SoleminiSanction

i've been seeing the idea that stephanie brown is hard to properly tackle as a character in the comics because of how horribly she was treated in war games. how what she was made to do is difficult to approach because out-of-universe sexism is what caused it.

and while i agree to some extent, you can't deny the sexism of it all, and how it in retrospect validated everyone irl and in-universe who questioned her ability to be a vigilante for reasons other than her inexperience. but i might be alone in thinking this, but when it comes to rehabilitating characters from bad writing decisions and character assassinations, to me.... steph is not too hard to do this with?

because ultimately what stephanie did wasn't so much *out of character* for her, but very dramatic and having far-reaching terrible consequences for her and gotham. it's not leslie letting a teenager die on her table. from a pure writing perspective, taking stephanie's history into account, it feels like a logical if high stakes culmination of her flaws finally biting her thoroughly in the ass, with innoccents getting caught in the crossfire in ways she can't ignore.

like i can see a world where war games becomes steph's reason to continue being a vigilante. she did this horrible, reckless mistake that got so many killed and hurt people she cared about, and while she can never take it back, being a vigilante can maybe make up for it even a little. after her dad is dealt with steph needed a new motivation to be a vigilante that fits her, and isn't just "because she wants to". and people are right to be hurt, to distrust her, and having stephanie be humbled, yet stubborn and desperate to prove she *can do good*, that she *wants to do good*. having her fumble around until she reaches that point, tackling her own flaws that led her to unintentionally starting a gang war, clumsily yet earnestly trying to repair the relationships that were strained by this, maybe even ending up with better bonds as a result of her trying and growing as a person...... i dunno there's something compelling about it to me.

i don't know if it's any good, but i've been thinking about it lately. sorry for the wall of text in your inbox, feel free to delete if you prefer that.

You're extremely valid, anon. I pretty much agree with everything you said here. There's some real meat in War Games that, in the hands of the right creative team, would make Steph as crunchy and compelling as Cass or Babs.

This whole attitude of "Steph is soooo hard to tackle because War Games was sexist" is a prime example of what I meant in a recent post, that the way people in fandom (and increasingly in canon) discuss Steph actively gets in the way of both feminist critique and letting Steph be fully actualized as a character.

Because if that were true every single woman in superhero comics would be treated the same way.

Babs had Killing Joke. Cass has that forced villain era. Carol Danvers had Avengers #200. I've lost track of all the shit they've put Mary Jane and the various Black Widows through. Ditto Selina Kyle and the Black Canaries. Lois Lane and the original Kara Danvers had the entirety of the 1950s and a decent chunk of the 60s. Modern Kara has big chunks of her reintroduction storyline, especially the art. Starfire, Cassie, Raven, Zatanna, and countless others have the New 52. Leslie Tompkins had fucking War Games (and, more specifically War Crimes).

So why is Stephanie singled out? Why is she, and she alone, treated as tainted, ruined by sexism to the point where we just have no choice but to strip her down to the factory-model-female defaults of "sassy" and "pure of heart"?

It all winds back to this frustrating attitude of putting Steph on a pedestal and demanding that everything about her (and her story, and her suffering) be hailed as special and unique and not like other girls.

There's nothing unique or targeted about the problems with War Games, they're symptoms of deep-rooted systematic issues in the industry: namely, the general lack of regard for any audience beyond middle-aged straight white men, and the fact that way, way too many male comic artists never learn (and are never instructed to learn by their editors) how to draw women outside the context of sexy pin-ups, even when it's gross and inappropriate.

Steph's treatment is a part of that. But so is the fact that, unlike the other characters removed by that storyline (who were people of color, elderly, disabled, etc.), Steph, the only conventionally attractive young white person, got a leading role with full plotlines before, during and after that are constantly dedicated to showing off her character traits, good and bad, and reinforcing how talented and special she is to shore up the tragedy.

Hell, hers is the only removal that gets treated like a tragedy and not a moment of shock value. Even the scripting on her fucking torture scene is way more restrained and treated with more respect than a scene of the same villain torturing a random male character from earlier in the exact same storyline. The problem was never in the writing, it was in the fact that said scene ended up in Catwoman, and was thus drawn by Paul Gulacy, who was on that book in the first place because he draws women like sexy pin-ups and fetish dolls.

War Games is not a story of Stephanie Brown being uniquely targeted by sexist creators who specifically hated her for... reasons. It is one of countless sexist, racist storylines that have happened, are still happening, and will keep happening, because the comic book industry is a part of our larger culture and is thus shaped by the systematic problems and biases that infect that culture.

But that scary reality is big and hard to fix and can't be addressed by harassing creators on social media. And it doesn't fit the narrative that Stephanie is special. It's practically a direct refutation of that narrative, the ultimate slap-in-the-face proof that she is, in fact, Like the Other Girls. You can't girlboss your way out of a systematic problem.