That seems to be a phenomenon with a lot of fucked up ships, sadly. :/ I think it’s a combination of A. purity culture bullshit and B. people who fucking suck at characterization writing fanfics (which, in my experience, often get depressingly popular, and then the bad characterization kinda spreads...).
There's (at least) one person on FFA who tracks that ship tag (which I know because they are a frequent contributor to the WTF Tags threads) and it sounds like a lot of it is a mixture of the obvious "Death Eaters are right!" stuff, but also a fair bit of, like, time travel pre-Voldy-intervention type stuff and other convoluted AUs where Tom Riddle isn't Voldemort.
Remembering my own gripe which is. Rhack (borderlands ship) has so much potential to be used in fucked up fanfic, but the most popular fic for it is a flowershop AU. I don't like fluffy rhack personally (to each their own really), but why is it so hard to find fucked up rhack that explores the abusive relationship presented in canon?
gripe: i have over two hundred pages of AU musings on the same AU. i have written zero words of fic. ETA: this gripe brought on by going through lord huron's songs, finding one that just feels like a song for one of the OCs partially made for the fic, considering posting it in the songs that remind you of fictional characters thread, then remembering that that character exists only in the 200+ pages of rambling about this elaborate dystopia AU
people who write dc/marvel crossovers need to recognize that the two verses have different levels of realism. i'm sure dc fans are just as tired of "batfamily is a creepy abuse dynamic" as i am of "batfamily can wipe the floor with the avengers bc they are by definition maximum badass". you gotta synch your reality levels. it takes some creativity to make them agree. i mean, yeah, batfamily IS child soldiers, but they're not the red room. and yeah, they ARE practically naruto ninjas, but in a crossover they're subject to the same physics as natasha, and therefore if you let them do impossible things you have to let her do them too. canonically she's way older than she looks and has been trained to kick ass since she was 4. damian fucking wayne is not going to be better at fights than her. you just can't do that without breaking my suspension of disbelief. this gripe brought to you by one particular fic that had tony stark firing repulsors at a 12 year old because he didn't know what else to do, which what the actual fuck, but also by quite a lot of other fics, including the ones i didn't notice the disparity of because i'm a huge slobbery avengers fanboy and i think bucky barnes is the greatest invention since jacketed rifle rounds.
like, if you wanna explore the consequences of the bats' "never ever kill anyone no matter what" policy, good, so do i, but you can't do it by dropping it unaltered into a universe where the heroes are all spies and ex-military and current-military. you especially can't do that and then have the bats look down on the avengers for not being good at heroing. the avengers are not doing heroing. they are doing counterterrorism. the fact that it looks like heroing to the general public makes them kind of tired. and then to have captain america be this bewildered creampuff, when by dc hero morality he's a massive war criminal -- you wanna guess how many hundreds of personnel went down with the helicarriers? and probably not all of them were hydra, in fact probably a lot of them were being forced the way that one tech in the control room was and didn't have a handy agent 13 to rescue them -- just kind of made my brain die. i know, i know, even avengers fans have trouble with the whole 'steve is in fact a soldier and has shot many people in the face' factoid. it's just. y'all keep putting a serial killer in the same facility he keeps escaping from, and then taking no responsibility for his murders because you don't kill anyone, but you have no problem with steve and friends bringing down three fully staffed battleships in the middle of the district of fucking columbia a couple years ago? i dunno man. i just feel like writers aren't thinking these things through, is all.
"Batman is the bestest ever and any Batman-associated character can totally beat every other character and the best thing everyone else could do is become more like Batman" is unfortunately a very common problem even with certain published DC writers, and I don't think it has much to do with the levels of realism so much as a lionization of Batman in particular (and the Batfam by association). There are published comics that do exactly that same thing with non-Batman DC heroes; one that particularly sticks in my mind is an awful what-if story that Linkara reviewed where everyone in the DC-verse spontaneously lost their powers, and naturally they were all completely helpless and filled with despair and gave up until a few of them crawled to Batman for ninja training, which he condescendingly deigned to give them.
From talks with a good friend who’s a huge Batfan, I do get the impression that one major area of appeal is the idea that with enough planning, ingenuity, practice, and low cunning, and maybe also a large personal fortune but who’s counting, an ordinary human guy could draw upon the worst life has to offer to beat the best of the best of the superhuman. My one friend may not be a representative sample, but I think he kinda needs Batman to win, and Batman’s moral lines in the sand to remain more or less intact because otherwise it doesn’t mean anything that Batman won. I have no idea how that would mesh with Marvel. It’s definitely not totally incompatible, but it would probably take some doing. ....I bet Batman could do it.
