#again don’t know the dc timeline just work with me here

[floralcyanide]

ʜɪꜱᴛᴏʀʏ ᴘʀᴏꜰᴇꜱꜱᴏʀ!ᴊᴏʜɴ “ʙᴜᴄᴋʏ” ᴇɢᴀɴ ʜᴇᴀᴅᴄᴀɴᴏɴꜱ ɪɪ

Your job at the museum teaches you more than you think when it’s opening night for a WWII exhibit.

pairing: professor!john "bucky" egan / fem!reader

warnings: none!

author’s note: I'm thinking the next part to this will be an actual fanfic but we'll see (:

masterlist | divider credit: @cafekitsune

this fic has been cross posted to ao3.

ᴅᴏ ɴᴏᴛ ᴄᴏᴘʏ, ʀᴇᴘʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴇ, ᴏʀ ᴄʟᴀɪᴍ ᴍʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ᴀs ʏᴏᴜʀs ᴏɴ ᴛᴜᴍʙʟʀ, ᴀᴏ3, ᴡᴀᴛᴛᴘᴀᴅ, ᴏʀ ᴀɴʏ ᴡᴇʙsɪᴛᴇ. ʏᴏᴜ ᴅᴏ ɴᴏᴛ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴘᴇʀᴍɪssɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ᴜsᴇ ᴍʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋs ɪɴ ᴀɪ ɢᴇɴᴇʀᴀᴛᴏʀs ᴏʀ ᴀɴʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴅᴏ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴀʀᴛɪғɪᴄɪᴀʟ ɪɴᴛᴇʟʟɪɢᴇɴᴄᴇ. ʏᴏᴜ ᴍᴀʏ ɴᴏᴛ ᴜsᴇ ᴍʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋs ᴛᴏ sᴇʟʟ ғᴏʀ ᴀs ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴏᴡɴ ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛɪᴏɴ.

✦ You work hard on your first paper based on your thesis. Dr. Egan gives you pointers here and there. Sometimes, you go to his office just to chat when you aren’t doing research. 

✦ He doesn’t go into detail about his personal life, but you do know he’s divorced and has a kid who’s a teenager. He talks about his son a lot, and it brings a smile to your face. Dr. Egan says he hopes his son is just as smart as you when he gets to college. 

✦ He mentions a trip to DC for the Master’s program. You jump at the idea, much to Dr. Evan’s delight. You ask if he’s going, and he says no. You wonder why but don’t bother to ask. There’s a lot that Dr. Egan doesn’t seem like he wishes to tell you. And you wonder if it’s simply because he’s your superior or if it’s something else. Either way, you’re curious. But you don’t want to cross a line. 

✦ You talk a lot about your grandfather to Professor Egan; he always listens patiently and even gives you a moment to gather yourself when you become emotional. You also talk about your father a good bit. Dr. Egan asks what he does, and you explain that he used to be a pilot in the last war. Dr. Egan makes a peculiar face but brushes it off quickly.

✦ He asks what squadron your father was in. “My father was in the Hundredth. He talks about his experience a lot.” Dr. Egan suddenly checks his watch and excuses himself, saying he had to be somewhere and that you were welcome to return to his office tomorrow.

✦ You leave confused about what caused the sudden change in Professor Egan's demeanor but shake it off. You do come again the following day and bring coffee, apologizing for anything you may have bothered him with.

✦ “It wasn’t anything you said, don’t worry,” Dr. Egan says, “I just lost track of time. I tend to do that with you a lot.” You try not to get flustered at his comment when he gives you a soft smile with it. 

✦ Whenever you aren’t researching or hanging with Dr. Egan, you work at the local World War II museum, creating exhibits and giving guests tours. It’s the opening of the new exhibit of the airmen of the war tonight, and you’re dressed your best. You’re happy to explain to guests the timeline of the war and show them photographs and artifacts. 

✦ A familiar figure catches your eye. You notice a tall, graying man with his hands shoved in his pockets, eyeing photos of the squadron your father was in that he donated to the exhibit. You approach the man, “Have any questions?” he turns around, and sure enough, it’s Dr. Egan.

✦ “Professor Egan! I didn’t expect you to be here!” you smile as he looks at you knowingly, with a bit of defeat. “I knew you’d be here, actually,” he says. You give him a confused look.

✦ Dr. Egan points at the group photo of the remaining airmen from the 100th who live to V Day to a specific man with a dashing grin. “See this guy here? Does he look familiar to you?” You squint, leaning close to the photograph you’ve seen many times. Then you realize that dashing smile only belongs to one person.

✦ You carefully look over to Dr. Egan, unsure of what to say. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” you ask. “Didn’t want people, especially students, to see me differently.” “How would they see you in any way other than a hero?” you ask, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not really the ideal profession,” Dr. Egan swallows, unable to look you in the eye. You sigh, “It was war, Professor. You did what needed to be done, unfortunately. And it’s over now.”

✦ “I just felt you needed to know about my past,” Dr. Egan admits, “Especially since we’ve grown so close professionally and your father was in the same squadron as me. It was only time before you found out.”

✦ “I’d love to know everything you’re willing to tell me. Especially since it’ll help with my research. Not to mention there’s probably stuff my father never mentioned,” you chuckle. There’s a mischievous glint in Dr. Egan’s eye at that statement. “Lunch tomorrow?”

[superawesome40]

Wayne Children Timeline Update

Okay, so I’ve hit a standstill on the timeline. I’ve got (most) significant not-hero-related details worked out (I think???) and I’m working on education/jobs right now, but there is SO MUCH from canon that I could pick from, and I’m honestly a bit overwhelmed. Anyone want to help me out?

Enjoy me spiraling into madness as I attempt to introduce the events that I’m probably going to include:

Dick

The Slade/Deathstroke story line, probably heavily warped to fit the storyline.

Talon/The Court of Owls. I love those funky dudes, but I admit I only really know them ‘cause of the rhyme.

Spyral? Maybe? Honestly I have NO IDEA what Spyral is at all, and I’ll need to investigate more.

I’m on the fence about including the whole Catalina Flores storyline. I’ve heard about it in passing, but I haven’t actually done any research into it yet. It’s a VERY sensitive topic, and I don’t want to mishandle anything, especially if I ever get around to writing stories set within this universe.

I think Dick being a cop at some point is really, really funny, so I might have him join the Bludhaven (Blüdhaven?) PD for a bit? So he can take them down from the inside or something. He quits after like. Two years.

Jason

The Catherine Todd/Sheila Haywood/Willis Todd… situation.

Whacking the scary man with a tire iron (was that one ever even a question? Of course I’m including it)

League bodyguard for baby Damian (I’m pretty sure this one is fanon, but it’s my AU, I do what I want!!!)

Heads in a duffle bag

Titans Tower attack.

I’ve heard something about magic fire swords maybe, but I’m not sure.

This is making me realize I know… very little about what Jason got up to after his revival.

Cass

Huh. I don’t really have anything to put here? I know next to nothing about Cass outside of her involvement in the Batfam. Send help.

No like actually. What does she do? I love her character, but this post is making me realize that I don’t actually KNOW them.

Tim

Stalker baby stalker baby stalker baby stalker baby

Joker Jr.! I dunno, I really like the idea of JJ being like a completely different entity who lies dormant in Tim’s head and pops up from time to time? It inspired a story where Tim has several versions of himself living up in his head. I invented an entire disorder for it: Fragmented Personality Disorder. Probably won’t be a thing in this AU, but either way. JJ is DEFINITELY happening.

Young Justice is morally gray at best and they try very hard to pretend like they aren’t. (Young Justice is actually the only comics I’ve read, and I’ve only read up to like. Issue # 6 so far. I love my little dudes so much.)

Off topic, but will someone explain coffee Tim vs. energy drink Tim? Can’t he just combine the two with an ass load of sugar and call it a day?

Spleen.

Highest kill count. Don’t care if it’s canon. He has the highest kill count, he’s not sorry, and he WILL do it again.

I don’t know why the idea of Conner, Cassie, Tim, and Bart running around space completely unsupervised is so funny to me, but it is. Is it canon? Don’t ask me, I have no idea. Is it in this AU? Absolutely.

Again. What does he get up to? Robin era, Red Robin era, anywhere? Anything significant happen? At all???

Duke

Uhhhhhhhh.

I know about his parents. That’s definitely happening.

We Are Robin? What is We Are Robin? Is it pre-Batfam? Post-Batfam?

Wait was he Signal before or after he was a Bat?

Is he a Bat?

I COULD do my research. Or I could do the lazy thing and make you all do it for me :)

Damian

This is the little bastard that dragged me kicking and screaming into the DCU. This is all his fault.

Fun fact! I hated anything and everything to do with DC purely because I was introduced to Marvel first. I thought it was dumb, and poorly written, and a cheap knock off of Marvel. This was back when I only knew about like, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. I didn’t even know that the Flash was DC at this point. Then I found out about Damian and… well, it all spiraled from there.

So anyways, let’s see.

Killed by the Heretic? Yup.

Metal spine? Absolutely.

Dick Grayson’s Robin? Without a doubt.

Hmmm what else…

What happened in Super Sons?

Uh

What did he get up to with the Titans (?) That was a thing, right?

Wasn’t there a murder island story arc? Maybe? And he died for like, a minute but then he came back?

Also Damian and Tim attempt to murder each other as a ✨bonding activity✨

Bruce

Don’t even get me started on freaking Bruce. I dread the day I finally get up the courage to start looking into Bruce.

So yeah. Send help? Suggest your favorite fight/monster/comic for me to research? Please, I’m begging you. Doesn’t matter the universe, or the era, or whether it’s pre-Crisis or Earth 1 or whatever other million ways there are to break them down (I still have to look into those, too.), anything you think should be on the timeline, let me know and I’ll look into it.

[laughterbynight]

Possibly unpopular opinions incoming which means post it before bed, natch.

I actually think Tim in a trio would be cute. I don’t trust DC not to make it weird of course but as far as headcanons go I could see him trying that out for a bit. One partner is of course Kon. DC can fight it all they want but I do think someday (maybe when I’m 70) Tim and Kon will end up canon.

Anyway, temporary trio wise I think Tim, Kon, and maybe a new character. I have no issue with Bernard but I always feel like DC shoved him in there to cut off timkon talk so I have a hard time seeing him as anything permanent y’know? But then again that would work as a transition into timkon when the trio ends. Amicably!! I’m so not here for drama.

I’d like to see a woman in there maybe, for some balance. No not Steph. I know some fans are still really married to the idea of them but the whole manic pixie dreamgirl thing has never been my jam personally. That’s why I’m generally attracted to the batfam. I like stoics. Yes, Dick isn’t my fave either (drawing all kinds of targets on myself tonight).

I feel like figuring out sexuality is so…basic and static in comics. Like yeah they talk about it being a journey of discovery but we don’t really *see* that, they just say it.

I think I’ve seen Bart as a popular third. Idk if that’s in line with him as a character at all since I’m less familiar with him but I’m open to it. I do kinda like the idea of an Amazon about their age. I know the supe/bat/amazon thing is common ground but hey it works really good. I can’t argue with it. I like reading superwonderbat too. Sue me.

If we wanna shake things up it would be interesting if it was a male Amazon. I mean we know men aren’t allowed to stay there so they must go somewhere. I think it would be interesting to see a male character from a culture where women are in control and that’s considered normal. No hate about it just, yeah that’s how it is here. I get bored of the sausage club that is the batfamily but I’ll take it if that means an interesting third.

sidebar: I really wish Cass was in more stories and we could have more girldad Bruce moments. I feel like DC tries to do the “girlpower” thing by putting all the girls on teams together and honest to god I do not care. I wanna see Batman and his kick ass daughter and her brothers, together.

