#but her arc is also about her dealing with the repressed trauma of being violated by the borg and learning to become human again

[guardianhalle]

Is anyone going to talk about the “the victim is wrong/what about the accused” SA allegory episode of Star Trek Voyager or just me

Seven reacts uncharacteristically violently to a man touching her and the Doctor helps her uncover repressed memories where this man violated her and extracted borg tech from her and dude acts exactly like a guilty mf would act, except about halfway through the episode it’s almost like, and this is speculation, known abuser Rick Berman changed the ending to reveal that, surprise, Seven was actually wrong about the extremely vivid memory she has of an incident that happens several days prior and the accused guy bitches and moans about how things like this ruin men’s careers etc until he gets accidentally exploded out of fear of retribution

TNG would have used an episode like this to make a commentary about bodily autonomy and corruption, VOY said “but what about MEN”

[darklordgorblax]

Why does Mass Effect hate Gay Men?

So, I know I'm pretty late to the party, and plenty of people have said it better, but I've finally been getting around to playing the Mass Effect games, and I can't sleep until I get this out there. Also, apologies that I'm all over the place. It all just adds up, you know?

Disclaimer: There is a lot to really like about Mass Effect. This isn't a review, just an attempt to voice a frustration.

Where to start? I first played Mass Effect in ~2010. I was in college, and still very repressed pretending that homosexuality is totally a choice. Like most people, I imagine, I really appreciated the way that I could tailor Shepherd to my vision. He wasn't a blank slate self-insert, but had just enough flexibility that it was really easy to slip into that skin and imagine I was a badass commander out saving the galaxy.

Then the end happened and Ashley raped me. Obviously with Shepherd it was consensual, but for me identifying and connecting with Shepherd it felt deeply violating. I was leaning heavily into Paragon, and genuinely thought I was just being a good nice person. I had hardly ever spoken with Ashley, and I didn't think I had said anything particularly suggestive that was the direction I wanted to go. As a result I swore off everything Mass Effect for over a decade.

I've grown a lot since then. It's finally time to give it a fair shake. I still don't want any unpleasant surprises, so I did a bunch of research to figure out what I want to do about romance. Of course I ran into the same problem that every gay man playing Mass Effect runs into. Where are the m/m romance options? It's fine though. I decide I'm going to save myself for Gay Kaiden, and honestly it's very poignant. It's frustrating that it took 3 entire games to pay off, but even that worked into the character arc nicely.

So I played through the trilogy, hated the ending, but overall really appreciated the moments I got with Kaiden. It was pretty emotional for me too, just because it made me realize how much I needed that kind of representation. It was a catharsis to the trauma of being pushed into sleeping with Ashley a decade ago.

Moving on to Andromeda, there's still not nearly enough gay representation, but it's ok. I'm down with Gil. Then there was the scene that set off this spiral. Gil casually mentions that his only friend Jill gives him crap for being a gay genetic dead end. I tell him that's not cool, and he brushes it off. This is deeply uncomfortable, but maybe they salvage it. I have to know more.

End preamble, begin rant: Why does Mass Effect hate Gay Men?

What the ever living fuck. Gil's *entire* character ark is his "best friend" pressuring him into being her baby daddy. The first thing I had to know is who wrote this and are they gay. If they're gay themself, then maybe they're just speaking to personal experience that I happen to find distasteful and unrelatable. I couldn't find out much about the guy, but I suspect not.

So first - To straight writers writing gay characters: Just write them straight. Kaiden was written in such a way that it works either way, and it *works*. Yes, I want gay characters that deal with uniquely gay issues, but I don't trust you. To explore something as deeply personal and fraught as a gay man choosing whether or not to have children and how is not a plotline you just slap together. Just write them straight and then flip the pronouns and descriptors when appropriate.

