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gothamite-rambler · 1 month ago

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Toby and Melissa Dowd being decent parents to Bernard

Yes these are made up names, no I don't want to change them... I like these names now lol. After doing months of research on the batfam and then their dating partners I think Bernard has untapped potential and don't want to hear any arguments saying otherwise. This is the story of the parents being dysfunctional, but they do love their son.

Bernard: Why did you and Dad get into a fight with the Smiths at the dinner party?

Melissa (icing her eye with a bag of peas): They had the nerve to ask why we brought you and Tim to the club house party, and we told them that 'What's the issue he love attending these parties!"

Bernard: Right, so you lied. Go on.

Toby (dipping his left hand in a bowl of ice): Yeah, the usual stuff. They started throwing passive-aggressive comments about how we didn’t raise you right. We thought they were talking about you joining a cult.

Melissa: Usually, we come up with excuses to walk away, but they just kept going on about how you’re bad, part of a mafia... and then we wanted clarification. That's when Will called you a...

Toby: Bundle of sticks. Among a string of other insults. So, I responded like any good father with anger issues would: I punched him right in his damn rhinoplasty nose.

Melissa: And when Sheila doubled down on what Will said and that your being with men was just a phase we could "cure", I wasted my glass of wine by throwing it in her face and went for her fake extensions. Sorry we made a scene, Bernie.

Bernard (genuinely happy): Why are you apologizing? That's an awesome reason to get kicked out of a stupid party! You guys defended little old me and Tim?

Toby: Yeah, if anyone insults you for being queer, we’ll defend you... Is "queer" okay to say?

Bernard (smiling): Not... really, but thank you for defending us. I appreciate it.

Toby: Anytime, son.

Melissa (patting her son on the arm): We’re not perfect, but we love you and Tim... right, Toby?

Bernard (dryly): I love Bear. I think Tim’s kind of weird, but okay. Shame we won’t be able to show our faces at that clubhouse again, but honestly, it was kind of worth it.

Esmeralda, the family maid, pulled out her phone and handed it to Toby.

Esmeralda: I beg to differ. I found a few videos of you two fighting that homophobic couple, and now you have a lot of supporters. I'm actually proud to be working for you guys now.

Toby (seeing how popular they are online): The Smith's got banned from the clubhouse too! Melissa, people actually like us!

Melissa: Because we beat up people who insult our son... oh my goodness... We did a good thing! Up top!

Melissa and Toby high-five, cheering their newfound popularity, while Bernard could only laugh. Toby winced realizing he high fived with his broke hand.

Bernard: Honestly, this actually makes you guys seem not so bad as parents. Semi-decent, even.

Toby: Semi-decent... I can work with that.

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jesncin · 2 months ago

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we need to talk about dc pride 2025-

PURELY from a consumer perspective!! I'm not writing this in an antagonistic way just because I'm part of the DC Pride fanzine (which I'm very proud of, you should check it out)- I just really want to talk about it and I feel I'm entitled to an opinion as gay book king of 2025 so HERE WE GO

To catch you up to speed, the DC Pride specials are usually anthologies with a handful of short stories highlighting and celebrating DC's canonically queer characters, with an all queer creative team (as is tradition). They're ordinarily self contained stories. This year though it looks like they tried to be more ambitious- and the stories are all connected to a bigger plot. In my humble opinion this was a huge mistake.

It's the nature of anthologies to have hit and miss stories! You've got a huge pool of creatives and some of those writing styles or stories aren't going to vibe with you. But that's no biggie, because you can just hop onto the next story and start fresh. It's what I've come to enjoy about anthologies! And I found this an accessible way to learn about DC's queer characters through these short stories.

BUT THAT'S NOT THE CASE FOR THIS YEAR'S SPECIAL. The overarching plot that all the Pride stories are under follow a magic plot where all queer characters across universes are trapped in a fantasy world (where they supposedly have all their desires granted) and need to snap out of it to get back into the real world. A character named Ethan Rivera, a trans man who served in the war, is usually the one to snap people out of it. This Pride Special serves as a backdoor-pilot style origin story for Ethan.

