#robin’s year in review | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bunny-lou · 1 year

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I posted 565 times in 2022

195 posts created (35%)

370 posts reblogged (65%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@sparrowmoth

@bunny-lou

@telli1206

@bamboocarbon-ver-2-0

@sistersmcclain

I tagged 188 of my posts in 2022

#asks - 86 posts

#the black phone - 77 posts

#finney blake - 62 posts

#anonymous - 56 posts

#the grabber - 55 posts

#incorrect descendants quotes - 48 posts

#robin arellano - 44 posts

#carlos de vil - 41 posts

#jaylos - 33 posts

#jay descendants - 31 posts

Longest Tag: 32 characters

#incorrect the black phone quotes

My Top Posts in 2022:

Robin and Finney are dating, which is cool. Robin is Finney’s romantic boyfriend, so he gets to hold Finney’s hand and listen to him talk about space and go on dates and stuff. This means Robin is Gwen’s platonic boyfriend, so he has gets to hold Gwen’s bag and listen to her talk about her friends and have her be the third wheel on dates and stuff.

Or, a bunch of head canons with Gwen both ruining and supporting Robin/Finney

Finney patching Robin up after a fight and Robin making comments about how he has the cutest nurse, but Finney is still mad at him for fighting.

Robin arguing that Finney can’t be mad at him, Robin got in the fight for defending Gwen against some kids who said she was weird

Finney pointing out that if Robin was defending Gwen, she is going to be more pissed than he is. Gwen likes to fight her own battles, she doesn’t let other people be her voice.

Robin realizing, oh shit, he’s right, and asking Finney to lie and say Robin got in the fight defending Finney because yeah Gwen is younger and shorter and smaller, but Robin is not prepared to be on her bad side

Robin’s uncle lets him take his truck to the drive ins on weekends, which is dark and secluded and if they see a scary movie, Finney will practically be in his lap the whole time

he arrives at the Blake house to pick up his boyfriend and is shocked and confused for Gwen to climb in the truck beside Finney

Finney is just like ‘Gwen wants to see this movie too, so I invited her’

Robin is a good boyfriend and he does actually like Gwen, so of course he has no problem with it, even if his plans are ruined.

Part way through the movie, Robin slips her some money and tells her to go get some snacks

And Gwen is smart and says ‘why? so you can be alone with my brother and make out?’

And Robin, completely serious, saying ‘yes, so make sure you take your time because you don’t want to see this’

Finney is just a flustered mess

Yeah, Robin is Finney’s boyfriend, but the match to his BFF bracelet belongs to Gwen

Gwen starts dating a boy and swooning over him, so Finney gives his best big brother talk of ‘if you hurt her, I will be very disappointed in you and I will make you feel bad’

And Robin’s like ‘good job, babe, you really scared that dude’

But when Finney’s back is turned, Robin is grabbing the guys shirt and promising to break his teeth if he ever hurts Gwen.

Way more invested in Gwen’s stories about the girls in her class and her bitch teacher and how dumb boys are than Finney is. Finney listens because he loves his sister and wants her to have a safe place to talk, but Robin listens because he loves girl talk and there’s no way Susie actually made out with Bobby while she was dating Jack, omg, what happened after that???

Gwen making up total lies to get out of the house when Robin comes over because she’s a good wingwoman and lets them have alone time

Braid twins as Finney makes dinner for all of them.

Teaching Gwen one on one how to do a round house kick so she can use her fists and rocks and feet

(does the same thing with Finn, but it takes way longer because Robin keeps flirting with him)

Also teaches Gwen how to swear in Spanish after she gets detention for the 12000th time for calling her teacher a fuckwad

Gwen helps Robin plan out dates. She points out the restaurants Finney wants to try and the new rocket launcher he’s been eyeing and the new rom com he hasn’t seen yet and if they go to the park at night, Finney will be able to point out the constellations as they hold hands under the stars

Robin is Gwen’s platonic boyfriend, the end.

Might turn this into a fluffy fic after I’m done with my angsty fic

515 notes - Posted July 17, 2022

Just saw Barbarian (2022) and while it was amazing, I would also watch and enjoy a film of Tess and Keith just spending a weekend slowly falling in love during this renting mixup because they were so cute and had such good chemistry.

703 notes - Posted September 10, 2022

Finney: "I made this friendship bracelet for you."

Robin: "I don't really wear jewelry."

Finney: "Oh, okay... You don't have to wear it."

Robin: "No, I'm gonna wear it forever. Back off."

789 notes - Posted July 19, 2022

Robin: “When I was younger, I had a crush on a boy in my class and I didn’t know how to deal with it so I wrote him a letter that just said ‘get out of my school’.”

Finney: “That was you?!”

808 notes - Posted October 12, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Bruce: “What’s the happiest place on earth?”

Finney: “The science lab.”

Robin: “The gym.”

Bruce: “Apparently neither of you have ever been in Vance’s arms.”

Finney: “Of course we’ve never been in Vance’s arms, he’s terrifying!”

Robin: “I brushed against him accidentally once and he pulled out a switchblade.”

