I Hc Dick Will Be Non-verbal For A Bit When Bruce First Adopts Him

One day I am gonna grow wings

All he wants is to be loved 😭😭😭

Let him be loved dammit. Dc stop making him sad. He’s just a little guy who wants a farm and for his parents to be proud of him. Let him have this. Stop ruining his life.

watching in horror as i scroll through tiktok and video start to freeze or not load at all. profile pictures disappear. i am unable to leave likes. i felt like watching the ship sink.

i crawl back to tumblr on my hands and knees.

A rant on the racism of the DC fandom

So, if you follow me, you will know that very recently I called out a post about certain undertones of casual racism (OP and I talked about it, and we both apologised, them for posting and me because I should've made a separate post to talk about these issues). Thus, I decided to make this post.

Quick warning: This will talk about different dark moments in comics, from SA to child abuse, neglect and violence. If you are triggered by these subjects, please do not read. If you still want to read, proceed with caution.

Also, warning, this post is extremely long.

Okay, first of all, we need to define:

What is casual racism?

According to the Australian Human Rights Comission, casual racism refers to conduct involving negative stereotypes or prejudices about people on the basis of race, colour or ethnicity. Examples include jokes, off-handed comments, and exclusion of people from social situations on the basis of race.

Many times people make jokes with a casual racism undertone not because they themselves are racist but because they do not know it or even realise it. This can happen in many ways, such as making a joke about an Arab child being feral/having rabies or making jokes about how Jewish people are greedy. Other casual racist comments are those such as "Your English is very good."

Now, I'm not going to say I have never done this, as even I wrote things with casual racism without realising, because that's just what I saw everyone else doing, and it wasn't until I actually started talking to other people that I realised what I did was wrong. Because many pieces of media I consumed were fics, which affected how I wrote characters until I actually got into the canon characters.

Once I realised my mistakes, I not only fixed my own fics but also started looking deeper into fics, artwork, comics, etc. And realised that casual racism was so deeply engraved in the fandom that many people continue to push certain headcanons, not realising how offensive it was. And this is only made worse when we have people who have only read specific comic books and have no idea how characters were depicted prior to a certain year. So this, mixed with a large decrease in media literacy, has led to me being so annoyed that I have blocked multiple character tags on Tumblr and other social media platforms to get away from the racism in so many posts. Especially surrounding POC characters:

The al Ghuls, specifically Ra's, Talia and Damian, as well as Cass and Duke.

As well as people headcanoning a white character as Asian, which is fine, except many people do it using a lot of racial stereotypes as a reason behind it:

Tim Drake.

Racism in the DC fandom

Now, I will warn you about this: this is where we get more and more into child abuse/neglect, as well as SA. I will put trigger warnings in each section to warn you, but just in case.

Ra's al Ghul. TW: Murder, SA

Before getting into the stereotypes surrounding him, let's just do a quick recap on Ra's' past(s). In his childhood, Ra's belonged to a group of nomads who came from China, all of whom were attacked and murdered brutally by a group of colonisers.

Later in life he became a healer and getting marriedto his first wife, Sora. Even though the marriage began as a convenience deal, since Sora's father kept trying to marry her off, the two grew to love one another, with Ra's falling in love with Sora thanks to the fact that she was fearless, standing up to everyone around her, even Ra's.

They settled down in a kingdom, with Ra's becoming a physician/doctor. However, after Ra's finds the Lazarus pit, he uses it to heal a prince, not knowing that this prince was already completely messed up. The Lazarus Pit makes him even more insane, leading to him assaulting Sora, trying to have Ra's killed, and then strangling Sora and blaming Ra's.

Ra's is then saved by a man whose mother's pain had been lessened by Ra's during her final days. Ra's leaves and comes back with his tribe, killing the prince and the king. It is heavily believed that it was this event that made Ra's become vengeful and able to see things as just black or white.

So, with that out of the way, let's jump into the stereotypes surrounding Ra's stereotypes/misconceptions.

Sexist (Not canon)

A bad father (By Western standards, yes, but considering he's a man who leads a cult, was born 700 years ago or more, and has seen colonisers commit genocide and other atrocities, he's pretty good.)

A homicidal maniac (Kinda canon; we'll get into it later.)

Obsessed with Tim Drake (Not canon AT ALL. Stop lying to yourselves and us.)

Let's debunk each theme one by one.

a. Ra's is sexist.

A lot of people say Ra's is sexist because he "didn't make Talia his heir" and was "desperate for a male heir".

