#i really like that jason is clearly seeing himself in Dana | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rason-rodd · 3 years

Text

The Boy Who Didn’t Like Christmas - Jason Todd x Reader

Summary: You decide to surprise Jason with a Christmas tree but things don’t go as planed. Did he really just call you a friend?

Warning : Fluff, Humor, Slight Angst

Author’s note: A new Bat-Christmas one shot, this time with Jason (the last one will be with Dick). I tried to make Reader as general neutral as possible. Hope you’ll like it

“You’re clearly not from the Hill … or the Narrows.” You were pretty certain the rebuke would have hurt ten times more if Dana Harlowe had said everything she was keeping well hidden in her badass heart. But there was no need to say more. It was clear she didn’t hold you close to her heart. To her, you were the pain in the ass from Uptown Gotham, the one who certainly knew nothing about striving to get out of the dirt and who had certainly always get what she wanted by simply twitching her nose. In a nutshell, everything she was happy not to be. But you had one thing in common. Or at least, one person. Jason Todd. Dana had known him for over a decade. You had known him for a couple of months. But you as well as she had learned to deeply care about him, except that one of you had let things go way beyond friendship quite a couple of times. That one being you. “I was just suggesting bringing Jason a Christmas tree to decorate his apartment, Dana. That’s it.” You tried to defend yourself as you buried you hands in your pocket. “And how many times should I tell you that Jason hates Christmas?” You sighed as you both could barely keep your annoyance to yourself anymore. “No one really hates Christmas.” “So what you’re going to show up to his place with a goddamn tree, all dolled up, flutter your eyelashes and hope he won’t be mad at you?” You shrugged. “That’s an idea”

***

And Dana hadn’t been able to stop you. So, one Sunday afternoon you showed up to Jason’s place with a bag filled with brand new Christmas decorations and a heavy tree that had made you sweat streams to carry in the old staircases and, with a tired sigh, you rang at Jason’s door. He opened it without waiting or looking through the spyhole, apparently not thinking (or caring) about the possibility of a lunatic waiting on his doorstep with a deadly weapon. “You know I could have been a very angry elf with a gun. You should use that little peephole” “ Y/N” He looked astonished to see you here, especially with all that Christmas stuff “I…” “By the way, you should also write your co-ownership trustee and ask for an elevator. Yours stairs are a living hell.” You declared to make sure he wouldn’t have time to realise or protest against what you were planning to do. “Give me a hand, would you?” You asked as you tried to drag the tree by the crown inside the apartment, sprinkling the ancient wooden floor with pine needles. “Explain.” Jason demanded as he helped you carry the Christmas tree to the corner of his living room and erect it. “There! Perfect.” You clapped your hands, proud that the tree was still looking good despite the mistreatment you have given it and also because it was standing in Jason’s apartment, contradicting all of Dana’s sayings that “a Christmas tree will never cross Jason Todd’s doorstep”. “Suck it, Dana!” “Alright. You’re weird today. What’s with the tree?” Jason’s face seemed a bit twisted, as he didn’t know if he should smile or be worried. “Next week, it’s Christmas. You can’t celebrate Christmas without a Christmas tree.” He frowned, definitely looking for the right words in his beautiful yet tortured head of his to be sure he would not kill your excitement or hurt your feelings. “Y/N. I wasn’t planning on celebrating Christmas this year.” “I know. Dana told me about you being Scrooge Jr.” You joked, not caring at all, as you opened the plastic bag full of decorations to empty it on the couch. “That’s a bit overstating things.” Jason scratched his head. He had never heard anyone compare him to Dicken’s famous character. “I mean. Not liking Christmas doesn’t make me a miserly bitter old man.” “Were you planning on spending Christmas alone sitting on your couch with cold noodles, watching Netflix and calling Christmas humbug?” He waited before answering, trying to see how he could debunk you little argument. But there was no way. “Not Netflix. Cutthroat Kitchen.” “Oh my god. You’re Scrooge.” You sighed, exasperated before showing a beautiful transparent Christmas ball with little snowflakes inside. “Look how cute!” Your enthusiasm made him smile discreetly but not discreetly enough to go unnoticed. “I guess there’s no way I’m gonna stop you, right?” You shook your head. “You can still try but no. I’m going to give you some Christmas spirit, choke you with it if I must and I won’t leave this place until you love it. And mark my word, I will use string lights if needed” You threatened as you showed him the lights. “You would really tie me up to the tree? You know BDSM is not my thing.” “ No I would tie myself to the tree. Because as much as I know you can throw that tree away once I’m gone, I’m sure you won’t be able do so if I’m tied to it.” “And why so?” He smirked, curious to know your reason. “Cause you like me too much.” Was he really an open book? He never thought so but there was something with you, something weird and unusual that could make him act in strange ways. Perhaps was he getting soft. “And also, because you wouldn’t get my very special gift if you kick me out.” Jason squinted and you played with your eyebrows as you bit your lower lip so that he would get the naughty message. That eventually made him laugh and he tried to remember when was the last time he thought sexy could be funny. “Ah. The things I would do for you.” He kissed the top of your head softly, making your shiver and close your eyes and for a second you tried to resist the sudden urge to catch him by the neck and kiss him on the lips. Not that he would have minded, you thought. But there was a difference between occasional sex and displays of affection. “Let’s do this. Before you decide to make me sing Mariah Carey.” “Oh …” You pretended to think about the idea with a finger over your lips. “Don’t push it.”

And so you ended up decorating the Christmas together, laughing and chatting about some random stuff until you dared ask. “Why don’t you like Christmas?” Jason froze for a moment and you saw him close his eyes to take a deep breath. “Well it’s difficult to like Christmas when you’ve got a family like mine.” He finally declared as he hung a Christmas ball on a branch. “You mean Bruce …” You supposed though you were not sure of you should continue this conversation. “If only there was just Bruce.” You decided to be quiet when you noticed his sudden bitterness but he chose to keep talking. “I never had a proper Christmas as a kid. When mum wasn’t completely stoned on the bathroom floor, dad was in jail. And when we were finally together, well … Let’s say Christmas spirit wasn’t something the Todd family knew about.” “I’m sorry.” You said, wondering if you should hug him or at least caress his arm as a sign of comfort. “Don’t be. Plus, it’s not like I cared that much about Christmas as a kid anyway.” You could tell it was a lie, a huge bad lie only made to mask some deep-rooted wound, a lie Jason had learned by heart as if it was a mere line and had probably served to anyone around him for as long as he could remember. It wasn’t hard to guess. You just had to see how hurt he looked deep down in his beautiful tortured eyes. “I mean, there are other days to offer gifts.” “Sure.” You had a light smile and you focused again on the decoration of your tree. “But I appreciate what you’re doing, Y/N” “By what I’m doing, you mean … making you celebrate the event you hate the most without complaining?” You tried to joke. “That.” He chuckled. “And being a good friend.” A friend? Was friend really the right word? Well, maybe … in a way … or not. After all, what friends occasionally end up fucking when the sexual tension becomes too hard to handle? “I know you’re doing this because of your permanent worry about me. But you don’t need to worry. I’m fine.” “I’m sure you are.” You sighed and Jason caught your hands in his. “Hey. I’m a tough guy. I’ve got thunder thighs and sharp abs. You said it yourself”. You chuckled briefly, remembering the time when you told him this. Pretty sure you were naked and drunk by the way. “I know you’re tough Jason. Actually, you’re certainly the toughest person I know. But I’m not stupid. And I know there are things that you’re hiding from me.” He suddenly frowned and you felt his grip around your hands loosening, as if he was ready to run away from you. “And I’m not asking you to tell me what it is. I understand that you have your secrets. I do to. I just … I just want you to be honest with me, to tell me when you feel low, when you need me.” You added as you grabbed his arms to keep him close. “We’re … friends after all, aren’t we?” You hated that argument but you decided to use anyway, just to see his reaction. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.” Jason whispered after a second of heavy silence. “We’re friends.” Not the reaction you wanted. “Good.” You let go of him and went back to hanging Christmas balls but you both could feel the weird tension, the awkwardness and you couldn’t help but blame yourself for ruining that moment which had begun so well. You should have listened to Dana. “Maybe I should go.” You declared as you resigned yourself to get the hell out of here before making things worse between you two. “No!” Jason almost shouted. “No. We … Let’s finish the tree first okay? Please” You sighed. “Plus you mentioned a gift, right?” Normally that comment would have made you smirk but not today, not now. “That’s not a gift you give friends, Jason”

***

“You played the friends card? Not cool.” Jason suddenly remembered the little mental note he had left for himself the last time he had talked to Dick about his love life. ‘Never again.’ But Roy was gone and so were Artemis and Bizarro or any other friends he could have confessed to. “But we are friends.” He tried to justify himself. “I think.” Dick shook his head, slightly exasperated yet amused by his little brother. “You saying ‘I think’ makes me believe you don’t see Y/N as a friend.” “Why does it have to be so complicated?” Jason sighed as he tried to remember when was the last time he had seen you as merely a friend. “Because it’s love and nothing is ever simple when it comes to love. No need to be a relationship expert to know this.” Jason glanced at Dick who was smiling at him. “I hope you don’t consider yourself an expert considering the failure that is your love life and your on and off relationship with Babs.” Dick shrugged. Yes, apparently he was. Cocky boy wonder. “I’m expert enough to know you don’t call someone you have sex with a friend.” “Oh come on! Ever heard of friends with benefits?” Jason harrumphed, slightly annoyed by his predecessor’s judgemental attitude right now. “Jason please. You guys are not friends with benefits and you know why? Cause your relationship is not platonic at all. You like Y/N and Y/N likes you. But you are too unconfident or too scared to admit it so you end up having sex when you don’t know how to handle your feelings anymore. Now can we take care of that bunch of lousy criminals before they escape with the money?” As much as it hurt Jason to admit it, Dick was right. He liked you. He liked you a lot. Maybe he was in love with you even, he didn’t know. But what he really knew right now was that he had screwed up, bad, and that he wanted to fix things between you two.

***

You turned your key in the keyhole, exhausted by your long day at work and blaming the snow that had literally frozen your toes and fingers on your way back home. “Maybe I should ask for a ugly pair of Uggs for Christ…mas” You couldn’t move, your limbs as frozen as your fingers and toes or maybe worse. Eyes widened you looked around you and at the thousands colourful lights illuminating your entire apartment and the Christmas decorations scattered all over the furniture. “What the hell happened here?” “Do you like it?” You yelled and jumped and, out of pure reflex and fear, punched hard the person standing right behind you before you could realise it was actually Jason. “Oh my god, Jay.” He groaned and put a hand over his nose to calm the pain. “Damn. I think you broke it.” “Let me see.” You tried to remove his hand from his face to see how badly injured he was. “No! Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it.” He cried out as a sign of protest but eventually let you take him inside right to your couch where you left him an instant to go fetch some ice in the freezer. “What are you doing here that late?” You asked as you came back to sit by his side. “I wanted to surprise you. I guess it worked.” He hissed as you finally put the small bag of ice against his nose. “You did this?” You asked as you looked again around you. There were probably at least dozens of flickering string lights hanging from the ceiling above your head as well as fake snow all over the floor of the living room and miniature Christmas trees and other lovely decorations carefully placed on the furniture. “Yeah.” “How? When?” You couldn’t believe he had done this. “This afternoon while you were gone. I entered by the window. You know you should check if they’re close before leaving.” You smile when you understood the nod to what you had told him last you saw each other. “Why?” “ Well. Because it’s dangerous of course. I mean a lunatic could enter and turn your place into a Christmas shop. Oops too late.” “ No, I mean. Why did you do this?” You asked again, not really in the mood to laugh at his joke right now. “It’s Christmas, isn’t it? … And I like you” He said while looking at you right in the eye. “And not as a friend. Cause clearly we’re not friends and we’re not …” You dropped the bag of ice to catch Jason by the neck and kiss him passionately. How long have you waited for him to finally say it. “Ow. Ow. Easy.” Jason complained right against your lips when your nose pressed too hard against his. “Sorry.” You whispered with a smile. “Don’t smile at my pain. I’m really hurt.” “Aren’t you a tough guy?” You teased, using his own arguments against him. “Not when I’m with you.” He confessed and approached your face again, slowly and carefully, to kiss your soft lips with a delicacy that made you shiver. “There are so many things I want to tell you, Y/N.” “ Then say them.” You whispered still close to his face, feeling his hot breath against your skin. “It would ruin Christmas’ spirit.” “I thought you didn’t like Christmas.” “I lied.”

#Jason Todd #red hood #jason todd x reader #red hood x reader #dick grayson #nightwing #dana harlowe #bat-christmas #one shot #jason todd one shot

170 notes · View notes

analviel · 3 years

Text

Idea for the Titans Tower AU Tim-is-a-sad-boi-and-thinks-Jason-is-a-hallucination sort:

Seeing Jason, who's dramatically looming in the darkness with his creepy glowy eyes Tim says his name with awe and hope and heartbreak, clearly writing this down as a stress and fatigue induced illusion, and usually he'd ignore these sort of things, they'll go away eventually if he tries hard enough, but tonight he's all alone in the room and Kon is in his sound dampening room/away so Tim allows himself to indulge in this and he doesn't really have the mind to shut himself up because oh my god, Jason, Jason Todd, you're alive? I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to disturb your rest, this is my fault and you're totally justified to hate me for disturbing your slumber it's just that I couldn't help it, everything's been too much lately, I think everything's just too much from the beginning, I bit off more than I could chew, I shouldn't have ever been Robin dude, YOU should never have died, I wasn't enough, and I'd just been thinking recently that if you- I'm sorry, I don't even know you, I don't have any right asking you anything but I sometimes wish it was you here, you would've done so much better than me, if I've never been Robin Stephanie wouldn't have died, and Darla wouldn't have died, and Dad wouldn't have died, and Dana wouldn't have become sick, and I tried so hard, I just wanted to help, I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt, but I was never enough, and I just kept thinking that if you were alive, Bruce wouldn't be like this and Dad would still be alive, and everything would just be better, you can be Robin again, please, I never wanted to be Robin- *he's blubbering at this point and not entirely coherent*

I mean, taking it from Tim's perspective, his predecessor suddenly coming back when Robin had essentially just caused his Dad's death, to take up Robin again so Tim doesn't feel like he can't leave the position would be some sort of God send. I mean, there's not really much for him to 'return' to, but he's not really chasing AFTER anything, it's more running FROM everything and Tim, if given the chance, if relieved of the obligation, the responsibility, won't be able to help but take it.

Not being Robin anymore WOULD be sad, but it can be sadder.

Maybe his opinion would be different a few days later, maybe he'd be less honest after a few hours of rest, but dressed in the same colors as his dead girlfriend (or ex, who knows), knowing full well that this mantle got his father assassinated, and I refuse to believe that Tim never regretted becoming Robin, at least once. He'd never say it because it'd make it more real, and it's just not something he likes to dwell on, but... he's human -a kid too.

It's a difficult place to be in, because all the lives he'd saved might've cost him the people he loved and it's not a rare position to be in as a hero but damn, Tim really never knew what he was getting into. No idea whatsoever.

No time to brace himself and even less to recover.

(Why does it always turn into Tim rants for me?)

#tim drake #robin #red robin #dc #dc comics #batfam #jason todd #titans tower au

43 notes · View notes

popculturebuffet · 3 years

Text

House of Mouse: Max’s Embarrassing Date Review

Hello House Mouses and welcome back to the house of mouse. Another comission by Kev and my second House of Mouse for the valentine’s season. This time we’re not tackling a Valentine’s Episode necesarily, but a romantic one all the same as fan faviorite couple Max and Roxanne finally go on a date. I always liked Max. Even as a kid when I wasn’t the biggest fan of “A Goofy Movie”, didn’t like the darker patches like the principals office scene or the Pete Hot tub scene.. though in hindsight both had legit greviances with Max... it just dosen’t make either less terrible as the principal still told an innocnet man who wasn’t responsible for what his kid did and was trying his best that his son was going to become a crminal because of one stupid but mostly harmless prank, and Pete.. is just an abusive, unlikeable and unlovable ass in both Goof Troop and Goofy Movie, and I hate how he treats his son, don’t blame his wife for leaving him or taking their daughter and dog, and am really sad he got custody of PJ somehow. And for the record this isn’t ALL petes, just this version. The rest are fine and just the right level of asshole.

Point is despite my problems with the first film, I had none with the second and even now I like it due to having some really good ideas and concepts while also being gloirously rediclous due to the loveably dated X-Games element. While I do have a spot in my heart for the Dana Hill and Shaun Fleming versions, especially the latter once upon a christmas is awesome, Jason Marsden’s version is the best by the mile having the right amount of ego mixed with self doubt to make him likeable enough to brook him being an ass to his dad a lot. He’s a good character.. and it baffles me Disney NEVER uses him nowadays. No really, the last time he showed up was in twice upon a christmas and no one liked that because he was dating someone who wasn’t Roxanne just to rehash the same plot they’d already rehashed better in Extremley Goofy Movie. I REALLY need to rewatch that one. Hmm.... gonna see if I can squeeze that one into May or later in April. That’s for another time.

But yeah while he’s at one of the disney parks, that’s it. The character just .. vanished, and hasn’t been brought back in any way shape or form. Though I could see either a Disney Plus reboot of goof troop or a goofy movie with max having his own kids. That could be intresting. Also bring Roxanne back as weirdly this episode i’m reviewing, a goofy movie and now her ducktales cameo are her ONLY apperances.

Seriously I get she’s not the most fleshed out.. but then flesh her out. Like Max she’s crminally underused and while I get her absence as a character in the sequel, the plot really didn’t need her, he still could’ve been dating her off screen. Though clearly the two worked things out and tried again as this episode came out AFTER extremely did. But did this episode work out? Join me under the cut to find out.

As i’ve decided is my standard for House of Mouse Episodes, shorts first, then wraparound, then Mickey Mouse live sex celebration. Though I will say i’ve picked up there are two kinds of formats for the show: They either use two of the longer Mouseworks shorts or just one close to 11 minute short, a medium one, and one of the little two minute segments. There might be a break from this in the future, we shall see but for now those ar ethe two standards. This time we have two longer shorts.

Pluto’s Penthouse Sweet:

I’ve mentioned in the past I dont’ really get why Pluto is part of Disney’s sensational six along with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Daisy. And I stand by that: While he’s had his own cartoons they just aren’t as entertaining and creative as MIckey’s or hilarous and relatable as Donald and Goofy’s. He’s just an average cartoon dog. He works fine in tandem with Mickey, but on his own he’s just nothing and his spot should be taken by pete, who while not a goodie all the time, again the goof troop version needs to step on a rake and fall into a well.. somehow. i didn’t think my insult through. Point is pete is better. And this short isn’t BAD .. but to me it’s what some fans THINK the disney shorts are: Bland, maybe one or two good jokes but almost nothing new or intresting. As I found out last year, that’s far from the case, as a lot of the Donald shorts are still hilarious today and a lot of the mickey shorts are shockingly creative, like Thru The Mirorr where he goes .. well thru the mirror into a wonderland like world where all the inanaimate objects are alive and he can shrink and what not via astral projection, or Mickey’s Mechanical Man, which I sadly didn’t know about when I did the MIckey Birthday Special and for some reason isn’t on disne plus. In it Mickey creates a robot and has it box a monsterous looking gorillia.

How has Mickey piloting this thing but giant sized against various kaiju been a thing yet? And if it has someone tell me. Seriously with all the comics and animated series how. I’d even settle for a Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse episode. Just bring this guy back. Point is there was far more invetnion than it seemed.. at least at first as it slowly died out as they went by the late 50′s. But Pluto just seemed even in their hayday like your standard pet gets into antics thing without the creative slapstick of tom and jerry or the likeablity of sylvester who never could get that asshole Tweety Bird. This is just weak sauce and whiel I could forgive the older shorts, as their from another time and likely lead to say Tom and Jerry... I can’t forgive this which was made probably in 1998 and released in 1999 originally. Comedy had evolved a LOT by that point and unlike the Goofy how to shorts, which are a format that is immortal and still evolved to match the times and felt fresh, these just feel stale and boring and like the last Pluto short I covered this one was a chore to sit through though not nearly AS bad.

Still though the premise is about the same, Pluto’s left to his own devices, and finds a female dog, though in this case she’s VERY intrested in him. I”m also not entirley convinced she’s a dog, but instead one of Jumba’s experiments and that Lilo and Stitch later had to journey to.. wherever these shorts take place to fetch him. Or more likely the house of mouse. I mean Proud Family, Recess, American Dragon Jake Long and Kim Possible all take place int hat universe, why can’t house of mouse? Also tell me you wouldn’t watch an avengers style team consisting of Kim, Ron, Jake, Penny, Probably TJ, Lilo, Stitch and Donald Duck. If you wouldn’t i’d call you a liar because you would be.

Seriously the eyes give her away.... just look at them. Very experimenty. But before Pluto can do it like they do on the discovery channel he has to get past the guard dog.. though how he does produces the one great gag of the short, as he BUILDS A GIANT, TROJAN HORSE ESQUE PLUTO OUT OF JUNK. Just holy shit that’s awesome> It gets him inside, only for him to find his lady friend is a bit TOO affectionate and he has to escape, he does so, and MIckey wonders if he missed him etc lame button. This short was a vacuum of comedy outside of GIANT PLUTO. Seriously where’s my disney giant mecha series. YOu have five main characters, and Pluto among with MANY, MANY side characters, frmo scrooge to the boys to hopefully Della, to even possibly pete and mortimer who could have their own mech against the heroes but maybe join them in the last episode. Maybe max and pj could have some, have a father vs son thing with PJ and Pete. I”m just saying, i’d watch it. I know my nieces would watch it. I know my nephews would watch it. Greenlight it. Or i’ll make it.. somehow.

How to Ride a Bike: Speaking of the How To Shorts, as usual for the House of Mouse era ones.. this was awesome, pretty much what you’d expect, some goofy, pardon the pun, gags about goofy riding a bike and then a fun climax of him in a bike race. Not a ton to add, other than that hamster bike above is genius. Just needs some tweaking. Really funny, really simple, and really good as you’d expect from a good Goofy Short. Easily the best part of the episode.

Max’s Embarrassing Date: So this was a disapointment. Like i’d try to be nice.. but I had high hopes given this brought Roxanne back, and while the premise was stock maybe they’d do something funny with with it.

But no the plot is pretty standard, very predictable and fairly obnoxious. Max has a date with Roxanne, and is playing it cool and what not, but is worried his dad will find out.. which he somehow did offscreen. Probably Clarabelle.. I mean they do go out sometimes in this one, wouldn’t surprise me.

So Max pleads with the rest of the HOM staff to keep him away because he fears his dad will overdo things, which.. is fair and one of the few things I like> He dosen’t want him to overdo it on the mood because this is well.. a first date. He dosen’t want to pressure her or himself and just wants it to be nice and calm. The problem is it’s framed like him once again being embarassed by his dad and having to learn better.

At this point we’d had TWO movies do this already, one of which was only two years old at the time of this episode. This plot is stale as old toast even if it dind’t have goofy in it. And the twist is predictable: the HOM crew end up also overdoing it: Minnie comments on how cute they are and wants candles brought, Daisy gets them a bigger table forgetting how dates work,t hough we do get a great gag of hte 7 dwarves stacked, and Mickey while having .. some.. gopher? I honestly can’t tell who it was, usually i’m better at the cameos. Speaking of which they also have a runner of beast going on a date with Cruella Devile.

I mean is he cheating on his wife? Is she holding his wife hostage? Is this before belle because we see a post transfomratoin beast too so maybe the House of Mouse is an intersection of space and time? That’s.. actually the most resonable answer I can think of honestly and when i’m focusing more on how the hell your gag works than how funny it is, you clearly failed somewhere along the line.

Point is Mickey puts his good friend in a pothole, and not only calls max little max, which while an understnadably close family thing to do is still embarassing, but also takes pictures while their eating the spagetthi.. which i’m 100% sure was Huey’s idea nad had Mickey not interrupted, would’ve been tied up down the middle for a lady and the tramp thing. It’s his signature move. Well that and having a panic attack. That’s also one of mine the others being lettterkenny refrences and sex jokes about disney characters. But yeah this just.. dosen’t work. Them being as embarassing? that’d be fine.. if they weren’t wholly unsympathetic for not only keeping their friend from WELL INTEITONEDLY trying to help his son on his date, something his son shold have no problem with since ROXANNE’S MET HIM. AND IS FINE WITH HIM. AND NEVER CARED ABOUT YOU BEING HIS SON LIKE THE DICKHEADS AT SCHOOL. MINUS BOBBY WHO YOUR FRIENDS WITH FOR SOME REASON. My point is this plot bothers me a lot, and it makes the mickey crew come off like assholes for doing this to thier friend instead of just talking to him like a person. Especially since only ONE of them is a parent and Conviently donald is mostly absent. Likely because he realized this was going to end badly and just agreed to tie the spagetthi like huey taught him to keep his involvment in this shit show and gaslighting his best friend to a minimum.

Eventually Mickey takes things a step too far and has Sebastian almost sing kiss the girl. Max cuts him off though yelling that he just wants them to back off, he just wants them to relax and he TOLD them this, which makes them come off worse as they KNEW he didn’t want this and did it anyway and never apologize becaue apparently the first rule of house of mouse is never apologize for anything, huh huh. Goofy naturally steps in, tells them off and agrees to serve them and Roxanne finds him entertaining and gives him a nose kiss for being a good dad. He’s a good guy that Goof. Roxanne then whispers something in max’s ear at the end of the date... which gives him an audible erection. No really. And given his age is vauge here I’m suddenly super duper uncomfortable so let’s move on.

