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Nov. 2nd, 2014 12:50 amREGULAR
Mun
Mun name/journal: Kay
Mun Age: 23
Contact: dragon8writer at plurk
Timezone: PST
HMD: Here.
Characters currently in game: None.
Character
Name: Barbara Gordon
Fandom: The Batman
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Canonpoint: Post series finale.
Character Journal: barb_notbabs
Permissions Post: Here.
Character Inventory: Please elaborate on the following:
-Briefly describe, or link a picture to the single weapon (that they have NO KNOWLEDGE on how to wield) that will be waiting in the box, for them. http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/33200000/Bat-Sword-role-playing-with-others-33271938-214-500.jpg
-Bonsai tree
Abilities: Olympic-potential gymnast who's learned how to turn her skills toward fighting, mostly on the fly. Something of an untapped genius, she tends to grasp on to concepts and skills with incredible ease. Fighting, marksmanship - she can get the hang of pretty much everything in a few moments.
She's also a decent cook.
Background Information: A lot of Barbara's early life is a mystery. Her mother is never mentioned or pictured in the entire series, and is probably dead. At the start of the series, sixteen year old Barbara lived with her biological father - the police Commissioner James “Jim” Gordon. She wanted to be a police detective, but her father didn't want her having a job which got her shot at, so he had been pushing her for years into taking gymnastics with an Olympic Trainer. It paid off in skill, but left her without a real passion – which was why she apparently took to making multiple “best friends” and adopting their passions for a while. The flavor of the month in her first appearance was Pamela Isley, the only best friend ever seen, and possibly her last. The two of them would break into company's that damaged the environment, and assault the CEOS with gooey squirt guns in order to protest habits.
What Barbara didn't know was that Pamela used their protests as scouting missions. The more villainous of the red heads was hiring a mercenary named Temblor to take down the buildings when they refused to change their practices. Barbara realized it, tried to get her friend before she got sent to jail, and ended up being nearly sacrificed to an angry mercenary instead. Turned out that nineteen year old Pam didn't really have the cash to pay him at all, and he didn't make much distinction between the two girls.
Batman, the vigilante of her series, got involve and the whole thing came to an end with Pamela being bathed in toxic fertilizer. The fiasco was a life changing night for both girls, however: Barbara realized that her father would never get over his fears, and allow her to become a detective. The only thing to do, she decided, was to be an Olympic-hopeful gymnast by day and a butt kicking crime fighter by night, operating under the name of Batwoman. That got changed to Batgirl pretty quickly, mostly because everyone insisted on using it.
Pamela Isley's exposure to the toxins, on the other hand, resulted in becoming half human, half plant with a connection to nature around her. Pam had mixed reactions. Deciding to go by Poison Ivy, she went to ask Barbara to join her. Telling her former friend to think about it, she fairly immediately tried to feed the commissioner, the father who never approved of their friendship, to a man-eating plant.
Barbara and Batman did manage to take down Ivy and her plants. Her father didn't find out her identity, despite being five feet from her, and Batman didn't blow it despite having figured it out early. That was pretty much all the excuse Barbara needed to make herself Batman's unnofficial sidekick. She stalked him from crime to crime, asking to be let into the loop, and fighting to be made his more official sidekick. It wasn't until Barbara saved Batman and Gotham City that he finally honored her request, however. He gave her bat gear, a new costume, and a batwave communicator to let her know about crimes and join him on the scene.
Then next season, he brought on Robin. A thirteen year old boy who Batman had adopted in his civilian life as Bruce Wayne. Richard “Dick” Grayson became Batman's “official” sidekick, to the utter frustration of Barbara who had spent months following Batman just to get into the loop. It was only in an attempt to make things right and get his two sidekicks working together that Batman finally brought her into the Batcave and revealed secret identities so that there would be nothing standing between them anymore.
To an extent, it worked. Batgirl and Robin grew closer. But unlike some versions, where romance grew, there was a very different sort of tension between them. Batgirl was the big sister. Robin was the annoying little brother who she grew attached to, but was always rivaling for daddy's attention with. After all, Barbara had come first. She'd fought hard for her title. She was older... and while her father might support her in every other aspect of her life, he would never support her as a crime fighter. Bruce's approval was all she could hope for.
