#dc comics asks

I honestly roll my eyes at 90% of fandom's "Jason is being victim-blamed" claims.

Like, I agree that the comics that try to argue Jason was a "bad seed" who was destined to meet a sticky end because of his upbringing or bad attitude or whatever are wrong and also kinda mean and dumb. But that's a Doylist problem of narrative framing, not anything that can or should be placed on any of the in-world characters.

But it's not "victim-blaming" to acknowledge that Jason got himself killed, ie, that he made the pivotal choice which led to his death. Bruce ask him to wait. Jason chose not to. If he had, he wouldn't have fallen into the Joker's trap, and he wouldn't have died. Like with Steph and War Games, it's taking his agency away to claim otherwise, all in the name of making them "perfect" victims.

It's also not "victim-blaming" to acknowledge his reasons and motivations for making that choice. Jason needs to be in control of that moment, because that's the real core of the tragedy. It wasn't inevitable, he wasn't somehow "destined" for a bad end, but his circumstances and choices combined to put him on that path anyway. It's the culmination of his rocky relationship with Bruce and Jason's own trauma and hang-ups about parents, specifically mothers, coming to a dramatic end that both plays into and deconstructs the tropes of the kid superhero genre.

To paraphrase an old John Green video, the core struggle of being a teenager is that of being pulled in many directions by the world around you, while also desiring to live fully and fearlessly and maybe a little foolishly. And the occasionally tragic thing is that, as a teenager, you are just grown-up enough for those understandable, natural desires to get you killed.

If that happens, it's not "your fault," but it is the result of your choices, and it's insulting and infantalizing to pretend that it's not.

In that regard, Jason's role in Tim's story, as the ghost who hangs over his adventures reminding him of the price he can and will pay if he makes the wrong decision, makes perfect sense. What people who call it "victim-blaming" are actually mad about is that the story isn't about Jason. It's not about his tragedy, it's about how his tragedy affected the people around him, the people who were left behind to continue on and the people who came after.

There's a smart post going around stating that one of the things you really have get used to -- or better yet, learn to enjoy -- about superhero comics is that there will be times when it's just plain not about your fav. And you will have more fun if you learn to embrace that, to enjoy seeing them in different lights and from different perspectives.

But some people can't or don't or don't want to do that, and so they get mad at the stories that aren't centered on their fav's feelings and perspective. And they use loaded psychiatry language to express that.

Just asking since I was curious. There isn’t any I’ll intend. If fact I also prefer DC over marvel too. But that’s mostly because I grew up with them more instead of marvels

The short answer is their non-spiderman characters just don't grab me. (There's the X-Men, but X-men shares the same problem as spiderman in that they don't really fit into the wider Marvel universe well).

The longer answer is that you might never guess this about me from my My Hero Academia takes, but I actually love teenage superheroes, and stories about adolescents with superpowers growing up into adulthood. My favorite comic of all time is Teen Titans precisely because it's about this topic, instead of someone like Bruce Wayne who has trained their whole life to be a hero what is it like to be a teenager with superpowers and suddenly have to grow up and figure all these things out about yourself and balance that with the crushing responsibility of being a superhero that adults struggle with? What happens when you have to grow into a different hero than the adults that came before you?T hat eventually you can't live entirely off their guidance forever?

It's a common saying in DC that batman needs Robin. That's why a lot of batman movies feel like they're missing something when they cut Robin out. DC does it's sidekicks extremely well, better than any other big comics continuity and they are also the best at letting them grow up. The best example is Nightwing of course, but every twenty years or so there is a generational shift in DC Comics where the sidekicks grow up and they get to rotate new superheroes in and the titles and costumes pass down. Jason Todd is allowed to grow up into Red Hood even though it is drastically different from who he was as Robin. Wally West replaced Barry Allen as the flash for a long time and even is the default flash in a lot of adaptations (Justice League Unlimited). Roy Harper is a proud single father of the world's cutest daughter Lian.

The thing is I don't just love the Fab Five and the NTT. When we got to Tim's generation, I was super invested Young Justice especially Tim and Kon and Cass. There are a lot of new kids that are being added in the post rebirth continuity, the new wonder girl, Wallace West (reverse flash's son), Emiko the new arrow sidekick, Duke Thomas fairly new additions that have so much potential and are just as interesting as the teenage characters from the 80s and 90s.

DC isn't perfect about this (the two reboots didn't help one bit we're now stuck in Damian's generation like perpetually) but it's better than anyone else.

5. Favorite character?

This is so hard ahhhhh but I have to go Donna Troy bc I just love her (closely followed by Roy Harper

6. Favorite cannon ship? 

again. hard question. But I really love dickkory in my heart

7. Favorite non-cannon ship?

24. If you had total control what would you change?

OH BOY

Bring back the original Teen Titans show and Green Lantern: the Animated Series.

Have a new Blue Beetle comic with the original writers from the 2006 run.

Put Equinox/Miiyahbin Marten in more stuff since DC pushed her so much when she came out and then forgot about her.

Put Jax-Ur and Mala in more stuff.

Merchandise for the Reach.

MAKE SAINT WALKER AND ARKILLO A CANNON COUPLE

Have the next live-action movie be a rom-com with King Shark and Killer Frost.

48. Favorite villain?

Oof. Tough question.

Obviously, I do like a lot of villains, but not necessarily because they’re villains? Like Jax-Ur and Mala: I like those two because of their relationship, but as villains they’re pretty standard.

