#titans meta

Well, I finally gave in and decided to write it all down. How can I not when the show is basically slapping me in the face with it? It's all right there, if you're only willing to look. I've been dropping the phrase invisible string in relation to these two here and there for a while now and it's time to give it some more sense.

And yes, I am well aware this might be a stretch - it's Titans, nothing is ever intentionally that deep. But if there's one thing that show ever did right, it's this relationship, from the pilot to the end. So it's worth looking into it for me even if it's only my delusion speaking and it's not officially a thing.

So what is the Invisible String in this case? It's a connection, most likely supernatural, linking these two characters together and tethering them to each other in a way that is unexplainable by either logic or feelings. It plays into the definition of soulmates, though in this particular case other things like fate or magical powers might be connected. It's a bond made of love, fueled by love, but not responsible for it - the characters' feelings feed into it and strengthen it but they are their own and aren't affected by the existence nor strength of the bond. After all, even with the connection already in place, Dick and Rachel could have met and ended up hating each other.

Which means that not every scene they share will end up on this list I've put up here. Most of the time, the characters' actions are driven by their feelings, and the circumstances surrounding the scene are easily explainable. But sometimes, something strange happens and no matter how you look at it, you can't figure out how it happened without the so-called "higher power" at play.

(the higher power in question is most likely my delusion but fuck it we ball)

So where does it start? Obviously, in the pilot episode.

So I did a little mini meta on Twitter about what I think Dick and Kory’s love languages are so why not share it with my folks!

Kory is emotionally intelligent and she can really hit all five languages depending on who she is with but her personal languages are physical touch and acts of service.

In s1 Kory immediately goes into protector mode when she rescues Rachel. She not only uses physical touch to show affection but also her physical power. The duality of her physical whether to heal or to harm is displayed throughout the season.

Although it wasn’t her intention to sleep with Dick that night, he used physical touch as avoidance while she used it in hopes that it would open him up emotionally.

After the physical trauma of being experimented on in the asylum, she turns to the physical touch of someone she trusts to combat the feelings of being violated.

In s2 she used her physical powers to heal Conner and her AOS Language came fully into play when she left her own problems behind to help the titans and Dick.

In s3 She’s now fully comfortable with her new family and uses touch a lot to comfort Gar. She hugs Hank immediately when she sees him. She also uses her physicality to show Conner her frustration. She also heals Dick by stitching up his wounds. (This was the only time they interacted physically 🙃) And steps in front of him to protect him from Gar’s anger.

In s4 her tendency for physical touch is highly utilized. Now she’s completely cemented her position as co-head of the family. She’s comfortable. She’s touching Dick whenever she can. To flirt, to calm him down, to stabilize herself. She’s hugging everyone all the time.

Whereas Dick’s love language is firmly placed in acts of service. It took until s4 for him to even be emotionally available enough to delve into the other placements but that’s fine because one thing you can count on is Dick showing up for you to give or get you what you need.

In s1 he drops everything to protect and help Rachel once she re-enters his life. He tries to find better help for her than him but realizes it’s ultimately best for him and Kory to do it. He uses all of his abilities and connections to do this.

This continues in s2 when he feels like he can’t protect his friends any longer he makes the decision to go to jail. He is the person they need protection from, therefore he will remove himself from the situation no matter how bad it hurts him.

In s3 he tries to do everything in his power, including to continue to sacrifice himself to save Jason, protect his family, and Gotham. Kory and Gar remind him that sacrificing hisself is not the way to go about it and it takes him dying for that to really sink in because he’s crazy. But yes.

In s4 he does everything he can and uses ALL of his resources to help everyone to fight this prophecy and their destiny. His efforts are a bit futile because his lesson was to learn to trust. Trust that Kory knows how to defeat this evil, that Rachel can control her darkness, that Gar has control over his abilities, that Conner will ultimately do good, that Tim can stand on his own. By providing them the tools he was able to help and not just be the tool. He also explored quality time with the road-trip plan in general which is Gar’s love language.

The thing to remember about love languages is to love the other person in theirs and not yours. Dick and Kory learned this overtime together. Kory gives the ultimate act of service in sacrificing her life for Dick everyone. Which is a language he can completely understand.

Dick shows up physically for Kory everywhere. Being her literally shoulder to lean on when she’s feeling weak. Now he could’ve done a bit more with this emotionally but well let him cook for now. And finally once he realizes what he could’ve lost shows her exactly how he feels in that final kiss. He’s no longer using affection to deflect or escape but to express.

So what do we think their languages are? Feel free to add on. I’m going to add the other team members as well!

