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the urge to write…. Ugh….

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Best of bros ❤️💙

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I like that Dick holds a grudge against Harvey for nearly beating him to death with a baseball bat as a kid. He goes through a ton of terrible things that he never really processes or mentions again as comic book characters tend to do, so it's nice that there's a couple* he still reacts to.

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Things that people don't know about the whole: "Dick killed the Joker by beating him to death":

���� there👏was👏a👏meta👏amplifying👏anger👏in👏the👏room👏with👏them👏

Joker wanted to die like this. This was his last hooray.

It wasn't just because Joker taunted him about Jason's death. It was that and Dick thought he just killed Tim and Babs and him were having a fight about the death of the joker this entire time.

Dick hated that it happened and isolated himself for weeks after that.

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Batgirl and robin 2/3 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

Part 1

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you are never alone in your pain because there is always The Character

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i am endlessly annoyed by the treatment of comic books as adaptation fodder. if you only enjoy adaptations of these characters, that is perfectly fine, but it is beyond maddening to be a reader and writer in comic spaces and have people insist that the comics are some sort of distant, inaccessible text that people simply can't be bothered to engage with.

adaptations, in the context of hero comics, are not, and never really have been a straight translation from page to screen, and i wouldn't particularly expect them to be! comics are a medium and art form just as film, animation, and television, and it's ridiculous to act like wanting to engage with the source material is elitist. and for some reason it's the only medium where this is constantly asserted!

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you gotta tell your cats theyre small. they dont know. you gotta tell em

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Idk if this will make sense BUT something I think about a lot is how Horrocks' run is often discussed purely through a gender/sexuality lens, but I think it could be read as an exploration of racialised (and specifically Asian) identity in a White world. To me it's not a coincidence that Cass reacts more negatively to Kon's gaze than to Tai'Darshan's (an Asian man); while the boat scene is about sexualisation in general, the fact that Kon's White gaze makes her more uncomfortable than Tai's suggests that Cass is reacting to a specifically racialised hyper-sexualisation.

Batgirl (2000) #39

Asian hyper-sexualisation causes Asian women to be perceived as submissive, 'exotic', and workers/tools for White people. Kon says, "we could do with another--er--body on my team...". While this would be sexualising to any woman, Cass' Asianness means Kon's desire to 'use' her as a body for his team connects to White people viewing Asians as tools.

Babs doesn't notice this undertone and encourages Cass to go with him. The fact that Babs cannot identify why Cass is uncomfortable suggests a dimension beyond gender - Babs is a woman, but she's a White woman, and misses the other layer to Cass' discomfort.

Cass' female role models - Steph and Babs - are both White. Whenever she attempts to copy their femininity, as seen when Cass puts on Babs' old Batgirl outfit, it doesn't work.

Batgirl (2000) #45

In that Babsgirl outfit issue, Cass encounters a White woman who tells her her eyes have "no soul...". This relates to another Asian stereotype, Asian mechanisation or "Asian as automaton", where Asians are compared to robots/seen as non-human. Cass being told she has 'no soul' hits very close to home - Asians being seen as affectless, emotionless, or soulless is something that still plagues media to this day.

Now media for Cass is interesting. She loves reality TV, but she very likely saw few Asians and even fewer Wasians/mixed race Asians on screen. After being told she has no soul by a blonde White woman, and after Babs tells her about her own experiences as (a White) Batgirl, Cass searches Batgirl up on the computer:

The focus here is on Babs' desirability, including the subheading "and she's cute!". Despite Cass' negative experience with sexualisation on the boat, she looks at these pictures and wants to be like Babs. She wants to be seen as desirable - the magazine cover announces this desirability as "GIRL POWER!". As many Asian girls (and girls of colour) can relate to, Cass sees White women displayed as the beauty standard, and longs to reach that standard.

So she puts on Babs' old costume, but of course experiences the same discomfort she felt on the boat (from Tim this time instead of Kon). Where Dick's gaze is pleasurable to Babs, Tim's gaze horrifies Cass. Cass' racialisation limits her ability to mimic Babs' experience of White femininity.

It's important that throughout all this Cass isn't fully aware of these stereotypes. She never thinks directly about her race until Gabrych's run, so her confusion is compounded by being unable to understand where she's falling short. Why are her gendered and romantic experiences so different from Babs' or Steph's? This intersects with both a queer reading and one that centres her disability - her disability is explicitly brought up in the hallucination Soul issue, where imagined Kon and Dick poke fun at her disability as the reason why people don't want to date her. Her disability taking centre stage makes a lot of sense because it is the thing people talk to her the most about, especially Babs, who frames it in an explicitly negative light. But her racial difference is hidden because nobody talks to her about it. Nobody gives her an opportunity to discuss and understand that aspect of her identity.

Batgirl (2000) #44

Except for Tai'Darshan. Although the Tai arc is not explicitly about Cass' race, Tai talks about his people's cultures and traditions, including a tradition where he buries secrets in the earth. He asks Cass, "where are your secrets buried? I don't even know your real name...". In a way, he's asking her about her identity and culture - what traditions she has, who she is. For Tai, nation and culture are incredibly important. He's the first person who asks Cass what her culture is, but of course Cass deflects because she cannot respond. It's maybe the first time she's realising another dimension of what David stole from her. (This is not really about race, but about belonging to a group of people and having communal traditions. However I think it's important Tai's the first to bring it up, instead of a White person).

Anyway there's more stuff I didn't touch on here probably, and a lot of this can be read otherwise (and sometimes I do read it otherwise). But I looove analyses of Horrocks' run so much, and I feel like more intersectional approaches (that explicitly explore how Cass' other identities affect her gender/sexuality) have so much still to unveil!

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but also if a novel like my dark vanessa gets hit with charges of “romanticizing” abuse like it in fact was there is like no point. you will never win on these grounds. you will never write the perfect text that is condemnatory enough for these bad faith actors while also managing to say anything true or real about lived experiences of sexual abuse. we’ve lost the game. because the true game is to just stop talking about, bury it, return it to the realm of the culturally unspeakable. the error is treating these people as if they have good faith concerns about the evils of csa and its fictional representation. and it makes them over-anxious and over-corrective. that might be the case for some. i do think it is when i am in a mood to be as generous as i should. but i think we need to seriously contend with the fact it’s certainly not all and many simply instinctually wish to shame any cultural representations of abuse out of public life for the same reactionary reasons that silence is always useful to those who want to commit violent sexual acts. we just claim it’s about “problematic representation” now instead of “decency”

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several dozen dogs were destroyed last night as part of my new initiative to save the world

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little arrows

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yeah actually we removed the big bad wolf from the little red riding hood story because portraying violence against minors is really messed up. yeah. yeah also the wolf narrative was really predatory and had had some icky grooming vibes and a fable meant for literal children shouldn’t have implied p*do shit and grape so now little red riding hood goes into the woods and nothing happens and she goes to grandma’s house. don’t worry our kids will still stick to the path and know not to follow to wolves implicitly because we told them to and children should always do as their told. just like little red riding hood does now.

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Posting this for no reason

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Cigarette Emoji

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