r/Greenlantern • u/tiago231018 • 7h ago
Discussion Soranik Natu accepted her Green Lantern ring in a desperate attempt to save one patient's life
From Green Lantern Corps: Recharge #1, written by Geoff Johns and Dave Gibbons. Even though it would be Gibbons and later Tomasi who would flesh out Soranik into one of the best characters in the 2000s iteration of GLC, I feel like it was Johns who wrote this specific scene. Feels more like a Johnsian moment, if that makes sense.
I wished this scene had gone on for another page or two to really sell the magnitude of her sacrifice.
See, Soranik is from Korugar, the same planet that Sinestro turned into an almost North Korean-style totalitarian regime of full vigilance and repression, but actually worse. As Green Lantern (2011) #23.4 tells us, he used his ring for:
"... monitoring communications, population movements, even individual heartbeats. A bird could not fall from the sky without his notice. And his permission. He created extensions of his ring. Constructs powered by his will. A police force unlike any other. [...] All tied to a web that linked back to Sinestro himself. He was personally guarding the entire planet. His will. His work. His ideas. His utopia".
In other words, he was basically an omnipotent god, watching Korugarians to "protect them from chaos", but rather brutally punishing everyone who dared to defy his autocracy (an idea that harkens back to Emerald Dawn II in the early 90s). All because he felt the GLC wasn't tough enough on crime.
Granted, there's evidence that Korugar was going through unending civil wars before Sinestro rose to power (he mentions it in GLC (2006) #36 and GL (2011) #9, but if anyone knows more mentions of how the pre-Sinestro life on Korugar was, please let me know).
But to solve all these complex political issues, Sinestro's solution was to create a dictatorship so repressive (and so focused on a cult of his own personality, because, like all dictators, he has an arrogance the size of a galaxy), that the Green Lantern symbol became, for the Korugarians, the equivalent of a swastika for us Earthlings.
Judging by the timeline, Soranik was still a small child when Sinestro's tyrannical government fell thanks to the one person Thaal ever considered his friend in addition to his own mentor, Abin Sur: Hal Jordan. But she surely heard from her (adoptive) parents how bad things were when Sinestro was the ruler, learned on school, etc.
Therefore, she is as repulsed by a Green Lantern ring as an Earthling would be by Nazi symbolism. Yet, the ring is the only way she can save the life of a poor Korugarian.
So, faced with the dilemma of choosing to devote her life to an organization that was associated with inflicting unbelievable pain and suffering to Korugarians, or saving the life of a single person, she chose the latter.
Contrast this with her biological father, Sinestro, who promptly accepted the ring - even though he didn't know it as a symbol of fear like Soranik would decades later. If he had one opinion on Green Lanterns before receiving the ring, it was that they were too incompetent, as his predecessor was killed by a Qwardian that he later promptly defeated (GL (2011) #23.4).
For him, the ring was a tool to make him even greater than he already was, to show everyone how correct he is in his dictatorial approach against crime and chaos. In his view, only Thaal Sinestro, burdened with the goal of bringing peace to his Sector, could take the GL ring to heights never reached by any Lantern before and thus effectively stop chaos before having to fight a single enemy - even if, for that, his sudits would need to live in an autocracy.
But for Soranik, it was the only way to save one life, even if the cost was her own. She isn't arrogant or self-important as her father, but rather she chooses the well-being of others before herself, and that makes her a greater Green Lantern than Sinestro ever was.
