#i don't create for this fandom I'm so sorry

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[fandom-friday]

Hi Hi! I am so sorry if I'm too late for 5/24. I keep silencing the dang reminder on my phone each week but then I don't remember to submit T_T

If I'm too late for 5/24, please let me know and I'll resubmit for the next one :)

Long story short, people put me in a Wrecker mood this week, so here are the Wrecker fics that are feeding my need for a fix :)

As always, @wings-and-beskar's A Gentle Touch series remains stunning and delightful with a deliciously spicy Epilogue. (Wrecker x f!reader, Parts 1-3, SFW, Epilogue, NSFW).

@dystopicjumpsuit graced us with a lovely new Wrecker hc (SFW)

@tinywitchgoblin also graced us with a very sweet Wrecker asking for cuddles scenario (Wrecker x gn! reader, SFW)

This STUNNING artwork of a shirtless Wrecker (technically SFW but I go rabid over Wrecker so your milage may vary) by @zaana

And my own recent contribution to the Wrecker love, The Slow Stretch (Wrecker x f!Reader, very NSFW).

Thank you once again (and always) for taking on the task of creating this space for us to celebrate our favorite bits of fan creations :)

NO WORRIES AT ALL, FRIENDO! I just roll late submissions into the following week, and boy howdy am I glad you sent this one in! You are SO RIGHT that Wrecker deserves ALL THE LOVE, and this list is just PERFECTION, from the fluff to the SPICE, I adore all of it. Thank YOU for taking the time to put it together and send it in!

Participate in Fandom Friday to show your favorite creators from this week some love! :)

[witch-sweets]

I'm confused-

[mokutone]

hi what do you think abt t4t kakayama (it's canon to me tbh)

:) hi ty for the question. i will do two sweet pictures of them being intimate and then under the cut there's going to be a longer very unsweet and more technical response

so i'm usually not a very shippy person! but that said i am also on the record as an occasional kakayama + kakayamagai enjoyer

i do hc them both as trans and in different ways w/ different experiences of transition and identity! i have no interest in proving my view as canon, but i do regard my reading of the text (text here including the anime) as a valid interpretation of yamato's experience of identity

yamato, for example, imo, doesnt have any real lived experience of being raised as a child of any gender. he was an experimental subject, and then he was Danzō's weapon/vessel for the mokuton, and then he was in anbu.

in a fun little word game which should not be taken seriously: it'd almost be more fitting to describe him as "adgender" rather than "transgender" since the prefix "trans" implies moving across where the prefix "cis" means to stand still, but the prefix "ad" means "to move towards" and i headcanon him as somebody who was degendered as a child, not in a cool nonbinary way, but instead in a dehumanizing, objectifying way, so his experience of creating his identity and his gender along with it is one of moving toward the concept of gender this word doesn't and wont exist, but bc of the way english works it would probably be simplified to be spelled precisely the same as "agender" in the same way that "aggression" came from latin "aggredi" which came from "ad" (meaning to/toward) and and latin "gradus" (meaning step) (essentially the combination means "to step to" [in a threatening manner]) the only diferences is where agender (meaning no gender) is pronounced ay-gender, the agender that comes from adgender would be prounounced more like "uhgender" in the same way that agressive isnt pronounced like "ay-gressive" but instead like "uhgressive"

and then...as for kakashi? i just decided on vibes. i didn't think hard about it.

i guess i should also say that, while i draw kakayama very infrequently, when i do draw it i usually try to be very apparent about the transness in the artwork if i can? especially if i'm drawing anything more intimate than a peck on the cheek. it's no secret that shipping is often times the most energized part of fandom, and i kind of don't want to produce romantic or sexual artwork which will be enjoyed by people who don't think trans people can be attractive? or who find that trans headcanons make a character uninteresting to them? or worse, "ruin" a depiction of a character to them?

often i think about in terms of. IF there are people that follow me that love my work (usually) and think that kakashi or yamato are hot (usually) and love kakayama (usually) but get frustrated or even uncomfortable out when i draw them as explicitly trans? then i'm drawing all intimate artwork of them as explicitly trans.

it's a little like...nobody gets to love my work if transgender characters are a turnoff for them. that's the bar for entry, is the way i think of it, but really its more like putting onions in a dish. if you want to eat the dish you have to eat the onions. if you don't want to eat the onions, don't eat the dish. all the meals i make contain onions. i'll never compromise on my intention to put onions in every dish i make. that's my ninja way, as the kids say.

especially in the climate we're in right now.

i don't know. i have a lot of feelings about how most fandoms tend to view trans men, especially in terms of romantic and sexual relationships. I'm doing a bad job of expressing the depth of how much seeing how fandom treats trans male identity and transmasculine bodies impacts the way that i draw + write kakayama, but genuinely it's something i think about every single time i create content about them.

