#dick for the parallelisms inherent in robin war and steph for the parallelisms in MY head

[casscainmainly]

Of course Duke having a Robin growing up just doesn't make sense for his character, as this post points out. WAR was created in the absence of Batman and Robin, and having a Robin Duke looks up to is just really contrary to his characterisation.

BUT I actually love the idea of exploring Duke having a Robin in fic/headcanons or something, but only if it properly reckons with the ramifications. If Duke had a Robin, and assuming his parents still get Jokerised, then his Robin failed him. This would a) make him becoming Robin more emotionally charged and b) negatively impact his relationship with said Robin. This could be REALLY fun!!! Imagine Duke entering Robin War with a vendetta against Tim, or pulling the Bruce train stunt with Dick 😭😭. Basically, 'so-and-so is Duke's Robin' could be really interesting if used as a vehicle to explore Duke's philosophy, rather than as a way for him to prop up another Robin.

[ectonurites]

Why do you think Steph gets the "girl treated terribly by fandom because she dated one half of a mlm ship" treatment but Cassie who dated both Tim and Kon doesn't?

I have a few theories on this, based more on observation than anything else, so take it all with a grain of salt

1) The inherent difference in how Cassie is close to both Tim & Kon, as opposed to how Steph really isn’t... friends with Tim’s friends much (especially in pre reboot) I think already puts her in a different position. Because like, often in these situations people will try to pit the girl who’s dating the guy against the other guy and have him be mean to her kinda as the author talking through the character, but that doesn’t really work the same way in a situation where she’s friends with and has been romantically with both of them. Take that plus the fact there was a canon point where Kon was a dick to Steph (While she was Robin, because he was looking for Tim and she wasn’t Tim) it seems a more likely route would be using Kon as kinda a mouthpiece for the author to shittalk Steph, which I’ve seen happen before.

2) Steph & Tim’s relationship was around longer and since Tim had a whole solo comic that could focus on he & Steph’s relationship sometimes (as opposed to only being one part of a team book like Kon & Cassie who didn’t have solos at the time), it was able to be more in the spotlight I feel. Since it’s more prolific that way, Steph could be seen as a bigger ‘obstacle’ or whatever. Like, Tim & Steph got together officially in Robin #56 in 1998, but they had been dancing around a possible romance between them since their first kiss in Robin #5 in 1994. And this didn’t really end (it had ups and downs sure but still) until Steph’s death during War Games in 2005, and even after that she had a presence in his mind and then eventually came back and there was more stuff kinda complicated between them until the end of Tim’s Robin solo, and even Red Robin teases feelings still being there. (Also in current continuity they’ve been together again since 2016). With Kon & Cassie even though she had a thing for him since the start of YJ 1998 and there was some flirty stuff then, they didn’t get more officially together until the 2003 Teen Titans comic... and then Kon died during Infinite Crisis in 2006. He came back during Final Crisis around 2009, but they broke up just over a year later in Teen Titans #91. There’s just definitely way less time they were in a relationship with both of them alive vs Tim & Steph.

3) A lot of people who ship Tim and Kon are more fans of Tim and the Batfamily in general, so since they’re coming at it from an angle focused on Tim, his past major relationship (particularly since it was with someone also in the Batfam) I think would just be what people might know more about and thus would focus on even in a negative light

4) People like to use the Cassie and Tim’s romance stuff for Tim/kon fuel, because there’s a lot you can read into that scene with them in the lab and parallels between how Cassie and Tim both feel about Kon, but her and keeping her relationship with Kon as genuine/important is a vital part of that situation making any sense. Vs Everything with Tim & Steph is pretty separate and unrelated to Tim’s relationship with Kon, so it’s easier to disregard/mistreat her I guess?

Idk it’s definitely interesting because Cassie in general I feel gets more ignored (or like I said in my last point, used for parallels between her and Tim) vs Steph getting the hate.

also kinda unrelated but I think that Cassie and Steph should be way closer than they are in canon, something just really appeals to me about the idea of ‘Wonder Girl and The Girl Wonder’

[bigskydreaming]

kai06leaf replied to your post:

Ended up all night, with sleep derailed by a RUDE...

