Fic - Blog Posts

Do you think Bruce Wayne became written as a worse and worse parent because the idea of what makes a person "Heroic" has changed over the years?

(Cut for rambling)

At the start of Batman comics there was a very clear need for the audience to suspend their disbelief. The comic was very much a story, a reflection of the world where the reader was to be entertained with tales about a strange detective investigating the strange crimes of Gotham City.

Robin was Batman's partner, a new element to the story that appealed to a younger audience. They were a team that brought in a lot of capital. Authors would write heart-rending storylines and at the opposite page there would be a weird cheerful ad for Batman and Robin using fruit pies to stop crime.

Society evolves quickly and our media can struggle to keep up. The notion that children should be protected is a relatively recent one and it makes the inclusion of child heroes become... unpalatable to people. Modern values have changed and so too must the characters.

But applying current social values to the concept of child heroes would erase them.

Their whole existence is to be young and to fight the people who want to hurt them. To be young and be able to protect one's loved ones is a compelling story.

It's not just comic book heroes who fall under this paradox, either. Avatar: The Last Airbender is full of children learning how to fight and die for their world. Percy Jackson is another. Hell, one could even make a case for Warrior Cats. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were facing off with murderers just as often as any kid hero.

It's a common and loved story because we've all been children who have had to carve out a place for ourselves in the world.

So the existence of Robin, of child heroes in general, becomes an awkward duality. The character is too profitable to retire. Many people can still suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the story. Other people struggle to accept that a "hero", a "good Dad", could allow his children to fight at his side.

So authors are tasked again and again to try to explain Robin. To excuse the existence of a child hero in a day and age when most responsible adults would freak the fuck out at the idea of a kid going out at night to fight criminals.

And sometimes, more often than many of us would like, they come up with writing Bruce as a bad parent. A bad leader, even. It doesn't help that writers don't often get to have stories published that have significant influence on Batman as a character. He's purposely, perpetually trapped at one starting position for every new story.

Which is a valid take. In my opinion it's uninspired, but I understand the rationale behind it. They're working against a lot of baggage. There's nearly 90 years of culture shift to account for and hundreds of authors. Even the way comics are written now is very different from back then and that also messes with perceptions.

To me, Bruce is a deeply flawed man. He's been a shitty dad, yes, but not because Robin exists. He didn't have a choice with Robin - that was decided by forces beyond his control. I don't know how to judge canon Bruce Wayne; there are genuinely too many stories for me to feel like I have an accurate read on him.

I know that he tries very hard to do good. I know that he has the potential to make better choices and take kinder actions.

I'm not going to hold my breath, though. Even if we get a canon Batman run where he gets therapy and apologizes for his mistakes and past actions, where he has some real, meaningful dialogue with the people he loves... The next writer can ignore that for a more dramatic plot where he acts like a complete drip.

Pick your preferred version and warp canon to fit that guy - it's what DC does.

Thank the goddess for fanfiction.

Hey, heeeey. This fic is so freaking good. I love me some cryptid Batfam and this one is like.

*insert hand flapping*

It's like that? Like, it's such an excellent look at humanity and masking and people being different aspects of themselves throughout their lives, but it's all hidden in the subtext of a story about spirits and I love that even more?!

I love that sometimes we see humanity best when we strip away what we usually define as human.

Fucking. Love this. I'll write a comment on it in a bit, gotta hit that therapy appointment but I loved this so much I wanted to share aaaaah

I want to explore the Bernard-as-the-third-Robin idea a little more.

Firstly, that's a mouthful and we're calling him Robern from now on.

CW: in theorizing backstory we address potential/canon child abuse and suicidal ideation.

How does he come to find himself in Batman's orbit? By accident. By storming out of his house after a fight with his parents. By blindly walking to the more dangerous part of town, or climbing up to a rooftop, or standing at a bridge.

By looking at something dangerous and thinking, "how much would they care if I were hurt? Would they care at all?"

And then along comes the goddamn Batman. And he's a fucking mess. He burned the bat signal onto a guy's face earlier.

And maybe that's where this change in the timeline starts; with Batman sitting next to this kid who looks nothing like either of his sons, listening to him talk about his parents and his fears and...

Bernard is just a kid who wants his parents to love and accept him.

Just like Jason.

Do y'all think Batman would take him home immediately or do you think he'd try to find alternative arrangements for this kid?

