Hey, do you remember Renaissance of Raven, that DC Universe Infinite webtoon/webcomic where Raven is sent back in time to save the kingdom of Galonia?
…
That’s ok, no-one else does either.
As noted philosopher, Mr. Peanutbutter in BoJack Horseman once said “What is this, a crossover episode?” And by that, I mean that writing this blog feels incredibly strange to me. If you’ll indulge my ego for a second, then I normally like to start off reviews by pretending that someone has asked me “Why are you reviewing this? Why is this interesting to you? Why is this worthy of the time and effort and being discussed?” Which is a little bit unrealistic, because I imagine that not a lot of people are very invested in what I review, and that’s probably my fault because I only review around five things a year, due to reasons colloquially known as ‘The Big Three’; laziness, depression, and being too busy playing RollerCoaster Tycoon Deluxe– that is not a joke answer, I just really sincerely enjoy it.
But another reason why it takes me so long to publish things, is because I don’t just have a blog that I only update five times a year despite permanently having ten reviews on the go at any given time. I also, ever since I was sixteen, have a fanfiction.net account that I also only update five times a year despite having ten stories on the go at any given time. And my specialty – although ‘specialty’ implies a level of skill which is misleadingly dishonest – is Teen Titans.
So… reviewing a Teen Titans series on here is not something that I ever expected to do. I’m not Linkara. I would be much more likely to write a Fix Fic than a review. But Renaissance of Raven has one hundred percent captured my interest – if you’re looking for a quote mine, DC, there it is “Renaissance of Raven has one hundred percent captured my interest – dopefishblog, 2025” – for a variety of reasons, but the primary, overarching one, is that…
It’s really, really bad. Like, you would not believe how bad this actual series is. And I’m writing this in the year that DC saw fit to commission and release a Harley Quinn fart fetish story. And I do not say this lightly, but I think Renaissance of Raven is actually considerably worse. There’s your second quote mine, DC; “The Harley Quinn fart fetish comic is even better than Renaissance of Raven!” I really just mean that it’s less offensively bad; I barely keep up with comics and even I know that DC have had no idea what to do with Harley for the last ten years. The fart story is probably less embarrassing for her than Heroes in Crisis was. Probably less embarrassing than Heroes in Crisis was for everyone involved in that story. But alas, I am getting off-topic.
So, I wanted to talk about Renaissance of Raven because a) It’s absolutely terrible, b) It’s absolutely terrible in ways that are so obvious that it’s amazing that no-one spotted the problems, but also c) It’s really underdiscussed? Maybe my Google search history has been manipulated by cookies – no judging, Google, I’m pretty easily manipulated by cookies as well – but if you look up “Renaissance of Raven” then you’ll find two interviews from just before and after the first few issues were released, and… then it’s pretty much straight onto just Reddit comments. And if I’m being honest, not even a lot of Reddit comments. I’ve genuinely seen two – and I’ve looked – discussing the series, and both of them were very negative. That’s the total amount of feedback that this series has gotten. So, maybe I also wanted the chance to talk in depth about something on the basis that it might actually show up when people look up feedback about the series.
I should probably have done an overview by now, so… the DC Comics – yes I know the ‘C’ also stands for Comics – subreddit does a weekly round-up of upcoming issues, and every week they post the same solicit for RoR – I hate calling it that because I always instinctively assume that people are talking about Record of Ragnarök – so here is what the story of Record of– God damn it, Renaissance of Raven is all about.
Raven needs an escape. Her fellow Titans won’t leave her alone, she just had a fight with Beast Boy, and to top it off, it’s the anniversary of her mom’s death. We find her trying to live life beyond the curse of her father. She’s over it! Raven is more than her trauma! When a strange girl in a graveyard proclaims that Raven is some kind of destined hero, she’s ready to walk away… until suddenly, she’s pulled through an enchanted portal…to the kingdom of Galonia. Raven is sent hundreds of years into the past, where she must contend with a cabal of witches and the difficult choice of helping those in need or returning home!
You got it? Good. Except for one problem; a lot of that brief summary is objectively wrong. And you know you’re in for a treat when even the summary of the story is lying about what happens in the story.
On the one hand, I would like to really get into the story more before I start delving into my critiques. But straight off the bat, I need to point out that this summary is incorrect. It is false. It contains a multitude of falsehoods that – while not actively lowering the quality of the work itself – really undermine any effort that DC may claim to have put into this. Because to be entirely clear, this is not “I believe that their description is wrong from a certain point of view,” territory. This is straight-up… they are describing things that don’t happen in the story? And I just think that that’s interesting in the sense that it reveals how much attention DC are paying to their works, and the amount of quality-control that goes into them.
“Her fellow Titans won’t leave her alone,” this just doesn’t happen. I don’t know how to explain the manner in which it doesn’t happen, because it simply just doesn’t happen. The story opens with Raven doing some training program in the gym while her friends cheer her on, and at no point does she think “Ugh, can’t these people just leave me alone?” Having read ahead, I’m surprised that she doesn’t think that, given her general opinion of her best friends/found family for life, but she just doesn’t. I guess the implication could be that them expecting her to show up for training, and her doing so without protesting, constitutes wanting them to leave her alone? She does have an argument with Beast Boy though, because he notices that she’s mopey and depressed and asks her what’s up, and she says “Ugh, go away,” so he keeps asking what’s wrong, so- look, if you’ve read any Teen Titans fanfiction, then you see this set-up about twenty-seven times a week, and each and every time it’s probably done better than it was here. Raven angrily blurts out-
-with all the grace and decorum of the line “He was in the Amazon with my Mom when she was researching spiders just before she died!”
“We find her trying to live life beyond the curse of her father. She’s over it! Raven is more than her trauma!” Oh, Jesus. Okay, so this is going to be a lot, and we’re going to come back to it later in a lot more detail, but… no, this is a complete fabrication. One of the major defining factors of Raven’s characterization in this story is that she is not over it, and she angsts constantly about whether she will ever be more than her trauma, which is especially grating because the Titans have fought Trigon multiple times, and she’s been a superhero for an estimated four-to-five years, so the idea that she’s still wondering “When I die, will all I amount to be my trauma?” after saving millions of people over the course of multiple years is just… what?
Also, no, that’s not me phrasing it badly, she literally says-
That’s just how she’s actually written. Consistently. Strap yourselves in, it only gets worse from here.
“-where she must contend with a cabal of witches and the difficult choice of helping those in need or returning home!”
She never makes this choice? Or maybe she does in the future, but I’m writing this as Issue #21 has just been released, and nope, she still isn’t making that decision; Raven is perfectly happy to stay in Galonia and help them out, she never once has a single thought of “Maybe I should just go home and leave these people to sort out their own problems.” It just doesn’t happen. As soon as she finds out things are happening in Galonia, she decides to stay, not least because her mother appears to have been there too. I really can’t stress that whoever wrote the solicit either did not read the story that they were describing, or they were actively lying to try to make it sound more interesting.
Writing the solicit by highlighting things that don’t happen until the tail-end of the story is also how I think they tried to get away with the whole “She’s over it! Raven is more than her trauma!” thing, because we can all agree, even though it hasn’t been released yet, that by the end of the story, Raven will have gotten over it, and she will be more than her trauma. But she one hundred percent is not over it at the start (even though she logically should be- did anyone who wrote this even know what her backstory is?) and… it’s just really weird to advertise a story by talking about the post-character-development personality that they’re going to have at the end of the story. Imagine picking up a Game of Thrones: Season One DVD – yes, DVD, not blu-ray, because I am ancient – and the blurb on the back reads “The Seven Kingdoms are in chaos following the execution of Ned Stark!” and then you watch the show, and sure enough, that happens at the end of Episode Nine. Of Ten. You would think “Who wrote this blurb?” And then when Season Eight happened, you would just think “Who wrote this?”
To briefly cover some of the things that actually do happen in the story, Raven is sent back to Galonia circa 1568, where magic is normal but only used by a specific few, because of a big crystal that was placed somewhere which prevents men from using magic, and that crystal looks a lot like the chakra on Raven’s forehead. But that crystal has begun to… leak, lately, so wizards are emerging, and also everyone has started using the word ‘seepage’, which sounds disgusting. It turns out that Raven’s mother Arella was also in Galonia at some point, so Raven is very curious about that and wants to stick around and find out what happened, what’s going on, why is there a mysterious statue of Arella outside the Bookbinders Dell, etc, with the help of cute blondy-brunette sword guy Denver. Halfway through the story, the rest of the Titans also get sent back in time.
But anyway, I want to go into this as unbiasedly as I can. Since I normally stick to video game reviews, I can put it this way; I can find positive things to say about Outlast II, Ride to Hell: Retribution; I’ve played Shaq-Fu and Hotel Mario and thought that they were both okay. Hell, I like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), so finding good things in practically objectively bad works is kind of my jam. So, even though I really don’t like Renaissance of Raven and don’t think it’s very good at all, I still feel that, in all fairness, I should take some time to go over, in detail, some of the things in the work that I liked. And I think that we all could use a reminder that even in the things we don’t like, we can admit where credit is due and effort deserves to be acknowledged.
So, if you want to get to the complaints, you might want to scroll down for a bit, because first, I need to do my duty as a reviewer and cover the parts of Renaissance of Raven that I think are worth giving credit to. So, let’s begin with that.
Things That Are Good About Renaissance of Raven
1) The Artwork
I think some of the artwork is pretty good.
End of List
…
Okay, okay, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from writing about some indie games, it’s that the developers of them can actually find your work. And it genuinely brings me so much joy to know that the developers of Moonglow Bay and Deleveled saw what I had to say about them, and were pleased to know that I loved their games. And… I’ve never written about comics before; I have absolutely no reference point for this, and I don’t know if Sina Grace is somehow going to find this. If I wrote a comic, I would be self-Googling myself and my comic constantly and I would get really upset if some British (objectively the worst nationality) dickhead tore it down on their shitty website that they only update once every three months.
So… I don’t really know if I would want Sina Grace to read this? I completely stand by all of the criticism that I am about to give, but I also… I don’t seek people out to force them to read my criticism? There’s a difference between being critical and being mean, and I don’t want to be mean. But sometimes, not being mean can actually be more mean, because… hey, do you remember twelve seconds ago when I did that “What was good about Renaissance of Raven? Number one, the artwork. Number two- just kidding, list over,” bit? Of course you do, it was hilarious. But it could also come across as a bit mean. But it comes across as meaner… if it’s not mean, because that means that I meant it. I completely meant that there are zero redeeming factors to this story, other than some of the artwork looking okay. Not even great, in my opinion, because artwork for a bad story can only be so good; it can’t elevate the story to a level of quality that it just doesn’t possess. And that’s the truth; I genuinely, wholeheartedly found nothing else enjoyable about the entire work.
And I’m not alone in that; look, all you need to do is look at the various governments in power across the world to conclusively prove that you should never place much stock in public opinion on anything, ever, because the public are bad and make bad decisions and have bad opinions. But the fact that Renaissance of Raven’s rating on League of Comic Books is-
I mean… those aren’t good numbers, no matter how you look at it. The poor attempt at comedic phrasing may not have helped, but it looks like my “Artwork okay, everything else just awful,” take is actually the prevailing opinion, based on the reviews of that issue, and only that issue, because League of Comic Books only covered Issue #1.
So, um… look, Sina Grace, if you’re here, I do not want this to sound or to feel hurtful; I would love to say that I’ve read your work on Iceman and loved it, but I haven’t, because I’m not only a fanfiction author; I also used to play Yu-Gi-Oh, which scientifically proves beyond all reasonable doubt that I can’t fucking read. (Future-Dopefish here; I was curious enough and I did read Sina Grace’s work on Iceman, and it is good! Shockingly, a gay man writing a story about a gay superhero and the trouble he has coming out to his parents, his friends, balancing his work life and personal life, is able to tap into a lot of material that feels sincere, heartfelt and realistic! And that same man can not write an angsty teenage girl with the same sincerity. Real mystery why that is.) But I have heard nothing but absolute positivity towards the quality of your work, the effort you put into it, the stories that you tell… and I don’t want this to take anything away from the well-earned success you have found. It’s just… this story kind of sucks, man. It’s really, really bad. I’m sorry. I think that this was out of your wheelhouse, and it didn’t really work for me, or anyone; except for that one person on League of Comic Books who just said “GOTH GIRL SUPREMACY!” and gave it four stars as soon as the first four issues came out. And honestly… mood.
