A Look Back on the Little Blue Planet Arc: A Quest Recap and Thematic Breakdown by King Crimson
So this will be the second retroactive look at the arcs in the quest so far. This arc is a lot larger than the previous one starting with the turn 8 results before ending in Interlude: Bloody Hands. I'll be keeping it relatively informal and there is a lot to discuss and go over in regards to the themes and ideas of this arc, some of which have not entirely played out fully. I will also be giving an entire section to talk about Ignition as he was the breakout character for the arc and has set up a lot of stuff in the future.
The arc in question was called (in my head at least) the Little Blue Planet arc because of how it dealt with how huge the world really is. Lex starts dealing with the more bizarre aspects of the universe he is in, starts dealing with international situations and discovers that aliens are a thing. At the same time Lex attempts to establish a legacy for himself that will endure across the globe eternally. This is also the arc that most cleanly develops many of Lex's failings as a person.
The arc opens with Lex recovering from the war with the League of Shadows and attempting to cement Metropolis as fundamentally his. He reaches out to many different organizations and seeks to either twist them to become his allies or coopt them into his own organization. However Lex's own arrogance causes him to overlook certain people as potentially useful. While this trait was present at the Wayne party it is here that his callousness and dismissiveness of some individuals gets him into some trouble.
In this specific case Lex attempts to destroy all criminals with no warning or attempts at negotiation and ends up drawing Intergang's ire for this attempt.
At the same time various other foreign powers (Wayne Enterprises, Batman, Russia etc.) begin to become relevant to Luthor's own ambitions and start to compete with him or cause him problems.
Furthermore he starts to face some problems on the Homefront as Galaxy Communications begins attacking his image and various groups lurk in the dark which Lex doesn't trust.
Lex in response to this begins to start taking means to subvert these groups and establish his own legacy. He picks at weaknesses, undercutting Wayne Enterprises, stealing files from the US government, taking stands in such a way that paint Stagg in a very poor light and more. Most notably he also begins to attempt to enhance his own forces in the attempts along the way. He recruits Mari from Zambesi due to the chaos going on there and actively takes Cassandra under his own wing to maximize the use he can get out of her. He then reforges these disparate pieces into the LexCorp machine.
However the more he learns about what's really out there the more he strives to surpass it. These secrets drive Lex to ever more impressive heights in his quest to ensure he isn't caught off guard by some secret he doesn't know of. He takes multiple steps to bind everyone ever closer to him, begins campaigning for image control more than ever and starts taking a somewhat active role in manipulating perception of him and his company and begins attempting to find his own ways of creating individuals with superpowers to know what is out there.
Lex succeeds in most of these tasks but the paranoia from it drives him to greater and greater heights and we see both the other great flaw of Lex Luthor in this arc and the birth of some of his more supervillainous actions. In this arc Lex does things like hire assassins to kill people repeatedly, conduct human experimentation, cooperate and work with criminals and terrorists and much more in pursuit of ensuring he is secure and his powerbase cannot be threatened by things he doesn't know of. In response to the escalating threats Luthor has also escalated his tactics recruiting far more than he did before these things occurred to swell up his powerbase.
At the same time we see the other major flaw of Lex begin to come into play, his inability to trust anyone not under his control and his need to keep secrets. Lex begins indulging in keeping secrets and lying to everyone nearly constantly in this arc. None of his allies get the full story of what he is doing and even many of his employees have things hidden from them, Pamela's powers being the prime example. This doesn't come into play just yet but early on others begin to clean up the various messes he didn't see coming like the link between Galaxy Communications and Intergang coming to light because of Lois, Ra's killing Intergang's leadership, Tobias Whale pushing out most of their ground forces and Diana and the DEO destroying Woodrue before he could do anything.
When meeting with Ra's Lex continues to show a continued inability to trust anyone he doesn't control and his actions with Nygma turn Batman against him. This will be touched on but it will be important to bring up later.
On the other hand while we see plenty of Lex's failings we also begin to see the best side of Lex as well. His desire to create a lasting legacy causes him to repeatedly do good things and his willingness to defend what he views as his can oftentimes be admirable when extended to others. Lex's relationship with Cassandra embodies this aspect as well but the way Lex consistently treats his employees well serves to emphasize this point as well. Katherine, Pamela, Carol and more all grow under his watch and he builds them up to become better. Furthermore the many outcasts of society (Jinx, Rebecca, Marie, Ivo etc.) all find a home in LexCorp they can belong to and a cause they can work for. The case is made that despite Lex still being manipulative and controlling as all hell he still does good and has indeed formed a sort of pseudo-family amongst those at LexCorp. Even the cruel and the deranged are given outlets towards which they can channel their issues productively and aren't judged too harshly for who they are. Carl, Karl and Nygma are all examples of this coming into play but I think the biggest example of this is the evolution of Ivo over the course of this arc. Ivo in the previous arc has been an utterly nasty and despicable person who fit the standard mold of an evil mad scientist. Over the course of this arc Ivo doesn't lose any of his negative traits but he gains some humanization and his motives and ideals are put in a far more sympathetic light. Essentially LexCorp has bad people in it and does bad things but ultimately twists things around to achieve good ends.
