I don’t kill. But I don’t lose, either.

However, Damian consistently disrespects and looks down on female characters during that era using gendered language that he just…doesn’t use for male characters he dislikes (Tim, for example). When he’s attacking or being rude to men he’s not referring to their bodies or calling them gendered insults like he does with various female characters. Most of these remarks are geared towards Steph (who to her credit, appears to also be one of the main reasons that he stops making these kinds of comments by the time the New 52 happens), but not all of them.

There is, of course, the infamous ‘Fatgirl’ panel from World’s Finest #4:

And Nicieza chose to have this moment happen in RR #12:

Which largely seems to tie into the multiple instances he’s rude in a pretty gendered way to Steph earlier on in her Batgirl run:

As well as how he treats women like Donna Troy in JLA #41 and Selina Kyle in Gotham City Sirens #7:

Like I said, Damian visibly gets better about it throughout the Reborn era and his various guest appearances in the Batgirl book (whether that’s because of Dick’s influence, un-learning toxic thought patterns, or because he’s growing to respect Stephanie in particular, I’m not sure), but it is a consistent and notable aspect of his characterization in those early years.

Unlike Tim, whose sexism (which absolutely does exist!) seems more like a combination of ‘Written in the 90s’ Syndrome combined with “Written by Chuck Dixon and Bill Willingham” Disease, post-Crisis!Damian’s sexism seems more like an intentional character flaw than an unintentional byproduct of the times or writer’s POV on women, and it’s clearly intended to say something about the environment he was raised in. Regardless, Damian is 10 years old and immature during the majority of these instances, and it’s obviously something he unlearned and grew out of.

sag;lkj tim is back for 2.5 seconds and his friends already want him gone

ID under cut

That's fanon. The idea that Jason is his fav Robin is uhh kinda funny when you look back at the majority of moments that Tim talked about Robin Jason in Post-Crisis.

@bat-lings made a post about what Tim thought of Robin Jason that you can read here.

The respect moment that bat-lings referred to is from this:

Also does it ever bother you how people always use Dick as being a bad brother to tim during the Red Robin arc when at the same time Jason literally tried to murder Tim but is used as an example of a great big brother????

Talia has been there since 1971, throwing everything she used to be away forever just so her child can have angst is simply not fair. She is more than just Damian's mother. Bruce is a biological parent now too and I don't see DC forcing every story he's in to revolve around that fact. He can disappear for a mission for several months or put his physical and mental health on the line and nobody in the DC universe tells him that he should think of Damian before doing stuff like that.

Oh and it wouldn't even be that difficult to redeem Talia. Use Son of the Demon as Damian's origin story, remind people that Batman: Death and the Maidens (Nyssa killed Talia over and over again, brought her back with a lazarus pit each time and brainwashed her into turning evil and crazy) was a thing, have Ra's take Damian from his adoptive parents (the ones from the end of Son of the Demon) and let him train Damian to become his heir. Make a story where Talia finally gets healed from what Nyssa did to her. Done.

I'm not going to argue with you further, I'm too old for dumb fights like the one you're trying to start here.

and choosing to instead go with fucking this

even after seeing the first design i’d still go with the second one because the first one is just way too reminiscent of the “mysterious edgy asian woman” character that i find a lot in media, ESPECIALLY action film. plus gwen already fills in the ~mysterious girl with semi-realistic design~ role

The first design (after some cleaning up for ease of animation and readability) could be cool for an edgier character, but Peni Parker isn’t that character. The filmmakers also probably realized that if they went with the heavy makeup, choker, low neckline, and platform boots, people would be much quicker to assume she was an older teen and/or sexualize her.

(Not saying that young teens don’t have the right to dress up exactly like that concept art but still be respected: they do. But when you’re making a movie that’s going to be shown theatrically to millions of people across the globe, you can’t be idealistic. You have to weigh the likely consequences.)

IMO there was nothing wrong with her design from the Edge of Spider-Verse comics, and I wish the ITSV team had adapted this instead. Her uniform stands out from the typical seifuku while still evoking that sailor-suit image, and the hair clips and blue skirt add a touch of colour. I like the design of her SP//dr mech more here too, but I’m biased towards it because it looks like an Eva unit lol.

