I just saw someone say that Tim was the only member of the batfamily who didn’t suck at math.
With the exception of Dick (acrobatics) and Cass (body language) none of the Batkids are THAT much better than the others at a certain skill
Yes Jason is a better shot
Yes Tim is a better detective
And on a technical level they’re much better
Sure
But that means that if they have a 0.001% chance of cracking a case or making a shot. There will be a noticeable difference between Tim being the character or say Damian.
Otherwise
Not particularly.
Think of each skill like a normally distributed curve okay with the mean being your average hero/olympian/hacker/genius
Right
The Batkids will be at the 96th percentile in the skill
With the exception of 1 of them being at the 99th percentile range
Unless you are writing something you can comfortably say is complex/difficult enough to warrant drawing attention to the 3% difference. It’s annoying to bring it up
I exclude Dick and Cass
Because Dicks introduction is the fact he can do something the rest of the kids can’t to the point where it’s an identifier within his own story. It’s how Tim found him, a signature only he can do.
And Cass because she is genuinely cartoonishly cracked in her own storyline and in batfamily stuff she’s borderline a mind reader
(Could also argue Jason for supernatural stuff and the all blades)
These are exceptions because yeah
If you told me Jason, Dick or Steph cracked a difficult case in a run I wouldn’t treat it as shocking information
If you told me Tim, Dick or Damian managed a tricky shot with a firearm in a dire situation (like what happens in the Grayson run) it would be interesting, surprising but like not? Shocking?
If you told me that Jason did a quadruple summersault off a building and landed on his feet I’d be confused as shit
And even WITH Dick and Cass the other kids are still FREAKISHLY good at D&Cs special skills but they both have unignorable signatures
This is a very long winded way of saying when an author simplifies a character down to
“Oh look nice flippy one”
“Smart one”
“Angry gun one”
“Pet collector”
It’s annoying because you basically ignore all the interesting overlap
Like guess what Dick literally has a habit of collecting strays (see the rabbit and 3 legged dog he lives with in his apartment in the new run)
Tim is fucking badass and is very good at dealing with explosives
Damian is canonically currently thinking of leaving the family business and no longer being a hero to maybe focus on helping people in other ways
Jason occasionally works with magic and demon bullshit
And every single one of them is a genius okay literally every single one of them could get a masters in physics, chem, bio and history in like 2 weeks flat.
Their stats are stacked
All of them know enough info to be able to do 99% of a task and yeah someone might call Tim or Dick in for detective help or Jason for muscle and restraining backup but in 99% of cases THE OTHER CHARACTERS SHOULD BE EQUALLY competent
Dick in TT: manipulates his friends
Dick in YG: manipulates his friends
Dick in New teen titans: manipulates his friends and also villains
Dick in solo run: manipulates enemies
Dick in team up runs: manipulates team
Everyone canonically when dick is manipulative: 😮
Us the readers when Dick is manipulative: 😮
Us the reader when Dick is trying to be manipulative but fails and ends up manipulated: 😮😮😮
"I headcannon Dick as manipulative" you and the writers of Nightwing babe
Now imagine this whole concept with in the de-aging mix
-Dick goes from pushing 30 to saying is 9 and 3/4 which is basically 10 shut up
-and Bruce just melts
-it’s temporary but all stress the wear and tear of the year falls off of him. He has his boy back
-and they’re the dynamic duo, the first Batman and Robin. The never need to speak to understand each other and the way they communicate doesn’t get lost in translation the way it did when he got older.
“You were reckless” went back to being interpreted as “I’m worried about you be safe” instead of a criticism.
-Bruce laughs again in a way he hasn’t since Jason died and all the bats are there for it. They see Bruce Wayne as the man when his life was 1 tragedy instead of a million. And if they thought measuring up to Dicks Robin was hard actually seeing makes it seem impossible. They kid just fits in a way none of them feel like they do (they do fit they all just have issues)
- and then a crisis happens and 9 (10-shut up) Dick just isn’t as competent as Nightwing (obviously 20 more years of experience and aging will do that) but Dick also can’t work outside of Batman and even when working with Batman he struggles to fill in the huge gaps that his older self filled seamlessly
-and Bruce sees how Much his boy has grown, how much he’s changed and developed and matured and how did this little sweet boy become the future standard for heroism.
