#Instead it tripped on its own ambitions and crashed somewhere between Voltron BBC!Sherlock and Tite Kubo's BLEACH

[threewaysdivided]

Frustrations with Young Justice:  Structure, Scope Management & Engagement

So, the long-awaited Season 3 of Young Justice has finished up and by all accounts it… certainly was something.

I’d originally considered writing this to address Season 2 pre-revival-announcement, but at the time I figured there wasn’t much point.  The series was over, and overall it was good.  We had two seasons (plus tie-ins) - one very strong and one that was enjoyable but struggled with clear and concerning structural issues on examination - with no way to be certain what was an intentional creative strategy and what was the result of studio meddling or troubled production.

But now we have Season 3. Now we have a pattern.  And so, I think it’s time we talk.

Some Disclaimers Before We Begin

I haven’t actually watched Outsiders yet, and at this point I don’t have any plans to (I had it pretty significantly spoiled for me while waiting for the official international released).  Unlike my Frustrations With My Hero Academia, the issues I’m seeing in Young Justice speak to larger flaws in the overall structure of its narrative.  I’ll be going off the wiki, as well as a few reviews and a handful of video clips, focusing on the wider trends in Season 2 and beyond over specific details.

This is not intended as a personal attack on Young Justice, or to cast aspersions on any of its creative team.

This is also not an attempt to convince anyone that they were wrong to enjoy Outsiders, the revival or Young Justice as a series.  I enjoy the original seasons, and Outsiders looks to have plenty of entertaining moments, especially for people deeper in the DC Comics fandom.  These structural issues exist below the surface and are not immediately noticeable - and even if they were, a work having flaws doesn’t prevent it from being genuinely enjoyable.

Warning: We’re going to look at the series as a whole so spoilers are in effect for all three seasons.  If you’re spoiler-dodging for a blind watch this one will not be good for your health.  Proceed below the cut at your own risk.

Revival-Specific Issues

Before we get into the full-dive I do want to touch on some potential problems specific to the new revival series.

Meta-issues:  Service Delivery & Fan expectations Beyond just internal writing issues, the Outsiders revival also faced external issues in delivery and fan-interactions which, though not the fault of the creators, do create extra barriers and complications that had the potential to negatively influence first impressions.

Firstly, while the DC Universe streaming service is arguably what allowed the series to come back, I feel it was a poor decision to lock the revival series there as an exclusive before the site went international (at the time of this post’s release, DCU remains geo-blocked to anyone without a US VPN and bank card).  

Not only did this make the show officially inaccessible to a good chunk of overseas fans, it’s also a particularly egregious snub to the co-ordinated Netflix watchers who formed a substantial part of the pro-revival campaigning.  I feel bad for fans who took the time to participate in the Netflix mass-watchings, only to learn that their show would be coming back exclusively on a different paid service.

It also created a split in the fanbase for those fans who weren’t in a position to access, or afford, the service; either pirate the show to keep up, not supporting the creators in the process, or wait for the official release and have to withdraw from all fanbase engagement to avoid spoilers (functionally impossible considering the rapid spread of untagged posts, gifs and fanfiction across social media and fansites, and how quickly spoiler-dense clips made into youtube’s recommendation feeds).   Instead of unifying the fanbase, these delivery decisions fractured it; diluting and spreading out engagement, and lowering hype, while allowing spoilers and negative reactions from early responders to potentially put off fans who might have been on the fence about whether the revival was worth the service/blu-ray price.

Secondly, Outsiders was always going to face a lot of pressure purely by virtue of being a revival.  Young Justice was off the air for five years; five years for fans to campaign, talk up the best aspects of past seasons and put them on pedestals, re-watch, analyse, ask questions and think about the kind of things they would want to see in a revival.  Even if they didn’t believe one was coming, on at least a subconscious level most fans probably had some idea of what a new season ‘should’ be. This puts any revival in a difficult position; many of these would have been contradictory and you simply can’t please everyone.  Expectation, as they say, is the root of all heartbreak.  Still, if it was to please the most fans, the revival would have needed a strong landing that recaptured the spirit of the original; encapsulating the best (or at least, most memorable) elements of the writing, characters and plot from the first two seasons.

Unfortunately, this isn’t what happened; Young Justice: Outsiders instead highlighting and exacerbating some of the series’ weakest scope management, writing and structural issues, while tonal and directorial shifts potentially introduced new problems and points of disconnect from the original.

Tone & Maturity One of the early things that came out about changes to the revival was the shift in rating; jumping from PG to something closer to M.  This was apparently done to “progress into more adult themes and storylines”, which would be perfectly reasonable.  Young Justice has always operated with a level of underlying maturity and, with Invasion ending on a major death and Outsiders pitched to address human trafficking, shaking off TV-broadcast restrictions could have allowed stronger atmosphere and a more direct discussion.

