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[hangswithrobin]

In Character Information

character name: Stephanie Brown
Fandom: DC Comics
Timeline: End of Robin #74
character's age: 16

powers, skills, pets and equipment: 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. She has no pets and no real equipment to speak of, and will be arriving in civilian clothing with a wallet and cell phone and nothing else.

canon 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. 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 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 was incredibly supportive of Steph, giving her advice and even taking her to lamaze classes disguised as ‘Alvin Drapper’. The pregnancy was 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 was a combination of peer pressure and low self esteem, a mistake she will be certain never to repeat again. Her mother was recovering from her drug addiction so long as Arthur was in prison, but it still left Stephanie as the 15 year old high school student single mother of a child whose grandfather gave her nightmares over the baby’s safety. Keeping the child simply wasn’t an option. She was so distraught by having to give away her child that she refused to see it before they took it away, and didn’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.

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, that Steph never fell into the trap of blaming herself for her parents’ shortcomings. 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 guy, 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.

why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?
Stephanie has lived through enough to make anyone shudder, and in canon she will survive to go through much worse. In fact there is very little that she can’t get through with a smile given enough time, and Anatole is no exception.

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample:
So! A friend of mine is having a birthday soon. I won’t say who, because I’m not technically supposed to know, but I have my ways.

[ She isn’t nearly as sneaky as she thinks she is, but this is still a point of pride. ]

So I’m wondering if anyone besides the carnival does birthdays around here. Not your usual Red Robin ‘the whole waitressing crew screams the birthday song so the whole restaurant gets pissed of’, my friend is way classier than that. I was thinking something more along the lines of renting out a place and getting everyone to jump out and shout ‘surprise’!

[ This is literally the entire present- it’s more than she can really afford anyway. ]

Don’t worry, it’s not like it’ll actually be a surprise. But it’s the thought that counts, and with the way things have been going I wanted to make it really special this year.

Third Person Sample:
She had no mask and no friends from home. As she walked through the streets of Anatole Stephanie thought that it wasn’t really so bad. She didn’t need a mask here, although a couple of those smoke bombs Robin gave her wouldn’t have gone awry. And without Robin, Batman, or her father, she didn’t have anything to prove. It was almost relaxing.

Okay, relaxing might have been taking it a little too far. But she could make new friends here, friends she didn’t meet in elementary school and who, whether or not she was stuck here long enough, were much more likely to live to see thirty. There were plenty of people around who were stuck here like she was and with whom she would probably get along well. And the city was interesting in a way that Gotham never had been. There was less pollution, for starters, and the streets were paved with real cobblestone. It was like being in a movie. Something like Cowboys and Monsters, not like any of the period movies she’d ever seen.

She found herself wandering towards the carnival. Growing up in Gotham she was never too fond of clowns, but everybody loved a good carnival. It was something to do, something to cheer her up. She thought maybe she would get on the carousel just for the hell of it.

This was what she did now. With no school, no money left for frivolous shopping, and no vigilante crew to hang out with she simply wandered. It was like a never-ending weekend back home. Only she didn’t have any friends to spend it with.

She missed her friends. And she missed Robin. She wanted to go home.

But she couldn’t think about that now. It wouldn’t do her any good anyway. Maybe she would go talk to the fortune teller. The best ones only ever gave you good news. She could use a little good news around now.

Anything else? Nope!