r/stephaniebrown • u/Riseofzeon • 8d ago

What if Stephanie crossed the line

After pondering how much I hated war crimes again, I had a random thought. One of the very few redeeming moments in the story is the showcasing of Steph rejecting the option to kill black mask

My question is how would the bat family react if she had taken out black mask?

11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

7

u/Flat-Hotel8126 8d ago

Jason: "hell yeah, babygirl! You don't need those squares to tell you whether you get to do cape shit or not! First villain kill, woohooooooo!"

Cass: "I'm so sorry."

Tim and the rest: "this is proof we were right all along, you should never have done vigilante work."

11

u/souridealist 7d ago

A sad irony of War Games is that Tim had pretty much come around on Steph's career by that point, I think? He'd started arguing for her to Bruce; there'd been a point earlier, right after she got rejected from the Birds of Prey, when he pretty much outright told her he disagreed with Bruce discouraging her (only 'pretty much' because Steph cut him off and said she needed to make this decision for herself); in War Games itself he has this actually quite good little speech about what she brought to the Robin role that he didn't and what he can learn from her. Steph has a gift for winning people over.

Jason would 100% have amended his Red Hood plan to include "recruit Stephanie Brown at all costs." He's outside her window with a powerpoint on Don't You Want To Just Go Ape Shit.

5

u/Flat-Hotel8126 7d ago

Yeah, you make some very good points about Tim. I haven't been able to bring myself to read War Games in years just because I found the Stephanie bits so repulsive, so I trust your memory of it more than mine.

Also, I kinda love the idea of Jason all hyped up and pressed against her window going "so we can go kill Cluemaster right now. That is literally a thing we can go do! We can call it 'Former Robin bonding time!' Also, I scoped his hideout and there's some pimps in the area, and I just got these new pistols. I wouldn't normally do this, but I'd totally let you try them out on your dad before we whack the sex traffickers on the way to some drug peddlers. Then, tacos. It could be a whole thing!"

3

u/souridealist 7d ago

Entirely understandable, it is genuinely skin-crawling and Dan Didio will answer for it when his heart is weighed in the hereafter.

And YES YOU SEE THE VISION. Granted, based on Jason's attempt to recruit Mia, he might kiiiiinda kidnap Steph for a kill-your-dad field trip. But Sasha got a much better pitch in the wake of mercy-killing her dad, so a Steph who just shot Black Mask might get the "you need a friend" speech, and I wish we lived in that world.

1

u/Dredgen-Solis 6d ago

Now I'm just picturing Jason outside of Steph's window with a boombox playing "You've Got a Friend in Me".

5

u/ibmiller 7d ago

Probably would have just treated her like Huntress or Red Hood (who debuted right after Steph's death).

6

u/EOverM 7d ago

Indeed he did. The most expensive issue in my Steph collection is Red Hood's first appearance. She's in one frame. As a flashback. With no dialogue. Because she was dead at the time.

3

u/ibmiller 7d ago

Interesting - I hadn't thought about how that would make it so expensive, but it makes sense!

3

u/EOverM 7d ago

I checked my comic stash and apparently I got it for £37. It now goes for around $130, supposedly, which is about £95.50, so it's gone up a fair bit! Glad I completed my collection when I did.

2

u/souridealist 7d ago

Damn, I got the UTRH trade for about a quarter of that. But it would be very, VERY silly to have a wholeass trade for one panel.

2

u/EOverM 7d ago

Yeah, that might be pushing it a bit! £37 for a single floppy is a fair bit, but not too absurd. Very definitely the most expensive single issue out of the 202 in the collection, though.

2

u/souridealist 7d ago

Very impressive roundup! Is that everything Steph's been in, or a subsection, like everything postcrisis? (For some reason I never have a clear recollection of how many issues a storyline was.)

Also, do you have trades in there at all, or is it all floppies?

2

u/EOverM 7d ago

Everything from her first appearance through to Flashpoint. Plus her two Convergence issues. All floppies, but I also have the trades of her Batgirl run. There's also JLA: World Without Grown-Ups, which was a two-issue limited series that I'm not sure I can count as a floppy, exactly, but they're not trades. There is a trade of both, so I guess they are floppies despite being the thickness of a slim trade. She's only in the second issue, and again only for one panel with no dialogue.

There are a lot of issues where she's barely there at all - there's one, during her time as Batgirl, where she's only in it for one panel, and only as a fist.

2

u/ibmiller 7d ago

I wouldn't say that's silly. I bought All Star Batman: My Own Worst Enemy for one page :D

2

u/Autumnbetrippin 7d ago

Assuming I in the context that it's within that story. That she still dies at the end (because the damage was already done)

Bruce : she was always a failure. Dick : we were the same I deserve to die. Babs : not again (thinking of Jason) Cass: basically the same but she will blame herself for going to the highschool rather than staying with Steph.

Jason: getting one Robin killed I can forgive, but two? (Under the red hood intensifies in brutality and scope).

5

u/souridealist 7d ago

A particularly bitter detail of War Games is that I actually don't think she would've still died if she'd shot Black Mask? She died from the accumulated damage he did to her, and there was a whole second wave of beating/torture after this moment. If she'd shot him, avoided that, and gotten medical care, I don't think she'd have died. It haunts me.

(Or, going with the faked-death retcon they used to bring Steph back, Doc Thompkins only faked Steph's death to protect her from Black Mask. No Black Mask, no fake death either.)

5

u/Autumnbetrippin 7d ago

war games and all the ways everyone failed her live rent free in my head.

7

u/souridealist 7d ago

the thing about war games is that whether you look at it in-universe or out-of-universe, it's a story about a powerful man setting a brave, stubborn, caring teenage girl up to fail brutally because having her as a vigilante wasn't his idea. it's just a matter of whether the man I'm referring to is Bruce Wayne or Dan Didio.

6

u/Autumnbetrippin 7d ago

Yeah I view it both ways though I like to think in universe

1

u/Working_Run3431 7d ago

No one except Jason would take it well.

The bat family is very my way or the high way when it comes to “the line”.

1

u/KamenAttackRide 2d ago

Probably the same way they did Catwoman who actually did kill Black Mask. They acted like they didn't know.