Arrowverse: Lena Luthor / Characters

Lena Kieran Luthor

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/spg201a_0042b.jpg

Species: Human (Empowered via Magic)

Portrayed By: Katie McGrath, Camille Marty (child; Season 2), Norah Dobbyn (young; unknown year), Samantha Davis (child; Season 5), Lucy Loken (teen)

Voiced by: Ivette Toriz (Latin-American Spanish dub), Sayaka Kinoshita (Japanese dub)

First Appearance: "The Adventures of Supergirl" (Supergirl 2x1)

Appearances: Supergirl | Invasion!^note(Supergirl) | Crisis on Infinite Earths^note(Supergirl)

"I’m just a woman trying to make a name for herself outside of her family."

The younger half-sister of Lex Luthor, who is now the head of LuthorCorp/L Corp after his incarceration. She bought CatCo in Season 3.

see Titans (2018): Other Characters page for the Earth-9 character who bears her name and background

see Smallville: LuthorCorp for the Earth-167 character who bears her name and background

see Smallville: Earth-2 for the Mirror Universe of the Earth-167 character who bears her name and background

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A-G

Aborted Arc:
- The season 2 episode "Luthors" ended with the implication that Lena was not as innocent as she seemed and was playing both Kara and Supergirl. This was never followed up and the rest of season 2 showed Lena as a 100% good person and all the initial "shady" aspects of her character disappeared. They were reintroduced in later seasons, but as reactions to the events of the series.
- Season 4 saw Lena's experiments result in the death of a test subject. This seemed to start a new direction for Lena's character but the plot was never referenced again save for a brief flashback later in the season. Lena also avoided any legal actions over the death.
- Season 3 started to set Lena up in the path to true villainy. When Andrew Kreisberg was fired, all his plots were shelved including those involving Lena.
- This led to a partial subversion in Season 3. The plot between Lena and Morgan Edge was supposed to last all season and would be tied into Lena's planned descent into villainy. This was shelved because of the Kreisberg firing and that Edge was a sexual predator would be a case of being in poor taste. The show took advantage of Edge's arrest in "Both Sides Now" to write him out of the series (the episode ended with him claiming he would beat the charge).
- Happens again in season 5. Word of God before the season started (from Jessica Quller, Melissa Benoist and Katie McGrath) was that the season would be a fight for Lena's soul, and her and Kara's relationship would be the main plot. Then the show was allowed to keep Jon Cryer on after Crisis on Infinite Earths. This led to Lex becoming the main antagonist while Lena was essentially demoted to his lackey. Other than the 100th episode, she and Kara only had a couple of scenes together post-Crisis before Lena made a Heel–Face Turn due to Lex's actions.invoked
Action Girl: At least, she's not a Neutral Female. She will fight back, even if she's outmatched.
Actor Allusion: In the final series she becomes a powerful magic user, just like her actor's character on Merlin (2008).
Adaptation Dye-Job: She's blonde or redhead in the comics, but on the show she has very dark hair.
Affably Evil: She retains her polite attitude after becoming willing to use the Non Nocere project.
All for Nothing: All the work she did to get Non Nocere working was doomed to failure from the beginning. Naturally, Lex knew this and wanted her to see it by herself, counting on the resulting despair to drive her to embrace his level of villainy.
Alliterative Name: Lena Luthor.
Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: She gives off this demeanor at first, but it doesn't make her a villain.
Anti-Villain: Lena becomes this in Season 5 after finding out Kara's secret in the worse possible way. She doesn't consider herself a true villain and admits that she doesn't want to kill Kara, or anyone else for the matter, but her increasingly morally grey actions to get what she wants and her plan to remove people's ability to hurt each other, means she is no longer a 100% good character, either.
The Atoner: She repeatedly states that one of her goals is to undo some of the damage Lex (and, later, her mother) did to the Luthor name.
- At the end of Season 5, she genuinely regrets what she did out of spite for Kara just for keeping her identity as Supergirl a secret from her.
Benevolent Boss:
- Of L Corp. She is very kind to her employees and takes a hands-on approach in ensuring their productivity and morals remain high.
- Also of CatCo after buying it: When Kara repeatedly blows off work to focus on being Supergirl full-time, Lena immediately picks up that something is wrong and tries to get Kara to tell her what's going on. Though she has no issue dialing up the "Boss" part when Kara refuses to talk about it and insists on focusing on work, pointing out that Kara's behavior is unacceptable for an employee.
- Subverted and also played straight with Eve and Hope in season 5. Lena has no issues in having Eve kidnapped, holding her prisoner and then having Hope body Jack her (possibly killing the real Eves personality in the process) but she also doesn't want Hope to sacrifice herself to launch non nonchere.
Berserk Button: Being disagreed with, criticized, or deceived in any way. She's broken up with James and permanently ended her friendship with Supergirl due to the first two, and given that she sees being lied to as unforgivable, it's a safe bet that however she plans to punish Kara and company for keeping Kara's Secret Identity as Supergirl from her will be very unpleasant.
