#because yeah he's trapped in a narrative but he's doing the opposite of what tim is doing

[powderkegging]

5x13 / 4x13 / 4x10 / CRAFT AND VISION, Carl Phillips / H OF H PLAYBOOK, Anne Carson

[bigskydreaming]

How old was jason when he died? And when he was resurrected?? And that time he spent dead make him crazier than Ra's when he is under the pit's effect?

The general consensus as far as I’m aware is that Jason was fifteen when he died, and he came back to Gotham in Under the Red Hood about five years later. There’s a couple different versions of the in between time, but most common I believe is that he was resurrected due to multiverse bullshit (like, the official explanation is that an evil teenage version of Clark Kent punched the dimensional walls of the place he was trapped outside of normal time/space so hard that the ripple effects of him breaking through like, caused ‘hiccups’ or anomalies across various universes - one of these being Jason’s resurrection. Yeah. I’m not making this up. LOL).

ANYWAY. The go-to version of the timeline I believe is that this happened about six months after Jason died, which was right around the time Tim started trying to convince Dick to come back and be Robin again and ultimately ended up becoming Robin himself. When Jason dug himself out of his grave, he was largely catatonic and unresponsive, and here’s where it tends to be most vague. After some period of time, which could have been anything from days to weeks to months, depending on who you ask, Talia was in Gotham for supervillain shenanigans or whatnot, came across him and realized who he was, and took him back to the League with her. 

Where again it depends on who you ask, after some period of time, ultimately Talia convinced Ra’s to put Jason in the Pit to see if it would restore him to full consciousness and heal the remaining physical after-effects of his death. And also, her reasons for doing this tend to be subject to your own personal interpretation of Talia. Some view this as her doing it for Bruce’s sake, some view it as her just wanting to use Jason as her pawn against Bruce, etc.

Personally, I view it as somewhat in between, though again this is just my take. I ignore ‘Talia the rapist’ characterizations in both regards to her actions with Bruce and Jason, so I mean, I’m just not here for Morrison or Winick’s take on her in that regard. BUT I also kinda....highly object to the ‘soft’ characterizations of Talia that kind of make her the ideal parent that highlights how crappy Bruce is in comparison? Like, its no secret that I’m hugely critical of Bruce’s parenting, but I just....personally am not a fan of acting like Talia is amazing at it and noble and selfless either. I don’t like the outright vilification of Talia - especially when she ends up coming across as worse than Ra’s, which, no thank you - BUT I don’t like...blunting all her edges either, for lack of a better phrasing. 

I tend to view her as someone who is extremely ambitious, ruthless and uncompromising in her own ways. I think a huge part of her dynamic with Bruce is that they mirror each other in so many ways, even if they’re not always on the same page. She’s often used as a narrative foil to Bruce, but I disagree - I think Selina and Bruce are the ‘opposites attract’ whereas Talia and Bruce are the ‘like calls to like/their bond in large part stems from how well they understand each other, even though they have different goals and aims most of the time’. 

But point being, like......I don’t like shallow, two-dimensional interpretations of Talia where she’s just evil and has no shades of gray to her, but I also don’t like the flip side of that and her being viewed as the lesser of two evils compared to Bruce. Like, sorry not sorry, I think both of them need to take some parenting classes. Unless you drastically change Damian’s entire backstory and characterization by the time he arrives in Gotham, and/or insist that Damian’s upbringing was all entirely due to Ra’s control and Talia at no point in ten years had the option of arranging for her son to end up with Bruce or somewhere else where he didn’t spend his childhood being taught that affection was a sign of weakness and how to murder his nanny in six hundred different ways and show his work plz, like......I have trouble with the super!mom Talia takes.

All of which is just to say....I don’t believe Talia brought Jason back with her and put him in the Pit out of the goodness of her heart, but I don’t think it was entirely absent of positive intentions either? If that makes sense? I just mean...she’s a SUPER complicated woman in my take, and that’s what makes her so much more interesting than she’s usually reduced to being in a lot of stories. Talia is not as stone cold as she often comes across as a defense mechanism - I think she is someone who feels things deeply, but she shuts that down even harder than Bruce. She’s a very pragmatic individual, and I think she tends to justify a lot of even her most emotional-driven choices by finding an advantageous spin she can put forth as her ‘real reason’ for doing things.

