#Young Justice Critical

[sidecharactersdomatter]

Ok, Ok quick update one last time:

Relationship officially ended with animated Young Justice now My Adventures with Superman AND Batman Wayne Family adventures are my new Best Friends.

[threewaysdivided]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mimeparadox]

You know, given how seasons 3 and 4 of Young Justice went out of their way to claim "we're totally hip with what progressive youths think about" (even as it did so in the most hamfisted, performative way possible) it's actually kind of shocking that the current volume of Gargoyles ended ...

...with the Manhattan clan officially becoming cops.

[technoturian]

On a related note to my last, Miss Martian is the Rachel Dolezal of comics.

[ravenpureforever]

On one hand, Young Justice is kind of neglected by the actual superheroes that should be looking out for them in a lot of crucial ways and very much failed by the adults around them

But on the other hand Red Tornado straight up hosts a parent-teacher conference where their respective legal guardians all show up, barring Batman who’s in traffic so Nightwing fills in instead because Robin’s dad does not know he’s a vigilante which is objectively hilarious

[jonmyblaze]

Oh you aren't even getting into the best parts How about somebody as innocuous as Cheshire? And how they fucked her up

in the comics Cheshire was sold into slavery by her own father, a French national (She was Vietnamese)(Her father was wealthy and she was the only one sold while her brothers were allowed to stay)

That made her become an assassin and kill her master.(

After killing her master, Jade was informally adopted by Chinese freedom fighter (Hong Kongnese specifically)

Weng Chan, who taught her all he knew about guerrilla fighting. She then. Was married off to Kruen Musenda, a famed African assassin known as the "Spitting Cobra" when she was 16. And he was an adult.

She learned his techniques and killed him. Like she did her master.

To her Cheshire was what she became to survive. Giving death granted freedom to her

Jade is who she is. She views them as two different personalities

But she doesn't know who she is when not trying to become something to survive.

And you want to know what Young Justice did? Oh she just became an evil. Her mother was huntress.

Like what the fuck?

Not to mention the adding the whole clone thing for no necessary reason, fucking cowards.

I hate young justice so much

they took beloved characters and ruined them

robin: he reminds me of the teen titans robin that just mashed all the robins together and said it’s dick. I did like his abuse of the English language but everything else just felt ooc. Make him happy. I don’t like how he is as nightwing either. It just seems like the creators are doing the bare minimum.

Wally: I really like Wally in the comics. He’s funny and goofy and super protective of his loved ones. It’s cute. I also like his friendship with dick. I didn’t like him in yj. Mostly because of his forced relationship with Artemis and his weird attitude in the later seasons.

Artemis: she’s so unlikable omg. She’s annoying and brash. She’s supposed to be half Asian but just isn’t. Also her relationship with Wally almost made me stop watching.

m’gann: eww. She was cute in the first season but now she’s manipulative and abusive. She is tricking kon and they continue to date. She’s possessive and keeps ‘killing’ people. I hate her.

kon: my boy deserved better. They took his beautiful leather jacket and sunglasses and replaced it with the most boring thing I’ve ever seen. He looks so square. Plus his relationship with mgann.

kaldur: i don’t have anything against his character. He’s cool. I wish we saw more of him though especially with wyynde. I love that he’s gay but I wish it was shown a bit more. Representation matters.

this show is just so flat and problematic. None of the main relationships are healthy. All of the characters hate each other. It’s exhausting

[vintagerobin]

Those "when the Justice League finds out about Robin" headcanon posts always confuse me for a second because I forget that some people don't know how inseparable early days Batman and Robin were. Like of course they already know Robin...? He's been there practically ever since Batman has from the perspective of the early League. He had other things to do sometimes but it was always just kind of assumed that wherever Batman went so could Robin.

[crownedwille]

S3 alternatives/rewrite ideas: What if the truth about the video came out and August got exposed? What if Hillerska investigations looked different?

