#here's some yj core four *offers* | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bigskydreaming · 4 years

Note

You often saya you think bruce is a good dad in young justice, so i'm curious, how do you think Dick decided to become Nightwing? And how do you think his relationship with jason was like??

I do think Bruce is a much better dad (consistently) and has a much stronger relationship with Dick than in the comics. At least for the age Dick is for the second and third season, which corresponds to when Dick and Bruce had their most strained relationship in the comics.

To be honest, I credit a lot of that to the fact that even though there certainly are times in the comics where I really like Bruce….I think he’s pretty much always portrayed better in the animated adaptations. I think that has a lot to do with the audience the cartoons are written towards…..obviously, many, many adults have enjoyed the various cartoons as well, but there’s no denying that they’re meant to appeal to younger audiences in particular. So, there’s a concerted effort on the part of the writers to well, write a more kid-friendly Batman than the grim and gritty figure so many comic book writers are obsessed with keeping him as, without variation.

Note….this doesn’t mean that Bruce can’t ever be (and isn’t ever) those things in the various cartoons. He’s still a dour, cynical, dark figure compared to most of his teammates in various adaptations….but there are degrees to that sort of thing, and ways to pull off those personality traits that aren’t so inherently alienating to audiences and as often prone to violence or conflict with his own family as many comic book writers make them.

I think the key difference is a lot of comic book writers, especially in the last couple decades, prioritize pushing Bruce to various extremes and ‘exploring’ the limits of what a hero is, and how far you can go while still being termed an actual hero or even a good man. Compare this to the cartoons, where most of them, even when emphasizing Bruce’s more antisocial traits, never go anywhere near the worst territory in the comics…because the cartoons still remain cognizant of the need to keep Bruce….a hero in the eyes of children as well.

And the way he’s written in the comics, at least lately, just…isn’t that.

Anyway, point being, I think he and Dick have a lot less conflict in the YJ universe, and in how I headcanon and write them there, though that doesn’t mean its always smooth sailing. I personally always go with a take that in that universe Bruce adopted Dick while he was still living at home, somewhere around twelve or thirteen maybe, after he’d been living with Bruce for three or four years. There’s nothing really in YJ continuity that contradicts that, and there’s no storylines predicated on conflict over him not being adopted, so there’s no reason in my mind not to have him adopted fairly early on and give him a more secure grounding in his relationship with Bruce in that continuity.

So as a result, even though I think due to certain core differences, there was always going to be some conflict between Bruce and Dick as the latter got older, due primarily to Dick’s need for independence and self-agency and Bruce’s issues with only feeling secure with having a measure of control over situations and thus struggling with Dick moving towards more autonomy in his life as for Bruce that correlates to it being harder to protect him….

Like, I think that was still a thing in the YJ universe, but due to Dick feeling more secure in his place in Bruce’s eyes and family, and Bruce feeling equally secure due to Dick having accepted his offer of adoption and expressing that he doesn’t really want to ever not be a part of Bruce’s family even if he’s not living at home anymore or even in Gotham….I think that’s really all that’s needed to keep things from ever getting TOO bad between them.

Then however, there’s things with Jason - one thing that’s always had me really eager to see them get to Jason’s story in YJ is that for years, Weisman has mentioned in passing that in that universe Dick and Jason were very close before Jason’s death. Which of course, is like catnip for me. LOL. So I tend to headcanon that Jason was adopted not long after coming to live with Bruce, but there was no conflict or insecurity or even reason for those things between the brothers and Dick and Jason became close pretty early on.

And so personally, I headcanon that Jason was a large part of the reason for Dick’s transition to Nightwing….I think he was already organically feeling that Robin, as he’d put so much effort into making a symbol during his own time in that mantle, like….no longer quite fit him or who he wanted to be as a hero, specifically, as he grew older. And that perhaps Dick wanted Robin to remain associated with Batman, his father, in a way that it might eventually come to no longer be associated with Bruce if Dick had stayed Robin even after moving away to another city and becoming more strongly associated with that city.

