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Cyborg — Description

Cyborg was one of those heroes I discovered in a rather backwards fashion, because my introduction wasn't the classic silver half-man, half-machine Victor Stone -
it was the Omega-Drome body from The Technis Imperative, where the Titans and the Justice League collided and Vic emerged reborn as a gleaming golden technomorphic titan.
That was my first Cyborg, and I thought he was great. It wasn't until years later that I circled back to Marv Wolfman and George Pérez's original creation and truly appreciated some of the tragedies -and triumphs - of the classic design, which in turn made the sleeker New 52 reinvention click for me a bit more as well. Tying his technology more explicitly to New Gods mythology and Apokoliptian/New Genesis science gave his upgrade into the League a bit more sense,
boosting his capabilities that made him feel entirely at home amongst the worlds finest, while never losing sight of the frightened young man trapped inside the machinery.
I enjoyed him in the animated series, where his warmth, humour and endless made him the team's beating heart,
and I found his wonderfully unexpected appearance in the live-action Doom Patrol series an equally inspired reminder that Victor works best wherever damaged people are trying to become whole together.
Created (as i mentioned before) by Wolfman and Pérez in 1980, Cyborg was also one of DC's most significant Black superheroes at a time when mainstream comics desperately needed more heroes who looked like the world outside their pages,
and that importance has only grown with time. His powers have expanded from extraordinary strength, integrated weaponry and cybernetic adaptation to controlling vast digital networks, opening Boom Tubes, and interfacing with technology
on a planetary scale, but those have never been the point. At his core, Vic is still the gifted quarterback whose life was shattered in an instant, forced to reconcile not only body dysmorphia and the profound alienation of existing
in a form that no longer feels wholly his own, but something closer to body integrity dysphoria and even xenomelia in reverse - the aching awareness that parts of him are both undeniably him and yet forever alien.
It is an astonishingly rich metaphor which is sometimes drowned out simply because it's wrapped inside a superhero package, but what makes Victor endure is that he cannot conquer those feelings through brute force (which he now has plenty of ironically).
He overcomes them because the Titans refuse to let him face them alone. They become his family, and in time he becomes theirs: the dependable elder brother, the steady hand younger heroes instinctively gravitate towards,
proof that strength need not measured by the amount of metal in your body but by the mettle of your heart.