#mine:media analysis

[jostenneil]

i struggle to understand why authors are so loath to acknowledging that talia is a different person from ra’s. that defined the entirety of her character arc bc where he was relentless and ruthless in the pursuit of his goals talia was forgiving and kind and she turned against his ideology time and time again. she may have been trained as an assassin in terms of skill set but she was never interested in becoming his heir (nor did ra’s want that for her, that’s why he needed to find an heir) nor in proving herself as a cold blooded killer since birth. what makes talia’s pre-00s arc significant is that despite all of the stress and abuse of her situation she remains uniquely kind and good and stands apart from her father on multiple occasions. depicting her as having been molded into a mini-ra’s since birth renders thirty years of her character development as null and void bc the fact that she was different from him no longer matters

#talia al ghul #dc #mine:media analysis #i’m so frustrated that story did nothing for her

[jostenneil]

some people don’t realize the reason fans of characters like shiva, jade, or talia are so concerned with how they’re portrayed as mothers or the utter lack thereof is bc they’re literally subject to a racist trope that either renders them completely absent from their child’s life or as a serious threat to it while their child’s white father is portrayed as significantly present and a bastion of influential compassion in comparison (if you count bruce as cass’s father figure in this case). even in today’s issue for example we have damian saying he learned ruthlessness from his mother and compassion from his brothers and sisters when talia was originally a character entirely mired in compassion. people don’t want to see her, jade, and shiva “thrust” into motherhood for no good reason or bc we’re being misogynist. we want to see comics value the potential for them to have a real nuanced relationship with their children at all (without being villainized in the process too lmao) when their white husbands are afforded at least that much and more. it shouldn’t be this controversial to want them to have equal importance in a relationship with their children instead of suffering over and over bc of the asian baby mama trope

#talia al ghul #jade nguyen #lady shiva #dc #mine:media analysis #no like i’m so. are people really this stupid #a lot of what i am seeing in comics fandom is this idea that #if a character is written shitty you just have to accept it #like what the fuck lmao 😭 #why would i do that it’s literally comics everyone and their mother has written for any one character #i don’t have to give a shit about their shitty writing if i don’t want to #and it’s not like i want to woobify these characters either simply the chance for them to be taken seriously #without being villainized per a trope #would be nice. lol #i’m so annoyed i feel like there’s something new to be mad about here everyday #and i’ve barely been here. two months? LOL #i still need to get detailed reading lists for shiva and jade #but if what happened with talia is any indication then lol! #also just another edit i see ppl saying shiva is different bc her being cass’s mom is a retcon and i can respect that! #but ig my point is moreso not to necessarily make them like #a goody two shoes present mother #but just to acknowledge their motherhood at all without pandering to villainy contrast with the white father ya know #even if it means them not being in the picture per se #like my issue is more with respect for their character despite the asian baby mama thing ig #hope that makes sense! but i get what ppl are saying too

[jostenneil]

also idk genuinely the funniest thing about the batcat vs brutalia argument to me is just how often it’s used to obscure selina and talia’s own personhood like this may be an unpopular opinion ig but i don’t think these romances are like others in dc in the sense that they’re about a marriage-entailed true alignment of dreams and moral values between two people. they’re far more complicated than that largely due to selina and talia’s distinct moral ideologies which are what constantly render their relationships with bruce on-and-off, bc they do things differently than he does. both are women who have either valued their freedom from the start or who have come to value it over time, and they act with their own gray area morality or goals in mind bc that’s just how their unique brand of experiences have shaped them. and that’s not to say it’s impossible to emphasize upon their unique ideologies while they’re in a relationship with bruce but very few writers have seemed to be able to do that over the decades, even in portrayals where both relationships were seemingly at their “best”. almost always a relationship with bruce has come at the cost of either of their ideologies being either overshadowed or pushed aside in favor of his own bc he is the hero and the main character of the story so in a plot where their romance is featured his world view ultimately will be emphasized upon first. that’s not a narrative development that’s a problem with relationships like clois or wallylinda bc those relationships rely on both people involved generally sharing an ideology and methodology to begin with where batcat and brutalia literally don’t by nature of the dynamics themselves. they’re on-and-off for a reason and they’re arguably at their best when bruce and selina or bruce and talia are people who have a respect and care for each other but nonetheless stick to their guns bc they believe in the way they do things and they’re not going to compromise on it for anything, even a love this strong

