#so this is my way of retconing my college experience and replacing it with something SILLY AND FUN

[lightyaoigami]

Down Bad

Down Bad • Rating: E (cautiously)

“He's not coming, is he?” Light jerked his head towards Ryuzaki.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Good. I would rather eat glass than spend more time with him than absolutely necessary.”

OR

Light can have a little jungle juice, as a treat.

Read on AO3.

[traincat]

It is true that Flash Thompson was not originally a bully and that later writer retconned him to be one to make Peter more relatable?

This is an interesting thing to explore and I don’t think it’s quite as clear cut as that, because it’s not like a retcon where the switch got flipped and suddenly This Is How Canon Is. It’s more of a messy canon landslide, filled with creator infighting. (In a move that I’m sure will surprise no one, just like people in fandom disagree with each other’s headcanons, different writers on longrunning multi-creator series disagree with each other’s headcanons. It’s just that they get to then make those headcanons canon.) But to take it back to the very beginning with Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s run – no, I don’t believe Flash Thompson was originally intended to be a bully in high school, at least not in the same way he later became characterized during that time and not in the way that the word “bully” brings to mind in modern context. I think it’s more accurate to say that the original depiction of Flash in the Lee/Ditko run is as the popular student to Peter’s wallflower. Compared to Peter, Flash cares less about intellectual pursuits and schoolwork and comes across more as the Typical American Teenager of the time, complete with curly flaxen hair and sweaters with his initial on the front. Peter and Flash are certainly not friends in high school and Flash is verbally rude to Peter, but he’s certainly not the only one, and, especially after the spider-bite, Peter gives as good as he takes in that department and more. I’d describe the relationship in the Lee/Ditko run as “mutually antagonistic”, and that the nature of that antagonism is largely verbal. Out of the couple of times they have come to blows in the Lee/Ditko run, there’s one boxing match in Amazing Spider-Man #8 to “settle their feud”:

I don’t think this was approved conflict resolution between students even in the 60s, but whatever – anyway, long story short, after an attempt to figure out how to pull his punches enough so he doesn’t seriously injure Flash, Peter… still wipes the floor with him. 

Okay.

Then there’s a fight in Amazing Spider-Man #26, which only gets broke up because Liz Allan physically gets between them:

So in both of these original cases, it’s hard not label Peter as, if not the aggressor, then at the least complicit in these physical fights solely within the confines of the original Lee/Ditko run. I also think it’s notable in the latter scene that, though the principal blames Peter – and look at that flying tackle leap – Flash takes the rap for this fight so Peter won’t get in trouble.

Here’s the thing about Spider-Man as a series: there’s a big joke at the forefront of the series at its beginning, and the joke is that Peter’s dear old aunt might think he’s such a fragile boy, and his classmates might think he’s just another scrawny nerd, but he knows – and you and I, the readers, know – that that’s not true at all and that physically Peter’s much stronger than all of them and he knows – and again, we the readers know – that he could flatten anyone at school who looks at him wrong, and that it’s his own sense of responsibility and morals that keeps him from doing just that. It’s a very specific kind of joke, it’s an in-joke. We know it, Peter knows, nobody else knows it, and that’s why it’s funny. And that joke deepens when they introduce the element of Flash Thompson being Spider-Man’s biggest fan. 

(Amazing Spider-Man #17) So now the joke’s not only that Flash, as Peter’s classmate, might think he’s kind of a wimp, it’s that while he thinks Peter’s a wimp he simultaneously worships the ground Spider-Man walks on. I’ve mentioned before that in my opinion it’s a shallow take to boil Spider-Man’s humor as a series down to Peter’s quipping in fights; the narrative itself is clever, and Flash squabbling with Peter while simultaneously thinking Spider-Man’s just the greatest ever is part of that. To complicate things further, part of the reason Flash dislikes Peter at this point in canon is because he feels his girlfriend Liz Allan is gunning to get with Peter (and she is). Flash and Liz have an odd relationship; they’re ostensibly together through high school, but essentially they’re both obsessed with the same guy in different outfits. (This isn’t actually canon, or at least, it isn’t yet, but for the sake of the conversation: I do strongly believe that Flash, as he’s been written in 616 over the years, is gay. @bipeteparker has an excellent breakdown of the subtext here. And so while I do think it’s very easy to paint Flash’s feelings for Spider-Man as more than platonic, I also think his feelings for Peter eventually get, yeah, pretty romantic. Identity porn in practice!)

