#and also how literally nothing changed so Leslie let Steph die for nothing

[horsechestnut]

War Crimes is a weird story with some ideas I hate and some I love, but the part that keeps sticking in my head is how weirdly fixated Leslie and Bruce are on Stephanie's daughter?

I guess this kinda makes sense, but how did Leslie even find the kid? How does she even know Steph had a child?

And than Bruce swoops in with this:

And I get Bruce is projecting, but also Stephanie is not that child's parent. Like, sure, she cares about her daughter in an abstract sense, on her death bed she did ask Batman to make sure she was okay, but the baby has no idea who Stephanie is and likely will never even know that she died.

It feels like the writers are telling us that Steph dying wasn't enough of a tragedy on it's own. That a 16 year old girl dying a truly horrible death wasn't enough, it's sad because Stephanie's unnamed daughter will never get the chance to known her. Leslie can never make it up to said unnamed daughter.

They never actually talked about Stephanie outside of abstracts either. Leslie talks about why she did it, Bruce talks about why she shouldn't have, but neither says a word about who Stephanie Brown even was. They don't talk about how the world lost something without her in it, or comment on how much good she could have still done, or how she didn't deserve to die. The only one in the whole story line that tried to do that was Crystal, but even after she tells Batman off for it he turns around and has this conversation with Leslie in which he doesn't talk about Steph. He only talks about her child, and how it wasn't fair to take Steph away from them. Never once do they say it wasn't fair to let Stephanie die simply because she deserved to live.