Curate, connect, and discover
I just saw someone say that Tim was the only member of the batfamily who didn’t suck at math.
With the exception of Dick (acrobatics) and Cass (body language) none of the Batkids are THAT much better than the others at a certain skill
Yes Jason is a better shot
Yes Tim is a better detective
And on a technical level they’re much better
Sure
But that means that if they have a 0.001% chance of cracking a case or making a shot. There will be a noticeable difference between Tim being the character or say Damian.
Otherwise
Not particularly.
Think of each skill like a normally distributed curve okay with the mean being your average hero/olympian/hacker/genius
Right
The Batkids will be at the 96th percentile in the skill
With the exception of 1 of them being at the 99th percentile range
Unless you are writing something you can comfortably say is complex/difficult enough to warrant drawing attention to the 3% difference. It’s annoying to bring it up
I exclude Dick and Cass
Because Dicks introduction is the fact he can do something the rest of the kids can’t to the point where it’s an identifier within his own story. It’s how Tim found him, a signature only he can do.
And Cass because she is genuinely cartoonishly cracked in her own storyline and in batfamily stuff she’s borderline a mind reader
(Could also argue Jason for supernatural stuff and the all blades)
These are exceptions because yeah
If you told me Jason, Dick or Steph cracked a difficult case in a run I wouldn’t treat it as shocking information
If you told me Tim, Dick or Damian managed a tricky shot with a firearm in a dire situation (like what happens in the Grayson run) it would be interesting, surprising but like not? Shocking?
If you told me that Jason did a quadruple summersault off a building and landed on his feet I’d be confused as shit
And even WITH Dick and Cass the other kids are still FREAKISHLY good at D&Cs special skills but they both have unignorable signatures
This is a very long winded way of saying when an author simplifies a character down to
“Oh look nice flippy one”
“Smart one”
“Angry gun one”
“Pet collector”
It’s annoying because you basically ignore all the interesting overlap
Like guess what Dick literally has a habit of collecting strays (see the rabbit and 3 legged dog he lives with in his apartment in the new run)
Tim is fucking badass and is very good at dealing with explosives
Damian is canonically currently thinking of leaving the family business and no longer being a hero to maybe focus on helping people in other ways
Jason occasionally works with magic and demon bullshit
And every single one of them is a genius okay literally every single one of them could get a masters in physics, chem, bio and history in like 2 weeks flat.
Their stats are stacked
All of them know enough info to be able to do 99% of a task and yeah someone might call Tim or Dick in for detective help or Jason for muscle and restraining backup but in 99% of cases THE OTHER CHARACTERS SHOULD BE EQUALLY competent