Peter and Flash continue this kind of mutual antagonism into the early days of college, where they both end up in Gwen Stacy’s social circle:

(Amazing Spider-Man #37) I do think the Ditko/Lee run is very important, but there’s a reason I don’t usually recommend people start with it, and it’s because if you’re used to Peter Parker being a certain way, Peter in the original run is uhhh. Let’s call him prickly, to say the least. For all of Flash’s posturing here in this scene, if you look at what’s actually on the page, he does sort of come off a little better than Peter – from his perspective, he’s trying to defend Gwen, his friend, from a guy he knows has a history of some pretty weird behavior. I don’t doubt that the original point of the scene was for the reader to come down more on Peter’s side of things (note Gwen’s internal monologue), but from a modern perspective, well – Peter’s being a pretty big jerk in it. (Peter mellows out a lot in college, and also when John Romita Sr hits the scene and replaces Ditko on art.)

So one of the things that kept Peter and Flash from being friends sooner – and within the confines of the Lee/Ditko run, kept Peter from having friends at all sooner – is that Peter’s responsibilities towards Spider-Man and his aunt did make him initially come off as very standoffish during high school and at the beginning of college, which was the result of him being, well, just superhumanly busy and having a lot on his mind, but which his classmates (who don’t have the reader’s privilege of knowing just what the hell is up with Peter Parker) did read as him thinking he was too good for them:

(Amazing Spider-Man #34)

Flash remarks on this same behavior in the future, after he and Peter have become friends:

“We all had responsibilities, Pete. But we made time for each other. You made it clear that you always had something more important to do than be with us. How do you think we felt?” (Web of Spider-Man #11 – with a classic Flash Thompson fashion look.) This is one of the downsides of Spider-Man; because of his secret identity, even the Peter people loves most in his life (and he grows to love Flash a very great deal) don’t really know every side of him. And it’s very easy for the reader to sympathize with Peter first and foremost because we know he missed that movie/dance/dinner/whatever because there was a supervillain on the loose, or someone was trapped in a burning building, but when he can’t/won’t share that information with the people in his life with whom he keeps breaking plans, I think it’s also reasonable to sympathize with them feeling like they’re just not important to him, so I like Web of Spider-Man #11′s spin on the situation. (Flash also comes down on Peter’s treatment of Liz Allan in high school, given her obvious crush on him, in the issue.)

To go back briefly to the idea of Peter and Flash having a mutual antagonism in high school, rather than a bully-victim dynamic, while Flash looked down on Peter for not being as athletic or popular with girls as him, Peter teased Flash about his intelligence:

(”Back before we became friends, Parker used to tease me for not being as bright as he is. I wonder if he knew how much that hurt?” – Spectacular Spider-Man #148.) So there’s an interesting twist in the dynamic there, because we the readers know that Flash teasing Peter about not being as athletic as him is funny because, after the spider-bite, Peter’s far stronger and faster than Flash is. Peter teasing Flash about not being as smart as him, on the other hand, isn’t funny at all, because Peter really is that much smarter than Flash. And I’m not trying to make Peter out to be the bully in the situation, but I do think Spider-Man comics and relationship dynamics are at their best when not everything is as simple as it seems and when there are different sides to the story, and that I do really like this dynamic of Peter and Flash of two kids who just drastically didn’t understand each other, and who both had pretty valid reasons not to like each other in high school, but who ended up clicking really well in later life as they both matured. It’s also notable that Peter, while orphaned as a young child, had Ben and May who were very loving parents, whereas Flash’s father was violently abusive. In the issue that reveals Flash’s home life situation, a much younger Flash stares down in envy at Peter and Uncle Ben:

(Spectacular Spider-Man #-1)

(Venom (2011) #5)

