Titans is a Spiritual Successor to the DC Cinematic Universe: First Impressions and Other Thoughts

Remember a couple months ago, when the collective DC nerd community huddled close to their computer screens and heard the words that caused a shift in the multiverse: “Fuck Batman”? Because I do, and I thought about it a lot as I sat down to watch the open arc of DC Universe’s Titans. As an unabashed fanboy for all things DC Comics, I was… looking forward to it? The original Teen Titans was a staple of my adolescent animation years and for whatever reason, I am an ardent watcher of all of the Arrowverse. Titans looks like what happens when you blend the general premise of the former, the aesthetic of the later, and then you grab some of the filters they used for the DC Cinematic Universe and then set it to max intensity to see what happens.

And look, I try to keep an open mind. I try not to be beholden to canon and all of the preconceptions I have fostered due to nostalgia. Titans was very clearly going to appeal to a different sensibility, and it was very upfront about that. But on a scale of Telltale’s Batman, a stunning reinvention of the character that made targeted changes in order to bolster certain characteristics, to Gotham, a haphazard slapdash of various Batman-related sound bytes and errant fan wiki pages that were organized by a random number generator, Titans definitely errs more on the side of Gotham. Legit, Teen Titans Go! is a better encapsulation of the characters as sacrilege as it might be to type that. As such, your enjoyment of the series is going to be …