#or lose direction

[littleeyesofpallas]

I always really liked, in Death Note, that when they introduces M and N as L's two competing protégée, they just took a list of L's traits and quirks and split them down the middle: L was both logical and intuitive, passionate about justice and personally enraptured by solving puzzles, sat like a child, played with his food, and had an insatiable sweet tooth? Mellow gets the passion, the justice bordering on vengeance, the intuition, and the sweet tooth. Near gets the childlike demeanor, the play habits, the cold logic, and personal investment in puzzles for puzzles sake. And together they make one functional L.

I want that for the Batfam. Bruce has his giant obnoxious hyper competent repertoire, but instead of every Batkid being just a mini version of Bruce, give them each a SUPER distinct specialty. Something actually discernably different from their peers, rather than just slapping the same onesize fit all batbrand competency on all of them. The martial arts expert, the ace parkour/acrobat, the detective, the gadgeteer, the batcomputer data analyst, the criminal profiler, the vigilante, the master of disguise, the urban legend, the avenger, the ninja/assassin, etc... Obviously theyre each well rounded and versed in all these archetypes, but each one ought to have a specialized category where if it ever really came down to its, they could beat Bruce in a contest of that one set of skills. (Except Damian. Damian should just be a tiny Bruce with maybe a bit of an ethics problem, and the promise of being better than Bruce at EVERYTHING, just given a bit of time to grow into it while Bruce loses a bit of edge to old age)

(and frankly i really just want this for a bunch of hero families -the WWfam could have different fields of specialty from diplomacy to archeology and magic artifacts, to mythological beast tamer, to proper soldier and commander, etc...; the Flashfam could have radically different approaches to what elements of how they approach processing at superhuman speed and their atomic level of finite control; the Arrowfam could have a whole spread of survivalist vs hunter/tracker vs sport archer vs esoteric historical martial arts, etc skills to set one another apart.- but that's several whole other cans of worms...)

Dick is far and apart the best in the air, fastest maneuvering both around obstacles and on the run, in and out of the fray, sheer 0 to 60 from ground to air on a grappling line, fastest all around reaction time, and contender for most well honed raw athleticism right next to Cass.

Babs has the information network, the batcomputer sciences, and organizational and tactical perspective that comes uniquely from not just being a bat kid but from being so closely acquainted with GCPD's structures and systems. When it comes to cross referencing and pinpointing precise information, Babs is unmatched by a substantial margin.

Jason has the I Am Vengeance, I Am The Night down. The raw passion for crime fighting, and indeed the fixation on crime specifically. He and Steph are the most personally acquainted and invested in Gotham's underworld and the actual humans working, living, struggling and thriving in it.

Ill be honest I m actually never quite sure where the hell either Helena fits into this structure... Bertinelli feels like she should fit a niche almost too similar to Jason's, but lacking in the fanfavorite melodrama of being a dead robin. And Wayne ought rightly to fit a role not dissimilar to Damian or just Bruce himself... Consider this one unresolved...

Tim is of course is everyones favorite ace boy detective. I feel like theres always a temptation to make him Babs' equal in the tech department but outside of the laughable 90s hackerkid aesthetic I just dont see it. He's great at trivia and detective's intuition, and of course his near shamanic level of insight into Gotham itself.... He does strike me as one of the family's top gadgeteers; not a full blown engineer like Luke, but quick to pick up and make unconventional use of existing tech and hardware, matched and even surpassed in that respect only by...

Steph, who as Cluemaster's kid and one time potential protégée has had a thorough talent for tinkering and sabotage from and early age. Maybe she cant tap into the same depth of trivia or strictest logical deductions that some of the more thorough bred bats can, but no one can pinpoint the most vital areas, or dismantle a deathtrap more quickly than Steph, both by way of knowing the mechanics, but also by way of intimating a super villain's psychology and behavior. Where someone like Tim or even Bruce might fixate on knowing the exact layout or schematics or logistics of a hideout, a machine, or a plan before taking action to dismantle it, Steph knows at a glance where the most volatile parts of a machine or a plan are so that even if she doesn't have the time or the specific knowledge to work out every detail of what it does and how, she can figure out how to break a mechanism or topple a plan at its most central pillar(s) of support. I've always wanted her to be essentially the family's espionage expert, right next to Catwoman's breaking and entering expertise.(Ric Grayson eat your dman heartout)

Then there's Cass, and obviously, at her peak she's the family's (and frankly the world's) top martial artist. But even with her first language of combat fluency stripped down/away she's more than a match for anyone else in the family.

