#i think this could be a solo Tim adventure tbh | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whetstonefires · 5 years ago

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Hey so random ask but, I see a lot of people calling Tim drake sexist, I personally don't think he is but what are your thoughts on that.

Oof. Okay.

Technically I can’t just say he’s not, because as the product of a sexist society he, like any other dude and to a lesser extent any person, has got some passive sexist attitudes baked in there.

It tends to surface in things like, when he went on that first big solo adventure when the Robin comic launched, that started in Paris? And he wound up hunting King Snake with Lady Shiva and this one rogue federal agent, a black man, and he got very decisive. Shiva says something cutting about white men, and she has a point, in that if either of his adult companions of the moment were also white men Tim would probably have been somewhat more conscious of the fact that he was thirteen.

That unconscious prioritization that DC’s sexist narrative tends to favor? That is sexism, and also racism, and it’s valuable to draw attention to it, though not, I feel, to blame it all on Tim because quite often he hasn’t actually done anything, the universe around him has just colluded to make him look good.

(Of course this doesn’t happen much anymore, but back when he was the Main Character it did. Comics is a sexist community in a sexist culture, so of course Tim got some of that muck on him.)

But most of the accusations you see going around are about tearing him down on Steph’s behalf, and that’s...murkier.

Because honestly Tim is less sexist than most of the men in his profession. Significantly less so than Bruce or Dick. I literally cannot imagine Tim talking about a loved one the way Dick used to talk about Kori, or a new acquaintance the way Dick did a lot of the one-episode women from his ‘90s Nightwing solo series. He wasn’t bad to them exactly, he was honestly very normal and probably above average, but the incredible, controlling arrogance and casual sexualization is still hard to get through, sometimes. Almost more so for how much more it comes out when he’s talking behind their backs. And Bruce...well, Bruce and gender is an entire deal I’m not going to try to unpack here.

And I cannot see Tim ever using ‘girl’ as an insult, the way Damian does.

Tim’s interactions with the ladies on Young Justice, for example, tended to be a lot less emphatically gendered than Dick’s interactions with the ladies of the Teen Titans, or even Bruce’s in the Justice League, though there are fewer women there and less casual interaction.

And to a considerable extent this was because the passage of ten years had modernized writing norms, and to a considerable extent this was because his demographic was younger than the Titans and therefore less sexualization was expected of the writers. Young Justice built on some stuff Marvel had been doing with young teams and broke some ground that Marvel has built on even further lately. (Seriously what is with Marvel’s young team books lately they’re incredible.) But there was also that Tim as an individual cares less about gender than most of his family.

(In some ways Jason may care even less, but he also leans really hard into performative masculinity and thought flirting was a reasonable way to interact with older women as a teenager, and he’s been being written by Scott Lobdell for ten years even if I have a hard time thinking of that as canon, so his data is mixed.)

Or take the case of this young freedom fighter (/terrorist) who happens to wear Robin colors, who Tim meets at one point in Europe. Dava. The story creates situations where Tim gets a weird mind-altering stimulant transferred orally to him by Dava, and then from him to Shiva when he’s giving her CPR, and Tim rather notably doesn’t have a single narration box or speech bubble that treats these as ‘kisses’ that he has somehow benefited from obtaining.

Later he crawl-drags Dava’s knocked-out-by-Shiva body out of the middle of the bloodbath Shiva is now staging, because he’s in no state to do anything to stop it, which he hates, and while this is certainly the comic arranging things to put Dava in a damsel status relative to Tim, Tim does not at any point frame it that way.

He is really good about not disrespecting Dava, honestly. It’s an interesting storyline partly for that reason, though it’s not the only time it comes up.

Tim was constantly meeting Troubled Young Women who could kick his ass and whom he respected considerably in most senses, but whom he was able to convince that their particular approach to violence was somehow flawed and needed to be re-thought. Thereby allowing there to be Strong Female Characters but keep the balance of the world in order and not worry the readership, by placing the male lead in a subtle power position even if he had gotten his ass kicked.

It was like. An entire genre. Tied to the way Shiva kept popping in as Incredibly Terrifying Supporting Cast.

This was a major way DC was using female characters in and immediately after the 90s and tbh in some ways it was more progressive than what they tend to do now, even as certain parts of the framing set my teeth on edge.

