#and I think that had a very weird effect on how I processed things if that makes sense

[your-lovely-ghost]

TW for grief rambling, and mourning an abuser

Will it ever stop feeling weird? Grief, I mean. Grieving people that have done objectively monstrous things to you is incredibly isolating because it’s like nobody understands why you’re grieving, and most days you don’t either. God we just need to hear from someone else that’s been in this situation. Please tell me we’re not alone.

For losing someone so close to us, it feels like it should hurt more. And sometimes less.

I feel like I should regret more, but sometimes I just can’t. Or at least I can’t admit to myself or the others when I regret something.

This woman raised me for almost half of my life. We were strangers for the last five years.

I love(d? No… still love, I think.) her more than myself, more than my parents and siblings, I can’t begin to describe the deep seated loyalty I felt towards her for some reason.

She was the best and worst memories of my life.

Even being forced to relocate so much I always tried to get back to her, to where I thought my home was, and she’d try to keep me no matter how it tore everyone else apart. Until the day I gave up coming back, which had its own reasons.

We spent the last two months of her life together every day. I don’t even remember what I’m trying to say. But nothing feels real. I just want her back so fucking bad. It feels weird to grieve someone that did horrific evil things to you but still showed you the most love.

How am I supposed to go on after this?

[cosmic-dust-poltergeist]

Pt 2 forever teen Danny adopts post-JJ Tim. Tim accepts he has a new dad.

[Pt 1: here][pt3: here]

Tim has known Danny a month, and he can say it has had a positive effect on his life. He's super understanding and accepting of all Tim's weird quirks. And when he ran away back to the Bats (which was a train wreck. B and Dick seemed relieved for 2 seconds, then tried to throw him in Arkham. Between him not selling out "Phantom" and still having JJ traits, they found him unacceptable.), Danny let him go, understanding, before accepting Tim back as easy as breathing when he came crawling back. He helps Tim break into Drake Manor directly after, revealing the invisibility and intangibility Tim thought he hallucinated to get clothes, toiletries, his phone (there's 20 missed calls, 5 are Dick, 2 are Bruce, 2 are Barbara, 1 is his parents, and the rest are his school.), his photographs, camera, and the card linked to the allowance his parents send every 2 weeks. Tim took the last thing because he doesn't want Danny to suffer for taking him in and help with expenses, Danny frowns before giving him a lecture about that not being Tim's responsibility when he finds out. Tim still buys groceries and gets them both new laptops when Danny isn't looking.

Danny modifies any electronics to be untraceable, showing Tim the whole process, so that Tim can contact his school with a fake doctor's note, a fake kidnapping story (some thugs heard what Joker tried to do with Robin and tried their own hand at it. Harley squawked about the JJ thing and how a new meta called Phantom killed Mista J, so it's all over the news. (A fake police report magically appears in the GCPD)), and how Tim won't be able to physically be at school for a while and if they could please send his schoolwork over. Tim holds off on contacting his parents, curious to see if they notice anything, and can't find it in himself to be disappointed that they don't (not even when they stopped by the manor a few days ago, they texted him exactly 1 time to scold him about the lack of food in Drake Manor).

When Tim's physical injuries are mostly healed, Danny moves them from the shitty 1 bedroom apartment to an equally shitty 2 bedroom apartment, still in Crime Alley. Tim feels slightly guilty about Danny refusing to let him sleep anywhere other than the bed, taking the floor or couch before he moves a second bed into the new apartment. Tim isn't sure what to do with the level of care Danny showers him with, but he loves it.

Danny, while disapproving and disliking Tim wanting to continue being a vigilante, doesn't actually stop him (something about being a hypocrite if he says no?). Tim designs a new costume since he can't be Robin, and Danny helps create it! Tim isn't sure how Danny got the nearly indestructible materials that need specialized cutting and sewing materials, but it's awesome!

The costume's base is black. Black cargo pants, an armored turtleneck, black domino mask. But he decides that since he unfortunately can't get rid of all his JJ traits (the laughing fits, the scars, his hair is growing green??, the (bipolar depressive/) manic episodes, etc.) and the Bats won't accept him anyways, so why not lean in. Over the black base, he adds a gothic tailcoat vest. It's very dark purple with bright Kelly green lapels and buttons. The lenses on his mask and his combat boots are the same shade of green. He feels like the green ties his new vigilante look to Danny's ghost form. He also finds the whole fit awesome and a giant fuck you to both Papa J and the Bats.

This does lead to his current dilemma. He needs a new name before he debuts his new vigilante identity.

"I refuse to be Joker Junior!" Tim huffs at Danny, who's calmly making dinner.

"Like I've said before, then don't be."

"But what should I call myself? I can't use a bird or bat name either. I've never had to think of a name for if I was an independent before!" Tim flops on the floor. The kitchen and frontroom is basically one room, so Danny can still see him being dramatic without Tim getting underfoot.

"Name yourself a ghostly name."

"Huh?" Tim sits up to look at the slightly blushing man trapped in a child's body.

"I mean, you're already connected to my ghost form, since everyone is going to connect you to your old vigilante identity, so why not pick something ghostly or supernatural." Danny turns to do something Tim can't see, but Tim knows he's just trying to hide how embarrassed he is about sharing the suggestion. "You don't have to. You could pick something more personal, like Shutterbug or Mania or something."

"Huh... That would work. It'd really rub in the Bats' faces that they basically killed 2 Robins." Tim mutters before twisting himself into a pretzel. "Any suggestions?"

"Depends. What do you want people to get from your name? And what annoyed do you want people who know both your IDs to be? Phantom was a literal pun off my lastname."

"How is Phantom a pun off of Kronokori?"

"Kronokori is Jazz's last name, mine's Kronoyios."

"Huh??"

"And those are our lastnames because Clockwork, or I guess Kronos, adopted us. Our original lastname was Fenton."

"You got adopted by a god?"

"Basically, yeah. Don't worry about it. It's probably one of the least weird things to happen during that time, but that's for a different time. What do you want from your name?"

"Uhhh..." Tim takes a moment to really think about it. "It should be something loud and chaotic, but not necessarily good or evil? I don't really care if it would make people eye roll or groan if I share my ID. Maybe something that is angry? I definitely feel angry."

"As you should." Danny affirms and thinks a second. "Wraith? It's a vengeful spirit seen shortly before or after death."

"Mmm... No."

"Sprite? It's a-"

"No way!" Tim pauses and thinks on his violent reaction. "... Sorry.. It just feels childish and like I'm a 2 dimensional game sprite. Not something that can grow with me or demand respect."

"It's fine, Tim." Danny flashes a reassuring smile. "How about Bashee? They scream to warn someone death is near."

"Aren't they all women?"

"Not necessarily. Kinda like selkies, there's more myth about the women, but there's men too." Danny starts plating the food he made. "Apparition? They're closer to an after imagine of the dead."

"But are they loud?"

"Not usually...hmmmm" Danny hands Tim his plate while scrunching his face in thought. "Let's see, Dullahan, Kelpie, Sphinx, Shade- Oh! Oh! I know! Poltergeist! They're loud, chaotic, usually malicious, they bite and scratch and slam things! It also doesn't sound childish, so you can keep it for as long as you need."

Tim munches on his dinner while thinking it over. "I think that would work. Hehe! A Poltergeist under the care of a Phantom."

Danny smiles, "Glad to help, kiddo."

Tim sets his mostly empty plate down and launches himself at Danny. Danny used to the behavior, quickly gets his own plate out of the way and catches him in a hug.

"Thank you, Danny." His tone indicates he's thanking him for more than just the name.

"No problem." Danny kisses the top of Tim's head. They stay like that for a moment before Tim pushes himself up.

"I think I should talk to your sister." He grabs his plate and sits near Danny on the couch. "I don't want someone to trigger me with a dumb comment or something."

"I'll tell her tonight." Danny says, "She's been wanting to meet you. Mostly because she wants to know her new nephew, but also because she likes to psychoanalize hero types. She finds us fascinating, but is still usually chill about it. Unlike when we were teens."

"What happened when you were teens?" Tim asks curiously.

"So Jazz has always wanted to be a therapist, and unfortunately, that means she knew a lot on the topic, but had none of the tact in implementing the knowledge." Danny looks absolutely fond. "She'd corner me to try and force me to talk about my feelings. "You can't keep it all bottled up, Danny." "You're hurting yourself and others by not talking." It was very annoying for an angsty teen to hear. She was right, but her methods needed work. And she's definitely put in the work since then."

"Any chance she's going to be anything like Harley?"

"Not a chance. She hates clowns and isn't one for jokes that aren't well thought out. You have to be really clever to even get a chuckle at a pun." Danny explains, taking their empty plates to wash them. "She isn't opposed to dark humor, but only if she knows the reason for it and knows it's not your only coping skill."

"So you got in trouble with her a lot, didn't you?" Tim teases, knowing Danny still uses dark humor as his main coping mechanism.

"All the time, but I started listening to her advice when I was.. 30? 32? Somewhere in my early 30s." Danny admits. "I got really tired of wanting to die all the time. And her advice has definitely helped minimize the want, unfortunately, mental illness doesn't truly go away."

Tim thinks about that. He knows you can't cure the types of mental illness he has, and Danny has been very open about his own issues, but he can't help his disappointment.

"Hey, on the plus side," Danny speaks up as if sensing Tim's thoughts, sometimes Tim is positive the man can. The man isn't facing him currently, so it's definitely not because Tim was making a face or something. "You're legally a person, so Jazz can get you meds. At least for your bipolar. I know you've been struggling with the whiplash between your extreme emotions."

"That's good..." Tim stares at the back of Danny's head. "You're not legally a person?"

"Nah. In the eyes of the government, I'm dead. It's why I've been hiding out in Gotham. The government has no place here, and as much as I hate the guy, Bats keeps the people hunting me down away." Danny pauses. "You know, I wonder if they think I faded? I haven't made an appearance in nearly 20 years. Then again, Harley snitched to everyone in existence, so I might have to start dodging ghost hunters again. At least the Anti-Ecto Control Acts got repealed, so I won't be taken to a secret government lab to be experimented on again. Shout out to Amity Parkers for clawing their way into office."

"The dad lore of your life is extensive." Tim jokes.

Danny chuckles. "Being a lab accident made ghost child vigilante with a portal to the infinite realms in his basement and ghost hunter parents and the government after you and the other ghosts visiting your town will do that. You'll have your own out of pocket stories to tell your kids one day, well, if you want kids. Otherwise, shocking friends is just as fun. Just imagine telling someone about the last 2 months. "Yeah, hi! My name's Tim! I was the 3rd Robin because a furry couldn't get his act together and then the Joker kidnapped me and I got adopted by the dead guy who showed up and killed him!""

Tim giggles. "I don't sound like that!"

"Maybe, maybe not, but it's still something you could say." Danny grins at him, drying his hands. "Do you need any help with your homework?"

"Yeah, there's a chemistry problem I don't understand-"

Tim loves living with Danny. It's everything a Tim pre-Batman would daydream about. Just a dad taking interest in his life and interests and taking care of him.

[glowettee]

✧・゜: self-discipline doesn't mean hating yourself into action :・゜✧:・゜✧

hey lovelies! ✧

i've been thinking about this a lot lately… how did we all collectively decide that being mean to ourselves was somehow the path to getting things done? like, who started this toxic rumor that self-discipline means internal screaming and punishment? because honestly? i spent years believing that the only way to accomplish anything was through this weird self-bullying technique and it was literally the least effective approach ever.

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ the wake-up call ･:࿔ೃ.⋆

last semester i hit a wall with my essay project. i had been doing that thing where you stare at your laptop, call yourself lazy in your head, promise to work for 8 straight hours to "make up for it," then get overwhelmed and watch netflix instead. but one night at like 2am (why do all realizations happen at 2am??) i wondered what would happen if i just… stopped being mean to myself about it?

what if self-discipline was actually about being the most understanding friend to yourself instead of the worst drill sergeant?

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ what actually works ･:࿔ೃ.⋆

start ridiculously small, i'm talking embarrassingly tiny steps. want to write that paper? commit to just opening the document and typing a single sentence. need to clean your space? just put away three things. the magic is that once you start, continuing feels so much easier.

create environments that make things easier, not harder. i rearranged my desk so everything i need is within reach and visible. stopped trying to work in my bed (even though it's so comfy) because my brain associates it with sleep and tiktok scrolling.

acknowledge the resistance instead of fighting it. when i feel that "i don't wanna" feeling, i literally say to myself "i hear you, and it makes sense you feel that way. what's one tiny piece we could do?" talking to myself like i'm my own bestie changed everything.

use curiosity instead of judgment. instead of "why am i so lazy?" (which never helps), try "i wonder what's making this hard for me right now?" sometimes the answer surprises you. maybe you're actually just hungry or need better lighting.

build in rest BEFORE you crash. i started scheduling actual breaks before i felt desperate for them, and somehow i get more done? it's like my brain knows it's not going to be held hostage forever.

