YMMV / Black Canary

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Her relationship with Oliver and her motivation for continuing to go back to him after their many break-ups. Either they're a genuinely loving couple who have both made mistakes and gone through a rough patch, or they're an incredibly destructive mess with both having massive issues that they've constantly failed to work on. In-canon, this has been shown with her having a stable relationship with Mid-Nite, only to abandon it to get back together with Oliver despite the fight they were having all the while.
• Badass Decay: Tends to get hit with this whenever she's paired with Green Arrow. This tends to be the reason many of Black Canary's more vocal fanboys and girls tend to detest the pairing. Though, in fairness, this happens a lot when she's teamed up with almost any other male hero, too.
• Broken Base: Her relationship with Green Arrow, as seen by the vast majority of entries on this page being about how much some fans really hate it, despite its popularity. This is a case with DC's writers themselves, as Depending on the Writer it's either depicted as a mutually supportive, fun, engaging couple who compliment one-another and have great chemistry, or its a mutually abusive train wreck that derails Dinah's character terribly and makes them both look horrible.
• Cant Unhear It: When fans read the Black Canary comic book, the voices that come to mind when reading her lines are either Grey DeLisle, Jennifer Hale, Kari Wahlgren, or Vanessa Marshall.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: She may not have much in the way of solo material compared to Wonder Woman or Supergirl, but she is considered to be one of the most beloved DC female characters.
• Fandom Rivalry: Strangely given in-canon the two characters are long-time lovers (and naturally, this means there's a sizeable Friendly Fandoms segment for those who ship them), but Green Arrow fans and Black Canary fans often butt heads due to the fact that Canary is in-canon a much better fighter than Green Arrow but often falls victim to Badass Decay to make Green Arrow look better, and the two have had a fairly destructive romance. Canary fans resent the Badass Decay and take Dinah's side in their romantic troubles, while Arrow fans declare her a Faux Action Girl and take Ollie's side. Given both characters have had bad writing in their history, if one took everything a face value, they're both incredibly abusive and destructive towards each other, so there's some reasoning, but only if one ignores that most of the time, this behaviour is Out of Character for both of them.
  • Another, lesser point of resentment between the two camps is also DC's tendency to favour Green Arrow, despite the two being pretty much equal in popularity. Whenever they've headlined separate books, the sales tend to be about the same give or take a few hundred units (and even there, which one is 'winning' tends to swap between the two), yet Black Canary is more likely to have her book canned in favour of dropping her into Green Arrow's, while her Rogues Gallery have have been taken by Oliver, and she's been overlooked for promotion outside of the comics. This tends to fan the flames quite a bit as it more-or-less encourages Green Arrow's fanbase to view her as less important while also pushing her fanbase to resent his.
• Les Yay:
  • Black Canary and Oracle get a LOT of this, as well as Homoerotic Subtext. And with Huntress, to only a marginally lesser extent.
  • Black Canary and Oracle have a hands-on friendship with a lot of touching. The most blatant example is when they meet for the first time, in person, and go on a First-Name Basis. Their relaxed hug seems like romantic cuddling.
  • One Birds of Prey page has Barbara saying she feels so close to Dinah that it's almost as if they're "more than just partners". The panels cut to several photographs of her and Dinah.
  • She also has a significant amount with Lady Shiva.
• My Real Daddy: Dinah's depiction by Gail Simone is considered to be the only one that matters by many fans.
• Never Live It Down:
  • The '80s costume.◊
  • Also, her "lesbian biker" look (as it is referred to by fans) from her short-lived 90's solo series.
  • The negative parts of her relationship with Green Arrow often get poked fun at. Some have gone as far as to accuse her of being abusive towards him born from scenes of her hitting him or kicking him in the junk, which besides the fact they leave out the fact Green Arrow is at times emotionally abusive, but also that the times Dinah has hit Oliver were followed immediately by them making out or having sex, making it clear that the violence is part of their sex life.
• Newer Than They Think: Dinah playing second-fiddle to Oliver any time they're together isn't quite as intrusive as some fans seem to see it as. Before the Grell run, Oliver and Dinah often traded saving each others' lives, and it was shown repeatedly that she was the better fighter of the two, despite some troubling dialogue choices and behaviours, and during the Hard Travelling Heroes era, she even regularly showed up both Ollie and Hal. Even the Grell run, while infamous for Dinah being tortured, sexually assaulted, and left depowered, had Dinah recover from the ordeal and later save Oliver from the same scenario. Dinah getting the short-end of the stick with Oliver is more a case from after Oliver's resurrection; since she had Took a Level in Badass before that and was so far above his weight, some writers gave her The Worf Effect so Ollie could look good.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Her affiliation with rock predates the New 52. A 2000s comic had a flashback that showed Black Canary was a grunge fan in the 1990s as a teenager, and though its more coincidental, her fondness for fishnets, leather jackets, and combat boots are staples of punk rock fashion. The Civvie Spandex shirt/short-shorts look also first appeared back in Birds of Prey #49, as a result of Dinah only having part of her costume with her during an adventure. Her association with singing is also something that was previously focused on in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, with her character getting a number of songs in the musical episode and elsewhere.