Ra's did want Talia as his heir. It was Talia who didn't want to be his heir, as she did not agree with his methodology. Nyssa, Talia's older sister, was Ra's heir until she was murdered.

If Ra's was desperate for a male, he would've never cut Dusan off or killed him. The only reason Ra's ever considered Bruce as heir was because he saw Bruce as worthy just because of Talia:

Ra's has never been sexist; that is just a consequence stemming from poor media literacy mixed with the whole stereotype of Arab men being sexist.

b. Ra's is a bad father.

Ra's is someone who loves Talia dearly; that is something that characterises the al Ghuls; they love each other so much that they're willing to kill, die and defy death for each other. (Even if some specific writers decide to ignore ALL CANON to depict them all as abusive.)

Ra's was someone who lost it all; his people to colonisers, and his first wife was murdered, for which he was framed and exiled. Ra's cares not for the sex of his family; all he cares for is their health and lives.

However, this love manifested in ways that could become even toxic, going as far as locking Talia in her room once to protect her (I'll talk about this more during Damian's section).

He also supports Talia, even when she wishes to date Bruce, and even in her education, he supports her.

c. Ra's is a homicidal maniac.

Ra's is actually more similar to Poison Ivy. He's an eco-terrorist; he commits acts of violence which are committed in support of environmental causes, against people or property.

Ra's is someone who has witnessed the extinction of multiple species, both animals and plants. He has witnessed these crimes go unpunished, resulting in him becoming hardened and violent, thinking that the only way to stop this is by killing off humans, whether they are in the 1% or not.

However, for some strange reason, when Ivy kills hundreds to save the Earth's flora, it's fine, and she's a boss babe pussy queen girl, yassss. But when Ra's does it, he's a tyrant who's obsessed with killing innocents? Okay, sure....

c. Ra's is obsessed with Tim.

That's funny; tell another one.

This could easily be an entire post on its own, so I'll just say this:

Ra's never took Tim's spleen; Tim was attacked by the Council of Spiders, enemies from the LoA. He was stabbed, and White Ghost (Fadir Nasser), who works for Ra's, performed surgery to prevent Tim from dying. No, Ra's did not send for Tim's spleen or to keep it in a jar; that never happened.

2. Ra's only spoke with Tim in this single run, and simply because Tim decided to blow up ALL the league bases, murdering thousands, because... plot?. And then Ra's simply got back at him by trying to kill him when he could've absolutely done worse.

Outside of this? Nothing; stop lying to make your fave look interesting. Make him look interesting by using his canon, not fanon.

2. Talia al Ghul. TW: SA, r*pe

Talia, sadly, was assassinated by the "Dragon lady" trope, the opposite of the "Lotus blossom" trope. The Dragon Lady is a stereotype of certain East Asian and occasionally South Asian and/or Southeast Asian women, portraying them as strong, deceitful, domineering, mysterious, and often sexually alluring.

We see her go from her original self, a woman with a strong moral compass but whose love makes it hard for her to leave her father and choose Bruce over him and vice versa. Talia and Bruce were extremely in love; never did Talia r*pe Bruce or SA him. This was written by Morrison in 2006, after he retconned the OG storyline with Bruce falling in love with Talia, because a white man could NEVER be attracted to an Arab woman??? And even though this storyline was also retconned, people still claim Talia not only SA'd Bruce but also Jason, and considering that Talia herself was SA'd and r*ped by Bane multiple times, this is fucking disgusting.

This post actually does dive into the way r*pe is depicted in DC Comics when a woman is a victim and when a man is a victim. And even if I hate the fact that so many people take a retconned storyline that happened in ONE comic as canon. They do call out the fact that white men are made "blameless" for sleeping with an Asian woman by having them dr*gged to lead to an assassin Asian baby storyline where the white man can save the baby from the evil people of colour.

In the beginning, Bruce was not only in love with Talia; he was also overjoyed when he found out she was pregnant.

Talia is also often written as a bad mom or as a Tiger Mom, a stereotype that mostly affects Chinese mothers, presenting them as cold women who relentlessly drive their children to study hard, without regard for the child's social and emotional development, which is baffling. Is she perfect? No. Does she love Damian? Yes, more than anything in the world. Does she strive for his protection? Yes. In fact, in his original storyline, Talia actually gave birth to Damian and gave him up for adoption, wanting him to live a normal life away from the League. So not only did she lie and tell Bruce she miscarried to protect him, she also gave her son away, all to also protect him.

There's also all these comic panels.

