#1 grell's green arrow HATER

i think. yj are gentle with greta, when she becomes human again. treat her like she’s frail, because she is, like she’s precious, because she’s that too.

when there’s harsh light, kon slides his sunglasses over her eyes before she can even wince, her eyes are sensitive still, she giggles when they’re too big for her. he says, with a barely there shove, not everyone appreciates style. if they’re out at a restaurant and she’s picking at her food because she ordered something she ended up hating, bart switches their food neatly without even stopping his sentence, and she grins at him gratefully. with cissie, it’s in all the little things, the holding her hand when they’re walking, the little it reminded me of you gifts and souvenirs when they see each other, the nightly calls just to talk and catch up, the arm wrapped around her shoulders like she’s something, someone, treasured and wanted. if she’s cold, and she hates being cold, it reminds her of before, cassie’s jacket swallows her up and cassie tucks her into her side and it feels, for as long as she’s there, the cold and the hurt can’t reach her. greta knows she’s irrational, it’s a petty grudge she let go of long ago and has no right to hold onto still, but tim places a hand on the middle of her back, soothing, places himself in between greta and—she’s his friend, they dated, they love each other, and greta has no right to make this awkward, she’s done nothing wrong—her, and steers her away smoothly, and doesn’t hear any apologies—it’s fine, he says, the others don’t like her either, they’re petty like that, sometimes people don’t get along, it’s okay, you don’t have to—and greta feels less bad. anita, she watches buzzfield unsolved and ghost hunting shows with her, and they make fun of the inaccuracies and speculate on which are real or not (very few of them), and anita always cranks down the volume because she knows they’re loud and greta doesn’t like them loud.

i love you, they say without saying it, i love you i love you i love you.

wanted to redraw damian based on my own interpretations because i miss him

you know ultimately i think i fall on the side of "bruce probably should have pulled down his cowl when sitting at steph's side on her deathbed, it would have been good shorthand for readers that steph was finally fully accepted"

but. sometimes when i'm crystallizing unpopular opinions in my head i just think. idk how much that would have really mattered for steph's story, because steph's story has never been about needing to know who batman was, it has always been about *batman's* acceptance that she's worthy to be part of the in-group.

and, like i said. as readers, we know that one surefire way of showcasing batman's acceptance into the group is the revealing of his secret identity. it's about the hugest thing he could do as far as a show of trust (which is why jim & bruce in no man's land, where batman puts down his cowl & jim steadfastly refuses to look is such a Thing). however. a show of trust doesn't necessarily equal acceptance. joe public & pagan are bit gotham heroes who have no clue who bruce wayne is, and yet they have batman's acceptance. helena's off again and on again acceptance also doesn't have much to do with bruce wayne's identity, either, only with batman. cass's full acceptance happens immediately despite her not knowing bruce's identity, and she's the one who has to figure that out herself. but her knowing who bruce wayne is or not has nothing to do with batman's acceptance & sanction of her as a vigilante. it has everything to do with her acceptance into bruce's family, however.

and, like. there are some characters where the secret id is perceived as the ultimate acceptance, but i don't necessarily see that so much for steph. like yes, she was annoyed that tim kept secrets from her, especially because tim's secrets, to her, meant they weren't on equal ground in their relationship. but her acceptance by tim as spoiler happened long before she was given tim's secret id by batman (as he was the one who accepted her & sanctioned her as a crime fighting partner while she still only knew him as *robin*), and his secret id only really became important to her after they were dating. so, like. she cared more about his secret id on a personal level than needing to know it to feel *accepted* by him.

like idk. i feel like steph's perceptions of secret id's is different because she fundamentally doesn't have one (everyone figures her out immediately). so she gets annoyed when people keep secrets from her, as she has no secrets to keep.but the secret identity doesn't have as much to do with. acceptance. she knows cass's and babs', but knowing their secret id's has nothing to do with their acceptance of her--the birds of prey accept her and train her and help her until they don't, it has nothing to do with secret identities. so to me, idk. to steph, knowing the secret identity isn't what makes acceptance, even though we as readers know that from an out of universe perspective, robin should know who batman is.

so sometimes when i think of whether bruce should have revealed who he was there at that moment, i'm like. does it matter. does it matter that he didn't do it. because if he did, and he's still ostensibly lying, then that's just bruce wayne lying to her instead, which is even more a kick in the teeth. a show of trust, just to lie to her face again about whether she was accepted in the end, is almost worse.

so the crux to me, is. not whether bruce let her in on his secret but whether batman was telling the truth and finally accepted her & fwiw. even though we know that he never took her in as a serious robin during her actual time in the role, he could have looked at her, dying, and realized that at that moment that yes, it became the truth at that very moment, in hindsight. like yes, it was a trick to get tim to come back & steph knows it. but steph asks if it wasn't just/only that--if there was a part of any of it where she was really robin, if there was a part of it that was real & i don't think bruce is lying when he says yes. and that, right there. more than any of it, what what steph finally needed to know. that was the acceptance from batman that she had been waiting for the whole time, since she put on the spoiler mantle the first time and he told her to home, that she was worthy, that she was a hero--like the rest of the in-group. because it's never been about bruce and steph. it's always been about batman & spoiler.

(there is another thing where the editorial refusal post her death to think of her as a real robin, thus showing great cruelty on bruce's part by refusing to memorialize her absolutely gets muddled by the retcon of her not being dead after all, and bruce being suspicious the whole time that leslie faked her death, because idk to me that absolutely makes sense for the bruce & leslie relationship. leslie says it was too late to save her, that stephanie dies. bruce has done the research, realized that there's no way she should've. he figures out leslie lied to him. he knows leslie, understands why she did that. pretends, for her sake, that stephanie is dead, & leaves her be even though he knows it's not true. he knows that leslie left & took steph with her. it's cruel to tim, yes, to not tell him his suspicions. but he has to keep it to himself for leslie. the woman who raised him. and also. a memorial for steph would mean reminding tim, his newly adopted son, everyday about his "dead" girlfriend in his workspace. like it's a dick move to steph, to be sure, but can you imagine tim having to look at something like that every day in the batcave asdfdj)

You know what? I’m so used to having The Case Situation being Didio’s Take That to the fandom (memories of the con reports of the panels while Steph was dead) that I hadn’t walked through the steps of ‘why would Bruce put one up’.

Why did Bruce put Jason’s case up? Well apart from the classic ‘it’s a hallucination’ version (a theory I do have a soft spot for despite how many times people have broken that glass), the standard mix of reasons why the Case was in the Cave are: as a memorial/acknowledgement of Jason’s sacrifice to the Cause; as a reminder to Bruce and others of how dangerous the role was; and as a way of keeping Jason’s memory close in an environment Bruce spent a lot of time in.

Only the first of these reasons is really a reason Bruce would have put a memorial case up for Steph; if it’s about acknowledging dying in the line of duty (see a War Memorial). But if it’s essentially a memorial to Our Honoured Fallen Dead, why is it only Jason who has one? Why not Roy Kane, who died wearing the Bat suit for Bruce (‘Tec 600)? What about Orpheus, who also died during War Games? Why not Harold, given he lived in the Cave for years? Why doesn’t Jean-Paul Valley have a memorial? Azrael not only had been Batman, but at the point when he died he’d had more page time and stories than either Steph OR Jason.

So it cannot just be about the sacrifice made. If it was simply about that, JPV should have had a Case. And he didn’t, and he died more than a year prior to Steph.

Is it a version of the other Cave trophies, a reminder of past battles? Well by the time Tim became Robin, we rarely if ever see Bruce adding to the trophies anymore. They’re an older, fixed thing. Very few new items come in and are kept. As a museum, their collections policy had largely closed to new objects, compared to the list of one-off items from Dick’s time as Robin.

As a reminder of the dangers of the role and of Bruce’s failure? Don’t let a teen steal your protocols and enact them, Bruce. I don’t think Bruce ever really saw her death as his failure in a way more specific than the general blame he lays on himself for everything. It was about Leslie ‘letting’ her die as a warning/his suspicions about Leslie taking her away (depending on which time period/retcon we are in). In both of those, his issue is more with Leslie than with Steph herself.

As a standard to live up to. Bruce knew how much time Tim spent as a young Robin, standing in front of Jason’s case and talking to it, perpetually measuring himself against Jason. Both ‘Don’t be like Jason’ and ‘this is what the role can demand from you’. Why would he put Tim through that, given he knew Tim would be in and out of the Cave all the time? When he knew how Tim had used it previously? It’s one thing to hurt himself with that perpetual reminder, and another to deliberately cause the hurt in someone else.

As a memory to keep close? That would be for Tim and Cass, more than for Bruce himself. And right after Steph’s death, they both moved to Blüdhaven, and by the time Cass is back operating out of the Cave again Steph’s basically back, and even Tim’s not back working out of the Cave regularly for more than a year. Bruce probably (rightly) assumes Tim has his own quiet memorial and way to keep Steph’s memory close and alive by the time we get through OYL, and doesn’t need Bruce creating one for him. And Tim didn’t ask for there to be one. (Also Tim went CRASH into Jason’s case all of 3 issues into OYL, at which point you’d assume he’s not really feeling memorial cases right then)

If you take away ‘Jason got one because he was Robin, so Steph deserved one too as a Real Robin’, then there’s very little motivation in-universe left.

Megan Thee Starfire Stallion- Hottieween♥️

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

i can no longer stay silent. grant morrison if you're out there, if you are reading this: we have beef. and i don't just mean the normal parasocial comic book reader-vs-author beef. if i wanted that, i'd read a leah williams book. no. this is real beef. violent beef. beef from the soul. from this day onward my every waking moment is dedicated to plotting your downfall. so too is my every sleeping moment henceforth dedicated to this task. in my dreams we fight to the death and you lose, over and over. these manifestations of my psyche's greatest wish will soon become reality. the sheer rage which is created in my soul simply by reading anything you have written is enough to motivate me to become the greatest marksman this world has ever seen. and your bald head is a shiny, gleaming target. so watch out

cheeeese