All the same, they managed to work pretty well together when they weren't trading snarky comments and snide remarks. Barbara comforted Dick when he was feeling scared, and Dick looked to her for support when things seemed grim. A secondary family grew for Barbara, separate from the one she had at home. The annoying little brother Dick. The secondary father figure, Batman. Alfred the buttler/grandfatgher figure who always had good cookies and better advice, including the fact that sometimes they had to disobey Bruce to get things done. The second family both supported and annoyed her – especially annoyed, sometimes, in Bruce's case. He didn't even know when she graduated high school.
Although she appeared in less episodes by the final season, Barbara didn't stop fighting crime. In the final episodes, right before her arrival in this game, she actually saved the earth from an alien invasion. How much of it was her is debatable: Batman and robin did most of the heavy fighting, and J'onn the man hunting martian was the one who downloaded instructions into her brain, but Barbara was the one who actually pushed the buttons and blew up the entire invading force.
The series ended with her recommending a teen division to the justice league, and Batman shutting her down.
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Barbara_Gordon_(The_Batman) is her wiki page. It's a little bare bones, and occasionally inaccurate. Specifically, Bruce didn't “manipulate events” to keep his identity secret. He bumped his head and lost all memory of being Batman, acted like a total coward, and convinced her there was no way that spineless jerk could possibly be her hero. Also, Batman actually gave her gear and allowed her in the loop at the end of season 3, before Robin arrived, though as I mentioned he didn't actually take her into the cave until afterward.
Personality Description:For those more familiar with the comics, it would be good to think of this version as a mixture between the traditional Barbara Gordon and Stephanie Brown. She’s even a gymnast.
Barbara comes off as a sassy and impulsive teenager, passionate about what she wants and willing to go after it. We don’t see that much of her life as a civilian, but what we do see of her at home isn’t that different from what we see of her as Batgirl.
She’s smart, answering questions in class but not apparently seen as the teacher’s pet. When teased by the self-purported class clown, she sent back a zinger of her own, and got a far better reaction from the class than the original did. She doesn't make much trouble, that we see, but neither does she always do what she’s told. She makes that clear to everyone from the get-go, skipping gymnastic lessons to protest a company’s treatment of the environment, and lying to her father about it too. She’s a willful young woman who isn’t afraid to go after what she believes in. Though, as her father points out, just what she believes in occasionally shifts. The environmental love was new, and most likely inspired by her friend Pamela Isley (later to become Poison Ivy).
That didn't stop Barbara from devoting her all to it, though, sneaking into buildings to confront CEOs. The same ways she devoted herself to gymnastics, despite it being her father’s idea – his not-so-private goal to deflect her from a career path as a police detective. The fact that she could match Dick, who’d been raised by performers to perform, shows that she clearly took her years of practice seriously, regardless of her personal passions.
Barbara can potentially come off as capricious, at least in her choice of hobbies. Before either crime fighting or environmentalism, she apparently took up bee keeping, and a best friend named Betsy. Listening to her father, both were very important to her, right up until she dumped them for Pam and her plants. Barbara put it as “trying to find herself,” however, an interpretation that rings true in this case. When her father shunted her away from being a detective and pushed her into gymnastics, it left Barbara without a true passion. She might enjoy the success she’s had at gymnastics, she was all too willing to skip lessons for her hobby of the month. Bee keeping, or environmental protests: it seems Barbara has a tendency to latch onto other people’s passions when she’s missing one of her own – but only when she’s missing her own. The moment she took on crime fighting, and “found” herself, these other hobbies all fell to the wayside. Fighting crime is what she’d wanted to do for years. She was practically raised in a police station, after all. That wish is still mentioned when she’s in the middle of her environmental phase, especially when her relationship with Pam deteriorates. Her need to be involved in crime fighting eventually comes to a head in the form of a batgirl costume. She realizes there’s no need for her father’s approval, if he has no idea who she is.
While fighting for justice did end Barbara’s revolving door of hobbies, it didn’t end her impulsive behavior. She once leaped onto Batman’s motorcycle while it was on autopilot, turned it to manual driving, and ended up losing control of it to a man who’d fused with nano technology. She had yet to finish driving school at the time. In another episode, she leaped into Batman’s massive battle armor to fight the Joker when he was pumped up on Bane’s muscle-making formula, never having even seen the machine before. On yet another occasion, she took the helm of a villain’s flying headquarters to steer it away from the city and crash it into Gotham bay. At no point in any of this did she receive one iota of training on how to use any of the above equipment. The motorcycle was just a chance to catch up with Batman and take part in the fight. The other two times she saw it as a necessity to stop a crook or save lives. On all three occasions she did it without any real planning, coming up with ideas on the fly and running with them.
