Originally Posted by
Ascended
I think the face plate and the baggage associated with it absolutely need to be debated and a solid, workable direction decided upon (by DC, not us, since we're just nerds on the web with limited influence in the matter), but I don't think the plate is Vic's problem. Yes, you can say that it's following the 'broken black man' troupe and therefore needs to die, and I feel that. But the plate isn't the real issue, DC's view on Vic is. They see Cyborg as ensemble only, worse; Titans-ensemble only. They're not interested in his potential, they see that as misplaced effort because he's 'just' a Titans-aligned team player. They see Raven, Beast Boy, and Starfire (among others) the same way. Change that and all the rest works itself out. Remove the plate without doing anything else, and you'll still have the exact same Cyborg, only no longer recognizable as Cyborg.
If the argument is that Vic would be a bigger deal if he were pretty, it's disproven by the fact that he's a bigger deal than all the non-legacy PoC's at DC who *are* pretty. By this logic, Vixen should be the biggest PoC at DC. That said, I do absolutely support updating his look; the plate isn't a problem but the plate looking like it came out of 1985 is.
We can compare Vic to the big name Leaguers, and Vic certainly pales in comparison to them. And it's probably easy to blame the plate on that, with all the perfect white people around him. But it's not the plate, it's the fact that those perfect white people are twice as old as him, global icons with some of the most well known stories in modern (nerd) fiction, and decades of high-caliber talent that built rich, compelling mythologies. The plate doesn't make Vic less, his lack of history and development does. You don't fix that by making him pretty, you fix that by giving him history and development.