#anyway I trust my son

[lover-of-mine]

Buddie Countdown to Season 7:

15 days.

[silverwhittlingknife]

How do you feel about Jack Drake?? What are your thoughts on him and Tim’s relationship?

Anon, I hope you were interested in a novel, because look, I am fascinated by Jack Drake.  He’s key to a whole lot of what I find compelling about Tim as a character, and if I were in charge of DC, I’d bring him back to life.  This would make Tim unhappy but would IMO make for good plotlines.

Jack and Tim’s relationship is Complicated (TM)...

Jack and Tim hug in Nightwing 20 / Jack impulsively yanks a TV out of the wall in Robin 45 / Tim grieves in Identity Crisis

“I could tell the truth.  But I don’t.” - Robin 66

...and it involves a whole lot of Tim lying, and feeling guilty about lying, and thinking about telling the truth, and choosing again and again to keep lying.

And I think that’s great.

Below the cut:

Shorter version - key points about Jack

Really long version - my gentler take (vigilantism is choir and Jack loves sports) vs. my harsher take (Jack has some major flaws)

Final thoughts

Shorter version - key points about Jack:

He’s a bad parent.  He’s self-centered, he consistently prioritizes his own comfort and interests over his son’s, and when upset, he does things like order Tim off to boarding school.

But he’s never a bad parent in an actionable way.  He’s not like David Cain or Arthur Brown, who are abusive monsters.  Jack’s not a monster!  He just...kinda sucks.

He genuinely loves Tim. If Jack’s aware that Tim’s disappeared or is in trouble, he’s always worried and upset.  He periodically resolves to be a better dad, and IMO he’s always sincere.

And Tim loves him, a lot.  Tim’s protective of him and worries about him when he’s kidnapped or in danger, and when they’re reunited, Tim’s really relieved and usually hugs him (and Jack hugs back!). 

...But they have very little in common, and that’s a problem. Jack doesn’t value the things that Tim values, or respect the people that Tim admires, or care about the things that Tim’s interested in.  Tim lies to him a lot, but that’s partly because he correctly guesses Jack wouldn’t respond well if he knew the truth of what Tim’s up to.

The Batfamily is a surrogate family that Tim’s drawn to because of the ways his real family doesn’t meet his emotional needs…but also he feels guilty about that and disloyal. (And to the extent that his dad recognizes what’s going on, he's jealous and resentful!)

Very long version:

(LISTEN I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS)

Okay!  So first: Jack’s a character who IMO is pretty up for interpretation.  You can interpret him very charitably, and make excuses for the bad behavior, and fill in the blanks sympathetically when situations are ambiguous; or you can interpret him uncharitably, and emphasize the bad behavior. I don’t think either approach is invalid - it depends on what kind of story you’re interested in!  I have enjoyed Bad Dad stories and also stories that redeem Jack.

My personal take on canon is that Jack and Tim’s relationship is in a gray area.  Jack's definitely neglectful, and he does prioritize other things over Tim, but he’s never so bad that Tim can easily reject him, and he's never so bad that Bruce could justify taking Tim away.  He's just...not great.  Tim loves him, and feels loyal to him, but it’s a very mixed-up complicated love.

I have a gentler take and a harsher one which I switch between as the spirit moves me. xD

My Gentler Take (tl;dr: vigilantism is choir and Jack loves sports)

Here’s the core conflict: Jack and Tim are very different people with different values.  Tim idolizes Bruce and Dick and vigilantism, and secretly gets involved, knowing his dad will hate it. He gets increasingly wrapped up in his secret world and lies to his dad...because if his dad finds out, he’ll make Tim quit.

This is a great setup for an ongoing comic.  It’s practical, because it provides endless potential for plotlines, and it’s nicely thematic, because it maps closely onto relatable real-life situations with extracurricular activities:

Tim the drama nerd whose dad thinks he’s playing football and not in the school play; 

Tim the closeted-queer kid secretly getting involved in his school’s politically-active Gay-Straight Alliance; 

Tim the choir kid whose dad only values making money and wants him to go into the family business (and Tim keeps promising himself he'll give up choir soon, definitely soon, but maybe he'll stay in just a liiiittle longer, because they need him, you see, the last tenor left town, so...); 

Tim the computer geek with the sports-obsessed dad (this one’s just canon);

etc. etc.  

