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pluckyredhead · 9 months

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Character Profile: Rose Wilson (Ravager)

By popular demand, the next member of the Lost Titans: Rose Wilson!

Rose was introduced in Deathstroke the Terminator #15 in 1992. She is the daughter of Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke the Terminator, and at the risk of rehashing stuff everyone knows, I have to give you the basics on Slade, too.

Slade Wilson was a soldier (originally in Vietnam, though that's obviously been updated since) who was so good at soldiering that the army gave him a super soldier serum that made him faster and stronger than any normal human. After leaving the military, he became an assassin - unbeknownst to his wife, Adeline, and their young sons Grant and Joey. When Slade's secret assassin-ing and ego caused Joey's throat to be slit, rendering him mute for life, Adeline left him.

The Wilson family first crossed paths with the New Teen Titans years later when Grant became the supervillain Ravager. When Grant's own janky powers got him killed, Slade decided this was the Titans' fault somehow and vowed revenge. This involved sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl for some reason. Slade is a terrible person.

Meanwhile, Joey grew up to become the superhero Jericho, and became a long-standing member of the Titans. However, he got possessed by like a thousand ghosts at once, like you do, and went crazy and evil, and Slade had to kill him for his own good.

By this point, Slade had become such a popular character that he'd shifted from villain to antihero. (Never mind all the attempted child murder and statutory rape.) It was in this context, fresh after Joey's death, that Rose was introduced.

Rose is the daughter of a woman named Lillian Worth, a.k.a. Sweet Lili, a Cambodian woman who Slade once helped escape from the Khmer Rouge. Lili set up a high-end brothel in the States, and she and Slade became essentially fuckbuddies (this was after Slade's divorce), which eventually led to Rose. Lili didn't tell Slade about Rose because of his...everything, and Rose had a happy childhood, growing up with the other sex workers' kids in the brothel.

Unfortunately, Slade's enemies eventually came for Rose. Specifically, Slade's evil, shitty half-brother Wade LaFarge. (If you're thinking "Wait...Slade Wilson has a brother named Wade?" then yes, Deadpool was in fact Rob Liefeld shamelessly ripping off Deathstroke. Liefeld's collaborate Fabian Nicieza named him Wade to acknowledge this, and joked that he was Slade's brother. So Marv Wolfman gave Slade an actual brother named Wade, who sucks so bad and who nobody likes. I don't think Marv was happy about Deadpool.)

Anyway, Wade became the fourth Ravager (don't worry about the second or third, they don't matter) and kidnapped Rose. Slade...basically decided not to try to rescue her because he was busy, leaving the job to Lili and his best friend Wintergreen. Rose, who had been trained in martial arts by her mother, managed to partially escape on her own...at which point Lili showed up and tried to kill Wade by hitting him with her car...and driving them both off a cliff. This is usually described as Wade killing Lili, which...okay. (She died, but he secretly survived, because of course he did.)

Slade refused to take any responsibility for Rose, afraid of putting her in even more danger, so this extremely traumatized tween was placed in the care of the Titans, who at this point were led by Roy Harper. She was still a civilian at this point, although she did spar with the team, and she also showed she was not to be fucked with when women and children were in danger:

This is when Rose's powers first manifested: she has precognitive abilities, which originally involved lengthy visions of the distant future but quickly became flashes of what is about to happen, which makes her particularly good in a fight because she can predict what her opponent will do.

Also! During this period she became friends with Grant and also developed a brief but adorable crush on Kyle Rayner, while Bart Allen developed a brief but adorable crush on her. Babies!

She later shows up in the 1999 Titans series, considerably older (I'm assuming she's at least 18 here), when Roy hires her to be Lian's nanny, a job she takes very seriously:

But then the 1999 series was canceled. Then the 2003 Teen Titans series began, and very quickly it was revealed that Joey Wilson was alive, that he had been possessing his father, and that that was the reason for Slade's turn as an antihero, not any actual desire on Slade's part to be good. A newly freed Slade decides he wants a do-over with one of his kids.

Meanwhile, Rose has been placed with a foster family, because I guess she's somehow underage again? But said family is then murdered by Wade LaFarge - remember him? - who then kidnaps Rose. Who is rescued by Slade:

Rose, at Slade's encouragement, kills Wade and becomes the new Ravager. It's later revealed (to the reader, not to Rose) that Slade anonymously hired Wade to kill Rose's family because he wanted exactly this setup: for Rose to become completely emotionally dependent on and devoted to him.

Rose spends the next few years by her father's side, attacking the Titans and saying "Yes, daddy" in a sexy baby voice a lot. It's...tiresome. She's so determined to prove her loyalty that she even stabs her own left eye out, because we're in the mid-2000s now and it's peak edgelord time, baby! It's later explained that she's behaving like this because Slade drugged her with the same super soldier serum that gave him his powers (???), so Rose is now also extra strong, fast, etc.

Slade blackmails Dick (in his "villain" era) into briefly training Rose, and I have to include this panel because it kills me every time:

She's trying to be mean and scary but she loves the Harpers so much. I'm cry.

Anyway, Slade has only involved Dick as part of a convoluted plot to kill Superman by putting kryptonite in Rose's empty eye socket (sure), and when Dick reveals that kryptonite causes cancer in humans and that Slade knew that perfectly well and just didn't give a shit about Rose, Rose decides to go back to the side of good and join the Teen Titans properly.

