u/bookhead714

These characters, from the two-parter A Better World, are the best "evil" superhero designs I have ever seen.

First off, they're just so slick. Let's get the je ne sais quois out of the way. They look awesome. Even in isolation, I have never seen a better alt-universe Superman look, much less all the rest of them. Batman is my favorite.

Another part is how they're not obviously evil. They look more sinister than the Justice League we're used to, but their designs read as heroic without that context. They're still convinced that they're the good guys, and they genuinely are still trying to look like good guys.

Instead, just little bits have changed. The darker colors do a lot. But something really interesting is how nearly all of them whose normal costumes show a bit of skin covers up more of it than usual; Martian Manhunter is wearing a full bodysuit now, Hawkgirl no longer has bare arms, Wonder Woman has pants. And Superman has gloves. Which is huge.

Superman should never wear gloves. His bare hands are a massively underrated part of his design that contribute immensely to him looking approachable and friendly. He is able to touch you, to hold your hand, to dry your tears, and lift you up. Putting gloves on him and covering up those universal signs of humanity is the easiest way to make him look more authoritarian. And if you realize this, you can see it clearly; basically every non-good Superman elseworld or pastiche, from Red Son to Homelander to Omni-Man to Metro Man, wears gloves.

But my absolute favorite part is the subtle similarities in their costumes. Whereas the original Justice League's supersuits are solely informed by personal expression, with each person just bringing whatever outfit they used before joining up, the Lords have a unified design language. Parallel bands on their arms and legs, the accent color on their upper chest and shoulders, the three-part belt. They are no longer free and able to decide their own looks, but now are wearing uniforms. Even they are being repressed by their own autocratic decisions. It's such a good little touch that resonates so well with the writing of the episode, with how unhappy these characters are.

We can actually prove how excellently unified the Lords' designs are by referring to a canonical bad example: the Flash in image 3. Those aren't the real Lords, they're androids created by Lex Luthor/Brainiac to mess with the Justice League's heads, and because the actual Lords don't have a Flash (he's dead), Luthor/Brainiac had to come up with a design for the android. And he didn't do a very good job. He missed a few of those elements of their shared design language — forgetting the upper chest accents and the belt — and it messes up the whole team's visual cohesion. The designs are so carefully balanced that changing just one bit of coloring and the dang belt can screw the whole thing.

So yeah. The Justice Lords are written exceptionally well, and their designs are just as good.

Anakin Skywalker (the movie version) is unbearable to watch.

Almost every word he speaks is atrocious, both written and performed in the most awkward way possible. “From my point of view the Jedi are evil!” is perhaps my most despised line of dialogue in all of cinema. His arc is strange and muddled, beginning as a joyful personality-less child and evolving between films into a murderous fascist creep that everyone still seems to love for no reason. Characters around him insist that he is “strong and wise” and “a great Jedi” when he demonstrates nothing but disturbing villainy except in the opening half-hour of the final movie in his trilogy. His relationship with Padmé is completely barren of character or reason for them to like one another, stripping Padmé of most of her personality and agency to the point that this strong-willed pacifist senator just glosses over his open authoritarian sympathies and his LITERAL GENOCIDE cuz he’s pretty. The one person who dislikes him is Mace Windu and fans despise that guy, calling him “everything wrong with the Jedi” as if distrusting an obviously unstable and violent manchild is somehow unreasonable. And his ultimate turn to the Dark isn’t so much a turn as it is pitching himself headfirst off a cliff, going from “please teach me how to save my wife” to completely losing his mind and butchering thousands of his former friends and family in minutes flat because the total destruction of the Jedi Order needed to be rushed through in montage form so we could get to the really important bit of an overlong lightsaber smacking festival that tricked everyone into thinking it’s sad because the setting is visually interesting and John Williams’s score is fighting as hard as it possibly can to drown out the emotionless choreography.

My hatred for him is a little exaggerated by spite after years of hearing people raise him up as some great achievement of writing, but I’m afraid I truly hate this weirdo. I rewatched these movies recently and found myself wondering how I ever liked him as a kid (it’s because of the Clone Wars, he’s way better there).