The extracurricular metaphor works pretty well for Tim’s relationship to vigilantism.  Tim's involved in his "extracurricular" because he genuinely thinks it's important and fulfilling, and he values it and wants to be good at it. He idolizes Bruce and Dick because they're good at it. He's been collecting information about it since he was a little kid, and hiding it from his parents because he knows they wouldn't approve. And mayyyybe there's also an element of low-key rebellion against his dad, and maybe that's secretly part of the appeal. And yet also as Tim gets more and more invested, he starts to daydream: maybe I could tell my dad and he'd be proud of me and supportive. But he doesn't, because actually he knows his dad would be upset and angry and make him quit.

And - again, just like with lonely kids and extracurricular hobbies - one of the things that happens is that Tim starts getting his unfilled emotional needs met ... by people he knows through this secret hobby. And people like Bruce and Dick start turning into a surrogate family. Which Tim feels guilty about. And also as Tim gets more and more wrapped up in their world, he has to lie to his dad even more, which means the distance between Tim and his dad gets bigger and bigger and more and more unfixable.

I love this dilemma. It's simple, it's recognizable, it provides endless sources for conflict, and there's no obvious solution! Tim can't tell Jack: he'll make Tim quit! And Tim doesn't want to quit, because he loves choir / art / theater / whatever.  Yeah, it’s difficult, and there are challenges, and sometimes he has doubts...but at the end of the day, he cares about it a lot.  And everything he values is there, and all the people he admires and cares about are there, and all he wants in the world is to feel like he's one of them and belongs there. So he has to lie, even though he doesn't want to lie, and he feels guilty about it...

...but also he ends up lying more and more.

(Sidenote: I think it's important that Tim chooses to keep lying - Tim's narration often glosses this as "I have to lie to my dad," and that's certainly how it feels to Tim, but this... isn't quite true. He has to lie to his dad, because if he doesn't, his dad will get mad at him and try to stop him, not because he literally has no choice about it.)

Other Reasons Why I Like The "Secret Extracurricular" Interpretation

(tl;dr it complicates not just Tim's relationship with his dad, but also all his other relationships)

Tim's problems have some obvious parallels to Steph and Cass, who both become vigilantes while rejecting their evil supervillain dads. But Jack isn't evil. And that means the Tim-and-Jack relationship is ambiguous and complicated in ways that I like. Steph and Cass can just leave their Bad Dads in prison, and say good riddance, and feel very righteous and triumphant about it! Tim’s more complicated. Tim gets into vigilantism ostensibly out of duty and altruism, but secretly, he's also involved for straight-up selfish self-fulfillment reasons. He's lonely, and bored, and his life feels pointless, but he thinks that Bruce and Dick are cool and amazing and he wants to be a part of the things that they do.  When his dad gets jealous of Tim’s relationship to Bruce, and feels like Tim’s looking for a surrogate family, he’s... not wrong.

And the ways in which Jack is not Actionably Bad complicate things from Bruce's POV.  If Jack was a straight-up villain, it’d be an easy call to keep in touch when Jack finds out and makes Tim quit...but he’s not a villain, not really.  So what do you do?  Do you try to surreptitiously stay in touch with Tim even though you’re ignoring his dad’s express wishes and thus forcing Tim to sneak around?  Do you respect his dad’s wishes and stay away from Tim even though you have a years-long relationship at this point?  

Again: a bit similar to the extracurricular analogy.  Say you’re the choir director and you’ve built this whole relationship with a kid in the choir, and you’re an important mentor to him and you care about him etc. etc. etc.... and then right before a big performance, his dad finds out he’s been secretly involved, and yanks him out.  How would you react?  Well, maybe kind of in some of the ways Bruce reacts.  You replace him. You’re annoyed with him. You miss him. You want him to come back. You’re also worried about him.  You’re upset with his dad.  But also... what should you do, exactly?

Bruce and Alfred and Dick care about Tim as if he were part of their family, but he’s not part of their family, and there’s a lot of interesting tension there.

My Harsher Take

Jack never hits his son.  But his temper is a big deal.

In his worst moments, he takes out his anger on Tim’s stuff - wrecking his room, or ripping his TV out of the wall and confiscating it.  When he’s worried about Tim, he usually expresses that fear by yelling at him / punishing him / sending him away - threatening to send him to boarding school in Metropolis in Robin III, or threatening to send him to military school abroad in Robin 92, or actually forcing him to go to an all-boys' boarding school post-NML.  

