Danny fake guardian angel au
You know how sometimes it’s highlighted how you have to be very careful on what you say in the presence of a spirit because they can twist your words and end up bidding yourself to it?? well uno-reverse-card the spirit also has to be careful on what he says because when Danny had said he owed the dude one for coming to his rescue in a gala Vlad had dragged him to, he didn’t expect that to be taken literally.
danny: wait seriously?? i literally say that all the time!
cw: not after being crowned ghost king, you haven’t
danny: but—but I was also human when I said it. doesn’t that protect me or smth
cw: *shakes his head*
danny:
danny: omg this is a nightmare
cue timmy’s brucequest period (cuz he’s the guy) being so high strung and tired, he just wants some company, which is a so low stakes thing to want the deal Danny unintentionally goes sure we can do that and pulls him towards the guy, despite Timmy never outright saying he wants company. (tim always speaks in the sanctity of his own mind, not out loud)
So. random spirit manifesting. Tim going all who the fuck are u
and Danny panicking and saying your guardian angel
Tim not being impressed while Danny promptly blushes like a moron because that did not come off as he wanted it to.
Yes accidental dead tired where the dynamic goes from Tim trying to shake this probably demon that somehow latched to him being all like ??? dude leave me alone, and Danny being there like bitch i’m trying
to
huh. im actually being protected by a spirit like he said he would. he’s strangely an idiot but also he’s overpowered and just never leaves my side which he says it’s an angel obligation but I think it’s bullshit but also hoping it’s not because it appeals to my crippling fear of abandonment (anyways he really seems to take after those little cartoon angels that poof into your shoulder to keep from me doing wrong decisions) translate into my future boyfriend seems increasingly appalled to what i am up to
meanwhile danny
Bitch you better thank your god I’m dead because otherwise I would already been killed. I did not sign up for a assassins what the fuck I thought you were a normal civilian not a literal superhero and omg that is a fruitloop. no no back off you wrinkly raisin this is my emotional support idiot you can’t have him and what do you mean you’re messing with time whatever this way I can get back to clockwork—
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New place, same fight
Danny loves his friends, they have been with him since they were little and they have experienced too many things together, things that have helped them grow, things that only strengthen their friendship. Because Sam and Tucker were everything to him, as he was everything to them.
But at the same time, Danny could admit that he hated his friends; not always, but there were times where they wouldn't stop fighting, where they forced him to choose. The halfa could understand, Sam and Tucker had different world views, they saw different things and occasionally Danny thought they only got along because of him.
That was okay, he learned to live with them, to be the center of their arguments. And when they moved from Amity to Gotham, when they decided to rent an apartment together and go to the same college (which miraculously had all their majors), he thought everything would be fine.
It was idiotic of him. Because at the time he could only see a repeat of what had happened in high school; Sam was having a protest about the cafeteria menu and Tucker had organized the meat lovers (again), and the halfa knew how it was all going to end.
The point is, Danny was tired of repeating the same cycle, a cycle that apparently included Waylon and Poison Ivy fighting in the cafeteria at his new college (and how the hell did his friends manage to get the Rogues of Gotham into their fights?), so when he saw the people in bat suits he exploded.
When Sam and Tucker turned to ask his opinion he shook his head, pointed at Lunch Lady, who had her arms crossed and decided it wasn't his problem before disappear. Literally, no matter if half of Gotham was calling him meta, he was tired.
Red Robin gawked at him before turning his attention to Lunch Lady, who was gathering all the meat around her to form a giant meat monster. And Danny decided it wasn't his problem.
Apparently, Sam and Tucker decided that the bats could take care of it before they looked worried and started looking for Danny. It became obvious that the bats needed help when Danny looked at a giant meat monster two hours later, the halfa arched an eyebrow in dismay, weren't they supposed to be professional heroes? Lunch wasn't even trying...
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dick and jason dynamic, where when they were younger jason always idolised dick and didnt see any of his faults and then he comes back as red hood and is mad at everyone including dick because he is the golden child, the can do no wrong child, that follows batmans rules
then for one reason or other he starts kind of working with nightwing
they develop a working relationship as equals, dick is not his older brother, he is his colleague
and this is where jason finds out that dick "anger issues, hasnt had a civil conversation with bruce in the past couple of years" grayson is in fact on as perfect as he always thought
he gets to see the side of him that dick never lets his younger brothers see, the nasty side that is ready to hurt anyone and do anything for the people that he cares about
they end up having to rescue robin from a hostage situation and jason almost gets a black eye because he is staring frozen at dick breaking bones and lightly maiming without a care in the world because tim has been drugged, kidnapped and is currently sitting tied down to a chairs passed out, so dick doesnt have to worry about him remembering any of this and just goes to town on all the goons
afterwards jason doesnt know what to think because who was that, hes never seen his brother act like that (and maybe he feels mad because where was this energy when he was kidnapped)
then they end up having a run it with some known joker goons, they are just patroling, notice something weird and jason doesnt even plan to engage, he has his plan for the joker and taking down his goons that are seemingly not doing anything interesting is not part of it, maybe he can to little surveillance later, find out what they are doing
dick whoever has very different plans because he has made it his mission to destroy anything regarding the joker so he doesnt even take a moment and just drops on them
jason is obviously surprised but well if this idiot is just gonna go and fight them, its not like hes gonna let him do it alone, so he goes and helps
and here jason gets to again see the part of dick that he saw the other day and even gets to see the reaction of the goons when they see nightwing, hes never see a group of criminals scramble faster not even from batman
after this jason is even more confused, even considers asking talia if maybe dick didnt take a dip it the pit recently but decides against it and just tries his luck with going to the source
so next time him and dick are doing something together he asks, because he heard that "nightwing is a pretty chill vigilante and follows batmans rules"
unbeknown to him dick just had fight with bruce couple hours ago, so the batman comment really just sets him of and he basically screams in jasons faces that hes not batman, he doesnt care about his stupid rules, that if he could kill the joker he would because he took his brother from him and hes never letting that happen again, so he shows very obviously that robin is under his protection and that if anyone tries to mess with him, they will have to answer to him and his no killing rule might just not be as unbreakable as batmans
and goes on how he was never batmans perfect soldier even when he was robin and that maybe if he followed the rules back then his brother would have never gotten the mantle and he would be alive right now, but he just couldnt, why should he not just stab the rapist in the dick so that he never does it again, why cant he break a hand of an abuser, theyve done much worse to their partner
and when he is finally done, jason feels like his whole world view shifted just a bit to the right and he doesnt know what to do about any of this and his big brother is right there, obviously hurting and god has he missed him so much, so he just runs into his arms, gives him the biggest hug and says someone like "i missed you dickhead"
and dick goes all still because what? and they pull apart and they stupid helmet is removed and there is crying and hugging and jason still isnt sure what to do now that he knows that his ohh so perfect brother isnt actually that perfect and they have a lot of stuff to work through but maybe right there in the moment being hugged by his brother none of it matters
actually like this so much i wrote a whole fic
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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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Everytime something happens in France in a comic, I realize how little researches comics writers do. And like, if they are this bad with my western country, how bad it is with third-world countries they talk about???
In Nightwing (2016), Raptor is from a circus that was near Paris during Mary Grayson's childhood, so more than 40 years ago at least.
In this flashback, they accuse the mayor of Paris of having given leprosy to the romani and of keeping away the meds they need. Already, with our healthcare's system, it's hardly possible, as they would be able to go to a hospital to get the help they need. Do they think "public healthcare" means the state has a direct control on medication, because that's not the case at all. The French gov control the money put into medication, how much is bought, but a mayor has no power over this. I just don't understand how something like this could happen. You can totally write a racist medical scandal in France, but makes it make sense with our system.
But also, Paris didn't have a mayor until 1977, so if it's before 1977, impossible. And, Paris' mayor from 1977 to 1995 is JACQUES CHIRAC, who was the PRESIDENT after. They wrote a story implying that a French President kept medications away from sick people, was discovered and was still elected President. And, yes, the French government is far from good and they have deeply harmed the romani, but like, maybe don't write shit like that. (Also, Chirac was really against the war of Iraq, and stood up against the US, which France is still paying the price for to this day. So I don't really like an USAmerican to criticize Chirac. Like, we can do it, others can do it, but not USAmericans, y'all have done enough) I'm pretty sure that wasn't the goal of the writers. No, what happen is that they didn't do researches about Paris' mayor and so, wrote that shit.
This may be inspired by the contaminated blood's scandal in the 80s-90s, which was worst in France, but no mayor was found guilty, it was doctors who knowingly contaminated patients with a deadly illness. And the French government was held accountable, even if they had no hand in it, as a matter of principle.
I understand it's a fiction, and they didn't literally wrote "Chirac did this", but it's kind of clumsy. (Especially because of everything I wrote earlier about Chirac's politics and how the US is still punishing France for being against killing civilians and destroying Iraq. France was doing the right thing, and the US worked so France would go back in line and treat Arabs like shit. Do not think western countries are free from the US' imperialism)
And in no way I'm saying that you cannot write France being awful, I know my gov's crimes (rn, they have deported homeless out of Paris for the Olympics, the President is refusing to acknowledge the left won the elections and to take a leftist prime minister so we have no prime minister since mid July and fuck democracy I guess, they support Israel's crimes against humanity, and are behaving like the colonizers that they are in New-Caledonia, sending the armies against the Kanaks that have not enough power on their own land), I'm just saying it should at least be believable enough to work. (Easiest way: make the cops racist. Boom. Also, French cops talk like vilains, it's insane.) And also, not about someone touchy like clumsily painting badly a president that was punished by the US for doing the right thing.
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