big fan of the meta commentary on the perception of the robins that you can read from absolute batman #23.
even in a universe where they are presented to the public as a unified front, where they all have the same uniform & the same ultimate goal, and the public is not given any information about their individual backgrounds, personalities etc., there is still the tendency to project a superficial image onto each of them to fuel a popularity contest.
the sight of their mission gets lost in this media frenzy their existence has spawned, where instead of focusing on the issue at hand (the robins being a militarized group meant to protect gotham from the perceived threat that is batman), their existence is reduced to a figment of stan culture. everyone is known for only one or two traits, and it's the traits the public wants them to have rather than ones necessarily rooted in reality, as well as the traits they see desirable in one way or another.
looking at their mainline counterparts, they are coincidentally treated in a similar fashion, by both writers and fans.
of course, this kind of framing in the comics is largely a result of the fandom's TMNT-ification of the robins, which happens not only because of the constant game of superlatives fans of each robin like to play to prop up their favorite (smartest robin, angriest robin, coolest robin etc.), but also because any nuance in the original text gets lost when you only engage with it through the eyes of stan culture. the mainline robins all have so much more to them than the vague descriptors given to them by the greater fandom, and their motivations and values often get sidelined or forgotten in favor of this very one-dimensional way of engaging with the text.
circling back to the absolute robins, we get to see the consequences of such reductive framing in real time. they appear to be more exicted about this popularity poll than worried about the task at hand, and it's what skews their priorities later on. they get so lost in the media frenzy of it all, of sticking it up to dick (the only one who doesn't care about the poll) they let their guard down and well... it gets one of them killed. suddenly, it's not about their mission or "job", it's about vanity and popularity. they've gotten too comfortable in their celebrity status, too detached from their reality and now they've paid the price.
tim in particular is the one who seems to be winning the poll, the one who's most invested in its results and how they're all perceived, and the one who brings up the poll first after their supposed victory over dick (because it's not about catching batman, it's about beating dick and proving him wrong, once again highlighing how important this sense of competition is to them). so it's only right that he's the one to get killed as result. something something both tim and jason flew too close to the sun and now the reality of their situation has come crashing down. it's a painful reminder they're not these lovable celebrities meant to foster a fandom - they're expendable soldiers, too young to fully grasp the gravity of the battle they're fighting.
i can't help but seeing how this parallels fandom sentiment when it comes to the robins. not just with the simplifying of each character, but with how the fandom gets lost in the popularity contest of it all as well. the character's mission, motivation and values get lost in favor of propping them up on a pedestal, and even if the character doesn't suffer from this oversimplification, the purpose often becomes disingenuous, since it's about sticking it up to the other robins and their fans as opposed to discussing the character in earnest.
if you want to give scott snyder and co. more credit, notice how even the way the absolute robins are described seems to mirror the reductive descriptions given to them by irl fans (tim the popular lovable one, jason the bad boy, duke the silent one, steph the mysterious one). now granted, this could just be a product of the same framing that led to the other examples from mainline that i provided above, but with the commentary that can be gleaned from everything else in this issue, such an interpretation isn't that far-fetched in my opinion.
it's just a very interesting direction to take with the robins, since we don't ever really see dc exploring the consequences of portraying the robins as a unified group. it has me very excited to see where we go from here 🙂↕️
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