[SPOILER] Were Raven and Donna Coded Before?

SPOILERS for Multiversity: Teen Justice and Suicide Squad: Dark!!!

So… In the last week, new information has been released about different alternate Earths: 11 and 13, to be exact. And both worlds’ newly discovered variants of Raven are queer: The Earth 13 version is apparently older and is shown to be in a relationship with Annataz, and the Earth 11 version is explicitly stated to have feelings for Donald Troy. Obviously, a pair doesn’t have to have been coded to be together in an alternate reality - Apollo and Midnighter are argued to be versions of Batman and Superman, you-know-who and you-know-who-else in Dark Knights of Steel, and, well, Raven and Zee (A?). But I’m wondering if Raven and Donna were coded before. The only comic I’ve read where the relationship between the two of them is a plot point is the Year of the Villain tie-in, so I’m wondering if someone who knows more - which is to say, anyone - could point me to a storyline that’s a good example.

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I think pretty much every Amazon is at least half way there to being queer-coded, but I don’t think there’s ever been a woman character she’s been paired with in fanon. I can’t recall anything with Raven, though.

But hey, alternate universes, so it works for me.

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I specifically meant in relation to each other. It never occurred to me that Donna could be not queer, since she is, after all, a clone of Wonder Woman.

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I finished rereading the one comic about the two of them that I had already read, and yeah, I could see them as kind of like Korra and Asami… But also Superman and Wonder Woman - My general interpretation of them is usually that Diana is attracted to Clark but is smart enough not to pursue him, so much so that I don’t really think about it.

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Well, the answer is no they have not had any past relationships beyond teammates/friends that I am aware of. LBTGQ was not really allowed in comics until really fairly recently in the early 2000s starting with i think Renee Montoya’s outing in no man’s land in 1999-2000.

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Well, that’s why I said coded.

(and BTW we can all agree Half a Life is a masterpiece)

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well the answer is actually no at this point in main cannon as donna is Dicks age (late twenties) and Raven is high school age. so there are age of consent issues in main cannon, greater multiverses like earth 11 has them at different ages.

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Please Pied Piper came out in 91

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Opse I meant to say ‘I think.’
I just put that back in.

Ahhhh, that makes sense. Athough since Donna is an Amazon, Raven will catch up to her in a few years (based on the Bat-Family timeline established in Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, time in the DC multiverse equals roughly one-fifth its speed in our reality, so maybe 15/20 years for us).

Yeah, and Extrano (I know there’s a tilde! But right now I’m too lazy to copy and paste from a website where you can have the tilde!) was in 1987. Having queer characters and having a company-wide effort at even lip-service representation is very different, and I think @Nobody.bladesmith is saying Renee was something of a catalyst for that… Is that correct?

It’s More Renee was the first LGBTQ character I was aware of and I think the first to be publically outed as part of a storyline…actually I think it was two main storylines. I learned she was LGBTQ in The Novelization of No man’s land (2001) but was also featured in Gotham central in 2004. (I still have a lot of catchups to do in the New earth era as I started reading actual comics in rebirth era).

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A lot of the coding in comics is people reading too much into things

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I’ve never seen anyone else point this out, but it seemed very clear to me that Raven was coded in Wolfman-era New Teen Titans/New Titans (which is a pretty sprawling run from 1980 to 1996 and I’m referencing things from a wide stretch of it). Not necessarily as being in a relationship with Donna, who was happily married to Terry Long, but Raven’s three relationships with men are portrayed in various ways as very creepy and resulting from manipulation of her empathic powers, usually by outside forces.

The early '90s stretch of the comic where Raven went all evil and possessed for like the twentieth time sucked, but there’s a telling plot point in the middle of that mess. Evil Raven goes around spreading the corruption that’s possessing her to people by kissing them, but the part of her that’s still herself is preserved by transferring into Starfire. So, to summarize all of this more directly, she literally saves her soul by kissing a woman after a line of fake relationships with men.

A lot of the more intelligent things Wolfman did seem to have been… sort of by accident, so I can’t guarantee that he meant to imply Raven was a Lesbian, but it’s a pretty intuitive reading. Plus, New Teen Titans/New Titans takes very heavily after Claremont-era X-Men, which I haven’t read but have heard pretty heavily coded Kitty Pryde.

… And then everybody glosses over this to ship Raven with creepy womanizer Beast Boy.

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If only Terra hadn’t been a double agent, Gar could’ve ended up with her and no one would’ve needed to have their hearts broken. :broken_heart:

Oh, X’Hal, you weren’t kidding, Beast Boy was worse than Captain Kirk in the early '80s.

Another thing: Most residents of Earth 11 are probably pansexual for one simple reason: Ancient Greece. Some historians and human sexuality experts believe that sexuality as it currently exists is probably an invention of (relatively) modern times, and the ancient Greeks generally believed that everyone was capable of both hetero- and homoerotic feelings. This is relevant because the Amazons are an ancient Greco-Roman concept, and the reason Earth 11 is the way it is is because these Amazons of Themyscira never hid themselves away from Man’s World, but imposed their own matriarchal order upon it. It’s probably safe to assume that in this world, if the New Testament exists, it never instilled us with the dumb idea that there was any difference between, as Stephen Colbert’s Joe Biden impression put it, Jack and Jill vs. Jack and Jack or Jill and Jill, and therefore identities that are based around this false de-equivalence would not exist, which is why my mom would hate Earth 11. I’m not sure if asexuality would still exist, since unlike hetero- and homosexuality, it doesn’t require the dumb idea of Jack and you-get-the-idea. And if it does, what are the demographics? Is it the same as the pansexuality-asexuality ratio on modern Earth 33, which is something like one-point-something to one? Either way, for these reasons, I think it’s likely that any resident of Earth 11 who isn’t asexual is pansexual and vice versa. And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this, because I am the very niche demographic that What If… ? is catered to: People who spend way too much time thinking about the butterfly effect and thoroughly enjoying it.

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om your missing something very critical to your argument the Amazons of Earth 11 are all men not women as Earth 11 is a compleatly genderbent universe…that includes the Amazons.

Also we see that wonder woman is insted Wonderous Man and Donna Troy Is Donald Troy and are both men in this universe in story three of DC's Very Merry Multiverse #1 which is Teen Justices first appearance. also the fact that damian Wayne is Talia Kane supports this concept as Kane is Martha Wayne’s Madien name in main stream continuity, and The batwoman of the justice guild is Kathy Kane.

Yours would need to be a Generational genderbent univesers which can work given Jason of Themiscura existence, however not in a total
genderbend universe like Earth 11.

I’m not entirely sure what the last paragraph means, but you’re thinking of the pre-Flashpoint Earth-11. The modern-day Earth 11’s backstory was described here, among other places.