ORACLE/BAE Blog

Nobody cares about a detailed history, but the short version is that BAE started as a commission. At no point was it not messy, but it was obviously much messier in the beginning. This was because I was setting potential things up—remember that gang with Lotte in it? The Red Cross character? Threads like that, which never went anywhere? I’d set something up, then the readers would vote to go a different way, and that thing would get forgotten. This is not on the readers; it's on me for having an irresponsible structure. It’s definitely possible to have lots of freedom but also a coherent plan, and for things to be cohesive, it just takes more effort and planning, which I wasn’t doing back then. At the beginning, stuff was all over the place. By the time we got to Oracle, it was pretty tight. Not perfect by any means, but there wasn’t any WTF stuff. This comes from having a decent outline, and decent outlines come from not running off half-cocked and overeager to start an exciting new idea. I haven’t conquered that yet, but I’m making progress. Other problems were that I spent some of the commission money from the original BAE on a subscription to the DC app that lets you read all the comics, and I got into it! I gained a lot of DC knowledge, but not total DC knowledge. So I was clueless about some DC stuff while simultaneously doing deep cuts that the average reader probably found confusing. I'm an expert on Batman and Constantine and Batgirl/BoP, but not on Justice League, Superman, or Green Lantern, for example. Huge blocks of text explaining who Shiva is and why Cass is the only one who can handle her probably wouldn’t have been great, but it might’ve been better than readers having to Google it or just wonder. I don’t know. I probably should have stuck to TAS as the template.

For the themes of the work, the original commissioner expressed frustration with the Barbara Gordon character as she’s been handled in the comics/media. She said: “I think I like the idea of Barbara Gordon more than Barbara Gordon herself,” and explained that Barbara was supposed to be the smart one, with a perfect memory, and without the trauma and madness that is such a handicap for Batman. It bothered her that despite this being the premise of Barbara’s character, she was always portrayed as a useless damsel with bad judgment. I wasn’t a DC expert at that point, but I found her grievance relatable. She also cited Cassandra Cain, saying that her superpower is that she can’t lose a fight, yet writers make her bad at fighting when she needs to be for the sake of lazy plots. And so forth. I think it was pretty typical comics fan venting.

But her description of who she wanted Barbara to be was what got me thinking about how if Barbara was written ‘correctly’ according to this person, she wouldn’t *be* a bat person. Batman is an outlier as a more overtly problematic person, but even the ‘good’ heroes are content to prop up a status quo that isn’t actually good. That’s where “Batgirl Against Everyone” came from. That, and I was and still am fixated on dumb abbreviations for my fics. And even though the commissioner stopped commissioning after a while, I stuck to that central theme and vision for the character.

Readers were very consistent about being pro-Ivy, so I accepted that. I think the “Good End” would actually have been Barbara committing to a relationship with Summer and walking away from the costume, but that definitely would have been less exciting.

Taking away the use of Barbara’s legs was a mistake, and another example of me liking the idea of higher stakes more than I end up liking the reality. We ended in a pretty good place, but there’s still some stuff unanswered.

Anyway, I’ve learned from at least some of these mistakes. Next week on Sunday, we’ll start a new Resident Futa story that FSC readers should be able to get into easily because it’s about Riley, Hana, and Adella. I know the RF stuff is super self-indulgent and sucking up too much effort, and there’s more to come, but it doesn’t have to be all at once. So we’ll have opportunities to do other stuff along the way. Start something new? Some other IP? More DC? Start over with a different POV and a different story/take? My original pitch when the commissioner said she wanted Batgirl was a full yuri wrongly-imprisoned Barbara stuck in Arkham and having to form alliances with all the villain hotties while she figured out how to escape. I still think that was a good idea, although the women in prison exploitation genre probably works better in cinema than prose.

Anyway, thank you for reading to the end and participating. This was definitely an interesting project. If you’re just baffled by the weirdness of it, especially early on, I think that mostly came from the difficulty of trying to blend all these elements that didn’t go together perfectly: the commissioner’s specific view of Barbara, the Batman TAS vibe, the smut itself, and then my own weird dumb storytelling sensibilities plus the X-factor of votes not going how I expected. When I look at it that way, I’m just relieved it turned out readable at all!