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*whispers into crowd*: Dick and Selena are the same character, you dont even have to squint and tilt your head. Down to their fighting styles, personalities, and interests. One chooses to use acrobatics to prove they can take what they want and one just beats people with it. Both are protectors with histories of viscious assaults. Both are adrenaline junkies and canonically need someone "more like Batman" as a stable romantic partner. There's so much more. They would have awesome sex and a really, really fun but messy relationship is what I'm saying. There has got to be one universe where she never got with the Bat and got with the Bird instead. It's just strange that the enduring Batman love interest is the female Dick Grayson.

do you think Dick is more important to batman mythos than all of batman love interests? I always thought so but it seems to be an unpopular opinion in tumblr/twitter

Oh, interesting question. My quick and sweet answer is yes—I think this is a big part of what leads some people to read the relationship as romantic, I think DC is aware of that and has at times tired to supplant him with one of Bruce’s canon love interests because of it, and that alteration has never quite taken.

For one thing, he’s the only character who was a consistent presence in Bruce’s life throughout the early years of the franchise (billed as ‘the Adventures of Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder’), making Dick a deuteragonist, whereas love interests appear sporadically on a guest basis. Dick also predates Bruce’s two most popular and enduring love interests: Talia by a matter of decades, and I believe his first appearance in Detective Comics #38 precedes Selina’s debut in Batman #1 by about a month.

Moreover—and this is what I find really compelling—both Talia and Selina are written to resemble Dick in some way. The story arc in which Talia is introduced directly juxtaposes her with Dick: Bruce finds out that Dick has been kidnapped, and Ra’s enters the Batcave soon after to reveal that Talia has also been kidnapped. Like Dick, Talia’s conflicted relationship with her father has romantic overtones. Like Dick, her love for and loyalty to Ra’s manifests as compulsion to take care of them emotionally and morally police him. They agree with their fathers’ goals, but not their methods, and forgive their fathers for hurting them in ways that are pretty unconscionable to me. They are also, at the time of Talia’s debut, both college students.

Selina I feel has grown to resemble Dick more closely over the years. Batman: Year One remodels Selina as a gamine (a makeover that’s shown in detail in Her Sister’s Keeper) the same decade that Dick grows up to be a beautiful man. She and Dick share similarly sanguine personalities, in contrast with Bruce, and are the two good guys in Gotham who have figured out how to factor a sense of fun into what they do. Their playfulness is important because it's 1. hard won in a way that belies a lot of resilience; and 2. sustaining both to themselves and the people around them.

There’s also a lot more you could unpack with regards to the singular symbolic significance to the mythos Dick has acquired. He, as the person Bruce can count on to catch him when he’s falling, is Bruce’s moral and sometimes physical savior. He represents everything positive about humanity, as well as about Bruce himself. He’s everything that’s worth saving. The light of his life, the fire of his loins. His wonderwall.

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Subcontracting

Chapter 2: Family Lines

Summary:

There is no evidence that anyone is in danger at all. At least that anyone can see. Batman and the family learn about Nightwing's source and want him to give up on the case. Nightwing is worried he'll have to choose between his family and Deathstroke.

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https://archiveofourown.org/works/66287320/chapters/170899408

Subcontracting

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Summary:

Slade Wilson gives Dick Grayson three days to prevent the killing of a small boy. Simple, right?

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Brain Block, No Plot

I haven't written in months. I've got everything for a new story but an actual plot. I've got characters, scenes, imagery, some symbolism, but when I ask my brain what the point of it all is there's nothing. What do the characters want? No idea! What are the stakes or the motivation? Cause and effect? Don't be silly, that would require planning. Planning is something my brain apparently doesn't do anymore. But there is some killer dialogue in a mostly empty google doc. So, I've got that going for me.

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Batman is that persistent, knock you down, but you'll crawl with it on your shoulders until you bleed out kind of love. That kind of love that you would die for, because that would be easier than satisfying the endless abyss of want and obligation to keep it. That kind of love that you only find if you're very, very lucky, but also very, very cursed. Wounded animal love. Batman loves with every fiber of his being and he hates it because he would literally rip his own personality out of his body than feel the weight anymore. And everyone knows it. He's the parable of how too much love will consume you.

