#drawing a lot of siblingish character interaction just sets me thinking

[skecherss]

There’s this funny idea I seem to see implied in most comics/fics, that each of the batkids have, like, one special sibling that they get along with, and the rest are kinda just there? That’s a thing, right? Like, Dick and Damian will be buddies, and people seem to think that that’s at the expense of Dick’s and Damian’s relationship with Tim (granted, Tim thought so himself at one point but it’s too soon to contradict myself, let me finish, I have too many thoughts to stop now)

Duke and Cass, I think Tim and Jason sometimes, Steph and (literally nobody because DC refuses to acknowledge that she has more than a tenuous affiliation with the rest of the batfam), those are acknowledged Pals™. Their relationships with any of their other siblings are virtually nonexistent unless it’s just straight-up arguing.

But, like....does nobody have siblings that they’ve learned to get along with....? I feel like I so rarely see instances of all of them getting along in different ways like siblings just DO. And sure, it totally makes sense to be closer to one sibling than another — I’m a lot closer to my brother than my other siblings — but that doesn’t mean your interactions with the others are always fraught with tension or apathy, you’re still able to have your own fun dynamic with them because you love them and they’re different people and it makes sense for the dynamic to be built on different things.

Take my big sister — I barely got along with her at all for years, she’s the only sibling that I honestly thought I hated at any point, and when she moved out I fully expected her not to want to talk to me any more. She didn’t get along with any of us that well. But somehow that’s become a bonding point? I know now that whenever I have family issues, or anything my parents refuse to talk out, she’ll be willing and way too prepared to fight things out for me. And c’mon, couldn’t that be Jason and Damian?

I get along with the brother closest to me probably just because we’ve spent so much time together; we understand each other well and it’s fun to be around someone who can predict your every move and get so much just from an eyebrow raise. That could be Tim and Cass — both so wired to read people that it’s like second nature to understand each other and know instinctively that the other person loves to have it reciprocated for once.

My younger brother has had a really hard time learning to reel his emotions in; he’s super sensitive and lashes out easily so it’s hard for him to be nice to people sometimes and vice versa. That was me as a kid. So I get to be the one who’s grown enough to be a diplomat for him, we get to rant about how hard it is to have feelings to each other, and sure our relationship isn’t so much built on a near-psychic link but we still like spending time with each other. Maybe that’s Dick and Jason — not always reciprocated, but there’s an understanding there nonetheless, and unfortunately Jason WILL get extremely offended and possibly violent on Dick’s behalf if he hears him at all insulted.

My little sister and I are only just barely getting along and I still have to fake so much of it because she reminds me far too much of myself when I was younger and it doesn’t sit right, I’d love to avoid her, but she so clearly craves affirmation and I feel like I’m the only one who sees it so I have to be the nice one who treats her like a person and honestly that’s okay too, I’m happy with that too! And maybe that’s Tim and Damian; you don’t need to LIKE your sibling to be decent to them and have concern for their well-being! Tolerance is a relationship!

And, like, obviously my relationships with my siblings aren’t a pattern for all Realistic Fictional Siblings everywhere, but idk, I feel like everything I’ve experienced is a direct contradiction of the classic “one of your siblings is a friend and the rest don’t really matter much.” 

Perhaps I am wrong and it is actually more realistic to only get along with one sibling at a time. But I think that it’d be nice to have a silly made-up alternate universe where it wasn’t that way.