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As Swamp Thing faces the end of the world head-on in Future State, the Green Champion reveals why he works best with a human host.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Future State: Swamp Thing # 2, by Ram V, Mike Perkins, June Chung, and Aditya Bidikar, on sale now.
As an Advocate of Green, Swamp Thing is an avatar personally selected by the Parliament of Trees to pursue his interests throughout the DC Universe. While the physical makeup of Swamp Thing is usually entirely made up of plants, the avatar has almost always developed important connections with humanity, either through a human body linked directly to green or by retaining memories of ‘a human connection to green.
And in the post-apocalyptic timeline of Future State, Swamp Thing reveals why it is exactly important for the various Greens champions to maintain this important connection with humanity despite humanity’s propensity to pollute and destroy the plant life of the world.
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Swamp Thing is most often associated with Alec Holland, a scientist who was murdered, his flaming corpse falling into a bayou outside his house. While Alec initially believed he was born as the Swamp Thing to serve the green, keeping his human core under all of the foliage, closer inspection revealed that the superhero was in fact only a sensitive plant that inherited Alec’s memories from the scientist in his dying moments. Despite this, Swamp Thing maintained his sense of humanity to varying degrees even after this revelation, deepening his bond with a resurrected Alec Holland at the start of the New 52 era.
Further down the Future State timeline, a mysterious cataclysm resulted in the demise of the iconic heroes and villains of the DCU. Swamp Thing lives on, with its connection to humanity visibly disappearing as the last remnants of the species shelter in the north as the ruins of the old world are consumed by green. Rather than being completely alone, Swamp Thing has spawned a whole family of sentient plants who see him as their father figure. And as Swamp Thing’s longtime nemesis Woodrue resurfaces for a final attempt to topple the superhero, Swamp Thing makes it clear that the reason Woodrue couldn’t fully bond with Green and why the avatar needs a human host are only one thing.
Woodrue has always been obsessed with replacing his own humanity to become the ultimate sentient plant, deeply jealous of the fact that Swamp Thing has been selected by the Trees Parliament as their champion. In Future State, Woodrue went so far as to inject plant DNA directly into his body to access green only for the transplanted foliage to visibly reject him, turning Woodrue into even more of a monster. Swamp Thing explains that while the dynamic of the Parliament of Trees with humanity has always been tenuous, the Green works in tandem with other species to preserve the natural order; Swamp Thing being constantly linked to a human host throughout history is an important part of this symbiosis.
With generations of Swamp Things stretching back through time for untold millennia, one of the major constants has been a human host to bring a perspective to green outside of one on which plants fully depend. And as humanity is on the verge of extinction in the future state, Swamp Thing is a reminder of how important it is for the species to endure as it reconnects with its lost past while remembering that he had once identified as a human himself.
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