“David Cain loves Cass!” is probably the coldest take I’ve ever seen about Cass as a character (y’know, aside from the blatantly racist/misogynistic/ableist ones or that time DC decided to make her a ruthless killer) because? he fucking doesn’t?
Cain loves the idea of Cass; he loves her fighting skills, her potential to be the world’s greatest killing machine, the fact that she’s the only one of his experiments that was ‘successful’, but he doesn’t love Cass as a person. I don’t think Cain hates or even dislikes Cass’s personality; in fact, I don’t think he thinks about it. At all. I don’t think that he cares about who Cass is as a person, about her wants or needs, about her life, her personality, her likes and dislikes. I don’t think it occurs to him to think about it. To Cain, Cass isn’t a person. She’s an experiment, and a successful one. In a perverse way, I think he might even be proud of the fact that she refuses to live by his rules, because that just proves, to him, how much powerful she is, more powerful than him, and in the end, that has always been his goal; to make something that could surpass him and any other assassin on the planet.
And yes, I do know that the later issues in Cass’s Batgirl run tried to paint him in a more sympathetic light, showing scenes of him stargazing with a little Cass, when Cass had said earlier in the series that he never touched her except to fight. And you know what we call that? Retconning. It’s bad fucking writing.
But it goes beyond just ‘going against stuff that’s already been established’; writing Cain as someone who ‘loves’ Cass as a person is just fundamentally bad writing unless you change a significant portion of Cass’s backstory. Cain has always denied Cass personhood and humanity in the most basic of ways, refusing to give her easy means to communicate (so that her isolation would lead to her prodigal use of body language), throwing her into fights without explaining what violence actually is or what it does to people (because why would he need to tell her, when she’s only a tool to be used?), isolating her from humanity, etc. etc. These are not the actions of a man who loves his daughter.
Cain’s motivations have never been ‘I love my daughter so I must train her to be the perfect fighter, so that nothing and nobody can ever hurt her’. It’s always been ‘this is an experiment, and the experiments before this one have failed painfully, and now I’m getting pretty desperate to get this one right’. No love, no care for Cass’s well-being, no nothing.
The fact that Cain does not see Cass as a human being is pretty significant to her and her character arc, and taking it away and retroactively changing it to ‘no actually he loved her all along!’ is fundamentally bad writing because it reduces the emotional punch you get from Cass choosing to reject Cain and walk her own path. Because she’s not just getting out under his thumb; she’s reclaiming her own humanity.
What I’m getting at here is that David Cain is a piece of shit. A complicated piece of shit whose relationship to Cass is quite interesting to analyze, sure. But still a gigantic piece of horse shit who has never loved his daughter. He loves his experiment. He doesn’t love Cass.
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