i'm noticing this pattern of comic book writers defaulting to incompetence when it comes to giving characters "flaws" instead of like… actually making them flawed. what narrative purpose does hal jordan crashing his test plane (a task he is meant to excell at) serve? it contributes to neither the plot nor character, unless the writer deliberately wants to make his protagonist seem like a joke.

a character fucks up and learns nothing from it, because there was no compelling reason for them to have failed in the first place. rather than developing a character, it regresses them. there's no nuance in their mistakes; none of the their errors stem from faults of personality and the guise of imperfection dissipates as soon as the narrative requires it to. where's the struggle in all this? the hard-wrought character development? incompetence is generic, nothing but a red herring to distract from the fact that most characters now have but a fraction of their pre-reboot depth. the so-called internal struggles these heroes have are shallow caricatures of the moral debates that used to be present in comics.

a flawed character is not an incompetent character. it's just something i wish writers would remember.