So....I think her feelings for Bruce DID have a lot to do with her taking Jason with her. She does love Bruce in her own way, she always keeps an eye on him so she absolutely had to have been aware just how badly Jason’s death was affecting him, and so I think when she first saw Jason and realized who he was....I do think on a gut level, her motivations were like, she felt a need or want to take him with her and see that he was well cared for, for Bruce’s sake if nothing else.

BUT....I think the complication is she has trouble justifying that to herself, even, let alone to her father or subordinates or any of the others who constantly seek an edge over her within the League’s inner power structures and hierarchies. So I think that’s where the pragmatic side of her took over, and once she DID see to Jason at least nominally being taken care of....that’s when she started to look at it in terms of how she could play this to her advantage as well.....and whether that ultimately was in pursuit of convincing Bruce to join her side, and using Jason as leverage there, or just hurting Bruce for rejecting and hurting her and her chosen path, and using Jason to accomplish that.....tbh, like I said, I see Talia as an extremely complicated person and IMO the most likely take is that even SHE probably couldn’t say which she truly wanted or intended.....or perhaps it just changed at various points, and more than once.

My point with this tangent is I think there tends to be a very narrow focus on Jason’s return and Talia’s role in it as opposed to just the Pit in general. As much as Talia did help Jason, I think it doesn’t get acknowledged enough that as long as her own motivations and agenda were AT ANY LEVEL behind her choice not to reveal he was alive to Bruce....that’s something that I think could use more scrutiny in fandom, because that is a selfish choice, even if she did nominally spin it as being in Jason’s best interests. I just mean....it was a complicated situation, she’s a complicated person, you can’t add that up and still walk away with the simple narrative “Talia helped Jason after he came back to life and everything she did was to his benefit and in his best interests’ you know?

The thing is, the Pit’s influence aside, we have NO idea how things might have gone if Bruce, Dick and Alfred had ever gotten the CHANCE to get to Jason immediately after his submersion in the Pit and try and help him through it.....because Talia and Ra’s didn’t allow for them to ever have that chance. And that is a hugely critical plot point I think, that’s gone largely unexplored. There’s a lot of attention paid to how Jason felt upon learning that the Joker was alive, that there was a new Robin....but not a ton of attention paid to the HOW of Jason finding out all these things, and just how exactly this information was delivered to him and in what framing and context.

Because again, Pit influence aside....just sheerly in terms of the massive trauma and disorientation Jason had to have been going through upon having his full cognitive faculties restored by the Pit.....like....Jason came back to Gotham as an adult, ultimately. But at THAT stage of things....he was still likely only sixteen or so. VERY young. VERY traumatized. COMPLETELY isolated from all previous existing support networks.....and all of that adds up to being VERY. VERY. Impressionable.

And this is the part I wish got more focus. Just how much influence Talia, Ra’s and the League in general had over Jason’s thought processes, morality and ethics during that period he lived and trained with them....in the wake of a massive traumatic ordeal and with zero effort paid towards helping him cope and recover in any way other than what they laid out for him there. See, whatever Talia’s actual motivations for bringing him back and putting him in the Pit were....there’s not really any denying IMO that once that was done, she still took advantage of the opportunity Jason’s impressionability and gratitude for what she’d done (and just the interest and care she’d demonstrated in his eyes merely by doing it)....like, she still took advantage of the...influence this gave her over him.

Like.....Under the Red Hood? Eight heads in a duffle bag as Jason brutally slaughtered some of the key members of various crime organizations in Gotham and used that to gain the attention and fear and/or respect of various crime lords and organizations?

That didn’t come out of nowhere. And personally I think there’s too much focus paid to Jason’s potential for violence before his death, the murkiness surrounding Felipe Garzona’s death, and the effect the Pit still had on his mind when he returned to Gotham.......and not enough focus paid on WHERE AND WHO HE SPENT ALL HIS TIME WITH IN BETWEEN THESE THINGS.  

Because as brutal as Jason could be at times as Robin......eight heads in a duffel bag is still a LONG way away from that. What its NOT a long way away from, however....is League of Assassins training, methodology and worldview.

Like, literally everything Jason did in Under the Red Hood came right smack out of the League’s playbook, so I’ve always just been like....forget the Pit for a second, guys! What about just....examining what effect being surrounded and trained by League assassins for three or four straight years in the wake of massive, life-altering trauma and circumstances that make you feel both INDEBTED to said League and BETRAYED BY all your previous loved ones who weren’t there for you....because they never had the opportunity TO be there, given that they weren’t the ones that ran into Jason while he was on the streets after digging himself up and like, even in the DC universe AT THAT TIME ‘hey wonder if he might end up resurrected somehow’ was not like, something that was at the forefront of anyone’s mind as a likely possibility?