[lesbiankordian]

guys I don't think a petition to make a character canonically queer makes sense

[musical-chick-13]

"Truly GOOD works don't have thriving fandoms because people aren't interested in fixing them, so what do they have to write fics/make art about."

Idk about you, but I don't write fic for properties I don't genuinely enjoy and think are, on some level, actually good.

[kaymarie-bell]

How to dou play twst? Is there a way I translate as you play?

Hi there!

1. Although I'm not fluent in Japanese, I do have an okay understanding of spoken conversations, so on my first playthrough I mostly rely on the VAs acting and characters' visuals to know what's happening.

2. Whenever I'm not sure what the dialogue is, I use the camera in my old phone to translate the screen in my current phone in real time.

I try to use a couple of different apps/sites at the same time because digital translators are never 100% accurate. Google Translate sucks a lot of the time, so I wouldn't rely on it entirely to begin with. I use Naver Papago and DeepL Translator, also Jisho . org for quick vocab lookups. These are just reference tools that could never really replace actually studying and learning the language, but they get the job done if you only need them for personal use and you understand the limitations they have.

3. What I find the most reliable while playing is the commentary/translations of real people who are actually fluent in the language. Since twst is a popular game, you can find a lot of real-time reactions/translations on places like twitter when updates drop.

If you're willing to wait a couple of days to read the chapters, there are also some really dedicated people here on Tumblr and/or YouTube who go out of their way to translate hours of gameplay for free just because they love the game. (I love them with my whole heart, I know how time-consuming this is 💖)

A lot of people just complete the gameplay and then go for fan translations to actually read the story!

In conclusion: where there's a will, there's a way 🌻

(more to read in the tags)

[romanticatheartt]

Well f*cking done people. Keep this up and you'll chase away every single artist. Good job.

[nonuggetshere]

Ah yes. Hollow and their *checks list* 8 partners

LISTEN-

Ok, I only seriously ship them with like. 4. 6 if you consider the two AU-specific partners (Hector for Pure and Ichor for Hallow (sorry about the selfcest jumpscare)). 7 if you include queerplatonic partners. The rest are "oh this dynamic/scenario could be fun to explore but none of the already existing bastards fit it" and also the joke that was Hallow's absolutely MASSIVE polycule

...okay yeah no, I have a problem /j

[icemankazansky]

Things I see on tumblr:

Things that will happen between Ice and Maverick meeting at TOPGUN and the availability to consumers of the earliest cell phones capable of texting:

the end of the Cold War

the United States elects two Presidents

the Exxon Valdez oil spill

the so-called "War on Drugs" begins

the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany

the Gulf War

the collapse of the Soviet Union

Starbucks

Al-Qaeda

the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent massacre

Nelson Mandela is freed

the Hubble Telescope is launched

the Americans with Disabilities Act becomes law

the World Wide Web is designed, created, launched, and made available to the public

[always-a-joyful-note]

I’ve passed 52% (yay!) and I have so many thoughts written down (yes, I take notes while reading (mostly keyboard smashes, though)). But I’m just gonna appreciate all of the relationships being portrayed here between the characters. And the level of complexity their personalities and worldviews and arcs are allowed. And also the fact that they’re allowed to show deep, deep emotion as much as they hide/deny it...and that their changes are so brutally shown to us readers and the people around them.

Just how? I don’t know how this book managed to show such character development, such a progression and changing of relationships, such nuance between characters (not just Dokja @ everyone, but also between the sides themselves), such belief in each other and the person they’ve become (312′s “I believe in the story they had built” - I’m dead), such lightheartedness but also such depth between everyone...

*suddenly throws the book into the wall* And how does it keep one devastating me with all these random exchanges!?!? It’s happening so close to each other and yet it seems so well built-up and paced?! I cannot....

[moonstrider9904]

💖 Your gentle reminder not to repost gifs 💖

💖 And if you absolutely must, saying "not my gif" isn't proper credit 💖

💖 Asking for permission before using a gif for a fic or a post is a thing, you should totally do it more 💖

💖 Respect a giffer who doesn't want their stuff reposted. 💖

💖 Respect boundaries. 💖

💖 Or use the tumblr editor's gif function, because as much of a pain as it is, it links to the original poster 💖

💖 Frankly, I get happy when someone uses a gif of mine through the editor and I see the mention. But when it's reposted without credit, not so much. 💖

💖 If you're going to repost a gif, know who made it and link to their post so that those who see it go support them for their effort 💖

💖 But it's much easier to just not repost gifs 💖

💖 And please don't reblog posts with reposted uncredited gifs. Support the person who created, not the person who reposted. 💖

💜 And dear fellow gif makers, I encourage you to not be afraid of watermarking your creations 💜

💜 If the people who consume our content for free are going to keep viewing us like machines then they could at least know our handles 💜

[bargledblocks]

Every time someone complains about a genre of fic (i.e. superhero au's) I make 5 more just to piss them off.