My preferred s3 outcome would've been August being actually punished and his actions having tangible consequences so let's think about that! Also 'fixing' a whole lot of other storylines and plot holes that are connected to that so here we go!

Disclaimer: This post is not looking for explanations or defenses in favor of s3 plots so please only interact if you're open and willing to fantasise and theorise and spin this imaginative story further and have fun with it

I also wanna link to this post by @raincitygirl76 that kind of addresses this whole bit and has some really valid points in my opinion.

This post by @resipsaloquitace also mentions some important plot holes I'm addressing here.

The background: Wilhelm has admitted to being in the video with Simon in front of live cameras and phones for everyone to hear and it's probably being spread like wildfire on the internet already. After the first shocked reactions, I imagine the second one would be "who the hell posted that video?"

The fact that apparently no one in all of Sweden or the rest of the world (because we know this 'scandal' has been international news and the crown prince of Sweden coming out wouldn't be any different) has seemed to ask the question of "who did it?" and tried to figure it out is just completely unrealistic. People care! We know they do, the way Wille's scandals were treated before are proof of that! And he wasn't even the heir to the throne yet during one of them! Imagine how much bigger it would be now that somebody did this humiliating thing to their Crown Prince! Wouldn't you want to know as a normal citizen and think there should be justice and consequences for that person?

The conspiracy theories would probably run rampant on social media and if Felice can figure it out after only a few days, then millions of people on the internet will be able to do the same. And millions of people are damn better detectives than just Felice. Not to mention there would probably be journalists diving deeper into this and articles discussing it, wanting to be the one to drop the ultimate exposing story.

Now that that's established, let's get to the alternatives/rewrite part of it: What would a realistic and accurate punishment look like?How would that exposé come along and what would happen when August is found out?

What about Sara's report? What if that actually meant something and the police is now involved and it's tricky and not so easy to brush under the rug? In one way or another, legally or publically, August won't get away with it. Sara is a witness after all. So even if August wouldn't get charged and be registered as a sex offender, there should at least be an effort made and a logical reason be found for that instead of ignoring what happened in the s2 finale because it's inconvenient now. The settlement in the show was too simple and easy for me and I feel like an entire writer's room should've been smart enough and come up with something.

We're talking about a crime committed against the crown prince first and foremost, that won't be taken lightly by the police, it's a matter of the country and if you will, also about politics. They have no political power but we're still talking about the son of the Head of State. They could consider this child pornography and a hate crime committed against the projected future Head of State and August essentially barely gets a slap on the wrist?

And also no mention of his estate Årnäs and Rousseau, the horse he bought? Oh and Alexander who was made the scape goat in the entire thing and then was completely dismissed in s3 like that never happened? I'm definitely open for suggestions how all that could be handled differently and all of these elements that were introduced in the s2 finale could be brought up and tied together in a more cohesive, satisfying way.

Of course this also asks the question - how does it affect August's storyline this season? Is he anxious and terrified of the truth coming out beforehand now that he can no longer control it and it's only a matter of time? And what about him after the truth came out? Will he actually learn from the consequences? Could he realise being rich and of noble birth does not protect you and lets you get away with things? Could it even be a good thing for his character and he could finally understand the real damage he has caused to Wilhelm and especially Simon and try and make up for it? Maybe he could heal even when the world is against him and his perfect image is shattered. Maybe that's exactly what he needs, to reconstruct himself. He doesn't need this facade anymore and has to figure himself out in the future without the pressure and significance he put on titles and performance now that it's no longer important.

Or if you just want to see him be punished and suffer the consequences with no healing in sight, this plot could still work. He will be stripped of his estate and the money, his name will have no worth anymore and be associated with shame and Wille and Simon can get actual justice for the crime committed against them and his place in the royal family will be taken away and they never have to deal with him interfering with their lives again.

