#even though they're totally different

[softambrollins]

2016 / 2023

[lustwithoutlore]

Bruce: I'm retiring. Someone will need to fill my place.

Dick:

Tim:

Jason:

Barbara:

Duke:

Damian:

Stephanie, launching into a dramatic monologue: There comes a time when one has to step up and do what is right. Gotham needs a Batman, I will heed the call-

Bruce: Uh, Dick, how about you? You've been Batman before.

Stephanie: HEY!

Dick: Um.... I'll pass, thanks, Bruce.

Stephanie: No matter. I will become the beacon of hope this city needs. I will-

Bruce: Tim! You'll one day be an even better detective than me. You'd be a perfect Batman.

Jason, muttering: Over my dead body. Hey, wait...

Stephanie: DON'T IGNORE ME!

Tim: I'm already a better detective than you. And, if I had to take on anyone's mantle, I would pick Nightwing.

Dick, tearing up: Awww, Tim!

Stephanie: Again, it leaves me as the only option. The underbelly of Gotham City needs a figure to invoke fear, and I vow to be that figure-

Bruce: What about you, Damian? You've fought over the title of Batman many times!

Stephanie: YOU JERK!

Damian: Yeah, when I was twelve. I'm not a child anymore. I would rather be Nightwing.

Dick, sobbing: The both of you want my mantle? How will I choose a successor? This is getting to be too much. Babs, catch me!

Stephanie: I will fight for vengeance. No, I am vengeance. I will bring upon a dark reign that will be unleashed whenever a force threatens my city. For I am-

Cass, appearing out of the shadows: I will do it.

Bruce, happy because Cass was actually his first pick: Oh thank God.

Cass: But only if Steph is, too. We are Batgirl together. We will be The Bat together.

Stephanie: HA! YES! CASS YOU'RE THE BEST! I'M BATMAN!

Bruce: ... Actually, Stephanie, your words from before moved me. I've decided to be Batman for a while longer.

Stephanie: NOOOO! I was so close!

Cass, patting her back: There, there.

Dick: That's it! Tim, Damian! You can both be Nightwing! If Cass and Steph can be The Bat at the same time you guys can both take up my mantle one day, too!

Tim:

Damian:

Tim & Damian: ... I'll pass.

Dick: NOOOO! I was so close!

Barbara, patting his back: There, there.

[hi-im-kaybee]

don't meet yourself unless you're okay with thinking you're a bit of a douche

[anghraine]

Maybe it's just because I'm sleepy and my brain is tired and irritable, but I do wish fandom in general weren't so absolutely intent on casting all familial or quasi-familial relationships into some near approximation of US nuclear family idealization.

Acting as a caretaker for a child doesn't automatically make someone their "real parent" or "adopted parent" or "any parent at all" if the child doesn't see them that way. These caretaking relationships can be messy, begrudging, or essentially coercive (in both fiction and IRL, and in life, forcing children into situations where "they'll be taken care of" is often coercive and/or predatory).

And sometimes a caretaker adult, whether a natural parent, adoptive parent, some kind of guardian, or more amorphous caretaker, is ... bad, actually. It's understandable for the children they take care of (whether literal children or now-adult people who experienced it previously) to have had negative experiences they have complicated feelings about, to have complicated feelings about their caretakers that may not distill down to "real parents", to be capable of harsh criticism of their former caretakers, even if they love them.

Sometimes it is the simpler scenario where a child is adopted and it looks very much like a conventional "nuclear" relationship (though even then, the child can have more complex and inconvenient feelings than they're often supposed to have). But—okay, I may be biased from coming from a family that was licensed for foster care, which saw a lot of children essentially forced into foster care with varying complicated feelings about it that didn't always equate to "this person who looks after me is my mother"—even after a long time, sometimes.

And there's frequently a nasty pressure on children placed in "care" to either reach out to their birth or adoptive parents, or to wholly turn their backs on them and accept their current caretakers as the only parents who matter. But usually things are messier than that. You can care about a caretaker, you can respect and love them, and still not feel like you're their child. Or maybe you do! It just depends.

This can happen with siblings as well, especially when there's a big age difference—yeah, one of the siblings may be functionally filling the shoes of their parents as well as they can, but it doesn't necessarily make them actual parents in the eyes of their younger siblings (or themselves). It can, but doesn't have to. Or maybe it's something messier, like when the relationship is almost parental, but not quite, and the exact nature of the dynamic is hard to pin down.

There's also the case where the relationship may have been parental at one point, but one of the parties (usually the caretaker) burned bridges so badly that the child (often an adult at this point) cuts ties and doesn't deny that the caretaker filled a parental role back then, but wholly rejects it as any kind of current reality. This can happen with biological family, but also with looser caretaker relationships as well (esp the cultier ones).

