sdwolfpup

Cassandra Cain:

She is consistently sidelined and ignored. If she's included in fanworks very few people bother to learn anything about her character beyond surface level fanon information. She's not mute! She doesn't know sign language! She is instead a complex character with a complicated relationship with language, a crazy backstory, and unique characteristics beyond 'wise background character'.

She is SO COOL. She was born to be a weapon but refuses to let anyone get hurt. She was raised not to talk but has learnt to spread a message of hope anyway. She has the strongest no-kill rule of all of the batkids, as well as absolutely insane combat skills (she can predict what people do before they do it) and is arguably the most suitable successor to the mantle of Batman. She's a symbol of hope and of overcoming your family and finding a new one. Cassandra Cain I Love You.

Batfandom heavily focuses on the so-called “core four batboys”—Cass is often ignored or outright erased in fanworks as a Gotham hero and one of Batman’s adoptive children. Many will describe her as being “in Hong Kong” to explain her absence in fic (in reference to a brief period in which she, a mixed Asian woman with a speech focused disability who very much only spoke English, was moved to Hong Kong to get her out of main Batman books in a stunning display of racism and misogyny on the company’s part), characterize her as being stoic and robotic (see: disabled Asian woman), or exclusively write her as being there to be her brothers’ braincell and cheerleader. Awful!

Cass is a teenage girl who gets to beat up Batman. What’s not to love?

they literally made her a villain for no reason. and then they infantilized and exoticized her

cassandra i am so sorry you’re boiled down to “mute/selectively mute young girl who’s either gfs or bffs or sisters with steph (and they never fight there’s no tension there’s no complications in that relationship!! of course!!) and loves her family (aka only the waynes of course) so so much and will do anything to support them haha she’s such a good listener slash therapist!! and she calls her siblings things like “little/big brother” and all her relationships are totally fluffy without any conflict and she’s perfect (but we totallyyy care about her personal life don’t worry). and she loves ballet and she’s daddy’s little princess” <- speaking of can you say GAG. oh or maybe she’s in hong kong where she magically knows Chinese or everyone there magically knows asl. : ). like end ittt i am so so tired of seeing cass brushed aside because she’s such a fascinating interesting character with complex relationships yes and it genuinely makes my blood boil to see this shit ^ and the racism & misogyny surrounding her just. is accepted in fandom. okay.

so back in 2010 DC did a big full company reboot of their universe that basically reset their entire comic universe. (they also used this massive ending of a bunch of titles and starting of new ones to reduce the number of women writing for them to 1% of their writers. comics companies often suck in this way). while a bunch of characters more or less just got a fresh new start, some were completely absent from this new universe at the beginning, like steph and cass. but steph and cass were a special case because they were being blacklisted by dc editorial, with dan didio labelling them as "toxic to the brand" and refusing to allow writers to use them, forcing writers to invent new characters with similar qualities just because they couldnt have the ones they wanted. this even extended to being wiped from art in certain issues. there was a cute comic being put out called Lil Gotham that wanted to have a blonde girl wear steph's batgirl 2009 costume as a halloween costume, but were forced to change the costume and hair color so that steph was not even alluded to. it took 6 years for them to finally reintroduce steph, and even longer to reintroduce cass. so yeah dc writers were awful to steph and cass on the misogyny front, this did bleed over into the fans as well.

Abbie Mills:

Some fans hated her for threatening the Ichabod/Katrina ship and for being a black woman main character of a genre show.

Abbie Mills was a hero with a great backstory and really fun banter with Ichabod. I have to stop there because if I get into the fuckery that occurred on the show itself my blood pressure will rise.

Black police lieutenant who hesitantly throws in her lot with Ichabod Crane, even to the point of leaving him sticky notes around her house explaining how modern things like indoor plumbing, coffee machines and co.puters work. Gradually they become very close, to the point that when reunited after separation they run to each other and she jumps into his arms. At one point he holds her close, whispering into her hair to remember their bond and that he'd be back for her. Naturally, the primary white fandom basically ignored her in favor of Crane's dead (white) wife Katrina. Around the time it was airing I was cursed with seeing 'racebent' (aka they made her white )art of Abbie because apparently the artist 'couldn't relate to her' as a Black woman. Oh and the series itself did her dirty by killing her off at the end of the first season and carrying on without her for the second. Justice for Leftenant Mills (Leftenant is what Crane calls her, he's British you see.)