experimenting with Saki too
might continue to play around with other finches
The council will decide your fate.
I might be wrong but I figured you'd be the person to ask: Someone in a Discord server I'm in was talking about the "popular fanon idea of Cass learning ASL and sometimes preferring it to speech." And I... don't think this is fanon? Doesn't she canonically know ASL? I know she learned English and (I believe) Mandarin but I'm almost positive there are also lots of canon instances of her signing.
Okay so I'm going to split this ask into two questions:
- Does Cass know American Sign Language (ASL), canonically?
- Could Cass learn ASL?
The answer to #1 is no, Cass doesn't canonically know ASL to my knowledge (caveat: this does not, apparently, apply to the Young Justice cartoon universe; Cassandra Wu-San does appear to know some form of legitimate sign language). Canon!Cass, on the other hand, knows some basic signs and does use them, but it's more charades, 'loud gesturing,' and basic hand signals than it is ASL. The reasons Cass knowing ASL is such a popular fanon misperception are rather complex, but it largely comes down to two things: misunderstanding how ASL works and misunderstanding what Cass's disability actually is.
ASL isn't just some fancy hand gestures that translate one-to-one into spoken English; that would be "baby sign" or spell signing at best. ASL is a language, with all of the complex grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure that implies. It takes years of learning and immersion to understand, learn, and utilize properly, just like any other language. Treating it as anything else is a form of ableism.
Someone like Cass who has difficulty processing language is going to have just as much trouble learning ASL as she would English, Mandarin, or any other language, because her problem isn't that she just "doesn't know English." Cass's disability is not that she can't read or communicate verbally: it's that her brain is literally built different because of how Cain raised her, and that affects how she processes language (and thus how she communicates with other people):
"David Cain…had some unusal ideas about combat. He experimented with infants. Trained them in isolation and deprived them of human speech. The goal was to adapt the language center of the brain to interpret physical movement as a language. She can…read you. Your body. That's why she understands what you're saying when she doesn't know the words. It's why in combat, she knows what you're going to do before you do it." -Batgirl (2000) #1
"The language centers of your brain are all over both hemispheres. Not centralized like with most people. When you try to read or write, your brain doesn't know how to keep it cohesive. But the good news is--you can learn. It's just a matter of figuring out how." -Batgirl #67
It's actually specified somewhere (I don't have the panel on hand, unfortunately) that she doesn't know sign language; Cain wanted her to read natural body language and nuance, not artificial hand gestures. Cass's primary "language" (and thus form of communication) until her brain was semi-rewired was body language.
But body language isn't actually a language; it's a form of non-verbal communication that functions through the (largely subconscious) 'reading' of both conscious and unconscious physical movement. Cass's childhood and training simply elevated that ability to ridiculous heights:
"A special ability to predict my opponent's moves. That doesn't begin to describe it. Time...ran together. The future...blending...into the moment. A blink of an eye...the knife thrust that follows...both one. It was like...like I could predict my opponent's moves. Okay, that does describe it. But it doesn't do it justice. All this knowledge. No substitute for knowing." -Batgirl (2000) #7
We see explicitly how this ability plays out on several occasions throughout her Batgirl run and the Detective Comics Rebirth run, and it's pretty clear she's reading subconscious feelings, thoughts, and movement, not language:
Cass absolutely communicates via hand gestures before and after Batgirl #4, but it's not any form of cohesive language, much less ASL. It's effectively advanced charades mixed with some universal non-verbal gestures:
"You don't speak any language, do you? Except violence." -Detective Comics (1937) #734
"Is he giving you any trouble?" *Cass flaps her hand to indicate the guy is a blabbermouth* "Got you. He talks too much." -Batman: Family (2002) #7
*Cass gestures to Jason's heart, Tim's mind, and Dick's voice to indicate she understands how they work as a team*-Batman and Robin Eternal (2015) #3
People learning a English as a second language already have an understanding of how language works, but Cass doesn’t have that foundation. Her primary language isn't sign language, it's body reading. Thus, she struggles to speak, read, and write in English not because it's a different language than she's used to communicating with but because it's the first actual language she's ever learned. Fanon largely projects ASL fluency onto Cass because they fundamentally don't understand how her abilities work (and thus don't understand how her disability works either).
