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sukenwinter · 8 years

Note

So your DickBabs commentary is some of the best around, but I was wondering if you might be willing to explain what works about BatCat for you? : )

So, it’s taken me forever to answer this because my life has been ridiculous lately and also I’m terrible sometimes, but! I did not forget about you, dearest of Renas! (To those who don’t know, this post is to celebrate Rena reaching 1000 followers!) So, let’s get down to this:

(Also: Thank you for the compliment on my DickBabs commentary.

So, I think a lot of people spend most of their time talking about why Selina is good for Bruce when they talk about this ship, and there’s definitely a lot to be said there and I’m going to get to that, but I want to start off talking about why I think Bruce is good for Selina, which is a side that I think often gets ignored. (Possibly because Bruce gets such a bad reputation that people can’t believe he could possibly contribute anything positive to a relationship - but that is only true when Bruce is written by terrible writers like Frank Miller, and I firmly ignore that characterization of Bruce.)

So, to get there I’m going to start off talking about this scene, which is one of the most essential Bruce/Selina scenes in my book:

This is from the first issue of Ed Brubaker’s Catwoman run, which I’m sure you already know, but I’m just stating it for the record so that if anyone is reading this post and hasn’t picked up Ed Brubaker’s Catwoman run, consider this my advertisement for it: Go pick up Ed Brubaker’s Catwoman run. You will not be disappointed. (Also… not to beat a dead horse, but… the above scene is the note Ed Brubaker chose to begin his Catwoman run on. Let’s just compare that to how Judd Winick chose to begin his. *moment of silence*)

Anyway, there are a handful of scenes that just define Bruce and Selina to me, that are the first to come to mind when I’m thinking about how I see their dynamic and why I ship them, and this is one of the major ones. Because here’s the thing I think so many people miss: The reason Bruce treats Selina differently than his other antagonists isn’t just because he thinks she looks hot in her costume. It’s because he knows she’s not a villain, at the core of who she is. He thinks she’s a good person, in spite of everything. And that is so, so important.

See, here’s the thing: Selina is someone who’s been underestimated and dismissed for most of her life. She’s been looked down on for her gender, her lower-class background, her history in sex work. And when she has been taken seriously, she’s been perversely appreciated for the bad side of who she is. The few people to really respect her have appreciated her intelligence and skills for how useful she could be to them as a thief. But no one really looked at her and saw her as someone with the potential to be more than a thief. (Not even Holly, although Holly’s relationship with Selina is positive and good for Selina in different ways.) Certainly no one saw her as someone with the potential to be a hero - until Bruce.

And if you’ll forgive me for going into Psychology Major mode for a minute: People will live up or down to expectations. If you’ve been treated all your life as if you can’t be anything but a thief and a troublemaker and someone with purely selfish interests, it’s really hard to believe that you can be anything else. It’s not impossible, and I’d certainly never suggest that Selina never did anything heroic or altruistic until she met Bruce. But it’s hard. Someone believing in you is a really, really powerful thing.

This is something that, for all its faults as a movie, The Dark Knight Rises did get very right about Bruce and Selina’s relationship:

Selina tries to present herself as someone driven purely by selfishness, but Bruce sees through that: “I think there’s more to you than that.” And I think what Selina says in response is so revealing. It’s clearly intended as a denial - saying that if he keeps expecting her to be better, he’ll only keep being let down in response. But it also clearly shows that he’s gotten to her - which is, of course, confirmed by the decisions she makes later in the movie. As much as she wants to pretend it doesn’t, Bruce’s faith in Selina has an effect on her.

The thing is, knowing you’ve let someone down isn’t a pleasant feeling. But it can sometimes be a positive thing. Knowing you’ve let someone down means knowing that they had high expectations for you in the first place. It means someone saw you as capable of making the right decisions, and that’s actually much healthier than knowing you didn’t let anyone down because they never expected anything better of you to begin with.