(Compare ‘Tim on drugs manages to hit Shiva hard enough to take her down because she didn’t expect lethal force from him so he has to do CPR’ to the more recent Red Robin story where we spend a couple of pages with him laying out to her face how she came to town to fulfill a contract on him but he brilliantly out-thought her and she ate the drugged chocolates he sent her so He Wins. Bleh.)

Steph stands out for hanging around instead of being a one-off appearance, and for not really rethinking her life in response to Tim much at all, while also not being a villain.

The crux of the issue is, Tim slid into talking down to Steph on a semi-regular basis, especially when trying to get her to stop vigilante-ing, which he’s getting backlash for some twenty-odd years later, mostly by people blaming him for her narrative deprioritization because it’s more satisfying than blaming DC.

And a major form this takes is declaring him generally sexist.

And the thing is, I’m sure his unconscious view of himself as more competent to make judgment calls because Main Character Demographic did play into the way he approached those conversations! I have never met a dude with any self-confidence whatsoever for whom that wasn’t a factor. Sexism, like racism, is the air we breathe, you have to actively extricate yourself from it and even then it will crop up at odd moments.

Classism played into it, too--especially once he knew she was a C-list villain’s daughter; there was that sense that often crops up in Batman properties that not only does greater access to resources make it safer and less self-destructive for the moneyed class to go vigilante-ing, noblesse oblige means it’s also somehow more just. The old ‘the outsider has a more objective approach’ canard. This was even more subtextual than the gender stuff, but I’m sure it was there.

Intellectual elitism is sort of a subset of both that and gender issues--Tim knows he’s smart, it’s the core of his pride, and Steph is not as smart in the same ways and has not had the same educational opportunites, and there are definitely moments of high-handedness tied to this.

And then there was the territorial aspect; it was official Bat policy to discourage all other Gotham vigilantes, usually in a much more absolute and commanding way than Tim ever tried, not to take them in and train them.

That might have been an option for Bruce if he’d wanted to, but it wasn’t really on the table for Tim unless he wanted to stage an intense campaign to totally disrupt his own life in order to bring this person who introduced herself by hitting him in the face with a brick after he mistook her for a villain into private Bat training and spaces. They’d known each other for a while and been having this argument in various forms most of that time, before they ever dated.

Please also remember that the last time Tim wanted to take a troubled blond under his and Bruce’s wings and show them the ropes and make sure they could do this safely as part of a personal healing process that would help everyone, that person took less than a week after starting to show signs of instability to have a complete psychotic break, beat him into the ground, build a brick wall in the Batcave to keep him out, lock down the computers, and start killing criminals with the knife-hands he added to the Batsuit, while failing to prioritize civilian safety.

This was not that long before Steph’s debut. If I were Tim I would not trust myself to sponsor further new team members either!

All of these things besides the Azrael trauma are directly from Bruce, who is often way more emphatic and more of an ass about them. Robin was mirroring Batman (consider the way he talks to Selina sometimes egad, sometimes it only doesn’t look awful because she’s playing along) and following Bat-policy; it is totally nonsensical to hold Tim accountable for this and not Bruce.

It’s also important to note that Tim wasn’t significantly less condescending to Anarky or the General, who were white guys around his age with roughly his class background whom he was trying to talk out of villainy, and honestly Lonnie’s motives were baller. (The original Anarky was a hacktivist based on a design somebody drew up for the third Robin, but Tim got made instead.) Tim’s entire character design back to his first appearance holds that when he’s trying to talk someone into something he tends to fall into a lecturing approach.

This can be very annoying! The first time he did it to Nightwing he got grabbed and shaken and snarled at. And of course it’s worse when he’s talking down a demographic slope, rather than up one.

I am very aware of how fucking annoying it is when guys do this, even if it is their normal mode of interaction. I have come very near to punching faces over it, when it’s really bad.

Tim doesn’t usually approach that line, but the problem is his writers didn’t seem to know the line was there, so if you’re reading some of his interactions with Steph from the perspective of having that chip on your shoulder already, especially if you’re not immersed in the narrative’s assumption that he is The Main Character, especially now that language norms have shifted slightly so wording that was considered neutral in the 90s is now obnoxious, it can ironically make a deeper impression than the much more blatant and decided sexism going on all around him.

