#grandon

Young Justice fans do NOT want to miss DC's Fandome event

The creators of the show are pretty adamant that you tune in on Oct 16 at DCFanDome.com

It's confirmed that there will be a 'preview' of Young Justice: Phantoms. A trailer is almost guaranteed, but we might also get the first few minutes of episode one like we did for season three.

(This is written with enough salt to fill the fucking Pacific, I swear.)

First off, no time skips!!! Why, you ask? Because we don’t fucking need one, that’s why. I didn’t turn on Young Justice because I was hoping it would be about a bunch of thirty-year-old has-beens who aren’t even in the superhero game anymore because they can’t throw a punch without shattering their hip. For every year that this show skips, my patience thins just a little bit more.

HOWEVER!!! The introduction of the Legion of Superheroes means we’ll be getting some time travel shit, right?? Some good ol’ time fuckery?? Some timeline shenanigans?? Then how about we get some flashbacks between the past and the future?? Pretty please??? There is no better opportunity to bring back all of the phantoms (literal AND figurative) of the Team’s past than to do it in a season that is LITERALLY titled “Phantoms.” Show us big milestones from the five years between seasons one and two like Dick becoming Nightwing, Wally and Artemis quitting, when all of the freshmen joined up, etc. Have the season center on linked conflicts between the past, present, and future because this is seriously the PERFECT season to do that! Connect Jason’s death to his resurrection! Connect Wally and Artemis quitting the hero gig to Wally’s triumphant return! The possibilities are limitless! And if the writers don’t take this golden opportunity for whatever reason, then guess what!! They’re dumbasses who just missed a huge opportunity that we’ll probably never get again!!!

(Also, let me just say real quick that if Artemis is in a relationship when the season begins, I’m gonna lose my fucking mind. This is an opinion thing so you don’t have to agree, but if she is dating someone to try and “fill the void” after Wally which leads to a whole love triangle thing when he comes back, I will break things. Buildings will fall. Trees will be uprooted and yeeted across nations like goddamn Paul Bunyan. Don’t fucking do it.)

This one goes without saying by now, but Wally West is going to come back. That’s happening. That’s gonna be a thing. I’m almost positive about it, unless of course all of the hints at his return in season 3 were just Voltron-level baiting, which is highly probable at this point. Still, I’m sticking with my faith that Wally will be back before the season ends. Have him be stuck in the Speed Force. Have him be stuck in the Phantom Zone. I don’t care where he comes from, just bring him back home and reunite him with his friends and family, please. Maybe then I can finally rest. (Bonus points if he’s got boosted speed and/or a red and silver Rebirth-style suit!)

Bring in Inertia, AKA Bart’s clone Thad!! I know I had a super good reason for this when @damthosefandoms​ and I talked about it weeks ago, but I honestly forgot all of it. Regardless, I think it’s an excellent idea because Bart deserves the screen time, PLUS he’s already our resident time traveler so why not give him some spotlight in a season all about time travel? And while you’re at it, introduce a wonderfully crafted character who could make the season SO much more interesting, whether he takes Bart’s place in an echo of the mole plot from season one or just as a wild antagonist who is ACTUALLY a teenager like the rest of them. (Looking at you, Lex Luthor and Deathstroke and all of you bad guys who already have gray hair and aren’t remotely interesting anymore.) (Okay, that last part was a lie because they are pretty interesting, but still. Give us some younger villains.)

Also I would really like Bart and Ed to be official because. I mean, did you see their interactions in season four?? The whole “Virgil being a seventh wheel which implies that Bart and Ed are a couple” thing?? Come on, man.

The Phantom Zone!! It’s a thing!!! Use it!!!

This one is more wishful thinking than anything, but I would really dig a huge final battle on Apokolips in the season finale. As wild and shocking as the season three finale was, I was expecting a cool battle sequence between those who were under the influence of the anti-life equation and those who weren’t that never happened, which made the ending seem a bit...empty. What better setup for a battle sequence than the entire Justice League, Team, Outsiders, and Legion fighting together against Darkseid and his minions? It would be incredible.

