Work Text:
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a plot arc in Superman’s various comic book titles during which Lex Luthor got in the habit of wearing a ring set with a ‘gemstone’ which was a piece of green kryptonite – because Luthor was paranoid about Superman attacking him and thought the ring would protect him from such. (It really would not have. A blast of heat vision from, say, half a mile away would have disintegrated Luthor outright, so the ring was pointless.) Luthor discovered too late that the radiation from green kryptonite has a carcinogenic effect – by which point, he was doomed. He only barely managed to have his brain saved, grew a clone of himself, transferred his brain into the clone’s body, and then masqueraded as his own son – thus cheating death.
…so here’s what I’m wondering: on the TV show ‘Smallville’, lumps of green kryptonite were scattered all over the town of Smallville, Kansas, and the farms and fields surrounding it. Yet no one seemed to die of cancer because of exposure to its radiation, the way that comic book-Lex Luthor did.
Even weirder, I have never seen a work of fanfiction which referred to such an eventuality. (Although maybe I’ve simply been reading the wrong ones.)
For crying out loud, Lana Lang wore a necklace set with a lump of ominously glowing green kryptonite around her neck for years on end. Surely the radiation from that necklace should have killed Lana before the events of the show’s pilot episode?
I suspect that this is an example of Bad Writing and Planning at work. (Either that, or Smallville’s production team decided that their show’s kryptonite was going to work differently from the comic books’ kryptonite so they could ignore any ‘inconvenient’ properties of the substance.)
So, if you’re interested in writing a fanfic for the Smallville fandom, and if you want to try something new? Please consider my thoughts on this subject, and maybe try them out for yourself sometime.