Because I rather like the idea of a deeply concerned Tim Drake going to Nightwing sooner rather than later, holding photos of messy!Batman ushering a sad-eyed blond kid into the Batmobile.

Someone out there is really dedicated to telling me to kill myself at least once a day through my ask box.

Glad you have a hobby, buddy.

For the record, I don't hate Talia al Ghul. I think she's a great character with a lot of complexity.

I just get a little tired of some parts of the fandom treating her as a wonderful mother figure and limiting her to that. She's so much more than that. She is so much more interesting than that.

The duality of mother and murderer has been explored a couple of times in DC comics; her story keeps getting shifted around to make her more marketable. More palatable to the casual consumer.

I'd just like to see more variety to her than "deus ex mother". Let her be mother, yes, and also let her be murderer. Let her embrace dark actions for a "greater good". Let her character be influenced by her actions, the good and the wicked.

Let her be flawed. Let her do shit that's awful. The Mother trope can be great and terrible in their love.

And as a fan of anything in general, you probably shouldn't tell other fans to die because you don't think they're enjoying something correctly. Kinda fucked up.

So, when Jason was living his Red Hood life and stalking Tim to an intense degree, I want to imagine him running into a little problem. He finds something that Tim has been keeping secret from the other Bats.

Tim livestreams his W&W campaigns with his civilian friends.

It's mostly done for Ives when he's at the hospital; the steam is easier for his friend to watch and communicate his turns while he's sick. Tim plays both his and Ives' characters at once.

And the thing is...

Jason fucking loves a story.

And after so long watching the streams for stalking purposes, he's reluctantly invested in this one.

He'll definitely beat the shit out of the new Robin soon! It's part of his plan! He needs to prove he's better than this little twerp.

But first he needs to know how the romantic subplot between Tim's orc Artificer and that blond kid's half-elf Paladin is going to turn out.

I HAVE SPENT. TOO LONG. TRYING TO WORD THIS PROMPT PROPERLY.

Seriously, I have three drafts and one of them is basically me just writing the fic myself...

By the time Jason is ready to be legally revived as a Wayne, the world - and Gotham, in particular - is NOT going to accept the excuse of a coma or amnesia. What they ARE going to accept is the excuse:

"Batman's cult-themed enemies used magic and science to raise me from the dead to use me as a way to stop Brucie Wayne from funding him. But I'm a bad Gotham bitch and I escaped my Rogue Origin Story. Also they cloned me, and that's why the Red Hood gets away with so much - Bruce is trying to adopt him, too, but Batman kinda has dibs on morally dubious antiheroes, so there's a custody fight."

"Yeah, they aged Hood up and planted him in Gotham before I made it home. It took me awhile, I was dodging assassins! No, he didn't know he was a clone until we met by accident when he rescued me from a mugging and turning it into a kidnapping. Yeah, the cult messed with his memories; we spent like four days going over everything."

"No, I've never subbed in as his body double, I'm traumatized by my narrow escape from supervillainy. Yes, we keep in touch."

DC world is used to weird shit by now; one guy dipping out of the enforced supervillain arc a cult planned for him would be mildly remarkable. Maybe he'd go on the Daily Show or give a few interviews about the experience.

Slade Wilson makes me want to write an au where his son, Grant, joins/is adopted by/marries into the Batfamily during his teen rebel phase.

His codename is Wrenegade.

Wouldn't that be some shit? All this lethal potential and he's using it to be a martyr vigilante in the hellcity? Slade would have a coronary. Batman would be the most smug bitch. Grant would keep the orange-and-black just to flex on his shitty bio-dad.

He'd hang out with the Waynes and everyone "in the know" would know that Batman poached a kid from Deathstroke.

"Slade is a titans villain!" "Slade is a Batman villain!" Slade is his own fucking villain. Have you seen the bastard? He is the main component in wrecking his own life godbless.

Been thinking about how Tim and Bernard are similar when it comes to conspiracy theories and general willingness to wreck shit.

But Bernard, unlike Canon!Tim, had a really bad home family life going on. One that might have pinged Bruce's dad senses if he'd known about it.

So, really, maybe Bernard could have been the third Robin. I feel like that's not too far of a stretch to consider. It'd be interesting to see how that could have changed the story.

(Imagine Titan's Tower with Bernard as Robin. Jason would be torn; he's gotta beat the new guy up, but also Bernard is the only teen there who understands the importance of balanced meals.)

Hey, where are my DC x DP people at?

What if Jason came back wrong because the GIW had his little ghost self captured for 6 months?