Speaking of that though, I do want to get a disclaimer out of the way. It’s a bit weird as disclaimers go, but if anyone were to care enough to ‘debunk’ this, then one line of attack they could use is “I’ve done my research, and it turns out that Dopefish is actually a massive Beast Boy and Raven shipper, which makes him biased, because he would’ve preferred if the whole story was just Beast Boy and Raven kissing.” And I am a huge shipper of that pairing, but I’m aware of that, I have tried my best to separate that part of me from the part that deals in objectivity, and I truly, sincerely believe that my critique of this work all stands up regardless of whatever ship I support. Like I said, a bit of a weird disclaimer to make – I’m in my thirties and I write Teen Titans fanfiction, of course I have a ship – but I felt it worth addressing.
I think that’s enough stalling, let’s get into what is actually wrong with this series. And the biggest, most-obvious, and most-common complaint would have to be-
That’s So (Not) Raven
(Sorry to butt in – you can tell it’s an interjection because of the brackets – but if your immediate and understandable response to that point is ‘Oh, so you’re just complaining that this Raven isn’t like other established Ravens? That’s lame and superficial and doesn’t matter; as long as this Raven is engaging on her own merits then there’s nothing wrong with her being different!’ then I would really, really like to encourage you to stick this point out, until we get to the second one. Please.)
One of the funnier sides of keeping up with Renaissance of Raven is that I get to see the live reaction of Raven stan accounts on Twitter, who have reliably reacted to the story in this way. Week 1: Wow, I’m so happy we’re getting a Raven series, the artwork looks nice, can’t wait. Week 5: Artwork still nice, a little unsure on the story but hey, early days. Week 10: Raven kind of comes across as Sina Grace’s generic teenage girl OC (that’s ‘Original Character’ for you non-fanfic-ers, AKA, normal people,) and not at all like Raven. Week 16: I think this might be the most unlikeable Raven I’ve ever seen in any iteration of Teen Titans. Week 21: (silence, because they have either deleted their accounts or faked their own deaths.)
As a fanfiction author- okay, I’m just going to cut myself off there, because I’m going to say that a lot, but I don’t like how it sounds. “Hey Sina Grace, well-respected and critically-acclaimed nominee for the 2019 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book; did you know that fifteen years ago, I wrote an eight-hundred-word Animal Crossing one-shot? It got like, three reviews on fanfiction.net! That means that we’re peers, I think!” That’s not what I’m going for here. But what I am going for, is that I have extensive experience, both reading and writing people’s takes on characters. And one of the most difficult things about delivering your take on a character, is that you have to reconcile your vision, with the official vision. Or not, apparently.
Nothing takes the reader out of a story about an established character, more than that character just not behaving like themselves at all. And you might ask “But what if it’s a non-canon, alternate universe thing?” Which makes sense, because Renaissance of Raven is a non-canon alternative universe story. And that’s a perfectly valid question and explanation for any out-of-character antics. But then you run into the other problem, that being, “If Renaissance of Raven is supposed to appeal to fans of the character Raven… will it be enjoyable for those fans to read about a character whose personality is completely different?”
I’m going to say ‘No’.
I am uncomfortably aware that this is a very anti-experimental, anti-indie, anti-art position if applied to the extreme; if nobody took risks or changed anything about the characters they were portraying, those characters would never evolve, never do anything interesting, and never star in good stories. One of the worst things you can do as an artist is resolve to only ever give the people what they want. But this doesn’t mean that the reverse of this position is a guarantee of quality; you also shouldn’t take pride in not giving the people what they want. Your job is to make people want what you have to give.
And the people did not want Renaissance of Raven.
This is all a bit vague, so let’s get into some specifics. Who is Slade Raven?
There’s already some debate here that I want to acknowledge and then immediately sidestep, because the fact of the matter is that I just don’t care. That big debate is that fans of Raven are split – (shocker, comic book fans fail to agree on something) – on whether her portrayal in the 2003 animated Teen Titans show is faithful to the original character from the comics, or has done damage to the character, or has overwritten the previously established character who existed in comics for decades, etc. Statistically speaking, Teen Titans 2003 Raven was probably your introduction to Raven. It was certainly mine. And Teen Titans 2003 Raven is a very different Raven to the character in the comics. In the comics, Raven was withdrawn, awkward, unconfident; honestly a little like Starfire in my opinion, in the sense that she finds Earth to be a rather alien place for a while, and struggles to feel as though she fits in as a result. 2003 Raven is also withdrawn and struggles to fit in, but also very sarcastic, witty, funny, and not really awkward at all. But there are some qualities that both of these Ravens possess; that basically all versions of Raven possess… except for maybe Teen Titans Go, which I will not be referencing outside of this sentence.
Raven is wise beyond her years, because she never had the opportunity not to be. She’s withdrawn, but mostly as a victim of her circumstances; her powers being tied to her emotional stability and all. But when the walls come down, Raven is one of the most caring and compassionate members of the team, and as you would expect, she is also fiercely protective of the found family that she loves and considers her real family. I believe (translation: it’s been a while since I watched the series) that the only explicit death threat to come from a Titan in the animated show is Raven, to Terra, when she’s threatening the life of Beast Boy, and Raven unflinchingly snaps “It’ll be the last thing you ever do.”
As the daughter of a demon destined to destroy the world, Raven has felt as if she’s been in the shadow of her father for her entire life. That’s part of why she’s so protective of the family she found who accepted her even after discovering who she was, fought alongside her, and encouraged her to reclaim her destiny for herself; she’s not just Trigon’s daughter, she is Raven. And Raven loves the Titans because without their acceptance, she may have never realised that. Where he is destructive and evil, she is wise, calm and temperate. If you were a Titan and you needed help, advice, or just to talk to someone, Raven would be a fantastic choice to help – just maybe don’t interrupt her while she’s meditating – because while she might not always be the best at showing it, she cares for her friends more than anything, and will drop whatever she’s doing to help. She’ll drop whatever she’s doing to help anyone, but especially her friends.
In Beast Boy’s words (Titans United #1) “You always wanna help. That’s why you’re the best of us.”
…
So, what’s Renaissance of Raven Raven like?
… Uh oh…
Uh oh! Oh heavens, look at the time; it’s generic teenage angst o’clock! This bodes well.
So, to start with, she can’t stand her friends. Just outright hates them, to the point where she considers it a surprise that she’s happy to see one of them when they travel back in time to find her. Every single internal monologue – and external, for that matter – is about how annoying they are and how she wishes that they would just give her space… but also ‘come for me’. She says this, while flying away from the tower, after telling Beast Boy to leave her alone. No, the fact that Raven recognizes that her feelings are contradictory and making her behave unreasonably does not significantly change the fact that she is being unreasonable. When she is sent back in time, she snarkily wonders whether her friends even care, what’s taking them so long (as if she’s, like, trapped in a fucking IKEA or something and calling them for help while they ignore her, and not having been sent backwards through time,) and snarking again about how much she doesn’t want to see them when they actually show up.
She’s also sassy now! But not in the way she was in Teen Titans (2003), where her jokes were mostly sarcastic remarks, usually at the expense of Beast Boy in some way. Now she’s just sassy all the time, always, to everyone, including people she’s just met, and she’s not awkward at all about meeting them; she’s very outgoing and confident and likes to make pop-culture references.
She’s not shy either, and will happily chat with anyone she’s just met, not on guard at all about things that she usually keeps very private about herself. She would normally have to know someone for an extremely long time before she was comfortable discussing things like-
-and just being her usual sarcastic, joking self, with an internal monologue that – when she’s not splitting her time between slagging off her friends while also wondering why they haven’t found her yet – is even sassier. This is how she thinks about her mother.
Raven’s mother, Arella, was… I’m not going to say the word, but she was an r-word victim. That’s how Trigon had a daughter, the r-word. So… Raven thinking about her mother, the r-word-victim, with “What the actual hell, mother? I know hooking up with a Demon God wasn’t your choice…” is extremely… un-Raven-like. But you know what else is un-Raven-like? (Other than everything you know about this version of Raven?) A huge part of the story is Raven gushing over how cute this cute boy with a sword she meets in Galonia is, and how cute he is, and he’s cute, and she likes that he’s cute, because he’s cute. Also she already has a boyfriend. But this guy is cute.
…
So, you may have noticed by now that this Raven is not Raven. It’s not even remotely close to the same character that you know from the comics, or the cartoon, or… any other pre-existing version of Raven. And it’s completely baffling to me that you would take a character like Raven and remove everything Raven-esque about her, when the option was always there to just… write an original character with these traits. Admittedly, fewer people would have read ’Renaissance of Jimothy: Sina Grace’s OC Do Not Steal’ but at least people wouldn’t be going into this series with expectations and then having those expectations shattered in a way that was not enjoyable.
But that’s the whole point; Raven might not be Raven in this story, but you know what? Old Man Logan isn’t like Wolverine. Miles Morales isn’t like Peter Parker. Hell, Raven herself in the Teen Titans cartoon isn’t like Raven from the comics, and people loved her! So, this version of Raven does not have the same personality traits as Raven from the comics or the cartoon, but so what? As long as this Raven is still likable, then that’s not a problem! So, they just needed to make this new Raven likable. And there’s no way a talented writer would screw up something as easy as that, right?
Right?
“You’re Gonna Love Her”
… Raven in Renaissance of Raven is the most obnoxious, self-centred, overwhelmingly unlikeable interpretation of the character that I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m counting all those one-off alternative universe versions of the character who turn evil and destroy the world. I-I cannot stress enough that I am not a teenage girl, but I feel weirdly offended on behalf of teenage girls, just on the basis that… this is what Sina Grace thinks an angsty teenage girl is like? The problem with this Raven is not that she is an eighteen-year-old girl written by a thirty-eight-year-old man; the problem is that she fucking feels like an eighteen-year-old girl written by a thirty-eight-year-old man, and the only thing that man knows about teenage girls is that apparently, they’re just the fucking worst.
And it’s just so baffling to me, on a strictly professional level – again, acting as if writing a handful of low-quality fanfictions is in any way comparable to having a professional career – that this mistake was made. You are writing Raven, but this Raven does not possess several of the key positive qualities that most readers would associate with Raven, so you’ve got a bit of an uphill struggle – comic book fans are hard to please at the best of times – and you’re gonna have to try extra hard to establish her as sympathetic to the audience.
And the direction that you decided to take the character, who was already going to be facing an uphill struggle of being ‘Raven’ but without any of the positive attributes usually associated with Raven… was to have her cheat on her boyfriend? Who is also one of her best friends? While also being consistently terrible to her other best friends? That’s… definitely a choice. Not a good choice, but… a choice, at least. One of the choices of all-time.
At the risk of repeating the gag, here is the total list of positive qualities displayed by Raven in Renaissance of Raven.
1) She’s a superhero, which means that we can assume by default that she must be at least vaguely interested in helping people.
End of list. Again. And again, I’m not even kidding; she just doesn’t have any other positive qualities. They just forgot to include any scenes of her being anything close to nice.
For context – and we’ll come back to this, because it’s one of the worst lines in the series – the Titans have come back in time as well, anxious and concerned for Raven and just wanting to confirm that she’s okay, but she’s in the middle of some sidequest that goes nowhere, and reasons that they could ‘stand to get lost’. Because they took too long to find her. Yeesh. That’s the first big negative; she can’t stand her friends. Her surrogate family, who love and accept and support her and want nothing more than for her to be happy; she is incapable of thinking about them in any regard other than “Ugh! These assholes again!” and internally monologuing about how annoying they are, how much she hates them, how much she wonders ‘what a found family is good for’-
Jesus Christ. How annoyed she is that they haven’t found her yet, which… I mean, in her defence, she’s doing everything in her power to return home. She doesn’t want to worry them. She is focussing one hundred percent on-
Okay. And this isn’t even approaching the worst of it; and believe me, we’ll get to the worst of it. Number two of the negatives; she cheats on her boyfriend. She kisses that cute medieval boy, romantically, on the lips, despite the fact that it is established in the very first issue of the series that she’s dating Beast Boy, who is not only her boyfriend, but also one of her closest and longest friends. Very sympathetic, Sina. Oh, the affection I feel for this character. She hates her friends, she doesn’t want to see them, and she cheats on them. If you were trying to make her unlikeable then this is a fucking home run, but I don’t think you did. I think you were trying to make her flawed but sympathetic, but accidentally forgot to include anything that would make her sympathetic.
