#I AM having a lot of fun though

[carpsoup]

oughfhf i am so bad at ultrakill i am Not ultrakilling it man not at all

[cacw]

various

[egophiliac]

What do you like about the Diasomnia boys if I may ask?

I always love hearing about the different reasons people enjoy characters.

I mean, c'mon. he has split custody over Sebek okay

also, Lilia in particular has maybe the best timeskip character development of all time

[wardingshout]

Zelda goes mushroom girl

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Do you like sci-fi and indie animation? Check out Monkey Wrench!

[amphibianaday]

day 1421

[royalarchivist]

Pac: Why is she sad? My god, she's devastated! Guaxinim?

Guaxinim: I think she wanted...

Gris: I want 100 reais.

Pac: She wants 100– [Laughs] She's sad because she wants 100 reais?

Guaxinim: [Innocently] You don't have 100 reais, do you?

Pac: [Laughs] I have negative 100 reais, Guaxinim. Gris, I'm just like you! I'm sad too.

Guaxinim: [Whispering to Gris] Cancel the plan, cancel the plan, go back to normal.

Pac: What do you mean? Wait, wait, wait– [Laughs] No no no–

First rule of passa tudo: make sure your target has money before trying to scam them! 😅 (Thank you to sebbs12 and disfrutalakia for double-checking my translations and transcript! The help is really appreciated!)

[Full Subtitle Transcript ↓ ]

—

Pac: [Gasps in delight] Oi, Guaxinim!

Guaxinim: Oi!

Pac: How cool it is to see you here! Oi Gris!

Guaxinim: Look, how cute.

Pac: How cute you and Gris are here!

Gris: oi :( I'm so sad.

Pac: Why is she sad?

Guaxinim: I don't know, man.

Pac: My god, she's devastated! Guaxinim?

Guaxinim: I think she wanted...

Gris: I want 100 reais.

Pac: She wants 100– [Laughs] She's sad because she wants 100 reais?

Guaxinim: [Innocently] You don't have 100 reais, do you?

Pac: [Laughs] I have negative 100 reais, Guaxinim. Gris, I'm just like you! I'm sad too.

Guaxinim: [Whispering to Gris] Cancel the plan, cancel the plan, go back to normal.

Pac: What do you mean? Wait, wait, wait– [Laughs] No no no–

Guaxinim: [Laughing]

Gris: kkkkkk

Pac: I can't believe what you're doing with poor Gris to get money!

Gris: bom dia tio Pac [Good morning Tio Pac]

Pac: Bom dia, bom dia. [Laughs] Seriously, how is a crazy plan like this going to work, huh? Insanity!

Guaxinim: [Dancing with Gris] Muahaha! Muahahaha! We're the most badass evil duo, got it?

Pac: How incredible, man. You guys are great, you're even in sync! Did you guys already get 100 reais?

[koszmarnybudyn]

They were right this would make a pretty sick cover.

[sadie-wolfdawn]

not sso positive, not sso negative, but a secret third thing (adult w a job)

[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

[buwheal]

Hey Spam, not to sound rude or anything, but i think something is stuck in your hair to your left. IDK what it is, but it looks like kinda spiky so please be careful!

[sir-dahlia]

trying to find an art style that works for me, so i made doodles of the gang!

closeups below:

[egophiliac]

I hear you on brave but I think Mr. CEO man could be woz

Which I’m all here for tbh

anon you sent this over 9 hours before the reveal, h...HOW DID YOU KNOW

(I am also all here for it honestly) (I kind of hope they lean really hard into the overworked-CEO bit...how is he supposed to fight evil when there's all this paperwork that he has to get in by Friday, ugh)

[napping-sapphic]

I wanna date someone who joins in to sing along when they catch me singing to myself

[biblically-accurate-dca]

@vanweek2024 day 7 - sunrise

tomorrow is another day

[oneluckydragon]

I know it's a story, oh I know it's just a story. But why does it feel like my worst nightmare?

My Explorers of Sky Hero, Echo!

Lately I've been writing a study on her and this paragraph is taken from my rough rough draft. It's a more in-depth exploration of her character/origin/experiences and since I am a huge fan of the darkrai reincarnation theory, this is my personal take on the concept.

I think it's a bit poetic that Echo, in the aftermath of everything, winds up as a dark-type again (and one connected to the moon no less, the irony) as well. I mean, her timeline of lives has literally been this:

Darkrai (New Moon/Pitch Black) -> Human -> Eevee (Evolution) -> Umbreon (Moonlight)

A lot of her evolution into umbreon has to do with her personal trauma/amnesia and also significant influence from dusknoir (who she trusted and cared about), but deep down I feel like her evolution was also partially determined by the fragmented remnants of her original self. She even tried to evolve into leafeon, which obviously, did not work out as planned. Perhaps this is her past lives way of manifesting in her current self, though she is no longer the same pokemon anymore. Maybe it has something to do with self-forgiveness or acceptance? She still has a lot of healing to do, though.

Once evolving into a dark type, Echo slowly starts to regain some of her memories from her time as Darkrai. And Team Wish's new friendship with Cresselia, who is more perceptive than she has any right to be, gives Echo a lot of insight into exactly who she is. This spirals into Echo battling the reality of her past actions alone for a long time because how is she supposed to admit the truth to Sora? That she was the direct cause of their shared suffering? That she and darkrai are one and the same? That all of the pokemon of the future lived in an eternity of hell because she desired it? Of course, she keeps quiet for a long time out of pure fear-- because if Sora rejected her, she'd fall apart. It's a lot to keep secret but what else can she do?

And bonus!! Does Echo's shadow change during each night of the new moon? Hmm. Sure does seem like it.