#congratulations on de-railing my evenings for almost two weeks (but also thanks for the excuse to rewatch while screencap-hunting)

[threewaysdivided]

So we all know how you feel about season 2 of Young Justice so how would you go about fixing all the flaws that happened over the course of the time skip and are there any episodes in season 1 you would have done differently? Also love your Deathly Weapons story and look forward to the next part.

First of all, thank you! I’m happy you’re enjoying Deathly Weapons and I’m super grateful for how much patience everyone has shown about me disappearing down into the writing mines for years at a stretch - especially to all the readers, commenters and artists who’ve come by to say hi during those long barren periods.

Chapter 18 (#19 counting the prologue) is now in full draft version with about 80% in final draft and the last few scenes currently in revision, so with luck I might get the next update out this month (touch wood).

Now, to your questions:

Any episodes in Season 1 that I would have done differently?

Honestly, not really. Or at least not on a whole-episode-rewrite level.

I think most of Young Justice Season 1 is incredibly solid, even in the slower and less substantial episodes/ scenes. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, narrative is more than just plot, characters and thesis; it’s also stuff like pacing, framing, tone and emotional texture, and for what they are I think those scenes and episodes contribute pretty well - usually on top of doing some pretty decent character work by themselves.

That’s not to say YJS1 is perfect by any measure, but a lot of the issues I have are entirely the kind of polish stuff that you’d expect from the first season of a show still finding its feet.

The biggest things I would want to change are:

I would tweak the writing of the Light specifically around the episodes Welcome to Happy Harbour and Humanity. The reveal of T.O. Morrow’s plan is that he wants his Red Androids to drive humans extinct and repopulate the planet with a robot army, which doesn’t really fit the Light’s stated goal of evolving humanity. I would either cut the scene from Welcome to Happy Harbour that implies T.O. Morrow is a part of their plan and just let him be an independent antagonist like we see in a few other episodes, OR I would add a scene in Humanity to clarify that the Light were using Morrow for their own agenda a la the Injustice League (perhaps in hopes of turning Red Tornado or even just confirming that the Team is operating from Mount Justice) and that Red Volcano’s ultimate failure is something they anticipated or even planned to cause themselves if necessary. Looking at Season 1 in isolation I do understand why the first scene is there; Welcome to Happy Harbour is only Episode 3 and at that point they’re still trying to establish a sense of the Light lurking conspiratorially as a presence behind every curtain. It’s one of those minor things that’s understandable on its own but, with the context of the later seasons, kind of feels like ominous foreshadowing in hindsight.

I’d also potentially want to adjust the dynamic between M’gann and Conner in the episode Terrors.  In the context of just Season 1 it’s mostly fine – their relationship having some light friction around boundaries/ consent is interesting and could have been built into a future arc.  But in light of what actually followed, the way this episode has M’gann reveal something personal about Conner to a stranger without his permission, only to then frame Conner as wrong for reacting angrily and have him beg her to come back without addressing it because “don’t leave me, please, I need you” feels like a red flag for what would become a pattern of later entries routinely forcing Conner to just ‘get over’ or even accept blame for moments where M’gann is written to violate his trust.  Were it me, I would either add some extra lines toward the end of the episode to have both of them recognise that (although well-intended) M’gann’s choice of action was inappropriate and Conner is allowed to feel upset (even if he was a little harsh) OR leave it as-is but make resolving the issue of boundaries (especially as a character flaw of M’gann’s) a key focus for them in a follow-up story.

In a similar vein, I question the addition of Rocket/Raquel in the last two episodes. It’s not that she’s bad, it’s just a really late point in a season to be adding a new character. She doesn’t have any established emotional connection to the rest of the Team or the reveals that follow and, outside of a couple of scenes that use her powers for minor problem solving, she doesn’t have much narrative utility. (And sure, she shows up as a cameo in Revelations but so do a bunch of other characters who never meaningfully come back). Were Young Justice’s canon not trapped in The Bad Place and, had some actually competent showrunners created later seasons where she had an arc and proper function, they could have justified it but, again, with the context of what we did get: ominous foreshadowing in hindsight.

Apart from that, I think I would have liked to see a bit more animation fidelity in places. Little tweaks to things like expressions and maybe a few background idle/ breathing animations during group shots. There are some moments where facial features get a little bit slide-y, and characters can freeze into being these wall-eyed mannequins while waiting for their turn to talk. (There’s a couple of points in Denial’s elevator scene where Artemis just turns into this vacant cardboard cut-out when she’s not speaking and it’s kind of hilarious: she has become one with the elevator music.)

But on the other hand, I get why it’s like that. Animation is really complicated, especially in 2D where every little change or addition can mean an entirely new set of drawings; which means asking the animation/lighting/compositing/VFX team to make and implement those drawings, which means spending more time and money… at some point there’s diminishing returns and only weird nerds like me are going to notice or care. It’s flawed but mostly in that kind of charming way where it reminds you that even really good art is made by human beings trying their best. And, when it wants to, Young Justice’s animation can be really good, so I’m glad they put the resources there instead.

How would I fix all the flaws that happened over the timeskip?

Boy howdy, this one is going to be a doozie.

For the sake of people just tuning in: I have some significant frustrations with Invasion (and really all post-S1 content). To this day, Young Justice remains the only show where I adored rewatching one season, only to turn around and consciously think “I don’t want to keep watching, this feels like a chore” on the next. Back when things were still mercifully cancelled I poked at Invasion a bit, identified a couple of surface-level annoyances, and let it go because one great season and one flop is still 50% excellent (and hey, maybe there were production problems, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt).

And then the revival happened and OH NO. I have been sucked down the rabbit hole of trying to understand how deep the problems go and why they’re so infuriating ever since.

Here’s the resulting master post (I know, I have a master post, good grief) of my analysing various problems across YJS2+.

With that as context, the challenge in answering your question is that there’s no singular problem with Young Justice (well… there is but we’ll get there). It’s more of a Russian nesting doll of interlocking problems; smaller things that point to bigger things. So trying to “fix” all the flaws ends up feeling a bit like Sisyphus with his rock - as soon as you get on top of one it rolls right down another slope into a fresh quagmire of issues.

What I think I’d like to do now and I was going to say ‘with your permission’ but it’s my blog and none of you are here to stop me so this is a hostage situation, I’m so sorry is use Invasion as kind of a case study/ writing exercise. Go through the problems layer by layer, suggest some possible ways to address them and see where it leads us.

Alright.

Let’s take our boulder and get rolling, shall we?

Before we really get into this, there’s an idea I’d like you to consider:

Constructing a narrative is about making choices. Nothing in a narrative “has” to happen and, at the same time, nothing just spontaneously manifests by itself. Good fiction creates the illusion of being a window through which we experience pieces of another living world, but in reality what is presented by the text is all that exists. Everything has to be consciously constructed: from the events of the plot, to the backgrounds, to individual footstep sounds. A drawing intersecting another drawing on a screen does not make noise; someone deliberately adds that in. If a tree falls in a forest and the creators don’t depict it, it doesn’t even fall.