And that brings us on to the final problem; possibly the biggest problem in all of Renaissance of Raven. Raven’s sole quality that might make you feel some sympathy for her, is that she angsts. There are things that she angsts about, and so it’s important that we, the readers, are able to understand and sympathize with this angst. And the problem is that Raven’s angst does not fit the character at all. It’s more befitting of a generic teenage YA protagonist… which Raven is not; it’s angst that could work for another character. Raven wonders if she will ever amount to more than her trauma, more than her heritage, will she ever step out of the shadow of her parents, will she ever find people who really understand her – like, really understand her – and these are all legitimate enough concerns regarding YA fiction about teenage angst.
The problem is that Raven’s backstory being what it is… this angst isn’t just laughably inappropriate, it’s outright nonsensical.
Raven’s backstory – unchanged in this iteration – is that she was born to serve as a portal for her demonic father which he would use to take over the world, and in spite of that hanging over her for her entire life, she became a superhero, spitting in the face of his goals, and spitting in the face of her heritage. She found a family in the Teen Titans who, despite her being essentially the daughter of Satan, accepted and supported and loved her, and fought alongside her. Trigon takes a back seat in this story, but he is mentioned as an arch-nemesis who the Titans have faced – and defeated, given the lack of… the world being on fire – multiple times, which means that Raven has saved millions of lives by this point in the story. Raven’s backstory makes her the least suitable character for this kind of angst. “Will I ever amount to anything? Will I ever be more than my trauma?” You have rejected the ways of your father and forged your own path and your own identity, and in the process have saved millions if not billions of lives. So… what are you talking about? “Will I ever step out of the shadow of my heritage.” You already did; it was literally the first thing you did upon arriving on Earth. “Will I ever find someone who understands me?” Yes. You have a surrogate family. They’re right there.
And let’s be clear; angst and doubts and insecurities and depression- none of these things have to come from a logical place. It’s fine, I guess, for Raven to be doubting something that she has no logical reason to doubt. But… this was touted as an older, smarter, more mature Raven in interviews with Sina Grace? Eighteen or nineteen-years-old. Older and wiser. And she spends all of her spare time angsting over things that she has no reason to be angsting over. That’s the biggest problem with Renaissance of Raven; they wrote her to be the most generic teenage angsty YA protagonist, and that’s not who Raven is! It does not make sense for a character with Raven’s backstory to act like that.
If I could make a comparison here, I’d like to risk what could be a hot take.
I Am Not Starfire is a story published in July 2021 written by Mariko Tamaki (who has written Supergirl, X-23, Wonder Woman, Zatanna, She-Hulk, Harley Quinn- holy shit, what a résumé!) and it caused a stir on the internet a short time ago because… well, to be blunt, because it’s a book about Mandy, angsty teenager and non-superpowered daughter of Starfire of the Teen Titans, and it was negatively reviewed by a right-wing YouTuber with a big following. That is the main reason I heard of it; or at least, it’s the reason why it has a misleadingly-negative TVTropes page which I stumbled across, and then bought it out of curiosity, and I’d like to stop beating around the bush and just say what I have to say.
I think I Am Not Starfire is great. Two thumbs up, would recommend. And I say that despite the fact that Mandy in I Am Not Starfire is not entirely dissimilar to Raven in Renaissance of Ostensibly Not Raven. And this is because of the vital difference in their characters.
Numero Uno; Mandy is not a superhero. Mandy has never saved the world. It is perfectly reasonably for Mandy, just like any other teenager, to be unsure about her place in the world. Nombre Dos; Mandy is an entirely original character. No-one can argue that Mariko Tamaki’s take on Mandy is disrespectful to the original, canon Mandy, because there isn’t one. Numero Trois; the reasons for Mandy’s angst – she feels like she has nothing in common with her mother, she feels overshadowed, she feels defined as ‘Starfire’s daughter’, the other kids at school keep asking about her non-existent powers, or telling her how cool (and hot) her Mom is – are understandable. Nombrero Four; even in the – not nearly as often as Reddit would have you believe – moments when she’s being a tad unsympathetic, it’s still just… generic teenage angst – nothing remotely heinous or reprehensible – like not wanting to talk to her mother about her problems; something which literally everyone who has ever been a teenager can relate to. The big mistake Mandy makes in the story is that her friend or maybe more comes over to write a book report, but the Titans are there, and her friend snaps a selfie with them without telling Mandy, and Mandy is sensitive about people only caring about her because of her tenuous connection to them, and she gets upset about this. That’s it. Is that reasonable? Possibly not. Is that understandable? One hundred percent yes.
Quick aside; it feels like stating the obvious, but regardless of how obvious it is, it’s worth mentioning the very salient point that Mariko Tamaki is a woman writing about the angst that a teenage girl might feel, and Sina Grace is a thirty-eight-year-old man writing about the angst that a teenage girl might feel, and… his version is much worse than hers. Hmm. Real brain-tickler, that one.
So yeah, I really liked I Am Not Starfire and I think Mandy is interesting and sympathetic and – oh my God, there’s a moment after she has an argument with her mother, and she’s texting her friend about a test she walked out on, and she types out “I should have told her but I didn’t want to deal with her being disappointed,” which in bratty teenage talk translates to “I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me.” And then she pauses and deletes it. And that made me go “Awwww…” – and the context of this sympathy is that Mandy is a regular teenager, it makes perfect sense that she feels angsty and regular teenager things. You know who isn’t a regular teenager? RAVEN.
Sidenote, but since Mandy is a regular teenager, it’s also a lot more acceptable when she texts in l33t speak (I’m showing my age by even calling it that,) – that text she types above is actually “I shd hav told her. But I just didn’t wnt to deal w her being disapp.” – whereas when Raven, nineteen, older and wiser, grew up in Azarath, talks that way, then…
Hey, here’s a quick fun game for us all to play. Just a break in the complaining. I am going to post four images that have been taken directly from Renaissance of Raven. These are all completely real and legitimate images… except. I have altered one of them, to make the dialogue seem a little more modern, a little more teen-y, a little more un-Raven. And I want to see if you, clever reader, are able to spot which of these images I have altered. I’ll let you know at the end of the blog.
Right, so here goes. Here is the first of four images. Remember; three of these are real. One of them has been slightly edited to make the dialogue seem a little more unbelievable. See if you can spot the fake. (I really wish I hadn’t already used ‘… Me. The moody little sister nobody understands,’ because when I tried this with some of my friends on Discord, they universally reacted with “That’s the fake.” Or more accurately “Oh Jesus Christ, please tell me that’s the fake. I don’t want to be burdened with the knowledge that there’s a Raven series where she talks like that.”) But anyway, here’s the real images… except for one.
I’ll let you ruminate on that while- okay, there’s no point denying it. The edited image is obviously the first one. I very slightly increased the size of the text in ‘OHMERGERD,’ which as we all know, if something Raven would definitely say. Fucking hell, Sina. And for the record, one of my favourite games is Life is Strange, complete with the “Wowser!” and the “Hella”s and even the “Are you cereal?” Because they’re generic teenagers, so of course they talk like that. You know what the word was at my school? Rinsed. That was our ‘owned’. I have no idea why. And I joined halfway through the school year! I only found out when someone tripped over in a corridor and someone else shouted out “What a rinse!” and everyone else reacted as if that made sense. But generic teenagers say stupid things, it’s true. You know who’s not a generic teenager? Raven.
The confusing thing about Sina Grace completely failing to write a Raven that is either Raven-like or sympathetic is that he did grasp one thing. In the same interview where he mentions that she’s older and wiser, and more than her heritage, more than just a love interest, then he specifically mentions that they didn’t want to make this another Trigon story, because Raven has had plenty of Trigon stories, and they diminish her identity by making her relevance to the story entirely dependent on him.
Sina Grace proceeded to write a story in which Raven has decided that her entire self-worth and capacity to do good is dependent on her mother instead, whose capacity to do good herself is dependent on whether or not she could escape the influence of Trigon! It’s just- it’s just the same thing you were trying to avoid, but with extra steps!
This is, in my opinion, the most insulting line in the series. “There’s hope for me yet.”
THEN WHAT.
THE FUCK.
DO YOU THINK.
YOU HAVE BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIFE.
UNTIL NOW?
“She did something with her life,” So absolutely nothing that Raven has done with her life, up to this point, amounts to anything? The lives she’s saved, the friendships she’s made, it was all completely meaningless and/or delaying the inevitable, until it turns out that her mother also… did some things? “There’s hope for me yet,” so there WASN’T hope for you to do anything with your life? Until you found out that your mother also maybe did something? This isn’t teenage angst, this is… tiny little baby angst; what the hell is she talking about?
Raven has, at this point in her career as a Titan, saved literally millions, if not billions, of lives, and her ability to feel as if she amounts to anything is entirely dependent on whether her mother was able to amount to anything. She has no agency of her own. All you did was switch the parent who she defines herself by and lives lives in the shadow of. Just because it’s Arella and not Trigon doesn’t mean that you haven’t written a story about Raven – a story ostensibly about how Raven is more than her heritage, more than just her parents’ daughter – in which she lives in their shadow and depends on them to define her. Older and wiser. “She’s over it! Raven is more than her trauma!”
Raven is not more than her trauma. The entire character of Renaissance of Raven’s Raven is that she is nothing without her trauma, she doesn’t exist without her trauma; without Trigon and Arella, she has no idea who she is or what she stands for. And sure, by the end of the story, she will have inevitably realised that she was wrong, and her real family were beside her all along, how vomit-inducingly sweet – but the Raven who appears in the story, narrating internal monologues and shit-talking her friends and constantly angsting over things that it makes no sense for her to angst over; that Raven is not more than her trauma. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Raven as a character – especially with an unchanged backstory – just isn’t compatible at all with this generic teenage angst. Raven is more than that, she’s deeper than that. You can’t just take an Olivia Rodrigo song and apply it to-
… Do I even need to say it?
No, I don’t think I do. I don’t think I need to explain that the weight on the shoulders of Raven – magical teenage superhero whose trauma is due to her existence being tied to a prophecy that would cause the destruction of the universe – and the weight on the shoulders of Olivia Fucking Rodrigo – former Disney Channel star who sings about generic teenage angst (don’t get me wrong, love Driver’s License, and Vampire is a banger,) – are comparable enough for you to write a story about how an Olivia Rodrigo song makes you think “Ooh, you know who this reminds me of? Raven.”
And – son of a bitch – that line, “because god forbid a young woman be too angry or mess up,” is just so insulting to the character, and the readers, and young women, and… the concept of good writing. Because it’s so sneeringly superior in its self-satisfied tone; “I didn’t write Raven to be unlikeable with zero redeeming qualities, you just don’t think it’s okay for a young woman to make a mistake!” You are a thirty-eight-year-old man, Sina, and as a competent writer and also just as a human being, you should know by now that if you make a mistake while fully aware that it is a mistake and will seriously hurt the people around you, with zero remorse both during and afterwards, and without making any visible attempt to change your behaviour, or be a better person, or even take responsibility for what you did, then… it’s not really a mistake, is it? You just intentionally chose to be a shitty person. You did not write Raven as a good person who makes bad choices by mistake; you wrote her as a bad person who makes those choices entirely on purpose.
Raven cheats on her boyfriend, who is also one of her best friends, and her immediate response to getting caught for this is not guilt, or remorse, or any negative feeling whatsoever towards what she’s actually done. It’s just “Ugh, I just cannot even with this shit right now!” And no amount of inspiration from Olivia Rodrigo’s discography is going to make that kind of behaviour any more understandable or sympathetic; especially from a character who has exhibited basically zero positive traits up until this point.
…
‘Absolutely (Story of a Girl),’ that song reminds me of Raven though. I could see Beast Boy trying to learn the guitar to play that- right, next point!
More Than Just A Love Interest
In that same interview- why haven’t I just posted a link to that interview yet? Here it is. And here’s the relevant excerpt.
