#pls dont kill me for sayin al this again im not telling anyone how to enjoy stuff JUST my thoughts

[ectonurites]

Okay, so I kinda wanna know your thoughts about how weird the fandom portrays the bat characters. Canon is ... not my favorite, but it actually offers a lot of nuance to the characters that I think makes them all interesting. Unlikable, but interesting. I noticed fanon tends to boil the batkids all into these superflat caricatures. Like, cereal obsessed manchild Dick Grayson or bad boy who's literal crimes are only because of the lazarus pit Jason Todd. Its not really a major problem, just weird

Oh I have a LOT of thoughts about this. I try so hard not to shit on how other people interact with content because like, it’s comic books! We’re all just here trying to make the best out of a mess of stuff and have fun, but admittedly a lot of fanon stuff drives me fuckin’ nuts as someone who reads a ton of comics.

Like, I like memes, obviously, I draw tons of memes with the batfam (+ yj) characters and make lighthearted jokes etc etc, and honestly if it’s just for jokes then I don’t mind people having whack interpretations of the characters quite as much. The thing that drives me up a wall though is like... when serious works and analysis and discussion are very clearly based on just the fanon interpretations without any bearing on canon aside from what you could skim from a wiki page, and it’s spoken like it’s fact! There’s ‘having fun with jokes that aren’t taking things that seriously’ and then there’s ‘blatantly mischaracterizing based on misinformation’. Way too often I see things fall into that second category.

Now, a lot of people in the batfam fandom don’t... actually read comics (or at least not frequently) and that’s not even a bad thing necessarily, like you’re 100% allowed to enjoy content however you want to! (I don’t wanna be gatekeepey, especially since comics are confusing to get into)

But the problem is that when a lot of people aren’t reading the comics, then the people who do’s opinions have a lot more influence if they’re loud enough. All it takes is one person who read something and interpreted it a specific way that might not even be correct, and then it can echo chamber and suddenly half the fandom thinks it’s 100% canon that way because ‘oh so and so said that and they actually read it’.

I also think that’s a problem with the popularity of out of context panels/blogs, while they are super funny sometimes, when people make assumptions about characters based on just a few things without context... it can lead to problems. If enough people say something enough times people just... start to think it’s true, even if it exists entirely devoid of context which changes the meaning.

Like, for example, according to canon there’s no actual confirmation Tim stalked Batman on foot for an extended period of time! We know from Lonely Place of Dying that he followed him once to get a picture to convince DIck that he still needed a Robin. Otherwise his ‘stalking’ & how he figured out Batman’s identity was more through media appearances (like newspapers and tv). This is wildly different from the common fanon idea that little Timmy was sneaking out regularly to follow Batman & Robin around with his camera.

I primarily blame Geoff Johns for this misconception because of these panels in in tt 2003 (from issue 29)

But like, think about it for a second, literally how would Jason know that? This is one of the first times he’s ever interacting with Tim, and he was dead/catatonic when that would have been happening! He is either making a wild assumption or perhaps Talia told him this when she told him about Tim, whichever of those it was it’s secondhand information not something he witnessed. Taking his word as fact here makes no sense, he was just trying to get under Tim’s skin while fighting him. But seeing those panels out of context if you haven’t actually read Lonely Place of Dying/only read a vague summary of it, and don’t necessarily know the details of the Jason situation, it could absolutely lead you to believe otherwise!

Dick as a cereal manchild is a weird one because like... okay yeah sure he likes cereal, I can think of like two panels I’m too lazy to find right now off the top of my head of him having it, but... that’s not something we see all the time! Its not like Ollie & his chili (which IS a running joke- seriously I have not read that many Green Arrow comics but the amount of times I’ve seen that man bring up chili in just in the few things I have read is wild. there’s even an official recipe. his chili has it’s own dc wiki page). Then, because Dick isn’t quite as emotionally closed off in the same way the rest of the batfam tends to be, people project literally all the pent up feelings onto him, making him this hug-crazy crybaby manchild... again it’s just very clear people who perpetuate those ideas (outside of like, maybe as jokes) haven’t actually fully read that many comics with him. I’d also even blame the Young Justice cartoon version of Dick for some other traits fanon Dick has, bc that version of him is def a bit of a Hot Mess™️ once he’s Nightwing 

Jason I understand misconceptions about probably the most because of how wildly inconsistent his writing was before the new 52 and how consistently Not Great it was once Lobdell took over. Jason’s one of the few characters I have read like, 90% of appearances for so I’m speakin’ from experience here. But still... acting like Jason as Red Hood is just a ‘bad boy rebel’ that could have a relatively happy connection with the whole Batfam is fun but unrealistic. You can not blame everything on the lazarus pit... he still has killed people! Lots of people! Willingly! Yes he has reasons and when he’s being written well it’s clear that he’s not just ‘random murder happy’ but rather ‘I kill when I feel they deserve it and that it’s necessary’ which is what keeps him an anti-hero rather than a full fledged villain most of the time, but that still keeps him so at odds with the rest of the Batfamily! Writers in more current continuity have had him compromise by only using rubber bullets in Gotham so they can have him interact with the family, but he’s still killed and will do it when he deems it necessary.

Also like... at the time of Under The Red Hood in the comics... theoretically... he hadn’t even been in the lazarus pit for well over a year. Go read Lost Days (it’s short! And except for the thing with him & Talia towards the end of the last issue it’s pretty good!), he spends a lot of time traveling the world and learning things/training before the events of UtRH. Yes you could interpret there still being some Lazarus influence going on there but I think the movie version of UtRH especially leads people to believe there’s a lot less time between his dunk in the pit and his first actions as Red Hood.

Fanon also has a lot of ideas about pit madness that vary wildly from what we have seen in canon, like yeah it’s been said to be a thing to some extent, but there’s not really the Danny Phantom Glowing Green Eyes™️ or anything like that... it’s fun to explore cool new ideas for sure but I just think it’s important to recognize the distinction between things that are actually canon and things that are popular fanon. (Also there are things that fall somewhere in between, there’s definitely stuff that isn’t 100% confirmed canon but could still be plausible/has been hinted at by some writers/is only canon in some settings)

Other things that drive me nuts are ‘quiet does-no-wrong angel Cass’ and ‘the Normal One™️ Duke’ because those just make literally no sense if you’ve read any comics with either of them... but fan content either does those versions or just completely ignores their existence a lot of the time! So! That’s a whole bigger problem!

In general though, this is fandom it’s not like this... matters that much on the grand scheme of things in life, we’re just people on social media talkin’ about comics. And this kind of misconception/flattening of characters does happen in literally every fandom ever. But it still does suck to see characters that have a lot of nuance and interesting history to play around with get reduced to a few traits that aren’t even actually that relevant to who they are.