InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Manage your damage!"

runespoor7 (runespoor7) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-05-21 15:29:00

Entry tags:

char: blockbuster/roland desmond, char: robin/nightwing/dick grayson, char: tarantula/catalina flores, creator: devin grayson, creator: mike lilly, publisher: dc comics, title: nightwing

Request: Nightwing #93-#94
By request, scans of Nightwing's rape by Tarantula and the fall-out.

As a reminder, Blockbuster has been screwing Dick's life. He's had Dick's apartment building blown up with all the tenants inside, he's had a fire devastate Haly's circus during a show (which resulted with more than 30 people dead, despite Dick being there to help), and he wanted Tarantula – vigilante of the “I'll just kill him!” variety and all-around Little Miss Happy-Go-Lucky Sociopath – to kill Barbara, as Dick's girlfriend, but Tarantula was genre-savvy enough to get that it would just make Babs a saint in Dick's eyes, so she manipulated the situation and Barbara broke up with Dick. Dick has also had to resign from the force since his captain ex-partner figured out his identity and couldn't condone a vigilante on the force.

Then Dick convinced Tarantula to help him take Blockbuster down the legal way; she agreed, and everything looked like it was going to work and if you've seen even one Joss Whedon show you know that means everything blew up in their faces pretty bad.

Nightwing #93:

So now Dick has been confronting Blockbuster, and Blockbuster is taunting him that he's going to keep on screwing Dick's life for as long as there's a breath left in him, and Nightwing doesn't kill, so there's no way out. And Tarantula shows up with a gun and tells Dick to get out of the way.

She shoots.

Nightwing 94:

The next two issues are titled Road to nowhere, which I'm sure must've made people snicker as much as I did when the last words of Nightwing: OYL were something like “please tell me it's over stop.”

Black and white = flashback.

She makes him break into a bed and breakfast.

[In the present, they find themselves fighting Copperhead, Tarantula gets poisoned, Dick (of course) has the cure, and Tarantula follows Copperhead. Dick accuses her of wanting to solve the problem by murdering Copperhead, Tarantula replies that he has issues, and leaves.]

[in the present he puts on his costume and the issue ends with him not taking Babs' call; she tells him that Blockbuster has been found dead in Blüdhaven, and clues point to Tarantula being involved.]

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parsimonia
2009-05-22 02:06 pm UTC (link)

IMO, from Dick's point of view, Tarantula starts off something like this: vigilante, theoretically wants to save/protect people, but breaks that bat-code of being happy to kill people. In addition to that, she likes him and wants to work with him. He sees the potential to "fix" her, to get her to see why killing is wrong, to either persuade her to follow his moral code, or get her to stop being a vigilante altogether. Either way, she's a potential friend or enemy in his city, which means he has to keep an eye on her, and he feels responsible for what happens to her and for her actions.

It may not be the most common scenario for an abusive relationship, but it's a scenario which is possible for Nightwing to be in such a relationship.

(I understand your complaint about how Dick's friends/family should've intervened, and that any book about Dick should involve him being in regular contact with a wide range of people, and not all isolated and helpless. However, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief when it comes to that aspect at this point. It's my own choice as a reader, and not a judgement on any of yours.)

It's a horrible situation for him to be in, and if he weren't already in such an awful state emotionally, mentally and physically, and he likely would have prevented things from spiralling downward that way, and he would not have let Tarantula take advantage of him in any way as soon as he saw her pointing that gun at Blockbuster.

I wasn't reading comics when this stuff came out, but everything in Nightwing from around that time and all of War Games strikes me as intentionally being one big gigantic trainwreck. It's Murphy's Law gone wild: what can go wrong will go wrong. It was just tragedy after tragedy, and I guess the end result may eventually supposed to have been a catharsis, but I gather that OYL truncated that possibility.

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box_in_the_box
2009-05-22 02:15 pm UTC (link)

I wasn't reading comics when this stuff came out, but everything in Nightwing from around that time and all of War Games strikes me as intentionally being one big gigantic trainwreck. It's Murphy's Law gone wild: what can go wrong will go wrong. It was just tragedy after tragedy [...]

In other words, exactly what I find detestable about the current NuSpidey era. Once there are so many tragedies piling on top of each other that it becomes improbable, it is, by definition, no longer "realistic" - it is reveling in nihilism for its own sake, and it automatically gets shitcanned by me.

Frank Miller's "Born Again" arc on Daredevil was a good story, BACK THEN, but much like "The Dark Phoenix Saga," it's become a story that I now wish could be RETROACTIVELY UNWRITTEN, simply because of all the hamfisted attempts to recreate it, pretty much every single one of which has been devoid of any merit whatsoever. I'd actual rather that the original good stories had NEVER BEEN TOLD, just so we could avoid all the shitty stories that they inevitably spawned.

And I don't care about the end catharsis, if the struggle is one that I can't accept that the character should have been stupid and weak and OOC enough to get into in the first place.