JASON TODD!!! OUR FAVORITE PHANTOM WHO IS ALREADY REVEALED TO BE ALIVE!!! In my ideal “Under the Red Hood” arc, they would give us a ton of flashbacks (see??? it fits in perfectly with what I said earlier about bouncing between the past and future!!) to Jason’s death which probably happened during a Team mission instead of with Batman and Joker since it’s a Young Justice-centric show and all. Then we get to see the Red Hood operating with the Light as their secret weapon or maybe even their new enforcer until, after a whole season of watching the Batfam struggle to bring their wayward son and brother home, he switches sides and fights alongside them in the final battle. Fucking splendid you funky vigilante.

Additionally, a Red Hood arc gives perfect reasoning for some Batfamily content! Let us know what Cass is like and how she joined up as Orphan before season three. And while you’re at it, let Tim get some spotlight too?? Please?? Maybe even give us some Tim/Stephanie content because the writers wouldn’t drag out a whole boring breaking-up-but-not-really-because-nothing-actually-happens-there-and-they-get-barely-any-screen-time thing for Tim and Cassie if it wasn’t for a good reason. They could show Barbara training Steph to take over as Batgirl, or at the very least have her last scene in the season be of Steph opening a present from Barbara that turns out to be a purple suit with a bat symbol on the chest. It would be spectacular.

And lastly, this one isn’t really relevant even though it is, but. I am more than okay with Damian Wayne not being present in this season. It’s not that I don’t love him, which I do. But the kid was an infant last we saw him, and the only way he could become Robin anytime soon is if Dick were like thirty and I’m Not Here For That. Save Damian for future seasons when you actually need new characters, rather than cramming in a million easter eggs for no reason when you already have a perfectly good main cast right there.

Seriously, Grandon. I’m fucking begging you here.

(Following on from this ask.)

Oh, I also have some pretty strong negative opinions about that.

I do want to cut a fine line first, between criticising the use of violence (and things like sex and bigotry) in a story and saying those things are inherently bad, or always bad if they're not explicitly used for plot or characterisation. Narrative is also made of things like pacing, tone and emotional texture, and sometimes a blunt shock, or a moment of discomfort (or an interlude so some characters can have a little rub-and-cuddle) can be useful to provide variation and help build the tone and world.

That said, if I had to describe Young Justice: Outsiders in a word it would either be "shallow", "superficial" or "cynical", and my problem is that because of it the newly heightened violence, level of violence, sex, grimdark and most of the "drama" isn't really in service to anything.

Tangent Time!

A book I like to use for comparison when when thinking about the issues with YJ:O is Stieg Larsson's 2005 Crime-Noir Thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the two sequels that form the original Millennium Trilogy. These books, while they are very well written and engaging, earn their hard MA+ rating. There are multiple depictions and detailed discussions of sexual violence, stalking, characters who speak and think in incredibly misogynistic and racist language, conversations and reflections on domestic abuse, with later books going on to include homophobia, fetishization of woman and female (especially queer female) sexuality, and stigma against mental health. The lead female character (and titular Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Lisbeth, is an aneurotypical bisexual woman who has been and continues to be subjected to incredible injustice over the course of the series.

But here's the thing. In the original Swedish the literal translation of the first book's title is Men Who Hate Women (changed for marketing reasons by English-speaking publishers). The page divider between the Prologue and Part One gives the following statistic: "18% of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man".

Underneath the crime-noir-intrigue surface plot, the Millennium Trilogy is deeply concerned with and highly critical of gender, sexual and racial power imbalances, of the power structures within the status quo, of governmental and white-collar corporate corruption, of the injustices that those powers enable, and of the way unethical, uncritical, sensationalist media reporting perpetuates the demonization, belittling and excusing of mistreatment towards already disadvantaged demographics because:

WANTED FOR SEX-CRIME MURDERS: VIOLENTLY R*TARDED LESBIAN SATANIST AND HER WHIP-WEILDING DRAGON DOMINATRIX

will always catch more attention and sell more papers than:

Police are seeking security analysist Lisbeth Salander and her Chinese girlfriend Miriam Wu (law student and prominent Gay Rights activist) for questioning in connection to the deaths of journalist Dag Svensson and sociologist Mia Johansson, who officers believe were murdered over their investigations into sex-trafficking. Please be advised that Miss Salander has a history of mental illness, and may become aggressive if approached.

So, while you can personally disagree with the stance the work takes, how well it handles the topics, or how tasteful and necessary the execution and inclusion of specific details and scenes are, it's hard to argue that these elements are purely gratuitous or not in service of the narrative.

