They look for reasons; the reason is because she was written that way. So she could be set up.
Right--and within canon it's written into her character just as Tim's obsessiveness and detective skills are part of his. And that in itself isn't a problem for me because every character should be written with strengths and weaknesses, and every personality needs to have A,B and C rather than X,Y and Z. It's not just that she disobeys here, imo, it's how and why she does that seem like a valid thing to flunk her out of a training program. I think it tests more than whether or not she'll follow an order on probation when he said he'd fire her if she didn't.
I think the unfairness comes in because male characters are more likely to have a male writer want them to be succeed at everything. I've seen how sensitive many readers get over heroes not being competent--Dick, especially, gets trashed (or his writers do) when he fails--maybe that's why they want to dismiss Spoiler.
For instance, for me the way it works within the world is this: Bruce picks up Dick. He gets the idea to train him as a partner. By a combination of personality and background, Dick takes to this life well. Then Dick grows up or gets fired and Bruce grabs some other kid off the street. But this kid doesn't have Dick's raw materials. Plus Bruce and JasonII are a lot alike and their personalities have a totally different effect on each other than Bruce/Dick. Before Jason died it seemed like they were saying that this kid really didn't have the right temperment for the job either.
DitF didn't allow his death to come out of that (as I think it should have), but I still felt like that was the idea. Afterwards Bruce and Dick even have that fight where Bruce tries to say it was all about the training and Dick argues (sounding like he's wanted to say it for a while imo) that not many people have the raw materials to start with and Bruce should have seen Jason didn't.
So then Tim shows up and Bruce is reluctant but Tim also has a temperment that takes to this so it works. So in my mind Stephanie is more like Jason--just with totally different issues. I can understand why she doesn't get into the program and given the history I can understand Bruce being stubborn and knee-jerk about it if she hits his Jason buttons.
Only they *don't* have Bruce acting responsibly with Steph at all. They have him give her mixed messages and play his mindgames that come across differently to her (a normal person) than they do with somebody like Tim. It makes it so you can't really defend him by saying he learned a hard lesson with Jason because he's even more irresponsible here, trying to have it both ways, use her when he wants without having to give her anything in return, kind of keep her in the dark about herself.
Meanwhile, Jason's gotten writers who don't stick to his flaws. Sure he can still be violent and badass, but he's no longer a danger to himself and others unintentionally.
If you have the time, could you elaborate? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
I meant the retcon of Barbara into a near-adolescent trying to wrestle respect from Bruce, the man in authority, to get his approval to be a crime-fighter. There's nothing wrong with Steph being a teenager with father issues who projects some of them on Bruce (the boys are that too), but Barbara was originally more Bruce's equal and wasn't about that kind of defiance. She didn't have to always defy Bruce because he didn't intimidate her. She wasn't all about not caring what Bruce thought because she did admire him for what he did--she just admired him as one adult to another.
In the re-write it almost seems like now the writer's can only conceive of one way for a girl superhero to be: a young girl mouthing off to an older man. And then Batman has to spout stuff that sounds completely unnatural to him as a guy who grew up in a post-feminism world. As if you can only write a feminist character by having a bunch of big, older men tell a young girl she can't do stuff and have her do it anyway. Original Barbara had more important things to do in her mind.