He’s so small
-Dick gets turned back into his almost 30yro self and thanks Bruce for looking out for him a second time and does Bruce say anything about how proud he is of his boy, how much of a joy it was to raise him.
No
He just says
“Anytime”
I don't know where else to put this and I'm losing my mind over it. The passage of time in Dick Grayson's life haunts Bruce. His son is almost thirty. His son is nine. His son has been fighting crime for twenty-one years. His son is trying on the Robin costume for the first time. His son is sixteen and insisting on driving the Batmobile with a license he hasn't even had for a full week. His son is twenty-four and wearing the Batman suit. His son is ten and has aced a test that Bruce puts on the fridge. His son is eighteen and leading the Titans. His son is thirteen and falling asleep on Bruce's shoulder. His son is his child. His son is a man.
Bruce's eldest son, his first son, is a man that Bruce can never stop seeing the child in. Dick is grown and matured and Bruce is glowing with pride, and he will never find equilibrium. He will never be able to fully reconcile the boy and the man. Time is slipping through their fingers and Bruce would give anything to hold that nine year old again. He loves his son, both past and present, and that love of the past clings to him like a ghost. That nostalgia haunts him. He is proud of who Dick has become and will always mourn who Dick no longer is.
Dick Grayson absolutely pulled off the mullet and the suit and we all know it stop lying to yourselves
I'm still waiting for them to get back together....
There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...
can we stop pretending the bats all live in the same house together i swear those people do not communicate nor see each other regularly
YALL DONT UNDERSTAND
My favorite part of Bruce and Dicks relationship isn’t the unending loyalty and devotion and the self assured destruction of loving a man who hates himself on Dicks part and using an eternally flying man as a your stable ground on Bruce’s part
It’s not the adoration that feels like shackles or the unending trust that feels like raking hot coals over your back
It’s the fact that Dick Grayson will always love Bruce Wayne
And also
Always want to kick the absolute shit out of him
Violently
Like Dick has pent up rage and we see him lash out at people but almost never has he ever attacked any loved ones physically with the exception of Roy Harper after the women who they both loved more than life itself passed.
But with Bruce?
Yeah no
Dick not only hits to hurt
He hits with the aim of getting Bruce down and keeping him there.
It feels like vindication to him
He borderline revels in it
I mean look at the hits he landed during the Gotham War run or Forever Evil/Spyral
And then there’s Bruce
Who knows
Because he is not an idiot
And he knows he fucked up with Dick more than the rest as Robin (nothing can really compare to how he treats Jason as the red hood)
But do you think Batman feels guilt over the fact that Dick HAS this much rage and bitterness over the things Bruce has done
Like Dick in unendingly Kind and forgiving but he’s also and pardon my French, a dick (lowercase) so he absolutely holds resentment over the stuff Bruce did to him even if it’s water under the bridge in his day to day
But he’s still mad
He’s still mad over the loss of Robin
The gauntlet
The death of Jason Todd
The court of the owls
The reveal of Damian Wayne
The fact that Dick had to be Batman
The fact that Bruce died
The fact that Bruce told Dick he never should’ve been Batman
The fact that dick had to continue the cycle of orphans raising orphans
(no he doesn’t count Talia as a parent cuz then he’d have to view her as human and human life has value and in his opinion she has no value and should go find a nice comfy corner to die in like an old cat)
The fact that he was basically pushed into a pseudo father role with all the kids past Jason
Letting him kill the Joker
Bringing the joker back to life
Damian’s death
Steph’s fake death
Spyral
Losing his memories and leaving Dick alone at spyral
Showing Dick a video of him getting shot in the head when he’s mentally a 12 year old and also an amnesiac
And about 6 million other heart wrenching things
So yeah Dick hits to hurt and those times where Bruce has lost control (mind control, clone, fight etc) and Dick has Carte Blanche to cause harm to Bruce
He
Does
Okay but I have questions?
Is it Arabic coffee or Turkish coffee?
And if it’s Arabic coffee with or without cardamom???