LOL. Anyway. So that’s my hot take on Jason’s return.....yes, the Pit undoubtedly played a role, but I would love love love to see more of a role given just to looking at the sheer INFLUENCE the League and their teachings had over an isolated, traumatized and impressionable teenager.

As for the Pit itself.....that’s a topic for another day, probably, lol, but like...I have a LOT of thoughts about the Pit and how its used in various narratives, canon and otherwise. Because the thing is....its effects STARTED out as being brought into stories about Ra’s as kind of a moral fable. Like, essentially, the effects of the Pit in early stories were like....IMO more intended as a cautionary type narrative about the dangers of greed and being power-hungry, seeking to control even life and death, etc? I just mean like.....it originally came off as more of the idea “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” or in essence...everything has a price, and with something like immortality, the price is steep. There was a lot of focus initially on the idea that Ra’s was the man he’d become...only after centuries of using the Pit’s power to remain young, vital and alive. Power corrupts, essentially.

However, the problem I have...is that narrative becomes a wholly different thing when the Pit affects someone who DIDN’T seek to use its power, who wasn’t using it for selfish gain....nor like in Jason’s case...did they even have a choice about using it at all! This is the same issue I have with keeping Dick as a Talon in Court of Owls stories, and certain ways Cassandra’s story is told and her body language skills are used and discussed: I have a deep dissatisfaction with the idea of abuse inflicted by others, being like...the origin story or source of someone’s powers....when its paired at the same time with consequences that the person never asked for, would never have asked for......but the powers themselves tend to be the only thing focused on, rather than the drawbacks, with the overall takeaway ending up being that like.....the person should be grateful that the abuse happened in the first place because now they have these powers see, and isn’t that the most important thing?

So to correct myself, it isn’t quite the same thing, but I mean....the issue I have with Jason and the Pit here, in comparison, is that....Jason had no agency in choosing to go into the Pit. So to me.....its a big, BIG problem to have him ‘benefit’ from that in the form of look, he’s alive and well again, he has a second chance.....IF equal scrutiny isn’t being paid to the price he is stuck paying for the ‘gifts’ of the Pit, that second chance.....when he never asked to pay it in the first place. 

And I don’t actually think I’m the only one who has that problem, I think most people just don’t spell it out to that degree....because what I mean there is......the Pit’s effects ever since Jason’s return like....aren’t viewed in the context of being a morality narrative anymore. At least not in regards to him. People rarely write the Pit as ‘corrupting’ Jason the way it was once suggested to have corrupted Ra’s, because like....Jason was a victim, not a person motivated by selfish desires for immortality. And people want him to be a hero (or at least an antihero) rather than the villain that DC has at times tried to make him instead....and I think even unconsciously, we’re all aware that it doesn’t really work to have a character like that ‘forced’ into a villainous role because of exposure to a mystical corrupting agent they never asked to be exposed to.

SO. The end result of THAT is that.....the way people write about the Pit has shifted, both in canon and fandom. And now the Pit’s effects are viewed less as a cautionary morality fable and more as like...a heightened form of PTSD, a metaphor for the extreme and beyond-imagining trauma of being brutally killed and brought back to life again.

And that is where things get murky for me again, because you end up with an unintentionally confused/skewed narrative where writers and readers often aren’t even sure themselves if they’re writing this mystical McGuffin as being an external force of corruption that makes people ‘worse versions of themselves’ OR whether its a PTSD/trauma metaphor that highlights the hurt/confusion/paranoia/intensity of tangled emotions that survivors of great traumas experience. And the problem there is, without actually intending to....I think you inevitably end up dipping into a lot of really problematic ableist ideas that reinforce some pretty negative impressions of mental illness, bad survivors and recovery in general.

Oops. Tangents happened again, huh. Oh well. Hope your answers are in there along with everything else I stuffed that response full of, lol!

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘The Tale of the Field Hospital’ (S02E28) Analysis

A historical tale of disease and horror in a field hospital, and a few interesting new details about the tunnels below the Magnus Institute.  What’s not to love?  Come on in to hear my take on ‘The Tale of the Field Hospital’.

First, holy crap this narrator.  This is one of the best jobs Jonny Sims has done yet of capturing a personality through writing, and I found Joseph Russo equal parts hysterical and irritating.  The only character I can think of who tops him in terms of pure personality bleeding through the narrative is Jane Prentiss, and that’s saying something.

