I've always thought of him as being as far from that as it was possible to get.
The decision that it is a good or necessary idea to dress up as a bat and scare the shit out of criminals but never use lethal force on them, as well as train a passel of kids to do the same ... I think a case can be made that "serious defect in judgment" or "inability to objectively evaluate reality" may be applied.
Don't get me wrong. I love him. But I don't love him if he's some guy that perfectly healthily said "Hey! Good idea! Bat, you say?" and went out into the night. Not plausible to me, nor interesting. To be both, he has to be at odds with generally accepted reality.
Not to mention my conviction that Bruce is the disguise and Bats the man.
And I'm suddenly wondering how old Dick was when his parents died,
10-ish, with the usual funky DC timeline impossible to date things for sure handwave.
and do we know from canon when/with whom his first sexual experience was,
(trying very hard not to think of the birthday spanking page from Batman 10 right now)
and if not, could someone please write me pre-Batman circus-sex Dick fic?
(Oh, god, brain bleach now please.)
Okay, then 10-ish -- no circus sex. Ick.
Damn. I really liked that idea, too.
That's canon.
Is it sane? Is it compliant with our reality?
Not to mention my conviction that Bruce is the disguise and Bats the man.
I'm of the same mind on that.
Is it sane? Is it compliant with our reality?
But it's not our reality. It's a comic world with aliens who are the last of their race, ex-goddesses, intergalactic cops and so forth. Batman still always seemed to be the most normal and sane in the face of all that.
Batman still always seemed to be the most normal and sane in the face of all that.
This is what I mean by divergent canon. I don't think it works the reality laid out in the comics, or they'd be a dime a dozen. He's a damaged man. I thought that was canon too. Damaged and exceptional, but definitely damaged.
There's no direct evidence, but it's pretty heavily implied in the last-reboot-before-Graduation-Day version of Titans that Kory was Dick's first. (He has a memory of the two of them as kids, in which she's more or less jumped him in the control room... ah, good times.)
Damaged, but using that as a source of strength and focus. And yes, exceptional, which is the key. I don't think there are many other people in the DC 'verse who could have accomplished what he did on his own.
Damaged, but using that as a source of strength and focus.
How does that rule out psychosis? Just like blasts of radiation might make you or I dead, I think trauma-induced psychosis is perfectly reasonable a fuel for heroism in his universe.
