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Tim: Batman, it's time for your anti-depressants.

Bruce: *grumbles*

Tim: Speak louder.

Bruce: Go away Jason.

Tim: It's Tim, actually.

Bruce: GO AWAY.

How it actually was in the Batman comics:

Tim: How did my report card got on your fridge?

Bruce: I took a look at your grades, and they were great, why? Except for chemistry. Maybe you should not go out as Robin to focus on school.

Tim: Not happening. I'm not falling for that.

Bruce: Well, if you are really going to do this, we should add bubble wrap to the suit.

Tim: I'm not made of glass.

Bruce: Are you sure about that? By the way, do you eat enough? ALFRED, can you cook something for Tim? He needs some food.

Tim: I'm fine Bruce!

Bruce: Are you sure? Do you want a hug? If you want a hug, you can ask. I can have Alfred make some hot chocolate.

Tim: You realize I have parents, rights?

talking about bruce and jason: A Shakespearean tragedy. They can never be happy at the same time. They will always self-sabotage what could help them. Jason is dead and he’s always been dead, and Bruce died with him in most ways that matter, but the story won’t let them leave. The curtains will never close. They’re forced to keep moving and ruining themselves every time.

In the mood for silly little Bruce and his children during a gala.

Bruce, pushing Dick forward: and this is my eldest, Richard. My pride and joy.

Dick, who just got there and separated from his siblings: ??

Bruce:

Socialité, expecting an introduction: Uh...

Dick, also expecting it: Uhm, dad?

Bruce, shrugging: That's it. Honestly no idea who they are, just wanted to bloat about you.

Dick, fist over his mouth, emotional mess:

Bruce, turning on his heels and leaving:

---

Bruce, tired smile, nodding along:

Socialité, enjoying Bruce's attention: And so-

Jason, approaching to save his ass: Hey, old man-

Bruce, jumping with a gasp and pressing a hand on his chest, looking at the ceiling: Jason? Son?

Socialité: ??

Jason: ??

Bruce, cleaning a fake tear: Sometimes I still hear his voice... Excuse me, I- I need to-

Bruce, giving his drink away and leaving while dramatically covering his mouth:

Jason, shocked laugh:

Socialité: Wasn't this your reintroduction to socie-

Jason, hand up, blocking them while full on belly laughing: Yeah, no. I think my dad is crying, gotta go check on him.

---

Tim, surrounded by snobby people:

Tim, spotting Bruce in the public, waving his arms over his head: DAD! DAD, HEY DAD! DAD, HERE!! DAAAAAAAD!!!

Bruce, recognizing a call for help, also waving back: TIM! TIMBO BABY! TIM, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!

Socialité, looking between them both: You're literally right next to each other...

Bruce, still yelling, hand next to his mouth, the other pointing to the balcony: FIND ME OUTSIDE! I NEED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING!!!

Tim, right in front of him, yelling back: BE RIGHT THERE, WAIT FOR ME!!

Bruce, leaving:

Tim, signaling towards Bruce: Excuse me, my dad called for me.

Socialité: I KNOW?! I was RIGHT here???

Tim, leaving:

---

Dick, running after Jason: Jay! Have you seen Bruce?

Jason, looking around: No. I was actually searching for him.

Dick, laughing: I think he and Tim just made a fool of themselves.

Jason, chuckling: I mean, he did pretend I was a ghost to get away before, so.

Dick: No way! He's enjoying this way too much.

Jason: I had forgotten how much fun he has messing around with them. Kinda sad I'm not part of this world anymore.

Dick, clasping his shoulder: You do realize you will have to be here more often, right?

Jason: what?

Dick: I mean. You ARE legally back to life.

Jason:

Bruce, smirking at him from the balcony:

Bruce, raising his cup at him:

Jason: motherfucker...

