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androxys · 2 years

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I think if I could somehow mail a single TPB to every Batman fan on the planet for them to really read it would be the Death in the Family/Lonely Place of Dying trade paperback collection.

Like, I’m not saying that these stories are The Best Batman Stories Ever Told, or even that they’re particularly good. (I personally think LPoD is a great story, but that’s neither here nor there.) I do think, however, that these two stories are foundational to SO much of the modern Batman mythos as we know it (or interpret it, as it may be) and people are at a disservice by not understanding

a) That Bruce loved Jason and that Jason’s death was an unquestionable, morally indefensible tragedy

b) That Bruce went Totally Bonkers immediately afterwards, to the point of Superman having to get involved

b.2) That Batman and Superman are more than just co-workers, and that they’re actually friends

b.3) That Superman and Batman still have to exist within larger systems (though this point and everyone’s personal take on the whole U.N. situation varies, because sometimes comics sure make bad choices)

c) That Bruce was devastated by Jason’s death, and went into a death spiral of his own

d) That his friends--namely Alfred--did in fact see this happening and were summarily rejected by Gruff Bruce

d.2) I wish that, in this fantasy world, I could also mail The Caped Crusader Vol. 1 so that people could contextualize what Bruce was like immediately before and immediately after Jason’s death, and how people like Gordon reacted to this obvious and immediate change.

e) That people could see the actual origin of Tim Drake. Like, really, what he actually did rather than all the misconstruction and fanon telephone that is natural, but not entirely correct. This would then hopefully have the consequence of informing everyone’s understanding of Tim’s place as Robin--yes he’s a little crazy. A little intense. A little over-eager and afraid at the same time. But very importantly a character defined by connective tissue.

f) That Dick and Alfred have very interesting roles in those two stories. I mentioned Alfred already in DotF, but in LPoD those two are also cruising on the crazy train (both the normal vigilante one and the dead-Jason express) and picking up speed.

f.2) There’s a lot of Dick character work that happens here in short order--his circus roots, his relationship with the Titans, and then the beginning of his relationship with Tim as brothers. But it also establishes the way that Dick cannot become Robin again, that he can’t regress--Nightwing is who he’s supposed to be. Not being Nightwing, the identity he created for himself, is a disservice. This will color his time at Batman, and dovetails neatly into his held truth that he cannot save Bruce from Bruce.

f.3) Alfred is an interesting case study here in how quickly he jumps onboard with Tim, considering how opposed he is to Bruce’s self destruction in the endless war on crime... unless he views Tim and the dangers of Robin as an appropriate stopgap to hold Bruce from absolute destruction. That sure is a lot of burden to be put on one teen, however, so there’s another interesting wrinkle.

g) That this trauma never goes away. Even once Jason comes back in Under the Red Hood, the pain of losing him is still something that all of the aforementioned people still deal with because the death of a child is something you never fully get over. And it’s not like Batman didn’t try to do anything--he was fully ready to kill Joker. He was ready in the U.N. building and then left him for dead on a crashing helicopter. That’s part of what makes Jason’s return in UTRH so tragic, but the potency of that tragedy (you didn’t avenge me, Bruce) is amplified.

Anyway, this got to be much longer and much closer to a rant than I anticipated, but this thought has been rattling around in my head since I saw one too many things that made me think “this person has not actually read A Death in the Family,” so this is my soapbox.

#dc comics #batman #dick grayson #jason todd #tim drake #long post #chit chat #a death in the family #a lonely place of dying

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wesavegotham · 3 years

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So don’t hate me but I’m kinda liking damian’s animated versions better than his comic one I really like his comic one but after all the shit happening where he has been nerfed nonstop getting beat by Thomas Wayne Batman, the teen titans red hood (although Jason attacked from behind like a bitch) and now flatline beating him. Not to mention Bruce not being a father and Damian now Being blamed for everything when they all have no room to talk. God I was satisfied when his old team died in future.

This is going to be a really long post, my apologies in advance.

I absolutely get where you’re coming from. I personally still like comic Damian more because I feel like there is more nuance and layers to him compared to the animated universe Damian, but that is simply the fault of the limited time they could spent on him in the movies.

Movie!Damian certainly wins more fights than comic!Damian and was never regressed in any way that is comparable to the shitshow that was Teen Titans (2016).

