#i apologise for the excessive parenthesis

[lunchtiger]

Me learning about the existence of Duke Thomas and Stephanie Brown was very much a "I've only had them for an hour but anything happened to them I'll kill everyone in this room and then myself" moment. I honestly don't know much about them but even the little I do know puts them high on my "I wanna see more" list but like... So many representations of the Bat Family leave them out and honestly, What The Fuck™ more under the cut-

I wish I could pinpoint what it is, but like, why are Steph and Cass and Duke (and Harper too? I don't know anything about her, I'm trying to catch up with lore and failing) left out of the family portraits (fanart, comics, merch, etc) when Babs is constantly featured? My understanding of the situation is vague at best, and I know not everyone (me included) is caught up with the goings on of the comics, so Babs seems to have gotten included by virtue of time, even though she, like Stephanie, is separate from the Waynes both by circumstance and intention. But if that's the case, then logically, the name or legal guardianship isn't important so much as Batman becoming a story about found family. And if that's true, then where's the rest of the family in this scenario? I'm having a hard time believing it's an ignorance issue from the side of official DC given that, according to my quick googles, Stephanie has been around for 30 frickin' years (7 more years than Cass and most of my entire life but WFA was how I learned about her?) and Duke has been a character for about 9 years, so what the hell? Granted, I can't say I that comics are a hobby of mine in that I never had the opportunity to keep up with them, and by the time I did have the means in the early 2000's, it felt like all of the life and action had been sucked out of them in an ill-advised attempt to make comics (Marvel especially leaned hard into this) "for grown-ups" so I can imagine if that's the only medium these characters are represented in, that they wouldn't exactly be in the forefront in terms of visibility for your average person that has a more casual interest in comics/superheroes. I guess my question is are their omissions intentional sinister or otherwise? Or is it an issue of complexity (I couldn't imagine trying to write and keep track of... *counts on hands* 8? Bat-children, Bat-dad and Bat-gramps) in a necessarily limited timeframe? (comics are still 32 pages plus adverts, right?)