#*this is all a flashback so...°3°*

[melodyartist]

Gee Epimetheus, how did you get so lucky that the gods gave you a wife? Are your brothers jealous?

Epimetheus:"Maybe I was lucky! But they don't seem to envy me, they just don't get it."

[stargirl230]

ghost of you

super quick Sua screencap redraw to celebrate the new video release - no I was not expecting it to be Like That and yes I was devastated

(no reposts; reblogs appreciated)

[aurorangen]

Guilt consumed Vincent whenever he lied to Renee. Vincent thought it was risky to let her know about investigating the secret basement with Isaac. She'd want to help and that meant gathering unwanted attention from the police and the media. When they arrived, Vincent sat there in his car, shoulders slumped. He tried to think. He strained to think. But seeing his childhood home only triggered traumatic events from his past, obscuring all his plans for the day.

"Isaac…I don't think I'm ready today," he said, hiding the tremor in his voice. "It's okay, we can take our time to solve it," Isaac had his own nerves seeing Vincent's childhood home; they were facing the unknown after all. "I'm ready whenever you are."

[beaulesbian]

Luffy & Zoro in Wano || One Piece ep. 897

[askgardenerwoods]

hi Emma! Who do you consider your friends do you have a crush on anybody?

" For crushes... "

[bumblingbabooshka]

Every time I watch the cold open of Memorial and B'Elanna tells Tom about how she ASSEMBLED a 50's television set from SCRATCH just to surprise him (there's no reason beyond that - just an incredibly sweet and thoughtful gesture) and replicated popcorn for him to eat while he watches and Tom says "They didn't have remote controls in the 50's ♥ Also where's my beer?" I contemplate murder ESPECIALLY because B'Elanna responds cheerfully to it - GIRL!!! LEAVE HIM!!!!!! IS HE SUPPOSED TO BE CHARMING IN THIS SCENE????

[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

[haylessa]

which is gayer? being gay or whatever the fuck these two got going on.

whoever had the idea to write sherlock holmes and moriarty gay as hell is a genius. i genuinely wouldn’t have it any other way.

[jennilah]

its 2:30 am, i cant tell if im more tired or high, and the thought "Saw but every scene is in chronological order" blasted into my brain and made me laugh

linearized Saw

[luck-of-the-drawings]

[<==PREV PAGES] [NEXT PAGE==>(not out yet.wait a year.or maybe more.imagine.]

saw alot of comments on prev pages; saying 'i HATE that mean teacher! im gonna FIGHT HIM!!' & i LOVE the energy!! it WOULD be nice. to have that catharsis. but the story of young tidestrider is Not one of catharsis. it is a story of being so small and so special and sucking so bad.

[worstloki]

started watching Fangs of Fortune and the entire first episode is a fun female lead and this one demon guy who spends all his time aura farming

[littlefankingdom]

Everytime something happens in France in a comic, I realize how little researches comics writers do. And like, if they are this bad with my western country, how bad it is with third-world countries they talk about???

In Nightwing (2016), Raptor is from a circus that was near Paris during Mary Grayson's childhood, so more than 40 years ago at least.

In this flashback, they accuse the mayor of Paris of having given leprosy to the romani and of keeping away the meds they need. Already, with our healthcare's system, it's hardly possible, as they would be able to go to a hospital to get the help they need. Do they think "public healthcare" means the state has a direct control on medication, because that's not the case at all. The French gov control the money put into medication, how much is bought, but a mayor has no power over this. I just don't understand how something like this could happen. You can totally write a racist medical scandal in France, but makes it make sense with our system.

But also, Paris didn't have a mayor until 1977, so if it's before 1977, impossible. And, Paris' mayor from 1977 to 1995 is JACQUES CHIRAC, who was the PRESIDENT after. They wrote a story implying that a French President kept medications away from sick people, was discovered and was still elected President. And, yes, the French government is far from good and they have deeply harmed the romani, but like, maybe don't write shit like that. (Also, Chirac was really against the war of Iraq, and stood up against the US, which France is still paying the price for to this day. So I don't really like an USAmerican to criticize Chirac. Like, we can do it, others can do it, but not USAmericans, y'all have done enough) I'm pretty sure that wasn't the goal of the writers. No, what happen is that they didn't do researches about Paris' mayor and so, wrote that shit.

