For the ask game, 4 or 5??
YESSS!!! THANK YOU FOR THIS ASK! I've been dying to yap about one of my all-time favourite Duke moments. I'll be using panels too, so in a way, it could be answering both 4 and 5 as this is also one of my favourite pages 💜💜💜
Okay so, this goes down in We Are Robin post Robin War. When Duke is wandering the hospitals looking for his parents, he bumps into this man who clearly isn't in a good/stable mental state. At first, Duke brushes him off and tells him to chill out, which I liked because it showed how he knows how to stand his ground without escalating.
But when the situation does escalate, Duke is the one to step in and carefully restrain the man, and he's so level headed about it the way most adults wouldn't be never mind a teenager who's just been through hell.
He's so gentle too even when restraining the man because Duke always wants to help first wherever he can. He could have used his training to push him down, knock him out or put him in a less gentle hold and no one would have held that against him, but his first instinct was using skills meant for combat to help before hurting.
This could be me overanalysing, but in the next panel, it shows three white medical professionals coming towards them - there is a Black medical professional too, luckily.
See, both Duke and the man he's restraining are Black, and when Duke sees the med team coming towards them he makes a point of saying "He's alright. He just had a little freak out." Deescalating once again - he shouldn't have to, but alas - he tries to make them calm before they approach so a man having a mental breakdown doesn't get hurt. It shows Duke's constant awareness of how he and others like him are perceived, how he has to make himself the calm one, the adult, even among medical professionals just in case.
Then there's this part, how he continues to be kind and try to calm the man down. He offers to get him a burrito and just levels with him. He makes a point of focusing on the man, treating what he says with weight and empathy even when it's about something as simple as burritos. Probably because he knows a small thing can feel like everything when you're having a bad enough day or in a bad place.
Even one of the medical professionals say that he has a knack for this. They actually ask if he works at a hospital, which says a lot about Duke's skills and demeanour. About who he is. Someone who calms people, helps them, deescalates, and meets them where they're at.
I also love it because all of this shows that Duke will always put the lessons his parents taught him over anything else. No one can convince me he didn't learn those deescalation techniques from Elaine, who was a social worker in Gotham, she definitely knew how to navigate a situation and I'm sure Duke picked that up from her.
Most social workers have to be prepared to work with people who aren't always in a good place or their right mind. They have to know how to work certain situations to either keep things calm or stop them from getting to a point of no return. Now imagine one in Gotham. Elaine definitely had practice working in tense situations and I imagine she taught Duke some kid friendly ways of applying the techniques she knew in case he ever needed them.
But outside of that, Duke is an inherently compassionate character who makes an effort to emphasise with people even if he doesn't always agree with or understand them.
What makes Duke distinct from the other Bats is that violence isn't his answer; it's his fallback. I'm not saying the others are salivating for the chance to beat people up, but if I wanted someone to deescalate a tense situation, I'd want the Signal in the room over any of the others.
And this set of panels shows exactly why that is.
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