My Stuff

my one thing regarding these characters is that just because a title is used, doesn't necessarily mean the title applies. like i said when talking about jason and dick, they don't really view bruce as a father figure, the same way they don't really view each other as proper childhood-sibling-brothers; even though they all regularly refer to each other as brother/bruce as their adoptive father. titles are just words to them; they've all had so many identities/secret aliases/rebirths/changes to their life that they'll say pretty much whatever the fuck pops into their heads regardless of if it matches the actual emotions and dynamics of the relationship they're supposed to be describing. life as a wayne is just too messy to even attempt to mentally organise into categoric labels. another thing i'll say is that i wouldn't pen bruce as a grandfather-type for either of the younger two, just because i feel like that's more deriving from the concept that because jason/dick have been parental, then bruce automatically couldn't have the same role. that's not what i think happens here, because i think especially for tim and damian it is perfectly plausible/normal to have multiple people in the same parental role for them. they can have multiple dads, or multiple moms, and they wouldn't blink an eye at that. 

i also think it's worth saying that just off the bat--i think it's far easier for damian and tim to subconsciously develop familial ties with people than it is for jason and dick, due to their upbringings and who they are as people. there's a reason i specifically tend to categorise jason and dick as the 'older ones' and damian and tim as the 'younger ones', and it's not just because jason and dick are the only legal adults, it's also just because dick and jason are the two more likely to be internally mature and independent in the present point in time. i think all four of the batboys grew up in fascinatingly different circumstances, with dick and jason's leading them to be more isolated and independent family-wise (dick was an only child who was then taken in as an only child by non-parental acting figures, and he had no siblings until he was 19 when jason finally came along, and jason like i said in his lore dump grew up completely self sufficient both physically and emotionally because he was smart enough to recognise that nobody around him would take care of him), and tim and damian ending up with the opposite. 

the cool thing about damian and tim is that they were both brought up at first being isolated physically rather than mentally. i think it was different to what jason and dick experienced when they were young because dick obviously grew up in a very social environment, first in a literal circus bursting with colour and culture and people, and then when he was taken in by bruce he threw himself into the hero world--ignoring his issues by being as social as he possibly could and bringing that colour into being a vigilante. he was an extrovert, brucie wayne's little miniature, the pioneer of younger hero-groups. he was a lot of things, but dick grayson was not isolated. jason, too, didn't really have to deal with that. growing up on the streets meant there was a slight sense of community there for jason, and i think i've established pretty well that jason is a hardcore introvert anyway. he prefers being alone, just existing in his own head. when he was taken in by bruce he specifically tried to cut down on social stuff as much as possible because he doesn't thrive on it, so he didn't really experience any kind of negative effect that would come from being physically isolated; he enjoyed that shit.

tim and damian however are completely different stories. both tim and damian are, in varying ways, extroverts. tim's probably more textbook extroverty than damian, but still. they thrive on being around people for different reasons. to focus on tim specifically for a minute, i personally view batcom!tim as a very creative person. i know a lot of people put him down as the analytical obsessive one, but i put those traits more to him being a dreamer than anything else. 

tim was isolated physically as a kid. he was alone in a big manor with nobody to be close to and parents that were barely ever home and who didn't pay him any attention when they were home. he was, obviously, a bit of a 'weird' kid in the sense that he didn't fit in anywhere and other kids didn't like him, so both outside and inside he really was on his own. because of this i think tim was forced to delve into his own head to keep himself happy. he didn't get the enrichment he needed from real life, so i think he dreamed. i think he wished, and he pretended, and he daydreamed to get through the day. it might sound sad, and it probably is sad to be fair, but i think he learned how to be a very creative and colourful person inside his own head because there was nobody around him to provide that colour in real life. he is also, obviously, a very intelligent child as well, which only boosted those other aspects of his personality because they allowed him to learn things and become the kind of person that could only boost those dreams. by the time he was ten he was an isolated child with his head constantly in the clouds who also happened to be the only civilian to figure out batman, robin, and nightwing's identities. i think he watched that bat-world for so long, viewing it as his ideal life, to the point where he enmeshed it in his head with what he actually knew was reality. he probably dreamed so much that he forgot a little bit how to exist in real life, and he had absolutely nobody around him to keep him tethered back to the physical world. the first time he did have that, i think was when jason died and tim realised bruce Needed a robin to function. and boy was that a harsh tether to reality, because bruce was not in the state of mind to be delicate. 

