Tim’s not sure what the difference between butterflies in your stomach or anxiety induced nausea is. None of the cultural expectations around teenagers and dating are helping.

Rating: Teen

No archive warnings apply, but this touches on a lot of warning adjacent topics, and has canon-typical violence.

I hate girlboss x malewife ships where it's a pathetic guy who's obsessed with a cool girl who's not nearly into him as he is her and people call it bisexuality.I want them BOTH down bad,i want them BOTH pampering eachother nonstop,i want them BOTH going to the ends of the earth for their love,i want them BOTH to be actual characters instead 'She's everything,he's just Ken' and acting like that's feminist instead of writing women as perfect and men as people.Forget girlboss x malewife,i want Equalit4ty

Okay, time for another opinion.

Now, before I begin, I would just like to say a few things, just so no one gets the wrong idea of me.

I have no real problem with Tim Drake being made bisexual, even if most people who worked on the character probably did not intend on him being so. I feel that the only real problem with changing a pre-established character's sexuality is that you're retconning what came before. If it's done well, then I'm pretty much fine with it.

Also, while I'm not a fan of it, I'm cool with people shipping Tim Drake and Connor Kent.

Now, with that out of the way, I would just like to say... I can not stand Tim with Bernard. Bernard is such a flat and boring character. He feels like pre-death, non-revisionist Gwen Stacy, and I can never understand how people were actually upset with that woman being killed off. But at least she had some personality, unlike Bernard ever since they started having him and Tim go out. Granted, all Gwen really had going for her was being kinda mean at times, a daddy's girl, and hating Spider-Man after her dad died, but still, at least it was something. Sorry to those who like Tim with Bernard, but I, for the life of me, just can not bring myself to like these two together.

Also, to clarify, if anyone reading this hasn't seen my last post, this isn't a timsteph thing. I think Tim and Steph are fine, but I'm honestly not that big a fan of them. I don't hate or dislike them like some people do, and while sometimes, the two can be written as pretty toxic, I think when they aren't, they're great. It's just that for whatever reason, they just don't quite click with me. At least I like Steph as a character. She's great, and I wish she was in more adaptations so that more casual fans could see that, too. It's just that while I like her and Tim together, I guess I just don't, for lack of better term, love her and Tim together.

Ok, with all that said, I noticed that somehow, looking at Tim's current relationship and then also his longest reoccurring one, I find myself carrying less about them, and more about his short-lived romance with a member of the X-Men that admittedly, could have used a little more time for development... so maybe I'm just weird.

Things Stephanie Brown is not:

A pick me

Stupid

Defined by her blondness

Just the 'quirky waffle girl'

Boring

A bad person

A tool for Tim and Jason to have shitty cishet drama over

Things Stephanie Brown is:

A mix between very feminine and caring about stereotypical 'girl things' and as strong,rowdy and silly as what you'd expect from a 'one of the boys' type

A genius since childhood who's always worked very hard to be one

More than her design,which is about as relevant to canon as The Joker being potrayed as Deep ActuallyTM

Multifaced and excellently developed

Extremely fun both personality wise and plotlines wise

A realistically written victim of parental abuse who shows the consequences of what stuff like that does to you but also does her best to be kind and succeeds

Cassandra Cain's soulmate and vice versa

Happy debut anniversary to one of my biggest comfort character's who inspires me to be the best version of myself and who i'm very grateful i got to meet💜💜💜

deleted that because wow theres a lott of timkon hate on the wall who is sending them in 🤯 this ship is niche guys do not be fooled 🤯🤯 the regular comic reading population DGAF

