#batgirls legacies

[thychesters]

how to heal a bruise. (in 3 easy steps) | read on ao3. for legacies: a batgirl zine ; 2.1k stephanie brown, cassandra cain, barbara gordon bonding

Steph hooks her toes through the strap of her bag and drags it over while Cass folds her arms over her bent knees. Barbara only clicks her tongue, the last admonishment she tries, seeing as the first was already ignored.

“Alright Steph, you want to call this impromptu girls’ night to order?”

“Cass, read me the minutes from our last meeting,” Steph says, and only sighs at the odd look she gets in return. To her credit, at least Barbara looks amused as she rounds the couch again. She digs through her bag for her sketchbook, the corners of the cover and first few pages bent backwards. The GOOD JOB sticker Tiffany once gave her stands out in bold purple and yellow. “I think it’s time to talk suit redesigns.”

“Do you not like yours?” Cass asks.

“Oh, I like it just fine and it’s extremely high fashion right now, but internal bleeding is so last season. A little extra padding and kevlar is forecasted to be super on trend this year.”

“And here I thought most girls' nights involved more ice cream and rom coms and less trying to bulletproof an outfit,” Barbara mutters.

for the @batgirlzine! after a decade i finally got to do a collab with the wonderful @lyssartandstars and i am so, so proud of how everything turned out and could not have asked for a better collaborator. 💚

lyss did an incredible page for this fic and you can check out her amazing art and our girls in all of their glory here! ✨ don’t forget to check out everyone else’s work and keep an eye out for a leftovers sale while you’re at it!

[ashoss]

they should be wearing a "get along shirt"

nemesis siblings for my pjo au :D (they cant stand eachother) ((jk theyre besties)

[casscainmainly]

Though there are valid reasons to want characters to have their own identities, I think some people insist too much on the Batfamily having all individual, unique names. This is why the Orphan name persists so much in fandom, or even Wayne Family Adventures - it's a byproduct of seeing 'Batgirl' as transitory and lesser than. This is not only a misunderstanding of Batgirl, but a misunderstanding of legacy mantles. Legacy mantles aren't stepping stones towards individuality, but identities with symbolic and storied histories. Characters can, and sometimes should, end in a legacy role.

It's also interesting that this anti-legacy philosophy is exactly what DC adopted during the New 52. They destroyed virtually every legacy they could, including wiping Tim's Robin history, erasing the JSA, and deleting Cass and Steph's histories. We all agree New 52 was bad, but most people focus on the content/ramifications on a specific character, when it's the philosophy that was wrong. New 52 was an effort to diminish the power of legacy titles, and to dismiss many characters that fall under the legacy umbrella.

Some characters should grow out of their mantles, of course. But that doesn't make the mantle they grow out of less meaningful or important than the mantle they step into. If we want to leave the New 52 behind, we need to leave its anti-legacy philosophy behind, too.

[armed-with-a-waffle-iron]

Share some of your reasoning if you'd like too!

[fantastic-nonsense]

found the rest of my comics while unboxing my books in my new apartment, so my comic shelves are finally done!

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

If I had to pick any Batman character to return after being forgotten it'd be Bette Kane. (Helena Wayne already has been replaced by Bertinelli and Lance is just like. What do you do with that concept)

Like I know she hasn't been forgotten forgotten but she's even less popular than Harper, and as much as I love Harper I have to admit being less popular than her is pretty much a death sentence for a character. Especially with the attempts to erase her and replace her in the past (killing Kathy and replacing her with Kate, creating Barbara, giving a Robin a sassy blonde love interest/rival vigilante). It's honestly a miracle that she's still here.

But like as I mentioned in a previous post, she was the first Batgirl with Dick Grayson's Robin. Then he became Nightwing and she became Flamebird (granted in the comic lore it was a whole set of events but yada yada). I could go on a tangent on her personality and reasons to love her but simply put: Nightwing and Flamebird are twin gods. Neither was ever meant to exist without the other. Give Nightwing his Flamebird. Make them buddies again PLEASE.

