My son wants to destroy the world, how do I stop him? - Search
It had been a few months since Phantom joined the League. Although he was more of an emergency contact they called in worse cases than a real member. According to the Justice League Dark, he was a ruler of another dimension so he couldn't be around all the time.
When Wonder Woman complained about his commitment to the team, Phantom frowned and called her hypocritical. Apparently Phantom watched over all the dimensions, so asking him to protect one in particular was stupid, or worse, selfish. Diana ended up very embarrassed after learning about it.
Then, it was strange for Phantom to stay beyond 5 minutes after providing his help, so Bruce was surprised to see the boy walking towards him looking extremely nervous and asking for a conversation. Bruce agreed out of curiosity.
The conversation took a strange turn when Phantom started praising his parenting skills (Bruce was proud of his kids clearly, but how the fuck did Phantom know his identity?), and complimented him on...Red Hood's self-control??? And what a good kid he was??
Apparently, Phantom had a son (Bruce was starting to believe in the "immortal" part that Constantine talked about), but he had a terrible temper and loved to destroy dimensions, for which he was often punished (Bruce was at a loss for words), Phantom assured him that no dimension that didn't deserve it was destroyed but he didn't know how to change Dan's approach.
The King insisted that he was fine with his son destroying dimensions as long as his grandfather authorized it, since they had forgiven him and those dimensions were finished anyway (Batman was grateful that his mask would not show his facial expression) but that destroying everyone would affect him in the long run and he was worried about him.
In the end, Bruce invited them to the mansion, or rather, invited Phantom to talk to Alfred and he told him he would bring his son. Bruce remembered that Jason would be visiting that day and wondered how badly the meeting would go.
I genuinely like to believe that Bruce’s natural state is Brucie. His resting persona. I think Bruce is smart don’t get me wrong, but you can be smart and ditzy. My citation is Legally Blonde.
I think the Batman persona for him is ultimately a flexing of the mental muscles. Like he read one article on how to be a serious adult and was like I’m gonna do that at 9000%.
I believe that after Jason died is when Batman stopped being the mask, at least for a while. And yeah trauma, dead kid. But it’s also because Bruce was in the reverse position to when his parents were murdered. He was the parent who outlived his child. So he couldn’t afford to not be on edge, the vulnerability it takes to be silly and mess wasn’t going to keep his other son safe. It wouldn’t keep Dick or Tim or Damian safe.
I think if they steered back to Bruce learning to be vulnerable around his friends and especially around his family the comics could be so much better and set the base for many more stories that weren’t a repeat of the same cycle of abuse. It feels like the comics have been hell bent on breaking these characters for so long. Chipping them down to the worst, darkest parts of themselves. And that’s fine. But the writers don’t know when to stop. They can’t see that there is nothing left to break anymore.
Danny made a lot of stupid decisions in his life, several, so many that he couldn't even begin to count them, but according to him that was great when it came to learning from his mistakes.
So, it's no wonder that on his one day off he decided to do everything he was told not to do:
1. Leave Amity
2. Reveal himself to the world
3. Accept things from a stranger
The first 2 were reasonable, considering the situation with the GIW and how 80% of the population did not believe ghosts existed, the last was a warning Jazz made sure to instill in him.
But Danny was dead (more or less), and what harm could it do to eat a candy or two? It's not like he could poison himself.
The answer was a lot of harm; Technically no one offered him the fallen Kryptonite on the ground (he just thought it looked delicious), and both Lex Luthor and Superman weren't paying attention to him during their epic battle or whatever.
So Danny just picked it up and ate it, well, ate several (Lex was throwing them away like a candy trail, the halfa had fun thinking of Hansel and Gretel), Superman looked worried as he heard "Lex's evil plans to surround him with Kryptonite."
But instead of finding a perfect circle surrounding him, he found a teenager, a young white-haired boy who was rolling on the ground and complaining of a stomach ache.
Danny could almost hear Frostbite's voice scolding him for eating candy off the floor, damn it, and some of the candy wasn't even pure! They looked manufactured and stale. Danny glared at Luthor before deciding it wasn't worth it and going back to his task of complaining.