So that’s my take on the situation. Tim has some mild passive gender prejudice which he has never taken enough notice of to seriously compensate for, made more visible by being in a deeply sexist world and by being kind of an annoying person sometimes, and this has been blown wildly out of proportion by people who feel that he and Steph are in competition to be The One Who Was Not An Asshole in that relationship.

This is not a winnable competition. They were both assholes sometimes, and even if you could prove Tim was a terrible boyfriend/person it wouldn’t validate all of Steph’s behavior--she was often forced to behave very badly or stupidly, because back then one of her major narrative functions was as a stick for the writers to hit Tim with.

And the thing is. If you’re going to exculpate Steph of awful behavior because it was ‘just’ the writers being sexist, let alone let Dick off the hook on similar grounds, I think it’s really unfair and messed up to then turn around and hold Tim-the-individual accountable for sexism that mostly wasn’t even situated in him so much as baked into the narrative, though to his benefit.

Like. When sexism (or other -ism) benefits people in real life it can be useful to draw their attention to their systemic advantages if they seem not to get it, but drawing Tim’s attention to his narrative prioritization would be extraordinarily meta (lol somebody write that fic). And in neither situation is it productive or fair (though I do know it is so so tempting) to treat the very existence of someone’s privilege as an offense they have personally committed.

They literally cannot help that. That’s how systemic works.

#tim drake #sexism #comics #robin #batfam #ask #i have spent a ridiculous amount of time on this ask yikes #posting as-is without further revision #hoc est meum #calypsosposts

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ectonurites · 4 years ago

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can anybody please explain the appeal of tim drake because ive been into the batfamily for a while now and tbh im really confused on why people like his character so much compared to the other robins. like they all have their own thing going on and he just... doesnt?

Have you read his Robin solo? Because if not and you want to try to like him but just don’t understand why people do, that’s what I’d recommend. That and like, Young Justice 1998.

Because Tim definitely... does have his own thing going on. Maybe not in the same way as the others, but like, there’s a reason he has a 183 issue long solo comic that ran for like 16 years: he was fun to read about!

But I will give some more specific thoughts on the subject as a Tim Drake Appreciator™ (this got long im sorry)

The appeal of Tim (especially early on Tim) is kinda the fact that he’s this more normal kid. For a while that is his ‘thing’. He was basically designed to be a self-insert (he definitely became more than that along the way, but from the start he was meant to be relatable) in a different way than how Dick and Jason had been before him.

Like the role of Robin from the start was this way to create a character young readers could identify with more, could see themselves in more. And Dick and Jason did that, but they still had this element to their lives and stories that was more... unattainable for the average reader. Dick was a circus prodigy, Jason was either also a circus prodigy if we remember pre-crisis or if we go with his post-crisis story he’s this street-wise orphaned kid who had a really tough life but still went on to be a hero anyways. Obviously those lives are relatable for some people, but those’re definitely not as broadly recognized as common upbringings especially not by DC trying to market to the ‘average’ kid/young teen.

But the creation of Tim changed the game a bit. Dick and Jason were these aspirations a kid could look to like ‘wow I want to be cool like that!’ but Tim was a Robin designed for kids to look at and go ‘wow, his problems and civilian life are just like mine AND he’s a hero, I want to be cool like that!’, ya know? Tim was... just a clever kid with an average life who managed to connect some dots and had enough drive to want to fix things he saw were a problem, he didn’t have the same kind of heightened drama backstory the others did. The Robins that came after Tim definitely didn’t have this idea of relatability in mind the same way either. Unfortunately Steph’s time as Robin was much more of a marketing ploy than an actual like... decision to make her Robin, so it’s hard to really fit her into this conversation. But Damian from the start was first of all initially created not to be Robin but just as the son of Talia and Bruce back in the 80’s, but when he was later reimagined into the character that would become Robin he had the whole ‘raised by and is the heir to the league of assassins and is the son of batman’ thing going on still. He just was not supposed to be relatable that same way, he was a character designed with different things in mind.

I really think it was more just DC’s 90′s era younger-audience comics in general that tried to push that relatability thing (like in YJ how Cissie even after quitting the team stays a major character as a civilian throughout, and the civilian aspect that’s super present in Bart’s 90s solo too, etc), but later in the 2000’s that idea was definitely pushed to the side in favor of... putting in even more dramatic superhero-y stuff.

