@theflashjaygarrick / theflashjaygarrick.tumblr.com
the tragic part about loving any non-blue eyed dc character is that at some point they will inexplicably give them blue eyes.
Today I want to talk about Cassandra Cain and the 'silent asian' trope.
From what I have read the silent Asian trope is seemingly a manifestation of the far older 'inscrutable Asian trope in Western culture and fiction. The inscrutable Asian trope positions Asian characters as the perpetual foreign other in comparison to a ''familiar' whiteness or Westernness. They are mercurial, mysterious, and 'exotic', hyper-competent and alluring but cold. Considering the white, Western gaze in which American media is created, these Asian characters are therefore constructed to be as distant and mysterious to the audience as they are to the characters. And it is in this way that Cass, even when she was (largely) silent challenges this trope.
I'm going to be analysing issue #2 of the Batgirl 2000 run. (it'll be a long post so I'm going to put this under a keep reading.
@stephcassweek Day 4 - On the Case!
Was it the joker's goons? The Riddler's? Why did they target famed neurologist Dr Simmons, employed as Steph would know well at West Mercy Hospital, and what does it have to do with the string of armed robberies around the Gotham Docks?
Never fear! Batgirl and Spoiler are on the case!
Read the Robin Lives drama and honestly Jason fans deserve an official apology from DC at this point. Jason becoming the Joker?? Wtf??
Beyond being poor characterisation and classist it's also just boring. This was a chance to see who Jason could have been if he wasn't driven by his early death to become a violent criminal, but instead they make him a violent criminal because 'it was always inevitable' or whatever.
Jason!Robin living and Bruce having to come to terms with the fact that fighting crime isn't a one size fits all solution to trauma could have been interesting. Jason learning that Bruce's love for him isn't dependent on being Robin (I do think on some subconscious level Jason felt like Bruce took him in because he could be Robin instead of Dick).
Personally I would like to see Jason take somewhat after Leslie Thompkins and become a social worker in crime alley. He could still have conflict with Bruce about the effectiveness of Batman's methods and his vision for Gotham but instead of wanting to control crime and kill killers, have him want more systemic change and help for low income families. Have it be a strangely bittersweet ending where the reader sees that this is who Jason could have been if he wasn't sucked into the cycle of bloodshed and revenge. See who Jason could have been if he just got to be a kid.
Now again I'm not a Jason expert and I am not saying this is the best thing they could have done with his character, but I think we can all agree what DC did was shit.
Cass Cain fans, issue #3 solicitations dropped. The cover is elite.
It's such a shame how many Bat-centric fanworks reduce the Arrows to second-rate, downright incompetent, or just plain bimbos in order to make the Bats look even more badass than they already are.
Like, there's so much more there to explore without punching down at the less-popular characters! These are two families of very human vigilantes, who protect their cities at street-level but also work their bodies to the bone in order to be able to stand toe-to-toe with literal gods. Who else but each other would understand the immense effort and intense training required to do what they do? To hone their bodies, their minds, their crafts to perfection just so they can go out and fight and fall and come home bruised and bleeding because they're not invulnerable or enhanced or super in any way except the way they carve for themselves. And that's not even touching the actually-really-complicated relationship between Ollie and Bruce, and the many ways that they're both mirrors and foils to each other, or how Jason owes Mia an enormous goddamn apology and that interaction could be great to explore, or how Roy was friends with Dick long before he was friends with Jason, and how Connor is friends with Tim but almost nobody ever acknowledges it. And of course there's Dinah and Babs.
I hate when people try to justify the perfect, obedient golden child fanon Cass by saying she’s an extension of canon but I feel like it could almost work if it was just Bruce claiming to Babs with complete confidence that she’d never do anything to disappoint him whilst she actively disobeys his direct orders, commits theft, breaks into a government building, and digs up a grave in the background. He watches all of that happen on Oracle’s monitors simply refuses to believe any of that is real. Clearly a villain is trying to mess with him.
And then he sees her hang out with Steph for the third time that week and has a complete breakdown.
hot take: while at the moment Barbara Gordon’s character is being butchered in the service of Dick Grayson’s character, historically she spent a lot more time having her character butchered to service Bruce and Commissioner Gordon’s characters. And this isn’t just the killing joke, it’s also the original reason she was de aged.
