#but it's delicious food for thought in a ''if the nee 52 never happened'' kind of space

[weekend-conspiracy-theorist]

a fanfiction I read the other day (this one, it was very fun) jokingly mentioned the concept of tim drake taking on the legacy of cassandra cain's black bat mantle, and I literally have not stopped thinking about it since.

I mean, it's a fun concept for tim, he's doing a bunch of soul searching and whatever right now in canon (handwave the continuities, DC certainly is), and if he was going to take on a legacy mantle, black bat's literally only been cass's mantle and it doesn't have Baggage™ the way another title might. and okay, we don't see a lot of cass as black bat, because that era of canon ended very quickly when she got erased in the new 52, and the creative direction within the batfamily books at the time was fundamentally uninterested in using her in any meaningful manner, BUT. given everything that happened with deathstroke and the evil cass era, it doesn't feel like a stretch to interpolate some points and say that black bat was explicitly a way for cass to redefine and rediscover herself; her own bit of soul searching, and that dovetails quite nicely with what's going on with tim. I also think it'd be nice for him to get given a legacy instead of chosing to take it on, too. so that's great.

but all day today all I can think about is what it would mean to cassandra. when she gave up batgirl, I imagine that she could have been heading towards making that decision regardless (again, what with everything that had happened to her, it's not hard to think she may have felt like that identity no longer fit quite right), and I even think that she probably would have chosen stephanie as her successor one way or another. but she didn't actually decide to stop being batgirl on her own schedule, and she didn't choose who was going to follow in her footsteps--bruce did. and cassandra has always looked up to bruce in a way that obviously she wasn't going to buck his "dying" instructions to her. so sooner than she was comfortable with, and with the next batgirl already chosen for her, she felt pressured to give it up. and that had to have stung.

and so I'm thinking about cass having the opportunity to organically step upwards and outwards from one of her identities (in order to become batman. let us be clear.), and I'm thinking about how wonderful it would be for her to get the chance to offer her costume to someone of her own free will. as mentioned above, tim makes sense for black bat thematically, and I also think that it'd be really lovely for them on a personal level, because tim was cass's robin, and she was his batgirl. and now she could choose to tie them together again, through a quite literal symbol, as batman and black bat.

plus, tim spent years wearing his big brother's old clothes--why not his big sister's for a change?