However, Barbara’s lack of planning should not be confused with an inability to plan. Barbara’s even been known to caution retreat when the odds are stacked too high against her. She showed good tactics, too, when she had to think up ways to stall Black Mask’s army; ways that didn’t involve fighting every goon. It’s just that she doesn’t always think ahead when an idea takes her. Jumping into new equipment, refusing to wait for backup, getting snacks from a vending machine when she’s supposed to be on stake out – she’s intelligent and capable, but impulsive and undisciplined. She likes making jokes and quips, even when she’s fighting super villains. Especially when people like Black Mask are making threats and trying to scare her. Snarky comments are a good way of hiding just how scary it can be, when someone’s constantly trying to kill you.
To focus more on the inside, rather than the deflections: one of the most important things to recognize about Barbara is that she truly values the chance to help people. It’s the main reason she put on the bat costume. There’s no traumatic event in her past, or run in with the criminal element that caused her to make the decision. Her father is the police commissioner, the first member of the Gotham Police Department to officially work with the Batman, and even create a signal so that he could better help protect the city. His love of justice, his determination to make Gotham a safer place, inspired Barbara to do the same with her life. She even wanted to be police detective herself, at first.
Unfortunately, Commissioner Gordon didn’t really want his daughter getting shot at. He actively discouraged Barbara from joining the police force, and she suspected that he’d never allow her to follow the career. That’s why she made herself the Batgirl outfit. She thought it would be a way to fight crime regardless of what anyone else thought.
It might be for the best that she changed career paths. As mentioned above, Barbara does care about justice. She cares about her idea of justice more than she does about the actual law. When her former friend Pamela Isley first became Poison Ivy, for example, Barbara didn’t go to her father. Her father would just have arrested Pam. She went to Batman instead, hoping to help Pam recover without her father ever knowing. Although her former friend had in fact betrayed her, had been using their protests as scouting missions for her private mercenary to destroy companies, and had essentially abandoned Barbara to be torn apart by said mercenary while running for safety… Barbara still prioritized getting Pam help over throwing her in jail. It’s not just her friends that apply to, either. When her classmate Donny - the supposed class clown who had put a spitball to her forehead in class, joined the joker – Barbara specifically claimed that he was not a criminal. She again wanted Batman to help him, rather than simply wanting to take him down. She even briefly thought that Catwoman could be converted to the side of good, no matter her past crimes. Barbara doesn’t believe that just because someone is doing bad, that they deserve to be in jail. Her goal is not just to enforce law. It’s to bring criminals to justice, and even more importantly to help the people of her city be safe.
This mindset is not restricted to her life as a super hero, either, as seen in “attack of the terrible trio.” Even in her civilian life, Barbara was quick to berate a bully for picking on a few misfits. She was just as quick to come down on that trio for laughing when that jock was put in the hospital. Cliques don’t matter to her, or scale. Barbara does what she thinks is right.
Of course, Barbara can be quite determined about what “right” is. She’s very independently minded, not to mention stubborn. She ignored her father’s protective orders and hid her face under a mask, so that she could go off to fight crime. When Batman told her no, she essentially told him that he couldn’t stop her. She wanted to work with him against crime, and she continued showing up and joining him despite his protests. She continued even when he attempted to ignore her, despite his telling any villain who asked that she wasn’t his partner. She fought by his side, calling herself his sidekick with single minded determination to prove herself, until he finally accepted her. Mostly because she saved his life, saved the city, and kept going when all of Bruce’s other plans were falling apart. Then in season four, she turned around along with Robin and temporarily quit as his sidekicks, so that they could join him on a mission where he claimed not to want them. She knew he needed her, and she was going to be there.
That said, she obviously values team work and respects Batman, her inspiration for putting on the mask. He’s the hero her father is always thanking. The legend who keeps Gotham safe when no one else can. This is most likely why she continuously strove to be accepted as Batman’s sidekick, even while ignoring half his orders: always trying to prove herself, always pushing into battle in the hopes of getting a job well done from Batman, or even from a thankful if ignorant Commissioner. He’s her hero. Not to mention the only hope of approval she has, when no one else is allowed to know her identity.
