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[latinotimdrake]

The Bats Are Fighting (Distaff Edition)

some conflicts I enjoy:

Babs is pretty hostile/judgy toward Helena at first & is bitterly upset and hurt when Helena starts wearing a Batgirl costume without asking her. Later on, Bruce chases Helena out of the costume, and Babs gives Cass the Batgirl costume with her explicit blessing. Helena and Cass never have an explicit rivalry over this, but I don't think they ever really get along, either

Babs and Helena eventually make up when Babs lets Helena join the Birds of Prey but it's rocky in the beginning - Babs dislikes Helena's methods and doesn't entirely trust her; Helena resents being kept on the outside

Steph is super-impressed by Cass and tries to get her to like her and they eventually get close, but Cass has a pretty low opinion of Steph-as-a-vigilante and doesn't hesitate to boss her around or knock her out, and she's super-hurt by Steph lying to her about what's going on during War Games (probably not unrelated: Cass is the only Bat to blame Steph instead of Bruce after Steph dies)

Babs and Cass get very close but also have tensions because Babs wants Cass to have the 'normal' life that Babs thinks she should've tried harder to have when she was younger, and Cass isn't entirely comfortable with this pressure, plus - this one I think is a bit more well-known - Babs spends a lot of time tutoring Cass and looking after her (awww), BUT ALSO in a tense moment she gets really nasty and harsh about Cass's reluctance to learn to read and calls her "stupid"

Dinah finds Steph REALLY annoying and wants her to stop tagging around after her... until she finds out about Steph's miserable home life, and then she appears like an avenging angel and kicks Steph's dad and his cronies out of the house

Babs decides to work with a guy who tortured Dinah because she thinks he's capable of redemption and Dinah is NOT HAPPY about it

Just generally, Steph and Helena are very much outsiders who don't get brought into the "core" Batfam and who aren't trusted with info like Bruce's secret identity. By contrast, Babs is an insider almost from Day 1 - she may have conflicts with Bruce, but she's also got his absolute trust - and Dinah is as insider as it gets, with a mom who was also Black Canary and a stint on the JLA

other general characterization notes that cause Conflict (TM):

Babs is pretty much a classic Bat - she's got a ton of control issues and she's an instinctively secretive workaholic

Helena is an adult who will kill people if she damn well feels it's necessary and she doesn't appreciate being lectured about it

Steph is a defensive teenage outsider with a bucketload of family problems - deadbeat evil dad! addict mom! - and when she's upset she's got a reckless self-destructive streak

Cass is very much like Bruce in that 1) she is wildly super mega good at fighting, 2) she's an instinctive loner who's comically bad at people AND YET she can nevertheless effortlessly manage to head off to a foreign country for a weekend and have a passionately-felt mutual love affair with some random criminal or something, and then that person dies & she goes home like nothing happened, 3) she cares about other people but completely sucks at communication & when in doubt will just go silent & take off or refuse to have conversations, 4) because she hates talking sometimes she'll just knock you out or hit you so that she won't have to do it, 5) she will spend an entire year planning to have a fight to the death with someone for Reasons and tell no one about it because why would she tell someone

anyway they're all terrible <3

[latinotimdrake]

when im in a "loudly and constantly say youre nothing like your father while simultaneously being a carbon copy of him" competition and my opponent is jason todd

[latinotimdrake]

(via this) Alfred has never called Bruce an asshole when he was growing up, but he called him other things that Bruce, at age ten, thought were way worse

[latinotimdrake]

i keep beating the giant bat-horse™ but so many characterisation problems are caused by fanon suffering from moral absolutism — that either a character is absolutely right (and has been wronged) or a character is wrong and commits nothing but harm. we see that with tim and jason especially because a lot of that content refuses to engage with those characters flaws. jason having an internally hypocritical world view or sincerely hurting others is brushed off so bruce and dick are then demonised. tim is condescending and dismissive to the people in his life and struggles to keep his ego in check, but he’s transformed into a martyr to make damian look bad.

idk like as a dick grayson fan i like to think im relatively cognisant of the fact that like…. he’s historically mistreated his romantic partners, he’s bitchy and untrusting and isn’t afraid to hurt his friends despite being a fundamentally good person, and he can be very difficult. it’s what annoys me so much about taylors version — where’s his complexity!! being good doesn’t mean u can’t make bad decisions!!

