#racist writing

[enby-axels]

tfw you realize that the uchiha clan are based off of a real-life, functionally extinct indigenous japanese people and the way theyre written is so deeply informed by racist, colonial tropes that those tropes are inseparable from the very essence of the series

[bixels]

A color variant of The Grand Galloping 20's cover from the cheaper paperback edition issued in 1931.

Included is a scan of one of the paperback's pages.

[furious-blueberry0]

Star wars fans stop projecting your problems with Christianity onto the Jedi challenge: impossible

[jakeperalta]

one thing about taylor swift is she will have you going "god these lyrics 😭🥺🙌😪" and "god these lyrics 😬🤨🫣" in the same song

[ankahikoibaat]

[IMAGE TEXT: a thread of two posts from ‘aradhna.’ @/thebitterbeast.bsky.social.

POST ONE: me whenever it is clear either via marketing, interviews or the media itself that yet another Star Wars writer/director is ignoring the Buddhist and other Eastern influences on the Jedi to portray them as a flavour of Christian/Catholic and/or an institution not a religious order of monks:

POST TWO: *looks at said media* oh so this is just licensed fanfic then.

(hey Disney if you're just licensing fanfic now, I can direct you to some great ones that actually respect the real life religions and cultural influences of the main draw to Star Wars. heck, I wrote some!)]

[tweedfrog]

Kicking an even bigger hornets nest than i did with that Viserys post but I think the reason I'm not as angry as other people seem to be with HOTDs adaptational choices and can kind of just enjoy the show (although i have my criticisms) is that after reading and rereading the books i think the adaptation is magnifying underlying weaknesses already present in GRRMs writing.

Like "oh why does the show make Criston Cole half dornish and then cast him as an angry incel conservative". bro. The books have the Arianne Martell nipple chapter. The book with the quote "mens lives have meaning not their deaths" killed off the second most important woman in the country 15 years ago and 80 characters have reflected on how annoying and sickly she was but it was kinda sad that she died I guess. We get like 4 sentences where we find out her brothers cared about her and she laughed at a fart joke.

In all fairness to the HOTD writers room they are nawt adapting flawless source material.

[chubs-deuce]

An artwork I made for this week's update of "If you like Piña Coladas", a collab fic that I'm working on with the incredible @hazbinhobo <3

[frownyalfred]

all of the anons who told me, entirely unprompted, that I was a horrible fucking racist and I should kill myself because I’d never written a fic with Duke Thomas as the main character have been MIGHTY quiet since eye in the sky got published. just saying.

(this is your reminder that what people like to read/write doesn’t make them bad people irl. and just because someone hasn’t written a certain character does NOT mean they hate that character’s background or identity. I can’t believe I have to say that on here again, but here we are)

[bisexual-neco-arc]

the jokes write themselves on twitter dot com

[tariah23]

aisjsjjensnJAJAJ

[enby-axels]

if i was taking inspiration from a founding myth that manufactured a familial relationship between a settler-colonial monarchy and an indigenous people whose forced assimilation was justified by said myth, i would simply not reproduce and legitimize it in my story. rip to kishimoto but im just built different

[neproxrezi]

someone else could write it better than me but i love how the fucked up nasty shit you can make harry do/say/be in disco elysium isn't just like, random stuff caused simply by the player having free will and control over him but they're parts of who he is and who he has been

you're not a tabula rasa. you're a sudden shock of blank pages in a big, aged, damaged book and sometimes the paper you're trying to write a better man on is torn and you see something through the gaps nobody needed to see ever again. and it's just there now again, back to the surface

[casscainmainly]

Duke Thomas and the Robin Mantle

There's been some minor discussion about whether Duke counts as an 'official' Robin or not. While that discussion is interesting, I actually don't think it's the crux of the Duke and Robin issue. To me, the question is whether or not he should be Robin. And, to me, the answer is definitively yes.

This is purely my opinion, and I haven't read every single Duke comic so it's possible I've misread/missed things. Any Duke fans, absolutely feel free to add or disprove anything here!

The Changing Robin

The first thing to understand is that Robin, as a mantle, has shifted with each person it's been passed to. Tim's Robin doesn't mean the same thing as Jason's Robin, which doesn't mean the same thing as Damian's. A mark of a true Robin is the ability to shift the meaning of Robin by wearing the colours.

Duke absolutely fulfils this criteria. In fact, him and his We Are Robin crew are the biggest shift in the meaning of Robin since its creation.

