It has been a while since I wrote a blog without the benefit of the roundtable crowd. This has been as a result of a longish road trip, having to figure out how to become a moderator here, and just slowly getting back into comics. By this point I have cut my pull list rather substantially from the early days of the new 52 when I was reading seemingly everything. I guess as sometimes happens when looking for something to write about, that it is possible to think too hard, and in this case I guess I have been doing so for a few weeks, just trying to wrap my head around something. Only today I caught up with Green Lantern New Guardians, and it occurred to me something which I hadn’t noticed much before, and that is the ring’s ability to make accurate yet somewhat faulty predictions based on some sort of numerical formula. If I remember correctly the same concept occurred towards the end of the War of the Green Lanterns when the rings inform the Earth Lanterns that their chances of victory are almost zero. The same happens here with the Reach’s attack on Odym:
I feel generally speaking that this is a pretty weak plot device or concept. It is not too different from what happens in Star Wars with C-3P0 indicating seemingly pre-ordained losses. In Star Wars though it worked more as a running joke, but even then it was never really necessary to hear the odds against the characters – one of the things which make heroes into heroes and into our favourite characters is that they go in regardless of the odds and do their best. Hearing the odds reduced to a percentage for sort of makes this a bit less impressive. For instance in this case I am led to believe that Kyle and company have a 2.6% chance of victory, but really to make it more heroic, I want it to seem a lot more like a 0% chance of victory.
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