hot take but people use “eldest daughter syndrome” to describe Dick even tho it isn’t accurate bc they mean “emotional incest” but don’t want to use the language
100000%!!!! this is also why they don't use spousification and why i think parentification (which refers to inappropriate role reversal with an adult, typically a parent or guardian) is so consistently used in this fandom to mean "parenting a younger sibling" (which is a possible element of parentification, but is not the primary one--parentification is far more likely to be used by professionals and in academic writing to refer to a child "parenting their parent" or acting as a surrogate spouse for a parent).
people are uncomfortable with the reality of emotional incest because it has the scary yucky i word. it's easier to make dick's relationship with bruce about the younger bats and create a (largely non-canon, to my understanding, even in rebirth) dynamic where dick is an overburdened parent figure to them rather than to acknowledge that his relationship with bruce is definitionally inappropriate for a parent and child.
this could be somewhat sidestepped by just not centering the father-son element of bruce and dick's relationship to the exclusion of everything else, but dc and the fandom have both put all their eggs in the father-son basket. when that is the only dimension allowed for their relationship it makes the rest of the established canon of their relationship (which is ostensibly all canon!) emotionally incestuous.
i think batman & robin year one (2024) was an effort to combat this by creating a new early days batman and robin history that isn't emotionally incestuous/inappropriate in light of them being only father-son now (and in light of the us's like cultural obsession with "grooming" at the moment--we can't have "batman creeping on robin" as a potential reading or even as something readers can joke about). but b&ry1 portrays bruce as like... basically not caring about dick. so it is actually worse imo. or at least it pisses me off more
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