#not really by conscious choice i just don't gravitate towards it

[feynavaley]

I don't know why but despite him looking 19 Alfred wears what my dad wears, just he would wear Crocs and socks and fanny packs. Then there was that one time he dressed like a stereotypical English man when he went to the uk. And just he is one of the youngest nation's why does he give such dad vibes

Lool yeah America has no fashion sense to speak of. 🤣🤣 ...And maybe, also because of this, he’s kind of stuck with the way people dressed 40-50 years ago? It isn’t a conscious choice, he just got used to dressing that way and, since he doesn’t really realize (or care) how much fashion has changed he still tends to gravitate towards that style he’s familiar with, at times. Especially if he has to dress semi-formal. (Although he also wears lots of modern clothes such as hoodies and graphic t-shirts.)

[toflyandfall]

I just saw a photo of "What persona. Dick Grayson isn't a mask. Not like Bruce Wayne is" from Detective Comics #725 and I find it interesting that Dick and the rest of the bats, with the exception of Bruce, don't wear "masks" per se. They are who they are with or without the domino mask/helmet. The only time I can really think of Dick faking things is when he pretended to be an incompetent BPD cop. How was he able to avoid creating and living, half the time, through a "persona" like "Brucie"?

Oooh, this is a lovely, meaty question.  There’s a lot more analysis of Bruce than I planned because let’s be real, it’s kinda weirder for a guy to run around with half a dozen personas than for someone else to run around as himself.  I hope you still find it interesting, but if you want to skip straight to the more Dick-centric stuff, head under the readmore.

A simple but significant factor is that Dick thrives on the company of people in a way that Bruce does not.  I suspect if you talk honestly to many introverts, you will find they too have an extroverted ‘mask’ they put on to the larger world, though probably not quite so extreme.

Another factor is that the civilian social circles Dick and Bruce travel in are vastly different.  Though they each have a reason for being in those circles, that difference itself enables Dick to escape much of the scrutiny that Bruce’s public identity undergoes, because he doesn’t frequently associate with the much more media-hounded elite.

An interesting thing here is that the large difference in social circles between their civilian lives is actually caused by their own personal similarities: they are 100% committed work-a-holics.  It’s just that they have differing civilian approaches to their goals.

I want to start with Bruce because as you point out, his use of persona is distinct among the bats and his reasons for using them in part explain why Dick and the other bats do not.

Bruce is a child of privilege, he has always lived a lifestyle of privilege, regardless of the tragedies that have occurred during it, and his default view of the world, through no fault of his own, is natively that of the extreme upper class.  This drastically influences his perspective and approach to change, and changing the world is his perpetual goal, the reason he put on the suit in the first place.

Bruce works a top-down society approach toward systemic change, and he works it all the time.  This is actually my favorite but woefully under-emphasized part of him: he is not just someone who punches people on the street ‘for justice’, he uses his company, his money, and his social position toward substantial systemic change. This post does a wonderful job covering the ways he does this through his corporations and personal wealth, as does this one.  I cannot recommend either enough because I constantly want to push even the most casual Batman fans to understand: Bruce Wayne is not just a violent punchy puncher man.  He is a traumatized person genuinely trying to use all his resources including himself to make the world safer.

Detective Comics #725

Bruce has many personas he maintains, and he uses all of them according to what suits his need--Batman for places the law can’t go, Bruce Wayne the CEO pushing for systemic changes, Matches Malone for street information, and Brucie the society high roller for society information and social influencing.  He is rarely ever not in a persona and simply ‘Bruce’.

His top-down perspective of enacting change are what dictated the usage and necessity of these personas. He has the means and capacity to basically disappear from society if he so chose--he in fact does so to train during his younger years so successfully they don’t even know how long he was actually gone. 

The Batman Files

So he doesn’t need the personas.  Not Bruce Wayne, CEO, or Brucie, or any of them really, to protect his identity.  That tells us that Brucie is a deliberate choice he made at some point.  He could have been a recluse billionaire Batman indefinitely.  Even though he fully has the status and means to not maintain a job or a persona or, let’s be frank, a life outside the mask at all, it’s his own work-a-holicness that led to the creation of his public personas.  He’s an obsessive strategist, so if Brucie is a choice, that leads us to why?

Bruce does many philanthropic things with his money, but he isn’t the only rich person around, especially not in a city as old and corrupt as Gotham.   But he’s one of the very few ones doing good with it.