The downside of that is she’s quite sensitive to rejection from him. She was annoyed at Bruce frequently throughout the series. First because he left her out of the loop, making her practically stalk him if she wanted to find anything out and only revealing information on a need-to-know basis. Then he brought in Dick, an “official” sidekick, revealing his hideout and identity after a week despite never trusting Barbara with either until that very episode. Bruce could be infuriatingly unaware of her. To quote Barbara, ““He can give you the atomic weight of iridium and the private phone number of the president, but does he remember that I graduated high school? No.”
Bruce did begin to correct some of this at the start of season four, in the hopes of making them more of a team. He reveals his identity and takes her to the Batcave. Though the rivalry between her and Dick remained, it shifted dynamics to those of quibbling siblings. Like a big sister, annoyed at how much attention baby bro is gaining for himself, Barbara is caught between annoyance with Bruce over how little attention she receives… and actual affection for the younger partner she didn’t want, but who’s presence she has still come to rely upon. The end result is mutual teasing. It’s something that marks both their rivalry and their bond, and shows up heavily in their quips when they’re working alone together. They reassure each other when afraid, complain about who gets the best jobs, and worry when they think the other is hurt.
A final point to note on the matter, is loyalty. The commissioner’s mention of Betsy implies that Barbara is as prone to drifting as any other teenager. We don’t really see her with other friends, either, other than one episode where she attends the circus with two other girls. They don’t say a word, and she looks bored, but she does eat from their popcorn bucket. Still, her time with Pam shows a rather extreme example of Barbara’s loyalties: both its limits and the extent to which it will stretch. When she discovered that Pam was having buildings demolished, Barbara did try and stop her friend. She implied that she would turn Pam over to the police if she had to, rather than allowing the continued destruction of industrial plants. No matter how loyal Barbara is to a person, she will not break laws herself or stand by while they break laws. At least, not laws she agrees with – technically, vigilantism is a crime after all. Still, Barbara did stand between her friend and an angry mercenary who wanted to kill Pam. She still attempted to save Pam from the accident which turned her into Poison Ivy, and she still wanted to save Pam after the transformation had taken place. Barbara didn’t want to see her friend arrested, despite everything that had happened. She just wanted her friend to get help.
Considering she showed some similar concern with Donny, some of this might have been more her sense of “the right thing” than actual friendship. All the same, the way Barbara rushed to Pam’s aid, again and again, the way she called out when Pam was hurt, and her briefly continued use of the nickname “Red,” implied at least a little lingering friendship, despite the betrayals. Especially since Pam returned the favor by asking Barbara to join her. If it had actually been possible to cure Pam, and to convince the more twisted redhead to turn over a new leaf, it’s possible that Barbara would have continued their friendship.
After the episode, however, her friendship with Pam is never again discussed. The closest we receive is the tie-in comics, which are potentially of questionable canon. If they are to be believed, however, Barbara kept on visiting Pam during her first capture, and apparently still held some hope of Ivy’s recovery, at least for a little while. When push came to shove, though, Pam might have been her friend – but Poison Ivy was her enemy, and Barbara fought Ivy the same as she would any other villain. She did what she had to in order to protect the people of Gotham, and especially her father, who Ivy had a bad habit of targeting. She may have even been a little extra mean to Ivy, making a comment about her plant babies being “mulch” while the plant-girl laid crying in the rain. Arguably the cruelest comment she ever made, to the girl who hurt her more than anyone else in the series.
To end this, just for reference, there’s the episode Artifacts: the one episode where we see the characters aged up. Batman was still fighting for Gotham, despite getting older. Robin had become nightwing. Barbara was in a wheel chair, no longer fighting crime as Batgirl but assisting the other two as Oracle. She ran the batcomputer to give them whatever information and coordination was needed. We don’t know much of how her personality might have changed, from that one episode, but one thing can be said: her snark stood the test of time. She still answered phones with jokes, and teased Batman about what sort of things he might read. Whatever else changes in Barbara’s life, her passion for justice and spunk continue
Third Person Sample: http://high-seas.dreamwidth.org/96846.html?thread=16842318#cmt16842318 and http://high-seas.dreamwidth.org/96846.html?thread=16842062#cmt16842062
First Person Sample: http://dear-mun.dreamwidth.org/11496288.html#comments should provide a very niec sample
Mun
Mun name/journal: Kay
Mun Age: 23
Contact: dragon8writer at plurk
Timezone: PST
HMD: Here.
