>>149703148Again, some people joked he and Bruce were doing butt sex in the Wayne Manor, but that's it.
He's the character young boys self-insert as so they can pretend they're going on adventures with Batman. Everyone understood that. He was never on the same league of popularity as Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, etc. but was well respected for what he was and had his fans.
You're also putting the cart before the horse with TT cartoon. It wasn't supposed to push Robin; It was supposed to push the other characters using Robin as a hook. Little Jimmy became a fan of Robin from the DCAU, Burton movies or even the comics themselves, and now he's getting his own show where he and a bunch of brand new sidekicks (from Jimmy's perspective) are fighting whole sorts of brand new villains (again, from Jimmy's perspective).
So now little Jimmy is watching this new show, exposing himself to "new" characters and suddenly Raven goes from a literal who to one of the most popular characters in Western pornography. This only worked because Robin was there to get people in, and would have failed miserably if no one gave a shit about him.
But even if we assume Robin was a joke before the 03 cartoon, it still doesn't make sense in the context of DCSHG 2019.
What do you think is more likely: That Clark Kent was also a "joke of a meaningles loser" along with Hal Jordan and it's all just a throwback to ancient geek culture, or that the openly feminist Lauren Faust painted iconic male characters in a negative light to make her de facto OCs look better in comparison?
Look man, I liked the horse show too, but you are allowed to criticized Faust when she does something so blatantly disrespectable for ideological reasons.