Young Justice: A Retrospective
Introduction:
Young Justice is one of my favorite pieces of superhero media, period.
I don’t want to mince words, and I’m not saying that stuff like The Dark Knight, Into the Spider-Verse and Batman: The Animated Series aren’t also phenomenal stories. I love them all, but man, Young Justice is something special.
Young Justice is more than one of the best superhero stories ever made, it’s also one of the best Western animated shows ever made. I’d compare it to the likes of Arcane, Castlevania and yes, even Avatar: The Last Airbender as one of the gold standards for how “cartoons” can be mature, deep and thought-provoking.
I've wanted to make a retrospective of this show for a long time, and after watching Season 4, I think now is really the time. I want to run through all four seasons that are out right now, explaining the show’s approach to protagonists, antagonists and themes along the way.
Protagonists and Narrative Structure:
Young Justice has an interesting relationship with protagonists, which is to say, there isn’t really one. However, when I say that this show lacks a protagonist, I don’t mean in the way most superhero shows do. A lot of superhero stories focus on a fixed team of characters, alternating focus between them without ever fully committing to one as the “main character.” For instance, the Justice League stories will always focus on Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman; X-Men will always focus on Wolverine, Storm and Cyclops; Fantastic Four will always focus on, well, the Fantastic Four.
But Young Justice doesn’t even do that. The show was self-described by its creators as neither an adaptation of the Teen Titans comics nor the Young Justice comics they borrowed the name from, but an adaptation of the entire DC Universe that just so happens to place DC’s teenaged sidekicks in the center stage, and that really shows.
Each individual season has a completely different take on what a protagonist is and what that means for the story they are trying to tell. Because the protagonists are the center of any story, this means that Young Justice also has no consistent story structure. Each Season tackles different ideas, conflicts and group dynamics. Sometimes the season will focus on one specific corner of the DC universe, other times they won’t. Sometimes the season will focus on one specific villainous faction, other times they don’t. The end result is a show that feels like a love letter to all sorts of genres, demographics and fans of DC.
In a way, that makes sense. The show is clearly borrowing inspiration from Bruce Timm’s DC Animated Universe, specifically Justice League Unlimited. While the original team sans Shayera was likely to show up on a regular basis, for the most part it loved to mix up its own plot structure while doubling down on serialization.
But back to Young Justice, in order, we have four seasons:
Season 1 establishes the groundwork for the show, introducing a team of Robin, Kid Flash, Superboy, Aqualad, Miss Martian, Artemis, Rocket and a teenaged Zatanna. Miss Martian doesn’t join until the end of the pilot, Artemis joins a couple episodes later, Zatanna a few after that, and Rocket doesn’t join until the penultimate episode of the season. The individual episodes are more-or-less self-contained, and even when events do carry over, the actual conflicts only last for that episode. While it might have been easy for the writers to position Robin as the arguable protagonist of the show by giving him more screen time and a leadership position (as with Teen Titans), the writers took a different route, making Aqualad the Team’s leader and splitting screentime up relatively evenly amongst everyone.
Season 2 establishes Jaime Reyes as this season’s protagonist. Season 2 is all about the conflict between the main characters and The Reach, with Mongul and his Warworld stepping into the picture during the season’s final act. In all of this, Jaime Reyes usually (but not always) has major plot relevance. Jaime Reyes has secret connections to the Reach, he’s controlled by the Reach into betraying everyone after the siege on Warworld, and he’s the one who ultimately defeats Black Beetle. Bart Allen is a close second for the contender of protagonist, but even then it's only by proxy to Jaime, and Bart’s whole storyline is about trying to prevent Jaime’s corruption. The season ends with him stepping into the mantle of Kid Flash, fulfilling a character arc that began with his debut episode.
Season 3, subtitled “Outsiders,” is not what you’d expect from the name, and it arguably has three different characters that could all be considered the protagonist in different ways.
The focus of the season is initially about metahuman trafficking. The first half seemed to set up the Outsiders team from the comics (which traditionally consisted of Black Lightning, Geo-Force, Halo, Katana, Metamorpho and Looker). The first three are main members of this season’s cast, with Geo-Force taking on a protagonistic role because his storyline about the Markovian throne and rescuing Terra is so front and center. (Indeed, the season even ends with him killing his uncle and taking the throne back.) However, to the surprise of many, Katana and Metamorpho were merely cameos and Looker was nowhere to be seen.