Luke kind of predictably taking his dads role as engineer, utilizing the full extent of the high end bat arsenal unlike really anyone else. People joke about comparing batman and Ironman but really if anyone should have a shtick comparable to Ironman it's Batwing. The rest of the bat fam can operate and maybe maintain the vehicles and hardware fine, but no one can design, upgrade, and see through the actual fabrication process of the tech better than Luke...

...Runner up in this same category is Harper, who is lacking in the straight up manufacturing department but built her whole vigilante arsenal by juryrigging salvaged battech.

Ill be honest, a bit like Huntress, I dont fully known what to make of Kate. Her background is unique among the batfamily as having been strictly military. She has a penchant for the noirsy side of the detective shtick, but thats more of a genre thing than a skill set; what does it really mean for her shtick inworld? I dont really have an answer...

Duke is a bit of a weird case in that the obvious answers are all baked right into his existing profile: he's the meta, he works in the light, he's supposedly more above board and less broody. And that all feels fine, but it also feels like he doesn't actually fit into the whole schema of batskills at all as a result. I would like to see him use his experience with We Are Robin to create a kind of PR or outreach branch of the bat fam. Like, a bat that Gotham can actually sort of get to know and learn to trust, beyond believing in a boogeyman or not. Like, i dunno, give him some airtime with Vicky Vale or Jack Ryder...

And I already mention Damian is just small Bruce waiting to grow into his dad's shoes. The whole benefit of being ras' heir is that he's the one kid who doesnt need Batman to train him. He can fight and think and ostensibly even gadget without Bruce, what Bruce gives him is what Ras and Talia cant: A moral compass. Plus it's a fun change of pace for Bruce to have a protégé where he isn't filling the time with teaching combat and shit to, so that he really has no choice but to learn to connect with Damian emotionally, for both Damian's sake and his own.

I'm not touching Gotham Girl with a 20ft pole...

Did I forget anyone??

People like Owlman, and Ghostmaker are all just the same shtick... Bruce's same character build stats but without the ethics. The Talons are cool but skillswise still just sort of amount to Nightwing knockoffs, ala the whole Owlman origins of the Court of Owls plot in the first place. Similarly the Batman Inc crew are just discount batmen; same basic skill tree but lower point values, so to speak. Not really worth investigating. (unrelated but has Catman fought Green Arrow before? I feel like they could have a really cool survivalist rivalry thing going on)

Not counting people like Clown hunter, or Harley, or Scarlet, or Raptor as parts of the family...

OH! Jace! Boy what a weird case. I wish we got more of an actual motive from him. It honestly doesn't feel like he has a particularly good reason to even be a vigilante, least of all a direct successor to Batman of all things. And I wish they hadn't just shipped him off to NYC... Other than that his shtick feels super weird in the scope of the general bat repertoire. Like Kate, it's weird that his background is really just (para)military rather than the more eclectic spread that Bruce has made the standard bat regimen.

[montanabohemian]

if i see a single one of you pissed that your faves canceled an event or a con appearance because they're striking for fair wages then imma come for you in your sleep 🔪🔪🔪

(direct that fury where it belongs: AMPTP and the execs)

[pillowspace]

Does anyone else also have a default fandom or interest that you're just automatically returned to whenever you lose all your hyperfixations

[mxcrayon]

losing my actual mind rn

i had this interaction in the dropout discord (i am the first and third person). short. simple. i only got the first year bc of a discount + a gift card i had, so i was planning on using this person's suggestion.

then, i got this.

oh my god!! how nice!! how sweet!!! how thoughtful!! i gave them my email and they sent over a subscription, i thanked them profusely. i was very grateful, very touched.

hours and hours later i was still thinking about it and i recalled how, in the email id gotten about it, it said "tao yang sent you a subscription" and id seen that and thought "oh haha like the tao yang" and then moved on

but now, thinking back, i was like.... theres no way, so i googled tao yang.