It...does not go smoothly. Cassie hates and distrusts Rose and makes that very clear, and Rose responds by being as obnoxious and antisocial as possible, constantly accusing the other Titans of not trusting her, and basically causing problems on purpose. Like slipping naked into Tim's bed to surprise him problems:

I want to be clear that the writing here is absolutely abysmal. Johns and later writers (and artists) were trying to make Rose sexy sexy jailbait and also going for some kind of reductive Madonna/whore dichotomy with her and Cassie, and it's all very sexist and boring. But if you look past the, uh, actual comics, I do think that a lot of Rose's characterization here makes sense. She's a very traumatized teenager who expects people to dislike her, so she ensures that they dislike her to maintain control of the situation. She sees sex very much as something transactional and rooted in power exchange - which makes a lot of sense, since she was raised in a brothel! Plus she likes starting shit for fun. The comics are bad, but the idea of Rose is so, so good.

Another thing that is good in concept but shitty in execution: Rose/Eddie. As I mentioned in my Eddie profile, Eddie is utterly smitten with Rose pretty much immediately and he is both not at all subtle about it but also not at all a Nice Guy - his feelings are his to deal with and he never puts them on her to manage for him. Rose, for her part, doesn't seem to know how to handle just...a sweet boy who adores her, and so she alternates between flirting with him, being extremely mean to him, and being fiercely protective of him.

That last comes into play when Eddie is abducted by a villain team called (sigh) the Terror Titans. Rose fights her way through a gauntlet of them to rescue him, which is SO DAMN ROMANTIC even if the comic looks like shit. But she's so ruthless about it that Cassie and Tim discuss kicking her off the team, which she overhears - so she defects to the Terror Titans. Her plan is to go in undercover and take them down, but during the storyline she starts to wonder if maybe this isn't where she belongs after all.

Rose. Honey. Baby girl. The Terror Titans are led by the fucking Clock King, a loser in clock glasses who likes to sleep with teenage girls and is making other teenage superheroes fight each other to death in a ring. No, this is not where you belong.

(During this period Rose also becomes addicted to huffing adrenalin. I truly do not know how I made it through the late 2000s, y'all. The comics were abysmal.)

Somewhere in there Joey Wilson comes back as a hero, and he and Rose quickly bond, which is as touching as it is heartbreaking. But Joey is still deeply unwell, and despite Rose's best efforts, he goes villain again, and she has to help the Titans take him down. After butting heads with Cassie again, Rose decides to leave the Titans, again. She tries to convince a depowered Eddie to come with her, but he declines. She then stars in her own backup feature where she travels to a remote Canadian village and saves a bunch of women and children from trafficking; while she's gone, Eddie is killed. Rose then returns to the Teen Titans for the fifth time and remains on the team until Flashpoint.

New 52 Rose is...honestly I'm not even going to try to explain her, because most of it is just incomprehensible nonsense. She shows up as a supporting character (with two eyes) in Superboy and The Ravagers, but it really feels like Lobdell just used the character name (and a worse design, which is saying something) for an OC. She's basically hired muscle for an evil lab, and there's no mention of Deathstroke for ages.

Eventually over in Deathstroke's book, it's revealed that Rose's mother is Adeline in this universe, not Lili, which means that Rose has been completely whitewashed. Of course most art of her has always depicted her as white, but this erased any possibility of her being biracial. The Wilson family's New 52 adventures culminate in Slade killing both Grant and Joey by sticking a sword through their heads (?) while Rose watches in horror, which is so awful as to be actively hilarious.

Also the New 52 is of course where we got the first hint of a Jason/Rose relationship, when she appears in Red Hood and the Outlaws as his ex. This has nothing to do with any of her other completely contradictory appearances during this era. The New 52 was a goddamn mess.

Rebirth erased all of that mishegas, thankfully. Rose is once again Lili's daughter, and Lili is specified to be Hmong, meaning Rose is too. In a change from the pre-Flashpoint continuity, Rose was conceived while Slade and Addie were still married, meaning Slade was cheating on Addie with Lili. In fact, Slade was out of town saving Rose's life when Joey's throat was slit, so Addie viscerally hates Rose even though obviously none of that was Rose's fault. Despite this, Rose and Joey are quite close and love each other fiercely, which is nice, even if the astonishing toxicity of the Wilson family means they can't really do anything in a healthy or functional way, including love.

Here's an example of what I mean: during this period, Rose became possessed by an ancient Vietnamese warrior princess who occasionally took over her body. During one of those times, she killed Joey's fiancee (who was also sleeping with Slade) (and who Joey was cheating on with Slade's friend, a man at least twice his age). Joey forgave her. So that's...nice? I guess?

Both of you need so much therapy and also to go no contact with your father.

As of Infinite Frontier, Rose's original history seems to be pretty much intact, except that she has two eyes. (Her missing eye was restored by the New 52, although she was wearing an eyepatch in Death Metal. Maybe just for fun?)

She next appeared in Robin, hanging out on Lazarus Island with Damian, partially to keep an eye on him but mostly because she was trying to figure out what the deal was with one of the other competitors in the assassin tournament, a kid named Respawn. Eventually Respawn was revealed to be a clone of Talia and Slade, so basically Rose's younger half brother. Rose tried to take him under her wing, but she made the mistake of introducing him to Slade, who was like "Yes! A third chance to have a son and not fuck it all up entirely!" Rose was like "Hey maybe don't hang out with Slade" and Respawn was like "No this seems fine" and then Respawn was almost instantly murdered. So. That was a bummer.

Should've listened, Grant 2.0.

These days, Rose is a member of the clandestine team Stormwatch for some reason, and is appearing with them in Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Rose is one of those characters who is a fan favorite of gross dudes and so a lot of the writing (and art, oh god the art) around her has been truly abysmal. But she's so popular that every so often she's in something really solid, and even when the comics are bad, she somehow shines as a really fascinating, heartbreaking, lovable character. Maybe someday we'll get a really good Ravager and Jericho miniseries, that would be nice. In the meantime, there's always twelve thousand shitty issues of Teen Titans!

#rose wilson #ravager #character profiles #the lost titans #meta

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