#YJ:DW Meta

[threewaysdivided]

I just wanted to say: I love your art and especially your banner rn by talos! also your fic as well thank you for creating everything that you do for people, it’s awesome!

Second: what’s something that you’ve been chewing on lately, story wise? What character conflict, or plot point can you tell me about (that doesn’t spoil too much of course)? I wanna hear your thoughts about the characters you write and your head-cannons on them too! Just spit some word vomit at me!

Thank you! 

My current banner art is actually a crop of the first paired piece I ever did to go with my Deathly Weapons fic.  (Specifically Chapter 11, which I still have a soft spot for since it’s one of earliest chapters that really let me lean into scratching the thing-I-haven’t-seen-too-often-in-fanfic itch.) 

I recently got my hands on a discounted Wacom (my digital art process got tanked a few years ago when my poor art-compatible hybrid tablet-laptop was tragically taken from us by a cracked motherboard) so I’m looking forward to getting into a faster art workflow again and maybe putting some new pieces out more easily.  I’d like to do more comic art pieces for the Chapter 18 mission, and there’s a silly little concept drawing for the planned Mission 5 that might be new-blog-banner material if it turns out nicely.  We’ll have to see how that goes.

As for what I’ve been chewing on story-wise lately… I’ve sort of been all over the place.  I’m still on burnout recovery so I’ve been letting myself move non-sequentially, working on the bits my brain feels like focussing on rather than trying to force creativity where the juice isn’t flowing.   (One of the things about being my type of writing-nerd is that “self-indulgent” for me means a story with plenty of material to analyse, which is very fun as a reader but has created a lot of work for myself as the writer.  As mentioned in another post, I have a full-blown TV-show-style story-bible for this one.)

Recently, my authorial ping-pong-ing has been going into a fair bit of spoiler territory.  There are some chunks of the Act III endgame plan which are underdeveloped in the specifics of what the big-boss bad-guys’ plan is, whether I want to involve the Anti-Ecto Acts more, and the logistics of both the counter-strategy our heroes are planning to use and how to make its more action-heavy parts look cool in writing.  When I’m not doing that I’ve been focussing a lot on the upcoming Wally-centric chapters, which are a set I’ve been wanting to keep schtum about since there’s a small potential spoiler mixed in and I don’t want to risk giving the game up or pre-setting people’s expectations before they have a chance to blind read (even if a few people have already made some close guesses in the comments).  It puts me in a bit of an odd-spot right now because the chapters I’m drafting are an immediate spoiler, the later sections I’m working on are a major spoiler and there’s a good chance that a lot of the character stuff going on in the middle won’t make a whole lot of coherent sense without prior context because of how I like to layer foreshadowing/development.

That said, Wally-centric chapters mean Wally thoughts, and of those I have plenty to share:

First of all, I want to establish that I really do like Wally as a character.  The DW chapter set comprising Flashpoints through to Equilibrium is going to explore and develop some of his flaws and insecurities, which means he isn’t going to be looking his best, but it’s not meant to be a Ron The Death Eater situation.  He’s just a complex person, and taking him warts and all means sometimes you have to get up close and personal on the warts.

Something that I’m maybe a bit over-conscious of when reviewing my DW story notes is worrying about letting Wally slide into just being punching-bag joke-fodder.  Wally is quippy, irreverent, a little tactless and prone to being a bit of an impulsive goober who sometimes gets possessed by teenage boner-brain, which makes him easy to fall back on as a default source of incidental levity (whether cracking the joke or being the punchline).  Because I’m now writing an 8-character ensemble where most non-focal characters only get a few lines per conversation, it’s easy for characters to slide into being defined by their strongest surface level trait(s)… and something I worry about with Wally is that his availability as a source of jokes runs the risk of Flanderisation into a disposable Scrappy/ Flirty Comic Relief, which isn’t his character.  Wally is actually really important – not just for his scientific book-smarts but for his perceptiveness, earnestness and ability to function as one of the emotional barometers for the squad – so I always have it in the back of my mind to make sure I include enough moments that actually demonstrate those qualities and the other characters’ appreciation of them/ their friendship, so that it counterbalances the more light-hearted goofery.

I think he’s walking the same tightrope as Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender – yes, he tends to take the L more often than the others for comedy purposes and sometimes he gets stuck with supremely dumb side-plots for the sake of tonal balance, but to claim that it’s the entirety of his characterisation really misses the point by a wide mile.

On that note, I actually really like the decision YJ!Animated decided to go with in its first and only season (ahem) in giving Wally a normal and functional family background.  I know that’s not the typical background for his comics counterparts (and no shade on other fan-writers who want to write AUs exploring the abuse dynamic, those are really interesting stories) but I think it was a smart deviation for the purposes of a large ensemble, and offered a fair bit of potential for cast-balance.  It lets him serve an important role as the normal one – not only as an easy window into what the current lives of ordinary middle-class civilians look like (which is good because ordinary people are who our heroes are donning the masks to protect) but also as a touch-stone for the others, most of whom either come from different cultures or from very atypical backgrounds.  Even if we discount the Impure Atlantean with military training, the ostracised White Martian and the Half-Alien clone-weapon, the other members of this line-up are an orphaned circus acrobat adopted by a billionaire, a girl from a dangerously dysfunctional criminal household where she was forced to fight her sibling, and a fledgling sorceress raised by an overprotective single Dad.  The others might intellectually understand what a “normal” childhood and family look like but they don’t necessarily know it as intuitively and intimately as Wally does.  That normality gives Wally the potential to be a more stable foundation for the others, a source of emotional contrast and of a necessary wholesome mundanity.  That is a good thing for the Team to have.  I think it also speaks volumes to the heart of his character.  For this Wally, the Flash and heroism weren’t an escape from a bad personal situation.  His life was actually pretty comfy and privileged - he didn’t experience a brutal wakeup to the injustices of the world or some other personal call to action.  This is a Wally who opted into the game because he loves the players and sincerely believes in their values and mission.  And while that might mean he has a more romanticised idea of what heroism entails – and will probably face some rough shocks down the line as that rosy vision runs into those more brutal realities – it also means he brings a sincere hopefulness to the job that is less hardened than a lot of his roughed-up, pre-jaded peers.  Underneath the teen sarcasm and surface-level lancer/smart-guy traits, this Wally has as much power to be a stealth-Heart as any of his Flash!counterparts.

Something else I find interesting when using Wally is how a lot of his strengths and flaws feed into each other – and I think this alternate backstory is part of it.  For all of his good heart Wally can come off as insensitive, and I think some of that could be read as a product of living a more charmed life.  I think he’s susceptible to a thing that a lot of real people do – universalising their own personal experience as the default – and that while he is canonically a geek and somewhat genre-savvy about hero cliches, he’s a geek about in-universe media so he probably doesn’t think to apply those tropes to “real people” like himself or his colleagues.  While this Wally is a skeptic, he’s not a cynic, and I think he might forget how much of an outlier he is in a world where things like living parents and loving parents are often mutually exclusive.  He’s smart enough to connect dots but there’s a little blind-spot where he simply might not think to until one of the others jabs an elbow into his ribs, because his default view on humanity is in some ways a little kinder than typical due to that small but still significant amount of privilege.

At the same time, Wally is also someone who has probably run into (or watched his mentor run into) a lamp-post at high-speed at least once in his career.  He contains multitudes and among those multitudes is an endless capacity for some absolute Looney-Tunes nonsense, which the world is 100% better off for having.

I love him, your honour.

[threewaysdivided]

🦈and 🦋 for the ask game?

(Fanfic Writer Ask Game)

🦈 Which character is the toughest to write?

Back when I was writing Arc I of Deathly Weapons, I used to say Robin but, now that I've moved to writing the whole Team more, I think that wooden spoon of dubious honour has passed to Conner.

The thing that makes Conner challenging for me to work with is that he just doesn't have as much starting material as the others. We shall set aside the unrelated YJ Comics, where Kon is a very different character with a very strong and distinct personality. He's a bit of a blank, which makes perfect sense in-universe because he's very new. He only has about 6 months of lived experience by the finale and that means he hasn't had time to build up the layers of in-universe history and memories that can be mined for nuance, call-backs, behavioral tics and personality foibles yet. Which is tricky for a writer like me, since I like to lean into that nitty-gritty granularity of canonically-supported character specifics to help distinguish everyone.

Deathly Weapons also takes place at a point where Conner's still in the process of growing from an archetype into a fully-realised individual, and something that makes it extra tricky is that his starting archetype is "Strong, Silent and Broody". Where other Literally-Born-Yesterday characters might be written as childishly talkative/ curious/ naive about the world, Superboy tends to be taciturn with a dash of impatient directness. He's not antisocial but he is socially inexperienced - he often participates by silently observing unless he has questions/ observations, and he tends to withdraw into himself when processing emotions (unless he loses his temper). That's a challenge to integrate into a written medium because it could be in-character for him to go a whole group-conversation without saying or doing anything, but if I don't do something to depict him then he starts to fade out of the story.

Part of that is finding stuff for him to do, which is also tricky because of his power-set. Physically, Conner is a super-strong damage-resistant close-quarters brawler (with some secondary reconnaissance abilities thanks to his super-senses): i.e. a tank build. The problem is, super-strong tanks are well-suited for the strategic niche of threat management and demolitions, but Deathly Weapons leans hard into the more spy/investigative type of mission storytelling - conditions where open combat and large-scale destruction are undesirable. If your stealth-squad is routinely toppling buildings or drawing the kind of heavy fire that it helps to have a tank "pulling aggro" for, then something is probably going wrong. It makes it hard to find a balance because the more competent the Team is at being a black-ops unit, the more they avoid the kinds of combat scenarios that play to Conner's unique strengths. Which, again, means I have to keep a closer eye on him during field-work scenes to make sure he doesn't fade out of the story or end up saddled with endless grunt jobs just to give him something to do.

I like Superboy a lot, and I hope I've got enough planned to pay him his dues in DW, but it is a challenge to balance a character who is interesting in non-verbal ways and best suited to open combat in a written-medium stealth story where he's not the central focus. He's a gem who takes a bit more work to foil for this setting.

🦋 Which character is your favorite to write?

Wally. Wall-meister. Wall-man. Mister Meep-Meep. World's dumbest smart person and most brilliant fool. A boy who admired his uncle so much he reversed-engineered a chemical formula and blew himself up with it to get superpowers.

100% Wally is the most fun character for me to write. He has a really entertaining narrative "voice" and it's one I can find quite easily, even in early drafts (possibly because - as someone who was also a teenage STEM-idiot - I read a lot of his sixteen-year-old bullsh*t as being similar to my own tweens-to-twenties bullsh*t.)

I've called Wally my "free entertainment" character before, because whenever I need to add levity to a scene I just drop Wally in there, let his leash out a little and leave him to amuse himself. He's a lot like Sokka from ATLA: the way he talks, thinks and engages with his environment and other characters is naturally endearing and charming to me. So many of my favorite incidental lines from the published and planned Deathly Weapons chapters are just descriptions of Wally doing, saying or thinking something:

"So?" Kid Flash seemed amused by the idea, "Throw in a couple of glares and hang him off a roof as usual. Problem solved."

Wally made a disgusted noise and was promptly ignored.

“Wasn’t he tied to a table?” “Yeah, and?” the speedster gave a magnificent shrug.  “He still is.”

“Nope.  Guy was out of it.  Besides,” Kid Flash shrugged the item on experimentally, colour eye-watering against his stealth-suit, “you know me: moves like a shadow.” The archer and the detective shared a look. “Sure thing, mister ‘ninja-boyfriend’.” He shot a wink her way.  “You know it.”

Wally put on his best skeptical face.

He so didn’t want to do this. Well, okay, that wasn’t true.  Part of him didn’t want to do this.  Another - louder, guiltier - part very insistently did.  The rest… mostly just wanted to find a hole to curl up and feel stupid in for a while.

The stupid-hole was looking better and better.

Wally, meanwhile, had returned with a long-handled spoon.  He twirled it in a hand, sizing the plate up with a speculative look.

“Souveni-” “No.” “Oh come on, look at the little guy!”

The thing I like about my favourite iterations of Wally is that he's an earnestly good person. When you peel back the layers of insecurity and class-clownery and teenage nonsense he's someone who cares... and sometimes his flaws come from caring too much about the wrong things. He doesn't always come off looking the best (especially in DW's Flashpoints-Equilbrium set, where we're going to be unpacking some of his roughest character traits) but to me he's someone who genuinely wants to do right by people, even if he puts his foot in things a lot along the way.

He's also just... really funny about it.

Thanks for playing!

[threewaysdivided]

Ironic

Little bit of behind-the-curtain story time about Deathly Weapons.

Long ago in the distant past, the current WIP chapter set (Mission 2: Flashpoints and follow-up chapters) started life as a chapter pair called Boiling Points and Parallels, covering the primary character conflict between Kid Flash (Wally) and Phantom (Danny).

Originally Boiling Points included both the mission and major peak of conflict, with Parallels exploring and explaining the conflict from both sides, then resolving the tension.

Then (about 4 years back) I decided to cut Boiling Points into two pieces, splitting the mission and big fight into individual chapters to give them some breathing space. I also decided to change the names of the chapters to Flashpoints and Combustion (with Parallels becoming Equilibrium) since Danny and Wally are both STEM nerds and I thought it would be fun to make all of their focus-chapters chemistry references (plus bonus Flash pun, eyyy).

However, as I moved to working on the Mission 2 chapter set with more priority, I kept feeling like I wanted to split Equilibrium from one set of six scenes into two sets of three, to let the story hold and breathe at a natural break-point in the sequences and keep things from feeling squashed together. Eventually I decided to trust my instincts and break the first three scenes off into their own chapter, called Reagents.