There IS a middle ground between the stereotypes of “super moe kawaii” and “sexualized gritty neon asian action girl”. We don’t have to settle for one or the other.

Oh I’m so gonna use that ask to do some more ranting against DC, thanks for that gratuitous occasion.

I think as Robin Tim did have some more training (what with Shiva etc, the writing insisted more on his formative days than with Dick or Jason) but saying, like was often the case, that Jason was thrown on the field before he was ready or that he was “the dumb brash Robin” is indeed part of the retcons that he suffered.

[Batman (1940) #411]

Jason was ready. Jason was an excellent Robin. And a very bright kid at that with an interest for detective work. None of that was ever put into question before Starlin waltzed in and casually retconned the character to fit his child-murder agenda. The mere idea that Bruce ‘I prepare for every contingency’ Wayne would’ve let an ill-prepared kid on the streets is one convenient overlook of his character.

Honestly out of all the legends that surround Tim, the one that has him idolizing Jason always confused me the most. Dick was indeed the one Tim idolized. And it’s not just that Tim didn’t admire Jason— he was more touched by the fact that Robin died, and he worried about the effect it had on Bruce. But Jason himself? Lmao no shit given. Tim only showed the slightest bit of respect for Jason once, in ‘Tec #618. Every other time he mentions Jason it’s more in that tone.

[Batman (1940) #455]

And there starts DC’s bullshit because not even considering that they conveniently kept Starlin’s “Jason’s default mode is anger”, it’s Sheila who caused Jason’s death not his anger but look, looook how absolutely nothing is there to contradict Tim, if you read the full scene then not even Bruce tells him anything, no character ever puts Tim into question when he’s trashtalking Jason, Sheila will never ever be mentioned again in preboot and that’s not a frickin coincidence, I hate it

[Batman (1940) #469]

[Nightwing (1996) #25]

Even under Nicieza’s dodgy “partnership” the whole writing consists in making Jason incompetent af, insisting on how much Tim despises him, and emphasizing that he freed him of prison for Bruce & that he regrets it.

[Robin (1993) #183]

Part of Tim’s role as a character was to establish in the reader’s mind that he’s better than Jason, that Jason had some fatal flaw that caused his own death and wasn’t worthy for the Robin legacy (read: the child’s violent death is not DC’s or even Bruce’s fault) & that Tim wouldn’t repeat his mistakes. DC went as far as to instrumentalize other characters to drive that point through.

[Robin (1993) #0]

[Robin (1993) #10]

(I thought I remembered other similar mentions of Jason in Tim’s solo but I couldn’t find them. 183 issues man.)

Tim showed more respect to the memorial than to the person it was supposed to commemorate; he was introduced as worried that Robin would die permanently but not particularly touched that a child had died; he merely worried on the disastrous effect it’d have on Batman/Bruce. I think A Lonely Place of Dying made all of that pretty clear.

DC just couldn’t have Tim empathize with Jason, lest the readers themselves start empathizing with him too much which DC absolutely didn’t want. As a result Jason was used as a device to further prove Tim was dedicated and took Robin seriously (as if that wasn’t clear enough), and Tim came off as highly dismissive & disdainful of Jason on more than one occasion because it’s literally how DC wanted the reader to feel about Jason.

Tim was written in an era that constantly and viciously victim-blamed Jason. It impacted Tim’s portrayal and his view on Jason too. There are ways to exploit that— Tim was just a kid and never got to know Jason before his death, it’s not completely aberrant that he might’ve had misconceptions about him & I wouldn’t blame the character for it. But I blame DC a hell of a lot for framing Tim’s opinion as the absolute truth.

Tim idolizing Jason is a cute idea, really, and it’s a convenient place to get started if you want them to be pals in a fanfic. But as of post-crisis it’s completely fanon. It also pushes DC’s shittiness under the rug while they really don’t deserve their decades of ill-meaning and manipulative writing to be exonerated or simply forgotten.

