#I've been seeing a lot of her panels floating around Discord channels lately and it struck me hard how MEAN she is in all of them

[soleminisanction]

I don't have much experience with comics, but one thing that keeps popping up in fic and shocking me is how MEAN people write Stephanie. In a way where it's like they almost don't realize she's being mean, if that makes sense? For example I was reading this fic where Tim and Steph were having this emotional reunion after he thought she was dead, and she called him "boy blunder." And continued to call him that throughout the fic. Am I crazy or is that an awful thing to call someone? I guess they were going for an inside joke, but to me it just seems so cruel, like every time she talks to Tim she's implying he's made a mistake. Of all the plays on "boy wonder" I've seen, that sounds the meanest. Is this something she calls him when they're together in the comics, do you know?

Oh she's absolutely called him Boy Blunder in the comics, along with things like Boy Wonderbread and Boy Virgin once when she was poking fun at him freaking out over her pregnancy. It's true in fics and it's true in canon: a lot of what people try to pass off as Steph being "snarky" or "quirky" is just her being flat-out mean, but never getting called out on it.

It's everywhere. And you're right that people don't realize it -- in fandom or the comics. She turned up in Damian's Robin book recently for exactly one line of dialogue and that line was a judgemental insult -- "Your weird, gross pizza is over there, Damian." She only has a grand total of three lines in the action portion of "The Elephant in the Room" and two out of those are just her insulting Tim (while the third one might as well be "Ooooo, what does THIS button do?"). Hell. half of the so-called "jokes" in Batgirls are just Steph being a catty, judgemental brat while the narrator goes "lol isn't she funny?"

And it's not even a recent thing. I haven't been able to make a post about this because I'm on a freelancing deadline IRL but someday I'm going to go on a massive rant about Jordanna Spence, the poor civilian girl inserted into Steph's supporting cast as Batgirl whose only narrative purpose is to provide one of The Other Girls for Steph to insult and bully constantly for the crime of wearing pink and being in a sorority. (And sometimes she's accidentally racist about it, which is...""fun"")

Steph will spend storyarcs hanging out with like, Damian or Kara or Klarion, and they're all treated like these Big Meaningful Bonding Experiences, but all Steph does the entire time is insult them and make judgemental comments about everything they say or do. And yet every single one ends the story thinking she's the greatest person who ever lived and lining up to suck her dick with everyone else in the comic.

It's honestly messed up, but here's the thing: it's absolutely not a Steph-exclusive issue. You know who else I've heard these exact criticisms leveled at? Bella Swan. And Hermione Granger, to a lesser extent only because she's the author self-insert but not the point-of-view character. That's part of why She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's adult novels are so much worse, because they are told from the PoV of the self-insert character and thus we're constantly barraged with her judgemental opinions about men, trans women, poor people, people with heavy accents, any woman who doesn't perform femininity to the author's exacting standards and, of course, fat people.

It's a symptom of the self-insert character, is I guess what I'm saying. Which of course means that it also gets applied to literally everyone else in the Batfamily on occasion too -- the boys and Bruce especially but also like, I'm sorry, I don't think Cass suddenly learning to curse and be casually mean is funny, I think it's a sign of lazy writing.

The difference being of course that the guys get written by a lot of different people, many of whom are interested in them as characters instead of just as vehicles to project themselves onto. Several others (especially in fandom) do just use them as vehicles (Damian hasn't been given to a good writer in over a decade and god knows Jason got more than his fair share of Very Special Boy treatment during the New 52), but it's not the only part in their canon.

Steph, though? Since the end of War Games forward, she's been nothing but a self-insert character designed for straight white women to project themselves onto. Which is sexist and sucks and obviously can't be called "the character's fault" or anything, but knowing all of that doesn't make her mean-spirited bullying any easier to put up with if you're not one of the people getting off on the power fantasy of being the bully.