#i have several issues with the show and how different it is to the comics

[bluecrocss]

Yes. You are racist. (Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one)

So approximately half a year since the premier of the Disney+ Percy Jackson show, and almost two years since the announcement of the Trio's casting, I would like to take this moment to look back at the insane, racist and anti-black backlash that was launched at Leah Sava Jeffries and a few other cast members from the PJO fandom.

I'm not concerned with the trolls who are openly racist, who resorted to racist slurs and outright threats, everyone agrees that they "took it too far". I want to talk about the rest of you, the "I'm not racist, but.." people, the "What's wrong with wanting book accuracy?" people. Just to let you know, for the unasked question... yes, yes you are.

I've noticed the Percy Jackson fandom has been lording some weird superiority complex over a certain *unnamed* fandom that has fallen out of grace due to their recently outed bigot of an author. But honestly, y'all are not much different. The amount of vitriol and anti-blackness I have seen from this fandom (beyond just bullying a 12 year old girl), y'all don't have a leg to stand on.

Below is a breakdown of the most common arguments I have seen used to justify y'alls absolutely insane bigotry. I am going to explain why none of these justify the amount of anger and vitriol y'all have sent towards Leah, Rick or any of the cast.

I am not here to argue, and this is not a democracy. I am giving you a chance for some self-reflection and to understand that this pattern of violence directed towards POC actors (mostly black women) has never been justified in the name of "book accuracy"/"comic book accuracy"/"ending forced diversity" or whatever other excuses y'all try to make up.

If you still try to justify or argue further for any of these points, I will just block you. I am not coddling you through your racism. If anyone has seen any other dumb arguments floating around that I might've missed, feel free to sound off in the comments.

She's not book accurate:

Neither is Percy, Luke, Grover, Dionysus, Poseidon, and just about every other named character.

Rick already made it clear that physical features were not the priority with casting, rather it was actors that embodied the role. So why are the biggest complaints about Annabeth and Zeus? 🤔

What? You're gonna say everyone else got backlash too? I see you trying to obscure the main issue by playing dumb 😉

See my friend, yes, there were one or two comments about how Percy's hair should be black or how Luke is supposed to be blonde, but as soon as Leah was cast, none of those actors got any significant backlash. In fact, Walker and Charlie literally have an army of fan girls at their beck and call, calling them the perfect Percy and Luke, despite neither being "Book accurate". But then again, have we not observed the pattern of White boy of the month vs WOC to hate for the year? (Yes, I know Charlie isn't white. Further adds to the irony, doesn't it).

Why include character descriptions if you won't stay true to them, you cry? Well, my dear sweet moron, see, books and TV are two different mediums. Because in literature, you can't *Literally* SEE the characters, the author has to add descriptions to paint a picture in your mind, in TV... that's not an issue. So unless the character's appearance is necessary to the plot (like Luke's scar, or Nico being Italian) the show runners can actually focus on more important things.. Like ACTING and PERSONALITY.

2. It's just not how I imagined her:

News flash, babe! ANNABETH ISN'T REAL. None of these character are. They are concepts that originated from the brain of Mr. Rick Riordan. It doesn't matter how YOU imagined her. There are millions of people who read these books that imagined her several different ways. When the creator of the character watched Leah's audition and said, 'Yes! She embodies the character I created!", your imagined version of Annabeth ceased to matter. And guess what? The books still exist... they have not been burned. Your version of Annabeth has not disappeared. Go read the books.

3. Zeus can't be black/Gods have to be Greek/*Insert Character* can't be black:

Y'all did not read the books, I swear. You have to be fake fans looking to troll atp.

The gods move based off the center of western civilization. They change their forms/environment to reflect the culture they are occupying (they did it with Rome, now they're doing it with America). The gods change forms all the time. How we see them is not their true form as a mortal would disintegrate if they were to see their true form.

America is a cultural melting pot (specifically NY where Mount Olympus is now based). If the god's choose forms that reflect the current society they inhabit, they could literally be any race (keep in mind NYC is only 33% white).

All of this is literally SPELLED OUT in the Lightning Thief.

Furthermore, if you're going to push the ethnically Greek thing... Poseidon is British with a British accent and Hermes is Latino. The only ethnically Greek actor is Dionysus (who still doesn't look book accurate). Y'all are sounding like some white supremacists because do you forget that race is a social construct?

Before the advent of the transatlantic slave trade, I can promise you that the Greeks and the Anglo-Saxons did NOT view themselves as the same people. Why are y'all not taking issue with Poseidon's actor then?

Also, Percy Jackson has canonically had a slew of explicitly black demigods since the second book (including Harriet Tubman, which I have mixed feelings about 😭), so I genuinely have no idea where some of y'all are going with this point.

4. She was our smart blonde representation:

Don't pmo. I swear to God!

White, blonde women have NEVER been excluded from Hollywood. Representation is not something you lacked. The dumb blonde stereotype was a simple branch off of a larger misogynistic "dumb woman" stereotype. It has not truly been relevant since the mid 2000s outside of childish jokes.

This iteration of Percy Jackson will probably not go beyond the first 5 books, based off pacing and the age of the actors. So here's a fun game: 5 bucks to the first person who can find me a quote in the first 5 Percy Jackson books, where Annabeth laments her insecurities about being blonde (hint: there aren't any).

Also, her blonde hair does not hold her back at Camp because she is head of the Athena Cabin who are highly respected (and guess what?), ARE ALL BLONDE!

Her insecurities about her hair color are two or three lines at most in the later books, not this fundamental, core part of her character y'all all of a sudden wanna pretend it was. And guess what, as a non-blonde black girl, I was able to read those scenes of Annabeth feeling undervalued because of her looks and relate to her even if she didn't look like me at the time.

Why all of a sudden can y'all not do that with a black Annabeth? By every metric black girls are undervalued for their intelligence in academia more than white girls are, regardless of hair color. So your little representation of a woman undervalued by her looks would still hold. Do y'all dehumanize black women so much, that you are incapable of empathizing with show!Annabeth's plight in the way I could with Book!Annabeth simply because she doesn't look exactly like you?

Your issue isn't that she isn't blonde, it's that she is NOT WHITE.

Furthermore, Becky Riordan had tweeted previously (before the show was even cast) that Annabeth never needed to be blonde (probably recalling the BS y'all put Alexandra Daddario through), so even if they cast a white Annabeth, the blonde hair was never a guarantee. the author and producers all agree that it was not a significant part of her character. It's been a non-issue since day one.

Also, stop acting like smart blondes are rare in media... If you don't go watch some Legally blonde, Iron Man (Pepper Potts), Zack and Cody (Maddie), Liv and Maddie, FMAB (Winry), Captain Marvel, She-Ra, Buffy, The boys (starlight) etc. etc., and go sit down somewhere 🙄🙄🙄 (those were literally all things I've watched recently, off the top of my head, btw 💀)

5. It's not about race, but...:

Yes it is. It was always bout race. No other actors got as much hate as Leah. Her grandmother and other family members on IG had to mute their comments because they were getting so many threats.

Alexandra Daddario had to come to her defense on Twitter. Rick had to put out an official statement on his website. This girl has endured years of psychological torment for simply having the best audition. No one else is book accurate, no one else is ethnically Greek (except Jason Mantzoukas). Walker literally has British and German ancestry.

Why was she being called racial slurs on reddit and in youtube comments?

I know what you're gonna say, "I actually had problems with the entire cast", "I actually had a bigger issue with Walker's hair color", blah blah blah. Then why aren't you in Walker's comment sections? Why are you only making your displeasure known on posts defending/advocating for Leah? Why is she always your first example of 'wrong casting"?

Well, she "looks the most different"... Look up the term "scapegoating".

"Oh, I don't agree with the harassment. I just don't like the casting." Guess what? She's already been cast. They are not going to uncast her. What do you get out of still complaining about it.

All the vitriol you're stirring about her when you complain about her on Social media, it is directing people to send her hate, even if you're not writing it directly. It's is not enough to "not agree" with the racism, it is your duty to actively prevent it. And btw, these are young gen z actors, they are active on social media. They see the edits of themselves (even comment on it) and they most likely see these little "harmless" complaints you're posting. Are your upset feelings really worth contributing to the racist dogpile on this poor girl?

6. Why couldn't they atleast give her blonde braids?:

Why should they? Y'all wanted blonde because of the "dumb blonde" trope... that doesn't apply to POC.

A blonde black girl is gonna be viewed the same as a non-blonde black girl (or at worst, someone might decide she's "ratchet" or some shit for wearing colored hair). What difference would it make?

Why shouldn't Walker dye his hair, then?

7. Annabeth has Gray eyes:

Less than 3% of the global population has "gray eyes". Even if they cast a white actor, they would've needed contacts. Her being black is not the reason Annabeth's eyes aren't gray. Simply put, it is a plot element they removed, like the whole "names have power" element, or Ares having flames for eyes, or Dionysus using his powers to grow strawberries at Camp.

That's how adaptations work. Unnecessary plot elements are cut to save time and budget. This has nothing to do with her casting. They probably also didn't want to make child actors wear contacts (not a new practice).

8. Even if Rick chose her, he was wrong/Disney is forcing him to be okay with it:

Where do I start? Rick created the character. He can't be wrong. Do y'all have no self-awareness? Death of the author has no place here, because y'all are hung up on an aspect of the character that is not relevant to her arc or development.

Y'all's justification for wanting a "book accurate" Annabeth is that she was such an inspirational and important character growing up, and yet your behavior is so in conflict with the character you claim means so much to you. You're narrow minded, dismissive of bigotry and injustice, and disrespectful to the wishes of the creator of your favorite character; everything that Annabeth would never be. Y'all were never genuine fans of the books. You're bigots that needed an outlet for your rage.

Keep in mind, Rick has said countless times that PercaBeth directly mirrors his relationship with his wife. Y'all think he would have allowed them to cast someone who doesn't live up to the woman who has been by his side for decades? The mother of his children?

Regarding Disney forcing him, show me one piece of direct evidence that proves Disney in anyway pressured Rick to cast her. Cuz if you can't, that's baseless speculation. And if you have to resort to baseless speculation, maybe try to examine why it's so important to you to hold on to this belief.

9. So, I'm racist because I hate "race swapping"?:

To start, there is a difference between "race swapping" and "color blind casting". Often times, when y'all complain about the former, you're actually mad about the latter.

It would be "race swapping" if Rick and the team decided ahead of time that they wanted a black Annabeth and ONLY allowed black actors to audition. But the actual reality was that they accepted auditions from everyone (there were white actors and non-black poc that also auditioned for the role) and chose the best person who embodied the role. They didn't "make Annabeth black" and they didn't "make Zeus black", they cast black actors for those roles.

Y'all think you're being slick with your wording. Dismissing that is implying that they did not earn their roles fair and square. Which is racist. It's the equivalent of going up to a black college student and telling them they only got in because of affirmative action. You're dismissing the achievements of a person solely because of their racial background.

For all you people complaining about "unfairness" and "forced diversity", I would think hiring based on merit would appeal to you 🤔

71% of theatrical Hollywood leads were white in 2024 in comparison to 29% POC and you still think "black washing" is a thing? You still get this angry over a black person fairly earning a role because you think in a time where Hollywood only knows to do remakes and adaptations, that the majority of lead roles still *have* to be reserved for white actors?

Once again, white people have never been excluded from Hollywood for being white. Representation has never been something you lacked nor is it something you can lose. Your anger comes from seeing a black face where you think they don't belong. Because you feel you are owed a disproportion of representation in Hollywood.

10. Woke agenda/DEI/Forced Diversity:

If you are unironically using any of these terms in a negative light, it's already too late for me to reason with you. Look up the term "dog whistle". If you are sharing the same terminology with Elon Musk and his fanboys, maybe reevaluate some things.

POC are objectively underrepresented and have been historically excluded through actual laws and policies in Hollywood. There is no such thing as "forced diversity", you have bought in to a right wing conspiracy theory.

"Woke" is a term that was intentionally appropriated from the black community. It originally meant being aware of injustice and systematic threats to the community and is now being weaponized by bigots. Good job.

Diversity and inclusion is a good thing.

11. But POC deserve to have their own stories told:

We do. And we have been fighting for it for over a century now, and we've made great strides, no thanks to y'all.

No thanks to y'all gaslighting us about how little representation we get or that representation matters at all. No thanks to y'all pushing the idea that POC can't sell globally and obscuring POC actors in international promos. No thanks to y'all continuing to whitewash even to this day (Bullet train, the beguiled, gods of Egypt, atla, every portrayal of Jesus ever, etc.). No thanks to y'all calling every piece of media that has more than one black lead and more than one queer couple "woke". No thanks to y'all throwing a fit every time a black person in a fantasy setting isn't a slave.

Fact of the matter is, y'all never cared about POC "getting their own stories", you're only parroting our own words back to us now as a politically correct way of saying, "leave white roles alone" lmao

Well fun fact, actors of color getting opportunities to play lead roles and allowing poc to "tell their own stories" are not mutually exclusive. If y'all cared that much, instead of bullying a 12 year old actress, you could actually support up and coming independent POC writers, directors, and studios 😱

12. Studios need to stop "setting up" actors of color:

Do me a favor and google the term DARVO.

