I mean, this is coming from someone who doesn't have pretty privilege, but sometimes I wonder if the only people who talk about it are pretty girls humblebragging? Are there any people who don't have pretty privilege who talk about it missing from their lives? It seems interesting to me because most of those "I'm so hot and it's sad because it makes my life easier" video essays focus a lot on comparing their situation to a less privileged situation, but I mean. Where is that data coming from? Are they just imagining a life that would suck and attribute them not having it to their hotness? I'm not trying to say that those people invent a sad life to be sad over in comparison to the good life they have, which they then can also be sad over, with the sun in that fictional constellation being their hotness, but that's what it feels like, a little.
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I'm in A Mood™ (stressed) so im going back to my roots of melting two character together into one person. So bruce wayne!danny fenton. Danny Fenton who, for eight years, grew up in a beautiful gothic manor with his mom and dad under the name "Bruce Wayne". Playing piano with his mother, running around the manor with his father.
Then when he's eight it's ripped away from him. There's blood on his hands and pearls pooling at his feet, and both his parents are dead in front of him.
And he gets shipped off to distant relatives "the Fentons" shortly after, Alfred close on his heels because someone needs to take care of him, someone that knows him. Bruce goes to the Fentons for the safety of anonymity. Gotham's press wants to sink its teeth into him.
Danny misses his city even if it took everything from him. There are shadows in his eyes and he's pale as a sheet even beside his distant cousins, and they change his name to "Danny Fenton' because nobody should know that their newest child was illustrious orphan Bruce Wayne.
They call him Bruce behind closed doors. Danny prefers it that way, he clings onto the name -- the one his parents gave him -- like a lifeline. He makes friends with Sam and Tucker. Tucker takes one look at the willowy, morbid little boy standing in the corner like a shade, ghosts in his eyes, and drags him out into the sunlight, and takes him over to Sam.
When Danny is twelve, he's still not over it -- and he's a little obsessed with the Fentons' research, with the morbid. He has books upon books on death, murder, detective work. Anything he can get his hands on. And stars. He loves stars.
Alfred owns the apartment next to them and comes over regularly. Danny clings to him.
When Danny is twelve, he's still quiet, meek, a shy little thing prone to being bullied. Freaky little Fenton with the night in his eyes and too-cold skin even before he put one foot in the grave. in a sleepover in his room with Sam and Tucker, he tells them the truth. They're his friends, he trusts them.
"My name is Bruce." he murmurs, voice quiet as the breeze, always quiet. he's staring at his star-covered sheets.
"Like Bruce Wayne?" Tucker asks, a joking tone in his voice.
Danny smiles a little, lamb-like with insecurity. "I am Bruce Wayne." And he takes them down to the lab, disrupting Maddie and Jack, to prove it. Sam tells them of her own wealth then shortly after. They start calling Danny "Bruce" in private too -- its trust. Thats what it is. It's trust.
Sam goes to media functions and comes back with aching feet and complaints on her tongue -- and Danny soaks it up all like a sponge, splayed across a beanbag chair with Tucker in her room. He's not envious of her, he used to go to events with his parents and they kept him safe from the ugly of Gotham's Elite. For the most part. He's had comments made at him, he doesn't miss them.
Alfred returns to the manor semi-regularly, Danny goes with him. he wanders the hallways and helps Alfred clean, the last thing either of them want is for their home to fall into disrepair. He brings Jazz with him next time, then Tucker, then Sam. They all help him clean, and he shows them his room. The one across from his parents', it feels strange.
When Danny dies when he's fourteen, the first adult he tells is Alfred. He and Jazz go over to his house more often than they stay in the Fentonworks building. At least at Alfred's, the food doesn't come to life. Alfred sits at the kitchen table and weeps when Danny tells him, Jazz is upstairs, and its just the two of them.
Danny's ghost form wears pearls around his wrist and the gloves look stained with some kind of black substance. He looks like a child who died in a lab accident, but he also looks like a child who has shadows dripping off his shoulders, curling at his feet, hanging from his eyes.
because amorphous blob batman has my heart always and danny/bruce will not escape it even in death even if that IS the only reason im giving him Mild BatBlob Vibes...so far
when they go to the manor, alfred helps danny make a pile of stones between Martha and Thomas' graves, nobody but the two of them (and sam and tucker) will know what it means. (not even bruce's children later down the line, not for a long, long time)
danny dives into ghost fighting on shaky feet and not half as witty as he once was in one world. he's skittish, skittering between blasts from shadow to shadow and clumsily making his way through each battle. but helping people lights a fire in him. he still has shadows dripping off his feet but there's a purpose in his eyes.
and god help him, he's going to help people.
