#rip to Tim's shit roles in social interactions lately | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wesavegotham · 3 years

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So don’t hate me but I’m kinda liking damian’s animated versions better than his comic one I really like his comic one but after all the shit happening where he has been nerfed nonstop getting beat by Thomas Wayne Batman, the teen titans red hood (although Jason attacked from behind like a bitch) and now flatline beating him. Not to mention Bruce not being a father and Damian now Being blamed for everything when they all have no room to talk. God I was satisfied when his old team died in future.

This is going to be a really long post, my apologies in advance.

I absolutely get where you’re coming from. I personally still like comic Damian more because I feel like there is more nuance and layers to him compared to the animated universe Damian, but that is simply the fault of the limited time they could spent on him in the movies.

Movie!Damian certainly wins more fights than comic!Damian and was never regressed in any way that is comparable to the shitshow that was Teen Titans (2016).

You’re adressing a problem I have with comic!Damian too right now, a problem that I’ve already talked about with some people here on tumblr in private. Which is that for all the talk about what Damian can do the comics have rarely shown all those skills Damian should have being used in the actual story in recent years and that is frustrating. I find Damian’s arrogance interesting as long as I feel like he can at least back it up in some way, but in recent time he comes off as just an idiot because he has done almost nothing but fail and lose and the writers still have him act like he’s the greatest. But it doesn’t feel like he can back up his confidence anymore. At all.

If I had to name a skill that differentiates Damian from the other Robins right now then I could only list his skill to hide from Batman and that is a skill he only has for plot convenience. We don’t see him do anything to cover his tracks, we are only told that he somehow did it. And I’m pretty sure that the second this skill stops being convenient for the story it will vanish once again. It will probably end like it did with Jon, where Damian somehow hid so well that Jon said they would never find him in Teen Titans, when they wanted an excuse for Jon to not get involved with his friend’s fall into darkness, but now that DC wanted them to interact again all of that is forgotten and Jon has no problems finding Damian.

Damian is not the most social Robin, nor the most intelligent one and considering how he seemed to lose against everything and everyone in recent years I can’t say with a straight face that he’s the best at fighting or the most skilled. And that IS a problem. Damian will never be known for his social skills or his detective skills, those niches are already taken by Dick and Tim, but in theory he should be a great fighter or a highly skilled person. Damian has sacrificed his entire life for training, both in the league of assassins and during his time with the batfamily. But if Damian sucks at fighting (as in: he loses a lot more than he wins) and his skills play no significant role in advancing the plot, then what is the point of his character? Great, he’s good at drawing and likes manga now, but how will that help with a fighting tournament? Or with solving the mystery behind the league of lazarus? A protagonist is usually supposed to be able to change the situation he is in, that is why he’s the protagonist and not someone else. So what makes Damian so unique that only he can solve the situation he finds himself in during Robin and not someone like Conner Hawke? Or what makes him unique in the batfamily? I hope Robin adresses that soon.

Of course now one could say “He still has an unique position as Bruce’s biological child”, but that also was completely irrelevant in recent years. For all the moments since the start of Rebirth that had batfam-fans complaining that Damian was favored by DC because of his status as the only biological child of Bruce, there were actually very few interactions between the two. Stuff like Bruce talking about Damian or saying that he loves him was primarily found in scenes in which Damian was not present. Or it came way too late, like in Teen Titans (and Bruce refusing to hit Damian in the face because he is his child sets such a low bar, I refuse to acknowledge that as a sign of love)

If you look at how Bruce actually treats Damian or describes him then there is little love there. He ignored his 13th birthday, did nothing when Damian left him after the events of Justice League: No Justice, it had no impact on the Batman books at all, Bruce only called Damian for missions like two times, once in City of Bane (which was just so shitty, as I already explained in a previous post) and a second time in Detective Comics #1017 (He sent Damian to find a missing kid in a snow storm, while he dealt with something else), refused to comfort him at Alfred’s wake and when Bruce reflects on what happened in Teen Titans he blames most of it on Damian’s personality, both in Detective Comics #1030 and in Robin #1, and both times there is nobody questioning Bruce’s asessment. He really doesn’t have anything nice to say about Damian and apparently we are not supposed to disagree with him. So in summary: Damian seems to have no skills that make him indispensable for the batfamily, Bruce seems to have a very low opinion of Damian’s character and now that they have decided to give us Bruce searching for Damian the only reason for that seems to be that Bruce suddenly feels responsible for his child, even though that should have already been the case when Damian seperated from him in 2018 or at least directly after the second Teen Titans annual.

Even the kinda nice things Bruce says about Damian in Robin #1 can be called into question if you think about them. He says he has no doubt that Damian can take care of himself...and then we see Damian getting his heart ripped out at the end of the very same issue. Of course we know that Damian’s story doesn’t end there, so I won’t judge this too harshly yet, but to me this didn’t come off as Damian being able to take care of himself.

