It's finally happening. After a twenty-year absence, Dick Grayson is returning to live action for DC's Titans TV show, played by Brenton Thwaites, and we've finally gotten our first look at him in costume... Except it's not a Dick Grayson costume Thwaites is wearing. Right down to the color scheme, he's dressed like Tim Drake.

Why does it matter, you ask? Because it means that DC Entertainment is trying yet again to erase the single most important part of the Robin legacy: the scaly green underwear. Search your heart -- without even seeing the bottom half of the costume in the photo, you know this to be true.

And it's time for us to put our collective foot down, once and for all.

Hear me out. The original Boy Wonder's silhouette is iconic: The red tunic, the bright yellow, high collared cape, the pixie boots and the scale-mail underoos (okay, fine, sure, it was a full green leotard, but whatever). Yet, for some reason, DC has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the aspect of Dick Grayson's history never happened.

This historical erasure, this injustice obviously didn't start with the Titans show. The last time Dick was given a live action incarnation, back in 1997, he was also made to wear pants. It was a…complicated era for the live action Batfamily, for more reason than one, but at the very least both Joel Schumacher and Tim Burton's crack at both Nigthwing and Robin were organic to his movies.

What I mean to say is, they weren't, y'know, actually based off any legitimate source material for Dick Grayson, specifically.

Sure, maybe DC evoked Tim Drake a little bit, but who cares. Tim was the Robin of the '90s, so you can't really blame anyone for trying. But let's not pretend that Tim's Robin costume was anything more than an act of anti-underoo cowardice in and of itself: one of the first vague attempts at shoving the perfect, adorable spectre of the '40s into the shadows for good. The point is, the long pants and latex nipples stayed squarely in their cringeworthy '90s-saturated lane. They didn't hurt anyone.

...Okay, fine, maybe it kind of hurt. But still. It was something we could forgive and forget (kind of). No one was trying to edit the original look out of Dick Grayson's life all together, and, hell, even if The Animated Series was in on the whole long con of short pants erasure, at least we still had the comics, right? At least there was still one last bastion of hope for us.

But it was only a matter of time.

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Things began to go south for the first Boy Wonder's wardrobe in 2011, during DC's line-wide continuity reboot effort, New 52.

Now, the New 52 actually dropped us directly into Nightwing territory for Dick so people didn't pick up on just what had happened right away. We all knew that this version of Dick had been Robin at one point, but we didn't actually get to see it until we started seeing flashbacks.

The new origin story was pretty par for the course. It had been altered a little, sure, but it wasn't unrecognizable; Dick got some new twists thanks to the Court of Owls, Gotham's newest big bads, but that was fine. Really, almost all of it was fine -- different? Sure. But fine. All except for one thing: suddenly, in this new version of events, Robin wore pants.

Not just pants -- an an entirely different costume.

DC tried to pull a fast one. It tried to sweep it under the rug. It tried to sneak it by us so that we wouldn't notice. The New 52 version of "classic" Robin looked a lot like the Tim Drake version of Robin: full sleeves, covered legs, no jauntily collared cape, and not a single piece of scale mail in sight.

In short, it was a travesty.

The light and the joy had been vacuumed out of Dick Grayson's history, the party had been canceled, the fun had been surgically removed. Everything that made Dick Grayson's kid sidekick days iconic had been thrown out the window in favor of a costume some might call "practical." But practical for whom, I ask you? Certainly not Dick Grayson's fans.

Things only got worse from there. DC had a chance to undo its grievous fashion error with Rebirth, but instead, it only doubled down. Every flashback to Dick's childhood was buried beneath a mountain of lies. Like some Orwellian nightmare, DC tried -- is currently trying -- to make us believe that Dick Grayson's scaly underoos had simply never existed at all.

DC wants us to think Tim Drake's Robin outfit, spunky and cute as it was in it's own right, was the first, last and only uniform of Batman's sidekick.

DC wants us to forget our past.

"But Meg," you ask, "Why is it such a big deal? Costumes change. The original Robin look is too dated, now." That's where you're wrong, my friend. Not only is Dick's original look emblematic of an era, it's also evocative of his whole character. Let's be real: the Robins are a troupe of nearly identical blue eyed, black haired boys. Put 'em in a lineup and their own mothers would have trouble making the argument they weren't all biologically related to one another. But the reality is that the four of them couldn't be more different.

Costume design is a quick and easy visual queue to signify those differences. The easy, breezy, beautiful Robin costume is Dick Grayson. It's what defined the role, scale by shiny green scale. It's what embroidered the character into the zeitgeist. It's who we need him to be, in order for him to stand apart from his adoptive brothers and teammates.

It's time we stop collectively pretending that Dick's roots were anything but what they are. It's time we embrace the truth. It's time we rally in the face of this recurring cowardice and demand justice for yellow capes and scale mail. We must pull the wool from over our eyes and remember the truth.

Short pants and pixie boots or bust.