Everything CAN be about Tara Markov haunting the narrative especially where Mia and Rose are concerned (TT03 #21, #34; Mia's and Rose's first issues on the team). I just think the parallels between the three of them as imperfect victims are interesting to contemplate.
• Those issues of Robin where Cassie and Mia are always standing next to each other and the look on Mia's face when Cassie flies her out of the exploding base
• The period where Mia and Cassie were the only girls on the Titans and they both had something to prove but not to each other
• The timeskip period where we know Rose and Mia were Titans together and Cassie wasn't but they kept trying to convince her to rejoin
• Also Mia and Rose both nannied for Lian at different points, Rose pre Ravager when she was staying with Roy and the OG Titans, Mia later.
• Rose and Cassie's constant "you want to fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid" dynamic
• Cassie is newly broken up from a homoerotic girl best friendship with either Cissie or Anita and she's wildly overcompensating by changing her look and insisting she's straight (which is how I read a lot of her presentation shit in tt03)
• Mia is dissociated from her own sense of sexuality and hasn't really ever considered girls as an option.
• Rose is not subtle about her crushes or her bisexuality, especially post whatever happened between her and Cass Cain, but she hides genuine feelings behind snark and deflection
• Idk, just the three of them dancing around feelings for each other in Titans Tower for a year really fascinates me
Oh my god can you please share your reading recs for Rose? 🙇🙇🙇 Ideally if it's possible i'd love to see your thoughts on:
-your personal favourite arcs/stories, what you consider essential readings
-if there's a mini/short arc you think characterizes her great and is a good standalone (i.e. for fic writers who want to do her right but don't have time to read a whole rec list)
-some rose meta if you got it? Your own or someone else or you can just yap about her rn i'm curious and invested!
Also I'm curious if there's any fan artist on tumblr who does a great Rose you wanna give a shout-out to?
Sorry for the tall order, feel free to ignore me/just answer whichever you want!
Rose!!! She is my favorite of favorites I would love to answer this
If you're looking for a comic that does her justice to give you an idea of everything she has going on, you want Knight Terrors Ravager. It's just two issues, it's focused on her dynamic with her father and a projection of her childhood self, it's beautifully done and for a current event tie-in comic it has a lot of surprising deep cut references to her canon.
That said. Content warning for *very heavily implied* CSA and on-page abuse in her comics, including Knight Terrors, which means I'm going to be treating both as canon when I talk about her and is why the rest of this is under a read more
Rose suffers from a lot of her core appearances being in Geoff John's Teen Titans run, which is...not good comics but it is the point where she went from "background daughter of Slade who is also Lian Harper's nanny" to having her own storylines. @/roseworth has a more complete breakdown of this era
Ravager origin (Teen Titans 7-12): Rose is manipulated by Slade into taking up the Ravager mantle, drugged by him, they fight the Titans, and she ultimately stabs her own eye out trying to win his approval, there's another short arc where she and her father are working together but they're not the main focus.
After the One Year Later Timeskip, Rose ends up as a core member of the team. She forges a deep friendship with Eddie Bloomberg (Kid Devil), a rivalry with Cassie Sandsmark that gets very catty because it's Johns writing, and wrestles with both the team's distrust of her and her distrust of herself. I hate her writing in most of this. It's all very hypersexual trauma victim by way of a writer who's not remotely equipped to tell that story.
Noteworthy Rose arcs
Note that all these arcs are after Johns left the book and mostly written by McKeever, with Winnick and Wolfman involved in the Deathtrap crossover
The Teen Titans Deathtrap Crossover: Rose and Joey crossover arc that starts in issue 69 of Teen Titans and continues into Titans and Vigilante. Joey is going through an evil phase here.
Ravager Fresh Hell (72-82, with a brief pause for a blackest night tie-in that's also worth reading): this is essentially a Rose solo series focusing on who she is when she's alone, what she fights for, and her inner demons
Rose & Mia friendship arc (99-100): they have a lot of great interactions in these issues, they also interact at Lian's funeral in Rise of Arsenal but I only recommend that issue if you're desperate for Rosemia content
Nightwing 112-117 (Renegade arc, Devin Grayson): this is the 'Rose leaves her father with Dick's help' arc - it's essentially the connective tissue between Villain Era Rose and the Rose we get after OYL
Post reboot
Deathstroke 2016: I recommend at least trying the first arc which has Rose and Slade interacting. This book is messy but it does fascinating things with Rose, her trauma, and her parallels with Tara and Joey. CW for very heavy CSA themes.
I've enjoyed a lot of her post-2016 appearances as well including Brave and the Bold/Wildstorm, Robin/Shadow War, and Man Who Stopped Laughing.
Honorable mention to DCeased, Future State, and the Primer comic as they're Elseworlds but interesting nonetheless.
For backstory completionist purposes
Deathstroke vol 1 issues 0, annual 4, 15, 42-55: scattered early Rose appearances throughout her father's first solo, hard to get through but this is the most Lillian and Rose mother-daughter content we get and I love Lillian Worth.
Titans 26-39: pre-Ravager Rose living with Roy Harper, babysitting Lian, billed as 'a master of the martial arts'
There's a lot of art and meta in my 'rose rav' tag.
My thoughts:
Rose is interesting because the narrative spends a lot of time telling people she's unstable and aligned with her father and a killer -- and for that matter, that she's sexy/horny -- but if you look at what's actually on the page the character's "villain arc" is mostly contained in early issues of Teen Titans 2003, the Renegade arc of Nightwing, two issues of Cass Batgirl (and some not great nu52 arcs). What's actually on page is Rose as a member of the Titans (or currently Stormwatch); a fairly reliable ally to various Bat characters (Jason, Damian, Dick, Cass - I got another ask about her dynamic with the Bats and I'm going to put further thoughts and reading lists for those relationships there because this got long); and a person with an exceedingly complex relationship with her family including her half-brothers (Joey/Jericho and Respawn), dead mother, and shitty dad who she deeply wants to believe in but who keeps letting her down in genuinely horrifying ways.
Rose and sexuality: Rose spends a lot of time flirting and throwing out innuendo, but (a) the people she flirts with don't usually take her up on it and (b) in Deathstroke Rebirth it's repeatedly stated that Rose *isn't actually interested in changing that* (she calls it owning her sexuality and Slade mocks her for it); in Gotham War Red Hood when she tells Jason she'll "lick his wounds" she isn't upset when he says no but instead says she expected he wouldn't. I read her as using hypersexuality as a defense mechanism to prevent people from looking deeper.
There's a really good web weave I reblogged recently that pulls together the panels where Slade is talking about her as his daughter compared to the panels about Tara Markov (whom he canonically groomed in canon when she was 15) and Cass (who he canonically drugged and abused) and the frankly disturbing amount of parallels. If you add Tanya Spears (Power Girl II) and Amy Allen (Bombshell) to the list you get at least 5 on-page situations involving Slade Wilson and teenage girls in canon (I believe there's a 6th with a character named Pop Rocket but I haven't read that run). DC struggles with acknowledging this because they go through periods where they want Slade to be a Noble Mercenary Dad but being an abuser has been part of his character since the beginning, and that's core to understanding his dynamic with Rose, Rose's visible trauma responses, and why it genuinely upsets me how quick various characters in-universe are to dismiss her as "like her father" or "a bad girl who can't be trusted." She's one of the Bad Victims of DC, caught in the constant cycle of looping back to her father (all the way from Teen Titans to Dark Crisis) and then being held responsible/distrusted for it. She's a good girl now, as she says in her OYL first appearance as a Titan, but no one -- not the heroes, not her, not DC itself -- seems to be fully able to take her at her word.
Deathstroke 2016: This is a long, uneven run but it gives good Rose - it recanonized her dynamic with Nightwing and gave her new dynamics with Tara, Shado, and Harvey Dent; Rose and Joey are the doomed siblings ever in every continuity and it shows here. I recommend at least trying the first arc (Rose shows up in issue #2, and the Rosetara of it all starts in issue 21)
Batgirl 2008: whatever can be said about the execution, Rose and Cass Cain's Revenge Roadtrip is a concept that lives rent free in my head
Teen Titans 2003, 71-82: For about ten issues, Sean McKeever writes a Rose solo in the back half . She hallucinates Cassie Sandsmark as a conscience, she fights traffickers, she finds out her mom might be alive
Nightwing 114-117: I have a lot of feelings about Rose and Dick, and the role he plays in her attempts to get out of the cycle of abuse
Honorable mentions: DCeased Unkillables, Stormwatch/BATB storyline, and that period of time in Titans 1999 where she was just showing up at random to be Lian's nanny and hangout in the Tower
I saw you in the tags of a Rose Wilson post saying you’d read all her comics and could give recs/talk about her dynamics with the bats and titans👀👀👀
(I know very little about her but would 100% like to know more,,,,, so, no pressure to answer this, but if you do— what d’you think are some of her most interesting dynamics/relationships with the bats?)
she intrigues me :)
She intrigues me!
