caseoftheblues

[caseoftheblues]

Alright kids say it with me

My thoughts don’t make me a bad person

My feelings don’t make me a bad person

My thoughts, feelings, and impulses only exist inside my head, and none of it matters unless I act on it

Nobody can see my thoughts or emotions

The only things anyone can see and judge me on are my actions

There’s no such thing as a thought crime

thank u

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Alternatively:

REVERSE ROBINS!! 🐦‍⬛��‍⬛🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛

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Sum

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I started in DC by reading fanfics, but as I began to read actual comics, I started to be unable to read the actual fanfic that got me into it in the first place because it's so out of character.

But there are still some stories that I love to read because I love the found family trope so much, even if it isn't really accurate to the source material.

As a comics purist (sometimes), are there tropes that you like enough that you'll still enjoy a fic even if it's not accurate to canon?

oh my god this is SUCH a fun question. bc while i started with the comics, there were certain characters and/or character dynamics where i was exposed to the fanon before the canon (just bc it's hard to read everything when you start out just to read some fanfic) and so i've definitely experienced the fanon to canon transition. (*especially* with Jason Todd. i had only read 80s/90s stuff where he was already dead or the New-52 bc that was on-going when i got into comics and man. the fanon misunderstandings i had about him before i got frustrated and sat down to read all his pre-Flashpoint stuff were absolutely bonkers.) and aside from that, whilst i tend to prefer canon over fanon, i'm not past giving fanon its flowers for occasionally having really interesting insights. occasionally. so some of my fanon "guilty pleasure" tropes would probably be

Morally Grey Tim Drake - this is one where if you try to back it up with canon, i *will* get salty about it. of everyone in the Batfam aside from maybe Bruce and Cass, Tim has the *most* black and white morals. often his internal conflicts are routed in such an inability to compromise his moral views and it can cause him to clash with other characters. he's *very* stiff and rigid in his beliefs and is *rare* to compromise in even the smallest ways. i mean, DC has repeatedly used Tim Drake of Tomorrow/Savior/Gun Batman!Tim for a reason. it's to demonstrate that of everyone, Tim *cannot* have his morals compromised. there's no grey area for him. he's zero or a hundred, so if he tips over the edge of "too far" he tips *all the way*, and doing so is one of his worst fears, how he could go "too far" if he let himself. a couple panels out of context from Red Robin (2009) (which was a grief spiral for Tim to begin with) don't change that. now that said. if it's done *right*, i sort of love Tim being morally grey in fanfic. it takes a specific flavor for me, and it's incredibly important to include that mental spiral along with it, of him struggling to justify it. i don't have any interest in "Tim Drake is loosy goosy with Bruce's morals and has the highest kill count and no one knows teehee" bc it doesn't play with the interesting parts of making Tim morally grey, which are fracturing his psyche. but all in all, i think it's fun to put Tim in a morally grey area and i will read it in fanfic and i enjoy writing it a lot

Joker Junior!Tim Drake - i've not written it on this account (yet) but on my main ao3 account one of my biggest fics surrounds this concept. this is one of those "well *technically* it's canon but only in a specific very divorced from the comics universe and would not work at all in the main timeline" so, i categorize it as fanon in that 95% of fics exploring the concept are not doing so within the Batman Beyond universe, but the main timeline. i just love it. I'll take any excuse to whump Tim, but this concept is so fun. psychologically breaking Tim will always be my favorite pastime. there are so many ways to explore the long-term effects this could have on him, how it could affect the Batfam. i'm not a fan of it being used as a "gotcha" to Jason or Babs' trauma with the Joker to paint Tim as the Ultimate Victim, but it is fun to see how their relationships would be affected by being mutual victims of him. (i have a vague JayTim idea where TIm fully retires from being Robin after being Joker Junior and killing the Joker, making Steph Robin for most of his typical Robin era and Jason still tracks him down out of curiosity bc he wants to know what happened and all. very underbaked but i've got thoughts.)

Renegade/Apprentice of Slade!Dick Grayson - this is another one where yes, this happened *sort of* in canon, but i highly doubt most people writing Renegate!Dick have read or are actually pulling from Nightwing: Renegade. it's just an exploration fo the concept fo Dick being Slade's apprentice and i will always eat it up in any capacity. whether Dick grows up with Slade from a young age, or chooses Slade for whatever reason later in life. it's not anything that works in canon bc it compromises Dick morally (similar to the above with Tim) and therefore will always come across incredibly fanon in most fics. but i can't say i don't enjoy it. it's fun to make Dick a little morally fucked up and see what you can make him under Slade's tutelage.