#batcat #brutalia #dc #mine:media analysis

[jostenneil]

something i’ve been thinking about is how people often talk about how dick being brought into the batfam permanently was harmful to him as a character and like i completely agree but i also think we kind of fail to acknowledge or mention how that development also harmed other characters within the batfam. like to me the most obv example is barbara bc it’s interesting that for so many years dick has come to be known as the obv second in command to bruce but realistically he’s never wanted to just stay in gotham and be robin forever, let alone batman, meanwhile barbara has been committed to gotham for nearly her entire stint as a hero and has always been the one who stayed and never thought of going anywhere else. not to mention the fact that she used to be older than dick so if that aspect to her character had persisted then realistically the second in command to bruce would be her. and that’s not to say that she doesn’t have any authority as oracle but i think esp over the last two decades we’ve come to see how bringing her and dick closer to each other in age and prioritizing their romantic relationship has lead to this decentering of her importance as an authority figure within the batpham where it feels like her being dick’s girlfriend is more impt than her being oracle and why she became and chose to stay as oracle. like i don’t think barbara was de-aged purely for the purpose of being put together with dick, but de-aging her has sort of rescinded the initial independence of character that she had bc rather than being her own agent who often operated distinct of batman and robin, her time as a hero was then changed to occur explicitly in tandem with dick’s robin

aside from barbara, i also think there’s the matter of how there are arguments about who should succeed bruce as batman at all when dick has repeatedly had no desire to actually be batman permanently. he’s constantly brought back and put into that role when dc wants his place with the batfam to be emphasized and bc they somehow have no idea how to conceptualize a replacement to bruce who isn’t him (barring knightfall obv, but again, in the end the point was that azrael wasn’t the right choice and if bruce hadn’t been so anxious about contacting dick then the problems would have been avoided all along, thereby kind of implying that dick was always the right choice). and to me that’s kinda lead to an eclipsing of cass as the rightful heir to the mantle despite the fact that she genuinely wants it and intimately understands why adhering to bruce’s code is important, arguably more than anyone else. 

an additional angle you could also look at it from is that of damian’s, and how his relationship with dick has sort of come to overshadow his relationships with bruce and talia in canon. i made a post about this before, but while bruce and talia’s character assassination with regards to the introduction of their son was obv not solely employed in order to build a relationship between dick and damian, that’s nonetheless a major development that it lead to, and we’re generally shown that damian feels most comfortable and open around dick. i don’t mean to say that i dislike dick’s relationship with damian, it’s sweet and it makes sense and i love that damian has a big brother like that in his life, but again, one has to wonder whether damian’s relationships with his own parents might have been prioritized had keeping dick in gotham not been something editorial was so insistent upon, esp since dick’s break from the titans at the time that bruce was dead / missing felt incredibly unrealistic. he suddenly admitted to kory that he didn’t really love her in an eternal, lasting way, despite how potent their history was during the original new teen titans collections of runs 

to me dick is someone who has kind of inadvertently stunted the growth of other characters in the batfam with his permanent presence in gotham, bc he’s made to occupy so many different physical or emotional positions that there’s little room left for other characters to grow into those positions even tho they have all of the potential and reason to. this last extrapolation is a bit of a shaky one but i even wonder if it’s partly possible (in addition to dc’s hatred of legacy characters) that none of the other bat kids are allowed to age into adulthood in main continuity bc after bruce, dick has to be the one portrayed as the relatable adult, and they don’t want other characters to occupy that position 

#dick grayson #barbara gordon #cassandra cain #damian wayne #dc #mine:media analysis #has been on my mind a lot. a lot a lot #i joked on twt the other day that dick's two options are either to be with the titans permanently or die. ajklfjlasjdlfdjgfbhnjgf #like i LOVE him even tho i bully him i genuinely love him as a character he's fascinating to me #but i think he's harmed the batfam more than helped it idk. . .