And ever since I made that cut, the Parallels between Reagents and Equilibrium have never been stronger.

[threewaysdivided]

In the spirit of the ask game I didn't put anything in the answer, but in apology for the accidental-pavloving, let me see if I can help you find the right tag to condition yourself to.

I have a few different tags for my stuff:

#young justice: deathly weapons is the general tag where I put everything related to this fic (writing updates, ask responses, things from other people et cetera). This tag can get a bit... let's say enthusiastically cluttered so here are some sub-tags to help you filter for what you want:

#yj:dw is the tag I use exclusively for new releases - chapters or new artworks to go with current/future chapters. This is the one to look to for "official updates".

#writing update is the tag I use when talking about Works In Progress - prose writing on the next queued chapter or outlining work on future chapters. Posts tagged as #yj:dw don't get the #writing update tag, so you can filter either depending on what you want to see.

#YJ:DW Meta is a tag which I use for non-fic analytical content (character studies, world-building etc) if you want to see me go full nerd about this.

I am also delighted to shout out #art of my stuff because this site is wonderful and full of amazing people who have made fanart for Deathly Weapons. Fanart. Of my stuff. Not to get parasocial but I love them, they're amazing. Go show their work some love!

In the meantime, here is a compiled fic recs and meta post if you want some DW-adjacent content to tide you over.

Hope this helps you find something satisfying to chew on while you wait for me to emerge from the mines again.

You are amazing, but I am constantly having the rug pulled out from under me when I see a reblog about YJ:DW and I go, "ooooh... update?" and then it is not. I have been conditioned like pavlov's dogs and if you keep crying wolf on me without there actually being a wolf, I will be going feral. I hope you feel better soon; you are loved and appreciated!

.

Anonymously tell me how you feel about me. I can’t reply, I just have to read it and post it.

[threewaysdivided]

So, in YJDW, Danny is still very much a solo-hero type. I imagine that's going to potentially cause some issues down the road, both with learning how to work as an equal with other supers and bonding with them since his own hero development is so different from the Team's. No mentor, the discomfort that the nature of his powers can cause, the mixed history he DOES have that's public knowledge, and the lack of real exposure to the rest of the superhero sphere of influence.

(Young Justice: Deathly Weapons)

So this is interesting because you're completely right; those are things that should complicate Danny's interactions (and potential integration) with established heroes and hero teams.

However, the specifics of Danny's circumstances and road to joining the Team in Deathly Weapons kind of alleviate or sidestep a lot of those potential issues. At cost of giving him a new catalogue of complexes to deal with but beggars can't be choosers.

I think we discussed a few of the particulars a while ago in this post thread with @doodly-doop, so I might gloss over some of those finer points here.

Suffice to say that, if it was a immediately-post-series Phantom, there's a lot of potential stumbling blocks to do with him already having ingrained instincts/ strategic impulses/ reflexes/ fighting styles that are specifically geared towards him being the lone powerhouse/ point guard/ tank in a group of otherwise Badass Normal support members. (Compare Superboy, who might be best suited to the specific role of tank/ threat management but who knows most of his teammates can take hits that would incapacitate regular humans). There's also potential for personality clashes given that Phantom is somewhat used to being the de facto leader in his own environment, and also the possibility for him to be carrying some resentment over being left un-mentored or having to deal with ghost problems entirely by himself if it becomes clear that the others knew something was happening in Amity but chose not to intervene.

If you want fic recs, Communication Issues (DP x YJ) by @nerdofspades is specifically about the resentment thing, and the solo-act-joins-team-operation issue is something that comes up in MirrorandImage's DP x TT fic Ghost of A Chance.

When it comes to Deathly Weapons, the details of the setup have kind of brushed aside some of those issues or reduced their severity. Danny's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad nine months of being a fugitive in between leaving Amity and finding Batman (which we will learn more about in coming chapters) has made him a lot more amenable to feedback and groupwork.

Rather than being fresh from overt frontline heroing he's spent almost a year in hiding; a time where he and the rest of Team Phantom had to work a lot more collaboratively, in situations where Danny was very conscious that the others' skills and connections were just as, if not more important than his powers (which at times were even a liability since they could potentially be tracked). Trying to pull a solo-act or otherwise splitting up the group is a really risky move when you're being hunted, and it curbed a lot of the impulses that might have led him to break ranks or otherwise deviate from a team plan without checking in first.

It's also worn down a lot of his pride in a few ways. First, simply traveling around America has made him much more conscious of how small scale he and Amity Park are, both geographically and in the grand scheme of heroism. It's something he thinks about in Chapter 15:

Everything here was too big for him - the manor, Gotham City, Batman and Robin, top-tier heroes... Sure, maybe back in Amity he'd been something special. Or at least, half of him might have been. But if months on the road had shown him anything it was that, in the eyes of the world, Amity Park was just another small, no-name town. Just like he was. Small-town. -Roads to Safe Places (Chapter 15)

There's also the fact that he's just... extremely tired. Being the de facto head of a group in a time of crisis is an exhausting level of responsibility, especially when you have no reliable fallbacks and prohibitively huge consequences for failure. In Chapter 8, Danny is very resistant to cooperating with Batman and Robin, but that's not pride that's survival mode: Danny and Co. endured the last nine months primarily by being aggressively self-reliant and not trusting other people. (There's also a little bit of grief and survivor's guilt in the mix: a sense that this is his torch to bear alone, and that it wouldn't be fair to pass the burden.)

Part of him desperately wanted somebody to step in, to take the load. But that wasn't how it worked. This was his mess. He couldn't just shove it off onto someone else because he wasn't up to the challenge. - Interference (Chapter 9)

Not only that but Team Phantom did not do well during their time on the run - they sacrificed a lot just to get out of Amity Park and were mostly met with more losses as they went - which Danny feels responsible for as the one who was supposed to be leading them. In some ways Phantom and his team went through their own nine-month equivalent to the Failsafe training exercise, and Danny walked away from it with a similar mindset:

I was desperate to be in charge. Not anymore. - Robin, YJS1 E17 Disordered

Once he accepts that he can safely take the help, the suggestion of being on a Team where Batman, Aqualad (and sometimes Robin) are ultimately the ones responsible for calling the shots is less likely to be met with a how dare you as much as an oh thank god.

On top of that, the Danny of Deathly Weapons has a touch of literal hero-worship going on. This Danny grew up with the cultural presence of heroes on Earth-16; from the history of the Justice Society, to living through the formation of the Justice League. By the time he had the accident that turned him into Phantom, Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash and Speedy would all have been publicly active as proteges for at least 6 months. And in the absence of a mentor of his own, well... I'm going to share a sneak-peak snippet from the CH21 draft:

Maybe it hit harder coming from other heroes.  From the kinds of people whose stories he’d looked to when he was first starting out - that some young, secret part of himself had fantasised might meet and understand him some day. - Equilibrium DRAFT (Chapter 21)

In combination, you might be able to see how the Danny of Deathly Weapons has been shifted just enough to the left of canon!Danny to play better with others. If anything, he's uncharacteristically passive and submissive in their first standalone mission due both to his unfamiliarity with the situation and stakes, and to all that baggage squashing him down. This is a Danny who has new raw patches exposed, but whose experiences have sanded away some of the edges that would otherwise have clashed with a teamwork setting.

It also helps that he's being placed on The Team specifically. Unlike say, the Teen Titans or Justice League, this is a covert squad that's doubling as a proving ground for starting proteges. Between Superboy, M'gann, Artemis and Zatanna they're pretty used to assimilating a mixed bag of powers and skills from members who don't have a lot of direct exposure to the rest of the superhero sphere. And because they're a covert squad whose main advantage lies in being unexpected and underestimated despite how often their plans seem to end in arson, they have their own motivation to stay as publicly invisible as they can manage, which not only lets Phantom operate with lower risk of being personally discovered, but also helps limit them and the League's potential exposure to ectophobic public sentiment.

That isn't to say that this Danny doesn't still carry some resentment or bitter feelings about how he's perceived and what he's been through (especially if someone whose name may or may not start with Kid and rhyme with Dash was to specifically antagonise him about it) but he comes to it with an additional nine months of perspective that make him more likely to respond to collaboration with a quiet sense of relief. At least once you can get past the defensive prickle and general awkwardness about accepting help.

This is all stuff I'm looking forward to elaborating on across the story and especially in the upcoming Flashpoints/ Combustion/ Equilibrium chapter set (CH19-21). It'll make more sense after those releases but hopefully this explains well enough for now.

Thanks for stopping by! 💜

[threewaysdivided]

Thinking about The Light

More thought exercises? More thought exercises.

You know the drill: in this house we are Season 1 only - let’s see what we can extrapolate from just the information available way back when.  You can consider this canon to the Deathly Weapons-verse if you like but I’m also a big fan of Death of the Author so feel free to ignore literally anything I say on this blog until/unless it appears in-story.

Let’s go:

What are the Light’s Overarching Values?

The Light’s recurring tagline is to “make humanity see the Light” or “bring humanity into the Light”, which can be decoded to mean driving humanity into “the next stage of evolution” and building Earth into a cosmic power.

In Auld Acquaintance, Vandal Savage gives the clearest explanation for why their organisation opposes the Justice League; he believes that the heroes are upholding (and perhaps even enforcing) a “calcified status quo”, and that by continuing to operate they have become “agents of stagnation” who allow weakness to persist, holding humanity back from the next stage of its evolution.

Here’s a question: Do they have a point?

Let’s break this down into some sub-questions:

Is the status quo bad?

Do the heroes exist to uphold or enforce the status quo?

Are the heroes doing harm by (accidentally or intentionally) upholding the status quo?

Are the heroes impairing humanity’s development?

1. Is the Status Quo bad?

This is argument that has the most validity.  There are real issues with the status quo of Season 1; we see crime, corruption, poverty, domestic abuse, racial supremacy, violent dictatorships, warmongering and war-profiteering among others.  Season 1’s Earth-16 is presented as fairly analogous to the real world of 2010 so it would be reasonable to assume it has many of the same underlying issues with structural and systemic inequality.

2. Do the Justice League exist to uphold or enforce the Status Quo?

From an outsider perspective it could be argued that the Justice League as an organisation don’t do much to meaningfully address the problems with the status quo.  The League claims to uphold the principles of “truth, liberty and justice” but operationally they’re most publicly involved in danger management, apprehension of super-criminals, disassembling large-scale organised crime, and disaster relief.  Some League heroes do overtly function as an extension of some kind of military or law enforcement organisation - for example, the Green Lantern Corps.  From this perspective, one could argue that heroes exist to stop the status quo from backsliding/ being disrupted but don’t do a lot to better it, or to effectively address the root causes of suffering.  

And for someone who empathises or agrees with the arguments of a figure who the Justice League has stopped, and who interprets this as the League condemning and silencing their ideology (rather than the actions it is being used to justify), they could come to see the League as existing to forcibly instate a specific status quo and set of values.

However, while this is a not-reasonable conclusion for someone with a limited in-universe perspective to reach, from the audience’s wider perspective we know it to be incomplete.  Behind the scenes and outside of public Justice League activities, many heroes are working to improve the status quo and its systems.  In-show Bruce Wayne (Batman) is acknowledged as an internationally active philanthropist, and general pop-culture knowledge holds that several others do grassroots work in their home-cities (either as civilians or openly as heroes).  From certain angles, “heroes” could be considered a single extrajudicial facet of a diffuse humanitarian effort; the publicly visible stopgap against things getting overtly worse, while the same people work to make systemic improvement more quietly through other avenues.  

The League also doesn’t have a single unified agenda or stance on the specifics of their mission and methods; as seen in Agendas, the actions of the organisation are decided democratically through a process of round-table debate and voting.  From general pop-culture knowledge of the heroes presented as core members of the League, a range of political and ideological backgrounds are represented.  In that regard, the Justice League is more of an administrative/ logistical body for efficient large-scale coordination and information-sharing than an institute with an active political agenda.  

Some additional fridge-logic nuance should also be noted: because of their position, heroes cannot be too overt in their politics or in agitating for societal change.  Heroes - particularly metahumans and aliens - are physically powerful and imposing, especially a large paramilitary body like the Justice League.  They have to walk a fine line to avoid being seen as a political or military threat, or to give their more politically-influential adversaries material to make that argument.  In order to retain the public and institutional sympathy needed to continue operating unimpeded, the League has to maintain some degree of outward image positioning themselves as apolitical defenders working with society and within the status quo.  Being outwardly seen as safe is a necessity of being allowed to continue operating.

3. Are the heroes doing harm by (accidentally or intentionally) upholding the Status Quo?

Not really.  An argument like this holds some weight in worlds like My Hero Academia - where heroism has become a widespread societally-integrated institute that is functionally a branch of law-enforcement, with a financial incentive to enforce the status quo and supress dissent - but in DC Comics heroes are still a fairly small movement with limited systemic power.  

Exact numbers vary depending on the canon but there are usually no more than a handful of individual heroes or a small team (<10) per major city, with many cities having no permanent resident hero.  Even on the scale of organisations like the Justice League (which, let’s be real, is small relative to most institutes), they don’t have the presence needed to be an oppressive force - let alone the inclination.

You could argue that the presence of heroes inadvertently creates more violence and expansion from “villains” - a risk that the Justice League themselves acknowledge during Agendas - but it’s kind of a non-argument.  While heroes do sometimes create their own “villains” this is fairly rare - a lot of criminals are motivated by personal goals that have nothing directly to do with the heroes, and some of the ones who claim to be “the monsters you created” would probably have slid into villainy anyway and are just shifting blame for their actions onto the nearest available authority.  (The Joker’s multiple-choice past being a prime example here).  The fact that some criminals use the heroes as scapegoats to justify their actions or alliances doesn’t make them liable for those crimes.

