#I'd need to do much more research to feel confident attributing anything to Oliva and Chang specifically

[threewaysdivided]

How Different do you think Young Justice Season 3 would have been had Jay Olivia and Michael Chang returned?

[For context, we’re referring to this post where I broke down the major writing/directing credits for each episode of Young Justice Season 1 and found that former Teen Titans 2003 directors Jay Oliva and Michael Chang had handled over 75% of the episodes in Young Justice Season 1 before vanishing from the credits of all later entries, and this post where I summarise how those later entries actively destroyed the arcs, themes and narrative of the original season.]

TBH it’s kind of hard to tell.  I have a few ideas, but like I was saying in that first post, it can be unwise to pedestal one or two members of a creative team when there are so many factors that can impact the final quality of a work.

Here I think it’s important to mention what a director does.  In situations where the director and writer are separate roles, the job of the director is to adapt the script to a visual form – working with the writers/editors to make changes as needed.  Directors direct how scenes are constructed, presented, acted and “shot” – which affords them a great deal of subtle influence over the pacing, focus and framing of a story.  The visual language of film can do a lot to control what information the audience prioritises as important, and how they interpret/perceive it.  Unsurprisingly, when you have bad, fragmented or inconsistent directing, you end up with stories that lack direction.

While Chang and Oliva having such a presence in the direction of Season 1 definitely lent it some of their specific personal creative flavour, I also think a lot of the major benefit came purely from having two people (and likely others who formed part of the S1-specific creative team) who were experienced in working together and had direct input/oversight of more than 75% of the season from start to finish.  That kind of creative cohesion makes it easier to track and maintain the continuity and progression of a narrative.  Compare and contrast with Outsiders, where you have a rotating shift of three less-experienced directors and a huge revolving door of new writers, with no-one working on more than a single episode in a row, the same directors almost never getting paired with the same writer twice, and a general sense that the story was being produced episode-by-episode with very few people having a clear sense of what had come before or would follow after.

One of the challenges is that the declining quality from Season 2 onwards points to something being fundamentally broken in the creative process at DC Comics/ Time Warner productions.  Young Justice Season 3 was the straw that finally broke my trust in Detective Comics Comics but it came on the heels of things like the original Suicide Squad movie (see this Folding Ideas video for an excellent dissection of those production and editing issues) and the transparently marketing-driven disaster that was Batman vs Superman.  It feels rather like modern-day DC is producing the in-house equivalent of shovelware: underinvesting in the timing and budget that its creative teams need for proper writing, editing, revisions and post-production in favour of churning out superficially saleable high-profit-margin products to cash in on recognisable IP’s and existing fandom markets.  Faced with that kind of incentive structure and production-crunch it can be very hard for a single (or handful of) creative team members to make course-corrections.

That isn’t to say that good media can’t be produced under tight conditions, but doing so generally requires a well-thought-out creative plan for the project.  And unfortunately, that kind of plan is something Greg “I don’t write endings” Weisman is notoriously bad at both creating and sticking to.  This was one of the problems I ran into when doing my YJ: Invasion autopsy: while you can correct some of the surface level problems, the root issue lies in a core story that’s bad from base principles and fundamentally incompatible with what came before.  Again, this can be overcome if other production team members are given enough time and creative authority to review and revise that story-core, but that doesn’t seem to be the production environment S2+ was allowed.

With all that said, I think it’s safe to conclude that, under the circumstances, Young Justice: Outsiders was likely always doomed to be a mess.  The combination of a lack (or even discarding) of a clear show-bible to act as a guide, a lack of clear project-plan (or, at least, plan-communication) from the showrunners,and a lack of pre-/post-production time for other team members to figure out what story they were even telling is pretty much a guaranteed recipe for narrative failure.

However, assuming that a pair of Oliva/Chang-like directors had been on the revival team, with input into most of the episodes, I think we might have at least seen some improvements to execution:

Firstly, we may have seen better cohesion and focus.  In the multi-layered onion of bad storytelling decisions that is the later seasons, the outer layer that many people seem to have bounced off is that it’s hard to care about what’s happening.  YJS2+ are boring and badly paced on rewatch, and a not-insubstantial part of that is bloat.  There is a plague of random new characters, exposition and world-details that don’t meaningfully contribute to the narrative (and for the record, I should clarify that ‘narrative purpose’ is a lot more than just ‘plot advancement’ – the problem here is that these elements are actually purposeless to the point of being distracting), scenes and ‘jokes’ that overstay their welcome due to a lack of proper substance, and ‘twists’ that exist for expectation-subverting ‘shock bait’ rather than moving the story. 

At a surface level, the later seasons desperately needed someone to ask: both ‘what is the focal point?’ AND ‘what is the purpose of this moment/scene for the story?’ and actually make Greg Weisman give them a coherent answer beyond ‘just trust me, it’ll be totes smart when you (read: I) figure it out later’.  Like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of fat that could have been trimmed; shallow scenes that could have been reworked to serve characterisation and themeing, ‘references’ that could have had their screen-time reduced to passing easter-eggs, and other wasted time that could have been better allocated to developing a core cast of ‘focus characters’ with an understandable dynamic to help anchor the broader character web in a relational status quo.  Considering what we saw of Season 1’s character-focus, and Oliva and Chang’s previous involvement in Teen Titans 2003 (which was also very good at prioritising, reinforcing and maintaining characterisation/ character dynamics) I think some improvement in story-focus, especially towards characterisation, could have been achievable.

