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linkspooky · 11 months

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Adding to my earlier question, I’d love to ask your thoughts on cyborg in teen titans. And why he’s a important member of teen titans. (Example-Like how you talk about how Donna plays a important role as sort of babysitter)

Thank you for the ask! This was actually a long time in the making, because Cyborg is one of my favorite Teen Titans and I wanted to do him justice. I know I tend to talk about Raven and Terra more, but that's only because I think Cyborg is probably the most nuanced of the early Teen Titans so he requires a lot more effort to explain the nuances of his character.

Anyway Cyborg is a TEEN TITANS character his relationship with the group is important to his characterization, and you can't really throw him in other groups because of that.

I'll talk about why, underneath the cut.

So Cyborg's story is based off the story of Frankenstein, it's even in his name. Victor Stone, if you know German Stone = Stein. Cyborg's entire character is written around how society treats the outcast, and he's heavily influenced by the rejection he has faced by his society especially at the start of his arc where he meets the Titans.

There's two things immediately apparent about Cyborg, he's black, and he's disabled. It's visible in his original character design, half of his face is metal. Both of these things have had a pretty big influence on his life. The Teen Titans cartoon chose to focus only on the disabled aspect of his character, which was a bad choice but this is about the comics not the cartoon.

Cyborg's race had more of an influence in his early life and backstory then in the pages of New Teen Titans itself, but it's still there. The biggest aspect is Cyborg has two heavily successful scientist parents who are both black, and because of that Cyborg has been pressured his entire life to be successful in whatever field he is in too. When he was young he was even pulled out of public school for awhile and given private teachers because both of his parents noticed he was a highly intelligent child and wanted to nurture his "genius."

This resulted in two things, number one Cyborg was never really allowed to make mistakes by his parents because they were constantly afraid of him becoming "one of the bad kids."

Cyborg's relationship with his parents is also more complex than I can properly give time for in one meta, but while they are controlling it's not like they're outright abusive. Their intentions are good they want their kid to be happy, and be a success in life, but they do make concessions for Cyborg and listen to him when they realize they've made mistakes or push too far. It's a very normal conflict to have with your parents, your parents think one thing they're doing is best for you and try to take your choices away to push you towards that route because they thnik it will make you happy instead of listening to what you want.

Number two is Cyborg's never really been allowed to just, exist as his own person. His parents both wanted him to be a scientist, and when he showed an early aptitude for it they pushed him in that direction instead of listening to what he wanted. They did relent somewhat by letting him go back to public school, but when Cyborg wanted to go to college they refused to pay for it again unless he went into the field of science.

When Cyborg wanted to be an athlete and go into sports, he couldn't just enjoy them he had to excel at them and be the best of the best and earn a scholarship. So already before the accident which made him Cyborg, he's not really accepted by the people around him for WHO HE IS. He's not really allowed to just be Victor Stone, and Cyborg feels this rejection from everyone, from both of his parents, from the society around him (being treated differently because he was black is a part of his characterization) and as a result he's kind of left one, pretty directionless in his life, and two angry.

As someone who's never really been accepted for who he is, even by his parents, Cyborg doesn't really know what he wants in life. He's always defined himself by his rebellion for what his parents want out of him. He chose sports because his parents wanted him to be a scientist, but even after excelling at sports, the anger he feels at his rejection doesn't really go away.

Cyborg's already kind of lost in life and then the accident happens. Cyborg being half-robot is a metaphor for the way disabled people are treated by society, and I'd say it averts the X-Men Fallacy, because Cyborg has prosthetics he needs to live which make him visibly disabled and people treat him differently because of it. If you are visibly disabled you will be treated differently by completely strangers on the street, and often treated very poorly.

Cyborg's girlfriend breaks up with him, every friend in his life leaves him, and there's nothing different about Cyborg really, he's just got visible prosthetics now. And this is all true to life people will treat you differently than they did when you are abled.

Cyborg has a lot of internalized hatred because of this. He loathes his prosthetics, and the body he is now stuck in and I'd say this is true to life because Cyborg doesn't naturally feel that way he was taught to hate himself by the way everyone around him treated him. He would not be struggling as hard as he does, if people had treated him better in his period of adjustment.

To mention the cartoon quickly, there's a scene in season 3 where he's infiltrating the HIVE, and he fights a version of himself that is a fully robot duplicate and Cyborg just completely beats it to death his his bare hands until it's in pieces. He wasn't acting there, that was Cyborg projecting his internal self-loathing onto an external target and then destroying him. These aren't the actions of a mentally healthy person.

Cyborg has cripplingly low-self esteem, sometimes even veering into suicidal ideation. He mentions that when he woke up he literally would have rather been dead, then to have survived by his father turning him into a robot. These are some pretty serious mental issues that Cyborg is constantly grappling with.

Which is why the Teen Titans are so important to his character, because they are the first friends he ever made who accepted him unconditionally. Cyborg's only ever experienced conditional love before this point, even this Tales of the Titans issue talks about how he fell out with a friend in his life that was only his friend when he completely unconditionally supported him and agreed with everything he said, even his more dangerous and destructive ideas.

While Donna is the babysitter, I believe Cyborg is the first person to recognize that the Teen Titans are a family, because he was the one explicitly looking for a home and a family to belong in. Donna, Dick and Wally already knew each other and they are childhood friends. Garfield had just lost a family and he felt like a tagalong kid for a lot of the early run. Starfire's narrative is an immigrant narrative so she similiar to Cyborg is looking for a new home in the same group.

(There's a lot of Cyborg and Starfire parallels you could elaborate on too, but once again that's for a different Meta).

One thing I like to point out about Cyborg is he wasn't really looking to be a super hero. Cyborg's just wanted to be normal his entire life. He was born a genius, but he wanted to go to public school. When he got robot prosthetics his first thought wasn't "Let's go fight Crime", he went through months of rehab first, and then just wanted to pass as normal.

Cyborg is a selfless guy, no doubt about it. There is a story in the comic where he finally receives experimental plastics that allow him to look normal while still having his cybernetic parts keep him alive. However, over the course of the story he ends up having to give them up, and nearly dying because of a situation where he selflessly stays to help rescue someone rather than just getting out of there. He has a heroic spirit, but he doesn't really WANT to be a hero, his desire has always been to just be normal, or at least be accepted for who he is.

Which is where his dynamic with the group comes in, Cyborg treats all of the eccentric and very diverse cast of the Titans like they are normal people. He's the normal friend. Which is actually really important because I said, Cyborg's one of the more nuanced characters, like yeah he's half robot but besides that he's just a black kid from the city.

Cyborg's actually one of the first people to reach out to Raven, and like go out of his way to try to make sure she's included in the group, and he even fondly calls her "Witch" after he learns to understand her better.

Cyborg's relationship with Beast Boy is also something that's an incredibly positive influence on BB, because while they are best friends I think fandom misinterprets their relationship a lot. Cyborg is constantly giving BB a hard time, they're like vitriolic best buds who like insulting each other. The reason for this though, is because Cyborg knows that BB is a kid who's always misbehaving and joking around and will never actually tell you what the problem is if there is one. Cyborg's hard on Beast Boy because he knows BB responds positively to it, if you take him seriously and be straightforward to him rather than just dismissing him as a joke.

Cyborg's the first one to view the Teen Titans as a family, and that's the most important aspect of the group to him, that's why he's a hero because it gives him a place where he can just be himself. He's the friendship guy, if this were a shonen manga he'd be talking about the power of his nakama.

Which is why the most important Cyborg comic ever, is JLA / Titans Technis Imperative. Towards the end of the original New Teen Titans run Cyborg merged with an entity known as Technis and left his friends to go to space. I kind of hated how they made him more of a robot towards the end, but it led to Technis Imperative which is my favorite comic of all time. What happens is essentially after drifting in space merged with entity, he becomes planet Cyberion and returns to earth. His desire to be back with the Titans is so strong, that he mobilizes an entire robot army to kidnap every single character that was ever a teen titans, and then imprison them in a virtual world designed to make them happy.

That's essentially how important the Titans are as a family to Victor, and how lost he would be without them. Cyborg once became so lonely he almost destroyed the planet trying to reunite his family together again, that's literally how important the Teen Titans are to him you really can't take them away without drastically changing his character.

On top of that Cyborg is also just a painfully human character. He's angry because he's been rejected so much. He's lonely because he feels like he can never truly belong. He's internalized a lot of negative things because of the environment around him, and feels like he is less than human. He's constantly talking about how he's half robot, but he's really not, he just needs prosthetics to keep him alive.

When he is at his absolute lowest points, he pretends to be an emotionless machine, but that's just because it's what he has been treated as. He's probably the most emotional and deeply loving of the titans, but he's terrible at expressing that because he's never been in an environment that's allowed for the healthy expression of his emotions except for when he was with the group. However, the flip side of this is because Cyborg knows what it's like to be rejected he can be deeply emotionally intelligent in regards to other people and goes out of his way to treat THEM like they're human.

If you're interested in more comics about his character, I suggest reading New Teen Titans first. He's also getting a new solo comic series which you can probably just pick up and read because it goes over his backstory, the first issue came out last Tuesday. His old backstory of being with the Teen Titans has been finally restored in canon which is something I'm pretty excited about.

#cyborg #victor stone #vic stone #beast boy #teen titans meta #new teen titans #dc comics #dc comics meta #cyborg teen titans #teen titans cyborg #garfield logan #teen titans #metasks

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