[latinotimdrake]

another fun thing about the sliding scale of dc comics timelines is how 9/11 didn't happen while it was actually happening, but, by seven or eight years after the fact, had almost certainly happened in the past. comics!

[latinotimdrake]

Dick's canonically supposed to be one of the like 5 people in the world total who can perform a quadruple flip. I put forward that this is the one and only thing Cass has never been able to match him on. She is very bitter, he is very smug and neither of them are especially mature about it.

[latinotimdrake]

I know this is a losing game, but Earth-One Barbara must be 24 or 25 when she starts out as Batgirl, yeah? Not even getting into her career in Congress, to have her PhD and be head of the Gotham Library means 24 or 25 at least, right?

[latinotimdrake]

i think the popular fanon that dick and jason had a horrible awful relationship when jason was robin comes from them actually having an exceedingly normal "boring" relationship (except for the way it intertwined with both of the relationships with bruce which are very not normal)

like sorry but theyre living the life of siblings who have a large age gap where one is out of state attending college (partially true) with the added caveat of being adoptive siblings who haven't met before (mostly true)

when dick finds out about jason sure he blows up at bruce (complicated relationship) but he gives jason his original robin costume and says we're brothers call if you need me (very normal and not complicated relationship)

there's no more idolization and hero worship than a younger brother who thinks his older brother is just as cool as he is lame and there's no more extension and recognition of the self in you my mini me than an older brother who understands dad kinda sucks sometimes

sorry not sorry i find such a mundane relationship in a world where the stakes are always life and death where the relationships are always heart and gut wrenching allegories where connections range from soulmates to mortal enemies with little in between to be interesting as is

[latinotimdrake]

💣 No one knows where Damian’s nose came from. He has his father’s jaw. He has his mother’s cheekbones. His father’s eyes. His mother’s lips. But his nose.

It’s not aquiline or Roman. It doesn’t look the least bit distinguished. In fact, the tip of his nose curves up, in a bit of a snub.

No one knows where it came from, and although it does look slightly familiar, they gave up wondering when pressing matters took precedence.

Until one day Alfred was spring cleaning and set aside some pictures that really ought to go in frames. It was then that the prior familiarity was recognized.

Tilted nose, curved up at the tip, bit of a snub.

Damian has Martha’s nose.

[latinotimdrake]

#they make me absolutely bonkers #genuinely what the fuck #forever thinking about cass's knight complex for steph (tags via OP)

a big point of contention for steph and cass in Batgirl 2000 is that steph wants to fight and has the potential to be a really good vigilante, but cass feels a need to protect her when theyre on the field together because she knows steph "isn't good enough yet" and she doesn't want to see her get hurt.

and then steph dies. and cass couldn't save her.

post steph's death, we see a shift in cass's behavior. she was always reckless and blindly trusts her ability to punch her way out of things, but i would argue that she becomes more passively suicidal post war games/war crimes.

then, the two times cass almost dies steph is the one who saves her...steph became cass's white knight...like aughhhhhh

[latinotimdrake]

13 year old Clark Kent learning about brood parasitism in middle school biology class and barely touching his dinner that night.

When both Ma and Pa are asleep he climbs out onto the roof, shuddering in the dark, because the teacher said some species' biological parents will secretly come by night to teach their young how to be a proper cuckoo or cowbird even as they're still steadily starving their foster nest. Maybe he can just convince whoever left him here to just take him away again--find a different nest. He doesn't want to hurt anyone here.

[latinotimdrake]

Headcanon that Duke Thomas has a diary, but instead of it being regular journal entries it is a poem he writes about each day.

[latinotimdrake]

U know when it comes to things like comics and other purportedly hard to get into types of media I think ppl often like. Overthink it a lot.

I think it's a similar issue to how it's difficult to pick up a new skill as an adult bcos you're too conscious of being bad at it? Like let's face it a bunch of big comics fans are prolly people who went to their local library/comics shop/bootleg website/whatever when they were 12 and grabbed stuff they thought looked cool. & There's really no reason you can't do that as an adult? Who cares if you don't know what's going on. If you don't like what you're reading put it down & grab something else.

The way I got into Discworld as a kid was literally by picking books based on the cover art. The way I got into classic who was by reading a bunch of wiki pages & then looking up a story I thought sounded cool. & I had blast both times!

Like they're funky little books w pictures in. Who gives a shit just read whatever you want and have fun.

