#emilysidhe

Interesting question! I think I'm leaning towards no, he didn't kill the previous wives. I don't have any real evidence to back up this opinion, other than these two nebulous things:

The way Loren reacts to Annabelle's fake 'death'. There's a sense of relief there, but he also comes across as shocked and disappointed that she's dead - not disappointed that he didn't kill her, but disappointed because she's gone. Which leads me to:

I think, on some perverse level, Loren genuinely enjoys his relationship with Annabelle. I mean, they're both miserable and they hate each other, but Loren enjoys trading mean, clever quips with his wife, enjoys threatening her and being threatened in return. (This is true of Vincent Price's character's relationship with his wife in The Tingler, too - the difference is that Annabelle isn't also enjoying the game, while Isabelle in The Tingler is. Which is why someone else's wife gets killed in The Tingler while Isabelle survives.) I have absolutely no doubt that Loren quickly found Wife Number 5 after the film and created exactly the same terrible dynamic with her, because he enjoys it so much.

Ooh I like this approach. Because it also directly ties into sharing your (personal) cross with Jesus.

Hannibal (the cannibal) asking God why He made him this way. God gives each of us our own burdens we must bear, but we are expected to ask for help and guidance from Him. So Hannibal, feeling hopeless prays one night to have his hunger for flesh sated. Jesus offers His own.

I’m sure that’s the case a lot of the time but this is a thing for some people lol. If you take a look at the comments a lot people mention other wacky shit that happens to them, and I’m sure I’m not the only one whose mum eventually caved and got me a good quality one to try and counteract the issue.

Sure! So here’s the thing: Ollie-as-cheater is a retcon. The timeline goes something like this [CW: rape]:

1941-1969: Ollie has no real recurring love interest. (There’s Miss Arrowette, aka Bonnie King, Cissie’s mom, but she’s only portrayed as a potential love interest for Ollie in one of her four Silver Age appearances.)

1969: Ollie develops his leftwing hothead personality and falls head over heels for Dinah (who originally was a good ten years older than him, which is a dynamic I love).

1988: While in a committed relationship with Dinah, Ollie is raped by Shado, who bears a child as a result. He has no knowledge of this happening and doesn’t know the child is his.

1993: Ollie is kissed by a teenage runaway he and Dinah have taken in, and Dinah dumps him for not pushing her away.

1995-2000: Ollie dies. Chuck Dixon relentlessly portrays Ollie as a lovable but incorrigible horndog in both Connor’s Green Arrow and Dinah’s Birds of Prey, largely to contrast virginal, shy (and likely queer, deal with it Homophobic Chuck) Connor with his father and to explain some of Dinah’s issues during this period.

2000: Ollie is resurrected in Quiver, which is my favorite Green Arrow story, but has a few terrible moments in it, including one in which he is depicted as willingly cheating on Dinah with Shado.

2002-2016: Ollie is dragged through a decade and a half of character assassination in which more infidelity is retconned into his backstory, he’s revealed to have knowingly abandoned Connor and his mother after Connor was born, he cheats on Dinah some more, their relationship becomes increasingly toxic and physically violent, and everything is terrible. Honestly, I’m not sure how bad it eventually got, because I jumped ship completely after Lian’s death.

2016: Green Arrow: Rebirth happens and my big dumb romantic hippie rascal came BACK and I love him so much I want to cry about it!

Ollie has definitely never been perfect. The only part of your description I disagree with, actually, is “serial cheater,” because he is cocky (but I like cocky) and he is an asshole (but I like assholes) and he isn’t good enough for Dinah (but no one is). And he and Dinah weren’t perfect during the 25 years or so they were together before his death. She ostensibly dumped him for kissing Marianne, but this was coming on years of being impulsive and irresponsible (one time he went out to run errands and ended up in a dog race in Alaska).