843 notes - Posted October 12, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #The black phone #Finney blake #Robin arellano #bruce yamada #vance hopper #The grabber #Albert shaw #Robinney #Finbin #Rinney #Brance #gwen blake

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pokeharvest · 1 year

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I posted 16,429 times in 2022

324 posts created (2%)

16,105 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@sabertoothwalrus

@dandunn

@mishapcorner

@lochroma

@quilfish-swan

I tagged 9,534 of my posts in 2022

Only 42% of my posts had no tags

#one piece - 2,219 posts

#pokemon - 941 posts

#star trek - 571 posts

#dc - 465 posts

#poke things - 356 posts

#fave - 291 posts

#sonic - 198 posts

#rune factory - 194 posts

#genshin impact - 192 posts

#vocaloid - 172 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#(im not very good at it but i love when my mutuals who are all so smart make posts about it and then i can reblog it and say sooooo true <3

My Top Posts in 2022:

alfred is trying

(inspired by this)

[Image ID: Two digitally drawn images. The first image shows Alfred Pennyworth from Batman Comics. He is standing in the Bat Cave in front of a monitor. Text at the bottom indicates Alfred is speaking, and reads, “Good luck Master Bruce. Or as they say in Japan, (speaks Japanese).” The monitor reads, “To do: kill joker. kiss clark. Do not mix up!”

The second image is of Bruce Wayne dressed as Batman. He is standing in confusion with a speech bubble of ellipses next to him. End ID.]

395 notes - Posted August 25, 2022

See the full post

455 notes - Posted September 5, 2022

Decidueye does NOT like grandma dawn ruining his cool mysterious aesthetic

((click for better quality))

637 notes - Posted January 22, 2022

See the full post

1,168 notes - Posted June 6, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

See the full post

1,621 notes - Posted September 21, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #poke things #help. not my untagged robin self insert joke comic being my most popular this year

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moviecriticseanpatrick-blog · 7 months

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youtube

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ew-selfish-art · 8 months

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DPxDC Au: Normally when Danny vandalizes ancient cave walls and historic places on his 'favor' missions for Clockwork, he gets sent back to erase them. But no, apparently this time, when Danny added his actual phone number into some painting, he's not allowed to go back and fix it. Ugh.

...

Tim has had the painting of Bruce professionally reviewed a few times since the old Bat was retrieved from the time stream. He's not entirely sure how the painting still exists, he's not even sure that it matters any more... But one day Tim catches something new in the painting.

It was small, and it could've just been the light at first but... Is that a phone number in the background?? It looks like black marker on the black curtains and it makes him feel feral. The family is kinder this time about how they think he's gone crazy- but each one of them admit that they can't remember a phone number ever being present.

The lab reports that the number was added over the paint- and that it's an ink based marking akin to a sharpie but like, hundreds of years old. So... It's been added recently but not at all recently enough for Tim to have an explanation.

Tim doesn't want to hear any more of his family members opinions on the matter and he certainly isn't going to just, stop investigating or something stupid like that. So, he takes the painting to the tower, gathers his team (Cassie, Kon and Bart), and they call the number in the middle of the night after a lot of planning/back-and-forth/catastrophizing.

It doesn't answer until the final ring, and the static that comes through the phone is bone chilling. A deep, monstrous groan which echoed with agony fills the room.

"I have a math test in like, three hours, who the fuck are you and why the fuck are you calling in the middle of the night?" The voice now complains, still sounding vaguely inhuman despite it's very human word choices.

"Your number is in a historical painting, we had a few questions but uh, you can call us back later?" Tim cringes as he says it but he hadn't planned on having to reply to someone trying to go back to bed. Or someone who was apparently also a teenager. (He had so, so many contingency plans for like, every kind of villain, alien or demon. lame.)

"...Ugh. might as well." The voice calls out, agreeing with a sigh that echos so deeply the team can feel it in their bones.

"Cool. Good luck on your test?" Tim offers.

"Mph." And the line hangs up.

...

Danny is at lunch with Sam and Tucker when he remembers the late night call. He'd spent the morning bitching about never getting a full night of sleep and it finally occurred to him what had happened. Of course his friends think it's hilarious that CW wouldn't let him erase his number. Of course they do.

They stop laughing when Danny calls the number back.

"Hello, this is Red Robin of Gotham. I have Superboy, Wonder girl and Impulse present with me. How did your math test go?"

#dcxdp #dpxdc #dc x dp #dp x dc #danny phantom #dc crossover #dp crossover #long post #let danny be a shit head kid who puts the weird s on historical documents #clockwork always has him clean up his messes but not this time #this time he holds it over his head and danny is so annoyed #yj just want answers and dammit the horrors persist but so do they #someone please continue this #i beg

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readingwriter92 · 1 year

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I posted 9,750 times in 2022

That's 1,062 more posts than 2021!

621 posts created (6%)

9,129 posts reblogged (94%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@gaydhdstiles

@thatgenderfluidaroace

@rai-knightshade

@bruciemilf

@all-things-fandomstuck

I tagged 1,739 of my posts in 2022

#xddd - 53 posts

#shut up sarah - 30 posts

#hey sarah look at this - 26 posts

#the owl house - 23 posts

#toh - 19 posts

#xdd - 19 posts

#xdddd - 15 posts

#goncharov - 11 posts

#^^ - 9 posts

#ml spoilers - 9 posts

Longest Tag: 137 characters

#slightly paranoid i’m not reading these right but i don’t care bc i’m super excited and fuck it i don’t care if those aren’t the start or

My Top Posts in 2022:

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Bridgewater (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Anne Becker & Jeremy Bradshaw, Jeremy Bradshaw & Vipin Khurana Characters: Jeremy Bradshaw, Anne Becker, Vipin Khurana Additional Tags: Overworked Jeremy, tired!Jeremy, Mom!Anne, Hurt/Comfort, Vipin is done Summary:

The bags under his eyes had their own bags, his hair was a mess - as though his fingers had run through it a few hundred times - and his clothes were the same as Vippin had seen when he’d said his goodbyes on Saturday.