An example: Let’s look at the Toy Story Movies’ credit-scene “bloopers”. These aren’t actual bloopers - real bloopers would be stuff like the animation breaking, or textures not rendering, or the engine going haywire; things that would disrupt the illusion of life. What they actually are is bonus scenes that the creative team actively wrote and developed on top of the rest of the movie, to help support the illusion that these characters are real and continue to exist outside the story rather than being CG-rendered polygons that disappear when the program switches off.

The flipside of this, though, is that the creators have near-ultimate power over what does happen. The sky could be blue one day and chartreuse the next. Wally’s hair could change colour every five minutes. Zatanna could be a different nationality each episode. Superboy could speak exclusively in limericks. It’s not complete power - licensing agreements, executive mandates and the physical limitations of time/tools/team/budget do create restrictions and force certain things - but outside of that, anything they decide goes. Good narratives tend to make effective and efficient choices; choices which fit cohesively with what has already been established and with what is planned to happen later, which create a sense of causality that the audience can follow, which don’t break the explicit/implied “rules” of how things work, and which don’t demand a lot of additional work/choices be made just to facilitate them. This is why I have limited patience for people who try to defend stories by claiming that ‘X’ “had” to happen. No, it didn’t. The creators could have chosen anything; they decided that ‘X’ should happen, and had they chosen a different option, it would have become canon instead.

With that said: to business.

I want to make it clear; there are things I like about Invasion. I like that they continued Red Arrow’s personal narrative and that it was Jade and Lian who ultimately helped him break out of his self-loathing and find the original Roy (although it is frustrating that he drops from the story immediately after that).

I like some of the new additions. I like Jaime and Bart, and I think Jaime’s arc about developing a partnership with his Scarab is one of the strongest personal narratives throughout the season. I like the Runaways, and especially how Virgil was written. I like Green Beetle. These characters are entertaining; the animation team and voice actors created good moment-to-moment chemistry between them and they’re written to play off each other well.

There’s also a lot of potential in the ideas if developed further. Beneath his bubbly persona there’s a lot of layers to explore in Bart’s experience as a time traveller interacting with a world and people that in his own are long-destroyed and dead. I like the idea of him developing new relationships with the present-day Neutron and Blue Beetle despite already “knowing” them in another form. I like the potential between Jaime and Tye; two old friends independently and unwillingly empowered by outside forces, learning to navigate and live in their new environment. I like the concept of the Runaways; a group of teens abducted because they were unwanted/ neglected/ overlooked, who find a place with each other - being led by Virgil, a kid from a loving family who was grabbed by mistake. There’s interesting things to explore in the idea that each meta-ability in some way reflects the individual meta-human’s surroundings; especially since most of the Runaways are multi-ethnic, and particularly for Tye as the grandson of an Apache chief. You could make some fascinating commentary about a world where the lines are blurring and “superpowers” are increasingly being held by “regular” people, rather than just mythologised costumed culture heroes and aliens, and where aliens are becoming an increasingly normal aspect of everyday life.

Like I said, there’s good potential there.

It’s just…

I would have liked them better if they’d been in their own show.

The immediate problem is that these elements barely engage with the existing narrative of Young Justice. None of the new characters have emotionally significant personal interactions with the original cast. Nor do they or their journeys function as cinematic/ thematic/ character foils or parallels to the original Team. The mole plot and Bart/Jaime’s plot never seem to intentionally feed into each other; nothing Jaime and Bart do really contributes to the reveal in Summit, and nothing the original Team do really contributes to defeating Black Beetle on the Reach ship. While there are some minor convergence points in service of problem solving for one story or the other, it rarely (if ever) feels like both groups are actively working together in service of a mutual overall goal. They are connected primarily by virtue of existing in the same show.

Here we have that Scope Management problem I’ve mentioned before. We now have two functionally independent casts and storylines competing for less total screentime than the first season (Invasion having only 20 episodes to Season 1’s 26). Any screentime given to one comes as the opportunity cost of that screentime not being used to develop the other. It’s narratively inefficient, and the result is that even the good things end up feeling underbaked.

There’s also an issue with how the Reach fit into the structure. Invasion likes to frame their defeat as something that “broke the Light in half” but the more you think about it, the more that’s revealed to be untrue. The Reach were never fully-integrated partners of the Light; both organisations held each other at arm’s length, and both ultimately saw and treated the other as disposable. Indeed, the thing that drives the final wedge is the Team revealing that the Light had always planned to double-cross. And then the final climax happens because the Reach were intending to double-cross right back by attempting to destroy the Earth. In fact, you could argue that defeating the Reach was always part of the Light’s own plan, and that the Team’s actions in Summit simply altered the method and timeframe by which that plan advanced to its next intended stage.

Which is itself a problem because the presence of the Reach is most of the justification for these new characters existing in the story in the first place.

I’d like to introduce two concepts from game design:

Accretion Accretion is a design phenomenon (usually in MMOs and perpetual games) where instead of patching, improving or removing mechanics and systems that are becoming outdated, unbalanced, exploitable or broken, the developers choose to simply build and layer over unrelated new mechanics with the aim of replacing and outmoding the systems that already exist. The old Extra Credits team did a video on this if you want to learn more.

The Sidequest Problem In his God of War Retrospective, Hello Future Me identified what he called ‘the Sidequest problem’: where the designers establish a story goal but then (rather than creating future goals/stakes for the player to progress past it and on to) they instead have the player encounter a sequence of arbitrary obstacles and problems that mostly exist to obstruct progress to that main goal until the obstacle is removed. The issue being that, while this approach extends playtime and gives the player a lot to do, the things that happen don’t necessarily feel like they’re moving the story forward. This is similar to the “filler arc” problem in early-2000s TV anime. In order to continue airing episodes while waiting for the publisher to release new adaptable material, the show writers would put the ongoing story into stasis by inventing an unrelated/ unconnected original antagonist or problem which they could divert the cast into a story about overcoming without changing the status quo on either side.

As they exist in Invasion canon, the Reach represent a choice to add a disposable secondary antagonist who can be knocked down without much advancement to the central conflict. It’s effectively a canonical “filler arc”.

The overarching structural issue with Young Justice is that every season Accretes new Sidequests rather than progressing the existing narrative goals.

There’s also the broader Scope Management issue that (even excluding the characters required by the ‘Sidequests’) Young Justice introduces a ridiculous number of characters per season. Most end up in the same position as Rocket: no properly established emotional connection to the existing Team, no personal motivations giving them agency in the plot, little to no narrative utility outside of a couple of scenes of minor problem solving. They seem to have been added mostly as references but because they hang around longer than cameos they divert time and development away from the narratively significant characters. Again, it’s an inefficient choice with a high opportunity cost.

So, how could we fix this?

