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silverwhittlingknife · 1 year

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How do you feel about Jack Drake?? What are your thoughts on him and Tim’s relationship?

Anon, I hope you were interested in a novel, because look, I am fascinated by Jack Drake. He’s key to a whole lot of what I find compelling about Tim as a character, and if I were in charge of DC, I’d bring him back to life. This would make Tim unhappy but would IMO make for good plotlines.

Jack and Tim’s relationship is Complicated (TM)...

Jack and Tim hug in Nightwing 20 / Jack impulsively yanks a TV out of the wall in Robin 45 / Tim grieves in Identity Crisis

“I could tell the truth. But I don’t.” - Robin 66

...and it involves a whole lot of Tim lying, and feeling guilty about lying, and thinking about telling the truth, and choosing again and again to keep lying.

And I think that’s great.

Below the cut:

Shorter version - key points about Jack

Really long version - my gentler take (vigilantism is choir and Jack loves sports) vs. my harsher take (Jack has some major flaws)

Final thoughts

Shorter version - key points about Jack:

He’s a bad parent. He’s self-centered, he consistently prioritizes his own comfort and interests over his son’s, and when upset, he does things like order Tim off to boarding school.

But he’s never a bad parent in an actionable way. He’s not like David Cain or Arthur Brown, who are abusive monsters. Jack’s not a monster! He just...kinda sucks.

He genuinely loves Tim. If Jack’s aware that Tim’s disappeared or is in trouble, he’s always worried and upset. He periodically resolves to be a better dad, and IMO he’s always sincere.

And Tim loves him, a lot. Tim’s protective of him and worries about him when he’s kidnapped or in danger, and when they’re reunited, Tim’s really relieved and usually hugs him (and Jack hugs back!).

...But they have very little in common, and that’s a problem. Jack doesn’t value the things that Tim values, or respect the people that Tim admires, or care about the things that Tim’s interested in. Tim lies to him a lot, but that’s partly because he correctly guesses Jack wouldn’t respond well if he knew the truth of what Tim’s up to.

The Batfamily is a surrogate family that Tim’s drawn to because of the ways his real family doesn’t meet his emotional needs…but also he feels guilty about that and disloyal. (And to the extent that his dad recognizes what’s going on, he's jealous and resentful!)

Very long version:

(LISTEN I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS)

Okay! So first: Jack’s a character who IMO is pretty up for interpretation. You can interpret him very charitably, and make excuses for the bad behavior, and fill in the blanks sympathetically when situations are ambiguous; or you can interpret him uncharitably, and emphasize the bad behavior. I don’t think either approach is invalid - it depends on what kind of story you’re interested in! I have enjoyed Bad Dad stories and also stories that redeem Jack.

My personal take on canon is that Jack and Tim’s relationship is in a gray area. Jack's definitely neglectful, and he does prioritize other things over Tim, but he’s never so bad that Tim can easily reject him, and he's never so bad that Bruce could justify taking Tim away. He's just...not great. Tim loves him, and feels loyal to him, but it’s a very mixed-up complicated love.

I have a gentler take and a harsher one which I switch between as the spirit moves me. xD

My Gentler Take (tl;dr: vigilantism is choir and Jack loves sports)

Here’s the core conflict: Jack and Tim are very different people with different values. Tim idolizes Bruce and Dick and vigilantism, and secretly gets involved, knowing his dad will hate it. He gets increasingly wrapped up in his secret world and lies to his dad...because if his dad finds out, he’ll make Tim quit.

This is a great setup for an ongoing comic. It’s practical, because it provides endless potential for plotlines, and it’s nicely thematic, because it maps closely onto relatable real-life situations with extracurricular activities:

Tim the drama nerd whose dad thinks he’s playing football and not in the school play;

Tim the closeted-queer kid secretly getting involved in his school’s politically-active Gay-Straight Alliance;

Tim the choir kid whose dad only values making money and wants him to go into the family business (and Tim keeps promising himself he'll give up choir soon, definitely soon, but maybe he'll stay in just a liiiittle longer, because they need him, you see, the last tenor left town, so...);

Tim the computer geek with the sports-obsessed dad (this one’s just canon);

etc. etc.