- In Season 5, anyone calling Lena evil or a villain will lead to her acting in anger. She is so totally obviously evil that she actually believes she is the good guy and Supergirl and friends are the enemy.
Big Bad Ensemble: For Supergirl Season 5, together with Leviathan. Leviathan is a Nebulous Evil Organisation, while Lena wants to force peace on the world, becoming increasingly unhinged, even agreeing to work together with her recently revived brother.
Big Brother Worship: Before Lex went all crazed evil overlord, Lena admits she loved and admired him.
Black-and-White Insanity: In Lena's eyes, you are either truly good or irredeemably bad, no middle ground. Even if someone she considers good uses less than squeaky clean methods, she will find the intentions justified. However, if anyone dares to lie to Lena or betray her trust, there will be little-to-no chance of Rebuilt Pedestal for the transgressor in question.
Brainwashing for the Greater Good: After being continuously lied to and manipulated by the people she cares about, this becomes her goal during Season 5; to use various relics and technology to create a signal that can permanently remove peoples capacity to hurt one another (in any sense). So far, she has used it on Eve and Malefic. Her attempts at using it post-Crisis prove much more difficult, with a number of bugs cropping up in the process, culminating in the revelation that long-term, it can't work, a realisation that helps push Lena to a Heel–Face Turn.
Brainy Brunette: Raven-haired and the head of LuthorCorp. And, in one episode, she teams up with Winn to save the day.
Breakout Character: While the character was originally planned as a regular, the show couldn't find a suitable actress. The character was downgraded to a guest role and Katie McGrath was cast for 3 episodes. She was an instant hit and kept getting asked back. She was made a regular and initial plans to have Lena as a season long character were extended. McGrath's performance, along with her existing fan base and copious amounts of Les Yay with Kara pretty much assured this.
Broken Ace: She's the CEO of a large successful business who's able to develop technological advances beyond what most of humanity can conceive. But an abusive family, several painful betrayals, and the world's judgment of her based on her last name has left her full of self-hatred. It first comes out prominently in "Damage", when Lena drunkenly reveals that deep down, she believes all the bad things people have said about her.
Broken Pedestal: Lena ends up losing her faith in Supergirl in Season 3 after James reveals to her that she had told him to break into her private vault to see if she had any more Kryptonite. She tells Kara at the end of the episode (who she still doesn't know is Supergirl) that she could never trust the Girl of Steel again. In the following episode, she also makes it clear to Supergirl that she no longer considers the two of them friends. Sadly, the pedestal is completely broken when she finds out from a dying Lex at the end of Season 4 that Kara and Supergirl are one in the same, completely losing faith in her and their friends. She makes it clear in the Season 5 premiere that she can never forgive Kara for what she has done and is only pretending to forgive her to manipulate their former friendship to get what she wants.
Byronic Hero: Lena is very beautiful, highly intelligent, and easily one of the show's most capable characters. She's also prideful, self-hating, and self-sabotaging, and has bad habits of hypocrisy, going it alone, judging people harshly, and failing to take criticism. At heart, she's a good person and doesn't want to be judged for her villainous family, but her flaws make living up to the person she wants to be an uphill battle.
Can't Take Criticism: If Lena has a fault, it's she doesn't take criticism of her inventions or research well; they have benevolent intentions, but her friends always point out how they can be used negatively (Supergirl doesn't take kindly to Lena creating synthetic Kryptonite or other anti-Kryptonian measures). And her friends don't approve of her idea to give humans powers since there are so many ways it could go wrong. She actually goes so far as to break up with James when he tells that he thinks she shouldn't share her research with the government since using it for military purposes will undoubtedly cause chaos.
The Chessmaster: She's very intelligent, best shown by her ability to repeatedly manipulate Lillian (herself no slouch in the brains department) to get information or thwart her plans. Highlighted in Season 4 where she first appears playing chess with Lillian in prison.
Consummate Liar: She is able to completely deceive Supergirl's trust despite it being highlighted that Kara's powers make her a Living Lie Detector.
Daddy's Girl: According to Lillian, Lena was her father's favorite child.
Deuteragonist: In season 5. Aside from Kara, obviously, she may be the most important character throughout it. Her pre-Crisis arc of feeling betrayed by Kara culminates in using J'onn's estranged brother to power Non Nochere, while her post-Crisis arc of succeeding where she previously failed results in her teaming up with her brother to fight Supergirl and Leviathan. It all ends with her coming to realize her plan is doomed to failure, that she was on her way to becoming the villain herself, and she was just as much in the wrong as she accused Kara of being.
Dirty Coward: When Kara and Malefic thwart her plan to brainwash the world, Lena gets Eve/Hope to pretend that she (Lena) was being forced into the act, to avoid arrest by the FBI. This also includes shades of her being The Chessmaster, as she was seemingly prepared for this outcome.