There are so many heroes/anti heroes who are willing to kill and are still accepted in the dc vigilante community, and even begrudgingly tolerated by Batman. If Jason Todd came back to life and killed the joker I believe the majority of heroes willingly welcome him back.
But the thing is he made it about Batman as much as the Joker. He was just as mad at Bruce for not avenging him as he was at the Joker for killing him. He made sure Bruce was there watching when he tried to kill the Joker and that he felt complicit in it. From that moment post crisis Jason went from an anti hero who kills on a revenge quest to a Batman villain. This only became more evident when he chose to hurt completely uninvolved people (like Mia Dearden) seemingly just to get a rise out of Bruce.
And that's the tragic thing, in choosing to involve Bruce he turned himself into an antagonist of the DC hero community. He was no longer just an agent of bloody vengeance (like Kate Spencer or Helena Bertinelli), and certainly not as a person who would only kill in the most extreme cases (like Wonder Woman). Instead he came back desperate to pull The Dark Knight into the bloodshed and the despair of breaking his vow. And if he apologised, disavowed that behaviour and made amends they might forgive him knowing Jason but that seems unrealistic. And after that attack on another hero's (and his own father's) values and such a brutal violation of his boundaries I feel like Jason's relationship with the broader community is going to be inherently strained. A lot more than if his one crime was being a vigilante who kills.
Okay I 100% disagree with this take.
Firstly the superhero community is full of people who have one point or another been very mean to Bruce. Barbara Gordon. Huntress. Green Arrow. Power Girl. The list goes on. People have been calling out Bruce on his self righteous spooky bullshit since forever and no one considers it a crime as much as a rite of passage. This idea of Bruce being the unquestioned and universally admired leader is very much a consequence of the Batfanon where the Bats are the main characters of the DC universe over actual canon. If Jason showed up and chose to chew Batman out for being a judgemental and self righteous bastard people would be cheering him on. If he chose to leave Batman and strike out on his own out of anger I believe a of people would be fine with that.
The problem is rather the way he did it. Jason wasn't just 'mean' to Bruce, he devised and deliberately put him in his ultimate nightmare scenario. His trauma and moral code makes him heavily adverse to gun crime and murder. Moreover, he takes on an almost pathologically extreme sense of responsibility to any death that happens on (what he considers) his watch. This is a trait which he only really recognises existing in the same extremity within Cass. The ability to internalise the blame for all the death that happens near him, even if it was technically at someone else's hand and there is technically nothing he could do. Jason was going to kill the Joker in front of Bruce and through deliberately orchestrating him as the victim he turned it from an execution of his murderer to a punishment for his father.
So I would argue this malicious and meticulously planned violation of Bruce's moral code is the first instance where Jason goes from another vigilante who kills to an outright antagonist. But it is not the most egregious or hard to forgive act. That would probably be the indiscriminate murder of random prisoners and the kidnapping and torment of Mia Dearden and the blowing up of her school. These crimes are far more likely reason for the heroes to dislike him than being mean to Bruce. I just thought it was important to note that him wanting the kill the Joker was not the biggest issue that they would have with his UTRH scheme.
Now onto the second point, as a general rule the DC heroes don't believe they're better than other people. The whole point of characters like Superman and the Flash is despite everything they dont see themselves as more important. If Jason did something similar to a random person they would also find it horrific because forcing someone into a trolley problem where they have to watch death is a shitty thing to do. And if anything post crisis Jason is the one who acts like he matters more, as evident in his decision to indiscriminately poison his fellow prisoners despite being a criminal involved in violence and the drug trade himself. That implies that he saw himself and his crimes as 'different' to the other prisoners.
So I am not saying Jason is a bad character or that he is irredeemably evil, but more that his isolation for the superhero community was far from inevitable. But he chose vengeance against Bruce over the ability to truely belong in the hero community, the community that might have understood the trauma of what he had been through and helped him work through it. And you understand why he did that but a sympathetic reasoning doesn't mean a character can't be a villain. It means that they are an absolute tragic figure who condemned himself by choosing vindication and vengeance over the support of those who could have helped him.