And how does the royal court handle it before and after? How do their plans change of making August the back up now that that's no longer a viable option? Would the public question their involvement, would they be accused of covering it up and would the trust in the royal family go down? What kind of constitutional crisis could potentially arise from that? The show didn't dare get into that but let's get into that! Are they trying damage control, bring Simon and Wille into the spotlight to focus on their new progressive, modern royal couple or are they trying to keep them on the down low away from the press? What things might have to change and what will they do to keep Wilhelm in this position? What are they willing to do?

Another part are the Hillerska investigations that were a badly executed and unnecessary added drama plot in my opinion but if we keep it in this rewrite, they could be instead about the video logically. Simon and Wille were filmed in Wille's Hillerska dorm room and the person that filmed them must have been another student so that means the school is responsible and that could be really embarrassing for them.

Would the students be investigated? Would the whole day/the time the video was filmed be investigated? Would the society party be relevant and brought up again? Would the exclusive society that hinged on secrecy be exposed for what it is, promoting elitist, classist behavior and using it to consume drugs and alcohol? It would've been a good way to bring the Society back and also tie it to the s1 storylines since we had no mention of it again after that and it felt like a weirdly dropped plothole.

I bet there is a lot of attention and scrutiny Hillerska would receive after all that. How could they let this recording happen, the school doesn't seem to be safe etc. I think it would've been a logical step and feel more cohesive if the school's reputation was smeared because of the things we know have happened within the show's narrative and make it about that instead of making up a past event that has never been relevant before and was semi-retconning multiple character arcs and was put there as a shocking plot twist for drama.

This is a lot and I'm just putting these questions out there, maybe there's not an answer to all of it or there are a lot more questions to be put and it could be spun even further. And also maybe there isn't a case closed kind of solution to some of them but more an open 'what could happen after the show?' kind of implied ending (the future of Hillerska and the monarchy in the stars for example). And if anyone wants to add ideas or suggestions to this 'rewrite' (or actually rewrite it) I'm all ears!

[soleminisanction]

So. What actually happened between Secret and Spoiler?

The meat of this story goes down in Young Justice (1998) #30.

Taking place sometime shortly after the YJ crew returns from their adventures in space with Doiby Dickles, the story proper opens with a scene of Steph trying to follow Tim home to find out his identity and getting caught to establish that tension in their current dynamic for anyone who wasn't also reading Robin at the time.

As a refresher, when they decided to date (which was a couple of publishing years back at this point, during the events leading up to No Man's Land) Tim had tried to talk Steph out of it because he couldn't tell her his secret identity and he didn't think that was fair. Steph had responded with, quote, "I don't care about any of that, Robin. I just want to be with you." But she'd recently decided she wasn't happy with that arrangement after all and had been sneaking around trying to learn his identity behind his back.

This issue is very cathartic to me because it's one of the only times she's called out for violating her boyfriend's privacy, which starts here:

Couple of things to make note of here: Greta's not attacking Steph. We'd previously seen what it looks like when she uses her billowing clouds of angry smoke to attack (against Harm and the Pointmen, for example), and that's not what's happening here, she's just really pissed off. Steph is the one who escalates the whole thing to violence with that kick.

And while there is an element of jealousy here -- Secret did follow Robin home to get a look at his girlfriend -- the thing that's set her off isn't seeing Steph with Robin, it's learning of and seeing her self-centered justifications for her plans to continue trying to violate his boundaries. Which, it should also be noted, is something that Secret could do much more easily, but chooses not to. So it probably just pisses her off even more to learn that her crush is dating someone who'd disrespect him like that.

So they take it outside.

Where Greta, despite her anger, is almost certainly holding back because... yeah, let's face it, Steph doesn't actually stand a chance in this match-up. She has no powers, she hasn't even trained with Cass at this point; I don't know where she got that grenade but she's otherwise working with like a red belt in strip mall aikido and a bunch of gear she probably bought out of the back of a magazine. Secret is a sentient hellportal, a conduit between the realms of the living and the dead. She's pissed off, but she's still mostly focused on calling Steph out with her words rather than physically harming her.

