OYL Tim/Cassie: Why It Sucked (& Why It Didn't Have To)
Been re-reading some TT v3 and having Tim & Cassie musings.
Geoff Johns is a better writer than I remembered. He just has a few (particularly painful) lines of dialogue that reveal he didn’t do ALL the homework.
Sean McKeaver is more of a mixed bag than I remembered. He’s doing something p ambitious tho: trying to extrapolate on a love triangle between two living characters and a dead one. The problem is, he's failing at it epically. Mostly bc he doesn't get the weight of the different relationships at play.
Here's some things that had me sitting up and blinking because I just plain hadn't thought about them in so long:
A) At the start of OYL, while Johns is still behind the wheel, Tim is literally begging Cassie to come back. He's like, a pinch short of getting down on his knees and begging.
While I really like Tony Daniel's figures, his facial expressions are kind of limited to "blank wall" and " really angry". And I think that contributed to me forgetting how emotionally open Tim is being about a lot of things at the start of this run. (Not the cloning, obvs, but other things.)
B) Cassie is angry bc she feels like Tim abandoned her when she needed him most. Her walls are UP. She spends a lot of time yelling at Tim. Sometimes Tim yells back. But then back-pedals bc he's desperately trying to get her to stay.
C) Some of that yelling and anger is because Cassie is being judgemental of herself, and then projecting those judgements onto Tim. Delicious.
My fanon brain likes to emphasize that they eventually work things out and become very supportive of each other, but my canon re-read emphasizes that they DO, in fact, fail each other and hurt each other a lot when they are grieving.
But those failures only hurt as much as they do because they want each other's support very badly. They just get the timing wrong.
And that's part of why their back-and-forth of wanting to talk about Le Kiss and NOT wanting to talk about it actually fits even though it can be very, very frustrating.
I feel like there was a lot of UST that was meant to be conveyed over the course of several issues. The set-up is there, but the art is not. Most of the artists working on TT are actually pretty bad at doing a variety of nuanced facial expressions.
We get some decent body-language conveying hurt from time to time, but the only artist who seemed to get the "convey some yearning" assignment was Randy Green:
Honestly, Greene's art really helped give McKeever a decent first issue for his run. (Granted, some of T&C's lines about grieving Bart made ppl wonder if McKeever had done his YJ homework, but I'll show some grace there.)
Unfortunately, that run immediately dipped into mediocre with his revisit of the Titans of Tomorrow storyline. It's got some gripping moments, like this one:
But it also has this:
Which... doesn't work because it is speed-running a romance that is designed to be a slow-burn.
Tim and Cassie haven't even been on a date yet. They haven't talked about jack squat. They've had some individual epiphanies, sure, but not about their feelings for each other. They are still running away from that. So a Crescendo Kiss is gonna ring very hollow as a result.
So several issues later... there's a date. And it illustrates some problems very well.
They are being pretty in-character on page one and two. Neither of them is gonna escape the natural awkwardness of a first date, but they have the ability to power-through on genuine compliments.
And these dorks ARE dumb enough to mix business with pleasure and try to use a date to talk about work and then argue about it.
The argument starts off fairly on-point. Cassie can be reckless, especially when she's grieving. So having an epiphany about Kara, and then firing her without a vote? Something she might do. Would Tim call her to task for it? Absolutely.
(The start of OYL emphasizes he's been scraping from the absolute bottom of the barrel trying to give the team a roster--any roster--and Cassie tossing someone out on a whim should have him absolutely grinding his gears.) Would Cassie get defensive? Probably. Would they try to de-escalate right after? Possibly. They don't LIKE fighting each other.
Page 3 is where it all comes apart.
"[My evil older self] told me to let you go… because when I was finally able to bring Conner back, you left me for him. He said it was torture."
Ok. So?
Like, I am looking at canon here. This is practically a decade before DC made Tim officially bi. But even if Tim is 100% straight, even if Tim is realizing he has romantic feelings for Cassie, we still have all of the rest of TTv3 telling us Tim's priorities and mental state.
Tim's friendships have consistently been as or more important to him than his romantic entanglements. He has been canonically grieving for his best friend to an unhealthy extreme. While Cassie is also one of his closest friends, their romantic feelings are at beginning stages.
Tim also canonically has utter disdain for his Evil Future Self and that guy's life choices.
He would not give a shit about what tortures that guy emotionally. (Tim is normally pretty compassionate with a lot of villains, but this is HIMSELF. He ain't gonna give that guy the same amount of grace.)
