#definitely leaning towards her being jim's protege

[bardicious]

Thinking of Spock's ridiculously dated comment at the end of The Enemy Within from a less fucked up standpoint. Spock was joking about Kirk's hidden affections for Janice and her feelings to Kirk. (Lets just ignore the sexual assault, lmao)

[bitimdrake]

I just want to through my two cents in about calling Steph and Duke (and Babs) Bruce's kids because I feel strongly on the topic. I call them his mentees. Or his students. To me, those designation can signify a strong intergenerational relationship without the implications of friendship or family. I hate when people call Steph and Babs his kids because I think it massively undercuts their canonical relationships with their actual parents. Duke I'm more nebulous on, but I think mentee works best

Yeah that's very valid! Like I said, I have mixed feelings about it, but they do lean more towards the negative.

I'm not going to comment on Duke, since I haven't read his stuff quite yet. (I'm so cloooose. Technically I actually have now read one issue with kid!Duke, but I don't think that really counts for knowing his character.) But for the other two--

Definitely a big part of my problem with it is the way it undercuts Babs' and Steph's actual parents in Jim and Crystal. And considering Crystal especially is so often just forgotten in general...yeah, don't like that.

With Babs, there's also something about it that can feel...kind of infantalizing, I guess? Which is weird to say, because Bruce has multiple adult children, and them being his kids doesn't make them less of adults. But with Barbara, post-Crisis, as Oracle, she felt so much like Bruce's equal--in a way I'd argue even Dick couldn't, because for all Dick is just as good as if not better than Bruce, he is still fundamentally Bruce's son and that dynamic never fully goes away--that it just seems weird for even Bruce to think of her as a pseudo-daughter at that point. Add that to the way Babs has been continually de-aged and treated as ever younger ever since the new 52 and...yeah, Barbara being referred to as Bruce's kid is definitely the one that grates on me the most.

Steph, on the other hand, is the biggest reason my feelings are a little mixed. Because I don't want to see Crystal erased or ignored, and Steph for sure isn't literally Bruce's kid or part of the Wayne family. But there's also...idk, the way that she is a teen, and she was Robin for awhile. And at the best of Steph and Bruce's relationship--which, admittedly, was rare--it felt very similar to Tim and Bruce or Cass and Bruce. Recalling, ofc, that at the time Tim and Cass weren't Bruce's kids either.

Tim and Steph especially could hit real parallels in their relationships with Bruce--whichever one of them Bruce liked at the time would have such a close and important mentor/protege relationship with him, but then still have their own parents at home, and not remotely think of Bruce as their dad. Until, that is, Tim agreed to adoption and that relationship swapped over.

(I do wonder how much the hindsight of knowing they end up adopted makes people act like Tim and Cass were Bruce's kids from the start, because there was a time when there were only parental undertones to a non-parental relationship, if that! There was a time when Tim found the idea of Bruce being his dad hilarious! And if we're remembering that Steph and Babs aren't Bruce's kids--which we should--then we should also remember that there were many years when Tim and Cass weren't either, and it's okay for relationships to change over time. But I digress.)

The other source of mixed feelings is that even though I don't think Babs/Steph think of Bruce as a dad, I think it's feasible that Bruce sometimes thinks of them very close to his own kids. Like, we gotta be real here: this is not an expressive dude who does a lot of fatherly actions, and also this is a man who mostly relates to his kids via vigilante work. So I can see how, to Bruce, the relationships might tread very close to his real parent/child ones--though they don't have to. But either way, that doesn't mean they literally are parent/child.

imo the real biggest problem here is that DC just never has any nuance to it. If Steph/Babs are referred to as Bruce's kids, then they're listed right alongside his actual children, depicted hanging out at the manor, put in the family portraits, etc. And that's...not the relationship they have.

(And tbh goes hand in hand with DC's tendency to play it infuriatingly coy about whether the non-Damian kids have actually been adopted in any given post-Flashpoint continuity, and whether they're Bruce's kids or his "wards"/"proteges"/whatever "only blood relatives count" bullshit we're doing this week.)

If we could have thoughtful moments about how Bruce felt like Barbara was a surrogate daughter when he was training her as Batgirl, but still has a distance he can never get with his actual kids-- Or Bruce and Steph navigating how she (justifiably) kind of resents him and doesn't think of him as a dad and just wants her mom, but he sometimes catches himself lumping her in with his kids-- Or any other twist on that! allowing for some grey area without ignoring who is literal family.

Alas, we don't get that. And I like your phrasing, so mentee/protege/student sounds like the best encapsulation to me in lieu of a longer discussion.

They got their own parents.