Interesting that he noted that so many statements got leaked in 1999.  While this does explain how other paranormal organizations know about and disdain the Magnus Institute (especially since even Russo admits that most of the leaked statements were lies or drug-induced), I’m more interested in who did it.  It had to have been someone with access to the archives, which immediately puts me in mind of Gertrude or Elias, unless Gertrude had unknown assistants at that time. Of course, this begs the question of why either of them would want to leak some of those statements.  Was there a goal in discrediting the Institute? Perhaps they’d been getting too much attention and needed to seem less credible?  In that case, I nominate Elias for having done the deed.

I also went into this episode expecting a Leitner episode (as per usual when we get an episode about a book), but I really wasn’t expecting the sudden reemergence of John Amhurst.  He’s gone from a creepy unexplained thing last season to a being of great interest this season.  We now know it’s likely he was probably repeatedly dying, coming back, and spreading pestilence at least in 1899 and 1902 (the years of the Second Boer War).

I was also not expecting this to be really the first episode to draw a deliberate parallel between real-world horrors and the horrors of the supernatural.  It was a subtle thing, but the thread between John Amhurst, monstrous being of pestilence and death, and Jeffrey Amherst, the (actual, historical) governor general of Quebec, and one of the earliest known users of biologic warfare was deeply disturbing.  Because while Amhurst spreading his disease amongst the soldiers of the Boer War, and bringing back all the pestilence in the concentration camps to visit upon the field hospital is vicious, it seems more understandable.  Amhurst’s very nature seems centered around disease and decay. But when humans inflict something like smallpox blankets on one another … there’s a horror to that that’s worse than a monster.  Because it’s us doing it to ourselves.  It’s one person looking at another group of people, some of whom are on the opposite side of a war, but most of whom are simply trying to get by, and killing them through confinement and illness.  It’s consigning an entire group of people to death, not based on nature or some ineffable supernatural drive, but the horror of expedience and apathy.  And the connection there between Amhurst and Amherst is one of the creepier ties I’ve seen yet from this show.

Kudos on the show for daring to go there, and for doing it with a lightness of touch that didn’t make any potential message seem preachy or overbearing.  It was a moment when I really had to think about the parallels, and how much more awful the real Amherst seems to me than the fictional Amhurst.

Let’s get back to the story itself.  There’s now some question about how closely tied Amhurst is to the Hive, or if we simply drew the parallel because he and Jane Prentiss seemed so similar.  Of course, there were always differences, but I chalked it up to the Hive needing different vessels for different things. Both were plague-bearers, but Prentiss seemed far more a shambling force of nature, while Amhurst seemed intelligent and deliberate.  Prentiss could barely speak by the end, while Amhurst seemed to have retained a degree of eloquence right up until he got torched in ‘Pest Control’.  So there’s no real answer to whether or not Amhurst is part of the Hive, or something else entirely.  It is well worth consideration, however.  

What we do know now without question is that he is a harbinger of illness.  Each of the soldiers who replaced him on the bed grew septic and died in hours, and one can assume something similar was happening in the nursing home in ‘Taken Ill’.  The fact that the nurse said “We’ve taken ill; we’ve passed away” also seems to echo the fact that Amhurst keeps dying and coming back.  What about the soldiers he infected?  Would they come back as well?  Or is it more like in ‘Squirm’, where Prentiss could infect someone, but they wouldn’t become a Hive so much as burst once the Hive reached a critical mass within them?

And of course, there’s the question of whether or not Amhurst is really dead.  We know that ‘Taken Ill’ happened in 2011, as did Amhurst’s apparent death by lighter in ‘Pest Control’.  Is that the end of Amhurst, as the incinerator apparently was with Prentiss, or will he come back again, being such a restless man?

What’s also interesting here is we have a direct crossover between Leitner (likely) and a major player in the supernatural ecosystem, John Amhurst.  We know that the book itself is infectious, and killed Russo within days of accidentally getting a papercut from it.  So it’s likely to possess at least part of the Hive’s power.  The question I have is how much power, if any, a book like that granted Leitner over the subject?  Would John Amhurst, for instance, have been subjugated in any way by the existence of this book, and its possession by Jurgen Leitner?  I previously speculated that Leitner was the Mommy Fortuna of the TMA universe, using his books to trap and hold supernatural beings, to have a mundane and powerless human granted dominion over beings far higher than him on the food-chain.  All we know of Amhurst in our current timeline, as I mentioned, happened in 2011, well after the apparent burning of the Leitner connected to him in 2003. Was John Amhurst bound to the book, only to be freed upon the burning of his book, or was he never particularly bound, and the book acted more as a mirror than a cage?

