YESSSSSS i would love to read what you've got sorted out for your Dick alters :D
*does an evil little cheerleader dance*
-redhoodinternaldialectical
Hi! I liked the Ric arc. Conceptually. Sort of. It has many problems but it stuck with me. Most of my DIDick notes are tucked away in my DMs so I'm gonna do my best to go over all that! (and according to my writing program this is over 1.6K words so. whoops?)
By the end of the Ric arc, Dick has what are essentially 3-4 different lives in his noggin. I think the crystal shit is honestly more fucked up if he /doesn't/ have DID. And I was also just enamored with Ric, and all of the "we want you to come home Dick!!" that he was dealing with. Waking up for the first time and being bombarded by people insisting that you're someone else? It works so well for a DID story. As I continued to think about/work on it, it grew far past just covering Ric/Talon/Joker. I ended up going through the major turning points in Dick’s life and sort of walking through it, and seeing who I would end up with. In the canon I'm most attached to Dick is sent to juvie for a while before ending up with Bruce. That's where I imagine their mind first starting to take shape. Robin: A baby. All those happy memories of /before/ tucked away where they can be protected. Any pronouns, too young to really be concerned with much. They're an all around bundle of joy that almost never gets to come out despite wanting to explore and make friends. It's just too dangerous, and they have to stay "pure". This is essentially how they stay, a time capsule that never ages. For simplicity's sake, I'll refer to them as "Baby Robin" instead of Robin for the rest of this. Dick/Magpie: Dick sees Magpie as his imaginary friend. Magpie sees Dick as her partner in crime. The two co-front and switch places a lot, and are generally pretty close. Dick is still exposed to the horrors of the outside world enough to not /think/ he's missing anything, but Magpie takes on what he can't.
They slowly but surely become distant as time passes. Dick completely forgets about her by the time he turns 13. For most of their life Dick is completely in the dark. It's easier like this, when there's a face recognized by the outside world that doesn't need to know the details. It's easier to lie when you don't know you're doing it. There's a period around 10-14 where everything gets /messy/ and memories get weird, particularly where the Joker is involved. Dolly: A little girl with big dreams. She thinks herself much more mature than she is, and doesn't understand what's so wrong about Humbert Humbert. "He really did love her, you know?". Joker showers her in the attention that she couldn't find anywhere else at the time. He's the only person who knows she exists even including the others inside the system. He's the first person outside the system to know that there /is/ a system in the first place. Magpie eventually gets some indication of Dolly's existence, but she doesn't act on it. Has no clue what can even be done for Dolly in this situation.
It does make moving in with the Teen Titans an easy decision. They need to be away from Bruce for a bit, need to just leave Gotham and get it together. The stress of it all still keeps picking up while they're with the Titans. It's no easy feat to manage a team while trying to balance their own mental state(s). Elle: Originally unnamed, but Baby Robin thought they should be named after Elle Woods because they're "smart and cool like her!" but the resemblance pretty much ends there. They're very no nonsense and short tempered. They don't control the body at all, instead managing things from an inside perspective. They know just about everything about everyone. Like Oracle, but for the system and all that encompasses. They can occasionally co-front and speak if need be, but prefer not to. Cannot move the body if they were to front alone.
X: Do I even need to explain. X, Apprentice, eventually Renegade, it has many names, X just stuck the best. Rose ends up calling it René though. Slade gets to call it whatever he wants. X is pretty morally neutral. Doesn't seek to do harm, but follows orders without guilt or hesitation. Doesn't talk, sometimes it just can't, sometimes it just doesn't want to. Slade has heard its voice the most out of anybody. Its mental image of itself has no face, only a warped echo of the mask that Robin once wore. Not actually as mean as it might seem, especially when Slade isn’t around for it to serve. Slade was surprised when he found out about the system, but rolls with it in a way that earns him at least a little favor with most of them.
Maggie (Magpie): She's quiet during the teen years. She can't bring herself to talk to the Titans, seeing them as Dick's friends and not hers. She's lonely. Honestly, she’s a pretty normal teenage girl.
