#but for jason and bruce its more constant. Imo

[dukeofthomas]

calling bruce jason's 'father figure' should be illegal. jason is his son. he was literally even legally adopted. "father figure" my ass that's his dad ???

[bitterrobin]

You know what I've realized these past several months on Tumblr and just...years of consuming content?

It's pretty rare for the fandom to acknowledge Gotham as a city. A real, living city with people in it. Like, sure we always get cutesy posts about Batman or the others from outside perspectives or fics that include interesting ocs (I love u if you do that btw).

But what I mean isn't that. What I mean is: does anyone think of Gotham and its citizens as actual people? Because I've sure seen kind of the opposite.

I see constant arguments or heavily biased (mostly misinformed) posts regarding what Bruce does and how the Batman helps the city. That his riches would get lost in corruption and no one can save the city unless there's violence. You could try and make the argument, sure. But we've seen time and time again in comics that Bruce uses his money to the benefit of the city. We've seen in comics that he employs people who are disadvantaged and gives them opportunities. People know Bruce Wayne gives jobs and treats his employees well. He donates heavily to charities, creates his own organizations, funds Leslie Thompkin's clinic, and consistently updates the safety of his own buildings. People (at least post-Crisis) would know that Bruce Wayne did everything he could to save Gotham after the Cataclysm earthquake/No Man's Land - that he went up against Congress. Of course, not everyone would like Batman. Not everyone would trust the Wayne name. They'd see a stranger who prowls nightly and may or may not rescue you. They'd see the privilege of an old rich name who gets to exert his influence over the city. If you go to him for help, you go to him with the fear, and anticipation of rejection or with the knowledge that he will be safe.

I've also seen the (imo) ridiculous notion that Crime Alley citizens would trust the Red Hood. Maybe some would now, after the reboots and actual comic book evidence that he's doing something. But I cannot fathom living in a city with such heavy crimes occurring and then trusting what is essentially a cop. People don't know the Red Hood. They don't know Jason Todd. They would only know: 1. he has tried and succeeded various times to take over organized crime and drug routes 2. he can and will kill if he sees it fit. In some people's eyes, he would be a cop with even less judicial oversight. In some families, he would be the killer of their breadwinner, of their fathers or family members or lovers. A man with a gun. Eyes without a face. If you go to him for help, you go to him for blood.

This doesn't even begin to lay out the insane amount of vigilantes who live/operate in Gotham. The Batman is not the only figure. The Red Hood is not the only figure. If you boil down Gotham to only the conflict between these two characters, you miss the nuances and varied opinions of the city by miles. If you boil down Gotham to just Batman-affiliates, you miss even more.

For every person who doesn't trust Batman, there's someone who'd prefer Huntress. For every child who lives in fear but can't trust an adult, there's Robin or Batgirl. For an abused woman, there's other women out there who help: Catwoman or Black Canary or Holly Robinson. There's people who'd never trust a vigilante but want safety, they'd have Leslie Thompkins (who operates in Crime Alley) or Lucius Fox who could give them a job.

Not to mention, Batman is very obviously white. There would be some people who would rightfully mistrust white men, and would prefer figures like Orpheus or Onyx or Batwing or the Signal or Huntress (post-N52). There's the Creeper, who would be terrifying but some might prefer the monster over the man. There's Ragman, an explicitly Jewish vigilante who was literally called the Tatterdemalion of the Oppressed and trusted by the poor and homeless. There's Batwoman, Mother Panic, Spoiler, Nightwing, Red Robin, Azrael, Bluebird, the enigmatic idea of the Oracle, Anarky, Ghostmaker, Gotham Girl/Boy, Catman, Alan Scott-Green Lantern, Wildcat.

Hell, maybe someone who lives in Gotham would just straight up trust Superman or the Flash or Wonder Woman more than anyone else. Maybe they'd never once trust someone acting for a perceived view of justice and would just trust an employer like Two-Face or the Riddler or any mobster.

I'm stressing my point here: when you write anyone who lives in Gotham City, keep in mind that they don't know they live in a comic book world. Secret identities are foreign to them, they only know the base actions of each vigilante. Each person's opinion will heavily vary. Every experience colors their view of the city and vigilantes as a whole. Just, idk, widen your horizons and consider about what someone living in a place like Gotham would really think.

To that end, read the comics!!! Research actual cities!!! Take in experiences and history!!! It's all interesting and just adds so much more.

You want one comic that shows Bruce helping Gotham and the various views of Gothamites, read Gotham Knights #32, published in 2002 and titled "24/7." Read it online illegally if you have to!!

[bigskydreaming]

Dick has said it out loud explicitly, to Damian, that the mantle of Robin was his to pass on. Why do people still feel entitled to talk over him?

IMO? For the exact same reasons that people harp on so much about it being a retcon that Robin was Dick’s mother’s nickname for him and that originally he based the name on Robin Hood. To be perfectly honest that doesn’t make a damn bit of difference in regards to the fact that either way the point is still that Dick created Robin and it wouldn’t exist without him.....but the constant attempts to minimize its emotional significance to Dick and any kind of special attachment to it that he has and that the others can’t claim to share....

IMO these are just attempts to distance Dick from the mantle and make him seem less relevant or important to its very existence....freeing up people to focus on the importance of Robin as a symbol and a mantle to everyone else but without having to attribute any special credit or significance or respect to Dick as the originator of the mantle and the character that the other Robins are literally the legacy characters of.

It’s pretty annoying and very shortsighted IMO as actually, emphasizing the connection Robin has to Dick’s first family just enhances the weight and poignancy of Dick ultimately giving each of the other Robins his blessing when he didn’t have to and thus literally choosing them as his new family even without having to rely solely on a connection to each other via Bruce.

Of course people don’t seem to really want to do that either....given how rarely Dick’s blessing even gets acknowledged amid all the angst about who replaced who and who was fired and who wasn’t. It’s kinda ironic...I know so many fans HATE the version where Bruce fires Dick and so whatever they can not to acknowledge it and dismiss it as a retcon....and the ironic thing is? I get it. I totally see why it’s not something they want to run with and to be quite honest I can take it or leave it myself. I like exploring versions of events where Dick was fired, I like exploring ones where he wasn’t. Both have room for digging and delving imo.

My only beef with people who are soooo loud and quick to always dismiss the firing as just a retcon that doesn’t count.....is that in the pre Crisis version of events where Dick voluntarily gave up Robin and decided it was time to move onto a new identity....he gave Robin to Jason himself. The significance of that version of events isn’t JUST that it was Dick’s own choice to move to a new identity and that there was no conflict between him and Bruce about it...it was equally of significance that the Robin mantle was still viewed as inherently his, made by him, and his and his alone to pass on to a successor.

There is no version where Dick gave it up voluntarily but had no role in choosing Jason. The very premise of that mix and match honestly makes no sense because why make such a fuss about Bruce not having overstepped and fired Dick when it was never his place to say what he could claim as his identity or mantle on his OWN (fire him as his partner, sure that was always Bruce’s right, but tell Dick he couldn’t be the hero persona he created for himself? Fuck off Bruce LOL).

But my point is that mix and match makes no real sense because why preserve Bruce’s character from stepping between Dick and the mantle he created to honor his first parents....only to then turn right around and have Bruce still treat it as a Wayne family hand me down that Dick had outgrown when it was only EVER a Grayson family hand me down whose only connection to the Wayne family was through Dick being a member of both families and a bridge connecting them?

Whether Bruce fires Dick as Robin and gives it to Jason or JUST gives it to Jason without Dick making that choice....the one isn’t any better than the other because in both cases the actual offense is still the same: it was never Bruce’s to do ANYTHING with other than what Dick wanted done with it. Take on a new partner? Sure. But give him the mantle made of Dick’s work, Dick’s past, Dick’s every action as Robin? Nope.

So really the mix and match only serves one real purpose, for anyone who is intent on dismissing the firing as just a retcon but sees no need to uphold Dick choosing to give Robin to Jason instead of Bruce doing that...when Bruce doing that is literally part of the exact same retcon they’re so intent on discarding!

The only real purpose that mix and match serves is to keep Bruce centered in the Robin succession with his choice to give it to Jason being the basis of Jason associating Robin with Bruce. It keeps Bruce as the person Jason thinks of and feels connected to every time he thinks of why he’s Robin at all....because Bruce is the one who gave him the symbol that was already well known and full of meaning when Jason stepped into those shoes.

And then of course at the same time the mix and match also ‘lessens’ Bruce’s offense to Dick in taking Robin against his wishes WHILE also suggesting that Dick has less basis of feeling resentful of Bruce passing it on to someone else without his say so because it’s not like he was using it anymore right? And that was his own choice right?

But so what if it was? That doesn’t make it any less his creation and his legacy. It doesn’t make it any less a Grayson family connection and somehow more a Bruce Wayne family connection.

And that’s my beef. That’s the big irony of how flat out counter intuitive the mix and match retcon thing is and always has been. It only accomplishes half its objective....keeps the later Robins more connected to Bruce via it than they are to Dick via it....because it ultimately still runs through Bruce. But it fails to accomplish its secondary objective simply because refusing to acknowledge that Robin is intrinsically tied to Dick Grayson and not Bruce Wayne like....doesn’t actually make it any less true.

And that’s why imo the question should never have been “does your fic go with the version where Dick gives up Robin or the retcon where Bruce fires Dick” ...no, the right question in my mind should have always been “does your fic go with the version where Dick gives Robin to Jason or the retcon where Bruce gives it to Jason.”

And here’s the sticking point:

People always point to Bruce and Dick’s initial connection as the basis of their entire Dynamic Duo partnership. They understood each otrher via their parallel experiences losing their parents to murder. Bruce saw himself in a young Dick Grayson and he wanted to help Dick figure out a way forward to life after his parents’ death by drawing upon his own experiences.

But at the same time, they aren’t the same. Even with Bruce guiding Dick forward through his trauma and grief by following a map made of his own prior experiences, the end result was not the same for both....but it still used some of the same road marks on their respective journeys.

And this is why the Dynamic Duo were always emphasized as partners, as complementing each other, balancing each other....things they could only do because they were not the same and even using similar coping mechanisms to deal with their PARALLEL tragedies....produced entirely different results.

Both used their tragedies, their traumas, their PAIN to fuel their pursuit of justice and desire to help protect people. Both built new personas for themselves to use in their shared missions here....personas which embodied what they wanted to accomplish in these guises while at the same time reminding them why they were doing this.

But the personas they created ended up looking very different despite being born of similar crucibles...because they prioritized different things....and because they were honoring different people.

No matter how much Bruce and Dick have in common due to circumstances they are very different people who are both products of the families and places they come from....and thus even when using similar PROCESSES to build something out of their parallel tragedies, what emerged from the fires once they were done creating from their traumas.....don’t look the same. Aren’t interchangeable.

And neither are their creators.

Bottom line, it in my opinion flat out does not work to attribute more connection to Robin and the succession of that mantle to Bruce than Dick.....because Bruce would never, COULD never create that specific mantle out of his grief and pain any more than Dick ever would or could have created Batman out of his. Because they are too different. They needed different things out of their journeys forward, they were commemorating having had different journeys behind them, they were walking a shared path side by side but you can’t switch the clothes they made to wear going forward anymore than you can switch their footprints beneath their feet....they don’t fit into what the other made because it wasn’t made BY them and it wasn’t made FOR them.

So riddle me this, Batfandom: how does it make sense to focus on their parallel tragedies and how they moved forward from those in similar ways and on a shared trajectory, emphasizing how this is the entire basis of the Batman and Robin partnership from its very inception.....

Only to then view the role Bruce’s grief, his loss, his pain played in birthing the Batman mantle as something sacrosanct, undeniable....these things go hand in hand, there’s no separating them even when others end up wearing the Batman mantle as well, even through multiple generations....

But at the EXACT SAME TIME....treating Dick’s grief, HIS loss, HIS pain and the role all THAT played in birthing the Robin mantle....as something that barely comes up as a footnote the second you put the costume on anyone other than Dick? Something the others never even feel inclined to THINK about when reflecting on the mantle they’re wearing and where it came from and why it exists?

Why is the one rated as so less significant than the other....if the entire point of Batman and Robin is that both heroes were born from the ashes of tragedies so similar they understood each other in ways most other mentors and sidekicks never came close to?

How’s that work exactly?

Look, you’ll never catch me arguing that Bruce isn’t and shouldn’t be central to the Batman mantle, mythos, succession, etc. And I loved Dick as Batman too. But it ultimately should always come back to Bruce no matter how many people add to it in their own ways. Because it’s not just about what Bruce made.....it’s why he made it that matters too. The act of creating Batman is as important to the story of Batman as the created Batman.

And those very same reasons are precisely why Bruce shouldn’t be regarded as central to the ROBIN mantle, succession, etc.

To dismiss the Graysons as not being definitive to the greater Robin mythos is to say Thomas and Martha Wayne bear no special significance to the Batman mythos.

I love that being Robin connects these siblings and ties them all together as part of the same family. I love it being a shared family tradition that encompasses all of them and marks this family of choice as having been specifically chosen by not just it’s patriarch but each other.

But it’s not Bruce’s family tradition and it’s not a Wayne or even a Batman hand me down.

Because it doesn’t even come from Bruce’s family.

It comes from Dick’s. He brought it with him. It’s what connects him to what came before life with Bruce because as everyone knows but so many people often forget to give MEANING....

Dick Grayson, for as much as he is Batman’s son and is undeniably Bruce’s family, had a life of his own before he ever met Bruce.

He didn’t begin with Bruce Wayne. He didn’t come from Bruce Wayne.

And neither did Robin.

[novangla]

Dick Grayson for the character ask!

Why thank you!

How I feel about this character:

We all know, don’t we?  He’s the best.  I really love that Dick brings together the best of both Bruce and Clark into one character.  And it can be easy to forget, since he’s become Nightwing, but Dick Grayson–Robin–is as old and as iconic as the oldest heroes.  He appeared only a year after Bruce himself, and in the same month as the Joker.

Dick, IMO, is important because he’s the light in the darkness.  Bruce embraces darkness and uses it.  Clark is a sunshine boy in a sunshine world.  But Dick? Dick is in the middle of Gotham, having suffered basically all the same awful things as Bruce, but he’s eternally optimistic.  We all know this panel:

But what’s impressive there is not just that Dick’s a constant.  It’s that he’s a constant despite being someone who reinvents himself constantly.  He’s a constant source of hope and friendship despite living in the most demoralizing places in the DCU and wrestling with the most angsty plots that DC can throw at a Bat.  He’s had friends betray him, die on him, get blinked out of reality and brought back.  He’s had lovers rip the rug out from under him.  He’s been raped.  He’s watched his own parents die, and then pressed on when death came for Jason, and then Clark, and then Bruce, and then Damian, and then Tim.  When it came for him.  And did he become tortured and gritty?  Like, maybe for an issue.  But no, through it all, he’s remained DC’s constant touchstone.

I said once that DC’s legacies are such an important distinguishing point, since Stan Lee famously hated sidekicks, and Dick embodies everything that I love and that is so important about sidekicks and legacies.  He reminds us that being a hero isn’t something you can do alone.  That suffering doesn’t need to become your identity, even if you suffer a lot.  That you can always pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and jump again.

All the people I ship romantically with this character:

Mmkay so.  Heart-eyes tier is like: Wally, DickKory, really good DickBabs or like, one-sided young DickBabs.  Get a kick out of it but not attached: Midnighter, Tiger, Raya (remember her? yeah! I liked her until they fridged her womp wah).  Can appreciate depending on context and if in a well-written fic, but not my personal thing: Roy, most Oracle Babs, Spyral!Helena, Shawn.  Though honestly my experience with Dick is that if I write him interacting with one of these people I end up shipping them harder, and I can see myself potentially liking DickRoy more if I read more, but I prefer him with lighter hearted characters since the Batfamily brings enough angst for the whole world.  

As far as multishipping and timelines, I’m okay with DickKory not working out and being exes, but I think she’s really important to his emotional and personal development and I hate how that relationship is downplayed.  I like Dick and Babs as exes–their dynamic as Batman and Oracle was flirty and tense and great.  And I’m all for Rebirth-era Dick/Wally, assuming Wally survives HiC intact and all that. :/

My non-romantic OTP for this character:

The entire DCU?  Gosh, he’s just so good with everyone.  But I mean, a tie between Bruce and Clark, with Bruce edging out Clark just ever so slightly.  I talked about the Clark and Dick relationship already in my Clark answer, so I’ll focus on Bruce here.  The relationship between Bruce and Dick is so unique and so important to the DCU, and honestly everything else feels like it reverberates out of their relationship (and their relationships with Clark).  