The broader Scope Management issue is pretty simple. Just take out any characters who weren’t set up by Season 1 and who aren’t relevant to the Sidequest. So, outside of Jaime, Bart, Neutron, Green Beetle and the Runaways that leaves us with: Beast Boy and Arsenal, and then Batgirl, Bumblebee, Lagoon Boy and Guardian if we count the cameos as foreshadowing. That’s already a lot more manageable. Plus Bumblebee and Beast Boy’s powers are useful for specific problem-solving, and between them, the original Team, the League and the Sidequest cast they should be able to cover most of the critical roles in driving missions. And, by reallocating more time and jobs to them, you give them more opportunities to resonate with the audience and become narratively significant on their own.

I say simple but functionally it means we’re already re-writing most of the season (or at the very least re-animating and re-recording all the scenes with switched-out characters, which is pretty similar) .

The next step would be to address the Sidequest problem, which we could do in two ways.

Option 1: We could give the conflict actual long-term significance by making the Reach properly important to the Light, rather than just a tool whose loss they can shrug off. This could be done by making the Reach actual full partners, or by shifting the Light’s plan to a stage where they still need the Reach around for a while longer: either way losing them should represent a setback that the Light has to re-strategize around. Ideally we’d also like to fold the two casts and plots together more, which I think could be done using Bart. Even more than the Light, Bart is the one who understands what’s really at stake, so he has the motivation to encourage/ steer everybody he can towards working together against the Reach. You could also have Bart interact more with Wally; something that would work both because of their shared tie to the Flash legacy and because Wally is in on the Mole plot. Perhaps have Bart trying to bring Wally out of retirement because he believes Kid Flash is important to the future - which would add more weight to him taking up the mantle later - and since Wally “questions objectivity” and is skilled at detecting fakery (thanks to years of being Dick’s best friend) he might be the one to realise that Bart’s bubbly persona is a front and that something more is going on.

Option 2: Since we’re already functionally re-writing the season anyway, we could fix the Sidequest problem by simply lifting it out and making it into its own separate show. Remember nothing has to happen in a narrative; we could easily have another answer to the sixteen hours that doesn’t involve the Reach, letting the Mole plot and Red Arrow take centre stage again. Meanwhile, that Sidequest - the Reach coming to Earth to stealth-abduct humans for experimentation, Bart coming back from a future-apocalypse to stop them, Jaime finding the Scarab and learning to work with it to become Blue Beetle, liberating Neutron and the Runaways, freeing Green Beetle, and eventually defeating Black Beetle and driving the ambassadors off - doesn’t need to be bolted onto the side of Young Justice. You can write new reasons and ways for these things to happen in their own separate universe. And honestly that story would be better for having the breathing room. The “bond” that allows Jaime and Scarab to defeat Black Beetle feels incredibly barebones in Invasion. With the exception of Virgil, the runaways barely have a fully developed personality between them. Those more nuanced sides of Bart beneath his comic-book-personality act hardly get a look in. It would all be improved by having the space to be its own thing.

For the sake of simplicity let’s go with Option 2. Cut the padding, drop the Sidequest, get the focus back to the original cast.

Wait, where did our boulder go…?

Have you noticed that the Mole plot doesn’t actually progress the long-term conflict either?

We finish Invasion with barely more understanding of the Light’s structure and goals than when we started. When Kaldur is first revealed to be working with them, he’s apparently not trusted enough to have access to their inner secrets. Then, when he is finally brought into the fold after destroying Mount Justice, he gets immediately brain-blasted by Miss Martian and the plot pivots to solving that problem instead. Despite what you’d expect from a mole story, we don’t get to see the how the Light operate in their own environment; the dynamic between the individual members, any points of tension/ disagreement, what each one personally hopes to gain from the alliance. Even outside of the inner circle, Kaldur doesn’t interact with the Light’s wider network of resources and allies - he spends most of his time on the Manta-sub. They barely discover anything, and most of what they do learn is only really useful in knocking down the Reach.

So this is its own form of canonical filler. The conflict still isn’t progressing. It feels like wheel-spin.

Of the story threads in Invasion, we have a Sidequest and this. The only thing that actually moves meaningfully forward is Red Arrow’s personal arc, and he disappears from the story once Arsenal is introduced.

And this is something that persists into the revival at Outsiders; by the end the Light is still incredibly undefined.

It also indicates a weird lack of faith - or even tacit admission of failure - on behalf of the creators. Young Justice is supposedly about “generations” but, rather than letting each entry be a new story about a new generation, they never let go of the original Team. It’s like the showrunners weren’t confident that the audience would accept a whole new cast - or perhaps aren’t confident that they and their new production teams could create characters and conflict as compelling. The result is a lot like the “keep watching and maybe you’ll find out” problem that Hbomberguy so thoroughly criticised in BBC’s Sherlock. The original Team is always there, doing things that might one day progress the existing conflict, but really it’s just a hook to keep you going as the show subjects you to a Sidequest.

An aside: the revival’s blatant nostalgia-bait This is why I'm retroactively annoyed with the Outsiders trailer and how it put such heavy focus on Wally despite him barely being a presence in that season. It's why I was infuriated with the Outsiders fever-dream scene and how it sacrificed any opportunity to meaningfully reflect on Dick and Wally's friendship in favour of a shallow attempt to tug on our nostalgia for Season 1 (to the point that they play the original theme-song, despite it never being used in-show or musically associated with the Team before this). And it's why, despite having already dropped canon, I was still thoroughly irked by how heavily the Phantoms trailers used imagery from the first season when emphasising the next season's supposed return to focus on the original cast. These scenes and trailers speak to how consummately dishonest and insincere Greg Weisman is being as show lead. It reveals that he and the revival team know full well that attachment to the Season 1 cast and their story are the primary source of engagement for most of Young Justice's audience. But, instead of reciprocating that passion by progressing the story, they tease them in false-promise trailers and emotionally exploitative scenes as a transparent attempt to pander back into good graces; even though they clearly have no intent to deliver and (as we'll discuss later) even if they did, any possibility of actually continuing that narrative is at this point long gone.

The other problem is that, because it still drags the original Team through the time skips and plot events, it’s not quite a filler arc. They aren’t in stasis waiting for their turn again - they’re still making choices and doing things that reflect on their characters. And because the show has them do substantially negative things in service of “intrigue” and “drama”, it can accidentally make them seem unsympathetic and callous. And then incompetent when the lack of forward progress gives them no end to justify their means.

So let’s give them an end.

The Team don’t necessarily need to move against the Light in Invasion but they should at least retrieve some significant information. This is, nominally, an espionage show; things like objectives, in-group dynamics, individual motivations, alliances, favours, resources and supply-lines are all important pieces that have value in future problem solving and could act as the foundation of later strategies.

But here’s where we hit a smaller (at least for now) problem: The Light don’t actually have a plan.