Dolly: Went dormant when they left Gotham.
Dick still helps in Gotham for a while. Until he gets fired by Batman. It sets everything a bit sideways. Dick is sort of leading the charge for a while and is so annoying about it that a coup is briefly considered. This is around the time he falls in with Eddie and Liu, eventually losing his virginity to the latter. Maggie doesn’t handle that last part well. It does end in Dick establishing Nightwing, and most are content with that, but Maggie still occasionally ends up with the memories that Dick pushes out. It eats at her and eats at her, and she never really recovers. Maggie is stuck in a permanent state of being sixteen after this. Life goes on. Life goes wrong. Jason dies. Everything is messy again. Eventually Dolly comes back, but more as an adult this time. Doesn’t mean she’s well adjusted though. She’s selfish, reckless, and far too attached to the demon in their head. Did I mention the Joker introject? Good. Neither did any of them. It’s an open secret, a he-who-shall-not-be-named type of situation. Joker: “My pronouns are eat/my/ass.” He’s pretty much exactly how you think he’d be. He gained some influence after Dick tried to kill the original Joker, but he’s always been this ambiguous boogeyman. Doesn’t really go out of his way to fuck shit up, and mainly sticks to fucking with his Dolly.
Lola/Dolores (Dolly): Can't lie, she’s my favorite. She's got so many issues, but carries herself with a mix of playfulness and flirtation. She's a /woman/ now and isn't afraid to remind you, /Papa/. She thinks of Lulu Belle as being her “girlhood self”. It’s a lot more pleasant to cling to memories of when she and Bruce met and got along through the occasional “cross-dressing” mission than it is to think about what most of her younger years were like. She’s prone to manic episodes, and is frequently enabled by Joker. She drinks, she plays, and she gets yelled at by Elle about making sure she at least uses protection.
Dolores and Joker are effectively married (derogatory). It’s obviously really bad for Dolores. She doesn’t really distinguish between her introject husband and the original Joker, often prone to breakdowns when he sees the original with other women. She fucking hates Harley so damn much, and Punchline when that all happens. It doesn’t really come to anything, but it does mess her up emotionally. It goes on like that. The Blockbuster incident proves to be another low. They keep pulling themselves together into something functional just to be broken down again. Dolores forces her way to the front a lot. She already had a drinking problem, but it doesn’t really get better. At least that makes for a good excuse as to why Dick’s memories are so full of holes. Then Jason is back. He’s intimidating. He doesn’t know, but he can see through them more than most. They keep him at a distance when they can, because it’s terrifying feeling so exposed. And then there’s the headshot and the crystal. All previous alters are essentially locked out, and for a while it’s just Ric.
Ric: He’s angry and hurting. Why wouldn’t he be? Everyone looks at him and treats him like a man that he’s never met. They /hate/ him for not being that person. He’s reckless and guarded, but softens up around people who don’t know the stranger he’s supposed to be. He doesn’t know Slade, but he would've fallen for him easily. Also of note is that he ends up as one of those alcoholics turned health bros, in large part due to finding out that he’s a part of a system. He has a huge soft spot for animals and kids, and is pretty nice to those who deserve it. He’s not afraid to tell people when he thinks they /don’t/ deserve it though. The most date-able of them all tbh. Talon: It’s a feral animal. All its memories, thoughts, and feelings are incoherent and abstract. Joker: He’s given memories of being abused by the Graysons’ and the original Joker gets cemented in his mind as his dad. The aftermath of being groomed and controlled by the original Joker really fucks him up. He gets pretty forcibly humanized. He’s still not great, but he’s slightly better now that he’s learned about concepts like “pain” and “trauma” first hand. He’s morally improved and mad about it. He misses being evil and guiltless. Eventually the previous alters come back after the crystal is taken care of. It’s a fucking trip for Dick, because he’s finding out about all of them for the first time. From here they’d ideally stay away from the bats while they sort out/adjust to all that.