See, I don't think she writes the Dick/Babs love all that well. I think she's prone to throwing in monkey wrenches for the sake of throwing in monkey wrenches, and they don't always feel true to me. The restaurant scene felt very forced to me ... Dick and Babs have fought together since her time in the wheelchair, so I had difficulty believing that he'd suddenly be getting in her way. I didn't buy that Dick was suddenly going on a nostalgic kick, and that he'd keep staying on it even when Babs repeatedly asked him not to. I found Tarantula to be unevenly characterized: not an uneven character, but unevenly developed and portrayed. I had an easier time believing in Dick's attraction to Clancy than to Tarantulas.
(I also don't buy Devin's take on the Nightwing/Huntress relationship, but that's another rant.)
I was also extremely offended by Devin's script for the now-infamous rooftop rape scene. This isn't a case of me finding rape an inappropriate story choice; I happen to think that silence empowers the predators, and I've volunteered for our local domestic abuse/sexual assault center, so I've learned something about cases where men are raped by women. I felt that Devin's original description of that scene read as if it were being written by someone who was indulging in a rape fantasy, which made me extremely uncomfortable.
I find Gail Simone to have done a much better job of portraying the Dick/Babs relationship. YMMV.
As for lovey-dovey no-conflict relationships being boring ... well, speaking as someone who's been extremely happily married for nearly 10 years now, I don't think that's the case. Or if we're speaking strictly of fictional relationships, one of the things the Nightwing player and I have discussed in our prep work for portraying the Dick/Babs relationship has been about facing the issues a couple deals with when they get married. Some of the issues we've addressed include such things as how difficult it is to go from living by yourself for years to suddenly sharing your space with someone else (the fact that it's someone you love very much doesn't automatically make the adjustment stress-free, speaking from personal experience); more specifically, since we're dealing with a crime-fighting couple, we've been addressing Babs' tendency to play "Ms. Fix-It" by proceeding to implement a solution without considering the other party's feelings (see the early stages of Babs' partnership with Dinah, particularly Babs' "I am the word" attitude regarding the Santa Prisca mission), and how the couple struggle with when they are being Babs and Dick, and when they are being Oracle and Nightwing. We're tying up a storyline where Dick had to agree to a plan that he found problematic in Nightwing mode and intolerable in Dick-who-is-married-to-Babs mode. We've had scenes where the two of them have had genuine disagreements over the best way to handle situations--not simply cases where one is right and the other wrong, but where each person is viewing a problem from a different perspective and thus arriving at a solution that is in conflict with the other person's.
Or, as another married person I know has put it, the wedding isn't the end of the story; it's the end of a chapter, and what follows is the really good stuff.
no subject
(I also don't buy Devin's take on the Nightwing/Huntress relationship, but that's another rant.)
I was also extremely offended by Devin's script for the now-infamous rooftop rape scene. This isn't a case of me finding rape an inappropriate story choice; I happen to think that silence empowers the predators, and I've volunteered for our local domestic abuse/sexual assault center, so I've learned something about cases where men are raped by women. I felt that Devin's original description of that scene read as if it were being written by someone who was indulging in a rape fantasy, which made me extremely uncomfortable.
I find Gail Simone to have done a much better job of portraying the Dick/Babs relationship. YMMV.
As for lovey-dovey no-conflict relationships being boring ... well, speaking as someone who's been extremely happily married for nearly 10 years now, I don't think that's the case. Or if we're speaking strictly of fictional relationships, one of the things the Nightwing player and I have discussed in our prep work for portraying the Dick/Babs relationship has been about facing the issues a couple deals with when they get married. Some of the issues we've addressed include such things as how difficult it is to go from living by yourself for years to suddenly sharing your space with someone else (the fact that it's someone you love very much doesn't automatically make the adjustment stress-free, speaking from personal experience); more specifically, since we're dealing with a crime-fighting couple, we've been addressing Babs' tendency to play "Ms. Fix-It" by proceeding to implement a solution without considering the other party's feelings (see the early stages of Babs' partnership with Dinah, particularly Babs' "I am the word" attitude regarding the Santa Prisca mission), and how the couple struggle with when they are being Babs and Dick, and when they are being Oracle and Nightwing. We're tying up a storyline where Dick had to agree to a plan that he found problematic in Nightwing mode and intolerable in Dick-who-is-married-to-Babs mode. We've had scenes where the two of them have had genuine disagreements over the best way to handle situations--not simply cases where one is right and the other wrong, but where each person is viewing a problem from a different perspective and thus arriving at a solution that is in conflict with the other person's.
Or, as another married person I know has put it, the wedding isn't the end of the story; it's the end of a chapter, and what follows is the really good stuff.