#this is actually something i think canon did very well with tim + dana's relationship

[thattimdrakeguy]

Why do you like Tim Drake? (Not to say I don't like him too, I'm just always interested to see why people like what they do)

Sorry this is pretty long.

He’s my favorite comic book character ever. There’s just so many things I enjoy about him, especially his early Robin run, where I can’t really think of anything I didn’t like about it, even stuff I didn’t like later on in that run I can think of positives from those negatives.

His personality I just enjoyed, he felt very grounded and real. The way he reacted with stuff, and took it all in.

I loved how he felt he had to keep the reputation of the title Robin because he just felt so much for the ones before him with respect. How he never felt like he was good enough just felt like it would be a real problem with someone who was such a fan of the Robins and held them with such high respect with them.

He always felt un-sure and I feel like I just resonated with that, since I always felt like that. I feel like a lot of people would feel like that if they were given a role they held in so much respect like him.

I enjoyed how he was portrayed as more realistic in a certain sense. The way he reacted to everything and thought felt like how a real person would react and it was done so well I just love it.

I like how they took there time with him becoming Robin, I guarantee if people didn’t like his character he wouldn’t have made it to the point where he was the new Robin, he would’ve just disappeared, and if he did make it to that point, it probably wouldn’t have lasted long.

They just took their time with him, and I really like that so much. It didn’t just happen suddenly out of no were. It felt natural.

and his character growth, it’s really subtle from issue to issue, but if you go from the first few issues to issue 20 even you can see the progress, he grew like a real person through everything he went through. He didn’t just change from one moment to another. It slowly effected him and changed him even if it was subtle.

Even just little things like his costume and height and stuff like that, it’s never mentioned at all, but they add to his character. His costume showed that Bruce wasn’t taking any chances with him, he wasn’t letting this baby faced kiddo go out there in just briefs, his costume is thick, covers him more, and it will protect him. It showed the change in Bruce with his Robins now. He wasn’t going to let another death happen. 

His height was 5ft 1 when he was 15, and you can argue that it always changes between writers, but part of his character was that he never felt like he earned the title of Robin enough and kept having to prove himself and fight harder, I feel like being shorter adds onto that and makes sense to me. (Also he was actually written as being 5ft 1 consistently, I didn’t just say that for myself, it is actual canon.)

Something about small stuff like that, that probably doesn’t matter at all when reading it, but knowing that stuff to me just makes the bigger stuff more enjoyable since it just adds on.

His relationships with everyone I like and are so full of depth, especially his relationships with Dick and Stephanie, Dick, even though he was pretty rough and tough with him in the beginning grew to enjoy his company and it was like he was his actual big brother, it was so lovely to see happen. I just loved it.

Seeing him interact with Stephanie is always fun, Tim already had a girl friend when he was just Tim and not Robin, so to see this vigilante girl flirt with him, making him all sorts of uncomfortable and confused, even making the difference between Tim as Tim and Tim as Robin even larger was interesting. To the point where they even began dating for real, and Tim feeling un-sure about the long run of their relationship since he wasn’t allowed to say stuff about him for fear of his secret identity was just good conflict to me.

The thing Tim had with his dad always being gone was interesting, it seemed like Jack (Tim’s dad) really wanted to be more of a dad to Tim but it was hard since neither felt natural about it, and Tim being Robin always got in the way. It was always hard to predict how Jack would react to Tim’s excuses cause of that and it was just so good to read. Jack felt conflicted and it made him feel like a real person, he knew he wasn’t a good dad to Tim, he wanted to change that, although personally that wasn’t always portrayed as well as everything else. When it was done right, it was done right. But moments like where he would just throw a fit at Tim un-fairly without listening to him just felt odd to me.

Even though it was never highlighted as much as his other relationships, seeing him and his Step-Mother Dana was interesting to see. She cared for Tim, and tried to get out of so much heat with his dad was lovely. She wanted to show Tim that she cared for him, and it definitely showed.

His relationships with YOUNG JUSTICE and later on when they were the TEEN TITANS I love too, although in my opinion Tim was kind of out of character in Young Justice, and I can’t recall if they ever said why he acted like that. He was more confident and bossy, and you can make plenty of head canons about why he acted that way. But I can’t recall if it was ever stated in anything that’s actually canon. That still bugs me when reading Young Justice.

But to see him have all these wonderful and meaningful relationships with other heroes around his age just felt good. It was done in a very real way where you felt it as if it was real.