The comic you mentioned has a very beautiful moment where Bruce touches on that, and in full context you can feel how consumed he is by this goal of creating the Gotham his parents would have wanted.  Batman mentions he never sees himself in that place, and the morbid interpretation is that the city kills him before he reaches it, but the hopeful interpretation is that in that shining city, Bruce Wayne and Batman and Brucie and all his masks will no longer be needed.

Detective Comics #725

Back in the old days they’d call it noblesse oblige: the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged. Thomas and Martha Wayne ingrained this feeling of responsibility into Bruce by example, and as all things related to them, he obsesses over it.  It urges him to fulfill expectations within segments of society he finds onorous for the betterment of society as a whole in order to carry out their unfinished works.

Enter Brucie.

Brucie serves a two-fold purpose.  Since Bruce has chosen to maintain personas among society, it becomes a false face to justify any oddities Batman might bring into the life of Bruce Wayne by setting himself up as a eccentric, popular social scion.  But that persona itself also allows him to manipulate the upper crust of society.

I have some insider perspective on the kind of society events Brucie attends.  They’re all about the who’s who of making connections, name-dropping and networking, and unspoken class-based elitism.  Charity events among the upper class have these things at the forefront and the cause is the background.  You don’t get your hands dirty, you don’t go out and make change yourself, you pay money to be socially seen and sometimes it happens to go towards a philanthropic cause.  If you want to raise money from the rich and keep people with deep pockets coming in the door, you have to have social currency yourself. This is where, and why, Brucie comes in.  I believe Brucie ws crafted to maintain Batman’s cover but still attempt to carry on his parents’ legacy to grease the wheels of the rich in the directions he chooses: one of generosity towards those less privileged. 

Superman/Batman #51

The inevitable flaw of Bruce’s approach to his personas and their philanthropy is that in a city rife with corruption, money distributed from the top has many opportunities to disappear well before it reaches the bottom.  As in many of ways they are complements to each other, Dick’s approach balances that out, because his approach to helping his fellow man starts out at the street level...literally.

Nightwing #153 (Nightwing: The Great Leap)

Dick, we know, does not come from privilege.  His mother was from a middle class family before she joined the circus, and despite being world famous athletes, most circus workers are lower to middle class.  The people he grew up with, was comfortable with, were all working folk who expected everyone to pull their weight right alongside each other.  He enacts this everyone-together approach in almost all aspects and phases of his life. 

Batman #615

Even once he had settled into being Robin and adapted to living at the manor, he didn’t feel belonging to a culture of privilege, materialism, or high society. He preferred shotgun in the limo to chat with the driver to riding fancy in the back.  Once he was able to start making his own decisions about where and how he lived, despite having both Bruce’s money and then later inheriting a substantial amount of his own, he chose mostly lower-class communal places.

Batman Black and White #6

Dick also doesn’t see the value of throwing money at a problem when there is an option to fix it with his own hands.  We see this frequently, from building his own car instead of buying a finished one or outsourcing the work, to deciding the best way to clean out the BPD was to start at the bottom and work his way up (literally), to quitting college because his classes never got prioritized over crimesolving.  Most of his day jobs ended for similar reasons. 

Nightwing #153 (Nightwing: The Great Leap)

Despite the showmanship training, he gravitates away from spotlight on the rich and wealthy, who are notoriously the kind of people who do not get their hands dirty or go out and take care of things themselves, and prefers to find or build communities around the kind of people who do.

Finally, Dick is an extrovert.  He doesn’t need to act extroverted as Brucie does because he is extroverted.  He likes people and likes being around people.  Whether by conscious choice or not, he tends to put himself in situations where he is surrounded by people in nearly all aspects of his life.  He chooses apartment buildings whose occupants frequently pass each other on the stairs; jobs that involve interacting with many co-workers, patrons, or students; and collects superhero teammates like Boy Scout badges.  And all of these behaviors come very naturally to him.  

He doesn’t need a mask or a role or a persona for those kind of interactions; his mask is pre-supplied as “neighbor” or “co-worker” or “teacher” by the situations he puts himself in.  It helps make him an exemplary leader, because just by acting authentically to himself, he automatically builds up little communities around him any time he arrives somewhere.

