#this ONLY happens with Persona too

[mercurymacaroons]

arrives 15 min late with a latte

......sup

[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

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

silly guys that make me lose followers on tumblr dot com

[forcedhesitation]

why should it just be steve who has all the torturous purgatory realm fun?

[fakecats]

just finished eternal punishment worst day of my life actually

[macabre-crab]

pov im showing you my new ""poly"" ship that is totally not like any of the other poly ships i have

[aria0fgold]

Glittering Red Rose

Akira wasn't really expecting anything all that exciting from his trip outside of Shibuya, perhaps just the usual of walking around the streets and alleyways, finding new stores to shop at or even eavesdroppi— accidentally listening in on bystanders talking nearby. It was just the usual routine of killing time while waiting for the most anticipated day after stealing the treasure of their target, in this instance, waiting for the day Medjed “cleanses the world.” Although it wasn't Medjed that the Phantom Thieves of Hearts stole the treasure of. It was someone else, one who is more than skilled enough to stop such a large hacker group.

So here they are waiting for Futaba to recover, specifically here Akira is climbing the stairs of a random building he snuck into all while carrying a bag that has a cat poking his head out. It wasn't for any particular reason, aside from the fact that they heard a commotion nearby and wanted to have a better look only to be stopped by the overwhelming number of police officers surrounding the perimeter. So what other way to have a better view of the situation but on a tall building's rooftop?

“That was the first time I've seen so many cops around a single area, what do you think they were after?” Morgana tilted his head, curious and excitement evident in his voice.

“Hmm… Not sure.” Akira mumbled as he neared the top of the stairs.

“They must be even worse than a mafia boss like Kaneshiro. I bet if the Phantom Thieves stole the treasure of someone like that, our popularity will soar!”

Akira chuckled at the thought of that, their popularity were already steadily rising thanks to targeting an elusive mafia boss that even the police were struggling to capture, but if they targeted someone even worse than Kaneshiro, their fame will surely skyrocket then.

With that thought in mind, Akira's steps grew a bit lighter, excited to see exactly who was at the center of all those cops, he pushed the rooftop door open, it was already slightly ajar.

He wasn't really expecting anything all that exciting from his trip, he especially, wasn't expecting to see anyone eye-catching when he pushed that door. It was strange to see it already open, but perhaps an employee simply forgot to securely close it, or perhaps another person saw the commotion and had the same idea as Akira to enter a tall building to have a better view of it.

But instead, Akira stood frozen in place as he stared at the person standing near the edge of the roof. They had their back to him, wearing a white suit, a top hat, and a cape flowing in the wind. They held a small gem above their head, holding it up to the moon illuminating the scene from above. It felt magically, almost enough to take Akira's breath away, even Morgana made sure to stay silent as they watched the other person closely.

The few seconds that passed felt like minutes, the other person then glanced back, they wore a monocle on their right eye with their lips forming a proud smirk.

“I didn't expect to have an audience here.” The person spoke, it sounded like the voice of a boy, perhaps even the same age as Akira.

He walked towards them with a confident stride, as if the entire world was a stage, he was the star of the show, and Akira was merely an audience member randomly called to the stage.

The person stopped just inches in front of him, he bowed, one that is usually done by butlers, then with a simple flick of his wrist, a red rose appeared in his hand.

“Unfortunately, the show is already over. However, you're free to attend the next, whenever that may be.”

As if in a trance, Akira mindlessly reached for the rose as the other person walked by him. And as if breaking that a trance, Akira looked back, only thing to see the mysterious person had already disappeared.

“W-who was that?!” It was then that Morgana finally spoke, with his voice helping to completely bring Akira back to reality.

“R-right?!” He said in a rather confused panic, looking at the rose and back at where that person vanished.

“Hey, wait!” Morgana jumped on Akira's shoulder, “There's something sparkling in that rose!”

Akira closely inspected the flower, right at the middle of it is a small gem, the very same one that the other person held up to the moon. It was also then that the two heard some loud thundering noises seemingly getting closer to their location.

“Do you think that the cops from downstairs already found out about that guy being in this building?” Morgana quickly went back inside the bag, “Akira, this is bad! We gotta get out of here before they see us! Otherwise they might think we're the ones that stole that gem!”

Akira nodded, he planned on leaving the gem along with the rose on the rooftop but instead chose to leave only the gem after a moment's hesitation, keeping the rose for himself. It was a good thing, that he came here today.

[kiitoskiitos]

the very first transformation.

[revengeraven]

DOUBT CANCELLED!! YAY CONFIDENCE!!! SLAAYYYY!!! 👏 👏 👏

I SHALL GET UP AND PACE AND SCREAM AT MY SHADOW YAAAYY!!!

[yusuke-of-valla]

In Berry Blast Brigade Yusuke is way more chill about the "Chidori kidnapping him that one time" thing than most people would be but Hamuko does not forgive or forget when it comes to her baby siblings so whenever Yusuke wants to visit Chidori in the hospital Hamuko is in the hallway glaring menacingly.

[kumakuma-circus]

very funny to me how i have all my p3 knowledge from fanfiction and other spoilers so i know that, like, makoto/kotone dies at the end of the game but i have no idea what happens between april and june. or between june and october-

[monocub]

me: idk if i have a fav character from reload there’s too many to count

my camera roll:

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

Is Kuron an animal lover?(i can see him being a huge fan of all 'creepy' or 'ugly' animals like snakes or spiders, maybe he sees himself in how ostricied they are for things they cannot control?? someone mentiones sharks as bloodthirsty in a conversation and Kuron goes full 'uhm ACTUALLY lethal sharks attacks are extremely rare and often happen beacuse of the person's recklessnes-')

You are absolutely right, however i do think with certain animals (spiders, wasp etc) he's like "i respect you, i respect from far here, please respect me by staying far way" like he likes them enough but also he rather maintain his distance and appreciate them from far thank you very much!! He does get to have a pet snake because i say so-

[bobzora]

ive only managed to play like 2 hours of tactica so far but the gameplay has been genuinely really fun i was not expecting that

[aria0fgold]

third semester's like an extra arc exclusive to royal which is EXTRA SPOILERY as it takes place after what was vanilla p5's ending and 2/2 is "sob like a bitch (/lh)" day for akechi fans (me) (i cried at 2/2)

it's easily one of the best arcs imo i think you'll have a lot of fun w/ it :3c

(also futaba's arc is SO FUCKING GOOD TOO GRAHHHHH i am v normal about futaba's arc)

OOOOOOOOO I'm both scared but also excited to know what'll happen during those parts :o No wonder everyone seemed to have been changed after third sem tho it's nearly at the very end of the story!

[naggingatlas]

i looove putting spark over songs about like heroes and saving the world (tom cardy's 'level clear', uncle outrage's 'saved the world' <- nice voice hc for him!. and 'my superhero movie'.) when he like. Did. Not : ) funney.