[punkeropercyjackson]

Cassandra Cain core

[evilhorse]

Batgirl has a lot of numbers.

(Zero Hour 30th Anniversary Special #1)

[lyssartandstars]

“I’m thinking we keep some of the cool gadgets but reexamine the torso,” she starts, absently pawing through her still open bag for her array of colored pencils. Cass leans into her shoulder, spoon caught in her teeth. “A little extra padding around the ribs—not like, super thick or ‘I can’t put my arms down,’ though.”

“Enough that it doesn’t feel like a baseball bat is going to snap you in half?” Barbara offers. Steph leans her head back onto the couch to look at her upside down. Her next breath tugs at her sore ribs a little.

“See? You get it.”

Barbara smirks and rolls her eyes a little, and Steph goes back to her sketch. For a few minutes it’s quiet, and it’s easy to get lost in her drawing. The redesign on the previous page hadn’t exactly been up to her standards this morning, and black ink still stains the side of her palm from where she’d smeared through it earlier. Now, her head tilts a touch as she traces her way along the page, pausing just long enough to swap out one color for the next, letting them blossom across the design before an errant curl catches her in lashes until Cass brushes it out of her eye and breaks her out of her trance.

“You should draw more,” she says. “It suits you. You look peaceful.”

“Probably shouldn’t quit my day job,” Steph says, sticking the end of her pencil in her mouth as she holds up her sketchbook. She nudges Cass with her elbow in a silent thanks.

the snippet above is by the amazing @thychesters who I got to collab with in the @batgirlzine!! we’ve been friends for just over a decade and finally got to do a piece together, and her words just blew me away. working with her and everyone else on the team was a dream come true, and I’m so glad I got to participate!! 🥰

read the fic here, and go check out everyone else’s pieces if you haven’t yet!

[teleportationmagic]

Anyways. Today I am frustrated about how Cass -> Steph lagacy is explored better in Batgirl 2000 than in Batgirl 2009, and yes that's because of editorial, and yes I will die mad about it, and yes I doubt that we'll ever really see an exploration of it because Batgirls placed them both on the same level which isn't something I disagree with, but ends up with the result that we never get to see how Cass feels about the legacy she leaves behind. And yeah, Cass was never the point of Steph!Batgirl. And similarily, while we get some feeling of Steph towards Cass - questions about her faith in her, and joy in beind able to take part in her legacy - it's shallow, it has to be shallow, because Cass isn't there. And while putting Cass back in Batgirl is undeniably the correct choice, I wish there could be an opportunity to show the legacy going from Cass to Steph, even if Cass is picking it up again. I don't think these two things exist antithetically to each other.

[citrlet]

xoey’s very cluttered very colorful very fun room

[casscainmainly]

Looking at the notes of that Cass name poll and I don't mind people preferring Black Bat for certain reasons, but saying 'Batgirl is not unique/her own name' is not a good argument to me. Yes, it's not unique; that's the whole point. It's a legacy mantle. The power comes from the fact that Cass is linked, through Batgirl, to the people she cares about most. For a girl who was forcefully isolated, who was denied a name (and therefore denied a legacy), Batgirl is the first thing that was ever hers. And Batgirl is not, and has never been, tied to Bruce; the point of the mantle is women carving out their own spaces, forging their own identities regardless of what others have tried to make them. Saying Batgirl is not a good mantle for Cass is also denying what she brought to the name - under Cass, Batgirl became a legacy mantle. Batgirl irrevocably changed her, and she irrevocably changed Batgirl. Preferring other names is completely fine, but it's important not to undermine what Batgirl meant, and continues to mean, to Cass.

[dclegacytournament]

ROUND TWO

Stephanie Brown vs Stephanie Brown

This is your reminder to vote for the best legacy for the original, not just your favourite characters, and to be nice about this! We're here to have fun

[armed-with-a-waffle-iron]

Art: Stephanie Brown's Looks Over the Years

Talk about character development.

[wellzofyouth]

the internet is really wild. You be going about your day and then you're mad over original bat-girl bette kane

[punkeropercyjackson]

My personal fancast for Cass(Justina Xie)