In execution, however, this seems to have manifested as a push to make Outsiders Darker and Edgier; with increased and explicit violence, gun use and more direct references to sex.  Halo is subjected to multiple brutal Woobie moments (having their neck snapped, throat slit and face melted off on separate occasions, among others), Nightwing ambushes recruits with a rifle, and another character’s dismemberment is graphically portrayed with several frames dedicated to their exposed beating heart. It also seems to be taking a more cynical tone, with the heroes increasingly willing to go against their principles and manipulate others, the general populace being more volatile and easily manipulated, and one the new protagonists undergoing a Heel Turn to murder a relative for power in the finale. While some of these elements are in service of the narrative, others look to be less so - their main point seeming to be to present the audience with shocking, disturbing or titillating scenes in order to prove that the show is “not for kids anymore”.

What this does is create a potentially jarring shift in the tonal baseline from the past 2 seasons, specifically an issue because the revival is intended as a direct continuation of those stories.  While there’s nothing wrong with large tonal shifts, it must be asked what purpose this serves in the narrative, as they usually indicate some major change within the story.   It’s possible that Outsiders may be intended as a third-act Darkest Hour, but considering that both this season and the preceding one ended on bittersweet but ultimately victorious notes for the heroes, it seems unlikely.  The risk here is that, in needlessly pursuing a darker tone for the sake of “maturity”, Young Justice may have landed itself in a worst of both worlds situation; people who would appreciate the new approach having to sit through two seasons of sanitised PG to reach it, while potentially alienating those who enjoyed the original’s ability to be emotionally mature without graphic content.  It also runs the risk of disengaging the audience if the world and/or characters become too depressing or unsympathetic for them to care whether anyone gets saved.

Representation & Resonances I’m going to preface this part by acknowledging that it is neither my place nor intent to lead, commandeer or speak with any authority on the topic of representation in media. However, considering that increased representation was brought up as a selling point of the new series, and the discussion that has since risen around it, it is at least worth mentioning.  So, with minimal questions, commentary or asides:

After two seasons, a videogame and a companion comic that focussed on or refenced Kaldur’s unresolved romantic feelings towards a female friend, it’s disappointing that his bisexuality is then revealed by placing him already in an established relationship with a heretofore unnamed and undeveloped character who was barely a footnote in that same comic, rather than showing the development and conclusion of that romantic arc on screen.

What little characterisation Kaldur’s future boyfriend gets in the companion comic is as an active member of a racial supremacist group that carved a slur into the chest of Kaldur’s schoolmate and pushed for the ethnic cleansing of all Atlanteans with outwardly aquatic features (including Kaldur’s own gills).  Neither this history, nor the significant amount of character growth needed for this history to not be a deal-breaker in them ending up together is ever addressed or even acknowledged within the show.

Two other characters are revealed as bisexual by having them acknowledge that they’re currently in heterosexual relationships, engage in unfaithful behaviour with each other anyway, and then having it come back to cause relationship issues with one of said heterosexual partners, which is unfortunate.

Some potentially uncomfortable resonances may arise from writing an Outwardly-Female-Presenting, LGBT+, Hijabi, Character of Colour, and then demonstrating their resurrect-on-death superpower by brutally killing them multiple times on screen, having them self-describe as “broken” on several occasions, depicting their bisexuality through the aforementioned infidelity scene (after which they also self-describe a “bad partner”), and revealing that their non-binary-ness is the result of being an explicitly inhuman computer-soul fused with a human body.  

There’s also a degree of dissonance in the non-binary Hijabi character’s superhero costume still being functionally skin-tight from the neck down; closely adhering to the contours of their breasts, waist, hips, backside and thighs despite the hood and hair-covering.

Again, I do not intend to render final judgement on how valid/invalid or appropriate/inappropriate this is.  However, it does indicate an odd contradiction; the creators seemingly more aware of the diversity of the audience they’re writing for, but paradoxically lacking awareness of how tone-deaf, tactless, or tokenistic their depictions may be coming across as.  While their willingness to defy conservative/exclusionist fan demands is admirable, it seems strange to then do so in a way that also risks alienating the progressive fanbase they appear to want.  Which leads to the question of whether, for some team members, the superficial increase in diversity may have been intentionally used as a way of masking or diverting attention away from deeper problems with the show’s structure (Similar to how the valid feminist messages in the MCU’s Captain Marvel made it harder for fans to critique genuine issues with the writing and military depictions).  

I very much hope and want to believe that this is a sincere case of good intentions being poorly handled as a facet of bigger scope management problems, but these issues being seemingly across the board enough to make the former a possibility leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Suffice to say that, if they genuinely wanted to make the show more inclusive and respectful for a modern audience, a sensitivity reader/editor/test group would probably have helped.

However, even if these elements had been handled well, the show still would have struggled due to ongoing issues with its long-term narrative structure, which have been present and ever-growing since the credits rolled on the end of the Season 1 finale.

Scope Management: Opportunity Cost

One of the major problems affecting Young Justice from the end of Season 1 is poor scope management in its storytelling.  

On the production side, scope management is about controlling size and complexity to ensure that a quality project can be delivered within the budget, timeframe, team size and resources available.  On the storytelling side, this refers to what TV Tropes calls The First law of Metafictional Thermodyamics; balancing the number of story elements (plot points, characters, themes, settings etc.) against the available time/ space needed to satisfyingly handle them. It’s a game of opportunity cost; the more story elements you have, the less time any one can be given, with each new element coming at the cost of nuance and development for the others.

