#problematic characters

[princessofghosts-posts]

"But [insert name] is my comfort character 🥺 👉🏻👈🏻" and it's the most grey,tragic,traumatized,mental unstable,unhealthy,psychopath,intelligent,problematic one you will ever see. Every. Single. Time.

[prokaryoticnaven]

it has been ever so long since i have drawn let alone posted... thank you tumblr dot com for being so patient with me heres some oc stuff (more on the way!!)

[xunehh]

off the top of my head

[witcheshollow]

There are some characters that I am willing to take criticism on and then theres the aftg cast, nesta archeron, aelin and crew, fiona Gallagher, micky milkivich, sandy milkivich, Mandy milkivich, Damon Salvatore, violet sorrengail, xaden riorson and the rest of my problematic favs. They are the mfs that I just will not hear criticism on. You can point out their flaws till the cows are home, your blue in the face and Sunday had passed, i will not give two shits. They can do no wrong in my eyes.

[manufacturedrainbows]

It's so hard naming Bad Guy Tm characters because then I feel terrible for every real life person that also has that name

[shayera-the-magpie]

If you asked me personally back in circa 2015/2016 if I would have still liked Lxa if she were an man, I would have said, "yes." simply because I had an track record of liking male characters who were just as morally dubious, if not worse than her. One of them being an different Commander entirely who was featured on three episodes of another show. One who was also willing to throw another group of people under the bus for his own, though unlike Lxa he pretended to be on their side before Batman figured out the truth of his motivations. Yep, this guy right here.

[everyonesadoptivedad]

Stole this for this fandom bc some pEOPLE need to hear this today.

[problematic-tip-centre]

For anyone wondering:

•A backstory involving abandonment that affects the way the villain views certain situations (e.g Simon Laurent from Infinity Train Book 3)

•Caring towards someone else (other than their children)

•Experiencing horrors like war or death that hardened them

•Seeks to ‘right’ a wrong that has been done onto them by performing evil actions

•Is a nice person that fell into the wrong hands (abusive relationship, manipulated by extremist)

•Has unrequited love (performs evil actions both to cope with this love, or as a subconscious response to it, or maybe this love is unrequited because of their actions)

•Didn’t do anything that bad (e.g stealing, fighting or vandalism)

•Cannot control their evil (e.g blacks out or is forced to by another person)

•Has a vision for a better world which causes them to do evil

•Trying to prove that their worthy to an estranged, villainous loved one

•Wants to teach their victims good qualities by performing evil on them

•Trying to make amends for a mistake, but their attempts cause more harm (for instance they may become overprotective of others and destroy anything that they may see as a threat)

It’s not everything that makes a villain sympathetic, but it’s some things other than children (which are already good to give a villain nuance)

not the first person to say this but the main thing for female villains when it comes to thriving to make them more multifaceted and dimensional and empathetic for an audience being “but she loved her children… but she wouldve done everything for her children…” drives me up the fucking wall. the men do not get this same treatment at all. there is so fucking much other shit you can do to make these characters sympathetic

[enemywasp]

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A CHARACTER FLAW.

Last year everyone and their mother was complaining about all the Mary Sue ocs! Pick a lane!!

[irlplasticlamb]

everybody d/lies.

prints + merch + dm for commission info

[mckitterick]

[ ID: screenshot of a tweet by @RachelSketching: "people end up unable to see depiction as anything other than endorsement when their entire cultural diet is escapist fun and reassurance. they see something make them uncomfortable and can only assume people are watching horrible shit as vicarious pleasure and are horrified" /ID ]

depiction is not the same as glorification and I need people to get that 

[paradisekore]

severance writers are doing a rare portrayal of a female protagonist who is also her own antagonist, showing she’s capable of horrible, manipulative things because her upbringing repressed all the goodness in her and brought her inner conflict to life, making her have a literal psychic battle of self-loathing and showing the self harm she’ll do to her own self on both sides ….only for people to say “what a bitch she should just shut off her brain and let her other self take over completely, they aren’t even the same person really “ like... WHAT? 😭 does anyone like authentic storytelling and challenging character journeys ????