And I get letting Damian lose at the start of the tournament to establish Flatline as a threat and to make it clear that this tournament is not a game. I also get that Damian’s fight against King Snake was supposed to make sure that we still think of Damian as competent even though he loses later on. But at least for me, winning against King Snake was not cool or badass enough to make up for the fact that Damian was easily killed, in front of everyone, by a literal nobody like Flatline. King Snake is an old, blind guy, that didn’t show up in any DC comic I read since I started in 2018 and that was apparently beaten by Tim in his solo comic when he was 14 back in the 90s. Sorry, but that just isn’t impressive enough for me, especially since I’ve seen Damian lose so much in recent years. It doesn’t establish Flatline as a badass, it just makes me think that Damian is not that great of a fighter and shouldn’t be in this tournament.

I have some more thoughts on the tournament that make me wish that the arc will start being less about winning the tournament itself and more about something like taking down the league of lazarus soon (mainly the fact that a fight about being the best fighter is useless if the big guns are not taking part, the fact that you can only win by killing your oponent, which should be a problem for Damian and how nothing we know about the rewards for winning, becoming part of the league of lazarus und apparently immortality, is desirable for Damian), but this answer is already too long.

I’m going to be honest an admit that I did not like the ending of Robin #1 at all and that I hope that Williamson will show Damian being competent really soon because I’m not here for another pointless arc about Damian learning humility. I want to see Damian win for once, you know, like other protagonist usually do at the end of an arc and if Damian can’t even win or tell us what’s going on with him from his point of view in a book about him then I’m probably going to feel very disappointed by this book.

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gaiatheorist · 7 years

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“Social validation feedback loop.”?

Damn, the article about a former Facebook executive raising concerns that social media is ‘ripping society apart’ doesn’t have comments enabled, I can’t collect up-ticks, or start a lively debate with strangers. Yes, that’s sarcasm, and yes, I am well aware that this platform is just another ‘validation loop.’

I have Facebook, I was late to that particular party, I drifted over from ‘Friends Reunited’ in about 2008, I’ve had a couple of Twitter accounts, and deleted my SnapChat app without ever using it. WhatsApp is there, for that one former colleague who isn’t ‘on’ social media, oh, and there’s the email group for that other former colleague. I assume he’s in one of the WhatsApp groups, but he might not be, he says ‘cell-phone’, and was still carrying one of those PDA devices around with him until quite recently. See, it’s getting complicated already, all these discrete (sometimes indiscreet) pockets-of-people in my pocket. Have a borderline-obsessive pocket-tap while you’re there, to combat the very 21st Century phone-fear. I’m fine, I could give it up any time I wanted to, I don’t ‘have to’ check it every time it beeps, buzzes, or pings at me.

I do understand the point the article is making, it is very easy to allow social media to become something of an addiction, I fell into that particular trap with my first experience of Twitter, watching my follower-count creep up above 2000, and loving the re-tweet and ‘star’ numbers clocking up. I once had a ‘conversation’ with Tim Minchin, about whether to use singular or plural terminology in respect of The Beatles, and I ‘talked down’ Sinead O’Connor during a mental health crisis. The Jeremy Clarkson re-tweet attracted an absolute shit-storm pile-on of me being accused of plagiarising a TV show I’ve never seen. Swings and roundabouts.

It was new, it was exciting, I’m chuckling because I read ‘American Gods’ on the recommendation of a Facebook ‘friend’, and did see the ‘Media’ and ‘Technical Boy’ characters very clearly, in context of some of my low-level approval-seeking behaviours. ‘Did’, not ‘do.’, I’m 40, not 14, “I remember when all this was fields.”, and such, as much as I avoid contact with most flesh-people, ‘IRL’ is the real world, my like-whoring phase was short-lived. There was an incident-of-sorts, a person I’d ‘blocked’ on a specific platform made reference to something I hadn’t mentioned elsewhere, and it rattled me. Cross-overs and conspiracies, I still have the occasional pointless-perusal of ‘people you may know’ on Facebook, some of them I do know, some, I don’t want to.

On a cosmic scale, social media is ‘new’, 20 years ago, if you wanted to make plans with someone, you phoned them, or met up in person. If you wanted to show them your new sofa, you invited them to your house, to see it. (Why you’d want to do that, I don’t know, I just happened to be looking at the sofa.) 200 years ago, it would have been hand-written letters, taking days to arrive by horse and cart. Evolution, with much less pointless anxiety about knowing that the recipient had ‘seen’ the message, and not replied back in the ‘olden days.’

The instant-availability is new, no more waiting days for the society gossip pages to say which lady had the best hat, now everyone can broadcast to everyone else that they have a new hat, and then sulk when ‘not enough’ people ‘like’ it. I’m us/them-ing, because I don’t seek approval for the same things as some of my contemporaries. I think that the last ‘selfie’ I posted on social media was a deeply unflattering close-up of my eyes and nose, after a bottle of shower-gel hit me in the face. (Don’t ask, it’s me, isn’t it?) Posed-perfection on Facebook, from the “Don’t mess up my hair!” types, that’s not my world. I am aware that I do seek approval, but it’s never aesthetic, or vanity related. I am more than the sum of my parts.

Society is changing, and the pace is more rapid than anything humanity has experienced to date. During my wakeful pre-dawn hours, I ‘could’ monkey about online, and get myself into all manner of mischief. I choose not to, as much as there’s nothing else to do at 3am, starting an argument with another insomniac, or someone in a different time-zone isn’t particularly productive. 24/7 and everything-instant is new-ish, ‘everything’ being part of the problem. A few people I genuinely respect deliberately seek out content they disagree with, to be fair, it’s not difficult, I do my fair share of head-shaking, and muttering “No, it’s not, you knob.” at all manner of things. The ‘bubble’ phenomenon isn’t new, it just didn’t need a name, most people have generally chosen who they do-and-don’t interact with, before we had social media, we just limited contact with people we didn’t want to share oxygen with.

Personally, social media is not ‘ripping apart’ society for me. I’m not unique, or even unusual, I just understand it differently to the ‘other’ approval-seekers. I’m insular and isolated by choice, even before my disability made ‘outside’ social interactions much more complicated, I didn’t engage socially very much. It would have been very easy for me, newly disabled, and recently unemployed, to ‘fall into’ the internet to fill the ‘need’ for interaction and acceptance/approval. I’ve put ‘need’ in quote-marks, being that most dangerous of things, an isolated human. Other people disapprove of that, to varying degrees, but they do eventually stop pestering, after enough don’t-want-to responses to their I’m-right-you’re-doing-life-wrong insistence.

I suppose that pressure-to-conform is a part of it. “EVERYONE is going, why won’t you come?” and “This is the best face-crayon in the world, you NEED one!” I’m resistant, downright stubborn, obstinate about not buying-in to fads, or being ‘in with the crowd’. ‘My’ version of society isn’t being ‘ripped apart’ by social media, my Facebook account is only still open because my son uses the Messenger facility instead of text-messaging me. I flag/report concerning content re-posted into my Twitter timeline, and, occasionally ‘call out’ misleading news, rather than believing everything I read. (Or ‘Like and share to win this improbable prize’ guff on Facebook, but there’s no point trying to educate some of my ‘friends’ on there, I just ignore them.)

I don’t think ‘society is being ripped apart’ by social media, but I’m not glued to my phone-screen when I ‘should’ be giving real people my attention. If I’m ‘with’ a person, they have my attention, my phone can beep or buzz as much as it likes, I don’t ‘have to’ check, or respond, because anyone who ‘knows’ me won’t be offended if I don’t reply immediately. (I do have to advise ‘new’ contacts about my tendency to fall asleep mid-message, though, brain injury fatigue will wipe me out with alarming regularity, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was deliberately being rude, unless I actually was.)

My son doesn’t bring his phone to the dinner table, and if my phone buzzes or beeps when I’m with someone, I leave it. “Do you need to get that?” is rarely a ‘need’, but a ‘want’, I ‘need’ my heating to be fixed, and I ‘need’ clarification on a medical appointment, and my PIP disability tribunal, but if anyone messages or phones when I’m in an appointment, or with another person, I’ll just have to get back to them. ‘My’ society doesn’t include family gatherings, or social outings, but, even when it did, I wasn’t constantly checking timelines or news-feeds. I’m between generations, the in-laws complained about the grandchildren ‘always on their phones’, being ‘anti-social’, and couldn’t see that the young adults WERE being sociable, just in a new way.

Society as-was, for the in-laws, and possibly my own parents has changed, but I challenge the blanket-bad assertions. Bits of the internet are very bad indeed, it’s more a case of educating people to identify them than monster-shouting that Facebook is a portal to hell itself. Work is needed with the younger people, who have ‘always’ had social media in their lives, but some of my generation are already validation-trapped, not the best role models. The validation-loop, the desire for affirmation from others needs to be challenged, to my mind, it’s a negative behaviour, eroding self-confidence and self-worth in vulnerable individuals. (There’s an expand-out on vulnerability to grooming, while-ever the external-affirmation is ‘needed.’)

Social media is not ‘destroying’ society. In some ways, social media is becoming society. ‘Real’ society progressed, from burning witches, to abolishing slavery, to votes for women, and acceptance of non-binary identities, social media can do the same. In the right hands.

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