Okay, so given that Zoat's planning to release some spoilers here shortly, I guess I'll get my thoughts out of the way now so I can participate in that discussion, maybe append a spoilered section to the end if he posts before I do. Who knows?
So, to start; the main conflict of this arc is Nabu of Cilia.
Jamie's done a lot to convince me he's not as awful as I thought, but I'm American, and therefore have a huge cultural... thingy... about personal freedom. Ultimately, I don't know that I'd have reacted any different to OL given the same circumstances. Was what he did right? I think so. It would have been better to separate Dr. Fate, and maybe I'd have worked more towards that end, but killing him wouldn't have bothered me any more than it does OL. I'm very much an "in-group" kind of guy, and I have an escalation problem. I don't see his thought process as too alien, really, which I guess makes me a bit alien, but I knew that.
That said, in Nabu's position, I'd have done what he did too, at least up to a point. Of course, our differing personal philosophies mean I'd rather have died a long way back than end up as a helmet reliant on others to have agency, but assuming I got there by my own choices somehow, yeah, I'd have held someone hostage. Probably Wally, though. I doubt I'd have been as trusting as Nabu was there. Definitely Zatanna, if I'd let Wally go by some miracle. I wouldn't have traded her for her father, sworn by magic or no. Of course, I'd be working on a way to separate us and let me work on my own, likely via golem, but I'm just a fundamentally different person from Nabu, and putting me in his shoes would always result in me leaping out of them as soon as possible. It's hard for me to condemn his individual actions, but his pattern of actions leaves me little sympathy for him, as I see his problems as self-wrought.
So then, we come to the actual episode, and the plan.
This episode, in my opinion, is kind of a wreck. That's not really Zoat's fault though. Well, mostly. Let's break it down.
A lot of this rests on the idea that Nabu's treatment in the series is a large part of what lead Zoat to write With This Ring, alongside a love of DC, and rational uplift fiction in general, so if I'm wrong here, my argument kind of falls apart.
Okay, so I think Zoat's a pretty excellent writer, and that's a large part of his problem. He set this story arc up years ago, and he's got a lot of passion for it, but ultimately, he's just too good for this plotline. It's not believable in the setting he's created. (Hell, it wasn't believable in vanilla YJ.) Trying to continue with it is straining his fic, because the internal logic, which otherwise runs rather smoothly, grinds to a halt as he tries to include it. This may have become apparent to him over hundreds of small updates, but if so, they were too numerous to go back to attempt to fix. A flaw in his posting style? Perhaps.
I've seen a lot of accusations that the League get poor treatment, or are 'put into storage' when offscreen, and I think this is why. As much as Zoat may wish to develop these characters, if he goes too far with it, the Nabu situation loses any semblance of sense it currently retains. That's not really a good reason to avoid 'properly' characterizing the League, but if you hold that fixing this plot thread was part of the point of WTR, then you start to see why he'd do it anyway. If he gave them the same treatment he gives other characters, proper motivations, sensible backstories, self-consistency, it would just naturally butterfly the Nabu situation away. Why?
Because the Nabu situation is bad writing, and Mr. Zoat just isn't a bad writer.
So we can see why he'd hold the Justice League back, leashing them more to canon than other parties in the fic. What about his bizarre habit of skipping stuff?
Well, the most egregious example, at the end of the fight with Nabu, I'd have actually liked if it occurred during a different fight. It makes sense for him to get knocked out at some point in his career, after all, but I think a fight built up for years was a poor choice for it. So why do it?
Well, one thing I've noticed about Zoat's writing across the story is that he doesn't handle emotionally driven decisions very well. He's simply too reasonable. I mean, he practically pioneered a way to tell us what characters were feeling in their dialogue without having to show them acting on it. I think the colored text is kind of genius, personally, but I'm a more logically driven person myself, and emotion's pretty opaque to me. Having it displayed there is a huge help to me, but it's maybe not the best for actually learning to express emotion via believable character action.
(Additionally, OL's empathy vision fills the same role. Show a character's feelings via shorthand. You'll note, though, that he usually has it toggled off, and so Zoat doesn't have to consider emotional motivations too often.)
I think that OL had to fall into a coma here so that Zoat could come at the situation from a more reasoned, less emotional perspective. The emotional responses a more temporally fresh league might portray may be outside his comfort zone. At first, this seems disproved, since the league initially only learns of the situation much later, barely before they speak to OL, in fact. But, imagine if they'd found out as it was happening, or just at the last moment, too late to stop it? Much more interesting, narratively, but there's practically no way to avoid an all-out brawl believably. That's an issue, because it means that when OL returns to the Earth, when Zoat actually intends to deal with most of the fallout, those involved would still be pissed. Hell, they may not have let him leave in the first place. This way, everyone will have calmed down, and we can talk about it as reasonable people.
The problem, of course, is that that's super unsatisfying. We've built up this huge emotional investment, and instead of an explosive catharsis, we get a leaky balloon, to be revisited and dissected after it's already fully deflated. But I just don't see how it could be anything else.
We actually see this on a smaller scale with the debrief. We skip Wonder Woman's reaction, and the League's as a whole to the 'supervillain' comment, perhaps the most emotionally charged remark made. In fact, the League gets very little chance to respond at any point, because Batman drives the debriefing continually forward, while OL does a mic drop and walk off at the end.
Even when Diana comes back to talk to him in the most recent update, OL shuts her down rather than participate in an emotionally charged discussion.
This is also why I suspect we'll never see Zoat write an extended League focused meeting on the situation, when OL isn't present.
A lot of people are arguing that it must be mind control, but I really disagree. I think that's certainly a way to resolve this, but it wouldn't be much more satisfying than what we've gotten already because when it comes time for the emotional payoff, we'd run into the same issues we've seen across the course of the fic, and which I've discussed above. It simply won't be satisfying.
Of course, I could be wrong, but even if I'm not, I'll keep reading. I genuinely enjoy this story, and Zoat's style and writing. It's simply that no one's perfect, and that's okay.
What do you guys think? I'm not expecting Mr. Zoat to respond in depth, because anything he could say is too much into spoiler territory, but I'd love to hear what you think.
tl;dr No. Learn to read. I'm not holding your hand.
