Hello and welcome to Fandom Heresies, where I talk about all my controversial opinions regarding different fandoms. DC, Marvel, Disney, Nintendo… I have heretical opinions about them all. And, because heretics gotta heretic, I’m going to share them with you.

Today, we’re going to talk about one of the many ways DC has screwed over the original Batgirl, everybody’s favourite redhead Barbara Gordon (we’ll discuss how DC likes to screw over the other two Batgirls, Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown, in a later post and possibly different series. After all, it’s not like DC’s horrible treatment of those two characters hasn’t been a source of fan complaint for what? Fifteen years now? Something like that. Hardly heretical). Specifically, we’re going to talk about how, since the 90’s, DC has continually de-aged and undercut Barbara to serve Dick Grayson and the Dick/Babs romance. We’ll talk about how Barbara started out life as a replacement love interest for two different characters (Kathy Kane’s Batwoman and the Eartha Kitt version of Catwoman, respectively) for Batman, how she evolved into her own character (with some bumps along the way; I’m looking at you, Frank Robbins) and how, starting in the 90’s, DC began undercutting Barbara in favour of Dick. This is part one of three. The other two are here and here.

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