rose actually being acknowledged as asian in ds26 #4 was so relieving and so wonderful to me but i also love the context in which it was written, i just love the writing of this whole scene in general. a racist creep makes racist and creepy remarks towards rose and attempts to harass her and slade immediately sets him straight. the guy doesn’t process that rose could be his daughter, again, bc of her race and that fact the they’re in the middle of nowhere, USA.
this whole interaction + his interaction with slade in the bathroom is racialised. so he doesn’t consider the girl young enough to be this guy’s daughter could be his daughter. obviously bc he’s white and she’s asian. but then he makes a comment that sets slade TF off who is already on high alert and enraged bc of this perceived threat to his child. the sexualisation of her is the final straw that breaks the camels back and slade kills him. it’s funny to me that this deranged act is obviously an act of love here. like i cant help but cheer at slade killing racist creeps for his daughter.
this moment in particular was chilling i loved it
…but then rose runes around and throws it in his deface that slade killed him for something that he didn’t deserve to die for, and slade tries to reason with her saying that he did for HER sake and saftest and rose lashes out and tells him he did to satiate his own thirst for blood and bc of his twisted (or lack of) morality and is repulsed by the action…..i just loved it
None of you told me that Donna and Terry's son was a one-off villain in a Flash comic where he's adopted by Granny Goodness. Donna had that whole angsty issue about her lost dad and the end of her marriage and motherhood in the 2025 Titans Annual and she still has no idea that Bobby has spent the last five years getting tortured on Apokolips
I want to analyze Changeling/Beast Boy/Garfield Logan's behaviour in NTT, I will also take into account his backstory (parents, Upper Lamumba, South Africa, Galtry, Doom Patrol).
What do I actually want to focus on?
Basically, the sexual harassment we see from him in NTT. Specifically toward Tara Markov/Terra, but more in general, toward any female-presenting two-legged creature.
Anyway, welcome to another episode of LET’S OVERANALYZE EVERYTHING!
Sexual harassment?! No, no, you’re completely wrong! He was just a bit annoying!
Emh-emh…
(just to show a few)
Unwanted physical contact (even in animal form), sexualized comments, coercive “jokes” (mouth-to-mouth trick, forced proximity, kiss attempts)… these map pretty cleanly onto modern definitions of harassment. Joking intent doesn’t erase impact.
That behaviour is constant, and sometimes it’s clearly not intended toward a potential partner, but just… put out there:
It doesn't matter whether it’s an object [him kissing the floor of Titans Tower, jokingly saying “let’s run away together and make little bungalows”]
A non-human male-presenting villain
Not intended for the girls to hear
Or not directed at any girl specifically
This is literally his standard behaviour.
And why is that?
The real reason? Because he was written by Marv Wolfman.
Yeah, believe it or not he wasn’t a sex pest in the Doom Patrol OG run. Yes, he was annoying, bratty and a ‘rotten kid’ to use Mento’s words, but we don’t see the sexual harassment that NTT put us through and that was kept in some other runs.
But the in-world reason?
Because that’s been reinforced instead of corrected or sanctioned.
Gar wants attention. He starves for attention. He’s been feeling like he’s not enough his entire life (more on that later) and so, if the only thing he’s good for is being the idiot, the fool, the kid who makes bad jokes, then so be it.
And what will get him even more attention? Push on his hormonal teenage-boy side.
Guess what happens when someone wants attention and engages in problematic behaviours to get that?
Any kind of attention reinforces the behaviour.
Good reaction? Fantastic, social reward!
Bad reaction? Well, that’s still better than being ignored.
Anyone who has worked with children has probably seen some version of this [refer to Skinner, Bowlby, Adler].
Which explains why Gar keeps being a sex pest around Kory (who jokes with him and sometimes plays along → playful reinforcement), Donna (who is usually just annoyed → mild disapproval), and Tara (who feeds him the biggest reactions: rage → high reward, even if negative).
And Raven?