He sighed. Clearly the professor hadn’t left. This wasn’t the first time the man had done this, but it had been a good year. And recently with his frequent excursions with Anne, Vippin had thought maybe he wouldn’t get so sucked into work but alas, there they were. “Professor?” “Vippin?” Jeremy looked up from his work, squinting up at him as his glasses were absent. Seeing him head on just emphasized his gaunt look. “What? What are you doing here? It’s…” He trailed off, lifting his phone to check the date, only to see that it was dead. “It’s Monday- were you...here all weekend?”

~~ Jeremy overworks himself so Vipin calls Anne-

9 notes - Posted April 1, 2022

Ahhhhh programming a great joy wherein I spend FORTY MINS trying to figure out why two strings don’t equal all bc there was an extra \n at the end of one

10 notes - Posted October 13, 2022

Me: I’m gunna write

Also me: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

10 notes - Posted July 15, 2022

Do I know anything about batman? fuck no. but do I have a genius level theory? yes.

Robin #1: Dick Grayson What sounds like Grayson? Jason Who's second robin? Robin #2: Jason Todd What is the first letter in Jason's last name? T What letter does robin number three's name start with? T Robin #3: Tim Drake Now you see. They didn't want us to catch onto this theory therefore What letters do they avoid having in the beginning of Robin four's name? T and D What is robin four's name? Robin #4: Stephanie Brown [ignore the fact that I'm not actually sure if Stephanie is Robin four or not I was too lazy to read an entire bunch of articles for this] Now but you see they needed a robin five. what do we call him? Well what letter has appeared in all of the first three robin's names? D What letter only appears in robin four's name? W Who is robin number five? Robin #5: Damien Wayne Thus I am just right

11 notes - Posted July 3, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Fucking quaking over the sneak peaks from wfa season two where Bruce is having a hella moment and I dragged the image from the polygon article to save it bc it’s beautiful and it fucking says ep 56. Batman scarecrow and guys I am totally okay and normal and fine about this information

14 notes - Posted September 26, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #I stand by my Robin theory I’m fucking hilarious #also…9 thousand posts huh

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alchemistc · 9 months

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Child popstar Steve Harrington finally finishes out his label contract and spends five years off the grid. Most ppl just assume the label didn't know what to do with him and that he didn't have enough auto tune to keep himself relevant.

Meanwhile Steve's been off writing the most devastating folk album to be released since Stick Season. It's a departure, to say the least, but his fans have aged with him so all that poppy angst from their tweens finds a new home with his smooth, crooning voice and his clever lyrics and the subtle use of wind instruments that shouldn't work but somehow DO and But Tammy's A Girl goes TikTok viral overnight.

Eddie Munson, looking to assuage his PR teams worries about his ever escalating internet feud with Ronnie Radke, starts reviewing music in non-metal genres as kind of a cute little schtick, except he's really insightful and KNOWS HIS SHIT where music is concerned so the videos he puts out get more and more popular, to the point that a lot of ppl unwilling to bounce genres eventually find themselves streaming Eddie's albums to get a sense of his own musicality.

When Steve releases Be Kind Rewind, Eddie adds it to his list and doesn't think about it for a few weeks, anticipating based on the longevity of BTaG that it'll still be relevant by then.

When he actually gets to it he goes about it how he always does -- pulls up his research right there on the Live and reads out anything of significance. He'll edit it down later.

Only this time he sits and stares for a good minute because "Sorry guys, I had this guy's poster hanging over my bed when I was like twelve - when the hell did he step away from label approved pop?"

He loves the album. Everyone loves the album but Eddie specifically waxes lyrical about the poetry of the lyrics and the way they work with the melody and the quiet sense of LOSS it evokes even as it forges a new path and the narrator finds a new muse. The final edit of the reaction video is three times longer than the album.

Eddie gets a call from his publicist three days later. "I have a Robin Buckley on the line?"

"Who - "

"Trust me I'm just gonna patch her through."

The Munson Harrington Collab breaks the internet for a week.

#steddie ficlet #steddie #inspired hthaze and posty nerding tf out over noah kahan

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ineffableoutpost · 9 months

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Steve Harrington on BookTok

Older Steve who downloads tik tok and begins to make book tok videos without ever having read much. Instead, he makes it like a collaborative book club where his followers suggest books and after he gives them his review.

At first people love him bc he’s this cute fifty year old man with glasses and a husband who was a famous metal star in the nineties and early 2000s. Then there are other people who give him the Pedro Pascal treatment of calling him “daddy” and thirsting for him. Steve shuts that down immediately.

The popular first request was the LOTR series and Steve has to apologize and say that his husband reads them to him and has been doing it for decades now.

Then comes Harry Potter and Steve is a little apprehensive because the author is a piece of shit. But he does read them and has a mini obsession over it.

Then he moves on to other books, and then the queer community of booktok finds him and begin requesting a bunch of queer books. Steve cries while reading The Song of Achilles, but loves it.