The cowards of twitter are afraid to admit that Batman represents love

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Do any of you work your dream / passion job?

How does it feel?

That's a sincere question. I've never done it, I don't even know what my dream job would be. How does it feel to do the thing you literally dreamed of doing? Will you stick with it?

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Dick is kind of a dick. He'll do the 'right things' regardless of how anyone feels about it or of the long term consequences - which is great for a big H Hero - but sucks for a normal guy. Who made him the arbiter of morality and right and wrong? And if you disagree? He's insufferable, arrogant, and can't see beyond his own narrow, black and white world. If you work really, really hard, he might forgive you. Someday. and you'll be glad for it. Asshole. Sound like anyone else, Dick?

Also, he's got so much legit brain damage and that goes way beyond losing long-term memories. He could wake up and not remember where he is or what he was working on. He could sometimes lose time in the present day. In the past, he could hear voices that sometimes come and go. That was usually manipulation by a bad guy, but not always. His moods have been profoundly unstable - especially after being shot in the head and the whole Ric arc - and this should translate into all manner of relationship and public image difficulties. Everyone seems to love him to death, but that's just not the real life perception of people with those kinds of difficulties. Most people are scared of or burned out by people like that, no matter how much they love the person in question. He's lucky he's smart, hot, and his dad is rich, is all I'm saying. And yeah, he's my absolute favorite. I suppose he's really, really good at the big H Heroing job too.

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Even if Bruce got therapy, it wouldn't work. He doesn't want it to work. Therapy is an active process and he doesn't want to feel different. Batman, his mission, and his family give him purpose and power. He doesn't want to see beyond that, not really. No amount of CBT and DBT or mindfulness is going to make him let it go.

this is so unbelievably funny to me, less than 0.01% of people are willing to besmirch alfred

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My stuff generally has too many lingering typos to be AI generated. Why have a competition to see how well a computer writes against itself???

a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on

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I feel like he would know, though. Part of him would be gone. That part that is his father / brother / best friend / partner across all the universes that he has to choose to ignore. It would be ripped out of him and no matter when or where, he'd feel it. Once Dick gets over blaming himself for not saving Bruce, if he lets himself live long enough to really get over it, he'd take up Bruce's mission - the real mission. The newspapers would be flooded with stories of Richard Grayson adopting children - "I guess I'm more like my dad than you all thought." and a flock of Robins would slowly start nesting in Bludhaven. Trying to fill a void that is always just a little too big.

Batman: Gotham Knights #10 has been my favorite issue so far in this series. The way Dick is so heartbroken and a mess throughout all of this, struggling with the idea of losing Bruce and being haunted by all the things they never talk about :/

"He's not dead. He can't be dead. I'd feel it. I'd know." ????????????? like, I'll be crying for a whole week

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I'll never get over it. 15 years of inviting this show into my home just for them to kill off the suicidal man who just needed one reason of his own to live. It's not ok.

I am once again feeling angry about the Supernatural finale.

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I don't have a praise kink, but Grayson, on the other hand, is a textbook breeding ground for a praise kink and I'll die on that hill. The family, in general, are probably not as in to masochism as I would think.

It is very very important to be able to recognise when a character would get absolutely soaking wet for a kink you've never been into. It's about taking a step back from your biases and realising that their kink is not your kink, and also integral to their character arc, and that's okay.

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Looking at you, Blorbo. Oh you bet your ass we're exploring those relationship dynamics in the worst way possible.

[National Biways, Oct/Nov 1994]

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That looming 'doesn't quite fit you', 'not quite right for you', 'pissed that you're even considering it because we both know you can do better', disappointed dad silent story telling. Art!

DICK GRAYSON/NIGHTWING in BATTLE FOR THE COWL (2009)

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I've seen the man too. You create a character as powerful and cheeky as Constantine and he becomes real. He doesn't care if you know it.

more comic characters should haunt their writers like how everyone who’s written John Constantine keeps meeting him in dark alleys

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Then you re-read it enough that you're bored. If you're bored, the readers (all 2 of them) are going to be bored too, right???

Pros of re-reading your own fic

a good time;

Has exactly the tropes you like and the characterization you want to read;

Gratification: yes you did finish a thing and yes you did do good;

just a very fun time all around.

Cons of re-reading your own fic:

Is that another TYpO

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