I see your "Alfred is a Disney Princess" characterization and raise you "Walt Disney met Alfred and then based his princesses of HIM."
We can be friends.
That's a fucking fantastic raise, and I love it and am adopting it as a HC immediately.
Imagine Damian forming a plan to catch Santa Claus. He’s written a letter, accumulated some traps, and stayed up all night just just to do this. He absolutely denies believing in him BUT what if the man does exist???
Dick intercepts the letter, like the good big brother he is, gathering the forces. Tim disarms the traps, Dick and Steph both get the presents, and Jason dons a fat suit and climbs down the Wayne manor chimney (Dick owes him big time).
It’s all worth it seeing the absolute astonishment of Damian’s face when Jason starts gobbling down the milk and cookies set out (and avoids swallowing the tracker hidden inside both items) before grunting up the Chimney.
They fein all knowledge of the incident in the morning. Bruce gets an absolutely earful from Damian about “increased security on Christmas Eve.”
We’re half way thereee~ WOooAah living on a PRAYERR!
5 hours and 45 minutes, estimated time of completion 10 hours 22 minutes (hopefully I still gotta do the others in SBI) ;-;
An AU in which Jason, upon returning to Gotham, gets really swept up into the whole crime lord thing, and never gets the time to go through with his revenge plan.
It starts small. He comes back and gets to work, and after a while, he has managed to carve out some of the crime from crime alley. This gets him noticed among some of the people there. One night, a group of thugs approach him, but instead of wanting to fight him, they want to work for him.
Jason, still fresh, with not much revenue coming for him yet, tells them that he isn't hiring because he cannot exactly pay them much. The thugs say that it doesn't matter, because they like what he is doing, and would like to be in on it anyway, and, well. If Jason has help managing other things, he can dedicate more time on his bigger plan, right?
Wrong. Things start to move much quicker now, and that means that more people come in and want to work for him. At this point Jason has money coming in, and he starts paying them, too, which makes more people come in, which in turn makes more money to come in as well. Jason can pay them more, and suddenly he notices a difference in many of the goons he has on his roster now. They seem happier. They joke more, many of them have better clothes on them, and they don't look so gaunt anymore, either.
Jason asks about it, once, and the goon tells him that they have had the money to buy actual groceries and new pair of boots, which makes living a lot more comfortable. They even got to buy their kid a new winter jacket! Now, if they save up a little bit, they will be able to get their kid new school books as well!
And Jason, Crime Alley boy Jason, who loved school and reading, feels his heart strings being violently yanked. Don't worry about the books, he says. I will take care of it.
At the end of the month, he has managed to organise a book delivery system for all the Crime Alley kids, where they get school books and picture books and science books about dinosaurs and angient Egypt and all that. He tells his goons that for every kid that stays in school for the semester, he will give them a bonus.
It works wonders. The amount of kids dropping out from school gets cut by 60 percent just during the first semester. The book system grows, and suddenly Jason finds himself pushing some money to get the old local library running again, to make things a bit easier. He even hires some people to run the system for him. Suddenly, he is like actually employing people. He needs an accountant. He hires one for himself, and then another one to run other funds.
Things just keep escalating after that. Local parent group starts to have meetings in the new library, and they put up a babysitting club and start a clothes exhange program as well, where you can bring all the clothes that are too small for you, and people get to take what they need home. A soup kitchen starts as well, first because the kids need snacks, and then it grows so much that Jason needs to find a place for it to run effectively and safely. Many local restaurants get into it as well, and their business starts to rise as well, because people who are fed and have warm clothes have more time and energy to seek for jobs. Many of them are still employed within just Crime Alley, though, because jobs elsewhere require an adress, and some people don't have those.
Jason thinks about himself, after his parents died, on the streets, trying to survive, and thinks never again. He tells his accountant to start budgeting for housing.
He needs to hire more people for it. He needs to run his crime empire, after all, he doesn't have the time for this.
He has so many people working for him now. There are a few thugs that were previously employed by other Gotham Rogues coming in as well, because they have heard good things about the Red Hood. The other Rogues are in and out of the prison or Arkham all the time and the pay isn't reliable and there is a high chance that you will get beaten up by one of the bats as well, and they don't really get offered medical services by their bosses, you know?
There's another thing. Jason now has to organize people to get first aid-training. And also get some sort of vaccination program going. And also get everybody dental.
It's all getting too much for him, really. He doesn't even have a high school diploma.
He mentions this to one of his goons one night, because they said that he looked stressed. Don't worry boss! The goon tells him. We will take care of things, if you want to go back to school! It would be a good example, too, for the older kids, who are still dropping out more than the little kids, you know?