3. Damian Wayne al Ghul. TW: Child ab*se, neglect, martyr complex, (maybe) religious guilt.

Now, Damian is a character that I could talk about for hours on end.

He's often represented as pretentious, when in reality he is arrogant at most. The difference (the basic one at least) is that pretentious people "talk the talk"; they pretend to be something they're not; they brag about capabilities they do not possess. Arrogance, on the other hand, is to "walk the walk"; Damian is arrogant because he was raised as a prince, trained by the world's best assassins, and is smart enough to have a PhD at seven years old. He sees people as inferior because that's how he was raised. He is above them; he's the son of a godly figure in a cult; he's royalty, the blood son. He is all those things, and that's why he's arrogant. He won't see you as worthy until you prove yourself worthy.

However, he's also deeply caring and selfless, going into the Gotham sewers to find a pearl that belonged to Martha Kent to give it to his father and surrendering himself to the Court of Owls to protect others. He's kind and loving, treating his very own malformed clones as his brothers, sympathising with them almost immediately.

He carries so much guilt over the blood in his hand that when he kills and is discovered by Bruce, he doesn't act like someone who's been caught by a vigilante but by someone who was caught by a religious figure, and considering Damian was raised to see Bruce as a god, it's not shocking.

Damian is also extremely insecure; he doesn't know who he is beyond the son of Bruce and Talia. He's a construct that he doesn't understand and is currently trying to do so because it has come to a point in his life where he knows nobody is going to help or save him, not Bruce, not Dick, not Talia. Damian only has himself, and he doesn't even know the only person he has.

A lot of people also claim he's better off with Bruce; however, let's not forget that Bruce isolated Damian, refused to actually try to talk to him and simply let people (Tim and others) beat Damian up instead of trying to form a connection with Damian to explain the way things work in Gotham. (Saying "We don't kill" over and over ISN'T communication; he needs to actually talk to Damian. Not isolate him and destroy his paintings because they're gore. Even if it's a coping mechanism.). I mentioned that Ra's also locked Talia away in her room. But the main difference between Bruce and Ra's here is that Ra's does it to protect Talia from the dangers of the world, while Bruce does it to protect the world from the danger that he sees Damian as. Really, it's no surprise that Damian's mental health declined so badly since he came to Gotham that he currently suffers from PTSD, anxiety and psychosis (hallucinating Alfred after he died and also evil versions of himself).

And listen, Damian is 10 when he comes to Gotham, meaning he went from one culture to an entirely different one with nobody to be there for him to explain how things work and how to express himself, and nobody tried to accommodate him. He complains about the food, which I get, because going from foods full of spices to just a weird coloured broth or food dipped in grease is a hard thing to get used to, and instead of maybe trying to get food from places that sell Arab dishes, Bruce just insults Damian, locks him in his room with a padlock and security code, and then what? Refuses to let him eat? "But Damian's an assassin; he can handle it."

He's ten. Assassin or not, this is Bruce verbally abusing his son. The son that he was so happy to have once upon a time, a son who he loved in theory, but not in practice.

People claim Damian is better off with Bruce, but even though the League was clearly not perfect. In the total of six years Damian stayed in Gotham, he was isolated, verbally abused, neglected, beaten multiple times, forced to witness the murder of the ONLY person who actually cared for him since day one and never failed him, and blamed for said murder. When Damian is in the manor with Bruce, he's mistreated and told to leave, but the moment he leaves, everyone freaks out and goes to get him back. Many people joke that Damian is the only one "not chosen", but Damian really is the only one who is chosen over and over and over; even when he doesn't want to be chosen anymore, he just wants to live his own life without being constantly told to hate his maternal family.

I do have a theory as to why people hate Damian but love Cass, even though they have slightly similar stories. And it's because Damian isn't the perfect victim. He's not submissive nor quiet; he doesn't bow to his white saviours; he stays in touch with his "evil" culture and family. He also calls out Bruce and Tim all the time. Thus, people dislike him and treat him as feral or rabid, just because he's a child raised in a cult who struggles to understand the way a society in a completely different continent works, especially how a group of vigilantes who have known one another for YEARS work.

Adults who migrate to other countries with a support group already struggle with the culture shock and homesickness. Imagine how a ten-year-old suffers when he moves to a new place all by himself where nobody thinks to sit him down, talk to him like a person instead of a ticking time bomb/rabid animal, or thinks to accommodate him by maybe trying to cook a dish or two from his culture or trying to ask him how they can make the food better for them or easier to digest.

