Follow TV Tropes

Following

Fridge / Teen Titans

Go To

Fridge Brilliance

  • At ScansDaily there is a posting about Nightwing and Starfire's almost wedding in Teen Titans during the lead up to it Dick Grayson was acting uncharacteristically dick-like and controlling. However his behavior makes scene when you consider he had been Bed Tricked into sleeping with Mirage and Kory breaking up with him because of it was the catalyst for him proposing. He was probably suffering from PTSD after being raped and having the woman he loved blame and leave him for it. He wanted to marry her because that was the only way he could think of to keep her from leaving him.
  • Starfire's species evolved from cats, right? Guess the apple didn't fall that far from the tree.
  • Raven's powers being fueled by her emotions? Either mere fuzzy logic as is normal for comic or EPIC-scale foreshadowing, more than a decade in advance, of the whole Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum plot device in Green Lantern post-2005.
    • Given the era of her introduction, there's also a Star Wars element to it. The more she draws on strong emotions, the easier it's going to be to stop listening to reason and start listening to "daddy's" influence.
  • The Titans, as far as power levels go, aren't as strong as the Justice League, aren't as experienced as the Justice Society of America, and even some lineups of Doom Patrol could probably overpower them. But when the Titans do have to go up against any of them, they end up holding their own. The Titans have a degree of teamwork and loyalty to one another that will put every other hero team to shame, as aptly shown when Nightwing called every living past and present Titan to show up in a fight against Dr. Light.
    • Likewise, the closest they came to a Total Party Kill? That took Terra infiltrating them from within, gaining their trust, becoming part of that teamwork, and then handing them over to her employers.
  • The unshakable teamwork aspect to the Titans also explain a lot about how and why Dick turned out differently from Bruce. Bruce has contingency plans for everything, up to and including keeping kryptonite on his person to kill his best friend if he has to. Bruce also spent most of his formative years all but alone. The idea of betrayal never leaves his mind, and therefore he doesn't trust anyone fully (Alfred is possibly the only real exception). Dick spent his formative years among the Titans, sometimes as the only Badass Normal the team had, and yet the one with the most experience in the hero business (well, aside from Beast Boy, who would never want a leadership job anyway). They were all Child Soldiers who had to have complete trust and faith in one another because their mentors were usually awful at the parenting job.
  • In the Bronze Age lineups, Cyborg had some hard struggles adjusting to being rebuilt with cybernetic parts. Beast Boy was the most consistent at listening to him and trying (as only Beast Boy can) to remind him that things weren't as bad as it seemed. Remember Beast Boy's first team? Yeah, Gar's heard it before, because Cliff (Robotman) Steele had the same reaction to being put into a fully robotic body. Victor's transformation, while very extensive, wasn't nearly as awful as Cliff's.

Fridge Horror

  • Due to Felicia Henderson and/or the editors of Teen Titans, the other Titan members have no clue nor seem like they care that Kid Eternity was kidnapped and ultimately killed off, by the Calculator via forcing him to constantly revive/summon/create a duplicate of his dead son Marvin.
    • In a recent crossover with Red Robin, they find out. Based on Wonder Girl's utter fury, I'd say they care a great deal.
  • The original five Titans are all survivors of some pretty horrific abuse:
    • Robin eventually grew apart from Batman, resenting Bruce's manipulation of him as a child. Both characters have since reconciled, but it's difficult not to view Robin's training as Bruce making him a child soldier.
    • Aqualad's relationship with Aquaman grew increasingly strained as it became clear that the latter prioritized both the League and Atlantis over his other relationships, contributing to the deaths of Aquagirl and even Aquaman's own infant son.
    • Kid Flash was both on the receiving and the giving end of this, with Raven using her powers to gaslight him into a fake romance so he'd join her iteration of the Titans, and Kid Flash later pressuring Magenta into becoming a hero while ignoring her nascent mental illness.
    • Wonder Girl's professor, ten years her senior, romances and marries her while she's barely of legal age. At best this is inappropriate, but it's difficult not to look at this as grooming.
    • Which just leaves Speedy, the recipient of the worst of it. After Green Arrow's neglect leads Speedy into drug use, Arrow beats Speedy in-panel for being an addict. He would later have a romance with the established assassin Cheshire, culminating in the birth of a daughter. Paying attention to the timelines strongly suggests Speedy was in his mid-teens while Cheshire was an adult.
    • In context of the above, the Titans acting like Terra was the real villain of the Judas Contract makes for some more fridge horror, as none of the core five had the emotional distance from their own abuse to recognize Slade's grooming of Terra.

Fridge Logic

  • The first issue of the New 52 series has Tim holding a picture of him and Bruce swinging through Gotham. It looks cool, until you question how he even got that picture. Seriously, did they pose for it? It outright looks like a comic book cover.
  • Given how seriously Amazons treat the crime of sexual assault, why didn't Donna call Mirage on the carpet for what she did to Donna's de facto brother?

Top