#and can thus be ignored

[trans-cuchulainn]

I legit thought you were irish because usually the only people I see with Gaelige in their bio are Irish 🥲

I do not think it’s bad for non Irish people to like or have an interest in Gaeilge!! The sad face was for the lack of knowledge about it outside Ireland, as someone who is fromIreland I’m really really glad you like it!! Not that you need my validation or opinion but I realise the other message could have been misinterpreted

tbh because my area of academic expertise is medieval irish literature and i post about irish stuff a lot (and also in irish, and also used to live in ireland for a while which really confused things), i think a lot of people on tumblr assume that i am irish, to the point where at one point my bio said "disappointingly british". because it did always seem to be a disappointment when people discovered this and i wanted to preempt that

(i use "british" rather than "english" because a significant portion of my dad's side of the family were welsh, even if they are dead now, and i also have family connections in scotland, so this feels more accurate to me. some people get weird about british/english distinctions so i always feel the need to clarify on this front. but i was born and raised in england)

and every time anyone irl finds out what i study or that i used to do irish dance or that i play trad music, their next question is always "oh so is your family irish then?" and when i tell them no, not meaningfully, they're like ?! because their brains can't compute that somebody might just. like stuff

it makes me a bit sad that so many irish people don't realise that irish lit and language and music can stand on its own two feet. it's good! people don't only like it because they have an Ancestral Connection! it is interesting even without that! so i feel you on the 🥲 but like. from the other side of it because the very fact that nobody expects people like me to exist seems sad

(but actually within my academic field itself i probably know more non-irish people than irish people, and while some have a family connection, many others don't. most of my academic friends are not irish. we cluster together in solidarity and weep over learning gaeilge as adult beginners because we never had the chance to do it at school)

[ricky-mortis]

Some pose practice with my favorite spy

[dailyloopdeloop]

DAY 71: shy

[butlerkitty-art]

older atreus, baby baldur, & Hel concepts from 2022

[medicalunprofessional]

the phoenix

[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

[kheprriverse]

Look familiar? Bounty Hunter and magic user turned Deity, Ko'jin. Later dubbed as the "Fierce Deity."

Other outfits are a wip. I was gonna wait until they were done but couldn't resist sharing what I was working on for a week.

Masterpost | Lineup | Ko-fi - More info under the cut! This one’s gonna be a pretty long one and the last half below will have the text on the image (coz tumblr’s probably gonna eat the quality) plus some notes sprinkled in.

Plus a look at the Moon Serpent, a common form Ko'jin takes. I'd like to think the Moon Serpent is more commonly known by his followers than the man himself. There are others he takes, like the Silver Wolf, but the dragon is the one most associated with him.

He's relatively unknown after the war before Skyloft's ascent, his image having been completely removed from history. The few traces of him by OOT/MM would be oral tradition, specifically through family members as bedtime stories and legends to tell. Stories about a curious serpent and a powerful artifact.

After the events of MM, the Moon Serpent becomes active again and the festivals dedicated to it return.

Text on the image + extra notes:

Ko’jin, Bounty hunter chosen by Goddess Farore.

“Ko’jin” is not his real name. Once a mortal becomes a god, they abandon their original name. He was never given a proper one again aside from nicknames by worshippers and other deities. Ko’jin is a nickname given to him by his future wife when they first met.

He wears facepaint which is mixed with magic to bolster strength and speed. And later he would get tattoos that did the same [seen later].

Before becoming a god he was a bounty hunter [and popular at that, often being the favorite of a neighboring town]. He would take commission to hunt down monsters many others refused to go near.

Ko’jin has a strong affinity for magic [he uses it practically every day] and often imbues the edges of his sword with darkness magic. Though, the element given to his sword can still vary depending on what or who he’s fighting.

His undersuit and white tunic are much more protective than the brass chainmail, which instead is used more for artistic liberty than function.

“Early Days Moon Serpent”

Ko’jin’s god form was often a dragon for the ease of guiding lost spirits to the afterlife [he’s a judgement god with a very strong connection to the dead and guiding those spirits became his secondary function].

[During the first war with Demise] Soldiers often saw this form as the “Spirit of Courage” and their protector. They worshipped him and gave him gifts in hopes that he’d watch over him [and guide them to a better afterlife if they were to fall in battle (that secondary function). He basically became a huge symbol for soldiers specifically and I feel like this would feed the “War God” title he was given way later on despite not actually being a War God.]

In many ancient artifacts [ones that could be found at least], the Moon Serpent would be as either a two-headed serpent or two separate beings with their horns crossed. [There’s going to be a lot of “two’s” with him. Two swords, two lives, etc. in depictions of him the two heads/bodies of the serpent would be called “the Body” and “the Spirit”. Later on he’s split into two to be sealed away in a similar theme. “Two lives” refers to the before and after his sealing as he loses his memory of his “past life” and becomes a new person (hence a different appearance). I can see Hylia having foresaw a lot of this tbh.]