[latinotimdrake]

One of the many tragedies of Jack Drake is that not only was he bad at being a parent, but that he had the perfect person to discuss how hard the experience was for him right there and yet the only conversation they ever have about parenting Tim is conducted at gunpoint.

Because look at Jack Drake. As far as he was concerned, he had everything under control until Janet died and his world fell apart.

Tim was a Good Kid™ as a kid. He was well behaved and polite and not a difficult child and that's obvious from the fact that many of his memories of his parents together are of being taken out in public. Jack and Janet had one kid and they clearly wanted that kid to enjoy the same things they did, so they took him with them to restaurants and museums and art galleries and the opera. And he enjoyed it and enjoyed that time with them.

Jack however clearly saw his role as a father and a husband in the very traditional position as the main provider. It was his job to work and bring in the income that supported their lifestyle (his depressive episode after losing the company and their having to move makes it very clear how much of his self-worth was tied up in that role). He had a son, but his time with Tim was pretty clearly about taking Tim out with him on a Saturday afternoon to watch sport, or play tennis with his friends, or go to the monster trucks, or go fishing: being able to spend a few hours with Tim and show him off to his friends and then return home and someone else took over looking after Tim. And in his mind, he clearly thought he was a good parent! He spent time with his son! His son was a credit who was worth showing off! He could take Tim with him when he and Janet went out for the evening, and Tim could be relied upon to behave. He was winning at being a father!

The part Jack never realised, of course, was that like many men in his position, he'd handed the day to day logistics of raising a kid over to his wife (Janet) and to people he paid to do it for him (Tim's boarding school). He wasn't the disciplinarian parent. He was the 'fun' parent, who got to have the good times with his child.

If Jack was ever actually involved in decisions about discipline and consequences of actions, it was probably at the ultimate stage: the 'wait til your father gets home' sort of threat. The nuclear option. He didn't handle the everyday stuff - he probably never SAW the everyday stuff.

So, Jack thinks he's a great parent. He can brag to his friends about how well behaved HIS child is, unlike those little ruffians you see screaming in public or whose parents can't take them anywhere because they're disruptive.

Then his world falls apart. He's injured and disabled and grieving. He's a single dad. And the kid he's got is suddenly not the child he remembers. Tim frequently acts out, lies, runs away and comes home with bruises and notes from school saying they’re worried something is going on. He also starts dating and possibly trying to have sex ‘too young’ (being caught with Ariana sleeping over and the couch situation, Steph being pregnant even if Tim insisted it wasn't his).

Jack Drake has to suddenly step up to be the main parent of a 14 year old who he's probably never had that dynamic with. He doesn't have the years of experience in how Tim reacts to various forms of boundaries and punishments, because he's never been the one who set them or enforced them. He's probably never sat down and talked to Tim about his feelings in his life. And Tim, I repeat, is fourteen years old, possibly one of the most difficult ages for a kid. Everyone's 14 year olds are suddenly more difficult than usual and pushing boundaries.

On top of that, he's got to learn this all on the fly, in circumstances where he basically has no support. "Help, I'm a new single father to a teenager' isn't really a genre of self help book or parenting group that gets a lot of love - most people who are single parents aren't men, and most people looking for advice on dealing with problems with raising their kids are talking about under-5s, because by the time kids are out of the toddler stage most parents have a reasonable idea of what works and what doesn't, have networks set up, and are usually reaching out for a bit of advice or support about a specific situation, not Dealing With It All.

What Jack really needs is a buddy or two who are also single fathers to teenage boys, who have experience navigating this, maybe who also acquired responsibility for their son in his teen years. Wow. I mean that's a big ask, but funnily enough, there's someone who lives right next door who exactly fits that description...

(The tragedy that Bruce and Jack only ever have the one discussion about parenting Tim, the kid they've been effectively co-parenting since Tim was 13 years old, and that that discussion took place with Jack holding a gun on Bruce).

So of course Jack is terrible at being a parent to Tim. He's inexperienced, he doesn't have any support, he doesn't SEEK support outside of marrying Dana (and Dana clearly while lovely is both ineffective and reluctant to interfere in Jack and Tim's relationship). Now, he fails on very specific axes, in ways that are both understandable and also signs that Jack has a bad handle on his temper.

His go-to threat is sending Tim back to boarding school, because: when Tim was at boarding school, Jack didn't have any discipline issues with Tim! It clearly worked!; Tim doesn't want to go back to boarding school, making it a threat to hold over him; again, Jack's seeing a kid who is sneaking around, lying, running away and he's at his wits end - there's a narrative in the circles he lives in that such kids DO need to be taught to behave and sending them to boarding school is a way to do that.

He runs hot and cold on paying attention to Tim because up until Tim was 14 that was...what he did! And it wasn't such an issue then, as he wasn't a single parent. And when he pays attention, he does tend to be focused (laser focused, in fact), in getting Tim out of No Man's Land, of the dramas at school during Cry of the Huntress when Jack's getting outraged over Tim's bruises and getting into fights, when he's arguing with Ariana's uncle over whether Tim and Ariana's relationship was going too far.

It's just that he never developed the day to day, in between level of parenting and boundary setting and discipline. He's got a temper, and he swings between "it'll be fine, Tim's a smart kid, I trust him" laid back permissiveness, and getting mad and going immediately to the nuclear option: "You are going back to boarding school!" and so on.

He doesn't know how to walk away and calm himself down when he's worked up. He's not particularly good at redirecting his aggression. And he gets easily frustrated, because in his mind everything went smoothly for years...until it was all his responsibility.

And the thing is, there are so many ways Jack could have tried harder to be a good parent, that were available to him. But because of his background and the culture he lived in and the demands of storytelling he never reached out for any of them.

(And Bruce was right there! They knew each other socially! Everyone knew Bruce had worked through having two teenage sons on his own! He could have asked for advice, and he even knew Bruce knew Tim, given Bruce had officially fostered Tim while Jack was in a coma and in hospital. If you were putting together a specific support group you'd kick yourself over how perfect this was)

It's just such a part of the tragedy of Jack Drake.

[latinotimdrake]

had a more seriously written post about this in the drafts and then just couldn't sustain it so anyway here's my latest batman thesis as a speedrun:

tim and damian each have a specific relationship to orientalism that showcases how orientalism in the usa played out over the course of their early runs. detail:

god i'm sorry i can't speedrun the concept of orientalism let mr. said do it for you

tim was introduced in 1989, contemporary with works like die hard and neuromancer that were spun out of america's 1980s fear of/fascination with japan's culture, technology, and economy. he was built to serve as a regular, relatable teen boy with a middle-of-the-road whitebread backstory.

relatable normal white boy tim drake's establishing robin costume features tabi boots. other unused very 1980s concept art elements included things like bandanas and denim vests -- but it's the japanese element specifically that makes it into production to update the robin costume for the cool new era.

his foundational miniseries involves: going to learn ancient martial arts from its last surviving tibetan master; falling in with hot but evil chinese gang leader; getting mentored by hot evil chinese martial artist lady shiva; facing off against the latest terrifying leader of the triads, a white british man who is better than anyone else at specifically asian martial arts.

the 1994 robin annual issue is a batman samurai au one-shot. this to illustrate both the trend of the times and the trend of chuck dixon (who wrote this and a lot of early tim) specifically.

tim is the regular white boy who seeks out east asian traditions and redeems them by bending them to his rational western ends. it is a funny panel but also significant that when he tells lady shiva he will not kill her response is, verbatim, "how christian of you. how white of you."

lady shiva spends that mini trying to get tim to be her mentee, her "weapon." tim says no. he breaks away and ends the mini having returned to batman.

he transcends shiva due to being white; he transcends king snake (the villain) by fully living by his white rational principles.

AND NOW,

damian was introduced in 2006 and became robin in 2009.

damian is the son of bruce wayne and talia al-ghul. talia is the daughter of ra's al-ghul who i am pretty comfortable calling an orientalist caricature of an evil old arab man.

american culture is at a different point then than it was in the 80s. it's no longer preoccupied with japan and not quite yet preoccupied with china. we're post-9/11. it has arabs on the mind.

meanwhile we are also getting a push in some areas of pop culture for what we now in 2023 would call diversity and representation.

damian's backstory is that talia raised him without bruce's knowledge within ra's's organization, the league of assassins. he has been brought up as a fighter, a potential heir to bruce or ra's.

the league, their culture, and their bases are universally portrayed as tribal, deadly, sexist, vaguely desert-exotic in the mode of disney's aladdin. do you know how often we get a broad establishing shot of something that just looks like agrabah. i die every day.

damian struggles sharply with reconciling what his mother has taught him to his new environment. he cuts off some heads. he tries to kill tim. he does not share tim's "white, christian" preoccupation with mercy.

damian struggles specifically between the rational, merciful teachings of his white father and the dangerous, traditional, regressive teachings of his arab mother's family. this continues even into his latest ongoing from 2021.

tim comes in from the outside, picking up traits associated with the east because they're cool at the time while having outside western white mastery over them. damian is the call coming uneasily from inside the house, representing the shift of america's preoccupation with the orient and the uncomfortable growing realization in pop culture that some people of colour might have internality some of the time.

THANKS FOR LISTENING ✌ i was going to take more time with this and cite sources but then i stared down the barrel of trying to coherently summarize decades of scholarship on an incredibly complex topic (the stories the west (sarcastic finger quotes "the west") tells itself about the east (ditto) ) and blinked.

[latinotimdrake]

rich asshole: is there an assassin I can hire?

shiva *nudging cass*: this should have been you

cass: mom not now

shiva: not asking for a lesbian batman are they

cass: mom im trying to save someone literally right now

shiva: go see if throwing a batarang helps

[latinotimdrake]

You have been assigned a four issue mini comic [<100 pages]. It can be about whatever you want. The only restriction is that it has to be about a minor support character [IE character friends, character parents, reoccuring minor villains, reoccuring civilians]. Which character do you choose, and what story would you want to tell in a four issue mini?

For transparency, I'm asking this question to a bunch of people because I want to see all the ideas everyone has. See what everyone would do.

You know what I'd really love? Writing a Lady Shiva mini. I am stretching the definition of 'reoccurring minor villain' but she's never actually had a proper mini in her own right and she's very VERY rarely had viewpoint. I'd want to pick and choose from her various established backstories, and tone down as many of the League of Assassins connections as possible. I think I'd frame it as four pivotal fights (because that's the language of Shiva)

Fight 1: Sandra and David Cain (the 'sort out the backstory' issue/the apprentice) hitting the following:-

Carolyn and Sandra's childhood in Detroit as Chinese-American diaspora, including trips back to China to the family village there for additional martial arts training.

Carolyn encounters Ben Turner and David Cain, both of whom are training under Richard Dragon, with none of this LOA-linked

David Cain murdering Carolyn to motivate Sandra who he sees as a stronger fighter

Recanonise the Batgirl 2000 Cass origin

Sandra giving Cass to David

Fight 2: Lady Shiva and Richard Dragon (the 'birth of Lady Shiva' and her quest to match herself against the best fighters on the planet/the journeywoman)

This would revolve around Shiva's quest to seek training from various sensei.

References to Dinah and Shiva's shared mentor

Shiva and her encounters with Vic Sage and the first signs of her fondness for cases in which she sees the potential for greater violence, just as David Cain saw in her

Maybe recanonise the Paper Monkey stuff? Either way, have her win accolade and acclaim by facing off against the greatest fighters, killing many of them, and gaining her place in the hierarchy

Lots of wandering swordsman journey

Finishing point has this fight ending with Shiva not killing Richard because she can now best him and has found herself alone at the top as the 'best fighter in the world' - but she sees the power he still has above her - his ability to mentor and create the competition she seeks

Fight 3: Lady Shiva and Dinah Lance (Shiva the mentor, training those she most respects the potential in/the master)

I picked Dinah to frame this one for two reasons: she's my fave AND I wanted a fight with a woman for the second set.

We hit backstory with Shiva actively encountering Dinah, Tim, Connor, Cass. 'Her' heroes who she becomes attached to and to pushing them to be better competition for her.

This is the only bit where I might lean towards League of Assassins in terms of probably Nyssa and/or Talia approaching her to ask her to help train their troops, but Shiva finds it dull.

"Go to sleep Westley I might kill you in the morning" attitude emerging as she finds herself weirdly attached to the people she's pushing.

I would love to include a pay off for her fight with Helena Bertinelli in BOPv2 that was put on 'hold' in this fight with Dinah.

Fight 4: Lady Shiva and Cassandra Cain (The inheritance and future issue)

This would be framed around a NEW encounter between Shiva and Cass rather than one of their old ones

Leans into Shiva's death wish and viewing she's already passed on her inheritance, and that she's now defeatable

I would also want to see Sin Lance and Bethany Thorne appear in this issue (also Tim)

Looking at all four of these characters and how they have the potential to surpass and surprise her.

This one WOULD end with Shiva in a position where she's pushing Cass to kill her as she's now the tired one and Cass once again denying it to her