4. The Meta Human Factor
Quick, what is Batman’s superpower? If you answered none, or he’s always prepared, or he’s the goddamn Batman, you would be correct. For a guy who knows gods, Martians, and Scooby-Doo, the Batman’s most impressive quality was the fact that he never needed superpowers to be one of the most feared heroes of the DC Universe, inspiring others to live up to his standard. Birds of Prey however, abandons this human aspect in favor of a meta human one.
Dinah is the daughter of Black Canary, imbued with touch-telepathy, prophetic dreams, and eventually telekinesis as opposed to a supersonic scream of her mother (because that totally makes sense…). Huntress, on the other hand, gains all of the cat-powers of her mother, because in this universe Catwoman has superpowers for some reason. I’m not a meta-geneticist — couldn’t get past Calc II– but some consistency with passing down powers could be observed.
When you think about it, retroactively giving Catwoman superpowers is insulting to her entire character. Part of the reason why Batman was so attracted to Catwoman in the first place was because she was essentially his equal, a woman able to bypass and unlock the deepest treasures and locks of humanity with just her human intellect and physical abilities. Though she may have used her abilities for evil, it is the impressiveness of these abilities that drew Batman to her. To instead say it was all because she was meta-human is insulting.
Consequentially, this meta human Catwoman also sort of makes makes Catwoman, the movie, canon. Do you really want to be remembered as the show that borrowed an idea from Catwoman?