Oh, this is where things get interesting and child psychology helps us:
Raven cuts him out. She ignores the sexual jokes and innuendos altogether.
Which to Gar becomes: okay, it’s not fun like this (no reward→behavior drops).
And thus we don’t see him do that remotely as much as with anyone else!
(Don’t you take this out of context to imply that I think “ignore your abuser/bully” is a good strategy, this is NOT what I’m saying!)
But, if you want to believe he has an ounce of decency (like I tend to believe), it could also be that, after hearing her backstory (specifically, the SA her mother suffered) and seeing how distressed she is with closeness, he simply understands that he shouldn’t put Raven through that.
Also, the way he acts with Jillian Jackson further supports this. She is the only character who showers him with attention and affection at any given moment, making him happy and removing his need to be a pain in the ass to feed his hunger for attention.
Just playful banter, then?
There are also things that I don’t think qualify as sexual harassment, like these:
Yes, he’s one hell of annoying, but that’s the fact: he taunts every single villain they fight (so when he’s taunting Tara after the bank robbing that’s just his way of annoying the bad guys) and when he says things about the possibility of them making out, he does that to anger her (or more accurately, to get a reaction from her), not because he’s actually gonna act on it.
Some of these exchanges read less like harassment and more like the kind of mean-spirited banter I've seen between teenagers twenty years ago.
Maybe we were horrible people in the 2000s, I’m not gonna deny it, but when it was done among close friends, and we felt in a safe space, we knew we were all joking and if someone ever felt uneasy, we had the emotional intelligence to stop IMMEDIATELY. Gar evidently doesn’t.
Peek into what may have been going on in his head? “Okay, she’s being bitchy, I’ll be annoying, that’s our thing.”
Even when Tara yells at him (thus making it clear EVEN TO HIM that he’s crossing a line and she wants him to stop), and he stops it feels less like respecting a boundary and more like “Okay, that attempt failed, try again later, differently.”
Social reinforcement
The thing is… the good guys, the heroes all around him, NO ONE CALLS HIM OUT—yeah, I’m looking at you 19 year olds Dick and Donna!
They either ignore what he’s doing (leaving Tara to deal with him) or they’re all smiley about it!
The 80s context (or "boys will be boys, Marv will be Marv")
Is this because it was the 80s and catcalling & co. were still widely considered compliments?
Is it because the comic relief pervert was an archetype back then?
Is it because this is Marv Wolfman being Marv Wolfman?
Sounds plausible, could be, not sure.
From my personal experience, I was born in the 90s in a country that (socially speaking) lived very much like it was still the 80s.
(Meaning the baseline was “women are pretty things to be commented on”, “SA is a crime against morality, not against a person”, “breasts are to be displayed on TV for the male gaze, but god forbid you breastfeed in public!”, very nice kind of shit. Sucks, I know. But don’t worry, most of us have evolved into civilized people now.)
And I can tell you that I’ve shown these panels to people who were teenagers in the 80s (women and men) and their reaction was either “Oh, yes, I used to find this kind of guys so annoying” or “Lol, I had a friend like that. Had to punch him when he tried that with my sister.”
The thing is: no one from that generation (at least that I found in my very small and not statistically relevant sample) recognized this as abuse or harassment. Just "annoying" or "stupid".
Which tells me this was probably what they were aiming for in the 80s.
EDIT (just before posting): Found someone who called this harassing!
My mother-in-law said "can you believe what we had to put up with? Now people do finally see this as sexual harassing"
(For context, she was born in the mid 1950s and was a prominant figure in local second wave feminism)
This means some people (notably: the victims of these actions) did already recognize this as harassment, and it also confirms it wasn't widely perceived as such.
"""Heroes"""
Very short digression: ALL of the Teen Titans are pretty awful.
