#221talks

[intraterrestriall]

cass cain who was never supposed to be a person herself. who was put through hell by her father. who escaped only to not be seen as a person for nearly a decade more. stuck wandering, unable to communicate.

cass cain who managed to find joy in a war torn city. who overcame years of deprivation to learn language so that she could be understood. who after years of being alone and unloved found people who saw her.

cass cain who hangs out with her friends. who watches shitty reality tv and sci fi movies. who is enraptured by ballet. who loves eating new and different food. and who is so so funny and always joking and smiling.

cass cain who was never supposed to be anyone and became everything.

[intraterrestriall]

me when i saw someone say their favorite batgirl was tim drake

They need to introduce the concept of "women" to the dc fandom

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comic books are the perfect interest because you will never be done nor satisfied

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cassandra cain incorrect quotes:

cass:

explanation: it’s incorrect because cass is not actually mute

[intraterrestriall]

twin bitches

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sorry about the quality but this panel was especially bad to me. why does it look like a bad webtoon.

another preview for absolute green lantern got released and fortunately i’m now reasonably confident the story will be intriguing enough to make up for the boring art

[intraterrestriall]

if i draw cass cain and her hair looks greasy that’s bc it is. she has been wearing the cowl for three days straight. she stinks.

[intraterrestriall]

what makes bruce and cass so similar isn’t actually their shared dedication to saving people and hardcore moral codes. what makes them so similar is that both of them have never worked a day in their lives. unemployed bitches.

[intraterrestriall]

i’m so excited for cass to do the wrong things and make mistakes

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why are you talking about a comic character that you’ve never read a comic about

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i love cass cain

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i don’t read comics with women in them because they are all written by misogynistic male writers so i just read comics with men and say that they are female coded

[intraterrestriall]

dc comics (dick and cass comics)

[intraterrestriall]

just got spoiled for a comic that came out thirty years ago don’t hmu 🥀

[intraterrestriall]

if you’ve ever in your life hated on damion scott’s art block me right now. we have fundamentally and incorrigibly different mindsets.

[intraterrestriall]

I think most people who have some exposition to psychology are familiar with the Critical Period Hypothesis. But just in case anyone isn’t, I’ll explain it real quick and how it connects to Cass Cain and BG2000.

Long explaination below:

The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) asserts that language acquisition occurs exclusively in childhood. After childhood, the brain looses the plasticity that would allow it to adapt and organize stimuli, rendering language acquisition difficult (or impossible).

The CPH states that if adequate stimulus is not provided within the first few years of life, the individual will never achieve a full command of language.

Though the CPH cannot be technically proven because of how crazy unethical it would be, proof of the CPH is seen in case studies of “wild” and deaf children who were deprived of language in early life. I’m going to refrain from mentioning any specific cases, because as you can imagine any child deprived from language for the entirety of their early childhood suffered tremendous abuse.

Here is of course, unfortunately, where we bring this back to Cass. Cass spent the first nine years of her life isolated and deprived of language (often in bg2000, Cass and others will refer to her ability to read and analyze body language as “language” but it is inherently not language in the sense we’re referring to here).

Whether Cass, at age nine, would be able to learn language following her deprivation from it is unclear. In real life cases, children who were deprived of language until the age of six years old were often able to learn language later in life, but children deprived until the age of 12-13 were often unable to learn language. Batgirl 2000’s explanation regarding Cass’s neurology suggested that the neural pathways responsible for processing spoken language were underdeveloped to allow greater development of neural pathways specialized for processing and interpreting body language. Under this assumption, we can assume that similarly to other “wild” children, Cass’s struggle and inability to learn language stems from her missing the Critical Period of language acquisition.

This explains why despite relatively frequent interactions with people, Cass never learns any language from the ages of nine to sixteen (fleeing cain to no man’s land). This also clarifies the interaction that Cass has with that Psychic in BG2000 #4. The Psychic explains this to Cass in simple terms, but he doesn’t magically transfer the knowledge of english to Cass’s brain, but instead gives Cass’s brain the ability to acquire language. Which is why Cass struggles to learn english for the rest of the run, because even after the Psychic’s intervention, she is still a seventeen year old girl who was never taught language. And even though now she has the ability to learn, she still needs to fight to learn how to speak every word.

We can also assume that the psychic changed Cass’s enlarged and shrunken neural pathways, hence why her ability to read body language suddenly declined. But that reverted following Cass’s discussion with Shiva (did we ever get an explaination for that? i don’t remember). Either way, Cass is disabled as an outcome of the abuse David Cain inflicted on her and even as her speech improved throughout comics, Cass will always be disabled.