4. Are the heroes impairing humanity’s development?

No.  The Justice League uphold “truth, liberty and justice” - outside of opposing corruption, criminal actions and inhumane behaviour they do not arbitrarily block progress.  They may be opposed to the development of technology that has the potential to be used for harm but the opposition is to the potential misuse and damage, not to progress itself.

Nor are they stifling innovation.  Heroes exist to solve a very specific niche of problems; they are a supplement to existing systems, stepping in where the normal course of justice is failing/ being impeded and to manage immediate threats/ disasters that are too large to be easily handled by existing infrastructure, everyday civilians or communities.  The problems they solve are not problems that had other viable solutions at the time, and they do not treat the development of alternative solutions as “competition” to be eliminated.  The most legitimate argument is that the League hoard advanced technology (such as Zeta-transportation and holo-displays) for themselves rather than sharing it with the public, but even here they are not attempting to supress its use or distribution by others.

Vandal’s argument contains a more overt implication that heroes cause complacency because people become over-reliant on them to solve problems rather than using their own ingenuity/ developing resilience, but again the League doesn’t have the scope for this to be systemically true.  It’s the same bad-faith argument that can be used against any safety-net or preventative system/tool: “X is bad because people can rely on it rather than having to be fully individually self-reliant to survive Y”.  You might as well argue that oncologists are bad because people rely on them to help overcome cancer.

Let’s look at another angle: do the Light practice what they preach?

Are the Light addressing the problems with the status quo?

Are the Light working to progress humanity?

1. Are the Light addressing the problems with the Status Quo?

No.  All of the members are either indifferent to these problems, actively benefiting from unfair systems that they have a vested interest in maintaining, or intentionally doing harm.  Lex Luthor is an ultracapitalist war-profiteer who is openly self-aware about the moral bankruptcy and purely financial motivation of his actions in Targets.  Queen Bee is an iron-fisted dictator, using dubious claims and propaganda to justify annexing her country’s peaceful neighbours.  Ocean Master stoked the flames of the Purist racial supremacist movement in Atlantis as part of an attempted coup for the throne.  Ra’s Al Ghul runs a sect of assassins, engaging in “extortion, manipulation [and] power-broking”.  The Brain is largely removed from the world, preferring to conduct unethical experiments in pursuit of his interests in bioenhancement, immortality and the mind.  Klarion is an overtly sadistic Lord of Chaos who would happily turn the world into a “personal playground of pandemonium”.

All of these people have the power to influence the status quo and address some of the issues but they are not interested in doing so.  When they do attempt to make change it’s usually for the worse, in service of personal gain.

2. Are the Light working to progress humanity?

Not really.  This one’s a little more complex as the big-picture scope and ultimate goal of their actions is not clear, but for the most part each are shown pursuing largely personal endeavours outside of the unified plan for Starrotech - which is itself a mind-control device intended to disrupt the Justice League rather than something to benefit the people.  All of them in some way have the resources and/or influence to improve the lives of people in their sphere and/or contribute to technological advancement but we never see them doing this; more often than not they cause harm, and any good done is an incidental side-effect of pursuing another goal (e.g. the Rhelasian peace summit).

To summarise:

Claims of harm used to justify dissembling the Justice League are a gross overstatement/ wilful misunderstanding at best and illegitimate at worse

The Light are demonstrably not working to address any of the criticisms that have legitimacy

Many of the Light’s actions either directly or indirectly cause far more harm

From this we can draw 2 potential conclusions:

1. The Light’s claims are an empty placard used to lend a veneer of legitimacy to selfish pursuits

This seems very likely given the composition of their membership, their actions and that several members are openly self-aware of their wrongdoing.  

The following statement could be easily applied to the narrative of the Light: “The moral of this new story is freedom over equality, and one freedom above all – the freedom to be unbothered by others' needs.”  In holding the members of the Light accountable for their actions, the Justice League “impinges” on the desired “freedom” to indiscriminately do what they please in pursuit of selfish goals.  It is not hard to interpret the Light as reactionary and their rhetoric as the bad-faith reactionary argument that being held accountable is a form of oppression.

This would explain why they do not propose an alternate solution beyond dissembling the League and eliminating/ restricting heroism.  They don’t actually want to refine the system, they just want to remove a control.

2. The Light subscribe to a different moral/ ideological framework, which has diagnosed a different “problem” and is prescribing a different “solution”

This is not mutually exclusive to the first idea.  While the Light is an organisation, it is composed of individuals who each have their own personal position towards the mission of the whole.  Some may be in it purely as an alliance of convenience against a common enemy, others because they believe in “the cause” to varying degrees.

But to make sense of the Light as a unit you need to make sense of the ideology driving its formation.  Which is to say, the ideology of its leader.

Vandal Savage and Survival of the Fittest

Vandal Savage is positioned at the leader of the light - he is designated L1, he is the one who brought them together and he is the character who most explicitly vocalises their stated motivation.  The Light’s purported ideological stance is specifically a reflection of Vandal’s personal ideological stance.

What is Vandal’s ideology?

Functionally it is a belief in “survival of the fittest”.  This is the overt explanation he gives - that by protecting humanity from dangerous situations the heroes allow the “weak” to continue existing, causing human evolution to stagnate.  

Implicitly, his stance is that the heroes should stand aside and allow humanity to face danger directly, so that the weak can die and the survivors can build a stronger species.

Is there any validity to this?

No.  He’s categorically wrong.

Firstly, this is a basic failure to understand what “survival of the fittest” means.  It has nothing to do with individual strength or athletic “fitness” - what it actually means is that natural selection favours individuals and populations with traits that are best suited to efficiently survive in the ecological niche they inhabit.  It is a process of random mutation and the primary success metric is simply that the organism survive long enough to pass that mutation on to the next generation.  Physical strength or aggression are not prerequisites for this; in fact, both can become liabilities in excess (high musculoskeletal mass becomes deleterious if the environment cannot meet the nutritional needs to maintain it, while overly-aggressive individuals will be unlikely to successfully attract a mate).  Some of the “fittest” organisms on Earth are incredibly physically weak and incredibly vulnerable to sudden changes in their niche.

Secondly, humanity has been evolving successfully around Vandal Savage in a way that disproves his thesis.  Natural selection has been at work, it has been selecting for the traits that make humanity best suited to survive on Earth, and (on the whole) the traits it has selected for are ones that make humans pro-social, intelligent, compassionate, communicative, collaborative, adaptive and resilient.  Evolution selected for a species of individuals who care about others, and whose ability to develop tools and pass on information outstrips the need for raw physical might - a collective that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.  (To use a real-world example, there is a reason why women survive so long after menopause and why we feel compelled to care for people who are visibly elderly/ frail - it benefits the population to have individuals with accumulated life experience).

Within DC comics’ alien-inhabited universe there are also a large number of other social species with community structures.  Pro-social/ tribal behaviour is one of the most commonly selected-for evolutionary traits across the galaxy (just look at the diversity of species that comprise Green Lantern Corp membership), with compassionate pro-social behaviour being a quite common variant.  Vandal isn’t just wrong about physical strength being the end-goal of life on Earth - he’s wrong on a cosmic scale.

There is also an irony to Vandal Savage being a self-proclaimed champion of human evolution. Vandal himself cannot evolve.  He can adapt, certainly, he can learn and he can grow on a physical/psychological/emotional level, but evolution does not occur on the scale of a single individual, even a long-lived one.  As an immortal individual and static point, Vandal will always be limited to the constraints of his own starting nature; human evolution will inevitably leave him behind no matter what direction it takes.

How might someone like Vandal have come about this mindset?

Vandal is indeed limited by his origins and starting point.  He is a relic of early-humanity; a man who fought a bear and won, who was big and strong - at best a warrior-protector type - and who gained immortality/invulnerability through exposure to meteor-radiation that either made him into a mutate or awakened a latent proto-metagene.  

This was a random event - not necessarily the “next phase of human evolution” but simply the acquisition of a trait that offset the personal negative consequences of his more aggressive, uncompassionate and antisocial sides.  But that invulnerability elevated him above his peers and gave him a reason to see himself as exceptional.  It bred within him a narcissism, and a belief that his mindset and experiences were either universal or superior.  

And then humanity moved on.  It evolved, and that evolution selected for a more communal, more pro-social, more compassionate population; whose skills at collaboration, coordination and tool-building surpassed the need for raw brute strength and domination.  Not only that but other meta-humans and mutates began to emerge - ones who chose to use their abilities in compassionate, pro-social, humanitarian ways.  Vandal was left behind, no longer exceptional in any way that mattered.  

But a world in which Vandal Savage was not “the fittest” was intolerable to his ego.  Rather than considering that maybe he was flawed, that he needed to revaluate himself, adapt, grow and place value in other things, he became reactionary.  Instead of accepting the evolution occurring before his eyes, he disdained it as wrong, as enabling weakness, as a regression. Vandal may have adapted the rhetoric of his worldview to fit within the new language of modern science but he’s never actually questioned the core premise.  He actively rejects the evidence in front of him, seeking to drag humanity back to a mythologised past, where might is power and Vandal Savage is the apex of the species.

Underneath all the attempts at intellectual rationalisation, this is ultimately the validation-seeking tantrum of a reactionary narcissist, whose meta-abilities let him enact it on an immortal and cosmic scale.

Here is a small truth Evil is mundane.

What is the ultimate goal of The Light?

While never explained in-show the most logical answer is that it’s probably a form of intergalactic colonialism. This tracks with the membership of the Light - ultra capitalists, unethical scientists, dictators, power-hungry princes - and is a reasonable fusion of the “survival of the strong” and “evolved humanity” ethos.  

It also aligns well with this reading of Vandal - the idea of conquering the universe, dominating all the warlike species and subjugating the peaceful ones to become the ultimate “apex predator” would flatter his ego and strength-based exceptionalism.  It also tracks with traits of narcissism; one of which being a perception that others exist to support and serve oneself.  In Vandal’s mind, humanity will be better off reshaped in his image: Earth as a cosmic power, not through trade or innovation or diplomacy but through might.

Let’s ask a couple of other questions:

If Vandal is immortal then why only form the Light now?

There are a few potential factors here.  

Firstly, the tools he needs are now readily available. True global interconnectedness, communication and space travel were only properly refined in the last two centuries - before that he would have been limited to operating on a much smaller scale, over much longer timespans.  The last two centuries also saw large leaps in technology, science and warfare.  In the modern age Vandal can source allies from around the world, communicate with them instantaneously over distance and make use of a number of resources.  Starrotech is the product of multiple advancements that would have until recently been impossible for even powerful people to easily obtain.  

Secondly, this is the age of metahumans and heroes.  The last two generations saw the prominent appearance and then public acceptance of heroes on Earth 16, and development of coordinated groups (first the Justice Society and then the Justice League) combined with global news media spreading the word.  This would likely have provided the inspiration for Vandal’s plot of using the heroes as tools.  It also would have made him more reactionary; the presence of people who were exceptional in similar ways to himself and who chose to use their gifts compassionately challenging both his view of human nature and his place as “the fittest”, spurring him to action.

A Theory T.O. Morrow and his Reds may have been an early test.  Vandal may not have directly recruited him but he could have made contact and planted the suggestion of using Androids to infiltrate the Justice Society - an experiment he could observe from afar.   It would also account for Morrow’s ambitions diverging into a plan to wipe out humanity - Vandal planted the seed but he didn’t have control over what it would ultimately grow into.

It is also possible that Vandal made smaller scale attempts in the past, but this likely would have been hamstrung by both technological limitations and by the personalities involved. Vandal’s preferred allies would be people who share similar strength-based antisocial worldviews but those groups are essentially doomed to tear themselves apart with infighting eventually - after all, there can only be one “fittest”.

What do the Light’s loyalties look like?

The 7 principal members of the Light have different motivations for joining, spanning from purely personal alliances of convenience to varying degrees of belief in Vandal’s mission.  These factors will determine the closeness of their allegiance and the conditions under which they might turn on the others.

It’s also worth noting that all of the members of the Light are at least somewhat antisocial and will likely abandon or even betray the group out of self-preservation if needed.

Vandal Savage The originator of the ideology.  He will remain loyal to it but may turn on the others if he perceives them as no longer useful, as “weak” or as a potential liability/ threat to himself, his ego or the cause.

Lex Luthor Luthor has a number of potential personal and ideological reasons for joining.  As an ultra-capitalist he stands to economically benefit from their colonial schemes.  As someone with political ambitions, the Light’s rise to power as leaders of the “new humanity” would appeal to him.  Luthor is also often depicted as xenophobically motivated by a fear of Superman - a projection of his own mindset, which cannot conceive of someone using their power for pure altruism - something that aligns well with Vandal’s reactionary strength-based mindset.

Luthor will potentially turn on the others if he believes doing so is a more financially or politically profitable move.

Ra’s Al Ghul Ra’s alignment will depend on the specifics of the character; his depictions range from a brutal, villainous “demon” to a more sympathetic anti-villain with environmental motivations.  What little is seen in Young Justice seems to swing more towards a calculating villain.

Ra’s often has a strength-based worldview, something that would resonate with Vandal’s mission:  though they may diverge on the details, Ra’s has no great love for humanity in its current state and would have reasons to see them as weak.  As the leader of an assassin sect, he has a potential business interest in intergalactic warfare as it generates a need for espionage and sabotage.

In canon it seems that Ra’s is withholding some information from the Light, as he explicitly knows Batman’s identity but does not appear to have shared this with the rest.  He canonically has family, Talia Al Ghul appearing in the YJS1 companion comics.  He also often has some degree of honour-code (if not a moral code), and a loyalty to his Shadows.

