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Hi! As promised, although the sequel got long enough that I've posted it as a separate work, I'm posting a note here for all the subscribers who have been waiting for two-and-half years! You'll notice that I've also created a series—I do have plans for a third part, from Lois' POV, which will move the story forward into Jason's resurrection.
This also seems the best place to post a necessary mea culpa and trigger warning for the series as a whole.
Unlike every other DC fic I’ve written, I actually tried to stick fairly close to canon in Gently in the Night. I did that because I’d read articles about the story of Jason’s death, the nationwide poll to decide the death of a fictional teenage boy, and found it compelling enough that I woke up with an idea in my head based on it. However… I’d never read the actual comic, only the articles about it. I read a few wikis to prep for writing my story and thought I had it covered. Gently in the Night is under five thousand words, after all, and barely touched on the canon events. I figured that was good enough.
When I got started on the sequel, I originally thought it was also going to be fairly short, and other than resetting the comic to the present day (because Eighties period pieces aren’t really my jam), I believed I could still stay canon-compliant. It would be longer than Bruce’s POV, of course, because Clark is nothing if not a wordy bitch, but still short. Easy-peasy.
Unfortunately, Clark was not cooperating with me. Eighty thousand words later…
During that process, I found out that it’s a lot harder to just skip over and leave stuff out in a novella-length piece, so I went back and actually read the comic, several times. And I discovered that it’s batshit fucking loony tunes in a way that the wikis had… not fully prepared me for.
The original Batman: Death in the Family is heinously, blatantly racist and Islamophobic, both in its multiple 101 errors that imply that all Islamic countries are the same (having Batman speak Farsi in Beirut; having the Joker wear the wrong style of clothes as the “Iranian Ambassador,” etc.), and worse, in its constant depictions of African and Middle-Eastern people as blanket terrorists on par with DC’s worst supervillain (they’re also just drawn really horribly, with gray skin and blank expressions).
I struggled with how to deal with that, once I'd turned this very short story into a whole series. It was clear that regardless, either way, I would need to make significant changes to canon to avoid repeating Starlin’s sins. Given that, was it better to take out the Ethiopian and Iranian side plots entirely? Or try to transform them?
I wrestled with that decision a lot. Rewriting the plot to erase the Ethiopian and Islamic villains that Starlin exploited with such blatant disregard seemed like adding insult to injury. But while I’m significantly more educated on international politics than the average American… I’m still American, and one with two full-time jobs and household responsibilities that do not allow for either full-time research or finding and paying a sensitivity reader enough to make it worth having to read the original canon.
In the end, I made somewhat of a combined choice. There are some things that are just left out. The series is set after Jason’s death, which meant I could entirely avoid portraying the sections with Bruce and Jason traveling through the Middle East and then down to Ethiopia, the Joker killing his (all Black) henchmen, and the Joker’s meeting with the Iranians. In my mind, the whole part with Jason and Bruce decided they could travel through the Middle East killing “terrorists” with impunity just didn’t happen, and the Joker’s henchmen were a mixed group including some of his own imported Gothamites and corrupt Western aid workers (in canon, Jason’s mother is an American aid worker in Ethiopia who has been reselling first aid supplies and sells Jason out to the Joker).
Those parts that do happen during the section of canon in which my narrative is placed, I did my best to transform. Mainly, I write the way it’s framed in Starlin’s fic as being through a Western racist lens (as delivered by his CIA character, who I kept in the fic), which Clark and Bruce then directly refute.
A few additional notes, for plot rather than politics—I’m following the canon specifically for Batman: Death in the Family, not for any other DC comics published around the same time in the same verse. That means that there are places that all the characters, but particularly Lois, Clark, and Alfred, may not exactly match up to late-80s DC canon, especially in their backstories.
And finally, I also made a couple minor plot changes, in places where I just couldn’t find any possible way to fanwank canon so that it made any sense. More details on that in this previous tumblr thread, for any canon nerds among us.
I’m honestly still not sure if I made the best choice, and if I made it for the right reasons, but it’s the one I landed on. For specific trigger avoidance, the characters talk briefly about the Tigray conflict in Chapter 1 of Praying on the Height, and Chapter 2 takes place in Ethiopia. The depictions of Islamophobia and Iranian/US diplomatic relations are limited to Chapters 14 and 15. As always, all corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcome.