#that's kind of alive on its own and doesn't adhere to any actual expectations of space

[ichorblossoms]

having ttw Thoughts while reading house of leaves but it's nothing that's lead to a breakthrough yet so i'm just like soaking in the vibes

[bigskydreaming]

Do you ever get weirded out when people insist that Dick is a "control-freak?" I don't really have a good counterargument for that supposed statement, but that just doesn't really click for me... It kinda feels like one of those fanon things that puts a ton of unrealistic pressure on Dick to be a "perfect being" if you know what I mean....

Yes and no? Like I just mean with this, this is one of those things that I actually do think is part of his character.....its just that it gets snowballed into being this huge flaw and yet another avenue to criticize or condemn him, rather than just being used to explore WHY Dick is this way.

Like personally, I think one of the biggest similarities between Bruce and Dick despite all their differences is the fact that they both have control freak tendencies.....BUT these manifest in very different ways, and IMO stem from very different mindsets.

Because I feel like Bruce’s control freak tendencies stem from his awareness of his own resources, capabilities and knowledge, all blended in with a thread of ingrained classism that frankly, its just unrealistic to think that a born billionaire managed to avoid being influenced by at all.

I think Bruce’s control freak tendencies spiral out of his brilliant mind’s ability to map out so many scenarios in a way that lets them end in an optimal resolution for everyone involved....but ONLY IF he controls as many of the variables as possible himself, because the variables are what make or break a projection and how much it ends up being fully realized.

Bruce is a control freak because when he’s in his own head, when he’s the one in control of all the many varied elements that have to come together in just the right way at just the right times to allow everything to fall perfectly into place and thread the needle so everyone makes it out alive, nobody has to die, so long as Order is allowed access to everything it needs in order to control an outcome, it will prevail and the senseless Chaos that has so often stolen the things Bruce loves and cherishes most in ways he sees as always being preventable, could have been avoided, if only he’d been able to control more of the situation than he actually had at the time........

When Bruce retreats into his own mind to analyze things and project outcomes and try and come up with the one course of action that will accomplish all of his intended goals without anyone being hurt......because he is the master of his own universe there in his own mind, he’s in complete charge of his thoughts, his brain always having been his greatest and ultimate weapon......because there’s nothing interfering with his control of all the little minutiae that need to happen just so in order for his seemingly impossible plans to come together properly......there, Bruce can see it all play out perfectly. A perfect outcome, nobody hurt, nobody losing anything, everyone accomplishing everything they needed to accomplish in order to rate the plan an unmitigated success.

But that’s only in his own head. Where he controls everything. The real world is not so easily controlled and shaped despite his best efforts and considerable reach......and thus, in my mind, the eternal tragedy of Bruce.

Because his control freak tendencies do come from a genuine place, a good place, a desire to see all his loved ones, and everyone else just safe and happy and protected and ALIVE...

But those good intentions butt heads with the fact that so many of the variables he tries his best to control are actually y’know....expressions of other peoples’ free will that he has no right to override or manipulate for them, no matter that he does so with the best of intentions.

Its okay to play God in your own head, in your own assessment of a situation as you run through how you would LIKE for it to play out, ideally.

But that doesn’t mean its okay to play God like that and to that extent in your real life, influencing and superseding the agencies of those closest to you to arrange them all like pieces on a chessboard because you’re convinced you are right and you know best.

Because the thing is - the tragedy - is that Bruce undeniably IS brilliant. His mind probably works in ways most people couldn’t even comprehend. His ability to analyze so many disparate variables and factors in his head and calculate projected outcomes, is like....second to none.

So the thing is.....in his own head, when Bruce maps out solutions to the various crises he comes face to face with.........with him controlling all the variables in play there, he truly does find an optimal outcome most of the time, I think. That’s the tragedy. I believe he really is able to 90% of the time calculate a strategy that could safely navigate everyone of his loved ones and teammates and allies through whatever dangers they face and see them safely through to the other side....but ONLY if he controls the majority of the variables, INCLUDING the actions of all those people. In essence...only if they all do EXACTLY what he tells them to, and just takes it on faith that he is right and knows what he’s doing and listening to him now will keep everyone alive.

And unfortunately, that’s just....not something you can ask of people, let alone expect. No matter how much they trust you, the kind of faith that’s asking (usually in life or death situations and the heat of the moment)....that demands ABSOLUTE certainty that this man has found the one truly optimal solution to their crisis, no matter what anyone else says to the contrary - and most of those other voices usually belonging to geniuses in their own rights. And especially when the things Bruce is asking of them or telling them to do flies in the face of other heroes’ own well-honed instincts that have kept them alive through years and even decades of being a superhero in their own right, without Bruce constantly looking over their shoulder advising them....sometimes, that’s just not something even people who know and trust him are going to be able to do.

