#in regards specifically to like. tim. and i guess the others. like more vigilante than world class superhero u know

[honeyoats]

Genuinely curious of everyone’s opinion on this. Thoughts on like. the recurring theme of superheroes or vigilantes being like I cannot let my friends or s/o know abt any of it. like i get the notion of like. if the ‘civilians’ know too much it puts them at risk but. isn’t it fine if they’re like like. Hey btw i mask up and fight crime at night. Just letting you know. So. Be careful. like that kinda thing. like i understand this whole thing of keeping ur identity hidden being Sacred but if. it werent.

like not being like. Let me make my friends/partner become a person deeply involved in what i do (like behind the scenes). but just like. Hey heads up. Because. i don’t know isn’t it Worse to not know of the risk… i mean obviouslt the natural solution i guess is to Not Become Involved With Anyone. but. Not sure if that works for anyone. so i feel like. Yes it is a risk to let them know. But it’s a calculated one. i think in the long run of like. knowing that persons secret identity (and not much else, but also there is a question of how feasible that is, like how long can the vigilante/hero go without slipping up or if their friend/loved one presses for more BUT there is a component of awareness to that. i think) it helps to be more aware of certain situations??????? i just think. not knowing is worse.

there’s also like. i guess the ethical part of it? of it being like… does this superhero/vigilante really know better than me when it comes to my safety. like maybe so BUT. is it still ok for them to make decisions without letting that person know. like especially if they’re a loved one. idk. does that make sense. like the question of autonomy. and judgment. Right. especially if that person is like. i want to take that risk. ya know. idk. lots of thoughts to be thought

[scattered-winter]

When you love Barbara Gordon but Dickbabs is also your notp 🥂

I was oh so tempted to respond with a sarcastic remark but no. I'm actually gonna get into this one

the reason I hate dickbabs doesn't have anything to do with my love for the characters. I love dick grayson. I love barbara gordon. these aren't secrets; anyone who spends more than 30 seconds on my blog can see it. my issue with dickbabs comes from a long history of barbara being thrown with every batboy that comes along. tim in arkham knight, even bruce in btas, to name a few examples. to me this makes even dickbabs seem surface level and 2-dimensional because......dick is another batboy.

another issue I have with it is the fact that both characters are reduced to only their relationship with each other. tom taylor's recent run puts dickbabs at the forefront of a story that, if you go by the title, should be about nightwing. I don't mind romance in stories but if I am reading the nightwing comics, I want to read about nightwing. and this isn't even getting into the disgusting ableism in regards to barbara in particular! her disability, something that enabled her to become the literal capstone of the vigilante society, was retconned but guess what!!! to replace the lost representation we'll just write in a 3-legged dog!!! there's absolutely no way this is ableist or shitty!! ✨✨✨ (/s)

I also really hate how fandom (and dc) are pitting all of dick's love interests against each other. it turns babs and kori (some of my favorite heroes with their own powerful stories and personalities) into the bratty girls squabbling over the guy. and I don't even need to say why that's so upsetting to me

finally, my biggest issue is that I just?!?! don't like it very much!! they have an incredible friendship and I fucking love good friendships!!! there doesn't need to be a big reason why I dislike a ship! sometimes it just doesn't vibe with me! but in the case of dickbabs, there are a few things in specific that make me dislike it.

tldr: my dislike for dickbabs has nothing to do with how much I love/hate their characters and everything to do with the fact that I am curating my own experience with this media and if I dislike something, it is of my own choice so to assume that I have to ship dickbabs because I love barbara as a character is, frankly, childish and immature. with all the love, grow up <3

[fancyfade]

What do you think of the relationship between Babs and Helena in Pre52? Actually I love them both, but I feel that some stories were deliberately expanding their contradictions.

I think it's really interesting!

(and sorry for late response; this was in drafts for a week because I was super busy)

So I think there are two especially interesting bits, one is re: killing.

It should be noted Babs is consistently portrayed as having a problem with Helena's approach to crime fighting (that is, that it's okay to kill people who deserve it from helena's POV). We see this way back in birds of prey: manhunt #1, where Barbara says she doesn’t work with “That” kind of vigilante (that kind of vigilante being the kind who purposely get blood on their hands in the name of justice).

