the 90s are so fascinating for both Dick and Babs from a romantic standpoint because they're both working through MASSIVE crashouts for extremely different reasons: Babs is recovering from The Killing Joke and breaking off her engagement with Jason Bard, while Dick is reeling from his marriage to Kory failing, Joey dying, the Titans dissolving, not being Bruce's first choice to fill in as Batman for him after Knightfall, etc etc. Them getting togetherāand their romance in generalāis a slow burn, slow-building relationship explicitly presented as "okay, they're both independent, mature, and confident characters now, this is the only way this was ever going to work and now they're ready for it."
Birds of Prey (1999) #8 was the first time in the post-Crisis universe the potential for their romance was explicitly acknowledged, but there are theseā¦.hints, here and there, in mid-90s comics (post-Dick returning to Gotham after the dissolution of the Titans) that indicate DickBabs was something that was definitely being thought about in the Bat Offices. Because Dick is CLEARLY not over Kory during this era and he dates 2-3 other women before he and Babs get together, but the hints are definitely there! It's actually really fun to read and realize that the entirety of the mid to late 90s is mostly just them reconnecting, talking to and supporting each other, and building up towards the more explicit romance in Nightwing/Birds of Prey at the speed of molasses.
Like, the "it was you. it was always you" trope DOES NOT WORK for them! It invalidates their other relationships and misses the whole point of what made them work in the first place! The whole point is that they're not the same people they were before their lives disintegrated, and through the rebuilding process they reconnected with each other as people who have grown, changed, and learned from their previous life experiences and found each other that way. They only work because of the adults they grew into being.
And then they finally get together, and it's great for a couple of years!
ā¦.then of course the mid-2000s hit the towers, and they break up, and we have several years of Dick and Babs explicitly thinking of each other as "the one who got away" and tiptoeing around the subject of whether or not they should give it another shot at some point.
idk it's just routinely astonishing to me how many people don't really recognize that Dick has to have already gone through the entire NTT era and his relationship with Kory and that Babs has to be Oracle and a grown woman who had a life before Dick for that romance to work. DickBabs only works as Nightwing/Oracle. Trying to retcon it into being Batgirl/Robin (beyond a 'childhood crush that is never acted on' aspect) or Batgirl/Nightwing is setting it up for failure every time.
also yet another reason why current DickBabs is shit, because DC is ignoring that a large part of the appeal of the relationship was the slowburn "part of rebuilding a new life after the old one has disintegrated" aspect, but that's a conversation for another post I guess
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