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[hangswithrobin]

Player Info

Name: Alex
Age: 20
Contact: flamingchemist
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Character Basics:

Character Name: Stephanie Brown
Journal: hangswithrobin
Age: 16
Fandom: DC Comics
Canon Point: End of Robin #74
Debt:

Class A: Betrayal – against her father (ongoing)
Class B: 51 counts of Assault, 3 counts of Breaking and Entering
Class C: Evidence Tampering, Enabling Substance Abuse, 4 counts Property Damage, Conspiracy to Commit Murder, Sassiness (ongoing), 7 counts Trespassing, 6 counts Fleeing the Scene of a Crime

Vigilantism (6 counts)

Sleeping With the Totally Wrong Guy

GRAND TOTAL: 30 years 4 months

Canon Character Section:

History: here

Personality:

Stephanie Brown is a girl who likes to take matters in her own hands. Rather than sit back an wait for more experienced individuals to get their shit together, she determines what it is she wants to happen and does whatever she can to make it happen. Unfortunately it takes 15 years for her to realize that the experienced individuals don’t have their shit together. As long as she’s been alive Stephanie’s father has been an abusive asshole, driving her mother to abuse prescription drugs on top of verbally and physically abusing her himself.

The cause of Arthur Brown’s psychosis is unclear, and whether or not his abusive behavior is linked to his criminal set of problem solving techniques he is a father figure that should have been removed from the equation years ago by social services. In Gotham these sorts of cases tend to be overlooked, and Steph has to rely on his inability to successfully pull off a bank robbery and a clean getaway to keep him in prison and she and her mother safe. When even that system lets her down, releasing him and declaring him ‘cured’ of his pathological need to actually send the police clues to help catch him in the act, Stephanie knows there is no other course of action but to make sure he is put away herself. Batman and Robin already set an example for her, proving that masked vigilantes can in fact put criminals behind bars. It isn’t a far stretch for her to take to the sewing machine and copy their act.

Whether it’s sending her father to prison or getting just a little bit closer to her favorite Boy Wonder, Steph knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go for it. In fact based on her actions it seems there is very little of which she is actually afraid. She dives into conflict without a second thought and has no hesitation to tell others how she feels. This puts a bit of a strain between her and Batman, who doesn’t think she should be on the streets. She is often telling him that he isn’t the boss of her and more or less ignores every instruction he gives her. Batman is enigmatic at best, and she doesn’t try very hard to read him. Instead she focuses on what she thinks is best for her. She says she’s afraid of him, but if her fear shows at all it is only with indignation and a stolid refusal to back down.

This policy causes some tension in her relationship with Robin as well. Whether he’s following Batman’s lead or trying to protect her out of affection, Robin often voices his disapproval of Stephanie’s chosen career track. At times he is respectful and understanding, but at other times he shows no respect for her decision and even calls her by her real name while they’re fighting together. Robin seems to have conflicting feelings towards Stephanie, and she reacts in kind. Underneath it all she has an undeniable attraction to him and keeps coming back. When he’s respectful she takes the job seriously, and when he isn’t respectful she retorts and acts bitter. Their relationship is very reactive, and often seems on the edge of breaking.

Steph and Tim’s relationship is best shortly after they begin dating officially. Ironically, this is long before she knows his name, and Stephanie isn’t able to do vigilante work because she has just discovered she is pregnant. Not with Tim’s child, of course, but with the child of her previous boyfriend Dean who dumped her when an Earthquake hit and things got a little too dangerous for his tastes. Throughout the pregnancy Tim is incredibly supportive of Steph, giving her advice and even taking her to Lamaze classes disguised as ‘Alvin Drapper’. The pregnancy is incredibly difficult for Steph, mostly because she has a weakness for children. In fact she would have kept the child if she could, and is adamantly against abortion (at least while hormonal and being used as a mouthpiece for the pro-life writer in charge at the time).

She became pregnant at the age of 15, a freshman in high school. The only reason she had sex with Dean in the first place is a combination of peer pressure and low self esteem, a mistake she will be certain never to repeat again. Her mother is recovering from her drug addiction so long as Arthur is in prison, but it still leaves Stephanie as the 15 year old high school student single mother of a child whose grandfather gives her nightmares over the baby’s safety. Keeping the child simply isn’t an option. She is so distraught by having to give away her child that she refuses to see it before they take it away, and doesn’t even want to know the gender. She recovers from the rough birthing quickly but doesn’t return to high school. She only talks about her child twice more in the series: Once when she explains to Cassandra Cain that she feels bad about it, but doesn’t regret giving her child a better life than it would have had with her, and again on her ‘death bed’ when she asks Batman to make sure the child is taken care of. The loss of her child is something that Stephanie thinks about and has very strong feelings about, but not something she ever really wants to discuss. She knows she made the right choice and chooses to leave it at that.