Even if Damian had a support network in Alfred, Dick and Steph, Steph and Dick were rarely ever in the manor, Dick had to actually learn to love Damian, and Alfred would mostly sit back and do nothing about Bruce's awful parenting.

I could speak on Damian for hours, but that's a story for another post.

3. Cassandra Cain TW: Child ab*se, murder.

Sadly, due to Tumblr's 30 pictures limit, Cass' section will be the last one to include a picture, but I will include links to other posts that have more panel screenshots. Which I don't mind doing.

Now, I have seen many people misinterprit her in making her selectively mute. I'm not here to tell you you can't headcanon someone as selectively mute or as someone with an actual disabilty or mental health disorder. But when it comes to Cass, so much of her character is driven by her desire to learn how to behave like a human that making her selectively mute is a disservice to her character. This post explains why, and I will quote it, but it also adds more photographic evidence, which I can't do now due to the limits.

But basically, Cass was raised as a weapon, not a person/assassin (Something that also differentiates her from Damian). She was never taught how to read, write or speak, so when she was adopted by Bruce and began to spend time with the family, she was taught how to do so by Barbara.

The only language she learnt was body language; she can read a person's posture easily, but she can't express herself verbally.

She wishes to be able to speak; she wants to be able to write and at least communicate like a human rather than still be a weapon who couldn't speak, read or write.

Making her selectively mute is severely tone deaf and shows a lack of understanding of her character. And even making her use ASL when she doesn't even know how to do so in canon is also highly tone-deaf. Cass doesn't speak ASL; she uses hand gestures, but they're not ASL. In the comics Batman himself says

“You don’t speak any language, do you? Except violence.” -Detective Comics (1937) #734

If the fic you write takes place early in her time with the family, her being mute and speaking in hand gestures makes sense. But if the fic already takes place decades in the future, it doesn't make sense for her to still be unable to speak, especially since she is actively learning and practising all the time.

In my opinion, making Bruce or even Jason selectively mute makes more sense. Since Bruce spent hours next to the corpses of his parents without being able to call for help, and Jason couldn't call for help because he was either choking on blood or smoke during his murder.

It's not wrong to headcanon a character as disabled. Hell, it would make sense for Cass to shut down during specific situations and become mute, but a lot of people write her "selective mutism" as just pure mutism.

The post I linked also shows a lot more comic evidence and even dives into it much deeper, so check it out.

5. Duke Thomas

Now, I bet you're wondering. "What do people do to Duke in fanon?" And the answer is: They delete him.

You could read a 400k word fic, and all Duke will do in it is snort at something someone says. He is treated as "the other one"; he's often depicted as a sort of quiet "Black sidekick" who's just there to find whatever the designated white main character does funny, agreeing with whatever the designated white character (DWC) says or does, and overall just there to work as a sort of bridge for the author to add in hints of what they want you to do when the DWC does anything.

Even when I was planning to write this, I was asking myself, "He's not depicted as the agressive black male, nor is he depicted as the sexist black male. Is he just excused?" And then a friend told me the same quote I added about him just snorting in a 400k word fic. The same friend also sent me a TikTok where it was the batfam doing something (I blocked the user immediately after seeing the video, so I don't remember), and they didn't include Damian because they said they hated him, which, okay fine, you're free to have that opinion, but they also completely ignored Duke; they didn't put him in the video and didn't acknowledge his absence; he was just not there. And also, instead of adding Carrie Kelley, or Mia Mizoguchi, Helena Wayne, Terry McGinnis, or any other batfam member. They added in Billy, who I swear to God I cannot remember the last time he was with the batfam hanging out without a mission with other heroes in the way.

Duke isn't depicted as a stereotypical black male from a hood (or at least, I have been lucky enough to have never witnessed anyone depicting him as such.) But he's always erased or reduced until he's almost absent. And a lot of people, I hope, do it because they don't know how to write Duke. Which, if that's the reason for you, this post here talks a lot about him.

Tim Drake

Now, I think anyone who has read about 10% of my posts knows I do not like Tim Drake. Which is actually a big misconception; I don't dislike Tim; I dislike the way his stans depict him by constantly erasing the bad stuff he has done, exaggerating/making up facts about him to victimise him and making him seem like this weak, helpless damsel in distress. I could make a post on its own about Tim, but I can't right now, so I'll just plug this post, this post, and also this Reddit post that has some interesting comments.