The show likes to pretend they do - they’re always lurking in the background, putting fingers to their noses to make their anime-glasses keikaku gleam - but once you stop to examine it, it starts falling apart.

Let’s unpack the Lights “plan” In Season 1 we learn that the Light exist in opposition to a “calcified status quo” which they believe the heroes have helped to create and are enabling to persist; and that their goal is apparently to drive humanity into what they see as “a new stage of evolution”. (Keep that “status quo” bit in the back of your mind for later.) At no point do we learn the details of what this “new stage” entails, or what systems they intend to have replace the current status quo; although by virtue of them being the antagonists and our protagonists being Heroes we can infer it will be worse than (and probably not solve any of the actual problems with) the existing one. By Season 2 we know that the “plan” has something to do with meta-humans, as well as lowering public perception of/ faith in the Justice League, and that their partnership with the Reach is apparently in service of this.

However, this doesn’t really line up.

Season 1 effectively communicates the idea of the Light as meticulous planners taking steps toward a specific goal; on rewatch you can see how the main events of multiple episodes serve as cover for them assembling the pieces of their final weapon. The Team stop Amazo and the Fog, but Ivo and Roquette’s nanotechnology go on to be used in creating Starro-tech - along with the Echidnoderm piece, which Downtime’s attack serves to move to the surface so that it can be stolen during the panic in Misplaced. I especially like the jump-cut that happens right after the trigger phrase ‘Broken Arrow’ in Targets, concealing the period when Red Arrow is pumped for information and likely given the directive to infect the League.

And yet the primary plan that this is in service of involves waiting four-to-five years in hopes that that right aliens are lured to Earth. It’s almost like they’ve gone fishing. They don’t take any on-screen steps to capitalise on the disorientation of the League in the aftermath of the Starro attack, and they don’t carry out any other attempts to attack the heroes or alter the status quo over the intervening years - there’s not even evidence of them making preparations. The only sign of activity is early in Team Year 5; when they go after a magic Tiamat statue as justification for a tie-in game that IGN rated 4.8/10 as “a bland, unsurprising action RPG that has little to do with the series’ continuity or mythology.” (And for anyone wondering; yes, Greg and Brandon were the lead writers on this.)

A smarter strategy might have been to use the 16 hours to implicate the League in some kind of corruption or racketeering on either Earth or in the immediate planetary system; something that would more directly damage their public image and could allow the Light to gain open support and resources by positioning themselves as defenders against the League as a potential threat. Plus, the Light have access to Project Cadmus. Any facility capable of conducting full live cloning is capable of comparative DNA analysis, and any organisation able to entirely replace Roy and steal clone-quality DNA samples from Superman should have no problem gathering DNA from other known meta-humans. The only benefit the Reach bring is the mass-meta-gene-tracer distributed in their drink, and the Light actively sabotage that as part of their double-cross.

Then the plan becomes even less sensical in Season 3. We learn that Vandal Savage is apparently the first meta-human, and has been motivated to form various iterations of the Light throughout history in order to evolve humanity as part of an old pact with Darkseid where they would conquer the galaxy together and then have Earth and Apokolips fight for rulership. Vandal has, apparently, known about the return of Apokolips for millennia; long before the formation of the current status quo or the heroes who supposedly “calcified” it. He’s also confirmed to have known Klarion - who in Season 3 is revealed to be able to activate meta-genes with magic - since the days of Ancient Babylon. Yet he did seemingly nothing to change the course of history or make use of those tools until 2010 - and even then the plan he picked involved passively waiting around for another five years despite intentionally doing things that would put Earth back on Apokolips’ radar.

The whole thing is an Idiot Plot: it requires every member of the Light to be actively and obviously bad at basic planning, strategy or project management. It completely defangs any impression of an organised conspiracy; they exist purely to contrive the illusion that movement-to-moment events, Sidequests and plot-happenings have a greater long-term significance. And in “justifying” internally inconsistent things, the show reveals that there is no coherent creative plan for the Light beyond bog-standard villainy-in-opposition.

Unfortunately, for the creators this is a feature and not a bug; Greg Weisman has openly said he doesn’t want to end the show. If the Light never have a clearly defined plan or internal structure then the Team can never come up with a counter-strategy that will stop them for good. Of course, he could always have had the Light be executing multiple different plans, or be the first in a chain of bigger, badder, baddies for the Team to tackle, but that would require him to get off his ask blog and actually think about the story for more than 10 minutes.

But anyway, let’s give the Light a plan and a structure.

Let’s give Kaldur a proper briefing on their mission statement and at least their current plan once they bring him into the fold. Let’s give him some time to interact with them and learn about their internal dynamic; where the alliances are and who might be persuaded to break away if the incentives were right. Let’s have him observe the coming and goings of mooks from different parts of their wider network. Let’s properly foreshadow their suspicion of him and why (even after “killing” Artemis) it was necessary to take such as drastic step as destroying the Mountain. Let’s give Artemis a chance to offer her own insight into proceedings as someone who grew up among villains. Maybe we could have some suspense around them finding ways to deliver updates and warnings to the others, or even subtly sabotaging a move before it gets someone hurt. When Dick and Wally are fighting, let’s have Dick actually spell out the strategy and stakes.

Now, even if the Team doesn’t take direct action, the conflict is advancing on the information side. It sets up potential for future strategies and justifies the actions they had to take to get there.

So, fixed?

Oh no, not again.

The premise of the of the Mole plot represents a huge contradiction in continuity between seasons.

To an audience watching the seasons back-to-back, the Team has just learned how to work together and trust each other. After the reveals in Usual Suspects we know all of them to be trustworthy. In Alpha Male we see how secret-keeping about a potential mole damages their ability to work together. There is no justification within the show for why Conner, M’gann and Zatanna were excluded from the plan. And the problems that leaving them out causes are extremely foreseeable by the characters. In Failsafe they all experienced the fallout of a situation where they thought Artemis was dead. In Image they watched M’gann brain-blast Psimon into a coma. It’s another Idiot Plot- it requires the characters to be incompetent.

Not only that but this Idiot Plot only works if several characters are written to act directly against their previously stated motivations and values: if Dick is willing to "sacrifice everything for the sake of the mission", if Kaldur is wiling to unquestioningly follow his orders like a soldier, and if M'gann is wiling to casually abuse her powers in a way that hurts people she cares about. There is no acknowledgement or in-show explanation given for why these characters are suddenly acting like the Bizzaro-versions of themselves, despite how badly it damages their arcs.

Plus, if you’ve just come off the back of Season 1 and watching the Team repeatedly express a value of anti-secrecy and getting angry at being lied to over much lower stakes then the whole plan looks super hypocritical.

Then, to make this plot “dramatic” and “intriguing”, the characters are written to do some really callous things. Artemis “dying” is a known source of trauma which the plan forces members of the original cast to re-experience. Blowing up Mount Justice renders M’gann and Conner homeless (and probably destroys most of their earthly belongings). When Dick is questioned by Wally in the aftermath, he responds with an incredibly demeaning and invalidating jab about Wally’s “precious souvenirs” instead of giving an answer. And again, the fact that this doesn’t actually progress the narrative in canon makes their behaviour even harder to swallow.

