#irresponsable dad

[slavhew]

what happened?

[ky-landfill]

[squishydem0ns]

"They say the family you choose is better-"

Okay but THE FACT THAT HE'S THE ONE WHO SAID THIS? I know he was just trying to fuck with Lucifer but... found family monkey brain has been activated... admit it Al you're starting to get attached...

[bruciemilf]

While I absolutely love the " Battinson has no idea what to do with a kid beside love it with everything in him, and Alfred sighs in Competent Guardian" trope, I offer you:

Alfred watching Bruce make sure Dick has a curfew, getting involved with school activities like bake sales and and art projects, goes to the doctor regularly, has playdates and actual social life, all Responsible Parent Things he most definitely Did Not Do:

[littlefankingdom]

AU where Jason's trauma around his Lazarus Pit's dip and his protective instinct as a sibling are stronger than his pride, so he snitches to Bruce about Damian and the tournament to the death Dick is letting him do.

Bruce: You are both grounded.

Dick: I'm an adult, B, you can't ground me!

Bruce: You encourage your brother in a death's tournament, try me.

Tim: I can't believe Jason is the responsible one.

Jason: Why are you surprised? Contrary to this clown, I know how it is to get a bath in the magic green goop, and it's not pleasant. Zero stars, would not recomand, and don't want any of you to go throught.

Steph: Aww, you love us!

Jason: Shut up!

Bruce: Thanks Jason for contacting me before Damian died.

Damian: *mumbling* I did died and came back on the Island, I'm fine.

Bruce & Jason: WHAT?!

[normalbrothers]

TOMMY: The war is done! Shut the door on it like I did.

[unyassified-kiba]

always cracks me up how jd is constantly like 'i basically raised all of you! im the oldest so i have to be in charge!' and hes like far and away the most irresponsible of the bros

[ghstsrock]

why do Ralph Macchio characters never have a dad? it like “oh, you? you’re gonna be played by Ralph Macchio? DADLESS.”

[ro-bottt]

thorfinn and einar taking care of baby karli <33

[agir1ukn0w]

I love how each member of the east blue saga strawhats (except usopp) thinks they’re the parent of the group who’s holding everything together.

like, nami and luffy both think they’re the mom.

zoro thinks he’s the dad.

sanji could think he’s the mom or the dad imo (probably both).

(usopp’s perfectly content just being the chaos child who never does as he’s told and fibs all the time.)

but at the end of the day they’re all a bunch of dumb goofballs who don’t know what’s going on but they keep on trucking anyways

[taddymason]

A fun example of jay being a violent guy, it’s a skybound clip (hoping this link sends) https://x.com/legotim82/status/1813002886730682705?s=46&t=gUEBy-jzuRkP_f6TD5QNig Jay just went for the kill in this, he straight up forgot the sword seals them away. Makes sense why he would go for the kill in order to defend Kaida. He’s just a bit of a violent lad

I was just thinking about this topic about "Evil Jay" and the things he can do when I got this ask hjsvkh

yeaah I agreed if Kaida's life is in danger, the guy goes completely crazy, no doubt (although Kaida is much worse in that regard if Jay's life is in danger but that conversation for another day-)

Now I don't think Jay is an inherently violent person who enjoys doing those things or can do them with a cold, calculating mind, that's not Jay. He's the type of person who makes bad/violent decisions in the heat of the moment, in the middle of a fight where adrenaline and his own impusivity lead him to not really think about morals and stuff. I will always say this, but if you compare him to the rest of the team, he is the most morally questionable, that's why I don't understand when people say he's a pacifist. At least in this AU, one of his biggest problems is that he really does bad things, feels terribly guilty, justifies himself not having to think about it, and then makes those same decisions again the first chance he gets.

It's funny because I've recently seen this discourse recently about whether or not it's realistic for Jay to be a villain or do bad things. But we have already seen him in DR be deliberately negligent with the lives of the people his department relocates. And that EVEN if he didn't see the point in arresting Zane&Bonzle he was still going to do it. Idk there you have a guy with doubts and uncertainty doing bad and negligent things because he doesn't really want to reason about another alternative or why they are wrong. Obviously we won't get an "Evil megalomanic Jay" but a Jay who does those things in the name of obedience because that's how indifferent he has become.

[transannabeth]

none of you are allowed to judge me if i go out and buy a copy of the great gatsby tomorrow and just start eating it.

[topicaltropic]

oops! all wips

[jamiesfootball]

One of the things that’s been noodling in my head since the finale is how Ted Lasso plays the forgiveness card in regards to the Tartt Sr situation.

Yes, I’ve banged on this drum before. I shall bang on it again. Buh-dum.

Bear with me as I start from the outside and work my way in by first referencing a moment from a different show.

In Leverage, there’s an episode where they convince the guy they’re trying to take down to break out of police custody by making him think he’s in the middle of a deadly epidemic that’s being covered up by the government. The details of this aren’t important, but when Nate is explaining why it worked, he says something along the lines of ‘there’s a part of your brain that’s meant to question and make judgements. What we did was we tapped into the emotional center of his brain, so that he would forget to question anything.’

Now I'm paraphrasing, but this is actually a good summary of how a lot of cons work- they create an emotional story and a sense of relationship, to make you forget to ask ‘wait does this guy just want my money.’ Think of scary voicemails telling you your student loans got sent to collections and you need to call now. Think Nigerian Prince schemes. Think car dealerships.

Because that is the power of a story when the narrative structure follows all the guidelines. You become invested, and you believe the narrative. (This is also why Jump the Shark exists, when a narrative has wobbled so off its tracks that the belief becomes suspended, but I digress.)