- Raven manipulates Wally's feeling so he'd fall in love with her (okay, nothing physical ever happens, but still);
- Roy forces a kiss upon Kory;
- Tara goes from saying misogynistic things to Kory to kinda racist remarks to Raven (besides the general bitchiness);
- And don’t get me started on the “I was trafficked by terrorists” to which they reply “Get a grip, girl. We’ve all been through bad stuff.” (paraphrasing) Like, guys, I know her story might be just bollocks to buy your sympathy, but God you don’t need to be this shitty!
- There could be more and I just can't remember everything.
So… I'm not really surprised no one ever thought to tell Gar that was unacceptable behaviour.
NOT a compulsion
Back to Gar, this is where things get more complicated.
Because there are also instances where we see that he does know there is a line, so he does know this behaviour and jokes are inappropriate.
Like this:
Gar makes these kinds of jokes all the time, but the moment Vic does?
“C’mon. Level.”
This means his is NOT a compulsive behaviour, he knows there’s a line and what that line is, but it could also be hinting at something else—maybe he thinks that when he does it it’s okay because he’s a “kid” (16) but when “adult” (18) Vic does it it’s not.
Ergo? “It’s just childish joking around, it’s okay when I do it because I’m a kid.”
Obviously, we do know it’s not okay.
"Jeez, I'd be afraid to be alone with this guy!"
Then we see that, in private, when he’s not putting on a show, Gar gets all meek and is reticent to open up about his real feelings. And when he's alone, we get a peek into his depression.
Basically he reminds me of those young men/late teenagers who put on a hyper-sexual mask, joke about sex all the time, and then cry after.
I know some of you might find this pathetic and funny, but it’s really not. Psychologically speaking, it usually indicates that something in there is seriously hurt.
And I can assure you that’s horribly common among men raised in the 80s and 90s (again, at least here, maybe the US are enlightened enough to be beyond that).
That damn sparring scene
Then we have the kiss, and right after the kiss we have that horrible “training goes WAY wrong” scene.
[TTT#43, just read it all, I've hit the 30 images limit]
Basically, Gar taunts Tara while they are sparring. He’s not just winning, he’s wiping the floor with her, and he keeps taunting her and making fun of her so much that even Donna (who has been silent about his behaviour until now) tells him to stop.
But not everything we see in that scene can be considered sexual harassment, and believe it or not, it’s not the sexual aspect of it that makes Tara snap.
He wraps her in cobra form and he jumps over her and kisses her cheek in monkey form. These are the only openly sexually coded things he does in these panels. All the other things we see can be read as him kicking her butt in training, and making fun of her in the process.
And that’s when Tara snaps.
Not after the cobra hug. Not after the monkey kiss. But after he flies away, making fun of her and provoking her, after he kicks snow in her face and pushes her head in the snow.
That’s the moment Tara says “enough” and things get dangerous.
This is the last time we see Tara on the team, and we will never know if Gar would have learned something from that training session.
Like… don't kick someone when they’re down.
You've been babbling for way too long!
So… what’s my goal? Am I defending or condemning him?
Neither. Since I’m not a judge and this is not a trial. I’m trying to understand and explain what I see.
Because all this sexual harassment might not come from out of nowhere…
Let’s take a trip into his past. (Please try to remember that understanding why Gar acts the way he does is not the same thing as excusing it.)
Time machine!
Quick summary [refer to Doom Patrol (1964) #100, #112-#115]:
Happy (or seemingly happy) family life with his biological parents when he was a child (TT vol.3 #13 states he was 6).
Green monkey, Sakutia, experimental serum, he becomes green, yada-yada.
His parents die. He is forced off the canoe by his father to save himself, and he watches them fall to their death knowing if he just was a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, he could have saved them.
He is taken in by King Tawaba, he’s shown to be beloved by his tribe with the exception of Mobu, the witch-doctor, who (beside yelling at a very young child that he’s cursed) explicitly wants him dead.
(I don’t know about you, but in my line of work I’ve seen kids turn out much MUCH worse after way less than what we’ve seen up until now)
He is then kidnapped by two thieves who starve him, abuse him, shove and drag him, yell at him and use him for their crimes.
