Titans Academy made the Titans feel old. I think the concept eats itself. Are you selling the teachers or the kids. Its hard to sell both. Either the Titans become the older authoritarians or the students become defiant punks. Which isn't a good look for either. So it just undermines itself.
I didn't think Titans Academy made the Titans 'feel old'. To me, it felt like the Titans were playing pretend. The issue wasn't the concept, but the franchise itself. After a long history of characters getting maimed or killed off for shock value, the pivot to 'teaching' didn't make any sense. Had the Titans been written as competent, it might've salvaged the concept.
The students would literally make fun of them for being old. No matter how competent they made them, standing next to teenagers, and turning the concept into that of a job made them seem far older then it benefits them to be. It morphs the Titan’s from the next generation to the teachers of the next generation, at an age where they should ideally be trying to come into their prime. And again, who is that’s suppose to save the day with that concept. Them or students. Who’s the sell there?
Last edited by Godlike13; 04-28-2024 at 01:33 AM.
How old are the X-men. It’s hard to tell right not young adults that’s for sure. Their experienced, season in their prime.
But that tends to be a problem because it ages their mentors (the human Bruce ) to much. The entire OG team have all been parents at one point that should be a little old considering we have had 5 generations of titans
The Titans as mentors to younger heroes could definitely work but obviously the execution of Titans Academy was terrible. They were just trying to salvage the 5G story in some way and it was a mess.
The Young Justice tv show had the first generation of sidekicks as mentors in later seasons and it worked quite well.
Going back to the X Men, there are younger mutants at Xavier’s school who have become prominent and get mentored by the older team members. It didn’t make them seem old or “uncool”.
I agree with this. This was obvious when reading the comic and you had a scene where the older Titans debate if it would be okay to murder one of their own students because they're the anti-christ and they are destined to bring the end of the world. And the one who tells them not to do it is one of the students.
Leaving aside that's...literally just Raven (and no, nobody is self-aware enough to point this out), that's obviously just designed to make the old Titans seem out of times and authoritarian compared to the new students. In what world would you make the Titans argue if it's okay to murder one of their own students otherwise?
And about the X-Men: the students are rarely the focus over the teachers (who are rarely shown actually teaching). The X-Men were not even a proper school until Morrison wanted to do synergy with the first movie.
The Johns' Titans didn't have a rigid estructure akin to a school (and, frankly, once Starfire leaves the book he pretty much drops the whole mentoring angle).
Last edited by Reddead; 04-28-2024 at 02:43 AM.
Did it, or did it create an audience invested in the first season’s characters that started to taper off as they shifted from the stars of the show, to support, and to just cameos as they moved onto the JL.
And while the X-Men function out of a school, the X-Men’s concept isn’t about teaching the next generation of X-Men. The school is a setting, part of its world. The X-Men team itself serves a different function though.
Where with the Titans, it becomes heroes who lost all their own ambitions as heroes, and so decided to become teachers in superhero uniforms so they can teach kids to do what they should be doing themselves. The Titans should to be out their saving the world, not teaching students so they can save the world instead.
Last edited by Godlike13; 04-28-2024 at 12:04 PM.
There is also a question can you really do a school setting when characters can't really age and become next big thing.
X-Men being in their own bubble lets them play around with age and other things. Titans can't really do it due to having strong connections to other franchises.
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I know but it was initially set up as the older Titans mentoring the younger Young Justice generation.
YJ never 100% recovered from the time-skip and introducing too many characters and never knowing quite who to focus on.
Though I don't think that means the idea of Titans in mentorship roles is a bad one.
The Titans Academy book was trash, and the school setting was a horrible choice. It didn't help that the original Titans were treated as a joke, a bunch of "boomers" that the "cool kids" didn't even respect. Everything Tim Sheridan did with that book should be forgotten.
But Titans being mentors to a younger generation is not even a new thing. Most of them were mentors to the characters that came after them, like Tim, Bart, Cassie, Rose, and such. So the idea is good, but not as they were presented to us in TA.
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