But man, the writing of the two of them after he came back to life and Kevin Smith left the book was just dreadful, and I largely blame Judd Winick for that (although I goddamn hate what Brad Meltzer did, too). Winick turned their banter into toxic fighting - at one point, Ollie calls Dinah a slut and accuses her of sleeping with an entire football team, she hits him, and then they get really turned on by this and do it. No, Judd, hitting is not “sexy” when women do it, especially when they’re one of the top ranked martial artists in the world. Around the same time, Babs is shocked to learn that Dinah is marrying Ollie, “who fathered Connor with that Shado woman” - except Connor’s mother is Moonday and Shado raped Ollie. It’s a combination of comics not accepting that men can be raped (and Grell really didn’t write it as rape, just a ~thing that happened~), and writers basing their characterizations on retcons instead of the original text and that particular aspect of Ollie’s character snowballing.

I’m willing to accept that Ollie’s a tomcat, no problem. The man has two (or three! I personally believe that Cissie is his) illegitimate children with (two (or three) different women, none of whom are The Love Of His Life. I have no problem with a characterization of Ollie as Enthusiastic About Sex. But the cheating retcon really gets my goat. (As does the retcon that he knew about Connor from birth, which I simply refuse to accept. It’s my Green Arrow Rubicon and I won’t cross it.)

As to why I like him: again, he’s not perfect. He’s a mess. (I like messes! Look at Booster Gold. Look at Daredevil.) But he’s a try-hard mess. He’s so passionate and he cares so much. He makes the spiciest chili and yells at people about recycling and spends half an hour waxing his beard into points every morning and accidentally brings a new teenager home every time he goes outside. He is cranked to eleven 100% of the time and even if he sometimes goes too far or gets it wrong, it’s never out of apathy.

Ollie is a showboater and irresponsible and he fucks up all the time - with Roy, with Connor, with Dinah. But he loves with his whole self and he wants the hero community to be better than they are and he has committed to a silly theme to a truly ridiculous degree and I just adore him.

If I have convinced you to give Ollie a shot (ha, arrow pun), here are my recs:

Green Lantern/Green Arrow by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, otherwise known as the Hard Traveling Heroes era. Be warned that this is 70s liberalism so there are some well-intentioned but reeeeeeally dated Hot Takes on race and class, and some real opposition to women’s lib. (But oh boy does Adams draw a beautiful Dinah.)

Hunter’s Moon by Mike Grell. The Grell era on GA actually starts with the miniseries The Longbow Hunters, which spun off into Ollie’s first ongoing series; Hunter’s Moon collects the first issues from that run. But The Longbow Hunters, though visually stunning as well as important (it moved Ollie and Dinah to Seattle, introduced Shado, and temporarily removed Dinah’s Canary Cry), has a lot of sexual violence (against Dinah) and Orientalism in it. I’m sick of books with violence against women being the Important Comics so I’d rather boost Hunter’s Moon, which shows Dinah going to therapy and working through what’s happened to her as a person with agency instead of using her trauma as a plot point to motivate Ollie. But I’m including Grell in here because Dinah’s assault aside, he depicts Ollie and Dinah’s relationship as healthy, complex, and joyously sexual, and I love it.

Quiver and Sounds of Violence by Kevin Smith and Phil Hester. Ollie’s resurrection and the sequel. As noted above, Smith hits a couple sour notes for me, but I mostly love his Ollie, plus he introduces Mia here and I would die for her. And Hester’s Ollie has imprinted on my heart forever as my Ollie. (Weirdly, Smith and O’Neil share the odd distinction of writing my favorite Green Arrow and my least favorite Daredevil.)

Green Arrow: Rebirth and the current ongoing series by Benjamin Percy and Otto Schmidt. Can be clunky, but the heart is there, as Ollie tries really really hard to unlearn his privilege, be worthy of Dinah, and repair his relationships with Diggle (!) and Roy. Also features his kid sister Emiko Queen, who was created somewhere during the time that I was ignoring Green Arrow comics but she is PERFECT and I would fight a mountain lion for her. In some beautiful parallel universe Mia and Cissie and Emi all live with Ollie and make fun of him 100% of the time and it’s beautiful.

In conclusion, THANK YOU if you made it through all that nonsense, and please enjoy this ridiculous macro from LJ user parsimonia that I saved a million years ago and which makes me laugh every time I look at it: