#I feel like these past like four issues have given dick more healthy interactions with his male friends than all the other Nightwing

[frogaroundandfindout]

“What can I do for you Mister Nightwing?”

“Got the chair tonight, huh, red?”

“Flash told me about the museum gig and I just about crapped my—”

“Shut up.”

“Shuttin’ up. Here come your Kodak moments”

“Thanks buddy.”

Roy is in the chair and dick calls for assistance on getting some images on their location. He and Tim then head out to do more recon (Nightwing Vol.2 #143)

[bigskydreaming]

Thinking about the Church of Blood story in general now, like, the big culmination one, and it had some really great Donna and Joey moments, as well as some great scenes between Kory and Jason actually.

I’ve talked a little about my disconnect with the Kory - Jason - Roy trio in general in the past, in terms of their New 52 dynamic vs their history pre-boot.....but this story in particular makes it stand out for me, because like, both Roy and Kory thought Jason was precious as fuck, but he was very very much their friend/boyfriend’s kid brother. Not in a dismissive or condescending way, but just like.....hmm, hard to describe exactly. But it also went both ways, and personally, I’ll never be able to look at the three of them and NOT see Jason as always viewing them through the lens of how he first knew them.

Because one thing that I really really think has so much potential to be explored after Jason’s return and when he starts to get closer with the family again, is......so like, if you’re going off of pre-boot continuity, whether you ship DickKory or DickBabs or DickRoy or whomever....I think if you play off of the idea of DickKory’s canon relationship at all, to any degree, like......Jason is Gonna Have Opinions and Feelings about them not being together by the time he returns to Gotham. I think it absolutely is gonna be a big deal to him, whether he voices that or not, and hell, whether HE even consciously processes why that is or not.

And that’s because canon DickKory IMO was quite literally Jason’s first look at a happy, healthy and mutually respectful adult romance.

Jason’s never cited any real memories of his parents being happy together, frankly. And for the three or at most four years he lived with Bruce, its not like Bruce was in any committed long-term relationships other than his flirtations with Selina. And while Jason was never quite as removed from Bruce’s Justice League circle of friends as a lot of fanon takes for granted, its not like Bruce was hosting weekly gatherings and thus giving Jason a lot of up close encounters with Clark and Lois as a couple, or Ollie and Dinah or Barry and Iris.

So for pretty much Jason’s entire existence as Robin, the relationship he had with Dick and by extension Kory as his brother’s girlfriend....literally WAS his first and most formative view of what two adults in love COULD look like.

And throughout that time, Dick and Kory were SOLID. Like, they were together for a very long time, and the issues in their relationship pretty much existed at the start of their relationship when they were first getting together and working through their very different at times outlooks on life....but with this predating Jason’s debut.....and then like.....conflicts in their relationship pretty much only then started appearing at the tail end of Dick’s brainwashing, with Kory’s wedding on Tamaran - which Jason wasn’t witness to, and didn’t last long at all as Kory returned in time to help rescue Dick and with Jason having a front row seat to her concerns for him and desire to reconcile and put all of that behind them. And then again AFTER that....Kory and Dick were once again quite solid for awhile, up until and after Jason’s death, with her pretty much being Dick’s rock through all of that....and their ultimate break-up basically only happening around the time of Knightfall, when Tim was already firmly established as Robin.

So for basically the entire time Jason knew Dick before he died.....he knew Kory too, and the fact that his brother and Kory were very much in love and very happy and very GOOD together. And then years later, Jason returns, and finds that at some point in his absence.....the literal golden couple, the two people whose relationship was literally his introduction to the concept of a healthy adult relationship, hell, probably the only reason he viewed such a thing as even POSSIBLE.....had broken up, and not only did nobody ever talk about this or bring this up....if Jason HAD looked for details....the reality is very few people probably even had a clue WHY....beyond just being able to tell him vague facts like “oh they were engaged, but something happened on their wedding day, and then they called it off, and then Dick left the Titans around the same time and they never got back together.”

I mean, if I’m Jason, and I come back and that’s all anyone can tell me about why my brother and his girlfriend, the two people who I thought were more in love than anyone else I’d ever in my life known two people to be.....

I’m gonna be like....dude, what the FUCK HAPPENED??!?!

But at the same time, probably not wanting to actually ASK Dick that, because sensing that anything to result in this probably isn’t something he remotely wants to talk about, or be reminded of just how good they used to be, back when Jason knew them.....and also there’s always the possibility that on some level Jason doesn’t fully WANT to know what happened, as he doesn’t want to ruin the mental image/memories he has of this formative-on-his-view-of-romance couple’s happier times by knowing just what exactly did happen to destroy that.

