This will likely come off as a rant, but after reading the second last issue of Green Lantern Corps from a few months ago (I am little behind I know) I was kind of surprised at the depiction of love. The story basically revolves around Kyle and Soranik, a couple since about two years of publication time, trying to sort out their feeling after the War of the Green Lanterns. They are aided in this by Miri Riam, the Sapphire Corps member that sort of brought them together to begin with. In order to heal the wounds of the previous events the two are brought together by her in a staged crisis so that they can rekindle their feelings for each other. In so doing Kyle accidentally blurts out that when he saw his true love (as shown by Miri) it was Jade and not Soranik. Soranik already sort of blaming Kyle for the destruction of Mogo storms off saying she never wants to see him again. This for me is very much where this concept of love fell off the tracks. I am not an expert on love nor I think can anyone be, but for me love is about action more so than words, and Kyle had done much to portray his feelings for Soranik over numerous crises, including in Blackest Night where Soranik restarted Kyle’s heart with her own (which worked on both a figurative and literal level.) To throw this all away because Kyle was forced into an action he didn’t want to be part of (and to be fair it was actually John Stewart that destroyed Mogo) and because he didn’t originally see Soranik is in my opinion really bad writing and generally poorly conceived. Love is not really something which is tangible or definable, but a characteristic of it is that it is generally something which evolves. Ask any married couple and they will tell you that how they define love has changed over the course of their relationship. Thus while Kyle and Soranik might have had a physical attraction at the beginning, or some sort of mutual respect for each other as Corps members, the defining moments of their love was not in fact those initial moments, but what has transpired since. In this way this issue really failed me. I am often not disappointed but the portrayal of female characters in comics, mostly because I usually do not expect much, but in this case this sort of goes beyond that and acted as a quick and easy exit for the characters as opposed to developments in their relationship which made sense.
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