I really want to know how Leitner’s library functioned, and how it interacted on a larger scale with the supernatural ecosystem.  I’d also like to know what, or who, eventually got Leitner.

The Supplemental

So that hope that Sims would actually do the sensible thing and take a little field-trip with his assistants?  Yeah, that was obviously a pipe-dream.  I should have known, but I’m still dramatically unimpressed with his decision-making abilities.

What’s interesting is that Not-Sasha came for him, probably deliberately.  How did she know he was in the tunnels?  Was she waiting for him to go down?  If so, why did she follow and rescue him?  And what was it about the tunnels that allowed him to see through her deception for a second?  Is the thing in the tunnels able to work through him somehow to make him see what the Archives can only push him to be paranoid about?  Are they one in the same thing, but somehow the presence is more present in the tunnels?  Is the thing in the tunnels acting like a protector, sort of like the creature in the Alexandrian archive found in ‘Crusader’?  If that’s the case, does that indicate that deep at the bottom of Smirke’s impossible stairwell, someone has secreted a second archive, with all the things that previous archivists squirreled away, beyond even the reach of the Institute, just in case this current larger archive should be burned or otherwise destroyed?

The more we get to know the thing in the tunnels, the more I think it’s deliberately protective of Sims, and yet trying to guide him somewhere.  Things went wrong for him in ‘Too Deep’ only when he decided to take a random side-jog of his own.  And in this episode we see how rapidly Sims got lost, but was he truly lost?  Or was he instead being guided somewhere?

And if he was being guided somewhere, did Not-Sasha want to stop him getting there?

Either way, next time maybe he won’t be a colossal idiot and take Martin with him (Martin being the only one likely to be willing to accompany him down to the tunnels at this point).  We haven’t heard from Martin in a while, and I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on with him.  We have a far better accounting of Tim and even Not-Sasha right now.  Martin is keeping his head down, and I wonder if it’s deliberate.  Is Martin working on something we don’t know about, or is Sims simply not noticing him?

I’d like to see what would happen in the tunnels should Sims bring a friend along with him.  Would the tunnels exert the same effect over him, or would it hold off until he was alone again.  And if it did still exert its effect, would Sims’ bravery be bolstered enough by someone being with him to find whatever it is that the tunnels are hiding?

Conclusions

I always love a good historical story, and this one was particularly skin-crawling (pun intended). Bringing in the atrocities of the Boer War, as well as the atrocities visited on the Native Americans by Jeffrey Amherst, makes for some uncomfortable parallels between the supernatural forces, which we often treat as less malicious and more instinctual, and the human evils of deliberately infecting people with smallpox or other diseases to decimate a population.  It’s a very well done parallel, and only served to highlight to me how much more frightening people are than any monster.

This episode brought up a lot of questions about Amhurst, his connections to the Hive and to Leitner. It also brought up new questions about the tunnels under the Institute.  The more I hear, the more I’m hoping we have a proper multi-cast episode in them.  Even the brief snippet we got this week was properly chilling stuff, hearing Sims panic as he realizes that he’s lost and didn’t prepare for an extended stay (why the hell did you go down without preparing first, you idiot?).  I’d love to get more Tim and Martin down there (though it would be a hell of a thing convincing Tim to return) and their takes on the tunnels and the thing that lurks there.  The more it becomes clear that Sims is a fantastically unreliable narrator, the more I appreciate outside perspectives to either confirm or refute his observations.

[davidmann95]

The Nightwing Problem

I mentioned this the other day in passing, but I’ve got more thoughts on the subject: I’m no longer convinced Dick Grayson as Nightwing is a good idea, damn cool as that costume may be.

I was convinced. Tim Seeley, Javier Fernandez and their collaborators really knocked it out of the park with the introductory volume of the new Nightwing book spinning out of Grayson; it combined the best of the world-trotting vibe from that with the acid-tinged death trap gimmicks of Morrison’s time with Dick as Fun Batman, and while I don’t think that’s incompatible with just making him Batman again, it’s still different enough from the regular model that it’s reasonable to distinguish it with a whole other identity. If you were able to entirely divorce him from what Nightwing has meant up to this point, and really grab by the horns what Grayson and that first arc of the new book set up for him - the dashing globetrotting super-adventurer who can journey into morally murikier territory than Batman himself, because he’s not vulnerable in the same ways Bruce is vulnerable - I think it could’ve worked. It might’ve still had some issues that I’ll get into, but it could’ve worked in spite of them.

