Kara Zor-El | Supergirl

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â–¡ Name: Al

â–¡ Age: +20

â–¡ Contact: crotalus @ plurk

â–¡ Journal: crotalus6

â–¡ Do you play anyone in Ariel?: Nope

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â–¡ Name: Kara Zor-El

â–¡ Journal: knowsaboutanger

â–¡ Series: DC Comics

â–¡ Canon point: Post Blackest Night, pre Last Stand of Krypton

â–¡ History:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergirl_(Kara_Zor-El)#Modern_Age
http://www.comicvine.com/supergirl/29-2351/
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Kara_Zor-El_(New_Earth)#History 

â–¡ Personality:

Kara is first a teenage girl, Supergirl later. Unlike her cousin who came to earth as a baby and was raised human, she had a life before her home planet exploded. She already had a family, friends… dreams. She was still young, but that might make it even more difficult. The possibilities were endless. We don’t know how much of her memories were fake because of the Kryptonite poisoning, but even though she didn’t seem to be exactly ‘popular’ in the Kryptonian version of high school she still had friends. She had family. She had a life and a future.

And then her world was attacked by Brainiac, she lost everything and woke up in Earth. The baby she was supposed to take care of was a grown up man who was seen (in her own words) as a God, and she had powers she didn’t know what to do with. At first she was just curious, happy to investigate and to get to do things a normal human girl would do with Kal-El- sorry, <i>Clark</i> by her side. But soon the reality of the situation caught up with her and she found herself more than a little overwhelmed, kind of caught between two worlds. It’s not a surprise that she doesn’t exactly fit in as ‘Supergirl’ and first and chooses to party around and have the fun she thinks she deserves after all she’s gone through. It’s not that she doesn’t want to help people, she’s just afraid she won’t live up to the standards Earth has set on the Kryptonians.

It’s hard to wake up in a world where everyone expects you to be this perfect ideal of truth and justice, the way everyone sees Kryptonians. Superman is, to people’s eyes, some kind of demi-god so Kara must obviously be one as well… and that put a lot of pressure on her shoulders. Eventually though she learns to give up trying to be the Supergirl everyone expects her to be, and becoming the Supergirl she actually is. Coincidentally that’s also when everyone started liking Kara a little bit more, when they realized

The superhero community itself has a lot of mixed feelings about Kara. On one hand she’s Superman’s cousin and she means well, so of course she has to be a superhero. On the other hand… well. Cat Grant wrote an article called’ Why the world doesn’t need Supergirl’ for a reason, and that’s because Kara isn’t exactly the most gentle superhero or one who thinks about collateral damage until it’s a bit too late. She had a bad reputation even among civilians when she first appeared, for all the destruction she caused even though she’s saved the world plenty of times at her young age.

She’s a Super but she’s also still a teenager… and if usual teenagers already usually believe themselves immortal you can imagine how worse it might be for someone who actually is invincible. Kara isn’t exactly full of herself, not in the way other people with powers are- but it’s a fact that there isn’t much that can hurt her, that there’s very few people on Earth that can actually harm her. She’s been superpowered all this time and now she’s kind of gotten used to it, she even kept her powers in occasions when Superman lost them and got to protect Earth all on her own… so the powers are kind of tightly tied to her sense of self.

(And I’m going to be honest here: depending on the writers Kara is just a confused teen or a nuclear bomb waiting to explode)

She is willing to learn and improve though, and she’s a fast learner once she puts her mind to it. She is quick to admit someone is more powerful, more intelligent or just superior to her in a sense and try to learn from them. She looks up to Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman as her three mentors specially, having learned things from each one of them and adapting them all to the way she is. But at the same time that doesn’t mean she’s shy or unwilling to stand up to them though, and she’s oh so stubborn when she thinks either of her mentors or teachers are wrong. Once you’ve faced DC’s holy trinity you’re never scared to tell someone off if you think they’ve made mistakes. She’s willing to look back and admit her mistakes, but until she gets there she will defend her point of view with teeth and nails if she has to.

