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noybusiness · 11 months ago

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This is a great analysis, thank you for posting!

Some Gotham Knights-related thoughts I've had since the end of the series:

I do wonder if Turner might have changed his name to Turner Wayne eventually, since he now knows his biological parents were bad guys (whom he described as "monsters") and reaffirmed his commitment to Bruce's legacy in the finale, and with all those fake IDs, Hayes may not have been their real name, anyway.

Also, as they were prolific international assassins, I would expect that they had a bit more money than they seemed to, stashed away in a nest egg somewhere.

Being thought dead while being trained by the League of Assassins increases his parallels with Jason Todd, at least in the later adaptations where Jason was resurrected by the Lazarus Pits while Bruce thought he was dead. And of course, Damian Wayne was raised by the League. Doubtless a dramatic reveal/unmasking would have been coming in the future when the other Knights finally both saw him again and learned the person before them was Turner.

I actually would have liked to see him embrace the bad boy thing Duela pointed out he was flirting with in the episode "Daddy Issues" and run away with her in that episode (with or without Jane Doe) instead of how things turned out. Also, have you noticed that Oscar/Turner has blue-brown heterochromatic eyes? It's striking, but I rarely see people comment on it.

Rebecca March said that she started over with "a new name and a new family" several times, so Brody may not be the only child she's had over the past century+. He could learned about or even met them. And what would the long-term effects of the Electrum in his system have been? Would it have run out after he took enough injuries?

It wasn't totally clear to me if Cullen's confession to Turner about how much he matters to him was platonic/fraternal or not.

The show made sly references to Stephanie and Harper's comic book codenames Spoiler and Bluebird a couple of times, so I wonder if they would ever have actually used them, as Carrie goes by Robin already. Of course, Cullen doesn't have a codename in the comics :( :( :( , Duela's is primarily "the Joker's Daughter", which she now knows she's not, and Turner and Brody are original characters. I suppose Turner *could* resurface as Red Hood. At more of a stretch, Turner and Brody could be Batman and Owlman, but I have a harder time seeing that; slightly easier if it's years in the future when they're older. Carrie could also become Batwoman when she's older.

I hope we would have seen more of Carrie's mother Doctor Lisa Kelley, since she's the only living parent the Gotham Knights have access to who doesn't suck (something the others can all be envious of), apart from arguably Harvey/Two-Face (and what kind of frenemy/evil mentor/anti-mentor dynamic might he have developed with the kids? We were robbed!). Would Brody have wanted to work at the hospital more, and would he and Carrie have gotten closer? They seemed to have chemistry.

For that matter, I assume he and Stephanie have had all the necessary conversations offscreen before the last scene of the finale about her not really being into him and dating Harper now and that he's more-or-less cool with it, though I suppose there could have been a bit of awkwardness for an episode or two at least, I don't know.

CW’s Gotham Knights sorting

Attention: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Turner Hayes

The first thing that hit me about Turner before he was framed for Bruce’s murder is that he was genuinely happy with his life. I expected a lot of Main Character AngstTM from him, the way most protagonists are written especially on the CW, but there was none (or very little) of it. And it’s not like Turner doesn’t have sources of angst: his parents are dead and he went overnight from the son of cleaners to the adopted son of a billionaire -and all that implies- without any explanation. You can see it clearly in Gotham Academy (and in the city at large) that he isn’t very liked. Actually it looks like most people resent him for ‘getting uppity’ and rising above his station. Just look at how Brody treats him in the beginning or how the people of Gotham are ready to believe the worst of him overnight. But Turner doesn’t care. He has his best friend, Stephanie, he has Cressida and he has Bruce. He loves them and they love him; more than enough for a Snake primary. Sure, Bruce may be a bit too busy and it’s annoying, but Turner can always distract himself with a party. Classic hedonistic young Snake.

