User blog comment:Red Canary/Need to rant? We all do./@comment-5069635-20120518035056/@comment-5069635-20120523081914

Thank you for the corrections, Red Canary.

"that are going through the same situations and know what its like to be an outcast."

No, M'gann and Superboy are shown going to school, and making friends outside the team. From what we saw, they were on their way to becoming popular. Wally looks like he lives a normal life outside the team, too. Notice, during Secrets, Aqualad did not go to the Haloween party at thier school, but Wall y did.  Though, I don't know where Robin was in that episode.

"Also, Rocket, at the end of "Auld Aqaintance" had a kissing scene with AL."

This was well after all the interactions I pointed out, and his feelings might have been festering by then. A kiss does not automatically and magically make everything better. My own out-of-world opinion about this is that it was an afterthought, almost as if the creators realized what jerks they were being to Aqualad in the romance department and belatedly tossed in a flat, 2-D character with an equally as 2-D attraction to make up for it.

''Aqualad needed to be a villain. If no one loves you, and everything you care about is taken away from you in a firey explosion (Or in a hail of bullets.) you become a villain, or a total badass, and you can't do that with "Aquaman's Sidekick the Teams apathetic token black guy." ''

It's just heartbreaking to think that he didn't form close enough bonds with his team to overcome this. Although I can kinda see the angle, it still hurts, and is still hard to believe. And "apathetic" is not the right word for him at all. Just because he doesn't have a typical cartoon character's over-zealous and over-the-top personality, doesn't mean he's apathetic. It means he's calm. And, dare I say, maybe closer to normal, real life people than a lot of the team, aside from his speaking patterns. (which, btw, would throw off his social interaction with other surface-dwellers, too.)