So max tells them she liked it and wants to come back.. 100% sure that wasn’t what she said but what she said isn’t fit to print and you’ve seen what i’ve said and what I put in the we’ll be right back. Point is he’s happy, though Mickey says we’ll try to make it extra special next time. Mickey.. did you do a space mountain’s worth of pills and cokea nd just forget the entire evening? Did you take some of those hangover roofies/ Why would you do that? Was that pete’s new plan to steal the house of mouse? To drug you guys and make you forget you already paid the rent? Did PJ stop him? Inquiring me wants to know.

Final Thoughts: Yeah this wasn’t a very good episode. Roxanne is wasted despite having a suitable replacment Roxanne voice in Grey Delise, with no real depth just to rehash the plot of the first and second goofy movies. And this one didn’t have an inexpilicable beatnik cafe, PJ getting laid and finally being happy for once, a standard college fraternity plot surgeically infused with an out of nowhere obession with xtreme sports that was nowhere in the first film, Goofy in an afro, Goofy finding love, That disco sequence, and a climax in which Goofy carries Brad Garret out of a fire, then Brad Garret probably kills the villian of the film who certainly deserved it. My points are this episode was an underwhelming rehash only saved by some good shippy moments and a good goofy short. It was weak, not all that funny, and not all that intersting. My other point is that an extremley goofy movie is awesome and also kinda insane and I love it for that. I’m glad I saw this one but i’m really disapointed in how bleh it was. Next time I visit the house of mouse is.. actually in a few days as Pete Does a One Man Show. So yeah already 100% better just by having THAT musical number in it, see you then and if not, there’s always another rainbow.

#house of mouse #max goof #roxanne #the goofy movie #max x roxanne #goofy goof #goofy #donald duck #mickey mouse #minnie mouse #daisy duck #cruella de vil #beast #disney #comissions

64 notes · View notes

heyitsani · 3 years

Text

Loving You is a Losing Game Chapter 3

Word Count: 6194

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Character death (not this chapter)

Pairing: Jason Todd/Dick Grayson

Summary: Something’s there that wasn’t there before...

Notes: Okay, chapter 3 here. If you want to know what their versions of the iconic outfits are, there are links at the bottom of the AO3 post but I’ll link them here too. Just be warned, it’s technically spoilers if you clink the links.

Jace’s jacket (worn with black shirt and no tie) with a pocket square to match Dick’s jacket.

Dick’s jacket (worn with a black shirt and vest, no tie.) sans pocket square.

You can also read it on AO3 here

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Walking down the hall toward the dining room, Dick found himself actually nervous. The castle felt different after last night. After he had learned that Jace was as much of a prisoner as he was, or the others were. After Jace had saved his life. There was something about the man that seemed familiar in the same ways he found something familiar in the others.

But he couldn’t pinpoint what any of it meant. It had only been a few weeks since he had been trapped here and now he was actually viewing the situation in a positive light. He could practically see Bruce’s stoic face judging him and hear Damian telling him to stop being an idiot.

But what if he wasn’t being an idiot?

“Dick,” Wade greeted, holding the door to the dining room open for him. Dick gave his greeting before stepping inside to find Jace already seated at the table with a cup of something still steaming in one hand and a book in the other.

When he spotted Dick, Jace immediately set both items down and stood. “Dick,” the man said, clearly surprised to see him there. “Uh…good morning. Is…is everything okay?” Dick felt his nerves melt away into amusement as he watched Jace glance to Wade and then back to him, almost as if he was trying to figure out exactly what was happening.

“Well, you said I could dine with you when I first arrived,” Dick spoke hesitantly, his nerves sparking just a moment before settling again. He hadn’t really thought his actions through. He had just told Dana he planned to have breakfast with Jace when she had brought his usual tray. She had looked surprised, but immensely pleased at the idea. Jace, on the other hand, just looked completely surprised. “Does that offer still stand or…” He glanced over at Wade who had a hand over his mouth, but his shaking shoulders and eyes told of the smile he was trying to hide.

It took Jace a moment longer before he was able to shake himself out of his surprise and nodded, waving a hand at the various chairs of the long table. “Yes, of course! Please.”

Dick smiled at him before glancing at the options he had. He could sit at the opposite end, but felt like it would defeat the purpose of him coming down here at all. He wanted to get to know Jace. He wanted to know what it was that sparked so much loyalty in the people around him. And he wanted to know what it was that was just so familiar about the man.

So he passed the chair at the end and walked over to the one just to the right of the man. He paused when Jace moved over to pull out the chair for him, surprised at the act but not put off by it. “Thank you,” he said as he sat and Jace helped him scoot the chair in. Within seconds of Jace taking his seat again, Dick’s customary cup of coffee was placed in front of him and he smiled up at Dana in thanks. “Um, so what are you reading?” He asked, looking back to Jace, who was still watching him as if he thought it wasn’t real.

But the question seemed to snap him out of it. “Oh, just Pride and Prejudice,” Jace picked up the book and showed him. “Do you like reading?”

“Are you going to get mad if I say no…?” Dick gave an awkward smile, hiding behind his coffee cup. Jace looked scandalized but then let out a laugh.

“We all have our enjoyments.”

Dick hummed, amused at how much that phrase reminded him of Alfred. “I have never been very good at sitting still long enough to enjoy a good book. My interests lie with physical activity as opposed to mental activity.” Jace nodded and seemed to accept that answer as he took a drink of what Dick could now see was tea. “Is that Earl Grey?” He sniffed the air.

“Good nose,” the man nodded. “Someone important to me introduced me to it a long time ago and I never lost the taste for it.” Just like Alfred had tried with Dick but failed outside of Mint tea. But Jason…Dick quickly scrubbed that thought from his mind and focused on the here and now. Pulling up that grief wouldn’t do him any favors.

Instead, he turned his curious eyes onto Jace and studied the man for a few moments before gathering the courage to ask something he had been wondering for a while. “Can I ask you a question?” Dick asked, drawing the man’s attention back to him and away from the book he had gone back to reading. When he nodded, Dick took a deep breath. “How long have you been here?”

Jace was silent for a while, staring off in the direction of one of the many paintings adorning the walls. “Five years? But I wouldn’t know for certain without knowing the date. I lost track of some of the time. I was alone for a long while before the first person came through the wall.” Kassandra, Dick remembered from what they had told him. Wade had followed shortly. Then Dana and Ryan together. The most recent addition had been Jared, just a teenager, a few days before Bruce had come through.

“Does anyone know you are missing? Is there anyone searching for you?”

“No.”

It was said with such finality that Dick almost flinched. But he didn’t bother asking anything more about it because he could tell when someone didn’t want to talk about something. This was definitely one of those times.

“Would you give me a tour of the grounds after breakfast? Wade and Ryan gave me a tour of most of the inside, but I haven’t seen much of what else is out there,” he said, glancing toward the large windows covering one wall. They looked into the center of the castle, revealing what looked like a maintained garden. And Dick wondered who exactly was the person who took care of all the plants.

When he looked back to Jace, he found the man watching him with a curious look on his face. There was a few more moments of silence between them and Dick wondered if he would be denied the privilege of going outside after what happened yesterday.

“I can show you the grounds, sure,” Jace agreed finally. Dick smiled and nodded, looking out the window again before thanking Dana as she set a plate of food in front of him and another in front of Jace.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sitting on one of the benches on the outer edge of the gardens, not far from the door that would let him back into the castle, Dick watched Jace moving around the beds of various flowers and plants. He had been surprised to learn it was Jace who was the master of the gardens and that the items needed for it just appeared.

Like everything else did apparently.

“The magic provides,” Jace had explained with a shrug when Dick had asked where the food and other items came from. The more he learned about what happened around the castle, the more confused he got. There was so much he didn’t understand, probably would never understand since he wasn’t magic and never would be.

But he didn’t mind the idea of being in a place that could sense a need and provide for it. Which was apparently what had happened in the case of the garden. Jace had wandered out there one day and wondered if he could clean up the area and the next day there were supplies available for him to use.

“You could come help,” Jace called out, smirking from his place kneeling next to a hydrangea plant that had been planted under the shade of a willow tree. He remembered Alfred saying they liked minimal sunlight, always indirect, and he wondered where Jace had learned that from.

Standing and wandering over to the man, Dick leaned against the trunk of the tree. “You don’t want me touching your plants. Unless you would like them to die. I am terrible with them. The green thumb is not something I have ever been accused of having.” Jace laughed and shook his head, leaning back over a patch of weeds he was pulling.

Dick took the moment to let his eyes drift over the shifting muscles he could see under the material of his shirt. He had been doing that a lot recently, watching Jace with eyes that spoke of more than just curiosity. Ever since the night Jace had saved him from the League assassins, he had begun to see Jace as more than just a man holding him here against his will.

And he knew Jace had been doing the same.

There were plenty of moments when he had caught the man watching him, a look he had seen in plenty of eyes in the past. But there was something much more respectful in the way Jace would look at him. Not like the cougars at Bruce’s galas or the people at the bars he would occasionally go to with a teammate or work friend. Jace looked, but he didn’t seem to lust in the way they did. In the way Dick was sure his own gaze relayed. But since Jace had yet to say anything, he figured the man either didn’t care or he didn’t notice.

“Where did you learn to garden?”

Jace froze in mid-pull of a weed before shrugging as he continued to pull the weeds. “A man I knew a long time ago. So long it often feels like it was a different lifetime.”

Dick considered his words, frowning when he realized he didn’t actually know how old Jace was. He just knew the man assumed it had been about five years since he had been brought here by the witch who had casted the magic. But that was it. Dick had assumed he was maybe a handful of years younger than him, but now he wondered if maybe Jace was closer to his age than he thought.

“Do you think you’ll ever get out of here?” The question came out before Dick had time to think about it and it surprised him just as much as it seemed to surprise Jace, given the look on his face when he sat up. “I mean, I assume you don’t want to stay here forever.”

He watched Jace sit back on his heels and look out to the distance. “I used to think about it every day, getting out of here. But it had been a few years since the thought crossed my mind. Even when each of the others arrived, I never had hope of breaking the curse.”

“And now?”

Jace shrugged and Dick felt his heart ache for the man. He had been there long enough and believed no one out in the world was looking for him, so he had resigned himself to this life. To never seeing the outside world ever again.

“I try not to live on hope,” Jace admitted. “I spent a lot of my younger years struggling just to survive and learned the hard way that trusting my fate to someone else can be deadly. I wish I could tell you what you want to hear, Dick. But I do not foresee the circumstances required to get us all out of here. Not even the great Nightwing can swing what the witch required.”

Considering the man for a moment, Dick smiled. “Well, I always live on hope. And a good friend of mine, who is very capable of magic, often tells me that there’s always a loophole.”

Jace narrowed his eyes at him and considered what he said before giving another shrug and going back to his weeds. Dick just remained against the willow tree and observed the man as he worked, silently hoping that Bruce was working on that loophole right then.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“This is ridiculous, you know that right?” Dick laughed softly as Jace led him through the building, his large hands covering Dick’s eyes as they moved. But instead of answering, Jace just chuckled low in his throat and continued to lead Dick. And because Dick knew how to read a room, he stopped trying to get the man to tell him where they were going or to remove his hands from his eyes. It was obviously supposed to be a surprise and since things had been actually friendly between them the past few weeks, Dick knew he wasn’t in any danger.

There was the sound of a door sliding open, a screech of metal on metal and Dick could tell the moment the flooring beneath them changed. A deep breath also indicated a room change by smell. There was something familiar in the scent he took in, but he didn’t have time to pick it apart before Jace was removing his hands and allowing Dick to blink his eyes open.

And what he saw made his jaw drop.

“How…” He took a step forward, taking in the various gymnast equipment pieces scattered around the room. His gaze fell on the trapeze and he swore his heart stopped. He hadn’t flown in months, too busy helping the search for the missing heroes, but his body ached for the feeling. Not just a grapple across the city skyline, but something so much more familiar and freeing. “How did you know?” He turned and looked back at Jace, who had remained near the door with his hands in his pockets.

For a moment the man stood there, brows furrowed in thought and Dick felt confusion fill him. But then the man was shrugging. “One of the others mentioned it. And the magic provided.” And yeah, that made sense. He had talked about his family with a few of the others wandering around. But it didn’t sit right. There was something in the expression before Jace had answered that told Dick perhaps he had known without having to be told.

He didn’t bother pushing the subject though, opting to wander around the room instead and test out some of the equipment. He chalked his hands and pulled himself up onto the rings, testing their strength and range of motion. He could feel the familiar burn in his arms and shoulders, in his core, as he balanced himself on them and did a flip before dismounting with ease.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had taken advantage of the equipment that Bruce had spent thousands on for him when he had been taken in by the man. Or the thousands of dollars he had spent in the following years to upgrade and upkeep all of the equipment. He couldn’t remember the last time he had simply indulged in the feeling of freedom it provided him.

But he could do that now.

There wasn’t anyone expecting anything from him. He didn’t have to put on the suit each night just to fight a battle that he hadn’t started but somehow allowed himself to get sucked into. He didn’t have to set an example to younger brothers in hopes that they didn’t fall to the same fate that Jason had fallen to. He could just be Dick Grayson, the last of the Flying Graysons.

So he did just that. He pulled himself up onto the uneven bars and let his muscle memory take over, indulging in the emotion and freedom of it all.

It felt like coming home. It made this castle behind a wall of magic feel more like home than anything had in a long time. And he had Jace to thank for that. The man who he could see still watching from the entrance out of the corner of his eye.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Try this one with the gold,” Wade shoved a shirt at him, and Dick sighed with a certain fondness as he tugged it on. They had been trying on various shirts and pants for the better part of an hour and while Dick had been plenty satisfied with some of the items, the other man hadn’t been. Nothing had been the right look. But Dick knew when to pick a fight and when not to. This was one of those times it was better to just let the other person do as he saw fit. “Yes!”

Looking at himself in the mirror, Dick took in the black dress shirt he had tucked into the black slacks. It looked nice with the champagne gold jacket, fit him perfectly, but he didn’t see what had sold Wade on this particular one. It wasn’t more special than the others. Although, the jacket was beautiful with its floral embroidery and Dick could tell it was expensive just by the feel and fit. But overall, he had thought some of the other items had been more striking.

But Wade was the one making the decision here so Dick let him do his thing and he just allowed the man to dress him like a Ken doll.

“Here,” the man tugged the jacket off and offered up a black vest for Dick to pull on before putting the jacket back on as well. “Oh yes, perfect.” Glancing over at the bed, Dick felt himself smile at the familiar blue color that made up one of the silk ties that had been discarded fairly early on in the process. Nightwing blue.

A spark of sadness and longing hit his chest before he pushed it away and purposefully didn’t think about what he missed about his old life. He had made a promise and while he missed his family and friends, he was not miserable under the magic here. And Jace…had become something special to him. Dick couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about him. Part of him wondered if the magic made him feel that way, but he also knew that the familiarity he felt couldn’t be carved from nothing. Magic didn’t work that way when it came to emotions.

“You look perfect.” Turning back to look at the mirror again, Dick had to agree. He looked like Richie Grayson. He looked like all the magazine spreads he had been forced to do over the years of being Bruce Wayne’s eldest ward. “He won’t know what hit him.”

Right, because this was a date. Jace had asked him to dinner, even if they couldn’t actually leave the castle grounds. The intention was clear. This was meant to be romantic. And the thought sent butterflies fluttering in his stomach.

“Ready?” Dick looked away from his reflection to face Wade and took a quick moment before nodding.

Without another word, Dick headed out of the room toward the staircase that would take him to where Jason was probably waiting for him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

With a deep breath, Dick descended the stairs that led to the main ballroom of the castle. He had actually belly laughed when he had learned that the castle had an actual ballroom, bent over and everything. He wasn’t sure why he had found it so funny, but it had probably made Jace think he was just a bit insane. Thankfully, it hadn’t deterred the other man from whatever this was they were doing at the moment.

And when Dick had finally laid eyes on the opulent room, he had been breathless. It was like every historical film he had ever seen. Every beautiful piece of architecture in Italy that he had seen over the years. Stunning.

As was the man who was standing at the foot of the stairs talking to Ryan, waiting for Dick to arrive.

They couldn’t go out for a fancy meal and a movie or even just a walk through the city, but Jace had promised that they could still have a night that wasn’t quite like anything Dick had ever experienced. So he had agreed and accepted the invitation. Date his mind reminded him. He was on a date with a man who he was imprisoned with.

How had his life come to this?

The moment Jace spotted him, Dick felt his breath catch in his throat. The blonde locks had been side swept in an artful manner, making them look almost effortlessly windswept. And the deep blue suit coat he wore was tailored perfectly to show off broad shoulders and a trim waist. Much like his own, the fabric of the jacket wasn’t made of just a plain material, but looked to have a design on it, or perhaps pattern was a better description. Whatever the word was, it was a fine piece of clothing and Dick could easily appreciate it.

The same way he could appreciate the champagne gold pocket square the man had tucked in his breast pocket. Wade had planned this, even if he had acted like he hadn’t thought the gold was the right one. The evidence was right in front of him.

“Dick,” Jace greeted as Ryan sent Dick a nod before leaving the room. “You look…” He licked his lips and Dick found his eyes tracing the movement before shifting his gaze back up to the other man’s eyes. “You look perfect.”

Coming to a stop on the final step, setting Dick just over Jace’s own height, Dick smoothed a hand down his chest before resting it against his stomach. “I could say the same for you. That color is very much yours.”

“I find I prefer red, honestly. But blue has its merits.” There was a twinkle of amusement in the man’s eyes and Dick smile, not certain what it meant but enjoying it all the same. “Come on, Dana will have our heads if we take too long and our food goes cold.”

With ease, Dick accepted the offered arm and dropped the last step before walking next to Jace to the corner of the room where a small table had been set up for them. The table itself was decorated with various flowers and lit candlesticks, the cloth covering the table an almost pearl white. Something about it seemed to shimmer under the candlelight and lights above their heads. The plates, white trimmed in gold, were covered with silver covers and hiding whatever whispers of smells Dick was able to pick up. All in all, the set up was romantic but simple. It wasn’t nearly as lavish as he had thought it would be.

And that was just fine by him.

He had suffered through enough terrible and extravagant dates to last a lifetime. It was enough that this date was taking place in a literal castle. He didn’t need all the extra weight of expectations and fancy.

But he still appreciated when Jace led him to his chair and pulled it out for him, allowing him to sit before helping him scoot it in closer. Dick watched the man as he rounded the table and took his own seat, smiling across at Dick before looking over as Dana appeared with a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice.

Jace took the bottle from her and easily uncorked it with a pop before stand and moving over to fill Dick’s glass and then his own. Once the bottle was back in the chilling bucket and Jace had taken his seat again, Dick took up his glass and raised to toward Jace.

“To us?”

Jace let out a snort and raised his own glass. “To beginnings and possibilities.” Dick grinned and gave a nod, accepting that he had been beat. But he had never been very good with romance, despite his numerous relationships.

“I am curious what a castle thinks date-food is,” Dick commented, reaching for the cover over his food but found himself stopped when a hand appeared out of nowhere. Looking up, he found Dana giving him a stern look as she removed the cover herself and went over to take Jace’s off his plate as well. Glancing down, he had to smile at the items waiting for him. Just an appetizer then.

“A birdie told me it was your favorite,” Jace commented, smirking behind his glass as Dick looked up at him. Dick chuckled before picking up his cutlery.

Once the last of their plates had been taken away and they were left with just their champagne glasses between them, Dick took the time to glance around the room again and really take in the beauty of it. The faint music playing in the room just made it even more beautiful. A work of art.

His musings were interrupted when a hand appeared in front of his face, jerking him back into the present and pulling his attention to the fact that he had completely missed Jace getting out of his seat and walking over to him.

“Can I have this dance?” Dick raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What? I have learned a few things from the others and there isn’t much else to do for a date here. Isn’t it what would be done in the times when a place like this was alive and well?” And yeah, Jace made some good points.

So Dick accepted the offered hand and let Jace lead him to the middle of the room, watching the man curiously. There was only a moment of hesitation before Jace was slipping his hand around Dick’s waist and keeping a grip on his hand. Dick easily followed suit, placing his hand on Jace’ shoulder and looking up at the man. He sent a silent thanks to the ballroom dancing lessons Bruce had insisted on when he was younger. Definitely not the manner that the man had intended the knowledge to be put to use, but it was far more pleasurable to Dick than the stupid galas he had attended in the past.

When the chords of a new song struck, Jace swept them up into the movement. He took the lead easily and Dick found it almost effortless to follow it. It felt like breathing. Like everything seemed to feel these days now that he had accepted that Jace was just as much a prisoner as he was. If they were to be stuck here for an unknown amount of time, they might as well enjoy it together.

“You’re very good at this,” Jace commented, pulling Dick from his wandering thoughts. Smiling up at the man, Dick gave a shrug but offered no explanation as to why he knew how to hold his own. “Fine, keep your secrets,” he teased and Dick laughed.

“I need to keep some air of mystery about me, don’t I?”

Jace hummed and released Dick so he could spin him back to him and Dick found his breath stolen the moment he pressed back into the man’s solid chest. Hard lines from chest to hip pressed against each other in a way that was possibly more sensual than most sexual situations. And the look on Jace’s face told Dick all he needed to know in regard to how the other man was feeling right then.

He wasn’t alone in this feeling, whatever it was that was building between them.

It had been growing for weeks. Since that night in the woods. And it felt different than anything Dick had experienced in the past. Not with Kori or Babs. Not with any of the people he had attempted to date in the past. This was…he couldn’t quite put a word to what it was. It was strong and it was almost tangible. Like he could touch the air between them.

But really, he just wanted to touch Jace.

They took another spin around the room as the song switched to another, the piano and strings playing a beautiful tune. Dick licked his lips as he watched Jace’s face. Though the man was looking at him, Dick could tell he was well aware of where they were and what they were doing. While Dick couldn’t care less of what was happening around them in that moment.

Sliding his hand across Jace’s shoulder, Dick let his fingers dance up the back of Jace’s neck and into the small hairs on the back of his neck. He wanted to push up and close the distance between their lips, but he also didn’t want to break this moment. It felt important, it felt right. Like everything had purposefully been leading them to this exact moment and they needed to treat it with care. Dick needed to be sure that he wouldn’t ruin it the way he had ruin so many others. Because that was the only explanation, wasn’t it? He was the common denominator.

“Dick,” Jace’s soft voice called to him, once again pulling him away from his thoughts. “I need to ask you something.” Blinking, Dick refocused on Jace and gave a nod to tell the man to ask what he needed to. When Jace stopped their movement and Dick noticed they were now outside on one of the terraces, he felt a familiar sense of foreboding filling him. Whatever it was the Jace had to say, Dick wasn’t sure he was going to like it.

But he kept silent as Jace took a deep breath and led Dick to the railing, sitting on it and Dick following suit. “Are you…are you happy here?” Dick frowned. Jace hadn’t questioned his happiness in all the months he had been there. He hadn’t asked if there was anything he could do to make things better. Because he had just done them. He had just seemed to know what it was Dick needed in order to make his time there more tolerable.

“I am,” Dick answered, even though the thought of Bruce, Damian, and Tim filled his mind and made him frown.

Jace must have noticed because he leaned forward and covered Dick’s hand with his own. “Are you really? You don’t look very happy right now.”

Sighing, Dick looked out toward the wall of magic sizzling in the distance. “I miss my family, my friends,” he admitted before looking back to Jace. “I am happy with you and the others. But I can’t help but miss my life out there as well.”

Jace watched him with those penetrative green eyes for a moment before standing and tugging Dick, silently asking him to do the same. Nothing was said as Jace pulled Dick through the castle toward the familiar wing where Dick’s inability to quell his curiosity had changed everything.

“Jace?” Dick finally questioned as they entered the room that looked more destroyed than his mind remembered. He wondered if Jace had done the damage after Dick had run away from him that night. But he didn’t have time to ask as Jace led him to the table where the basin of green glowing liquid sat filling the room with its sickly glow. The watch still sitting protected in the glass case.

Jace dropped Dick’s hand and reached for the basin, picking it up carefully and turning toward Dick. “This can show you anything you wish to see. You just have to ask.”

Frowning, Dick furrowed his brows and looked down at the liquid. How could something as ominous looking as this liquid show him what he really desired to see? Looking back up at Jace, the man gave him an almost sad smile before nodding toward the basin. So Dick trusted him and took the object, careful of the liquid inside.

“I wish to see my family,” he said softly, hesitantly. What would it reveal to him? Would Bruce be with Alfred, trying to find a way through the wall? Would Damian and Tim be with the Titans on a mission like they had been when Dick had come into this world?

But as the liquid began to swirl and shift, Dick found himself looking at a scene that had his heartrate spiking. Bruce was dressed in his Batman gear, just beyond the outer edge of the wall of magic, and surrounded by the familiar footmen of the League of Assassins. Leaning forward, Dick watched with bated breath as the ninjas got in blow after blow.

“Bruce!” He gasped when one of the assassins seemed to get the upper hand and Bruce fell to his knees. Looking up at Jace with wide eyes, Dick saw the man had turned his back on him. “We need to help him! I need to help him. He can’t die! He’s the only one who could get us out of here. Please.”

He watched Jace’s back expand with a deep breath and then his shoulders droop as he released it. And when he turned to look at Dick, he knew exactly what it was Jace was feeling. Resignation. Dick had seen it in the mirror too many times to count. Had felt it far too many times and in relation to too many people.

“Then you must go,” Jace whispered, looking down at the basin. He reached out and took the basin without looking back to Dick and Dick wondered what he was supposed to do. But remembering that Bruce was out there right now, he didn’t ask the questions he wanted to ask. He didn’t question how he would be able to leave now when he hadn’t been allowed to before. Instead he moved forward and pressed his lips to Jace’s cheek before hurrying out of the room and toward his own to change into the waiting Nightwing suit.