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ the permission slip approach ･:࿔ೃ.⋆

my favorite technique lately has been what i call "permission slip productivity" where i literally write myself little notes giving permission to:

work imperfectly (first drafts can be messy!)

take breaks without guilt

change my approach if something isn't working

celebrate small progress instead of only the end result

acknowledge when something is genuinely difficult

there's something so powerful about physically writing yourself permission. it sounds silly but it works because it interrupts that mean inner voice that's been programmed into us.

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ the results speak for themselves ･:࿔ೃ.⋆

the wildest part? i actually get MORE done now that i've stopped the self-hate productivity method. turns out your brain works better when it's not being constantly criticized? who knew!

my essay (very big essay) got finished early. my room stays cleaner. i actually enjoy my study sessions now instead of dreading them. and most importantly, i don't feel that heavy cloud of shame following me around everywhere.

self-discipline isn't forcing yourself through misery, it's creating systems that work WITH your natural tendencies, not against them. it's about making things easier, not harder. it's about treating yourself like someone you actually care about.

and maybe the real glow-up isn't just checking things off your to-do list, but doing it without sacrificing your relationship with yourself in the process.

what about you? have you been trying to hate yourself into productivity? might be time for a gentler approach. you deserve that kindness from yourself. (and honestly? it just works better.)

xoxo, mindy 🤍

[sunderwight]

Shang Qinghua strikes me as the type who would only pursue a particular cultivation skill if it had some utility to making his everyday life easier or some specific task more doable, not even register that he'd achieved anything impressive with his cultivation in the process, and then carry on firm in the belief that this is a normal skill that every other cultivator has probably already acquired. Because if it's useful, why wouldn't they?

Like he thinks cultivation is cool and all, but (as can be evidenced by some of his writing choices) he's not really interested in it for its own sake. So everything he chooses to pursue has a reason. Usually that reason is "letting him be done with this tedious task so that he can possibly scrape together some free time, or at least more time to do other tasks."

This is why, despite sword arts being very cool and dashing and all, Shang Qinghua doesn't really bother learning a lot of swordsmanship or fighting skills. There are pretty few situations where wielding a sword is useful, most of those situations are ones which Shang Qinghua doesn't want to be involved in, and nearly all of his martial siblings are better at and more interested in fighting anyway.

He knows that martial prowess is popular and attractive, but it's boring. Sword drills? Dull as hell. There's a reason he came up with a super cursed sword that let his protagonist immediately win almost any fight, with consequences that just led to more interesting drama or conflicts to write about. His fight scenes were at least as boring and repetitive as his sex scenes, let's be real.

The end result is that Shang Qinghua's cultivation is probably deeply weird.

Like he's done muscle-reinforcement but not for combat, it's so that if he needs to he can literally pick up a recalcitrant ox and move it. He mastered inedia because remembering to eat and finding a moment to do it during An Ding's inventory week was harder. He introduced flying carpets to the setting after he transmigrated because figuring out how to transport items on some compatible spiritual device that was bigger than a sword blade, and could thus hold like a chest of goods or baskets of supplies, was way too convenient to pass up. He has selective knowledge of various skills, like alchemy, medicine, smithing, etc, things that are usually only brought up at the master level (thanks to his author knowledge cheat) but he doesn't know most of the basics of those skills, and he only deploys his knowledge for like, hyper specific tasks largely unrelated to the field.

He probably drives Mu Qingfang and Wei Qingwei crazy because he'll drop expert niche knowledge that they know is expert niche knowledge into a random discussion out of the blue, but then can't actually sustain a conversation about it because he doesn't know all the usual accompanying information. Mu Qingfang counting slowly backwards from ten because somehow Shang Qinghua knows that a super rare tonic made from a believed-to-be-extinct plant can bestow temporarily telekinesis to those who imbibe it, but doesn't know anything else about the medicinal uses of the plant, the history of the tonic, or other tonics that can achieve similar results with varying side-effects. But he knows what this one hyper-specific thing will do and he knows, very very vaguely, how to make it. Somehow.

Which would be less weird if it was just one thing, because people do pick up odd bits of knowledge or skills from unexpected places now and again. But it happens all the time. Seemingly at complete random! He also, as said, doesn't just do it with knowledge but with skills. No idea of basic leveling up, Shang Qinghua singles out what he wants from a process and then just does enough to get it and skips everything else that usually goes with it.

I bet he's like thirty before it comes to light that he has no idea how to actually do basic meditation, or something, and Yue Qingyuan does that thing where he smiles placidly while dying inside because how? Shang-shidi is a peak lord! How does a peak lord not know how to meditate properly?!

(In Shang Qinghua's defense, meditating involves spending a lot of time just focusing on one's self and not doing anything else, and he is a busy man! And he actually has mastered a form of meditation, but it's a kind Cang Qiong doesn't usually teach and that you do while also performing repetitive tasks. Usually those repetitive tasks are things like "repeatedly punching the exact same spot on a tree until the tree topples" but Shang Qinghua's are more like "reviewing a thousand nearly identical requisition forms and eating melon seeds at a steady rate" type stuff. When other people expect him to meditate he just sits quietly for a minute until they leave.)

[dross-the-fish]

What about writers and chat gpt?

same principal. Whether you hire a human writer to write your ideas into a novel or you use the AI to do it you're still using an external source to do the writing for you rather than being a writer yourself. And again I don't really think AI is an effective tool to help someone grow their writing skill or help a disabled person become a writer since the generative function also means results are going to be randomized and very limited in what it's actually going to be able to do for you. Even if it generates a serviceable result it's not going to be able to output a consistent quality or style, it's just a machine's closest approximation of what you want based on how it understands a prompt. I could put out a detailed prompt and hold a writing contest and get a bunch of random people to write me something then pick out which story I liked best. I have a story, possibly a good one, but I did not write it and therefore cannot call myself an author. That is effectively what Gen AI is an alternative for commissioning a writer. You didn't make this. I would even argue it's not really a good disability aid as it doesn't actually assist you in making your creation, it creates in place of you. And I'm speaking as someone who has always struggled a lot with both reading and writing and who frequently uses aids when they are available to me. Whether it's writing with more spacing or dyslexia friendly formatting. I don't write completely unassisted.

There are plenty of writing tools you can use if you struggle with writing, I sometimes do audio recordings of my writing and have my partner help me transcribe it when I find the actual process of writing to be overwhelming or difficult. But I do write. It is still my words, my characters, my prose, such as it is. It may not be good or up to a professional standard of writing, but it is unquestionably my work and that's really the crux of what makes an artist or writer. I had to painstakingly learn how to slow down and organize my thoughts and learn how to make an outline and a draft. Any skill is going to take a measure of work or dedication and for a lot of us that is going to be difficult. At some point we do have to accept that there will be things we can't do and some of our setbacks cannot be compensated for even with assistance. There will be times when you do have to let go of the notion of making something "good" and focus on making it because you want to create something. Generative AI created content will never be anyone's work. I don't care how much skill it takes to input the prompt or how long it takes to filter through the results and give suggestions for changes. That's literally what a client does when they hire an artist or writer but in this case your artist/writer is a subscription to an AI program. It's not different and the fact that this is even in question seems weird to me. We don't call people writers when they hire an author to pen a work for them. So it stands to reason that we wouldn't call them writers if they ask a program to do it.

[hyperlexichypatia]

What some of y'all call "recovery" and "healing" is just... growing up.

The theme I keep coming back to, the theme I keep writing about over and over, is the inextricability of ableism (specifically neurobigotry) and ageism.

The pathologizing of youth. The infantilizing of disabled adults. The structuring and micromanaging of childhood leading to ever more opportunities for "deviancy" to be classified as "disordered." The "neurological" push to raise the age of majority. The constant framing of disabled parents and caregivers as "unfit" or "bad influences" on children. And on and on.

Ageism and neurobigotry are such an interconnected tangle loop mobius strip that people are using the "healing"/"recovery" framework for basic human maturation.

When you were little, you uncritically accepted the worldview of your parents and other adults in your life, but now that you're older and "recovered," you see it differently?

That's called growing up. You grew up.

When you had less information and experience informing your worldview, you saw things one way, and now that you've "healed," you see things differently?

That's called learning. You learned new information and changed your perspective accordingly.

Look, learning and change and growth and maturation are (or should be) lifelong processes with no endpoint, and one of the cultural factors making people so weird about "maturity" and age of majority issues is the assumption that a "Real Adult" is in their fixed final form. So people think "If I've changed and grown in the past 5 years, that means that 5-years-ago Me was Still A Child and should not have been allowed to make major life-altering decisions," and also think that once they reach An Endpoint, they can or should stop changing. And that's a problem.

But. But. Changes in one's relationship to oneself and one's family of origin are especially common during times of major transition. That's not pathological. That's not even abnormal. If you see the world differently than you did before a major life transition, that does not mean that you went from a diseased state to a nondiseased state ("recovery"), or from an injured state to an uninjured state ("healing"). Time passed. You got older. Everyone else got older. You changed. Other people changed. Your family changed. The social context in which you live changed. The pathology paradigm has no place in this phenomenon.

People are out here saying that "People should heal themselves before they have their own children," and then when asked, what they mean by "heal themselves" is "learn how to effectively communicate with children." That. That is a skill. Learning a skill is not "healing." Lack of a particular skill set is not a disorder you have to "recover" from. You just have to learn the skill.

But that's also why when we say "You don't have to recover from your disabilities, recovery isn't a moral obligation," people say things like "You want to use your disability as an excuse not to change and grow."

My good bitch, what does change and growth have to do with recovery?

And this isn't even a new observation, because people have talked about how parents of developmentally disabled children will credit "therapy" and "recovery" for their children's natural developmental trajectory (if your child gained a skill after a year of intensive therapy, that doesn't mean "the therapy worked," that means they got older and developed the maturation to acquire that skill). A lot of the rhetoric around early childhood education does the same thing (the reason your 6 year old can hold a pencil now and he couldn't last year is because his bones got stronger and his fine motor skills improved, not because his high-quality preschool made him ready to compete).

But this. This is adults doing it to themselves! And it's so very original-sin-coded. You are born Unhealthy, but through continual effort and right practice, you can Recover and Heal.

No! You just grew up!

[the-dumpster-fire-of-life]

Ok but imagine 42! Miles with a s/o who's literally the complete opposite of him in terms of aesthetic but she helps him when he's the prowler. Like nobody would expect the sweet, energetic, girl with the "Mabel pines" energy to be the gal in the chair for the prowler and making his weapons and at the same time being his girlfriend. They're a literal force to be reckon with.

Complete opposites but totally work

(I love this and so sorry it took so long but enjoy!)

Mabel Pines!Reader

You guys work very, very well together

I can't even describe it very well but it's like yin and yang

He was absolutely gobsmacked on how smart you actually could be

Because not mean, he thought of you as a sort of airhead for a while

But he actually found it quite cute or adorable on you

But he did find out very quickly that y'all have very, very different aesthetics

To be frank you look like a rainbow threw up on you

While Miles is all gloomy and dark over there

So safe to say you throw some glitter in him and force him to be colorful

He finds it hard sometimes to keep up with your energy

But it good for him

His mama absolutely LOVES you

She sees how much Miles loves you just due to the light you bring into his eyes

You can give this man anything and he will pretend to not like it but raise hell if you try and take it back

You guys proudly watch the news of worried women and men on TV talking about jobs you guys pulled and tryna catch you guys

Y'know those sassy guys we see in Tiktoks?

He's that sassy guy with you when you make him mad or annoyed

Knees facing the other way with his whole body while he side eyes you

But he can't resist you for very long

He actually was quite shocked when he found out you had a little dark side

He always saw you looking on the bright side of things

So you partaking in his Prowler activities, much less MAKING the shit for them, absolutely shocked him

He found it quite hot though I can't lie

You're absolutely right when you're completely different but work so well together

Even Uncle Aaron saw it

He uses you sometimes as a little diversion

A fake damsel in distress might I say

He never actually puts you in danger a you can very much so handle yourself but he's always lurking around the corner in these situations

You are an absolute monster at anything Miles needs

New gloves? Done

New mask? Done

Fucking Ray gun? Why didn't he ask sooner? Here, it's in your bag

You absolutely stick little stickers on his crap as well

You can't help yourself

But he absolutely loves it

You sit in the chair looking all pretty but can turn intimidating real quick as he's sitting on the arm chair

Y'know those scenes where the bad guy asks their "dumb/weird" henchman like

"I have no idea…how about we ask (Name)?"

