#Observation Club

[hawnks]

Gojo is lonely. Not just in the big, existential sense.

He doesn’t have anyone to tell about his day. He doesn’t have anyone to go try out that new restaurant with. He has so many movies because he has no one to talk to.

[vrgssmncht]

Fast fast messy sketch of some mantids! Coloured! Featuring a praying mantis I found (photograph) and this silly guy (Rhombodera sp.)(the illustration) on iNat!

[cerealmonster15]

i want jamiazu + idikei to go on a double date so badly i think the vibes would be So Very Turbulent

[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

[isas-bathbombs]

[ctl-yuejie]

a taste

[indigovigilance]

Okay, generally commentary on fic. People be like “Aziraphale only says tickets-boo twice and I’ve seen it 1000x in fic” or “Crowley only says the word gorgeous one time and now it’s in every fic”

K first of all there’s only one book and 12 hours of footage. There are >60,000 fics (???) based on that relatively small amount of source material, and a good fic writer will ref the material as much as possible. So yes, you’ll see a lot of the same stuff. I presume that’s why you’re reading fic.

That said I’ve also seen some crazy AUs; ice-skating, zombie apocalypse, sex work is it’s own sub-genre, high fantasy…

Anyway. Fic writers, fic readers, fic artists, I love you all.

Tickety-fucking-boo.

[ms-scarletwings]

You know….narratively speaking, these are all the same character

But idk if y’all ready for that conversation

[palin-tropos]

ignus nilsen talking about the euphoric and drug-amplified loss of self into mass coordinated action as a dialectical materialist theory when he should have LITERALLY been at the club

[jacksprostate]

pls more fem fight club... from one of ur biggest fans

It's after fight club, when we've slunk back to our den and Tyler has stuffed me full of factory farmed chicken. I must be wearing my concussion on my face with how crinkled kind her eyes are. She takes me by the hand, we go to the garden to lie shirtless in the blood and guts and hair and shit and stare up at smog.

We lie close, like identical twins. Nursed in the same shitwater house, pummeled into superficial similarities. I know, my face is so blown out by bruising. Hers is no better; you could think we were a mirror. I could be some fucked up funhouse paper jam insomnia copy of Tyler. It would be a success.

"What do you really know of success?" Tyler scoffs, reading my mind.

Tyler says, "You don't know shit."

I don't disagree. I let my hand dig through the soil and mud until I've found a worm. Gently, I let its bristles catch on my skin. It wants to flee.

"You're told, we have it better than ever," Tyler says, and I know she's gearing up for a sermon. "You're told, we can work, and we can divorce, and have our own bank accounts. You and I both know you'll be fought every step of the way, but you can have those things now, isn't that a success?"

She takes the worm from me. Guides it into the unpleasant shape of a knot. Tyler pinches the ends of the worm lightly, pulls. These little cruelties are normally enacted on me, and I'm enraptured.

"If I stop, if I stop crushing and tearing this thing to death, is that a success?" Tyler drops it on my chest, in the valley between my tits. I see the knot is tight enough, some of the worm's organs must be crushed. Annelid internal bleeding.

"Is that good?" Tyler says.

Tyler says, "If you look to our glorious leaders, you will be told you should be overjoyed with getting a restroom into the Senate and the opportunity for the elite women who are part of our oppressive machine to wear pants. You will be told you should look at six women out of a hundred demons as a success. All of this, successes. Dripfed progress."

The common woman, she gets sexual harassment and a portion of the dollar. She gets marital rape exceptions finally struck off the books only in writing. She gets the second shift. She still gets rape and too late abortions and status barely beyond property of her husband and mother of his children.

The worm squirms.

Tyler says, "The House of Representatives still has nothing. They say, we have to be careful, we have to carefully mind the important history of the building as we act so kindly as to accomodate the silly womenfolk. Nevermind the steady light above his head and the subway he uses to get around."

Tyler reaches over, hand brushing my skin as she traces the twitching knot with a finger.

"I say, forget history. Holding onto history gets you little old cabins converted to rental cottages on a huge, private botanical garden with one large porched mansion in the middle. It gets you beloved buildings where even the most privileged women have to walk a block to take a piss, while men enjoy their modern heating and plumbing. It gets you the boot upon your neck. The knot in your spine."

She holds her hands out, spread. Occluded moonlight filters through. Her fingers are streaks of true night.

"If I were a worm," Tyler says, "I wouldn't wait until these hands die to consume them."

She takes the worm back, patiently, slowly unknots it as it writhes. I wonder if it knows those hands are the same ones that tortured it. I wonder if it cares.

"We can't wait for this. We should not expect the hands tying knots all through the world to truly ever undo them."

Forget history. Forget successes. Tyler wants to dismantle the world. Tyler wants to render things so equal that the sins of the past can be forgotten.

"Let's blow up the US Capitol," Tyler says, voice thick as syrup.

[tea-time-terrier]

An earthdog weekend in which I drive multiple hours to camp and volunteer at a test that my dog doesn't run in.

[asachuu]

Guys. It’s been a while but I have to come out. This was a very hard decision for me to make, so please be respectful.

Anyway.

I fucking love Litchi Light Club. Nobody knows why, not even me. I just went to Akihabara again and the FIRST thing I did was run to a bookstore to pick up the second book AND the officially released art book, because I happened to have the main manga already, and I did that entirely on purpose, this was very much pre-planned. I also have a Jaibo cosplay and I’m thinking of investing money into the very limited amount of LLC merch out there and/or making my own. I need help, I think.

Wise words from a wise man once told me you cannot escape an interest no matter how far or fast you run, and I fear it’s true, because I have spent the past two to three years actively forgetting this fandom existed, just to re-read something from it on a random afternoon a couple months ago, and lose the remains of my mind over it. I’m genuinely hoping this whole Arthur business never wears off, because the second-in-line— albeit still incomparable, but regardless— is likely this godforsaken spawn of the devil, unless I get my ass back in gear and read the rest of TGCF, but even that’s debatable. It’s so unbelievably cursed that I found the main manga volume in a bookstore for 20¥ last year, because evidently, someone wanted to get rid of that thing immediately, and I cannot blame them.

I am deeply sorry if this significantly lowers your opinion of me. I am also mortified at this knowledge, I really am.

[snekmadehorrors]

therapy doodles. Host, orbits, all good stuff

[aroacettorney]

tbh i wish aup had more reps for characters who achieve greatness purely through hard work and effort. the emphasis on genius/being special is mayhaps way too much to the point that it feels kinda damn depressing for those who aint born as one.

[sing-you-fools]

Here's what I want. A book club. But not just any "we meet once a month and discuss the books, but it's really mostly about the wine hahahahahahAHAHAHahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA!" sort of club.

I want a book club for Book Fans. A Book Fandom club. I want a book club where we will read a book together and collectively go insane about it. We will lose our minds obsessing over the details. Comb through to find every drop of foreshadowing, symbolism, references, little jokes. We will make fanart and write fanfic. We will decide who is a Blorbo and who is a Babygirl and we will ship them - or we will send our clubmates death threats because they ship them.

We will not simply read the books. We will C O N S U M E T H E M E D I A .

And then, after we've thoroughly picked it apart, we will say: Alright, that was fun. What next? I think it was your turn to pick, right?

[fungi-maestro]

JLU Question's Watchtower bedroom details. From the now defunct Vicsage.com. [1, 2, 3, 4]