This fundamentally ties into the potential thematic conflict with Superman later on down the line. I've talked a bit about it earlier that I think Lex and Superman's conflict has to deal with the use and abuse of systems (Superman encourages people to rise above it, Lex encourages people to give in and twist the system by any means necessary to achieve what they want. My actual thoughts are more complex than this but I won't rehash it here). The way LexCorp is portrayed here gives weight to Lex's argument as he provides a working model of an environment filled with things being done incorrectly and constant manipulations of every system imaginable achieving good results and generating a net good despite causing some problems and crushing a few innocents along the way.
I'll continue to touch on this a bit more later once I get around to Ignition but I want to shift the context to how Lex chooses to dictate the fight against Intergang for now. Intergang is an opponent who can attack Lex on multiple fronts and can engage in war with him fully and effectively. Unlike Nyssa, Intergang is coming from a position of superior strength and has numerous important secrets of which Lex is unaware of. To deal with this Lex throws every ally he can against Intergang while hoarding secrets and experiments to gain power for himself. He starts investigating magic, working on superhuman formulas anything and everything to get to the top while also hiding information from his allies as he doesn't trust them.
This all comes to a conclusion as the arc closes up. As time goes on, more and more of Lex's lies are outed and his allies cut ties with him, culminating in Markovia where Lex's secret keeping costs him his most powerful ally. Lex then goes on and takes it a step further attempting to kill Whale when he doesn't need to and once again cutting ties with a potential ally and turning them against him due to his mistrust. By the end of the arc, Lex has no allies left that aren't inferior to him in some way and have ties to the very things he wants (control, authority and legitimacy) and even then he still hides information from them, hoping to use them rather than work with them. Lex ultimately concludes at the end of this arc that he cannot have allies who are equals in all ways, only inferiors and groups he can subvert.
So I'm now going to be talking about Ignition. Ignition I believe is the breakout character of this arc and played the largest role in its themes and neatly sets up for the next arc. Ignition is a complete unknown to Lex Luthor and manages to repeatedly come into conflict with him and win more often than not. He is too powerful to be dealt with conventionally and Lex searches for ever more power and security in order to deal with him. Furthermore Ignition's motives and behavior leave Lex unable to predict his actions and thus leave him feeling unsafe. Ignition then goes on to shape the state of the world in a big way and demonstrates just what kind of upheaval a man with massive amounts of power and no real checks to him can do. The fact that the situation he sets up has everyone now racing to ensure that they have the necessary power to deal with things also sets up nicely for what is going to come next.
Ignition hits most of Lex's personal bugbears in this arc and sets up an excellent parallel for Superman later on. After all if Ignition, who was someone Lex could still somewhat handle, managed to do this much damage how much more terrifying could Superman be. The events of this arc also set precedent for groups to be lying or keep secrets. Virtually every major and even most minor ones lie in some way shape or form. The only people who consistently do not lie to Lex are people he controls and since Lex cannot control Superman how could he ever trust him?
On top of all of this Ignition has created a world in which Superman is needed. Fear, mistrust and constant manipulation and secrets have been spread so thoroughly that the idea of a paragon like Superman is more appealing than ever, being something to unite people rather than divide them.
The arc has concluded with Lex victorious but with no one he calls equal and more desperate than ever to gain power and forever cement his legacy. Lex Luthor always had the makings of a supervillain but in this arc it is where he fully tips his hand and shows why he is one and why he would oppose someone like Superman so vehemently.
The main themes of this arc are the importance of legacy, the inability to trust things you do not control and the question of whether you should have faith in the unknown, the isolating and escalating nature of dominance and the costs of bringing it about and it sets up the main philosophical argument between Superman and Lex Luthor.
I hope people enjoyed this analysis. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts and feelings. I condensed a lot of this arc down so I might have missed some nuance in the actual messages portrayed as I wanted to give more of an overview. If there are any questions feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer. I've done most of my analysis on Lex since he is the principle character of this work but there are numerous other characters I could talk about and expand upon and look into their themes and journeys. I won't be doing another one of these for a while as we are still setting up the next big arc right now. I'm very interested in other peoples ideas of themes or where things would end up going.
