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seriousficI was reading this story and... besides the fact that there was an entire section of text that hit me like a semi, and I imagine the ending tapped into the same anger that handicapped people felt over Million Dollar Baby*, a sort of Replicant-esque outrage if I may be so dark...
It occurred to me that Cassandra Cain was autistic. Comic book autistic, sure, in a disability = superpower sort of way, but relatable nonetheless. And in the end of her own book, she manages to actually solve her internal conflict and go off to have a fantastic life. Mabye not 100% Everybody Lives, but a good ending. A happy ending.
Bringing her back, in turn, as a Fu Manchuette supervillain and then magically erasing her communications difficulties (even retconning so they NEVER EVEN EXISTED, if you go by the Navejo code shit), is rather like someone taking your puppy dog, running it over with a car, then pissing on its corpse, and deserves every bit of hate it's received.
So now we're at the point with Batgirl is back, but with what's most distinct and endearing about her erased. They Kid Flashed her Impulse, to put it obscenely. They wouldn't cure Barbara Gordon's paralysis and they wouldn't bring Batman's parents back from the dead. So, basically, I'm pissed off at the world and the people for whom political correctness is more about covering their own ass than actually acknowledging that people are...
Fuck it, here's a fanfic.
The fairy godmother told Cinderella that she had to leave the party before midnight—a simple enough rule. So much more direct than most of the rules that NTs followed. It was good that the fairy godmother told Cinderella the rule. NTs usually didn't talk about the rules they all followed. They just did certain things and then told me I was wrong when I did something else.
Title: Play By The Rules
Fandom: Batman
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,651
Characters/Pairings: Cass, Barda
Timeline: Batman and the Outsiders
Summary: I was reading a story and it occurred to me that Cassandra Cain was autistic.
There were Rules.
Cain had Rules. Batman had Rules. And now the Outsiders had Rules.
One of them was that she had to wear clothes. She’d known that, known how men looked, that made sense. But when there were no men there, why did she have to wear clothes? It wasn’t cold. Wearing clothes would only get them dirty, which would make for more work later on. They didn’t mind seeing her naked. So… what was the problem?
She’d done something wrong again. She knew that. It was like a barb in her skin, pulling. She’d done something wrong.
She would wear her Mask if they let her. She liked her Mask. It was comfortable and covered her eyes. No eye contact. If she looked at people too long it was staring, but if she didn’t look it was impolite, and she had to smile too… if she wore the Mask, no one cared. They just wrote her off as creepy. She liked that. It was simpler.
Cass watched as the Outsiders talked, lips flapping, arms waving. They knew the Rules, all of them. No one ever said the Rules, but they were Important, and if you broke them it was Bad. That had been an easy lesson to learn. Killing people was Bad. Rule number one. Not one of Cain’s rules, but one of hers. One of the world’s.
Batman had had Rules. His Rules were simple. Go out at night. Fight crime. Help people. Don’t engage Metahumans. But then his Rules had stopped making sense too. Don’t spend time with Steph, her friend. Don’t question. Don’t kill, even when it would be Good (this was paradoxical, a word Barbara had taught her. Even Cass’s Rules didn’t make sense). So she had left to find her own…
That was a bad time. Don’t think about that time. Rule number two. Don’t think about Slade, don’t think about assassinations, don’t think about Tim as he broke and bled and then broke her in turn and he didn’t care, wasn’t her friend, no one was her friend, she was alone and no one would tell her what the Rules were—
Crossing to her toilet, Cass vomited. Clear gruel vomit, which she flushed immediately. She washed her mouth out in the sink, then gargled mouthwash. This was the proper sequence of events, the right way of doing things. She brushed her teeth, even, though it was neither morning nor night nor after a meal.
She looked at the mirror. Her face was clean, smooth with water. Barda was also in the reflection. She was here because Batman needed more than the Outsiders and she could follow his Rules. Cass fidgeted her teeth in worry. Barda was hard to read. She wasn’t quite human, but she was close and had lived on Earth for a long time… maybe she didn’t know the Rules either.