While the show has so far managed the production side, its long-term story has been a scope-management snowball that increasingly undermines the power of the narrative.

Outsiders in particular shows noticeable symptoms across the board; the sheer number of threads, twists and substories combined with limited time to explain them comprehensibly pushing the plot into on-the-nose Kudzu territory, and fans pointing out scenes where certain characters go noticeably unvoiced - possibly out of unwillingness to have actors do additional line-reads - indicating that it may also be starting to impact the production.

However, a more persistent and enduring issue has been the way cast-scope issues weaken the character writing, something that was clearly apparent even back in Invasion.

In Season 1 the slow build of cast and plot scope allowed remarkably detailed characterisation for just 26 episodes.  The team came together gradually, with several episodes exploring their dynamic in different contexts between each new addition, and spotlight episodes highlighting the personalities of smaller subsets and individuals, as well as how their personal motivations pushed and pulled them towards the unit.   This created an inherently entertaining and strong status quo, with clear hierarchies and relationships between members, and each individual providing an obvious functional/emotional contribution. Even less-well-developed secondary characters could be easily understood through their opinions of and relationship to this dynamic and/or individual members.

Invasion loses this advantage, with the timeskip front-loading a large number of new characters into a 20-episode season with a plot already in motion.  This makes it difficult to bring the whole group together, while the competition for screentime gives less space for subsets and individuals to demonstrate their dynamic.  This is further hurt by the inflexibility of the ongoing plot structure, allowing less opportunities to see the groups and individuals in contexts outside of “heroes on a mission”.  The status quo of Invasion is much weaker, with an unclear dynamic of ambiguous relationships and hierarchies.  A large number of the new characters are also underdeveloped - their personalities archetypical, gimmicky or re-treads of previous.  As a result, many feel redundant or interchangeable; like they could be swapped out for another team member or DC character with similar abilities without significantly altering the plot or personality of the episodes.

This then leads to bigger problems with a lack of internal drive.   Many of the new characters get very little explanation for who they are, their personal goals or what would motivate them to specifically join a stealth-ops squad.  Where the original team were internally motivated, engaged and proactive in their behaviours, many of the Invasion members feel more passive and reactive - seeming to go on missions simply “because they’re heroes”.  This also effects the existing characters, as the lack of timeskip coverage creates a sense that everyone put their plans on the backburner between instalments instead of continuing forward with the expected level of urgency.  Not only does this make it harder to get invested in the Invasion characters, it also makes the characters themselves feel less invested in the story; neither of which is good for engagement.

In Outsiders this reaches critical mass, with another timeskip and even bigger cast expansion forcing the show into a no-win situation. Existing writing issues become exacerbated and obvious; the heroes fragmenting into different factions, many new characters existing in personality-less background roles or getting only sporadic or single-meaningful-appearances, characters from past seasons having their ongoing arcs watered down, truncated or dropped entirely as they are Demoted to Extra, and new character arcs often being inconsistent or irregular as they fight for space around the plot and other elements - complaints of “too many!” echoing vocally across the fandom.

While this sheer volume of characters present by Outsiders would likely pose a scope problem in any scenario, it is made infinitely worse by Young Justice’s use and execution of timeskips.

The Trouble with Timeskips

A defining feature of Young Justice is its habit of timeskipping between seasons, with Invasion jumping ahead 5 years from January 2011 to January 2016 and Outsiders skipping from July 2016 to July 2018 (2 years).  Of the 8.5 in-universe years spanned by the current seasons, only 1.6 years (less than 20% of the timeline) are directly covered by the main entries.  Not only this but, rather than serving to cut unimportant slow periods, Young Justice’s inter-seasonal jumps come as Nothing Is the Same Anymore Timeskips; introducing large numbers of new characters, significant changes to the world and major development for existing cast members during the unseen periods.

This creates and compounds problems with scope management as not only must the new characters and plot be developed going forward, the story now needs to dedicate adequate space to filling the audience in on the changes if the skips are to be satisfying, forcing even more competition for screen time.  

The argument against skips is obvious.  Progressing with no (or smaller) jumps would have made the cast-scope more manageable; a gradual addition of characters allowing better understanding of the dynamic and personalities comprising the status quo, while characters who were to become less relevant could have their arcs concluded before being written out. There is, however, a production counterargument; reaching the point of Outsiders without timeskips would take massive number of extra episodes, requiring much more plot as well as time, resources and labour from the creative team. Personally, I think this is a weak argument as there was no narrative requirement for the scope to escalate to this level, and the decision to do so sacrificed a significant level of storytelling quality for the sake of including a large quantity of material.  It’s possible that executive mandates by DC, Warner Bros. or Cartoon Network forced these elements onto the production; although, considering how deep the problems run, this seems unlikely to be the major cause.

The biggest issue here is how the lack of backfill impacts long-term engagement.  At its core most storytelling is about understanding, with unconscious engagement often deriving from curiosity - good stories raising unspoken questions within the audience that are satisfyingly answered by the information provided as it progresses (subverted in Shaggy Dog stories, where unsatisfying conclusions are the point). This is especially true in mysteries - a genre that Young Justice borrows from - which tend to encourage questions more directly.

