YMMV / New 52

• Angst Aversion:
  • Specific storylines:
    • "Death of the Family" has The Joker hogging the spotlight and being improbably successful after some time out of the spotlight and the Bat Family falling apart.
    • "The Pearl" ended with Damian's death and members of the Bat Family mourning him-plus Batman getting another Wangst period during which he gave the most violent Never Be a Hero speech to someone ever.
    • "The Culling" tossed the Teen Titans into a super-powered Battle Royale situation which they (and two other teams) barely survived.
  • The Superman/Lois Lane Ship gets torpedoed, while the Superman/Wonder Woman relationship devolves from "super-powered couple which overcome problems by the power of trust" to "super-powered couple who can barely trust each other, with only a couple of Happier Times Flashbacks keeping them from being at each other's throats".
  • Supergirl, having been a Plucky Girl pre-reboot, now has enough angst to give Spider-Man a run for his money (and enough anger to become a Red Lantern). You can count the number of times she smiles on one hand.
  • The Blue Lantern Corps (which is powered by and represents hope) are wiped out.
  • Earth 2 Superman being a brainwashed Dragon-in-Chief to Darkseid... though he turned out to be a Bizarro instead.
  • Futures End: All of the victories of the heroes, all of their happiness, all of those beloved characters, will be killed and turned worthless and the triggers are coming ever-so-inexorably closer... and the time-travel shenanigans of the arc have not changed the chances of this future existing in any way whatsoever, except for some more super humans running around playing resistance.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Considered one for the DC Universe due to just how laughably bad the attempts were to be "dark and edgy". It barely clicked with the majority and was thoroughly mocked for its attempts to replace the old continuity. At best, it was commended for at least sticking with the idea and trying something new (not all of it was bad and some good stories came out of it), but it was obvious in the end that this wasn't the best direction to go for the company and was doing them more harm than good. DC wisely got the hint and brought things back to semi-normalcy with Rebirth which allowed the history of the previous continuity to return, kept some of the good parts of the New 52, re-injected some much needed levity to the comics again and re-railed a lot of the heroes' personalities back to their former selves.
• Broken Base: The reboot in general was very controversial when it was announced, and even years after it happened opinion was divided and discussions could get very heated about certain aspects of it. Overall, some fans consider it an interesting and fresh new take on the universe, while others consider it the return of some of the worst tropes from The Dark Age of Comic Books.
  • Superman and Wonder Woman as a couple, especially from the Clois, Wondertrev, and Wonderbat shippers. Those who like the relationship enough to at least give it a chance hated the brutal devolution it got in the arcs of the Superman and Superman/Wonder Woman comics.
  • Lois Lane exposing Superman's secret identity on the "Lies" arc in order to try to create a Blackmail Backfire against an unknown blackmailer who hadn't even asked much of Superman yet, let alone endangered him. The trouble the fans and reviewers have is that obviously the blackmailer would eventually use Superman to perform some evil act and/or endanger him... the question is whether or not it was a good idea, and if it was a good idea then whether or not she was too impulsive in going for said solution ASAP. The arc then has Superman's relationship with everybody else (especially Lois and including Wonder Woman) souring up harshly (everybody else wants to help and doesn't mind, but Superman is on the quick track to superhero Cowboy Cop and insisting that "I Work Alone"), the United States Government taking everybody he loves into custody (because one man wanting to have a secret identity means that those he worked alongside with on the Daily Planet must be members of his secret army wanting to conquer the world) and the Darker and Edgier piling up at a pace some people think is too hard and fast.
  • Now that some of these fan favorites have been incorporated into the New 52, opinions are divided regarding how these characters have been handled and whether or not the changes made to their histories work.
• Complete Monster: See The DCU.
• Continuity Lockout: With the near-constant Bat Family Crossover flow of the various Green Lantern comics from in the very least the beginning through "Godhead", it has become increasingly difficult to recommend the series to newcomers. Although this was already the case before, the common crossovers have become unending, especially with "Green Lantern" and "Green Lantern Corps", which some think may as well not be separate books at all for the amount of interconnecting they have. It was so bad that creators were confused. George Pérez quit writing for Superman because he had no idea what aspects of the character, especially with Action Comics (New 52), were in canon or not.
  "I became very frustrated," Perez added, explaining that there were basic questions about the character's new status quo that DC editorial couldn't answer for him. "Are the Kents alive? What's his relationship with all of these characters? Who exists? And DC couldn't give me answers. I said, 'Oh, my gosh. You're deciding all these things and you mean even you don't know what's going on in your own books?"