The extracurricular metaphor works pretty well for Tim’s relationship to vigilantism. Tim's involved in his "extracurricular" because he genuinely thinks it's important and fulfilling, and he values it and wants to be good at it. He idolizes Bruce and Dick because they're good at it. He's been collecting information about it since he was a little kid, and hiding it from his parents because he knows they wouldn't approve. And mayyyybe there's also an element of low-key rebellion against his dad, and maybe that's secretly part of the appeal. And yet also as Tim gets more and more invested, he starts to daydream: maybe I could tell my dad and he'd be proud of me and supportive. But he doesn't, because actually he knows his dad would be upset and angry and make him quit.

And - again, just like with lonely kids and extracurricular hobbies - one of the things that happens is that Tim starts getting his unfilled emotional needs met ... by people he knows through this secret hobby. And people like Bruce and Dick start turning into a surrogate family. Which Tim feels guilty about. And also as Tim gets more and more wrapped up in their world, he has to lie to his dad even more, which means the distance between Tim and his dad gets bigger and bigger and more and more unfixable.

I love this dilemma. It's simple, it's recognizable, it provides endless sources for conflict, and there's no obvious solution! Tim can't tell Jack: he'll make Tim quit! And Tim doesn't want to quit, because he loves choir / art / theater / whatever. Yeah, it’s difficult, and there are challenges, and sometimes he has doubts...but at the end of the day, he cares about it a lot. And everything he values is there, and all the people he admires and cares about are there, and all he wants in the world is to feel like he's one of them and belongs there. So he has to lie, even though he doesn't want to lie, and he feels guilty about it...

...but also he ends up lying more and more.

(Sidenote: I think it's important that Tim chooses to keep lying - Tim's narration often glosses this as "I have to lie to my dad," and that's certainly how it feels to Tim, but this... isn't quite true. He has to lie to his dad, because if he doesn't, his dad will get mad at him and try to stop him, not because he literally has no choice about it.)

Other Reasons Why I Like The "Secret Extracurricular" Interpretation

(tl;dr it complicates not just Tim's relationship with his dad, but also all his other relationships)

Tim's problems have some obvious parallels to Steph and Cass, who both become vigilantes while rejecting their evil supervillain dads. But Jack isn't evil. And that means the Tim-and-Jack relationship is ambiguous and complicated in ways that I like. Steph and Cass can just leave their Bad Dads in prison, and say good riddance, and feel very righteous and triumphant about it! Tim’s more complicated. Tim gets into vigilantism ostensibly out of duty and altruism, but secretly, he's also involved for straight-up selfish self-fulfillment reasons. He's lonely, and bored, and his life feels pointless, but he thinks that Bruce and Dick are cool and amazing and he wants to be a part of the things that they do. When his dad gets jealous of Tim’s relationship to Bruce, and feels like Tim’s looking for a surrogate family, he’s... not wrong.

And the ways in which Jack is not Actionably Bad complicate things from Bruce's POV. If Jack was a straight-up villain, it’d be an easy call to keep in touch when Jack finds out and makes Tim quit...but he’s not a villain, not really. So what do you do? Do you try to surreptitiously stay in touch with Tim even though you’re ignoring his dad’s express wishes and thus forcing Tim to sneak around? Do you respect his dad’s wishes and stay away from Tim even though you have a years-long relationship at this point?

Again: a bit similar to the extracurricular analogy. Say you’re the choir director and you’ve built this whole relationship with a kid in the choir, and you’re an important mentor to him and you care about him etc. etc. etc.... and then right before a big performance, his dad finds out he’s been secretly involved, and yanks him out. How would you react? Well, maybe kind of in some of the ways Bruce reacts. You replace him. You’re annoyed with him. You miss him. You want him to come back. You’re also worried about him. You’re upset with his dad. But also... what should you do, exactly?

Bruce and Alfred and Dick care about Tim as if he were part of their family, but he’s not part of their family, and there’s a lot of interesting tension there.

My Harsher Take

Jack never hits his son. But his temper is a big deal.

In his worst moments, he takes out his anger on Tim’s stuff - wrecking his room, or ripping his TV out of the wall and confiscating it. When he’s worried about Tim, he usually expresses that fear by yelling at him / punishing him / sending him away - threatening to send him to boarding school in Metropolis in Robin III, or threatening to send him to military school abroad in Robin 92, or actually forcing him to go to an all-boys' boarding school post-NML.

This is bad behavior! It is Not Good!

