pagliacci daughter

audrey | 20s | she/her | lesbian currently dc posting

[an-organism]

yeah

[valtsv]

"here's my original character, Man Who Sucks But Loves His Daughter Very Much" and it's a guy who worships at the altar of patriarchal violence and the woman he uses as an excuse and an effigy to absolve him

[terradni]

Slade had his memories erased, lost his kids, ex-wife, best friend, sons were already gone.

When characters go through traumatic events their opinions change.

Their sense of loneliness might encroach upon them to the point they go to their last remaining relatives and do anything to keep them with them.

Idk. I think Slade drugging rose is in character

That’s my take

[deadgenerations]

"i dont think thats true" powerful ward against Posts

[nedlittle]

age of sail tracy chapman: you've got a fast ship

[roseworth]

lrb i think especially the incest/csa parts are what completely throw me off on whether or not it was intentional. like surely he purposely wrote her as an incest survivor because why else would he have written her and slade like that… right…. did he know he was writing that or was he possessed. was he just that weird about women that he accidentally wrote such an accurate representation of an imperfect survivor

[an-organism]

it's crazy geoff johns stumbled into a nuanced portrayal of an imperfect survivor struggling and often failing yet continually trying to find purpose and identity and maintain relationships and exert control over her own life and mind and body after having that control taken away from her by someone she thought she could trust and the only thing going through his head at the time was "daddy issues!! uh-ohhh 😜"

[an-organism]

do you think that there is any way that the current comics/continuity can bring back the whole slade’s indoctrination of rose/training her etc etc without the drugging (consider the fact that she would not need the drug bc she was born with his abilities built in and he doesn’t drug her bc of grant obviously but the manipulation and entrapment of training remains) ? not that i think the comics will ever bring back the pre-n52 stuff in the first place. but hypothetically.

how do you think they can reconcile that ? do you see a way in which the rebirth version of rose (which is more or less her mainline version currently) can be given that plotline or that her story can be structured similar to that version (where slade tries to make a soldier out of her)….the drugs are unnecessary to me in this case bc we’re just talking about manipulation and indoctrination so yeah….just wanted to know your thoughts (again)

generally my feelings on that plotline are that it wasn't executed that well but it's important that it happened. if you're going to rework/retcon it then something else needs to take its place that touches on the same or similar themes - bodily autonomy, loss/change of identity, deprivation of agency/control, the lasting physical and psychological effects of trauma, crucially slade being responsible - otherwise rose is just a different character, bc all of that was formative for her as a person and as a hero pre-n52 (which is the version of her character i fell in love with) and if it's suddenly gone then that means she hasn't been, yk. formed. which imo is what's happened over the past decade plus and she's suffered for it.

as far as the plot details of the drugs, slade's moment to moment motivation, what specifically he does to her, all that just comes back to execution i think. ofc it's important to tell the story in a way that's believable in general and to slade as a character, i don't think johns really cared much about that and it's pretty evident; n52 aside it'd be overdue for a retelling regardless. personally tho it's hard to imagine what could replace it and still hit on all the aforementioned thematic stuff that i think is really essential for her character. her wants and fears and sense of self and how she thinks about people and interacts with them etc etc, the layers of messiness that made her who she was, all stems (or stemmed, i guess) from what was a very specific traumatic situation, and the more you chip at the edges of what happened to her the more different she's necessarily going to have to be.

which like different is okay and things change and whatever. but i do miss 00s rose deeply even though i think johns made her interesting mostly by accident. so if someone less misogynistic could intentionally write her as an interesting character that would be cool

[an-organism]

tony fleecs be like yeah slade's done some bad things i guess but you know who’s even worse? his bitch ex-wife

[an-organism]

whataburger banana shake . not bad

[an-organism]

to the rose and cass end (sorry i keep bothering you about this) i think it’d make sense for the story if their childhoods were more similar.

bc hear me out, the comics have never been either here nor there on….what happens to rose after lillian dies. does she ends up in the teen titans’ lap ? or in slade’s lap ? does she have an adoptive family that’s killed later on ? the way i’d go about it is slade taking her in (with wintergreen doing the child rearing) and training her and having that extent of influence and control over her life m until one day she comes of age and he just….leaves. and she’s left with all her father’s skills but w/o him ever telling her what he really wanted out of it, he never really pushed her to be a merc like him but why train her then ? to protect her ? or bc it’s the only thing you know how to do ? train a solider rather than raise a child….i loved how you talked about david never having any paradox or conflict about what he was doing to cass…for slade to have met rose later on in life having already robbed her of her mother, his control/influence/abuse in its nature would be different and the way he views what he’s doing too…bc ultimately unlike david he doesn’t want rose to carry on his “legacy” he might even try to frame it as giving her the tools she needs to survive in this world, HIS world, but he hates himself and doesn’t want his life for his children