Imagine it. The warehouse in Ethiopia happens to be on some powerful crossing leylines and a GIW agent is stationed to keep an eye on the area. She sees the Joker and his men. She sees Robin enter the building. Maybe the place is bugged and she even knows what's happening and she realizes... This is their chance. The GIW could get data on a ghost as it forms! This is unprecedented!

So, she waits and watches and records data.

And when the warehouse explodes, when the Batman has come and gone, when the response team has put out the fire... She searches. She finds Robin's ghost as it begins to form. She captures it, the scientific find of the century.

And six months of inhumane, dehumanizing experiments later, the ghost of Robin seems to shred itself as it's ripped violently through all the anti-ecto restraints and containments.

Maybe there's a perfect sphere left behind and Jason doesn't realize that he's missing his core. Maybe the recorded experiment logs are out there, waiting for the right hacker to release them. Maybe Team Phantom rescued the core and are searching for the being it belongs to.

Just some thoughts~

The thing is... The Thing Is...!

The Honorable Chef Gordan Ramsey would immediately lose his shit at this contest because he is a motherfucking Scott! He is British by the technicality of Scotland being part of the United Kingdom.

And legitimately, he doesn't seem to drop curses without genuine cause or for a zingy one-liner.

Honestly, this silly prompt has gotten me updated on my Chef Ramsay lore and I'm just vibing with happiness for him. He's got 6 kids, none of whom seem to be terribly hounded by the press. He and his wife seem to be still very much in love. He's got so many businesses and ventures. He ran the London Marathon once a year for a solid decade.

He almost died while hunting puffins. He almost died again in a bicycle accident. He's extremely active in charity work and a surviver of child abuse and he's just. Yeah. He's worked extremely hard to live the life he's living now and I'm just really happy we - the world - get to know him a little bit.

And also, I'm like, even more craving a Very Special Episode kinda story with DC!Gordan interacting with superheroes. I want to see him being proud of Roy, or talking to Oliver Queen about what it's like to have a loved one with a heroin addiction and the struggle to balance supporting them vs enabling them.

Which of his TV shows could be an excuse to get him to Gotham? Specifically, Park Row. Probably The F Word. Because I really want to see shit go down and Chef Gordan making "we're trapped in an elevator" conversation with a fully kitted-out Red Hood. They're both car guys, it'd be cute to see them chat. Maybe they can swap violent father stories the way Spoiler and Batgirl got to.

I've given enough angst lately. Have something amusing:

Chef Bernard Dowd on Hell's Kitchen.

Imagine it, please. Imagine Tim gripping with bloody hands to the shreds of his self-control, trying not to physically attack Chef Gordan Ramsey for yelling at Bernard for fucking up the risotto.

I've given enough angst lately. Have something amusing:

Chef Bernard Dowd on Hell's Kitchen.

Imagine it, please. Imagine Tim gripping with bloody hands to the shreds of his self-control, trying not to physically attack Chef Gordan Ramsey for yelling at Bernard for fucking up the risotto.

YES! But then also, we can make it angsty. Tim going into sub drop because everything was very very good and now suddenly; Jason's here and furiously making horrific accusations? And Bernard's bleeding-hurt-helphim-savehim-! And Tim is having to pull himself together and possibly convince Jason to untie him and not kill Bernard and have to explain that they were doing a scene and the humiliation of it is not the good kind?!

Send that boy into a spiral, we all know he's gonna internally monologue at the drop of a hat.

Red Hood has 100% heard Tim and Bernard being freaky and broken into their place thinking that an assault was in progress.

Shots were definitely fired.

Hey, shout-out to Marvel who made their (at the time) front runner, most popular and profitable hero into a domestic abuser by accident. And I don't mean "accident" as in a writer made a bad character decision that was signed off on, I mean "accident" as in there was a literal miscommunication between the writer and the artist.

Can you imagine suddenly becoming a wife-beater because two of your gods missed a memo? Wild.

BUT! Instead of retconning this, the team leaned into it, made it lore that Ant-Man's tech was giving him mental problems and emotional instability. He faced consequences and had to struggle with himself as a hero and as a person. It's a fucking great plotline, it's a fantastic story hook!

It's depth and recognition of brain disorders and loving someone and divorcing them anyway because you have to put on your own oxygen mask first. It's realizing that your long-term plans are crashing down around you because of a physical injury no one can fix. It's an identity crisis. It's losing friends because being a caretaker is hard.

