#DC Comics #Mia Dearden #Speedy #Speedy II

@queen-lance made a post that reminded me of the thoughts I've long had about these panels.

This is Ollie, explaining to Mia why he's not going to train her to become Speedy, no matter how much she pouts about it. And he's right to be concerned about enabling kids to jump into this crazy life that he leads. This is an Ollie who saw this life lead his son down a dark path that could have killed him. Who saw his best friend go out of his mind and murder people, who had to kill said best friend, and who then died, himself. He's grown, he's changed, and he's seen first-hand what this life can do to a person -- and he doesn't want that for Mia. From the first moment he met her, he saw her as a child who wasn't being treated like a child -- and when she eventually came under his care, by God, he was going to make sure that she had the childhood she always deserved. To Ollie, getting involved in this superhero game is the opposite of that. It's taking that childhood away again, inflicting new scars atop the old ones that still haven't healed. To Ollie, sending Mia out there into harm's way is barely any different than sending her back to the life she came from. But the reason that it falls flat in Mia's eyes is because... well... look what he's saying, and who he's saying it to. This is a rich boy who grew up privileged, who didn't realize how spoiled and selfish he was until reality slapped him in the face, telling a girl who grew up abused by someone who should have loved and protected her, who hasn't known anything except the worst, dirtiest things that people can do to a child, that "it's a nastier world out there now". Can you imagine how absolutely, frustratingly laughable that must sound to her? "Local dweeb finds out world is actually pretty shitty, film at 11." This "nastier world" isn't new to her. It's the way the world has always been. It's not going to stop being nasty just because she lives with Ollie now. Her childhood isn't actually something she can ever get back -- and she tells him so at least once when she talks about her dad, that she stopped being a child a long time ago. He's telling her that keeping her at home is keeping her safe from the bad guys... but the bad guys in her life were at home the whole time. She doesn't want to become a superhero because she's a thrill-seeker, or because she's naïve about the true nature of the world. In her eyes, the world is going to be cruel either way -- the difference is whether she's being empowered to fight back, or whether she's going to keep struggling to fight back. She's going to fight either way -- because that's what she is, a fighter -- but there's a difference between surviving and thriving. Superheroing, to Mia, is fighting the fight against this dirty world with better tools. Ollie has the ability to train her into someone with the skills to protect herself more effectively, and -- even more importantly -- to protect other people. Because that's something that's important to her, which she'll express to him later on: the ability to be, for someone else, the person who should have been there for her and never was... until the day Ollie handed her a little business card that gave her the little bit of hope that she needed in order to save herself. The very first person, in her entire life, to reach a hand out to her in kindness was a stranger in bright tights, toting around a bow. Is it really any wonder that she wanted so badly to be that tight-wearing stranger for someone else?

To Ollie, superheroing was stepping out of his relatively safe world and choosing one that's full of fighting and pain in order to sacrifice for others. To Mia, it's acquiring a new and improved arsenal to meet a world that was never safe in the first place, that was already full of fighting and pain -- an arsenal that allows her the choice of how she's going to experience that pain, and what she's going to do with it, instead of being a slave to it.

Behold the trio of Blonde teenage girl heroines fucked over by DC