Jason & Damian Meeting in the League -there's no world where i believe this could work in the canon comics. (maybe in the Young Justice cartoon i suppose, but even then i think it's iffy) i would go as far to say it's wildly unrealistic. i don't see a world where Ra's would let Jason anywhere *near* Damian, bc Jason was Talia's pet project that he didn't approve of. that all said, there's something very interesting about how they *could've* met and them potentially bonding during that timeframe. them being somewhat brotherly during this time because Jason sees Bruce in Damian and sort of latches onto the kid and Damian is full of wonder hearing real stories about Batman and Robin, then that getting violently ripped away by Jason leaving the League is fun to me. it's fun how that could affect them within the Batfam and all. it's super fanon to me, but i do not care. i will eat it up

Bad Dad Clark Kent/Good Dad Lex Luthor - i will admit as a late, i've been less and less kind to this particular fanon bc of everything i've argued with people about, *this* one seems the most pervasive as misunderstood fanon. i don't mind when fanon exists, my gripe is when ppl try to claim it's canon. and the *arguments* i've had over this with people who can never seem to cite an actual comic are... frustrating. but that said, i think there is something fun to this strictly in fanon. the duality of who you expect to accept Kon and who you expect to hurt him being flipped is just sort of fun for the occasional guilty pleasure fic. it can make Kon's internal conflict a bit more interesting. the same goes for the Jon favoritism from Clark, it's not a canon thing (and i rlly wish ppl understood how complicated the timeline of Kon and Jon is and any distance from Clark toward Kon isn't malice, it's that Kon is from a timeline that Clark does not remember in the current canon so Clark just straight up doesn't know the poor kid.) but it's sort of fun to give Kon that complex of being overlooked and forgotten sometimes. making Kon just a *bit* more Luthor than Kent will *always* appeal to me in fanfic, especially if he *knows* it's wrong but craves approval from anyone who will give it.

Good Dad Bruce Wayne - i'll die on the hill Bruce is canonically a shitty father. maybe not to the extreme some people write him as, but he's not great at it. that said, i enjoy it in fanfiction. sometimes, i just want silly fluff or hurt/comfort where Bruce finally gets it right and manages to comfort whatever Batkid is in the fic. one of my favorite fics of all time is hinged on Bruce being a good dad, so i think it's just fun to explore how good the relationships *could* be, if Bruce was slightly less of an asshole. i usually prefer him as an asshole, but there are times i want low stakes nonsense.

Gotham Rogues Having Soft Spots for Robin(s) - just about every Rogue in Gotham has done something absolutely irredeemable, and most of them don't like or care about anyone in the Batfamily. but if there's a fic where one of the Robins inexplicably is sort of close with a Rogue and they have a cute silly relationship out of it? I'll eat it up i fear. Steph and the Riddler are besties? I'll believe it. Tim and Scarecrow get along pretty well? give me ten of these. Rogues protecting Robins just hits a spot. the unexpected nature of the relationship, as well as the fact they see each other regularly, can make a lot of good fodder.

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There’s not enough people talking about how important Stephanie is to Damian’s growth pre-Flashpoint.

Bruce had seen Damian as a beast to be tamed, Tim sees him as a ticking time bomb, and Dick is far better with him but he’s still an authority figure for Damian to combat with. But then he meets Stephanie, a college-aged girl who nobody trusts and he bullies her relentlessly and becomes inseparable from her.

She doesn’t interact with him based on his past, but on what she can see. This 10 year old just threatened to kill her? Wow he doesn’t get outside much. He’s not old enough to have seen Gremlins. What do you MEAN you’ve never been inside a bouncy house before we are fixing that immediately.

They are like cousins to each other. They poke fun at each other for being lame and stupid and Dick has to tell them both to shut up. She doesn’t see him as a project to be molded and redeemed, he’s just a kid with a crappy childhood like her and if he’s nice to her for 5 seconds she’ll do something with him to let him feel like a kid. And he doesn’t look at her and see a liability or a failure or a lost cause, like everyone she’s ever interacted with does. When he’s awful to her, it’s because he’s an obnoxious preteen boy.

And then you get the “there’s room in our line of work for hope, too” scene. Because Damian has gotten to know Steph and he can’t fathom why she’s here. She obviously has had to deal with crap and is still working through being kept on a leash by Nightwing and Oracle, but she isn’t broken like the rest of them are. Damian is surrounded by people who were molded and shaped and torn down and broken to become the monoliths that they are, and then there’s this girl who seems so at peace with herself and is constantly making quips, and it’s so foreign to him.

And she tells him that she’s in his world because she believes people are worth fighting for.