This is bad behavior!  It is Not Good!  

And you can easily connect the dots to a bunch of Tim’s terrible coping mechanisms, like the constant lying and or the fact that Tim’s go-to methods for dealing with interpersonal conflict are 1) repress it and pretend it never happened (most of his fights with Bruce), 2) withdraw from the relationship until he can pretend the conflict doesn’t exist (when his friends get mad at him in YJ, he quits the team for a while), or 3) literally run away from home.

Also, Jack is a Manly Man with firm opinions about how men behave vs. how women behave, and he thinks boys shouldn’t be scared and thinks Tim should date hot girls and pushes Tim to work out and wants him to play football and expresses period-typical sexism, etc. etc. etc. ... and though obviously this wasn’t what the writers had in mind at the time, all of that is certainly interesting to read backwards in the light of Tim as a queer character.

More Disorganized Thoughts on Jack Drake

Tim’s our hero, so we’re naturally more sympathetic to him, but it’s also true that relationships are a two-way street, and Tim doesn’t value any of the things his dad values, either.  Jack at various points is shown to care about grades, business, money, boarding schools, archeology, football, a kind of macho bragging-about-dating-hot-women ethos, and a very public and performative kind of caring. Tim tends to respond with discomfort or disinterest or even disgust.  When Jack gets on TV to try to rally the government to save his son from No Man’s Land, Tim isn’t touched—he’s mortified.  When Jack makes some bad investments and loses money, Jack’s deeply upset and his self-image is majorly impacted, and far from being sympathetic, Tim’s annoyed and kind of contemptuous of the idea that this is a problem.  Jack thinks fishing in the early morning and going to tennis matches is a fun father-son activity; Tim finds it exhausting and tedious.  And so on.

This means that Tim often longs to be closer to his dad in theory, but this longing is more tied to fantasy than to reality. He rarely seems to enjoy spending time with His-Dad-The-Actual-Person.  So for example, when Tim’s deadly ill with the Clench, he has an extremely poignant fever dream about telling his dad the truth and getting hugged…even as he insists in real-life to Alfred and Dick that he does not want them to tell his dad what’s going on.

The same is true of Jack, who IMO genuinely wants to be closer to his son and is continually declaring that he’s going to turn over a new leaf and get closer to his son…and just as continually backs out of activities or loses his temper when faced with spending time with his actual son.

Tim and his dad sadly get along best—by far—in Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder situations.  When Jack gets kidnapped or is in danger, Tim worries for him (and Tim grieves him deeply when he dies).  When Tim disappears or runs away, Jack’s genuinely worried about him.  So e.g. they have a really moving emotional reunion and hug when the earthquake hits Gotham, and Tim panics about his dad’s safety and comes running home (and meanwhile Jack’s been panicked about Tim’s safety!).  It’s the day-to-day, regular life stuff where they don’t connect.

Jack's written quite differently by different writers. Mostly, Tim's parents are at their least likable in his early appearances and early miniseries (this is where you get, for example, Jack and Janet being nasty at each other while a pained employee looks on, and Tim disappointed to once again get news of where his parents are via postcard - "I guess that sums them up! Never know where they’re going to be–or when–or even how long!” - and Tim alone on school break, and Bruce and Alfred thinking there's something weird going on with Tim's parents, etc. etc.). Jack's more sympathetic but still often unlikable in most of Tim's Robin solo, and he's almost invisible (but positively treated if he does show up) in Tim's team books.

For obvious reasons, Jack's remembered way more sympathetically after his death. Tim's completely devastated by Jack's murder, which he arrives moments too late to prevent, and he basically never gets over it. We see him grieving Jack again and again in Robin, and also in Teen Titans, and also in Resurrection, and again in the Halloween Special, and again in Batman: Blackest Night, and all the way up to the end of Red Robin. Tim also grieves for an extended time over Janet - he hallucinates a happy reunion with her when he's feverish in Contagion, and hallucinates her in the final issue of Robin, and the reveal-your-buried-emotions song in Robin 102 brings up his grief for her too (meanwhile, other characters dance or laugh or otherwise get giddy).  Tim’s grief over his parents’ deaths is intense and long-lasting.

I'm not going to clip comic panels because this is long enough, but if you're curious, here's a nice and fairly lengthy compilation of comic panels with Tim and Jack.

If you're interested in a Jack-centric story with a softer-but-still-recognizably-canon take on Jack, I really like the way Jack’s narration is written in the one-shots Heart Humble (set shortly before Jack dies) and Never a Hero (Ra's resurrects him during Brucequest, and Jack's archeology skills turn out to be unexpectedly useful).

[ozlices]

nintendo het baiting w sidon and his fiancee only to pull the gayest shit ive seen in a While by having sidon renew his vows w link (they got married at the end of ruta’s quest in botw. obviously. clearly.) and giving him a power that lets him ‘stay by his side forever’. i see you husbands i am so glad your marriage is thriving. good for them. good for them. they also both have two hands for anyone who wants to pull any nonsense im js. there is room for yona she just has to understand link has held sidon’s heart for years first.

[hayaku14]

kuroba toichi you need to stay dead or im going to fucking kill you myself

[itsalwaysforyou]

jay not asking coach about letting lonnie onto the team bc he doesn’t want to do anything coach might disagree with…….

[apple-spider-vinegar]

Not a Norman Osborn Apologist or a Norman Osborn Hater but a secret third thing

[musicalchaos07]

Thinking thoughts about Joyce & Jonathan again

[ninja-knox-ur-sox-off]

APPARENTLY IT’S INTERNATIONAL FRIENDS DAY AND I JUST HAPPENED TO WRITE A LITTLE FICLET ABOUT MEI AND MK OFF OF AN IDEA I HAD ABOUT THEIR FRIENDSHIP there was more i kinda wanted to add cause it felt slightly off to me and I wasn’t going to post it, BUT HECK IT HAVE SOME BEST FRIENDS CONTENT HAPPY INTERNATIONAL FRIENDS DAY 

Hype Man

Mei didn’t think all that highly of herself for a dragon.

Her parents had tried to instill some of that pride in her, a dragon descendant of oceans, she had a tall standing heritage to be proud of, but it mainly just resulted in her feeling inadequate. Like she could never quite reach as amazing as every other one of her ancestors, all dragons. Something about her felt different, felt wrong. Her family came from the ocean, but Mei felt like she was burning from the inside out some days.

She couldn’t seem to connect with her family the way her parents did, some sort of disconnect there that led her to seek connection elsewhere. She started a bit of a gaming channel, didn’t ever show her face, just mostly chatted, looking for some form of connection. She bought bikes, dismantled them, built new bikes with the parts, she stared at her creations and couldn’t bring herself to show her parents, instead keeping them hidden away, because something so important to her couldn’t possibly be important to the family.

They left her alone for the most part. They were more involved when she was younger, but once she became a legal adult, they did seem to withdraw a bit. She figured they just didn’t want to seem overbearing, but their absences just seemed to make things seem more impossible.

Mei would show them things, talk about her accomplishments quietly at dinner, voice getting meeker and milder once she said them out loud. A couple thousand followers compared to a couple thousand dedicated warriors didn’t seem like much. A few races won compared to hundreds of battles won didn’t feel worth sharing, so she mostly let them talk. If they asked she would just say she was filling her time. Sometimes it felt better to say nothing at all than to mention gaming or racing.

Compared to all of her family, sometimes Mei felt like nothing at all.

Then she met Mk.

He was… silly. A little odd at first. Nothing at all like the tall white and jade pillars of home, or the endless empty hallways. Mk was loud. He was animated. He was waving his hands about and filled every second like a firework, like he could like he didn’t have a moment left to lose.

It was a contagious sort of energy. Mei had always felt a little too energetic herself compared to her composed, poised parents, still and calm in their movements; hopping from foot to foot in place when she was excited compared to their subtle nods of their heads. But next to Mk it felt natural to bounce around a bit, talk loud, laugh louder.

He was a little jumpy at first. Something she wasn’t sure she wanted to look too far into considering what it might’ve been, but after an initial stiffness Mk relaxed into contact like a cat soaking up the warmth of the sun. Throwing an arm over his shoulder became almost as easily as breathing.

If Mei didn’t know any better, she’d say he was a little touch starved, leaning into every shoulder bump after he was more comfortable around her, seeking her out for a hug even when he wouldn’t outright hug her first until later.

She made sure to maybe hug a little more than she usually would, just because it seemed to make him smile and a little giddy, and soon that too felt just as natural, and she couldn’t help the breathless grin when he slammed into her to initiate a hug for the first time. And from then on, hugging him, holding his hand, bumping into him, felt natural.

