#esp when them being bad at their jobs is costing innocent people their lives

[hatake]

ppl on here really calling palestine protestors "hecklers" at rallies

[atdamnbraina]

topic...  (  my  portrayal  /  reasoning  of  raven’s  behavior  in  s6  /  s7  &&  some  things  i  would  like  to  be  done  better  ); 

season five

starting  off  at  the  end  of  s5,  raven  and  shaw  were  turned  in  to  mccreary’s  crew  by  clarke  and  they  were  tortured.   but  most  importantly  mccreary  was  threatening  to  cut  shaw’s  legs  off,  because  he  was  a  pilot  and didn’t  need  his  legs  to  fly,  in  front  of  raven   ( if  i  remember  correctly ).   that  was  very  hard  for  her  because while  shaw  may  have  not  been  a  person  she  loved,  she  had  started  to  care  about  him  and  now  they  were  threatening  him  with  something  that  raven  had  experienced.  she  knew  what  it  was  like  to  lose  the  mobility  of  your  legs  and  it  was  something  she  wouldn’t  let  happen  to  shaw.   so  by  the  end  of  s5,  raven  is  very  mad  at  clarke  for  turning  on  them  because  it  could  have  left  shaw  disabled. 

season 6

going  over  to  s6  raven  wakes  up  to  see  a  goodbye  video  of  two  people  who  she  considers  family.  it  hits  her  hard,  to  lose  people  she  care  about  very  much.    but  at  the  same  time  she  saw  the  happy,  she  saw  them  in  peace.    i don’t  know  about  you,  but  spending  a  lifetime  with  someone  you  love  sounds  pretty  damn  good  to  me.     it does  seem  good  to  raven  and  maybe  this  time she’ll  get  it  until  they  get  to  sanctum  only  to  find  shaw  dead.   she  breaks  at  that,  more  than  she  shows.   raven  becomes  tired  of  all  the  torturing,  the  killing,  losing  people  she  cares  about  but  she  never  handles  her  emotions  well.   

so  when  they  find  the  others,  she  does  what  she  does  best  when  she’s  hurt.   turn  her  emotions  to  anger  towards  clarke  for  turning  on  them  in  s5,  to  abby  for  hurting  her  and  for  hurting  herself  with  the  pills,  to  ryker  for  travelling  across  the  universe  only  to  find  another  planet  where  they  kill  innocent  people  to  survive.    jasper’s  and  later  monty’s  words  stick  to  her  by  that  point.   they’ve  both  been  her  friends  and  she  realizes  that  they’ve  been  right.   and  that   they  should  do  better.    everytime  you  do  something  bad,  you  say  you’re  sorry  and  then  you  do  it  again.    the  cycle  keeps  going  over  and  over  again  without  stopping ,  no  matter  where  they  are.

however,  she  doesn’t  express  that  in  the  same  way  that  monty  did ,   instead  she’s  more  judgmental  towards  others  in  her  attempt  to  make  them  do  better  resulting  in  having  a  rift  in  her  relationships  rather  than  advocating  for  them  to  do  better.   a  small  part  of  her  does  this  intentionally,  because  firstly  she  lost monty & harper and later shaw,  they  thought  clarke  died  and  eventually  towards  the  end  abby  died.   that’s  four  people  that  raven ( & others )  lost  and  she’s  putting  up  walls  again  and  pushing  them  away  because  she  can’t  handle  the  grief,  anymore. 

jroth  moved  the  role  of  people  advocating / being  tired  of  the  violence  from  jasper  to  monty  to  raven,  which  could  have  been  done  some  much  better  if  after  raven  acted  like  this,  they  also  had  a  taken  her  in  the  direction  of  admiting  that  she’s  tired  of  losing  people  and  she  wants  this  violence  to  stop.  it  would  be  perfectly  understandable  in  s5  if  that  had  happened  with  raven  and  any  member  of  the  spacekru  /  or  even  abby  when  they  started  to  ment  their  relationship.   raven  is  a  great  choice  to  pass  this  trope  onto  for  the  later  seasons  because  firstly  she  had  spent  a  lot  of  time  with  jasper  during  s3/s4  when  he  was  tired  of  the  violence.   she  was  the  first  ( besides  monty )  to  be  with  jasper  while  he  grieved,  while  he  searched  for  something  more  than  violence  and  her  storyline  in  s6/s7  could  have  mirrored  that  ( esp  considering  raven  is  again  in  a place  of  grieving ).  also  with  monty  it  could  have  made  sense  on  the  matter  of  they  probably  spent  a  lot  of  time  together  in  the  ring  and  figuring  out  stuff  together.   she  could  have  definetely  kept  the  be  the  good  guys   part  of  his  goodbye  in  her  attempt  of  honoring  him. 