But now I'm just gah! We've already established they're extremely lacking in the m/m romance options, but let's take a look. Gil and Cortez, the two exclusively gay men. Why are there no gay men party members? For fuck's sake! Every single exclusively gay (and lesbian?) romance option is confined to the ship. Just... I think you already know how fucked up that is, so I'm going to stop.

To move on to character arcs. I've seen people defend this, but frankly shove off. It's like these narratives' primary purpose is to make sure that everyone knows they're gay. It's show don't tell gone horribly, horribly wrong. You want to know how you show that a gay man is gay? Show them flirting with men. You don't need to consume the entire character arc showing how Cortez has a dead husband and Gil might not have children. I can cut Cortez some slack since dead spouse isn't a specifically gay arc, but even the way it's presented just puts way too much emphasis on the "husband" part.

But speaking of specifically gay character arcs... Maybe whether or not to have children isn't specifically to highlight that Gil is gay... Oh wait it totally is. This game is *loaded* with interspecies romances that will never have children. Why is the only relationship where this "problem" is highlighted the one for which it might be deeply traumatic?

I can't talk about interspecies romance without talking about the Asari. Perhaps it's the first problem, but for me it will have to be the last. I know it's been beaten to death, and scrutinized from every angle, but it's just so bad. In many ways the Asari are at the heart of the "Why does Mass Effect hate gay men" problem. A mono-gendered, naturally bisexual species that exists to fetishize lesbians for the benefit of a straight male audience. (Anyone who says they aren't technically female deserves to be punched in the face)

So with that I'll conclude: Bioware owes gay men big time for this travesty. Make a mono-gendered, naturally bisexual species that's coded as male. I dare you.

[autisticandroids]

I appreciate you being Dean concerned and not Dean critical. I’m sure you’ve already answered this before but what do you genuinely like about him? A lot of his good traits get twisted in your meta (and in the show) which is really interesting! But like. What about him do you just think is neat?

Also, you don’t talk about Sam a lot but I’m rewatching season 8 and it really feels like both a continuation of preseason one -> season one (Sam has a normal life, Dean is gone -> Sam wants to return to his normal life but Dean coming back gets him back in the game) which also gives it finale vibes :(

Besides the fact that the stuff with Amelia is really boring, it all just feels ooc and like a step back for Sam. Not to go on a rant but Sam seemed to finally make peace with his life back in season 7.

The stuff with Amelia also has both the same and the exact opposite energy as the stuff with Lisa. During his time with Lisa, it was always like Dean had one foot out the door back to hunting. During his time when he goes back to hunting with Dean in season 8, it feels like Sam always has one foot out the door back to Amelia.

That and I just can’t bring myself to give a shit about Amelia (maybe because she’s boring and inconsistent, maybe because info about her is drop fed instead of presented mostly all at once like with Lisa in season 6, maybe because she’s just shoved in for something for Sam to be up to and it feels ooc to me idk)

I thought I’d like season 8 (and I do really like a lot of Cas’ stuff but he’s always my favorite anyway so that was basically gaurenteed) but a lot of the stuff just makes my brain feel like a white noise machine. I’m only on episode 10 so I’m sure it’ll get better for me once the Sam stuff gets resolved but for now it’s very.... eh.

Thoughts?

okay so, what i like about dean. hm. that's hard! i love dean, for all sorts of reasons, and i know i'll miss stuff, but: - he charms me, on a sort of pure, animal level. he's very charming, that's true within the show but it's true for the audience, or at least me, as well. he's funny, he's affectionate, he's sweet, and he tries so hard. and it makes me love him - he's compellingly tragic. like dean is a fucked up guy, he hurts both himself and everyone around him because of patterns of trauma an neurosis he can't break out of. no one wants to be a bad guy, no one wants to hurt the ones they love, least of all dean, but he can't stop doing both those things. like his self-made cage of ideology, emotional repression, and control is killing him, and it's killing everyone who doesn't get away from him, and that's sad! it's awful! no one is winning except dean's self-image. he will sacrifice everyone and everything he loves on the altar of never having to re-evaluate himself. or, i hope he won't. but he might! and that's sad! it's the perfect tragedy! - second hand deangirlism due to cas kinnie disease. men will be the first person who was ever nice to castiel and then me and castiel will love them forever about it. - he is my little puzzle box and i will solve him - straightmarried gf i liked that sam ran off and tried to escape The Life in s8, that makes sense to me. i think sam really fundamentally doesn't want to be a hunter and the only reason he gives up on trying to leave post s8 is that it is impressed upon him that he's completely trapped. he can never be free. dean will always drag him back, kicking and screaming. i actually feel like sam's equivalent to lisa isn't amelia, it's jess. i talked some about that here but like. both jess and lisa were kind of synecdoches for a false ideal of the american dream, each in their own way. they're both images of suburban perfection, and what draws the winchesters to them is the desire to fit into that image.

