Quote Originally Posted by km_sus View Post
In general, I'm very opposed to any sort of regression or "going back" for a character. Once the cat's out of the bag there's no trying to put it back. It's why I don't like characters like Tim becoming Robin or Barbara being Batgirl again (even though she's been Batgirl again for ten years). And since someone else said it: yes, I am a Cass fan - but I don't think she should go back to being Batgirl. She's fine as Black Bat, she just needed a better costume.



What I'm getting from this and this:



... is that Barbara needs an evolution of some kind.

I know there's a knee-jerk reaction when I say that Barbara should leave Batgirl behind, but I'm still not saying that she just go back to Oracle. If there's one thing I'm excited for in Taylor's upcoming Nightwing book is the possibility that Barbara might actually forge out a new identity and role in the bat family. If Oracle is outdated and Batgirl isn't unique, then she needs something new.

I know it's obvious that I don't like Barbara as Batgirl, but "outgrowing" Batgirl doesn't need to be a bad thing. I just think that Barbara doesn't need Batgirl anymore.
Setting aside the antipathy for Barbara as Batgirl, I do think there's room to do more with Barbara as Oracle. They could, for example, make her the first netrunning superhero. Comics are a visual medium, and having someone **** around in front of a computer screen and talk about what she's doing can only go so far. But if you present her online activities as if they were taking place in a Tron-like digital landscape, turning a hacking session into the visual equivalent of a night patrol of Gotham City, you could do something about that impression that Oracle is “just Batman's secretary”.

It needn't even be literal netrunning in the classic cyberpunk sense; you could make it clear to the reader that the “cyberspace scenes” are purely metaphorical, merely a way to present in a visually interesting manner what Babs is doing when she's hacking. That said, making her an actual netrunner who can interact with the digital world through some sort of virtual reality and/or augmented reality interface could be interesting, too. Maybe even leverage the “miracle cure” that have her back the use of her legs as the basis for a “net-jacking” interface.

That said, I wouldn't take away the Batgirl thing. Oracle works well as an online persona; but there will be times when Barbara needs to get physical. In the Birds of Prey, that's where Black Canary and, later, Huntress came in; they did the physical work that Babs couldn't because of her wheelchair. But as a solo heroine, she'd need to do that sort of stuff herself. And “Batgirl” works well for that side of things.