The other gain we could have potentially seen is more sensitivity and tactfulness in the presentation of certain story beats/ characters.  For this I want to highlight framing:  whether something is respectful or offensive comes down less to the inclusion/exclusion of particular elements and more to the way in which those elements are presented to the audience – the priorities, assumptions and worldview revealed by the delivery.   

Let’s do a couple of case studies just to get our heads around the idea:

For Example One, we’re going to make the point by jumping straight in the deep end of sexual assault and fanservice in media feel free to scroll to the next paragraph if this is a no-fly topic for you.  Our contrasting studies will be The Millenium Trilogy (a noir series I’ve previous referenced in contrast to the YJ revival) and the shounen anime Sword Art Online, both of which contain assault and rape scenes.  Millenium’s depictions of assault keep the perspective on the victims, focusing on the pain/ powerlessness/ degradation/ anger they experience during and after the violation, and examining their reluctance/ aversion to reporting these crimes, while maintaining a respectful detachment towards describing the acts themselves.  In contrast SAO contains an infamous scene where an arc villain attempts to rape the female lead, while the camera fixates on the fanservice of her breasts quivering as he tears her shirt off (in addition to a concerning amount of other fanservice scenes where female characters are penetrated, groped or “peeped on” in ways that are clearly nonconsensual and unwelcome).  From this we can conclude that the issue isn’t inherently with sexual assault being present in a story – how it’s framed makes the difference.  The Millenium Trilogy respects the autonomy of its female characters, using assault scenes as an important narrative device to confront the audience with the violence of systemic sexism and condemn the cowardly entitlement it enables as part of its wider critique of misogyny; Sword Art Online degrades, objectifies and disregards the autonomy of its female characters by using narratively unnecessary sexual assault as a vehicle to ‘reward’ its target audience with fanservice.  What matters is how the subject is handled: is the sexual assault of women treated as a serious problem in need of criticism or as a guilty-pleasure ‘treat’ for boys to enjoy?

Moving to a gentler and more home-field example, let’s compare how pregnancy is handled in Young Justice Season 1 vs Outsiders.  It’s easy to overlook in the wake of the brick-to-the-face that was “you got a baby in there!” but Season 1 also included pregnancy as a plot-beat; Queen Mera announcing the news that she is “with child” during the episode Downtime.  However, there’s that difference in framing:  after it’s announced, Downtime quickly moves past the physicality of Mera’s pregnancy to focus on why it’s narratively important - because Mera and Orin are the royals of a hereditary monarchy and their child will be first in line to the throne of Atlantis.  Despite this being her only episode in Season 1, Downtime also gives Mera multiple characterising moments outside of child-bearing; introduced her first as a Queen and teacher/mentor to the students of the Conservatory, and later demonstrating her power as a battle-mage during the Manta-trooper attack – her pregnancy being almost a footnote outside its narrative-relevance.  By contrast, I think the reason that “baby in there” line from Amistad gets memed so heavily is because it highlights Outsiders unnecessary fixation on the physicality of female characters being pregnant, in addition to a disproportionate tendency to depict female characters as married, pregnant or mothering in the absence (or even at the cost) of narratively meaningful plot or character development – reducing these characters to little more than “pregnant sexy lamps” (as @mimeparadox so eloquently put it in their recent review of similar issues with the Gargoyles revival).  Again, the difference is execution: where Season 1 used pregnancy in a character-specific and narratively-relevant way, Outsiders not only assumes but enforces it as the expected path for female characters – sacrificing both characterisation and screentime for a subtler form of fanservice: one that reinforces and validates a specific worldview of gender (and which has been increasingly revealed to lurk beneath the surface of performative ‘feminists’ like Eric Schneiderman and Joss Whedon).

At this point, I think it’s worth noting that Jay Oliva and Michael Chang are both Asian-American men (i.e. less likely to be blinded by privilege a problem that Greg Weisman has always struggled with), that Chang himself was lead director on TT2003’s anti-bigotry episode Troq and that TT2003 on the whole is often praised for its respectful depiction of female characters (and also Victor’s cyborg status).

Given this, I think similar direction could have resulted in more respectful depictions of non-white and disabled characters.  As it exists, the revival at large (and Outsiders in particular) has a HUGE issue with unnecessary and disproportionate violence towards and villainization of characters-of-colour in a way that inadvertently reveals the bias of the creators; shock-value violence towards marginalised characters being treated as more acceptable and less needing of commentary because they clearly weren’t expected to be as relatable or worthy of empathy as the “main” characters.  Different direction could have seen some of the more needless violence removed in favoured of equally-shocking-but-more-narratively-purposeful elements, some of the narratively-justified violence reframed in a way that was more empathetic to the personalities and bodily autonomy of the victimised characters, or - given more time for revision - used to make a critique of in-story bigotry by presenting the disproportionate targeting of marginalised protagonists as being the product of systemically prejudiced antagonists (rather than casually-bigoted producers).

