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gothamdetected-a · 4 years

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an idiot’s guide to the wayne family.

now complete with new diagrams! i wish i wash kidding, ive really made a diagram to help illustrate this.

[ follow the link here for actual visible quality. thanks tumblr.]

some points to make quickly -

• this is not complete. there were probably more siblings and wives and children, but i just focused on the main lineage i could piece together from DC knowledge

• apologies for the lack of knowledge on the women in the family past the last century. this is unfortunately common in real life too, as women were not landowners etc, and without a marriage certificate they basically don’t show up on records. dc happily talk about the male line but not about the wives and daughters so :/

• the dates are fairly made up, and especially at the bottom are just me twisting things to fit my own personal canon

• and finally, i just wanted to say that while this is pieced together from what DC have told us, there are a lot of holes that i have filled with headcanons. not all of this is canon. sometimes i just want to give a person a cool life that dc are too cowardly to do.

so, although this varies by “earth”, i have tried to combine the various histories given for pre- and post-52 waynes into a full comprehensible timeline. i’ve probably failed, but this is what i’m sticking with.

to start with we’re supposed to believe that there was a norse guy calling himself the Bat-Man, running around in the 10th century killing frost giants. is it plausible? yes. is it exaggerated? most definitely. am i wiping it from existence because it was one issue in a faintly terrible run that has technically been retconned anyway? absolutely. ignoring that makes the earliest recorded ancestor of the wayne family a man called gawayne de weyne, a french crusader in the 14th century. on some earths he’s called lancelot wayne (too on the nose) or harold wayne (thanks i hate it), so im personally going to retcon that and just say gawayne is it. also because i love the etymological aspect of the name beginning as de weyne in old high french and it slowly changing through out the centuries. gawayne, also sometimes written as gevain, was one of the knights sent to retrieve the holy grail, but, as knights tended to do, he died. sorry gawayne. the weirdest part about all of this is that he asked for his heart to be embalmed, and there’s a plot line revolving around this (batman: scottish connection). now i’m not saying that madness runs in the family, but the waynes absolutely do not get a good head start in history.

gawayne must have had at least one surviving heir who goes on to have babies etc etc, and eventually we get to the 16th century, and the next instance of the waynes. specifically, contarf wayne. which, i have to say, super dumb name. if i ever have a kid, im calling it contarf. so it’s now the 1500s and the waynes have somehow become scottish, probably from getting given land after crusading and that. apparently gawayne was aknight of the scottish court, despite being french, which actually happened a lot back then. literally the only notable thing contarf does with his life is build castle wayne, and i swear these people are all born with both madness and a flair for the dramatic. yes at some point bruce does go to this gloomy scottish castle where it’s always rainy and stormy and fits right on in, so that’s terrifying.

around a hundred years later nathaniel wayne tries to emigrate across to the “new world”. nathaniel likes witchhunting, and has come over to what will one day be the US following a witch fleeing from england - annie. annie who he may have dated. annie who may be pregnant with his child. good on you nathaniel, that’s a healthy relationship you’ve got right there. after the baby is delivered, he finds her and. you know, people were not kind of witches back then, so she dies. and with her dying breath, curses nathaniel and all his descendants. which includes her OWN BABY (super punk move), and one day bruce wayne. this curse manifests in very few of the extant waynes surviving beyond 40, often going mad, and absolutely tuning on each other. nathaniel’s particular grisly end comes when his is the fateful colony that ends up in what-will-one-day-be-gotham (see my idiots guide to gotham for more juicy details), releasing the deacon blackfire from his little cave and ending up missing, presumed dead. (definitely dead). this is the start of the “waynes probably should avoid gotham” saga. spoiler alert - they don’t.

somewhere in the interluding 100 years, a branch of the waynes do actually successfully make it over into the americas. 2 brothers, caleb and thomas simon wayne, reach the east coast from britain, and go their separate ways. caleb joins a convoy heading out west, leading a wagon train, and, as so many pioneers do, he also dies, while trying to make this trip. but caleb really isnt the interesting brother here (sorry man), because what thomas gets up to is far more exciting. he settles in, lo and behold, the newly formed town of gotham, and for some strange reason (probably because all the waynes are fairly nuts, as we’ve established at this point) decides to give devil-worshipping a go. maybe its fucking curse. maybe its something in the water. maybe its maybelline. but whatever it is, thomas wayne tries to summon and ensnare the demon barbatos by killing some innocents, in a wild, but understandable, attempt to gain immortality. he doesn’t succeed. or does he. it half works - instead of summoning the bat-demon (yes the same bat-demon that the founding fathers later summon and also trap beneath gotham) he gets one of darkseid’s hyper-dimensional bounty hunters, and some how, through some space age magic, the energy of this event corrupts him into agelessness/slowed ageing, we’re not totally sure. later dear old tom pops back up as the villainous dr simon hurt, and literally fights his own descendant. DC give no fucks.