Then, they make him read a book full of smut, and Steve makes a video halfway through the book where he’s like;

“You guys are making me read porn!” You can clearly hear Eddie cackling in the background

- - -

Steve makes a special series where he and Eddie purposely read shity books and laugh along the way. (Colleen hover makes many appearances)

*reading about the two characters laughing at their baby’s balls*

Steve: *speechless*

Eddie: *speechless x2* and gay people are the problem?

They look at each other and burst out laughing

- - -

Steve making another series with Nancy and Robin where they look at how some male authors write female characters.

Nancy: *reading* her breasts jiggled excitedly as she descended the stairs

Robin: *laughing her ass off in lesbian*

Steve: *also laughing along*

Eddie: *pops his head into frame* I, for one can account this as true. Steve’s tits do jiggle excitedly

Eddie stitches the video with an old home movie where Steve is running down the stairs shirtless, and his tits do in fact jiggle

- - -

Steve makes a video with Eddie where Eddie explains how he annotated his books and shows his oldest copies of the hobbit and LOTR.

Then there’s a small clip of one of Steve’s annotations in one book and it says “slay”

Cut to Eddie laughing asking where Steve got that word from and how long he’s been using it secretly in his annotations.

- - -

Steve gets an opportunity to partner up with audible or some shit to make a small collection of his favorite books into a subscription bundle.

He’s so excited when he also starts seeing bookshops make a little table with a sign saying “Steve’s Favorites”

He’s so exited because reading and books was something he hated for so many years, but also something he managed to turn positive.

Some stores also display a “Steddie Favorites” with the LOTR series and some of Steve’s selected books.

#steddie #stranger things #steve harrington #eddie munson #steve harrington x eddie munson #steve harrington/eddie munson #my writing #steddie thoughts #steddie writing #steddie fanfiction #steddie fluff #steddie fic #steddie Drabble #ficlet

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waynefamilyreactions · 9 months

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New to Gotham? A useful friendly guide for the newbies at Gotham.

There's never a boring day in Gotham City.

The best view of the city is from the Wayne Enterprises rooftop. Entrance is for free during the weekend.

Came to Gotham as a tourist? First things first: why?

Red-lights and traffic rules are more of a suggestion.

If you're not from Gotham, and unless you have very good reflexes, avoid driving in the city and a very likely trip to the ER.

On the bright side, chances of bumping into the Waynes at the ER are high.

Sign our Changeorg petition for the making of 'Keeping up with the Waynes'. Don't question it, just sign it.

In Gotham, the 'It' movie (2017) is rated as A+ and classified as an educational documentary.

Although sort of infamous, and for some reason considered a Gotham attraction, 'Crime Alley' is literally an Alley of Crime. It should go without saying that visiting is NOT advised.

Metropolis might be safer and sunnier, but we got style.

Always look both ways before crossing a street even if its a One-Way street.

If still in school, don't make fun of the smart kids in your class, they are the most likely to answer a Riddler's Riddle and save you all.

Don't be surprised if your therapist turns out to be one of the Gotham's most wanted.

Improved universal antidote formula for laughing-gas and poison-ivy's pheromones (previous to august of this year) can be acquired for free at any Gotham Hospital.

Best coffee shop is the family-owned business on the corner of the ninth avenue at Old Gotham District. Rated as top 1 by Red-Robin and also positively reviewed by Wayne member Tim Drake.

Fan of art and animal-lover? There are a couple of handmade paintings by Damian Wayne that could be acquired at Gotham's Gallery. All earnings go to Gotham's animal rescue centers.

Most of the famous Gotham criminals are all professionals despite their funny names, do not underestimate them.

Think you're tough? Think again.

Have fun and enjoy your time in Gotham. It's kinda nice once you get used to it.

#only in gotham #gothamit #gothamnit

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imfinereallyy · 8 months

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Passengers

It took Robin three years to get her license. Which all things considered, the twice apocalyptic experiences, and, ya know, being poor, wasn’t too bad in her opinion.

20 was as good as any age to get behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Okay, if she was honest with herself, really honest, maybe her calculations were off. It wasn’t three years exactly. She could have gotten her license at 16; hell, she could have gotten her permit at 15. So it quite honestly had taken four, five years max to get her license.

But the first two years didn’t count to Robin.

She didn’t even give a thought to driving until she was 17, and Steve was driving her every day without question. She hadn’t thought about it until Steve threw his keys at her, telling her to drive, that Robin realized he was driving her every day because he wanted to, not because she was a license-less loser.

It cracked Robin open when she finally had time to think about it. After all the blood, and gore, and almost losing Steve several times, it hit her that this dingus really wanted her by his side.

So, Steve was really to blame if she ever got into a car accident. Sure, he didn’t push her to get behind the metal contraption, but Robin wanted to pay him back somehow, for all the rides and love over the years.

That was how now, Robin was seething in regret as she drove the rest of the way home, in the dark, from their road trip.

See, when Robin had pictured them doing things like this, it had just been the two of them. Steve in the passenger seat, arguing over music and the best car snacks. Windows down, yelling about who fucking cares, and just laughing their way through different states.

Robin hadn’t taken into account there might be other people involved in her bestie road trip fantasies. No, instead, it wasn’t the terrible two, platonic soulmate extravaganza she pictured. Instead it now involved them, Steve’s ex-turned-best friend, whom Robin had a horrible crush on, Nancy Wheeler, and a sweet metalhead who Robin saw as a brother, and Steve had a huge soul-consuming crush on Eddie Munson.

Robin begrudgingly would admit the additional two had made the trip better, so she didn’t have too many complaints. Actually, in reality, Robin only had one big hang-up about the whole thing.