Engagement issues arise because Nothing is the Same Anymore timeskips inherently raise these kind of unspoken questions for the audience.  Why did we timeskip?  What have the heroes and villains been doing in that time?  Why did Artemis and Wally leave the life?  Why did Conner and M’gann break up?  Who are these new heroes, where did they come from and why?  Who was the second Robin, what was his relationship to the others and how did his death impact them?  What happened to Tula and how did it affect Kaldur?

This creates a curiosity-anticipation engagement, the audience waiting for information that will satisfy these questions.  Unfortunately, many of these questions are instead left hanging by the end of Invasion, either being dropped or answered in an unsatisfying manner.  

On first watch Invasion does a decent job of masking this issue. For an invested viewer the moment-to-moment writing is entertaining, and the season raises enough new questions that you don’t initially notice how many of the early ones are going unanswered.  Several members of Young Justice’s creative team have expressed the opinion that the show was a perfect candidate for streaming distribution and, though somewhat cynically, I agree; it’s possible to maintain a high level of investment provided you don’t stop long enough to realise how much is falling by the wayside - something easier to manage in a delivery format that encourages back-to-back bingeing.

Unfortunately, this strategy makes later seasons a bit one-use-only.  Where a Season 1 re-watch offers the satisfaction of seeing how all the information comes together, Invasion replaces the curiosity-anticipation with an unconscious knowledge that the answers aren’t coming, making it easier to become disengaged. (This was actually what prompted this analysis; after thoroughly enjoying a re-watch of S1, I realised halfway through Invasion that I was only continuing because missing too many episodes would make it hard to pick back up later.)

And again, this poses a particular problem for Outsiders, not only because Invasion ends with a larger number of unresolved plot threads around the mole arc, the runaways and Wally’s death, but because fans have had up to 5 years to consciously express their curiosity and be actively looking for answers, making people more likely to notice and be frustrated by the issue.

Show vs Tell vs Imply: Earning Your Narrative

Another frustrating element of Young Justice’s timeskips is the way the series attempts to use events from these periods to set up future payoffs without conveying that information in a satisfying manner.  The show largely eschews the use of flashbacks, preferring to occasionally tell but mostly imply timeskipped events through indirect dialogue and background details.  Neither of these make effective main tools; overuse of Telling without Showing can produce Informed Attributes, while Implying places both the information and emotional content a step removed from the narrative - making it easier to miss, and forcing the audience to stop and think if they want to understand the impact, which can pull people out of the story.  As a result, payoffs whose set-ups and development are delivered in this way can feel unsupported and unearned.

This can be seen in characters like Batgirl and Bumblebee, who make background appearances as civilians in Season 1 before joining the team during the timeskip.  Nothing in the framing of these appearances suggests that the characters will become important later, or that their presence is anything more than an easter-egg for comic fans, and no backfill is provided once they join.  Of the new characters who appear at the start of Invasion, only Beast Boy and Blue Beetle are earned (Garfield through his Season 1 story and Jaime retroactively through one of Invasion’s few flashbacks), with this lack of earned-ness contributing to the season’s weaker character writing.

A more obvious instance is the show’s implementation of Jason Todd, who is both introduced and killed in the first timeskip with no screentime given to his interactions with other cast members; his presence only indicated by the hologram in the grotto and a few indirect lines of dialogue.  Not only is this frustrating for any Invasion characters whose arcs are meant to be affected by his character, it also causes his implied revival in Outsiders to fall flat.  Nothing hints at his return and, due to an absence of unique characterisation (and Dick’s name being widely known by Season 3) there is no reason to make the connection outside of external prior knowledge.

The problem also impacts the development of the original team, with most of their growth into adulthood being Informed rather than demonstrated due to the lack of timeskip coverage.  Furthermore, this growth sometimes contradicts what was shown about the characters in past seasons; e.g. Artemis and Wally, whose departure from the life by the start of Invasion feels particularly jarring and unsatisfying given the strong drive towards heroism that they demonstrated at the end of Season 1.

The worst example of this is how the series has handled Dick Grayson.  Of the original cast, Dick’s character had the most direct set-up for an ongoing thread, with his fear of becoming too much like Batman - a sentiment echoed by Bruce in a later episode:

By Season 2, though, Dick is acting exactly like this, willing to lie to his peers and keep secrets despite the high risks and the damage it causes to their relationships.  This could have been an effective tragedy set-up; a person becoming what they feared to be.  However, nothing in the framing or writing suggests that either the characters or narrative realise the true significance of this conflict, and very little is done to explain the shift in character trajectory.  Through a bit of analysis, it can be inferred that losses implied in the timeskip have changed Dick’s priorities, but as this is neither shown nor told it is not earned.

This then reaches exasperating levels in Outsiders where a similar clash appears in 4 characters; M’gann, Kaldur, Bruce and Dick being revealed among the masterminds of the secret Anti-Light plot to manipulate other heroes, with Bruce going so far as to leverage his unconscious influence as a former mentor to recruit younger heroes for ‘Batman Incorporated’.  Not only does this fly in the face of the lessons Dick, Kaldur and M’gann learned from Invasion’s mole subplot, it also contradicts what we’ve been shown of Bruce’s character - Season 1 demonstrating concern for the protégés emotions and awareness of the unhealthiness of his personal approach, with Invasion offering little to suggest a significant change in this mindset.