if you try to structure rose’s story a little differently though…like imagine if she met slade a lot younger….grant is still alive atp, joey has already been maimed and addie’s taken the kids away and divorced him, ending his nuclear family. lillian dies and slade is suddenly left with another baby to raise and his own so to speak and thus another type of fatherhood ensues

sorry if this sounds like the david and cass-iffication of rose and slade’s relationship lol

this is indeed a modern dc moment bc literally who even knows wtf her history is supposed to have been at this point. i think if you asked fleecs who’s ostensibly Her Writer rn he’d waffle for a few minutes and finally go you know her and slade have a really complicated relationship and we’re super excited to explore that

i guess scraps we have to go off of in terms of recent-ish (post-dkdm soft reset) appearances is she’s pretty culturally american, she knows slade and doesn’t get along with him, and she’s close to wintergreen. the amalgamated version that’s stuck in my head across this century of her writing is more or less priest’s take where lillian dies when rose is like 10-12, he takes her back to the states for an indeterminate but relatively short period of time (mayyybe like a few years?) during which she grows close to wintergreen and less close to slade, then Something Happens which causes slade to convince dick to take her onto the titans and look out for her, at which point he’s basically done with the dad stuff. whether that Something is a specific event or just an arbitrary point slade chooses to call it quits is dealer’s choice. generally that feels the most grounded to me

past that my various intuitions - when i think about the few years she spent with him i actually don’t imagine a ton of training got done? like more than a typical childhood obviously but i don’t think she got to the titans as a ready-made mini-deathstroke. immediately after lillian dies she’s a sad grieving preteen that he’s just not equipped to deal with emotionally and so billy does that stuff and slade is barely around, taking on contracts 24/7/365 so he has an excuse not to be there. also grant’s already died so that’s part of his headspace too. maybe over time it becomes the one thing they kinda do together, which i think rose would grow to be at least somewhat amenable to once she realizes it’s the only way she’s ever going to get to spend time with him, but imo it doesn’t really stick. she gets tired or hurt or annoyed with something or doesn’t do it perfectly the first time and slade is always quick to give up and write the whole thing off until one of them eventually wants to slink back and try again. 

that in mind what he's telling himself when he sends her off to dick is that she needs to learn how to fight because she’s his kid and that’s how the world works or whatever, she doesn’t want slade to train her and/or he doesn’t have time to do it (again, work trips), rose is old enough to mostly look after herself, the titans are bleeding hearts who aren’t going to turn a kid away, therefore this is a decent enough solution. like the whole thing is really more about getting her out of his care for both of their sakes but that’s his train of justification.

tbh i think any scenario where slade ends up with a baby, boy or girl he’s handing that thing off to someone else as soon as possible. i don’t think he can conceptualize a baby as either like an endearing tiny being that needs to be nurtured and cared for or as a potential person he might eventually have interest in knowing. it’s a small loud sack of bodily fluids and none of that is his business. the role required is much more traditionally “father” which i don’t think he really enjoys that much, either as a job or a self-concept? he’ll show up when they’re closer to being fully formed people, i don’t think he wants to do the actual forming. again not his business. for a variety of reasons including grant and his own childhood but regardless

this could be an adoptive family situation but otherwise, probably wintergreen draws the short straw again because adeline’s not putting up with any of that (although a version where rose is begrudgingly raised by her is. compelling to me) and he doesn’t have anyone else in his life to dump her on. also i think it screws up his relationship with both wintergreen and rose over time as rose comes to know billy as a father and not slade and they diverge more and more and everything that entails. there wouldn’t be a direct confrontation because that would require slade admitting he feels some type of way about it but yk. could be it goes similar to the above where he’s in and out in her teenage years giving ill-fated self-defense lessons, idk if it ends up any differently outside of maybe wintergreen being less open to him being around because his priorities have changed etc. 

as far as cass-davidification i meannn idk. to me any extended length of time past a couple years of him raising rose presents too many opportunities for him to look for an out, come up with a reason she needs to be somewhere else, whatever it is. like on a day to day level i don't think he's equipped to withstand the self-doubt and everything else that differentiates him from someone like david who just follows what feels satisfying. even if he liked it he wouldn't be able to let himself like it for that long. but that's just me i think you could support another conclusion if you wrote it well. or even if you don't care and write it anyway. i mean he likes respawn apparently. so there's that

[an-organism]

sometimes ppl will go on about how totally slade is not a good dude and that's really important to maintain in the narrative and it's like yeah you get it. and then you realize what they mean by him not being a good dude is just that he kills people for money. which like yeah i guess,

[an-organism]

cass cain u would love disgusting $12 protein lattes

[fiercestpurpose]

How to write a plot

Start with woman

Put her in situation

Add another woman

Complicate situation

Almost solve situation, but then…

Another woman!