and you know, it would have been harsh, but i also think in a way it was probably necessary for tim to get that level of reality check? i think tim did jump into the robin role with a very starry-eyed vision. he had his dreams and his internalised world where everything was better for him, and although he was devastated that his hero robin was dead, he was still jumping at the idea that by him becoming robin, he could finally live out those dreams. but obviously, being a vigilante is not a dream, and it's not the vision he expected, and you also have to take into account that tim had been living his entire fucking life in his own head--he was probably very self destructive. when everything around you is half-fake and you exist only in your thoughts, then nothing real matters. taking care of yourself, eating, sleeping, getting through life practically; it all disappears. that was the state with which tim first became robin, and i guarantee you it terrified bruce. he just lost jason and right out of the gate the next robin he gets is a kid that doesn't seem all that bothered by being hurt because who cares about being hurt in a dream? so obviously bruce was, initially, very harsh on tim in order to bring him back down to earth. slightly mean? yes. did it do the job? also yes. 

so obviously he was brought back down to earth and given a lot more stability in life by being robin, both in the sense that it kinda killed that romanticised view of what being a bat would be as well as gave him multiple people that actually paid enough attention to him that he stopping needing to entertain himself in his own head as much. the way that i think this aspect of who tim is as a person is relevant to his view of being a part of the family is that it shows he was already pre-accepting of the idea of having these people as his family in the first place. his bio parents didn't fill any kind of parental role and he'd spent the better part of his childhood dreaming of being a part of the wayne family, so for him assigning dick and bruce to those roles was easy--they were pretty much already there, and although at the very beginning bruce was harsh on him, it was very soon after tim came along that both bruce and dick started truly working on themselves both separately and as a family unit, meaning that they both also actively accepted and tried to live up to the role of being tim's brother and father figures. i also think that it's quite important and fortunate that it was tim specifically that was the youngest during this period of time, because although bruce was trying he wasn't just. better overnight. and tim was, in a sense, a little bit delusional/looking through rose-tinted glasses regarding the concept of bruce as a father, so although he had 100% been disillusioned to who bruce was as a parent he was still capable of bouncing back and keeping faith in bruce; helped along, obviously, by the fact that dick was trying this new thing with kid-brother-number-two called 'encouraging forgiveness rather than hate towards your adoptive guardian'. so for tim it's pretty straight forward, dick is his brother (there was never any sense of dick being a father figure to tim; when tim came along dick wanted to make up for being a bad brother to jason, so he never tried to be anything more than a brother to tim and tim never looked to dick for that because he wanted batman) and bruce is his dad, even before he was officially adopted (which happened when he was around 13, a year or so after becoming robin). over the years he's definitely gotten more jaded and grown out of that head-in-the-clouds nature just a bit, as he grows used to being a wayne and everything that involves that, but that aspect of his personality effected him enough before he grew that he'll always subconsciously consider the waynes as his family, and because of that it's easier for him to form that type of bond with other people later on, like when jason and damian show up. it also i think is what made tim the one that pushed so hard to figure out that bruce was trapped in the time stream rather than dead--dick accepted it and started grieving, jason accepted it and had to run away to deal with whether he wanted to grieve or not, damian just... accepted it point blank. but tim didn't, because he is still at his core, partially, that dreaming kid constantly chasing and trying to live out that fantasy life he made for himself when he was little that he somehow managed to somewhat make a reality. bruce couldn't be dead, because tim decided that's his dad and he doesn't want his dad to be gone, so it's not true and he's gonna fix it. luckily, of course, he was right, and now in the present batcom era he can settle down somewhat with everything Better and probably as close to 'normal' that the waynes could ever get. 

now, damian is interesting for a multitude of reasons. like i said before, i see batcom!damian as  a version of extroverted, even if it probably doesn't come across as much as it might with tim. i think damian is a different type of extrovert than tim, in the sense that damian has a much more analytical mind in the way he thinks and interacts with people. he is artistic, like tim, and when he was younger he was obviously a very whimsical kid, liking magic and fantasy, but he's also at his core a very linguistically artistic person--good with words and speaking. this is definitely something he gets from jason, but he is also a wayne and an al ghul, and i think the calculative intelligence and the social dominance that he inherits from talia and bruce mix with that todd-linguistic nature in a way that makes him very good at interacting with people. he's an extrovert less because he genuinely loves and enjoys being surrounded by lots of people at all times, and more because he's very good at navigating interacting with people and figuring out how to benefit from other people's presences. in essence, being manipulative runs in his family for about six different reasons and damian's inherited all of them, even if he isn't selfish about it like he could be. 

