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Tweak says, "Hold me closer, Tiny Draco! "

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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parsimonia
2009-08-06 03:31 pm UTC (link)

she raped Dick Grayson and was never punished for it. She briefly went to prison, but that was for her other crimes. It didn't help that, reading barely between the lines, Ms. Devin Grayson was projecting her own issues with sexuality and sexual trauma and crushing hard on a fictional character onto a character for no reason than to work out her own issues.

Okay, I have to say that I think you have to make a lot of assumptions about Grayson's life and personal history to make such a claim, and IMO the accusation borders on (if not crosses the line to) personally attacking her.

I agree that there should have been something more in canon confronting the rape as rape, but unfortunately it would have been impossible for her to be arrested for raping Dick without revealing his secret identity (not to mention it might have implicated Dick as an accessory to murder). She did go to prison, and as we saw in Secret Six a little while ago, it was one of the bigger/high security prisons and she was in there for life. And now she's dead.

Huntress gets called a Mary Sue because she almost always seemed to win her arguments with Batman about how far masked heroes were supposed to go, or at least Batman would rarely respond in a meaningful way. Every. Single. One.

I gotta disagree. Huntress's thing used to be that it's okay to kill people or be more brutal when the original crime was heinous. Batman's has always been that killing was wrong, and frequently espouses the idea that excessive brutality isn't usually effective or moral. Huntress eventually came around to Batman's side of things, but by way of Babs and the Birds of Prey's influence. In my mind those old 90s confrontations with Batman never seem to go anywhere, and neither one of them ever really "won" the argument.

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aaron_bourque
2009-08-06 05:50 pm UTC (link)

"Okay, I have to say that I think you have to make a lot of assumptions about Grayson's life and personal history to make such a claim, and IMO the accusation borders on (if not crosses the line to) personally attacking her."

She's on record as being both a victim of sexual assault and a bisexual.

"Huntress's thing used to be that it's okay to kill people or be more brutal when the original crime was heinous."

Yes. Used to be. Years later she softened a little bit. But at the time, whenever she'd go off on that tangent, Batman was rarely shown to reply in any meaningful way. It's one of the reasons it took a long time for me to like the character.

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angelophile
2009-08-06 07:46 pm UTC (link)

Her being on record as being both a victim of sexual assault and a bisexual doesn't justify making assumptions about her "issues" with sexuality or her motivations for writing the story as she did, unless she has raised that directly. You may see a connection, but I have to agree that making assumptions about how those experiences affected her and projecting how she dealt with them in your view makes me very uncomfortable.

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	aaron_bourque 2009-08-06 10:41 pm UTC (link)
	The connection is made by correlating how other writers use mary sue and self-insert characters and the bizarre justification of the scene in question. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	angelophile 2009-08-07 12:10 am UTC (link)
	But not anything the writer has said herself. You do see how imposing your view of how someone might be dealing with being a victim of sexual assault and how they express their sexuality onto them could be considered... problematic and closer to insulting than fair criticism, yes? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	aaron_bourque 2009-08-07 02:58 am UTC (link)
	What view am I imposing? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	angelophile 2009-08-07 09:29 am UTC (link)
	That "Ms. Devin Grayson was projecting her own issues with sexuality and sexual trauma and crushing hard on a fictional character onto a character for no reason than to work out her own issues." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

aaron_bourque
2009-08-07 04:20 pm UTC (link)

Fact 1: She was the victim of sexual trauma.
Fact 2: She has stated how much she loved Dick Grayson.
Fact 3: She had tried to imply in interviews that Dick was bisexual, just like her.
Fact 4: She gave Dick a sexuality that was not in evidence in any of his other appearances (the infamous "fight or fuck" bullshit).
Fact 5: She gave Dick a sexual trauma.

Psuedo-fact 1: Many fanfic authors project "too-much-information" aspects of themselves into characters they love.

Fact 6: She started out as a fanfiction author.

Make your own conclusions.

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	starwolf_oakley 2009-08-07 06:20 pm UTC (link)
	Make your own conclusions. ...Quesada should hire Devin Grayson for DAREDEVIL after Brubaker? (Reply to this) (Parent)

parsimonia
2009-08-12 03:11 am UTC (link)

Sorry, I'm just catching up with this thread now.

I supposed this may be something we'll have to agree to disagree on, but even considering your points here, I still feel uncomfortable with the implications made by such an assessment.

But at the time, whenever she'd go off on that tangent, Batman was rarely shown to reply in any meaningful way. It's one of the reasons it took a long time for me to like the character.

Well, perhaps there is room for a bit of the pseudo father/daughter relationship that is sometimes implied between them to explain that: Huntress rants about how Batman doesn't know what he's doing and that she knows better than him, etc, which does come off a bit as a rebellious teenager kind of thing (albeit with subject matter not usually common to parents and teenagers). IDK, I really haven't read enough of the earlier interactions between the two characters to have that firm a grasp of Batman's reactions to her. I just have the impression that he was usually pretty down on her and her methods.

(reposted comment for unfinished sentence)

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