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anonymouscatloaf · 6 months

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"You know, he's the yin to my yang. He completes me."

So the funny part about Dan repeatedly calling Perry the yin to Doof's yang (besides the fact that he can just freestyle some Greek tragedy level bullshit about Doof & Perry's relationship on the fly for Radio Disney or an episode commentary track) is that at face value you might also be like, okay but why is Doof the "yang" (light) and Perry the "yin" (dark)?

I didn't say good vs evil because that's not what yin and yang are about. As a concept it's one of those terms from another language that have variable meanings in English depending on who's using it and why, but its most enduring interpretation - with the disclaimer that I am not a philosopher, just someone who is far too invested in overthinking relationships in a kid's cartoon - is the idea that they are opposing but complementary forces of the energy that the universe operates on.

It's a balance. According to Lao-Tzu, "everything is embedded in yin and embraces yang; through [vital energy] it reaches [harmony]". Two sides of the same coin, sun and moon, my other half - you get the idea. It's not hard to see why Perry and Doof are complementary but opposite; one can't exist without the other: Perry all but gives up evil when Doof has that brief dalliance with Peter; Perry has exactly two POV songs in the entire show and both of them relate to Doof, one of which explicitly states "[his] life, it seems, is empty" without Doof's scheming and he "gave [Perry's] life heroic cause"; and he straight up has no idea what to do with his life and makes the saddest platypus sound ever when Doof bans thwarting as Tri-Governor in LDOS.

On the other hand, Doof is a lot easier to see - partly because he actually talks (though Perry is actually one of the most facially expressive characters in the show - by necessity - though I digress). He's overt about his affections and very clingy (a result of childhood trauma and abuse/neglect by his parents) because Perry's his only real friend. He all but begs Perry to thwart him in that whale episode, he became really upset when Perry seemed to be helping him in the episode with the Dull-and-Boring-inator but was just using him to fix the problem with Phineas and Ferb, and he can't bear to leave Perry behind in Road to Danville, just to list a few sillier examples off the top of my head. Really, the entire B plot could be used as evidence.

(There's also the fun dynamic of Perry being an animal that has human-level sentience, and Doof being a human that was raised by animals - ocelots - during some of his formative years.)

So they're irrevocably intertwined. One of the most important characters in each other's life, according to Dan from SDCC 2015. The LDOS ending song even puts Perry smack dab in the middle of the Doofenshmirtz family with Heinz, Vanessa, and Norm - two other characters deeply wrapped up with Perry as a result of Doof himself. I mean, look at them:

Yeah, this was an excuse to make you look at one of my favorite scenes and witness Perry's hopelessly fond smile, not sorry.

Anyway, back to yin-yang. They were originally ascribed to just "day" and "night", and eventually came to also mean "movement" (because you work during the day), and "rest" (because you sleep at night). In terms of qi, they embody heaven and earth, and in the collection of essays of the Huainanzi, "yang is generated from yin and yin is generated from yang [...] sometimes there is life, sometimes there is death, that brings the myriad things to completion". Technical details of Chinese philosophy aside (which I'm sure exactly nobody is considering when they call someone the yin to their yang - it's really just the "you complete me" part), the words themselves also have various opposing definitions: positive/negative, active/passive, sun/moon, overt/covert, etc etc etc you get the idea.

In terms of their relationship, Doof has the more active role. He's one who makes the crazy inators and plots elaborate traps and monologues everyday; Perry usually just reacts to that accordingly. Doof play-acts at a lofty, larger-than-life "evil", while Perry keeps him grounded ("you are my rock" and "having you around just makes me feel, you know, safer"). Perry isn't necessarily a wholly passive character, but also, like, a lot of his plot is just Shit Happens and Perry Has to Deal With It. Doof is overt about his "evil" schemes and can't stand even white lies. Perry spends his entire life hiding aspects of himself and keeping secrets from his loved ones, and he has a whole song in CATU about being an unrecognized hero. One of these characters is living in the "dark" more than the other...

Doof is overflowing with emotions - most of them negative, but also love: so much so that his daughter feels smothered, because a lot of that love (while borne of good intentions) is misguided, and Doof fails to actually listen to her; it takes a few rocky starts (helped along by Perry himself) before they get to the point where Vanessa considers her dad a "misunderstood genius" and convinces him to give up evil. On the other hand, Perry keeps his cards close to his chest - it's not that he doesn't know how to emote (he clearly adores his boys in ATSD and he apparently is happy to hang out with Doof as a friend outside of his job enough that he has a whole wallet of photos of them just goofing off together), he doesn't because of necessity. He's better than anyone at separating his work life (fighting evil) from his pet life (pretending to be a mindless animal) from his personal life (how much he loves his family, watching his silly dramatic soaps, having a petty streak and sassing Monogram a bit, is genuine friends with Doof).

