#Fireflysymbolism

thank you!!!!!! Hal would be really bad at girl's night

okay i'm not gonna lie this just turned into t4t halcarol

See, in the JLA story arc “The Obsidian Age,” back in 2002 or 2003, not long before the end of Kyle’s original solo GL series, the JLA lineup of Clark, Bruce, Diana, J’onn, Plastic Man, Kyle and Wally ended up three thousand years in the past in Atlantis, where they were killed by a JLA-style team of the time, thanks to the manipulations of an Atlantean sorceress named Ganymede.

At pretty much the last second, Bruce came up with a plan that would tie into failsafe protocols he had back in the present, and allow the new team he gathered then to resurrect the JLA….but to do so, he needed someone to inform the ‘rescue team’ of what to do….and there was only one person he could figure out a way to survive long enough to do that: Kyle.

So Kyle’s physical form was killed along with the rest of the JLA, but his mind and spirit survived by stowing his consciousness inside his own ring, which was then taken and hidden away by Manitou, one of the ‘ancient JLA’ who ended up siding with the JLA and joining them in the present later.

(Incidentally, this is part of what I love about Kyle so much. Bruce was just like “Okay, I need you to exist as a disembodied consciousness/ghost for 3,000 years just to pass on a message to the modern day heroes about how to save us all, can you do it?” And Kyle’s just like…”oh man, that’s gonna suck for me, but hey, if you say its what I gotta do, I’m your guy.” Like, much like Dick Grayson, Kyle Rayner was born to be a team player, which makes how often he spends isolated and alone super depressing).

But yeah, Kyle had to let the whole 3,000 years between then and the present day pass naturally, before the rescue JLA lineup, led by Nightwing, went searching for what happened to the JLA, found Kyle’s ring and him, and he could tell them the whole story and fill them in on Bruce’s plan to piggy-back off Ganymede’s own magic and get her to unintentionally resurrect them all herself.

So for 3,000 years, Kyle’s ghost essentially sat in a cave with no companion other than Manitou, who is similarly long-lived now thanks to the spell he cast to keep him alive long enough to help. Kyle’s joked about how many games of solitaire he played during the time, and how much time he spent contemplating the meaning of life and other deep philosophical questions, but like…the experience definitely left a deep and lasting effect on him.

In fact, not long after that story, it was one of the canon reasons Kyle left the JLA and Earth in general, to spend the next several years in space….as he told J’onn and Hal-as-the-Spectre….he was having a really hard time adjusting to life in the present day again, because he didn’t feel like he fit anymore. He didn’t know how to relate to people given the sheer scope of what he’d experienced and how long he’d spent existing mostly alone. He basically sent himself into self-imposed exile because he just didn’t get people anymore, and he genuinely felt more comfortable among alien species and out on his own in empty space.

Eventually, he adjusted more or less, with of course this also being due to a lot of later writers not knowing or being interested in factoring in this aspect of his stories and experience….but because of that period he spent in self-isolation away from Earth, even if the Obsidian Age isn’t often cited as a defining reason for that….ultimately, there’s a stark difference between the Kyle of before the Obsidian Age and the one after…because everyone who’s picked up with him after his space exile has tended to write him as a lot more quiet, introspective, contemplative than the more bravado-filled, joking, eternal frat boy kind of characterization he kept pretty consistently up until the Obsidian Age. 

You could easily argue that his experiences and several millennia spent mostly alone with just his thoughts directly played into his later ability to be the one and only person to master all seven emotions of the emotional spectrum and become a White Lantern without help from any other entities, just purely by himself….as well as it playing into how and why he was able to host the entity Ion so much longer than anyone else.

Anyway, I’ve always just found it a really fascinating aspect of his character that’s rarely remembered or played around with, when it both explains so much about his later stories and just has so much potential in general. Batman’s like “Hey you gotta play dead and just bum around as a ghost for three thousand years just cuz I said so,” and Kyle’s just like “Aww man? Seriously? Ugh, well if you say so, fine I guess. Let’s do this thing.”

Like, this was a guy who has on at least three different occasions been the most powerful person alive and at all other times exists as ‘just’ one of the biggest guns Earth has defending it, and has so little ego and so much implicit trust in his teammates and the talents and expertise of even someone with no superpowers whatsoever, that they say “here’s what we need from you” and he’s just like “if you say this is the only way, I trust you, so just tell me when and where.”

How can you not love a character like that? 

maybe they're just really important to me