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#David Cain
bet-on-me-13 · 5 months
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Danny is Cass's brother
So! Back when David Cain was making his "Perfect Weapon", he came across a complication.
Lady Shiva, the woman who was set to give him his Weapon, was pregnant with Twins.
He decided that the Spare was useless to him, and that he needed to devote all his time to the Weapon. He was about to give it up, or maybe just dispose of it, when he decided that it was fine to keep it. A Spare is still a Spare after all, if the Weapon ever failed or died, he could start from scratch.
So, Danny was raised for the first 8 years of his life as a Spare Weapon. He didn't get the same rigorous training that Cass did, as she was the main focus, but he was still trained in the basics. Even a Spare Weapon need maintenance after all.
Then, when he was 8, Cass broke into his Cell Room and ran from the Base with him. She knew that once she escaped, Danny would be the next one to suffer, so she took him as well.
Unfortunately, they got seperated somewhere in Illinois when they got caught by some of David's mercenaries.
Cass kept going, running all across the country before ending up in Gotham at 15 (1 year earlier than normal). There, she got adopted by Bruce Wayne and became the Vigilante, Orphan. She never stopped looking for her brother, but at the very least she knew that he must have escaped David Cain's men. They were focused specifically on her after all.
Cass had enlisted the help of her new Family to search for him. DNA tracking, Facial Recognition, even asking some of their Underworld Contacts for information.
Unfortunately, they had no leads. Until one day when one of their Facial Recognition Programs finally picks up on a Match.
The face of a Small Time Hero in Illinois.
...
When Danny and Cass got seperated, he ended up in Amity Park. After a few days of Wandering, he was found by Jazz, who then took him to her Parents and convinced them to Adopt him.
When Danny is 14, he is in a Lab Accident that turns him into a Halfa. Using his New Powers and Old Training, Danny manages to keep his new Family and Home safe from the Ghosts coming through the Fentons Portal. He becomes a Hero basically, even though he doesn't really want to attention.
He thanks the Ancients when he finds out about the Media Blackout Amity is Under. He guesses it's not great, but at least he is safe for now.
He continues like this until one day when he is 16, and there is a knock on the Door.
He opens it, and stands shocked when he sees his Sister. Not Jazz, the wonderful woman who took him in and taught him how to speak all those years ago. The one who has acted as his Older Sister for the past 5 years.
His Sister. His Twin. Cass.
After a moment of Shock, they simultaneously go in for a Hug and start to cry a little.
After a few minutes of calming down, Danny introduces his Sister to his bewildered Family. Cass likewise introduces her Adoptive Brother, Dick, who came along to make sure she was safe on the trip.
While Dick and the Fentons get acquainted, Danny takes Cass up to his room to talk.
She explains what happened after they got seperated, what she is doing there, and how she found him.
She tells him that she had originally come to Amity to bring him to her new Family, but she could see the love he held for the Fentons. Also the town needed its Hero.
Danny is shocked that she even found him through the Media Blackout, but not so much at the fact that she nailed his secret identity on sight. She was always observant after all.
After that, Cass and Dick stay in Amity for a few weeks so Danny and Cass can catch up. He introduces her to his friends, shows her around his parents Lab, and even let's her meet some of his kore friendly Rogues.
They are just having a great time.
...
Back in Gotham, Batman just got a very frantic call from Barry.
"Bruce, I just came back from the future!" Shouted Barry through the Comms.
"Explain." Demanded Batman. Barry knew better than to Time Travel without just cause. If he was forced to time travel, it was serious.
"A Villain shows up, an Apocalyptic Level Villain." Barry explains, "He destroys Everything. And I mean Everything. None of us can stop him, he has too many powers to combat. Flight, Invisibility, Intangiblity, Energy Beams, Energy Constructs, Ice Manipulation, Weather Manipulation, Electrokinesis, the list goes on."
"How do we stop him?" Asked Batman. This was dangerous, a Villain with even half of those powers was deadly already.
"It's complicated, but I think he followed me and another Hero back in Time. I think it may be a Closed Time Loop. He is the catalyst for his own creation."
