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bigskydreaming · 4 years

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I’m very kneejerk about references to the Blockbuster arc, lol, but I just really really hate how its been immortalized as just “Dick having a breakdown cuz he blames himself for Blockbuster’s death and fears Bruce’s rejection” and like...Tarantula.

Because the Blockbuster arc in its entirety is SO much more than that, and so much more traumatizing on multiple levels. Like, Blockbuster was Dick’s archnemesis in ways that the Court of Owls could only dream of fucking with him. This was a guy who deliberately, systematically attacked every aspect of Dick’s life, in both his personas, over an extended, ongoing period, in an attempt to make Dick’s life a constant day to day existence nothing but guilt, isolation and misery, and just crush his spirit in any and every way possible. Murdering people who just passed through Dick’s life by chance, purely so Dick felt that his entire existence and being was....as he said to Tarantula while she raped him....poisonous.

As much as people reference that line in Tarantula fics, it kills me how rarely it seems like they get the context.

Dick told her to stop. But then went on to say HE WAS POISONOUS.

That line was him literally apologizing to his rapist because he felt he’d just failed her as a mentor by not stopping her from murdering Blockbuster. That he’d hurt her, and he was going to hurt her more. Because he was poisonous.

All this while she was actively raping him. He didn’t consent, he told her no....specifically because at the time he was so traumatized, his only focus was how he was poisonous to even be around or touch, and thus how he was hurting his rapist just by being unable to stop her from touching him.

That’s how out of it he was, as a result of Blockbuster’s extended campaign against him. That’s how traumatized he was.

And then seven months after Blockbuster’s death and Dick’s rape by Tarantula, the Society of Supervillains put the cherry on top by dropping a living nuclear bomb named Chemo on the city Dick had sworn to protect, just because Slade Wilson wanted to say fuck you.

Like that entire arc is a dissertation on Dick Grayson’s guilt complex and why it exists and always will until people make an effort to break it down for him that just because fucked up people do things like this and CITE him as their reason, that’s not the same thing as being his fault.

Of course Dick thinks he’s responsible for all these peoples’ death when a supervillain says flat out “I’m killing these people because they met you,” but like. How in the hell does Dick avoid ‘being at fault’ then, short of exiling himself to Antarctica? Dick’s presence may be villains’ justification at times, but that doesn’t make their crimes his fault.

And you can easily make the argument that all of this stretches right back to his own parents’ murder....

And the fact that Dick saw Zucco arguing with Haley over money, but failed to convince his parents of what he saw or any potential danger from it....

And thus Dick has at many points in canon, cited himself as being responsible for his parents’ death....simply because he failed to convincingly express there might be danger from something he just happened to see with no real understanding of the context at the time.

With it being highly unlikely that this self-blame ever was properly targeted by Bruce as a necessary part of Dick’s recovery after that initial trauma. Because Bruce relied heavily on the similarities between himself and Dick in order to forge their initial connection....and while Bruce undoubtedly has survivor’s guilt from his own parents’ murder....this is an entirely different thing from Dick feeling like there was a specific reason he should be held responsible for their deaths.

And of course, when you factor in the juvie origin as I tend to do, it only compounds. Because what else would eight year old Dick Grayson think, when the people in charge of orphaned children in Gotham sent him away to this place where every other kid there had been said to have committed some crime.....and the only possible crime Dick could have committed in his own eyes, the only thing that made sense for why he would have been sent somewhere like this...is because everyone else deep down thinks that its his fault his parents are dead too?

I’ve long wanted to see people tackle imprisonment itself as one of Dick’s prime fears....far more so than even just the memory of his parents’ death or his fear of seeing loved ones fall.

I headcanon that one of the things Dick sees most often when under the influence of Scarecrow’s toxins...is himself being imprisoned or locked away by his own loved ones, for hurting them or others.

I think this perfectly encapsulates Dick’s actions after Blockbuster’s murder....with him ultimately turning himself in as well as Tarantula, for the murder....because in Dick’s eyes...a failure to prevent a murder is every bit as responsible for that murder as actually pulling the trigger. He believed he was responsible for Blockbuster’s murder because he failed to stop Tarantula...the exact same as deep down he still believes he’s as responsible for his parents’ murder as Zucco...because he failed to stop it from happening.

And then, by turning himself in....in essence, Dick was trying to do one last thing right, for Bruce. In his own eyes, he was sparing Bruce the necessity of locking Dick up for the crime he believed he’d committed....or possibly, at the same time also sparing himself from having to see Bruce lock him up for it. He fully believed he belonged in jail for his part in things....that he was supposed to be sent away ‘with the bad people’ just as he had been when he was a child, for a similar ‘crime.’

Which fully explains his resulting spiral and increasingly desperate and reckless choices in going undercover first with the mob and then with the Society of Supervillains, when Rohrback released him and refused to charge him with Blockbuster’s murder.

Because in Dick’s eyes...this made no sense. This was his friends and loved ones doing the wrong thing, for his sake, just because they loved him, and not because he deserved it. It did nothing to absolve his feelings of guilt, because it did nothing to address that they were unnecessary in the first place. If anything, it just made him feel worse, like he was even further corrupting those around him. It made him feel bad, like he was fundamentally a bad person....thus he started to see the only way he could do the right thing or help people, as by seemingly ‘embracing’ his status as a bad person, and surrounding himself with only other bad people, so they would be the only ones he could accidentally hurt just via his presence.

He spiraled, because more and more, peoples’ attempt to help him were just accidentally piling on to his own misconceptions of his own place in the fault and responsibility ecosystem. They just pushed him further and further into his own belief in his own worse nature. With this ultimately culminating in the utter destruction of his entire city that he was in the process of putting together the final pieces of this strategy he’d concocted to keep Bludhaven safe longterm...without his presence. I don’t believe that Dick was ever actively suicidal, but I do believe that deep down, he was hellbent on his own inevitable demise.

He wasn’t planning on killing himself, but he was planning on making sure his city was protected in the likelihood that he ended up dead....because deep down, he was convinced that was the only outcome that was ever going to be to his city and family’s benefit. With him being more and more reckless as a somewhat passive insurance that it would come to pass sooner rather than later. Which means that ultimately, in Dick’s eyes its entirely likely that he equates Bludhaven’s destruction....with him not having died soon enough to prevent it.

Incidentally, this also ties back into my belief that Dick has never truly regretted killing the Joker....because you’ll note, as much as he gave himself grief for that, and isolated himself, and was convinced Bruce hated him for it....he never took any of these other steps, tried to turn himself in for it....even though it was the one and only time in his life that he actively and undeniably caused someone’s death. And the difference there, I believe is even though it affected him hard, believing that Bruce thought less of him for this.....that was the part that affected. Not his actual actions in having killed the Joker. He never spiraled to the extent he did with Blockbuster, because deep down Dick couldn’t actually bring himself to be sorry he killed the Joker, or regret having done it.

#rape cw #suicide cw

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