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tbcanary · 8 months

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I love how much you love Dinah. I’ve been reading as much of her as I can recently, but I feel like I’m all over the place between old/new GA and BOP (Dixon vs Simone) and JLI and JLA and etc… with so many people cautioning that this characterization gets her or that one doesn’t. Would you be willing to talk a little about what you see as her core character, and/or what different runs get right about her?

oh anon, this is such a delightful message and i am overjoyed to receive it tbh. i can absolutely talk about this!! i keep starting this ask and then just rambling for a while with a bunch of context, but for the sake of not boring you:

i'm still pretty new to comics, and i'm learning as i go, so this is not going to be the most comprehensive look? also, i tend to take the approach of "no one writer gets everything right," so it's more of a pastiche of different things as opposed to just... one person's interpretation. bc everyone brings different aspects that i enjoy.

ok! deep breaths. i'm holding your hand and we're going to dinah land together.

core characteristics!

generally, i shy away from the idea that a character's main feature is their "compassion." this is something comics throw around a lot as either a character flaw or a point to differentiate them -- specifically from batman or one of his proteges, in this case, babs. so whenever dinah is described as "compassionate," i tend to back away a little and think of how to reframe it.

see: birds of prey (1999) #60, when babs "fires" dinah for being too emotional and compassionate in the field.

dinah does put herself in harm's way a lot. and sometimes it is emotional, for sure, which is something all superheroes do. but for dinah it's not... it's not that she gets too emotional or compassionate. she's very logical, actually, and pretty calculated even when taking risks. what dinah does comes from more of a utilitarian perspective, i think: if i do this, then fewer people get hurt. it's just that "fewer people get hurt" often translates to "dinah gets hurt instead of anyone else."

this is similarly reframed by shiva later, not as something compassionate but as something heroic. see issue #94: "what would dinah do? something heroic, i'd imagine." and then she immediately offers to fight someone one-on-one, not in a self-sacrificial way but more because she has logically -- if incorrectly -- assumed that it will be an even match and she stands a chance of winning. shiva knows dinah would put herself on the line instead of letting the whole team risk themselves; she also knows that it only makes sense to do so, for either her or dinah, when they stand a chance of winning. (bop #94)

this is reflecting back on dinah's little adventure with ted grant, where she frequently realizes the odds are against them -- and makes a calculated choice to get them out of the situation, even if it risks blowing her cover or revealing her identity. point of fact: it always works. (bop #82)

she recognizes they're outnumbered, pulls a stupid and desperate gambit to prey on the insecurities of twelve trained assassins, and in the end, they all get out alive. it might be based in compassion and worry for ted's safety, but it comes from a place of fully understanding their circumstances and acting off of those factors. it's what makes her such an incredible field agent.

so anyway. a lot of these are from simone's run, because that's what i've been reading lately. but generally, i think dinah is aware of her own skills and abilities. she takes risks and she acts against orders -- but while those behaviors may seem wild or random or unsafe from the outside, she always does it with an understanding of how much she can get away with. she might push herself here and there, or get into situations that are difficult to survive, but very rarely is she truly caught off-guard in a situation she actually cannot handle.

(and, when she is, she's fucking excellent at asking for help. she contacts batman, she contacts ollie even when they're on the rocks, she contacts huntress. she urges other people to do the same. dinah knows her own skills, and she also knows other people's skills and when she needs their assistance. she's a tactician and a strategist, she's just also more willing to make a bigger play than most of her colleagues. risk it for the biscuit, baby!)

this is not to say that she isn't compassionate; she cares deeply for her family, and once you're in her circle, you are in it. wildcat, sin, roy, babs, helena -- every time she's gotten close to someone, she's held onto them. when babs and helena fight, dinah urges them to get their shit together (bop1999). when ollie finds out about roy's addiction and doesn't offer the support roy needs, dinah stays with roy until he's sober and can safely be on his own (snowbirds don't fly). when hal is transported to another world, dinah volunteers herself to go in after him, because she knows she's the only one who can do it (green lantern/green arrow). when "mother" threatens to train sin to become the new shiva, dinah pulls strings to get sin out of the country and into a safe circumstance (bop1999).

tl;dr: she does not give up on people. this is a pillar of the dinah lance experience, to me. everyone gets a second chance, and a third, and a fourth. there are limits and lines and regulations on that, obviously; when ollie cheats, it is a hard thing for her to come back from. again, she's logical and strategic in how she maintains these relationships. but! she does maintain them. she tries to keep people close to her, and i love how much work she puts into it.

also, like, i love dinah and ollie so much -- but despite the fact it took her a long time to get her own run and really develop, i appreciate that as early as the grell run in the 80s, she was her own person. the best dinah writers understand that, while ollie might be her other half, she has always been able to operate on her own.