“I did bad things,” Cass explained, and instantly cursed herself. She’d made the mistake again. Assumed someone could read her just like she read them. It seemed so obvious, like the little words that appeared on the bottom of the screen when people in movies talked other languages. Why couldn’t they read her? Them. Why couldn’t they just read the subtitles?
“Me too,” Barda said. She looked at Cass for a moment, grunted, and walked away.
Cass sat down on the toilet and thought about that. Barda hadn’t tried to talk to her, but she hadn’t ignored her either. That didn’t make sense. Usually they tried to either “engage” her or they gave up on her. The others tried to talk to her, sometimes, like she was a parrot. Talk enough and she’d just be able to repeat it back to them, all the nice little sunshiny things. She didn’t care about that. They were unimportant. Got in the way of the Mission. Broke the Rules so often, when she tried to talk. Made people look at her. Judge her. Bad.
But if Barda hadn’t done either… just sympathized… then maybe she could read. Someone had to! Batman had, she’d thought he had, and Slade had… What if Barda had sensed that she’d wanted to be alone and then acknowledged that and then…
This was good. This was very, very good. Cass nodded to herself. Maybe Barda could explain to her all the Rules so she wouldn’t keep making mistakes. And then…
She’d walked in the daylight once. She’d been wearing clothes Steph had picked out for her. No one had pointed. No one had stared. It was scary, but exhilarating. The light had seemed too bright for the longest time, then she’d seen a place selling sunglasses. She’d taken out her wallet and given the man a dollar. He’d said it wasn’t enough. She gave him a five and pointed to the one she wanted. He’d given her change. And the sunglasses. She’d put the sunglasses on and put the change in her pocket. Then walked away, congratulating herself over navigating the miniature labyrinth or human interaction even as she savaged herself for the mistake. There’d probably been a sign reading that the sunglasses cost more than a dollar, but she hadn’t known because she was stupid, like Barbara said.
Barbara’s Rules hadn’t made sense either / then Slade had come.
Cass went after Barda. Barda was getting milk from the refrigerator. She was wearing her Mask, but no one said anything about that. Maybe it was okay because it showed her face. Cass stopped and stared and tried to think of something to say. She was making eye contact, she was making eye contact, but that wasn’t enough, she had to say something before she had looked at Barda too long and…
Cass turned away and walked and turned back. Barbara was right, she was stupid. She didn’t have anything to say. She wanted to be friends, but you couldn’t just say that. That was against the Rules. People would laugh at her. What would Steph say? Steph would say something clever. Clever. That was a whole different language. Making people laugh… whatever Cass found funny, no one else would laugh at, even though it was funny. Once, Cain had ended up getting shot because of Cass, and her own actions had come from Cain shooting at her. Irony was funny. But no one else thought so. And sometimes people would laugh at Cass when she said something, and Cass didn’t think they were laughing at her, but it was so loud and so…
“I want to talk,” Cass said to Barda.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You choose.”
Barda’s brow furrowed. She didn’t have anything to talk about and Cass wondered for a heart-stopping moment whether she had broken a Rule.
Cass bit her lip. “You could… tell me a story. An anecdote. A joke.” It was good when she found a word she knew. She always tried to look them up in the thesaurus so she didn’t repeat herself. She stockpiled words like money, saving up to spend it on she knew not what.
“None of my stories are very good,” Barda said with an apologetic smile. “But I do know a good story. It was told to me by my friend, Diana.”
“I would like to hear it,” Cass said, smiling eagerly. She held her smile for exactly ten seconds before terminating it.
“Once upon a time…” Barda paused, as if thinking, then made a little motion of confirmation with her spine. Yes, that was how to tell a story. “There was a lonely queen who ruled over a beautiful kingdom. It was a remote island that no one could reach. Her name was Hippolyta, and the island was called Themyscira. And though Hippolyta had many subjects who loved her, she had no children. So one day, she walked along the beach that separated her domain from the ocean, and prayed to the gods for a daughter…”
***
Cass enjoyed Barda’s story. When it was over, she shook Barda’s hand politely and said thank you and only started to run when she was out of Barda’s sight. She hadn’t broken any Rules, not one! She’d done everything exactly like a… like a normal person would. She celebrated by going to her gym and working out on the balance beam. Steph had called it dancing, said that it gave her endorphins that made her happy.
The story was strange in many ways. Diana, who was Wonder Woman, had been made out of clay, but clay was ugly. Of course, Cass had seen a woman give birth once and that was ugly, but once it got cleaned up it was skin. When you cleaned up clay, it was still clay. And then Diana had been beautiful and her mother, who loved her, had made her into a weapon. That made no sense. It had made so little sense that Cass had fumed on the inside and felt black, but she hadn’t wanted to interrupt Barda or break a Rule. She’d filed it away to start a conversation later.
Beautiful things had to stay beautiful, weapons had to stay weapons. Weapons kept beautiful things beautiful. It seemed this way to Cass and she didn’t understand how things could be any different. She’d tried to be beautiful once and now she was a weapon again. The story was wrong, or she was wrong, and she would have to talk to Barda about it.
She showered and brushed her teeth and slept, resolving to talk to Barda about it in the morning. It made no sense. It just didn’t make any sense. The story was stupid. She had to talk to Barda. Or maybe Barbara. Barbara would explain things, because Barbara was much smarter than her. It would be hard to keep up and understand, but Cass would try. Barda was her friend and her story had to make sense.
*"What do you mean she's not going to get better? She's supposed to get better!"
It occurred to me that Cassandra Cain was autistic. Comic book autistic, sure, in a disability = superpower sort of way, but relatable nonetheless. And in the end of her own book, she manages to actually solve her internal conflict and go off to have a fantastic life. Mabye not 100% Everybody Lives, but a good ending. A happy ending.
Bringing her back, in turn, as a Fu Manchuette supervillain and then magically erasing her communications difficulties (even retconning so they NEVER EVEN EXISTED, if you go by the Navejo code shit), is rather like someone taking your puppy dog, running it over with a car, then pissing on its corpse, and deserves every bit of hate it's received.
So now we're at the point with Batgirl is back, but with what's most distinct and endearing about her erased. They Kid Flashed her Impulse, to put it obscenely. They wouldn't cure Barbara Gordon's paralysis and they wouldn't bring Batman's parents back from the dead. So, basically, I'm pissed off at the world and the people for whom political correctness is more about covering their own ass than actually acknowledging that people are...
Fuck it, here's a fanfic.
The fairy godmother told Cinderella that she had to leave the party before midnight—a simple enough rule. So much more direct than most of the rules that NTs followed. It was good that the fairy godmother told Cinderella the rule. NTs usually didn't talk about the rules they all followed. They just did certain things and then told me I was wrong when I did something else.
Title: Play By The Rules
Fandom: Batman
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,651
Characters/Pairings: Cass, Barda
Timeline: Batman and the Outsiders
Summary: I was reading a story and it occurred to me that Cassandra Cain was autistic.
There were Rules.
Cain had Rules. Batman had Rules. And now the Outsiders had Rules.
One of them was that she had to wear clothes. She’d known that, known how men looked, that made sense. But when there were no men there, why did she have to wear clothes? It wasn’t cold. Wearing clothes would only get them dirty, which would make for more work later on. They didn’t mind seeing her naked. So… what was the problem?
She’d done something wrong again. She knew that. It was like a barb in her skin, pulling. She’d done something wrong.
She would wear her Mask if they let her. She liked her Mask. It was comfortable and covered her eyes. No eye contact. If she looked at people too long it was staring, but if she didn’t look it was impolite, and she had to smile too… if she wore the Mask, no one cared. They just wrote her off as creepy. She liked that. It was simpler.
Cass watched as the Outsiders talked, lips flapping, arms waving. They knew the Rules, all of them. No one ever said the Rules, but they were Important, and if you broke them it was Bad. That had been an easy lesson to learn. Killing people was Bad. Rule number one. Not one of Cain’s rules, but one of hers. One of the world’s.