Bruce is good for Selina because he looks at her and says “I believe that deep down, you’re really a good person.“ Because he looks at her and says ”There’s more to you than that.” And that’s something Selina hasn’t had a lot of in her life, maybe something she’s never had until Bruce comes along. He sees past her bad side and sees her potential to be something better. And instead of letting her off the hook, he challenges her to be the person he knows she’s capable of being. He has faith in her. He believes she can be a hero, and eventually that leads to Selina believing it, too.

(But it’s so, so important to note that Selina doesn’t start acting more heroic for Bruce. She’s not doing it because he wanted it or to make him happy. She does it because it’s right for her. At her heart, Selina is a hero - all Bruce did is see the heroic qualities that were in her all along.)

The second reason I ship them so hard together is: They help each other have fun.

(The comic this panel is from - Catwoman #32 - is basically my all-time Bruce/Selina issue ever, and you’ll definitely be seeing more scans from it in this post.)

Bruce is the one who needs more help in this area, obviously, like he says here. It’s no secret that Bruce is serious and withdrawn even with the people he loves most, and has a tendency to focus on The Mission above everyone else. So it’s a huge deal that he’s playful and mischievous and flirtatious with Selina, because not many people get to see that side of him. And no one brings it out in exactly the way that Selina does. He lets himself relax around her in a way which is really good for him:

(See? I told you we weren’t done with that issue! I love this scene because you so rarely see Bruce - or Selina, for that matter - being so completely relaxed and happy and normal.)

But I think it’s worth noting that Selina always looks like she’s having just as much fun as Bruce is, and I think that’s really good for her, too. I think people tend to forget that as much as Selina is by nature a more playful and flirtatious person than Bruce, she isn’t really a much happier one. She’s had a really hard and lonely life over the years, and that’s why it’s so great to see how genuinely happy she seems with Bruce:

I always love how huge Selina’s smile is in the first panel of this sequence (drawn by the always awesome Cameron Stewart). She’s just having so much fun, and I think that’s really just as good for her as it is for Bruce.

Even when they’re fighting, it’s very often play-fighting more than anything else:

(This scene, which is from Batman: The Brave and the Bold, can be watched here. And it is awesome.)

Look at those smiles. Bruce and Selina just bring out the fun side in each other, and I really love that. You’d never see Bruce smiling like that if he was fighting, say, the Joker. (For good reason.)

This is something Gotham has also gotten very right in their depiction of baby!Bruce and Selina:

SO. FREAKING. CUTE.

AHEM. *is mature*

(By the way: Do you remember a while back when I sent you a message that was basically like “RENA RENA RENA YOU HAVE TO GO WATCH GOTHAM NOW”? It was right after this episode aired.)

I find this scene particularly poignant because this is not long after Bruce’s parents have died, and it’s the first time you really see him having fun, smiling and laughing like that. Frankly, it’s the first time in the show that you see Bruce or Selina acting like normal children. (Even Alfred notices and is forced to approve of Selina!) And even as adults, I think they still bring out that lighthearted side in each other:

Although as this scene shows, what Bruce and Selina consider “fun” might not be what most people consider fun, which bring me to my next point: They just get each other, on a very fundamental level. Partly that’s because they’re very alike, and partly because they’ve come to understand each other over the years. There’s this scene I really wish I could have found - I tried, believe me - where (if I’m remembering correctly) Selina is sneaking into Gotham during the No Man’s Land era, and Bruce knows exactly how she’ll do it - because it’s the same way he would. Bruce and Selina are also very different from each other in certain ways, obviously, but a lot of the time they’re just very in sync like that:

Despite their differences, Bruce and Selina have a lot in common. They’re both highly intelligent and skilled, they’ve both known a lot of tragedy in their lives, they’re both far lonelier than they care to admit. They’re both hesitant to trust people. They both follow a unique moral code that others don’t always understand - though those moral codes are not exactly the same. They’re both highly independent and can be too stubborn for their own good. At their heart, they’re both driven by a very real desire to help other people. And I think they’re similar in a more indefinable way, too. They’re just cut from the same cloth, somehow. They understand each other both instinctively and also, as the years go by, because of the true friendship they’ve formed:

I think that’s something that’s so often overlooked with Bruce and Selina: People look at them and only see the Cat-and-Bat game, the “lovers on opposite sides!” trope, and they overlook the fact that Bruce and Selina are genuinely friends. More than that, despite all the odds, they’ve come to really trust each other over the years. Even though they still disagree over plenty of things, they know they can always turn to each other in a time of need:

I think nothing says more about how much Bruce trusts Selina than the fact that he willingly told her his secret identity - something that I’m not only pretty sure was unheard of for Bruce to do, it’s pretty dang unheard of in the superhero world in general. For a point of comparison, Clark didn’t tell Lois his secret identity until after they were engaged, and whether you think that’s good writing of Clark or not (I don’t, necessarily), it still says something about what a big deal it was for Bruce to trust Selina that way. In the superhero world, telling someone your secret identity is basically the biggest statement of trust you can make.

Bruce telling Selina his secret identity (though I firmly headcanon that she’d figured it out anyway) is a huge statement - and, as he basically says himself here, tantamount to an admission that he wants a real relationship with her. For Bruce to willingly make that leap is huge.

Because of that trust, you see Bruce and Selina really open up to each other in a way that they really don’t with most people, especially other love interests. They’re willing to let themselves be vulnerable and emotionally open. And Bruce is actually vocal about his feelings in a way that you practically never see:

Now, obviously Heart of Hush as a storyline is not without its problematic elements, but I still love this scene. Because Bruce pouring his heart out like that? Bruce basically never does that. Getting an “I love you” out of Bruce is a big deal already, but an entire speech? That says a lot, again, about how much he’s willing to open up to Selina. (Granted, she was pretending to be asleep… but let’s be honest: he most likely knew she was pretending.)

I think it’s also significant that pretty much any time either of them dreams about settling down, or there’s an alternate universe where they do, it shows them ending up married to each other:

I think for both Bruce and Selina, when they imagine living a normal life, they think about having a normal relationship with each other, ending up married. But they think that because they’re not “normal”, they can’t have that - which is a theme going back to the earliest days of their relationship:

(This scene is from Batman #3, which also happens to be the issue where Selina kissed Bruce for the first time.)

Bruce and Selina will never be “just another boy and girl”, and I think they both assume that means they can never have anything resembling an actual committed relationship. The fact that they were starting to take steps in that direction before the reboot was a huge deal for both of them. But I think it’s going to take a lot of character growth for both of them before they realize that they can have an actual relationship without either of them compromising who they are.

One more reason to ship them: Bruce moons over Selina like a little schoolboy. Enough said. ;-)

CONTROL YOUR FACE, BRUCE. You are supposed to be the terrifying personification of justice and the night and you’re acting like an absolute goober.

(And it’s amazing.)

Oh, and Dick approves:

Dick approves so much that Dick is actually the one who encouraged Bruce to tell Selina his secret identity, which, again: Huge frickin’ deal.

It’s not just a “Ha ha, Dick ships it” thing, either. Dick knows Bruce better than pretty much anyone. So the fact that Dick looks at Bruce’s relationship with Selina and says “Yeah, this relationship is good for you”? That says a lot. Because Dick knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Bruce.

Also, they have almost 75 years of history, which is pretty dang cool:

I’m a sucker for history. And theirs is a 75-year-long multimedia history spanning comics, cartoons, live-action TV, movies, and videogames, which just makes it even more amazing.

In conclusion: Have some of my miscellaneous favorite Bat/Cat scenes that I couldn’t find a way to include in this post.

(This is another scene that speaks to how well Selina understands Bruce… and also brings up a very important point about Bruce’s nature that far too many Batman adaptations forget.)