Ra’s will likely hold true to any agreement he has made, but may turn on the others if they go back on their word, if their actions severely violate his personal code or reveal them to be hypocrites, or if he believes they pose a threat to his Shadows or his family.

Queen Bee Queen Bee’s motivations and allegiance to the Light are somewhat unclear.  Her personal motivations seem mostly concerned with retaining power in Bialya and acquiring Qurac as a territory.  As a dictator holding power through military might and propaganda, it is possible that she is sympathetic to Vandal’s ideology and may stand to politically and materially benefit from the Light’s intended rise to power.

Interestingly, the Light seems to have more interest in Queen Bee’s connections than her own skills and abilities; making use of Bialyan locales and the more powerful telepathy of her second-in-command, Psimon.  It is possible that the Light could turn on her if they were to require an equivalent alternative ally and supply of resources.

Queen Bee may turn on or abandon the Light if they do not provide adequate support to her ambitions in Qurac, or if she believes their plans will require her to cede power without equivalent returns.

Ocean Master/ Prince Orm Ocean Master’s reasons for allying with the Light are not explained.  He seems personally motivated by jealousy toward his half-brother, King Orin (Aquaman), and a desire to supplant him on the throne of Atlantis. It is unclear what the Light are offering him in return, although the promise of gaining political power through alternative avenues, or the potential to discredit and unseat Orin as part of dissembling the Justice League may be driving him.

Like Queen Bee, Orm seems more useful to the Light for his position and sphere of influence than his specific personal skillset; he provides a foothold in Atlantis and the ability to monitor and potentially influence Orin’s court in his capacity as Prince Orm.  The Light may turn on him should he fall out of Orin and Mera’s favour, or if they acquire another Atlantean ally with similar reach.

Orm may turn on or abandon the Light if they do not sufficiently support his attempts for the throne.

The Brain The Brain seems rather detached from the main activities of the Light - mostly involved in their experiments with Kobra Venom and bioenhancement rather than Starrotech. He appears to be their biochemical and neurology expert - being the one to suggest that the Kobra Venom sample could be reverse engineered - yet it is Luthor who seems to be driving the operational side of Project Cadmus.  

It is possible that he scientifically agrees with Vandal’s Darwinian argument.  However he may also be involved for more amoral, transactional reasons; content to provide the Light with scientific services and advice so long as they provide the resources and facilities for him to pursue his own unethical research interests.  This may explain his relative distance from their central plan.

It is unlikely that the Brain will diverge from the Light on moral or ideological grounds, but he may turn on or abandon them if he believes they are cutting him off.

Klarion Klarion is here for shits and giggles; he allied himself with the Light because he thought it would be “fun”.  As an immortal Lord of Chaos who cannot be contained, they have very little to offer that he might materially want.  The Witch-boy is a wildcard loose cannon - impulsive, impatient and childish - both their powerhouse and biggest potential liability.

He will stay so long as it remains entertaining and will either abandon or turn on them on them if it becomes too “boring”, if he thinks the alternative would be “more fun” or if he believes they might try to contain him.

A Different Take on the 16 Hours

For the sake of people just tuning in: I don’t really vibe with the direction Season 2 took - I think both the heroes’ and villians’ plans are more hole than plot and end up much less compelling than they had the potential to be.  So, let’s try something different:

How about this?

When the Light sent the Justice League members off-world for 16 hours, they sent them to directly adjacent solar systems and galactic arms (with the exception of Green Lantern who may have been sent further in attempt to divert the attention of the Corps).  The intent of this was to extort resource-rich alien civilisations; demonstrating the strength of the controlled heroes before demanding that the inhabitants being paying protection tithes to Earth, with the threat that the full might of the League would descend upon those who did not comply.

This would accomplish several things:

The Light could quietly collect resources from any planet that complied, allowing them to stockpile wealth and alien technology to serve their future plans.

If any of the threatened planets attempted to contact Earth in protest it would reputationally damage the Justice League - shattering public trust by “revealing” that their supposed protectors had apparently been racketeering for personal gain outside of the public eye.   In order to counter this, the Justice League would have to definitively prove that they had been controlled against their will - an admission to having been severely compromised that would weaken faith in a different direction and create opportunities for the Light’s publicly visible members to smear them as dangerously incompetent.

If any of the threatened planets attempted a military retaliation it could accomplish some combination of A) setting the Justice League up for targeted elimination, and/or B) present a “common threat” for Earth to militarily rise up against, allowing the Light to stoke demand for their own weapons-tech (bionic limbs, Kobra-Venom, Genomorphs etc.), potentially rise to power and drive humanity into a more aggressive state that would justify abandoning the “weak”.

Not only would this variant strategy offer multiple potentially beneficial outcomes, it would also yield results on a faster timeframe.  By acting on adjacent systems, effects would likely be seen within a year or two at most - sufficient time for the Light to make preparations and set other support plans in motion, while also allowing just enough time to pass for the Justice League’s own investigations to potentially start turning cold, opening them up to be blindsided.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today.  Let me know your thoughts - or if you want other meta I did a S1-Only Take on Martian Colourism.

[threewaysdivided]

Martian Bigotry in Deathly Weapons

Have a thought-exercise I did while ruminating on some YJS1 lore-implications for a couple of M’gann scenes in my Deathly Weapons fanfic.  (You don’t need to know this for the story BTW, it’s just a background worldbuilding thing I sometimes do to help ground characters/ systems/ conversations in a consistent internal context.)  This one turned up some interesting ideas so I figured I’d share it.

Two quick things first:

Content warning: this meta is going to deal with prejudice and bigotry. Fictional prejudice toward made-up aliens but there may be parallels to real-life racism, ableism, queerphobia etc. so if this is a potentially upsetting topic for you then please take care.

I recognise that canon has made a decision, but given that I strongly disagree with most of the writing decisions made post Season 1 I have elected to ignore 99% of it.  Yes, I am aware of all 3 sequels. No we are not doing that. This is an active choice, don’t make me tap the sign.  We shall be heading down an alternate path, to hopefully find something that is compelling in a different way.

Let’s go.

The complexity of White Martians in Young Justice

Where other DC Comics stories frequently present Green and White Martians as distinct species/sub-species that cohabit Mars (either explicitly or by implication of their visual design) Young Justice creates complexities by framing them as the same race/species, with White Martians being a minority group within the Green Martian majority.  

This is presented very explicitly in how the issue is introduced during the episode Targets; during a classroom discussion where Conner questions the conflict between North and South Rhelasia, noting that “they’re all humans - I mean, Rhelasians”, M’gann reveals to him telepathically that “It’s the same on Mars.  The White Martian minority are treated as second-class citizens by the Green majority.” This framing directly positions the White Martian situation on Mars as closely analogous to racism on Earth.

Other implications within Season 1 and its tie-in companion comics support this reading.  While M’gann did lie to J’onn about her ethnicity - and the series does note that J’onn probably missed this on account of having 300 nieces/nephews that he’s not especially close to -  the series never actively refutes their blood relation (compared to Green Arrow and Artemis, whose relationship is revealed very early to be a cover story).  Since J’onn is biologically Green, this implies the existence of mixed-colour families; or possibly that White Martianism is some form of mutation (similar to albinism).

M’gann’s own characterisation is also deeply rooted in her experience with Martian anti-White bigotry. M’gann’s attachment to the Hello Megan! TV show, her strong desire to please others/be accepted and her extreme panic at the idea of people learning her status (to the point that it becomes something she is willing to harm her teammates to conceal and is eventually blackmailed over) are all intrinsically linked to her experiences as a White Martian growing up among the Green on Mars.  In some ways, M’gann’s personal narrative across Season 1 is about finding acceptance in a new community after leaving a place of oppression, with the potential set-up for further development about reclaiming identity after a lifetime of enduring prejudice.

All of this combines to make Young Justice’s presentation of White Martians markedly more complex and delicate to handle than many other iterations.  While there can be questionable elements/ implications/ coding present in a story having a designated “pure evil” species (such as Tolkien’s Orcs) or “mostly evil” sub-species who live in separate communities/ societies (see some versions of Drow or Dark Elves) these can also be accepted as a simple conceit of the fiction.  Meanwhile, Young Justice overtly frames its White Martians as a discriminated racial minority within a majority that they are socially integrated with.  The nature of this framing also positions White Martians as near-entirely sympathetic; at no point during Season 1 (or the tie-in comics) do any of the characters explain why White Martians are regarded so poorly, nor do we see any indication that White Martians pose a potential risk or threat that would reasonably warrant differential treatment*.  By implication, the Martian culture of Young Justice is one of systemic prejudice towards a seemingly undeserving minority -  strongly analogous to racial discrimination in humans - in which all Martians (even sympathetic ones like J’onn) are at least somewhat complicit.

As a result of this, any commentary Young Justice tries to make on the nature and/or validity of Martian anti-White prejudice has the potential to become a comment on the nature and/or validity of real-life prejudice.  It also means that any attempts to retcon White Martians to be inherently dangerous/ threatening/ predatory in order to excuse or justify the discrimination/ oppression could accidentally resonate with and implicitly validate real-life discriminatory rhetoric that villainises minorities.

*While M’gann is noted as an exceptionally powerful telepath, the problem is framed as her raw lack of experience/ training rather than an innate volatility. Her Season 1 personality is not inherently manipulative/ malicious (although she occasionally struggles to grasp human boundary standards), nor does she show a lack of capacity for compassion/ empathy/ respect. Most of her negative moments in Season 1 can be reasonably attributed to accident, misunderstanding or an act of desperation rooted in her understandable - if irrational - fear of being “outed” and ostracised.

Other details from canon

Skin Colour on Mars The companion comics (Volume 1, authors: Art Baltazar and Mike Norton) note that there are three colours of Martian; Green being predominant, with smaller numbers of White and Red.  

M’gann’s “true White Martian form” does not have any noticeably significant anatomical differences to the true form of Green Martian (B’arzz O’oom shown in S2), aside from colouration. The use of purplish viscera-adjacent colouring on parts of M’gann’s true form, combined with vein lines, suggest that blood and tissues are more visible through the skin of White Martians - something that aligns more to a form of Albinism than an opaque white pigment being produced in place of green.

It’s also worth noting that this base skin colour does not seem to affect a Martian’s ability to present as other colours, since M’gann is able to convincingly mask as Green for most of the season, fooling not only humans but also seemingly her Green Martian uncle.  (Contrast Beast Boy in multiple incarnations, whose skin/hair colour is always green no matter what form he shifts into).

The Primary Experience of Anti-White Bigotry In Targets M’gann describes White Martian’s as being treated as “second-class citizens”, directly comparing to tensions between human racial/national/ethnic groups.  The companion comic also notes that “some [on Mars] do not see White Martians as equal” and that “the treatment of White Martians especially was horrible”.

Specifically, M’gann cites an experience of “constant rejection” and being afraid that the Team would never accept her if they knew “what [she] truly was” as the reasons for concealing her status.  In Image she mentions that her attachment to the Hello Megan! TV show was partially the product of having a lonely childhood.

This suggests that the day-to-day experience of anti-White racism is less one of active violence and more of persistent shunning, ostracization, isolation and general social rejection.

Extra-textual elaborations While not explored within the original canon, extra-textual information suggests that at least some members of the original production team intended for M’gann to be one of two White Martian children in a large mixed family of a White father and Green mother, with J’onn being her maternal uncle. 

Extra textual statements also mention that there is supposedly no colour-spectrum in the offspring of mixed parents - children are always one colour or the other with no correlation between shade and “percentage heritage”.

Discrimination is mentioned to be purely based on individual colouration.  While Red Martians only appear as a passing note in the companion comic (simply mentioning that they exist), extra-textual statements suggest that they were intended to be a Royal/ Noble class.

Unreliable narrators A complexity of understanding the situation on Mars is that M’gann is an actively unreliable narrator on the subject since she spends most of the Season pretending to be a Green Martian from a purely Green family.  As a result it is unclear when M’gann is speaking honestly about her own experiences but in an indirect manner, when she is describing the treatment of White Martians semi-honestly but in-character as a “liberal-minded Green Martian”, when she is saying something about Mars because it reflects what she thinks a Green Martian would say even though it conflicts with her own opinion, and when she is engaging in active deception to hide her status.

Within the companion comic, M’gann claims to have 12 sisters - a statement repeated within the show - and 17 brothers, but their colours are never referenced since at this point M’gann is still pretending that her family is “pure Green”.  Within the comic several direct lies are also present; all Martians (M’gann included) are presented as having the humanoid forms that she and J’onn preferentially take on Earth, M’gann claims to have always had a great relationship with J’onn, and claims to have won her protégé-ship via a rigorous contest.  (It’s also worth noting that Wally is an overtly unreliable narrator in this comic; telling a very glorified and rosy version of his origin, in direct contrast to the much less positive story the panels are showing).

Alien Biology Makes Things Complicated

The ubiquity of shapeshifting and telepathy among Martians of all colours introduce some significant differences from any real-life models of prejudice.

Cosmetic Discrimination and Status When Everyone Can Shapeshift Prejudices are often attached to the fact that certain physical traits are inherent and cannot be changed (or at least cannot be changed without borderline-prohibitive levels of effort, expense and/or medical intervention).  Similarly, status-based classism is usually rooted in the status symbol being a limited resource whose access can be gatekept to/by the “superior” classes - and which usually falls out of favour/ becomes derided once that resource becomes widely accessible to “common people” (e.g. use of imported spices in English cooking).

However, with shapeshifting being a ubiquitous ability among Martians, day-to-day skin colour is neither a fixed trait, nor a limited resource.  It also doesn’t seem like there is any significant cost or limitation to holding a shapeshifted form since M’gann and J’onn consistently hold non-native forms even when alone (with M’gann remaining shapeshifted as “Miss Martian” even when unconscious) and never express any concern about hitting a limit that would cause them to revert back.  Nothing would prevent any Martian from cosmetically presenting as any of the other colours; indeed Martians could do away with the tri-colour system entirely by presenting across the spectrum of all colours their shapeshifting is capable of.

