norwich36: (Default)
norwich36 ([personal profile] norwich36) wrote2006-12-12 10:40 am

SV "What If" Game

Edited to rename my game now that it is famous all over teh internets, since "an SV Game/Poll Thingy" doesn't scan quite as well.

I have one of those extremely tedious projects at work that require, for sanity, an lj break every half hour or so, so it seems like a good time to play a game.

So here's the premise: the SV fairy has appeared to you and offered you the opportunity to travel to the SV-verse, temporarily, to improve Smallville and/or the lives of the characters in any way you see fit. There are rules, however. You can either (1)have one conversation with one character (and only one character), time length up to one hour, at any point in the timeline OR (2) you can change one event, but not speak to anyone.

--If you choose the conversation, you can talk to anyone at any point in their timeline, but you have to be yourself (mysterious stranger); you can't, for example, be Clark to talk to Lex. You can, however, be a mysterious stranger who knows the future; you just can't hang around more than an hour to show that your predictions were accurate.

--If you choose changing an event, you have a fair amount of power--let's say the limit of your power is that of a meteor mutant--but you can only change one event, and you can't speak to anyone. So, for example, if your goal was to prevent Jodi from becoming a fat-sucker in "Craving," you could either magically prevent her father's greenhouse from being salted with kryptonite OR you could have a conversation warning her, but you couldn't do both. If you wanted to save Jonathan's life in "Reckoning," you could have a conversation with Clark or you could blow up the Fortress of Solitude (if you think that would help) OR you could puncture Jonathan's tires so he never has the encounter with Lionel, but you could only do ONE of those things, not all of them. If you want to redirect the meteors in the first meteor shower to squash Lana, you can do that, but you can't then talk to Clark to get him to wait on Loeb bridge so he saves Lex's life even though he no longer has Lana to moon over and so he may not end up there on his own.

SO:

What is your goal?
What are you going to do to accomplish it, given the constraints on your powers?
What do you think the effect of your change will be?
What might be the unintended consequences?

For example, here's mine.

What is your goal?
I want Lex NOT to become an evil monster whose sociopathy exceeds Lionel's. It turns out I want that even more than I want Clark and Lex to get together.

What are you going to do to accomplish it, given the constraints on your powers?
After much thought about this, I think what I would do is appear to Lillian a couple days before she kills Julian and HEAL HER with my magical kryptomutant powers.

What do you think the effect of your change will be?
Even though I don't get to talk to her, my hope is that healing her would cover both her post-partum psychosis (to which I am attributing her desire to kill Julian) AND her heart condition, so she would live and continue to be a countering influence on Lex. I think by the time Lex gets to Smallville it's really too late for him to really change; he's too fucked up already. My hope is that if Lillian is not sucked down into despair because of her mortal illness, she would actually be able to support Lex in not becoming like his dad. And Lex would still have a little brother, who he clearly loved a lot, so that would give him motivation to try to be a good person and set a good example.

What might be the unintended consequences?
Well, Lillian might already be so damaged that she would still kill Julian, and maybe this time Lionel would catch her and she'd go to prison or be locked in an asylum, which probably would NOT make things better for Lex. Or maybe she wouldn't be caught, but she'd live, and instead of being Lex's dead model of goodness, she'd be the psycho-mom he was protecting, and that could get ugly and he might go evil earlier. Or maybe none of that would happen but instead Lionel would succeed in molding Julian to be the heir he wanted Lex to be, and instead of Lex being the evil genius he'd be locked in an eternal struggle with his brother the evil genius.

So, does anyone else want to play, or did I make the rules too complicated?

[identity profile] latxcvi.livejournal.com 2006-12-13 03:32 am (UTC)(link)
Right. Without more than "Lionel Luthor cheated us[/them] out of the creamed corn factory," it's hard to know what he actually did. Like I said to Nora, if it was buying it for less than it was actually worth (and that's certainly what I think the term "cheating" implies to most people), then it's not Lionel's fault that the Rosses didn't bother to get an accounting of what the business was worth before they undertook selling it1. If there was some kind of double- or triple-speak in the contract, well, they had at least one and possibly two family members who could have reviewed it if the two gentlemen we saw in the pilot didn't understand everything they were reading.

I have no trouble with the idea that Lionel's general business practices weren't always ethical or above-board. But since there's never been any actual explanation of exactly what he did to the Rosses that was so wrong or unfair, I've always had a hard time understanding Pete and Jon's anger about it. All the ways I can think of Lionel "cheating" depend on the Rosses being kind of ... willfully ignorant, and that makes it hard for me to blame Lionel for how it went down.

1. I'm certain businessman!Lionel's never bought anything without having it examined/appraised, so yeah, I can believe that he had his accountants look into the factory and possibly learned that it was worth more/generated more profit than was reflected in the Rosses' asking price. And while yeah, the most honorable thing to do in that situation would be to tell them, "Huh, my people say it's worth more than you're asking for it," it's not necessarily dishonorable that he failed to do this. At the end of the day, the onus is on the seller to set the initial price, so that means it was the Rosses' responsibility to know exactly how much they should have asked.

[identity profile] slinkling.livejournal.com 2006-12-13 09:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Here's a what-if: What if the repeated references to Lionel "cheating" the Rosses out of their creamed corn factory has nothing to do with what he paid for it, but rather with the fact that he bought it at all, and then leveled it and turned it into a fertilizer plant?

In the deleted scene from the pilot, the Rosses really didn't seem happy about the prospect of selling to Lionel. Maybe they were considering it (because he wanted property in the area), just didn't like the man and decided they didn't want him to have their factory, and then Jonathan Kent persuaded them that Lionel really wasn't so bad? And maybe Lionel assured them that he would carry on in the fine Ross tradition, but kept the language of the contract vague with regard to how he would dispose of the factory once it was his -- and then, as soon as he took possession, he fired their workers and bulldozed the place and built a plant that's been leaking pollution into the Smallville groundwater ever since.

I realize this is a whole lotta fanwank, but it might be a way to reconcile canon with itself.