In episode 13, the focus suddenly shifts to Beast Boy and his conflicts against Apokolips, and “the Outsiders” becomes the name of a Teen Titans-esque team that Garfield founded. It’s a bit odd to see BB in a leadership position, but given that Cyborg is introduced in these episodes it’s also nice to see those two together.
Even though Geo-Force is the most plot-relevant character in Part 1 and Beast Boy is the most plot-relevant in Part 2, one could also argue that Halo is the main character of Season 3. Her storyline connects to both the metahuman trafficking and the Apokolips conflict, so her plot relevance manages to be consistent even as the situation around her constantly changes.
Season 4, subtitled “Phantoms,” has no clear theme and no clear antagonist. It shifts the focus back to the original cast from Season 1, but separates all of them and gives them longer 4-5-episode long arcs.
Season 1 Overview:
Of these seasons, Season 1 is universally praised as one of the best seasons of television DC has ever put out for its strong team dynamics, wonderful fight choreography, loving references to the comics and well-written villains, with Cheshire, Vandal Savage, Sportsmaster and Luthor receiving particular praise.
Season 1 really wastes no time with its story. It’s the most tight-knit, fast-paced of the Seasons and it really shows after watching the newer ones. It immediately propels you into this world of secret identities, robots, aliens and wizards. Best of all, it avoids a mistake a lot of modern DC media falls into: making the Batfamily way, way too relevant.
Listen, I’m a fan of the Batfamily. But they’re also just a bunch of normal people in capes. They absolutely do not deserve to be at the front and center of every DC crossover. That’s why I love that even though Robin is one of the catalysts for this whole show, he’s far from the lead character. It frees up room to explore stranger, more interesting ideas, such as Dr. Fate and the Lords of Order, CADMUS and their cloning, and Atlantean politics.
Fans of Bruce Timm’s Justice League tend to also love this show, and I can see why. A common strength both series have is taking certain characters with no history in the comics and creating an organic relationship for them. It happened with Batman and Wonder Woman, it happened with Green Lantern and Hawkgirl, and now we get to watch it unfold with Wally and Artemis, as well as Connor and M’gann, who are two of the best couples I’ve ever seen in any animated show.
Everyone and their mother has analyzed this season to hell and back, so I won’t spend much longer on it. But I do need to say one thing: on a rewatch, my biggest complaint of Season 1 is that it started a very unfortunate trend where the Light just acts and seems invincible, even when they absolutely shouldn’t be.
For instance, the Light claiming that everything went “according to plan” in the season finale feels like a cheap, extremely unlikely copout to try to make them stay competent. As a reminder, it took several of the world’s supervillains, billionaires, sorcerers and scientists several years to control the Justice League, and eight teenagers dismantled the whole thing in an afternoon. Having the Light just laugh it off and say that it was all fine feels dishonest, unfulfilling, and frankly lazy.
Nobody likes invincible antagonists, and this is a problem in future Seasons. No matter how thoroughly or soundly our heroes defeat the Light, the Light still talks as if they’d planned everything and it somehow benefits them. How in the world is losing your team of all-powerful mind-controlled superheroes somehow better than not losing your team of mind-controlled superheroes?
We’re not in Season 3 yet, but fuck it, I’ll mention this now. Lex Luthor is especially prone to “invincible villain” syndrome to the point of majorly stretching suspension of disbelief with each appearance. One of the most egregious examples is Lex Luthor being fired as UN Secretary General in the Season 3 finale because it’s revealed that he cloned Superboy with half of his DNA. From the public’s perspective, the whole thing completely tarnished his reputation, obliterates his chance of any future with the UN and retroactively paints all of his supposedly diplomatic actions in a bad light. Yet Lex acts completely fucking fine with the whole thing as if his PR isn’t completely in shambles.
Anyways, we’re moving on.
Season 2 Overview:
Season 2 made the whole narrative far denser and more complex, taking place five fucking years after the previous season and more than doubling the cast. This is easily the most contentious part of the Season, though I think Young Justice does use it in an interesting way. After all, the big problem with time skips is that either nothing happens, everything important is conveyed through flashbacks, or everything important is conveyed through exposition. Most of the time. Young Justice is the exception, because all plot-relevant events that occurred in those lost five years was:
Either a piece of information that we didn’t necessarily have to watch on-screen to know about. (IE Garfield awakening his powers, Dick becoming Nightwing, Jason’s adoption and death, etc.)
