Headscratchers / Justice League S 1 E 18 And 19 Legends

• Something that came to me recently regarding Legends: everyone focuses on how John Stewart gets that 'you're a credit to your race son' line while missing a really big plot hole. When Stewart intervenes to prevent the theft of that rare violin the bad guy comments on how 'well change your costume but I can still tell it's you Green Guardsman'. Now tell me, it's a 1950s style setting and he can't tell that this obviously BLACK man isn't his obviously WHITE opponent he's fought many times? That the only thing he notices is the difference in costumes? Not that the guy's a young, very black bald man and not a very white middle-aged white-haired man.
  • The Green Lantern rings have frequently been shown to be able to disguise their bearer; changing how they look, including the color of their skin, apparent age, and even gender. I'll admit it's odd that he only comments on the costume and not everything else, but I'll wager he's seen the Guardsman desguise himself before for other purposes, and just assumed it was more ring trickery.
  • Actually he didn't just comment on the costume. The villain's exact words were "Your disguise can't fool me, Green Guardsman!"
  • And, let's face it, in this world, it's highly unlikely that a hero essentially dressing in blackface would be either out-of-the-question or seen as that remarkable beyond a disguise.
• Why did Ray get treated as the villain? At first, they just thought he was the only one left and somehow creating an illusionary enviornment, which isn't exactly evil. Sure, it's shown later that people were being forced into roles against there will, but the Leagues reactions indicate they didn't know that before.
  • He's lying to them and putting them in mortal danger for his own thrills. Even if there was nobody else on the planet, and he wasn't harming anybody before, as soon as the League arrived he began attacking them without regard for their well-being.
  • Also, they did talk to the ice-cream man and it was very clear that he was terrified of whoever was responsible. The JL aren't stupid - what he was doing to the other survivors wasn't hard to figure out.
• One thing has bugged me with this episode. The final battle of the ep is against Ray, who defeats 4 members of the Justice League (and some of the stronger ones at that) with hardly any effort on his part or damage thanks to his reality warper mental powers and barrier that can shrug off Green Lantern's ring blasts and Hawkgirl's mace like it's nothing. However, the headscratcher comes when the Justice Guild decides to take him out, and each of them hurt Ray with their every blow, and Ray is hardly even able fight back, including Black Siren and Catman, who, like Batman are just Badass Normals, they shouldn't have even been able to make him flinch if the League couldn't do it. Why were the Justice Guild doing so much better than the League especially since their Let's You and Him Fight earlier in the episode established that both teams are roughly equal in power? Not to mention, why didn't Ray simply blink the Guild out of existence with a thought since he created them, recreating them later once the League was dealt with?
  • The thing about the Justice Guild is they weren't just beating him with straight up strength. They were beating him because they were something he created and cared about and which he didn't want to hurt—the Justice League were something he didn't want in his world, while the Justice Guild are something he set up the entire world for. They were effective against him because, deep down, he didn't want to hurt them.
  • Heck, it may go even deeper than that - it wasn't just that he didn't want to hurt them, it's that he literally could not imagine beating them. After all, they're his mind's image of the Justice Guild and, in his mind, the Justice Guild always win in the end. As J'onn said, it was the strain of the attacks that brought him down, and that kind of contradiction seems like it'd do exactly that.
  • It's a safe bet that Ray's powers, like many psychics in fiction, are based off/fueled by willpower. Being attacked by his heroes would be a major blow to his ability to focus which could be why he wasn't able to defend himself from them, as opposed to just holding them at bay with a barrier.
  • There's also the tactics they used to consider. The League would attack one at a time, and wait for him to shrug it off before their next attack. The Guild, on the other hand, would distract him or catch off guard, (such as when he was fending off another attacker, or recovering from a previous attack), before eventually mob rushing him and attacking all at once. Their combined efforts, plus the thought of his heroes and creations attacking him, was what pushed him to his limits.
  • Ray must have known on some level that what he was doing to the other survivors was wrong. He hid that behind walls of denial and rationalization, which cracked when the League heroes intruded into his world and dug up the truth. Once Ray could no longer deny that he was the villain in this scenario, he simply couldn't imagine his heroes not confronting and defeating him, so that's what happened.
• What's going to prevent Ray from recreating his world after he wakes up?
  • He's not waking up.
• Tom Turbine says that he hasn't been able to find an energy source to power up his interdimensional machine. Did he never think to ask Green Guardsman to use his energy beams? They're pretty similar to GL's, whose powers were able to power up the machine in the end.
  • Tom Turbine and Green Guardsman are ultimately Ray's creations. Trying to build an interdimensional portal is the sort of thing he imagines his heroes doing, but he doesn't want to actually deal with people from some other dimension. Thus, they keep going through the motions without accomplishing anything, rather like the activities of the survivors like the ice-cream truck driver.
  • Considering that the interdimensional portal still existed after Ray was defeated and with it all his recreations, the reason it's there is because Tom Turbine was actually working on it before the world was destroyed but ran into the same problem. It's likely Tom only got that far before the world was blown up. Ray probably knew about it, but recreation Tom never figured out how to get it working because Ray didn't want to. It's also possible Tom never figured it out because Ray himself couldn't figure it out. Ray's Justice Guild and their counterparts the Injustice Guild ultimately are flawed idealized recreations with the survivors also forced to play those roles, hence why they all act like Golden Age comic book characters instead of acting like real people. Ray's recreations aren't going to be able to do or know things that Ray himself doesn't.
• Here's a question regarding the opening: why did Batman have to be there? What was so special about what was powering Luthor's mecha that they needed a Batarang? Granted, Green Lantern was still out cold, but why couldn't Hawkgirl just hit it with her mace or Superman just punch it, considering he was the one who ripped open the hole in the first place?
  • That's a question with Batman around superbeings in general, in cartoons and the comics. In actual fights against anything the league as a whole is needed for Batman tends to be pretty useless at actually fighting against it. Like in Paradise Lost he can't do anything against Hades but throw completely ineffective exploding batarangs at him which really is just an act of defiance or at best a distraction. Hence why the cartoon and comics usually have Batman as the planner, functioning as a distraction, and/or sabotaging things or dealing with a few mooks rather than have him actually fight anything.
• Why didn't Ray reimagine himself as a superhero? He wanted to be one, given his line about becoming one when he grows up.
  • Being an adult superhero means responsibility and Ray is despreately clinging to his childhood to avoid dealing with the horrific trauma he suffered. He imagines himself as a kid, who is pals with superheroes and can participate in their adventures, but doesn't have any personal responsibility above that of a kid.
  • He was also a kid at the time the nuclear war happened. He might have thought that he was too young to be an actual superhero. And as he grew up, he clung to his childhood even more strongly.