an absolutely not brief history of rose wilson, part one
Rose Wilson, you guys!
Once upon a time, Slade Wilson aka Deathstroke, a mercenary, was in Cambodia, and he was hired to rescue local princess Sweet Lili from the Khmer Rouge and safely escort her to Thailand. LUCKILY for him and his mercenary buds, Sweet Lili has a whole gang of hot friends with her, and they are all DOWN TO FUCK and also to cook delicious meals with ingredients they foraged, and it's TOTALLY normal and I wasn't shocked at ALL when I realized that issue came out in my lifetime and not THE MIDDLE AGES. Everyone else dies, but Slade gets Sweet Lili safely out of Cambodia so she can move to the United States and found a brothel because WHY NOT. She never gets around to telling Slade that she's carrying his child, so when Rose first appears in comics, it's A HUGE SHOCK when Slade's butler Wintergreen figures out who she is:
And then nothing much happened for a while, until all hell broke loose when Deathstroke's half-brother Wade showed up, bent on ruining his brother's life, killed a bunch of people, ransacked the brothel, and kidnapped and tortured Rose. Lili, now a ninja AND a madam, is understandably upset:
Slade: Still not cluing into the fact that Lili's daughter is his daughter, even though she has the same highly-distinctive hair as him and is exactly the right age to have been conceived right around when he and Lili were having all that sex in the Cambodian wilderness, where condoms were presumably not readily available. Slade is maybe not the brightest.
Meanwhile, Wade is NOT. PLEASED. with the fact that Rose doesn't even have the decency to be openly terrified of him:
In an attempt to get a response out of her, he starts cutting her face with broken glass. YIKES, I KNOW! When she still won't cry, he knocks her chair to the ground and storms out of the room, and she proceeds to use the broken glass to cut her hands free and escape. Then he chases her through the woods and she responds by hiding up in a tree and then ambushing him from above. JUST YOUR AVERAGE KIDNAPPED CHILD, BASICALLY! NOTHING AMAZING HERE!
Lili dies during the rescue - or, more specifically, Lili tries to run Wade off a cliff with a Jeep, but he dives out of the way, so she pretty much just drives off a cliff. ...didn't really think that one through, I guess. Rose is devastated and promptly avenges her mother by KICKING WADE OVER THE EDGE, then shooting his hand when he finds a branch to grab onto. Wade falls to his death, only not, because comics.
Deathstroke, of course, ends up finding out that she's his daughter, but he rejects her, reasoning to himself that she'd never be safe with him for a father. SPOILER ALERT: HE IS CORRECT. Sooo, for some reason she goes and lives with the New Titans, and everything works out great! HAHA JUST KIDDING, it's occasionally great but the trend of people assuming Rose is, at her core, dangerous and irredeemable ALSO starts to form, so fuck everything basically.
She chafes at Roy telling her she needs protecting, and makes herself feel better by running away and kicking the shit out of a gang that makes the pitiful mistake of thinking she's an easy victim.
Of course, like four pages later some random important dude [COMICS, I DON'T KNOW!] is talking about how he sent her to the Titans so that they could protect her...and, if necessary, they could protect everyone else from her, which COME ON. I'll get into it later, but COME ON. Did she have a little too much fun beating those guys bloody? PROBABLY. But they're also a bunch of gross nightmare rapists so really, who cares? NOBODY CARES!
Then there's this bullshit. FULL DISCLOSURE, I don't know who these people are, but here is the gist: He showed up at Titans HQ and threatened to kill his own children if Annie tried to take them away - and we're not talking idle threats, okay? We're talking about one arm around his kid's neck, one hand holding a gun, and telling Annie "you can step away from them or you can bury them." The Titans are all off on a mission in space OR WHATEVER, so Rose TAKES HIM DOWN, TAKES HIS GUN, RESCUES EVERYONE'S ASSES, and asks Annie to call the cops:
YES, ANNIE. SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH HER. Namely, she just risked her life to save your family, she is a child who has been put in the horrible position of having to keep a gun trained on someone for her own safety, and she has asked you to call the police so they can come and take over so that someone other than a teenage girl is in charge of the situation, AND YOU ARE SITTING AROUND WISHING THE TITANS WERE THERE INSTEAD OF GETTING YOUR ASS TO A PHONE AND CALLING 911.