Disc-One Final Boss: Is gradually sidelined by Lex in Season 5, before having a Heel Realization in the penultimate episode.
Disproportionate Retribution: As Kara points out at the end of Season 5, Lena used the one mistake she made (of keeping her identity as Supergirl from her) as an excuse to deliberately hurt Kara at every possible chance as payback.
Easily Forgiven: Averted. While Lena's Heel–Face Turn at the end of Season 5 is genuine, Kara has a hard time moving past Lena's abuses of her trust, which went far beyond Kara's own deceptions, although she is willing to at least try to forgive her.
Even Evil Has Standards: Despite hating Kara, Lena (knowing what it is like to lose a parent) visits Kara to offer condolences after Jeremiah's death and gives her a book on dealing with grief. Both the episode and offscreen interviews confirm that Lena was being sincere.
Fake Defector: She pretends to side with Lillian in "Medusa", giving her the rare isotope needed to disperse the titular virus over National City. But it is later revealed that she sabotaged the isotope, making it useless, and calls the police on her mother.
False Friend: In Season 5 she pretends to be forgiving of Kara just to get revenge at her. She later does the same to Andrea. By the end of the season, both become much more genuine.
Family Relationship Switcheroo: Initially, she believed she was simply adopted by the Luthors after her biological mother died. As it turns out, she was the product of an affair between her mother and Lionel, so Lex is biologically her half-brother and Lillian is the only Luthor she's not related to by blood.
Fatal Flaw:
- Pride. As good-natured as she is, Lena has a bad habit of assuming that she's always right and cannot abide disagreement, leading to the dissolving of her friendship with Supergirl and the end of her relationship with James. She also places her own judgment above anyone else's, lacking trust in those who would otherwise be friends and allies, and placing too much responsibility on herself, causing unnecessary emotional strain.
- Self-loathing. Because of her family and the circumstances of her mother's death, Lena has very low self-esteem, which has been exploited by the likes of Lillian, Rhea, and Lex to manipulate her. It also fuels her personal issues, tendency to act alone, and her difficulty in maintaining friendships and relationships.
Friendless Background: Strongly implied to have one due to her family's bad reputation and her comments about always being alone on holidays. Somewhat subverted in later seasons with the introduction of Samantha, Ruby, and her old school friend Andrea Rojas (although they did have a falling-out which led to Lena's massive trust issues), the former two being close enough to Lena for Ruby to consider her an honorary aunt.
Gadgeteer Genius: Can hot-wire and invent high-tech equipment on the fly at speeds rivaling Winn's.
A God Am I: While she doesn't express the specific sentiment, Lena's Harun-El experiments and Non Nocere project show that, if she feels she's in the right to do so, she has no problem with playing God, even feeling right in trying to change human nature itself.
Good All Along: Given that her surname is Luthor and her mother is as crazy as her brother, the series spends a lot of the first half of Season 2 teasing that Lena might be a villain, complete with an apparent Face–Heel Turn that ends up being a Batman Gambit on her part. By the second half of Season 2, it's firmly established that she's not only a good guy, but well on the way to becoming Kara's best friend.
- Subverted in Season 5. After killing Lex and learning that Kara and nearly every friend she has lied to her about Kara's Secret Identity, she becomes resentful and bitter. Shelving plans to out Kara to the world, she instead manipulates Kara to help with her plan to brainwash the world and forcibly overwrites Eve's personality with that of Hope to give her human form. Although her plans have been stalled for now, she has allowed Hope to take the fall for her, shows zero remorse for basically killing Eve, and still hates Kara. Ironically, she still views herself as the good guy. This is ultimately Double Subverted by the end of the season once Lena realizes that her Non Nocere experiment can't work long term when it starts killing her test subjects and Lex reveals that he wants to use her technology to control the world. After realizing just how badly she screwed up Lena turns on Lex and goes back to Kara helping her take down Leviathan and her brother showing that, while she made a major mistake and was misguided, she certainly isn't evil.
Good Is Not Soft: She may have initially been on the heroes' side, but even then still doesn't hesitate to gun down the man who tried to kill her, which would have killed him if Cadmus hadn't gotten to him. In Season 3, she engages in a brief debate over gun ownership and states flatly that she has used a gun in self-defense. In a later episode, she doesn't hesitate to help Supergirl by attempting hand-to-hand combat with someone who makes a Badass Boast of being a black belt (and holding her own).
- When confronting Morgan Edge over endangering the lives of children just to frame her and her lead bomb, she holds a gun on him and express her belief that anyone so vile deserves to die.
- Later, when she learns that Edge is going to be murdered by her mother, she later realizes that just because she has the same ability as her brother and mother when it comes to being The Chessmaster doesn't mean she has to do it the same way. So she does arrange to save Edge's life but uses the attempt to get a confession out of him.