Because as brilliant as Bruce is, he’s still human. He’s not actually God, he’s not infallible. He CAN be wrong. He HAS been wrong, and will be again. Even if he’s only wrong one out of ten times as opposed to most peoples’ 50/50 split.....that is still a margin of error, and ANY possibility of error, even a one in ten chance that Bruce isn’t right this time, he missed something or didn’t account for something or sheer dumb chance could potentially strike at just the single most critical moment and derail his whole strategy no matter how ingenious it was.....

*Shrugs* Well, when you’re talking life or death stakes, sometimes even just that one in ten chance this might be one of the times Bruce is wrong means that other experienced heroes, even his own family like Dick, have to do what’s right in their eyes, what makes sense to THEM, and not being able to see the world the way Bruce does, see the strategy he’s concocted run through its projections seamlessly and without a hitch in his mind......they sometimes have to say I do trust you, but I also have to trust myself as I’ve gotten this far, and every instinct, all my experience as a hero myself is telling me I have to go a different way on this one.

And the tragedy of Bruce is every single time someone does that, someone makes a choice he advised against instead of adhering to what he told them to do......he can still see in his mind, the shining perfect strategy as he’d envisioned it, still running from Point A to Point B without a single hitch as long as everyone in his mind’s eye performs exactly according to the strategy he’s mapped out....and when that happens, the scenario, the projection ends exactly as it always ends from the very first time he mapped it out and ran through it in his head, checking for flaws.

In his head, no matter how disastrously things might have gone wrong in real life, the second they diverged from Bruce’s plan or someone acted in a way Bruce had specifically advised against.......in his head, where those things don’t happen, where everything goes exactly according to his plan, where he has total, perfect control......there, his projections whether imagined ahead of time or running through them in hindsight, always arrive at the same conclusion:

The optimal outcome he was aiming for. The one where everyone made it home alive and safe, where all objectives were accomplished, where the good guys won and after the movie, Bruce and his parents got ice cream and then went home and nothing unanticipated happened or went wrong, because he had it all under control, as long as everything adhered exactly to his plan.

And that’s a hell of a thing to have to live with....a crystal clear image of things ending the way you wanted them to, the way everyone wanted them to....if only everyone had LISTENED to you and done exactly as you said instead of refusing to trust you or going off script and doing their own thing.

So Bruce is a control freak, IMO, but for a reason.....and that reason is such that no matter how many times his control freak tendencies clash with his childrens’ independence, his teammates’ trust, he can’t view it as a solution, to just rid himself of those tendencies.....because they WORK. When allowed to. He’s not controlling just for the sake of being controlling, he’s just trying desperately to keep as many people as possible ALIVE by the time he returns home every morning.......and even though he’s intelligent enough and self-aware enough to see where those very same tendencies cause major problems in his interactions and relationships with even his own children....I think Bruce is constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place, unable to keep himself from weighing that against his success rate, and how often embracing his control freak tendencies instead of dismissing them has led to an optimal outcome, and kept everyone safe, that he was trying to keep safe.

So I get it, even as it causes clear problems for a character I favor more than Bruce.

Because see, like I said at the start, I do think Dick has control freak tendencies too....but the problem I have with talking about them, or seeing them talked about elsewhere in fandom, is that I truly don’t think its possible to divorce Dick’s control freak tendencies FROM how Bruce’s impacted him while growing up.

Basically....you can’t productively talk about this tendency of Dick’s, IMO, unless you’re willing to also talk about Bruce’s control freak tendencies and how and in what ways they negatively impact his children, like Dick.

Because Bruce and Dick, while similar, are not the same and are never going to be the same, because there’s no avoiding the fact that Bruce is a direct and pivotal - most pivotal, lbr - influencer on Dick’s life, and the man he grows up to become.

And Bruce, as stated....is a control freak. And he already was, before Dick ever set foot in the manor. 

But Bruce grew into his control freak tendencies as a reaction to his trauma, the shock of the unanticipated stealing everything from him, in ways that later, in hindsight, Bruce can’t help but view as being entirely preventable, if only things had gone differently that night, if people had made different choices, if someone had CONTROLLED the situation.