But you can’t really do that; Nightwing had over a hundred and fifty issues to himself in that name before this came along. And as we were just reminded when Seeley journeyed into more familiar territory (I’m pretty convinced the first arc of Nightwing was at least in part really a reconfigured version of what would have been an arc of Grayson), the name doesn’t actually come with much other than baggage at this point.

To be clear: the recent Blüdhaven story by Seeley, Marcus To and company was by no means a bad set of comics. Nightwing is still one of the most underrated, purely entertaining superhero books out there right now, and I’m tremendously looking forward to the upcoming Nightwing Must Die pitting him against an army of his greatest enemies, from the Talon to Pyg to fucking Deathwing. I also know bringing him back to his iconic city was Geoff Johns’ idea that Seeley had to implement, as I expect was bringing back his old ‘rogues gallery’. But it’s still an arc - hot on the heels of an opening titled Better Than Batman - built almost entirely around reaffirming his status as a third-tier offshoot of the actual brand of importance. It’s literally him teaming up with the villains who couldn’t hack it in Gotham, and it draws a clear line between him and them as being in similar positions. I dig setting up his new haunt as the Vegas to Gotham’s New York/Chicago, but even that can’t erase the vague feeling that the characters’ had the keys to his nice shiny new car snatched out of his hands, and now he has to go back to the busted-ass old model his dad loaned him.

I get the impulse to hand him his own city - it gives a stable environment, obvious opportunities for building up a supporting cast, and a base to head back to even if he regularly goes globe-trotting - but as presented, Blüdhaven has always been Gotham-lite. Even now that it’s more pointedly distinguishing itself, it’s still a shadowy city of corrupt cops where Gotham crooks wander around. All elements that could work, but again, it’s straight-up established that the ex-villains here, the people it’s leaning into the nostalgia of Dick having once counted as arch-enemies...were the no-hopers who weren’t cool enough to be worth Batman’s time. Complete with Dick solving a stock Batman-style Whodunnit? hinging on one of the most iconically awful Batman villains in Orca the Whale Woman, and flirting with a morally ambiguous acrobatic lady supervillain. If Batman and Robin established Dick can work as an A-list superhero, and the last few years of Grayson and the beginning of Nightwing demonstrated a valid and fascinating new direction for him to be spun off into, this arc felt like it was reestablishing that whoa there son, don’t be getting too big for your britches now, you’re still Officially Worse Batman. Whatever you think of the stories themselves, that’s how Nightwing has been known for over 20 years, and that’s a narrative gravity I’m not sure he can escape as long as he has that name.

And even if he could, Nightwing isn’t his main identity anyway. The entirety of pop culture can chime in on that.

Not by a mile am I suggesting he should go back to being Robin (though Arkham Knight presenting an adult Robin working alongside Batman in Tim Drake has some interesting possibilities), but it’s more than just cultural weight that keeps that as his biggest identity, even in the comics. The thing is, Nightwing as a name doesn’t mean anything. Yes, I know Superman came up with it, and that these days there’s a connection with the Court of Owls, but those are purely abstract. There was some recent thing where he said “yeah, people think I call myself Nightwing because I’m like Batman, a flying thing at night, but really it’s because of Superman’s suggestion regarding a Kryptonian fairy tale”, but citing the nerd trivia explanation can’t change that the first explanation is clearly the actual reason he’s named that. That’s all there is to it; it’s a cool-sounding name. Robin on the other hand is an obvious pairing with Batman as a brighter flying creature, and if you think of it in the context of heroism you get the obvious connection to Robin Hood. And if you want to talk about him as an equal-but-opposite contrast to Batman’s Zorro figure, comparing him to a charming hero to the people so upbeat they called his partners his Merry Men goes a long way. Hell, Dick sure knew that, given Robin’s the title he picked as a crimefighter, Nightwing being a years-distant second choice. Robin is just plain a better name and identity, as evidenced by the fact that DC’s made at least 4 others of note to fill the void...Richard left behind. Nightwing again has a cool costume, but it can never be his iconic identity in even a best-case scenario; he’s not even Batman’s partner anymore, he’s just the off-brand. Short of showing up in a massively popular and acclaimed movie with virtually none of the elements that have established him over the years as a lesser Batman figure, I’m sincerely skeptical that any amount of momentum could change that forever. In a popular sense, it’s all he’s got.

