hi fredericwertham!! sorry for unfollowing/following u like three times i was trying to hit the ama button not the unfollow button. anyway i was looking through your posts tagged talia al ghul and i saw this and wow. ive never seen/heard of this arc do you quite possibly remember where/when it was??
Hey there I've been avoiding answering this because I figured out that the story I was thinking of happened in issues #5 and 6 of Azrael (1995) and got too embarrassed. So, it wasn't Dick that Ra's wanted her to get with, it was Jean Paul Valley, and it wasn't pre-crisis, but post (although, being written by Denny O'Neil, the veil is thin). I was wrong about everything besides the gist of the story! Egg on my face. I swear I check this stuff when I make actual posts.
Anyway, I don't think the story in question is very good, but it's interesting? The scene I was thinking of is in #6, and it points to an aspect of Talia's character that a lot of people who claim to like her are uncomfortable with, which is that the fact that she likes Bruce as much as Ra's does is really fortunate on her part, because she isn't ultimately being given a choice in the matter. Rather than simply being good luck, this is also possibly (imo definitely) part of what motivated her to like Bruce so much to begin with.
Talia is bound, for lack of a better word, by love first and foremost to her father. Yes, she doesn't like mass murder and will try to stop him from doing. Yes, she struggles to break away from him and sometimes succeeds at doing so for extended periods of time. But she always goes back because Ra's is her no. 1. So there's always this thing too where, while her feelings for Bruce are real, she's also found in him a reliable ally for dealing father with her father who's frankly easy for her to manipulate. All of this is important context for her Lexcorp arc and Death and the Maidens.