He then has to live on the streets on his own until he is found by Galtry, his new legal guardian.
But… guess what? Galtry is actually abusive as hell. And even though I’m not sure it’s canon in every single version of the character, I must remind you that Wolfman/Perez’s interpretation has child Gar being beaten with a freaking saucepan on panel! [Tales of The New Teen Titans #3]
He gets adopted by Elasti-Girl and Mento, finally finds a family with the Doom Patrol and… they die. Of course they die, this kid evidently hasn’t been through enough stuff.
More specifically, Elasti-Girl, Robotman and Negative Man die. Mento just goes nuts.
Gets severely bullied for his skin color (which is the one thing he cannot change). Yeah I know bullying gets overshadowed by all the other more "serious" trauma he went through, but I also happen to know how deeply it can scar a child. So maybe pick something else to make fun of him for. Body-shaming a fictional character because of an immutable trait doesn't really make people on the internet look as good as they think it does.
That is… an embarrassing amount of trauma.
And the really heartbreaking thing? He feels responsible for all the deaths that have littered his life, we clearly see it in New Teen Titans vol.2 #3, which is what his “evil version” rubs in his face.
Excuse me, 21Anon12, why the hell are you justifying a serial sexual harasser?!
That’s the thing: I am not.
Really.
I think NTT Gar should be smacked on the snout until he learns to behave.
(Or threatened with neutering if he keeps acting like an animal in heat)
(But only because he is a fictional character and I’m not hurting anyone by saying it)
But if you read my stuff you might notice that I like to analyze the psychological aspects of things, and that’s what I’m trying to do here.
(also, that's why it took me so long to double and triple check this overanalysis with three other people that know nothing about comics and all about developmental psychology)
And the outcome we see with Gar’s behaviour is entirely plausible after all he’s been through.
(Especially when he's being written by Marv Wolfman)
“I’ve been through more trauma than he has and I’m not a sex pest!”
First of all, I’m sorry you’ve been through whatever you’ve been through.
Second, we are not all exactly the same. Children respond to trauma and abuse in different ways.
That’s why some abused children become children’s rights advocates, while some others can become abusers themselves, while some others remain so traumatized they just stay in a cloud of fog. And there are tons more possible outcomes.
What I’m saying is that his trauma could plausibly contribute to the attention-seeking and emotional immaturity we see.
In Gar's case, when he was written by Marv Wolfman, one of the ways those traits manifest is through sexual harassment
So? Should he be allowed to do it?‼️NO‼️
That still has to be contextualized, in my opinion.
In the end, why do I think Gar was like that in the NTT?
Basically, he was written as a kid who wanted attention, in a society and time where this kind of behaviour was generally considered annoying, but not widely perceived as sexual harassment/assault.
(Also, Marv Wolfman.)
But he’s not written as a malicious sexual predator who assaults people to exert power over them or gain sexual pleasure from that.
If he was, we would have seen that in the multiple occasions in which he was alone with other female characters (instead, those are usually the moments he’s most normal).
The vast majority of the time he displays these problematic behaviours, there is an audience.
He’s also not written as having a compulsion to harass women (he doesn’t do that to Raven, or Jillian, or even Tara when they’re alone), or a dysregulated sexual behaviour disorder.
His history is consistent with an outcome of unhealthy attention seeking mechanisms and humor as a coping mechanism. Put these two together and the fact he forces horrible sexual jokes and “aggressive flirting” (=behaviour that we clearly see as harassment but was often framed in mainstream media as comic relief or boys-being-boys) is a plausible result.
Plus, we have his teammates involuntarily reinforcing his actions instead of sitting him down and treating it as the problem it is.
I think the NTT run simultaneously wanted two things from Gar:
a traumatized kid desperate for connection;
a comic-relief flirt whose behaviour is played for laughs.
