Are you familiar with the Teen Titans? Yes, I am referring to the popular young superhero team that many people vividly recall watching on their television screens. Among the many heroes who have had the honor of being a member of the Teen Titans, one flame-haired badass beauty has clearly stood out over the years – STARFIRE. Starfire has been dubbed the “pretty one,” but today I am here to tell you that she is much more than that.
Starfire, also known as Kory Anders, is a more multifaceted character than the Titans would have you believe. From the entire scope of her skills to her one-of-a-kind home planet, she has a lot to offer. After the launch of DC’s Titans, many people have gotten even more inquisitive about the Tamaranean princess, and in this video, I will teach you everything you need to know about her!
The First Comic Book Appearance
While many Starfire fans remember her from the Teen Titans series in 2003, she has been in the DC Universe for much longer. Marv Wolfman and George Perez created the character in 1980 and it was in DC Comics Presents Issue #26 that she made her first appearance. They needed new members for the Teen Titans, so the two men came up with the idea of creating an exotic alien princess who was both gorgeous and tough. Perez compared her to “Red Sonja from Outer Space” and she was drawn with glistening orange skin, lengthy red hair, revealing “armor,” and penetrating green eyes.
In this book, the Teen Titans make an appearance in the second story and as usual, they are busy saving the world. We watch as Robin investigates a hostage situation in front of Star Labs in New York. However, he feels dizzy and when he looks up, Wonder Girl shows up to assist him and he’s no longer dealing with a hostage situation but is actually in a Titans meeting.
The Titans introduce themselves to Robin one by one however, it seems like he knows none of them at all and can’t remember who these people are. It is during this time that Starfire comes in and introduces herself and is referred to as ‘Golden Girl’.
However, the reunion doesn’t last long as Raven warns them of imminent disaster as she shows them visions of a scientist who had opened a gate to another dimension and that had resulted in a dangerous organism entering into Earth, thus posing a threat to all of mankind. They thus rush to find and eliminate this threat and while Starfire can fly, Robin cannot so she carries him, bridal style – no wonder these two were together at a point in time.
They find the giant, hulking protoplasmic being and before they can even launch an attack, raven’s soul is captured by the entity, making it all the more important to defeat it. As they start attacking, Robin feels dizzy again and is back in the hostage situation, only to be transported back to the Teen Titans and it turns out both the situations were related and Robin was being transported through time, between the present and the future. However, what is important is Starfire’s role in this story.
As they launched an attack on the glob-like entity, it fled and they finally found it in the scientist’s lab, hanging in the passageway it had come through, Starfire realized that her starbolts had an impact on it physically and started bombarding it with them.
The scientist however told Robin that the only way to defeat the being was to send it back where it had come from and Starfire took on the responsibility of pushing it through the portal as the rest of the Titans evacuated the room as it had to be sealed. The reason behind this was the fact that Starfire did not need any oxygen to stay alive and thus would be the only person equipped to push the entity out and survive the ordeal. Thus, in all practicality, Starfire saved the day and this marked the beginning of countless appearances of this flame-haired hero.
A Brief History of Starfire
While Starfire was born into royalty, her life was not a bed of roses and very early on, she suffered betrayal at the hands of her very own sister. Her birth name was Koriand’r and she was the second of three children born to her parents on the planet Tamaran, which is located 26 light-years away from Earth.
Starfire’s people, unlike other well-known fantasy races, are primarily motivated by emotions rather than logic and their powers also depend on the state of their emotions. She was a princess and Komand’r, her older sister, was the first in line for the throne, but she was crippled by a childhood illness that took away her Tamaranian capacity to convert ultraviolet light into flight energy.
As a result, she was deemed unfit to be queen, and Koriand’r was chosen to succeed her. When both sisters were sent to train with the legendary Warlords of Okaara, the vengeful Komand’r bolted, siding with the Citadel and betraying not just her sister but her homeland in the process. The Citadel successfully invaded Tamaran thanks to Komand’r’s information, and King Myand’r was forced to hand over Koriand’r to the Citadel to secure peace and curb violence.
The sibling rivalry doesn’t end there and if you thought your sibling hated you, this is on a WHOLE new level. Koriand’r and Komand’r were both handed over to a race of people called the Psions for experimentation after facing six years of suffering and sexual abuse post the invasion of their homeland.
The Psions, who were primarily sadistic scientists, conducted a lethal experiment on both sisters to see exactly how much power their Tamaranian bodies could absorb before blowing up due to the overload.
During the process, loyalist forces that answered to Komand’r attacked the Psion ship in an attempt to save her, and while the Psions were sidetracked dealing with them, Koriand’r managed to break free using her newly gained ability called starbolts, which are catastrophic blasts of solar energy that she had attained through the experimentation. She then decided to free Komand’r, who was still soaking up energy, against her better judgment – oftentimes movies will have this big reunion scene of scorned siblings coming together after one saves the other but that does not happen in this case.
Commander, on the other hand, was less than grateful, striking her sister with the same – but much greater – star bolt power and restraining her for future execution. Coriander managed to flee and eventually made her way to Earth, where she was aided by the Teen Titans. She chose to stay with the team and assumed the name Starfire, quickly developing a romantic connection with Dick Grayson, better known as Robin who was the team’s leader at the time.
Thus, she spent a large part of her life struggling against tyranny, living in prison, and carrying immense burdens before she came to Earth and became known as the flame-haired ass-kicking superhero that we all know and love.
Starfire In The TV series Titans
On October 3, 2018, the first episode of the live-action television series Titans premiered at New York Comic-Con, before premiering on DC Universe on October 12. Starfire makes her first appearance in this episode when we meet a young woman named Kory. Kory Anders awakens in Austria with no recollection of her identity. All she recollects is that she’s made some powerful enemies, and all of it appears to be connected to one person: Rachel Roth. This first look establishes the tone for the rest of the story as it becomes a quest for her memory and in essence, her identity.
In the live-action series, it is shown that Koriand’r was born on the planet Tamaran on December 14, 1991, as the royal family’s firstborn. Her father needed an heir to pacify rebellion during a period of civil unrest, so she was conceived during that time.
However, in this version of Koriand’r’s story, she was never born with the royal powers of fire, which are seen as a sign of a royal’s natural right to the crown in Tamaranean culture. Despite this, her father instructed that she be falsely proclaimed as the legitimate heir apparent to the Tamaranean throne and confirmed that she was born with the gift of fire.
In order to go ahead and do damage control, when her younger sister Komand’r was birthed with the gift of fire, King Myand’r commanded that the newborn’s abilities be magically transferred to Koriand’r, while the true nature of the sisters’ abilities remained unknown. This was done to make sure that no one in the future could ever question the throne and his family’s legitimacy.
Koriand’r was adored and became far more successful than her sister, much to Komand’r’s chagrin, fueling fierce competition and disdain between them as they grew older. Coriander was eventually considered worthy enough to take on a historic prophecy recorded in the sacred book “Gul’ron Dez Dire” which roughly translates to “Death of Worlds”.
She was assigned the task of preventing the return of Trigon, an inter-dimensional demonic warlord who would swallow up the universe’s life-sustaining planets in a fiery shadow, including her homeworld, Tamaron. She was then given the codename “Starfire” and given the quest of traveling to Earth to secure Trigon’s only portal to her realm: his half-human daughter Rachel Roth, codenamed “The Raven.”
Kory was promised that she would become the new ruler of Tamaran once the mission was completed. And this brings us right back to the happenings of the first episode. This is definitely a completely different story if compared to Starfire’s comic book origins however, it is not uncommon for comic book characters and heroes who grace both pages of comics and our big screens to often have different origin stories.
However, you’re probably thinking, if this mission was so important and the fate of her homeworld rested on it, how did she forget everything?
Well, she changed her name and went undercover as “Kory Anders,” claiming to be from California and dressing in rather unusual attire after arriving on Earth (She was an alien after all so I’ll let this one slide).
She then went to Saint Paul’s Convent in late 2016 in the hopes of finding Rachel, but she was unsuccessful. She also began a series of updates on her ongoing Rachel Roth investigation, the most recent of which was documented on November 6, 2017.
Kory began operating in Vienna, Austria, a year later, at the behest of Konstantin Kovar, a sketchy man, and crime lord. Kory pretended to collaborate with him in order to track down Rachel’s whereabouts. However, as luck would have it, she was supposedly exposed by Kovar’s men one fine day, and she awoke as the sole survivor of a horrible car accident with no recollection of who she was.
In her search for answers, she met Robin and the rest of the Teen Titans and the rest is history. The series follows them on their adventures and Starfire’s quest to regain her memory, find out who she was, and save those she had to.
