YMMV / Blackbird (2018)

• Caged Bird Metaphor: A subtle, pervasive theme running through the comic is that Nina, who starts out as the titular Blackbird (a paragon not associated with any Cabal), is lonely but, by her mother's standards, free, whilst paragons in general are not. Despite all their wonderful abilities, they are constrained to their territories and strictly forbidden from interacting with the larger world. Paragon buildings may look like modern architecture, but they are directly referred to as "castles" and that is probably their actual function, given that the few Cabals we see appear to be constantly on the verge of war with each other. Nina's biggest superpower is arguably the ability to simply walk in broad daylight from one end of Los Angeles to the other. By contrast, Gloria, who apparently runs Iridium Cabal, was forbidden from even letting her daughters know that she was alive and living within walking distance of them, and is essentially a prisoner of the society she sits at the apex of.
• Jerkass Woobie: Despite being portrayed in an unsympathetic fashion, it is remarkably difficult not to feel sorry for Enrique Rodriguez when you think of his situation. Right from the start, his wife's family held him in contempt through no fault of his own and for no reason he could understand (it probably never occurred to him to consider that they despised him for not being a member of a secret society of magical superbeings). It was, unfortunately, not the only thing that drove a wedge between him and Gloria. However, even if he had been a perfect husband and he and Gloria were on good terms on the night of the Verdugo Earthquake, Nina would still have died and Gloria would still have agreed to her parents' deal to resurrect her. Now, a decade after being saddled with the undeserved guilt of having caused Gloria's death, he has lost both of his daughters to that same secret world. And it is probably only a matter of time (assuming it has not happened already) before he gets a knock on his door and someone comes along to tell him his daughters are as dead as his wife... or to make him forget he ever even had a family to begin with. Not even having an affair (assuming he actually did have one) can justify the endless existential nightmare his life as become.
• Tear Jerker: Gloriana's confrontation with Nina in her throne room is one hell of a tearjerker. After the Verdugo Earthquake, Gloriana basically sold her soul to bring Nina back to life and to prevent her young daughters from following her into the hellish life of the paragons. Now, ten years later, one of those daughters has been dragged literally kicking and screaming into that world and must soon fight in a magical war in which she will be badly outmatched and in which, thanks to the other daughter's actions, her Cabal might well lose. Meanwhile, said other daughter- whom she rescued from death itself- is standing before her screaming her head off, laying out in excruciating detail how Gloriana's selfless actions have deprived her of everything that gave her life meaning, and is firing off spell after spell in an attempt to kill her own mother because she is utterly terrified of her and thinks of her as a monster.
  • And what is Gloriana's response to her daughter's attempts to kill her, and to the collapse of all of her hopes for her daughters' futures? She tries unsuccessfully one last time to hit the reset button by erasing her daughter's memory, with one final plea: "Be happy!"