OR a piece of information that served to shock us by occurring offscreen. (IE Connor breaking up with M’gann, Kaldur betraying everybody, etc.)
Notably, flashbacks and long-winded exposition dumps are almost never used to fill in the gaps, but the show doesn’t treat those five years as if nothing happened. Once again, Young Justice is differentiating itself from the pack by treating its audience as mature adults who don’t need everything explained for them.
The biggest change that came with the time skip was more than doubling the size of the team. The massive roster of the Season could have completely ruined this season, but the showrunners made this easier to digest by focusing mostly on Jaime Reyes. Out of everyone that joined, he’s the perfect audience surrogate: Jaime is a new recruit about the same age as the cast in Season 1, with personal connections to the villain (just like Connor and Artemis), and the original Blue Beetle is dead, leaving him without a mentor figure to consult like everyone else, which creates a deep reservoir of drama. Effectively, he’s vulnerable, isolated, relatable and inexperienced, so we get to watch him grow on his own and overcome his demons. Season 2 feels like his Season, and that gives this otherwise chaotic story a clear focus.
We can’t talk about Season 2 without talking about the ending, specifically the decision to kill off Wally West. It’s one of the most unexpected but well-received deaths I’ve ever seen in a TV show. Unlike deaths in other popular shows that are just meant for shock value, Wally’s death was meaningful and carried immense dramatic weight. He was planning to retire with Artemis, yet the one time he took up the suit, he perished, ironically pushing Artemis further into the superhero scene. All of the original cast was heavily affected by his sacrifice, and the fact that fans still speculate about him coming back to this day proves that Wally’s death elevated Young Justice to the upper echelons of DC’s storytelling.
Season 3 Overview and Controversy:
Season 3 is when the fanbase really started dividing. Sure, Season 2 had some critics, but it was mostly well-received, and like I said, Season 1 was almost universally acclaimed. When the show was cancelled and revived, expectations were sky-high. As with Samurai Jack and The Clone Wars, the revival produced a contentious season with highs and lows, haters and fans.
But why was it divisive? Well fan expectations did play a role, it’s deeper than that and has to do with a lot of the unconventional, subversive narrative choices made in Season 3. To recap:
Longtime fans of The Outsiders didn’t care for the bait-and-switch, where it turns out “the Outsiders” was the name of a Teen Titans-esque group of people Garfield brought together. The marketing already made Katana and Metamorpho seem like they would be much bigger parts of the story, and this was just rubbing salt in the wound.
Longtime fans of Teen Titans didn’t care for Garfield’s new characterization as a leader and an actor. I personally found myself cringing at every scene of Space Trek 3016, and while Granny as a Hollywood executive was hilarious, I thought there were better characters to interact with her in that space than Garfield Logan.
I don’t know if I’m alone here, but as a Teen TItans fan myself, I wish that the showrunners had committed to assembling the comic Titans. This is more of a nitpick / missed opportunity than anything wrong with the Season, but we already got Cyborg and Beast Boy together. Starfire would have fit in perfectly with the focus Apokolips received this season, and someone like Raven could have easily been introduced as a protege of Zatanna.
Getting back on track, some longtime fans of M’gann and Connor didn’t like how her manipulative tendencies reemerged, while others agreed with her trying to keep the secret. And I think that’s…actually good. Unlike, say, M’gann mind-wiping Connor, where she was clearly in the wrong; M’gann keeping the secret from Connor is meant to be a bit more divisive and dubious, and everyone’s going to have different takes on whether she was right to lie and whether he was right to be angry, which is what the showrunners want.
Finally, longtime fans of the overall show didn’t enjoy how long the show would dwell on a single mission or battle. Compared to the first two Seasons where missions were more brisk, taking up a single episode or two, the entire first four episodes are devoted to a single mission. What could have easily been a small B-plot in a Season 2 episode now becomes a whole episode of Season 3, and what could have been the A-plot in a single episode becomes multiple episodes.
But that’s all small compared to the biggest criticism: screentime allocation for the newer characters.
Let me explain. Violet, Brion and Gar have become disliked (at best) and hated (at worst) by the fanbase for their massive amount of screentime, to the point that in their one season of screentime, Violet and Brion appeared almost as much as the entire OG team.
