#wow that page doesn't even bother showing Scarab grabbing her

[mzminola]

#kinda critical I guess?#mostly because I'm not going to pretend that Steph isn't responsible for getting herself fired#or causing the gang war#it's not like bruce doesn't share in the blame#he loaded the gun sure but steph's the one who pulled the trigger#after she broke into the gun vault to steal it from him#and she's not some innocent widdle kid who couldn't know any better she's 17#18 if people kept better track of her age relative to tim [tags via soleminisanction]

From the Doylistic lens, I think Stephanie got screwed over because DC was always planning to bring Tim back to the Robin role ASAP, and wanted a plot device to kick off War Games. She was always going to be fired (or quit). That’s one of the downsides of being a supporting character.

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I think how they did the Robin thing is in character for Steph.

Looking at this now, having read more comics than I did back when it happened and I only heard about it secondhand, I think the sexism is... present but not as directly affecting things as I assumed. The art is clearly focused on her boobs, which is often a comics problem. But I think she got the Robin role while Tim was out, with DC having no intention of letting her keep it, because she was the only other active teen vigilante in Gotham who didn’t have her own series.

(Cass was busy being Batgirl, and I’m pretty sure everyone else was adults.)

Like if Steph was a dude, this would have gone down similarly, just with less boob-focused art (and maybe without DC higher ups claiming she didn’t count as Robin, but who knows, maybe they still would have).

The interpersonal drama with Tim could’ve been done through some other contrived misunderstanding (or maybe a real conflict, please DC) if they were platonic friends at the time. The sexism came into play ages ago when a writer chose to shoehorn her into dating Tim rather than sticking with Vitriolic Buds, and then with that established the writers for this went with the sexist “how dare you cheat on me (oh wait you didn’t)” cliche.

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War Games still feels less in character and more victim-of-being-a-plot-device, though. I think Stephanie stealing the plans is within her established character at the time, but it would make more sense for her to wave “ha ha I did something sneaky under Batman’s nose” in Tim or Cass’s face (or even Barbara’s, by this point) rather than “I have to prove myself so B will take me back / let me be a vigilante”.

Because previously, Bruce told Steph to stop being Spoiler, more than once if I recall correctly, and she just... ignored him! Kept going out as Spoiler! She didn’t bother with any kind of “oh I gotta prove I can do it” she just fucking did it.

Though since she did kick off War Games, whether it was in character before, now it’s something I keep in mind with her further actions. And oof does she go on to make some terrible choices that are in line with this one.

:[

How did Steph become Robin and how did she become fired? I know it was her starting a gang war but how exactly?

I had this whole thing typed up last night with citations and everything and then the post editor glitched and I lost the whole thing. :/ So, take 2:

Around Robin issues #124-125, Tim's father Jack discovered that he was Robin and went to Wayne Manor with a gun to threaten Bruce over the whole thing. To keep the peace, Tim volunteered to step down as Robin and promised his dad that he'd give that life up forever.

Shortly thereafter (Issue 126), Steph was stalking Tim at his school because if she doesn't see him every day she immediately assumes that he's cheating on her. She arrived at just the wrong moment to witness his classmate Darla plant a kiss on him, took that as proof that he was cheating, and ran away without bothering to wait the ten seconds it would've taken to see Tim push Darla away and tell her, again, that he has a girlfriend, sending her off in tears.

Steph went straight home, made herself a Robin costume, then went to the Bat-cave and told Bruce she would be the new Robin now. And Bruce agreed to let her try.

It's never actually defined what Stephanie's motivation for this is, BTW. We're left to pick it up from context clues -- like the fact that she was perfectly happy being Spoiler and had zero thoughts or plans in this direction until she saw Tim "cheating," and the fact that she then immediately ghosted Tim for what's implied to be weeks, potentially months, with no explanation.

It is, however, implied that Bruce might be going along with it all as a -- quoting Alfred -- "scheme to lure Tim back." Which, yeah, is not great.

So Bruce sets Steph up with a non-homemade Robin costume and a stupid new haircut (it only looks passable when Damion Scott draws it, everyone else needs to stop trying) and gives her this ultimatum.

Remember this for a later post, this one got too long. This arrangement of theirs lasts for a grand total of two full issues.

Seriously. Steph is hired as Robin at the end of issue #126, and she's fired at the end of #128. She appears in, I think, one or two issues of Cass's Batgirl, maybe the same months' corresponding Detective Comics and Batman issues (I don't really care to look them up to double-check), and a single B-plot appearance in an issue of the contemporary Teen Titans mostly dedicated to Superboy calling her a backstabbing wannabe poser and telling her she'll never be welcome at the Tower because she's not the real Robin.

That is the only time those two have ever spoken, BTW. Which is why a lot of people have been annoyed that they're suddenly being written as buddy-buds in the recent continuity for no reason.

Anyway, the point is, Steph's Robin career lasted a grand total of 3 months out-of-universe and forty-nine days in-universe, which we know because she started calling her diary-based narration her "War Journal" and counting the days there. This was recently re-confirmed in 2021's Robins miniseries.

Which brings us to how it ended, which is where I need to correct you slightly, anon. The gang war wasn't the cause of Steph's firing, it was the result.

The cause was an encounter with a powered-armor-wearing assassin called Scarab, who'd been hired by an old enemy of Tim's to kill black-haired, blue-eyed boys in Gotham in the hopes that she would eventually kill Robin. Encountering Steph with Bruce convinced Scarab that she must've killed her target ("resulting in the need for a replacement") and she was preparing to leave Gotham when Bruce & Steph tracked her down.

Bruce suited up in some power armor of his own and went down to fight Scarab, giving Steph strict orders to stay in the Bat-plane and not touch anything. Over the course of the resulting fight -- in which Bruce does seem to struggle a bit but never loses his cool and never seems to be in more danger than he would be in other fights -- he repeats these orders to Stephanie no less than five times.

Stephanie does not listen.

Stephanie rushes into the building, continues to disobey orders once she's there, and immediately gets herself taken hostage. Her life is threatened by the bad guy and Bruce lets Scarab go to save her.

That incident is what gets Stephanie fired.

Interestingly, despite what Bruce said about this being "the precise moment [Stephanie's] out," he actually waits until his injuries from the fight have recovered to drop the bomb, and it's implied that he stretches that out longer than he usually would -- out to a full three weeks -- to give her time to stew. Which I find very interesting, I'll talk about it more in the later post.

The gang war comes in because he gives her some privacy in the Batcave to collect her personal belongings before she goes, including her personal files off the Bat-computer. While doing this, she decides it's a great idea to steal one of Bruce's, quote, "contingency plans" to "wipe out all crime in Gotham... if worst came to worst." This particular plan involved bringing all of the Gotham crime families under Batman's control, and Steph figured that if she could "set that in motion, show she could help him" then he might "take her back."

Unfortunately, one of the "Big Secrets" that she wasn't privy to as a result of being on probation was the fact that Matches Malone, the guy on whom the entire plan hinged, was actually one of Batman's secret identities, so when he didn't show up to the meeting she arranged... boom. A bunch of mafia heads ended up dead, and that led to retaliation from their subordinates. Cue War Games.