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As Green Lantern Jessica Cruz navigates her first days as a Yellow Lantern, the Sinestro Corps member learns the true power of one spectrum.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Green Lantern Annual #1, on sale now.
Jessica Cruz has become the newest member of Sinestro’s Yellow Lantern Corps. But far from turning herself into a villain, Jessica is discovering that the Yellow Ring, when properly utilized, has an incredible capacity for good, both for the universe at large and for its wielder.
Even more importantly, Jessica’s new position has revealed that, in the right hands, the Yellow Ring can be superior to the Green Lantern rings in Green Lantern Annual #1, by Ryan Cady, Sami Basri, Tom Derenick, Hi-Fi and Rob Leigh. They have the potential to be a corps that can enforce peace through truly understanding the motivations of the people they protect and even fight.
The personal benefits for Yellow Ring users were elaborated on by Sinestro. Though it is possible he was painting an unrealistic image for Jessica, it is possible he was telling her the truth. So far, Jessica’s uses of the ring have proven her to be a natural, but her kindness and empathy might make her the ideal person to utilize this power.
As Sinestro explained it, mastery of the Yellow Ring comes from empathy, understanding that fear is a universal emotion that can motivate others to do both terrible things and great things. People fear death, but there is always something they fear even more than that. Jessica fears what she’s capable of with the ring, but she later realizes she is afraid of missing out on the good she could do with the ring.
And for someone like Jessica, who has been scarred by fear her entire life, learning how to understand and work with fear rather than resist it could be an incredible opportunity for her, providing her with a kind of therapeutic experience that could help her move past her trauma.
Of course, this all depends on the wielder. Jessica is not a warrior by nature and merely does what she must to protect those who cannot defend themselves. That might make her incredibly unique in the Sinestro Corps, whose members are typically very aggressive. And it has been established that the ring can affect a person’s personality, as Guy Gardner testified to during Blackest Night. However, Guy is more aggressive by nature, Jessica is not.
And the practical applications already speak for themselves. Jessica can use the ring to locate sources of fear, which allow her to respond in real time to crimes in progress and help those who need it. With enough exposure, she can even understand the source of a person’s fear without speaking to them and has shown the ability to unify people by demonstrating what they should be afraid of instead of each other.
All of this, emotional understanding of both the user and the people they protect, coupled with its uses in the field have make the Yellow Lantern ring much more effective than a green one. Willpower is useful, but it pales in comparison to how Jessica used the Yellow Ring. Willpower is something that takes effort to bring out, fear comes easily to all living beings. By understanding that, the potential Yellow Lanterns have is truly limitless.
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