i want to talk more seriously about the fact bruce wayne has been canonically diagnosed with ocd, and i want to make a huge masterpost pointing to actual comic panels and junk, but the stuff i actually end up thinking about with regards to the subject is something like this:
bruce probably has intrusive thoughts about the sudden death of his children, which is, uh, fucking scary to deal with to say the least, and one of his compulsions is simply to check in on them. y'know. to make sure they're alright. if he can see they're literally alive right in front of him, the thoughts lose their teeth and it just becomes a matter of countering it whenever it comes up.
so the kids get used to these seemingly random check-ins. maybe they understand it's because of the ocd or maybe they don't, i would hope that bruce would be open about that but we're talking about bruce after all. but anyway. when dick was old enough to start going out a lot on his own, the check-ins would take the form of texts.
it started with something like... "where are you?" which to bruce seemed like a perfectly innocent question, but being on the other side of a random "where are you?" message is uh. concerning! so dick had to explain to bruce that that was a surefire way to give somebody a panic attack about if they were supposed to be somewhere and forgot somehow... so, it became more like "you okay?" and it would go on like that for a while. it comes off as very... needy from the outside, probably, but that's okay.
bruce does these check-ins with all of his kids as they come into his life - it got particularly overbearing and frankly frustrating after jason died (you know, the exact thing he was afraid would happen...) but by the time of, like, cass joining the family, and then especially once jason turns out to be alive again, he's able to ease up on it. and technology evolves pretty rapidly, y'know? so...
bruce's check-in texts morphed into sending his kids absolute barrages of heart emojis, and the first time he decided to do this, it made everyone concerned that he was replaced by a martian somehow. but no. it's perfectly logical to bruce, he loves his kids, heart emojis express love... what is there to be confused about!
anyway, this has been my vision, thank you for listening to my ted talk.
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