….these comparisons never make sense to me.
yeah, tim has seriously contemplated murder, most seriously of the guy who killed his dad, and then didn't do it. while damian has in fact killed lots of people, and made at least two serious attempts on tim personally.
like i understand grading on a curve and the fact that he didn't choose to be that person but was groomed into it, but. damian is absolutely more likely to kill somebody, by any rational in-universe analysis and most narrative interpretations.
he also, as part of his hero career and his first major stab at leadership, established a personal secret torture prison, with killswitches on the escapees, and once this was identified as immoral and impractical pivoted to magical brainwashing as the ethical alternative. like. that was just a couple of years ago.
admittedly that story looped into a weird, absurdly damian-centric arc, with deathstroke inexplicably desperate to get damian to kill him to prove some rhetorical point to batman and/or robin like he's the Joker now or something, and damian struggling to resist despite the obviousness of the bait, only for another member of his team to take the shot.
which is ludicrous characterization of everyone involved on like five levels, and the whole storyline was unfair to the other Titans, who were so blatantly only existing to prop damian up. it was such a bad arc ffs. hate a team book that's actually a protagonist vehicle.
but the point is, damian's hero narrative centers repeatedly on the idea that he will do heinous things without understanding the problem, but has now resolved not to murder anymore. progress!
while tim's corruption arc (which he isn't even on anymore because DC has decided wholesome bisexuality is his current character niche lmao but just for now we may assume it's ongoing) is he will do highly questionable things, especially when isolated and grieving, but has never actually killed anyone.
they are kind of approaching the same position on the ethics chart, from opposite directions, which i think is a much more interesting way to read their dichotomies on this theme as Robins than trying to argue one is Worse, but anyway.
except again, the only way tim is on damian's level for actual evil deeds is if we read the League of Shadows bombings as having killed people instead of just destroyed property. which logically they should have, but if we approach comics in those terms every hero is a mass murderer by now; they are constantly doing shit that SHOULD kill people.
textually tim has not ever actually done that, and in the timeline where he did, the scenario still wasn't world annihilation, it was Gun Batman And The Post-Massive-Mortality Titan Conquest Of Much Of America Via Raven's Psychic Powers, Theoretically For Hero Reasons But Come On.
Bad Timeline Tim is operating at about Damian's average moral level as Robin, with an extra major ding for vigilante murder. But that's bad timeline Tim. That's an alternate universe.
Bad Future Timeline Damian sold his soul to the devil for immortality (so he could be Batman forever and not let his late father down) and is prone to both fits of murderous violence and intentional sane acts of murder. and while Grant Morrison designed that timeline to be averted imo, DC is actively bringing it up and building into it and making it more and more likely to be his actual future.
which is lame. dumb thing to do with the character. let him grow.
But anyway, readings that make Tim more of a murder risk than Damian basically lean on the idea that Damian's arc trends up and Tim's trends down, because their in-setting actual records don't bear it out.
unfortunately, that's not really how they're being written at present.
so the only remaining basis to argue on is the idea that Tim is smarter and better organized than Damian, and therefore more dangerous.
which is like. very backhanded compliment to them both lmao and judging by Tim's pattern of pantsing his way catastrophically through shit like 'clone my friends new bodies and hope their souls move in like that other guy's did (failed)' and 'infiltrate League of Shadows (success but would have died like five times without outside intervention),' versus Damian's fantastically executed secret torture dungeon, is not even true.
hiding an extra batmobile in the batarang budget is nothing compared to building an entire elaborate high-tech secret underground prison that half the people living on top of it don't know about, let alone any adults not confined inside it. on-page, damian is better at supervillain shit than tim is.
at thirteen, tim's supervillain skills were at 'break into Dick Grayson's civilian apartment while he's out' and 'follow Nightwing with binoculars' levels.
in-universe, absolutely people have more reason to be concerned about damian's odds of murder than tim's. dick grayson has made more actual serious murder attempts than tim has.
