tim drake freak

ASK AWAY I LOVE TO RAMBLE 'morally grey' tim drake is pure fanon based on either mischaracterization of red robin tim drake or people's unbridled desire to have him and jason bond over hating bruce or whatever else. i made like a giant thinkpiece for oomf about a personal hc on how tims nightmares affected his moral compass but absolutely, tim is PURE super ego. given the trolley problem, tim would probably throw himself on those rails to die. he has proven it many times.

in robin #4-5, given the choice of putting steph in danger by letting her confront her father or killing arthur brown, he chose option 3: throw himself in the truck, which ended up with him nearly suffocating to death. what i personally find interesting of this is less his actions per sè and more his thoughts; every second a thought about ‘doubling air supply’ comes to his head, he punishes himself for it. he is only afraid of 'disappointing bruce', finding himself in a situation where he even had to choose 'who to save'.

in one of my favorite stories, 'batman: contagion', tim would rather die than let is father know he was dying. he wanted to avoid giving his father thta heartache and make sure that batman and robin's identity were safe so he preferred wallowing in his pain instead.

in the titans of tomorrow storyline, he didnt hesitate to put a gun to his head and nearly pull the trigger and it has to be noted that the only reason why he failed to take his own life was external factors. if it meant saving others, he was willing to let himself die.

finally (because i have too many examples LOL) a lonely place of living. too good. between letting the kanes become the target of the bombs or letting people perish, he chose the final option: redirect all explosives towards himself and let himself die.

tim counteracts hedonism, he is a pure self harming machine and most importantly, he is a masochist and a hypocrite. in his fantasies, he wishes for an easy life yet does everything in his power not to achieve that. he dates ariana, a girl whos life (as troubled as any gothamite’s can be) is fairly uncomplicated, overly accepting of his committment behaviors yet cheats on her with steph, someones whos life is an absolute mess and does nothing but make it even more complicated by being a vigilante and choosing to be involved in the vigilante life.

he says he wants to eventually quit robin and have an easy life yet, when offered the chance of actually quitting, he is trembling in his boots and afraid of a life without being robin. he comes back to bruce all the times, no matter how many times bruce disappoints him and manipulates him. he needs that complicated life, he needs to be a part of that change. he needs that pain.

the misinterpretation of a lonely place of dying by later retellings drives me nuts because ‘tim finds out who batman is’ is nearly not as much of a big deal as ‘tim doesnt want to be robin’ in the actual origin and it pretty much sums up whats wrong with modern tim drake. ALPOD is a tragic story of a twelve year old boy who had everything and willingly gave it up for a greater good. he is not like dick and jason who became robin to escape tragedy nor bruce who had everything and then lost it. robin was nothing but a curse he accepted to bear and he did so because of his selflessness. that selflessness is his driving rod, his smarts and physical talent are only the tools he uses to achieve his goals. he is not ‘the smart one’, he is a sacrificial lamb for a cause he became an unwilling spectator of. a twelve year old boy thought ‘people need saving, its that simple’ and put on the clothes a dying kid not much older than him wore because of nothing more than his selflessness and everyone he loved paid the price for it. he paid an even greater price for it.

fanon tim fans hc him to be ‘crazy in the head mini lex luthor’ miss out on ‘tim who never wants to harm anyone but he spent so long being afraid of his own head he had to impose an unshakable moral system on himself in fear of falling and failing’ semi-canon hc. tim who finds out that, in the future, no matter the timeline, he’ll become a man capable of murder so he tortures himself even further to never fall, never become that man. guilting himself of a future that hasnt even happened for the mere chance of it ever taking place. he spent his entire childhood ridden by nightmares of a death he witnessed so closely, scribbling the shadowy figure he kept picturing tormenting him. he listens to bruce trying to save harvey and wonders if he deserves such sympathy, in the case that future took place.

what is fun is that the time ‘bruce didnt want tim around’ is so brief compared to the one when he literally manipulated the people around tim just so he could keep him around, the times he would test him to see if he would ever leave him like. bruce cared for tim and wanted to protect, yes… but! he was also severely mentally ill and unstable, lets not forget that. knightfall happened for a reason!

a death in the family showed him he can lose robin, a lonely place of dying that he can get another one that will trust him forever. knightfall and no man’s land broke the batman and gotham. robin was the only thing he had so he clung on tim so that, at least, he wouldnt lose him.

he kept testing him, ‘do you really think i could ever replace you?’ so that tim’s only idea of normal life would be ‘by bruce’s side’