Bruce wouldn’t be able to be Bruce, to be Batman, without Dick.  I got into a lot of this in the character study above, but it all is at its most pronounced when with Bruce.  Dick is Bruce’s reminder that there is light in darkness and there is hope even after tragedy, that even if he can’t end crime, he can see the clear and positive impact of taking in Dick and directing him toward justice and away from vengeance.  They absolutely saved each other, taught each other, and forced each other to grow up, and there isn’t any other bond quite like theirs (though Dick and Damian might have been given one if Dick had been allowed to raise Damian for longer).

My unpopular opinion about this character:

Oh, I don’t know.  I’ll go with a minor thing which is that I don’t really liked de-aged Dick with Bruce.  I’ll accept 8 as his starting point but even that is pushing it a little young for me since he was the teen wonder from pretty early on, and I’ve now read enough about trapeze and the quadruple that having an 11-year-old accomplish that is absurd enough – an 8-year-old probably wouldn’t even be performing yet.  But younger is what kills it for me, because I think the age of these relationships are actually really important, and the fact that all of Bruce’s kids have lives before him and experience their own trauma and come to him as Older Children (or teens) is such a significant story that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Oh and a smol pet peeve also from having read a lot about the quadruple, but fanfic and pro comic writers both like to have him do the quadruple just like, into the ground or whatever, but you really need to do it into a swinging target if you want to survive, because something needs to absorb the momentum of spinning at like 80mph.  It’s not a character opinion but w/e.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:

LET HIM DATE A DUDE.  Seriously.  I mean, I’d pick Wally, but I’m okay if we start with a non-heavy-hitter where it wouldn’t be a double whammy.  Such a missed opportunity with single Midnighter, really.  Dick is just a great candidate for “jfc at least ONE of the Batfam should be non-straight” due to his long history of pushing boundaries of sex and gender expectations and his pure heroism (as opposed to Jason, who would fall into the edgy bi trope).

[lanternwisp]

Hi! So, i'm gonna do the thing: i'm going to battle through the fog of fear and take on a Jason centric batsemble fic and since your batmfam is my favorite rendition i was hoping you might have some hefty characterization tips for writing the rest of the batkids? Specifically Dick, Damian, Cass & Tim and of course the Batdad. Anything you've got to offer would be greatly appreciated!

Oh my. Well first of all, congrats on your new undertaking! Character interpretations are very subjective, but I’ll tell you some basic points that I personally keep in mind.

Dick: Something fandom often forgets is that Dick is a lot like Bruce. He’s incredibly responsible and very occupied with the Mission. He’s far better adjusted when it comes to his parents’ tragedy, so it’s not so much about fighting back the bad in the world but about protecting the good. Dick is what Bruce is most proud of in his life; he’s canonically  Batman’s heir as the world’s second best detective as well as Bruce Wayne’s legal heir for the company. 

Fandom often turns him into a goofball or a ditz or someone who is extremely easygoing, and that is inaccurate. Dick’s chatty and tries to pick up Bruce’s slack in terms of emotional labor in the family, but that doesn’t mean he’s not incredibly serious about the work he does. Speaking of emotional labor, he will try to be there for people but does not like it when others try to draw attention to his own insecurities. His temper is cosmic and he will go for the throat if it means getting someone to drop an issue.

Damian: I am perpetually side-eyeing the jerk sue direction DC has started to take Damian in. I’ve made posts about Damian’s character here and here but the gist is that he’s still a kid; he’s in a constant process of learning new things and unlearning old ones. He’s proud but has insecurities, educated beyond his years but not a genius, wants approval but his social skills are incredibly terrible, is a bit spoiled/sheltered but gaining more practical life experience everyday. He shouldn’t be leading his own team imo, but working under a mentor and being guided through all these changes he’s going through.

Cass: Fandom likes to claim that Cass is some pillar of perfection, and it’s so not true. She’s a complex and nuanced character, not this dutiful, loyal, stoic asian daughter archetype. There have been many times she’s chafed under Bruce’s overbearing ways and rebelled/given him grief. She’s far more expressive, emotive and mischievous than fandom gives credit.

Cass makes mistakes. She acts on impulses. She defaults to violence in ways that are very understandable and shouldn’t be erased. She also understandably doesn’t like being controlled or confined. Her ability to read body language does not substitute social skills and she can have a hard time realizing that her loved ones (notably Babs and Bruce) can be wrong - if she reads that Barbara is upset about Dick, then bam that’s all she needs to know and she’ll throw Dick out a window. If she reads that Bruce believes it when he says Jason and Steph were too reckless to be vigilantes, then she can’t discern between truth and Bruce’s truth. 

But she also loves hard and works hard and is completely dedicated to helping others. Bruce has pretty much usurped Cain as father figure, and Cass has replaced Cain’s philosophy with Batman’s. But Cass also considers Barbara her mother figure, so Bruce and Babs should be depicted as basically having shared custody of her.

Tim: Ookay so people here know that I am not happy with the way DC handled Tim. His origin is built on classism and victim blaming and I’ve got Opinions on it. But a main thing that I like to emphasize is that Tim is a very hard worker; he’s not a natural athlete but he puts in the time and effort. 

A lot of the time Tim seems to be out-of-sync with other people’s social cues or emotions. He also has the tendency to fixate and obsess over specific concepts, and there are many instances of him doing things that are hurtful or cross boundaries, with seemingly no idea he’s doing it or the severity of his actions (cheating on Ariana, trying to clone Kon, the debacle with Tam and her dad, etc).

Tim is not an academic! He hated school and was happy to drop out. He’s a great researcher that is capable of parsing important details from large amounts of information, good at pattern recognition and skilled with technology. He’s like Barbara in that he’s highly valuable to have as mission support, but he’s not going to any fancy universities nor would he want to. He’s also not interested in corporate (he dreaded helping his father with Drake Industries, and his role in Wayne Enterprises was isolated to an offshoot charity project). He’s a nerd and a slob (seriously have you seen how he lives?) who cares most about his vigilante work.

Bruce: The thing about Bruce is that he’s a man of action, not words. Meaning he will show he cares through gestures, but then he won’t explain those gestures, leading to a mess of misunderstanding as people try to figure him out. He often does not do this on purpose. Miscommunication is a driving force behind most of the batfam conflict where he’s concerned. 

Ever since Jason died Bruce changed, becoming the paranoid and constantly vigilant mess we know today. Bruce can be an overbearing ‘my way or the highway’ person, to no one’s surprise. He’s always been a control freak, but that took it up to eleven. He loves his family but demands their obedience so that he can eliminate risk factors to their wellbeing. He’s an anxious man with the stubbornness of a thousand mules. His coping skills are terrible and often self-destructive or self-sabotaging in some way.

But he does also have a sense of humor, can be ridiculously dramatic and Extra, and doesn’t take himself totally seriously (he’s dressed like a giant rodent ffs) despite how stoic he is. He goes overboard with his Mission, but family is incredibly important to him - his parents’ deaths are what began his journey, and his kids are a huge part of its continuation. Bruce is just kinda inept at expressing it.

[bigskydreaming]

Making an additional post to respond to @fuyunoakegata’s response to @fiyaerrigan’s post here without derailing or going too far afield from the OP:

I think an additional thing to consider that the other kids had by benefit of Dick being the eldest is......every single one of them to varying degrees had Dick to look to as a precedent for like.....reassuring themselves that their presence in Bruce’s life wasn’t a temporary thing. Dick’s constant or recurring presence was an affirmation of permanence - that no matter how bad things got between Bruce and one of his kids, since things HAD been very dicey between Dick and Bruce for awhile - Dick still was there, at the end of the day.

Now, the obvious sorta exception to this is in Jason’s POV, with it being a sorta exception cuz there’s a couple different ways you can play this. By emphasizing how much Bruce and Dick were on the outs from Jason’s POV while he was living with Bruce, you CAN cast doubt on the idea that Dick was proof things would never get so bad with Bruce that he would just stop being part of their lives. And then this in turn can be used as a sort of explanation for why Jason was so convinced that there was no coming back from a lot of what he’d done by his return to Gotham, even without the events of UTRH....like, you can make the case that this is why Jason escalated things to that extent period. He thought reconciliation was never truly ever an option.

But by the same token, you can also use the fact that Dick IS reconciled with Bruce by the time of UTRH to seed doubts about this in Jason’s head, because he DOES remember just how bad things were between Bruce and Dick when he was younger....and if they could come back from that, maybe it WASN’T just wishful naivete to think that there could be a future for Bruce and Jason’s relationship as well, y’know?

To cycle back to the beginning though....it should be acknowledged imo that Dick never had the benefit of this proof of permanence, this security blanket of knowing that no matter how bad things got with Bruce, there wasn’t truly a point of no return. That WAS in doubt for him a lot of the time. Which gives him all the more motivation to see what we so often see evidence of in the comics - Dick going above and beyond to stress to his siblings that they aren’t temporary in his eyes, and their connection is not just limited to being via Bruce. They’re his siblings with or without Bruce in the picture.

Now to respond more directly to what @fuyunoakegata had to say in that last reblog addition, I think the fact that Dick is so good at translating what Bruce leaves unspoken is actually a key part of the conflict between Dick and Bruce at so many points. Because the thing is....Dick should never have HAD to become that good at it. He became good at it by necessity, because Bruce does leave a lot unspoken and taken for granted, and at a certain point Dick realized he’d just have to fill in the blanks himself.

But given that Dick was the traumatized kid that Bruce chose to take in as an adult - no matter how young of an adult he was - there’s an inherent disservice in not recognizing that it should never have been on that kid to feel HE had to be the one to bridge the communication divide between himself and his guardian when said communication felt lacking. That is the responsibility of the guardian or parent, its literally a key part of the sense of security its their job to offer the traumatized orphan in their care.

That’s not to say, however, that its not realistic for this to happen this way - and for reasons that actually have nothing whatsoever to do with Bruce, and everything to do with Dick. Because it is possible that Bruce just never quite clued into just how much Dick was assuming the burden of translating Bruce’s intentions into actual communication and filling in the gaps where Bruce was leaving stuff unsaid.....because as I’ve said before, for all their similarities and parallel tragedies, a key part of Dick’s tragedy that Bruce simply couldn’t relate to, was the abandonment fear of being sent away for not being good enough or being too much of a burden. Bruce has HUGE abandonment issues due to his own tragic loss of his parents - but his abandonment issues tend to be more geared around losing people to tragedy or death. 

Now from a parental standpoint, he does have fears of driving his kids away by not being good enough for them or by hurting them in various ways, true.....BUT the specific overlap he lacks is that he’s never really identified from the perspective of a child, with that fear of a parent or guardian not wanting to deal with him or be burdened by him anymore. When he was raised by Alfred, he feared losing Alfred in a variety of ways, but not really so much by driving Alfred away or making him sick of him....because there has always been at least an implicit awareness, even while acknowledging that Alfred basically raised him, that Alfred still technically worked for the Wayne family, and Bruce simply wasn’t ever in a position to feel quite as dependent on Alfred and say...his ‘whims’ or whatever, as other children might in regards to their own parents. Alfred’s loyalty is readily apparent and of a more....fundamental sort than most others can claim, y’know?

So I think one of the key divides between Dick and Bruce, a NATURAL area of oversight for Bruce, who tends to take for granted at times how much he and Dick are alike in certain ways.....is that it wouldn’t necessarily ever occur to Bruce just how much Dick feared being a burden who could and might be sent away at any time he became too difficult to be worth putting up with anymore. And by not realizing how big a role this played in Dick’s thoughts as he grew up, its natural that Bruce wouldn’t necessarily notice just how almost....eager Dick was to jump at filling in gaps in communication himself rather than risk having to insist Bruce clarify himself or his intentions in order to be understood instead. Dick didn’t want to give his guardian any reason to send him packing - so he voluntarily took up the role of Bruce-translator early on, before ever even alerting to Bruce that there was anything about his communication tendencies that might be lacking and left Dick occasionally grasping for assumptions to fill in the blanks.

But see, the problem that naturally arises from this sort of inherent miscommunication or oversight, no matter how understandable it is....is that it over time builds in an expectation or even reliance on Dick doing the majority of the work and emotional labor when it comes to understanding each other. And the precise problem this creates lies in when Dick for whatever reason - such as believing Bruce has already as good as cast him aside and no longer wants to be burdened with him - like, if for whatever reason Dick STOPS doing the majority share of their communication, if he no longer sees a reason to translate Bruce’s thoughts into actual words of affirmation and read approval into his actions or assume the best of Bruce’s intentions......if Dick basically just stops TRYING here, because he’s convinced there’s no longer any reason to try and the worst has already happened, the very thing he was going above and beyond in filling in Bruce’s gaps in communicating himself in order to avoid happening in the first place....

Then Bruce is going to flounder, naturally, because all of a sudden its going to seem like nothing he says or does in the ways he’s always been used to communicating himself like, seem to be getting through to Dick or leaving him with the same understanding or awareness of Bruce’s true feelings that he’s grown used to Dick having, based just on whatever Bruce DOES actually do or say.

So from Bruce’s perspective, its going to be like nothing he says seems to make any impact on Dick or convey to him that Bruce does in fact still love him and care....BECAUSE Bruce hasn’t quite realized yet just how much Dick has HAD to fill in those blanks for himself, because Bruce’s actual communicating of them has not actually involved ever FULLY expressing those sentiments.

Hence, their complete communication breakdown after Dick was fired and/or Jason was made Robin and adopted without consulting or even alerting Dick to the fact beforehand, or reassuring him that this didn’t actually say anything about Bruce’s feelings for his eldest. As well as Bruce’s seeming obliviousness as to why.

And another thing I want to add here is that I always tend to push back a lot against people bringing up how young Bruce was when he took Dick in, and how that explains his lapses in parenting....

Because the thing this fails to take into account IMO is that like.....by and large, and with obvious occasional exceptions like Robin: Year One.....its almost unanimously agreed that Bruce was at his BEST as a parent to Dick - whether thinking of himself as his father yet or not - in their early years together. So I don’t see how Bruce’s young age can excuse his later lapses in parenting Dick, when it was at his YOUNGEST, that Bruce was at his BEST in parenting Dick. To me, his age has nothing to do with it. The difference in Bruce’s effectiveness in being a parent to Dick at various stages in my mind lies entirely in the fact that in those early years, Bruce was most consistently putting in his most effort into being there for Dick, being the person Dick needed him to be, etc. 

Basically, those early years were so good between them, compared to other periods, because even with Dick assuming more responsibilities than he ever should have had to - but for completely understandable reasons ie Bruce simply not REALIZING Dick was so desperate to not be a burden he was making sure Bruce never realized there was a problem here at all -  the bottom line was it was in those earliest years that Bruce most consistently TRIED. He put his best foot forward. He did the WORK.

And thus the problem in the later years of Dick’s youth, IMO, had nothing to do with Bruce’s own relative youth - it was that I think Bruce had just gotten comfortable with their dynamic and lost sight of how much of that was due to his own EFFORT. He started to take Dick for granted, and thus defaulted more towards frustration when he didn’t understand why Dick did something or where he was coming from....where previously, he would have been more patient as he applied his intellect towards trying to figure out for himself WHY Dick was acting the way he was or what it might signify.

BUT. The point of all this digression is like.....me working my way around to how there’s not JUST an opportunity for Dick to buttress Bruce’s lapses in parenting for his younger siblings, and for them to benefit from him having gone first.....BUT, if people WANT there to be....there’s also every bit as much to fix or address a lot of the flaws in Bruce and Dick’s relationship via Bruce learning from things with his younger children like....an awareness of WHY he and Dick grew apart and how it can be addressed.

For an example.....with Jason. I’ve commented before on how a lot of authors doing revisitations of Bruce and Jason’s early years together in fic actually do a GREAT job of showcasing how patient Bruce is with him, and understanding of his history and why he behaves in various ways or reacts to things differently than Bruce would or expects.

And a lot of focus is put on how in the comics, when Bruce talks to Dick about why he took Jason in, he describes himself as having seen Jason as being a lot like him, and thus thought he could help him with his anger, etc.

