#team: birds of prey

[is-this-fandom-who-knows]

Dinah: Ollie and I are getting married!

Barbara: Don't share your personal problems with everyone.

[goblinbeetle]

[aingeal98]

One of my favourite little things this BOP run does is establish just how loved Cass is by other heroes. Harley calls her everyone's favourite Batman and Dinah empathises with Barda's concern for Cass by acknowledging how much people like her and how she usually ends up the favourite teammate.

Thinking of shy awkward teen Cass who struggled to make a single friend, who got too nervous during her first big team up because there were so many people and had to ring Oracle who asked Dinah to look out for her, who desperately tried to emulate Bruce during her first team with the Outsiders only for it to end in disaster. If that Cass could see how far she's come she'd be stunned. Stunned she doesn't have to be more like Bruce or Babs or Steph in order to successfully work with a team. It turns out the version of Cass other heroes like the most is well.... Cass.

Cassandra Wayne, in and out of universe you are so loved.

[necrotic-nephilim]

saw you wrote reverse robins too, it always has a thing for me. what's your headcanon about it? any particular ship you like?

oh i ADORE Revers Robins, i wish i got the chance to write it more! i think there's something interesting in the challenge of flipping these characters and trying to see how they would change in each other's arcs. How Tim would approach being Red Hood, how Damian would approach being Nightwing, etc. it's all so interesting to me. some headcanons i have are

i think, making Damian the oldest and forcing him to mature on his own with just Bruce is fascinating. bc it's going to make a *very* emotionally closed-off Bruce. the bulk of Damian opening up happens when he's Dick's Robin, so to make it just him and Bruce destabilizes a lot of that. Bruce chose Dick, but if Damian's the oldest, it's likely he didn't choose Damian, he got stuck with him. which adds to their dynamic and imo makes Damian a bit more stunted in the way Dick is, in that being raised solely by Bruce can make one. emotionally constipated. i do think Damian would be forced to mature a lot faster and would be a very quiet person.

i've mentioned this in a post talking about JayTim in RR AUs, but Tim as Red Hood would be *far* more calculating, imo. i think a lot of the emotion of Jason's actions would be stripped from it. even if you make Tim a killer (such as when Tim is Savior in a future universe) he's never going to be a "heads in a duffel bag" killer. he's going to be planned and methodical about it. (like how he almost killed Boomerang) half of his plans would be hidden from Bruce and i think part of the game for Tim would just be seeing how much Bruce even figures out.

replacing Tim with Jason instead of vice versa is interesting, bc it forces Jason to enter the role of Robin with a lot more caution. i think his backstory still works in a RR situation, street kid Bruce just kinda plucked from nowhere and called Robin. bc Bruce is grieving, and this if the first kid whose mischief sort of reminds him of Tim. but bc there's a dead Robin before Jason, it means he's going to be treated with much more care. and his anger regarding entering a Red Robin role could be interesting bc he is known for his anger and i do think he'd be far more violent about the transition, as opposed to Tim's self isolation route.

for RR, i always always prefer that it's Damian who adopts Dick. usually i like it best as Damian adopting Dick when Bruce is "dead", but i think it also works if Bruce is alive when Dick comes into the picture. it'd make for a stunted relationship bc of how closed off Damian is while *wanting* to do right by this kid, or at least do better than Bruce did. and i think Damian as Dick's mentor figure would make how Dick confronts his anger very different.

as for Steph, in any case where i do a Reverse Robins, mentally know i'm also picturing it with a Reverse Batgirls. and to keep from Cass just not moving around, i'd include Helena's time as Batgirl and thus, Steph is Oracle, Cass is Huntress, Helena is Black Bat, and Babs is Spoiler. which, makes canon ships like TimSteph and DickBabs a lot of fun. also you have a lot of curious things to explore by flipping Cass and Helena's moral codes under their vigilante titles. Cass as an outsider to the Batfam instead of being under Bruce and Babs' wings? could *really* force her to do unsavory things. and Helena with more support could be a bit softer around the edges. honestly, i could make a whole post about Reverse Batgirls too bc i think most RR AUs don't tend to address the women in it, which is terrible. gimme Oracle!Steph. and with Spoiler!Babs, if you play with Babs brother that rarely exists being the person she becomes Spoiler to stop, that could be super fun.

as for my favorite RR ships: i'm a suck for RR!TimDami. i think it's just bc of all ships, that one tends to play with the AU the most, in my experience? which is *so* fun bc Nightwing!Damian and Red Hood!Tim struggling to reconcile is everything. i devour every fick. i'm also particular to JayTim, just bc i think Jason as Robin seeing Red Hood!Tim would *immediately* be too interested for his own good as he copes with his anger of being replaced as Robin. but seriously any RR ship if the worldbuilding is done well will always draw me in. i just adore seeing how ppl explore filling in the logical loopholes and if backstories need to be adjusted or not and how personalities would naturally change in the situation. it's endlessly fascinating to me.

[stephaniebrownthespoiler]

A Story In Three Parts

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

[zal-cryptid]

DC characters - Black Canary

Hope I figured this character out. Not as complicated as Hawkgirl, thankfully. I swear to God if one of you ask me to do Donna Troy, my brain is going to implode.

[dailydccomics]

the Birds of Prey by David Nakayama

[hmslusitania]

I love her

[blindbeholder]

Hey so now that Cass and Dinah are in the same place at the same time for an extended period can they talk about Shiva???

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

What do you mean my team is unbalanced because I use "too many magic units" fuck you!!! I love my mages. They're so slay. I reclass all of my units to be able to use magic. You can counterattack from any range! Physical damage? Speed supplements + artificial dodge tanking + killing enemies preemptively in player phase + vantage (if they have access) + my dick's bigger than yours.

.

[is-this-fandom-who-knows]

Barbara: Have you heard the joke about the gaslighting?

Dinah: No.

Barbara: Yeah, you have.

Dinah: No, I haven't?

Barbara: You've literally heard it already.

Dinah: I DON'T KNOW IT.

Barbara: You're crazy.

[zahri-melitor]

I just really wish people would cross check random claims they’re making in these stories.

This is Che Grayson’s Birds of Prey which…look it’s not a Birds of Prey. You probably could have got way with calling it a Ravens, but it’s not BOP.

“Noah was sent to Arkham Asylum. The youngest patient in the hospital’s history.”

(Urban Legends #14)

Okay, so we’re claiming here that 13 is the youngest anyone’s been at Arkham.

Which…okay Abigail Arkham grew up at the asylum but technically wasn’t a patient. So you’re clear on that.

Cassius Payne was held at STAR Labs not Arkham, as best as I know (also in the ‘toddler’ stakes). And he’s technically not yet back in continuity in Prime Earth.

But we also have Elliot Strummer, over in House of Gotham in Tec. A storyline that finished the month before this story was published. And Strummer is teeny tiny the first time he’s held at Arkham because there was no space at the orphanage. He’s at MOST 13, probably more like 10.

Just…don’t make bold claims like this about ‘youngest’ when writing, because audiences will try to work out if there’s true and if it’s probably unlikely/wrong from characters appearing in other stories in VERY CLOSE PROXIMITY maybe don’t risk it.

[tbcanary]

gonna preface this by saying i really love the current ongoing bop run and it is one of my favorite comics right now.

okay. with that out of the way i gotta say. it’s wild to try and have a birds of prey without oracle as the guy (feminine) in the chair. that’s the entire point of the operation. the lineup changes and the goals change but first and foremost the birds are the limbs that oracle uses to shape the world and make her vision reality. and to try and have the “birds of prey” when she isn’t in charge of it just feels so strange!

i do think there’s a way to recover this but i’m not happy about it being the situation to begin with because obviously it all comes back to editorial deciding that Babs is batgirl now, right, and regardless of what bop’s creative team may or may not want to do, that’s how it works. which is bad and irritating as hell with regards to continuing this run.

and like thompson has worked around it beautifully, don’t get me wrong, but at this point the team feels very disjointed and it needs. some kind of guiding hand. someone to direct them. in the first arc maps/meridian had all the answers and could point them in the right direction, and honestly, I thought that worked! it felt very birds-like. “go do this, i cannot tell you why or how” is exactly how the birds have always been directed.

and like idk i guess if babs has to stay batgirl (which. again. do not want.) then maybe we need to run with that. it might be kind of fun to see the mantle of ops director passed on to maps. let her be the guy (feminine) in the chair directing them to do things. it isn’t a perfect solution but it would feel a little more like a classic birds of prey dynamic than having everyone as a field agent making decisions on the fly.

this team works best when someone is behind the scenes holding all the cards, and the team members just have to trust that one person and follow them. that’s the core of it.

anyway. I’m just waving my hands around here. all things considered it’s a good run and I enjoy it but the Barbara Gordon Is Batgirl agenda continues to wreck my shit in a distinctly non-positive fashion.

[punkeropercyjackson]

Solo Batstans who insist on rewriting the Batfam to make them into what other characters are in canon instead of stanning the latter confuse the shit out of me because i legit do not get why don't they just do both.Like i love the Batfam too,they're tied with the Superfam as my favorite DC faction but they're not the only one that exists and it's inconsiderate to fans of less popular characters to steal their stories and personalities when you could literally just read for and post about them and just write your own spin on the concepts of the Batfam without copying them???Jason in my verses for him is more of a legit vigilante because i feel canon wastes his potential but i also read Helena's stuff when i found out she's like that canonically and i post her a lot and reblog and make posts saying it's bad to steal her elements to give them to Jason.I see Stephanie as black and darkskinned and impliment that into my potrayals of her but i stan Kory as much as i do her and i also hype up Natasha and other lesser known canon DC bw.Sometimes i hc Dick as a victim of Slade's ped0 shit so i can get better at writing recovery stories for that topic but i'm way more focused on that with Mia because her origin story is being a victim of child traficition(?).I could add more but you guys get my point and before the people i'm talking about jump onto this to say i'm 'policing' them or whatever,consider that i am literally just saying you are fully capable of reading actual comics if you're gonna get so invested in the characters from them without actually knowing them and then thinking you have a right to speak over us

[gonkaccino]

SHE'S FINALLY GETTING A SOLO BOOK 17 YEARS AFTER BECOMING THE QUESTION LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO