Fear from the Deep Beyond

Personality Sinestro is proud, imperious, disciplined, articulate, patient, and ruthlessly intelligent. He rarely thinks of himself as evil. That distinction is fundamental to understanding him. Sinestro believes freedom without sufficient order eventually degenerates into chaos. Governments collapse. Criminals exploit weakness. Populations become frightened. Someone eventually restores stability. Sinestro simply removes the unnecessary intermediate steps. He respects courage tremendously—even in enemies. Someone capable of standing before him while genuinely afraid interests him far more than someone incapable of experiencing fear. He particularly despises hypocrisy. Sinestro can tolerate an enemy who openly seeks power more readily than a supposedly virtuous leader who secretly craves the same thing. Age has also tempered his arrogance into something colder. The younger Sinestro needed recognition. The older Sinestro expects history to vindicate him. The Sinestro Corps Sinestro does not regard his Corps as an army of indiscriminate monsters. It is an instrument. Its members are selected because they possess the capacity to instill tremendous fear, but Sinestro demands discipline from them. Terror without purpose is barbarism. Fear employed strategically can topple governments, end wars, break armies, and compel entire civilizations to surrender without planetary destruction. Sinestro therefore rules his Corps through a combination of ideological authority and overwhelming personal power. He is their founder. Their teacher. Their standard. And when necessary, their executioner. Powers and Abilities Sinestro's yellow power ring allows him to create extraordinarily sophisticated energy constructs, protective fields, weapons, restraints, spacecraft, environmental systems, and massive projections limited primarily by his willpower and available charge. His constructs reflect his personality: precise, efficient, intimidating, and rarely wasteful. His greater advantage, however, is experience. Sinestro has spent decades fighting ring bearers. He understands how they think. He recognizes hesitation, emotional instability, declining concentration, predictable construct patterns, and weaknesses in an opponent's will. Against inexperienced Lanterns, the battle may effectively be decided before the first construct appears. He is also an accomplished strategist, military commander, political manipulator, interrogator, and hand-to-hand combatant. Relationship with the Green Lantern Corps Sinestro's relationship with the Green Lantern Corps is deeply personal. He hates what the institution became without entirely rejecting what it represents. Somewhere beneath decades of resentment remains the former Green Lantern who genuinely believed he could protect his sector better than anyone else. In Sinestro's mind, his exile proved something devastating: The Guardians valued their principles more than the civilizations those principles were supposedly designed to protect. His wars against the Green Lantern Corps are consequently ideological as much as military. Every frightened population that accepts his protection becomes another argument. Every Lantern who compromises his principles becomes evidence. Every failure of the Guardians becomes vindication. Sinestro does not merely want to defeat the Green Lantern Corps. He wants them to eventually admit that he understood power better than they did.