The fact that she’s extremely stubborn has sadly worked against her a lot of times even if she always has helping someone as her main priority: one time she was so determined to save a little kid with cancer than she didn’t realize how much pain she was making his family go through. Another time she destroyed the Air Force One (THE AIR FORCE ONE!) because she wanted USA’s president to have a talk with the Queen of the Amazons, since the two countries were at war at the moment. And these are just some of the examples. Sometimes she just needs to see she’s wrong before moving on, and won’t listen to anybody who tells her otherwise.

Earlier I talked about how she just wanted to party around when she got to Earth, a little overwhelmed by the responsibilities that came from being a Super. That’s one of her escape routes to not get into depression about all the things she has lost in her short (depends on how you look at it) life. The other escape route… well, it’s pretty easy to guess from the username I’ve chosen for her: she can be really aggressive. She never ever kills; the S-shield is a universal symbol all over the DC universe for ‘you won’t kill me’ (…willingly at least, she might have accidentally killed Lois Lane’s sister once) but she will beat you up good if she has to without a second’s hesitation. And even enjoy it a little. She’s really not as sweet as nice as her cousin, and she actually gets very pissed if you imply she should be.

But even though she isn’t Clark Kent she actually <i>is</i> a really sweet girl if you don’t piss her off. Get her on your good side and you will have a friend for life. Batgirl, Wonder girl, Captain Boomerang… she’s been very loyal and sweet to all of them, and will protect them with teeth and nails if she has to. Which again leads us to her anger problems! She wouldn’t mind, say, fighting an entire group of USA soldiers if she had to defend one of her friend’s mother- wait, no, she actually did that. Sometimes she doesn’t make the best decisions under pressure, but she tries.

The main force driving her actions is her desire to help people. All her mistakes, all her anger and all the things that have made people frown at her every once in a while happened because she really wants to protect Earth and all her inhabitants. She doesn’t exactly feel human, not in the way her cousin does, but Earth is still her adopted home and she loves it dearly. She’s torn between two worlds, especially now that New Krypton was brought back and she actually has other Kryptonians around her. She stays in the newly created planet with her mother because Kryptonians are her people, but Earth holds a very special place in her heart and she’s very reluctant to leave it behind. If her father hadn’t asked her to, she wouldn’t have agreed to leave it completely.

Because Kara is very much a daddy’s girl. She loves her mother, and her cousin was pretty much the father figure until they rescued the bottled city of Kandor but Zor-El, he father, is the person Kara looks up to the most. When she lost him she was so angry she even said she’d wish her mother Alura was the one to die, but she realized how horrible that thought was and hated herself for it. She loves her mother as well, but they never got along as well as Kara and her father did.

 And to end this I’ll mention how Kara is actually fairly smart, a true daughter of El. Kryptonians have a bit of a cast system, dividing the population in ‘guilds’ depending on their focus: military, art, science, history… and since they are a very technologically and science-driven species the Science guild is the most important one and the one that basically governs the city. So the Els are the smartest house of the smartest guild of one of the smartest races of the universe…. So while Kara isn’t the smartest El in the science guild she’s very much a smart girl by Earth’s standards. When she tried to have a secret identity and attend school the problem wasn’t that she wasn’t smart enough to follow… the problem was that she was too smart by their standards.

â–¡ Age: She just turned 18 in canon. It's a bit complicated because technically she spent ages in crio-stasis in space, but that's her physical and mental age.

â–¡ Gender: Female and really proud of it. She's an alien but she's completely humanoid, down to her genitals (otherwise Clark wouldn't have been able to have sex with his wife, oops)

â–¡ Appearance:

Kara looks like a normal white young girl her age, albeit an admittedly pretty one. She’s a bit on the tall side but still average, and the skirt she always wears as Supergirl shows off how long her legs are. She’s thin, and she honestly lacks a bit of cleavage (which is made it even more obvious when you see her alternate-universe self, Powergirl).

She has long blond hair and big bright blue eyes, and artists really like to draw her with big full lips. Her facial traits are softer than her cousin’s, she doesn’t have the El trademark chin or cheekbones which makes her look younger than she actually is. She’s probably 20 at the end of her canon (not the point I’m taking her from), and she could still be mistaken by a 17-18 years old teenager.

