#and idk if that's just a part of my own self-loathing or massive insecurities

[potatoesandsunshine]

truly incoherent late-night ramblings about the mighty nein and pride under the cut. an unorganized stream of consciousness basically. i’m so tired i have so many Thoughts

cad saying tonight that nobody in the m9 is vain (can’t remember if he said “none of us are vain” or “none of you are vain” but i’m going with the first one bc i can’t watch it again till it goes up on yt) really got me thinking because my immediate reaction was “no? that’s not true?” but i couldn’t figure out why exactly i thought that - so naturally i spent the rest of the episode pondering it.

like... the members of the mighty nein are each in their own way juggling a massive load of insecurity and in some cases just pure self-loathing but they’re still very... they’re not vain, but they are proud to the point of arrogance which is just super interesting from a character perspective (just wanna note here this is not a “and this makes x character A Bad Person” hot take or whatever, characters have character flaws and that’s what makes them interesting to me, please don’t come to my inbox saying i hate fjord or caleb or caduceus or veth or jester or beau or yasha because that’s just not the case) anyway imo yasha is currently the only one who hasn’t shown a big moment of this flaw, everybody else has. yes it’s possible i don’t remember a moment for yasha at this second but tbh she’s spent so much time getting controlled by other forces this campaign like :( give yasha a break challenge :( she gets one from this post

early on beau had her kind of rebel without a cause, too cool for school thing going on - to me that’s a kind of pride? like it came from a feeling of isolation and disconnect from the people around her and the structures her life had operated in and also the idea that “i’m the only one who sees how bullshit everything is” that’s (at least in my own experience) a really common feeling in late teens/early twenties. honestly the first moment that shook her out of it was dairon imo (i know that a lot of beau’s change is attributed to molly’s death but i honestly think it started back with that brawl in the warehouse) and dairon has continued to be a (flawed themselves) check against arrogance for beau which is really interesting to me? anyway continuing

fjord’s whole persona that kinda wasn’t a persona during the pirates arc (i’m talking specifically about the captain pursuing his own ends, not about the accent thing) was very much a character based on knowing more about the world than everybody else did, even though i don’t think fjord himself believed it? honestly for all that you can say about fjord i think he’s lowest on the list in terms of pride (besides yasha!! who isn’t on this list!!) bc he’s very honest about the fact that he often feels like he just does not know what’s going on around him. props to that bc it is hard to do.

veth’s biggest Moment of this (and pride just doesn’t feel like the right word but i don’t know how else to capture the meaning, the idea of Knowing Better than everyone else i guess? you know what i mean) that i can think of is the letter to astrid in zadash that everyone screamed about bc caleb was the current fandom favorite sadboi at the time; it was such a big moment of trying to arrange someone else’s life for them that’s like. like it’s a Big Moment idk how to explain it. i think a lot of the responsibility she feels for yezza and luc also relies on the premise that she Knows Best which again is super interesting because it clearly causes her a lot of guilt that she’s not doing Enough for them in her own eyes when it’s like... like... talk to each other... idk idk i have Feelings about the brenattos. Arranging the lives of other people, no matter your intentions, is imo a thing that comes from thinking you Know Better than they do. 

caleb... i so do not want to re-litigate the disintegrate discourse that was imo truly a waste of time last week but i do agree with the idea that caleb’s got ye olde mythological-level hubris. the man has a goal of turning back time to rewrite his own mistakes and like it’s not just a dream it’s a Goal He’s Working Towards which means that either 1) he believes it’s possible for him to do it or 2) he can’t admit that it isn’t possible and he has to live with ‘his’ mistakes (i can’t get into the caleb stuff rn but uhhh it’s not as much a personal failing as you believe it is caleb). both of these viewpoints are like. so dependent on viewing himself as A Power That Affects The Universe instead of someone who is affected by it which is kind of the sentiment i’m trying to get at idk idk it’s late i’m tired

it’s interesting with jester and caduceus for a couple reasons but the fact that they’re both literally blessed by gods is like... like i can’t say they’re unduly proud (i don’t really think that any of the m9 are like unduly proud) because they’re literally made More Important by the deities of the setting from the moment of introduction but we do still see really interesting stuff from both of them imo

caduceus thinks he knows better than everybody else which is something i think we’ve seen from the beginning as well? that’s part of why he’s kind of set himself up as the Wise Councilor of the group (and if you ask me, why he seems unable to reach out for support of his own - all the instances of someone digging deeper into him were instigated by other people from what i can remember right now) and it’s been neat to see him reconciling things he Knows Are Right from his time in the cemetery with a more complicated reality in the wider world. it’s hard for me to say that cad’s arrogant because he thinks he’s privy to the literal divine plan when he is privy to an actual divine plan thanks to the wildmother but i think it’s interesting to see it in the small moments. we saw it more earlier i think? but like this part of his character isn’t Gone. as long as he’s got himself designated as the group moral compass i think there’s an element of this in play. 

