#he was only volunteered for it bc cadmus wanted him out of the way

[mamawasatesttube]

hey! so i just started reading through superboy '94 and idk exactly how to explain this but like. i like the comic itself but it's really hard to enjoy it bc there's so much of older women hitting on kon. i've read issues zero, one, and two for context. i think i want to read through more of it but does it ever stop having so much of that? bc so far it's really uncomfortable watching like 3 people that're way older than kon hit on him and the narrative not really address it in a significant way (so far)

unfortunately, that won't go away for a hot minute (until about halfway through the run). kesel is like... trying to fulfill the "teen boy fantasy" of dating a ~hot older woman~ and unfortunately, it can be really hard to read because he doesn't seem to comprehend that tana grooming kon, is, like, a bad thing.

as for knockout, i will say the culmination of her arc and everything she does to kon is fascinating to analyze in some respects (though still hard to read!). because she is a villain, she does manipulate kon, and the narrative acknowledges that she lies and uses him in a way that is deeply hurtful to him. in some ways this arc reads so intentionally like a story about abuse that i find it hard to believe kesel didn't intend it as exactly that; in other ways i'm like wait no never mind he's an idiot, i don't know. (it's sort of like everything surrounding blockbuster+tarantula in nightwing '96: the guy it happened to reacts realistically like someone who's abused/traumatized would, and it really does read like A Trauma Response, but the rest of the characters in the narrative don't really treat it or the character it happened to like they would if the story was gonna acknowledge that they have any sort of sexual trauma.)

overall i kind of regard this part of sb94 like. almost a horror story? where we're sitting on the outside banging on the glass like NO GET AWAY FROM HIM but he doesn't even realize they're monsters. i also personally kind of interpret it like how kon sees the situations; he doesn't realize anything is wrong, so the narrative doesn't acknowledge anything is wrong. it's unreliable narration. (kesel did not mean this; kesel wanted us to like tana, lmao. but this is kinda how i take it and run with it.)