Those two elements don't always fit together cleanly. Looking at the character through a modern lens means recognizing both the pain underneath and the harm he caused.
Let me say that again in case I wasn't clear enough.
Was it ever acceptable? No.
Was it common for comics to frame that behaviour as harmless or funny in the 1980s? Yes.
Should we cancel that? No. Just like I don’t think we should cancel other problematic stuff (*cough* The Judas Contract *cough*).
They should, however, have held him accountable for his actions back in Earth-One/New Earth (I don’t think they ever portrayed him like this in Prime Earth, but I could be wrong).
It would also be nice to understand how he went from serial sexual harasser to almost normal from one run to another.
Maybe they finally told him it was unacceptable?
Maybe he turned eighteen and said “uhm, this wouldn’t look good on my criminal record”?
Maybe Raven used her magic lobotomy to purge him of his harassing nature?
Guess we’ll never know.
✨And that's why I don't write him as a sex offender in my fics🪄
I endorse most of this. Chiming in because you mentioned you "could be wrong" about Prime Earth, and I think Gar's Prime Earth characterization makes a point similar to the one you make here.
To my memory, the most Wolfman-esque scene from Gar in the past decade was his debut in Titans Rebirth.
A couple things to note. First of all, I don't think this rises to the level of how Gar abused Tara on New Earth, and I'm not arguing that here. That said, he does come on pretty strong, to say the least. And while I acknowledge that I'm poised to see her everywhere, I do think Tara was on the mind when this scene was written. Tyra resembles Tara, their names are one letter apart from each other, and the scene itself, to me, evokes the dolphin scene from NTT. Gar's behavior here is similar in nature to his behavior with Tara, just much less severe in degree.
The main takeaway from the scene is that this is not Gar at his best. Garfield in this scene is grieving, alone, and trying to fill the void. In his own inner monologue, he describes this behavior as addictive. On some level he understands that this is a problem. And when he's better off, when he has friends supporting him, this behavior mostly disappears into the more playful sort of banter you give examples of. The only other example I can think of where he blew past boundaries like this is in issue #17, "the Battle for Beast Boy's Soul." And that's while Titans Tower is still up in smoke, all of his trauma is re-activated, and he's abandoned his friends to go it alone, seeking attention. The throughline is that this is a bad coping mechanism Garfield falls back on when he's at low points in his life. To be clear: this is not okay! No amount of internal struggle makes it okay to violate another person's boundaries! But it is human and it's handled with authorial forethought that I don't see much of in Wolfman's writing.
Batgirl (2000) #1 opens with the above panels - a rose puzzle being assembled, David saying "You can take off the blindfolds now," a shot of a young Cass, and then someone else saying "What's with the camera?" Immediately there is a focus on visuality - the blindness of the "blindfolds" and the eye of the "camera" - and a link between Cass and objects. The rose puzzle precedes child Cass' appearance, connecting the object Cass is handling with Cass herself.
Personhood, objecthood, and visuality are themes that underlie Cass' relationship with her father David. They are also themes that pop up in Anne Anlin Cheng's ornamentalism, a theory of Asiatic femininity. Ornamentalism describes how Asian women are commonly depicted as aesthetic, decorative objects. (The theory has way more to it but for this post that's what I'll focus on! Highly recommend reading the whole thing!)
I'll be looking at ornamentalism within Cass' narrative, mostly through David but also other White people in Cass' life. This is mostly an in-universe reading, although an examination of how writers use Cass as an ornament would certainly be interesting as well! As always this is just my own interpretation!!!
An Upbringing of Objects
David brought Cass up in relative isolation - the only person she had a real relationship with was him, which means that for the majority of her childhood, she was surrounded by more objects than people. Returning to the opening scene again, the men discuss the objects in the room more than Cass herself:
Batgirl (2000) #1
The plastic, the camera, and the knife all form part of how the men (and David) perceive Cass. From the beginning of Batgirl (2000), objects are intrinsically tied to Cass' identity. It's not only that objects surround her, but that she's perceived as an extension of the objects herself.
Batgirl (2000) #11
This is particularly pivotal when considering David's desire for tapes of Cass. In this panel, Damion Scott draws a picture of Cass imprinted onto the surface of the film. Her literally flattened image is a metaphor for David's 'flat' conception of Cass - his love for her is, to an extent, equivalent to his love for this roll of tape. In many ways he has always loved her as a two-dimensional object. And not just any object but an explicitly visual one like video tapes. In other words, his love for Cass has always been tied up in his perception of her Asian femininity as an aesthetic ornament.
Surfaces
This 'flattened' image of Cass is a recurring motif in David and Cass' relationship. Throughout their time together, they are commonly separated by glass or screens, like in Batgirl #1 when the end of the issue reveals that the flashbacks have been David watching Cass' tapes all along. Another example is their first meeting after Cass runs away:
Batman (1940) #567
Cass spots David in real life, but David sees Cass through the scope of a gun (which the art emphasises by putting us in David's perspective). While Cass can see David as a three-dimensional person, David's viewpoint flattens Cass into a surface. Cheng writes that ornamentalism reduces Asian women into surfaces, "impermeable and insensate". Although David doesn't shoot Cass because he doesn't want to hurt her, it's also interesting to consider that shooting her would shatter his illusion of Cass as an 'impermeable' surface.
In fact, every time the 'surface' between them is shattered, it's Cass doing the shattering. She learns to see herself as more than a surface, but he never quite gets there.
Batman (1940) #567 // Batgirl (2000) #33
David's flattening view of Cass relates to how some people say David sees Cass as a weapon, which I won't dive into here (I kind of agree but don't? but that would be its own post). The important part for this post is what weapon he sees Cass as. Because while David himself is most associated with guns, the weapon associated with Cass is...
The Knife
If "Asiatic femininity is ornamental/surface/portable," then the knife is the perfect weapon for her - small, sleek, and often highly decorative. David connects Cass with a knife, from the opening scene where he encourages the men to try to cut her with one, to his birthday present in Batgirl (2000) #37.
Bruce highlights that the gifted knife, while useful, has not been used "for years". This parallels Cass, who hasn't been 'used' by David in the decade since she left. Neither the knife nor Cass are loved by David purely for utility - there is an extra element that cannot be accounted for by just usefulness. This 'extra element' is the aesthetic consideration, the enjoyment David gets by looking at the knife/Cass. Rewatching the tapes, gazing at Cass through glass, affords pleasure to David through the visual medium.
Batgirl (2024) #20
In Batgirl (2024), there's a direct parallel between Bruce handing Cass a letter with the name 'Batgirl' (how Bruce sees her) with David handing her a knife (how David sees her). The fact that the knife is a reflective surface is essential, because if that's how David sees her then he's never really seeing her. Cass is a two-dimensional reflection of him, his "heir" (as said in Batgirl Secret Files and Origins). Which is why David never truly understands that Cass ran away of her own accord; he calls it "his fault," because he is still viewing her as an extension of himself.
Bruce Wayne: Fugitive
When Bruce asks David why he's throwing his life away, David says "it simply left without consulting me." Another obvious allusion to Cass, and note that David uses the pronoun "it". Here, David conflates Cass with his own life, a nod to how much she means to him but also how unable he is to view her as her own person.
Projection
David is not the only one with this problem, of course. No. 1 projector onto Cass is Bruce, someone with numerous parallels to David and who is also a White man. Bruce's projection onto Cass is also a result of his ornamentalism of her Asian femininity - she is a surface for his own desires. This is captured well in Batgirl (2000) #1:
Notice how Bruce's projection onto Cass ("you... are me") is interrupted when Cass makes contact with him ("uh...). Bruce's projection is dependent on perceiving Cass as that insensate surface, but Cass' act of touching him destroys that illusion. Bruce's actions in early BG 2000 have a lot to do with trying to maintain the lilusion - from rejecting the evidence of the tapes to isolating her in the cave, Bruce tries to mould her into the perfect, interiorless surface he wants her to be.
This is particularly important in the Tai'Darshan/romance arc. Cheng writes that "the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made and unmade by the aesthetic project". Bruce's perception of Cass as an aesthetic (i.e, as a surface to look at and project onto) clashes with her desire to explore her own sexuality. But it's not just Bruce - Babs, Tim, and Kon all contribute to Cass being sexualised while being barred from sexuality. The one person she desires (Tai'Darshan, an Asian man) is kept from her, while she is sexualised by the White people around her.
Batgirl (2000) #45 // #39
But Cass, who has spent most of her life as this kind of decorative ornament (as explored above), learns to refute this behaviour. She expresses discontent to Babs about Kon's comment, punches Tim in the face, and eventually directly confronts Bruce about his behaviour. She gains awareness of how other people look at her, and exerts more agency over her perception.
Breaking Free
DC Festival of Heroes: The Asian Celebration
Cass' story constructs a duality between seeing and speaking. While seeing is a large part of Cass' abilities, it is also the medium through which she is ornamentalised - it is the gaze that often causes Cass the most discomfort, from Kon on the boat to David's tapes. On the opposite side of seeing is speaking, something David deprived her of and something she struggles with, but something that Cass comes to understand as freeing her from the White male gaze.
Cass speaking refutes the idea that she has no interiority - it dispels the illusion that she is a surface, a decoration. In DC Festival of Heroes (one of the few Cass stories written by an Asian woman), Mariko Tamaki demonstrates the power of speech.
In this panel, Cass thinks of words as "a thing other people do," while she herself is visually trapped in a double reflection. The reflections symbolise how her silent body is used as a mirror for White projections -her existence is limited to the visual medium, and she is barred from speaking. But then she meets and has a crush on Dr. Chin, which prompts her to think "Words. You will be mine."
As mentioned above, Cass' experiences with romance have been heavily restricted by the expectations and gazes of the White people around her. With Dr. Chin, though, it's her gaze that is being centered, leading to her reclaiming 'words' for herself. Instead of being an object owned by someone else, she has become the owner.
Final Thoughts
This post isn't meant to say David 'only' loved Cass as an object rather than a person. It's more about how the White gaze construes Asian women's personhood as inextricable from objecthood - that is, that David absolutely loved Cass as a daughter, which does not negate that he simultaneously (and interconnectedly) loved her as an object. Cass' visibility as an Asian woman coloured the way basically all the White people in her life dismissed her thoughts and desires, the way it was so easy for David and Bruce to project onto her.
Anyway this is a petition for more Asian women to write Cass!!!!! Although these themes are very much present in the White male-written Cass stories, I believe an Asian woman would be better able to draw these themes to the forefront and explore them in more nuanced ways!
what do u think markovia’s national sport is / is most popular there
Oh, this is a fun combination of questions. I'm a bit nervous to answer, because I can't remember anything in the comics themselves touching on this. @21anon12 is more knowledgeable about Outsiders lore than I am, so she might be a better person to ask.
Based on the people's history and geography, a few options for traditional sports reveal themselves. We don't know much about recreation among the Polabian slavs, but we know that they practiced sledding and skiing, and given its location Markovia has stolen all of Belgium's best ski slopes. So there's an option for a national sport. Since popular games usually derive from peasant culture, Wallonia's local Balle Pelote is another one that you might see people play more often. And, if the games of their closest linguistic relatives are historic enough, some variation on the Spreewald's "man on horseback attacks a chicken" games might survive after the migration.
Which sport is the "most popular" is an easier question. It's football. The game was introduced to the region in the 1860s, right before the wave of standardization in Western sports and the emergence of international competitive organizations. There is nothing in Markovia's history that would dampen the perfect storm of football popularity in Western Europe. Markovia might even be one of the first nations in FIFA.