But that wouldn’t be a problem if Violet, Brion and Gar were…well, interesting. When Artemis received several episodes about her in Season 1, fans loved it because we got to learn about her home life, her relationship with her mother, and her feelings of Imposter Syndrome. When Jaime became the focal point of season 2, we learned about his origins, his relationship with Tye Longshadow, and his internal struggles with the Scarab.
But everyone in S3 just felt one-dimensional. Brion was banished from Markovia (arguably the most interesting part of his character) so he doesn’t really even have a proper “home life” to explore, and the writers didn’t know what to do with him after he saved Terra only a dozen episodes in. Halo has no home life to speak of either, so we end up just focusing on her and Forager in a new school, which is about as fun as it sounds. Garfield’s trauma over losing his mom and the Doom Patrol is explored briefly in his reintroduction episode, and while I would’ve liked him to mention it more, it’s glossed over in favor of his stardom and acting. I do not care for Gar as some emancipated Hollywood brat, so this was deeply unsatisfying.
It wasn’t all negative, of course. Even when we got slower, less interesting episodes with Violet and Brion, we got scenes of Connor, M’gann, Artemis and Dick by proxy, and they were all wonderful. Connor and M’gann’s engagement was one of my favorite parts of the show, and watching Dick and Artemis figure out how to cope with Wally’s death was pure catharsis. (Plus, as a Barbara Gordon fan, her being Oracle and appearing so much with Dick was much appreciated.)
But all of that had to be ancillary to whatever the hell Forager, Violet and Brion are doing, and when that’s the meat of your season…well, yeah.
Season 4, Narrative Layers, and My Worries:
Remember how I said earlier that I loved all the scenes of the original cast in Season 3? Well, everyone else seemed to agree with me, including showrunner and creator Greg Weissman. When he announced that “Phantoms” would focus on the original cast more, we were all overjoyed.
Before I can dive into this show’s fourth season, I feel I should discuss how Young Justice tackles narrative. Essentially, the show’s narrative works on three levels.
First, there’s the current mission, which is usually a single episode. (Though, in Season 3, these might be anywhere from 2-4 episodes.)
Each mission advances a story specific to that Season, which is usually about a single Corner of the universe. Season 1 focused primarily on assassins and espionage, Season 2 had the Reach, Season 3 had metahuman trafficking in its first half and Apokolips in its second. The Teen Titans animated show and the Titans live-action show do similar things, and Geoff Johns even said that this unique narrative structure was one of the reasons he signed on to work on Titans in the first place.
Those season-wide storylines, in turn, advance an overall narrative for the show all about the clash between the Team and the Light.
This structure is brilliant, and it’s why even when I was less-than-impressed with Season 3’s main characters, I still found myself enjoying the season overall just because the seasonal conflict was that good.
For a time, I thought Young Justice perfected that structure…only for Season 4 to throw it out the window. Season 4 consists of 26 episodes split into several “arcs” that focus on individual corners of the setting. Season 4 has no seasonal antagonist, no seasonal protagonist and no real Season-wide conflict.
In the short-term, it cuts down on the show’s bloated cast and produces incredibly compelling and genuinely shocking moments. The individual arcs of “Phantoms” are some of the best television I’ve watched recently.
But in the long-term, by focusing on a completely new, unrelated aspect of the setting every 4-5 episodes; it doesn’t feel like we’re focusing on anything at all. What are we progressing towards? What is the trajectory of all these smaller-scale conflicts? What’s the endgame?
I recently read an interview with Greg Weissman, creator of Young Justice, who stated that he approached every season like it was his last, partially because he didn’t know when the plug would get pulled permanently on this project, but partially because in real life stories don’t have neat endings. It’s a neat idea, and I can definitely see why he’d take this approach after his critically acclaimed Spectacular Spider-Man series abruptly ended after two seasons.
But if that’s the case, I feel even more concerned. That means that he wrote the Vandal Savage and Darkseid teaser in Season 2 without knowing how or why he’d follow it up, and he did the same for the Legion of Superheroes teaser in Season 3. If the show’s fate is uncertain, all of that buildup from Season 3 might not get a resolution, and worse still, all the arcs of Season 4 might be going nowhere in particular.
Themes:
While the four seasons of Young Justice might vary in tone, content and structure, they do have one major constant. In all of these seasons, the main theme of Young Justice is legacy. Every character is expected to one day replace their predecessor, and it terrifies some of them while exciting others.