note:  raven  ( like  the  rest  of  spacekru )  spent  6  years  in  peace  and  by  the  moment  she  went  aboard  the  eligius  ship  to  get  everyone  back  on  earth ,   she  got  tortured  multiple  times  in  that  season.   so  it’s  very  understandable  that  she  doesn’t  want  to  fight and  hurt  in  the  rest  seasons. 

season seven

now  onto  s7,  they’re  in  a  place  were  peace  could  be  close  if  they  all  make  it  work.    raven  is  back  on  a  place  of  getting  things  done.  it’s  easy  and  she  knows  what  to  do.  but  the  reactor  suddenly  malfuctions  and  in  the  span  of  a day  she  has  to  make  a  decision  that  costs  four  innocent  lives.    up  until  that  point  she’s  done  questionable  things  but  she  hasn’t  killed  anyone  that  wasn’t  considered  their  enemy  and  threatened  her  life.    she  was  in  a  similar  spot  in  s4  were  she  denied  the  medicine  to  heal  the  radiation  poisoning  of  the  child  from  floukru  but  by  murphy  stealing  that  medicine,  it  confirmed  that  she  was  right.   whether  or  not  she’d  taken  the  medicine,  the  child  would  die.   now  hatch  and  his  people  were  killed  by  her.   the  reactor  would  have  killed  them  anyway  if  they  hand’t  fixed  it  but  as  she  said  in  the  last  episode,  she  could’ve  done  the  job  herself.   she  really  thought  in  the  beginning that  they’d  just  be  sick  for  a  few  days,  so  she  didn’t  risk  herself  and  decided  that  it  would  be  best  to  monitor  and  help  emori  from  the  chamber.  by  the  time  emori  had  gotten  back  and  she  could  do  fix the  pipes,  she  now  knew  that  going  in  would  be  a  suicide  mission.  raven  has  always  risked  her  life  to  save  others  but  she  never  had  a  death  wish  and  she  wanted  to  stay  alive. 

that’s  what  completely  broke  her  in  s7.   she’s  wants  to  do  better  since  the  moment  they  stepped  on  sanctum.   it’s  why  she  makes  sure  jordan  undestands  that  her  killing  those  disciples  was  wrong.   he’s  the  new  blood  of  their  people  and  she  wants  him  to  learn  to  do  better  than  killing  the  enemy  and  that’s a  big  difference  from  raven  in s1-s5.   she  never  hesitated  to  harm  the  enemy  if  it  meant  saving  the  people  she  loves.   but  now  when  she  was  forced  even  in  relative  peace  to  kill  innocent  people,  she  breaks.   raven  didn’t  want  to  harm  hatch,  she  just  tried  to  protect  herself  and  she  hates  herself  for  that.   she  saw  herself  in  nikki  who  was  angry  and  hurt  and  attacked  raven  because  in  her  spot  she’d  have  done  the  same.   in  that  moment,  she  didn’t  realize  that  these  kind  of  decisions  are  hard,  she  didn’t  understand  clarke.   instead  she  realized  that  exactly  how  this  cycle  of  violence  is  so  fundamentally  wrong  and  saving  their  own  people  doesn’t  justify  it ,   because  the  people  they  kill  also  have  loved  ones.   and  the  cycle  keeps  going  and  hurting  more  and  more  people.  where  does  it  end ?

conclusion

what  i  really  want  to  see  is  exactly  this  notion  being  said  by  raven.   i  would  have  loved  for  raven  to  speak  more  about  it  instead  of  having  her  judge  everyone  in  season 6  although  she  had  her  reasons  and  it  was  her  defense  mechanism.   she  tried  with  murphy,  telling  him  to  chose  morality  over  immortality  and  it  was  a   good  start  but  then  they  had  her  focused  on  getting  shiedheda  out  of  madi  instead  of  speaking  about  it.   i  think  the  biggest  problem  is  that  t100  has  too  many  storylines  going  on  and  in  result  with  the  limited  screentime  they  are  half  done.   instead  raven’s  storyline  would  have  made  more  sense  if  she  had  time  to  speak  with  more  people  about  this.   instead  she  spent  more  time  with  ryker  for  no  reason  instead  of  being  a  part  of  the  rest,  and  speaking  with  bellamy,  for  example,  about  it  who  also  wanted  to  do  better  here.  another  thing  is  that  they  keep  isolating  characters  with  the  different  storylines  and  it  doesn’t  help.   but  generally  i  think  that  raven  should  have  approached  this  storyline   in  her  own  way.   she  has  lost  so  many  people  throughout  the  series  and  she  can  speak  about  wanting  that  to  stop.   everyone  would  understand  why  raven  is  tired  of  them  losing  people  or  hurting  people  because  she  knows  first  hand  how  it’s  like  to  lose  those  close  to  you.   this  way  it  would  have  mirrored  jasper’s  storyline  but  still  be  a  bit  differently  because  jasper  was  tired  of  fighting  /  of  hurting  in  general  while  raven  doesn’t  want  to  give  up  she  just  wants  them  to  do  better.   and  it  would  have  been  different  from  monty  who  found  peace  in  harper  and  wanted  them  to  live  a  better  life  together  and  raise  their  family  in  a  better  world.    raven  doesn’t  have  that  stability  but  she  wants  to  be  able  to  find  it ,   to  live  in  peace  for  once  in  her  life,   and  because  that  has  elements  from  both  jasper  and  monty  could  have  made  this  storyline  so  much  better  and  so  much  more  interesting. 

[jcmorgenstern]

@superohclair oh god okay please know these are all just incoherent ramblings so like, idk, please feel free to add on or ignore me if im just wildly off base but this is a bad summary of what ive been thinking about and also my first titans/batman meta?? (also, hi!)

okay so for the disclaimer round: I am not an actual cultural studies major, nor do I have an extensive background in looking at the police/military industrial complex in media. also my comics knowledge is pretty shaky and im a big noob(I recently got into titans, and before that was pretty ignorant of the dceu besides batman) so I’ll kind of focus in on the show and stuff im more familiar with and apologize in advance?. basically im just a semi-educated idiot with Opinions, anyone with more knowledge/expertise please jump in! this is literally just the bullshit I spat out incoherently off the top of my head. did i mention im a comics noob? because im a comics noob.

so on a general level, I think we can all agree that batman as a cultural force is somewhat on the conservative side, if not simply due to its age and commercial positioning in American culture. there are a lot of challenges and nuances to that and it’s definitely expanding and changing as DC tries to position itself in the way that will...make the most money, but all you have to do is take a gander through the different iterations of the stories in the comics and it’ll smack you in the fucking face. like compare the first iteration of Jason keeping kids out of drugs to the titans version and you’ve got to at least chuckle. at the end of the day, this is a story about a (white male) billionaire who fights crime.

to be fair, I’d argue the romanticization of the police isn’t as aggressive as it could be—they are most often presented as corrupt and incompetent. However, considering the main cop characters depicted like Jim Gordon, the guys in Gotham (it’s been a while since I saw it, sorry) are often the romanticized “good few” (and often or almost always white cis/het men), that’s on pretty shaky ground. I don’t have the background in the comics strong enough to make specific arguments, so I’ll cede the point to someone who does and disagrees, but having recently watched a show that deals excellently with police incompetence, racism, and brutality (7 Seconds on Netflix), I feel at the very least something is deeply missing. like, analysis of race wrt police brutality in any aspect at all whatsoever.

I think it can be compellingly read that batman does heavily play into the military/police industrial complex due to its takes on violence—just play the Arkham games for more than an hour and you’ll know what I mean. to be a little less vague, even though batman as a franchise valorizes “psychiatric treatment” and “nonviolence,” the entire game seems pretty aware it characterizes treatment as a madhouse and nonviolence as breaking someone’s back or neck magically without killing them because you’re a “good guy.” while it is definitely subversive that the franchise even considers these elements at all, they don’t always do a fantastic job living up to them.

and then when you consider the fetishization of tools of violence both in canon and in the fandom, it gets worse. same with prisons—if anything it dehumanizes people in prisons even more than like, cop shows in general, which is pretty impressive(ly bad). like there’s just no nuance afforded and arkham is generally glamorized. the fact that one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, I will admit, does not help. im not really sure how to mitigate that when, again, one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, but I think my point still stands. fuck you, killer croc. (im just kidding unfuck him or whatever)

not to take this on a Jason Todd tangent but I was thinking about it this afternoon and again when thinking about that cop scene again and in many ways he does serve as a challenge to both batman’s ideology as well as the ideology of the franchise in general. his depiction is always a bit of a sticking point and it’s always fascinating to me to see how any given adaptation handles it. like Jason’s “”street”” origin has become inseparable from his characterization as an angry, brash, violent kid, and that in itself reflects a whole host of cultural stereotypes that I might argue occasionally/often dip into racialized tropes (like just imagine if he wasn’t white, ok). red hood (a play on robin hood and the outlaws, as I just realized...today) is in my exposure/experience mostly depicted as a villain, but he challenges batman’s no-kill philosophy both on an ethical and practical level. every time the joker escapes he kills a whole score more of innocent people, let alone the other rogues—is it truly ethical to let him live or avoid killing him for the cost of one life and let others die?

