Its a very vague, general, and very poetic language despite being a very scientific society.
For example, (according to Kryptonian Dictionary) the word “El” by itself roughly translates to the word, “Sun”. But because the society worshipped their sun, Rao, it would be with great Narcissim to think that one could have the surname of “Sun”. So the House of El then roughly translates to, The House of Star(s).
But their house motto is “El Mayarah”, which – according to Kara – means “Stronger Together” but “El” doesn’t mean “Stronger”… and “Mayarah” roughly translates to “band together”… So it really means, “stars band together.”
I headcanon that Kara was only able to give a very loose, very shorthand translation. Because she’s not sure how else to fully capture the phrase, how to fully give the full description without it losing the meaning.
Because Krypton is a logical, scientific society – and when the House of El is a mostly scientific house, then they know that the stars are really just distant suns, often dying suns, often dead suns – and yet they still shine in the night. They also know that the stars can be used to map out your location. You could be lost, but just look up at the night sky and look at the stars, and then you realize you’re not alone no matter where you are, no matter what planet you’re on.
So, on Krypton, the complete phrase would be something like a proverb – translated into something like, “One Star is enough to light the day, but Stars Band Together to light up the darkest of nights.” – It’s meant to say that by yourself, you can only achieve so much. But with others? You achieve so much more.
It’s meant to transcend distance. It’s meant to transcend time. It’s meant to transcend death. No matter where, no matter when, no matter how.
On Earth, in English, the best way to translate it is just simply, “Stronger Together.”
When Kara says, “El Mayarah” she really means to say, “I’m with you no matter what, no matter when, no matter where….”
And so when Kara looks at her house emblem, she remembers her house, The House of El – The House of Stars. She remembers their motto, El Mayarah, the Kryptonian phrase for dead stars that still light up the darkest of nights. She remembers happier times with her family. She remembers that she’s been given a new family.
(And that’s where she succeeds the house motto where Clark fails; he believes it’s his sole duty to be strong for everyone, she knows she’s stronger with everyone.)
(If you would like to see my thoughts about this topic from before this season as presented in a fic-ish way—as opposed to this updated comprehensive meta break down—check out here and here.)
Before Kara was sent off in a pod to journey to Earth and protect her cousin, only to trapped in the phantom zone for 24 years, the stars were simply Kara’s home.
(Ever since, ‘home’ has been anything but simple.)
Kara personally visited those stars. “As someone who’s been to twelve different planets,” those stars represent civilizations. People, places, lives. Soccer with dragons and cinnamon scented air.
When sweet Kenny, keeper of secrets, asked if Kara could imagine whole other worlds beyond what they can see, Kara replied with an unimpressed, amused, and slightly sad, “Yeah.”
The moment reminds me of how difficult it was for Kara to understand how people could see her as a god just because her biology processes solar energy a certain way, see her everyday actions as miracles.
The stars were once so easily a part of Kara’s life, so comparatively effortlessly in reach to her that the idea of not being able to even imagine other worlds must be incredibly odd.
“What do you think is up there?”
They are as real to her as the lights in the windows of the National City skyline.
And yet for both, knowing what is behind the light does not detract from the reverence she feels as it’s witness.
To Kara, the light represents lives. Afterall, she was in one of those families so far from Earth, staring at her own sky.
When Kara was growing up, she and Astra were very close—“I couldn’t love a daughter more than [sic] if Rao had granted me a child of my own,”—and Astra would teach Kara about the stars in Krypton’s sky.
The stars were not only Kara’s home in as far as she could travel amongst them, they represented warm memories once shared with a loved one, and—knowing their names and rightful places—they were landmarks that let Kara know she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
And so how sickeningly wrong must Earth’s sky have felt to Kara when arrived on Earth? They must have been a constant reminder that this place isn’t right, these people aren’t her people.
This isn’t her home.
The sun—not only different from Rao in its yellow color and smaller size, but a force that made Kara a stranger in her own body—and the stars, which would never look right again.
The stars were once home in the grandest sense, in that they represented her rightful place in the universe (now ripped from her along with her “normal” life), and they were also home for her in her tangible, day-to-day past experiences.