[masochistikitty]

rough draft

[canichangemyblogname]

Fuck. We are in desperate need of genocide studies in the US. Because people are genuinely arguing that Nazism— and thus the white supremacy which inspired it— is an aberration of European philosophical tradition, rather than the end conclusion of “Western” ideologies.

“Nazism is uniquely evil” implies it cannot happen here and that it originally happened by freak happenstance. If you singularize the actions of the Nazis, you lose critical analysis of what ideas inspired them (see: US genocide of First Nations People) and how the Germans developed their tactics of oppression and murder (see: German genocide of the Herero and the Nama people between 1904-1908).

I believe it’s time we call this kind of rhetoric what it is: genocide denialism and Holocaust revisionism. It denies the European-created genocides before and after the Holocaust, and it rewrites the history leading up to the Holocaust to purposefully cover up the fact that it can and will happen here. Over and over and over. Such rhetoric also (purposefully) denies victims of genocides the world over solidarity with each other. To justify the destruction of Poland, Hitler asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Would you deny the son of a Shoah survivor the right to march with Armenians? Or would you, like the German state, accuse him of de-singularizing and relativizing the Holocaust and report him to the local antisemitism commissioner?

If you treat Nazism as unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen, then you don’t need to worry about it and the tragedies it created happening ever again. “Never again” becomes an empty promise. This type of rhetoric gives people the opportunity to wipe their hands of any culpability in the rise and reproduction of similar systems or other genocides, and they can use this singularity rhetoric to position themselves into a moral category despite supporting similar ideas. That Nazism and the Shoah happened means it was possible and still is possible, among any people.

The “massive, systematic, and efficient nature of” Nazi oppression, brutality, atrocity and its genocidal tactics and policies is a function of modernity and “Western” Enlightenment rationality. It is not an aberration.

[autumngracy]

Not me creeping up to the wordcount of the fourth longest book ever written

[fluffypotatey]

Pre divorce shadowpeach didn't seem to be the type to fight a lot. In fact the shadowpeach divorce probably blew up that big due to all the unsaid frustrations they never let out.

So I'm just imagining shadowpeach never fighting in an obvious way (closest to fighting would be backhanded comments or barbed words) but that just makes things more unsettling

oh yeah 100% it didn’t help that swk was always leaving FFM out of his need to get stronger and be the best and be respected. not to mention they probably never saw their times together as the right moment to voice their concerns out loud because this was their time to wind down and they just had to wait it out, wait until everything was perfect enough to have those talks

[provendermalkin]

oh NOW Israel wants the UN? NOW the UN is a valid authority? NOW rulings and censure by the UN matter? All of a fucking sudden, huh? What did you THINK was going to happen holy shit

[outeremissary]

Oooh how about telling us a little about The Thousand Mile Fall? 👀

Thank you Ash and @bearvanhelsing for asking!

I want to begin by apologizing- I suspect you were looking for Tristian, but this is the single BG3 thing that was on the list. Jay, idk where you stand on discourse game of the year, but Ash, I know that you're not a fan and have been working on distance. I'm placing the rest under a cut. You can read it or not read it. Either thing is fine with me.

As compensation: the one actual Kingmaker ask I got on this (sorry it's not a flashy one), or a PF2e one about Kasander/Asperia.

Still with me? Thank you, I appreciate it!! Let's see to what degree I'm willing to bare my soul before I get too embarrassed and awkwardly trail off.

Ah: DUrge spoiler warning. And content warning: DUrgetash (sorry)

So! The Thousand Mile Fall, something which was only just starting to go beyond planning (and originally planning for a comic) when my laptop committed die. I was really interested in the concept of the Dark Urge as a character who was always framed as having fallen from grace, and who had also fallen from a state of divinity. The liminal state excited me, and we all know how I feel about a horrible someone who's a horrible failure of an angel. Horrible failure of a demigod occupies a similar space. I think the nature of that failure- that fall- began to occupy me quite a bit, since I had a strong concept for Asperia from very, very early on in my playthrough (long before I knew anything besides the DUrge plot besides that they were a Bhaalspawn, even before I had become convinced Kasander and Asperia existed simultaneously) and at the heart of Asperia was someone who was infallible and convinced of their invincibility- maybe rightly so.

