Me: Hey WFA, which fun moral and emotional dilemma that fandom usually loves to give to Bruce and the boys are you going to give to the girls this week?
WFA: Cass is feeling so pressured by everything the Joker is doing along with the visit from Shiva that she's debating whether she should kill Joker herself because no one else deserves to risk their life like that and then carry the scars of causing death with their own hands
Me: Fucking fantastic you funky little webcomic. Keep it up.
set sometime nebulously after infinite crisis
dick: i’m glad that jason’s getting better
cass: what?
dick: yeah, after that whole dunk in the lazarus pit thing, i’m glad the side effects are finally wearing off
cass: side effects?
dick: mhmm i think he called it lazarus pit madness or something? i’m not really sure, but it basically made him lose control over some of his actions and do some things he regrets now
cass:
cass: that’s the dumbest fucking thing over ever heard
dick: what?
cass: i’ve been in a lazarus pit, my mom put me in one after my half brother killed me and i never had any ‘madness’ because of it
dick: but… he said…
cass: jason has been lying straight to your face he wasn’t affected by some outside force he knew what he was doing the entire time
dick:
dick: i’m gonna unpack that later when i have time for my world to fall apart again, right now, i need you to go back a few chapters what do you mean your half brother killed you??? you have a half brother???
cass: and a half sister too
dick: …what…
Okay I’ve been thinking about the Parallax retcon again cause god do I hate it. I’ve done some meta on it but I’m gonna focus on what it did to Hal. Earlier to day I said there wasn’t much build up to Parallax but that’s not exactly true because I wasn’t considering the frame work of Hal’s headspace.
So back after Crisis, Hal Jordan wasn’t doing so hot. His best friend had died. Carol was possessed by the Star Sapphire and committing all sorts of crimes to fuck with Hal. John and Guy weren’t that close with Hal back in the 90s. John and Hal fought over a ton of shit Carol did while possessed.
Hal was pretty isolated at this point. He tries to go to people he thought were his friends and they all wave him off or openly tell him to get over himself. Some of them were down right malicious about it. Hal wasn’t in a good place.
Then Coast City is destroyed. And Hal wants to try to fix it. He tries with the rings and the Guardians tell him no. Hal is so completely isolated at this point no one even notices that he is running to take a swan dive off the cliff of sanity.
Hal goes to Oa. He steals the rings of the other Lanterns and leaves them in Space to die. He kills Sinestro. He kills Kilowog. Then Hal steps into the Power Battery. He kills every single one of the Guardians minus Ganthet here.
And his plan? Reset the universe. Hal wants to put everything back to his it was before Crisis. When Coast City wasn’t rubble. When Barry Allen was alive.
Now the heroes step in. They look at this man who they turned away, who they ignored in his grief, in the aftermath of the destruction of his city, and they call him a villain. Then they act surprised he doesn’t wanna hear what they have to say? That he maybe doesn’t care about their opinions on him because they certainly couldn’t be bothered with him before this.
In the end Ollie shoots him in the chest. And Ollie thinks he killed Hal but he didn’t. Hal and Kyle just ended up on Oa.
And the heroes wipe their hands clean. They were then absolved of any guilt around Hal because he was clearly a bad guy. They couldn’t have stopped him. But that’s not true. Anyone at all offering a hand out might have stopped him.
By the time Hal attacks Kyle in New York he’s desperate. He has no other plan than try Zero Hour again. He wants the Green Lantern ring. He wants to be a Green Lantern. That’s all Hal. Hal is there and he’s been practically screaming for help for years.
And Kyle oh hopelessly naive Kyle is the first one to tell Hal what he’s doing isn’t heroic. Everyone else declared Hal himself a villain.
Kyle was the one who saw the hero in Hal. Kyle went to the Source Wall to ask for Hal’s help in restarting the sun.
And only once Hal had died did the others look at him like a hero again. And with a bittersweet taste nonetheless.
Kyle set up Hal’s funeral. He made the memorial. He wanted everyone to know that Hal was a hero truly and fully.
But they turned their backs to Hal. They decided he wasn’t worth their time. What good are they to decide who’s a sinner and who’s a saint to paraphrase Hal himself.
And then the retcon. That it wasn’t Hal at all. It was Parallax.
That is their wipe away for everything that happened to Hal. It cloaks his depression, his anger, his loneliness in some supernatural fear bug and we can all just move on.
It means when Hal tells Barry about it that Barry waves it off as not Hal. As if nothing Hal was feeling then matters. As if Hal didn’t exist at all. Just Parallax.
This means the other heroes don’t have to feel bad at all, as if they would, for abandoning Hal because his emotions were being influenced. Nothing at all could have been done.
Except then they fucked up again when Kyle was possessed by Parallax. Hal held out a hand and he helped Kyle break free. Which means yes they could have helped Hal. But they chose not to.
The Parallax retcon is a massive cop out so the writers didn’t have to address a characters actual mental state. Because it’s easier to draw a smile I suppose.