Cover from We Are Robin #1. The phrase "We're not sidekicks. We're an army!" signals the shift from Robin as individual to Robin as collective; from Robin as tied to the singular Batman to Robin as a wider movement, a socio-political force. The last question, "are you ready?", is vitally important as well. Duke as Robin is meant to be different. He's meant to be non-normative, a groundbreaking turn in what Robin looks and feels like.

At the end of the first issue, a disguised Alfred (who started We Are Robin) thinks the following:

Alfred infuses the phrase "of color" with two meanings: the Robin colours, and People of Colour. By explicitly linking Robin to POC, the comic is suggesting that not only can kids of colour be Robin, but that they should be Robin. Robins of Colour are the "future of this city," and Duke is the vanguard of this future. It's no coincidence that the Robin before (Damian) and the one after (Maps) are both POC. Duke, however, is the Robin that gives the mantle an explicit direction towards diversity: him and WAR use Robin as a social movement, and in doing so transform the colours of Robin into a symbol for the diversity in Gotham and the world.

Robin as Collective

Duke doesn't change Robin alone. The point of We Are Robin is that Robin is a collective, and it's important that Duke doesn't start WAR (as much as people like to say he did). By joining late, the comic demonstrates that Duke is part of a bigger movement.

The Robin community represents POC solidarity, the necessity and ability of the oppressed to band together. Lee Bermejo ends We Are Robin's final issue with "stress on the word "we"" - Duke's arc, in one sense, is learning to rely and work with others (he initially mistrusts basically everyone). The WAR community is essential to both Duke's character development and his tenure as Robin.

So to have this page, affirming his loyalty and love for them, to be followed immediately by them being written out is... something.

Duke appears next in Batman: Rebirth, where Bruce gives him the yellow suit and tells him he's not looking for a Robin. As soon as he stops being Robin, the community around him quite literally falls apart. Izzy sticks around for a bit but fades into obscurity, Riko and Dax turn evil, Dre ends up in Arkham - all of these fates are antithetical to these characters and genuinely tragic.

Batman: The Secret Files: The Signal is possibly the worst Duke story in existence, but it's important to understanding why Robin!Duke mattered. Riko calls Signal 'Bat-Signal', highlighting his sudden reduction to a Batman acolyte. His friends turning on him shows how, by losing Robin, he also lost the community formed by WAR. In every way, his transition into the Signal was saturated by loss.

Robin Doesn't Need A Batman

Bruce giving Duke the Signal suit is borderline insulting. He already had an identity predicated on the fact that he didn't need Batman.

From Batman (2011) #45, Batman: Rebirth, and Night of the Monster Men. "Robin doesn't need a Batman" is an inversion of Tim's 'Batman needs a Robin' - in many ways, Duke is the opposite of Tim, who's rich, White, and whose Robin is the most focused on helping Batman. If Tim is the ideal Robin-as-partner, Duke is the ideal Robin-as-individual. His idea of Robin is not, and has never been, associated with Batman.

People who say Duke isn't an official Robin since he was never Batman's partner miss the point. He is Robin because he was never Batman's partner. That's what Robin means to him - a mantle free from Bruce and all authority.

"Batman is on the gargoyle. Robin... Robin is on the street." Robin is the person on the ground, who lives and belongs to the people. When Duke becomes Signal, this ground aspect - as well as his separation from Batman - is gone.

In this cover from Batman & The Signal, they gave him a Bat symbol and put him on a gargoyle. They erased every single part of his Robin philosophy.

The Original Robin

Post-We Are Robin, Bruce becomes the Batfam member Duke interacts with the most. Besides the insult of Bruce withholding Robin, this fact also strips away one of my favourite aspects about early Duke - he was tied to the Batfamily through the Robins (especially Damian and Dick), not by Batman.

It's Dick, the original Robin, who chooses him.

Dick recognises that him and Duke have a lot in common. He tells Duke in Robin War that he's "got it," and that he's a natural leader - Dick knows Duke has what it takes to be Robin, and explicitly endorses him.

Not only that, but when Dick sends Duke to jail (along with the other Robins, official and unofficial), he tells Duke that he "take[s] care of [his] family". He basically inducts Duke into the family then and there!

Dick's endorsement of Duke makes it more interesting that Bruce doesn't make him Robin. Despite Duke's disillusionment at the end of Robin War (dispelled soon after in WAR), the events in RW confirm that Duke can and should be Robin. Bruce not making Duke Robin is defying both Duke's potential and Dick's right to choose Robins.

