my flavor of reverse robins au feel something like:
duke (dick’s place: hope of gotham, the light to batman’s darkness, bruce sees himself in him)
damian (babs’s place: very much concerned with equal footing opposing bruce, has to undergo some traumatic event that reframes how he thinks of himself in relation to the world, a hypercompetent know-it-all.)
steph (jason’s place: wonderful and bright and scrappy, difficult childhood, dies, comes back wrong)
cass (tim’s place: actively sought batman out, major struggle between abnormal hero lifestyle vs. what it means to be a normal person)
tim (cass’s place: no man’s land plays a big role here, bonding with damian, lots of focus on parental relationships)
jason (steph’s place: strong and complicated relationship with mom, willful, loses bruce’s trust, finds narrative foils in cass and tim)
babs (damian’s place: scarily precocious child, disrupts cass’s status quo)
dick (duke’s place: carves out his own mantle instead of receiving a legacy, adrenaline junkie, witty and judgmental kid ready to disagree with bruce, bruce sees the world in him)
everything has the lovely effect of swapping the characters that fandom hyperfocuses on (dick, jason, tim, damian) with the characters who get sidelined (babs, cass, steph, duke). the “robins”, aka batman’s partners, aren’t called robins because dick is chronologically last, but looking at the characters who fit this pattern—duke, steph, cass, jason, babs (though babs is tentative here)—i think rr!bruce is like canon!bruce in selecting his partners: whoever reminds him the most of his first partner who he adored. here, that’s the memory of a stubborn, hopeful, bright, rough-kneed duke.
