Originally Posted by
Dr. Ellingham
Alan Scott fan since the mid-1980s, yo. And since my take hasn't really been represented in this discussion, I figured this is the place for it. Haphazard as it is:
1. In the interest of intended progress, we conscript the past to conform to our present. Alan Scott being made gay as a modern character for stories set in 2020 is fair; the world has changed, and DC needs to evolve to modern social dynamics, and inclusiveness is good.
2. My Alan Scott is of the 1960s-1990s, and this is just another goodbye to him. But it's not a big loss; I don't read comics these days, and more importantly it's not like Alan has his own stories. He, and the other classic JSAers, lost their agency with COIE and have been primarily used as "mentors" to prop up legacy characters in the JSA over the past 20 or so years, anyway. The real loss here is less tangible, and more problematic:
3. Alan being a gay superhero in stories set in 1940. In a fantasy, action-adventure story, these sorts of social stories are never handled with any degree of believability.
Alan is apparently becoming to the JSA what Sal Romano was to Mad Men - a closeted gay character trying to navigate the 1960s corporate world, who eventually marries a woman, has affairs, gets outed, loses his job, etc. The story goes that way because that's what would realistically happen in 1962.
Mad Men was a brilliant, thoughtful show. It practiced treating the social norms of the 1960s accurately. Mostly. Unlike, say, Downton Abbey- where the protagonists' morality is thoroughly 2010s, despite the show being set in the 1910s. It's done this way to prevent making our lead characters "ugly" by giving them the beliefs and values of the era. Instead, they're "us", and we have time-traveled to the past.
Modern audiences aren't as accepting of complexity; people have become increasingly binary in their thinking. They want unabashedly "pretty" characters. So when we visit the past, our heroes are imbued with modern values, and characters with period-accurate values are either not present, or or cast as villains. So when Alan is outed to his teammates, will they keep him on the team? The truth is - in 1945, the answer would be no. But in the story, it will be yes. So then - why tell that story? To throw darts at the past, to feel morally superior.
That's simplistic, and more than a little dishonest. Alan Scott deserves better than being a dart thrown at the world he came from. Especially since we increasingly lack the ability to understand our own complex world, let along a very different complex world from 80 years ago.