Your racism is not the fault of the studios for giving a POC actor a role that they earned. It is not up to the rest of society to tiptoe around racists to avoid their vitriol. It is our responsibility to hold them accountable and protect minorities from unwarranted hate. At most, you can say it's the responsibility of the studios to provide adequate support to POC actors who face this backlash.

At the end of the day, Hollywood only allows very few spots for POC actors (especially WOC), while simultaneously pushing a new white boy every month to put in everything. Putting minorities in these roles that are usually closed to them, usually opens the door to more actors of color than before.

Brandy being cast as Cinderella did a lot to push her into the mainstream (yes, she was already extremely famous in the black community atp), Halle Berry being the first, black, bond girl literally shot her to icon status, and even going as far back to what Anna Mae Wong did for Asian American actresses with her "femme fatale" roles.

At the end of the day, even with the backlash, *some* rep does more good for POC actors than *no* rep. The solution to racist backlash isn't to take away those opportunities, but rather to not be racist??? 🙄

Also, for everyone that claims that "POC race-swapping" is just as bad as "white-washing", despite white washing having a longer history and objectively causing more harm, note how the backlash to white washing never lasts as long as the harassment that POC get.

Like, no one brings up Scarlett Johansson's ghost in the shell role anymore, but you can best believe Candace Patton is still fending off racist trolls. As much as people hated the atla movie, people moved on quick from Nicola Peltz playing Katara since she was just a kid that accepted the role (re: daddy bought her the role), but y'all would not have any of that consideration for Leah Sava Jeffries.

But I digress...

13. What if we made Tiana white? Wakanda white? Hazel white...:

Ah, my favorite inane point. I was so excited to get here :)

See, I could start out by pointing out how "White washing" and casting a POC actor as a traditionally white character are not equivalent.

I could point out the history of hollywood ACTIVELY excluding POC actors and POC stories. I could point out how grossly over represented white people are in hollywood. I could point out that POC characters are so few in comparison that whitewashing them causes actual harm, where white people have never lacked rep.

I could point out how, because poc characters and stories are so often tokenized that their racial/cultural background is often directly tied to their character's identity, in opposition to a lot of white characters, since hollywood treats white as the "Default".

See, I could make all those points, but the thing is, the people who make this argument already know all that. They are trying to waste time by drawing me into a pointless circular argument that will sum up to "fair is fair", while ignoring all the context and nuance I previously provided.

So you know what? Forget it. Let me play your game.

I am actually fine with a white Tiana. Would it make sense, for her and her family to experience Jim Crow era racism, in the south while white? No. But we can look past it. Disney was never known for historical accuracy anyway 🤷🏿‍♀️

However, in exchange, the live action frozen will have a black Elsa and Anna, live action Rapunzel will be black, live action Merida will be black, we're re-filming Cinderella and Beauty and the beast to cast a black belle and Cindy, snow white will need to be recast as black, and we also get aurora whenever the live action sleeping beauty is announced. But then y'all can keep Tiana, deal?

You want a white T'Challa? Fine! (I'm partial to Ryan gosling), in the meantime, we'll be recasting Iron man, Captain America (Steve version), Bruce banner, Thor, Loki, hawk eye, black widow, ant man, captain marvel, Bucky, Peter Parker etc. All the avengers and their side characters, then y'all can have Sam Wilson, war machine and the whole of Wakanda (will it make sense that a sole, hidden, African nation is randomly made up of white people? Who cares? We get the avengers!).

You want white Hazel? You got her! I hope you have no problem with us taking Percy, Nico, Will, Poseidon, Jason, calypso, Rachel, Tyson, Silena, the stoll brothers, Sally Jackson, Hades, Hepheastus, ares, etc. But y'all can have Hazel and Beckendorf.

If we're gonna do this, let's commit all the way. Fair is fair, after all.

14. Leah isn't as "pretty" as Book Annabeth/Movie Annabeth:

I wish I could say this wasn't a genuine point I had read, but when all else fails, they will always go for a woman's appearance.

Now first of all, as a rule, I will never hold black women to white beauty standards. Our hair will never be long and silky enough, our nose will never be narrow enough, our skin will never be fair enough and our eyes will never be light enough (Might I recommend Toni Morrison, when you get the chance?). But Leah is unfairly gorgeous idc what any of you say, and you're not gonna have me use my defense of Leah as an opportunity to bash Alexandra either because she is also beautiful. These two queens slayed to the best of their abilities within this toxic ass fandom.

I find it funny, however, that so many of you harped on the "blonde" issue because you thought it was important that Annabeth be seen beyond just her looks, but quickly devolve to bashing an actress's looks when it comes to why she's not right for this role 🤔

I would also like to sincerely apologize that the 13 year old girl they cast in the show, wasn't as sexually attractive to you as the 24 year old woman they cast in the movie and sexualized through like 25% of her screen time (I'm actually not sorry. You're very weird if this is an actual point for you).

15. I don't agree with sending hate to the actor, but she's just not right for the role:

Once again, what are you doing by complaining about her casting on no other basis than her race?

The creator of the character said she embodied the role. She has already been cast, and Disney would be in a legal/production hell to recast her atp. Just because you're not directly leaving comments on her social media doesn't mean you're not part of the hate mob.

No matter how you look at it, your issues with her casting come from a very entitled and narrow-minded place. When you join in on these dialogues you are bolstering a sentiment that pushes more people to harass this teenage girl. When you leave these "harmless" complaints, on show content, fan posts or posts defending her, she's liable to read them because the cast regularly interact with fans online.

What do you have to say that is so important that it trumps protecting a young girl from the long-staying trauma of racism, of being told she doesn't deserve something she worked for because of how she was born?

16. I can't even criticize the show without being called racist:

Get. Over. Yourself.

Y'all are not the victim. Have fans of the show gotten protective of Leah and the young cast? Yes.

With good reason. This fandom is unbearably toxic.

Racism outweighs your need for a "perfect adaptation", sorry.

If you explain yourself properly and keep your critiques fair (like, even I don't think this was a perfect season, and will be sharing my thoughts shortly), no one is gonna call you racist.

You're preempting with that because in all honesty, you're probably planning to use your "critiques" of the show to pivot to one of the many points that I just outlined, and you want to pre-empt the criticism.

If a black Annabeth is the end all be all for you, just don't watch the show, no one's holding a gun to your head. Geez.

17. I'm Black/POC and I don't agree...:

Hey, Candace Owens... No one gives a shit.

First of all, for all the "I'm POC and I don't agree" people, you don't speak for us. Anti-blackness is rampant in just about every culture globally. You being not-white doesn't somehow make you less prone to hating black people.

But for the "I'm black and I don't agree" leftovers (assuming you're not just a 👩🏼‍💻 behind a keyboard). Black people are not a monolith. You're not obligated to think a certain way because you're black.

But consider why you're putting yourself up as a barrier to protect this hate mob. It's one thing to just state why you don't like Leah's casting, but to start off your spiel with "I'm actually black" as a way to weaponize the very identity politics you're critiquing... very strange. Not to mention, what are you defending?

The black community is coming together to defend one of our own, a kid who has been receiving death threats since she was 12, and this is when you feel the need to back the opposition?

I mean whatever... sometimes the house slaves would snitch to the master. There will always be some of y'all in the woodwork. It is what it is.

But when the exact ideology you defend is turned against you, when a Baltimore elected official is being accused of getting his job through "DEI", when conservatives are claiming that they wouldn't "trust a black pilot", don't decide that's where you'll finally draw your line in the sand.

All that being said, This is my Annabeth:

May every tongue that rose against Leah Sava Jeffries Shrivel and die in 2025 🙏🏿 My girl will keep winning ❤️

(video by @/waleahhasmyheart on TikTok)

[dailycass-cain]

As promised many months ago to end this day, here's a 🧵of the insanity Cassandra Cain's "human" body can do due to what David Cain put her through (besides the two obvious ones of body language and various forms of killing he trained her in).

The best issue that showcases that is of course Batgirl Vol. 1 #14 where various government agencies look at the footage Cass got caught filmed in.

The first few pages are literally showcasing how inhuman, but still bordering on human she is due to what David Cain put her through.

This is always fully covered throughout Batgirl Volume 1 and is usually forgotten when writers and editors tend to have their job. Not saying any names or storylines of any RECENT kind where a WAR broke out in GOTHAM.

is still salty YES

We've seen Cass's speed all the time throughout the Puckett run. To just showcase the prior issue's bullet dodging or her issue of Tim (#18) be child's play (along with her taking several shots up close and dodging each one from a certain corrupt government bastard).

Nah the best example of Cass's true "speed" is in #34 facing the mob boss Ving and his gang.

Yeah, you're seeing that right she is faster than a freaking bullet. Surprising how SOME seem to forget that in other comics. 🙄

Something even Batgirls remembered (#15) when Cass was playing shogun dodge with Cluemaster who was trying to shoot her with a shotgun.

But what of Cassandra's strength? Just how strong is she really?

#19 where Cass is faced with the obstacle of three-inch quartz preventing her from escaping a gas chamber. So let's examine just how thick three-inch quartz is.

Well, let's google just that.

A SEVEN on the hardness scale. Further research says that it can only crack due to "extreme impacts" which wouldn't ya know:

As for her body itself, Batgirl/Ghost: The Ressurection Machine #3 suggests this about Cass being immune to A LOT of poisons:

Something Batgirl Vol. 1 "sort of" delves in #50 when both she and Bruce are doused with a new batch of super drug but it turns out they were both immune to it due to them being built differently than normal humans.

This is all the more surprising because a few issues prior to (#46) Cass is doused with a version of it, but you could say given what she "sees" Cass is under A LOT of stress (the building tension with Bruce, Babs breaking up with Dick, Superboy/Black Wind stuff). Plus she does "sort of" snap out of it to beat the bad guys in that issue.

Just like in #51 she avoids the pheromones to Poison Ivy even though she is showing signs of falling under the hormones but snaps out of it due to willpower (something Bruce was almost succumbing to before he fully snapped out of it too).

It really feels like "this anti-poison" ability Cass had was all but forgotten once the series ended. Of course, naturally with a certain "infamous" story ONE YEAR LATER, but also Batman & Robin Eternal as she is affected by Fear Toxin (among other stuff too).

#9 & #59 showcase that David Cain shot Cass regularly so much that she can not even feel it. This could explain also HOW she was eventually able to dodge bullets and become so fast.

#22 also showcases this as well so this is not something simply just randomly put in. This was something the writers wanted to show the sickening lengths David Cain put Cass through.

Again, #14 brought up Cass's metabolism and how off the charts it was. I think something we just overlooked is that in #26 Cass slept for 20 hours a day for four days (or perhaps longer) straight until she fully recovered from fighting Lady Shiva.

That's not even going under the amount of food she consumes. This little detail was first showcased in #39 when Cass ate like she was freaking Goku.

This little bit of detail was brought back in #66 when she ordered THREE burgers (I'm assuming with everything on it) with three sides of fries and a BIG milk.

Amusingly, this detail was recently brought back in Nightwing #106 & #108 where she FEASTED on who knows how many pancakes.

Lastly, I feel this bit is worth mentioning as well from #47 with Doctor Lewis Friedman who started the theory on body language that David Cain made a frightening reality with Cass (shame he was never brought up again after this issue).

All this isn't even counting on the extremely LONG hours of shower time Cass picked up in the Gabrych run that even Willingham's Robin (which went on during this) teased (something again Batgirls kept up on).

So there you have it. The utter anomaly that is the body of one Cassandra Cain.

[ot3]

Hey! The link to your FAQ wasn't working for me so I don't know if this question has been asked before. I really appreciate your perspectives on AI art. Do you happen to have any resources that you read/listened to on intellectual property rights and the issues with it? I just don't really know where to start with it.

[heres where i cut out a big paragraph of me, once again, bitching about how blog pages don't work on the tumblr app and i think that's fucking stupid]

anyway i dont have any generalized sources on the subject but the tl;dr of it is: intellectual property rights exclusively benefit people who have the resources to pursue sustained litigation. 99% of the time, what IP law is being used for is to reinforce corporate ownership of work that was done by their employees.

the whole disco elysium debacle is a great case study.

The shareholders of ZA/UM accused the trio of, among other things, intending to steal intellectual property (IP) from the company — a curious accusation, considering that the world of the game is based off of a novel written by Kurvitz himself. The case of Disco Elysium illustrates the shortcomings of IP rights as protection for artists. Consequently, it contains a lot of lessons for the labor movement when it comes to the arts, and serves as a reminder that creative workers are, at the end of the day, workers. But this is not just an academic exercise. It’s a human story about the intimate consequences of capitalist exploitation. “I got my soul ripped out of me,” Kurvitz told me over Zoom in April of 2023. “I got my skull cracked open and my brain lifted out of it by a fifty-five-year-old financial criminal.”

another example: alex norris of webcomic name, which you will probably recognize when you see it, has been raising hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past several years to try and keep up with the protracted legal battle over maintaining ownership of his own work.

