Your comments are reminding me I want to go back and finish up the Bendis run of Young Justice, which I think was one of his better storylines here.
The idea of diversity with the Legion I think should be open a little more to discussion. Definitely it helps with broadening out who will be interested in reading Legion by acknowledging the diversity of the United States for example, and also that DC has fandom worldwide.
But on the other hand, there are futurists that have said that in the next several hundred years there won’t be several different races of humans, but through less concern about other people’s race or ethnic origins, there’s going to be basically just this one big mix (which I’m sure will not be white). Or then again maybe everyone will just be a brain floating in fluid in a metallic body.
So the use of Rose / Thorn was Bendis’ way of having the reader participate in the passage of time for the DC Universe from the present to the Legion age during the two part LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES: MILLENNIUM (2019-). He also tends to write titles that feature solo strong female leads. I’m thinking if he had stayed with DC, the idea was to have Rose provide wisdom from the Ages for the young Legion.
I never finished it either, but glad to hear it’s one of his better works here :“”") His YJ was hard to get into as a less knowledgable DC fan (even one who’s crazy about Tim Drake); it really felt to me like Bendis was bringing in a lot of references and old characters who I was supposed to know and love but that I just didn’t because I was new…^^; Maybe I’d like it more now than I did three years ago lol
Definitely! I think it’s cool to have fewer humanoid characters, but that has no real-world significance until we do run into sentient non-humanoids lol But racially (which does have real-world significance), it was way overdue to diversify! Like I will say as a POC reading older Legion stuff it was r e d o n c u l o u s to me that they kept harping on how “different!!!” and “diverse!!!” a Braalian, Titanian, and Winathian working together is and then the corresponding image is three white kids LMAO Now, I understand and appreciate the sentiment of course, but it’s time they put their money where their mouth is! So bravo from me on the designs!! haha
As for “post-racialists,” again I like the sentiment behind it, but not sure if a story that’s more “realistic” to the future by having everyone ethnically ambiguous (based on current population sizes, I would guess more Chinese or Indian-looking?) would be more impactful or important than a story that is more realistic to how things are now. After all, there were post-racial theorists in the 19th century who thought race would disappear by 2050, but that’s definitely not going to be the case. We’re not in a post-racial world yet, so stories with diverse characters are still important for everyone to experience, and Legion is one of the best opportunities for that imo!
Ahh, I see. It still seems a bit out of left field to me, but I guess I ended up liking her well enough as I’m reading on in the Legion title so I’ll accept it haha