As comfortable as she was around Mk, Mei still didn’t talk about herself all that much. After all, what was a new drifting turn trick in a race compared to turning into an actual dragon?

She did eventually let something slip.

“Wait, you're a gamer?”

Mei halted and stared at him like a deer in headlights.

Mk backtracked immediately. “I mean--I know you, like, game, like pshh, yeah obviously, we’re literally in the arcade right now. But I meant more like, gaming like, consols, VR, all that fancy stuff, and like, streaming it, you said you had a livestream--I mean you might not even be a gamer, that could have been a different kind of livestream, which in that case, this is kinda awkward and now I’m going to apologize for assuming--”

“No no,” she waved her hands a bit, then stopped and let them drop. “It’s… uh… yeah it’s a gaming channel.”

Then the enormously unexpected. “That’s so cool.”

It was?

Mei blinked. He knew she was a dragon and thought… gaming was still cool?

“How many followers do you have?” He was looking at her so excitedly, she couldn’t exactly not tell him, but it still felt weird to say it aloud.

“Uh, I dunno, like… 80k… I think? Last time I checked?”

Mk gaped at her.

“I mean it’s a big city,” she felt the need to add. She knew so many channels with millions of followers, her’s honestly wasn’t that big in comparison. “Lots of people watch streamers, so it’s not… like a super high number but--”

Then he was shaking her, hands on her shoulders and pulling her back and forth. “80k? Mei that’s so freaking cool, that’s so many followers--ohmegosh wait, what if I follow you already?”

“Cool?” Mei stammered out.

“Um yeah!” He said it like the most obvious thing in the world. He was pulling out his phone that had a Monkey King charm hanging from it and an art piece decorating the back of the case. “What’s your channel? I wanna see if I’ve watched you before.”

He had, as it turned out, been subscribed to her channel for around two years.

“Mei,” he whined, clinging to her arm.

“What,” she laughed for the twelfth time.

“Mei you don’t understand, you’re so good at video games. You’re so funny and clever, you’re so cool, how do I know such a cool person. How is this legal? How am I meant to survive?”

It made her laugh hard enough her face turned a little red.

“I’m not that cool,” she told him fondly as she got on her bike.

“YOU DRIVE A MOTORCYCLE?”

“Um…” she glanced down at her helmet, then back up at him. “Yes?”

He grabbed her face and bonked their foreheads together, squishing her cheeks. “Mei, I need you to be real with me for a second.”

“O-okay?” she managed to say, voice a little muffled by the way her face was being squished.

“I need you to tell me you didn’t build this.”

She blinked.

He stared directly into her eyes.

“Um…”

Then he was back to shaking her. “Mei. Mei you don’t understand, how are you this cool?”

“It’s just a bike--” she tried to say.

“Just the coolest looking bike I’ve ever seen,” Mk said, even louder.

“Okay, okay,” she laughed, pulling her face out of his hands. There was a heat to her cheeks and a warmth to core of her chest. She looked away. “Okay, so it’s kinda cool.”

“Extremely cool,” he corrected.

“Extremely cool,” Mei amended. “I actually did some repairs this morning after yesterday’s race--”

She stopped short at the look on his face.

“What?”

Mk put his hands together in a praying motion, pressed them against his mouth, crouched down next to her bike, one leg stretched out, leaning back on the other and looked up at her.

Mei leaned away from him a little, nervously laughing. “What?”

He inhaled.

“BOI--”

“So, let me see if I got this all right,” he said after the bike ride to Pigsy’s noodles. His hair was a mess after wearing her helmet all the way there, sticking up in every direction, some of it smooshed against his head in odd shapes, and his cheeks still flushed from whooping so loudly and screaming at sharp turns. Mei nodded along, stirring the ice in her soda bought from the vending machine down the street with her straw. “You’re a dragon.”

“Correct.”

“Like a literal descendant of the Dragon of the West, a direct descendant of the White Horse Dragon in Journey to the West…”

“Yup,” Mei said, ending the word with a pop and then leaning down a bit to sip from her soda.

“You have a million subscribers--”

“Not a million yet.”

“A million subscribers,” he said again, stressing the words and widening his eyes, as though daring her to argue, then sat back in his seat, waving his hand and gesturing to himself. “Of which, yours truly is proud to be one.” He slammed his hands down on the table. “Which is for good reason since you’re one of the best gamers out there--”

“I’m not even in the top hundred, Mk.”