obviously it goes without saying for anybody that knows a bit about the batcom universe that damian was isolated before jason came along. he was raised in a cell within an ancient cult to do nothing but train as an heir to the demons head. he literally was isolated in a cell, he had no choice but to be alone. but something that i think a lot of people overlook is that damian has something that none of the other batboys really experienced, that effects his ability to grapple the concept of family, and that's a present and large extended family. 

damian was being raised isolated and groomed to be the perfect soldier, but he was still aware that he was an al ghul, which meant he was obviously aware of who his family was. he knew he had an aunt, an uncle, a grandfather, cousins, and he knew they were those peoples titles. the al ghul family in the batcom universe is obviously a complicated thing--the al ghuls aren't good people and their traditions and ways of life obviously are not healthy or safe in any way, but they are still a family. damian has never disowned or despised who his family is because of what being an al ghul meant for him, instead i think he just learned to embrace the toxicity and abuse and stopped caring at a very young age (which honestly interestingly enough i think 100% contributed to jason's ability to accept his place in the batfamily later on, as well as repair his relationship with bruce. damian could do it with the al ghuls, so why couldn't jason do it with the waynes?). the point is that damian grew up with really weird familial dynamics all around him, with an extended family that he probably didn't see all that often that he still recognised to be his family. on top of that he already knew that his father was bruce wayne before jason even died, so the concept of him having family in gotham wasn't strange to him. it's also worthwhile to point out that he was well used to the concept of just. accepting people as family off the bat before he even went to gotham in the first place--keep in mind the person he's closest to in the world is jason todd, the fourteen year old that just kinda appeared when he was little and talia told him was his brother. gotham is not even close to the first time he's randomly acquired a sibling. 

obviously damian as a whole is slightly more complicated as a person because he is a lab child, in a sense. i think it adds to damian's nature of just accepting the things around him for what they are, because he doesn't really have a choice. everything about his very existence is inherently chaotic and disorganised, from his various extended family tree, to his age and dna being mutated and not following the natural laws of being a child, to the rapid changes in his life; such as going from a cell to being in jason's care, to jason giving him to bruce, to bruce going missing, to bruce coming back again, all on top of his constant juggling of now being both a vigilante and a bat as well as attempting to build a 'normal' civilian life. that sort of living is insane for a child to attempt to mentally organise and comprehend, and so damian just learned not to. it is pretty much impossible to catch him off guard at this point, which i think feeds into a lot of how he is as a person later on; very calm all the time, not reactive to things that the other batkids would be angry/embarrassed/excited about, a little bit OCD when it comes to his surroundings because if he can't figure out what the fuck he is on the inside you can sure bet your ass he's gonna keep control of what's on the outside, and easy to adapt and adjust to wild situations that cause a lot of distress for the others, such as big injuries or when bruce was thought to be dead. tim and jason ran off, dick was grieving his adoptive father, but damian just accepted it and moved on to being dick's robin. because, as he responds with everything else in his life, why not? might as well. 

this obviously effects the way he perceives his relationships with the others, in that it's very easy for him to be told that the waynes are his family and him to just shrug and say 'ok'. obviously one of the few things he's known from the beginning of his existence is that bruce wayne is his biological father anyway, so he knows bruce is his dad, and this is then strengthened by the fact that when jason comes along he is at first introduced as a brother, also a son of bruce.

i do think that quite a lot of how damian feels in reference to the family is at least partially influenced by jason, as is a lot of damian's life anyway. obviously jason is the person he has the strongest bond with out of everybody he knows for a multitude of reasons. jason is probably, ironically, the most stable aspect of damian's life so far. like i said, experiments/hand-wavy science stuff makes his ages while at the league a little up in the air, but i like to think he probably was around six years old when he and jason first met, upon which jason immediately took the kid under his wing. the fun thing about jason and damian at the league is that jason was still definitely a little bit crazy back then--mental and emotional issues topped off with being newly resurrected and imbued with lazarus energy as well as whatever the fuck the all blades does to him. damian was obviously smart enough to recognise the instability within jason, but he also got to watch jason tirelessly and consistently work through/around those little dips of crazy specifically so he could continue to be a guardian figure in damian's life, which would have been the first time that damian had witnessed a family member ever make damian a priority for damian's sake, which no doubt would have been refreshing. there's also the plain aspect that jason just straight up made damian's life a thousand times better--him existing got the rest of the al ghuls off damian's back about being a main heir; he got a proper bedroom, better food, protection. to damian the concept of comfort in general became associated with jason at a pretty young age, which i guess is both a blessing and a curse. the thing is that although he knew that he had a father, bruce wayne, he didn't exactly have a father figure that was actually present and interactive in his life while he was in the league. because of this i think that 100% jason was mentally shoved into that role for damian, even if it became another weird chaotic amalgamation inside his head. jason was both a brother, a guardian, and a dad to him; obviously this was only cemented by jason eventually figuring out how ra's experiment bullshit worked and making himself a biological paternal donor to damian's DNA, making him a technical second biological father. subconsciously, damian views jason as a triple-thread of every kind of family member he'd ever need--and on top of that jason became that thread even while mentally unstable, meaning that damian probably assigned him more trust that he would have originally under the logic that, well, jason didn't leave at his worst, so why would he leave at his best? 

this relationship with jason would of course effect damian's coming to gotham, in the sense that it just adds to damian's whole 'well who cares' attitude towards the family. he knows that he's a wayne, and so he accepts that bruce is his father and by extension dick and tim are his brothers, and it's easy for him to let them fall into that role because why not? might as well. but also because on top of that, regardless of what the waynes end up being to him, he still has jason in the background filling literally every role anyway, so if things go wrong then no harm done. --and to be clear, i do mean in the background. jason was coming and going during those first few years in gotham, he was busy. this didn't bother damian because i imagine jason was also flittering about a lot while at the league so he's kinda used to jason rushing in and out like a damn bumble-bee, and he probably knows ways to contact jason if he ever truly needs him for an emergency. again, damian is a very accepting and quick-to-adapt person, so being alone is something he got over being worried about years ago. 

obviously his relationship with bruce is... slightly weird. he is damian's dad, but he's not damian's only dad, and he did fuck off in the time stream for a year not too long after damian first appeared, which kinda put a dent in their initial relationship's first impression. funnily enough, although damian can be quite protective of jason, i think the strained nature of bruce's relationship with jason was probably what made damian settle into the idea of bruce being a present father figure in the first place. it just made sense to him, you know? that's what an older family member is to him based on what he's experienced--messy and complicated. if he'd shown up and bruce had been picture perfect suburban dad material i think it would have turned damian right off, because how the fuck could he be the picture perfect suburban son to match? but bruce is messy, and complicated, and a massive work in progress, which meant that damian felt he could fit right in and was able to work out a half-decent dynamic with the man. obviously damian is a lot more independent than he probably should be at his age, but i think that's needed for damian in order for him not to feel suffocated after having such a weird and, in a lot of ways, lax early childhood. bruce recognises that, but i also think he recognises that he isn't the only person in damian's life that looks out for him like a parent does--even if he doesn't know the biological extent just yet, and i think it's part of his attempt at healing his relationship with jason to trust that if jason lets damian have that independence, then bruce should probably be ok with damian having it too. 

for the matter of dick, i think again damian subconsciously takes note of jason's relationship with dick before forming his own. obviously dick was his legal guardian while bruce was missing, and i think damian trusted him to take that role because jason so obviously did (damian trusts that jason wouldn't have run off without him to do his little mental-breakdown grief-stricken league visit if he didn't think dick was capable of keeping damian safe), but i also think that he took note of jason and dick's relationship before jason left town for a while, and he would have picked up on the fact that although they were not in any way hostile towards each other, things were... awkward between them. stilted. unknown. cautious. and because of that damian would have held back from fully accepting dick as a parent. i think it really was more of a 'distant uncle taking guardianship' kinda shtick for damian, and they probably ended up being a lot warmer towards each other as brothers when jason came back and damian saw them start to get along again. 

funniest thing about the family is probably that the strongest brotherly bond in my humble opinion, is tim and damian's relationship with ech other. both of them had wildly different childhoods with slightly similar psychological effects in specific aspects, and funnily enough they merge together like fucking magnets because of it. both of them find it easy to just 'accept' people as family, they're young enough that they're around similar stages of mental development, they're both creative and artistic with wildly unrealistic views of the concept of violence/fighting (damian bcs he grew up in the league and tim because he still sometimes forgets he isn't dreaming), and both of them fully accept and embrace bruce as their father. it also goes without saying that they're the only two living in the manor together and they go through quite significant development while around each other--damian slowly learning to trust that being in gotham is stable and figuring out how to be a civilian, and tim finally starting to slow down in his role within the wayne family and grow out of his various untethered-from-life coping mechanisms because he now has a pretty full life to keep him occupied and he's settled into his role as red robin for long enough that it doesn't feel like a dream anymore. in a way, i think damian and tim both grew up being more abstract concepts of a child, rather than being actual human kids; and it's only now together in the present batcom era that they're starting to smooth out into who they really are as singular independent people, which gives them a very childhood-sibling-specific essence to their relationship that the others obviously missed out on getting.