Usually, when I fall in love with a series it is instantaneous, but for Young Justice, it was different. I was excited when I saw the trailers, but when it was time to watch the show I was just whelmed. (Fun fact: that was a 10 Things I Hate About You reference that went over the heads of most Young Justice fans, including myself.) It wasn’t until a couple of episodes in that I started having a good time. Unfortunately, as the series went on more and more things started bugging me about the show.
While season one’s problems were a little annoying, I was still able to enjoy the show as a whole. It wasn’t until season two that the things I saw as minor irritants evolved into me not missing the show when it was gone.
This post is in no way an attempt to argue why the show is bad. I think it was perfectly enjoyable when I could look past these problems. This is just a list of what lead me to realize the show isn’t really for me.
(Also, I know it’s a bit late to be writing a Young Justice post, but I didn’t have a blog before so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Besides season 3 is right around the corner, which opens the door for posts like mine. P.S. if you thought these wouldn’t be any spoilers on an analysis post, you’d be wrong.)
Focus, Focus, Focus!
From the get-go, Young Justice had a problem what characters that should matter and, more specifically, what it means to be a member of the Team. When you really look at it the team that is advertised isn’t really the team you get in the show. (And I’m not talking about how the show is named after a comic series that it only loosely follows. That is excusable from the standpoint that they were using the name literally and they make that clear be naming the show’s team as just called the Team.)
In advertisements, Aqualad, Robin, Kid Flash, Superboy, Miss Martian, and Artemis all stood together as a team. It sent a clear message. They are the main characters. They are the most important characters on the show. They are the main focus. But their not.
There are a couple of characters who join the team later. The show has a weird relationship with these characters. Some are given the same amount of focus compared to the central cast. Some are given way more focus. Some are introduced in ways that indicate that they should get the same amount of attention as the main six but for some reason fall short. And some are treated like the writers barely remember they exist.
We get our first (and most important) off-team character as early as episode one.
Red Arrow/Roy Harper
I find it interesting that before the Team was formed, Roy got introduced the same way as Robin, Aqualad, and Kid Flash. A young hero being brought into the Justice League’s supposed headquarters for the first time. However, he stormed off too early. Resulting in him missing the inciting incident that forms the Team. But it wasn’t too late because Roy was later offered a position on the Team…and he turns it down.
Why the writers had Roy turn down the offer? I have no idea. I guess they just wanted to keep with his rebellious character. However, that doesn’t change how for the rest of the season Red Arrow is given a lot of attention. I remember watching the show when it first aired and asking myself why they didn’t just have him be a part-time team member (kind of like Batman from the 2000s Justice League cartoon).
In the first half of the season, Roy returns to be Artemis’ foil, flirts with her sister, and be a general rebel. And then the mole plot started.
After the discovery that there is a potential mole among the teens, Red Arrow gets placed on the Team to help the investigation (also to make his resume look better for when it’s time for him to join the Justice League). After a while, Roy concludes that the whole mole thing was a trick, but the very next episode reveals that Roy was the mole (and a sleeper agent).
It seemed odd to me that the writers would give this plot to Roy. If they had picked anyone else, they wouldn’t have made so much of the story revolve around him, especially since the main team members’ plots didn’t really amount to much in the end. If they made Artemis the mole, it could have been a story of redemption. If they made it Conner, it could have been a story of overcoming nature with nurture. If they made it about the less likely but not impossible Zatanna, It could have a been a story of becoming disillusioned with heroes after her loss.
Zatanna
Speaking of Zatanna, she was a character who, after experiencing a whole character arc, lost her usefulness to the plot part way through the first season. Which is a shame because I like Zatanna.
In this version of the character, Zatanna is the daughter of League member Zatarra, who is reluctant to let her join the Team. She sneaks off with to help her new friends in a couple of episodes before she is functionally orphaned.
From this point on, she is an official member of the Team and moves into the cave with the other team members without homes. For the next couple of episodes all she really does is (understandably) mourn her father and reminds the audience she’s Robin’s love interest.