Having established all of that, it is pretty much hard canon now that Flash was more of a garden variety bully in high school, with the idea popularized in Spider-Man fandom by like, every Peter Parker movie, and as comics moved forward with new writers who saw different parts of their own experiences in Peter’s high school isolation, or who wanted to move things into a more modern perspective. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing for Flash as a character, necessarily – I don’t think it’s in the original Lee/Ditko run’s text, but neither is Flash having a father who beats him, and while “bully is actually a victim of abuse himself” is maybe an overused trope, it comes up a lot for a reason, and so much of Spider-Man does boil down to what abuse does to people, and how they then abuse other people – or how they choose not to do that. (A huge part of Flash’s Venom run is on breaking the cycle of abuse.) I know I’ve talked a couple times about Flash being put down to make Peter look better by comparison, I don’t really mean the slide of Flash from popular boy who just, well, didn’t really like Peter into Peter’s bully so much as some later canon (particularly around the late ‘90s and into the ‘00s) that, well, didn’t seem to really know what to do with Flash.

For example, for a while in canon, Flash had a job as an athletics coach teaching kids, and he seemed to really like it and he was really good with kids! Then we hit a point in canon and it’s like, oh never mind, he considers this a dead-end job for a loser. In the mid-250s of Spectacular Spider-Man, Flash tries to get back together with Betty Brant, with the caveat that something unnamed and jerkish happened to end their relationship and that it was his fault -- but that doesn’t make sense, in part because after Ned’s death and Betty’s breakdown it’s never clear whether Flash and Betty’s relatoinship ever even regained a romantic footing, and besides we see Flash and Betty hanging out in the same company after that when Flash was seeing Felicia with no apparent hard feelings between them. And some of it’s just your regular comic book style character regression -- at one point, Flash gets kidnapped by Norman Osborn, waterboarded with whisky, framed for a car accident that leaves him in a coma and with brain damage, and then when he comes out of it he’s regressed back to his high school-ish personality and can’t remember being friends with Peter (this didn’t last but it was sure a thing). So there’s some stuff like that. And I do think a lot of it comes out of comic book writers who maybe identify with Peter a little too closely as a former high school nerd and it offers them a chance to put the jock down which -- I don’t know, I think it’s just a shallower take on a relationship that developed very naturally. 

So long story short, I don’t think the bully angle is something that was really in the Lee/Ditko run, and that Flash and Peter have more of a mutual antagonism that initially stems from Flash being the popular kid and Peter being a loner who feels isolated, yes, but who also had a tendency at that age to isolate himself, and that the bully aspect later emerged as a way to make Peter more of a relatable figure initially -- less prickly, more picked on, and Flash got pushed into that role because of it. It’s canon now, and I don’t really have a problem with it -- Flash and Peter managed to work it out amongst themselves, after all -- but I do think it’s interesting how it’s changed over the years, and I do personally think the initial dynamic from the Lee/Ditko run is more interesting. Ultimately I think the evolution of Flash in high school from a popular and a bit airheaded jock who loves Spider-Man to being characterized as a bully first and foremost is a shame because Flash and Peter have a really great friendship in later canon, and that’s something I’d like to see more of in Spider-Man adaptations. Instead the bully role just gets trot out over and over again.

[whetstonefires]

how do you think the batfam mightve progressed if jason never died?

Whaa, 4 asks at once? I’m sorry I still haven’t gotten back on the last one, I thought I was unstuck but guess what, I wrote myself into a pretty little corner by being all ‘I don’t care about what’s canon! i’m just gonna have fun!’ which is the correct approach except then you find out the thing you made up is incorrect and idk how to deal with that. being wrong. it’s a life skill i’m still working on.

So like, if the vote had gone the other way...it depends so much on the writing and editing teams, and so little on real causality, it’s hard to frame a picture?

Jason was created as an alternative to aging Dick down and taking him out of the Titans; his new character origin after the Crisis on Infinite Earths barely got out of its shakedown tour before they killed him off. We know who he was enough to spot the major character derailments, but who he might have been? It’s hard to say.

If he’d made it through the vote, the noisy fans would still have hated him, and so would the man writing his comics. I doubt Starlin would ever have convinced DC to do the HIV plotline with Robin like he reportedly tried, but I feel like Something Bad remained likely.

The 90s are known for their grimdarkness for a reason, and Jason just missed living through them. I feel like his odds of going villain were pretty high anyway, not because of him but because of the constant need for drama fuel. I mean, Alfred had a villain phase, in the 60s.

Babs became Oracle almost simultaneous with the Robin trade-off, debuted the same month Jason died (January ‘89), so that still would have happened. Tim’s influence on her was very slight.

Without Tim, there would have been no need for Steph, since she was created partly as a love interest but more importantly as a foil, and a way of getting more of that high-energy feeling traditionally associated with Robin back into the story even though so many of the fans loathed it and refused to have it in their lead.

(Not that Tim didn’t have a lot of it anyway, but it wasn’t his core feel the way it had been for Dick and Jason. Possibly of note, the ‘87 Killing Joke and ‘89 Batman movie also marked a rise in the use of Joker as Batman’s main dramatic foil rather than Robin, which coupled with the Bronze Age in general really shaped Tim’s character direction. It’s hard to say what caused what, with these trends.)

They might have introduced a girl anyway, to replace Babs. Maybe even a version of Cass. Shiva stated under interrogation during ADitF that she had no child, but in comics terms that half-guaranteed she’d get one eventually, because the concept was now out there.

I doubt Jason would have gotten his own series in the 90s, considering his screaming hatedom and the fact that it took three extremely successful mini-series to get Tim a regular title, but if DC had managed to repackage his character into something that the 90s liked and he had made a go of it, he’d probably have acquired a completely different supporting cast. He might well have continued his pattern of acquiring moms. Maybe even Talia. The whole Sheila thing would have been a half-forgotten backstory subplot by like ‘94 probably.

It occurs to me after typing all of this that you might want to hear my ideas about what in-universe causality might logically have led to, lmao. Let’s see.

Jason’s adolescence was hitting a rocky stage that I doubt this betrayal and near-death experience and technical bereavement would have ended, though it would probably have hit harder than his last few near-death experiences even assuming another improbable complete recovery.

If we up the realism dial a little, he might be forced into retirement by the severity of his wounds. He’d still have to hash out his trust issues with Bruce, probably more than ever. Being a shit communicator was not yet a key part of Bruce’s personality; they might have sorted things out.

Jason would not have dropped out of college. If he’s retired, he goes into a prestigious but helping-centered field with an understanding that he is now the son Bruce trusts to step up to keep WE on the straight and narrow after he dies; inheritance of voting shares may be structured around this expectation.

(Dick experiences that really complicated hypocritical jealousy where you specifically rejected a thing, but it spent so long being marked yours that you feel robbed anyway when someone else gets it. Not a lot of it in the disability scenario, because there’s a distinct vibe of consolation prize there, but otherwise.)

Babs would still have been Oracle. It would have been a less fraught launch, though.

Dick might not have heard about the Ethiopia thing at all, if Jason made a full recovery, considering how little communication was passing between him and Bruce at that point. Dick’s level of Batcomputer access only stated Jason as ‘location unknown’ when he was dead, so.

He and Jason got along fine, regardless of retcons since then, but he was under a lot of stress from a lot of sources, and the feeling that he couldn’t go home even when he really needed to, because he’d been replaced, was very present. That might well have blown up at some point.

I tend to think of Bruce as having changed pretty dramatically as a result of Jason’s death, disregarding a lot of retcons, but I mean, 1987 Bruce already failed to notice Dick having a mental breakdown right in front of him and put him off in favor of hero work with Jason on Dick’s birthday, he just did it cheerfully and with fairly courteous wording. There was a trend in the faildad direction starting already.

There was a lot of relationship stuff in need of fixing and in some ways Jason’s presence made that as hard for Dick with Bruce as Damian’s later did for Tim, even though there was a lot less drama and intentional emotional violence and attempted murder involved. So. That could have gone a lot of ways. Realistically, even without Tim trying to play peacemaker, Dick always gets dragged back into Bruce’s orbit, though. That’s narrative causality at work, but also psychology.