What would I do then, unless that theoretical movie comes along? I say make him co-Batman again, and totally not just because my favorite writer did that within a year of me starting to collect comics. You can still do all the fun stuff Nightwing offers with him; he can have his own city if you really want, he can smile and go on fun adventures as Fun Batman now that Bruce doesn’t do that, you could even redesign his costume to be more in line with his sleeker Nightwing look while still being recognizably Batman. He gets A-list talent by default. DC sustained two Batmen for a year as equals, so it’s certainly possible. It’s simpler to explain too - when someone asks “Wait, what happened to the first Robin?”, “Well, now he’s Batman too, and Batman’s son is his Robin” works a lot better than “He calls himself Nightwing now and is his own minor superhero. Do you remember him as an occasional guest-star from the 90s TV show? No, he was Robin for that first part, the second part. Yes, there was a second part. No, he’s not on the Teen Titans anymore either. Anyway, he protects another city that’s basically shittier Gotham where he fights a bunch of crappy villains.”

Most of all though, Dick thrives in situations that threaten to undermine him. With his and Bruce’s relationship threatening to fall apart, wondering if he can cut it as Robin after Two-Face beats him, worrying about whether he can escape the ‘shadow of the bat’, trying to hold onto his morals as an agent of SPYRAL, struggling to reform Damian, even being trapped as Slade’s apprentice. He works when forces threaten his sense of stability, and he as a fundamentally upbeat guy naturally finds having to be Batman - plus all the attendant baggage besides - the ultimate destabilizing force, far more so than basically still comfortably being Robin into adulthood. It’s a perpetual conflict generator that still allows him to do his own thing as a fun character while also positioning him as a major player - the most major player possible. And given Anthony Mackie or Sebastian Stan are probably going to become a new Captain America onscreen in the next few years, I think the public at large is going to be primed to accept the idea of there being multiple Batmen of reasonably equal importance far more easily than they could be swayed to care about the guy whose main popular trait is not being Batman.

[cbk1000]

Part two of BTS of Why Is Jenn the Way She Is What Happened In Her Childhood to Produce This??

This series began and ended with Klaroline, but more importantly, it began and ended with Caroline. Even before TO really got off its feet and horrified us all with its first wobbly preggo steps, I knew it was unlikely that Caroline would play a large role in the show. So that was my goal in the beginning: simply to transplant Caroline into TO, to explore her burgeoning relationship with Klaus, but especially to explore Caroline as the wonderfully flawed and flawless character she is. She was a perfect foil to Klaus: not just romantically, but as a way to explore immortality from a new perspective, to line them up side by side, to show that evolution in its various stages, and at its most extreme ends. Caroline was at the perfect jumping off point for a writer with a boner for tackling all the most difficult questions of immortality: young, poised between humanity and vampirism, with one foot in her old insecurities and the other in her revelations about humanity and relationships. She was fun, she was heartbreaking, she was the very bitchslap Klaus needed when he was in the midst of an unchecked tantrum. She will forever be one of the best characters I've ever had the pleasure of trying to do justice to, and I think her character arc was immense, and thank god for my unrelenting obsession with her, because I never would have found the necessary satisfaction in canon. Canon degraded, regressed, and threw her aside; I wanted to do the exact opposite. I wanted her to climb out of the tiny box of Mystic Falls; I wanted her to realize how shitty and unfulfilling and damaging her time there was; I wanted her to understand that she didn't deserve it. I wanted her to be young and confused and a little lost, but, Jesus, that's ok, you know? She has so long to  grow into herself. And I had three years to follow and document that growth, and frankly, I'm sad it's over, but I'm also proud of where she's at as a character now. As challenging as Klaus was, Caroline was equally difficult. People underestimate Caroline; she's the easy one. She's not the thousand-year-old murderous manbaby who somehow must be shaped into an actual relatable character that human readers can sympathize with.

She's not the easy one; she has so much depth and love in her. The writers underestimated her potential and trapped her in a shitty podunk town with Lieutenant Colonel of the Shitheel Fuckboy Brigade (I cannot emphasize enough how much I hate Stefan), and I could never let that fucking stand, so in reality, even if TO had realized all our most fantastic headcanons, I'd have still shit out a War and Peace-sized brick about why Caroline Forbes is objectively The Best and if you disagree you are wrong.