"Is there any way to break the Loop? What is the main driving force to his Creation?" Asks Batman.
"Well, I know his name at least. He goes by Phantom, but his real name is Danny Fenton." Barry explains.
Bruce feels his heart grow cold. He knows both of those names.
Phantom, aka Danny Fenton, aka Daniel Cain.
Cassandra's Brother.
Barry seems to hesitate, before continuing, "...and as far as I know, the catalyst for his creation is the death of Orphan in Amity Park."
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punchedlines · 1 month
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Cass Cain You Have to Stop. Your Smoke Too Tough. Your Swag Too Different. Your Bitch Is Too Bad. They'll Kill You.
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fantastic-nonsense · 4 months
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Cain being disappointed in teenage Bruce and telling him "if only I'd gotten hold of you sooner" because he wanted to train an unbeatable warrior who communicates flawlessly through violence and then specifically raising Cass from infancy for that purpose...DAVID CAIN WHEN I CATCH YOU
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blackbatcass · 23 days
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David and Cassandra Cain.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, Jeanette Winterson / First Memory, Louise Gluck / Journal, Day Three, Richard Siken / Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón / ? / Sue Zhao / To Live in the Body of a Survivor, Blythe Baird / I used to be a hole in the ground, Katie Maria / Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Anne Carson / Questions About the Father, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers / Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Sáenz / East, West, Salman Rushdie
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deadsetobsessions · 3 months
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He doesn’t know how they got here, but Jason’s thankful for it. It’s not often that he speaks to Cass, when Jason’s passions are words and righteous murder and Cass’s passions are distinctly not that, but when they do speak, they manage to get along. Somehow.
“So, why don’t you kill?” Jason leans back on the couch, his favorite mug filled with Alfred’s hot chocolate.
Cass is curled against the arm of the sofa. She looks at him, head tilted. Jason knows she’s reading him, but he’s not sure what she’s finding. It’s humbling, and intimidating, to know she sees more than what he allows to show.
“I can see,” she says. “That one time… I killed. I saw. Pain. Fear. Desp- des- not wanting to die.”
“Desperation?”
Cass nods. One of her fingers fiddle with the material of the couch. Jason knows she’s allowing him to see the motion. He knows it’s her silent way of showing him trust.
“There is more. To dying. Like… like they see their lives-They think- remembers. Loves. Their life- regret, love, everything. It goes through-” Cass taps her temple.
“Their lives are flashing through their heads?”
“Yes. Good. Bad. Everything. I see.” Quieter, Cass adds “I know. I know them, then. I killed a life that I know. They love. Everyone, have something they love. I kill, I kill that love.”
“That must suck.”
Cass leans back. She nods, neck releasing their tension and eyes less hunted, more accepting.
“Yes. I don’t want to- I don’t want to be the end.” Cass swivels her shoulders towards him, now. “Why… why do you?”
“Me?” Jason… hasn’t thought about it for a while, nor too deeply. But this is Cass. And her honesty deserves an honest reply. “I kill because some people shouldn’t be left alive to hurt and kill others”
“Not about… Bruce?”
Jason took a sip of his hot chocolate. Cass settled more into the couch, her eyes clear and watchful.
“It used to be,” he admitted. “About him, I mean. It used to be about vengeance. But then I came back to Crime Alley, and then I saw the kids getting hurt instead of being protected. They’re innocent. And then, it wasn’t about Bruce anymore. Killing is just the means to an end now, for me.”
“Do you- not regret?” She makes a gesture at his leg, where on a normal day, his holsters would be.
“I try to make sure I don’t kill people I’d regret, no. Like, you know how sometimes you guys arrest muggers?”
Cass nodded.
“Sometimes,” Jason said, remembering the days of digging through trash for food and the lingering hunger that rumbled through his younger self’s stomach. “They mug people because they’re desperate. I don’t kill those guys. But people deal to kids? Who hurt sex workers? Rapists? They’re doing irreparable harm, with full knowledge of their actions. For profit, mostly. If they’re willing to ruin lives, then they should be ready for their own to be ruined. It’s justice, for people like me.”