It's retiring a character for legit in-world reasons and allowing someone else to take up a symbol. It's about creating a legacy.

Marvel lost a major money-maker during this time, but holy shit did they get to tell a story.

This is the stuff I think about when I get frustrated with DC's restarts and quick retcons; what kind of intense, personal storylines could we have seen play out if they just allowed their characters to make those mistakes? Take those terrible actions?

I don't want to see something awful handwaved into "it didn't actually happen", I want to peel open a character's mindset and motives and understand why it did. Give me the introspection. Give me the reasons. Give me them acknowledging mistakes.

Okay, hear me out. I know it's not canon that Jason drugged the other Titans during the Titans Tower Incident; he electrocuted two of them and then drugged the third.

But we're playing in the au's like bitch whatever, DC retcons and rewrites at the slightest provocation and we are here for stories, right?

And a lot of Titan's Tower au's have Red Hood drugging more people than in canon. And every time it happens there's an absolutely terrible little voice in the back of my head going, "Jason is so lucky that no one he drugged was hiding a substance abuse issue like Roy did. Jason is so lucky that none of these teenagers-to-young-adults who are incredibly physically active and who have so many traumas took some physician-prescribed, completely legal pain medications or anxiety pills or muscle relaxants. He is so lucky that any daily upkeep medication didn't cause a catastrophic drug interaction with the unknown. Heck, Jason is so lucky that whatever drugs he used were perfectly tailored to each individual's body mass and species."

I'm not saying I want a fic where Jason accidentally makes a young hero OD, but I think it would be interesting and darkly funny if Tim made him think he might have.

"You drugged everyone? Wait, even (X)?! What did you use, did you check to see if they took their benzos before you drugged them? (Y) Is allergic to propofol, was that part of the stuff you used?"

"Look, you can have the fight you want, just let me make you none of my friends are choking on their own vomit first."

Hey, friendo! (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠) April 27th is coming up! (⁠✿⁠^⁠‿⁠^⁠)

Doesn't that make you want to

Celebrate? (⁠✷⁠‿⁠✷⁠)

But no fr, there probably going to be a ton of angst fics dumped into the world all at once soon, maybe you've got a more fun prompt somewhere to offset the coming storm of grief?

Someone bully me into writing

Red Hood has 100% heard Tim and Bernard being freaky and broken into their place thinking that an assault was in progress.

Shots were definitely fired.

Hey, you know what would be absolutely tragic? What if Jason were alive because of traditional ghost story reasons - he cannot rest until he is avenged?

If Jason kills the Joker, or if anyone kills the Joker in Jason's honor, then Jason has to rest in peace whether he wants to or not. That's how the stories go, don't they? The spirit can move on once their Unfinished Business is Finished.

Would it be quick? Would he collapse immediately, like a puppet with his strings cut? Would he feel his heart leap in one last beat of vicious satisfaction?

Or would he feel the gentle embrace creeping up on him slowly, the way his limbs grow stiff and cold. Would he have time to stumble to his family, his team, a friend, a sibling, a lover, and feel the burning heat of a living person hold him as he stutters out confused goodbyes?

It's been so long since his last stay in the coffin, he's rebuilt an entire life. And he's losing it again. Because of the same bastard man.

Just a thought (⁠✿⁠^⁠‿⁠^⁠)

I don't remember whether canon revealed Tim's specific Hit List contingencies or not, I lost that comic book awhile ago.

So I'd like to make shit up and invite people to add to the list. I've said before that I like to imagine that Damian just found the Hit List file and saw himself and immediately went to Nightwing, and I think it'd be funny if the Hit List was actually either A) Tim's customized playlists for everyone or B) the stupidest plans that might work as a mockery of Batman's contingency list.

In this episode I want to focus on option B, what would be on the Stupid Plans List if someone goes evil.

Damian - erase his Cheese Viking saves. Tell him his sketches of Batman are technically furry art. Buy him Robux???

Dick - lead him to Gotham zoo, get him to the elephants. Strategically leave powdered sedatives on ground, hope he licks? Dress as Jaybin, talk him down as hallucination.

Jason - just cut my own throat this time fuck.

Bruce - call Clark. Call Diana.

Cass - aw shit here we go again

Steph - Join. As a treat.

Cassie, Kon, Bart - all else fails, Core Four Suicide Pact 👍

Ra's - tell him I'll be his heir if he wins an MMORPG of my choice. Maybe he'll forget to Lazarus bathe?