You’re adressing a problem I have with comic!Damian too right now, a problem that I’ve already talked about with some people here on tumblr in private. Which is that for all the talk about what Damian can do the comics have rarely shown all those skills Damian should have being used in the actual story in recent years and that is frustrating. I find Damian’s arrogance interesting as long as I feel like he can at least back it up in some way, but in recent time he comes off as just an idiot because he has done almost nothing but fail and lose and the writers still have him act like he’s the greatest. But it doesn’t feel like he can back up his confidence anymore. At all.

If I had to name a skill that differentiates Damian from the other Robins right now then I could only list his skill to hide from Batman and that is a skill he only has for plot convenience. We don’t see him do anything to cover his tracks, we are only told that he somehow did it. And I’m pretty sure that the second this skill stops being convenient for the story it will vanish once again. It will probably end like it did with Jon, where Damian somehow hid so well that Jon said they would never find him in Teen Titans, when they wanted an excuse for Jon to not get involved with his friend’s fall into darkness, but now that DC wanted them to interact again all of that is forgotten and Jon has no problems finding Damian.

Damian is not the most social Robin, nor the most intelligent one and considering how he seemed to lose against everything and everyone in recent years I can’t say with a straight face that he’s the best at fighting or the most skilled. And that IS a problem. Damian will never be known for his social skills or his detective skills, those niches are already taken by Dick and Tim, but in theory he should be a great fighter or a highly skilled person. Damian has sacrificed his entire life for training, both in the league of assassins and during his time with the batfamily. But if Damian sucks at fighting (as in: he loses a lot more than he wins) and his skills play no significant role in advancing the plot, then what is the point of his character? Great, he’s good at drawing and likes manga now, but how will that help with a fighting tournament? Or with solving the mystery behind the league of lazarus? A protagonist is usually supposed to be able to change the situation he is in, that is why he’s the protagonist and not someone else. So what makes Damian so unique that only he can solve the situation he finds himself in during Robin and not someone like Conner Hawke? Or what makes him unique in the batfamily? I hope Robin adresses that soon.

Of course now one could say “He still has an unique position as Bruce’s biological child”, but that also was completely irrelevant in recent years. For all the moments since the start of Rebirth that had batfam-fans complaining that Damian was favored by DC because of his status as the only biological child of Bruce, there were actually very few interactions between the two. Stuff like Bruce talking about Damian or saying that he loves him was primarily found in scenes in which Damian was not present. Or it came way too late, like in Teen Titans (and Bruce refusing to hit Damian in the face because he is his child sets such a low bar, I refuse to acknowledge that as a sign of love)

If you look at how Bruce actually treats Damian or describes him then there is little love there. He ignored his 13th birthday, did nothing when Damian left him after the events of Justice League: No Justice, it had no impact on the Batman books at all, Bruce only called Damian for missions like two times, once in City of Bane (which was just so shitty, as I already explained in a previous post) and a second time in Detective Comics #1017 (He sent Damian to find a missing kid in a snow storm, while he dealt with something else), refused to comfort him at Alfred’s wake and when Bruce reflects on what happened in Teen Titans he blames most of it on Damian’s personality, both in Detective Comics #1030 and in Robin #1, and both times there is nobody questioning Bruce’s asessment. He really doesn’t have anything nice to say about Damian and apparently we are not supposed to disagree with him. So in summary: Damian seems to have no skills that make him indispensable for the batfamily, Bruce seems to have a very low opinion of Damian’s character and now that they have decided to give us Bruce searching for Damian the only reason for that seems to be that Bruce suddenly feels responsible for his child, even though that should have already been the case when Damian seperated from him in 2018 or at least directly after the second Teen Titans annual.

Even the kinda nice things Bruce says about Damian in Robin #1 can be called into question if you think about them. He says he has no doubt that Damian can take care of himself...and then we see Damian getting his heart ripped out at the end of the very same issue. Of course we know that Damian’s story doesn’t end there, so I won’t judge this too harshly yet, but to me this didn’t come off as Damian being able to take care of himself.

And I get letting Damian lose at the start of the tournament to establish Flatline as a threat and to make it clear that this tournament is not a game. I also get that Damian’s fight against King Snake was supposed to make sure that we still think of Damian as competent even though he loses later on. But at least for me, winning against King Snake was not cool or badass enough to make up for the fact that Damian was easily killed, in front of everyone, by a literal nobody like Flatline. King Snake is an old, blind guy, that didn’t show up in any DC comic I read since I started in 2018 and that was apparently beaten by Tim in his solo comic when he was 14 back in the 90s. Sorry, but that just isn’t impressive enough for me, especially since I’ve seen Damian lose so much in recent years. It doesn’t establish Flatline as a badass, it just makes me think that Damian is not that great of a fighter and shouldn’t be in this tournament.