This may be inspired by the contaminated blood's scandal in the 80s-90s, which was worst in France, but no mayor was found guilty, it was doctors who knowingly contaminated patients with a deadly illness. And the French government was held accountable, even if they had no hand in it, as a matter of principle.

I understand it's a fiction, and they didn't literally wrote "Chirac did this", but it's kind of clumsy. (Especially because of everything I wrote earlier about Chirac's politics and how the US is still punishing France for being against killing civilians and destroying Iraq. France was doing the right thing, and the US worked so France would go back in line and treat Arabs like shit. Do not think western countries are free from the US' imperialism)

And in no way I'm saying that you cannot write France being awful, I know my gov's crimes (rn, they have deported homeless out of Paris for the Olympics, the President is refusing to acknowledge the left won the elections and to take a leftist prime minister so we have no prime minister since mid July and fuck democracy I guess, they support Israel's crimes against humanity, and are behaving like the colonizers that they are in New-Caledonia, sending the armies against the Kanaks that have not enough power on their own land), I'm just saying it should at least be believable enough to work. (Easiest way: make the cops racist. Boom. Also, French cops talk like vilains, it's insane.) And also, not about someone touchy like clumsily painting badly a president that was punished by the US for doing the right thing.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

if i had a nickel every time magneto, charles, and amelia were all featured on a cover that framed them as having a wack love triangle then im sure im missing more than just these two but im still baffled i naturally found two so easily anyway

[valgeristik]

You know they've been stabbin' 🤗

been thinking a lot lately about Zea n how they're perceived vs how they Are. And how their upbringing would affect all that. Especially Noel being one of their parental figures............maybe one day ill make a more eloquent post about it. but for now have. this (yes the boxes arent centered i know i know please ignore that, it would be too hard to fix now)

Vetted Gaza Evacuation Fundraiser List

E-sims donation

[jesseisquick]

Ok so preliminary thoughts about Absolute Flash #3:

I wonder if there's a reason why these issues are consistently shorter than the other Absolute series? I love the idea of Wally gaining the courage to face the Rogues by being given someone else to stand up for (i.e Grodd) and I think it would lead quite naturally into his development as a hero, but the pacing is kind of all over the place. The connection between Wally and Grodd wasn't given room to breathe!!!! It seems like the first arc is over already in 3 issues where the Trinity had 5 or 6, and I feel like AF is worse off for it. Maybe now that the exposition is out of the way the story will settle into its rhythm.

[bumblingbabooshka]

I love how this is the only entry on the wiki page for the Rite of Tal'oth. Both T'Pol and Spock talk about their Kahs-Wan and it seems to be an extremely common thing for Vulcan children to go through but ONLY Tuvok so far has mentioned this Tal'oth rite so it doesn't seem to be as expected of Vulcans. This jives with my impression of Tuvok's character being the most spiritual of the three main Vulcans (from what I understand the spirituality of Vulcan that we see in 'later' series is seen as highly taboo and illogical in ENT's time? EX: Tuvok was raised beliving in the katra while most Vulcans in T'Pol's time think katras are a myth). Tuvok speaks about questioning his faith in katras, he has a holoprogram that seems to take place in a monastery, he puts great stock in prayer (his wife and children say prayers for his safe return and he is sure to tell Neelix that the temple they go to is among the holiest on Vulcan), some of his favorite music is monks chanting, and he was pursuing the kolinahr in his youth - the only reason he didn't complete it being that he went through the pon farr and chose to be with T'Pel instead. To me, it would make sense if the Rite of Tal'oth was only undertaken by certain Vulcans who did so for spiritual reasons or as a personal test of some kind rather than something all Vulcans do at a certain age. Tuvok later goes into Security so it's possible he's always had an interest in the kind of life-or-death strategy that such rituals (Kahs-Wan and Tal'oth) require, even if his first time in Starfleet he's shown as a Science officer, likely at his parents' "request." Speaking of, we learn in 'Flashback' that Tuvok's parents pressured him to join Starfleet AND that Tuvok's father is heavily implied to be part of Starfleet. This, and the fact that Tuvok's father specifically was namedropped as the one who disowned him as a teenager makes me wonder whether or not Tuvok was pressured to participate in the Tal'oth ritual - perhaps as a way to prove himself Vulcan once again (after his adolescent failure). Or even as a preparatory method for Starfleet itself since his father was/is part of it. "If you can't do this, how are you going to be a Starfleet officer?" sort of deal.