......

TAO YANG BOUGHT ME A FUCKING ANNUAL DROPOUT SUBSCRIPTION

[myststone]

LOOK AT ITTTT

[fisheito]

He's a magician

[idliketobeatree]

NO WAIT ROB ARE YOU TELLING ME AZIRAPHALE HAD, ADMITTEDLY, THE WORST KISS IN RECORDED HISTORY AND HE WAS STILL LIKE "come back and do that again, please, right now"?????!?!??!

[taiturner]

#what if you held a knife to my throat to kill me and months later i used that same knife to sacrifice my blood to save your life

@yellowjacketsnetwork event 01: dynamics SHAUNA SHIPMAN & TRAVIS MARTINEZ

[eerna]

me explaining why Will/Elizabeth/Jack love triangle was a perfect little one-movie arc that wasn't present in the final movie because it was never about choosing and instead just about dynamics and character development so they all outgrew it by then

[inkogneato]

[nomlomoni]

i have a theory for side order:

coral bleaching. it's when coral reefs die due to climate change and when they die, they turn white- which is what it looks like with all the death and the white coral

not to mention this photo of a dead fish (salmon?)

and then the implications of this screenshot, are they being cloned?? or are octolings suffering from the bleaching as well?

[ok-pop-1]

NEW ZELDA

[turtleblogatlast]

Don't think about how Draxum created the turtles to destroy humanity...and in the original timeline, Leo's actions caused the apocalypse. Like, do you think Master Leonardo thought of that? About how he indirectly ended up causing the end of humanity? Which is what he was technically created for?

Sidebar, I wonder if Draxum in that timeline, saw what the Kraang did and ever had a moment where he went 'this isn't what I imagined.'.

[ cw: apocalypse / bad future timeline / self blame / self hatred / ]

Anon you are destroying me 😭😭😭

The thought that at some point in the bad future timeline, maybe more than once, Leo would realize this and think ‘oh. I was always bad.’ oh that hurts horribly. Of course he’d be quick to throw that away, because his brothers are too good to be bad. This is something unique to him…I think, horribly, he’d be more comforted by that thought. That it was just a coincidence, or just him fulfilling that old purpose, and not his good, heroic brothers. Gosh…

And Draxum, wow, yeah I bet that was definitely not what he had in mind. To see a truly ruined humanity must be a sobering thing for him. Doesn’t help that yokai aren’t exactly freed from the destruction either.

[paperrkites]

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Mission Impossible: Fallout

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

the parallels 😭

[chaosgenasi]

It's recently occurred to me that I should probably ask people about this. I don't want people to get hurt in there, so I'm... It's very strange. The best I can describe is whatever magic resides in that crystal feels very new, yet very old.

[introspectivememories]

sorry but do you ever think about the fact that the bernard we have today is a direct amalgamation of everything that happened in his past and i know that sound like such an obvious statement to say but it actually kills me to know that you can draw a direct line from who he is today all the way back to that sixteen year old boy who watched his best friend bleed out. like it is the defining moment in his life. it fundamentally shaped who he is and the person he's become. he is the bernard we know and love not despite the grieves shooting but because of it. because the gangs all got together and shot up his school. because tim walked out of that room with nothing but a baseball bat. because his darla got shot. because he watched her gasp and cry as she died. because he watched the blood coagulate around the wound. because he sat there and held her hand as her life drained out of her. because he walked into school that day with a joke he knew would make her laugh and her nose would scrunch up and she'd snort a little and tim would roll his eyes at him and call him ridiculous and instead he walked out with a bloody white shirt, blood under his fingernails, and two friends less. because, even now, almost half a decade out from the shooting, he thinks that if he closes his eyes, he will always be that stupid, scared little sixteen year old, holding the cooling body of dead best friend.