i will actually start with amy because amy has two dads

three if we're counting her bio dad's loser boyfriend who joined them for their tea time every day

starting with mark dallon, amy's adopted father he's like... fine. neglectful but not really on purpose? he has clinical depression and tends to just let his wife do most of the parenting which she resents because he was the one who actually wanted amy and she was rather vehemently against it

he received a really serious brain injury that amy (and her family) knew she could heal, but she didn't because it was a violation of one of her hard rules about using her power that she set to keep herself in check.

eventually she was forced to do it by bonesaw (complicated relationship) and he asked if she was okay and she promptly ran away from home and fell into an extended psychotic breakdown

WHICH CULMINATED IN HER MEETING HER BIO DAD

who is a supervillain, a warlord who ruled over a section of the city by breaking his bones repeatedly, and later became a cell block leader in the birdcage (jail for supervillains)

she spent most of her life terrified of him because he was a villain and so she thought their blood connection meant she was doomed to follow in his footsteps (reinforced by carol's obsession with blood). then when she actually met him he was a genuinely loving, attentive and competent father. they had daily tea parties. he often says embarassing things like

how she's everything he ever wanted in life while she's pretending to be tougher and cooler than everyone. he loves his gay loser daughter who sucks.

aelwyn's dad is angwyn abernant. who sucks. we get less insight into the specifics of aelwyn's relationship with her parents but we do know that it was. bad!

aelwyn was the golden child of the family - the one who could do no wrong and was shackled to the perfect daughter role no matter how much she rebelled. when her parents bullied her younger sister adaine, aelwyn internalized that standing up for adaine means trading places with her, and in general despite aelwyn's desire to rebel, she's also incredibly

afraid of her parents and afraid of losing their approval.

angwyn was the elven ambassador to solace, so he moved the whole family from falinel TO solace (a country he has no respect for) and moved them into an elven wizard school - forcing lofty expectations onto them as an extension of his own ambitions and success.

aelwyn singlehandedly destroyed his career forever.

by murdering the elven oracle literally inside of his house and committing an act of treason, all while plotting to bring kalvaxus back to his full power. she was arrested and held in solace but before anything could happen with that, her parents had an elven strike team free her from prison and drag her back to falinel where she was held in max security and

tortured with her father taking a direct role in overseeing her containment (he didn't see it as torture and in fact none of them did). adaine broke her out - she ran away from adaine out of fear of kalina and her parents, and that's about where her canon point cuts off

in canon she sticks up for adaine and then adaine punches his head clean off. aelwyn now however kind of just has a black hole of hatred and rage in her heart and mostly wants to return and kill them just to show she's over needing them and that she's done with taking orders. sometimes in her internal thought fantasies she thinks about sinking falinel too.

damian's dad is batman

he fucking sucks

it's complicated

i will do a breakdown on their relationship in a little bit because it is admittedly one of my favorite relationships in dc and it's my favorite out of bruce's relationships with his kids (second and third being. steph and jason. i like pain ig)

okay bruce wayne.

damian and bruce's relationship is kind of from it's very inception built on a fundamental tragedy. damian is a kid that never had a childhood and bruce is a man that will never grow up. there's a scene in one of the first issues of batman & robin (2011) where bruce makes a wish on a paper boat to send his regrets away and damian is quick to point out

that the paper boat will fall apart or get stuck, but bruce insists it'll float forever.

the big problem that bruce runs into with damian is that damian is the only robin that he can't actually abdicate responsibility for in any way. it's like, his first proper attempt at being an active parent rather than a distant parental figure since jason died as fucking sad as that is. and the problem they run into is that bruce struggles to see him

as more than like. a tragic duty. that he has to guide damian into the light. except it's bruce's much more active moral scrutiny that most frequently causes lapses in damian's morality. when bruce was gone, their relationship was simple and idealized. damian worshipped a promise he made and bruce was an ideal. and then he came back and the promise

became less of an act of faith and more of a restriction placed on him by outside forces. he will be what batman requires him to be no matter what. they had a much better relationship after batman & robin (2011) and they managed to genuinely connect despite their mutual struggles with being normal people (mostly because of that mutual struggle) and after

damian got over some of his deep rooted instability.

then alfred died

it's a tom king storyline so it's stupid and pretentious and nonsensical but it works. bane showed up, took the manor and alfred hostage with thomas wayne at his side for some fucking reason - damian and tim held the line and argued over how to proceed (damian wanted to storm the manor, tim advocated for a more wait and see approach)

Bruce meanwhile was recovering from a back injury on a beach resort with selina. and from that position he got an alert that alfred escaped, and so he gave damian the go ahead to storm the manor so he can get caught, escape, and bring the whole family in.

except alfred hadn't escaped so bane snapped his neck in front of damian. which left him with this very deep underlying belief that a massive part of what lead to this conclusion is that he, frankly, trusted his dad's strategy to be infallible and was proven brutally wrong

bruce tries to be a better parent to damian but he frequently falls short with bangers like "You're my son and I love you but sometimes I don't like you." "If I was there, I could have saved Alfred." "I'm terrified that you don't care about anyone but yourself." "If I can't trust you, I can't respect you."

oh also bruce wayne had prophetic fever dreams about damian becoming batman and burning the city of gotham to the ground that then comes true because of damian's own efforts to prevent it while condemning himself to live a life of neverending devotion to his dad's memory.

also damian went into the sewers and searched day and night for hours to find his grandmothers famous pearls that fell into the river - and presented one of them to his dad as proof that he did actually care and that he was actually listening. they're sooooo

lmao god angwyn is just so comically evil, apologies to the abernant siblings for getting stuck with this absolute supervillain

tbh their mother is more the supervillain he's just like

a pencil pushing bureaucrat who happens to be the worst person in human history

elf history

ig