And IMO Jason was always going to want to go the Robin route himself, not just to be like Dick or whatever but just because Jason is very proactive and action minded, and while I don’t think either Bruce or Dick would have encouraged it or pushed him towards it, like….my view of Jason is that he was never going to be okay with sitting at home safe and secure when his father and brother were out on the streets fighting supervillains and risking their lives to protect people. He was always going to want to be part of that, IMO, and I think upon recognizing this inevitability, Dick (like he did in the pre-Crisis comics) is the one that actually gave Robin to Jason in the YJ universe, with his blessing, and then he took up the Nightwing mantle for his pre-Crisis reasonings - the hero he shifts into becoming as Nightwing was in his eyes a result of being inspired by Bruce, Clark and his first father in various ways.

However, there are drawbacks to this of course, when Jason dies….because due to having given Robin to his brother himself, Dick inevitably feels a lot more responsible and guilt-stricken here, like if he hadn’t done that this would never have happened - even though, as I said, Dick ultimately only gave Robin to Jason because he was sure Jason was determined to go the vigilante route with or without anyone else’s blessing, and so with that in mind it only made sense to offer him Robin and enable Jason to carry on in a family tradition at the same time.

So Dick, in my YJ headcanons and writing, distances himself from Bruce, Gotham and pretty much everyone in the wake of Jason’s death, because of his guilt and his unwillingness to let anyone like, pardon him for that guilt or tell him its undeserved. Because Dick is only 19 in Season 2 and was 14 in S1, I headcanon Jason as not being five years younger than him the way I view them as being in the comics….rather I bump Jason up a couple years so he and Dick are only about three years apart, and go with the idea that Dick was fifteen when Jason was adopted at age twelve by Bruce, which is about how old he was when taken in by Bruce in the comics.

So I put Jason’s death as happening only about a year, maybe a year and a half before YJ S2, when Dick is only 18…..so a lot of how I see Dick reacting here, and how he deals with his grief and guilt, like, stems from him being young and not really wanting to RELINQUISH his guilt. He’s experienced so much tragedy in his life already by age 18 that like, he needs it to make sense, he needs there to be a reason, and that gets twisted in his head so that he comes to lean on his guilt and rely on it, because the extension of it being his fault, is like….that means there’s a REASON Jason is dead, and by blaming himself, Dick is able to kind of impose a sort of artificial order on what is ultimately just a senseless tragedy, violence that needed no reason to exist.

Grief rarely makes sense.

But point being, like I said, I feel Bruce is a bit more emotionally healthy and put together in YJ than in the comics a lot of the times, so here I emphasize him trying to work through his own grief by FOCUSING on his remaining son, rather than alienating him and immersing himself in violence and his own guilt. Trying to help Dick through his grief and loss and guilt at the death of his brother, after having lost his first family just a decade before, whereas Bruce’s own initial tragedy is further removed for him….like, here, this is how Bruce copes. It gives him a goal, something to focus on, a productive direction to channel his grief and anger and energy.

Unfortunately, the thing is, you can’t really ever help someone through their grief or loss in something like this, IMO. You can only really ever just….be there for them, when they’re ready and able to come to terms with it in their own way and just need your presence and support. Which Bruce does here, for Dick, but the caveat to that is there’s no timeline to it, and no way to speed up that timeline. It happens when it happens. Sometimes these things just need some degree of time to work themselves out, and I think that here, Dick needs time to spend feeling guilty, being angry, raging at the senselessness of it all before he’s able to accept the tragedy of it and the fact that it happened because it happened. Reasons ultimately don’t do much more than chart a course to the tragedy. They rarely change anything about it having happened.

So again, even though its the right thing to do and not really something he had any better alternative to, Bruce trying to get Dick to see that Jason’s death wasn’t his fault is ironically the thing that alienates them for a period here, even if only a year or two at most. Because as I said, Dick just doesn’t want to hear that, doesn’t want to accept that, because blaming himself is something he can DO, and if he doesn’t have even that anymore, then there’s nothing to distract him from facing the simple reality that’s just…his brother is gone and nothing he can do or say is going to change that.

And then there’s Tim. I always view him as about two years younger than Jason in the comics and the same here, so if Jason is 15 when he dies and Dick is 18, Tim is 13 when he becomes Robin.

But again, there’s differences here, because Bruce is actually dealing with Jason’s death a bit more healthily here, in as much as that’s possible. By focusing his attention on Dick and trying to get him through this and them through this as a family, Bruce is able to avoid the spiral he goes through in the comics, where he descends into brutality and self-destruction in his crime-fighting. Here, he’s trying to be a rock for Dick, when Dick is ready to try and grab hold of something instead of just drowning in his grief, so the end result is there’s not the same canon impetus for Tim to seek out Dick or Bruce himself out of concern for Batman’s behavior.

So rather, its more just hero worship that motivates Tim. I headcanon him as having figured out their identities previously, same as in the comics, and him being like, a huge fanboy of both Robins and having been among the first to realize when Jason took Dick’s place as Robin, even before Nightwing debuted and people connected the dots there. So of course, when Robin was nowhere to be found and Jason Todd was announced dead, Tim knew why Robin wasn’t out there anymore, and that he was never going to be again.

And so here, I think that alone is what motivates Tim, as that’s the thing he’s not able to accept. I think its a fitting grief reaction for Tim’s age, given that in a way, it is grief. He might not have known the Waynes personally at this point in time, but he did KNOW them in a way, from following their public lives in both their civilian and costumed personas. So it makes sense to me that Tim, knowing that Jason Todd and thus Robin is dead, and knowing that he’s one of the few people to even KNOW for sure that Robin is dead, like….it makes sense to me that he would end up grieving in a kind of way himself, even just from a distance, knowing that he can’t really just go up to the Waynes and offer his condolences about Robin.

And so for a thirteen year old fanboy who is grieving for a fallen hero he never knew personally, just via his symbol, and is perhaps frustrated and maybe even angry that nobody else is grieving for Robin, because the general public has no idea that a hero even fell….even being able to understand WHY it had to be that way, why Batman and the JLA weren’t announcing Robin’s death in order to protect the remaining Waynes’ identities….

I think here, this all culminated in an unwillingness, a refusal to accept this, and from there it kinda morphs for Tim into a determination to….keep Robin alive, essentially. He understands why they can’t admit Robin’s dead, he does. But if Robin can’t be dead, Tim decides, then he needs to be alive, otherwise its like pretending Robin just…..doesn’t exist anymore.

So here, I headcanon/write Tim as having set out as Robin himself, in kind of a makeshift costume and trying to help people the way he watched Dick and then Jason help people as Robin for years, as just…a combination of hero worship and a grieving thirteen year old trying to process things there’s no real manual to going through, and trying to honor his fallen hero by emulating him. I don’t think he was actually trying or intending to attract Batman’s intention, though he’d realize in hindsight it was inevitable, its just…that was never why he was doing it, so he was kinda like AWARE of it as a likely possibility, it just wasn’t particularly relevant to him until it happened.

And of course, it’d be quickly obvious to Bruce that this kid didn’t mean any disrespect with what he was doing, the exact OPPOSITE in fact, so its not like he could in good conscience be angry with him or resent him for doing it. Rather, he’s touched, it means a lot to see someone else honoring Jason for the things Bruce is kinda STUCK being unable to honor him for….so that makes Bruce perhaps a little more predisposed to Tim and not fighting him on his efforts than he otherwise would be, just considering it was as Robin that Jason died. I see it as Tim probably reminded him of Jason then and there just as Jason had reminded him of Dick when he met him…..rather than see himself in each of his sons and future sons, he sees THEM in each other.

So he kinda convinces himself not to talk himself out of letting Tim continue what he’s doing, justifying it as like, Tim’s obviously so much like both Jason and Dick, there’s no way he’s not going to keep doing this on his own if he feels this strongly about it, and he understands and even agrees with Tim’s logic in doing all of this in the name of Robin, like it makes sense to him as a way of honoring Jason, so he kinda just….like I said, he just talks himself out of talking Tim out of this and focuses on just training Tim and trying to make him as capable and prepared to survive anything he encounters as possible. And at the same time, Tim kinda becomes a new ‘project’ for Bruce to distract himself from his own grief with, especially while Dick is avoiding him.

Dunno if you’ve seen my meta on this subject but I really LOATHE the take that is used for Tim’s comic book narrative, that Batman NEEDS Robin and that this thirteen year old shouldered the burden of becoming a grown adult’s emotional support child in order to stop him from like, beating people and himself to the point of hospitalization. To me that’s just…..super backwards and not ideal at all, so I flipped it here to what I think it should be, at least for a world predicated on child superheroes who aren’t grounded from crime-fighting each and every time they try it.

So rather, in the YJ universe I posit Tim becomes Robin to keep Robin alive, after knowing he must be dead, and Bruce devotes himself to helping the latest caped kid to plant himself in his life and say “I’m gonna go save the world whether you like it or not so get on board or get outta the way old man,” like….actually survive their “Kids, Don’t Try This At Home, No But Seriously, Really, Really Don’t” life choices.

And so here, Bruce doesn’t make Tim Robin….its more he just doesn’t have the heart to second guess Tim’s choice there, given his reasons for making it and the fact that Bruce no doubt feels guilty about not being able to honor his son as Robin himself.

Problem is, from a distance, that’s not how it would look to Dick. So this contributes to Dick’s distance and alienation for a few months at first….because to him, this is a betrayal, because he looks at what he knows of the situation and he doesn’t know Tim personally yet, so to him it looks like his dad took the one thing Dick ever gave to his brother that was truly his, that was just theirs…and gave it to some stranger. And he’s like, wow, I’ll take “You’re fucking dead to me for $500, Alex” and keeps his distance.

Except Tim hero-worshipped Dick just as much as he had Jason, and he’s witness to Bruce’s unhappiness because of his strained relationship with his son, and so Tim sets out to like, meet Dick and convince him that his dad is miserable because he never wanted to hurt either of his boys and he loves Dick so much, gosh, he just wished Dick knew how much…..

And the thing is HERE, unlike in comics, since the real issue is Dick not knowing Tim himself and seeing how similar he is to Jason and himself and how determined he was, like, having a backwards perception of Bruce just kinda….giving Robin to Tim rather than Tim just genuinely wanting to honor Jason’s memory, which Dick of course can’t actually fault him for any more than Bruce can, for pretty much the same reasons….

Because THAT is the specific issue, here, meeting Tim and getting to know him IS exactly what’s needed to get Dick to reconcile with Bruce, and from there, finally start to heal as Bruce and Tim and Dick and Alfred are kinda all able to finally get on the same page and help each other with that.

And then stuff with Tim’s parents happened, I figure, and Bruce is like, well I gotta adopt you now, like duh, obviously, but I mean, only if you want, and Tim is like well yeah, obviously, like duh, and this probably all happened right around the exact same time Cass came into their lives and family and Steph started Spoilering around town because what is pacing, I mean, really.

BUT then bonus to all of that is that then by the time Jason DOES come back, he doesn’t feel as alienated or forgotten as in the comics, because Dick due to his and Bruce’s very apparent period of estrangement, not to mention Dick’s reasons, is able to act as a bridge between Jason and Bruce. And similarly, he’s able to blunt Jason’s resentment of Tim and insecurities about being replaced by virtue of the fact that Dick held these very things against Bruce himself on Jason’s behalf, until Dick got to know Tim and began to see it the way Bruce had, and that he in turn is now able to relay to Jason and help guide him to see it the same way and how everything only happened this way BECAUSE of everyone’s memories and feelings about him, not in spite or in dismissal of those things.

And thus I can this way see the YJ Batfamily awkwardly stumbling (albeit with a few backsteps along the way) towards actual happy and healthy cohesiveness, huzzah!

16 notes · View notes