I have been fighting this case since 2019. It arose out of an agreement to make a boardgame based on my webcomic in 2017 but the publishing company has used this as an opportunity to take all of my intellectual property, and has even claimed ownership of Webcomic Name as a whole. I can't go into more detail here, but the details of the case are publicly available to read online.

Then, in a 2024 update:

I have essentially won the main case based on the decisions made last summer. The Judge has clearly stated that I own my comics, and that the other party has infringed on my copyright. It is not over yet, as there are still a few things that need to happen. Hopefully things will all be wrapped up this year. After 6 years of legal battling, I can’t wait to be free of all of this. Hopefully, this second case will backfire, and they will be sanctioned for filing it. But to get to that point requires a frustratingly large amount of work, time and money.

An interesting thing about both of these two specific instances is that they involve creators who had entire bodies of work produced around the specific IPs that were stolen from them before they even began partnering with corporate entities to produce works. which is insane! you can spend years writing novels, drawing comics, and if a company comes in with enough lawyers they can own those ideas.

this is pretty distinctly different to me than instances of work you do while being employed by a corporate entity being owned by that corporate entity, because at least you know what you're getting into there to some degree, but i still think that's bad too. consider stuff like the owl house and gravity falls, two disney shows made by people who very very clearly did not like working for disney. disney owns their ideas, their characters, their worlds, because that's the price you pay for having an animated show produced.

essentially it's very very clear upon even the slightest examination that intellectual property in no way exists to codify who the creator responsible for specific creative concepts or works is. it exists to turn nebulous things like 'ideas' into market commodities, and to funnel the profits made by the labor of individual artists and writers into corporate bank accounts.

the only person who has ever really benefited from IP law as an individual trying to lay claim to their own work is ken penders, who notoriously won his suit to have ownership of characters and storylines he created. heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Gets An Unequivocally Deserved Legal W.

The comics continued under Flynn’s direction as if nothing happened, but things started looking grim in late 2012, when Archie suddenly fired its entire legal team. The company had been unable to produce Penders’ work-for-hire contract, which would have given control of his creations to Sega. Penders claimed the contract had never existed. A heavily circulated Tumblr post outlining the case (which has been corroborated as a reliable source by Penders) explains that while Archie did provide a photocopy of a contract allegedly signed by Penders in 1996, Penders claimed that the document was a forgery. That it was neither an original copy nor a contract from the beginning of the writer’s tenure at Archie meant that its validity was questionable. Making things worse, Archie couldn’t produce an original copy of any previous contributor’s contract, meaning that any writer or artist who had worked on the Archie Sonic line could potentially follow in Penders’s footsteps and reclaim their work. “So are you saying prior counsel blew it?” the presiding judge asked Archie counsel Joshua Paul in a May 2013 court session. His reply was unequivocal: “Absolutely, your Honor.”

So yeah. Owning the work you do as an artist is only something that happens when the people trying to profit off of it show unprecedented and staggering level of incompetence in their legal teams.

Then, alongside not owning the concepts and ideas you produce while working with corporate entities, there's the issue of NDA regarding specific pieces you've produced. This causes a LOT of trouble for freelance illustrators/character designers/concept artists, etc. Looking for work is very hard when the past three years of pieces you've drawn can't be added to your portfolio. Some people have password protected pages on their portfolios that they use for NDA work, but I believe the right to do this varies depending on your contract. I'm not 100% sure. In cases where the project you worked on eventually comes out, that's one thing, but there will be instances where the entire project gets canned after all the work is done, but is still under NDA so essentially all of your work has been taken from you, crumpled up into a ball by a studio executive, thrown in the trash can, and legally you are not allowed to go pick it out of the bin and try and flatten it out again.

This has all been pretty art-focused because that's the kind of circles I run in and where a lot of my interests lie but the truth is none of this is even remotely close to as evil IP law gets. I've saved the most egregious for last: The Lakota Language Consortium

The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks.  But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks.

When you're in defense of IP law, this is what you're siding with. This is the rational endpoint of IP and it is neither a fluke nor an example of the concept being twisted against its original design. Art, culture, language, it belongs to whoever is most capable of turning it into a product. The economic incentives of producing and distributing arts and culture demand this is how things be.

Meya says his work is a vital tool in preserving the Lakota language, which did not previously have a standardized written form. He estimated that there are fewer than 1,500 fluent Lakota speakers left and that over the last decade and a half, the organization has helped add 50 to 100 more. “Just because money is involved in it does not inherently make it an evil thing,” Meya said in a recent interview with NBC News. Most of the products his organizations make are free, he said, but the cost of printing textbooks has to come from somewhere. “That tends to be sometimes part of the rhetoric, ‘Oh, there’s money involved. It must be, you know, part of the overall colonization effort.’ Well, you know, that’s just not realistic.”

Artists looking to force their way into the class of people who gets protected by these laws are not looking out for their community. They are not protecting anything but their own perceived financial interests. Intellectual property will never, ever benefit the most marginalized members of creative communities and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is huffing some serious copium.

Frankly, I don't believe anyone can or should 'own' things like Ideas or Specific Aesthetic Flairs. But even if you do believe in that, IP law isn't the framework for handling it.

[jesncin]

Chimera Constantine breakdown, refs & nods mega-post

Welcome to the master post of behind the scenes for the Chimera Constantine comics. In the style of the Sons of Mars ones I made, this post archives our research and process. So here we go! This will be a mix of showing references and personal anecdotes for how we cobbled this project together.

I'll be repeating some things I've mentioned across blog posts because I like having all this info in one place.

So! There's a lot of ways to go about re-interpretation and re-imagining a story, and one of my techniques is to not get overly attached to research. While it's good to be informed about a character, sometimes knowing every little thing about them can make one hesitant to innovate and try something different with them. So I'm purposely mindful about how much material I research.

But how does something like that work when the character in question has only 2-3 total appearances, one arc, and a quick revisit several years later? We play twin telephone.

For this project, Cin read the Hellblazer Golden Boy arc and vaguely retold it to Jes, who would then write a story based on assumptions and half-remembered memories of the story. Letting personal experience, influences and bias fill the blanks. We're inspired by how Naoki Urusawa wrote Pluto based on his mis-remembered memories of reading Astro Boy. Also when I was a kid I used to look at book covers and summaries and make up a story based on the limited information I was given. It's fun for me. Part of why I love obscure characters so much is that the lack of content about them lets the reader fill in the blanks about their lives and try telling new stories about them that aren't constrained by a saturated canon.

The original Golden Boy arc written by Jamie Delano (#39-40) is about John Constantine coming to the realization that he strangled his twin in the womb. After taking some 'shrooms, John...manifests into another reality, it's very surreal. There, John meets his twin from a universe where John had died, and his brother gets to live. The twin (taking on the name John Constantine, we'll call him Golden Mage to keep it simple) is John's opposite in every better way. They decide to merge their souls to restore...the universe. You kind of had to be there.

John's twin returns many issues later (#249) to wrap up a different arc, there he and the story are written by Andy Diggle.

The first panel of our full comic references the tarot cards John gets from his reading with Zed.

This panel is a direct reference to this scene where John sees his own shadow on a curtain after his reading with Zed. I like the imagery of this arc, even when the dialogue describing twins is really cringe. We changed it to a mirror to reinforce the mirror imagery throughout the comic. Speaking of which...!

Through Jes' reworking of the story, mirrors were streamlined to be the main way alternate universes were portrayed in the story. They'd be the main motif that paralleled the twins too. In issue #249 of Hellblazer, John uses the mirror to confront his twin who resides within himself after their soul-merge years ago.

The line "He's so beautiful, he frightens me." is spoken by a doctor witnessing the Golden Boy's birth in his universe. We repurposed it to be John's dialogue for when he's describing the man he sees in the mirror.

John's twin uses a sacrifice involving these candles to summon his sickly twin. Jes repurposed the use of candles to a magic salt circle that contains spirits like the Golden Boy (he's nicknamed "Goldie" in our take).

The Golden Boy! Even though he died in the womb, he's portrayed as a boy. Probably because a floating fetus wasn't what they were going for. We wanted to give him a distinct look that foreshadows how much he would grow his hair out. I like that his mouth isn't visible! We use the shape of his eyes and posing to get across how he's feeling. It gives him a vacant-toddler-stare I find really endearing.

We made some minor adjustments to the Golden Mage's design. Initially, we followed his canonical pulled back long hair. But since he was a challenging character to emote when we had one less arm to work with, we decided to part his hair so that it could carry how he's feeling. I like when I can get it to cover a part of his face for intense moments! If it was animated, it would 100% be expressive Ghibli hair.

Our main goal for Golden Mage's characterization is to make him feel like his own person. In the original arc, he's less of a sibling and more of an au of John Constantine himself. He doesn't get his own name. Despite gloating about having a better and more fulfilling love life than John, he also shared the exact same love interests John does. Being a twin is less about a family story and more a vehicle to talk about self hatred and potential here. Which isn't fair to the individuality of the characters!

(note, this is not how the panels look in the og comic, I've rearranged them so that they display on this post better)

So we characterized the Golden Mage to still have his canon charisma (albeit with the dialogue toned way down from his original appearance), but to have a thinly veiled temper under all that bravado to foil his con-man trickster brother. The Golden Mage was vaguely described as not being particularly attached to the love he receives. Golden Mage is also dismissive of his womb twin's death, saying it's something he shouldn't grieve since he never really knew him. We reinterpreted these lines as him being in denial over his brother's death, thinking himself as above his own feelings of grief.

Also as a tiny note, we kept the Golden Mage's name ambiguous to keep with the vibe of the original comic, but in my mind I headcanon his full name to be Marigold "Goldie" Constantine. The yellow flower is culturally associated with prosperity, but also grief and jealousy. It's perfect for him! So we made references to the flower in the cover and first panels of the comic. I also headcanon that as a kid he called John Constantine's ghost "Johnny".

My influences for how this whole beginning meeting scene is staged and played out is E.M Carroll's When I Arrived At The Castle. The "animated" panels of Golden Mage looking back at John and breaking through the mirror is a direct call back to the keyhole sequence in that comic! The premise of daydreaming about how your life could have been and not realizing that you're staring at an alternate universe is loosely inspired by Junji Ito's Hellstar Remina. I really like the concept of staring into the unknown and then something sentient staring back from that. "What if our day dreams are just other realities we're dreaming of" kind of deal. I don't see that sort of thing in the saturation of multiverse stories these days.

Next reference is the Dead Boy's Heart! While I like that this story's its own thing, I was surprised it wasn't linked to John's dead brother in any way. It felt thematically relevant, so we brought it over as a device to trap Goldie while the brothers merge souls.

Twins can be positioned in a bunch of ways in the womb. I think canonically, John and Golden Mage were positioned like they are in the cover for Hellblazer #39, ideal for strangling I guess! We changed it to echo the motion of yin and yang. I do think the inclusion of yin and yang is a little cringey in the original comic even though I get what it's going for (balance and all that, it's just kind of simplistic to the philosophy). But I do like it as a way to echo card imagery we established in this comic. We combined the imagery of the tarot cards featured in the Golden Boy arc and King/Queen/Joker playing cards. So it felt right to bring back that whole upside down twins in the womb thing. Special fact, this is how my twin and I were vibing in the womb.

The scene where the twins hit Ctrl + E to merge layers! It's a pretty iconic pose! I like how their heads peaked out of the panels so I brought it back for our comic too. In our version, the twins fail to merge their souls entirely. In the revisit to the Golden Boy character in the comics in issue #249, it's revealed that the merging "failed" in some way, trapping the Golden Mage within John's soul.

For John's ghost counterpart from Golden Mage's universe we took Dave McKean's portrayal of him very literally haha. I know he doesn't literally have one eye, but we thought it gave him a really distinct look for us to stylize. We decided to keep the ghost kids consistent with no mouth and vacant pupil-less stares. We gave ghost kid!John a sort of bedsheet ghost form to contrast against Goldie.

Speaking of one eye! That's another motif we decided to emphasize throughout the comic. It's not in the source material at all, but we liked it as a way to both hint at chimerism and visualize how the two brothers serve as incomplete halves of each other. Special fact! Heterochromia can show up in chimera twins. Of course in the case of identical twins like the Constantines, their chimerism isn't as detectable since they have identical sets of DNA. But! It's still fun to stylize in a supernatural way. For our take we show the glowing golden eye as the soul of the Golden Boy manifesting in his brother. I like to think that John takes advantage of how undetectable his chimerism is to have an upper hand in any soul-related deals he makes.

This stylized heterochromia is inspired by @ratblazer 's Constantine design! I made a subtle nod to it with young punk John's make up echoing the scar in her design too.