And so even this small bond she shared with her aunt was tarnished, so that perhaps learning these new constellations, centering herself in the universe again, would have felt like a betrayal.
But then, miraculously, Astra returned.
She was on Earth, and though she at times was ready to kill Kara, how it must have felt to share the same sky again, to have at least a chance to mend that broken piece of her history.
Kara tries to light the void in her heart that was left by the loss of her world by helping others, saving others, so that it never happens to anyone else again. So that everyone gets to go home. When she gives that to people, she feels like she is sharing in their light.
The yellow sun may give her great powers, but it is that light which makes her a hero.
And so when Astra came along, someone who not only could she help form a life, but who she could truly share that life with, oh, she tried.
Kara tried to help Astra, to capture the last star of Krypton (after all, “Astra” means “star.”).
But, as it seems Kara is always destined to do,
she watched another star go out.
In the end, Kara would never get the chance to build a home with Astra under this new light. In the end, like her planet, this shared experience with Astra was wiped out and enveloped by the dark.
“I re-lived my last moments there. And then being stuck, floating through space for so long, knowing I could never have my life back.”
With the new information that Kara was aware for some undisclosed amount of time in the Phantom Zone, the accusation that Astra went insane when staring into the darkness of space seems rather… specific.
Who is to say Astra even had a view that would allow her to stare into space? Who is to say she wouldn’t instead lose her mind within the confines of a steel, windowless prison? Or that she wouldn’t instead be spending her time fighting prisoners to the death, losing touch of the values she had left?
And the vehemence and disgust with which Kara says it, like something she dragged up from the darkest corners of her mind…
Regardless of how long it really was that Kara was stuck staring into the void, never aging, never changing, never living and yet existing, it’s an experience that will never leave her.
When Psi plays on her deepest fears, the first glimpse of terror she sees is a sun, and some stars, and the dark.
Space.
We hear Kara speak of the thoughts that have kept her from finding sleep and have given her nightmares when she does for the past seven months,
“You know I don’t sleep anymore? I lay awake at night just staring at the ceiling because if I close my eyes I dream about you dying.”
This is the part which hurt most to speak of. When she closes her eyes, she sees the blackness of space.
And Kara—who feels light become a part of her by helping others, by keeping them from the from the darkness and the loss that fell upon her—Kara’s worst fear is that she did that to someone. She gave them the dark when what makes Kara the happiest she’s ever been is protecting people from the worst the universe can offer.
And make no mistake, to Kara, the void is the worst the universe can offer.
It haunts her. In her dreams, her paintings,
When she first came to Earth, she’d even have claustrophobic episodes because of being trapped in the void. Kara has ptsd because she experienced the violent destruction of her entire world, but it’s that utter absence afterward which truly made its mark upon her psyche.
When Kara thinks of Krypton, of her lost family, she seems so very far away. Her eyes hold grief and love and shock and everything that can’t be expressed in a look so that all that it really tells us is we don’t know, we can’t possibly know.
“And my planet…died. My culture, my home, my parents. Everything was just wiped from the stars.”
She’s searching for something amongst the cosmos that even she, in all her abilities, can no longer see.
But when she thinks of the phantom zone, there’s that same impossible distance, but then she just looks… lost.
And I think that’s the difference between the stars and the void. The worst of the light in the sky, for Kara, is the unfathomable grief for the light that is missing.
But the worst of the dark?
It’s despair. Soul-deep, mind-wrecking despair and loneliness.
In the stars, she’s searching for Krypton. For home. For her lost life.
In the void, she’s searching for anything.
Anyone.
Even Kara’s religion uses this dichotomy of light and dark, star and void, life and loneliness. For one, their god is a star: Rao, the sun god.
As the prayer Kara would say with her mother states—“Though we go forth alone, our soul unites us under Rao’s gladsome rays.”—Rao’s rays, starlight, unites Kryptonians souls so that they are not alone.
When Astra died and Kara was the only surviving woman to read the rites, she recited, “Our prayers will be the sun that lights your way on the journey home.”