Complicate situation

[an-organism]

also the dichotomy of like…..david raising cass to be a killer, raised to perform the specific function of taking lives in the most efficient and ruthless ways possible to the point where the language she spoke became violence and then her rejecting that and finding independence from him and leaving him behind

vs rose being pushed away and seemingly rejected/abandoned by her father all bc he didn’t want her to be poisoned by his world and his life and the violence he lived in (having lost one child to it and nearly lost another) and rose going against his wishes and going into the merc business anyway much to his horror and chagrin

the irony

definitelyy something to cass and rose having what the other lacked and both suffering for it. being chased vs chased away for sure. cass remembering the happy parts and struggling to square them with the pain vs rose idealizing a father who’s there and loves her but never having enough of it concrete in her head to complete the image.

i think cass understands david on a really core fundamental level but can’t look that understanding in the face because she’s too close to it all and it hurts too much and she can’t separate it out. i don’t think rose will ever really understand slade no matter how hard she looks (and she does keep looking), in part because he's too much like her and neither of them understand themselves.

cass has spent most of her life trying to forget both the good and the bad. rose would take the bad if there was some good in there too. would either of them be happier if they got what they wanted? do they really want what the other has or does it just seem slightly more conceivable than an uncomplicated good? probably not, and they probably both know it. i think they'd both call the other ungrateful anyway

[an-organism]

rose and cass as mirrors of each other, and each other’s counterparts in the comics is a concept that i love, even though i think her main foil is damian (there’s lots to be explored there too) i’ve read the rose issues of batgirl and i personally don’t like the way rose is written overall but some parts of it i really like and are really fascinating to me

anyway, i wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the dichotomy of cass & david vs rose & slade, where david specifically brought cass into the world and engineered her to be a human weapon (his legacy, his progeny etc) and then ended up just…loving her as a daughter. vs slade who didn’t even know about rose’s existence for a decade or so (her existence being unknown to him, and a”mistake” to rose which she internalises) and then immediately pushed her away from himself bc he didn’t want her hurt bc of him/didn’t want her to end up like him. their relationships are similar and paralleled but like also opposite and inverse if that makes sense…

do you think though slade’s relationship with rose is like…directly similar to cass and david’s…dc continuity is messed up but i feel like the writers have never been able to decide on whether to make slade a copy of david as a father (training my daughter like a child soldier to be my legacy, the next Me) or like…making slade someone who wants his kids far away from what he does so they don’t end up like him or become him. he pushes them away and makes them hate him for good measure. how would you go about this ?

sorry my thoughts are all jumbled up lol, i’d love to get your insight on this

many thoughts yes here are some

the thing with david imo is that he isn’t grappling with a lot of cognitive dissonance when it comes to loving cass and hurting her. it doesn’t really occur to him that she can’t be both his weapon and his daughter, or that she would struggle with being both of those things. i don’t think it even occurs to him that he’s a particularly bad father, or that it’s not in her best interest to be with him and that being a bad thing and so on. he’s not comparing himself to anyone else, there’s no ideal he’s trying to live up to or outperform or contradict. david i feel is also pretty in touch with his own desire to have cass close to him as a combination daughter/partner/weapon etc. he’s aware of it and not tortured by it, there’s not really any self-consciousness or guilt or fear of inadequacy there. he remembers those early years as cass being happy and himself being happy and he wants that to continue in a relatively uncomplicated way.

otoh that kind of desire isn’t something slade’s ever really been able to look directly at in himself. he’s always approaching it in these very distanced overwrought ways where he doesn’t have to make himself vulnerable by expressing some kind of longing to be more present; he’s relatively content to be the bad guy and piss rose off and drive her away because the image of him it creates in her head is one he’s more comfortable with, but he still doesn’t want to be completely out of her life and comes up with reasons to be kinda-sorta around and do the above on repeat.

like slade knows he’s a piece of shit and that he isn’t good for rose and on some level that does bother him. there’s an internal struggle driving his actions between that awareness and the want for closeness that he doesn’t ever have total control over. i think there’s an abstract better version of himself somewhere in his head that could be a positive presence in her life, but he either doesn’t think he’s capable of getting there, doesn’t want to go through the (difficult, painful, messy) process of changing, doesn’t want to acknowledge the desire for change period… some combination. in any case he can’t see himself becoming that, but it’s hanging over him regardless. 