• Fandom Rivalry: Naturally the Marvel/DC fandom rivalry would continue, but New 52 was often pitted against Marvel NOW!, Marvel's own line-wide relaunch that debuted a year after. Unlike New 52, Marvel Now wasn't a reboot, just a relaunch, that made no changes to continuity but rather created a blank slate for creative teams to start "new chapters" for the franchises so new readers could get on board. The general reception to both tends to tip into Marvel Now's favour; Marvel Now succeeded in bringing in new readers and with some exception, didn't alienate older readers too much, with most criticism being aimed at the MCU synergy that caused some major changes. The greater range of tone, styles, and content also helped.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "The DCnU". A portmanteau of "nu DCU"
  • Nu-Image Comics due to the costume designs and the Darker and Edgier tone.
• The Firefly Effect: Dan Didio himself cited this as a major misstep in the New 52. He noted that it became company policy to cancel books once they went under 20,000 units per issue and launch new books to replace them. This created what he referred to as "the churn", where instead of resulting in the bad books being replaced with new, good ones, it just meant that DC was constantly having to replace low-performing books with similarly low-performing books, and over time, more and more books failed to hit that threshold. A full twenty-one of the original starting lineup of 52 books had been cancelled after two years, with six only making it to eight issues.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • A common gripe with the New 52 is that despite a large number of changes, the Continuity Lock-Out that was typical for the old DCU did not disappear, and many characters (such as Green Lanterns) still require extensive knowledge of their old DCU stories to understand what is going on, instead of having a fresh start. What made things even worse was that many older fans who would otherwise be immune to Continuity Lockout got confused as well, due to the fact that whatever continuity that had been retained was very hazily defined. For example, according to the new "superheroes debuted five years ago" compressed timeline, Batman started his career and took on all four male Robins within six years. In the end, all that it had accomplished was frustrating everyone.
  • Earth 2 has received this kind of complaint, since it started out as a different team of superheroes similar to those from the Justice Society of America fighting against the onslaughts of new villains and a different member of the forces of Darkseid, and turned into Batman's team vs. Superman's team.
  • The same can be said of the practice as of July 2014 to re-relaunch cancelled series under new creative teams, when one of the points made in the New 52 is that there are only 52 running books at once, taking space from newer ideas in an attempt to reboot a reboot.
  • There's been phenomenon referred to as 'House Style', where creative teams tend to make each book look and feel almost identical. Artwork tends to be similar to Jim Lee's art, colorists use the same techniques, and writers stick to writing and characterizing the heroes in a similar angsty way. Because of this, many feel that the bulk of the line-up isn't really bad, just boring because they all feel generic. The few books that succeed to escape this 'House Style', either by unique artwork, creative writing, or some combination, tend to get more interest online for actually being different.
• Old Guard Versus New Blood: The New 52 DC Universe has managed to be on both sides of this trope.
  • When it started, the New 52 was aimed at New Blood; it was massively alienating towards the existing fanbase but garnered new readership who liked the Darker and Edgier storytelling and reinventions of the characters. Unfortunately, it burnt more than it sowed, so readership numbers ultimately ended up in a net loss by the time DC You rolled in.
  • When DC Rebirth came in, New 52 became its own Old Guard. Though the former was ostensibly aimed at the Old Guard who had lost interest in the latter, it gained a number of new readers who were interested in the writing sensibilities that came back. As such, the New 52 fanbase butted heads with them.
• The Scrappy:
  • New Lobo was derided as an Edward Cullen knock-off, a straight version of what Lobo was created to parody, or, in the words of the the REAL Main Man himself, a "nancy boy bastich".
  • New 52's version of Tim Drake, who is In Name Only and considering how it's a false identity via the witness protection program, not even that. Doesn't help that both of the New 52's attempts at the Teen Titans (of which Tim is a member) are regarded as an Audience-Alienating Era.
  • The New 52's take on Jason Todd is not very well liked even among those that like the character as a whole, with many saying that in Red Hood and the Outlaws, he doesn't really seem to have grown from how he was back when he was killed off in A Death in the Family or from when he first came back from the dead (some "attempts" at development have been made, but whether or not any of them are convincing or well-written is contested). The fact that most of his appearances in this verse are written by Scott Lobdell (generally regarded as one of the worst writers working at DC at the time) just exacerbates this.
  • No one likes New 52's version of Mr. Freeze, due to removing his well-known tragic backstory of him wanting to save his wife, and replacing it with him being a crazed lunatic obsessed with a much older woman. Thankfully, DC Rebirth returned him to his sympathetic origin.