So, this story is set only a bit before the game and is meant to unpick the loss of that perfect favor- in my mind, the loss of Asperia's "godhood," something which is stolen twice. The second and definitive loss is of course to Orin in a singular act of violence, but Orin's path to victory was opened by the slow and insidious poison of having known Enver Gortash. In a "the bar is in hell" turn of things, their... acquaintanceship is the closest thing Asperia has ever experienced to a normal relationship and a normal life. And that glimpse of the other side is what unmakes her. It's always been crucial to Asperia's role in the system to be the one who loves being Bhaal's beloved child, who can reconcile anything with belonging, who buys in so fully that it is unthinkable to be less than a god and it is unthinkable to have desires besides those of a god. Others hold the questions, the fear, the other desires- Kasander and Bride especially- but Asperia wants nothing else in life, and Asperia believes with painful, self-destructive fervor.

Asperia has already been acquainted with Gortash for some good while here, the wheels turning in the scheme of the Absolute. This is the longest positive relationship of any kind Asperia has ever had outside of whatever pseudo-parental thing he has with Scleritas, and it has been wonderful: novel, collaborative, a meeting with someone who resembles an equal despite being a mere mortal. Asperia has begun to see other facets of the world through this, to see the ways the world of the living comes together for purposes besides inevitable execution. It's all an act of devotion, all furthering the will of Bhaal, all what Asperia desires and wants to do. But the further it's gone the more it's started to be fun for its own sake too, and a certain fascination with a frenemy has begun to blossom into dangerous fantasies.

Asperia doesn't fantasize. Asperia can't fantasize. Asperia is a god, and he only wants things which are real and deserved. Bhaal's favor is proof of that: Orin's ugly, messy desires make her a worse worshiper, and she's never had their divine father's love. Asperia is Bhaal's beloved. Asperia is defined by her distance from those mistakes. And so too is Asperia the perfect disciple, a being beyond sin. If something is what Asperia wants, then it must be acceptable.

And this is how Asperia begins to lose Bhaal's favor.

Asperia starts the story at a personal high and only rising- with the world at her fingertips and Bhaal's love behind her, she's preparing for the victory lap and has taken an extra prize in becoming more intimately involved with Gortash. But you can't have your cake and eat it too- this impossible personal high the seed of Asperia's ruin, already sown, takes root and begins to grow. Bhaal's perfect killing machine doesn't play house with Bane's Chosen. And there are more than enough people who fucking hate Asperia already and are ready to take note- as well as Gortash himself, so much older and colder than young, sheltered Asperia. There may be some genuine affection there in some form, but calculation and power take precedent, as does the enjoyment of solving this Bhaalspawn puzzle by picking her apart.

Over time the increasingly clear dissonance between the impossible misalignment- the first Asperia has ever experienced- between what they want and what Bhaal allows them to desire and have drives them to spiral into a state of exceptional vulnerability that ultimately allows Orin to usurp them. The escalating stress causes them to lose time more and more frequently, beyond what they can explain away to themself and make disappear, and they begin to doubt themself. To fear what is happening, and to develop their own doubts about Bhaal- things that should live elsewhere, things that cause other parts to bubble up in ways they notice. Asperia is straying and rivals like Orin can see it, is becoming less dependable and reluctant allies like Ketheric can see it, is becoming a less than perfect disciple and that butler shepherd of Bhaal can see it (not that every part was always perfect- Scleritas has always known that "Asperia" is more than just Asperia, and has long pitted Asperia against themself). And Asperia is vulnerable and open and easier and easier to see- and Gortash, who has solved the part of this puzzle Asperia refuses to see quite well, sees it all and drives the spiral deeper. Pulls Asperia closer, and begins to learn the others without letting Asperia know (this is a piece of how Kasander knows Gortash, has known Gortash before anything).

So y'know. It's all heading for inevitable tragedy, heartbreak, ruin, bad feelings, and a tadpole in the head, as well as a shitty asshole boyfriend conspiring with one's sister who has been waiting for ages for the change to REALLY wreck one's shit. Yikes! Feel like not enough was spent on the family drama and that's sold Orin short, but she's played a damn active hand through it all. Sacrificial Orin, always underestimated, always overlooked, always surviving.

I dunno how to conclude this and I feel like I probably talked too long (half just to remember things I can't access until the new laptop arrives and is set up). All in all, just a fun little project to play with while I continue to fail to finish the last teeny bit of the actual goddamn game (I'm the worst at wrapping up the last little dregs of things after I've cleaned up the most fun stuff).

TLDR: Asperia, main character of life, starts to Lose the Plot and gets written out of the story for a little while

[neutralbrick]

redesigning this fool cause i liked him pre reveal lmao

[000yul]

saileach: i was scolded severely by my grandfather for being uncivilized enough to climb a tree

saria: i cling to reason and rationality so heavily my emotional side has never seen the light of day

bagpipe: i know all about growin’ potatoes ❤️

the vouivres we know sure do react differently to the reputation for madness their race has huh

[silent-scribbs]

Hypothetically…?

+ Bonus Sepia reaction