#fifteen years ago in scans_daily when people argued “that bitch should stay dead” with me

[ladyloveandjustice]

so like I saw this entire argument for the first time when someone reblogged this post a few weeks ago, and was like "well it was two years ago, it's cleary a reach but i'm not that invested, they clearly just REALLY want to yell about this issue of Batgirl rather than go with the most obvious interpretation that was clearly intended, whatever, it's fine" (If they had Jordanna bring up "are you poor" after Steph talked about "her own issues" it is supposed to imply she was poor, whether Steph answers or not (and why would she answer that), otherwise why would the comic bring it up, it's not deep)

but then i was looking at one of my old amvs and

Stephanie's house looks kind of rough there. Yet this was a flashback? No earthquake?

man looks rough there too and this was way before the earthquake. weird that doing-well middle class people wouldn't repair a cracked wall and window.

As I said, that there are plenty of other comics that show Stephanie's house looking run down, this is exhibit A that I just happened to run across. I didn't really have the energy to actually look but turns out I didn't have to.

Steph's dad put the family in a financial hole. That is stated in this very comic. "Using all their money" every time he comes back means a bunch of stuff will pile up and you have to dig yourself out of it. Including the house being in disrepair. In-universe, it's only been like what, a year? less? since the last time he did that in most comics she's in. People don't just automatically recover from that. And that was most of Steph's childhood, Arthur doing that. This is a comic where "we have financial issues" is directly bought up. Steph's Mom likely has very little savings.

That's all I say. Comics are inconsistent. The writers are not as thoughtful about finances as the fans sometimes. It's often hard to nail down a single interpretation. But people think Steph has financial issues because there's more than one comic where her house looks rough, because it's directly stated, it's not out of nowhere.

Like I said, not super invested, I'm not going to say else anything past this post. Steph isn't obviously in danger of being thrown out on the streets, there's miles of difference between her and someone who was literally homeless like Jason, but "struggling" isn't a reach. It's been accepted as a fact for 15 years, since the first time I got into comics, with every fan I talked to, and this is the first time I've seen it so hotly contested, even by people who were following my series of scans on scans_daily (liking it or disliking it), having bits from almost every comic Steph was in right in front of them.

(OH. oh. You don't like Stephanie. that explains the amount of passion here that was confusing for me, I didn't understand why it seemed you were so invested in refuting this. it's like a moral thing now whether she's poor? or a 'financially-concious middle class white girl" is that why white was bought up despite not being relevant to the current conversation about finances? or something? idk what's going on in fandom anymore. anyway.)

If you ever have the time/interest, would you break down the canon surrounding Stephanie’s economic circumstances/home life? It seems like a lot of people have chosen to take it a specific way so I’d love to see your reasoning

Sure. Thanks for asking, it’s honestly a fun topic.

Y’know it’s funny—I actually happen to own something that I think most people, even most Steph fans, haven’t seen: Steph’s first appearance. Not her Robin first appearance, her Detective Comics first appearance, her actual introduction. I happened to pick them up by accident at a con a few years ago because they’re also some of Tim’s first cover appearances. 

Other people might disagree with me on this, but I like to go back to the characters’ origins whenever I can to find the baseline of what they were originally intended to be and try to bring later interpretations in line with that. I like to think of retcons as new revelations, new plot twists in an ongoing story, and not a way to reset aspects of the past just to fit your story. It works especially well for this because Steph’s socio-economic status doesn’t actually change, there’s just kind of a game of telephone that happens across the decades that leads people to misunderstand. 

One thing worth noting in these early issues is just how much Steph, a 16-year-old girl, has at her disposal before she ever even glimpses Batman and Robin. Literally the first shot we ever see of the Spoiler is this: 

And because I am, in fact, that kind of nerd, I have gone in a couple of times and dug out old era-appropriate electronics magazines to figure out what that piece of equipment would cost you in 1992. Baseline for a parabolic microphone is $600, and that price is for much larger, more delicate pieces of equipment meant to be used for like, outdoor nature shoots, which wouldn’t be able to hear through glass. Steph probably dropped $1,000 on that microphone alone. 

Remember also that her costume is homemade—she doesn’t have any other way of getting it. She’s also shown using some pretty elaborate climbing and painting gear, with no indication that they were stolen or borrowed or anything, and you can see that she’s got a pretty well-stocked utility belt there.

Again, for some reason people tend to forget or overlook this but, right up until she demanded Bruce make her Robin, Steph operated as Spoiler with zero Bat support. She got some hand-to-hand training from Cass late in the game and tagged along on some of Tim’s assignments, but was otherwise being actively discouraged from vigilantism for most of her career. She made her own costume, bought her own equipment, and maintained her own motorcycle, all without the financial support of either Batman or her parents. 

So right off the bat we know she’s a teenage girl with a not-insignificant amount of personal disposable income, the only hinted source of which is the implication she works a part-time job somewhere—which I don’t think is ever brought up again when she reappears in Robin. 

We all know minimum wage went further in 1992 than it does now, but it didn’t go that much further. So it’s reasonable to assume that Steph has access to at least some money from her parents to support her vigilante habit, whether that’s in the form of an allowance, gifts that she carefully manages between Christmas and birthdays, or money that she’s able to just, take from Crystal without her noticing. 

