Alfred Lore - Blog Posts

the fact that alfred was the one to put up jason's memorial is so important to me

reading some tags and I totally get why it's very popular to say that Alfred is the "heart of the Batfam." However: Alfred is the heart of the Wayne family, not the Bat Family. Which are two different things that should not be conflated with each other.

A few examples: Helena doesn't particularly care about Alfred's opinion, but she does care about Tim, Dick, and Babs. Babs loves Alfred, but he is not the one who kept her communicating with Bruce in the 90s as Oracle. That was Tim and to some extent Dick. Steph (eventually) loved Alfred, but Alfred is not why she started working with the Bats or why she became Robin or Batgirl. That was, for better or worse, heavily connected to her relationship with Tim.

That's why I call Tim the heart of the Batfam; because it's through him that quite a few of these heroes came to be seen as Batman allies in the first place. Part of it's circumstantial; he was Robin at a time when DC was creating several new Gotham-based characters and Tim was a convenient narrative device to convince Bruce to give them a chance (why should he accept them operating in Gotham? Well Tim trusts them, Bruce, why don't you?). But part of it is just...a very deliberate characterization of Tim as someone who a) genuinely wants to be friends with most people and b) wanted to give Bruce a support system to fall back on.

More generally, unless you are a Wayne (biological or adopted), there's no actual reason why Alfred is your "connective tissue" character. In some cases, he may have even actively and openly disliked you. He's generally lovely and nice to have around, but he's also not why you started working out of the Batcave on a semi-regular basis and stuck around to voluntarily deal with Bruce Wayne's emotionally constipated self. Your connective tissue character if you aren't a Wayne is usually one of two people: Barbara Gordon or Tim Drake. And in most cases....it's Tim.