I've said it before, I'll say it again. This series infuriates me because fundamentally, it's a bad story. It's got a great premise, and some really good concepts were introduced, but at the end of the day, it's poorly-written and executed, and now that it's all over, Tom King utterly botched the ending.
Wally West, a fan favorite who people had been asking to return for YEARS, is brought back, only to be utterly ruined by turning him into an accidental mass murderer, a would-be suicide, and a broken man.
Over a dozen other characters are dragged out of comic Limbo to be unceremoniously slaughtered, whether or not it made any sense for them to exist in continuity at this moment in time anyway, their traumas mined from obscure stories. Some were out-of-character, some weren't even correctly depicted. And yet all were wasted just to heap more trauma on Wally.
The entire -mystery- turned out to staged, and the answer involved time travel bullshit. The resolution involved time travel bullshit and future cloning technology. The whodunnit portion was -explained- to the audience by the perpetrator in such a fashion that the world's greatest detective and forensic scientist, the ones investigating the mystery, essentially had no part in solving it. Lois Lane, the world's best investigative journalist, was drawn in but likewise useless in solving anything.
The ending shows that no one's learned a damn thing about how to properly treat superhero grief, trauma, and PTSD, and no one's learned a damn thing from the tragedy in the first place.
This story REEKS of editorial interference (write extra issues! kill these random characters chosen from a list!) and authorial incompetence. (And I don't say the last lightly...) It basically took a good idea and good characters and created a flaming toxic mess that will take years to undo and which has eradicated a tremendous amount of goodwill on the part of the fanbase.
If this series had retconned itself out of existence on the final page, I'd have been annoyed but at the same time relieved. As it stands, if any of the victims of this massacre return without explanation, I'd be okay with that. Because they deserve better.
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scans_daily2019-05-29 10:32 am
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This series infuriates me because fundamentally, it's a bad story. It's got a great premise, and some really good concepts were introduced, but at the end of the day, it's poorly-written and executed, and now that it's all over, Tom King utterly botched the ending.
Wally West, a fan favorite who people had been asking to return for YEARS, is brought back, only to be utterly ruined by turning him into an accidental mass murderer, a would-be suicide, and a broken man.
Over a dozen other characters are dragged out of comic Limbo to be unceremoniously slaughtered, whether or not it made any sense for them to exist in continuity at this moment in time anyway, their traumas mined from obscure stories. Some were out-of-character, some weren't even correctly depicted. And yet all were wasted just to heap more trauma on Wally.
The entire -mystery- turned out to staged, and the answer involved time travel bullshit. The resolution involved time travel bullshit and future cloning technology. The whodunnit portion was -explained- to the audience by the perpetrator in such a fashion that the world's greatest detective and forensic scientist, the ones investigating the mystery, essentially had no part in solving it. Lois Lane, the world's best investigative journalist, was drawn in but likewise useless in solving anything.
The ending shows that no one's learned a damn thing about how to properly treat superhero grief, trauma, and PTSD, and no one's learned a damn thing from the tragedy in the first place.
This story REEKS of editorial interference (write extra issues! kill these random characters chosen from a list!) and authorial incompetence. (And I don't say the last lightly...) It basically took a good idea and good characters and created a flaming toxic mess that will take years to undo and which has eradicated a tremendous amount of goodwill on the part of the fanbase.
If this series had retconned itself out of existence on the final page, I'd have been annoyed but at the same time relieved. As it stands, if any of the victims of this massacre return without explanation, I'd be okay with that. Because they deserve better.
no subject