#stephs story

[bricreative]

what did you think of steph's novel?

Better than I thought it was gonna be! I honestly didn’t know what to expect, I just knew I was a excited to see more of Steph and learn about her time before Haven.

I did enjoy getting to know Izzy more and I do feel bad for her, even though you can see why they just couldn’t work out. Also enjoyed meeting Steph’s other nerdy friends. They all felt like they fit in with the LIS world. Wish we got to see them mentioned more

Also, loved that Katy Bentz did the entire audiobook for it as well. 8 more hours of Stephs voice? Yes please

[pazak-thion-brady]

I'm reading the Life is Strange Steph book and I just got to the scene where Izzie dresses Steph and the outfit described is exactly what I'm wearing right now.

Black ripped Jean's, graphic rank top, a pair of leather bracelets and a flannel shirt tied at the waist. The fuck. That just slightly freaked me out.

[maxthesillyy]

GUESS WHO JUST FINISHED STEPHS STORY 😎….😭

[aalghul]

once again thinking about jason as duke’s robin. he’s ~4 years younger than jason, and that puts him at 8-12 during Jason’s time as robin. that’s prime time to get attached to your local kid vigilante before your own life goes downhill.

and if we try to keep duke’s meeting with bruce in zero year + duke’s age (so he can remember the meeting and hold that conversation with bruce), he has to be around 8. if he starts following batman through the news at that time because of the mess that just happened, the robin he sees is probably jason. I’ve literally connected the dots

[corkinavoid]

DPxDC Danny's Strange Gifts to the Bats

So you know how it's common knowledge to not accept any gifts from the Fae? Well, even if the batfam knows about it - I mean, they've dealt with a lot of otherworldly stuff, besides, you shouldn't take things from strangers no matter if they are Fae or not - they might not always abide by it. Unknowingly.

The trick is that you never know if it's a gift or not when you're dealing with the fair folk.

So things start appearing in the Wayne manor. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. A book left on the table in the library, a vintage teacup in the kitchen drawer, a cat toy with some real bird feathers. No one pays them much attention. After all, when you live in a family this big, you don't really keep track of who brings home what.

The book was probably left by Jason. The teacup is most likely Alfred's new addition. The cat toy is totally Damian's. It's not the first time and surely not the last when one or another member of the flock brought something to the manor. The book is put on the shelf, the teacup is now Steph's favorite, and Alfred the cat really likes those feathers.

And then, one day, they all get down for breakfast. Damian is the first to appear, with Alfred the cat in his hands, then comes Dick, who stayed in the manor for the weekends, and Steph, who was here for the movie night and decided going home was too much work. Tim comes to the table with a tablet that is quickly put away the moment Alfred starts serving food. Bruce and Duke come the last, taking their seats, and it is almost like a signal for everyone to start eating. After all, everyone is here now. It is peaceful and quiet, a rare but not unwelcome occurrence that Bruce greatly appreciates.

That is, until a few minutes later, Damian appears in the doorway.

"Good morning," he greets, and everyone at the table freezes.

And then does a double take.

Damian is in the doorway.

Damian is also sitting in his seat, eating waffles, the only one who did not stop when the other Damian appeared.

There are two of them.

Damian-sitting-at-the-table looks up to Damian-standing-in-the-doorway and smiles. His face is stuffed with waffles.

"Goov movning, bvothev," he greets back, and before anyone else can react, Damian-in-the-doorway clicks his tongue.

"You are in my seat. Move."

"I don't see your name on it, therefore it is not yours," argues the other one, not moving from his place. Yet now, when everyone can see his eyes, they finally notice the difference. The one sitting at the table has blue eyes.

Tim all but jumps up from his seat, slamming his hands on the tabletop:

"You-" he nearly chokes on his words, when blie-eyed Damian looks at him, and then at everyone at the table with a confused frown.

"But I thought you liked the vintage films for your camera that I got you? And those four-leaved clovers?" He asks, looking almost hurt. The normal, green-eyed Damian looks thoroughly disappointed:

"Have you been accepting my brother's gifts, Drake? You're lucky they were not courtship gifts."

"Court-" Tim sputters in the middle of the word, looking between the two.

Bruce lets out a long, absolutely resigned sigh. Was it too much to ask for just one, single normal morning?..

Long story short, Danny, being a fae and also just generally a little shit, kept leaving gifts for Bats all over the manor, and they all unknowingly accepted them one way or another, so now Danny has the power to ask for something in return. He chooses to just come to the manor and dump the fact that he is going to live here on them at breakfast. Technically, he just ended the long line of gifts by giving the last one, himself.

| <-prev | next-> |

[cowardlykrow]

“Not my circus, not my monkeys”… Except those are his monkeys and they are the circus

[hellojuiceboxbaby]

There’s something about Crystal completely forgetting who she is and where she came from and still retaining her personality and sense of self. Yes she can be combative and strong willed but that doesn’t make her a bad person. Her life experience and the people who raised her made her a bad person. When given a clean slate (or a second chance at life imo) she is good. She’s still herself but she has no preconceived perception of how she’s meant to operate as herself if that makes sense. She joins the boys in helping find the little girl because it’s the write thing to do. She helps Niko rid herself of the sprites and befriends her helping her out of her shell. She’s just a girl dealing with relationship problems and a trying to escape her evil ex but those things don’t give her any reason to be a bad person.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say but Crystal actively choosing to be a good person in her amnesiac state just gives me hope.

[everwistfully]

Objectively speaking; I LOVE thinking abt the body types of the Robins and how it would've come to be. Like Dick??? He'd have the BROADEST shoulders and PROB tits to go with them! Ya know?? Cause of his more excessive acrobatics and his fighting style. He'd be the PERFECT example of the triangle; the broad shoulders to the tits to the tiny waist with the ass.

And Jason??? Jason's just ALL muscle but like that type of muscle that really only makes him look BIG and like only looks muscular when he's flexing. And this would be both a good and a bad thing for him. Essentially he gained all his muscle mass and newfound height while with the league/in the Pit so there's that but also, I'm sure he’s the exact type of person Little Jason thought he'd grow to be so that he could protect all those he loved that he was too small, at the time, to protect. I'm sure he also must have some mixed emotions abt the connections one could draw between him and Bruce without him also growing to look so much like him.

And Tim??? He's just all wiry muscle, a sleeper build, if you will. He's def got the shoulders and defined pecs but because of his overall slender build, you wouldn't notice. He's obvi MUCH stronger than he looks and it THROWS everyone off. And his legs??? Women are JEALOUS! He'd look GREAT in heels. ;) I'm sure that he suspected this would how he'd always be; smaller. But it must be so difficult to accept because of everyone around him (the batfam) and I can only imagine that he tries to draw inspiration from his mother who was in his same shoes but inspired respect and fear wherever she went.

But Damian??? I'm hesitant to go one way or another with him but I LOVE the idea of him, in the end, leaning towards his mother's physical features. He has the traits of his father but features of his mother and he'd feel so put out because of this. He's The Blood Son of The Batman and he can't have features leaning on the lean, fast, and slender side. On the other hand, he could be the carbon copy of his father which has its own emotional turmoil within it. And for personal reasons, I hope he does grow to be more like his mother because I think that while in his fathers care, this will indirectly force Damian to actually discover himself and not just accept to be his fathers perfect shadow until he becomes that shadow.

[violent138]

Out of the Batfam, Jason is one of the most atrocious liars. He can make it work when he absolutely has to, but usually I think whenever he lies he does with little motivation and with emphasis on irony to make it funny for himself. In comparison Dick is a phenomenal liar and can sell outrage so well before hanging up and reverting to normal that Jason sprays him with holy water and never believes a word out of his mouth.

[welcometogrouchland]

I understand that literature nerd Jason Todd is kind of overblown in fanon compared to it's actual presence in canon (a few issues during his pre (and post?)crisis Robin tenure that highlight it) BUT consider that I think it's hilarious if the unhinged gun toting criminal has strong opinions on poetry

[intheconflux]

[ GAME OF CHANCE, DAY 1: Tinky rolls a 4 on the die. The group successfully passes through the first hallway. 6 more halls to go. ]

[ringer04]

Cody Rhodes - Wrestlemania 40

[horsechestnut]

My Bat Academy AU is fun because it's like:

Dick is Luther because he's the leader. Cass is Luther because she was the one caught in the explosion. Damian is Luther because he's the one to who was sent away on an "important mission".

Damian is Diego because he's the one who's still acting as a superhero. Jason is Diego because he's the maddest at Bruce. Dick is Diego because he's got connections to the police force.

Duke is Allison because he's the one not using his powers. Tim is Allison because he's the one who messed with Steph's memories. Cass is Allison because she's the one holding the gun at the end.

Jason is Klaus because he's the one who gets captured. Tim is Klaus because he's our connection to Jason. Cass is Klaus because she's the one struggling with her powers. Damian is Klaus because he's the one everyone brushes off.

Tim is Five because he's the one who went missing. Duke is Five because he's doing the eyeball plot line. Dick is Five because he's the one convinced the world is going to end. Damian is Five because he's the one with a connection to the commission.

Jason is Ben because he's the one who died. Dick is Ben because he's the one with a "Jennifer Incident". Tim is Ben because he was the least interested in being a superhero.

...and Stephanie is Viktor.

(pt 1, pt 2)

[silverwhittlingknife]

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

[sliipppy]

Being a huge fan of 2009 era of batman comics but also a huge cassandra cain fan. it's hard out here.