But that doesn’t mean he’s not gonna definitely have some thoughts about all that and a whole lot of confusion and likely some mixed feelings....

And it DOES also mean that if and when he DID find out about various factors that contributed to the end of their relationship, like the role Mirage played in that as well as the one-sided nature of how the Titans as a whole reacted to Dick in that storyline.....IMO, its not going to be as generic or removed a situation for Jason as most Jason-finds-out-about-Tarantula-and-sometimes-Mirage takes often assume it to be. For Jason, its likely to be a bit more personal than that, especially compared to the way Tim, Damian, Steph or others who came along later would view that revelation.

And this too, plays into why I’m big on “no, actually Dick and Jason did have a sibling relationship k and thx, this is kinda key and crucial to some very poignant story beats”....

Because Jason was THERE, back in the day. He SAW Dick and Kory together. I need to grab some panels of Jason and Kory from the Brother Blood story because they had some cute moments and like.....I mean, we might not have seen much there but what we did see, he was Team DickKory. The end of their relationship would not be some abstract piece of history the way it would be for most of the Batfam....because given that Jason literally interacted more with Dick during the time he existed as Robin than even Bruce did during that same period.....Jason is the one and ONLY member of the Batfam who could ever possibly have an actual clear image and view of just what Dick LOST due to the end of his and Kory’s relationship.

Because he’s the only one who ever really got a chance to see what Dick HAD there....back when he had it, and it was good.

[liskantope]

Back during my early days on Tumblr, around the time I started here actually, I started reading Questionable Content comics from the beginning, 10 per day, to catch up to the current ones (at the time the comics numbered just over 3000). The day I finished the first 1000 I blogged about it, and then after the 2000th and 3000th I reblogged to update my review. The final reblog, from December 15th, 2015, is here.

The 4000th QC comic came out on Friday, and I’ve decided that in keeping with tradition it’s time to write a review of the past 1000 (although I’m doing it in a fresh post and not reblogging because apparently back in 2015 I hadn’t discovered readmore links yet and the post would look annoyingly long). So let’s get right to it... under the readmore link which I now know is a thing.

This past thousand comics, more than the previous runs of 1000, happens to converge upon a few prominent themes and one very prominent new character: Bubbles. As Bubbles is introduced soon after comic #3000 and is then heavily developed through the next thousand comics, with many of the story arcs (including the longest one ever seen in QC) centering on her, I might call the period of this past thousand comics The Year of Bubbles or something like that if in fact it were only a year instead of almost four (The 200-Week-Period of Bubbles doesn’t roll off the keyboard quite as nicely).

More generally, this webcomic has taken the AI theme to a whole new level in the past thousand comics with Bubbles’ introduction and development only the most major component of this -- whereas the presence of AI was a very minor and almost awkward side-issue in the early days of QC, the comic has now gone full-on robot-themed. I’d estimate that something in the ballpark of one third of the content in the #3000′s was focused on robots’ interactions and relationships with each other -- I think for the first time one could say it passed the AI-rights analog of the Bechdel test. Some 1000 comics ago I remember being mildly impatient at how robot-themed the content was getting, perhaps out of a vague feeling that the human characters were the ones I identified with the most (perhaps in the QC universe, and possibly the real world before the end of my lifetime, this would be considered a semi-subconscious form of bigotry which I can’t call “human-ism” but would deserve some term). I particularly remember not being enthralled with Bubbles when she was first introduced and was slightly irritated that she was immediately taking center stage.

But Bubbles, as well as the story arcs involving AIs in general, grew on me a lot, not just as an allegory of real-life social justice issues but as stories which provoke ideas and questions that I find interesting in their own right. In the case of the comics involving Bubbles, I think they mainly show just how masterful the cartoonist Jeph Jacques’ writing and approach to character development has become. Every bit of dialog taking place between Bubbles and other characters (particularly Faye of course) is gold, often without a single word that could be changed. The sequence of scenes during the #3700′s through which Faye and Bubbles finally get together is the epitome of this and in my opinion the very best writing we’ve seen in QC.