Which Steph responds to with, again, a grenade and... this:

Why yes, that sword does come out of nowhere for a single panel and then vanishes into the ether, never to be explained or mentioned again. I find that hilarious. I suspect the script just said "Spoiler cuts the power lines" and left Todd Nauck to figure out how that worked.

But uh, speaking of how that worked -- in Greta's defense for how she'll behave later on in this post, Steph just clearly tried to kill her first. Like. I assume that any grenade a Bat is carrying around isn't so high-powered that it's actually going to hurt somebody if thrown at them directly so for all my joking I'll give her a pass for that, but the power lines?

Steph, of course, has no way of knowing that electricity is Greta's weakness, let alone that it's a trauma trigger for her. But she also has no way of knowing that Greta isn't an average metahuman teenager who would just, y'know, die from being hit with several hundred to several thousand volts of electricity. Which is part of a trend in Steph's characterization -- she's always had a tendency to make rash, dangerous decisions like this and only consider the ramifications after the consequences smack her in the face.

And once again, this is Steph's escalation; Greta only lets loose after Steph tries to low-key murder her. But I did say in my previous post that she was explicitly trying not to kill Steph here, right? That's because she's not:

"Oh," she says, directly to Steph's face. "I'm not going to kill you, but you're going to wish I had!"

The issue ends with Tim giving the girls a lecture about trust that... honestly, doesn't actually make much sense, but it's only there to set up the bullshit Bruce would soon pull in Robin to wrap up the whole Steph-and-Tim's-secret-identity subplot.

Instead, I'll just take this moment to point out that these two pages are the only part that anyone besides Steph and Greta themselves actually saw: Steph, overpowered and running like bugger all while a furious Greta hunted her down. Tim and Red Tornado don't have any other context for this encounter, and anyone else hearing about it would have even less.

We should also probably address the question of whether Greta was actually trying to hurt Steph here and: no, I don't think she was. Not physically, anyway. I think when she tells Reddy that she "just wanted to scare" Steph, she was telling the truth. Which, mind you, means she was going to dump her into a terrifying hell dimension and give her a repeated taste of her own mortality. But it wouldn't have hurt her; it didn't hurt the gang when they teleported through it in issue 19. And, frankly, between this issue and the shit Steph pulls over the course of the Robin issues around this subplot... I think she deserved it.

I never said I wasn't a hater.

Now, to be fair, Steph has no way to know this. She doesn't know Greta, and she doesn't have a reason to think kindly of her. And like I mentioned, it's an important part of Greta's storyarc that her powers and her connection to death makes her friends suspicious of her, and that suspicion sadly drives her to Darksied.

Which is why I'm inclined to think that their next encounters, brief as they are, are deliberately framed. First in issue 50:

And then in issue 54, during the storyline where Secret has allied herself with Darksied:

This leads into Greta basically eating Steph for reasons that don't actually have to do with their conflict -- she's already eaten the D.E.O., ie, the people who held her prisoner, and would continue to eat, it's implied, everyone on Earth except the members of Young Justice, saving them for last as we come to climax of the story. That probably counts as "trying to kill Steph" so technically speaking Greta has tried to kill Steph once, it just wasn't the time everybody thinks about or in a jealous rage. It wasn't personal at all, she was just part of a checklist.

The important bit I wanted to focus on was Steph and Tim's descriptions of their past encounter, and the fact that Greta calls it an exaggeration. With that context, I'm inclined to think that "almost killed me in a jealous rage" is the way that Steph framed their story to other people, not necessarily because she was trying to manipulate anybody, but because that's how she, Stephanie, internalized and interpreted the event.

