How Do You See Stephanie Brown, And What Do You Think That Others Get Wrong?

How do you see Stephanie Brown, and what do you think that others get wrong?

I see Stephanie Brown as someone who has always, always refused to break.

I think that’s the first thing that people always lose sight of with her. In the Nu52, Steph’s trauma and history and stubbornness ended up being erased in favor of her being a fish-out-of-water newcomer to the scene.

Steph has not had an easy time of things. She is an abuse survivor, who had to deal with her mother’s struggles with opioid addiction. Friends and family of her parents couldn’t be trusted, and so she grew up, alone, longing for someone to come along, to understand, to help. She built up an idea of Batman as that perfect adult she never had, of the person who actually could help her, could understand her, and would.

But no one came. No one helped. Therapy and jail and stints on the Suicide Squad only made her father more dangerous, rather than helping him, and she was becoming more and more aware of the full extent of his abuse towards her mother.

So she saves herself.

First, and foremost, Steph saves herself.

Steph is kind, and happy, but what I think people don’t understand is that her kind of joy is a choice. It’s a fight, every day, and she is fighting tooth and nail for it, every day. It’s not always easy, she doesn’t always succeed. But she is, at the heart of herself, railing against the cycles and systems of abuse that has defined her life, has defined the lives of her friends and the people she is trying to help.

Her life is, fundamentally, an attempt to break that cycle, and to help others break it to. She believes in second-chances, because you need them, because people make mistakes, and stumble, but if you are going to heal, if you are going to improve, you need those chances. To break a vicious cycle, you need an exit, and she is fighting hard for those exits.

And I think people struggle to understand that, to understand that her happiness, her kindness, are a choice made in spite of the cruelty of Gotham and the world. It’s not that it doesn’t affect her; it shapes her entire life, and she burns with that injustice, burns with the fact that every system failed her, failed her mother, failed Cass.

And that’s why she stays, that’s why she keeps fighting, because if Stephanie Brown is ever going to be more than the daughter of a supervillain, the girl who looks just like Arthur Brown, the teenaged mom, the girl who was Robin for seventy-one days… she has to.

And she is. She’s Batgirl. She’s Robin. She’s Spoiler.

And that’s something worth smiling about.