after the whole corrupting not-magic thing, but before he disappears, thomas/simon impregnates one of his cult’s disciples. a lot. (is this why the waynes can look 30 at 50? more on this at 10) and between 1747 and 1771 (because immortal people also have immortal sperm apparently), she bears him 3 sons. probably some daughters too but again, who cares about that. not DC, that’s for damn sure. these sons are all absolutely fucking insane, just like daddy dearest. the eldest, who is LITERALLY known as “mad” anthony wayne, is said to be the spitting image of bruce, which is confirmed through some time travelling bs that we’re not going to think about. anthony and horatio wayne, the middle brother, both sign up to fight in the revolutionary war. unfortunately THE CURSE STRIKES AGAIN and horatio perishes while burning british ships. anthony goes on to becomes a brigadier general, serving directly under george washington and pulls some crazy good strategies that help to kick the british out of new jersey, earning his nickname of “mad” anthony, because only someone fucking nuts could come up with these plans, and pull them off. the youngest brother darius wayne is only 4 when the war breaks out, and is therefore too Babey to fight, but does later become notable for being the man to start construction on wayne manor. in 1795, using the money inherited from his brother horatio on his death, he hires an architect nathan van derm, to begin planning and building. sadly darius will never see it completed, with funds dwindling and his older brother’s death, eventually darius takes his own life.

not to worry, he leaves behind 2 sons - herkimer and charles wayne. literally herkimer’s only notable feature is that he fights in the war of 1812. sorry my guy, DC hate you. charles, on the other hand, is a businessman, who manages the failing company his father had left behind and starts to grow the wayne fortune. charles buys more land surrounding the manor, as well as a lot of general gotham real estate, and is the man accrediting for starting wayne enterprises as a series of several small business, ranging from merchant trading to land ownership to mining, in 1845. however charlie contracts tuberculosis at the ripe old age of 62 and shuffles off the mortal coil.

the oldest of his sons, charles lincoln wayne, also known as charles junior, does 2 things - begins construction on the wayne manor again in 1855 after purchasing it back from jerome k. van derm, the destitute son of the original architect, who had been living in the bones of the construcion, and uses a considerable portion of his inheritance to build the gotham botanical gardens in 1870. the next son, winslow wayne, is another enigma - the only thing mentioned about him in the comics is that he fought alongside teddy roosevelt, which i’m guessing is in the spanish-american war. but the youngest two brothers, joshua thomas and solomon zebadiah wayne are the real spicy pair. not only do they tackle the bat infestation on the manor grounds, but the pair work to change the federal system of america - joshua, when he’s not managing the wayne companies, is an abolitionist who engages in secret missions to free slaves by getting them across the border into canada, and solomon, the vaguely more sensible of the two, becomes a judge, attempting to be as fair and incorruptible as possible. sadly joshua is killed due to his slave smuggling antics (THE CURRSSEE), and this sends solomon slightly nuts, and causes him to contract the architect cyrus pinkney, who is even more nuts, to basically. build gotham. these two men are the reason 97% of buildings have gargoyles on them.

solomon has only 1 child before he dies, who fortunately, grows up to be a very shrewd businessman capable of growing wayne ent even through with the advent of shipping and rail sectors. this man, alan wayne, constructs the original wayne tower in 1888, and it completely swamps the gotham skyline. he also marries catherine van derm, the great granddaughter of the original architect of wayne manor, and finally manage to complete and move in to the building in 1895, exactly 100 years after the project was started. for a while they are very happy, and catherine falls pregnant. but this darn curse just won’t leave these wayne boys alone, and in 1897, catherine dies giving birth to their son, kenneth wayne. a year later, lost and traumatised and going insane thinking about his wife’s death alan wayne mysteriously disappears (read as: fell down a well and was maybe or maybe not tortured and killed by the court of owls).

kenneth wayne, raised as virtually an orphan, turns out to have his papa’s business management skills, and, foreseeing america's impending industrialisation in the 20s and 30s, makes some risky moves that pay off, including the advent of wayne chemicals, and wayne ent expands yet again. kenneth, like the recurring pattern that you can see here, dies fairly early due to WW2 however, leaving his wife laura to care for their 4 sons AND the company, which she does like a boss ass bitch. seriously, women barely had the vote and she was already a titan of industry and raising 4 teenage boys like. massive props to you babe. these boys are

ishmael wayne, a whaler who is an incredible parody of captain ahab and also dies trying to catch a white whale, elwood wayne, who goes and reclaims what is now called waynemoor castle in scotland, living there until his death, silas wayne, who may or may not be a thief posing as a wayne because the real silas died, AND at long last, patrick wayne - bruce’s granpappy, who founded the wayne tech arm of the company at 20 years old, aiding the war effort, and where this stupidly long post ends, because there is 0 point in me recounting the lives of thomas, bruce, or any of his children. everyone knows them. could i write more about thomas’ siblings and the kanes and how they tie in? yes. but this post is like 2100 words long and i want to sleep at some point today so this will have to do askjdbjsdhgf

#im #this is virtually incomprehensible #\system\directory\hidden.txt ›› META #long post /

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