from "I" to "we"

i’ll be honest anon, there is no short explanation i can give better than this image by @cobalt-knave:

…with the caveat that even with jason, bruce’s relationship with him is ‘batman & robin’ before ‘father and son.’ the batman & robin relationship has primacy over whatever familial relationship bruce has with the robins as individuals with maybe the exception of damian (which is also partially why they’re so dysfunctional as a b&r duo). or to quote malihah:

going back to pre-crisis when their dg+bw and jt+bw relationships are allowed to be more fluid, the difference between the two is pretty obvious. dick is bruce’s ward and is consistently referred to as such because that’s what he is, and while they will occasionally break out a father-son or brotherly language in-universe, the narrative stays consistent that bruce is his guardian, friend, partner, mentor, etc.

“big brother image”. not “big brother.” very different!

jason, by contrast, leans towards a father-son relationship with bruce almost immediately; one of my absolute favorite pre-crisis jaybin story arcs centers around jason’s custody as bruce tries to adopt him, and as we know, eventually succeeds. and it should be noted that for a very long time, jason was the only character to have this status with bruce! but even when the story is literally about bruce trying to become jason’s legal father, it’s always very clear that to jason and bruce that that is just legal accessory to their primary relationship of batman & robin. the language used is kind of interesting throughout the arc because while characters are quick to talk about natalia (competing for custody, long story, you should read it!) as jason’s “adoptive mother”, they rarely use the phrase “adoptive father” for bruce; they more consistently say “wanting custody”. this panel was the closest i found in that arc to either jason or bruce being explicit about a father-son dynamic, and as you can see, it doesn’t even hit that mark:

in-universe, bruce has a lot of hang-ups about dead parents for obvious orphan reasons. he never wants to replace john grayson or joseph todd (and later willis todd, jack drake, et cetera) for the same reasons he would be gravely offended if he felt that someone was trying to replace thomas wayne in his memory. bruce has a lot of love in his heart and cares so damn much, but he’s so emotionally distant and he needs that distance to protect both himself and, in his mind, other people from him. having the batman & robin relationship allows him to bond with dick and jason that he actually feels comfortable in without the all-consuming anxiety of am i fucking this up am i a fraud oh god i’m not fit to do this because bruce is the only one who can be batman (for now), which is why even when he becomes jason’s legal father there’s always a bit of a wink about it to the primacy of the b&r relationship. again, this is a reason why his relationship with damian is, frankly, the worst out of his “sons”: there is no distance, no other father that bruce can pass the buck off to, and it freaks him out and is why we get 1000 repeating comic storylines of bruce beating himself up over whether or not he’s capable of raising damian.

out-of-universe, the distinction between why dickbin is a ward (and thus nebulously bruce’s friend-partner-brother-son) and jaybin is adopted comes down to simply the passage of time. dick and jason might only have a seven or so year age gap as characters, but they have forty-three years of real world time in between their creations. in 1940, adoption was a long, bureaucratic, pretty stigmatised slog that had a very heavy focus on erasing the birth family with sealed records and new birth certificates; it was mostly something done for couples adopting very young children to pass off as their biological child. guardianship and wardship was far more common and appropriate for an orphaned pre-teen being raised by a bachelor. adoption became more common and less stigmatised around the 1960s, and guardianship became more of a probate role than a child-rearing one. by jason’s creation in 1983, adoption was now the appropriate measure culturally. wards have largely vanished as individual relationships; i can only think of one wardship circumstance in my life, and literally everyone who knows about it makes batman & robin jokes because bruce & dick are really the only lasting fictional wardship out there (the only other one i can think of is the little orphan annie comic strips of the 20s, but those have been subsumed in cultural memory by the 70s musical adaptation, which ends in adoption!).

there’s also the evolution of comics readership over time. in the 40s, superhero comics were overwhelmingly for children aged 6-11. dickbin (and all other kid sidekicks) was a reader viewpoint character, and part of the power fantasy of robin was that he was super cool and largely unparented. the kids weren’t there for emotional melodrama about custody battles. compare that to the 80s, and the same 10 year olds who were buying tec for a dime on a newsstand were now headed to comic shops to buy tec for $1.25 at age 50. readership skewed older, or at least more all-ages, and they were people who might have had kids of their own by then. they probably learned that their parents were also fellow human beings a while ago, and thus could handle a gothic melodrama about custody battles in their batman comic.

back to in-universe, as we know bruce does eventually adopt dick, but it’s not until dick has long since stopped being robin and is a grown man. it’s a very sweet little arc of gotham knights… minus the anti-māorism and antiziganism, thanks devin. it should be said that bruce’s decision to do so is haunted by jason’s death, quite literally:

and, importantly, this is only a clear-eyed decision that adult dick and older bruce can have. bruce took in a pre-teen in his twenties or so. imagine being tasked with guardianship over a child about 12-15 years younger than you. smaller parental age gaps have (unfortunately) existed, but it makes sense that bruce would shy away from really thinking of himself as dick’s dad and vice versa. nonetheless, bruce did raise dick for his whole adolescence, which is something dick acknowledges often after he’s done being pissed at bruce. dick needed time away from bruce to reflect on their relationship, which he got during jaybin’s tenure and then after jason’s death. by the time of prodigal, dick is already making tongue-in-cheek references to tim about bruce being their shared dad while neither are adopted:

It's clear Dick would rather have his teeth pulled out by eager amateurs than ask this question, but this iteration of Bruce is (if only momentarily) emotionally mature enough to consider the question and answer honestly, even if it's not flattering to himself.