And because it uses these elements in service of theme and message it still feels topical and like it has meaningful things to say, even over a decade later. And also because the real world has not changed nearly enough on these issues in that time and that's just depressing.

But Back on Topic

The problem for me, which I touched on in the last answer and in my long analysis is that the Young Justice Revival is tremendously shallow and thoughtless, both in how it brings back existing elements and how it uses the new stuff it tries to include.

In other situations I would be more generous, and say that the people behind the revival probably had genuine ideas to explore and a story they wanted to tell but couldn't because of production limitations or excessive executive pressure. In fact, I used to make that excuse for Young Justice: Invasion because the First Season had such a level of seeming granularity and intentionality in how it was constructed that I couldn't imagine that there wasn't a similar level of planning and passion behind the rest.

But the problems with Outsiders are both so deeply entrenched in the structure and at points so easily identifiable as out of step with explicit content from past seasons that I can't make that argument.

If you want a more balanced, more detailed writing-focused critique I would suggest reading the long narrative analytical essay I wrote.

But now I'm going to be blunt, and that's going to mean saying some unkind things because the simplest conclusions to be drawn from the observable facts are, on the face of it, unkind.

Young Justice: Outsiders is, to me, first and foremost a product. It was greenlit by DC Executives on the back of extensive fan-campaigns that told the company there was a large, pre-invested audience, many of whom would readily buy something that looked like more Young Justice.

Emphasis on looked like.

When you stop to think about it, Young Justice: Outsiders has very little by way of sincere, mature or meaningful things to say in its own right. But it is obsessed with chasing the appearance of meaning and maturity in order to be marketable, and to bait fans with the false promise that one day it might get good again.

This quote is often cited in the criticism of shallow media and I think it applies here:

The director has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why. -Roger Eggbert's review of Battlefield Earth (2000)

The producers, writers and marketing division clearly recognise that shows/films/games that get praised for "maturity" are popular right now. And in principle I think there was potential in a genuinely mature look at YJ's story in terms of emotional maturity, moral complexity and handling complicated and nuanced topics. I would have loved to see them use the M rating to go harder on scenes like we saw in Season 1's Disordered, delving into the psychology and emotional difficulties of the characters and how they were handling the major death that concluded Invasion's season finale and the ones that occurred in timeskips - or to actually take a thoughtful look at the interactions and purpose of heroes in regards to the public that had been set up by earlier seasons.

But instead they saw that those other products have graphic violence, sexual content, coarse language and heroes who are at times selfish and unheroic. They saw the stoicism, emotional stiltedness and fear of things seen as 'weak' or 'childish' (hope, vulnerability, whimsy) that gets falsely conflated with maturity.

And so instead we get scenes where new token intersectional minority character Halo is subjected to multiple instances of excessive, overly-explicit, fatal levels of violence, justified by the in-universe explanation that their powers let them revive on death, while being given little to no agency in the violence they are subjected to and barely any time to explore how they feel about those experiences; instead being used as a cheap way to shock the audience and sometimes to trigger reactions from other characters in service of plot or "drama" (which given that Halo is AFAB walks dangerously close to the Women in Refrigerators trope).

Instead they chose to adapt Cyborg's origin story in the most needlessly, tastelessly graphic way possible, filling the screen with several frames of the exposed pulsating organs of a dismembered young black man in horrific pain in order to discomfit the audience.  (Outsiders having the most brutal depiction of the character’s origin to date.)

Villains get beheaded, characters are tortured both on and off screen... but in service of nothing.

The show has no meaningful critique or commentary to make about the nature of violence or its newly grimdarked world - these elements being included almost entirely in service of in-the-moment shock-value, gore-porn and demonstrating that the show is "grown up" and "not for kids" anymore. Like a bad jumpscare, it uses imagery to trigger a reflex reaction of disgust, distress or horror while having no greater meaning or purpose or substance to back it up. It's a juvenile, thoughtlessly teenage-edgelord idea of what it means to be "adult".

Not only that, the tastelessly excessive violence also robs future storylines of the ability to use violence and death in a meaningful way, desensitizing the audience and teaching them not to care too much. Why would you care that a character is injured or dies when Halo does that over 9 times in 26 episodes with little more than an "it's fine, don't worry about it"? Even if we intellectually understand that Halo is a special case, the emotional effect is the same.

And we see the same thing repeated all over the place throughout the revival