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Cyborg and negligent parents

Zack Snyder’s Justice League came out a few days ago, and it has been one of the most talked-about subjects in the comic book industry. And regardless of how you feel about it, we cannot deny that it was an adaptation of arguably the most famous superhero team of all time and the first time that one of its main characters, Cyborg, got so many spotlights.

Cyborg’s story is quite interesting to analyze once you are more familiar with his background, origins, and the things he has to go through because of his powers and abilities. And his parents play a significant role in him becoming the superhero that he is today.

Many people have said that Cyborg has suffered from negligent parents, but today we will explain the character’s origin and his parents’ role in that. After that, you are going to find out that it is a much more interesting situation.

His origins.

Born Victor Stone, often known as Vic, he was a talented football player in his teenage years. He seemed destined for greatness in the game until his parents, Silas and Elinore Stone, decided to experiment with him, turning him into a half-human/half-machine with many abilities and a supreme intellect to deal with technology. He would obviously turn into Cyborg, and that is how he became the superhero we know today.

There are have been reboots throughout DC Comics’ history where creators have tried to twist his origin a bit to keep his parents from looking so abusive. For example, there is the case of the 2011 reboot, the New 52, where Vic was on the edge of dying, and his father Silas decided to keep him alive by turning him into a cyborg. This is the origin story that is used in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

As you can imagine, this resulted in Vic having a lot of trust issues with his parents and holding a lot of justified resentment towards them as he was their guinea pig. Furthermore, being now a cyborg, he was never going to have the life he always wanted and will never have everyday human needs like eating, sleeping, and so on, which makes him angry and resentful in many periods of the character’s history.

This was particularly emphasized during Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s New Teen Titans run of the 1980s, where he is struggling to connect with the rest of the Titans because he no longer trusts people. So many times, there is this constant dichotomy between the man and the machine inside him, which often goes one way and then another.

Of course, his relationship with his parents is often addressed. But, slowly but surely, he starts to connect with them again, healing their relationship and finding common ground after all the things they have gone through. This was one of the reasons that the character was so successful in the eighties, along with the rest of the Titans: that combination of superhero deeds and their human nature.

And Cyborg always had a lot of humanity.

Negligent parents?

Cyborg’s parents have gotten criticism that they have been negligent by how they have treated their son, and you have to agree with that because they were willing to turn him into what he is today. However, even if we consider the New 52 version, we are talking about Vic and his father having a very distant relationship, failing to connect through most of the former’s childhood.

There is no denying that they are an example of how parents can be negligent, and that is not up for debate because they genuinely risked their son’s life for experimentation’s sake. That is something that has taken a massive toll on Vic’s growth and development as a human being.

But there is also the factor that this was an instrumental aspect of the character’s journey through the DC Universe. So there is an inherent element of tragedy in Cyborg’s character, and there is an intrinsic ordeal he has to go through to become the superhero he eventually becomes.

Cyborg’s archetype is a flawed hero, so he is not aspirational like, say, Superman or Captain America, who are driven by their inherently strong moral codes. No, in Cyborg’s case, he has to learn to be a hero, and part of that journey involves overcoming his resentment with his parents.

You cannot progress if you are still holding to grudges and to pain, which is where we find Cyborg’s character through most of his arc in the early stages of the Titans run in the 1980s, and that is something that has become a running theme every time he is rebooted or adapted on another media.

He feels broken and hopeless, but through his friendship with the Titans and the challenges he goes through as a hero, he grows as a person and develops the tools to face his parents, with the latter also making amends.

All of this leads to a character that maybe is never fully human but finally embraces his humanity once again and manages to reconnect with his parents, especially with his father. This is very important in his character arc, and you cannot do that without the negligent element thrown in there.

So, yeah, Cyborg’s character arc maybe doesn’t put his parents in the best light, but it addresses poor relationships between the parents and their son, which is sadly a very relatable state of affairs. But all those situations make him all the more human and all the more interesting because he has these different challenges he has to go through to grow and develop as a human being.

And we can all understand him from that perspective.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]