Those type of scenes and you can come up with the best shit he didn't even think of

Absolutely soul mates

Anyway, enjoy this little scene I made:

Miles breathed heavily, leaning against the wall on the rooftop to the door to go back down to his home. He was dressed as the Prowler, breathing labored from a fight.

Miles tried to breathe the best he could, even succeeding for a moment before his eyes snapped open as he heard the shudder of a phone camera and a flash.

Miles' eyes widened, hand in front of him as the flash died and he saw you standing there, blank faces and camera held out in front of you.

Miles and you stared at one another for a moment, nothing to say at all.

"Is that carbon fiber?" You suddenly spoke up.

"...what?-" Miles blinked, barely able to process this before you almost jumped on him.

"Ooh! How did you make this?!" Miles couldn't even breathe and before he knew, his helmet was in your hands as you went on.

"This material is tough enough but you know I could make a much better one if-" you rambles on, an excitement to your voice Miles knew all to well as you flipped over the mask in your hands

"Wait– hold on." Miles held his arms out, effectively causing a pause in your rant as you stared back at him.

"Y'know who I am…right?" Miles asked, slowly and almost trying to be intimidating.

"Um…the Prowler?" You muttered, utterly confused as you tilted your head, holding the helmet to your chest.

"Yeah?!" Miles exclaimed, eyes wide and hands held out like he was trying to get a point across.

"Mhm. Is this like…a trick question, or…?" You asked, completely unbothered by it all as you looked down at the mask, examining it as you merely glanced up at him.

"No! Just- why are you so calm about this?" Miles asked, shocked as well.

"Well, it's not really shocking. You sorta have the backstory of a villain, anyway." You shrugged, staring dead at him.

"...seriously?"

"Well, kinda. Sorry, is this like a bad time for you?" You asked, still not handing over the mask as you held it over your head, almost trying to put it on.

"No, just, you can't tell anyone about this." Miles said, grabbing the mask to hold it in place and off your head, almost dangerously close to your face.

"I mean, I'm not? But-" you started and Miles almost rolled his eyes at your excited expression.

"I can help you!" You stated, biting your lip in excitement as you almost glowed from the glitter on you.

"Help…me?" Miles raised a brow.

"Yeah! Everyone thinks I'm dumb, but I have dirt on everyone. Everyone. And, not a lotta people notice I'm there so I can get you a lot of info, or like- routes and stuff. I'm also good with my hands."

You went on proudly, Miles looking between you and your hand which held his helmet.

It took a moment, Miles going over it all in his head.

He finally sighed.

Miles opened the door to the stairwell, gesturing inside as your eyes widened in shock before you actually smiled, hurrying inside quickly as you rambled on.

Miles followed after you, a seemingly annoyed expression on his face, but the dust of pink across his cheeks from your smile gave him away.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

@mushystrawberries @sweetheartlizzie07 @itstooearly-its3am @Ihavetoexist @kaorussgf @samsketchezz @yas-v @lovelymiaablogss @sussybaka10 @shisuishoe @sairavity @moonlight-rosevine @spectr3inl0ve @najiiix @popeheywardssecretgf @onginlove @sylisan @onginlove

[the-exiled-comic]

have u ever done a post about crowstar and her thought process behind everything? srry if i missed it and u already did one (u dont have to answer this if so!) but i love her as someone who only feels remorse once it starts effecting her child and the moment to make it right is long past, but then starclan didnt give her the grace that they gave autumnstar and shes got that curse yo rlly interesting stubborn til death character i need in her brain

crowbar post... for me? :pleading: i might have talked about her in the past but i have no idea where i say things

despite me reminding ppl shes been deserving this lately she is one of my fave characters to write. "its too late to make it right" is pretty key to her character ya, i'll add more under the cut

crowstar has a lot of sympathetic qualities to me but like she does a lot of wrong things and knows that they are wrong. so i dont consider her a tragic villain in the same sense that firespots is, bc he's just extremely off the deep end. he's in a bunch of shit he truly did not start aggravating until like poking at treeclan and murdering cloverfall. in like a technical sense you can say it started with the rebellion bc i think he jumped the gun and went in under prepared but its different to me. but anyway this isnt about boy... we are going to talk about girl...

if we start from the very beginning, she's like a jealous mean girl kid. she has some unresolved issues with her family, her sister nightstride is older than her and actually knows her dad but crow doesn't know her own. so she projects onto autumnstar as a father figure and doesn't really like that firespots doesn't like his dad. she would be a good daughter, it would be so easy for her to be a good daughter! why is firepaw such a bad son!?

she's then groomed into being a kind of protege for autumnstar, she loves the attention but this sort of isolates her from her peers at a young age. she's the bratty teacher's pet that no one really gets along with crow goes on to date fallensnow and this is weird for her, affection for someone who isn't her family? for the first time? and then she gets burned by the fact he's avoidant and probably doesn't even like women (i could go on a tangent about fallensnows sexuality but this is not the post for it LMAO) so he leaves and shes like geeze!! that the only thing i ever loved! autumnstar explodes and shes leader now, her ex tries to kill her and then she has a little baby boy... theres also no more autumnstar around to be like "yeeeup start training that boy for war" so she just tries to raise him with a lot of love

and you see now how thats been backfiring as fallenscar is a super sheltered adult who has little grasp on reality. she lied to him about what exactly went down with the rebellion. killed a child for "attacking" him. told him about her curse which in turn made him have questionable faith in starclan (this hasnt really come into play just yet but it will soon, trust). made him deputy and then died before he could ever truly prepare himself for the world. good intentions, a lot of love... but that's just not really enough

and the curse. crowstar just fixated on the fact its not fair, why didnt this happen to autumnstar? is starclan misogynistic? more at 11 if this solved any problems... debatable. starclan stuff will get answered later in the story

crowstar to me is like. pitiable. she made too many enemies, didn't grow up in a place that fostered change, and then took over and didn't try to amend that until it was way too late. and the enemies.

now.. crowstar likes male attention. she is a straight woman i am sorry ;^; to me she is one of those people who cant make friends with anyone she sees as competition for this. she started off negatively with firespots and whisperleaf out of her love for autumnstar and fallensnow respectively. and she probably did not like that the men in her age group liked other girls. she did not like that her sister had all the amiable relationships. she's very jealous by nature and it hurt so much of her friendships

i like her and enjoy writing her but goddamn she is a plethora of unlikeable traits- some of which are things only I know as her creator- but it still surprised me that a lot of people like her. im glad you all do!

i know i said i dont view her as tragic but like the last few days of her life are a little tragic in the sense she IS realising just how badly she fucked up and theres not a lot of things she can do to fix it. she knows her baby boy is going to suffer greatly for this and all she can do is say sorry and tell him to be strong, shes out of options because she took too long. learning that yeah actually being a tyrant ruined her life

my fave way to write villains... their final moments are of anguish about their life choices :) except autumnstar hes just having a good time i dont think hes self reflected literally ever in his life. he thinks hes playing a video game

[psychhound]

ttrpgs in the classroom (part 8)

oh boy have i not made one of these posts in ,,, like a year. grad school is crazy yall. lmao. but. i wanted to share what we do for our analysis unit now that we've hit it this semester!!

other games used in the unit:

we are but worms & graves for funerals

the assignment:

write an essay of approximately 1000 words doing a literary analysis of some aspect of a game, first forming an inquiry question, then looking in the text for evidence, then coming up with an argument about a deeper meaning of the text. the second draft of the assignment can either be an expanded essay, or a multimodal piece of the student's choosing. (the other option for this essay is to do a rhetorical analysis of an argumentative text about gaming)

the games:

[ID: a powerpoint slide titled choose your fighter game (the word fighter is crossed out, so it reads choose your game). it shows five ttrpg titles, with a short description of each, and an icon to represent them. the background is a light orange sky and green grass in a video game like art style. there is a fake game menu bar on the bottom. the games in the slide are functionally described below. end ID]

when we made war upon the slumbering woods by richard kelly @sprintingowl

a collaborate journey into the magical woods ... to destroy it

the treasure at the end of this dungeon is an escape from this dungeon and we will never escape from this dungeon by riverhouse games @riverhousegames

a lyric game about a never-ending dungeon and those stuck there

kenzie's project by sasha winter @stargazersasha

a Weird Academia horror game for three players

i love you, alive girl by anna anthropy

a 1-page game about writing love letters under surveillance

drifters by gila rpgs

a Weird West game of gunslingers and their guns

past semesters game options:

a dragon game by chris bissette cozy town by rae nedjadi @temporalhiccup

the process:

in the powerpoint introducing the games, i have a more thorough description of each one, and then three examples of inquiry questions that they could use as jumping off points to do their analysis on. the inquiry questions ask things like, what moral stance might this game align itself with, what other stories is this game in dialogue with and to what effect, what does this game have to say about the current state of our society? the students can use these inquiry questions or not, theyre only meant to be examples

the results:

this is definitely the most challenging project for my students, but i think that challenge is good for them! i've had really mixed results, with the most common issue i run into just being surface level analysis. they are, however, 18 and have never done anything like this before (for the vast majority of my students) so a lot of my feedback is just pushing them further and trying to get them to say something interesting. i really love a dragon game and cozy town, but i found they didnt have enough context of ttrpgs and dnd/pf to really Get why a dragon game was interesting, so i replaced it with escape from this dungeon since thats got some more meat for them like voicey rules and characters. and im a big fan of nedjadi's games and wanted to give my students something more cute and fun, but they struggled to find much to read into or say about it that wasnt very surface level. escape from this dungeon and ilu, alive girl are new games this semester so we will see how those go over!!

[rederiswrites]

How did you end up having so many sheep to bottle feed? I didn't know anything about sheep, is disinterest from the moms normal/common?

I'd love to hear more about the sheep process in general it's really neat to see on my dash

Alright, so, first off, I am an inexperienced shepherd, and came into this (my first) lambing season FAR less prepared than I would've liked due to my mother being in the hospital for the weeks leading up to lambing. Not only that, but Soay are weird, mostly feral, archaic sheep, and a lot of the care principles that are expected for most sheep don't really apply to Soay, so you end up relying on the far, far smaller body of Soay-specific literature. So there's a lot I just don't know.

Sometimes, for any number of reasons, a ewe may reject a lamb. Rates of rejection vary so much with various factors that so far I haven't found anyone willing to give a simple blanket statistic on the subject. Nutrition, ewe experience level, environmental factors, breed, and a million other things could play a part. We've had two rejections out of eight births (one singlet and one set of twins), and I genuinely do not know how bad that is relative to baseline.

Soay are reputed to be good mothers and easy lambers, and so far that seems to be true for all the mothers who bonded with their lambs. Bonding is the critical period right after birth during which baby and mother get each other's scent, and baby begins to nurse. But bonding can be effected by the mother's experience--ours are all first time mothers; there's not a single experienced mother in the flock. It can be effected by disturbance during the bonding period after birth, like a human taking the lamb away for too long or getting its scent confused by washing or by handling with another lamb's scent on their hands, etc.

Our ram is currently in dog kennel prison, because after having seemed to be a pretty good dad for a while, he started running one of the ewes off her new lambs repeatedly. If he had done that with a previous ewe during the night, that might have caused one of the rejections, and we wouldn't have seen it. Larger or more controlled sheep operations might well separate the ram from the ewes during this period pre-emptively. That would have been laborious for us at a time when we're Fucking Swamped, like, just so underwater bro, just fucking drowning. So we didn't do it initially. We can't know now if one of the failures to bond might be his fault.

And of course it's entirely possible that we, the shepherds, effected the ewes in some way that our inexperience doesn't allow us to see. It's part of the process. Learning, when your learning experiences come at the cost of another creature's wellbeing, is one of the very difficult parts of animal husbandry.

What fascinates me is how willing the lambs are to bond to humans, and multiple humans at that. We jokingly refer to each other as Mama-mama, Papa-mama, Sister-mama, and Brother-mama, and just walking through a room right now is likely to net you a flurry of tippity-tapping hooves as all three bottle babies eagerly follow under your feet.

