I mean if he's allowed to embrace the fact that a guy like Hal Jordan in real life is 100% smarmy loser and being fearless in his context would be more of a mental illness than an admirable quality ... I'm still not sure it's a show I'd want to watch but at least it would appeal to some folks. (But of course that would actually be a different character than the Hal Jordan we actually have).
I'd argue it's the Hal Jordan we
do have. But then again, I think making Parallax into a separate character was a cop-out. If you're going to tell stories about a character for decades upon decades, embrace the good, the bad and the ugly. Not discarding the weird outlier stuff is what made Doctor Doom and Magneto so nuanced, for instance.
Let Hal be someone willing to risk his life to save the world several times a week and
also a person that needs massive amounts of therapy and, based on his behavior, has a lot of family trauma to work through.
To me, that's a lot more interesting than Generic Hero Guy, which is what he and Barry Allen were originally and what Geoff Johns tried to reboot them to when he took the reins of DC a decade or so ago. (To be fair, Johns also gave Barry more of a background than "ho ho, the terminally late guy is the Flash.") The company has escaped at least some of that -- although Johns keeps wandering back in, pitching Golden Age books whenever someone leaves a door unlocked -- and it's worth them moving on from the vanilla version of Hal that has been unconvincingly propped up for the last decade or so.
There are a
lot of much better Green Lanterns now. The only arguments for using Hal instead of any of the others is nostalgia or because you're going to actually embrace the stuff that makes Hal someone interesting, which are his gaping, cavernous flaws.