See, I have always, ALWAYS, called bullshit on this point. (And that’s aimed at the comics canon btw, not fic writers).

Because uh, I just don’t see it at all. First off, Jason has always had even less in common with Bruce than Dick did, and second like, the only thing that Bruce has ever pointed to as feeling similar to Jason in....is Jason’s anger.

And like....early Jason, even after the post-Crisis origin retcon, like...wasn’t that angry! His supposed anger issues come from all of like, two different stories and that’s it. And I don’t buy that Jason was the first kid in all the time Bruce had been Batman by that point, that like, Bruce saw as a kindred spirit due to just being ANGRY. Umm, no. Sorry. That doesn’t track for me.

Especially because like....when Bruce first encountered Jason? When he first MADE the decision to take Jason in? First when meeting him stealing his tires, at which point he took him to Ma Gunn, and then after finding out that was a criminal front and deciding to take Jason in himself? Jason was like....literally not even angry in any of those encounters, lol. He just wasn’t.

Jason was scared. He was defiant. He was stubborn. He was proud. He was vulnerable. He was doing his damnedest not to show it. He was a lot of things.

What he wasn’t.....was...angry.

And so I truly don’t believe that Bruce took Jason in for reasons that had anything to do with identifying with him and seeing himself in Jason.

I think Bruce looked at that tiny young vulnerable but proud, spirited and defiant kid before him, utterly unrepentant about stealing Bruce’s tires and then hitting him with a tire iron and then with the Ma Gunn storyline....

And Bruce saw a young Dick Grayson reflected in the boy before him. 

Bruce missed Dick and took Jason in as a kind of do-over, a chance to fix the mistakes he barely understood making with Dick to lose him from his life or drive him away in the first place....and just resolved to do BETTER this time. To not make the same mistakes. To be patient, understanding, to try and get why Jason did and thought the things he did instead of just making his own assumptions.

And the painful irony is that despite Bruce’s best intentions in the comics, history DID repeat himself. He and Jason became estranged, even before Jason’s death - by Bruce projecting himself and his own issues and viewpoints onto Jason rather than see Jason as an entirely different person from him. He grew to take Jason and their dynamic for granted the same way he did with Dick. A significant element of the Garzonas story that never gets talked about is that after they captured Garzonas the second time, after Gloria’s suicide and before taking him into the police where Garzonas ended up just walking again....

Bruce stood back and literally encouraged Jason to take out his anger and frustration on the man. The same way Bruce sometimes did with criminals himself. He literally stood there and watched as Jason vented his anger by beating up Garzonas further.

And THIS is the heart of why Bruce reacted the way he did with Garzonas’ death, I think. Especially when you couple it with how much of Bruce’s reactions in UTRH are based around how HIS entire reason for being unwilling to kill the Joker is because he doesn’t think he could just stop there, couldn’t pull himself back from doing it again. I think Bruce just ASSUMED that Jason had pushed Felipe to his death, because he projected himself into Jason’s shoes, and saw that moment playing out from how he feared HE HIMSELF would have reacted in that moment, if he were say as young as Jason still was at the time, and frustrated by how futile everything felt. He assumed the worst of Jason, because he identified with Jason, and in that moment, was projecting his own worst assumptions of himself in a parallel moment of intense emotional frustration and anger.

Like I said.....he drove Jason away by making the same mistakes he’d made with Dick in essence - he projected too strongly on identifying with them and thus viewing their actions or choices through the lens of how he would behave in similar circumstances and WHY....and he stopped doing the WORK of keeping in mind that they were very different people from him with very different reasons for choosing the things they choose, different histories, different priorities, different contexts.

So the point is like.....instead of letting things play out like that, since fic IS an opportunity to improve upon canon, you can draw upon literally ANY of these ideas, and like.....examine what happens if not only Dick helps his siblings in their relationships with Bruce by drawing from his own experiences with him and the mistakes there.....

But you can also examine what happens if Bruce is helped in his relationship with Dick by drawing from his experiences with his younger children and using those to identify mistakes he made with Dick specifically, and address them even now....instead of just writing off his relationship with Dick as the best it’ll ever be now and damaged beyond further repair and so instead devoting himself to trying to just do better with his younger kids.

Because see what happens then, if you use Bruce’s patience and understanding while raising a young Jason, and awareness of just how different Jason is from him....to glean for HIMSELF, without having to be told by others....an awareness that no, maybe he took in Jason for reasons that had far more to do with regrets having to do with Dick than because of identifying with Jason just himself. And from there.....a simple examination of his relationships with Dick and Jason respectively, like, even just to wonder what’s so different about his differing dynamics with the two and why is so much better now than the other...that’s literally all that’s needed for Bruce to become AWARE of how patient he is with Jason and his seeming idiosyncracies, to acknowledge the work and EFFORT he puts into building and maintaining his relationship with a young Jason....and from there....the realization that....holy shit, he’d taken Dick for granted, and THAT’S why things broke down between them. He’d stopped TRYING to understand Dick the way he was working so hard now to understand Jason, and instead just started getting frustrated with the fact that he so often DIDN’T understand Dick, period.

And once you have Bruce HAVE that epiphany, GAIN that awareness....

Its the easiest thing in the world to just write him GOING to Dick and just like...acknowledging this. Owning his faults. Admitting that he took Dick for granted and put too much reliance on Dick doing most of their communicating, fell back on it being easier that way and stopped placing importance on being the one to take the LEAD in their relationship and addressing its flaws, as the PARENT.

And just saying.....its not too late to fix this. If I can do it with Jason, if I could do it with you in the first place, I can do it again. All I need is for you to give me the opportunity to try to do just that, to do better, and instead of demanding that or expecting it from you or even just hoping for it but never actually voicing it....here is me asking for it, but letting you know I understand if you don’t trust me with that or want to risk yourself like that again.

And whammo zammo, you’ve got yourself a road to a healthier, happier Batfam, and it doesn’t require actually vilifying anyone or expecting anyone but the patriarch of the family to like....take the actual wheel.

[bigskydreaming]

How do you think the major DC/Batfam events would of happened if editorial hadn't stopped the DicKory wedding and they've just been a couple this whole time?

Oh god.

I don’t even know. But now I desperately WANT to know, and like, why has nobody ever written this story lmao nm we all know why.

But for starters, none of the stuff with Blockbuster, Tarantula, etc would have played out at ALL the same...assuming Dick was ever even IN Bludhaven, like, if he and Kory had married, why would they have left the Titans and not still been in New York, y’know? (Bonus! Dick never ever ever ever ever became a cop!)

But then too there’s the stuff that happened with Kory’s homeworld and her responsibilities to her people when they were refugees......no matter how much Dick had tying him to Earth at the time, this is not even just his girlfriend anymore, this is his WIFE, dealing with the potential end of her entire people....there’s NO way he’s gonna wait at home and expect her to go off and deal with that all on her own, he’s like no, I’m going with you, this is our ‘in sickness and health,’ let’s not argue about this when we could be using that time to travel instead, your people need us.

Jason’s return would have played out dramatically differently IMO, because as long as Dick was around and present in any capacity at the time, I think Dick would be in a LOT better place, a lot more centered here....and no matter how paranoid or pessimistic Bruce might have been about Jason at times, Dick would have had Kory there to counter that, and point out and remind him of all the things he loved about Jason, all the ways he KNEW Jason, no matter how much they both had changed....because Kory would remember that sweet kid who was so eager to go help the Titans save his big brother and she’d have just enough emotional distance and objectivity from her in-laws’ issues to be able to keep THAT image of him front and center and make sure to remind Dick of it too.

Ma’ri would likely have been born by the time Damian came along, assuming her birth happened around the same time most of the other OG Titans became parents, with Cerdian and the twins as well, and Lian already being a toddler....maybe even Jake might have been born by now too....

Which would have created a whole different dynamic as Damian would have been raised that year Bruce was gone by both Dick AND Kory, had a father figure AND a mother figure to compare not just his later relationship to Bruce to, but his relationship with Talia too as well.....not feeling as lacking or insecure by whatever choices Talia made in regards to him, assuming that most of the rest of DC events and choices other than Dick and Kory stay relatively the same and DC sucks at writing her. Its likely Damian never dies.

Before that point, again during the year Bruce was gone....things could have gone dramatically differently, smoother for the entire family just by virtue of Dick having Kory’s support and could bounce things off her as a sounding board the way he didn’t have anyone at the time.....the transition of Robin to Red Robin could have gone a lot smoother and with less resentment, Dick might have had the mental and emotional SPACE and presence of mind to be a lot more understanding of Tim’s insistence Bruce was alive instead of just focused on the pain he’d feel if he gave into temptation and believed Tim only to have those hopes crushed later down the line. Again, in this AU I’d posit that due to Dick and Kory never breaking up, Dick never grows distant from the Titans period, which makes it all the more likely they’d have remained a constant presence in his life at this time and he’d have been more willing and trusting about relying on them to help out in Gotham, because the way he did things wasn’t the way Bruce did things and that was always a strength in the past, they’re different men, they have different approaches and trying to do things the way the other did was NEVER going to work for Dick or be to his advantage.

All of which means Dick had help and OPTIONS for dealing with Jason and getting through to him, that is, if he wasn’t already closer because of how differently his initial return had gone down. Cass likely wouldn’t be in Hong Kong, because she’d have more reason to be around if it wasn’t just her and her brothers and Babs (who wasn’t even IN Gotham by that point). I’ve always headcanoned though that Cass and Kory would get along GREAT, and be really close, and again, if Ma’ri and potentially Jake are already born by that point, no way Aunt Cass is leaving her niece and nephew behind in this trying time in particular.

And then again, maybe Steph never died or was believed dead either, because War Games didn’t play out the same with Dick not in Bludhaven and with Kory’s potential intervention.

(Of course, by that line of thinking, its possible Tim was never fired as Robin and Jack Drake was never murdered and we’re just gonna gloss right over this here, see, because despite my frequent Tim Ire, he IS a part of this family, dammit, and no second rate sperm donor is gonna stand in the way of that, so whoops, in this AU Jack Drake tripped and fell down the stairs and like. He still died. Oh no, very sad, much regrets, Siri plz send flowers, end tweet.)

And then of course, eventually you get the next generation old enough that Ma’ri, Jake, Cerdian, Lian, the twins and a Robert Long from a parallel Earth who just dropped out of the sky one day because Who Cares and never left, like....are all bursting at the seams to start their own team and go out and have their own adventures, and Ma’ri turns on the Grayson charm to be like “Pleeeeease, Uncle Dami, enable us, please, it’ll piss off Grandpa Batty, and you know you love making him do the scrunchy face of doom, c’mooooooon, we just wanna borrow the Batplane for a little trip and we’ll bring it right back and wash it and everything, NOBODY HAS TO KNOW.” 

Kory, from the other room: I already know.

Ma’ri: Curses! Foiled by my lack of an indoor voice yet again.

Uncle Dami just winks at his niece though, in that way of his that isn’t actually a wink cuz he’s still Damian, and he doesn’t Do That, but he does twitch his eyebrow in a downward direction at least, and that’s basically the same thing, it totally counts: Don’t worry, Little Star. You had me at enable.

And just. Yeah. More of that. All of that. Selina and Bruce probably actually walk down the aisle at some point too, by the power invested in me Cuz I Said So.

In conclusion:

This would be amazing and excellent and DC sucketh for denying us it, The End, roll credits, and SCENE.

[bigskydreaming]

Y’know, here’s the bottom line about all my constant references to canon this and canon that. I don’t actually ever think that canon should have to be the be-all and end-all of any fic writer’s writing process. But I do think its relevant for fic writers to KNOW so they can then like....make an actual CHOICE whether or not to use it or substitute their own.

Because the reason this is relevant IMO is.......I don’t think anyone would truly argue that there’s a ‘problem’ with ignoring canon and substituting your own version that makes a character come across as BETTER....unless they just flat out hate that character and don’t WANT them to appear better. 

So to me, the reason its an issue is because.....like yeah, do the former all you want, but when you ignore canon and substitute your own that makes a character come across as WORSE....then....why wouldn’t fans of that character be “yeah, umm dislike” and reference canon to point out that like.....this narrative decision to make a character do things they didn’t actually do in canon or come across in ways that are less appealing than in canon....like, why shouldn’t people point out that hey, like it if you like it, just know this was a personal choice by the writer, their preferred take, rather than the default base template for the character as provided by canon. Y’know?

Like....if people want to ignore canon to make it so Jason never tried to kill Tim or Damian - I’m there. If they want to ignore canon so that Bruce is always a good dad and doesn’t engage in any of his worse canon behaviors with his kids - as I’ve written a bajillion posts about, I have ZERO problems with that....unless a writer isn’t so much just flat out writing over or around abusive behaviors as engaging in abuse apologism arguments FOR those behaviors....OR unless that one character’s behavior is transplanted onto another character....so the family dynamic still has that ‘tension,’ its just Bruce is no longer the cause or face of it.

THAT is the only place my objections stem from. When writers choose to write a take wherein Bruce’s outright abuse never happens....but somehow, Dick becomes guilty of pretty much every single thing Bruce is the one actually doing to members of his family in canon. Or with any of the characters, honestly. 

Its just.....if you see certain behaviors or dynamics as enough of a problem that you don’t want them associated with your fave characters or the character you’re prioritizing in a fic.....then by all means, FIX the problem or even just outright REMOVE the problem.

But don’t just SHIFT the problem onto another character and make it their fault and responsibility and then act like you can’t comprehend why fans of that character would be....not any more thrilled with this than you were with the actual canon. 

*Shrugs* I mean, I don’t personally view that as being canon-fixated, I think of it more like.....pointing out that’s what happened there because when you wind up with widespread fandom impressions of events and dynamics that stem entirely from fic writers’ personal takes, but are constantly referenced as being drawn from canon instead.....like....why wouldn’t that merit discussing?

[bigskydreaming]

About "ward" and "son", part of It's the legacy of the Batman show. Also, while Dick became Bruce's son in 2001, that was well after "ward" no longer applied. Meanwhile, Damian is Bruce's biological son, and reminds us of that constantly. Not so much anymore, but he used to.

I mean, the constant harping on Damian’s blood son status absolutely IS bullshit, I agree? But that’s also like....part of my point, is the thing. I hate any and all insistence on treating any of the kids like they’re actually less Bruce’s kids somehow than any of the others.....and this absolutely includes singling Damian out as his biological son, which is a thing that for the record, I rant about a LOT too, and one of my biggest issues with Tom King’s run (though to be fair, I have so many Big Issues there its hard to actually rank them, lol). But the thing is......there’s plenty of people in fandom and in fics who speak to how the blood son crap is bullshit, and again, all for that, I do it too, no disagreement. BUT, there’s not to my knowledge a whole lot of people speaking about the tendency to prioritize Dick’s former ward status over his adopted son status.

Like I read plenty of fics that have no problem referring to Jason and Tim as Bruce’s sons, even when referencing events after Tim got himself emancipated in the comics, and Jason objects to being called Bruce’s son....BUT IN THE EXACT SAME FICS, refer to Dick with terms like ‘ex-ward’ or ‘former ward’ as a description, rather than son as well....even though he’s actually his son by adoption in those fics as well. And I’m totally cool with those things as well, because, hey, not wanting to legitimize DC’s weird are they/aren’t they fixation about letting any of Bruce’s kids (except for Damian, yes)  be CONSISTENTLY regarded as his kids....totally valid in my books. Fics don’t regard the inconsistencies or weirdness or vagueness or totally unnecessary ways in which DC finds to refer to Bruce’s kids as something other than his kids? Noooo problemo.

The problem I have is so many fics still allowing those inconsistencies with Dick to stand, or still play into agreeing things other than ‘Bruce’s son’ still make for a more accurate or standardized description of him.

As far as it being a legacy of any of the animated Batman cartoons, sorry, I just don’t see it. The 90s era one was a popular show, a lot of peoples’ first introduction to the characters, yeah, and the others all had plenty of fans of their own, but there’s a TON of stuff from those shows that have nothing to do with comics canon OR have been accepted or prioritized by comics fanon....so Dick being Bruce’s ward rather than his son seems a weirdly specific thing to hold on to and carry over into comics-based fandom when so much else from the shows weren’t. 

