to Earth as Kara, although when he gets stuck in the Phantom Zone, it’s for a lot longer. Kara feels fascination and sympathy toward this similarly-adrift alien refugee, until she learns he’s a Daxamite. Then, she’s immediately ready to fight.

Even though Kara was a still child when she left Krypton, it was time enough to cement her people’s animosity toward Daxamites, and once she finds out that Mon-El is one, she stops seeing any kinship between them and only perceives a threat. Again, this was an idea that really interested me. We all know Kara as so generally open and loving, a champion of aliens on Earth, so the notion of her harboring prejudices seemed to promise a good exploration of her character.

Kara moves quickly from “DEFCON 1” to “not this guy’s biggest fan, but I’ll still help him out.” She decides to take it upon herself to be his alien-on-Earth mentor, teaching him the ways of his new planet and how to pass as a human. Again, interesting.

However, none of these plots go particularly where I want them to go. Kara’s mission to help the refugee acclimate to his new surroundings quickly becomes “Kara babysits Mon-El at Catco and is scandalized when he hooks up with Miss Tessmacher in the supply closet” and “Kara wants Mon-El to use his new powers to be a superhero/help others and is exasperated when he won’t.” While these things work well in the plot of her being both annoyed with and unknowingly-attracted to him, as well as the plot of him being a “bad boy” who reforms under her influence, they’re not nearly what I was hoping for them.

I wanted to really see Kara showing Mon-El around and helping him learn the ropes on Earth (I’ve since been able to get more of that with Brainy’s interactions with various characters, which is maybe one of the reasons I enjoy him so much.) I wanted to see him making mistakes and feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, and Kara relating because she went through the same thing when she first came to Earth. I wanted them to bond over both of them losing their planets in the same catastrophe, and I wanted Mon-El’s comparatively-recent reckoning with that (while both planets were destroyed decades ago, he only just got out of the Phantom Zone, so it still feels fresh) to stir up Kara’s feelings of loss over Krypton. I also wanted to see Kara start to interrogate her prejudices against Daxamites, realizing that a) what she was taught about them was a distortion, and b) Daxamite culture is different but not “bad.”

This last point is where I really get bummed when I think about these two. Part of the issue might again trace back to my lack of comic knowledge. I didn’t know anything about Daxam before Mon-El showed up on Supergirl, and it’s later brought up that the Daxamites practiced slavery, which is very obviously reprehensible. If Daxamites really are bad in the comics, then maybe the kind of storyline I was hoping for just wouldn’t have made sense, although that still wouldn’t preclude individual Daxamites being good people.

But like I said, when Kara first talks about how awful Daxamites are, she doesn’t lead with the slavery (which, why not?!) Instead, she focuses on their hedonistic lifestyles, full of drinking, sex, and partying. Given how seriously Kryptonian culture took itself, animosity/prejudice between Krypton and Daxam seems to track. Just as Kara looks at Mon-El as a party boy who doesn’t care about anything real, he sees her as a card-carrying member of the self-important Fun Police.

Since this was the first image the show gave me of Daxam and its dynamic with Krypton, and since Kara’s reaction to Mon-El being a Daxamite gave me serious, “Look, even Supergirl has unexplored biases!” vibes, I assumed this was where we were going, Kara and Mon-El learning to reevaluate one another and get passed the prejudices they were both taught. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. While Kara and Mon-El’s opinions of one another do change, it’s not until Mon-El himself starts to change along with it.

Because Mon-El’s drinking and casual sex is portrayed as a bad thing. He’s painted as a frat boy, a shallow guy who’s basically a waste of potential until Kara inspires him to clean up his act. But while that’s what those characteristics might look like on Earth, there was no reason that, for Mon-El and Daxam, those things had to be framed in a negative light. There’s nothing inherently bad about liking a good time and being open about sex. We know how Kara feels about this, and plenty of people on Earth would be inclined to agree with her. But the narrative didn’t have to affirm that opinion, the idea that Mon-El needs to change in order to be “worthy” of Kara. Because when “change” appears to mean “be less like a Daxamite,” that seems to support Kara’s original prejudices.

I think of it this way. A number of cultures are far less focused on time and punctuality than what you’d call “mainstream” American culture (more specifically, white American culture.) In plenty of countries, camaraderie or giving others a hand takes priority over being on time, and showing up late to work because you were giving your brother a ride wouldn’t be a big deal. Now, if someone from a country that follows this norm moves to the U.S., they would need to learn how to adapt to U.S. norms about punctuality in order to be successful, yes, but that doesn’t mean the way they grew up doing things is inferior; it’s just different.

That’s what I would’ve appreciated seeing about Daxam. Why not look at traits that can be viewed on Earth (and apparently on Krypton) as character flaws or “moral failings” and recontextualize them? Rather than debauchery and promiscuity, make it about having a lust for life and not being repressed when it comes to sexuality. The show at least makes a nod to the latter, when Alex comes out to the group and Mon-El is confused as to why her being gay would ever be regarded as anything other than perfectly normal, but that’s really the only time. Other than that, it’s Mon-El the frat boy who, over the course of the season, stops drinking and sleeping around because Kara makes him want to be “better.” 1) This has already been done so many times before, and 2) that show had a chance to do something neat with the perspective of a different alien culture, and for my money, they didn’t take it.