Characters currently in game: None.
Character
Name: Barbara Gordon
Fandom: The Batman
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Canonpoint: Post series finale.
Character Journal: barb_notbabs
Permissions Post: Here.
Character Inventory: Please elaborate on the following:
-Briefly describe, or link a picture to the single weapon (that they have NO KNOWLEDGE on how to wield) that will be waiting in the box, for them. http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/33200000/Bat-Sword-role-playing-with-others-33271938-214-500.jpg
-Bonsai tree
Abilities: Olympic-potential gymnast who's learned how to turn her skills toward fighting, mostly on the fly. Something of an untapped genius, she tends to grasp on to concepts and skills with incredible ease. Fighting, marksmanship - she can get the hang of pretty much everything in a few moments.
She's also a decent cook.
Background Information: A lot of Barbara's early life is a mystery. Her mother is never mentioned or pictured in the entire series, and is probably dead. At the start of the series, sixteen year old Barbara lived with her biological father - the police Commissioner James “Jim” Gordon. She wanted to be a police detective, but her father didn't want her having a job which got her shot at, so he had been pushing her for years into taking gymnastics with an Olympic Trainer. It paid off in skill, but left her without a real passion – which was why she apparently took to making multiple “best friends” and adopting their passions for a while. The flavor of the month in her first appearance was Pamela Isley, the only best friend ever seen, and possibly her last. The two of them would break into company's that damaged the environment, and assault the CEOS with gooey squirt guns in order to protest habits.
What Barbara didn't know was that Pamela used their protests as scouting missions. The more villainous of the red heads was hiring a mercenary named Temblor to take down the buildings when they refused to change their practices. Barbara realized it, tried to get her friend before she got sent to jail, and ended up being nearly sacrificed to an angry mercenary instead. Turned out that nineteen year old Pam didn't really have the cash to pay him at all, and he didn't make much distinction between the two girls.
Batman, the vigilante of her series, got involve and the whole thing came to an end with Pamela being bathed in toxic fertilizer. The fiasco was a life changing night for both girls, however: Barbara realized that her father would never get over his fears, and allow her to become a detective. The only thing to do, she decided, was to be an Olympic-hopeful gymnast by day and a butt kicking crime fighter by night, operating under the name of Batwoman. That got changed to Batgirl pretty quickly, mostly because everyone insisted on using it.
Pamela Isley's exposure to the toxins, on the other hand, resulted in becoming half human, half plant with a connection to nature around her. Pam had mixed reactions. Deciding to go by Poison Ivy, she went to ask Barbara to join her. Telling her former friend to think about it, she fairly immediately tried to feed the commissioner, the father who never approved of their friendship, to a man-eating plant.
Barbara and Batman did manage to take down Ivy and her plants. Her father didn't find out her identity, despite being five feet from her, and Batman didn't blow it despite having figured it out early. That was pretty much all the excuse Barbara needed to make herself Batman's unnofficial sidekick. She stalked him from crime to crime, asking to be let into the loop, and fighting to be made his more official sidekick. It wasn't until Barbara saved Batman and Gotham City that he finally honored her request, however. He gave her bat gear, a new costume, and a batwave communicator to let her know about crimes and join him on the scene.
Then next season, he brought on Robin. A thirteen year old boy who Batman had adopted in his civilian life as Bruce Wayne. Richard “Dick” Grayson became Batman's “official” sidekick, to the utter frustration of Barbara who had spent months following Batman just to get into the loop. It was only in an attempt to make things right and get his two sidekicks working together that Batman finally brought her into the Batcave and revealed secret identities so that there would be nothing standing between them anymore.
To an extent, it worked. Batgirl and Robin grew closer. But unlike some versions, where romance grew, there was a very different sort of tension between them. Batgirl was the big sister. Robin was the annoying little brother who she grew attached to, but was always rivaling for daddy's attention with. After all, Barbara had come first. She'd fought hard for her title. She was older... and while her father might support her in every other aspect of her life, he would never support her as a crime fighter. Bruce's approval was all she could hope for.