and jester ohh jester i love u i’m so sorry everything has been so hard for so long like aaaa imagine you find out your best friend (who is also your god) has been lying to you for all of your friendship and also lying to all of his followers (because it turns out he’s not a god, technically) that’s so hard anyway. anway. i don’t wanna derail into talking about how much i love jester but i love her ok? ok. anyway jester’s current defense mechanism is retreating into the fact that she’s the best follower of the traveler and he loves her the most, because she’s Special (which again, her god told her this there’s literally nothing i can say against it) but we’re seeing that kind of fracture in an interesting way if you ask me? because the fact of the matter is, whenever jester asks a question about ‘the followers of the traveler’ she is implicitly also asking a question about herself (this is why i was so fascinated by her convo with fjord tonight also). it only works for So Long to keep repeating that you’re special when you’re not sure about it anymore oh jester i am so worried about u ohhh :( i am so sleepy but i have so many thoughts

#cr spoilers #critical role #i mean the character flaw pride just to be clear

[whetstonefires]

how do you think the batfam mightve progressed if jason never died?

Whaa, 4 asks at once? I’m sorry I still haven’t gotten back on the last one, I thought I was unstuck but guess what, I wrote myself into a pretty little corner by being all ‘I don’t care about what’s canon! i’m just gonna have fun!’ which is the correct approach except then you find out the thing you made up is incorrect and idk how to deal with that. being wrong. it’s a life skill i’m still working on.

So like, if the vote had gone the other way...it depends so much on the writing and editing teams, and so little on real causality, it’s hard to frame a picture?

Jason was created as an alternative to aging Dick down and taking him out of the Titans; his new character origin after the Crisis on Infinite Earths barely got out of its shakedown tour before they killed him off. We know who he was enough to spot the major character derailments, but who he might have been? It’s hard to say.

If he’d made it through the vote, the noisy fans would still have hated him, and so would the man writing his comics. I doubt Starlin would ever have convinced DC to do the HIV plotline with Robin like he reportedly tried, but I feel like Something Bad remained likely.

The 90s are known for their grimdarkness for a reason, and Jason just missed living through them. I feel like his odds of going villain were pretty high anyway, not because of him but because of the constant need for drama fuel. I mean, Alfred had a villain phase, in the 60s.

Babs became Oracle almost simultaneous with the Robin trade-off, debuted the same month Jason died (January ‘89), so that still would have happened. Tim’s influence on her was very slight.

Without Tim, there would have been no need for Steph, since she was created partly as a love interest but more importantly as a foil, and a way of getting more of that high-energy feeling traditionally associated with Robin back into the story even though so many of the fans loathed it and refused to have it in their lead.

(Not that Tim didn’t have a lot of it anyway, but it wasn’t his core feel the way it had been for Dick and Jason. Possibly of note, the ‘87 Killing Joke and ‘89 Batman movie also marked a rise in the use of Joker as Batman’s main dramatic foil rather than Robin, which coupled with the Bronze Age in general really shaped Tim’s character direction. It’s hard to say what caused what, with these trends.)

They might have introduced a girl anyway, to replace Babs. Maybe even a version of Cass. Shiva stated under interrogation during ADitF that she had no child, but in comics terms that half-guaranteed she’d get one eventually, because the concept was now out there.

I doubt Jason would have gotten his own series in the 90s, considering his screaming hatedom and the fact that it took three extremely successful mini-series to get Tim a regular title, but if DC had managed to repackage his character into something that the 90s liked and he had made a go of it, he’d probably have acquired a completely different supporting cast. He might well have continued his pattern of acquiring moms. Maybe even Talia. The whole Sheila thing would have been a half-forgotten backstory subplot by like ‘94 probably.

It occurs to me after typing all of this that you might want to hear my ideas about what in-universe causality might logically have led to, lmao. Let’s see.

Jason’s adolescence was hitting a rocky stage that I doubt this betrayal and near-death experience and technical bereavement would have ended, though it would probably have hit harder than his last few near-death experiences even assuming another improbable complete recovery.