Batman had had Rules. His Rules were simple. Go out at night. Fight crime. Help people. Don’t engage Metahumans. But then his Rules had stopped making sense too. Don’t spend time with Steph, her friend. Don’t question. Don’t kill, even when it would be Good (this was paradoxical, a word Barbara had taught her. Even Cass’s Rules didn’t make sense). So she had left to find her own…
That was a bad time. Don’t think about that time. Rule number two. Don’t think about Slade, don’t think about assassinations, don’t think about Tim as he broke and bled and then broke her in turn and he didn’t care, wasn’t her friend, no one was her friend, she was alone and no one would tell her what the Rules were—
Crossing to her toilet, Cass vomited. Clear gruel vomit, which she flushed immediately. She washed her mouth out in the sink, then gargled mouthwash. This was the proper sequence of events, the right way of doing things. She brushed her teeth, even, though it was neither morning nor night nor after a meal.
She looked at the mirror. Her face was clean, smooth with water. Barda was also in the reflection. She was here because Batman needed more than the Outsiders and she could follow his Rules. Cass fidgeted her teeth in worry. Barda was hard to read. She wasn’t quite human, but she was close and had lived on Earth for a long time… maybe she didn’t know the Rules either.
“I did bad things,” Cass explained, and instantly cursed herself. She’d made the mistake again. Assumed someone could read her just like she read them. It seemed so obvious, like the little words that appeared on the bottom of the screen when people in movies talked other languages. Why couldn’t they read her? Them. Why couldn’t they just read the subtitles?
“Me too,” Barda said. She looked at Cass for a moment, grunted, and walked away.
Cass sat down on the toilet and thought about that. Barda hadn’t tried to talk to her, but she hadn’t ignored her either. That didn’t make sense. Usually they tried to either “engage” her or they gave up on her. The others tried to talk to her, sometimes, like she was a parrot. Talk enough and she’d just be able to repeat it back to them, all the nice little sunshiny things. She didn’t care about that. They were unimportant. Got in the way of the Mission. Broke the Rules so often, when she tried to talk. Made people look at her. Judge her. Bad.
But if Barda hadn’t done either… just sympathized… then maybe she could read. Someone had to! Batman had, she’d thought he had, and Slade had… What if Barda had sensed that she’d wanted to be alone and then acknowledged that and then…
This was good. This was very, very good. Cass nodded to herself. Maybe Barda could explain to her all the Rules so she wouldn’t keep making mistakes. And then…
She’d walked in the daylight once. She’d been wearing clothes Steph had picked out for her. No one had pointed. No one had stared. It was scary, but exhilarating. The light had seemed too bright for the longest time, then she’d seen a place selling sunglasses. She’d taken out her wallet and given the man a dollar. He’d said it wasn’t enough. She gave him a five and pointed to the one she wanted. He’d given her change. And the sunglasses. She’d put the sunglasses on and put the change in her pocket. Then walked away, congratulating herself over navigating the miniature labyrinth or human interaction even as she savaged herself for the mistake. There’d probably been a sign reading that the sunglasses cost more than a dollar, but she hadn’t known because she was stupid, like Barbara said.
Barbara’s Rules hadn’t made sense either / then Slade had come.
Cass went after Barda. Barda was getting milk from the refrigerator. She was wearing her Mask, but no one said anything about that. Maybe it was okay because it showed her face. Cass stopped and stared and tried to think of something to say. She was making eye contact, she was making eye contact, but that wasn’t enough, she had to say something before she had looked at Barda too long and…
Cass turned away and walked and turned back. Barbara was right, she was stupid. She didn’t have anything to say. She wanted to be friends, but you couldn’t just say that. That was against the Rules. People would laugh at her. What would Steph say? Steph would say something clever. Clever. That was a whole different language. Making people laugh… whatever Cass found funny, no one else would laugh at, even though it was funny. Once, Cain had ended up getting shot because of Cass, and her own actions had come from Cain shooting at her. Irony was funny. But no one else thought so. And sometimes people would laugh at Cass when she said something, and Cass didn’t think they were laughing at her, but it was so loud and so…
“I want to talk,” Cass said to Barda.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You choose.”
Barda’s brow furrowed. She didn’t have anything to talk about and Cass wondered for a heart-stopping moment whether she had broken a Rule.
Cass bit her lip. “You could… tell me a story. An anecdote. A joke.” It was good when she found a word she knew. She always tried to look them up in the thesaurus so she didn’t repeat herself. She stockpiled words like money, saving up to spend it on she knew not what.
