#and all the intersections of them

[rivilu]

Dude how am I supposed to get back into dragon age mood in time with this level of brainrot

[sabo-torao]

Sabo Week Day 3 - Brothers ("This bond is my treasure.")

version with a not-so-trasparent ace under the cut!

ble :P

[zu-is-here]

<– • –>

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Parallel Lines and Brothers.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[cali]

really a lot of the time i am onto something big. my idea for revolutionizing music:

[tanyafreemont]

the grip that good omens has on this site is insane. barbie was trending at #1 for a week and now it's not even trending at all because good omens has pushed it out. ofmd is trending just from the sheer amount of people drawing comparisons. nobody is normal here

[realtapiocafan]

on a date 😌

[novelconcepts]

The more the show progresses, the more I want to see the 90s cast infiltrating the modern timeline. We've gotten hints of it with Shauna and her younger self, her Jackie hauntings. We've gotten a little more with adult Lottie seeing teenage Nat (and Laura Lee), and with Natalie getting teenage Lottie in her final moments. I want more. I want the teen cast to be absolutely invasive on pivotal adult moments, infecting their adult counterparts when least expected. I want Taissa's argument with Van to dissolve into their teenage selves, their bond endless and timeless and inescapable. I want Misty absolutely wrecked by young Natalie lurking around corners, watching from mirrors. I want to see these women unable to navigate adulthood without the specters of their teenage selves cropping up absolutely everywhere, more and more as they let the memories in, as they stop being able to repress the trauma. They didn't grow up. They never could. You are always doomed to regress around your high school teammates. You are haunted by the phantom elements of your misspent youth. It is a comfort, and it is a gift, and it is a trial, and it is a curse. I would love to see that reflected with greater intensity, until the lines blur, until the timelines have no choice but to intersect. They haven't escaped themselves at all. They didn't grow up. They just got older.

[toastytrusty]

hickey is a really good example of a character who's internal conflict is represented externally by his relationships with other characters. his feelings towards the british empire/the bureaucratic command of the mission is split between his respect for crozier and his reverence tuunbaq. and it gets so religious and existential it's so good.

to hickey, crozier represents the british empire, and tuunbaq represents the new world. we learn throughout the show that he came from a lower class background, has a lot of resentment towards the upper class and government of britain, and feels they oppressed him. there's commentary there on how insecure/downtrodden people often become tools of imperialism in an attempt to find some small amount of power or respect, by positioning themselves above someone else. punching down and all that. his first lines in the show are about how command puts dogs above men, showing how belittled he feels by it all, and how much resentment he holds towards them for it. yet, the moment crozier shows him the slightest recognition, hickey begins attempting to appeal to him entirely, chasing the idea of social mobility through the system he has spent his life detesting, because now, it seems tangible to him. he goes out to kidnap lady silence, thinking crozier will appreciate him for it ("i just saved your life" line. laughs), abusing the people of the new world for his own potential personal gain. he gets whipped for it, and loses the reverence for crozier, and therefore the british empire at large. and while he continues to abuse the native people, it is now through the conduit of abusing his fellow englishmen. there's a Lot to the irving farr murder scene that both is and is not relevant to this specific conversation, but the way his violence is turned inward there i think is really important here; even though, and perhaps especially because, the result of native people dying is the same. at his hanging he properly denounces crozier, and calls him out for what hickey perceives as essentially abandoning his men. something something the british empire has abandoned its people; abandoned the lower class to a miserable fate as hickey feels has happened to him, and abandoned this mission of people to die in the arctic on a doomed expedition with no rescue until it's far too late.