The five-year timeskip and lack of backfill don’t help either. For five years the Team has known both that the Light exist and that they’re dangerous enough to take control of the Justice League. And yet the audience never sees or hears any sign of them having made meaningful attempts to investigate or address this during that time. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that they spent four years procrastinating before panicking and rushing into the first scheme they came up with like it was a college assignment the night before submission. Oh, and the characters too!

There is no chain of causality from Season 1 to Invasion. It’s a narratively inefficient choice because justifying it requires a lot of additional work and choices - and in the absence of the story doing that work the burden gets shoved unreasonably onto the audience.

So let’s do the work.

Let’s use the extra time we’ve given ourselves on flashbacks and conversations. Show the audience that the Team has tried multiple times to investigate and stop the Light, but been frustrated at every turn by their ability to disappear into the shadows and hide behind layer-upon-layer of proxies. Let’s take some time to explain how M’gann became so cavalier about using her powers invasively; pushed further and further by the situation and the others as they became more frustrated, or maybe overcompensating for a time when holding back caused things to go wrong. Let’s have people speculate about the reveal that Black Manta is Kaldur’s father, and how it broke the trust between Aqualad and Aquaman.

Why don’t we add some scenes properly showing how Dick was, and still is, devastated by the death of Jason. Hear more about how Tula’s loss rattled all of them and crushed Kaldur. Perhaps have a conversation between concerned League members where we realise that the Mentors have gone too far in the opposite direction; treating the Team too much like adults instead of offering the support and guidance that grieving adolescents needed. Actually explore Wally’s reasoning for leaving; how he became disenchanted by years of minimal progress and heavy losses, eventually persuading Artemis to walk away with him so that they wouldn’t have to see (or make the others watch) anyone else die a pointless death. Let us understand how, to Dick, that felt like being abandoned by his best friend (explaining his petty meanness during Darkest), and how the loss of the person who “questions his objectivity” impaired his judgment.

Let us realise that the Mole plot comes not from stupidity but as a last resort - that it’s the only strategy Dick and Kaldur think might work, and how at this point they’re so emotionally compromised by survivors’ guilt and a fear of losing anyone else that they truly believe keeping the others in the dark is better than sharing the danger between them.

Give the audience a way to understand that what we skipped over was 5 years of increasingly desperate times, which have finally called for desperate measures.

Now we have causality. An emotional and logical through-line that the audience can follow from how it started to how it’s going.

And with that… are we done? We’ve trimmed the scope to a level that’s manageable, we’ve built the plots into something that actually progresses the conflict, we’ve created an understandable sense of continuity from Season 1 to Invasion. That’s everything.

… Right?

HECK.

So this is where we get to that singular problem and why it took so many ding-dang essays for me to reach it. It’s like that footprint scene from Godzilla - the underlying problem is so big, so fundamental and at the same time so beginner-level basic that you have to step a long way back to realise it’s even there. And then you see that all the other problems are nested inside it.

As I said a million years ago in that first Scope Management essay, at its core most storytelling is about understanding. It’s about communicating ideas. It’s about answering unspoken questions.

And one of the biggest, most basic storytelling questions seems to have never been asked by Young Justice’s showrunners or answered by the series as a whole:

What is this story about? What are the core ideas, themes and values that it speaks to?

For the showrunners, the closest answer we’ve gotten so far seems to be: It’s a superhero spy show that will go on forever and has Secrets and Lies and Generations.

But that isn’t actually an answer. “Superhero” and “spy” are genre descriptors. “Secrets and lies” and “generations” are story elements, patterns and/or motifs. All of these have collections of commonly associated themes and ideas but unless you narrow it down and start engaging with those ideas to create a thesis, they can’t actually tell you what Young Justice is about.

The problem at the root of every other problem with Young Justice is that it doesn’t have an actual narrative. It’s only an illusion of story. Once you peel the surface layers back, it’s not saying anything.

But one season did.

There is one season of Young Justice where that season’s Production Team seems to have genuinely thought about and constructed a story which answers that most basic question.

No prizes for guessing which.

So, what is Young Justice Season 1 about?

Well, it’s about trust and collaboration and respect. And specifically that open communication, trust and information sharing are the most valuable tools both interpersonally and in a world of deception and espionage.

Once you notice it, it pops up everywhere: in the explicit dialogue of both Team and League members and in incredibly loud subtext. The Team initially formed to show their mentors they could be trusted to handle more than just being tag-along kid sidekicks. The unit is always most functional when they collaborate honestly and their effectiveness is always threatened when one or more of them is noncommunicative or actively keeping secrets. The Team is finally able to outmanoeuvre the Light for the first time in Usual Suspects because Artemis, M’gann and Conner choose to share the personally painful strategic information they were being blackmailed over - trusting that their friends will accept them for who they are and giving the group the big-picture understanding needed to approach the conflict on their own terms.

When assessing proposed candidates in Agendas, Wonder Woman states that the most important criterion for Justice League membership is:

And to fill the gap between the seasons in a way that justifies Invasion, you would have to look at that theme and say:

No.

You would have to say: It doesn’t last. You would have to say: Only children can believe in that. You would have to say: This world and the things they will go through are so bleak as to break and beat that trust and collaboration out of them.

This is what I mean when I say that post-Season-1 Young Justice feels cruel. That it feels like a tragedy.

But, hey, maybe that’s the solution. Should we frame Invasion as a tragedy?

Maybe.

Well, except…

Firstly, this would likely feel tonally and emotionally misleading. As mentioned in the zombie-fic post, part of storytelling is setting expectations - and one of the expectations a first entry sets is the general tone. That isn't to say that tone can't shift over time - many series become more solemn and less lighthearted as the story develops towards the final conflict - but a large, unexplained tone-shift can feel like a deception, especially if a series gives no way to reasonably anticipate it. And this is particularly true if that tone-shift swings more cynical.

Season 1's tone is, on the whole, Hopepunk. The world of Earth-16 is not fair - it can be corrupt, characters can die, things can go traumatically wrong - but it is also a world where that trauma is treated with respect, and where hope, collaboration, trust and progress are possible. It is a world where Artemis can find new family, where M'gann can find community, where Conner can be more than a weapon, where Wally can come to appreciate helping people, where Dick can realise he wants to choose better, and where the Team can forge something powerful. But to get from there to Invasion, you must be cynical about all those things. It's brightly-coloured Grimdark.

It's also just a generally poor idea to write a sequel about how your strongest theme is wrong, because it insults the intelligence of your audience. It asks them to believe something and then turns around and tells them they were stupid for believing it. (In Invasion's case, on top of already calling them stupid by asking them to swallow a double-dose of Idiot Plots with a side-serve of canonical filler.)