This might seem a bit out of the blue to you, but I just wanted to say your old posts about Stephanie Brown changed my mind on her quite a bit, even if I still don't feel quite as strongly about it as you seem to haha. Overall she's a character with some interesting potential to her backstory, but she's been written awfully over the years. Your points are all really well-argued, even though for me it's hard to look past the Doylist context of the choices made with her character; from plain poor writing to mysoginy to editorial mandates and whatnot, so it's tough for me to outright *hate* her, but when I put the Watsonian glasses on... yeah, she does kinda suck, and Batgirl 2009 is pretty darn shallow. And honestly, TimSteph shippers outright baffled me--well, no they didn't, a lot of their outrage at the breakup was just pure biphobia, but if I were giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming they genuinely liked the relationship as presented from Rebirth onwards it's like... why tho. They're such a boring couple, leaving aside the toxicity of Post-Crisis because I don't know much about it and just ick. Idk what I'm even saying here. Just expressing appreciation for the effort put into your posts even if I don't agree with absolutely every interpretation, I guess. Keep on keeping on

Thank you. I appreciate you saying all that.

It's not like I'm unaware of the Doylist reasons behind all the events that happen in-comics, I just don't agree with the idea that the way to fix that is to brush huge swaths of a character's history under a rug. That's just not how you do it if you're trying to reclaim a character who's been sexistly victimized, not if you're doing it well -- they didn't do it with Barbara after Killing Joke, or Carol Danvers after Avengers #200, or Gwen Stacy when creating Spider-Gwen, or with Harley when transitioning her into anti-hero, and those all resulted in great stories.

And male characters have to deal with the aftermath of bad shit they pulled under other writers all the time. Wally West only just put a final capstone on the events of Heroes in Crisis last month. Over in Batman, Bruce is catching the brunt of fall-out from both the Babel Protocol and the Batman of Zur-en-arrh. Hank Pym got labeled an infamous wife beater because one artist misinterpreted a script direction. Roy Harper has only just recently gotten back everything that Cry for Justice took from him.

So yeah, I think it's only fair to do the same with Stephanie, and that it does the character a major disservice not to. More than that, it's lazy. The least amount of effort needed to get people on the internet to stop yelling at them.

Killing her off for Bruce's manpain and having her around, alive, but presented as a flat, perfect little Princess Badass with a bland "quirky" personality and no interests outside the immediate needs of the plot are both examples of sexist writing. If you want to engage with her as a character you need to embrace the fact that she can be kind of an asshole, that she's got negative emotions and bad opinions and shitty ideas and things that she just plain sucks at. Of course she does! She's human!

That's all feminist writing really means. Treating women like they're human instead of just a plot convenience. It should not be that hard.

I keep encountering antis in the wild so far my favorite one has been the one who was frothing over Jaytim shippers. "Just because they're not technically brothers"!

Friend they're not technically nor non-technically brothers. They weren't raised together. They don't have a brother dynamic.

"It's different from DickBabs and TimSteph!" Not really! You're just cherrypicking!

90% of antis use anti rhetoric to justify why their ship is better/more valid than another, not because they really care about things they deem immoral or whatever, and I think a lot of Fandom Discourse tends to miss that by a long shot.

Like more often than not it's just bitches digging for reasons why their OTP is the only ship that can be shipped, therefore if you ship something else You're Wrong and the ship you ship shouldn't even exist. They use arguments on morality and such because they're hard to argue with - lots of folks don't know what to say when they're faced with "don't ship X and Y cause it's harmful and abusive!", "you're hurting victims of SA and grooming by shipping X and Y!" - and what happens is that they get scared out of the ships/topics they like and stop engaging actively with fanworks. Sometimes they rationally or subconsciously realize that it works, so they end up even adopting the same rhetoric as it's really fucking convenient: being on the moral high horse is delicious because people feel like it automatically puts them in the category of the good guys, therefore everyone else is a bad guy and they can harass them and send them death threats, even if it's just about shipping fictional characters.

I've seen this happen in basically every single fandom I've been in since I was 12 (and I am Not Young™), and I've seen the most unexpected people use anti rhetoric while not being antis themselves, or even labeling themselves as proshippers, but they would still use anti arguments to "legitimize" their ship and claim how and why it was better than others in the same fandom. Instead of just... saying that one ship in particular is not for them. Tbh lately I'm only trusting multi-shippers not to pull anti bullshit out of their ass, and this niche of the DC fandom is really a safe haven. But I digress.

One of the things that really pisses me off the most is the rampant homophobia. Going by generic anti logic Jaydick is incest, but Dickbabs isn't. Jaytim is incest, Timsteph isn't. Brudick, Brujay, Brutim are all incestuous ships - except Bruce and Barbara isn't. The het ship is fine would you look at that. Childhood friends to lovers is alright with pop culture as long as it's a man and a woman, because if it's two men they'll immediately scream incest and abuse (lumping them together too, while they're also not the same thing ffs). Because hiding behind anti mentality and purity culture there's the big bad monster of queerphobia, which shows its ugly face the moment you take a peek below the surface.

And since I feel like this isn't being said enough. Dick and Jason ARE NOT BROTHERS. Neither are Dick and Tim, or Dick and Damian, Jason and Damian, Jason and Tim, I could go on. These people are not related, not by blood or legally, not in any way that matters and would make it incest. They're a legacy of characters who wear the same cowl for narrative reasons, and THAT'S IT.

Calling Jaydick "incest" irks me to no freaking end because I LOVE incest ships, I am DOWN BAD for them, and this one ain't it chief. They're not related. They didn't grow up together. They don't share any brotherly bond except a vague "brothers in arms" kinda thing. People decided this at some point in order to have an argument why their plastic prepackaged het ships were better than the Bad Abusive (gay) ones, because they're fucking homophobes, and that is about it.

And that's what I really want to say to all the young, queer antis that parrot the terfs and homophobes that pushed them in that direction. They are taking away a space that is YOURS TOO. They fucking HATE YOU. They hate you because you're queer, gay, bi, pan, ace, trans, nonbinary, a woman, even just a teen. Purity culture and anti mentality is how they keep you under control, tied to their morality leash and making life miserable to every other queer person that refuses to conform and refuses to shut up and to stop enjoying fiction for the harmless, but also valuable thing that it is.

*Types out an anti Timber rant for 10 mins only to delete it cause I don't want beef with anyone/causing drama, but man I just get SO worked up over it and how they treated TimSteph I just AGG* .....

What is batcest? I’ve seen that term thrown around and I’m not sure what it means

Oof ok putting a read more as this might be triggering

Ok so batcest refers to the incestual (and often pedophilic) relationship (and it’s shippers) between members of Bruce’s family *to clarify I’m saying Bruce as whilst Steph and Babs are “batkids” they are not his children and relationships w them while not always good are not incestuous-batcest does not just mean a “bad” ship it specifically means an incestuous one

Ships that are batcest : in any combination

Bruce x Dick/Jason/Cass/Tim/Damian/Duke/Helena (Wayne)/Alfred

Dick x Bruce/Jason/Cass/Tim/Damian/Duke/Helena Wayne/Alfred

Jason x Bruce/Dick/Cass/Tim/Damian/Duke/Helena Wayne/Alfred

Tim x Bruce/Dick/Jason/Cass/Damian/Duke/Helena Wayne/Alfred

Cass x Bruce/Dick/Jason/Cass/Tim/Damian/Duke/Helena Wayne/Alfred

Damian x Bruce/Dick/Jason/Cass/Tim//Duke/Helena Wayne/Alfred/MAR’I

Duke x Bruce/Dick/Jason/Cass/Tim/Damian/Helena Wayne/Alfred

Helena x Bruce/Dick/Jason/Cass/Tim/Damian/Duke/Alfred

Alfred x Bruce/Dick/Jason/Cass/Tim/Damian/Duke/Helena Wayne/his daughter I’m blanking on

Babs is not one of Bruce’s kids and thus her ships as a general rule are not batcest however Cass is her daughter (she’s also Bruce’s no one is denying that) so shipping them would be incestuous and thus under the batcest umbrella

Ships that are not batcest but still bad vibes :

Bruce x Babs it’s not batcest he’s not her dad it being a bad ship doesn’t make it incest-also this ship has complicated comic history as tbh she’s closer to Bruce’s age than Dicks half the time-she was originally written as his love interest

Babs x Tim/or Jason yes it’s weird-yes it’s pedophilic no it’s not batcest they’re not related yes it’s still a bad ship

Harley Quinn x Dick yes it’s creepy no it’s not incest *will say the batkids w Selina/Talia I consider to be under the batcest umbrella as they both are fundamentally their step moms/the actual mother of one of their brothers-it’s close enough 😭

As a general rule any weird age gap ships between non related bat characters whilst yes weird are not automatically batcest I’m clarifying because I’ve seen it used about a Bruce x Babs art (pre52 ect) and whilst you may have your opinions on the ship I wouldn’t consider it a batcest one ect

Ships that are often mistakenly referred to as batcest by ship “antis” (I hate that word I don’t know a different word to use here) but again are not batcest as they are not incestuous-Bruce can be a mentor w/o characters being siblings :

As I’ve already said almost (Cass excluded) every Babs ship as again she’s not Bruce’s daughter nor is she any of their sister even if she views Tim/Jason/ect in a sibling manner that doesn’t make Dick x Babs incest-I don’t even like Dick x Babs but calling it that is an incredibly stupid argument

Steph x any of the batkids : while some are worse than others it’s not incest and for the love of god pls stop calling Cass her sister she’s not StephCass even if you don’t ship it is not an incestual ship 😭 nor is TimSteph

Helena BERTINELLI x Dick people need to stop mixing her up with Helena Wayne. Yes Helena Wayne is his sister-Helena Bertninelli is not. Pls learn to tell the huntresses apart before you say people are shipping incest for shipping them (real things I’ve seen 😭)

Any of the fox kids again just because you’re loosely connected through the batfam does not make you related 😭 Tim and Tam and Luke & Babs are fine. My god

Harper x Cass or Steph again they’re not related

Hope this clarifies it a bit. In summary it means incestual ship however some people use it a bit loosely just at that side of the fandom which while fair tbh is confusing when you’re not used to it. Hope I explained well enough feel free to ask any questions ect

Olay so i'll do my best to make this not SUPER long!!

1st Robin:Dick Grayson.For him,he stars in a couple of comic runs with his team the Teen Titans!There's the og run from the 70s,it's 80s sequel 'New Teen Titans' and another sequel called 'The Titans' from the 90s!Whatever you do,do NOT read his 'Grayson' and 'Nightwing' series,they treat him in a super nasty way,such as by being racist about his romani heritage!

2nd:Jason Todd.The best introduction to his character is the 'Batman:Under The Red Hood' and tbh a lot his comics stuff is...not very good cause unfortunately his team was poorly written asf so i think you should be good on understanding his character just by watching it!!

3rd:Tim Drake.He has a 'Robin' series from 1993,his team stories can be found in 'Young Justice 1998' and 'Red Robin' is fun too,which is about him taking on his own hero identity!!

4th Robin:Stephanie Brown.She started out as Tim's love interest who evolved into a solo character so you read Tim's Robin run for her too and she has a solo run called 'Batgirl 2009'!If you end up liking Timsteph,they have a onehsot dedicated to their relathionship called 'Robin/Spoiler 2008'

5th Robin:Damian Wayne.Sadly,his story has a lot of anti-arab racism in it so i will give you the ones that are mostly clear of it!'Son of Batman' is a miniseries about him and 'Supersons' is about his relathionship with his best friend,Jon Kent!!

There's actually a 6th Robin called Duke Thomas but DC is on and off with wether he's an official one or just honorary.If you're interested in him,his runs are 'We are Robin','Batman and The Signal' and 'Batman and The Outsiders'

For all of these,you can find them for free to read online on 'readcomicsonline' and there's a webtoon of them and their adoptive dad + their adoptive sister called 'Batman:Wayne Family Adventures'!!

Hey Summer! Sorry for responding late! Holy crap this is a lot of information 😭 not gonna lie I'm having a hard time trying to digest and understand what I'm reading right now, Its like that thing where no matter how many times you reread something the info doesn't stick to my head 💀💔

Either way thank you for educating me on this Summer!!! 💖🙏💗💓😊

Quick intro

Baz <3

She/he, 18

Interests:

Revue Starlight, the Hunger Games, Taylor Swift, the Legend of Zelda (and Linked Universe!) Batfamily (Stephanie Brown), Reverse 1999, JJK, etc.

Favorite ships rn:

Futakao, Timsteph, Everlark, Zelink, Blossica, Satosugu.

DNI:

All the basic DNI criteria, proshippers, Taylor Swift haters, batcest or linkcest shippers, timsteph antis, etc.

:3

It's always either 'they're a fucking monster!!!' or 'they don't have any actual mental problems,that's scary so let's make them normal!' or even 'Well actually they're not a kid at all!'.If you'd met me in school you'd have called me a future serial killer

I love how everyone in the batman fandom has minimum one anti but usually more just because they are all horrible to each other and we all have a favourite

Tim Drake antis are so stupid to me as someone with a 17 year old brother who acts exactly like him.Abusive this,toxic that,no you'll notice that is actually a teenage boy

Character Ask: Stephanie Brown

- first impression

...it very well might have been her calling Dick "sexy batman" and i laughed so hard

- impression now

Hooooo boy she deserves so much better. She's the underdog in and out of universe that no one has ever taken seriously. She's been used by men out of universe for cheap drama (war games) and a prolife PSA that wasn't interested in exploring the trauma of what they were putting her through instead just using her to parrot talking points and make them come out of a teenage girl's mouth (and won awards for it mind you) instead of considering how she would actually feel. In universe she's used as a pawn, mere bait to attract her boyfriend back to a role she's currently filling because that's all she's seen as good for. Comic writers don't seem to think it's a problem to write her not/ex-boyfriend as having the authority to fire her. Or to write her as responsible for "fixing" his mental health. Like are you kidding me? I have so many thoughts and feelings about how that is not her job and Bruce asking her to do that puts undue pressure on someone who literally just came back from a traumatic experience herself and needs care and support. I have feelings about how comics killed her off and then said ohhh, let's bring her back in a way that justifies the men in her life being able to blame her for things. Let's bring her back in a way that makes her seem worse. So my impressions on her now? At her best in her Batgirl run, she's defiant of her treatment, and a ray of hope despite everything life and batman editorial through in her way. And she deserves to give literally everyone a piece of her mind.

- favorite moment

I really liked her interactions with Damian. The moment she realizes Damian doesn't know how to be a kid and takes him to a bouncy house. Because I love that Steph can be that person to someone, and it was short but it was so sweet.

- idea for a story

I think it would have been interesting to see Dinah be a mentor to her, there were a few issues where they interacted with Dinah scaring her dad away from her house and protecting her. I don't really think Dinah's the type for sidekicks but I think it would have been interesting if she took on and trained Steph. Alternatively Dinah as a mentor would make for an interesting story, the one comic I read were they interacted in cataclysm (i think) made me craving more.

- favorite relationship

Her friendship with Cass. I really like the post that points out it's not perfect. And just like that's what makes it so good! It's compelling, there's shared trauma and bonding, it falls apart, there's regret, there could be more done with the reconciliation - the whole Cass passes on her mantle to Steph thing. It was interesting. Steph dying while she felt that Cass betrayed her? Cass being the only one to go looking for Steph during war games? 😭😭😭😭

- favorite headcanon

Thinking about her college major is always fun. There's a great post out there that makes a good case for psychology iirc, I'd also love to see nursing, like her mom.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!! THEY BROKE UP!!!!!!!!!!