For John's dynamic with Goldie the Golden Boy, we built the conflict of the story around making him doubt his attachment to his dead brother. There's a line of dialogue in the revisited Golden Boy arc about John needing to "let go", so we repurposed it into the Golden Mage assuring him that his attachments make him weak.

Even though the Golden Boy doesn't show up nearly as much as I think he should in canon, John has been shown to be really sentimental about him. John wants to be the Golden Boy's friend because he's so beautiful John mistook him for Jesus as a kid. Canonically, the Golden Boy ghost rejects John's friendship, likely still not over the whole strangulation in the womb thing. It still breaks John's heart though, he's a sobbing mess about being owned by a dead kid.

We changed this whole dynamic! The twin murder in the womb felt very X-men Xavier vs Cassandra Nova, and it's hard to get behind babies having that much motivation before they're even born. In our version, Goldie is a vanishing twin absorbed by John, the sickly twin. Infants being accidentally strangled by umbilical cords does occur in reality. However, we changed their origin to being that of Vanishing Twin syndrome because it was more specific for the ideas we were going for.

I feel this crucial change is more in tune with the overall themes of Hellblazer. John always cheats death at a cost. People are constantly sacrificed for John's continued survival. But the Golden Boy's case would be special, because he sacrificed himself out of love before he even knew what it means to love. Unlike the other ghosts that haunt John Constantine, Goldie isn't resentful of John. I think it makes more sense for the Golden Boy to be attached to John because he's all the Golden Boy's ever known. As a chimera twin, John is like a horcrux holding his brother's soul in his body. This reaffirms survivor's guilt to be something John experiences since his birth.

Canonically, although the Golden Mage initially feels sorry for the ghost of John that haunts him, he rejects John as well. John's ghost in canon is like a nuisance that keeps bothering Golden Mage. There's an instance mentioned of Golden Mage trying to recreate his murder in the womb? It's cryptically written. But Golden Mage does keep using the phrase "banished" to describe his brother.

We took this and made it so that he performed an exorcism on himself to remove his supernatural chimera-bond to John's ghost. The Golden Boy arc is pretty unique when compared with how saturated multiverse stories are nowadays since it doesn't share the science fiction sensibilities. Grief comes up a lot in multiverse stuff, in these stories characters use parallel universes to save a loved one as they're bargaining with their loss. For our take, we wanted a character to use the alternate universes to hurt and lash out at the loved one they're grieving. I pulled influence from Everything Everywhere All At Once's concept of a self destructive character on a search for the one familial connection who could understand what they're feeling.

References! The first panel is a nod to issue #36 where John is sleeping with Marj. We changed her to Kit. The second panel is a direct callback to issue #67, an iconic visual for his break up angst era.

Trivia; this page was added at the last minute! I needed something to bridge the birthday cupcake page and the final panel of Golden Mage's breakdown, so I linked them through candles! In this weird case, I reference my own work! This is a callback to Birthdays, a short comic we made for John Constantine's canonical birthday. It sets the premise for his relationship with Goldie based on the habits and experiences of survivor twins. The pages referencing this comic are meant to re-establish that John shares meals with his twin.

I wanted this page to feel like John's lighting an incense for his dead brother, and to contrast it with the snuffed out candles from Golden Mage's flashback. The candle has a yellow and blue intertwined spiral pattern that calls back to the color of John and Golden mage's dialogue boxes and speech bubbles, along with how twisted they look when they merged. Implying that in this universe, they're together in some way. I really wish I did this intentionally but it was by complete coincidence of making the cupcake pink and balancing it out with pastel primaries. But I sure can acknowledge how cool it looks symbolically okay???

The dialogue here is a nod to John's monologue in issue #19 where John is comforting Simon Hughes. It's re-contextualized a bit to be about sharing grief together in our comic.

This is a really goofy one but- since Golden Mage is supposed to be the fully realized potential of John, we thought that he would have a successful career as a musician and singer where John didn't. I don't think Golden Mage would be a punk singer though, he probably does something he'd consider more elevated.

BUT-! In the 30th Anniversary edition of Hellblazer, Sting (the guy John's appearance is based on) wrote an introduction for the edition while roleplaying as the Golden Boy. Which is nuts. The Anniversary edition basically canonized Sting as being a Constantine variant in our universe with the soul of Golden Boy. Sting, as Golden Boy, describes himself as a musician and singer too. Absolutely bonkers for Sting to throw me a bone this late in the game since no one's touched this character in ages.

Another E.M Carroll influenced panel sequence. This is from the digital comic Out of Skin.

So that brings us to the end of the comic! We've had the ideas for this comic cooking for some time, and it's people's continued interest in our takes on these characters that gave us the chance to finally bring the story together.

I'm very fascinated by the Golden Boy story, not because it's particularly strong compared to other stories in Hellblazer's run, but because its intriguing premise is bogged down by its surreal take on typical Evil Twin tropes. og Hellblazer's strength was always in its raw humanity. John Constantine's character countered the sensational spectacle of his superhero contemporaries. He may be able to outwit a vampire but he's can't fight back against being brutalized by the police. In one of his most iconic arcs, he finds out he has cancer- not because of any supernatural shenanigans, but because he literally smokes too much. In another arc, John's long time girlfriend breaks up with him, and he lashes out by saying the cruelest things to her. When he hears that his abusive dad is murdered, John still cries about it.

I think the Golden Boy arc and the retcon that followed his brief return actively undermines what makes Hellblazer special. Suddenly John's having X-Men-level evil twin escapades in the womb. Suddenly, merging with his twin will help save the universe. Suddenly, it's not smoking that caused John to have cancer! It was actually because he merged with his twin and his twin became the cancer from inside him! Suddenly it wasn't a moment of lashing out that caused John to say all those cruel things to his ex upon their break up, that was actually the Golden Boy controlling him from within, so you see it's not really his fault! Also what followed the break up was extra devastating because of the Golden Boy, somehow.

Often I hear in fandom that when you change a character too much from their canon counterpart it's basically "just an oc" at that point, but in the case of characters who get to be re-imagined and passed through many creative teams, I think that kind of mindset is deeply limiting for transformative work. The line I draw between "just an oc" and an interpretation is if the changes involved engage with their source material in any way or if they're just superficial. Big changes and 180 flips can work because they still respond to the history of said character. It's why we see that kind of thing in canon a lot. These characters are inherently built to be passed through many hands in meaningful ways to varying degrees of success. So I hope that by showing all this process that goes behind big changes to a canon character, people better understand what can go into transformative creativity.

Our thesis for this re-imagining is to take what makes Hellblazer special and re-examine the arc that we felt undermined that. Despite the grief John has for many characters in his cast, mourning isn't brought up at all in the Golden Boy arc. It's dismissed by the characters in narration, and the Golden Mage himself isn't even recognized as a sibling by the narrative, no matter how many times John calls him "bro".

Survivor twin grief over dead womb twins especially is a real thing that's often dismissed because in the words of canon Golden Mage himself "I couldn't mourn for those I'd never known". This is not true to the experience of twins. They play with and remember each other from spending 9 months growing in a tight space together. So when one of them doesn't make it out with the other, that survivor feels a grief they can't comprehend. It can manifest in unresolved trauma, commitment issues, and survivor's guilt. All things that feel so relevant to the themes of John Constantine's character. I think that by integrating the real lived experiences of survivor twins, the Golden Boy arc could've been one the most human and personal parts of the original Hellblazer run. It's could've been a story that helped a community of people so rarely validated in their grief feel seen.

[blackfliesinbluesugar]

Prefacing by saying I have been a hardcore Hazbin fan since mid 2019, pre-pilot release. I am not an embittered anti.

Hazbin's pacing doesn't make me angry, it makes me sad. I think about this show setting up like a normal cartoon, letting us get to know the characters, letting us see them day-to-day and strengthening their relationships with each other and how they cope in different silly or serious situations, and I get... just, upset. This isn't a cartoon, this is a webcomic, and it's a webcomic based off some lady's twitter where she gave us a character sheet for everyone before we clicked on so the comic wouldn't have to waste time explaining it. I'm sad.

Who is this Camille lady and what do I care if she killed an angel? Her daughters? Who? I don't know either of their names and I don't care enough about her or them to check. I just met her today! If she dies, if her daughters die, what difference does it make to me? A random decent character design is gone? Ok??

What do I care if Vaggie has self esteem issues? I don't know her, I just met her! I'd care so much more about her song if I cared about her! I'm just expected to care because, hey, Hazbin had a huge fandom pre-release, so why wouldn't I care? She's had so much fanon and speculation, that practically did all the set up for me, right?

,,,nO. I still need you to do the work! I want to know who these people are before I see all their trauma laid bare, because otherwise all they are to me IS their trauma, and it's tough to get invested in that in a world this bleak with a cast this huge.

Helluva Boss did the same thing - Octavia is introduced in episode 2, and then in that same episode we get some big emotional dramatic moment with her and her father that feels like it should have capped an entire character arc. And yeah, I like Octavia, I like her design and her voice and her relationship to her family, but I sure didn't care when she cried about a conflict I only learned 2 minutes ago I was meant to be taking seriously. She gets another big arc for her issues in s2e2, and I cared a LOT MORE, because not only have I actually met her before that episode, I had the entire episode to develop on her specifically and lead up to the emotional climax! It didn't just play happy dappy with her all day and then make her break down, it was a clear progression. Same with Fizz - I enjoyed his recent episode with Blitzo, because I have had several episodes to build up both their individual characters and their relationship to each other and past tension. If that had been their first episode together, I would have again, not cared one bit.

Man.

[breakandbuildfiction]

The Danny Phantom Crossover Power Scaling Issue

The existence of the Ghost Zone/Infinite Realms in Danny Phantom should, in theory, make it super easy to create crossover stories between DP and other series. The Ghost Zone is literally a dimension that exists between dimensions and has literal doorways and random portals that lead to random points between time and space and to pocket dimensions. There would be no reason NOT to have Danny just decide to check out another dimension, to have one of his rogues go cause trouble somewhere that Danny has to chase them down. And yet most people here and on AO3 only do Danny Phantom crossover prompts and stories with DC Comics.

Why? Well, for one thing DC Comics is just very easy to do crossover scenarios with thanks to it having so many different original locations, teams, and power origins. But another reason, from what I have been able to gather, is the problem of power scaling.

Danny Phantom, even without adding in fanlore like Ghost King Danny, Eldritch Danny, and Ancient of Space Danny, is incredibly OP both in terms of raw power and because he has a such a wide range of incredibly powerful, useful, and dangerous abilities.

Danny has superhuman strength, speed, and reflexes, he can fly, regenerate, shoot lasers/plasma from anywhere on his body, has cryokinesis and telekinesis, can duplicate himself, can vanish from the visible light spectrum and phase through solid mater and most forms of energy, and more. And there is only so many of those powers you can ignore and how much you can weaken them before it becomes ridiculous and character-breaking.

How can you have Danny become part of a story like Harry Potter without either making it so he never uses his powers or just steamrolls the challenges that nearly get Harry and his friends killed every year? How can you have Danny throw down in the MHA universe without him negating the danger presented to him by becoming intangible and attacking at range or overshadowing his opponents? Or Game of Thrones without making all the dangers and power plays of that world looking like a joke when he can just fly into King's Landing and force Cersei to confess to her infidelity and incest or make Joffrey look so deranged that his allies have no choice but to abandon him? Hell, I brought up shows like Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss on this blog before and I had to be very careful to avoid anything that would boil down to Danny becoming part of the direct military conflict between Heaven and Hell or having to interact with IMP!

To make crossovers with Danny Phantom work you either need to use a universe that has powers that scale to Danny's own, like DC and Marvel, or you need to avoid stories that could be solved via direct combat, which means ignoring the primary genre of Danny Phantom and a severely major aspect of what makes Danny unique as a character. So people, including me, tend to restrict themselves to DPxDC to avoid the problem of powerscaling as much as possible and allow us to have Danny keep his powers and keep having a history of heroics and personality that is in line with protecting and fighting people.

[genericpuff]

ok so i just saw you making a post referencing this so i would love to hear your onion on the whole “rachel smythe presents” thing

like my first issue is that it feels like a word for word copy of “rick riordan presents” intention and all? and secondly it just feels icky and i can’t put my finger on it

yeeeah I'm also a lil' sus on the whole thing for a ton of reasons, but I think my biggest "ick" towards it that might align with the vibe you're having is just the fact that like... Rachel is a one-hit wonder creator, not a seasoned veteran in webcomics in the slightest. Rick Riordan Presents didn't launch until 2018, after he had published 15+ books spanning several different series. Lore Olympus, meanwhile, is the only long-form comic Rachel's ever seen through to the end, and even then that doesn't seem like a brag because it's now soured its own reputation after dragging on way too long and if anything, it only went on this long because of potential corporate meddling from WT (and the fact that it's been Rachel's lifeline in terms of being her career).

I've used this comparison tons of times before, but it always reminds me of the SuperEyepatchWolf video about online "influencers", how so many Youtubers and social media influencers try to sell their audience on those "how to become big on social media" courses that don't actually guarantee any form of success because their own success was contingent on luck and being in the right place at the right time.

