Was the First Born a successful addition to Wonder Woman's rogues gallery?

[Ascended]

I'm a big fan of the Azzarello run but don't think First Born was the best thing to come of it. I personally think he created the best Wonder Woman villain (well, sometimes villain) in Strife. I still think Cassandra has a LOT of potential as well.

Gotta agree here. Strife is by far the best addition to the mythos and Cassandra *could* become huge. I could see her becoming, in time, what Circe was meant to be.

I think these two have a lot more mileage in them, or, at the very least, are much more accessible, than the FB.

Man, I really want a high quality creative team who wants to pick up all these pieces and continue to work with them. I am so very tired of Diana getting a soft-reboot with every creative team.

[Cryptid]

The First Born had less personality than the antagonists from the title's earlier issues, such as Hera or Hades or Apollo, but there needed to be a character who would shake up the relationships between the gods in a different way than Wonder Woman herself. Once she found her footing in the divine intrigues, at the end of the book's first year, it made sense to throw the First Born into the mix, or someone like him. And his feelings of grievance and entitlement at being the unacknowledged child of Zeus made for a nice foil with Wonder Woman's gradual and cautious acceptance of her new family. So the story ended with one character who wanted to seize Olympus by force and another whose reluctance to accept more power became a kind of moral influence. The First Born did a lot of nice things for the plot structure, but he was never the most interesting person on the page. He suffered from what they call "motive decay" over on TV Tropes, in that his desire for revenge against the gods gradually dissolved into a general desire for chaos and suffering and evilness.