#tmwcd

[iliadicjasontodd]

Hello! 👋 I just wanted to know what your Tim Drake WIP was about if you'd like to yap. You had some thoughts on his character in general and I'd be happy to hear them! What are the issues in canon and what nuances you'd like other people to consider. Thank you!

Hi!! I've been thinking about this ask for days I'm thrilled with it tbh!!

So, from my notes on the WIP, tentatively entitled too much will cause damage:

keep the basis. the wealth, the parents, the genius intellect and the thrusting himself into the role of robin. he thinks little of it. jason in his memory is an unobtrusive, quiet, and mostly unremarkable- if disruptive due to others’ reactions to his class and race- when they crossed into each others’ vicinity in high society and in school, and jason served his purpose until he’d clearly fumbled and outlived it. because robin is a job and a role and tim simply believes he can fill it best. Bruce never entirely forgives this trespass and it weighs over their relationship and, assuming steph and cass and damian still come in in this verse, does colour his ability to trust that jason’s worth is not somehow being degraded by their presence and his ability to trust that he himself does not actually view children as somehow fulfilling a utilitarian role. anyway, tim is driven by a belief in his own self-worth and invulnerability and a fundamental desire to exercise that self-worth in order to mold what he can of the time he lives in in his own image; he has a gd complex, in other words. he wants to be robin because he desires more strength- he desires to be chosen (and so he will never truly be satisfied with having taken the role himself, even if he does get satisfaction from taking and winning things). i enjoy the idea of this cold and irritating and mostly uncompassionate child putting himself in a position that eventually does push him to gain a desire for selflessness, and a desire to not be the best but to be good, even though it never comes naturally to him. he learns from bruce, he learns from dick, and he learns from jason, who, while not literally, does haunt him throughout his robin run as tim learns about him in bits and pieces, at first on accident, and later on purpose. i would keep his mission to find bruce and his altercation with the league of assassins but just have him be absolutely bodied. just fucking destroyed, trying to fix something he doesn’t fix anyway: bruce comes back on his own, and in the course of this he learns the real manner of jason’s death, learns the fact that jason did not die from mistakes tim is simply better than him for not making, and when steph “dies” in part due to bruce and tim’s treatment of her, most of his beliefs about himself crumble under the weight of all of this, and he is forced to build himself back up, but he is never going to be the naturally nice, hopeful, altruistic Robin through his nature. so he puts in the effort to discard as much of himself to fit the role he so na��vely took, believing it was suited for him, that it was his when it wasn’t, but he made a commitment. basically, i want him to be a tragic figure. he will lose little externally- his parents won’t die, he gets the job of his dreams, friends and status- but internally he won’t be at all unscathed or unchanged. i want him striving for this very imperfect goodness, faltering, and then trying again anyway. i want a statement in inherited wealth and main character syndrome, and on the choice to be compassionate and selfless when that does not come easily and must be chosen again and again. i want him cold and egocentric and entitled enough that when he feels guilt, true guilt, it’s nearly, nearly a novel feeling, and it changes him. I want him to have come from a place of devaluing and stepping over the still-warm corpse of a dead boy and i want that to haunt his entire narrative inescapably like an original sin.

Very long. But basically the idea behind this was, for me, turning Tim into something that could be, for me, and for many of the people I know who take issue with him as he is, satisfactory. The goal is to span his Robin days through Jason's revival and Bruce's 'death'. I'm aware he will not fully or even very much resemble the canon Tim Drake because the idea is to take the groundwork and adjust. Because, tbh, the groundwork lain is something that I could find really interesting, but the way he is written and his existence in and of itself is something I find difficult to swallow.

under the cut because I got caught up in the joy of talking shit about Tim Drake:

You asked about my issues with Tim in canon and I have panels from his Robin run that I criticised him for in DMs and other panels saved here and there that I might reblog this and add later but it's almost 2 am now and I have class in like 8 hours, so for now we'll take my word. Basically, Tim was created to be the quintessential perfect unproblematic Robin after Jason was killed basically for-- existing while poor. For having poor parents, for coming from a poor area of Gotham, for having been homeless, for being traumatised by any of this. But not Tim, no. Tim can be equal to Bruce, of course, in a way Jason never could! Tim is everything Robin should be- he is wealthy, and he is white, and he has normal high school problems. Never mind that he cannot pack his own bag, that he has beef with an eleven year old, that he will eventually steal Jason's mantle- not Robin, but Red Robin. He's the best Robin! Tim is a genius and he is a disciplined hero and he goes to beat up Asian people in Paris.

I will admit, a lot of my annoyance with tim stems from his fanon interpretation, which betrays a lot of misogyny and classism, ableism and racism in the fandom, which obviously shouldn't be a surprise. But yeah, in short- in fanon, he often replaces Barbara as a coder or technological genius or genius point blank, often replaces Jason as having experienced homelessness, food insecurity, and even death or torture at the Joker's hands; the amount of fanfiction I have read in which some form of the phrase "Jason suffered, but Tim had it so much worse," has been unironically uttered- often by Jason himself!-in some fucked up trauma olympics that everyone will bend over backwards to have their favourite rich boy win somehow even though no one else was really trying to play is ludicrous. In these cases, Barbara's own Joker-related trauma is hardly ever even brought up. In every case, Jason must repent endlessly for the unforgivable sin- not of murder and desecration and attempted patricide or any of that, no, but of kind of beating up his sort-of brother that's like a year and a half younger than him at most. Tim was neglected, no one loved him, he is neurodivergent and a minor. He is a little helpless child with glass bones and paper skin.

Basically, I think Tim is a deeply flawed character who actually starts from a point in the narrative rich in potential: Bruce has just lost his son, Gotham is going darker by the issue, and the Batman symbol is more haunted than ever, and Robin is never meant to fly again- after all, it's difficult to use wings six feet under. Tim is positioned as different from Jason in every way, which canon used to turn him into some prejudiced cardboard cutout teenaged hero but could be used to make him effectively an extremely particular boy who, for all intents and purposes, is still rather singular to this moment, and could be used to examine being Robin and growing up through an entirely novel (to Batman, at this time) angle. Blood had to be spilled to make space for Tim in the story; I just want to see what happens if I take that and run with it.