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Talyn's Very Reasonable Request
07/04/2025
FADE IN: INT. [MY HOUSE] - DAY
Working on a laptop, MATT has the dawning realization that he’s going to have to do a page for obscure Justice Society villain The Gambler. He looks up at the camera incredulously, which freeze frames.
MATT (V.O.)
Yep, that's me. I bet you’re wondering how I got here?
Working on a laptop, MATT has the dawning realization that he’s going to have to do a page for obscure Justice Society villain The Gambler. He looks up at the camera incredulously, which freeze frames.
MATT (V.O.)
Yep, that's me. I bet you’re wondering how I got here?
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Well it all started innocently enough. Ian, who does the pixel art sprites for the site, let us know that their laptop has given up the ghost. To be helpful, I created a GoFundMe, since I knew everyone would jump at the chance to help them. (It was successful, by the way, thanks everyone!)
To sort of grease the wheels a little bit, I made what I thought was a bit of a bold offer: I said that I would implement a change requested by the person who makes the biggest donation. I knew there was a chance it might be something I have to backpedal on if they asked for something impossible or offensive, but it was far more likely that they would just have a character they want me to include, and I figured I could, this one time, just find a way to do something I wouldn't usually do. |
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But this is where we meet Talyn. They did the biggest donation (by quite a bit), and I’ll just share their email to me so you can see what they hit me with;
“Hi Matt!
I do have a request! I understand you don’t much care for the way the relationship between Black Canary and Green Arrow has been portrayed throughout the early 2000s. I also find it quite terrible, but the relationship was not always like that.
Me and my dad have a strong attachment to those characters, my dad’s love for those characters is actually what got me interested in superheroes in the first place, and so it makes me sad that when you think of their relationship you think of that era. I think they’re really interesting together, their relationship is messy at times and they hurt each other, but they always come back to each other and work things out. Also, I think a lot of the cheating traits Oliver has come from a terrible game of telephone between writers. My dad recalls a lot of uncomfortable Green Arrow stories where he’s getting pursued by women when he doesn’t want to be and we both feel that writers after have taken that and ran with it to just make Ollie a womanizer, when that really wasn’t a trait of his at all in the beginning, or at least he was no more a womanizer than other heroes of that era.
The cracks in their relationship started in the Mike Grell run, which in general has a lot of problems with sidelining Black Canary in what I feel is an extremely misogynistic way. She’s treated as the woman at home, she’s tortured, she’s de-powered, etc etc. He overall had no idea what to do with Dinah, or he just didn’t care. Which really is a shame, Oliver had been very loyal and loving to Dinah before that, and it’s really upsetting that part of all the sourness to their relationship is from someone who just didn’t really understand her.
With all that being said, I would really like to see Dinah and Ollie together. Their relationship is one that means a lot to me, and it doesn't have to mean Dinah becomes secondary to or dependent on him. Dinah was leading the Justice League and kicking ass with the Birds of Prey while being married to Ollie, and it was a time where she arguably had never had more of a spotlight. The two of them being broken up is a canon plotpoint, but its also one that is built on a lot of mischaracterization, sidelining of Dinah, and ultimately the DC universe is better off leaving it behind. Black Canary can still be the kickass leader of the Justice League, and the great independent hero that she is, and she can also have Ollie in her life too.
So, yeah. DinahOllie 2025. I hope and pray with my strongest heart. Thank you.”
Imagine my reaction. This was a REALLY well articulated request and obviously a deeply personal one. How tragic, then, that I OBVIOUSLY couldn't do it…
“Hi Matt!
I do have a request! I understand you don’t much care for the way the relationship between Black Canary and Green Arrow has been portrayed throughout the early 2000s. I also find it quite terrible, but the relationship was not always like that.
Me and my dad have a strong attachment to those characters, my dad’s love for those characters is actually what got me interested in superheroes in the first place, and so it makes me sad that when you think of their relationship you think of that era. I think they’re really interesting together, their relationship is messy at times and they hurt each other, but they always come back to each other and work things out. Also, I think a lot of the cheating traits Oliver has come from a terrible game of telephone between writers. My dad recalls a lot of uncomfortable Green Arrow stories where he’s getting pursued by women when he doesn’t want to be and we both feel that writers after have taken that and ran with it to just make Ollie a womanizer, when that really wasn’t a trait of his at all in the beginning, or at least he was no more a womanizer than other heroes of that era.
The cracks in their relationship started in the Mike Grell run, which in general has a lot of problems with sidelining Black Canary in what I feel is an extremely misogynistic way. She’s treated as the woman at home, she’s tortured, she’s de-powered, etc etc. He overall had no idea what to do with Dinah, or he just didn’t care. Which really is a shame, Oliver had been very loyal and loving to Dinah before that, and it’s really upsetting that part of all the sourness to their relationship is from someone who just didn’t really understand her.