“None of my stories are very good,” Barda said with an apologetic smile. “But I do know a good story. It was told to me by my friend, Diana.”
“I would like to hear it,” Cass said, smiling eagerly. She held her smile for exactly ten seconds before terminating it.
“Once upon a time…” Barda paused, as if thinking, then made a little motion of confirmation with her spine. Yes, that was how to tell a story. “There was a lonely queen who ruled over a beautiful kingdom. It was a remote island that no one could reach. Her name was Hippolyta, and the island was called Themyscira. And though Hippolyta had many subjects who loved her, she had no children. So one day, she walked along the beach that separated her domain from the ocean, and prayed to the gods for a daughter…”
***
Cass enjoyed Barda’s story. When it was over, she shook Barda’s hand politely and said thank you and only started to run when she was out of Barda’s sight. She hadn’t broken any Rules, not one! She’d done everything exactly like a… like a normal person would. She celebrated by going to her gym and working out on the balance beam. Steph had called it dancing, said that it gave her endorphins that made her happy.
The story was strange in many ways. Diana, who was Wonder Woman, had been made out of clay, but clay was ugly. Of course, Cass had seen a woman give birth once and that was ugly, but once it got cleaned up it was skin. When you cleaned up clay, it was still clay. And then Diana had been beautiful and her mother, who loved her, had made her into a weapon. That made no sense. It had made so little sense that Cass had fumed on the inside and felt black, but she hadn’t wanted to interrupt Barda or break a Rule. She’d filed it away to start a conversation later.
Beautiful things had to stay beautiful, weapons had to stay weapons. Weapons kept beautiful things beautiful. It seemed this way to Cass and she didn’t understand how things could be any different. She’d tried to be beautiful once and now she was a weapon again. The story was wrong, or she was wrong, and she would have to talk to Barda about it.
She showered and brushed her teeth and slept, resolving to talk to Barda about it in the morning. It made no sense. It just didn’t make any sense. The story was stupid. She had to talk to Barda. Or maybe Barbara. Barbara would explain things, because Barbara was much smarter than her. It would be hard to keep up and understand, but Cass would try. Barda was her friend and her story had to make sense.
*"What do you mean she's not going to get better? She's supposed to get better!"
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 06:29 pm (UTC)Anyways, I really enjoyed this.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 07:25 pm (UTC)Well, canonically, Cain's upbringing manifested itself as damage to the language center of her brain, preventing her from learning normally to read. So even if it's not capital-A autism, it's close enough for comics of the "X-Men equals homosexuality/superpowers equal puberty" meme. Get a writer to do some research, give her an all-age title, and I think she could even be the next big character. After all, the modern age of comics was begun based on characters that went through what their audience was going through...
no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 09:53 pm (UTC)It occurred to me that Cassandra Cain was autistic. Comic book autistic, sure, in a disability = superpower sort of way, but relatable nonetheless.
That same thought occurred to me when someone was telling me about the movie Chocolate (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1183252/)! It's about an autistic woman who is able to memorize and copy any actions or martial arts she sees (thus she is awesome at it and can kick a lot of ass).
So now we're at the point with Batgirl is back, but with what's most distinct and endearing about her erased. They Kid Flashed her Impulse, to put it obscenely. They wouldn't cure Barbara Gordon's paralysis and they wouldn't bring Batman's parents back from the dead.
I never looked at it from that angle before but...yes. That, exactly. The only way that I can see Beechen's mess being redeemed (without completely retconning it) is if while she can read and write, we find out that she's still far from what the average 20-year-old's literacy level should be at.
Because realistically, even being a very smart person, a year's worth of ESL for someone who never even had a first (verbal/written) language is not going to be enough. It would make sense for her to still have trouble with things like spelling, some vocab and the nitty-gritty grammar stuff that you only really learn by having your English essays pick apart with a red pen for years. Fits with the whole dyslexic/LD theory that Babs came up with she scanned Cass's brain or whatever.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-12 12:28 am (UTC)I'm not familiar with Barda, but I like how you explore their rlationship here. It just seems *right.*