[image: comic panels from the aforementioned comic. first, dinah lance (black canary) holds a gun up. Over comms, barbara gordon (oracle) asks “you’re not kill ---?” Dinah says “Nothing -- huff! lethal! I just -- hff -- need to cover my next move.” barbara says "Good, 'cause i don't work with that kind of vigilante".as she sees this, we cut to helena bertinelli (huntress) busting through a window and running at two guys.  it looks like she just shot them with a wrist-crossbow in the face, but with an arrow with a dull tip (so it didn’t kill them) the final panel shows braun tackling helena as someone holds her legs. Barbara continues her conversation with dinah and says “You purposely get blood n your hands in the name of justice and I’m outta here.” end image]

.

also note the purposely clarification. It seems like if someone accidentally killed hte person they were fighting (and barbara genuinely believed it was an accident) she wouldn’t consider it a big deal.

We also know... WRT Killing, Barbara is kind of hypocritical in this regards, which I think makes sense for her character development at the time she contemplated killing.

I was looking through some Joker’s Last Laugh aftermath, to see if she didn’t think Dick intentionally killed the Joker (she was extremely undersatnding of him killing Joker, which HE didn’t like because he blamed himself), but... I’m not actually sure she did think it was an accident.

[image: first 2 comic panels from birds for prey #37 showing barbara’s shadow cast in a doorway as she is talking on the phone to dick. she says “I need to talk to you. You need it, too. You can’t hide away like this. It’s not good. Killing the joker was wrong. We know that. But no one can fault you for it. We’re human. god knows, I am.” end image]

(also, something I think that was not touched on at all, was Barbara’s time with Suicide Squad, where killing people was pretty accepted (though some members like Bronze Tiger/Ben chose not to). It’s a shame that there’s no canonical continuity explaining how she goes from working with suicide squad to being more anti-killing, but I guess at the end of suicide squad the characters were fairly disillusioned with the mission and IIRC Amanda waller had them specifically act against the US government it was like after a long stream of unethical missions they had enough and she said it was the last mission the squad would do)

But anyway besides that there are otehr contexts barbara is portrayed as feeling like the necessity outweights the cost wrt killing

one is when she feels someone is in danger and the ONLY way to save them is via lethal force She gives Huntress authorization to use lethal force to rescue tim in joker’s last laugh (link) and before huntress showed up, she was GOING to shoot someone with a sniper rifle in no man’s land to save the people who were being attacked by a mob.

The other case I count as different because it is treated different by her, which is not too long after she becomes disabled, she is treated as being willing to kill someone (and intentionally leading them into a trap to kill them, rather than it being a last resort) to avoid being a victim again. (link) In this case, it has less to do with necessity but more to do with fear and wanting to prevent her agency from being stripped from her again.

anyway so that’s one aspect... the lethal force hting they are portrayed as not seeing eye-to-eye on.

The other thing is just that Barbara is objectively kind of bad with people in birds of prey (which is part of why I love her). She manipulates huntress to try to get her to stop her from killing people and it works -- but huntress understandably feels extremely betrayed and leaves the team. Their relationship would not be the same (and  it would be worse writing and worse for both of their development) if huntress had just forgiven her immediately. Because barbara DID mess up and it wasn’t an “oopsie” thing that just happened once... she intentionally chose to go about it this way and to treat Helena like a mission rather than a peer. and the fact that barbara is forced to acknowledge she messed up rather than sweeping it under the rug makes their relationship more interesting and stronger

it’s also interesting that huntress goes off on her own, but DOESNT go back to killing. she instead tries to work on things the way that she thought Oracle was working on them and gets good intel. and then she’s like “Maybe there’s a reason oracle is the way she is”

I think it was really interesting how much they can rub each other wrong yet also understand each other... i love them.

[yaderyngochrps]

Tim’s stare at Jason remained unimpressed as he was teased for rescuing the cat. Of course Jason would make fun of him for it. Frankly Tim shouldn’t have said anything. Tim was fairly close to Selina, closer than most of the others in the Batfamily. She’d become about the closest thing to a mother-figure he had, but their dynamic was far less cold and rigid than Tim’s had been with his own actual mother. 

Then Jason was taking his helmet off, for reasons Tim could only guess. A genuine attempt to seem more open by having a visible facial expression? Or only an attempt to seem that way. 

Ugh, Tim hated this. Hated the uncertainty. Hated the way he overthought every single little thing, the analyzation of every little move Jason did without thinking. Hated feeling like his concern was entirely unjustified and he was just cruel and cynical to someone who was actually trying, but being unable to scrape away that last little bit of distrust that clung to him so tightly. 