Talia is definitely a Turkish coffee person she also does the thing where she flips it over, swirls it and reads the meaning.
I think Ras would be an Arabic coffee drinker but he’s one of the puritans who likes his coffee light, kinda how they serve it in Saudi. Like the pale green one with a small plate of dates.
But there’s one thing I think is really funny
Listen Arabs don’t… really drink coffee alone in a full house? It’s just not really done.
You also don’t drink coffee quickly
Coffee is a period of time where you sit down and get all the gossip from your family members if you’re a matriarch (I’m talking elopements, marriages, divorces, cheating scandals with the Al ghuls probably all of that + murders, assassination attempts and or plans etc)
Can you imagine Damian moving to the manor and seeing Alfred the eldest member of the household serving people tea and then …. Leaving?
Or taking his tea by himself for a well earned break?
Personally if I was 10? It would freak me the hell out if my grandma was sitting alone having her coffee when my mom and various aunts and uncles were in the house.
Or my GREAT grandma omg no that’s just eerie
He’d be so confused?? Like wtf are you doing?? Or like how people have coffee with breakfast here instead of after??? Like you don’t move to the sitting room and have coffee with tiny bite sized desserts or dates? Are you okay? Why are you having a pot of coffee with your oatmeal?
In my Arab region (I can't speak for the others, but I'm pretty sure they have similar things. Add your stuff if you do!) Coffee time is kind of sacred and is tightly regulated with heavy traditional rules. Especially so for the male populace.
Coffee makes the man! (Literally, I can't stress this enough)
Men and women alike are trained from a very young age on how to make and serve their coffee. A coffee with a good colour is a bright sign for your guests, and the way you serve is very telling of you.
Doors are ALWAYS open for guests, and HUGE halls are prepared to accommodate them (they can reach hundreds, depending on your dad's popularity). A household's head is a very blessed man when he has children/grandchildren because he can brag about them by showing their serving skills off. Those children will be scrutinised and judged according to their coffee serving manners. It's a very integral part of a charming character's traits for us. So, parents, especially fathers, are very strict about this.
Aside from guests, families have daily coffee time for themselves, too! It's very respectful to serve your mom and dad coffee. So it's expected from you.
Considering Ra's personality, serving him coffee as a grandson would be a nightmare.
Imagine Damian refilling the finjaan again and again in front of an elegantly sitting Ra's until he gets it right? Imagine him waiting (while standing, maybe for an hour or so) for Ra's to finish his finjaan so he can refill it again? Imagine how LIVID Ra's would be when Damian accidentally fills the finjaan to the top (a message that says, are you satisfied, yet? Get out! In my region) imagine Ra's asking Damian to serve coffee for his villain allies?!! Arabs and non?? And imagine people getting to know and hear about him from his coffee serving, like a good Arab son, before they know him from his sword?
Also, when he finally lives in the manor and sunset arrives and Batman is sitting by the batcomputer, deeply focused, and then is surprised by a finjaan presented to him because it's coffee time?
Damian would be very confident and proud of his coffee making and serving skills he would expect from Bruce nothing but sipping and asking for a refill, because his father should know his manners.
Bruce would know nothing about this but would, of course, sip (not drink! Drinking bad!!!) without question, and will continue to accept and sip every. Single. Day before patrol without knowing what is happening but going along with it because he's pretty sure this is Damian's way of bonding.
Which is not really true because Damian is only performing his duty as a son. He never really understood the core meaning behind this tradition because for a long time now, the art of Arabian Coffee was only a skill that was expected from him and a part of showing good grace. But as days pass and the number of people being served coffee increases and coffee time becomes a routine before each patrol for the whole family, when dates and snacks and small talk and occasional laughter join in, the very meaning behind this tradition clicks with him, and he serves it with a smile.
I dreamt a comic panel where Bruce described first Dick and then Diana. And it was like: Robin: My partner, my son, a hero. And then Diana was: Wonder woman: a woman 😭
I write bad Dick Grayson and TMA fanfiction on ao3 follow me @imtired_likerllytiredI literally keep creating and deleting accounts on this hellsite lurker since age 8
310 posts