You could feel Kon cared for Tim, and just the whole group together truthfully cared for each other. There deep talks, Kon being able to sense when Tim isn’t telling the truth was stuff during his Red Robin days and it doesn’t feel forced and corny. It feels right.

For negatives though, I don’t personally like when they just decided to kill everyone in Tim’s life that he cared about. I felt like it was extremely unnecessary and still feel that way, but the writers managed to get some extra depth and change to Tim. Even if it was extremely unnecessary to do so.

It showed Tim reacting like a real person, and feeling depressed and not knowing how to feel exactly, and having problems with that, and how it effected him dealing with certain situations and feeling angry just in general about it.

Make it to Red Robin, and you can feel Tim’s pain when no body believed him about Bruce being alive. Even he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do about it, and you could sense it and it didn’t even need to be said. There was a lot you could sense and feel without it being said and still been shown and it was all done beautifully.

Tim is a character that isn’t as beloved and appreciated as he should be. There’s a lot to love about his run and history. Even if it was all gone by the reboot. It’s still out there and it’s still wonderful to read.

I just love Tim Drake.

There’s a lot I just summarized and tried to keep short for the sake of not taking up to much space and time to read. So if you want anything to be more specific just give me an ask.

[scintillyyy]

can i say something. sometimes i actually do think that considering dana as tim's mom/his parent actually does immensely flatten the complexity of their relationship and try force it into unnecessary nuclear roles in a way to assume that her importance to him must be that of parent and child when in reality they can have a meaningful relationship and importance to each other without needing to be slotted into neat parent & child roles + it trends toward the tendency to see moms as replaceable beings in a child's life especially in comparison to how fathers are usually considered sacred and irreplaceable.

because dana and tim have a very interesting relationship in canon which they themselves define as explicitly Not parent & child several times (at the start of the jack and dana relationship, at their wedding, and the time tim specifically said that even though dana wasn't his mom, at some point she became more than just his dad's girlfriend, she became family to him). and dana is very supportive & kind to tim. she helps manage his relationship to jack sometimes. but she doesn't have to be his mom to do any of that & that's important!! because they can be family without her having to be his mom! she's not his mom just because she's standing in a woman shaped next to his dad! and the emphasis fandom puts on dana as tim's mom does trend towards this sometimes. dana was jack's girlfriend/wife for 20 years of comics & therefore filled the necessary role of "tim's mother figure" despite thr fact that the comics themselves & their relationship in them always presented as dana is jack's wife, dana is not tim's mom, dana and tim have a positive and important relationship despite that (and, might i say, is an excellent and kind presentation of the experience of gaining a new 20something year old as a stepmother when you're 14, where the stepmother in question is a good addition to the child's life & doesn't push the boundaries of her expected role in it). and when it does get flattened into "dana is tim's" mom, it does take away from the important ultimately chosen family aspect of it. it doesn't need to be defined or clear cut. they can just be dana and tim.

+ there is something in the way that fandom uncritically just accepts & also kind of pushes the status quo of a woman character being created to fill a hole/role left by another woman character with barely a consideration that the initial woman character was may be capable of leaving a potentially unfillable narrative impact on those she left behind after she dies. why does a child have to get a new mother after the old one dies, when there's not the same expectation that his father would need to be replaced in the same situation, that any man near his mother is automatically his dad now. like idk, if it had been janet who lived and she married devlin davenport and he became tim's stepfather, there'd probably be no insistence that he was tim's dad. but because dana is a woman, there's an insistence she has to be tim's mom despite canon saying that's not how they want to define their relationship. hell even compare the replacement of bruce as tim's dad after jack dies...the relationship is paternal and loving but still with the greatest respect to the spectre of the Dead Dad, whose loss will Forever be Enshrined and Bruce will be Tim's parent now out of Respect for Jack with all the Honor of a Man Taking Responsibility for his Friend's Son but despite this he will never be Jack, Jack has an Untouchable Place. (i know this is not always true in fanon, where they can't wait to replace parents with a shiny new dad, however. in canon, compare to the absolute lip service they paid janet before slotting dana into her empty narrative role & then she becomes a non-presence & the way that to fandom that automatically makes dana mom, even as she and tim are explicitly trying to define their relationship as non-paternal because dana still fills the missing mom role by virtue of being there). when you say dana is tim's mom, it doesn't just flatten the complexity, it also diminishes janet's ability to hold a sancrosanct Role from a narrative aspect as women are never allowed to do.