Who would you rather overseeing and guiding your work in the publishing world? A seasoned creator with several works under their belt and loads of experience working with different publishers, imprints, and people within the industry - or a creator who made one super popular thing 6 years ago which has been circling the drain for the last 3 and has nothing else to show for their career and experience beyond that one project?

And that's not even to say Rachel hasn't created other things outside of Lore Olympus, but she never talks about them. A lot of people are regularly surprised to learn that she illustrated and wrote a Wonder Woman one-shot for DC, or that she had been awarded for her past works such as The Maiden. She's not even really doing anything to hype up Rachel Smythe Presents or the actual finale of the comic she's been working on for the past 6 years, so really all it means is that once LO is over, her staying power as a creator in the webcomic industry will vanish. She hasn't done anything to build a stronger foundation outside of relying entirely on her one-hit wonder - and therefore, her trying to launch some prestigious imprint based around her one project feels way too early and unearned.

and that's my onion

[healerfromhell]

On The Night Nurse

hi dead boy detectives fandom, i’m here to give you the tea on the night nurse because i cannot watch her incredible lore get overlooked any longer. this post was initially a thread on my twitter but i wanted to cross post :3

long post under the cut

DOOM PATROL

we first see this iteration of the night nurse in what ruth described as a “backdoor pilot” in s3e3 of doom patrol. she’s only on screen for 3 minutes but in that time there’s an insane amount of implications in terms of her abilities.

she’s shown to have telekinesis, as well as shifting her appearance into a more “demonic” form, including her mouth seemingly splitting in half. finally, as the doom patrol escapes, she projectile vomits acid onto them which later turns them into living-dead style zombies!

it’s up for debate whether or not this is canon to the dead boys show, HOWEVER, in terms of asa herself we’re not given any reason to believe she isn’t functionally the same, even if this IS an alternate universe.

as such, it is likely that the night nurse possesses these abilities in dbd and we simply haven’t seen them yet. furthermore, she’s already canonically an “eternal, trans-dimensional being”, so while this is a different universe, it could potentially be a single, dimension-hoping night nurse.....

COMIC HISTORY

here’s where we get into the good stuff. it’s pretty much agreed upon that the night nurse is an adaptation of the comic character “nightmare nurse”, also known as asa the healer. she’s a demon of an unknown age and she’s absolutely delicious as a character.

asa first appears in the phantom stranger, but she’s most notably present in justice league dark. during this it’s explicitly stated that john constantine is her ex-boyfriend and that she’s sapphic! let's go through some of the most important connections we get from these comics.

Constantine

we see her make several references to her history with constantine, but she’s also pretty loud about how her priorities are, first and foremost, her job, as you can see here, which i think ties in nicely to her pendanticism in dbd — all she wants to do is her job.

Zatanna

here are a few panels in which she hits on zatanna, then kisses her, then says she’s a much better kisser than constantine. girl kisser asa you’ll always be famous.

by the way, that creature with the red eyes? yeah, that's asa. that's her demon form that she appears in after enduring the blackmare curse with constantine.

Alice Winter

it is revealed that asa used to work as a nursemaid for a sickly woman named alice, but eventually she decided to possess alice instead. this is the body we see her in throughout her comic appearances.

however, it turns out asa is the only thing keeping alice alive. when this becomes evident, alice invites asa back into her body for good.

Other Appearances

asa is also seen a few times in other comic runs, i’m just gonna add some of my favourites here.

Suicide Squad

i love her character design here and i think her ability to remove trauma like a cancerous growth is a nice tease at how she can literally go into charles’ head and watch his trauma in dbd

The Phantom Stranger

this is from issue 8 of the phantom stranger and there’s several reasons i love it. firstly, LOOK AT HER.

second, let’s go queer demon who enjoys threesomes! you’re an icon, asa. third, apollo and panacea. oh, apollo and panacea. we’re about to get tinfoil hat-y for this last bit.

FINAL THOUGHTS

so you might’ve noticed, up until this point asa’s mentioned having sworn an oath, but that panel has her outright stating she was actually FORCED into it by the gods. we also get a hint at this in jld, though they don’t explicitly name apollo and panacea.

“asa” quite literally means “healer”. her given name; every time somebody addresses her, they are calling for a healer. that cannot be coincidental. it makes me wonder if she even HAD a name before this oath was forced upon her, or if she was just… a creature. a monster.

perhaps the gods saw fit to name her asa as a means of throwing salt in the wound. not only have they branded her, even her name is a reminder of her new purpose. it gives a lot of weight to the numerous occasions on which she says that she is, no matter what, a healer.

because regardless of where she is, what skin she wears, no matter what… she has that oath, and her name is healer. there’s no escaping that for her. it’s the fundamental core of who she is.

and as a final, final thought i would like to draw attention to this casting because hooooooly shit. perfect.

anyway if anyone cares to see any more of my never-ending thoughts about asa you can find all my head canons on the carrd i have for my rp portrayal or my ao3 where i will no doubt be posting writings about her :3

[cupcakeslushie]

Separate Donnie is just so precious but also I want to put him in a jar a shake him like a kid with a firefly

DONNIE TIME!! Strap in, this one’s gonna be long

@raisondetre2012 @cutesybumbleb

Donnie struggles a lot in the beginning with distinguishing his brothers from his hallucinations. It helps that his real brothers act so different from the harsh figments that constantly torment him, but his brain will still trick him into listening and believing what they’re saying. The family has to be very careful at first when Donnie’s deep in one of his episodes, as there’s no telling how he’ll react to them intervening. Sometimes they’re able to guide him back with soft spoken words of encouragement, and other times he’s convinced they’re just trying to get him to let his guard down and he’ll get pulled deeper into the fog of his hallucinations.

The family’s knowledge of everything Donnie went through with Draxum is sort of limited down to: traumatic events Donnie has mentioned jokingly in passing, the horrifyingly casual way Donnie talks about testing things on himself, and just seeing with their own two eyes that Donnie has clearly been put through severe physical and psychological trauma for a long time. Mikey is probably the only one brave enough to ask about specific scars like Donnie’s metal plate and his wrists, but after hearing the blunt and honest recounts from Donnie, no one really feels a strong desire to dig any deeper.

@redheadedhypocrite They all have their own issues but Leo and Mikey are better able to mask theirs, unlike Donnie who can’t really contain his own panic any time he thinks he’s done something wrong. They just try their best to avoid any land mines, because hearing Donnie grovel and stutter his way through apology after apology for any little perceived mistake is pretty heartbreaking for all of them.

Donnie has a hard time with accepting that he deserves his place in the family, and thus will often still refer to himself silently as Three. He doesn’t really understand that the things Draxum did to him were unforgivable. He was always led to believe that Draxum was just trying to make him stronger so he could stand next to his brothers once the time came that they were all reunited. It doesn’t help that when they are reunited, even if it’s not in the way he’d thought—he’s kept from joining his brothers in their patrols for months. Leo and Mikey are left to babysit him for a while, but even then, they rejoin Raph and April before Donnie is allowed out. And the way Splinter treats him is so alien to Donnie, the doting and the affection. He wants to be Donnie so badly, but he hasn’t done anything to deserve it. Life was so simple with Draxum. Three would do something, anything really, and be punished. Nine times out of ten, Three was able to predict how the end results would play out—with Donnie, everything is an unknown—and he hates not knowing.

Donnie’s first run in with Draxum is fine in the moment, his brothers and April are there, and Draxum’s attention is more focused on Raph, Leo and Mikey and trying to convince them to join him. And his family instinctively puts themselves in between Draxum and Donnie so there’s no mistaking where their opinion of Draxum lies. It’s only towards the end where for a split second in the chaos of battle, that Draxum gets a moment alone with Thre—Donnie, but that’s all his previous guardian really needs to throw Donnie off. The battle ends and they retreat, but Donnie can’t help but over analyze Draxum’s words for the rest of the night, getting no sleep and replaying the encounter again and again. Sleep doesn’t come, and in the morning…

@imtiredandcoffeeismylifestyle

Not sure if you guys checked out the character sheet, I’ll link that above, it’s got all their ages, and then the start of the comic, where Mikey gets rescued, is a sort of prologue and then when Leo and Donnie’s stories comes in a year later would be the start of the show, so ages are 14, 15, 16, and this takes place over two years with a bunch of stuff in between before the finale fight with Shredder, then a two month break where Leo goes on a type of vision quest and has to return quickly as the events of the movie call him back home.

A lot of Donnie’s scars are from experiments, while most of his psychological scars are from punishments. We’ll see a lot more of what Draxum did to Three so I wont go into much detail there. While with Leo, most of his scars are from him failing to follow through The Shredder’s orders or expectations. Most happened early on, during training, and as Leo grew, so did his ability, which meant fewer punishments, and more praise from Saki.

Three was fed pretty close to a regular soft shell turtle diet, mostly fish and 🤢 insects and frogs—bleh. Which he didn’t really…enjoy, but it’s not like he had much choice. As he got older and was able to fix his own meals, he would more often choose flavorless juice smoothies, and only fall back on the other options when he needed the variety. Donnie is pretty picky when he joins the fam, but he trusts Mikey’s suggestions over his other two brothers. All in all though he much prefers the diet he has now.

@tksmainhellhole The bandana is to cover up the scars on his head, which were some of Three’s first, and so he was more self-conscious and attempted to hide them. Eventually though, he has so many that he doesn’t care, but for some reason he likes the feeling of the bandana and so he keeps wearing it.

Raph, Leo, and Mikey can kind of remember enough turtle to instinctively communicate back. Leo’s pride prevents him from doing it unless Donnie is in distress. Otherwise Raph and Mikey think it’s adorable and have fun with it.

Three/Donnie would normally hate being covered in grime and he’ll usually wash off the oíl as quickly as he can, but he loves picking off the dried spray paint (omg he’s just like me fr). So with it there, it’s a great alternative to, ya know—other bad habits.

Donnie and Raph will both go non-verbal when pushed to a certain point. Raph tends to hide when he does this (except from Splinter or April), but Donnie will seek out comfort.

@snailsnaps When Donnie is overstimulated he tends to either shut down if it’s really bad, or if it’s just enough to give him a headache or irritate him he’ll go find someone to latch on to who he can zero in on and ground himself in. With how quickly his brain works, being under stimulated happens far more often, and is usually what brings on his work binges and some of his more chaotic ideas.

He’s more aggressive before sleeping, when he’s gone on a five day bender of zero sleep and constant tinkering. Getting him to finally pass out is where the struggle comes in. He’s pretty hard to wake up once he’s out, even in the midst of a nightmare, he’ll come awake on his own. Leo and Mikey are more the, don’t approach after waking, or risk being attacked types. But sometimes when Donnie goes into his own headspace, and dissociates too deeply, it’s best to leave him alone, since he doesn’t like to be touched during those moments. That’s when you could lose a finger.

Donnie and Raph have a great relationship, and Raph is the one who Donnie probably goes to the most when he’s overstimulated, because a Raph hug is better than any weighted blanket—Donnie can focus on Raph’s calm breathing and his heartbeat and the warmth of his arms around him, nothing at all like the cold, hard vines that Draxum would entangle Three in until he was practically suffocating.

@space-is-spooky Check out this post here for your answer on Splinter talking about Donnie!

@redheadedhypocrite I think I mentioned a while back that Donnie is more wistful when he thinks about what could’ve been his childhood, but he’s not bitter so much, as he doesn’t even really think he deserved to be rescued. He’s just grateful that he’s even allowed a place in this perfect, happy family, when he’s only ever been a disappointment.

@ifyourereadingthisblinktwice

Donnie, when he is finally allowed to join his brothers in battle, has a hard time with larger groups of opponents, since he’s got the least amount of field experience. He tends to do much better from afar or from higher ground where he can see the whole picture. He’s probably the stealthiest after Leo, but with Leo on the front lines directing the team with Raph, Donnie is the one who gets sent in for recon and intel gathering, and then he’ll take more of a backseat role, taking out stragglers and calling out positions. This doesn’t mean he’s helpless though, he’s just more used to fighting one on one, as that’s how Draxum trained him. He’s still a master with his bo and once he taps into his ninpo and has more training on how to work with his brothers, they all feel better about letting him jump into the thick of it without worrying that he’ll get hurt in the choas.

Also Donnie would 100% use explosives in battle if he didn’t have to worry about his bros and April being caught up in the blast. When he unlocks his ninpo he can create some pretty specific weapons that allow him more controlled, but just as fun explosions!

[ravensvirginity]

I think Titans #10 actually exemplifies a lot of what has weakened about Raven's character over the years. Take this panel:

This would be shocking if NTT Raven said it! Her pacifism is so well established that this would be an immediate glaring red flag that something is wrong with her! It is meant to be out of character for her here, as this is her demon side speaking, but it loses a lot of impact because there has been no attention paid to Raven's pacifism. We don't even know if she's even meant to be from Azarath in this current run.

