#The Heretic & other Damian clones still get made but only because Talia just misses her son so much that she makes more of him | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whetstonefires · 5 years

Note

While i was rifling thru your fic tag like a half-starved raccoon in a cake tin I found your clone Damian's fic & i'm in LOVE! And like, do u hav anymore meta on that verse? like how do the rest of the fam find out? how do they REACT?! how does Damian? does the heretic clone still exist? Just reading abt tim with a bunch of tiny dami's gave me heart palpitations. Thank you for this gift.

(In reference to this post.)

Why thank you!

It’s vaguely inspired by some meta @cerusee and @audreycritter did about what if Damian was one of several identical clones, but I’ve been fascinated by the character potential suggested by Damian having been cloned since Talia first revealed it, so.

Let’s see.

I don’t think the Heretic still exists, not in the form we saw. This story fragment sort of assumes Talia went less crazy than they made her for the whole Leviathan storyline; she doesn’t regard the clones as sons the way she does Damian (she totally relied on cloning to get him perfectly matched organ replacements, like that spine) but she’s not “sons are born to die in battle” “let’s grow him big inside a WHALE” levels of whacked out.

She hasn’t fully committed to having them compete to be selected as the official Damian #2, either, because she’s still attached to the original, though the growing prospect of that was a lot of the reason they ran for it. One of them might have wound up as the Heretic, in another timeline? But it was a timeline that diverged long before they fled the League.

So they make it to Tim’s emergency van without being intercepted, and get as far as his secure site on city limits, but they have to fight their way through the last leg of that trip and to make it inside the bunker, and it’s supplied for a siege but not really big enough for eight people, even if seven of them are small, and also staying there and being besieged would draw the attention of the Bats, which defeats the whole purpose of not making for the Cave/calling reinforcements.

So he calls his friends for extraction, and they all wind up in Kansas.

Tim puts off contacting the family until the clones have with his guidance sorted out exactly how they want to present themselves.

Unfortunately, the last stage of the ninja battle was showy enough not to be overlooked, so his absence was noticed much sooner than he expected, and regarded as more worrying. On the second day Dick calls Kon to see if he knows where Tim’s gotten to, and Kon fails to lie adequately.

Dick can’t pressure Kon as easily as he can most people because last time he asked Kon for a favor Kon came to the North Pole and died for him.

Which is the kind of thing even Nightwing isn’t veteran enough not to take seriously.

But he still calls his bluff and asks a bunch of questions, and winds up very suspicious and worried, so at this point Tim and the Damians have to hurry up and figure out how to announce the situation or go on the run from the Bats as well as the League, which would be. Not smart.

Tim explains the situation over videochat with the Cave before having the cloneboys join him on the feed; this spares them the worst of the yelling.

Bruce, Dick, and Damian all respond pretty badly. Bruce because he doesn’t like change and he’s reflexively suspicious, and having eight Damians to raise is a justly horrifying notion. Also anti-clone prejudice. It’s unfortunately an established trait of his, though not like. A strong one.

Dick because he’s really defensive of Damian, and perceives this first and foremost as an emotional threat to his bab’s fragile identity.

Damian because he knows exactly how he was raised to react to someone being in a place he wants, and he knows how many opportunities his father’s household policies gave him to take shots at Tim, and they may be six years old but there are seven of them. He is going to die.

All things considered, Damian’s being the most rational here.

He’s wrong though. The clones were raised as disposable ninjas, not princes; they’re perfectly well aware killing him would gain them nothing, and they have very little sense of entitlement.

Bruce and Dick do try to be nice to the kids once it’s finally settled they will be staying at the Manor at least for a bit, because they need to be somewhere safe and Bruce can’t leave them at Clark’s house forever. Even Ma Kent has her limits.

But Bruce blows bewilderingly hot and cold and Dick kind of makes a point of of not being too warm to them, because he’s loyal to his demon brat. Damian starts staying at his place a lot and consequently working with Nightwing instead of Batman.

Bruce has no idea what to do about this or if he even should do something. Damian’s thirteen, right? Teenagers are supposed to rebel??? This is a pretty harmless way to do that?

But he misses him.

This does lead to making more time for the Seven Identical Six-Year-Olds.

Their sense of morality revolves around having made the breakthrough to valuing on another’s lives; they aren’t as opposed to not-murder as Damian was but they’re also a lot harder to coax into seeing things his way because they don’t need as much from him, emotionally.

