#yj is the better property. jsa as well

[roobylavender]

could you give your full thoughts on new teen titans? Im trying to read it but I find the writing just so....idk trashy? lol and everyone seems to praise it and I think im missing something lmao

i blazed through ntt last summerish so my memories are more vague now but my central problems with it have to do with a) the way wolfman writes nearly every single female character he can get his hands on, and b) the way so much of dick’s development as a leader is built on painting other members of the team as deficient in competency or proper heroic rigor

wolfman to me is someone who indulges in melodrama to his heart’s desire, which isn’t inherently flawed, except for when it renders all of your female characters into prop pieces to be put through a repetitive mental or physical torture scheme where they can never be truly happy bc soon enough the next traumatizing event to debilitate them will show up and take center stage. i absolutely believe this is why none of the headlining female characters from his run have significantly progressed thereafter. the popular perception with their characters has been to always see them suffering and incapable of escaping this never ending cycle of trauma that at some point becomes nauseating to read about bc like! why do the girls almost never get to be happy. like ok i get it the same somewhat applies to the boys who are trapped within wolfman’s scheme as well but for the girls i find it to be particularly abhorrent bc of the additional ways in which they’re often demeaned and tortured (i.e., the entire terra affair, the way kory is treated for her cultural values, donna essentially being wolfman’s escapist fantasy to project a predatory escapist fantasy onto, raven forever being victim to repetitive body possession plots via her demonic father, etc.). the melodrama of it all is absolutely what drove its popularity imo but to me that came at the cost of keeping the characters in a forever regressive state, esp the girls 

on my second point i should clarify that this phenomenon admittedly predates wolfman. if you’ve read the 1966 teen titans run you see it there too with how roy, garth, and wally are turned into blithering, womanizing idiots half the time meanwhile dick is the clear-headed leader who calls the logical shots and knows better than to flirt with donna bc he truly values her as a friend. in that run it’s a little annoying at best bc while the boys are robbed of the competency they otherwise exhibit in their parent titles, they’re not turned into outright awful people? but wolfman kind of takes it an extra mile in his run bc not only are other members of his team portrayed as brash and incompetent and secretive in comparison, they are also sometimes made into outright bigots and misogynists? 

idk maybe it’s bc wally is a personal favorite but seeing what wolfman did to him was absolutely awful bc it’s antithetical to every single thing wally stood for as a hero in the flash title. the basis for his entire foray into heroics was his belief that being vested with powers entailed a duty to do good that must be taken seriously and ntt did nothing short of obliterate that, not to mention it made him into a conservative despite the fact that that identity is also pretty much antithetical to what wally stood for too? that’s the most egregious example of wolfman character assassinating other team members but his modus operandi in general was to go with the idea that other members were not as put together or morally straightlaced as dick so as to be able to successfully participate in/and or lead the team and it eventually got on my nerves and forms the basis for most of my gripes with dick as a character. i do think he’s abnormally hyper competent and has a stick up his ass which contributes to his specific brand of leadership but i also think that’s something you can portray without character assassinating the people around him, which to me wolfman was utterly incapable of doing (and like don’t even get me started on the way he had dick treat kory under the guise of maintaining standards of morality. . .) 

#like i think if you want to read a good team book that actually values its ensemble cast as a whole #yj is the better property. jsa as well #outbox