So what'll happen now is that these guys will continue to need a bottle roughly every four hours, day and night, for six weeks. During that time, it'll be up to us to haul them out to the pasture progressively more often, until they're getting most of their nutrition through grazing and a little feed. On a more traditional or established farm, the bottle babies might be kept in a barn, but we don't have anything resembling a barn. On the other hand, we're hardly the only people to bring a bottle baby into the house, given that you have to feed them in the middle of the night/constantly. Soay are hardy sheep who can do well even on fairly poor pasture, and don't need supplemental feed at all on good pasture. Maryland is, I think it's safe to say, a much gentler climate than the islands of the Outer Hebrides where Soay lived feral for a thousand years. So really, we only give our sheep grain-based feed to facilitate their bond with us as the goodie-givers.

Someday, Binabik will hopefully be a big, fine ram, and if we play our cards right, he will still be fairly trusting and affectionate to us, which will lead to the rest of the flock being somewhat more trusting. This should help us catch them for medical care more readily, so a bottle baby now and then is a good thing. We really, really did try to get the twins (whom we're now calling Minnie and Kazoo) to bond with their mother, because we did NOT need more lambs in the house. But here we are, and here I am, with three snoozing lambs around my feet.

[mezz-merizing]

Confusion & Suggestibility

so i had a fun experience in voice chat today! there’s this discord activity called blazing eights that is basically just uno— bear with me, i promise this is hypno-related— and myself and a couple friends were all playing it. one of them, who we’ll just call PK, played one of those “change the colour” cards and couldn’t figure out how to actually use it, because the UI for this game is really weird and bad. PK had already timed out of being able to choose the colour once, so they were a little frantic, rushing to figure out how to do it before the game just chose it for them

so at this point another one of the people in the game, who only had one card left, jokingly said “make it green,” since, y’know, that would have won them the game! PK actually laughed at this, so i know they heard it in the moment. and then they figured it out, finally realised how to actually choose the colour, and then they… made it green. it actually took PK a couple of seconds to realise what they’d done, and at that point, the other player had already won. it was pretty funny!! they very incredulously asked “WHY DID I MAKE IT GREEN??” since they knew full well that doing so would make them lose the game. we all laughed about it, because it was funny in the moment, but then i got to thinking about it. you can probably tell based on the title of this post where i’m going with this!

this is, funny enough, a very useful case study on how confusion and shock inductions actually work. it’s kind of the perfect real-world demonstration of it! PK was confused and occupied, frantically trying to figure out how to play the game properly, and when they heard essentially a direct order, even a joking one, they really didn’t pay it any mind. but once they had cleared up the thing that was taking up their brain space, their brain sort of “loaded in” the thing they had heard, and before they even realised what they were doing or processed it fully, they just… obeyed. the command slipped past their critical thought and took effect before they could actually think about it, because it was slipped in while they were confused and frantic

you can apply this principle in a lot of places, the classic rapid induction being one of my faves! we’ve all seen the jerk the arm and shout “sleep” thing, and it really works the same way. the subject is dazed and confused by the sudden physical sensation, and while they’re in the midst of processing that, trying to figure out what just happened to them, and reorienting their kinesthetic sense, that command hits first, and just like PK did, they obey before they have the chance to think about it. a deeper part of them obeys, really! the command passes right through the critical, conscious mind and vanishes into the depths of thought, which just follow it uncritically

and a lot like PK, by the time they realise what they did, it’s too late. they’re already asleep, or have already lost the game. it’s such an interesting induction tactic- and obviously, such a hot one. just having a command slipped past all your faculties, giving you no choice but to follow. you don’t even get the chance to think about it. you’re just gone…

and that’s really it!! a fun demonstration of how confusion inductions work happened before my eyes, and it’s been plaguing my thoughts ever since. can you really be sure your thoughts are yours when new ones can be forced in so easily? <3

[krispdreemurr]

ive been going back and forth for a bit now on this: on some level i kind of feel like sword route should have had a little more consequence if you did it on an otherwise pacifist run. like i get why it doesnt (it could potentially read as labouring the point about the layers of the fiction if sword route altered things beyond kris' outlook) but also i kind of feel like it should have at least been mutually exclusive with saving tenna... especially with the changes in his bossfight if you do it, i feel like it would still make sense. plus it would potentially make the meaning less opaque to the notorious subset of utdr players who tend to misinterpret all things no mercy related. in general i feel like there should have just been a little more lasting consequence to your choice to do this. obviously we can't fully know yet what the outcomes of the wider secret boss scenario will be (and I'm starting to have serious doubts about how good it will be for us at large). overall though i think with the specific nature of what you have to do to get the mantle, and how it does affect kris' behaviour and the way they approach obstacles, it might have worked a little better if there were more unavoidable consequences to your file.

at the same time though i keep talking myself out of this thought process because i think its kind of important to the feel of sword route that it remains a game within a game with no lasting consequences to those outside of it. the plausible deniability feels important especially as commentary on us the players and the way we inevitably experience stuff like the weird route. but then again we literally did stab tenna to get him out of the way during the game... and there are multiple instances of characters asking kris whether they had fun with the game (increasingly clearly referring to the violence)... plus the increasingly obvious blurring of the lines between the fiction and the fiction-within-fiction... i dont know. i think maybe it would have been interesting for it to affect things more permanently. but also i think it having more permanent concrete effects potentially might have made it less compelling. sorry for basically rambling in your askbox and coming to no useful conclusion on this, but if you or any of your followers have thoughts on this id be very interested to hear them

i think, genuinely, the fact we seemingly "get away with it" is part of what's going on. like, no one knows what Kris was up to, everything goes away when the game is turned off, nothing has been altered... except, of course, that's not true. pixel kris has definitely done Something with ramb. kris has lingering desensitization. but you can still act normal, continue on like normal, etc.

it's connected to weird route in that regard too, honestly - isn't it weirdly low-consequence, through 2 and 3? isn't it the case that your dark world actions are invisible when you've left except for the mental marks left on Noelle and Kris and Berdly (counting being comatose as a mental effect)? can't you still recruit enemies, make friends, see all the major plot beats, and have a good time?

if something is contained and invisible from the outside - if it will have no consequences except on the mind - if you can safely walk away from it back into the normal world...

is that what makes it "okay" to do it?

would it be fine to do a no mercy run in Undertale if at the end Frisk logged out of a MMO they were playing and went back to daily life with no one the wiser?

is the arbiter of morality whatever you can get away with?

[mayasaura]

sorry if this has been answered before or if there's a post about this, but I've been seeing a lot of posts labeling harrow as schizophrenic and/or having trouble recognizing reality, including the one you just made about crux as harrow's caretaker and reality-indicator.

I realize that these interpretations come from htn, but I'm curious as why people feel that it's always been a trait of harrow's instead of a side effect of the lobotomy?

I was under the impression that she created the reality problems as an excuse to cover the blocks in her memory, especially since we know that wake/the sleeper didn't possess her until after gtn and most of her confusion happens in the river bubble.

even the "hallucinations" of the body don't really impact her perception of reality, and it's actually alecto's soul not a real hallucination. the only questionable moment I can remember is when she sees cytheria under the bed and ianthe says there's nothing there, but we know ianthe is a duplicitous legend so I read it as ianthe lying to harrow lol

long story short, I was wondering if there was scenes in gtn, ntn, or post-realization htn that indicate harrow has had these reality problems pre-lobotomy? or if you know of a post analyzing it further? sorry to throw this at you, I just haven't seen any analysis of it but I saw your post so I was hoping you would have more info :) I really adore all of your tlt analysis posts!

Hi! Yeah, if you go into my '#harrow's schizophrenia' tag, I've made several posts about it, and other people have added on to a few of them with further elaboration.

But I don't think I've ever laid it out fully like a thesis. And I have several stressful things I should be doing right now, so I can't think of a better time to get into it.

When Harrow's brain is editing Gideon out, there's an effect a little like a record skip. Her memory snags on something, very briefly, and then quickly moves on. Or she'll make an assumption or say something that doesn't actually make sense without Gideon in the picture, but she won't notice. The most prominent example is the details in chapter 3 surrounding her opening of the Tomb:

Just ellipsis "found out" ellipsis to skim over the very large part Gideon had to play in those events. If she were to interrogate the memory, it would be strange that she doesn't remember how her parents found out, but doing so would make her brain bleed. She would black out, and most likely forget what she was trying to remember.

And an example from the same chapter of a statement that doesn't make sense, unless you know about Gideon:

Two things are important about these examples, the first being that they don't upset Harrow. She doesn't think they're strange, because she barely thinks about them, which was sort of the point of the lobotomy in the first place. The second is that they can be immediately explained by plugging Gideon into the Gideon-shaped hole in Harrow's memory. If you know about Gideon, and what Harrow's done, there's no mystery remaining.

In contrast, there are other details in chapter 3 about Harrow's childhood that Harrow did, and does, find strange and upsetting.

Gideon didn't attend services, and she most definitely didn't participate in chants. Putting Gideon back in the picture does nothing to explain the "weird, thuddering beat" Harrow finds disruptive. But it does sound an awful lot like an auditory hallucination, as does hearing doors open and close where no doors were opening and closing.

Maybe we could try to explain the doors by supposing she was hearing Gideon coming and going without remembering the source, but that doesn't really track with how we know her mind processes the missing pieces. If Harrow were papering Gideon over in her memory, it wouldn't be important who was or wasn't opening doors and where. The focus of her memory would quickly shift, just like it did when trying to remember how her parents found out about the Tomb, in order to avoid looking at what she's hidden from herself.

Then there's the next paragraph:

Again, plugging Gideon into this memory does nothing to explain it. Even if Gideon had been in the habit of sneaking up behind Harrow and attempting to choke her out—which, yikes—Harrow has already seamlessly blocked out the memory of one attempted strangulation. Then there are the phantom ropes she sees, her parents' method of suicide haunting her.

The forgetting where she was, losing time, and false memories do seem at first glance like they could be explained by the lobotomy, seeing as that is sort of the whole purpose and effect. But I'm pretty sure even these are real memories. Again, because of the focus of her attention. She's remembering having forgotten, while the lobotomy make her forget to remember.

Then there's Harrow's overall behavior. Her reactions to her hallucinations, especially in the River bubble, which imply that not all of this is new to her. She isn't shocked, or caught off-guard. She has coping mechanisms. She's figured out what evidence she can probably rely on to rule out hallucinations, and what's more likely to be suspect. A lobotomy, even a necromantic lobotomy, doesn't come with built-in tools for coping with its effects. Her memory of her past without Gideon in it is fractured and incomplete, not an entirely new life story with new life lessons.

Finally, from Nona the Ninth, some evidence that Harrow's problems with reality definitely predate the lobotomy:

Crux remembers them.

[anthurak]

I’ve seen some discussion on how we’re likely to get an Octavia song next episode based on this trailer clip we haven’t seen yet (which I very much agree with), and specifically a lot of discussion/assumption about the song being a duet with Stolas.

Now I will say, it is certainly entirely possible that this is what we wind up seeing.

Buuuttt… I can’t help but think it would be more INTERESTING if this was in fact a SOLO Octavia song.

One of the more subtle details about Octavia’s character and a major factor in her dysfunctional relationship with her father is that it seems that Stolas (almost certainly completely unintentionally mind you) has made Octavia almost entirely emotionally dependent on him.

Looking back at both Loo Loo Land and The Circus, it’s pretty clear that for most of the past 19 years, Octavia was the ONLY THING Stolas really cared about. Making sure she was safe, cared for and happy, that was the only thing in Stolas’ life that mattered to him. Likely the only thing he was really even living for.

But again, I imagine that this absolute devotion to his daughter has had the unintended side-effect of making Octavia entirely emotionally reliant on her father.

Not just in the specific cases of Octavia being fairly sheltered and likely unaware of the true context and details of her father’s abusive marriage (which could in turn make it easier for her mother and uncle to manipulate Octavia), but more generally making Stolas not just Octavia’s father, but also basically her only FRIEND.

Which in turn does a lot to explain how and why Stolas has become such a complete and total fuckup of a father to Octavia ever since reuniting with and starting his affair with Blitzo. Stolas had spent the last 17 years caring and even just living for ONE thing; his daughter and her happiness. But then without any warning, Stolas suddenly finds himself caring about someone ELSE. Not just caring, but being completely head-over-heels in LOVE with someone in a way he never thought he could love someone else.

