Green Lantern and What I Learned From 'The Blackest Night'
Recently I just wrapped up reading the main story line of 'The Blackest Night' event in DC Comics. The story centers around the Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, which is one of my favorite superheroes.
The basic premise of the story is that the emotional light spectrum (based around the ROYGBIV framework) has split. Where there is usually just the green light, powered by will, there is now lanterns for all of the aforementioned colors. Yellow is powered by fear, red by rage, blue by hope, orange by greed, violet by love, and indigo by compassion. This creates an imbalance, more or less, that realizes the prophecy of the "blackest night" which would extinguish all the light in the universe and end the chaos this splintering of the emotional light spectrum caused.
Long story short, this plot involved a lot of discussion of emotions, their causes, and their validity. Certain lanterns are obvious opposites of each other and an emotion like greed, turned up to 11 (so to speak), is just chaos. In the end though, all of the different colors are able to come together to end the rampage of the undead husks of the "Black Lanterns" that are destroying life all over the universe. They come to an understanding of each other at times, or at least an acceptance that for some, the power of their ring is the one controlling them, making them a single-minded embodiment of greed for example.
This was my big takeaway and my favorite element of this story line. People feel what they feel, we shouldn't judge them or assume anything about what they're feeling. Sometimes rage is the appropriate response to injustice. Sometimes hope is the hardest thing to do for someone. Sometimes fear can make good people do misguided things. In the end though, it furthered my love of the Green Lantern to know that no matter what else is going on, you just need to have the will to carry on because there are people that care about you and it gets better.
I highly recommend all of the Blackest Night story. It's action-packed, involves the whole DC Universe, and has this great undercurrent of emotional stuff. Check it out and let me know what you think!