--

Cass, sitting on the balcony rail:

Tim, loosening his tie: Why is there so many people today

Bruce, sighing and helping him take it off: It's Jaylad's comeback to society. People saw it as a chance...

Cass, swinging her feet: Hate rich people.

Tim:

Bruce:

Cass, panicking, waving her hands in front of her: EXCEPT DAD AND TIM! EXCEPT DAD AND TIM!!

--

Damian, joining Dick and Jason: Where's father?

Jason, sighing and pointing to the balcony:

Damian, frowning: Again? Is he with Drake and Cain?

Dick, amused smirk: Does he do that often?

Damian, crossing his arms: Often is an understatement. Every. Single. Time.

Dick, giggling:

Damian: He ALWAYS do something stupid. Last time, Cain pulled his sleeve and called him "Dad"

Jason: So?

Damian, grumbling: He covered his mouth, yelling "Oh my god, her first words!!", grabbed her as she laughed and ran to the car.

Dick, chuckling: Oh my god

Damian: Drake pretended to be super emotional and ran behind them screaming something about not having that on video or whatever.

Jason, amused laugh:

Damian, exasperated arm's throw at the air: We were talking next to Lucius and other people who knew us!!

Dick, barely breathing:

Damian: THEY LEFT ME WITH THEM!

Jason, laughing out loud:

--

Duke, opening the curtain and stepping to the balcony: There you all are!

Tim, hurrying to pull the curtains: Close it, close it!

Duke: ?

Cass, smiling from her spot at the rail: Hiding.

Duke, frowning at Bruce, hands on his hips: Again?

Bruce, next to Cass, shrugging:

Duke, sighing: I don't know why they keep trying to glaze you. You clearly enjoy their suffering more than their company. They must realize that.

Bruce, pointing at himself: Disgusting billionaire?

Duke: ... Right. This is why I hate rich people.

Tim:

Bruce:

Duke: You KNOW I don't include you both on it, come on!

--

Dick, knocking at the window: Can we?

Jason, pulling the curtain fully open: Fuck it, we can.

Tim, screaming like the woman from Psycho: NOOOOOO!

Socialité, pointing: THERE!

Damian, using his size to get away:

Duke: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?

Tim, turning around: Bruce! We have to-!

Duke:

Tim:

Dick: No way...

Jason: Did they...

Dick: No way!

--

Bruce, crouching behind a bush:

Cass, right next to him:

Bruce: We are never speaking of this, ever again.

Cass, nodding:

Damian, poking his head over the bushes: Baba, can we go now?

Bruce, rising up and cleaning himself: What about your siblings?

Damian, shrugging: Dealing with the socialites?

Bruce, sighing: I can't believe I jumped.

Cass, already up, patting his arm: Reflex.

Bruce: I know, but. God, that was embarrassing. They are going to be so mad.

Damian: I thought it was pretty cool how you both vanished.

Bruce, covering his face: It was the fifth floor!

Damian, tilting his head: ?

Cass, giggling:

Bruce: How do I excuse my exit?

Damian, waving it off and dragging Bruce to the parking spot: Who cares? Nobody would have noticed. They will be too focused on winning over Todd.

Cass, at his other side, also dragging him: Let's go. Wanna cocoa at home?

Bruce, sighing: Sure, let's. Let's make enough for them for when they come home.

--

Dick, kicking the front door: HOW COULD YOU?!

Jason, throwing his suit's jacket to the floor: THAT WAS HORRIBLE!

Tim, sitting on the couch's armrest: Kinda impressive you dared to do that in the middle of an event.

Duke, thanking Damian as he gets his chocolate:

Damian, sitting on the sofa next to Duke: Father was incredibly regretful.

Dick, plopping himself over Bruce's back: I thought you were so proud of meeee!!

Bruce, turning to pull him over the coach and into his lap: I am. Incredibly so. You all fill me with love and joy.

Dick, letting himself be dragged: ... Unfair. I can't be mad anymore.

