2 traditional sense that Batman and Robin are suppose to be. Once DC stopped wanting to focus on Bruce as a father figure his relationship w/Damian lost focus because they aren’t good as partners. Dick and Damian’s family and partner bond has continued to survive and even grow despite their limited appearances together. Their relationship works because they are each other’s other half in a dynamic duo. Their dynamic was essential to both of them in a way only a Batman and robin can be. In –
3 the end Bruce and Damian’s bond only works as a straight up father son bond. They can work together but it’ll never be as good as Bruce’s work relationship w/Dick, Tim or Cass or Damian’s w/Dick. They weren’t meant to be comparable in that way. At least not as good as Damian with Dick. Only Dick can understand and validate Damian in a way Bruce never can and only Damian can give fire to Dick’s spirit and open love in a way Bruce also can’t. Damian wasn’t designed to ever be Bruce’s partner.
(This is gonna be a bit long, sorry, but , .)
This is such a good point and I couldn’t agree more with you if I tried, especially about how the N52 B&R is more about Bruce learning how to become a father to Damian than his Batman (that’s why I love it so much). After all, at that point Bruce doesn’t need to learn how to be Batman again, and Damian has already learned what it means to be Robin, and I find it both funny and heart-wrenching that Dick was the one who taught the both of them, first as Robin and then as Batman. It’s one of the many things I love about Dick&Damian’s run: it’s so full of parallelism and closures and the more I think about it the more I fall in love with it.
And I know I’ve said it before, so I apologize for being repetitive, but to me the key to everything is that both Dick and Damian starts from ground zero with each other. They don’t know each other, they don’t even like each other, they have an idea of what their roles towards each other are, but their idea is ultimately wrong, and they learn that together, step by step, while they adjust to their partnership. It’s something Bruce and Damian never had, not at the same level. Because when Bruce came back Damian was already Robin, and contrary to what he did with the others, Bruce had no role in his “upbringing”.
With Dick, Jason and to a lesser degree Cass, Bruce took a grieving/lonely kid and gave them something to fight for, a direction, a raison d’être. With Tim was already different, because – at least at the beginning – Tim was the one giving Bruce a direction/a reason to keep fighting without denaturalize what Batman was. With Damian, though, Bruce had no role at all if not “sharpen” the notions/skills Dick had already imprinted on the boy. And another thing that kills me is that Bruce knows that. He knows Dick did his job 200% better than he would’ve, that what Dick and Damian had was something unique, that worked by its own rules and its own balance.
And there’s already a lot of better written meta on why Damian can only be Dick’s Robin while he doesn’t really work as the Robin to Bruce’s Batman (here’s my favorite) so I’m gonna stop before I bore you to death but the point is @dc give us the goddamn Nightwing&Robin series we all know we need and stop being assholes.
kiragecko 