#however i'm taking my tags

[ryanthedemiboy]

[Gif of a video game detective looking guy holding a cigarette as he ages from like 25 to 60 in under two seconds]

[hinamie]

in spite of everything, I had fun <3

[son-of-avraham]

One thing I love about people who are more frum than me is that two minutes after havdalah has seen shabbos away, they're sending you texts, emails, phone calls and it's like clockwork! I find it funny but more than that, I think it's iconic

[rasoyas]

exploring the secret lab, 6/6 🧪

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

I'm slowly making my way through a new project- editing the entirety of the album PUNCH by Autoheart to the Life Series.

I was originally planning to post all of the edits in order of the songs on the album, but I instead made the Lent one first and am too excited to keep it in my drafts any longer while I work on the first four songs of the album (especially since we're coming up on finals seasons and the amount of time I'll have to work on these is gonna plummet so fast). So instead, I'll be posting them as I make them and make a masterpost of them all in order at the end.

That being said, I hope you enjoy this! I'm really proud of it and a lot of work went into it.

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[hellohoihey]

Sara & Felice - s1e1

(just trying out making gifs - may or may not be doing more of these in the future 😅)

[wannablowloverboysonelastkiss]

the katniss and careers foils are katniss and careers narrative foiling!!!!

[scarlet-witchery]

—House of M #7 // marsadist (via twitter) // amal el-mohtar and max gladstone, this is how you lose the time war

[beneathsilverstars]

if i failed to protect my kid during the apocalypse and they almost died wandering on their own but got rescued by a team of four competent, battle-experienced adults who cared about them very much and made them feel less scared and useless but refused to let them fight, i think that would be a pretty decent outcome and i'd be pretty okay with it. sure i could dream up a better situation but there's a hell of a lot of worse ones too.

[suudonym]

stream of consciousness thoughts about jp>en translation as it pertains to closeness in demon society, etc.

it's no mystery that when iruma asks azz and clara if he can think of them as friends, the word he uses is 友達/tomodachi. it's a casual word that denotes... you know, a friend. someone you like to spend time with. very straightforward.

there's also a more formal word for friend, 友人/yuujin, but to the best of my knowledge this one doesn't get used in mairuma, and this may be because it seems to strictly avoid using the 人 kanji (hito/jin/nin/person). it's often said that the way 人 is written makes it look like the two strokes are supporting one another, implying that people are things that live with the support of others. to my understanding this isn't the actual origin of the glyph, but it is a fairly common saying - and so it fits the worldbuilding nicely that the highly egocentric demons don't have 人 in their language. they do use the word "hito" sometimes, but I can't recall seeing it written in kanji

speaking of words demons do have, we see 仲間/nakama quite a bit, but while there are plenty of situations where it's valid to translate nakama to "friend," you don't actually have to like someone to consider them thus. someone is your "nakama" when you're united under the same banner, so to speak. it could be a classmate or a teammate or a coworker - anyone you share circumstances and goals with. the fact that this is one of the most friend-adjacent words demons have is also very like them.

demons also have 仲良し/nakayoshi and 仲が良い/naka ga ii, both of which describe getting along with and having a good relationship with someone. so demons do clearly have the concept of friendship, even if they don't have the word for it.

anyway, soulmates. the word iruma uses to describe what azz is to him is 親友/shinyuu, which is... I mean, it's really hard to translate this as anything but "best friend." it's a very close friend and/or someone you've been friends with for a long time. however, there's two reasons it's hard to translate 親友 to "best friend" specifically in the context of mairuma, both of which are summed up in this exchange:

it's a word that azz doesn't recognize. demons have the word "best" and azz knows the word "friend," so why would he have to ask what a "best friend" is? shinyuu sounds completely unlike tomodachi, so to have the same effect, the english word used to translate it also has to sound completely unlike "friend"

iruma's kind of embarrassed about it. "best friend" is usually a rather light term in english and not one we'd typically get flustered talking about. your best friend might just be the person you like spending time with more than anyone else. you could be talking about the past and say someone "was your best friend back then" and it doesn't necessarily suggest that you had a falling out or anything, you might have just kind of drifted apart or met someone else you got even closer to or something similar. I don't know if I'm explaining this completely accurately but from what I gather, "shinyuu" is more of an intimate, time-tested friendship. there seems to be a certain level of emotional vulnerability associated with it that "best friend" doesn't always convey by default.

if absolutely pressed for an alternative translation, I might posit "kindred spirit," but that doesn't quite feel like as natural a thing to say as "soulmate." I do think it's a shame that it has that automatic romantic connotation, but honestly that's society's failure. embrace the concept of platonic soulmates, you cowards.

anyway, them's the thoughts.

[canisalbus]

Hii!!! Hello I just discovered your blog and oh my god im absolutely hooked I love machete so muchhh. I’ve known machete for a day and a half and if anything happened to him I’d kill everyone in this room and then myself- /ref (machete: *gets assassinated* me: a.)

Anyway!!! because of that I’ve really wanted to draw him and I was wondering if you’re okay with me posting it 👀 with proper credit of course and I’d tag you! Ik not everyone is comfortable with that so I thought I’d ask.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

pray for me please

[royalarchivist]

Pac: This is my secret base. And this is Pequito!

Fit: Pequito! *Immediately starts cooing over Pequito*

Pac: [Laughs]

Fit: Sorry, sorry.

Pac: No no, that's good! He likes you, you know, he likes you.

[electroniccollectiondonut]

I have not been in this fandom long enough to reasonably judge others' takes however. "EPIC fans are so silly to characterize odysseus as feeling guilty for his actions don't you know he's a war criminal" is definitely a wild one. like first of all to each their own so settle down and let people enjoy things ok. and secondly making choices with a bad outcome, even knowingly and deliberately, does not exclude the possibility of feeling bad about it later. in fact it makes for a much more in depth character because then you get to explore what he does or doesn't feel guilt over, and why, and if that guilt ever edges into regret or not.

[lynxfrost13]

would you guys still love me if hypothetically something bad happened to Kosmos and Dorredt