Because they've distanced themselves so much from Raven's original backstory and vital parts of her characterization, this moment falls flat. While what she did (cutting her brother's arm off) is more brutal than her usual attack style, there's been nothing in this run to suggest she shies away from offensive attacks. It's not even particularly egregious by superhero standards: he's a demon, and we can assume his arm will grow back or otherwise be magically healed, and he was threatening a lot of people when she attacked him. It's even less dramatic than NTT's ongoing conflict of Kory thinking the Titans should kill their enemies and everyone else having a more merciful approach.

Then there's the distancing of actual Raven (I refuse to call her Rachel) from anything her demon side does. She's literally imprisoned in a gem. It isn't even her body committing these evil acts. A lot of the impact in the original Terror of Trigon arc is that it really is Raven doing all this; Raven, who's been worn down for years both in universe and out of it, finally snapping and becoming a villain.

This, in contrast, has about as much impact as if Trilogy was the main villain of this story. I do like the angle this comic is going of having demon Raven pretending to still be her normal self among the Titans, but having normal Raven be a physical separate person who's in magic prison really weakens it. It's not as far as I can tell that it's meant to be a trapped aspect of her soul, it seems like she's just an entirely separate person from her evil self. Demon Raven even calls normal Raven her sister.

It's meant to be more figurative (at least I sure hope it is) but it just drives in how severe the degree of separation between normal Raven and demon Raven has gotten. Nothing about this story would change if demon Raven was Raven's shapeshifting half-sister. Contrasted to something like Terror of Trigon, where Raven being the same person, just corrupted into something unrecognizable, is so central to the entire plot and theme, it feels a lot cheaper and less impactful.

I just think this arc could be so much better without the weird complete division of Raven and demon Raven as separate people. Instead of having both Raven and demon Raven be physically separate people, they could've still gone with the gem thing as a sort of projection in Raven's mind, with her good side locked up in it. They still share the same body, it's just different aspects of her soul fighting each other.

I don't hate this story, but it's frustrating because it feels like it could be so much better if just more care was put into it. I wish there was more time to show the Titans' friendship, so the betrayal of Raven siding with her father could be more devastating. I wish they'd paid more attention to Raven's pacifism earlier, so this issue would actually be jarring. I'm interested in Trilogy, but they haven't shown us enough of him to really get any feel for his personality and motivations other than a vague jealousy over Raven being Trigon's favorite. Hopefully more will be revealed in the future, but with the way this comic has been going so far I'm not too hopeful.

[laufire]

just finished watching "never fear", and episode of the new batman adventures clearly based on "fear for sale", a post-crisis!jason story. so of course, I have some thoughts!

both share the premise that scarecrow has invented a new toxin that removes fear. the episode then deviates from the issue in several ways, for example with the choice of the targets: comics!scarecrow offered his drug to athletes, tnba!scarecrow went through a middleman who offered it to scaredy cats who wanted a leg up in life (btas had a plot about scarecrow using his classic fear toxin on athelets while dick was robin though, so I get why they wanted to switch things up). another difference is in how early bruce is dosed with the anti-fear toxin AND the way it affected him. the biggest one is jason's role versus timmy todd's, though.

as a sidenote before I get into the meat of it: this episode does also showcase the little ways in which they differ in personality. timmy todd fits the *idea* your average middle-class person would have of a street kid lol. not necessarily in a bad way, always, but to me it's telling that jason's academic enthusiasm and artistic inclinations seem nowhere to be found in timmy todd.

but let's get into it. in the comic, jason and bruce are at the racetrack and they help rescue a driver whose car was catching on fire (bruce goes for him, ordering a nervous jason to dose it with water). later jason is dosed with classic fear toxin (and sees a burning bruce disappointed in him) and gets kidnapped by scarecrow and used as bait. scarecrow has also dosed batman with the anti-fear toxin, hoping to see him destroy himself out of fearlessness, but obviously bruce pulls through via some impressive feats. the comic ends with this image that just. yeah we're gonna forget about the unintentional foreshadowing for a moment because OUCH.

detective comics #571

in the show, bruce gets dosed early on, and it makes him dangerous. it, specifically, removes his fear of killing. timmy todd, the only other bat in the episode, has to task himself with stopping bruce. and he's very proactive about it, vis a vis comics!jason's more passive role. and very effective! he ties up bruce, he doesn't fall for his trick when bruce pretends he's seen the error of his ways, frees himself from some cuffs in the *very brief* time he's subdued, and gives batman the antidote, stopping him from killing the scarecrow. bruce validates his choices at the end of the episode, telling him he did the right thing.

this is the first time I've seen some comics!tim in timmy todd, though it's two-fold. I think one half of it could be and probably was intentional, while I suspect the other half is a matter of the show's creators developing similar goals as comics!tim's writers in an organical manner.

the first half is this: "fear for sale" was telling a story about bruce as a father and caretaker, and about jason as his child and charge; "never fear" was following the idea of comics!tim as a jiminy cricket figure, someone who stops bruce from "crossing the line". the context is different (inner conflict vs. external influence), and timmy todd does it in a timmy todd way and not a tim drake way, because their personalities are notably different. but the idea is there.

the other half is, timmy todd, just like dc comics when they created robin!tim drake, had writers that wanted him to be more proactive, to more *independence* as a HERO than the role of robin afforded post-crisis!jason.

this, as I said, I don't think it was tnba's writers "grabbing" a trait from comics!tim. mainly because it was not a trait only afforded to tim, although he is who perfected it. batman and robin are a duo but, although I'm not an expert on this era, dick already left gotham and had his own team and his own adventures as robin, separate from bruce. and pre-crisis!jason was also more proactive in his role, insisting on his role as partner, etc.

it's curious because bruce has that infamous scene where he tells gordon to basically treat jason as an adult because of how his difficult life experiences had made him "mature", the comics at this time very much do not treat jason as an adult, imo. even later, when starlin comes with his own agenda, I would maintain that: he doesn't see jason as an innocent kid, but neither, obviously, as Batman's Partner with everthing that comes with it.

and just... it's definitely something I've felt before, but this episode makes me feel more than a little mournful for what could have been, you know? mournful for what jason could have been, had he been allowed to really mature into the role, and enjoyed the perks that came with it.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA if I told my mother her book covers are bad?

I (20s F) used to design book covers for my mother, who is a self published author. I've recently stopped, both due to time conflicts because of work/school, and because it was a pain working with her (she never knew what she wanted and I would have to BEG her to give me enough information to work with, but then would ask for random additions to completed covers because new ideas suddenly came to her head; would give me deadlines for covers to be completed and then complain if I was doing personal hobbies instead of working on her cover even if the deadline was weeks away. also I don't know if this will be relevant, but yes I was paid for all covers I made for her). I did a handful of covers for her over the past few years, all of which she said she loved and would excitedly show to anyone she could. However I recently noticed she'd had some of the covers I'd done for her remade by a friend of hers. Some of them are Fine (not the best, I think the friend just throws stock photos into Canva) but others are very bad. Not quite Chuck Tingle bad, but close.

I love my mom, and she loves writing. It's been her dream to pursue a writing career for decades, and I want her to succeed! But no matter how much we say don't judge a book by its cover, a good cover can mean the difference between readers snatching a book up immediately and skipping over it without a second thought. Especially for self published authors who can't pull readers by name alone. I think it's important to note that she has explicitly asked for my help in this regard in the past (in addition to helping her design her website/developing an "brand" identity for her). She self admits to having no artistic eye and not knowing the difference between what looks "good" or "bad" (yes I know these are subjective, but you could slap a stock photo on a white background with comic sans and she wouldn't understand why that's not a Good cover she should be paying possibly several hundred dollars for) and has asked for my help both when I was a teenager with an interest in art and in the past few years as I'm currently in college for art and design. However she hasn't asked for my help recently, and that's where I fear I may be TAH. If this was her hobby I wouldn't care at all, but she's actively trying to make a career off her writing, and I believe some of her covers (in addition to things like poor web design and other miscellaneous stuff) reflect poorly on her because they look unprofessional, lazy and just. bad. From the way she's spoken in the past, I think she doesn't care/doesn't want to focus on anything that isn't actually writing, and while I understand that sentiment, I think it'll do more harm than good to her career. If it weren't for the issues mentioned above, I'd offer to work with her again.

WIBTA if I told her these covers were bad, despite her not explicitly asking for my input?

What are these acronyms?

[asses-to-ashes]

Longass post about some problematic aspects of 2000-2010 fandom, and why antis are not the solution for ongoing problems.

When people my age talk about 2000s-2010 fandom, they usually talk about it with rose-colored glasses as if it was the Golden age of fandom. I've done the same thing in some of my posts at times, and I don't necessarily see a problem with it, especially when you're discussing it under the context of the current climate of censorship and community harassment, but it's important to look back at the past objectively. When I say old fandom in this post, just know that I'm referring to 2000 to 2010.

There is a happy medium that needs to be reached between holding people accountable in fandom and avoiding censorship. The "anti" mindset goes way too far and polices how people explore fiction, but Old Fandom had its own problems with extremely poor behavior. In this essay I'm going to be exploring these problems in old fandom, the causes and solutions, why media censorship is never the answer. It's important to recognize and reflect on these things especially for people who weren't around to experience it. History repeats itself when Forgotten.

My point is not, and has never been that old fandom was worse than new fandom. My point is not that old fandom is bad at all. My point here is looking at problems, the solutions that have been made for those problems, and why they don't relate to censoring fiction at all.

I want to reiterate that I know things I'm about to discuss still happen. You do not have to comment. But it's important that we start looking objectively at Old Fandom as a wonderful, accepting but sometimes problematic (real problematic not the way antis nave coopted that word) space.

Keep in mind that this is an opinion piece. While I do provide statistics, I'm not trying to make any objective statements. My experience is probably different than yours. The experiences of my friends and my sources are probably different than yours.

With that in mind, let's get into it. Click read more for the meat of this essay

Cosplay Is Not Consent

Consent and sexual harassment have always been a huge issue within the cosplay community, there have been countless stories of women dealing with unwanted sexual advances such as touching, cat calls, kissing, and groping in convention spaces. At conventions in 2000, consent was never mentioned. With such a severe problem, the Cosplay Is Not Consent movement began.

This has been a notion that has been around for a while, been posted at some small cons as far beck as 2012. but it really only became a popularized sentiment at New York City Comic-Con 2014, where the phrase "Costumes Are Not Consent was posted publicly in the convention apace, along with a clear anti-harassment policy.

Even though research shows that most sexual harassment goes unreported, the amount of sexual harassment reports had more than halved in the first year of the visible anti-harassment signs and movement. The amount of sexual harassment cases at NYCC remained steady at "about a dozen" per year even as the number of attendees has increased from 151,000 in 2014 to more than 200,000 in 2023- A testament to the increased awareness of sexual harassment within fandom, an ongoing movement to protect attendees with anti-harassment policies.

A policy is only as good as the structure set up around that policy. An increasing number of conventions have a policy, display their policy prominently, define harassment, explain consequences, let guests know how to report harassment, and give separate protocols when convention organizers are responsible for abuse.

Now, instead of an unspoken "look the other way" policy, congoers are more likely to notice sexual harassment, come to someone's aid, and speak out. People who harass women are more likely to be kicked out of conventions and sexual harassment is more likely to be reported.

Obviously, sexual harassment and assault is still a huge problem in convention spaces, but with an increase in awareness around the issue, it's not as prominent as before.

Subsection: Yaoi Paddles, Glomping, and dangerous conduct

Reportedly first sold in 2002 at Otakon, yowie paddles are a wooden paddle with the word Yaoi burnt into the paddle end used for spanking people. They were a huge problem at conventions and caused a lot of people to be injured as a result. There were countless stories on forums about people being hit by random passerbys using a yaoi paddle, and people begged for it to be banned.

Glomping Is a running hug action that's a mix between a hug and a pounce. It was very popular in fandom, specifically around 2005 in the anime and furry fandoms. It was mostly younger people doing this and it caused a lot of people to be injured as well. Glopping incidents sometimes even included biting or groping.

Both of these behaviors were considered very poor etiquette, but were still very common in conventions. They were common enough so that even saying the words yaoi paddle or glomp to a cosplayer my age is like activating a sleeper agent. Your life flashes before your very eyes. Obviously I'm being dramatic here but it was very annoying.

Inappropriateness with Actors

In general, poor etiquette around celebrities is still a thing now. I haven't seen etiquette getting any better, so this point is less about a problem with old fandom and more about a current issue that still needs to be addressed. I'm going to be talking about real people, fan fiction and the blurred lines between characters and actors.

I'm not here to debate the ethics of "real people fiction." For those of you who don't know, RPF is a genre of fanfiction that involves real people. These people can be actors, politicians, historical figures, youtubers, really anything like that.

The problem comes from involving real actors in your fiction about them. What I mean by this is sending the actors your explicit fan fiction, or asking them inappropriate sexual questions. This is more of a problem from the early 2000's. While this does still happen now, it was really prolific in the early Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fandoms.