This makes them ironically less terrifying for Bruce, even if he’s still having trouble actually bonding with them the way he normally does with his kids.

Barbara meanwhile is cautious. She always takes a while to warm up to new people, and she doesn’t have Tim’s history with clones to get her over that speedbump. She tries very hard to be fair, but she’s not really welcoming. She’s Reserving Judgment.

Jason thinks this is the funniest thing ever and goes out of his way to tease Damian about it. Privately he’s super creeped out, but as that wears off he starts getting mad about Bruce and Dick making the kiddos feel unwelcome and at some point does a rant, and after that is vaguely protective in a useless sort of way.

He enjoys being a bad influence. The septuplets also enjoy this. They think he’s funny, too, and he’s easier to communicate with than most people around here. Achieves a fairly high tier on the Favorite Non-Clone Brother list they aren’t exactly keeping.

Cass is super about these kids. She can relate to them even more than to Damian, because they weren’t raised as heirs to anything and don’t have the sneering put-down form of pride going, and also she’s actually around to meet them at the crucial getting-to-know-you stage.

She thinks sparring one-on-seven is an excellent sibling bonding activity. There are assassin-child puppy piles once they’re all worn out. Many photos are taken.

She’s doing much better than Bruce at getting them to extend their nascent sense of empathy beyond one another, without actually making an effort. It’s not like they’re actually much behind their cohort when it comes to social development, they’ve just got murder conditioning flattening their affective empathy. (And are ahead of cohort intellectually, which contributes a lot to the dissonance.) Cass’ accidental therapy involves butterflies.

Tim continues to be around, a lot more than he has been for a while because he’s kind of obligated to see this through. The septuplets trust him, which is more than they do anybody else for a while, so he winds up with a lot of childcare duties.

Since this amounts to ‘showing them where to find soap’ and ‘being in their vicinity’ rather than i.e. brushing their teeth for them and making sure they don’t steal each others’ snacks, he’s fairly okay with this.

Sizdahum sticks especially close, which is fine because he’s not a big talker; he winds up getting a lot of absent lessons on detective work.

Tim gets yelled at for having murder scene photos open in front of him; both of them and Haftum, who happens to be there at the time, roll their eyes a lot throughout.

Tim’s friends also visit the Manor a few times specifically to visit the kids, since they already met them. At one point the Damian clones, Tim, Kon, Wonder Girl Cassie, and due to rumor mill Anita, Cissie, and Greta all have a picnic in a rare afternoon of sunshine on the Manor grounds.

Alfred packed the picnic so it has ludicrously expensive cheese, a fruit salad featuring freshly pitted cherries, and thermoses of milkshakes in the favorite flavors of everyone who got one, even the ones he’s never met before. In response to this bounty Anita threatens to come to visit every time she can get babysitters for her parents.

Then she considers introducing her parents to the clone kids. They’re turning out almost as weird, even if in theory they don’t remember their previous lives. We’ll see how that turns out.

Bruce got used to how all his sons’ friends know his secret identity over a decade ago, it’s…fine.

Steph thinks they’re creepy but she’s far enough from ground zero to laugh about it, especially about their occasional appearances as Tim’s row of ducklings, and also she trusts Cass’ judgment.

Everyone does, to a certain extent; it helps the septuplets’ cause incredibly over the course of the first few weeks. It wins Alfred off the fence about them after about three days, which is quite a coup; even before that he was fast catching up with Tim in the ‘learning the differences between the septuplets’ sweepstakes.

(Cass is the only one who can even semi-reliably tell them all apart if they’re not wearing their nametags, or catch them switching, but learning things like their individual preferences in weaponry or cake is arguably much more important.)

Speaking of names, it’s a difficult issue. Bruce would (with considerable angst and self-doubt) be willing to name them all if asked, and they’d probably be open to it if he offered, but they’re not quite comfortable naming themselves and he’s too insecure and weirded-out to suggest anything else.

The other members of the family are varying degrees of not okay with the numbering system. Steph’s main issue with it is she has trouble remembering them precisely, because she doesn’t speak Farsi and learning seven unfamiliar similar-sounding words at the same time doesn’t play to her strengths.

Damian has a tendency to call them by their numbers in English, which only some of the clones actually mind but it offends the hell out of Bruce.

