What To Do With Donna Troy

[Agent 86]

want to create an origin for a donna character that feels right, peel back everything, and fold in only the absolutely necessary bits. She doesn't need titan gods, she doesn't need insular references to alternate histories. She needs a way to get to the island, a way off the island, a reason for her powers, and a reason for why they appear after diana arrives on man's world. Start with that.

^^^^ this!

[Doctor Bifrost]

I think the problem with all the different "professionals" fixes to Donna were that they were far too self-referential to story tropes found within the comic book industry. Things like exiled intergalactic gods creating a new generation from aliens, magical memory wipes and subsequent magical trauma felt in a different person, dimension-hopping and timeline rewrites, flipping the original clay-birth story into a manufactured enemy combatant... they're all latter century comic-book solutions to a cosmology that relies more on pulp and fantasy inspirations.

Want to create an origin for a Donna character that feels right, peel back everything, and fold in only the absolutely necessary bits. She doesn't need Titan gods, she doesn't need insular references to alternate histories. She needs a way to get to the island, a way off the island, a reason for her powers, and a reason for why they appear after Diana arrives on Man's world. Start with that.

As you may know, CRaymond, I agree with you on this just about 100%!

I particularly dislike the "Donna's had so many origins in her publication history, we should make her origin that she is an essentially multidimensional creature that has many, many different origins!" This completely overwhelms any value any of the individual origins had - and makes her less of a character and some sort of post-modern metanarrative device, which is completely at odds with the best aspects of the character.

As for magic memory wipes - don't get me started!

[SiegePerilous02]

Of all the things done, the Titan Gods stuff is the most blech for me. It's as though they made the whole convoluted storyline just so they could call her Troia, which I LOATHE.

I actually like some of the Titans God stuff more than any of the other "fixes" that came afterward, though that's mostly because it was Wolfman and Perez that did it out of necessity and Wolfman even said he would have ditched all of it in a heart beat to get back to the pre-Crisis origin. I think involving the Greek Titans in her transition to Troia would have worked even pre-Crisis because she interacted with them a great deal already. It just would have been less convoluted.

Involving Titan goddesses just because Donna was on a team called Teen Titans was remarkably shallow imagineering. Wolfman gets praise similar to Claremont despite both making questionably poor creative decisions.

Yeah she's on a team called Titans, but she's also (sometimes) the baby sister of Wonder Woman, the DC superhero who is steeped in Greek myth. When you have a group of superheroes calling themselves the Titans, and one of them is from a franchise attached to Greek myth at the hip, it would be kind of senseless not to do anything with that. And the Titans generation of Gods are an area Diana herself seldom interacts with, so why not give it to Donna and give her something to herself that Big Sis isn't already covering?

The problem is the connection is very convoluted post-Crisis. Pre-Crisis the connection was simpler because Donna met Hyperion and the rest during her adventures with the NTT and formed a connection that way. Her backstory was still relatively simple and untouched.

[Ascended]

I think the problem with all the different "professionals" fixes to Donna were that they were far too self-referential to story tropes found within the comic book industry. Things like exiled intergalactic gods creating a new generation from aliens, magical memory wipes and subsequent magical trauma felt in a different person, dimension-hopping and timeline rewrites, flipping the original clay-birth story into a manufactured enemy combatant... they're all latter century comic-book solutions to a cosmology that relies more on pulp and fantasy inspirations. .

Its not the "trying too hard to be clever" troupes that bother me, really. I mean yeah, a lot of that was just needless fluff from writers who should've known better, but what really gets me is that it happens so much, and so often, over such a long period of time. And DC allows it.

I mean, at some point why didn't a member of management step in, prevent creators from re-doing the origin (over and over and over and over) and force a little communication between the editorial groups who handle Donna and Diana to ensure there was cohesion?

I get that Donna isn't a big enough player for DC to invest in her. Hell, Im not even much of a fan of her in the first place. But I cannot understand the organizational culture that allows a part of two profitable, popular IP's (Wonder and Titans) to be abused in such a way. Maybe Donna Troy will never be big enough to matter in sales, but the way DC has treated her over the years has certainly damaged their brand recognition. It's like finding out the Coca Cola company allows its least popular flavor of soda to be bottled in dirty containers. Even if you dont drink that particular flavor, you're probably not going to feel totally comfortable buying any of their products.

Its just bad business.

[Ascended]

I particularly dislike the "Donna's had so many origins in her publication history, we should make her origin that she is an essentially multidimensional creature that has many, many different origins!" This completely overwhelms any value any of the individual origins had - and makes her less of a character and some sort of post-modern metanarrative device, which is completely at odds with the best aspects of the character.

Even that, had they stuck with it, could have provided a degree of consistency to her character and provided a place to go with her. They established her as the Harbinger of the multiverse, and whether that was a good direction for her or not, at least it was a direction! Better that than the ping pong of bad ideas and reboots and retcons the character has been saddled with. A consistent direction can find fans and eventually prove itself, or be adjusted if it fails. But DC doesn't give Donna even that. They just throw her wherever, into whatever, with no follow-through. Why should a fan watching the Titans show right now decide to get into Donna Troy in the comics, knowing that what they liked in one book or one year would not only fail to carry over to the next, but be completely rewritten as well?

[CRaymond]

Yeah she's on a team called Titans, but she's also (sometimes) the baby sister of Wonder Woman, the DC superhero who is steeped in Greek myth. When you have a group of superheroes calling themselves the Titans, and one of them is from a franchise attached to Greek myth at the hip, it would be kind of senseless not to do anything with that. And the Titans generation of Gods are an area Diana herself seldom interacts with, so why not give it to Donna and give her something to herself that Big Sis isn't already covering?

The Titans aren’t just another tribe of Greek Gods, they are the previous regime. They are monstrous celestial forces of nature that were toppled by the strategies of the Olympian cohort.

I realize it’s comics, and we may never agree on this notion. I believe Wolfman’s interpretation of the Titans was cheap and boring and weird and idiosyncratic. Donna suggested the name “Titans” because she grew up learning Olympian history. Involving actual Titans in her backstory is a 3-ton cart in front of the outline of a horse.

That’s not to say it’s not possible. I just have yet to read a potential reboot Mythic Titan Donna that feels “right”.

I’d much rather discuss and debate the timing of her arrival and departure from Themyscira, and her magical powers —like whether she needs any at all.

[kjn]

The Titans aren’t just another tribe of Greek Gods, they are the previous regime. They are monstrous celestial forces of nature that were toppled by the strategies of the Olympian cohort.

Very much agree (with the caveat that there were titans that were more personal and more benevolent. Hecate and Prometheus are probably the two main examples—in reality few of the Greek gods were what we'd call nice or moral beings). And I agree with that Donna doesn't need any supernatural gifts, I'd push her all the way over to "Amazon training" with maybe some mystical rituals/potions/baths thrown in.

[Doctor Bifrost]

I believe Wolfman’s interpretation of the Titans was cheap and boring and weird and idiosyncratic.

I'm not sure I'd go that far, personally, but it wasn't compelling to me. Many people, and most Wonder Woman readers, already have a sense of the Olympian gods as individual characters. Writers can leverage off that (making changes where needed for their stories.)

But far fewer people know much about the Titans, especially the specific generation Wolfman used. (Some of their children, such as Selene, are another matter. And of course the story of Cronus and Rhea, as parents of Zeus and many of the other Olynpians, makes them better known.) And there are fewer Greek myths about them - some of them may have been invented by Greek storytellers essentially as placeholders. There is less art about them, less representation in culture (popular or otherwise). In comparison, they are vague.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad place to start. But when you put them all on the same isolated planet of New Cronus, give them all the same project of empowering twelve kids from different planets (most of whom didn't get much screen time themselves) for some generic reason, and have most of them paired off in similar male/female brother/sister husband/wife dyads (each couple in matching clothes!) - well, they doesn't weren't distinct and individual enough to be interesting characters. And I found myself not very interested in what they were doing.