The story serves as a spiritual sequel to Alan Scott's recent solo comic. Years ago, Alan and his ex carved a heart onto this wall in a gay bar, unknowingly imbuing it with magic. In modern times, the wall and the bar its in are going to be turned into a parking lot, another gay monument lost to history. Suddenly it's doing some cosmic horror stuff where every queer character is sucked into a fantasy and regroup there.

(this dialogue is so....uh trite and on the nose I'm sorry afasdf)

This might seem like a new fun way to shake the Pride specials up- you get an overarching plot and everyone gets to interact with each other. There's a main character to help follow you through the action, theoretically giving you the opportunity to explore more depth in conflict than your usual short self contained Pride story, etc.

But no. It did the opposite for me. The overarching plot put some serious constrains on the writers, forcing them to essentially write the same plot over and over again.

Character is in a fantasy, something is off, Ethan snaps them out of it, and they all end up in a "home base of operations" where they get exposition dumped and caught up to speed with the magic shenanigans happening.

Interesting at first but very quickly overstays its welcome!! I couldn't escape the loop. I wasn't granted the freedom of a fresh start to read a new story, it was the same plot. Again and again and again.

I can sense some writers really trying with the limits they're given. Vita Ayala's The Question segment was among the stronger stories! And I felt a sense of this character's personality and history way more than the others.

Other characters weren't so lucky. Connor Hawke has been done so dirty this year. Not only was he whitewashed in a Pride illustration (that accompanies this collection), with half his face covered to add insult to injury- but he got a meager 2 pages of backstory before being cast to the side. And the writing was among the worst of the collection. Tragic.

(these panels summarize all these stories' plots. Just the same thing rinse and repeat)

Lowkey hate that the ace character's "celebration" this year is getting smooched on and then cast aside for a bigger plot. Justice for Connor.

Quick roundup of stories I want to talk about- sorry if I don't include your fav! This was just such a repetitive read that they all sort of melt together in my mind.

Any Apollo and Midnighter fan can go in more detail over how these complex morally grey characters get watered down to being sanitized Pride ads every year, so I'm going to review this on just the basic storytelling level. The premise is that the fantasy these two husbands are stuck in is a tongue-in-cheek respectable sitcom. "vigilante justice" is "legalized" but whenever someone violently threatens the gay couple, Midnighter can't really kill them. They turn into confetti.

I can sense this is trying to poke fun at respectability and censorship but it lands flat for me. Why are there people threatening them with slurs and guns if it's an escapist paradise? I've never seen a cute sitcom have that. It doesn't help that this idyllic fantasy is literally a desire for Apollo. That the reason they're stuck there is that one of them actually likes it there. If they went a more WandaVision route where they were stuck in a censored reality where they can't boink and have to dress as respectable sweater-wearing neighborhood gay dads, this could've poked fun at the company's own problems with softening edgy queer characters. Just a fascinating case study of attempting rebellion within a company.

Quick note for Harley's story. It basically says that all her modern motivations boil down to wanting a girlfriend. If that isn't a summation for how these characters lose all depth after being canonized as queer I don't know what is.

We need to talk about the Blue Snowman story. Or what I like to call, "this year's contender for "Pride is a Party""

Summarized perfectly by Dizzy on twitter as

The Blue Snowman's fantasy is that they're outed by Wonder Woman when she uses the Lasso of Truth on them. Forced to come to terms with their fluid gender identity, they imagine being graciously accepted and defended by the world against Wonder Woman, with her labeled as "Not An Ally". (we'll talk about how Wondie's canonically queer later in the conclusion)

I get that it's a joke, that the Blue Snowman is self deprecating, insecure, while also being egotistical enough to frame Xanthe Zhou as an "unimportant trans person"- who is inspired by the Blue Snowman to be queer. But it's not funny. And reads like a conservative "the gays are so fragile" comic. Again, this is presented to us as the Blue Snowman's secret desire. Much like the Apollo and Midnighter one, any commentary it's trying to make doesn't land.

