DC INFO NEEDED!

[icarus_chained]

Alrighty then. This is an appeal to Those-in-the-Know of the DC fandom. I got thinking about the whole meta-counselling-network idea, and I could use a little help, if anyone is listening.

Musings and questions under the cut. Warning, slightly in-depth:

Recently, in a fic called Amor Verus, I posited the idea that J'onn and Oracle between them had somehow begun to cobble together a pan-JLA/Batclan counselling network, using Oracle's networking, J'onn's talents, and the Watchtower systems. Some people jumped on the idea, because it makes a lot of sense. Not necessarily that J'onn/Oracle would do it, but that there would be some kind of similar system in place.

This got me thinking. Because it *does* make a lot of sense. I am far from the first person to realise this. In that fic, I had it as a kind of relationship-counselling, both for metas and those humans involved with them, but if you expand the idea, both in terms of range of services, and the people it services, the ramifications of its existance would be immense. (Bear with me here for a bit. I promise I won't be too long, but I've been stuck in work all week, and thinking about this is pretty much all I've been doing.)

Think of it. If you linked in all the other teams, all the communities like the magical community, the alien community, etc, made it a centralised network available to as many capes and metas and humans as possible, in the interests of brotherhood and common sense, think about the kind of networking you'd have put in place. You'd have a system linking an entire subculture on a personal level. Now, the teams themselves fulfil this function in a lot of ways as it is, but the potential here is much greater.

The range of services you could provide would be of huge personal and tactical value. Ranging from the above-mentioned relationship advice/counselling, to how-to-keep-a-secret-identity, to juggling personal life/day job/cape activities, to more paranoid functions. Even done anonymously, that's still a lot of personal information flying around. Now, with the likes of Oracle and Batman in the know, the chances of it getting around outside of the community itself are greatly reduced (but as Ra's proved, not beyond the bounds of possibility), but leakage within the community could cause huge problems.

Tactically, you could use it as an early warning system, catching people before they go superpowered-crazy, the way counselling services in our world have a responsibility to go to the authorities if they think a patient presents a danger to themselves or others. Also, it might serve as a means for more isolated heros, etc, to keep in touch with the broader community, and ideally lessen the number of missing persons. On the human side, as well as helping family members/significant others cope with the lives of their loved ones, how many traps have been set for heros by kidnapping girlfriends they recently broke up with, estranged family, and the like? If those people were talking to a meta counselling system, then you could note it much faster.

And how far could you go? How paranoid do you want to be? Imagine how Question, or Oliver Queen, or even Batman would react to such a proposal? Taken to the darker extremes, it could be used as the ultimate spying tool. The amount of information on the thoughts, emotions, and personal lives of an entire community, all flooding through a relatively small network of linked systems. How vulnerable to outside attack would it be? How vulnerable to internal controls? It's 1984 come to life. Done right, you could influence the thought patterns of one of the most dangerous groups of people on the planet, or indeed in this portion of the Galaxy. The individual crisis-contingency plans on the style of Batman and Year 1 J'onn, exploded out of all proportion. How far away would the likes of the Justice Lords be, from that?

...

Alright. I've just described a great big stinking pile of AU's, haven't I? Benevolent integration of resources and vocations aimed at helping one of the most stressed work-groups in the universe, or fascist 1984-style dictatorship controlling the thoughts and lives of an entire subculture (and by eventual extension, the rest of the world), and the whole range of options in between. Oooookay, then.

Anyway, coming back down to the smaller (and less horrifically paranoid) scale of things, I have a couple of questions.

I was trying to work out the mechanics of the idea. How would you go about setting something like that up? Now, in the fic mentioned above, I had J'onn and Oracle as the hub, with Alfred on the side, because their focus was the two groups in question, JLA and Batclan. I had Oracle functioning as the central information hub, the contact point, and the network operator, as it were, since she apparently performs that function on a variety of levels for half the capes in North America and beyond anyway. J'onn was the main 'counsellor' for the JLA end, and also the one sitting on one of the largest neutral technological installations ever, with a monitoring system covering most of the globe, and links to every hero ever associated with the League. On the Batclan side, we had Alfred, since he is the defacto counsellor, psychologist, comforter, and sense-knocker-in-er for the Batclan, and more or less everyone who ever walked through the doors of Wayne Manor.

Now, say they got that up and running, with the tentative approval of Batman and the League (who of course would find out, probably long before anyone ever said anything), and wanted to expand it out to other communities, like the JSA, the Titans, the magical community, etc. Say they needed to reach out to people who could a) get a network up, and serve as contact points, and b) serve as actual counsellors. If they managed to get that far, and decided to go further ... Who on those other teams and communities would they reach out to?

You see, my particular corner of DC has always been JLA and Bats. I have next to no knowledge of the intricacies of the other communities, and you'd have to know the makeup of the society in order to pull something like this off. So. Anyone any ideas?

And before anyone says anything, I make no promises that I plan to write *any* of this, ever or at all. It was a thought that occured, and demanded to be explored. Besides, with the range of stories contained in that single concept, no-one would ever be finished with it. Maybe as a community, or something, with lots of different authors exploring the themes, you might convince me to join in, but who in their right minds would try to tackle *that*??

So, this is just me being curious. Whacha all think?