(no subject)

[frelling_tralk]

I don't know how many Smallville fans are still on LJ, but I thought that this interview with Al and Miles was fairly interesting:





Q: Smallville stirred up a lot of controversy with hardcore comic book fans devoted to the original. How did you guys deal with that?

AG: Like all writers — we tried to avoid it as much as possible! We stopped reading Ain’t it Cool News where we were being burned in effigy everyday, and didn’t go to the San Diego Comic-Con until Season 2.

MM: Listening to fan boys is tiring, frustrating and ultimately futile. Smallville began at the dawn of the fan-forum era — we used to scan the posts to get a sense of the general feeling, but that’s it. If we did course-correct a storyline it would be because the fans’ sentiment mirrored our own. The truth is the so-called “hardcore fans” will find fault with anything and everything. We had no interest in following the established mythology of the D.C. universe or aligning our timeline with theirs.

Q: What was the most controversial?

AG: Making Lex and Clark friends. That was a radical idea at the time, as well as casting an African American actor to play Pete Ross and a Eurasian actress to play Lana Lang. You would not believe how much flak we caught for those choices from the internet peanut gallery.

MM: Again, probably the meteor shower because it led to accusations that we over-relied on the “freak of the week” formula. We had a super-powered, crime-fighting teenager — we figured he had to battle someone every week. It’s not like sleepy Smallville was a hot bed of crime. It wouldn’t exactly be great drama if Clark was forced to use his awesome abilities to solve the case of the missing library book. I have zero regrets about that.

Q: Looking back, is there anywhere you wish you’d taken the characters of Smallville?

AG: I wish we had a better trajectory for Lana Lang. That was probably a three-season love story that lasted six seasons.

MM: It’s so torturous and slow. Ultimately, it damaged Lana in the audience’s mind. Because Clark refused to tell her the truth about his identity, he was constantly forced to lie to her. Although justified, Lana’s response to his behavior made her seem cold and unsympathetic — even though from her POV, Clark was a sneaky, bold-faced liar.



Miles also mentions that We also almost succeeded in bringing Aquaman to the small screen but were thwarted when the WB got swallowed by UPN and became the CW. The atmosphere at the new network was very hostile to Smallville and they were not open to doing another comic book series. It was all about Gossip Girl — looking back, it’s kind of amazing we survived at all.

Comments

[apeygirl.livejournal.com]

I almost forgot that part, them implying casting POCs was a big gripe. I don't remember seeing much of that. I think them telling themselves that allows them to dismiss valid complaints as if all the comic fans are just a bunch of racists. So why listen to anything they say? Maybe there were those comments out there. I didn't see them over at TWoP, where I spent my time, but that wasn't the majority of complaints at all.

And the biggest problem with Pete was how badly they used his character after season 2 before putting him on a bus, never to be spoken of again till they have him come back to pimp gum. And Lana... well, it's all been said above. Even KK is said to have been really dissatisfied.

I think I ended up having more sympathy for Lex than Clark by season 7, the way he'd spent time up till then being asked for favors and then trash talked. Obviously, he was doing horrible things, but he treated Clark on an interpersonal level, a bit better than Clark treated him.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Yeah it was an awkward thing where Clark came across as the colder of the two, someone who didn't think much of the person that Lex was and only went over to speak to him when he had too, whereas Lex always comes off as the pathetically needy one who was throwing money at his first real friend in an attempt to impress him. I would have definitely preferred that dynamic being changed so that Clark was written as a softer character and desperate to get through to his friend and understand why he was pulling away from him and making all the wrong choices, instead he just came off as another Jonathan Kent with how disapproving and cold he would act. I.e even early on in Suspect Clark is immediately accusing Lex of being responsible for shooting Lionel, and then at the end of the episode he doesn't even apologise for that wrong accusation but just makes a snotty comment about "even you" when Lex is talking about how sad it is how many people had believable motives for shooting his father

Maybe there were those comments out there. I didn't see them over at TWoP, where I spent my time, but that wasn't the majority of complaints at all.

I hang out on TwoP, Livejournal, and Kryptonsite, and I never saw any comments on Pete being black at all, A&M even said themselves at the time that the most common complaint was that fans wanted more Pete and for the writers to find something to do with him, and then they pointed out that fans hated the Velocity episode which thus proved that fans just don't care about Pete supposedly. (Er and maybe the writing of that episode just sucked!) And I came across the occasional comment from fandom about Lana being portrayed as white when the actress was clearly Asian (i.e an old white woman playing older Lana in Hereafter, Lana's parents and then Henry Small all being portrayed as Caucasian), but I still never saw it being a really huge issue for fandom that an Asian actress was cast, it was usually more jokes or irritation about how A&M were trying to whitewash the actresses true race.