#trying to preserve the image

[not-equippedforthis]

just finished writing the first 1k word flashback of arthur and faroe being silly and was about to move onto the main angst when my laptop bluescreen'd. arthur is that you. arthur stop trying to un-doom the narrative. arthur the time will pass anyways. sorry.

[hazieash]

Here are all the Keepsakes and Accessories from the Moonshadow Forest region of The Dragon Prince: Xadia mobile game (recently removed by Netflix). #TheDragonPrince #playXadia

[kirby-the-gorb]

[flowerakatsuka]

started thinking about the okipara museum artwork and i just realized what flower 18!kara is holding in it.

those are alstroemeria, which can mean perseverance and yearning for the future in hanakotoba....

[gooopy]

LOOK AT MY SELF INSERT BOY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! cringe is dead i can do whatever i want FOREVER and that includes making a character to beat scout tf2 to death with my own two fists

[beevean]

I offer another angle to explain why I hate the Lenector subplot: Lenore and N!Hector drag each other down.

And not in that fun "they make each other worse" way, not as people - as characters. The ways they're both badly written influence each other. And it's hard to see where the problem starts: I don't care about Lenore being a manipulative #girlboss because I don't care about N!Hector's fate in S3, and I don't care about N!Hector in S3 because he was watered down to make Lenore look good (as in, a hot #girlboss to masturbate on).

N!Hector is not a character one can root for in S3. And it's not because he's "evil": after all, fans are quick to cheer for N!Isaac when he kills innocents and defiles their corpses for petty reasons. It's because not only N!Isaac is forcibly made to be the coolest strongest most powerful character in the show, but because the dude has at least solid motivations and reacts to events around him. <- writing so peak i'm forced to appreciate the very basics of writing

N!Hector has lost all of that. In S2, there was a conflict between his morbid goal of turning humans into livestock for vampires, and his principles that made him recoil at N!Dracula's actual plan of mass slaughter. He was evil, but he was also lied to by N!Dracula through no fault of his own, and there was an unique dissonance between his terrible goals and his complete lack of malice. It at least made sense that he'd listen to Carmilla, up to a certain point. By then, I still wanted to follow his journey. I wanted to see him grow, I wanted to see him challenged, I wanted to see him learn empathy for humans. (well, I would have wanted to, if I wasn't spoiled lol. you get what I mean)

In S3? What's the point? What does he want? What does he fear? What does he feel?

Characters going through hell and coming out reshaped, for better or for worse, is the bread and butter of fiction. The CV games themselves have put some of their protagonists through the ringer: Leon lost everyone he held dear in one night in LoI, Shanoa discovered she had been groomed to resurrect Dracula in OoE, and Hector himself suffered a lifetime of abuse, watched Rosaly die in front of him, and then discovered that all of that pain was so that he could become Dracula's vessel in CoD. The thing is that, I care about these characters. They have personalities, a past, relationships, and I want them to succeed. I want them to be happy. Their suffering is a tool through which they show what they're made of.

Hell, it's not just the heroes: Isaac in CoD also has gone through hell. I don't want him to succeed because his happiness is tied to Hector's suffering, but at least I feel bad for what he had to endure, and I feel bad that he died even though it was partially due to his actions: he is both a cruel antagonist and a tragic victim whose tragedy is believable but not a full excuse. He's a compelling, fleshed out character, not to mention charismatic because he has one hell of a personality lol.

N!Hector has nothing. The story itself is just making this character suffer, in a humiliated, undignified way... but not to break him and reshape him into something different. It's just torture for the sake of torture. It's to laugh at him, because he's stupid and that's what he gets for being stupid. It's to find him pathetic when Lenore puts him on a leash: the point is not how disgusting she is, the point is that he's a cute puppy, who barely reacts to this humiliation so that you viewer are not distracted from the kink. It's to shake your head when he can barely have an edge in the interrogation with Lenore, even when he could give some more personal answers like "I followed Dracula because he accepted me and gave me a reason to live", because the point is to make him look dumb and easily malleable. It's to facepalm when Lenore tricks him into having sex so that he can be coaxed into pledging loyalty to her, because he can't even see the very blatant way she lies to him - and it's his fault for being so impossibly dumb.