but comparing lisa and amelia..... like, dean promises sam that he will go try to make a normal life with lisa, and then he does, because that obligation is all he has left to cling to. like dean is nothing but a miserable little pile of duties and tasks, he doesn't know who he is without a chore (see: demon!dean's total directionlessness) and lisa is the last promise he made to his brother, so he fulfills that. she's an idea to him, not a real woman. the thing he's clinging to, in sam's absence, is not lisa, but the idea of a normative suburban lifestyle. but then the moment sam shows up and voids his own last wishes, dean is like okay bye i don't need to fulfill this obligation anymore. like he was never all that interested in lisa. he didn't love her and his relationship with her was built on obligations, normative images, and anxiety over her safety, which finally resolves itself in dean horrifically violating her by asking cas to wipe her memories.

whereas sam is with amelia because he like, meets her and they form a connection. they hit it off. and sam has a pattern of like. when he wants to get away from something, especially if dean isn't around, he jumps into bed with the nearest girl who smiles at him and then forms a super intense with her. his early season one-off love interests, ruby, and now amelia. (amelia is actually kind of the last time he does that, because after season eight he gives up trying to escape for real). but what he's clinging to there isn't an image that he's trying to fit into. it's the girl herself. like he likes amelia and he wants to be around her and he dives into like. spending time with her and building a relationship with her. and like amelia is a real woman and sam sees her as a real woman. like she's a fucked up mess and so is he and they connect. like she's a bitch and she clogs her drain with limes. also #MyGirlfriendsHusbandFightsForYourFreedom. like samelia is a little boring but i don't begrudge sam that. it's almost compelling because it's boring.

i'm actually not a huge season eight guy myself but my issue with it isn't samelia.

actually, and this is a complete tangent, can i bitch about season ten for a second? like. okay. seasons eight and nine are about sam learning that dean will never let him go. that he's trapped forever in the hunting life and trapped forever with his brother, that dean will do horrific things to him in order to keep them together. and slowly just... giving up. deciding to relinquish his dreams of getting out once and for all.

and then season ten rolls around and suddenly sam makes a hypocrite of himself? suddenly sam is the one who will go to any lengths to save dean, even against dean's own wishes? NOT believable. like sam should be like. sad and fucked up about it, but letting dean go his own way. if anything, cas should be the one trying to save dean against his will, that's way more cas' move. like there's definitely a certain level of cas -> dean :: dean -> sam that exists in the show, at least in terms of protective fixation. cas is somewhat more respectful of dean's boundaries and autonomy, but he's the one with a pattern of blowing up at dean for being self-destructive etc etc.

like, sam should have been way different in s10. i don't know exactly what i would do with him, maybe give him his own distinct plot? or maybe have demon dean last somewhat longer and make "demon dean tries to kill sam" a whole multi-episode arc, i think that would slap. and then the relationship fallout from that can be many more episodes.

like imo this happened because jeremy carver got his start in season three, when sam legitimately was trying to save dean against dean's wishes, but in s3 that made sense. like, one, the brothers were much closer then, dean wasn't quite as much of a prison guard for sam, but two, much more importantly, dean's deal was sam's fault. he blamed himself. he wasn't just trying to save dean from dying, he was trying to save dean from going to hell because of him. like girl, it made sense in mystery spot. but this is not the energy you should be bringing to the table with sam in s10. ooc!

