Title: Something Borrowed
Author: jaynewithawhy
Rating: K
Genre: Romance
Status: Complete, 49500 words
Fandom: Supergirl TV show

Summary: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Three weddings and the two women who attend them.

I've been on a bit of a Supergirl kick recently - I can't quite remember how or why I got started, but I started reading fanfic for it before I'd actually watched any of the show itself. Much like what I have now seen of the show (the first series and a few episodes of series 2), most of what I've read has been lightweight, fluffy nonsense that's perfectly enjoyable, but not necessarily something I'd recommend elsewhere, but there's a few decent fics, and this immediately struck me as something special.

There's not much more to it than you see in the summary. Three chapters, three weddings, all of them attended by Kara Danvers - or Supergirl - and Lena Luthor. Nearly fifty thousand words of two friends hanging out and getting closer to each other, and that's basically it. It's a character piece more than anything; despite tagging it as I have, in many ways I'd describe it more as a character study of two people who are in love with each other rather than a romance (a distinction which makes sense in my head, but may not to anyone else /shrug).

What it is is charming. The writing isn't the flashiest, but it's smooth and polished, and really gets under the skin of the characters (in some instances a little more literally than you might expect). The relationship feels real in a way I can't remember seeing in fanfic anytime recently, and it left me with a touched smile on my face at the end.

It won't be for everyone, even within the Supergirl, Supercorp niche, but I found it a thoroughly lovely way to spend an evening. 5/5

 

I've seen a few episodes of Supergirl and dropped it for the same reason that I'm not too into this fic.

The characters are utterly empty.

Perhaps that makes it true to the source material in some ways, but an adept author would have been able to add some flair. The characters' voices all read exactly the same, and their relationships to one another don't exactly seem to move in any real capacity. As a "character study" perhaps it makes a bit of sense if you were really into Supergirl and hungry for any new material. But honestly, this feels like there's nothing new to it either.

And the author has a habit I despise - using numerals in text instead of writing out the number. She also uses an absurd amount of place names as adjectives - up to five or six in the worst offending paragraphs sometimes. And then, perhaps worst of all, we have sentences like "a smattering of sniffles popcorned about."

Ugh.

Most of it isn't bad, per se. More like bad habits nobody has ever told the author about than errors. But because of how utterly beige this fic is, the only thing which stands out to me are these small annoying features which would have been glossed over entirely had there been anything at all to capture my attention. It's easily a readable body of work, but there's no payoff. Not for me. I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone but the most diehard fan.

3/5

 

I watched quite a bit of Supergirl before dropping it and I dunno, I wasn't feeling most of the story. The writing was competent for the most part but the characters and main romance just didn't really have any heart. I think the parts I enjoyed most were when the two canon characters were interacting with OCs during the weddings.

Yeah I don't know, I was mostly bored. 2.5/5