Does Cass have the ability to learn ASL? Absolutely! Would ASL be a really cool way of depicting Cass communicating with other people and an interesting way to showcase language learning difficulties and communication disabilities in the visual medium that is comics? Absolutely! I would actually be genuinely thrilled if canon and the fandom actually worked with what a physical, visual-based language like ASL might mean for Cass's ability to communicate given her childhood training. But as it stands, "Cass knowing ASL" is a well-meaning but misguided fanon attempt to showcase inclusivity while being...well, frankly kind of offensive.
(As for why she would theoretically "know" Mandarin, it's a product of the incredibly racist and ableist writing that defined the "Evil Cass Era." This culminated in DC putting her on a bus and shipping her off to Hong Kong because "Asian girl knows Asian languages, right? Brilliant! Send her off!" while ignoring literally everything about Cass ever. She's never actually shown speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other dialect of Chinese on-panel, but we can reasonably infer she probably picked up SOME level of comprehension while living there.)
#I was writing a fic on Cass and that problem appears #no need to say it is sitting in my files until I see a realistic way for Cass to really communicate (@tank--shield-anda-cloud)
You can write her speaking; as I explained here, Cass has been able to process language largely "normally" since Batgirl #4. Her reading and speech disabilities mostly manifest through a long-term struggle to learn how to read/write and through delayed speech, largely represented by ellipses rather than broken syntax:
"Am I going to prison?" "I...don't know. Probably. But not...forever. And you...need to...remember. You did...one bad thing. But you're...not." -Batgirl: Secret Files & Origins (2002)
Cass is generally characterized by short, to the point sentences, but she's far from mute or non-communicative. She can be quite ‘loud’, sassy, cocky, and/or expressive when she wants to be (which is most of the time, because Cass is a pretty expressive person!):
She actually gets pretty consistently frustrated when she can't necessarily communicate precisely what she wants to because of her speech difficulties, like in the "Sounds" short (which chronologically appears to take place pretty early on in the pre-reboot universe):
"I do not need words to do what I do. But sometimes...I want them. There are a million things I can do better than anyone. But these words. Stick in my throat." -DC Festival of Heroes: The Asian Superhero Celebration (2021)
She's not going to be spouting monologues or using extraneous words where she doesn't feel they're needed, but she doesn't hesitate to make her feelings known or try to get her point across (even earlier on, when she's not particularly great at speaking):
And even in the current universe she's not exactly a "strong, stoic, silent" figure:
basically: Cass has a personality! She's not just there to occasionally give one-syllable responses and leave the room! She's way less chatty than most other Batfam members, but she likes to be heard and listened to just like everyone else; her struggles to achieve it are just different than most people.
i see a convo w a character ai and i keep scrolling
listen im seeing tags about people agreeing that ai bots can be really inaccurate and i want to point out that this is NOT about that. the ai bot can be as accurate as you want it to be i still get mad at em.
its not about how good they do at emulating a character, its about that they aren’t a person making creative choices and i hate that. i want to enjoy my characters with other people. hold my hand and tell me all about why you think your blorbo is autistic or likes your favourite shitty band. i love you. if a bot randomly shuffles those opinions out idc if theyre even the same ones im exploding it with my mind.
What’s the point of loving content if I know there isn’t someone as obsessively fucked up as me sitting on the other side of the internet
To dull the pain of DC’s treatment of Damian as of late, I compiled virtually every Damian hug I could find. Serotonin abound.
To The Person At The Bus Stop Holding A Bouquet of Red Roses by Jordan Bolton
Part of Scenes From Imagined Films Issue 3 - Order now on Etsy