Again, this could have been an effective moment of character tragedy if properly developed; if the narrative had shown their increasing desperation and frustration as the situation grew more dire, with the characters trying to find alternative solutions before accepting that the only way to proceed was to make a choice they knew from experience to be wrong.   If they had demonstrated Bruce’s relationship with Jason and Barbara, and how their respective death and disability impacted him and his ideals.  Instead this development goes almost entirely implied, resulting in behaviour that feels unearned, unsatisfying, out of character and that completely ignores the lessons learned from past seasons.  Made even worse is that Barbara and Conner call Bruce and M’gann out for it, indicating that the writers were aware of this contradiction but decided to go ahead anyway instead of finding a more satisfying and character-faithful solution.

The problems with this approach are threefold.  Firstly, it disrupts emotional continuity, causing the seasons to feel discontiguous; entries not properly flowing on from or fitting with the ones that precede or follow them.  Secondly, it undermines the importance of events shown in past seasons; onscreen development being rendered insignificant compared to the massive off-screen changes, with some of these changes going so far as to roll back what development was shown. Thirdly it hurts investment; if the story can change rapidly between entries, with no explanation and in directions that cannot be anticipated based on the available material, then there is little value in speculating.

Side Content: Not A Substitute

Outside of the seasonal entries, Young Justice provides some additional story information through side material.  The Legacy game covers Tula’s death, the revelation that Black Manta is Kaldur’s father, and Kaldur stepping down as Team leader, as well as some dialogue hinting at Jason’s death and Artemis and Wally’s decision to later leave the life.  Wynnde, Talia al Ghul and the Lazarus Pit all make appearances in the Season 1 comics.  The Season 2 comics introduce and flesh out some characters, relationships and additional stories from both pre-revival TV seasons, while the Torch Songs comics focus on Conner and M’gann’s relationship reconciliation pre-Outsiders.

The issue here is that, while excellent for exploring and developing non-essential stories and character details, side material is not a good medium for setting up or progressing key information and plotlines.  By its nature, supplementary content is secondary; usually engaged with after the main story as before this, fans may not know or care that it exists. People also tend to consume all available main content first - especially in a binge-streaming format - so if something feels jarring, ill supported or contrived without the side-information, it will probably feel that way to the majority of viewers on first exposure.

Furthermore, it is fundamentally backwards-thinking to expect fans to spend additional money and time on secondary content in order to have a satisfying experience with the core entries.  If the main seasons alone are not sufficiently comprehensible and engaging enough to encourage further time investment, then the fault lies with the creators for developing a flawed product - it is not the job of fans to seek additional content to correct for weak storytelling, nor to pay the creators extra to fix basic narrative problems that should have been caught in the edit.

Even if this were not the case, the companion material would still suffer from a lack of coverage.  Jason’s death and the fallout from Legacy are not covered in any material, and Torch Songs places the focus on Conner and M’gann’s need to forgive each other rather than the circumstances that caused their breakup.  Due to the timeskip the Season 1 comics are also ineffective as foreshadowing for Outsiders; though Batman and Talia are romantically involved, their story closes on Bruce ending the relationship with nothing to indicate that it will be rekindled and result in Damian.  Wyynde meanwhile makes his sole appearance as a background antagonist with no signs of future significance.

The Author is Dead (and so are the comics)

Looking through the Young Justice Fan Wiki as the seasons go on, you’ll increasingly find instances of entries written in green text:

These indicate additional information provided by the creators through avenues outside of the series itself; at interviews, convention panels or through Greg Weisman’s ask blog. TV Tropes calls it Word of God.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with creators engaging with their fans and sharing trivia through avenues other than the work itself, the specific approach seen here represents a concerning barrier to Young Justice’s viability as a stand-alone story.  As they do not exist within the text, audience members cannot arrive at these set-ups, conclusions or pieces of information by engaging with the series, causing elements introduced this way to feel poorly supported, out of place or contrived.  

This becomes particularly apparent in Outsiders, where the story begins attempting to pay off this non-existent setup, running them afoul of Death of the Author theory.

Death of the Author This theory posits that, because commercial art is created to be consumed, not just created, the audience’s interpretations of a work should be considered as just valid as the creator’s.  The work must stand on its own and creators cannot micro-manage their audience’s response to it.

1.  A creator's intentions and biographical facts (political stances, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining the validity of an interpretation. 2.  Save for re-releases/reboots or direct continuations, the creator cannot and should not attempt to retroactively insert information or interpretations that were not present in the original text.

The problem here should be obvious:  If the creator wants to include something, they need to take steps to do so within the story.  If they are unable to, then they need to drop it and devise an alternative.  To not include elements while still insisting that they’re there (and worse, trying to use them) is not only dishonesty of purpose, it’s disrespectful to the intelligence of the audience.

It also further hurts the willing suspension of disbelief; if the creators are going to write whatever suits them as it suits them, using information that the audience is not able to access or infer, then there is little point in actively engaging with the narrative.