And it’s been abundantly clear for a while now that Stolas had absolutely no fucking idea HOW to properly emotionally process ANY of this.

So is it really so surprising that we’ve seen this recurring trend across the entire show of Stolas completely forgetting about Octavia whenever Blitzo-related shenanigans/bullshit are afoot? He’s spent so long caring about just ONE thing in his whole life that he doesn’t know HOW to balance two things mattering so much to him. So he’s essentially just been flip-flopping between caring ONLY about Octavia, and ONLY about Blitzo.

At least until he threw away everything to save Blitzo… including Octavia.

Which of course in turn gives Octavia EVERY reason to believe that her father is/has abandoned her and doesn’t care about her anymore. She has gone her entire life being the ONLY thing her father cares about to all of a sudden… NOT being the only thing. Even worse is the fact that her father is doing a really shitty job of processing and managing all this so to Octavia it feels like he’s completely forgetting all about her to be with this weird red dickhead. And the worst part is, she’s not entirely WRONG in this belief either. Of course it also doesn’t help that Stolas seems to have been completely unwilling or unable to actually explain what’s going on from his perspective to his daughter.

So to circle back around to where we started; considering how a core part of Octavia’s character and story has been grappling with the fact that she is not a child anymore, I have a feeling that a big part of Octavia’s character going forward could be her learning how to be independent of the father she’s been entirely reliant on her whole life.

We’ve already gotten a lot of hints that we’ll be seeing Octavia inherit Stolas’s power and status and succeed her father as a Goetic Prince. Combined with how it’s pretty clear Stolas has a LOT of work to do in reconciling with his daughter and figuring out how to balance his care for her and his love for Blitzo, I think it’s very plausible that we see Octavia learning how to be more emotionally independent of her father as well.

So I think it’s rather interesting to imagine this starting with Octavia specifically getting a solo-song number in Sinsmas, rather than a duet with her father. Representing how she is starting to learn how to stand on her own.

Of course, Octavia getting a solo-number next episode is what I think would be interesting to see.

If we want to talk about what I’m HOPING we see, well…

Imagine Octavia getting a duet with Loona.

And the best part is that I would even call this plausible, and ties back to what we saw between Octavia and Loona in Seeing Stars.

Because a subtle yet major idea of that episode wound up being that while Stolas, Blitzo and the M&Ms all got sidetracked and distracted from their search for Octavia by various shenanigans and bullshit, it was actually LOONA who tracked down and helped Octavia.

It wasn’t her father who wound up giving Octavia the advice, closure and comfort she so desperately needed at the end of the episode. But instead a young woman not so different from Octavia who could deeply understand and relate to the problems she was dealing with. I think it’s fair to say that in this episode, Loona became Octavia’s first real FRIEND who wasn’t her father.

And I both think and hope that this is going to wind up being VERY important.

[suzukiblu]

Ko-fi thank-you WIP excerpt behind the cut, as promised, friends; 7k of kidnapping your soulmate for fun and profit. (and non-chrono link for anyone on the app.)

Tana Moon follows Leech over to the group, looking a little wary herself. Tim sizes her up in his peripheral vision, pretending not to notice her approach. He’s “just” found out who his soulmate is, so he can sell the illusion of only paying attention to Superboy right now. It’s not an unusual reaction. 

It’s a pretty typical one, actually. The fact that Superboy decided to immediately show him off to everyone he knows is actually the less usual option, in fact. Not unheard of either, of course, but still. A lot of newly-discovered soulmates tend to just forget about the outside world for a few hours. Or days, even. A few missing person cases that Tim’s been involved in solving turned out to be cases of “I met my soulmate and we just eloped/ran away/went on a road trip/holed up in a hotel room without telling anyone”. 

Tim had thought it was ridiculous at the time, if obviously preferable to ending up with either a dead body or a traumatized victim, but Tim is currently in the process of planning an ethically-necessary kidnapping less than twenty-four hours after first cracking into Superboy’s file, so he supposes soulmates just bring out most people’s less pragmatic sides. 

Though he personally thinks carefully-planned ethical kidnappings are an improvement on spontaneous weekends in Vegas, pragmatically-speaking. But whatever. 

“He showed you?” Tana Moon says, glancing Tim over suspiciously. Superboy’s face reddens this time and he tugs at the slash in his own suit. 

“He, uh, saw mine first,” he says. “Kinda got into it with a dude downtown and Tim here was in the area, and like, he recognized it, obviously.”

“It’s fairly noticeable as a mark,” Tim supplies helpfully, figuring he should be being supportive of his soulmate here, and also be shutting Rex Leech up as efficiently as possible. “And Superboy came over to check on me after the fight, so it was hard to miss.” 

“Sure it was,” Leech says, his face souring. “So then you won’t mind showin’ yours to–” 

“Shut up, Dad!” Roxy hisses, kicking him viciously hard in the ankle. Leech yelps in pain. Roxy is immediately his favorite, Tim decides. By far Roxy is his favorite. The dog’s kind of cute and Dubbilex seems decent, but definitely Roxy is his favorite. 

Her dad definitely fucking sucks, though. 

And as for Tana Moon . . . 

“You’re a tourist?” Tana says, just barely frowning down at Tim. She’s taller than him. She’s also taller than Superboy, because she’s a grown-ass woman and why, exactly, is a reporter even here right now? How is that necessary or reasonable? 

. . . admittedly she’s also taller than Leech and he’s a middle-aged man, but that’s not the point here. If Tim has to “no comment” this situation and figure out how to get either his parents or Bruce to kill a story, he absolutely will. He isn’t even slightly gonna hesitate there. He is gonna the opposite of hesitate, in fact. 

“Yes,” he lies, which might not endear him to Moon, given she’s a native, but is better than confessing to having premeditated designs on kidnapping a teen idol superhero. Especially to a reporter. 

Even if it is legally salvage. 

“I’m just in town for the day,” he continues. “I needed to get away for a little while, you know how it is.” 

“Sure,” Moon says, narrowing her eyes at him. “Who doesn’t.” 

“He’s from Gotham. And he helped the civilians get out of the area while I was fighting that guy downtown!” Superboy says eagerly, which is . . . odd, actually, and throws Tim off a bit. That seems like a weird thing for Superboy to be eager about, considering. Like . . . just very weird. 

“Well, that’s a Gotham thing, probably,” Tim says, putting on a sheepish Civilian Smile (#7). “We’re used to rogue attacks with area of effect concerns involved, so we get pretty good at clearing a street.” 

“You did awesome,” Superboy says, grinning excitedly at him. That is . . . still weird, yeah. Tim really doesn’t get it. 

Well, maybe Superboy’s just relieved to have a soulmate who knows how to stay out of the line of fire and what to do in a crisis, given how often crisises probably come up in his life. That would make sense, considering. 

“It was nothing, just a little light crowd control,” Tim tries, assuming that’s what a normal civilian would say. Probably, right? Almost definitely. “Nobody even needed any urgent medical attention. And you used your TTK really strategically and contained the guy too, that was much more impressive to pull off in a mess like that.” 

Yeah, that was normal civilian talk, he thinks, pleased with himself for managing it. 

Superboy turns pink, then grins again. Dubbilex . . . tilts his head. 

Normal. Normal. Normal civilian. That’s what Tim is. A civilian! Who’s normal! Very, very normal! 

Normal. 

He smiles Normal Civilian Smile #4 and pats Krypto’s head again. Krypto makes an enthusiastic attempt at licking his fingers off. 

Ew. 

“‘Light crowd control’,” Moon echoes. That’s what Tim said, yeah, so he’s not sure why she’s repeating it. Well–reporter, again, so It’s probably a trap. 

It’s almost definitely a trap, actually. 

Really definitely it’s a trap. 

“Sorry to just show up like this, hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he says to Roxy and Dubbilex with a smile, politely pretending not to be ignoring Moon. He is definitely ignoring Moon, though. Again: reporter. She may not be a Lois Lane or even a Vicki Vale, but he’s still not giving her any information he can avoid giving her. And he’ll just ignore Leech while he’s at it, too. 

“I invited you, man!” Superboy says with a laugh, shaking his head. “We’re gonna hit the beach for a while, go hang out. Just swung by to grab Tim a swimsuit I can lend him.” 

“You came to Hawaii to ‘get away’ and didn’t pack a swimsuit?” Moon says skeptically. 

“Yup,” Tim replies with the most placidly innocent expression he’s ever worn in his life. Nothing. He is giving her nothing. Let all her reporter instincts strike against mirrored glass and high-security privacy windows and come to naught. 

Moon stares at him in silence, clearly waiting for him to fill it. Tim doesn’t fall for the incredibly obvious bait and just keeps the placidly innocent expression on. 

She frowns. 

“C’mon, man,” Superboy says cheerfully, apparently–and fortunately–oblivious to their stand-off. He grabs Tim’s arm and drags him towards the front porch. Tim seriously doubts its structural stability, from the look of it, but tactile telekinesis is hard to argue with. 

The steps manage not to collapse–possibly also because of tactile telekinesis, Tim can’t help suspecting–and Superboy pulls him straight into the house, which is . . . not particularly well taken care of, no surprise. The furniture looks like it all came from a thrift store, and not a nice thrift store. 

Admittedly Tim’s upbringing might be showing here, but also the corners need swept and there’s random boxes of assorted Superboy merch everywhere, most of which looks like cheap junk, and a huge stack of mail and four empty pizza boxes on the coffee table and overflowing trash cans with random junk scattered around, and it’s just . . . it doesn’t look taken care of, no. Which is something Tim would expect from a teenager or two, and maybe Dubbilex doesn’t know how chore wheels work or whatever, but fucking Rex Leech should at least be capable of getting out the broom once a week. 

Assuming there is one, anyway. Tim isn’t particularly optimistic on that one, honestly. 

Superboy’s room is even messier than the living room, covered in dirty clothes and abandoned comics and crumpled-up papers, but Tim’s bedroom looks like a bomb went off in it so he’s not gonna judge. Anyway, that’s Superboy’s personal space, not a common area. He can keep it however he likes, Tim figures. 

Somebody should really sweep that living room, though. And throw out those old pizza boxes, too. 

Tim isn’t judging, just–well, no, he is very much judging, actually. Specifically what he’s judging is Rex Leech, noted asshole sleazeball manager with predatory business tactics. 

Fuck that guy, seriously. 

“You want trunks or a speedo?” Superboy asks as he lets go of his arm to fly over to the cluttered dresser. Tim turns seventeen different shades of red and nearly disassociates. 

“Trunks,” he says quickly. “Please.” 

“Gotcha, man,” Superboy says easily, and then all the dresser drawers yank out at once and dump out crumpled piles of . . . mostly swimsuits and super-suits, it looks like, yeah. Like, basically nothing else but swimsuits and super-suits and a couple of cheesy-looking Hawaiian shirts. 

Well, that might be one lonely, lonely pair of cutoffs sticking out from underneath the swimsuits. But otherwise, that’s pretty much it, yeah. 

Fuck, that’s depressing, Tim thinks. 

Superboy comes back over with an armful of swimsuits, just about all of which have the S-shield either printed or stitched on them. Tim wonders why the guy even has this many swimsuits, especially considering he barely has any other clothes at all. At least not as far as he can see, anyway. 

He also wonders if he’s gonna die if he wears Superboy’s clothes. Is that a thing that might happen? Because it really might happen, yeah. 

Also wearing something with an S-shield on it feels like just a little too much to handle right now, so Tim’s hoping for a basic black option to be buried somewhere in that pile. Given Superboy’s apparent fashion sense, it seems unlikely, but hope springs eternal. 

“Take a look, see what’s good,” Superboy says, dumping the entire armful of swimsuits on Tim. Tim’s just grateful he remembered to stick to just the trunks, at this point. 

“So you spend a lot of time on the beach, huh?” he says wryly. 

“C’mon, man, it’s Hawaii,” Superboy says with a sheepish grin. “And I mean, I look good in anything but wet leather is just not a comfortable fit, you know?” 

“I guess it wouldn’t be, no,” Tim says, giving him Civilian Smile #4 again. Superboy’s ears redden a little again, and then he leans back and zips back across the room to shove all his drawers back shut. Tim lays out the pile of swimsuits on the bed, since it’s right there anyway, and then immediately feels embarrassed to be this close to Superboy’s bed. Which is stupid, even if they aren’t platonics. They’ve just met; it’s not like anything’s gonna happen. 

. . . even if Superboy is a notorious flirt and totally shameless and–

Tim is just not gonna pursue that line of thought right now, he decides. Just for his own sanity and all. 

