#//anyone who likes to interact

[sunderwight]

SVSSS bingliushen fic where Shen Qingqiu assumes that even though he somehow managed to turn the former stallion protagonist gay (he's still not totally clear on how that happened) and in love with him (x2) there's no reason to assume Binghe would become monogamous as well. So he preps himself for the possibility of there still being a harem, just, full of dudes this time.

Meanwhile, Binghe has in fact become functionally monogamous but it's in self-defense. Theoretically there is some universe where he would be happy to sleep around. His relationship with SQQ is unique and deeply important to him, but that would be true whether or not they were sexually exclusive.

The problem is that Binghe knows with 1000% certainty that if he brings other dudes into their lives, they will fall in love with Shen Qingqiu. In the unlikely event that they did not fall in love with Shen Qingqiu, then they're be so incomprehensible to Luo Binghe that he wouldn't be able to find them attractive anyway. Luo Binghe's insecurities cannot yet handle the idea of Shizun being with other men.

Cue the inevitable mess of Shen Qingqiu trying to set Binghe up with suitable hot men, only to unwittingly accumulate more fodder for his own unacknowledged harem of admirers, while Binghe tries to fend off these would-be suitors until he finally decides he's going to bring Liu Qingge into the relationship just so he has an extra set of hands ready to help throw other people back out of it again.

[grotesque-butler]

for anyone who stumbles across my blog because i interacted with you, i need you to understand that i like whatever posts i like. i don't have time to click on every single profile to see if i'm "allowed" to interact or not. and expecting that of me, or anyone else, is frankly ridiculous.

if you don't want certain people interacting with your posts (and let's be real, liking a post is barely an interaction to begin with), then the internet is not for you. people are going to engage with the content they want to engage with. you cannot control who sees your posts, unless it's a private account that you only let certain people see.

[tio-trile]

Came up with the headcanon with my friend that Todd is the only person from the Institute who has caught them together but it didn't matter after all

Bonus:

[inklore]

can we bring back fun fics? ya know when they weren’t taken too seriously, where we were simply writing them to feel that ooshy gooshy feeling and laugh and feel. nowadays i feel like all that matters is how intense the smut is, and trust i love smut. i am its number one fan. but i feel like its become a means to popularity, only writing it because it’s following a status quo of readers who only care about fics when it includes filth. like its not wrong to want the filth. we all love the filth. but please bring back the silly little plots. give me one bed, give me unrealistic fake dating, give me a wild crossover with fandoms that shouldn’t work together but do, give me something crazy like aliens invading or dinosaurs! like all of those things can lead to tooth rotting fluff or shaky knees smut. just bring back the feels! the silliness! the reasons why we all stay up until all hours of the night devouring these works of art!!

[jestroer]

"You form the most interesting relationships with people, Cleo" I am thinking now, was an extremely bold thing of Etho to say, considering the way he interacts with his friends on daily basis

[spite-and-waffles]

FUCK YES STEPHANIE IS THE JASON THAT NEVER WAS PANDA YOU ARE THE HERO THIS FANDOM NEEDS BUT DOES NOT DESERVE PREACH THE GOSPEL OF STEPHANIE AMEN

[royalarchivist]

Jaiden: Cucurucho, you have a lot of power, right?

Cucurucho: ...I don't know. Maybe.

Roier: Ah... Yes, you know, don't act like a dumbass, you have it. You have it, man. Eh?

Jaiden: Is there a way for us to protect all the Eggs? Do you know? I don't want anything to happen to the Eggs that happened to Bobby.

Cucurucho: Ha ha ha

Roier: WHAT? [Smacks Cucurucho]

Jaiden: [Bops him] Headpats.

Cucurucho: Maybe.

Jaiden: [Continues to bop him] Headpats. C'mon, I can get it out of you! Headpats! Chin scratches! Belly rubs!

Roier: [Joins Jaiden in bopping Cucurucho, chuckling and laughs]

Jaiden: Yeah? He's comin' around!

[Jaiden and Roier both laugh]

[prismatoxic]

concept: laios wants so badly for izutsumi to like him the way she likes chilchuck but he can never get it right, so finally chilchuck takes pity on him and gently teaches laios how to treat her more like a young girl and only like a cat when she invites it, while also carefully explaining to izutsumi that laios is just so eager because he thinks she's so cool

laios and izutsumi bonding properly and she's more comfortable sleeping in laios's bedroll or letting him give her affection (chilchuck is also more comfortable with it bc he's sure they're both communicating and laios's intentions are good)

izutsumi sprawled in laios's lap as he writes in his book about whatever they ate that day and chilchuck watches them fondly from a distance before going "ah, damn, i see them as my family, haha well i guess they've earned it"

takes a sip of his waterskin while still watching them

"...this isn't familial affection i'm feeling about laios"

[fungh0u1]

the start of a beautiful friendship <3 (my most canon innacurate as someonw who hasnt finished naruto piece of fanart yet? (no spoilers guyss. <3))

[puppyeared]

learning abt friendship decay and "not reaching out to your friends for months at a time unprompted is not neurotypical behaviour" has me feeling a certain way

[therandomfuzz]

The solidarity of never being yourself

[massiveladycat]

meme aside, if you like to go into the tags of characters just to harass and attack people who actually like said character, you disgust me. there is something called the block button and filtering. there are anti tags made for a reason, holy shit. literally no one wants to hear that. they are trying to have a good afternoon and you're fucking it all up. some people find comfort in the characters, and when you openly decide to go out and scream at them for liking them, you're just raising the chances of them being afraid to come back to fandom. if you really want to talk about how bad you think a character is, make a damn post and ONLY tag it with the anti tags. yes, that will not stop pro character's from finding you, but it's much better than going after people i agree that people are entitled to say that they dislike a character just as much as someone is entitled to say they like a character. the only problem is when it's blown way out of proportion

[theresistanceneverquits]

When will this fandom realize that pre-s8 Garmadon and post-s8 Garmadon are canonically two separate entities?

[The Garmadon comic series confirms that the Garmadon we have now was born when the real Garmadon was bit by the Great Devourer, and cast away when Lloyd purified him. That separate entity is the personification of the evil in Garmadon, and is a separate being from Lloyd’s father.]

[barbieaiden]

yeah um clearly late august me was going through something

[threeyrslost]

“Proshipping actually means problematic ship, and proshipping is bad. Proshippers are bad because they think abuse and toxic relationships are okay in REAL LIFE!”

So self-declared proshippers. By this logic. Call themselves. “Problematic shippers.” Because they “see nothing wrong in toxic and abusive relationships”. So they. Apparently turn around and. Call it. Problematic. The supposed group that “thinks abuse is okay”. Would then turn around and call it “problematic”…?

Okie, u know what buddy, so real, so true; I’m gonna lie, you are spitting! <3

[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