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I have OPINIONS on how Outsiders is using their new freedom for violence

(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

The series recognises that works that address "topical" issues get critical praise, but instead of exploring the existing themes and material to find something that reflects a current issue and then examining it more deeply, we get the sudden inclusion of a refugee crisis, social media, #wearealloutsiders, Nightwing developing out-of-place existential angst about whether "normal" humans are being evolutionarily left behind by the development of metahumans (they aren't, you dumbass, you're just an immature wanker who refuses to adapt his own behaviour in the face of obvious evidence and suffers for it), and Lex Luthor parroting ex-US-president Donald J. Trump's "very fine people on both sides" Charlottesville line in response to an in-universe conflict between protestors.

A pretence of being relevant with so little to actually say for itself that it makes Outsiders feel so much more dated than the season that came out nearly a decade before it.

The series understands that "representation" and "diversity" draws attention and makes successful shows, movies and books critical darlings. But instead of recognising that that praise comes from authors working to respectfully acknowledge and depict a broader range of normal human experiences, or having something to contribute to the conversation we get Halo; a character who superficially ticks the boxes of Hijabi, Bisexual, Genderqueer and Of Colour while also being written as an amnesiac uncomfortable with their past to give the writers an out on having to actually meaningfully explore the ways culture, gender and sexuality intersect to inform a person's identity (with almost more time being given to them discovering how apples taste nice).

We get Kaldur, who has almost all his existing characterisation around his leadership insecurities, mole-plot fallout and lingering feelings for Tula dropped, but who we're still supposed to treat as a diversity win because he's in a relationship with a man who is never established within the animated canon, voiced or even named until after the four-still-drawings-panning-over-a-background that is their kiss scene, serving almost entirely to out Kaldur's bisexuality instead of properly introducing the relationship or his character. (And if you look to the extended tie-in-comics canon you will find that Wyynde only exists as a similarly nameless background member of an Atlantean racial supremacist group, meaning that he was either actively complicit or directly participant in capturing Kaldur's childhood friend Topo and carving a racial slur into his chest, and that he gets no redemption or development between this and a later joke implying he sucks Kaldur's sea-snake. It is incredibly gross how Outsiders wants to pat itself on the back for the “very fine people” line while treating this canonical history of explicit racial supremacy as no big deal.)

Instead we get weird semi-queerbaiting nonsense between Ed and Bart, two characters with barely any meaningful personal screentime together in Invasion.

We get an incredibly forced line where Conner (a person who named his pet wolf "Wolf" and pet metal ball "Sphere", and genuinely doesn't seem like he'd care about this kind of thing) brings up Forager's nonstandard use of pronouns so that M'gann can explicitly talk about their "complicated relationship with gender", despite Forager being a member of the alien Bug race whose anatomy and culture are entirely separate from human perceptions of gender, who is immediately given a masculine name and appearance for their cover identity, never given a chance to investigate how they relate to either their own culture's or western human culture's concept of gender identity and this whole gender line being triggered by the fact that Forager preferentially speaks in Third Person and barely uses even gender-neutral pronouns like "I" and "you" for anyone. Can't wait for Todd Howard to release a tweet about how The Elder Scrolls is gender inclusive because most of the Khajiit in Skyrim talk the same way.

To be clear, I'm not criticising the idea of including more diversity in the series - I think that's a cool and admirable thing to do, with a lot of potential when executed well - but the way this was handled does not make me think that the intent was to give a more diverse audience more characters to directly relate to, or to meaningfully engage with the ideas of diversity and inclusion. Instead it feels like the intent was at best to manufacture superficially screencap/gif-able moments that could be shared on social media with an "OMG look what they did #diversitywin" or a “leftism claims another victim #BoycottYoungJustice” in order to get free marketing, and at worse to create a shield that would let the creators hide from valid criticisms of poor writing by redirecting the conversation with counter-accusations of bigotry. It certainly doesn't seem like they put any thought into how their depictions might be potentially insulting or distressing to real audience members who identify as part of those demographics.

Also, because it severely grinds my gears, I feel like I have to point out just how much Outsiders transparently wants to have it's cake and eat it with Halo in terms of being praised for progressive diversity while simultaneously using them for all manner of regressive storytelling drama. Repeatedly subjecting them to extreme levels of gruesome injury with little personal agency while making no meaningful commentary on the disproportionate threats of violence faced by the real life minorities they represent, their bisexuality being played for infidelity drama about a time when they were a "bad partner" to their heterosexual boyfriend, having them describe themself as "broken inside" on multiple occasions and then validating that with the reveal that Halo is genderqueer because they're actually the body of a dead girl being reanimated by the consciousness of a motherbox computer, with the deeply uncomfortable implication being that they are the way they are because they do not have a human soul (remembering that this is also one of the few recurring significant characters who is explicitly coded as culturally non-Christian. It’s also worth noting that “confused cis-girl led astray by an unnatural outside influence” is a common piece of transphobic rhetoric used against AFAB trans people in real life). Plus the designers and animators were willing to compromise Halo’s gender and religious/cultural identity by putting them in a supersuit that's functionally skin-tight from the neck down and treating their body with similar posing and camerawork to the white cis-female characters without acknowledging that dissonance or making it part of the character.

