feygan | Tim Drake

This was going to be my response to a comment questioning the interest people have in Tim Drake. The poster had serious questions about why people in the Batman fandom constantly perv out over Tim and the other male characters. Then I realized that I was completely going off topic. But I didn't want to throw my post away, so here...

The fascination people have for fictional characters is the fact that depending on what you're personally in to, they can be whatever you imagine them as. Literary characters and comic book characters that have constantly changing and evolving physical characteristics and personalities are particularly favored because if you want Tim to be pretty, well, he's pretty, or you want him to be butch, he's butch. Whatever you personally want, he becomes.

Tim Drake is understood to have black hair, blue eyes, and is shorter than the other male characters. Some artists draw him as being of slight build. Others have him with wiry muscle. He can be seen as girlishly pretty, as a small child, or as a compressed down little adult with very little personal expression shown about him.

The fact that he is shorter than the males around him, allows him to be more readily feminized. It's an instinctual thing, though in America we really don't take it to the cultural extremes of Japanese yaoi and shounen-ai manga (where the height-rule can really come into effect.) It's just that the fact that he's smaller than almost every other male--Batman, Nightwing, Superboy--and is so completely human and superpowerless that makes people want to put him in the role of the female in a slash context. He may be supremely competent in the things that he does, but he's so vulnerable when compared to the other superheroes that it's just ridiculous. One bullet, or one zipline failing and he's a body in the morgue ready to be identified.

Personally, I like the fact that even though he's oh-so-human, he's still out there saving the day. He's smaller than the people around him, more vulnerable, he's scarily screwed up, yet he's still out there doing his job, being more adult in some ways than the adults around him (Batman, when are you going to stop wearing your underwear outside of your clothes and start using more of your money to fund a better police department? Alfred, do you realize at all how ridiculously self-destructive the actions of your employer are, and to bring young boys into the dangerous mix... when are you going to put your foot down and tell him to wake up, get some counseling, and join the adult world? And come on, how can you in good conscience allow him to become the guardian of an emotionally traumatized boy like Dick Grayson, who never had a real stable living environment before the horrifying murder of his parents before his very eyes?)

Anyways, I personally am drawn to Tim because he's young, vulnerable, mentally screwed up, and that because of the fluctuation in his canon personality and physical appearance can basically be molded into whatever kind of person I want him to be while writing.

Fanfiction is fiction written by fans, but it can also be taken to mean "fantasy fiction." What you want to have happen, can happen. Or what you're afraid to have happen to a character, can be written about so as to relieve some of the tension and fear out of your system. Lots of people get so involved with their TV shows and comic books that they need to write stories as a kind of catharsis, especially when there are weeks or even months before a story arc is resumed, much less completed.

Sure, lots of people aren't so *sexually* graphic about their fiction, but verbal and physical violence etched out in exquisite detail is just as telling personality wise. So even though someone might not have any sex whatsoever in their story, the scene descriptions they use (Tim being tortured by Joker, or Tim beating the crap out of someone with every spray of blood described) can show just as much of a character-connection as having him leaping through the air in a graceful arc of flexing ass cheeks and a bowing spine.