It’s been about ten years since the pages of Blackest Night first introduced the world to the concept of the White Lantern, the most powerful of all Lanterns, wielding the power of life itself. But what does it actually mean to weird the power of life itself? How does that make them the most powerful Lanterns? Every other variation of power ring has clearly defined traits that determine the abilities and limitations of the rings, and directly inform the goals of the Lanterns wielding them. So what exactly does a White ring do that sets it apart from every other color?
Figuring out the actual abilities of the White Lantern is harder than you’d think, because almost all of the most significant displays of power performed by a White Lantern are done with something else augmenting their power. There are three things we have to untangle: the abilities of the White Lantern ring, powers inherent to the Life Entity, and actions made possible through use of the Life Equation.
The Life Entity is the first living thing ever to appear in the universe. The power radiating from it is literally the source of all life, period…before it showed up, all of existence was just the empty void of space. The Life Entity is one of the most powerful beings ever to exist, and the white light coming from it would splinter into the seven lights of the Emotional Spectrum, the power source all Lanterns draw from, channeling very small quantities through rings designed to make the power easier to control. Eventually there would be White rings specifically meant to channel the undiluted white light directly.
We have seen two different ways of creating a White Lantern ring. The first is that a ring is generated by the Life Entity itself. When this happens, the White Lantern is essentially acting as a host for the Life Entity, or at least tapping the Entity’s power directly. While we may be able to assume that any powers gained from this version of the White ring are representative of White Lanterns in general, it’s very likely that directly tapping into the Life Entity means that these White Lanterns are doing things far larger and more powerful than what a white ring may otherwise be capable of. We’ve seen this with every other color Lantern…Sinestro, for example, is significantly more powerful when in possession of the fear entity Parallax than he is with just a normal yellow fear ring.
The second way a White Lantern ring can be created is by taking one ring from every color Lantern Corps in the spectrum, and fusing them together. This isn’t easy, because it takes someone with an incredibly strong affinity with every single emotion being completely honest with themselves about their feelings. The only person to do this, so far, is Kyle Rayner. One of the only things Kyle’s been able to do with this white ring reliably is channel each individual light of the spectrum, mostly one at a time…though that may be unique to Kyle’s ring since it was made by fusing together different rings. A white ring made by the Life Entity may not share this ability. It’s also possible that this is more a limitation of the user than the ring…Kyle was primarily trained as a Green Lantern, meaning that his ability to use green willpower is already very strong, while he’s still fairly new to commanding most of the rest, which could be keeping him from using them all in harmony.
…but either way, we have our white ring. So what can it do? What are its abilities, and why is this such a complicated question? Well let’s start by answering what should be the easiest possible question: can a White Lantern bring a dead person back to life? It’s usually the very first thing people assume a White Lantern can do, since the ring is tapping into the power of life itself. And the answer is…maybe?
In Blackest Night, we see many instances of White Lantern rings bringing dead people back to life, which should make this pretty simple, right? Of course White Lanterns can resurrect people, they did it right here. Except that every White Lantern that existed during Blackest Night was acting as a direct vessel for the Life Entity, and thus had access to more power than they otherwise would. When a group of them aim their rings at Black Hand…who by the way is kind of a space zombie, long story…it isn’t just the light from their rings that restore him to life, their rings act as a delivery method aiming the Life Entity at Black Hand, and it was the Entity that returned him to life.
In the same issue, we see that a white ring placed on the finger of a dead body has the ability to restore that person to life, as a large group of dead heroes and villains are instantly resurrected…but again, these rings were made by the Life Entity, and as we’d see in the Brightest Day series, the Life Entity chose to bring each of these people back to life to fulfill specific tasks. We don’t know what a White ring would do to a dead body if a White Lantern just took their ring off and placed it on the hand of the deceased.