The series understood that fans liked Wally, that they were hurt by his death in Invasion and that seeing whether he would come back or getting closure for him really being gone was a strong emotional hook for viewers. But instead of taking the time to write a satisfying grief arc to give the audience catharsis, or explore how the characters coped with the loss of a close friend and one of the original founding Team members, they chose to timeskip over the most emotionally tumultuous period of the fallout, teasing hints of him to bait continued watching and writing scenes that exploit the audience's existing attachment to his character instead of meaningfully progressing, developing or concluding the relationships.

Instead of acknowledging the things he most valued about Wally, how their friendship changed him, or confronting the conflicts between them and the way they drifted apart, Dick's scenes pursue an incredibly shallow and outdated understanding of the Wally that appeared in early Season 1; with Red Arrow almost accidentally calling attention to this when he calls Dick out for trying to recreate a superficially Wally-style-adventure with him because he has "the red hair" in Private Security, and the fever-dream flashback being such a transparent attempt to exploit audience attachment to the the Season 1 incarnations that it plays the original theme song over the top (a song that has no presence or musical association within the show itself apart from getting you hype to watch Young Justice during the Season 1 title sequences).

Artemis' and Wally's scene is almost devoid of any aspect of their established characterisation and relationship, being entirely generic outside of the proper nouns (including the word Spitfire, which we must note, is the fandom name for ship, only appearing once in the canon of the original series and never being used by Artemis or Wally in reference to their relationship, giving it no established significance between them. Based on the animated canon you could argue that Artemis may never have even heard the word). It also carries some really regressive implications in how it entirely focuses on Artemis' supposed regret that she did not fully give up her life of heroism and place on the Team (remembering that it was her main path out of an abusive criminal household, that she explicitly calls the Team "her new family" in Season 1, and that she was internally conflicted about it in Invasion) to instead live a life of domestic marriage, pregnancy and childrearing as Wally's wife and kept woman, declaring that it would have been "all we need", despite neither of them ever discussing the specifics of the life they wanted or their future plans before this. Not only is it one of several times when the Outsiders revival seems uncomfortably fixated on female characters as pregnant and/or mothers, it also plays into outdated ideas that all woman subconsciously desire marriage and motherhood even if they themselves "don't know it", made worse by the fact that this scene is later revealed to be an telepathy-and-magic-induced hallucination literally taking place in Artemis' subconscious.

The series understands that the Secrets and Lies plot points of the first season made an exciting story, but instead of developing it and showing how characters have learned from it, adapted and changed in their approaches we get Kaldur, Dick and M'gann repeating the same mistakes and behaviours from previous seasons even after learning how they are harmful. We get them lying to characters we know they can trust and we know will be hurt by the inevitable reveal, with the series giving only the most flimsy, fragile and easily-defeated justifications ("the Light changed the terms" M'gann reactively argues when questioned, despite Season 1 having Black Canary explicitly tell them that they should be "keeping the battle on your terms. You should always be acting, never reacting"), seemingly because their need to retain complete petty control while still being liked and respected is more important to them than their friendships or the ability of the teams they now oversee to be effective in handling the problems they know exist.

In doing so, Dick, Kaldur and M'gann end up replicating the exact same problems and structures the Team was originally formed in response to - an upper echelon of older heroes who give orders, conceal information from and do not include the younger generations in their plans - seemingly unaware of and unconcerned by this now that they have personally grown beyond it; completely disinterested in creating a better path for the people following in their footsteps. Ultimately the end of Outsiders sees Black Lightning, the new leader of the League, unofficially decommission the Team and convert it to a safe training space for younger heroes - exactly the thing that the original Team members were so desperate not to have it become.

The way the revival barely engages with this as the tragedy it is; instead treating Dick, Kaldur and M'gann as ultimately correct, heroic and to be respected, seemingly presenting it as something to just be accepted as a a natural part of "growing up" leaves me cold.

It's so cynical, so defeatist, so nihilistic, such a cowardly deference to the status quo.

The contrast between a 13-year-old Robin, openly desperate to not become too much like Batman or too sacrificing of others, and the proud approval with which Outsiders calls direct attention to how calculating and manipulative and Batman-like Nightwing is now - seemingly applauding the “adultness” of him giving up on his "childish" desire to care or self-improve... it feels almost cruel.

Where was the hope? The message? The point of any of it?

And so I am left thinking of this quote by Ex-Disney-CEO Mike Eisner and what it reflects about the goals of large media companies in the modern day:

"We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective." -Mike Eisner, internal memo for Paramount (1982)

Because that's what the Young Justice Revival is. It's a product, greenlit to exploit the emotional attachment of fans who had genuine reason to love the early seasons.

It's a vanity project, by a pair of fanboy showrunners, unwilling or uninterested in fighting for a meaningful narrative; allergic to endings, addicted to adding characters, incurious, insensitive, devoid of introspection or respect for their audience, writing self-indulgent F-tier DC fanfiction under the belief that having a lot of comic book knowledge, that including references to other actually well-told stories, and throwing out post-hoc retcon explanations via interviews, tweets and ask-blogs is the same as writing something meaningful yourself.

A cowardly pretence - both from the characters within the show and the writers producing it - that they had no say in how the story played out, rather than admitting that they had the opportunity to choose to be better and simply did not care enough to make the effort.

The final output of an apathetic process where the people in charge are financially incentivised to not give creators the time, tools, editors or quality assurance that would produce a good story; knowing that so long as the end result looks decent enough on the surface to draw in a strong first wave of buyers it will make enough money to justify its existence.

It is the illusion of story in service of profit.

A reminder that you can't spell Doesn't Care without D.C.

And it's heart-breaking, because it could have been something good.

#grandon

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