14. Roy - No one liked Roy’s evil arc. You didn’t like it, I didn’t like it, Roy didn’t like it, it erased all his characterization and put him on a path he hasn’t recovered from since. NOT ONLY THAT but

hey let’s talk about the contract agreement that dick signed I assume after coming into the role of robin or thereabouts, perhaps even before then if the flashbacks we got of dick as a kid arriving at wayne manor are indication -- particularly that note from bruce about offering to teach dick how to face his fears. in the contract agreement that kory finds tucked safely in dick’s old bedroom at wayne manor, signed by both dick and bruce, we see the statement, “I, Richard D. Grayson, under no circumstances, not death, nor love, nor loneliness, will ever give comfort to fear.”

like. wow.

barring the clearly stupid but likely honest prop mistake that is changing dick’s middle name to something that’s obviously not his rip john grayson you didn’t deserve this, clearly, this contract is an ambitious vow that’s impossible to not break, but the point isn’t to not break the agreement. it’s meant to be broken. the point is making the agreement in the first place, to recognize and exact control of one’s emotions, decisions, thoughts, and actions, in order to train oneself enough for it to even become possible to entertain the idea that one doesn’t have to give in to fear. it’s a mantra. but the fact that it’s a mantra that took the form of a contract, complete with the wayne crest and framed to boot, is what I personally find so fascinating. that can tell us as much about the kind of household that bruce ran while dick was growing up with him, as much as it tells us about how bruce managed his own relationship to fear, and why he might offer the same to dick.

but I mostly want to focus on the caveats to the contract: death, love, and loneliness. while all of these are quintessential aspects of superhero life for anyone, powered or not, it’s particularly interesting to think about how non-powered heroes relate, and especially how bruce and his allies relate in gotham. it’s obvious for anyone remotely associated with the concept of batman that the fear of these three things are not fears that batman has because he cannot be batman otherwise. so it’s not that batman is not afraid of death, but that he will not allow the fear of death to drive him from being himself. it’s not that batman is not afraid to love, but that he will not allow the fear in risking to love to drive him from himself. and it’s not that batman is not afraid of loneliness, but that he will not allow the fear of being alone to drive him from himself.

and I think that’s the key: that fear is to be expected, to be prepared for, to even be accepted. but it is not to be coddled, or to be allowed to stay too long or immobile too much. according to bruce, fear should not change you. fear is not to be comforted -- that means acknowledging the presence of fear, understanding that fear is ever present, but that it cannot be made comfortable to live in or by. that’s not how batman handles fear, and that’s not how bruce handles fear, which means that’s not how dick has been taught to handle it either.

of course dick is his own person, whether he’s willing to admit that to himself or not. and we know that anytime he’s close to bruce or to gotham or even his early days as a titan, he quickly slips back into a perception of himself that cannot see where the boundary to his own self ends and begins next to the people and the city that made him who he is. because of that, it’s not hard to imagine dick eagerly signing this contract, eager to emulate someone as confidently controlled and perceptive as bruce, at whatever young age dick likely was when he did sign the contract. what’s interesting is dick’s unique experiences with death, love, and loneliness over the course of the series, and how these things impact his relationship to his own fears -- a relationship that is increasingly nothing like the way bruce has learned to live with his.

we can almost chart this season by season: dick opens the first season still struggling with death and loneliness in his empty life between being robin and becoming nightwing, and the fear of confronting these forces in his life only grows by the time we get to the second season, love is a part of all of this too -- or at least the fear of loving too much, which is perhaps one of the things I have always loved the most about dick grayson: that he loves with his whole entire fucking heart and soul and mind and strength. he loves his family. he loves the titans. he loves his city. we saw him lose all three of these things, and yet he still chooses love: he still fights like hell to get bruce back and rescue jason, he still builds the new titans, and he still goes home to gotham. if someone reaches out a hand to him, you bet your last buck that dick will take that hand.

and what’s fascinating is that this has always been the case for dick, but he spent so much of the first two seasons really trying not to let this be true, really trying in small and big ways to still emulate bruce. it’s not that bruce wouldn’t also reach out a hand to someone who had extended theirs to him; it’s that dick would have done so and always does so without you even needing to reach out first. he will reach first -- until he doesn’t, which is how we first meet dick at the start of the series, a time when he’s the farthest from his core self, and this being the primary reason he broke with batman in the first place. interestingly, we see this distancing as a defense mechanism -- as dick still following the mantra/contract -- in how he comports himself through much of the series so far, particularly anytime he’s especially emotionally overwhelmed by a situation or when the situation feels out of his control. when that happens, dick routinely reverts back to what bruce would do, even as he’s trying to force his true self into the mix, like when he chose to rescue rachel and carefor gar, or open up to kory, or return to donna and the others.

Honestly the third episode of this new season left me with my jaw on the floor. Who wrote this horror, cause this was horrible, in a sense of FEAR inducing, HORRORific, horrendous thing. And I'm talking about how *spoiler*

... Hank dies.