First things first, let me thank you for introducing Tumblr to whatever Hahnrupfen is ("man on horseback attacks a chicken").
Yeah.
Old European traditions are weird, okay?
My town used to set fire to a giant puppet while someone made it dance (while being INSIDE said puppet). We only stopped after my mom got trapped underneath it and things almost went very badly.
And now let's take a deep dive into Batman and the Outsiders.
The comics give us... nothing.
As far as I know (and I'm pretty confident about this), there's never any mention of an official national Markovian sport. Nor do I remember ever seeing a Markovian sporting event on-panel.
So... your guess is as good as mine.
Since the comics like to portray Markovia as a mountainous country, it would make sense for Markovians to be skiing enthusiasts. But when you look at the real-world area it's supposedly located in... most skiing facilities are actually indoor snow centers. Outdoor skiing in the Belgian Ardennes relies heavily on weather conditions and only operates during winter, unlike places such as Switzerland, Austria, or northern Italy, where many Alpine ski resorts can stay open year-round.
So if we want Markovians to ski... it's either indoor facilities or we borrow Switzerland's geography. Personally, I prefer the latter.
Just to explain myself better: I'm not saying skiing is not a thing in Belgium, I'm saying the Ardennes have limited outdoor skiing because snowfall is unreliable and only a thing in full winter.
We can also imagine the aristocracy enjoying stereotypically upper-class sports like horse riding or golf (polo isn't nearly as common among wealthy people in continental Europe as it is in the UK).
If I had to put money on one sport, though, I'd say football (soccer, for the Americans). I don't think there's a single European country that isn't at least a little football-crazy.
Also, I remember seeing a beautiful fanart once of Tara, Brion, and Gregor cheering for the Markovian national team during a match. They had face paint, flags, everything. It was heartwarming.
Then there's another sport people often forget: cycling. Belgium and the Netherlands have a huge cycling culture, so if we're borrowing from Belgium, that's another obvious candidate.
That said, most of Belgium's cycling culture is associated with Flanders, whereas the canonical location of Markovia would be the Belgian Luxembourg.
what do u think markovia’s national sport is / is most popular there
Oh, this is a fun combination of questions. I'm a bit nervous to answer, because I can't remember anything in the comics themselves touching on this. @21anon12 is more knowledgeable about Outsiders lore than I am, so she might be a better person to ask.
Based on the people's history and geography, a few options for traditional sports reveal themselves. We don't know much about recreation among the Polabian slavs, but we know that they practiced sledding and skiing, and given its location Markovia has stolen all of Belgium's best ski slopes. So there's an option for a national sport. Since popular games usually derive from peasant culture, Wallonia's local Balle Pelote is another one that you might see people play more often. And, if the games of their closest linguistic relatives are historic enough, some variation on the Spreewald's "man on horseback attacks a chicken" games might survive after the migration.
Which sport is the "most popular" is an easier question. It's football. The game was introduced to the region in the 1860s, right before the wave of standardization in Western sports and the emergence of international competitive organizations. There is nothing in Markovia's history that would dampen the perfect storm of football popularity in Western Europe. Markovia might even be one of the first nations in FIFA.
Ok I should have checked what comes up when you Google "spreewald chicken game" because I am not suggesting that the shareware computer game Moorhuhn is an ancient traditional equestrian sport. I was referring to two games which originated with the Sorbs: Hahnrupfen/Lapanje Kokota, and Hahnschlagen. Hahnrupfen is a game where players on horseback compete to pluck a rooster which is hung upside down from a post, with feathers from different parts of the body being worth different numbers of points. Hahnschlagen was a game where a rooster is put in a hole in the ground and beaten with sticks.
Lusatia was different in medieval times. Nowadays neither game is supposed to use live animals; the Hahnrupfen rooster has been replaced with a stuffed or dead animal, and the Hahnschlagen rooster has been replaced with beating a metal pot.
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