This is based off of that one tiktok from @sorruna where it’s the audio from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse.
——
Dick Grayson was a sneaky, intelligent little shit.
He was also dumb. These things are not mutually exclusive.
To this day, one of his best kept secrets- one of the many, many that he had now- was something he’d take to his grave.
Or to Jason’s grave, at least.
Dick sat down and began telling the story to ears that would never truly hear it.
——
Batman’s voice rumbled behind him as Dick, in his Robin suit, stood blankly on top of a roof.
“I know you snuck out last night, Robin.”
Dick froze, train of thought about his dinner derailed. Holy busted, Batman! Quick! Play dumb!
“Who’s Robin?” He asked, the years of performing in front of a large crowd coming to save his ass.
Not that dumb!
Batman sent him a dry look, reprimand already poised on his lips. Dick, however, was nothing but a good performer. Nay, a dedicated performer.
Quick! Do something out of character! He shouted at himself, panicking visibly. He stepped backwards, an idea appearing in his head. In his defense, it sounded like an amazing idea at the time. He had no idea it would blow up into a Justice League issue. If he had known… Dick would have lied better, probably. There was no way he was going to let B bench him for weeks!
“Who the fuck are you?!” He yelped. Dick apologized mentally to Alfred and his parents. Batman paused, stunned.
“That’s my question. Who are you?!” Bruce asked, immediately hostile. His son doesn’t curse. Well, not in any normal way anyways. Dick quickly backpedaled by yelling at him with a heavy Vlax dialect, missing his parents terribly as he screamed stranger danger in rudimentary Romany. After this, he was going to have to convince Bruce to get him a language tutor. He refused to forget one of the only ties he had left to his parents.
“Wait, wait- you’re my son.” Bruce replied back, in perfect Romany. He looked more convinced but still skeptical.
“My dad is a circus performer! Not a flying rat!” Dick screeched back. He couldn’t help but feel touched about Bruce seeing him like a son.
“Oy! Keep it down out there, you assholes! Some of us like our sleep, damn!” A random Gothamite screamed out of their window.
“Yo, shut the fuck up! The vigilantes are helping to keep the rent low, motherfucker!” Another Gothamite shouted back.
….
Needless to say, Bruce quickly brought Dick back to the cave- with precautions to make sure he didn’t figure out where the Cave was if Dick was actually someone else.
——
“You would have loved it, Little Wing. B was running around like a headless chicken. The memory loss protocol was actually made because of me, you know.” Dick chuckled, sniffling as he talked to the carved gravestone.
It did not reply.
——
The blood tests came back. Yeppers, Dick sarcastically thought, who woulda thought I’m me?
Reinforcements were called in.
Meaning, Batgirl.
“Watch him while I contact Justice League Dark.”
“You think it’s magic?” Barbara asked.
“Yes. There was no one else near our vicinity that could affect Dick like this. He has no head wounds.”
“Eesh. Okay, go. I’ll watch him.”
Bruce disappeared in his zeta tube, looking harried. So, to everyone that’s not a Bat, he looked absolutely terrifying.
“What did you get yourself into now, Boy Wonder?” Barbara sighed. Dick was careful to keep any signs of recognition out of his face.
“Stop calling me that! Where are my parents?!” He asked back. Barbara coughed and looked uncomfortably away.
That’s right, Babs. I’m pulling out the orphan card. Feel bad. Dick hid his feral grin.
“They’re… uh, busy.” Busy being dead, Barbara thought, immediately wincing at her own thoughts. Apparently, Dick thought the excuse was lame too, and he sent her an incredulous look.
“Would you like refreshments, Master Dick?”
“What?”
Alfred held out some cookies on a platter, giving Babs a quelling look as she tried to reach for his share.
“Oh, wow, these are really good!” Dick said as he shoveled cookies into his mouth. He tried to replicate the reaction he had when he tried these for the first time, and from Alfred’s satisfied look, Dick nailed it.
——
“Robin doesn’t remember who he is.” Batman rumbled as he all but dragged Zatanna and Constantine by the scuff of their jackets towards the zeta tubes.
“Hey, wait-”
“We have no time.” Batman snarled, tossing the two magic users into the zeta. He punched in the destination.
When they got there, he glared at the two magic users until they got into the cave.
“Damn, Bats. Really living up to your name, huh?”
“Not bad,” Zatanna said as she looked around.
“Robin,” Batman- Bruce- reminded them. He did a quick glance over to check on his kids, and found them satisfactorily uninjured. Though, Barbara was looking worse for wear. Bruce quickly found out why as she stalked to him.
“You deal with him.” She muttered. “I’m going home.”
Bruce blinked and nodded. “Get home safe.”
Zatanna and Constantine followed Batman as he walked towards Robin. It was odd to see the normally laughing child frown.
“It’s you! The kidnapper! Where are my parents?!”
Bruce winced which, for him, was akin to a full body flinch and recoil. No wonder Barbara was so tired.
“Fix it.”
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Batsy.” Constantine grumbled.
“Well help, Batman. Though… I’m not sure if he should be doing that.”
Bruce sharply turned his head back to where Dick was. Emphasis on was. Because now, he’s halfway up the giant dinosaur the Robin had insisted they keep.
“Robin, get down from there!”
“Stranger Danger!” Dick hollered back.
Batman- Bruce Wayne- sighed.
“That’s high level magic,” Zatanna hummed. “I can’t feel anything, but I know for sure that he won’t die. Magic like that either dissipates naturally or…”
“Lasts forever,” Constantine finished.