But even with the retcon it shows how the others dropped the ball. Hal wasn’t suffering in silence and they “couldn’t have known” he was asking for help. He needed help. And they turned him away.
TL;DR: Hal Jordan needs some better friends
This was inspired by @pulsar-1919 thank you for that reply about The List. I forgot how much of a dick everyone was to Hal. I knew about Bruce in the robe being a jackass but that’s par for the course for Bruce tbh.
Diomedes: That's Odysseus, cleverest of the greeks. He's probably concocting a wicked plan right now.
Odysseus *internally*: Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Penelope Pen-
Someone please write a fic abt how Kara knows Bruce’s identity cause she’s dating/married to Babs and Hal knows because Bruce told him in that one comic but now he regrets it.
Anyways, they are tired of Bruce and Clark’s pining so they play matchmaker while everyone else has no clue what’s going on.
One time the bat kids hung out in the cave while B was at a JL meeting. The whole place was covered in pink glitter and silly string by the time they were done. The only person who didn’t have glitter on them was Cassandra, no one knows how.
They don’t even try to clean it and just fr owned it.
Bruce comes back with the JL in tow to a pink, sparkly batcave and almost has an aneurism.
Oliver and Dinah is laughing their asses off and the JL is shocked.
Oliver; remind me to get them Prada for Christmas.
Bruce;…
Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, Robin, Spoiler, Black Bat, and Signal chose that moment to reenter the room.
Oliver; good job!
Hood; thanks uncle arrow!
Hal; what’s wrong with B?
Signal; wait for it.
Bruce; THE BATMOBILE TOO!?!
I have been reading a lot of headcanons of the justice league, my favorites are when batman reveals his identity but only to....Green arrow
It's so fun because imagine if for any reason Batman is forced to reveal his identity and everyone thinks he will choose Superman or/and Wonderwoman (because you know THE trinity, the dream team) BUT NO, he chooses green arrow
at this point the justice league already put aside whatever they were doing and start questioning batman, that is to say without hate towards Ollie but he is not the most secretive, nor the most competent, I mean HE IS NOT EVEN THE CLOSEST TO BATMAN, so yes, even Oliver is wondering why him?
and then without anything else Batman does or says some kind of code, at that moment everyone thinks that he must have already lost his mind when they hear the BIGGEST gasp from none other than Green Arrow, now he is running to hug Batman jumping and holding on like a koala while screaming
"WHY YOU NEVER SAID IT BEFORE SILLY"
"so you understand?"
"OF COURSE I UNDERSTAND IT'S OUR SUPER SECRET SUPER BEST FRIENDS CODE"
That's when J'onn leaves the room because he's not going to deal with the nonsense that these supposed heroes are thinking, the earth is doomed with these fools
Flash is screaming terrified that someone replaced Batman and brainwashed Ollie
Aquaman and Captain Marvel are pretending to know whatever is going on because they totally didn't sleep for half of the meeting
Black Canary's eyes are so wide and she looks like she had an epiphany from something Ollie said
Green Lantern still doesn't get over the fact that Batman is revealing his identity? (of course in such a weird way that only one of them understands, fuck him) but at the end of the day revealing his identity?
Wonder Woman and Superman are having a crisis and they are GREEN with envy, because not only did Batman reveal his identity to Green Arrow of all people, but he is also HUGGING him (also, they are the Bat's best friends, thank you very much)
Then Oliver, oblivious to everything, finishes by saying
"Wait, this means I kissed THE KNIGHT OF GOTHAM, THE BATMAN?, wow B you are killing me"
everyone explodes
totally based on this amazing post
In my mind Argos (the dog from the Odyssey) isn’t dead because Athena placed a spell on him so when Ody dies he dies.
No one questions it because they know Ody is Athena’s favorite mortal.
Hal Jordan as character is funny to me because the way fandom see and treat him as this poor meow meow character, make other people forget how actually fucking sad his whole life is. Like most people only remember about how he watch his father died and how he thrive to be like him as his tragic backstory. Not a lot mention about how abusive his dad was, how repressed Hal is as a result of that, his shitty relationship with his family, his struggle with his civilian job and balancing his life while being a green lantern. Like it's just funny. You search for his contents and most of them come out as funny stuffs, but then you try to learn more about him and you ask yourself, "Holy shit how tf did this man hold it together???". It's like experiencing a culture shock
and when you think about this in context of how he in all likelihood is the youngest of the original members of the league it gets even sadder like to think he was doomed from the moment he was given the ring despite it initially giving him so much hope that he could make a difference is so depressing and once again i think a very apt metaphor for how military structures prey on people and exploit them until they’re nothing
Bruce; Duke and Cass are my angel children. They tell me everything.
Batkids; glaring.
Cass who never told B she’s died twice and fr has done some of the most insane shit; smiles innocently.
Duke who blew up a warehouse last night and replaced Jason’s grappling gun with a slinky; Thanks B!
honestly the more i think about Hal as an often homeless, broke, frequently unemployed, felon who’s constantly five bad days away from a mental breakdown the less funny jokes about him being constantly belittled and bullied by the multi billionaire personally funding the justice league really are.