[folkdevilism]

I'm perpetually in awe at the number of people who are well in to their twenties and beyond who still think an on-screen portrayal of something, regardless of nuance or background context, automatically equates to inherent glorification or real-world endorsement of the actions being portrayed.

[thefloatingstone]

The older I get and the more terrible takes I see the more in favour I become of gatekeeping

[wishchip106]

i’m looking at those certain tiktok xmen fans

[kelaeri]

The Many Languages of Dick Grayson

Apparently, according to Nightwing #54, he can speak 12, so I went on a little quest to see just how many I could identify.

Starting off with The Essential Batman Encyclopedia, the entry for Dick Grayson lists him as being trained in French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese with having some proficiency in an unknown Romani dialect. Given there are multiple examples of him speaking these languages throughout the comics, I am inclined to trust this claim. To start, we've got several examples of French (Gotham Knights #14, Detective Comics Annual #12, Nightwing #73, Grayson #10-- also featuring Spanish)

In Grayson #1 he speaks Russian only briefly, but in Detective Comics #36 he speaks it throughout.

As far as the Chinese languages go, while I believe Dick can speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese fairly well (Batman/Superman World's Finest #3), his Hanzi recognition and literacy could use some work.

Similarly, when the Titans head off to Japan in Titans Annual #1, we have Nightwing speaking Japanese in battle; however, when it comes to the prospective job of being a manga translator in Nightwing #125, he claims he doesn't know Japanese, which leads me to believe he is only proficient in speaking Japanese/Chinese and struggles with the writing systems.

So what about the languages not covered in the encyclopedia? To start, we have another romance language: Italian (Nightwing #72).

Followed by some alleged German (Nightwing #51, JLA #44)

And conversations in Farsi (Robin #175)

While I've seen some Tumblr and Reddit posts claim he knows Kikuyu, The Power Company: Manhunter #1 only says he "brushed up" on his Kikuyu before going to Kenya, so it is unknown how much of the language he actually speaks, but to me it doesn't seem likely to be a lot.

He also, to some unknown degree, speaks Tamaranean-- at least enough to hack into an alien computer (Action Comics #842).

As far as unspoken languages go, Dick is fluent in ASL, which is proven numerous times when he communicates with Jericho (New Teen Titans 1984).

And lastly, the two languages that remain rather uncertain are Romani and Cant-- largely due to the nature of the languages themselves and their representation in comics. "Romani," for instance, has several different dialects, and when Devin Grayson introduced it for Dick (Gotham Knights #20-21, Nightwing #91), she never specified which, and based on the lines she wrote, her research into the language was questionable at best. Writers since have recognized Dick's Romani heritage, but have not otherwise suggested he retained much of the language to be considered fluent.

Cant is an even wider term than Romani and can be seen as more of jargon for a particular language than a language itself, sometimes even being called a "pseudo-language." The colloquial term for American circus cant is Carny, or "Carny speak" as Boston Brand puts it in Batman: The Brave and the Bold #14 when he and Nightwing encounter a kid who speaks it.

So... this leaves us with 11 languages Dick has notable proficiency in: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Farsi, and ASL. And ~3 languages he has unknown proficiency in: Tamaranean, Kikuyu, Romani, and Carny/Cant (if you want to count it).

Maybe memory-loss Dick was including either Tamaranean or Kikuyu in that count from Nightwing #54, or maybe he knows some other language we haven't seen yet. Given how close the family is to the Al Ghuls, I personally think it would be cool if one of them was Arabic.

But anyway, hope you enjoyed this post! A lot I've seen covering this topic are very surface-level and label some of his more iffy languages as "fluent," so I hope this cleared things up. I've read tons of Nightwing, and I swear there are more examples, but sifting through the 1,000+ comics I've read of him is a lot haha. If y'all know of some others, let me know!