All the same, they managed to work pretty well together when they weren't trading snarky comments and snide remarks. Barbara comforted Dick when he was feeling scared, and Dick looked to her for support when things seemed grim. A secondary family grew for Barbara, separate from the one she had at home. The annoying little brother Dick. The secondary father figure, Batman. Alfred the buttler/grandfatgher figure who always had good cookies and better advice, including the fact that sometimes they had to disobey Bruce to get things done. The second family both supported and annoyed her – especially annoyed, sometimes, in Bruce's case. He didn't even know when she graduated high school.
Although she appeared in less episodes by the final season, Barbara didn't stop fighting crime. In the final episodes, right before her arrival in this game, she actually saved the earth from an alien invasion. How much of it was her is debatable: Batman and robin did most of the heavy fighting, and J'onn the man hunting martian was the one who downloaded instructions into her brain, but Barbara was the one who actually pushed the buttons and blew up the entire invading force.
The series ended with her recommending a teen division to the justice league, and Batman shutting her down.
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Barbara_Gordon_(The_Batman) is her wiki page. It's a little bare bones, and occasionally inaccurate. Specifically, Bruce didn't “manipulate events” to keep his identity secret. He bumped his head and lost all memory of being Batman, acted like a total coward, and convinced her there was no way that spineless jerk could possibly be her hero. Also, Batman actually gave her gear and allowed her in the loop at the end of season 3, before Robin arrived, though as I mentioned he didn't actually take her into the cave until afterward.
Personality Description:For those more familiar with the comics, it would be good to think of this version as a mixture between the traditional Barbara Gordon and Stephanie Brown. She’s even a gymnast.
Barbara comes off as a sassy and impulsive teenager, passionate about what she wants and willing to go after it. We don’t see that much of her life as a civilian, but what we do see of her at home isn’t that different from what we see of her as Batgirl.
She’s smart, answering questions in class but not apparently seen as the teacher’s pet. When teased by the self-purported class clown, she sent back a zinger of her own, and got a far better reaction from the class than the original did. She doesn't make much trouble, that we see, but neither does she always do what she’s told. She makes that clear to everyone from the get-go, skipping gymnastic lessons to protest a company’s treatment of the environment, and lying to her father about it too. She’s a willful young woman who isn’t afraid to go after what she believes in. Though, as her father points out, just what she believes in occasionally shifts. The environmental love was new, and most likely inspired by her friend Pamela Isley (later to become Poison Ivy).
That didn't stop Barbara from devoting her all to it, though, sneaking into buildings to confront CEOs. The same ways she devoted herself to gymnastics, despite it being her father’s idea – his not-so-private goal to deflect her from a career path as a police detective. The fact that she could match Dick, who’d been raised by performers to perform, shows that she clearly took her years of practice seriously, regardless of her personal passions.
Barbara can potentially come off as capricious, at least in her choice of hobbies. Before either crime fighting or environmentalism, she apparently took up bee keeping, and a best friend named Betsy. Listening to her father, both were very important to her, right up until she dumped them for Pam and her plants. Barbara put it as “trying to find herself,” however, an interpretation that rings true in this case. When her father shunted her away from being a detective and pushed her into gymnastics, it left Barbara without a true passion. She might enjoy the success she’s had at gymnastics, she was all too willing to skip lessons for her hobby of the month. Bee keeping, or environmental protests: it seems Barbara has a tendency to latch onto other people’s passions when she’s missing one of her own – but only when she’s missing her own. The moment she took on crime fighting, and “found” herself, these other hobbies all fell to the wayside. Fighting crime is what she’d wanted to do for years. She was practically raised in a police station, after all. That wish is still mentioned when she’s in the middle of her environmental phase, especially when her relationship with Pam deteriorates. Her need to be involved in crime fighting eventually comes to a head in the form of a batgirl costume. She realizes there’s no need for her father’s approval, if he has no idea who she is.
While fighting for justice did end Barbara’s revolving door of hobbies, it didn’t end her impulsive behavior. She once leaped onto Batman’s motorcycle while it was on autopilot, turned it to manual driving, and ended up losing control of it to a man who’d fused with nano technology. She had yet to finish driving school at the time. In another episode, she leaped into Batman’s massive battle armor to fight the Joker when he was pumped up on Bane’s muscle-making formula, never having even seen the machine before. On yet another occasion, she took the helm of a villain’s flying headquarters to steer it away from the city and crash it into Gotham bay. At no point in any of this did she receive one iota of training on how to use any of the above equipment. The motorcycle was just a chance to catch up with Batman and take part in the fight. The other two times she saw it as a necessity to stop a crook or save lives. On all three occasions she did it without any real planning, coming up with ideas on the fly and running with them.
