that dick and tim fight in bruce wayne: murderer is so good and i will never be over it dick blows up at bruce way more but paradoxically it’s because he *does* have higher expectations bc he believes in bruce more?
tim loves bruce but comes in pretty jaded about him from the beginning and with the expectation that you can’t fully rely on him part of the reason why tim brushes off bruce’s everyday bad behavior is that tim doesn’t really think he’s capable of better (and tim has lousy parental models anyway so thinks that caretaking your grumpy immature parents is normal) so bruce has to be really egregious for tim to get mad at him
whereas dick KNOWS in his SOUL that bruce can do better & thus gets way more fed up with him for the petty stuff like. the higher expectations come at their most subconscious level from a sense of betrayal because once upon a time he WAS somebody that dick could rely on and KNEW he could rely on
the little indignities sting because dick remembers a time when bruce wasn’t like this and he really truly KNOWS that bruce can do better which is why e.g. in B 416 Dick’s yelling at him but also demanding better behavior whereas Tim will yell at him and then just drop it bc Tim tends to assume that this is just How Bruce Is and that it’s the price of admission for having a relationship with him but for dick that is his DAD his COMMANDER his ROLE MODEL his I’d-die-for-you-in-a-heartbeat guy
and what’s tragic abt them is the bad communcation bc Bruce actually DOES reciprocate that loyalty & love Dick unconditionally but because he is a terrible disaster person who only knows how to communicate with children he keeps trampling his relationship with Dick out of his own self-loathing issues and his general inability to communicate but that connection!! from when they were a team!! is actually still there and REALLY STRONG it’s the one thing in his life he can’t fully screw up even as he screws up in all kinds of ways because he will always be the person who reached out from his own grief and gave dick a home and support and a new beginning
& like. paradoxically half their problem is that bruce DOES NOT GET how important he is to dick & thinks he’s helping by giving dick space when what dick actually needs and wants is not just independence but affirmation that bruce loves/needs/respects him but to bruce this is just such an obvious fact of the universe it almost never occurs to him that dick might need to hear it
(via @silverwhittlingknife)
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