Hey, Where Are My DC X DP People At?

Slade Wilson makes me want to write an au where his son, Grant, joins/is adopted by/marries into the Batfamily during his teen rebel phase.

His codename is Wrenegade.

Wouldn't that be some shit? All this lethal potential and he's using it to be a martyr vigilante in the hellcity? Slade would have a coronary. Batman would be the most smug bitch. Grant would keep the orange-and-black just to flex on his shitty bio-dad.

He'd hang out with the Waynes and everyone "in the know" would know that Batman poached a kid from Deathstroke.

"Slade is a titans villain!" "Slade is a Batman villain!" Slade is his own fucking villain. Have you seen the bastard? He is the main component in wrecking his own life godbless.

I want to explore the Bernard-as-the-third-Robin idea a little more.

Firstly, that's a mouthful and we're calling him Robern from now on.

CW: in theorizing backstory we address potential/canon child abuse and suicidal ideation.

How does he come to find himself in Batman's orbit? By accident. By storming out of his house after a fight with his parents. By blindly walking to the more dangerous part of town, or climbing up to a rooftop, or standing at a bridge.

By looking at something dangerous and thinking, "how much would they care if I were hurt? Would they care at all?"

And then along comes the goddamn Batman. And he's a fucking mess. He burned the bat signal onto a guy's face earlier.

And maybe that's where this change in the timeline starts; with Batman sitting next to this kid who looks nothing like either of his sons, listening to him talk about his parents and his fears and...

Bernard is just a kid who wants his parents to love and accept him.

Just like Jason.

Do y'all think Batman would take him home immediately or do you think he'd try to find alternative arrangements for this kid?

Because I rather like the idea of a deeply concerned Tim Drake going to Nightwing sooner rather than later, holding photos of messy!Batman ushering a sad-eyed blond kid into the Batmobile.

Such a good take, I love how Bernard can be used to address the standard difficulties of life. He's a complimentary character to Tim, who will look at all his hero shit and be like "but that's the real trauma", and Bernard will be like, "Babe, no. That is additional trauma. That is the Trauma à la mode."

Adding my headcanons:

Bernard is absolutely the type of conspiracy theorist who does psych profiles for funzies. He's worked on himself enough to know that Tim needs his own set of self-help books. He's going to be supportive as heck, but he's also not going to let himself become Tim's sole point of mental stability.

Basically, Bernard is pulling a Tim, on Tim, and Tim recognizes it, and is even more touched because he knows how much you gotta love someone to go that far.

Headcanon: TimBer Parents' Parallels

Tim: His parents loved him, but their actions (constantly leaving him alone) created emotional distance, making it sometimes feel as if they didn’t.

Bernard: His parents didn’t love him, but their actions (wanting him to come back home and pretend to be a family) made it seem like they did - until he learned to see right through them.

Tim: Learned to cope by being a "perfect, angelic son" so as not to let his parents worry about him. This allows them to go gallivanting without any guilt, while he learns to shove aside his trauma as if it means nothing.

Bernard: Learned to cope by NOT following his parents’ expectations of a perfect son. Instead, he became the sort of individual (his high school persona, bathroom jokes made loudly in a public place) who agitates them and forces them to acknowledge his presence, even if the attention is negative.

Where that leaves them both:

Tim: Struggles with the idea of "loving someone despite the distance." He sometimes falls into habits of loving someone to a choking degree (stalking them, trying to remove them from the vigilant world, withholding information of his emotions/superhero identity to maintain a tenuous balance) or puts up more distance when he feels the relationship can’t be fixed (quitting his Robin career, pushing Stephanie away harshly, running away from Young Justice/Gotham).

Bernard: Doesn’t believe love is something you should just expect from someone else, because obligations of love (like in a family) just leave everyone hurt. Instead, he freely loves other people without caring if it's returned (he still wants a relationship with his parents despite their regret for his birth, admits to "Robin" his romantic feelings towards Tim without ANY assurance that he would be accepted). However, at the same time, he doesn’t do so blindly or without recognizing that sometimes you have to keep a distance for the sake of your own wellbeing (never contacted his parents during that year apart despite that it hurt him, refusing to move back home no matter how much he really wants to unless some changes are made).

I feel like these are the sort of issues that they can really only talk about to one another, common bad childhood/messy homelife scenarios that have nothing to do with vigilantes or supervillains. Just the dichotomy of bad parenting and how a child copes as best they can, even though it leaves a lot of deep scars.

At least, that’s my opinion on all this.

There are lots of fics about Batman being a bat shifter or being magically turned into a bat. I think there should be more of them. And that they should feature more confused bats swimming in the wet air.

Fucking thieves using ai for all the wrong fucking reasons I hope they become a better person someday and are choked with guilt for their shitty actions

How To Lock All of Your Fics At Once On Ao3

Someone has probably already done this but

For anyone looking to lock their works for only registered users over on Ao3 in light of the sudowrites scraping thing here is how you can lock all of your fics at once.

