Me, finishing my cocktail: βMan, I should make that post. Really kick the hornetβs nest.β
Pip: βYou should. Drinky post time!β
Me: βItβs gonna make people really mad.β
Pip: βTime to hurt some πΆfeeeeeeeliiiiiingsπ΅~!β
They gotta stop aging Robin up I swear to god. Heβs like fully an adult man half the time and it fucking sucks. Make him recognizably a child or donβt bother including him at all. βBut it makes people uncomfortableβ yeah dude! Because it is! Youβre never going to make it okay so make it interesting! Make it mean something! Like Robin is fully just a grooming story. I donβt mean sexually but itβs a narrative about a man convincing himself that his relationship with a kid is so special and unique that the normal boundaries between child and adult can be suspended, that the childβs circumstances and capabilities and needs are so extraordinary that they are rendered a kind of un-child, and that the scale of their eagerness and want counts as consent. Robinβs already traumatized, so what is there to lose?
Everyone wants Batman to be morally complicated so they make him a huge douchebag for no reason but flinch away from the actual parts of his character that are really troubling. The βis it wrong to have Robin?β question is always brought up and then neatly solved in a way that absolves Batman. But like. One of Batmanβs most consistent character traits is that heβs able to convince himself of anything no matter how stupid.
Batman is a hyper-intelligent, hyper-powerful Sherlock Holmes character piloted by the ghost of a lonely child. Heβs a genius who uses his intelligence to justify acting upon the emotional impulses of an 8 year old with horrific trauma and unmet needs. He uses children for his own emotional gratification and convinces himself that, while it might not be right, itβs not wrong enough to stop doing it.
And, well, many such cases!
Honestly I think the cognitive dissonance of like a 9 a year old Robin does so much more to establish Bruce as a psychologically complicated and morally gray character than any amount of the pointless assholery people just keep piling on to his personality.