Bruce’s tendencies grew out of a failure to react properly, and grew INTO an extreme form of proactiveness. Bruce doesn’t wait for things to happen, if he can help it, because too often that means by the time you act, its already too late. Bruce prepares as much as humanly possible. He acts preemptively to take out threats before they can become actual threats. He forms contingencies way ahead of ever needing them, because by the time he needs them, he knows he won’t have the time needed to properly map a plan out from scratch/

But this kind of proactive approach to life as a superhero - a mindset he never truly ever leaves behind in the Cave even though he changes before going upstairs, because the line between Bruce and Batman is far too blurred, there is no real distinction in Bruce’s mind...he’s ALWAYS Batman, and thus he’s ALWAYS on guard and doing his best to be prepared.

However, the caveat to that is that means that a lot of time, a lot of his life and how he goes about living it......is according to plans he’s mapped out to preempt or stave off or avoid even POTENTIAL problems or dangers in his day to day life.

In essence....he spends a lot of his life choosing his course of action based on not just avoiding existing threats....but even potential threats, whether or not they ever end up being something he had to be concerned about.

And the thing that gets left out of criticism of Dick’s control freak tendencies IMO....is this is Dick’s father. This is the man who raised him, for MUCH longer than any other Batkid has been raised by him. This is the way Dick grew up.

And it was fine at first! When he was younger, a kid, it didn’t bother him to live his life according to Bruce’s advice and wishes and plans, because children that young, like, they’re USED to parents making a ton of their decisions, steering them towards certain choices because they’re literally too young and too lacking in life experiences to know what the best choice to make even IS.

That’s the way its SUPPOSED to work, and thus, for a long time...it DID work.

But...at a certain point, parents are supposed to pull back, take off the training wheels, stamp down their desire to overrule the choices their children make that they view as misguided or disasters waiting to happen, because its their life to live now, and they need to be allowed to do that. For better or for worse.

And the problem was.....Bruce didn’t do that. Because I honestly don’t think Bruce knows HOW to do that. Because when he thinks he knows better than someone else, I don’t think he’s just sure he’s right, I honestly think he can SEE it in his head. He’s face to face with it, can’t avoid looking at it no matter how determined someone else seems to steer themselves down a far more harmful path, when it would be sooooo easy, in Bruce’s estimation, for them to get what they want without any risk of danger, he can see it so clearly, if only they would just LET HIM STEER.....

And as Dick grew up, grew into himself and his own surety in his own instincts and priorities and choices.......that just....didn’t work for him. At all. Its practically anathema to who he is and what he cares about most, values most for his own life. Its oil to his water. He CAN’T live like that, the very idea chafes at him, probably.....the thought of just surrendering his own choices to someone else’s directive, even if it is his own father, even though he does believe that Bruce only wants what’s best for him and for him to be safe and happy.....

Because the thing is, I don’t think Dick CAN be happy living like that. He is someone who desperately needs the freedom to make his own choices even if they’re the wrong ones, sometimes even especially if they’re the wrong ones.

Because Dick is a product of his own traumas and tragedies just as Bruce is of his own.

And the thing that took Bruce’s parents from him, ruined his life, wrecked everything and put him on the path to becoming the Batman.....was something Bruce sees as avoidable, preventable, with the missing variable being the control he lacked. But the thing is, Bruce always had agency. He grew up the privileged heir of a vastly wealthy and influential family. He NEVER lacked for personal power, for the ability to make choices and have them respected.

So the problem the night his initial tragedy occurred on was not that he was lacking control or agency he normally possessed, that someone else had removed it or countered it......he was the same as always. No, the problem was that even though he had his own personal measure of control, his personal agency....that wasn’t ENOUGH to subvert his tragedy. That on its own was never going to be able to seize control of enough of the variables in the situation that he could then guide it safely to a different outcome, no matter how many times he mapped it out in his head looking back on it. He had his control and agency, but it wasn’t enough....he needed MORE. Only by having more control over the situation, his environs, his person, the influence he could wield on people around him......only that could give him ENOUGH control to influence the high volume of variables needed in any given scenario, to assume control of that situation overall, and be the one most influential in deciding what outcome ultimately resulted from it.

But Dick is another matter entirely, and his situation - for all its parallels to Bruce’s - was always INHERENTLY different.

Because Dick wasn’t born the privileged heir of a family of wealth and power....and even after being taken in by Bruce, that didn’t remove his origins even in the eyes of Gotham society, and no matter how much Bruce’s wealth and connections made Dick’s life better and easier in many ways, merely being raised by him starting at age eight or nine was never going to actually give Dick the entirety of all the privileges Bruce enjoys, and always has, his entire life.

