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reblog if ur mom is smart and beautiful

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Can you tell us anything about Jay Garrick's Reverse Flash, the Rival?

Garrick was known to be a deeply jovial presence when it came to his interactions with the criminal element, up to and including his own supervillains. It's a special kind of relationship that would become a defining trait of the Flash Family as a whole that their villains tended to be of a higher 'moral quality' than the villains that other heroes would face. In the modern day, the violent exception is the Reverse Flash. Back in the 1940s the exception was The Rival AKA Edward Clariss.

(A photograph of Clariss taken during his first showdown with Garrick, circa 1949) Clariss was a chemistry professor at Keystone University where Jay Garrick originally studied and where many of his original cases brought him back associating the Flash with the University from very early on. Becoming obsessed with the Flash and the power he wielded, Clariss dedicated himself to finding a chemical reproduction of Garrick's super speed. Modern theories suggest he may have discovered an early and pure variant of the drug now known as Velocity 9 but regardless of the specifics Clariss was indeed granted superhuman speed.

Using his speed drug to empower a small cadre of followers Clariss committed many high profile crimes in a small length of time wearing a darker version of Garrick's iconic costume with a black face mask. Calling Garrick out into confrontation Clariss was originally defeated when his speed drug wore off.

Unmasked and sent to prison Clariss managed to escape via unknown means, this time obsessed with the idea of avenging himself upon Garrick. The battle between the two men ended when Clariss pushed beyond the limits of our reality and was swallowed by the interdimensional Speed Force. This phenomena is poorly understood even to this day but as best I understand it the Speed Force is an extradimensional plane that serves as the source of all motion. Speedsters, via one method or another open a kind of stable connection to the Speed Force which grants them their abilities and the tweaking of physical laws that allows their abilities to function within current physical models BUT when speedsters reach the breaking point of our 3 dimensional reality, usually by attempting to exceed the speed of light the stability of the connection breaks down and the Speed Force draws the speedster into itself.

Within the Speed Force, as it is a dimension of pure motion and kinetic energy the concepts of time and matter break down on a fundamental level. No one knows, no one CAN know for certain how long Clariss was trapped in the Speed Force because the idea of "how long" doesn't apply. When he did reappear decades later, rescued by the interdimensional villain Johnny Sorrows his physical body had been worn away leaving behind a being of pure Speed Force energy and with his mind fully fractured and focused upon the singular goal of destroying Jay Garrick.

His new energy form allowed him to possess the semi-retired speedster Max mercury, using his body to commit a series of gruesome murders that spelled out CLARISS when dotted on a map. One can imagine this was some kind of gruesome challenge to his enemy. Garrick answered the challenge with the severity it required who lacking a better option to contain Clariss used his abilities to shunt the Rival back into the Speed Force.

Returning again, this time with his sights set on murdering the recently hospitalized Joan Garrick he was this time foiled through the combined efforts of Garrick, Mercury and the young speedster known as Impulse although in once again using their combined speed to drive the Rival back into the Speed Force it lead to Mercury being trapped alongside him for many years only recently released when the Speed Force was broken open and the second Flash was retrieved from within.

Clariss was originally a man of almost standard delusions of grandeur, wanting the power and respect that came from The Flash's abilities with none of the moral responsibility needed to use them wisely. The irresponsible use of his abilities leading to him being overwhelmed by the forces that powered him, trapped in a realm beyond the human scope of understanding that drove him increasingly mad with each defeat until only his singular drive to destroy Jay Garrick remains.

No one knows if Clariss was also released when the Speed Force was opened, if he was then he has yet to reappear but we can only wait and see where next the Rival might strike.

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Depends on the character.

Question: is shattered glass like everyone has the opposite of their normal personality or everyone has the same personality but evil/good?

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some messy doodles of the apocolypse au - horrific lack of references for all these guys so had to improvise some, sorry if any dynamics or characters are off, lol.

Looks good. I understand a lack of references.

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Do not be so hard on yourself.

My hobbies include talking to my friends who live in the computer, scrolling transformers on eBay, and spiraling.

Ya I’m kinda a loser… especially during summer…

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I have a hard time trusting Meryl’s character due to the whole: “exploiting children” thing.

ok first thoughts after reading jjl chapter 25

-Usagi is such a well written character araki please don't kill him off (he will)

-i really hope Meryl Mei doesn't turn out to be evil/manipulating the gang I feel like she genuinely cares about them and is trying to protect them

-im excited to see Paco kick some ass

-simultaneously scared because I feel like someone's gonna die

-i love how everyone was fighting for their lives and Lulu-chan has just been chilling

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And the last of the gang: the Fruity Yummy Mummy. Oddly enough, this was the design I had the most fun with– and I think it was because I REALLY disliked the character’s original design. 

So I threw that sarcophagus out the window and started from scratch, lads.

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:)

Nice!