Meanwhile, Steph’s relationship with Batman is a complicated one. In her head he’s a mysterious figure, the dark and silent avenger. He is Gotham’s hero, a force to be reckoned with. But at the same time he’s the man who has failed to save her from her miserable life, to live up to her dreams, or even to keep her father in prison. From the very beginning she is aware that he is both mortal and fallible. Perhaps more importantly, he’s a bit of a hypocrite. He trains Robin, a boy even younger than she is, but refuses to train her. That he refuses to train her and fails to live up to her dreams is infuriating. As such he bears the brunt of her frustration and perhaps even her daddy issues. It doesn’t help that he never dispels the idea that she is somehow less worthy of being a vigilante and less trustworthy because of who her father is. In this way he actually feeds her self esteem issues and her anger at her father.

It’s a funny thing about Stephanie that despite growing up in such a damaging environment, with a criminal for a father and a junkie for a mother, Steph never falls into the trap of blaming herself for her parents’ shortcomings. She doesn’t even blame her mother for her shortcomings, and is able to see through the addiction to the root of the problem: her father, his abuse, and her mother’s lingering love for him. As she explains to Tim after her father dies later in the series, she places the blame for her home life squarely on her father’s shoulders. For her whole life Steph has had two theories about her father: he’s evil, or he’s weak.

She has a similarly grounded view of other such deviants, which she explains in talking to Tim about how she feels about her father’s death and an attempted sexual assault she suffered in elementary school. She knows that there are people who are mentally ill, and they don’t represent the majority or their entire gender, race, what-have-you. But those people can do a lot of damage. She’s also well aware that there are perfectly healthy people who do bad things for what they think are good reasons: selfishness, desperation, fear. She also understands that her reactions to those sorts of incidents and those sorts of people are perfectly natural and valid. Sick people may not be the majority and the majority of men may not be evil, but after an attempted assault it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to be afraid of men. And maybe selfish, desperate, scared people don’t deserve to die, but they remind her of her father and make her angry and so she doesn’t feel the need to go out of her way to save them, either. Robin attempts to teach her the value of saving lives, but for now the best she can do is admit that sometimes other good things happen when you’re wasting your time saving a couple of scumbags.

Perhaps it’s her history, but Stephanie has a rather bleak outlook and tends to expect the worst from people. Robin often has to convince her that she’s supposed to be saving people even if they’re the bad guys, and it takes longer than he can afford to wait for her to realize the truth of it. She would rather take care of herself than spend any effort on criminals like her father. Under Robin’s influence she tries to be a better person, but some habits are hard to break, and others she just plain doesn’t want to. Sticking up for herself and for other victims is one of the latter. Her bleak outlook translates often to a dry sense of humor and sometimes even serves as an emotional defense mechanism – when you expect the worst, nothing can let you down, right?

She’s very self-aware when it comes to her own motivations, admitting that she wants revenge against her father more than justice and that she’s more interested in seeing Robin than fighting crime. She doesn’t fight these urges and she isn’t ashamed of them, they’re just part of who she is. She fights her father not because she sees him as her responsibility, but because she wants him as far away from her and her mother as she can keep him. Once her dad runs out as an excuse and her relationship plans with Robin fall through, Stephanie keeps up the vigilante gig for no better reason than because she enjoys it. She may not be able to put her finger on exactly why, but putting on the mask makes her happy an that’s reason enough for her to do it. Maybe it’s the adrenaline or maybe it’s the feeling of helping people, but she keeps coming back for more. Most likely vigilantism appeals to a part of her that has been neglected in her upbringing: a sense of importance. Fighting crime puts Steph in control of at least one aspect of her life, and it allows her to be a part of her community without resorting to crime (as she thinks of it – vigilantism is obviously illegal). The Spoiler mask is a way for Steph to mold the world she lives in and make it better, something that she might never have been able to do as the poor child of an unskilled criminal thug.

When Steph first faced her father in costume, she was angry enough that she was willing to kill him. Batman convinced her not to, and since then she has more or less fallen in line with his rule of ‘no killing’. Beyond that she doesn’t have the training to choose whether or not she does permanent damage, nor does she have the talent to even come close to killing someone unintentionally. Later in the series she does have the training, and she is firmly of the policy that if someone intends to kill her then she isn’t going to hold back. This only changes after severe emotional trauma (to say nothing of the physical trauma that followed) convinces her that she doesn’t want to break any more of Batman’s rules. She doesn’t kill, not because she’s against it but because Batman is. At this canon point the most immediate reason is because Robin wouldn’t approve, and if she wants to be his girlfriend she has to have his approval.

If there’s one thing Steph is good at, it’s rolling with the punches. She’s been through several kidnappings, near-death experiences and the like, but she always manages to find the time to get back on her feet and crack a joke. She isn’t the sort to sit and cry until someone saves her. She pays attention to her surroundings and takes advantage of any opportunity to save herself. For all that she is so often dependant on others to save her, she is a very independent individual. There have been occasions when she was scared enough to consider leaving the vigilante lifestyle behind, but she’s both reckless enough and determined enough to work through it (much to Tim’s dismay, of course) and put the mask back on.

