Me, finishing my cocktail: “Man, I should make that post. Really kick the hornet’s nest.”
Pip: “You should. Drinky post time!”
Me: “It’s gonna make people really mad.”
Pip: “Time to hurt some 🎶feeeeeeeliiiiiings🎵~!”
They gotta stop aging Robin up I swear to god. He’s like fully an adult man half the time and it fucking sucks. Make him recognizably a child or don’t bother including him at all. “But it makes people uncomfortable” yeah dude! Because it is! You’re never going to make it okay so make it interesting! Make it mean something! Like Robin is fully just a grooming story. I don’t mean sexually but it’s a narrative about a man convincing himself that his relationship with a kid is so special and unique that the normal boundaries between child and adult can be suspended, that the child’s circumstances and capabilities and needs are so extraordinary that they are rendered a kind of un-child, and that the scale of their eagerness and want counts as consent. Robin’s already traumatized, so what is there to lose?
Everyone wants Batman to be morally complicated so they make him a huge douchebag for no reason but flinch away from the actual parts of his character that are really troubling. The “is it wrong to have Robin?” question is always brought up and then neatly solved in a way that absolves Batman. But like. One of Batman’s most consistent character traits is that he’s able to convince himself of anything no matter how stupid.
Batman is a hyper-intelligent, hyper-powerful Sherlock Holmes character piloted by the ghost of a lonely child. He’s a genius who uses his intelligence to justify acting upon the emotional impulses of an 8 year old with horrific trauma and unmet needs. He uses children for his own emotional gratification and convinces himself that, while it might not be right, it’s not wrong enough to stop doing it.
And, well, many such cases!
Honestly I think the cognitive dissonance of like a 9 a year old Robin does so much more to establish Bruce as a psychologically complicated and morally gray character than any amount of the pointless assholery people just keep piling on to his personality.
#Batman is a grown man who is so desperate to believe that what he went through as a child was survivable #that he will go through multiple sidekicks the way people go through outdoor cats. #he loves his family so much and he cannot understand that he allows them access to more danger than they ever would have been in otherwise. #he is a metaphor for the positive ways trauma can encourage people to help others #but also for the ways people will project on others and try to live vicariously through them! #batman is trying to exert control over childhood as a concept! he is making child soldiers to prove he could have done more than he did! #and over and over again the universe tries to tell him that he can’t. and so he gets another sidekick. #because surely THIS time the small traumatized child will have the strength and will and power of an adult. #and then Bruce can finally sleep easy knowing if he’d only been a stronger boy he could have saved his parents.
