Unadulterated Strangeness

elfgrove:

Why is everyone fighting over Tim’s sexuality anyways? He’s a fictional character. Everyone is going to read him differently. That means some folk are going to really dislike the current writing that has him making out with a girl every other issue. Some people read him as straight, so they don’t like being told he must be read as gay and that is the only valid answer. Some people, and that may be a dying breed, read Tim as pretty asexual, and thusly don’t really like either camp.

That means, for every single writer that takes the character up, some people are going love their take on Tim and others will hate it. It’s just a matter of opinion.

…Fandom, I do not understand you and your need to be so angry at each other over it. Is it not possible to agree to disagree and not fling insults at each other over it? Not telling people to shut up, I just don’t get it.

Well, I don’t think the sentiment is that Tim must be read as Queer. It’s concern and frustration over the fact that Tim is being written as so fervently and essentially heterosexual that parts of his established personality (particularly a reluctance to be physically intimate, his obsession with crime fighting that eclipses all else, even make-out sessions—see the issue when he dropped Steph mid-snog because he heard police sirens) are thrown out. It almost feels a bit desperate, this assurance of Tim’s heteronormativity. Like anything, even the abandonment of core facets of his character, is preferable to any hint of Queerness.

And you have to realize. Tim was lauded as the perfect Robin for a long time. Think about what this means, in relation to his character. White, a cis man, upper class, unflaggingly patriarchal through much of his early Robin run, displaying classism and sexism that was never questioned or called out. But then he had that deep relationship with Bart and Kon. There was a chance that he wasn’t the quintessential white straight cis rich boy, not completely, and that meant that the perfect Robin model didn’t have to fit that mold, either. There was some wiggle room for interpretation in an industry that tends to strongly deny that anyone directly related to Batman could deviate from a place of privilege.

There’s nothing quite as disheartening as seeing white supremacist classist sexist models of supposed perfection given the Batman stamp of approval.

Maybe I’m saying this wrong.

But that’s part of why I’m upset

and I think this goes a little deeper than just a shipping war