The Secrets Behind Starfire’s Power
Starfire has been shown to have a plethora of different powers in the various appearances that she has had, all across mediums. As far as the live-action series goes, her powers are as follows.
Kory has Tamaranean physiology that is unlike anyone else’s, even her royal family members, who share amazing physical prowess, endurance, accelerated healing, and the capacity to retain and project solar radiation. Kory possesses superhuman strength as a result of her Tamaranean physiology, and she can easily incapacitate beings of lesser or similar strength.
Her incredible strength enables her to inflict substantial bodily harm on opponents and launch them into the air with a single strike. Kory was also capable of breaking a metal chain apart simply by pulling on it with both hands during her fight with Deathstroke, despite Deathstroke’s enhanced strength.
She is also more durable and physically capable than any human. She has an inhuman resistance to direct collisions, as well as temperature and pressure extremes. Her physical state has improved to solar levels, as her body absorbs solar energy without causing harm or exhaustion to her body.
She has a regenerative healing factor and, like the majority of Tamaraneans, the ability to make her eyes glow green. She has demonstrated this ability on numerous occasions. K ory, unlike the rest of her species, can generate and manipulate blue energy, which she manifests as powerful starbolts and levitates from the ground.
This is her signature ability. Kory has the ability to manipulate energy in order to create barriers that she can change to as required for self-defense. Kory can also levitate, as she is capable of lifting herself into the air as her abilities develop, indicating that she may be able to fly. Kory has psychic dreams that can sometimes send her into trances similar to sleepwalking, such as the ones that led her to her sister who was telepathically calling out to her. This is an ability over which she has no control.
Even while amnesiac, Kory is an expert in self-defense and an extremely competent unarmed combatant. Despite their surprise attack on her, she was capable of immobilizing multiple armed officers with minimal effort and simultaneously dominating both of the Nuclear Siblings on an equal footing.
Kory was able to fight Deathstroke on an equal footing, preventing many of his punches. Muay Thai, Aikido, Tai Chi, Krav Maga, Kali, and Kung Fu appear to be part of her fighting style. Apart from this, she is also a skilled investigator and a level-headed leader.
Now for some of the funnier facts that were mentioned in the titans animated series. She can learn languages by interacting with other people physically. She’s been known to learn foreign languages by kissing people, despite the fact that she claims she can do it via any physical contact. Pretty neat eh? She has nine stomachs and does not require oxygen to survive, considering she is an alien princess, that probably checks out!
The secret to her insane powers can thus be traced back to her roots in Tamaranean physiology.
Her Relationship With Dick Grayson And Jason Todd
Starfire’s relationship with these two men has always aroused the interest of audiences. As far as her relationship with Dick Grayson goes, during their adolescence, Starfire and Nightwing had deep feelings for each other.
In fact, they were happily engaged and all set to get married at one point, but Raven went rogue and ended up getting into an altercation with her fellow Titans, which resulted in their wedding being called off. This violent incident served as a wake-up call for the two, and they realized they weren’t the right fit for each other, much to the dismay of fans who loved seeing them together. Even though they are no longer together, it is implied that Koriand’r has feelings for Nightwing.
However, Jason Todd is the one she ends up with (so far at least!) After the events of Flashpoint altered the timeline, Starfire joined forces with the Red Hood and Arsenal to form The Outlaws. Roy and Starfire have a long-term sexual relationship.
While Roy thought she was dating Jason, it was later revealed that they were only friends because Jason was the first person she had only known as a friend. Despite the fact that her relationship with Roy appeared to be unromantic, the two have begun dating. Many fans also ship the couple because of their electric chemistry!
It is interesting to note here that not only has she been in a romantic relationship with one Robin but she has actually been romantically involved with two of them because The Red Hood had assumed the role and title of Robin at one point – talk about awkward!
Lastly, Starfire has always been an integral part of the Teen Titans team and while she is usually a team player, she isn’t always a bystander or one who takes orders. In some comics and animated films, she has been the protagonist. She’s arguably the team’s oldest, friendliest, and most experienced member, so it’s only natural that she’d take the reins. Thus, she is a formidable force and it doesn’t hurt anyone that she absolutely drops dead gorgeous. With that we come to the end of this video, what do you think of Starfire? Let us know in the comments section below!