It’s almost a shame Cass was adopted bc she would fit as a good third but of course we can’t do that for obvious reasons. Maybe in an AU, but I’d be more sad if she didn’t have batdad instead.

Anyone have any ideas about a third? I’m curious. Keeping in mind they'd need to get along with Tim and Kon on some level obvs or why would any of them bother.

Edit: How do we feel about Connor? I realized the rep for Ace characters is abysmal and I think Tim and Kon would be really sweet and understanding compared to like, idk a lot of other characters in general. Tbh I think of Tim as demi but idk if DC can handle that Bi was hard enough for them. But then I think I’d want them to stay a trio too. Idk y’all is Connor around their ages I seriously can’t keep up with how DC rearranges timelines. I DO know it would probably cause Bruce and Ollie to get catty with each other around the holidays and that’s always a bonus in my book.

So many ideassssss

edit edit: wait that’s two Connors. I shouldn’t do this at 1am. That would also be funny tho.

[tickldpnk8]

Winter’s Edge : Flowers of Romance

In my reread of Sandman, I've actually got a few new issues I get to read. Originally, I read the series through the individual issues on DC's comic streaming platform. This time, I'm reading them in the Deluxe editions which captures a few issues I missed. Winter's Edge was one of them. And the first story in that issue is Flowers of Romance...and the art is just lovely!

I mean, this is just a beautiful depiction of Desire. The art style seems like a blend of watercolor and collage. Is this an outfit? A tattoo? I don’t know what’s going on here, but it just works. Proving once again that Desire can pull off any look they want to. (I also find it interesting that in this issue, Desire uses she/her.)

Clues and suggestions in this issue that I noted:

So apparently a satyr gave a gift at a wedding at the "dawn of the world" and that favor granted satyrs the ability to ask a boon of Desire. But what wedding?? With this coming on the heels of Song of Orpheus, it's tempting to think that this relates to Aristeas' attempted rape of Eurydice. Or even that this particular satyr is Aristeas himself. But pairing it with what we found out in the last issue about Del having once been engaged, I kind of want to headcanon that her wedding is the one spoken about. Maybe Dream isn't the only sibling whose relationships get meddled with? But that timeline might not work out either if the wedding was what caused Del to change.

So this is the first spot I feel like I'm seeing it spelled out that mythological creatures and/or gods come from and go back to the Dreaming. Desire says that Death will come for the satyr and then he'll go to Dream's realm. It's interesting to me: do they just blip out to nothing when they die? Go back to dream stuff? Or do they become actual dreams/nightmares in his realm since folks might still think about them?

Also, what does that mean for the gods of the underworld of past civilizations? Do they and all of their residents blip out over time too? Or are there enough believers to create the Reality of their afterlife despite being dead? (a la 1000 Cats or Overture) I like the world-building, but there are some plot holes from a theological/philosophical side in how Gaiman treats the afterlife in this series. I guess that's where headcanons come in.

In any case, I love how in this story Desire almost gets a positive portrayal...it's a really nice thing of them to grant a boon to the Satyr. Until you realize that the boon was essentially a form of rape for the mortal woman involved. Unless the Satyr had already died/turned to wood before she could get there? I'm going to headcanon that is what happened: he got to be young again and spin his magic. But that he was already gone by the time she got there since there's no indication that anything else happened.

[coquitokisses]

Trusting Again | Bucky Barnes (introduction)

series masterlist • m. masterlist

spotify playlist • moodboards • files

After having spent much of her childhood being trained in a private organization in Bulgaria, Catalina Navarro is finally free when she is rescued by Nick Fury during a SHIELD mission.

Nick took the responsibility of taking care of Catalina and thus preventing her from falling into the adoption system. He saw how much potential she had and as she got older, he thought that she could use everything she knew for good so at the age of 16, he decided to get her into SHIELD and since then she has worked for the organization as an agent and spy.

In 2014, Catalina witnessed the Winter Soldier event in Washington DC. A few months after all the files, from both SHIELD and HYDRA, went public, Catalina decides to help Steve and Sam find Bucky.

But when she finds him, instead of bringing him with her, she decides to let him go. An action that will have consequences later on..

A/n: hiiii! I have a few things I wanna clarify before starting the story

— I said it before but I’ll say it again, this story is 18+, it contains strong language, explicit and/or implicit sexual scenes, topics like mental and/or psychological health and PTSD.

— The story takes place during Captain America: Civil War, but there'll be a prologue which is set in 2015 just to give a little context of the story between Cat and Bucky. Then it’ll go along with the MCU timeline, although the story will be one year ahead (for example, Infinity War happens in 2019, not 2018, but everything will happen according to the timeline)

— I'm planning on following the order of the rest of the movies probably till Avengers Endgame (if things go how I've planned) maybe till TFATWS but I’m not sure yet, however, there may be some changes to the storylines of the movies just so I can introduce Catalina's character into the story.

— My first language is not English, is Spanish. I am bilingual, even tho I don't really talk in English just because I really don't need to, but I wanted to make this story in English. In case there's any errors/mistakes well now y'all know lol my brain process things in Spanish first and then translates them to English.

— This story is available on wattpad as well, (even tho I don’t really use that account much, the user is -dolcekisses) but I’m also uploading it in spanish in case anyone wants to read it, my user is coquitokisses (same as here lol) and the account is in spanish if any of y’all are spanish speakers.

— Also, I don’t know how many chapters this story will have lol (with everything I have written, notes etc, I think maybe like 55-65? I’m not sure, is that a lot? Lmao I’ll just go with the flow)

— When I started the story I started writing it in 1st person (my oc’s pov) but I actually write my stories in 3rd person now so there’ll probably be some times where it’s narrated in 1st person and some other times in 3rd. Sorry about that lol

— I chose Eva de Dominici to be the face claim of Catalina Navarro (my oc)

That'll be all, besties, I hope you like this fanfic as much as I do, let me know what y'all think, feel free to comment your opinion! Feedback will be appreciated <3

I'll see you in the prologue!

Likes and reblogs will be appreciated!

[radioactive-earthshine]

I’ve been WAITING for this question okay so

Just to clarify I’m fairly new to comics and also not up to date on what’s happening with most of the characters rn so if this doesn’t fit anywhere in any current timeline or has already been done uhhhh sorry I don’t give a fuck

Anyway I’d give Starfire a solo series.

The first major arc would be kind of a space road trip type thing and for this arc I’d partner Kory up with Donna Troy and it would be so fruity. Like so so fruity. Those women kiss. I’m not sure what exactly I’d have Kory doing in space or why Donna joins her but the arc should end in a way that consolidates the best parts of her lore and scraps everything else (this is how I’m retconning Red Hood and the Outlaws). So some kind of soul searching magic quest idk.

At the end of her space quest, Kory gets established with a job and apartment in a new city and her villains are all super high tech, sci-fi. The artist needs to have some fuckin whimsy in designing characters and backgrounds, none of that dark grey everything is gritty shit. Bright colors all around. Obviously there would probably be at least one arc with the Titans but I’d really want her to work with characters she hasn’t previously interacted with or to bring back characters she hasn’t worked with recently like Animal Man. Maybe for one arc she teams up with the (RENEE MONTOYA) Question to blend Kory’s whole alien thing with a street level noir story (making Dick the detective for this would be so lame and im not about that. Im giving Kory more female friendships thanks). I don’t know if she’s ever worked with Kon but if she hasn’t THIS IS THE TIME. It would be soon after she gets back from space and would kick off a storyline for him to change in some important way like idk maybe growing out of the Superboy mantle and actually being an adult.

Maybe none of that makes sense and if this is stupid feel free to tell me so. So yeah that’s my idea. Korydonna space road trip, set up a new status quo for the remainder of the series and have her work with new characters to fight super powered sci-fi villains in mundane settings, emphasis on Kory working with other women. If I have fundamentally misunderstood this character then just ignore all of this. But anyway the thing about this that I think would piss off DC is that Kory has no male love interests in this series, at all, period. She either kisses Donna or no one at all.

Unrelated to that I would also fix the whole Batgirl thing and have Babs be Oracle again, retcon Cass’s villain arc out of existence, and put her back as Batgirl for a solo series so we can have her pass the mantle to Steph at the end in a way that’s satisfying and does not include the character assassination. I don’t know how I would accomplish this in-universe without fucking up the timeline but I’d find a way.

I'm interested and am listening to you very closely. I'm not the most well versed person in Kory or Donna lore (I've read thousands of comics but not a lot with them meaningfully) so I can't say if this is compliant with anything, and even if it was an impossibility, this is about self indulgent stories YOU would write with no one at DC to tell you NO. I definitely feel strongly that DC needs more women with their own solos featuring other women and having relationships that are platonic so this 100% good in that regards and I feel a lot of people would be interested.

Kory and Kon interacted in TTv3 but I can't justifiably say it was the best of situations so having better interactions would be 100% a delight to see.

But yes, Kory deserves her own solo and we always need more queer content. And SPACE! We need more comics that take you away from Earth.

But here's an important question; WHAT CITY is she working out of??

Babs being Oracle again is a mantra even the most staunch of batfans cry daily and I feel most would welcome her back.

Tell me what you would do if you had full creative control to write for DC with NO push back from editors and who would you piss off the most with your unhinged creative wiles?

Also, I shouldn't have to say this but don't be a DICK to anyone whose self indulgent fantasies might make you mad. Keep scrolling, block, move on. Thanks.

[jskim2112]

Stop this train

I want to get off and go home again

I can’t take the speed it’s moving in

I know I can’t

But honestly, won’t someone stop this train?

It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything other than emails and to-do lists. So here goes nothing…

I’ve been feeling pretty existential these days… the past 12 months, really. There’s a lot going on at church, work, family, friendships, and I’m just barely able to process it all at the speed of a Pentium II Processor (for reference, it came out in 1997).

My best friend (weird label) and prayer warrior sister of 12 years moved away last month after 3 sweet years of being in the same city again.

My church is figuring out identity-level mission and vision questions at every level from the individual to the collective and everything in between.

My mom is turning 60 in a few months. In Korean culture, the 60th birthday is called a Hwangap and used to hold (still does? Probably not…) great significance due to the shorter life expectancy of that time. My mom’s 60th birthday means a lot to me moreso because she recently admitted to me that after my dad died, she used to pray that God give her the strength to live just two more years so that she could send her youngest child off to college. But that recently she has started to pray that God give her the health to live as long as he wills because she has come to enjoy this life he has given her. My mom has lived through a lot of trauma in her life… and I mean more than the average immigrant parent of that generation. I want the world for her and know that turning 60 is just another year closer to the inevitable. As E and I continue to consider a life of m work, how do I balance being a loving and dutiful daughter to both my earthly parent and also my heavenly one?

My husband and I are coming out of the tectonic shock of two sinners coming together to die to each other and reflect Christ to one another. And are thoughtfully continuing to pray through what or where He is calling us to. Oh, and trying to think through our family planning timeline.

As I think a lot of the future, I wonder a lot about who I want my kids to be. What I want them to become. I think of my friends who genuinely love the Lord and live “average” lives. They are not the top [earthly] earners amongst my friends but I know the treasures they must be storing in heaven are magnificent. I want my kids to be like them. Kind, gentle, sharp and shrewd as serpents, innocent as doves, smart, capable, strong, and meek. I’d like to think public school, homeschooling in foreign countries, sacrificially living, and having a strong marriage are enough. But so much seems undetermined and out of our control. We won’t know until we get there. So I sit in that tension of trust and also being prepared. As I oscillate between the two, I get frustrated that E is a lot more “go with the flow” kind of guy and not as internally conflicted as I am. Deep down, I know he is thoughtful in his own way and just expresses it differently than I do.

I want to post something on IG that shows all of these thoughts and the ones I haven’t even begun to process, like Tim Keller’s death. But I know that’s not the place for this stuff… and so I just don’t end up posting anything.

