from what i remember the dick and bruce fallout around dick’s young adulthood was added at the end of the 70s and carried into the 80s as a response to robin fans who were mad that batman books weren’t featuring robin like they used to anymore since dick went to college. the hudson u era was the end of the dynamic duo which was signified by the & Robin being dropped by the batman books. after that robin was relegated to cameo appearances and backups which is what got fans mad
Yes, that is what happened, but the point I was making was different. Starting around the Wolfman era (plus or minus a few years, with the dropping out from Hudson and NTT and whatever else), Dick and Bruce become a lot more combative. However, this fissure in their relationship has erroneously trickled down to depictions of their partnership from before this period.
You’ll see characterizations of them when Dick is 16, 15, 14, sometimes even younger, where Dick is some antagonistic misbehaving child digging for arguments, where they’re constantly lashing out at each other and unable to communicate, when such simply was not the case. Raising Dick was not like pulling teeth. They were the duo for a reason. Insofar as they did grow more aggressive and stunted, it didn’t occur until Dick was almost almost Nightwing. Honestly, that’s what makes the later fissure so sad — the fact that they were so perfectly attuned for so long. It wouldn’t be nearly so tragic that the duo split up if they’d always been two angsty guys barely held together by the mission. And it’s funny, coming from frequent depictions of Dick as being angry and defiant and a handful throughout his time as Robin, to see the source material reject this outright.
I think it stems from the fanon that people like to imagine where Dick was a brat until his later Nightwing years, because that’s funny in concept. Like, haha, you see this nice sunshine himbo man and you wouldn’t imagine how much of a devil he used to be. Except, just as we know the first half of that isn’t true, the second half is equally disingenuous.
It wasn’t “Dick was misbehaved and then became ray of sunshine man”. He always was kind, and optimistic, and hopeful, and funny, and he also always had issues with obsessiveness and caring too much, which later manifested in being callous, having the occasional outburst, or being exceptionally hard on himself. He wasn’t a super difficult kid. He is also not a saint as an adult. It’s just that the latter is a mouthful and not as funny and tropey as “omg Golden Boy used to be baddddd 🙂↕️🙂↕️🙂↕️”.
That’s all I was saying. In the era I’ve been reading, which is like the mid-lateish teen years, Dick and Bruce do not yet have the combative relationship they’re often depicted as having.