  • Wally West, who has been rebooted as a 12 year old delinquent and whose Race Lift is handled in a manner that, to many readers, smacks of White Man's Burden.
  • Harvest, for being an annoying Invincible Villain who just won't shut up about his Utopia Justifies the Means.
• Tainted by the Preview: Since DC released fifty-two first issues in one month, even people willing to buy all fifty-two #1s were unlikely to give anything they didn't like a second chance. (How many #2s are you going to buy of comics you already have a bad impression of? When there might be dozens of them?) Ergo, any writer who put something controversial in the first issue, expecting readers to stick around for justification in later issues, was making a grave mistake. Several of the series died due to their first issue not being as good as later ones.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The announcement of the relaunch drew a very large amount of vitriol from a lot of people. To this day, the base is still broken on whether the relaunch is still good or not.
  • One of the reasons for this reaction was that quite a few titles suffered from an Aborted Arc in their cancellations - although most of them wrapped up fairly smoothly, there was still a small forest of dangling plot threads left behind, presumably now never to be resolved.
  • The fact this line abolished the Underwear of Power trait of the main DCU was also controversial.
  • One of the most controversial examples of this in fandom is giving The Phantom Stranger a definitive origin.
  • Lobo's new, Twilight-esque design has not gone over well with fans.
  • Mr. Freeze's backstory's alterations have come under fire, partially because they screwed up his Tragic Villain background, and partially because, in the original, the Corrupt Corporate Executive who caused all the problems was a disgusting asshole who was just such a good liar and fake that everyone loved him. Both the original episode of Batman: The Animated Series and the adaptation of it in Batman: Arkham Origins were highly praised, and the episode won an Emmy. So, what did they do? Changed it so that, instead, it was Bruce Wayne and have it that Mr. Freeze was delusionally in love with a random frozen woman. Even most of the people who like the New 52 harshly panned this change!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The rebooted Birds of Prey introduced the character of Starling (real name: Ev Crawford). Starling was a rarity: a breakout character from the New 52 era, a quick shot with a gun, a devil-may-care attitude, and cool tattoos. Plus, she was a bisexual character, and the reboot was supposed to be more diverse in its character roster. Starling became a fan favorite... so naturally, she was revealed to be a traitor in 2013, tossed into comic book limbo, and has been forgotten ever since.
  • Artemis, a popular character from the (still airing at the time) Young Justice (2010) cartoon, was introduced and killed in the space of an issue of the Teen Titans/Legion Lost/Superboy crossover "The Culling". The final issue of the first run of Teen Titans reveals Artemis and every other teen murdered during, before and after the events of the Culling were revived and had their powers (if they had any) removed. That being said, Artemis has not been seen since anyway.
  • Much of the supporting cast of Green Arrow was Put on a Bus for the better part of a storyline, so as to introduce Felicity Smoak and Mia Dearden into the New 52 reality, as part of an effort to make the book more appealing to fans of the old series as well as Arrow. Once that arc was over, Felicity, Mia and all of the supporting cast except for hacker Fyff and Ollie's half-sister Emiko were similarly Put on a Bus.
• Uncertain Audience: A major issue with the era, as it turned out. There were three main groups it tried to appeal to: the existing fanbase, a fully new audience, and former or inactive fans. The existing fans were angry that the New 52 existed at all, especially since it had been sprung on them very abruptly to the point that the post-Crisis era never really got the sendoff it deserved. The lapsed fans weren't interested in jumping on board, either, since most of the things that would have driven them away from DC's prior status quo were still in place. And since the era kept a lot of old continuity, new fans found the era about as impenetrable as ever, not to mention bearing little resemblance to the cartoons and films that most prospective new fans cut their teeth on (i.e. a Teen Titans relaunch with none of the characters from the show in it).
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Quite a few of the redesigns, but especially Jim Lee's Justice League—and especially Jim Lee's Superman. The design's been blamed for seriously harming the Superman line, and the bizarre choices it makes (heavily armoring a character who's invulnerable, removing the Underwear of Power but not adding enough red or yellow to balance it out, excessive lines and seaming making it hard to draw and messy on the page, the weird Nehru collar and extended cuffs looking militaristic on a character who's really not supposed to have that vibe) have made it a fairly common example on the internet for what not to do when redesigning a character. After much pushing, his design was completely dropped after just three years, with none of the redesigns since taking much from it, and even people who like the era have claimed that Superman was easily the worst design in his own book. A fair number even wished that he'd kept the T-shirt and jeans in Action Comics, instead of "graduating" to his "modern" look—notably, when an alternate Superman clearly based on the New 52 version showed up in Sideways, he'd gone back to the T-shirt and jeans.

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