What does he want? He mentions that he wants to be free, but in the same breath he says that he wouldn't be able to survive on his own, so it's not a goal he fully believes in. He still says that he wants to put humans in cages, to which Lenore says "oh it's what we want to do too", so... N!Hector's goal matches with Lenore's? Then where is the conflict? As I said in the past, Lenore didn't need to resort to rape by deception to tie him down: N!Hector already trusted Lenore and would have worked for her, at the very least, especially if she kept pretending to care about him and improving his life conditions gradually. Morally, he hasn't even begun the process of changing - and, of course, he never does. He is stagnating. He's not interesting.

(this isn't even negative character development. For N!Hector, it would have been, for example, convincing himself that everyone deserves to die, and him becoming more violent and bitter towards the people who hurt him. This could have been one of his developments in S4, even if tragic. We don't even get that. The "development" he has is that he let Lenore kill herself instead of forcing her to live like he did with his pets, which is. so fucked up i can't even put it into words.)

Hell, I even realized recently: the fucking ring would have made much more sense if N!Hector actually showed signs of rebellion, because the way she described it, the ring's only purpose is to prevent rebellion, not to force him to work! If the issue was that Striga was considering hiring mercenaries and that would have made N!Hector useless, the ring doesn't solve jackshit about it, because if he wanted to he could have starved himself to death and the ring wouldn't have hurt him! The ring only solves the issue of N!Hector potentially using his Night Creatures to harm or kill the sisters! Which it's a moot point because he has been shown to be nothing but docile after Lenore beat him into submission precisely to make him docile, and he clearly was on his way to be convinced to peacefully work for the council! If he got convinced that he would be living the best life as Styria's Forgemaster, taken care of by Lenore who at least treated him well, not lied to like Dracula did, and doing what he wanted to do which is forging and working to enslave mankind (remember, he shows no growth in this), he wouldn't have hurt anyone! Lenore saw with her eyes how pliant he is, and in S4 she even calls his ill-thought attempt to threaten her "half-hearted at best"! She got the idea to butter N!Hector up to make him trust her and work with them willingly, and not through torture, and it was going all too smoothly - and then she broke that trust by deceiving him and playing with his feelings in a much worse way than Carmilla did, and realistically, N!Hector shouldn't have wanted nothing more to do with her in S4, let alone work for her! But if he was shown having at least signs of aggression, defiancy or doubts, vulnerable to Lenore's "kind" acts but still wary enough of his situation taking too long to be convinced, then the ring would have been a good solution to "tame" him! Lenore raping N!Hector into slavery would have been more justified and not come off as a vile gratuitous OOC act if he had showed a personality!!

i'm calm.

Anyway. My point is, there is no conflict between these two characters, even though Lenore is clearly the real antagonist. The conflict of Styria's story in S3 is watching this snake deliberately play with N!Hector's feelings for no reason other than sadism and a power trip. And the conclusion we're meant to reach is "wow he sure is a dumbass, he deserved to be enslaved".

Unlike in CoD, N!Hector's life is so miserable, and his conditions so suffocating, that I wouldn't have felt anything if N!Isaac actually killed him. Who cares? No one cares about this character. Least of all the writer. I don't care if he succeeds or not, because he has nothing to succeed in; and I don't care if he suffers, because he doesn't even care, and has nothing to live for. It's literary bullying.

So this brings me to Lenore. If Lenore's whole thing in S3 is that she's such an amazing manipulative bitch who gets her way through deceit and subtle abuse, but she's effectively deceiving a bag of meat... I'm not impressed.

Oh, I hate her, because her actions are disgusting and poorly match what she's supposed to be, which is the selfishly kind diplomat who finds power in taking care of lesser creatures. She doesn't come off as her own archetype, because she is too smug, too happy to force herself on N!Hector in a sexual way (the collar, the ring), and her first scene shows she's just like Carmilla in that she easily resorts to excessive violence to prove she's not weak. So, while this is yet another instance of bad writing, in-universe she also comes off a a raging hypocrite (further proved in S4 where the writing and voice acting imply that Lenore sunned herself because she didn't like the idea of being in the same gilded cage she had put N!Hector in, which makes her look cowardly and pathetic). But she's not fun to hate in the same way Isaac is when he forces Hector to watch Rosaly's execution in PtR. She's bullying a shell of a person. She is weaving uncomfortable lies to a manchild who is not even trying to put up a mental protest to her manipulations. Why should I care? She is getting her way so easily, not because she's that good (she's really no better than Carmilla, who in-universe failed) but because N!Hector doesn't have enough personality to challenge her; and if she succeeds, N!Hector would either be okay with it, or if he's not... well, he'd deserve it for being stupid, according to the show's logic.

Lenore in S3 exists solely to further prove the general message of that season: trust is for fools, and fools deserve to be punished. She is a plot device moved around like a puppet to serve that general message, and on top of that her creepy actions are painted as titillating... well, as long as you either want to be dominated by a pretty woman (which explains the great amount of male fans simping for her) or you want to dominate a pretty failure of a man. Which I don't. Because I have no reason to care about N!Hector, let alone find his sexual humiliation hot.

Do you see the problem here? Lenore cannot shine of her own because N!Hector is not written well; but since she only exists to bully him, she doesn't come off well either, despite her concept being brilliant and actually interesting and deserving of being fleshed out more organically without turning her into four characters clumsily stitched together.

And of course, as you have noticed, I have only talked about S3 so far. What's the point of even talking about S4? It completely destroyed everything S3 set up. Lenore has lost everything that made her allegedly cool in that season, being reduced to a whiny brat who feels so alone and unwanted and cries about it to the man she raped by deception. N!Hector mildly sasses her back and listens to her woes, but doesn't seem to care at all about what Lenore did to him, both positive (being put in a giant gilded cage where he can't be killed and being given some sort of authority) and negative (the mocking, deception and rape). They have chemistry now, a positive chemistry made of mutual respect, but it comes out of nowhere and it clashes with their past.

I don't care that now Lenore feels sorry about her life, because she crossed the moral event horizon and now she doesn't get to regress into being a poor little girl who only wanted to do diplomacy 🥺. I don't care that N!Hector freed himself and tricked everyone in the castle, because his "badass" actions were all for the purpose of bringing Dracula back, which is proof that all the suffering he went through was for nothing - he didn't learn that putting humans in a cage was bad, and now he seems to want back the madman who planned to kill everyone out of personal atonement (plus, he only freed himself from working for Carmilla, Striga and Morana: he still chooses to live with Lenore, so effectively still tying himself to the woman who forcibly tied him to her). He's even worse now, he has regressed for no sensible reason: I still don't want him to succeed. And I don't care that N!Hector has found the strength to let Lenore go, a contrast with how he used to resurrect animals to have loyal companions, because I don't even know why he'd grow to love her. The story wants me to believe his love for Lenore is pure and organic, and not the result of breaking from horrible abuse and accepting the scraps of something barely resembling kindness. As if S3 never happened.

And if S3 never happened... why should I care about these characters and that story?

(funnily enough, I could make a similar post about N!Alucard in S3 and S4. I also don't care about his grief, because he was a cunt to N!Trevor and his own similar trauma. I don't care about the Japanese not-twins raping him, because it's so out of nowhere that it only feels like gratuituous shock factor. I don't care about N!Alucard apparently falling down the same path as Dracula, because he gets better after one episode. His story in S3 - well, what little can be considered a story - is also "trust is for fools, and fools gets punished", although at least N!Alucard isn't painted as a dumbass for trusting these two plot devices, and at least he kills them before he can forgive them. but basically my point is that this writing is bad.)

[rexscanonwife]

Just kidding I just lied I was talking to my partner the other day and no one REALLY says that their favorite powerpuff girl is Blossom (I'm also guilty of this, Bubbles is my favorite) but I really do adore her so much 😭😭 she's for the burnt out gifted children

[ambrosia-ghostie]

🛏️💗

[1hyunjae]

[rubyreadd]

nothing like a photo taken by your mother to obliterate your selfesteem

[hanakihan]

Howl’s moving castle AU with Dantès as Howl, Salieri as Sophia and Jalter Lily as Markl—

[giratina-plushie]

what this is teaching me is that im funnier and more correct and i should make more posts

[roboyomo]

day 2 of not giving in to the urge to rot in bed immediately upon coming back home can i keep it up to a full week,,

[fandomtrumpshate]

Our Stance On Gen-AI

This year, for the first time, we've had a couple of reports from bidders that the FTH fanworks they received were produced using generative AI. For that reason, we've decided that it's important that we lay out a specific, concrete policy going forward.

Generative AI tools are not welcome here.

Non-exhaustive list of examples:

image generators like Imagen, Midjourney, and similar

video generators like Sora, Runway, and similar

LLMs like ChatGPT and similar

audio generators like ElevenLabs, MusicLM, and similar

Participants found to have used generative AI to produce a fanwork, in part or in whole, for their bidder(s) will be permanently banned from participating in future iterations of Fandom Trumps Hate.