Robin as Family

On the rooftop in Robin War, Dick tells Duke that Robin is about family. This is the fundamental connection between them both: Robin acts as the link to the families they've lost and gained.

For Dick, Robin keeps John and Mary Grayson alive, while also symbolising his connection to Bruce. For Duke, Robin is the intersection of three families: the heroic legacy of his parents, the tight-knit community of We Are Robin, and the newfound friendship of the Batfamily.

In Batman (2011) #45, Duke tries to give his friend Daryl a Robin badge. He says, "you and me, we came up together. We're fam[ily]." Even before Dick, Duke associated Robin with family, and Daryl implies in the next issue that Duke became Robin because of his parents' inclination to help. Signal, of course, also comes from his mom; but unlike Robin, Signal isn't a legacy mantle. As Robin, he constantly inducted people like Daryl, Riko, Damian, etc. into his family. As Signal, his circle shrinks immeasurably, until it's really only the Batfamily and the Outsiders if we're being generous. (Daryl also turns evil - a really unfortunate pattern for Duke side characters).

Lark and Conclusion

I'm going to end with this panel from Batman & The Signal #1, which is emblematic of the way DC has treated Duke and Robin as a whole. Bruce tells Duke that Lark is "too soft" a name. DC was probably debating between Lark and Signal, but it's telling what they went with. How is Lark too soft, exactly? How is it any softer than Robin?

By overtly dismissing the bird-like name, Bruce - and DC editorial, or whoever decided this - is definitively moving Duke away from Robin. And it's a shame. In Duke's transition from Robin to Signal, he has next to no agency. Bruce tells him he's not Robin, Bruce gives him the suit, Bruce tells him not to be Lark, Bruce gives him another suit. It's a stark contrast from his induction into Robin - though Alfred arranged it, he gave Duke a choice. Duke chooses Robin.

Duke being disallowed the Robin mantle is, to me, on par with DC stripping Cass of the Bat symbol during the New 52. The racism behind both these decisions cannot be overstated - both Cass and Duke redefined their mantles, and their mantles defined them. At least Cass' mistake has been corrected, and lots of writers and fans acknowledge how horrible that period was. For Duke, he was never given a real chance. And it's unlikely he ever will be.

This is not a knock against the Signal identity or any writers. However, it genuinely saddens me to think that all of this story potential - Duke's redefinition of Robin, his relationship to Dick, his connection to We Are Robin, and above all his ability to choose who he wants to be - has been neglected and cast aside. Even if they never acknowledge his role as Robin, I hope future stories centre him once again, because it's what he deserves.

[madelinetess]

As a subtle April Fool's joke Buck goes through Tommy's contact list altering every contact he has inside ever so slightly.

At first he wanted to use everyones full names and not nicknames but after changing Eddie's contact to Edmundo it simply felt too flat, so he decided to also change the surname thus creating 'Edmundo Noches', Eddie's dark alterego

Buck then went back and changed cap's contact from Robert to 'Bobbing in the Ocean', for, Buck thought, obvious reasons

Hen's contact now read 'Chicken Wingson'

Chim became 'Chim Chim Cheree'

And his sister was 'Maddie Poppins' to fit in the theme

But Buck didn't stop at the 118, no, Christopher became 'CD Player'

Lucy Donato was now simply 'Lucy Donut'

Karen got deconstructed into 'Leaving you a Car in Will son' don't ask him, the mind works in mysterious ways and who is Buck to question his train of thought

Gerrard's Blocked number simply got changed to 'Catpiss G.' he deserved that

Whoever Buck knew had their contact name changed

When Tommy saw the updated contact name when Edfie called him he thought it strange, and when he checked his contacts list for a second he thought he might have gone crazy, but once he saw Evan beaming at him mischievously he knew what had happened.

He went through every single name deciphering all of them and laughing at the puns his boyfriend came up with

But when he reached Evan's contact he realised it remained unchanged as if Evan forgot about himself...

He then proceeded to spend the next few days thinking of a pun that would also convey the love he felt for the man finally settling on 'Even Ground' because Evan was his safe place, his even landing ground, the man he loved coming back home to

[dejwrldarchived]

and to all the white mutuals who blocked me & soft blocked me because of me being vocal about anti blackness in fandom spaces in the name of “clearing your dash of discourse” i hope your fics flop and your favorite character dies in whatever manga/anime you’re currently obsessing over.

[stewy]

it’s just so frustrating when someone can only talk about a female character in terms of what she “deserves” in a greater moral sense and never about what she wants and willingly puts herself through by means of having agency and what serves her narratively