Jason, pointing: BUT I AM! You left us alone there!! We had to call an Uber!

Bruce, frowning: What? Why? We went in two cars. You four fitted ok on Tim's.

Tim, leaving:

Duke, sipping at his cup:

Dick, gaping:

Jason, yelling and walking after Tim: YOU TOLD US TO TAKE A SEPARATE UBER NOT TO CAUGHT TOO MUCH ATTENTION!!

Dick, slowly rising and glaring at Duke: You knew...

Duke, avoiding his eyes behind his cup: Tim's car is a smaller one.

Dick:

Duke: It would have been so uncomforta-

Bruce: OK, have-

Bruce: Just Kon? Not the Titans?

Tim: Yup.

Bruce:

Tim:

Bruce: Did he at least come to pick you up?

Tim: Yeah, he's upstairs. I'm just gonna grab a sweater.

Kon: *chilling in the hall*

Bruce: *appearing*

Kon: Oh, hey B, how-

Bruce: I have been informed that you are taking Tim to the movies.

Kon: Yeah, we’re-

Bruce: I don’t know how Luthor or Kent raised you but when taking a son of mine out on a date, you should at least have the decency to introduce yourself.

Kon:

Bruce: I am willing to let that slide as long as you understand the rules. He’s home no later than 9:30. That’s 9:30:00 not 9:30:01. If he comes back through my door anything other than happy and content, I swear on Gotham, you will live to regret it.

Kon: Come on, B, you-

Bruce: It’s Mr Wayne when you’re dating my son. Now, he’s on his way down. You’re going to tell him how nice he looks or you’ll be sleeping under Gotham Habour tonight, understand?

Kon:

Tim: You ready?

Kon: Yeah, you look nice by the way, hot. No, um, handsome? Great, definitely. Overall, pretty.

Tim, beaming: Come on, we’ll be late.

Bruce, hugging Tim: I slipped some Kryptonite in your bag just in case the kid gets fresh, Ok?

Tim: B, are you serious?

Bruce: As a heartattack.

SOOOOO this is the most exciting ask I have ever received. My sweet, precious anon… LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT COLIN WILKES! I am protective of the baby bird as well, but Colin is 1000% approved company :)

Basically, he was Damian’s first friend that he ever made outside of the Bat family, which I think is REALLY important. He mainly only appeared in the Dick-Bats book Streets Of Gotham, and the extremely adorable Lil’ Gotham, but sadly now he doesn’t exist or something because DC CONTINUITY LOL. This gives a nice summary of his origin, but essentially Colin Wilkes was an abused orphan the same age as Damian who was kidnapped by the Scarecrow and given Solomon Grundy-esque powers and used as a weapon against Batman. Batman ultimately saves him (but doesn’t adopt him ??? wtf) and Colin, who idolizes superheroes, goes back to the orphanage, where he decides he should use his new powers to fight for those who can’t. 

(There’s also a fairly solid theory that Colin may be the son of Tommy Elliot, aka Hush, but who cares)Enter: DAMIAN “BABY TEETH” WAYNE-!! 

Bruce has never been prouder of himself.

He has it for a total of two weeks before Red Hood Jr. is stolen from his room and is never seen again. Right under his nose, Bruce can't believe it.

Distraught does not begin to describe what he feels. Alfred tells him he looks silly moping, but he does pat Bruce on the head and lets him have two cookies, so Bruce knows he doesn’t mean it.

On the plus side, Jason does start texting him more. Once, when he was sending a pic of the dinner he was having in his apartment, Bruce could clearly see the bulbous body of the plushie he had worked so hard on.

Oh well, at least it was in good hands.

In other news, he was halfway done with making his Black Bat plushie of the same size and dimensions.

Well, long story short, Nightwing gets his senses back and it's Timothy who runs back to the others screaming "I STOPPED THE BOMB! I JUST CUT THE PURPLE WIRE."