Especially when you consider that the majority of instances of cartoons distinctly referencing Dick as being Bruce’s ward were ones where Dick was a teenage Robin living with him in Wayne Manor.....which absolutely matches up with how Dick was always a ward when he was a kid and teen living at home still in Wayne Manor too, y’know? Since Dick wasn’t adopted until well into adulthood in the comics.....there’s no reason it wouldn’t be presumable for the same to be true for any of the cartoon versions.....so again.....IMO that just kinda doesn’t match up with a legacy of teenage Dick Grayson in any of the Batman shows being the frequent description of him as a former ward in fanfics about adult him from the comics. 

Plus most of the other Batkids never even existed in any of the cartoons, and writers never have trouble fitting them into fics and in fact, a huge emphasis in fics in this fandom is pushing the actual family connections to Bruce moreso than the comics EVER have.......so again, it still comes back to me as being very very distinct that Dick’s connection to Bruce is so often defined by being his former or ex-ward in even just casual descriptions in a fic...instead of like, his eldest son.....when there’s tons of reasons why that feels forced instead of a natural or obvious take to default to. 

*Shrugs* Tbh, my only real concern is just ‘this thing that happens a lot has a tendency to single Dick out as different from his siblings in ways that carry unfortunate implications regardless the conscious or unconscious reason for doing it, so I wish more people would stop to examine why they default to that description IF they’re someone who does so, in the hopes that maybe in doing so they’d find no reason to continue doing so. Which I mean, I know I’d prefer but honestly I do think is to the benefit of how anyone writes the Batfamily as it makes them a more cohesive, happy and healthy FAMILY of a father, his surrogate father, and all his kids, be they biological or adopted.....rather than a family in this case being a father, his surrogate father, and all his kids, be they biological or adopted....or his former ward.”

Like I said, its just about how you frame things most often. The word used most as a descriptor is almost always going to be the description readers internalize as being most accurate....so the more a character is described as an ex-ward rather than a son, the more people are likely to internalize their default view of that character as an ex-ward rather than a son.

[bigskydreaming]

Was just reading a story set just before ADITF, about Jason finding out Catherine wasn’t his biological mother, and some thoughts came to mind based on something in it that’s reflective of a trend in a lot of similar stories. (Just FYI, this wasn’t a recent story or anything that’s been updated recently, its from years ago and a few hundred pages back in the Dick Grayson archive, and I’m mostly talking in general terms as usual).

And also to preface this, I think a lot of people who write stories that emphasize the following are just taking their cues from ADITF and how Jason reacted then and his train of thought in that story, the things he emphasized and prioritized in his thoughts and dialogue.....buuuuuut its always worth acknowledging that canon’s writers are pretty shit at writing the Batfamily’s dynamics with anything approach nuance at times.

So! All that said, just some things potentially worth thinking about if ever writing a fic about that storyline, that personally I think likely to give things more depth and do all the characters more justice in that situation than canon did....first and foremost being the fact that Jason, the character who finds out at the beginning of that story that Catherine is not his biological mother.....is at the time he finds this out.....already a child of adoption. By Bruce.

Which is to say.....even though Jason is only fifteen, at that point in time he’d been living with Bruce for at least three years, and we know that Bruce adopted him fairly early on. Most of the time Jason spent living with Bruce, he did so as Bruce’s adopted son. 

There’s a lot of focus in fandom on how Jason is a lot more sensitive and thoughtful than canon typically credits him as being, and that he was always a very bright and intelligent kid. So yes, while of course this was always going to be a shock for him, and of course its possible and even likely for him to have feelings of betrayal as he feels like he’s been lied to for most of his life, that this was kept from him, that Catherine kept this truth from him....its still not necessarily true or likely that meant Jason was going to react, say, the same way media often write this revelation being received by children who don’t have any experience with adoptive parents.

Because again, at this point in time, Jason has had about three years worth of time to experience life as Bruce’s adoptive son, and to do a lot of processing and thinking about just what that means to him. Such as whether or not being adopted makes Jason any less Bruce’s son than not being adopted makes any other kids he knows the children of their respective parents. 

And also, Jason spent all of those three years as an adoptive child who was adopted relatively later in his childhood, and he actually does have clear, vivid memories of his biological father to compare his life with Bruce to. Unlike kids who find out later in life that they were adopted at birth, but have absolutely no memories or awareness of life with anyone other than their adoptive parents. And thus they can’t feasibly do anything but wonder whether things might have been better or worse with different parents, like if they’d grown up with their biological parents.

Jason does have that point of comparison, enabling him to contrast how he feels with and towards Bruce as opposed to how he felt with and towards Willis....and so, IMO its pretty inevitable that this would likely come up for him at some point in the search for Sheila......because he already knows firsthand that the grass is not always greener on the biological side.

Like, although he and Bruce were definitely having issues at that particular point in time, which no doubt influenced and contributed to a lot of what Jason was feeling and how he was reacting.....the majority of those feelings were of hurt and betrayal at the wedge that had grown between he and Bruce since Garzonas’ death, that Bruce didn’t believe him when he insisted he hadn’t pushed him, etc.....but the point is not that he had those feelings, had those issues with Bruce at that particular time, the point is that he was hurt by Bruce’s distance....because he didn’t want that distance to exist. He wanted things between them to go back to the way they were before, he wanted Bruce to believe him. 

All of which says to me that no matter how angry he was at Bruce then and there, no matter how hurt he was feeling, etc.....that’s still a long ways away from lumping Bruce in the same category as Willis, because of all that.....the hurt about Bruce’s distrust and judgment, while still very much a real thing.....is not IMO remotely interchangeable with the hurt Jason felt due to his first father’s physical, emotional, and constant and willful abuse. 

(Yes, after Jason’s return, and the disaster that was the UTRH storyline and later interactions between he and Bruce, you can definitely make a lot better case for him linking Bruce with Willis in his mind, and its not like I’ve never drawn those parallels myself.....but fifteen year old Jason? I don’t for a second think his mind was going THERE, specifically, because he knew very well that he was hurting because of Bruce’s actions and why....but he also knew very well that feeling the loss of Bruce’s trust and easy camaraderie was not the same thing as having never felt like he’d had Willis’ trust or camaraderie or even love, period).

So again....that was not a good time for Bruce and Jason, compared to at least the first couple of years Jason spent as Bruce’s adoptive son......but none of that, to my mind, suggests that it ever even popped into Jason’s head that he’d been better off with Willis than with Bruce, just because Willis was Jason’s biological father. It never would have escaped Jason’s awareness that biology is no guarantee of love, and that finding out Catherine wasn’t his actual biological mother didn’t in any way guarantee that he’d have been better off growing up with an unknown, still as-yet-nameless biological mother he had no mental picture of.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that this should in any way impact Jason’s hopes for this biological mother he was searching for, that she would be a good mother, would actually love him, want him, actually be the kind of figure he wanted her to be from the moment he found out there was someone else to be found out there with a connection to him. All of that makes total sense, not trying to imply otherwise - 

No, the thing I don’t really click with is what all of this means for his feelings for Catherine, specifically. Being hurt or upset at her memory because he feels like she lied to him by never telling him she wasn’t his biological mother? Sure. But that too is not the same thing as an easy or quick dismissal of her as his mother in his thoughts or dialogue, the second he finds out she technically was his adopted mother all along, not his biological mother as he’d assumed. Jason usually has pretty complicated thoughts about Catherine over all, at least at most other times, and he should, I think. Its totally understandable. And he’s usually written as being a lot warmer and more charitable towards Catherine and her issues after his death and return....if for no other reason than because after how Sheila betrayed him, after realizing she’d never given a single shit that he was actually hers, biologically, its a lot easier for him to look back on his life with Catherine and think “well no matter how I might feel about how bad things were at times with her as my mother, at least I did feel like she’d cared about me, unlike Sheila. She could’ve been worse, Sheila proves that.”

But what I’m saying with all of this is personally, I feel that despite his young age, and despite his emotional turmoil and the complicated situation between him and Bruce at that time.....Jason still had a lot of time to put a lot of thought into what Bruce being his adoptive father meant in terms of whether or not that made him Jason’s father, in Jason’s own eyes. And what I think fics about this storyline could only ever benefit from, is just......not need him to meet and be betrayed by Sheila in order to realize that Catherine not being his biological mother didn’t actually mean she didn’t have a right to that title in his memories or while he was growing up with her. Because the second Jason starts down that train of thought, it begs the question - though the question hardly ever actually seems to come up - if Catherine was never really his biological mother and thus she was never ‘really’ his mother.....then what does that suggest about whether Bruce could ever really be his father?

And again - this isn’t to diminish the turmoil Jason was feeling towards and because of Bruce at that very specific point in time - but it does demand a bit of context to that line of thinking, I feel like. Because as I said....the issues Jason was having with Bruce were that he was hurt by Bruce’s distance, distance he wished wasn’t there. Those issues weren’t standing in the way of Jason coming to accept and view Bruce as his actual father, they weren’t evidence in support of the idea that they’d never truly be father and son and thus Jason should give up hoping for that........because Jason had already before this point viewed them as father and son. Its what I said previously about him having at least a couple of good years, extremely close years with Bruce, before these issues got between them.....and how Jason had always been smart, insightful, sensitive and a lot deeper than canon likes to credit him as being. Jason had already done his thinking on the matter of him and Bruce, probably starting from the day Bruce had even asked to adopt him. He’d already come to the conclusion that Bruce could in fact be his real father in every way that really mattered, despite not being his biological father....he’d already deemed that none of that actually mattered. 

So that question I raised, that is kinda of the logical extension of ‘well Catherine wasn’t my biological mother, so she wasn’t actually my mother’....just applied to Bruce in light of this new information as well......problem is......IMO, that question had already been asked and answered, in the matter of Jason’s view towards Bruce, when Bruce adopted him. This new information about Catherine doesn’t change the fact that Jason had already had that particular information about Bruce not being his biological father and that nothing was ever going to change that.....before Bruce even actually adopted him. That when Jason went into that particular situation with eyes wide open.....he did so already knowing that the only way that adoption was ever going to mean anything to him, to Bruce, to both of them, to mean he could truly consider Bruce his father from that moment on or accept or hell even just hope it meant Bruce truly viewed him as his son....the only way that worked at all.....was if Bruce’s biological parentage didn’t need to exist with him in order for his being Jason’s father to be real, and matter.

Bruce was only ever Jason’s father, because Jason had already put in the time and thought and knowledge that Bruce was never going to be his biological father......and he’d already arrived at the conclusion that the latter part didn’t matter. Didn’t change anything. Was not, and never would be, the necessary ingredient to make the two of them the father and son Jason hoped they could be - and were, for at least the first couple of years together. 

So the part that always makes me sit up and scratch my head kinda, its the sequencing of the equation “Jason discovers new information about Catherine not being his biological mother - makes him doubt or feel that this makes her less his mother than he’d always assumed and believed to be true = [rarely examined conclusion] thus suggesting Bruce can never truly be his father because Bruce is not his biological father.”

That train of thought doesn’t follow for me, because the first two parts of it lead to a conclusion that’s entirely different from the conclusion Jason already reached when years before, he solved for “Jason is asked by Bruce to be adopted as Bruce’s son  - knowing he is not and never will be biologically Bruce’s child = [previously decided conclusion] Jason says yes and accepts and views Bruce as truly his father anyway, because the biological component is not necessary in order to do so.”

Now, in all fairness - nobody is ever 100% rational about these sort of things, even when they’re not teenagers, and let alone when they’re in the midst of a lot of emotional turmoil specifically geared around feeling distance growing between them and their parent. Like Jason was feeling about his and Bruce’s relationship and was the very thing that led him to go back to his old apartment looking to feel more of a connection to his previous family because he was feeling less connected as family to Bruce at that very time.

It would be totally fair and realistic IMO for all of this new information and the intensity of Jason’s search for his previously unknown biological mother, to be directly connected to him having doubts as to whether or not he and Bruce were truly father and son....but not ‘and whether or not they ever could be’.....but ‘and whether or not they ever had been, or if he’d just fooling himself that a biological connection wasn’t necessary and didn’t matter.’

All of this contributing to Jason second-guessing whether his and Bruce’s bond had ever truly been real, had ever truly been that of parent and child....yeah, that makes sense. The math adds up for me on that.

But again - its the sequencing that’s the issue, specifically. Second-guessing whether the conclusion he’d previously held about the two of them....requires first acknowledging that a conclusion had been drawn in the first place.

And that’s the part that’s missing for me, from a lot of stories and headcanons and even the actual canon issues themselves, when it comes to this particular point in time.

The connection to Bruce, and his place in all of this specifically. Not just in being the reason Jason’s driven so frenetically in pursuit of other connections and the biological mother he learns might be out there for him still.....but also existing as proof that while Jason might never have expected to explore this line of thinking in regards to Catherine.....he very much had already explored it well before he even found a reason to do so with Catherine. 

And that while he might currently be experiencing doubts or second thoughts about the conclusions he’d drawn when he’d gone down that road before....the fact remains that he had still gone down that road before.

And that still is very much relevant here, to my mind.

[bigskydreaming]

To me the most strange thing about the Dick is a manchild take is that often the same people that say this are the same people that say that Dick's primary characterization should always be as a pillar of support for Bruce and the others. So, basically that Bruce and the others are so helpless that they should be mothered by a manchild. As a preference, I find it it kinda ???

Exactly! There’s no consistency to it, and the thing is, I feel like a lot of people tend to treat Dick as a plot device rather than an actual character in his own right. What I mean is, even in big ensemble fics that feature almost the entire family, when most everyone has their own little storylines, Dick’s sole storyline is acting as a supporting character in everyone else’s storyline. Essentially, its like rather than people going into writing a fic with a specific characterization of Dick in mind already, like they do for most characters, I feel like a lot of the stories out there start with the author figuring out what their plot is, what their preferred characters are doing….and then Dick’s characterization within their fic tends to end up being almost completely determined by what role they want him to play.

Like……as you said, a huge facet of his core characterization is that he almost always prioritizes being a pillar of support for Bruce and the others….but in fanfics, he’s just as likely to be the antagonistic foil that’s causing drama within the family by not understanding Jason or favoring Damian over Tim or whatever…..and its like he ends up that way purely because writers want some internal strife within the Batfam, but they want Tim and Jason to get along, and they want Bruce to interact with Jason as a son and Damian’s too young to cause the kinds of disruptions within the family from internal/ideological disagreements that authors are usually after….so Dick ends up shoehorned into the role of obstinate last holdout getting in the way of the whole family getting along because he just can’t get over himself or whatever.

But then go two fics down from that one and its a whole other ballgame, because in this fic now, Dick gets along with everyone, everyone loves him, but ultimately in the end his lack of contributing to family drama comes from the fact that as far as that fic is concerned, he’s too ineffectual to ever actually be a problem for the family. He’s just kinda there, solely because he was the first kid Bruce took in, but no attention is paid to the fact that he created Robin, DEFINED Robin. And instead the fact that he’s still alive at all is basically implied to be a fluke because he’s not really that bright compared to the others, not really exceptionally talented compared to the others, the only thing he has going for him is he has seniority, and he’s just too gosh-darned happy and perky and nice for anyone to stay mad at for long……so Dick ends up shoehorned here into the role of comic relief, either by cracking jokes constantly and never taking anything seriously for the sake of ‘family morale,’ or just by being the butt of the rest of the family’s constant jokes. With these fics, you get 50/50 odds of it going either way.

And then on the very next page of fics you’re likely to run into one where he’s supportive of all the others rather than antagonistic, yes, and he’s considered competent and effective at what he does, sure, but now with these fics, he’s basically relegated to the role of wallpaper, because the story’s not supposed to be about HIM and the authors don’t want him drawing focus away from their preferred characters. He’s not the character people should be hoping or expecting to see in a starring or even a major role, when reading their fics, is basically what the sentiment feels like there. 

Like, he’s there, he’s present, he’s competent and helpful, but it largely ends up feeling like all of that is because ironically, having him NOT be there and coming up with reasons and justifications for that….would draw or require more focus on him than they want to spend. So instead he’s present in the story, but that’s about it. 

He largely just….exists, within these types of stories. At best he’s there to be a glorified bodyguard to his various siblings, and be hanging around so that he can swoop in and save them from any major danger that isn’t the direct focus of the plot…..but he has little to no scenes other than ones where he’s directly acting to save, rescue, emotionally support or offer sage wisdom or a shoulder to lean on, for any of his siblings or Bruce himself. 