The actual outcome of Faye and Bubbles winding up in a relationship with each other, along with all the constant hints and speculation and build-up leading up to it, now that I have much more mixed feelings about. It precisely puts its finger on one of the main ever-present aspects of the ethos of QC which I’ve complained about before more than once and wound up calling “sex-causality”. Part of me wishes I hadn’t spent as many words ranting about this issue and I’m still uncertain on exactly how I categorize it, as purely a personal distaste or something more objective that does happen in certain subcultures and is bad when pushed on members who are uncomfortable with it, or what. But I do think the slow development of Faye/Bubbles over the course of most of the past thousand comics deserves a brief discussion as an example. There are two prongs to this thing: the fact that Faye and Bubbles getting together was the outcome, and the intermittent banter of all of the other characters about that outcome through hundreds of comics in approaching it.

With regard to their getting together in a both romantic and sexual relationship, it would go against my principles to oppose something like this. That said, it’s a departure from what we knew about Faye (which, to QC’s credit, is openly acknowledged), I would imagine that in a universe with human-like still-made-of-metal AI such a thing would still be somewhat more unusual than it’s given credit for being in the comic. Then again, it’s almost impossible not to underestimate the variety and frequency of still-under-discussed sexualities that are out there (e.g. romantic love and sexual attraction towards metal objects is definitely a thing), and certainly it makes the story more interesting, which after all is part of the writer’s job. No, what I think bothers me here is what feels like an under-representation or under-recognition of profoundly intimate friendships that don’t at any point contain an element of one party wanting to sleep with the other -- does there have to be a sexual element to every relationship that’s deep? It was mainly for this reason, I guess, that once I saw a meaningful (platonic) relationship blossoming between Faye and Bubbles, and noticed how well it was written and how much good it was doing each of them, that I feel it was a really beautiful thing as it was and began actively rooting against the ship that most of the other characters were rooting for.

As for the speculation between the other characters, well, if you’ve been following QC and my posts on this issue like the one I linked to above (those of you who have even made it up to this point in this post!), then you might guess rightly that my main reaction was profound annoyance. I don’t like getting on my high horse about other mostly-inoffensive adults acting kind of immature because I’m trying to stay open to it possibly being a personal-taste thing and maybe mostly on my end, but, well, I thought a lot of the banter irritating in a way that perceived immaturity irritates me. These two comics epitomize what I find annoying, and the “You just... seem to care about her a lot, that’s all” line at the start of this one points to precisely my complaint about the existence of deep platonic friendships not being recognized. Anyway, by the time we got past the dinner conversation in the comics I just linked to, I was throwing up my hands and fully onboard with the Faye/Bubbles ship just to finally be done with all the excited speculative giggling. And as I said, when it finally did happen, the writing (including of the reactions of other characters) was fantastic.

To (finally) change the topic away from Bubbles, some of my emotional reaction to QC has shifted subtly while the last thousand comics were coming out. The period of publication from #3001 to #4000 happens to have spanned a segment of my life (which will hopefully be ending soon) in which I’ve felt quite lonely and isolated. And watching all the interactions going on in the QC world makes me feel... not nostalgic exactly because I was never really part of a social circle quite like Marten’s... but rather bittersweet because of how much I’d like to be in so many ways. QC presents a fictional environment that in the confines of my brain I often call a “social utopia” or, perhaps slightly less ridiculously, something like a “social circle / subcultural utopia”. It’s poor terminology because the QC universe on the whole isn’t a utopia in any sense of the word -- in fact there are plenty of social ills that form the backdrop of many storylines -- and even when confined to looking at how the particular social circle operates “utopia” doesn’t seem like an appropriate term. But the variety of people in the social group, the places, they meet, and the way they interact with each other all seems to click together and operate in what I would consider -- and I believe the artist Jeph Jacques would consider -- to be pretty close to idyllic. I like especially how much diversity there is among the characters, both in their backgrounds and interests as well as their quirks, and how completely at ease and accepting they are of each other in spite of or almost because of them. There’s this vibe of “We’re all a little weird but we share the same values about how to be decent human beings, so let’s all revel in our weirdness together and be there for each other through thick and thin!” (Of course there are some bad characters lying on the periphery and kinda-sorta-dicks like Sven who are mostly excluded from the group, but that’s not the core of the world.) With few exceptions, conflicts are resolved in a very systematic way and almost immediately (with only a couple of exceptions that did eventually end happily).

And as a matter of fact, even during times when I was fairly socially happy, I was never part of any group that was so exemplary in this particular way. But reading QC, which is hopefully at least somewhat drawn from the cartoonist’s own experiences, sort of gives me hope or at least a very concrete means of imagining such a crowd. And even if I did feel the need to gripe from time to time about what I call the “sex-casual” norms that permeate the group interactions, honestly in the grand scheme of things that’s just something I could live with or even enjoy if comes through in a non-pushy, non-conformist way, in order to be part of such a welcoming and healthy family.