Even if you totally agree with Annie that Rose is unhinged and someone to be frightened of, she is requesting a police presence, so even if you assume the worst about her, you also have to grant that at worst, she's worried she might kill him but ultimately doesn't want to - she'd have to be at least as scared by what she's capable of as Annie is.
Sometimes things are great though! Sometimes she spars with other Titans and has lustful thoughts! [One time she gets knocked unconscious while sparring and has some super-trippy vision of the future because it turns out she's got limited precognition?] She snarks! She makes friends! She's Lian Harper's nanny and she takes that shit seriously!
Later, Rose is living with a foster family in Chicago. It's not totally smooth sailing - some perv at school gropes her and tries to follow her into the girls' locker room, so she maintains he kicked himself in the balls breaks his arm.
For the first time in her life, Rose is leading something like a normal life. She has a family again. She's in school of the non-ninja-brothel-homeschooling variety for the first time in her life. She has foster parents who worry about her violent tendencies because of what could happen to her, not because they're afraid of her.
So NATURALLY it all goes to hell, since her uncle Wade MURDERS HER FOSTER PARENTS. The newly-reformed Teen Titans - a totally separate group from the one she lived with, this one headed by Robin/Tim Drake - show up just in time to do nothing. They fight Wade for a while, destroying the house in the process.
Wade gasses them, then runs off with Rose. When the Teen Titans come to and realize that Rose has been kidnapped, they respond by standing around bitching in the rubble that used to be her home. THIS TAKES PLACE LIKE TWO FEET FROM THE STILL-WARM BODIES OF HER MURDERED FOSTER PARENTS:
Bart Allen, as always, gets it. Anyway, while they waste time arguing about whether having an evil father means Rose is psychotic, Wade is delivering her to her father. This ultimately turns out to be a bad move on Wade's part, since Deathstroke overpowers him, ties him up, and then persuades Rose to kill him:
Rose does it, which is unsurprising, given a) the hyper-violent tendencies she's had since her mother died, b) the unimaginable horror she JUST experienced when her foster parents were murdered in front of her, and c) the fact that for the second time in eighteen months, Wade has kidnapped her, killed her family, physically destroyed her home, and robbed her of even the slightest shred of safety and stability.
Not only does her dear old dad get her to kill Wade, but he also manages to establish in her mind that his approval - and by extension, her only chance at love and family - is contingent on her violence and on doing his bidding. HE'S PRETTY DAMN PROUD OF HIMSELF!
I don't always know what to make of Deathstroke. From the general Wikipedia browsing I've done, I get the sense that he inhabits a grey area, so that even though most of my direct canon experience with him involves what an indisputably destructive and harmful presence he is in Rose's life, it's possible that overall he's not Lawrence Crock levels of pure evil dad. There are a few occasions where his hurtful or harmful actions are revealed to be part of a plan to keep Rose safe or otherwise help her by driving her away, and the case is eventually made that he really does love her and want the best for her, but I keep coming back to this:
The serum is supposed to make her harderbetterfasterstronger, and it does, but it also wreaks havoc on her mind and leaves her unstable and overwhelmingly desperate for her father's approval, which he uses to control her. Rose becomes Ravager, Deathstroke's protege, and while it was easy for him to persuade her to murder Wade and, thanks to the serum, she's got no qualms about killing nobodies, she hesitates before killing her brother Joey [Joey's spirit is body-hopping and blah blah blah comics BASICALLY], which is unacceptable to her father:
And if anyone ever had any doubt that the combination of the serum and Slade's manipulation hadn't completely destroyed her mind, well, this is how she tries to prove herself to him:
SHE STABS OUT HER OWN FUCKING EYE!!! NIGHTMARES FOREVER!
The thing about the serum is that the physical effects are permanent - she will always be stronger, faster, more resilient - but the mental effects are not. When it wears off, she's herself again, albeit a significantly more traumatized version of herself. Actually, I think she's probably an even better fighter without the serum - calmer, more rational, more in control, more focused. [It's possible that this is also just the effect of being trained by the best, but we'll get to that in a minute.] Under the influence of her father and the serum, there are too many other factors in play, something Batgirl takes advantage of when Deathstroke sends Rose to kill her.
[SIDEBAR!!!! Batgirl - Cassandra Cain, at this point in time - was, like all the best DC characters, raised by a villain to be a villain, so she understands Rose. Cass also has this to add because it's not comics unless I'm having lethally overwhelming feelings about assassin dads training their daughters:
SCREENPRINT THAT ON MY TOMBSTONE WHEN I DIE OF FEELINGS, PLEASE! Ugh, terrible.]
Anyway: Cass rightly picks up on the fact that Rose is dependent on Deathstroke's approval to the point that it's counterproductive. The serum heightened all of Rose's physical abilities, but it also heightened her emotions, her needs, her impulses, so at this point it's probably hindering her progress more than it's helping it, right? So, since the physical effects are permanent, why wouldn't Deathstroke just stop giving her the serum? Won't she be an even bigger asset to him if she levels out?
Oh, or that. That's what happens after Rose stabs her own eye out! She comes down from the serum, realizes what she's done, is HORRIFIED, and her dad forcibly injects her with the serum again to bring her back under this control. Even at her serum-iest, Rose is still herself deep down, and she's being held against her will and routinely drugged and manipulated into doing things she doesn't want to do, and everyone...lets it happen, pretty much. Even though there is a deep and rich history in comics of people becoming heroes despite their shitty backgrounds, for some reason, everyone always expected Rose to turn out bad, so this just seemed inevitable, not sinister, and nobody bothered to help her. GREAT JOB, EVERYONE! BEAUTIFUL WORK!
Luckily, though, there's this one character who just so happens to be THE BEST HUMAN:
Dick Grayson WENT THROUGH SOME SHIT, I guess, I don't know, I can't be bothered to find out, and now he's holed up in Bludhaven and pretending to be a bad guy, I guess? It's this whole thing. He's wearing a red and black costume instead of the blue and black Nightwing one and he's all I'M NOT NIGHTWING ANYMORE!!!!!!!!! I'M NOT GOOD BECAUSE I'VE LOST EVERYTHING THAT MATTERED TO ME AND I DON'T CARE ANYMORE!!!!!!! and I don't fully understand what the fuck is going on but I and basically everyone in the world, be they comic readers or comic characters, is like "lololol DEFINITELY Dick Grayson: BEST HUMAN is suddenly an amoral mercenary or whatever, SURE, THAT'S A THING THAT HAPPENS." Dick, you're such a good, warm person that Bruce Wayne opened up his cold, dead heart to ADOPT YOU as a purely symbolic gesture of love when you were already a grown-ass man, YOU'RE A GODDAMN GIRL SCOUT, NOBODY BELIEVES THAT SHIT.
But Dick wants Deathstroke's help or trust or something, and Deathstroke is like "I'm pretty sure this is the dumbest attempt the good guys have ever made at an undercover sting," but he ALSO recognizes that Dick Grayson is amazing, so he figures that having Dick train Rose is win/win - even if the whole thing's just a ploy on Dick's part, Rose will be learning from the BEST and keeping an eye on him at the same time, so what's the risk?
MUCH LIKE VOLDEMORT, DEATHSTROKE IS UNDERESTIMATING THE POWER OF SHEER GOODNESS AND LOVE. And also the fact that Dick is a magnificent phsyical specimen and Rose is a teenage girl who was OBVIOUSLY going to be into that. [Dick, obviously, is a perfect gentleman.]
It's not a perfect partnership - she's still her dad's deranged lackey, she doesn't trust him, and sometimes it gets awkward when Dick's old friends show up and don't realize which side he's on and are like "hey, I heard there was a suspicious guy who looks just like you stealing some shit from here, want to team up and look for him?" [ALSO, FUCK YOU, ROY, SHE WOULD HAVE TAKEN A BULLET FOR LIAN AND THIS IS HOW YOU RESPOND WHEN SHE NEEDS SAVING?]
