#so what exactly is the issue

[starry-bi-sky]

my martha knight au in a nutshell:

Danny/Martha: see up here?

Danny/Martha: *taps skull*

Danny/Martha: intense psychological damage

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Danny/Martha: *upon finding out she's pregnant*

Danny/Martha: oh my god i cant be a mom, I'm fifteen and homeless--

Danny/Martha: im going to be a terrible mother--

Danny/Martha: i live in a cAR--

Danny/Martha: what if the baby inherits my powers? Oh no--

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Danny/Martha post giving birth: i've only had Bruce for a minute and a half but if anything were to happen to him i won't even need to fuse with Vlad, I'm razing this goddamn planet to the ground myself

Danny, to Baby Bruce: you are the last remaining thread of my sanity. I'm going to give you the world :)

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Danny/Martha prior to getting pregnant: Fuck it, if everything in my life has led to this moment, i'm allowed to make one stupid decision. I'm getting drunk and getting laid

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Danny/Martha while Bruce was a toddler: i swear to fucking god i am going to kill the next person who talks to me--

Bruce: hi mommy!! i brought you something!!!

Danny/Martha, immediately flipping on a dime: hi baby!! what do you have?

Bruce, a weird child like his mother: a spider :)

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Danny/Martha, talking to Falcone after he made an unsavory comment at her and Bruce: If you ever come near me or my son again, I will dig up your shithead father's corpse and make you eat his skin.

Danny/Martha: do you understand me

Falcone:... crystal, ma'am

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Danny/Martha new in Gotham: *getting mugged*

Danny/Martha: *grabs man's arm*

Danny/Martha: I AM GOING TO BREAK YOU IN HALF LIKE A TWIG, FUCK BOY, DO YOU HEAR THE WORDS COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH--

(she then proceeds to terrorize Gotham's night life for the next extended period of time, mostly unintentionally)

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Danny/Martha: Danny Fenton?? No. you must be mistaken, my name is Martha Knight.

Danny/Martha: this here is my littlest knight, Bruce.

Danny/Martha: I made him all by myself :]

[wistfulwatcher]

[luminarai]

Attempting to get the beast used to a dental hygiene routine is… well, it’s going.

(She stayed that way for a solid 8 seconds despite hating being held belly up so I think it’s safe to say that Mim is not beating the ‘tiny speaker playing elevator music instead of a brain’ allegations any time soon.)

[horsechestnut]

Anyway, if you're a fan of Bruce and Steph having a father/daughter relationship you should probably go read about Oliver and Mia.

[several-breathing-eyes]

Percy Jackson Calypso: A teenage girl who was stuck (mentally and physically) as a teenage girl for thousands of years. Due to being literally prevented from maturing and having love be used as a punishment for her, love, relationships, and maturity are things she now struggles with.

Odyssey Calypso: ...

[thisisadonaldduckblognow]

all the rise boys get done dirty on characterization by fandom in different ways i think. (not ALL the time every fanwork etc etc these are just like, trends i tend to notice?) every fandom suffers from losing character nuance.

- leo i’ve talked about plenty on this blog, how some of his canon traits (genuine belief in his skill and cockiness, capacity for joy, his manipulativeness whether for good or ill) seem to get watered down or wiped off the board and supplemented with generic sad boy. his struggles with purpose and identity and not wanting to fail somehow morph into “he hates and completely holds no value for himself”

- donnie’s canon personality gets blurred out and largely replaced with whatever list of Neurodivergent Traits. and i think there’s such a fine line to walk between exploring a character that’s been word of god confirmed as on the spectrum and overwriting what’s canonically there. it’s a hard needle to thread. it also feels like a lot of his canon emotiveness gets left off the table for some reason. bc he does have his moments of flat/deadpan delivery, but a lot of the time he’s honestly very emotive. he has the passion of a theatre kid and the vindictiveness of... also a theatre kid. and the mind of a scientist.

- raph loses so much of his rowdy teen boy energy it’s kind of wild? like interpretations sand off that he’s also impulsive and can be reckless and dumb and LOVES fighting and roughhousing and isn’t the most eloquent person. suddenly there’s this pitch perfect soft boy big bro who would never hurt a fly and always says the exact right supportive thing and singlehandedly raised his 3 brothers (which simultaneously sands off all the nuance of splinter’s issues emotionally connecting with his sons and how that affected all of them). and like i LOVE raph, he’s so full of love and care and anxiety, he clearly has learned to put a lot of work into being aware of his strength and size. but there’s a difference you know?

- mikey is like. where raph gets overparentified by fanon, mikey gets over “family therapist”-ed IMO. the impulsiveness, the goofiness, the powerful emotions including a VERY powerful temper, the flat-out dumb teen boy choices... they get ignored. suddenly there’s this only very sweet and earnest boy who has read a hundred psychology books and runs group family therapy weekly or something. he is crying in his room bc leo and raph are arguing about something. which is so. he IS very sweet and can be very earnest and is full of love! he HAS come in with his opinions and unsolicited advice a couple of times and life coached for the greater good. but there’s a difference between what he does in canon and the role he gets in fanon.

