#someone take Damian away from Waid

[arabian-batboy]

“This character’s development is always erased and he’s constantly reset to an annoying brat, I trust that this will not happen under your writing?“

“Oh, unquestionably! We will definitely fuck him up and make him suffer!“

Sir.......you didn’t even answer the question, suffering isn’t development.

[nightsstarr]

Hot take: Demonfire isn’t incest

I wanted to preface this post by acknowledging that this is a controversial topic. If I get a whiff of incest I usually keep pretty far away and I'm really going to actually try to explain why I feel like Mar'i Grayson/Ibn al Xu'ffasch or Damian Wayne is not incest. If you just want to fight about it I'm not interested in that, but if you actually want to have a discussion I'd prefer to do it over asks or messages rather than reblogs and replies because I don't need to be fielding responses from people piling up and attacking me.

Mar'i Grayson is not a canon character. People like to insert her into the canon/fanon universe by deaging her to a toddler and leaving Damian the age he is in canon comics and inserting him into some nuclear Grayson family where Dick and Kory are the parents and Damian and Mar'i are the children. This take is cute and the most prevalent, but it's not canon and has no basis on judging the characters. I think that people forget this and get very angry when people play around with the family dynamic of the Graysons, and this is a huge factor in the incest argument.

Mar'i Grayson is only canon to Earth-22, the universe of Kingdom Come. Kingdom Come was very popular when it first came out in 1998 and it has a spin-off mini-series featuring Mar'i Grayson trying to put together a team of her friends to save their universe from erasure. This arc crossed over into the canon comic Titans and is probably where a lot of people first saw her.

In Earth-22, Kory has died of an ambiguous illness and Dick and Mar'i have a contentious relationship. One of their first scenes together in the Nightstar book of the mini-series shows Mar'i literally throwing starbolts at him. Mar'i has also been estranged from Bruce, since Bruce is regarded as a more aggressive vigilante. Dick appears not to have a good relationship with him or any relationship at all.

On this Earth, vigilantes have become violent and dangerous to civilians in Superman's absence. When Superman returns, he is dismayed to see what has happened to the vigilantes and he tries to reform them. He forms of team of good guy vigilantes who want to stop those who have become too violent, and on his team are Wonder Woman and Red Robin AKA Dick Grayson. He ends up going too far and just imprisoning most of the other vigilantes, and Batman gathers his own team of vigilantes called the Outsiders to oppose Superman.

One of the most interesting things about Mar'i Grayson is that she seems to realize that the vigilantes are too powerful and have become corrupt, and she teams up with Batman in an effort to find a way to stop the aggressive vigilantes without imprisoning them indefinitely. For me, this was when I really started to fall in love with Mar'i. As someone who has a pretty bad relationship with my own father, it seemed really cool to me that she was able to make her own decision about something so important and stand up to her father to do what she thinks is right.

I know I've said a lot already, but I realize that a lot of people haven't read Kingdom Come and I think it's important to understand the context to really know Mar'i's character. Basically, Mar'i Grayson is headstrong, she doesn't just do what her father wants her to do, she's had no relationship with Bruce throughout her adult life, and she reconnects with him by defying her father. Mar'i does still love her father, and she saves his life by flying him away from an atom bomb.

Now onto Ibn. He ends up being pretty pivotal to the plot. He teams up with Lex Luthor's Mankind Liberation Front, which is basically a bad-guy Justice League that wants to have the villains in control. He ends up double crossing the MLF and was teamed up with Bruce the whole time and helps save the day, sort of. We find out in his book in the mini-series that he was raised by Ra's al Ghul and NOT Bruce, and that he was tortured and buried alive as part if his assassin training and he's pretty traumatized by that.

So to recap: Ibn and Mar'i both had no contact with Bruce any time before they were fully grown adults. They don't even meet each other until the last installment of Kingdom Come, and it's clear that they're mutually attracted to each other.

To me, this setup works because it seems more like their love and yes, sexual attraction, is pulling the batfamily back together. At the end of these events, while Mar'i is in love with Ibn, she has a better relationship with her father, an actual relationship with Bruce, and she and Ibn have this crazy passionate relationship where they try to help each other deal with their anger, which is an issue for both of them  in healthy ways. The only time incest is ever brought up is by Dick, who is only bringing it up because he objects to his daughter dating the heir to the League of Assassins. Mar'i brushes him off because she's already made it clear that her father can't make her decisions for her.

Mar'i Grayson is so important to me because her entire arc in Kingdom Come is centered around her desire to make her own decisions for herself. She forges her own relationships with people important to her but she still ultimately forgives her father, and even realizes how important he is to her.

I think that's a really great journey for a character who's really only a side character. I love how strong and sure of herself she is.

When people try to reduce their relationship to an uncle/niece relationship, it really defeats the entire purpose of Mar'i's arc in Kingdom Come. She's a grown woman who has made a decision she feels comfortable with and she explains this to her father, and then for people to literally subvert her whole arc and diminish the relationships she built from scratch to who her father is really squashes any agency and independence she shows us.

And, because it's related, I want to defend calling Ibn Damian instead of Ibn. The only name he's given in Kingdom come is Ibn al Xu’ffasch, which is really not a name at all and translated from Arabic means son of the bat. I love Kingdom Come but I feel that it's racist of Waid never to have given him a proper name, and because Damian is the name of Bruce and Talia in canon, I think it's much more appropriate to call him that. Ibn al Xu’ffasch is a title, not a name, and I guess Waid thought it sounded cool or whatever. Also Ra’s doesn’t have a name, his name is also a title (Head of the Demon), but Talia and Nyssa have names so I don’t think this is a good reason.

If Mar'i Grayson was dropped into the canon universe the way it's set up right now, and she had a good relationship with both her parents and with Bruce, then yeah! I concede that it would feel incestuous. But I really don't know many people who ship it in terms of the canon comics. I'm just really tired of people who haven't read Kingdom Come interpreting it as incest without bothering to take the context into consideration. Mar'i Grayson's arc is incredibly empowering to me as a woman with a complicated family, who lost her mother, who doesn't get along with her father, who has a complicated relationship with her grandparents. The fact that people are so quick to take all that away without a thought as to what it actually means is pretty sucky and I just wanted to get my two cents out there.

Because I'm sure some people are thinking about it, I've seen the meme going that if you need to defend something from being incest it's not a good start. But I think that people lately are having a problem where if something seems controversial nobody wants to think critically about it because they're worried they might be giving stock to something morally wrong. Which is a huge problem that definitely has ramifications in real life. If you really think that demonfire is incest after reading this, that's fine and I purposefully never add the Mar'i or Damian tags to any demonfire content because I'm trying to be courteous. But I had to say something because I've never seen someone defend them outside of an active argument.

TL;DR: Demonfire isn't incest unless you take it totally out of context. Demonfire is part of Mar'i's extremely empowering arc in Kingdom Come about asserting her own identity that's separate from the men in her life. Their relationship is empowering to both parties which is kind of rare in comic relationships and part of why I love it so much. Ibn's name is swapped out for Damian's name commonly even though they aren't the same character because they are mirrors, and it's kind of racist that Waid never gave him a real name.