Who Is Razer? The Latest Young Justice Character Explained
Young Justice is a famously explosive show, tying in many different storylines and building different plots upon each other in an enticing, entertaining way. They cycle through different characters all the time, and usually they’re pretty recognizable. The characters are either straight from the comic covers, or they have a buildup and thorough backstory explored. The character Razer from Season 4, Episode 19 didn’t get much of an in-depth entrance, and he's actually not from the comics. So, who is he and what exactly is his quest?
Razer’s origins actually call back to a short-lived series from 2011, Green Lantern: The Animated Series. The show was canceled after one season, reportedly due to poor merch sales and reception of the live-action adaptation, Green Lantern (2011). Razer was created for the animated series and introduced almost immediately as a Red Lantern, a Corps powered by anger and hate. He was shown as a part of the plot to kill the Green Lanterns, yet he could never take the action himself. When Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and Kilowag went to investigate the uptick of Green Lantern deaths, they came upon the Red Lanterns and eventually took Razer as a prisoner.
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Not long after he becomes a prisoner, we learn more about his backstory and motives. Hal and Kilowag take Razer to a prison, where they made inmates relive their worst moments. Here, we learn that Razer is from a planet that was full of fighting and death. He had a lover, whom he had the motivation to protect from the violence plaguing their planet. As a result, he joined up with a local militia to fight back against the War Lords. One day while he was gone, his lover was killed. After discovering her body, he was filled with an extreme amount of anger and hate, which seemingly resulted in the Red Lantern ring choosing him. The Green Lanterns came back and freed him shortly after with the help of Aya, the AI system of their ship.
Razer didn’t enjoy the killing and the acidic feelings the Red Lantern Corps spread, so he aided the Green Lanterns in fighting back. During this fight, he learns that the head Red Lantern, Atrocitus, had seen the potential in Razer to become a Red Lantern recruit. Atrocitus was behind the violence on his planet and the murder of his lover, and the outrage from this revelation gave him the strength to overcome and tear away from the primary Red Lanterns.
After the culmination of the Red Lantern arc, Razer found himself with the newly established Blue Lanterns, the Corps that protects and upholds hope. With the Blues, he attempted to learn control over his anger since their powers negated his own. While control doesn’t exactly come, he learns about the different kinds of anger and how to differentiate between them while protecting his new-found love, the AI who wasn’t exactly artificial after all, Aya. She had been observing and learning the whole time, learning how to process emotions and how to reciprocate the feelings.
A new threat was posed against the universe, a robot wanting to consume it all. During this arc, Razer breaks it off with Aya due to his own internal battle, and she struggles to process this. She tries to shut her emotions down completely, sacrificing herself to destroy the robot. The thought of her death causes Razer to once again lose himself to his anger, but it turns out she wasn’t dead. She molded herself with the robot's body, making it her mission to destroy emotions after her negative experience left her scarred.
While his love seemed to be lost, Razer never gave up hope that she could be redeemed. He makes every effort he can to do so, the efforts increasing tenfold when the truth about Aya actually being a living being comes out. Aya never actually killed anyone, so the situation didn’t seem hopeless. His hope that she could be redeemed paid off, she comes back to herself but once again has to sacrifice herself in order to save everyone. This time, that sacrifice seems to be for good.
Razer doesn’t accept that, though. She had come back from so many other things; he believes that she could have come back from that as well. He has hope that she is out there, somewhere in the universe and vows to scour every inch to find her. This is his quest, and it is one fueled by hope. The Lanterns make it clear that he can reach out for help if he ever needs it. To close out the season, and subsequently the series, a Blue Lantern ring is shown to follow Razer as he begins the quest.
The whole “reach out if you need it” bit is how the characters reconnect. In the aforementioned Young Justice episode, the Green Lanterns receive a distress signal on their way to the New Genesis Peace Summit. It leads them to Razer, now in Blue Lantern gear. From here we learn how the quest has gone and how Razer has spent his time since we last saw him, focusing on hope and letting go of his anger. That ends up not working out all that great, with the New God Metron interfering for his own academic endeavors and research. After a brief confrontation, Razer takes control of his quest again, and returns to the search.
The connection is frankly seamless, and hopefully any questions about who the character is have now been answered. The Blue Lantern power had previously drained the Red Lantern’s, so to see the powers be combined in such a way as they were on New Genesis was very surprising. If nothing else, it sets up a good path for future lore and future use for Razer.
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Source(s): GLTAS Wiki, DC Fandom Wiki