Because Steph, demonstrably, doesn't think she was doing anything wrong. If she wants something, like her boyfriend's secret identity, or whatever, she will come up with excuses and justifications why she should get to have it ("He's testing me! He wants me to figure it out!" etc.) and no one can change her mind. So it's inconceivable to her that this person who clearly has a crush on her boyfriend would actually be mad at her for the reason they say they're mad at her; clearly, to her, Secret was jealous, and therefore Secret must have been the aggressor. Plus, she was big and scary and Steph (to be fair) had no way of knowing that Greta was mostly just having trouble keeping her emotions under control.

And because nobody else saw what went down between them, people were more inclined to believe Steph's story over Greta's, partially because Greta was clearly the overpowering victor when Red Tornado and Robin arrived on the scene, and partially because Greta's powers mean people, even her friends, tend to be suspicious of her, which is a key point in her personal, rather tragic storyarc.

---

So, to summarize, because I know this has gotten rambly: Greta followed Steph home to investigate her and was angered by her violating Robin's privacy. Steph escalated their dispute into violence, and then further into attacks that could be perceived as lethal until she bit off more than she could chew. Robin and Red Tornado, arriving at the tail end of the fight, only saw the much more powerful Secret overwhelming normal human Spoiler and were therefore more inclined to believe Steph's version of the story which, naturally, framed her as the victim and Greta as the aggressor, when it was in actuality a more even fight fueled by anger rather than jealousy.

[pinkbelugacollective]

my favorite thing about about the 90's young justice solos is that they catered towards three distinct audiences, and yet after all these years, the one that would have been LEAST likely to be projected into nowadays is now the MOST woobified out of the three.

tim: a story for white kids, by a white guy who hates poor people, and didn't really take itself OUT of that white-male-projective-state even after all these years. bonus note, now the gays can project into tim cuz timbo's finally out the closet, and chuck dixon wants to kill himself over it, but it's ok bc we like tim even tho we don't like chuck.

bart: a story initially about a time-displaced refugee whose narrative heavily mirrored a refugee's forced assimilation into a new culture WHILE also appealing to the adhd/autism crowd, which the writer was absolutely OK with because bart's story can be accepted by BOTH the refugee narrative enjoyers and the adhd/autism crowds without impinging on his narrative poignancy, plus mark waid actually loved bart and he loves that WE love bart. inshallah he will write his boy again.

kon: a story about teenagers who are being neglected, and so he's acting out every which way and partying it up because he was meant to appeal to the 90's teenage rage and show how easy it is for kids to get caught up with predators like knockout and tana because of the lack of structure and discipline in their lives, but when geoff decided to ignore nearly ten years of creator-run canon, we had to deal with his timkonnie dreams, and now geoff's leaving, so now we gotta deal with the yja nonsense and some lady's self-insert dreams going into a character whose writer is not only still alive, but actively on the bi!kon train but from the 90's crackhead era perspective. and HE'S the one most woobified.

it's absolutely facinating cuz you'd think kon would be the most hated out of the three bc of his issues with consent and the unhealthy ways he frames relationships, but instead it's BART who people hate the most! bart's being infantalized and discounted and used at a third-man-ship-prop, while tim's being rewarded for being an emotionally strugglesome white man who just came out of the closet, and it's not nearly as bad as how bart's getting his ass beat in the fandumb, but poor tim can't even date his high school homie in peace without someone crying about how he 'deserved' kon instead.

to think that the character with that many issues would be the MOST woobified character in the yj cast is insane, bc what are you even woobifying? his depersonalization? his lack of boundaries with women? his inability to read a room? the fact that nobody loves nor cares about him enough to protect him from the horrors of the world? the fact that he was a stellar example of a CSA survivor who didn't even KNOW he was a victim of CSA, and thus wasn't really able to understand the ramifications of his inappropriate behavior until years later when he forced himself into a masculine fold so he didn't fall into the trap of being like 'the old him' again?

