#you can be mad at Ted in this fic he's being frustrating and I'm writing him like that on purpose

[asteria-argo]

i can feel myself getting preemptively annoyed with some of the comments I might get on the next chapter of to all the better places and let me tell you it's making it really hard to write this chapter in peace

[spock-smokes-weed]

Another annoying thing about Fanon Tim is that he never has friends before YJ and is completely antisocial. While Canon Tim "is it new school? cool, cool, cool. I'm going to make friends with every second person I meet. annoying jocks? a couple of minutes and we are the best bros forever."

LITERALLY!!!!

Honestly I don’t think any of these people who write for fanon Tim know a thing about his character. And that’s fine, but it’s super annoying and frustrating when you have read the comics. Not to mention how it’s actively destroying Tim’s reputation in the fanbase.

Even when it comes to his YJ friends they only ever focus on Kon and Bart; sometimes Cassie if you’re lucky. When there was a whole nother group of people who Tim was friends with and cared about. Greta, Cissie, Lagoon Boy, and even the friends he made in the titans are just never talked about. Not to mention the people he’s close with in the batfamily are erased in place of making Jason his hype man (which is just so fucking weird????). Like Dick, Steph, and Cass are all super important people to Tim and it makes me so insane seeing them get tossed aside or written badly to make their uwu sad boy look better.

Like Tim’s history is constantly getting shuffled around and twisted and it’s just so strange. Like things that happened when he first became Robin will be paired with things towards the end of his time as Robin and I’m just ??? what’s going on??? Like one time I read a fic that was about Jason’s attack on titans tower, and it mentioned that both of Tim’s parents were alive, when at this point both would have been dead. It seems like they just hear about a few things that happened to Tim and just fucking run with it.

Tim is also constantly being portrayed as a wide eyed fanboy who always listens to Batman and others heroes, and while that was a part of Tim’s characterization when he was first Robin, he drops it over time the more he’s involved with the hero stuff. Like Tim regularly lies to Batman all through YJ, is constantly shown to not always trust Bruce’s judgment, and even thought Bruce was guilt of murder for a time because of how Bruce was behaving. And when he does have a wide eyed admiration for another hero it dissolves into just regular coworker respect pretty quickly (like when he met Ted Kord). So seeing him constantly act like a squealing fan boy who thinks his heroes can do no wrong is mad cringe. 

I have this big conundrum when it comes to the fanon batman fandom, because I’m fully aware that comics are an expensive and difficult hobby, and I started from reading fanfic because I couldn’t afford anything, but at the same time it’s just so frustrating to see panels and comic arcs get take out of context and twisted to prop up a OOC version of a character. And with Tim being a character that not many people know about, fanon is actively ruining his reputation and that just makes me every more frustrated.

I think the place where I come from is that because I used to read a lot of fanon fics, not knowing they weren’t even close to canon, when I finally did get to reading the comics I got really mad because how things are in canon is just objectively so much better. There is so many great stories and character in the comics and seeing it brushed aside for these just fucking terrible and watered down clones makes me wanna chew glass. And there’s huge attitude among fanon that fanfic and fanon is far superior than the source material. Which is just???? There is a near century’s worth of comics for batman and ur telling me fanfiction is better that all of it??? Please for the love of g-d touch some grass.

All I can really do is call out bad fanon when I see it, and recommend good comics and plotlines to start with. I have a Batman recs list pinned on my blog that I updated every so often. If anyone is new and wants to read comics, if you’re willing to spend a little chunk of change then the DC Infinite app is a great resource (if ur in the us 😔). They have everything DC has ever published and it’s all organized. They even high light a lot of really good storylines. If you don’t want to do that then just hunt down a character recs list and pirate the fuck out of whatever is on there. Piracy is a victimless crime and it makes u cool and sexy. 

Just…. please… read a fucking comic book before I walk into the ocean