Ironically enough, Steph doesn’t like secrets. Or perhaps more accurately, she doesn’t like when people keep secrets from her. She has plenty of her own, but not knowing Robin’s secret identity wore on her for a long time. For all her protests that she was happy just to be with him, she has a nearly insatiable curiosity and finds it incredibly frustrating when people know more than she does. It’s this curiosity that drives her to be more of a ‘true’ vigilante. She often goes on cases to discover the truth – about her drug-dealing gymnastics coach, about her father’s relationship with the Riddler, or even about her boyfriend possibly cheating on her.

For all of her confidence in other areas, Steph has really poor self-esteem as well. She’s legitimately surprised when Robin is nice to her, and even tells him that he’s probably too good for her. All of this of course while she’s dating a boy who’s name she can never know and whom she can never be allowed to see without a mask on. She claims that she would recognize him without the mask, but it’s obvious that Steph doesn’t believe she deserves better than half a boyfriend.

In Teleios Stephanie will be forced to keep close company with some of the worst criminals as well as some of the best – much closer company than she would like to keep. Unfortunately this is not unusual for her, and although she may spend most of her time feeling very angry she never loses touch of her own moral compass, twisted and gray though it might be. Conceivably, without her mother, father, or boyfriend to motivator Steph would be tempted to lose the Spoiler mask and give up vigilantism altogether. But in such close quarters with murderers and other such scum, it’s inconceivable that she would stand back and allow anything bad to happen to those she considers innocent.

If the bad guys happen to kill each other, well, that’s not her problem, is it? It’s not her responsibility to risk her life to save a murderer.

The idea that vigilantism is on par with such lunatics is not unheard of by any means. There are those in Gotham who claim that Batman is every bit as bad as the Joker. To these people and the system they support Steph says bullshit. Being placed in such a system sucks, but such is her life, and it doesn’t mean that Batman isn’t a hero or that she’s a bad person. It’s simply an inconvenience.

Powers/Abilties: Steph has gymnastics experience, speed and agility to make up for her size, and the fighting experience to make her a viable match for most small-time thugs. At this point she has not received any training from any vigilantes. She has limited first aid experience, mostly learned secondhand from her mother. Also she can play piano! Although she is a bit out of practice.

Appearance: Stephanie is 5’5”, with shoulder length, wavy blonde hair, blue-grey eyes, and the body of a gymnast. Despite her sordid past, present, and most probably future, she walks with confidence and optimism, only caring after the fact if a certain move is going to end in pain, or say a broken ankle. She wears mostly solid shirts and jeans.

CR AU

Game You’re Transferring CR from:

How has your character changed from their canon self?

Are they gaining any abilities from their time in game? Did the game setting take something from them?

Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

If this is a joke, it’s really not funny. Seriously. Not laughing. This isn’t even funny by the Joker’s standards, and that maniac would laugh at anything.

[ She huffs. ]

Look, you’ve probably got me confused with my dad. It’s understandable. He’s only, you know, twenty years older, three feet taller and male. So why don’t you send me home and pick up someone who actually deserves the time? Lord knows Blackgate isn’t doing the trick.

[ Once it becomes obvious that logic will not help her, Stephanie begins to pace and mutter to herself. ]

C’mon Steph, think. What would Robin do?

[ But she’s not Robin. She’s not even close to Robin. And all she can do is sit and sulk and hope to be rescued. ]

Prose Sample:

Spoiler was running across the rooftops. The night was pitch black, but the stars were out and they were beautiful. It wasn’t the first time she had gone out since the pregnancy, but after looking at the stars through a window it felt nice to see them in the open air. It felt nice to run and not worry about falling, to jump and really worry about falling, but only because the pavement was five stories below and she didn’t really want to be a pancake.

She was looking for Robin. She'd gotten a handful of phone calls, but there still wasn't any good way for her to get in touch with him when she wanted. Which was probably a good thing, because she wanted to get in touch with him a lot. Especially tonight. She felt like she hadn’t seen him in ages. It was ridiculous, of course, but they had bonded while she was pregnant and now that the baby was in a loving home somewhere she wanted to do some bonding without the hormones.

He was probably busy. The Spoiler wasn’t discouraged. Maybe she could help! Worst case scenario Batman was around and he would glare and tell her to go home in that terrifying, booming voice of his. As though she would ever listen. Batman was like her mother that way. They could bitch and moan and take away her costume but she would always find a way to do what she wanted.

Speaking of things she wanted, the sound of breaking glass stopped Spoiler dead in her tracks. Not the building below her but one block down, a robbery was taking place. Her heart leapt only a moment before her body did and a handful of seconds later she was watching the criminals from the roof directly across the street from a pawn shop. It looked like three guys, possibly a fourth in a ratty looking car parked at the corner.

She scanned the horizon for Robin. No luck. Wherever he was, he wasn’t here. Which meant there was only one person around to stop the crime taking place. Under her mask Stephanie grinned. Three guys wasn’t so bad, even if she was out of practice. And boy, had she missed this.