At a time when the Robins are more divided than ever, will something as innocuous as LARPing lead to their ultimate defeat?
WARNING: This article contains MAJOR spoilers for Robins #4, on sale from DC Comics now!
Since donning the colorful tights and joining Batman’s crusade against crime, the Robins have faced brutal life-ending threats every single day of their lives. Until now, they’ve managed to beat everything that’s come their way. But the newest threat to their lives is deeply personal to them and could lead to their final downfall – and all because of Live Action Role-Playing (LARPing).
LARPing, for those unaware, is a form of role-playing where players physically embody the characters they’re playing. Their actions represent their characters in imaginary settings, all in service of weaving epic narratives. In modern times, LARPs and alternate reality games (ARGs) are often must concurrently to tell one cohesive narrative. Currently, Matt Reeves’s The Batman is seemingly using an ARG to promote the film.
Robins #4 (by Tim Seeley, Baldemar Rivas, and Romulo Fajardo Jr) reveals the next step in Jenny Wren’s brutal plan to tear down the Robins from the inside out. After stopping the Robins’ warpath against Anarky and his disciples, Stephanie Brown explained coercion lay at the bottom of all these violent interactions. An immersive gaming platform made people forced to play it literally believe they were Gotham’s worst supervillains. Essentially, they were LARPing to the extreme. Worse, Brown discovers four narrative drives built explicitly for the Robins by Wren.
So far, the Robins series has been keen on reflecting on the Robins’ careers. It centers the cost of their time in the colorful tights. At their first meeting, they agreed being Robin was bad for them. Still, good or bad, their experiences bind them to one another. The main villain’s plan seeks to break those ties, making the Robins unsure in their positions as superheroes and within the Bat-Family. Showing them lives where they never underwent the trauma of being Robin furthers her agenda. If they prefer the LARP version of themselves, it leaves them wide open for a surprise attack while lost in another world. Even if only one gets lost in these alternate realities, the team is left vulnerable.
Rash as ever, Dick Grayson used his drive immediately. He wakes, as Agent 37 of Spyral, a life he’d left behind. In this false reality, he began to believe everything he experienced after Spyral was just a terrible dream. Writing off the Robins as bad dreams could leave him unavailable and unwilling to swing in to help his brothers and sisters in green, yellow, and red.
But much like how the loopholes in Batman’s data led to the Robins being able to take down the junior super-criminals masquerading as Gotham’s most twisted supervillains, these narrative drives might lack essential information. They reflect what Batman thinks of his family. Inevitably that perspective is flawed and biased. Given that he’s often proven not the best at dealing with his family, the programming flaws may prove quite significant.
For example, when Dick Grayson was Agent 37, it was an intensely lonely experience for him. He was farthest from the Bat-Family and his friends like Wally and Donna that he had ever been. While trauma fills the Robins’ lives, so does a love and sense of community they would never have found otherwise. A virtual experience built on Batman’s knowledge of Dick’s time with Spyral may not account for that loneliness. Thus, revisiting life as 37 may end up being as unappealing as it was the first time around. Moreover, when Grayson left Spyral, he gained a newfound understanding of what it meant to be part of the Bat-Family. As a result, he might actually leave the simulation more committed to the team than ever.
The other Robins will likely face similar situations, virtual scenarios that seem to deliver dream outcomes but are undermined with fatal flaws. To fully extract themselves from these LARPing traps, they’ll need to rely on the one thing they have over their mentor — their community. If they can’t reaffirm that bond after their alternate reality experiences, it could mean the Robins’ final flight draws nearer by the second.
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