H-P

Happily Adopted: Zigzagged. She did love and was loved by Lionel and Lex growing up, but craved approval and affection from Lillian. Plus, it turns out that she's Lionel's biological daughter from another woman. It transpires that Lillian does love Lena, though being an Evil Matriarch she's not that great at showing it.
Heel–Face Revolving Door: While a good character in seasons 2 to 4, she did some questionable things such as stealing the Harun-El, secretly trying to create metahumans, secretly working with Lex and causing the death of a volunteer. She was forgiven by Kara each time. In season 5, the show still is unsure whether she is a villain and has her doing unquestionably evil things like basically killing Eve, manipulating Kara, later poisoning Kara with Kryptonite, and trying to brainwash the world, but she also helps evacuate Earth-38 in the Crisis. The 100th episode seems to indicate that the show will soon decide which side of the door Lena will occupy. By the Season 5 finale, she's firmly settled as one of the good guys.
Heel–Face Turn: The Season 5 finale places her firmly back on the side of right, if not quite Kara's good graces, ending with them vowing to take down Lex together. Season 6's opener cements it with her effectively becoming a member of the Superfriends.
Heel Realization: It takes until the end of Season 5 to finally settle in, when she realizes that Lex has been playing her the whole time for his own benefit.
Heroic Bastard: She is the illegitimate biological daughter of Lionel Luthor and his long-time mistress, while at the same time being the most upright member of the family.
His Own Worst Enemy: Lena often bemoans her lack of friends due to her familial reputation, but as the series goes on, it's shown that she has a habit of inadvertently driving people who are closest to her away when it comes to disagreements over her work. Her deterioration of her friendship with Supergirl over the issue of her keeping Kryptonite and anti-Kryptonian technology; her very blunt refusal to even try to rebuild her friendship with Supergirl, and her (second) break-up with James for his heinous crime of daring to tell her that he thought sharing her human augmentation research with the government for military use would be a bad idea are primes examples of this. In the latter case, Lena recognizes this.
Hot Witch: After learning that her mother was a witch and Lena inherited her magical talents.
Hypocrite:
- Lena can't abide being lied to, but is prepared to keep secrets and lie to those close to her if she thinks it's necessary. When she is angry about Kara hiding her identity as Supergirl, she is willing to maliciously deceive Kara and Andrea to pretend friendship to further her own goals, despite bitterly condemning both women for supposedly doing the same to her.
- When setting out on her Harun-El experiments, Lena maintains that she doesn't want power to solely be in the hands of those who thinks it makes them morally superior. She herself, of course, feels fine choosing who should be empowered because she's "a very smart woman".
- "I'm not a villain. You shouldn't have treated me like one." Said by Lena to Supergirl after conning her way into the Fortress of Solitude, turning the Fortress' defenses against Kara, and stealing Myriad, a mass-brainwashing device. She seemed blind to the irony.
I Am Not My Father: If there were any questions about Lena's morals, they were answered when she foiled her mother's plan to kill all aliens with a virus. She has come close to uttering a variant of the trope ("I am not my brother") on many occasions.
- Subverted in season 5, when she starts acting like Lex in doing villainous acts while genuinely believing that she is the good guy. Double Subverted by the season's end, however; unlike Lex, Lena has a definite conscience and the self-awareness to realize when she's gone too far, as well as a genuine sense of altruism that, far from Lex's narcissistic lust for power, lets her turn away from a villainous path and throw in with the heroes again.
Iconic Sequel Character: Doesn't appear in the show until its second season (and in the Arrowverse until the fifth year).
I Lied: After retrieving Malefic, she promises him to help him overcome his mental blocks to kill J'onn in return for his cooperation. Instead, she brainwashes him with his own powers afterwards.
Irony: Despite being a woman of science and technology thanks to growing up as a Luthor, it's revealed in the shows final season that Lena's birth mother Elizabeth Walsh was a witch and that Lena inherited her magic potential.
It's All My Fault: After many children of National City begin to show signs similar to lead poisoning, Lena doesn't deny or reflect blame that her lead bomb that was used to repel the Daxamites could be the catalyst. Devastated, she offers a sincere and gripping apology to the public and almost steps down from L Corp and CatCo.
Jumping Off the Slippery Slope:
- In "Battles Lost and Won", she lies to Supergirl about giving Alura all of the Harun-El. In reality, she secretly kept some of it to experiment on.
- In the Season 4 finale, she point-blank murders Lex to keep the world safe...or, at least, that's how she tries justifying it to Lex. Then Lex turns the tables on her by using his last minutes alive to reveal that Kara is Supergirl and she and the rest of her friends have kept Lena in the dark about it for years.
- Taken to its logical extreme in Season 5. Fed up with being lied to by people closest to her and human cruelty in general, she plans to forcefully brainwash humanity as a whole into a peaceful state, being willing to experiment on a prisoner and even threatening the life of her former best friend's lover to get what she wants!
Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman: Subverted in season 2 and the first half of season 3, where Lena becomes Kara's best friend while being both friendly with and admiring Supergirl.
- Invoked in the latter part of Season 3 when Kara/Supergirl finds out that Lena has kryptonite and reacts badly as Supergirl. Kara and Lena are still best friends, but Lena no longer considers Supergirl a friend and is at times openly hostile to her.