  • Black Canary debuted in 1947 but didn't become mainstream amongst non-comic fans until the 2000s (thanks to adaptations like Justice League Unlimited, Young Justice, and Arrow).
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Green Arrow and Black Canary's marriage felt very forced to many fans. After leaving the Birds of Prey, Dinah got a miniseries that was supposed to be about her new role as Sin's legal guardian, but in-practice was a lead-in to their then-upcoming marriage, followed by several years of her playing ineffectual sidekick to Ollie in what was supposed to be their shared title. Their relationship became a sour point for many fans because of how it effected her character growth.
  • One frustrating problem with the relationship is it is often only to Oliver's benefit, not Dinah's. Oliver's book by-and-large does better when Dinah is around; stories and runs set when they're broken up have rarely faired as well, and the most iconic and successful Green Arrow stories have generally been when he's paired up with her (with the exception of Year One and Lemire's run). Dinah though, thanks to the Birds of Prey (which started life as more-or-less a Black Canary book with Oracle as a supporting character) has demonstrated she can have an lengthy run without Oliver at all, and tends to go through much more character development when he's not around. For some, it can look like her relationship with Oliver holds her back.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Though it's probably more a case of misremembering, a point has often been touted that Dinah blamed Oliver for his rape. She didn't, she was upset at this conceiving a child (at-the-time, Dinah wanted kids with Oliver but had been told she was infertile), but it wasn't until he kissed Marianne that she considered him a cheat. Years later this incident was brought up, and similarly it's been described as Dinah dismissing the rape as an affair, but the opposite is true, she angrily defends the fact Oliver is a rape victim and puts full blame on Shado.
  • Likewise, there's been a tendency from some to present Dinah as being abusive towards Oliver, citing a few moments where she's hit him. However, while it's true that she has hit him, he's also hit her, and has gaslighted and manipulated her, as well as (consensually) cheated on her at least twice. It's less she's abusive and more that some writers write the two as incredibly toxic on both sides. This is a major reason their relationship is such a controversial one among both characters' fandom.
  • And then there's her actions in Rise of Arsenal, which some of Roy's fandom present as if Dinah wrote Roy off as a lost cause. In the comic itself, Dinah leaves Roy in a rehab facility for his own good, and she hates herself for it, but it's the only workable solution as Roy is refusing anything less and Dinah planned to be there for him, but he broke out. It also ignores that Roy spent the previous three issues repeatedly assaulting and attacking Dinah, even using the fact she's infertile to attack her, while dismissing how she could never understand his grief...despite her having experienced it herself only a few years prior with Sin when Oliver faked the kid's death without telling her. As bad as the comic is in general, Dinah is doing everything she can to be there for a man who spends the entire time spitting in her face, and somehow she's seen as the badguy by hardcore Roy Harper fans.
• Super Couple: Black Canary and Green Arrow have been an on-and-off couple since the 1960s and is one of DC's main Official Couples. Green Arrow has dated both the pre-Crisis and post-Crisis Black Canary's. The couple has appeared in various adaptations such as Justice League Unlimited, Young Justice (2010), and Injustice.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Surprisingly averted with her DC You-onward rockstar touch. Her Rebirth redesign has been a hit with fans much like the similar Burnside Batgirl redesign was, while Dinah's status as a punk-rock singer has largely been welcomed due to making a lot of sense for her character and just being so unique within the medium.
  • Every time Black Canary's costume gets massively changed, fans complain and it inevitably changes back. Examples include her 1980s costume and her brief 1990s stint where she removed both her wig and fish-nets.
  • Adaptations of her character have a tendency to be met with this reaction, though in fairness, she's yet to be adapted even close to how she is in the comics (outside of animation, which tends to be better received due to being Truer to the Text). This has been commented on by her fanbase, who note that bizarrely, every Live-Action Adaptation has felt the need to change her backstory, give her Adaptational Villainy (going from The Cape to, at best, a gritty anti-hero), and downgrade her skillset so she doesn't overshadow someone else. Part of this is her never being given a lead role in any adaptation, but it's notable that there's been seven live-action Black Canaries in-between 2002 and 2021, yet the closest to Dinah Laurel Lance was called Sara and was a League of Assassins member prone to murder without her signature Canary Cry.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: During Chuck Dixon's Birds of Prey run, he had Stephanie Brown, AKA Spoiler, make occasional guest appearances, alongside having Dinah and Steph interact within other Bat-books he was writing at the time, during which Dinah became something of a Cool Big Sis to Steph and even personally dealt with her abusive father for her. This friendship and budding mentorship all but disappeared without any reference to it shortly after.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Black Canary and Green Arrow developed this problem after the latter proposes marriage, where both of their flaws get Flanderised. Until they actually broke up for good, their mutual treatment towards each other had became so toxic that it raised serious questions what was making them think that getting married would be a good idea, and after the wedding, things didn't get any better. It took Oliver becoming a killer for Dinah to give back her wedding ring, and even that she regretted.

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