I'm thinking of a lot of fandom examples of these kinds of indeterminate caretaker-child (or former child) relationships, where either we know or have good reason to believe the child doesn't regard a former caretaker as exactly the same as a parent, or we just don't know what the nature of the relationship is, and fandom will be absolutely insistent that the only possible way to read it is parent-child.

And also, sometimes there's nothing wrong with the caretaker relationship, but it's still not parent-child. It simply doesn't map onto this parental mold that fandom tries to box all adult-child caretaking relationships into, because family is more complicated than a single, very simplistic model allows.

[coquelicoq]

no but it's so funny that breq and mercy of kalr seem to be working from the same first principles (ships love captains) but breq interprets the "i could be my own captain" thing (which it immediately follows up with "i don't want to be a captain. but i find i like the thought that i could be") as "i don't love you as my captain" instead of "i could be someone you (a former ship) could love…"

i also love the ambiguity of that later scene when ship says it likes seivarden mostly because she loves breq. which you could interpret either as ship liking that seivarden loves breq because ship loves breq (the main interpretation, given that ship loving breq is what the rest of ship's speech is about), or as ship liking that seivarden is a person who can love a ship (and ship is a ship…).

idk just like. mercy of kalr my beloved but also. hilarious breakdown of ship-to-ship communication here. breq is the first captain who used to be a ship, breq is the first (former) ship to have the undying devotion of its human (former) officer, ship is the first ship to have a captain who used to be a ship, ship is the first ship offered the chance to be its own captain, none of this has ever been done before. mercy of kalr is trying to go off-script but breq is still interpreting all its responses according to the figurative Intership Social Schemata and Communication Protocol even though none of the prompts are in the Intership Social Schemata and Communication Protocol! like come on babe YOU'RE the one who asked ship this brand-new question and opened up a whole new universe of existential possibility. meet ship halfway already!!

[fizzingwizard]

dear internet stop throwing pictures of beautifully toasted bagels slathered in cream cheese at me i don't have a toaster i don't have room in my teeny kitchenette for a toaster a toaster is a luxury here in japan as are bagels as is cream cheese

bagel places here that ask me "do you want that heated up" make me want to cry tears of joy even though all they mean is they're gonna stick the bagel in the microwave for ten seconds so it's slightly warm-ish but not enough to crisp up or melt the cream cheese a little

[a-vibing-potato]

Listening to episode 4 of The Magnus Protocol and I don't have any plot related thoughts (except that Augustus ISN'T Jonah Magnus!!!! I'm shooketh to my very core, that ruins my headcanon)

But this podcast really just is me trying to place accents. The entire time. The first episode was the worst with me trying to place who was Scottish and who was British just not the basic British accent I'm used to as an American, but literally I just heard Augustus' voice for the first time, and after I realized he wasn't Jonah, you know what I thought?

"Hm, he sounds JUST like Gertrude. The accent same accent and spacing in his words."

What, like why? Why is this what I'm doing? What in the world?! The only thing the Magnus Archives/Protocol has done is broken my heart, shattered my worldview by making me unable to look at anything without attributing an entity to it, and forced me to realize how vastly different British accents can be.

[kristhekrispy]

heard you have ocs? grabby hands...

EHEH. yeah.......I'd say you heard right. ramble under the cut

okay so most of my ocs come from this story that ive been thinking of since I was. 9? I think? still very much so a WIP though, even the name (Imperium Chordata) is something im working on

The whole plot's about overthrowing this long-lived, tyrannical king but if I'm being entirely what I'm most interested with when I'm thinking about IC is the relationships that characters have with each other, especially the main three characters. Aruna, who overachieves and goes to unhealthy lengths to be praised, Sól, who isn't skilled in what's seen as "useful" but is otherwise very talented, and Piper, who...uh. okay I was TRYING to avoid talking to much about IC's world because it's something very subject to change but it is also obviously impacts the characters in it so

basic rundown is that everyone is some sort of regular animal, like a squirrel, dog, cat...OR they are a mythical creature/monster, like a chimera, kitsune, dragon. idea was that more monster-like people tend to have more access to the world's magic, but that any could possibly have access too. Its not impossible to see, say, a weak or powerless enfield, just as its not impossible to see some magically inclined croc

some people can come into it more naturally, aruna and sól being some such people. others may need to put more effort in, but can still manage. and lastly, some people simply lack the ability to do any sort of magic. piper falls under that last category and it crushes her because, for the longest time, aruna and sól were the only people she could lean on/relate to. not being able to do magic made her end up pretty alienated from the other two. im really not explaining this well. it sounds so much better with the Full explanation. best I can give is that all of the main 3 have an intense need to be praised to feel sure of themselves, and it all comes out in different ways for them. for piper, not being able to be in the same sort of "league" as her two best friends, the two people that know her best...even though she genuinely does not care about magic, she still keeps going forward and forcing herself into it. neither sól nor aruna want her to do all that btw. when they realize that they were unintentionally excluding her and pushing her far past where she should've gone, they did their best to...idk, move past it? listen im getting the chance to talk about ocs im writing this off of pure giddy feeling and only barely making this make sense.