Baby Got Back

His grandfather and mother would revive in the boiling pits of green, each time waking up a bit…different from their previous dip. His Father hadn’t truly died, he’d faced the impossible and fought his way through time. Similar thing goes for Richard, he hadn’t actually died either. Todd had come back to life as well. Most people he knew that went through death came back, even him. Numerous times he has died and been brought, that night with Heretic, the two deaths at the Lazarus Tournament.

So would death even be the end to his problems? Who’s to say he won’t be revived? Brought back? Whether it’s done by his Father and his associates or done by his Assassin family. Realistically, he knows that one day he’ll die, he’ll succumb to death’s arms like any mortal. But so far his experiences have proved it otherwise. He has always been a “I’ll believe it when I see it” type.

And even if he dies, will it truly be the end? Or will he just wake up in Hell again, go through all his misfortunes and then some, just in a different realm? And then he won’t even have his makeshift family and associates to anchor him to a certain extent. It would true death, not of his pain, no it wouldn’t give him any remedy, no relief. It would just be the death of who he is.

No matter what he does or how he ends up, he’ll never escape his destiny. And he shouldn’t, not after all the harm he has caused in this world.

When you look up who created Tim Drake you’ll see Marv Wolfman and Pat Broderick, but that’s just because Pat Broderick drew Tim’s initial cameo as a creepy looking toddler cause he couldn’t draw a toddler.

And I’d rather not believe we’re supposed to take this as what Tim is suppose to look like, when he looks much more different during his origin story.

————————————-

Today I want to attempt to make the most quintessential Tim Drake post I can manage. By talking about his characterization as written by the man that created Tim, with help from various artists, Marv Wolfman. So basically, the man that has no better authority on Tim Drake.

That way I figure is the most concrete characterization you can get for Tim. And while obviously he’s had character development. His stories were made to show us who Tim Drake was at his heart.

So that’s what I chose to go off of for this post that goes over his origin, motivation, personality, and looks.

That way you can get the ultimate understanding of Timmy Drake! Or at least the basics.

Also, as a note, and what may be obvious, this is his origin, meaning that he’d obviously develop more as a character, which would lead to the degree of some of these traits being changed, or written by other writers that focus on some more than others, or even just made to be out of character.

I’m just choosing to use the origin, because it’s the closest way to show what the intention was for the heart of his character. <3

(I don’t own the hardback cover, but man, if I did. I’d…just treat it the same as my softback. But it’d be really cool. It’s a very fun cover. Batman’s smiling again and look at Timmy’s toothy grin!)

I think the easiest way to begin to explain Tim and his characterization, is what I can gather may be the most obvious way to it. His origin story. Which I’ve covered in quite some detail in another post, which I may link if I can figure out how to do that. So I’ll just recap the important parts of it, before just going to the character moments that can show us what little Timmy is like.

In contemporary superhero fiction, where characters often calcify into stable archetypes, Damian Wayne stands out as an anomaly: a child protagonist constructed not for comfort, but for friction. His very presence disrupts the narrative ecosystem of the Batfamily, generating a level of fan polarization rarely sustained by comic characters long-term. This isn’t accidental. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Through the lens of literary criticism, Damian functions as a destabilizing agent, a character whose design interrogates the assumptions embedded in the Robin archetype and, by extension, the moral architecture of Gotham’s heroic lineage. The fandom’s split reaction is evidence not of flawed writing but of a character who is doing exactly what he is built to do: provoke discomfort, confrontation, and discourse.

A Character Engineered for Narrative Disruption

Most Robins enter the Batman mythos as narrative balms — emblems of hope, resilience, and childlike optimism. Their arcs typically follow a rehabilitative function: Bruce saves them from trauma; they save Bruce from himself.

Damian Wayne arrives as the inverse of that formula. He is not rescued; he is delivered. He is not hopeful; he is honed. His very first appearance reframes the Robin role from “child healed by Batman” to “child forcing Batman to confront the systems that created him.” Damian is written not as a supplement to Bruce’s emotional landscape but as a mirror of its darkest contradictions.

