52/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< 52


  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: Alas, poor Osiris!
  • Complete Monster: Bruno Mannheim, Chang Tzu, and Lex Luthor are the three unapologetic villains of the series, other villains have redeeming (or at least pitiful) qualities, or are so far outside our ken as to be unclassifiable.
  • Crazy Awesome: The climax of the series is a time traveling glory hound saving the universe from a giant alien butterfly with glasses who inadvertently creates a multiverse by eating time. In space. This is why we read comics, folks.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Oh, so many. As an ensemble piece with multiple plots there are individual Crowning Moments for each character as they each triumph in their own stories.
  • Fan-Disliked Explanation: The original plan for the Booster Gold/Skeets subplot involved fixing the timestream, which had become broken during the recent crisis, and this is hinted at by the discrepancies in Skeets' history files starting in the first issue. However, the writers eventually decided that this plot was too generic and had been done far too often with other time traveling heroes, so they instead had Skeets possessed by Mr. Mind who planned to eat reality. However, with this shift, they never do get around to explaining why Skeets has these initial memory errors, since they occurred before Mr. Mind had ever left the cocoon.
    • In general, this series was intended to explain a lot of things that were depicted in DC's concurrent "One Year Later" event, in which DC's books took up the story exactly one year after Infinite Crisis to show that many things had occurred differently. However, the writers of 52 ended up ignoring a lot of these in favour of their own stories, meaning that some of these (such as, in Batman comics, the events that saw Commissioner Gordon re-instated and his successor resign in disgrace) have still not been explained.
      • Of course, this might have been for the best, as getting into every reason things were different in during "One Year Later" would have been incredibly boring and / or hard to follow. Countdown to Final Crisis proved that (even if the things they did were in canon with Final Crisis & everything else, it would still have been horribly tedious).
  • Growing the Beard: Could be seen as this for several of the main characters, such as Will Magnus and (with a literal beard) Ralph Dibny.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Several of The Question's lines take on a new meaning once you find out he is dying from cancer and knows it. This line in particular from Renee is especially wince-worthy.

"I swear before this is over I'm gonna hold his dead body in my hands."

  • Magnificent Bastard: Ralph Dibny of all people. Cross him and you lose. It is that simple.
  • Memetic Mutation: Three panels of Will Magnus looking at a page of "machine code" has been photoshopped in a bunch of funny ways.
  • Narm: By the writers own admission, their original plans for killing Booster Gold came off as hilarious instead of traumatic and they had to rewrite the scene several times in order to arrive at a scenario that had both the impact and the solemnity they wanted.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: The Natasha Irons/John Henry split was written with the intention for both sides to have legitimate points that each would realize over the course of the series, but when a page was re-drawn to display more cleavage it actually derailed the writers' plans. The scene, which featured Natasha welding her own suit of armor, was scripted as her wearing full welding gear as a standard safety precaution. When she was drawn without the gear (so that a close-up could focus on her chest), she burned herself when she struck an air pocket. This small change made her somebody who really was unprepared for the responsibility of Powered Armor, since she did not even have the forethought to take proper precautions in the controlled environment of a lab. The authors were not happy with this change, as they felt it undermined a large part of the story.
  • Tear Jerker: See C-List Fodder, particularly The Question's lingering death.
    • Isis' death in the arms of her husband. The fact that she had been broken so utterly that she admitted that she was wrong... just gets to you.
    • Skeets telling Booster Gold that he (Skeets) was proud of him, just before Skeets had to be sacrificed to stop Mr. Mind.
  • Thirty-Sue Pileup: Isis. And given what happens to her later, this was in all likelihood completely intentional.
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