If we up the realism dial a little, he might be forced into retirement by the severity of his wounds. He’d still have to hash out his trust issues with Bruce, probably more than ever. Being a shit communicator was not yet a key part of Bruce’s personality; they might have sorted things out.

Jason would not have dropped out of college. If he’s retired, he goes into a prestigious but helping-centered field with an understanding that he is now the son Bruce trusts to step up to keep WE on the straight and narrow after he dies; inheritance of voting shares may be structured around this expectation.

(Dick experiences that really complicated hypocritical jealousy where you specifically rejected a thing, but it spent so long being marked yours that you feel robbed anyway when someone else gets it. Not a lot of it in the disability scenario, because there’s a distinct vibe of consolation prize there, but otherwise.)

Babs would still have been Oracle. It would have been a less fraught launch, though.

Dick might not have heard about the Ethiopia thing at all, if Jason made a full recovery, considering how little communication was passing between him and Bruce at that point. Dick’s level of Batcomputer access only stated Jason as ‘location unknown’ when he was dead, so.

He and Jason got along fine, regardless of retcons since then, but he was under a lot of stress from a lot of sources, and the feeling that he couldn’t go home even when he really needed to, because he’d been replaced, was very present. That might well have blown up at some point.

I tend to think of Bruce as having changed pretty dramatically as a result of Jason’s death, disregarding a lot of retcons, but I mean, 1987 Bruce already failed to notice Dick having a mental breakdown right in front of him and put him off in favor of hero work with Jason on Dick’s birthday, he just did it cheerfully and with fairly courteous wording. There was a trend in the faildad direction starting already.

There was a lot of relationship stuff in need of fixing and in some ways Jason’s presence made that as hard for Dick with Bruce as Damian’s later did for Tim, even though there was a lot less drama and intentional emotional violence and attempted murder involved. So. That could have gone a lot of ways. Realistically, even without Tim trying to play peacemaker, Dick always gets dragged back into Bruce’s orbit, though. That’s narrative causality at work, but also psychology.

In-universe, Tim can be assumed to have already existed before Wolfman invented him. He’s mostly away at boarding school, but he’s nosy and well-intentioned and he Knows. If Jason ran away more comprehensively than the Great Mom Tour, he might approach him with an argument for why Batman needed Robin and he should go home. Or there would eventually have been a case where he knew something they didn’t and attempted to subtly pass information and got noticed.

Or Oracle’s expanding field of awareness would have eventually noticed him and his zoom-lens one summer evening while his parents were in Haiti getting dead. Idk.

He’d probably have gotten mixed up in Bat-things eventually, and if it wasn’t before the Haiti thing there’s no way Batman would have been invested enough in this random disappearance to be there in time to help, so he’d have been completely orphaned at 13. Bruce taking him in is reasonably likely, since he wasn’t exactly in a position to create himself a fake uncle at the time. On the other hand, he might have gone into foster care. His parent’s company still would have crashed without them, so he wouldn’t have inherited much, but he’d have been better off than most kids in the system because he’d have some assets.

Steph is even more guaranteed to hit the vigilante scene. Bruce would be a lot friendlier to her without Jason death issues for her to trigger, though that doesn’t mean he’d actually be friendly, and Jason would like her, and possibly communicate more effectively than Tim did about how she could not die, or possibly they’d have egged each other on into steadily more unwise behavior.

On the other hand, depending on where Jason’s character development went after surviving Ethiopia, he might at 17 find 15-year-old Steph indescribably annoying precisely because they have so much in common, and lash out at her as a proxy for his younger self, and be kind of awful.

Cataclysm breaks causality to even acknowledge anymore because they rushed on from it like massive chumps, but Jason would have been a good Robin to have for it. He’d have been pretty tall by then, and he’s got the mental tools for surviving in an unfriendly urban environment where money is useless. I think he and Cass would have gotten on well, they have compatible personalities. The only major issue I can see is if Bruce or Babs got really positive about her and triggered some kind of jealousy or possessiveness issue.

We don’t really have any specific data at all from before Jason died about how he would cope with a rival for something he felt entitled to but insecure about--he deferred very nicely to Dick as his elder, but Dick wasn’t actually a threat to anything Jason valued. Assuming later canon is applicable, jealousy would be a definite issue with any additional family members, though I assume without the risk of homicide.

Okay here is an after-midnight hour of my half-baked opinions. You asked for it! ;DDD

#ask #answer #jason todd #batfam #dc comics #superheroes #hoc est meum #my dumb opinions #kuppatan