kon's story was a story of self-hatred come to life in the most fantastical ways. he thinks it's ok to publicly date a grown woman other people are judging for dating a dumbass minor. he didn't know what a mother's love was, and had to witness it first hand with nanaue's mother. he thinks an emotionally unavailable and distant clone handler is his dad bc he doesn't KNOW anyone else who can fit into that mold. he thinks roxy's his sister but still has no problem sexualizing her in his head bc he thinks it's ok to find your older sister hot.

kon was the DEFINITION of the kids are not alright, nope, not at all, hell to the fuck no. geoff was the single biggest driver in stripping all the nuance from his character post-graduation day, but he not even here no more... what's the excuse in continuing to strip away at what makes kon, kon? i know dc's afraid to admit lois and clark looked the other way when a teenaged clone was dating an adult woman, but you woulda thought he woulda been a turnoff to the fandumb as well. he aint tho, so he suffers for it accordingly.

i can only hope karl kesel lands another contract after these new movies flop, so we can finally get a REAL follow-up to the 1994 solo. you could never make me hate that man's insane writing. justice for 1994 kon. if dc still had good writers, we coulda had a multi-year healing arc exposing how horrifying superheroing really is for people, and why clones deserve something to the equivalent of human rights. instead, he's doin fuckall and kissin m'gann. no shade to m'gann, she absolutely deserves more than the current caricature.

[undead-knick-knack]

It still counts as leaving no witnesses if no one's left alive

[necrotic-nephilim]

I know you like Young Justice 98 so I have to ask what you think of my favorite problematic girl Greta Hayes.

I LOVE GRETA SO MUCH.

Greta Hayes is my favorite bbygirl ever. i think her backstory is super interesting and i wish DC had done more with the whole Warder concept, exploring other Warders and what her relationship could've been with them. i just love the like. duality of her? the way she appears pretty shy and timid but has this really deep, explosive anger to her. she's a hot mess and i love her dearly, she can do no wrong in my eyes. the only moment i didn't like with her was when she and Steph fought, but i blame that more on the writers bc "two girls must have a crush on the cool main character and fight over him" just happens a lot in comics.

i lost my shit when Stargirl: Lost Children brought Greta back. i'm so happy she's back around and i think Lost Children was an interesting plot to explain the concept of all of these teenage heroes and sidekicks getting lost to comic book limbo. i wish Anita had also been in Lost Children but, i'm happy for the scraps of Greta we got bc if you'd asked me before if we would ever see her again, i would've said probably not. i hope the New Golden Age stuff does more with her and i'm delusional that we'll see her reunite with Young Justice, or at the very least Bart, since that's who she mentions being friends with in Lost Children.

i do ship her with Tim, i fear. i think her crush on him was really cute and how much faith she had in him. and him being the one who was able to talk out of working with Darkseid? just very cute vibes. i do also like GretaSteph, but GretaTim is rlly fun and i wish we had more content of it. whether it be an unrequited love situation where she has to watch him grow up while she's trapped as her age in this life/death limbo, or them actually trying to make it work. i crave to use her more in fanfic, i just haven't thought of stories to easily slot her into yet.

anyway, i love her, she's a doll, she should've been in Young Justice (2019), begging DC to do something with her now that she's officially back in the continuity. give her a mini or something pls DC my kingdom for content of my dumb angry ghost child.

[wandixx]

I had a might need to draw cape with stars and well, Miss Martian was a great model.

[technoturian]

So my friend recommended Young Justice and even though I’m not much of a DC person I started it. And it’s okay, except it has the fatal flaw where the least interesting, most annoying characters and relationships are the ones that get the lion’s share of the screen time.

[azurecanary]

I don't know where the origin of Kon El came from in the comics, but i have to imagine it's better than being named after the celebrity crush of the girl who now has a crush on you

[icyfox17]

New tag game bc I'm bored

List 5-10 of the most obscure crossovers you have floating around in your brain !!