This suggests that 1) there is some form of social convention/ pressure that leads Martians to preferentially present as their birth colour and 2) there is some metaphysical significance assigned to birth-colour that persists regardless of later cosmetic colour shifts.

The Other Among the Population Prejudice is also a result of othering; an “us vs them” mindset that treats other demographics as fundamentally different/ foreign to or on some level less human than one’s own group, despite the fact that - beneath small superficial differences - all human beings are fundamentally homoousian (of the same substance). Part of dismantling prejudice is the recognition that all other people are as real and human as oneself, and therefore equally deserving of autonomy and respect.

Since Martians are telepathic and communicate mind-to-mind, and the three demographics are societally integrated (rather than separated into pure-colour communities) it might be expected that any discrimination based solely on superficial skin colour would quickly be overcome by the recognition that members of all three colour-groups are the same in mind.  It’s also worth noting that the two minorities are seemingly treated very differently - Red being privileged where White are disparaged - rather than being seen as equally threatening to the Green majority.

While it is possible that Martians’ longevity and mental interconnectedness is allowing a historical prejudice to perpetuate through the community, this may also suggest that there are some slight but significant differences between the three colours (at a population level if not an individual one) that lend just enough legitimacy to these biases for them to persist unquestioned. 

Identifying Base Colour When Everyone Can Shapeshift Martians seem to have some ability to identify each other mentally; shape-shifting for play is apparently a common game that is seen as harmless since the other Martians can identify the person regardless of the physical guise they take.

It is unclear if this unique “mental signature” automatically conveys the Martian’s birth colour.  The fact that the three colours are treated as different classes differently suggests that there is some mechanism by which colour is tracked within the community - otherwise White Martians could simply mask as Green to avoid discrimination, and both White and Green Martians might attempt to present as Red to gain preferential treatment.  

However M’gann also seems to believe that she has successfully lied to J’onn about her colouring, as one of her fear-visions features him turning on her and saying that she must return to Mars now that he knows the truth.  While it is never confirmed whether J’onn actually knew M’gann’s status from the start and was simply waiting for her to tell him (similar to when Conner found out in Bialya), this does suggest that the possibility of Martians concealing their birth-colour from others on an individual level is at least plausible enough for M’gann to believe it into her mid/late teens.

How Anti-White Bigotry Manifests in Deathly Weapons

Headcanon time. Let’s see what we can build with these pieces and parameters:

Mechanisms of Martian Birth-Colour In the DW-verse, Martian birth-colour is determined by genes carried on the same genetic locus as some secondary mutations governing telepathic and magical affinity.  While colour inheritance doesn’t follow classic Mendelian dominant-recessive patterns (based on the ratio of Green to White Martians in M’gann’s family) the Green trait dominates to a large degree, and the Red trait also dominates over the White trait.

This shared locus does not mean that colours and abilities are 100% correlated - having one trait does not guarantee having the other - but it means that there is a higher statistical likelihood of traits appearing together.  (Similar to how Coeliacs disease and Type 1 Diabetes act as increased risk factors for each other).

In this case, White and Red carriers are more likely to have a stronger connection to the source of Martians’ telepathic/ magical abilities (in fact it’s more likely that Green colouring is co-located with a mild power dampening factor that is absent from the Locus in the other two).  However the genes that code Red birth-colour co-locate with secondary factors that make the power easier to control.  Meanwhile the White Locus has a higher likelihood of lacking all three factors; colour, dampener and stabiliser.

Under this system, both Red-born and White-born Martian populations are proportionally more powerful than Green-born Martians.  However among powerful White Martians there is a higher proportion of individuals with a less stable handle on those powers.

White Martians are not necessarily more dangerous or less moral, they just need more accommodation in the form of training and support when learning to manage their powers.   But placed under the same stress conditions an untrained Red Martian is more likely to present as a natural prodigy, where an untrained White Martian may seem destructive, volatile or preternaturally unlucky.

This provides the shred of legitimacy from which the rest of pro-Red, anti-White Martian prejudice is built.

The Narrative of Bigotry Birth colour was assigned metaphysical value loosely derived from the power issue above; Green being seen as normal, Red as a sign of favour/ blessing and White as an ill-omen/ curse.  This started off in early Martian society (prior to a proper understanding of inheritance, heredity, genetics or disability) and evolved into a set of ingrained systemic biases.  

Over time, moral qualities began to be attached to colouring; White in particular being seen as inherently lacking in moral fibre.  White Martians also came to be viewed as intellectually inferior; being perceived as too stupid and/or lazy to properly control themselves, rather than recognising that White Martians are disproportionately likely to be struggling with a challenging burden of power-management.

As Martian powers are tied to their emotional and mental state, this creates a vicious cycle. Rather than being properly accommodated and given techniques to manage their higher power burden, White Martians are left under-supported while being treated in a way that increases agitation, anxiety and distress - i.e. conditions likely to trigger disruptive power malfunction in any Martian.  Effectively White Martians are set up to fail, and instances of failure are taken as evidence to support the prejudiced narrative and justify further oppression, priming the cycle to continue.

(Ironically, Red Martians - who are disproportionately likely to inherit a combination of manageable and stable powerfulness - are the ones with the most access to resources and support.  The privileged become more privileged, the oppressed become more oppressed; again, vicious cycles.)

Treatment of White Martians in Deathly Weapons

General Attitude Anti-White bigotry largely manifests as a combination of contempt, condescension, disgust and shunning.  White Martians are stereotyped as inherently less moral and intelligent, so even more-benign treatment tends to be condescending in an “it’s not your fault you’re inferior” or an “I didn’t realise someone like you could do that” fashion.  There are some who see White Martians as having naturally malicious/ manipulative personalities.

Beyond being seen as inferior, White Martians are considered undesirable to be around; specifically as potentially dangerous, disruptive and/or unlucky to be in the presence of rather than bringing bad things only upon themselves.  This is partially rooted in the small number of real instances where a White Martian with more volatile telepathic/magical abilities lost control around others but this risk has become massively overinflated within the narrative of prejudice.  What is in actuality only a low chance for a small number of White Martians under specific circumstances ends up being treated as a near-inevitability of associating with any White Martian for an extended period (with “well you got lucky” being a common dismissal when this doesn’t happen).  As a result, White Martians are tolerated but typically excluded, shunned or ignored unless it is necessary to interact with them.  (This also contributes to White Martians being less well-socialised than the other colours on the whole, which folds back into perceptions of them as underdeveloped, strange and socially undesirable.)

All Martians are socialised into anti-White bigotry, something made more pervasive by the shared telepathic existence.  Since Anti-whiteness is so normalised, even tolerant partners/ parents/ children of White Martians may not initially recognise some of their own opinions and behaviours as anti-White microaggressions.  Even direct Green relatives of White Martians frequently fail to truly appreciate how relentlessly passively hostile Martian society is to White Martians, and how mentally exhausting it can be for White Martians to simply exist in that space.

Exploitation White Martians become an easy scapegoat for problems in Martian society.  By framing issues as a “White Martian problem” or focusing on real or perceived issues specifically to do with White Martians, Green and Red Martians are able to maintain an inflated sense of goodness and complacency (i.e. “there’s not a systemic problem in Martian society, it’s just a White Martian problem.”)  In some cases, White Martians are scapegoated in more overt ways; being accused of instigating bad behaviour in groups of other children when young, and easily blamed when items are lost or stolen.  (Something that some Green Martian children knowingly take advantage of.)

This makes White Martians more exploitable as a resource to the other colours.  Since White Martian suffering is somewhat normalised/ trivialised, there are fewer qualms about making them do tedious, unpleasant or dangerous menial tasks.  A more pernicious side is in threat management (either from predatory animals, elemental danger or the rare cases of violent internal conflict); the perception of White Martians as both societally low-value and “volatile loose cannons” making them doubly at risk of being used as a sort of high-power cannon-fodder first-wave in physical threat containment. (If they eliminate the problem, they spare the Red and Green Martians an inconvenience... and if they die well, it’s not that big of a loss).

There is also an insidious side in how Red Martians are incentivised to maintain this structure. Red Martians are, at a population level, disproportionately biologically privileged; making it easier for them to obtain positions of religious, economic and political power.  However, a White Martian who was properly accommodated and trained has not only the potential for the same raw power level but also possibly even greater control due to the mastery required to handle the tendency toward more volatile abilities.   A well-adjusted, well-trained White Martian potentially represents a political threat in how they not only disprove stereotypes but implicitly challenge the moral correctness of the current system, and draw attention to Red privilege.  As a result, Red and Green Martians can feel uneasy with/ threatened by the idea of White Martians as socially equal, and are unconsciously incentivised to keep White Martians under-supported, unaccommodated and oppressed in order to keep this threat from arising.

An interesting thought: This could have potentially thorny implications if M’gann were ever to return from Earth as an openly White Martian Hero trained and sponsored by a Green Martian Hero.

Identification of White Martians in DW

Beyond cosmetic appearance, birth colour does not inherently change the feeling of a Martian’s mind in the DW-verse.  While another Martian can uncover one’s colour if given permission to explore memories/ connect intimately with one’s mind, two Martians meeting alone for the first time would initially have to trust each other’s outward presentation.

White Martians are regularly clocked within the community they grew up in because the memory of their early years and the bias against/ association of their mind with their birth skin colour pervades the collective consciousness. In the DW-verse Martian children have only limited control over their shapeshifting until around age 4 in Martian years (12 Earth years).  This means most Martian children present as their birth colour during early childhood, long enough for an automatic association to become set in the minds of the people around them.

Even if a White Martian begins to mask and present as Green later in life, this collective awareness makes it extremely difficult to “pass” in their home communities.  Even well-intentioned family members can accidentally “out” White Martians with a misplaced or unintended thought.  On top of this, anti-White prejudice and the not-uncommon belief that White Martians are more malicious/ manipulative by nature means that attempting to pass as Green is often interpreted in the most bad-faith way possible (rather than simply an attempt to avoid being singled out and mistreated) and can result in a more overtly hostile rejection if caught. As a result, the majority of Martians simply choose to present as their birth colour in day-to-day life.

A White Martian could successfully pass as Green and live undetected if they chose to travel a long way from their birthplace and start anew - however this would mean entirely cutting ties with all friends, family and community members who knew them as White (a difficult and lonely prospect due to the deep mental intimacy of the family unit) and leave them vulnerable and without protection/ support should they be discovered so far from home.  Again, the perception of White Martians as potentially manipulative means that individuals and groups of notably smaller number than a standard Martian family unit tend to be regarded with some level of suspicion when they first arrive in a new community.

Linking back to canon This is how M’gann managed to initially fool J’onn, since they were separated from their community by the time he caught her aboard his ship and he didn’t know his extended family well enough to be able to immediately distinguish which of his 300-odd nieces and nephews were what colours.  However it is very possible that he did eventually realise that she was White prior to her telling the Team, and simply chose not to say anything until she did as a gesture of trust.

How White Martians Respond to Their Treatment

All Martians are socialised into anti-White bigotry in a way that is much stronger and more pervasive/ hard-to-escape due to Martian telepathy and the collective consciousness. Anti-Whiteness as an attitude pervades the communal mind-space as a persistent undercurrent in all aspects of life and language.

White Martians are more likely to recognise anti-White rhetoric but also tend to struggle with internalised anti-Whiteness more than human minorities struggle with internalised self-prejudices, due to constantly sharing a direct mental space with other Martians who both hold anti-White attitudes and who perceive them through the lens of anti-White prejudice and bigoted narratives; something that persistently reinforces those beliefs on both a conscious and unconscious level. (If 80% of people around you openly perceive you to be inherently lesser/ undesirable/ a monster, at what point do you start to believe it yourself?)

Responses from White Martians generalise into 4 major types:

Defeated Resignation: Many White Martians have somewhat unhappily made peace with their lot and resigned themselves to a life of keeping their head down, finding solace within their family unit.  These White Martians often have a “you need to accept that this is the way that it will be” mindset - they acknowledge the status quo as unfair but advocate for eking out what personal contentment they can find.

On some level many of these Martians have internalised the rhetoric that this is as much as they deserve and all they can aspire to.

Model Citizen: A smaller sister-group, these White Martians believe that by being the best representatives of their demographic that they can (well-behaved, polite, socially useful, nonconfrontational) they can carve a quiet path to respect, acceptance and equality.

As parents, these White Martians are mostly likely to put well-intentioned pressure on any White children to perform model behaviours as well.

While optimistic, in reality mostly this just upholds the status quo.

Benevolent Political Challenger:  A small number of  White Martians recognise the system as unfair and respond by bucking that system through intentionally presenting with Red or atypical colouring at all times; some going so far as to shift their anatomy and physical form to create non-Martian silhouettes.  #BeAubergineFuckTheSystem This is physically and telepathically harmless behaviour aimed to passively challenge and confront other Martians about the necessity of colour-classism.  These are the White Martians who are the most likely to also be actively agitating for societal change.

This is often successful in discomfiting Red/Green (and sometimes other, more passive, White) Martians but the decision to live in a permanently shapeshifted form - outside of play or camouflage - is also frequently dismissed/ derided as immature or simply attention-seeking.  

To live this way is an unapologetic political statement but it exposes them to a degree of danger as doing so can often mark one out as a White Martian and thus make them a target (something which in turn draws annoyance from Green Martians who occasionally choose to use colour display for costuming or self-expression).

Some White Martians find the idea of this lifestyle exhausting as they simply want acceptance and equality without being a public spectacle.