The non-daptation

“One is Arrowette who we introduced in Season 1 as Cissie King-Jones. We didn’t name her but we named her dad Burnell Jones, so if you were comic book savvy… you could look up ‘Who was that guy that nearly got assassinated? Oh, look who his daughter [is], that’s who the daughter was.’ The idea was even back in Season 1, you see her expression as she sees Artemis save the life of her father. So she was clearly inspired by Artemis and is now Arrowette, a hero in her own right.”  - Greg Weisman at San Diego Comic-Con, Reported by JK Schmidt for Comicbook.com, August 4, 2018 (Emphasis mine)

[It’s worth noting that the father character being discussed here is only referred to as ‘Mr Jones’ outside of the episode credits.]

There also seems to be an assumption by the creators that Young Justice fans should be willing to apply or research broader DC comics information in lieu of proper set-up or development within the series itself.

This pattern can be most clearly seen in the handling of the Bat-family;  Barbara becoming Batgirl and later Oracle, Jason’s personality, death circumstances and later revival, Tim’s appearance as the third Robin, Stephanie becoming Spoiler, and the appearance of Orphan as well as Talia Al Ghul with an infant Damian Wayne - all of which are given little to no foreshadowing or context within either the main or spin-off entries.  It may also explain the noticeable under-characterisation of the secondary cast from Invasion onwards; characters that would no doubt feel more realised to fans who were already attached to stronger, more detailed characterisations from other stories, and could project those personalities and motivations onto the show’s largely blank archetypes.

The issue here is that Young Justice becomes increasingly unable to work in its own context - there being little way to understand or anticipate these characters and subplots without external fan-knowledge.

In this regard Young Justice runs into a similar problem as the fourth Harry Potter Movie.  The cinematic release of Goblet of Fire cut multiple key plot points, setups and payoffs for time - creating a story that doesn’t make much sense when viewed in isolation - but was able to get away with it due to the saturation of Harry Potter book knowledge at the time of release; the audience’s prior awareness allowing them to unconsciously fill in the missing pieces of story so long as the film simply referenced them.

However, where the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie has a direct source material that fans can refer back to, Young Justice’s further complicates things by being an original property.  While the series uses and references DC comics characters and storylines it also synthesises them into its own take, something clearly apparently from the line-up of the Season 1 team.  Even if fans wanted to find them, few to no stories about this combination of characters exist, meaning that - while we can extrapolate broad strokes information from other versions - any nuanced conclusion is going to be conjecture. Especially considering the variance in different comics’ depictions, and that Young Justice is willing to break from comics canon in changing the backstories and identities of several characters.

I want to highlight the Season 3 reveal of Ma’alefa’ak.  This character has no set-up within the series - only foreshadowed in a blog-response from Weisman about M’gann having a White brother - and even for fans familiar with the comics it’s unlikely to make sense as Comics!Ma’alefa’ak is typically J’onn’s evil twin.  Accepting this Word of God also severely hurts M’gann’s character as further creator statements claim that she left Mars without saying goodbye; meaning that she abandoned her younger brother to Martian racism with no explanation, then proceeded to not think or talk about him for upwards of seven years, while adopting a new little brother who she seems weirdly comfortable directly manipulating in the present season.

Arguably one of the core appeals of telling stories based on existing material is an exploration of specifics and nuance; seeing the details of how scenarios, dynamics and plot beats would arise and play out with the creators’ particular versions of the characters, settings or premise.  After Season 1, however, Young Justice seems to take the exact opposite approach, treating the DC Multiverse as a shortcut to jump between plots without adequately building them in-story.  

In this regard it’s almost closer to fanfiction - which intentionally uses existing investment and knowledge of a specific source material to springboard to ‘the good stuff’ with minimal set up.  (In fact it may be in a worse position, as fanfic on the whole tends to place high emphasis on character context and emotional continuity.)  The problem is that this approach isn’t backwards-compatible with original storytelling; new audiences are not pre-engaged or informed (in which case the lack of context becomes a barrier to entry), and existing DC-fans may be disappointed at being given an underdeveloped reference instead of a new take on the character(s) they already like.

Which leads to the question: If the best way to understand and enjoy Young Justice’s long-term story is to consume other, better-constructed shows/comics/movies/games and do the work yourself, then… why bother coming back to this series at all?

What Good Amidst These?

With all of this, it’s hard to determine where the core focus or appeal lies for Young Justice as a stand-alone series.

The Characters While strong in Season 1, scope and timeskip management issues have been weakening the character writing, with new additions frequently feeling underdeveloped in both personality and group dynamic.  Even characters who are well-developed in their introductory seasons rarely have their character arcs satisfyingly continued beyond them; ongoing threads often being handwaved, dropped, or simply limited by lack of available time.  Making this worse, the timeskips also contain points of significant development that are not shown or sufficiently explained, sometimes pulling characters away from the characterisation that was provided - feeling more like a betrayal of character than natural growth. It is difficult to draw an emotionally satisfying through-line from the people they were to the strangers they become.

This also contributes to a lack of motivation; underdeveloped new characters not having clear motives through which to understand their actions, and developed existing characters often outgrowing their motivations between seasons without the series stopping to re-establish a new internal drive.  As a result, it is difficult both to remain connected to the characters, and to feel like the characters are personally invested in the plot.

