Setting aside the idea of a parade memorializing the deceased being "fun", because maybe that's a standard response, what struck me as odd about the whole thing is Arrow's having this conversation as he squares off with Harrow, his dog, and his vertically-challenged lackey. There's a guy here ready to kill him with a diamond ice pick, and he's calmly discussing parades, with a passerby who seems completely oblivious to the drama.
This isn't a new thing for Nocenti. Her Daredevil run had DD regularly interacting with everyday folks. Drinking in bars with them, stopping to chat after stopping a mugging, hanging out with some of the local kids while they were goofing around after school. It gave the scenes where they express concern for Daredevil more impact because we've seen the casual relationship he's developed with them Maybe not with that particular person, but we see enough examples the reader can infer that Daredevil either met this person somewhere off-panel, or they had seen or heard about him before.
We haven't seen Ollie do that as much, at least in Nocenti's run. She hasn't had that long with him, and he's spent a lot of time in the Great White North or China. Still, he's developed a reputation as approachable, to the extent joggers will call out greetings to him like he was some old acquaintance. They cheer him on when he deftly disarms a gunman, express concern for him when he's injured, and question what his actions are really accomplishing. It's different from how a lot of nameless characters are in superhero comics, where they either get saved by the hero, or curse them for damages incurred. These people are almost displaced from the whole thing. Maybe that makes them us. We read the comics, but we aren't in the story. We're in no danger, so we can cheer when he saves the day, or we can criticize him for focusing on the wrong problems, or get worried about his head injuries.
Or they can ignore the danger entirely. That's what really struck about that page. Not Ollie ignoring the criminal in front of him, but how the jogger didn't seem to notice or care. As far as her reaction goes, Green Arrow might have been sittin' on the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll away. It reminded me of Daredevil #260, when Typhoid Mary set a host of Daredevil's enemies on him, and their fight crashes into the middle of a peace march protesting nuclear weapons. At first, the marchers are angry, suspecting Daredevil of being against them, and trying to wreck their protest. Then they get disgusted, deciding the fight isn't about them, but is just a couple of kids fighting over a sandbox. Eventually, as Daredevil gets more and more trashed, people stop noticing him all together. They have their own problems, and whatever he's up to just doesn't matter. In that case, I think it was a point that his fight really didn't matter much. It was one woman taking a particularly brutal approach to destroying one man on another man's orders. There were other occasions where the citizens of New York were too wrapped up in their own stuff to notice anything wrong with Daredevil, during Inferno for one, though it was almost a joke there. The people were so used to things being strange, demons running amok barely registered.I don't know what the sequence in Green Arrow means. If the civilians are us, then it could be our blase reaction. We don't think this guy is going to be the end of Green Arrow, even if the cover says, "FALL OF THE GREEN ARROW". It could be a perception thing, that people think it's perfectly reasonable for him to carry on conversations while in a standoff with a villain. Why not? We see them leap easily from roof to roof, never missing a shot. How hard can it be to talk while keeping a bow drawn?
There is the fact that the parade is for dead fishermen, presumably they died on the water, and Ollie just dumped a load of illegal weapons, the kind used just to kill other people, into the water. And there's Ollie's "Wall of Shame", all the people whose lives he destroyed. It all feels significant, because Ollie's still too wrapped up in himself. That's his recurring problem. He his boredom and his ego nearly destroy his company. His pride jeopardized the recovery of it, and he still had to give an evil man some dangerous gifts. Those are messes he caused, ones he's struggled to fix. He hasn't really had much time to help the average person by patrolling the city or whatever. Even if the people feel comfortable enough to chat with him, he's so out of the loop he didn't know about the huge parade to commemorate people who have perished.
Maybe the point is he's still doing this for the wrong reasons. Feeding his ego, fighting boredom, not trying to assuage this guilt he feels for lives he ruined. The people he helps aren't people to him, they're means to that end.
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