It was only fear and experience that allowed him to work quickly in removing the dress clothes he currently wore and tug on the skin tight suit he hadn’t worn since the night he had come here. He rushed out of the room as he hooked his escrimas into their latches on his back and ran as quickly as he could toward the front door. The door where Jace stood waiting for him.

“Take this.” The man held out a vial of the green liquid and Dick knew exactly what he was offering. A way to see Jace after he had left. They couldn’t be together if Dick was in the real world, but they could see each other.

So Dick closed his hand around Jace’s and took the vial, holding on for a moment longer. “Thank you,” Dick whispered, hoping his eyes conveyed what he couldn’t say. “I’ll come back for you, all of you. I’ll find a way.” But Dick could tell Jace didn’t believe he would. He didn’t care though, Dick knew he would do whatever he could to save the man he had fallen in love with and the people he now considered to be his friends.

He would.

But right then he had a father figure and mentor to help save. So he tucked the vial in a protective pocket and gave Jace one last look before he rushed out the doors and straight toward the wall of magic. He was slightly surprised when no assassins came to try and stop him, but he didn’t think about it too much as he came into contact with the wall and began pushing his way through.

It felt just as malicious as it had the first time, cold and void of hope. It was consuming. And then it was over and Dick was left gasping on the other side of it and suddenly in the midst of chaos.

Immediately ducking out of the way of a punch, Dick grabbed his escrimas and turned them on as he leapt into the fight. “Batman!” Dick called out as he got close enough to help eliminate the assassins attacking the hero.

“Nightwing…?” The man seemed frozen, for once allowing his emotions to catch him off guard. But Dick didn’t have time for that as he worked his way through the now thinning assassins. They seemed to be backing off the closer Dick got to Bruce and Dick had to wonder what that could possibly mean. It would have to be something he figured out later though because the moment he reached Bruce, the last of the assassins had backed off and slid back into the shadows they hid in so well.

“Are you hurt?” Dick gasped, turning to help Bruce to his feet. But the man didn’t seem to have pulled himself out of his stupor just yet. “Batman!” He snapped, trying to get Bruce to come back to his senses. The tone seemed to work as Bruce shook himself and immediately looked Dick over.

“How? How did you escape?”

“I didn’t. I was allowed to leave.”

But Bruce didn’t seem to understand, looking back at the wall of magic with a frown.

“It doesn’t matter right now. Let’s get back to the cave.” With a firm nod, Bruce came back to himself and led them over to the batmobile that was hiding just out of the way. Dick gave the wall of magic one last glance, touching the spot where the vial Jace had given him was hiding, before following Bruce.

#jaydick #jason todd #dick grayson #beauty and the beast au #anikah writes

8 notes · View notes

taiblogcomics · 3 years

Text

King of The Hill

Hey there, stinky pets. This is the last thing in my backlog stack! It's been a while, but next week we'll have to go back to the New 52. But that's a problem for future me. In the meantime, we still have one more issue of Red Hood to get through~

Here's a cover:

And I did mean Red Hood! Yeah, starting with this issue, it's Outlaws no more. Oh good, because you know what made the previous issues all readable? The other characters! Roy, Starfire, Artemis, Bizarro... Those are the characters we cared about when Jason was insufferable. But now it's a solo series for Jason! Oh boy, I bet that won't be terrible! Anyway, this seems more like an advert than a cover. Maybe it's the text. I'm not sure. Otherwise, Croc is promising (though his human ears are weird), metal mask guy is not, and I'm neutral on fancy lady with stick. Let's see if the comic can convince us on any of them~

So we open with a news broadcast about the "Joker War" event, wherein our anchorperson says, I kid you not, "After another unnecessary event, Gotham exhales again". My god, they're becoming self-aware. Now if only they'd stop making the unnecessary events, it'd actually be worth remarking on. What we really open with are some masked dudes preparing a hit on a shipment coming in from the docks. They all have African tribal masks as their gang motif. Fortunately, they're stopped by another vigilante gang, whose motif is American football. Wow, Gotham's gone really downhill in inspiring criminal motifs lately~

The next morning, Jason Todd moves back into town. Specifically, into the Gotham neighbourhood called “The Hill”, which has been particularly crime-riddled of late. He picks up an apartment a friend of his has been watching for twelve years, and it's kind of a shithole. Meet Dana Harlowe, she's the lady with the stick from the cover. She's actually sisters with the news anchor we saw earlier. But that's not important right now.

Instead, we cut over to an exchange of a shakedown racket between some guys. The guy pays his protection, and the gangsters leave as another guy comes in. This other guy is Thomas Misell, and he's described as "the white Kanye". Except that instead of music, he's more of a clothing designer. And he gets all his design inspiration from Batman's foes. He's here to show off the design for his new Killer Croc sneakers for this guy to sell, and that's really about it.

We get a brief interlude of Jason and Dana getting food from a truck, while Jason comments on how different Gotham is now. She comments that it hasn't been easy, and a lot of them had to stick together. As they eat, they pass by the gangster guy who was just collecting from Misell's friend. But it turns out he's also Misell's friend! Essentially, Misell's feeding him money from his sales, which he uses to buy weapons in service of his gang war. They otherwise pretend not to know each other. He's now recently acquired some sort of laser gun, and he warns Misell to keep away from super types.

That night, it all kinda breaks loose. Misell doesn't listen to his friend and hires Killer Croc (Croc's price is a cut of any him-themed merch and a tailor-made suit). Then, a few moments later, the guy whose store was shaken down earlier (his name is Gudda), his store explodes. This is because the football vigilante from earlier (who's named Strike) blew it up. Before the gangster guy can react, Killer Croc, dressed sharply in his new suit, busts in with Misell in tow. Misell has now stamped "GOTHAM" into his forehead and is calling himself "Tommy Maxx" now. He says he's here to teach idiots how it's done. Good, can he start with the writers, please~?

Now, I made that jab at the writers, but only because it was an easy line. Fact is, this is actually a major change in the writing department too. Scott Lobdell has written pretty much the entirety of Red Hood right from the beginning, with the exception of issues #19-31 of the original run. Other than that, it’s been pretty much all Lobdell all the time. And honestly, I’m not a big fan. Let’s hope the new writing team can inject an actual reason to care into this book~

Other than that, though, this book feels like some serious set-up. I mean, Jason’s in it for less than half the pages. All the rest is for building up these new characters: the gangster dude, Tommy Maxx, and Dana (who is pretty clearly being telegraphed as also being the vigilante Strike). She’s interesting, but the others are not, particularly Tommy Maxx. I’m not into these books to read your new villain OC. I wanna see more of Killer Croc, who it’s nice to see in a book other than Suicide Squad for a change. He’s still great here.

I guess we’ll have to see where it goes, if anywhere. But, like I said, not next week. Next week we return to more New 52 junk and the total slog that is The Ravagers~

#comics #reviews #Red Hood and the Outlaws #Red Hood #Taiblog

8 notes · View notes

thattimdrakeguy · 4 years

Note

I’m writing this fic about the Batfamily and I’m afraid of writing them as OOC. If you are able to, could you please give some tips on each of the Batfam’s personalities and characteristics? To specify, Dick, Jason, Tim, Steph, Cass, Babs, Damian, and Duke are the characters I’m using. It would be really helpful! Thank you!!

This is a tricky question, because I don’t know the story of your fic to help you in any specific way. So if after this you wanna DM me for more specific help on how to work things out, I’ll be there to help you right away unless I’m doing something, but I have no plans.

I’m going to go from easiest for me to do to least easiest, because I obviously know Tim the best, but even then, it’s hard, because going off the character’s you are choosing, it’s set during the part of the timeline were he went OOC, but I’ll do my best just to say his general character so you can use that as a base for things. Like how he was developed in his origin and all that, and notable characteristics he’s had as he grew while still in character. With some that even if they weren’t around with some of those characters, would apply to them.

His is also going to be the longest, like way too long, because he’s a way more nuanced and complex character than anyone ever gives him credit for. So he takes a lot longer to explains by a freaking large margin. Like sorry if it’s too big, I just kept saying more as more came to mind because I feel like his nuances are what makes him interesting and easy to right. Once you get a hang of his nuances, and you get used to it, it makes it easier to put yourself into his mindset to how he works, which makes him easier to write as well.

(THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY LONG POST, AND I APOLOGIZE. I just really wanted to be thorough and give contexts to stuff. It’s less of tips and more of an overly long description of what I know about each character and what’s in-character and what’s not going off of how the character’s were developed to be, and not counting the out of character writing. So really sorry about this being so freaking long)

Tim:

Tim’s origin right off the back is having met Dick at a very very young age, I don’t think he could even strongly walk yet, so I’mma say three. He was instantly attached to Dick, he just admired him instantly just for giving him affection. He was his hero. But he was also there the day Dick’s parents died, which traumatized Tim and gave him nightmares for years. But being able to remember that night so thoroughly, he remembered a specific move that Dick could do that very few could, and that’s how he found out Dick was Batman, and logically, Bruce Wayne was Batman.

There’s a large misconception that as a little kid, Tim followed Batman and Robin around, but that was not the case. At least not physically and literally followed them around. Closest being when I believe he happened to come across Batman in his origin story, and purposely did his best detective work to figure out where Dick would be.

As shown several times but most strongly in his origin, but wasn’t as strong the more he went on, he’s sort of socially oblivious to what’s considered normal or not, or what other people are thinking of him.

For instance he just knocked on Starfire’s and Dick’s apartment, asked Kori (Starfire) if Dick was home because he needed his help, and when she said no, just bolted even when Kori asked his name. Just concerning the crap out of her. Even when he first met Dick, he just wouldn’t say his name because “NO TIME”, he just squirmed around place to place on his bike being completely oblivious of himself. In his first miniseries he searches up information on Clyde (a former government agent he saved and befriends) that he shouldn’t have, unaware that that’d obviously be crossing a line for some people. Even taking his girlfriend to a car show, where there was a lot of bikini models around, and it didn’t even occur to him what it’d look like he was there for. He was just genuinely bubbly to see the cars.

He doesn’t do any of those sorts of things out of malice, he’s always just presented as being incredibly oblivious of himself quite a bit. Most likely from not having his parents around that much as his childhood progressed, and typically just living in boarding schools, or with a nanny. So he didn’t really developed right as one interpretation, and another being (that was actually almost confirmed if it wasn’t for Tim getting a writer before another could say it) is that he’s on the Autism spectrum. Which is technically verified, as he has many symptoms of Asperger’s. But that isn’t technically canon, as it never got to be officially said. But it’s valid enough.

Tim’s main strength is his detective work, he also knows how to use a computer to his advantage. Many modern comics act as if Tim is a master hacker who could hack into anything. But he actually mostly used them for detective work, and small hack jobs, some of which he failed. He seemed to have learned more about hacking from Barbara, or at least some what implied, as Babs let him help her build a big computer, or something of that sort.

He also took karate as a kid, and is implied to have also taken gymnastics. It’s stated that he’s actually really good at gymnastics by Alfred in Tim’s origin, but his fighting skills, despite the karate lessons he had previously taken, isn’t as good as the others. Hence his staff, and having to be clever in how he goes about a fight.

How Tim operates as far as emotionally or mentally depends too. Sometimes he’ll go straight from the heart and get himself in trouble, but other times he’ll take his time to really plan something out for himself on the spot. It depends on how his emotions are at the time. If he was just picked on or beat up, he’ll be more agitated, and if something really really bad that happened, he just go so far in he just beats the crap out of everyone as bad as he can. As shown by trying to apprehend someone that shot someone he knew at school, or Batman betraying his trust (in an honestly out of character story). If he’s calmer though, or at least doing his best to be, he’ll use his brain more before he starts. I think his talents in planning have been overstated for ages, because while he’s good at it, he’s not exactly the greatest or overall good. Just enough to work fine enough to get the job done.

One of his biggest mental weakness’s, is his constant insecurity. Somethings that’s so constantly on his mind is letting someone down, rather it be Batman or his dad Jack, or even Nightwing, or his team. The reason why Tim acted so different and more of a seriously brooding personality in Young Justice, was because he was so insecure about not having powers that he thought he had to push himself to his limits. So he used some Batman leadership tactics, and fought harder than he ever fought before just to seem like he was even worth having around. When by himself though, it’s more of a sadness, an upset feeling in his gut. Tim has anxiety about things, rather or not he’s good enough. He’s not a super confident person when it comes to himself. He doesn’t think much of him.

One editorial person answering fan questions in the back of comics as they used to, even described Tim as meek. He doesn’t brag or think much of himself as super according to it.

He’s also stated and shown to be internally scared quite a bit, even shaking when he first got his own Robin suit. Another occasion saying the cold water might excuse his shivering. Which goes along with his anxiety.

Another thing about him that is more low-key and not as noticed, is how Tim, even though he clearly thinks of himself as a kid, heck even the letter column above says so, he has also said since being Robin he’s never had time to be a kid. But he is also still a kid.

As they specified his voice a bit more, he tended to use heck, Holy crud, dang, fudge, weenie, and even Pus Bucket (a reference to Ghost Busters) as his choice of cussing (if that even remotely counts).

And even if it’s not noticeable at first, is shown as having a secret teddy bear that he kept hidden under his mattress so I assume no one would see it.

He’s also a pretty innocent kid despite what all he sees. His mind doesn’t go to the gutter. He trusts people far faster than he should, even trusting Lady Shiva, the world’s most dangerous woman and know criminal right away.

Even Tim’s step-mother saying so out-loud. Showing that this is also the case in his personal life as well.

It also goes along with his social obliviousness. This stuff being rounded into not having any street smarts, which was a main theme for Tim directly in his first miniseries. As well as being naive.

Of course as life went on that wasn’t the case as much, but in the above screenshot, Dana (his step-mom) is saying that as Tim is already 16.

Tim in-general also being a super hero fanboy. As a kid he watched the news, clipped out the papers on them, collected, and even drew his own Batman art (and potentially) others to put on his wall.

Tim’s general behavior while socializing also depends on his emotions at the time. He’s normally very nice and friendly, when not super depressed or down on himself he’s bubbly. But he’s also still a kid, he can pout when he’s hurt, and passive aggressive to people he doesn’t like. Examples being, literally not listening to a jock that picks on his friends, an over-arrogant jerk he met in France, and even Steph because she kept being reckless and flirting with him when he didn’t like it.

Nothing straight up insults, but just generally passive aggressive, give them a clue he doesn’t like them very much even if it never worked. He just wants them to go away, unless they’re a straight up bully. Tim, if it’s no one he specifically knows that will invade his personal life, will beat up bullies. He really can’t stand a bully.

Another thing about Tim is that even though he’s an introvert typically, he’s also not very shy. A shy kid wouldn’t travel miles on a bike (and I freaking hope busses) to meet someone he barely knows because he believes in Batman needing a Robin. He also stands up to bullies, and unless he’s really uncomfortable could talk to about anyone. He even slept in only his briefs and undershirt in the house of someone he doesn’t know, with two people he also barely knows. With that example also probably adding up to the socially oblivious part of his personality.

As far as his relationships go, he canonically thinks of the Bat-Family as his family. Dick calls Tim his little brother, Babs treats Tim as her baby brother as well as acting like his/ Aunt/ Mom depending on the situation (I think Tim fell asleep on her couch after eating pizza while using his cape as a blanket and drooling. So Mom’s a stretch but still), Bruce is his distant but still father figure, Alfred is his grandpa (who he actually plays video games with), even Cass to an extent treating Tim as a baby brother as well.

He is very much the baby of the family. And Tim talks to them about personal stuff (bar Cass cause he was scared of her in the beginning), most of them from Alfred and Dick, to the mute hunchback in the Batcave Harold (who is a real character and I love him). He was always collecting advice from where ever he could get it.

He’s also intensely morally operated. He hates killing. He said he took an oath to let himself be killed before ever killing, getting PTSD from feeling responsible for a death, and even crying when he had genuinely thought Bruce killed someone.

As far as how he tries to present himself, he is constantly doing his best to take everything as seriously as he can, even shunning himself when he starts to stop taking things as serious, he wants to be seen as serious, trustworthy, and reliable desperately so he doesn’t let anyone down. He is constantly hard of himself, and is always trying to be what he thinks Batman wants him to be. Which is were a lot of his anxieties from. Even trying to think of what Batman or Dick would do because he regards them so highly. Even calling Bruce the great man he’s ever known I believe during one of his post-origin pre-Robin appearances.

He’s naive and oblivious of himself, as well as childish in some areas (I think his nanny yelled at him once for it), but overall what he tries to hardest at is taking everything seriously as possible, and using his brain as much as he can. He may not be the most mature, often actually handling situations very immaturely, but he does his best to at least seem like he’s mature, and to an extent he actually can be genuinely very mature, or at least as much as a naive oblivious child can be.

Dick:

This ones a lot shorter probably, because I don’t read him as much, but still have a good handle on him.

I think he’s a character very few always write correctly, because they ride too much into the friendly, compassionate guy. Which, compassion being his main motivator in how he goes about as much as he can, and he’s incredibly friendly, he’s also a very angsty and angry person deep down.

He’s a perfectionist, a trait fics tend to give to Tim more, but actually belongs to Dick. He gets really hard on himself when he thinks he messed something up badly, having nightmares over it, he doesn’t like himself when he messes up something badly. And even if he’s not a naturally angry person, when he is angry, he can be VERY VERY angry.

And until Batman writers in the early 00s started it, I wouldn’t even had considered him all that chatty. He had some jokes in him, was very light hearted when not in distress or mad, but as he was developed by Marv Wolfman, who basically created the Dick that has remained the base for him ever since, he was relatively a generally calm guy when he wasn’t emotional.

He was polite, a charming guy, the type of person you want to bring home to your parents basically. He dressed well. Did his best to keep people accommodated.

He wasn’t a goofy, constant jokester that’d talk your ear off or keep begging for hugs.

He’s not that kind of guy. He’s just a gentlemen.

He’s also not that much of a thot. He’s a “wait till it’s right” sort of guy when it comes to sex.

He’d do anything in the world he could to make sure his friends felt right too, and that they were okay.

But all this doesn’t mean he’s not just a one note personality. Depending on how bad he feels like he messed up, he’ll distance himself from people, stop caring as much about his appearance, get more violent and mean. He also doesn’t take well to Batman’s nonsense, he’s probably the person he got specifically mad at the most. He didn’t like the way Batman went about stuff after a while. He had complicated feelings towards him.

Despite people nowadays just thinking of Dick being Batman’s son officially, adopted, end of. That wasn’t exactly their relationship. Dick had a complicated relationship with Bruce. Part of him looked at Bruce as a big brother, and another half a dad, and he wasn’t even adopted, just a ward. Something that Dick was actually quite insecure about, till apparently he got adopted as a grown adult man (which I dunno is true or an edit, but I’ve seen it somewhere).

Dick’s relationship with Tim is pure big bro baby bro. He was very protective of Tim, calling him the closest thing to a brother he ever had, and little brother, before they were ever even officially brothers. He’d push Tim out of the way in times of big trouble, make him stand back, ruffled his hair all the time, and loved teasing him. But when they started off, Dick just sort of thought Tim was a weird annoying kid, given that Tim was acting so screwy during his origin, Dick really didn’t know what to make of him, but the closer they got, they got very very close. Dick cared a lot about Tim a ton once they got accommodated. Tim would even call Dick on the phone just to talk to him about anything from his day to his problems. Tim could count on Dick to help when ever he could. Tim was Dick’s dweebie baby brother who he took care of when needed. Even teaching Tim how to wash clothes personally since Tim didn’t have a clue.

I don’t think him and Jason really had a relationship. He gave him a number to talk about stuff like Robin angst, and a few pics show they hanged out at least once or twice, but nothing suggests they were close. It seems like Dick was hard on himself, because Jason died before they could get close. After the Red Hood, Dick’s just kind of a-- dick to Jason, and Tim was too, but I don’t consider that in-character. Neither Tim nor Dick would be even remotely okay about the killing, but I can’t picture them treating him like he’s a joke and less than trash. Too much emotional baggage there. Tim would be distant to Jason, and Dick would be uncomfortable and conflicted. That’s my guesses on a more accurate relationship.

Dick’s always had a really big crush on Babs ever since he was a kid to the point they were stuck in a small area together and Dick lost dignity over-- I dunno, puberty effecting him. There’s no way I can put that that’s comfortable. But Dick has a crush on Babs, that got put into a romantic relationship both ways when they aged down Babs, but for some people the relationship is relatively gross because of the age gap, and feeling the need to age down a character like Babs, who just looked at Dick like a kid, to just date him. It’s complicated, and I dunno enough about them besides that exactly. I’m not the guy to ask on that.

He doesn’t have a proper relationship with either Duke or Steph, but it doesn’t seem like Dick’s ever been the fondest of Steph. And Duke’s new, and they only ever been around each other in fan service moments. So I don’t think he has a real actual relationship with Duke.

Dick and Cass despite I don’t think ever being shown much together, also had a sweet relationship. With Dick doing his best to make sure his sister (before she was adopted, but Dick treated her as one nevertheless much like Tim as Dick’s baby brother) was comfortable, acting goofy, and to me coming across as if he’s always really wanted a sister. But they weren’t super close, but there’s enough there to say that they easily could become close.

Dick and Damian was mentor mentoree, and to a large extent Dick was Damian’s father figure as Bruce was dead. As written by Damian’s creator, Dick didn’t seem to like Damian at all in the beginning, but as Dick could realize and understand his responsibilities more, they did gain a closer bond. Dick would put Damian in line (besides when bad writers were too afraid to make Damian seem like he’s in the wrong fully), sometimes even the hard way, and could be very proud of him. They aren’t big bro little bro like how some current writers act for pandering purposes. But they did grow to be close, even if Damian’s naturally really emotionally distant. Dick always wanted the best for Damian, even if he couldn’t always handle it the right way or knew what to do. He was a guy in his early to mid 20s with the responsibilities of reraising a 10 year old kid that was raised and abused by a cult, who can blame him.

Damian

I’m kind of just getting Damian out of the way, because to be frank, he’s been a really crappily written character since his origin, because he personality just absolutely switches between every writer, and he’s just so badly written that way.

But I’ll go off of what I believe to be what his writer wanted, since that’s the most accurate you can get.

Damian was raised and abused in a cult. That dictates a lot of how he thinks.

He was not close to his mother (which is out of character for Talia, and they later switched that after the reboot, but to be frank if Talia was always in-character Damian wouldn’t exist as we know him. He’d be a total different person and character). And he seemed to despise the way his dad goes about things. He seemed very indifferent and had his mood set to angry in general when he first met.

Which made it all the weirder when an issue later Damian seems to want his parents to be together, despite making it clear he doesn’t even like or think much of either one of them at all.

He was also very entitled, because despite being treated as an experiment some of the time, he was also treated as a prince the other half of the time. He thought the world was his, and he deserved everything.

He nearly killed Tim because he thought he deserved being Robin, as Tim was just adopted and not a “real” son. Seemingly he thought that was what he had to do to have his dad accept him and treat him as he thought he should.

He also seems to think he’s above Jason as well.

He’s also shown as sexist and homophobic.

He was brash and reckless about everything. Had a talented in just about everything just because of how he was raised, and goes off on his own to do stuff, because I assume he thinks everyone else holds him back.

After Dick though, Damian learned to not be a murderer (which I also think he might’ve learned before cause he wants to live with Bruce, It’s a little weird and not given enough time to actually be developed fully in an easy to digest way. Which is another reason why I think he’s such a poorly written character), also more reserved, and reckless.

As he was originally intended, he was very tall and not cute. His height being around 5′2 to 5′4 at age 10. Meaning he was an inch taller than Tim was at 13 when Damian was 10 off of that first one, and only an inch shorter than Tim at the age he met him, where Tim was 17 going on 18. It may not be drawn that way, but you also have to remember this is 00s and beyond era DC Comics were Tim despite being described as looking 12 got drawn as big as Dick sometimes. Don’t always use the art to go off of certain information. I say he wasn’t intended to be cute, because there’s a scene were he was at a gala, where a woman clearly wanting to gold-dig Gotham City’s most eligible Bachelor Bruce Wayne by getting close to her son, but she immediately backed away when she saw him.

Which sounds harsh, but Damian’s also basically the “anti-Robin”, he was everything a Robin wasn’t meant to be and he was intended to just die and that’s it. Hence why he was with Dick to keep the Batman and Robin dynamic intact, just in reverse. As you can see, they completely forgot what made Damian interesting when his character gained some consistency with his creator.

Damian’s development was that he grew a actual caring heart even if he still carried the generally same personality. He was dismissive of people, sexually harassed Steph, was generally anti-social-esque.

And honestly because every writer after (even the one everyone seems to think is his best writer, which I massively agree times a billion and infinite more) just kept reverting him, again and again, even when they wrote stories with character development, it was gone again. And applied a whole bunch of traits that aren’t like Damian in the slightest, so if you pay attention. Ya can tell Damian’s not Damian, he’s literally not even a shell of his self. They just painted another one to look kind of like him, and even then they don’t do that because he freaking looks completely different some of the time. They botched him so much.

But that was the main thing about Damian.

I think one reason he got close to Dick and no one else was because Damian from his origin (no matter how poorly written they showed it), always wanted to have a proper parent. Which it seemed he could never have. And Dick grew to serve that purpose, as Dick was the one teaching him lessons, and making sure he was actually safe.

But of course later on DC Comics literally forgot everything that was letting him slowly become a better character. So that sucks.

I partially came into this fandom because of Damian. So when I actually got to read him, I was so freaking miserable after. I genuinely wanted to like him so bad, even voicing that to people I was chatting too as I read the comics, but I literally just couldn’t see why anyone cared for his comics. I don’t think any of them are fully well-written.

But it did help me grasp what Damian’s suppose to be like as I could tell what he’s suppose to be and not suppose to be, much like how I learned about Tim’s actual personality vs the one writers that don’t care about him write.

Steph

Just doing this one to get a more negatively centered one out of the way, because I struggle to find any personality traits I deem actually likable when put under context.