moreover, batman’s ““blind”” faith in the justice system (prisons, publicly-funded asylum prisons, courts) is conveniently elided—the story usually ends when he drops bad guy of the day off at arkham or ties up the bad guys and lets the police come etc etc. part of this is obviously bc car chases are more cinematic than dry court procedurals, but there is an alternate universe where bruce wayne never becomes batman and instead advocates for the arkham warden to be replaced with someone competent and the system overhauled, or in programs encouraging a more diverse and educated police force, or even into social welfare programs. (I am vaguely aware this is sometimes/often part of canon, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s the main focus. and again, I get it’s not nearly as cinematic).

overall, I think the most frustrating thing about the batman franchise or at least what I’ve seen or read of it is that while it does attempt to deal with corruption and injustice at all levels of the criminal justice system/government, it does so either by treating it as “just how life is” or having Dick or Jim Gordon or whoever the fuckjust wipe it out by “eliminating the dirty cops,” completely ignoring the non-fantasy ways these problems are dealt with in real life. it just isn’t realistic. instead of putting restrictions on police violence or educating cops on how to use their weapons or putting work into eradicating the culture of racism and prejudice or god basically anything it’s just all cinematized into the “good few” triumphing over the bad...somehow. its always unsatisfying and ultimately feels like lip service to me, personally.

this also dovetails with the very frustrating way mental health/”insanity” or “madness” is dealt with in canon, very typical of mainstream fiction. like for example:“madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.” yikes, if by ‘push’ you mean significant life stressors, genetic load, and environemntal influences,  then sure. challenge any dudebro joker fanboy to explain exactly what combination of DSM disorders the joker has to explain his “””insanity””” and see what happens. (these are, in fact, my plans for this Friday evening. im a hit at parties).

anyway I do really want to wax poetic about that cop scene in 1x06 so im gonna do just that! honestly when I first saw that I immediately sat up like I’d sat on a fucking tack, my cultural studies senses were tingling. the whole “fuck batman” ethos of the show had already been interesting to me, esp in s1, when bruce was basically standing in for the baby boomers and dick being our millennial/GenX hero. I do think dick was explicitly intended to appeal to a millennial audience and embody the millennial ethos. By that logic, the tension between dick and Jason immediately struck me as allegorical (Jason constantly commenting on dick being old, outdated, using slang dick doesn’t understand and generally being full of youthful obnoxious fistbumping energy).

Even if subconsciously on the part of the writers, jason’s over-aggressive energy can be read as a commentary on genZ—seen by mainstream millennial/GenX audiences as taking things too far. Like, the cops in 1x06 could have been Nick Zucco’s hired men or idk pretty much anyone, yet they explicitly chose cops and even had Jason explain why he deliberately went after them for being cops so dick (cop) could judge him for it. his rationale? he was beaten up by cops on the street, so he’s returning the favor. he doesn’t have the focused “righteous” rage of batman or dick/nightwing towards valid targets, he just has rage at the world and specifically the system—framed here as unacceptable or fanatical. as if like, dressing up like a bat and punching people at night is, um, totally normal and uncontroversial.

on a slightly wider scope, the show seems to internally struggle with its own progressive ethos—on the one hand, they hire the wildly talented chellah man, but on the other hand they will likely kill him off soon. or they cast anna diop, drawing wrath from the loudly racist underbelly of fandom, but sideline her. perhaps it’s a genuine struggle, perhaps they simply don’t want to alienate the bigots in the fanbase, but the issue of cops stuck out to me when I was watching as an social issue where they explicitly came down on one side over the other. jason’s characterization is, I admit and appreciate, still nuanced, but I’d argue that’s literally just bc he’s a white guy and a fan favorite. cast an actor of color as Jason and see how fast fandom and the writer’s room turns on him.

anyway i don’t really have the place to speak about what an explicitly nonwhite!cop!dick grayson would look like, but I do think it would be a fascinating and exciting place to start in exploring and correcting the kind of vague and nebulous complaints i raise above. (edit: i should have made more clear, i mean in the show, which hasn’t dealt with dick’s heritage afaik). also, there’s something to be said about the cop vs detective thing but I don’t really have the brain juice or expertise to say it? anyway if you got this far i hope it was at least interesting and again pls jump in id love to hear other people’s takes!!

tldr i took two (2) cultural studies classes and have Opinions