He has no problems of his own, as far as the fic ever mentions, no priorities or personal ambitions beyond ‘always be available for whatever his family needs, whenever his family needs it’ and everything you learn about him in the first couple chapters of that story, when establishing his place/status quo within that particular fic….like, who and what he is and cares about and prioritizes and even just talks about in the first couple chapters will basically still be the exact same things in the final chapters of the fic….because absolutely nothing throughout the fic has actually affected HIM, changed HIM, impacted HIM in any kind of meaningful way that would lead to actual character development or even just….change.

…wait, hang on, I take that back. There is one sizable exception in these types of fics, where there is focus on Dick’s POV and him being impacted by the plot and ‘changing’…..but that exception comes in one form, and one form only: Scenes Where Dick Self-Flagellates and Regrets Being the Worst Brother/Son Ever to Jason, Tim, Bruce, etc. And reflects on how massively he’s failed or let those members of his family down at one point or another in the past, when they have only ever been there for him, consistently, without fail, and thus they deserve better than his previous fuck-ups with them and he staunchly vows to Make It Right and from this day forward, Do Better and dedicate himself to being the best brother, son, blah blah blah that ever lived. 

(With the problem being - or well, my problem at least, lol - like…..rarely if ever are these things Dick is beating himself up over, like…actually his fault or things he should feel like a terrible human being for. And granted, Dick has a definite canon tendency towards self-blame and assuming the worst of his own actions and the fallout from his actions, so its not like its out of character for him to be an unreliable narrator in this regard…..BUT like….when you’re using an unreliable narrator to like, beat himself up for being just the worst ever, you kiiiiiiinda need to balance that out with the narrative or someone else in the narrative at some point contesting that unreliable narration…..and being like….what? No??? Omg enough with the Catholic guilt Dick, you’re not even Catholic, and you definitely aren’t responsible for me dying in Ethiopia at the exact same time you were light years away on an entirely different planet, dumbass.” ANYWAY).

So I mean….there are all these various roles Dick plays in different kinds of almost….I wanna say like ‘genres of Batfam fanfiction’……and IMO that’s how large parts of fandom manage to juggle all these completely contradictory views of Dick without ever finding it odd or illogical that he can be considered to be both the Batfamily’s primary source of emotional support one second, and the thorn in everyone’s side the next. Because many people, I feel, just aren’t approaching his character in terms of how his characterization, and thus his presence, would affect their plot, result in specific kinds of dynamics, interactions etc…..rather, they’re looking at it from the complete opposite direction. They do all that with the characters they’re more interested in writing, and then when they have most of it figured out, they basically just pigeon hole him into whatever gaps in the plot need filling, and go with whatever popular take on him is most convenient for what their story still needs or is lacking.

And it all kinda loops back around, I think, to make it this sort of self-perpetuating cycle…..writers aren’t as interested in writing Dick as they are the other siblings because they don’t find him all that compelling, except what they actually don’t find all that compelling is probably more accurately labeled various fanon views of him that have at most just a superficial relationship with his more developed canon characterizations. 

But regardless, they’re not that interested in him as a character, due to mostly equating him with fanon takes that prioritize his usefulness as a plot device with ready made connections to most anyone else a fic needs to bring in, rather than trying to view him, understand him and relate to him as an actual character in his own right…..so they too end up also just using him as a plot device rather than try and even just give him some more development themselves. 

And it all feeds back into itself, forming this constant feedback loop that’s ironically mostly just fueled by itself, rather than anything outside that loop of perception and perpetuation….like, y’know, his actual stories and his actual well-established dynamics with various other characters.

Its like….you know how sometimes people are like “how would you describe yourself/this person/this character in just three words, like what are the three words that best encompass them in your mind?” Like…..that’s not SUPPOSED to be an easy thing to do. That’s SUPPOSED to be a hard - and revealing  - question, because three words is a very very limited frame to try and condense entire personalities into in a way that’s in any way actually specific to them as an individual rather than just a list of generic traits that could equally apply to any number of people.

And yet….I do not think a lot of Batfam fans would consider that a hard question to answer about Dick Grayson, and therein lies my eternal frustration. Like I’m pretty sure we can all predict what a lot of those answers would be: “funny,” “angry,” “cheerful,” “supportive,” “moody,” “hopeful” and various other things related to either 1) Dick the Emotional Support Non-Entity, 2) Dick the Unattainable and Impossible to Match or Even Relate to Standard or 3) Dick the Antagonistic Foil, etc. 

But my point is……I do not think a lot of fans would find it difficult to reduce Dick down to just a short list of generic character traits….because that’s the pattern I’m talking about in fics. A huge amount of his depictions in fic could be summed up with just two or three adjectives….because whatever role he’s been designated in a particular fic……that’s it for him, most of the time. As in…..he doesn’t at any point break out of that very specific and definitive box the fic puts him in because its been slated as the role/place/designation he’s most ‘useful’ to the plot and the other characters and the story over all. So whatever he is in that fic….he’s usually JUST that one thing. His actions are usually perfectly in sync with whatever the other characters expect those actions to be, his mood is fairly consistent throughout with very little variation, and his motivations are usually fairly superficial and don’t require a lot of digging under the hood to see what’s really going on deep down beneath his surface level.

*Shrugs* Anyway, that’s my take on all that, and the various contradictions that all conversations about him are practically immersed in, all at the same time. Granted, I’m biased as hell and who can say if I’m actually on to anything there or not, but for me the most telling and pertinent question about fandom’s perception of Dick Grayson is:

When one of the few things everyone can agree on about him is that he’s a natural performer and the face he presents to people around him is often just a mask hiding his true thoughts and feelings….

Why on earth aren’t more writers interested in pulling back the mask and seeing, writing, revealing or expanding upon whatever might be underneath?

Cuz the way Dick’s primarily used in fics literally only makes sense to me if you’re prioritizing his role in fics based on what the plot or other characters require.

Looking at him purely on a character level, in terms of archetypes? “Eternal secret keeper who even (successfully) keeps secrets from the rest of a family made up entirely of people who are both adept secret keepers themselves and adept detectives”…..

Like how the hell do you tell me that archetype’s only narrative appeal lies in advancing everyone else’s plots? For all intents and purposes, Dick is essentially the trickster archetype within the Batfam, innately predisposed to constantly come into conflict with his chosen father figure, given that Bruce in contrast embodies a stern lawful judge type archetype. Thus with the two of them operating off of entirely different world views that nevertheless can overlap just often enough to make that not quite a given….given that trickster archetypes, by their very nature, have flexible alignments and can go in entirely different directions from one story to the next, all while still being true to themselves and their core archetype. 

Then you have Jason, with it being hilarious to me that people so often write Jason as being convinced Bruce will never understand him the way he does Dick, that they could never have the kind of bond Bruce and Dick had in his eyes…..with the funny part about this IMO being that Jason is one of the Batfam MOST similar to Bruce, archetype wise. Because Jason also operates almost entirely off of his own convictions, based entirely off his own moral code….WHICH IS THE EXACT SAME THING BRUCE DOES….the only part they actually disagree on is the precise specifics of their two differing moral codes. 

Jason has always had FAR more in common with Bruce than he realizes or cares to admit to, and if you look at Dick as a trickster archetype forced reluctantly into the role of arbitrator or peace-keeper purely because there’s no one else stepping up to do the job, even though its not a role he’s ideally suited for because of how it constantly forces him into shapes and actions that are contrary to his own nature and thus result in so much of Dick’s personal conflicts ultimately being with HIMSELF….

….eternally torn between trying to be true to himself and who he wants to be, while at the same time trying to be what his family needs him to be because he’s the only one of them with a track record showing he at least is willing to bend to try and accommodate all their conflicting viewpoints, whereas they all tend to try and just bulldoze each other into submission instead….which never works because they’re all equal parts Immovable Objects AND Unstoppable Forces at the same time…and each too stubborn to admit that their siblings/father/children are just as stubborn and willful as them so they could easily stalemate each other indefinitely, if they didn’t have a mediator present, who has enough flexibility to contort himself into whatever configuration is needed to find some kind of bridge or common ground between two conflicting family members who each refuse to budge even an inch….

Well anyway, my point with that little random offshoot was just that personally, I think Dick gets fed the fuck up with both Bruce and Jason at times and just wants to knock their heads together because its so frustrating to him that neither of them can see how alike they are and thus how they’re always THIS CLOSE to finding common ground, they literally just need to like….each move an inch to the right and maybe pivot like five degrees or less…..lolol.

Anyway. I kinda got carried away there with unnecessary narrative analysis and archetypes and whatnot that literally nobody asked, but umm, in response to your actual message itself….err…yes. Agreed. As a preference, I too find bwuh????? to be the most accurate response to the frigidly cold take that ‘Dick is the emotional support pillar for the Batfam but also Dick is massively dysfunctional and a disaster baby who is literally the worst of the Batfam at taking care of himself and not just dying because his favorite pizza place doesn’t deliver on a Tuesday and he doesn’t know how to get food another way so he’ll probably just starve I guess.’

Oh well.

[bigskydreaming]

Hi, I'm not sure how much fanfics you read, seems like you read enough... Do you perhaps know why Tim and Jason get the most intense stories where they go on adventures or are abused by the society so they live in whump central and just generally the most interesting stories, whereas Dick gets the family/ Damian centric stories? His major whump plot is only that Tarantula thing. His role seems to be either the himbo or the happy thot big bro who means well but doesn't get the kid bros' trauma...

LOL aka the eternal source of my frustration in fandom.

*Shrugs* My view is its more than likely a result of how much both canon and fandom have conditioned readers and fans to view Dick as only existing as a supporting character in everyone else’s stories, rather than someone with stories of his own, let alone ones that the others act as his supporting cast. The exceptions, as you noted, are the occasional Court of Owls fic or Tarantula based whump-fest.

But its the whole big brother rides to the rescue thing, dialed up to eleven, and combine that with Dick’s characterization as an empathetic caregiver type personality, and it creates a perfect storm for people to just slot him in the role of designated comfort-giver in any given plot...OR to cite fanon lore and use that to cast him as the antagonistic foil to Jason or Tim

End result is....DC isolates Dick for his own stories, but then only has him interacting with his family when he’s swooping in to either help, support, or make everything all better...a la Robin War, Batman & Robin Eternal, etc...but the second the crisis (always someone else’s) is over, DC sends him back out on his own, because they have this perception that the only way to differentiate him from Batman is to have him completely self-sufficient, as otherwise Bruce would overshadow him when swooping in to save him.

Except, that’s a flawed premise, because you don’t need to send in Bruce to SAVE Dick, even in plots like the Blockbuster arc...its enough to have him show up to comfort and support Dick...but the problem is....DC is unwilling to ever let Bruce take the back seat or support role in even his children’s own stories. Thus he’s largely absent from Dick’s, even when he really SHOULD be there, he’s made into Jason’s antagonistic foil more often than not to keep him from playing the supporting role there, and DC’s take for the last several years has been just to cloud what the hell Bruce’s connection to Tim is even supposed to be. And so on and so on. The closest I’ve seen DC come to letting Bruce play a supporting role is Snyder’s use of him in the limited Batman & The Signal run....but then Duke and Cass both ended up shipped off to the Outsiders book where Jefferson and Katana occupy the role of supportive caregivers. 

All of which sucks.

But that’s DC’s problem. The problem with fanfics, IMO, is they so rarely apply the same transformative energy to Dick and his stories as they do to Jason or Tim’s because....Dick’s USEFUL in the caregiver or antagonist roles. He serves a purpose in being everyone else’s supporting cast, and they’ve got canon as an example for how that works and why, not to mention to point to as an explanation for why they so frequently put Dick and Dick alone in that designated spot.

But Dick being the heart of his own stories and adventures not only ‘takes him away’ from that caregiver slot for Jason, Tim and Damian, which much of fandom has come to see as being so synonymous with him, its like...if he’s NOT there and ready to provide support at any given moment, he’s fundamentally just failing as a brother and a character.....

But also at the same time, with Dick as the protagonist of fanfics rather than the designated supporting caregiver....someone else has to be cast in that role, for HIM. And by and large, most people just...don’t seem to want to do that. 

Typically, when it does happen its for things like Tarantula based fics, where its relatively easy to slot Jason into that role, because of the facts that Jason IS actually a very empathetic character himself, and very passionate about being an advocate for victims, as well as someone with experiences himself....but ironically, even with those fics, Dick’s trauma tends to become just as much about Jason, because of the other appeal for casting Jason in this role....Jason VERY easily fulfills a wish fulfillment role for readers projecting onto Dick and his situation and desiring to see Tarantula and/or Mirage punished in the ways Jason’s best known for.

And the other thing about keeping Dick’s trauma limited to specific instances just like Tarantula and Mirage or the Court of Owls, is there’s no need to reimagine anyone else’s role in the family, in order to take up the caregiver role more fully, at least when Dick is the one in need of comfort. Like, there’s no need to drastically redesign the status quo of the Batfamily, shake it up, or analyze or rebuild or restructure the family dynamics to account for Dick not having to be solely responsible for maintaining that position....

Because when Dick’s trauma is limited to those select story plots, the story already comes with a ticking clock for it. Its framed as a finite thing. There’s a definitive beginning or ending to someone else having to shift over into the caregiver slot in order to support Dick...because if the trauma is framed as a specific isolated or finite thing by the narrative, then Jason or Tim or Bruce’s time in the caregiver role is set up from the get go to only be a temporary thing, like just until the story’s over and Dick’s ‘back on his feet’ and able to take over his old narrative duties, as it were.

All of which...doesn’t work for me for a number of reasons, but like....I don’t think its like, really a mystery why things tend to play out this way with caregiver archetypes....because its pretty basically a reflection of how its very easy for those personality types to be taken for granted and taken advantage of in real life, and that’s like....a huge and constant part of my irritation with this phenomenon. Because ultimately, like all things fiction AND fandom related...its really just an extension and reflection of real life tendencies and behaviors...rather than really ‘just’ being about a fictional character and being frustrated there’s not enough varieties of fic to read about him, lol.

[bigskydreaming]

You know... i haven't read the original teen titans but i saw the cartoon, i remember i thought dick and beast boy should have a close relationship, as brothers or something like that, but never happened in the show, it was like that in the comics?

Hmm, yes and no? I mean, there have definitely been times in the comics where Gar and Dick were pretty close, particularly in the NTT era where the core team was Dick, Raven, Vic, Gar, Kory and Donna. But I wouldn’t necessarily describe them as ever having been….like, they were never the closest of the bunch, for lack of a better phrasing? It wasn’t like they didn’t like each other, trust each other, or have one on one moments with varying degrees of emotional weight. Its more just like…..of the various team members, neither of them are like….the ones I would immediately associate with the other as having an especially close bond. Rather than just you know, being good friends and teammates.

I think the key thing is, both Dick and Gar at various points in the comics and different adaptations have very similar light-hearted and even goofy mannerisms and behaviors at times…..so it seems pretty natural for them to gravitate towards each other and be best friends or particularly brotherly. And I mean, its not hard to headcanon a time or place in which they do kinda sync up their prankster/jokester personalities and just goof off together.

But, that said……for most of the time period they were teammates, Dick was team leader and like….overall….more characterized as being pretty serious and feeling the weight of responsibility during that period in DC history. So as a result, I think they never quite matched up while on the team together, as like….as natural a fit as they might have been at other points in their lives.

I’ll always default to viewing Gar’s best bud/platonic soulmate/would totally be boyfriends if DC weren’t COWARDS, ahem, where was I…oh yeah, for me, that will pretty much always be Vic (Cyborg). During most of their time as NTT, Vic and Gar were like Dick and Roy often are in the comics, or like Dick and Wally were in the Young Justice cartoon.

Whereas Dick during the same periods typically spent most of his time with either Kory, as they were dating most of that period, or with Donna, as she was his oldest friend among that lineup, or with Joey, as the writers tended to put a particular emphasis on Dick and Joey growing close due to the existing rivalry and issues between Dick and Slade.

Which is also where another particular wrinkle comes in…..due to the time dilation effect that is later readers reading issues that took place over a period of months and years, like…in a pretty condensed period of time or just off of wiki summaries or in adaptations…..this tends to create kind of a skewed impression of how big a deal or how little a deal various story elements were…at the time.

What I mean by that is….pretty much everyone knows the general story of the Judas contract, and how Terra was secretly a mole for Slade the whole time and betrayed the team. But reading that in hindsight and in greatly condensed time frames doesn’t always capture the extent of how much the effects of the Judas Contract lingered at the time, if that makes sense?