But it's also GREAT because Dick Grayson teaching Rose Wilson how to be great like him and being exasperated by her bloodlust is maybe my favorite thing that's ever happened:
And she's exasperated because he never lets her have any fun, and they make a surprisingly good team even if her interrogation tactics leave something to be desired, and then there's that time they dress up in formalwear and go dancing and it's the fucking greatest mission ever.
But at the same time that he's showing her how to be more methodical, he's reaching out as well, highlighting the danger Deathstroke is exposing her to, generally leading by shining example, and, oh yeah, TENDERLY HOLDING HER CHIN WHILE HE EXPLAINS TO HER THAT HE UNDERSTANDS THE DESPERATE NEED FOR APPROVAL BUT THE STAKES ARE LIFE AND DEATH? AND IT'S DURING THAT FORMALWEAR MISSION? THAT HAPPENS:
Dick appeals to her humanity, to her rationality, over and over again, and he's understanding and he's patient and he's relentless, he doesn't stop trying to get through to her no matter how many times she sells him out to her father. Even through the serum, it works. When Deathstroke orders Rose to kill Superman and actually goes so far as to IMPLANT A HUNK OF KRYPTONITE WHERE HER EYE USED TO BE, she's uncertain and terrified, even though before Dick showed up she would have thrown herself into the job without any concern for herself or anyone else:
I CAN'T EVEN HANDLE ANY OF THIS!!!!!!!!!!! LOOK AT HER GODDAMN FACE IN THE LAST ONE, LOOK AT THE SHADOW AND THE KRYPTONITE AND HER EXPRESSION AND FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. Dick getting through to Rose will never not be my favorite thing of all the things he's ever done, it is beautiful and only made MORE beautiful by the fact that nobody [except Bart Allen that one time, NEVER FORGET, but that's for the next post] else ever even bothered to try.
With all this, though, the cat's pretty much out of the bag re: OF COURSE DICK GRAYSON IS ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS, although he's still not done being the best and saving people's souls and all that:
And even though the jig is up, he's lost free access to Rose, and has to make a break for it? He comes back for her, and it. is. amazing.
SHE DOESN'T NEED TO BE SAVED. HE'S NOT HERE TO ASK HER TO COME WITH HIM. Ugh, that is my favorite part, my FAVORITE FAVORITE PART in a SEA of favorite parts, that he doesn't try to recruit her or persuade her to come with him, because she's already spent so much time being manipulated and pulled one way or the other. He just makes sure she knows everything she needs to know, and then he backs off so he can make her own call - she can stay with her dad if she feels like overlooking the Kryptonite thing, she can strike out on her own as a villain, she can join up with the good guys, she can disappear if she wants to. All that matters is that someone has finally helped her get to a place where she could decide for herself.
So what does Rose do?
She ditches her dad and joins up with the Teen Titans almost immediately, because she is a SUPERIOR HUMAN BEING, but unfortunately the Teen Titans are dicks - lowercase d, because if they were all Dick[ Grayson]s then everything would be perfect and wonderful.
How do you think Tim Drake reacted when she joined up? Do you think he was sorry that she spent so much time in her own personal hell, being controlled and twisted by her father, especially since she only ended up with him because the Titans fucking blew it when they tried to rescue her? Do you think he felt guilty that they just wrote her off and assumed that it was inevitable that she'd turn out evil, like she had any say in the matter? Do you think he was ashamed when Dick proved that she was still herself somewhere in there, that all it took to save her was for someone to actually bother trying to get through to her? I mean, what happened to Rose is Deathstroke's fault and his fault alone, but you'd think the Titans would at least be carrying some weight around following their spectacular failure to prevent it or stop it, right?
HAHAHAHAHAHA, I'M SORRY, HAVE YOU MET THE TEEN TITANS? THEY'RE SHITHEADS. ABSOLUTE SHITHEADS. But that's a neverending haterant for the next post, which will cover 2006-2011 and her time as an on-again off-again Teen Titan. IT'S GONNA BE AN EMOTIONAL ONE!!!!