He accidentally knocks some paper off the bed as he’s laying out the suits to get a look at them, and reflexively leans down to pick it up. The room’s a mess, yeah, but it’s Superboy’s mess. It’s still rude to just drop shit wherever. 

The paper isn’t as crumpled as some of the others, and Tim sees a glimpse of color as he picks it up. His inner detective reflexively wonders what it is, and . . .

Tim uncrumples the paper a little, and blinks down at it in surprise. It’s a little kid’s drawing, it looks like. A sunny beach rendered in bright colored pencil and simple, awkward shapes all painstakingly but clumsily colored in and–

Superboy’s suddenly right back next to him snatching the paper from him and immediately hiding it behind his back, looking absolutely mortified. Tim’s confused, for a moment. What’s he embarrassed about? It’s obviously not anything he’d have drawn himself. It’s probably just something a fan or a neighbor’s kid gave him, or . . . 

Tim pauses. Then he recontextualizes just how much of the crumpled-up paper is lying around Superboy’s room and wonders, very briefly, if a bunch of STEM majors with delusions of grandeur would’ve bothered programming their custom-designed “Superman” with anything resembling art skills. 

So . . . maybe that is something Superboy drew himself. If Cadmus didn’t program him with the muscle memory or knowledge of how to draw . . . well, then he probably would draw like a little kid, wouldn’t he.

And given Superboy’s cocky, braggart personality and defensive ego and how all that paper is all crumpled up as if in frustration . . .

“Gift from a fan?” Tim “assumes” with Smiling Civilian Face #4, pretending to be oblivious. 

“Uh–yeah!” Superboy blurts quickly as he jumps on the provided excuse, though he keeps the paper behind his back. “Yeah, just–you know, just some kid gave it to me at a signing, whatever. Uh, bathroom’s through there, if you wanna get changed. Or like, whatever.” 

“Thanks,” Tim says, and resists the itching urge to peek at a few more of those crumpled-up papers. It’s just a lot of paper, especially if Superboy’s upset with the results.

He wonders why the guy draws so much, if he’s that frustrated and embarrassed by it. Maybe it’s a rebellion thing, since it’s something Cadmus didn’t want him to know how to do. Tim would definitely understand that logic, if he were in Superboy’s situation. Or maybe he’s just bothered not to know how and trying to teach himself to make up for the perceived failing. 

Or maybe he just likes it, Tim supposes. That’s an option too. 

Probably a less likely one, though, given that it’s Superboy. Not to be an asshole or anything, just it’s a lot easier picturing the guy assuming he should be able to do something and getting fixated on trying to pull it off than just, like . . . liking to draw. Also, judging by all that balled-up paper, it doesn’t seem like there’s much there for him to “like”, either.

Tim takes the plainest set of trunks with a drawstring waist, which are black and dark blue but still have an S-shield iron-on patch sewn onto their waistband, for whatever reason, and ducks into the bathroom with them. He realizes belatedly that said S-shield is probably going to rest right up against his soulmark, then feels like an idiot for feeling flustered by that idea and just sets his bag against the wall and starts getting undressed. 

He’s definitely wearing one of the spare shirts in his go-bag for this, he decides as he stuffs his clothes into his bag. Just–definitely, yeah. 

The trunks fit once he cinches the drawstring enough, but the S-shield definitely does rest right against his soulmark. Tim has never actually considered the sight of the S-shield to be, like . . . relevant or interesting outside of work, but he’s realizing that he sure does feel differently about it now that he knows his soulmate’s one of the people wearing it. 

Which is a little ironic, really, considering Superboy wears the S-shield as a branding thing or whatever and lets Leech slap it on whatever cheap shitty merch he can think of. Like, he’s probably the least respectful S-wearer there is. 

Tim pulls on a plain clean T-shirt and a short-sleeve button-down to go over it, figuring that’s beach-friendly enough. He should’ve packed sunglasses, probably, but he was a little distracted by his kidnapping plans and didn’t think to. 

Seriously. He didn’t think to bring sunglasses to Hawaii. 

This whole situation definitely has him off his game, yeah. 

Soulmate thing, he guesses.

Tim eyes himself in the bathroom mirror, mentally decides he’s being an idiot to worry about how he looks right now, and then grabs his bag and heads back out into the bedroom. Superboy’s changed into low-waisted S-shield-themed trunks of his own and flip-flops and nothing else, which does in fact give Tim an embarrassingly good and embarrassingly distracting view of their soulmark. It’s not quite distracting enough for him to miss the fact that the amount of crumpled papers strewn around the room has noticeably decreased, though. And there’s definitely more of them sticking out from under the bed and dresser and in the back of the closet than there previously were. 

Which is kinda cute, honestly, but Tim should probably not say that. Like, ever. 

“Thanks for waiting,” he says, smiling Normal Civilian Smile #4 at Superboy as he hitches his bag up a little higher on his shoulder. “And for the loan.” 

Superboy stares blankly at him for half a second, then seems to startle a little and puffs himself up. 

“Uh–sure, yeah!” he says quickly. “No problem, man. Anytime.” 

“‘Anytime’ seems pretty open, as an offer,” Tim jokes, because normal civilians make that kind of joke, and Superboy turns red. 

“Oh, uh–you know what I mean!” he sputters awkwardly, holding his hands up, which seems kind of a lot as a reaction, and then somehow manages to nearly knock over his dresser without even touching it. Well–that'd be the TTK, Tim guesses. 

It wasn't even that much of a joke. Like, lame suburban dad joke territory, that's all. 

“I do, yeah,” he says with a wry smile. Superboy finds a way to turn even redder and shoves his dresser back into a corner. That also seems like kind of a lot as a reaction, but Tim doesn't comment. Just seems, well . . . awkward? Unnecessary? “Are we good to go, then?” 

“Um, yeah, yeah,” Superboy says, clearing his throat and then zipping out into the hall. Tim wonders if he always flies indoors this much. “All good, dude! Let's head out.” 

“Sure,” Tim says, keeping the smile on. Superboy is still red, but floats along down the hall. Tim follows. Okay. They’re almost definitely not platonic, but Superboy clearly isn’t any more sure what to do with that than Tim is, so . . . small favors, he guesses. Like–that they’re at least roughly on the same page there, he means. 

Unless he’s just reading into things because of weird personal biases he didn’t even know he had, and Superboy is completely straight and just kind of socially awkward around civilians, and Tim’s just being socially pressured by the background radiation of living in a society that over-values romantic soulmates in comparison to platonic ones and sometimes disavows platonic soulmates altogether. 

He supposes technically they could be familial, rare as that is. It’s not like he really knows how he’d feel about having a brother. Dick’s the closest thing to one he’s ever had, and that’s just . . . not actually the same thing, obviously, even if sometimes he wishes . . . 

Anyway. It doesn’t matter. He’s pretty sure having a brother wouldn’t in any way involve this level of embarrassment and unexpected hormones and just general sexuality-questioning over every little thing. Like, that seems very much not like what having a brother would be like. 

So–maybe he isn’t straight, or maybe Superboy’s not actually a boy, or maybe both of those things are true, or maybe he’s just really, really bad at having a soulmate.

Entirely possible, under the circumstances. Tim’s not really all that good at getting close to people. If he got a little confused about how to handle having a soulmate, well . . . that wouldn’t really be a surprise, would it. 

Or maybe he just doesn’t want to have to figure out how to come out to his dad or Dana or the goddamn Batman. 

One or the other, probably.

. . . statistically speaking, the likelier explanation probably is not wanting to come out to the goddamn Batman. 

“Wanna fly someplace or just chill on the beach out front?” Superboy asks as he floats backwards into the living room. Krypto runs up and jumps on Tim excitedly, his tail wagging so hard his whole little body’s wagging with it. He’s a weird-looking little mutt, but he’s really friendly, apparently. “Krypto, oh my god, get off him.” 

“I don't mind,” Tim says, leaning down to give Krypto a polite little pat on the head. Krypto barks happily and wags his tail so hard he knocks himself over. 

Yeah, weird dog in general, Tim thinks. But again, really friendly. 

“We can go wherever,” he says. “You're the local, you know the best places to get a little time alone to hang out, right?” 

“‘Alone’?” Superboy repeats, his ears reddening again as he somehow manages to trip in mid-air and hits his head on the doorframe. Tim can probably safely write off the idea of “platonic” at this point, but is still a little bit wary of his personal bias interfering. Though . . . “Uh–yeah! Totally! Yeah! We can do that!” 

Yeah, Superboy really isn’t selling the “platonic” idea here either. 

Does Tim have a boyfriend now? Is this how boyfriends happen? 

. . . well, or a girlfriend, maybe. He still hasn’t ruled out the “maybe Superboy’s just trans” option. That seems like a thing that might confuse his sexuality a little, if nothing else. 

This is definitely not anything like any previous girlfriend-getting he’s experienced, though. Like, not even a little bit. He’s not complaining, exactly, because admittedly it’s actually a little bit easier going into a new relationship with a plan and a cover established, even if the plan is admittedly still in flux and the relationship’s “romantic" vs "platonic” status is still unclear. It’s still something he can approach like a case, which is much more straightforward than just floundering around trying to figure out how normal people work. 

And Superboy’s about as far from a “normal person” as it gets, so really, this is a pretty ideal set-up on Tim’s end. 

Hopefully Superboy feels similarly, though he also, like . . . is lacking some pretty important information there, so . . . yeah, that might be an issue. Bruce would definitely not have appreciated Robin telling Superboy he was his soulmate, though, and who knows how Superboy would’ve even taken that. Going in as a civilian is going pretty smoothly, though, so Tim’s pretty sure it was the right choice. 

Hopefully it was, anyway. 

“Cool,” Tim says, keeping up the placid harmless civilian face and thoughts and Totally-Not-A-Vigilante vibes. Superboy does a very bad job of pretending he didn’t just bump into the doorframe and ducks back outside, putting on a cocky grin of his own as he does. It occurs to Tim, briefly, that maybe Superboy has his own catalog of performative expressions. None of his friends really seem to, but Superboy is in the community too, so . . . well, it’d make sense, right? 

Also he does sell his likeness via a sleazy manager’s sleazy business deals, so yeah. It does kind of make sense. 

Huh. That’s . . . a thought, he guesses. 

Not a thought he’d really had yet. 

Just . . . something they might have in common, Tim guesses. 

Though so is being in the community to begin with, obviously. And they're physiologically about the same age and have similar coloring, though Superboy is–well, not actually mixed with East Asian, because Krypton did not have an actual place called “Asia”, but he does have subtle hints of that look, same as Superman. Easy to mistake for just being white, but recognizable if you know what you're looking for. Superboy would be at least half-white given Westfield's DNA, Tim guesses, but . . . 

Yeah, no, he doesn't even know how to begin to figure out the nuances of racial identity on a dead planet he knows next to nothing about, much less any potential experience parallels there might be for a second-generation half-alien immigrant with effectively zero access to their own culture, but maybe he could–

Right, okay, he needs to focus here. There's some fascinating stuff there that he can theorize about and investigate later, once he's kidnapped Superboy properly. The kidnapping is the current priority, though. Like, it is very much the current priority. 

Tim follows Superboy back out onto the porch. Everyone else is still out there, which is fine in regards to Roxy and Dubbilex and not fine in regards to Leech and . . . well, jury's out on Moon, maybe. 

Also the dog. He doesn't really know about the dog. Though said dog does run after him and jump up for attention wagging his scruffy little tail hard enough to wag his whole little body, which is sort of cute. 

Or as cute as a wet dishrag can get, anyway. 

Tim’s trying not to judge Krypto for that, since obviously he didn't ask to be born as the living embodiment of a wet dishrag, and anyway he's a really friendly dog, so judging by appearances seems like a dick move. Even if Tim kind of wants to iron him, to be honest. Steam-clean, maybe. 

At least take him to a decent groomer, if nothing else. 

“Down, you little shit, Jesus!” Kon says, scowling down at Krypto and trying to shoo him away. Krypto growls at him, which seems weird, then goes back to fawning all over Tim. Tim leans down and pats his head, figuring it might calm him down. 

“It’s okay,” he says. “He is cute.” 

“Whatever,” Superboy grumbles, folding his arms and inexplicably glowering at his dog. 

“You gonna go swim, or just hang out?” Roxy asks curiously as she comes over to them again. 

“Oh, we’re–” Superboy starts, but Moon cuts him off. 