Because she’s full of her self, reckless, cynical, more or less sexually harassed Tim, kissing him against his wishes (and before ya say Tim did that first. it’s a little less offensive when Tim didn’t do it sexually or romantically. That was just for a dumb trope. A reward kiss. It’s still gross, but it’s a different context that’s less directly offensive), goes behind people’s backs sometimes, can be emotionally abusive, and shows signs of physically abusive.

So I don’t exactly find her super likable. And her spot in the Bat-Family was so contrived, that often nowadays I just don’t pay attention her anymore, but in fairness a lot of that’s just cause she has crazy stans that start fights that were barely there, be hypocritical, and group bully folks. So it’s relatively hard for me to wanna look at her these days.

But to be more specific before she seems like an actual freaking demon woman or what ever. Some of that doesn’t come across as bad compared to what it could be. Besides the emotional abuse, that was just a thing and the comics and people just elected to ignore it even though that was written by her creator.

She’s reckless in a way where she clearly doesn’t have proper training to make sure no one or herself gets hurt. She’s been shown causing herself to get hurt or underestimate stuff. She also doesn’t listen to people that know more about what they do, and she usually relies on luck to get by.

She’s full of herself, because she more or less says she’s an adrenaline junkie, and might just be beating up bad guys because she finds it really fun and exciting. She likes the thrill. And tries to put a title of super hero on herself sometimes, because she tries to seem heroric as she does it. She also does it to make up for her dad, which is more admirable, but behavior wise and focus wise it’s more pinned on her just being an adrenaline junkie.

She also just constantly just flirt with Tim even when he didn’t want it. Which is what sexual harassment is. She also kissed him for her own satisfaction twice, once nearly getting them both killed cause people were shooting at them, and another as them and other people were close to freezing to death because they were stuck under snow. That kind of behavior able to be under sexual assault given the context for her kisses was just for herself. Even the time she tried to say it was to make up for Tim’s reward kiss, she quickly makes it obvious it was just because she’s very sexually attracted to him.

She also just nearly lets criminals die a lot because “What’s one more life”, and seems to not care much for the lesson of not killing, specifically her dad. Like she still has the moral standard not to kill, but compared to the others it’s not one she takes as serious. She learned her lesson on being cynical, but it’s still ingrained in her personality.

I also have a whole very long post on why her relationship with Tim doesn’t work, and how she was abusive. I don’t feel like going over that again but that’s a thing.

Besides Tim she has no real relationship with the others besides Cass, which is another relationship I don’t fully understand, because Steph borderline insults her, and Cass thinks she gets in the way so much she just fractures Steph’s jaw to knock her out. They gave them some admittedly cute moments, but it’s never felt right to me. Always felt forced and pandery, but it’s a thing. They’ve played tag each other, and talked about how both of their parents are abusive.

She also had one with in Batgirl, but the best I can describe that is, she helps Steph so she doesn’t hurt herself, and she can be pretty gruff sometimes, but is also caring. it’s just kind of a been there done that sort of thing.

A lot of Batgirl is sort of forced. Bat-Family has reasonable criticisms of her, writer does something to make them more unlikable so readers still like Steph, Steph proves them wrong, they respect her. It’s a formula for a few stories in her Batgirl run.

People have also said her and Damian have a sibling relationship, but I don’t agree with that. Damian sexually harassed her and kept looking at her boobs. Damian had a crush on her, but he was also a stubborn entitled jerk to her. Steph just got back at Damian by making him dress as a normal kid to embarrass him, and when she saw Damian never played before got him to jump on a bouncy castle. Besides generic banter that’s about it. And given Damian’s personality, they never did anything like that bouncy castle thing again. It’s a really big stretch to call that sibling-like. And even the stuff you could stretch is still doesn’t pay attention to the Damian talking about her boobs constantly thing. Parts of it was just pandery, as a lot of that Batgirl run was.

So I don’t overall have a good opinion of her. She’s perseverance and doesn’t give up, and won’t take no for an answer, but given the context it’s not in a good way besides saving Tim’s and others lifes a few times.

Babs

Despite having read her a lot I don’t know her a lot, because she’s typically always the other character in things. The lady that gets the information.

So I only know a few things about her.

She has the perseverance and won’t take no traits, but in a more positive context. She has no use of her legs but that doesn’t stop her from fighting crime and helping people.

She’s a serious, and mature personality. Every case is very seriously to her, besides a few Tim got into because they were just very goofy.

She can also joke a lot. She has a very teasing personality in her as well. Especially with Tim, she seemed to find Tim really cute and loved teasing him.

I pretty much only have panels of her and Tim besides a rare few maybe, cause as I said she’s mostly a side character helping out.

I have read Birds of Prey but that was possible a year or two ago, and I didn’t really pay attention so I’m not as sure.

She’s very leaderly, and will direct the traffic so to say. She’s a magnificent detective and hacker. Stands up for herself. Inquisitive. Her mind always seems to be thinking of the next thing to think about.

She’s a character I can’t talk about as well without it being one dimensional.

Cass

Cass is another character I don’t have the best grasp on but been trying to learn because she’s probably my second favorite Batkid even if I don’t understand her as strongly. But I do get a lot of her basic personality, and a bit of the nuances, even if I’m not ultra confident on it yet.

She’s quirky, she knows how to tease, but she can also be a bit objective based unless she’s bored it seems, like she does watch TV, but when she has a goal she will not stop until the goal is done. She’s a fully compassionate person as well, she sees little kid needing help, she helps little kid.

Also given her upraising she can be more socially oblivious than anyone else, even Tim. She’s walked around an apartment she was sharing with others butt naked. I think she accidentally flirted with Babs (not a shippy thing, it’s a, Cass said a thing she didn’t understand thing), because she couldn’t tell the difference between a platonic thing and cheesy romantic thing as she watched TV.

She doesn’t always listen. She will just beat by her own drum unless she believes in something someone else said more.

Given her mind wasn’t raised to be socializing, a lot of this stuff makes sense and is kind of obvious when you think about it.

Cass can also be very stubborn when she has a goal, even when it’s against someone else’s wishes.

She’s mostly been a loner by herself, but she has grown to seem to genuinely like having company around to bond with.

She’s been shown being protective of Tim. Literally carrying him out of a fight zone.

Babs’s is more or less her mom.

Dick and Steph’s I’ve described before.

Distant with Alfred, but Alfred will occasionally drop by to help out. They’re still carrying if they aren’t as connected as others.

Not gonna lie I can’t remember her relationship with Bruce.

But that’s some of the basics and slight nuances of Batgirl. I’m still in the early part of learning about her. So I’ll probably understand her more later on. I genuinely really like her though. I like how she isn’t a one dimensional character like some writers make her out to be. She’s genuinely really fun to read.

Jason

I actually know Jason quite a bit because I made a big long post about his time as Robin (post-crisis only, not counting the scripts written before the 80s reboot, or anything inconsistent).

He’s anti-authority, angry, cusses, smokes, violent, murderous tendencies, aggressive, but also has a genuine heroic spirit, is appreciative of the opportunities he was able to have, loved being able to learn especially, had insecurities, and a lot of his violence was in the name of being a more aggressive way of justice. He’d never hurt an innocent.

A lot of this is explain by the fact he was raised on the streets more or less.

When ever he got especially violent was because of a bad guy hurting or killing an innocent or committing abusive acts of any sort. He probably seen a lot of bad stuff on the streets and doesn’t handle it.

He’s pretty decently cynical because of thinking that’s the best way to deal with it.

He was also moody, but after his upbringing that’s to be expected, and unlike what some thinks, Batman was actually understanding and did his best to help Jason back even if he didn’t get it as first.

Jason isn’t a villain, he is a pure anti-hero, he wants to help, he loves to help, when he feels like he should help he does. He just has his own way of doing it that lots don’t agree with.

When he became the Red Hood, all of this stuff just became amplified because of the traumatic event he went through and the feeling of not being avenged and abandoned again.

Where as before he’d nearly kill people, he outright does now with even left empathy. He had a sack of decapitated head once just so other criminals knew he wasn’t playing around.

However his moodiness came out in different ways. He was actually a very calm, chill personality as the Red Hood, until his traumas got poked at, where he’d go back into his angry bitter ways, but to a more unstoppable way. He’d be more violent, more angry, more inconsolable, more unstable.

As the Red Hood, he is a very far ahead planner and tactition. People always call Tim the planner, but to me Jason is the planner and tactition of the group. He had a large plan that took a while to do, but caused him to accomplish a lot in a short time. Tim does it in the moment or moments before and does a fine enough job, but he isn’t a good leader. Dick is a good planner tactition and leader, but it can also just be shortly before he does something. Jason thinks very far ahead and how people will react and think, how to get under their skin, what will piss them off, what will give him what he once etc.

When he’s not unstable, he’s calm and collected, and is always trying to get under people’s skin. Not in a large over the top way, but just a bit. In an almost charming sort of way. A sly way. He pokes buttons when he’s calm and collected.

As to be expected his relationship with the Bat-Family is complicated. He’s mostly just in the Bat-Family almost purely because of his past in it, more than what he is currently. He’s more of a loner type that will get help when needed, but until the New 52 said otherwise, he’s not much of a team player as he mostly works by himself.

Bat-Family wants him to get better, but at the same time I think they recognize it’s gonna take a lot for Jason to get better, and since Jason is dangerous it creates a lot of overwhelming feelings. Bruce is upset at himself and is almost grieving Jason all over again, Dick has regrets he never had a chance to know him till then, and Tim’s relationship has been so varied and never really felt right, I’d say most likely Tim would be scared of Jason, and upset at him. Jason was a Robin that killed. Going off of how Tim reacted to thinking Batman killed, he’d probably be genuinely miserable at the thought of what Jason became, and be distant from him.

Jason is sly and hard to read unless he’s emotional.

Duke

Duke is the hardest to say anything for, because he’s the newest, most obscure (even tho he is gaining quick prominence), and so therefore has less to go off of. Not helped by a lot of writers making him very two dimensional at best a lot of the time.

He is a natural leader, a dare-devil, very willing to put his life on the line at any time, and passionate and almost stubborn about helping people. He wants to save people, and he’s always wanting to help, because he wants to make his neighborhood a better place.

And that’s almost all I can say, because having read his mini-series he doesn’t have many character traits, and WE ARE ROBIN, where he was introduced and I got that from was short lived.

He’s only with the other Batkids when they really wanna pander, so I can’t even accurately say anything, and the few times you could make a guess it’s not in-character for the other. So he’s just hard to tell. Besides Cass.

I think he’d naturally get along with Bruce, Dick, and Tim, and he’s shown being closest to Cass in the Outsiders series. Considering Cass a sister I believe. They console in each other, care about each other, worry about each other, and look after each other. That’s the closest relationship he has.

But it’s hard to say a lot for him.

AGES:

To be blunt I can’t say with full accuracy because there’s so many inconsistencies plus reboots.

But I’ll go into oldest to youngest, because some don’t realize some ages.

Dick, was 21 when Tim was 13

Jason was 18 when Tim was 15

Cass is the same age if not older than Jason

Steph is two years older than Tim

I believe Duke is around the same age as Steph

and Tim and Damian’s ages off of that is pretty obvious.

Sorry this is so freaking long, but like I said, just DM me. I’m about to watch a movie, but I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. I at least hope this helped some, and if it’s too long, just message me because it’ll probably be less overwhelming then.

#long post

46 notes · View notes

arecomicsevengood · 4 years

Text

Movies Watched During Self-Isolation, Part One: Mostly Just Paul Schrader Stuff

I’ve been watching movies during this period of not leaving the house, which goes back a bit further than just when we are all told to stop leaving the house. The streaming services I have access to at the moment are just Kanopy and The Criterion Channel, so I have been watching different things than people who have Netflix or Hulu have been, most likely. These things are generally older, and possess a different set of aesthetic values than things seem to in our era of codified genres and niche marketing. Even the things I end up not being particularly into feel refreshing, in aggregate. There is a real sense of “they don’t make movies like this anymore!” which means, in a lot of ways, movies that seem keyed into being movies, that seem to understand the role of actors as charismatic, mysterious, or sexy, that then dictates the stories that get told. Let me break it down into some specifics, which will then function as recommendations.

The Comfort Of Strangers, 1990, dir. Paul Schrader. One thing I’ve been watching is a lot of Paul Schrader movies. This one comes from the era of the “erotic thriller” and was maybe marketed as such, but it feels like a post-Peter-Greenaway thing, maybe because of the presence of Helen Mirren. Mirren plays one half of weird and creepy older couple with Christopher Walken. Walken’s voice opens the movie with a disembodied narration that sets a tone of creepiness right from the jump, but the disembodied nature of it, heard as the camera roams through a residence, also recalls Last Year At Marienbad. The movie is largely about a younger couple, played by Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, who are vacationing in Venice, and end up being stalked and sort of seduced by Walken and Mirren. The lens of sexuality is a huge part of this movie, but it’s this sort of mysterious force, like the gaze of the camera is itself a malevolent thing, because whoever’s behind it can be an uncaring pervert. Movies’ particular relationship to sex, and sex’s example of a compulsive behavior with capability of destruction, feels like it plays a large role in a bunch of the Paul Schrader movies I watched. I often chose to watch them because of this, their understanding of compulsion made them compulsively watchable, which I appreciated when I felt distracted or inattentive.

In The Cut, 2003, dir. Jane Campion. This has a similar thing going for it. In many of the film’s earliest shots, the camera follows the lead (Meg Ryan) from a distance, with bodies we don’t see the entirety of in the foreground, giving the impression she’s being stalked or in imminent danger, although mostly she isn’t. She plays a writing teacher who lives in an apartment where the head of a murder victim is found in the garden. Mark Ruffalo plays a detective investigating, they end up fucking, even as she becomes paranoid about all the men around her, especially after her sister (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) is also killed. The interest in this lies in the fact that it’s directed by a woman and has both an oppositional relationship to the male gaze and an interest in depicting female desire. It feels pretty sordid and a little rushed at the end. However, the ending seems rushed because the person that ends up being the killer is a person Meg Ryan’s character had no romantic or sexual interest in, and so largely ignored or didn’t think about. It’s not a bad movie but to whatever extent a movie stands on the strength of how interesting its actors are, this one doesn’t deliver. There’s a cameo by Patrice O’Neal though, as like the gay doorman at a stripclub Jennifer Jason Leigh lives above? If I understood correctly.

Patty Hearst, 1988, dir. Paul Schrader. This one’s really interesting, and I’ve kept thinking about it for a number of reasons. One is the interest of the Patty Hearst story itself, which I guess I hadn’t heard the entirety of or thought much about. For one thing, I don’t think I really understood the concept that she was brainwashed or had stockholm syndrome? Which is one of the things that makes the movie good, or what makes Natasha Richardson, playing Patty Hearst, so amazing to watch: She’s really compelling playing someone who has no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing at any given moment, because when you’re brainwashed, you don’t know you’re brainwashed, which is both perfectly obvious to me thinking about now, but that I also need to remind myself of when I think about MSNBC viewers positive feelings towards Joe Biden, for instance. The movie begins with her sudden kidnapping. There are shots that show her, in flashbacks to her life before that point, in a blindfold, that I wasn’t too into when I thought they were going to be sort of the entirety of the movie, but is I guess just intended as a visual metaphor for this sort of trauma as a deconditioning thing that removes whatever sense of a historical self she would’ve previously had. I also didn’t realize the Symbionese Liberation Army was basically just a sex cult with very few members, that robbed banks essentially just to fund themselves. Ving Rhames plays the leader of a group otherwise made up of a bunch of neurotic and ineffective white people. A lot of stuff happens, it’s all pretty interesting, and it doesn’t feel anything like a biopic, it always feels like a story is being told, but it’s always destabilized, and always heading towards doom. After arrest, Patty Hearst’s lawyer makes the argument that, even though she’s clearly brainwashed and undergone great trauma, and that is why she joined in bank robberies and the spouting of revolutionary rhetoric, it will be impossible for her to get a fair trial making that argument as so many parents felt their children went away to college in the 1960s and came back brainwashed as different people, though they did it of their own free will.

Hardcore, 1979, dir. Paul Schrader. This one’s about George C. Scott as midwesterner whose daughter gets kidnapped on a Church trip to California and ends up in porno. I guess has some parallels with Patty Hearst in terms of preying on parental fears, but also has this sort of sordid exploitation-y vibe in its basic summary. Peter Boyle plays a private detective whose debauched nature really bothers George C. Scott, whose beliefs the film takes pretty seriously. The end of the movie revelation that the daughter basically did run away and hates her dad sort of comes from nowhere, but the daughter is largely absent from the entire movie, and the disconnect between her and her father plays out so much from the father’s perspective it’s not really unearned. It also makes sense considered in the context of Patty Hearst, which is both a deepr work, but also a historical one, sort of about the creation of the moment and cultural context in which Hardcore would’ve been made and received. I wish Schrader’s first movie, Blue Collar, was available on a service I had access to.

Auto Focus, 2002, dir. Paul Schrader. This was the first Paul Schrader movie I was aware of, it was sort of critically-acclaimed. I avoided it because it seemed somewhat exploitative and grossly voyeuristic, being about Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, here played by Greg Kinnear, and his interest in filming himself having sex with random women lured in by his celebrity. The film is characterized by a certain glib irony, but it’s also defined by the presence of Willem Dafoe, who’s great in it, as a completely loathsome person, taking advantage of Bob Crane’s celebrity to participate in the sex he otherwise would not have access to, and hastening his downfall by transforming him into a totally debauched sex addict, before finally killing him. The contrast between Bob Crane’s wholesome exterior and his descent into depravity is mirrored by a contrast between the the sort of jokey mockery of that contrast and a lived-in sense of squalor in the depiction of two men in a basement jerking off as they watch porn together.

Light Sleeper, 1992, Paul Schrader. Dafoe stars in this one, alongside Susan Sarandon, much hated by some for her adamant refusal to support Hillary Cilnton. This makes Sarandon admirable to me, but I don’t know how much I’ve seen her in. She’s in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, also on the Criterion Channel, a movie I thought was great when I saw it but have forgotten almost everything about in the years since. Dafoe plays a mid-level drug dealer, who’s been off drugs for a few years, and Sarandon is his higher-level contact, who’s looking to get out of selling entirely and enter the cosmetics business. Dana Delaney plays Dafoe’s ex-wife, from his addict days, back in town because her mother is dying in the hospital. The compulsion towards sex that’s present in a bunch of other Schrader movies is replaced here with drug addiction as this force to fight against, or exist in tension with, and also love, which is very present in this movie and very tender. The movie also boasts early-career cameos by Sam Rockwell and David Spade, and the great Jane Adams plays Dana Delaney’s sister. Delaney’s character ends up relapsing and dying, probably due to the shock of her mother’s death, probably not helped by the unplanned reminder of DaFoe’s character. It seems very rare for a movie to have roles as strong for women as this movie does. Even the psychic who Dafoe sees in two scenes, played by Mary Beth Hurt, who I don’t know from anything else, is great.

La Truite, 1982, dir. Joseph Losey. A friend of mine highly recommended Joseph Losey’s film Mr. Klein, but that one’s hard to track down. This stars a young Isabelle Huppert as a young woman who gets flown out to Japan by a rich businessman. He doesn’t have sex with her, just sort of enjoys the money being lavished on her, but her husband, who she also does not seem to have sex with, gets pretty pissed about it.

Eva, 1962, dir. Joseph Losey. This is a really similar movie from Joseph Losey in a lot of ways. It stars Jeanne Moreau, who also has a smaller part in La Truite, and it’s also about a woman whose whole deal is getting money from rich dudes and not having sex with them. In La Truite, Huppert’s life gets kind of ruined, in this movie, Moreau does the ruining, of an author/hack who is married to an actress from one of his work’s movie adaptations who doesn’t know what the he confesses to Moreau, which is that he stole the book from his dead brother and didn’t write a word of it. I wasn’t that into either of these movies but I feel like the sort of archetype, of like a young beautiful woman who doesn’t want sex and sort of just busts men’s balls “works” in a film, how film’s objective or ambivalent view makes their motivations opaque in a way that allows them to be compelling to male and female audiences alike, if for different reasons. Vera Chytilova’s Daisies plays on this sort of youthful feminine brattiness too, to a more anarchic effect. None of these characters have as much depth as Patty Hearst or any of the women in Light Sleeper but they nonetheless suggest the possession of such, kept far away from the camera’s eye.

5 notes · View notes

fly-pow-bye · 7 years

Text

DuckTales 2017 - “The Living Mummies of Toth-Ra!”

Story by: Francisco Angones, Madison Bateman, Colleen Evanson, Christian Magalhaes, Bob Snow

Written by: Madison Bateman

Directed by: Dana Terrace

Storyboard by: Emmy Cicierega, Ben Holm, Jason Reicher

Walk Like An Egyptian.

For the first time since Woo-oo!, aside from the golden cricket from two episodes ago which shouldn't count, we get to see Scrooge on an adventure. He's bringing along Huey, Dewey, Louie, Webby, and Launchpad, here seen eating a burrito that will become the running gag. They have six characters to juggle around here, and each of them will have their own roles, which is a hard challenge to take, but they find a solution.

Scrooge going to excavate the Tomb of Toth-Ra, the last of the lost pyramids. Huey explains that these tombs are generally filled with treasures, gold, and jars of vital organs. Louie, ignoring the last one, is immediately excited to find all of the treasure. They all fall into a trapdoor with two chutes, splitting Webby and Louie up from the rest of the ducks, and essentially cutting the plot into two.

In the A plot, they land in a large, dark, room. Before realizing Webby and Louie are missing...

...they are surrounded by mummies, much to Dewey's delight as he wanted to see a mummy army. However, as the title suggests, they're not dead, but they're not undead either. They're actually of a lost society, trapped in a tomb with the all-powerful, ever-living pharaoh Toth-Ra.

The servants and their descendants have lived in the cave for thousands of years, serving their god-king by giving him an offering of their crops. While they dress in wraps they're only dressed to way to appease their god-king, the bringer of the golden sun. There's a few allusions to certain totalitarian leaders in the real world, both with actual pharaohs and supposed eternal presidents who scored hole-in-ones in their first try at golf.

It's pretty obvious from the get-go that things are not too swell. All of the crops are wilted from the lack of sun, the cows are malnourished from eating dirt, and people buy and sell sand like it’s a big commodity. However, they still feel this is just temporary, and if they work hard enough, the almighty and merciful god-king will give them the sunlight they need.

Scrooge suddenly finds out that Webby is missing, and Amunet tells them that she must have gone through the other chute to the Pharaoh's Forbidden Chamber. How she would know this? I guess the same way she knows what lasers are; Toth-Ra must have let that one slip. Scrooge doesn't even mention Louie. He clearly has a favorite, and she's not even related.

This turns out to be a room filled with piles of gold and treasures. Louie immediately runs to make gold angels, while Webby is delighted by all the ancient treasures she's able to name. She also finds a prophecy, which ends with "beware those that cross him", and, conveniently for the plot, she doesn’t know how to translate the last few words.

Webby tells Louie to not touch anything, as she assumes that they could be either cursed or trapped for the rest of their lives. That rascally little green duck, on the other hand, just can't help but talk to a golden sickle and even run around and touch pretty much anything he can get his hands on.

Louie: Ooh! What’s in this weird jar, huh?

Oh, Dee Dee. That's going to be a common theme in this episode: Louie causing problems. Louie's role in the plot appears to be the person who learns the lesson, though I'm not sure if he even learns anything in the end. He causes problems for Webby, for the rest of the family, and even for himself. as it turns out to be one of those jars. That's another running theme, and a very good one at that: even the random jokes have some sort of payoff later on.

Back in the sand-filled inner-city, the ancient pharaoh arises, and the followers offer him the best crop they can grow. He accepts this, and gives them the golden reward: sunlight from a brick he can move away. As soon as the farmers start hurryingly watering their crops, Toth-Ra almost immediately closes the brick. This subtly implies this is normal for them, a good touch. Huey tries to talk some sense into Amunet by trying to explain how the sun really works, only for her to call him not-too-bright, which offends him. Again, fitting.

Scrooge really wanted to talk to the shadowed pharaoh, and asks Amunet if there's a way he can get to the Pharaoh's throne. They immediately laugh, and say the only way is to revolt against them. Scrooge desperately tries to convince them with promises of sunlight and freedom, but they don't budge.

During his rising speech, he gets interrupted by Launchpad eating his burrito. The followers immediately wonder what he's eating, and Launchpad shares his burrito with the followers. To make a long story short, this ends up giving them the bravery to stand up to Toth-Ra that Scrooge attempted to instill in them.

Scrooge facepalms at the sight of Launchpad becoming the hero of the episode, and outright calls it the dumbest revolt of all time later on. He's not exactly wrong, either. He sure likes to echo my sentiments.

As for Webby and Louie, they get caught by a guard as soon as Louie finds out about the jars full of vital organs. Louie tries to use his way of talking his way out of trouble. Another callback to Daytrip of Doom, that's becoming a lot more important than I thought. I'm starting to get used to this kind of consistency, which will be some bad news for certain other cartoons.

Webby does a genius plan: insult him on the lack of proper sacrifice etiquette. Louie gives the guard a scroll that he happened to steal from the treasure room, somehow getting his arms out of that rope to give him that. Maybe he's getting lessons from Webby? Even the nephews are starting to figure out how to get out of rope.

Of course, this is all a trick; as soon as he starts to read it, Webby gets Louie free from the rope entirely, and they run off. It's a very Looney Tunes gag, oddly enough. Louie thanks Webby for her great trick, but, in another joke that completely fits her character, she actually was trying to help him out. If she's going to get sacrificed, it must be done right.

We get to see each of the ducks in the A plot's idea to train the new revolution against the almighty Toth-Ra, all in their own little way. Dewey trains them in the art of looking like scary mummies. Huey tries to line up a plan using Xs and Os, but Amunet keeps telling him that Toth-Ra would be able to get around any plan using his laser-beam eyes.

Scrooge is delighted to see Launchpad doing a good job, but it turns out that he's only training them to make giant burritoes, using their sand as the meat. Scrooge continues to be sarcastic.

Scrooge: And...we're going to die down here.

We go back to Louie and Webby, who find a secret passage while running away from the guard to...the same treasure room. Louie continues doing things his own way, while Webby scolds him for doing actions that would put them in danger. It's kind of leading to the lesson of the episode. Speaking of danger, a new guest suddenly appears while they keep fighting.

I actually recommend watching this episode for this twist, even if it isn't the best one even in this episode, hint hint, so here's some ellipsis.

← The Infernal Internship of Mark Beaks 🦆 The Impossible Summit of Mt. Neverrest! →

...

The real Toth-Ra appears right in front of Louie and Webby...and it's clearly a puppet. A puppet of a dead body, DuckTales doesn't mess around!

We do get some hilarious scenes where Louie taunts Toth-Ra for not being able to get up and smite him from a few feet away. It's Louie that manages to figure this out first. It's not necessarily cleverness as opposed to being a wannabe-con-artist knowing a con when he sees one. Louie, "the evil twin", if I remember correctly.

It turns out to be the guard, who happens to be the only higher-up in this place, is a part of this family keeping this con going for generations. Where did this guy find more family if they're trapped in here? Did he just happen to choose one of the followers to, you know? This is one of those cases where the less one thinks about it, the better it is.

Scrooge and family barge into the room alongside the followers to start their revolt. The guard tries to convince them that Toth-Ra is angry, but Louie does the other thing that leads to something positive: taking the controls and convincing the followers to throw that guard in a coffin. I'm glad those both happened; it's not all "huh, huh, he's so silly, he can't do anything right."

At this point, this episode could have ended here with the whole Wizard of Oz-like reveal, but it wouldn't have been as satisfying. While I've come to accept that the intro is going to be more action packed than the actual show, I would have been a little disappointed if the mummy from the intro was just a puppet.

Let's just say, that's not entirely the case, as there's a twist beyond the twist! I don't want to get into too much detail, but the real mummy's curse is triggered by something Louie does, of course, and it ties into the prophecy in a clever way. Honestly, they could just take out the "can't translate those last few words" out, and it could still work.

There's also a fake-out with Launchpad. I think it's there just to do more of a parody of action movies, but it just ends with another burrito joke, It's mostly pointless.

Everyone gets to do something in this grand finale against the revived Toth-Ra, for better and for worse. One of the lesser examples: the extent of Dewey's part in the part is him making a group of revolters do an obvious Thriller reference. I guess it was inevitable; whenever a comedy does this sort of thing, the chances of a Thriller parody quickly reaches one.

It's not just the prophecy; I like how everything ties together. That seemingly random joke about Launchpad training the followers to make giant sand burritoes leads to them doing in a villain with the same method. Even a scarab Louie coughs up in the beginning of the episode ends up somehow giving advice to this same villain, a reference to something Amunet says during the Huey scene. No stone is left unturned.

Eventually they escape, that's pretty much a foregone conclusion. The episode ends with all of the followers, and Scrooge, getting a certain food item out of Scrooge's pocket. Not willingly, of course.

It's not hot dogs.

How does it stack up?

Once again, it's a filler episode that doesn't continue the two ongoing plots, but it's a good standalone story. Great action, great adventure, the running gag only gets slightly stale, this and Woo-oo! are great introductions to this show. Two thumbs up.

DuckTales is going on a hiatus throughout November, but will return in December. Such is the reality of great animation; good things come to those who wait.

← The Infernal Internship of Mark Beaks 🦆 The Impossible Summit of Mt. Neverrest! →

#fpb dt 2017 #ducktales 2017 #ducktales #disney #fpb reviews

6 notes · View notes

digidetective-shararaizel · 7 years

Text

Parent Troubles

Summery: Jack has found out about Tim's nightly activities as Robin and blames Tony for being a bad influence. Tonight, Tim gets to see his bio-dad and the Bats out of uniform while attending a fundraiser gala, but they're not the only people he finds himself reunited with.Takes place a few months some time after No Man's Land but before the events of the Avengers movie.

I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to get this chapter out. Like the last two, it ended up longer than originally intended. It's also not as fluffy as I wanted, but we do get to see Barbara, Steph and Cass for the first time. Let me know how I do.

Full series AO3 link

My Master List for Fan Fiction

Parent Troubles

2012

Cassandra and Stephanie had Tim in tow as They made their way through the ballroom looking for Tony Stark so that Tim could introduce them. Tim was a bit nervous. He wasn’t sure how they’d react to his dad or how he would react to them. A lot had happened over the last six months in Gotham during No Man’s Land and all that had happened afterward. Namely, what had happened nearly a month ago, after Jack found out that Tim was Robin. No. That Tim had been Robin. He wasn’t anymore. Steph was Robin now because Jack hadn’t taken it well and Batman needed a Robin. Tim and his father had argued a lot and Jack had yelled at Tony over the phone about it too. He blamed Tony for putting ideas in Tim’s head about becoming a superhero.

When he’d managed to secretly meet up with Dick after school one day and told him what had happened, the older vigilante had found it amusing that Jack seemed to blame Tony more for Tim becoming Robin than he did Batman. Tim didn’t find it funny at all. It wasn’t Tony’s fault. Tony had had nothing to do with his decision to become Robin, though Jack didn’t seem to think so and had forbid Tim from seeing Tony. He’d even confiscated Tim’s Stark Phone. Not that it had stopped JARVIS from hacking into his new phone, or Jason from dropping by when no one but Tim was at home, but Jack didn’t need to know that. Essentially, Tim hadn’t seen Tony since that trip he’d made last fall and found out that Jason Todd was living and recuperating at the Stark Manor in Malibu. That seemed like forever ago. No Man’s Land had happened right after that and everything just seemed to come to a head and led to Jack finding out his secret.

Now Tim was attending a city fundraiser gala with Jack and Dana (his new stepmom) where (surprise!) Cass and Steph had found him and dragged him off to find Tony. Tim was surprised that Jack and Dana let him go, but - then again - neither of them knew that the girls were Batgirl and the new Robin or, apparently, that Tony was in Gotham that night. They’d probably just assumed that they were friends of Tim’s from school wanting to hang out.

When Tim finally spotted Tony, he wasn’t surprised to see Jason “Peters” lurking in the background while Tony made small talk with some other big-wig out-of-town donators for the night’s fundraiser. Jason also happened to be scowling at a cheerful looking Dick Grayson who was saying something that only seemed to irritate Jason more. Tim smiled fondly at the sight and realized that if Barbara and Bruce were around then the whole “Bat Family” (as Tony liked to refer to them as) would be present.

“Hey, Tim.”

Ah. Speak of the devil and he shall appear, as they say.

“Hi, Barbara,” Tim said, turning to smile at the lovely young redheaded woman as she pulled up in her wheelchair next to them followed by none other than Bruce Wayne himself and Alfred Pennyworth. Cassandra moved to Barbara’s side in an instant and gave her mentor a hug.

“Bruce. Alfred,” Tim said, greeting the two men.

“Tim,” Bruce said back with a bright Brucie Wayne smile. “It’s good to see you. How have you and your father been faring?”

“We’re alright,” Tim sighed with a smile. “Still working through some things, but we’re good.”

“That’s good to hear, Master Timothy,” Alfred said genially with his usual small smile.

“Get away from me, Dickface,” Jason suddenly said loud enough to get their attention as he stomped over towards them. Tim was a little surprised when Jason stopped next to him and gave him a playful nudge with his elbow. “Sup, Replacement?”

“Jason,” Tim sighed, smiling wryly at the older teen.

“Aww! Little Wing!” Dick whined with a pout as he joined them, but Jason moved to make sure Tim stayed between them. This both irritated and amused Tim, though he could see Stephanie eyeing Jason wearily. Her first encounter with Jason had happened shortly after she’d become the new Robin and Jason had started returning to Gotham regularly as the Red Hood. It really hadn’t gone well. Red Hood hadn’t exactly beat her up or tried to kill her like he had when he and Tim had first met, but he hadn’t been particularly civil either. There had been an epic rooftop brawl though, from what he’d heard from both parties. Jason hadn’t taken Tim’s quitting the vigilante life very well.

“No! I’m done dealing with you,” Jason growled. “Go pester someone else. Don’t make me shoot you.”

“Tony didn’t give you that side arm to shoot people for being irritating, Jay,” Tim sighed.

Jason tisked, but since he hadn’t made a move for the permitted side arm they all knew he was carrying no one was worried about his idle threat.

“Dick,” Barbara said sternly, “don’t be an ass.”

Dick chuckled, flashing Jason a devilish grin, but stopped playing ring-around-the-Timmy with him and settled behind Barbara’s wheelchair so that he could give her a playful peck on the cheek.

Jason huffed, and crossed his arms before bumping his shoulder with Tim’s. “How’s civilian life treating ya?”

Tim snorted. “How do you think? I know you and Tony have been keeping tabs on me. You’re as bad as Babs and Bruce.”

“Hey!” Barbara cried, though Bruce looked more amused than irritated by the comment.

“It’s because we care, Timmy,” Tony’s voice suddenly said before the man’s arm wrapped around Tim’s shoulders when he came up behind him.

“Yeah, nothing says that more than a daily cellphone hack and a dozen or so hidden cameras in my room,” Tim deadpanned, though everyone only grinned obnoxiously at him.

Tony laughed before letting Tim go, allowing him to turn and get a proper look at the man. He looked good.

“Hey, Timmy.”

“Hi, Tony.”

“Can I have a proper hug from my Godson now?” Tony asked, arms slightly extended. The man still wasn’t much of a touchy feely person, but he was learning. Having Jason living with him for most of the last year had been good for both of them it seemed. The man was more open to hugs these days though he was still awkward when initiating them.

Tim huffed good naturedly but accepted the hug. He’d really missed Tony. Talking to JARVIS on the phone and getting updates and messages from Jason just wasn’t the same.

“You’ve gotten taller,” Tony commented.

“Nah, you just got shorter,” Tim quipped back.

“Smart ass,” Tony snorted.

“I learned from the best,” Tim chuckled.

“Damn right you did,” Tony laughed, with a smirk. “Now are you gonna introduce me to your lady friends?”

“Sorry,” Tim said, turning to the blonde on his left. “Tony, this is Stephanie Brown.”

“The infamous Steph I’ve heard so much about?” Tony asked, grinning as he offered her his hand. “A pleasure to meet you at last.”

Steph blushed, but appeared pleased. She knew how much Tony meant to Tim, though she - like everyone else except for Jason and Bruce - didn’t know their real relationship.

“And these lovely ladies?” Tony prompted, looking over towards Cassandra and Barbara.

“Cassandra Cain and Barbara Gordon,” Tim said, gesturing to each in turn.

“Ah,” Tony said, grinning as he shot a sly look at Dick, before turning on the charm. “Now this really is a pleasure. Timmy’s told me a lot about both of you, and Bruce and Dick speak very highly of you, Miss Gordon. I’m told you’ve got quite the set up back at your place. Timmy’s even showed me some of your little gadgets. It was some very impressive tech.”

“Oh?” Barbara said, clearly flattered and then became amused when she caught sight of Dick’s scowl.

Tim sighed. Tony couldn’t help baiting Dick, could he? He was starting to doubt that those two would ever get along.

Then Barbara and Tony began to get into some complicated techno talk about computers and various projects they’d worked on while being playfully teasing and even a touch flirty. Jason and Dick seemed to have a role reversal mere minutes into the conversation. Dick looked very grumpy and kept glaring at Tony while Jason practically looked giddy upon seeing how much it was bugging Dick that Barbara was enjoying conversing with Tony. Cassandra also looked amused, though she clearly had no idea what Barbara and Tony were talking about and had moved back over to Steph and Tim to talk about school and how Tim was handling life without a cape. Bruce and Alfred were now talking to Jason, and Tim was glad to see that Jason appeared to be more relaxed when talking to Bruce. He’d heard that Jason had been visiting the manor and had begun reconciling with Bruce about the older teen’s death. Whatever therapy Jason was going through when he stayed with Tony was doing wonders.

That is when Gotham apparently decided that they weren’t allowed to have nice nights like this so soon after No Man’s Land and something exploded near the front entrance of the gallery that was hosting the gala. There were screams and cries of alarm as people began to run and push and shove their way as far from the explosion as possible.

Jason and Tony were in action almost immediately. Tim wasn’t sure where they’d been keeping Tony’s portable suitcase armor, but Tony was suited up in seconds and Jason had his sidearm drawn and was making his way after him, shoving people towards the back exits as he went. Cass, Steph, Bruce and Dick had practically vanished, leaving Tim alone with Barbara and Alfred.

“Never a quiet night,” Tim huffed.

Alfred merely quirked an eyebrow, but Barbara was grinning wryly at him.

“TIM!”

“And cue my worried parents,” Tim sighed when he caught sight of Jack and Dana pushing their way through the panicking crowd to get to where Tim, Barbara and Alfred had managed to stay out of everybody’s way by remaining where they were against a far wall. There was no way Tim was going to leave Barbara in her wheelchair to maneuver through the crowd. It wasn’t that Tim didn’t think Barbara could handle herself. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s just that in their panic, people might knock her chair over and trample her. It was safer to wait for the crowd to thin a bit.

Jack’s hand felt like a vice as it grabbed his arm and began to yank him towards the exiting crowd.

“Dad, calm down,” Tim hissed. “I’m fine.”

“Why weren’t you trying to leave?” Jack demanded. “Thought you’d stay behind and help?”

“I thought I’d keep my friend company and help her out once the crowds thinned a bit,” Tim snapped, gesturing to Barbara and her chair.

“Jack,” Dana said softly, placing a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder. “Let him go. He’s fine.”

Jack flushed slightly, though whether it was in anger, or embarrassment, Tim wasn’t sure.

“Babs, this is my father, Jack Drake, and my step-mom, Dana” Tim said once Jack had let him go. “Dad, Dana, meet Barbara Gordon.”

“Pleasure,” Barbara said, shaking Dana’s hand.

Jack seemed to have collected himself and shook her hand as well. “Yes, a pleasure, I’m sure. But I think it’s high time we got out of here.”

Tim nodded as he looked over towards where the explosion had occurred and could hear the whine of Iron Man’s repulsors and the occasional gunshot, and saw the occasion blur of black as Batman and the others arrived to help.

“Yeah,” Tim sighed as he and the others moved away to the back of the hall where everyone was scrambling to get through the back exits. Once they got mixed up in the crowd, though, Tim found himself separated from the others. He could hear Jack yelling for him and tried moving towards the sound of his voice, but someone grabbed his arm from behind.

“My apologies, boy, but I’m going to be borrowing you for a short while,” a man’s deep voice said in his ear to be heard clearly over the din of the chaos still going on around them.

“Who are you? Let me go,” Tim hissed, shoving at the hand that had a solid grip on him.

“Now, boy, is that any way to speak to your uncle after all these years?” the man behind him asked. “Janet would be so disappointed to hear that her son has lost his manners. Although, because it’s me you’re being rude to, she might have been proud instead. She loved giving me hell.”

With a growl, Tim whirled around and faced a tall impeccably dressed, but formidable looking man wearing an eye patch over his right eye and had snow white hair. It was Slade Wilson, otherwise known as Deathstroke the Terminator to the caped crowd.

The man’s words suddenly hit him with all the metaphorical force of a speeding train. His mother was supposed to have a brother that no one had been able to track down after her death. There had been no record of him after his stint in the army nearly two decades ago. Jack had once described him as eccentric, wild and uncivil. Neither of his parents had seen him since Tim’s first birthday when Janet had apparently had a bad disagreement with him. Her maiden name was Wilson. His uncle was Slade Wilson, the Terminator: Deathstroke .

“Oh fuck,” Tim gasped, feeling slightly numb.

“Now he figures it out,” Slade grumbled before yanking him through the crowd.

Tim was reeling in so much shock he didn’t even try to resist as Slade manhandled him through the crowd and into a car.

“Come on, boy, it isn’t that shocking,” Slade snapped as he put the car in gear. “And put your seatbelt on.”

Tim numbley did as he was told as Slade smoothly pulled away from the curb and began to quickly leave the scene, though not fast enough to warrant attention from police who were just now arriving at the scene of the gala.

“Where did you think you got your athleticism from? Certainly not Jack. What exactly did you get from that moron? You look nothing like him to be honest,” Slade mused. “You look more like you’re Stark or Wayne’s brat. What the hell did Janet see in that man?”

“I am so confused right now,” Tim sighed. This man wasn’t quite what he’d expect Slade Wilson to be like after all he’d heard about the mercenary from Dick, the older Titans, and Ravager, Rose Wilson. Who was Slade’s daughter… which made her Tim’s cousin.

“What’s there to be confused about?” Slade huffed. “Your mother married a pansy.”

“Why am I only finding out about you now?!” Tim cried.

“Because your mother told me to stay out of your lives when I showed up on your first birthday after a job and nearly blew her cover with Jack. Don’t know what the problem was. The man’s so thick he never once suspected her of being a spy,” Slade grumbled. “He’s never liked me, though, and the feeling is mutual.”

“Mother was a what?!” Tim screeched.

“A spy. Are you deaf?” Slade scowled. “She worked for the CIA. Why else would she marry Jack? He was the perfect cover and allowed her to travel all over the world on all sorts of trips for so-called business meetings and archeological discoveries.”

Tim stared out the windshield unseeing, connecting dots and putting together facts about his mother that he’d never been able to make sense of before. The constant traveling, the way she’d always seemed to keep Tim at arm’s length, like she didn’t want to get too attached to her own son, and the depths she went to, to ensure that Tim had Tony in his life. Little things like that in her mannerisms and habits suddenly made too much sense.

“Fuck,” Tim breathed again.

“Yeah, Janet’s good at messing up people’s lives. Even in death,” Slade growled.

“If my mother wanted you to stay out of my life, why make contact now?” Tim demanded.

“To keep your ass safe, of course. Janet would find some way to haunt me if anything happened to you. After she died, I got a letter asking me to keep my eye on you. Not that it mattered. You’d already become Robin by the time I tracked you down. So now we’re going to have to have this little family reunion fast before the Bats and Iron Moron realize you’re missing and try to track us down,” Slade said, though he looked a little too gleeful at the prospect.

“Wait, so the robots attacking the gala weren’t your doing?” Tim asked.

“No, but they provided one hell of a distraction, and I’m not one to let a good opportunity pass by.” Slade smirked, pulling the car into the back of a parking lot and got out. He had put a hat on to cover his distinctive white hair and had the brim pulled down low to leave his eye and eyepatch in shadow. “Come on, runt. We’ve got some things to talk about before your guard dogs start sniffing out the trail.”

Tim cautiously followed Slade onto a busy street. Slade grabbed him by the arm so that they didn’t lose each other on their way down into the subway. Tim had some trouble keeping up with the man’s long strides, but he managed not to trip over himself too many times before Slade shoved him into a maintenance room that had a well hidden secret passage into a long hall that went on for blocks and led to a safehouse of sorts. Tim was surprised to find himself in a nice townhouse. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, it was only a few blocks from his school. That was unnerving. How long had Slade been watching him?

“So what’s this about?” Tim asked.

“This,” Slade said, pulling an envelope out of a wooden chest on the mantle in the living room. “This letter was sent to me by someone after her death was confirmed. An old CIA buddy, no doubt.”

Tim took the envelope with trembling hands. The addresses on the envelope and the letter inside were all written in Janet Drake’s neat cursive.

Slade,

If you are reading this, then I am dead. Looks like I wasn’t the death of you after all, big brother. I know we haven’t spoken in years and I told you to stay out of my life and Tim’s, but now that I’m dead I wish to take it back. If I’m dead, it’s likely that Jack is dead too, and that means that Timothy only has Tony Stark. As much as I like that man, I don’t fully trust him to take care of Tim. Especially now that he’s Iron Man. Consider it my dying wish that you watch over my son. I know you’re shit with kids, but just keep your eye out for him, Slade. He is a Wilson in all but name and that’s going to get him into serious trouble one of these days. He’s going to be great someday. You love to say that I am the reason your hair went prematurely white, so if that’s true, then Timothy is going to make you bald. There are a million things I want to say to you, my dear older brother, but half of them are curses and the other half is just too sappy to write down without me wanting to vomit, and will have you wanting to gouge out your eye, so I’ll spare the both of us.

I’ve left a box of things for Tim at your Gotham address for when he’s older. Please make sure he gets it.

Take care of him for me, Slade.

Your baby sister,

Janet

Tim read the letter twice before he folded it back up and handed it back to his uncle.

“There’s one for you too,” Slade said, pulling out a second envelope from the chest, this one still sealed and unread as far as Tim could tell as he turned it over in his hands. There was no address. All it said was “Tim” in his mother’s neat cursive on the front. With slightly shaking hands, Tim opened the envelope and took out a page of crisp stationary.

My dearest son,

If you are reading this letter, then I am dead and Slade has found you. He is your uncle, Timothy. My older brother, whom I trust enough with your life, despite whatever I’ve said about him to you. Though his morals may be questionable, family means a lot to him.

I know you think that I don’t know about your new nightly habit of sneaking out to train with the Batman, but I know that you’re following Tony’s example and are training to become the next Robin. Depending on how long it takes my letter to find Slade, you may already be Robin and have heard about him from in a less than spectacular light.

But I know you will give him a chance if only on the merit of him being your uncle. There is more to him than the mercenary, Timothy. There is more to him than Deathstroke the Terminator. He just may be a complete ass about it at first unfortunately. He’s sadly a touch insane, but his black heart is still in the right place and is capable of some emotion.

I want you to know that I love you very much, Timothy. I know I never said it often. I know I was hardly there for you, but I did love you. I loved you enough to make sure that you had Tony and that he remained a part of your life. I loved you enough to make sure I wrote one of these letters before every trip I took in case I met my inevitable end. Slade should have them all. I know that it can’t ever make of for all the time lost between us, or make up for how horrible of a mother I was, and how much of your life I’ve missed, but it’s all I have left to give you.

I love you with all my heart, my darling son, and am so proud of you.

Your mother,

Janet Wilson-Drake

Tim swallowed as he read the letter, holding back tears. His mother had known, and seemed to have approved of Tim’s actions to some degree. However, She was entrusting his safety to Slade fuckign Wilson, even though she had to have known that Deathstroke and Batman had clashed on more than one occasion. Just because his mother and uncle had been staying out of each other’s lives didn’t mean that they hadn’t been keeping tabs on the other’s activities. You can’t completely avoid someone if you don’t have any idea of where they are afterall.

“Why is my family life so messed up?” Tim bemoaned.

“Because you’re a Wilson by blood, sister’s spawn,” Slade chuckled softly.

“But why are you only showing up now?” Tim asked. “Mother died nearly two years ago.”

“I didn’t get my letter until last year,” Slade sighed, taking a seat in a wingback chair. “As you already know, we hadn’t spoken in years. She kept to her life and I kept to mine, making sure our paths never crossed. I have safe houses that she didn’t know about. She sent her letter to the last place she knew I was living. It got forwarded a bunch of times until it ended up at our idiot brother’s address in New York.”

“Wait, I have another uncle?” Tim gasped.

“We don’t like to talk about Wade,” Slade growled. “ He is certifiably insane. Can’t take that moron anywhere. He got some unsanctioned experimental bullshit done to him and now he’s practically immortal. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to kill him, but the idiot won’t die and now I’m stuck with him. Why couldn’t it have been Janet? Her kind of crazy was easier to deal with.”

Tim stared at Slade in alarm.

“Just stay away from a guy in a black and red suit that’s similar in design to mine and goes by the name of Deadpool and you’ll be fine,” Slade sighed. “Point being, short stuff, I didn’t get Janet’s letter because it was forwarded to our crazy brother who forgot he had it until his girlfriend found it while she was cleaning house. Then the annoying bastard decided to personally track me down and deliver it. By then you’d already been Robin for a year, Jack was awake from his coma, and you didn’t really need me. I have kept tabs on you, though. You maintained impressive grades considering how you were spending your nights.”

“Uh, thanks?” Tim said.

“In all seriousness, kid,” Slade said, “I wanted to talk to you tonight to let you know that I’m around if you need me. I might not always be here, but if I am in Gotham, I can be found at this address. You can come here whenever you need to. It’s not changing.”

“You’re not afraid that Batman might already know this address?” Tim asked.

“Kid, so long as I’m not up to anything in his city, the Bat and I leave each other alone. And even if I am up to no good in this city, I sure as hell am not staying here when I do it,” Slade laughed. “And speaking of the Bat, I better get you back home before he and Iron Man start looking for you.”

“That’s it?” Tim asked, “You just drag me off, show me a couple letters Mother wrote years ago, and just send me on my way? Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just approaching me at the gala and show me the letters there?”

“And let the Bats and your Dad listen in?” Slade scoffed. “Look, kid, I don’t care if they know we’re related, but I figured you’d appreciate a private conversation considering the fact no one outside of the CIA knew that your mother was a spy or that her two brothers were still alive after leaving the army, one of whom after being dishonorably discharged.”

“You?” Tim asked

“No, Wade,” Slade grunted. “I went into the CIA for a short time before I got into the mercenary business. I swear Janet only joined up too just to piss me off. Speaking of which, if for whatever reason you do need me and I’m not here, call this number,” he said as he flipped open Tim’s phone (when the hell had he taken that?) and started hitting buttons. “I put it under Winters. It’ll call a friend of mine, who’ll get in touch with me. If you can’t get a hold of him and he doesn’t get back to you no matter how many times you call within a twenty-four hour period, then - and only only if it’s an emergency - call Wade, whose number I’m also putting in here.”

“Wait, didn’t you say that I should stay away from him?” Tim asked, confused.

“Unless it is an emergency,” Slade repeated with a sigh. “He’ll probably talk your ear off when you call, but he’ll get here faster than anyone else since he’s only a couple hours away in New York. Oh! Almost forgot.”

Slade got up from his chair, took the chest off the mantle and handed it to Tim.

“It’s full of letters and things from Janet for you kid. There are hundreds of them,” Slade said.

Tim took the chest, examining the ornate carvings all over it’s wooden surface. Curious, Tim flipped open the lid and saw bound bundles of hundreds of letters and a few large envelopes that looked like they held objects in addition to the letters. Slade gently set Tim’s letter on top of everything and shut the chest.

“Don’t open anything until you’re home alone,” the man said gently. “Once you start, it’ll be hard to stop.”

Tim nodded, wordlessly following Slade - his uncle - out of the townhouse and into a garage where a sleek but unremarkable black car waited. The drive to Tim’s house was a quiet one. Neither spoke until Slade pulled the car up to the Drake house, where Jack burst through the door almost the moment Tim stepped out.

“TIM!”

Tim wasn’t surprised to see Dana right behind him or a couple figures moving slightly in the shadows. The Red Hood’s helmet gleamed briefly in the tree next to Tim’s bedroom window.

“Where the hell have you been?!” Jack cried, racing forward, gripping Tim’s arms tight and shaking him slightly.

“Relax, Jackie boy,” Slade drawled as he got out of the car and came around to stand by the passenger door. “He was with me.”

“You!” Jack growled, pushing Tim behind him as if to protect him. “What are you doing here, Slade?”

“I’m just bringing my nephew back home,” Slade said, smirking. “He got separated from you in the crowd at the gala and I offered him a ride home. We did take a detour over to my place, however. I had a few things of Janet’s that she wanted me to pass on to the boy in the event of her death.”

“It’s true dad,” Tim said gently. “Mother left a chest of things for me at his house that she didn’t want me to have until I was older.”

“What things?” Jack demanded.

“Letters, mostly,” Slade said, shrugging. “Janet was a practical woman. She wrote Tim a letter before every trip you two took when globe trotting in the event that something might happened to her. Now if you don’t mind, Jack, it’s late and I’ve got an early flight to catch tomorrow morning. I’m sure Tim is also anxious to go through the things Janet left him. Do call if you need anything, Tim.”

“Uncle Slade!” Tim called out, shoving past his father to stand before the man. “Thank you.”

Slade’s smile actually looked soft and genuine when he looked down at Tim. He hefted the chest out of his car and gave it back to Tim.

“You’re welcome, Tim,” he said. “I know that Janet would be very proud of who you’ve become.”

Tim nodded, stepping back to stand by Jack and Dana as he watched Slade get back in his car and drive away. Tim sighed, staring down at the chest in his arms.

“Please excuse me, Father,” Tim said softly as he headed inside the house.

“Tim, wait!” he heard Jack say, but Dana stopped him.

“Jack, let him be,” he barely heard her say in a soft tone. “He’s home. He’s safe. He wasn’t out fighting.”

Tim couldn’t hear anymore of their conversation as he slipped upstairs and into his room. He set the chest on the foot of his bed and stared at it for a moment, trying to reconcile all that had happened in the last couple of hours.

He was pulled from his thoughts when the window opened and Red Hood slipped in with Robin and Batgirl.

“Tim!” Robin cried softly as she practically tackled him into a hug. “Are you alright? The boss man was really worried when O reported that you’d disappeared.”

“Tony was too,” Jason sighed as he pulled off his helmet. “What the hell happened, Baby Bird?”

“Baby Bird?” Robin repeated, voice squeaking a bit as she stared at the young man in surprise. Obviously she’d never heard that particular nick name out of the many Jason had given Tim over the last year.

“He’s tiny and he was Robin,” Jason snapped defensively. “Kid was practically a baby compared to Dickface and I when we wore the uniform.”

Batgirl said nothing, but the slight shaking in her shoulders told Tim that she was laughing at the exchange. She sidled up to him, her full face mask giving nothing away.

“You okay?” she asked. “What’s in the box?”

Though she spoke quietly, Jason and Robin heard her and stopped talking.

“Letters,” Tim answered, flipping the lid open. “They’re all from my mother.”

“Why the hell did Slade have them?” Jason asked.

“Mother left them with him, I guess,” Tim said, picking up the first bundle of letters. There was fifty in the stack held together by a couple rubber bands. All had his name on the front. “Slade is her older brother.”

It got dead quiet in the room.

“You have gotta be shitting me,” Jason gasped. “Fucking Deathstroke is really your uncle?! That wasn’t just some bullshit cover story?”

“That’s not all,” Tim sighed, handing him the letter he’d read at Slade’s.

Jason’s eyes got bigger and bigger as he read it. Robin and Batgirl were up on their tiptoes to read over his shoulders.

“She knew?” Jason whispered.

“Yes,” Tim sighed.

“Do you think she knew who Batman is?” Robin asked.

“Highly likely,” Tim sighed. “My guess is that she did and was too smart to say so outright in her letter in case it fell into someone else’s hands.”

“I’m still wrapping my head around the part where Slade fucking Wilson is your uncle,” Jason growled. “Tony’s not going to like it.”

“Neither is the boss man,” Robin sighed.

“Well too bad,” Tim snapped, taking his letter back from Jason and shutting the chest full of letters. “I can’t help who my family is. It’s not my fault my mother was a spy and has two crazy mercenaries for brothers.”

“Your mom was a spy?!” the trio gasped.

“CIA,” Tim answered shortly. “So was Slade until he got into mercenary work, apparently.”

“No wonder you’re so good at being sneaky,” Jason mused. “You get that from your mom’s side apparently.”

“Yeah,” Tim chuckled darkly. “Got just the right amount of crazy in my blood too with my mother being a Wilson and all.”

“Tim,” Robin said softly, reaching out a comforting hand.

Tim stepped out of reach.

“If it’s all the same to you guys, I’d like to be alone right now. I’ve… got a lot to think about.”

He didn’t hear or see them leave, but he knew he was alone after a few minutes of silence. Letting out a long tired sigh, he got out of his suit, showered, and put on a pair of comfortable sweats and a large old worn t-shirt that he was pretty sure had been Dick’s at one point in time. Then he crawled onto his bed and stared at the chest full of letters.

When he finally mustered the courage to open the chest again, he pulled out the first bundle and undid the rubber bands. It wasn’t until he moved to open the first letter in the bundle that he realized that the back of each envelope was dated. The bundle he held dated back a year before his mother died. Putting the bundle back together, Tim searched through the chest until he found him mother’s first letters, dating back to just a few months after he’d been born.

Then he began to read them. The letters that covered the first two years of his life weren’t that long, but they were full of lovely sentiments and Janet’s hopes for his future. At least a third of the letters, however, had been written during her trips and occasionally had pictures of the places she’d been. As he went through the years through the letters, they got longer, and he occasionally found pictures of her with Jack or Tim as a child. He had found one particular letter that had been written a few months after his third birthday with a picture of Tim sitting in Dick Grayson’s lap with Janet, Jack and Dick’s parents standing behind them.

Her letter was full of reassurances that even though Dick’s parents were dead, that the boy would be fine. That she believed that there was a life after death and that Dick was sure to see them again after he died, and that Tim would get to see her again when his time came. It was one of her longest letters, one that she’d written in the event that she might die during the trip that she and Jack had taken soon after two of the three Flying Grayson’s had fallen to their deaths. Tim kept that letter and the picture out and set it on the bedside table in a small pile of letters that he wanted to reread later.

Tim kept reading through the night going through letter after letter until he came back to the last one she wrote - the first he’d read - and read it again. He let the tears flow, feeling true grief for the loss of the woman who had been his mother, who had been made real again through these letters. He felt like he knew her more now than he had when she had been alive. He missed her, mourned for her, and felt emotions that he felt hadn’t been there the day of her funeral when he’d watched them put her in the ground. He hadn’t known that woman then, but he knew her now and it pained him that he only got to know her after she was gone.

He wished that he could have spent more time with her. He wished that he could have gone on some of the trips that she’d written about and taken pictures of. That he could see the places she’d found and bought the trinkets that were kept in the larger envelopes. One trinket in particular was a necklace made of thick hemp cord with seaglass beads woven in the fibers and had a shark’s tooth dangling from it. If her letter that came with the necklace was to be believed, she’d gotten the shark’s tooth from a diving expedition that nearly went wrong somewhere in the Pacific Isles where a great white shark nearly took a bite out of her and her scuba instructor. Janet had found and collected the tooth from her wrecked diving bag that had been recovered and had a local Samoan weaver make the necklace and carve symbols of strength and love into the shark tooth.

Tim put the necklace on his side table on top of the letters he’d kept out. There were quite a few of them.

He jumped when he heard a knock at his the door before Dana slipped in.

“Did you stay up all night?” she asked.

Tim glanced out the window and realized that the sun was starting to appear in the sky. It was a good thing it was Sunday and he had no school.

“I guess I did,” Tim said, his voice a little hoarse from his crying.

“May I?” Dana asked, gesturing to the bed.

Tim nodded, putting away the rest of the letters that he wasn’t keeping out, as she sat beside him on the bed.

“Your father and I had a talk last night,” Dana said.

“I swear, I didn’t do anything,” Tim groaned. “I didn’t try to go back and fight whatever the hell attacked last night’s gala. I was lost in the crowd trying to find you but Slade showed up, dropped the bomb that he is my uncle and told me he had some things from my mother, gave me the chest, and drove me home. That’s it. Nothing happened.”

“I believe you,” Dana said, smiling softly. “Do you want to talk about her? I know Jack doesn’t like to, but I am here if you want to, Tim.”

“Thanks, Dana. I know why my father doesn’t talk about her. I don’t either. But now there’s…this,” he said, gesturing to the chest. “Before, there wasn’t anything to really talk about. I barely knew her. To be honest, I barely knew either of them. I didn’t start getting to know my father until after he woke up from his coma. It’s kind of hard to talk about someone you didn’t know.”

Dana nodded slowly. “And now?”

“Now… now I know what she must have been like,” Tim whispered, his throat tightening like it was trying to choke him as the words started spilling out. “I know how much she loved me. I know that I was always in the back of her mind. She wrote to me before every trip in case it was ever her last. She wrote all those letters like they might be the last thing she would ever get to say to me. And then there are the ones she wrote while she was on her trips about all the places she’d been and the things she’d seen. She wrote about where she’d want revisit to take me on trips with her one day. She wrote about how she wanted to show me the Pacific Islands for my sixteenth birthday, about her plans to get Tony to come out with us and trick him into paying for the whole thing.”

Tim’s strangled laugh turned into a wrenching sob.

“For my eighteenth she wanted to take me to New Zealand to visit and hike places the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed because she knew how much I love those movies. She wanted to track down and introduce me to Slade and reconcile with him. She regretted that she hadn’t tried to find her brother after his wife and son had died. She regretted that she’d spent so little time with me. She regretted being an absent mother. She regretted putting her job first and me second even though she thought about me all the time. She’s written so much and now that I’ve read everything that’s in that damn chest, all I want is to find more!

“I want to find her journals and the diaries she refers to in her letters. I want to find them so that I can know what her childhood was like with her brothers. To know how she met and fell in love with my father. I want to know more about her trips, and her life that I never knew about aside from the destinations. I want to know so much more about this woman I never knew when she was alive, and feel awful that I felt nothing when she was buried.

“I couldn’t look past her absence and didn’t love her as much as she loved me. She says it in every letter and I can feel it bleeding off the pages. It kills me that I can’t even recall a single time that I told her I loved her. But I must have, right?! She had to know that I loved her. That I only wanted to be with her. Oh, God! I wish I could see her one last time if only to tell her that I’ve read every letter. That I love her as much as she loves me. That I want to make her proud, that I want to take those trips and see the things she wanted me to see. I wish I’d said goodbye.” Tim choked. “I never got to say goodbye.”

It was like a dam had broke. His tear ducts were working overtime, producing wave after wave of tears. He found himself sobbing into Dana’s shoulder as she pulled him into her arms, her hand in his hair, shushing him and saying incomprehensible but soothing words. He wasn’t sure how long it went on, but when the tears finally stopped, and his breathing - though still hitching - was returning to normal, he found Jack sitting on his other side, gently pulling him out of Dana’s arms and into his own. They didn’t exchange any words. Jack just held Tim and began rocking him slightly, as if he were a little boy again. The action was more soothing than anything he could have possibly said, and Tim felt himself slipping into unconsciousness.

Before he succumbed to sleep, however, he vowed to be a better son. He promised himself that he wouldn’t let Jack remain a stranger in his life. That he wouldn’t have to bury the man without knowing who he was, like he had with his mother. He might miss being Robin, maybe even regret giving up the cape, but he would give it all up again to have this chance to know his father. To know Jack, and get to know Dana better. He swore that he would stop dwelling on what he missed about being a vigilante, and focus more on his family.

Author’s Note:

I KNOW! I KNOW! I totally failed to drag myself out of the darkness and keep this a fluffy piece like I'd intended. I found myself crying as I wrote the ending of this chapter because of all the feels. I actually had to get up an walk away from it for an hour before wrapping it up. I'm actually kind of mad with how depressing this chapter ended, but I just couldn't deal with writing more for this chapter. I'll try to post a new chapter soon that'll be nothing but pure fluff. Maybe I'll write about Jason and Tim racing hamsters or something.

I'm really kind of bummed that Steph and Cass weren't in this as much as I'd originally wanted. Maybe it's because I'm not as familiar with their characters as I am with everyone else's, that I kept hitting road blocks when writing them in scenes. And speaking of characters that I'm not familiar with, I totally hadn't intended for Slade to show up this chapter, but he muscled his way in anyway and then decided to go "oh hey! Here's some angst for you" and dumped a chest full of letters from Janet into Tim's lap. I must apologize if Slade comes off incredibly OC in this fic. Some of you may have caught my hints that Janet had a brother that could possibly be Slade or Wade Wilson and I have had some readers guess that her brother would turn out to be one or the other but you're all right! It's both! Though technically it was Slade that was being referred to in chapter six's funeral scene because (as Slade said this chapter) "we don't like to talk about Wade." So yeah. Tim's family situation continues to get crazier and crazier. The kid was never meant to be normal, the poor boy. XD

I hope I did alright writing Slade, Cass and Steph (even though the girls weren't in the chapter much). I realize that they are perhaps the most OC of any of the characters that I've written so far, and I'm afraid that it shows that I'm just not as familiar with them as I am with the others like Bruce, Tim, Tony, Dick and Jason (the last of which I find kinda funny because I haven't read his character in any comic apart from the new 52 Red Hood and the Outlaws comics). If you guys have any advice about writing Slade, Steph and Cass's characters, please tell me because the only thing I've read Steph and Cass in is the Red Robin comics. Slade, however, I've seen in Teen Titans, Young Justice, the DC animated movies, and CW's Arrow (all of which are different characters in their own ways, especially in age). The Slade I'm kind of leaning towards and referring to character-wise, is the Slade Wilson in the Arrow tv series on CW.

The Slade Wilson in my fic is probably in his early to mid 40s, but looks like he's in his 30s because of the procedure that gave Slade his regenerative abilities and heightened senses. For the sake of simplifying things (and because I'm not familiar with his comic origins except for what's written on wikipedia), let's just say that Slade has the same regenerative abilities as Wolverine and Deadpool, and went through a sanctioned secret government experiment that was very similar to the one Wade (who I'm gonna base off the Deadpool movie for most if not all of Wade's backstory and characterization) went though but didn't didn't have any adverse results because he didn't have cancer, though it didn't regenerate his eye because that happened before he went through the procedure.

Alright gang, technically this is where this fic ends things before we get to the events surrounding the Avenger's film. I won't change this fic's status to complete just yet, however, because there are moments I want to go back to and write little chapters for, like hamster racing, and happy times with a younger Timmy interacting with Tony, Pepper, Happy and Rhodes. If there's anything you guys would like to see, please feel free to drop a suggestion in a comment or something.

This of course means that I'm finally getting ready to actually write the Avengers plot lines. As you know (If you ever bother to read these author's notes) I have 3 main plot lines that I'm toying with and am going to write as their own separate stories that'll all exist bus as their own AU in this same verse. So for all three plots, this is where the plot lines diverge into their own realities, so keep your eye out for new fics under the new Tim Drake-Wayne-Stark series tag that I've added. :)

#Timmy Stark Verse #Tim Drake #tony stark #slade wilson #jack drake #Jason Todd #Stephanie Brown #cassandra cain #bruce wayne #barbara gordon #dick grayson

1 note · View note

chestnutpost · 5 years

Text

Conor McGregor's next opponent should be…

9:05 AM ET

Former UFC lightweight and featherweight champion Conor McGregor, who was suspended six months by the Nevada Athletic Commission for participating in the UFC 229 postfight brawl, can return to the Octagon in April. He recently took to Twitter to voice his support for potential opponents in Cowboy Cerrone, Anderson Silva, Max Holloway, Nate Diaz and more.

Anderson is one crafty, crafty Martial Artist. You only develop these methods through years of hard fought experience. Phenomenal performance. The crafty veteran. Big respect always. It would be an honor!

– Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) February 10, 2019

Book it. I’ll fight Nate on it. https://t.co/ewh4aQ4E7A

– Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) February 10, 2019

For a fight like that Donald, I’ll fight you. Congratulations.

– Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) January 20, 2019

Which of these possible foes — or someone else — should “The Notorious” face when he fights next? ESPN’s MMA contributors — Brett Okamoto, Ariel Helwani, Jeff Wagenheim, Chamatkar Sandhu, Eric Tamiso, Phil Murphy and Andrew Davis — give their takes.

Okamoto: How good does it feel to see McGregor tweeting about fights instead of whiskey again? Good, right? Of course, until he actually signs a bout agreement, these call-outs don’t mean a lot — but still. It’s nice to see him expressing interest in his next fight.

Anderson Silva fought well against a rising star in Israel Adesanya, but if Silva should set foot in the Octagon again, it must be against the right opponent.

Look, I’d be more than happy with a Holloway rematch or a Diaz trilogy. I’d be thrilled. But right now, I really like the Cowboy Cerrone fight, man. I do. The UFC’s biggest star against its all-time leader in wins. It feels fresh. UFC president Dana White recently said Cerrone “deserved” the McGregor fight, and I actually think that’s a fair way to put it. Cerrone has never been the type of fighter to ask for a specific opponent. He’s choosing to do so now, and I think he’s earned that right.

Helwani: There’s no right answer here. Do you want to see McGregor vs. Cerrone next? Of course you do. Do you want to see him rematch Holloway? Absolutely. Do you want to see the Diaz trilogy? Yup. The Anderson Silva fight doesn’t make much sense to me, but we’d all watch. You know this is true. McGregor once told me the fight game is all about “numbers and options.” He has both right now. Most important, though? A win. His next fight is an absolute must-win. No doubt about that. After all, we are getting close to three years without a win for McGregor. So if I were advising him, I’d take the most winnable fight next, get back on track and then proceed to watch the numbers and options continue to grow.

Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone is coming off a dominant victory against Alex Hernandez in January. Anthony Geathers for ESPN

Wagenheim: Anyone but Holloway. I’m not as interested in weighing in on whom McGregor should fight as I am in opining on whom he shouldn’t. Conor is not currently in a position — coming off a loss, with no wins since 2016 — where he merits a title challenge at featherweight or in any other division. And I don’t think a non-title scrap with Max at lightweight makes sense, either, as the only fight at 155 pounds that the 145-pound champion should be allowed to chase (while keeping his belt) is a champ vs. champ clash.

Beyond that, whatever McGregor wants — Cowboy, Spider or Nate — is fine with me. Conor has proven himself to be as top-shelf as that famous brand of Irish whiskey he likes to ridicule. He doesn’t need any one of these guys in particular to help him build a legacy. A spectacular win over any of them — and let’s face it, every Conor victory has some majesty to it — would put him right back in position to challenge for a strap. Is that what he truly wants, though? McGregor’s cordial callouts of late suggest that he’s looking for fights that will keep the sport interesting for him.

Looking at it from that perspective, I guess I’d most favor putting Conor in the cage with Cerrone because that seems like a fight whose time has come. A matchup with Silva, by contrast, is beyond its sell-by date — it’d surely sell anyway, but matching a fighter in his prime against a guy who’s about to turn 44 years old might turn the stomach. And as for Nate III, that’ll always be sitting there in the back pocket. There’s no sell-by date on that one — those two can duke it out in a retirement home three decades from now and it’ll still do a big PPV number. So go ahead and hand the notorious Irishmnan a bolo tie and send him out to the dusty Wild West to see if he can lasso the guy in the cowboy hat.

Sandhu: There’s a lot of fights that make sense for Conor McGregor right now, and to be quite honest, I’d be down for pretty much any of them. I just want the biggest star in our sport booked for a fight ASAP. We miss him.

That being said, the one that jumps off the page for me is Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone. Stylistically, on paper, this is a fun fight. You just know it’ll be action-packed. Cerrone is hot right now, coming off a fight-of-the-night win over Alex Hernandez, which kicked off the UFC on ESPN era and did gangbuster numbers. It was also his return to lightweight and he looked great. So much so that he got some props from McGregor on social media. That, as the kids would say, was the seed. Cerrone wants it, McGregor wants it. Here you have two of the biggest names in the sport and a fight that could headline a pay-per-view and do well over one million buys.

Cerrone doesn’t have too much time left in this sport and wants to put together a run to warrant a title shot. A win over McGregor would certainly go a long way in helping make that dream a reality. For McGregor, he needs a win in the Octagon and has the skillset to beat Cerrone. It would be a very even contest. It’s also a fresh matchup. Not a rematch with Holloway or Diaz. We’ve seen those fights and while I’d love to see the sequel and the trilogy respectively, it would be refreshing and I think quite fun to see what a McGregor vs. Cerrone buildup would look like.

Nate Diaz has not faught since August of 2016 when he lost a close decision to Conor McGregor. Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Tamiso: Many times in combat sports after a superstar loses, or hasn’t fought in a while, their next match isn’t against the stiffest competition. When Mike Tyson was stunned by Buster Douglas, his comeback bout was against Henry Tillman. While being an Olympic gold medalist, Tillman wasn’t an elite pro and played a “contender” that lost to Tommy Gunn in Rocky V. After Anderson Silva rearranged Rich Franklin‘s nose for the first time, the former champ took on Jason MacDonald, who while being a super nice guy, went 6-8 in the UFC. For the first bout after Oscar De La Hoya’s first pro loss, he fought Derell Coley, who went on to compete at a Ramada Inn after being knocked out by “The Golden Boy.”

My point? Fight promoters often attempt to build a star’s momentum back up by putting them in a bout that can put them in the best possible light. It reminds fans of the come up years and they’ll think, “Hey, this guy can still fight” and potentially add more content to the highlight reel. At the very least, you want a fun fight, and a fun lead up to said fight.

McGregor’s next opponent should be Diaz. The trilogy fight was always going to happen from a business perspective, the rematch is the second biggest UFC PPV of all-time, so why not book it now? Diaz is 3-3 in his past six fights, and it’d be close to three years since their second fight. Don’t be scared.

Murphy: Conor’s next fight needs to make a lot of sense for both he and the UFC. It’s intuitive, but those benchmarks are particularly critical when the UFC’s biggest all-time star remains winless since November 2016.

While McGregor and featherweight champ Max Holloway both seem keen on building a functional super-fight — and I’d pony up $65 for that in heartbeat — now is not the time to diminish one of those two stars. There are two options for Conor this summer: capping the Nate Diaz trilogy or answering Cowboy’s call.

The former has inelastic demand; that fight could be staged in 2022 and get 1.5 million buys. The window to face Donald Cerrone seems like it would shut faster, so that’s where I lean.

Conor vs. Cowboy an promotional layup that doesn’t compromise Conor’s existing rivalries against either Nate Diaz and Khabib Nurmagomedov. The renewed, black hat Cowboy, who was clearly motivated by the disrespect from Alex Hernandez, facing a man Notorious for disrespecting his opponent in pre-fight build-up is a stylistic dream that has justification within the lightweight hierarchy.

Davis: At this stage of his career, McGregor is a main-event fighter and he needs to fight in the main event. Regardless of whether an interim title is on the line or not, the fight I want to see is McGregor vs. “Cowboy” Cerrone. Cerrone is the UFC’s all-time leader in knockdowns with 18 and has 10 wins by knockout while McGregor has knockouts in 18 of his 21 wins. This fight is a dream for bringing old and new UFC fans to pay-per-view.

When McGregor fights, people want to watch. They want to see what he’ll do in the cage, but they also want to hear what he will say outside of it. If I’m the UFC and Team McGregor (and for that matter Team Cerrone), I keep the trash talk out of this fight and put the focus on the fact that these men are both new to fatherhood and are fighting for their families. These two fighters don’t need to sell this fight with their words; just grab some whiskey or beer and watch their highlight reels.

The post Conor McGregor's next opponent should be… appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://www.thechestnutpost.com/news/conor-mcgregor039s-next-opponent-should-be/

0 notes

chrismaverickdotcom · 7 years

Text

On the new Mandingo...

My friend and former wrestling tag team partner Donté posted a link on Facebook to an article a little while ago. Before I share the article I want to share my initial reaction. This is what I commented to Donté: “ oh for…. you’re fucking kidding me…. I mean, wow…..” that was my initial reaction.

My second reaction was to hit the share button myself and not actually write a blog about it other than to say “I am just too annoyed and upset about the idea of this to even write a blog. So I’m just resharing it with a link to what Donté said.” And then I found that I was already automatically writing a paragraph of bitchiness.

Ok, so first, let me share what happened. It seems that because he joined in the NFL kneeling protests this weekend some 25,000+ (at the time of my writing this) Baltimore Ravens fans have signed a petition asking for the removal of Ray Lewis’s statue in front of the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium. Sigh…

To quote Donté, “So he was cool enough to have a statue when he was just alleged murderer.. But, he takes a knee nah dog. Smh.”

I’m going to stick with my “you’re fucking kidding me!”

Here’s the deal. I am not a Ray Lewis fan. I am a lifelong Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I grew up squarely in Cleveland Browns territory. It is fundamental to my identity to just be automatically predisposed to hating the Baltimore Ravens. And that’s even aside from other issues with Ray Lewis. Fuck Ray Lewis.

That said, if you think this is the reason to remove Ray Lewis’s statue… fuck you! Seriously… go fuck yourself. Fuck you so much more than fuck Ray Lewis. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you… and I’ll tell you why.

I’ve been pretty clear about my stance on Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem. I support it. It’s important. If you don’t understand why it’s important, well… you’re not going to. I get that. Keep not understanding and bringing more attention to the issue. For all the boneheaded dumbassness of the President, he did a net good thing by turning this from a protest of like 10 people to a protest of about 200 people. So awesome.

But that’s not why you should go fuck yourself.

No, you should go fuck yourself specifically if you think that THIS was the camel’s back for pulling down Lewis’s statue. See, for those of you who don’t follow sports, On January 31, 2000, four years into his seventeen year football career, Lewis and two of his friends got into a physical fight with two other black men that resulted in the other two men being stabbed to death at a nightclub during a Super Bowl party. Lewis eventually took a plea deal (obstruction of justice) and flipped on his friends, both of whom were tried and eventually acquitted for the murder. He went on to become Super Bowl MVP the next year and kept playing for another decade. In 2014, two years after he retired, the team put up a statue in his honor. Baltimore loves Ray Lewis.

Or loved him.

But no… apparently 25,000+ people think that kneeling down during the national anthem is a greater offense than being an alleged murder suspect. Remember, Lewis’s friends walked. Lewis pled guilty to obstruction. Literally, Ray Lewis is the only person on earth who has ever been convicted of a crime in relation to that murder. But that was forgiven because he was a hell of a football player.

But apparently he isn’t allowed to have a political opinion 5 years after retirement.

Look, I don’t care how you feel about kneeling during the national anthem. Ok, that’s not true. I do care… and if you have a problem with it, you’re a fucking idiot. But really, as I said before, it’s because of your idiocy that this is getting press. You are what makes this an effective protest.

But don’t pretend this is a moral outrage. It’s not. Ray Lewis played 17 years with the Baltimore Ravens. He is a two time Super Bowl champion, one time Super Bowl MVP, thirteen time Pro Bowler, and as much as it pains me to say, one of the greatest linebackers that ever played the sport. He is football royalty. He is an easy first round ballot pick for the NFL Hall of Fame. And because of that, he without a doubt deserves the statue in front of the stadium that frankly, he fucking built. That said, there is not a single fan in that city who doesn’t know that he was a suspect in a double murder. Even if he didn’t kill them himself, he was involved in the fight that led to their deaths. HE FUCKING ADMITS THIS! HE TESTIFIED TO IT!!! But I maintain that the two things are unrelated. No matter how awful a person he may or may not be outside of football, he is without a doubt one of the greatest to ever play.

But no, the petition to remove the statue stems from his protest, not his involvement in a double murder. The petition even says “I will not stand for that kind of disrespect towards our country, especially from a legend such as Ray Lewis.” In other words, the petition writer believes that Lewis has even less right to his opinion because of how good a football player he was.

And that’s the problem. You may not believe in Colin Kaepernick. You may not believe in #BlackLivesMatter. You may have a faulty understanding of what the flag represents or how long it has been a tradition to have the players stand for the national anthem (answer, eight years… in other words, only since the last three of Lewis’s career). You may have such conviction for your misled patriotism that you’re now willing to boycott the NFL (and I don’t believe you… you can say whatever the fuck you want, no football fan is missing their team in the playoffs over this). You may think that #BlackLivesMatter is a racist movement because “all lives matter.” You may think all of this is stupid and you may not understand any of it.

Understand this… if you are offended by Lewis’s statue BECAUSE of his kneeling and not because of the rest of his personal history, then you DO NOT believe “all lives matter” and specifically you think black lives don’t matter at all. What you believe is that you want to see a bunch of dumb giant black men crashing into each other for your entertainment. And you don’t care if they literally kill each other off the field. You just don’t want to think that they might have personal opinions that might differ from what you believe. You don’t want them to have opinions at all. You aren’t mad at Ray Lewis because he knelt. You’re mad at him because the nigger didn’t dance when you told him to dance. You’re mad at him because when you said jump, the nigger didn’t ask how high? You’re mad at him because the nigger reminded you that he might be more than an animal that fights other animals for your amusement.

I have on many occasions said that I completely support the rights of white supremacists to march, to carry their nazi flag, to fly the confederate battle flag. I stand by that. If a white player wants to scream “white power” as they take the field, I actually won’t try to stop him. I won’t be a fan. I might bitch about him. But I support his right to do it. And I mean this. I said before that Donté and I were tag team partners. We were part of a group that we called Affirmative Action, a reference to exactly what it sounds like. And if you’re a part of wrestling, then you need to just accept that there is going to be no shortage of white wrestlers with southern gimmicks wearing confederate flag inspired outfits. I might not agree with it, but I never had a problem with any of them. I STILL support their right to stand up for something I don’t believe in… even in the name of entertainment.

You might say “all lives matter” but if you’ve signed this petition… If you have ever said “they can protest on their own time” (something that clearly people also don’t REALLY believe)…if you have a problem with this at all… then you DON’T think all lives matter. You DON’T think their lives matter. And you sure as hell don’t think black ones do. Or at least they don’t matter as much as your comfort level of being able to pretend you’re a patriot while stuffing your face with fucking nachos.

Go fuck yourself.

Ray Lewis says ‘racist’ tweet from Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend kept the Ravens from signing the quarterback

Donald Trump says NFL anthem protests have ‘nothing to do with race’ as fresh demonstrations follow Wembley stunt

Steelers stay in the locker room during national anthem as 100 NFL players protest

Who took a knee? How each NFL team responded to Donald Trump’s tweets about anthem protests

NFL Players Across the Country Take A Knee In Response To Trump

Spike Lee Promotes Rally For Colin Kaepernick, Spells His Name Wrong On The Flyer [PHOTO]

NFL Teams Are Now Taking Turns Systematically Humiliating Colin Kaepernick

NAACP to NFL: Quit blackballing Kaepernick

SaveSave

Ray Lewis says ‘racist’ tweet from Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend kept the Ravens from signing the quarterback

Steelers stay in the locker room during national anthem as 100 NFL players protest

NAACP to NFL: Quit blackballing Kaepernick

Donald Trump says NFL anthem protests have ‘nothing to do with race’ as fresh demonstrations follow Wembley stunt

Who took a knee? How each NFL team responded to Donald Trump’s tweets about anthem protests

NFL Players Across the Country Take A Knee In Response To Trump

Rod Wood: Players have Lions’ support if they want to protest

Michael Strauss, Ashley Bobak, Jim Thomas, Barbara Jensen, Tammi Doerfler, Stephanie Siler, L. Parker Gibson, Mark Best, Emily Virkus Calle, Moshe Hyzon, Carol Fox, Jason Thomas, Michael Higgins, Shawn Churchill, H. Jameel Al Khafiz, Anne Brannen, Lynn Thomas Holly, Dana Siler, Dominic Widdows, Katie Boyd, Van Butler, Nicole Freim liked this post

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=1449198322001470"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, "script", "facebook-jssdk"));

On the new Mandingo… was originally published on ChrisMaverick dotcom

#Baltimore Ravens #Black Lives Matter #Colin Kaepernick #Donald Trump #National anthem #NFL #Protest #rant #ray lewis #The Star-Spangled Banner