However, Barbara’s lack of planning should not be confused with an inability to plan. Barbara’s even been known to caution retreat when the odds are stacked too high against her. She showed good tactics, too, when she had to think up ways to stall Black Mask’s army; ways that didn’t involve fighting every goon. It’s just that she doesn’t always think ahead when an idea takes her. Jumping into new equipment, refusing to wait for backup, getting snacks from a vending machine when she’s supposed to be on stake out – she’s intelligent and capable, but impulsive and undisciplined. She likes making jokes and quips, even when she’s fighting super villains. Especially when people like Black Mask are making threats and trying to scare her. Snarky comments are a good way of hiding just how scary it can be, when someone’s constantly trying to kill you.
To focus more on the inside, rather than the deflections: one of the most important things to recognize about Barbara is that she truly values the chance to help people. It’s the main reason she put on the bat costume. There’s no traumatic event in her past, or run in with the criminal element that caused her to make the decision. Her father is the police commissioner, the first member of the Gotham Police Department to officially work with the Batman, and even create a signal so that he could better help protect the city. His love of justice, his determination to make Gotham a safer place, inspired Barbara to do the same with her life. She even wanted to be police detective herself, at first.
Unfortunately, Commissioner Gordon didn’t really want his daughter getting shot at. He actively discouraged Barbara from joining the police force, and she suspected that he’d never allow her to follow the career. That’s why she made herself the Batgirl outfit. She thought it would be a way to fight crime regardless of what anyone else thought.
It might be for the best that she changed career paths. As mentioned above, Barbara does care about justice. She cares about her idea of justice more than she does about the actual law. When her former friend Pamela Isley first became Poison Ivy, for example, Barbara didn’t go to her father. Her father would just have arrested Pam. She went to Batman instead, hoping to help Pam recover without her father ever knowing. Although her former friend had in fact betrayed her, had been using their protests as scouting missions for her private mercenary to destroy companies, and had essentially abandoned Barbara to be torn apart by said mercenary while running for safety… Barbara still prioritized getting Pam help over throwing her in jail. It’s not just her friends that apply to, either. When her classmate Donny - the supposed class clown who had put a spitball to her forehead in class, joined the joker – Barbara specifically claimed that he was not a criminal. She again wanted Batman to help him, rather than simply wanting to take him down. She even briefly thought that Catwoman could be converted to the side of good, no matter her past crimes. Barbara doesn’t believe that just because someone is doing bad, that they deserve to be in jail. Her goal is not just to enforce law. It’s to bring criminals to justice, and even more importantly to help the people of her city be safe.
This mindset is not restricted to her life as a super hero, either, as seen in “attack of the terrible trio.” Even in her civilian life, Barbara was quick to berate a bully for picking on a few misfits. She was just as quick to come down on that trio for laughing when that jock was put in the hospital. Cliques don’t matter to her, or scale. Barbara does what she thinks is right.
Of course, Barbara can be quite determined about what “right” is. She’s very independently minded, not to mention stubborn. She ignored her father’s protective orders and hid her face under a mask, so that she could go off to fight crime. When Batman told her no, she essentially told him that he couldn’t stop her. She wanted to work with him against crime, and she continued showing up and joining him despite his protests. She continued even when he attempted to ignore her, despite his telling any villain who asked that she wasn’t his partner. She fought by his side, calling herself his sidekick with single minded determination to prove herself, until he finally accepted her. Mostly because she saved his life, saved the city, and kept going when all of Bruce’s other plans were falling apart. Then in season four, she turned around along with Robin and temporarily quit as his sidekicks, so that they could join him on a mission where he claimed not to want them. She knew he needed her, and she was going to be there.
That said, she obviously values team work and respects Batman, her inspiration for putting on the mask. He’s the hero her father is always thanking. The legend who keeps Gotham safe when no one else can. This is most likely why she continuously strove to be accepted as Batman’s sidekick, even while ignoring half his orders: always trying to prove herself, always pushing into battle in the hopes of getting a job well done from Batman, or even from a thankful if ignorant Commissioner. He’s her hero. Not to mention the only hope of approval she has, when no one else is allowed to know her identity.
