#<- my hatred to zdarsky is essential.

[boyfridged]

Could I ask what makes you dislike zdarsky so much? Not disagreeing in the least lol, just curious for ur opinion

i was going to link my posts criticizing his work but tumblr is not cooperating, so let me just write up a couple of bullet points:

constant retcons of characters and their stories for much worse, including jason and talia. his retcon of jason's robin days in cheer is the most shameless and heartless interpretation of the character to date, and jason had already been a victim of plenty poor-taste flashbacks. his retcon of talia in the knight makes her a mindless seductress without her own will nor motivations. their respective relationships with bruce lose all depth, love and unique qualities. zdarsky managed to even retcon khoa within a year since he was first introduced as a character. and even when he does not rewrite the backstory per se, he just makes the characters act in ways that make no sense for what we already know of them (like with selina in gotham war) most of the time his ideas completely upset and discredit the already existing storylines and contradict what lies at their core. the audacity it's unbelievable.

classism & misogyny: this is a simple one. the previously mentioned retcons turned the characters into stereotypes of their background and gender, the most malicious ones even.

his personal biases and favouritism: here's a thing. zdarsky has perhaps three favourite characters: bruce, tim, and khoa. and you will know about it, because everyone else will be thrown under the bus to make them look good. bruce is a perfect man and all of his mistakes come only from his good intentions apparently. he is so perfect that he knows better about classism than jason. and tim is his favourite robin because (checks notes) jason hated being robin and dick just didn't care about cooperating enough apparently. this is a claim that literally appears in-text.

since i already mentioned classism twice: his politics are plainly atrocious. he sometimes loosely uses phrases and tropes that make some readers think that he is progressive, but somehow all of his storylines always get a "plot twist" that reverts them into something ugly and cynical. and somehow a lot of fans just don't notice. i think the fact that he loves a war on drugs moment should perhaps give people a hint but what do i know.

his writing is just bad? he can't write dialogue. his plotlines are all over the place. what even was failsafe. the concept of zur as the backup personality is so incredibly tacky and useless it doesn't belong even in the genre as camp as superhero comics. and on top of that, there is so much meaningless melodrama that doesn't say anything about the characters, their values nor their relationships at all- there's just a couple of panels that batfam fans will go crazy for because bruce hands kid a lollipop as batman or because tim calls bruce "dad." but neither of them convey anything of significance, especially not within their original context.

there are more reasons and i could talk of particular creative decisions that i just think are offensive to both the legacy and the intelligence of the readers, but it would take forever given zdarsky's prevalence in dc as of late.