The Plot Since Season 1, Young Justice has had an increasingly complex plot.  While this has been weakened by cast-scope and timeskip issues reducing the context and available screen time, it may be facing a deeper issue with repetition of the mystery formula and withheld information.

Season 1’s use of mystery-intrigue-suspense worked well because the heroes spent most of the story unaware of the Light and their plans, while the audience were given glimpses behind the curtain; culminating in a reveal at the finale.  From here you might reasonably expect a focus shift, with the now-aware Team attempting to uncover The Light’s long-term goals and counter them.  Instead, however, Invasion jumps forward 5 years to the Team dealing with another short-term plan, having made no progress on the sixteen hours and with little to nothing shown about off-screen attempts.  By the end of Outsiders (now 8 in-universe years after the Season 1 reveal) the Light’s specific end goal and major objectives remain unclear to both the heroes and the audience.  Not only does this make the heroes feel artificially passive, it also weakens the narrative stakes, as without this information it’s hard to understand the importance a given victory/loss has to the balance of power and progress on either side.  Where Season 1 compensated by having an equally strong character-focused B-plot providing personal stakes, Invasion and Outsiders’ weaker characterisation does not offer this advantage.

It also indicates something potentially concerning for the series’ future.  By keeping the end goal vague and the heroes reactive, the creators could theoretically draw things out in perpetuity; extending the series until they run out of plots, characters or funding, regardless of the effect on long-term structure or pacing.

The World In fairness, the world of Young Justice (like most superhero cartoons) was never a major drawcard; largely being our reality with some fictional cities/countries and superpowered/alien/supernatural/technological elements layered over the top.  Unlike fantasy, sci-fi, space-operas etc., the world and worldbuilding itself isn’t a particular point of engagement - mostly coming instead from the stories and characters within it.  That said, the tendency for the world and society to shift rapidly between seasons without showing those developments contributes to the feeling that seasons are less grounded and contiguous with each other than they should be.  And, as mentioned at the beginning, Outsider’s decision to call greater attention to the world’s violence, injustice and discrimination with limited comment in pursuit of a “darker” tone poses a particular issue; if the status-quo is cynical and unfair then the audience has less reason to care about the world or the characters defending it.

The Team While never the direct focus of the series, the Team had a lot of symbolic importance in Season 1, representing a solution to the personal motivations and/or emotional needs of the core cast, and providing the season’s strong B-plot.  In Invasion, this is weakened; many original members having outgrown this connection, and the new members having little to no clear personal motivation or emotional tie toward the unit itself.  By Outsiders the Team breaks entirely, spending most of the season dispersed across other groups and at the end being decommissioned in all but name as Jefferson retains it only as a training space for younger heroes - exactly what the original members fought hard not to become.

Secrets and Lies A stated theme of the show, this was strongest in Season 1 thanks to the character writing.  Even when characters kept secrets against the interest of the Team, time was taken to explore and explain their reasons.  This theme became weaker in Invasion due to the lack of screen-time and timeskip context.  It’s not clear how the mole plot was conceived, the strategic goal it was meant to accomplish, or why Dick would keep the rest of the original team in the dark after bringing Artemis and Wally on board - especially considering that Conner and M’gann’s position and powers make them not only more likely to uncover the scheme independently, but also more driven and able to do serious harm to Kaldur in ‘retribution’. This is then undercut in Outsiders by the creators having the same characters repeat the same behaviours to even greater negative impact, indicating that they either did not learn or chose to ignore the lessons from Invasion.  It also makes the characters less relatable, with them seeming unsettlingly callous and comfortable with betraying their friends’ trust as a strategy.

Generations Another creator-stated theme, this one is notably weaker.  Like most things it was strongest in Season 1, with the mentor-protégé interactions and coming-of-age overtones to the B-plot.  From Invasion on, however, it’s undercut by the same timeskip and scope-screentime problems, with the series missing obvious opportunities to explore the concept.  Many of the new Invasion additions are the same age as the original group and suffer from underdevelopment, while the mentors spend much of the season off-world.  Little to no time is spent exploring the direct Flash and Bat-lineages, M’gann’s relationship with Beast Boy, or Superman and Superboy’s developing connection.  Red Tornado is increasingly underutilised despite working with heroes as far back as the Justice Society.  Black Lightning’s mentorship of Static and Artemis’ inspiration of Arrowette go timeskipped and unaddressed.  Kaldur’s transition to Aquaman ahead of Outsiders is likewise timeskipped and barely discussed, despite its importance to both his character and this theme.  Outsiders does have the original Team directly mentoring new heroes but this lacks impact as so much of the Team’s growth to adulthood has happened offscreen, informed and unearned.  

While Young Justice certainly has generations, the series has not done enough work to be about generations; this honestly feeling more like a post-hoc attempt to justify a poor scope-management choice.