“Only because every other streamer shows their face which adds to the experience of watching them game.” He aggressively slurped up some noodles before continuing.

“Not only that but you’re a freaking racer. You race a bike which you built yourself.”

Mei hummed around her straw, looking away tapping her fingers on her phone lightly, a heat to her face.

“And on top of all that you destroy arcade games like you’re going for a walk in the park.” He finally slumped back in his seat. “Did I get all that?”

Mei tapped her staw against the edge of her cup and slurped up the bits of soda from the bottom of the straw. “Yup.”

He went limp as a noodle and slumped all the way down, sliding until she could only see his hair, his knees bumping into hers.

“You’re so cool, Mei,” he whined. “Why are you so cool? I’m like… I deliver noodles.”

She laughed and lightly bumped her leg against his. “Hey, delivering noodles is cool.”

“You built yourself a motorcycle,” he hissed back.

She found herself grinning. “Okay, so it is… pretty cool.”

He popped back up just so he could slam his hands down on the table again. “Extremely cool.”

“Extremely cool,” she grinned wider.

And that… was kinda how things went.

Mei did a new trick on her bike? Mk was there across the street in the empty stands yelling about how cool it looked.

Mei beat own high score on an arcade game? He was right there jumping up and down.

When Mei hit a million subscribers she was racing to Mk’s apartment above the noodle shop in the middle of the night to tell him about it before she could even think about how a million subscribers was nothing next to a million subjects in a kingdom, and Mk opened the window with his Monkey King themed pajamas and was awake in seconds to squeal with her.

Her ancestry was still a massive thing to try and live up to, and something that was still immensely important to her. And although her accomplishments now seemed like nothing compared to their great feats… every dragon started somewhere. And right now, winning that race was a big feat, because it was her feat. Something she did.

Even if she wasn’t a full fledged dragon, Mk was right there next to her to remind her of just how amazing she was.

[wonder-worker]

A.J Pollard’s biography on Edward IV was so cringe lol (generic; minor but frustrating inaccuracies; intensely judgmental at times and oddly dismissive at others while never considering the broader context; entirely diminished and trivialized Elizabeth Woodville as both queen and wife of his main subject in the name of "defending" her; created a false dichotomy between Edward and Henry VII’s styles of ruling and lauded the latter at the former’s expense even though Henry literally followed Edward’s example for the very things Pollard was criticizing Edward for; had a downright nonsensical and thoroughly misleading conclusion about Edward’s legacy & Richard’s usurpation that was based entirely on hindsight, Pollard's own assumptions, and the complete downplaying Richard’s agency and actions to emphasize what Pollard wrongly and misleadingly claimed were Edward's so-called 'failings', etc, etc)

I wanted to buy his book on Henry V but after reading this shitshow and the synopsis of that book, im guessing it's going to be 10x worse, so...no thanks

[khaothanawat]

i know i’ve seen people say it’s weird that nueng doesn’t, as of episode 7, seem upset that his mother was shot, but i don’t think it’s that weird. or: i don’t think he’s not upset. he’s just either hiding it very well, or completely compartmentalising by giving himself over to the fantasy escape of the island. or both.

like. i feel like the show has, over and over again and since episode one, made it so clear that nueng is a master of hiding his own feelings (unless he’s drunk pleeeaaase kssjdjjd). we saw him do it with ben in the dance hall, right before he decided to poison himself (hhh). my man ate food that was way too spicy for him and kept a perfectly straight face the entire time 😭

equally, it does also seem like nueng’s also keeping his feelings completely bottled up and letting himself instead get lost in this escapist fantasy the island offers him. he said it all out loud in episode 7 - i’m a different person here, i’m free from the weight of the expectations that are placed on me back home, i haven’t been happy in a very long time but i can be happy here… his focus on what the island offers him in comparison to the life he had (and just casually disregarding that the life he had would probably look very different to the life he’d be going back to, without either of his parents.) he was upset the entire journey to the island - and then he locked it up completely.

i mean, he’s out there trying to earn money as a fisherman because he’s never earned his own money before! he’s trying to work out how to put sheets on a bed! it’s not reality and he knows it, but i think that makes compartmentalising his feelings about what happened to his mother so much easier. he can just enjoy his time with palm, enjoy pretending to be a normal teenager (bc omg he’s a teenager) who doesn’t have people trying to murder him and his entire family. how else would you even really cope with that?