- Lena does come to see Supergirl more favourably over the course of season 4 until Lex reveals the truth to her. From this point onwards, Lena hates Kara in both her identities.
Mad Scientist: Shows some signs of this in Seasons 4 and 5, experimenting on humans with Harun-El and trying to use technology to strip aggression and negativity from human nature.
Morality Pet: For her brother, according to Word of God, something that's also been the case in the comics. It's subverted when he hires an assassin to kill her.invoked
Moral Myopia: She hates that people lie and keep things from her, regardless of the reason. Never mind she's done the same because she had "good intentions". It gets even worse in Season 5, where, seeing herself as the wounded party and the good guy, she abuses Kara's trust to a far greater extent than Kara ever did to her, reacts angrily at any attempt by the heroes to disrupt her plans (which she refuses to explain, expecting people she doesn't trust to take it on faith that she's not a villain), and refusing to drop her grudge against the heroes even if they're working together.
My God, What Have I Done?: After Lena realizes that humanity can't be 'programmed' by her Q-Wave project, she finally acknowledges that, regardless of her good intentions, she has become the villain she always refused to be.
Never My Fault: An unfortunate tendency of Lena's that plays into her self-destructive tendencies: she refuses to accept blame when her own actions affect her relationships, blaming the other person for lacking trust in her when she either won't trust them or proves herself untrustworthy. To her credit, unlike Lex, Lena does have the self-awareness to eventually realize when she's wrong, showing a willingness to be the bigger person and seek forgiveness.
- Likewise, at the end of season 5, Kara calls her out on blaming all her immoral actions on Kara not telling her she was Supergirl when most of what she did that season had absolutely nothing to do with Kara. Lena comes to this realization herself during this rant and apologizes.
Nice Girl: While she does have a number of negative qualities, Lena is friendly, altruistic, and affectionate, especially to people she becomes close to, like Kara and Sam.
The Not-Love Interest: To Kara. With her relationships with James and William never really getting off the ground and her one with Mon-El not winning over the fans, it was her friendship with Lena that seemed to be the main emotional driving force behind the show.
Not So Similar: While she and Lex aren't that different, in "The Missing Link", when Lex tries to use the failure of Lena's Q-Wave project as proof that taking over the world is the only 'sane' response, Lena refuses to be like him.
Non-Idle Rich: Instead of loafing about like a stereotypical heiress, she uses the vast Luthor fortune to fund many charities and philanthropy to make her family a force of good in the world. Even Rhea openly admires her dedication to "the little people."
Obliviously Evil: Lena's "non nocere" plan in Season 5 amounts to mass-brainwashing, but she is in deep denial about why such a plan puts her in the wrong. She treats Supergirl and Alex as treacherous villains for trying to stop her, and when her plans are thwarted in the mid-season finale, she dejectedly notes that "sometimes, the good guys lose".
Odd Friendship:
- She forms one with both Kara Danvers and Supergirl. She even brings up how people wouldn't believe "a Super and a Luthor working together" in "Crossfire".
- She is also friendly with Winn who, to her, is just a random tech geek, though they are nowhere near as close as she is with Kara, notwithstanding a bit of Ship Tease during one of her first appearances where they join forces to help save the day.
Only Friend: Increasingly views Kara (not Supergirl) as this. Later begins to see Samantha this way, too.
Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Katie McGrath is a good actress, but an awful Fake American. Possibly justified; we don't know if her biological mother was American, Irish, or a different nationality (Lex mentions Lena's biological mother once sang an Irish song to him when he was upset, but does not confirm that she was Irish).
- In the final season, we learn that her biological mother grew up in Newfoundland, an area of Canada that was heavily settled by Irish emmigrants and still carries the Irish accent used by those settlers.
Once Done, Never Forgotten: Post-Crisis, Lex rarely passes up a snide remark about her killing him.
Out of Focus:
- Lena was a major part of the first 5 episodes of season 2. She disappeared from the show save for 3 spaced out episodes before becoming a regular in the 18th episode. (This was partially a case of RealLifeWritesThePlot as Katie McGrath was a regular on Frontier (2016) at the time and she could only film Supergirl when not filming on Frontier).
- Again in Season 5. The Kara and Lena story was the main plot of the first half of Season 5 (and Word of God said season 5 would be nearly all about Kara and Lena's relationship). After the reboot following Crisis on Infinite Earths, the show was given permission to continue using Lex as a character. The show then dumped the plan for the season-long conflict between Lena and Kara and Lex became the main villain. This meant that the show had no plan for Lena, so she simply restarts her plan for Project Non Nocere. This meant that other than the 100th episode, Lena spends her now reduced screentime stuck in a lab or conning Andrea. She barely appears and no longer has scenes with the cast she has worked with for 3 and a half seasons.
Pair the Spares: Pretty much the only reason Lena and James began a relationship. No onscreen explanation was given for them getting together and very little build up was given.
Pride: Despite her self-worth issues, Lena is a deeply prideful person, fully aware of her own intellect and capabilities, but having a hard time accepting the notion that she can be wrong and taking any slights personally.
Promotion to Opening Titles: Starting in Season 3.

Q-Z

Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Lena has very dark hair, which greatly contrasts with her pale skin.
"Reason You Suck" Speech: After first rebuffing Lena's attempts to clear the tension between them and focus on the bigger problem posed by Leviathan, Kara finally lets Lena have it for how she's acted throughout all of Season 5 up to this point.
Lena: Please Kara, I'm sorry. Okay, I truly believed what I was doing was helping people.
Kara: I told you I don't want to talk about the past.
Lena: Oh, come on, you can scream at me if you like. I know I deserve it. I know now that working with Non Nocere was a mistake. That working with Lex was a mistake.
Kara: This isn't about Lex! This is about J'onn and Alex and all the other people that could've been killed today because they are on my team. Don't you understand that?
Lena: No, I do. Of course I do.
Kara: No you don't. You have never understood what it means to share a secret identity with someone. How much danger that puts them in. You never even understood that I kept my identity from you because I wanted to protect you! And I know, I know that I hurt you by waiting so long to tell my truth, but what about all the ways you hurt me? You pretended to be my friend for weeks just so you could manipulate me. You stole from me. You convinced me to steal for you. And then, then you even, you used Kryptonite on me. I made one mistake, one mistake that was only ever meant to protect you, and in return, all you did was hurt me in every way imaginable.
Lena: I'm sorry.
Kara: I know you are. But if you came to me looking for absolution, I can't give it to you.
Rebuilt Pedestal: After spending all season being bitter towards Kara for keeping her secret, she later comes to realize it was only to protect her and not done for any malicious purposes. This combined with her Heel Realization allows her to forgive Supergirl.
Redeeming Replacement: She succeeded her notoriously evil brother as head of their family's company.
Redemption Rejection:
- Once Kara discovers the truth about Lena she spends most of 5x08 trying to reason with her and bring her back from the darkness, while Alex and the DEO take the pragmatic approach which includes lethal force. Lena rejects all of Kara's genuine attempts at apologising.
- Following the crisis reboot, Lena retains her memories and Kara tries to make amends with her again. Lena is implied to consider doing so but Lillian convinces her otherwise and Lena starts work on her brainwashing plan again.
- The 100th episode ended with a final plea by Kara for Lena to stop her plans or she (Kara) would have no choice but to treat as a villain. Lena promptly ignored her and continued to work with Lex. She even went as far as to dismiss Kara's threat as her (Kara) not understanding Lena's goal.
- Finally averted at the end of Season 5; after realizing the folly of her plans and the extent of Lex's manipulations, Lena turns away from her villainous path and goes straight to Kara to help fight Leviathan and beg for forgiveness.
Redemption Quest:
- She is working hard to restore her family's reputation and reinvent their corporation after her brother's shenanigans. Her first step is renaming the company "L-Corp."
- After having her Heel Realization and realizing how far she fell during Season Five Lena is working to redeem herself, both in the eyes of her friends and herself.
The Reveal:
- The Cadmus Lead Scientist is revealed to be her (step)mother.
- She herself is revealed to be an illegitimate child of Lionel, making her a biological Luthor after all.
The Rich Have White Stuff: Lena's entire office, right down to the knick-knacks barely in shot.
Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: She's one of the few people outside of the Paragons that naturally remembers the Pre-Crisis universe, due to Lex making a deal with the Monitor to keep her intact should the Multiverse be destroyed.
Secret Legacy: It's revealed in the shows final season that Lena's birth mother Elizabeth Walsh was a witch and that Lena has the potential to harness and use magic herself.
Science Wizard: She is an expert in nanotechnology and has magic potential due to her mother being a witch.
Sibling Yin-Yang: The evil Lex Luthor's more benevolent sister. Even when they're both villains, Lena is, by any measure, a better person than Lex, lacking his narcissism and xenophobia.
Sins of Our Fathers: She and her family receive backlash from Lex's actions, including from some of the main characters.
Smart People Play Chess: Which makes her loyalties really suspect, even though she's definitely not on her stepmother's side.
Young Lena: [beating a young Lex] I like this game.
Lillian: You are a Luthor.
Strong Family Resemblance:
- Flashbacks to her childhood in "Luthors" show that Lena and Lex looked a lot alike. Lillian admits that Lena also greatly resembles her birth mother (which was one of the major factors for her cold treatment of Lena).
- Season 5 confirms that Lena is the spitting image of her mother (Katie McGrath plays Lena's mother in a VR flashback).
Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
- Although she is a unique character in her own right, Lena is also in many ways a female version of Maxwell Lord, who disappeared without explanation between the first two seasons.