The downside of that is she’s quite sensitive to rejection from him. She was annoyed at Bruce frequently throughout the series. First because he left her out of the loop, making her practically stalk him if she wanted to find anything out and only revealing information on a need-to-know basis. Then he brought in Dick, an “official” sidekick, revealing his hideout and identity after a week despite never trusting Barbara with either until that very episode. Bruce could be infuriatingly unaware of her. To quote Barbara, ““He can give you the atomic weight of iridium and the private phone number of the president, but does he remember that I graduated high school? No.”
Bruce did begin to correct some of this at the start of season four, in the hopes of making them more of a team. He reveals his identity and takes her to the Batcave. Though the rivalry between her and Dick remained, it shifted dynamics to those of quibbling siblings. Like a big sister, annoyed at how much attention baby bro is gaining for himself, Barbara is caught between annoyance with Bruce over how little attention she receives… and actual affection for the younger partner she didn’t want, but who’s presence she has still come to rely upon. The end result is mutual teasing. It’s something that marks both their rivalry and their bond, and shows up heavily in their quips when they’re working alone together. They reassure each other when afraid, complain about who gets the best jobs, and worry when they think the other is hurt.
A final point to note on the matter, is loyalty. The commissioner’s mention of Betsy implies that Barbara is as prone to drifting as any other teenager. We don’t really see her with other friends, either, other than one episode where she attends the circus with two other girls. They don’t say a word, and she looks bored, but she does eat from their popcorn bucket. Still, her time with Pam shows a rather extreme example of Barbara’s loyalties: both its limits and the extent to which it will stretch. When she discovered that Pam was having buildings demolished, Barbara did try and stop her friend. She implied that she would turn Pam over to the police if she had to, rather than allowing the continued destruction of industrial plants. No matter how loyal Barbara is to a person, she will not break laws herself or stand by while they break laws. At least, not laws she agrees with – technically, vigilantism is a crime after all. Still, Barbara did stand between her friend and an angry mercenary who wanted to kill Pam. She still attempted to save Pam from the accident which turned her into Poison Ivy, and she still wanted to save Pam after the transformation had taken place. Barbara didn’t want to see her friend arrested, despite everything that had happened. She just wanted her friend to get help.
Considering she showed some similar concern with Donny, some of this might have been more her sense of “the right thing” than actual friendship. All the same, the way Barbara rushed to Pam’s aid, again and again, the way she called out when Pam was hurt, and her briefly continued use of the nickname “Red,” implied at least a little lingering friendship, despite the betrayals. Especially since Pam returned the favor by asking Barbara to join her. If it had actually been possible to cure Pam, and to convince the more twisted redhead to turn over a new leaf, it’s possible that Barbara would have continued their friendship.
After the episode, however, her friendship with Pam is never again discussed. The closest we receive is the tie-in comics, which are potentially of questionable canon. If they are to be believed, however, Barbara kept on visiting Pam during her first capture, and apparently still held some hope of Ivy’s recovery, at least for a little while. When push came to shove, though, Pam might have been her friend – but Poison Ivy was her enemy, and Barbara fought Ivy the same as she would any other villain. She did what she had to in order to protect the people of Gotham, and especially her father, who Ivy had a bad habit of targeting. She may have even been a little extra mean to Ivy, making a comment about her plant babies being “mulch” while the plant-girl laid crying in the rain. Arguably the cruelest comment she ever made, to the girl who hurt her more than anyone else in the series.
To end this, just for reference, there’s the episode Artifacts: the one episode where we see the characters aged up. Batman was still fighting for Gotham, despite getting older. Robin had become nightwing. Barbara was in a wheel chair, no longer fighting crime as Batgirl but assisting the other two as Oracle. She ran the batcomputer to give them whatever information and coordination was needed. We don’t know much of how her personality might have changed, from that one episode, but one thing can be said: her snark stood the test of time. She still answered phones with jokes, and teased Batman about what sort of things he might read. Whatever else changes in Barbara’s life, her passion for justice and spunk continue
Third Person Sample: http://high-seas.dreamwidth.org/96846.html?thread=16842318#cmt16842318 and http://high-seas.dreamwidth.org/96846.html?thread=16842062#cmt16842062
First Person Sample: http://dear-mun.dreamwidth.org/11496288.html#comments should provide a very niec sample