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parsimonia
2009-05-22 02:34 pm UTC (link)

And I don't care about the end catharsis, if the struggle is one that I can't accept that the character should have been stupid and weak and OOC enough to get into in the first place.

I think the point is to humanize the character by showing that they are capable of "weakness" or not using his/her intelligence, and by putting them in circumstances in which they are more susceptible to bad things around them, or making bad decisions.

Whether that's good storytelling or not is subjective opinion, but I'm pretty sure that's the theory behind this kind of thing.

I'm not familiar with Spider-man or the Dark Phoenix Saga (beyond the 90s cartoon version, that is! heh), but I think it's kind of the same reasoning that brought about Identity Crisis. "Let's put our virtuous heroes into a situation where they think the right thing is mind-wiping Batman and giving Doctor Light a magical lobotomy," that'll be dramatic. (The fridging of Sue was a horrible side effect of that premise, IMO.)

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box_in_the_box
2009-05-22 02:54 pm UTC (link)

I think the point is to humanize the character by showing that they are capable of "weakness" or not using his/her intelligence, and by putting them in circumstances in which they are more susceptible to bad things around them, or making bad decisions.

Yes, I agree, but if you have a character who has been consistently characterized as a superhero up until this point, I shouldn't be looking at his situation and thinking, "This is bullshit - *I* could get myself out of this shit with a PHONE CALL." Seriously, all he had to do, at any point, was DROP A LINE to ANY ONE of his friends. I mean, it's not even like Dick has ever been a hero hindered by his PRIDE. If you're going to make things bad for a character by preying upon their weaknesses, then you need to play upon the weaknesses which THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. Otherwise, if I just wanted to see things turn to shit for shit's sake, I might as well be watching Todd Solondz's Happiness or Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark.

NARM.

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parsimonia
2009-05-22 03:11 pm UTC (link)

Again, I don't think it was pride, but guilt and shame, that prevented him from making that phonecall. He felt responsible for the mess he was in, and to him at that point, reaching out to someone for help, having them see where he went wrong or what he did, what he could have prevented but didn't/couldn't...from his point of view at that time, he's suddenly the enemy.

He went against the beliefs he was raised with, that he and his friends and loved ones have fought for with their lives. To then turn to those people and tell them that he's the one to blame, that he's responsible for Blockbusters death, he might risk losing them.

(Of course, he's not thinking straight, he's under an insane amount of stress and is emotionally wiped. He knows it was Tarantula who actually pulled the trigger, but that doesn't matter when it comes to bat-guilt.)

As the OP noted, the #94 ended with Barbara calling, telling him Blockbuster was found dead, reaching out to him, but he doesn't pick up.

It's a fine line between guilt/shame and pride, perhaps, but I think it's an important distinction. He's not afraid to tell them because then they'll think he's infallible, he's afraid to tell them because he'd be letting them down. And letting them down means risking the loss of their respect and/or love.

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box_in_the_box
2009-05-22 04:16 pm UTC (link)

Bottom line, it's a story in which a series of stupidly unrealistic, out-of-character circumstances occurred for obviously no other reason that to push a character into behaving in a stupidly unrealistic, out-of-character fashion. Writers who want to do this shit should keep it on their LiveJournals and their FanFiction.net accounts, and the hell out of writing that they expect anyone to pay any amount of money for. There were countless intervals, BEFORE it got SO bad, that he COULD have turned to others for help, WITHOUT shame, but of course, that would require him to have more than two braincells, and to be written as more than just a Canon Woobie. I'll echo another poster - the ONLY way it could get THAT bad is if, quite literally, almost EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in the DCU was behaving OOC, since if Dick DOESN'T check in with them after a long enough period of time, do you seriously think that somebody like Barbara is just going to say, "Oh, well, I left him a message, sucks to be him"?

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	bluefall 2009-05-22 05:16 pm UTC (link)
	Hey, the beginning of ORACLE would have us believe that Dinah and Dick would just call Babs a couple of times and be satisfied with leaving messages on her machine that she never responds to, so maybe it's just a Bat thing. -_- (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

box_in_the_box
2009-05-22 05:29 pm UTC (link)

... You know, I think it's the exact same problem with Spider-Man and Batman - in many ways, both of them arguably STARTED as loners (although Spider-Man much more than Batman), but they've both built up MASSIVE casts of supporting characters since then, so whenever some dumbass gets it in his head to "restore" the characters to their "iconic" state, he has to come up with some rationalization for keeping these characters' friends and families and teammates at arm's length, which leads to ALL of the characters involved looking like stupid, insensitive assholes.

HALF-measures make it even WORSE, because that's how you get idiotic developments like Peter telling his secret ID to the FF and the NuAvengers, rather than HIS OWN FRIENDS AND FAMILY (really, Peter? MOCKINGBIRD needs to know who you are more than AUNT MAY? REALLY???)

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