There are two very effective solutions that are very obvious.
A) Clone-resurrect your bff BEFORE you catch feelings for his gf, and then everybody can be (theoretically, unethically) happy.
B) Stop trying to clone-resurrect your bff, move on, and date whoever you want. Then everybody can be (eventually) happy.
And Cassie?
Cassie's opinion of her evil future self isn't much better. Cassie's level of freak about grieving Conner matches Tim's to a T. They are both struggling to move on, and Cassie is also kind a furious with Tim for taking time off to be with his family when she needed his emotional support.
He's her closest friend rn, because Bart is off having an existential miniseries crisis, and her hyper-focus on her hero life has distanced her from her Cissie, Anita, and Greta who are all busy with civilian life. (And she might have JUST fired her kryptonian bff from the team.)
So yeah, Tim is her closest friend rn and half the time she reeeaally wants to strangle him. And it does NOT help that he looks really kissable when he's crying in a pool of clone juice. Or that his hotness level goes up when he puts on a sports coat. That's only adding to the confusion most days. But she could ignore all of that. If it was important that she ignore it.
Tim and Cassie have the potential to date. Their shared history and interests make it possible, but they don't have to date. In fact, the moment it causes more problems than it solves, they are both likely to simply... stop. With not hard feelings at all, because of those shared priorities/histories/etc.
So the fact that McKeever is pretending that their romance, in it's infant stages, can hold a similar weight to their feelings for Superboy... it ain't load-bearing. The structure just crumbles.
If you wanna give these two a romance, and have Kon haunt the narrative, there were plenty of options, even with the restrictions of canon-style storytelling.
Give them a mini-series. If you don't have the proper space the develop a relationship amid a group title, just sequester them for a lil' in story of their own.
Give them a mission pertaining to Kon's legacy. Have them investigate Cadmus. Make them deal with Knockout or a Hawaii incident, something they know Kon would care about, something he'd be proud of them for resolving. T&C spend plenty of time after his death feeling like they let him down, so give 'em a chance to feel they've done something right by him.
Make them verbalize their admiration for each other to each other. It can be a quiet moment. Or it can be in a villain's lair involving some truth serum. Whatever. McKeever got so caught up with the SB thing, he kept forgetting to show that Tim and Cassie actually like each other. As people.
Show them learning about each other. Tim does not know everything about Cassie. And Cassie definitely doesn't know everything about Tim. Have Tim meet Helena Sandsmark. Show Cassie visiting Gotham. This is the natural progression of any relationship.
Again, you want Kon haunting that narrative? Make them wrestle with the imperfect memories. Kon was Cassie's first boyfriend. He was also an imperfect one. Tim has the opportunity to be more present, so how will Cassie wrestle with the comparison? Kon was Tim's closest confidant, so how much will it mess with Tim that Cassie slips into that role, and then performs it differently?
And fer the luvva Grife, give 'em better art. Please. Somebody who can convey fraggin' emotions on a face. Multiple emotions. In a way that is pretty. Bc they deserve it.
All of that could have built up their relationship enough that a returned-from-the-dead SB provided some complications instead of 100% joy.
But without T&C actually establishing a relationship that has changed into something vitally important to them... they have nothing stopping them from returning to the Kon/Cassie, Tim&Kon bffs status quo.
Which is why that's exactly what happened.
Though the alternate possibilities will, perhaps, always intrigue me.
Thinking abt what Tim’s redesigned post-Infinite Crisis Robin suit might have looked like if Kon had never switched to the red-and-black T-shirt look and stuck with the bomber jacket and red-and-blue suit instead.
Loved your latest fic!! Musculine bro love for the win =)) Can I also request for an angsty and smutty fic? Huhuhu love your writing
Ha, thank you love ❤️
Well, starting tomorrow (oh my god it starts tomorrow) is the 12 Days of Witchyness so you’ll be getting a new story/chapter from me every day until January 3rd. So you’ll definitely get angsty fics (Nepenthe, Golden, Don’t Close Your Eyes) and smutty fics (Drowning in the Night, On Your Left, Got No Idea). And ones that have a bit of both (Leverage, Oh But You’re Good To Me).
There’s probably more that fit in but my brain has forgotten 🙈
Okaaaay babeyy i just got the true ending of one eyed lee!!!!! So if some mf wants to play it, here is some advice: make sure to not let lee speak EVER and piss off both isaac and harriet to the point they won't speak to you anymore. And remember to not break the knife!! You need the weapons <3
