the men and boys are innocent too.
we cry "the innocent women and children" to appeal to the masses, to try and force their sympathy, but the men and boys are innocent too.
I have seen sons crying out for their mothers, their fathers, their siblings. I have seen them break down at the loss of their families. I have seen them cling to their dead and grieve.
I have seen fathers cradle their dead children, seen them kiss their faces and hold their little hands. I have seen them faint with grief when asked to identify the dead. I have seen them carry their sons and daughters. I have seen them fasting to provide what little they can for their families.
I have seen men and boys digging through the rubble with just their bare hands, I have seen them comforting strangers, playing with children, rocking them, hushing them, even if the face of such imminent danger. I have seen them cry, seen them grieve, seen them break down into each other's arms, seen them be selfless, beyond selfless, becoming something I don't have a word for.
I have seen the men who are doctors refuse to leave their patients, even when they have no medicine or supplies to give them, even when they're threatened with bombings. I have seen fathers who have lost all their children pick orphans up into their arms and proclaim them their child so they are not alone. I have seen men and boys digging pets out of the rubble.
the men are innocent too. the men and boys are being hurt and killed too. the men and boys are grieving too. the men and boys are scared too. the men and boys are fighting to save their people too. the men and boys deserve to be fought for too.
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I've had a brainworm for a few days now so here me out.
After an accidental reveal gone wrong, Danny is forced to flee the country with both his parents and the giw after him. While he's trying to find some place internationally to settle down, he comes across a secluded complex.
Said complex happens to have access to an ectoplasm run off which Danny is in desperate need of. Though it has been corrupted by whatever the people of the complex have been doing to it, that's no problem for Danny as he can easily purify the portion he takes in to survive.
Deciding this is the perfect place to live off the grid, Danny sets to work figuring out how to blend in. It turns out that's the easy part. With his temporary stint as a ninja, his training with his black belt mom, and his general ghost physiology, he fits in pretty well.
He fits in so well in fact that he is told he'll be training someone one of the head bosses has their eye on. A kid his age.
Basically what follows is Danny accidentally ruining Talia's plans for Jason by unconsciously purifying his corruption and just talking him through his emotions. When Jason gets back to Gotham, he returns without a clouded mentally and realizes just how much Bruce went through after his death.
Instead of unleashing his complicated plan, he quietly takes over the underworld. He loves his father but also knows there are situations in Gotham that require a more firm hand. Jason decides to be a firm hand in his dad's place.
(I imagine he is only revealed on accident yet his reunion with his family is just as dramatic as Under the Red Hood. Tbh it probably has something to do with the joker suddenly going missing.)
Meanwhile back at the League of Assassins, Talia is impressed by Jason's training and is under the impression that his failure in Gotham is due to him getting cold feet at the last second so she puts Danny in charge of Damian's training.
Danny this time takes a more conscious role in ruining the league's brainwashing by challenging Damian's beliefs and teaching him he should use his weapons to protect, not to harm. By the time Damian gets to Wayne Manor, there is significantly less deprogramming that needs to be done.
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if we should protect children because they are vunerable, this means you would protect cruel children who bullies people who different than them then. the children who responsible to trauma for someone else's entire years
You're assuming that "protecting" children is the same as absolving them of responsibility and that's not what I said. All children are vulnerable, because all children are children; they don't come out of the womb with a perfectly working moral compass anymore than they come out of it waiting to hurt people--they're vulnerable because their understanding of the world is entirely at the mercy of what we, as adults, consistently tell them and show them. Children behaving cruelly aren't exempt from that--they learn that cruelty from somewhere, or someone. Your job, as the adult, is to make sure they understand that it's unacceptable so it will not happen again--but your job is also to ask why someone that young is behaving this way to begin with, so you can ensure they become better.
"Protecting" kids is not ignoring when they hurt or torment others, it's not refusing to teach them consequences or right from wrong, it's not "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat a child being bullied and the child bullying them as equal instigators, and it's certainly not protecting them from recognizing, and atoning for, the pain they have caused someone else. You don't have to make peace with the now-adults who hurt you when you both were kids, but you cannot let the horrors of your own childhood impact how you treat or respond to the children living theirs around you right now, either.
You don't protect kids so they can get a free pass for bullying or tormenting another child. You protect them because kids are impulsive, emotionally reactive, and profoundly social (which means deeply impressionable) human beings who are still learning & processing insane amounts of information every day about what it means to be alive, to be alive as yourself, to be alive as yourself with other people. Protecting them is realising that you can't isolate the responsibility of a 10 year old from the bigger responsibility of the literal grown adults around them, adults who are in charge of teaching them about the world and how to behave in it. Whether you have children of your own in the future or not is completely irrelevant to this; we all become those adults eventually--no matter what happened to us as kids.