In this season, She does get one more episode where she drives a sub-plot and it shows that she’s doing better, but that pretty much the last time she is really at the forefront of a plot for the rest of the series.
It’s weird because it felt like the writers wanted to give Zatanna a bigger role than she ended up having. Her first episode was all about how much the Team liked her and showed how well her powerset could be contributing to missions. Unfortunately, I suspect that her being too big of an asset is exactly why she faded into the background.
For a series about teen heroes trying to prove themselves, a character like Zatanna is pretty overpowered. In her first episode, Zatanna explains that the only limit to her powers is whether she knows the spell and the amount of energy that “usually has to come from within” the caster. Essentially, it’s at the writer’s discretion what she can do, and every time she opens her mouth, she was creating another obstacle that the writes need to work around.
For example, when M’gann’s telepathy doesn’t work to get information from Ivo, Zatanna easily gets him to spill his guts using a spell. Jump forward to season two where M’gann is abusing her powers to brakes the minds of villains to get information faster, guess who is conveniently written off the Team to make this plot possible.
The writers when do use Zatanna, it is sparingly. She provides a quick solution for otherwise complicated problems. As a result, with each appearance, she becomes less of a character and more of a Zatanna-shaped plot device.
Rocket/Raquel
For the life of me, I can’t understand why the writers did this to Rocket. Unlike Red Arrow, who got too much attention, or Zatanna, who stuck around long after her story ended, Rocket had no reason to be introduced in the first place.
Initially, I was excited to learn about her since this is the first time her character has ever been animated and she was a character I’ve never heard of. I thought it was a bit weird to introduce her in the penultimate episode of the season (especially since it focuses on the Team bonding over being honest with each other for once), but I figured that we would get to know her better in season two.
I was wrong.
Season two jumps ahead five years and Rocket is no longer on the Team (she has since joined the League). She does reappear in one subplot where she was having a bridal shower (she’s not an important enough character to find out who she’s marrying), but other than that she is mostly just a background character.
Honestly, it kind of feels like the only reason Rocket was introduced to the show was so that Kaldur’ahm had someone to kiss on New Years.
Season Two Team
When season two premiered, the audience was suddenly thrust five years into the future. Resulting in the teens we knew suddenly becoming adults with half of them having left the Team and new members have replaced them in that time. (Now I have problems with the timeskip’s effect on certain storylines, but I will address that in the next section.)
I wish I could tell you about the newer Team but I only really remember about a handful of them. The rest were just recurring side-characters who had to step back to make way for the real focus of the show.
The new characters that did stick out to me were the ones that played major roles in this season. Large sections of the plot couldn’t have been possible without characters like Blue Beetle and Impulse. Even then, the constant attention given to the original cast’s trivial plots undercut the narrative importance of the younger cast. The invasion plot suddenly seems less dire when the adults who need to fix it are busy messing up a spy mission because of poor their communication skills.
Though, it did feel like the writers tried to give attention to the new cast. A few of them even had episodes that revolved around them, often with the older teammates acting in almost mentoring roles. However, it always felt like a breather from the real focus.
Honestly, I didn’t notice half this stuff when I first watched the show. Looking back, I was unhappy when a new character was getting screentime because they weren’t the original Team that the show told me to care about. It wasn’t until thinking back that I realize the OG Team probably had the least important stuff to do. Any story they did have never really goes anywhere and their problems mostly relied on miscommunication to carry them (which was understandable when they were teens but is just incompetence as adults). Which is a nice segway to my next problem I with the show.
P.S. Originally the post had more sections, but I realized that would make it way longer than I wanted, so I’ll just break it into parts.
P.P.S. This was originally published before the new season premiered but because I’m a perfectionist I took it down to edit it. For the most part, nothing about the new season will affect what I am writing.
*All images used came from the Young Justice Wiki
I Think Thinks 