#sometimes the fanon backlash also tries to argue that tim isn't smart at all and every clever thing he's done was pure fluke | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bitimdrake · 2 years

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on the subject of people pushing back on fanon so hard they go non-canon in the other direction I would like to log: I don't think there's any indication in the comics that Tim hated school, never cared about his grades, or that he would have wanted to drop out without extreme outside circumstances.

Like:

annoying canon: N52!Tim is a super genius; various comics with terrible writing and reductive characterization dub Tim "the smart Robin" (a subjective criteria with the bonus effect of unfairly denigrating all the other Robins; also not in line with his original/post-Crisis characterization)

pure fanon: Tim can be squarely categorized as a nerd (a huge exaggeration from the above, plus the canon of him having some nerdy interests)

backlash to fanon: actually Tim isn't a nerd at all, in fact he hates school and was thrilled to drop out; [insert Robin of your choice] is the real nerd

actual canon: As far as I remember, Tim never expressed particular excitement and enthusiasm about school nor particular dislike of it.

As a kid he had consistently good grades. In his early years as Robin, he tried to do everything at once, which resulted in his schoolwork suffering from his limited time and sleep as a vigilante, despite him not intentionally de-prioritizing it.

In his later years as Robin and then Red Robin, he was filled with survivor's guilt and unwarranted feelings of responsibility over Gotham, which made him struggle to justify spending time on anything that wasn't saving lives. The two times he dropped out of school were each directly caused by a father dying: the first time because he felt he needed to make Jack's death "mean something" by focusing in on his Robin work, and the second because he was determined to prove Bruce wasn't dead at all.

Had he never become Robin, there's every reason to believe he would have continued to do well in school, and could easily have carried on to higher education. Had he not suffered such an intense string of personal losses in a very short time, there's every reason to believe he would have at least finished high school and have been happy to do it.

#*#*dc #dc #dc meta #tim drake #tiny musing that turned into a full post #sometimes the fanon backlash also tries to argue that tim isn't smart at all and every clever thing he's done was pure fluke #but i'm pretty sure that's just people who hate tim in the first place being upset he's constantly dubbed 'the smart one'#(which to be fair IS extremely annoying on dc's part)#(but trying to just argue it the other way around is equally annoying and dumb)#10to2 #canon vs fanon

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