There's a lot of people who love Starfire on Wattpad and I know that comics can be kind of hard to get into - money comes into play, whether or not you have a computer you can read on can get in the way, and it can be intimidating when looking at th...
Most of us are familiar with the treatment of female characters in both comics as a medium and in the fandom that surround them. From situations as shallow as existing solely to create a vortex of romantic drama to recurring phenomena as serious as fridging, it's clear to an audience with critical analysis skills that comics aren't necessarily the friendliest medium for women to exist in and that tends to extend to comics fandom as a whole.
This is especially true when it comes to the now decades old question of who's better: Kory or Babs?
You can find mile long threads dedicated to picking apart this argument anywhere on the internet. On , LiveJournal forums, DeviantArt, , Twitter, Tumblr, and even on —just search their names together and you have a near endless list of thousands of options to choose from. Want someone to tell you Babs is smarter, not a slut like Kory, and is the best option for Dick? Look no further than the first results page on google. Want someone to tell you that Kory is prettier than Babs and is therefore a better match for Dick Grayson? Look a couple search result pages in and you'll find it.
My point is: it's easy to find hatred pointed at either character on the basis that the other is superior.
And I'm sure at this point you're looking at your screen wondering 'why the hell does it matter?' or maybe you're wondering 'what's she even talking about?' but I'm really hoping that, instead, you're asking yourself why people do this and if there's a basis for any of it (there isn't).
This kind of behavior—pitting two characters against each other on the basis of a shared past romantic partner—is predicated on sexism and a misunderstanding of both character histories. Neither Kory nor Babs have been solely defined by their relationship to Dick Grayson and, yet, in fandom, it seems that their respective relationships to Dick is what does define them. I want to examine both their character histories, actual interactions between the two of them, and their relationship to Dick Grayson as a point of contention in fandom.
Let's take a look at the actual interactions between Kory and Babs that may or may not have fed into this behavior.
(For this essay, I will be assuming that my audience has more familiarity with Kory's character history and appearances than with Babs'. This essay is about 1500 words long and I am very tired.)
For those of you unfamiliar with Babs' character history, her appearances in comics had become sporadic after the end of the three-year run of Batman Family (1975-1978) and, while she occasionally appeared in Detective Comics, she was a difficult to find character. She came back into the foreground in 1985 during Crisis but, afterward, continued to be used only sporadically. Her character was retired 1988 (Batgirl Special #1) but, as many of us are familiar with, she was brought back later that year to star in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke as Moore's victim of choice.
With her sporadic appearances in the 80s, her late 80s retirement, and then her violent shelving at the hands of DC and Alan Moore it seems that Babs was not a character that would have frequently, if ever, appeared alongside Kory who, coincidentally, was in one of the highest selling titles of the decade. Babs didn't see the same all-star treatment that Kory received during this decade as Kory regularly appeared in crossover events, had a variety of solo arcs, and was the starring character of quite a few The New Teen Titans story arcs.
For reasons unknown to me, Kory and Babs didn't meet in comics during this decade.
That's not to say that Kory didn't see other members of the Batfamily, though:
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