I haven’t watched the new film by Bruce Timm, save for a clip but it feels like superhero television and cinema are beginning to resemble where superhero comics have been at since the 1990s. You have a growing acceptance of shock content and edgier versions of children’s characters.
I bet that the people watching Arrow and The Flash did grow up with superheroes at one point or another. Even if you disagree but that doesn’t cancel out the existence of prior superhero programmes like Superboy, The Adventures of Lois and Clark and Smallville.
Not to mention stuff like Spawn, Wildcats and The Tick were on the telly before. There was even a Spawn movie before, followed up by the Joel Schumache Batman, Blade and X-Men movies. Many of them emerged in an environment where superhero comics were increasingly very niche and self-conscious.
Roughly two decades later, we’re seeing edgier and sleazier versions of these characters. So far in the Gods and Monsters movie, there’s a red-haired white clad Wonder Woman. There was one character closely resembling her in the comics and her name is Artemis.
Not to mention a morally dubious Superman and vampiric Batman were there before in the comics as well. You have the Hank Henshaw evil Superman, Superboy Prime and Bizarro. In hindsight, Bruce Timm was also a fanboy turned professional.
He’s not a bad one as he’s able to make that stuff appealing to the masses and did a good job at it. Later producers like Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim are living in very close proximity with the fanbase if it weren’t for the nature of the Internet these days.
Superhero programmes are beginning to become blatant in their fan pandering. Fan pandering was there before but not to the same degree it is today. The Olicity ship was a fandom couple turned canon because some of the fans demanded it.
Even if other, albeit older programmes came close to it that didn’t come to fruition. Chloe Sullivan is a similar blonde hacker who dated the protagonist for a while but ended up marrying another man who is coincidentally the protagonist on Arrow.
As what somebody else said about her, though Felicity Smoak technically predated her in the comics Chloe Sullivan was more fully fleshed out than the former is because she didn’t come off as a plot device. Now with superhero oversaturation, it seems inevitable that if Flash and Arrow are ever going to catch up with their peers the best they can do is to be very shocking.
Just like what happened to the comics, the use of shock value has become a last minute attempt at getting noticed. Who cares if Supergirl became a Red Lantern, Superboy Prime did it before her. Superheroes getting amplified powers? Legion of Super-Heroes already did it before in the 60s and 70s.
In three decades time, nobody will give a damn if Felicity Smoak masturbated or not. Nobody would also give a damn about a depowered punk Barry Allen either. At this point, the overuse of shock value in superhero media is a sign that nobody really cares about superheroes and could be a sign that superhero fatigue has been working its way up since the 80s.