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bigskydreaming · 5 years ago

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LOL so I’m gonna say something that a lot of people are gonna HATE, because of what it does to the usually preferred canons or headcanons of how Dick goes to live with Bruce after his parents die.

But there is one more reason that I prefer the juvie origin for Dick, beyond what I’ve said in the past, and its that....

There is no possible way for Dick to go straight to living with a single billionaire in his early twenties RIGHT after his parents died, or even just a week or two after that....unless Bruce abused the FUCK out of the system himself, in order to get Dick in his house.

And I don’t see any reason why Bruce would go to the lengths of bribes or calling in ‘favors’ that would be needed to expedite the OBSCENE amount of bureaucratic red tape he would need to navigate before any judge would let him become a minor’s sole guardian - especially considering he undoubtedly had no paperwork or had undergone any of the interviews or visitations or hoops demanded of prospective foster parents BEFORE they take in their first kid....

Unless he really truly had reason to believe that every viable alternative to him greasing the wheels like he HAD to have, in order to get Dick there with any kind of swiftness.....like, I honestly don’t see a mid-twenties Bruce Wayne, with his myriad of issues and his own self-image, honestly thinking that he’s SUCH a better candidate for taking care of this traumatized eight year old kid that he’s going to cut any corner he possibly can to speed up the process....unless he was utterly convinced the alternatives were so much worse.

Like say, if he found out that the system had decided the best thing for Dick was to be tossed into juvie.

I mean....the process for fostering a kid, becoming a legal guardian, ANY which way you go about that....its not as simple as just, signing a few papers. No matter WHO you are, UNLESS you leverage that ‘who you are’ bit to get people to step on the gas to a degree far beyond anything they’re supposed to allow.

It takes TIME.

And even in scenarios wherein Bruce takes Dick in as a kind of witness protection while Zucco is on the loose - first off, that’s far more unrealistic than even the juvie take because like....the police HAVE protocols for that sort of thing. They don’t just hand over a kid to the first civilian who steps up and volunteers.

Honestly, the canons and headcanons where Bruce just ‘arranges’ for Dick to come stay with him almost immediately after his parents’ murder....like, they honestly skeeve me even more than the juvie thing, because of how matter of fact people are about it? Y’know? Like nobody seems to see anything wrong with the idea that a billionaire just, with zero prior experience or qualifications just says “oh I’ll take this boy home with me” and everybody goes “yes sir, well you’re a billionaire so if you want him, you got him,” like....it treats Dick like a toy. That’s not how things work, and its not how things SHOULD work....and most importantly IMO, I can’t fathom Bruce thinking that he’s the best option for Dick to such a degree that he’d break all the rules in order to get custody that fast. For that matter, if he really could arrange all that, in spite of the way the process is supposed to go, then shouldn’t it beg the question “why couldn’t Bruce pull similar strings to ensure Dick could stay with the circus, the people there who clearly loved him and wanted him to stay?”

And honestly, I kinda feel like the way people have reduced that whole process to the shorthand of “well Bruce is the good guy and we know with the benefit of hindsight that he’s Dick’s dad in every way that counts, so of course Dick has to end up living with him, so why NOT quicken the process to just a few days”....like, I feel like that actually contributes a lot, albeit unintentionally, to this tendency to take Dick for granted both in universe and out of universe, because it lends this air of like...’only the destination matters, the end result.’ Which is usually how Dick gets screwed in most cases....because people only ever look at the end result of his stories, the last position he ends up with...and completely fail to consider any of the steps in between that happened along the way, and all the things that might have happened alongside each of those steps, that lends important context to his final position in a given story.

Like this idea that well Dick has to end up with Bruce, that’s the part that matters, so its not really all that important how or why.....I feel like that really has a lot to do with how it so often gets just accepted at face value that Dick’s the one in the wrong for keeping his distance from Bruce at later points in life, or for leaving the manor, or for digging in his heels with stuff....because it all loops back into this mindset that “everyone knows Bruce loves Dick, the best place for Dick is in the manor with Bruce, ergo, everything else - like how he comes to live with Bruce or his reasons for storming out of the manor - are semantics, irrelevant details, etc.”

Except...they’re not.

And so again, as an example like....you can’t really just cut out the entire process of Dick coming to live with Bruce...because it really, truly, EXTREMELY doesn’t make SENSE for Bruce to get custody that fast without having SOME kind of leverage.....and it similarly doesn’t make SENSE for him to think he’s so clearly the most qualified person to take in this traumatized kid (no matter how much he empathized with him), that he would circumvent the system he USUALLY is so militaristic about upholding as much as he possibly can, while still being a vigilante. And that last bit sure doesn’t feel in character for Bruce, from that particular angle.