Resentful/ Angry Rebel: There is a small but vocal proportion of White Martians who openly resent the system and their Green community/ family members.  This is also expressing a desire for change but more in a way that releases feelings of societal impotence and powerlessness.

In some cases this manifests as being openly hostile toward and willing to start arguments with the other colours at the barest provocation.

Sometimes this anger is also directed at other White Martians if they are seen to be being too complicit or compliant instead of advocating for change.  (Angry Rebels hate Model Citizens.)

For a small number of individuals this turns into deliberately embracing and playing into the worst stereotypes in a kind of “is what you want?” challenge.  This is very much a case of “cutting off your nose to spite your face” since the main result is that they become examples used by Red and Green Martians to confirm and reinforce anti-White narratives.

Another small minority respond by doing whatever they like with no regard for others. This can vary from more harmless “any attention is better than no attention” class-clown misbehaviour to more actively hostile “if everything you do is doing to be wrong anyway then you might as well do whatever you damn well want” justification for callousness or cruelty.  Again this is mostly unproductive as it serves to reinforce stereotypes.

Treatment of Mixed-Colour Pairings/Families in DW

Most Martians tend to take a partner (or partners) of the same colour, but mixed-colour pairings of all combinations have been observed.  As colour discrimination happens on an individual level, Martians are rarely mistreated for their selection of partners, and Green/ Red children of mixed pairings are considered to have risen above their “lesser” parent in being blessed/ escaping a curse.

Sidenote: Martian gender and queerness in Deathly Weapons As there isn’t much physical dimorphism between female and male Martians, shapeshifting is ubiquitous and telepathy/telekinesis/magic are neither gendered nor physical, Martian society is quite egalitarian about gender.  While there may be some separation of roles around reproductive function and gendering of minor ceremonial behaviours, Martian physicality and powers are very equalising, and little status is attached to biological sex. Given how many children a breeding pair of Martians has on average, their longevity, that shapeshifting is a universal ability and that everyone has psychic powers, Martian culture is very accepting of various attractions and sexualities (both to different genders and even sometimes to other species, although the latter is uncommon simply because the general Martian populace lives mostly underground and doesn’t see many interplanetary visitors).  Long-term Martian attraction is based on psychological compatibility moreso than physical form, which tends to preclude any concerns or biases about physiology. The egalitarian approach to gender/ gender roles, low dimorphism between the base-forms of each sex and the ubiquity of shapeshifting also means that concepts like transgenderism probably aren’t very present in the Martian consciousness.  In order to not be incapacitated by their own shapeshifting, Martian biology is likely immune to experiencing dysphoria/ dysmorphia in the way humans conceive it, and minor shapeshifting to alleviate physical discomfort - whether environmental or medical - is considered very normal.  (Although Martians may experience psychological distress if a specific form has associated trauma, and Martians who have spent extended periods shapeshifted into one particular form may experience a period of discomfort as they reacclimatise to inhabiting now less-familiar shapes.) Yes, the tolerance of Martian Society towards shapeshifting outside of masking birth skin colour is a hypocritical and irrational double-standard.  Bigotry is like that.

Social status and colour-breeding tend to be the biggest factors in the social reception of pairings.

Of all the colours, Red Martians are the ones most likely to strongly practice “true breeding” in order to retain and pass on the perceived blessing of Red colouration within families. (This means that Red Martians - especially Red Martian aristocracy - are more susceptible to becoming inbred by human standards, especially when you consider how large Martian extended families are.)

Green-Red Green-Red is probably the rarest pairing since Green colouration predominates in the offspring of these unions.  While not openly disdained it is frequently met with a degree of initial confusion towards the Red Martian - especially from other Red Martians.  Often the Green Martian in a Red-Green pair is regarded as being in some way exceptional enough to persuade a Red Martian to “dilute their blessing”.

Green-White Due to the widespread and massive disdain towards White Martians, Green-White pairings are viewed as somewhat eccentric.  Only a very liberal-minded Green Martian would consider a White Martian for a mate. The Green partner in a Green-White pairing is often seen as being very magnanimous, or even a naïve bleeding-heart.  Others may view the Green partner as being brave or strong enough to have overcome/ tamed the “dangerous” or “cursed” nature of their White partner.  (It’s also sometimes derided as a fetish thing; the stereotype of White Martians as “brutish” being a source of many unkind jibes.)  The White partners in Green-White couples are often Model Citizen types, and are typically ignored in social settings in favour of interacting with their spouse(s).

Since the Green trait heavily predominates the White trait in the offspring of these unions, there is a somewhat insidious mindset in particularly intolerant Martians that Green-White coupling is actually preferable to White-White coupling since it will “breed the White out” of the population.  This mindset is vile enough that it is rarely openly voiced… but the thing with telepathy is that it’s not hard to know what people are really thinking.

Red-White Red-White pairings are considered taboo/ scandalous and are frequently publicly denied while being one of those dirty secrets that happens more often than people think.  While some Red-White relationships are sincere, there are a lot of social and political power dynamics at play.  In many cases it’s more of a tryst, with the White Martian being akin to a concubine more than an equal partner.  While there are rare cases where this is a true courtly-love situation and the arrangement is the result of the Red Martian wanting to be with the White Martian but unable to publicly claim them as a partner due to social/ political repercussions, often it is more the case that the Red Martian is simply enjoying the thrill of a broken taboo.  If a Red-White tryst is discovered, the tendency of White Martians to be scapegoated usually directs most of the consequences onto them.

Since the Red trait is dominant over the White trait, there can also be an insidious level of colour-breeding strategy at play.  Given no suitable Red partners, a secret White partner will produce a higher proportion of Red offspring than taking a Green partner.  It is not unheard of for a White child to “spontaneously” be born to a “True Red” couple, and very quickly smuggled away to the White parent’s extended family before the truth gets out (if they’re lucky).  White children of Red-White couples are some of the worst-treated individuals.

M’gann’s Personal Experience

Beyond just her experience as a White Martian, M’gann’s behaviour and dialogue indicate that she may have had a more isolating experience than is typical for her demographic.

M’gann never mentions her family in any kind of positive/fond context, and barely mentions them at all - even in situations where family comes up for other characters in front of her.  Of all the main members of the Season 1 team, we know the least about M’gann’s family (even compared to genomorph Conner, canonical orphan Dick and latecomer Zatanna).  While some of this may be a biproduct of her attempting to conceal her colouring, not even innocuous anecdotes are shared.  This suggests that M’gann does not feel particularly connected to her family and/or may not feel that her experiences of family are comparable to the others.

M’gann feeling unusually disconnected/ distanced from her family aligns to readings of a few other details.  Despite purportedly having 29 Siblings M’gann cites her childhood as being lonely.  Even assuming that Martian sibling dynamics are markedly different from Human siblings, one would expect a large family to provide some sense of community.  One potential reading of her “I always wanted a sister” line in Infiltrator (followed by quickly tacking on that she has 12 on Mars) is that M’gann never felt like she had a sisterly dynamic with her siblings.

M’gann’s true backstory also seems to support this.  Apparently she ran away from home without telling her family or leaving a message. Beyond simply not talking about her family, we never see any signs of M’gann expressing concern or regret over how they might be feeling, nor does she seem to particularly miss them.  We also do not see any indications that they have attempted to contact each other, even via J’onn.  While she may simply have wanted to avoid a fuss/ attempts to stop her, it also suggests that M’gann believed no-one would miss her/ notice her departure, and that there was no-one/ nothing on Mars she considered worth staying for.

Deathly Weapons’ take on M’gann

The M’gann of the DW-verse is one of two White children to a Green mother and White father.  In total there are 30 children in her family, of which M’gann is a younger-middle child, with a slightly older White brother.  In Deathly Weapons, her brother is Micha'kel and her father is Dal'en (named for two background White Martians in the wider DC comics).

M’gann’s family dynamic is not one of abuse or intentional neglect but it is one of absence around her. Her family is on the larger side by Martian standards, and her parents’ attention is often occupied by dealing with her younger siblings.  Her older siblings, meanwhile, are all Green save for Micha'kel, and their achievements and milestones often overshadow her.  M’gann sits somewhere within the realm of the “forgotten child”, existing quietly on the fringes of her family.

Like a lot of Green Martians, M’gann’s Green siblings have been somewhat shielded from understanding by their own privilege.  While they are liberal-minded, they don’t necessarily realise how passively exhausting it is to be a White Martian or how many barriers it places socially.  There were times where some of her siblings invited her to tag along to things but then didn’t seem to realise how quickly M’gann would slip into being ignored or subtly mistreated by other people - until eventually M’gann withdrew from going at all.  Being Green frees her siblings to live their own lives and, while M’gann doesn’t feel she can resent them for it (most of the time), it does make her feel lonely to watch.

M’gann has a complicated relationship with her father and brother.  Dal'en leans towards being a mix of Resigned and Model Citizen about his own White status; he has found contentment with where he is, he is happy to let their mother be the face of the family, and - while he recognises that the system is unfair and has sympathy for his children - his advice is mostly about making peace with your position and being grateful for what you have rather than risk losing it by pushing for more.  While M’gann can somewhat appreciate where he’s coming from, she also finds it frustrating/ upsetting to not have a strong advocate in her corner.  Micha'kel, meanwhile, is slightly older than M’gann and responds to his treatment and the system by being more of an Angry Rebel.  He is vocally critical of Dal’en’s attitude and will pursue arguments to challenge his father and siblings about allowing their treatment.  Micha’kel’s “problem child” behaviours further divert the family’s attention away from M’gann, and she does not enjoy being roped into these arguments as an example.  M’gann and Micha’kel have very little in common as people or in terms of interests; when they were younger M’gann had hoped that they would have a closer sibling bond due to their shared colouring, but on some level she recognises that being related is the only thing that meaningfully connects them.

M’gann sits at an odd point between her father and brother’s mentalities.  She is too dissatisfied to take Dal’en’s advice but she finds the idea of actively confronting the system to be exhausting.  She tried something similar to Micha’kel for a year - being more assertive and confrontational in trying to make others acknowledge and include her - but mostly found herself left tired, frustrated and having experienced more firm rejection.  Where Dal’en has made peace with unhappiness and Micha’kel is always angry, M’gann just wants to be herself.

This is made more pronounced by M’gann’s own personality and interests.  The disconnect from her family caused M’gann to withdraw slightly into escapism - specifically into Hello Megan! because of the simple stories, cheerful tone and easy resolution of problems, as well as the similarity in their names (and the fantasy of being well-liked and paid attention to).  Where most Martians find Earth TV enjoyable as a passing curiosity, M’gann has made it into more of a hobby than others. It’s rather easy to read M’gann as the Martian equivalent of an otaku; she is defined by her relationship with a piece of media from another culture, eventually moving to live as part of that culture while adopting a persona based on that media.  That combination of being a White Martian with a niche interest made it more difficult to find community; not many other White Martian’s shared that interest with her, and her status as a White Martian meant she was frequently denied entry into Green Martian groups/clubs.

M’gann’s own family are patient but perhaps a little patronizing about her hobby.  While they are supportive of her enjoying something she likes (especially since it lets her amuse herself in a non-destructive way), they don’t really understand why this throw-away piece of Earth entertainment is so important to her.  (There is a bit of wilful obtuseness going on - no-one really wants to confront the possibility that their own dynamic is contributing to it by unintentionally hurting their daughter/sister).  Dal’en’s more Model Citizen mindset is something of a hindrance in this situation as well; he has a well-meaning (and somewhat legitimate) concern that M’gann’s niche interests won’t translate into something societally productive and could be a barrier to connecting with others, but even with telepathy it’s hard to communicate that in a way that doesn’t come across as being critical and/or pessimistic about one of the few things M’gann finds unambiguously joyful. While his relationship with M’gann is less fraught than with Micha’kel, Dal’en can’t really step out of his own mindset and coping strategies enough to connect with her in the way she needs.

Because of all this, as a child M’gann had a tendency to be somewhat clingy and overenthusiastic in her desire to please people who showed her positive attention, inadvertently pushing potential friends away by grating on their boundaries.

M’gann may have tried to mask as Green a few times in attempt to be accepted, but would have been quickly revealed and chased away - one of the reasons why rejection is such a source of pain for her.  She might have had a better chance at making it work by befriending a Green child from a recently-moved-in family that arrived at the outskirts of her own community (just far enough out for the communities collective mindset to not immediately reveal her status) but it would have been unlikely to last.  There would have been low change that a random rebellious Green child would share her main interests and a high chance that M’gaan would end up silently enduring a fair amount of judgmentalism and casual anti-Whiteness in their language and jokes in order to “fit in”.  A relationship based on such a fundamental lie could never sincerely sustain itself in that state, and the question of whether the “friend” rejected her because they didn’t like M’gann’s actual personality or if it was because they had started to suspect her status as a White Martian would always hang over the failed attempts.

M’gann’s decision to stow away with J’onn to Earth was based both on feeling like there wasn’t (and might never be) a place for her on Mars, and a belief that Earth would be a simpler, kinder and happier place based on what TV had shown her.

[threewaysdivided]

Hello! I hope you don’t mind, I’m kind of curious about how Danny’s past experience as a solo-hero will affect his actions and thought-process while on missions? Will it cause friction between him and the Team? It's good that he will be on a team with other teen heroes like himself⏤but unlike him, the rest of the Team were trained by already-established heroes with their own sets of rules, opinions, and philosophies when it comes to rescuing others and crimefighting.