Anyway, in this interview, Sina Grace expresses that getting sent back in time gives Raven a chance to be herself. “Raven’s in this situation where she gets to be taken as her own person – she’s not a Titan, she’s not the tortured trauma Trigon daughter – (No, she’s the tortured trauma Arella daughter, that’s totally unique and different!) and she’s not Beast Boy’s love interest.” Sidenote, but “Does she fall back into old patterns, or does she herself enter a personal renaissance of self-growth?” is just hilarious, because a) Old patterns? You mean what, appreciating her friends and being a superhero? Oh yeah, heaven forbid she fall back into those patterns. And b) We’re more than twenty issues into the story, and there hasn’t been a single fucking moment of growth. Lots of ‘self‘ though. She’s got the ‘self’ down to a tee.
But Sina has, once again, actually stumbled upon a valid criticism of Raven in the comics. Beast Boy and Raven is currently a canon relationship in DC, and it’s been a big part of the last two Titans storylines; the latter of which was also yet another “Hey what if Raven turned evil and blah blah Trigon?” etc. A lot of people don’t like the Beast Boy and Raven ship in large parts because putting Raven in a relationship in the first place makes her… an accessory to the story. A supporting role for someone else. And that robs her of the opportunity for her to do interesting and original things herself.
So, Sina has promised us a story in which Raven is more than just Beast Boy’s love interest. If you’re looking for a story where she’s just reduced to his love interest, then keep looking, pal, because you won’t find it here. Raven is more than just a love interest. Now, let’s read the very first issue of Renaissance of Raven and take a quick look to see what is literally the very first established fact about these characters. The first issue opens with Raven in the gym doing a training exercise, and-
…
Okay, so in this story, in which Raven is definitely more than Beast Boy’s love interest, then the very first thing we find out about Raven other than stuff like “She is a hero,” “She is doing a training exercise,” “She is on a team with Nightwing, Cyborg, Starfire and Beast Boy,” and so on, is that… she’s dating Beast Boy. Or at the very least, they are casually hooking up. I mean… I’m just freestyling here, but if someone asked me to write a story about how Raven was more than Beast Boy’s love interest, then one of the first things I would consider doing, is… not making the very first plot establishment in the very first issue of the series, confirmation that Raven and Beast Boy are dating each other. That’s just- that’s a really easy way of establishing that she is more than his love interest.
But okay; there’s nothing strictly wrong with this approach; obviously Sina is just establishing that she’s more than his love interest by bringing it up, but not making it too relevant to the rest of the story! Anyway, let’s look at the official cover art for this-
Okay, so that’s literally a love triangle. That is one of the most Twilight-ass, love-triangly, Bella/Edward/Jacob, Katniss/Peeta/Gale images I’ve ever seen in my life. She is flanked by two characters, both of whom are attracted to her, both of whom she is attracted to, almost as if she’s torn between them or something. The one on the left is the cute boy, Denver – and oh boy, we’ll get to Denver! – and on the right is Beast Boy, making a very un-Beast-Boy-like face. I’m not entirely sure what I even mean by this, but it looks like Twilight-face. I don’t even know how I would describe what Twilight-face is, and that’s not a hateful statement – I have never interacted with Twilight and do not really have an opinion on it – it just… feels like it.
Anyway, after arriving in Galonia, Raven spends a lot of her time with the cute pretty boy Denver, thinking about how cute he is, despite, again, having a boyfriend in Beast Boy. On the rare occasion when we cut back to the Titans, Beast Boy’s entire characterization is “Where is Raven? I am worried about Raven. I’m sad that I upset Raven earlier by asking why she was upset today. I hope Raven’s ok.” So Sina has no problem at all making Beast Boy nothing more than Raven’s love interest. But that’s not a huge complaint; it’s her story after all. But a big part of that story, is putting Raven into a love triangle, when the whole point was supposed to be that she was ‘more than just a love interest.’
And what makes this especially bad is that… she’s a pretty terrible love interest.
(Full disclosure: Beast Boy does – as he is prone to do – put his foot in it when Raven angrily confesses that it’s the anniversary of her mother’s death, because “Oh gosh, Raven I- none of us knew. Honestly, you never really talk about your Mom. It’s usually “Trigon this” or “Trigon that,” if I think about it.” Like, your Dad is our arch-nemesis, and your Mom sort of just died…”
When the Titans arrive in Galonia, Beast Boy immediately tracks Raven down, and she’s in the middle of kissing Denver for some of the worst-explained reasons in the history of fiction; he has issues with his Dad, and that makes Raven attracted to him because she has issues with her Dad, completely ignoring that basically everyone else on the entire Titans roster has issues with their family; hell, Nightwing in particular must get that whole “I wonder if I’ll ever get out of the shadow of my father,” given that his surrogate father is Batman.
So Beast Boy finds his girlfriend Raven kissing another boy, is surprised, and runs away. Raven comments in her internal monologue about how he ‘does not do well with emotional confrontation’, without really acknowledging that she just cheated on not just her boyfriend, but one of her most trusted, loyal, longest-standing best friends. I really cannot emphasize enough; I’m not looking at this from the point of view of an irate Beast Boy x Raven shipper. Even if they’re not a couple, he’s one of her best friends, and has been for years. And she cheats on him, for the flimsiest of reasons, and… Sina Grace thought that we were going to love her. Because I love it when people cheat on their best friends. Nothing makes a character more sympathetic to me, than cheating on one of their best friends. H-how does anyone write this and think that people will like the character?
And I think this is an important point to address; I have read stories where the cheater was the sympathetic one, and the cheatee was unsympathetic. That can happen. In fact, if you randomly told me about a couple I’d never met, and all you know was that one of them cheated on the other, I would declare that one hundred percent not my business; I don’t know them, I don’t know the situation.
The problem, which Sina Grace again fails to grasp, is that in Renaissance of Raven, we do know the situation. And the situation is this; Raven is one hundred percent in the wrong and completely unsympathetic in this scenario. Even in the opening scene of her argument with Beast Boy, after he quite firmly plants his foot in his mouth, he’s the one who apologizes, and she’s the one who tells him to leave her alone and flies away acknowledging that she was being mean. That’s the entire backstory you’ve established for these characters, and every other time we check in on Beast Boy, he’s sincerely concerned for her wellbeing, and she’s internally slagging off her friends.
So, what incredible reasons does Raven give for kissing this guy and cheating on her boyfriend?
Denver is sad because his father is a bad man and he feels that he’ll ‘never escape’ or be free to be himself, despite being under no obligation whatsoever to follow in his father’s footsteps. Raven is turned on by this because she has never met a single other person in her life who feels this way about their parents. What a coincidence that the very first person she meets who she feels has these issues, is also the guy who she thought “Wow, Galonia makes their boys cute. Like, really cute,” about the first time they met.
… She spent five fucking years on a team with: the adoptive son of Batman, an alien whose own sister tried to kill her and drove her off her planet, a cyborg (no prizes for guessing who I’m referring to there) whose backstory is usually that his mother died in the series of events that turned him half-robot, causing an extremely strained relationship with his father, and her boyfriend, whose parents died when he was young, and in most versions was raised by a horribly abusive uncle. And all of these people became her best friends, they know her history with Trigon, and they love and accept her and both respect and encourage her to forge her own identity, independent of her shitty demon dad.
…
But this guy right here, this is the first time ever that Raven has felt understood. Because cute medieval boy has daddy issues. Mmm hmm. Oof, the sympathy. And it’s not uncommon at all for a young person who hasn’t been in many relationships to project the qualities they want onto someone – especially someone cute – but… that is a very ‘generic YA teenage protagonist’ thing to do. It’s not what Raven would do. And if your version of Raven does that, then congratulations; your Raven is all about melodramatic high school drama shit. You know, everyone’s favourite thing about teenagers! Older and wiser. You’re gonna love her.
She kisses him because she wants to kiss him, and “What’s the worst thing a kiss can do?” seems to indicate that she knows on some level that yup, it is wrong to be doing this when you have a boyfriend, and of course, Beast Boy shows up at that exact moment and catches her being unfaithful. Just like before, Raven’s sole reason to be sympathetic to the audience in spite of her constant shitty behaviour is that she angsts, but the angst is nonsensical, and the sole reason she cheats on her boyfriend is because… she wanted to, because he was angsting, and his angst reminded her of her own angst, which means that if you weren’t sympathetic to her before, then now you think she’s completely awful. And if you were on the fence, then… well-
Now you have a direct example that Raven uses her angst as an excuse to be incredibly shitty to her closest friends and betray their trust in completely selfish and self-centred ways, and only expresses guilt afterwards in the sense that she’s sorry that she got caught. It could be projection here but based on my read of the character, if she hadn’t gotten caught, I absolutely cannot imagine her going Back To The Future (hey, someone should write a fanfiction named that! This is a friend’s fic, this is not me, please go give them all the Kudos but do not bug them about fucking Spec Ops: The Line articles that they did not write) and telling Beast Boy “By the way, um, I kind of cheated on you? Hope that’s ok. I mean… sorry, I guess.” I just don’t see the Raven that Sina Grace wrote ever doing that. Because that would involve Raven… thinking about someone else and willingly facing the negative consequences of something she had said or done.
No it was not, Raven. No it was not.
Hey, do you remember those Raven stan Twitter accounts I mentioned earlier? I’m not posting screenshots because I would have to DM them to ask if they were comfortable with that, which would be awkward, and also I’m lazy, but just to be clear, I’ve really looked into some of these accounts, and they are Raven stans. Not Beast Boy x Raven shippers; strictly Raven stans. A substantial amount of them aren’t really fond of Beast Boy because of the effect they believe his character has had on hers. They root for Raven. Cannot stress that enough. And… I have seen them declare that this version of Raven is a comically unsympathetic two-timing cheater who needs to grovel for forgiveness from her friends for being so unbearable, grovel for forgiveness twice from Beast Boy – which he should not give her because frankly, he can do better – and eat a slice of humble pie so big that she has to make two trips to and from the humble pie store, just to get it into Titans Tower to begin with.
This is what Raven stans are saying. Think about that for a moment, Sina. You have got Raven stans to think “Boy, run. Run and don’t look back.” About Raven. The goth gf who the entire internet loves and has a collective crush on. It’s almost impressive that you actually managed to do that.
But speaking of what you managed to do, therein lies the problem; does any of this actually make Raven more than Beast Boy’s love interest? No. No, you haven’t done that at all. Your attempt to establish that Raven is more than Beast Boy’s love interest, amounted to explicitly confirming that Raven and Beast Boy are in an established relationship, and then she cheats on him in a way which is recklessly immature, insensitive, hurtful and unsympathetic. Older and wiser. You’re gonna love her.
So, all you’ve really done, instead of making her more than his love interest, is make her a really shitty love interest. Great job!
Seriously, Why Does She Hate Her Friends?
If you thought the way that Raven treated Beast Boy was terrible, then oh boy, I can’t wait to show you the sequel.
As has been said, one of Raven’s defining traits is that she genuinely loves her friends, even if she isn’t always the best at showing it. And of course she loves her friends; she was abandoned, alone and afraid, in a new world, and all that she knew about it was that she was destined to destroy it, and she found a group of people who accepted her, supported her, and love her. And she loves them back very much. Except for Renaissance of Raven Raven, who thinks that they suck, doesn’t really understand what purpose they even serve, and just wants them to leave her alone, while also bemoaning that they’re taking too long to find her. She barely thinks of them at all – and the worry they must be feeling at her absence – on her escapades in Galonia, except to briefly think, “Boy, if X Titan was here, they’d probably be judging me!”
Remember when I brought up that one line? “There’s hope for me yet.” I said that it was the worst line of the story, or at least the most insulting. Well, there was very stiff competition for second place, because by the evening of the same day when Raven stormed off and got sent back in time, then her friends have noticed that she’s missing, visited the graveyard where she was last detected, and they promptly get sent back in time too. Raven hasn’t thought much about them on her adventures in Galonia, except for wondering where the hell they are, and-
… This is just such a self-centred thing to think when the Titans cannot time-travel. And again, since Raven is lost in time – five hundred years before the Titans even existed – then this “Have they even noticed I’m missing?” comes across as just illogical. Hey Raven, if it took the Titans ten minutes or one year to notice that you were missing, then if they travelled back in time to find you, then they would still arrive at around the same time on your end. Also, just note the complete lack of any thoughts resembling “I’m worried about my friends.” “My friends are probably worried about me.” “I hope that my disappearance has not caused them too much distress.” “I hope that they somehow know that I’m okay.” You disappeared completely from this plane of mortal existence; your friends probably suspect on some level that you’re dead? A little concern, maybe?