[jostenneil]

Do you mind elaborating on what you dislike about Winick’s writing?

it’s a couple of different things, but where i think it stems from is the idea that some jason fans have of jason being turned into “the angry robin” as only a recent development, and that winick returning to the writer’s mantle would fix that issue, as if he didn’t ascribe to this version of jason in his own writing of under the red hood, and that influenced so many of the versions of jason thereafter. as much as i hate starlin and what he ultimately did to jason, i think there’s a distinction that has to be made about his writing. he didn’t think jason was a generally angry kid. in quite a few of his stories, jason is bright, nervous, insightful. he’s still very much a good kid. the central aspect to his writing of jason and how that eventually leads to a death in the family is his depiction of jason as reckless due to emotional involvement or naïveté, sometimes both (as can be seen in the case with sheila). and while that’s a bit annoying given the earlier issues collins wrote, where jason was capable of exercising restraint and patience, the part about him getting too emotionally involved at times is at least not all that far fetched given the issue where he learns two-face is responsible for killing his father. but that’s about as far as the portrayal goes, and even in aditf (which is immediately subsequent to the garzonas issues, the content of which obv deeply upset jason and that he also got emotionally involved in), the concern from bruce is that jason hasn’t had enough time to properly cope with his parents’ death, and that if bruce can help him then maybe he’ll be able to patrol normally. there’s never the idea that jason’s some angry kid with a mean streak, and while the thing about his “mean streak” is only a single throwaway line in under the red hood as a whole, i think it exposes the problem with winick and jason writers in general. they don’t want to acknowledge the fact that his issues pre-death were specific. he wasn’t hurling himself like an infuriated ballistic at every criminal. truly there were only two cases where that happened, and one involved his father’s murderer, obv a sore point, and the other a woman who hanged herself bc she couldn’t escape her rapist. (ig if you wanted you could also count him going overkill on the drug bust at the start of aditf, but that was the kind of temporary mental place starlin was leading jason to with the garzonas issues, rather than something that necessarily spoke on his character as a whole.) ascribing all of that to him having a mean streak and not just. . . the fact that he was a deeply empathetic person who was upset by these things that happened to good people is kind of bizarre to me. and yeah, i know winick writes jason killing people who harm children, but it’s the way he goes about writing jason’s attitude that bothers me bc it feels purely driven by rage as if jason’s feelings about certain criminals didn’t stem from a deep compassion for and personal connection to their victims. when you center so much of jason’s post-resurrection motivation around the joker and little else, you forget what drove jason to get emotionally involved with cases to begin with. more than self righteousness about what criminals deserved, it was compassion, and i think winick really missed the mark on that.

on another end, i also think ignoring the case with his father specifically has spelled a kind of disaster for his character. jason’s father worked as a lackey for one of gotham’s biggest crime bosses, and jason initially thought he’d been abandoned by willis until he learned two-face killed him. i think it’s crazy that his philosophy regarding who deserves to die and who doesn’t wouldn’t account for that deeply personal experience, esp since he loved his father. that’s not to say that every person he’s ever killed is suddenly in possession of a conscience and that every head, lackey, etc. was as sincere of intentions as his father was, but i think what winick’s vision lacks is the idea of jason having to contend with difficult questions. what is the definition of “bad”? how do you get to decide who lives or dies? what marks the point of no return for a criminal? it’s that lack of specificity that to me has harmed the character as a whole, not bc i think drug lords and rapists don’t deserve the absolute worst, but bc i think jason should come across situations where he’s forced to ask himself what gives him the right to play god, esp since a part of his philosophy is that he’s unperturbed with killing people who get in the way of him exacting what he calls justice (also this is not to say i agree with how urban legends handled this; while i enjoyed the premise i think the execution was lacking). people like to say there is a lot of nuance to jason’s introduction as the red hood but i don’t really think there is. the film version of the comic marginally improves on things but it’s still far from a genuine analysis on crime or the question of what criminals deserve what punishment, and how one would actually decide on that or on their right to decide to begin with

ultimately, i just don’t see how people believe subsequent writers are what drove jason to end up as the resident batfam psycho by the end of preboot, or as the angry robin in more recent years, when i very much think it’s a direct consequence of winick’s writing. so long as people hold that writing on a pedestal devoid of any criticism whatsoever, jason’s never going to improve as a character, and i’m still going to be of the belief he hasn’t been written well since before he died