What is it that I want to post? Something that captures what? If I could sum it up in bullet points…

Life is weird.

I miss my friends (DC in TX, TH in NY). I’m super thankful for the friends I have locally. I know these are lifelong friends that know no physical bounds. Can’t wait to have coffee in heaven and catch up on life.

Gratitude. I’ve been feeling really thankful lately.

Choice……… the paradox of choice, the illusion of control, the paralysis by analysis…

I just want my kids to be smart and kind. And strong.

I used to want to speed up life. And now I’m not quite wanting to slow it down or stop the train necessarily… but I am definitely swallowing a lot of air due to my open mouth and the speed it is going.

Man, I am really out of practice in putting my words onto paper and organizing my thoughts coherently.

I found this article while I was looking up the lyrics of “Stop This Train” by John Mayer.

And it is an excellent article that resonates within my bones. I thought about writing something similar and then I couldn’t separate my own thoughts from the author’s so I thought it might be best to just link it. So here it is: https://crosspoint.tv/stop-this-train/

Here are some additional thoughts:

I’m glad E and I went through a season without children. It was (is?) hard in some ways and gave me so much empathy for folks who are not on the married with kids trajectory that the rest of the world is on.

Something about the youth and mentoring them and really finding it hard to feel like I have any wisdom to impart when I am still trying to figure life out… but also talking to them and wanting so badly to help them in their figuring life out too.

Gratitude. Again.

[kaithonks]

So I’ve had some thoughts about Comic Fanon and Canon

I feel the need to admit I’m not particularly active online. Do read fanfics, like art, but I don’t really comment on other people’s or get in to discussion. Specially regarding fandom topics. I tend to fall in to the category of just letting people do whatever they like. But recently, a lot of what’s been on my freed is talk about people making fan content without having read the source material. Partially in the comic book sphere, and for me specially in DC Comics. And my initial thought to this was, let the people do whatever the hell they want. But as I thought more about it, I realized that fan content is not for fans of DC Comics but fans of the DC comic fan work. That is getting all lumped together, when in reality it’s not for the same fandom. 

It’s an interesting spiral to think about, honestly. 

And I feel it’s important to make clear what I want when I go consume fan content. I personally don’t look for canon compliance. I am of a mind set that nothing outside the comic book is canon. Canon is not perfect. It can be awkward and frustrating, and contradictory of itself at times.  So I want fan work that maybe more used Canon as a guideline for a different interpretation. I don’t really bow down to canon, and I don’t expect a fan work to as well because to me that fan work is never going to be close to canon. In some ways I see the line runs parallel to reality verse fiction, it’s just a microcosm. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this way of thinking about fan works, but it does again twist where fan works base on fan works falls. 

Brining this back to comics. There are trends that have developed with in Comic fan work. And for our purpose today, I’m gonna stick to Bat family fanfiction. I personally only really read Jason Todd, and I haven’t been keeping up with anything mainline for a while now. (I just need a break and I started reading Green Lantern, but that’s beside my point) But when I for “Jason Todd is Robin” I get (at time of writing) 2,783 works on Archive of our own. And let’s be real. I’m at work on my hour lunch break. I don’t really have time to read that much. So use the flitters to narrow it down. To “Jason Todd is Robin” “Time Travel Fix it” (if you know the story you probably have an idea of what I’m looking for) Now again at time of writing I’m down to 20 fics with the first one being a FNaF cross over. Not what I’m looking for. I go down, and the next describes Jason going insane and killing everyone.

In no way am I bashing people for making crossovers or writing stories they want with characters they love, but this is where the problem of fan content of fan content lives. It makes things harder. And it becomes the situation of making a copy from a copy. Again, I’m not passing judgement on anyone who post on AO3 because I see it as work done out of love and passion and that’s good. If I don’t think canon is perfect, I don’t expect fans works to be. But these works dilute the characters because you’re not working on your own interpretation of the character, but other people’s popular ideas of that. At that point, you probably should just work on an original character with troupes you like.

I don’t think people should stop posting if they’ve never read a comic. I think they should read a comic because they are a great medium with a lot of good reads, specially outside the superhero genre. But I have trouble justifying to myself having fanon of fanon takes in these spaces.

Here is one guilty pleasure that’s definitely fanon more than canon. I like Tim being a fan of Jason’s Robin. Particularly because It makes Tim still being 17 make more sense. There is just gonna be a point where Tim discovering Dick’s Identity is just bonkers timeline wise. And DC’s Timeline is already….. Something. But that’s bound to happen when you have something running for so long and honestly a different discussion. 

The point I’m making is, I like it. I think it’s ultimately a good little twist to their relationship. Adding to Jason and Tim’s characters. With A) Tim’s betray at a Robin hurting him and B) Jason’s guilt at having hurt someone who believed in his Robin. I don’t read enough Tim to feel comfortable making full judgement on his character, but again this is more of a different interruption, which is what I look for in fan content. So fanon takes aren’t naturally bad characterizations. But If someone who only knows Tim and Jason by the popular fanon takes. It’s gonna really dilute their characters, and at that point just write original characters based on those them. 

All of this really boils down to personal preference, but we do need to talk about things like this. And to me, fan content of fan content shouldn’t be in spaces where people who are fans of the original source material go. Because it’s not for those people but in still in their space.

[britcision]

Okay I know you said Tim or Damian

Let me argue for Dick

Specifically young Dick who did backflips everywhere for literally no reason

Danny cannot do a backflip out of ghost form because flying is cheating and is caught by Alfred within 20 minutes

However Alfred is sympathetic and becomes Danny’s guide and informs him that if he doesn’t need to be fished out of the chandelier by the end of the day Bruce will become suspicious too

Dick meanwhile keeps trying to do a backflip just without paying attention and keeps falling. Luckily this body doesn’t really take damage and heals real fast

He explains it away by claiming he wants to learn to get it right and yeah Danny’s weird like that so it passes with Sam and Tucker

It does not pass with Jazz

Double bonus points if Jazz does not yet know Danny is Phantom

Luckily for both boys since they are in each others’ bodies they do have each others muscle memories so Danny picks up Dick’s gymnastics like he’s been trained for them the second he stops trying and just lets the body go

Dick on the other hand has no fucking clue why he keeps running for the bathroom the second there’s a cold feeling in his mouth and winds up sitting there confused through at least 2 ghost attacks before Tucker comes in after him

Dick goes for “look I can’t do the thing anymore I dunno why it just isn’t working” hoping Tucker will fill him in on “The Thing”

Tucker… buys it, declares it a problem, runs to grab Sam to help Dick transform, and WILL NOT provide more details for suddenly super worried Dick

Helping Dick transform takes the shape of a LOT of near death experiences that are worrying him more and more and eventually just yeeting him into an ongoing ectobeam, because controlled dying is hard to trigger until you’ve died

That works, Dick is ecstatic with his new super powers, his body’s friends are super into his “new” fighting style and ask if he wants to backflip to be more like Robin

Dick agrees enthusiastically and successfully teaches Tucker to backflip too

Now, Dick being around 16 means there is a canon-adjacent world where we don’t get batsibs, but canon is for cowards and quitters and there’s a billion DC fandom ways around it even ignoring the rat’s nest that is DC’s various canons:

- reverse Robin AU; what it says on the tin. Damian was Robin first, Dick is the youngest Robin after Jason

- alternate first meetings; might be Dick meeting Jason and Tim before Bruce, might be Jason jacking Alfred’s car early, point is they’re here out of order

- time jump; keeps mostly the same events, compacts the timeline so the age difference is a couple years tops and into the soup they go

However, there is also another option:

- we see the baby bats before they are siblings

Tim and his stalker obsession also quickly works out that this Robin may have Dick’s body, but he sure ain’t Dick Grayson. He corners Danny at school to demand explanations

Danny wanders across Baby Jason in Crime Alley on a patrol after his dad’s been beating his ass, patches him up and gives him a Robin Whistle to call if he needs help because Danny doesn’t actually know Dick’s patrol route he’s wandering for fun

Steph is located after having “run away” from home again, angry with her supervillain dad and Danny can REALLY relate to that despite assuring her he can’t but his parents are also wild

(Steph leaves this encounter actually super relieved her dad isn’t a mad scientist that actually sounds way worse. Her dad gets his first hug in 3 years when she finds him

She will later be super confused that the Graysons are not mad scientists until Danny and Dick meet up and explain)

Damian and Cass get respective peeks in by noticing their guardians tracking what has happened to Dick and Danny because death cults are fun for all parties

Also it’s super important that every time Danny accidentally tries to go ghost as Dick he does a backflip instead

This habit translates back over to when he’s in his normal body because Dick stubbornly taught him to do flips (whether or not Danny’s any good at them… well, his transformation sequence includes at least an attempt at a backflip now anyway)

currently imagining a freaky friday dpxdc crossover in which one of the batkids gets kidnapped by cultists whose plan is to give the ghost king a physical anchor in this world by offering a sacrifice for the king to inhabit. however, given that danny is not fully dead, the moment the spell completes the aforementioned batkid gasps awake in a small blue bedroom with NASA posters and glow in the dark stars, and danny wakes up on the cold concrete floor of a warehouse amidst groveling cultists

[sylvielauffeydottir]

Hello, it is I, your friendly neighborhood historian. I am ready to lose followers for this post, but I have two masters degrees in history and one of my focuses has been middle eastern area studies. Furthermore, I’ve been tired of watching the world be reduced to pithy little infographics, and I believe there is no point to my education if I don’t put it to good use. Finally, I am ethnically Asheknazi Jewish. This does not color my opinion in this post — I am in support of either a one or two state solution for Israel and Palestine, depending on the factors determined by the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli Government does not speak for me. I hate Netanyahu. A lot. With that said, my family was slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have stood in front of that memorial wall at the Holocaust memorial in DC for my great uncle Simon and my great uncle Louis and cried as I lit a candle. Louis was a rabbi, and he preached mitzvot and tolerance. He died anyway. 

There’s a great many things I want to say about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but let’s start with some facts. 

In early May, there were talks of a coalition government that might have put together (among other parties, the Knesset is absolutely gigantic and usually has about 11-13 political parties at once) the Yesh Atid, a center-left party, and the United Arab List, a Palestinian party. For the first time, Palestinians would have been members of the Israeli government in their own right. And what happened, all of the sudden? A war broke out. A war that, amazingly, seemed to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal prosecution, despite the fact that he has been under investigation for corruption for some time now and the only thing that is stopping a real investigation is the fact that he is Prime Minister.

Funny how that happened. 

There’s a second thing people ought to know, and it is about Hamas. I’ve found it really disturbing to see people defending Hamas on a world stage because, whether or not people want to believe it, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I’m sorry, but it is. Those are the facts. I’m not being a right wing extremist or even a Republican or whatever else or want to lob at me here. I’m a liberal historian with some facts. They are a terrorist organization, and they don’t care if their people die. 

Here’s what you need to know: 

There are two governments for the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In April 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed planned elections. He said it was because of a dispute amid Israeli-annexed East Jerusalum. He is 85 years old, and his Fatah Party is losing power to Hamas. Everyone knows that. Palestinians know that. 

Here’s the thing about Hamas: they might be terrorists, but aren’t idiots. They understand that they have a frustrated population filled with people who have been brutalized by their neighbors. And they also understand that Israel has something called the iron dome defense system, which means that if you throw a rocket at it, it probably won’t kill anyone (though there have been people in Israel who died, including Holocaust survivors). Israel will, however, retaliate, and when they do, they will kill Palestinian civilians. On a world stage, this looks horrible. The death toll, because Palestinians don’t have the same defense system, is always skewed. Should the Israeli government do that? No. It’s morally repugnant. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. It’s hurting people without the capability to defend themselves. But is Hamas counting on them to for the propaganda? Yeah. Absolutely. They’re literally willing to kill their other people for it.