1. Dumbass!crimeboys x halcyon!crimeboys

-> arguably the most obscure since it's a crossover between two aus that aren't even posted publicly, but i gen adore it sm<3 db!crimeboys is a hero au where tommy is just. Welp. A dumbass<3 he's my fav tommy ever guys 😭😭 he's my friend's au and I just SOBS most precious guy ever... And halcyon crimeboys is a detective au. Basically take the dumbest tommy and tired older brother Wilbur and make them meet the smartest crimeboys. It's very silly:))

2. Psych x Dsmp

-> okay hear me out. Hear me out. Shawn Spencer is literally Tommyinnit. They are the SAME. Now Phil as Chief Vic, Techno and Wilbur as twin detectives who both function as Jules and Lassiter (platonic ofc), and Tubbo as Gus. It fits way better than it should 😭😭

3. Critical Role (specifically Mighty Nein) x Dsmp

-> guys. Guys. I went on a rant on here like a year ago BUT CADUCEUS AND TECHNO'S CHARACTER DESIGNS ARE EERILY SIMILAR TO EACH OTHER. Tall pink dude w animal traits (cad is more cow, tech is more pig)? Cad is like c!Phil and c!Techno to me... (Is it bc of the tea obsession? Maybe...). I just also think that clingyduo would get along with Jester and Nott/Veth like a wildfire. OR OMG FOOLISH-- Does anyone remember Foolish building dick statues everywhere?? Yeah, he's definitely a follower of the Traveler.

4. 911xMCU

-> okay ngl guys this just came 2 me bc I realised that everyone calls Bobby Cap like how all the Avengers call Steve Cap and I was like lmfao imagine a scene where someone says Cap and they both respond to it.

5. Cw Flash x Pjo

-> okay this isn't my idea but it's one of my fav fics ever WHY DOES IT WORK SO WELL LMFAO

6. Spider-Man x Dick Grayson & Wally West

-> PETER IS LITERALLY DICK AND WALLY IN ONE PERSON 😭😭 SUPER SMART SCIENCE BRAIN + SILLY GOOFY + ACROBATS they're the same. I need them to meet so badly sobsosbsosbsosvsosbsosbsisbsjs Not sure which versions of which I just. Need it. Pls 😭😭😭

7. Justice League Unlimited x Young Justice (tv show)

-> This one has its own separate post here, but omg it makes me SO UPSET GUYS 😭😭😭

8. TMNT x Batfam

Okay not obscure bc they have had both a movie and a comic BUT HEAR ME OUT. SPECFICALLY THE 2007 MOVIE VERSION OF TMNT. This scene is literally Dick and Jason I can't do this guys WHY DO THEIR COLOURS EVEN MATCH

9. Dceu!Bruce & Barry x MCU!Irondad

-> okay my mental illness is full blast here but omfg they are the same duo THEY ARE THE SAME I need them to swap sons for a day plspslspslspspspdlfkfdishskdfjdksklaskd

10. Any vigilante au Tommy x Spider-Man

-> this is hidden in my notes app and is both like my own version of Tommy and Spidey but omfg I'm attached it's such a fun idea to play around with rahhhshshshss. I have a scene where Tommy and Spidey have a miscommunication over Blade lmfao and it lives rent free in my mind. Like Blade is a vampire but does NOT dress the same as Technoblade who might also secretly be a vampire in Tommy's universe lmfaooo

Okay and Bonus One that literally no one will understand except me

11. Magnum PI remake x Orphanduo (Techno and Skeppy)

-> Katsumoto is literally Technoblade guys. THEY ARE THE SAME PERSON. And omfg Magnum and Higgens are so happy duo ngl 😭😭😭

OKAY THAT'S ALL FOR NOW YIPPEE

Tag time :D

@sammiekel @jiksvokrat @cristalmystery @ghosts-and-blue-sweaters @sleepdeprivedofmycorn @sunflowervc @angrilydancing and anyone else who wants to join in!!