let’s do some autistic meta knight headcanons!! over explaining my interpretation of meta knight yet again wooooo
this orb has NO idea how to talk to people!!! outside of work anyway. a lot of this is partially due to upbringing (suppressing his emotions all the time) but he does not know how to express emotions, like…at all.
this goes into a few things
1. yeah talking is hard. even after figuring out what he wants to communicate he will struggle. conversation can be so overwhelming, especially under pressure. he will need time lol
2. because of that, forming connections is hard. i really don’t think meta is much for shallow relationships, and certainly not early in the timeline. which also means he has very little experience with friendship. so a lot of the relationships he did have went kinda neglected, and issues that probably could’ve been worked on by talking became…*cough romk* escalated.
3. honestly i wouldn’t be surprised if meta convinced himself he couldn’t feel emotion (anymore) until like. katam-ish. he tried very hard lol
vulnerability is terrifying. (though this gesture here is also just comforting, like his little cape cocoon thing he does.)
unmasking—yeah im taking the mask thing very literally here—is a big deal and a very slow process for mk. i’m sure he has a lot of feelings on that lol. it served as a way to ensure no one could ever, y’know, see him.
i can’t say i think he’d ever fully ditch it—there’s always gonna be some days that are more stressful than others and if having it could help him get through it, it just makes sense. mainly when working.
it really is about vulnerability. granted, i don’t think he has the most expressive face (in my head every astral just tends to stare at things) but i doubt he has much control over it. can’t fake a smile but also can’t hide it. probably blushes easy because yeah, astrals; just look at kirby’s face.
just the idea that someone might be able to read his expression and know what he’s feeling before he’s ready for them to (or even understands it himself…) yeah he doesn’t want that
but emotional turmoil aside, i think his mask also hides a lot of his stims
remember that whole “suppressing your feelings” thing? yeah turns out that ignoring half your instincts isn’t a good idea. so in true meta knight style, he tries to stim as subtly as possible
1. he has the least control over his wings, so they will flick and twitch on their own. they’re usually a good indicator of how he’s feeling, not unlike the body language usually seen in cat ears and tails lol. flapping is also an extension of this of course, though he probably suppresses it more.
2. this also effects when he takes his wings out. pretty much every time he’s excited or nervous it just happens. kinda makes me wonder if his wing cape ordeal might also go into the suppression thing… (i’d say yes, but using a cape is also very comforting so it’s not necessarily a bad thing)
3. going back to the mask thing; he stims a lot underneath it. think like biting or pursing your lips. he bites his tongue and clicks his mouth. that sort of thing. his mask also makes it harder to notice that he is constantly sighing, humming, grumbling…all that
one nice thing about the mask though is that it helps a little bit with lights!!! woo
(look at him and his magically floating glasses)
sensory stuff—i think he’s mostly bothered by light and sound. maybe a bit of texture. he’s pretty sensory avoidant and perfectly happy standing off to the side not touching anything.
the one exception to this is physical affection, which is, despite all of this, most of how he shows affection. it’s a lot easier to hug someone than to try to explain your feelings for them, after all.
i think he would like pressure though. so that’s probably part of it. and i’m pretty sure there’s some connection in here to fighting (dang, is that the only way he knows how to get his energy out?)
anyway, pretty much all of this is in contrast to kirby, who i would gladly nominate as the champion of Doing Whatever He Wants. he might pick up a few bad habits, but he will never mask the way meta knight does. he might not understand how he feels, but he’s in tune enough to express it…usually.
this is a very good thing for meta because it helps him to do the same thing. kirby’s so energetic, it’s hard to not want to stim with him. it reminds meta to be kinder to himself and explore his own emotions. he can also help kirby understand themselves, so this connection is very important.
yeah, at the end of the day, everything kinda just boils down to kirby and mk as parallels
this is the conclusion i promise
to me, meta’s arc is about growing stronger by growing kinder, and this is mostly by learning to be kind to himself. letting himself be a person again, loving and understanding other people, and eventually, letting go of all the expectations placed on him and doing the things he’s always wanted to do…
autism headcanons are fun for me because it’s cathartic to write, but at the same time, it just makes sense in this sort of narrative. meta is, to me, inseparable from these things. and so is kirby! that’s a dynamic that’s a lot of fun to play with, and it’s at the heart of my kirby interpretation.
if you actually read all this WOW thank you
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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
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