Originally Posted by
Ares
Agreed. If they HAVE to change his name, if Captain Marvel is just not an option anymore, then Captain Thunder is at least a nice compromise, you can have the Thunder Family, you don't need to jump through so many hoops to make them work, nothing about his magic word being his name, etc. You lose a little alteration with "Mary Thunder", but that's a relatively small thing.
I agree that Cap should not be portrayed as a fool, but I disagree about making him and Billy separate entities again. The Pre-DC stuff was always coy about whether Billy and Cap were the same person or separate people, because examining that kind of thing wasn't really part of the storytelling of the time. Sometimes they leaned towards "same person", sometimes they leaned towards "separate beings".
I do agree that some sources have presented Cap as being an idiot, but I have my doubts that they would have portrayed him better if Billy and Cap were separate people. The biggest sources of such have been things like Justice League International, where Keith Giffen and JMS Dematties wrote Cap as simpleminded comic relief, and was really the source of a lot of Cap's portrayal as being a whitebread doormat. Curse of Shazam and the overall Nu-52 have portrayed Billy as not particularly bright, somewhat boorish and arrogant.
On the flip side, Billy's animated appearances have generally portrayed him pretty well (outside of the Justice League:War/Atlantis films), and in a fair bit of his books he was portrayed as a pretty solid hero.
The problem with bad presentations of Cap isn't that Billy Batson was in control of the body, the problem is that writers wrote Billy Batson as an immature idiot instead of as the hero. One thing the Pre-DC Fawcett books did was constantly show that Billy was brave, resourceful, clever, determined, incorruptible and mature for his age. He was sometimes impulsive, he could be fooled by a sufficiently clever scheme, and his inquisitive nature sometimes got him into trouble, but it was clear that Billy was a hero.
And that's the thing for me: Billy was the one picked by Shazam to be his champion, so Billy should be in control of the Captain Marvel body. Otherwise, Captain Marvel is basically a genie Billy summons to solve all of his problems, which defeats the purpose of picking Billy in the first place. Captain Marvel is much better as just a form Billy assumes that gives him the power to take matters into his own hands.
Instead of making Cap a separate person, there just needs to be some kind of mandate/reminder for anyone that wants to use Billy that he should be written more like a kind of hybrid of Dick Grayson and Tim Drake. If you make Billy a capable but relatable hero, and Captain Marvel more like magical power armor he puts on, then Cap would never be written like a moron because the core of who he is would be genuinely heroic and clever. It boggles my mind that people would write Cap as a buffoon when his origin is all about picking the best person for the job.