#anti-morrison talia

[thebatsdemon]

If you can pretend Captain America being a nazi never happened you can ignore Grant Morrison’s characterization of Talia Al Ghul

#anti grant morrison #dc comics #dc critical #talia al ghul #fandom critical #fandom misogyny #fandom racism

[spite-and-waffles]

Talia "aggressively groomed" Jason – did you actually read Lost Days or are you trying to find a convenient scapegoat for his choices? Jason can't be held accountable because "Pit Rage", but the woman who was killed and dunked in the Pit one hundred times until her mind broke enough to brainwash is 100% culpable for every misogynistic plot point hung around her neck. You can find a way to rationalize and ignore Jason's indiscriminate killing at Nicieza and Morrison and even fucking Winnick's hands as OOC, but Talia acting out of character cements her as a groomer and abuser.

It's amazing how people bend backwards to whitewash their little uwu white boy because the narrative is so meeeean to him, but have no problem throwing the woman of colour subjected to every kind of racism and misogyny in the trash.

#show me in Lost Days where this woman had any control over this kid #she couldn't even keep him from trying to kill Bruce #or did you just see a teenager and an older woman and decide what the dynamic is #and that she wasnt acting out of character when she slept with him #Winnick has a problematic history with women of colour but even his point was that this woman was not well #she had a case of raging ptsd and literal brainwashing #the idea that you can just throw out Winnick's BnR arc but not that gross ass moment in Lost Days #talia al ghul #jason todd #red hood: the lost days #batman and robin: the streets run red #anti grant morrison #anti fabian nicieza #judd winnick #jason todd meta #racism #misogyny #dcu #tw grooming mention #batfamily #bat meta #spite waffle #talia al ghul meta

[redwiccanrobin]

I see people try to frame Morrison’s mischaracterization of Talia as a good thing because it brings light to male victims. Which, yes, we should be talking about male victims but that’s not what they were doing. Morrison has this sort of habit you could say of using very upsetting and traumatizing situations as a way to shock readers. I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that they had any good intentions about writing that in. They wanted people to just gasp at their comic.

#dc comics #batman #talia al ghul #anti grant morrison

[wesavegotham]

Sometimes I wonder if Grant Morrison fanboys don't know or don't care just how weird this guy is. Not just the racist and sexist way they handled Talia in general, even though the way seem to think that their retcon with Damian's conception was fine because:

giving someone drugs without their consent is apparently fine in their mind if the other person is into them is just...really fucked up.

But Morrison also seems to think that the Invisible Woman and her brother the Human Torch over at Marvel secretly want to bang each other:

Oh and Morrison compared Magneto (a holocaust surviver) to Hitler and also wrote him that way in their X-Men run:

Can we please all agree that, maybe it's not the characters that are messed up, but Grant Morrison who probably is.

#grant morrison #talia al ghul #bruce wayne #damian wayne #Anti grant morrison

[introspectivememories]

my family: heaven gained another angel </3 fly high

me in hell:

#morrison watch your back #i'll never forgive you for what you did to my girl talia #talia baby get behind me #anti grant morrison #dc #talia al ghul

[oifaaa]

The ginger Jason thing I think showcases two of Grant Morrison's biggest flaws as a writer. They believe their own hype, to the point that the smallest, most inconsequential change (like to Jason's hair color) is some sort of stroke of genius. And they ignore other writers' work whenever it's inconvenient to them without even trying to come up with an excuse, so a lot of the changes they make don't make sense within continuity (post-Crisis Jason's hair was always black, but Morrison decided to ignore that).

See morrison is quiet a good writer there's no question about that but your completely right about them buying into their own hype and not caring about previous established characterisation they also don't seem to think certain things through and how certain choice may negatively impact a character like they did apologise for the damage they caused to talia as a character and took back some of their writing desision for her but that doesn't stop people from taking their shitty choices and just running with them all the way to hell

#Ask #Anon #Sorry just want to remind any anti talia people out there #That even morrison the person who made that shitty recon denounces it as being bad #And not Canon anymore #Consider that for 5 seconds

[augustheart]

it is absolutely Nuts to see people still upholding morrison's older writing as some kind of bastion of progressive representation even though it is often deeply antiblack. both the depictions of rebis and especially the way that frenzy is written in doom patrol are racist. these trends continued into their creator-owned work like the invisibles, where the only black main character is written in even worse antiblack ways right down to the codename that she uses and black side characters are treated equally poorly.

there is also the transmisogyny of rebis' character and the absolutely horrific transmisogyny of as of yet unmentioned hilde's appearances in the invisibles including her very first appearance in the comic. morrison's transphobia, though now handwaved away by the fact that they have come out as genderqueer meaning that these things must for some reason be forgiven, is utterly sickening to read in these comics. i will not give brownie points for "representation" in a time when there were barely any trans characters in comics to characters who are made the butt of the joke by the narrative, are treated awfully by the characters around them, and are subjected to nauseating levels of violence.

these are not the only problems in morrison's late 80s/early 90s work, far from it, but they are the issues that i see handwaved away most frequently. grow a spine—if you can rightfully condemn the way they retconned talia and bruce's relationship as a product of racism, you can condemn their other racist and misogynist works.

#this is something i have been thinking about for awhile. the antiblackness in morrison's works is not some big secret #it is Extremely blatant. it is Right There. i remember all of that shit from the invisibles. i remember all of that shit from doom patrol. #this is not something they've grown out of with time--while they have apologized for talia's writing as they should-- #their other work goes unquestioned by fans #i cannot stress enough how much you should not look into the things in the invisibles because of how deeply deeply upsetting some of it is #the racism and transmisogyny in that comic runs insanely deep and is not helped by the other bigotry present (namely antisemitism) #racism / #anti grant morrison #transmisogyny / #antiblack racism / #transphobia /

[luciferz-morningstar]

my favorite hobby is pissing racists off<333

#stares at lizzie olsen stans #and talia al ghul antis #fuck the mcu #and grant morrison #and the fuck ton of racist writers out there #anti mcu wanda #anti mcu

[nepobabyeurydice]

yeah we made your fav female character an irredeemable bitch because she got in the way of our fav ship, and we just called it being critical and salty instead of bashing because she always had those traits, and we're not warping her into an unrecognizable form.

#fandom #fandom bullshit #looking at you anti-talia fuckers #find a hole and die we both know that grant morrison is a racist pos and all of his talia and ra's writing is shit

[dyslexicandakeyboard]

Some Blog: They hate Talia because of one reconned time she raped Bruce. They so stupid and racist and sexist.

Talia:

Gave him a love potion

Married him without his consent purposefully. Either Ra's had him drugged and she went along with it or she planned to drug him.

Connected to/Was fine with/Committed genocide

Me:

I mean like what you like and let me like what I like.

#Batman #Bruce Wayne #Morrison wrote her bad #But don't just be throwing those words around #Youtube #Anti Talia Al Ghul content #I'm not a anti #Do what you want

[thebatsdemon]

Begging for Talia to be in a Batman movie that doesn't base her off her Morrison characterization

#talia al ghul #dc critical #dc comics #anti grant morrison

[spite-and-waffles]

I feel like neither the pro-Talia Al Ghul camp or the anti-Talia camp really care to delve deeply into the fact that she has been abused and used by her father her whole life, and is as tragic a character as Jason. Her fixating on a man as emotionally distant and obsessed with his mission as Ra's, knowing full well that he will never choose her or his children over it, is a completely accurate showcasing of the way people perpetuate their own trauma cycles.

And while I hope more people refuse to take anything Grant Morrison wrote about Talia to account, making her a good mother in reaction to it also just does not make sense. Just like Bruce, she's an example of someone who loves her child fiercely but is too traumatized and emotionally stunted to express it in healthy ways. Unlike Bruce she grew up in a literal terrorist cult and raised Damian in it as well. Her being exacting and teaching Damian to be ruthless and trust no one were all incredibly damaging and abusive, but it's also the only fucking way he could have survived the League or Ra's. Yes, she could have sent Damian to his father and keeping him by her side was selfish, but this woman, who had been starved of love and had never been anyone's priority since her mother died, finally had a person to be hers and only hers. It's horribly, tragically human to guard that love jealously and possessively.

The Tiger Mom as a trope is racist, but the emotional effects on women made to prove their worth as humans via motherhood is very much a reality that women of colour can relate to, and one not confined to just Asians. I'm only going to speak for my own people here, but the way Asian mothers make their sons their whole reason for being stems directly from the oppressively patriarchal cultures we grow up in, where a woman's worth is predicated on being a wife and mother and the highest honour she can aspire to is having a son. Ra's is the original patriarch who drilled into his daughters that they could never inherit his legacy no matter how much they proved their love, and that they owed him male heirs. Damian's very existence is tied up with Talia's idea of her own personhood and worth and achievement, which is why she piles on so many contradicting expectations on him - that he's fiercely independent but also stays by her side, become his father's perfect heir but take only her values, never be a pawn like she was, but align with her own wishes.

However you want to negotiate the racism of the way Talia is written is up to you obviously, but I feel that there's no realistic way that Talia can be a good mother (even in Son of the Demon she acted in Bruce's best interests, deceived him and abandoned her child, which actually might have been kinder than attempting to raise him in the LoA). I feel that making her one is an extremely simplistic way of dealing with the racialized misogyny her character is subjected to, and a disservice to real-life children of mothers like her, who love their children fiercely but perpetuate abuse cycles because of that very love.

For me, deconstructing and reaching past the misogyny and racism means humanising her and not making her value and sympathy as a character contingent on how good of a mother she is to Damian and Jason. Trauma and abuse slows or arrests your emotional development and makes it difficult to regulate your emotions and impulses, which is why it's a requirement for traumatized people to cognitively work on themselves in order to be good parents to their own children. Talia cannot. There's absolutely no therapist she can trust, the last time she felt close to someone she was decieved, tortured and brainwashed by her, and not only can't she get away from her father but she received a harsh object lesson from her sister on what happens when you try. This woman is a goddamn victim in every possible way, even more than Jason. It's also one of the reasons I don't buy that she allowed herself to be close to Jason, maternal feelings notwithstanding.