Let’s get back to Kyle Rayner, who’s tried a number of times to bring the dead back to life, with some very unclear results. He tried and failed to resurrect the dead members of the Blue Lantern Corps, which ended with Kyle’s White ring destabilizing and splitting back into the individual spectrum rings it was made of…but even then, we can’t say any of that’s a consequence of what he was attempting to do, because it’s heavily implied that the failure of the resurrection, and even the dismantling of the ring, were done by Doctor Manhattan, as the DC Universe was still attempting to foreshadow the Doomsday Clock event.
He did successfully bring Hal Jordan back from the dead, but with a number of caveats. Hal “died” in a massive explosion of willpower that caused him to merge with the Will side of the Emotional Spectrum, kind of like a Flash merging with the Speed Force. It’s presented as being basically “Green Lantern Heaven”, because anyone who’s super in tune with willpower can go there when they die…but that raises a lot of questions. If the Emotional Spectrum is the energy of life, can anything dead exist inside it? If Hal’s body dies, but his willpower lives on in the Spectrum, is Hal actually dead at all? It further complicates things that Kyle was able to restore Hal by using Hal’s ring, which Hal forged himself out of a piece of his own willpower, meaning that ring was a small piece of Hal Jordan left alive even after the destruction of his body. So did Kyle bring Hal back from the dead…or did Kyle simply use Hal’s ring as a conduit find Hal’s willpower, separate it from the Spectrum, regenerate Hal’s body and place that will back inside it? Was this a successful resurrection from the dead, or was this just the complex reassembling of a person who was still alive?
Kyle also came across a recently destroyed planet and attempted to resurrect it and all of its people. He ultimately fails, and says that all he can do is “hold the door open for them”, meaning he can only resurrect the dead if they want to come back…which lends credence to Hal Jordan not actually being dead in the previous example, since Kyle more or less forced Hal back to normal. Unlike Kyle, the Life Entity can just compel someone to become alive again if it chooses. In Brightest Day, Boston Brand is one of the people resurrected by the Life Entity to fulfill a specific purpose, and in his travels, he’s shot to death, and the ring automatically brings him back to life. It’s implied this is because he hasn’t yet completed the task given to him by the entity, but it does hi-light the fact that we don’t actually know whether or not a White Lantern can die. Kyle survived two back-to-back brushes with death that I would love to say are tied to his growing mastery of the white light…but this is where we have to start talking about the Life Equation. And to do that, we need to talk briefly about the Emotional Reservoir.
So for a little while there, the Green Lantern books operated under the idea that the Emotional Spectrum which fuels the Lantern rings is also a limited resource that can run out, and running out is bad because the universe needs that resource to live. The DC Universe has something called the Source Wall, an unknowably large wall that totally encircles the universe in every direction. Nobody’s ever been able to get to the other side of the Source Wall, anybody who even tries gets absorbed by it and turned into a lifeless statue for eternity. It’s unknown what exactly is on the other side of the wall, but it’s believed that one of the things over there is the reservoir of Emotional Spectrum energy that feeds the universe.
In the New Guardians series, the Templar Guardians state that the purpose of the White Lantern is to achieve perfect mastery over every emotion in the spectrum, and then bring that energy through the Source Wall to refill the Emotional Reservoir. Kyle does this, and it seems to work, and it should have been a one way trip…except Kyle found something else on the other side of that wall. He found the Life Equation, which is basically the instructions for how the universe was built. If you know the Life Equation, you have the ability to make small adjustments to it, and thereby change things about reality. How would Kyle Rayner get back to our side of the impassable Source Wall? By rewriting reality to make doing that possible.
Kyle going beyond the Source Wall and seeing the Life Equation makes it difficult to know just how much of the more extreme things he’s capable of are directly because of the White ring. Those various brushed with certain death I mentioned earlier? It’s directly stated that Kyle’s been unconsciously using the Life Equation to re-write reality, making impossible things possible, so maybe his White Lantern powers have nothing to do with the amazing thing’s he’s accomplished during most of his tenure with the White ring. Kyle did successfully resurrect the dead twice while in possession of the Life Equation…one was a sentient planet like Mogo, the other was a city destroyed by the villain named Oblivion…but this came at a time when the focus of Kyle’s story was how possessing the Life Equation was tempting him to play God with reality and the lives of others. Once again, we have a White Lantern who’s only able to resurrect the dead with the help of something greater than their own power, just like in Blackest Night.
