Wittles

I accidentally clicked the submit button before I finished the rant lol, so here's the rest.

That's not to say that there aren't any redeeming qualities to this style. For example, batman has evolved from essentially a guy in a Halloween costume going around punching bad guys also in costumes. He has evolved to be a very complex character with a very strict moral code and his rogues gallery serve to challenge parts of his character. This was partially because of the success of Watchmen, which was the first story to be about superheroes' personal lives and was the first to explore moral ambiguity through superheroes, it was so successful that almost every superhero comic at the time tried to replicate it by making their own characters more complicated, and it essentially shifted the overall tone of these stories into a much more negative one. Which I personally think is very cool, but it doesn't apply to every character. There are some that benefit from this (batman) and some that are a completely different character because of it (Spider-Man). (I know that Spider-Man is a character whose story is almost entirely focused on his personal life, but if he becomes a morally grey character, it changes who he is fundamentally; but that's a totally different rant.) 

Anyway, the constantly changing authors, writing, and marketing, make characters that are always being changed, retconned, rebooted, etc. This is really frustrating to me because it means that there will absolutely spectacular character progression in one arc only to be taken over by a new author and be completely reset. The example that frustrates me the most is a character named Jason Todd/Red Hood from DC. He is such an amazing character. He is one of those characters that you love not only because they are a very well constructed character, but also because they are the kind of person you just want to be happy. If you don't take into account the amount of times he's been used in the almost identical storylines, or the convoluted mess that is the DC canon, his arc is straightforward and a very good progression for his character. DC could have taken this a number of ways to make his character even better, but they decided to do all of them and constantly retcon him back to the state he was near the beginning of his story. It just makes me really sad to think about how there could have been a narrative where there was a character arc for him that wasn't redone to death and he actually progressed to where he would naturally be. I'd be okay if they had had some sort of multiverse thing where they could do each version of the character, but they do all of them in the same continuity, and it just makes him a weaker character because he's constantly reverting back to how he was before the most recent change. 

This may just be that I don't get comics as a medium, but I think this form of storytelling is frustrating and obnoxious because it has amazing characters, worldbuilding, setting, but there is never a good, or at least a consistent, story to use those. In short, DC canon sucks, but fanfic exists to make a coherent story out of amazing characters.

I know I said first of all, but idk what I was going to say, so here's just the one rant if anyone cares to read it.