#Arrah

[keplercryptids]

Z'ress has a WIFE?!

YEAH lmao they got drunk and had a pirate wedding with their girlfriend when they were 16. a pirate wedding is when you hold hands and jump from one ship to another and it's really only legally recognized in the main pirate city. she came looking for z'ress for a divorce lmao.

[somsesh]

Managed to post the penultimate episode from the ongoing 'Arrah' chapter on www.littlebylittle.online. Durga Pooja was not as intense a festival as Chhatth Pooja, but it was around for ten days and that meant the festivities and rituals surrounded our everyday routine like a dew drop rolling on a leaf. Our home would smell of dhoop, agarnbatti and postadana halwa. To this day, participating in the aarti feels slightly heavy because of how religiously my father participated in the ceremonies. The thing I really looked forward to was visiting the pandals early in the morning on Dashmi. The handiwork of different craftsmen trying to outdo each other with their effort on stitching the corners of the pandal's cloth or how beautifully rendered the stage backdrop was a marvel for a six-year-old. I have always felt that from the onset of Durga Pooja, the wind took a different turn, slowly opening the doors to the nippy winter, and the festivals would just pour in from that ajar door one by one, leaving you no choice but to be soaked in it.

Read the episode here.

[varmacollegeofnursing]

biharnursingcollege.org VERMA NURSING COLLEGE

VERMA NURSING COLLEGE has Fraternity which encourages the students to meet the complex challenges and build their career.

[dynamiccomputerarrah]

DYNAMIC COMPUTERS

DYNAMIC COMPUTERS, is one of the leading institutes in delivering computer education in Arrah, Bihar.DYANAMIC COMPUTERS, Arrah focuses on concept-based training .

[madhavinetralaya]

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[nitpickrider]

Once they're all done playing Amongus over this, Element Lad should really take that as a compliment Action Comics 379

[dailydccomics]

the Legion of Super-Heroes by Barry Kitson

[kara-zor-els]

DnD is still around on the 30th century

[dc-polls]

"That Really Happened?!" DC Comics Tournament Entry #34

Shvaughn/Sean

[ID: Cover of Legion of Super-Heroes #1 that says Young Romance. Shvaughn Erin cries into a handkerchief and says, "*choke* He spends so much time saving the world... When will he find time for me?" In the foreground Element Lad looks off into the distance. A narration box reads, "All my life, happiness eluded my grasp... and nothing I ever cared about lasted! Was this the way it had to be with Jan, too? The Elements of Heartbreak!" /END ID]

What Happened?

Shvaughn Erin was a member of the Science Police, the 30th-century cops who assisted (or hindered) the Legion of Super-Heroes. During the Paul Levitz/Keith Giffen run in the 1980s, she became romantically involved with Legionnaire Jan "Element Lad" Arrah. This upset some members of the Legion fan community who had a theory that Jan was gay. The character wasn't traditionally masculine, wore pink, and had curly blond hair (look, this just how gay coding worked in the 70s and 80s).

When Giffen and married couple Tom and Mary Bierbaum (who got their start in the Legion fan community) took over the title with 1989's vol. 4 (aka, the "Five Years Later" run), one of the things that Giffen wanted to do was kill off Shvaughn to establish Element Lad as gay. They were already using Jan's archenemy, the criminal Roxxas who years ago had genocided the rest of the his species, the matter-transmuting Trommites, as the villain for the first arc. Shvaughn was eventually spared this fate, but the writers still had to square the circle of why a "gay" character would be involved with a woman. Their solution? What if "she" was a "he?"

I'm going to try to explain the rest of this story in as sensitive a way as possible. This is a story that was written in 1992 by, as far as I know, three cishet people and your millage will vary (and as a cis person myself, I can't really speak to how well this holds up). I will generally be using she/her pronouns when the character is presenting as Shvaughn and he/him when presenting as Sean.

In Legion of Super-Heroes, vol. 4 #31, the Earth is recovering from the devastation of losing the moon due to the machinations of the alien Dominators who have infiltrated and subverted the planetary government (note also, the Dominators have an extremely problematic "yellow peril" design so there's a lot going on here). In the midst of this, Jan and Shvaughn meet for the first time in a while. Jan finds out that Shvaughn is going through withdrawal from not being able to obtain the drug Profem. She explains that she had been born male under the name Sean on a very conservative planet. While growing up, Sean developed a crush on Element Lad, who as a teenager was intergalactically famous as a member of the Legion. Thinking that the only way a boy like Jan would find him attractive, Sean started taking Profem, changed her name to Shvaughn, enrolled in the Science Police academy, and eventually became the liaison to the Legion. Now, without access to the drug, Shvaughn is reverting back to her more masculine appearance.

Jan takes all of this in, before telling his former lover that "anything we ever shared physically...it was in spite of the Profem, not because of it!" Shvaughn later runs into the teenage clone of Element Lad from the Dominator's Batch SW6 (we can't get into that right now), and in future appearances shows up fully presenting as masculine and going by Sean. The adult Element Lad goes into a coma and Sean is at his bedside.