[palepinkycat]

we all do what we can.

[popculturerobots]

Leon vs. Mustard

Pokémon: Twilight Wings

[bylertruther]

.

[variousqueerthings]

#spinster hawkeye is so important to me

@jerottblyth calling him “spinster hawkeye” is so important to me!!!

[todayisafridaynight]

I saw the "#is there yaoi in the arakawa family" tag basically right as it popped up in the notes and was also left completely dead on the pavement, but honestly? As someone who is wholly and irrevocably AraSawa-pilled (whether said pill is red or blue in color is up to interpretation...), it's objectively SO much funnier if they're just Like That. I love your comics on the topic!

There's also some element of this post I saw earlier I think, divorced from the sexual context since it's not really relevant to what I want to talk about (you'll just have to bear with me there I guess lol, can't help what the post says). It's also still pretty melodramatic applied to them (even for me) when it chiefly is just. Hilarious. But what I'm trying to say is that, taking a more serious approach, "unresolved potential" is such a compelling and central recurring beat here, so what's one more instance?

I guess that post kind of presupposes that there is or could be yaoi, but I think it's kind of like. The concept of "yuri of absence." But with dads. Like that's along the lines of the emotion things like the pair of armchairs on the second floor of Jo's office evokes in me. Honestly I think this particular ask is probably one of the least intelligible I've sent and I'll probably regret it. But. It's. They're married. But they're not. But They're Married. BUT THEY'RE NOT. But th

after meeting with The Arakawa Family Council the verdict i bring to everyone today on Is There Yaoi In The Arakawa Family is:

Well,

[guiltyidealist]

I was immediately smitten with Hayabusa when I first played Okami.

I considered him my husband and shipped myself (Ammy) with him.

It blew my MIND when he wound up being more than just another dog... He was a whole dude and I had to fight him and he used his digging techniques because of course he would have digging combat moves!!!! He had an entire PRECIOUS backstory, and I actually teared up the moment he saved Mushi from Orochi's arrow.

Here I'm pictured carrying him (side note: I wish you could still carry him after you find out he's a canine warrior ): ), fucking him????????? jumping with him, digging shenanigans, and cracking open a cold one with the boys

He's a Kai Ken apparently, which is 1/6 Japanese breeds alongside the Shiba Inu. I've only ever seen one kai ken plushie and it's fuckin $50 😭😭😭

[sheepwasfound]

after a few days have passed now, it was interesting to read through a transcript of the instagram dm’s which dream confirmed he believed were real. seeing them just on their own like that with nothing around it is a valuable experience i feel like

[nicollekidman]

I’m so annoyed that HBO did so much right but couldn’t/didn’t want to risk pacing slowly enough for us to get more laena/laenor/strong content and not make Larys just another little finger. I feel like no matter how badly GOT was received at its end; this show was a safe bet but they are rushing so much to get to the dance it feels like they had no faith!! the performances and writing have been strong just feeling like we could have had it all

personally, i understand the accelerated timeline, given the story they want to tell. for fans of the book, it's jarring and disappointing to speed through characters they love, but from a creative standpoint.... i don't think it's a lack of faith at all - they used the first seven episodes to position to pawns on the chess board. with that in mind, seven hours of background and context for the story they think is the Main Event is pretty generous, but it was always going to be basically a crash course in character development for those involved in the dance. so much of laena's story gets cut because she's not a part of the dance, which means from a show perspective, she matters only insofar as she informs the motivations and emotions of those left standing, which i think ep 6 (and 7) established as well as they could. given that they never intended to faithfully adapt those chapters in their complete works, i think the things they prioritized - making the entire conflict about alicent and rhaenyra, giving us half a season of development between the two of them before circumstances shift, making viserys much more complicated/compelling, setting the stage for the next generation - were smart. there were always going to be things left out, and i DO think that a whole season of soap opera relationship drama and intrigue would've been FUN, but in terms of the creative direction of the show itself, i think these ommissions are very thoroughly thought out, and don't come from a lack of faith in the show or a lack of respect of the source material. i actually have very few problems with the way they've truncated things and moved it along.