Dick feels pressured to take on a leadership role throughout Season 1. (A bit of meta commentary on how each incarnation of Robin is usually a leader of their respective sidekick team.) When he finally does become a leader, it’s in a telepathic simulation and suicide mission. The traumatized preteen realizes he’s acting too much like Bruce and desperately tries to avert this, even creating a new identity as Nightwing, but it’s no use. Time and time again, Dick makes the same mistakes as Bruce, lying to his teammates and nearly getting Kaldur, Artemis and M’gann killed. By the time of Season 3, he and Bruce are working behind the scenes to coordinate everyone against their knowledge, and it takes an intervention from Jefferson and Barbara for him to realize the error of his ways.
On the surface, Artemis’ personality and stress seems to be a response to being Green Arrow’s niece. In actuality, she’s not related to him at all, but to Cheshire and Sportsmaster, and her anxiety is because she’s worried she’ll become like them, not the man training her. Seasons 2, 3 and 4 have her become an assassin named “Tigress” like her comic counterpart, yet she never becomes a villain; this demonstrates to the audience that she’s walking her own path without succumbing to the bloodlust of her father or sister.
Connor is fully prepared to take on Superman’s role one day, as he was cloned to do. He wants to view Superman as a father figure, even though Clark can only view him as a younger brother. At the same time, Connor tries desperately to forge his own identity, even feeling guilt in the first Season when he realizes he accidentally chose the same last name. This is the crux of Connor’s internal conflict: he’s torn between the desire to become Superman and the desire to become his own man, both of which appeal to him.
Aqualad is, thus far, the only one of the original members of the Team to outright replace their Justice League mentors, with Kaldur'ahm becoming Aquaman as of Season 3. As with Arthur Curry ruling Atlantis, Kaldur becomes the League’s leader, showing that those who don’t want to lead are oftentimes best fit for it.
Zatanna’s Season 4 arc focuses on her trying to free her father, and it’s revealed that the arc was a gambit she orchestrated to replace her father (along with Khalid and Traci). Of course, this distresses Zatara, who actively wants Zatanna to not be like him.
Even Bart and Jaime get in on this theme, and Season 2 plays out like a coming-of-age story for both of them. Jaime learns how to stand on his own, and though he uses the Blue Beetle name, he makes the title his own, and his experiences as a puppet of the Reach helped him become his own person. Bart does the exact opposite, abandoning his original identity as “Impulse” in honor of the well-established “Kid Flash” identity because of the symbolic value it holds to him.
But that’s not all. Sidekicks don’t just inherit the powers and skills of their predecessors. They also inherit their responsibilities, and in some cases, their more toxic traits. The other main theme of Young Justice is secrets, specifically the toll it takes on everyone, and it goes hand-in-hand with what I’ve already mentioned.
In the first season, Superboy, Miss Martian and Artemis all have some deep, dark secret connected to a supervillain. Half of Superboy’s DNA is from Lex Luthor, and he has to use Luthor’s drugs to stay on his A-Game; Miss Martian is being blackmailed by Queen Bee for her racial identity; and Artemis is the sister of Cheshire and the daughter of Sportsmaster. Keeping these secrets nearly tears the team apart, and it’s also why many people consider those three to be the closest things to protagonists in Season 1.
In the second season, Jaime is well-aware that the Reach is behind his suit and that they aim to control him, but he keeps this knowledge away from everyone else for fear it will endanger him. The only other person who knows is Bart Allen, who came from the future not because he’s a time-travelling tourist, but because he’s trying to prevent a dystopia.
Furthermore, Kaldur, Dick, Wally and Artemis are all working together to sell the secret that Kaldur is a double agent and Artemis faked her death. They decide not to tell anyone to really sell the story, resulting in Mt. Justice exploding, the superhero community grieving, Kaldur being rendered catatonic and Wally losing his trust in Dick.
In the third season, the secrets are abundant. M’gann is now the leader of the titular Team, and the Justice League are still active, but Batman and Nightwing have left them to found their own factions. M’gann and the Batfamily regularly cooperate on missions without anyone knowing in an attempt to throw the Light off their trail, which sows disgust and discord in the superhero community. Furthermore, Helga Jace feeds false lies to both Brion and Violet, threatening to tear apart their new family.
The fourth season has emphasized this theme with Artemis and Zatanna’s stories, specifically. Artemis is confronted first with Cassandra Savage, who poses as a double agent to lower her defenses so she can capture Cassandra Cain, who is secretly the daughter of Lady Shiva. On Zatanna’s end of things, she took on three proteges specifically to liberate her father but never informed Mary, Khalid or Traci of her real intentions.
One could also make the argument that family is a crucial theme of the show, specifically with Season 3. Each arc of the season focuses on family in some way, whether it be the Batfamily in Dick’s arc, the Crock and San-Wu families in Artemis’ arc, the Zatara’s in Zatanna’s arc, and more. But I think the legacy and secrets overall cover the meat of the show.
Moving Forward:
So, what does all of this mean moving forward, if/when we get another season?
For one, I think the writers need to hone in on a specific story structure, and I don’t think the arc structure is sustainable. Maybe if the show had always implemented those arcs from at least the second season onward it wouldn’t be so bad (The Clone Wars proves that 4-episode arcs can lead to great animated storytelling), but implementing it in the fourth season just doesn’t work. We need to go back to the structure of Seasons 2 and 3: crafting a single story spanning the season that hones in on a single part of the universe.
Personally, I think that a whole season dedicated to the supernatural would be the way to go. Zatanna’s arc in Season 4 touched on this briefly, but it was restricted to everyone in proximity of the Zatara family and Nabu. To this end, it makes sense that we would hone in one a teenaged Raven and an adult Constantine as our main characters, much like how Jaime was our main character for S2 while Violet, Brion and Gar were our main characters in S3.
Why the supernatural? Well, let me explain.
All of the “mini-arcs” in S4 aimed to thoroughly and completely explore corners of the DC universe, but Zatanna’s only touches the surface of what DC has to offer with the supernatural. Characters like Spectre, Swamp Thing, Orchid, and Zauriel could appear here, and I’d be most intrigued in an episode that touched on The Endless and their nature in the Young Justice universe.
The supernatural would stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the series, adding a bit of flavor to this universe. If Young Justice is meant to be an adaptation of the entire DC Universe, why do supernatural elements rarely pop up? Season 1 focused on the more mundane elements like espionage, while Seasons 2 and 3 heavily focused on the space opera elements. After Season 4 had no particular focus, having a fifth season that focused on the supernatural would be an interesting way to balance it out.
Raven as our lead character also makes complete thematic sense. Raven carries a heavy legacy; she’s the daughter of Trigon, the most powerful demon in the world. She could get support from Artemis, Spoiler and Orphan, themselves daughters of supervillains who sympathize with her plight. But she might be reluctant to mention this at first, and like Artemis, M’gann and Jaime before her, she could spend the first half of the season wracked over guilt for not sharing her secret.
One of the show’s newer problems is that it’s not even about the Team anymore. The Team seems to be its universes version of Young Justice from the comics, yet you wouldn’t know it was important from watching the last two seasons. The writers are clearly struggling with knowing what to do with their large cast, considering they’re evenly split between the Team, BB’s Outsiders and a bunch of miscellaneous groups. I think a great way for Raven’s character arc to unfold would be for her to start off as a member of the Team (giving them some much-needed screentime for the first time since 2014), only to realize that her real place is with Beast Boy and the Outsiders. She would end the season by joining them alongside Cyborg, bringing them closer to the comics version of the Teen Titans; meanwhile, the Team could exist as its analogue for Young Justice.
I’ve already said that the show suffers from making characters in The Light too powerful. We watch the show’s heroes get beaten down and killed so much, yet we rarely see villains suffer the same defeat in a meaningful way. But look at the Light’s roster. Most of them are metahumans, genetically-engineered soldiers, assassins or corporate leaders. The supernatural is largely unknown to them, and S4 showed that it's one of the few things that actually scares them. Trigon being an emergent threat to the Light and the League would not prevent the show’s central conflict from getting stale, it would pose a serious threat to them and maybe even Darkseid, as evidenced by Justice League Dark: Apokolips War.
Of course, that movie poses a problem: we’ve already gotten an animated story about Raven combatting Trigon and Darkseid. Not only was that movie critically panned, but even if it was well-received, Young Justice likes to focus on the random characters nobody knows about, and Raven has become extremely popular among DC fans.
Regardless, I still believe this would be the best possible course for the show. It would expand the scale, realize untapped potential, balance out the show’s mishmash of genres, streamline the narrative and diversify the conflict between relentless heroes and invincible villains; all while staying true to what Young Justice is actually about.
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