🤷🏆(i want a rant about you know what/who for either of these) 😎 🎵

🎵 - What do you listen to while you read?

Generally can’t listen to anything with lyrics as it just distracts me. If I have it turned down low so it’s more like background noise it’s okay, but I prefer putting on a score (MoS is my go-to) or sometimes just nothing at all.

😎 Who is your BroTP?

Stepping away from DC for a moment, but Harry and Ron. I love them. I love them so much. They’re the best Best Friends ever.

🤷 What thing that your fandom loves do you just not “get”?

Prepare yourselves for some long ass thoughts on Barbara and why I don’t like her and why I don’t get why other people do.

I don’t get the Gotham fandom’s love for Barbara. And this is on two levels. Firstly, she’s a bad person, that somehow, to me at least, stands out in a sea of bad people. Because there are others on the show who are murderous and cruel and selfish and petty, but Barbara has always felt worse to me, I think because so much of her behaviour is toxic and abusive in a very real way, a way that I recognise. Barbara treats the people around her badly, consistently, and is straight up abusive to every one of her romantic partners. She treats Tabitha like shit again and again, abusive in both physical and emotional ways, and she’s manipulative with Renee, employing classic abuser tactics to turn Renee’s desire to stay healthy into an attack on her to create guilt, deflecting blame off her for that and other parts of their relationship. It’s the worst with Jim though. Throughout their relationship in S1 she abused his trust, ignored his boundaries, was manipulative, controlling and jealous, tried to gaslight him on more than one occasion and then either A. cheated on him, or B. left him to immediately hook up with an ex who was as knee deep in the stuff Barbara said she was afraid of as Jim, and then got mad that Jim wasn’t sitting around waiting for her when she finally came back months later, having run out of other options (and either way, she left Jim via letter, which is just a crappy thing to do). And then following her breakdown her behaviour escalates to murder attempts, physical assaults, repeated sexual harassment, and on at least two occasions, outright sexual assault.

And she is never, ever held to account for any of it, by the narrative, by the fandom, or by the other characters. When anyone tries she turns it back on them, or the one questioning her is made out to be the bad guy, and she doesn’t ever apologise or make amends or work for any kind of redemption, which would be fine if she stayed a villain, unrepentant to the end, but that’s not what happened. Which is why I will never be happy with her being the mother of Barbara Gordon. Aside from the fact that I wouldn’t want her anywhere near a child, nor do I think the character we saw for 5 seasons would want to raise a child, or be able to (remember how she told a 12 year old she should start using her looks as a weapon to manipulate people? And that time she actually did take her 10 year old daughter out of the house/away from whoever was taking care of her to drag her across town to an empty club in the middle of the night while there were criminals loose to get a gun?), she was Jim’s abuser, for years, so for her to be the mother of his child, the mother of Barbara Fucking Gordon, leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. Even when she was pregnant she spent half the time using it to punish Jim for not wanting her back. Everything about it was so spiteful and I hate it and it was a bad choice all around and they shouldn’t have done it.

And I have my suspicions as to why she gets away with all of it, why the fandom, and even the writers I think, don’t see her behaviour as anything particularly bad. There’s almost a wider issue of letting the female characters off easy for particular kinds of behaviour that male characters would, do, and rightly should get called on, stemming really from the idea that it’s fine if it happens to men. Lee can slap her partner and ignore his explicitly stated personal boundaries, he’s a man, that’s fine. Selina can lie and deliberately hurt her partner again and again, that’s fine. Female characters can beat and abuse and assault male characters, romantic partners even, and it’s no big. Barbara can spend years sexually harassing someone and there’s nothing wrong with that, because it’s happening to men, it’s fine, gurl power, etc etc.

It’s a general “problem”, I guess, that’s beyond Barbara, but for me her treatment by the fandom is the worst. I just don’t really understand why she’s so beloved, because most of the fandom seems intent on pretending she doesn’t do 99% of the terrible stuff she does, which is insane to me - love a villain for the things they do, love them because they’re villainous. It’s fiction, it doesn’t mean you approve or whatever, but the bad things they do are a part of them. If you can’t handle that, if you have to change everything about them, then you’re not really loving the character at all, you’re making up a whole new one. I mean this even extends to her relationship with Tabitha - Barbara treats her horribly, and Tabitha spends half her time seeing someone else, but the fandom holds them up as their perfect, healthy, appropriate representation lesbian queens (also erasing their bisexuality in the process). Again, if you have to erase or ignore almost everything about the characters and their relationship and their history and their personalities in order to ship or stan them, then you’re basically just making up new ones. More than anything, I just don’t understand that.

Which brings me to my other point, because the second reason I can’t stand her is the writing. Erin is a great actress, does the best with what she’s given, but Barbara is just so badly written. So, so bad. And it’s not that the writers can’t write well, even with stumbles and bad choices, the majority of the show’s characters, male or female, are written well, particularly the villains, but for whatever reason they just didn’t with Barbara. She has no consistent personality or goals. She’s twenty different kinds of crazy, which one which time just depends on the episode. Her personality and mental state and wants change multiple times each season. Who is she? 

And it’s frustrating and infuriating watching a character be so inconsistent and aimless, especially when it interferes with other story arcs, which is what happened time and time again with Barbara. It’s pretty obvious that the writers had no idea what to do with her after season 1. There was a decent enough arc following her breakdown, where you could track what she was after - Jim, her love and hate and obsession twisted up so that she wants to hurt and kill him as much as she still wants him, but after the coma, she just loses focus, and it never really comes back. She floats between the other villains with very little point, like the writers couldn’t come up with a story for her, so they just stuck her in scenes. Her personality jumps all over the place too. Like, is she crazy, is she faking, is she a little crazy and faking the rest? Who is she with? Who is she working for? What does she actually want? Who is she?

And when they do manage to write something more substantial for her, it rarely makes much sense. Barbara suddenly wants to be head of the underworld? Okay then, came a little out of nowhere, but okay I guess. Then she’s an arms dealer???? Then she’s Sofia’s lackey????? Then she’s the god damn head of the League of Assassins??????????. This last one being the worst for me. Barbara’s involvement in the League arc was 100% unnecessary and in fact made the whole thing more confusing and nonsensical and is the most egregious example of the writers just sticking her in somewhere because they didn’t know what to do with her. Ra’s was only interested in Bruce to begin with, so why bring her back at all? Why give her the power when he and others explicitly name Bruce as his heir? Why would the League follow her, a criminal, and not Ra’s’ actual heir, or idk, one of his daughters who are already involved? Why would they keep following her once it became clear she had no intention of fulfilling the League’s mission? Why did she look like that chick in the painting? Why was Ra’s into her, given that literally everything about her is antithetical to everything he stands for? Why any of it?

And then there was her incredible writing in season 5. The whole pregnancy thing was badly done and pretty much the worst way to bring Barbara Gordon in, but besides that, the writers once again had no idea how to write her so they pretty much spent the first half of the season turning her into Oswald.

So yeah, that’s why I don’t like Barbara as a character, and why I don’t understand why so many people love her now.

And that’s today’s Unpopular Opinion

Little Red Riding Hoodie

Hey there, sweaty overweight ham. Okay, we're here. This is the one I really want to talk about. And sure, it's the start of a new arc, but we'll just do this one, then move back to Suicide Squad for a while until I get a new shipment. But yeah, this is the point in the story I wanted to get to, and it's for a very simple reason. I want to make fun of Red Hood's new costume~

You can see it on this cover:

Because, after all, making fun of costumes is a tried-and-true pasttime of the Taiblog. And it's been ages since we had a Harley Quinn design to complain about. Look, I wasn't super fond of Jason's previous Red Hood costume either. But at least it looked like a costume. Now he looks like a bargain basement Casey Jones. You could make this costume on a $50 budget. And ha ha, look! They crossed out the Bat logo and the "and the Outlaws" part! But they didn't actually change the name of the comic, because no one wants to actually read a Jason Todd solo series. And if we can't sell you just on Jason's look and character, how about some gratuitious violence~?

Literally the first word in the comic is "'Merica", as the scene setter caption. That tells you everything you need to know, right? A person in a red hoodie is riding a late-night bus goin' anywhere with a chatty driver. Gee, who could be this man, this wearer of red hoods? Given that everything else in the comic is drawn in monochrome blues, Jason here really stands out as the only red in each panel. He has the driver stop the bus when they spot a woman lying in the road. She flashes a badge at them, warning that they shouldn't help her because she's FBI and couldn't handle whoever messed her up. Jason doesn't care, gathers her up, and brings her aboard. Naturally, no sooner does he do that does a redneck biker gang show up.

Jason refuses their posturing, and beats them all up with a road flare. He then progresses to a knife and then a gun, each taken from an opponent. He then shoots the whole gang except for the leader, and the bus driver comments that he might actually feel sorry for their aggressors at this point. Jason returns to the bus and discards his hoodie, at which point the FBI lady recognises him as the man who "tried to assassinate Oswald Cobblepot". The "tried" kind of implies he's alive--because of course he is--but I can't say for sure. Jason ignores her and gets dressed, which reveals his new costume includes a stupid little half-face mask. And despite the FBI lady's protests, he walks off the bus, telling the driver to hit the hospital about 40 miles back.

Meanwhile, up the road, a very obvious mafia-type gangster is informed by a very obvious rural cop that he should get out of there before someone comes to investigate the murder of the FBI lady's partner. The gangster guy--who is wearing a turquoise suit, by the way--says he isn't going anywhere until his boys come back from killing the FBI lady. That's when Jason smashes in through the roof, and leads into four pages of nothing but Jason just beating the hell out of everyone. The mafia guy brags that he's a member of Underlife, that shadowy cabal mentioned in the annual, and therefore he's untouchable. Jason responds by touching him, very violently.

Jason eventually manages to kill all of them, including the clearly shady cop and the mafia man. He then returns to the hospital, giving the FBI lady her partner's badge. She expresses gratitude, wondering why a crime boss from Gotham like himself would be so sentimental, and Jason replies than he lost a couple partners himself recently. Essentially, what happened was that the mafia guy was someone her partner was sent to pick up, but his Underlife connections allowed him to turn the tables. She asks for Jason's expertise in this, but Jason refuses to work with anyone, and jumps out the window, giving you a nice splash page of his whole stupid outfit~

So yeah! This is the new direction for Red Hood. After losing his partners and presumably also the news about Roy, Jason is now a hitchhiking vigilante in middle America who dresses like he raided a clothing donation bin. And despite no longer having any partners to speak of, the comic is still named “and the Outlaws”. It’s stupid and generally non-compelling, so I look forward to going back to enjoying making fun of the book instead of just enjoying the book for its own merits~