(Also her sleeping with him was pretty gross and unnecessary of Winick, whose writing is far from unproblematic when it comes to WoC, but it makes for a fascinating character deconstruction because afaik it happened right after Nyssa tortured her until she was brainwashed against Ra's and Bruce. So at that point in time she was basically in tatters and locked in the same self-destructive spiral as Jason, and maybe she wanted to nuke her sense of maternal care towards him in a bid to feel less emotionally vulnerable. I love this kind of psychological yarn balls in fiction.)

Absolutely none of this should absolve her choices. None of this means she's a good anything or that she should be seen as a purely sympathetic and wronged character. She's obscenely rich and powerful, ruthless, cunning and manipulative. She's one of the most dangerous people in the world. She's not fit to raise anyone. But if you can't accept all of that and square it with a fiercely loving heart and find a deeply human character then I really can't relate to you.

Let female characters of colour be human, morally grey and complex. Let fictional mothers be traumatized and deeply damaging without demonizing them. And stop moralizing female characters, I am begging you. We're far past Victorian England. Making them be on their best behaviour all the time to be sympathetic is oppressive as hell and not what storytelling is for.

#talia al ghul #ra's al ghul #son of the demon #anti Grant Morrison #parental abuse #abuse cycles #asian representation #women of colour #jason todd #red hood: the lost days #damian al ghul #damian wayne #misogyny #racism #death and the maidens #bat meta #dc meta #batfamily #dc comics #spite waffle

[aingeal98]

Thinking again about the al Ghuls and how DC deliberately tanked it's own writing to turn them into ooc cartoony villains because the anti Arab racism post 9/11 was just too potent for them to resist. You take a villain whos love for his family is one of his core characterisations, he's sexist and evil and runs a cult but he forgives his daughter every time she betrays him to help Batman. He lost his godson fighting nazis in world war two, he wants Batman to be his heir, to be family. Because he respects Batman's mind.

And DC looks at this and gives him a Jewish daughter who Ra's left to die in a concentration camp because in Death and the Maidens he found the Nazis to be useful allies. Nazis, who not even Joker would team up with. Who Ra's had talked about fighting against in older continuity. Whoever came up with that plotline needs to never work in comics again.

Nyssa tortures Talia into insanity and turns her into a willing member of the LoA who believes in Ra's vision for the future. Because it wasn't bad enough to assassinate Ra's, every single Asian character in DC had to be one dimensional racist evil villains. It's no coincidence this was the time period they tried to make Cass Cain evil too.

In Cass's case, the backlash to the awful writing forced them to retcon it. In the al Ghul's case, Morrison used it for Damian's story as if evil Talia and evil Ra's who didn't care about his family at all were always canon, and not just a disgusting racist retcon. And now it's the go to characterisation for them. Talia drugging Batman is still what a lot of dc fans assume is canon, even though it was retconned. And there was no reason for it to exist in the first place other than racism.

For DC to actually fix the al Ghuls, they'd have to acknowledge that Talia was brainwashed into being evil, and come up with some retcon for Ra's oocness. The Lazarus Pit is right there as an excuse. Robin Son of Batman managed it with Talia.

But instead DC seems to be working off the impression that their shitty writing for the past 15 years was the character's natural state. It's why "holding Talia accountable for her crimes" doesn't work any better than holding Cass accountable for all the terrible things she did during the garbage evil era.

DC needs to hold itself accountable instead of the characters. More of Ra's Talia and Damian bonding. Ra's runs a cult he is not a good person and it's a good thing that Damian got out but if you can't show that without relying on racist stereotypes and 00s character assassination then why are you even a writer lol. More clarification that what the Ra's and Talia did was not in character for them. Less "I helped torture baby Damian as part of his training but I felt really sad about it." That's never been what gave the al Ghuls their complexity.

Basically, stop trying to add nuance to the racist post 9/11 al Ghul characterisation and just give us back LexCorp era Talia and pre DATM Ra's. You're one of the top two comic book brands in the industry surely you can find someone who can make Damian's backstory work without destroying the rest of his family in the process.

#dc #dc rambles #ras al ghul #talia al ghul #batfam #damian wayne

[about-faces]

It honestly really fucking sucks that Grant Morrison’s character assassination of Talia al Ghul has been so irrevocable that there are fans now who treat that retcon (which only happened because Grant misremembered her actual canon) as how she’s always been. It defines her character now, at least to certain fans.

Anyway, I should have known better than to defend her on an anti-ship post, because I’m usually more sensible than that, but it still frustrates and saddens me.

#talia al ghul

[doberbutts]

regarding batman, his original relationship & conception of damian was completely consensual; morrison making talia into a rapist was an example of his anti mena racism & misogyny towards talia that completely tarred her character, the rape was the retcon not the other way around. just as a heads up! love your post on the subject. 🩷

Hey thanks for the correction! I can't keep the comics universe straight to save my life.