Headcanon that Tim introduces Cass to reddit and helps her make an account. But she mostly uses it to ask questions and user batgirlfan99 accidentally becomes a meme and an urban legend. Half her posts are AITA situations listing either horrible trauma done to her which she doesn't acknowledge as trauma or moments where she was most definitely the asshole but seems massively confused as to why. To make things more baffling the other half of her posts are questions to various subreddits like "Why does food have out of date labels when it tastes fine?" or "How many bones can I break when I'm fighting someone before it becomes cruel and not OK?" and "How can I get a real passport if I don't technically exist?"
She's so completely serious about all of this people aren't sure if it's an elaborate bit, shitposts like dril, or if someone should call a hospital and get her help. Tim's having too much fun watching it all happen so he strikes a deal with Babs to make sure Bruce never finds out and shuts it down. Babs agrees because it's nice to see Cass interacting with civilians even if it's anonymous and online.
Unfortunately Cass goes a little too locally viral on a discussion thread about Gotham water, insisting that she drank it for two years both during and after No Man's Land and she's fine, so people are clearly exaggerating about the chemicals. Bruce gets wind of it and starts making plans in case the account is run by a new Gotham joker variant but the more he looks at it the more these questions seem familiar...
The next time they're having a family dinner he mutters to Cass: "I still don't think I was the asshole during the Soul fight. You didn't give the full context ."
After this reveal, the rest of the dinner is spent with both of them arguing their case and everyone voting on if Bruce was NTA. Dick, Tim, Duke and Damian vote YTA. Cass and Bruce vote NTA. Dick says Cass was also the asshole for punching him in the face which sets off a whole new round of discourse.
batgirlfan99 deletes her account the following morning, leading to widespread mourning across her frequent subreddits. Cass still thinks it was worth it. She knows the difference between laundry detergent, fabric softener, and fabric conditioner now.
Jason: *makes a gun construt*
Jason: *makes a shotgun construct*
Jason: *makes a machine gun construct*
Jason: Okay, fine. I understand the appeal.
*****
Jason: *passive aggressively drops a detailed rendition of the Joker's severed head as a construct at Bruce's feet.*
Bruce: And who exactly is fueling your emotion to maintain such a complex construct?
Jason: It's called self-love.
Bruce: Now see, that I will not believe.
****
Jason plays Go Fetch with Dog using construct balls and sticks as practice. It works great, because Jason loves Dog.
***
Jason: hey Kyle, you don't have to look at them like that, you know I don't have tasers there in that uniform right? I really tried, but the space magic won't let me incorporate most of my Red Hood suit features into it.
Kyle, who definitely was staring at Jason's uniform's boob window : What? I wasn't looking, why would I be looking- wait, your other uniform has tasers where?
*****
Jason: *tries his best to make a flamethrower construct, cannot construct the necessary chemical reaction*
Jason: *tries to make a construct of a book he has been wanting to read but hasn't gotten to yet, the pages are blank.*
Jason: *tries to construct himself a cup of tea and drink it, fails.*
Jason: *tries to construct an actual living breathing cat. Obviously fails.*
Jason: I think God hates me.
*****
Jason, beating Bruce up with a baseball bat construct made out of his love for him: So, my relationship with my dad is going great-
_____
Alternate Lantern Lore explained in this post:
An Illustrated Guide For Vampires
1. Privacy Tent
2. Antique Chinese Wedding Bed
3. Victorian Box Bed
4. Canopy Bed
5. Full Body Wearable Blanket + Novelty Halloween Mask of Choice
6. Hyperrealistic Black Bear Sleeping Bag (with built in ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature)
7. Tinfoil Bodysuit (For maximized UV protection)
8. Blackout Curtains You Fucking Vampiric Dumbass
in conclusion why in fuck’s name are you sleeping in coffins to begin with you utter shitmuppets
DC Bat comics have a lot of classism issues (among other problems) but thanks to the weird-ass way that wealth scales, any analysis that assumes Tim’s original family is closer to the Waynes than they are to the Browns is going to be full of holes. Or if you assume Stephanie’s family is closer to the Todds than to the Drakes.
Like, the Drakes when Jack still has the company are definitely in a different tax bracket than Crystal Brown the nurse & Arthur Brown the ex gameshow host turned costumed villain, but the Drakes & Browns are still closer to each other than they are to the old money Bruce Wayne whose company bankrolls the Justice League.
Plus the time when DI went under and the Drakes were relying on Dana’s income from working as a physical therapist moved them to probably about the same bracket until Jack picked up a job too.
Acting like Stephanie Brown, who grows up in the suburbs in a house her mom owns outright, can easily put herself up in a hotel room for a week or two when fighting with her mom, only needs a job in college to avoid student loans instead of to supplement them… is close to pre-adoption Jason?
Even pre-his-parents-dying Jason?
No.
Tim & Steph have enough of a gap to have different experiences and sometimes talk past each other, but they’re still both much closer to each other than either of them is to the Waynes or the Todds.
Tim & Steph are both economically well off kids with abusive dads who decide to sneak out and fight crime. Stephanie’s mom is uninvolved in her life because of a prescription pill addiction (though she works past that to become more involved), while Tim’s mom is straight up dead, and the stepmom he gets later is nice but takes a hands-off approach to parenting (and then dies too).
This makes sense with Stephanie’s role in earlier comics being a foil to Tim (though she grows into a more independent character over time). They need enough similarities in circumstance that their different philosophies and crime fighting styles come down to personal choice, and they can argue with each other without mutually devolving into “You just don’t understand!”
TL;DR: economics and social class are fucking weird, Tim & Steph are foils, exaggerating the differences in their backgrounds messes up your analysis.
Bonus: You don’t need to make Steph even more of an underdog to appreciate her character.
Fave Tim and Bruce dynamic is when Tim can just raise an eyebrow at Bruce and he stops working, eats, sleeps etc. the rest of the Batfam (excluding Alfred) are absolutely stunned every time it happens (they couldn’t get Bruce to take care of himself short of knocking him out and force feeding him). Bonus points if Bruce literally cannot make Tim do anything he doesn’t want to because once you’ve seen him drunk and depressed the batglare doesn’t have the same effect
Thinking about calling Jason Todd ‘angel’. He loves a good pet name, uses all kinds of variations of ‘baby’ and ‘darling’ for you, but he’s still floored the first time you call him ‘angel’. It’s silly and mundane the first time it happens, hey could grab me the flour off the top shelf, Angel? And he swears his knees turn to jelly. He’s embarrassed by how badly he likes it. Angel, like in your eyes the cracked bones and bloodstained scars of his body are something good and pure. Angel, like after every deal with the devil he’s made he’s still an innocent in your eyes.
One word has his palms going sweaty, skin tight and itchy, vision blurring at how badly he wants it to be true. And once you notice just how badly he wants to be your angel, any pretence that it doesn’t bring him to his knees evaporates. Got you crooning oh Angel as you stitch him back together in body and mind. He’s your Angel as you laughingly reach out to tangle your hands at the curls at the nape of his neck and pull him down to nip at those treacherously soft lips. Jason Todd’s been a lot of things in his short life but he thinks he likes being your Angel best of all.
Hurry up or we’re going to be late Angel! C’mon Angel, just like that. I swear to god you’ve got too many siblings to keep track of Angel. Angel, have you seen my house keys? Angel, I thought we agreed we weren’t getting a dog yet. More, Angel. I do, Angel. Angel. Angel.
Test Compilation of my writing submissions for the Mecha AU started by @keferon.
Friends in Every Universe
Part 1
Part 2
Part 1.5
Part 3
Part 4
broke: jason is tims robin who tim stalked on rooftops and has an unhealthy obsession with
woke: tim is jasons robin who jason stalked on rooftops and has an unhealthy obsession with
in this essay i will-
the misinterpretation of a lonely place of dying by later retellings drives me nuts because ‘tim finds out who batman is’ is nearly not as much of a big deal as ‘tim doesnt want to be robin’ in the actual origin and it pretty much sums up whats wrong with modern tim drake. ALPOD is a tragic story of a twelve year old boy who had everything and willingly gave it up for a greater good. he is not like dick and jason who became robin to escape tragedy nor bruce who had everything and then lost it. robin was nothing but a curse he accepted to bear and he did so because of his selflessness. that selflessness is his driving rod, his smarts and physical talent are only the tools he uses to achieve his goals. he is not ‘the smart one’, he is a sacrificial lamb for a cause he became an unwilling spectator of. a twelve year old boy thought ‘people need saving, its that simple’ and put on the clothes a dying kid not much older than him wore because of nothing more than his selflessness and everyone he loved paid the price for it. he paid an even greater price for it.
Wise words from my brother:
"What year is month?
August?"
i personally have very complicated feelings on the Gotham Knights video game and the routes it takes with characterization. i think it has a charm to it and it goes in an interesting direction with everyone (especially within the confides of the plot of the game) but it does have certain moments that veer painfully fanon for me. (such as: the dialogue where Tim drinks too much coffee) it's an interesting story for what it is but i don't view it comics-based for characterization and therefore don't care to interact with it much for like. fanfic purposes.
that *said* though. i do have to give the game some kind of credit for giving one of the top five JayTim moments that lives rent free in my mind. every since i played the game, the cutscene lives in my mind daily. it's the specific cutscene where Jason and Tim are arguing about whether or not Jason's non-lethal bullets are too dangerous for the field, and the argument leads to TIm *standing in front of the target* Jason is shooting and telling Jason to shoot him. it lives rent free for me. i never stop thinking about this.
the absolute certainty Tim has that he is in no danger standing in front of Jason, who has a loaded gun pointed at his face. the way Jason *hesitates* for just a moment before lowering the gun. he thinks about it for just a second. Gotham Knights JayTim seem to get along very well and can rely on each other, but Jason still clearly holds a bitterness about his death and Tim that flickers through in some lines of dialogue under the guise of jokes. especially since this game deals *heavily* with concepts of Pit Madness causing an altered state of consciousness, i think it's believable that occasionally, Jason fights the urge to fight and hurt Tim for the feeling of being replaced.
i like their tension so much in this canon. they get along but you can *tell* Tim is afraid of addressing Jason's trauma or even addressing Jason head-on, and Jason leans into spooking Tim about it. which isn't very comics feeling in their dynamic, but it is an interesting way to place their dynamic if you're playing with a more timid Tim who's newer to the role of Robin. (which he seems to be in-game) he really doesn't want to offend Jason, or worse, piss him off. but he'll still face Jason head on for things like this, while completely aware of what Jason could be capable of.
and Jason seems very protective of Tim and respecting Tim as a Robin in typical Jason fashion. if Tim pushes, Jason *will* relent. he knows this is a kid who's proved himself and should be treated with equal respect, sometimes even more than Dick and Babs do in-game.
so for all that to culminate in Tim stepping in front of Jason's loaded gun that he *knows* is on the edge of being too dangerous, just to force Jason to listen? it's the most unhinged way Tim could've gotten his point across in this scene. he was literally daring Jason to hurt him and playing with a very dangerous fire. but he did it anyway bc he believed he could make Jason heel just at the thought of hurting Tim. and he was *right*. they're gay and i'm feral ty.