The necessity of keeping them secret until they have actual public-ready names and a story has been settled on wears on everyone’s nerves a bit. The issue that there exists no story more believable than the actual extremely weird truth stands in the way.

Barbara actually crafts an entire cover about rescuing the products of an illegal cloning operation by people planning an overly complicated ransom scheme for Damian, and Bruce going ‘well dammit they’re my kids too,’ which doesn’t get deployed for a while because:

1) everyone’s still hunting for something a little less weird and

2) they have to review the entire body of legal precedent relating to clones to make sure this won’t put the kids in jeopardy down the line or undermine Bruce’s chances of getting custody somehow.

Meanwhile, Bruce absolutely forbids the clone squad from getting involved in vigilante fighting. Because they are six. They’re not quite on house arrest but they have strict supervision and a curfew. They mostly accept this; they’re used to discipline and they did come here for refuge.

He tries to take away all their live weapons. Because they are six. This fails to stick. It threatens to become a serious bone of contention.

Cass, Tim, and Damian (somewhat unwillingly) wind up having to broker the issue; explaining to Bruce that the kids think he suspects them of plotting murder, and to the kids that Bruce doesn’t think they can be trusted not to hurt themselves with sharp objects is. Fraught. On all sides.

Why does Bruce never get any kids for whom normal responsible parenting guidelines are fully applicable?

272 notes · View notes

nothingofnotereally · 5 years

Text

Unpacking the Mother of Skeletons

So I was just talking to some friends about this page and those references, and my psychology degree-possessing butt started explaining the wire mommy reference, which led me to researching the other references, and now I’m going to unpack them here for your benefit.

Before I do this, let me be clear that I am not agreeing with Grant Morrison or his portrayal of Talia nor am I agreeing with this use of these cultural, religious and social sciencey references. Just trying to break down what he’s getting at here.

Ahem.

So the context is this: Morrison’s Talia is 1. On a rampage of destruction because Bruce won’t date her and 2. Rejecting Heretic’s desire for her love and approval. Noteworthy: Heretic is Damian’s clone, so he is her genetic son.

Okay, here we go... in order, except for Kali which is last because boy is that a reference to unpack.

Tiamat: Okay so Tiamat is a goddess, in this case the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of creation, the mother of gods and monsters. She gives birth to the gods, but her husband realizes they want to depose him, so he wars against their children and their children destroy him, and then Tiamat wages war on their children. She is ultimately killed but not before creating the dragons who have poison in their veins instead of blood... but anyway I’m pretty sure the point he’s getting at is that her progeny rebels against her and she in turn wages war on them. This may also link back to the final bits of Batman Inc where Ra’s is set to unleash Damian’s clones - Talia’s unnatural children. Dragons with poison instead of blood, metaphorically.

Medusa: This is a stupid reference because the actual myth (at least the ones I’ve personally encountered) is that Medusa was r_ped in the temple of Athena. And Athena decided to act like a Greek God does, blaming the victim and cursing her to become a monster. Not super relevant except that Morrison has previously referenced this as the story of a beautiful woman who became a monster after her love was rejected - no idea where he got that from, but I think that’s fairly self-explanatory in the context of a Talia who has gone warpath because Bruce won’t date her.

The Wire Mommy: So I’m pretty sure this is a reference to the Harry Harlow rhesus monkey studies in the 1930s. So basically this was a study conducted in, I believe, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Harlow got some babby rhesus monkeys and removed them from their mothers and placed them in one of two primary environments:

An inanimate substitute mother made of wire holds food and a similar substitute made of terry cloth is without food.

An inanimate substitute mother made of terry cloth holds food and a similar wire mother does not have food.

Okay so the findings of this study were basically that the baby monkeys didn’t like the wire mother. In the case where the food was with the wire mother, they would go over and eat and then dash it over to the terry cloth mother and cling to that one.

What I gather from this, especially in the context of the above where Heretic is looking to Talia to love and nurture him, is that she’s saying that, despite having given him life and physically supported him (in other words, having the metaphorical food), she has no warmth or love for him. She is made of wire and without comfort or softness.

The Red Queen: I’m not superfamiliar with the Alice books beyond Wonderland so I did look this up on Wikipedia as well. Therein lies this quote from Carroll:

The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm - she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses

So, again, a comparison between Talia and a cold, dispassionate anger/hatred, and a female/maternal figure without warmth.