With all that being said, I would really like to see Dinah and Ollie together. Their relationship is one that means a lot to me, and it doesn't have to mean Dinah becomes secondary to or dependent on him. Dinah was leading the Justice League and kicking ass with the Birds of Prey while being married to Ollie, and it was a time where she arguably had never had more of a spotlight. The two of them being broken up is a canon plotpoint, but its also one that is built on a lot of mischaracterization, sidelining of Dinah, and ultimately the DC universe is better off leaving it behind. Black Canary can still be the kickass leader of the Justice League, and the great independent hero that she is, and she can also have Ollie in her life too.
So, yeah. DinahOllie 2025. I hope and pray with my strongest heart. Thank you.”
Imagine my reaction. This was a REALLY well articulated request and obviously a deeply personal one. How tragic, then, that I OBVIOUSLY couldn't do it…
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See, there is actually a bit of a backstory here. Among the regular discord users is Darkalex, who is a diehard Green Arrow fan, and who obviously has brought up similar feelings about the way we depict Ollie in the DCCP. Over and over, I've had to explain… this is just how I read him. This is how I understand the character to operate, and this is what I built my version of the character on. We’ve had some long conversations about things I could do with Ollie to make him function more like the socially conscious character Darkalex insisted he was, and I had those changes sitting on my list of possible ones to make. I even put Ollie on the poll recently. (a poll he WON, although I'm thoroughly convinced Darkalex cheated :) ) When I tried to implement those changes, however, I just couldn't figure out how to DO it. My sense of the character just wouldn't LET me.
In the aftermath of Talyn's request, however, I just started to feel like I MUST be missing something. I went to Darkalex and really tried to start a conversation about our different takes on Ollie… I found his reaction to be uncharacteristically cagey? I kind of pushed a little, and after a bit some more people got involved, and it actually became a THING. I came away realizing that my tendency to really stand by my own opinion, while it helps me build a giant website out of my own headcanon, can also make me a hard person to debate sometimes. I don't LISTEN well |
The argument that really came to light was this; I wasn't allowing Green Arrow the same latitude I've done with so many other characters. If the canon representation of a character in the comics has somehow strayed from the core of who that character is, then we work to return them to the character we WANT them to be. It's sort of our whole deal.
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My reading of Green Arrow really started in the 90s, mostly from Chuck Dixon, and then Kevin Smith, Judd Winnick, Joe Kelly and so on. It was basically all in response to the post-crisis Mike Grell run, which, like Talyn’s letter described, introduced a lot of less-savory personality traits for Ollie that weren't necessarily in keeping with who he was before that. Basically, my take on the character was skewed. I was seeing traits that didn't necessarily need to be there and treating them as foundational to his personality.
What's REALLY funny, to me at least, is that this actually isn't the first comment I've gotten that was pointing out this particular blindspot. The prior commenter just went about it in the exact opposite direction… basically saying ‘hey if you’re going to treat certain bad behavior as foundational in THIS character, then you have to do the same thing with Deathstroke.’ Which… no, dude. Obviously. |
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So what's the SOLUTION here? It was finally Ian who helped me turn a corner and get a handle on what was happening here. They asked: well what WOULD it take for Dinah and Ollie to get back together? We’d need a different and more concrete reason why they broke up in the first place, there really needs to not have been any infidelity, and Dinah would need to see, in a very palpable, selfless way, that he’d undergone the necessary growth to no longer be the person he once was. It hinged entirely on finding the right reason for their breakup… and that was actually so easy. Ollie's reaction to the reveal of Roy’s drug use. It's a major story point that so much of their story should turn on. Starting from there we worked backward, redoing basically their entire timeline...
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Then, of course… it just started to spiral. We had that entire rethink of Green Arrow sitting in the wings, adding a greater amount of detail to how he operates in Star City as well as a few more villains, but we also had several for Black Canary as well. We wanted to bring Ted Grant into the modern timeline to make her Dinah's mentor (another idea of Ian's). We wanted to give her an early rockstar career. We wanted to tie her more into Richard Dragon & Ben Turner to build up her connections to Lady Shiva. We had the Monkey Fist Tournament… and also had plans to add Sin to her story. Obviously, if we’re going to rewrite these timelines from scratch… We’re going to build all of this into them from the beginning.
So the number of new or rewritten timelines related to this Just. Kept. Getting. Bigger. So this is a ton of stuff. This isn't a fresh coat of paint, we really tore out a whole wing of the timeline and re-poured the foundation. It took FOREVER, but it's all stuff we wanted to add anyway. I doubt Talyn realized what they were asking, just how deep the roots of that particular request ran… but in the end, I did actually manage to make it happen. Dinah & Ollie have their reconnection. I hope this meets expectations! |