When J’onn asked if Non could be trusted to respect the mourning period and not come after Kara, she said, “Do you think he’s going to let his wife walk alone in the dark?”
Light means being home, and the dark means being alone.
And now, how strange it must be to be so distant from even your god.
Fire, warmth, light, life, love.
The cold, the dark, death.
The cosmos is filled with the empty spaces in between the stars where she sees her planet, her culture, her parents, her aunt, her god, her home. It’s filled with expanses of darkness which her loved ones could never comprehend, expanses of loneliness that even she cannot understand but which tear at her from the inside.
And it’s filled with brilliant shining happinesses which she cherishes.
In many ways, the cosmos are Kara’s Kryptonite—her home and yet it hurts.
Like memories you hoard but can barely stand to think upon. Dreams of family and loved ones and warmth that turn into nightmares the instant you wake up.
But what is wonderful and inspiring about Kara is that no matter how distant she is from the light—whether it be by force or as a desperate, misguided act of self-preservation—and despite the complex and painful relationship Kara has with the cosmos;
Still, somehow, she looks up and thinks,
The light, the dark, the poisoned fragments of her planet and the scraps of culture that bleed onto other worlds, the broken families and closest friends, the nightmare prisons and shining towers —it takes power to look at that sky which is mostly black, know that darkness intimately and fear it utterly, and yet find yourself in awe of the light.
The thing about Kara is that she’s an unreliable narrator. She left Krypton at 12. Obviously she’s going to be somewhat biased, and like she herself said when she was talking to Astra as a child-no one would tell her anything. And Kara tends to believe the best in people. Alex was lying to Kara for years about working for the DEO, and she never knew until she was literally brought to the organization’s headquarters. Kara isn’t exactly the hardest person to fool, despite the supersenses, because she always believes the best in the people she loves. And she loves her mother, “the best woman who ever lived” is how she described her when she wasn’t thinking, when it was all instinctive. Alura’s faction is extreme, but like Kara asked to the hologram, “But was she right?” Because Krypton is gone and could Astra have saved it?
But can you imagine, for Astra? Kara might have been asleep all those decades she was in the pod, but Astra wasn’t. I’m not ignoring the fact that Astra deceived them, but I don’t think she was entirely lying to Kara. Astra says that she loves Kara like a daughter, and I’m inclined to believe her.She had very little reason to lie to Kara when she saw her for the last
time on Krypton, thinking that they wouldn’t see each other for a long
time, if ever again– “I couldn’t love a daughter more than if Ra
granted me a child of my own” (and complete side note omg now I want
Kara to talk more about Kryptonian religion thanks).
More than 30 years, she held onto the spy beacon, not knowing what happened to Kara. Not knowing if, just maybe, Alura might have listened to her. Might have thought of some contingency plan and figured out a way to save Kara, at least. She didn’t know if Kara was dead or alive. And still she held on to it, held on to the only thing she had of Kara and she never knew what happened to her niece. When they crashed, I wonder how much she looked for Kara, how many places she searched not knowing anymore what Kara would look like because she didn’t know that Kara got trapped in the Phantom Zone too, looking at people in their 30′s and 40′s and wondering if her niece looked almost the same age as her now, not knowing she should be looking in schools instead. Seeing Superman with the giant symbol of the house of El on his chest and knowing how much Kara would have loved her baby cousin, she looks for any sign of her, she’d never leave the last of her family alone and Kara has the heart of a hero, she’d be trying to save people if she could. Astra doesn’t know that Kara is still a young girl, not yet ready, and year after year it becomes less likely that Kara is alive and it’s been over a decade without results and maybe Alura didn’t get her off planet after all.
Astra probably thought that Kara was dead, and she still kept the spy beacon, she had no reason to anymore but as a reminder of Kara and I’m just emotional because Astra loves Kara and what if Astra is actually the hero, not Alura.
alittlelesspain: Alura in every scene 6/?: Kara has a memory of Alura on Krypton, being late to dinner due to tending to her adjudicator duties. (Episode 1×2)
do you ever think about the billions of Kryptonians who died when Krypton exploded, completely blindsided, never even knowing that this was a possibility. only kara and kal-el getting out in time, astra, a general being sentenced to the phantom zone, where some of the worst criminals in the galaxy are sent since krypton doesn’t have a death penalty, for trying to get the information out there and not complying with the counsel’s orders to be passive, to just let it happen.
