to be honest this is just a nightwing fan account

cassie sandsmark ur so cutieful

Long time no kory... i've missed her

My girlssss

oh to be a tired little cowboy napping with his cows

the 90s are so fascinating for both Dick and Babs from a romantic standpoint because they're both working through MASSIVE crashouts for extremely different reasons: Babs is recovering from The Killing Joke and breaking off her engagement with Jason Bard, while Dick is reeling from his marriage to Kory failing, Joey dying, the Titans dissolving, not being Bruce's first choice to fill in as Batman for him after Knightfall, etc etc. Them getting together—and their romance in general—is a slow burn, slow-building relationship explicitly presented as "okay, they're both independent, mature, and confident characters now, this is the only way this was ever going to work and now they're ready for it."

Birds of Prey (1999) #8 was the first time in the post-Crisis universe the potential for their romance was explicitly acknowledged, but there are these….hints, here and there, in mid-90s comics (post-Dick returning to Gotham after the dissolution of the Titans) that indicate DickBabs was something that was definitely being thought about in the Bat Offices. Because Dick is CLEARLY not over Kory during this era and he dates 2-3 other women before he and Babs get together, but the hints are definitely there! It's actually really fun to read and realize that the entirety of the mid to late 90s is mostly just them reconnecting, talking to and supporting each other, and building up towards the more explicit romance in Nightwing/Birds of Prey at the speed of molasses.

Like, the "it was you. it was always you" trope DOES NOT WORK for them! It invalidates their other relationships and misses the whole point of what made them work in the first place! The whole point is that they're not the same people they were before their lives disintegrated, and through the rebuilding process they reconnected with each other as people who have grown, changed, and learned from their previous life experiences and found each other that way. They only work because of the adults they grew into being.

And then they finally get together, and it's great for a couple of years!

….then of course the mid-2000s hit the towers, and they break up, and we have several years of Dick and Babs explicitly thinking of each other as "the one who got away" and tiptoeing around the subject of whether or not they should give it another shot at some point.

idk it's just routinely astonishing to me how many people don't really recognize that Dick has to have already gone through the entire NTT era and his relationship with Kory and that Babs has to be Oracle and a grown woman who had a life before Dick for that romance to work. DickBabs only works as Nightwing/Oracle. Trying to retcon it into being Batgirl/Robin (beyond a 'childhood crush that is never acted on' aspect) or Batgirl/Nightwing is setting it up for failure every time.

also yet another reason why current DickBabs is shit, because DC is ignoring that a large part of the appeal of the relationship was the slowburn "part of rebuilding a new life after the old one has disintegrated" aspect, but that's a conversation for another post I guess

hes my special guy

He look everyone, I’m a DC artist who doesn’t know how to draw people that aren’t adult white men.

This is so accurate, I’m so glad I’m not the only one bothered by this lmaooo!!! 😭👏👏

Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying, Chapter 2: Roots

Its moments like this that show me how Dick is truly so much better than me. If a random kid walked up to me and said that about my father who just decked me in the face and told me to not come back, I'd get violent 😭.

And the funny thing is, we as the reader know that Dick has been "paying back" what he "owes" Bruce, as Tim says it. Batman Year Three shows Dick going to talk to Bruce after talking with his therapist *post-New Titans #53 in the hopes of settling the issues between them.

It's not "when Dick became Robin."

It's "when Robin became a hero."

Dick was always Robin.

batma

Batgirl (2000) #14

Like I love Duke Thomas a lot and him as the Signal means a lot to me (and I think Dick has a particular fondness for both Duke and Steph because the Making Your Own Mantle solidarity and like, they're basically the only two to have ever born the Robin name who set it aside or decided after the fact to not stress it over their own chosen mantles BECAUSE their own self-made mantles in hindsight meant more to THEM, were more about THEM and Dick's like ironically I feel more in sync with you in these moments than when either of you were Robin because like. I barely even knew you then, but this I Get).

But man oh man, do I HATE Robin War. As an event. Because of a lot of stupid choices that were made by the narrative, but mostly just because while I can see WHY a generation of Gotham kids would make a Robin-inspired movement, we never got any angst (other than one stupid, lazily written "Dick trusting all these kids' safety to the fucking cops like what is this, did the spirit of Chuck Dixon possess the writers and try to recreate the 90s" plot point) about the Robin name being co-opted from being something personal to one family, Dick's family, whether his first one it was made to honor or his second one that he expanded his view of it to include after the fact.....to being something that was wholly symbolic, and kinda inherently depersonalized as a result.

Like no discredit to the good intentions of every kid to take up that name during that event and what that said about them, the fact that Robin meant something personal to each of them. Honestly, the idea that kids at some point WOULD do something like that in Gotham was the least objectionable part of the story to me. It made sense. It felt like an inevitable consequence of Dick and the later Robins ACTING like symbols to Gotham youth. Robin had been symbolic for a long time at that point. This sort of thing happens, whether the people behind that symbol like it or not.

BUT I hate that we never got any like, actual introspection about what it meant for Dick to see what essentially became a war fought in his entertainer family's signature colors and name.

Like. That had to hit, and not in a good way.

And the fact that it was Alfred who was behind the movement, even if it was in part his way of honoring Dick's memory when he did so, not knowing then that Dick was alive.....

Ugh. I hate that we never got a scene where Dick is like you of ALL people know how much pain I've felt over Bruce making choices about my family's mantle without regard for what I wanted or how I felt about it. How could you POSSIBLY think this is EVER how I would've wanted to be honored?

But we never got it because Dick came back for 2.5 seconds and then got shot in the head and forgot to care about any of this and then Alfred died and Dick remembered he cared about this and ten years from now when they're once again both finally alive and in equal possession of their memories all at the same time, the statute of limitations will have long since run out on this particular character beat.

C'est la comics.

POISON IVY in DC PRIDE 2024

What