And you can easily connect the dots to a bunch of Tim’s terrible coping mechanisms, like the constant lying and or the fact that Tim’s go-to methods for dealing with interpersonal conflict are 1) repress it and pretend it never happened (most of his fights with Bruce), 2) withdraw from the relationship until he can pretend the conflict doesn’t exist (when his friends get mad at him in YJ, he quits the team for a while), or 3) literally run away from home.

Also, Jack is a Manly Man with firm opinions about how men behave vs. how women behave, and he thinks boys shouldn’t be scared and thinks Tim should date hot girls and pushes Tim to work out and wants him to play football and expresses period-typical sexism, etc. etc. etc. ... and though obviously this wasn’t what the writers had in mind at the time, all of that is certainly interesting to read backwards in the light of Tim as a queer character.

More Disorganized Thoughts on Jack Drake

Tim’s our hero, so we’re naturally more sympathetic to him, but it’s also true that relationships are a two-way street, and Tim doesn’t value any of the things his dad values, either. Jack at various points is shown to care about grades, business, money, boarding schools, archeology, football, a kind of macho bragging-about-dating-hot-women ethos, and a very public and performative kind of caring. Tim tends to respond with discomfort or disinterest or even disgust. When Jack gets on TV to try to rally the government to save his son from No Man’s Land, Tim isn’t touched—he’s mortified. When Jack makes some bad investments and loses money, Jack’s deeply upset and his self-image is majorly impacted, and far from being sympathetic, Tim’s annoyed and kind of contemptuous of the idea that this is a problem. Jack thinks fishing in the early morning and going to tennis matches is a fun father-son activity; Tim finds it exhausting and tedious. And so on.

This means that Tim often longs to be closer to his dad in theory, but this longing is more tied to fantasy than to reality. He rarely seems to enjoy spending time with His-Dad-The-Actual-Person. So for example, when Tim’s deadly ill with the Clench, he has an extremely poignant fever dream about telling his dad the truth and getting hugged…even as he insists in real-life to Alfred and Dick that he does not want them to tell his dad what’s going on.

The same is true of Jack, who IMO genuinely wants to be closer to his son and is continually declaring that he’s going to turn over a new leaf and get closer to his son…and just as continually backs out of activities or loses his temper when faced with spending time with his actual son.

Tim and his dad sadly get along best—by far—in Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder situations. When Jack gets kidnapped or is in danger, Tim worries for him (and Tim grieves him deeply when he dies). When Tim disappears or runs away, Jack’s genuinely worried about him. So e.g. they have a really moving emotional reunion and hug when the earthquake hits Gotham, and Tim panics about his dad’s safety and comes running home (and meanwhile Jack’s been panicked about Tim’s safety!). It’s the day-to-day, regular life stuff where they don’t connect.

Jack's written quite differently by different writers. Mostly, Tim's parents are at their least likable in his early appearances and early miniseries (this is where you get, for example, Jack and Janet being nasty at each other while a pained employee looks on, and Tim disappointed to once again get news of where his parents are via postcard - "I guess that sums them up! Never know where they’re going to be–or when–or even how long!” - and Tim alone on school break, and Bruce and Alfred thinking there's something weird going on with Tim's parents, etc. etc.). Jack's more sympathetic but still often unlikable in most of Tim's Robin solo, and he's almost invisible (but positively treated if he does show up) in Tim's team books.

For obvious reasons, Jack's remembered way more sympathetically after his death. Tim's completely devastated by Jack's murder, which he arrives moments too late to prevent, and he basically never gets over it. We see him grieving Jack again and again in Robin, and also in Teen Titans, and also in Resurrection, and again in the Halloween Special, and again in Batman: Blackest Night, and all the way up to the end of Red Robin. Tim also grieves for an extended time over Janet - he hallucinates a happy reunion with her when he's feverish in Contagion, and hallucinates her in the final issue of Robin, and the reveal-your-buried-emotions song in Robin 102 brings up his grief for her too (meanwhile, other characters dance or laugh or otherwise get giddy). Tim’s grief over his parents’ deaths is intense and long-lasting.

I'm not going to clip comic panels because this is long enough, but if you're curious, here's a nice and fairly lengthy compilation of comic panels with Tim and Jack.

If you're interested in a Jack-centric story with a softer-but-still-recognizably-canon take on Jack, I really like the way Jack’s narration is written in the one-shots Heart Humble (set shortly before Jack dies) and Never a Hero (Ra's resurrects him during Brucequest, and Jack's archeology skills turn out to be unexpectedly useful).

#tim drake #jack drake #ask tag #i wrote this ages ago and now i can't remember what i was going to add to it so oh well draft amnesty? sorry for the long wait anon!! <333 #anyway i kept this carefully on topic and virtuously did not derail into talking about the other blorbo but tags are for disorganization SO #for me this kinda half-in half-out place where tim is with the batfamily is SUCH an interesting part of his relationship with dick #and i never stop turning it over in my head #he's kiiiinda replaced dick in that he's robin - but in a very real way he *hasn't* - he's NOT bruce's new son the way jason was #and early!tim makes a BIG POINT of how bruce is not his dad #and i think this relative distance from bruce is a huge factor in why dick is able to build a close relationship with tim at all #(because dick's still pretty estranged from bruce!)#and there's such interesting tension there when dick starts jokingly calling tim ''little brother'' or when villains call them brothers #because they're NOT. increasingly they would both LIKE to be brothers! but dick has zero official standing in tim's life #if tim got hit by a car in his civilian identity bruce and dick wouldn't even be able to visit him without his dad's permission #which jack would be pretty unlikely to give! jack doesn't like or trust bruce!#or like. this is morbid. but if tim died. dick wouldn't even be invited to the funeral you know?#and there's such interesting tension there for me in the contrast between this vigilante relationship that's very very close #but in their civilian lives no one would assume they're anything in particular to each other #anyway the 1st half of tim's robin solo has this thread of tension between tim's family life vs. his vigilante life (plus his mom's death)#and then the second half + red robin has the thread of struggling with grief in a world that's not fair + feeling lost/alone #and these two threads are a big part of my interest in tim as a character! jack's the backdrop that makes a lot of stories possible

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bigskydreaming · 4 years

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AU where someone, anyone, shows up to comfort Dick after the TWO canon times someone burns down Haly’s Circus, his childhood home - just to hurt him. First Blockbuster, and then Joker, in the New 52. Like....Dick already lost it once, when he was taken away from it as a child, but how debilitating must it have been to lose it a second time, and know it only happened because of his connection to it?

On a somewhat similar note, my nonexistent kingdom that I’ve already given away like a dozen times in posts like this, for fic that has one of the Batfamily freaking TALK to Dick about the revelation of his family’s history with the Court of Owls. I’m not talking about fic where he’s abducted by the Court or turned into a Talon - just purely having a conversation with him about the psychological and emotional impact of finding out that he thought he had no biological family left, but turns out, he’s got an immortal great grandfather who’s an assassin for a secret society and who has intended Dick to follow in his footsteps since before he was born.

Like, imagine what that revelation has to do to a person, ESPECIALLY someone like Dick, for whom his independence is so fundamental and important to him as a person. Who, thematically, is a character who routinely has his agency violated in all manner of ways, not just sexually, but in how his world was upended after his parents’ died and he wasn’t allowed to stay in comfortable and familiar environs, or how he was fired from being Robin and had very little control over his own legacy at times. Or the many, MANY times he’s been brainwashed or controlled by villains, the way he so often has to put aside what he wants to do or be or what’s important to him to be what others need, like when he became Batman while Bruce was lost in time. Or the way villains tend not to target him directly, but rather everyone around him, not just Blockbuster but the Court, Joker, Deathstroke, and more have all followed this pattern, resulting in the frequent loss of friends, casual acquaintances, his various homes, his entire city....

My point being, Dick doesn’t often have memorable physical traumas to point to as proof of what he’s been through over the years, as even the ones he does have, like his two times being shot in the head, tend to get glossed over and moved past. But that’s also largely because the vast majority of his traumas and tragedies are intangible, attacks on his agency and his choices, his freedom to be in control of his own life.

Which of course, translates directly into WHY he’s so stubborn about things, and why he’s so volatile when he feels his choices are being limited or not respected, and so fiercely protective of his right to be his own person, outside of just who he is as Bruce’s son, partner, leader of the Titans, etc. He doubles down whenever he has the opportunity to make his own choices at all, because of how rarely that’s even been possible for him throughout his life, and how much he expects and takes it for granted that his choices will come under attack and people are going to once again try and take away his ability to decide what he does.

Because that is the pattern in his life. The one that repeats most consistently.

So imagine what an opportunity the Court of Owls is, just to have Dick’s family really GET this about him. Because often, given how stubborn and impassioned they all are, they wind up on the opposite side of Dick in arguments about his choices, and so even in relatively minor disagreements....they’re poised to be defensive about their own stances, and why they feel the way they do about his various choices. But Dick’s forceful denial and resistance to his biological great-grandfather’s agenda for him...how it affects him, what a blow it is to him for the specific reasons it is - that the very idea of his life’s path having been predetermined by someone else is an attack on who he fundamentally is at his core....its an ideal opportunity for them to understand, to view objectively, as spectators rather than active participants....that its NEVER been about them. Its never been about Dick coming into conflict with them on these matters because of something he does or doesn’t feel about these various members of his family of choice. It was always going to happen, no matter WHO it was in opposition to him, because this is JUST WHO DICK IS.

He NEEDS that independence, that freedom to be his own person, that ability to sometimes put distance between himself and anyone else, whether the Titans or Bruce or Kory or Babs....and to be able to say I am still me, I am not defined by who I am in those settings or those dynamics....I am the person I am because of ME....to be able to say, to know, to believe...that he is still his own person, not just the sum of what Bruce and various other important figures in his life WANT him to be.

And this, I think, is at the heart of so many of Dick’s conflicts with his friends and family, because they look at him being stubborn over something they don’t see as that big of a deal....not realizing he looks at it and sees just one more attempt in a long, LONG string of them, to get him to fit into someone else’s mold, fall in line with someone else’s expectations or desires for him.

And Cobb and the Court of Owls are like...the ULTIMATE embodiment of that. The reappearance of biological family in Dick’s life, long after he’d thought that an impossibility....but bringing with him nothing BUT expectations, agendas and plans for Dick, whether he wants them or not....and he very much does not.

Imagine the impact this must have on someone who lost his first family when he was so young. There was SO MUCH he likely never got a chance to know. All the questions he must have had for them over the years, about his parents, their parents, their family history....just some basic connection to where they came from, where he came from. The kind of things his parents might have been waiting to tell him when he was older, because they’re not always good stories, just...

To have closed the door on that part of his life, no doubt thinking it was for good, because there was nothing more to be learned about all of that....and then surprise, surprise - here it comes swinging wide open, an ancestor whose son was the literal birth of the Grayson family name.....as William specifically picked that name for his son when he gave him to Haly’s Circus a hundred years ago.

Here’s someone who has all the answers Dick might ever have wanted to ask, who is that direct connection to his family history and past.....but whose very existence is a catch-22, because he comes with all these strings attached...strings that Dick absolutely does not want attached to him, no matter what Cobb could offer him in return.

This is a huge emotional upheaval, no doubt. A shock to the system that upends so much Dick’s long implicitly believed about his family and his place in the world....and I’ve never seen anything actually delving into what effect this and this alone would have had on his psyche.

There’s such rich potential for his family to reach out to him in the wake of his learning all this and reaffirm for him just WHY they are his family in ways Cobb could never be....as long as they themselves use the opportunity to reaffirm how important it is to Dick to even HAVE family, a support system, that lets him just....be.

That values him for who HE wants to be, rather than how well or not he’s living up to their intentions for him. Vowing never to be the kind of family Dick’s last biological family has proven to be....people who would throw away everything Dick is, everything Dick has made of himself, by his own choice....in order to prioritize instead, what they think he should be.

Like, centering this particular plot or character arc as the crux of a fic about Dick’s family of choice gathering around him to shore up whatever damage the reveal of Dick’s biological family does to him.....that has SO MUCH POTENTIAL to cement a new understanding between Dick and the rest of the Batfamily as to WHY he’s the way he is, and why certain things are so important to him....if they’re just written showing a willingness to accept this and understand that....they don’t always HAVE to understand his choices in order to just....be supportive and trust in his decisions and his reasons for prioritizing the way he does.

I do think due to the....idk, ‘shiny’ factor of the Talons and that aspect of the Court of Owls storyline, its easy to overlook a lot of the other angles inherent in the larger concept. But IMO the reveal of Dick’s secret family history and Cobb and the Court’s intentions for him alone is a psychological treasure trove of potential character development, insight, angst and more.

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