Hello! You may remember me from AO3~
I want to ask you a few questions while giving you a few ideas~
The question is how are you able to make a Dark!Dick~? I might struggle to write him like that because I always envision him as the fun big brother~
The ideas I want to share with you~ While I already did that in the latest chapter of your NSFW art, I want to expand a little more~ Raven would be wearing a maid costume when serving the Batboys, having Dick as Slade's apprentice to capture Raven, having Raven in the mercy of libertine Batboys in a historical France (without the more messed up parts), or dark!Domestic DickRae, maybe with a crib nearby~
I hope you like these ideas~
This is the supply my inspiration needs right now, thank you! Let me just hand them over to my muse who is going to fuse them with more twisted energy and reconstruct them into more desirable form >:))
The question actually had me taken aback lol, I'm never the best author to begin with and I constantly struggle to churn out non-awkward sentences, so being asked for writing advice is new to me :)))
I reckon that you're placing Dick on too high of a pedestal, thus writing him being part of a vile, diabolical scheme (even when he only had one foot in it and doesn't actually play any imperative role) seems like a dishonorable thing to do. The only feasible tactic when it comes to molding a dubious character is to change your perceptive of them, they are human, they are breakable, they are susceptible to the effects of the drastic shift in their environments. You have problem visioning him as anything but the perfect ball of sunshine who help people get back on their feet like a good brother, and that's interfering with you being able to stain that image of him.
Dick has demons flying in his head and a scarred heart full of troubles (this is already established in the comic, it's canon so don't worry about making him OOC). Exploit this, use it as a setup for your plotline, have him listening to the voices in his mind in lieu of tuning them out, and the important thing is, let him sink. Don't bother yourself with trivial concerns like 'Is this becoming of him' or 'Nah this is way to beneath our golden boi', he has to descend into madness, that's the whole point of choosing the negative arc over the positive one and build a dark character.
And don't mistake dark with being cold, standoffish, desolate or having an angsty vocabulary and always whine about their misery, because, I'll be frank, that's how you write an epic edge lord, not a crime lord. That dark part isn't their core personality or their entire nature, it's only the result of having something inside them snapped and leaving behind a hollow space, followed by a warp of their psyche. Nothing else, though. In other words, their morals are looser and they are more willing to solve matters in a more extreme methods than most idealistic characters, but they aren't necessarily evil. They can be kind and caring without having to pretend, they can give motivational advice and hold you as you cry in your darkest moment, they can spare beggars some changes on a good day. But if they are crossed, all Hell broke loose, and they simply go Hannibal on the idiot dumb enough to do that.
I personally enjoy the concept of sweet, lovable devils. They cannot even be considered morally grey with the shit they have done, but when they are not bathed in blood, they are gentle and supportive and draw people towards them with their calm, reasonable personality. They are not masking, that's simply who they are.
They're trickier to pull off than the typical raging idiot who never stop wanting people to know how life was hard on them and they have no other choice, of course, since their actions always seem to be in conflict with their nature, and one wrong decision can ruin them for good. But I think they are interesting characters to construct as long as you know how to handle their story and psychology.