And the thing was (at least in my impression from reading those comics and the years of aftermath as a kid)……the Judas Contract, for all that its upheld as a hugely iconic Titans story, isn’t often regarded as having as big of an impact as it did on the various characters involved. At the time of that story, like…..it was the Teen Titans version of the Dark Phoenix storyline. It was HUGE. The idea of a team member that readers had followed and rooted for over a period of years, just as the characters had related to her as a friend, a comrade in arms, someone they trusted with their life….turning out to have never cared about any of them all along, like, had gleefully plotted and planned for their deaths the whole time? That was pretty much unprecedented in superhero comics, at least to that degree.

So as much as thirty plus years later we tend to regard it and refer to it as an iconic, but singular story…..back then, it was a narrative well that was constantly being dipped into or referred back to or just kinda…hanging over everything like a constant presence.

Like, I talk a lot about how Dick was affected by his estrangement from Bruce at the time, his insecurities about not being adopted and being replaced by Jason, etc…as well as the responsibilities of leadership. But IMO its equally true that on top of all of that, a lot of how serious and driven he was during the NTT era and aftermath….like, it traces directly back to the Judas Contract. Because Terra’s betrayal was just…..none of the Titans of the time had ever really experienced anything quite like it, with the exception of Kory due to her past with her sister. And for Dick….a huge part of why Slade has always been viewed as Dick’s archnemesis in particular, rather than the Titans as a whole, even though Slade initially targeted all of them….

Like, that’s because Dick MADE Slade HIS archnemesis in particular. All the Titans were targeted, impacted by Slade’s actions and plans….but Dick made it personal between him and Slade in specific, because for Dick, it WAS personal. In his eyes, it was HIS team that Terra had infiltrated. It was HIS responsibility as team leader, to vet each member, to be sure that every one of them COULD trust the others to have their back. 

Dick, I think, has always viewed the Judas Contract as his failure in particular (and I also think a large part of that has to do with him feeling that if he’d somehow maybe have given Terra more of a reason NOT to betray them, she might have sided with them instead of Slade….but that’s the danger of hindsight and not an expectation anyone could reasonably have - not that I think that’s ever stopped Dick from having it for himself).

And again, something that I’ve always felt deserves more focus in regards to Dick and Slade’s dynamic, is I think Dick has always been crucially aware that Slade only knows all the Batfam’s identities…because he knew Dick’s first. And he only ever knew Dick’s identity….because he got it from Terra, his mole. After Dick gave it to her, along with the rest of the Titans. Entrusting her with it, and by extension, everyone in connection with him.

But anyway, my point with that whole tangent is like….the Judas Contract was life-changing for all the Titans of the time, and Dick and Gar felt those changes more strongly than probably any of the others….given that Gar was her best friend on the team (or so he thought), and off-and-on love interest, and Dick was the team leader and felt responsible for them having been infiltrated and betrayed to that degree in the first place. It was hugely impacting on both of them as despite how they conduct themselves a lot of the time….you could very plainly see how both of them became more withdrawn, less trusting in the aftermath of it….because all the Titans got burned by Terra’s betrayal, but none moreso than Dick and Gar in specific.

And I think part of the fallout of all that is that ever since the Judas Contract, there was always this….awkwardness between Dick and Gar. It was never really a thing where either of them blamed the other for what happened with Terra, I don’t think - more just them both having a mutual awareness of how much what happened with Terra was constantly in the background of their minds, if that makes sense? 

Like, the ghost of what happened there was kinda just always there in between them, even if it wasn’t actually either of their fault. Ever since then, Dick was always just slightly more reluctant to be the first one to Gar’s side when he was in trouble, not because he didn’t WANT to be, but because like…he kinda felt like it shouldn’t be him, or something like that. And Gar was always just a little more….cutting in his jokes to or about Dick, even though he almost always felt bad afterward, it was like an instinct, a kneejerk reaction. Like he blamed Dick even while knowing Dick wasn’t really to blame, and Dick wasn’t ever going to call him on it because Dick felt he SHOULD be blamed, and so it was just….messy. 

So the end result is Gar and Dick were never like, each other’s first go-to guy, but also just, they were never as close after the Judas Contract as they were before it. And you always got this sense that they were both kinda aware of that, but neither really knew what to do about it, because the thing was, it was never either of their faults, so there wasn’t really anything that COULD be done about it. They were just the two closest to the damage the Judas Contract did to the team as a whole, so inevitably, their relationship was what caught the biggest fallout from the blast radius of that storyline, and ended up like, the biggest collateral damage to it.

[bigskydreaming]

Just heard about Tom King’s explanation for why Bruce hit Tim in Batman #71, and its gross and stupid and awful and IMO probably just backpedaling and something he worked in after the fact when he got hit with a ton of backlash he didn’t see coming because he didn’t think it was that big a deal when he wrote it. As far as I’m concerned, its still abuse apologism, because coming up with a make believe in story justification for why Bruce hitting his kid wasn’t really what it looked like, even though it very definitively was meant to look like Bruce hitting his kid, like...hello, that is very much the essence of abuse apologism. God, I can’t wait for him to be gone.

That said, I know people are celebrating Tynion taking over, but I’m still extremely wary on that front, and I’d like this to be talked about more, given the EXACT things fandom is most holding against King, myself included, and all with very good reason. Because I have DEFINITELY not forgotten Tynion’s bullshit inclusion of BOTH Tim AND Damian hitting Dick at different points in Batman & Robin Eternal, simply because they were pissed at him, and him making no attempt to defend himself or call them out for this, and then with Jason eagerly trying to bond with Tim over this moment and being gleeful about it and comparing it to his recent punching of Dick in Grayson #12 and like, wanting to talk about how good it felt to deck the Golden Boy.

Because it was NO different, and it drives me nuts that Tynion’s writing is so positively regarded because fandom is more than happy to forget about those instances since it goes hand in hand with the tendency to gloss over things other family members do to Dick. And again, let me be clear, this in NO way is meant to lessen, invalidate or take away from the very justified and rightful criticism of King’s writing of Bruce and Tim, its simply a plea for people to BE CONSISTENT WITH THIS STUFF, AND NOT JUST BASE IT AROUND WHETHER OR NOT IT HAPPENS TO A CHARACTER YOU LIKE.

An older brother passively letting his younger brothers all hit him and get away with it and make no attempt to EVER raise it as a criticism or point of complaint against them, because its a kind of apology for upsetting them each to the point where they wanted to hit him, like. That is STILL abusive as hell. It doesn’t matter that he’s the older one, because abuse isn’t about set ages or positions or anything like that. Its simply a dynamic. Its the exploitation of a power or advantage one person has over the other. In each of these cases, it was the exact same dynamic...the power that was exploited in each of those scenes, that the brothers all had and Dick has never been shown having a comparable advantage, is that Dick was desperate for his brothers to forgive him and get past their issues with him, and he was willing to do or allow anything to see that happen, and Jason, Tim and Damian were each very much aware of this tendency and desire of Dick’s, and at no point was it ever framed as if any of the three had any expectation or care that Dick might retaliate or hold this against them. This is an abusive set up, its shitty, bad writing for a family, and not calling it out as such is shitty, bad writing and bad takes and abuse apologism.

This isn’t meant as a bash Jason, Tim or Damian thing, because that would require accepting this as part of their family dynamic with Dick, and I DON’T. Its a terrible dynamic, it should be regarded as such, and pushed back against and called out rather than ignored or normalized. Every bit as much as Bruce’s abusive actions at times are called out. If people don’t want to validate these scenes’ existence at all, I can understand and empathize, but as I’ve said in past posts, the problem I have is with the willingness to engage on the topics and instances of Bruce being abusive with Jason or Tim but then any mention of similar shitty scenes between him and Dick at MOST reduced to ‘and he’s punched Dick a couple of times’ before swiftly moving on. BE CONSISTENT. That’s all I’m asking. 

What King wrote was shit. He should be gone. I’m glad to see him gone. It should be addressed. It should get all the fix-it fics. I’m glad to see it get all the fix-it fics.

I’m just extremely unsettled by the cheers for the return of a writer who wrote THE SAME DAMN KIND OF SHIT in one of his most acclaimed instances of writing the Batfamily, with no mention of these exact same kinds of scenes, dynamics, and bullshit explanations or lack of followup and accountability....from either canon OR in fandom responses to that canon, potential fix-it fics, etc. The fact that in Tynion’s case, each and every one of those scenes happened to revolve around the character that fandom most frequently glosses over being the butt of his family’s bad writing or worst tendencies, like....its not a coincidence, its like pretty much the entire heart of my constant harping on about double standards and inconsistent criticisms of hugely charged topics such as abuse and abuse apologism.

Again, I DON’T want to see it validated that everyone in Dick’s family is apparently fine with hitting him when they’re ticked at him. I just want to see it validated that this is a thing that has been written more than once into canon, and normalized into more than one fanfic. With no resulting trend of fix-it fics that either tackle addressing these instances, revealing they’re a problem, discussing why they’re a problem, or rewriting those dynamics entirely so that this problem never exists in the first place...the way fandom produces fix-it fics and headcanons for the times other Batfam characters are the ones victimized.

Tynion has written some good stuff. Far more than King has ever managed. But I’m still extremely worried about HIM of all people, being the follow up to King, given the specific nature of most peoples’ issues with King and his writing.

Because when Tynion has written the exact same kind of bullshit, with like....no real sign of pushback or criticism from fandom and readers saying hey this is bullshit, this is NOT the kind of family dynamics we want to see...

There is absolutely no reason to hope or be optimistic that Tynion won’t pull the same crap again and think nothing of it....because unlike with King, nobody’s making enough noise about how this is crap and writers should think twice before writing it!

Just to be perfectly 100% clear, that is the ONLY real point of this post. This is not a waaaah, Dick has it so much harder than everyone else, it is not an attempt to make it a competition, it is not an attempt to take anything away from Tim or the reactions fandom had to what happened to him, this is simply me being worried about seeing more bullshit happen to yes, admittedly my favorite character here, but specifically because we’re going into a new run written by a writer who’s already established a tendency to write this kind of dynamic in regards to the kind of scenario where Dick feels he has stuff to make up for and his family has reason to be angry at him, with fandom largely agreeing....given that y’know, we’re talking about that very same writer now about to take over at a time when Dick will once again only JUST be returning to his normal self as Nightwing and Dick Grayson and a member of his family....with him most likely being poised to feel he has stuff to make up for and his family has reason to be angry at him, with fandom largely agreeing.

Like, do you see why I’m concerned about that particular combination of things, especially when added to the supreme lack of mentions these moments of Batman & Robin Eternal got the first time around? 

And given that all the issues people have with Ric Grayson are quite likely to be transferred right back over to Dick the second Ric disappears for good, even though all their criticisms and complaints are more accurately attributed to the actions of someone who’s been pointed out to essentially NOT be Dick Grayson, as in that’s the entire premise of the story.....much like how all the issues people had with Spyral and Dick’s faked death landed solely on him at the time, even though all their criticisms and complaints were more accurately attributed to Bruce’s canon actions?

Just saying, as much as I hate King’s writing of Batman #71 and his followup to it, at least its been a relief to see that hatred validated and reflected across the board by all parts of fandom, even those of us who aren’t Tim fans first and foremost. Its crap. We all agree its crap. Nobody’s saying otherwise. Just like with Lobdell’s bullshit with RHATO #25. I never WANT to have to read about abuse within the Batfamily and ensuing abuse apologism but it really really really helps when fandom’s largely on the same page about it being what it is and saying in no uncertain terms, hey, we don’t want to see this shit.

Just...please, please, please don’t make me sit through months and months of abuse and abuse apologism in canon and fandom if history repeats here again, just because ‘well at least its not King’ and because its happening to Dick instead of Jason or Tim. That’s all. That’s literally my only point and concern. 

[bigskydreaming]

Hi! I'm new to your blog but found a few posts that were about a JayTom ship, and I was wondering who Tom was? And also you've mentioned in a couple of posts the idea of Jason having a lineup of Titans in his age range and you talked about the Ray and Damage in one. Do you have a whole lineup in mind for them and if so, is there a post on that somewhere?

LOL man, I really need to start pulling all my posts about JayTom and Jay’s lineup of Titans together for some kind of a masterlist, so thanks for the reminder haha. Like, I saw this ask and thought of various posts to point you towards but ugh, I don’t know where any of them are.

Anyway, so. The Tom of JayTom. Aka my ideal ship for Robin!Jason in the series of one-shots about an AU where Jason doesn’t go to Ethiopia in ADITF and thus never dies, that’s kinda grown out of that of a one-shot I started as a writing commission a couple months ago, if anyone else remembers that….the one that was like ‘what if Jason called Dick after the Garzonas incident and Dick sided with Jason’…that one. 

Which then snowballed into ‘well, then I could give Jason his own lineup of Titans who are in the same age range as like a younger gen learning from Dick’s generations of Titans but still older than Tim’s generation of YJ and then eventual Titans.’

Sigh. Oh, me. Right! So! Anyway! Tom in JayTom is Thomas Bronson, the son of JSA member Ted Grant, aka Wildcat. 

Tom and Jason have never ever interacted in canon as far as I know, as I don’t think Tom’s ever appeared outside of JSA and Jason never appeared in that book either before or after his death. BUT by the magic of winging it and Canon Has Not Definitively Contradicted Me, I think the two of them are feasibly in the same age range, so I’m going with them both being fifteen when they meet here.

Tom’s a scrappy, street smart, attitude throwing teenager with daddy issues of his own, lol, thanks to Ted’s general non-existence in his life, for most of it….and he’s also tiny, like, 5′6″ and 135 lbs even at the end of his teenage years. LMAO, I honestly don’t remember, but I think that might be the whole basis of this ship for me, or where it originated. Like, I happened across Tom’s stats as listed on one of the DC wiki sites, and was like, lol oh, he and Robin!Jason could be pint-sized punks together! And then from there, I had the inevitable thought “okay but now make them gay” and then from there I fell into my usual trap of “oh no, it was supposed to be a joke but now I’m taking it seriously and seriously pondering how it could seriously work.”

And then from there it consumed my brain and devoured my life. I swear, it was Dick/Kyle all over again. Ugh, my brain is so problematic.

So anyway, this is Tom:

He’s a werepanther, he can shapeshift into a panther form to fight, which brings up an interesting facet of his character and something I think could be really fun to play off Jason and his own issues…because Tom hates fighting. HATES it. Will run from a fight at any given opportunity rather than engage….but its not because he’s a coward, or doesn’t have heroic instincts of his own, and its not even because he’s not GOOD at fighting.

Its that he’s scared of himself, and scared of hurting whoever he’s fighting…at least more than he means to. Because he has trouble controlling his shift when in fights. His panther form just comes out in response to his own amped up levels of aggression. The fight or flight response for him is actually more like “flight or turn into a raging whirlwind of clawed and fanged fury that can’t stop won’t stop until he’s definitively won his fight….which by extension, usually means his opponent is currently bleeding out on the ground from a few dozen deep claw marks because Panther!Tom’s claws and fangs are SHARP.”

Now pair this fear of his own power with Tom’s natural belligerence and problems with authority at certain points in his life, AND his desire to follow in his hero father’s footsteps as well as his resentment and giving himself grief every time he realizes he even has that desire, because he doesn’t owe his deadbeat dad shit and can’t stand that he nevertheless admires him in a lot of ways and still feels a desire to prove himself to him…

Then pair him up with Jason during his Robin years, going through similar issues and emotions as well as a comparable dynamic with Bruce as him not dying in Ethiopia nevertheless changes nothing about the two of them likely clashing more and more over their views on how to deal with criminals and the appropriate levels of aggression when dealing with them….

And that right there, IMO, is super strong potential for a dynamic couple with a lot in common and yet occasional clashes of their own due to different opinions on which direction to go in so as to address those shared issues…but who likely would never hesitate for a second before backing each other up and presenting a united front against anyone else who tried to give one or the other shit for any reason whatsoever.

Also, I have vastly amused myself with the thought (and the occasional post here and there) of Ted and Bruce continually glowering at each other and blaming each other’s son for being a bad influence on their son, who has never done anything wrong in their life ever, CLEARLY (even if Bruce had actually just grounded Jason the day before. Whatever. Ted doesn’t need to know that).