So Jason goes back to school. God he loves school. He barely even thinks about his revenge plan anymore, because he is busy running his programs and studying and making plans with his goons.
He gets his diploma and then starts a community college so people can get degrees.
He then runs into an entirely new problem. The people look up to him, especially the kids. And now the kids also want to help him.
Jason, the second Robin, the bird with clipped wings, tells them no. Absolutely not. You are kids, go back to school, your bedtime is at nine.
He cannot control the older teens, though. They just tell him to fuck off and accept the help. Now train us, so we can start running the more specialized missions too. You can't be the only person jumping on rooftops. If you don't train us, we will do it anyway, dipshit. We ain't scared of you.
And suddenly Jason has his own vigilante team with him. His workers are unionizing. Some of them are actually running for the city council to get things addressed that need to be done the legal way. Crime rates have dropped by 70 percent around Crime Alley.
They can't really call it Crime Alley anymore, can they? It's Park Row again.
The bats are extremely confused by the new team. The Hoods, they call themselves. All of them with a red bat painted on their chests and fighting in an eerily similar manner to them.
Jason is not there on Thursdays. He is busy getting his English degree.
Love the idea of the batfam all being equally unhinged like Tim calls dick every two days with “why’d you take the cameras I use to stalk you down :(“ Dick is always placing trackers on everyone, Bruce just fucking shows up and watches his kids go about their daily lives, Jason’s got eyes all over the city to ping him if someone matching his families description pops up, Barbra is always listening and watching like love that shit
Headcanon Bruce color-coded his kids... but the colors make No Sense with the Power of Hindsight
Dick is red ❤️ since that was the main color of the Robin suit, and Bruce started doing the color coding when Dick was Robin
Barbara's not technically his kid, but her Batgirl suit was purple so she's purple 💜. Stephanie straight up refused to be anything except purple, so now purple just means Not Technically Adopted
Jason also got a Robin color, but he got yellow 💛 since once he got settled in, he had a very sunny personality. This does not age well.
Bruce doesn’t actually give Tim his own color, since his integration into the family is sloooow. Since Tim is #1 Dick Grayson Fan TM, he always chose the blue cup when grabbing something to drink, so he accidently became blue 💙
Everyone was thinking Cass should be black. But also, Bruce is black. So they shrugged and grabbed the next darkest cup available, which happened to be dark green. The "dark" part ended up getting dropped, though, as it's just easier to get any shade of green 💚
When Damian showed up, Bruce’s mind was still stuck on "Talia’s Kid", so he's bright pink 💖 before he even realizes the color-coding exists
Duke is orange 🧡 because there are literally no other unique colors left
This leads to the baykids yelling at Bruce, "You can’t adopt that kid! There isn't a free color open!". It unironically has a much greater success rate than any other tactic
I love my Alfred's smart but oh so dumb 😩 boy can and will spend an afternoon explaining nuclear fission and theoretical physics if you let him but will also try to fish his toast out of the toaster with a metal fork. Beautiful baby girl that can take apart and repair just about any kind of contraption then put it all back together from memory alone and then forget Obama's last name. He's is so incredibly, frighteningly intelligent and a cringe fail dumbass 🩵
NEW ART STYLE WOOOOO
Imagine a world where Batman and his family never joined the Justice League but like, both Wonder Woman and Superman know him.
They mention him idly sometimes and even despite not being there (that they know of) he's become the League's cryptid. No one knows who this hero is- Gotham sticks to itself, it's a shithole but it's their shithole- or where they are or anything??
Eventually rumors start going around between the heroes. Is the bat some sort of eldritch being? They overheard the big 2 say something about shadows and undead revival?? Their secret boyfriend? They heard them talk about kids???
It comes to a slight head when during a mind-controlled Superman rampage he gets tackled by a black blur and the next time they see him he's fine?? No mind control??? What?????
"Oh, Bats was passing by and is exasperated about me getting mind controlled again."
Supes that doesn't explain as much as you think it does-
I like the idea of Nightwing being a well-known figure among the hero community, but relatively unknown to the public outside of Gotham and Blüdhaven. Like, he was the first ever sidekick and a kid of one of the Justice League's founding members. Most older heroes are his aunts and uncles, the first generation of sidekicks are his friends, and to the younger ones, he is a mentor and older brother figure. The hero community loves him. But outside of that, he is just a local hero. He sticks to the shadows, and while the people of blüdhaven love him, and the people of Gotham have at least heard of him, he is not very well known.
That is until the Justice League hosts some sort of public event with a lot of younger heroes attending, and one journalist gets an idea for a fun, lighthearted story. They go around asking different heroes and sidekicks who their favorite hero is, and 80% have the same answer: Nightwing