So the issue for me with regards to the James Tartt Sr story line, is that from a technical standpoint the wider Story of Ted Lasso did meet the minimum requirements for ‘believable.' My coworker, for instance, absolutely loved how ALL the story lines tied up in the finale, including that one. She couldn’t explain why, she just said it was ‘really nice and it worked for her.’

But I’ll highlight that bit in the middle—she couldn’t explain why—because that’s the thrust of the situation. The Story, from her perspective, told a satisfying emotional conclusion by hitting all the correct points. It essentially did what a con does, and in the resulting emotion she failed to question it.

And I think therein lies the trouble with the Jamie's dad story line. Because it is being told within the scope of a broader narrative, it is allowed to coast on the merits of the rest of the narrative. For three seasons, the show preaches forgiveness and second chances and people having depth, so when it asks you to do it again at the end - with Jamie's dad, hell I'd even say with Rupert for a hot second - you already have within you all the emotional build-up to say 'yes.'

Except that the buildup doesn’t happen with James, or even Rupert, it happens to the people that they hurt. Jamie’s the one who learned how to be better. Jamie is the one who tried to make amends to the people he hurt. Jamie is the one who had to un-fuck his whole life. Jamie earned all of that emotional payoff.

His dad did not.

So the show sells you one emotional story, and at the end shuffles in another to reap the benefits of it.

But just like a con only works as long as you don’t start to question it, the second you question the James Tartt Sr storyline the more you realize how much of that work happened elsewhere in the story.

You know those youtube videos that are cut together scenes of ‘every time This Character talks about Big Plot Point’? Think of those videos. Sometimes they’re a concentrated dose of very high tense moments, but sometimes they’re a little anemic, aren’t they? Sometimes you watch those videos and realize just how much heavy lifting other scenes did just to imply that the narrative was moving forward.

Well if you made a youtube video of ‘all the scenes that mention / have James Tartt Sr in them’ and cut them together, you definitely do NOT get an emotionally satisfying ending. In fact you go from someone who implies that their father is violent, to seeing their father be violent, to seeing their father threaten violence to his kid, to seeing him inflict that violence on someone else in place of his kid, to the kid confiding in someone else that even more fucked up shit happened, to the kid’s mom trying to console him, to the kid literally showing symptoms of PTSD at the idea his father might be around-

-to someone asking him if maybe he should try to let that go

-to their dad being proud of them

-to reestablishing contact

-to a happy montage of them smiling together the end.

At bare minimum there is an entire confrontation missing. And that is minimum. Minimum narrative work said this storyline should have had a climax. But this is a storyline that did not breathe on its own- it relied on a dozen smaller, unrelated, moments to give it the illusion of a satisfying ending.

And since it was weaved in with the rest, to some people – people who were too in vested in the story to question it – that was a great ending. That was a perfect ending.

That’s the illusion of telling a story- people are predisposed to believing the story that is being told, to the point where they will forget to ask questions.

When people talk about this kind of narrative being a dangerous one? That’s where that comes from. That’s what it means. It’s not just that someone depicted a story of someone forgiving their abuser, it’s that the did it in such a way that that isn’t even what happened. Most of the time it is the narrative that forgives the abuser, not the character. The character doesn’t get to scream and cry and let out all the pain they suffered. The character doesn’t get to set boundaries and learn to experience the world safely. The character, often times, isn’t even worth an apology from the person who hurt them.

It isn't the character who gets closure in these narratives; it's the audience who does. And it’s so insidious that it can very nearly trick a person in real life into thinking that maybe they too will get closure if they forgive someone – without ever realizing that in these stories, the narrative was never on their side in the first place.

[sebsdaniel]

I love the FE grid sm

[yellowocaballero]

what stuff can't you forgive batman beyond for? :o

Ugh OK. Disclaimer that none of these things make Batman Beyond bad. None of this is bad writing. I just don't like it. It's fine, actually, I just hate it.

I know Batman Beyond had to justify its existence somehow and answer the question "why is the ONLY PERSON who could become Batman a random teenager off the street?". There had to be some sort of reason why Bruce was completely isolated from Dick, Tim, and Barbara, and why Dick or Tim wasn't Batman.

The ways in which it got rid of them though!! Dick's like 60 and he hates Bruce and never speaks to him! Barbara's a cop, which she would never do, who had a thing with Bruce. Superman's infected by Starro so all of his friends at the League are out. And freaking Return of the Joker, oh my god. Putting aside the fucking sadness of Tim also never speaking to his dad and living an entire life pretending Batman and Robin never happened. COME ON. I really didn't like the "Terry is Bruce's secret kid" thing either, but that's less of a moral and more of a personal stance.

Sometimes a work is the most influential work in your writing completely against your will and without your permission. Return of the Joker traumatized me as a kid, and for some reason although I hate it SO FUCKING MUCH, it's permeated a lot of what I write with Tim. His death in the Reverse Robins thing was directly what happened in ROTJ, except he killed himself instead of the Joker. And I never even get into much detail on Tim's death there because it makes me sad.

Batman Beyond, you did not stop to consider those of you who were watching every DCAU cartoon sequentially, and who had come fresh off watching the most adorable small child run around doing Robin things in the final season of BTAS. You did not stop to wonder if he was a baby only a week before in my own mind. And now this.

DCAU!Batman had always been a lighthearted, kind person who had a robust support network. He had shipteasing. With Wonder Woman. It was really sad to see every good thing in his life stripped away and turn him withered, bitter, and old. Showing Batman in that light isn't bad in and of itself, but I was attached to this guy :c. Why hadn't they just set up another continuity where these characters didn't exist so they didn't have to worry about depressingly shoving them aside?

Oh, and. Just kidding. I can forgive them for all of this. I hate it, but it's fine. What I actually cannot forgive them for is for fucking Bruce and Barbara having an affair. Oh my god. Oh my god. Bad. So bad.