I have some more thoughts on the tournament that make me wish that the arc will start being less about winning the tournament itself and more about something like taking down the league of lazarus soon (mainly the fact that a fight about being the best fighter is useless if the big guns are not taking part, the fact that you can only win by killing your oponent, which should be a problem for Damian and how nothing we know about the rewards for winning, becoming part of the league of lazarus und apparently immortality, is desirable for Damian), but this answer is already too long.

I’m going to be honest an admit that I did not like the ending of Robin #1 at all and that I hope that Williamson will show Damian being competent really soon because I’m not here for another pointless arc about Damian learning humility. I want to see Damian win for once, you know, like other protagonist usually do at the end of an arc and if Damian can’t even win or tell us what’s going on with him from his point of view in a book about him then I’m probably going to feel very disappointed by this book.

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nightwing-ing-it · 4 years

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Damian and Tim [Part 2]

At this point in the comics the readers knew Tim and Dick well but we started to sympathize a lot more with Damian once Batman and Robin (with Dick and Damian) came out and we could see Damian really start to understand that Dick and Alfred actually care about him and that he could choose to be good. We also see that Dick is a lot more patient with him and a lot more understanding.

[Batman and Robin #1]

Dick takes a mentor/eldest brother/pseudo-father role. Which has always been the case with Dick and Tim too on a less ‘hand holding’ level. When Tim has to deal with Bruce being too harsh or too controlling Dick has stepped in. When Tim has issues and he can’t talk to Bruce about it he goes to Dick. This stops for a while during the beginning of Red Robin, not because Dick isn’t offering anymore but because of the whole Robin argument and Dick not believing Tim when he say’s Bruce is alive.

[Teen Titans v3 #6]

As Damian reforms and time passes Tim see’s this and they start to get along better. They can be in the same vicinity and not be at each other’s throats all the time.

[Red Robin #13]

But things are not perfect. Tim doesn’t trust Damian completely. Damian is hurt because he’s been working hard to prove himself but becomes aggressive and defensive in a way that only proves Tim’s right to be cautious about him. But Tim at this point is cautious about almost everyone not just Damian.

On the other hand, Damian getting hurt by Tim distrusting him also shows that Tim’s opinion of him is important to Damian.

[Red Robin #14]

It’s really hard to write a Tim and Damian post without including a lot of Dick. Dick’s basically their moderator.

[Red Robin #15]

When Bruce comes back Tim is feeling a lot better and glad to have him back.

[Red Robin #17]

But Damian is less enthusiastic. Not because of anything bad but because Bruce and Damian barely have a relationship. The one who believed in him was Dick, not Bruce.

[Batman and Robin #16]

But luckily Damian proves how far he’s come as Bruce see’s that he helps Dick during the fight and continues to do well. Dick stays as Batman and continues to be Damian’s partner. Which he had been worried about.

[Batman and Robin #16]

With Bruce back they even get a family movie night. A small glimpse of actual family bonding time.

[Batman and Robin #20]

Later on, with a push from Dick, Damian joined the Teen Titans for a while.

[Teen Titans #89]

It didn’t last, mainly because it’s Tim’s friends. Tim’s generation. They see Damian as Tim’s little brother. Tim rejoins as Damian leaves. Although it didn’t last Damian did learn from his experiences.

He made a friend in Rose Wilson. He even fought along side Tim without Dick around and without attacking him. Progress!

[Teen Titans #92]

Although Bruce is back Dick is clearly still mentor to Damian and a much bigger part of his life.

[Batman and Robin (2009) #22]

Dick and Tim work together too, although it’s definitely more of an even team up than the way Dick mentors Damian.

[Red Robin #23]

Things are looking like they’re getting better.

And then New52 happens!

Which comes with a roller-coaster of bad things like The Total Change of Tim’s Character and good things like The Redemption of Damian.

With the reboot of the universe some past events (we will now call Pre52) are unclear whether they occurred or not. But we’ll keep trekking on!

Bruce is Batman, Damian works with him as Robin, Dick is Nightwing, and Tim was never Robin, he’s just Red Robin. Damian’s character growth has regressed a bit. This time though Bruce is a bigger factor in his rehabilitation. On the flip side Tim and Bruce seem to have a much less father-son relationship.

These two still grind each other’s gears though.

This is also where we see that the batfamily writers really do not talk to each other. Especially after New52 started. Tomasi and Gleason either didn’t get the memo that Tim was never Robin or didn’t care for it for that change.

[Batman and Robin #10]

Damian then challenges the batboys to duels to prove his worth.

Tim and Damian fight and we see that the fight is all about how Damian wishes to be acknowledged and accepted by Tim. Damian doesn’t do it in the best way and Tim drives off but the point is made.

[Batman and Robin #10]

The brothers arc ends with Jason, Dick, and Tim coming to Damian’s rescue.

Things aren’t picture perfect but Dick reassures Damian of his place in the family before everyone leaves.

[Batman and Robin #12]

In this timeline Bruce works with Damian mostly but it’s not uncommon for Tim, Dick, or even Jason to show up to help sometimes. Damian probably (?New52?) hasn’t been Robin for very long, especially Robin with Bruce and so it’s understandable he’s feeling really insecure about it all.

[Batman Incorporated (2012) #1]

Damian is probably (?New52?) wrong about Dick not ever lecturing him but he obviously misses Dick. And there goes Bruce making one of his sons prove himself to him. Also they’re really taking everything away from Tim, not just his origin and the fact that he was Robin, but also the fact that Tim was in charge of the Wayne business Pre52 for that period of time Bruce is talking about.

On a lighter note, it’s funny how in this moment Damian just turning towards Tim has him backing off. Tim really doesn’t care to get into a fight with this small ball of rage at the moment. Bruce has a whole arc about whether or not he should trust Damian and let him continue being Robin and later become Batman.

[Batman Incorporated #6]

Then Damian dies. Killed by his an aged up clone following his mother’s orders. Damian’s death in particular gets a whole lot of fanfare compared to the others who later ‘die’ as well in New52 (Tim and Dick) but he is a small child and it seems like the writers were preparing to write this whole death arc.

Tim is stricken with grief and even hallucinates Damian.

[Teen Titans #18]

Everyone is wary of Bruce at this point. As Bruce rages against Talia and Damian’s killer he also grieves and looks for ways to bring Damian back from the grave. He gets confronted by all of the batfamily members. Tim was the first, finding Bruce dismantling Frankenstein.

Tim destroys the place so Bruce can’t continue.

[Batman and Robin #19]

But have no fear because Bruce does find a way to bring Damian back! Tim, Jason, and Babs help! Dick isn’t with them because he’s ‘dead’ to everyone except Bruce and is actually a spy at this time but he does help too secretly.

[Batman and Robin #37]

Damian is back alive and well! And he went through a short stint of superpowers before returning back to normal!

[Part 1] [Part 3]

#tim drake #damian wayne #bruce wayne #dick grayson #batfamily #superheroes #meta #wingingit

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maximummusesarch · 3 years

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I wanna talk about a page from a comic and why it annoys me.

Under a “read-more” because this will get lengthy fast.

Context: in Detective Comics #775 (written by James Tynion IV and illustrated by Alvaro Martinez Bueno) is about the Bat-Family (some members excluded) discussing what to do about Kate Kane, as she previously killed an out-of-control Clayface last issue. Bruce, Dick, Jason, Barbara, Tim, and Damian are the main family members having this conversation.

The three panels I have just listed are Damian’s sole contribution to the discussion, and a missed oppritunity and a complete regression of Damian’s character.

If this was written in 2009, around the time Damian started being Robin, then I will concede that this would have been something in-character for Damian to say. But this was published in 2018. By this time, Damian has been shown to outgrow this line of thinking, as evidenced by his numerous interactions with Dick Grayson and the other Robins.

But this is also a wasted oppritunity because Damian would have a lot to say in regards to this conversation. (Him never having interacted with Kate in a meaningful capacity in the comics is also a wasted oppritunity but that’s neither here nor there at the moment).

This is, for all intents and purposes, a Jury Deliberation on Batwoman and whether or not she should be continue to be allowed to operate as a vigilante, as she has killed somebody while wearing the Bat-Symbol.