As a result, he is full of emotions he rarely gets to express - around the Flynn-Fletchers specifically, because Doof does know he's sentient, which is another reason I think they click. Doof gets the single-minded attention he never had; Perry gets the treatment as an equal he never had. They both gain a friendship, and a new sort of family. There's a part of their life imbalanced when the other isn't present.

The yin and the yang. They complete each other.

#phineas and ferb #perry the platypus #heinz doofenshmirtz #pnf #cat talks #this is why they are the most compelling characters/relationship in the show to me #the higher stakes of the B plot are fun and all but the characters are still what really get me #this ain't about the ship but like they're very queercoded too if you wanna go there #ii just think their characters are FASCINATING how they play off each other #how important they are to each other #anyway i have several exams coming up so obviously i wrote this instead

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silverwhittlingknife · 1 year

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Has Tim ever put Dick on a pedestal?

100% yes! This is basically Tim's backstory IMO. Prior to meeting Dick in Lonely Place of Dying, Tim's a kid who's got a distant, idealized, made-for-TV vision of Dick and Bruce - mostly Dick - and he sets out on a quest based entirely around that misperception.

Aaaand then he immediately crashes headfirst into reality, because the Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne he remembers from his childhood memories and daydreams are like this:

But it turns out that the actual real-life human people are a bit more, uh, cranky than Tim's glossy vision - things are tense and neither of them are super-happy to meet Tim:

And Tim has to rethink a bunch of his mistaken deductions as it slowly dawns on him that - far from being a plucky team - Dick and Bruce are actually not getting along at all:

And so Tim has to realize his whole plan of "Dick has to be Robin again!!! That will fix everything!!! :)))))" was actually wrong, and based on a misunderstanding of Bruce and Dick's relationship. And having realized he was wrong, he immediately sets about trying to figure out what he’s failed to understand in the most intrusive way possible—by asking lots of nosy questions!

Actually-meeting-Dick is basically the end of Tim’s super-idealized vision of Dick. It's not a vision that can survive contact with an actual human being who's snapping at you. And kid!Tim is (I love him but) extremely pushy and annoying, and Dick's a prickly young adult who is not above getting annoyed, which means Dick snaps at him pretty regularly.

But Tim does continue to admire him.

So for their various interactions after Lonely Place of Dying, IMO "does Tim have Dick on a pedestal" is kind of a judgment call based on your assessment of Dick's relative strengths/virtues. What's unambiguous: Tim has a consistently higher opinion of Dick than Dick does of Dick, and they argue about it a lot.

I had way too many thoughts about this, so below the cut:

Comics where Dick and Tim have conversations along the lines of Dick: "I suck and I'm failing at everything." Tim: "That's not true!! Actually you're great and you're succeeding at the thing you think you're failing at!!"

So who's right - Dick or Tim?

Dick and Tim's high opinions/expectations of each other: the plusses and minuses

Comic examples

Here are a couple different variations on Tim thinking that Dick is great (often when Dick's less sure):

in Showcase, Tim thinks that Dick’s a way better teammate than Azrael, even as Dick’s thinking himself as a failure who let the Titans down;

in Prodigal, Dick tells Tim a story about confronting Two-Face which to Dick symbolizes a moment of great failure and which Tim insists was a no-win situation where Dick did the best he could;

also in Prodigal, Dick’s despairing over how badly he thinks their encounter with Killer Croc went and meanwhile Tim thinks it went fine (after all, Dick listened to him and called an ambulance instead of beating up Croc!), and Tim tells Dick to lighten up and Dick talks about how he’s a failure;

in Nightwing 6, Dick thinks he’s doing badly in Blüdhaven and he’s self-conscious about it and paranoid about what Tim might tell Bruce, and Tim insists that the fact that Dick’s being targeted means he’s succeeding and getting close instead of failing, and Dick retorts that this won’t be comforting if he winds up dead because getting close just isn’t good enough;

also in Nightwing 6, Tim thinks Dick was a better Robin than Tim is, and Dick thinks he wasn’t that great and that Tim’s better;

post-Last Laugh, Tim’s insistent that Dick's being too hard on himself about attacking the Joker whereas Dick's really haunted by the experience and confides that it feels like he's discovered a terrible dark side of himself;

way later in Nightwing 110, Tim’s seeking Dick out and Dick’s trying to avoid him because he thinks he’s a bad person who’d be bad for Tim;

in BW: Murderer, Tim doesn’t trust Bruce absolutely, but in Red Robin, he does trust Dick absolutely (or at least, more than Tim trusts himself);

etc. etc. etc.

Who's right: Dick or Tim?

So, is Tim being too easy on Dick and looking at him with rose-colored glasses, and Dick’s harsher view of himself is the correct one; or is Dick a perfectionist who’s being too hard on himself, and Tim’s the one who’s actually seeing Dick’s strengths more clearly?

I don’t think the comics really commit one way or another! These are moments of multiple-perspectives, where we notice that Tim has one attitude and Dick has another attitude and that tells us things about the characters, not moments that are meant to resolve to a simplistic “one person is Right and one person is Wrong.” I think often you could argue that they're both right? So, like, if you wanted to take the approach of, "Tim's idolizing him but he's not actually as great as Tim thinks," I don't think the comics precisely contradict that interpretation.

... THAT SAID, look, I am a Dick Grayson fan at heart, and I tend to lean toward “Dick’s being too hard on himself.”

Tim’s not oblivious to Dick’s flaws—he immediately figures out, for example, that Dick’s gonna attack the Joker, and rushes off to stop him; he just isn’t as judgmental about this moment as Dick is, and he doesn’t think it makes Dick an awful person forever. The point is (Tim says later, practical-minded) that it was made right, and Dick shouldn’t beat himself up about it. In Prodigal, Tim’s not unaware that their fight with Croc went badly; he’s just focused on how Dick’s morals and teamwork-centric attitude feel right to him in a way that Azrael’s didn’t, and look, Tim didn’t get shot even though he got shot at, and isn’t that the important thing? Tim gets caught in the same ambush that Dick does in Nightwing 6; he just takes the glass-half-full attitude toward it while Dick takes the glass-half-empty attitude. And so on.

Tim admires Dick, looks up to him, trusts him, interprets his flaws generously, and doesn’t think he’s a failure. And... this isn't quite in the comics, but it doesn't contradict them: I like to imagine Dick feeling like he's on a pedestal, and feeling kinda uncomfortable with Tim's admiration when he's forced to realize it exists, and feeling like he doesn't deserve it, and sometimes subconsciously braced for the other shoe to drop, convinced that Tim can't possibly really think this forever, that he's deluded somehow, and that eventually Tim will realize who Dick really is and get disillusioned and leave.

And I tend to think of Dick having this problem a bit with everyone in his life who thinks highly of him, but especially with Tim, because he doesn't feel like Tim's ever needed him or that he's done anything worth Tim's admiration. I feel like Dick - despite some insecurities - does know his own worth as a team leader, and he knows he was a good partner to Bruce, and he understands when he's helping people who are clearly floundering, like Damian and Rose. But all he's ever done for Tim is...hang out, and be nice. And he doesn't think Tim ever needed fixing or saving, and he vastly underestimates both the value of his own friendship in general and how much it's meant to Tim in particular. Not all the time, because later in their relationship when they've known each other for years I do think Dick does feel a bit more secure in that friendship and entitled to make demands based on it (and vice versa, for Tim). But I do imagine Dick periodically feeling like Tim lets him off the hook too easily, and thinks more highly of him than he should, and alternating between being grateful for it and uncomfortable with it.

But I would argue that Dick does deserve Tim’s admiration!

Look, Dick's not a perfect person - no one is. He does screw up sometimes, and sometimes he's petty or jealous, and sometimes his temper gets the better of him. But he is pretty great! He's brave and thoughtful and kind and generous and caring. He takes his own grief and his own suffering and devotes himself to helping other people. And Tim sees that. Tim watches an orphaned kid crying on stage, and has nightmares about it - and later recognizes the hero in him. Tim stops Dick from beating the Joker to death, and he holds Dick back from strangling Hugo Strange, and he talks Dick down from two separate panic attacks, and he listens to Dick monologue about his various perceived failures, and he gets yelled at a lot when Dick's annoyed with him, and his takeaway from all of that is that he believes in Dick, and trusts Dick, and thinks he's a hero.

You could see that as Tim having him on a pedestal and refusing to acknowledge the ugly reality. But I tend to see it as Tim understanding that Dick's flaws and occasional missteps don't define who he is - the fact that Dick's human doesn't make him any less of a hero. Tim can see the hero that Dick can't always see in himself.

Dick and Tim have really high opinions of each other... for better or worse

Tim's not alone in having a high opinion of Dick - Dick thinks Tim's pretty great, too! Dick repeatedly compares himself to Tim and finds himself wanting, whether he's thinking that Tim's a better partner for Bruce, or having a fear toxin nightmare where Tim's a rival who's beating him out of a job, or deciding that Tim would never have let Blockbuster die (and that he'll be better off if Dick avoids him), or musing that Tim would be a better Batman. Dick calls Tim his equal and closest ally in Red Robin; Tim thinks Dick is "the best" in his origin story and basically never changes his mind.