You know why this works for Hamas? They know that Israel will respond anyway, despite the moral concerns. And if you’re curious why, you can read some books on the matter (Six Days of War by Michael Oren; The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich; Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergmen; Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt; and Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis). The TL;DR, if you aren’t interested in homework, is that Israel believes they have no choice but to defend themselves against what they consider ‘hostile powers.’ And it’s almost entirely to do with the Holocaust. It’s a little David v Goliath. It is, dare I say, complicated.

I’m barely scratching the surface here. 

(We won’t get into this in this post, though if you want to DM me for details, it might be worth knowing that Iran funds Hamas and basically supplies them with all of their weapons, and part of the reason the United States has been so reluctant to engage with this conflict is that Iran is currently in Vienna trying to restore its nuclear deal with western powers. The USA cannot afford to piss off Iran right now, and therefore cannot afford to aggravative Hamas and also needs to rely on Israel to destroy Irani nuclear facilities if the deal goes south. So, you know, there is that).

There are some people who will tell you that criticism of the Israel government is antisemitic. They are almost entirely members of the right wing, evangelical community, and they don’t speak for the Jewish community. The majority of Jewish people and Jewish Americans in particular are criticizing the Israeli government right now. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel support Palestinian rights and are speaking out about it. And actually, when they talk about it, they are putting themselves in great danger to do so. Because it really isn’t safe to be visibly Jewish right now. People may not want to listen to Jews when they speak about antisemitism or may want to believe that antisemitism ‘isn’t real’ because ‘the Holocaust is over’ but that is absolutely untrue. In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States reached a high we have never seen before. I remember that, because I was living in London, and I was super scared for my family at the time. Since then, that number has increased by nearly 400% in the last ten days. If you don’t believe me, have some articles about it (one, two, three, four, and five, to name a few). 

I live in New York City, where a man was beaten in Time Square while attending a Free Palestine rally and wearing a kippah. I’m sorry, but being visibly Jewish near a pro-Palestine rally? That was enough to have a bunch of people just start beating on him? I made a previous post detailing how there are Jews being attacked all over the world, and there is a very good timeline of recent hate crimes against Jews that you can find right here. These are Jews, by the way, who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. They are Americans or Europeans or Canadians who are living their lives. In some cases, they are at pro-Palestine rallies and they are trying to help, but they just look visibly Jewish.  God Forbid we are the wrong ethnicity for your rally, even if we agree.

This is really serious. There are people calling for the death of all Jews. There are people calling for another Holocaust. 

There are 14 million Jews in the world. 14 million. Of 7.6 billion. And you think it isn’t a problem the way people treat us?

Anyway (aside from, you know, compassion), why does this matter? This matters because stuff like this deters Jews who want to be part of the pro-Palestine movement because they are literally scared for their safety. I said this before, and I will say it again: Zionism was, historically speaking, a very unpopular opinion. It was only widespread antisemitic violence (you know, the Holocaust) that made Jews believe there was a necessity for a Jewish state. Honestly, it wasn’t until the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that I supported it the abstract idea too.

I grew up in New York City, I am a liberal Jew, and I believe in the rights of marginalized and oppressed people to self-determine worldwide. Growing up, I also fit the profile of what many scholars describe as the self hating Jew, because I believed that, in order to justify myself in American liberal society, I had to hate Israel, and I had to be anti-Zionist by default, even if I didn’t always understand what ‘Zionism’ meant in abstract. Well, I am 27 years old now with two masters degrees in history, and here is what Zionism means to me: I hate the Israeli government. They do not speak for me. But I am not anti-Zionist. I believe in the necessity for a Jewish state — a state where all Jews are welcome, regardless of their background, regardless of their nationality. 

There needs to be a place where Jews, an ethnic minority who are unwelcome in nearly every state in the world, have a place where they are free from persecution — a place where they feel protected. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that place being the place where Jews are ethnically indigenous to. Because believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. I’ve addressed this in this post.

With that said, that doesn’t mean you can kick the Palestinian people out. They are also indigenous to that land, which is addressed in the same post, if you don’t trust me. 

What is incredible to me is that Zionism is defined, by the Oxford English Dixtionary, as “A movement [that called originally for] the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and [since 1948] the development of the State of Israel.” Whether we agree with this or not, there were early disagreements about the location of a ‘Jewish state,’ and some, like Maurice de Hirsch, believed it ought to be located in South America, for example. Others believed it should be located in Africa. The point is that the original plans for the Jewish state were about safety. The plan changed because Jews wanted to return to their homeland, the largest project of decolonization and indigenous reclamation ever to be undertaken by an indigenous group. Whether you want to hear that or not, it is true. Read a book or two. Then you might know what I mean.

When people say this is a complicated issue, they aren’t being facetious. They aren’t trying to obfuscate the point. They often aren’t even trying to defend the Israeli government, because I certainly am not — I think they are abhorrent. But there is no future in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians don’t form a state that has an equal right of return and recognizes both of their indigenousness, and that will never happen if people can’t stop throwing vitriolic rhetoric around.  Is the Israeli Government bad? Yes. Are Israeli citizens bad? Largely, no. They want to defend their families, and they want to defend their people. This is basically the same as the fact that Palestinian people aren’t bad, though Hamas often is. And for the love of god, stop defending terrorist organizations. Just stop. They kill their own people for their own power and for their own benefit. 

And yes, one more time, the Israeli government is so, so, so wrong. But god, think about your words, and think about how you are enabling Nazis. The rhetoric the left is using is hurting Jews. I am afraid to leave my house. I’m afraid to identify as Jewish on tumblr. I’m afraid for my family, afraid for my friends. People I know are afraid for me. 

It’s 2021. I am not my great uncle. I cried for him, but I shouldn’t have to die like him. 

Words have consequences. Language has consequences. And genuinely, I do not think everyone is a bad person, so think about what you are putting into the world, because you’d be surprised how often you are doing a Nazi a favor or two. 

Is that really what you want? To do a Nazi a favor or two? I don’t think that you do. I hope you don’t, at least.

That’s all. You know, five thousand words later. But uh, think a little. Please. 

[redbeardace]

I was asleep.

Everyone remembers where they were. I was sleeping.

I was in college then. Summer quarter had ended a few weeks ago, and Fall quarter was a few weeks away, so I had nothing to do that Tuesday. I was sleeping.

My mother would get up to help get my father ready for work. He'd leave a little after 6 AM. Then she'd stay up and turn on the KTLA Morning News. We weren't in Southern California, but we'd lived there and had family connections there, so it felt like a "local" newscast, even though it was a thousand miles away. So most weekdays, I'd fade into consciousness, hearing the rhythm of the broadcast.

Carlos to Mark, Mark to Jennifer, Jennifer to Sam, Commercial, Repeat.

That morning, none of that.

I couldn't really hear what was going on, but it wasn't normal. There were no jokes, no music, no commercials, no changes. Just a steady drone.

I started to listen, to try to hear what was happening.

I heard something about the Pentagon and a bomb at the State Department.

Well. That's not good.

I roll out of bed and into the living room. It was a little after 7:30.

There's a helicopter shot of giant cloud of dust on the TV. Dust. A few buildings. here and there. But dust. Everywhere. It looked like Mt. St. Helens had moved to the city and erupted.

It wasn't the Pentagon. It wasn't the State Department. Was that New York?

"Planes hit the World Trade Center towers." My mother's voice is shaky.

Okay, then, somewhere in that dust are the towers. They build those things to survive plane strikes. It survived the bomb in '93. The Empire State Building got hit by a plane and it's still standing. She told me that they'd fallen, but I didn't believe her. I couldn't believe her. They're just hidden by the dust and the dust will clear.

The dust will clear. The towers can't just fall. You'll see.

The dust will clear.

There was nothing there.

---

We watched what was unfolding on the other side of the continent all day long. I think my father got sent home early and joined us.

Watching a day like that unfold live is an experience that's hard to describe. You look back now, and there's a clear timeline, there are clear events. But on that day, nothing was clear. The news was an unbroken stream of numbing repetition and confusion. The anchors narrating what's going on have a worse view of it than you do, because they're squinting at small monitors halfway across the studio. You can flip between CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and pick up little tidbits here and there, but they can't. They only have what comes through their earpiece, what ends up on their TelePrompTer, what's handed to them on paper. No one knows what's going on, not even the people telling you what's going on.

That day was full of rumors and confusion. There were attacks at the State Department and the FBI, there was a plane that had crashed in rural Pennsylvania, there was a plane that had been hijacked in Alaska. We didn't know what was real, and what was a phantom of fear. But mostly, it was just the numbing repetition. There was nothing new to add. Nothing more to say at 1 PM that hadn't been said at noon. What got repeated is what had happened, what didn't get repeated hadn't. The plane crash in Pennsylvania got repeated. The attack at the State Department didn't.

All day long, it was the same video from earlier in the day. Maybe a new angle as reporters and survivors got their footage to a TV station. But we watched it again and again. Maybe there'd be a new detail to see, something to fill in another piece of the What The Fuck Just Happened puzzle we were now living in.

In a weird way, that day didn't seem as bad as it went on and the rumors subsided and the scope became clear. My morning started with a dust cloud that covered all of Lower Manhattan and obscured what had happened. Had the towers toppled sideways and crushed dozens of buildings for blocks around? It was 9 AM on a Tuesday, a work day, those buildings were full, and the area was a major commuter hub. 10000 people in each building, maybe tens of thousands passing through, hundreds of thousands in that cloud of dust. There's no one alive down there. The initial estimates they gave were 20-30 thousand in the collapsed towers alone, to say nothing of the people suffocated by that cloud of dust and smoke. And then Washington DC is under attack and they're even hijacking planes in Alaska. What are they going to do to us next? But the death toll steadily dropped, other rumored attacks were found to be false alarms, they didn't come back for a second round. But that "good" news didn't make us feel any better. What would've made us feel better would've been word that they had been rescuing dozens of people from the rubble, stories of survivors being found days later, but that news never came.

---

Where's the President? Why haven't we seen the President? Why hasn't he said anything?

"He's safe and in an undisclosed location."

On September 10th, George W. Bush was just a bumbling dumbass who'd stolen the election from Gore. He wasn't yet a warmonger, although he'd surrounded himself with them.

On September 11th, Bush was still a bumbling dumbass, but he was our President. I was actually glad that he was invisible and hidden most of that day. We didn't know what in the hell was going on. If I knew where the President was, then the assholes who did this to us would know where he was, and no matter how much I didn't like the guy, I certainly didn't want to see a terrorist attack on Air Force One or the White House.

But I was worried that he'd send in the missiles and bombers and turn everything from Morocco to Pakistan to ash, which is what some people were calling for before we even knew who was responsible. And that's not what happened. All that happened that day was... nothing. I respected that, and I still respect that. Rushing headlong into revenge isn't what we needed that day.

---

We ended that day, not with Dan Rather or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw, but with Hal Fishman, legendary anchor on the KTLA News at Ten. He was a plane guy. He'd know what happened. He was comfortable to us, familiar, and we needed to know there was still something out there comfortable and familiar.

---

The next day, my mother wanted a break from it all, so we went shopping. I don't think we needed to, and Wednesday wasn't the normal shopping day, but we just had to get out, so we went to Wal-Mart.

Throughout the store, there were TVs hanging from the ceiling. Normally, they'd show ads and music videos and things. Not that day. They were all tuned to CNN. People stopped in the middle of the aisle, watching Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell or whoever giving a press conference.

There was no break from it.

---

Does everyone else know it was a Tuesday? I mean, just know. Like somehow that is an important, integral part of what happened that day. Because I know it was a Tuesday with that same fierceness as I know that the towers fell. I don't remember all the flight numbers or which tower was hit first or which one fell first or even a single word of what the President said that night, but I know it was a Tuesday. And I don't understand why.