And the other thing that’s... such a more normal thing but it actually made him unique here, was that Tim’s dad was still alive until like 2004 (so 15 years into Tim being around as a character). This gave Tim a lot more typical ‘family school girlfriends normal life etc’ problems on top of/in contrast with his superhero problems. These just manifested in very different ways than they could with the other Robins because of that unique situation with a living civilian parent who doesn’t know about hero stuff (until he did find out which lead to that whole Unmasked thing, but there was only the brief time around War Games & Identity Crisis where Jack knew Tim was actively Robin and he was... still alive) Tim also had his life at school expanded way more than most other Robins, like, he had such an extended supporting cast of civilian friends which is a really interesting thing to read about (and the fact that he hasn’t had that stuff since the New 52 I think really hurts his character)

And then related to that loss of his dad... Personally another thing about Tim that really interests me is how a lot of things were more... his choice. if that makes sense. A lot of characters in the Batfamily were struck with tragedy/extreme trauma before they became heroes and that’s what spurred them into this life of becoming heroes. Tim’s situation wasn’t like that at all! When he first got involved in everything during Lonely Place of Dying, the only tragedy he’d experienced was watching Dick’s tragedy happen. Which sure yes traumatic obviously, but that’s not the same as how pretty much all the other Bats had gone through these very personal losses or other sorts of very first-hand personal traumas that served as motivators. Tim didn’t start to experience those things until after he got involved in the hero life, and aside from his Mom’s death which was more of just an unrelated incident (that technically happened before he was officially Robin but it was during his time training to become Robin), pretty much all these other tragedies and things... would not have happened or been experienced by him had he not become Robin.

That’s not me placing blame on him or anything like that, because god no that’s not how that works, but it’s very interesting because from his point of view he definitely feels that guilt because he knows him being Robin played a role in a lot of it (Thinking specifically about in Adventure Comics #3 when Kon even says “I know what guilt does to you” to him like it’s... it’s a thing with him!). His dad was murdered because he was Robin. He only met Steph and started dating her through being Robin, and thus he would not have experienced the loss of his girlfriend dying like that had he not been Robin. Tim met both Conner and Bart through being Robin, and would not have had a personal connection to them when they died otherwise. The whole Bruce’s death thing after Final Crisis, like. I could go on honestly, that was only talking about losses not even his own experiences nearly getting killed, but yeah, all these personal tragedies were experienced by him specifically because he chose to bring himself into this life, which I think in turn plays into how throughout his comics you see him go from having this really optimistic view on things and being really hopeful to seeing him at that low point he reaches by the time of Red Robin. (thinking about that one post that points out how Tim started out in the 90′s as an optimist and Steph a cynic and by the time they were Red Robin and Batgirl in 2009 they had switched outlooks...)

I also think that him having had such a great team book with the original Young Justice can help contribute to people liking him. His friendships with the rest of the core four and that team in general are really compelling. (and that’s something like again when looking at the other Robins, while Dick had the Titans ofc, Jason never really found footing with a team outside of like one mission with the Titans and then We All Know How Damian’s Teen Titans Stuff Went. Steph also only ever really worked with a team outside the batfam on very brief occasions) and even though I’m not as big of a fan of the 2003 Teen Titans run that came after YJ, people who read Young Justice and also that could follow and be attached to those same characters over a pretty decently long period of time.

Idk man, I don’t really have an ultimate point here i’m just rambling. I can definitely understand not seeing the appeal to him right away (honestly i’ve been into Batfam since like 2013/2014 and Tim did not become one of my faves until 2020) especially if like... idk when you say ‘into the batfamily’ that can mean a lot of different things. If you’re reading more like the bigger events with the batfam sure Tim can kinda fade into the bg a bit, if you’re more talking about fanon the fanon version of him is prettyyyyy uhhhhh not really the same as how he was in pre New 52 canon, if you’re mainly reading New 52 era Batfam stuff then that Tim I also don’t understand the appeal of bc thats Not My Boy, if you’re interested in a different member primarily and only familiar with Tim when he shows up in things focused on that other character then it’s easy to not really understand the appeal right away bc he’s more there to support that character rather than shine in his own right.

I think it’s also worth mentioning he’s just not everybody’s cup of tea, and that’s totally fine. Like, these are fictional characters and sometimes you just will vibe with a character and sometimes you won’t! idk if this helped at all or even made sense. but yeah. I just think he’s neat 😌

#Anonymous

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