Don't get me wrong, I love the batfam, but like... Your fav doesn't have to be able to beat everyone to be worthwhile! Sometimes I feel like they're like "they're not JUST unpowered humans! they're also UNBEATABLE." And just. Chill, okay? Just because batman has a plan to take all of his colleagues down if he thinks he has to doesn't mean it would work. I have ragequit several mcu/dcu fics because of the stuff @jacktrash was talking about. Mostly I've found that i prefer Jason Todd to be the batfam member interacting with the mcu. (Speaking of which, have/want any recs?)
i feel like the recs i'd give you are the same ones you'd give me, but i'm definitely up to find out! too crippledy to coherently sort thru my bookmarks rn tho.
the thing is, there's several characters in marvel who embody this too, which is why i bring natasha up in particular. she's got some knockoff-of-a-knockoff supersoldier serum, but all it appears to do is give her slow aging and some improved regenerative abilities. it doesn't matter in a fight, only in the hospital afterwards. which is why it piques me so much when people have her lose to bat lads. i mean, if you wanna get into whether krav maga beats ninjutsu, i am here for that. but don't tell me that being raised by the kgb doesn't count because the red room wasn't the batfamily. that dog won't hunt. (edit: not that you personally are telling me that. just that writers who discount the avengers as basically the superfriends but without masks are doing that.)
Suddenly feeling very good about my decision in the fem!Tim-Drake-and-fem!Bart-Allen-end-up-in-mcu-verse spinoff of my fic (we all write aus of our aus, right?) to have Anthea (fem!Tim) witness Natasha fight and go "ohmygod, teach me".
Friend has mentioned that I believe. The non-super guy in the superfriends who could probably take out any other member of the team if necessary, at least according to friend. Contingency planning, ya know. This relates back to Batman needing to win if it really came down to it, if I understand his meta correctly. Because it may very well be that he is literally the only one equipped to stop the others if comic plot things happen, like they turn evil or go on a rampage. I don’t know how important it is in-universe that the last ditch plans person isn’t super or trauma-free. It seems very important to friend. The crossover thing could be very interesting or a huge mess. Like @jacktrash was saying, he wouldn’t be the only human capable of taking out superpowered threats at all. But that’s also not really how the Avengers operate I don’t think? Like, sure, if you have a member who can be dangerous, make sure you have something prepped in case of that. I’m not an expert on Avengers comics, but it doesn’t really seem like they would consider contingency plans for taking down one of their own to be morally above board unless there’s an unavoidable, already existent need. They take on(to the team), work alongside, or consult with people they probably have no good plans for winning against like, every Friday. I think the universes of the stories are mismatched in that way, too. Batman having all those plans matches the tone of his story and his setting. If you shove the Avengers directly into his setting, they’ll probably look foolish and unprepared at the least. Batman dumped wholesale in an Avengers tone story is probably not just gonna seem very creepy, he may seem outright immoral in the kind of way that would alienate him from other characters very fast. Edit for clarity
Well, I imagine most people writing Batman meta would be talking about the Justice League. Super Friends was the incredibly cheesy old Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon where they never had any idea what to do with Aquaman. </unnecessary pedantry> I do think some tonal dissonance has a lot to do with the fact that most DC fic is based on the comics or cartoons, while most Marvel fic these days is based on the MCU. And the MCU has a setting tone that's different than the comics from either company; it's more dissonant to imagine Squirrel Girl (a Marvel hero) in it than it is to imagine her in, say, Young Justice (a DC show). At least part of it comes down to that the MCU doesn't really have supervillains; literally the only antagonists I can think of who've lasted more than one movie are Loki and Thanos. It's not a world where the superheroes are working around the assumption that at any given time some weirdo with superpowers and a garishly-colored costume could (and probably will) pop up with an elaborate plan to take over the world, and you can't even cross the dead ones off the list. Batsy's kryptonite ring makes a lot of sense in a world where there are dozens of random jerks with mind-control powers who could at any given time be launching a convoluted plot to turn Superman into their henchman; it exists within a setting where superheroes randomly going evil, whether of their own apparent free will or not, is a constant risk which he has experienced firsthand. And that kind of stuff happens all the time in Marvel comics too, but it doesn't show up much in the movies, because the world of the movies is one where Superhero Stuff is still well outside the status quo.
Pedantry welcome! I'm talking about something I don't actually know about except for watching some movies and my recollection of literally one friend's opinion. If that's the worst mistake I make, I'll count myself lucky.