That’s something Damian would have unique experience in, having killed Morgan Ducard while in his Robin uniform and assuming the role associated with that. There’s an insight he could have given in this issue but for some reason, Tynion decided that Damian was better served as the bitter comedic relief than saying anything meaningful.

For the record, Damian would have argued for Kate and defended her in this conversation. He would have argued that Kate being dismissed for a mistake he has made would be absurd, and that if Bruce believed in Tim’s idea of building Batman into an “inspirational force” then Kate deserves a second chance

#Out of comic books ||OOC||#[this has been on my mind for a while and I wanted to bring it up]

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bigskydreaming · 3 years

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Hey, any comic recs to ensure that I get Dick Grayson character right? Other batfam included, if you're willing. I'm trying to make sure I don't write a character completely ooc, because that drives me up the WALL when I read that. However, since I dubbed you the #1 Dick Grayson person, I thought I'd ask you to make sure I do him justice rather than a smear campaign or something lol! Thanks! ALSO TELL ME YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TITANS SHOW! That's all xD

LOL thanks I appreciate it, but while I’m good for the rants, for actual comics recs I would go to the likes of @northoftheroad, @hood-ex, and @nightwingmyboi because they’re a lot better than I am at knowing where to find specific stuff and comprehensive reading lists! I tend to jump all over the place in terms of my go-to comics for Dick.....I’m always on about Robin: Year One but I’m like eh Nightwing: Year One is pretty trash tbh. I prefer pre-Flashpoint continuity overall but I did enjoy some of the early Nightwing Rebirth stuff and before that the pre-Forever Evil New 52 stuff had some good beats. But for the most part, my favorite Dick Grayson tends to be him as a member of teams like the Titans....he shines most in ensembles, I think, because his strengths ultimately are that like...he gets people, he knows how people work, and he knows how to get the most out of the people he’s with, how to make people gel and get in sync and become more than just the sum of their parts.

(Speaking of nightwingmyboi, haven’t seen them posting in awhile, anyone know what they’re up to? Hope everything’s okay!)

Which brings me to the problems with the Titans show. There’s a lot I like about it - Anna Diop and Ryan Potter in particular - and a lot I was never gonna like about it - I’m heavy on the Ugh why must Dick Grayson be a cop ever why is that a thing make it stop. And so while I don’t think Brenton Thwaites does like, a bad job with the role or anything, there was always kinda a ceiling on how attached to or invested in his take on the character I was ever gonna reach.

But Season 2. Oof. Let’s talk about Season 2, and how so many of the problems with it are identical to the problems that surround Dick in the comics, but also aren’t limited to just his character or DC and just as equally show up in all kinds of media. Like, I could have (and probably did) offer an identical rant about the role of Scott McCall in TW’s S5.

The problem is one I’ve kinda taken to calling in my head “The Ensemble Lone Wolf Effect.”

This is when writers have a character they nominally want to be part of an ensemble....but that they repeatedly go back to the well of “this character should however spend most of their time on their own, or are more natural on their own, or just wants to be on their own, or also sometimes they just deserve to be on their own cuz they suck for Reasons we decline to specify.”

But its that thing of wanting it both ways....believing a character honestly NEEDS to be a loner or off on their own for the sake of their story, but also still wanting to utilize them as part of an ensemble, not willing to actually MAKE them a solo character, and so it kinda creates this never-ending feedback loop wherein they pay lip service to the character being part of an ensemble, but that’s never really on display, which creates a lot of unnecessary conflict among characters that’s to NONE of their benefits.

(And honestly in the comics, you could apply this to pretty much all the Batfam at times...not just Dick. They do it with Bruce ALL the time, they’re doing it with Damian right now, did it with Tim with Red Robin, Jason most of the time he’s not with the Outlaws and Cass most of the time she’s not with Babs or Steph or the Outsiders. As well as Babs herself at times).

Basically what I’m talking about here is like....so much of the drama in S2....and specifically the parts that most every fan I saw had issues with....came about not organically, because it made sense for the characters to behave that way, but solely in order to launch a specific plot, that the writers clearly wanted for S2:

And that was Dick Grayson off on his own, at his lowest, facing his demons on a solo journey of self-discovery the writers clearly deemed necessary before he could find himself as Nightwing and rise to his most heroic self.

Now the thing is....this isn’t inherently a bad plot or a problem. The problem lies in how they went about it.

Because rather than looking at the overall story and saying okay, that’s what we want to do with Dick Grayson, that’s what we want for HIS story, now how do we get that and where do we take it from there, rather than looking at that as just a STARTING point, and engineering a plot that grows OUT of that.....

The writers just started out by viewing that as an ENDPOINT, and reverse engineered a way to get Dick TO that point first and foremost....at the expense of so many characters who then basically turned on him and held him solely responsible for the things many of them also had a hand in....purely to get him off on his own and isolated.

But that was never necessary!

Because Dick’s character contains multitudes when it comes to guilt and self-blame, everyone knows that. He never needed anyone else to blame him for what happened to Joey because he blamed himself. So the second they conceived of the plot “Slade wants revenge for something Dick at least blames himself for”.....they had all the ingredients needed for Dick to decide proactively that the best way to protect everyone was to put distance between him and them, that he should try and hunt down Slade on his own, solve this between just the two of them.

And that should have been the STARTING point, for that narrative journey of self-exploration, not that journey resulting as an ENDPOINT in and of itself from Dick being FORCED into a kind of isolation by the others all blaming him.

Because now see what ripple effects result:

Now, the other characters are just as able to focus on their own individual storylines as they were in the show, with the additional concern of wanting to ACTUALLY find Dick and figure out what’s going on with him or tell him they still want to help....without this in any way needing to distract them from their own storylines, practically speaking, or cut into Dick’s narrative alone-time, because as part of the equation you ALSO have Slade, who has his own wants and agendas, not to mention tactics. And Slade’s perfectly capable of and willing to work with others, or utilize the long game, or engage in a game of cat and mouse as a distraction...there are numerous ways that you could engineer a plot FROM these motivations that allows him to keep the rest of the Titans distracted and even targeted individually, without allowing them to group back up with Dick or Dick to even know that they’re in danger and that his attempts to avoid that backfired.

You want the characters isolated and divided? The PLOT can do that for you. You don’t need the characters to do that to themselves.

IMO, most if not all stories are meant to advance characters, first and foremost. Take Characters A-Z and leave them different from how you found them. Move them to a different position in their lives as much as anything else, from where they began. The goal is character DEVELOPMENT.

What this means, in my book, is that the plot should serve the characters, NOT the other way around. The plot should grow FROM the characters and what they would or would not do....the characters should never have to be forced to FIT INTO a plot.

That’s backwards.

There shouldn’t be any need to reverse engineer a certain starting point, characterwise.

Just like....start the plot, plotwise....and from the moment you first introduce a single plot element, prioritize how would the characters react and BUILD from there.

The only engineering you should need to do is how to get to an eventual END point....which is still all about the forward momentum, not backing your way into anything.

Its one thing to have an endgoal for your plot, a point in character or narrative development that you want characters to reach. But its all about perspective. About keeping that what you’re working towards rather than something that you like, have to reach before you can even really BEGIN.

Which is what Titans S2 did. The real GOAL of the season in terms of Dick’s storyline, was his solo journey of self-discovery. But there’s a million different ways they could have LAUNCHED that journey, without it having to be the forced and contrived outcome of events and character decisions that literally only existed to initiate a journey that never required a forced initiation.

And so all this narrative energy gets utterly wasted and expended on stuff that it just flat out doesn’t need to be spent on in the first place....instead of just putting that same energy to use building forward-facing storylines for ALL the characters, that don’t require contrived spats of disharmony when the goal of such moments isn’t even the disharmony but rather just that they’re kept apart, the end RESULT of the disharmony.

Imagine what S2 could have built if instead of wasting time, characterization and energy on getting to a point they could have simply started from if they’d simply looked at it that way and chosen to just....start. If they’d applied all that to building across the board, everyone’s story in service to their own character first and foremost, no tangled feedback loops making characters regress or cycle through the same behavior or narrative positionings over and over again in order to not get in each other’s way or cross paths at a time when the show didn’t want them to cross paths....because rather than make all these characters work at cross purposes, they’re all on the same page, they still want the same things....you’re simply engineering from their own natural characterizations and organic decisions and reactions, ways the PLOT can be utilized as a TOOL, to keep them moving forward in their own respective chapters, WITHOUT their characters having to be bent out of their natural shapes or forced into niches that don’t really suit them, just to keep them, PREVENT them, from more naturally or organically making a choice or action that would ‘get in the way’ of the plot.