now the tuunbaq representing the new world is not at all unique to hickey's character arc—it's something present and relevant within the core of the whole show—but the specific way he perceives tuunbaq as a direct foil to crozier is unique to him. when hickey toasted with crozier, he thought crozier Saw him, and understood him and his experiences in an empathetic way. he thought they had connected. he was, obviously, wrong, but that's not the only thing he was wrong about! when he kidnaps silna, he says that the tuunbaq Saw him, looked Him Specifically in the eye. he thought he had connected with it. obviously he did not. there is Something to the way the tuunbaq is always summoned by hickey's actions; it shows up to attack them whenever harm comes to the native people, and usually that is hickey's fault. however when it shows up at his execution, it saves his life, which is really interesting. honestly not entirely sure what the thematic significance of that is past furthering hickey's delusions that the tuunbaq is in his corner but i digress. by the time of his mutiny he has all but fully forsaken crozier and the british empire. yet the nagging desire to appeal to authority and get that recognition remains. he wants crozier to see that he alone is capable of saving these men, and brings up their toast to try and get crozier to understand. when crozier tells him the toast was a joke, and there was no connection whatsoever, he gives up on saving them entirely. he chains them to a boat and, again, summons the tuunbaq, but with dramatic british songs instead of preemptive violence. there is violence of a different kind, though, and now it is Only turned inwards. there are. a Lot. of ways to read the final stand off with tuunbaq, but i've always read it as a sacrifice. hickey did not want to kill the tuunbaq, obviously. he hardly wanted to leave the arctic at that point. he was turning over the remaining of their men, and crozier especially, this embodiment of the british empire, to the tuunbaq as a sacrifice. when he cut his tongue out, i didn't see that as an attempt at domination. i saw it as an attempt at supplication. the last thing he used his tongue for was denouncing britain; its monarchy and its church and its empire. instead, he names tuunbaq as the most holy thing he's ever seen. the god they've lived their lives believing in means nothing when faced with the raw dregs of godhood present before them in the tuunbaq; the empire they've lived their lives believing in means nothing when faced with this beautiful and merciless land they are now condemned to. he is renouncing his britishness. he gives the tuunbaq the human embodiment of the empire to kill and eat because he no longer wants anything to do with it. his reverence is for tuunbaq and tuunbaq alone. but tuunbaq does not accept his offer, and kills him anyway. because he Is british, he Is a tool of imperialism, he Has done so much harm to this land and it's people, and no end-of-life realization is going to change that. i find it especially fitting that it is hickey's body that kills it. everyone else's rotting british flesh had sickened it, but hickey killed it, because despite his best attempts to distance himself, he Is the rotting evil of the empire, and is just as much a poison to this land as the rest of them

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[kirdoodl]

so in your relativity falls au did euclid and scalene burn down their dimension too? btw loving ur interpretation of the au SO much!!!

Thank you for the ask! And I'm glad you like this so far :D (if you want the short answer, yes, they did)

As for the long answer... In terms of Bill's backstory playing into my interpretation? I haven't figured it out yet, I have a couple of concepts but I'm not really interested in exploring that part of the narrative (even in gravity falls) as much as other parts and character relations 💔

I'd like to think that Bill or even the concept of him doesn't exist in this au, so the destruction of his home dimension wasn't at all connected to him, but maybe Scalene and Euclid still managed to cause a tear in their dimension by other means.

As far as I know in tbob the destruction itself is kept vague, and lemme tell ya I am NOT creative enough to fill in those gaps in a way that is satisfying, especially in this scenario, but...

My personal headcanon is 2 lesbian triangles find out about the concept of z by seeing something from a perspective that would be impossible to them and then accidentally exploding their universe.

Slams hand on table, there ya have it!

[theetwinkleboy]

just. came across this panel and got unexpectedly and wildly emotional about aizawa becoming a dad. because like. he cares about his students, he's shown time and time again that he'll push them and fight for them against villains and the media and he'll go to his last breath to protect them but like. they're hero students and he's their teacher and he's tough and strict because he has to be to keep them alive. but then like--

it's morning and he's doing her hair. he's got the hair ties with the little baubles on them and he's doing her hair and she's been through so much crap and aizawa's never shown being demonstrably affectionate or enthusiastic around her the way that izuku and mirio are but like. he's been her dependable quiet shadow every time she's shown up in the manga so far, and he doesn't have to be strict or tough with her because what she needs isn't someone to teach her how to save others, it's someone that she can trust to be there when she needs, someone she can trust to do her hair with little bauble hair ties in the morning.

[themissingmango]

I love your lestappen art so much. It always says such a story. Its so evocative. Love it every time!

🤩☺️ thank you!!! That means a lot to me—sending you a huge thank you for making my day brighter with this message ❤️💙

[anetherealpoetess]

empathising with the women who feel forbidden from expressing desire over villains by some imaginary morality clause. villains are so, so sexy. villains transgress all manner of societal norms which is especially appealing to women as we have been confined and restricted all of our lives.

[kind of personally thought woman loving villains who want to burn it all down should make far more sense to everyone than woman identifying with heroes who want to keep everything intact? heroes uphold the status quo. the status quo in our world is patriarchal. there is no catharsis for women in seeing the current state of a world upheld, even if that world is in a galaxy far, far away. but seeing a character played by a handsome actor want to carve up the status quo? yeah. that's sexy. obviously.]

we aren't attracted to villains because we don't understand that they're bad; we like them because they are bad. because in their otherness we find symbolic representation. because in their defiance of societal norms we find catharsis.

[gothicrepetitions]

The thing is… I do think that there is a certain part of SPN fandom who are only interested in it as a typical Gothic Horror story and so only select certain aspects of the show so it aligns with their ideal of Gothic Horror. Which like, I don’t think anything is wrong with that per se, in that fandom is a space for enjoyment, first and foremost, and to dictate how someone should enjoy any media or text is ludicrous and harmful… But I still think it’s leads to this pigeonholing of the show, and of Sam and Dean, their relationship and their characters, and neglecting facets of them that are a fundamental part of their character but go against fan interpretation.

[bookshelfpassageway]

i'm gonna be the one insufferable bastard on this earth that liked everhood 2, huh