bigskydreaming:

So fun story. Fans trying to influence stories isn’t remotely new. It’s not something Sterek or Olicity or Stydia invented lol. Back in the eighties, when comic books still had letter pages in the back of each issue where they’d publish letters fans wrote and mailed in about the comics, they held a poll about the fate of the second Robin, Jason Todd. Since his debut, there’d always been a vocal section of fandom mailing in letters about how much they hated Jason and he wasn’t a worthy successor to Dick Grayson and how Dick was the only REAL Robin. 

So DC decided to hold a poll for the fate of Robin. They wrote a story where Robin ended up at Joker’s mercy and it was up to the fans to decide if he’d live or die. Fans voted via their phones not unlike what you’d do with American Idol or any of those shows. And according to the fans, Robin should die. So DC killed off Jason Todd. The story ended with the Joker murdering him and he became immortalized as Bruce Wayne’s dead son, Batman’s ‘fallen soldier’, a cautionary tale to the younger generation of heroes and the primary source of Batman’s angst for the next couple of decades. Of course, it wasn’t like they could really regress Dick Grayson to the Robin role, so he stayed Nightwing but they figured out pretty quick that the Batman titles were missing something without a Robin, so along came Tim Drake, and after him Stephanie Brown, and then Damian Wayne.

And of course, despite how much Jason was ‘hated’ at the time, martyring him in the comics did exactly what anyone with a brain could have predicted….it made him more central to the Batman mythos than he might have ever been if he’d lived. He was Bruce Wayne’s greatest failure, his biggest regret….and so of course, it being comics, that made his ultimate resurrection all but inevitable. It might have taken two decades but you can’t build a character up like that for that long and not expect that sooner or later SOME writer’s not going to come along and be like ‘okay but what do you think would happen if we took this character who’s impacted every Bat-character that ever existed…and brought him BACK?’

So they brought him back. And the once-hated Jason Todd became one of the most pivotal characters of the last decade and a half.

But here’s the funny part.

Years after the poll that killed Jason Todd, the writer responsible for that story came out with some interesting behind the scenes facts about the poll. Namely, the fact that they were pretty sure that one singular fan who worked as a computer programmer had jury-rigged his computer to auto-dial his phone so he could vote over and over again. He was notorious around the Batman offices for writing in dozens of letters about how much he hated Jason Todd and what a terrible character he was, and they were pretty sure he’d voted hundreds of times in the poll. Like, supposedly they’d calculated that he was responsible for over five hundred votes himself.

The writer also revealed that the ‘kill Jason off’ option only won by a couple hundred votes.

So yeah. It’s entirely possible that the death of Jason Todd, one of the most pivotal events in DC comics, only happened because one singular fan hated his character that much. 

Course, the flip side of that is that by ensuring his death, that one Jason Todd hating fan paved the way for his return as one of the most significant characters of the modern take on the Bat-family. FAR more relevant now than he likely ever would have been if he hadn’t died. If he’d lived, he probably would have eventually been replaced by another Robin anyway, and then just faded into obscurity.

So, you know. Its just funny how ‘fanatic’ behavior can backfire like that.

I mean. It makes me laugh at least.