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i think, and this may just be my zekrom bias speaking, that if someone wants to experience the full value of bw's story it's better to play through white first. black has the issue of coming off as very dismissive towards plasma's legitimate and well-founded claims that pokemon abuse DOES occur (and it does! from the kanto games' marowak to bw2's liepard there's instances where it's put in the spotlight, so it certainly does happen)... by assigning the protagonist to truth, it feels pretty evident that n's beliefs are "wrong", and the game just seems to brush any questioning aside.
on the other hand, white giving n the hero of truth role means we're basically forced to think about what that means for the relationship of people and pokemon at large. to translate a point n makes in chargestone cave: if you allow people to coexist with pokemon, even if the majority of trainers treat them well, there will always be someone somewhere out there who abuses or neglects them instead. are we okay with that? should those pokemon still be allowed to suffer, just because what they experience is an outlier to the general rule? while not outright stated, zekrom's association with hope and the strive for the ideal suggests that we don't brush off these facts, but instead take them into consideration, and aim to change the world based off of them... like how in bw2 society in unova puts a lot more emphasis on the bond between people and pokemon, and on pokemon as equals (see: iris's dialogue before entering your team info the hall of fame).
i think black version has its own unique avenues to explore, but on the surface level, it's a much more cut and dry, "no, you're just wrong", type of story that kind of makes you work harder to fit it into bw's overall theming of "the world's not black and white, there's not a singular objective right or wrong perspective."
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OP I LOVED UR ANDREIL POST GOING CRAZY THINKING ABOUT IT if you have anything else in that amazing brain of yours on this take please do share because i absolutely LOVED how you articulated this aspect about andreil. its something i particularily appreciate about their dynamic and relationship with anger and Their Issues TM. your post will cross my mind whenever ill think about it from now on.
I don’t think I have ever gotten an ask and this is kind of making me go insane??? I hope you know that you made my day and also, I’m so glad people share in my endless brainrot bc when it comes to this series and these characters I simply cannot stop
It really isn’t nearly talked about enough that the thing that got Andrew to actually look at Neil and become interested was (as cited by Neil himself at some point tho I can’t remember in which book that scene is from the top of my head) Neil’s bone-deep jealousy of Kevin. It’s—it ties into that whole epiphany that Neil has at some point, when he looks at Andrew and realizes that while he is hurtling towards his own breaking point and about to burn out and shatter into something he’s not sure he’d recognize if he survived the encounter, Andrew hit that point and broke from it years ago. And that’s an understanding that goes both ways between them—in a fucked up way, it feels like Andrew might be the future that Neil has waiting for him if he doesn’t end the year six feet under: hollow and drifting, passionless after everything he had to rip away from himself to be able to survive. At the same time, Neil probably reminds Andrew of how he used to be, back when he had hope for things only to have that hope rip him apart—which is exactly where Neil seems to be headed for the majority of the story.
I think that a lot of Andrew’s understanding of Neil comes from the fact that he knows intimately what it feels like to be caught between a rock and a hard place and cut his own lifeline, only to then fail to die on impact. Neil hasn’t had to resort to that yet, but he is hanging by a thread. You’d think that watching him struggle would only serve to drive it home for Andrew that he made the right choice in closing himself off, except… well. His expectations of life and the people in it are so bleak, it’s no wonder he finds himself drawn to Neil’s messy emotions and every unexpected show of spine like a moth to a flame.
Neil, for all of his issues and scars, can still feel things—can still want something so badly it defies all logic. Can want something with such visceral, fucked-up intensity that it resonates where it shouldn’t. It’s an ability that Andrew thinks he’s either lost or cut out of himself to stay somewhat safe, sane and alive a long time ago, but that remains as the most fundamental crack in the foundation of his being. It’s a fascination that seems to come out every time he’s sober and eventually ties into him wanting Neil—wanting something worth wanting and putting a name to it once he finds it. They look at each other and don’t want a watered-down version of the person in front of them. It creates a relationship that embraces issues big and small and accepts (even values!) the messy parts of being human. It means that any space shared between them immediately becomes safe once they settle into something comfortable together. The way they handle the uglier sides of each other’s personality honestly makes me feral because it’s always done with understanding and acceptance and they even find positives or comforts there that the other can’t see and that’s probably a reason for why 1) their chemistry is so off the charts and 2) their relationship is so damn healthy (in addition to their communication being stupidly good when it comes to each other).
Andrew wants something real and Neil wants to be real. And then they get to have exactly that.
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