Cass studied him. “Justice…?”
“The only kind us Alley kids could ever appreciate. Arresting an abuser, a threat, and having that stick is for the privileged. Having that threat removed completely is relieving.”
“Can’t trust the world to be fair. But death, is fair.”
“Yeah. I think if I saw as much as you do, it’d be harder to do. But I think I’d still kill, because one person’s suffering after a life of being evil is worth the safety of so many others. To know… well, I guess I’m glad I don’t know what that’s like.”
“I see.”
“I know you do,” Jason grins at her. “But not killing is an act of courage too. Even if B makes it seem like it should come instinctually.”
“Yes. He does not connect, with Damian. Does not understand, fully, how hard. To unlearn.”
“Yeah.”
They sit in silence for a while after that, listening to the sounds of their family clambering around in other rooms.
“Hey, Cass?”
Cass turned back to him.
“I would kill David Cain for you.”
He would. It makes the Pit seethe when he thinks about how much David Cain and Lady Shiva hurt Cass for her to get this insanely good at reading people. He hopes she sees the pure honesty and sincerity he feels at that declaration
Cass puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezed once. Twice.
“Okay. Thank you.”
“No objections?”
“… would not feel too bad.”
Jason snorted.
“Yeah. You and me both.”
He doesn’t know how they got here, but he’s thankful for it anyways, because he understands his sister just that much more now.
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drbatsponge · 6 months
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Silly poorly edited meme I made.
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evasive-anon · 8 months
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Cass remembering good and bad moments as a child with David Cain in Batgirl (2000) Issue 22.
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aingeal98 · 9 months
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Thinking again about what my favourite Cass moment is and it might just be this one from issue 37 because of how bleak it is.
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This man is a thief, but he loves his kid. The mother not only doesn't love her, but exploits her for her talent with art and uses it to make herself rich. According to the law, one is a criminal. According to anyone with decency, it should be the other way around.
But Cass has just gotten a gift from David Cain. She's just figured out that he's her real father, and she's projecting so hard. It doesn't matter that he loves her and that she loves him. What he does is wrong.
The key difference here is that David Cain horrifically abused Cass while this father genuinely cares for his daughter. But Cass still does not fully see it as abuse. She sees the love he has for her, and that she has for him. The same with this kid and her father. The problem isn't that Cain hurt her constantly as a kid, she's heartbreakingly fine with that given that it was the only childhood she knew. No, the problem is that he hurt other people. He's a killer, and he made her a killer too. That's why his "love" doesn't matter.
It's such a good piece of character work because it shows why Cass's moral code, which is iron clad when it comes to killing and redemption, can also be flawed due to her own childhood trauma. There are these key elements of good and bad parenting that seem straightforward to everyone else but simply elude her, and all she has left as a framework is the law and her own projection of her relationship with Cain.
It's something she gets to work on and grow from. But as a character statement on it's own it's so tragically bleak and I love it.
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arianna-creates · 4 months
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I dont know why I am the way I am
There's something in the static
I think I've been having revelations
Coming to in the front seat, nearly empty
Skip the exit to our old street and go home
Go home alone
Song: Not Strong enough by Boygenius
Flat color version under the cut:
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acaiyatree · 1 year
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hey girl not to pry or anything but ur past seems to haunt you a lot?
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but-a-humble-goon · 4 months
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It's scary to think that if Cass were there while Bruce were beating David Cain into a bloody pulp on her behalf for all of that childhood abuse, Cass probably would have stepped in to defend David. She doesn't care about the abuse, she doesn't care about the life he stole from her, he's her dad and it would tear her apart to see him get hurt like that.
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bet-on-me-13 · 3 months
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Ellie is Cass
So! Years ago, Ellie began to destabilize again. They finally figured out that the reason she was destabilizing was because her Core was too young to sustain a Fully Grown Ghosts Body. The only way to save her was to Revert her to her True Age, so her Core could healthily grow alongside her Body. She would lose her Memories, but she would survive.
But, there was an incident. A Mercenary had attacked the Fenton's Lab one day while they were Babysitting Ellie, and killed both of Danny's parents. Then, that motherf#cker had kidnapped his Daughter.