Um I had asked for a link for your batman related works?:)

Oh score, this is actually weirdly timely then! FlashinthePan is my Batfam pseudonym (https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlashInThePan/works), its just it hasn’t been useful for much other than to use my bookmarks page there as a fics rec list. Since the only other things still up on it are the YJ WIP I haven’t updated in a couple years and an elephant’s graveyard collection for the random ficlets I often write on here while forgetting they’re usually long enough to be actual one-shots...and that I then forget to actually add to that one, that I created for the specific purpose of putting all those in one place. My mind. Its just....*staggers at the Legend of it all*

I’ve been on a pretty committed “No more posting unfinished WIPs kick” for the past couple years but am finally at a point where I have stuff to post without cheating, so that streak officially ends today, when I finish my read-through of the first fic* in question and hit publish. “The Requiem Rites of Robins,” the ten chapter first story in an AU Battle For the Cowl fix-it series, “A Legacy of Robins,” with TRRoR being roughly 40K, focuses on Dick and Jason and their issues with each other and Bruce’s believed death, picking up and going AU at an indeterminate time not long after the end of BFTC. 

Specific goals of focus with this particular fic were addressing Bruce’s bullshit last will and testament to Jason (ugh), the eternally unremarked upon moment that was Dick watching his brother refuse to take his hand and instead fall to what at the time must have seemed very likely to be Jason’s second death, in a pretty fucked up parallel to his parents’ death (ugh), various other unaddressed issues between the brothers that kept them making like they were Cain and Abel instead of two people who loved each other and very much could use each other while grieving for their father or even just pretending they weren’t....and also steadfastly jumping their combined train of events well off the tracks before Morrison’s whole...”Jason” thing ever happened at all (ugh).

Just a headsup for readers for whom certain characterizations of Bruce are a dealbreaker - full disclosure, this fic and its sequels do consider various less pleasant moments between Bruce and his two eldest to be in character and canon, with NTT #55 and the ending to UTRH the most touched upon and relevant. For what its worth, my intention there (and hopefully my execution of things) was not to vilify or bash Bruce, or to make it at all a question of whether or not both really loved Bruce and he them. 

To be clear...I do categorize Bruce’s actions towards Dick and Jason at those times/specific others as abusive, but a huge part of my reason for even writing this particular fic was to explore and examine the reality of loving a parent even despite a history of actually abusive behavior on their parts. Of how to mourn for someone you loved at some times and hated at others, who was both the person who made you feel whole again and the one who made you at other times feel the most broken. 

Especially when you’re two people who pride themselves on being heroes, who are ‘supposed to know’ that there’s no defense, no excuse for some of the things their father did, but that doesn’t always change or erase how much they want to. And who are both looking for an answer in the other, as to how they’re supposed to live with the fact that deep down, there’s a part of them that will always still be those ten and twelve year old orphan boys who came to believe their father was a man who could literally do the impossible...even mend what was broken, make things right with them and the world as they knew it just like he’d managed once before, when he’d first come into their lives and they’d been just as certain then that there were no more happy moments in their futures at all. 

And with the both of them still, even after everything, having held onto that secret hope that someday he was going to find the secret loophole, the magic words that let them forgive him, that let them let the past all just be in the past and the future all that really mattered, that their best days as a family weren’t all behind them yet and there was still time for things to be different, for him to be different....because their dad wasn’t like other ordinary dads, their dad was the Batman, he was a superhero.....

....who was also still just a man, and sometimes men die with their most important deeds still left incomplete.

This first story is centered firmly on just Dick and Jason, because I have a tendency to let things get too widespread and expansive plot-wise the more characters I focus on, and because this first story, about mourning Bruce and finding a way to move on, needed to be just Dick and Jason, although Cass and Tim and Damian, as well as Steph and Babs and Alfred all have things in the wake of his believed death that IMO they needed explored, and that were never explored in canon. But Dick and Jason had to be the first two and a solo act except for each other, especially as this series is still geared towards Bruce’s eventual return, and just to a much different status quo....because the thing about Dick and Jason at this specific point in time, is that they were quite possibly the only two people in the world who would ever have the relationship with Bruce that they did, to see him the way they both at times did, and nobody else ever fully grasped. 