Bottom line......the plot is supposed to be there to advance the characters, because the characters are what we come to stories for. The characters are who we invest in, relate to, ROOT for.

The characters aren’t there to advance the plot. We’re not here to yell yeah, I really hope the writers do whatever it takes with characters, no matter how backwards or unnatural it seems, just to get that sweet sweet and oh so specific ending we want that is in no way dependent on how invested or not we ACTUALLY are in the characters by the time it arrives, in order for it to actually be effective or not!

Lol. Y’know?

So yeah, that’s my biggest gripe with Titans so far. I’m still eager to see what happens between Kory and her sister, and although I’m not thrilled it seems to be becoming Batfam Straight Outta Gotham rather than like, Titans: The Show, I admit I am curious about what take they’ll go with for Babs. As I still pretty vividly recall that weird as hell Birds of Prey show the CW or UPN or WB or whatever it was at the time did for one season, where Babs was honestly not terribly adapted despite the show otherwise bearing like, zero in common with any existing DC property or character (do not even get me STARTED on their takes on Dinah and Helena, no, blehrrible, those were bad, those were like super bad)....anyway, I’m kinda curious even if it wouldn’t have been my choice for what direction the show should take. Not that I have a specific one in mind, just, yeah. And I also kinda would not hate if we got a new Roy Harper now, to replace the not!Roy of Arrow, because I don’t know him, no seriously, who is that, its not Roy Harper.

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bigskydreaming · 4 years

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There's also canon racism. Easy example: The Court of Owls. So, Martha Wayne was Jewish. Naturally, the richest families in Gotham, including the Waynes and Kanes (and it's more or less stated for Thomas Wayne) are part of a multiversal conspiracy. Or how Dick's rapists are portrayed as temptresses, a common Latina stereotype? Or Damian having his own private Gitmo? And how did Cass learn Cantonese, given her disability?

All good examples. I actually have another ask from the other day talking about the fact that both Mirage and Tarantula are Latina, which is not at all a coincidence and more just an indication of how prevalent the predatory hypersexualized Latina woman is in fiction, given that there are a ton of almost identical parallels not just in what Mirage and Tarantula did, but in their entire behaviors in the months leading up to those penultimate events - stalking Dick, getting enraged because of jealousy over his actual relationships, etc. So I’m working on a longer response there, and about how I think this impacts writing about those events and making them so central to Dick’s narratives as a survivor but at the same time needing to be mindful of the role racism played in selecting them as his aggressors and trying to divorce them from stereotypes or at least the further perpetuation of such stereotypes as much as is feasibly possible.

Its a similar thing with the Court of Owls.....yeah, the writers definitely didn’t think through the implications of having prominent Jewish families central to a global conspiracy. So for me, personally, its important to kinda divest them from that in-story wherever possible - which luckily isn’t too hard when it comes to the Kanes, since its likely they haven’t been a part of the Court for at least a couple generations. Kate’s dad wasn’t father of the year, but the Court was not his style I don’t think, so I have trouble imagining either he or Martha had anything to do with it, and that suggests to me that their father probably was the one who stepped away from the Court or refused to have anything to do with it and thus they might not even have known about it.

So much ugh to Damian’s storylines of the past several years, honestly. The prison storyline bothers me on so many levels, not the least of which is that one, but also like, remember the whole thing with Tim’s list of potential threats in Red Robin? This was just taking the very thing Damian objected to being made a part of, and then just like....dialed up to 100 because Damian as written by most writers has no chill whatsoever and is like what are limits tho. Its sooooo obnoxious when writers clearly either haven’t read previous stories with a character or just don’t bother thinking of their own stories in the CONTEXT of previous stories that might either invalidate them or just be like....hey, this ground has been covered already, and we went thataway, so....whatcha doing here.

And with Damian especially, it tends to be two steps forward, five steps back with him every time he gets a new writer, it feels like. People would rather regress him than progress him every time he gets even a hint of development, and its tired and also has more than a little to do with his own stereotypes. Nothing like selecting the Robin of Middle Eastern heritage to be the ‘problematic’ Robin to a degree even Jason can’t match (at least not as Robin).

Can’t they just de-age Jon back to his normal age and let him and Damian be BFFs who get into mishaps together? LOL what was wrong with that, I wanna know.

I’m gonna skip over the Cass part for now too, because there’s a longer meta I’ve been working on about Cass that covers a lot of that as well I think.

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