#its a very conflicting feeling

[noises-of-nothing]

I didn’t have cable tv or the internet during the time between 2012-2019. 

My dad would pirate shows when he could, while at work, but if he didn't get it, it didn't exist, as far as I was aware. It didn't bother me much when I was still in elementary school as I didn't really have friends to talk to about these shows I was missing. But when I got to high school I made actual friends that I would talk to about the interests I did have that we shared, like video games and comics and such.

I had missed A LOT of shows that a lot of my new friends would talk about often or draw fan art for. I always felt lost and out of place when they talked about the different shows and anime they watched, while I just sat there confused. They explained the premise of the shows as best as they could, but it wasn't the same as watching and experiencing these stories myself. I would ask my dad if he could get these shows so I knew what it was my friends were talking about, but he could only do so much with the websites he knew how to use to get any entertainment for my family.

Now, I'm out of school, currently out of work, and I have time on my hands. I’ve been watching these shows that my friends from high school used to watch, and I've been really enjoying them.

But, I don't talk to any of my high school friends anymore, I don't really have anyone to share the thoughts and feelings I'm experiencing while watching these shows for the first time, or watching episode my dad missed for the first time.

It’s really bittersweet, seeing characters that my old friends used to talk to me about and being reminded of them, even if I don't see these friends anymore. But it also makes me feel incredibly lonely and like I fell behind...

[mipexch]

been thinking about something wicked a little too much lately. no harm in romanticizing the ominous dreadful unstoppable force

[bacchuschucklefuck]

space sweepers but they're delivery people and are at no point on screen through the entire movie

[800db-cloud]

i’ve been wanting to do this since day one

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Up High!

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[puppyeared]

RETURN TO MONKE (PUBERTY EDITION)

MK’s monkey form doesn’t feel right to me so i wanted to break up his transformation into stages. Maybe as he learns to accept that side of himself it becomes part of him, instead of changing between human and monkey randomly (which is probably painful). Love yourself, NOW!!!

@zymstarz im tagging you for FULL MONKE

[ganondoodle]

rough draft screenshot from page 59

good ol demise and hylia fight (changed her horn design slightly so it makes a little more sense and is easier to draw)

[fuzzbuns]

Quail, so confusing

[silverwhittlingknife]

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

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

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

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

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

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

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

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

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

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

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

[widowkills]

富察·容音 Fuca Rongyin from 延禧攻略 The Story of Yanxi Palace (2018)

TV APPRECIATION WEEK 2024 — free choice: favourite chinese period drama character

[kagoutiss]

so ive been thinking about an AU loosely based on the whole ‘sheik was a double agent also working for ganondorf’ thing in the oot manga and. basically here is a bunch of stuff so tonally different that it gives u whiplash

[iwoulddieforienzo]

Something really great about the persona 2 cast is that they all individually fucking SUCK to talk to casually. Every single one of them. They are all infuriating. We have:

Tatsuya, who will stare at you blankly if you try to initiate conversation (IS) and will dip without saying a word afterward (EP)

Batsuya, who will scoff and brush you off/otherwise act dismissive

Eikichi, who might honestly be the best to talk to in the IS crew and that is not saying much, who WILL talk extremely loudly over you (probably not on purpose?) and will not be paying particularly close attention to the conversation beyond whatever he wants to say (gets points for talking about his gf. gets points taken away for constantly talking about his gf)

Lisa, who will automatically assume bad faith and will be rude to you the entire conversation unless you manage to defuse her temper (good luck)

Jun, who is uncommunicative at BEST and requires an encyclopedic knowledge of flowers, metaphor and body language just to get a HINT on what he’s thinking, and who will be extremely polite but completely unhelpful. If you tried asking him what he wants for dinner I guarantee it will be the longest 30 minutes of your life as he goes “oh I have no opinion :) whatever you want. :))” EXCEPT HE DOES HAVE OPINIONS. He has SO MANY OPINIONS. He is Expecting you to be able to pick up on his “obvious” clues. He will be passive aggressive if you don’t. (Jun babygirl you suck so bad I love u)

Maya, who is a delight but will very quickly become grating if you try to talk to her about anything serious as she hits you with the white suburban mom's "how to live a happy, healthy life" lifecoach slogans. You can’t even mention, like, stepping in a puddle or something without her hitting you with the positivity beam.

Yukino is great actually. 10/10. She’s fabulous we love her. Incredible conversationalist, chill and fun and easy to get along with. But she’s from Persona One, she doesn’t Count.

Ulala, who WILL bring up her relationship problems in every conversation within 10 minutes at least once. Any longer and she will start talking about Maya.

Do I even need to explain Baofu. Have you seen him.

And finally, Katsuya, who is a cop and a kiss ass and Very Obvious about these things. Also he can't talk to women. He can barely talk to men. Help Him.

And yet they all work wonderfully as a group. They are so annoying I love them

[4lph4kidz]

been pondering this one for a while and i'm not sure where i stand on it myself so i want to know what people think about this, so (assuming there's no good way to represent hal as an artificial intelligence /non-human entity/extension of dirk):

feel free to share thoughts in the tags & replies!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

These FFS inner demons are very “disco elysium skills” reminiscent. I NEED to meet that cast! Also freaking awesome work to you and your buddy :]

May it be an open secret that one of my inspirations was Disco Elysium. I think they could party together.

[seriousbrat]

I actually think that dumbledore wasn't entirely wrong to compare the snape-james dynamic to draco-harry. it's just that draco is the james of it all, not harry. he's the one with the privilege, the loving parents who buy him nice things and send him sweets (which i'm also sure the potters did for james) and the more aggressive of the two.

perhaps draco wasn't quite as extreme as james in the end but things like the potter stinks badges, making fun of him publicly for fainting etc, all the rita skeeter stuff in GoF, trying to (presumably) get him to fall off his broomstick by dressing as a dementor, that is bullying. the nastier stuff draco did to harry and co. throughout the books was almost entirely unprovoked and unmatched by harry's actions towards him; draco fired the first shots trying to get harry expelled with the 'wizard's duel' when like, what had harry ever done to him other than not like him/reject his friendship.

I do think it's a less extreme version of snape-james as I said, but the parallels are definitely there, especially when you consider that it culminates in harry using sectumsempra on draco- a spell it's implied that sev created to use on james. it's somewhat more equal perhaps because harry is generally more popular than sev was at school, but there are also various points where harry is very unpopular, such as the entirety of OotP when Draco lords his status as prefect and then inquisitorial squad member over harry to torment him. like it is a rivalry but also draco is considerably nastier to harry and more aggressive than harry ever is to him.

harry typically holds his own better than sev appears to in SWM, but with the exception of HBP he usually has much more pressing matters distracting him to devote much energy towards hating draco. I also think Sev often could hold his own and probably did, that doesn't make it not bullying.

[charmac]

is there any season that you'd say does the best (or worst) at character development for the gang? personally, i've always thought that season 1 did wonders in helping the audience understand the gang's individual characters (minus frank) right away, but i'm interested in your opinion on the topic

Season 10 absolutely, 100%. It’s my favourite season of Sunny (and one of my favourite seasons of television ever), especially for the fact that it does so much insane character work in its span of ten episodes.

I don’t want to discount seasons before it, there’s an insane amount of foundational work that should be mentioned, but Season 10 being a milestone they never thought they would reach really sticks out as a major turn in the idea that the Gang don’t “develop” as characters by making the Gang face their own devolution. I've written about how Misses the Boat touches on this on the Paddy's Pub Blog, but Season 10 really as a whole just turns a lot more inward to the characters.

Charlie Work rotates around one of the Gang's schemes while having quite literally nothing to do with the scheme at all and everything to do with Charlie's character. This is the perfect example as to how the whole season operates, pushing the characters ahead of the plots, the schemes are just background work to revolve around. (Really, this is how the show operates a chunk of the time, but Season 10 is really really telling you that.)

It's hard to talk about each individual character without spiralling and trying to hit every S10 episode for everyone, but in brief summary: Frank unearths his own childhood trauma and starts to understand he's running out of time here; Dennis is diagnosed and his mask starts slipping more and more as he's forced to face (and attempt to disregard) how he is seen by outsiders; Mac is no longer able to front to himself that he's into women and he destroys his relationship with his father one step further; Charlie really sees he's viewed as less-than by Mac and Dennis and grows much more persistent to (dis)prove Frank is his father; Dee is shown as an even more 'successful' predator than Dennis, though just as pathetic at each turn.

All of this is not only built off what their characters were, but really are the very central parts of their characters that they clearly keep in mind as we push into the later seasons. (Arguably every character is still grappling with these core issues except Mac.)

(Briefly on worst season for character development, I think 13 is kind of the obvious choice. While there are some things I think they did well and are built on later (i.e. Bathroom Problem), episodes like The Gang Wins the Big Game are a prime example of how Sunny does not work well when the whole basis of an episode has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with the plot. There was really negative character work done there, imo.)

I think it's funny you mention Season 1 for character development, because while I think it’s so so insanely essential to watch (and understand) as a foundation for the show and who the characters become, those versions of the characters are pretty distant from the Gang to me. Season 1 reads very much as Rob’s original idea: these are the worst versions of themselves; characters, but still a little too clearly RCG. Season 2 took those guys and built on them to create actual characters outside of themselves as terrible people, but I don't see the Gang as fully formed individuals until ~S4 (which I think RCG have mostly (?) admitted as much on TASP, lol)

Obviously every season contributes a lot to the characters as we know them, and some do a lot more for certain characters than others, so these are just my personal opinions... But I will argue for the rest of time that Season 10 is that bitch (and the best example of who the characters are).