Steve was in the back seat.

Which would have been fine if Robin had been there too, but she wasn’t. It was her stupid turn to drive in the home stretch of their way home. Instead, Robin had Nancy beside her. Which should have brought her joy but instead made her nervous and clammy and not at all suited to be behind the wheel of the death contraption they called a car. Plus, Nancy was asleep.

Her snores were pretty cute though.

Robin seethed silently; it was Eddie’s fault. He positively insisted on sitting with Steve in the back. Something which Robin would normally tease the both of them for, the oblivious idiots that they were, but Robin was a possessive little creature. It was a trait of hers she tried to bury deep down. She knew people didn’t like that; they didn’t like when people clung. Didn’t like that she felt like baring her teeth, even sometimes wanted to actually bite at people who tried to pry her people away from her.

It was funny, really; the only person who understood that part of her was Steve himself, which made her possessive side come out even more. Like seeks like, and crazy seeks crazy.

God, if she was every lucky enough to get a girlfriend, she was screwed.

Robin had resisted looking in the review mirror for twenty minutes. Probably not safe, but driving angrily wasn’t either, and if she saw the two of them giggling like school girls, she was gonna flip the car.

But Robin was never good at resisting temptation. She was most definitely the child who would touch the plate after someone told her it was too hot. So Robin took a glance, shoulders tense and mouth dry, and saw—

Well, shit. Robin melted. There in the back seat with their heads leaned against each other were Steve and Eddie, sound asleep.

The edges of Robin softened; she remembered Steve pinching his nose earlier, eyes squinting on his turn to drive. She had been in the passenger seat then. She had wanted to ask but instead said nothing, knowing he would wave her off. So she claimed her turn to drive, and then Eddie had been insistent that Steve come in the back with him and—

Robin was getting it now. Although Eddie had a big fat gay crush on Steve. That wasn’t why he wanted to be with Steve in the back. He had noticed, too. The edges of sleep deprivation creeping slowly into an oncoming migraine for Steve. Eddie had seen Steve pushing himself, and somehow also knew that if Steve stayed in the front, he would feel obligated to stay awake.

Robin hadn’t realized that, Eddie didn’t just want Steve; he paid attention to him. Eddie noticed Steve the way Robin noticed him.

Robin spared another glance at the two of them, wrapped around each other like vines snaking up an old oak tree. The last of her anger seemed to fade away. Even after all this time, none of them got a lot of sleep. Steve, most of all, seemed to run on fumes. Robin knew he couldn’t sleep soundly alone, but also couldn’t fall asleep around just anyone. For a long time, Robin had been his only cure for his insomnia. Steve never dared to fall asleep in front of strangers, afraid he’d scare them with his screams.

But here Steve was, in the arms of the man that he loves, not a single worry line on his face as he slept the rest of the trip away.

Robin knew, with certainty, Steve felt safe.

And because of that, Robin thought wistfully to herself, if Eddie Munson ever wants a turn at being a passenger, she wouldn’t mind taking the wheel for him, too.

***

a short lil thing to get me back in my writing grove. Is inspired by a friend of mine who is in her 20s and doesn’t drive. It’s totally okay and everyone moves at their own pace! And also I’m definitely a person who likes to drive others around as a sign of love (I am Steve coded I am beginning to realize)

Sorry if this isn’t any good, or seems rushed. Writers block is a bitch.

#steddie #stranger things #robin buckley #Robin is a feral gremlin just like the kids you can’t change my mind #steve harrington #eddie munson #platonic stobin #platonic soulmates #platonic soulmates stobin #POV Robin Buckley #outsider pov #background ronance #nancy wheeler #my writing #ficlet #steve x eddie

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literary-illuminati · 4 months

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Book Review 68 - Babel by R. F. Kuang

Overview

I came to Babel with extremely little knowledge about the actual contents of the book but a deep sense of all the vibes swirling around its reception – that it was robbed of a Hugo nomination (if the author didn’t outright refuse it), that it’s probably the single buzziest and most Important sf/f release of 2022, that it was stridently political, and plenty more besides. I also went in having mostly enjoyed The Poppy War series and being absolutely enamoured by the elevator pitch of an alternate history Industrial Revolution where translation is literally magic. And, well-

It is wrong to say I hated this book, but only because keeping track of my complaints and starting organize this review in my head was entertaining enough to keep me invested in the reading experience.

The story is set in an alternate 1830s, where the rise of the British Empire relies upon the dominance of its translators, as it is the mixture of translation and silverworking, the inscription of match-pairs in different languages on bars of worked silver and the leveraging of the ambiguity and loss of meaning between them that fuels the world’s magic. The protagonist is pluckted from his childhood home in Canton after his family dies in a cholera outbreak and whisked away to the estate of Professor Lowell, an Oxford translator he quickly realized is his unacknowledged father. He’s made to choose an English name (Robin Swift) and raised and tutored as a future translator in service to the Empire.

The meat of the story is focused on Robin’s education in Oxford, his relationship with the rest of his cohort, and his growing radicalization and entanglement with the revolutionary Hermes Society. Things come to a head when in his fourth year the cohort is sent back to Canton to, well, help provoke the first Opium War, though none of them aware of that. The final act follows the fallout of that, by which I mean it lives up to the full title of “Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution”.