Similarly, I think better direction could helped respect female/femme characters more.  From Season 2 onwards Young Justice has an increasing problem with the male gaze in how it frames and poses women; Outsider’s borderline-fetishistic obsession with depicting late-term pregnancies again being a particularly egregious example.  Many of these scenes either didn’t need to be included (hence the meme-potential of wasting screen time on a toddler explaining how pregnancy works to a mature audience) or could have been made more narratively meaningful by prioritising specific characterisation over generic ring-fingers and pregnant bellies.   This male gaze issue was at its most insulting with Halo; even if different directors couldn’t change the incredibly disrespectful character-design decision to vacuum-seal a nonbinary, hijab-wearing minor inside a boob-socking, ass-grabbing, wasp-waisted super-suit, they could have worked to preserve Halo’s modesty and gender identity with posing and camera choices that minimised the attention drawn to Halo’s sexual features, and presented their body-language and posture in a less-feminising way.  

This likely wouldn’t have fixed the underlying biases baked into Outsiders’ plotlines but I think there was the potential to soften the execution to the point that they could have felt more like a “missed the mark” than the farcical offensiveness that we got.

That said, I don’t think anything could have truly saved this series.

As I said at the start, I think the thing that ultimately doomed Young Justice was the lack of a long-term story vision; the ego and overambition of showrunners trying to build a story that runs on teasing twists, mysteries and future-resolutions while also openly wanting it to go on forever.  Those two elements are fundamentally incompatible if you want a satisfying experience, and without a clear guiding plan you can’t expect the underlying creative team to successfully find a story’s identity during a rushed pre-production.  You can’t provide direction if you don’t know where you’re going.  It would be like trying to invent an entirely new plane and build it as it’s taking off: a crash is inevitable, the only question is the extent of the damage.

At best, I think we could have seen another Invasion-level non-story: a few isolated good character moments bogged down within a season that, while not overtly offensive, was still thematically confused, overstuffed with characters, driven by contrivance and insulting to the intelligence of anyone actually trying to follow the narrative.  A slow zombification, riding out a few extra seasons on plausible deniability, rather than Outsiders’ rapid crash-and-burn seasonal rot into an offensive cash-grab parody of itself.

And, in a way, I’m kind of glad that Oliva, Chang and the other Season-1-only creative team members didn’t come back for that.  Because, even if it would have resulted in a more palatable product, it would have come from forcing a group of marginalised creators to salvage a privileged dude’s mess.

I’ve spent far too many words over the last few years trying to unpick the layers of why Young Justice is such a narrative failure post Season 1 and now I feel like Benoir Blanc.  Because these problems are a glass onion and at their clear centre, Greg Weisman is an idiot.  He’s a demonstrable bigot, who had a publisher back away after he trashed their franchise with misogynistic queerphobia.  He’s a sex-obsessed loser who tried to launch a Not-Safe-For-Work production company writing Gargoyles Parody Porn while wearing an eye-patch and pretending to be a ‘fan collaborator’.  His writing reveals a consistently toxic attitude towards abuse, consent, boundaries and power dynamics.  Based on some of the creepier things he’s said/written, he could be potentially unsafe for certain fans to be around.  And even setting all that aside (and it’s a lot to set aside) he’s just obviously a hack: he claims things that are neither present in or even supported by the text, he promises future developments and fixes/explanations that he rarely if ever delivers, and he uses those holes as a springboard to pitch separate-purchase side-content that also seldom delivers, in a way that suggests he either has no idea what he’s talking about or is intentionally lying to grift his fans.

And, look, this problem is far from exclusive to Weisman: it certainly didn’t start with him, and it’s not even exclusive to the arts.  Across industries we are currently realising that we’ve let privileged guys who can talk a good game coast by on an assumption that they were qualified to hold their positions of influence, even as we held them to far lower standards of scrutiny than we would equivalent people of any other demographic.

Young Justice was never going to survive long-term (any more than the Gargoyles revival is) because the creative load was always resting on that rotten core.  I think we as a fandom were very lucky that Season 1 had both a sincere creative team and the production schedule needed to overcome it and give us something as good as they did.

I wish we could have seen that quality continue. But, at the end of it all, I’ll make peace with the disaster we got.  Because it was at least a somewhat honest reflection of its lead creator, rather than enabling him to keep failing upwards on the back of his colleagues' contributions.

So yeah. Better directors would probably have resulted in better surface-level polish... but you know what they say about polishing turds. No matter how much sugar they added, Outsiders couldn't be turned into a brownie. You'd still be being fed crap.

And frankly, whether it’s his characters, his audience or his co-creators, I’d rather not continue the pattern of letting Weisman shove the burden of dealing with and correcting for his bullshit onto less-privileged people.