Bruce, on the other hand, is an introvert.  For him, interacting with people isn’t easy, automatic, or comfortable unless it has a purpose, but as a strategist, he knows the necessity of human interaction as a catalyst to achieving dynamic change. So he adapts personas to suit people’s expectations.  Extroverts have more social currency; the life of the party can generate more resources than a brooding wallflower.  

So, it boils down to just a few elements: Dick believes in living and interacting at the street level to accomplish the things that he wants to, and he is extroverted enough that the level of social interaction that entails is not a burden to him.  He surrounds himself with the types of people he is more familiar or perhaps more comfortable with, which happens to keep him further out from the media’s eye than associating with the upper crust does. The lower profile is more incidental than intentional, but it lessens his need to have a cover story for every single bruise and lets him get away with even less of a ‘persona’.

Bruce, on the other hand, is introverted and follows a more classist view that systemic change needs to be effected from the top down.   His personas are more of a self-assumed duty than a necessity, as a way of trying to carry out his parents’ legacy.  Any of his children could have chosen to follow his path in business or the high society limelight, but the sense of obligation toward it is something personal to him that most of them don’t share.

[musetotheworld]

Hail, great prompt-taker! Can I have a little Cat Grant/Lena Luthor? Kara can join, I really don't mind, but mostly, Cat and Lena fluff. It can even happen in the An Evening Out universe. Just need some Cat Grant/Lena Luthor interactions because rare!pair hurts.

Whoops this took longer than I intended. Sorry about that! I’ve got a crazy backlog of challenge stuff I’m working on, but I got stuck and figured I’d finish this up. Hope it fits what you were wanting!

“Hey, where’s Kara?” Lena asks softly as she kicks off her heels, surprised to see Cat already home without Kara next to her. Usually Cat is only home this early if Kara has dragged her away from CatCo. Then again Lena’s home earlier than usual too after a meeting had been rescheduled, so she knows it happens sometimes. Just not usually to Cat.

“She took Carter to some science retreat he’s been begging to attend. Hopefully this time she avoids insulting one of the leading experts in astrophysics to his face,” Cat says with a softly amused smirk, one that Lena soon echoes. That had been an interesting night for them all.

“To be fair, she didn’t realize he could hear her,” Lena points out, playfully defending Kara since she’s not there to defend herself.

“Yes, and how an alien with literal super hearing can miss a man who drones on as much as he does I will never understand. He was literally right next to her the entire time, terrorizing a group of middle schoolers with words I swear even he doesn’t recognize.” Cat’s tone is dry, and Lena can’t help the small chuckle that escapes as she pours herself a glass of wine from the bottle Cat had left open for her.

“I think she was a little focused,” Lena says, remembering back to that day and the way Kara had been unable to keep her criticisms to herself. It didn’t matter that no one had understood her or even had a hope of knowing what she was talking about, her obvious irritation and passion had been utterly endearing.

Cat hums thoughtfully as Lena sits next to her, leaning closer without conscious thought. Once upon a time neither woman had been big on physical displays of affection, but after dating Kara that particular hesitation had completely faded. Even when the Kryptonian wasn’t around to pull them in Cat and Lena seemed to gravitate towards one another. It was familiar and comforting in a way both women had denied themselves for years.

Kara had been the reason they’d both changed, the driving force that had been able to overcome each woman’s legendary stubbornness. She was impossible to deny, not that they’d tried too hard. After all, the only thing more potent than Kara’s smile was her pout, and both women had quickly learned to avoid it as much as possible.

But it was moments like these, when Kara wasn’t there tucked between them, that proved it wasn’t just Kara’s doing. Lena and Cat had both been afraid that it would be, at least in the beginning. After all, Kara was the reason they’d gotten together. Without her, there might have been some vague chance they would find each other, but it wasn’t likely. They were both too walled off, any flashes of attraction would likely have been dismissed as momentary distractions.

And what a tragedy that would have been.

Lena isn’t often one for poetic ramblings or overly sentimental notions. She’d been raised a Luthor after all, and such things were a weakness. But this massive change in her life, this complete reversal of where she’d thought she’d end up, sometimes it deserves a little bit of whimsy.

Like when she’d had Kara’s office filled with flowers, or when she’d bought out and liquidated a small media station that dared to question Cat’s role in her son’s life. Little things like that.

