Donna in Titans Rebirth--Which origin will we get?

[CRaymond]

Come on, you know the new origin for [any DC property] is going to be re-told/ret-con with a twist that won't work 20 years from now or even 10 years from now. We'll be doing this all over again.

I wish people accepted this truism and surfed the changin' times, rather than beat the bible of their nostalgia.

[Agent Z]

I wish people accepted this truism and surfed the changin' times, rather than beat the bible of their nostalgia.

Not every bad reaction to a change is just because of nostalgia. This is clearly not helping DC in the long run.

[CRaymond]

I wish some people accepted this truism and surfed the changin' times, rather than beat the bible of their nostalgia.

[Doctor Bifrost]

I wouldn't call it a mistake. All the changes to WW post-Crisis was to make the character stand on her own and give her a distinctive origin. It worked. A de-aged, 19 years old WW, Themyscira, an aged Steve Trevor who wasn't going ever be a love interest...it all worked (until writers and editors started doing their own thing). With WW de-aged, Donna Troy wasn't going to work in that origin. It was all a move to set WW apart and make her special. That's all been un-done. The new WW origin being penned will be un-done again eventually as well. Gullible comic book readers will eat it up as if the writers from time by gone were nitwits and these new guys are geniuses for recognizing the nitwit's "mistakes". Rinse and repeat, we'll be having this discussion again 20 years from now.

Come on, you know the new origin for Donna Troy is going to be re-told/ret-con with a twist that won't work 20 years from now or even 10 years from now. We'll be doing this all over again. Are these mistakes? I'll let others decide....

Well, I have my own take on this, but it's a matter of personal taste. When I read stories set in a large-scale fictional (particularly science-fictional or fantasy-based) setting - a doorstop novel with a lot of backstory, multiple stories in the same world, a shared universe - one of the things I'm interested in is world-building. (One of the things. I'm also interested in "good stories." I'm also interested in characterization. I don't consider these interests to be in conflict. I consider them interconnected.)

I enjoy and appreciate the way a world is build out of individual stories and details - if it's done well. I think we often get better, and certainly better-thought-out, stories, when the writers and editors remember that they're not just writing and individual issue (or arc, or series) - they're also taking advantage of what writers created for them before, and adding to it so that writers after them can use it. "Leave the sandbox as clean as you found it, and don't break the toys" seems like a useful principle to me.

I'm not a fanatic about it - I don't hold continuity and consistency as a value above and beyond all other aspects of story-telling - but I appreciate it when it's well-done, and when writers make a good-faith effort. When they toss it aside unnecessarily out of apathy, laziness, ignorance (that they have no interest in fixing), or arrogance ("I'll just overwrite their stories because mine or so much better!"), I don't think we always get the best results.

Connected with this, though, is my realization that a large-scale shared universe with multiple authors probably can't be maintained indefinitely (unless that's your only goal, which would be a mistake), so I think it makes sense to reboot your universe every 25-30 years or so. Maybe take the old universe and set it aside quietly in a parallel timeline, and set some stories in it, or even visit it, now and again.

The relevance here being: unless you have a really, really, really good reason, I don't think a character should be rebooted, or their origin retconned, until you're ready to reboot the whole universe. Especially when characters like Diana and Donna are so interconnected.

(And I don't happen to think that the success of George Perez's Wonder Woman - which I loved; it's my favorite version - depended on Wonder Woman debuting five years after Superman and Batman, and well after Wonder Girl. If he wanted to write a Year One maxi-series of her earliest days, that's fine. And I've seen some indication that that's what he originally had in mind. But I could be wrong.)

But that's just me. As, as you implicitly suggest, I've lost that argument a long time ago. DC's major retcon/reboots seem to happen about every five years now, and smaller (but not very small) retcons happen more frequently, and asynchronously. And right now the DCU is basically defined as a universe undergoing a constant series of retcons - or retcon-adjacent activities, with deus ex machina entities stealing history, altering the memories of the entire human race (and changing all physical evidence while they're at it), recreating relationships based on events that characters sort of, kind of remember but that sort of, kind of, didn't happen (or did happen, then didn't happen, and now did happen again).

This is all in the service of a good cause (in my opinion), restoring the "Legacy DCU," which I like a lot better than The New 52 version. But if, like me, you're also interested in world-building - how you get there, how solid the world looks when you do - then the techniques being used can be seen as a little disheartening. The resulting world is something of a Frankenstein Monster, with all the seams showing, and it's hard for anybody (readers, writers, editors) to know which characters experienced what events, in what company, who remembers what, and why they remember it, and so on. All of which I consider important to character development, ongoing narrative threads, mysteries to be solved, questions to be resolved, and stuff like that there.

But I'm probably not the most important reader demographic they have in mind.

[Outside_85]

I wish some people accepted this truism and surfed the changin' times, rather than beat the bible of their nostalgia.

Or maybe we just wish people would stop trying to fix things that aren't broken.

[Herowatcher]

I guess I want to know when Titans of Myth were first introduced as a motivating factor for Donna Troy.

I get that Donna named her peer group the Teen "Titans", but aside from that choice, where did the Titans of Myth really enter the picture? In my opinion, the creative choice to tie this suggestion to a secret origin is among the biggest hurdle to simplify her history. Why wouldn't a girl raised by Amazons have known about the story of the Titanic gods?

Her peer group was the "next generation of heroes", so naming them after the "next generation of gods" seems fairly simple. To complicate it by adding rescue by Rhea, being trained on a distant planet, memory suppression... it's all just reeks of Bronze overcomplication.

Just to clarify my opinion of using Rhea....it doesn't include being raised on another planet or memory suppression. I only suggest Rhea be used to save her from the fire and then hand her over to the Amazons. Everything else would follow Marv Wolfman's original origin for Donna. However, Rhea and the Titans of Myth would be watching her growth on the sidelines...seeing her as a possible "seed" to succeed them.