To be clear, this was technically a very accomplished book. The writing never dragged and the prose was, if not exactly lyrical, always clear and often evocative. Despite the breadth of space and time the story covers, I never had any complaints about the pacing – and honestly, the ending was, dramatically speaking, one of the more natural and well-executed ones I’ve read recently. It’s very well-constructed.

All that being said – allow me to apologize for how the rest of this is mostly just going to be a litany of complaints. But the book clearly believes itself to be an important and meaningful work of political art, which means I don’t feel particularly bad about holding it to high standards.

Narrative Voice

To start with, just, dear god the tone. This is a book with absolutely zero faith in its audience’s ability to reach their own conclusions, or even follow the symbolism and implication it lays down. Every important point is stated outright, repeated, and all but bolded and underlined. In this book set in 1830s England there are footnotes fact-checking the imperialists talking heads to, I guess, make sure we don’t accidentally become convinced by their apologia for the slave trade? Everything is just relentlessly didactic, in a way that ended up feeling rather insulting even when I agreed with the points Kuang was making.

More than that, and this is perhaps a more subjective complaint but – for an ostensible period piece, the narrative voice and perspective just felt intensely modern? This was theoretically an omniscient third person book, with the narrative voice being pretty distinct from any of the actual characters – with the result that the implicit narrator was instead the sort of person of spends six hours a day getting into arguments on twitter and for this effort calls themselves a progressive activist. The identities of all the characters – as delivered by the objective narration – were all very neat and legible from the perspective of someone at a 2022 HR department listing how diverse their team was, which was somewhere between a tragic lost opportunity to show how messy and historical racial/ethnic/national identities are and outright anachronistic, depending. (This was honestly one of the bigger disappointments, coming from Kuang’s earlier work. Say what you will of The Poppy War series, the narration is with Rin all the way down, and it trusts the reader enough not to blink.) More than that it was just distracting – the narration ended up feeling like an annoying obstacle between me and the story, and not in any fun postmodern way either.

Characters

Speaking of the cast – they simply do not sound or feel like they actually grew up in the 19th century. Now, some modernization of speech patterns and vocabulary and moral commensense is just the price of doing business with mass market period pieces, granted, but still – no 19th century Anglo-Indian revolutionary is going use the phrase ‘Narco-military state’ (if for no other reason than we’re something like a century early for ‘narco-state’ to be coined as a term at all). An even beyond feeling out of time most of the characters feel kind of thinly sketched?

Or no, it’s not that the characters are thinly sketched so much as their relationships are. We’re repeatedly, insistently told that these four students are fast friends and closer than family and would happily die for each other, but we’re very rarely actually shown it. This is partly just a causality of trying to skim over a four-year university education in the middle third of one book, I think, but still – the good times and happy moments are almost always sort of skimmed over, summarized in the course of a paragraph or two that usually talk in terms of memories and consequences more than the relationships themselves. The points of friction and the arguments, meanwhile, are usually played out entirely on the page, or at least described in much more detail. In the end you kind of have to just take it as read that any of these people actually love each other, given that at least two of them seem to be feuding at any given point for the entire time they know each other.

Letty deserves some special attention. She’s the only white member of Robin’s cohort at Babel and she honestly feels like less of acharacter and more a collection of tropes about white women in progressive spaces? Even more than the rest, it’s hard to believe the rest of the class views her as beloved ride-or-die found family when essentially every time she’s on screen it’s so she can do a microagression or a white fragility or something. Also, just – you know how relatively common it is to see just, blatantly misogynistic memes repackaged as anti-racist because it specifies ‘white women’? There’s a line in this that almost literally says ‘Letty wasn’t doing anything to disprove the stereotype of woman as uselessly emotional and hysteric’.

Also, she’s the one who ends up betraying the other three and trying to turn them in when they turn revolutionary. Which is probably inevitable given the book’s politics, but as it happened felt like less of the shocking betrayal that it was supposed to be and more just, checking off a box for a dramatic reverse. Of course she turned on them, none of them ever really seemed to even like each other.

As a Period Piece

So, the book is set in the 1830s, in the midst of the industrial revolution and its social fallout, and the leadup to the First Opium War (which is, through the magic of, well, magic ,but also mercantilist economics, make into a synecdoche for British global dominion more broadly). On the one hand, the setting is impeccably researched, recent and relevant historical events are referenced whenever they would come up, and the footnotes are full to bursting with quotes and explanations of texts or cultural ephemera that’s brought up in the narration.

On the other, the setting doesn’t feel authentic in the slightest, the portrayal of the British Empire is bizarrely inconsistent, and all that richly researched historical grounding ends up feeling less like a living world and more like a particularly well-down set for a Doctor Who episode.

The story is incredibly focused around Oxford as a city and a university. There’s a whole author’s note about the research and slight changes made into its geography and I absolutely believe its portrayal as a physical location and the laws about how women were treated and how the different colleges were organized and all that is exactly as accurate as Kuang wanted them to be. The issue is really the people. With the exception of a few cartoonish villains who barely get more than a couple pages apiece, no one feels, sounds like, or acts like they actually belong in the 19th century. The racism the protagonists struggle with all feels much more 21st century than Victorian, and the frame of mind everyone inhabits still comes across more as ‘unusually blatantly racist Englishman’ than 19th century scholars and polymaths.