Someone on the writing team, did this, this I dunno, huge damn metaphor, like in your face, subtle like stubble, metaphor.

Hank, is being trapped, while being on that thin line of "saving someone younger who doesn't know better" and knowingly walking into that trap, at some point it was obviously noticeable -

He is stripped naked at a derelict gym (with tons of sexual innuendos and objectification happening in the process), swims in a murky pool to the other end in nothing but his birth suit, and gets attacked from nowhere, and a literal ticking bomb is attached to his heart.

How more cringey than that could it be, I have no idea. I had goosebumps.

Later, Hank dies - just read this slowly - by the hand of his beloved, albeit being an unwilling proxy. Instead he could've been saved by a harmless replacement of his ticking bomb. REPLACEMENTS!!! DAMN TITANS SHOW!

Let me make it even more blatant:

A man who was sexualy assaulted as a boy, by the school coach, in the gym, was living with this trauma that would never go away. It's his horror, his personal horror. He was threatened into that horrible situation, he was a boy trying to defend his younger sibling. That abuse was his ticking bomb, and saying that, people who have lived with such a burden, might die by a hasty decision of their most loved ones, who don't know better... While the "good" alternative is to REPLACE THAT TRAUMA WITH A SIMILAR YET NON LETHAL ONE (mind you it was Dick's idea, how damn perfect, PERFECT, on a subtextual level this is) - that would be there, ticking forever still.

A circle, a horrible circle was made for Hank, through his back story, him meeting Dawn and what they did to that coach, and how he met his end, by her unwitting hand. With the simple push of a trigger. It was... Awful.

Titans, you nailed it, you fucking nailed it, and this. This is horror.

... And I really will have some huge, huge trouble seeing this version of Jason as redeemable. They will have to convince me. A lot.

Titans Batman simply put, is not Batman. Much like in recent comic books he is an edge lord fascist twist on a good superhero. All nice things done to draw parallel to Adam West and Ben Affleck’s Batman interpretations, the only thing Batman is seems to be a fascist that actively seeks to make child soldiers. Something even in the comics he has never done outside of earths made of dark or anti matter. He also expects Dick to become the next Batman as to where in the comics though he would have preferred it, he allowed Dick to become his own person and even went as far as to find an alternate replacement. To be perfectly blunt, Titans takes and over exaggerates Bruce’s flaws as a parent while also erasing the vast majority of his virtues. What little times we do see his virtues only seems to try and shield Titans from perfectly relevant criticisms on how badly they hardly Bruce, and he is far from the only character they handle badly. As much as I love it, it really shows the bottom of the barrel of Executive Producer Greg Bertlanti. Perhaps he needs to read Batman’s peek characterization again instead of hailing the edgy, for good measure add the rest of the production team. Because doing it to Bruce is just a symptom. They have been doing it to Dick since season one. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised there.

So how does Young Justice tie into this? Simple. Upon my rewatch I have remembered just why it is one of my favorite DC cartoons.

Aside from it’s focus on relationships between the characters and the perfect highlighting of how they are different in and out of costume, we see their flaws and their virtues highlighted.

Bruce is no exception. Seasons one and two heavily highlighted Batman’s flaws as a leader, but his virtues as a friend. Seasons one and three focused heavily on his flaws as a father, but also showed his virtues and that no matter what he truly does love his children. Even if he is not the best at showing it at times. We see him constantly called out for his flaws but never once praised for his virtues and both are placed well.

I’ve been corresponding with a discreet fan who is hitching, like me, to write some meta on this scene from Titans; or rather, on all scenes showing Bruce Wayne from the mental perspective of Dick Grayson. Why is the real Bruce so different from the phantasm Bruce ? Why do these scenes arbor such audacious and paradoxical companion or contradictory subtexts, mixing daddy issues with Daddy issues, anger issues, and true father-son tenderness juxtaposed to homoeroticism ? Is it because the show-runners have something up their sleeves ? Is it a tip of the hat to the ambiguity that has *always* accompanied readings of this duo, ever since the 60′s tv show (and possibly in the comics too) ? Or is it more simply because Iain Glen cannot NOT infuse all his performances with eroticism ?

Have you heard of the Eros of performance ? It’s not about lusting or inducing lust. It’s much more elusive and powerful than that. It has to do with the subterranean currents at work between performers or between the shaman and his audience, seducing us into relinquishing control over to them, for us to go to Hades with them and back out again, renewed, rejuvenated, in a cathartic cleansing involving the soul, the heart, the mind and yes the senses.

THIS, this magic, is what Iain Glen has whenever he steps on the stage, whenever the light strikes him and the camera magnifies him, regardless of whom he shares the spotlight with... though surely his partners partake of the experience the same way we do.

I’m completely fascinated !

Below, all exhibits to the aforementioned thesis...