The second problem is how this shift in theme impacts the long-term conflict. And to talk about this properly I want to run through a couple of ideas about the nature of conflicts and fights in stories:

One way to consider ‘fight scenes’ - and conflict more broadly - in stories is in terms of two narratives:

The Technical/ Strategic narrative is the physical and logistical actions involved in winning a fight/ solving a problem. It’s the blows of a sparring match, the parry-and-riposte of a duel, the movement of chess pieces on the board. In terms of a wider narrative, it can be the strategies and physical steps the characters will use to solve the main “problem”. This also isn’t limited to just physical confrontation. In the show Leverage the strategic narrative of each episode is mostly behavioural and psychological; the con and what they do to make the mark fall for it. In the Alex Rider series the strategic conflict is very literal; they’re spy stories about retrieving tactical information. Plenty of Mysteries run entirely on the technical/strategic conflict of clue-gathering and puzzle-solving.

The Emotional/ Ideological/ Thematic narrative typically provides the underlying thrust of a conflict, and usually expresses the themes and ideas of the larger story. The surface level “technical” conflict becomes a proxy for the deeper emotional arcs of the parties involved, for clashes in their personal worldviews, or for a symbolic conflict between the themes each represent. It gives the parties personal stakes and often provides the deeper answer to why the fight is happening beyond just “because plot”. It’s often where the mind games happen. It’s where the “fight” becomes more of a thematic debate. And - while it’s common for the ideological victor to also win the technical conflict for emphasis - where the two diverge, the ideological/ thematic victory usually feels like the “true win”. (I would recommend Super Eyepatch Wolf’s videos on Fight Scenes and “Non Battle” Battle Series if you want a deeper discussion of this.)

An example: The Todoroki vs Midoriya match in My Hero Academia’s Sports Festival Arc is a great example of divergent technical vs emotional narratives. The technical fight is a fairly low-danger (but impressively animated) superpowered sparring match to see who advances to the next bracket of the competition. But the important emotional conflicts come in Midoriya trying to live up to All Might’s expectations, and his disagreement with Todoroki’s plan to become a hero using only one half of his power in order to spite his father. Over the course of the fight, Midoriya convinces Todoroki to embrace his power as his own and become a hero on his own terms; costing himself the technical conflict of the match as he’s not able to withstand Todoroki going all-out. But in winning the ideological conflict he takes the true victory: earning both Todoroki as a long-term ally, and All Might’s approval for sacrificing a personal win to help someone in need.

The reason I bring this up is that main antagonists typically play an important role in the story’s overall Emotional/ Ideological/ Thematic narrative. Often they represent some combination of the following: 1. An ideology the protagonist(s) opposes 2. A counterargument to the protagonists’ ideology 3. A symbolic obstacle representing something the protagonist(s) must overcome as part of their personal journey 4. A thematic foil to the ideas the protagonist(s) represent within the story

Another example: Avatar: the Last Airbender's Firelord Ozai is an excellent example of a multi-layered main antagonist.  As Firelord/Phoenix King, Ozai is the "final boss" in the series' overarching strategic narrative of stopping the Fire Nation, as well as an extremely dangerous opponent in the immediate technical narrative of his fight with Aang. But he also represents fire (or, at least, fire’s destructive and consuming sides) and the disruption of balance within the thematic narrative of elemental harmony that the Avatar exists to maintain. Ideologically, Ozai's brutal colonialism and rigid belief in "respect" through domination and fear is a direct foil to Iroh and the Gaang's values of harmony, growth and love. In Aang's personal journey, Ozai is the final obstacle on the path of accepting his role as the Avatar; something Aang must fully embrace and make peace with in order to energybend properly and end the fight without killing. As the heir of Sozin, Ozai also carries the legacy of the Air Nomad genocide; a source of pain and grief that Aang must confront as The Last Airbender. And, as both the Fire Nation leader and an abusive father, Ozai is (however indirectly) responsible for all the pain and oppression inflicted upon the rest of the cast; who - in supporting Aang to get to this point - are granted justice by proxy. Aang vs Ozai is not the strongest technical fight in A:TLA (let's not pretend rock-ex-machina didn't happen) but, in culminating so many thematic/ emotional narratives, it makes for an incredibly powerful climax to the series.

In Season 1, the Light don’t have their own distinct ideology beyond the vague stance of opposing the “calcified status quo” revealed at the very end. In isolation, though, that’s kind of okay (especially for a first season). It would be more interesting if they eventually revealed a specific worldview that could be interrogated, but so long as the Team develop their own paradigm and operate in a different way to their mentors (keep that in the back of your mind for later too) then they’ll naturally counter the status quo argument anyway.

What’s more important is whether the Light represent a symbolic antithesis to the themes and ideas represented by the Team. Which, in Season 1, they do.

It’s unclear whether the members of the Light actually trust each other on a deeper level (although just based on the characters you can probably assume they don’t) but they do collaborate effectively - in comparison to the Team slowly figuring it out - and their secrecy and ability to hide behind proxies is what makes them so hard to unmask, anticipate and bring to justice. Even more importantly, the primary way they attack the Team is by sowing discord, distrust and misinformation. As Kaldur himself points out, Sportsmaster’s mole reveal is a play to create dissent, anger and lingering suspicion between members. Artemis, M’gann and Conner each have a personal fear/shame/secret used to blackmail them into acting against the interests of the group. The Light repeatedly attempt to drive wedges, and the Team is finally able to gain the upper hand when they fully trust and work together in spite of it.

And herein lies the problem.

In Season 1, the Light act as an effective thematic foil to the show’s core ideas of trust, collaboration and communication. But properly connecting Season 1 to Season 2 requires a story about how that theme is wrong. Which means that Invasion’s Team are also an antithesis to those original ideas. Trust is for fools, secrets and lies are the only reliable way. The heroes and the Light are thematically in agreement.

So, now what’s their conflict about? What ideas does it advance? Are we advancing at all?

As presented in canon, Invasion removes the closest thing to a proper thematic conflict that the series had set up.

Any ideological conflict is likewise in shambles. The Team has never really had a driving ideology or set of values beyond “don’t treat us like children/sidekicks”. But - in time-skipping them forward five years to Nightwing being his own hero and other members joining the League - the show has had them literally grow out of that. And the mole plot itself contradicts any anti-secrecy values previously expressed. So now the Team primarily exists to react to the Light. But (as mentioned) the Light’s stance against the “calcified status quo” is mostly a villainy-in-opposition pretext to throw sidequests at the Team. So the two oppose each other just to oppose each other: purely “because protagonists vs antagonists”.

Which leaves only the technical/strategic narrative to drive the story forward. And since the Light doesn’t actually have a long-term plan, and most of the “moves” and “counter moves” on both sides have been a series of illogical, unpredictable, internally inconsistent “decisions” that mostly exist to provide in-the-moment “drama”, the show doesn’t offer much by way of meaningful strategic conflict either.

