I'm working on a story crossing my Supergirl Returns series with Lois and Clark - basically, Jason Kent / Lane / White / whatever (Superman Returns) accidentally crosses to the L&C dimension, looks for help, and is a bit boggled by Clark looking nothing like his dad; meanwhile Clark remembers Jason Trask and can't believe that he'd have that name.

To make things more complicated, I'm thinking that Jason Kent might turn out to be named for Jason Trask - in the Superman Returns universe he was a Secret Service agent who was killed by Zod while defending the President, and Lois saw the name and thought she'd use it for her son as a tribute.

Plausible? Or would L&C Clark just shrug and immediately get over it? And what about Lois?

For L&C, I would imagine it would be a no-go. Trask was a lunatic who nearly killed Clark, his parents, and their neighbor. It would be very, very hard for them to get past that name. It might even make them suspicious of the "new" Jason- that maybe, wonder if they can trust him at all.

I think "our" L&C would have far more problems with Jason's Clark having behaved so poorly than with Jason's name. If they could accept that Jason's Clark was so different than their Clark, I don't think they'd have too much trouble believing that Jason Trask might be different, as well.

It might also depend on when you are setting the story. I am assuming that it is after L&C are at least engaged.

Sounds like an intriguing tale.

Joy,
Lynn

It's set more or less in the present day, so L&C have their own family.

The hard part is coming up with a new means of dimensional travel. So far in this series I've mostly used magic, but I think this time around it'll be weird science.

I think it'd cause some nose-crinkling, but not much else. I mean, they already know that universes can be different, and it's not like the kid chose his own name. It'd probably just result in a recurring "Seriously?!"

As for a mechanism - there's always Eureka or Luthor or Star Labs messing up things they should know better about. And when all else fails, there are tempocanes.

Ooh, interesting premise. I've written for both universes, and I gotta say I'm excited to see how this plays out.

I agree that Jason's first five years might trip up LnC more than the name, but it's likely that wouldn't come up. Why would Jason have any reason to mention this to them? Unless you wanna get angsty with it (a la Mouse ) maybe have Jason be a little jealous of Clark spending time with his youngest kid? If you had Jason mention something about Trask, I can see the reaction being plausible, but otherwise not sure how boggling it would be.

UNLESS I'm picturing a much older Jason. (Figured he's grown, or at least teenaged.) Is there any chance he's still a young kid? That might change his reactions to his dad looking so different too. Although I could see a scene where he thinks our Clark is an imposter and decides to take him on.

As far as dimensional travel goes, you could always play around with a Flash-verse idea. Maybe Jason just runs so fast he tears a breach into time and jumps to their universe. Maybe our Clark has never run that fast, has to figure it out with him.

Two cents deposited. Looking forward to reading whatever you come up with!

Sorry for the delay replying, I missed that you'd commented.

I've gone with him being born some time in 2000, based on the chronology of Superman Returns, this is set in 2016 so he's 16 and thinking about going public as a superhero once he's 18. To complicate things his girlfriend is along for the ride - Sky Smith (adopted daughter of Sarah Jane Smith - Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures) who is another alien adoptee with electrical powers. Which is fortunate because I've now figured out how they got there, and there may be some opposition in need of zapping...

As you say, his early years are unlikely to come up - the origin of the name will.

Forgot to say, what gave me the idea of Sky as his girlfriend was this picture from 2012, which establishes that she's physically about the same age as Jason (it's actually a bit more complicated than that because she is an artificial being) and at least in this picture is wearing a shirt with an eerily familiar letter:



I'm guessing her hair is like that for electrical reasons, I can't actually remember that scene but it looks like she's been charged up to a few thousand volts by a Van de Graaf generator.

Delightful idea, looking forward to your tale.
I tend to think the canonical Jason Trask had a STD that effected his mental state. So over the top, but of course he turned out to be rightly concerned about an invasion. Season 4 !!

One idea I've seen in a couple of fanfics xover was to ignore the appearance differences. Just assume that all versions of Superman looked the same.

Sorry for the delay replying - I actually have precedent for the same person looking different in different universes in an earlier story; my version of Dick Greyson is a refugee from a comics-based universe, my Batman is the Batman Begins movie version. Dick mentions that in his universe Bruce Wayne is older and has been Batman much longer, and that Superman is also different.

My explanation for this is that there are a lot of universes - Tempus was targeting versions of Clark in very similar universes to the L&C universe, the further apart they are the greater the chance that things will go differently, e.g. Clark's ancestors over several generations were the result of different egg/sperm pairings and looked a bit different by the time Clark was born, the same for Lois.