[darkmacadamien]

There’s something so Freudian about Luke Skywalker falling in love with a masked man with a menacing aura (who also just so happens to be an amazing father)

[moeblob]

A lil guy !

[bigskydreaming]

Imagine looking at a character whose entire premise is that in every stage of his life, he's made every version of himself into someone that inspires people to such a degree that EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF HIM has people wanting to literally follow in his footsteps in some way or another.....

And coming to the conclusion that like.....the most important things about him are the sum of all his trappings. His entirely homemade developed from scratch could not exist if not for what he already was and brought with him BEFORE crafting this newest version of himself trappings, with his greatest trait throughout all of it being his adaptability; his ability and willingness to roll with the punches and not try to simply weather any opposition or changes to his life but instead reshape himself as needed to better fit INTO whatever new shape his life and the world around him takes. All while managing to carry the most innate, fundamental and necessary aspects of himself from one version to the next. Thus every single version of himself is different but simultaneously every single version of himself is also undeniably the same person.

The strength of this character, to me, will always be that he can be so many versions of himself, he can become so many things, all without ever actually losing or discarding any of the aspects of himself he considers most essential, the things he's not willing to lose or give up just to keep going. Finding that road not taken by most, usually because most never even think to look for it as an option. But one that he's always able to find because the one trick he's mastered in his tumultuous life is threading that needle of not just digging in his heels in an unproductive way but rather being selective about when and where he makes a stand and decides "this is not a thing I'm willing to compromise about" but here are places and ways I can and will change and evolve and adapt in order to make it possible for me to hold onto these parts and keep them as they are.

And that's why its always so mind-boggling to me that so many writers can't seem to think of anything else to do with Dick Grayson other than invent some new reason for him to just....not be that person, or to like just take the character whose most basic fundamental trait he's NOT about to compromise on is willingly giving up his spot in the driver's seat of his own life.....and make him just a passenger in his own life and stories.

Dick Grayson at age nine....at age nineteen...at age twenty nine....the one core thread running through all versions of him is the only way he's standing back and letting you call the shots for him or putting him on the sidelines in some way is over his dead body.

HOW he goes about that, what that looks like, who he becomes and what aspects of himself he plays up at some times and what traits he lets fall by the wayside at other times when they offer less in service to his primary goal here....that changes constantly. He changes constantly.

But those changes are almost always (or at least they used to be/should be IN MY OPINION) made with the intention of keeping certain things about him or his life as consistent as possible.

That's the duality of Dick Grayson that I'm here for. The inherent contradiction of him that COULD allow for endless conflict and breaking new narrative ground in all sorts of ways if mined properly:

His eternal willingness to compromise....but only ever in pursuit of doubling down on the ways he's not willing to compromise.

Forever walking that tightrope in ways that only a kid born and raised in a circus could ever hope to.

[moonxq]

Shin and Midori's friendship was for sure unhealthy but it's also much more complicated than "Midori is pure evil and exists only to cause Shin misery" and there's so much to analyze about it. I use both "Midori" and "Hiyori" for Seaweed-head and Shin is just Shin. There's a little bit of Kai analysis too for comparison. Be warned because there are a LOT of words beneath the cut as I ramble about these characters in a somewhat organized fashion!!

Yes, the Shin AI called Hiyori scary, and he recognized that his friend liked to see him anxious. Shin panicked when Sara accidentally imitated Midori, and he felt that his friend had some kind of darkness inside of him that he didn't want any part of. Their dynamic is absolutely concerning considering that when Shin took on the name Sou Hiyori, he adopted a cruel and manipulative personality—something he learned from experience. Shin freely admitted he feared Hiyori, and Sara said that Shin knew “how scary Midori can be" far before the Death Game occurred. Those feelings absolutely matter, but they are not the whole story.

What also matters is that alongside the bad parts, there were good parts, too. Shin is smiling in the lost memory and the photographs we see of him. He's comfortable enough to "playfully say good morning" and call Hiyori selfish and laugh with him. He's comfortable enough to tell him that he's like a big brother to him. He's distraught reading the test data because he learned that Midori got close to him just to hurt him. Because they were close!! Close enough for Shin to idolize his intelligence, to think of him as an anti-hero, to call him family, and to grieve his absence. The relationship was bad enough that Shin confessed he would've been relieved to learn that Hiyori died, but there was enough good there that Shin was desperate to see him again and did "all kinds of things" in an attempt to make that happen. Those feelings can coexist, and the war between them is a critical part of his character.

And Midori is a difficult character to figure out, but I think in his own messed up way, he genuinely did care about Shin. Midori, however, thinks that breaking people means loving them. He thinks killing Shin with his own hands is affection that no one else can understand. And it's horrible, but it's definitely a product of how he was raised. Kai's mini episode heavily implies this without mentioning Midori at all.