UNLESS.

Unless he’d discovered the system had MASSIVELY FUCKED UP with Dick, and he no longer trusted it with him whatsoever....and so THEN he took matters into his own hands, and did whatever necessary to get custody of Dick ASAP - realistically helped along by the MASSIVE leverage Bruce would have had at his disposal if he threatened to publicize what they’d done to this eight year old orphan.

THAT, to me, feels far more realistic, and far more in character for Bruce....and it at no point takes for granted any of Dick’s own personal journey along the way, or renders it irrelevant or an unnecessary detail.

Idk, maybe its just me, but I’ve always been super uncomfortable with the level of detail fandom puts into fleshing out Jason and Tim’s backstories (and with precedent established by his taking in Dick, any of his later kids would have had very expedited custody arrangements....but that makes it MORE likely that the FIRST kid and the process of gaining custody of him would include hoops that later kids’ stories wouldn’t), while at the same time, hollowing out Dick’s origin story to a barebones outline of ‘well his parents died and then this and this happened and then he lived with Bruce and became Robin and happily ever after until he hit his teenage years and developed an attitude problem.’

Like, there’s just something very....unsettling about how much fandom has romanticized the idea that this billionaire with a quite frankly TERRIBLE public reputation, like this is a guy who has DEDICATED himself to appearing totally irresponsible as far as the rest of the world can tell.....and just....being like ‘oh hey, no big deal about this guy of all guys just being like hey I see you have an eight year old orphan there, howzabout I take him off your hands for you’...and fandom’s like....swoon. Y’know? I mean yes, WE know Bruce is a superhero, WE know that years of cute Batman and Robin and father and son bonding would lie ahead of those two after that.....but...ANY scenario in which Gotham is like....yeah we see no problems with just letting Brucie Wayne take a traumatized orphan home to live in his big old manor with him....like..yeah.

I mean, even as I’m typing this out, I’m thinking that yeah, there is something to be said for streamlining the process in the name of escapism, so that there’s a smoother, easier transition for this poor kid and he doesn’t have to go through so much.....BUT like at the same time, its one thing when we’re talking cute fluff stories and others when the angst is clearly a focal point of the story and yet the story STILL romanticizes this....Daddy Warbucks swoops in to save little Orphan Annie and like, this is definitively treated as like....nobody should be raising objections to this or being like wait a second....

Because the latter feels less like its being done in the name of escapism and more, like....in that sense I was talking about where it all loops back to how often Dick gets reduced to a prop within his own narratives like...things happen because they HAVE to happen, not because like....he’s a person going through things that inform the choices he makes and the things that happen from there, yknow?

Or maybe its one of those things where its like....I feel like that story is one that’s meant for a different time, at this point? Like, there WAS a time when the billionaire swooping in to take the poor orphan off to live in a manor was the kind of escapism people were looking for, but we do live in a different time now where I think most of us would agree like...wait, a decision that big deserves more than being treated like the billionaire just stops in to shop around for an orphan to accessorize with, kinda?

Idk, I feel like I’m not explaining this well, the precise reasons this disturbs me so much, which is why I’ve never posted about this particular angle before, but its been on my mind a lot lately, so maybe it makes more sense than I think it does here? LOL.

*Shrugs* Idk, I just honestly do feel in the long run and in the big picture, Dick’s personhood is ironically better preserved in the scenario where he was definitively stripped of it by an uncaring system and thrown into the last place he should’ve been....with Bruce then, upon discovering this, moving heaven and hell to see that personhood or awareness of personhood, more accurately, restored to Dick, no matter what it took, even if he had to do it himself. Because again, I also think that there’s a heeeeell of a lot of hubris in Bruce thinking that he was equipped to care for this kid right off the bat....and its not even that I don’t think he is (because I think Bruce really was a good father to Dick in their early years, and the majority of their problems arose later, when Bruce was unable to reconcile that this kid he’d once thought himself so alike to was growing into a man with his own ideas and choices that Bruce couldn’t understand or relate to).

Again, I think its more that I don’t truly see BRUCE actually having that degree of confidence that he’s truly a good fit for taking care of Dick, not being more worried that all his issues and his focus as Batman would be a deterrent....unless he had an external kick in the ass that made him feel like no, I don’t trust this job to anyone else at this point, so I HAVE to be up to the task myself, its that simple.

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