daggerpen:

jadedgreensage:

daggerpen:


Anonymous asks: hi, i&rsquo;m new to the dc fandom &amp;amp; i don&rsquo;t understand why babs is never included in the complete batfam? i see posts with bruce, dick, jason, tim, (sometimes steph &amp;amp; cass), damian, (maybe alfred), but no barbara. i don&rsquo;t get why if she was batgirl? on that note, why are you anti-babsgirl?

Rebloggable by request.
Welcome to comics! My advice is to get out while you still can. Failing that, just give the entire New 52 a reboot and dive hard into the archives before the reboot.
To answer your questions, however:
1. Well, Babs&rsquo;s position in the Batfam is a bit complicated. It&rsquo;s not that she&rsquo;s not closely associated with everyone, unlike Batwoman, who&rsquo;s a bit more loosely affiliated, but she&rsquo;s neither a Robin nor a Wayne, which are the two Batfam ensembles you&rsquo;ll see most.
In general, there are a few common subgroups inside the whole Batclan:
1. Waynes - basically, Bruce Wayne + any children of his, whether adopted or biological. This includes Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake (due to later canon), Cassandra Cain, and Damian Wayne. It does not include either Barbara Gordon or Stephanie Brown, who have their own families, and it only recently included Tim Drake, whose father and stepmother were killed not long before OYL, which was a one-year timeskip in comics in the wake of Infinite Crisis that generally fucked shit up. You&rsquo;ll occasionally also see Terry McGinnis, who, thanks to a vaguely obnoxious retcon, is also Bruce&rsquo;s biological son, but he exists in a different continuity than the others.
2. Robins. This includes, in chronological order, Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and Damian Wayne. Carrie Kelley was also a Robin in Frank Miller&rsquo;s The Dark Knight, and is thus occasionally included, as is Tim Drake from Batman: The Animated Series, who is called Tim Drake but has a backstory more similar to Jason&rsquo;s.
3. Batgirls. This is the subgroup that includes Babs! It also includes Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown. This one is a little bit complicated as well- while Babs is the first Batgirl in continuity after Crisis on Infinite Earths, the first Batgirl ever was in fact Bat-Girl, AKA Betty Kane. Betty was introduced alongside Batwoman, Kathy Kane, so that the two of them could serve as the love interests for Robin and Batman respectively, thereby making the Dynamic Duo seem less gay in response to the accusations of Seduction of the Innocent. Ironically, Batwoman was later reintroduced as Kate Kane, who is a lesbian, and Bette Kane was reintroduced as her cousin and sidekick, Flamebird. So sometimes she&rsquo;ll appear, too, but only rarely. Occasionally also seen is Helena Bertinelli, aka Huntress. During Baman: No Man&rsquo;s Land, a story arc in which Gotham was struck by an earthquake and then officially declared to no longer be a part of the US and cut off from the rest of the world, Helena chose to stay behind in the city. Because Batman had disappeared for several months during No Man&rsquo;s Land, Helena chose to become the Bat, wearing her own Bat costume whose design was later reused for Cassandra Cain. When Batman returned, she was given the name Batgirl, but she never chose that name for herself, meaning that she&rsquo;s also kind of a quasi-Batgirl. Further, you will also sometimes see Nell Little, who was a huge Batgirl fan in Stephanie Brown&rsquo;s Batgirl run, and who Stephanie, in a hallucination of the future, saw as the next Batgirl. Finally, an additional Batgirl has been introduced in the Batman Beyond continuity, the same continuity as Terry McGinnis and Batman: The Animated Series, but she does not currently exist in the main universe and has only recently been introduced, so she&rsquo;s not really in any Batgirl stuff either.
Yeah, Batgirls are complicated.
Anyway! The point of this is that the Batfam, being huge, is often broken down into subgroups in various fanworks, only one of which Babs belongs to. In addition to that, Babs for the past almost 30 years before the reboot served in her own capacity as Oracle, managing her team the Birds of Prey and generally ruling over the internet with a shadowy hand, and generally being more powerful than Batman. Because she had her own &ldquo;team,&amp;#8221; she had kind of a dual membership between the Batfamily and the Birds of Prey. However, in full Batfamily portraits, she should&nbsp;absolutely&nbsp;be included.