An aside: Strong Female Characters Fertile Child-rearers The revival’s specific focus on ‘generations’ through ideas of children and mothering also creates some issues with the writing of female characters, several of who have part or all of their arcs consumed by nurturing, acting as mother-figures or maternity.  M’gann is suddenly and inexplicably a youth counsellor; Lois Lane, Talia al Ghul and Iris Allen largely exist to be the mothers of Jon, Damian, Don and Dawn respectively; and Karen Beecher has a substantial side-plot dedicated to her pregnancy with Mal Duncan’s child, despite the two of them having barely resolved their relationship conflict by the end of Invasion.   Outsiders also seems to have a fascination with female characters being heavily pregnant; exemplified in the scene where Raquel’s young son points at Karen’s distended stomach and declares “there’s a baby in there!”. 

All of this can be most clearly seen in the writing of Artemis; who spends most of Outsiders acting as a nurturing figure to Violet and Tara, being pressured to settle down with Red Arrow and co-parent her niece in Jade’s absence, and whose grief scene focuses less on her and Wally’s existing characterisation/conflicts and more on her supposed regret at not giving up heroism for a life of domesticity as Wally’s wife and child-mother (the scene also featuring a shot in which she is heavily pregnant).

While a lack of internal motivations is common across Outsiders’ characters, very little is done to develop these women as autonomous individuals, or give them agency in establishing whether they like/want children, desire a family or if they and their partners are ready to be parents.  The show also lacks any strong overarching “family” themes that would allow viewers to reasonably assume that this is common desire of most characters.  

Instead, Outsiders appears to presume that these characters would want these things and assume these roles simply because they’re female; an oddly regressive attitude that conflicts with the revival’s attempts at progressivism.

Morality This had potential to become a theme in Outsiders, with the heroes willing to go against their principles and Vandal Savage stepping up to defend the earth in Evolution.  However, it’s hampered by a lack of development.  While the Light are presented as having their own agenda beyond simple villainy-in-opposition, and claim to be pushing back against a “calcified status quo”, the personal goals and ideologies motivating individual members, as well as any ultimate strategy or vision of the group is unclear (assuming that they have grander ideals at all and this isn’t just an empty platitude to rationalise purely selfish pursuits).  

This lands the series in an awkward middle-ground; the villains being too underdeveloped in their motives and cruel in their actions to support a meaningful debate about who’s in the right, while the heroes and the world they defend are now too callous and ethically compromised for the story to easily split down simple moral lines.  And while Grey-on-Gray or Black-on-Gray conflicts can make for excellent stories, they require a level of creator awareness and attention to plot and character motivation that Young Justice’s scope, cohesion, and consistency issues simply do not allow.

The Swansong

"That's the ‘young’ part of Young Justice is there’s always a new generation coming.” -Brandon Vietti, at San Diego Comic-Con, Reported by JK Schmidt for Comicbook.com, August 4, 2018

“the promise of new heroes is something that we can always offer. That's, I think, the one thing that we can promise for season four.” -Brandon Vietti, interviewed by Gabe Bergado of Teen Vogue, August 28, 2019

When I look at Young Justice as it now exists, I can’t help but wonder what reasons there are to continue following the canon:

Why care about the existing characters when they’re increasingly becoming strangers; pushed further into the background, their arcs watered down, truncated or dropped, their on-screen development rendered insignificant compared to massive, unexplained off-screen changes that sometimes pull them against their established trajectories?

Why bother getting invested in the current season’s additions when everything about the show’s pattern and paramount focus on “new heroes” indicates that they will likely suffer the same fate?

Why care about a plot that’s become increasingly convoluted and incoherent, undercut by the disconnect between seasons, the lack of clear end-goals and motives from both the heroes and villains, and the creators’ desire to needlessly obfuscate information for the sake of intrigue?

Why care about themes when they’re not explored in enough detail to be resonant, or are just going to end up as repackaged versions of the same characters learning the same lessons they should have learned in past seasons?

Why care about new entries in a story whose structure shows a complete disinterest in satisfying long-term storytelling?

Why care?

The worst part is that none of this was necessary.  Young Justice’s ideas aren’t inherently bad, they’re just being let down by poor execution, weak structure and terrible scope management.  Nothing at any point of the narrative forced the need for time-skips or massive cast-escalation; the creators simply chose to, and for no apparent reason.

The new season could have been an opportunity to address some of the writing flaws that crept in during Invasion.  Wally’s death would have offered an ideal focal point and premise for a more reflective and introspective story; characters of different ages coming together in subplots around working through and looking back on the journey so far.  A perfect opportunity to back-fill timeskip content, wrap up hanging threads and rebuild a strong status quo, while a main plot laid the foundations for the espionage and interstellar conflicts to come.  (The suggestion of this possibility being why I got my hopes up at the initial trailer.)

But that’s not what we got. What we got was Season 3.  Outsiders.  With this, the series has landed itself in an uncomfortable position; enough time having passed in-universe that future attempts to stop and backfill will likely feel awkward and out of place, while the lack information threatens to make the series increasingly unsatisfying and incoherent if they attempt to push forward without it.

And so we have ‘Young’ Justice, a show “about generations”…  or at least that has and will probably continue to force in new generations with each season, no matter how much it undercuts and overburdens the story they’re trying to tell.

Which, to borrow a phrase from Stephen King:

I don't know what you think, but for me, that version's a loser. It's like the Cadillac with the chrome stripped off and the paint sanded down to dull metal. It goes somewhere, but it ain't, you know, boss.