Birds of Prey #28 - "The Unreality" (2025)

Evelyn: “We dig up dead people who often have monstrous curses placed on them!”

Rick: *grabs sword from equally ominous looking wall full of weapons one of which seems to be glowing* fantastic I was getting a bit rusty

Rick: Have I mentioned how wonderful my wife is yet, I really feel like I haven’t really expanded enough on how wonderful she is

Gomez: do go on, I would be delighted to hear about how wonderful your wife is, I strongly encourge all men to extoll the virtues of their wives with rapturous praise, however I should perhaps mention my wife is in fact better

But taken with the modern “Batman has PTSD and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” this suddenly makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE because if there is a way to get a telepath to go “um no thank you” to some mental shenanigans it would be someone with constant obsessive intrusive thought spirals and massive trauma.

Like Martian Manhunter hooking up a mental link between Justice League members trying to screen out how Batman’s brain is screaming at him for the entire 12 hour mission about how Nightwing hasn’t stopped by the cave to switch out his costume for the new improved kevlar weave so he has definitely already been killed by a rocket launcher and oh god what is Batman going to say at the funeral

Gerard Way witnesses 9/11 and as a consequence, starts My Chemical Romance

Stephanie Meyer sees My Chemical Romance and becomes inspired to write Twilight

Somewhere in Rio de Janeiro, a man by the name of Felipe Neto is so outraged by the Twilight movies that he makes a hate video about them that goes so viral he becomes one of Brazil's biggest YouTubers

His brother Luccas Neto rides off his fame and becomes a children's YouTuber

Across the Atlantic, Portuguese children become obsessed with his videos. Like the lusophone Jake Paul

Portuguese children watch his videos so fucking much that they begin talking like they're from Rio

Portuguese parents are horrified by the Brazilian Portuguese but can't make it stop

He has a whole section in the back of the collection saying who he is that manages to tell you absolutely nothing and just make me want him out of this comic even more.

some facts about the name itself:

each element in her name hails back to norse or proto-norse: the name tora is derived from the god thor (whose name in modern norwegian usage has also dropped the th-sound for a hard T). olaf/olav means "ancestor's descendant". dotter/datter is still in our base vocabulary meaning "daughter". her name is very much anchored in old tradition and familial ties.

all in all a natural-sounding norwegian name i wouldn't find odd if i encountered it irl even now. true patronymic names like olafsdotter were phased out by law in norway in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but you frequently encounter so-called frozen patronyms, ie one patronym that became the family name when the laws changed. the female variant (-dotter/-datter) is markedly less common than the male (-sønn/-sen/-son) but still a thing you'll spot here and there.

in (my very rusty) IPA:

[ ²'tu͍:ɾɑ 'u͍:ɭɑʋs'dɔtəɾ ]

in my clumsy non-IPA:

stressed syllables at the start of each naming element: "TO-ra OL-afs DOTT-er".

the first two Os (tora, olaf) are closer to the vowel sound in "cool" (so "oo", not "oh").

(central) norwegian Rs are tricky for english speakers, they're a lot more fronted in the mouth (tonguetip touching palate just behind teeth) than in english. imagine a very short rolling R.

the As are open like in "palm". aah.

the "afs"-combo gets swallowed into a single brief sound where the f-sound is commonly simplified into a v-sound (bc it's easier to combine with S. lazy phonetic drift is very norwegian). lavvs.

despite the O in dotter it's still pronounced fairly close to "daughter" with the same "aw"-sound (also like in "call") but with a shorter vowel. you're not gently resting the vowel on the soft bed of "augh", you're tossing it on some very hard Ts. dot! dawt!

the unstressed E ("dotter") might almost disappear depending on personal pronunciation (DOTrr)

I think an important cornerstone is her messy and atypical relationship to her own past that befuddles those around her (and should befuddle the audience too). At least, that’s a part of the Puckett written Cass which I still hold to be the best.

As an example, I don’t think that Cass would feel much anger over many of the physical aspects to her upbringing.

These were the parts of her childhood that she actually enjoyed. Cass *likes* being the best, and the physicality of it isn't really a negative thing for her. She likes fighting and succeeding. Doesn’t make it "right" at all but it’s still *her*. What she hates is that it all amounted to murder and that’s where more of her sadness about her past shows up. A kind of contradictory and inseparable quality that combines a deep sense of pride with self-loathing is my preference for Cass.

It's hard to divorce and cordon off these deep seated emotions that Cass would have about her own self, and I'm not really interested too much in the kind of stuff we get more often in modern Cass depictions that reference David Cain that to me often feel like the writer wants Cass to be as aghast at David Cain as we the audience would already naturally be. Seldom did Cass ever cry over her past in her 2000 solo but these days Cass cries like... a lot over it.

On a broader level I think it should also be a bit of a blueprint to Cass in other areas too like her being confusing to other people who have trouble relating to and adapting to her approach to herself and others and that coloring her relationships with them.

A Cass depiction that embraces that kind of off-putting ambiguity on a more broad level would be a boon for character relationships

Tim takes a while to get comfortable around her and even then struggles to really see things from her POV a lot of the time:

Barbara throughout Cass' solo struggles to really relate to and often pushes Cass to be the kind of person she wants her to be.

And conversely her relationship with Stephanie is made all the better by being a point of contrast where she seldom treated Cass like this weird thing (outside of a few instances here and there like when they both got locked out of the Batcave) which is in large part why Cass and Stephanie got as close as they did.

She was one of the few to really take her as she was while also not really "enabling" either (see Bruce throughout Puckett's run). She didn't baby Cass or balk at her general abrasiveness but just kind of accepted her for who she was even if she didn't accept all of her specific actions.

Embrace letting Cass have contrasts that don't always track with "healthy" relationships to things whether they be with herself or others.