#raising the next generation

[langernameohnebedeutung]

Teachers in the 2000s were like: "Wow, ADHD is such a trend diagnosis. It is very concerning how these lazy parents and arrogant doctors just put a label on kids instead of helping them properly. They're just harming them in the long run! Anyway, random student, here are your daily punishments for being lazy, disorganised, distracted, late, too loud, too quiet-"

[sporeclan]

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Finally, we officially have SporeClan's first newborn kitten!!!

[threestripeslider]

Tired: Rise!Splinter is a neglectful and awful father who doesn’t care about his kids >:(

Wired: Rise!Splinter’s negligence comes from a place of deep trauma that he’s carried with him his whole life – losing his mother, having been betrayed by the love of is life, being imprisoned and forced to fight for his life, used as an experiment and subsequently being mutated and losing his whole identity as a person – and while it certainly doesn’t excuse his behavior, there is no doubt that this man loves his sons fiercely despite his own shortcomings and perhaps it is exactly that love and care that causes him to keep his children at arms length in hopes to spare them his family’s cursed legacy that grooms them into martyrs and are thus destined to die young, a sacrifice for the greater good that Splinter is never willing to make even if it means forfeiting the world to the Shredder. Splinter’s journey of fatherhood began by being completely unprepared as a fresh young single father of four young children that depend on him to survive and there is no surprise he’s hit almost every bump there possibly is when raising a child but never in his life has Splinter ever blamed or resented his children in any way – he is not perfect and he’s aware and he tries to do better all because he loves his kids this fucking much bc despite all the shit he’s been through, those kids made him realize that he can try again. to dismiss him as an awful father is a gross mischaracterization of a deeply traumatized man of color who evidently tried his fucking hardest not to pass on the hurt onto his own children while grappling with his own demons and the crushing destiny of his family’s blood line that took away his mother.

[unforth]

@esper-aroon has enabled me, so here let me scream at y'all about The Imperial Uncle.

Okay, so I recently read The Imperial Uncle (Huang Shu) by Da Feng Gua Guo from Peach Flower House and I really loved it??? It's first person pov, mlm, about the Emperor's uncle Jing Chengjun, who is mistrusted by everyone simply because of who his parents were and his position, and so he's basically given up on trying to convince people that he's actually a nice, decent person without ulterior motives. He's super trapped by his position, and there's so much he can't say and do, and he's also a hopeless romantic, like, from his own mouth all he really wants is to sleep beside and wake up next to someone who actually gives a shit about him, and even that is basically out of reach in his life. Like, the book starts with his wife (who he has never once had sex with) storming into a meeting he's having and announcing he's a cuckold and she's pregnant.

But also, this poor bastard really thinks he knows what's going on and his very smart. Very unreliable narrator. He's actually kinda a hilarious, impulsive himbo. But the TL:DR is that his loneliness and isolation and the extent to which he's politically trapped routinely lead him to make absolutely terrible decisions.

E. Danglar's translation is absolutely gorgeous, too, and... idk, if you love political plots, melodramatic idiot main characters, a dose of pining, and a slow burn that eventually pays off, come take a look??? (some people think it's a love triangle??? idk, I never really got that vibe, I never felt it was really in doubt which of the two potential dudes he'd end up with, but maybe I only feel that way because I got it right, lmao).

Anyway, I can't stop thinking about how these two idiots end up finally finding each other and getting together, and I have an entire AU in my head (a modern corporate one) and part of another (canon divergent from like a decade before the book starts), and I just want people to love this book as much as I did and scream with me about it.

[myfckingnameisnuwanda]

I made a background <3

It's terrible, but it's there <33

[moths-are-better]

Me forcing my little cousin to watch wakfu with me so that she’ll have childhood nostalgia like me and we’ll get to talk about when she’s older and If everything goes according to plan she’ll show it to her little siblings and get them hooked

[flame-shadow]

being a kid obsessed with dinosaurs while being raised christian fundamentalist (i think?) made for some very interesting moments.

books would say that dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago. my parents would say the earth was created 6000 years ago. so for a while, i thought dinosaurs were fake like dragons. and for a long while after that, i never paid attention to the estimated years because they were all clearly false.

books would say that dinosaurs evolved over their millions of years of existence, at some point some developed feathers, and that birds probably came from dinosaurs. the pastors and sunday school teachers would say that evolution wasn't real and that god created the birds as they are. i was confused and disappointed, because evolution made a lot of sense and sounded really cool to boot.

documentaries would show fossil sites and talk about how the rock can be dated. one time, i heard that god left dinosaur fossils for us to find as enrichment. another time, i was told that satan planted the fossils to sow doubt among god's followers. i thought it odd that some people thought god would want to trick his people with such an elaborate hoax.

years later, i heard someone say that god created the universe to look like it had always existed even though it was created relatively recently, and that's why the light from stars further than 6,000 light years have already reached us. i was reminded of the explanation of god putting apparently millions of years old fossils in the ground.

more recently (within the past decade and therefore i was no longer a kid nor a christian), i've heard the people who raised me to believe the things above reciting new "facts" that people have since come up with to explain away more recent scientific discoveries and conclusions. a few years ago, my grandmother had someone speak at her church, and afterwards she bought some of the books they were selling and shipped them to me. whereas twenty years ago, she'd have told me dinosaurs couldn't have existed, now she had sent me books about how actually dinosaurs were created 6000 years ago along with humans and all the other animals. these "facts" were corroborated by some other relatives next time i shared a meal with them.

they can't even keep their false facts straight because the old stories don't make sense anymore, even though the new stories aren't any better!

and i keep coming back to my early interest in dinosaurs.

the one that my mom was reluctant to allow me to pursue because of the perceived falseness of their existence. the one that i felt i had to carefully regulate what facts i expressed interest in lest my mom decide that dinosaurs were banned from being talked about the way pokemon was. and i was so so deliberate to pepper in the occasional qualifiers like "even though the bible says that's not possible, 150 millions years is a long time ago!" or "i know they're not actually going to turn into birds and this is just a drawing, but this one with the feathers does really look like it could become a bird someday."

thank god for dinosaurs (haha), because im not sure how long i would've been mired in such a closed-minded worldview otherwise. even though satan didn't sow the fossils in the earth, they did cause me to doubt the veracity of what i was taught.

[candorverity]

i've actually seen people pointing out that making all and only characters that can shapeshift nonbinary or genderfluid representation can get problematic (or at least icky), bc you're reinforcing the idea that body = gender. it's super automatic too: yes, of course they're genderfluid, they can change their body to what they want! and that's completely alien to the experience of real genderfluid people

You are probably right about it geting possibly problematic, I just haven't done much research into it and was just spitballing my ideas. I know, as a genderfluid person myself, and a young one at that, it's more fantasy wish fulfillment than reality. Obv body ≠ gender, but my thought process came from my own desire for a solution to the dysphoria.

When it comes to the characters in questions, I was just thinking about my hc version of Teddy Lupin, and how he would have a different take on gender and sexuality than most people due to being a metamorph, being (in my mind) raised by two men, and one of those men often being headcannoned as genderqueer themselves. In my mind, she comes from a super interesting situation that can be explored. Not that being raised by a gay couple would change anyone's gender or sexuality, but that it would undeniably create a safer space for doing those things.

Tonks only got looped in bc it felt weird to ignore her, and also her earlier framing in the books and movies, but my intention was mostly with Teddy. I didn't mean to include all shape-shifting characters into my Teddy Lupin centric thought process by lack of specification.

[ash-and-starlight]

.

[dedenneblogs]

(heartbreak high) that one babysitting format meme

but my fun lil spin on it

[dark-elf-writes]

Cloud introduces his summons to the kiddos and absolutely no one is surprised when kid 4 and Bahamut zero get along like a house on fire

“Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad.”

“You can’t play with Bahamut until your homework is done.”

*the sound of very fast little footsteps as Kid Four books it to finish his homework*

“Blondie did you just… bribe your child… with Bahamut?”