“Want some company?” Moon inquires, pleasant and suspicious all at once. Superboy looks–conflicted, momentarily, and then awkward. 

“Um, well–Tim’s only in town for today, so . . . next time?” he hedges. Tim resists the urge to eye Moon. Can I just spontaneously insert myself in your first day with your brand-new soulmate? is incredibly rude, as a suggestion. And incredibly fucking disrespectful to boot. Like, what entitled-ass kind of thing is that to ask, exactly? 

How old is she again? Twenty? Twenty-one? He should look that up later. Well–no, she’d graduated college and started her career by the time Superman had died, which was a good eight or nine months ago now, so unless she skipped a grade or two in there, she’s gotta be closer to twenty-four, if not twenty-five or twenty-six. 

That’s . . . a thought, considering there is definitely news footage of Superboy kissing her in Metropolis. Like, Tim very definitely saw news footage of Superboy kissing her in Metropolis. And she was very definitely kissing him too.

In retrospect, that seems like something someone should’ve, like . . . done something about? Or at least addressed? And is definitely further proof of how fucking useless and slimy Rex Leech is. Sure, let the five-minute-old clone make out with a twentysomething reporter and hang out with her at home; all publicity is good publicity, so it’s fine, right? Sure. Why wouldn’t it be? 

Tim is going to absolutely decimate that bastard’s credit the first chance he gets. Leech probably already has terrible credit, mind, but he’ll make it worse. He’ll find a way. 

. . . though he’ll wait until he’s sure Roxy is eighteen and financially independent, he doesn’t actually know if she is or not. Roxy seems nice, she doesn’t deserve that particular fallout. 

“It’d be nice to get to know each other later, I’m sure,” Tim says before Moon can say anything, smiling Gala Smile #1 at her, which is a targeted psychological attack and not actually very moral to be trotting out this quick, probably. 

He has no regrets, for the record. Absolutely none. 

Moon narrows her eyes suspiciously. Tim blithely strokes Krypto’s ears, Gala Smile #1 flawless and unphased. 

“I’m sure,” she “agrees” frostily. Superboy remains apparently oblivious to the tension and grins brightly at both of them. 

“Cool!” he says. Oh, sweet summer child who has clearly never socialized with sharks, Tim thinks resignedly, petting Krypto again. Has Leech taught him literally nothing about conversational warfare, for fuck’s sake? At least living with your sleaze of a manager should be good for that, dammit! 

Then again, Leech is probably not actually competent enough to teach Superboy anything actually useful, so maybe that’s for the best. 

If nothing else, Superman could’ve taught him a bit of “bless your heart”, but apparently that’s not a thing either. 

Tim has a brief moment of dread that maybe underneath his personal list of performative expressions, Superboy might just be a straightforward and honest person, which is a concerning thought. He doesn’t even know how to talk to a straightforward and honest person at this point, after this long as Batman’s emotional support sidekick. How do you form a lasting relationship with someone who isn’t habitually using at least three layers of double-talk and constantly locked in on all your microexpressions, anyway? 

That’s going to be a weird experience, yeah. 

“Ready to go?” Superboy asks Tim, grinning brighter at him. Tim feels momentarily overwhelmed and just sort of . . . has to collect himself about that, a little. 

Or a lot.

“Lead the way,” he says, smiling at him. He’s flustered enough to forget to use an appropriately-planned smile, which is embarrassing, but Superboy just grins even brighter–which should not be physically possible, but apparently is–and reaches out to scoop him up into his arms and into the air again as Krypto lets out an offended bark. It’s totally overkill and not even slightly necessary. 

Tim isn’t complaining, just–well–

It’s really flustering. 

“Air Superboy up, up, and away!” Superboy says cheerfully as they float up over the others’ heads. His face is way too close to Tim’s face. 

Tim is gonna need a bit longer to collect himself this time, he’s pretty sure. 

“Do I get an in-flight meal?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. Superboy laughs, which is even worse than his grin, and then takes off across the beachfront with him. It’s another bridal carry, which is quietly mortifying but could be worse, probably. Maybe. 

Somehow. 

Superboy flies them straight across the beach and then straight out over the water, skimming them along just above the waves. Tim makes a briefly startled noise, reflexively tightening his grip on the strap of his bag. 

“This isn’t waterproof,” he says just as reflexively, and Superboy laughs again. 

“I’m not gonna drop you, dude,” he says. Tim actually more assumed Superboy was intending to either dive-bomb them both into the water or just dump him in on purpose, because that seems like Superboy’s sense of humor, but maybe that was an unfair assumption. 

He really is not prepared for how it feels to be held in close against Superboy’s bare chest and arms like this, even if he’s still wearing a shirt himself. The idea of possibly doing that while they’re both wet seems a lot worse. 

Yeah. Definitely worse. 

Tim should’ve worn long sleeves. And maybe a wetsuit. And maybe a few layers on top of that. 

Jesus. 

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he says, barely resisting the urge to loop his arms around Superboy’s neck as the other hangs a right and swoops them back around towards shore. Flying over the water like this is a pretty cool experience, admittedly, now that he’s not worried about Superboy dumping him in the water. 

Well. Less worried, anyway. 

Camera next time, Tim promises himself, glancing back over Superboy’s shoulder towards the shining horizon. The sun reflects off the waves bright and beautiful, and the sky is a smooth and perfect blue dotted with sparse but billowing clouds, and everything smells like salt and sea and leather, which is probably Superboy, even without the jacket on anymore. 

Definitely camera next time.

“Definitely holding you to that, actually,” he says, and Superboy laughs again and brings them down in the surf just past the tideline with a splash. Neither the splash or the water goes high enough to soak Tim's bag, so he figures it could've been worse. 

Assuming Superboy isn't planning to toss him or anything before he can put his bag down somewhere safe, anyway. 

They both settle down into the surf and onto their feet, and Tim becomes very aware of how close together they’re standing and also how very, very shirtless Superboy is, and in fact the only thing between their soulmarks is the very thin layer of cotton of Tim’s own shirt, and if he leaned in just a little bit . . . 

Jesus, Tim thinks faintly, and forces himself to take a step back before he can make it weird. 

He smiles Generically Pleasant Civilian Smile #2 just to make sure he doesn’t look like a creep or anything, and Superboy grins excitedly at him. Tim allows himself all of two seconds to be overwhelmed by that gorgeous expression and their physical closeness and the reflection of the light in Superboy’s eyes, as bright and perfectly blue as both the sky and water, and then reasserts standard operating procedures and keeps Generically Pleasant Civilian Smile #2 locked in place on his face. 

“The water’s really warm,” he observes, glancing down at it. “Is that normal?” 

It’s probably not an impending supervillain thing, he tells himself. 

Maybe global warming or something, though.

“I mean, feels normal to me?” Superboy says with a shrug. Tim considers mentioning the average ocean temperature, comparatively speaking, or at least the average temperature of the water off the docks in Gotham. Admittedly, Gotham waters barely count as “water”, legally speaking, but that’s not the point. 

“It’s pretty out here,” he says instead, and Superboy grins at him and leans in. He’s pretty sure it’s more an instinctive thing than a deliberate one, just from the way Superboy does it, but that doesn’t exactly make it less flattering. 

Or flustering. 

“I mean, it’s Hawaii, man!” Superboy says, grinning wider before kicking at the surf. “‘Course it’s gonna be pretty!” 

Actually you specifically are possibly the prettiest damn thing that I have ever seen, Tim thinks, but isn’t stupid enough to actually let out of his mouth. Superboy, unfortunately, continues to be all warm and grinning and lit up by the island sun. Tim did not come prepared enough for this. 

“I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I’d be the guy who came to Hawaii and got a monsoon,” Tim says wryly, and Superboy laughs brightly. 

Tim really did not come prepared enough for this. Like, not at all. Not even slightly. 

“Guess you’d just have to come back, then,” Superboy says, grinning wider again and kicking at the surf again as he floats back up out of it. It’s–weird, a little, looking up at him like this. 

Well, not weird, just . . . yeah. 

Something like that. 

“Guess so,” Tim agrees, feeling embarrassingly flustered. Superboy’s friends can probably still see them from the porch, distant though it is, but part of him is still just considering very weird and dumb ideas like maybe tugging Superboy back down to earth and into the surf and just . . . confirming the little sexuality crisis he’s been having since breaking into the other’s file and seeing their soulmark in it, maybe. 

Just, you know, ruling things out. Making deductions. Going through the process of elimination. 

Kissing him, maybe. 

He could very, very much kiss Superboy right now. They’re on a gorgeous beach in the surf and under the sun and Superboy is floating in front of him and grinning as happy and excited as could be and Tim’s stomach is fluttering in a stupid and also-embarrassing way, and . . . 

He could kiss him. That’s all. 

“I mean, it’s a nice place to visit, right?” Superboy says casually, linking his hands together behind his back. 

“The tourism industry seems to think so,” Tim says wryly, and wonders what the “normal civilian who didn’t come here specifically looking for his soulmate to kidnap/salvage him to begin with” thing to say is here. He has absolutely no idea, because he actually has absolutely no idea how normal civilians react to superheroes. Robin is . . . not exactly an urban myth, necessarily, but definitely not a publicly-recognized superhero. He’s a vigilante that’s just barely allowed to operate outside the law, and not one with any kind of publicity or celebrity involved. 

eSuperboy, on the other hand, is not only a superhero, but a professional superhero. He’s selling his likeness and doing events and has signed a stupid predatory contract with a sleaze of a manager that technically shouldn’t even be legal, given Superboy isn’t even considered a legal person by the government. Apparently no one has ever realized that, though, or at least no one’s ever let Superboy realize that. 

Tim really doesn’t love that that’s a thing, to put it mildly. 

Actually, he just fucking hates it. 

Superboy laughs, and looks very, very pretty doing it. Tim continues to wonder what a normal civilian would do here, and for lack of a better idea falls back on small talk. 

God, his best plan right now is small talk. What is his life, even? 

No wonder he’s gonna have to take six months to kidnap Superboy, ugh.

“So, uh–this seems like a weird question to be bringing up this late in the conversation, but what’s your name?” he asks, because it’s occurred to him that he actually has no idea what Superboy goes by when he’s off-duty. He knows he doesn’t have a secret identity, of course, but there’s no way his friends just call him “Superboy”. Well–maybe his slimy asshole manager does, but otherwise. “I mean, if that’s okay to ask. Marks or not, I understand if you don’t feel like we’re there yet, given the whole superhero thing and all.” 

Robin knows Superboy doesn’t have a secret identity, after all, but Tim Drake is a normal civilian and shouldn’t act like he knows too much about any superhero in general, so–

“Naw, it’s fine, I don’t even have one,” Superboy says, for some reason just beaming at him, which is . . . weird, Tim thinks, but nowhere near as weird as that answer is. 

“You don’t . . . have one?” he repeats slowly, and Superboy shrugs easily. “Like–not at all?” 

“Yeah, everybody pretty much just calls me 'Kid' or 'SB', when it's not Superboy,” Superboy says. “Oh, and Knockout calls me 'Pup' when she's around but like, that's really just a 'her' thing. So, you know, you can call me whatever.” 

Tim stares blankly at him for a long, long moment, speed-runs all five stages of grief, and also discovers a couple of new and unexpected ones. 

Alright. Well, he officially regrets literally nothing about this impending kidnapping. 

“Oh, okay,” he says. “Um–sorry, I guess I just assumed you’d have a more . . . civilian-ish name too, I guess?” 

“I’m a clone, man,” Superboy says, looking amused. “The only other name I’ve got is ‘Experiment Thirteen’, which is definitely not something I answer to."

Tim discovers a few more stages of grief that hit with all the subtlety of a spiked baseball bat and makes himself nod as much like a normal person as he can. 

“Yeah, I don’t think I’d go for that one if I were you either,” he says. “Kind of a mouthful, if nothing else.” 

Superboy laughs, then grins at him again. He is actually doing so, so much of that, Tim’s realizing. Tim was really not prepared for how much of that he’s been doing, in fact. He just did not come prepared for any of that at all. He’s got some nebulous kidnapping plans, but everything else here–from the supervillain attack to Superboy’s ripped suit and exposed soulmark–has been a crime of opportunity. 

He probably should’ve done more research. Actually, he definitely should’ve done more research. He kind of just panicked and bought a ticket and flew right over, and just because Dick didn’t stop him doesn’t mean it was a good idea. He just–he should’ve done more research. Planned more. Not shown up without something concrete. 