Subsequent stories didn't fix the problem for me. Frankly, I have trouble remembering them.

Add to that the fact that this new origin put an enormous narrative distance between Donna and Diana (where previously Donna was Diana's beloved younger sister, adoptive or otherwise), and created the very strange situation where Wonder Girl - who had a similar costume to Wonder Woman's, similar powers, similar accoutrements (lasso, bracelets) - started her career years before Wonder Woman (and none of the characters seemed to find those "coincidences" worth mentioning or figuring out). And then that, in order to make the story work, everything Donna knew about her pre-Teen Titans life turned out to be fake memories imposed by the Titans of Myth (a trope I really dislike and which, in this case, I don't think could stand up to much examination) - well, none of this prompted me to feel invested in the Titans of Myth and the origin story they had been whipped up for.

And I speak as a big fan of Marv Wolfman. But I think he was handed a narrative Gordian Knot here, and the solution - perhaps rushed, and forced to fit in to the larger Teen Titans storyline - didn't work very well.

I think it would be quite possible to pick a Titan of Myth or two and make them into fascinating characters. And some of their descendants (such as Prometheus and Hecate, as kjn mentions below) are halfway there. But the way the whole gang was portrayed in Donna's post-Crisis on Infinite Earths origin just seemed bland to me.

But that's just me.

(Of course, some people know the Greek Titans and their classical stories backwards and forwards. But I think that's rare.)

(It's funny that I never had the same reaction to the Guardians of the Universe, who for decades were indistinguishable from each other. I'll have to think about that.)

[CRaymond]

Prometheus and Hecate were both latter-generation Titans who allied themselves with the Olympians in the Titanomachia. They would later regret that choice.

I agree with Bifrost regarding Wolfman. He may be a great writer of other stories, but his handling of the Titans was not to my taste.

There are a million other gods in the greater Greek Pantheon that may serve as Donna’s separate set of patrons IF the choice is that she needs a separate set. I believe building different power-machinery lends itself too closely to the Shazam hero family.

What if Donna was patroned by the Goddesses of the Eleusian Mysteries? A cohort of female goddesses that don’t include the Hera/Athena/Aphrodite heavies? Hecate herself? ROMAN Olympus(very dumb idea)?

[Doctor Bifrost]

What if Donna was patroned by the Goddesses of the Eleusian Mysteries? A cohort of female goddesses that don’t include the Hera/Athena/Aphrodite heavies? Hecate herself? ROMAN Olympus(very dumb idea)?

My version (here): A multigenerational group of goddesses of the night and stars (Nyx, Selene, Artemis, Asteria among them.)

[CRaymond]

My version (here): A multigenerational group of goddesses of the night and stars (Nyx, Selene, Artemis, Asteria among them.)

See? Now that's a novel gathering of divinities and on-brand with Wonder Woman themes.

[dswynne]

Here's an idea (or two):

Idea #1: Use John Byrnes' "Dark Angel" storyline to tell the origin of Donna Troy. Or,
Idea #2: In the very beginning of the Teen Titans, Wonder Girl showed up without an origin story, but based on the idea that a magical construct of Wonder Woman, a "Teen Diana", had been recruited on to the team (due to Paradise Island being outside of normal time and space). The mysterious "Wonder Girl" has her adventures, and then promptly disappears.

Just a thought or two.

[kcekada]

Adopted sister from man's world is the simplest answer -- and if they need to involve a Dark Angel or some other sorceress who hid the truth from all inovlved (hey, maybe it was Dr. Manhattan), the so be it. Let's just get things righted finally after all of these years!

[Titan Theo]

As I've said in the past, they can make Donna that premier mystic/warrior of Paradise Island, or they can give her an edge and make her the new Greek Nemesis.

[Fuzzy Mittens]

I honestly wont be surprised if the comics eventualyl come to adopt whatever the tv show did as canon.