Mother of Skeletons doesn’t seem to be a specific reference - if you’ve got one, feel free to drop that on me, too, but I couldn’t find anything. I’m guessing it’s another way of reiterating this point that she is a destructive maternal figure who devours or destroys her unworthy children.

And finally...

Kali: Kali is a major Hindu deity, the wife of Shiva, and one of the more famous Hindu gods. Please note I am not Hindu, I’m not going to front as some kind of expert and if you know better than me, feel free to correct me. Anyway, Kali has many aspects, some of which are extraordinarily destructive and some of which are less so. To find out which one he’s specifically referencing all we need to do is look at the art, though:

Kali’s most common pose in paintings is in her most fearsome guise as the slayer of demons, where she stands or dances with one foot on a collapsed Shiva and holds a severed head. She wears a skirt of severed human arms, a necklace of decapitated heads, and earrings of dead children, and she often has a terrifying expression with a lolling tongue which drips blood. --Ancient History Encyclopedia

So okay looking at Wikipedia because I’m lazy... some relevant references, and you’ll see how the other names she gives for herself back this up:

Rāmprasād comments in many of his other songs that Kāli is indifferent to his wellbeing, causes him to suffer, brings his worldly desires to nothing and his worldly goods to ruin. He also states that she does not behave like a mother should and that she ignores his pleas:

Can mercy be found in the heart of her who was born of the stone? [a reference to Kali as the daughter of Himalaya] Were she not merciless, would she kick the breast of her lord? Men call you merciful, but there is no trace of mercy in you, Mother. You have cut off the heads of the children of others, and these you wear as a garland around your neck. It matters not how much I call you "Mother, Mother." You hear me, but you will not listen.

To be a child of Kāli, Rāmprasād asserts, is to be denied of earthly delights and pleasures. Kāli is said to refrain from giving that which is expected.

So, a mother who, having been born of stone herself, lacks mercy and warmth. Given Morrison’s take on Talia’s background and her relationship to Ra’s... self-explanatory pretentious reference. But that’s not all:

Vamakali is usually worshipped by non-householders. The pose shows the conclusion of an episode in which Kali was rampaging out of control after destroying many demons. Shiva, fearing that Kali would not stop until she destroyed the world, could only think of one way to pacify her. He lay down on the battlefield so that she would have to step on him. Seeing her consort under her foot, Kali realized that she had gone too far, and calmed down.

Okay this is super relevant because one thing that people often miss about Morrison’s Talia is that her acts of destruction are ultimately meant to get Bruce’s attention. She undertakes this villainous rampage because he only pays attention to villains: she doesn’t even think it’s interesting, she mocks her own plans and calls them stupid. She says she’s doing this because Bruce prefers things black and white and over the top.

And in the end, she shows up in the Batcave, declares that they’re going to fight to the death, and then has a passionate kissing session with him...

...seriously, everyone remembers the kiss but no one talks about how Bruce is still into it.

But anyway, so they make out, and she poisons him...

...then declares she’s doing all this as a gift to him, expresses frustration that he doesn’t understand, and demands that he beg her for help.

Here’s my point: she’s not actually trying to kill him or take the world down. She’s trying to force Bruce to submit to her, at which point she would feel satisfied and come back back from the edge. As evidenced by her earlier panels expressing her frustration that he won’t stop or admit defeat.

In fact, a great deal of what she does in Batman Inc. seems to be done to elicit a specific response from Bruce - for example, she has a hit put on Damian, but it’s really just to mess with Bruce’s head, it’s not really meant to result in Damian actually dying. I would say this comes back to this idea that the opposite of love is apathy not hate - love and hate are both intertwined and Morrison’s Talia both hates and loves him, or rather loves him until she hates him and hates him until she loves him.

This reminds me, one day I should write a thing about how Morrison’s Bruce/Talia story is basically a tragic romance and Talia is the actual love interest of his run... or should I because I don’t really want to be the person who writes longass meta about runs and interpretations that I actually hate.

Anyway, SIGNING OFF AGAIN, it’s...

Me!

#talia al ghul #dc comics #batman #fandom meta #batman meta #grant morrison #have i mentioned that i hate grant morrison's talia #because i do

33 notes · View notes