And before I get into the "Tim is Asian" headcanon, I do want to say this. Tim was created to be more relatable than the first two Robins (Dick and Jason), having an active social life and home life outside of Robin and having flaws which were important to his character. But it all went to hell when they killed off his parents and made him a Bruce 2.0 with a blank personality that can be moulded to be a self-insert for every writer.

Tim's flaws are a reflection of his upbringing, and his flaws are the reason why he was so likeable. He was like everyone else who read comics; he had emotions, and he could be jerkish at times, like every single teen. He had his own unique abilities that made him different. His stans (again, stans, not fans) did ruin him for me by trying to make him a Gary Stu who was better than Barbara, a better detective than Dick, and a CEO of WE (which he never was; he was a shareholder; Luke Fox is a CEO).

By doing this, they stripped him of everything that made him interesting, and then by making him a sick Victorian child who did nothing but drink coffee all day and night, they just made it so I can now never enjoy a piece of media containing Tim Drake.

And now, by headcanoning him as Asian, we can have a very interesting conversation on headcanoning a white character as POC or at least partially POC (mixed). I would totally be down to maybe accept that headcanon if it weren't for the fact that a lot of people do it for the wrong reasons.

I also want to preface this by saying I am not Asian; the statements I will make I have gotten from my own Asian friends, so if you are Asian and do agree or disagree with statements made here, feel free to add your own commentary.

Now, we can talk about racebending all we want, since it is a very complicated subject to talk about when it comes to media racebending a character whose race is important to their story. But, in my opinion, headcanoning a character as a specific race/ethnicity isn't all that bad in some cases. People headcanoning Sero from BNHA as part Latino is something that I do follow because Sero's ethnicity isn't important to the story. In Marvel's "Cloak and Dagger" I did enjoy the fact that they switched their backstories to make Dagger/Tandy come from a poor background and Cloak/Tyrone come from a high-class family, since I have grown tired of the "All black people are from poor hoods, and all white people are from rich neighbourhoods" trope.

However, Tim's headcanon of him being Asian wouldn't annoy me if it wasn't based off of the stereotypes of Asians having neglectful/abusive parents (read back on my Tiger mom Talia section). (Which Tim doesn't have; his parents were emotionally unavailable at worst. As this post explains, it also explains a lot of Tim Drake misconceptions). The reason why a lot of people also headcanon him as Asian is to feminise him and present him as the "Pretty boy in distress" who can't save himself without seducing his attackers or by having the big strong men in the family save him.

That is something that I have seen in a lot of Tim Drake stans (Read: Stans are NOT the same as fans), where they seem obsessed with making him a damsel in distress who is so delicate that a gust of wind will knock him to the ground and will make him die of the Black Plague. And also, they constantly make him be abused by people who never abused him, such as the people claiming Dick tried to send him to Arkham, when all he did was tell Tim that he needed therapy, which was true. But that's all for another post that will definitely get me shunned from the DC community.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, why did I make this post? Was it to be the friend that's too woke? To ruin people's headcanons? Call everyone racist?

The answer to three of the questions is the same: No

The reason why I wrote this was to educate people, which is something I wish I could've read before I started writing fics, because I definitely did write these same stereotypes unknowingly. And that is something I look back on with shame, even if I was unaware of the things I was doing and never wrote it with ill intentions, which is something I see every time.

Referencing that post I reblogged the other day, the OP themselves told me during our conversation that they never meant to write something that could be offensive. And it's definitely not their fault; it's just something that affects all of us who only consume media in the form of fanfics written with these tropes or only consume comics written by specific authors. This post was simply done as an educational post, not a bashing post or a call-out post. Even if I became emotional at moments during this post, I swear I don't do it because I think everyone is evil; it's mostly the annoyance I feel towards writers who ignore canon and retcon it to add in their own racist views into the characters.

Writing characters is hard when you write fanfic based off of comics since any comic you take inspo from is either retconned, or a different timeline, or not taken as canon, etc. So I do hope that at least this post was able to help, even if slightly.

If you have your own thoughts and feelings do feel free to add onto my post, since this post is my own view, as well as the view of a handful of other people. But be respectful about it, this is to start a conversation, not an argument.

Have a blessed day.

And I'd like to thank the accounts that I cited and linked here, even if they have no idea who I am, but still worked to actually educate me further on issues without realizing it. So thank you to @bitimdrake , @fantastic-nonsense , @wesavegotham , @sohotthateveryonedied , @lanternwisp and @bat-lings .

im a meljayvik shipper that believes in melvik. "jayce has two hands" mel and vik also have two hands and they're all standing in a circle like this

Bathroom cats!!!

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