(I’m sort-of grouping Superboy in this category as well since the Genomorphs “taught” him about Superman during his time at Cadmus). And Danny didn’t have that. He had to built his own hero identity from the ground up and had to learn how to make the hard decisions on his own and learn the hard way how the world works and how good (and cruel) other people can be. Sorry this turned into a two-part question 😅 I saw a post comparing Spider-man and the Avengers and my brain jumped onto this thought

Hello! And no, I don't mind at all 😄

This is a very good question, and I think the answer depends on if we're talking about close-to-canon Danny or YJ:DW Danny.

As you and other posts have pointed out, Danny is a lot more "first gen" than most heroes in his age range. He wasn't inspired by another hero, he never set out to get powers... and when he first got them he had no idea what they were, how they'd develop, how to use them or if there was anyone else out there like him. And even after encountering Vlad, he still didn't really have anyone to properly teach him how to be a half-ghost, let alone a hero. Which meant a lot more trial and error, both in terms of abilities and in other stuff too - like his reputation with the public and how to be a "hero" in that regard - with all the bumps and doubts and bad press that comes with being The First. Not for nothing do people make the comparison between him and our friendly neighbourhood wall-crawling, web-slinging "masked menace" Spiderman at least more classic Spideys, I'm not as familiar with the Stark-assisted Spidey of the MCU.

It creates a weird situation where Danny's "career" and development as a hero better mirrors the experiences of members of the Justice League, or even the Justice Society in the case of some League heroes who were already following legacies (such as the Lanterns and Flashes). But, unlike many incarnations of Spidey - who are college-age or at least late-high-school-age enough to pass as adult - Danny is obviously a fairly young teenager (to the point that he is unflatteringly called a "pre-pubescent spectre" at one point in the show).

So where Spidey and the Avengers roughly line up as a group of adult (or at least adult-adjacent) mostly-first-gen heroes who all had to work through their first-gen-related "working with others" issues together to make the unit function, there's a gap between Danny's path to heroism (which aligns to the League) and his age (which aligns to the Team).

One thing I will say for the Team is that, despite being mostly second-generation and used to working in combination, they still had to go through a process of learning how to work with each other after being more narrowly trained to function as junior partners to their specific mentors. One of the early-side comics has Robin and Kid Flash literally trip over each other because Flash and Batman use different codes for combo attacks and neither of them understood what the other wanted. It's not the same but there is some similarity.

Which gets us back to the original question, and into the frustrating territory of it depends. Let's go:

I think the frictions this causes would be much more pronounced with Canon!Phantom than DW!Verse Phantom, and also change depending on the way they encountered each other and what they were working on.

To start with, I'm not sure Canon!Danny would be particularly good at working with the Team in the beginning, purely because of his solo-hero habits. In his own environment Danny is used to being the lone heavy-hitter (and most experienced even when Val and Dani are involved) in a small support team of fairly young Badass Normals, and more often than not the one to take the lead on making hard calls. It would probably make him prone to a similar issue to what we saw with Robin in Drop Zone - not communicating decisions or establishing chains of command, going off on his own without explanation - although minus the side that was Robin actively pushing for leadership because of his status as Batman's protégé. Not out of any sense that Phantom sees himself as inherently "better" or "more deserving" as a hero - Danny might act cocky sometimes but we know he struggles with self confidence and negatively comparing himself to others, and would probably really want the acceptance and approval of recognised heroes - but purely because he's so unused to working with people who can safely follow him into intense combat situations.

I think this habit would be at its worst the more ghost-related the situation was, since Danny would be in his comfort-zone there and more likely to fall back upon ingrained behaviour. Although this probably wouldn't be a major issue in those cases, since ghosts are such a deep, narrow niche that the Team would probably benefit from having someone who knew what they were doing and was able to directly fight them taking charge. On the other hand, a more Team-typical mission would be well outside Danny's comfort zones since his experience is so specialised to the niche of "ghosts", in which case I think he'd be more likely to defer to them for guidance and direction (especially given that he wouldn't want to mess up and embarrass himself in front of them).

Probably the worst situation for both parties would be to be thrown together on short notice into circumstance that mixed ghosts with the Team's espionage work fairly evenly, since it would be easy for their instincts to pull them in opposite directions and keep tripping each other up.

When it comes to more direct friction, I can see a possible situation were Danny would be more actively oppositional/ uncooperative/ commanding when working with the Team: if the League brought him in with similar treatment - or what could be perceived as similar - to what they gave the early Team members when it was first founded, or if they/the Team came across as more critical of his abilities. Other struggles aside, proteges do benefit massively from having a partially-pre-laid path and reputation to springboard off, as well as their mentor providing guidance, resources, a safety net and sharing the burden of responsibility for hard decisions. Being held to the same standard without being given those tools - possibly due to a League assumption that any hero that young must have a mentor and that the mentor must therefore either be doing a bad job or Phantom must be wilfully ignoring their direction, or a protégé failing to realise how different the experience is without a mentor - would get really get his hackles up (especially considering that the actual amount of "consistent adult support" in his life is functionally zero).

As for Danny as he appears in YJ:DW, we're going to see chunks of this play out across chapters 18 through 21 so I won't go hugely into detail, but the intervening 9-ish months and what he experienced in them do cause things to shift a fair bit.

This isn't a directly-post-canon Danny at a point where he's comfortably settling into heroism; this is a Danny who spent the better part of a year in circumstances where his powers were more often a liability, facing opponents that didn't operate within his experience of "ghosts". During a lot of his time on the run he was effectively situationally depowered, having to rely on more classic espionage tactics, in a position where his friend's connections and skills were just as - if not more - important to their survival, and they were consistently living in very close quarters; something that changed their dynamic both in terms of power balance and communication. Add to that the slow chipping down of his self-assurance, trust in other people and his ability to feel safe, and then the effect of losing those last pieces of his support network (and his tendency to internalise blame when things go wrong), and suffice to say Phantom joins the Team with his confidence in his own abilities and leadership skills somewhere between "around his ankles" and "all the way in the toilet".

Combine that with the intimidation factor that is working for/with the Justice League and how little relative experience he still has with using either his powers or newfound stealth skills for heroic espionage, and you can see why he was so uncharacteristically shy and quiet around the others in Chapter 16 and Chapter 17.

Layer it over what I was saying before about comfort zones and you should be able to get a decent idea of what Phantom will be like on his first few missions.

Hope that answers things well enough for now 😊

[threewaysdivided]

I've always had a question abt YJDW. When Danny gets his hazmat suit replaced and updated with an actual superhero suit does it appear when he transforms or is it something that he has to put on afterward? I love your work btw

(Young Justice: Deathly Weapons)

Thank you! 💜

The idea I had with it was for Batman to have studied Phantom's OG suit (plus the Fentonworks research he brought along) and developed a material-variant that integrated with his ecto-signature.

Partially so that it would "stick" to Danny's ghost-form and transform with him, partially so that it would react to and not interfere with his powers, and partially so that the ecto-dampening component of the built-in stealth-tech would mask his signature and prevent tracking when activated.

I also did a rough concept sketch of the design a few years back.

Chapter 16 was one of those ones that went through a lot of drafts. The early versions had much longer sections about the functionality, performance requirements and design process that Batman and Robin went through in making the new suit, and how Danny had to hang out for several days in Phantom form just wearing it until synced to him properly.

But, as I went back through, a lot of that detail ended trimmed down to keep the opening from taking a needlessly technical exposition-dump at the expense of the pacing, characters and information that was actually important to the story.

In the final cut I think it ended up just being lightly alluded to in this line:

Even with non-stop wear it could take weeks before a uniform felt truly comfortable.

So yeah, the idea was that the new suit behaves effectively the same as the old one in most ways (minus any self-repairing features). It's meant to stay with his ghost form across transformations unless he actively takes it off, in which case it'll stay off (and he'll have to find alternative clothes in Phantom form) until he puts it back on again.

[threewaysdivided]

One thing I noticed in the assessment scene in the last chapter is that Danny never mentions that he has supernatural durability, agility, and strength on top of all the other things? Like, Danny can pick up and fly around with a 5 ton bus at the very least, and he's been thrown through buildings and concrete with little damage.

A few people have been asking about Danny’s powers across reviews and comments so I might pull in a couple of those and make this one big answer if that’s alright.

Why does Danny not mention he has [X] power in Assessment?

The first thing to be aware of here is that none of the characters in Young Justice: Deathly Weapons are completely objectively reliable narrators, especially when it comes to what they say in dialogue.  That doesn’t mean they’re unreliable narrators - they won’t lie in their internal narration (unless they are also lying to themselves) - but, basically, they’re people;  they’re not always fully rational and their own biases/ preconceptions/ insecurities/ self-perception/ priorities can colour how they interpret information and how they communicate information to other characters.  

Characters might disregard/ gloss over information that they think is unimportant/ uninteresting, they might draw incorrect conclusions due to incomplete data or their own preconceptions, they might prioritise/ emphasise/ play up things they want other characters to know or are pleased/ angry about, while trying to downplay or hide other things because they don’t see them as a big deal or are concerned with how other characters will react or are trying to be humble or are embarrassed/ ashamed.  There can also be times when they just genuinely didn’t know/ notice/ realise something or think to bring it up.

Specifically with Assessment, there are a few things going on:  Firstly is that this is Danny talking about himself in dialogue, and our boy does not have the most objective or positive self-image; he can be pretty harsh and dismissive about his “stupidity” and lack of ability when he feels like he’s not doing too well, and... suffice to say after the nine months Danny’s just had, he really doesn’t feel like he’s been doing too well.  It’s also not super clear in DP how much Danny knows about the specifics of his own powers, and whether he sees things like durability, agility, and strength as separate abilities, as extensions of other abilities, or if he’d consciously recognise them as powers at all unless someone pointed them out. On top of that, Danny’s being affected by exactly who his audience is.  These aren’t the kids at Casper High or some civilians he wants to impress, they’re Justice League mentors and their proteges.  Heroes he would have been seeing on TV before he even became Phantom, and would have idolised and looked up to as he tried to step up and protect Amity Park.  That’s a recipe for some pretty hefty imposter syndrome right there. Sure, he might be faster/ stronger/ more agile /more durable than a civilian, but compared to The Flash?  To Martian Manhunter?  To Superman?  There’s no way he’d even dream of putting himself on that level.

(There’s also the simpler Doylist answer that this is a piece of fanfiction and that as the writer I know 90%+ of you are already fans of DP, know what his powers are and have probably read the wiki.  Dryly rattling off his power list or dragging things out further to cover the minute ins and outs of every ability wouldn’t make for a very enjoyable read and the main purpose of this scene is to set up some characterisation, let the other characters react to the powers he’ll be using a lot and establish those things ahead of time so I don’t have to pause later situations to have Danny explain how and what he could do to help.)

Danny’s Powers in YJ:DW

One of the more complicated aspects of Danny Phantom as a show is that it’s a 2004 Nicktoon caught between a superhero series, comedy and light-horror (with different creators and executives clearly having different priorities) and as a result can often run on Rule of Cool/ Rule of Funny/ Rule of Drama/ “Cartoon Logic” at the cost of internal consistency.   There are certain elements of the lore and characters which to me were clearly driven more by "whatever this episode/ scene/ joke needs" or “what will be easiest to animate” rather than how it would work within the rules of the fiction. I don't actually think it's possible to integrate every single piece of DP lore across all the episodes into a consistent series-spanning canon without actively breaking parts of the show.  (I’ve talked about the way this can negatively impact characterisation in my Sam posts). 

It’s also made more complicated because the animation of Danny’s powers in DP isn’t always consistent/ clear and the canon doesn’t do a lot to spell out what’s a new power and what’s an existing power being used in a different way.   Is it superspeed or is it a mix of his high flight speed combined with good reflexes and spectral body manipulation?  Is it super strength or could it be ecto-augmentation combined with his ability to transfer invisibility/ intangibility/ flight to things he's in physical contact with?  Is it teleportation or is he just flying really fast and turning invisible?  Is that a fireball or did the animators just add an aesthetic flourish to a standard ectoplasm blast because it looked cooler?  

Some really neat meta has come out of other fans trying to reconcile this but it does kind of force a bit of a pick-and-choose approach if you're doing crossover world-building.

Powers I’m excluding from YJ:DW canon:

Underwater Breathing/ No need for oxygen This is inconsistent in the show: in space he needs a helmet, which implies he does, but then he can breath and talk underwater.  I’m going to write off the lack of helmet in those places as a mercy on the animators and say that while he doesn’t need to breathe as much he still needs some O2 in both forms.

Pyrokinesis This one straight doesn’t makes sense with the more explicit canon that he has an ice core so I’m going to say the “fireballs” are less actual fire and more that ectoplasm blasts can look like fire because you know... plasm (Robin also makes this mistake in YJ:DW Chapter 2).  It’s possible for ectoplasm to cause things around it to spontaneously ignite from the sheer energy (in the same way you can technically ignite things with a Plasma Cutter), but there’s no actual fire involved.

Telekinesis I only remember one instance of this in the show and it was the gag from the end of Boxed Up Fury so I'm crossing it off as a Rule of Funny joke contrivance rather than part of the serious lore.

Dream Invasion, Software Fusion, Direct Power Absorption/ Weather Control These only happened in one episode each and only with assistance from tech or interference from another ghost so I'm going to call these as situation-specific and not part of his normal capabilities.

Teleportation Writing this off as mostly an animation/ editing goof, plus he's fast and can turn invisible so it's more likely an optical illusion than a defined power for him.  In theory this may be a power he could eventually develop but it’s not one he has in YJ:DW

Classifications of the powers I’m keeping in YJ:DW:

Standard Ghost Powers (touch-transferable on sustained physical contact) - Flight  As in canon, Danny is a naturally fast flyer - Invisibility - Intangibility

Spectral Body Manipulation/ General Augmentation - Physical Augmentation:  Strength, Speed, Agility, Durability - Accelerated Healing (also reduces wound scarring) - Improved Balance & Wall-Crawling (a flight bi-product) - Physical body distortion (ghost form only) Can distort his body in Phantom form to avoid attacks and escape tight spaces but beyond the flight-tail there's limited conscious usability - it's more like a reflex reaction.