[ssaalexblake]

You know, I remember before s12 aired I was talking about how I liked how they’d managed to say something with the casting of Jodie as the doctor Without forgetting the doctor’s socialisation. As in, 13’s anger has been Very feminine in that it deals with repression and hiding it behind 8 layers of denial and not letting people See she’s not a perfect happy go lucky joy machine who just helps people all the time. It made sense plot wise because of what 12’s last wishes were, he didn’t want the bad. He hoped for a future of laughter and kindness, not the kind of things the doctor has ended up with.

The doctors dedication to their own last wishes has unknowingly pushed 13 into somewhat typical feminine reactions in s11, she is being passive aggressive (this doesn’t actually stop, to be fair, she’s definitely being this in her calmer moments in s12), she’s only letting those around her see her positive attributes, hiding her questionable past by avoiding questions. She cornering bad guys alone so only They see her darker side. She’s using them as a pressure valve to vent her anger and disdain openly, because she knows she can’t do so to the fam without violating her own vow to herself.

So while 13’s ways of displaying anger aren’t stemming from being present in a society that socialises women that way, she has effectively ended up in the same place without her behaviour stemming from said same socialisation. Because this regeneration just Suddenly appearing like they’ve been perceived as a woman and socialised as such when they’ve been taken and treated as a man for thousands of years would not have worked.

And I personally quite enjoy this, might as well Say something with the casting, right? And I said this waaaay back when, and I got push back (rudely, but W/e) because why would I enjoy something that’s not a power fantasy of her acting in an entirely socialised male way, and that this whole thing was remarkably lacking in self awareness but like... I actually am thinking as time goes on that it is Very self aware and is serving as a bit of a lesson on toxic femininity.

I... have no idea if this is an arc that was self aware from the get go, but 12′s last wishes could have vastly different connotations depending on whom you say them to. From seeing two seasons of 13′s behaviour in an effort to fulfil them, i think it’s pretty evident that hearing them sent her down a pathway of very unhealthy emotional expressions that i clocked when watching Very early in the eleventh series as a very feminine type of anger repression. 

And in s11, she’s sailing on that. She Kind of slips up in the first new year’s special with the dalek, but other than that life is Good for her. She’s managing to find effective therapeutic venting villains to release the pressure of having to be perfect all the time and it’s not even having too much of a negative mental effect on her. 

Of course, this only holds for as long as life is going well for her, literally the first thing that happens in s12 is the Worst thing that ever could for her. The Master shows up, drudging up trauma related to Bill, relating to hoping against all hope they could be friends again but ending up dying in the dirt alone. He destroys Gallifrey, commits genocide, which would have been traumatizing enough but it would have drudged up all the trauma from when they thought They’d destroyed it and ruined the win they got when they’d actually saved it. The fam whom she loves are now Also in mortal danger and want answers. This all just goes to prove that 13 Only pulled that off in s11 because it was to a level that she could handle it. Once her stress and trauma and anger and hurt reaches a certain level, she can no longer function in the way she wished to and the true toxicity of that behaviour becomes apparent. 

And through all of this, while the 13 hasn’t arrived at these behaviour patterns through female socialisation, she is Presenting in the same way so it functions as a criticism of toxic femininity. 

In Orphan 55 she latches onto Kane Before she knows she’s done anything bad and treats her like dirt to vent the anger, the fam had Already noted she’s in a foul mood and it’s kind of evident she did Not want to take it out on them and used Kane to do it. Then the Skithra happens and she is Brutal and she is so in front of the fam. Fugitive of the Judoon happens and her instinct to hide all of her trauma and not talk and just be Happy is shown from the opening scenes to be causing division amongst the fam and her, she is moody and short and angry At them because she can no longer contain it. By the end of the episode she actually even verbally slams Ryan. That is how far gone she is with all of this. 

fotj is also when the fam Kind of manage to get through to her and show support, she actually is shown to be in a slightly better place in the next two episodes, so we also see that when she functions honestly and Doesn’t lean into toxic femininity her life Improves. 