But this page is more important to our current interests because it’s also when we see Steph’s neighborhood for the first time. We’re told here that Steph and her mother (who is called Mrs. Agnes Bellinger in this comic, although it’s possible she was using a fake name to visit her ex in prison) live in what is described as “115 South Holden Street, in Manchester.” 

Now keep in mind, the Gotham City map can be extremely fluid and tends to change depending on the needs of the story. But there have been attempts to map it, and “Manchester” has never been on any of those maps, so we have to do some extrapolation. At the very least, we can tell the neighborhood is clearly not in the city, given the very deliberate angle there in the first panel to show that they’re well away from the crowded downtown Gotham skyline.

This implies that Manchester is intended to be one of the mainland suburbs that feeds the island city of Gotham, similar to Bristol Township where the Wayne and Drake Manors are located. It’s not nearly as nice a neighborhood as Bristol—note the fenced-in front lawns, the broken shutters on the neighboring houses, and the vaguely racist lawn ornament on the Brown’s property—but it’s also not some rundown slum. People aren’t afraid to let kids play in their front yards or leave their garage doors standing open. And you’ll note those aren’t trailers, either, they’re decently-sized suburban homes.

Also worth noting: Crystal seems to keep this house perfectly fine on her own as a single mother. Arthur doesn’t live with them; when he’s shown having residences it tends to be apartments in the city by himself, and it’s not like he could support them from prison or with his ill-gotten criminal gains. And yet, we don’t see Steph or Crystal worrying at all about bills or mortgages or anything like that throughout any of their appearances. We see the interior of their house on several occasions and, while it’s often messy, it’s not in disrepair or neglect.

This is a constant portrayal throughout all of Steph’s appearances, from Robin through even her run as Batgirl. So, with that in mind, where does the idea that Steph is poor come from? Well, I’ve got a couple of theories.

One is the usual comics fandom problem: canon is huge, nobody can keep up with all of it, and some people go out of their way to be assholes about it, so misinformation gets spread like wildfire, in no small part because Steph is a character that a lot of people use as a self-insert and therefore she must be the misunderstood underdog in all things.

But on the more-interesting-to-talk-about front… I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Steph’s first big storyline was her pregnancy. Yeah? Like, it’s the first story involving her that really started getting critical attention. Whether it deserves that attention is more open to debate—personally, since reading Icon & Rocket for the first time, I’ve come to view it as Dixon pulling the comic book equivalent of white guys repackaging black music and watering it down—but the important thing right now is that it’s the first time people would’ve been specifically reading the Robin comics for Stephanie Brown. And in those comics, Steph’s house is shown as visibly run-down, covered in cracks and disrepair.

Thing is, there’s a context that people miss if you’re reading for the baby storyline and nothing else: this storyline plays out over the last days of “Aftershock” and early months of “No Man’s Land,” the storyline where Gotham is racked by a destructive earthquake that nearly levels the city and is abandoned by the federal government.

Again, we get the reinforced confirmation that Steph’s house isn’t actually in Gotham because it’s not destroyed in the quake—the neighborhood is damaged and briefly evacuated due to a gas line rupture in the immediate aftermath, but once that’s cleared up they’re free to return home, and their suburb is not part of the federal government’s evacuation. Nearly every building in Gotham is shown with similar damage during this time, including Drake Manor. 

This storyline also plays into, I think, the stereotypes that people jump on when it comes to Steph’s socioeconomic status. Like I’ve mentioned before: Arthur is a criminal, Crystal is a drug addict, and Steph is a teen mom. Therefore, they must be poor, right? Because good middle class families supposedly don’t have those kinds of problems.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s an inaccurate stereotype that ignores reality: plenty of drug addicts, criminals and teen moms live in the suburbs. And the Browns’ specific circumstances are distinctly atypical of the stereotype—Arthur’s not some down-on-his-luck thief pushed to crime by economic hardship, he’s an arrogant former gameshow host who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and resents the world for not handing him the success he feels entitled to. Crystal’s not some crack addict, she’s a working nurse who used to get her doctor friends to write her scripts for prescription painkillers. And Steph is just a teenage girl who slept with a boy and got pregnant, with the costs of prenatal care and/or childrearing never seeming to be a factor in her decision to bring the child to term and give it up for adoption. 

I could go on but that’s pretty much the long and short of it: Steph is simply not shown as being poor in the comics. Ever. She’s not rich, she does clearly rely on her fists much more than any gadgets or fancy gear and lives with her mother rather than moving out on her own for college, but she’s also never shown worrying about student loans and can apparently pay for all her classes with some government assistance and a part-time job alone.

People just assume that she’s poor because they’re misinformed, or they’re projecting, or they’ve got biases they haven’t examined, or they need her to be an underdog to justify their argument against one of the other characters, or they really want her to be buddy-buds with Jason for some reason. 

Or, y’know, they just don’t want to acknowledge that they’re rooting for a middle-class white girl from the suburbs who commutes into the inner city to pick fights for fun.