Ectoplasmic Manipulation (Offensive) - Ecto-blasts (aka ghost-rays) - Ecto-Energy Constructions - Ghost Stinger - Energy Strike/ Power Augmentation Can channel ectoplasm into physical attacks to increase damage, usually by holding an unreleased ecto-blast at the end of whatever limb he’s doing the hitting with.

Ectoplasmic Manipulation (Defensive) - Shield Constructs - Attack Redirection - Repulsion Field

Overshadowing - Possession of host body/ people puppet-ing - Exorcism  Combines with intangibility - ghosts can't overshadow other ghosts, and intangible ghosts can interact, allowing him to drag/ drive ghosts out of overshadowed hosts.

Frost Core - Cryokinesis - Ghost Sense

Advanced - Duplication Every time he's done it successfully in canon it was with some kind of outside influence/assistance/augmentation, so it's something he has to work on refining if he wants to use it at his base power level.

Danny-Specific - Ghostly Wail

Will YJ:DW include powers added by DP side content or Hartman’s later videos?

My general answer when it comes to Word of God is “only if it personally interests me or could make for a more interesting story”.  I typically fall on the Death of the Author side of fandom - I’m happy to listen to the creators’ ideas and explanations but just like any other person’s headcanon it’s only as strong as the actual textual evidence supporting it.

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 just as 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.

As for Butch Hartman in specific, he’s... not really a creator I have much time for beyond the direct canon of the show, if I'm honest. I appreciate his role as the primary creator and director, but (as covered in more detail in the Reboot Thoughts Post) he only has writing credits for about 10 episodes in total - the majority of which are in in Season 3 and include very weak ones like Phantom Planet - while most of the strongest entries in my opinion came out of the original S1/2 writing team when Steve Marmel was in the role of lead story editor.  He's also been rather contradictory about the canon and seems to want to actively deny certain parts of it (for a while insisting that the ghosts were actually monsters from another dimension despite some pretty explicit dialogue in S1). Plus, I find myself in disagreement with his more recent creative philosophies and some of the ways he's treated fans and fellow creators since then.  

Danny Phantom as a show often seems to be the product of the individual writers on a given episode more than some grand vision from Hartman on high.  To me this show was as much Marmel, Ventress, Isenberg and Silver's product as Hartman’s and I've found myself favouring their output most of the time. I don’t follow him or watch his videos, and unless it’s in show itself I don't count his content as canon.

Hope this answers everyone’s questions! 😄

[threewaysdivided]

[Light spoilers for Ch.18 premise]

Me: I need a nice semi-bridge mission to serve as the last piece of connective tissue before the main arc rolls out. What can you give me for a set-up that lets me use this characters powers?

My ridiculous, misbegotten brain: How about a complex hostage situation in the South China Sea? I've even found some villains for you!

Me: You want me to have to wrangle sensitive handling of a real-life politically fraught area, and potentially juggle respectful depictions of race/nations... just to set up a story that's only a few nominal shades from "filler episode"?

Gremlin brain: ... you'll get to blow up an oil rig?

Me *opening a word doc*: Welp, guess I'm sending 8 teenagers to fight eco-terrorists.

[threewaysdivided]

Hello and welcome to the mess!  I’m ThreeWaysDivided, also known as 3WD.

Statistically you are here from either my Young Justice: Deathly Weapons fanfic (in which case yes, I’m still writing it, it’s just that Life Happens So Much) or the Van Gogh quote (in which case, in the interest of not deceiving you: this is not a quote/inspo blog, I do that sometimes but for the most part we post nonsense here, sir).

Anything important we should know about you?  

I am a legal adult and have been for several years, and if that is something you have boundaries about then that is A-Okay.

Are you in other places?

I am!  You can find me writing on Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own, and goofing about on DeviantArt and Discord (ThreeWaysDivided#3586).

What can we find here?

Madness.  A rather quiet sort of madness involving plentiful food and plushies, in which we at least try to be balanced and approach things in good faith but still - this way lies madness.

But I suppose you mean content…

Fanfiction (#my writing)

As mentioned, my main fic is Young Justice: Deathly Weapons, a YJ x DP crossover (FFN | AO3).  The #young justice: deathly weapons tag will give you all the content, asks etc. about it, or use #yj:dw if you only want to see chapter release posts and my ‘official’ art pieces.  

If you want to know what I’m up to you can take a peek under #writing update, or send an ask should you need to tap the glass more vigorously.  There is also a discord server.

Wondering if you can make something for, or use part of my work in a thing?  See my Transformational Works Permission Statement.

Talking About Writing (#writing advice)

Sometimes I write my own thoughts, sometimes I share other posts, either way here we talk about the meta of story-telling, analyse how stories and writing techniques work, chat about tropes and all that good stuff.

Big Essays (#scattered thoughts)

Ever wondered what those long Youtube media videoessays would look like if produced by someone with no film or editing skills?  Ever thought they were just too audiovisual and wished you could read a transcript instead? ��Boy do I have a thing for you!

You may recognise such smash hits as Tumblr Post Plus is Not Your Friend, Thoughts About Sam Manson, Young Justice’s Terrible Failure of Narrative and Why Does the Danny Phantom Fandom Attract So Many Asexuals?

Art (#my art), Cooking (#3WD Cooks) and Fabric Craft (#sewing)

Sometimes I paint, sometimes I draw, sometimes I bake and sometimes I sew my own pokedolls, whatever takes your fancy.

Fun/ Cool/ Inspiring Anecdotes (#amazing stories)

None of these are mine, they’re just stories I found around and think are Neat.

Short Stories (#original writing)

Cool original fiction pieces by other writers.

Animal Shenanigans (#animal shenanigans)

Sadly I do not own animals but I love seeing the wild things they get up to.

Interesting Quotes (#quote of the day)

Because sometimes I am an inspo blog.

Photography (#photography)

A collection of other’s photos, mostly of natural world stuff, especially birds, flowers and insects.

Fandom Nonsense

In which there be art, meta, fic and other assorted delights.  Tagged by fandom, most commonly Danny Phantom, Batman, Young Justice, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Fullmetal Alchemist, My Hero Academia, Hollow Knight, Dan Jones & Dragons, Marvel and The Dragon Prince.

Is there anything I might need to watch out for?

I try to keep my blog relatively “all ages” so you won’t see explicit or graphic content, NSFW or even much swearing here.  That said sometimes I do talk about heavy or challenging topics such as mental health, loss, relationships and abuse.

I try to tag appropriately so everyone can sort and filter according to their needs but if you need an extra tag on a post then please feel free to let me know.

[threewaysdivided]

Ask Box is Open

Heck with it, let’s talk.  Feel free to come and ask me things or even just share fun stuff you’ve been up to!

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the recent Chapter 18 of my fic, I’m bringing the #YJ:DW Spoilers and #YJ:DW Meta tags back into action since there’s a bunch of fun future stuff that I’m tired of sitting on by myself until I can write and post the chapters, I just reblogged an ask game if you prefer to fling numbers at me, and I have been consuming/ am currently getting into the following series if you want to chat about them:

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Fullmetal Alchemist

Into the Spiderverse

Psychonauts

Hollow Knight

The Dragon Prince

Kingkiller Chronicles

Millennium Trilogy (aka The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and sequels)

The Bartimaeus Sequence

Soulsborne/ Sekiro/ Elden Ring

Tales of Arcadia

Demon Slayer

Leverage

Criminal Minds

Elementary

Alex Rider

Mayday: Air Disaster

Keys to the Kingdom

Recommendations also welcome!

[threewaysdivided]

ahh I want to ask you stuff about your doc but I’m afraid my questions are too spoiler-y!

Please feel free to ask away!  I enjoy practicing the no-major-spoilers ambiguity dance.

(Heads up for anyone committed to a true blind read: I’ll use read-more cuts and the tag #YJ:DW Meta for any significantly hand-tipping content, so block the tag and/or don’t click if you see it appear.)

[threewaysdivided]

Author Meme

Tagged by @pi-cat000​. Hello to you too!  I'm also something of a lurking digital hermit, but more than happy to interact so feel free to tag me in stuff, send asks or just poke my blog with a stick if you want to chat.

Author Name:  Three Ways Divided across Tumblr, Archive of Our Own and  Fanfiction.net.  Occasionally I do art-stuff and post the High-Res versions to DeviantArt as RedMoonWhiteTiger.

Fandoms You Write For:  Pretty much just Young Justice and Danny Phantom.  I’m involved in other fandoms too but I don’t produce fic-content for them (maybe one day).

Where You Post: For Fanfic:  Started on FFN then began crossposting to Ao3 when I noticed people migrating across to the archive.  Now I simulpost to both, and drop a linked preview here when new content comes out.

For Art:  Any proper finished pieces go to DeviantArt for full res viewing, as well as under #my art here.  Sillier art stuff and WIPS are Tumblr-only.

Other stuff:  Tumblr.  Outside of fic and art the main things I do are long analytical meta-pieces under the #scattered thoughts tag, discussions of writing for the #writing advice tag, and food stuff under #3WD Cooks. 

Most Popular One-Shot:   I only have one official one-shot right now and it’s my DP piece Defining Moment, so I guess it wins by default.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: There’s something to be said for limited choices - my one and only is, of course, Young Justice: Deathly Weapons.

Favourite Story You Wrote: I have a love-hate relationship with YJ:DW but I’m very happy with how the plan’s coming out so far.

Story You Were Nervous to Post:  I have exactly 2 stories and I wasn’t particularly nervous about posting either - either they’d work or they’d vanish and I’d let them go when my interest ran out.  There are some more out-there concepts that maybe one day might develop into fics, but if they survive workshopping then I’ll at least be confident that they’re not completely devoid of value.  

Right now I’m mostly nervous about ensuring that new YJ:DW chapters live up to the existing material.

How Do You Choose Your Titles:  Typically Wordplay.  If I can find a pun or phrase with double-meanings then I might use that.  Callbacks or references to the source material also work in a pinch. 

For example, “Young Justice: Deathly Weapons” is a reference to YJ’s canon titling style and a play on the phrase “Deadly Weapons” (i.e. lethal weapons) and the word “Deathly” (adj.: resembling or suggestive of death), because dangerous plot involving ghosts.  Several of the chapters and planned chapters have titles that are chemistry references, puns or nods to other series.

Do You Outline:  Do I outline?

You tell me.

Complete:

Unless it’s a one-shot, not for a very long time.  

I do plan my stories with the end in mind but I’m also a compulsively overambitious, overachieving, perfectionist gremlin so there’s a whole lot of content and drafting between here and there.  By a lot I mean an entire half-season of the show.  This one puts the long in long-fic.

In-Progress: 

I have one fic that’s not a one-shot, and I promise I’m still working on it.

Coming Soon: YJ:DW Chapter 17 “Assessment” is 1k from draft completion and getting closer each week.

Do You Accept Prompts: Not really, no.  My writing style typically involves a lot of planning and drafting so I find spontaneous flash-fic hard unless I’m especially inspired.

BUT!  Analysis is my bread and butter so if anyone ever wanted some fic-meta, or analysis of storytelling/ characters or even to pitch a story/scene/trope idea for feedback/suggestions, I can spin out a decent essay-style or research piece quite fast.  My brain is naturally geared towards analytical writing over narrative prose.

“My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.” - Sherlock Holmes

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write:  Young Justice: Deathly Weapons is actually 12 semi-self-contained story-episodes, at least 2 significant character arcs, a long-running mystery and a bunch of short character essays stacked inside a trench coat and masquerading as a single sane fanfiction, so mostly I’d just like keep on with that.  I also have a few tie-in one-shots, so I’ll be prioritising this series before moving on to any other big projects.

Ideas I’ve been kicking around and may one day write when YJ:DW is closer to done and assuming they survive workshopping:

DP x YJS1 Danny-Dick Brother AU, of which there are three variant ideas for execution

DP x YJS1 dissection-fic in the vein of Unfair Justice

DP x YJS1 literal crossover in which Danny has to leave his universe behind and ends up on Earth 16

DP AU fic - in which the Fenton parents are much worse at parenting, Danny gets his powers a different way and we explore depression, isolation, self-perception, self-hatred and neglect

BNHA fic in which Izuku never gets One For All, tones down the fanboy after realising just how serious the issues with the status quo are and chooses to go into Support instead to change the system from within

Dark Souls one-shot mood piece

Yeah, YJ:DW is more light-hearted than all but two of these, my brain is just a barrel of laughs.

-

Tagging: @lunagalemaster @batmanisagatewaydrug @ao3commentoftheday I would be curious to hear from you if you’re interested and have the time.

If anyone else would like to participate but haven’t been tagged, please consider this your open invitation.

[threewaysdivided]

23 for the ask game!!

meta asks for writers

23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

Oh, Deathly Weapons at this point, 100%.

There area couple of OC ideas and very, very basic scene concepts that I've had in my head for longer but they were always more of an excuse to play around with a specific emotion or aesthetic than an actual story. (And most of them were exactly as derivative as you would expect for things invented by a 10th grader. Which, you know, I had fun with but is not a shame to be shared with the public.)

It's kind of funny to remember back in 2016 when I was posting a chapter of YJ:DW every month. Although admittedly back then "a chapter" was more like "2 pages of middling prose with a high-concept". And also I was younger. And actually slept. That definitely helped.

There have been a couple of other DP or DP-crossover story premises that I've come up with but even early on baby me was self-aware enough to know that I'd vastly overcommit to and overengineer anything I work on and smartly keep the actual writing just to the one.

Thanks for playing!