So, how do you fix this?

Well, you don’t.

You can’t.

The premise itself just doesn’t fit.

We finally got our boulder to stop rolling but now it’s shattered into pieces and we’re completely stuck.

Great.

Hopefully you’re starting to appreciate the complexity of the challenge when it comes to “fixing” the flaws in Invasion. Even just improving the more surface-level issues would require huge swarths of re-writes and restructuring (and then re-drawing, re-recording and editing all of it).

And to truly solve the root problem… you’d have to start over from scratch with an entirely different story.

But there might have been another way.

A revival: The saving throw that never was

When news of the revival first dropped, I was curious but mostly tepid about the idea. Even before doing the analysis, I could feel that there were deep structural problems with Invasion, which left me concerned about the direction of the series (especially after the follow-up announcement of yet more characters and yet more time-skips). And considering what we got and my now well-known “oh god, oh god, please just let the poor broken thing die, it’s suffered enough” reaction to it… yeah.

But I didn’t want to dismiss it out of hand. Because I think there was the possibility for a different third season to (while not erase) at least address Invasion’s issues in a satisfying manner and bring the story back somewhat more on track.

So, how might we go about doing that?

First, let’s go back to what we’ve already figured out. We know that the main appeal is the characters. We know that the narrative was strongest when it spoke to ideas about trust/ collaboration/ communication with a generally Hopepunk tone. And (stealing again from the zombie-fic post) we know that, based on Season 1, audiences could reasonably have the following expectations:

Obvious questions get answers

Emotional consequences are acknowledged and addressed

Main characters have consistent internal motivations that are addressed/ explored/ reinforced in-story

Pre-existing comic book knowledge should not be required to understand the story.

Right, let’s start putting pieces together.

First thing’s first: No More Time-Skips and No New Characters that aren’t do-or-die narratively essential. The cast-scope by Invasion is already wildly overstretched to the point of barely holding together. Adding more while creating yet more holes to backfill is not only inefficient, at this point it would be actively detrimental to the basic structural integrity of the narrative.

An aside: we need to talk about the time-skips Let’s be real here: The time-skips in Young Justice’s canon do not serve a narrative purpose. They aren’t there to accelerate the plot through slower periods that would be more effective if summarised or communicated through flashback. Nor do they exist to facilitate mysteries around learning how things changed so drastically from one entry to the next. What they are is a cheap and lazy contrivance that allows the writers to pile on characters and disregard continuity without doing the work of narratively justifying those inefficient choices. Now if a new character comes out of nowhere or an established character is acting against their prior characterisation, well it’s because “a lot happened in the time-skip” and “it’s not Greg and Brandon’s fault that the audience don’t know”… about events they could never have been aware of because Grandon never actually did the work to make that information available anywhere within either the main or extended canon material (which, remember, is a choice on their part), and are now just obviously lying about in attempt to “well actually” their way out of a legitimate criticism. It’s amazing what you can creatively achieve when you have absolutely no respect for the time and intelligence of fans sincerely trying to engage with your story as its own text!

With that said, let’s bust out some bandages. I think the two main patch-jobs our hypothetical Season 3 would need to perform are addressing the contradictions, and giving emotional consequences to events.

The break between seasons left a lot of obvious questions in need of answers. The mole plot doesn’t make sense based on Season 1 and how/why it was conceived is a complete mystery in canon. Most of the character changes are big enough to feel inconsistent without an explanation. In particular we need to address the obvious conflict between Dick’s explicit Season 1 character realisation that he doesn’t want to be a person who’d “sacrifice everything for the sake of the mission” and him doing exactly that in Season 2. And we also need to continue the narrative threads of the new major characters Invasion brought on board.

How to go about this?

Well first of all, I would frame Invasion as a narrative darkest hour. The point where everything has gone wrong, where the heroes realise how far they’ve fallen… and from which they can start building back up.

The inciting incident for this hypothetical realisation would be pretty obvious - just use Wally. He’s a founding member of the Team, he’s the best friend who questions Dick’s objectivity, he’s part of the same Flash lineage as Bart, and he just died. That’s an event that should have serious emotional fall-out within the narrative.

And this would also be a great vehicle for backfill because death/grief stories (at least good ones) usually involve a lot of introspection and retrospection. It’s when characters start to look back on the journey they shared with the person who passed; to think about who they were, what they valued and what that relationship meant to them. It would be a prime point for both Dick and the Team as a whole to realise they’re going down a path they don’t want to be on - a path Kid Flash never stood for - and scenes of them discussing or flashing back to how they reached their current point would pull double-duty in backfilling missing information and context to bridge the seasons.

Wally was one of the characters most strongly written to call-out internal secret-keeping across both seasons, so he would be an effective way to pull the show back on theme as well; have the remaining Team members re-affirm their commitment to honesty, trust and collaboration in honour of his memory.

In the context of being a revival, this would also show respect to the fans. Wally was a widely-beloved major character and his death during Endgame was a huge bombshell for the fandom. I personally know people who dropped the series over it. People’s desire to see if Wally would come back (and to get closure if he really was gone) formed a massive part of the thrust behind the revival campaigns. And remember, it was those fan-campaigns that convinced DC that reviving the series would be financially worthwhile. Greg and Brandon didn’t resurrect Young Justice: the fans did. And a lot of those fans were motivated by Wally. So centring a major emotional arc around him would be a nice way of paying that effort back.

Another aside: Oh Wally, what did they do to you? This is, I think, why some fans now believe Greg Weisman hates Wally as a character. I don't believe this: I think Greg is just a deeply incurious and insincere writer, who neither understands nor particularly cares to understand how other people think and feel, who primarily sees these characters as tools to play out whatever scenes he personally thinks are “cool” or “clever” rather than as fictional people who real people care about, and who mostly values the audiences' attachment to them as something he can use to extract emotional responses and bait further viewing. But, in the face of such open and sincere love and passion for a character, that kind of dishonest lack of caring can feel a lot like hatred. Especially when combined with the bitter sting of the trailer (which clearly understood what fans wanted when it teased the promise of Wally so heavily) turning out to be a bald-faced lie.

As for the Light’s plan, we could have some of the proposed reflection do additional work as a form of “retroactive foreshadowing”; having scenes whose surface-level purpose is to give on-mission flashbacks about Wally or the Team over the missing five years, but which also reveal that there was more going on in the background. Invasion sets up the idea that Darkseid is coming but I think it would be enough for a third season to go back to Season 1’s approach; letting the character arcs take focus while cutaways to the Light reveal more to the audience and keep viewers very aware of the impending threat that the Team need to get themselves sorted out in time to face. And Season 1 already established the New Gods as a group of characters that we could use in an episode or two should we decide to have Apokolips send any advanced guards just to keep things interesting.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of fallout from Invasion that could be used to build the central plot thread of an intermediary season aimed at stabilising a new status quo while setting up for big climactic conflicts in a fourth or fifth season (and realistically 4-5 seasons is about as far as you expect the average story-driven original animated show to travel). The challenges posed by a world reeling from the Reach’s betrayal and dealing with an increased population of metahumans could easily create a central story core that spoke to ideas of collaboration and accountability as the Justice League rebuilt and re-earned public trust in the aftermath.