Bruce groaned, shooting off a grappling line and swooping upwards to catch Dick as he fell from the giant dinosaur.
——
“I pretended to get my memories back later,” Dick chuckled. “And pretended to forget the whole thing. Bruce was so relieved that I stopped knocking things over and trying to do cartwheels in high places that he totally forgot I snuck out.”
Dick patted the headstone.
“But between you and me? I’m pretty sure Alfred knew. I think B pissed him off that week.”
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You know when this all started coming to light, I fully expected that leftists would try to downplay the horrific violence by acknowledging that it was "bad and our hearts go out to the victims and their families, but......" or by making a sharp distinction between civilians and soldiers (or even like, minors and adults), but the thing that's fucked me up is that nope! We sailed right past any attempt to even pretend at human decency and cut straight to "they deserved it."
Even the kids?? Yep, even the kids.
Like Jesus H. Christ y'all.
I'm used to people feeling like they need to at least gesture vaguely in the direction of giving a shit about Jewish lives and not justifying actual terror tactics and war crimes on civilians (you'd think for consistency's sake they might care about looking like they care for the credibility but..) even if we both know they really don't actually care about antisemitism in a meaningful way. We both know that they won't be there when it actually counts, and they sure as fuck aren't going to interrogate their own personal or group's antisemitism. But usually there's a fig leaf. There's at least a baseline assumption that they should care about antisemitism and Jewish people staying alive, even if they don't actually, so they'll say the minimum amount of correct sounding words and then quickly skedaddle onto whatever it is they actually care about.
And like, is that good? No, it's not. It's not good enough. I'm sick and fucking tired of people doing juuuuuust enough to pretend to care without ever addressing the real underlying issues.
But this? This totally floored me. This drops that baseline assumption that antisemitism and murdered Jews is a bad thing entirely and blatantly sides with literal actual terrorists committing unspeakable horrors while holding it up as "liberation."
And what's worse? Most of those were the further out fringe types (although there were a horrifying amount more than I expected) right? Most everyone else wasn't spouting off about how happy they were that vive la révolucion, right? You know what was really deafening?
The silence from everyone else.
Literally everyone except for maybe one or two gentiles I remember seeing kept their mouths shut. Everyone else? Not a goddamn word about how fucked up it was that people were crowing over our people's fresh corpses. The bodies hadn't even cooled yet and we had jackasses on here publicly celebrating with memes and gore videos, and not a word from 99.9% of you.
The people who did speak up? You have no idea how much it means, and I'm grateful. Truly.
Everyone else who was too gutless, spineless, or oblivious to realize how critical a moment this was for support and/or was more interested in protecting your image or whatever?
Let's just say: duly noted.
I may continue to work alongside you (what choice do I have?) but the trust is gone.
We're clearly on our own, with rare exception.
(This is a vent post I will not be adding any caveats to it and I will be blocking anyone who tries to be an asshole. I will lock reblogs if there's any discourse. Our lives are not up for debate you sick fucks.)
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even if i didnt love botw as much as i do, totk drives me nuts bc, similarly to pokemon, this series is so SO SO full of potential, they have so many games they can pull from, theres so many themes, characters and worldbuilding thats just left to rot, you dont need to connect anything with a chain to old titles, you dont need to bring back any things that already had their ending, but PLEASE harness at least a fraction of all this!!!! and they just refuse to do it beyond shallow references
totk jsut drives it all home to me, bc this isnt just the next game in the franchise, but a DIRECT SEQUEL no 10 years apart from botw, yet they cant even, they REFUSE to even keep the continuity with its OWN lore it established in botw together, and that, i think, is what truly makes me so insane (derogatory) about totk
it PROVES they do not care, they dont care to build on anything of the lore of old titles beyond references in form of amiibos or whatever, they dont even care to make a sequel to their most successful game in the franchise coherent with its own lore
botw established a captivating detailed world full of potential, while lacking in active storytelling, it had environmental storytelling, characters and ideas that were the perfect ground to build on-
and then they do away with it bc idk .. they want you to build mechs and make videos of it that go viral and thats all they care about or something
shiekah tech? forget that existed
character being the character you know? act as if you are seeing them for the first time just like they are
lame story? dont think about that just be distracted by the epic presentation of it
lore the previous title established? forget that, all that matters is what is here and now
beloved character from old games beign brought back? hes a new guy and has no background and no lore and just sits waiting for you at the end to have a flashy fight with
references from old titles and their lore? just here for nostalgie bait, dont you remember? you LOVE this series, now give me 70 bucks for a glorified DLC that ruins what you loved about the series and makes you realize that nothign matters and nothing is interesting anymore
you are supposed to take it all at face value, to not think about anything, to see a character say something and just go with it, and forget it the second its over, be distracted by good music and pretty visuals, but dont think about, dont think about anything but what is directly said to you like you have no critical thinking skills, forget there was a game before this one, only the one you play matters, empty your skull and dont let yourself feel anything but what the game tells you to feel
if they dont even care to make the sequel to their most successful game actually build on the previous title, dont even care to keep their continuity of two games supposedly directly happening one after the other in tact- maybe they never cared, and all the meaning we thought we saw them build into their games was all accidental and meaningless
and that is absolutely soul crushing for fans like me to discover
its a game.
its not a story, its not a world, its not themes, its not characters, its not lore.
its a product made to make you pay money, not to make you think about anything.
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