Then the Legion gets rebooted in Zero Hour, all of the Legionnaires are teens again with new continuity, and Shvaughn (when she shows up at all) is back to presenting as female with no indication that she was ever Sean. Element Lad (unless I missed anything) is only given female love interests or sexual partners by later writers, or implied to be asexual with a spiritual bend.

While Shvaughn is far from the first female love interest who gets her storyline derailed to support a gay headcanon, it is surprising that it 1. happened in canon and 2. the solution was not to kill her off, but to reveal she is trans (ish?) so the character can detransition back to a man so that his love interest can be gay. What's really weird is that Giffen and the Bierbaums also made canon a romance between Light/Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet, but never felt a need to invalidate their previous relationships with male partners, which maybe points towards the culture of the time's perceptions of male vs. female bisexuality.

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Tournament polls will be posted after all entries are up. As always you can find all posts related to the tournament using #dc-polls-trh

[silverstarchildd]

theres something suspicious here......

[somsesh]

Lucy and The Ending (not The End).

It was 2012 December, if I am not mistaken, and my friend, Hazel shared a documentary with me called 'The Secret Life of Dogs'. I have always loved dogs, so there was no reason to avoid watching the documentary. Even before I could finish it, I remember tearing up. It's a similar feeling I had while watching Hachi. It always takes me back to Lucy, the alsatian dog we had as a kid. I remember so vividly the day she arrived at our home. A bundle of joy in a matted black coat, shivering because of the cold outside. We all had different duties assigned while taking care of Lucy. Mummy used to feed her, Bhaiya used to take her out for walks, Papa would give her a bath after putting neem oil on her, and I would just mess with her when she was in a playful mood. She knew it before anybody else when Papa's motorcycle entered the street. But she was a ferocious one. The legend says that she made a giant labrador jump over the fence and out because of her growl. You couldn't put a foot near her when she was eating. She would bare her teeth wide to make the hair on your skin vaporise. But she was our dog and she took care of us. And this is what comes to haunt me to this day how did I let her go so easily? How did I get over her so easily? I must have been really swirled up in my own new life after moving away from Arrah to not feel the grief I feel now. When I was finishing the last pages of this chapter, I could feel the guilt and shame rushing back in. Sorry, Lucy, for not taking care of you the way you did for us. You fought for us, and I didn't. The last episode I put up online on www.littlebylittle.online is dedicated to her. This is my small way of paying gratitude to Lucy. She was a big loss, and I realised that every chapter I have finished so far has been left as a footnote of having encountered a loss, or you could just sum it all up as a part of growing up. Maybe this is what growing up is all about, hiding our small bits and pieces in the sands of time.

Love you, Lucy.

______

______

On another note, I have decided to stop publishing new episodes up online. I am very thankful for all the encouragement I received from the time I started sharing episodes online, and it has been a good push for me to be at the drawing table and keeping at the pages, but I have reached a stage where I have to put the blinds tightly and make the dash to the finish line. But that finish line is a good distance away. This is not a sprint, it's a marathon. In every long-distance running, there is a moment you hit the wall. This year, around April, it did feel like I have burnt my heels being on this path of working on my own graphic novel. It had been close to three years since I started work on it and with the cold slap of the pandemic, it had become even more difficult to feel the jubilation I had when I started work on the novel initially. The beginnings are often more celebratory, it's the mid-journey that tests you out. I had been running on fumes because I had turned down projects more than I would have liked, and it was starting to show that lack of funds was causing irritability. My confidence had plummeted and I would second guess every little decision I would make. My father used to say that arth (money) gives purusharth (character). While I won't go all the way to agreeing to it, having your expenses covered is a basic necessity to continue doing what you would like to and feel a sense of dignity in your existence. Thankfully, I have managed to steer back the balance (thank you, Pankaj Mishra for showing up) to sustain the many more miles left to run. But keeping balance is forever work, it's the ultimate aim because it's so easy to slip away into the distractions and lose sight of what you want. What I really want is to finish this book well. I am done with three chapters, and two mega chapters are left to be finished. I am hoping to work distraction-free for two more years to wrap up the base work on the book before editing can start. Putting the small episodes up online has been gratifying but it takes a lot of my effort and time to do that. I will continue to share a small peek into the novel's progress, but this is it for now. I hope to come out of this cave in the next few years with the entire book in hand.

Really thankful to @halfchai (Hazel) and Aparna Kapur, for going through my pages before I put it up online. There are many more people to thank, but I hope to do that like real authors do.

If you enjoyed reading what I have shared so far on www.littlebylittle.online, then please buy me a coffee.

[dcsnextgaycharacter]

[protytwo]

Interlac #287, the February 2024 mailing, is 313 pages with zines and art from 22 members. Cover by Greg Fox.

[varmacollegeofnursing]

biharnursingcollege.org VERMA NURSING COLLEGE

VERMA NURSING COLLEGE has Fraternity which encourages the students to meet the complex challenges and build their career.

[dynamiccomputerarrah]

DYNAMIC COMPUTERS

DYNAMIC COMPUTERS, is one of the leading institutes in delivering computer education in Arrah, Bihar. Trainers work hard to give a good opportunity for students to grow. In addition, they help in building work portfolios and job assistance.

[bluejaysandblackbats]

I know I want to add Jan for sure but I just need to know which grouping would make more sense.