all of that is what i like to think about with their bg2k run-in where cass compares him to david. because what she says actually bothers him! again, he knows what he’s doing with rose is fucked up and wrong and kinda pathetic, but he’s in a place where he’s losing that internal battle and trying not to acknowledge how much he’s indulging himself and embracing the heartless evil bastard persona that everyone thinks he is anyway because it’s easier to be that than the alternative. 

but cass gives him a chance to double down on it, and he doesn’t. there’s an interesting ‘what would david do’ with the sword-in-the-throat thing which to me is like. i think david would do the same as slade for similar reasons but what’s happening in his head during/after would be different. for slade i think it cracks open a pandora’s box of self-consciousness that again, david doesn’t struggle with in the same way. david does not care about his image, about what anyone could conceivably think of what he does or wants with cass. he’s not thinking about any of that. slade i feel like is really overthinking what it means that he lost the idgaf war, that it’s a crack in the persona.

it’s entirely possible that i’m reading a lot of internality into slade with that arc that maybe wasn’t totally meant to be there but that’s a lot of what i personally see in it/trying to fit it into the broader context of their relationship over time. which is obviously written very differently at different points. them being foils as father-daughter pairs in either direction i go kinda back and forth on, both whether that was intended and whether that’s what i think they are? that bg2k thing i mentioned i feel like is an example of david and cass’s relationship being the foil to slade and rose’s, in the sense that they’re meant to be contrasting - not mirrors as in 'slade is just rose’s david' but rhyming at this one intersecting point that highlights their dissimilarities, with cass temporarily taking an antagonistic role to slade's temporary protagonist in that issue so all of that stuff can be teased out. (which i think is a really cool choice for something that happens in her own book btw.)

does any of that make any sense whatsoever  idk

[an-organism]

any thoughts on ds26 characterisation of rose so far ? what do you think about her being a mercenary ? me, i’m personally excited to get into it esp in regards to how different she is from her pops and what her own moral code is etc etc

also, what are your thoughts on the adeline of it all ? we know that at the end of #4 she’s about to kidnap rose to get to slade (revenge for grant i take it) i’m kind of teetering between concern over her being used as a plot device for slade’s story (go figure it’s happened before) i wouldn’t be able to stand if anything happened to her, yet am excited to see slade lose his mind about it lol. as long as my baby is okay though

anyways what do you think ? do you have any theories of your own on where this is going to go ?

ds26 in general hasn’t been overflowing with things to unpack i’ve felt? with the caveat that we’re only four issues in, if all we’re really getting at is ‘people slade cares about get hurt and he gets pissed and kills a bunch of people over it’ that doesn’t do a ton for me personally. like it’s conceptually inoffensive and not like i’m jumping ship but is there anything else we can touch on besides turning him into dirtbag john wick or whatever. that all sounds more negative than i really feel about it but i want a little more messiness ykwim

rose last issue felt pretty good i think. i don’t have any problem with her being a mercenary, though i wish we had some sense of what the state of continuity is with her being in the titans, what happened there, why she left, how she got to being a merc… it feels like nobody’s done any work in trying to develop her point a to point b in forever. even from the reworked history priest gave her i have no idea what’s still in effect since dkdm. (this is kind of a dc-wide problem rn with ~everything being canon maybe sorta~ but yk.) but yeah she’s just shown up here and there without any of her own drive or context, usually adjacent to/facilitating a man’s story (basically it’s been either slade or jason), and like. don’t love that. no idea if fleecs has any interest in changing that, so far the perspective has been pretty strictly limited to slade. again it’s been four issues so withholding judgment for now.

the idea of adeline hurting/killing rose as a villain move (my hypothetical sadness aside) is a liiiittle boring to me tbh. i feel like there’s more interesting ways to explore her internality, how losing grant has affected her, how she feels about rose and slade and his relationship to lillian… plus i’m a little wary of any plotline that puts slade in the position of the righteous protective alpha patriarch etc, if only in terms of my own taste. i liked it with him and isherwood in ds16 because it felt like there was more going on beneath the surface, an element of him performing that role, some kind of hypocrisy/misdirected anger, everything else that’s hanging over the family being embodied in this one person for slade to take it out on, all the extra stuff you can pull out of that situation that felt at least somewhat intentional. this idk. we’ll see.

i do think killing off wintergreen has some interesting potential if it actually sticks, taking away his external moral center and seeing how he responds, so on. the idea we got last issue of wintergreen lowkey usurping him as a father and slade having to deal with some sense of envy/inadequacy about that in the midst of grieving, and not having any place to put those feelings because his feelings guy is dead and the feelings are about him anyway so even if he was alive it’s not like he could have worked through it with him. that’s cool i’m into that.