Origin story/Villain arc (Teen Titans 7-12): Rose under her father's influence as an antagonist
Dick Grayson (Nightwing 112-117): Dick helps Rose get to a point where she can leave her father's influence, I think this is arguably the most influential relationship in her life because he's the person who got her out of her abusive family dynamic, he's the one who helped her, this comes up again in Deathstroke 2016 where she brags about being trained by Nightwing. He continues to mean a lot to her although she'll never admit the full extent
Cass Cain: Rose's first interaction with Cass is indirect - she and her father impersonate Batman and Batgirl in Teen Titans 22-23, they meet in Batgirl 63-64 when Rose under Slade's influence fights Cass and Cass notes explicit parallels between herself and Rose, both in their parental dynamics and in the similarities between Rose's immediate precognition and Cass's body language reading, Rose is then involved in the fallout from the "evil Cass" arc where Cass was taken by Deathstroke, drugged, and manipulated in a similar way to Rose's own trauma. This arc concludes in Batgirl 2008. They are narrative foils, they are tentative allies turned hesitant friends, they've even stabbed each other. In conclusion I ship it but they haven't interacted much outside of Elseworlds in 15 years
Jason: Jason and Rose meet in issue 47 of Teen Titans, she flirts the way she does with everyone in the run, it develops into a consistent dynamic, they'll meet again post-reboot in Red Hood and the Outlaws 38-40 which establishes that some part of that dynamic remains intact, she's working as a mercenary and he's doing his outlaw thing, they fight, they flirt, she's in contact with him as of Robin 2021, helps him out in Man Who Stopped Laughing and offers further assistance in Gotham War Red Hood. I tend to think of them as somewhere between platonic life partners and mlm wlw solidarity/hostility but they're very commonly shipped including by canon writers
Tim: in this household we do not acknowledge Teen Titans 35, we skip over it completely, Rose and Tim have a relationship built on him distrusting but tolerating her presence on the Titans, although they eventually build a good dynamic as teammates over the course of Robin/Teen Titans/Red Robin. This hasn't really been followed up on since the reboot, as Rose hasn't been on the Titans since then.
Damian: Rose meets Damian in Teen Titans 2003 88-92, when Dick sends the new Robin to the Titans to make friends, she adopts a sibling dynamic with him early on, something that is picked back up in Robin 2021, where she looks after him during the Lazarus Tournament, they also interact in Deathstroke 2016 and Shadow War. They've pretty consistently been written as understanding each other and having a sibling-ish dynamic
Steph: they've only interacted in Man Who Stopped Laughing 9-12 but it's a fun interaction and I think they should be written as friends more often.
Bruce: he primarily interacts with her in Deathstroke 2016, and all around his fairly condescending in this, but he does encourage her to choose a different life path and get away from Slade.
Selina: The Rose issue of Catwoman (62) is not great, but it does establish that Selina cares enough about Rose to check up on her after Gotham War, something no one else has done in canon.
Rose has no real canon dynamics with any of the other Bats, although she's been in issues with Oracle.
Elseworlds
Future State: Dead or Alive story, Rose and Jason are partners and sometimes lovers. Some fun moments especially for Rose's precognitive powers but shaky characterization where she's concerned.
DCeased: in post-zombie apocalypse earth, Rose, Jason, Cass, and others are teamed up to survive and protect a group of children. This series has one of my all-time favorite Cass moments, plus Jason and Rose are married and tragic. Rose gets a few good lines and her precognition shines but she and Cass don't interact as much despite sharing panels which loses some points for me.
Bonus
Roy Harper: Rose lived with Roy, Lian, and the Titans and acted as Lian's nanny in the pre-Ravager days (Titans 26-39). This is actually how she met the Titans.
Hi there, I was wondering, do you know if Rose can or could know how to dance? Or if she has an ability that could allow her to learn it super quickly ? (Preferably ballet, though I'll take any discipline)
Asking for no reason at all! (<- girl who is definitely not trying to cram all her blackswan rosemia thoughts into a cohesive storyline)
Rose doesn't dance canonically as far as I'm aware but she has enhanced reflexes and she's a "master of the martial arts" so she'd probably pick it up really fast.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Batman (Comics)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jason Todd & Rose Wilson, Jason Todd/Rose Wilson, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Characters: Jason Todd, Rose Wilson
Additional Tags: Post-Batman Comics Story Arc: The Gotham War (2023), Jason Todd Has PTSD, Bad Parent Bruce Wayne, Dissociation, Fear, Protective Rose Wilson, I Love You, Bruce Wayne Has Issues, jayrose can be platonic or romantic
Summary:
Jason and Rose, post Gotham War
Skating in just under the wire with a short angst fic for Jason Todd Week Summer 2025
