Memory In Context: Teen Titans #20-23.
Jul. 29th, 2013 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
detectivewonder The memory is three weekends spent with the Titans, right before and right after his father's murder.
The first weekend is a fruitless manhunt, occurring off to the side of the page, and ending with Tim eavesdropping on Vic & Kory (cyborg & Starfire) discussing Starfire leaving the team, to go and join Dick on the Outsiders. Most of this isn't clear to Tim, but he knows she's leaving to help another friend (probably another friend of his, since he has some memory of Dick), he knows there's some big, unnamed fear that makes Vic want to stop her, and he's a little awed at the dignity and gravity with which Vic lets it happen and memorializes it. He feels guilt, just a little, for spying on them. And he tells Vic he won't be there next weekend. He'll be camping with his father. And he needs the time away from the Titans "after what happened."
We jump to Tim at his father's headstone. "My dad. Jack Drake. He was murdered last week. The person who killed him is dead. The one who hired him is locked away in Arkham. None of that makes it any easier. In some weird way... I finally understand Bruce. ...I'm finally thinking like Batman. And that... that scares me."
We jump again. The narration pretty much stands for itself, but it's also important that Tim is still out of context -- he doesn't know who killed his father or what happened to that person. After his last memory, he's afraid he did it. He's also, for the first time, aware of his ambivalence toward Batman and his way of doing things... and he's aware of how that ambivalence changes.
Titans Tower, the next weekend. He's closed in, observing the people around him. Only Superboy knows what happened, and Tim won't talk about it, although Kon reminds him that they've shared other secrets, and that Tim's been there for him. Before they can finish that conversation, they get called out to fight; the resolution of that fruitless manhunt from the first memory. The fight itself is largely unimportant; except that only Tim winds up in close pursuit of one of the villains, and when that villain starts taunting him about Batman, his presumed father, Tim snaps. Cyborg has to pull him off the guy's prone, unconscious body, because Tim isn't going to stop hitting him on his own.
Let me just say it's sort of funny to get the week-after and year-after memories back to back, because it gives a much darker perspective to Tim, not of his life necessarily, but about himself, and his own risks of losing control. I want to say these are the only two occasions he snaps so completely, both for understandable reasons, but for all he knows right now this is what he's like, on-edge and violent and ready to blow at any moment.
In any case. He confesses his dad's death to the Titans, and they are immediately there for him. This is the other important part of this memory -- stressing the importance of team, and the existence of that support structure you can trust immediately and implicitly. Something that only gets stressed further in the third weekend of the memory.
The Titans are training when they're awkwardly interrupted by a new teammate, Mia/Speedy, who's somewhat standoffish at first. The team is called in to resolve a hostage situation involving her mentor, held captive by Doctor Light, who all the Titans present remember as a sad joke of a villain, but who now swears to kill Green Arrow unless the Titans and ONLY the Titans come to stop him. They're confident going in, and get utterly demolished by Light, who is much more dangerous and together than they recall. Putting the pieces together, it seems that very early in his career he was dangerous as well... then something changed.
Meanwhile, while parts of the team play cat-and-mouse with Light... the rest of the Titans assemble. Not just their current front line-up... every hero who ever served with them is there inside of, say, four hours. And then all of them, lead by Nightwing, who Tim recognizes as his mentor-figure and brother-surrogate, take on Light together. It's the first time Tim hears "Titans Together!" as a battlecry, and the scope of the response... well. Anyway. That Titan ethos, the all-for-one-one-for-all sense of constructed family, flawless teamwork (this time), and just the general overwhelming camaraderie,,, that's going to stick with Eclipse as an ideal of what Amethyst should be like.
Light being taken into custody by a Batman and a Batgirl who snub the Titans and don't even greet Tim will sting, and the implication that the Justice League lobotomized Light in the past to keep him neutered, so to speak, will start to bother Eclipse some as he thinks about the removal of memories in Aather.
Finally, Mia reveals to the team that she's HIV-positive. They're supportive, and in turn each of them shares some deep secret of their own -- lightening the burden of their fears by divvying up the weight between all of them. The only ones not to speak, almost, are Tim (everyone knows about his father's death) and Kon (whose secret only Tim knows; and he doesn't understand what he remembers of it). The memory ends with Tim giving Kon a very skeptical look. Clearly he can see that these are people he can trust?
