10 Subtle Changes That SAVED Iconic Comic Book Characters
8. Introducing The Parallax Fear Anomaly - Green Lantern
When Green Lantern was rebooted in the silver age DC changed the power ring from having a mystical source to a sci-fi one, being a cosmic embodiment of willpower... that just also happened to be weak to the color yellow. What?
Yeah, for decades Green Lantern was infamous among comics nerds for having one of the all time dumbest weaknesses in the history of the medium. Now in most cases like this, the solution if you want your character to be taken seriously as time goes on would be to just pretend it was never a thing to begin with, because they're comic books, and it is totally okay to just do that.
Instead, they went with a different solution.
See, when they introduced the color spectrum of power rings, they also introduced various deities that represented these types of rings, most notably Parallax. And with him came the minor lore detail known as the Parallax Fear Anomaly.
This is the Green Lantern mythos' small but effective way of explaining why their power rings don't work on things that are yellow. They CAN, under normal circumstances, unless the ring-bearer is incredibly afraid. When that happens, the rings have no effect.