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Waiting patiently for the fan artists to find Yáng Yáng. I'm love her.

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Poor Ambulon.

The stories the minicons share are not for the faint of heart

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The comics tend to be darker don’t they?

The stories the minicons share are not for the faint of heart

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First date!

(Still working on finishing teal mask, so please no spoilers, <3)

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Only 4 sg characters are playable: evil Autobots Goldbug and Jetfire and heroic Decepticons Thundercracker and Shovkwave.

fellow Victory Fans, comic readers, and gamers who don’t actually game— how do we feel about cultist mass murderer Star Saber in the IDW comics

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Earth wars sg event is interesting because the heroic Autobots never interact with the heroic Decepticons and same deal for the evil factions. Basically everyone is forced to interact with their mirror duplicate and hating it.

fellow Victory Fans, comic readers, and gamers who don’t actually game— how do we feel about cultist mass murderer Star Saber in the IDW comics

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He appears in the Earth Wars game where is a campy loves to give the uplifting speeches character.

fellow Victory Fans, comic readers, and gamers who don’t actually game— how do we feel about cultist mass murderer Star Saber in the IDW comics

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You know I actually think Douglas Graves is more spineless than Andrew could ever be. Douglas seems to simply view himself as an extension of his wife, I do not think Andrew consistently views himself as an extension of Ashley.

This one’s interesting, because I do conceptually agree, but I also think I have a little more to say than just that.

Where Andrew and Ashley vs Douglas and Renee gets interesting to me is that Douglas isn’t necessarily portrayed as uncomfortable just doing what Renee wants in the same way that if nothing else, just the ____ in a box ending (Choosing Andy ending in episode 3) shows that Andrew is completely miserable just being Ashley’s plaything. It does get a little hard to say, because we are very deliberately shown very little of Douglas, typically, because the story is told from Andrew and Ashley’s perspectives, and he is completely absentee to both of them. (We don’t even get his portraits until we’re in a vision from Renee’s perspectives, for instance) I would say though, that whereas Andrew feels confined and consumed by being under Ashley’s thumb, Douglas seems to be comfortable under Renee’s direction, from what we see.

He won’t stand up to his abusive father, but Renee will do it for him. (They had a plan to kill his parents together, and though we have no idea how much Douglas really liked the idea of this, we know that he was perfectly prepared to go along with the plan before they discovered and decided to keep Renee’s pregnancy.) He doesn’t get the social mind games the surgeon plays with him, but Renee does, and he’s perfectly happy for her to just speak for him entirely in the opposite way to how the surgeon speaks to him for her. And even just in the car on the way to the grandparents! He tries to stammer out to the kids why they shouldn’t ruin the car, but they don’t respond, and then he’s perfectly happy to let Renee bark out the orders. (Only to Andrew, passing that chain of responsibility right along, as well….)

Andrew wouldn’t take this from Ashley. We’ve all known for a while that his ‘doormat extraordinaire’ descriptor is a good bit of unreliable narration, and is exactly what he wants us to think, but it’s still worth noting for that all he does give into Ashley and appear to be that doormat, it’s reluctantly. A lot of the time he’s only battered down into agreeing with her, which is part of why he’s so frustrated and often times verging on nihilistic in episode 3.

So whilst, yep, I do think Douglas would be happy to call himself an extension of Renee, because when he comes home from long hours of work, feeling tired and frustrated and perhaps verging on nihilistic (note, we do not know this, but considering he has to tell Andrew in an episode 2 flashback that he isn’t about to jump off the balcony, it’s not hard to see potential parallels to our very suicidal and nihilistic Shots and Such Andrew) she makes everything right again.

But it really is more complicated for Andrew. Just in this framework, Andrew is both happiest when he has Ashley right beside him, but also at his most miserable when he’s ‘forced’ to put up with her. When he’s apart from Ashley, he feels wrong. But when he’s with Ashley, they so frequently fight and he does things that he doesn’t like. If he thinks of himself as an extension of her, it’s in a very miserable sense; he wants to be more to her than just what she wants to be, and more than just Leyley’s Andy, and feels confined as just her plaything. He views her as fundamentally incapable of drawing any kind of lines between them, so when he is Ashley’s anything, for all that he claims to be happy to be her everything, it isn’t offering any kind of safety or fulfilment in the same way that being Renee’s husband offers something to Douglas.

To put it succinctly, Andrew yearns for an equal partnership; Douglas yearns to be with Renee in any capacity.

Or, well, it’s hard to say exactly how Douglas feels, because we never see his perspective, and because most of the thoughts we have on their relationship are from Renee’s perspective. But we know that they both feel as though they saved each other — it’s just that Renee’s words about this are a lot stronger. She very fervently insists that meeting Douglas is practically the only good thing to happen to her, in her time capsule letter, but Douglas’s is more… wishy-washy, I suppose? He says that being with Renee gives him a reason to stay alive, but practically everything else he says is along the lines of “I want to do this because you do”. Even in Renee’s vision in the vision room, mostly Douglas seems to just test the waters more saying anything concrete, so it’s hard to get his thoughts on things beyond just the obvious “I love my wife”.