The reason for this is because their takes always reek of entitlement to people's hobbies and free time and they always demand for something "different" instead of realizing that a story someone isn't actually passionate about would be way more shit than one they like despite it being a genre you personally have grown bored with <3

[bejeweledmp3]

my number one rule to stay sane in fandom is that as soon as i see the take "the writers/creators don't understand x character like us, the fandom, do" i get the fuck out of there. like even if the character gets treated like shit in canon proudly declaring that The Fandom as a whole understands them usually leads to some of the worst opinions human beings can have about things that really don't really matter

[ricoka]

I've never experienced it on a grand scale, because there's just no mass appeal about my art. But I went through the tag of an old fandom on Instagram and found a handful of reposts of my old fanart. And even on that scale, and going through a ton of other reposts from other artists I remember from that time, it's so incredibly alienating? People just taking your art and putting it elsewhere without permission or credit. Sometimes cropping out any water signs or signatures to make it even harder to trace it back to the original artist. No credit whatsoever. One of the posts of my art pieces had like 500 likes, probably way more notes than I ever got on the post I made myself here on tumblr because I wasn't a good or well-liked artist then either.

It's just so messed up to me that that's normal? That hours upon hours are spent on something and someone just takes it, crops it to hell and back and reposts it in horrible quality with zero thoughts spared for the person who did all the work. AND PEOPLE GO WITH IT. 'found it on Pinterest' 'credit to the artist' fuck you, seriously.

You're so desperate for notes and followers that you resort to stealing. It's already so hard to find original credits through reverse image search. You make it even harder for fucking internet clout based on being a fucking thief.

[ao3commentoftheday]

any advice about how to deal with posting a fic and getting radio silence? I know ppl aren’t owed engagement ofc, but I feel embarrassed at having spent so long on something no one cares about, and although I liked thinking about the characters and fandom before (and was considering writing more about them), now I can’t think about it without feeling that overpowering embarrassment 😭 part of me wants to delete the fic, but that would mean having to open ao3 and look at it again LMAO

sorry for the venting, I know this is probably a me problem, but has anyone else felt this, and if so, is there any way to make this pervasive shame go away??

*hugs* This is a very painful thing to experience and there isn't really any way to make it just go away, unfortunately. However, you can reflect on it a bit, when you're ready to.

Writing and posting are separate activities. If you've enjoyed writing the story but you haven't enjoyed posting it to the Archive, you can always continue writing just for yourself. This may or may not be something you'd enjoy - you know better than I do whether some of your enjoyment came from the anticipation of a reaction to your work.

Try to analyze where your embarrassment is coming from. Is it worrying that your story was poorly written? A lack of a reaction doesn't mean that the story is bad. Being unpopular doesn't mean it's bad, either. If your story is good to you, then it's a good story.

Is your embarrassment from feeling like you were "caught trying." Is it a cringe at the idea that you put effort into something that someone else doesn't (appear to) find valuable?

Is it actually embarrassment at all? Are you feeling a different kind of hurt instead? Did you hope that someone in particular would read your story and now you feel ignored? Did you hope to be embraced by your community and now you feel shunned?

These are difficult questions that I'm asking and you might not want to think about them right now. That's okay. You don't need to if you don't want to. You can definitely delete the fic and pretend it never happened. Or you can log out of that AO3 account and create a new one and never look back. Maybe you just need to take a week or a month off for a hiatus of sorts and when the ache isn't as bad, you'll be able to face it all again.

When I felt this way, it was because I felt like I'd put something into my community and that I'd been ignored. But since that time, I've found one person who gives me all of the community support I used to get from an entire fandom, and now when I post something on AO3 I don't actually need a response anymore. I get all of the fun and excitement and validation etc from my conversations and RP threads with my best friend.

Once you've got a little distance from the pain of this moment, try to figure out what it is that you were hoping to get and then figure out how you can get it. Maybe it's through posting fic to AO3, but maybe it's not.

Let's see what others can suggest. This is not something you're experiencing alone, anon. So very many of your fellow fan writers have experienced this too ❤️