Dragaros wrote:So Young Justice is finally giving some plot focus on Cassandra and Lady Shiva. Cool. Love both characters, and their family dynamic is ripe for some juicy story material and narrative conflict. But they're already doing some things I'm not liking. For starters, Shiva cut out Cass' vocal cords so she's literally incapable of talking, apparently thinking it would maker her a better living weapon if she was deprived of a voice and couldn't speak. Shiva, even at her nicest and least villainous would still make for a ruthless as fuck mother, but that's out-of-character as far as I'm concerned. Not even her father David Cain in the comics did that.
This 4th season of Young Justice so far is rather disappointing IMO. From what I understand they will make successive story arcs for the OG Young Justice one after another, so while eps 1-4 were about M'gann and Conner, eps 5-8 focused on Artemis.
The first four reaaaaally were a missed opportunity for me because of how they unsubtly hammered their underlying message of "Racism is bad". I'll get into spoilers to develop a bit.
► Show Spoiler
They use the Martian society, where Red > Green > White as a quite obvious parallel for modern day USA. Most of it is rather ham-fisted, but, well, it's hard to disagree with the basic message - except we don't get an original explanation for this "natural order" on Mars. The problem is that, since it's based on the USA, and that White Martians are stand-ins for black people, we as per usual get two contrasting figures of White Martians in M'gann - the MLK - and her brother - the Malcolm X. But on one hand, M'gann is very much privileged - lives on Earth, has a non-Martian boyfriend, is the niece of the greatest Martian alive - and doesn't do much beside big speeches to change the status quo. On the other hand, her brother wants to fight by...exterminating all green and red martian.
So all in all, it's kinda yikes when you look a bit deeper at it...which the show is supposed to encourage you to do by obviously making real-world parallels in its plot..
The next four are basically about characters who have ties to both the good and bad guys, so Artemis, Cheshire, Orphan, and two supposed Light defectors, Onyx and Cassandra Savage. It's not bad, but it does not really go anywhere - I hope it means we will see more of Orphan and the others later on, as it clearly serves to flesh them out while they just were background figures before.
There also are (from what I gathered, not familiar with source material)...
► Show Spoiler
Two big changes to the DC, and Bat-verse in particular, lore.
First is Cassandra Wu-San, aka Orphan, who got tortured and abused by her mother Lady Shiva, and not her father (who is nowhere to be seen). The second is that Cassandra is the reason Barbara Gordon became Oracle, as she literally jumped under her blade to stop her from committing her first assassination.
And while that second point is interesting - as it makes Barbara an actor of her transformation into Oracle, instead of a victim, and it gives her a connection with Cassandra - it is utterly dropped out of nowhere. I mean, the Batfamily is fighting in the darkness against...Joker I think?
And then suddenly Barbara spots a shadow and decides to sacrifice her spine to avoid that shadow killing someone. I really wish we at LEAST had been given a bit of context - she might have researched that hit squad and noticed a very young girl among them, or we could have seen her bat-deductions that allowed her to understand that she was dealing with an unexperienced teenage assassin - instead of what we got.
And the pacing of that arc was really off. The last episode in particular felt odd and devoid of thrills despite starting with the entire squad at the mercy of Shiva and her allies. The one thing I loved however is the League of Shadows, with both Ra's and Sensei aka evil Uncle Iroh both being very fun, and potentially very interesting for what comes next.
But...yeah, it was all over the place. We were jumping from Cassandra's background, to Artemis and Cheshire's childhoods, and back to the present...messy.
