Originally Posted by
Ascended
The "intelligence" issue is something that causes problems with any character who's from another world, future time period, dimension, whatever. Their origins give them access to stuff that's wildly out of touch with anything resembling the real world, and it becomes a problem when you try to compare those characters to earthly ones like Lex or Holt.
The super science that people like Holt and Lex dig into, that's only cutting edge on earth. On Krypton the same science might've been covered in high school. Karen (and Kara) were given this knowledge as kids while Holt and Lex have to experiment, research, and spend tons of time discovering the same information.
I heard a story once, about a guy from some remote tribe with minimal math knowledge who found a basic algebra text book, and from that beginner's title, invented all manner of new mathematics on his own. If you went back in time a few centuries to his era, you would bring with you all the math that we've invented since then. So who is smarter, the tribesman who created new equations from scratch, or you, who was given even more advanced math at the age of sixteen?
I think the only way to really compare someone like Karen to someone like Lex or Holt (or Palmer, Choi, Morrow, Magnus, Irons, Veritas, etc), it to look at how well they innovate, not what facts they know. Karen might instantly understand one of Holt's new theories because she took "principals of dark matter" in high school, but can she discover or build something totally new? Can she push the boundaries of Kryptonian knowledge the way Holt pushes human knowledge?
Obviously the El's are a very smart family from a crazy smart species, and their intelligence and knowledge doesn't get highlighted enough for my tastes. But it's hard to compare them to earth geniuses in an honest way.