It’s been a while, I admit…but there hasn’t been that much to write…

One of the reasons I stopped writing this Blog was because my disability got worse. As in going from being able to move around the flat ‘furniture walking’ to needing to use a walker pretty much all the time from the moment I get out of bed. It’s somewhat debilitating to realise that my disability has got to this stage, but there is no point getting upset about it because it won’t change anything.

On the plus side I’ve been watching awful lot more telly and I found couple of sites that allow me to download both films and television series. I finally found both ‘Hawk the Slayer’ and ‘The Court Jester’ – yes, I know “the pellet with the poison’s in the pestle with the vessel; the chalice with the Palace has the brew that is true.”

It’s also meant that I’d been able to get my hands on some of the cartoon Batman series, both Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Brave and The Bold – which I have always adored and only got to see a few episodes when they were first broadcast. I freely admit that I love comics, DC was my favourite, mainly because I liked the characters – my brother preferred Spiderman who was a Marvel character, and I have no problems with any of them because some of the older writers/artists wrote great thought-provoking stories. It’s only occasionally that they’ve gone off the rails, and unfortunately it’s usually the writers.

For example Frank Miller’s ‘All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder’ – the art is glorious, the writing, well, let’s just say that Miller didn’t just go off the rails; he defecated, urinated and vomited on the rails and then did some sort of Scatomancy to create a Batman that wasn’t Batman, but a man that a YouTuber calls ‘Crazy Steve’, a tramp who discovered the Batcave, knocked the real Batman out, stuffed him in the closet; stole his suit and went gallivanting all over Gotham.

Now I freely admit that I love writing fanfiction, it took me almost 12 years to realise that I should do I like doing and everyone else can go to hell. I write fanfiction mostly about the DC Universe, although lately I haven’t just been changing Canon I’ve been BUTCHERING it. There were three stories in the DC Universe that totally cheesed me off.

The first was Jason Todd’s death. It’s not that it was badly handled, DC Comics hasn’t exactly been the best at handling certain instances – Dick Grayson’s rape – or perhaps that should be rapes because he was also raped by Mirage posing as Corey and his friends reaction was not sympathy but vilification, and the comics just glossed over it as if it was nothing. It was the fact that someone actually set his phone to keep dialling the same number again and again to swing the vote for Jason Todd’s death – I’ll be honest when I discovered this it infuriated me more than the comics writing his death to start with.

The second was the behaviour of Dr Leslie Thompkins when she withheld treatment from Stephanie Brown a.k.a. Spoiler during the whole Black Mask debacle. Obviously Dr Thompkins is not familiar with Primum Non Nocere, a phrase meaning ‘First Do No Harm’. Now while this isn’t really part of the Hippocratic Oath, there is a general feeling that you shouldn’t deliberately cause harm or as a physician cause harm to come to someone else. So her behaviour made me absolutely furious, especially as it was all a cunning plan and she would spirit Stephanie away to a different life, and she thought that if Stephanie died it would stop Batman recruiting other youngsters into his coterie. All I could think when I read the story was how utterly, utterly cruel her behaviour was, for Bruce and his family to bury someone they thought of as a sister, that Tim thought of as a girlfriend and then to find out that she had withheld treatment for reasons of her own that wouldn’t have been successful anyway. I mean I appreciate where Leslie was coming from, but it wasn’t as if Batman went out on the streets with a net looking for youngsters to recruit. For example Dick was going to go after Tony Zucco anyway with or without Batman’s help; Jason Todd was trying to filch the tyres off the Batmobile and Tim Drake followed Batman for months after Jason’s death taking photographs of him and identifying Dick by his quadruple flip. Although Stephanie and Cassandra weren’t exactly on Batman’s radar, their upbringing set them against their parents at a very young age. Batman really had no choice but to bring them into the fold to try and protect both young women from their parents. As I wrote, it seems a very shortsighted view of Batman and how he recruited youngsters. So yes, I have written fanfic stories where someone comes in and gives Leslie a ‘Reason you Suck Speech’.

The final one I think was the death of Nightwing, I know it wasn’t on Prime Earth but the writer/artists seem to miss the point that in all realities Dick Grayson is the crux on which the earth/universe stands – kill him and that earth is doomed. Okay, maybe that’s going a bit far, but I sometimes wonder where these writer’s heads are at. I stopped reading comics really after Bruce/Batman forced Dick to go back into Spyral after faking his death and then when his other siblings discovered he was alive, their reaction to him was pretty much not what how you expect family to react. I mean I know that Batman’s family is not the norm, but he’s not necessarily a bad father – hell he’s better than Jack and Janet Drake (mind you a pair of Neptunian Sea Serpents would be better parents than Jack and Janet Drake, so that’s not saying much, but you know…)

I’ve just realised that I know far too much about the history of Batman and DC Comics than is healthy for any woman – after all we’re girls we not supposed to like comics! Although I do remember someone ranting about a character in a comic called Hellraiser and in all seriousness I turned to him and said, “Are you talking about John Constantine?” To which there was a wide-eyed, speechless response and a spluttered “You’re a girl, you’re not supposed to like comics!” Which I’ve heard more times than I’d like, so I generally now just keep quiet about it. To be brutally honest I don’t actually care. I write fanfiction and enjoy it, I brutalize Canon, or at least change it (but then so do other fanfic writers so I’m not alone in that regard.)

So, this is really all I want to write for my Blog this time, there really isn’t that much more to write, hopefully things will improve the next few months – I’ll let you know how things go. As it is, I’m putting this Blog up and seeing what happens.