Almost no one knew that Krypton was about to die. Hell who knows for how long Kara knew, or if she was even told at all before they sent her in that pod. Kara would have wanted to tell everyone and well–look at what they did to Astra.
Lmao “kryptonians can be arrogant” trust me i think kara learned that
lesson long ago, while she watched everything and everyone she ever
cared about go up in a swirling ball of flames (and if she didn’t know
as a child? she now has alura’s hologram. “why am i the only survivor,
besides kal-el” is something she has definitely wondered)
Kara is someone who watched a world die because politicians decided to play god, to decide exactly what her people could and couldn’t know about their own livelihood. Do you ever think about in that context, Kara wanting to be a reporter–someone who serves the public, someone who reveals secrets powerful people do not want the world to know–and remember that Kara has very different reasons than her cousin for following that career path?
honestly for all 13 years on krypton, kara did not have powers. For clark, his powers are what makes him kryptonian and as we see with myriad, clark thinks of himself as human but with abilities–and when he solar flares he thinks “i’m human for a day.” If he lost his powers permanently, he would think I am now human.
For Kara, her sense of Kryptonian identity does not hinge on the fact that she has special abilities, because for the first half of her life she did not. And would explain why she never feels normal–not only is she on a new planet, an entirely new culture and language and history and religion that she is expected to assimilate to, and thus is not normal for any human–her abilities would make her an anomaly among Kryptonians as well.
Kara is always Kryptonian–this is not about what she can do but who she is, her language and culture and history and beliefs, the way she looks at a problem–like that idea that no one was their own man on Krypton, how she doesn’t want to be the same kind of superhero as her cousin but wants to be an el mayarah superhero–a kryptonian superhero, not the lone solitary human savior that clark likes portray himself as (and the Christian savior that a lot of writers like to portray Clark as but @ them they are frickin space jewish go do research stop doing the whole Christian savior thing bc n o p e but i digress)
When Kara loses her powers she is not “human for a day” but powerless, still Kryptonian,the only one in her life not to be taken over by Myriad’s control without outside intervention. And the fact that so many people forget this– the writers of both season 2 AND fic–and it’s too many
Clark’s secret is that he is Superman, that he is powers–Kara’s secret is not that she has powers, but that she is not human–and considering that James and Winn almost always forget this, forget that she is a survivor of her entire world dying and forget that she has so much anger and grief inside of her, that if she forgets herself just a little she could accidentally break their bones, that she isn’t just “Sunny Danvers,” a constant smile affixed to her face?
(except alex-alex, who saw that transformation, that struggle, that act that kara constantly puts out there, for every nightmare, for years of grief–because when Alex was looking at Kara, after everyone else found out about all of the pain lingering underneath the sunny surface, looking at her after red kryptonite and sporting a broken arm and looking at kara sobbing on the table back at the DEO once it was all over–Alex looked at Kara with sadness and love and understanding but she did not look at her with surprise. She’s known for years that this has existed, the struggle Kara has gone through not to succumb to this, to keep her head above the water and become someone she can look at in the mirror. She knows that this is not who Kara chooses to be but that she could be? Yeah, everyone else (except J’onn, the only other one who can relate) was surprised. Alex wasn’t)
It means that Kara is just as successful as Clark is at hiding.
This is the secret that Kara would share, with Maggie or Cat or Lena–because sure it’s obvious to anyone who has spent a good amount of time with both Kara and Supergirl that they’re the same–same scar between the eyes, same exact gold earrings, same hair color, same height, same bright blue eyes.
Kara’s secret is her grief.
sometimes i wonder, if the reason that Clark abandoned kara was that she was a constant reminder that (as demonstrated with Myriad) he is not simply “a human with powers,” could never be “human for a day” he is Kryptonian. And he didn’t want to think about it–so he gave her away.
Kate's FanCave 