This alone destabilizes decades of established character dynamics, and readers feel that shift viscerally.

The Source of Polarization: A Textual Tension Between Origin and Expectation

Damian is polarizing because he embodies three contradictory literary functions simultaneously:

1. The Tragic Heir (Mythic Role)

His lineage positions him within a classical tragic framework: born into legacy, trained for violence, destined for leadership he doesn’t desire. This evokes Shakespearean and Greek tragedy structures — the child doomed by the machinery that birthed him.

2. The Misfit Child (Modern Character Interiorization)

Yet his interiority is profoundly contemporary: confused, defensive, yearning, hostile as a protective measure. He echoes the modern antihero child—complicated, prickly, resistant to affection yet deeply shaped by it.

3. The Catalyst (Narrative Function)

He is the mechanism by which the narrative is forced out of stasis. The presence of a child assassin in the Batcave requires every character to react, shift, or grow. He is disruptive by structural necessity.

This simultaneous role-triple generates the kind of cognitive dissonance that pushes readers into polarized camps:

Is he a child to be protected? A threat to be contained? A symbol to be analyzed? An heir to be feared?

The answer is: yes.

Reader Discomfort as a Measurement of Effective Craft

Polarization is often treated as evidence of bad writing, but in literary terms, polarization can signify productive ambiguity—a character designed to resist simplistic moral or emotional classification. Damian embodies that ambiguity.

He is intentionally difficult to read.

He is intentionally challenging to moralize.

He is intentionally resistant to narrative smoothing.

In literary criticism, this is often aligned with the concept of the “resistant text”—stories or characters that refuse tidy moral conclusions and instead confront the reader with unresolved tension.

Damian is a resistant text in character form.

What the Discourse Reveals

Fandom discourse around Damian often says more about common reader expectations than about Damian himself. He forces readers to confront ingrained narrative biases, such as:

1. The Expectation of Innocence in Child Heroes

Readers tend to grant adult antiheroes moral complexity but expect child heroes to embody purity or soft-edged trauma. Damian violates this expectation and, in doing so, exposes it.

2. The Preference for Familiar Archetypes

Dick as the optimist, Jason as the rebel, Tim as the strategist — these slots were stable. Damian does not “fit.” His refusal to assimilate challenges the fandom’s sense of narrative order.

3. The Unease with Children Who Have Agency

A child who chooses violence, who asserts authority, who feels entitled to the Robin mantle—this disturbs readers because it challenges the idealized construction of childhood in superhero narratives.

The polarization becomes a diagnostic tool, revealing what readers unconsciously expect from heroism, childhood, and redemption arcs.

The Long Arc of Moral Reconstruction

What makes Damian particularly fascinating—and why literary critics actually love this type of character—is that his arc is not a redemption in the simplistic sense. Instead, it is a slow, fractal reconstruction of self.

He does not transform overnight.

He does not erase his upbringing.

He does not suddenly “become good.”

Instead, his growth accumulates through:

• Small gestures of empathy

• Awkward attempts at connection

• Moments of emotional transparency he instantly regrets

• The steady influence of relationships (Dick, Jon, Alfred)

• Repeated confrontations with the ideological machinery that shaped him

This is not a redemption arc. It is a resistance arc—a character refusing the destiny scripted for him and painstakingly writing a new one.

Polarization as Proof of Narrative Vitality

Damian Wayne is polarizing because he is not designed to be universally liked. He is designed to be interpreted.

His narrative function is to fracture the traditional Robin archetype, complicate the emotional economy of the Batfamily, and challenge the reader’s comfort with morally complex children in heroic frameworks. That challenge produces friction, and in literature, friction is generative. It creates meaning.

To polarize a fandom is to prove that a character is alive on the page.