Ever since she accepted being Supergirl she wears her suit most of the time, but when she wanted to escape from her responsibilities and keep a low profile she still gravitated towards skirt and short tops in happy bright colors. Coincidentally the two times she’s tried to keep a secret identity she decided to wear big clothes that didn’t show her figure in boring colors, probably taking an example from her cousin when he’s Clark Kent… but I don’t think that’s the style of clothes she’d pick.

â–¡ Abilities/Powers:

While Kara looks human to all intents and purposes she is actually an alien, and more specifically a Kryptonian. Her species, born in a planet with an old red dwarf and a planet with a nucleus way more heavy than Earth’s, had adapted to those conditions. That means that while they didn’t have any kind of power in their home-world and were basically (really smart and advanced) humans, once they got to Earth their body cells began storing all that energy and reacting to the way lighter pull of gravity with extraordinary consequences. Kara is no different. 

Her powers are:

- Superhuman strength. Supers can move cars and stuff with relative ease, breaks things by touching them if she’s not careful, etc

- Superhuman speed. Superman can almost outrun the flash, and Kara’s been mentioned to be slightly faster than Kal himself at some points. Can’t say how fast for sure, but let’s say above match 5, below match 10? She definitely moves at hypersonic speeds.

- Practically invulnerable to any kind of harm. Bullets bounce of her chest, swords break when trying to touch her… her skin can only break with extreme impacts or Kryptonite.

- Quick healing, which also gives her longevity to some extent. Her cousin Kal is 40+, and still looks like a young man who just entered his 30s.

- Ice breath, her breath is so cold it creates a blizzard.

- Able to hold her breath for a very long time. How long exactly varies from writer to writer but she’d need a bubble of air for a long interstellar travel…. So she needs to breathe, she just doesn’t need to breathe nearly as often as a human does.

- Heath-vision (aka has the ability to shoot lasers out of his eyes). She can focus her irises enough to create blasts of red energy. The power of these lasers is similar to normal military energy-weapon laser.

- X-ray vision, she’s also able to change the field of vision as an x-ray but nothing in the comics implies it creates the same radiation actual x-rays do. She can see through clothes, skin and innards, walls… the only thing she can see through is lead.

- Telescopic and microscopic vision, able to see things at a microscopic level (think bacteria, viruses with a lot of focus) or telescopic one (Able to see galaxies far away with a bit of focus)

- Super hearing. In Superman’s word they can hear a pin drop in the other side of the world if they focus, but the range of hearing they would get would drive them crazy. One of the first things they learn if to tune in all the sounds they aren’t focusing on out.

- Super stamina (takes a lot for her to get tired, doesn’t really need to sleep more than 2-3 hours a day and even that it’s implied to be out of habit…)

- Flight. Krypton’s nucleus was way heavier than Earth’s and its pull higher. That combined with the energy being under a yellow sun gives Kryptonians have the ability to control gravity’s pull on their bodies as they please. It’s not, like a lot of people think a matter of strengths in their legs but a matter of gravity.

As for weakness, they are basically: Kryptonite, a piece of her homeplanet turned radioactive to them; A red sun’s light, since the energy it gives doesn’t give their cells the same kind of energy a yellow sun does and as soon as that energy is drained away they would be rendered powerless; magic, since it affects Kryptonians the same way it would affect any human (and they have been implied to be outright allergic to magic, so magic actually affects them even more easily); lead, since the lead atoms keep their x-ray vision out (and is also coincidentally the only way to stop Kryptonite’s radiation); electricity since it also affects them the wame way it would a human and finally holographic vampires come to life.

(…ask the writers about the last one I'm not sure either).

â–¡ Personal Items:

> Her Linda Lang clothes



> Her super-super suit under said clothes

... and that's it, really. She's never had many possessions.

â–¡ First Person Sample:
http://knowsaboutanger.dreamwidth.org/1630.html
http://knowsaboutanger.dreamwidth.org/1125.html 

Have two entries from the game I used to play Kara in.

â–¡ Third Person Sample:

http://theloonybin.dreamwidth.org/16999.html?thread=9332327#cmt9332327

Kara at the test drive