I did a similar (sounds similar?) exercise wrt War Games -- I made a list of Things That Happened, trying to figure out what, exactly, I disliked so much about it. Because looking back on it, I have no problem incorporating it into canon -- as opposed to what I was feeling about certain developments at the time. And the Things That Happened seem... reasonable to me, on paper. I can see how they happened, and how they might have gotten from step 1 to step 2 all the way through to the inevitable step 23, or whatever. And it's really down to the writer failure that they couldn't get those bridges right, as opposed to the events themselves being outrageous and unlikely.
Could this have been solved by having one writer instead of however many they did have? It may very well have, as long as it wasn't Willingham. Because yes, exactly, the Bernard thing is Willingham's problem in a nutshell. When a character has appeared four times and is a completely different character each time... that reads like badfic, where a writer pairs characters together because the actors would be pretty together, and strips them of their individuality.
The lack of character comment on Steph's death baffles me. Because yes, all logic circuits tell me that they should be wallowing in this angst. At the very least, anyone who's writing Tim should be pulling her out of the background at every opportunity. Instead, Willingham has had her appear in one nightmare, and Johns has ignored her altogether. The only excuse I have for Johns is that maybe he was as confused by chronology as the rest of us, and that brief snappish conversation between Tim and Raven before the "Titans of Tomorrow" arc was supposed to be an oblique reference to his loss.
The really awful creeping feeling I have is that Steph's death served no purpose within the universe; that her death was a purely meta-level thing that tied in with the Red Hood thing, to ensure that people on the meta-level could still point fingers at Batman's culpability, at the "cost" of his crusade.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-04-05 03:35 pm (UTC)I did a similar (sounds similar?) exercise wrt War Games -- I made a list of Things That Happened, trying to figure out what, exactly, I disliked so much about it. Because looking back on it, I have no problem incorporating it into canon -- as opposed to what I was feeling about certain developments at the time. And the Things That Happened seem... reasonable to me, on paper. I can see how they happened, and how they might have gotten from step 1 to step 2 all the way through to the inevitable step 23, or whatever. And it's really down to the writer failure that they couldn't get those bridges right, as opposed to the events themselves being outrageous and unlikely.
Could this have been solved by having one writer instead of however many they did have? It may very well have, as long as it wasn't Willingham. Because yes, exactly, the Bernard thing is Willingham's problem in a nutshell. When a character has appeared four times and is a completely different character each time... that reads like badfic, where a writer pairs characters together because the actors would be pretty together, and strips them of their individuality.
The lack of character comment on Steph's death baffles me. Because yes, all logic circuits tell me that they should be wallowing in this angst. At the very least, anyone who's writing Tim should be pulling her out of the background at every opportunity. Instead, Willingham has had her appear in one nightmare, and Johns has ignored her altogether. The only excuse I have for Johns is that maybe he was as confused by chronology as the rest of us, and that brief snappish conversation between Tim and Raven before the "Titans of Tomorrow" arc was supposed to be an oblique reference to his loss.
The really awful creeping feeling I have is that Steph's death served no purpose within the universe; that her death was a purely meta-level thing that tied in with the Red Hood thing, to ensure that people on the meta-level could still point fingers at Batman's culpability, at the "cost" of his crusade.