InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "am i hot?"

starwolf_oakley (starwolf_oakley) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-08-05 17:37:00

Entry tags:

char: batgirl/oracle/barbara gordon, char: black canary/dinah lance, char: huntress/helena bertinelli, creator: gail simone, creator: joe bennett, title: birds of prey

BOP #68: A canary or a "mock"ing bird? or The Sexual History of Helena Bertinelli
The first page of Cry For Justice #2 has caused some controversy on this board and elsewhere. But it's not like that kind of "behavior" is unheard of in Huntress' history.

First, Babs and the girls talk about Savant, who kidnapped Black Canary and chained her to a ~~fridge~~ bed.

Uh-oh. Anyone know the exact issues?

This was revealed in OUTSIDERS #12, but not the circumstances. Nightwing must have told Oracle. Because that's not weird at all.

Ah, so Roy is "quick to let fly." No wonder Cheshire got pregnant!

Well, give she's now about Roy's age due to that Lazarus Pit dip, it's less "mother and son" these days.

How does that date go?

Sheesh, I thought they only kept the masks on in ULTIMATE or ALL-STAR stories. Supposedly Gail Simone wrote this so Helene could find realize she deserved better in the romance department. Is a threesome with Hal Jordan and Lady Blackhawk really better? Well, I doubt they'd keep their masks on.

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	scottyquick 2009-08-06 02:32 am UTC (link)
	Tarantula wasn't meant to be a girlfriend, she was very much meant to be a negative, abusive, destructive force in Dick's life. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

batcookies
2009-08-06 02:40 am UTC (link)

Indeed. She's a bad person that was trying to be a good guy, but in the end she didn't have the right stuff. In the end she cowardly tried to kill Nightwing, howling obscenities all the while, rather than go to jail. And he beat her, with ease, while on crutches. I'll never understand people that claim Tarantula was a "self insert". If that's what Devin Grayson honestly sees herself as, then she needs help. But I think it's more likely that people are just seeing something that's not there.

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starwolf_oakley
2009-08-06 03:31 am UTC (link)

Tarantula may have been a former FBI agent, a skilled fighter and ranted about "class warfare issues" regarding crime, but I don't think that made her Devin Grayson's "Mary Sue." To me, Mary Sue means "irritatingly perfect."

I don't mind the "Born Again 2: Electric Boogaloo" Nightwing story as much as other fans, but I am curious where the story was supposed to go before INFINITE CRISIS. Batman telling Nightwing "You lost sight of the value of Roland Desmond's life; don't lose sight of the value of your own" is letting Dick off the hook (for Batman).

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	runespoor7 2009-08-06 07:08 pm UTC (link)
	IIRC, Nightwing was supposed to infiltrate the Society of Super-Villains. Thus the Renegade arc. But instead Devin Grayson received orders to have Dick back in the Bat-fold and Deathstroke destroy Bludhaven. (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2009-08-07 03:53 am UTC (link)

My (potentially controversial, so apologies) theory goes like this:

Devin's self-insert/'Mary Sue' was Nightwing.

Evidence:

1)Devin Grayson was not born Devin Grayson, she changed her name to denote her deep identification with the character.

2)A lot of the meta and fanfic she's written re: Nightwing's sexuality overlap with much of what she's written about herself in those areas.

3)Reading the Nightwing/Tarantula debacle felt like listening in on somebody's therapy session.

This isn't to say that all of her stories were awful. I liked quite a few of them. I even used to regularly defend her Nightwing and Titans work on an old Titans mailing list I used to belong to. She did a lot interesting, character driven stories that stood out from what the rest of the Bat-writers of that era were doing, and (usually) in a good way.

But she sometimes objectified and fetishized the character to a weird degree, and some of those weirder story beats, IMHO, read as if she regularly vacillated between wanting to do Nightwing or be Nightwing -- sometimes within the same issue.

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runespoor7
2009-08-07 02:39 pm UTC (link)

I don't see the contradiction/weirdness in both wanting to be like someone and being in love with someone (or, like you put it, wanting to do someone and wanting to be someone); after all, don't a lot of us fall in love with people we admire? There's a fine line between hero worship and crush, etc etc.

About Nightwing being Devin Grayson's Mary Sue, I think you're right on the money. In one interview where she was questioned about Tarantula being her Mary Sue, she answered that she thought it'd be much truer to say that Dick was her Mary Sue. Incidentally, I'm not sure if she really understood what the term 'Mary Sue' meant/means/is used as, in part because like batcookies said, it's used any way nowadays. As far as self-inserts go, however, I'd say her most probable self-insert was Babs. Her Babs says a lot of things, particularly about people's psychologies, that seem to reflect how Devin Grayson intended the portrayal to go. Sometimes it reminds me a little of how Hermione was depicted in Harry Potter.

...And as for objectifying Nightwing's character... she's not the first nor the last writer to have had characters remark on him being beautiful.

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(Anonymous)
2009-08-07 08:31 pm UTC (link)

"...And as for objectifying Nightwing's character... she's not the first nor the last writer to have had characters remark on him being beautiful."

True, true. But no writer before (or since, really) did (or has done) so to such a great extent -- see the other Anon's comment about the 'Rise of Sin Tzu' novel upthread for one rather OTT example.

Again, I liked Grayson's writing more often than not, but I do think her portrayal of Nightwing was often compromised by a certain amount of objectification.

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