What I will say is interesting about that vision is how he does take some actions without Renee’s direct input. He, at the very least, is in tune with her enough to act on her behalf sometimes, as here, he unplugs the phone for her, and is the first to tentatively bring up that they don’t have to do anything about Andrew and Ashley potentially being Nina’s killers. But I think more relevantly here, we also observe he easily he backpedals. He thinks out loud about how the punishment for Andrew and Ashley can’t be that bad if they killed Nina, because they’re both just kids – very apathetic to the situation as he’s apathetic towards the kids – but quickly changes his tune when Renee snaps about not wanting to be seen as the mother of two kids raised so badly they’re murderers. After that, that’s when he starts of his casual avoidance – the “We don’t know that it actually happened, so therefore it probably didn’t” type attitude. (Curiously, this is more of a parallel to Ashley’s line of thinking about Nina with her whole “If you don’t think about something for a really long time, it’ll be like it never happened” type mentality.)

We see test Andrew test the waters in similar ways, especially in episode 1, where he lets Ashley dictate a lot of his behaviour for some kind of plausible deniability (“Do we, uhh… Do you want to go check on him?” about the neighbour once on his balcony, and the infamous “Wanna go take a peak?” “Nope. But I’ll come along if you do…” about going to see what the music is about the first time) but I think this comes from a bit of a different place. Douglas tests the waters with what he says because he fundamentally trusts his wife’s judgment over his own, seemingly, and because he doesn’t want to go against her. But Andrew speaks like this because his mask is still so far up in episode 1, especially when we don’t see him from his perspective, so he’s still very much shifting responsibility for what they do onto Ashley because he doesn’t want to accept it. It’s not that Andrew especially trusts Ashley’s judgment, clearly not, given how much he doubts and insults her plans and motives in later episodes, but if she makes the decisions, then it’s just not his fault if things go wrong.

Or once again, to summarise, Douglas lets Renee be responsible for his actions and opinions because he trusts her and because he wants his thoughts to align with hers, whereas Andrew lets Ashley be responsible for his actions and seemingly at fault for his opinions only when it’s both most convenient for him to have her to blame, and when he’s willing to entertain her as actually Ashley – when he’s having enough fun with her to actually want to hear her thoughts.

Because if there’s one big thing that stops Andrew from an extension of Ashley, it’s that most of the time, he doesn’t see her as her own person. Most of the time, if anyone’s an extension of anyone, she’s just some extension of him, as he’s the stand-in mother, father, boyfriend, whatever the fuck she feels like that day to her, whilst he consistently dehumanises and infantilises her. He can’t be the extension of someone he views as never having grown out being a child at the best of times, and as simply an “it” – some kind of object that can’t be consistent because it doesn’t have its own thoughts – at the worst. And when she attempts to force him into that position – when she chains him up or puts him away in the toy box – he’s miserable, because he is only willing to be Ashley’s if it’s on his terms.

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I doubt conquerer's is the answer: Luffy was using it on the elders and it did nothing.

OP ch 1148 SPOILERS

My reactions as i read:

didn't know Ulti can act so respectfully; he cloak also has a sun symbol on it

it's nice to see the factory not producing smoke

holy shit we've known Ronya for only one full chapter but fuck she's already making me tear up please don't tell me she's gonna die... i'm getting flashbacks to Atlas' sacifice

only 30 seconds!?!! oh i hate the CDs so much

i wanna see Robin go ham but her DF is a terrible match against Sommers and Gunko

even Brook's helmet is wrapped up lol

calling him a prick is such a genius translation since it's not only a fitting insult, but also a pun on Sommer's DF; i wonder if VIZ is gonna do something as clever but i doubt it

the mothers are rallying

Robin!!! :DD too bad those pricks can regen but that was a great hit

break him! fuck him up! yeah!

holy shit Robin that was so badass but how are you gonna break your fall? she can sprout wings or maybe it's a clone? so i'm sure it's gonna be ok but damn i love her so much she's so awesome

also, who would ever get a crush on a loser like you? Robin is so out of your league it's not even funny

yes! it's a clone! i knew it! but any hits to her sprouts get transferred to her body so i'm a bit worried

huh? shouldn't she have felt the attack? that's how her DF should work tho? i'm confused

dammit

oh Ronya no please no

yeah you're gonna be ok she's gonna be ok the monster trio are down there so i'm sure they're gonna catch her but damn this is making me tear up she's so brave

i hate this

oh no, Robin

Gaban!!! :DD oh he's pissed >:)

does that mean thet conq haki is the way to injure them? idk how i feel about it so i'm gonna wait a bit more to form my opinion

amazing chapter, no words