---

I've cried over it. I just did while writing all this. It's one of the few things I have cried about. But it's never sustained weeping. One tear. Maybe two. It feels like it should be more, but then it's like the scale becomes incomprehensible and unreal and it stops. What good will my tears do? They won't fix it. They won't change it.

---

"Never Forget", they say, but twenty years on, many of you have no memory of that day, maybe even weren't born yet. You've only seen the packaged videos from the perfect camera angles. You know what happened, the full story told from beginning to end across three acts in a two hour movie. You know the death toll, you know about the box cutters, you know how Osama Bin Laden ends, you know where the undisclosed location is, you know about the plane that said "Let's Roll". We didn't know any of that, sometimes for days or weeks or years. We only knew shock and confusion and sadness and anger and numbness and a giant cloud of dust that has not cleared and will never clear and still coats everything in our lives, even if we were thousands of miles away.

For those of us who saw that day...

Never forget?

How could we?

[obsessedwithstarwars]

Ooooooooh! I’m a glutton for attention. Not really, I have anxiety, I’m very awkward, and a major introvert but THIS makes my heart happy. You are very much not overstepping and this helped me to get some of my thoughts out of my head. Thank you Gil for engaging! Also sorry, I’m about to wordvomit some of my ideas so I don’t forget them all. Also if it sounds like I’m rambling, I am, I know it, and I am sorry but I also can’t stop won’t stop.

I am definitely having Regent Jazz, also Regent Dan because they both hate it SO MUCH. Dealing with Observants SUCKS. They take turns until anything big comes up then essentially rock paper scissors it for who’s gotta deal with the annoying eyeballs.

Becoming/being Regent is going to be like becoming/being an eldritch horror. Just because I said so and I think it’s a cool concept. I’m so excited to write about it -maybe even draw it. One thing’s for sure, shit will hit the fan and the JL will be relieved the eldritch being is fighting for them and also absolutely terrified at the idea of it turning on them. I gotta freak out Constantine somehow. He’s a hard man to impress.

I’m debating on identity shenanigans. You did it so well in Friendly Neighborhood Vigilante, (if you haven’t read it yet, READ IT NOW IT IS AMAZING) and I don’t know that I’d have a good way to fit it into the storyline. But if I can figure out a way, I definitely will!

The Fentons were left for dead and deserved it. Unfortunately they probably survive (I kinda need villains and they’re annoyingly great at it).

I would use DC villains here, but I am more comfortable with DP knowledge-wise. I will use one or two or five (it’s Gotham, hello) but want to look into Red Hood and his character and his interaction with the Batfam more before I write too much about any of them. I have some comics a friend gifted me on Tim so I’m not too worried about him; but the rest of them? I am doing some extensive research on and writing character sheets. (I will also do this on Tim. Let’s be real here, I would feel bad for excluding him from the rest even though he’s not actually real, wouldn’t actually know or has any real feelings to get hurt over.) Opinions and ideas are welcome, accepted tearfully (tears of JOY), and appreciated.

Also I don’t know DC timeline. *Hides face behind hands* LIKE AT ALLLLLL but it will be before Jason reconciles enough to move back into the manor. Which I hear he did. His relationship will be iffy with Bruce and wary with the rest.

Dan starts working with the Justice League as Phantom. This causes problems. Lots of problems. I kind of want Ellie too but I don’t know how to include her in the fic yet. Same with Vlad. And Sam and Tucker and Valerie. I will figure out MOST of them. Probably. Hopefully. Lady Gotham and Clockwork and Frostbite too.

From what I do know of Jason, he will most definitely try to hide this incident from the rest of the family and it will fail miserably. Barbara will find out. It is inevitable.

I’m thinking about going total cliche and having both Jazz and Danny be adopted. Of sorts. Maddie is still their biological mom but they both have different fathers through IVF. I vote Bruce (Danny) and Lex Luthor (Jazz) because Maddie has the brains to pull it off, but is it TOO cliche? If I do go this route, boy do I have PLANS. They involve DEATH.

Of course Danny has his own problems, like surviving puberty AGAIN. It wasn’t fun the first time and he’s not looking forward to a repeat with another Dash at another school. He is definitely going to the same school as Damian (courtesy of Vlad cash, comes back to bite them in the butt later) and shenanigans ensue. Also chaos.

Dan (haven’t decided if his name will be Dan or Dante or a combination of both like Jazz and Jasmine) is redeemed, but bitter and guilt ridden. He is either working with Vlad (who is redeemed… sort of) for his day job and hating every second of it orrrr working as Lex Luther’s bodyguard. Either way, he has work trips, which I need for the plot because Dan and Jazz take care of Danny. And it gets Jason (not Red Hood… okay maybe Red Hood) involved too.

The plot involves them all growing into who they are meant to be while fighting for their right to live and the rights of ecto-entities. (I need you to know that that autocorrected to ectopic pregnancies and I almost left it that way because I laughed) Also Red Hood/Jason growing closer to this weird family, slowly falling for Jazz, and working on his relationship with Bruce.

ALSO BRUCE. There is a lot of potential there.

And don’t think I’ve forgotten about the GIW. They are the WORST and will be dealt with.

Dang it. This was meant to be small. I haven’t even gone through their overall arcs/themes (or the actual plot) and it’s sounding more and more like a 40 chapter fanfic. Oh poop.

Also, this will go up on my AO3… eventually. Probably this weekend because my state is about to get hit with like 14 inches of snow, but I’m not committing to it. I am also not committing to a posting schedule because I’m moving in a few months and scrambling to get ready for that. Just know the brainrot is there and apparently not dissipating even after 2.5 years of DP obsession. I’ll post/link my AO3 on here when I add the fic.

If you have any ideas, feel free to voice them!

Still Alive (But Barely Breathing)

If someone had told Red Hood that he was going to climb through the wrong window at one of his many safe houses, he’d have laughed and flipped them off. Not just because it probably would have been the Demon Brat saying it and disregarding the little fucker would certainly get under his skin. And piss off Bruce. No. Jason was definitely too careful to make a mistake like that.

Well, until tonight.

To be fair, he had been shot. Twice. A through and through in his side, hopefully not damaging anything important, and once in the arm. But that might’ve been a graze. Going by pain, it hurt less than his side. Somewhere between “I need a bandaid” and “stepping on an infinite number of Legos with sharp teeth” on the pain scale. Honestly, he didn’t even want to look until he was safe. It’s not a problem if I can’t see it. And he was currently not safe judging by the sword the resident of this apartment held at his throat.

The first thing he noted was that she wasn’t afraid. In fact, she seemed hella pissed. Her beautiful blue eyes flashed in the moonlight. Most people, when they saw the helmet, along with his stature (Dickface said he was built like a tank) and intimidating presence, well, they got a little scared. This woman stood resolute, calm and determined in the face of danger. She had the presence of an Amazonian warrior. Now, Jason wasn’t much of a betting man, but he’d have put money down on her winning this fight.

Too many voices were vying for dominance in his mind. A part of him thought that if he could get the sword away from his throat, he stood a fighting chance of getting away. Another part considered his injuries. He was lightheaded already which was not a good sign. He needed to get out of here and get help fast. Another part geeked out over the sword. It was exquisite. This woman really had taste. The ornate filigree handle looked like a Swiss rapier, circa late 1600s. But the blade was not fragile like a rapier. In fact, it looked more like a sturdy longsword. Like she had taken pieces of history and meshed them together to create a sword that was beautiful but deadly. Another very small voice thought she was beautiful. He tried to ignore the last one it definitely wouldn’t help him here and hatch a plan to escape. She stepped further into the moonlight and all thoughts flew out of his head. He could have sworn her eyes were ice blue. Now they were a familiar bright green; practically glowing. Where had he seen that color before?

Trying to think made his head all fuzzy. Oh well. Time for some introductions. He felt like a seasoned warrior out to meet a new friend or foe. Attempting to speak felt like an impossible task.

“Hi.” He choked out, his voice gravelly and menacing with the helmet on.

“Hi Mister Red Hood!” A boy’s voice rang out from behind the woman. Oh shit. There was a kid. How did he not see a kid? Why was there a kid here?! He glanced around and noticed the sparse furniture along with a few moving boxes stacked in the corner. He… did he have the wrong apartment? This was his safe house in the Narrows. As far as he knew, no one lived on his floor or in the apartments above or below his. That’s what made this safe house perfect. It was convenient. It was safe.

The woman whispered something to the boy. He couldn’t tell if the words she spoke in a foreign yet all too familiar language were what made his blood run cold. Or the rapid blood loss was getting to him. Right. He needed help. Now. That forced him back into focus. He could feel his thoughts slowly slipping away. He grabbed onto the edge of the windowsill he’d just climbed through, grunting in pain at the sudden gush of blood coming from his side.

The woman tentatively lowered her sword, concern etched on her face. Good. This was good. He was… what was he doing? A wave of dizziness washed over him and he fell backward onto the floor. Black started forming around the edges of his vision. The woman rushed to his side and leaned over him. Her touch was light as she quickly assessed his wounds. Her hair enveloped his vision, so all he could see was her beautiful face. She was talking to him, face to face, er well, helmet, but he couldn’t hear her. Her voice distorted and muffled.

His last thought was, “Damn she’s pretty.” Before succumbing to sleep.

[maxwell-grant]

Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?

I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s). 

I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.

Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.

He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth? 

That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-

Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.

The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).

Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -

Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:

Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914). 

Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.” 

He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.” 

Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.

The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins

And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,

Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion

One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day. 

I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”

They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth. 

You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.

Whoops!

Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.

The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm. 

He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.

The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel

I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.

Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC. 

So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?

Just until he gets his full powers back of course. 

I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.

[oh-mother-of-darkness]

Timeline: Batman

google doc / ao3

This is my best attempt at a post-crisis timeline based on age-- specifically Bruce’s age every time he adopted and/or met one of his children. 

List of events:

Bruce’s parents die

Bruce becomes Batman

Dick’s parents die

Dick becomes Robin

Jason becomes Robin and is adopted

Jason dies

Tim becomes Robin

Cass appears

Dick is adopted

Tim is adopted

Cass is adopted

Damian becomes Robin

I’ll be citing my work by issue and panel. This isn’t my most organized work, and I don’t know how well tumblr will let me translate it, so I do recommend the google doc. I imagine the image quality here won’t be great. 

Notes:

This is a post-crisis timeline (1986-2011). I’ll be referencing a few pre-crisis panels, but I won’t be touching the New 52 or anything after it. That’s a different game of ball with its own, extremely bad, timeline.

Crisis on Infinite Earths is a 1985-1986 series that rebooted the DC timeline and altered some backstories, including Jason’s. Pre-crisis, his backstory was almost identical to Dick’s. Post-crisis, he changed to the “steal the wheels off the Batmobile” origin. Anything written before 1986 is a weak source for my purposes. 

My original question centered around Bruce’s age through the process of meeting and acquiring his children. In this timeline, those children are (1) Dick Grayson, (2) Jason Todd, (3) Cassandra Cain, (4) Tim Drake, and (5) Damian Wayne. I was envisioning an interview where the kids explain their family timeline to outsiders. I did not anticipate the project taking this long. 

We’re talking about 72 years of content here, which means decades of contradiction, conflation, and rewrites. I’m pretty satisfied with my work product, but please understand that there are no perfect answers. I’m going to cite my sources, and I’ll do my best to explain why I chose those sources specifically, but it’s pretty likely that for every panel I pull, there will be others with different numbers. We’re all going to have to live with that. 

Event timeline

*I’m defining Jason’s age by the time elapsed since his birth, but you could make an argument for using time he has been alive, which is, of course, different. That’s why the parentheses are there. 

Age differences

As Robin

----------

Bruce’s parents die

Pretty consistently, Bruce is written as eight years old the night his parents died. 

Detective Comics #0 (1994)

This is a zero issue where Bruce thinks back on his origin story. It was written long after Crisis on Infinite Earths (1986), and I tend to give a lot of weight to ages written in summaries of past plot lines, my reasoning being that it’s easier to be consistent in one issue than it is to be consistent through a month to month story. 

Bruce first appeared as an adult in Detective Comics #27 (1939), and the Waynes were already dead at that point, so flashbacks are the only available material anyway. 

Gotham Knights #6 (2000)

The text is Hugo Strange talking about Bruce, and the image is Tim and Dick playing at Wayne Enterprises. 

I’ll take a second here to note that I did find at least one alternate age for Bruce— in Superman/Batman Secret Files & Origins (2003), Bruce was 10 when his parents died. I’m disregarding that in favor of the stronger 8 year old timeline, especially in light of Batman #404 (1987).

Batman #404 is the beginning of Batman: Year One, which was explicitly written to clarify the Batman timeline post-crisis, and it’s the basis of most of my calculations for Bruce and Dick’s ages.

----------

Bruce becomes Batman

According to Year One, Bruce was 26 years old when he became Batman. I’m using his age at his parents’ deaths, his age when he returned to Gotham, and his 18 year timeline.

Batman #404 puts Bruce at age 25 when he returned to Gotham in January. 

Batman #404 (1987)

Bruce gives his dramatic, “Yes, Father, I will become a bat,” line in March. In the same scene, he says that it has been 18 years since his parents’ deaths. Knowing that they died when Bruce was eight, that puts Bruce at 26 years old the day he became Batman, which makes sense considering Bruce’s birthday is usually set at February 19th. 

He was 25 in January, turned 26 in February, and became Batman at 26, 18 years after his parents’ death. 

Batman #404 (1987)

Post-crisis, DC built timelines off the “Year” model. Year One is Batman’s beginning, and events after that are measured by how far away they are from the year Bruce became Batman. I’ll be using the Year model for Dick’s life events next. 

----------

Dick’s parents die

The Graysons died in Year Two. Using the Year Model, Dick was 12 when his parents died, and Bruce was 37. 

Year timelines appear a fair amount, especially in issues titled “Secret Files & Origins.” I pulled this bit from Batman Secret Files & Origins (1997) because it was the easiest to screenshot. 

Batman Secret Files & Origins (1997)

Year Two would place Bruce at 27 years old. I’m calculating Dick’s age backwards, based on him being 13 years old during Year Three. 

Batman Secret Files & Origins (1997) 

----------

Dick becomes Robin

Dick became Robin in Year Three, when he was 13 years old and Bruce was 28. I’m using two different issues to calculate the number. 

Batman #441 (1989)

Batman #441 is from Tim’s introduction story. It takes place “months” after Jason’s death. We’ll get to that part. In Batman #441, Tim asked Dick to be Robin again in order to help Bruce, who was visibly unstable after Jason’s death. Dick says that he can’t go back to being Robin, just like he can’t go back to being 13 years old. The strong implication there is that Dick became Robin at 13, which corresponds to Dick’s statements in Batman #416 (1988). 

In Batman #416, Dick as Nightwing returns to confront Bruce about Jason becoming Robin. He says that he was Robin for six years, and he stopped being Robin at 19.

Batman #416 (1988)

If Dick stopped being Robin at 19, after 6 years, that would put him at 13 when he debuted as Robin, the same number from Batman #441 (1989).

Dick was 13 during Year Three, so 12 during Year Two, the year his parents died. Those numbers answer the first bit of my original question. I wanted to know how old Dick and Bruce were when Dick became his child. It’s a bit more of a complicated question for Dick, since he was originally Bruce’s ward, then adopted as an adult. 

Based on the timeline so far, Dick became Bruce’s ward at 12 years old, while Bruce was 27.  

----------

Jason becomes Robin and is adopted

As previously discussed (see Notes), Jason’s timeline is complicated by Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986). Pre-crisis, Jason first appeared in Batman #336 (1983) as a former circus acrobat very similar to Dick.

Jason’s origin story reboots at Batman #408 (1987), which describes the switch-off between Dick and Jason. I’m building a lot of my timeline off of that issue. At the beginning, Dick gets shot by the Joker, and as Bruce carries him away, the media ask if Robin is dead. Dick isn’t dead, but back at the manor, Bruce decides to retire Robin as a role, based on the idea that crimefighting is too dangerous for a child. 

Batman #408 (1987)

This version is more or less from Bruce’s point of view, but there’s a contrasting version from Dick’s point of view later, in Batman #416 (1987). That one has a significantly different tone, and I already cited it once (page 13) because Dick talks about his age and the amount of time he was Robin.  

Batman #408 (1987)

The second part of the issue takes place “weeks” later. Bruce goes to Crime Alley to mourn his parents on the anniversary of their death. He comes back to find that somebody stole the wheels off the Batmobile. The somebody was Jason, and by the end of Batman #409 (1987), Bruce is calling Jason “Robin.”

Batman #408 (1987) seems to divide Dick’s departure and Jason’s introduction by only “weeks,” in the post-crisis reboot. Dick’s version of the story in Batman #416 (1987) is much less charitable to Bruce— instead of ending on a panel of Bruce smiling, it shows the aftermath of Dick in tears as Bruce walks away. Dick goes on to describe leaving the house, going to college for a semester, then dropping out. According to Dick, Bruce didn’t even say goodbye. 

Batman #416 (1987)

I don’t think the stories are contradictory; they’re just different experiences of the same events, separated by only eight issues. Dick tells us that he was 19 when he left Wayne Manor, and Bruce chooses his new Robin “weeks” later. 

As a summary, we know that Bruce’s parents died when he was eight, and that 18 years passed before he became Batman at 26. One year later, Dick’s parents died while Bruce was 27. One year after that, Dick became Robin at the age of 13. From those facts, Bruce is 15 years older than Dick. 

All of my calculations of Bruce’s age are based off of the age gap between him and Dick. Dick was 19 when Jason became Robin, so we know that at that time, Bruce was 34. We also know that at that time, Jason was 12. 

I can’t show a source for that number because it appears on the letter page of Batman #408 (1987), Jason’s introduction.

Even after a significant amount of investigation, I can’t find a copy of the letter page, but it’s cited by enough secondary sources for me to be comfortable using it. That issue is specifically written to show Jason’s origin, so it makes sense that it would contain Jason’s age at inception, even if the number wasn’t in the actual exposition. 

From Jason being 12, we can establish a seven-year age gap between Jason and Dick, who was 19 at the time. Now we know Bruce, Dick, and Jason’s ages, and the age differences between them.

Back to my original question— when did Bruce acquire Jason? We know that Bruce was 34 when Jason became his ward, and Jason was 12. The next question, however, is when did Bruce adopt Jason? On this one, I’m making an educated guess. 

Again we have to differentiate between pre-crisis and post-crisis timelines. Pre-crisis, there’s a full storyline about the fact that Bruce did not adopt Jason, although not for lack of trying. In Batman #374 (1984), the Child Welfare Bureau investigates Bruce when it notices that Bruce has not adopted Jason— and is not even, in fact, his legal guardian. 

Batman #374 (1984)

The rest of the storyline is about Jason’s custody. A villain named Natalia Knight (Nocturna) adopts Jason in an attempt to get Bruce to marry her in order to become Jason’s father. In the court scene in Batman #377 (1984), Bruce says that he filed to adopt Jason sometime beforehand, although it’s unclear to me whether he means he filed between those issues or the CWB documents were incomplete.

Natalia does adopt Jason in Batman #378 (1984), and he briefly lives with her before returning to Wayne Manor in Batman #381 (1985), directly before the reboot. 

I’m including all of that for two reasons: first, I do think it’s important to clarify both this version and the post-crisis version I’m about to address. Second, I spent years under the impression that Bruce adopted Jason pre-crisis because of one, well-known scene. 

Batman #377 (1984)

Batman #378 (1984)

Batman #381 (1985)

Donna Troy gets married in Tales of the Teen Titans #50 (1985). At the wedding, Bruce and Dick have a conversation about Jason and about their own relationship. A few of those panels get spread around because they contain what I would consider a defining moment between Dick and Bruce. 

I’m certainly not complaining about the amount of times I’ve seen the wedding conversation, but I think that, in regards to Jason, seeing just those panels has created a misconception.

Tales of the Teen Titans #50 (1985)

Without context, it looks, at least to me, like Dick is saying that Bruce has adopted Jason pre-crisis, which isn’t true. This issue takes place between the Natalia adoption in Batman #378 (1984) and Jason’s return to the manor in Batman #381 (1985), and the panels directly before the exchange make that clear. I just didn’t see those panels until I looked through the whole issue for this project. 

I’m reasonably certain that in the past, I publicly cited this issue as evidence of Jason’s adoption, and I was wrong about that. [Note: As it turns out, I was only partially wrong. See section Correction.]

Tales of the Teen Titans #50 (1985)

As we see, the wedding conversation is in the context of the Natalia adoption. With that cleared up, and with the pre-crisis timeline filled out, let’s move to post-crisis. 

In my brief read-through of Batman #404-427 (1987-1988), I didn’t find any direct references to Jason’s status. Those issues begin at the reboot and end at Jason’s death. However, Dick and Jason’s statements after the fact do tell us that post-crisis, Bruce did adopt Jason. 

In Batman #436 (1989), Dick returns to the manor in the direct aftermath of Jason’s death, and while he is there, he sees that Bruce removed any trace of Jason from the house. There aren’t any trophies in the Batcave, and there aren’t any pictures of Jason on the nightstand displaying Bruce’s family photos. 

Dick says that Jason was Bruce’s son.

Batman #436 (1989)

I think it’s fair to ask whether Dick is being literal here, because even if Bruce hadn’t legally adopted Jason, it would still be more than appropriate to call them father and son. I’m not going to place my opinion solely on this kind of statement, even if it does appear pretty regularly from 1988 to the end of the timeline.

Green Arrow/Black Canary #4 (2007)

We get a more definite answer later, during Tim’s first appearance. In Tim’s origin story, he deduces Batman and Robin’s secret identities after he sees footage of Robin doing a type of flip that only the Flying Graysons could do. Tim was at the circus the night Dick’s parents died, so he saw Dick do the flip there, then saw Dick become an orphan. 

Because Tim knew that Dick was the first Robin, he correctly identified Bruce as Batman and Jason as the second Robin. He tells Dick all of this in Batman #441 (1989).

Batman #441 (1989)

Tim does specifically use the word “adopts” here, and that’s good enough for me. The last part is guesswork— I don’t know for certain how old Jason and Bruce were when the adoption took place, but I’m electing to say Jason was 12, the same age as he was when he became Robin. 

I picked that number both out of convenience and because Tim seems to be putting Jason’s adoption and the second Robin’s appearance at around the same time. With that in mind, I think that Jason was 12 years old both when he became Robin and when Bruce adopted him. Using the age gap we already established, that would put Bruce at age 34. 

Circling back to my original question, Dick became Bruce’s ward when Dick was 12 and Bruce was 27. Jason became Bruce’s ward, then adoptive son when Jason was 12 and Bruce was 34. 

At this point in the timeline, Bruce is 34 with one former ward and one adopted son. 

----------

Correction 

A few days after I wrote my section about Jason’s appearance and adoption, I realized that I was missing a panel citation in my discussion of Jason’s death. The panel is from New Titan #55 (1989), and you’ll see me cite it when I talk about Jason’s death certificate. 

New Titans #55 (1989) is the issue where Dick, who is with the Teen Titans,  finds out about Jason’s death. While I was combing through the issue for the panels I wanted, I reread a scene I had completely forgotten about. Dick goes back to the manor to speak to Bruce, and it doesn’t go well.

New Titans #55 (1989)

I have three comments here. First, I do think this scene is inconsistent with the simultaneous story in the Batman title. In this version, Dick and Bruce have a very aggressive confrontation, but in Batman #436 (1989), Dick appears to be returning to the manor for the first time since Jason died, and there isn’t any reference to a prior fight. 