#jason todd #dc #mine:media analysis #anti judd winick #i hope this is coherent sorry there’s probably so much more i could say but it’s already so long

[jostenneil]

was talking with alea about this and i think what makes talia’s rapist retcon additionally so insidious and racist is how it blatantly ignores her own origins as a really young brown girl who grew up in a cult and was so vulnerable due to that upbringing that she latched onto the first white man who expressed kindness and an interest in her and who was theoretically around a decade older than her. like i think about it sometimes and it’s crazy that she got married to bruce twice within the first two to three years of them knowing each other and how that was followed by a distanced five or six years where they crossed paths on occasion but under usually pained circumstances where bruce got to return to his support system (regardless of how much he actually relied on them) while she returned to her father, who used her repeatedly as a pawn. and i just can’t imagine how damaging that entire experience was: of being passed back and forth, vesting her self-worth in the hands of two men, and wishing for some kind of escape, all while she was in her early to mid-twenties at best. i’m not trying to imply that bruce was a predator or whatever like he’s fictional and this was all clearly a product of racist writing that lacked self awareness or the willingness to acknowledge the orientalist optics of talia’s relationships with bruce and her father, but it’s Astounding to me that after her going through all of these experiences and trauma where she was clearly at the lower end of a power imbalance, a writer decided to turn the tables and assign so much power to her as to make her the predatory figure in her relationship with a much older white man. it reeks of so much racism, misogyny, and ignorance that i truly, truly cannot stand when people underscore the depth of morrison’s “mistakes”. bc it really is about so much more than just turning her into a rapist (and this doesn’t even get into the optics of her relationship with damian lmaooo) 

#talia al ghul #dc #mine:media analysis

[jostenneil]

it is deeply interesting to me just how much resistance there is from comic readers towards seeking change or evolution from the status quo of cape comics. even the smallest suggestion of wanting to see empathy and compassion prioritized, carceral means of justice questioned and abolished, or hope and optimism re-centered as key heroic traits, is met with a resounding “you know this is super hero comics right? we don’t do that here.” i really want to know and be able to trace back how this level of cynicism came about from a collective of readers who are supposed to be consuming media about super heroes claiming to act for the good of the people. what good is a genre built on this simple concept if the people in question are so inexorably ignored at every turn? what good is it to let go unquestioned depictions of abuse, carceral humiliation, and utter fractures of communal support under the guise of creating “interesting” stories that do not actually contend with modern politics on any level of awareness that exists outside of the structures of white capitalism? it is incredibly bleak to me that so many cape comic fans are so rooted to remaining in a bubble where they are allowed to enjoy what they enjoy with no leeway for critical thought whatsoever that they are, by extension, content to see the figurative assassination of their favorite characters and to see a genre formed in the wake of genocidal fascism become so watered down as to represent nothing more than a vapid money making machine. questioning the ethics or structure of what you read is not an automatic demand to stop enjoying it. questioning the progress of a system and industry is not suddenly going to fracture it at the roots and topple everything over. you are allowed to question and dissect the media you engage with and you should, and there should be room made to acknowledge that heroes at their core should be compassionate people who are driven by empathy and care for their common man more than they will ever be driven by an arrogant crusade to mitigate crime or to maintain the order of inherently discriminatory law 

#mine:media analysis

[jostenneil]

fma just suffers so much from the fact that its two political mouthpieces are a war criminal with a god complex and a white liberal pacifist like if you look at it as a series made up by its emotional beats and character development alone it’s phenomenal but the politics of it are just so bad and it frustrates me that ed is painted as this person who cares too much about the suffering others undergo but somehow finds it difficult to sympathize with a man whose people were ruthlessly murdered nearly to extinction. it’s not just a disservice to his character arc but to readers of color who relate to scar’s plight and suffering and have to see their struggle so decentralized bc the militant perpetrators are ultimately more important and portrayed as more sympathetic characters