Admittedly Superboy doesn’t hate him yet or anything, but this was just . . . yeah, this was not his brightest idea at all. Not even slightly. 

Why didn’t he do more research? 

“You really can just call me whatever you wanna, don’t worry about it,” Superboy says with an easy shrug as he settles back down into the surf, which, unfortunately, puts him back into kissing range and is therefore incredibly distracting. 

Dammit, Tim thinks, trying to beat his stupid teenage hormones into order. 

“Whatever I wanna?” he repeats. 

“Except for Experiment Thirteen,” Superboy says with another grin. Tim politely pretends not to notice the slight tightening of the corners of his mouth as he says the word “experiment”. 

“Uh, okay,” he says, clearing his throat. He guesses Superboy doesn’t really care what his name is, then, but being told to just call him whatever he wants to is . . . well, a weird feeling, maybe. “What do you do when you just want to be a civilian for a while, though?” 

“I don’t,” Superboy says. 

“. . . don’t . . . what?” Tim asks slowly, not sure if he should be dreading the answer or not, but–

“Be a civilian,” Superboy says. 

Tim’s running out of new stages of grief, he’s pretty sure. 

“Ah,” he says. 

Superboy–for a second, Tim thinks he looks self-conscious, but then he’s grinning again before he can be sure, and . . . 

“Why would I?” Superboy says, puffing up proudly. “I’m Superboy, man! Nothing else I’d rather be.” 

Given how limited Superboy’s options for anything “else” he could be probably are . . . well, Tim’s not sure what to think of that statement. 

He doesn’t think it’s anything good, though. 

Yeah, no, he thinks as he looks at Superboy’s too-bright grin and thinks about how he just said "nothing" and not "no one". Definitely not anything good. 

Who wouldn’t pick being “Superboy” over being “Experiment Thirteen”, after all? 

And what else would Superboy even know how to pick, if he thought those were his only options?

[centaurianthropology]

Visual Narratives for an Internalized Book Series: Semi-Unhinged Predictions for ‘Murderbot’

I got into ‘The Murderbot Diaries’ recently, and was thrilled to find out there’s about to be a tv series!  And while I’ll admit I had to do a bit of a recalibration of my mental picture of our titular character, I’ve really come around to what I’m seeing from Alexander Skarsgård’s SecUnit.  And the rest of the cast?

Picture perfect PresAux team!  I don’t know many of these actors, but I really sort of love not knowing them as anything other than the characters from this show.  It makes them feel very real and lived-in (emphasized by the slightly beat-up sets, the comfy colorful clothing, and the general lack of makeup, highlighting natural wrinkles, creases, pores, and vitiligo spots).  And contrast this to the much more well-known nerd actors they cast for the space-soap-opera-within-a-show, ‘The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon’, who have elaborate makeup and wigs?

I love it.  I love the look of the show.  And given that we’ve really only got one trailer and a few scenes out, that’s about as much as I can really say about it without seeing actual episodes, seeing how the pacing and the dialogue and the FEEL of the show will actually work.

But in the meantime, speculation and meta are my favorite things.  And I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges of adapting this particular book series.  The thing is, it’s a very internalized series.  Everything focuses on what’s going on in SecUnit’s head.  Its perceptions of the world (and its somewhat unreliable narration) are the core of the series.  Which makes it a challenge when translating the written word into visual media.

I'm going to cut here for show-only folks, as beyond this point lies plenty of book spoilers ('All Systems Red', 'Artificial Condition', and 'Rogue Protocol' specifically) and speculation for how the showrunners might choose to adapt the series.

I got thinking about the process of adaptation because this person popped up in the trailer, and according to articles, she’s an indentured corporate citizen, and is absolutely not in 'All Systems Red'.  And while I get people being suspicious of adding a character not in the source material, Show Don’t Tell is in full effect for a television series.  If corporations enslave and warp the people trapped in the Corporation Rim, we need to see that.  ‘All Systems Red’ doesn’t get into that nearly as much as later books, so we need someone to show us that perspective.  Someone pointed out she’s wearing a different pin than the PresAux crew, so it’s probable she’s either an added DeltFall survivor or a GreyCris agent pretending to be a DeltFall survivor.

Either of those work really well!  You have to show how bad the Corporation Rim is, and you have to highlight the rampant, horrifically abusive capitalist system to set up the world and explain why Murderbot gloms onto this weird group of space hippie scientists from a Luxury Space Communism utopia.  They’re kind and decent, but more than that, they’re radically different to the culture and mentality it’s been trapped around for its entire existence.

Having a character outside the PresAux crew who embodies that (and embodies that they absolutely would have taken in someone in need of help, as GreyCris likely tricked DeltFall into doing in order to get access to their base and kill everyone), you need a person.  And in television, to really hit the audience with a villain, that villain needs a face. The GreyCris agents in ASR were almost all faceless or unseen, or in too few scenes to really make the audience loath them. Having a mole in our sweet hippie base is a way to get around that issue when translating the story into a visual medium.

If she’s a GreyCris agent in disguise, that works.  But even if she is the sole survivor of DeltFall, having her betray the PresAux crew for a promise of money or even relief from her indenture contract serves to highlight the backstabbing, vicious mindset people in the Corporation Rim have to adopt to survive. Even if she really is a DeltFall survivor, she simply isn't able to believe that this sweet, naive group of nerds can save her. So she betrays them for a pat on the head, because that's what she thinks she has to do.

Gurathin, who figured out the hack in the books, is likely to be the one to figure out she’s double crossing them. Depending on how they expand out his character, he might initially want to trust and work with her, only to figure out her game a second too late. Given some of the scenes in the trailer (and the fact that the writers clearly took one look at David Dastmalchian and decided they had to splatter him with blood at some point), she takes him hostage, probably injures him, and either tries to leave or hold the PresAux crew in one place until GreyCris can arrive.

And Murderbot kills her.

And there we also have another important role for her character to play: someone to really spark some more conflict in the group. Per its threat assessment, SecUnit had to kill her, but how does our group of hippies react to that? I think it's a really interesting way to force everyone into on-screen growth, either developing a level of trust with Murderbot they didn't necessarily have before, or having to question that trust. But either way, leading to stronger bonds in the end.

It’s perhaps a trickier, stickier, and nastier situation to put the crew in than their relatively smooth working relationship in ASR, but for an on-screen adaptation, it could definitely be useful to have some (well-handled and realistic, please!) conflict in the group. I think it would go a long way to showing us (rather than telling us) what makes a SecUnit what they are, and what makes this SecUnit a unique person outside its basic construction.  It cares deeply, but it also does its job very well, and if it has to kill people to protect its humans, it’s going to.  But perhaps it regrets. Perhaps it struggles with that decision because it complicates its relationships with its humans. All these could be really good things.

So, yes, I think the addition of this new character is almost certainly going to be hugely helpful in establishing the universe, the central conflicts between Preservation and the Corporation Rim, and to better highlight SecUnit’s relationships with all the main cast.

And that got me thinking about how to adapt future books.  Because beyond ‘All Systems Red’, continuing the development of those relationships becomes complicated.  You have two entire novellas in which the PresAux crew and Murderbot are separated as it goes off to figure itself out, and they stick around to deal with the legal and personal fallout of the GrayCris incident.  And in the books, that’s great!   Novellas are short enough you’re back with the PresAux gang before you can really miss them, and the scattered references throughout 'Artificial Condition' and 'Rogue Protocol' keep them in your mind. 

But if the show is adapting a novella a season--or even if they try to combine ‘Artificial Condition’ and ‘Rogue Protocol’--that’s two entire books we don’t get more than snippets of the majority of the cast. And that really doesn't work on television.

To actually keep things cohesive, keep the cast in their contracts (most actors sign a 3 to 5-year deal for series, and you don't want to lose one of them to another commitment while you backburner them for a year or two), and keep the audience invested in all of the cast to make the plot of 'Exit Strategy' really hit, changes in how the story is going to be told will be necessary.

First, we’ll almost certainly get a LOT more scenes of Dr. Mensah and Pin-Lee trying to grapple legally with GrayCris.  Playing this as a tense legal drama with ever-mounting stakes and dangers will be an interesting side-story while SecUnit is off finding itself.  And honestly, having Dr. Mensah get a lot more scenes where we get to see her as the planetary leader she really is will be great. Likewise, getting to actually see Pin-Lee go full legal-shark will be awesome. It's not only good setup for ‘Exit Strategy’, but it's great character development, showing them both in over their heads, but in a situation far more within their elements where their own flavors of competence and strength can really shine.

And now it's time for my true wildly unhinged speculation: I don't think SecUnit is going to go alone to find itself in this adaptation.  It’s going to be hard to adapt its conversations with bot-pilots, and its internal monologuing alone as it attempts its Pretend-to-Be-Human subroutines. As it attempts to blend and pass, it's ALL internal in the books. To externalize it, you need at least one person to bounce off of.

If I’m right and it doesn’t go alone, I 100% think Ratthi is going with SecUnit.  This would allow a development of Ratthi being its best friend, and Ratthi isn’t critical to Mensah’s plot line at first.  From a character perspective, it makes perfect sense he would elect to go with SecUnit. 

I’m back and forth on who Arada stays with.  Given that they’re shifting her marriage from the written-out Overse to Pin-Lee, I lean toward Arada staying with Mensah and her wife.  And I also feel like Arada and Ratthi can have overlapping personalities/plot effects.  They’re both sweet, friendly, and a little naive.  So separating them out into two different storylines allows them both to grow in different directions, and gives each plotline one eternal optimist/slightly sheltered character who can be shocked or dismayed by various developments.

Gurathin is the wild card here.  I could see him staying with Mensah, but I think it’s more likely he goes with Ratthi and SecUnit.  For one, they're shifting the also written-out Volescu's crush on Mensah to Gurathin, which I imagine goes precisely nowhere and makes him feel incredibly awkward, so he might be eager to get a little distance for a bit.

For another, a lot of ‘Artificial Condition’ is very tech-heavy, so having someone else who’s tech-oriented to translate that into a visual medium would be useful. Him helping develop (and critique) the Act-Like-a-Human subroutine would make good sense for him (and having Ratthi help out could be hilarious). 

It would also allow the development of the Ratthi/Gurathin relationship and make it clearer why they go from coworkers to regularly getting meals together and hanging out.

And it gives SecUnit a continual snarky associate who isn’t just ride-or-die for it.  Which is good for storytelling.

If Gurathin does go with them, I think it's likely that he goes back to help Mensah as things get worse for her.  SecUnit could be trying to decide if it should give up its own journey of self-discover to help her near the end of the 'Artifical Condition' part of the storyline, and Gurathin volunteers to go back in its place. 

I say this because I don’t feel like introducing Gurathin to ART prematurely is a good idea.  Ratthi would be fine, and probably very fun, to have along as SecUnit is having to deal with ART.  I completely understand wanting to give ART and SecUnit time alone, but from a visual storytelling perspective it’s hard to have multiple extended scenes where there are only two characters and one of them is the disembodied AI of a ship.  With another person there, we keep visual interest up, externalize the internal monologue, and can hopefully carve out times when SecUnit and ART are alone and bonding. 

Gurathin doesn’t fit in quite as neatly with this, and his augmented human status goes from helpful to the story in ‘Artificial Condition’ to less helpful with ART in the picture, which is why I would predict he’d leave to help Mensah before SecUnit and Ratthi meet ART.  He’ll stay in communication with them, and it could be him who reaches out with an SOS from the PresAux gang after the events of 'Rogue Protocol'. 

That leads us into ‘Exit Strategy’, which I honestly think needs far less tweaking to make it work as a piece of visual media. Much like 'All Systems Red', it's a good story with all the main cast, and they're all together with important things to do. So it's a far more straightforward piece of adaptation.

As for the one-off side characters in ‘Artificial Condition’ and ‘Rogue Protocol’, I figure they’re either getting merged (i.e. Tapan has Miki or something like that), or severely pared back (Tapan is SecUnit’s only client for the ‘Artificial Condition’ section, and Don Abene and Miki are alone for ‘Rogue Protocol’) to keep the cast leaner and lighter.  I think both the Tapan storyline, and especially the Miki storyline are really important for SecUnit’s growth as a person, so I don’t see them getting removed, but I do seen them getting pared back a bit to keep the focus on SecUnit and its original humans.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.  Stoked for the new series, and really hoping it lives up to the source material.  I’m going in cautiously optimistic about it, and always enjoy speculating about practical ways to adapt difficult source material to be satisfying both from a visual storytelling perspective and from the perspective of respecting the source material.