0 notes

writingsubmissions · 7 years

Text

UFC Fight Night 104 Preview

WHAT'S HAPPENING: *The Fox show from Denver pretty much delivered everything that could've been expected of it, particularly on the main card, which saw four fighters each make a name for themselves with fairly quick finishes. Leading the way was Valentina Shevchenko, who affirmed herself as bantamweight champ Amanda Nunes's top contender with a somewhat surprising second-round armbar win over Julianna Pena. It's not that Shevchenko won that was the surprise, since she was the betting favorite, but that she was able to tap out a tenacious grappler like Pena, who had actually been having a solid amount of success up to that point in the clinch and wrestling games. Shevchenko can seemingly do it all - she came into UFC with a strong muay thai background and her wrestling looked to be on point, but we hadn't seen much in terms of finishing ability, so this was a huge step. And UFC did well to have Nunes come into the cage after the fight for a pretty endearing showdown, as the two traded barbs back and forth in stilted English that was absolutely charming. That should be a hell of a fight, given how their first meeting went - Nunes had a bunch of success early, but Shevchenko took over for a one-sided third round, leading most to believe that Shevchenko would've won the fight if it went five rounds. So we'll see how it goes this time around. *Well, good on Jorge Masvidal, as his plan worked perfectly. After beating Jake Ellenberger in early December, Masvidal called out Cerrone even though he was already booked, knowing that Cerrone would want to fight as soon as possible anyway, and he did indeed get that fight. And then Masvidal did the hard part, knocking out Cerrone basically twice in a little over a round to get the biggest win of his career and suddenly make himself a welterweight contender. It was mostly an even fight until late in the first round, when Masvidal was able to drop Cerrone right before the horn - Herb Dean pretty clearly stepped in before the round was over, but then insisted the fight was still headed to the second round...at which point Masvidal finished a clearly shaken Cerrone again. I do feel bad for Cerrone, particularly since Denver is his hometown, but this is the downside of taking as many fights as he does - though, on the flip side, he'll probably fight four more times this year and could easily find himself back as a contender by the time 2018 rolls around. As for Masvidal, he does seem to finally be more aggressive, which should serve him well, and he's suddenly got a ton of interesting matchups in the top tier of welterweights to make a run at the belt. *The third big performance on the night belonged to Francis Ngannou, who more or less ran through Andrei Arlovski to establish himself as the next great hope at heavyweight. It'll be fascinating to see what the ceiling is for Ngannou - he's an athletic monster who's only been fighting for a little over three years, but he's improved rapidly from fight to fight, and while Arlovski is somewhat fragile at this point, he was a huge step up for Ngannou in terms of speed and craft, and the Cameroonian really had no problem with the challenge. I have no idea if Ngannou is ready to become a title contender, but I do know there's really nothing left for him to prove fighting guys outside of the top handful of the division, so it might as well be time to try. And the scary thing is, with him being just thirty years old (which is very young for heavyweight at the moment), he's got a few more years to keep improving and figuring things out. *And the Fox card opened with a fourth excellent performance, this one by Alan Belcher protege Jason Knight, who beat Alex Caceres in fairly one-sided fashion leading up to a second-round submission. Like Shevchenko in the main event, the result wasn't as surprising as the finish, as Knight got the better of things on the feet and was able to jump into the grappling realm without much trouble, tapping out a talented, if mercurial vet. And then Knight more or less nailed the post-fight interview, praying to his late father before calling out Doo Ho Choi for what would be a hell of a brawl. Sounds good to me. *The undercard wasn't quite as scintillating, but there was some interesting stuff on it. The biggest result was probably Raphael Assuncao winning a split decision over Aljamain Sterling to stay alive as a bantamweight contender, although it was a fairly boring fight that probably didn't get Assuncao any closer to a title shot. Sterling's extremely frustrating - a blue-chip wrestling-based prospect coming onto the scene, Sterling spent the first two rounds using a weird, low-volume range kicking game that just isn't effective, and probably lost him his previous fight against Bryan Caraway. I'd chalk it up to him not realizing what needs to be fixed, but then he went out and started mixing in some boxing in the third round, winning that frame rather easily and making one wonder exactly why he didn't do that the whole time. So that's two losses for Sterling that easily could've been wins, and I don't really see UFC matchmaking doing him much favors, since he might not be on the best terms with management after some contentious contract negotiations last year. Sigh. As far as individual performances, the best probably belonged to debuting light heavyweight Jordan Johnson, a wrestler who pretty much dominated Henrique da Silva en route to a decision win. Johnson stuck to what he was good at and looked like a top prospect in the process, though he's still fairly raw, so I'd just keep him treading water for a bit until he's ready to move up towards a title shot. In other results on the undercard, Jingliang Li knocked out newcomer Bobby Nash in a fun brawl that was the best fight on the card, Sam Alvey won the featured prelim over Nate Marquardt in yet another weird Alvey fight, and Eric Spicely tapped out Italian prospect Alessio Di Chirico in fairly short order. Spicely then called out Australian fan favorite Dan Kelly after the fight, making him a smart man - try and get that trip to Australia. And even the deeper prelims had some fun stuff, like Marcos Rogerio de Lima knocking out Jeremy Kimball in short order, and Alexandre Pantoja besting Eric Shelton in a battle of TUF 24 alums. *Conor McGregor and UFC are still going back and forth. McGregor had his pay-per-view that was just him being interviewed by Ariel Helwani, and he said some stuff. And Dana was pretty much the promotional equivalent of "come at me, bro." There's still some interesting stuff that can happen, particularly if McGregor uses his boxing license and the Ali Act to get out of his UFC contract, but we're not there yet. *So, Donald Trump's whole travel ban on Muslims. That's a thing. A pretty bad thing. MMA's always had some weirdness going on geopolitically (sup Dagestan), and this is the latest one, as nobody's sure how this is going to affect the foreign-born fighters on the UFC roster. At the only moment, the only pressing case is Gegard Mousasi, who's slated to fight Chris Weidman in Buffalo this April, but was born in Iran and may not be allowed to enter the country despite living in the Netherlands since the age of four. Wheee fun. *World Series of Fighting continues to just be a weird thing, as it's just sort of lurched on as a money pit for whatever shadowy investors are involved at the moment, putting on shows that don't really draw anyone, but still managing to pay some of their top fighters (typically the ones also managed by former matchmaker/WSOF executive/possible terrorist Ali Abdelaziz) way above market value. Anyway, WSOF got bailed out yet again by a new investor group, as they've somehow managed to raise $25 million to sell sixty percent of the company, despite most of their champions now being free agents and the fact that they don't even own their tape library, which may have some value. MMA is a weird sport. *Comings and goings! Per a tweet by UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby, it looks like Al Iaquinta is headed back to the Octagon after basically retiring due to a falling out with management. Iaquinta was a top lightweight contender and his contract was up after a controversial April 2015 win over Jorge Masvidal, where the crowd booed the decision and Iaquinta decided to respond by cursing them out. He then suffered a major knee injury in training, and by mid-2016, all rumors had Iaquinta, a Long Island native, returning against Thiago Alves on the Madison Square Garden show. But Iaquinta never signed a new contract - essentially, Iaquinta argued to UFC that his injury had cascaded from a smaller knee injury suffered in this days on The Ultimate Fighter, while UFC disagreed and basically refused to cover it. Iaquinta eventually got his way, but then felt slighted when UFC fined him for missing a mandatory fighter summit, even though Iaquinta had made it clear he couldn't attend due to some BJJ teaching obligations. After all this, Iaquinta got a new offer, basically decided the money wasn't worth the trouble, and then decided to just call it quits and work as a real estate agent. But now, about six months later, it looks like things have been patched up, and we'll finally see Iaquinta back. On the flip side, UFC may be losing three pretty solid fighters, as welterweights Lorenz Larkin and Rick Story, as well as light heavyweight Misha Cirkunov, were removed from UFC's official rankings since they're no longer considered "under contract," having turned down the chance to re-sign with the company. Basically, this doesn't mean they're free and clear and done with UFC, but rather means they're in a form of restricted free agency, where they can only negotiate with UFC for a bit, and then UFC is free to match any offer one of the three gets after that. Larkin isn't a surprise, since that was well-publicized, and even though he's finally looking like the top contender most expected him to be, it wouldn't be a shock if he left, since he reportedly has a good relationship with his former boss at Strikeforce, current Bellator president Scott Coker. Story, frankly, I could see UFC taking or leaving - he's a solid top ten-to-fifteen fighter and can ably fill a high-card slot, but he's not particularly flashy or exciting. Cirkunov is the really fascinating one, since after his win over Nikita Krylov, he might be the best rising prospect at 205 at the moment. Add in the fact that he's well-known in the Canadian scene after emigrating to Toronto from Latvia, and he's really someone UFC should want to hang on to, and it'll be interesting to see if Bellator decides to make a run at him. Oddly, Ryan Bader is still present in the rankings, although he's openly talked about how this week is when Bellator can finally give him an official offer - I wonder if this is a sign that he's already quietly re-signed with the promotion. *And as almost always nowadays, we end with a whole bunch of drug stuff. We have a race to see who becomes the first three-time drug test failure in the USADA era, as George Sullivan and Ricardo Abreu were both popped for the second time this past week. Sullivan was set to return from suspension and face Randy Brown at UFC 208, but apparently failed a test for clomiphene, a fertility drug that's often used to boost testosterone levels after someone cycles off of steroids - it's the same thing Brock Lesnar failed for, and actually, the same thing that Jon Jones's infamous "dick pills" were tainted with. Anyway, Sullivan has claimed he's trying to have kids and is applying for a retroactive exemption, but given that clomiphene isn't apparently even FDA-approved, good luck with that. As for Abreu, I'm just impressed, since the Brazilian middleweight was already under suspension until the summer of 2018 and I guess just didn't realize he could still be tested. And we got one more failure this past week, as Texan heavyweight Justin Ledet was quietly pulled from this Houston card after popping for something yet to be disclosed. And lastly, Brazilian lightweight Felipe Olivieri has been sentenced to a two-year suspension for a failed January 2016 drug test. ------ BOOKINGS: *Some really interesting fights got booked, but no really big fights, save the rumors being confirmed that the Daniel Cormier/Anthony Johnson rematch for the light heavyweight title will in fact take place at UFC 210 in Buffalo this April. In a way, it's kind of amazing how this all worked out with Jon Jones on the shelf, since, well, Cormier stayed injured long enough that we never really had to dip into the well of whatever contenders UFC would have to create in such a thin division past Johnson. They also added three solid undercard bouts, though none figure to be on the main card - light heavyweights Patrick Cummins and Jan Blachowicz squaring off (and both are ranked, if you need more proof of 205 being a thin division), local featherweight Shane Burgos taking on Boston's Charles Rosa, and an interesting fight between bantamweight prospects Katlyn Chookagian and Irene Aldana. *UFC keeps adding fights to the March card in Fortaleza, Brazil, and it's looking like by far the best TV card of the first half of 2016. There was already some interesting stuff on it, but we get two more good fights, with lightweights Francisco Trinaldo and Kevin Lee squaring off, as well as a UFC 207 rematch between Tim Means and Alex "Cowboy" Oliveira. I feel a bit bad for Trinaldo, since at 38, time is running out, and despite a seven-fight win streak, UFC hasn't really moved up the ladder, but a bout against Lee, one of the division's top young prospects, should be an excellent affair. And the Means/Oliveira fight in December was really fun while it lasted, until Means hit a controversial illegal knee that got the fight turned into a no contest. Add in two more decent undercard fights, with welterweights Sergio Moraes and Max Griffin, as well as featherweights Godofredo Pepey and Kyle Bochniak, and the card's looking like a good one. *So, UFC kind of pissed off their British fanbase, as tickets went on sale for the upcoming London card without an announced main event, and then UFC just decided to promote the already-announced light heavyweight bout between Jimi Manuwa and Corey Anderson to that spot after the fact. Reportedly, the initial plan was Alexander Gustafsson against Ryan Bader, but Gustafsson is hurt and Bader is not yet back under contract, so UFC just went with this due to a lack of other options. I also heard some stuff that Anthony Pettis against Mairbek Taisumov, a fight that Joe Rogan dropped sometime around UFC 207, was slated for this card, but it's unclear what's going on there, since Taisumov has been agitating on social media for Pettis to go ahead and sign a contract. Maybe that'll be your co-main event, as there's not really a viable one at the moment and the card still has one or two open spots for fights. *Speaking of disappointing cards, UFC 208, which was initially an exciting card on paper despite a pretty bad main event marquee-wise, is slowly continuing to get gutted. Three more fighters are off the card - flyweight Neil Seery was forced off due to the death of his mother-in-law, and heavyweight Luis Henrique wasn't cleared to fight following eye surgery for his nearsightedness, so into the fray step two UFC newcomers - Jarred Brooks steps in to fight Ian McCall, and Justin Willis steps in to fight Marcin Tybura. Alright then. And as mentioned above, welterweight George Sullivan is also off this card due to a drug test failure, but it's unclear if UFC is still seeking a replacement to face Randy Brown, who really should stay on this card as an exciting local product. *And a few odds and ends - Rashad Evans will maybe, finally, make his debut at middleweight, and it looks to be a weird one, as he'll face Australian Dan Kelly at UFC 209 this March. Kelly's near forty with bad knees, but the decorated judoka still gets it done through sheer force of will and good old-fashioned dad strength, so it's actually a pretty solid test to see exactly what Evans has left, even if it's a bit concerning that it's come to this. And while UFC has yet to officially announce their second quarter schedule, two more events have already leaked out, as they're heading to Kansas City on April 15th, and making their promotional debut in Denmark, as UFC: Copenhagen is happening on May 27th. The broadcasts for each card haven't been announced, but the Kansas City date lines up to be a Fox card, and it already has its first fight, as Kansas City native Tim Elliott is apparently not heading to bantamweight after losing to Demetrious Johnson after all, and instead will face Louis Smolka at 125. And the Denmark card means that for the first time in a while, UFC will not be running a pay-per-view or a show in Vegas over Memorial Day weekend - and that card has a fight as well, as Danish heavyweight Christian Colombo will take on Polish vet Damian Grabowski in a fight between two guys in search of their first UFC win. ----- ROSTER CUTS: 1) Ali Bagautinov (15-6 overall, 4-3 UFC, last fought 11/19/16, L vs. Kyoji Horiguchi): UFC let two ranked flyweights walk this past week, and Bagautinov's the more surprising of the two, even if you could tell by his match placement that he was a bit out of favor. Bagautinov, a popular vet in his native Dagestan, made an impact pretty much immediately upon his UFC debut, going on a three-fight win streak that included one-sided wins over Tim Elliott and John Lineker and earning himself a title shot at Demetrious Johnson. Like everyone else, Bagautinov pretty much couldn't do anything with Johnson, and even worse, he failed a drug test afterwards, and that pretty much derailed the rest of his UFC career. Outside of a weird fight against prospect Geane Herrera that Bagautinov won, UFC pretty much used the Russian as a keep-busy fight against top contenders like Joseph Benavidez and Kyoji Horiguchi, and after going 1-2 post-drug suspension, I guess UFC figured he had outlived his usefulness. A shame, though, since losing a guy like Bagautinov (and Makovsky below) really does hurt the depth of UFC's flyweight division. 2) Zach Makovsky (19-8 overall, 3-4 UFC, last fought 12/10/16, L vs. Dustin Ortiz): Makovsky being let go is a damaging cut for the flyweight division, but it wasn't a surprising once, since most figured the fight between him and Ortiz was loser leaves town. Bellator surprisingly cut Makovsky in 2013 - he was the promotion's first bantamweight champion, and they let him go after only one loss following him dropping his belt - but he cut down to flyweight and caught on with UFC pretty quickly, earning wins over Scott Jorgensen and Josh Sampo. Makovsky was a decent all-around fighter, particularly in terms of wrestling, but the middle is a hard place to be in UFC's flyweight division. Essentially, you have a few scrubs, but outside of that, there's really no easy fights once you're a relevant fighter, and like Bagautinov, just kept racking up the losses even though they were against really good competition. 3) Aisling Daly (16-6 overall, 2-1 UFC, last fought 10/24/15, W vs. Ericka Almeida): Daly suddenly announced her retirement while in the midst of recovering from injury, as a scan of her brain apparently uncovered a hemorrhage she had suffered at some point while training, forcing a premature end to her career. Daly's probably a bit underrated as a pioneer, since the Irishwoman was one of the first female fighters to really make her name in Europe, and really the first Irish fighter to make a global name for themselves period, racking up a 9-0 record wherever she could find fights before a brief stint in Bellator. It may just be my heritage showing, but I've always liked Daly because she was just so, well, Irish - she suffered a three-fight losing streak in 2012 and then proceeded to take a year off to battle her issues with depression, and, well, it really doesn't get more Irish than that. Daly had a solid showing on season 20 of TUF and a solid showing in UFC thereafter thanks to her solid grappling game, and honestly, she probably got the best sendoff you could probably ask for, as she was the big Irish favorite on UFC's October 2015 card in Dublin, and the ovation both for her entrance and her subsequent win over Ericka Almeida was one of the highlights of the show. And even her postfight interview was just so...wonderfully touched with Irish bleakness, as the big McGregor/Brandao card with all her SBG teammates took place during her time in the house, and she likened watching it to seeing a child grow up and no longer being able to talk to them. Anyway, Daly seems at peace with the decision, and she'll go on as a grappling coach for SBG, so I wish her well. ----- UPCOMING UFC SHOWS: 2/11 - UFC 208 - Brooklyn, NY - Germaine de Randamie vs. Holly Holm, Derek Brunson vs. Anderson Silva 2/19 - UFC Fight Night 105 - Halifax, NS - Travis Browne vs. Derrick Lewis, Johny Hendricks vs. Hector Lombard 3/4 - UFC 209 - Las Vegas, NV - Tyron Woodley (c) vs. Stephen Thompson, Tony Ferguson vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov, Mark Hunt vs. Alistair Overeem 3/11 - UFC Fight Night 106 - Fortaleza, Brazil - Vitor Belfort vs. Kelvin Gastelum, Edson Barboza vs. Beneil Dariush, Mauricio Rua vs. Gian Villante 3/18 - UFC Fight Night 107 - London, England - Corey Anderson vs. Jimi Manuwa 4/8 - UFC 210 - Buffalo, NY - Daniel Cormier (c) vs. Anthony Johnson, Gegard Mousasi vs. Chris Weidman 4/15 - UFC TBA - Kansas City, MO - Tim Elliott vs. Louis Smolka 5/13 - UFC 211 - Dallas, TX - Stipe Miocic (c) vs. Junior dos Santos 5/27 - UFC TBA - Copenhagen, Denmark - Christian Colombo vs. Damian Grabowski ----- UFC Fight Night 104 - February 4, 2017 - Toyota Center - Houston, Texas 2017 has already seen UFC break with a few traditions - MLK weekend was in Phoenix instead of Boston, and here UFC breaks a streak of a few years, as the company is eschewing a pay-per-view over Super Bowl weekend in favor of a FS1 show in Houston, where the big game is taking place. And while this continues this year's trend of being somewhat low-wattage in terms of star power, it should be a hell of a show, as this is one of those cards where UFC has matched up a bunch of action fighters. Even past the headliner, which is the return of one of the better action fighters in recent history, "The Korean Zombie" Chan Sung Jung, there's a solid mix of prospects and just outright showcase performances that should make for a fun night of violence. Good stuff. MAIN CARD (Fox Sports 1 - 10:00 PM ET): Featherweight: (#9) Dennis Bermudez vs. Chan Sung Jung Women's Strawweight: (#12) Alexa Grasso vs. Felice Herrig Lightweight: Abel Trujillo vs. James Vick Light Heavyweight: (#6) Ovince St. Preux vs. Volkan Oezdemir Heavyweight: Marcel Fortuna vs. Anthony Hamilton Women's Strawweight: (#5) Jessica Andrade vs. Angela Hill PRELIMINARY CARD (Fox Sports 1 - 8:00 PM ET): Heavyweight: Curtis Blaydes vs. Adam Milstead Featherweight: Chris Gruetzemacher vs. Chas Skelly Bantamweight: Ricardo Ramos vs. Michinori Tanaka Women's Strawweight: (#6) Tecia Torres vs. Bec Rawlings PRELIMINARY CARD (UFC Fight Pass - 7:00 PM ET): Welterweight: Alex Morono vs. Niko Price Light Heavyweight: Daniel Jolly vs. Khalil Rountree THE RUNDOWN: Dennis Bermudez (16-5 overall, 9-3 UFC) vs. Chan Sung Jung (13-4 overall, 3-1 UFC, 0-2 WEC): It's been about three and a half years, but finally the day has come. "The Korean Zombie" is back. Chan Sung Jung became a bit of a phenomenon within the MMA bubble back in 2010 - he made his stateside debut in the featured prelim of WEC's lone pay-per-view and wound up having one of the best MMA fights of all time against Leonard Garcia, an absolute war that Jung lost in what was considered a bit of a robbery. But between the all-out action style of Jung and the fact that he has one of the best MMA nicknames of all time, the legend of "The Korean Zombie" was born, and Zuffa had a bit of a minor star on their hands. After surprisingly losing via knockout to George Roop in his only other WEC fight, Jung picked up where he left off with UFC - almost literally in fact, since UFC decided to rematch him with Garcia in a fight that wasn't quite as great as the first, but did give us the first and only twister submission in UFC history, as Jung basically tied Garcia into a pretzel. And then Jung made history a few more times, first knocking out Mark Hominick in just seven seconds to tie the fastest knockout in UFC history, and then putting on the consensus 2012 fight of the year in a war over Dustin Poirier. Despite a year-long injury layoff after that fight, Jung's notoriety still earned him a title shot at Jose Aldo, although he wasn't really able to do much with the champ, eventually losing in the fourth round after badly dislocating his shoulder. And just as Jung was ready to return, he was forced to serve his mandatory two years in the Korean military, resulting in this 42-month layoff. And UFC isn't really doing Jung any favors in his comeback, as while this should be a fun fight (hell, of course it should be, it's a Chan Sung Jung fight), Dennis Bermudez is a dangerous fringe contender. Bermudez looked to be close to a title shot by mid-2014, as he capped off a seven-fight win streak with a submission over Clay Guida, but once he got moved into the ranks of true contenders, some defensive holes became apparent. Ricardo Lamas handled Bermudez rather easily, stunning him with a jab before jumping onto a submission, and Bermudez was winning a fight with Jeremy Stephens rather handily before Stephens uncorked a beautiful flying knee from out of nowhere that gave him a sudden comeback win. It doesn't seem to be a case of Bermudez having a glass jaw so much as just defensive unawareness, but at any rate, Bermudez has since chosen to play it a bit safer, relying on his wrestling to beat Tatsuya Kawajiri and Rony Jason, though the latter did have some success with his submission game. As far as the fight goes, it's absolutely fascinating, particularly since Jung is such a question mark. Going back over his last few fights, I got reminded of exactly how dangerous Jung is a grappler - at least in my mind, the first thing that pops into my head for "The Korean Zombie" is back and forth striking wars, but particularly the Poirier fight showed that Jung is a dangerous, creative guy on the ground, and that the risky offense doesn't stop once the Zombie is on his back. So that makes it a really tricky fight for Bermudez - the two striking back and forth would probably spark into a crazy war that could go either way, but Bermudez relying on his theoretically safer wrestling game might not be all that safe, particularly since Bermudez has shown that he can be caught defensively unaware on the ground as well. Still, I kind of have to favor Bermudez to take this by decision, just because of the uncertainty around Jung - and while it does look like a lot of his game will still translate into the current landscape, there's just the fact that we haven't seen Jung fight since mid-2013, and things have changed a hell of a lot since then. But it should be a fun one - again, it's a Chan Sung Jung fight, and Bermudez has enough defensive flaws that Jung suddenly changing the momentum and getting a win wouldn't be a surprise. Alexa Grasso (9-0 overall, 1-0 UFC, 4-0 Invicta) vs. Felice Herrig (11-6 overall, 2-1 UFC, 0-1 Invicta, 3-0 Bellator): Even though it's honestly probably the third-most relevant of three strawweight fights on this card in terms of pure sport, the positioning shows that UFC is fully behind Alexa Grasso, and it's hard to blame them. Grasso has the looks, personality and skill to be one of UFC's big Mexican stars, and they're pretty much dusting off the Paige VanZant playbook in order to promote her, right down to making her second UFC fight against Felice Herrig. Grasso immediately became a prospect to watch upon her Invicta debut in 2014, and she's done nothing to dissuade that, putting on a fight of the year contender in 2015 against Mizuki Inoue and pretty much dominating all her competition. Grasso comes from a boxing family, and that's where she excels, possessing an excellent sense of distance and combinations, and after an injury layoff, she returned in 2016 and even showed off a bit of wrestling skill, shutting down Jodie Isquibel's wrestling game and imposing her own a bit. After a bit of a showcase bout in her UFC debut over Heather Jo Clark, Grasso now faces Herrig, who's strictly in the gatekeeper role, but might be Grasso's toughest test yet. Herrig's more known for her personality than anything - in the days when strawweight was still getting off the ground, Herrig made a bit of a name for herself by wearing provocative clothing and all sorts of weird outfits, and her stint on TUF 20 established her as a bit of a motor-mouth (which, having met her, I can also confirm was not editing) - but as far as in the cage, she's a solid, game wrestler-slash-grappler. That combination of skills made her a perfect stepping stone for VanZant, and essentially the same for Grasso here, but against lower-level foes like Lisa Ellis and Kailin Curran, Herrig has been able to latch on a submission without much trouble. This figures to be another Grasso showcase, so I'll pick her to win by decision, though there's the chance she gets so much momentum going on the feet that the referee steps in and stops it late, but there is the caveat that Herrig is probably the best grappler Grasso has faced, so there's a chance that if Grasso turns out to be awful on the ground, that gets exposed here. But still, I'm fairly comfortable picking the potential Mexican star. Abel Trujillo (15-6 [1] overall, 6-2 [1] UFC) vs. James Vick (9-1 overall, 5-1 UFC): This fight was thrown together after both men's original opponents got hurt, and it kind of shows, since this is a weird one. Abel Trujillo's carved out a bit of a niche as a berserker of an action fighter, but it's still hard to root for him, given that he has a fairly distressing history of domestic violence. As far as in the cage goes, Trujillo's seemingly learned to pace himself, as he initially had the rep of being strong for one round before gassing out, but he's still one of the purest examples of the "bully" mentality in MMA. Essentially, when Trujillo has the advantage, he's absolutely frightening, an explosive power puncher and takedown artist that's capable of scoring the finish at any moment. But when things don't go Trujillo's way, he has a bad tendency to cave in, and when guys like Tony Ferguson and Gleison Tibau have gotten the advantage, Trujillo has just sort of panicked and looked for a way out. So Trujillo's a fairly boom-and-bust fighter, and adding to the potential variance of this fight is that, even after almost five years in the UFC, it's still unclear how good James Vick is. The Texan came out of nowhere to make the semifinals of TUF 15 before falling to Michael Chiesa, and looked like an interesting prospect, thanks to his ridiculously long and tall frame for lightweight - Vick is 6'3", and as an example, he'll have a seven-inch height and six-inch reach advantage over Trujillo. But Vick's career settled into a weird pattern - for one thing, he'd often get hurt and have to spend a year between fights, and even though he racked up wins, UFC just never really did anything with him, just matching him against rising, unproven prospects. I forget exactly where I heard the analogy (I believe it was from Connor Reubusch, who does some good work breaking down the technical aspects of MMA), but it was like Vick wasn't moving up the ladder, but instead just sort of hiding behind the ladder and shoving other people off as they tried to move up themselves. But after derailing another prospect, in this case Glaico Franca, Vick finally got a legit fight in a late-notice bout against Beneil Dariush, and, well, he pretty much got smoked, as Dariush outboxed him and eventually knocked him out in brutal fashion. But, then again, Dariush is looking like a fringe title contender at the moment, so there's still a wide range as far as where Vick stands in the lightweight division. So, yeah, anything could happen here, but I'm picking Trujillo by decision, since I'm not exactly Vick will be able to deal with Trujillo's aggression and physicality enough to turn the tide. That said, Vick could just keep Trujillo at a distance and pick him apart, or, and this may be even more likely, I could see Vick continuing his trend of accidentally poking his opponents in the eyes, and that being enough to demoralize Trujillo and give Vick the advantage. But I'll stick with Trujillo by decision as my pick, though this is one of those bouts that is more or less a coin flip. Ovince St. Preux (19-9 overall, 7-4 UFC, 6-1 Strikeforce) vs. Volkan Oezdemir (12-1 overall, 1-1 Bellator): Well, light heavyweight needs bodies, and I guess we're going to continue to try with Ovince St. Preux, as this figured to be a bounce-back win against a late injury replacement. St. Preux was an interesting prospect for a while - a former linebacker for the University of Tennessee, St. Preux is a top-flight athlete, and Strikeforce and UFC both just let him move slowly up the ladder and rack up showcase wins. St. Preux chose to remain involved with the University of Tennessee community, continuing to train in Knoxville rather than seek out a bigger camp, and the result has been St. Preux developing a weird game, built around unorthodox striking and strange submissions where it all kind of works thanks to St. Preux's athleticism, but doesn't really fit together in any sort of cogent way. And that's gotten exploited badly as St. Preux has faced upper-level competition - outside of a quick knockout of Shogun Rua, most of St. Preux's big fights have been one-sided losses - Ryan Bader and Glover Teixeira just schooled him with grappling, Jon Jones treated him as a glorified sparring partner, and Jimi Manuwa put his lights out in October. It's probably time to move on from any thoughts of St. Preux becoming a top-flight fighter anymore, particularly since he's about to turn 34, and his athleticism-dependent style may go downhill quickly as he ages, but light heavyweight is also a thin enough division that OSP is probably going to remain a concern one way or another. Anyway, he faces Volkan Oezdemir, who becomes UFC's first Swiss fighter - Oezdemir apparently has a background in muay thai, but the fights that I've watched have seen him focus on taking his opponents down, where he's aggressive, but has trouble keeping his foes on the mat once he has them there. There's a chance Oezdemir can still do something with that - St. Preux, again, just sort of relies on his athleticism to get up after he's taken down and leaves some holes in doing so - but I just really don't see anything from Oezdemir that suggests he can compete with St. Preux's athleticism and power, unless St. Preux is hitting the decline phase even moreso than it looks like. I'll call for St. Preux to get a first-round knockout, but if he doesn't, this could be a bit of a slog. Marcel Fortuna (8-1 overall) vs. Anthony Hamilton (15-6 overall, 3-4 UFC): This is certainly happening. In a heavyweight division where everyone is pretty much either a contender by default or just hot garbage, Anthony Hamilton seems to be one of the few who's just sort of a guy. He's just a really physically big dude who can do a little bit of everything, and his UFC record places him squarely as a middle-of-the-road gatekeeper - he's had no problem with lower-level guys like Ruan Potts and Damian Grabowski who just aren't at a UFC level, but anyone decent has beaten him, including Francis Ngannou, who tapped him out in his last fight. This was a really late addition to the card, so Hamilton is facing UFC newcomer and inflated light heavyweight Marcel Fortuna, a Brazilian who trains out of California. Fortuna hasn't fought in about a year and a half, as his only MMA action of 2016 was trying out for the Jedrzejczyk/Gadelha season of The Ultimate Fighter, where he lost a close decision to Cory Hendricks before even getting into the house. I'm a little surprised UFC didn't at least wait for Fortuna to win a fight or two somewhere else before taking him on, but I can see what they liked looking at film, since Fortuna has a BJJ background and looks pretty solid as a wrestler/grappler against a middling slate of competition. But I don't really think he can do much here - Fortuna's game is extremely one-dimensional, and he had trouble even taking down Hendricks with Hendricks's size and athleticism. And while Hamilton may not be quite as athletic, he's a much, much bigger dude than the 205ers (and some converted middleweights) that Fortuna was having success against on the regional scene. I have no idea how good Fortuna's chin is, but I figure he'll be overwhelmed here, and I'll just call for Hamilton to get the first-round knockout. Jessica Andrade (15-5 overall, 6-3 UFC) vs. Angela Hill (6-2 overall, 1-2 UFC, 4-0 Invicta): From a sporting standpoint, this is probably the most important fight on the show, since Jessica Andrade is the assumed next contender for Joanna Jedrzejczyk's strawweight belt, and Angela Hill will be right there if she scores the upset in her UFC return. Andrade was somewhat mercurial during her time at bantamweight - she'd look dominant against overmatched competition and could seemingly do a bit of everything, but she'd suffer some bad losses, getting tapped out rather easily by Marion Reneau and Raquel Pennington. Strawweight didn't really seem like an option - even though Andrade was short for the division, she seemed to be too thickly muscled to cut much weight, but she took about nine months off to cut down to 115, and the results have been outstanding. Andrade has been an absolute powerhouse, overpowering Jessica Penne on the feet and just bulling Joanne Calderwood in the grappling game, looking like one of the most dangerous physical threats in the division. Meanwhile, Hill's had a weird path here, as I'm not exactly sure what the hell UFC was trying to do with her in her first stint with the promotion. Hill was part of the cast for TUF 20, which was a tournament to crown UFC's inaugural champion, even if she didn't really belong there - she was a 1-0 striker at the time, and while she showed some potential and some personality, it's hard not to see her inclusion as tokenism at worst or just TV execs wanting a marketable face on the show at best. And then, after a solid win over Emily Kagan, UFC pretty much threw her to the wolves, putting a 2-0 fighter against two of the top fighters in the division, as Tecia Torres out-wrestled her and Rose Namajunas choked her out. And then UFC cut her, which really was a bad look, since it looked like they had pretty much failed in developing what could've been a marketable, exciting prospect. But Hill landed in Invicta quickly thereafter and had a breakout 2016, going 4-0, showing greatly improved grappling defense, and taking Invicta's strawweight belt from Livia Renata Souza, who was looking like the next big thing at 115. After one title defense, Hill re-signed with UFC, and after some issues with her getting cleared to return by USADA, her fight with Andrade gets moved from UFC 207 to here. It should be an interesting one, though I favor Andrade pretty handily - the big story is going to be more how much Hill's improvements shine through rather than expecting her to win. I always think of Hill as taller and rangier than she actually is (maybe it's the hair, although she's gone with a close fade for this fight), but she'll still have that advantage on the stout Andrade, so I could see Hill having some success picking her apart at range. But I'm not really sure how Hill will handle Andrade's power if she's able to get through, and the grappling game favors Andrade hugely - while Hill's takedown and submission defense is much improved, she still had to do a lot of work against Souza, and Andrade is a complete powerhouse compared to Souza. So it may come with some difficulty, but I see Andrade eventually taking things to the ground and dominating from there, enough so that I'll call for a second-round submission. Curtis Blaydes (6-1 overall, 1-1 UFC) vs. Adam Milstead (8-1 overall, 1-0 UFC): Yes, somehow, two heavyweight prospects that are each under thirty years old are squaring off. Adam Milstead's only a few months shy, but that still counts, and the Pittsburgh native is coming off a solid UFC debut in May, outboxing Chris De La Rocha en route to a referee stoppage. He'll face Illinois's Curtis Blaydes, who came into UFC with a decent amount of hype thanks to his size and strong wrestling background, but ran into Francis Ngannou in his UFC debut before rebounding in October with a win over Cody East. Both guys are promising - Blaydes in particular is just a beast of a man, one of those guys who actually needs to cut to make heavyweight, and even his fairly one-sided loss to Ngannou looks impressive, since he had some success getting Ngannou to the ground, if not keeping him there. Honestly, this may be a weird comparison, but I see this similarly to the Andrade/Hill fight on the complete opposite side of the size spectrum - while Milstead has a wrestling background, he's primarily been a boxer in his recent MMA fights, and should be able to have some success trading with Blaydes in the pocket. But I just don't see Milstead being able to handle Blaydes's physicality, and I figure Blaydes will be able to take things to the ground a solid percentage of the time and just maul Milstead from there. Both guys are still raw and improving, so the possibilities are a bit wide here, but I'll call for Blaydes to eventually ground-and-pound out Milstead sometime in the third round. Chris Gruetzemacher (13-1 overall, 1-0 UFC, 1-0 Strikeforce) vs. Chas Skelly (16-2 overall, 5-2 UFC, 3-0 Bellator): Sure. Chas Skelly has had a somewhat underrated UFC career thus far - he's a bit older than you'd think, since he'll probably be 32 by his next fight, but he's one of the better grinders out there, and opens things up enough that he scores the occasional submission. Despite being the betting favorite for some reason, he lost pretty handily to Darren Elkins this past March, establishing that Skelly isn't king of the featherweight grinders just yet, but he rebounded in extremely unexpected fashion in a crazy fight against Maximo Blanco, as both men decided to start the fight with running, flying kicks, Skelly's hit cleaner, and Skelly subsequently locked on a choke to win in just nineteen seconds. Crazy stuff. Skelly returns to his home state of Texas to face Arizona's Chris Gruetzemacher, who's a solid wrestle-boxer. Gruetzemacher had a decent run on the McGregor/Faber season of TUF in late 2015, won a fight over castmate Abner Lloveras to stay on the roster, and returns here after missing all of 2016. Gruetzemacher is fine at everything, but it's hard to see where he stands out - he could stick around if he just gets matched with the right lower-level guys coming off losses, but he really does seem like one of those fighters who can have a ton of success on the smaller circuits, but will struggle against UFC-level fighters. At any rate, unless Gruetzemacher has improved greatly in his year off, this seems like a pretty one-sided win for Skelly, so I'll call for him to just out-wrestle "Gritz" and earn a one-sided decision, with a chance of him getting a submission at some point. Ricardo Ramos (9-1 overall) vs. Michinori Tanaka (11-2 overall, 2-2 UFC): This is an interesting first UFC fight for Ricardo Ramos, who comes into UFC with a bunch of hype, and deservedly so. Ramos is just twenty-one years old, but he's put together an excellent resume thus far, racking up win after win thanks to an exciting submission game, reminiscent of Charles Oliveira, where he just chains together techniques until he finds one his opponent isn't able to stop. That said, Ramos has already flown a little too close to the sun, as Manny Vazquez was able to reverse things on him and tap him out for his lone career loss, but between his submission skills, his long frame, and some pretty decent striking already, the sky is pretty much the limit for Ramos. He debuts against Michinori Tanaka, who's one of the better Japanese prospects of the recent wave that came into UFC. Tanaka's a strong athlete, a solid submission artist, and has some solid, movement-based striking - the type of overall package that doesn't really stick out, but should be enough to keep Tanaka around in UFC for a bit while trading wins and losses. This could really go either way - Ramos obviously has a high ceiling, and it's just a matter of if it's too much, too soon at the moment. I'll roll with the top prospect and say Ramos racks up another first round submission, but if he's not able to do much against Tanaka, that's perfectly fine, since the long-term outlook is still so good. Tecia Torres (7-1 overall, 3-1 UFC, 4-0 Invicta) vs. Bec Rawlings (7-5 overall, 2-2 UFC, 1-2 Invicta): Part of me still thinks the UFC dropped the ball a bit when it comes to Tecia Torres, even if I understand why they don't really seem to be enthralled with pushing her as a top contender. When Torres came onto the scene in Invicta back in 2012, she looked like a future star - "The Tiny Tornado" was a particularly apt nickname, as Torres would just mix in her wrestling with a vast array of spinning strikes; add in the fact that she was a cute Latina, and she really did look like someone UFC could build around whenever they introduced strawweights. But things never really clicked - Torres has always been held in high regard, but as she's gotten better as a fighter, she's also gotten much more conservative, relying on her wrestling and grinding clinchwork in a lot of fights, and replacing that exciting, but reckless, striking game with more steady kickboxing. Wins over Angela Hill and Jocelyn Jones-Lybarger were pretty unmemorable and didn't do her many favors, and a narrow loss to Rose Namajunas last April left Torres out of the title picture, and she's apparently had trouble getting a fight booked since. But she returns here after about ten months to fight Bec Rawlings, in a rematch of a Torres win on season 20 of TUF. Rawlings came into Invicta with a splash based off a solid record in her native Australia and a strong social media presence, but it soon became apparent that she wasn't really up to snuff as a title contender for the promotion. But she's eventually settled into a solid mid-card niche, as she's a decent, fun striker with just enough grappling to get by. Still, this is pretty much a keep-busy rebound win for Torres, as she's probably the better striker and should always have her wrestling to fall back on. Rawlings being big for the division while Torres is so small could be a concern, but Torres is always so undersized, and it hasn't really hampered her yet, so the call is Torres by fairly one-sided decision. Alex Morono (13-3 overall, 2-0 UFC) vs. Niko Price (9-0 overall, 1-0 UFC): This should be a pretty fun welterweight fight, as both guys have put on solid performances in their UFC careers thus far, and we're still figuring out exactly what both have to offer. Alex Morono probably didn't deserve the upset division win over Kyle Noke in his UFC debut, but he at least made good the second time around with a one-sided win over James Moontasri. Morono seems to be a solid striker and that's about it, though when he starts smelling blood, like he did in the Moontasri fight, his gameplan does tend to shift towards "start winging punches." Morono, a Houston native, is fighting on a pretty quick seven-week turnaround, though his opponent, Florida's Niko Price, is fighting on just five weeks notice himself. Price made his UFC debut on the Nunes/Rousey card, tapping out Brandon Thatch, and looked like a pretty solid, aggressive athlete - with the caveat that at this point, exploiting Thatch's ground game doesn't really seem to be clearing a high bar. Anyway, this is basically a coin flip fight, and I'll favor Price by decision, if only because Morono's wrestling game seems pretty untested itself, and Price has at least shown that much. But this could be a fun one, since both guys seem to fight quite aggressively. Daniel Jolly (5-1 overall, 0-1 UFC) vs. Khalil Rountree (4-2 overall, 0-2 UFC): Okay, so I assume this has to be the last chance for Khalil Rountree, at least in the UFC. When the cast for TUF 23 was announced, the two big favorites were Rountree and Phil Hawes, two middleweights (although the season was at 205) who were considered among the best prospects in MMA at any weight class. And while Rountree has done better than Hawes (who didn't even make it into the house, and was last seen getting tapped out in WSOF), the Las Vegas native has still been a huge disappointment. Rountree did make it to the final of the season, but Andrew Sanchez wound up making him look awful once he got there, taking Rountree down at will; things went badly enough that you could hear Rountree's mother in the crowd, telling her son to get up. After that, Rountree was matched against debuting Australian Tyson Pedro, and it was more or less the same story - Rountree rocked Pedro with his trademark striking power, but Pedro just shot for a takedown and it was pretty much all over from there, as Pedro eventually worked his way to a first-round submission. Rountree's a powerhouse of a fighter, and as TUF showed, when he's on, it's awesome, since he hits like a truck, but the lack of takedown defense and complete lack of improvement is making him look like a bust thus far in his UFC career. So, hopefully third time's the charm against "The Werewolf of Texas" Daniel Jolly, who's primarily a wrestler and a ground-and-pound artist. That made for a horrible matchup in his UFC debut against Misha Cirkunov back in August of 2015, as Cirkunov's own strength is his high level judo game, so Jolly just had no answers for the Latvian prospect. And, well, frankly, given how disadvantageous that style matchup was, he couldn't ask for a more advantageous rebound here. I'm going to go with my heart a bit and pick Rountree to finally get on track and score a first-round knockout, but I'm probably wrong in doing so, since Jolly can wrestle, and once he gets that first takedown, this might be a wrap.

#ufc houston #ufchouston #ufcfightnight104 #ufc fight night 104 #ufn104 #ufn 104 #ufc #mma

0 notes