And Danny searched for her, he did. He searched for Years on End, sent all the Ghost Allies he had to try and find her, got the word out in the Zone that his Daughter had been kidnapped. But nobody could find her.
It was like the Assasin has dropped off the face of the Earth, but even then he had his contacts searching Deep Space and the Zone as well. He just couldn't find her.
Still, he would not rest until he found his daughter. And the one who took her would have more than just Hell to pay.
...
For David Cain meanwhile, he had struck Gold on his most recent mission. He had been hired by the League if Assasins to go and kill a pair of scientists who had somehow managed to get their hands on Lazarus Water. Apparently they had gotten it a while ago, but had somehow gone under the Radar for years.
But while he was there, he came across something Special. A Lazarus Touched Child. One who seemed to be more Blessed than Any Other Lazarus Touched he had ever heard of. And she was just a Baby.
A Baby who could be raised and Moulded into a Weapon, as any Lazarus Touched should be.
So, he took the Baby and presented it to the League. Ra's ordered that he raise the Child as a Perfect Weapon, to be used as his Bodyguard and Attack Dog. And so he did.
For years, he raised the Child in the most Secluded base he could. There was no need for him to teach it Language beyond following orders, so he filled its head with absolutely nothing but how best to Kill.
Unfortunately, the Weapon managed to escape after its first mission. He tried to track it down for Years, but to no avail. He should expect nothing less from a Lazarus Touched who had been trained from Birth to be the perfect assasin, but he guesses he should have expected this.
Still, he will find the Weapon. And he will teach it why it should have never attempted to escape.
...
Cass had been feeling off for a while.
Well, No, that's not right, it's more accurate to say that she had never felt truly right. For as far back as she can remember, since her earliest days of childhood, she had always had a nagging sensation in the back of her mind, telling her that something was missing.
She didn't know what though. Was it an Object? A Memory? A Person? She had no idea.
For some reason, the feeling had lessened a little when she got adopted by Bruce. She felt a bit more whole, like some part of her had found a part of what it was looking for, but at the same time the rest of her still felt as if it was missing something.
And recently it had gotten even stronger. She couldn't ignore it anymore, she needed to find the thing her heart was yearning for.
She needed to feel Whole again. Again?
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tastycitrus · 5 months
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David Cain: This is my daughter, who I spent years raising under meticulously abusive circumstances in order to make her the perfect assassin.
Barbara Gordon and Bruce Wayne:
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dc-tournaments · 5 months
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gffa · 1 month
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Dick Grayson absolutely wrecking David Cain's shit and dropping him to the floor? Okay, New 52 can have some rights.
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madcapmento · 2 months
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One sec I need to talk about Shiva.
Lady Shiva was introduced in Richard Dragon: Kung Fu Fighter in the 70s. She was a traveling martial artist hellbent on getting revenge for her sister, who she believed had been killed by Richard Dragon. She lured Dragon into a trap, revealed herself as Carolyn's sister, and tried to fight him to the death. Once she realized that Dragon had nothing to do with it, that Cravat and The Swiss (unimportant villain characters, they killed Carolyn) had been the ones to kill her sister, she helped Dragon defeat the villain (by giving him her shiny belt so he could redirect the beam of a deadly laser that was being pointed at them while they were fighting, don’t even ask) and Richard Dragon and Lady Shiva became allies, friends even. Dragon convinced her it would be a waste to kill Cravat and told her that he had killed the Swiss himself. She accepted this. They shook hands. This all took place over the course of one issue of Richard Dragon: Kung Fu Fighter. It took ONE issue for Shiva to go from antagonist to ally. She then tagged along with Richard because she liked the adventures he got up to, the danger, the challenge, and the thrill of it. Richard even called her later on when he needed help on a different adventure. What I’m saying is she didn’t start out as evil.
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Okay, so what do we know about Shiva so far? She’s a thrill-seeking peripatetic martial artist of great capacity and skill. She cared about her sister. She’s willing to kill. She’s an adventurer and a valuable ally. Great. Moving on.