They knew him at his highest and his lowest points, the best parts of him and the worst, the center of their whole universes and the destroyer of them....and for them, at this place and time, its about being forced to realize that for as much as come between them over the years, they each are the only ones who will ever fully be able to speak to the entirety of their father as not just Bruce Wayne, the Batman, the myth and the legend, but Bruce the man, the flawed father who was supposed to be better than his worst mistakes with them, because he was supposed to be a hero. 

Even as close as others were to Bruce, there were specific slants to the light they saw him in....for Alfred, even when making his worst mistakes, he was still his son, for Cass he was still the father who fought her personal demon not because of what he wanted her to be but so that she could be who she wanted to be, for Tim, he was imperfect but still larger than life, the hero he’d still first only come to know through the lens of a camera from a great distance, a perspective he’d yet to entirely shake, and for Damian he was still largely a figure of make believe, a bed time story he’d been told all his life. 

There’s an inherent goodness, a nobleness around the idea of Bruce for most others in his life, that defies coming face to face with the realities his failings could be.....which only Dick and Jason could ultimately attest to, as losing the ability to keep sight of that innate shine was why they’d found themselves so disillusioned by their father at the lowest points between them. And so in a lot of ways, the ultimate goal of writing this fic was trying to get Dick and Jason to a point where they could share their full, messy, complicated as hell feelings about their father with each other, but simultaneously feel a need to preserve the way each of their siblings still saw him, because the truth is that if there’d been someone who could have preserved that shine for their own eyes, to keep their memories of him clear and unobstructed by complication....they would have been glad to have been left just missing Bruce their father, and not the mess of feelings forever tied up in a Gordian knot upon by his death.

So yeah. LOL. That’s the link to my Batfam works, though there hasn’t been much on their for ages, but stay tuned for Chapter One of The Requiem Rites of Robins, later today.

“In the wild, a group of robins is called a round. But Gotham’s birds have always been of a different sort, something entirely unique. And the only proper plural for them, I’ve found, is a legacy.”

An investigation leads the newly minted Batman to London, alone and without Robin’s back-up for the trip. In the past couple months, Dick Grayson has barely found time to breathe, let alone to grieve for his father and come to terms with his new role as the Dark Knight’s successor. But his distracted state leaves him vulnerable, and when a new villain’s one-man war threatens to make a casualty of him too, he’s left with no alternative but to work side by side with his rescuer - at other times better known as his brother, his successor, and a couple times his would-be killer.

(Their family always has been one of over-achievers. And if you’re going to pick a pair of brothers to play compare and contrast against with that in mind, its hard to go wrong with something biblical.)

But Dick seeming no more happy about it than he is, doesn’t do much to pick up Jason’s mood. He’s come to London for his own reasons, and no, he’s still not inclined to share. Curiosity killed the cat, but he’s sure Selina wouldn’t mind if innate nosiness knocked off a few birds here and there as well. Well-earned paranoia aside, however, secrets and cynicism can only carry them so far when the two are forced to rely on each other to fight their way free of a city turned death-trap. Both are keenly aware that the last time they’d fought side by side like this, they’d been all the way back on the other side of Jason’s first untimely death. And as far as potential omens go, that one’s about as shitty as they come.

But a mixed curse and blessing are nothing new for them, and so that’s not just a painful reminder, but also proof that things were different once. That the brothers they’ve become were not always the brothers they were supposed to be. It was time and pain and bloody loss that weighed them both down so much further than the altitudes that came most naturally....not fate, or destiny, or even them. And as their new enemy forces them deeper and deeper below ground, it becomes all the more clear there’s only one skill in either of the brothers’ arsenals that will see them through to the other side of all this: 

And only if they can not just remember, but rediscover, how to shed all of that and finally fly free again.