This is especially blatant as far as religion goes. It’s occasionally mentioned, sure enough, but to the extent anyone actually believes in Christianity it’s of a very modern and disenchanted sort – this is a society that sends out missionaries as a conscious tool of colonial expansion, not because of anything as silly or absurd as actually wanting to spread their gospel. Also like, it’s Oxford, in the nineteenth century. For all the racism the protagonists have to deal with, they should be getting so much more shit from ‘well-meaning’ locals and students trying to save their (one Muslim, one atheist, one probably Christian but black and protective of Haitian Vodou on a cultural level which would be more than enough) souls.

Or, and this is more minor, it is a central conceit of the whole finale that if a few (like, two) determined revolutionaries can infiltrate Babel they’ll be able to take the entire place hostage with barely any trouble. This is because the students and professors there are, basically, whimpy bookworms who’ll faint at the sight of blood and have no stomach for the sort of violence their work actually supports and drives. Which – look, I really don’t want to defend the ruling class of Victorian Britain here, but I’m not sure physical cowardice is really one of their failings, as a group? I mean, there’s an entire system of institutionalized child abuse in the boarding schools they went to to get them used to taking and dealing out violence and abuse. Basically every upper-class sport is thinly disguised military drill or ritual combat (okay, or rowing). Half of them would graduate to immediately running off and invading places for the glory of the queen. I’m not sure two sleep-deprived nerds with knives would actually have been able to cow the crowd here, is what I’m saying. (This would stick out less if the text wasn’t so dripping with contempt for them on precisely these grounds.)

Much less minor are our heroic revolutionaries themselves. And okay, this is more a matter of taste than anything but like – the Hermes Society is an illegal conspiracy of renegade current and former Babel scholars dedicated to using their knowledge of magic and access to university resources to oppose and undermine the British Empire in general and the work of the school in particular. Think Metternich’s worse nightmare, but in Oxford instead of Paris and focused on colonial liberation (continental Europe barely exists for the purposes of the book, Britain is Empire.) So! A secret society of professional revolutionaries in the heydey of just that, with a name that just has to be Hermetic symbolism, who concern themselves with both high politics and metaphysics.

They are just so very, very boring. This is the age of the Conspiracy of the Equals, the Carbonari, the Seasons! The literal Illumanti are still within living memory! Where’s the pageantry, the ritual, the grandiosity? The elaborate initiation rituals and oaths of undying loyalty? They’re so pragmatic, so humble, so (and I know I keep coming back to this) modern. It’s just such an utter wasted opportunity. Even beyond the level of aesthetics, these are revolutionaries with remarkably little positive ideology – the oppose colonialism and racism for reasons they take as self-evident and so don’t feel the need to theorize about it (and talk about them with the vocabulary of a modern activist, because of course they do), but they’re pretty much consciously agnostic as to what world should look like instead. They vaguely end up supporting a sort of petty-bourgeois socialism (in the Marxist sense), but the alliance with Luddites is essentially political convenience – they really don’t seem to have any vision of the future at all, either in England or the various places they claim as homelands.

On Empire and Industrialization

The story is set during the early nineteenth century, so of course the Industrial Revolution is a pretty core part of the background. The Silver Industrial Revolution, technically, since the Babellers translation magic is in this world a key and load-bearing part of it. Despite the addition of miracle-working enhancers and supports to its fundamental technology, the industrial revolution plays out pretty identically to history – right down to the same cities becoming hubs of industry, despite steam engines using enchanted silver instead of coal and thus, presumably, the entire economic and logistical system that brought this particular cities to prominence being totally unrecognizable. This is not a book that’s in any way actually about tracing how something would change history – which isn’t a complaint, to be clear, that’s a perfectly valid creative choice.

It does, however, make it rather galling that the single actually significant difference to history is that the introduction of magic turns the industrial revolution into a Legend of Zelda boss with a giant glowing weak point you can hit to destroy the whole enterprise.

On a narrative level, I get it – it simplifies things and allows for a far happier and more dramatic ending if destroying Babel is not just a symbolic act but also literally sends London Bridge falling down and scuttles the entire royal navy and every mill and factory in Britain. It’s just that I think that by doing so it trades away any chance for actually making interesting commentary on anti-colonial and -capitalist resistance. A world where a single act of spectacular terrorism really can destroy a modern empire is frankly so detached from our world that it ceases to be able to really materially comment upon it.

Like, the principle reason to not take the Luddites as your role models is not that they were morally vicious but that they were doomed – capitalism’s ability to repair damage to infrastructure and fixed goods is legitimately very impressive! Trying to force an entire ruling class not to adopt a technology that makes whoever commits to it tremendous amounts of money (thus, power) is a herculean task even when you have a state apparatus and standing army – adding an ‘off’ button to the lot of it just trades all sense of relevance for a satisfyingly cathartic ending.

(This is leaving untouched how the book just takes it as a given that the industrial revolution was a strictly immiserating force that did nothing but redistribute money from artisans to capitalists. Which certainly tracks as something people at the time would have thought but given how resolutely modern all the other politics in the work are rings really weirdly.)

All of which is only my second biggest issue with how the book presents its successful resistance movement. It all pales in comparison to making the Empire a squeamish paper tiger.

Like, the book hates colonialism in general and the British Empire in particular, the narrative and footnotes are filled with little asides about various atrocities and injustices and just ways it was racist or complicit in some particular atrocity. But more than that it is contemptuous of it, it views the empire as (as the cliche goes) a perpetually rotting edifice that just needs one good kick; that it persists only through the myth of its own invincibility, and has no stomach for violent resistance from within. Which is absolutely absurd, and the book does seem to know it on occasion when it off-handedly mentions e.g. the Peterloo Massacre – but a character whose supposed to be the grizzled cynical pragmatic revolutionary still spouts off about how slave rebellions succeed because their masters aren’t willing to massacre their own property. Which is just so spectacularly wrong on every axis its actually almost offensive.