Ideally, this would also have space to continue the narrative consequences of Invasion for both the original cast and the new main characters of that season. You have the mole plot thread and the challenge of healing broken trust, not only within the unit but especially between Kaldur and the people of Atlantis; many of whom would have sincerely believed he had turned on them, and would take more than just an assurance from Aquaman to fully sway back. We could check in on Red Arrow, find out what paths he is considering after finally recovering Roy at the same time as learning that he has a potential family who are entirely his own. For Bart and Jaime there are the personal consequences of the Reach’s defeat. Bart could finally allow his “act” to slip, while processing the consequences of having successfully erased his own timeline and his feelings over still losing Wally. Jaime could be dealing with the backlash of having publicly outed his identity and acted as a prominent public spokesperson for the Reach while under their control. The Runaways could be helping with clean-up on the metahuman situation, while figuring out their own values and stance on working with established heroes.

And the good thing is that these threads already have interconnections. Kaldur rebuilding trust in Atlantis would tie into the Team rebuilding more broadly. As a member of the Flash lineage (and the new Kid Flash), Bart would slide easily into any major arc about Wally, linking him to the original Team. Bart in turn connects to Jaime and the Reach, who in turn tie into the Runaways both by association and through Tye and Jaime’s existing friendship. And Jaime also potentially opens some interactions with Green Beetle.

What I’m suggesting is not a perfect solution, nor is it the only solution. Some of the structural problems from Invasion can’t be undone. But, with a bit of thought, they could be alleviated. We can’t reverse the cast-scope issue but we can reign it in by not adding more, and focus it by forming the most narratively important characters from the existing seasons into a “core ensemble” that the other additions can orbit around (kind of like how Justice League: Unlimited managed to stay relatively stable by holding onto the Original Seven as a central pillar and having at least one of them as a reference point in each episode). We can’t undo the 5 year time-skip but we can find narrative reasons for characters to reflect, bridging the gap for the audience. We can’t erase the contradictions between the seasons, but we can acknowledge and build a story to address them. We can go back to answering obvious questions and following up loose threads. We can course correct towards the themes and tone that originally resonated. We can give weight to emotional consequences and trauma. And we can show respect to an important central character whose death emotionally impacted a lot of fans.

But Outsiders doesn’t do any of that. And what it does…

I know I’ve belaboured this point in other posts but I have to stress just how thoroughly and systematically Outsiders destroys the narrative.

In terms of the Original Cast: Outsiders directly writes Nightwing to act exactly like Batman and treats it as a positive despite that being explicitly what Dick never wanted to become; all of Kaldur’s ongoing personal arcs have been dropped or forcibly resolved off-screen and he keeps making the same bad decisions, proving himself unfit to lead; M’gann has been repeatedly written to do harmful, disrespectful and manipulative things toward Conner and others for “the drama”; Conner is routinely lied to and treated not much better than he might have been at Cadmus while being constantly victim-blamed and forced to forgive that mistreatment; Artemis has lost her characterisation to Greg Weisman’s misogynistic inability to write women, being defined by her biological family and brother-in-law at the cost of her agency and connection to the Team; Wally is written to coward out of the Life before dying in a twist that was not properly built up to and after which is treated with no respect or gravitas beyond cheap knife-twisting; Zatanna is a grief-riddled Deus-ex-Magicka who manipulates Artemis in service of another pointless “twist”; Red Arrow has had all his personal arcs similarly dropped/ handwaved off-screen; and Rocket remains undeveloped and irrelevant.

In terms of the Central Conflict, the Light are proved utterly correct: by Outsiders the Original Team are callous, hollow husks of their former selves, who have replicated a worse version of the same status quo the Team originally formed in response to. Dick, Kaldur and M’gann’s Anti-Light are a new upper echelon of older heroes who keep even more secrets from the next generations, who exclude the new generations far more strongly from knowing their plans, who give them even less reason to trust or communicate with them, and who do so for less just, less honest and less narratively justified reasons than their own mentors' understandable (if condescending) desire to shield the proteges from the parts of the Life they may not yet have been equipped to face.

Not only that but their constant lying with the intent to control others, and refusal to hold themselves accountable for those actions goes directly against both the League's stated heroic ideals of "Truth, Liberty and Justice" and Red Tornado's conclusion that caring is "the human thing to do".

By the end of Outsiders, even the existence of the Team itself is undone; decommissioned into the exact kind of safe training space that the Season 1 characters were desperate for it never to be.

You can’t come back from that. The damage is now too deep, too extensive and too entrenched.

The closest thing Young Justice has to an ongoing thread across the seasons is this singularly joyless piece of miserable nihilism that the showrunners are attempting to wrap up in faux-intellectual trappings via twitter thread.

With Outsiders, any actual narrative set by Young Justice Season 1 is over. By their own standards the Team have lost, and lost entirely.

The show can “go on forever” now, because whether they actually progress to defeating the Light no longer matters. The only winner here is Greg.

But these problems didn’t begin with Outsiders.

The Vanguard

I think it would be a fair assessment to say that the Young Justice Revival has been divisive. The passionate part of the fandom is now split into two main camps; people who defend it, and people who dislike it for various reasons. But within that latter camp there are also two tents; people who think the original entries were uniformly good, and people who only really like Season 1.

I want to repeat what I said before: With the right writers and the right focus a different revival could have salvaged something decent, if maybe never quite as brilliant, from the series.

But that still would have left Invasion as the weakest link.

The reason I can’t like Invasion (and why I eventually broke DW away from everything post-S1) is that Invasion is the vanguard of every problem that ultimately killed the series for me.

The problems in Outsiders did not spring spontaneously into being with that season (apart from the rainbow capitalism so transparently, ignorantly insincere that it swung all the way back around into being bigoted). It just doubled down on everything that that was already breaking or broken.

And, in so doing, it snuffed out once and for all any embers that remained of the white-hot potential Season 1 originally promised.

In order to truly fix the issues with Invasion you would need to go back to that deepest root problem. To ask the questions that the showrunners seemingly never did.

What is this story about? What are the core ideas, themes and values that Young Justice speaks to?

But once you do that, you realise that Invasion is so misaligned to the answers Young Justice Season 1 gives that in order to create something cohesive and contiguous with it, you would basically need to re-write Season 2 from the ground up.

Remember, nothing has to happen in a narrative. There are only more-efficient and less-efficient choices.

And if you have to re-write Invasion whole-cloth anyway, then the most efficient choice would be to wipe the slate back to the end of Auld Acquaintance and start over. To write the show that Young Justice Season 1 set itself up to be.

The show that gave us this: