Ho Yay / Legion of Super Heroes (2006)

• Brainiac 5 writes an honest to God slashfic with himself as a Purity Sue in the Relationship Sue-ish role, and has himself die gallantly in Superman's arms. In fact, Timber Wolf even lampshades this: [1]. Then when he hears Superman is "back" he practically becomes giddy...then he sees it's not the "real" Superman (it's Supes' clone) and becomes quite pissy shall we say. This is after the Season One episode where Superman found a girlfriend, Lex Luthor's future offspring 'natch, and Brainy practically threw a hissy-fit and was about five seconds from drunk dialing Triplicate Girl to cry about it. Ho Yay doesn't even begin to describe it. It's outright Fanservice.
• In the Recursive Adaptation tie-in comics: Brainiac starts scrapbooking Superman-memories.◊ All for "training purposes" of course—so his lament on the next page about the extinction of 21st-century kitsch like "glitter" and "gluesticks" must be a complete non sequitur. It all got an interesting Shrug of God on What Could Have Been (after the comics were canceled):
  J. Torres: I definitely wanted to explore Brainy's "man crush" on Superman more. I also wanted to add Supergirl into the mix at one point and do some fun stuff with that "love triangle." I don't know if Brainy's love for Superman was of the romantic type, but then again, he has a 12th level intellect and his concept of platonic love versus romantic love is probably more complex than we could understand. I don't think we could accurately define it with our 21st century labels, nor would I necessarily want to in the context of this comic book.
• 12 years after the show ended, the DC Fandome panel for it provided the insight that Brainiac 5's crush was written intentionally:
  "For James, Brandon, or Adam… In the animated show, was it intended to seem like Brainiac 5 had a crush on Clark? Or were there plans to have LGBTQ+ characters on the show?”
  James Tucker (producer of LOSH): “Those are two questions… so yes to the first one, and we hadn’t quite decided on the second one.”
  “So something was there?”
  James: “Well, yeah! But I thought having subtext, that’s the thing, when sometimes the network doesn’t want you to have any subtext in anything you do, so that a person who can watch it can bring their own thing to it. So it was there, but it wasn’t something we wanted to hit over the head or make a hard, fast, you know, statement about. But if someone saw it, it’s valid.”
  Adam Wylie (voice of Brainy): “What I loved about it was that Brainiac 5 clearly not only admired Superman, but there was something even more there. And it was really fond actually, to like a more… not obsession, but just the love that this robot who didn’t have emotion developed for a human, was pretty awesome, actually."

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