In-universe, Tim can be assumed to have already existed before Wolfman invented him. He’s mostly away at boarding school, but he’s nosy and well-intentioned and he Knows. If Jason ran away more comprehensively than the Great Mom Tour, he might approach him with an argument for why Batman needed Robin and he should go home. Or there would eventually have been a case where he knew something they didn’t and attempted to subtly pass information and got noticed.

Or Oracle’s expanding field of awareness would have eventually noticed him and his zoom-lens one summer evening while his parents were in Haiti getting dead. Idk.

He’d probably have gotten mixed up in Bat-things eventually, and if it wasn’t before the Haiti thing there’s no way Batman would have been invested enough in this random disappearance to be there in time to help, so he’d have been completely orphaned at 13. Bruce taking him in is reasonably likely, since he wasn’t exactly in a position to create himself a fake uncle at the time. On the other hand, he might have gone into foster care. His parent’s company still would have crashed without them, so he wouldn’t have inherited much, but he’d have been better off than most kids in the system because he’d have some assets.

Steph is even more guaranteed to hit the vigilante scene. Bruce would be a lot friendlier to her without Jason death issues for her to trigger, though that doesn’t mean he’d actually be friendly, and Jason would like her, and possibly communicate more effectively than Tim did about how she could not die, or possibly they’d have egged each other on into steadily more unwise behavior.

On the other hand, depending on where Jason’s character development went after surviving Ethiopia, he might at 17 find 15-year-old Steph indescribably annoying precisely because they have so much in common, and lash out at her as a proxy for his younger self, and be kind of awful.

Cataclysm breaks causality to even acknowledge anymore because they rushed on from it like massive chumps, but Jason would have been a good Robin to have for it. He’d have been pretty tall by then, and he’s got the mental tools for surviving in an unfriendly urban environment where money is useless. I think he and Cass would have gotten on well, they have compatible personalities. The only major issue I can see is if Bruce or Babs got really positive about her and triggered some kind of jealousy or possessiveness issue.

We don’t really have any specific data at all from before Jason died about how he would cope with a rival for something he felt entitled to but insecure about--he deferred very nicely to Dick as his elder, but Dick wasn’t actually a threat to anything Jason valued. Assuming later canon is applicable, jealousy would be a definite issue with any additional family members, though I assume without the risk of homicide.

Okay here is an after-midnight hour of my half-baked opinions. You asked for it! ;DDD

[117--087]

Thanks for your insightful comments, @veta-lopis​ ! And yeah, a lot of the reactions to ‘Silent Storm’ I’ve been seeing are following along the same general likes & dislikes. Which isn’t a bad thing I suppose. I’d rather have that than yet another piece of Halo media that is ridiculously divisive and/or yo-yos in overall quality...Also I just re-read both yours and @equivalencept’s Pros+Cons for the book and realized mine was a lot more like them than I thought. So I apologize for the lack of originality. XD

(btw these fine folks’ posts can be read here & here - spoilers still apply obvs)

I wanted to “officially” put my initial thoughts on things out into the wild here anyway though. And I hope you don’t mind me replying on a separate post, but since the book is less than a week old I’m trying to be as courteous as possible to those that want to avoid any & all spoilers by keeping specific talk about the story’s contents under read-mores. :)

I get what you are saying about Fred’s humor being better balanced in Denning’s previous books - because it was. I guess for my part I still would have liked to have seen more exploration of the weightier side of what Fred would’ve been going through at that time. Such as: how does Fred feel about essentially becoming the "replacement" for the Master Chief in the eyes of his remaining S-IIs (not to mention HIGHCOM) and Kurt in the eyes of the S-IIIs? Is he trying to run things differently than his predecessors, or the same - and why? Does he remotely expect, or want, his new duties as squad leader to pass on to someone else eventually? And other such related items.

Adding some humor to liven up a story is perfectly fine. Welcome even. Humanizing the Spartan-IIs is something anyone who has seen me around here/the Halo community in general I think knows I am 110% in support of. Especially when it is used to show that the S-IIs are indeed people and not just emotionless/mindless war machines. But when humor is utilized at the expense of what else that a character has to offer that also makes them unique and dynamic, it becomes a problem. And I feel that has sort-of happened to Fred in Denning’s books - which, as you touched on, is getting into retcon territory. But like I said I have hope this issue can be course-corrected in future media with appropriate feedback to the right people.

