was watching somewhere the director of Megan Gerard Johnstone was writing a movie script for JLD back in the day where Zatanna was the team leader and they all went to hell to save her father, to make it a team based movie and she was finding her powers. Then i just started thinking...
My thoughts are they should use the upside down man- the primordial summation of fear the has been formed by all the cost of using magic that have never been paid. This creates this primal entity that just feeds on the cost of magic having a price and that price rising cause there is no balance. Giving this magic a currency in this way makes it have stakes. The magic always has a cost, it has consequences.
That primordial character can dissect this team down to their basic fears and use it against them, the debt of magic makes the cost go higher and the power go higher if you use magic just straight against it. How do you outweigh that balance? Which is such a good way to something relevant and make it worth something. This way you can very much humanize these characters, relate to them, cause they are fractured and broken.
Each character can be stripped down and the characters can get exposed for the broken beings they are while also really developing the backstory. Zatanna not powerful enough to save her dad who was torched in front of her. Constantine never saving a child's soul from hell. Swamp thing existing to a dad's man consciousness he never truly was, Alec holland is a ghost he is living. Jason Blood being tied to the bane of existence a demon, as retribution for their misgivings. Even deadman being stuck in a purgatorical hell. This is what i thinks needs that storytelling taken characters and stripping them down and making them build themselves back up. The reward is you full round the characters and at the same time tell a hell of story cause you move one thing out of play, straight up magic being used as a deus machina, you have to be smart about it. Everything counts, thats what makes it so rewarding. You have a chance to build the characters dialogue, skill work, etc, and even if they are not team players you can make them in this situation. I still agree with Zatanna as the team lead but i think can be creative in the way you move the board. You can still boost her power or have her find her power, but you got to take them down before they can go up and you have to be smart in how you do it.