2. Why am I anti-Babsgirl? Well, to understand this, let&rsquo;s start by delving briefly into the history of Barbara Gordon.
As I said above, the original Batgirl was in fact Bat-Girl, Betty Kane, introduced alongside with Kathy Kane as love interests for Batman and Robin to try to trick the two into relationships and make them less gay. So when Babs was first introduced, she was progressive as fuck. She was not only a female counterpart to Batman, but incredibly competent. Batman didn&rsquo;t even know who she was. Half of her entire deal was her incredible intelligence, grounds on which she stood even with Batman. Heck, at one point, she even became a congresswoman.
Shortly before The Killing Joke, and after Crisis on Infinite Earths, she retired from being Batgirl of her own volition - not because she was horribly embarassed or messed up horribly or any of the gross things typically done to drive female superheroes out of titles, or because she became disabled (that happened later), but of her own volition, because she felt she could do more good elsewhere. She became a librarian and retired from Batgirl because she felt it was time.
And then Alan Moore came along, with The Killing Joke. And he had a proposition - he wanted to tell a story exploring the Joker and his backstory, seen through the lens of the Joker trying to drive Babs&rsquo;s father, Commissioner James Gordon, insane by giving him &ldquo;one bad day.&amp;#8221;&nbsp;
And as part of this, he wanted to have the Joker shoot Barbara Gordon through the spine, making her disabled, and then strip her of her clothes and take photos of it in order to give her father general man angst. (This phenomenon, FYI, is known as &ldquo;women in refrigerators&amp;#8221;, a common practice in which female characters are killed, raped or otherwise brutalized in order to give male characters angst and character development. If you want to read up more on it, check&nbsp;this&nbsp;out.) What did Alan Moore&rsquo;s editor Len Wein say in response to this proposal? &ldquo;Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.&amp;#8221;
Suffice to say, it was not a shining moment of female empowerment.
Yet from this act of callous fridging, something truly amazing happened. Something beautifully and spectacularly progressive, a shining example of what comics could be, solid proof that superhero fantasies could truly be for everyone, not just cishet white able-bodied neurotypical men.
Barbara Gordon became Oracle. And as Oracle, she was so, so much more than she ever was as Batgirl.
To understand how truly progressive this was, I want to have a little bit of a side discussion about something known as ableism. Ableism is, in a nutshell, the belief that people with the most common levels of mental and physical ability are somehow better and more interesting than those with differing abilities; the belief that disabled people are somehow tragic, that their stories are uninteresting and their lives not worth living, that they are somehow&nbsp;less.
And yet&hellip; there&rsquo;s no reason that things should be this way. Why? Because our definition of ability and disability, of what is and isn&rsquo;t normal, is frankly rather arbitrary. Do people have different levels of ability? Sure. But why is it that, say, being bad at math is considered trivial, yet being bad at socialization is considered to make someone&rsquo;s life not worthwhile? That no one really cares if you, say, can&rsquo;t run a marathon, yet if you can&rsquo;t walk entirely you&rsquo;re considered worse off and discriminated against? It&rsquo;s not like we don&rsquo;t have the capability to make things accessible for everyone. It&rsquo;s not like we can&rsquo;t put ramps everywhere, and make the differences in transportation available to people without impaired mobility and wheelchair users trivial? Disability, then, is not really a matter of being disabled so much as a matter of having abilities that don&rsquo;t really line up with what our infrastructure is built to accommodate.
And yet, disabled people are told again and again that their bodies or minds are somehow &ldquo;wrong.&amp;#8221; They are denied employment, they are pitied, they are mistreated, and sometimes, they are even killed by those they trusted, only for everyone else to look on and pity their murderer for the &ldquo;hardship&amp;#8221; of having to associate with some