Tony S. Daniel hits on a way to make a young girl not look like an older woman who he's drawing like a young girl: tomboy her up!
This is the issue that says things that have already been said in lots of other comic books in other places. Once again, a Batman villain has gone through the same kinds of things that young Bruce Wayne went through but--surprise, surprise!--they turned into a jerk! But Mother gets to parallel Batman maybe even more than most of the others because she went the Batman route and began training young people traumatized by life to follow in her footsteps. So now the mirror can be held up to Batman's sidekicks so that readers can stop pointing out how awful putting children in danger is and they can go, "Oh! Batman is doing the right thing! Um, at least compated to what Mother is doing!"
The Harper Row aspect of the story just seems like somebody spoke up in an editorial meeting and asked, "Why is Batman so adverse to training Harper Row when he's taken in so many other kid sidekicks? Sexist!" But now we see why he kept turning her away! Because he was trying to deny that Mother had any influence on Harper's life at all. He was also trying to do to Harper what Alfred has been doing to Bruce in the recent issues of Batman. Deny them their destiny just so that they can be boring prats! Or something. I might have gotten the point of it all wrong.
I'm just about to the "A Lonely Place of Dying" in the 80s New Titans comic books but I won't be reading it. Too bad because it would be interesting to reflect on Batman and his sidekicks through the lens of that story. The reason I won't be reading it is complicated and...well, okay it's not complicated but I'm not going to go into it here so it'll seem more mysterious and less boring than it really is.
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