Of course, then villa diodati happens and it all once again goes to utter Hell and she totally Blows. He screaming at the fam was a total and utter breakdown and it was a Snap. It was a Snap like the other doctors have had, it was like ten at his worst except instead of it being a boatload of ugly toxic masculinity she is portraying this through a lens of toxic Femininity. And people are still on my posts on a weekly basis wondering when 13 will Finally Snap. 

13′s anger Isn’t like the other doctors’ in presentation because her unhealthy coping mechanisms are displaying a totally different side of toxicity in society. 13′s repression and her absolute Need to only display positive traits led her down a road in s12 where she was unable to find help, unable to say there was anything wrong, unable to display negativity in a healthy way, unable to keep the sheer supernova of emotions she was feeling down anymore and it exploded, and it was ugly. She blamed the fam for not knowing things she was deliberately hiding from them. She did Nasty things. Her inability to think straight and her disinclination to Deal with her own trauma and just repress it ultimately led her to give up the cyberium to the lone cyberman which led to Countless trillions, probably, of humans to die in the worst way possible (that’s the doctors Own opinion on that btw, she Knowingly did something that caused this) because her crutches are ignoring the bad and using the fam and earth itself as a second home in place of the old one, for her, the possibility of losing them or the earth is so traumatic and disturbing that she knowingly causes a horror. 

13′s poor mental health, the poor mental health stemming from toxicly feminine ways of dealing with anger and trauma and depression led, directly, to the terrors in the last 3 episodes in s12. It is not healthy! 13 may not have been led to acting in these ways by female socialization, But giving us a justified and logical reason to be acting in the same way women are Expected to act in society to ours (and, everybody’s) detriment Is a commentary on how toxic that type of feminine anger actually Is. 

So no, i don’t think they went ‘power fantasy’ as a route with jodie’s casting as the doctor, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t self aware, instead they chose to say something that wouldn’t have been as poignant a story had they cast a man to play 13, because chronologically and visually... A man told her to do this. It is more complicated, yes, but this Definitely says something.  

13 is a cautionary tale against the toxicity in the anger women are socialised into... A wild one, but since when was the doctor ever subtle. 

[whetstonefires]

Hi Whetstonefire. I have a question about the comic where Nightwing cheats on Starfire with Barbara: What happens directly after that? Does Starfire find out that Nightwing cheated on her? And, if so, how does she react? I've read online that (according to Marv Wolfman) Starfire is the opposite of everything Batman taught Nightwing to be and that Batman taught Nightwing to be repressed and cold. What did Nightwing contribute (emotionally) to the relationship between him and Starfire? (Cont.)

(Cont.) From what I can tell, from online, Nightwing was adamant about standards of mercy and monogamy - how do you think, if Starfire were to be written as her own character and not written around Nightwing and his emotional needs, she would handle and react to that? (This bit is an FYI for other readers: this is just speculation, not hate. Sorry about that.) Sorry about the questions! Have a nice day! 

Okay there are so many separate questions packed in here! I may miss some of them lol and I do not want to put in the hours it would take to produce an orderly response to all this, so this post is going to be a mess.

Initial query and important point: the cheating story was out of continuity. Like, literally, not just by ‘being rejected by the fanbase,’ it was just this weird retcon oneshot that seems to have been some sort of fuck-you to Nightwing or his fans or something. So no, it had no in-setting fallout lol. It, in more ways than most comics, didn't exactly happen.

It was just this weird thing where Dick hooks up with Babs before giving her a wedding invitation, which is both out of character for him in general and out of step with where he was leading up to the wedding--he was desperate to get married so they could have some Normal Stable Adulthood Happiness; the choice to recharacterize him as a fuckboy who regards it as a loss of freedom isn’t congruent, on much more than the level of principle.

As far as how Kori would feel about it, if she had learned...that is very hard to say. Apart from how it would require her to reinterpret everything about where their relationship stood at that point, the data is very unclear, and I don’t even have all of it. Gonna back up to cover some of the rest of the ask, get some context here.

So this actually brings up two of my biggest gripes with Wolfman’s NTT--weird Kori characterization and the weirdly negative interpretation of Batman as parent that backwashed heavily into other titles and influenced the character for the worse, in ways we're very much still dealing with today. 😩

The latter is pretty self-explanatory, though Wolfman’s take that the main thing Bruce taught Dick was repression does shed light on some writing choices and make others funnier. But Kori. Oh my lands.

So, item one, I wouldn't say that Kori is overall opposite Bruce, or even of his philosophy? There are just some very major points of opposition. She isn’t emotionally buttoned-down like at all, especially about positive feelings, although considered realistically with all the bullshit they’ve piled into her backstory she absolutely leans on repression to cope and stay positive, which makes her a lot like Dick actually.

To an extent, she was clearly written around foiling Dick’s Batman-derived traits in the same way that Robin was written to foil Batman, bright and glad and aerial. A Flamebird to his Nightwing in theme if not in name.

You could do some interesting stuff with that, and the bildungsroman aspects of this period of Dick’s life, like he has two roads forward in terms of how he’s going to define ‘adulthood’--does it necessarily require becoming more like his mentor-father, for good and ill, or can he make Kori in part a destination, as it were, and create an adult self that is derived from who he has always been as well as the man he’s modeled himself after?

To an extent I think this even was one of the things going on in ntt but like. Only a little bit.

(Given how much like Bruce Babs is in most of the ways Kori isn’t, especially once she’s Oracle, you could make a case for her as love interest being like. Symbolic of his not being in a rebellious phase? That gets weird and oedipal really fast tho lol.)

Okay stepping down one meta level lol, the thing about answering the 'what would kori' question here is that her character is deeply bound up in her culture, about which we are told and shown a great many contradictory things. Any attempt to read her as an independent character has to tackle not only the gender stuff you allude to and these inconsistencies, but how much of the sheer mess of her is rooted in racism.

'Fantastic' racism, technically, because Tamaraneans aren't real, but the 'taming the savage' narrative that kept surfacing between them and the language used in reference to it is just. The existing racism of presumably the writers, placed in Dick's mouth, and it's super gross. I hate it so much.

(I had a faint hope when they cast her for live action it was with a deliberate intent to directly tackle and better that history, but lollllllll nah. At least they didn’t double down in it tho! Can you imagine, with a black actress, in this day and age....)

So to predict and comprehend Kori, you have to make a lot of calls about Tamaran as a civilization. I like to slightly privilege stuff established earlier if there's no good reason not to, so while much is made over time of her inappropriate rage and the violence she was raised to normalize, I think what she says in her first appearance is good to keep in mind: in her culture, kindness is for friends and cruelty is for enemies. She doesn't understand why the Titans seem to have this backwards.

Kori is not a merciless person. She’s very empathetic, as a rule. With people she loves, she is self-destructively forgiving. That's not a trait only Dick benefits from--her family keeps betraying her in new exciting ways, and she keeps letting them.

Her arc of growing away from that habit is however greatly crippled by centering Dick in the narrative and by the awful 'civilizing' overtones that keep coming into it. When she comes back after the 1986 breakup, still married to Karras, she brings with her a commitment to doing things the Earth way--to eschew lethal force as more than a compromise with her friends’ values, but as a deliberate choice.

This deserved a lot more space and time than it got, and the fact that it didn’t get it is only somewhat due to her being subordinated to Dick and to general writing fail; a lot of it’s just the team book problems of everything happening to everybody all at once.