- Serves as this, and a Foil, to Lucy Lane (who also disappeared post-Season 1). They're both genius-level brunettes who don't suffer fools or criticism gladly, and have a fairly strong, if somewhat strained, working relationship with the DEO; both have parents who see Supergirl as a threat; neither woman is thrilled with being kept in the dark about their allies' secret identities; and they both date James Olsen. However, while Lucy doesn't initially trust Supergirl only to do so later and never fully respects Kara Danvers (due to seeing her as competition for James), Lena becomes fast friends with Supergirl, only to later suffer a falling-out over an issue of trust, and gradually but surely warms up to Kara to the point of seeing Kara as her Only Friend. Furthermore, Lucy's sister loves Superman, while Lena's brother absolutely loathes the Man of Steel. Perhaps most significantly plot-wise, Lucy quickly forgives J'onn and Kara for keeping their alien identities hidden from her, while Lena shows no signs of doing so anytime soon.
That Man Is Dead: An interesting variation in Season 5. From the moment she reveals her duplicity to Kara in 507, Lena only refers to her as Supergirl, either when talking to her or mentioning her to other characters. The implication is that Lena feels Kara Danvers was never real and is now dead to her and Supergirl was always her true identity.
This Is Unforgivable!:
- Lex revealing to her not only that Kara is Supergirl, but that all of her friends, including James, knew it and didn't tell her, shatters her to the core. It remains to be seen what exactly the consequences will be, but going by her crushing a picture with herself, Kara, and Alex on it, it seems to be a safe bet that their friendship is over.
  - And for a time it is. In fact, it gets so bad that Lena winds up on the receiving end of this trope by the time she finally realizes what a bitch she is letting herself become. See the "Reason You Suck" Speech entry above for details if you don't feel like binging Season 5.
- She is disgusted that Andrea Rojas hid the Acrata medallion from her, even when Andrea reveals that she wanted to save her father and her boyfriend with it.
Token Good Teammate: To the Luthor family since her half-brother and stepmother are both Card Carrying Villains, while her father was Ambiguously Evil.
The Unfavorite: Lillian always favored Lex and barely tolerated Lena, a fact that Lena is well-aware of and Lillian openly acknowledges this to be true, though according to Lillian, Lena was Lionel's favorite.
Unwitting Pawn: She agreed to work with Lex to get her Non Nocere running, unaware that Lex knew from the beginning that it was doomed to fail no matter what she tried, since he was still pushing his world domination agenda.
Thou Shalt Not Kill: Even with her decaying morals in season 5, she doesn't want to kill. She struggled to deactivate the Kryptonite cannons when they were attempting to fire at Supergirl. Subverted in earlier seasons, as she fatally shot Corben to save Alex, point blank murdered Lex and was responsible for the death of a volunteer when her experiments went wrong.
Villainous Lineage: Initially defied. Despite heavy teasing early on that she would be as evil as her brother, she's been adamantly against Lex's criminal activities from the start and a staunch ally to Supergirl who works hard to redeem the company's good name.
- Sadly, she comes close to this come Season 5, where she's gaining an desire to get revenge on Supergirl for her perceived betrayal, not unlike Lex's own beef with Superman.
We Used to Be Friends:
- She no longer considers Supergirl her friend after she asked James to break into her lab to see if she had any more Kryptonite. Supergirl wants to be still friends, but Lena point-blank refuses.
- Lena and Andrea were once very close friends. Once she finds out that Andrea lied to her about the Acrata amulet, she was deeply hurt by this betrayal and ended their friendship.
- After Lex revealed to her Kara's secret identity as Supergirl and that everyone she considered a friend was in on it, she decided that friends weren't worth it and turned on everyone she knew.
- She gets better by the Season 5 finale.
"Well Done, Daughter!" Gal: Lena has tried her whole life to please Lillian, but there are lines she won't cross.
Well-Intentioned Extremist: In Season 4, Lena starts experimenting with Harun-El in the hopes of enhancing humans to put them on a level playing field with aliens, believing that this will be the solution to the anti-alien bigotry perpetrated by the Children of Liberty. Along the way, she performs human testing, aligns herself with the morally shady Colonel Haley, and even works with her evil half-brother Lex. Through it all, however, Lena tries her best to maintain the highest moral standards possible and her intentions remain noble. She gets more extreme in Season 5; spurred on by what she sees as Kara's betrayal, she hijacks Eve's body to serve as a vessel for her new AI assistant Hope, and begins drawing up plans to mind-control all of humanity to stop violence and bring peace to the world. This is one of the biggest differences between Lena and Lex, whose supposedly well-meaning crimes are ultimately never meant to benefit anyone but Lex himself.
White Sheep: Her half-brother is Lex Luthor. Her mother is the head of Cadmus. (As for Daddy, we don't get to know this version of Lionel.) Morals must not run in the Luthor family. But she is benevolent enough to count Kara as her Only Friend.
You Are in Command Now: Takes over LuthorCorp after Lex is put in jail, striving to make it a force for good and rebranding it "L Corp" in an attempt to distance it from the stigma surrounding her family's name.
Younger Than They Look: While she doesn't look old by any means, she doesn't look like she was born in 1993 either (as per the second season episode "Luthors"). However, a fifth season episode partially set in 2004 shows Lena being aged between 15 and 17. This would give a birth date of between 1987 and 1989.^note