#fullmetal alchemist #fma #edward elric #mine:media analysis #like i think about this all the time and it drives me crazy! #i can’t believe arakawa didn’t have ed and al visit ishval even once #they were kids when the war happened ofc they weren’t going to fully understand #and winry’s parents’ death certainly wasn’t going to help their perception #but that she did hardly anything to alter their perception at all is so infuriating #esp since scar had to be the one to ‘prove’ himself like what the hell #ishval is at the center of everything and yet it’s so constantly othered #and tbh altogether these issues really do make ed look like a racist #as much as i love him #like obv it’s the influence of arakawa’s politics on her character writing #but i get why ppl don’t like him for that reason and it can’t be helped #he is a mouthpiece for her liberal milquetoast #and this doesn’t even get me started on roy oh my gooood

[jostenneil]

Where do you think Koriand’r fits in on the scale of how DC views women? I feel like she breaks a lot of standards and because of it she also suffers for it.

i agree! to me what kory distinctly suffers as a result of being written by wolfman for so long in particular is we get to learn about all of these interesting qualities she has—the depth of her powers, the duality between her compassion and anger, her beliefs about love and companionship, her duty to her people—but only as a sort of means to an end, because she never truly gets to succeed at large for the fact of possessing those qualities. instead, what we see over time is kory repeatedly being punished for trying to be herself. her powers are too out of control, she's too emotionally volatile, her ideas about relationships are out of tune with what's considered normal on earth, she's too self sacrificial, and so on and so forth. she exists not simply to shine but to be lectured at for shining, so there's almost this message of "here's one of the coolest girls in the world, with the biggest heart and with some of the strongest powers, but all that can come of those qualities are trials and tribulations, bc she has to learn, she has to be molded." and obv any character's contention with growth and development is about them being molded by their experiences, but what sticks out to me about the way wolfman writes women in general is how they almost always have to suffer for being themselves. he makes them "unique" and gives them compelling qualities or backstories, but we're never quite allowed to appreciate them in full bc those qualities are always used as a teaching point for why they're flawed in some way. i think that's why none of the frontline women on the new teen titans team have ever really been able to move forward. for fifteen years he trapped them in this never-ending cycle of suffering under the guise of "learning" and now all they can ever do is either pay for it or be relegated to stagnancy

#koriand'r #dc #mine:media analysis #asks

[jostenneil]

Hi, did Chuck Dixon (when he was writing Stephanie) have Spoiler go on an anti-abortion rant? Also, the people who complain about politics in comics usually on care about left-wing politics being present in comics, I haven't seen much people complain about Dixon's copganda.

yeah, i believe it was around the 60s issues of his robin run? basically stephanie got pregnant from some random boyfriend she had (who as i remember quite literally appeared out of nowhere) and when she and her mother went to talk to the principal about it stephanie made a big fuss about how it wasn't right to abort the kid and she had to take responsibility, etc etc. it was very opportunistically timed given the debates that were going on about abortion in the national court system at the time, and i imagine it's something he did on purpose as such

dixon's propaganda, to me, makes it sort of easy to ascertain why so many of tim's fans are white (at least from what i've seen). i think he was very much writing from a sort of lived experience of the average straight white male teen at the time and so it's no wonder that so many writers in the present are fanboys of him. i think they felt recognized bc their experience as part of that demographic was recognized even tho we're obv aware it could hardly be called a unique experience, let alone an interesting one. and so the sociopolitical mindsets of the time and that showed up in his books were glossed over bc for the audience that was most avidly consuming them, this was the norm. they didn't realize there was anything wrong with it bc they weren't part of the demographics that that narrative existed at the expense of. it was a book about an "all-american" teenager even tho in this case "all-american" entailed overwhelming heteronormativity, misogyny, and conservative politics cleverly disguised as exercises in personal agency. even with the readings of tim having internalized homophobia i think. . . a lot of white fans fail to realize that that reading can't be divorced from misogyny in his case specifically. like it's fine to read him as gay and obv i'm happy that a mainstream character (well. i suppose that's debatable in the current comic landscape) like him was revealed to be gay, but i think that, again, bc of that general atmosphere of capturing the life of an everyday, "all-american" teen that dixon tries to pass off as normal, a lot of people treat tim's experience with girls in that book as some sort of run of the mill awkwardness and discomfort with a sex he doesn't and will never understand, when it's just. . . dixon being a misogynist who doesn't know how to write women without making them subservient to a man's narrative. regardless of whatever you ship that's something you have to acknowledge, and like, i don't even like tim's relationships with steph or ariana, they're very suffocating to read about, but again, that's bc they're misogynist. i honestly think it even does a disservice to steph and ariana to act like it's fine for tim to treat them like shit just bc he has internalized homophobia. like idk i just think there's better ways you could go about interpreting that he's gay (and this is not to say there aren't in fandom, obv the way people interpret his interactions with kon is there, but i'm just specifically referring to how people use his relationships with the girls in their reading of him being gay, and how there's a lack of acknowledgement that misogyny fuels it more than anything) and overall i wish people would be more cognizant about the way they analyze and interpret dixon's narrative bc of how much harm it perpetuated under the guise of "all-american" normalcy

