#quillium

Ask me for the director’s cut commentary on a fic scene or send a star if you want me to pick one to talk about!

Thank youuuuuu!!!!! *cracks knuckles* I am ready. 

Okay! So! In Blackbird, many of you reading it probably noticed that when Cass joins the Batfam, she actually knows some sign language already and can understand people’s words. She understands most spoken communication, but she can’t really use it herself. She communicates through gesture and expression. 

In the comics, Cass isn’t supposed to be able to understand or reciprocate much of any communication, because she was supposedly raised with literally NO language or interaction aside from nonverbal assassin training. That’s it. 

Except I am mcfuckin REALLY HYPERFOCUSED on psychology on and off for like. Six years now. Okay. And part of that includes child development. And a very interesting, very heartbreaking part of that includes TRAUMATIC AND NEGLECTFUL child development situations. And they have serious effects. (For a really, really good primer on this topic, I encourage you to check out The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, because it’s an amazing and really interesting book with a lot of hope and shows just how much change the field of trauma and child psych has undergone in just a few short decades. EXTREMELY great read.) I want to be as true to the characters as possible while writing my stories, because if they’re going to have changes to their base characterization, I want it only to be because of changed circumstances (e.g., Tim joining the family a few years early, Jason not dying) or going to therapy and having a supportive network of people to rely on, not because I screwed up. But here’s the problem: putting aside all the normal levels of hand-wavey “oh it’s comics, suspension of disbelief, magic blah blah”, Cass’ situation in the comics is completely impossible even WITH magic. Even with the one meta who connected her brain pathways to make her able to speak. 

Because if a child was actually raised the way Cass was, missing every second of the critical development window in early childhood, it doesn’t matter what kind of meta you are and how much you can tweak a person’s brain. That child would have SEVERE damage. Language is not just language. It’s the gateway to the brain’s ability to understand and regulate emotions, form and store memories, make sense of the world, and understand and delineate concepts. Children raised “feral” without language are severely handicapped for the rest of their lives in most cases, even with years and years of the most intensive care and various therapy avenues possible. When the brain is stunted and damaged during its most rapid development periods that severely, to the point where certain structures don’t develop at all, you can’t fix that. Improvement is possible, but only to limited amounts. Cass would never be functional enough to be an independent, strategic assassin. Also, the trauma would very likely have also hindered the development of her brain structures that control motion and movement and rhythm, because language is critical for brainstem development as well. So she wouldn’t be the master fighter we know and love either. She’d be a very, very hurt and traumatized and brain-damaged child who needed a LOT of intensive care and gentle love for years. She would not be the Cass of our stories. So I was like...how do I reconcile her childhood with the reality of brain science and come up with a Cass who definitely has been neglected and damaged but has just enough foundation where she can, with a lot of time and work and help, gain the ability to speak and potentially read as well, even if it’s never up to the standard of most adults? 

So I came up with a different backstory and situation. Cass was still raised by David, she still went through the hellish years of training, she still ran away and was living on her own. But Bruce found her sooner, and not in Gotham. Cass had been given instructional commands as a baby and child via hand gestures, JUST enough to partially develop the linguistic and communication centers in her brain. Just enough to give her a foundational rock. Just enough to avoid making her nonfunctional, essentially, because no one as strategic as David Cain would put all that effort into raising an infant only to have them turn out too damaged to function as the assassin he wants. 

So Cass has a smattering of foundation. Not enough to have full language, not enough to not have developmental delays and struggle with memory retention--she runs on a lot of learned muscle and instinct memory, not so much actively recalled--but enough for her to be able to heal some and gain language. That was so, so important to me, because Cass is very intelligent and INCREDIBLY resilient and driven, she never gives up, and she deserves a solid backstory instead of the hand-wavey mess that the comics gave her. I’m not even TOUCHING Nu-52 with a thousand foot pole, lol. 

So Cass was still abused, still criminally neglected, still has unregulated trauma and severe learning and developmental delays to work through. But she’s got a foundation, in my story, of just enough language exposure via gesture and just enough audible language exposure from outside people she heard while taken out of their compound for learning experiences as an infant and toddler and child that she is able to recognize rythym and tone and emotion in language, and she picked up on meanings of words and sentences during her time on the run. She has a foundation to build on, instead of going from “she’s got nothing to work with and yet somehow the damage is only to her understanding of language and she’s a badass in every other area” to “Cass is absolutely a badass in every way and she has a lot of brain development issues from trauma and neglect but she now has a chance to start growing and healing from them with help and time”

(tagged by @quillium💜💜💜)

1. Shuffle Your Feet by the Black Motorcycle Club

2. Yours by Jesse McCartney

3. Strange Clouds by ufo ufo

4. Dinner and Diatribes by Hozier NSFW

5. Ten Feet Tall by The Devil Makes Three NSFW

6. Agni Kai by CJ Music

7. Zero by Imagine Dragons

8. Little Bit of This by Good Times Ahead (ft. Vince Staples) NSFW

9. Agni Kai - Epic Version by Samuel Kim

10. rainbow phone. by Madison Rose NSFW

omgomgggg i’m so 💖💞✨🥰💞💖💕 thank you for being so kind 🥺

(ask meme here)

fkdsajfdk i love you so much quill

thanks for your support as always! tbh i was so sure i was gonna sleep instead of staying up bc i went out the entire day... but i couldnt stop thinking about izone...

honestly theres a point in time for kpop groups when they begin to evolve from idols to artists... and i feel like that is starting to happen to izone