‘no one knows who the batman is’ was such a stupid idea they’ve had in the 90s/2000s cause like. did they not realize that defeats the whole point of batman and robin? its especially funny since the robin of the 90s and the 2000s is the same kid who’s entire origin relied on seeing batman and robin on tv? like thats how tim found out that dick grayson is robin?? and having clippings from articles and shit? like.

if the lord was merciful and allowed tim drake to retire from vigilantism onto the life of a gotham DA or private investigator, i’d love to see how vigilantism impacted him not just mentally but also physically. he spent most of his life in a poorly lit cave in front of giant computer screens for hours after hours, without counting all the new lens tech bruce was prototyping during his early years, i’d like to see him adapt to reading glasses or get a proper prescription or something + i know that fanfics kinda ruined it but i’d love to see the missing spleen be reprised as a canonical thing and see how he actually manages it both when it comes to eating habits and preventing illnesses and stuff. on the topic ‘bones and miscellaneous’, this is 100% self indulgent projection, but i’d love to see tim deal with back problems and joint issues from all the times he was literally freefalling from 100 floors high buildings onto literal concrete (how is this guy alive still)

every new ‘vigilante idea for tim drake’ away from robin fundamentally sucks because there are reasons why he should quit robin but no real reason why he should still be a vigilante when he could be anything else instead that actually makes sense for his character. ‘cardinal’ ‘grey ghost’ do any of these mantles mean anything to tim’s character or are they just cheap ‘we need him out of robin’ aesthetics?

i maintain he should not be robin still but it sucks that a character created to say that ‘everyone can be a hero’ HAS to be a vigilante. its why i came to despise modern comics because older comics actually allowed characters who werent stock vigilantes to get relevant stories from their own unique perspectives as civilians and i ask myself why cant tim drake get that? why must he stay a vigilante? he never chose to be a vigilante, he chose to be ROBIN because someone had to. he stayed as robin because he lost everything else and personally i think a great chance to make him quit robin is by reestablishing his connection to his civilian life and making something out of it. i am not a fan of td:r but we just established a new piece of gotham for tim to take care of, a plotline about the civilians being evicted was awkwardly introduced. is it not a good chance to prove that tim drake can still save people even as tim drake? that robin doesnt define him? can’t he save the people of marina as a civilian, perhaps as a detective or gotham’s future district attorney or whatever?

batman (2016) #147 spoilers!

“batman and robin will always be there to lift each other up. because batman needs a robin, no matter what he thinks he wants.”

i also think he could fit the orange/yellow colors/aesthetics! actually i think, symbolism wise, tim would rock the yellow color more than anyone (out of the main 5) cause so much of his symbolism was attributed to the contrast of light and darkness and between him and bruce.

in order: batman (2016) #135/batman #900, detective comics #620, detective comics #621

my idea for tim is for him to retire after robin and become an independent crime journalist or maybe even a DA so they idea of tim’s colors becoming yellow-ish as a way to separate himself from the red and green color scheme while still having a color palette resembling of his role in the family as the light breaking through the darkness could have a lot of potential as a story about healing and finding his way out the tunnel if handled with the respect and understanding tim so desperately needs right now.

unironically i think a ‘drake’ inspired color scheme for his civilian identity (brown/yellow/orange) would rock! something of the sort:

once again thinking about tim falling in love with steph since the beginning and spending most of his time convincing himself he didnt feel that way but he just couldnt shake it

people on tumblr will make eloquent posts about how the batboys are actually ‘female coded’ instead of actually reading about a female character

i think tim drake dealing with another toxic homoerotic situationship could fix him

you ever think about how tim never got the chance to come out to jack, janet and dana. how they raised that boy, taught him to be himself, to make him the man he is right now, and yet they will never know.

the thing about jason’s ‘brotherly bond’ with tim is that everytime it only benefits jason. its only about ‘making jason’s story richer’ and never about benefiting tim, who’s characterization got completely ruined to favor the role of jason’s caretaker when ‘big bad brucie makes jason mad’. genuinely is there a scenario when they ‘act like brothers’ when its not either fanfic bs or tim telling jason, in the year of our lord 2024, that its okay that he died in a comic back in 1988? tim never benefits from this relationship, its always about jason. and im not only talking about fanfics anymore because, to my dismay, the canon is now strongly influenced by fanon and we are getting comics like ‘knight terrors’ where tim tells jason that ‘he is not a failure’. tim. timothy jackson drake. the same dude that blatantly told jason, as he was getting beaten up, that he is still better than him? that dunk on him whenever?