UPDATE: Now co-creator Tom King is going viral, explaining why Hal Jordan’s killer never goes to jail in the finale.
Lanterns rewrote John Stewart’s backstory after Aaron Pierre was cast, and writer Vanessa Baden Kelly laid out exactly why.
Speaking with Justin Britt-Gibson on The Ringer’s Midnight Boys podcast, the writer and executive producer said the room had already broken her episode when Pierre got the part.
“John Stewart is supposed to be a dark-skinned black man. We are changing that canonically by having Aaron come in, and we need to change that in the writing,” Baden Kelly said. “We need to find a way to make this make sense.”
‘More Palatable To Damn White People’
Baden Kelly said she and Britt-Gibson worked out the fix and took it to showrunner Chris Mundy and co-creator Damon Lindelof.
“We brought it to Chris and Damon and they were immediately like, we trust that you guys know your folks. Get busy, do what you have to do,” she said.
“That’s when we baked in this idea that part of his being chosen is because they felt like his particular looks were more palatable to damn white people,” Baden Kelly continued. “And if that is who he was going to have to impress to get this job, he was probably the more likely of the three brothers to be able to do it.”
Hence John’s nickname on the show: “Chosen.”
“We dealt with it some in three, we deal with it in five, and then you see the outcome of it some in six,” she said. “But that was changed upon Aaron being cast.”
‘That’s Not My Green Lantern’
The room saw the casting reaction coming.
“We knew when his casting was coming up that there would be people that would say, hey, that’s not my Green Lantern or whatever. So it’s like, let’s write about it,” the writers said.
Episode 5 addressed it on screen: “In five we talk about, like, don’t let me come out with darker skin, I’m never going to hear the end of it. Let’s talk about it. We have to.”
They also credited their star: “Credit to Aaron for being game for that, because certain people may not be open to that conversation.”
In the same interview, the writers said the 2024 DNC shaped the Hal and John story, and Baden Kelly said Hal Jordan has “racist tendencies.”
James Gunn told fans on Threads that the DCU following comics continuity is “probably not going to happen.”
Gunn also says he has seen Lanterns 500 times.
