Midpollo Week Day 5 - Just Couples Stuff 

The real tragedy of the whole “Batman contingency plans” thing escaping containment into the wider cultural zeitgeist is that it’s become completely divorced from the original context of, you know, the Tower of Babel story-line happening after a beloved member of the Justice League did in fact go mad, become all-powerful, and destroy all of reality.

Which is devastating because it loses so much when you take Hal Jordan out of it! In both adaptations and fan discussions!

Despite only being mentioned by name once in the story, Hal haunts the whole narrative in how unspoken he is. The whole theme of the story is the failure to communicate and how it destroys trust, and an essential part of that is how the whole League won't (and can't) talk about Hal.

When Kyle finally tries to bring him up, Wally shoots him down. He is the forbidden topic at the heart of the League's breakdown of trust!

When the contingency plans plot is removed from the context of Hal's fall from grace, isn't proceeded by a JLA founding member doing what was supposed to be unthinkable, Bruce's actions lose their emotional core. It becomes just "Batman is the coolest and smartest and also a huge untrusting asshole" instead of "Bruce was already on the knife-edge of crippling paranoia regarding his powerful allies, and then one of those same allies started slaughtering people and he couldn't do a thing to stop it, confirming all his worst fears and sending him right over the edge"

You take Bruce's feelings of very personal betrayal out of the equation. He's not operating on just hypotheticals, but fears that were heartrendingly justified!

Bruce claims the reason for his plans on some past mind-control incident, but Clark calls Bruce out on it being an excuse.

Maybe that's how it started, but there's a reason the fail-safes aren't against mind-control and possession. The fail-safes are ways to permanently stop your friends should they willingly or unwillingly become a threat.

And they both know it. They've argued about Hal several times before.

Bruce has a lot of unresolved feelings about Hal. He's still hurting.

The contingency plans are not some cold, clinical necessity. They are the product of pain.

I think all readings and tellings of the Tower of Babel should be followed by the JLA/Spectre story.

It provides the necessary emotional conclusion to the unspoken conflict! Because they finally have to talk about it! They heal the broken trust! Bruce admits how much Hal's betrayal hurt him and his faith in heroes, and gets past it! Instead of letting a former and potential future threat be eliminated as his fail-safes say he should, he invites the threat back, even if he can't guarantee it won't happen again, because he chooses to believe in his friend!

The contingency plans are a cool and interesting concept, but again, you can't just...take Hal out of it. You can't make it about some evil alternate versions, or about Clark. By doing that, you lose the most heartbreaking part of the story. Batman isn't in the right or the wrong, but he's not heartless. He's brokenhearted.

the team up ever

they barge into justice league meetings saying they have something very important to show them. and do stuff like this

Things I need more of:

The lanterns being a family

I can’t believe that Bruce going on chat rooms to make stuff up about Batman is cannon

clark if you're worried about intruders maybe just don't have statues of your little gay family around with revealing labels idk man

I drew my favorite green lantern post

Ollie’s kids being Ollie’s kids

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH 💙💖🤍💖💙

There’s been a lot of discussion about the “fuck Batman” line in the Titans trailer so I thought I’d put in my two cents. 

There was a lot of anger between Dick and Bruce when they split up, so it is valid that he would say “fuck Batman” if it were in that time period, however he is still in a robin costume which complicates things in whether he is still working with Bruce or not. 

This Dick seems to be in his early twenties and part of the police force, all of which he did while Tim was robin, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to be in the robin costume, he should be Nightwing. If this is the time period they are based in the “fuck Batman” line isn’t valid as they’ve figured most of their issues out at this point (or at least what passes for it with those two). 

TL;DR: For the line to be valid Dick shouldn’t be wearing the robin costume, he should be wearing discowing