But then, the Titans do get sent back, and Raven discovers they’re here when Beast Boy catches her cheating on him, and then she decides that she doesn’t want to meet or talk to her friends who have come looking for her because they were worried about her – not even for a moment, not even just to let them know why she can’t talk to them right now – because… this.
Raven, who has thought nothing about her friends other than “How long is it going to take those idiots to find me?” finds out that they have found her, but doesn’t want to talk to them, because she doesn’t want to be punished for letting herself have this one thing; solving the mystery of hey, why is there a statue of my mother in this village in the past? Just three observations here; one, why can’t you just fucking tell them that? And if they respond badly, then you can judge them, because you’ll be judging them for a thing that they actually did, not just something that you assumed that they did and then reacted negatively to in advance? (This is not the first time she does this; when she does reconnect with them, she chides them for ‘assuming’ that she was running from her problems, despite the fact that none of them have said this,)
She just expects her friends to be shitty and then looks down on them for the shitty things she imagined them saying or thinking, it’s fantastic. By which I mean it’s terrible.
Second, why do you think they’re going to punish you? They’re your friends, they care about you, and they’re relieved to find out that you’re okay? That leads me onto the third thing; I can only assume that when she talks about being punished, she means that she thinks they’ll be critical of her for cheating on Beast Boy… except she should be criticized for that, because it was an objectively shitty thing for her to have done! So, she is running from her problems, because she has done something awful to one of her best friends for multiple years, and then seemingly decides to just not feel guilty about something that she should absolutely feel guilty about. Sorry that I’m rushing; it’s just that this is a precursor to the actual second-worst line in the story. So far.
…
I want to stay professional; I feel like if I devolve into just childish name-calling then it devalues the validity of the criticism and makes me just look like an irate comic book fanboy. But that is hard to do when you’re also trying to be honest, and my honest reaction to this is just… wow. What an incredibly, immensely unlikeable character. I’m not trying to make this personal, but the honest truth is that I do feel kind of personally insulted by Sina Grace in that interview where he said “You’re gonna love her.” Because it is insulting, I think. It is legitimately insulting to tell people that they’re going to love a self-centred obnoxious two-timer whose response to her loyal, caring friends showing up to help her, despite not even knowing what trouble she’s in, with “They could stand to get lost like I did.”
The only reason why this isn’t the worst line of the story – and it’s fucking close, let me tell you – is that Raven was already very unlikeable by this point, so while this confirms what a selfish person she is, it doesn’t assassinate her character quite as much as “My capacity to do good and amount to anything is entirely dependent on whether my missing mother amounted to anything.” But God damn, does this come close.
“Those people took days to find me-“ ‘Those people?’ She says that like she’s holding back from calling them a slur. And they took days? They took less than one day. They went looking for you on the same evening of the day that you went missing. Maybe you would know that if you actually talked to them?
“They could stand to get lost in Galonia, just like me-“ Is-is Raven one of those fucking boomers who insists that bad things have to always be bad, on the basis that “Well, back in my day, we didn’t have (positive thing) which means that no-one should have (positive thing)!”? I-I genuinely struggle to fathom this. I do not understand how a professional writer penned this line, and then thought that readers would sympathize with this awful, awful woman. “They could stand to get lost-“ They are your friends, and they love you, and they support you, and they showed up to help, just like you wanted them to, and they are concerned for you and just want to know that you are okay and are willing to help you in any way that they can… and she just hates them. She hates that they showed up for her, and she openly thinks that they could stand to be confused and disoriented and miserable. Because that’s what any good person wants for their friends; to suffer.
We all know that it would never happen, but do you know what I was actually hoping would occur as a result of this? Imagine if one of the Titans actually got hurt; it’s not unreasonable, this is a setting where magic exists. Also, lots of iterations of Cyborg need to recharge, which I imagine is quite difficult in medieval times. Imagine if Raven ran away on her errand because her friends ‘could stand to get lost, just like me,’ only to discover “Hey Raven, while you abandoned us in this strange alien land we know nothing about, someone attacked Nightwing with magic, and/or Cyborg ran out of energy and appears to be either grievously injured or dead. But anyway, I hope your pointless sidequest that went nowhere was worth it. We probably deserved it for being such horrible friends who love and support and care about you, and only showed up to try to help, after you explicitly expressed several times that you wanted us to hurry up and find you.”
And do you know what makes this even more insulting? As a fanfiction author – see, told you I’d say it again – let me rewrite this scene. Raven discovers her friends are here, and is excited and relieved and wants to see them, but there’s a time limit on this information about her mother, and she reluctantly trusts that her friends will be okay if she takes half an hour to check it out, and she remorsefully leaves them to follow up this lead. That’s how easy it would have been to write this scene, and have it end in exactly the same way, except Raven is now more sympathetic and actually conflicted and actually shows an appreciation for her friends. I don’t understand how a writer who has been paid money to write a character who people will sympathize with, makes a mistake like this. I just don’t.
But anyway, Raven does eventually reunite with her friends, and does so with all of the excitement and relief of an exhausted mother attending a parent-teacher conference for a stepchild who she openly doesn’t like very much.
… Why is she written like this? Are you trying to make her unlikeable? Because that just seems like a very odd creative decision. But anyway, if we hadn’t already had the first and second-worst lines of this series, then this one would be a decent challenger, for the sheer clumsiness alone.
The text missing off the top from the previous panel is just “I don’t know how I got here,” referring to both Galonia and her emotional state, I suppose. Still clumsy.
“I just don’t know why I’m actually happy to see Cyborg. Cuz he’s family.” This… what are you trying to say? Raven does not know why she’s happy to see Cyborg – odd of you to single him out, and odd of you to say that you don’t know why you’re happy to see one of your closest friends – but ‘Cuz he’s family,’ just makes it weirder, because… Cyborg is not Raven’s literal family; he’s a part of her surrogate family. You know, she cares so much about him that although they share no blood, she considers him – and all of the Titans, really – to be her spiritual family, because that’s how close they are. So this sentence, in full, means “Cyborg means so much to me and I value him so much as a friend that I consider him to be a part of my family. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m happy to see him.”
There’s also this wonderful moment when Raven finally sits down with her friends and finally puts in the minimal fucking effort to explain to them the basics of what’s going on, i.e. “There’s a crystal here which is suppressing magic, and it resembles the chakra stone on my forehead,” where Starfire immediately understands and tries to empathize with Raven, despite the fact that Raven had given her so little to work with – and Starfire has only had like, five lines in the whole series anyway (maybe that’s why they singled out Cyborg in the example above; because it was literally the only time in the story where Raven acknowledges that he exists-) – and Raven immediately cuts her off with something akin to, “Shut up, dumbass.”
There’s- there’s just nothing. There are no examples in this entire story of Raven having a single positive interaction with one of her friends.
I’m just- there are many, many more examples, but I’m just going to cut it here because the more I have to reread Raven talking shit about the people she cares most about in the world, the more annoyed it makes me, in the same way as when you watch a horribly-written film, and you know that someone was paid a considerable amount of money to do this, and you also know for sure that you could’ve done better, but you were never in the position to do that sort of thing. I will say one more thing though; Raven’s friends appear to be getting just as impatient with her as the audience presumably is.
Either this is supposed to show that Raven’s friends aren’t patient enough with her or don’t know her well enough to really understand what she is going through (in which case they would totally be more unsympathetic because she is a very sympathetic protagonist and everyone’s gonna love her,) or, Raven actually does kind of suck, even in-universe, and her friends are tired of dealing with her shit. It goes without saying that neither of these options is good for the story.
Denver Is The Worst-Written Character In A Cast Composed Exclusively of Badly-Written Characters
It should be noted that amongst the very little feedback that I’ve seen this series get, I recall one positive tweet that was made in the early days of the series, pointing out that, hey, it might not have gotten off to the best start, and the writing is clunky and Raven isn’t Raven and the story simultaneously starts way too quickly and then does fucking nothing for like ten chapters, but at least we got one thing out of it!
Denver is cute!
…
Denver is the worst character I’ve ever seen written in any form of comics media; his presence would not be out of the ordinary in the absolute worst self-insert fanfiction written by a horny twelve-year-old, and generally everything about him is just… the worst. The absolute worst. And to be fair, I should also disclaim that I don’t go out of my way to read bad comics, so it’s not like I have a huge arsenal of bad characters to pull from, but amongst the stories that I have read, Denver is easily the worst. It’s almost impressive that a character in this story is written worse than Raven is. And I understand that phrases like Mary Sue/Gary Stu are overused and often the use is exaggerated, so I would to demonstrate for you all right now that I am not kidding; he really is that bad.
Imagine if I, Dopefish, wrote a fanfiction where Raven went back in time and met a gallant knight named Sir Duncan Opefish. Or Ser, because I used to watch Game of Thrones. Ser D. Opefish. Now, here’s what you need to know about D. Opefish.
a) Literally the very first thing that Raven thinks upon seeing him is “Wow, what a cutie!”
b) He’s completely unfazed by her weird-ass story about being a magic time-traveller from the future.
c) Not only is he completely unfazed, but he explains how in a way that implies that it would be very mean and inconsiderate for anyone not to be unfazed? Like, why on earth would he “make someone feel the weight of his own reactions to their circumstances?” That wouldn’t be very helpful. Wow. It’s so crazy that he just met her and he already gets her more than her best and closest friends. He’s not like other boys.
d) … In case that was too subtle, let’s immediately follow it with a line about how he’s literally not like other boys.
e) She thinks that his name is cool. ‘Denver’. What a cool name. And she just has to tell him that it’s cool.
I’ve spoken to people from Denver and they say that this is the least-realistic part of the entire series. And that’s including the time travel.
f) He’s really good at fighting too, in addition to cooking and looking amazing and probably smelling great; wow, is there anything this guy isn’t good at?
(Sidenote: When I said that the story frequently takes a break to do nothing, then… the entire chapter this image is from is “Denver tells Raven that they need to pass a troll in the forest, so they’ll need to pay a toll, and the toll is meat, so they need to go to a cave and fight a monster to get the meat, so they go to the cave and fight the monster and get the meat, and then Denver says “Great, now that we have the meat, we can pay the toll and pass the troll!” and THE END, that is the entire chapter.” Absolutely thrilling to finally see someone adapt the tutorial from a Monster Hunter game into a webcomic.)
g) He gets her! None of her friends back home who know her history and personality and have been her best friends for five years understand her, but this guy she just met two minutes ago immediately gets her, and- wow, it’s just so awesome to find someone who finally gets me, you know?
h) He angsts over his mysterious past, but it’s a past in which he coincidentally did absolutely nothing wrong at all and is just suffering because other people are being unreasonable towards him for no reason at all; wow, how awful! Don’t you just want to give him a hug, Raven?
i) He plays the Lute! Which Raven thinks is hot.
j) Two days after meeting him, Raven is already gushing about how “everyone falls in love with you the second they talk to you!”
k) Kissy kiss kiss time (this happens because Denver is angsting about his father, and Raven has never met a single human being on earth who had issues with their father until this very moment in time)
l) Notices something positive about Denver “Does this mean I have a type?”
I cannot stress enough that I mean this completely honestly and sincerely; if I wrote this absolute dogshit of an OC into a fanfiction when I was twelve years old, I would have deleted it out of shame and scrubbed its existence from the internet entirely, probably by the time I was fifteen. I, at fifteen years old, had better instincts as a writer than… this, and higher editorial standards than DC. That is an exaggeration for the sake of comedy, obviously. DC does not have editorial standards.
One thing that I want to make clear here is that when I refer to OCs and Gary Stus and the like, I’m not auditioning to join Protectors of the Plot Continuum; a group of fanfic-spoofers and gatekeepers who I’m only aware of because I don’t really like what they do. If Renaissance of Raven was something I stumbled across on fanfiction.net, I wouldn’t even review it, I don’t think. The whole point of fanfiction is to write your story the way you want to. I don’t care if you’re thirteen or fifty-seven; if you want to write that self-insert story where you get sucked into Super Smash Bros and have a foursome with Samus, Zelda and Peach, you do that! It’s 2025. Who gives a shit? If Renaissance of Raven was one of those fanfics, I would think that Denver was a pretty terrible self-insert Gary Stu, but I would keep that to myself, because why wouldn’t I?
The difference is… someone was paid for this. Because it was supposed to be of substantially higher quality.
Someone was paid to write this story, and the story in question is of similar quality to a below-average wattpad fic about how much Raven wants to hook up with me, Duncan Opefish. The quality of the writing in this story is, I would say, professionally embarrassing. Someone was tasked with writing an interesting character who readers would be curious about, and the author had the fantastic idea “What if I wrote an original character who was literally perfect in every way, and who Raven’s internal monologue constantly pointed out was perfect in every way?”
And just to be clear; I’m not saying that Raven can’t be nice to this guy, but it really makes it stand out just how shitty she is to her boyfriend, her friends, her found family, etc, when she has this seemingly endless well of positive things to say about some random cute guy she just met, and goes on to cheat on her boyfriend with. There were so many ways this could’ve been approached, and Sina chose the least sympathetic of them all. We’re supposed to care about Raven’s plight, but her plight is “I have a boyfriend but I also want to make out with this cute guy who is cute… so I will!” God forbid a young woman be too angry or mess up. And God forbid a protagonist have any sympathetic qualities at all to balance out the overwhelming negatives. I’ll say this for it; “I hate you, Mom! I hate you, Titans! You don’t understand me! Nobody understands me except my cute new boyfriend who I met five minutes ago! He gets me more than any of you do!” is definitely something I could see a teenager saying, but a) You’ve chosen to isolate the single whiniest, most unbearable, immature and unsympathetic moment of teenager-hood, and attach it to a character we’re supposed to love and who was already doing pretty badly in the ‘sympathy’ department, and b) It’s not something I could see RAVEN saying.
There’s a horrible extended sequence that drags the story to a halt which is just “Denver is sad so Raven shows him a song on her phone while joking about Silicon Valley tech bros and ‘phone no work in medieval times!’ shtick, and she shows him what I can assume is an Olivia Rodrigo song, and we, the reader, are blessed with the incredible scene of Raven showing a boy a song she likes. Wow. Edge of your seat stuff. Also, I just want to note that Sina Grace explicitly cited Olivia Rodrigo’s music as an influence for this character/story, and the way he manifested that… was by having the protagonist literally show someone else an Olivia Rodrigo song. I refuse to believe that any decisions that went into the plot of… this, took longer than three seconds to make.
In my defence, this is the same author who explained in interviews that his intention was to make it clear that Raven is more than just a victim of Trigon, and the best way he could find to do that, was to just have her say this about her mother.
Also, this artwork of Raven is just, um…
I was half-expecting – well, hoping really – that Denver would be a bait-and-switch who turns out to be evil; that would give the character at least one actually interesting trait. But nope, that doesn’t happen, because instead, the secretly evil character turns out to be Denver’s Mom (who’s got it going on,) who appears in one issue and contributes very minorly to the plot, mainly by revealing some exposition and then making a hilarious pop culture reference!
They repeat this same joke the next issue, just in case you didn’t laugh hard enough the first time.
… This story is so bad. Really, really bad. I hope I’ve been able to make that clear.
But anyway, poor Denver, his mother turns evil, he gets a little Paulie Walnuts-esque “How much more betrayal can I take?” and then his mother possesses him and sends the other Titans through more portals, while Raven screams in an out-of-character way that she’s going to hunt Denver’s mother down and kill her. And she screams this with the most inappropriate facial expression.
Maybe this is a hypocritical of me? Way back at the beginning of this article – God, we were so naïve and full of hope back then – then I pointed out Raven’s protectiveness of her friends with that line towards Terra in the 2003 cartoon “It’ll be the last thing you ever do.” This was a line delivered when the life of one of her best friends was endangered. It was not a line that she delivered because Cutie McBlandface™, who she met less than a week ago, has been possessed.
…
I just can’t get over how incredibly immature Raven is for the entire run of this story, while being touted as older and wiser. I can’t get over how they forced her to feel a very specific kind of angst which is completely contradicted by her backstory. I can’t believe how much she despises her friends – to the point where she’s surprised to feel happy to even see them – while also making goo-goo eyes at a cute boy she’s just met. Renaissance of Raven‘s Raven is probably the worst take on the character that I’ve ever seen.
Raven Does A Complete 180 In Issue #22, Which Came Out Right After I Published This, Which I’m Convinced Sina Grace Did To Spite Me Personally (I’m Not Paranoid, You’re Paranoid-)
“Dopefish, are you seriously going to complain that the story got better? That it went back on everything that previously happened, and they actually took steps towards making Raven slightly sympathetic and having her take responsibility for the things that she’s done and try to be a better person-” YES I AM, because it DOESN’T WORK. It’s also extremely weird and rushed.
So, in Issue #22, which was the very next issue to be posted after I finished this entire review, it was as if Sina Grace read my critiques, and thought “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? You think my work is so bad, do you? Well here’s what I’m going to do with your criticism, you stuck up British pretentious twatwomble, I’m going to– respectfully take it on board with maturity and try to continue the story in a way that addresses these problems, and I hope that you like it. :)” And now I’m stuck here going, “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well I appreciate the effort and I suppose that I genuinely misunderstood the direction you were taking the story.”
“But, uh, with all due respect, it’s still pretty bad.”
Raven begins Issue #22 with two major concerns; the first is that Denver remains in the past, under the possession of his evil mother. The second is that she simply has to strike that trademark ‘superheroine in comic book’ pose where the audience can somehow see her breasts and her butt. It’s- this is very important to her, ok? It’s very important to a lot of female comic book characters, apparently.
But anyway, Denver’s Mom sends them Back To The Future (hey, someone should write a fanfiction named that!) so Raven is stuck with the team she barely tolerates, and the boyfriend who she cheated on and has seemed consistently not fond of, which means that naturally, there’s a lot of tension when they get down to-
… Okay, I… I think that it’s weird that he’s apologizing to her for what was a very minor verbal faux pas, before she apologizes to him for… you know, intentionally cheating on him, but hey, I would rather see them mend fences than burn bridges. I was honestly scared that they were going to have him go down the angry, bitter, spurned partner route and become vindictive or spiteful, in a way that would make her seem more sympathetic in comparison. Like, “Wow, no wonder she cheated! He was secretly a possessive asshole the entire time!” So… this is- I hesitate to say ‘nice’, but it’s definitely not as bad as it could have been.
I… look, I’m a Beast Boy x Raven shipper, it’s true, I admitted it right at the start, I wear it on my sleeve. But this feels almost unnatural, especially considering how the story was progressing. It’s like they got rid of Sina Grace, and replaced him with someone who wanted to change everything about the story… but who also wasn’t a particularly good writer? Wait, did they get me to write this and I just forgot? So you’ve got, like, five panels in Issue #22 in which Raven takes a quick detour to Awesome Reconciliations Done Quick 2025 and just fucking speedruns this shit.
Caught cheating on Beast Boy? Resolved in three lines.
Issues with her friends? Solved as well!
Also conveniently while a gust of wind is telling Raven “Don’t worry girl, you focus on the apology, and I’ll focus on making sure that everyone can still see your butt!”
But now they’re stuck in the future, and Galonia is in the past! And Nightwing – being the smart one – apparently possesses enough 4th wall awareness to say “Jesus Christ, can we just forget this entire thing ever happened? No-one has enjoyed this. If the 2.1 Stars on League of Comic Books drops to a 1.8 then we officially have to kill someone off.” But Beast Boy jumps to Raven’s defence of course, because they’re back and stronger than ever! (It has been roughly seven seconds since they apologized to each other for her cheating on him.)
Well, at least the dialogue isn’t as cringeworthy anymore? At least-
But… but your entire deal for this whole story has been you trying to discover what happened to your mother, as a means of getting over your trauma, what are you-
Who talks like this– ehh…
Okay, let me be clear; this is an improvement. This is a lot better than it could have been. But it’s also wildly inconsistent with the rest of the story? Raven didn’t show any signs of growing towards this – there was no gradual build-up, or specific moment when she seemed to realise the selfishness of her actions or the hurt that she had caused – so it just comes out of nowhere, as if DC just told the author out of the blue, “Hey, you know how we said that you had ten chapters left to wrap this up? It’s actually just three, so… chop chop!” And it goes in the opposite direction of the way that the story was developing.
To be clear, when I say that I may have misunderstood the direction that Sina was taking with the story, then what I mean is that given the interviews, given the (minimal but still technically there) hype, and given quotes like “You’re gonna love her!” and “Because god forbid a young woman be too angry or mess up,” then I totally thought that Raven was supposed to still be sympathetic throughout. And the revelation that “Surprise! We were making her unlikeable all along so that she could learn and grow from it!” is just… then- then why did you tell us we would love her? Why all the ‘older and wiser’ stuff? Why did you set yourself up for failure by making it sound as if Raven was ‘over it! She’s more than her trauma!’ when leaning into her trauma making her act irrationally was the only thing making her even remotely sympathetic to begin with? What a mismanaged story.
If Renaissance of Raven ends at Issue #30, then that means that the first seventy percent of the entire story was her being unsympathetic. That’s a lot of time in the story to focus on a character who will only be likable once she realises how unlikeable she has been and makes an effort to change. If this story somehow turns out to be good well, of acceptable quality, then do you know what it will feel like? It will feel like someone showed you a song they made, and the first two and a half minutes were assorted sounds of alarm clocks, roadworks, babies screaming on a crowded bus, etc, and then suddenly, for the last minute, it becomes… okay. Not even great, just… alright. And they say to you “Hey, I really got you with the bait-and-switch there, didn’t I? You thought it was going to suck the whole way through, but then I turned it around!” and all you can say is “Yes, but… why? Why not just make it be good okay from the start?”
Remember I Am Not Starfire, that story I explicitly think is good? Mandy in that story has her issues – she could communicate better with her mother, who is definitely making an effort, and she could give the benefit of the doubt to the friend of hers who visits and snaps a selfie with the Titans without telling her – but she’s still sympathetic, I think. Or at least, relatable. Who amongst us can claim to have never been guilty of not communicating well with their parents?
Renaissance of Raven asks you to extend that sympathy to someone who cheats on her boyfriend – who is also one of her best friends for multiple years – while also being horrible to her friends, and her motive for this is that she’s being self-centred in her obsession to find out what happened to her mother, because only from finding out what her mother did with the rest of her life can she move on from her obvious trauma… which the solicits said she was over! So this sudden “I’m sorry, I love you guys, I love you Gar!” -this- this is better, sure, but it’s still a mess! And it didn’t have to be! You could have just written her being conflicted and unsure and flawed but sympathetic from the start. You could’ve had her maybe express an attraction to Denver once or twice, instead of having her cheat on her boyfriend. She could’ve been happy and relieved to see her friends, but she hyperfixated on her mother, leading her to ignore them, which would be rude but understandable. And you didn’t do any of those things.
At least at the end, Starfire gets to deliver probably the best line of the story, directly towards Sina Grace Raven.
Raven doesn’t go through a ‘personal renaissance’ in this story, she just kind of sucks, until she very suddenly doesn’t for no adequately explained reason. And this is all assuming that she doesn’t do a massive 180 again in Issue #23.
… Why did I have to say that, why did I have to
The Ending: Renaissance of Rushing this Shit
…
I was done.
I truly cannot stress enough that I am being entirely genuine and honest here. I am writing this a month and a half after this article was first published. The following section after this is me explaining why I reviewed it at the time; because no matter how it ended, it was already pretty bad and worthy of criticism, and I didn’t see it improving too much before the end. I also did not think that it would get worse. I did not foresee that four issues later, the entire series would be over, and it would have been rushed beyond belief, leaving me with more to say. I was done. I was done criticizing Renaissance of Raven, because I thought it was over; or at least, it would finish predictably and without getting worse or being bad in any new ways, and certainly not in ways that deserved any more attention than I had already given this.
And then it ended just four issues later, and I am genuinely shocked, surprised, bamboozled and generally discombobulated to discover just how terrible the ending was. And that’s coming from someone who hated the story before it ended. The bar was so low, and they found a way to slither under it. And the primary reason behind the sheer lack of quality in the ending is this; they rushed this out with no regard for the story, because just like everyone else, they just wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. Major plotlines are dropped or wrapped up in a single panel or sentence or just ignored completely, because even the creators of Renaissance of Raven want nothing more than for Renaissance of Raven to just be over.
I don’t even know where to start with this, so let’s play it safe and just do a simple recap. At the end of Issue #22, the Titans – united again because Raven has spontaneously decided to just stop being awful to them for no reason (I guess that’s consistent; she started for no reason, she stopped it for no reason,) – are preparing to travel back to Galonia and save the day from Denver’s Mom. The first half of Issue #23 is them still preparing to go back in time, and then they do, but then Raven remembers that it’s not just Denver and Phelia she has to worry about; there’s also Cyril! Denver’s Evil Dad! Remember him? He shows up sometimes as a mysterious masked stranger and he attacked Raven once, and he’s evil, and whenever he’s on-panel then I uncontrollably start humming the theme for The Black Knight from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance.
Alright, here it comes, an epic showdown between Raven and-
… What’s going on with that tree? Like, the right side of it? How it’s just a block of brown with nothing on it? It’s slim, but once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it. Especially since the leaves on the tree are already pitch-black in shadow so no-one had to colour them or anything. Odd graphical error there, but no biggie. I sure hope that isn’t foreshadowing for other lazy errors! Probably not.
So anyway, Cyril throws a knife at Raven, and she remembers that she can do magic and so he gets grabbed by a tree and incapacitated, totally defeated. Um… yay? This is the secondary antagonist for the entire series, by the way.
FROOKT. What kind of sound effect is ‘FROOKT’? But anyway, Raven defeats him and takes his mask to give to Denver, for… reasons? Secret Santa gift? I don’t know why wearing his father’s mask would make him feel stronger, that wasn’t foreshadowed or anything.
But Raven takes his mask and flies away, thinking about how he will get out, while the wind is still thinking “Hey Raven, don’t mind me, just still making sure that your ass is in every single one of these shots!” And you might be thinking “Ah! She didn’t kill him and he’s going to get out, and there are still three issues left. Clearly he’s going to come back at a pivotal moment, either to continue fighting her, or to… do something with Denver, who has to show personal growth by overcoming his father, or maybe he even shows mercy for being left alive; any one of these, but he will come back.”
And you would be right!
…
That definitely is what SHOULD have happened!
But nope, this is the final appearance of secondary antagonist, Denver’s Evil Black Knight Dad Cyril, in the entire story. Raven grabbed him with a tree, and he got stuck… The End.
Raven reunites with Denver, which is very tense, because the last time we saw him, he was brainwashed by his mother! How will she free him from his brainwashing? Will she have to fight him? That would be terrible, because he’s innocent and she cares about him, but if he’s preventing her from stopping Phelia, then that could lead to a moral quandary, because how is she supposed to- I’m just kidding, he’s fine.
Phelia stopped brainwashing him because… uh… it took effort, I guess? So she just left him standing on a random hill, waiting for Raven to see him, and they reunite against Phelia; but the issue ends with the dramatic cliffhanger than Denver thinks they might be too late! Then the next issue begins, and it turns out that they are not yet too late, but boy, when he said that they might be too late? My heart was beating a mile a minute. Top-tier cliffhanger.
Issue #24! The most pressing issue is immediately resolved; the Titans have no drip! But with the help of the medieval folks, they get some yassified makeovers and truly begin to slay, queen. I’m so tired. I’m so, so tired.
Beast Boy isn’t pictured because he’s a dragon now. Anyway, most of this issue is a big battle scene in which nothing really happens. Every Titan does get a chance to do one attack though, Starfire fires some energy, Cyborg gets to say “We’ve got you covered,” and that’s it (poor Cy,) Robin kicks a witch while shouting “HI-YA!” and Beast Boy straight-up kills a woman.
Raven and Denver – because it makes the most sense for him, an unarmed and poorly-trained (compared to them) farm boy to confront his own mother – make their way inside to face off with Phelia, where Denver dons his father’s mask for some reason, and tells his mother that he will stand against her, and not fall victim to his lies. … Wait, was the mask supposed to protect him from brainwashing? Is that what that was? It was not explained well. But anyway, Phelia says “Okay, fine by me!” and then she-
…
HOLY SHIT. I mean, the tension is ruined by that weird wall texture to her right where I very clearly tried to edit out the watermark of the website I was reading this off of, but still!
Did Phelia just blast a hole through her own son? I’m not stretching out the image any further, but if you scroll down then there’s blood trailing down the screen from this grievous fatal wound she just caused!
Okay, I do not like this series, but credit where it’s due; even though Denver wasn’t as safe as the Titans, I still considered him ‘safe’. And Phelia just fucking blew a hole through his chest! And we got a POV shot of the wound; I think that’s supposed to be his arms clutching at the wound? Fuck! Gotta give credit for that, was not expecting a twist like that near the end.
That’s an actual cliffhanger for Issue #24, so Issue #25 kicks off and it’s basically all Raven VS Phelia. The stakes are high and the dialogue is dramatic-
… Alright, one more time.
Weird thing to think when your friend was just murdered in front of you, but it’s still tense; Denver is fucking dead, Raven is struggling… they both struggle for a long time, throwing generic magical energy blasts at each other, Phelia yelling about how she’s going to become immortal and timeless and Raven calling her ‘stuck in the past’ – OOOOOOOH– that’s kind of dumb actually – and Phelia even trash-talks Arella a little, but nothing much is really happening – other than some truly exceptional dialogue (Phelia: ALL OF THIS… IS MINE! Raven: THAT’S COMPLETE #*%$!) truly top-tier stuff – until Phelia yells “This charade ends now!” and then someone else says “Yes. It does,” and-
…
Aren’t you DEAD?
What were you- but… but the last chapter ended with Phelia firing a big blast of magic that tore a bloody hole through someone’s entire body, and then you were completely AWOL for the entirety of this fight, so… what just happened? I’m not kidding, I’m not playing this up at all; I have absolutely no fucking idea what is supposed to have just happened! And neither does Raven! She yells in surprise “You can wield magic?!” and he says yes, but only when near the magic crystal they seek, and… so, what happened? Did he heal himself? Was he invisible? Did he Clone-Jutsu himself? She blew a hole through your torso, Denver, how the hell did ‘magic’ help with that? What did he even do to Phelia; he’s just holding her magic staff and she fell over. At no point is any further explanation provided other than ‘it was magic’ which is on par with ‘A WIZARD DID IT.’ I guess he faked his death? With the magical powers that neither he nor Raven nor the reader ever knew that he had, and also they perfectly conjured a fake corpse that fooled both Phelia – incredibly powerful final boss mega-empowered witch – and Raven? (Abilities not even listed out of respect for the intelligence of you, the reader.) I love it when characters resolve problems with magical abilities that it was never mentioned that they had! Now that’s good writing!
Denver reappears and wins because he can do magic which was never foreshadowed and survived a graphic fatal wound by… surviving it, or creating a magic corpse-clone or just an illusion that he never knew he could – and the readers also certainly never knew he could – and Raven and Phelia also had no idea, and the only explanation you’re getting is “It’s magic! I ain’t gotta explain shit!”
It might not seem like it, but I’ve genuinely tried to avoid being too critical of the author – I’ve written shit way worse than this… when I was fifteen, on fanfiction.net, and not in an actual DC webcomic, but oh well – but… what is this? How do you- how did you write a climax that doesn’t explain how the climax happens? What are you- oh my God, let’s just move on.
Anyway, Phelia’s dead.
She’s dead now. It might look like she’s a Wine Mom taking a 4pm floor-nap, but trust me bro, she’s dead. She died from falling over. And also because magic. What kind of magic? Fuck you, that kind. How dare you read a story expecting to be told what happened in the story.
Phelia’s dead, and Raven gets her hands on that magic crystal that everyone was worried about the seepage of, and… Issue #25 over.
Issue #26 begins, and I was genuinely really expecting that Arella would have left some part of herself behind in the crystal, and Raven would have a heart-to-heart with her mother. This entire time Raven has been driven by a desire to find out what her mother was doing in Galonia. Now, I’ve already explained that I don’t think that this is a good thing, but it’s definitely a thing. It’s a plot point that requires closure. And while it would have been nice for Raven to realise by herself that her mother doesn’t define her any more than her father does, and she was always capable of doing amazing things regardless, then… a Raven-Arella meeting would be genuinely cool and fun to see. Arella delivering the message herself “You never needed me to do great things, I’m so proud of you Raven, I’ll always be proud of you, no matter what,” and then she fades away and Raven is crying but they’re happy tears; none of this is great, by the way. I wouldn’t have written a story that ended that way. But that was, I think, the best way that this plotline could have ended.
…
Obviously that’s not how it ends; Raven does some magic and the other magic flows out from the crystal and is returned to Galonia in a completely anti-climactic fashion; we get to see magic red waves returning to scenes all over Galonia; oh, and we even return to some existing scenes to see how magic affects them! Just kidding, I made that up because it would have been cool; instead we have ‘woman in kitchen’ and ‘man carrying a sack’ with wiggly red waves overlapped on top of them. Raven thinks “Cool,” and a creepy tree smiles.
This tree will return in your dreams.
Raven returns to her friends, who found the time to change out of their medieval outfits because the illustrator either complained or forgot, and they hear that Phelia’s coven is over, and they- they…
…
I don’t want to be that guy, I don’t want to be that guy, I don’t want to be that guy-
…
That’s not how you spell ‘corrupt’. That’s just- I looked it up, to see if it was one of those ‘ye olde medieval times’ spellings, and no. They just… they just got it wrong. They just spelled corrupt wrong. There’s a spelling mistake in the grand finale of this series.
To be clear, I don’t want to sound like I’m ragging on whoever made this mistake, it’s just… it’s just revealing. It reveals the amount of care that went into this, the effort that the editors put in to making sure that everything was right; I don’t know where to mention this, but at one point, Renaissance of Raven just didn’t come out for a week. It was announced and then they just skipped it, either because it wasn’t ready, or needed to be rewritten, or they just forgot because legitimately nobody cared. And nobody caring about this series on the reader’s side is sad, but nobody caring about it on the editorial side is downright unprofessional.
Currupt. I mean, I make spelling mistakes all the time, I’m always re-editing articles when I spot mistakes, but I like to think I would put more effort into a professional writing job that I had with DC. This is… ugh. Let’s just move on.
Denver! Denver just saw his mother die! He must be feeling some complex emotions. I wonder how Raven is going to- they thank each other and hug once and she whispers “You are your own fate, not the one your parents gave you,” to him – which is really rich coming from someone who said this like, thirty minutes ago.
And then they’re gone. Back To The Future (hey, someone should write a fanfiction named that!) where they have a big group hug and reaffirm their love for each other, and Starfire asks if Raven is happy to do her training again, and she answers with this cringe-inducingly out of place “No, Starfire! We don’t need training, because we’re not just a team… we’re a family!” and then everyone cheers and they have a pizza party and- fucking hell Sina, did you let a five year old write this? But anyway, it works, and the Titans are so happy with what she said, that they stand perfectly still for the next two panels, without changing their posture or facial expressions.
(deep exhale)
But, then Raven takes Beast Boy to Scotland via portal so that they can see what happened to Galonia, because Raven looked it up on her phone which ran out of power in Issue #12 and which she has not recharged, but at this point, who even cares about that? Who’s even still reading this, other than me, and definitely not a spell-checker? I know how her phone got recharged; magic. A wizard did it.
Galonia got invaded – wow, fat lot of good all that magic did, huh? – and something something, Scotland. But Raven kept a part of that magic crystal – the Crystal formerly known as Seepage – and plants it in the ground in memory of Arella, who she learned absolutely nothing about in the end. She laments that “… I’ll never know your full story,” or any of her story, really, “But at least I can move forward filling the gaps. Not with sadness, uncertainty or doubt,” and then she says to Beast Boy – or Arella, it’s not clear – “I now know your life – and mine – could mean so much more,” and then finishes off with the word “Possibility.” Her and Beast Boy have a big kissy-kiss while the artist tries to learn how a leotard works-
And then they walk into the portal back home, now that Raven has finally learned that thing that she never had any reason not to know in the first place. The end.
… Okay, I’ll give it this; that’s a nice ‘The End’ image. Good job whoever did that.
…
So…
What- what do I even say about this? I didn’t like this story, but reading the conclusion, it feels like both DC and Sina Grace also didn’t like the story? There’s an overwhelming air of “Wrap this shit up!” that pervades the last five issues. Important characters are written out in one or two panels, there’s little to no pay-off for any of the events that the first twenty-one issues build towards. I do not read the end of this story and feel anything from the writing or editing or even artwork that suggests that anyone was having fun or taking pride in anything that was happening in this series.