Log into Ao3 and go to your Profile, Works or Dashboard

At the top under you’re user name there are four buttons pick Edit Works

Second row of buttons on the right chose All and then hit Edit

Scroll down past all of your works and then keeps scrolling until you find Visibility  change it to Only Show to Registered User

(If a fic is over the tag limit you have to edit those down to make edit to the work.)

Hit Update All Works at the very bottom and you are done all of you fics should now have a little blue lock next to your user name on each fic.

Just want to remind the world in general of This Shit lmao

I like to imagine Robane and Red Hood-dressed-as-Robin accidentally meeting each other, having an awkward elevator ride together or something, Spider-Man meme. I feel like Jason would immediately rethink his life choices. New perspective and all that.

Hey! Hey you!

Yes, you! The person who thinks too much about comic book characters and deep dives into esoteric subjects in order to create a free work of art?

How's your typing speed? How quickly could you learn a new way to type? Do you like knowing things, often terrible things, that other people don't? Can you bear the weight of both banality and daily tragedy? Does the idea of a stressful job make you bare your teeth in a feral grin, welcoming the challenge?

Do you get fed up with the American court systems? Does the frustration of injustice and the feeling of helplessness choke you out at night?

Now is a fantastic time to look into the field of a Stenographer, or a Court Reporter.

Every court case must be legally and accurately documented and frankly there aren't enough stenographers to go around. Especially since a great number of them will be moving into retirement age in the coming years.

It's a no-breaker that the government is on fire, but we can't just shut it down until a roiling mass of different peoples somehow agree on a better way to get shit done. There are people in the now who need to have their cases heard sooner rather than later and Court Reporters are essential to that happening.

***I'm not claiming that this is or has ever been my job, either! There's like one person on this site who has confirmation of at most which state I lived in years ago and that's because we're personal email-level friends. Please be careful about what info you share on the Internet.

***That being said, I've held some fairly atypical jobs over the years and so have many friends of mine. They can be honestly fun to talk about and it's always fun to make someone realize that yes, that thing would have to be a job, that's an actual job thing to do. And I like to talk up my friends' wild experiences as well!

Wanted to write out something not-so-heavy, so I'm gonna borrow @arandomao3user's freaky Tim and Bernard pair.

Kink and Bondage go hand-in-hand, but there's a constant problem in the TimBern household. And it's all Tim's fault. He's a fucking escape artist. He keeps getting out of the ropes, the cuffs, the zip ties, the soft restraints, the chains, the really fancy bondage knots that took forever to actually get him into, the specialty restraints, the straitjacket from that one undercover op that went really weird...

It was cute at first when he could play-tackle Tim back to the bed (or floor or table or counter or chair or deck) for a different sort of game, but at this point it's become a problem for the both of them.

Because Tim genuinely can't stop escaping, even when he's into being tied up. Bernard, with equal amounts of frustration and affection, calls it Tim's Robin Reflex. He does it by habit, by accident, and while asleep, on one memorable occasion. Tim's always very sorry, of course, and he is trying so hard to be good for Bernard. It's just that they haven't found that sweet spot yet, that mystery thing that can keep Tim relatively helpless and at Bernard's mercy, but won't trigger the not-fun sort of sense memories that come with years of vigilante work.

So, at a loss and desperate for ideas, Bernard calls his bff.

Jason, actively falling asleep after patrol: "You want advice... On tying up Timmers? Like, shibari 'n whatever? Fucking. Didn't need this in my life, Burn Notice."

Bernard, entirely too awake: "C'mon, Jason; you're one of the most creative people I know and I'm out of ideas. You used to fight all the time! And you have major connections, my man, my buddy, my bestie. Don't you have any alien tech or magical stuff that might work?"

Jason, so tired: "I can ask around later, you freaky...I don't know. I never tied Tim up when we were fighting; I shot him in the thigh once and that slowed him down."

Hearing nothing but dial-tone, Jason sets his phone aside and promptly falls asleep

Three minutes later, Jason sits up in a cold sweat and scrambles for his phone to text Bernard.

J: DO NOT SHOOT TIM

J: BERN. FUCKING ANSWER ME.

J: ISTG IF ONE OF YOU FUCKERS IS SHOT WHEN I GET OVER THERE I WILL GET YOUR HORNY ASSES NEUTERED

Okay, okay, okay. More Bat-family brainrot to throw out into the void.

It's generally accepted that none of the Bats really enjoy going to galas or schmoozing with the upper class Gothamites. It's a fun enough joke or point of resentment or a good way to excuse the absence of other characters.

But consider the parties from a new angle: Galas are how the Bats patrol the ultra-rich areas. (I mean, that's where Epstein recruited his victims, right? And rich kids don't get their drugs from street corners)

Gotham vigilantes spend weeks swinging around on the main island, fighting street crime, foiling plots, etc. Gala Night is when they get to go hunting for the big fish, ya get me? They are so eager to dive into a Gala and find the tea.

It's a tech-heavy production, I'd wager. If your phone is on, it's being cloned. So many listening devices and/or cameras slipped into decorations or are being worn by the Bats. They're everywhere, popping in on conversations, encouraging people to talk about themselves, disguised as servers, disguised as other guests.