An experience I tire of having on Batman comics AO3:
Fanfic Writer: Here’s a story about a character dealing with the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.
Me: Ah yes, a goldmine for angst. Who’s the character? Selina Kyle or Holly Robinson, who were forced into prostitution at a young age while homeless and desperate? Stephanie Brown, who was groomed for molestation as a kid, barely escaped and then had a creepy relationship with an older man that resulted in a teenage pregnancy?
Writer: Actually, it’s Jason Todd.
Me: Oh. Huh. Jason has never been sexually abused in comics canon.
Writer: Yes, but we don’t know that he wasn’t. He was homeless and desperate as a kid! He could have been a prostitute!
Me: Well, that’s… just Selina and Holly’s backstories, but okay. What else you got?
Writer: I have a fic about a character learning to feel secure in a home and found family after an unstable, abusive, deprived childhood.
Me: Cool! That applies to all the aforementioned female characters and Cassandra Cain, who was a homeless vagrant for nine years after fleeing the absolute hell of her upbringing. It’s part of why I enjoy their arcs so much.
Writer: I also have one where a character is acting as the protector of the poor community they grew up in, with a special focus on looking out for kids in similar situations to them, wanting to be there for them in contrast to how the adults in their own life had failed them. They reflect on their past and stuff. You know, how they have hope for this community against all odds. Even if they might have been part of the systematic problems keeping these underprivileged people down earlier in their career, but now they want to atone for that.
Me: This is exactly why Selina became a vigilante instead of just a thief! She did some self-reflection and realised that having made her own fortune, she’d abandoned the lower classes to indulge herself like all the complacent social elites she hates. So she vowed to protect and support the East End, her old neighbourhood (which happens to contain Crime Alley). She and Holly both later ran the Alleytown Kids, a gang of needy children that Selina had been a member of in her day. She even renamed it the Alleytown Strays. And the idea of becoming what your childhood self needed, both for yourself and all the kids like you today, is foundational to why Stephanie ascending as Batgirl feels so right to me; she went from being a girl sitting on her roof wishing a Bat would save her to being the Bat saving and inspiring kids.
Writer: Yeah, but how does this sound? A hero’s war with depression, self-loathing, even suicidal ideation. They wonder if they can do anything but kill. They carry the pain of being violently murdered, thanks to their own long-lost mother no less, after which they were resurrected and later separately healed in a Lazarus Pit.
Me: I love it! Are you referring to Cassandra?
Writer: Um. Ooh, how about this fic? It has a gritty, tragic, tormented antihero wrestling with the moral complexity of their lethal actions, their fraught relationships with the Batfamily, and how closely they veer to embodying the very evil they seek to destroy. They’re true vengeance in a purer, sharper form than Batman, who they at once emulate and scorn. A hunter stalking Gotham’s worst souls in the night. They go on a beautiful journey to discover some degree of idealism, build stronger bonds, navigate emotional vulnerability and dare to believe that they are not damned or broken, and are still capable of healing as well as hurting. There are also themes of religion and spirituality.
Writer: The antihero is Catholic.
Me: Oh my God. That has to be Helena Bertinelli.
Me: All your stories are about Jason Todd, aren’t they?
Writer: No! Some of them are about Dick Grayson or Tim Drake!
I love Jason and Dick and Tim. I adore many fics that revolve around them. But not every story needs to do that. Female characters have just as much grounds for interesting fanfiction, and often decisively more grounds for specific tropes that I see widely assigned to the guys.