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i don’t think people who don’t read comics/mostly read wfa understand how much of a dweeb tim drake actually is because he was supposed to be a Good Role Model For Tween Boys in the 90s. one time he found out his roommate at boarding school was an alcoholic so he poured all his alcohol down the drain instead of just ignoring it like a normal person. his girlfriend wanted to have sex with him and instead of just saying “i’m not ready” he launched into a monologue about how “making love is like opening a door” and he “isn’t ready to open that door yet” because they “might have adult feelings for each other, but [they’re] still just kids.” 90s tim was the type of kid to remind the teacher to assign homework. he somehow got mad bitches even though everyone highkey thought he was weird. in one panel of one issue he randomly said he had to be “vewwy quiet” and never spoke like that again. he canonically plays dungeons and dragons (or the fictional dc equivalent). the money his dad left him after he died wasn’t even a lot because his dad went bankrupt shortly before his death. like it was a substantial amount but not enough to make him rich. i cannot stress enough that tim was SUCH a Regular Guy TM and constantly worried about not standing out. he purposefully did bad at sports and pretended to be winded in gym class so people wouldn’t suspect anything. like he wouldn’t even try and be average, he would purposefully almost fail. he is not a cool rich skater kid guys he’s such a dork

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this blog hates donald trump

Look how many people hate him. I’m pretty damn happy about that 😁😁😁😁😁😁

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Gotham’s light is its truth

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My favourite Tim Drake characterisation is ‘young IT department assistant’.

Forget the fanon coffee-addicted wet cat, the Red-Robin era hyper-competent angst, and even the YJ unhingedness.

I am currently living for Tim Drake, in a stable relationship in his early twenties, who is just the right amounts of experienced and tired. He needs to have the energy of an IT worker in a corporate office, being called in to fix a “broken” printer which was simply out of paper. He’s been there and done it all, and is frankly a little bit tired of everyone’s shit but it’s a job (vigilanteism), right? And sure, you’ll absolutely find him quoting memes, and explaining urban dictionary terms to you. And he will continue to help people even if he thinks they’re just being a little bit dumb, because duh, why wouldn’t he? But he also needs to have the energy that, after one too many snarky comments from Karen in Accounts about ‘kids these days and their overpriced coffees’ (he doesn’t even like the taste of coffee), you will witness the most brutal take down in a single comment, before he walks out of the room as if he didn’t just drop the verbal equivalent of a nuclear bomb in less than ten words.

I just love Older Robin! Tim approaching vigilanteism like a day job he’s over qualified for.

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:3

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I made a post a couple minutes ago about bat dynamics and I made a comment that I think that Damian is a better person than his family. Specifically Bruce is side of it and I just wanna explain that a little bit.

I think in comparison to Dick, Tim, Jason, and even Bruce Damian literally has empathy for everything.

Never mind the overcoming his childhood or what he was taught, he learned from the people around him, and even through working himself that people and animals matter so much, and then on top of that, he goes out of his way to help and save as many people as he can.

Now I also wanna talk about how Damian doesn't at any point essentially come to the conclusion that I'm gonna follow these rules just because whatever and if I get pissed off enough or it's convenient enough, I'm gonna break them.

Damain is never 10 seconds away from throwing it all away because of some reason.

Damian is also meticulous in a way that Tim and Dick aren't where he's not losing his cool and then doing something that is horrible.

Damian, I feel like is literally the best example of he doesn't actually have some inherent darkness that he needs to like force down. He truly is a good person. He does not have one bad day and then become a villain.

I feel like that is where so many people get his character wrong, he much like Superman I feel like even when he might come off a bit callous isn't a ticking time bomb.

Which again leads to the fact that he's just better than majority of the other vigilantes of Gotham. Could he kill someone again sure. But the motivation will never be. I'm gonna be evil because the world made me this way. He will never justify his actions with his own trauma.

Is the self-awareness that no one else has every single other bat would excuse it and he will never.

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Superman & Batman scene redraw

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WAIT ITS COMING PUT PCTOBER 2027???? if its not the scarecrow im RIOTING

rewatching the batman (2022) w my friends and im reminded that the next movies main villain needs to be scarecrow and robin needs to be in it

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it’s a fact that robert pattinson lies in his interviews for fun and i think this should be taken advantage of in terms of characterisation for battinson. please give me a bruce wayne who says ridiculous unhinged things in interviews because it literally does not matter

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The reactions to The Batman part 2 announcements are always so funny on twt

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two face would be fun too. or poison ivy, but they probably wont do her without harley and idk if i want them to attempt her anyway itd scare me

rewatching the batman (2022) w my friends and im reminded that the next movies main villain needs to be scarecrow and robin needs to be in it