The Question 1987 features THE Lady Shiva. A character capable of both ruthlessness and mercy, cruelty and tenderness. A curious, thrill-seeking, teasing character. She was vicious and nonpartisan and she was working as a mercenary for hire. But she was an ally, even when she was beating the shit out of Vic. She loved the O Sensei. You can tell she even cared about Vic in her way. I’m not saying she had a heart of gold, or that there weren’t tropes she fell into. She wasn’t and there were. But she was a fairly well-rounded, morally gray character that played a key role wherever she showed up. She was closer to a non-traditional anti-hero than anything else. Idfk, just go read The Question.
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I read a tvtropes article describing Lady Shiva as “an archetypical Dragon Lady, complete with sinister motivations and exotic sex appeal,” which… she isn’t. She subverted this trope in several ways actually. She never had “sinister motivations” until Chuck Dixon got his grubby little hands on her. Her motivations were pretty neutral. She had her own set of principles, she was very morally gray. She wanted to travel and fight worthy opponents on her adventures for the thrill of it. She seemed to operate mostly on personal whims, and on the basis of building worthy rivals, out of love for the art of combat. And she didn’t use her sex appeal for shit (until the Richard Dragon reboot comic kms), she didn’t tolerate sexual advances or objectification. She just WAS NOT a conniving temptress, I don't understand where this misperception came from (but I do blame Dixon, I’ll get to that in a sec).
This same article states that she began as the arch-nemesis of Richard Dragon? Unless you’re accepting the version of the two of them from the very short lived Richard Dragon 2004 series as their canonical relationship then NO she didn’t. But I digress.
There was a marked change in the way Lady Shiva was written by the time Robin (1991) came out, this is where her character starts to lean towards the Dragon Lady trope imo. She also weirdly, and maybe arguably, leans more into traditional femininity while at the same time being written as more wild and uncontrollable. Chuck Dixon seemed to fundamentally misunderstand Lady Shiva as a character. He turned her (sometimes ironic) disdain for brutes who wouldn’t last a second in a fight with her into stereotypical womanly haughtiness. He turned her capacity for ruthlessness into bloodlust. And he made her into a conniving, somewhat deranged, villainous woman, tempting our young hero towards evil (oh my!). Again, I’m not saying she ever had a heart of gold, but Dixon changed core character traits (namely her respect for other people's personal code) to turn her into a villain.
“Kill him, little bird. Kill him and become a predator…Aren’t you my weapon? My instrument of death? Say you are mine.” Like?? She would not fucking say that, respectfully.
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That isn’t even to mention Richard Dragon (2004) where Dixon turned Shiva’s relationship with Dragon into a resentful, sexually charged dick-measuring contest.
Even so, I don’t entirely hate Shiva as a villain, especially in Batgirl (2000). Pucketts Shiva is a bit less egregious imo. So she’s a passively suicidal evil mentor-figure who wants Cass to be a killer like her. Whatever, I can get on board with that I guess. I can enjoy it because I love Cass and this is a great comic run. But the retcon that–Listen, THE RETCON THAT IS SHIVA’S SISTER BEING KILLED BY DAVID CAIN, SHIVA DESCRIBING THIS AS FREEING, SAYING SHE’S GRATEFUL, THEN AGREEING TO GET PREGNANT WITH HIS CHILD IN RETURN?? This boils my blood. Shiva, who was introduced as somebody who cared about getting revenge for her dead sister. Shiva, for whom freedom and autonomy were core character traits. That Shiva?? That Shiva is relieved her sister is dead and is willing to carry her sister's killer's child to term?? What the fuck?
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I hate it. I don’t understand it. Why would you take a complex character who makes it difficult to tell who she really cares about, and flatten them into somebody incapable of love?
Okay I’m done, this is getting too long and I don’t even want to get started on New 52 era Shiva. I don’t have a conclusion, I’m just annoyed. Thanks for reading. The Question (1987) is NOT a perfect comic but if you’re interested in Shiva please please please check it out, it’s very moody and philosophical, noir-esque. Also Chuck Dixon suck my dick.
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