Putting that aside, Bruce does explicitly say that he adopted Jason, and that’s more, stronger verification of a post-crisis adoption. Lastly, it’s pretty clear that Bruce and Dick are talking about the wedding scene. 

I already explained that the wedding scene is pre-crisis, and in the original text, that conversation is about Bruce wanting to, but not being able to, adopt Jason. New Titans #55 (1989) carries the wedding scene into post-crisis canon, changing the language in the process. In this version, Bruce has adopted Jason. 

I was still wrong about the wedding scene because in the past, I used it as evidence of a pre-crisis adoption. It isn’t pre-crisis evidence, but it is, in a roundabout way, evidence of the post-crisis adoption. I wanted to clear that up before I move on to Jason’s death. 

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Jason dies

Jason’s death is by far the shakiest point on my timeline, but I’ve chosen to put him at 15 the day he died in Batman #427 (1988). 

I think it’s safe to say that Jason was either 14 or 15 when he died, and my basic conclusion is that running numbers doesn’t give me a definite answer. There’s a cop-out option based on an extraordinarily poor source, and I’m taking the cop-out. 

The general consensus seems to be that Jason was 15 at his death, citation to Jason’s death certificate. Jason’s death certificate appears in two different places, and I think most folks conflate the two. 

To my knowledge, the only copy of Jason’s death certificate in full appears in The Batman Files (2011), where it does list Jason’s age as 15. 

The Batman Files (2011)

Now there is a partial copy in Batman Annual #25 (2006), which I would argue is a very reliable reference when it comes to Jason. That issue is part of the Under the Red Hood story, the one where Jason returns to Gotham for the first time after his resurrection. In fact, the specific annual issue has a timeline for Jason’s events counting forward from his death. 

Here’s the problem: the issue doesn’t say his age at death. The partial copy of his death certificate looks like this. 

Batman Annual #25 (2006) 

I think that when most folks remember a death certificate, they think of this one, the one from a very important issue, instead of The Batman Files (2011) which, as noted, is a very bad source. 

I have three issues with The Batman Files (2011): the format, the publishing date, and the other information on the certificate. First, The Batman Files (2011) isn’t a comic book at all. It’s a commemorative book published in collaboration with DC in 2011. Now I don’t think that fact completely removes the book as a source, but it certainly damages its value as one. 

My problem with that date, 2011, is that it’s the year the New 52 premiered. I called it a commemorative book because it’s meant to be a look back at a fully complete timeline, a kind of “this is us saying goodbye” product. The date and format alone make me hesitant to cite the certificate, but on top of that, the certificate is inconsistent with prior canon. 

I am intimately familiar with retcons and conflicting numbers in the DC timeline. I made a point at the beginning of this paper to tell you that although this is my best attempt to make a cohesive timeline, assuming that I can carve out a cohesive timeline is fundamentally flawed. 

I’m not saying that a single contradictory number is enough to make me disregard a source. I am saying that in this particular conversation about an already suspect source, I’m going to take inconsistency into account. 

In New Titans #55 (1989), the issue from Corrections, Dick finds out about Jason’s death because a team member notices Jason’s status is set at “unknown.” Dick uses Bruce’s passcode to access restricted information, and he and the Titans see that Jason’s real status is “deceased.” 

The death certificate in The Batman Files (2011) marks Jason’s height at 4’6 and his age at 15. In contrast, Dick’s scene puts Jason at 5’4, and its only reference to Jason’s age is a very relatable question from Donna. “How old was he, anyway?”

New Titans #55 (1989)

There’s a substantial difference between the two heights, and I think it’s also worth noting that for a 15 year old American male, 4’6 is in the 0.1 height percentile. In the past, I and many others have tried to justify that height along the lines of Jason being malnourished or similarly afflicted. Personally, I liked the parallel between this height for Jason and Damian’s height at his own death in 2013, and I know I’ve talked about that in the past.

I’m not criticizing anyone for using the 4’6 number, but I do think the unlikelihood of a 15 year old that size is worth bringing up. 

In summary, The Batman Files (2011) is so bad of a source that I’m only willing to use it as a last resort. Unfortunately, it’s time for a last resort. 

I mentioned a timeline in Batman Annual #25 (2006) that counts forward from Jason’s death. I’m not going to use image cites here because they’re just isolated text boxes labeled either “six months later” or “one year later.”

Using that timeline, we know that Jason’s resurrection took place six months after his death. He spent one year in a coma, then one year on the street, then one year with the League of Assassins. Finally, he spent a nebulous time training before he returned to Gotham. 

We know that Jason was gone for a minimum of three and a half years, then whatever time “training” includes. Personally, I’m applying my best attempt at comic logic to say he was missing for somewhere between three and four years. 

To understand the next bit, I need to point out that from Jason’s death on, I’m going to be using Tim’s age to track time in the same way I’ve been using Dick’s so far. 

As a reminder, I know what age Bruce was when Dick became Robin (28), and I know Dick’s age at the same point (13), so I know there’s a 15 year age difference. As I track Dick’s age through the timeline, I add 15 to get Bruce’s. 

In the same way, I know what age Dick was when Jason became Robin (19), and I know Jason’s age at the same point (12), so I know there’s a 7 year age difference. I can use that number ongoing. 

I know that Tim was 13 when he made his first appearance as Robin, and I’ll get into that in the next section. After that, I’m placing Dick, Tim, and Cass’s adoptions based on Tim’s age. 

To do that, I need to know how much older Dick is than Tim, and I can only get that by knowing Jason’s age at his death, sort of. 

How long was Jason Robin? If I had that information, I could establish Jason’s age by counting up from 12, the age when he became Robin, then establish Tim’s age from there.  

I can’t really answer that question. There is a panel from Batman #436 where Dick, apparently in his first time at the manor since Jason’s death says the following. 

Batman #436 (1989)

My instinctual interpretation is it’s been two years since he stopped being Robin at 19, making Dick 21 and Jason 14. In my opinion, that’s straightforward plain language, but it seems like I’m in the minority on that one, and most folks read it as Dick saying it’s been two years since he was last at the manor. We know from Batman #416 (1988) that Dick’s last visit to the manor was 18 months after Dick left home. 

Batman #136 (1988)

I think the most honest thing to say is that Jason was Robin for an indeterminate amount of time that was somewhere between two and three years. I don’t know which number is closer. I also, if you remember, think that Jason was gone from Gotham for somewhere between three and four years, but I don’t know where in that range the real number is. 

Here’s why absolutely nothing I’ve said in the past seven pages matters: I need to build my timeline based on the age gap between Jason and Tim. 

I don’t know how old Tim was when Jason died. 

I know how old Tim was at his first appearance as Robin, and that’s a different number. 

We’ll finish this conversation in a moment.

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Tim becomes Robin

We begin, thankfully, with a straightforward fact. Tim’s first storyline spans Batman #440-442 (1989). The arc is called A Lonely Place of Dying, and we already talked about it. Tim, having watched Batman and Robin from the shadows for years, comes forwards in the aftermath of Jason’s death in an attempt to convince Dick to become Robin for a second time.

Batman #441 (1989)

We know that Tim was 13 years old at the time, but I do need to clarify exactly what time that was— an indeterminate amount of time after Jason’s death. 

The word that pops up a couple of time in Tim’s first arc is “months,” from Tim and Two-Face. How many months? Who’s to say. 

Batman #442 (1989)

So, from the top. We know that Bruce was eight when his parents died, 26 when he became Batman, 27 when he met Dick, 28 when Dick became Robin, and 34 when he met Jason.

Dick was 12 when he met Bruce, 13 when he became Robin, 19 when he left home and Jason became Robin. 

Jason was 12 when he became Robin.

Bruce is 15 years older than Dick. Bruce is 22 years older than Jason. 

Dick is 7 years older than Jason.

How long was Jason Robin? Unknown, but somewhere between two and three years. At that point, he died. “Months” after that, Tim was 13. 

Here, we need to acknowledge that Jason could have been either 14 or 15 at his death, and at the same time, Tim was either 12 or 13. We need to know how far they are apart to calculate Tim’s age in relation to Jason, Dick, and Bruce— ongoing, we will always know exactly how old Tim is, so (if we know how far apart Jason and Tim are) we will always know Bruce, Dick, and Jason’s age from there. 

How much older than Tim is Jason? Somewhere between one and three years, I guess, but I can’t really go beyond a well-researched guess. In my opinion, there isn’t a straightforward answer for this one.

Having presented my facts, here is my conclusion. Jason was 15 when he died. At the same time, Tim was 13. They are two years apart. 

Why? To begin, I’m more comfortable using the number we already have for Tim, 13, than I am dropping him to 12 on the mere possibility that he could have been 12. 

Second, even though The Batman Files (2011) is a terrible source, it does at least sort of indicate that the official DC position is a Jason who was 15 years old at his death. 

Third, visually speaking, Jason looks closer to 15 than 14 at his death. Is that good evidence? No, absolutely not. Comic book art is definitionally variable, but I am going to pull a few panels for you to look over. 

Batman #427 (1988)

Finally, I feel that Jason and Tim are, in later works, treated as if they are different ages. I’m not going to go into much detail on that one because it is purely a personal reaction, but I would refer to Teen Titans #29 (2005) as an example. That issue has Jason and Tim’s first meeting, after Jason comes to the tower specifically to attack Tim. 

Teen Titans #27 (2005)

Another well-known issue to check out is Teen Titans #47 (2007).

My basic position is that there are so many ways, all uncertain, to slice Jason and Tim’s ages that I can take my pick. I chose the ones that most closely mirror later canon, fall most squarely into the possible range, and feel the most intuitively right. 

They also have the benefit of simplicity, which was very much a factor. 

Don’t agree with me? Fair enough. I think I’ve given you enough information to make an educated judgment, and I’ve also gone ahead and made a timeline in the alternative. In this one, Jason was 14 at death, and he and Tim are only one year apart. 

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In the Alternative

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Cass appears

Having progressed beyond Jason and Tim’s age gap, we reenter simple canon. I hope you’re as pleased as I am. 

Cass was 17 years old at her first appearance, which we can establish easily based on two different issues. Cass first appears in Batman #567 (1999), during an arc called No Man’s Land. At the time, she is working for Barbara Gordon in the aftermath of an earthquake that destroyed most of Gotham. We learn Cass’s backstory through that issue. 

Cass’s biological father is David Cain, a villain, who raised Cass in isolation, never exposing her to a verbal language or allowing any kind of socialization. By comic book logic, her upbringing gave her a near-superhuman ability to understand and anticipate physical actions, as those actions are her only form of communication. 

Cain trained her as a child assassin, then took her to her first kill. Cass murdered a man and experienced, through his body language, the pain he felt at his death. Immediately afterward, she ran away from her father.

Batgirl #62 (2005)

We know that Cass was eight years old when she killed and ran. We also know that her first appearance in Gotham was nine years after she ran, thanks to Barbara Gordon’s file. 

Batgirl #1 (2000)

Simple enough. She was 17. How old was everybody else? We find out from Tim’s timeline. 

This next bit will come up a few times. We know that Tim was 15 from at least 1993 to 2003, established by three different issues. We know from Detective Comics #668 (1993) that Tim was 15 during Knightquest, the arc where Jean-Paul Valley was briefly Batman. Barbara tells us in 2002 that Tim is still 15, and Tim turns 16 on-panel in 2003. 

In Knightquest, Tim gets his driver’s license early, at age 15, because Jack Drake is in a wheelchair. I suppose the wording here is ambiguous on a technicality, but I don’t think there’s any significant argument against Tim being 15; if he was only 14, the language would be different.  

Detective Comics #668 (1993)

Next, in Batgirl #24 (2002), Barbara says she’s “sending a 15 year old” as she reaches for Tim’s com line.