There are so many heroes/anti heroes who are willing to kill and are still accepted in the dc vigilante community, and even begrudgingly tolerated by Batman. If Jason Todd came back to life and killed the joker I believe the majority of heroes willingly welcome him back.
But the thing is he made it about Batman as much as the Joker. He was just as mad at Bruce for not avenging him as he was at the Joker for killing him. He made sure Bruce was there watching when he tried to kill the Joker and that he felt complicit in it. From that moment post crisis Jason went from an anti hero who kills on a revenge quest to a Batman villain. This only became more evident when he chose to hurt completely uninvolved people (like Mia Dearden) seemingly just to get a rise out of Bruce.
And that's the tragic thing, in choosing to involve Bruce he turned himself into an antagonist of the DC hero community. He was no longer just an agent of bloody vengeance (like Kate Spencer or Helena Bertinelli), and certainly not as a person who would only kill in the most extreme cases (like Wonder Woman). Instead he came back desperate to pull The Dark Knight into the bloodshed and the despair of breaking his vow. And if he apologised, disavowed that behaviour and made amends they might forgive him knowing Jason but that seems unrealistic. And after that attack on another hero's (and his own father's) values and such a brutal violation of his boundaries I feel like Jason's relationship with the broader community is going to be inherently strained. A lot more than if his one crime was being a vigilante who kills.
bruce wayne is the first person to pass down their genetic predisposition to anxiety disorders to their adopted children
This is really interesting because it proves that Gunn's era of DC is committed to telling stories from different periods in DC's history. So even if Brave and the Bold is about Damian as Robin we can't rule out projects featuring earlier iterations of the Batfamily.
That being said we dont have confirmation it's set in the DCU and not an elseworld yet.
EDIT: The original deadline article had allegedly a synopsis that referenced something about them both being orphan thieves but that was soon edited out. Not sure if that was a complete mistake or seen as a spoiler but I seriously hope it was the former. I demand biblically accurate circus kid Dick Grayson.
Cassandra Cain is groundbreaking as a character because she wasn’t invented as a supporting character to a white man but her own protagonist. Sure, in the broader DC universe she was a part of the Batfamily but almost immediately she was given a solo ongoing where she was the titular figure. Batman was made a recurring side character in her own narrative. This is super rare in big 2 superhero comics. Most of the time women (especially women of colour) are introduced as a supporting character for a male character story, or as part of a white male dominated team, before organically gaining the popularity to ‘earn’ her a spinoff.
But with Cass they trusted that this stubborn, neurodivergent, Asian teenage girl was badass and compelling enough as a superhero to sustain her own solo series. And you know what? They were right. batgirl 2000 (her original run) is the first and longest individual batgirl run in DC comics history. Comic readers loved her.
And this only was possible because of a diverse writers room with a drive to push creative boundaries and a willingness to fight with editorial if necessary. Joe Illidge (the first black editor for Batman) recalled that the Bat creative team had to fight to have a non-white Batgirl. But they fought for it, they won, and Cass demonstrated that risks and moves towards more diverse comics pays off. And the fact that after countless attempts to silence her, ignore her fans, and pretend she doesn’t exist, Cass is back with a vengeance and a new solo only further proves they were right. Despite what the anti-woke crowd may cry bold, progressive storytelling can and does work, especially when the creative team believes in the character and plot and the people with the money let them do their thing.
I choose to believe that Diana Prince, Connor Hawke, Zatanna Zatara, Buddy Baker, and Damian Wayne are all part of a group chat that is exclusively used to share vegetarian recipes and restaurant recommendations.
I know getting into dc comics is absolutely terrifying so if you have any questions feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to help. And if I don’t know I will still be thrilled to help and contact one of the more informed users of this hellsite.
If DC was at all smart they would have spent the last two decades marketing Barbara Gordon as THE icon for women in stem and computer science.
They introduced a powerful, cool super heroine whose whole thing is being super smart and being (one of) the best programmer(s) in the entire DC universe in the 80s and they didn't think to capitalise on this?? In a time where there is a large push to get more girls into coding and STEM and many portrayals of the tech industry barely include women (much less as awesome, confident leaders)??
