#tim can be whatever you want him to be

[thatshadowgastwhore]

The thing about Tim Drake is that you can write any niche skill you need to him because he was an unsupervised genius child with access to a limitless credit card, devoid of any sense of self preservation. Odds are, if you need any character to have a Skill™️, Tim can have it, either because his parents wanted him to learn it, or he just…decided he needed that skill and took it upon himself to learn it.

You want Tim to play violin? Now Janet loved violin so he learned it to gain her approval. To do ballet? Yeah, he thought it would be a useful disciple for chasing bats, same with gymnastics. Expert fencer? He convinced his parents to get him a tutor. Learned a niche language or two or several? He was a bored genius child who hacked into college level classes, now he speaks Polish, and Tagalong, and Farsi and-, Need someone to translate ancient runes or dead languages? He just wanted his parents attention? Learned ancient magic? It was an accidental skill picked up from learning about his parents favorite artifacts in a bid to try to get them to take him with them on a dig. Classic car restoration? Well, Jack wanted him to have a “manly” hobby. Street racing? Well, he wasn’t going to NOT modify the vehicles his a parents bought in an attempt to show love through gifts. Lock picking? He wanted to be just like Robin. Forensic science? Duh, he’s a super fan of the world’s greatest detective. Field medicine? Well, he can’t go to an actual doctor with the scrapes and injuries he gets while trailing the dynamic duo. Ornithology? He had to pretend he meant he was really into robins, the bird, one time to avoid explaining that he meant he actually knew Robin’s patterns and schedule and not the regular bird, and decided he had to commit to the bit until realizing he actually did have an interest in birds. Tarot? Fortunetelling? Just another way to use his stalking tendencies to keep the social elite on their toes.

Like, maybe not all at once but whatever your thing is, that can also be Tim’s thing, with literally no effort needed to justify it. Barely even an AU. Tim is whatever you want him to be

[mickey-bees]

[soulless-bex]

hot take: Jason is actually one of the most emotionally intelligent members of the Batfam because, contrary to most of them, he actually expresses his actual emotions. and while those feelings are mostly negative, he still expresses them, which is more than can be say about Bruce (who will bottle it up till it blows up in his face), Damian and Cass (who were trained out of expressing their feelings during childhood by literal assassins), Tim and Dick (who are chronic liars and will bullshit their way through life unless there’s no other way).

[littlespoonevan]

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[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[notfeelingthyaster]

i think jason's probable death in gotham wars is going to either be a non-continuity death (like dick's deaths) or a "death" (like tim's deaths) in which he is not really dead, just like, in stasis or smh

(or they said we'll dig deeper this time so you can't dig out and offed him again)

[frequentderealizationcore]

The way writers use jason sometimes to make tim be the most special boy ever that absolutely hates that loser idiot jason todd who is absolutely despicable and evil. Like if you want to prop up tim don't use jason, that's not a "true sibling dynamic" that's just people using another character to show their dislike for jason. In my opinion they just shouldn't interact, not besties and not haha silly antagonistic siblings that's basically just tim insulting jason the entire time.

[izarnox]

Hey, you remember the Evil Clone Tim prompt? Yeah was thinking about it then:

In Amity univers (APu) there's already a Tim, who didn't come from Amity nor moves in the city but unstead is just passing by because he have some matters to do in the nxt city or something

This Tim is a straight up sociopath ( or whatever tf it is) who never feels anything, the perfect heir and son whove done nothing wrong in his life and thinks of everything and every single person he've as dull and annoying (life itself as bothersome)

He somehow get himself dumped into ectoplasm. The thing is he's not an Amity Parker, like everyone in APu he's sensitive to it but unlike Amity Parker's he doesn't have a natural resistance.

Interdimentional beings are made of ectoplasm. Tim had quite the reaction to it.

There's is no Justice League here. But there is also only one single power source on this earth, Amity.

Oh no, he's a bit power hungry now. Thanks to the other Tims, he now know what to do what not to.

There's just one thing standing between him and taking down the world. Amity's protector, Phantom.

I like to think of them as an enemy-to friend-to lovers. + the rehab for Tim, slice of life too I guess since they're living together (Danny have to keep a close eye on him(but you know human )).

[aster-draws]

Why do you write Tim as a Yandere? 🙁I’m not hating but it’s just putting me off whenever I read…

Because I want to? LMAO if it's putting you off just don't read it like what kinda question

[bluegarners]

pushing my bruce wayne has gray eyes agenda

[wellenklavier]

man. i really want to push my bf to stop vaping sooner rather than later but i also dont want to be some kind of asshole. like he's expressed that he wants to quit many times and has tried in the past,, esp if i move in i think i'd like to bring it up that he should try again. idk man

[kneworder]

idk if this is bc of fuckass n52 shit but every fic i read where tim complains about his relationship with dick. to JASON. where tim reconciles with dick. because of JASON. where tim doesn't feel comfortable around dick. but he does around JASON. guys please....... guys........... are you so serious rn.............

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Jason, especially in that one Teen Titans comic, often complains about the lack of pants he has. And I'm haunted thinking about that at all times

[shrugemojiidk]

Can I share my most niche deranged fanfic pet peeve. I hate when Talia gets mpregged out of Damian’s parentage. Like when it’s omegaverse Bruce/Ra’s and they make Damian Ra’s child. Being made to be the villain in Damian’s story was the biggest hit Talia’s character ever took but I still get so offended on her behalf like excuse you that is Talia al Ghul’s son put some respect on her name she’s literally his most pivotal relationship

[fairysylveon]

rubbing my temples a little thinking about tim takes

[tossball-stick]

post bl3 rhackothy save me..... post bl3 rhackothy....... save me post bl3 rhackothy...