Batgirl #24 (2002)

We could stop here for Cassandra’s appearance, since that happened in 1999, between the 1993 issue and the 2002 reference. For completion’s sake, however, let’s note that Robin #116 (2003) is about Tim’s 16th birthday. He forgets about it, so his step-mother throws a surprise party. 

Robin #116 (2003)

Okay, so Tim was 15 when Cass appeared at age 17. That puts Bruce at 39, Dick at 24, and Jason at 17 if you’re counting by years elapsed since his birth. 

Bruce met his daughter when he was 39 and she was 17, in reference to my original question. Cass is 22 years younger than Bruce, seven years younger than Dick, the same age as Jason, and two years older than Tim. 

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Dick is adopted

This one, having already established Tim’s timeline, is very simple. Dick was adopted in Gotham Knights #17 (2001).

Gotham Knights #17 (2001)

Again, Tim was 15 from 1993 to 2003, and 2001 falls within that range. Tim was 15, which makes Dick 24 and Bruce 39. 

At this point in the timeline, Bruce, a 39 year old, has two adopted children, one of whom is deceased as far as Bruce is concerned. His adopted children are (17) and 24. He has already met two of his future children, Cass and Tim. 

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This is PART ONE. I’ll reblog Part Two onto this post when I wake up, which should be around the same time this posts. 

[stxleslyds]

I have read your thought about the Batfamily, now I really want to know your thought about the one who started it, the Batman himself. We can't ignore the fact that Bruce is abusing his children, but there's also some moments where he's being a good father to them. But some of his act doesn't make sense.

He's beating his children, then calling them his son after. He act like a mad man after Damian's death (yeah, they did Jason dirty in here), feeling sorrow and desperately wanting to ressurect him, but then neglecting him continously in the future. I didn't know much about Cass, Bruce seems to always be a good father to her. But her fans once pointed that Bruce (or DC) is too hard on her to not killing/too soft on the others, because the other batkids has killed some villains while under Batman and still got to continue putting on their costumes.

What is exactly Bruce character? How is his relationship with every one of his children?

I feel like Batman can't be in a good relationship with one of his children without destroying his relationship with the other. I always love parents and children relationship in comics, but with batfamily sometimes it just so 'fanon-y' and some are hurtful.

I stopped reading Batman book for a long time. And come back reading that wedding and city of bane arc, because I want to know how they killed Alfred. And honestly those run are terrible. The issue basically just a batcat fanservice, with the worst Batman and Catwoman characterization ever. The batkids didn't even got many appearance and treated awfully as if they are just extras, even if they all are capable and have connection with Alfred.

Hey there Anon!

My thoughts on Batman and Bruce have changed over the last few years, he wasn’t the character that introduced me to DC comics but what I got to read from him at the time seemed good. As time went by, I started to feel like the whole concept of Batman was overrated and he kinda tired me in entertainment such as movies and all that. He never truly was a character that I actually liked so by the time that I read Under the Red Hood I knew that I liked Dick and Jason better than Bruce.

Batman was interesting but I was completely indifferent about Bruce. That whole thing changed around the time that the New 52 was sort of ending, there I started to heavily dislike Bruce and then that turned into pure hate. Now, I am just tired of the guy and every time that he appears in Dick or Jason content my day is ruined.

I hate that DC has been writing Bruce as an abusive and manipulative person and father to his “kids”, he has done a lot of wrong to them in comic history but all went to shit (in current comics) when Bruce tried to manipulate Jason into reliving the day that he died and his resurrection in Batman and Robin vol2. #20 and when he beat Dick and manipulated him into becoming a spy after telling him that he had told everyone that he was dead in Nightwing vol.3 #30.

Bruce was a horrible human being in the pre-New 52 timeline too sometimes, mostly towards Dick but in a way, it felt like Dick was able time and time again to get away from him a little bit. Now none of his kids are given the opportunity to turn their backs on Bruce, they are kept in his surroundings no matter how abusive he becomes towards them.

My biggest problem with Bruce’s abusiveness is the fact that the writers never treat it like he acts in an abusive way, they never make him apologize or have an internal discussion where he realises that he was in the wrong. “Bruce is a horrible person to his sons but it doesn’t matter because he is right and he is Batman so that’s that”, that’s the message that I feel DC is selling us. Bruce never receives punishment or is called out for his behaviour, Dick was never able to tell Bruce that what he did to him was unforgivable, he never got the chance to explain to anyone that he didn’t play dead, and when he came back from Spyral he took all the shit from his “family” himself.

Sometimes DC does something even worse, they try to hide Bruce’s neglect with things that never happened like they did with the Ric thing in Dick’s case. Dick was passed around from villain to villain when he was most vulnerable and at the end of it all DC had the guts to say that Batman had been watching over Dick all the time. Like, why lie in such a blatant way? Does Bruce enjoy watching his son suffer from a far or was he too much of a coward to tell Dick that he was a shit father, got stuck in a hole and then decided to play “Cat and Bat” with Selina instead of caring for any of his children?

The situation with Damian’s death and resurrection was a whole thing that was meant to prove that Bruce loved Damian and considered him his son. But in their effort to make Bruce look like a good father to Damian they completely destroyed his relationship with his other kids and that was also the start of Bruce referring to Damian as his ONLY son. And like you said after Damian was resurrected Bruce ended up neglecting him afterwards which ultimately led Damian to run away.

His relationship with Cass and Duke is something that I cannot explore because I am not into those characters and they are involved in books that I am not interested in. So I cannot say anything about that.

With Tim it’s complicated because I feel like his relationship with him was never actually father/son it was more like mentor/mentee and that seemed to work better for them, ever since they started the whole family thing Bruce started to act a little bit too rough towards Tim and that ended with Bruce punching Tim during the “City of Bane” arc. Bruce never apologised or was shown realising his mistake, but DC made sure to explain that Bruce was going through a rough time so that’s why he did it. It was pure rubbish and I dislike it a lot.

I answered an ask a while ago about how I thought Dick and Jason could become family the way that DC treats the “Batfamily” within comics and I came up with the idea of the “Dickfamily” because I felt like DC made a big mistake the moment they revolved the Bat family around Bruce and not Dick. Bruce is a character that is known for being lonely and for being surrounded by darkness that he only manages to escape through the light of Robin (Dick Grayson because he was the first), he was always depicted as someone who is hard to work with and considers his teammates only co-workers and not friends. He is a difficult person to connect with, so why on earth did DC come up with a family surrounding that man? (I actually know the answer to that question and it is: money, DC did it to sell more comics under the Batman name but we are going to forget about that here, let me be petty).

Why would DC make it all about a man that doesn’t connect or goes out of his way to say that he “works alone” when Dick Grayson is standing right there? DC hates that they created a character like Dick because he is just better than Bruce at everything, he just is, he is better family to Alfred, Jason, Tim and Damian, he was even written as a better father to Damian than Bruce ever was!

Bruce is just not a people person or a person that forms strong bonds with people. And that makes the whole “Batfamily” concept suffer and come off as something forced that doesn’t actually work.

Tom King was one of the writers that tried to kill the concept of the “Batfamily” with Bruce and Selina becoming a couple and by continuously saying that Selina was who was the most important person in Bruce’s life and the one that made him a better person. All Tom King did with that is make fans and non-fans of the “Batfamily” feel rage. Like, I might not like the “Batfamily” but there is no way that Selina comes first to Alfred, Dick or Damian, there is just no way and if that were actually true then that’s boring.

All the writers that have pushed the “Batfamily” concept (try) do it in a way that makes it look grand and of actual essence but without putting any work on it, if you ask me the “Batfamily” (if there has to be one) should only include Bruce, Alfred (he do be dead though), Dick, Tim, Cass and Damian (I suppose Duke too, I don’t know much about him). The “Batfamily” has to be small because that way you can actually build relationships and make them matter. Having Kate, Steph, Jason and so many others involved in a concept that was made to fit around Bruce looks stupid! Bruce has had almost zero connection to Kate and Steph in the last ten years and Bruce’s “relationship” with Jason is a complete joke!

Bruce is just not the character that is meant to be surrounded by too much people, and he is not a good person towards his family so the whole ass concept should be thrown to the trash and finally let it die. But money is important and if there is something that DC will never stop doing, is milking Batman for content that can be (sometimes) pretty basic.

All in all, I think Bruce sucks and that his “kids” shouldn’t be dragged back to him ever again or at least for a long while. All of them would actually benefit from not being involved with anything relating to Batman. Dick could benefit from Bruce and other Bat-related characters staying away from him and letting him live his life in Bludhaven. And Jason? My sweet Chonky? He would be in such a better place if Bruce disappeared from his life, imagine the actually good books we would have if Jason was free to act the way he was meant to do as the Red Hood…

(We saw a little bit of that in the back up story of Detective Comics by Rosenberg, Batman is still involved but he and Jason are definitely not on the same side of the story! So excited for Task Force Z!)

I don’t know If al that I just said answers your question but I hope you have a fantastic week Anon!

[sleeping-lilies]

Please give me your worst DC takes for entertainment purposes.

fuck, do you mean like the worst thing that i actually think or like the worst takes ive seen or like do you want me to fuck around and bait? i’m gonna fuck around and bait because i simply do not have bad takes, i’m too sexy for that and so is my brain, also i want to make this funny lmfao

the recent plot thingy for bruce losing his money has actually been really impactful and brilliant because taking a man from being a billionaire to a millionaire is a super humbling experience. this will majorly impact his character for the next couple of years.

it is an extremely big deal that NONE of the robins that came before tim wear pants. it is a MAJOR POINT in dc that TIM be the one to bring pants into the legacy, it’s HIS major character development and BIGGEST contribution to the mantle. jason and dick taking that away from him by adding leggings to THEIR robin uniforms in modern comics is DISRESPECTFUL to tim!!!

ra’s al ghul is a mega dilf, actually

discowing was b-ba-bA-AD nope nope i can’t do this one, sorry </3

ok this one is actually a bad take of mine and is completely serious oopsie, but i think we were all too harsh on the drake suit, like compared to other designs i’ve seen the suit itself wasn’t too bad it just had artists that didn’t do it justice. it’s just the name that makes me go 🤺

ok back to being “serious” lmfao, jason’s probably a really bad fighter i mean what does he do besides go BANG BANG BAANNGGG i bet he’s a kpoppie.

dc’s hate towards wally and all the flashes are justified those fuckers keep fucking up the timeline so they should repent by being tossed out lmfao

wait this one is serious again oopsie here we go again, the way dc draws dick grayson most of the time makes me go 😖 like that man is my favorite but dc does his character design dirty a lot, people point to this one panel and be like “this is the epitome of beauty” and now i gotta try and do the mental math of “is this actually terrible or do i have terrible taste” the answer is obviously that the art is terrible because i could never have terrible taste 😚

ok now back to “serious” damian is the best fighter in the entire bat fam and easily outclasses them, like he was training since birth to be an assassin and everything he could take on that crusty old fucker dick grayson any day. like i know dick has been training as an athlete and mega child prodigy acrobat since birth, and he’s been a vigilante since he was nine but he’s old and his bones prolly creak when he stands up wait wait WAIT I HAD TO SAY THIS ONE I SAW THIS TAKE WHERE THEY SAID DAMIAN WAS THE BEST FIGHTER IN HIS FAMILY AND IT WAS SOOO FUNNYYYYY

harper row is such a wild card in terms of characters that could be released in these past few years, like they really took a big risk with her and that’s really cool and it was especially cool how they changed cass’s backstory to revolve around that white girl. like, it added so much nuance to her story and so much more depth to her character instead of completely ruining it <3

personally i think if you don’t add a character i like in your posts then you are a bigot for any possible reason i can identify, sorry guys that’s how it works because the world revolves around me 😇