#i rly wanted ppl to walk away with a better tim than i had written in 2019

[yellowocaballero]

just rereading your reverse robins au...i have to say, i don't think anyone understands tim drake like you do. by far the most superior reverse robins au to ever exist. and it's not like tim is the only character you understand either! you get them all! it's earthshattering & spectacular.

I would love to demur and go "oh, surely I'm not the only one who understands Tim Drake and writes a suitably unhinged Tim just as unhinged as in the comics -"

No. I am. You guys need to shape up about writing Tim. What is with this sadboy 'I just want a family' 'where's my coffee' woobie stuff. Go back and read the comics. This man is fucking insane.

I've talked before on this blog about how I finagled writing a Tim who is very much unlike any Tim, but who still feels the same. The man REALLY canonically has an addictive/obsessive personality (complete with deeply escapist tendencies and disregard for if the object of addiction is dangerous/bad for him - it is the profile of an addict). We feel that, because it's his personality in the comics, and even though no sane person would write the kid with a coke addiction we still vibe that it fits with what we know of him. Sometimes choosing to write somebody DRASTICALLY out of character can get down into the core of the character better than anything else.

In fanfic people write Tim as perpetually seeking a family, and I think on one level it's true - he LOVED Dick's (guilty.) attention and brotherhood. But I don't think he really had a father relationship with Bruce and I don't think he really wanted it. Man literally tried to falsify an uncle so he wouldn't have to suffer adult supervision. Bruce kept him at an emotional arms length because of Jason. When his dad tried to reconnect with Tim as a teenager, Tim did love him and felt guilty for the discord he caused, but he just straight up wasn't emotionally invested in the relationship(and not really for abuse reasons - comic split between bad parents/abusive parents is uhh ill-done, but I think Jack is almost never written as an abusive parent with authorial intent, which imho is the important thing). Tim holds adults and family figures at arms length. He's close with Young Justice, but they never even know his ID - he loves them, but he's not intimate with them. He is a cold person and he never really tries for anything different, when he has something different he has NO idea what to do with it, and I don't think he really wants it. But like that doesn't fit Batman sad baby adoption narrative soooo

I think at the end of the day what Tim is defined by is loss and absence, and it can never be defined by presence because Tim is no longer a person who can accept that. He is the single most interconnected character in the Batfam (DC was pushing for a lot of #teenheroes at the time and he was buddies with ALL of them), but all of those relationships have an absence where Tim is pathologically incapable of vulnerability. His life is comedically, comic book sad - he has lost a dad, a mom, a step-mom, an adoptive dad (400% PARENTAL MORTALITY RATE), a girlfriend, a best friend, and another best friend. That is NUTS. And cuz comics are kinda whatever about things, he just goes on his way. Comics don't acknowledge these things. But what you end up with is a Tim, who one way or another is always alone, and who always accepts that.

I couldn't quite express everything I wanted to express with Tim in the prophetic spring, but by the Cass story I had improved as a writer enough to show what I wanted to show. Tim is an old character with a lot of stuff going on, so I could basically pick any emotional throughline I wanted, but I picked for me what I think has defined his life. Tim's story was about a child who had been depressed since he could remember. Tim is the story of a lot of victims of emotional neglect and who live their lives in deep depression that is never acknowledged. He is never vulnerable for a second (even with Cass - and that's what Cass struggles with during that story, how vulnerability isn't knowing but saying), and the depression is sublimated/repressed and never acknowledged cuz Bruce does the same damn thing and he didn't notice lol.

In a way, in that story, Tim's mental health and drug addiction spiral is a good thing. Tim loudly and publicly developing a drug addiction was his way of asking for help, his way of finally screaming that he was in pain. Worst possible way. But it was kind of the only way he could, because Tim didn't know how to ask for help, because he didn't know how to be vulnerable. He could only figure out how to be push everybody away and try to violently throw them out of his life and how to be cruel to them, and it's fucked up that it was his way of asking for help - but Cass knew, and Cass understood. And Cass wasn't going to ignore it anymore.

There are a lot of insanely reliable things about me and it is that I CANNOT shut up when I talk about Tim. Thanks for reading this long-ass diatribe jakldfjlasdf.