#butredd

Genre: SciFi/Fantasy

Major Tropes: Hero corruption arc, slow burn, enemies to lovers, enemies to friends, morally gray characters, women's wrongs, righteous rebellion, bury your gays*, unreliable narrator

Representation Rating: A

(brown lesbian mc, mostly LGBT and nonwhite characters, written by a queer?** author. Some disability rep but could be better/have more imo.)

Just found a new channel with HotD content, yay! And it seems like good character analysis, yay! Except...

...and I want to preface this by saying that I love Aemond Targaryen... and that I totally get how he became the man he did... And I feel for him a lot...

But this dude seriously thinks Aemond did nothing wrong during the fight that lost him his eye, and Jace is the one who escalated, because "the rock was an empty threat"

Fucking... WHAT?

Let's say it was an empty threat...

How the FUCK is Jace supposed to know that?? All he knows is an older boy is threatening his little brother with a large rock. That's easily a lethal weapon. Jace is 100% justified in pulling a knife.

And then this YouTuber has the gall to be all like "This could have been really bad, what if Aemond had died! There's no explaining that!"

Sure there is.

"Well, he was threatening to smash my brother's head in with a large rock."

Like if I'm in a fist fight and a guy threatens to smash my (or my sibling's) head in with a rock a. You bet your ass I'm pulling a knife if I have one and b. If the guy lives to testify in court and he's like "well it was an empty threat, I wasn't ACTUALLY going to bludgeon them to death with a rock" you know who the judge is gonna side with? Me. 100% of the time.

Like don't get me wrong, Aemond was a kid and so I honestly overlook a lot of his actions that night on that basis. But you can't seriously try to argue that Aemond is a poor unforetunate soul who lost half his vision over an empty threat and then try to vilify Jace for """escalating""" (from??? Potentially deadly force to potentially deadly force, but for real this time???)

Fuck around and find out, Aemond. Don't bring a large rock to a fist fight if you don't want someone to pull an equally lethal weapon.

(The Red Hooded Ninja in the League of Assassins.)

After reading the last two sentences of the 2018 history section here I'm convinced its canon. The only thing I'm meh on is his chosen weapons being blades, but that could be a LOA thing? And then when he left he chose guns because they suited him better?

The Demon's Head says it seems his "memories are returning" so it could be that Jason stayed as long as it took for his memories to return fully/enough for him to know who he was and what happened to him?

B:WFA says Dick's favorite superhero is Superman... and Superman was the original Nightwing... omg

Meanwhile, aside from being a small flying creature, the Robin identity/moniker is completely different from Batman's, and doesn't even feature a suffix like his does (such as boy/man/lad/etc.) (Thank the gods we didn't end up with Robinlad.) The Robin identity stands alone, even among many major DC heroes... It needs no support or confinement from identifying information such as Woman or Man or Boy or Girl (Imagine if Superman was just The Super... Wonder Woman just The Wonder... Just Aqua... etc. Ew.) It is both unique to Dick, being his mother's nickname for him, and meant for passing on, being gender/age/etc. nonspecific.

Batman and Robin's identities/themes are also completely different... You've got the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder. Additionally, Robin's costume doesn't have any animal elements-- it doesn't even follow Batman's theme of the costume reflecting the features and/or color palette of the animal namesake. Where's Robin's dumb little beak mask and cape cut like bird wings (Hawk & Dove anyone?) Where did the green and yellow come from? And where are Robin's pants?

So what do we get from this?

Well, from an Arthurian perspective... I really wonder why the hell Kane, Finger, and Robinson made him this way. (Does Robinson being one of the creators have anything to do with it?)

From a mixed Arthurian/Watsonian perspective, maybe Batboy/kid/lad/etc isn't intimidating enough. Unlike most heroes, one of Batman's main strategies is to inspire fear and one of his main appeals is that he's edgy and dark and brooding. But why not Blue Bat then? Why a wee little songbird? (I know they were trying to soften Batman's image by adding Robin but still, they weren't trying to make him lil songbird soft.) Why the Boy Wonder, why the goofy (but iconic) color scheme and (I ask you again) why no pants?

OKAY I WANTED TO LEAVE THAT THEORIZING IN BUT I DID SOME RESEARCH AND:

Robin is DC's first sidekick. In fact, as far as I could find, Robin is THE FIRST superhero sidekick. It's not that Robin's creators were shaking things up with their sidekick... It's that most of the creators of sidekicks with derivative identities were being lazy. RIP.

Anyway, a Watsonian perspective (because let's be honest, what we care about is the implications on story and character,) and this is where it gets good... Maybe Bruce a. didn't want Dick to turn out anything like him, and b. wanted Dick to have the opportunity to develop his own identity, not living in the shadow of The Bat. We see other sidekicks struggling with not being The Real Thing... Thinking they're never quite as good as the original, always living in the shadow of their hero. Bruce was never asking Dick to be just like him-- that's the last thing he'd want.

So I see in a lot of things that Damian has a superiority complex because he's not adopted and/or he's the bloodson. Bloodson, yes... Not adopted... no?

I mean, if you, for instance, had a child and lost/gave up custody only to regain custody a decade later, that's still adoption even if they're your biological offspring, right? I know that, in the US at least, if you have a kid with a woman who is legally married to someone else, the woman is legally the guardian/she and her spouse are legally the parents unless you adopt the child. Talia isn't married to someone else but I assume the same would follow if you only find out about the kid a decade into its life.

So technically ALL the batkids are adopted/wards.