(note: i love dinah in the longbow hunters. she is everything to me. she specifically tells ollie, let me handle this case, i have it and i want to do it on my own. and like... it doesn't work out, whoops, but that doesn't change the fact she was allowed to make that choice on the page. even in green lantern/green arrow, dinah is going undercover and investigating things on her own. these storylines fall into the trope of her being in mortal danger and needing ollie to save her, but like... aw, well. baby steps!)

i'm a lover of kevin smith's run of green arrow, and i think it's a great example of dinah and ollie at their best -- i love dinah's "the good ones always do the dishes" panels, and her dedication to assisting women who are in difficult or abusive situations -- so that's great supplemental material for that relationship, because as much as i've talked up dinah being logical and strategy-motivated here, i think a lot of that absolutely falls away in the face of the force that's oliver queen. he's the one guy who manages to get her to a point of misbehaving and turning off that voice in her head, which is just a delight to see. i love them.

i'm not AS familiar with jsa or jla, but! i think her appearances in justice league set her up as a good leader, despite bruce being a better strategist and superman being more powerful and diana being more compassionate and hal being more willful and ollie being more righteous and angry, etc. dinah is kind of... outmatched, on every front. but what she then offers is a sort of centralized perspective that encapsulates all of those things; kind of like a jack of all trades. she recognizes the strengths of the people she works alongside, and she can work to fill the gaps.

i haven't really been a fan of what's been done in rebirth/52, so i'm not as familiar with most of those. what i have read has leaned pretty far into her being a mess, and like... while dinah is messy, certainly, in other runs, it doesn't usually interfere with her work. she's very good at compartmentalizing. and i think when writers decide to focus on her Troubled Relationship With Ollie, they forget that like. she wouldn't be here if she couldn't separate the personal from the professional, you know? you just can't function that way.

and, yknow. i'm looking forward to where kelly thompson takes this run of birds of prey, because i like her writing generally and i'd like to see a new take on sin -- even if i wish they hadn't aged her up offscreen like they did with lian. because dinah's relationship with parenthood and children is such a big part of her character, to me.

there's longbow hunters, where she tells ollie that while she loves children, she "won't make orphans." again, this is why i push back against her being primarily ruled by emotion or her heart; she knows and understands the risk of her lifestyle, and she will not give it up. even if it means she can't be a mother, which is something she's always wanted to do.

(i'm not a huge fan of then moving to give her the whole infertility storyline, but whatever. comic writers will do what they do.)

dinah gets to play a motherly role with roy and connor, sometimes, but like. sin is the first time she comes close to actually having a kid of her own, so i'm interested to see where the current birds of prey run takes that. (i know they call each other "sister" usually, but dinah has called sin her daughter a few times; the sister thing is more due to the baggage of the word "mother" than because of the nature of the actual relationship.) i'd like to see how thompson writes dinah's relationship to motherhood and children now, and what might have changed or what they kept in the various reboots and retcons. because again, a core part of dinah is that she does love children, she does want to have them, she takes on maternal roles -- she just knows that it isn't practical or fair to do, with her vigilante lifestyle, and she loves that lifestyle too much to give it up for anything.

i don't even know if this makes sense anymore, frankly. i just love her so much. there are a few things i couldn't manage to fit in here that i think deserve mentioning, though, so here's a lightning round:

dinah struggles with guilt over her own abilities. she doesn't use the canary cry while fighting most of the time because it wouldn't be fair in hand-to-hand combat. she's been surrounded by respected martial artists and boxers for most of her life; she respects the art of unarmed combat, and her voice is a weapon she only uses in extreme circumstances.

similarly, she doesn't like knowing how to hurt people. she understands it as necessary for the greater good, and she does it when she needs to, but knowing how to break bones and having a "gift" in the area of physical violence isn't something she's proud of. it's a skill she possesses, not a trophy she shows off.

"You can't compartmentalize a lifetime of learning where to place your fist, just because you might be in polite company."

there is a panel where she explicitly refers to herself as a heterosexual. do not believe this; she has very weird, homoerotic tension with every single adult woman she has ever met, and other characters literally comment on it. (babs says she doesn't understand the weird Thing dinah and shiva have going on. as if anyone understands the weird Thing dinah and babs have going on, as commented on by ted kord, selina kyle, and likely many others i'm forgetting. come on.)

when babs tells her she's fired, she responds with the fact that fighting crime is the only thing she does "that makes any sense." despite her struggles with it, despite wanting a more peaceful life, she doesn't really know how to do it. this is who she is, and she will keep on doing it.

i didn’t reference Dixon’s run much here. it’s really good for developing dinah and babs’ friendship, but it makes a habit of downplaying dinah’s intelligence. she has some great moments and continues to shine as a field agent, and overall i do still love this portion of the run, i just don’t have as many specific pulls because any time dinah gets any kind of personal narrative it’s about being in love with “the wrong guy” or whatever. she and babs are really cute, though, and again — the mission where she takes babs’ place could be read as impulsive, but she has a handle on it. very rarely do her decisions as a field agent truly fuck her over. because she’s good at her job, damn it.

noooo idea if this answers any of your questions. again, this is very very bop heavy because that's the zone i've been in recently, but like. to be fair. it's a lot of dinah's big moments, so it seems appropriate. she's everything to me, really, and i love her so, so much.

#anonymous #ask.tb #well THANK YOU #i hope this is an acceptable answer kbnkjnbkjgng #i simply. love dinah lance so much. she's everything to me.#metaposting

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