She’s actually happy in a relationship in a way she never would have expected. Not just the fact that she’s in a relationship with two women, but that she’s in a relationship at all. Luthors didn’t do happiness, they did appearances. And here she is in a relationship that had caused a scandal that’s only just started to die down thanks to Cat’s determined efforts, putting her happiness over the Luthor name.

And the scary part is, she doesn’t even care.

She had at the beginning, the first time the press had gotten wind of their relationship. They hadn’t intended to take it public, for obvious reasons. But when given the choice to back down or square up, they hadn’t hesitated. What had been built between all three of them was too important for that. And it’s night like tonight that truly drive that home.

“You know, it’s her Earth birthday next month,” Cat says after they both relax into each other. “That’s why I’m home early, to get started on the planning while she’s not close enough to spy.”

“She is entirely too curious for her own good,” Lena agrees with a smile. “So what’s the plan? You know she’ll be with Alex that night. And you’re forbidden to do anything too ‘extravagant’ after what happened your first year together.”

“And you’re forbidden to mention that,” Cat says with a glare that holds just enough heat to make Lena want to laugh. She still doesn’t know the full story, but the reaction from Cat is always worth it. “But I had a thought earlier. I’m not allowed, thanks to that slight miscalculation, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t. And between the two of us, I’m sure we can avoid a repeat.”

“Oh no,” Lena says, already shaking her head before Cat finishes. “I’ve been banished to the guest room before, I have no interest in repeating that experience, even if you’re banished with me.”

Cat’s pout is almost as potent as Kara’s, and Lena feels her resolve waver until the stops to consider the worst case scenario. Kara might just banish them to the couches and lock the door to the guest room as punishment for trying this. And as comfortable as the couches are to sit on, Lena doesn’t think her back can take an entire night on one. The few times they’ve taken advantage of Carter’s absence to save time usually spent relocating to the bedroom have made it clear that they lack the long term support needed for a comfortable night.

“Fine then, help me plan something she’ll appreciate,” Cat says with a huff, sitting back as if she’s upset with Lena. But she doesn’t move far, and Lena knows an act when she sees one. Cat might have been hoping Lena would give in, but she’s smart enough to know when she’s beat.

“Well, we have to include food,” Lena says, laughing when Cat swats at her. “Hey, don’t ask for help if you don’t want it.”

“Of course we have to include food, you insufferable Luthor,” Cat says, “I was looking for something actually helpful. If you’re going to state the obvious I’ll get Carter to help me.” The playful use of her family name as an insult might once have been enough to make Lena withdraw, but after as long as they’ve been together she’s able to take it in the spirit it’s meant. She just laughs and gives Cat an evil smirk she’d perfected during the years spent playing that part.

“You know as well as I do that as long as we’re there, and we bring food with us, Kara will love it no matter what,” Lena points out. “You just don’t want to do the planning and since it’s work related you can’t have your assistant do it for you.”

“When did you figure me out?” Cat asks with a sigh, leaning back into Lena’s side. “Kara’s been giving you hints again, hasn’t she?”

“Or I’ve just paid attention,” Lena teases, pulling Cat closer. “If you want me to put something together, I will. All you have to do is ask.”

“I don’t want to push it off on you,” Cat says quickly, and Lena smiles.

“I know. But we both know you’ll go overboard and end up in the guest room, and neither of us want that.” Lena can’t sleep without both women next to her anymore, no matter where she is. The nights that she’s away on business are the worst, followed by the nights Cat is, or the ones that Kara has some emergency or another to deal with. Having Cat in the guest room would be as much punishment for her as it would be for Cat.

“I wouldn’t be that bad,” Cat scoffs, but she won’t look up to meet Lena’s eyes. “I can at least go all out for your birthday, can’t I?”

“I already took that week off and made sure nothing was scheduled for the L-Corp convention room that evening,” Lena says with a smile.

“Please, CatCo has a much better location available,” Cat disagrees, and Lena laughs at the familiar argument between them. Two CEOs in one relationship, even two CEOs with wildly different companies, makes for plenty of friendly competition.

“Well, you have six months to come around,” Lena teases, feeling the change in Cat’s posture as she does.

“If it takes me six months, you’re doing something wrong,” she teases right back, and Lena smirks, taking the challenge.

“How long do we have until they get back?”

“Two hours at least.”

“If I can make you come six times before then, we have it at L-Corp.”

“Deal.”