the "Letters to Batman" arc in GK which had Dick actually write that if asked to choose between the life he could have had with his parents and the life he had with Bruce, he's choose the latter. There might be a story to be built around that, but it just doesn't work as presented.

I had to jump on this because yeah, she's got a real with that. I just recently read Inheritance, which in many ways was good, cracky fanfic, but there was a point where I almost stopped reading. She had child!Dick decide that he didn't want his parents back. And I was just...huh? Not only would Dick not think that, I couldn't figure out why any child who had a happy life with his parents would think that. Why would he think he had to choose one or the other? Why wouldn't he want both lives?

And as I read on it seemed like maybe the idea was that Dick didn't think that at all, that it was a more subtle psychological thing about stuff he hadn't dealt with about his parents death and all that. That made it more palatable and I could actually sympathize and get into it. But I'm always left with the nagging fear that maybe that was my own fanwank or something. Basically I assume Inheritance *was* to a certain extent the story around that--and if it was the way I thought it was then it was interesting, but she never really came out and said "this is what's really going on" or had Dick come to that understanding, so I'm not sure.

Though I'm not at all bothered by the adoption story since I feel like Dick Grayson being a "ward" is so much part of his character that I can't retcon it into an adoption that easily. I probably owe my first understanding of the word to him!