I think nowadays we're sometimes pretty highly-attuned to the way that high expectations can be bad or oppressive, and... I have mixed feelings about this? On the one hand, it isn't untrue! Dick and Tim's mutual high opinions of each other, and correspondingly high expectations, are not an unmixed blessing! They 100% cause problems! Dick and Tim think highly of each other, and expect a lot from each other, and sometimes they're pushy or abrupt or demanding when they could stand to be more sensitive. And the iffy side of high expectations is something I find interesting, and I do think it's solidly canon-based - you see aspects of this in several of their comic conflicts - LPoD, Graduation Day, BftC, RR, etc.

But at the same time, it's complicated! I don't think you can fully untangle the higher expectations from "they rely on each other and have a lot of faith in each other." Love and trust are different things, and Dick and Tim care a whole lot about being trusted, not just about being loved.

I also think it's important that their belief in each other is often a gift rather than an inevitability: Dick and Tim choose to see each other in positive ways. Something they both do is after they have a conflict, they'll apply on a retrospective very positive gloss to whatever just happened. So e.g. Dick starts Resurrection mad at Tim, and ends it by declaring, "I let you make the choice... because I knew you'd make the right one." Tim spends most of Red Robin 1-12 mad at Dick, and ends it by declaring that he knew Dick would catch him because Dick's always there for him. And in both cases, we-the-readers are aware that they knew no such thing! But to me, that doesn't make these declarations meaningless - it makes them more meaningful. Their faith in each other is sometimes genuinely felt, and sometimes it's something they stubbornly brute-force into existence because they want to give that gift to each other.

And I mean... Tim did make the right choice. Dick was there when it really counted. Just because it isn't the whole truth doesn't mean it's not a truth.

Now, does this positivity also put some pressure on them? Absolutely! They're both people who are very upset by failure, so they tend to reassure each other by insisting that there was no failure, could never be failure, failure is impossible, even when they know perfectly well that's not true. They praise each other's skills as a love language, when what they mean is I love you no matter what. They talk about other people's needs but don't always acknowledge each other's. And it'd probably be healthier if they said instead, "Even if you'd made the wrong choice, it'd be okay, because it's okay to make the wrong choice sometimes," or "Even if you're not always there for me, that's okay, because no one can be there for someone else all the time."

And they do not say that, because Dick and Tim are relatively well-adjusted by Batfamily standards but that is a very low bar, and at the end of the day they're still deeply messed-up perfectionists who deal with their emotional problems by punching crime in the face.

But look, they're trying. And isn't that the important thing? <3

#dick 'imposter syndrome' grayson and tim 'dick grayson stan' drake #dick grayson #tim drake #dick & tim #ask tag #i rambled for a really long time anon <3 #it's complicated because i feel like mmmm the ''pedestal'' thing is obv true in some ways #but i think it also sometimes gets used in this kinda flanderized way #where it gets extrapolated into claims like ''older!tim is shocked to learn dick experiences normal human emotions' or w/e #and obv fandom is transformative and a rich tapestry etc but for me personally #part of what i LOVE about tim's introduction is that dick is in the middle of one of his very angsty eras #so tim's burst into his life being all ''hiiiiii!!! you're the best :)))))'' when dick is at peak ''i am gloomy and depressed''#that said tim's high opinion of dick is very canon and very compelling to me <3 #tim does think dick is the greatest thing ever!#but it's more like being a stan of his rather than being a distant stranger who doesn't know him at all #it's not that tim's unaware that dick gets angry/sad/etc or that dick and tim never have fights (they do!)#it's more that unless they're actively in the middle of a fight tim admires/loves dick a lot and is determined to think well of him #so he considers all of dick's strengths What's Important About Him and all of his flaws Basically A Rounding Error If You Think About It #and he doubles-down on this when someone's questioning it (including Dick)#there is definite motivated reasoning at play in Tim's view of Dick but imo it's not quite the same as a pedestal sdfdsfds #i'm not sure there's anything that Dick could do that Tim couldn't find a way to justify in his head how it was okay /#not really Dick / not really his fault / etc. - like if Dick went on a murder spree #Tim would be there making the big This Isn't You! I Know You Won't Kill Me Because I Believe In You! speech #and like. if he was wrong then he'd be dead sdfdsf but the thing is he'd have secret doubts and be wary AND STILL #find himself ultimately making that speech / taking the risk - and ditto for Dick toward Tim #it's not that they never get mad / distrust each other and it's not impossible they'd stay bitter and suspicious for a while #but in the END they both really really WANT to trust each other

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