Two Halves That Aren't Whole

Reading Huntress: Cry for Blood, I was pretty curious about the connection between Helena and Vic Sage. Vic describes her as being like looking in a mirror. Richard Dragon describes her as Vic's other half.

As Vic told her, they both have problems with anger and violence. With Vic, in the latter stages of the O'Neil/Cowan series, it caused him to lose perspective and the inner calm he'd been developing. He grew frustrated with how little of a difference he was making, with the people he couldn't save. He kept trying to fix things by hitting people. He forgot (or gave up on) being a reporter, even though he might have had more success going that route. Letting the people of Hub City know what he'd seen and learned, in the hope they'd stir themselves to action. But he was too far gone by that point.

With Helena, the anger works similarly. It makes her too stubborn to know when to back off, so even though everyone is looking for the Huntress, she still goes to try and shake down that reporter, who turns out to have been killed to help frame her. Her anger also leads to a lack of trust on her part. When Nightwing offers to help, she rejects him, because she thinks he's doing so not because he's actually concerned for her, but because he thinks there's something wrong with her that needs fixing.

For both of them, anger leads to isolation, and near destruction. It makes it that much harder for them to accomplish their goals, because they're too caught up in pain and frustration to see they're either being manipulated, or going about things in the wrong way.

But there was something about Vic's 'like looking in a mirror' line that stuck with me. What I realized was, when you look in a mirror, you see yourself, but reversed. All the same features are there, just on the opposite side. So what does that mean for the two of them?

One thing I hit on was their pasts, namely that Helena knows hers, and Vic doesn't. Sure there are certain things about herself Helena didn't know (which she learned over the course of the mini-series), but she knows a lot. That her family was killed, and she wasn't. That her family was part of a mob, that the men who took her in afterward were killers, who taught her how as well. Vic, conversely, knows none of that. He was an orphan, no knowledge of his parents, origins, any of that. Helena is driven forward by what she does know about her past, while Vic was driven by what he didn't. Helena needs to avenge her family, and that fuels the anger. Vic needs to learn things, uncover truths and expose them to light, but the frustration that mounts with not being able to answer questions about his past continued to build as his series progressed. The fact he couldn't see if he was making a difference just contributed to the problem.