Cass would’ve been a better choice for the latest episode of WFA.
You’re telling me the girl who believes everyone can change and deserves a second chance wouldn’t be there in her own weird way for her brother?
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With Wayne Family Adventures returning, I would like to overanalyze one panel from one of the preview images, as I have not been able to stop thinking about it...
[ID: Picture of Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake sat in a kitchen area. Tim sits in a chair while Steph sits on the table, giving him a pat on the head and smiling. In the bottom-left corner of the screen, bunches of lavender are visible. End ID.]
So, this panel is a nice moment between Stephanie Brown and her ex-boyfriend Tim Drake, with Steph giving Tim a supportive pat on the head. This may indicate that we will see them discussing their relationship history in some form this season - like the many, many, many other cases of “Thing that comic fans wanted to see acknowledged in canon is done better in the webcomic” before it. But that’s not what I find interesting.
What I find interesting is the flowers in the leftmost corner of the panel.
Drawn in a surprising amount of detail, we see a bundle of lavender. Now, this isn’t wholly interesting in of itself - Stephanie Brown does love purple, after all - but I find the choice of lavender specifically to be really neat and potentially meaningful given the history of Steph and Tim specifically and the mantles of Robin and Batgirl more broadly.
Lavender is a flower that has often had queer meaning assigned to it, dating all the way back to the early 1900s. The flower and references to it have often be used as code for queer community in a similar way to how rainbow flags are used as symbols of queer community.
[Content Warning: The next paragraph will include discussions of homophobia and systemic oppression of queer people more broadly.]
This unfortunately includes the Lavender Scare, the 1950s anti-gay crusade that ran parallel to the Red Scare. That period, horrific in its oppression of queer people in many different ways, also had a surprisingly major influence on the history of comic books in general and Batman in particular. The publication of Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 argued that comic books were having a negative influence on the youth of the day, including claiming that Batman and Robin were gay lovers and that readers would be “corrupted” by their relationship. In response to this book and the massive amount of scrutiny it put them under, comic book publishers founded the Comics Code Authority to regulate their content and DC created the characters of Batwoman and Batgirl as love interests for Batman and Robin in order to “prove” their heterosexuality.
With this in mind, I find the choice of lavender in the frame of this image really interesting. While Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake are not the Batgirl and Robin of the Lavender Scare, they are still a broken-up Batgirl/Robin pairing. Tim Drake is now an explicitly queer man, in a relationship with Bernard. Stephanie Brown has not been made explicitly queer, though the coding is certainly there in several of her appearances (mostly famously in her reaction to Zatanna in Rebirth Young Justice and her relationship with Cass in Future State). With this in mind, the flowers feel like a kind of cheeky nod to the past and how we are now able to move forward - in new, queerer, more lavender directions.
Or, y’know... Maybe Stephanie Brown just really likes purple and I’m thinking about this too hard... Who knows!
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