Then again, of course he was distrustful. He could count on one hand the number of positive interactions he’d had with Jason and all of them were in the past few days. Of course that wasn’t going to wipe away their history, to make it as though Jason had never tried to kill him in the first place. The distrust was only natural. Logical. Of course Tim was confused that the Jason standing before him was so contradictory to all prior knowledge Tim had of him.

And there Tim was again, wanting to scream and tear his hair out because he was overthinking again, working over every possible thought until his brain was practically sore. This constant back and forth with himself was utterly exhausting, yet Tim couldn’t turn it off. He’d never been able to. He could only hide his inner turmoil beneath a mask of impassiveness and carefully crafted reactions. 

Tim knew how Jason was likely to ‘finish up’ his case, and this time he didn’t hide the hint of displeasure from his expression. But would it be productive to say anything about it? Bruce had already fought that battle with Jason for years and it hadn’t gone anywhere, and if Tim chose to pick a fight about it now the only likely result would be that it would create animosity that could compromise the case. 

“What’s the address?” He asked instead. “Maybe I can find a list of the other tenants. Or check CCTV footage and see what I can find.”

Then Jason was asking him what his plans were, and Tim was again thrown off. Plans? In what regard? His plans were… to patrol. He didn’t have a specific objective in the patrol otherwise… was Jason making casual smalltalk about what Tim intended to do after the patrol? Tim assumed the obvious answer for most people would be ‘sleep’. That was what most of the vigilantes tended to do after patrol. Not that those were Tim’s plans, but Jason didn’t have to know that. 

“After patrol? Probably homework or something.” There was some paperwork from a recent WE fundraiser that he had to fill out, but he wasn’t saying that on patrol, whether or not anyone else could realistically overhear them. “Did you have any plans?” Perhaps Jason was only asking because he had plans of his own he wanted to share.

Birds of a Feather

(closed RP with @muuuumin)

Things were not going according to plan. 

Tim really didn’t like it when things didn’t go according to plan.

Sadly, that was the nature of Gotham City, which was exactly why Tim had backup plan after backup plan, accounting for every conceivable variable. He’d written an algorithm just for this case. There was a stack of paperwork heavier than Tim was. 

And yet, somehow, none of that accounted for faulty construction of the barrier along the route Tim expected to chase the criminal along, and just like that all 27 of Tim’s backup plans went out the window, and he and this thug were tearing through the streets of Gotham City. 

Fortunately, Tim had always been quick. Maybe not quite as strong as some of the other bats, but he was balanced in agility, which was useful when it came to jumping over the wooden palettes that had been knocked in his way. 

He’d been chasing this guy for months, the leader of a trafficking ring that made Tim’s stomach turn with each new detail he learned. Finally, Tim had him… nearly. Weeks of careful planning were reduced to instinct, fueled by the base knowledge that whatever happened, he had to catch this guy. Because of that, he wasn’t particularly paying attention to where the man was running, only that Tim needed to catch up to him.

Tim was getting close. His chest burned with it, but he was closing the distance. The leader was about three times Tim’s size, but that made him slow, which Tim used to his advantage. 

One last turn lead them down a long alley with far fewer obstacles to jump over, and Tim took that as his chance. Putting one last burst of energy into moving forward, he could reach out and touch the man before him. So, he did. He leapt forward and used all his momentum to send the both of them tumbling to the ground, pinning the man’s arms behind him. 

“Get off- you little shit,” the criminal squirmed violently, pinned face down as he was. Tim was fully sitting on his back, using his entire body weight to keep him down and frankly unconvinced that was enough. Tim was strong, but he couldn’t hold someone like this forever. “I ain’t getting taken down by some pipsqueak-ass kid. I’ll fucking kill you.”

Tim used his position to secure handcuffs around the man’s wrists, trying to catch his breath. He might’ve secured them a little tighter than necessary, but knowing what this man did Tim frankly didn’t feel bad about it. 

Things hadn’t gone exactly according to plan, but Tim had gotten the criminal in the end. This would just serve as… something to keep in mind for the next time he had to make a plan. Always double check the strength of the barricades along the predicted potential chase route.

Breathless and full of adrenaline, Tim forgot another much more important rule: Always pay attention to where your target is leading you.