#ooc. Doug Moench your mind

[officialbruciewayne]

ooc. I love this post because these are all , and especially this gem by the OP in the tags

[ @ruestheday » it depends what version of bruce. some comics i wouldn’t let that man care for a pet fish in others im like yeah he can run the just league ]

Which I think is really the heart of the matter when it comes to a collaborative story, and a character that results from it- which contains those multitudes. As a fan, your strongest and sometimes earliest impressions of a character can become very formative in your internal concept of them. This is sort of what people mean when they say 'not my Batman'.

It's easy to get locked into just one interpretation, whether that's your first one, or preferred one, but it's by no means definitive.

The reason I'm reblogging this in particular is that I write a very sanded-off Bruce Wayne, a version that is usually tagged as Good Parent Bruce Wayne. And I do want to emphasize that not only is this an interpretation, but that Alfred Pennyworth as a saint is also an interpretation, something which I feel is less readily recognized.

So here's some of his canonical hashtag Bad Parent Alfred Pennyworth moments that not everybody knows about!

I enjoy Flawed but Earnest Alfred and Bruce as Parents. Depictions of unqualified and traumatized adults doing their best to raise traumatized children through a lens of vigilante heroism. It's a beautiful moral and familial exploration of healing and intergenerational trauma.

But it's not the only story to tell, and I love that.

one of the biggest lies the fandom will tell you is that alfred pennyworth is a good man.

he’s horrible. people just don’t realize he’s horrible because they’re all too focus on the superheros.

not many people in the fandom know this, but alfred literally has a daughter. her name is julia. why does no one know about julia? BECAUSE HE ABANDONED HER. it’s canon that he chose the waynes over his OWN CHILD. when she’s introduced in the comics she hates her dad because he abandoned her in england to raise a child that wasn’t even his.

the infamous jason “a good soldier” memorial? yeah, alfred did that. bruce wanted it taken down. alfred also left jason’s destroyed robin suit on display.

alfred is the reason tim is robin. dick and bruce are trapped by two-face and alfred just… gives tim a robin costume and sends him on his way. no formal training. no anything.

ever blame dick for damian becoming robin? wrong. it was alfred. dick was against it. alfred is the first one to give damian the robin costume, like he did to tim years before. dick did eventually choose damian as his robin, but that was while damian was ALREADY ROBIN. (he even tells tim that he doesn’t pick tim to be his robin because he considers tim to be an equal, not a sidekick, but i digress)

when bane breaks bruce’s back, alfred literally packs up and leaves. he travels. he just drops everything and goes to explore the world, until dick eventually hunts him back down.

it’s also a common theme that alfred couldn’t find the right balance between being a father figure and a butler, so he was constantly enabling bruce growing up (and still does) because technically bruce was his boss… even though he had custody of him.

edit: actually technically (in some runs) bruce’s uncle has custody of him but literally makes being absent an olympic sport But you get what i mean

edit two: fixed the spelling mistakes that text to speech tiktok made me aware of. u guys are fake for not telling me. anyways fuck ai content farm accs