Rebirth: The One Thing I Hated

You know, as much as I loved Rebirth. Which I certainly did. But I am very upset with Mr. Johns for one thing.

No, it wasn't for bringing back Hal. I liked Hal. It wasn't for retconning Parallax, I think the retcon makes sense and adds an interesting element to Hal, basically naming him *weakest* of the Lanterns by being first to succumb. It wasn't for marginalizing Kyle, as Kyle was, as I see it, the hero of the piece as much as Hal.

It *certainly* wasn't for restoring Guy and John, or even getting rid of the Vuldarian-ness.

But it will be a long time before I forgive Mr. Johns for the unceremonious way he destroyed "Warriors".

I understand that Guy needed his ties to Earth cut dramatically, so he could be made the familiar human face of the space-based GLC. I understand that with regards to his character, having the bar had outlived its potential.

I would have been fine if Guy had left it. Or if he'd set someone else up to run it. Or if he just closed it and let it lie.

But in a burst of uncontrolled power, Warriors is destroyed. And that seriously upsets me.

Because that place wasn't only a bar. It was a museum to the superhero community. Lobo's cycle was there. JLA artifacts were there. Monuments to commemorate the Green Lanterns were there. Kyle's panting of all of them together... It was a marvelous way to put an accessible face on the superhero community, because anyone could go there and possibly comingle with heroes...even if they were in disguise. This is valuable! And would be even more so now, considering how often they're showing Diana snapping Max's neck on every tv screen in the country.

But it's more than that. Warriors was a *memorial*. Not just the Parallax statue, mind you. Though that's what gets the most attention. There were statues of *Ice* in there. Tora Olafsdotter as only a few people remember her. There was in particular a small figurine made by Queen Olaf herself of Tora and Guy, in her daughter's memory, given with deep, genuine love for the man she now called her son. Those are probably destroyed. Even G'nort's water bowl was there, apparently, behind the stairs...I'd imagine Arisia had some items displayed for commemoration as well.

Some of what was lost: (From Warrior 39)


I might be sensitive. My highschool was located in a museum, and I worked an internship there. And there's one thing, that even when the museum itself started to get boring (as anything would after every day for four years), I never could forget. These things there...they belonged to people. People like you and me. People who were probably long dead. Some might be in the history books, some never would be, but even the history books lie. They exaggerate. They make assumptions. No one really remembers the man or woman behind the legend.

But what we do have left from them are these things. Material objects. Completely worthless in their own right, but as the symbols of these people who are gone and forgotten...they're priceless. And the thought of something happening to these things, these things that commemorate people I will never even know...it's heartbreaking.

And Mr. Johns just did that. Yeah it's fictional, but it was symbolic. And he just destroyed it so *casually*. Turn the page, well, Guy has the ring again. Back to Hal and Kyle.

But as horrifying as I'd find the loss of the museum...how worse would it be if the memorials were of people I knew and remembered. If these paltry little items were all that was left beside my own memories. All treasured and displayed with all the love and emotion I never showed them.

And to have it destroyed with his own *power*. Without even a nod afterwords. It's monstrous. And even moreso that we never saw what happened when this sank in. When he realized what was lost.

I mean if nothing else, last we heard in Warrior, his mom was living upstairs, ya know.

I know the loss of objects doesn't compare with the loss of people, but when you've got something like a museum. Like an exhibit. Like a memorial. The objects take on much much more meaning than that. They become important in their own right. Like the Museum has for me, Warriors had to have seemed almost like its own entity to the characters in the comics.

Its "death" deserved a lot more respect.