#Young Justice and the Batfam 🤝 Tim: 'do not separate or risk evilization'

[fantastic-nonsense]

Tim "Power of Friendship" Drake. Is that why every Everytime I come across his “future” selves in comics (Teen Titans 2003, and lonely place of living) he is brooding angry loner who uses a gun for some reason? Why do they write him rejecting his friends?

Basically every Batman!Tim we’ve ever seen is evil, which I think is less indicative that Tim has inherent supervillain tendencies and more indicative of the fact that a Tim who is Batman is, traditionally, a Tim that is either alone or has lost people so fundamental to his sense of self that it sent him at least a bit over the edge. It’s a Tim without a support base, a Tim without the family and community he so deliberately and carefully cultivates, and a Tim without others to reign his darker impulses in and hold him accountable.

The thing about Tim is that he's a social person and a support character by nature. He gravitates towards talking to people and creating connections and identifying gaps and solving problems that keep people from working effectively together. As he's noted on multiple occasions, he has friends and treasures having them deeply. This is largely why when his social support structure breaks down, he goes off the deep end and starts getting angry and depressed.

Additionally, Tim has never wanted to be Batman. The concept of becoming Batman or being anything like Bruce canonically scares him. He rejects the idea outright on several different occasions, and he hates that he's finally being able to "understand" Bruce after suffering the immense personal losses he went through in the mid-2000s. Tim is stunningly realistic and critical of Bruce as a person for someone who is incredibly idealistic about the ideals of Batman; it's always been a very fascinating source of tension for his personal interactions with Bruce and to a lesser extent Dick and Cass.

Which is a larger point that people dance around but rarely actually talk about in these conversations: to get Canon!Tim to a place where he either wants to become Batman or actually becomes Batman, you have to remove at least 5-6 cornerstone people in his life that keep him happy, sane, and a nominally normal, functional human being. Wearing the cowl certainly doesn't help matters, but Tim's mentality and sanity would start sliding regardless of whether he was wearing the cowl or not in any situation where he loses that foundational sense of community and accountability. Thus, the proliferation of Evil Loner Batman!Tims that we see.

So imo it's less about Tim actively rejecting his friends and more "well what it proves is that Tim goes insane when he loses everyone he loves, which checks out."