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an-intronerd · 1 month

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I think the reason I dislike the Joker being given backstory is not that I don't want to feel sympathy for the Joker (I mean, that's a small part of it) but rather that I think it undermines the point of the Joker. I don't mean as a character with motivations, I mean narratively. Others have probably said this before, and better than I'm about to, but this is my blog and I'm going to ramble.

The whole point of the Joker that some writers seem to miss (especially films! films are ADDICTED to backstory for some reason) is that there IS no real reason. He's a primary antagonist because his entire schtick is that nothing matters, and that's funny as hell. He can treat people's lives as a joke because they don't mean anything.

Bruce, or Batman, as the protagonist is the exact opposite of this. The motivation to save others from what happened to him as a child is rooted in this concrete, fundamental-to-Batman truth: everything matters. This is why Bruce's parents dying in a random act of violence in a before-then obscure alley has had such staying power: it wasn't a massive event that changed the lives of dozens or hundreds. It was a small thing, a statistic in the grand scheme of violent crime, with no real motive other than desperation or greed. And it changed someone's life completely. For Batman, the hundreds of small acts that fill a patrol all matter because each person does.

Joker's obsession with Batman hinges on him believing the exact opposite, and trying to convince him that he's wrong, and that THE joke is that nothing matters at all-- walking away from a victim and torturing a victim have the same moral weight because there is no moral weight. The point isn't to be the most evil or the most cruel, the point is to prove that it's all pointless.

In a way, this means Joker's greatest ally is the apathy of Gotham. Every person who turns away or keeps walking with their head down and claims "not my problem" supports his claim that nothing matters, because Gotham is proving by inaction that it's pointless unless it impacts them personally. Nobody else matters unless I do, and then it's too late. Do I think Joker's crimes are Gotham's fault, narratively and within their fictional world? Not exactly. But I do think Joker isn't actually an embodiment of chaos but is a representative of what Batman is actually fighting against: a Gotham that doesn't care.

Batman's existence is a defiance of this. His work, masked and unrewarded, is a symbol of the fact that no wealth, no material comfort, no border of security, no past trauma, no law, no excuse justifies not caring. Every life matters, even if it isn't your own, even if it's a stranger. He can't kill Joker in-world because of his moral stance on killing. He can't kill Joker narratively because Gotham won't kill Joker. Batman's driving core is a relentless anti-apathy, and Gotham's current collective social spirit is that they are helpless and not responsible for it.

Joker thinks it's funny that anyone would care, and Batman thinks someone not caring is the opposite of funny. Caring can often hurt, but it isn't pointless. Every single life saved or lost creates a ripple effect that matters and hurts or helps others. Each victim Joker encounters is met with the same presupposition: "I can hurt you and it doesn't mean anything because you're nobody. It doesn't hurt Gotham because Gotham isn't anyone."

Every person Batman saves is saved by the same presupposition: "If I can save you, it's like saving all of Gotham. Everyone matters...because each single life matters."

The more people that build their lives on caring regardless of how they think it impacts them personally, the less sway the Joker has. Every person who shuns apathy is another person who will fight back against the Joker's Chief Joke: It doesn't matter.

And they fight back best by, like Batman, looking at each individual they come in contact with and deciding, "Yes, this one matters."

#yes yes yes #batman #the joker

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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arcade night 🕹️🦇

#awh #batfamily

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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in the guard's defense, fire ants sting 😔

#damian wayne #batfamily #awh

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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little brother duo supremacy

edit: sorry to disappoint yall but this isnt dick or virgil 😭😭 its duke in a nightwing sweater,,,,

#omg lmao #batfamily #duke and dami #disaster duo

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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Thinking about how DC writers keep trying to do that thing were they show bits of Jasons childhood with signs that he was fucked from the start only twist it a lil so it's literally just Jason being a child

Bonus: baby Jason just wants to read a book that was published in the last 50 years:

#omg lmao #batfamily

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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Batfam Ages:

Okay, there is no such thing as an exact science when determining the ages of the Batfam, but the easiest thing you can do is work of the concrete ages that you /do/ know, and make them fit with canon events to the best of your ability. Now, canon changes all the time—which definitely makes this a challenge, but I’m going to just explain my process for determining their ages and you can disagree if you’d like, or you can use this to write fic like I do where ages are semi important,

Let’s begin. I’m going to give you the arbitrary number of 15, this will be important later.