More importantly, the entire final act of the story relies upon the fact that the British Empire would allow a handful of foreign students seize control of a vital piece of infrastructure for weeks on end and do nothing but try to wait them out as the national physically falls apart around them. Like, c’mon, there would be siege artillery set up and taking shots by the end of week two. As with the Oxford students, the Victorian elite had all manner of flaws – take your pick, really – but squeamishness wasn’t really one of them.

On Magic

So the magical system underlying the whole story is – you know how Machinaries of Empire makes imperial ideology and metaphysics literally magical, giving expert technicians the ability to create superweapons and destroy worlds provided that the Hexarchate’s subjects observe the imperial calendar of rites and celebrate its triumphs/participate in rituals glorying in the torture of its ‘heretics’? It’s not exactly a subtle metaphor, but it works.

Babel does something similar, except the foundational atrocity fueling the engine of empire on a metaphysical level is, like, cultural appropriation. As an organizing metaphor, I find this less compelling.

Leaving that aside, the story makes translation literally capable of miracle-working – which of necessity requires making ‘languages’ distinct natural categories with observable metaphysical boundaries. It then sets the story in the 19th century – the era of newborn nation states and education systems and national literatures, where the concept of the national-linguistic community was the obsession of the entire European intelligentsia. Now this is not a book concerned with how the presence of magic would actually have changed history, in the slightest, but like – given how fascinated it is by translation and linguistics you’d think the whole ‘a language is a dialect with a navy’ cliché would at least get a light mention (but then the book doesn’t really treat language as any more inherent or natural than it does any other modern identity category, I suppose.)

As an Allegory

Okay, so having now spent an embarrassing number of words establishing to my own satisfaction that the book really doesn’t work at all as a period piece, let us consider; what if it wasn’t trying to be?

A great many things about the book just fit much better if you take it as a commentary on the modern university with Victorian window-dressing. Certainly the driving resentment of Oxford as an institution that sustains itself and grows rich off the exploitation of international students it considers second-class seems far more apt applied to contemporary elite western schools than 19th century ones. Likewise the racism the heroes face all seems like the kind you’d expect in a modern English town rather than a Victorian one. I’m not well-versed enough on the economics of the city to know for sure, but I would wager that the gleeful characterization of Oxford as a city that literally starts falling to ruin without the university to support it was also less accurate in the 1830s than it is today.

Read like this, everything coheres much better – but the most striking thing becomes the incredible vanity of the book. This is a morality tale where the natural revolutionary vanguard with the power to bring global hegemony to its knees through nothing but witholding their labour are..students at elite western universities (not, I must say, a class I’d consider in dire need of having their egos boosted). The emotions underlying everything make much more sense, but the plot itself becomes positively myopic.

Beyond that – if this is a story about international students at elite universities, it does a terrible job of actually portraying them. Or, properly, it only shows a certain type; just about every foreign-born student or professor we meet is some level of revolutionary, deeply opposed in principle to the empire they work within. No one is actually convinced by the carrot of a life as an exploited but exceedingly comfortable and well-compensated technician in the imperial core, and there’s not really acknowledgement at all of just how much of the apparatus of international institutions and governments in the global south – including positions with quite a bit of real power – end up being staffed by exactly that demographic who just sincerely agree with the various ideological projects employing them. Kuang makes it far too easy on herself by making just about every person of colour in the books one of the good guys, and totally undersells how convincing hegemonic ideology can be, basically.

The Necessity of Violence

This is a pet peeve and it’s a very minor thing that I really wouldn’t bring it up if that wasn’t literally part of the title. But it is, so – it’s a plot point that’s given a decent amount of attention that Griffin (Robin’s secret older brother, grizzled professional revolutionary, his introduction to anti-colonialism) is blamed for murdering one of his classmates who had the bad luck to be studying while he was sneaking in to steal some silver – a student that was quite well-loved by the faculty and her very successful classmates, who have never forgiven him. Later on, it’s revealed that this is an utter rewriting of history, and she’d been a double agent pretending to let herself be recruited into the Hermes Society who’d been luring Griffin into an ambush when he killed her and escaped.

This is – well, the most predictable not-even-a-twist imaginable, for one, but also – just rank cowardice. You titled the book ‘the necessity of violence’, the least you can do is actually own it and show that violent resistance means people (with faces, and names, not just abstractions only ever talked about in general terms) who are essentially personally innocent are going to end up collateral damage, and people are going to hold grudges about it. Have some courage in your convictions!

Translation

Okay, all of that said, this isn’t a book that’s wholly bad, or anything. In particular, you can really tell how much of a passion Kuang has for the art and science of translation. The depth of knowledge and eagerness to share just about overflows from the page whenever the book finds an excuse to talk about it at length, and it’s really very endearing. The philosophizing about translation was also as a rule much more interesting and nuanced then whenever the book tried to opine about high politics or revolutionary tactics.

Anyways, I really can’t recommend the book in any real way, but it did stick in my head for long enough that I’ve now written 4,000 words about it. So at the very least it’s the interesting sort of bad book, y’know?

#book review #babel #r. f. kuang #sff #lesbian space atrocities #-ish #hatermode

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