Xanthe and Blue Snowman only "reconcile" in a quiet sequence of panels where Blue Snowman begrudgingly holds Xanthe's hand. The one time this comic decides to shut up, it does this. Justice for Xanthe because they barely get stories outside of these DC specials, and the one time they return it's to be insulted and barely apologized to.

The Blue Snowman story is the most trans focused narrative out of the entire collection this year (outside of Ethan exposition dumping his origin story). And this is what we got.

In between everyone's stories, we see Ethan in a dreamscape fantasy realm that is very beautifully rendered! Props to A.L. Kaplan!!

Even though I visually love these pages, I did find them disruptive to the flow of stories. It didn't help that Ethan sort of intrudes on everyone's stories to snap them out of their fantasies- I just found it all annoying to read. I couldn't really get into each character because they were mandated to follow a specific structure. In the end I still don't have a grasp of who Ethan is as a character either, despite all that screen time.

Ethan just tells us his origin, we don't experience it with him. He explains to us how he feels about everything. He is entirely a tell not show character.

He'll even explain what the metaphors represent to the reader. "Because it feels as though everything I've done since then has involved a transition of some kind. It's like I'm always transitioning. Like this place." "It's a beautiful tribute Alan. And look what you started! These carvings, this wall...it's like a monument. it represents everything you and so many others were feeling." This is real dialogue. He literally tells us what the wall represents like we're too foolish to know.

The dialogue in general was a pain to read. Everyone sounded like a Joss Whedon character. They'd say the most obvious on the nose thing, in a weak attempt to hide it as quirky charisma. It was not working.

(just because you lampshade your writing by showing characters being bored of exposition doesn't mean it's suddenly good writing!!)

It got exhausting to read hope speech after hope speech of characters talking in corporate prideisms that I found myself wanting to skim through the pages because I felt I wasn't learning anything new. And when I say these characters yap, I mean they YAP.

Godspeed to the letterer team because what the heck!!

All this text and for what? More cosmic red lantern magical nonsense.

Anyway the interconnected story ends abruptly. After yelling at the cosmic image of Alan's ex, Ethan returns to the graffiti wall in the gay bar with all the other queer characters transported back to where they came from. And the ending is...surprisingly passive about its conclusion.

There's a strange resignation to the characters. Despite being literal superheroes who have attachment to this gay bar and graffiti wall that houses generations of queer expression, they just kind of give up on saving a queer historical monument. They don't even try.

This is all lamp shaded under a "the fight never ends" speech from Alan. But like, again- y'all didn't try. You didn't fight for the place. You are just telling me that you are. "It's always been that way, and it always will be. That's what we get right? That and the privilege of hoping that, because of what we do, the next generation and the next may get more." A bit of an oxymoron to say it's always the same and hope the next generation will get it better.

I understand what this collection is going for. Deeper, interconnected conflict for its queer characters that you wouldn't normally get in its typical anthology format. It's even trying to end in a more somber note. They don't save the gay bar and its graffiti wall. They move on.

But it's lacking nuance in its garbled hope speech by the end. I understand that "It gets better" can become an irritating platitude to hear when historically, we know it doesn't always get better for marginalized people. I think if the story ended with "Things don't always get better. It can get worse if we're not careful, that's why we have to keep fighting." And show your characters being active instead of just accepting queer erasure when it happens, that could be really resonant with the current political climate. Instead we get this passive resignation. Anti-hope disguised in hope speeches.

Quick review of the Jenny Blake auto bio in the end. It's cute, though I have some thoughts. Inevitably when these collections feature an auto bio comic, they feel more authentic because they're about a real person.