“Do you know how outnumbered I am? I’ll take whatever I can get at this point. Besides Bahamut loves him.”

[anthromimicry]

[metapphjores]

there is no future or liberation for any movements that sees their "enemies" as non-human

[laufire]

I'll preface this by saying I haven't read the arc where Bruce shoots and kills Darkseid; I'm fuzzy on the details. the sources I've looked up here and there whenever the topic came to my mind seemed contradictory; I get the impression there was collaboration from some other heroes and it might've not been that clear cut? either way, I'm not going to read the arc rn (might in the distant future, if I choose to do something with it), but it seems there's agreement that this was the one time Bruce canonically planned to and followed through breaking his most sacred rule.

and I remember at one point I thought: what if this plot was used to give Bruce a better understanding of Jason's choices? what if it could make him not just willing to find a middle ground between them, but intentionally seek it? it wouldn't, couldn't be blanket acceptance, but if there's one point in canon that will even nudge him way from his increasingly uncompromising stance during the post-crisis/new earth continuity (1), it would be the one time he found his line in the sand, and realised that, unlike he always feared, he could walk back from it.

at the time it was no more than a passing thought, but just today, to close that chapter with the year, I read the very last few comics including new earth!Jason, in my completitionist quest of reading every single one of his (and every other version of Jason's) appearances. and two (technically three) of them reminded me of this.

one is his arc in convergence: batman and robin #1-2, published circa 2015 (revisiting new earth after 2011's reboot). it's part of a larger event that I can't be bothered to read fully rn (this ain't about them), but the gist of it is that Red Hood and Scarlet return to Gotham as some apocalyptic level shit is going down, helping Batman and Robin (Damian). Bruce accepts Jason's help, which bothers Damian, although by the end of the arc there's a truce between them and a clear willingness from everyone involved to work together going forward.

the other one is in batman incorporated vol. 1 #6, the last proper appearance of new earth!Jason before the reboot in 2011 kickstarted (the arc seemingly continued in vol. 2, but from what I already know about, and what little I've personally experienced from, the new 52, I'm not getting my hopes up). it consists on just a couple of panels where we don't see Jason's face or hear his name, and just see Bruce recruiting someone as "Wingman" (2), offering him a opportunity to "salvage a reputation" by joining his international bat-initiative, on a few conditions like keeping Jason's identity a mystery (3).

and I'm sure that if (when?) I read the aforementioned Darkseid's arc (and the subsequent time traveling shenanigans) there might be plenty to be found to contradict this post, because I do have some experience with detective comics comics. but these two instances are so easily aligned with my own take (4) that I had to post about it.

unfortunately, this is just making me mourn what-could-have-been, had the reboot never occured, even more than I ever did.

(1) pre-crisis/earth one!Bruce had a different attitude. and sometimes it feels that things like self-defence (batman vol. 1 #400) or defence of others (detective comics vol. 1 #411), two incredibly understandable motives, seem beyond the grasp of new earth!Bruce.

(2) if I ever do something with this plotbunny, I refuse to give him such a generic codename, just so we're clear.

(3) "we're building a ghost –a bogeyman too big to be clearly seen. its edges indistinct, it's full extent and purpose uncertain. a rumor. a terror made of shadows and flapping wings." MOURNING, I said 😭. also do you see why I think this deserved a much cooler name smh.

(4) the other things Jason did in between Bruce's not-so-dead experiences and this were during his Evol Era (battle for the cowl, batman and robin vol. 1). obviously nothing there would convince Bruce to suddenly approach him with more generosity than he did even in UTRH lol. but it'd make sense for it to be something Bruce did.

[captain-nohbody]

So I'm working on my own take on vat7k and the doomed parallels are killing me because hugo and varian are painfully similar to donella and ulla

[kelpiemomma]

He hesitated as the child below him smiled and reached up. His claws rested right above its head and yet it looked delighted to see him. Did it not realize the danger it was in? It grabbed his fur and giggled.

"Puppy!"

...if he was asked, he was simply raising it up to help him infiltrate human settlements better.