Anyway, so that’s the JayTom I reference now and then. I’ve always maintained that Jason could really benefit from having a stronger support system of friends distinct to him and not sharing similar dynamics with any of his siblings, so then I was like, well if Jay doesn’t die, and I have him and Dick closer in this AU than they’re usually written as being, plausibly Jason would spend a lot of time at the Tower to get away from Bruce and his own fights with him. 

With Dick being more than able to relate to trouble dealing with Bruce and thus happy to lend a sympathetic ear….and eventually maybe express to Bruce that it might do them both some good for Jason to make more friends his own age and have some normal routines that took him out of the house and Gotham enough that he and Bruce don’t constantly feel like they’re breathing down each other’s necks and keeping tension a constant thing between them. A little space now and then could benefit them both, give them chances to cool off after their fights and actually MISS each other before readdressing the issues.

So then I could see the Titans kinda sending out invitations/recruiting various teen heroes around Jason’s age that they’d all maybe had their eyes on for awhile as kids who could benefit from the same kind of team unity/group support that helped them so much when they were that age just a few years ago themselves.

Which leads me to where I am now which is….I still haven’t settled on a solid lineup, because I came up with too many choices, lol. Basically, my parameters were I wanted characters who could feasibly be said to be in the same age range as Jason and Tom, and didn’t have super strong associations with any other characters that would create any kind of conflict with them being on a Titans team at this point in the timeline instead. And because I’m all about my thematics, I wanted them all to have certain root issues in common that they could all bond over and actually, y’know, support each other with and through. 

(The same way I think Dick’s generation of Titans actually has certain distinct themes and issues that almost all of them share and can relate to in varying ways, which I think has a lot to do with how quickly and fully they all bonded and why they created such lasting friendships and teams between them. But that’s a whole other post, lol.)

So the central shared issues I decided to focus on for Jason’s age group of Titans were: teen/young heroes from abusive homes or runaways, ones with issues and fears stemming from and regarding their own powers or tempers, etc, and misfits who were regarded warily by other or older heroes and considered potentially able to end up on either side of the hero/villain line in the sand.

Which Dick’s generation of Titans, which of course includes Raven, Kory, etc, would not be in agreement with that last part, and thus be all the more likely to recruit these specific teen heroes and be like nyah, nyah, watch how with our help and oh yeah, SUPPORT, they all become the best damn heroes that ever did heroically hero. Suck it, JLA-holes!

(And then Donna would be like, not you Diana, you know we’re cool, its just I gotta do the team solidarity thing and Dick, Garth and Roy are still being Displeased with their mentors/dads at the moment, and also we’re all kinda ticked you guys stole Wally. Btw, we’re stealing the new Green Lantern kid, because Revenge and stuff. He’s ours now, you snooze, you lose).

 So, Jason’s lineup of Titans will consist of some of the following, I’m just not 100% sure which yet, because I have to whittle down the list.

1) Jason (nominally mentored by Dick, but the latter just calls it an excuse for brother bonding time and neither of them make much reference ever to having any kind of actual mentor/protégé relationship like I see the rest of Jay’s lineup having. Plus, Jason unique from the rest already has a mentor in Bruce anyway, so his situation and reasons for being part of this team aren’t quite the same from the others, especially as one of my reasons for this AU was always addressing the issues I have with Bruce’s parenting before the canon event point of Jason’s death, and like…..so like, Bruce does get better once Dick calls out some of his shit with Jason based on his own experiences with Bruce and then later Jason returns the favor by calling out Bruce for taking Dick for granted and no longer putting in the same effort connecting with his eldest and being an actual PARENT to him like he used to).

2) Tom Bronson/Tomcat (who else would act as his personal mentor other than Gar aka Beast Boy aka Changeling, the shapeshifter extraordinaire?)

3) Grant Emerson/Damage (recruited by Roy and his personal protégéand likely BFFs with Jason IMO, as I think their temperaments are complete opposites but Grant’s the kind of kid who would roll his eyes and dolefully follow his troublemaking best friend Jay into likely danger, because his power to blow things up really comes in handy with the kind of scrapes Jason gets himself into and this in turn is a really handy thing to point out in the aftermath of pulling Jason’s butt out of a scrape and then gloating but in the totally mature and “I’m much too nice to actually be gloating, you must be mistaken about what’s happening here” manner in which I see that going down. And in terms of the parameters I mentioned, Grant grew up bounced around abusive foster homes, is watched like a hawk by various groups and heroes because of the huge catastrophic potential of his powers, which he has his own fears about, and also he has no idea who his parents are either, and I imagine him and Jason going on a ‘find out who our real parents are roadtrip’ after graduation or something).

4) Ray Terrill/The Ray (potentially recruited by Kory and her personal protégé. He was briefly a member of Tim’s Young Justice team, but part of the reason he was never that close with the other members was he was a little bit older, just a couple years or so, but enough to put him squarely in Jason’s age range. Also comes from an abusive home, and spent the majority of his childhood living in complete darkness because his asshole uncle told him he had the same powers as his father which meant sunlight would be harmful to him and make him dangerous to be around. When in reality, like his dad, Ray’s powers are fueled by sunlight and he’s like a living solar battery, keeping him afraid to leave the dark was just meant to keep him passive and powerless. Even knowing his uncle lied now, Ray still has long had fears about his own powers, unable to totally shake the fears his uncle instilled in him).

5) Todd Rice/Obsidian (potentially recruited by Raven and her personal protégé. He and his twin sister Jenny-Lynn Hayden are probably a bit older than the rest of this team, but their ages aren’t definitively linked to any points in the DC timeline, so there’s no real conflict between handwaving them as aged down to be right around the same ages as the others. Todd and Jenny-Lynn are the twin children of original Green Lantern Alan Scott aka Sentinel, and the DC villainness Thorn. They grew up in separate foster homes though with Alan unaware of their existence for most of their childhoods. Todd’s childhood was notoriously rough, with him having several abusive foster parents. He’s canonically gay and mentally ill/neurodivergent, which several of his foster homes targeted him for. In addition, his shadow powers are tied to a dark dimension that’s said to prey on his mental state and led to occasional times where he’s been a villain briefly, and at all times his powers are regarded fearfully by most people and with him shunned and avoided because of them. All of which I think makes Raven an ideal mentor for him).

6) Jenny-Lynn Hayden/Jade (Todd’s twin sister, even though they didn’t grow up together for the most part. Honestly, she doesn’t share in a lot of the issues the rest of the team prospects do, and had a relatively good childhood before her powers developed and she found her brother and they started operating as heroes together. But upon learning who her brother and dad are, she’s always been committed to growing closer with them, so I think anywhere Todd goes in this AU, she’d definitely follow, and its not like the team can’t benefit from a heavy hitter like her, let alone more girls. Not totally sure who I picture as most mentoring her in specific, probably because I don’t see her as being recruited per se, so much as just going with Todd when recruited….but I’m thinking maybe Garth, actually. Garth has a lot of range and versatility with his powers and magic, which makes him ideal for mentoring someone who not only has the same powers as a Green Lantern, limited only by her imagination…..but who also might benefit from being mentored by someone who ISN’T a Green Lantern because she doesn’t share their traditional weaknesses and thus she’d be best off training with someone whose own techniques and instincts aren’t geared around weaknesses that are literally irrelevant to her powerset).

7) Courtney Mason/Anima (A metahuman runaway who was almost sacrificed by a cult before her powers kicked in….she’s also right in the same age range as Ray, Grant and Jason, and has briefly been a member of a couple Titans lineups but never for long and usually only for big event stories. But she fits the runaway/rough home environment parameter as well as fear of her own powers….she absorbs life energy from people and animals and can potentially kill them by draining too much. She also has a separate power that’s basically a connection to an other-dimensional spirit called the Animus that she can summon forth and unleash on her enemies. I’m thinking she’d make a good recruit/protégé for Jericho actually, for a number of reasons).

8) Cynthia Reynolds/Fantasia (? Maybe? Not sure yet. Not her actual codename, but her actual codename is a slur, so I’m def gonna make up a new one, I just haven’t 100% settled on what it is yet. Suck it, DC. She’s most known for being a member of Justice League Detroit along with Steel, Vibe and the Ray, but she’s the right age range to end up recruited to be a Titan here instead, like Ray. Also is a runaway from an abusive home, and often deals with mistrust and suspicion due to her illusion powers. Perfect recruit/protégé for Lilith, IMO).

9) Cisco Ramone/Vibe (Also created as a teenage hero to be part of the Justice League Detroit lineup, which makes him the right age range and he’s another runaway. The nature of his powers makes him a good fit to be a recruit/protégéof Mal Duncan/Herald).

10) Amy Allen/Bombshell (Totally self-indulgent on my part given that I basically would ignore the vast majority of her storylines and writing, which I think suck. She was in the Titans stories revolving around Tim’s generation of the team, but she was always stated to be a few years older than the rest, like in her late teens when the majority were probably sixteen, so I think she’s a good fit for this age range. Also had a crappy home life and parents, and her powers are hugely destructive in certain applications…she basically has the same powerset as Captain Atom, though she’s never had any kind of official mentor or sidekick relationship with him. Also, I think Captain Atom is an asshat and a dillhole and he sucks, but I do like his powers, so reinterpreting Amy as a character who doesn’t suck and playing around with her powers instead is solid decision making on my part and renders Captain Atom irrelevant now. I think I shall kill him. Because I can do that. Anyway, I think she doesn’t need him as a mentor but could make a good recruit/protégé for Leonid/Red Star).

11) Carla Moretti/Cinder (Odd choice, given that she’s only ever really been used as a villainous member of Deathstroke’s anti-Titans team and was easily in her twenties at the time. Pyrokinetic who happily makes bonfires out of her enemies but written with zero attempts at nuance, like a total one note villain framed as having long since abandoned her own humanity….which bugged the crap out of me, as she was given a super angsty backstory of childhood sexual abuse and that’s just ‘why she’s like this’ and I have a deep seeded loathing for asshole writers writing survivors as villains and just blaming their casual homicidal ways on their abuse while serving up said villains to just be punching bags or dominoes for the heroes to knock down on their way to the Boss Fight. So I do have inclinations towards making an actual Titan out of her, like with Amy, because surprise surprise, both these characters being written shittily and one note was the work of the same writer, shocking. So I’d just handwave her down to the right age range and have her recruited/mentored by Donna, probably…more due to me thinking Donna would be the best person to help her deal with stuff because she’s mastered the art of avoiding avoidance via having Dick Grayson as a BFF. So with them its not really because Carla needs mentoring with her powers specifically. Idk, Carla anyway you slice it I think has a lot of rage, and Donna knows what to do with that. Written right, Donna’s not a character who judges or shames a victim or survivor for being angry…she gets angry with them, and helps them find options for what to do with that now.) 

12) Hero Cruz (Lesser known Titan, has a device called the Dial H device that lets him turn into a different hero with different powers depending on the setting he puts it on. Basically Ben 10, but Hero came first. Doesn’t really fit most of the parameters, other than being around the right age range, and not even sure who would make a good mentor for him though I wanna say Vic, but not totally decided yet. Mostly I just like him and think he’s underused, so whatever).

There’s also a few other candidates that I have mostly ruled out but not totally. I thought about using the aged up version of Chris Kent, and just introduce him earlier than he showed up in canon. And then Kara/Supergirl could be his mentor because I kinda handwave her into Dick’s generation of Titans anyway, even though it was the alien Matrix version of Linda Danvers that was the only Supergirl ever on the team. Whatever. She should have been a Titan all along anyway. But also Chris would fit the team well as he had an abusive childhood as well, at his dad General Zod’s hands, and again, I just like the character. 

Thought of including Virgil Hawkins/Static too, even though I think he’s closer to Tim’s age range. And again, just another character I’m a fan of and think is underused, but he would definitely be an odd man out in this group because like….he comes from a happy, healthy, loving home and family, and he loves his powers. So he would constantly be just like nodding his head along while his teammates talk and like ugh that sucks, but 10/10 absolutely can not relate, my parents are awesome.  Same with Natasha Irons/Steel, who really would have to be handwaved to even be in the right age range, and again has a happy loving home environment and a superhero uncle of her own so its not like she needs a Titan mentor…..but I kinda wanna see Karen Beecher/Bumblebee take her under her wing anyway, and have them be science nerds together.

Also pretty much the only reason I ruled out Connor Hawke too, as he doesn’t really match the rest of the team in any of the parameters except for feasibly being right at the upper edge of the same age range. But again, I just love the character. 

So I’m probably gonna end up throwing at least one of these other characters in there anyway, lol. I do know myself).

Anyway. So that’s Jason’s lineup of Titans, or at least the candidates as they exist bouncing around in my head now. Also, they’re pretty much Team “Everyone is Gay Except For When They’re Bi.” Which, granted, is basically how I view Dick’s generation of Titans, but with them I have to be like Make It So, in my brain, whereas with this group like….canon’s actually done the work for me for the most part lol. Ray is gay, Todd Rice is gay, Courtney is bi, Hero is gay. And I can’t actually find anything confirmed Tom was stated to be gay somewhere in canon, but I SWEAR he was, like, ugh this is bugging me.

But anyway. That’s that about all of that.

[bigskydreaming]

Ultimately I think the most defining characteristic of Dick Grayson - and the thing that makes him most distinct from Bruce, Jason and Tim (though possibly not Damian)....is that Bruce, Jason, Tim and most of the other Batclans’ morality is based on their worldviews, certain personal codes.

Dick’s sense of right and wrong is based entirely on people.

Don’t get me wrong, Bruce, Jason and Tim all care very deeply for the people they let into their hearts, but they all have certain lines they won’t cross. With Bruce and Tim, its because they’re afraid of what crossing those lines would turn them into, who they might become. With Jason its because he’s always had a personal code of honor, who deserves his righteous anger and who doesn’t....and there are absolutely certain things that a person can do that might result in moving from one side of that line in his head to the other. He partners with morally gray characters all the time, and is fine with them up until the moment he’s not; there are some things he can overlook and other betrayals he won’t tolerate. In ways that are more reminiscent of how strictly Bruce sticks to his personal standards than the way Dick will bend until he breaks in order to make allowances for those same things.

With Dick though...he doesn’t care about right or wrong so much as he cares about people. For the people he values most in his life, there is NO line he won’t cross. People focus on the fact that he freaked out after killing the Joker and that Bruce brought him back, but that doesn’t change the fact that he still killed the Joker. When he went undercover with Spyral while knowing how much it would hurt his loved ones to believe he was still dead, I’ll always emphasize the fact that he was in an extremely traumatized state of mind having literally just DIED and also Bruce was using every tool in his I Know Dick Grayson And How Much He Needs to Be Needed And Valued By Me toolbox to browbeat him into taking the mission, BUT I think in particular, its extremely key that Bruce was able to convince him that was necessary not because the mission required it, but because it was what was safest for his friends and family. 

(And someday soon, I reeeeally need to make a post talking about how the thing on Dick’s mind the entire time he and Bruce fought in the cave in NW #30, and the death he was feeling guilty about...was Damian’s. Because Damian, not that long before, literally died TO SAVE Dick’s life, and there’s no way Dick doesn’t blame himself for THAT in particular. And add in Bruce’s tendency to tunnel vision in his grief, and despite how good he is at comforting his kids when grieving for others he doesn’t have a close personal relationship with, like helping Dick deal with his first parents’ deaths, when Bruce additionally is grieving, he absolutely loses his perspective and fails to EVER factor in the fact that people other than him are grieving too. See his reactions after Alfred’s death, Damian’s death, Jason’s death....at no point does he EVER check in with his kids and acknowledge that many of them have their own feelings about these losses and are grieving, that its not just HIM affected by these things. Taking Jason back to Magdala Valley after Damian’s death, kicking Dick out after Jason’s....Bruce has an unfortunate tendency to compound his childrens’ grief by virtue of the writers making any loss all about being HIS loss and never even considering that his kids are feeling things too. The second someone in Bruce’s family is hurt, the writers are like, well clearly Bruce is the only one who cared about them, and this trend fucking SUCKS, but I progenitor-fucking DIGRESS. 

