Most Normal FNAF Fan

Happy Lorena Marquez day, everyone! I miss this duo so bad :') Everyone go read Aquaman vol 6 NOW.

oo okay! this is a really complicated answer so bare with me.

let's start with adaptations.

selina has been portrayed as a black woman since the '60s with eartha kit in the batman tv show

then of course, there is halle berry, zoe kravitz (in the batman and the lego batman movie), and other modern adaptations like DC superhero girls, the harley quinn tv show, and the upcoming lego batman game

honestly selina as a black woman in adaptations is just as common as her as a white woman, in terms of mainstream adaptations, and it dates back to the 60s. this is by no means a "new" idea.

(interestingly enough, in older superhero media, casting actors of colour for roles that in the comic were white characters is pretty common. of course there's eartha kitt in the 60s, but also '89 batman had billy dee williams as harvey dent and daredevil 2003 had michael clarke duncan as kingpin. no further comments about it i just think it's interesting.)

now for comics.

strictly speaking, selina is not "white" as an entire identity. she is however white-passing often (i will touch on her sometimes racial ambiguity in a moment) but she's still bi-racial. her mother is cuban, and is usually portrayed with noticeably darker colouring then selina

(catwoman 1993 #81 / catwoman 2018 #80)

there are also other elseworlds comics like catwoman: loney city where she explicitly states her heritage.

(catwoman: lonely city (2022) #3)

so selina is bi-racial, cuban and italian or irish. i think her current run is recanonizing falcone as her biological father which would make her half italian. otherwise brian kyle is irish.

the other thing you touched on was her racial ambiguity in comics. this is definitely a Thing. for a bit more on the year one issue i would suggest checking out this post by @/plausible-possible-perhaps. they break down how selina was portrayed and coded as black in the comic and the movie adaptation of batman: year one.

ur definitely not wrong to point out how she's often somewhat racially ambiguous in comic art. and there have been recent variants for prime universe selina that are straight up just a black woman (tbh idrk what's going on with that)

(catwoman (2002) #1 / catwoman (2018) #82 variant )

then of course there r recent comic elseworlds where selina just IS a black woman. including Sirens: Love Hurts & Absolute Batman (and upcoming Absolute Catwoman series.) noteably absolute selina was confirmed to be afro-brazilian !

(Sirens: Love Hurts (2026) #1 / Absolute Catwoman (2026) #1)

i think you are right to say there r more recently but by no means is the idea of selina having a more diverse racial heritage new. like a lot of things with catwoman this is an aspect of her character that's actually been canon for a while, but is not well known to be canon.

also noting this is just the information i could think of off the top of my head. im sure there r more examples so if anyone else wants to add information please feel free.

also important 2 note there r lots of issues with explicit white-washing of both selina as a black woman (absolute batman #13 variant covers are good example) and maria kyle as a cuban woman (notably, in one bad day: catwoman she is explicitly not coloured to be darker skinned then her children. she is darker-skinned again in recent appearances in selina's ongoing though.) there is also a conversation to be had how absolute selina has visually treated in terms of sexualization and how that sexualization is very different then her white-passing prime earth counterpart. (there was a post about this a bit ago but i cannot seem to find it now.)

So every once in awhile I see the "was Barbara raped?" question pop up online. I think many can agree with me in saying this isn't really a productive line of questioning. It's often frustrating and can lead to comments made in very poor taste while diminishing the complexities of sexual assault.

So since these convos are still happening in 2024 I guess I might as well throw my own take into the education side of the ring.

So first off let's dissect what the book and the following comics that keep the event canon tell us. I will keep these descriptions as brief as possible and I won't be sharing comic panels. We know she was shot. We know her clothes were forcibly removed. We know the Joker took pictures. That is consistently the story of what happened to Barbara that night.

As far as I know there is no art or dialogue about or in TKJ that explicitly states anything more happening. So where does the question about things going to a more extreme length come in?

Well, from what I can understand, it comes from a misreading of the implications in the carnival scene when Jim Gordon is being shown the photos. It does not help that these photos were originally more graphic and intended to show explicit nudity rather than implicit thanks to the positioning on the page spread. This is obviously a form of torture. And I do admit that this torture most likely had the intention of making Jim wonder what else happened to his daughter (and also if she was still alive).

However... I don't think that's enough.

The implications of anything else happening begin and end in that scene. And that kind of feels like the point too. Joker is trying to make Jim go insane, so he's not really thinking about what'll happen after Jim gets free and has time and energy to think and see his daughter. There is never really any other implications brought up again. Most importantly Barbara never alludes to anything "else" happening.

So if there isn't much evidence to support this claim and the answer is just a flat "no" why does this question aggravate me?

Because even though the answer is no doesn't mean an assault did not happen. This line of questioning brings up the idea that Barbara's trauma is not real unless she was raped, which completely ignores the fact that she was still sexually assaulted. Rape is a very specific definition, that not a lot of sex crimes fit. However the fact that Barbara was forcibly disrobed and pornographic pictures were taken without her consent is absolutely a form of sexual assault.

I see a very similar line of questioning happen with Black Canary too and her own torture scene from the Long Bow Hunters. And it follows the exact same path of dismissing Dinah's trauma and the fact that no matter what there is very clear evidence of sexual assault.

And this rigid line of thinking absolutely follows survivors into the real world. No one survivor, real or fictional, wants their trauma to be discussed in the context of "did the worse possible thing happen or not?" because to them their assault was the worst thing that happened to them. Why must this very specific bar be reached for their trauma to be valid?

Robin would be the son of Batman