Actors would frequently be invited to fan sites that had explicit RPF fanfiction. I've seen cases where actors were asked to sign copies of RPF, actors were mailed RPF, and were showed these fanfictions at meetups and conventions.

RPF never died off, and it's still a very popular genre. Between 2016 and 2017, fanfiction about real K-pop stars. Increased 10% on Tumblr. In 2015, Larry Stylinson was the number one ship on Tumblr according to Amanda Brennan, senior content insights manager at Tumblr.

Celebrities have been harassed for not following a fandom script, online shipping has led to the real life harassment of celebrities. For example, Lili Reinhart reported that her castmate was sent death threats because her character was getting in between a popular ship. This happened in 2017 and represents an ongoing problem in fandom.

Nazism and the Anime Boston Incident

I distinctly remember going to conventions when I was younger and seeing Nazi cosplayers walking around sometimes. They could be from Indiana Jones, Captain America, or whatever movie allowed them to wear that.

It wasn't until 2017 when Rose City Comic-Con updated a change to cosplay policy outlawing Nazi cosplayers including satirical or ironic cosplays which use Nazi paraphernalia or gear. Other conventions have also enacted similar cosplay bands in response to incidents such as the hello Kitty SS uniforms (yes, this is real) and cosplays of other fictional Nazis such as old school Hydra and red skull.

The most memorable incident that I distinctly saw on the internet in 2010 was the Hetalia Anime Boston Incident. For those of you who aren't familiar with hetalia, it's a series that came out in 2009 and initially took place in WWII, and each character is the humanization of a country. There is still debate on the characterization, especially regarding the character Germany- Poor guy was the cause of this specific controversy. The Italia fandom had exponential growth since 2009, and at anime Boston 2010, there was an incident regarding a hetalia photo shoot where cosplayers decided to do a Nazi salute as a joke. Even at the time, the sparked controversy on the Hetalia fandom on livejournal which is why I remember this incident so specifically. There were incidents like this beforehand, but this garnered enough attention online so that lots of photographers made it very clear that no Nazi imagery or posing was allowed.

With more restrictive policies and increased awareness, these types of cosplays became a lot less common in the west. The band are usually around Nazi iconography and symbols such as salutes and uniforms. You still see these cosplays today, such as an example from Hong Kong at Ani-com that took place this month, July 2024.

Where do antis fit in here?

I want to make it super clear that none of these major issues that I brought up here have to do with fiction. The points that are related to fiction, such as cosplaying a Nazi character or sending RPF to actors are entirely based on people's conduct in real life.

People never stopped liking characters like Red Skull, people still write about him and draw him. People should be allowed to write about characters like Red Skull and people should be allowed to like him, the issue arises when you wear a Nazi uniform in a public place.

People never stopped liking Yaoi. Little fan girls never stopped reading exactly the same stuff that I was reading at their age. The difference comes from behavior in real life.

Universally, the vast majority of fandom regardless of the time are able to separate fiction from reality. The problems were never caused by fiction, but rather people's behavior.

In order to stop people from cosplaying Nazi characters, the solution was not getting rid of all Nazi characters in media and harassing people who write about them. The solution was, very simply, to ban this kind of iconography at conventions and hold people accountable for their conduct.

Regardless of the space and the fandom, there are always going to be people who can't behave properly. There are always going to be people who don't know how to treat others. That's just the reality of looking at a group of people, some people don't have common sense. It is not the fiction that causes people to behave this way, but rather having a large group of people in a relatively new scene that hasn't established proper regulations and etiquette yet.

Allowing people to create, consume, and appreciate fiction that is not personally tasteful to you, or appropriate for some audiences, is an important part of society. It's extremely valuable to protect these freedoms, as censorship is a slippery slope.

My next essay will be about censorship in the Cold war era, McCarthyist homophobia, and why comic books were censored for having "anti-american" ideas.

Keep an eye out for that.

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 킹덤/Kingdom.

Kingdom is a 2019-2020 Netflix series set in Joseon-era Korea, following the collaborative adventures of an exiled prince, a country doctor, and a scrappy mercenary who's pretty much the only one in this entire zombie outbreak who has a damn gun.

I have very complicated feelings about zombie media. See, in case you hadn't noticed, horror movies are never actually about what they're about. And a whole lot of modern zombie stories wind up being a) metaphors for fears of immigration by mindless subhuman hordes hell-bent on infecting the good, pure people, b) white male fantasies about how the downfall of civilization will put them back on top again and then all you DEI people will be sorry! and/or c) ways to let your protagonists just kill the shit out of a whole lot of humans but it's okay because they're not really human. Soooo yeah. A lot of zombie-flavored things I like, I have to like them despite all that.

But Korean zombie media tends to avoid a lot of these issues. (Maybe because Korea's experience with invasion is less Fox News Lies About Scary Brown Migrant Caravan Again and more [long list of actual historical incidents]? Who can say!) Kingdom is no exception. It's smart zombie fiction, where the zombies are mostly here to make the already-complicated mundane geopolitical situation just that much more of a fucking nightmare.

This is a bloody, violent, grimy, often downright gross drama, so if you're squeamish, you may want to pass on this. If you're into horror, though, and into zombie horror especially, go on and sink your teeth right into these five reasons I think you should watch it.

1. No one here has ever seen a zombie movie

You know how one of the frustrating things about watching a zombie property is seeing a bunch of otherwise competent, regular people act like they had all their cultural awareness of zombies surgically removed, down to making up cute words that aren't "zombie" to keep from saying the word "zombie"?

Everybody in this show has the excuse that they are living several centuries before even the possibility of zombie movies.

This story starts out pretty standard for a historical drama: a sick king, a pregnant queen, a crown prince in a precarious position, questions of succession, accusations of treason, wealth and class dynamics oppressing the poor, shady backroom politics -- you know, the usual stuff. And it never stops being about all that! It just also has zombies. Evil bastards don't stop being evil just because decomposing hordes are breaking down the door. In fact, that just makes them worse! And our heroes are at ends because they have no natural immunity to the genre they've walked into.

Sure, there are some moments of comic relief, but for the most part, Kingdom plays its premise absolutely straight-faced. How would 17th-century Koreans deal with a bunch of walking corpses? With period-appropriate tools, tactics, and mindsets!

In your standard modern zombie setup, everybody has guns, and then some special badass rolls in with a katana and everyone oohs and ahhs. In Kingdom, the wealthy have swords, the common folk maybe have farm implements, and there's one measly matchlock rifle in the party. For a few lucky headshots, you've got archers. For everyone else, things are about to get real up close and personal.

The characters also have period-appropriate worldviews that both inform their reactions to the problem and are frankly bizarre by modern standards. What if you had to deal with zombies in a place with cultural taboos against dismembering or burning dead bodies? What if people felt compelled to treat the corpses of peasants differently from corpses of nobles? What if the scholars won't act in their own defense because it's insulting to ask them to wield weapons? What if you can't ask certain important people certain questions because it's literally treason to do so?

The real moral of Kingdom is that there's not a situation so bad that devotion to Confucian principles can't make it worse.

2. That scrappy bastard

I'm not going to play favorites here-- Wait, what am I saying, of course I am. It's Yeongshin.

You know how, in any given zombie movie, your hapless protagonists survive because early on they find a party member who's about ten levels higher than they are? That's Yeongshin. He's cagey as hell about his shady past -- to the point where we don't even learn his actual name -- but he's going to come in real handy here, because he is also the aforementioned only guy with a gun, and he fucking knows how to use it.

And okay, I'm exaggerating about the gun shortage, but not by much. Firearms are rare, you need training to be able to operate them, and no matter how good you are, they still take time to reload after each shot -- if they even fire at all. (Also, ignore the part where everyone's aim is far better than shitty matchlock rifling should allow.) Guns are not the go-to weapon in this zombie situation. You can't just shove a bunch of pistols in everybody's hands and count on at least a few lucky shots. You could amass all the period-appropriate firepower you wanted, but without specialists, it'd be useless.

Yeongshin is fueled by some very reasonable guilt, since, uh, a nonzero amount of the shit that goes down is kiiiiiinda his fault. But I love that instead of giving him a death wish, it makes him even more determined to survive and do what he can to mitigate the fallout of his unintentionally terrible decisions. He knows he's far more useful alive, so to hell with taking the easy way out. Whether his opponents are living or undead, he's going to make them wish they hadn't messed with him.

This is a good place to note that the whole cast is great, from the thunder-voiced head of the evil family to the prince's wife-guy manservant to the doll-faced bitch queen. And obviously Ju Jihoon and Bae Doona are captivating every second they're on the screen, because they are absolute acting powerhouses and I love to watch them work. His Prince Lee Chang and her physician Seobi are compelling, memorable main characters who perform the important zombie-movie function of being the people you care about when they get put into dangerous situations.

But I walked away from this unable to stop thinking about Yeongshin. Bare-headed in a world of very meaningful (and often very silly) hats, he's feral and bitey and completely unfit for polite society. So of course he's going to wind up side-by-side with the second most you-need-to-be-respectful-to-him guy in the land.

More than anything, I love watching him work. He's a very physical character, but all his stats are in speed and agility, so he will just literally throw himself full-body against doors or into fights and let his momentum do the work. His actor, the handsomely exhausted-looking Kim Sungkyu, brings such a great physicality to the role. Yeongshin may be the Gun Guy, but he's not sniping from the back row. He's right there on the front lines, pulling off stunts none of the other characters would dream of trying. I cannot stress enough what a delight his action sequences are. It's such a good visual counterpart to the zombies, who also have no sense of bodily self-preservation.

And speaking of the zombies...

3. Zombie rules

I find that Korean zombie properties are the best in particular at zombie physics. Their directors seem very interested in pondering exactly what the weight of that many bodies would do. The answer is usually pretty gruesome and visually fascinating!

Kingdom's main use of zombies is by volume. While there are a few (memorable!) one-on-one scenes, the show delights in seeing just how many zombies it can fit in the frame. The danger is always from the sheer number of hostile bodies. You can use those numbers against them, if you're clever, but wait too long and you run the risk of being completely overwhelmed.

I've seen some people criticize the zombie extras by accusing them of not moving like zombies, which is the kind of nonsense you say when your only exposure to zombies is Slow Zombies. Kingdom's zombies are Fast Zombies -- they don't shamble, they swarm. They all just plow on full speed ahead until something stops them, and they definitely don't watch where they're going. Those extras do some incredible work flinging their bodies over obstacles and into solid objects. I sure hope one of the benefits of all that voluminous period-appropriate costuming is how much good padding you can probably stuff under there.

Continuing the thought exercise about what a 17th-century zombie outbreak would look like, Kingdom does some clever things with putting humans and zombies alike in situations you wouldn't find in the modern world, ones made possible only by the time period. I really like that it never forgets that part of the fun of this whole enterprise is making the best of the social and technological concepts that would have been present then. It doesn't feel like a modern zombie movie with incidental hanbok -- it actually makes the most of what a rural medieval setting both gives and takes away.

The rules Kingdom makes for its zombies are also an interesting take. You, the modern viewer, know how zombies work in general, but you don't know all the quirks of these zombies in particular, so you're learning at the same time the characters are. And sometimes you learn wrong! Sometimes you have to rewrite your whole strategy because you realize at a critical moment that both you and the characters misunderstood something very badly.

...And yeah, okay, it plays a little fast and loose with those rules sometimes, but so what? You know how this works! You know that the lead actors will dodge more and get bitten less than the random extras will. You know that named characters will last longer than their NPC counterparts. If you're going to hold that against it, maybe horror movies aren't the thing for you. Go do a Rubik's Cube or something.

4. The parts without zombies

Plenty, plenty of people have made the Game of Thrones comparison, which ... yeah, sure, I can see it. It wouldn't have been my first thought, but I get where people are coming from. And you know what, if you're a Game of Thrones enjoyer, you'll probably like this too. It hits a lot of the same beats and has a lot of the same vibes. It's kind of like if you shrunk Game of Thrones in the wash, until there were only two warring families and not a conlang in sight.

This show isn't historically accurate to the letter -- think of it more as AU Joseon-Era Korea, where specific people are fictional but the larger context is more or less the way things would have been. You never get given a specific year, but from technology and various context clues, you can kinda narrow it down to the 1600s. It never commits to a single year, though, which dodges a lot of nitpicks. Its fictional aspects are nice, too, because that means you don't have to know any real history at all. The show will give you all the information you need to understand the campaign setting, just in case your knowledge of medieval Korean dynasties is not up to snuff.

The conceit of the series is that some very specific devious political backstabbing and corruption has been happening since before the show began, making everything vulnerable to catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, the sudden appearance of zombies does not magically mend those rifts and make everyone come together! In fact, the reason the zombies are happening at all is related to these treasonous power plays, and while we never learn the full story (see my later note on the drama's ending), we get a whole lot of it. And it's a good, complicated reason! Here we return to the idea that zombie movies are always metaphors for something else. Set against the backdrop of multiple Japanese invasions during this period, Kingdom sure does have some things to say about the dangers of considering certain lives disposable in the service of the greater good.

I will be the first to say that IT TURNED OUT MAN WAS THE REAL MONSTER ALL ALONG storylines are tedious, so I'm glad Kingdom didn't decide it needed to beat that drum. The truth is, nobody's surprised when the bastards who have treated other people like shit all their lives continue being bastards in a crisis situation. It's the Joseon Dynasty. Everybody's locked into a rigid neo-Confucianist hierarchy. They don't need an apocalypse to reveal how much the people at the top would sell them all for a single corn chip. They've been clear on that one for a long time.

What this means is, if you're not traditionally someone who goes in for zombie horror, but you like a good political thriller and can roll with some supernatural elements, you might consider giving this one a shot anyway! It's not some hugely complicated and sophisticated plot, but it's still plenty to chew on. (See what I did there?)

5. Time to spend that Netflix money!

This show is gorgeous. It looks beautiful and it sounds beautiful. It's shot beautifully against beautiful sets and even more beautiful landscapes. Everyone's wearing beautiful costumes. What little CG there is is even beautiful. It's just visually a treat.

Light is such an important part of the show that I can't not comment on Kingdom's use of it, production-wise. The show is often shadowy as hell, but in a high-contrast way, as opposed to the awkward near-blackness of so much prestige TV. Even when it's dark enough that faces and details are obscured, there are still light sources that provide visual interest. Besides, I'll cut it some slack because it is a horror property. You should be watching it in a dark room anyway! And sure, there's some awkward day-for-night stuff, and transitions around sunset can be downright goofy, but if that's the worst of the jank we have to suffer through, it's fine.

As beautiful as it is, it's also very ugly. The story takes place over a period of time so short that barely anyone has time to change their clothes, much less take a bath. The grime just accumulates: sweat, dust, mud, sewage, smoke, spit, and all kinds of blood and viscera. By the time the story's done, everyone looks realistically beat to shit. (Bless those poor makeup artists, having to keep such close track of all the damage characters have suffered.)

I feel as though I should note for context that while I'm a horror movie fan, I'm still pretty squeamish when it comes to gore. I made it through Kingdom okay, but there were definitely parts I had to watch through my fingers. It hits the realism middle ground that gives me the wiggins, where it's neither absurdly chaste about bloodletting nor dumping comedic buckets of corn syrup on the actors. It suits the tone of the show perfectly! Just, you know, if you're a little tender (like I am), be ready to look away from the screen sometimes.

Korean historical dramas sure do have a real advantage on the wig front, in that most everyone is wearing some kind of historically appropriate hat or headband that covers the places their wig joins. And then you have Yeongshin, who looks so good all shaggy because that's clearly at least mostly Kim Sungkyu's real hair.

I've seen a lot of shitty low-budget horror in my day, sure -- but I've also seen a lot of shitty high-budget horror, where a production has a lot of money and spends it all on exactly the wrong things. Kingdom uses its funds wisely. It's not extravagant (except for the queen's amazing outfits). There are practical effects aplenty and some beautifully framed shots. It gets a little gimmicky with the camera work in season 2, but you know what? It's fun! The gimmicks are action-movie fun, and I will not criticize something for having fun in the midst of some otherwise grisly subject material.

It's also got great rewatch value. There are just enough secrets running throughout that going back for a second viewing makes a lot of things make more sense -- in, of course, a horrible way! But that's just the way we like it.

caveat: Beware of cliffhangers

The show is two seasons long, and it's clearly set up in expectation of a third season ... which never happened. What did happen was a separate, largely unsatisfying movie that tells the backstory of the cool character you meet in the last ten seconds of the last episode.

But that's it. There was also a prince-focused prequel planned, but that got scrapped before production even began, and that was four years ago. I'm not holding out much hope that we'll ever get anything more from the Kingdom universe.

I am not super-bothered by this, though, and here's why: The two seasons are enough to wrap up the main political plot. Most of what's left is zombie lore, and I am so bored by zombie lore. Still, would I have watched these characters roll around in that zombie lore for another six episodes? Without question! Are there loose ends I wish had gotten resolved? You better believe it! Do I want to know what the super-duper secret behind the zombies is? I sure do!

But I also don't feel like I got cheated out of an ending. Those two seasons hang on a story that's 90% the political succession crisis and 10% figuring out where on earth this whole zombie thing came from. That means what you get feels like 90% of an ending, which is pretty damn good by my standards.

Still, it's enough of a bummer that I feel I should give a little heads-up about it -- working, as I always do, on the principle that something can't disappoint you if you know it's coming. If you go in with the right mindset, you can be happy with what you get while not being sad about what you don't. And what you get in Kingdom is, in my little horror-loving opinion, worth it.

(Also, am I giving it extra credit points for how it did not sink my ship? Buddy, you better fucking believe I am.)

Ready to watch?

Netflix money means Netflix. It's got two seasons, and then you can make the decision about how much you care about the movie. I found it mostly disappointing with a few really cool moments, so it's your call if that's enough to justify your watching it.

The series itself is a pretty quick watch, too -- twelve episodes total, all 30-50 minutes long once you skip the opening and closing credits. You can blow through the whole thing easily in a single weekend, which is not something you can say about your standard Korean television season of sixteen hour-long episodes.

And then pretty please come back and do fan stuff for it! I couldn't find exactly what I wanted so I had to write my own. One Quiet Night remains one of my comfort fics that I self-soothe by rereading, which may be a weird thing to say about a smutty gay fanfic about a violent zombie drama, but hey, we all make our own fun.

Also, I know I usually end these with a cute behind-the-scenes photo, but this promo video is too adorable to leave out, so we're going with it instead. It's slightly spoilery for season 1, but not in a way that makes sense out of context. And if you didn't have a crush on Kim Sungkyu already, well, you will after this!

[aingeal98]

Cass or Tim for the ask game

Gonna do Cass because she gets favourite blorbo privileges

three facts about them from my personal headcanons

-The dip in the Lazarus Pit removed a few of her latest scars. She's still covered in scars, it's not enough that anyone would notice, most of them look at Cass and are horrified by the bullet exit wounds covering her skin. But Cass knows what each scar is from, and the loss of even a few of them hurts her afterwards for reasons she doesn't quite understand. She got stabbed through the chest by her brother and yet there is no evidence of it. Some nights she gets tempted to scratch at where the scar should be, digging into her skin until she catches herself and snaps herself out of it.

-Her favourite music genre is metal and rock. She doesn't care about the differences between the genres despite Stephanie as a fellow Metallica fan eagerly trying to explain it. Cass just likes "Mosh pit music."

-Due to being homeless as a kid she got used to sleeping anywhere and everywhere. Her favourite place to curl up and hide was inside a washing machine, normally ones that were old and abandoned. She stopped as she got older but the washing machines in the manor are huge so she started doing it again when she felt low. This has given Alfred several near heart attacks when he goes to put clothes in and finds his grandchild curled up fast asleep.

a reason they suck

Batgirl issue 37 is one of my favourite issues and highlights some of the reasons I find Cass a compelling character but it also does objectively show one of the ways she sucks. Projection can be helpful or it can make you too self absorbed so you end up making bad choices. In this case it was the latter.

a reason they are great

Literally everything that makes Batman cool and compelling but with none of the downsides. Her downsides are different from his due to not having the narrative protection of being the white male lead. Her downsides are also deliberately and competently written. For further information see my entire blog.

a reason I relate to them

Autistic, mentally ill, used to be suicidal, awkward socially but enjoys violence not for malicious reasons but purely for the fun of it (I like boxing and martial arts.) Just everything about how she expresses herself and thinks and interacts with other people it's like wow. For a character with such a ridiculously comic book fantasy backstory she sure is incredibly relatable in down to earth ways!

(what I consider to be) the top tier otp/ot3 for that character

Stephcass. Steph is the Lois to Cass's Clark, the MJ to Cass's Spiderman. But Steph is also a vigilante in her own right and that adds extra flavour. If DC would give me one of those six issue mini runs they're so fond of I could do so much with it.

five things that never happened to that character that I believe should have happened

-Her Batgirl run should have had a proper conclusion not pushing her towards character assassination evil turns

-She should have become Batman.

-She should have been a part of the family from the beginning of the New 52 era. An essential part, closer to everyone than Jason and with more years in the family than Damian.

-She should have gotten to kiss Steph by now but I'll accept it if DC makes it happen this year.

-She should have gotten one final confrontation with David Cain where he comes back to life for 24 hours to remind DC of why her original run hit so hard and center her more on those themes than on being random Batgirl number 2.

five people that character never fell in love with and why

-Kon El. He's a good friend but she's a lesbian.

-Tai'darshan. He was a valuable part of helping her understand what she liked and didn't like romance wise but unfortunately he fell on the "didn't like" side in the end. Also she's a lesbian.

-Zero. He was her first fun civilian romance and while it wasn't serious it was nice while it lasted. It never would have been able to get serious though for multiple reasons. One of which being that she's a lesbian.

-Tim Drake. Shockingly being a lesbian is not the only main reason for once. Here it's also due to them being adopted siblings. While he loves Cass and was canonically mildly attracted to her at times during the early days, by the time they became adopted siblings they'd been through enough that any potential had fizzled out into pure platonic sibling menace energy.

-Harper Row. Being a lesbian is not an issue here at all actually. The issue is that in Harper's universe Cass killed her mom and in Cass's main universe she killed someone else and never met Harper until the world rebooted. Cass is not emotionally mature enough to wade through all that for a relationship. Especially when she can choose to wallow in guilt and stare awkwardly and painfully at Harper when Harper doesn't notice instead.

[rabidpomeranians]

An unorthodox approach to troll reproduction

It’s blood.

Its always been blood, and we’ve all been fooled by our own preconceived notions of how reproduction works. We were given a fill in the blank riddle and got it so wrong that the thousands of fanfics that reference it stand now as a monument to our presumptuousness.

It’s the easiest bodily fluid to get a literal bucket full of quickly. It contains DNA that can be recombined with a partners and utilized by the mother grub. It keeps pairs of any sex/gender viable. And it weirdly explains why rainbowdrinkers are a thing...

First debunking the other possibilities:

From a human perspective the answers to troll reproduction that immediately come would be A) Two sexes with matched-set gemetes, B) All genetically male, or C) Hermaphrodites. Which all come with contradictions.

A) If individuals only produce sperm or eggs, than a statistically significant number of all pairs would be non productive. Given trolls have no concern over the viability of same sex quadrants, there must be a different mechanic in use.

B) If all trolls produce only sperm cells than there would be no mechanism for genetic mixing between individuals. In fact there would be no point in pairing/quadrants at all. Their social system would match ants or bees which forgo reproductive activity outside of one to one interactions with their queen.

Since its been stated that the viability of offspring is effected by the strength of a pair, we know that pairing is a crucial element. Also if trolls are all genetically male, than binary gender has little to no reason to exist (unless sex and gender are also conceptually divorced, which is another theory).

C) The hardest one to knock and the most popular for it. I guess I would pose the question why, in a strongly individualist society, would people form pairs to do what they could technically do all on their own? Or at least why would ‘self-pairing’ not be more common. Sure, pairing allows for more variety but if the gametes paired randomly, half of the resulting mix would still be self fertilized anyways. 

Ok but what does blood have to do with anything like this?

The fundamental flaw that lies over all three answers and probably several more is that we’ve applied human physiology to an alien species. Yes they look similar but their quadrants and mother grubs are vastly different from our monogamy and individually assigned reproductive organs.

Blood mixing negates sex pairing issues, allowing any two individuals to produce offspring. It allows for genetic recombination, given it contains plenty of dna and possibly beneficial hormones produced from the emotional virility of a pair. Lastly, it necessitates pairing. Mixed and unmixed blood have some kind of fundamental difference, which disallows an individual from self-pairing.

I’d chalk it up to something with the immune system. It’s like how in humans certain blood types mixing causes an immune response. Which inside of a body is horrible because it bursts the blood cells, but in an external mix, bursting cells leave exposed dna, allowing for easier recombination. The ‘dominant’ blood type (immunologically, not caste related) dismantles and assimilates the ‘recessive’ producing a viable ‘genetic slurry’ to be hauled off to the mother grub.

And there is plenty of room for the social taboo behavior exhibited by trolls throughout the comic. Trolls live on a hell planet where everything, and everyone, everywhere is looking for an opportunity to kill them, all the time. Thus advertising that you’ve recently lost a half gallon of blood and are vulnerable because of it, would be really stupid. It makes sense then, to keep talk down and hide away any evidence. This evolves pretty seamlessly into a close enough match to the typical cagey/secretive behavior humans tend to show around their own reproductive activities. Hence why we perceive a parallel even though the reasoning is different.

tldr: We all assume that trolls connect sex with reproduction because that’s what we do, but they’re aliens, they do weird alien things. If their biology worked exactly like ours, they wouldn’t have a big weird moth laying eggs for them. Also you’re welcome.