+50 angst about violence
+10 worry about mind control
+100 team dere
+50 WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FATHER
The first weekend is a fruitless manhunt, occurring off to the side of the page, and ending with Tim eavesdropping on Vic & Kory (cyborg & Starfire) discussing Starfire leaving the team, to go and join Dick on the Outsiders. Most of this isn't clear to Tim, but he knows she's leaving to help another friend (probably another friend of his, since he has some memory of Dick), he knows there's some big, unnamed fear that makes Vic want to stop her, and he's a little awed at the dignity and gravity with which Vic lets it happen and memorializes it. He feels guilt, just a little, for spying on them. And he tells Vic he won't be there next weekend. He'll be camping with his father. And he needs the time away from the Titans "after what happened."
We jump to Tim at his father's headstone. "My dad. Jack Drake. He was murdered last week. The person who killed him is dead. The one who hired him is locked away in Arkham. None of that makes it any easier. In some weird way... I finally understand Bruce. ...I'm finally thinking like Batman. And that... that scares me."
We jump again. The narration pretty much stands for itself, but it's also important that Tim is still out of context -- he doesn't know who killed his father or what happened to that person. After his last memory, he's afraid he did it. He's also, for the first time, aware of his ambivalence toward Batman and his way of doing things... and he's aware of how that ambivalence changes.
Titans Tower, the next weekend. He's closed in, observing the people around him. Only Superboy knows what happened, and Tim won't talk about it, although Kon reminds him that they've shared other secrets, and that Tim's been there for him. Before they can finish that conversation, they get called out to fight; the resolution of that fruitless manhunt from the first memory. The fight itself is largely unimportant; except that only Tim winds up in close pursuit of one of the villains, and when that villain starts taunting him about Batman, his presumed father, Tim snaps. Cyborg has to pull him off the guy's prone, unconscious body, because Tim isn't going to stop hitting him on his own.
Let me just say it's sort of funny to get the week-after and year-after memories back to back, because it gives a much darker perspective to Tim, not of his life necessarily, but about himself, and his own risks of losing control. I want to say these are the only two occasions he snaps so completely, both for understandable reasons, but for all he knows right now this is what he's like, on-edge and violent and ready to blow at any moment.
In any case. He confesses his dad's death to the Titans, and they are immediately there for him. This is the other important part of this memory -- stressing the importance of team, and the existence of that support structure you can trust immediately and implicitly. Something that only gets stressed further in the third weekend of the memory.
The Titans are training when they're awkwardly interrupted by a new teammate, Mia/Speedy, who's somewhat standoffish at first. The team is called in to resolve a hostage situation involving her mentor, held captive by Doctor Light, who all the Titans present remember as a sad joke of a villain, but who now swears to kill Green Arrow unless the Titans and ONLY the Titans come to stop him. They're confident going in, and get utterly demolished by Light, who is much more dangerous and together than they recall. Putting the pieces together, it seems that very early in his career he was dangerous as well... then something changed.
Meanwhile, while parts of the team play cat-and-mouse with Light... the rest of the Titans assemble. Not just their current front line-up... every hero who ever served with them is there inside of, say, four hours. And then all of them, lead by Nightwing, who Tim recognizes as his mentor-figure and brother-surrogate, take on Light together. It's the first time Tim hears "Titans Together!" as a battlecry, and the scope of the response... well. Anyway. That Titan ethos, the all-for-one-one-for-all sense of constructed family, flawless teamwork (this time), and just the general overwhelming camaraderie,,, that's going to stick with Eclipse as an ideal of what Amethyst should be like.
Light being taken into custody by a Batman and a Batgirl who snub the Titans and don't even greet Tim will sting, and the implication that the Justice League lobotomized Light in the past to keep him neutered, so to speak, will start to bother Eclipse some as he thinks about the removal of memories in Aather.
Finally, Mia reveals to the team that she's HIV-positive. They're supportive, and in turn each of them shares some deep secret of their own -- lightening the burden of their fears by divvying up the weight between all of them. The only ones not to speak, almost, are Tim (everyone knows about his father's death) and Kon (whose secret only Tim knows; and he doesn't understand what he remembers of it). The memory ends with Tim giving Kon a very skeptical look. Clearly he can see that these are people he can trust?
+50 angst about violence
+10 worry about mind control
+100 team dere
+50 WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FATHER