I mean, Dick’s journey later on to deciding he loves her enough to date her even though she’s married and it’s technically against his principles was packed into this absolutely heinous issue where he was inspired by a woman refusing to separate from her husband who’d just threatened to kill her and their kid with a knife, until being stopped by Nightwing. Because he’s apologizing for what he did.

This is his inspiration for accepting Kori’s marital status! It’s supposed to be heartwarming, as far as I can tell! Not heavyhanded messaging that this is a self-destructive terrible choice in which Kori will inevitably harm him somehow! This issue is pro ‘consensual open relationships under certain circumstances’ and also ‘giving abusers another chance’ as expressions of love. Welcome to the 80s ig.

(Notable is that the wife in this issue was black and the husband and son both looked very white, so it’s probably her stepkid and she probably wouldn’t get to keep him if they separated; this is not even vaguely treated as a factor.)

Point is, everyone was getting too little space to actually go through the amount of development they were getting, and it was clumsily handled; it’s not just her.

In an overlapping period Gar processed his issues with his adoptive father with whom he constantly fought and their shared trauma over the rest of their family (the Doom Patrol) having died violently not long ago via a batshit several-issue storyline where Mento went crazy, created supermutants, and abusively mind-controlled them to attack the Titans. It is literally all like this.

Back to the infidelity thing, now. So much to unpack. So like I mentioned above, their first big breakup, while partially driven by Dick’s existing conflicted feelings about their different ideas about things like ‘killing in battle’ and ‘her identity and loyalties being tied up with her home planet,’ is explicitly over different takes on monogamy.

When Dick is breaking up with her, Kori makes it clear she thinks it’s totally reasonable to have both a husband and a love, since Karras also has someone he loves and they’re both fine with it, but the story doesn't really explain how nonmonogamy works on Tamaran, or even if it's practiced outside the context of political marriage. They do do a sort of...soulbond fusion dance...thing, as part of the ceremony, so marriage is definitely serious business. There are so many levels of cultural difference that get poor to no development.

But to return to the weird ooc retcon cheating story: because of this context, no matter what her personal norms are, Dick specifically casually sleeping with someone else would be something for Kori to be mad about, because of the hypocrisy.

Then there’s the Mirage Incident, which I haven’t read through properly and which was very poorly handled by the writers. Kori is upset about Dick having slept with someone impersonating her and there’s a general vibe of this being treated by Dick’s social circle as unfaithfulness even though he was in fact sexually violated by deceit; it famously sucks.

We still don’t learn a lot here about Kori’s ideas about monogamy, from what I have seen, because her focus is mostly on feeling like Dick doesn’t care about her enough or in the right way since he couldn’t tell the difference. Which is an understandable feeling, even if it’s not an appropriate reaction to have at him at this time.

What Nightwing contributed emotionally........hm. This is a mess, honestly; he was all over the map, and not just because of having Brother Blood in his head. I cannot speak definitively on this, it’s too inconsistent.

For most of their relationship, Kori was the more intensely invested one, the one to initiate and the one who was shown at length to be excited to come home at the end of the day to their shared apartment because her boyfriend was there to see and talk to. If we set aside his more egregious white male bullshit, Dick was pretty emotionally available most of the time, though? They were cute.

Since they split up a lot of ink has been spilled making him less into her in retrospect, but he was pretty invested--leaving her coincided with mental breakdowns both times, and it wasn’t even mostly because she was doing his emotional processing for him, because she wasn’t, although it’s fair to say he often fell into using the relationship as an emotional crutch. Kori was definitely doing the same thing though so...it wasn’t the most balanced relationship in fiction history, but apart from slight codependency and the racism, it was decent enough.

She gets more evenhanded development than most superhero love interests, honestly, because she was costarring in a team book. She had her own storylines. She had other friends.

Mostly both of them just needed some space to finish growing up and stop being retraumatized long enough to process some of the existing trauma better, and I think they could have gone on being good for each other for a long time.