The truth is that I think Tate Brombal gets Cass in a way that no other writer in the last decade has... but he doesn't get Lady Shiva AT ALL.
Ok, maybe "at all" is a bit harsh. There are bits and pieces of how he writes her that work. He remembered her ability to heal as well as harm and some lines she has are pretty in character but a lot of it has felt very against what makes her interesting.
Shiva's best stories portray her as an agent of chaos, someone motivated by pure id without things like planning or ideology. The very premise of the first arc, regardless of how well a lot of it was written, strikes me as bizarre since it involves her basically running away from danger. She recruits Nyssa and co. to help her out of fear for survival, rather than her usual choice of allies which is almost always because she finds them interesting or because she feels they'll bring her INTO danger.
I was uneasy about the idea of giving her backstory from the start, since my feeling has always been that she's more compelling as an enigma. My hope was that it'd be more of an update or syncretization of the O'Neil and Gabrych versions of her origins, but unfortunately we instead ended up with something that overrides the good parts of both in favor of a very tropey, exoticized "Asian fantasy" type story.
I still think there will be some bits of value that future writers can take from his version of Shiva (like a name that actually makes linguistic sense) but for the most part I kinda hope this gets ignored, which is a shame because I love a lot about this book.