Turner’s arc is all about betrayal and how one deals with it. Turner is slowly, over the course of the series, betrayed by almost his entire inner circle: Bruce, Cressida and even his dead parents. Interestingly enough he is the person who doesn’t betray anyone even when they turned their back to him. At the end of episode two, Turner is the one who went to save Duela from the Talon despite the fact that she abandoned him to certain death. I don’t think Duela was entirely in his inner circle at this point (although I think she, Cullen and Harper were slowly getting there from the very first pilot when they handed him the lockpicking tool for his handcuffs, thus including him in their escape), but I think it was important to Turner that he will not be the kind of person to leave behind someone who might rely on his loyalty. Another moment that comes to mind is finding out that everyone at the Gotham Gala is gonna be gassed to death. His first reaction? “Stephanie is there!“

Like all healthy Snakes, Turner adopts Bruce’s morality as his own. And he’s so successful that I almost wondered if he was an Idealist for a while. But what sold him as a Snake for me was him saving Cressida versus not saving Joe Chill. Cressida had helped the Court to kill his father and frame Turner for the murder but Turner saves her because ‘this is what my dad would do’. So he blows up his cover to save the woman who helped raise him and betrayed him in the worst way possible, despite the odds being overwhelmingly against them. But when he finds out Joe Chill had been framed by Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murders and will face the death penalty….he does nothing. Despite the fact that Joe was arguably more of an innocent than Cressida, Turner doesn’t even have a throwaway line later on about wishing he could have helped him. (This plus the way he has zero remorse over killing the Talon also made me rule out Badger as a primary.) That’s because Turner is Bruce’s son in all the ways that matter, but he is not his heir in this show. He’s too much of a Snake to ever be.

His secondary is somehow even more obvious than his primary: this is the guy who had argued that they need to stick together from day one, who said that what makes them different from Joe Chill is the fact that they have each other, who was literally introduced to us extending a hand towards Brody when the latter lost the sword fight. He is such a Courtier Badger that for the first half of the show it almost overshadowed his primary. Not to mention, he is an amazing manipulator. Look at the beginning of episode two; after failing to convince Duela to trust Stephanie by vouching for her, he pivots: “[Put the knife down] or you might kill the one person who could prove we were set up.” He realizes Duela needs a self-serving reason to stop threatening Stephanie and he gives it to her. The same hyper awareness of emotional situations shows up again in episode thirteen when he wants to convince the group to have faith in Duela. The rest of the Knights are somewhat derisive that someone with Duela’s past and parentage could ever become a self-sacrificing hero…at which point Turner reveals his own parents’ secret: they were assassins sent to kill the Batman, and if they don’t trust Duela because of who raised her, they shouldn’t trust him either. And it works like a charm as the group gives into Turner’s wishes.

Duela Doe Dent

Duela is such a complex character, I wasn’t sure of her sorting till the very last minute. I think what’s important to look at in order to figure her out is her mom. Duela idolizes Jane Doe and wants nothing more than to be like her. And Jane is the ultimate hedonistic Double Snake. So of course Duela has a Snake secondary that is always ready for a con. But at the end of the day this is just the model she wears because of her mother. One of the themes of the show is trying to live up to your parents’ expectations and what that does to you. And modeling Jane’s Snake sec I think made Duela to feel a bit invisible. In episode eight when she talks about how her mom had so many identities even she herself forgot who she really was, it’s the first time when she doesn’t talk about her with admiration, but with fear. Duela is similarly terrified of losing herself while trying to live up to the legacy of being the Joker’s daughter. Deep down under that playful Snake, there is a Lion Secondary that is as blunt as they come. Her plan B when rescuing Turner in episode nine? A bomber vest to kill everyone if needed. Her reaction to evil!Harvey? To taunt him by throwing the truth in his face. Turner is dying from radiation? Duela tells him as soon as she finds out, against everyone else’s wishes. As Turner says she ‘has no grasp on social clues’, ‘she always tells the hard truths’ and ‘she’s always…Duela’. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence it’s this last line that makes her kiss him. This is the Lion secondary being overjoyed at someone liking Duela for who she is, not who she tries to be. Her fighting style (punches and knives to throats), her way of gathering information being kidnapping and torture and her tendency of giving Turner a reality check whenever he needs it are also evidence that support a Lion secondary. Her idea of a distraction is also hilariously straight-forward: she escapes from the police by pointing out how she’s trying to pick her handcuffs. (Sidenote: Turner and Duela’s ‘not offended’ game, aside from giving us THE most romantic line in the show, it’s also very Lion-coded IMO. There is very little you can say to a Lion secondary that will offend them as long as you are honest and it’s clear your intentions aren’t malicious.)

When trying to figure out Duela’s secondary I realized that she is incredibly healthy for a girl raised in Arkham by a conwoman. Sure, she’s extremely self-serving and would climb over anyone to get what she wants, but she has no regrets about it. It’s a tough world and everyone is in it for themselves. Except Duela is in it for her and her mom. (And she thinks the same must be true for her mom.) She’s a Snake primary who can’t be with Her Person. So she’s a little burnt. She doesn’t let herself get too close to anyone because what’s the point? Everyone leaves you eventually. Jane is the only person that had been there for Duela so she is the only one allowed to be in her inner circle. But than episode two happens and Duela abandons Harper, Cullen, Carrie and Turner to save her own skin. So when the invincible assassin comes after her, Duela is all alone. Except no, because suddenly the others are there and they are saving her life. She tries to clumsily thank Cullen for it, but he points out that if it wasn’t for Turner, they would have left her for dead. This is the switch that puts him on her map and slowly but surely, her Snake latches onto him. “I don’t care about Gotham, I care about Turner.” Duela and Turner’s first conflict in episode 11 is a deeply Loyalist one: she wants him to run away with her and her mom because she only cares about these two people, but Turner’s inner circle has expanded to include the others, so he can’t just leave. And the girl who’s already kinda burnt takes it as a betrayal and leaves without him. But she does come back when she realizes her mom is safe, but Turner is in mortal peril; or tries to. I find it interesting that her reaction to seeing the others imprisoned is to say ‘Even little bird’. And that’s because Carrie is the other person she bonded with.

Duela heals completely in the last episode when two things happen: Harvey promises to be her dad and commits a great sacrifice for her…and Turner comes to save her despite still being under the impression that she was never gonna come back. Her delighted expression when seeing him says it all. I always thought the Twelfth Doctor’s speech ‘Do You Think I Care for You So Little that Betraying Me Would Make a Difference?’ is every Snake’s dream, especially a burnt Snake’s, and Turner gave her this exact speech with his actions. Duela’s last scene mirrors Turner’s attitude during the whole show.

Harper: Duela, do you even care about the people?

Duela: No. But Turner did. And I cared about him.

She has adopted her loved ones’ morality and is willing to act on it. She’s a healthy Snake now despite all the tragedies that have happened to her.

(I am unsure about this, but I do wonder if Duela might have had a Bird primary model filled with nihilistic beliefs that she gets rid off by the end of the series. It would explain some of her more Idealist-like scenes, like when she is upset Joe Chill -the patron saint of small thieves- was actually set up. Or when she has to be comforted by Turner after saving the lives of kidnapping victims: “Just because you did a good thing doesn’t make you a good person.” The fact that this phrase makes her smile happily was hilarious.)

Harper Row

Harper is another Lion secondary that can’t be anything else but what she is. She’s blunt and forceful and makes her opinion known. She may be a genius but she is no Bird as she has none of the Bird sec traits. Sure she does research when needed, but she doesn’t show any particular inclination towards it outside life and death situations. As proven in the last episode, when she’s in a fight she goes for the biggest weapon. The way she stands up to Stephanie’s mom by throwing the truth in her face is also a very Lion move.

Harper is another Loyalist and for a while I believed she was a Snake with only Cullen as her person. After all, everything she does was and is for him. But she’s actually pretty miserable. Which is why I think she’s actually a Burnt Badger. @wisteria-lodge has this to say about Burnt Badgers: “[the Burnt Badger ]has decided that communities are unsafe, unpractical, and the only way to be safe is to be alone - or to try and be content with a much smaller community than the one they want. For this reason, Burnt badgers tend to look like miserable Snakes.” We sadly don’t get a lot of interiority for Harper (another reason to hate the cancellation), but I think her behavior towards Stephanie and especially Stephanie-Turner when contrasted to Duela’s is telling. Harper and Duela both have a crush on a person that has a very deep relationship with someone else, to the point that one can mistake the relationship as romantic. Which Harper does and starts resenting Stephanie and pushing her away in order to protect herself. She’s too scared to let herself get attached, typical Burnt Badger behavior. Meanwhile Snake Duela is just happy there is someone else prioritizing Turner like she does.

After their names are cleared, Harper says she might enroll in Gotham Academy with Stephanie, which to me shows that she’s looking to build a community.

Cullen Row

Cullen is the only one, alongside Stephanie, that is willing to deviate from their quest of proving their innocence in order to catch an art thief. While Harper refuses to risk her life in order to ‘recover trinkets for the rich’ and Turner says it’s not a priority, Lion primary Cullen has embraced his role as a hero of the city and thinks it would be unethical to not try and catch the thief and recover the stolen art. He’s also the one that wants to clear his name in the pilot because ‘I am the one who chose the damned thing’. If Turner wants to prove his innocence because he doesn’t want to be remembered as his own father’s killer and Duela and Harper don’t want to risk their lives in order to clear their names, Idealist Cullen is the only one who wants to do it because it’s the Right Thing to do.

I oscillated between Snake and Bird for his secondary, but I went with the former because deception is his go-to method. Need to trade the electrum for Turner but don’t want to give it to the Court? Just create a fake one. (And that scene is such a contrast with Lion sec Duela whose solution is to try and cut the powerful space rock with a run-of-the-mill knife LOL) Need evidence from the police station? Pretend to be a cop. In the pilot, when they knock out the cops chasing them, Cullen is the one that uses their station to keep the other cops from finding them.

Stephanie Brown

Stephanie is a Lion primary who is pretty much being gaslighted by her parents. She knows your mom being so drunk and drugged she can’t even stand at your school function is wrong, just as wrong as your dad using his money and status to supply her addiction just to keep up the picture of the perfect family. Stephanie does everything her parents tell her to, including ‘dating a guy with the right last name’. Except that’s not entirely true. Stephanie rebels in her own quiet way from the pilot when she helps Turner and keeps helping him and his friends after they become fugitives. You can see her Lion primary both loves the rebellion and the fact that she gets to be a hero, to truly do something good. As I pointed out before, aside from Cullen, Stephanie is the only one who believes it’s their duty as heroes to recover stolen art.

When she lets her father go to prison instead of giving Lincoln her friends’ location, Arthur Brown frames it as a Loyalist conflict: me versus them. But Idealist Stephanie doesn’t see it that way. What she sees is that her father is going to pay for his crimes, while her friends are innocent.

Her secondary was a bit harder, because I think it had been a bit burned by playing the perfect daughter, but I settled on Lion secondary. She and Harper communicate with each other in an easy and blunt way, like Lions do. She also has the Lion tendency of picking a strategy and just sticking with it, no matter how ill advised it might be. In her case it is using her hacker skills despite almost being arrested in the second episode. She’s also incredibly honest (when Brody asks about what she thinks about his dad, Stephanie just repeats that she thinks his mom is nice), uncomfortable with deception and goes after what she wants once her Lion primary has picked a path (see how she kissed Harper both in episode 11 and 13).

