Spoiler

Stephanie Brown is nobody special. She's a pretty blonde teenager who attends Gotham Heights High School; a cheerleader who, if saved, will likely not lead to world salvation; a frequent fixture at YWCA gymnastics and self-defense classes. Oh, and her dad's a minor supervillain. No big, right?

The Spoiler is an earnest, if somewhat bumbling, young heroine. Her costume is pretty clearly homemade and her skills are by and large the sort that one would acquire after YWCA gymnastics and self-defense classes. Funny, that.

Background
There's not a lot to tell about the life of Stephanie Brown. She is a pretty average girl. Always has been. She was born to Arthur and Crystal Brown, a lower middle-class couple living in Gotham City, New Jersey. Her mother was a nurse, and, as far as Stephanie could see as she grew up, by far the major contributor to family finances. Her father spent a lot of time away. It wasn't until she was at least six years old that she realized that her father's long absences were not due to business trips, as she had been told, but because he was in jail.

As she started elementary school, Steph figured things out based on conversations around the house, both between her parents and between her father and the myriad brightly colored individuals who would come to the house looking for him. Her father was a villain called the Cluemaster. It would not be fair to call the man a thorn in Catwoman's side -- he was nowhere near sharp enough to be a thorn. Rather, he was a wannabe Riddler whose clues were typically obvious enough to bring the city's guardian feline to his location in minutes. He might as well have been arrested at home -- Stephanie, as she approached her tween years, came to the conclusion that SHE was the reason that Arthur was never arrested at home. There seemed to be a taboo against arresting a parent in front of a child.

But really, when one of those brightly colored felons came by the house when her father was not home and... well, Steph was only twelve and the things the man wanted to do to her were both disgusting and incredibly illegal. She kicked the man hard where it counted, hit him over the head with a cast iron frying pan, and then called the police herself. And her father was mad at HER. That was sort of the last straw. She began spending every possible moment at the YWCA, taking self-defense classes, gymnastics. She quickly became top of her class in phys ed, and by the time she was fourteen she was ready, she figured, for what she had in mind.

The costume was distinctly eggplant in color -- a dark purple that blended neatly into the Gotham night. The mask and boots were dark blue. It was all cut and sewn from an old skiing outfit that she found in a box in the attic crawlspace of her tiny home. The next time she heard her father discussing a new caper, she was prepared.

Stephanie secreted herself in a bathroom at the store she knew her father intended to rob, and when the doors closed and locked she changed into her costume and made her way into the main part of the building. Soon her father and his gang broke in, and as they split up to find the loot they came for, each in turn found the dark figure waiting for him. She saved her father for last, and it was the hardest fight -- both because he put up a greater fight than the others, having been tipped to something going on by a thud in the distance, and because she was trying very hard not to voice the sobs she was heaving as she beat her father into unconsciousness.

A year and a half later, Stephanie is still very angry at her father, and still has very mixed feelings about her part in his latest capture. She does not patrol so much, but the call of the costume is strong, and more and more frequently she has found herself pulling on the purple and blue garments and heading out into the streets after her mother goes to work for the night, tracking down muggers, vandals and gang-bangers and taking them down. The Spoiler lives.

Personality

 * Gutsy: It takes a certain amount of bullheadedness to take on Gotham City criminals with nothing but a mop handle, a can of mace, and what training you can pick up at the Y. It takes guts to stand up to your father and say 'what you're doing is wrong'. Stephanie Brown does these things. Steph does what she believes in, no matter what the odds may be against her. She knows what's right -- even if she doesn't have the money or training to make the sort of difference she'd like to.
 * Rebellious: Not only is Steph rebelling against her father's villainy, her mother would completely freak if she found out that her daughter was a costumed vigilante. There is a degree of teen rebellion in everything Spoiler does. She's likely to do the opposite of what authority figures tell her, even if they have a very good reason for telling her what she should be doing.
 * Angry: Spoiler has a lot of reasons to be angry. There's the fact that her dad's in jail (yeah, she put him there, but he didn't have to do the stupid things he did that made her take him down). Or how about her mom's addiction to a variety of pharmaceuticals. Or the way neither one of them protected her from the assholes that tried to molest her when she was younger -- her dad's buddies one and all. Or... well, there's no need to go through the whole list. Suffice it to say that Stephanie Brown is an angry young woman, and while that gives her drive it also leads her to make mistakes -- sometimes bad ones.
 * Well-Meaning: Steph may not be the greatest hero in town, but her heart, at least, is in the right place. She recognizes the proper order of things better than some heroes -- first you save potential victims, then you take down the villain. She'll break off from hot pursuit to save a kid who's about to fall. She's got the right idea and she means well -- even if she sometimes bumbles into major mistakes.
 * Bright: Stephanie is a smart girl. She gets good grades in school, even given her late-night activities, even given that she's half asleep in most of her classes. She's got a 3.8 average and while she's never going to make valedictorian, her grades combined with her SAT scores will almost certainly get her a good scholarship to the university of her choice in a few years.