#p.s. please remember alfred is british

[justiceiscalling]

wild opinion i know people will hate me for: i strongly dislike alfred pennyworth. i know what you’re thinking, “how could you hate him! alfred does no wrong!!!”

(loud incorrect buzzer) WRONG. omg, alfred can only do wrong in my mind. he is such a fucking enabler and then he wants to play devils advocate. recently, before starting ‘what the future holds’ i reread robin 1993—specifically tim’s birthday arc.

if you don’t know what that is i’ll tell you. on tim’s sixteenth someone delivers a package which is a holographic message from a future-alfred essentially telling him someone in the batfam is, like, evil, and trusting him to figure it out. eventually it’s revealed that the message was a test, part of bruce’s training, and ‘future’ alfred was actually just current alfred. it was a really good read, i believe it was issues #116-120.

point is, alfred WILLING sided with bruce on that shit. alfred was not held at gun point, his life was not under any threat, he was asked to assist and he. did. that. shit.

and after he had the audacity to be apologetic! ‘i’m so sorry master tim’ like no tf ur not???? like u did this, you allowed him to feel like everything was HIS responsibility and like he couldn’t trust anyone. which is just so fucked up on another level. he watched tim isolate himself and beat himself up over trying to solve this and he?? just?? let?? it?? happen???

and some how he can do no wrong?????

when tim first became robin, who gave him the suit? i’m pretty sure it was alfred. yes, tim was a relentless little kid—but that’s just that. he was a fucking kid, no older than thirteen. alfred gave him the suit. sure, it was to save bruce, but why did it have to be him? why couldn’t he call dick or superman or, hell, go out there himself? why’d it have to be the nosy ass neighbor?

also when bruce and dick used to beat the shit out of each other alfred didn’t do anything. he lowkey just let it happen. like how much is bruce paying bro for him to let that slide?

ALSO ALSO i would love someone to correct me on this, PLEASE tell me i’m wrong, but wasn’t alfred the one who put up the good soldier memorial? everyone hates on bruce (who, in a lot of ways, is a bad father) for that memorial being up but it was alfred. and i get he was but jason wasn’t just robin, he was so much more. and most importantly, he was a son. i know things were rocky for him and bruce but, god, that’s his son! like what the genuine fuck, yk?

and maybe this is only in some iterations but alfred literally influenced bruce to train to be a vigilante. he trained him when he was young, after his parents deaths. and yes, he was another one of those relentless kids, but there were things alfred could’ve tried to stop him from doing this.

what i’m trying to say is, im so fucking tired of this ‘saint alfred’ BS. he’s in the wrong! maybe not all of the time but a lot of the time. and i don’t know if that ‘jason loves alfred the most!’ thing is fanon or canon but either way i hate it. if you’re going to make bruce a bad dad, if you’re making jason and bruce’s relationship rocky, then alfred can’t be the exception. he should be held accountable as much as bruce.

like, if jason loved alfred so much and saw him as a grandfather, why isn’t he pissed at alfred for not killing the joker. sure he wanted bruce to do it but after bruce didn’t, why didn’t alfred take it into his own hands? alfred has no problems with killing people who deserve it. he was a soldier for crying out loud!

if jason and alfred are as close as fanon claims then jason should be beefing with alfred as much as he does with bruce for not avenging him.

okay, this turned into a rant about jason and alfred’s annoying fanon relationship but you get my point.

i don’t hate alfred, i hate fanon alfred and i hate this fandom and how they love to hold bruce accountable for wrongs that lowkey could be alfred’s fault too. and i also hate that’s it’s so hard to dislike alfred because people will yell at you for it. in my fics i try to keep him as out of it as i can because god forbid i make him how he is in the comics.

alfred is a flawed character—just like bruce and jason and tim and dick and damian and duke—and that’s okay! it’s better when they’re not so one dimensional, it makes them way more interesting as a character and also allows fanon to create perfect character development over the span of long ass fics that i love to binge.

thank you for coming to my ted talk.