Carrie Kelly

Carrie is Bruce Wayne’s student when it comes to vigilantism and his true heir in the show. She is another Lion primary, and a Paragon one at that, just like her mom and her mentor. Like Turner’s and Duela’s, her story is about rising to your parents’ expectations, but in Carrie’s case, she surpasses them! Dr. Kelly is Gotham’s best surgeon who has double shifts at the hospital because this is the right thing to do and her drive has rubbed onto her daughter. So of course Carrie picks up on her mom’s, and later, Bruce’s, desire to save people and protect the city. As such when the opportunity arises she becomes Robin, Batman’s partner. Dr. Kelly is shocked her daughter would become a vigilante, but as Carrie points out she had been raised to do the right thing. This is also why she saves Turner and co in the pilot: she knows they are innocent and as such needs to rescue them. She’s still a young Lion who has quite the idealistic view and we see in the episode ‘More money, more problem’ -where she manages to put a mob boss behind bars only for him to be released by corrupt officials- that Gotham’s harsh reality could easily burn her. Thankfully I think the creation of the Gotham Knights would help prevent this.

As for her secondary, first things first: this girl is not a Lion. She steals the journal pages in episode two and keeps the secret about Batman killing Turner’s parents for the next eight episodes without much effort. She doesn’t have any Bird or Snake traits, which leaves Badger secondary, something that fits her quite well. I would say she is a Bookkeeper Badger, the other side of the coin to Turner’s Courtier Badger. Wisteria says about them: “A Bookkeeper Badger shows up and does the work. They are dependable, they are thorough, they don’t like cutting corners (Badgers consider cutting corners on something that they actually care about immoral.)” This perfectly describes Carrie.

Brody March

Brody doesn’t get that much interiority, so it’s hard to settle on a primary to him. I am oscillating between a heroic Badger or Lion as he turns on his parents when he realizes they are doing terrible things. I am gonna go with Badger primary, mostly for how much it seems like a community is important to him. When he joins the Knights in episode 12 he immediately considers himself one of them: “We would be fine.” There is also the way he seems to have quite the social life at Gotham Academy. This is mostly implied, but from the very first episode, while Turner is positioned as the outsider who will never get over the stigma of being ‘from the slums of Gotham’ and as such never truly belong in the upper class, Brody is the ‘guy with the perfect family name’ as Stephanie puts it. Everything he does is to live up to this family name, but unlike Stephanie, he genuinely wants to do so, it isn’t just pressure from his parents. You can see the first peak of the more heroic Badger when he does volunteer work at the hospital with Carrie and is bothered by the people left to suffer and wants to help them.

Brody and Turner’s pre-show relationship is fascinating and I’m sad it never gets fully explored. It’s clear they were somewhat close to each other, probably mostly because of Stephanie, but they are also clearly rivals in a lot of aspects: when it comes to swordfighting, to Stephanie’s affection and just to social status in general. Being the Bruce Wayne’s son, Turner is somewhat socially above Brody and pretty much all of the other students and you can see it irks them as they certainly feel he doesn’t deserve it. Brody believes Turner is capable of murdering his own father for money for…nine episodes, I think! And unlike most of Gotham, Brody clearly had enough of a rapport with him to have some doubts, but he doesn’t. I think these are the dark tendencies of a Badger to give into prejudice.

As Turner’s foil, Brody is another Badger secondary, but like Carrie -with whom he forms an organic friendship- I think he’s more of a Bookkeeper. While Turner may have been introduced to us in the pilot offering his hand to Brody, Brody is introduced when he accepts said hand, showing his fair play. His reaction when he is in uncomfortable situations (the gala, when he discovers the hidden camera with the recorded evidence) is to ask a friend (aka Stephanie) for help.

TL;DR

Turner Hayes - Snake who picked up Bruce’s morality/Courtier Badger

Duela Doe Dent - somewhat burnt Snake (with maybe a nihilistic Bird model)/Lion with a healthy Snake model

Harper Row - burned Badger/Lion

Cullen - Lion/Snake

Stephanie Brown - Lion/burned Lion

Carrie Kelly - Paragon Lion/Bookkeeper Badger

Brody March - Badger/Bookkeeper Badger

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