#poor Tanya. deprived of everything she loves…

[dailydegurechaff]

Today's Daily Degurechaff is… more furry-posting

[firefrightfic]

Why is Slade emotionally stunted? (sorry i havent read much comics.) I got a vague impression that he has no mom, his father beat him as a child, they are very poor so his father has to sell him, I dont know what happens after that. Would u say he had as bad a childhood as Jason?

First things first, I want to clarify here that I’m talking about the Rebirth version of Slade as written by Christopher Priest in this post, rather than other, older versions. For example, the original Slade as created and written by Marv Wolfman in New Teen Titans was a rather different beast than the Slade we have today (and much more capable of discussing and expressing his feelings openly).

Now moving onto your question. Yes, I would say a large part (if not all) of Slade’s inability to express emotion is a direct result of his childhood. He grew up in what I think we can reasonably assume was a deprived home, with an alcoholic father who was deeply abusive – to the point he considered locking his young son out in a freezing shed in the middle of winter a justified punishment. And judging by the dialogue here, it’s certain he both physically and verbally abused Slade regularly as well (with ‘nancy’ being a particular term used that Slade would later go on to repeat with his own son Grant in the future).

Following on from that, the panels below also show that Slade’s inability to express emotions normally was evident from a young age (it’s worth noting these pages are taken from a sequence where Slade is placed in a telepathic simulation by the Society of Evil, but I still believe the memories and dialogue we see here to be completely valid, given that the Society’s goal was to ascertain whether or not Slade was still evil at a time when he’d temporarily turned to doing superheroics). He couldn’t even cry over his own mother’s death, and is cold and practical over matters like death to a chilling extent.

Based on just this brief glimpse of his father’s treatment of him, I think it’s safe to say Slade grew up in an environment where the expressing of emotion, especially ‘weak’ emotions like love, affection and otherwise caring were treated with scorn, and as children often do, he internalised those lessons as a means of survival. He’s not a sociopath, as both the above and blow panels discuss, but some irrevocable damage was definitely done, at least when it comes to his familial relationships.

All of Slade’s kids suffer from the emotional unavailability of their father. Grant got the worst of it (to the point it ultimately led to his death), but Joey and Rose definitely feel it too. Slade absolutely loves and cares for then, but expressing it openly and rationally… that’s a whole other ball game. He’s more given to displaying affection in other, unorthodox ways, such as putting out a hit on his own daughter to give him an excuse to spend time with her that doesn’t involve actually telling her that’s what he wants, or seducing his son’s fiancee to prove she’s a spy for Amanda Waller in order to protect him. Like Wintergreen says, you have to learn to understand the code with Slade, because he just doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth for more.

There’s also what happens with Tanya Spears, aka Power Girl, who Slade meets and then starts to develop paternal feelings for. Something which makes him so uncomfortable in the end that he kills her dog in order to drive her away from him.

To put it bluntly, I think Slade can’t stand the feelings of vulnerability that come with being openly emotional around other people. He built his current persona as a defence mechanism when he was a child and even now, as an adult with three grown children of his own, he can’t let go of it, nor that association of emotion with weakness. It’s better for both himself and them that he keeps everyone around him at a distance, because otherwise someone is inevitably going to get hurt. Which unfortunately is not an unreasonable assumption, given everything his family has been through because of him in the past.

Now as to whether this equates to him having had a worse childhood than Jason is a matter of opinion. Personally,I don’t like to quantify one instance of abuse against another. Both Slade and Jason went through horrible situations as children, and they both dealt with those situations in different ways, which then informed who they became as adults. Though Jason, at least, was able to escape his abusive situation at a younger age than Slade, then was taken into a loving home environment by Bruce for a few years of his life before he died. 

Meanwhile, Slade ultimately had to rescue himself by joining the army when he was sixteen (lying about his age to the recruiter), and while that was almost certainly better for him than staying with his dad, it’s also an environment that wouldn’t have helped him with his emotional issues any. It may even have worsened them, particularly in the time period Slade would have been a soldier.

(Though he also did meet Adeline in the army, and there’s definitely plenty more I’d love to see about how they connected and what their courtship was like, since she’s somewhat older than Slade, a divorcee, and her selection and training of Slade for the genetic experimentation that gave him his abilities has been referred to as ‘grooming’ within the comic. Theirs was definitely not a traditional romance, and on some levels Adeline is shown/implied to be just as a dysfunctional as he is.)