#tim drake #anti chuck dixon #dc #mine:media analysis #asks

[jostenneil]

i think at some point it’s better to just acknowledge that jason died because editorial wanted him to die. not bc there was anything inherently wrong with him as a person or bc the people in his life thought he was always more inclined towards crime. bruce saved him from a life off of the streets, but jason also saved himself (and bruce says as much) and was on a path to happiness and healing if only he had a little more time to process his grief (something bruce also says as much) and the circumstances were not so bleak and bizarre. i don’t think it’s worth it to try to paint every pre-existing member of the batfam as classist and fundamentally judgmental in order to explain why he died when we can just blame it on editorial and move forward. some things don’t need to be explained in more convoluted detail than already exists. it was a bad decision. it shouldn’t have happened. etc etc. writers may not want to let go of the interpretation where everyone thought jason was criminally inclined but i don’t see why we as fans have to ascribe to it

#jason todd #dc #mine:media analysis #i’m still gone i just. wanted to get some thoughts out after seeing something yesterday 😵‍💫 #i feel like people don’t actually read the starlin issues like #bruce never believes jason acts the way he does bc he’s criminally inclined #he believes he hasn’t given jason enough time to grieve and he feels sorry for it #it was later writers [winick] who turned it into a classist issue without actually addressing it with any nuance at all

[jostenneil]

it’s constantly frustrating how every time talia gets some bad and incredibly racist characterization and people complain about it there is automatically a group of people (usually not invested in her character) who are like well uhh 🙄 what did you expect 🙄 it’s been like this for years 🙄 like i know that you idiot it doesn’t make every instance any less shitty to see propagated at large. maybe the point is not that i had expectations but that this is just more content to cement to readers not invested in her that she is a character who sucks

#talia al ghul #dc #i’m so. god #mine:media analysis

[jostenneil]

like idk it’s something i have been thinking about esp since my conversation with the redacted account on twt but i think “not caring” for talia far too often veers into the territory of being willfully ignorant to how the racist writing entailed by her assassination pervades nearly every aspect of the batman mythos thereafter since damian is a member at the forefront of it. and it’s so odd to me how so many people were able to get through years of batman mythos surrounding his character and hers and be able to call it nuanced without any of it leaving a bad taste in their mouth as to how both of them were dehumanized as characters and by proxy how an arab audience was dehumanized in tandem. it just feels so disgusting to me and to see people just not care and go on acting like it’s at best irrelevant or a normal occurrence of poor writing is bizarre bc it’s so much worse than that, it’s a complete and long lasting exercise in full scale bigotry and i wish more people, not just talia or damian fans, would have the decency to push back against it rather than accept it as a new norm

#talia al ghul #damian wayne #dc #mine:media analysis #like idk. sometimes it’s hard not to assume people who don’t care for talia are racist #bc they don’t care about what she goes through as one of the only impt woc in the batman mythos in order to prop everyone else up #whether that’s bruce or ra’s or damian or jon or selina or slade #like i can’t take people who analyze those runs in good conscience while ignoring what they did to her seriously #it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth lol

[jostenneil]

some thoughts i had after reading an interview between brian azzarello and jim lee where they claimed that lois was too masculine a figure compared to clark and as a result they didn’t find themselves attracted to her, thus reflecting their lack of desire to center her in their superman run despite how integral she is to the mythos

#mine:media analysis #and obv this interview was from the early 00s. but i definitely thinks it reflects how dc began to shift in its approach to women #the gap between how women were contended with prior to the 00s and afterward is staggering tbh #and it sucks bc it’s not like the pre 00s was all ideal. there were problems there too #but i do think it was a lesser of two evils and that women were still allowed to be multifaceted without being punished for it #which i don’t think can be said of many of dc’s portrayal of women now

[jostenneil]

Hi! I’m not sure if you’ve ever talked about this before but, since you usually have a very fascinating perspective on the various bat-related characters, I was wondering what you think of Jason in The Diplomat’s Son- more specifically, do you think Garzonas was killed by Jason? Personally I don’t think so, especially bc it feels like it’s just another way to frame Jason as the “bad” Robin, but that seems to be a fairly unpopular opinion. Sorry if this annoying, best wishes!

i'm not sure if i'm making this up but i feel like i remember reading a starlin interview where he said that knowing whether jason pushed garzonas off of the balcony or not wasn't actually important. all that mattered was how it further encouraged readers' hatred of him as a character bc there was enough content there to cast doubt. in light of that, i don't actually think it's important to know the truth. what's more interesting to me is that the issue was ultimately framed as a way to seed doubt in bruce and in readers, so regardless of the real circumstances, jason was set up to be judged despite the fact that he was a child. that's where the real gold mine of analysis lies, i think, esp given how jason was introduced by max allan collins: i don't wanna learn to be no crook. i just boost what it takes to survive. so much of the initial relationship between bruce and jason in post-crisis is based on jason's anxieties over being judged. and i think that moment, where bruce even considers that jason could do something like that, sort of breaks jason in a way. bc he's spent all of this time trying to prove himself as someone who can believe in bruce's ideals and follow his rules, and in the end, it still isn't enough. obv we know they briefly reconciled during a death in the family and worked together before jason's death, but still. even if jason had survived i think that would have been a difficult thing to recover from, that feeling of inadequacy, esp when it came at the expense of jason feeling that people like him weren't valued as partners or as victims. i wish more writers capitalized on that and actually bothered to contend with any of the class tensions that collins and barr introduced by reframing jason's origins as a character

#jason todd #dc #mine:media analysis #this is like. kind of an answer and kind of not i'm sorrygkdfjlhgdf #but really the unmined class tensions within the batman mythos are so underutilized #(not just with jason but with selina as well tbh) #everyone hates storylines where jason just wants bruce to love him but idk i think they would be interesting if framed this way #bc there really should be baggage that he has over not feeling good enough for bruce despite even bruce saying that jason saved himself #bruce loves and believes in jason so much. he knows jason doesn't have criminal tendencies bc he saved himself from them #but obv the situation with garzonas was stressful. and despite bruce saying he knows jason's upset bc of his family #that doesn't mean jason doesn't internalize bruce's doubts or criticisms in line with his own insecurities #that's something any child will do. that's something even adults do #so much of bruce's relationships with his kids isn't that he's neglectful or that he truly judges them (at least at their best) #to me it's more the fact that bruce means well and does as well as he can. but he can sometimes fails to clarify his intentions #and clarifying those intentions would help a lot. he loves his children more than anything #but love also means making sure your children know you're not feeding into their insecurities. making those clarifications is important #and i think that applies to each of them in different ways

[jostenneil]

the cognitive dissonance of ed working with multiple state alchemists despite knowing about their war crimes in ishval but expressing such disgust at the thought of having to work with scar just bc he killed the rockbells is honestly. lol. and it’s made even more ironic by the fact that at one point he tells miles to hand off scar to kimblee likely while unaware of the fact that kimblee is the very person responsible for massacring scar’s whole family and leading scar to turn out this way, like that level of willful ignorance from ed that we have to see constantly on display is just appalling 

#fullmetal alchemist #mine:media analysis #had to rewatch some scenes from briggs arc bc i forgot something #and idk man it's honestly so nauseating to watch #the whole scene where winry's like 'yeah maybe my parents had a point' #only to then say 'i don't forgive you for your wantonness' #like it's literally a microaggression lmao #and then ed's subsequent behavior #the patronization from miles about doing work from the inside #AND MAKING SCAR SAY HE RESPECTS HIM FOR IT? #it's absolutely ridiculous i hate it so much