No matter the size of his bank account, the way the general public views Bruce Wayne and the way they view Dick Grayson, the poor circus orphan Bruce took in for some unknown reason....they are entirely different things, and not remotely interchangeable.

Bruce’s problem was that even as much control and agency as he initially possessed, it wasn’t enough to give him as much influence over outcomes as he NEEDED in order to protect people and keep them safe.

Dick’s problem was that from the moment his parents were murdered, he barely ever was even ALLOWED any control over his own life or personal agency at all.

Dick’s tragedy was preventable too - he could have stopped it from happening....if only he could have gotten someone to listen to him about the strange man he saw, to believe him and check things out as a result. But Dick was never the kind of kid Bruce was, even after he came to live with Bruce, because he needed to be the kind of kid people LISTENED to and took at their word in order for so many of the events of those first few years in Gotham to play out differently than they did....and he just wasn’t that kind of kid. 

He was a brown boy from a suspect background and heritage, he was willful and spirited and proud, which led to him clashing frequently with those who tried to look down on him and walk all over him....with him then often facing consequences from adults or authority figures, because.....he wasn’t the kind of kid they listened to and took at his word, about what had actually happened, not when more privileged kids were saying otherwise.

And that pattern has only repeated throughout Dick’s life....not just because of Bruce’s control freak tendencies, but because of classism, because of the prejudices that led CPS to unilaterally declare the environment he’d happily grown up in until then was no fit place for a child, and even freaking JUVIE was a place more ‘fitting’ for him. Dick never got any say about having to stay in Gotham, the city where his parents died, with him stuck and grounded in the one place that held the most painful memories of his life thus far, when previously he’d been a citizen of the world and used to traveling all over, never chained down to one spot, let alone a spot where he’d already lost so much.

And like I said, its only gone on in that same pattern ever since. He’s been brainwashed and had his mind messed with more than practically any other hero, and with some of these instances lasting months and even up to a year at a time. He’s been canonically raped twice and sexually violated and harassed in numerous other ways countless times.

His choice to honor his parents’ memory via his choices of costume and names are never respected or deemed good enough to justify said costumes’ or names existence.....the things he always intends as a memorial, a tribute to the parents he loved and misses always get weaponized against him and made objects of scorn and mockery instead, a reason for people around him to look down on him instead of trying to understand him and why he made the choices he did.

He didn’t get a say in keeping the name his mother gave him, when Bruce fired him and he was forced to come up with an entirely new mantle. He didn’t get a say when Bruce passed that mantle on without even asking him, as though the second Robin had become associated with Batman, that association took priority over all others, even the association with his parents that led him to choose that for his superhero name in the first place.

Despite living with Bruce the longest, Dick has had the least social influence and standing and legal benefits from being Bruce’s son, given that he was Bruce’s ward the entire time he lived with Bruce, his wardship dissolved at eighteen and he had no ties to Bruce whatsoever for at least another couple of years after, at which point he and Bruce finally reconciled, and it was still a couple more years after that when he was finally adopted, the way most of his siblings were adopted while still living at home and getting vastly more security and assurance from being legally bound to Bruce as his children by his choice, a choice that Dick was never offered, not until long after he was used to living on his own, and by necessity had already been forced to come to terms with not being Bruce’s child by adoption - Dick’s adoption has always in reality been more honorary than beneficial in a way he actually needed or could have benefited from, if it’d happened earlier or had been in place when first having issues with Bruce.

Etc, etc, etc.

So like I said way back at the start of this, the problem I have with talk of Dick’s control freak tendencies is NOT that he doesn’t have them - he does, very much so.

Its that you simply can not talk about them without talking about Bruce’s and acknowledging how Bruce’s affect Dick’s, IMO.....because while Bruce’s control freak tendencies are born of a desire to be as proactive as possible.....Dick’s are entirely REACTIVE in nature.

Dick’s a control freak not because he wants to control more than is healthy or acceptable without impinging on others’ agency and choices.......but rather, because he just wants to have the same kind of control and personal agency everyone BUT him seems to be granted in life.

They stem from the fact that so often in his life, even the most basic and personal levels of agency have routinely been stripped from him and denied to him. Bounced around like a pinball at the whims of others, who very rarely consider his opinion about his own life worth even listening to. They’re a reaction to the many times and many ways in which his privacy has been violated by Bruce and his boundaries crossed as though they’re nonexistent - which they are, if Bruce refuses to acknowledge them as existing and respect and abide by them. 

