CHARACTER NAME: Dick Grayson | Robin
CHARACTER AGE: 13
SERIES: DC Comics: Young Justice (TV)
CHRONOLOGY: August 21st (Episode 7 / Issue #11)
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: Anything goes!
BACKGROUND:
young justice is convoluted;
have a semi-helpful wikiDick Grayson was born a performer. He spent the early years of his life traveling the world with Haly’s Circus, performing with his family as the youngest member of the thrilling acrobatic act, The Flying Graysons. It was a happy, if unconventional, childhood, and Dick grew up as a bright, sweet boy with tight family ties and a love of showmanship.
And then everything changed. One night, when the circus was performing in Gotham City, mob boss Tony Zucco tried to shake the circus down for protection money. When he was turned down, he arranged an “accident” during the trapeze act. Dick — the only member too young for the dangerous, net-less act — watched as his family met their tragic end. As Dick’s uncle was too gravely injured to take care of him, he was adopted by a certain playboy billionaire whose hobby just so happened to be dressing up as a bat and punching the criminally insane.
It went surprisingly well. After losing his entire family at the tender age of nine, Dick — henceforth referred to by his codename, Robin — trained relentlessly to become a worthy sidekick, mastering acrobatics, martial arts, detective work, computer hacking, and more. Eventually, he and Batman were able to apprehend his family’s murderer and bring him to justice, and paved the way for other teen sidekicks.
It’s four years later that the series’ events begin. Robin, along with fellow teen heroes Kid Flash and Aqualad, decided that they’d had enough of living in the shadows of their mentors and not being taken seriously, and set off on an unauthorized mission to investigate strange goings-on at Cadmus Labs. There, they discovered and rescued Superboy, a teenage clone of Superman. With the Justice League’s eventual blessing (and new members Miss Martian and Artemis), the group became a covert black-ops team, performing missions to hunt down assassins and intervene in political negotiations. You know, because that’s definitely something that emotionally volatile teenagers should be handling.
Early on, Dick is headstrong and prone to leaping before he looks. He’s so used to working with Batman that it doesn’t occur to him to tell his teammates what he’s planning, and often runs headlong into danger with his own agenda. But it doesn’t take long before he comes to realize that teamwork includes the entire team — and that even though he’s been a hero for longer than his teammates, he’ll need more than that before he’s qualified to give them orders in the field. After an almost-disastrous mission in Santa Prisca, he admits that he isn’t ready, and gladly lets Aqualad take on the responsibility of leading the team. From that point on, he’s a little more mature: he’s noticeably better at listening to orders and telling his teammates what he’s planning… though he still has to do the ninja thing sometimes. He did learn from Batman, after all.
PERSONALITY:
The first thing most people notice about Robin is his cheerful demeanor. Always prepared with a wisecrack, bad pun, or creative new way to mangle the English language, Robin could maintain a conversation with a brick wall. Or Batman, which is pretty close to the same thing. Despite the traumatic loss of his family at a very young age, and the four years he’s spent fighting crime in Gotham (the city with the highest number of homicidal clowns per capita), he remains upbeat and perky. He’s the light to Batman’s darkness, and the quips to the Dark Knight’s steely brooding silence.
At least outwardly. Despite his optimism and sense of humor, beneath the mask is a boy with internal struggles of his own. Being a teenager is hard enough without adding superheroics to the mix. Though he sometimes comes across as cocky and youthfully overconfident, it’s because of the incredibly high standards he holds himself to. A great deal of Dick’s self-worth is tied up in his own abilities and the way other people see him. He loves being a hero, but he wants to be perfect, and he wants to earn it. Not only does he have his family’s legacy to live up to, but he also holds himself to the same standards as Batman — a high bar for anyone to reach.
He’s learned from Batman’s example in a few ways that aren’t terribly healthy, and a perfectionist streak a mile wide is one of them. Blows to Dick’s self-confidence can hit him hard, and he punishes himself for his mistakes harder than anyone. Dick struggles with his issues of inadequacy by throwing himself headlong into his training — sometimes to the point of pushing himself past his own limits.
His relationship with Bruce isn’t strained (in fact, the two work so well together that he sometimes forgets that he can’t communicate with other people without talking). Nor, however, is it entirely free of problems. For one thing, Dick isn’t always certain where he stands with him, which means that he often gets touchy and moody when he feels rejected or dismissed. And although Bruce does his best to keep Dick from becoming too much like him, Dick idealizes the man. Filling Batman’s shoes is a lot of responsibility for a thirteen year old, and it’s one that weighs on him more than even he sometimes realizes.
And although he’s friendly and chatty, Dick tends to keep people at arm’s length, by necessity rather than by choice. He takes his secret identity almost as seriously as Batman does — with exactly one exception. Unbeknownst to Bruce, Dick broke the cardinal Bat-secrecy rule and revealed his secret identity to his best friend Wally West, AKA Kid Flash. The two are inseparable: Dick calls Wally out when he’s flippant and irresponsible, and Wally’s cheerful Midwestern normalcy keeps Dick from becoming a tiny brooding Batman clone. Not that he doesn’t still have a tendency to backflip away from help when his emotions get to be too much for him. Let’s just say he’s good at talking, but not always so great at communication.
But despite a hefty dose of teenage Bat-angst, Dick is a relatively well-adjusted kid. In his civilian life, he’s an award-winning mathlete at a fancy private school, even if a lot of his classmates seem to know him as nothing more than that short, nerdy freshman. He’s well-mannered, too, attending fundraisers and charity events where he charms Gotham’s elite as Bruce Wayne’s ward. And with his team, he’s chatty, supportive, upbeat, and listens as well as anyone can expect a teenage boy to. Sometimes he’s a little blunt, and he doesn’t always realize when a playful wisecrack isn’t appropriate, but he’ll always apologize afterwards.
And though he’s too young and inexperienced to be a real leader just yet, he has the tactical knowledge and charisma to become a great one eventually. He’s bright and analytical, dedicated enough to track down criminal leads on his own and follow them through, but not too proud to admit when he needs a little help from his friends. And, most importantly, after a few missteps early on, he knows that he still has a lot to learn. It’s made him more cautious and reserved than he was when he started out, but more prepared, too.
Dick can perhaps best be described as a boy at odds with himself, struggling with two secret identities and not yet certain which one is the real him. He’s a friendly, affectionate boy with painfully few opportunities to get close to people. He’s working on balancing his natural desire to surround himself with others versus the carefully guarded secrecy that Batman instilled in him, and trying to reconcile his lighthearted side with the serious leader he wants to become.
POWER: Dick has no superpowers in canon. Upon arrival, he will be gaining:
• Technopathy. Dick is already obnoxiously tech-savvy and a gifted hacker; essentially what this will be doing is giving him the ability to talk to computers without the aid of fancy but conspicuous equipment. It has limits, of course: he can’t build something new from scratch without parts, blueprints, and a lot of time... but he might be able to charm a bricked smartphone into working again or get a secure database to spill its secrets for him. His info-gathering will be limited, of course, to what someone could get through normal hacking methods, and learning to use this power effectively will take practice and upkeep.
• Enhanced Stealth. He’s already good at hiding in shadows and concealing his identity with nothing more than a pair of sunglasses. This just ups it a little: he’ll be able to hide more effectively, maintain his secret identity more easily, and people who would ordinarily be suspicious might be more willing to ignore a thirteen year old creeping around in their air vents. It won’t be infallible, but it gives him a little boost to his ninja skills.
