#I'm done dwelling on and being mad about disingenuous condescending lazy writers and their disingenuous condescending lazy choices

[threewaysdivided]

Leaving Canon Behind

If you’ve seen this post and this post and this post you probably saw this coming:

I’m officially unmooring Young Justice: Deathly Weapons from canon beyond Season 1.

I used to have some patience for Season 2.  I like a few of the new characters and, while a lot were frustratingly underexecuted and wasted their potential, I did think some of the ongoing character developments could be interesting.

But the more I think about it - especially with the context from Outsiders - the more unhappy it makes me.  I’ve though about how you might fill in the seasons, what would have to happen to get them to that point and reconcile the character inconsistencies, and it just feels so depressing.

Season 1 gave us a team of teenagers who wanted to prove something and did.  They made mistakes and butted heads, had insecurities and kept secrets but ultimately they learned to trust each other and communicate, and found a place where they could be accepted for who they were and genuinely make a difference.

But then the timeskip happens and when we come back, they barely feel like friends anymore.  They haven’t learned from the lessons of past seasons, they rarely communicate before it escalates to a fight, they don’t trust each other even when they have no reason not to, they rarely spend time together and the new characters have such little development, screen-time and chemistry with the old cast that it doesn’t feel like they’ve forged any genuine relationships, let alone ones strong enough to replace the bonds they’ve lost.  (Tim Drake is Robin because he’s Tim Drake in the comics and no time is given to his character or relationship with Dick beyond that - and the same for Jason, Babs, Cassie, Steph, Raquel and 90% of the newer cast who you’ll only understand or care about if you already care about them from somewhere else).  Somewhere along the way they all just drifted apart, went through so many terrible things that they broke, forgot themselves, forgot their friendships, forgot what they’d learned, and instead of healing or growing or coming together they came back so much lonelier and unhealthier and unhappier as people.

And then Outsiders makes it all the worse.  They again haven’t learned the lessons of the mole plot, none of them meaningfully communicate outside of arguments, Conner and M’gann never properly resolve their relationship-breaking conflict from the first timeskip, what happened to Wally is completely timeskipped over except for Artemis and Dick who mourn in the most trite, generic, impersonal way possible with no care given to who he actually was or the details of the relationships they actually had.  They don’t respect each other, don’t trust each other, don’t even really seem to understand, take the time to reflect on or try to know each other anymore.

Dick, Bruce, Kaldur and M’gann are at this point liabilities to the League; willing to distort and subvert their positions, misuse their power for personal gain or as they see fit, lie to the people closest to them, manipulate younger heroes, reduce their colleagues’ autonomy and deny them the ability to give informed consent, and avoid accountability for their own actions.  And considering how little the lessons from prior seasons have stuck in the past there’s no reason to believe they won’t do so again.  I never thought I’d reach a point where it feels like the heroes would be better off without the original cast.

Meanwhile the villains’ long-term plans are contradictory, unclear and incoherent.  They don’t destroy the League in Season 1 because they apparenlty “need them”, but then they don’t do anything to capitalise on their disorientation or further their plans for 5 years (except for Klarion taking a short side trip to do some magic-tablet shopping so that a poorly-rendered videogame can happen and they can retcon-canonise Kaldur’s father and Tula’s death), because they’re supposedly waiting on some uncertain alien arrival that ends up endangering the world they want to rule, but then in Season 3 they want to regulate metahumans and we see Klarion knows how to activate meta-genes with magic so if they already know about that then why not use Starro to frame the League and get that ball rolling in Season 1?  Earth already has a galactic presence so why do they need to rely on random, incredibly hard-to-predict aliens?  How on any planet does the uncontrolled abject chaos of Outsiders benefit their supposed “evolved earth” in any way?  It’s impossible to figure out the stakes and tension of a win or loss when no-one has personal goals and the final prize is so unclear.

In the end, this is a show about hopeful, promising, collaborating teenagers who grow up to be miserable, isolated, irresponsible, emotionally immature adults whose complete failure and refusal to trust or communicate with others costs them the very team they worked to create.  About increasingly underdeveloped, inconsistent, narratively interchangeable and uninteresting characters who you’d barely know were friends if the story didn’t insist it was so. About a world that’s getting worse and more volatile, less worth saving with each season.  About villains whose plan doesn’t make sense and who have only not been stopped because the heroes are so apathetic and unmotivated that they’ve never tried to proactively uncover or counter their long-term strategy.

A story that ultimately goes nowhere and says nothing, dragged out at the hands of creators who openly don’t want to give it an actual ending at all.  All the problems with Dreamworks’ Voltron and BBC’s Sherlock and Tite Kubo’s Bleach rolled up into one great crescendo of cynical, uncaring, wasteful narrative tragedy.

As a fan-author, I can’t bring myself to do this to these characters.  

I’m upset because I can’t do anything to change the course of canon.  I’m not a shipper, I’m not a theorist, I don’t expect specific things to happen... I just wanted some quality, some answers, for any of it to mean something.  But I couldn't even get onto their horribly anti-consumer streaming service to support it officially back when I still hoped for a turnaround.  I can’t make Weisman or Vietti or their creative team or the DC executives care about narrative construction, this story, or make them respect their audience and characters.  And at this point even if I could the show’s just too broken to salvage.

All I can do is take the parts that had potential and try to make something different.