They’re born of his attempt to seize control of ANYTHING he can in order to ground himself, to be able to hang on the NEXT time the ground is ripped out from under him and his whole world is upended just like it was when his parents were killed and when Bruce fired him the first time, and the second time, and when the Titans disbanded, and when Jason died and Bruce hit him and when the woman he slept with was not the woman he was in love with but a virtual stranger who tricked him and started a chain reaction of events and fights and blame and resentment on both sides that ultimately ended in Dick and Jory breaking up. Or when Terra turned out to be a traitor or when he found out he’d been under the Church of Blood’s mental control for a whole year without even knowing it and he now had no idea which of the choices and actions he’d made the past year had been HIS and which had been the Church pulling his strings. Or when Joey turned out to have betrayed the team and then turned out to be possessed and then ended up dead. Or when Donna died or when Jason came back except he tried to kill Tim and instead of coming home devoted himself to becoming a literal crime lord. Or when Tarantula raped him and he was violated in that way for the second time, and Babs dumped him while he was blamed yet again for things that literally weren’t his fault and he was the victim of. Or when Blockbuster burned down the circus that had been his home for the first eight years of his life, just because it was his and he’d been happy there, or when the apartment building he’d gradually over time built into an actual community he was a part of rather than just a building he lived in was destroyed and everyone in it was killed. Or when his entire city was destroyed in part to spite him, specifically, 

Or in the New 52, when he found out that he wasn’t actually the only surviving member of his family....he had a great-grandfather except lol oh wait, whoops, Great Grandpappy is an undead zombie assassin with seriously whack family values and reveals that he’d been selected before birth and was intended to be groomed as a future undead zombie assassin as his ‘destiny’ because his homicidal Pappy he only just met had apparently decided his genes swimming around in Dick’s DNA meant his call to force Dick into a life that would actually span several lifetimes, in servitude and mindless obedience to people who opposed everything he’d ever stood for and fought against every single day of his life as a hero.

And forget about the lack of control Dick had in anything to do with Forever Evil and Spyral, or anything to do with Ric because its not Dick in the driver’s seat there, and lol ON TOP OF THAT it turned out RIC wasn’t even actually in the driver’s seat either, it was the Court of Owls all along, yet again pulling his strings like they thought he was Pinocchio and had a stamp on the bottom of his foot that said Property of William Cobb and His Cult of Crazy Bird-Equivalent-of-Furries.

So yeah. Bottom line is yes, Dick IS a control freak in a lot of ways at a lot of times, but like I often say about his instances of anger.....these are not flaws, these are humanizing aspects of his character that if looked at from his POV rather than just used as a reason to condemn him, they’re completely understandable even if they’re not always the ‘best’ of all possible choices or reactions he could have.

Dick’s a control freak because he kinda pretty much HAD to be. Seizing control of any scrap of well, control, within reach, any chance he could get, was initially just a survival mechanism built around what he considered necessary for HIS survival.....because to Dick, being alive means nothing if he’s not also allowed the ‘courtesy’ of being in control of his own mind, his own body, his own life and choices and path.

I believe for him, it started as a REACTION to Bruce’s own control freak tendencies, as well as the other factors in Dick’s life that habitually stripped him of his agency and choices. Controlling whatever he could in his immediate vicinity or sphere of influence was I think, initially just to act as a counterweight, balancing out the many times his personal innate agency was disregarded or taken away. If he couldn’t control his own life, be allowed his own choices, he’d just have to gain enough control of a situation through other means that it gave him a kind of leverage he could then use to take back what was taken from him.

And I think that’s absolutely understandable and relatable.

Obviously, there have been instances where Dick’s control freak tendencies have negatively impacted others the way Bruce’s have at times negatively impacted him. When he’s run over other peoples’ ability to make their own choices because he lost sight of what he was doing and why. Sometimes these are logical narrative choices and actual mistakes and errors he usually eventually acknowledges and tries his best to make amends for.......and of course, he’s just as vulnerable to being written by shitty writers who don’t know shit about things like agency and thus have him run all over other peoples’ agencies in ways that I don’t think are true to his characterization even with his control freak tendencies front and center. *Shrugs* Its all subjective.

But yeah. That’s my long dissertation on the control freak tendencies of both Bruce and Dick and why and how I consider them intrinsically linked. You can’t talk about the one without the other, because the one in large part only originated BECAUSE of the other. If Dick’s vigilante persona was named and themed Control Freak, Bruce’s status as KING Control Freak would be his origin story there.

Here endeth the word vomit. Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye.