I'm Annoyed

Actually, I'm pissed, but that looked too weird in the title spot. And the cause of it all is Judd "What the hell does he think he's doing?" Winick.

For the record, I still don't have a problem with the Wedding Special. And like Sally, I can rationalize and/or forgive a lot. My suspension of disbelief is great. I'm a reader who happily falls into a story and the writer has to push me out. No need to coax me in. I'm there, baby. Which is why things I've been reading about JW are all the more troubling. I am starting to feel betrayed.

According to Sally, in an interview I think I won't be reading in deference to my blood pressure (which is normal and I'd like to keep it there), Winick actually planned to kill Dinah, before settling on Ollie. Up to this point, I was readily accepting that, as you regular readers will recall, Dinah couldn't take Ollie down any other way. A plot device to spur on the new series, to be sure, but okay, I was willing to play along. No more.

Because I'm getting the feeling Winick has told us two important things about himself. He's a jerk, and he thinks we're idiots.

...

Okay, I lied. I went and read the interview. And you know what? My blood pressure is still normal. I just can't figure out what or whose side I am on this. The only thing I know for sure is that Winick's writing can't support his ideas. His execution, pardon any pun there, falls short of the goal line. It stinks, to be blunt.

Here's what he said:

"Yeah. We all came to the same conclusion around the same time, that it was going to be her, but it just became such a more interesting dynamic when it was Ollie who got it in the end. Ollie killing Black Canary and then hunting for the truth – there was something about it that didn’t feel right to me, and when Dan and Mike and I were talking, we came to the conclusion that we wanted Black Canary to carry the story forward from there. Dinah losing Ollie felt like a different kind of terrible than Ollie losing Dinah.

And I kind of wanted to start the book from Black Canary’s perspective, and this was the best way to do it. It wasn’t a small decision – it was just “are we going to get their by land or by sea?” Different things, but we decided to go by sea, instead of by land."

On the face of it, it's pro-Dinah. It makes it sound as if he wanted to use her, the female character, to move things forward, rather than the guy. That should be a good thing. But his execution, the way Ollie dies, hinders rather than helps the cause. Losing Ollie was one thing; killing him and doing it the way she did, is quite another. If she'd struck a blow to the side of his head and he died, that would've been more fitting. But there wouldn't have been blood that way.

So, I'm going to get and read GA/BC. I'll go along with this for now. And I'll be wishing a better writer was at the helm, because a better writer could've done something great with this story idea. Someone like Gail Simone, perhaps, if such a plot appealed to her. Or Will Pfeifer, if he wrote it in the style of his Catwoman stories and not his Amazons Attack story.

I don't have time to try this myself right now, but it could be an interesting meme. Given the background, what they (writer and editor and head honchos) hoped to accomplish, how would you have handled it?

Or better, how would you have started the new series? What kind of bang would you have used, instead of killing one half of the couple in question? It's something I'm going to be thinking about as I read the opening arc.

But I'm still peeved. Because I feel like I'm being played. And that's something I don't take kindly to. But you know, as bad as Winick might be as a writer, for me, he has never written anything as insipid as Jodi Picoult's arc on Wonder Woman.