thatclichedwriter

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

Roy: he's 22 in Sept 1988 (Action #618) during The Cheshire Contract. Dick is 21 there, so Roy is around a year older than Dick and ~2 years older than the majority of the Titans.

Raven: NTT is contradictory about Raven’s age. She could be second eldest or she could be the same age as Kory/Vic, depending on whether she's 18 or 19 in NTT #1

Dick and Donna: Dick and Donna are explicitly the same age, though I don't think we're ever told who's older. Dick is canonically older than Wally—Dick’s 20th birthday happens in NTT (1984) #18/Secret Origins (1986) #13, both of which are set during Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985/early 1986.

Wally: We're not told when Wally turns 19, but he turns 20 in Flash #1 in 1987 and 21 in Flash #22, in early 1989; Dick is already 21 (possibly 22) by 1989, as confirmed in Batman: Year Three/A Lonely Place of Dying.

Garth: his age is never explicitly noted during this era to my knowledge. He’s probably right around Wally's age, as he was generally depicted as the youngest of the Fab Five but not significantly younger, but I'm putting him here just because I'm not sure

Kory and Vic: Kory and Vic are both 18 in NTT #1. Vic turns 19 in NTT #20 (in May); Dick and Donna are both noted to be already 19. We’re not told when Kory turns 19, since "Tamaraneans don't celebrate birthdays," but I assume it's not too long afterwards. So Kory, Vic, Garth, and Wally probably turned 19 all within 2-3 months of each other (with Garth or Wally's March birthdays falling first).

Gar: Gar is 15-nearly-16 in NTT #1 and "three months from turning 17" in 1985, when Dick and co. are still 19.

Notes:

Realistically Wally should be a full year younger than Dick given general age gap markers, Dick's timeline, and the fact that both of their birthdays are in March, but post-Crisis they’re generally depicted as being a few months apart at most, so ???

Pre-Crisis Wally's birthday was January 16th and Pre-Crisis Dick's birthday was November 11 (Dick's had 3 different canonical birthdays), so that could explain the discrepancy (with Dick being 3 months older).

Pre-Crisis Birthdays, according to the 1972 DC Calendar and NTT: Wally's birthday is January 16, Garth's birthday is in March 6, Donna's birthday is April 26, Vic's birthday is in May, Roy's birthday is November 1, and Dick's birthday is November 11. As previously noted, Dick and Wally's birthdays were both moved to March post-Crisis (Dick to March 20 and Wally to an unknown date).

Those birthdays, along with Dick and Donna already being 19 when Vic turns 19 in NTT #20, imply that pre-Crisis Donna is about 6 months older than Dick and therefore 9 months older than Wally; note that these estimates cannot be taken with any level of seriousness post-1986 due to changed birthdays and backstory details. Dick seems to be solidly the second eldest post-Crisis.

The World's Finest: Teen Titans (2023) mini notes Wally as the youngest of the Fab Five. However, this slightly contradicts Garth historically being the youngest. They were reasonably born within a month or two of each other given their birthdays, so it doesn't really matter much which one you decide to make the baby of the group.

gotham knights (2000) #3 // batman (1940) #404 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // batman: the twenty cent adventure (2002) #2 // dennis o'neil's batbible (1989) // batman: kings of fear (2018) #4 // batman: shadow of the bat (1994) #2 // batman and robin (2011) #22 // batman: the dark knight (2011) #10 // batman: black and white (2020) #5 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // batman: shadow of the bat (1994) #0 // detective comics (1937) #1047 // dennis o'neil's batbible (1989) // detective comics (1937) #939 // batman: shadow of the bat (1994) #0 // batman (1940) #439 // batman: legends of the dark knight (1989) #29 // batman: arkham city // grant morrison from on fatman on batman // batman (1940) #634 // batman: night cries (1992) #1 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // gotham knights (2000) #3 // detective comics (1937) #982

short filmography - Jamie Campbell Bower

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

I was like, “It’s just a hat. If you like it and you wear it, it’s not a woman’s hat, it’s just your hat. You don’t need to follow what the tag says if you don’t want to.” And it was like I gave him some kind of awe-inspiring wisdom he’d never considered, and he left with that hat on his head.