i think dating palm is also clearly a part of that. i absolutely believe he has feelings for palm, but i also wonder if he’s operating with a little bit of a #yolo mindset and just trying to make the most of his time on the island and live while he can. he’s never dated anyone!! he was so so lonely before he had palm!!! he’s got so many things he’s trying to escape from!!!! but none of it is permanent in his mind. that’s what he says to palm: while we’re living on this island, can you be my boyfriend?

i wonder if the fact that he’s not sleeping is also a sign of where he’s at - the show has shown us this a few times in the past two episodes. ostensibly it’s because he needs his music; we’ve seen him a number of times listening to classical music, particularly at school which was rough for him, so i suppose that’s an escape too. it’s like the spicy food though - he could hide his reaction to the pain from his voice and his face, but his body still betrayed how well he was actually coping.

the thing is, though, is nueng even really being honest with palm? does he genuinely need to buy a phone just to listen to classical music? don’t be such a zoomer nueng - go find a radio or something omg.

i just think that if i was planning to hitch a ride off of an island, becoming a fisherman with access to a boat and/or getting myself a phone would be a pretty smart call.

or else, getting myself sent to a hospital miles away would probably also do the trick, i guess.

[ellivia]

🥹

[iridescentmidnights]

Can we all agree that Raphie needs a mother figure the most?

Why would he need a mom when there's a perfectly good Leo right there?? Basically the same thing

Jokes aside, yeah most continuities I can agree. The one that needs an extra parental figure most is usually Raph. Though I believe all of them would've had a higher quality life/childhood if they had a mother. Mikey, Donnie, and Raph would be such momma's boys, and I think that would be so sweet.

But context and character dynamics are important, it really only works in theory. So most likely a continuity with a healthy relationship between Yoshi/Tang Shen and they got mutated together or they stay together after only one gets mutated. All things considered a single mom wouldn't fare much better then just Splinter. But a Splinter that falls in love after mutation could work well too. An unhealthy/toxic dynamic wouldn't help in the slightest.

April often "sort of" fills the mom role, mom role adjacent like older sister or loving Aunt, and is usually the best at nurturing Donnie more then anyone else. Casey is often helpful giving Raph a mirror and helping him regulate his temper, but he's not much a parental figure and usually an honorary turtle sibling. Plus the lesson is usually Raph teaching an adult to control themselves which isn't fair to Raph who is always a child. They all need one-on-one time with a parental figure that isn't meant to further their ninjutsu.

2003 Splinter is exempt, he's not perfect but the literal "has always been a rat, never human" Dad is the only one that regularly just hangs out with his kids and watches them play games or just watches movies/tv with them for fun. And if his kiddos are in danger he's absolutely right there trying to protect them.

[todayisafridaynight]

damnnn was thinking of minedai and i think someone started cutting onions in my room haha

thinking about minedai always starts off like 'haha lmao mine so silly so silly yandere who would cry if daigo told him he was happy to have him as a friend' and then it quickly devolves into 'mine and daigo were both incredibly lonely people growing up one way or another, neither of them feeling as though they had a genuine relationship with someone until meeting each other' and then i throw up and cry

[fox-guardian]

reigen is so mean to mob and for why. he's literally doing all the work for you, you ungrateful cunt, AT LEAST LET HIM HAVE AS MUCH PORK IN HIS RAMEN AS YOU, GODDAMN

[pillowmoment]

CREATURE!

My weird cat son :3c

[incorrect-web-novels]

Actually, one of my 3-4 Main Complaints with DPA (which I'm overall very fond of) is this whole Mass Guilt of the characters who were at or aware of the contents of Reinhardt’s Public Interrogation in Chapter 446-447. Like, if someone has been lying to you for over a year, you probably cannot trust them! It’s not weird to say, "Hey, this guy is the leader of our probable enemies. It would be highly dangerous and negligent to listen to him without any suspicion." Should they have at least listened to him? Yes, but if bank robbers kill their hostages because you didn't arrange a getaway car for them, it's still predominantly the bank robbers fault, even if the leader of the bank robbers wasn't on board with the robbery in the first place.

It's so strange to argue that every single main character that didn’t side with Reinhardt is feeling unimaginable guilt and (in their eyes) are the absolute worst for not trusting someone who, frankly, did not trust them with the truth, even if that mistrust was justified. Leaving your entire life and endangering your family is so much weirder and arguably less justifiable than not trusting someone whose father you killed and whose kingdom you destroyed.