Also for the record, I don’t disagree that Eric Nylund’s past works could have done better with some punched-up emotionality throughout. Though in my opinion when it really mattered, the emotions that were attached to those various key moments were still strong and left a lasting impact (i.e. Sam’s death, Chief finding the surviving S-IIs on Reach, Operation: TORPEDO, Dr. Halsey and Fred fighting on Onyx, etc.). But that is neither here or there. Obviously different writers are going to have different strengths, weaknesses, and styles.

Also to give the current author some benefit of the doubt here, we don’t know exactly what material Troy Denning is working from. What was he given from 343i that briefed him on Blue Team and the other S-IIs? Was it even accurate, or detailed enough? Was he given anything at all? We just don’t know. Nor do I expect him, as a busy professional, to read TFOR/FS/GOO cover-to-cover dozens of times to become intimately familiar with the subtleties of the characters’ established personalities and mannerisms...that would’ve been nice if he had, sure, but that’s not realistic.

So all things considered he's done quite well - just needs to tighten the screws a bit in some areas, imo. Either way John being portrayed right was what was most important for ‘Silent Storm’ to do, as he is one of the primary POV characters. And I’m very glad, and relieved, to be able to say that aspect worked out great.

As far as I am aware, it wasn’t that the members of Green & Gold Teams were scaled back in terms of their involvement in the story. But rather 343i limited Denning in terms of the number of Spartans that he originally wanted to have in the book. As in, we could have seen another team of 4 present for this op (Black Team perhaps?). So when taking into account everything already going on between all the groups and the amount of characters involved as is, I believe the devs made the right call on that one. Still that doesn’t make it any less of a shame to see the Spartans we have not being utilized to their full potential (personality-wise and as soldiers).

Unfortunately though it is hard to say if Blue Team as a whole is even what 343i is wanting to “double down” on. All we have gotten from them in the wake of H5 is they think people want “moar Master Chief” - as evidenced with things like ‘Silent Storm’ and ‘Collateral Damage’ being labeled “A Master Chief Story”. Which, to put it mildly, is missing the big picture to a ridiculous degree. But (whether they like it or not) Kelly, Fred, and Linda were with John practically every step of the way up to the original games. So there is no way for them to be removed as long as “prequel” media is being made. So it is my hope that continued exposure to Blue Team will soften those fans that might have been soured on their presence due to H5′s extremely poor handing of their introduction to the games...and thus result in them being kept around as main characters and the Chief’s companions in H6.

Otherwise yeah, I totally agree that seeing a young John and Blue Team make their first forays into the wider world of the UNSC and it’s politics was the best aspect of the book. I really like that it did emphasize that at this point they are still kids and even with all their expert combat training and college-level education they have a lot left to learn from experience (both their own and their elders’/superiors’).

However, also like you said, more stuff that is just focused on their interactions as characters is sorely needed. Like that part early on in the story when Kelly broke some ribs and she had to call John out on his somewhat overprotective behavior. That was the perfect set-up for them to have a personal conversation later where they hash things out in more detail regarding how Sam’s death has impacted them both and what that means for them as teammates & best friends going forward...but it is never followed up on. Or for instance why not have a little more going on in the background with Daisy. I assume her confrontational attitude in the book is something of a reference to how she found out the ugly truth of what happened with their birth families after they were kidnapped...so why not have a moment where Kurt (as both a team leader for this op and someone we know is interested in understanding other people) really tries to push past that anger and make her feel better. Or why not just have a moment where Naomi uses her tech-savviness to assist Grace in doing something clever with explosives.

'Silent Storm’ was ripe for character-building elements like this. But, outside of a few moments for John, didn’t quite deliver. As you touched on in your own appraisal of the narrative there was just too much happening here to cover in one book - one that was less than 800 pages anyway. But for what we got, I will still say I’m satisfied with it and will continue to keep my fingers crossed that the positives and negatives currently being discussed across social media will be taken into account for next time.