Dick Grayson:

Depending on the canon, Dick is 8, 10, 12, or 15 when his parents die. All of these numbers will have problems depending on which you pick, but I go for the safe bet of 10 years old. Why? Well, a little known fact is that Dick ends up in juvie after his parents die, and he’s not immediately taken in by Batman. Thus, it takes a little while longer for him to become Robin, which doesn’t immediately happen after he becomes Bruce’s ward anyway, because Batman doesn’t immediately go and spill the beans. Thus, Dick ends up in Bruce’s car at around ten or eleven, but doesn’t become Robin until he’s 12.

Now Dick is Robin up until he’s about 18, when Bruce takes Robin from Dick because it’s too dangerous and Dick refuses to quit. Dick joins up with the teen titans full time, and he’s still Robin for a little while longer until we get Nightwing, aka Discowing, for the very first time at age 19. Simultaneously, while this is happening, a little kid is stealing the Batmobile’s tires.

Jason Todd:

Our beloved street rat Robin, Jason Todd, swings a tire iron at Batman and then gets taken out for fast food. It’s great, it’s cute, it doesn’t immediately lead to his adoption though, either. No, instead Jason ends up in an orphanage that is trafficking children. Bruce shows up one day to check up on Jason, and is made aware of this by his soon to be first adopted son (yeah, you heard me, Dick isn’t adopted yet). They take down the trafficking ring, and Bruce adopts Jason. Jason then becomes Robin at age 13.

Unfortunately for our boy, he was widely disliked by comic fans across North America, DC did a little telephone poll, and by a few hundred votes, DC changed comic history forever by killing off a high profile character what seems like /permanently/ for the first time ever. No resurrections this time. (Hah, right!). Which is to say, Jason Todd has the second shortest run as Robin at just two years, dying at age 15.

Tim Drake:

So then we get Robin numero 3. Tim Drake sees Batman getting darker and more violent and goes y’know, someone should do something about that. He tries talking to Nightwing, but he’s in a bad place with Bruce after learning Jason died via a Newspaper (yeah, Bruce sucks for that one), and tells Tim he won’t be going back to Robin. Thus, lil Timmy Drake gets an idea in his head. He looks himself in the mirror and goes, I can fix him, and then, Tim Drake becomes Robin at age 12.

Tim Drake has one of the longest runs as Robin, with only a mild interruption from a lil blond Bat.

Stephanie Brown:

Stephanie Brown starts off as the vigilante Spoiler, whose whole purpose in life is to spoil the plans of her C-list villain dad, Cluemaster. She meets Robin (Tim), hits him in the face with a brick, and then ends up dating him. Unlike most characters who appear a few times and never come back, Stephanie manages to stick around. She gets pregnant at age 15 (it’s not Tim’s, and no she did not cheat, this happened priorly), she gives birth, the baby is put up for adoption, and she becomes Robin after Tim’s dad, Jack Drake, finds out Tim is Robin and bans him from it. Tim is forced to quit and Stephanie picks up the mantle. She’s clocks in the shortest run as Robin, working with Batman for about two months before Bruce forces her to stop. Tim picks up the mantle again, and Steph goes back to being Spoiler—only to get killed by Black Mask, making her the second “Robin” to die. DC does retcon her death, and we later learn she was only badly beaten and sent off to live in a foreign country before she makes her return.

Jason Todd, Again:

While all this is going on, stuff is happening behind the scenes. Namely, Jason coming back to life. A common misconception here however is how long Jason was actually dead. While I wouldn’t be able to find the panels to confirm it, the true number is a “short” 6 months. Yep, while years passed in the real world, possibly decades, actually, Jason was dead all of 6 months. According to the books, he undigs himself from his grave six feet under (because Superboy punched through the multiverse or something?) and ends up wondering around Gotham as a mindless little zombie. Conveniently, Talia al Ghul stumbles upon her beloved’s lost little bird, and she decides to take him home and train him. He’s with them for a bit, gets dunked into a Lazarus pit, comes back very very angry, is shipped off to the all caste for a bit, and upon his return to the al Ghuls, is informed he’s been replaced by little Timmy Drake.

Jason makes his whole plan, and decides to make a splash by returning to Gotham wearing an old moniker of the Joker’s and taking over Gotham’s underworld. He beheads a few criminals, tries to kill Tim, tries to get Bruce to kill the Joker, and doesn’t really have success in those latter two objectives. That puts Jason at age 19, roughly. We don’t really know how to count the months he was dead.

Damian Wayne:

Shortly after Jason’s unmasking as the Red Hood, Damian Wayne turns 10 years old and beats his mother, Talia al Ghul, in combat. His prize is to be taken to his father and given to him for training. We know definitively that Damian is 10 thanks to this we can measure out the age gaps between the others and get their ages at this point in time. Dick at age 19 became Nightwing, while Jason is made Robin at age 13, so they have a six year age gap. Jason dying 2 years later at age 15 leads to Tim becoming Robin at age 12, they have a 3 year age gap. Tim is Robin for 3 years before Jason comes back and Damian trails after him a few months behind, putting Tim at around 16/17 while Damian is 10. I tend towards 16 instead of 17 because DC stopped aging Tim for a while, so it just makes more sense to pick the lower number. Thus, when Damian is 10, Tim is 16 as is Steph, Jason is 19, and Dick is 25.

Thanks to Damian being quite young, DC has kept an active track of how and when they age him. We know Damian is only with Bruce a few short months before he disappears into the time stream and Dick makes him Robin, and we also know that Damian’s 11th birthday is celebrated after Bruce is reinstated to the proper time. However, DC follows this up by killing Damian and making him the third Robin to die, the second to do so in the suit itself, and he’s dead for a significant number of months. In this time, Dick also dies—as in his heart is stopped by Lex Luthor for a few seconds, and then restarted, after his identity is revealed on live TV. Bruce decides to let the world believe Nightwing died and stayed dead, and Dick is sent off to Spyral to do secret spy stuff for Bruce. There is an issue around here in the “Grayson” run that claims Dick is twenty-one years old, which is ENTIRELY incompatible with the time line I just painstakingly established, and I go ahead and outright dismiss it because it clearly doesn’t work with a majority of canon. While Dick is with Spyral, Damian is brought back to life, and he goes on a year of redemption (which doesn’t actually last a whole year, but I digress). He and Dick meet again, and we move into Rebirth somewhere around here with the conclusion of Spyral and Batman and Robin Eternal.

General Events:

Damian turns 12 presumably sometime during rebirth, although not specified, I do believe Truth and Justice issue #6 to be his 12th or 13th birthday, but I lean towards 12 because of the costumes everyone wears in the issue. Steph is spoiler, Cass is Orphan, Tim is Red Robin, Red Hood has yet to don his solo Outlaw uniform, and Barbara is Batgirl.

I can’t name a specific issue for Damian’s 13th birthday, but it’s canonical that Damian turned 14 in his solo Robin series, Robin (2021) while he was off finding himself before the Lazarus Tournament, and since then, there’s been the Shadow War, Batman Vs Robin, Dark Crisis event somewhere around there, the Lazarus Planet event, Gotham War, DC Knight Terrors, and Beast World event, which catches us up to the modern day world.

Since Damian hasn’t yet turned 15 despite ALL of that going on, and is still for now at least, 14, that means Tim and Steph are 20, Jason is 23, and Dick is 29.

I know I mentioned Cass and Babs, and I would love to give you a proper age for them but I don’t know where to place them in DC canon like I do the others, however people do commonly place Cass roughly around the same age as Jason making her 22 or 23, and Babs tends towards being 6-8 years older than Dick, although that is an age gap DC has been slowly bridging over the years. Still, I put her at 35 years old. I don’t have a reference for Duke Thomas either, but he’s commonly placed as being two years younger than Tim making him 18 currently.

Lastly, I bring back the arbitrary number of 15, given that that is the number of years that separate Dick and Damian, I also use that age gap between Dick and Bruce—meaning that Bruce took Dick in when he was 25, and placing Bruce at 44 years old in main continuity.

Overall Ages Currently:

Bruce Wayne: 44

Barbara Gordon: 35

Dick Grayson: 29

Jason Todd: 23

Cassandra Cain: 22

Tim Drake: 20

Stephanie Brown: 20

Duke Thomas: 18

Damian Wayne: 14

#batfamily

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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I feel like Dick and Damian definitely do regard each other as father and son to a certain extent but in a way that is so tied to Bruce's "death" that they'll never actually say it. Damian will just keep referring to Dick as his Batman, a role that has only ever meant father to him, and Dick will refer to Damian as his Robin, a name that has only ever meant son.

#batfamily

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an-intronerd · 2 months

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