I think the ones that have a tie for Favorite would the:

The Reach, because most versions of them show them to be trying to help the universe, in their own way. The way they see it is that the only way for there to be peace is if everyone is doing things the Reach way.

And the other would be Lex Luthor, I guess mostly because he’s really interesting? Because he’s an evil genius as well as a business man. (I don’t know if I have any good reason for Lex. He’s just a good villain.)

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.

When he was first introduced he came across as really unlikeable. From speaking to other older comic readers, he wasn’t popular at all.

Now, unsurprisingly, he has many fans, but noticeably those who disliked him from the start also tend to admit they have warmed up to him. But looking at the source material there has never really been much of a Damian turning point than a gradual change in behaviour in the fiction. The most notable piece of Damian literature being maybe Juni Ba’s The Boy Wonder.

Do you think most peoples opinions have changed more because of exposure overtime than simply great and redeemable story writing? Or at least from your own experience?

I wouldn't say it's exposure so much as the fact that those gradual changes did in fact add up to softening his character enough that he now better fits the role he's been given.

'Cause like, the thing about Damian when he was introduced is, he was actually pretty exciting and likable -- as an antagonist/antihero. Like, I remember being on Livejournal, reading issue to issue during the events of the original "Batman and Son" arc and "the Return of Ra's al-Ghul." Most of us clocked immediately that Damian was being set up to become Robin someday, we were just expecting that to be in, like, a decade or more of real-world time, during which Damian would turn up every 12-18 months to pester Bruce or Tim or Dick for a storyline or so and leave every encounter growing a little less hostile and a little more heroic until he finally developed to the point that he could inherit the mantle on his own merits.

Making him Robin was the thing that turned a lot of people against him, because it just felt so sudden, so against what had come before, and so unfair. People don't enjoy it when you throw out the character they've been happily supporting for 20 years and tell you to start cheering for a new guy instead, who knew? Especially when it comes with that new guy being so painfully mean-spirited about the whole thing.

But that said, from that rocky start, Damian has now gotten a good 15, almost 20 years of stories behind him, and while I don't follow those stories closely enough to tell break down how they've changed him, they clearly have. He's not nearly as obnoxious or aggressive as he once was, he's learned to appreciate teamwork and family, and he's not a murderer anymore.

He is, honestly, at roughly the point I would expect him to be in his storyline after this amount of time in and out of universe, in spite of some of the dumb hiccups he's had along the way (but hey, what superhero hasn't had an extremely dumb death storyline or two clogging up their character arc?).

Honestly, I kind of feel about Damian the same way I do about Steph: that people would broadly like them more, they would be more cohesive characters, and their fandoms would not be nearly as toxic, if DC hadn't poisoned the waters by making them Robin in a desperate attempt to sell them to the audience. They could've done that so much better by just writing good stories about them.

And to think I even thought 'I wonder what people are saying in the comments and tags of this?' before being smacked in the face with such hot takes as 'Steph was fired for saving Bruce' and 'Steph didn't recieve any training'

I always forget what the fandom consensus is on Steph's time as robin when one of those posts come around, before being abruptly reminded…

It's so frustrating! It's such a blatant surface-level read of "these two moments look similar so they're the same thing" when they're just not.

My perpetual hot take: Steph was not held at a higher standard than the boys, but she should have been. She was the oldest and the most experienced. The boys (and Carrie, and Maps, and at least one version of Helena Wayne) all start between the ages of 10 and 13; Steph's at least 17, probably closer to 18 -- a legal adult, or close to it. She'd dropped out of high school, held down at least one civilian job, and had a baby. She'd been trained by Tim, Dinah, Cass, Babs, and Bruce before becoming Robin, and starts up a whole new intense training routine with the latter three once she gets the job.

She may not have been Trained On Arrival the way Dick or Damian was, but she had more training than Jason and more in-cape field experience than any of them. After all that, "Understands the danger she's putting herself in" feels like it should be the bare minimum to clear to continue being a superhero, period, let alone being Robin where Batman is explicitly responsible for her safety.

That post that's going around right now is particularly frustrating because it even acknowledges why Bruce was hesitant about Steph in the first place -- her recklessness and tendency not just to sometime disobey, but regularly resist and defy his orders, reminded him too much of Jason, the Robin Who Got Fucking Killed. And yet it still acts like that's just some stupid hang-up of Bruce's that doesn't really matter, as opposed to an actually pretty reasonable point that lines up with both Bruce's trauma and Steph's established character traits.

"His decision to leave the bar with a stranger without telling his friends ultimately sealed his fate"

or

"If only she hadn't stopped to help the supposed 'innocent man' on the side of that dark road, she might've still be alive today!"

would you call that "victim blaming"?

Probably not. Because it's not acting like the victim's innocent choice absolves their killer. It's just an acknowledgement of causality, that this was the pivotal choice that ultimately led them to cross paths with the person who did them harm, and isn't it sad or scary to think that such a casual decision ended up mattering so much. Acknowledging the causality of a person's choice is not the same thing as acting like their behavior justifies what happened to them.

And likewise, if someone around the victim's age and demographic hears that story and decides for themselves, "Golly, I better make sure my friend group keeps track of each other when we go out tonight" or "Oh, I'll never get out of my car to help a stranger in that situation, I'll offer to call a tow truck instead," and you, in turn, accused them of victim blaming the serial killer's target, you would not be the reasonable-sounding person in that conversation.