Anyway, my point being.....Dick absolutely blamed himself for Damian’s death, and fearing someone else getting hurt because of his actions or inactions was I think the pivotal point in getting him to take the Spyral mission, and it being Bruce who expressed that in particular.....matters. Because I also think Dick ADDITIONALLY felt that because of how Damian died, BRUCE blamed Dick for Damian’s death, and Bruce never offered anything to make Dick feel otherwise, or make Dick feel like Bruce in any way acknowledged that Damian’s loss weighed heavily on Dick too, as Dick had freaking RAISED the kid for over a year when Bruce was thought lost....AND I also think its important to acknowledge that the LAST time one of Bruce’s children, one of Dick’s siblings, died.....when Jason died in A Death In the Family....Bruce ALSO blamed Dick for that, verbally and with intent. And never ever walked it back, apologized or expressed otherwise. 

And that’s a HUGE plot/character point that has never been adequately examined in my opinion...that Dick’s tendency to be self-sacrificing when it comes to his siblings’ safety is NOT because he doesn’t care about their own autonomy or wants to take away their choices or doesn’t trust in their own competency to protect themselves....its because history has shown that BRUCE tends to hold Dick accountable for what happens to his siblings, as Bruce desperately attempts to deflect from his own feelings of guilt, and Dick’s the closest/easiest target for deflection. Except given that Bruce sucks at apologies, Bruce also fails to ever point out AFTER the fact that no, Dick isn’t to blame for these tragedies, and without that crucial point....why WOULDN’T Dick believe that deep down, Bruce DOES blame him for these things, and thus Dick considers his own safety less paramount than that of his siblings? 

Also keep in mind that when you factor in Bruce’s death-wish after Jason’s death and quest to bring Damian back to life, versus after Dick’s death sending him into kinda exile where he’d be literally out of sight/out of mind in a constant state of danger rather than where Bruce could reassure himself that Dick was safe and protected by him and the family....and ALSO factor in the period after Dick left home, when they went over a year without talking and which included myriad missions where Dick came very close to dying and there was no acknowledgment of any of this from Bruce or attempt to reconcile on his end or even make sure Dick was doing alright by checking in......and all Bruce really had to do to change this situation was like.....take the initiative to reach out to Dick.....basically I’m just saying, from Dick’s perspective, it looks like history proves that he’s the one kid of Bruce’s that Bruce is most capable of living without. And all that matters in the Spyral discussion. BUT I DIGRESS).

ANYWAY.

Back to Dick and his morality:

For the people he loves, there is absolutely no line he won’t cross, no crime he won’t commit, no betrayal he won’t enact. He might beat himself up for it until the day he dies, never forgive himself, decide he deserves to never be forgiven by anyone else....but he’ll still DO it, first. 

After the Spyral mission and Dick being alive was revealed, Tim accused Dick of being just like Bruce, but I disagree. The lines Bruce crosses in others’ eyes, he crosses for the sake of his mission, for the good of people in the ABSTRACT, the overall populace. There’s never been any mission that makes Dick cross similar lines...unless that mission is saving or protecting or rescuing someone he loves INDIVIDUALLY, a specific person or persons. And at that point, he’ll go much further than even Bruce will, no matter what it costs him.

Because of that, this trait of Dick’s is a flaw as much as its a virtue. DC writes Dick as a multiversal constant, with him being incorruptible across all universes. I agree and don’t agree. I think this could certainly be true, but from a different angle than DC usually goes with. Its not that Dick will always stick to ‘the right side’ in every reality, based on what the majority of people would deem being the right side. Its that what Dick views as the right side is whatever’s on the side of those he loves. THAT’S the way in which he’s truly incorruptible...the one essential truth of what it means to be Dick Grayson that he’ll never betray.

So IMO its not really a given that Dick would always be a hero, no matter what....its more that those who have his loyalty most, earned that by being the people who showed him the most genuine affection when he needed it most. And in most realities, these people are heroes themselves, hence Dick is a hero like them. In a reality where say, Slade Wilson rescued him from juvie before Bruce found out he was in there, if Slade took him on as his apprentice and gave him at least as much praise and attention as Bruce did in other realities.....there’s every likelihood that Dick Grayson would have grown up adhering to Slade’s far more flexible sense of right and wrong.

Back to the various canons however, this is why Dick will never fully separate himself from Bruce, no matter how mad Bruce makes him, or how much he hurts him. It’s also why Dick’s always so prone to trying to play peacemaker in his family....while the times he fails at that are the times someone in his family NEEDED him to take their side, and he’s trying futilely to take ALL sides. He could forgive Jason for anything Jason does....but he can’t defend Jason trying to hurt Bruce or Tim or Damian, who have Dick’s loyalty just as fully. He can understand and sympathize with most anything Bruce does....except for when that leaves Jason out in the cold. He’ll give Robin to Damian because he truly believes Damian needs it more than Tim, but fail at explaining himself to Tim, defending himself, because he doesn’t actually believe he can defend himself, he knows he hurt Tim, he’ll beat himself up for it forever, but he also knows that it was what Damian needed, so he’s just sorta....stuck. 

He’s always on every one of his family member’s side, but never as much as they WANT him to be, because they’re all usually so at odds that sometimes they basically demand that you’re either with them or against them, and Dick just fundamentally can not DO that, make that choice. He just tries to...and fails, because its literally the definition of impossible for him.

And it becomes even more of a problem in the instances where he gives his loyalty to someone who doesn’t deserve it or have his best interests in mind. Its why he gives more second chances than most anyone else, something that’s been to the benefit of many of his friends and family....but also why he gives more second chances than he should to Slade or others that he feels a sense of responsibility or obligation or even just kinship to. 

Look at the fallout of Blockbuster’s death. As much as Dick blamed himself for not saving Blockbuster, that he decided that was his responsibility (based on his perception of the moral codes he lives by when a loved one’s life isn’t on the line, his ‘default’ morality, one shaped by the opinions and values of the PEOPLE Dick values most)....the other side of the Blockbuster fallout was that Dick felt that he’d failed TARANTULA. Blockbuster’s actual murderer and Dick’s actual rapist. This is actually completely in character if you consider the fact that Dick took responsibility for Tarantula long before this. He agreed to take her on as kind of an apprentice, try and steer her away from her tendency towards killing and teach her to be a vigilante in line with the Batfamily’s personal code, someone who could work with them and gain Bruce’s approval. 

Problem is, after Tarantula made HER choice to turn her back on that and go in the opposite direction, it wasn’t that simple for Dick, not a matter of just snipping the thread that connected them in his mind. He still felt responsible for her, and thus responsible for her decisions. Her murder of Blockbuster was his failure because he’d failed to convince her to act differently. He held himself accountable in place of the accountability he knew she’d never accept...because in Dick’s mind, a mind where right and wrong are dependent on how much he cares about the person doing right or wrong, feels responsible for them....he’d already designated Tarantula as someone he’d go to most any length for, and thus he genuinely had trouble accepting her actions as wrong, and something he should turn his back on her for....and the only option that left him was accepting her actions as HIS fault, that HE’D been the one to do wrong, by not keeping things from ever getting to that point.

And the other area where this tends to be a flaw most, is the way this creates such a disconnect between him and people he cares about, who don’t get his reasoning, the fundamental logic at the heart of all his decisions. Because most of the people in his life DO base their sense of right and wrong on certain immutable standards, rather than their morality being inherently flexible, depending on who they focus it on at any given moment, like Dick does.

Again, look at what Tim said when they all found out Dick was still alive. Tim was disappointed, he said he’d thought Dick was different from Bruce, that this was something Bruce would do but he’d never have expected it from Dick.

Except its about context. Dick IS different from Bruce, just as much then as any time before. Bruce would always have done something like that for the sake of his mission, if he felt it demanded it. And Jason, Tim, the rest of the Batclan, they would always say that was wrong, because THEIR code of conduct, their sense of morality was set to different standards, ones that didn’t go as far towards the mission and away from its effect on people. They couldn’t sympathize with ever going to that length, doing that to people they loved, for the sake of the mission. And in that context, Dick would always be on the same side as them, here. Because he would agree, in his mind it would be equally indefensible to do that for the sake of an ABSTRACT, you don’t do that to the people you care about, for some goal or ideal or pursuit that you’ve placed above the actual people you care about. 

But where I think Tim and Jason and Barbara don’t understand Dick is they read his siding with them on matters like that in the past as an indication his sense of right and wrong is right in the same general area as theirs.....instead of being the complete opposite end of the mission vs people spectrum. Bruce is unerringly on the side of the mission, the thing he values most because he bases his OWN worth to people on how well or not he commits to the standards he’s set for himself. The others are in the middle of mission vs people, sometimes choosing one over the other, sometimes the reverse, with it dependent on context - who are the people in question, what is the mission in question, what matters most in this particular instance, someone they know or something they know they’d agree with them is the right thing to do, etc. But though Dick is facing Bruce from the same general direction as the rest of them, resulting in him often taking their side of an argument more fully than he takes Bruce’s.....Dick’s in a whole separate sphere behind them, fully in the people above all zone. 

So Dick never changed position, he never swapped his morality with Bruce’s, he never did anything differently from how he’s always acted...he’d just never before been in a position with his family, where they realized they weren’t as much on the same page with him as they’d thought. Dick understands what he did hurt them, he always knew it would, he accepted the guilt from that....but he never apologized, because he knows he’d make the same choice again. He didn’t do it because the mission demanded it, because Bruce said this was important enough to warrant lying to everyone - because he’d never agree with that. He did it because Bruce said this was the only way to keep his loved ones safe, and that he needed Dick to go on this undercover mission to end Spyral’s threat to the family and hero community at large....and ‘you need to do this for your family’s sake’ are the magic words for Dick. The ones that’ll make him agree to anything. (Such as agreeing to be the Court of Owls’ Talon - even with the intention of bringing them down from the inside, he’d still never agree to that, submit to that, unless someone he loved was on the line, like Damian had been). And that’s the part Tim, Jason and Barbara didn’t get...he acted like they expected Bruce to act, but for entirely different reasons.

Don’t get me wrong - I think Dick knows right from wrong no matter the context. Its not so much as his view of whether or not something is right shifts from one moment to the next. Its more just how much he allows whether something is right or wrong to influence his actions, based on the context around it...THAT’S what shifts. Because again.....his willingness to BE wrong is key. He engages in a lot of actions at times that on the surface might appear hypocritical given how much he talks about those very kinds of actions being wrong in other circumstances....but I’d argue that its not really hypocritical because at no point does he reverse course in what he actually states or believes is the right thing to do, just because he actually does something he’s previously stated is wrong. Its not hypocrisy when he does something he’s said is wrong, because he’s not fooling himself that its suddenly NOT wrong just because he’s the one doing it. Its just he believes its necessary to the point where he’s okay with the consequences or moral conundrums of doing it even WHILE accepting that its wrong.

He thinks killing is wrong. But if it came down to killing someone or letting someone he cared about die, with NO other way out....Bruce might find himself frozen, paralyzed by being faced with an impossible choice that he finally has NO alternative to without plot contrivance, which is realistically all that really keeps Bruce from never ending up in this situation. Thus keeping Bruce from acting, meaning his loved one dies....and then Bruce would torture himself forever with that failure, and with his choice or lack of action. In the exact same scenario though....Dick would have no illusions about what he was doing, he wouldn’t suddenly decide, oh, killing this person is fine....but he wouldn’t hesitate to kill them to save his loved one’s life....and then Dick would torture himself forever with THAT choice, that action, with his failure to find an alternative solution. Similar situations, similar outcomes, entirely opposite motivations and choices.

So yeah, Dick always knows right from wrong, no matter the situation - its just that he doesn’t always CARE. Not when someone he cares about is at stake. The moment that becomes true, the second he can’t find ANY viable alternative to whatever ‘wrong’ thing he’d have to do to save or protect or rescue them....he’ll do what he thinks he has to. He’s the walking epitome of ‘they can hate me as much as they want, as long as they’re alive to do it.’

And similarly....he might lecture or yell or judge or any and all of those things, but again I think that has less to do with hypocrisy and more to do with being caught between a rock and a hard place. I think he KNOWS his moral flexibility works way differently than most people understand. He doesn’t expect people to be like him, or even understand him, it just is what it is. So he doesn’t bother trying to explain it nearly as much as he should, I think....probably because it IS so opposite to Bruce’s motivations and personal code, that Dick decided early on there just wasn’t any point trying to convey how and why he makes certain decisions he makes. 

So yeah, he might lecture Jason about killing, but he’ll never actually give up on Jason, no matter what he does. But at the same time, Dick can’t ever actually give up on Bruce, no matter how much Bruce pushes Jason away because of their opposing stances and how much that hurts Jason. And it all tends to snowball, because as much as Bruce and Jason are frustrated at each other for their opposing stances and are unwilling to concede, Dick’s eternally frustrated with BOTH of them, because the part he thinks is most significant is that they both still care about each other and he just bottom line doesn’t GET why that isn’t enough for them to find an understanding. 

Back to Damian....I said at the start of this that Dick might not be so distinct from Damian here, and I think they actually have more in common than people realize. They DO have a closer relationship than any others in the family, and its not unreasonable that Tim and Jason have concluded that Damian is Dick’s favorite and vice versa...but I don’t think that’s quite true. It’s not that Dick loves Damian more than them or that Damian loves Dick more than their father. Its that they understand each other in a way that the others don’t. (I also think it has to do with the fact that as much as Dick eventually made his peace with Jason, Tim and even Steph being Robin and taking his family name, IMO its still a big deal, even if only subconsciously, that Damian was the first time HE got to give Robin to someone, to choose, to say here is my name, my family name, I’m inviting you into my family with this).

But yeah, as much as Damian’s learned to question the teachings he grew up with, I think ultimately that’s only been possible to the degree that its happened, because Damian is like Dick in that his morality revolves around people. Whether or not this is because Dick was the one to first break through the walls he put up, the first one to truly show Damian the affection he’d been starved for his whole life....who can say. He definitely played a formative role in who Damian’s become, but I think it comes down to the nature vs nurture argument, and where you stand on that. Is Damian like Dick because Dick’s the first one to really care about him and make him WANT to be different? Or is Dick the one who got Damian to care and want to be different because Dick was the one most like Damian in this particular way?

Regardless, yes, Damian knows right from wrong now, he understands his family’s stance on killing...but his abiding by those rules and overriding everything he’s been taught about killing, I think has less to do with him AGREEING with this new stance and everything to do with him wanting to be who they want him to be. Refraining from killing because he knows its what Bruce - and Dick - and the others he cares about want from him and for him. But no matter how far in the future, or how long he lives with Bruce and the family and goes without killing, if it came down to a choice between killing someone and letting someone he cares about die - Damian wouldn’t hesitate. And I think a lot of people both in universe and in fandom would point to that as him reverting to form, or character regression, or have them say he hasn’t changed as much as people thought after all....but I think that’d be just as much a mistake as the way Tim said Dick was just like Bruce now. Because if that happened, it would be because Damian NEVER changed....in the sense that he was always going to do what he thought was right based on what was at stake for the people he values. And he always has.

I think it fits perfectly that Damian was the only one who didn’t give Dick any shit about his death and Spyral when he returned - and not just because Damian had been dead when that happened and thus Dick hadn’t actually ever lied to him. It was because at the end of the day, Damian instinctively GOT IT in the way the others didn’t. He understood Dick’s reasoning because he knows Dick in ways the others don’t, because the things Dick taught him that resonated most with Damian, Damian in turn knew Dick only said because he understood they would resonate, and why. Damian didn’t judge Dick for it, because Damian would have done the same thing. And for the same reasons Dick did it, not because Damian’s any more like Bruce in that regard than Dick is.

So yeah, for all that the various members of the Batfamily have very different specifics to their personal moral codes, I think Jason and Bruce are actually the most alike in WHY they do what they do, and Damian and Dick are the most alike in the opposite regard. And Tim I think is in between them, not AS flexible in his morality as Dick and Damian, but not as rigid as Jason and Bruce are either. His flexibility has more to do with Tim NOT wanting to be anything like Ra’s and keeping a tighter leash on his own views and choices. Tim’s probably the most introspective of the Batfamily, and I think he’d likely be closer to Dick and Damian in this way if not for the fact that he’s also so analytical and constantly evaluating his own choices and reasoning in ways Dick and Damian - both more intuitive and emotional people than Tim - don’t necessarily bother with as much. Tim’s also come closer to making decisions he REALLY isn’t proud of or comfortable making than either Dick or Damian, and thus like Bruce, he’s more afraid of who he might become if he doesn’t keep such a tight reign on his actions.