daibhidc | What's wrong with the Star Sapphires

Okay, so it's been established that the Green Lantern Corps is now just one of a number of different ring-wielding organisations who represent different emotions. Fair enough.

Existing characters Sinestro (yellow ring created by the Weaponeers of Qward) and Star Sapphire (purple gem [now a ring] provided by the Zamorans, the Guardians' female counterparts) have been shoehorned into this concept, with their colours being those of Fear and Love respectively. Also fair enough, since it's broadly consistent with what's gone before.

But the Star Sapphires have two things about them that Just Don't Work.

Firstly, their power entity. Apparently all the Corps have an entity whose existence is the basis for their power batteries. In the case of the GLC and the Sinestro Corps, these entities have been shoehorned into existence by co-opting existing names. When Kyle Rayner got the entire power of the Central Power Battery he became Ion, so that's the name of the Willpower Entity[1]. And when Hal Jordan went mad, he called himself Parallax, so that's the name of the Fear Entity (now retconned as having been the GL ring's "yellow impurity" all along, and as posessing Hal during his time being mad).

Neither of these names have anything to do with the concepts they represent, because why would they; it's not like any of this was planned. But at least they're not entirely antithetical to them.

Having scoured the back alleys of continuity to find a suitable entity with a connection to the Sapphires, the best Johns could come up with was the Predator, originally presented as the masculine component of the first Star Sapphire's personality, later given humanoid form and fathering a child on SS in a really dreadful Extreme Justice storyline (is there any other kind?) He's not a great fit, to put it mildly. And he's called the Predator, which makes less than no kind of sense for the Entity of Love.

But that's not the dumbest bit.

The most noticable thing about the GLs is their alienness. Yes, they've got four humans and the usual array of basically-human-aliens. But they've also got nonstandard humanoids like Killowog or Tomar Re, and completely nonhumanoid aliens like the crystalline Chaselon, or the plant-based Medphyll. And Mogo, the living planet GL. And a chipmunk.

The other Corps have followed suit, with some members from the same races as the GLs, and others looking even more alien.

And, of course, all these Corps have members who are male, female, or simply don't apply to our simplistic human concepts of gender.

The Sapphires are all female. They're all humanoid females. They're all - ahem - very obviously mammalian humanoid females. Aparently the Zamorans are a bunch of chauvinists who think only women who are attractive by terrestrial standards know anything about love. It makes no sense whatsoever.

[1]Yes, I know willpower isn't an emotion. That bugged me for a while, until I realised that, since green is at the centre of the spectrum, it represents the ability not to be swayed by any of these emotions.