Characters / Arrowverse: Lena Luthor

Lena Kieran Luthor

Species: Human (Empowered via Magic)

Portrayed By: Katie McGrath, Camille Marty (child; Season 2), Norah Dobbyn (young; unknown year), Samantha Davis (child; Season 5), Lucy Loken (teen)

Voiced by: Ivette Toriz (Latin-American Spanish dub), Sayaka Kinoshita (Japanese dub)

First Appearance: "The Adventures of Supergirl" (Supergirl 2x1)

Appearances: Supergirl | Invasion!^note(Supergirl) | Crisis on Infinite Earths^note(Supergirl)

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Characters / Arrowverse: Lena Luthor

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Lena Kieran Luthor

Species: Human (Empowered via Magic)

Portrayed By: Katie McGrath, Camille Marty (child; Season 2), Norah Dobbyn (young; unknown year), Samantha Davis (child; Season 5), Lucy Loken (teen)

Voiced by: Ivette Toriz (Latin-American Spanish dub), Sayaka Kinoshita (Japanese dub)

First Appearance: "The Adventures of Supergirl" (Supergirl 2x1)

Appearances: Supergirl | Invasion!note (Supergirl) | Crisis on Infinite Earthsnote (Supergirl)

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Appearances: Supergirl | Invasion!^note(Supergirl) | Crisis on Infinite Earths^note(Supergirl)