To confuse matters further, after an encounter with the New God leader Highfather, the Life Equation is stated to be contained within Kyle’s white ring…which would mean that anything the Life Equation can do is technically an ability of the White Lantern? Though that won’t be true anymore going forward. Kyle split his white ring into seven white rings, each containing a piece of the Life Equation, but none having enough of it to actually do anything with it. So there is currently a small White Lantern Corps who have access to nothing but the power of their white rings…whatever that means.
That thing I mentioned before, where Doctor Manhattan took Kyle’s white ring apart and separated it back into the seven other colors…that happened after splitting the Equation. Which means there are still six White Lanterns out there, but it also means the Life Equation is gone. Remember, every one of the seven white rings had an incomplete, useless piece of the Equation that was only useful if all seven were reunited…and now Kyle’s piece of it is gone forever, meaning the Life Equation is no longer a concept tied to the White Lantern…which honestly should make things easier from now on, if and when more White Lantern stories are told. What makes things a little worse is the books abandoning the idea of the Emotional Spectrum Reservoir. That story ran its course and has never been mentioned again…which is understandable, you don’t want your super heroes to be actively killing the universe just by using their super powers. But it does rob the White Lantern of the closest thing it’s ever had to a purpose. If the existence of the White Lantern is tied to the Emotional Reservoir, and the concept of the reservoir has been abandoned, then we have no idea what the purpose of the White Lantern is. And that’s not a big deal when it comes to Kyle, he’s back to being a Green Lantern again. But there are still those other six members of the White Lantern Corps who flew off into space back in 2015, and haven’t been seen since.
…and I’m not very confidant we will see them any time soon. Instead of fleshing out the characters and concepts associated with the White Lanterns, DC has been trying its best to create new rings that are inferior knockoffs of the white rings. The First ring, the Phantom ring…even the Universal ring, which only appeared in a non-cannon crossover with Planet of the Apes…all of these rings are presented as ancient prototype rings, incredibly powerful and dangerous because they draw power from the entire Emotional Spectrum at once. Recently, in the pages of Batman Universe, we even saw another variation of the white ring that amounted to being just another ancient attempt at a ring prototype, just like all the others. The only thing that made it stand out was the ability to teleport through time and space at will, though there’s no reason to think other white rings could do the same.
So with all that said, once we eliminate all potential outside influences, these are the abilities possessed by someone wielding a white ring:
Since the white rings are powered by life itself, their light is the best weapon against anything embodying death, or just the absence of light and life, like a Black Lantern. It has the ability to gain strength the more its wearer embraces life and fights for it. The user is affected in a strongly negative way when confronted with overwhelming death, like the remains of a destroyed planet. They can project emotion onto others, compelling someone to feel a specific way for a short time. The ring can make constructs, like any other Lantern ring. It was suggested once that white energy constructs may be prominent, but that idea was abandoned before it could ever really be explored. It can individually use the seven colors of the emotional spectrum, though this may depend entirely on the aptitude of the user, or require the white ring to be made of a fusion of the other color rings in the first place. The new white rings made by Kyle come with a built-in instruction manual. In his own words, the rings won’t tell you what to do, just how to do it.
…so that’s it. That’s everything there is to know about the White Lantern. I have to say that I’m more than a little disappointed that we’ve had White Lanterns for about a decade, and the entire concept still exists in such a vague state. If I had to guess, it might be a case of writers struggling to continue the concept on past its original intended purpose. The White Lanterns were meant to end the Blackest Night…and they did…but then they stayed around, and nobody really knew what to do with them after that. The best idea they came up with was the whole Emotional Reservoir thing, but that didn’t pan out, and now the White Lanterns are drifting through comic limbo, waiting for a writer to come along with an idea good enough to not only let them live up to their potential, but to decide what their potential even is.
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