But most of all, this series was about the Originals and my obviously unhealthy and persistent obsession with them. This is what the goddamn show was supposed to be about: one thousand years of disturbing murder angst. They had the opportunity to examine these characters from various different historical perspectives, to really dig down into the deranged but seemingly unbreakable bonds between some fucked-up but fascinating individuals, and, well, you know what we all got instead. And I was so salty about it that I wrote over half a million words of weird murder fic.  And it was challenging and time-consuming and really, really exhausting sometimes trying to balance all these various different perspectives, to write Rebekah as a terrible bitch who is still somehow heartbreaking, and Klaus as a nearly irredeemable shithead, and Kol my little creepy murder Peter Pan. I spent weeks and often months researching the flashbacks. Random lines and scenes would wake me up in the middle of the night. I neglected Mr. Jenn. (Ask him about how I shut myself up in our bedroom like a hobo and issue strict orders that I am to be disturbed only if the house is on fire, and even then he better have tried everything to put that fucker out before jarring me out of a writing trance.) I poured everything I knew, every skill I had into trying to bring them to life, to understand them, to sympathize with them, to explore their relationships with each other, with history, with humanity in general.

And speaking of relationships...

We come to the other elephant in the room. That cardinal sin, the realm of aqua-haired Mary Sues, the dreaded OC. Poor Tim, precious murder child to some, unsympathetic narrative usurper to others. Tim was never intended to be anything more than a recurring background character who would emphasize just how fucking old these people are. Here's an acquaintance from literally a hundred years ago, just chilling in the same pink-cheeked pretty boy face he had in 1915, because has anyone mentioned how old all these fuckers are? And then I thought, you know what, I wanna' see Klaus turn and mentor someone. I want to see him manipulate and corrupt someone for the sheer joy of it. I want to show what Caroline is really getting into; I want to show all the darkest bits of him. I want everyone to know that this guy doesn't always have a plan; it's not always a scheme. Sometimes, he's just bored and he wants to ruin someone.

And then I sort of started feeling sorry for the poor bastard, because really, he seemed like a nice enough kid, polite, sexually confused in a time period when exploring that confusion would literally get you jailed. Not a slick British guy with dimples and a pun for all seasons; someone painfully awkward, someone with a deep and abiding kindness, no matter what. And then, well, he and Kol started banging, only I made the mistake of developing a friendship first, and there was this oooooohhhh noooooo falling sensation and I realized for better or worse this ship was sailing, and that I had better develop him as an individual outside of their relationship, so here we are, two years later, tap dancing and weird porn and all. He was supposed to be killed off, first before I bothered to delve into him, and later when he was bitten by the werewolves. But I didn't want to write in a shock death, I didn't want to kill him just because I knew some readers really liked him, and I kept coming back to something my sister said to me, which was that gay guys never get the happy ending. And that's true. I've watched a fair amount of LGBT films, and in almost all of them, someone leaves or dies or contracts AIDS, and we all learn a valuable lesson about the dangers of Being Gay. Happy endings are for heteros. That bothered me. A lot. Kol was always going to leave--that was always going to be his ending. But I was much hazier so far as Tim was concerned. I kept coming back to what she said, over and over again. Like, you know what, yeah--yeah. Men aren't supposed to end up together. That's what every movie has taught me. We can maybe excuse women for it, but that's not what Manly Men do. They need to be punished for even trying. So I threw them into the sunset and screamed, "Run, you fuckers!!" and now they're somewhere on a beach, doing it.

This is already too long (story of my life), so I'll just wind it up with this: I'm not a popular writer, and I've wrestled with that over years of posting fanfiction, and I wrestled with it while posting this series, especially as the shows began to jettison their audiences and that began to be reflected in review numbers. You wonder, if it's you, if it's the show. You wonder if anyone is listening. So for everyone who followed this series from the very beginning, who joined up later, for everyone who is still inexplicably here, for even those of you who aren't: thank you. Thank you to those who messaged me, who reviewed, thank you to those who followed silently along, lurking bashfully in my hit numbers. Thank you to everyone who encouraged me, thank you to everyone who talked me through some rough scenes, and some rough feelings. I never really had any faith that I would finish this in a way that satisfied myself or my readers; it was too big a project, too ambitious, too far beyond my abilities. And yet here we are, and you know what? I feel pretty good about it. (Gross but-what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life-now??? sobbing aside.)