i'll keep taking punches until their will grows tired
So last night, I read the whole "Blockbuster kills everybody close to Dick and then Tarantula kills Blockbuster and rapes Dick" thing and while I didn't enjoy it, it mostly made some sort of emotional sense, but then everything after that was sort of a big wtf? She wants to get married and he goes along with it right up until Batman calls? WTF? and then I skipped the War Games stuff, but he ends up in the mafia? Under his real name? WTF? It was like very bad fanfic (where were all his friends? He has a lot of them and not one stopped by and said, "hey, maybe we should chat about your poor lifestyle choices"? Really?), so I skipped to the part where Deathstroke makes him train Rose, and is it wrong that I just wanted him to take Rose and Sophia and train them as his own little Robins rather than what actually happened? (Though I was amused to see him try to pawn Sophia off on Helena, and she was just like "I don't think so.") Also, I don't know why I had it in my head that Deathstroke was black, but I kept being startled at how white he was.
(Also, also, at some point, my level of rage about how Dick teams up with bad guys at the drop of a hat to get the job done [and how Deathstroke and Lady Shiva and Cain all seem to get a lot more... leeway], but can't be bothered to help Jason when Jason needs it so badly is going to explode into some kind of ridiculously long profanity-filled rant. Or possibly not, since it makes me so angry I can't articulate. [I realize it's more complicated than that, but ugh.] Don't even get me started on Batman stopping in at Arkham to play chess with Two-Face, but nobody bothers to visit Jason. I feel like there's this huge double standard so no matter what happens, Jason gets shafted. and I know it's probably an editorial decision, but that just makes it worse.)
And then there was some storyline about the first girl Dick ever loved and how she betrayed him and screwed him up so he couldn't commit to either Kory or Barbara, and I was like, "Really? Really?" Not because it didn't have the potential to be interesting, but because it seemed really shoehorned into his backstory. I realize he was sixteen for, like, thirty years, and that I haven't read anything that took place during that time except Robin: Year One, but still. It did not seem at all organic to me (mostly because I'd never heard any reference to her or anything. I've even heard of his 70s college girlfriend, so that seems like kind of a huge oversight). It reminded me of that awful episode of BSG where Lee keeps having flashbacks to some woman we'd never seen before (or after), to ramp up his level of angst.
(protip, writers: when your character has actually survived the end of the world, you don't have to invent lost loves in their backgrounds to ramp up the angst. The world ending in a nuclear holocaust pretty much takes care of that. Of course, the problem with that is that everyone who survives has the same epic angst, and of course you want your protagonist to be even more douchy angsty, but that way lies the path to metaphorical lakes of manpain, and nobody wants that. /tangent)
Still, when Dick descends into his own pit of manpain, the narrative does call him on it, and he eventually climbs his way out, so I'm just going to ignore most of it.
I stopped there, because suddenly Damian and Tim were fighting off ninjas in the batcave. And while I'm all for fighting off ninjas in the batcave, it was a little too in medias res for me.
Lastly, Alfred is still my favorite. I feel that can never be said often enough.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/298093.html.
people have commented there.
(Also, also, at some point, my level of rage about how Dick teams up with bad guys at the drop of a hat to get the job done [and how Deathstroke and Lady Shiva and Cain all seem to get a lot more... leeway], but can't be bothered to help Jason when Jason needs it so badly is going to explode into some kind of ridiculously long profanity-filled rant. Or possibly not, since it makes me so angry I can't articulate. [I realize it's more complicated than that, but ugh.] Don't even get me started on Batman stopping in at Arkham to play chess with Two-Face, but nobody bothers to visit Jason. I feel like there's this huge double standard so no matter what happens, Jason gets shafted. and I know it's probably an editorial decision, but that just makes it worse.)
And then there was some storyline about the first girl Dick ever loved and how she betrayed him and screwed him up so he couldn't commit to either Kory or Barbara, and I was like, "Really? Really?" Not because it didn't have the potential to be interesting, but because it seemed really shoehorned into his backstory. I realize he was sixteen for, like, thirty years, and that I haven't read anything that took place during that time except Robin: Year One, but still. It did not seem at all organic to me (mostly because I'd never heard any reference to her or anything. I've even heard of his 70s college girlfriend, so that seems like kind of a huge oversight). It reminded me of that awful episode of BSG where Lee keeps having flashbacks to some woman we'd never seen before (or after), to ramp up his level of angst.
(protip, writers: when your character has actually survived the end of the world, you don't have to invent lost loves in their backgrounds to ramp up the angst. The world ending in a nuclear holocaust pretty much takes care of that. Of course, the problem with that is that everyone who survives has the same epic angst, and of course you want your protagonist to be even more douchy angsty, but that way lies the path to metaphorical lakes of manpain, and nobody wants that. /tangent)
Still, when Dick descends into his own pit of manpain, the narrative does call him on it, and he eventually climbs his way out, so I'm just going to ignore most of it.
I stopped there, because suddenly Damian and Tim were fighting off ninjas in the batcave. And while I'm all for fighting off ninjas in the batcave, it was a little too in medias res for me.
Lastly, Alfred is still my favorite. I feel that can never be said often enough.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/298093.html.
people have commented there.