YMMV / Power Girl

• Angst? What Angst?: Power Girl is arguably the worst case of Death by Origin Story in the DCU. Her entire reality was erased from existence, everyone is gone. Superman has his Earth parents and his cousin, Batman has Alfred and the Robins, Kara has no one, she is alone in the universe. It's a credit to Kara that she can function at all.
• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • World's Finest is this incarnate; make the totally heroic Power Girl a dodgy Anti-Hero, change her costume and remove the most famous aspects of said costume, and team her up with Huntress when Power Girl has always been a solo hero... it's like DC wanted to use a different character entirely before deciding to slap Power Girl's name onto it.
  • Her post-World's End interpretation, who is absurdly hostile to everybody including Huntress (and this attitude created a Relationship Reset Button with Val-Zod, which some people actually had come to like) doesn't have many fans, to put it nicely.
  • And not long before that, Judd Winick's run immediately followed up on Jimmy Palmiotti's, replacing energetic fun with a far more serious and long winded conspiracy story that was more interested in tieing into Justice League: Generation Lost than Power Girl.
  • Leah Williams' run has been derided by many long-term fans for making various changes to Power Girl's character, such as her citizen name being changed from Karen Starr to Paige Stetler (with "Paige" being a pun on the initials of her superhero alias), as well as her shift in characterization from an assertive and confident woman to someone who is more socially awkward and angsty. As this video by Casually Comics points out, the latter change makes her feel too similar to Supergirl and undermines what makes Power Girl unique as a character.
• Base-Breaking Character: Power Girl is either a fun, likable and underrated superheroine with more depth to her than many people realize or nothing more than fanservice with little to no depth behind her.
• Broken Base: The boob window. It's either too iconic to be removed or an embarrassing, shamefully exploitative part of Power Girl's costume that makes it impossible for audiences to take her seriously.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Pretty much her existence in a nutshell. Her Most Common Superpower is by far her defining trait (the "Boob Window" of her costume doesn't help), and every single article about her online or in comics-related media will comment on her chest.
• Crack Pairing: Some fans have taken to shipping her with Nightwing despite their lack of on-panel interactions for no reason other than that they are considered to be DC's definitive Ms and Mr. Fanservice respectively.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Power Girl is not a top hero in the greater DCU, but fans love her and many feel she's underused.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: A lot of fans weren't impressed by Power Girl's in-universe justification in JSA Classified for having her famous Cleavage Window was that she couldn't come up with a symbol. Fans felt like such an explanation was unnecessary for a character who's shown to be assertive and confident in her image, and trying to provide a serious explanation to a gimmick that is obviously for Fanservice only makes it harder for people to take her seriously.
• Iron Woobie: Pre-New 52 Karen, natch. She lost pretty much everything, her home, her family, her best friend, her entire universe... then during Infinite Crisis she relearns who she is, finds her cousin again... only for him to be beaten to death by an evil counterpart of his and die in her arms, leaving her alone again. And yet she still soldiers on.
• Les Yay:
  • Her friendship with the Earth 2 Huntress/Helena Wayne is full of this, both the original and New 52 versions.
  • Back in her solo series, there was a lot of this between Kara/Power Girl and Atlee/Terra, with a bit of Precocious Crush subtext on the part of the latter. There was a bit of tension between Kara and Satanna, though in more of a Combat Sadomasochist way.
• Narm: Power Girl saying the reason she has a Boob Widow is that she wants to have her own symbol to fill it in, but she can't think of one. And she tries to sell it like it's something Heartwarming.
  • Not helping that story is that there was a subplot in a pre-Crisis Powergirl story that arguably does this justification for the window much better. An alien engineer makes her a logo, but it's just a "P" stylised like the Superman "S" and she rejects it since she'd rather have a symbol that is definitly her own than a cheap copy of someone else's.
• Narm Charm: The famous boob window has become such a big part of her character and charm that both fans and writers violently object whenever DC tries to get rid of it.
• Never Live It Down: No matter what she does, or how well a character she's written, Power Girl will always be mostly known as the patron saint of giant boobs.
• Replacement Scrappy: The new Power Girl, Tanya Spears is already on her way to becoming this. Mainly because she has little-to-nothing to do with Kara, yet is still using the name. Her design and concept is liked, but the sheer fact that she's taken the Power Girl title and Kara has been Put on a Bus in favor of her has made fans resent the character. Also she's a case of Affirmative-Action Legacy, making it look like DC has only introduced the character in a desperate attempt to look progressive, similar to Wally West's Race Lift over in The Flash (2011) (before it was retconned to be a different relative of the West family).
• What the Hell, Costuming Department?:
  • Power Girl's New 52 costume got this reaction from fans. Even when she went back to the more classic looks, the fact that very shortly afterwards to honor a fallen Superman, the version of her home universe that had (alongside Lois Lane) raised her from the moment she arrived to Earth (seriously, she saw Lois as a second mother because of this) she put the "S"-shield where the "boob window" normally is made people explode.
  • Her costume under Leah Williams' run has generated mixed reception. While she keeps the iconic Cleavage Window, she changed her Leotard of Power into a full bodysuit and replaced her cape with a red jacket.
• The Woobie: Karen lost her home planet as a child and then later on her entire universe. She was also deceived into thinking she wasn't a Kryptonian for a time and was made to feel like she didn't belong anywhere.

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