I do find it ironic that Blake starts this comic by saying "just as no two human beings are exactly alike...no two lgbtqia+ stories are exactly alike" when it's featured in an anthology about queer characters experiencing the same "I'm in a fake fantasy, whoa time to wake up into the real world! What going on? Someone exposition dump me please" story over and over and over again. I had lost a lot of my patience by the time I made it to the end of this collection. And this felt like a punch in the face in the funniest way. Amazing lack of self awareness.

I have a nitpick for this later part though. Blake says "Evil reared its ugly head, and my country descended into cruelty and madness. Playing it safe was no longer an option. I needed to represent as my true self. I would not hide in the closet waiting for the bigots and transphobes to come find me!"

It's very cloying in its delivery. But I take issue with framing closeted people as shameful cowards who won't live their truth. Just "waiting for bigots to come find them". If things are hard for you in Texas (or anywhere for that matter) as a trans person, being in the closet doesn't make you any less queer. You're just protecting yourself the way Superman does when he's being Clark Kent.

NOW FOR BIG CONCLUSION FEELINGS

The DC Pride anthologies are always interesting to me for the wrong reasons. I'm fascinated by them like it's performance art. They're an annual celebration of the company's queer characters and staff. But they're also Pride ads. Sometimes there's little gems in the collection, but for the most part its watered down and corporate. I love dissecting all the ways they represent respectability, assimilation and the struggle between art and commerce.

This collection's existence is proof- evidence if you will- that queer writers don't always make great queer stories. Because they're human beings.

So this year's collection showing ambition to break away from the celebration-style writing to be more interconnected and somber, but still managing to feel corporate is a case study that my brain can't stop chewing on. Despite its deviance from the norm, it still follows DC's limitations with queer rep.

DC has so many more queer characters than those that show up in their Pride specials. And they even have huge mainline queer characters that mysteriously never show up in Pride.

Remember how the Blue Snowman comic joked about Wonder Woman not being an ally? Well. She's not. Because Diana's a canonically queer character. But DC doesn't market her that way. To the general audience, DC wants you to believe that Nubia is the queer Themysciran, the queer member of wonderfam. Despite Wonder Woman being a queer headline Trinity member, DC wants you to remember that Diana is for the boys. So they can't have her in the Pride anthologies.

Same with Selina Kyle, she may be Catwoman, she may have kissed a woman, but she's for the boys. So both her and Diana have a magical restraining order from the Pride Specials. A Lasso of Lies if you will. Catman can be here, though. Allies like Nightwing can be featured too.

Bi representation in DC is very bi-nary (pun intended). When Harley Quinn was canonized as bi, she's written like a lesbian character. Modern Harley solely hits it up with women, and has no feelings for men. Even in this collection she's being creeped on by a dude and has to reject his advances as she chases her girlfriend. It's as though DC resigned and said "fine, Harley's for the girls".

When Tim Drake came out as bi, he's virtually been written as a gay man. All his previous relationships with women are written off and discarded. Highlighting his gay relationship as the true relationship.

When Jon Kent came out as bi, he never says the word "bi". And is written to be a gay character. Yeah he's in dramatic love triangle right now, but we can't have our biggest multi-flag wearing mascot cheat and feel complex about this. That would be a bad bi stereotype! We can't have that.

The luckiest we get is bi characters like John Constantine. Who flirts constantly with men- but only has deep, character-defining romantic relationships with women. That's as good as it gets. He'll get bi jokes tossed at him though. We can't have everything.

That's only one out of the many ways corporate mingling messes with these characters. How it stops them from being truly transgressive. Because this Pride Special, for all its ambitions, just has the same foundational problems of the collection's usual offerings.

Only this time, in my opinion, there was no standout or good story. Because they were all the same story. They were forced to be. Which is deeply ironic for a Pride special.

#ramblings #jesncin dc meta #big big pride special review but i come in peace- i just like analyzing things #i was gonna write other things but this year's pride special captured my brain. held it hostage if u will.

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