And for all that I want Jason and Tim to get along (and Jason’s characterization is inconsistent enough that you can select the parts that’d make it work with Tim), I’m not a fan of how reboot went fanservice mode to make Tim & Jason best pals out of nowhere… especially at the cost of Tim’s and Dick’s dynamic.

I’ve read so many Jaytims (on varying levels of platonic to romantic dynamics) in the past few months and I can definitively say that few writers ever explore Tim’s changing attitudes towards Jason. Not least because canon brushes a lot of their past strife under the rug in N52/Rebirth and just jumps straight to a weird camaraderie between the two. And while it’s true there’s a recurring fanon trope of Tim idolising Jason*, there is room for nuance there too. At which point did he stop seeing Jason as a hero and as a cautionary tale? At which point does he then outgrow that simplistic view too, if and when he’s capable of moving past his black-and-white worldview, and start seeing Jason as a tragedy? How does Jason returning as Red Hood shape Tim’s changing views towards Jason Todd? And how does Jason’s continued growth affect Tim’s views (or not at all)?

Tim was just a kid and never got to know Jason before his death, it’s not completely aberrant that he might’ve had misconceptions about him & I wouldn’t blame the character for it.

Very few fan creators have turned around and went, maybe older!Tim Drake should’ve outgrown his idealistic, one-dimensional perception of Jason Todd as a concept and started seeing Jason as a person with a multitude of complexities; maybe even fanboy!Tim should be able to reach a point where he matures enough to realise Jason is/was a living breathing person beyond his reputation. I think it’s time we change that. After all, Tim isn’t a one-dimensional character either and he deserves the chance to grow and evolve his worldviews. And we as fans that love the characters can do better.

(*) there’s a case to be made for this being canon-compliant if you chuck certain parts of canon out the window and refine Tim’s character journey. early!Tim didn’t start off seeing Jason as a failure, he saw Jason as Robin II and thus a symbol for all the goodness and inherent ‘magic’ of the Robin mantle.

“The suit is magic”, he says, as he projects his ideals onto Jason’s Robin uniform (Batman (1940) #456).

This is his imagination of Jason (and Dick) as Robin in an early Scarecrow storyline (Batman (1940) #457).

As said above he didn’t know Jason or how he died and when he was first introduced he didn’t show any negative feelings toward him but if I remember correctly Dick, Bruce and Alfred did mention the retcon for us readers to know Jason wasn’t good enough (no matter how false it is). Whether it was in thought or just between them, it doesn’t change that it’s plausible they just told Tim that.

From there on, there can be two choices : 1. They’re assholes. 2 Grief made them lose any sort of objectivity and since they don’t know exactly what happened when Jason died, they made up what they could. It’s flimsy at best but they’re all so messed up mentally it’s not impossible.

Then Jason came back to life and writers jumped on the homicidal ex-Robin thing without caring when other writers actually made him get better. Point is, Tim hasn’t had the best experience with Alive!Jason. He’s ready to help Jason and try to put his bad feelings at rest in Bruce’s memory but that’s it (also it comes back to bite him in the butt).

Jason had no intention of going up against the Joker, he just wanted to warn his mom and get her out of harm’s way, and she betrays him. But Bruce doesn’t know that. Sheila doesn’t tell him she sold her own blood out to the Joker. All Brue knows is he told Jason to stay put and not go after the Joker, takes his eyes off him, and the next thing he knows, Jason is murdered by the Joker. 

The next several years’ harsh treatment of Jason’s memory, in universe, is predicated on a misunderstanding. 

Alfred wasn’t there. Dick wasn’t there. Their understanding of the situation comes entirely from Bruce, who made an assumption on incomplete data. And Tim, who never even knew Jason, was made to believe the same thing. 

Just like how Jason’s understanding of Bruce’s actions after his death are based on a misunderstanding, the rest of the Batfam’s understanding of how he died is also based on a misunderstanding. It’s a comedy of errors in the worst way. 

(All the ones with black hair are just wigs, before anyone asks).

Hell, she doesn’t even like wearing dresses, as seen in Young Justice 80-Page Giant. Which means her Rebirth design (which features a skirt) makes less sense to me.