r/TopCharacterTropes • u/FullBrother9300 • 14d ago

Hated Tropes (Hated trope) Remember all these stories and characters we followed for so long? Welp now it’s all reset.

Gallery image

Gallery image

1: using another flashpoint to create the tomorrowverse (Justice League Dark: Apokolips war) after 80-90% of the cast is killed off and billions lives are fated to die Flash and Constantine hatch up a plan to kill baby Darkseid to prevent the entire story from happening which just leads to an entirely different universe being formed and even erasing some characters from existence.

2: Jim travelling to the beginning (Tales of Arcadia series) after multiple characters die including Toby Jim uses a magic gem to travel back to the very first episode but instead lets Toby find the amulet… this changes things how?

6.8k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

426

u/lmaofyou 14d ago

The first Crisis by DC, maybe? Crisis on Infinite Earths? I think most people agreed that it was a good story, but also that reboot was needed.

185

u/AccomplishedCharge2 14d ago

Yeah, the original Crisis worked on basically every level, it worked as a story, it worked in terms of the retcon it created, and it worked in terms of how the new continuity lead to new types of stories

112

u/Loose_Translator8981 14d ago

I think it helps that the first Crisis was made partly in response to the fact that continuity in DC Comics had been an absolute mess for decades, especially since so many characters were created without the intent of all being in the same continuity. It was kind of a necessary cleanup just to get everything on the same page going forward.

48

u/AccomplishedCharge2 14d ago

Absolutely, but it deserves credit for pulling it off, like Zero Hour was also an attempt to fix some genuine issues with the timeline continuity, but it didn't really work at the time, and absolutely doesn't hold up retroactively, so credit where credit is due: Crisis was ambitious, largely successful just as a story, and they stuck the landing

2

u/TheDubh 14d ago

Comics, and any long-form media, suffer from their age. It’s like a sitcom that forever attempts to reset at the end of an ep or season. Comic book characters haven’t been allowed to progress because if they move too far from the established status quo, new readers may not understand it.

Years ago, I read an article about how sometimes it’s even the writers causing it, if editorial doesn’t have power. Writers sometimes have a story they want to tell based on a version of the character they grew up on. So they revert what progress has been made to tell that story.

I’d say the multiverse was supposed to be an out so they could say, “Well, that story is isolated,” but that only works till someone goes, “ I want a story where all my fav versions team up.”

Also, management seems to miss that the reason absolute and ultimate work is because it doesn’t have the extra baggage, so either tie it into main continuity or expand it out so much that people lose track. Marvel movies/shows being a great long form, overly expanded, making it hard for new viewers.

1

u/SirSilverscreen 13d ago

Wasn't Crisis built up to and planned out for, like, three entire IRL years worth of comics so that DC knew exactly how the Crisis multiversal collapse officially happened and how the DC Universe would be after? As opposed to things like Zero Hour which were more done moreso on a whim with way too much intercontinuity between comics and some weird commitment issues to the reboot concept?

That's what I recall, but I could be remembering it all wrong.

1

u/AccomplishedCharge2 13d ago

That's how ALL major crossover level retcons should be handled, they should be well planned and plotted, with clear ideas of the intended outcomes and the direction of the impacted characters

57

u/BeardedRaven 14d ago

Agreed but that might just be distance from it. New 52 failed but the first two were pretty decent. You can point to Geoff Johns green lantern run as another successful reboot.

10

u/thesirblondie 14d ago

Nah, there's a reason why after Crisis on Infinite Earth they have Zero Hour: Crisis In Time, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, and Identity Crisis. The series was so popular that DC tried to piggy back off the name for decades to come.

8

u/LaTienenAdentro 14d ago

Some of these are legitimately great stories as well. DC between Zero Hour up to Final Crisis into Blackest Night was great arcs all around, genuinely killing it with the joined narratives.

6

u/crasherx2000 14d ago

Blackest Night, from what I’ve heard of, sounds absolutely amazing

2

u/idropepics 14d ago

It is, and well worth a read. If you like it, it was basically a jumping on point for the New 52 and basically all the major characters have their own lead up/ follow up arcs with Blackest Night/ Brightest Day.

2

u/LaTienenAdentro 14d ago

I recommend you read the entirety of Green Lantern from Zero Hour to Wrath of the First Lantern. Its among the best comic book series Ive read.

8

u/LookItsDaphne 14d ago

No, it was genuinely loved. It led to frequent, nearly annual event series. Millennium, Zero Hour, whatever. Crossover events became unpopular because they were clearly cash grabs meant to make you buy 4 to 12 issue limited runs, and possibly an issue of a bunch of other series to flesh out the story.

Oh, and I'm getting memories of tge 90s, when the multiple Batman and Superman runs began running shared storyline, making Batman and Superman into weekly comics. It got expensive to be a teen.

8

u/soundguynick 14d ago

From the other side of the comics aisle, I point you towards Spider-Man, who I believe had five monthly titles running at once. Not only did the clone saga suck, but like you said, it was expensive to follow .

7

u/LookItsDaphne 14d ago

I feel for ypu. We had Death of Superman and Knightfall, but we didn't need the earthquake in Gotham City or Superman Red-Superman Blue.

5

u/soundguynick 14d ago

I actually liked the possibilities No Mans Land brought for Batman / Gotham in general, but any time I'm having to buy multiple books a month to follow a hero, it gets burdensome.

2

u/MrXilas 14d ago

My biggest gripe with the New 52 was always how they handled the characters' timelines in general. The most egregious being the Green Lantern and Batman. They tried to tell everyone that those stories all happened in a five year period. Flash got the worst of it I think. Not in terms of writing quality, but the whole Flash family (including the man who was Flash in publication for 23 years) was binned, and then Kid Flash had nothing to do with Barry. And then Damian Wayne got hit BIG with the regression bug. He went from maturing with his role as Robin to being a murderous brat again.

1

u/AvatarPhoenixGrey16 14d ago

Crisis on Infinite Earths is a bit complicated in terms of being a reboot. Because while some characters were definitely sent back to square one, others didn’t. It was a lot like the New 52, except that it didn’t have the other problems the New 52 had.

2

u/gomora121 14d ago

The difference is that CoIE was planned years in advance, while Flashpoint was a flash story that Dan Didio decided to turn into a crisis level event to completely reboot DC(expect not really) and gave warning to the creators at DC six months in advance, despite the fact that many of them were in the middle of long term story arcs.