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Like I don't have tiktok for a variety of reasons but to say "don't have CHINESE Spyware on your phone" as if that's like a legit concern when the American government spies on you ALL THE TIME (and is more of a direct threat to you as an American citizen and even abroad) like what are they gonna do with your data in China that they aren't doing 10x as much in the US with the patriot act. Get a VPN all that jazz if you're scared but the US is more of an immediate threat than the ccp, even if it were true.
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So Sampo is canon described as the only person who can travel between the overworld and underground, but it's never actually revealed HOW he gets around.
I'd like to believe part of the reason he's so secretive really is just because of business. One of the best ways to keep your customers is by being the only one to offer something, and Sampo stands to make a pretty nice profit if he's the only one able to smuggle in supplies. Gotta protect the trade routes ☆
BUT the other part is because he's probably one of the only ones that could SURVIVE it. I'd like to think a lot of his routes enter the overworld either in places like Backwater Pass, where it's technically in the city but is overrun by Fragmentum, or on the frontlines, where it's frigid cold and crawling with Silvermane Guards.
If someone manages to get all the way up, and even if they manage to sneak past all of the Guards/monsters and not freeze to death, there's still the possibility of getting caught in the city proper by regular civilians.
And if Cocolia heard word of someone caught in the overworld, I can't imagine there's any way she would just leave that, she separated the halves for a reason. This person would be interrogated, and then the route sealed off, and then the Undergrounders would lose a vital supply route. Sampo has to be extremely careful to not get caught and not be tailed.
And I'm sure he does a lot of shady trading in Belobog proper, but I think a lot of it also comes from him looting the Fragmentum-corroded areas, too. After all, in the Cyrille the Fool quest line, when the trailblazer sees something strange in the Fragmentum, the first person they think to consult is Sampo.
So I love the thought of Sampo being like extremely disciplined and being able to be out there for like days at a time.
Looting is easier in the beginning, but eventually Sampo has to go farther and farther out for supplies. Sometimes he'll be out there for days, and it's not exactly a safe place to sleep, but he can stay awake and alert for absurd amounts of time if he needs to be. Going for 24+ hours isn't unusual for him on a big supply run; Sampo will be awake for a day or two, he'll bring back everything he finds to Natasha, then sleep for a solid 8-12 hours and be back up again. He takes a couple of low key days where he rests or does easy work, then he's ready to plunge into the fray again!
On the rare occasions he sleeps in the Fragmentum, it's not for very long, less than an hour, and Sampo has traps he sets all around him while he sleeps sitting up with daggers in hand. Caelus finds out about this habit the hard way because he gets restless and decides to go explore (I'd like to think with the Stellaron dwelling within him, he's largely immune to any kind of Fragmentum corrosion), and he sees Sampo curled up in a corner, head down. So of course he approaches to see if he's ok, and-
A trap pops and hisses
There's a bright flash of pink
Caelus blinks
His back hits the wooden wall behind him
There's the sound of reverberating metal-on-metal right next to his ear
Caelus blinks again
...and is shocked to suddenly find that Sampo is looming over him, pinning him to the wall, one dagger sunk into the wood and the other blocked by his metal bat.
And they both just stand there for a beat, until Sampo blinks the bleariness out of his unfocused eyes, and then he yawns obnoxiously right in Caelus' face and tells him he shouldn't interrupt people's beauty sleep! How is Sampo supposed to stay so handsome otherwise!?
Caelus only notices shortly thereafter that there's a thin line of blood on his neck, and he belatedly realizes that Sampo really would have taken his head off by pure instinct if he weren't also incredibly quick with his reflexes. No wonder he's the only undergrounder surviving out in the Fragmentum; anything that approaches in his sleep thinking they have easy prey is almost instantly demolished.
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Thinkin of naga batfam, and as it's a prompt there's legitimately no canon for what they are, but here's my takes on which sneks each of them would be based off of, if they are in fact based off of snakes from earth. And not like, the realm of the dead or another planet or something lol.
Bruce- Rinkhals Spitting Cobra
Barbara- Purple-Glossed Snake
Dick- Bluestripe Garter
Cass- Banded Krait
Jason- Blood Python
Steph- Taipan
Tim- Coral Snake
Duke- Eyelash Viper
Damian- Boomslang
Helena- Black Mamba
Terry- Red Keelback
Matt- Bush Viper
What would Danny be? Good question. Some ideas include puff adder, hognose snake (the ones that play dead), anaconda or calabar python
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