Tinfoil hat time: I genuinely think that this was rushed. Not rushed as in, feeling rushed, but rushed as in, behind the scenes, things were happening that were not good and it was finished in a hurry. I don’t know if DC weren’t happy with the negative feedback the series was getting and asked for rewrites, or if Sina saw the feedback and wanted to make some changes, or if – like me if I wrote a fanfiction that was as negatively-received as this – they just lost interest and wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. Or maybe none of those things, and this was exactly how Sina wanted the story to go, and it came out fine. But between Walmart Black Knight Cyril dropping out of the plot, a complete lack of explanation of what the hell even happens in the final fight, Denver having one total line in the issue after his mother dies, and- CURRUPT? CURRUPT?!? – then I feel that I can confidently say that by the time Renaissance of Raven dragged itself over the finish line, to no applause, then absolutely no-one involved in the making of the series was taking any pride in their work. And even though I didn’t like it, that doesn’t make me feel happy. It just makes me feel sad. And it also doesn’t produce good work, as evidenced by the fact that I came back just to point out how much worse the ending was than I expected.
Take it away, Dewey.
Conclusion: A Journey of Self-Growth (Minus The Growth)
And now none of this makes sense because I originally reviewed this back when Issue #21 had just come out. Ah well. Everything from here on out is written by that Dopefish. How naïve and innocent he was back then. Please bear that in mind when I repeatedly refer to how I didn’t talk about the ending, after talking at length about the ending.
… The following was written at the original time of publishing, April 2025, before the series abruptly ended in May 2025.
You might be wondering “Why aren’t you revealing how the story ends? Why aren’t you talking about any late-stage plot twists? I read Renaissance of Raven and it ended with Denver turning into an evil dinosaur and then Raven punched him into the Sun, and she had that heartfelt conversation with the ghost of her mother, who tells her “I love you Raven, but also like, Jesus Christ, be less shitty to your friends.” And the reason for that is simple; I’m writing this before Issue #22 comes out. (Future-Dopefish: Yeah and that worked out really well, didn’t it?) (Future-Future-Dopefish: You have no idea!)
“But Dopefish, I’ve seen you reference things that happened after Issue #22 came out!” Yes, because I went back and edited this because I ‘umm’ and ‘ahh’ a lot over the things that I post, and it probably took much longer for this to come out, and if anything new and notably shitty happens then I’ll probably pop back here and add in a reference to it. ((I did!) TWICE!) But I did consider it, truly. “Are you going to wait until the series is complete before writing your takedown about how terrible it is?” And while the obvious answer is yes, because there may be more I can complain about – Raven and Beast Boy have not yet had a “So, about you cheating on me…” conversation, which would be fascinating to read, if only because Raven’s internal monologue would doubtless be about how immature and inconsiderate he was being by reminding her of the shitty thing she did – but ultimately… why? Why wait? Because this is the important factor.
Let’s say that the next six issues come out, and they completely turn the series around. Raven is forced to confront the shitty things she’s thought and done, and feels genuine remorse for them – not this piddling little squirt of nothing that happens at the end of Issue #21.
You might think that I like that she appears to be taking responsibility for a bad thing that happened, but it’s so over-the-top melodramatic and self-pitying, as well as completely inconsistent with her character up to this point, in addition to just being more angsting for the sake of angst. “I just ruined everything,” what exactly did you ruin, Raven? You still (somehow) have a surrogate family who loves you and a home to go back to; what have you ruined? Other than having to apologize to your boyfriend?
But the point is, let’s say that Issue #22 to #28 – I’m just guessing when it will end, it feels like it’s kind of getting into the tail-end now that Denver’s Mom has turned evil. I certainly hope it’s nearly over (You were close! It was #26) – turns things around and the story is good now.
…
The series would still be terrible.
That doesn’t change the fact that the story is still awful, because Issues #1 to #21 were awful. Raven is not at all like Raven, her character is entirely unlikeable and unsympathetic, her only claim to sympathy is angsting over things that it doesn’t even make logical sense for her to angst about, she cheats on her boyfriend/one of her best friends for several years for shitty, selfish reasons, she’s consistently horrible to her friends, she’s stepped out of her father’s shadow by deciding that her agency depends entirely on her mother instead, and she spends the rest of the story having a painfully awkward crush on a bland one-note OC.
Renaissance of Raven is not just one of the worst stories I’ve ever read; it’s almost like a guide for how not to write a story. It’s ticking all the boxes on what not to do. Again, I’m not trying to be mean – and the sincerity of this coming statement only makes this sound meaner – but if I was trying to write a terrible story, I don’t know if I would be able to pull it off as well as Renaissance of Raven. And… okay, I’m still trying not to be mean, but my completely honest and sincere opinion is that this is that horrible kind of work that unavoidably makes you ask questions about the person who writes it. Because… how do I say this diplomatically?
“You’re going to love her.” What does it say about you as a person, if you write a character who is consistently horrible to her friends – who have done nothing but show her love and support and acceptance – cheats on her boyfriend (who is also one of her best friends,) takes zero responsibility and feels no guilt for the way she behaves to those around her, wallows in self-indulgent, nonsensical yet generic angst (“Oh, woe is me. Will I ever amount to anything?” You have saved billions of lives, literally what are you talking about?) and doesn’t have a nice thing to say about any of the people who care about her… and your belief that she was likable and sympathetic and people were going to love her? I don’t want to make a personal judgement – I don’t know Sina Grace, he’s probably awesome! – it just… this work is so bad that it makes you ask that question. Do you think it is sympathetic, likable behaviour for her to cheat on her partner who is also one of her best friends? If not, why did you write her doing that and expect people to love her, and if so… well, yikes!
I’m sorry, because that feels like it crosses a line; it is a wholly personal judgement of another human being based on nothing more than a bad story they wrote, and there’s almost certainly some projection in there, because if you read the shit that I was writing when I first got into fanfiction, then… I can reread those stories and basically pinpoint the exact shitty thing I was feeling – often, the exact shitty thing about myself at the time of writing – based on the really obvious flaws in the work. And now that I’m thirtysomething and still writing fanfiction, I can’t wait to come back when I’m forty and reread all of my current stuff and realise all of horrible psychological implications of my “Beast Boy and Starfire make a pillow fort,” story.
Or, maybe it’s just a bad story and I’m looking too much into it. OR, maybe it’s not the author’s fault?
I was looking through DC’s site to make sure I wasn’t saying anything untrue about the concept of Webtoons, and… yep, in the year 2025, DC are still selling NFTs. Non-fungullible tokens. Yup.
So, if Sina Grace ever did somehow read this – and again, I really hope that he didn’t, especially after I just said “This story is so bad in such specific ways that it actually makes me wonder if it reflects badly on you as a person and not just an author,” – but if Sina Grace did read this, and said something in response like “Yeah, this story was not my best. DC editorials really forced a lot of that stuff on me,” then I would believe him in a heartbeat. I would immediately believe that this story is terrible because the NFT-selling Harley Quinn fart fetish people forced some bad decisions on a talented author.
But I would also believe him in a heartbeat if he just said “Nope, this story was 100% me, guess I didn’t pull it off this time.” And I would also believe him if he said “This story was me and I stand by it and screw all the haters.” Basically, I’m a very naïve person, and I believe things easily. I think that’s the moral I’m going for here.
The overarching problem with Renaissance of Raven is actually a mixture of two problems; Sina Grace does not know how to write Raven, and he also doesn’t know how to write teenage girls in general. The overwhelming vibe I get from this story is that it was generic YA teenage angst slop, and when it was about eighty percent done, someone from DC came along and said “Put Raven in it.” Which, as far as I can tell, is not what happened; it looks like DC approached Sina with the rough framework for a ‘Raven goes back in time to Renaissance’ story, and he had control over what happened from there. But it feels like a bog-standard shitty generic YA story, with Raven plastered haphazardly on the cover.
Sina, if you did end up reading this, then – firstly, oh my God, I respect that you had the strength to read, like, fourteen-thousand words of someone criticizing your work; I would get two hundred words in and crash out immediately and begin looking for any reason I could cling onto that the writer was stupid and didn’t know what they were talking about – I didn’t write this because I want you feel bad. I wrote this because… as I said, this work is pretty underdiscussed. You can find tweets of people expressing their issues in a sentence or too, but nobody has really dissected the myriad of problems with this work, because if I’m honest, no-one really cares that much about a DC Webtoon series. But you deserve to know where you went wrong, because you’ve done such amazing work and will continue to make such amazing work, and… I don’t want that work to be held back by the mistakes that you’ve made in this one. Because it was bad, Sina. It was really, really bad. Like “Raven stan accounts that exist solely to stan Raven think that your Raven is an unlikeable garbage person,” bad. And I hope that you can look back, and recognize the reasons why people didn’t like this, and… it influences the way you write teenage girls in the future. If you ever do, because you are under no obligation to, and frankly I just don’t think this is your area of expertise. … OR, you could take that as a challenge, and prove me wrong by writing an amazing teenage girl angst story, and then I could sit back all smug thinking “I did that! My criticism helped to create that! This must be how James Stephanie Sterling felt when Five Nights at Freddy’s took off!”
So… that’s Renaissance of Raven. Everything that the haters of I Am Not Starfire said about that comic, is actually true about this comic. Completely unlikeable protagonist with no sympathetic qualities, who we’re just expected to root for because… she angsts (over things that are contradicted by her literal backstory, but do you really expect the writer of a Raven story to know Raven’s backstory? Pretty unreasonable imho,) she is awful to her friends, cheats on her boyfriend, and has generic time-travel medieval fantasy adventures which don’t lead to a single moment of growth, realisation or development, until presumably right at the very end of the story. It’s a bad comic. It’s a really bad comic.
Yes. Yes it is.
But it’s also probably the only comic bad enough to make me review it, so… see you next time, when I’m back to talking about video games. I might be a while though, I’m really getting back into fanfiction right now. That’s one thing you can say for Renaissance of Raven; zero redeeming qualities as a story, but a phenomenal starting ground for a Fix Fic. Especially because Raven is so calm and wise and mature, so getting to write her as generic self-centred obnoxious teenager is actually kind of fun!
Oh, and Sina, if you did read and you’d like some revenge, you know what you should do? Get DC to commission a Webtoon from me, and then mine will suck and you can review it and point out how rightly terrible it is. I’ve had this idea forever about Beast Boy – like, child Beast Boy, on the run from his abusive uncle – and he ends up in Gotham, and you’ll never guess who he’s found by! That’s right, Bat- Catwoman, who is then like, “Hmm, several things to note here. a) I have a soft spot for abused children. b) He could help me rob some stuff. c) I’ll keep an eye on him while trying to find him a better guardian (not Batman because he will definitely force this kid onto the path of heroism, and I think he should make that choice for himself,) d) I hereby promise that at no point during this story will I start to make googly eyes and think “Wow, this feeling… is this motherhood? Is that what my life has been missing?” because my life hasn’t been missing anything because I’m Catwoman and I’m fucking awesome and I like to steal shit and I am completely content with who I am and that’s not going to change.” And it doesn’t, she doesn’t change that. Just a- that’s always been my one fanfic idea where I’ve thought “This could actually work as a story. An alternate-universe story, sure, but-“
Anyway, Sina, that’s just (makes ‘call me’ gesture) and also… um, not to sound mean again, but please never write a teenage girl ever again. Because you have many talents as an author, but that is not one of them. Although in terms of positive influence, then you may have unironically done something amazing with Renaissance of Raven, because you made basically every mistake that it was possible to make in the writing of this story, and if mistakes are how people learn, then Renaissance of Raven might be one of the most educational stories I’ve ever read in my life. Alas, not for the right reasons.
You said it, not-Raven. The Raven no-one wanted. I’m actually in a Teen Titans Discord, and there’s a running joke that this whole series was anti-Raven propaganda written by Terra. That was pretty funny. … Hey, Sina, you now have the opportunity to end this story in the funniest possible way, by-
Thanks for reading!
-Dopefish
The Dopefish 
Perhaps the logic was: “well, people love Terra, so if I write Raven with Tara Markov’s personality, it should be a hit! Right?”
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