Also!! It's fascinating to compare and contrast Kai and Midori as children of Asunaro. Kai's computer files lovingly record everything Sara likes, which is similar in sentiment to Midori's book of test data on Shin filled with diary-like entries and poems. They both have an unusual dedication to a specific participant.

In Kai's mini story, when Sei asks Kai to kill him because he’s already dying, he can't follow through with it. Kai knew the pitiful love of a father, even if that love came to him in scraps wrapped up in so many layers of suffering. He knew the love of a brother unrelated by blood, even if that connection was fleeting. He later experienced the peace of cooking and cleaning and living a mundane life for the people he cared about, and he admitted he didn’t know what true affection was until then—that it was changing him, that it scared him. To him, even though he was raised as an assassin, killing someone was not loving or merciful. He got the chance to experience the world outside of the darkness he grew up in, and he slowly learned what it meant to take care of someone and be cared for in return (even if, in the end, he's betrayed by the same hand which gave him that peace).

What was different for Midori, similarly a child of Asunaro, that made him believe killing is a loving act? Or that hatred allows him to satisfy others? How can he say that he loves humans, but also call them toys, as though people are just possessions created for his own entertainment? The few lines we get from the woman who's likely his mother don't paint a great picture.

From the vague details we get in the lost memory scene, it seems like Shin lived in Midori's house for a while. Or, at the very least, he had access to it on a regular basis. Half the shelves contain Shin's items. He has a heater that he can only use at full blast when Midori isn't there, meaning that he stayed in his house even when the man was gone. The exact reason for why Midori was so disproportionately obsessed with Shin isn't defined, but I wonder if, similar to Kai, he was intrigued by what "normal" life felt like. The Shin AI says that you could find people like himself anywhere. Midori is destructively curious about people and their emotions, so I think that if he's given something he's never experienced before—like living a comparatively mundane life alongside Shin, who genuinely looked up to and admired him—then he's going to pick it apart until he understands. And he's going to love doing it, even if in the pursuit of that desire, the people around him suffer.

In spending so much time with him, Midori might have grown to care about Shin on a deeper level than most, like how Kai slowly grew to care about Sara. It's just that while Kai wanted to keep Sara out of the darkness, Midori seemed thrilled to drag Shin into it. Unlike Kai, who distances himself in fear of tainting other people's innocence and happiness, Midori "loves" people until they can't handle it anymore. He exhausts them, and they break down or die.

It seems like he was constantly in Shin's space or crossing acceptable boundaries. He had his hand on Shin's shoulder in the flashback, he always stared and shot glances at him, he excessively took photos and put them on display. While Kai's love is quiet, distant, and secretive, Midori's love is loud, obsessive, and intrusive. It's a fascinating contrast.

Shin was right to fear him. Even if Midori did actually care for him in his own distorted way, Shin didn't owe it to him to reciprocate something that hurt him—something that was always going to get him killed in the end. But Shin did care about him to some degree. He was lonely in Hiyori's absence, with nothing to remember him by but the confused emotions the man left in his wake and the memories of the abnormal adolescence he experienced alongside him.

Midori may have cared, but his affection definitely messed Shin up. That's what makes their interactions in the game so fascinating and painful. They're on completely different wavelengths, from completely different worlds. Shin grew up without the sibling he should have known, and he might have latched onto Midori as a substitute. However, Midori's twisted concept of love could never have done anything but hurt him in the end.

People can genuinely care for you and still hurt you so much, and YTTD depicts that concept so well.

[astrolavas]

random Hunter headcanon GO!

AHH OKAY one of my random hcs is that hunter's smile is kinda asymmetrical/lopsided/wider on the left side cuz of his scars, especially after thanks to them. i imagine they'd significantly pull on his skin and could even affect nerves and definitely some range of motion, so-

sorta like this:

[kaiserouo]

idk someone about bones or whatever

[itslilacokay]

BLUEWART?? I LOVE THEM SM T-T

sure bro

btw i still have asks open so maybe check it out

[bruciemilf]

I can’t explain how fucking inconvenient a lack of local transport is

[boyfridged]

"and jason never looked more like a kid that he did in that moment, so vulnerable. so small" cool and i can think of like 478359 moments throughout his robin run when he did in fact look very small and vulnerable. starting with the first meeting and ending with multiple death scares that brought bruce to his knees too. but sure whatever you are on dematteis

[ace-with--a-mace]

they banned ap psych in florida cuz the class ap discusses sexuailty and gender which violates ron desantis' piece of shit dont say gay law so fuck you ron for that

in the college board statement they say it was banned because "teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law" which is bullshit because these gov leaders believe anything lgbtq is a brain disease so you'd think theyd keep the brain learning class

they banned ap african american studies because "it lacks educational value and historical accuracy" which is making it easier for them to erase black history that is so intertwined with the history of this country that most everything here is so deeply antiblack

this mf has his head so far up his ass that hes ruining our education system even more than it already was