Why?

We understand that there can be contentious debate around the use of generative AI, we know individual people have their own reasons for being in favor of it, and we recognize that many people may simply be unaware that these tools come with any negative impacts at all. Regardless, we are firm in our stance on this for the following (non-exhaustive) list of key reasons in no particular order:

negative, unregulated environmental impact

Over the years, you may have noticed that we’ve supported multiple environmental organizations doing important work to combat climate change, preserve wildlife, and advocate for renewable and sustainable energy policy changes. Generative AI tools produce a startling amount of e-waste, can require massive amounts of storage space and computational power, and are a (currently unregulated) drain on natural resources. Using these tools to produce a fanwork flies in the face of every environmental organization we have supported to date.

plagiarism and lack of artistic integrity

Most if not all generative AI models are trained on some amount of stolen work (across various mediums). As a result, any output generated by these models is at worst plagiarized and at best extremely derivative and unoriginal. In our opinion, using generative AI tools to produce a fanwork demonstrates a lack of care for your own craft, a lack of respect for the work of other creators, and a lack of respect for your bidder and your commitment to them.

undermining our community building impact

One of the best things to come out of the auction every year—we can't even call it a side benefit, because it's so central to us—is that bidders and creators form collaborative relationships which sometimes even turn into friendship. Using generative AI undermines that trust and collaboration.

undermining the value of participating as a creator

Bidders participate in Fandom Trumps Hate for the opportunity to prompt YOU to create a fanwork for them, in YOUR style with YOUR specific skill set. Any potential bidder is perfectly capable of dropping a prompt into a generative AI tool on their own time, if they wish. We hope all creators sign up with the aim to play a role more significant than “unnecessary middleman.”

In general, we try to be as flexible as we can in our policies to allow for the best experience possible for all Fandom Trumps Hate participants. This, however, is something we are not willing to be flexible on. We realize this may seem unusually rigid, but we ask that you trust we have given this serious consideration and respect that while we are willing to answer clarifying questions, we are not open to debate on this topic.

[ivorivet]

Fellowship Cloak Weaving Draft

Hi all! I've been kind of quiet on this blog, but I have something really exciting to share today: after six years, I FINALLY figured out the weaving draft for the Fellowship cloaks from Lord of the Rings.

This is a problem I've been trying to figure out since shortly after I made my Legolas cosplay in 2018. The cloaks that the nine members of the Fellowship receive in Lothlórien look like a nondescript gray fabric from far away, but zoom in and you'll see a very complex pattern of horizontal and vertical bars of dark gray and white.

(First image from Alleycatscratch, second is a photo of the scarf of the same fabric I bought from Stansborough where I was attempting to trace the pattern repeat with orange thread)

This is going to be a long post, so I'm just going to lead with the completed draft:

Imagine me Will Smith wife posing at this for the last 24 hours.

It's got the correct size of pattern repeat! It's got the five individual ripples! It's got that dumb little pattern break in the middle that breaks up the center of the leaf motif! I am OVER THE MOON about figuring this out, especially starting out with very little knowledge about weaving drafts in general. More ramblings about this type of draft and my thought process below:

This particular pattern is known as "shadow weave," a subset of color-and-weave where the pattern is created from the interplay of different warp and weft colors plus the weaving draft itself. To get an idea of how that works, let's start by looking at plain weave in one color:

The solid purple bar at the top indicates the color of the warp threads, and the solid purple bar at the right indicates the color of the weft threads. So far we've got our basic under-over-under-over pattern in a single, solid color (purple). But what if we add an additional color (green) to the warp, and alternate those colors? Then we'd get a speckled fabric like this:

The visual effect looks pretty much identical regardless of if you start with green or purple. However, if you also alternate purple and green in the weft, it produces a very different effect depending on if you start with purple or green (note the differences in the bar on the right):

So cool, now we can make either vertical or horizontal stripes! If you double up on the colored threads in some areas, you can even flip between the two and start dividing the fabric into "blocks," like so:

Note that with all these changes, the only thing we've been doing is changing the order of the colors in the warp and weft. The actual weave structure itself is still just regular ol' plain weave. The pattern that we've created in the pictures above is called "log cabin," which you can read about here. But similar effects can be created by skipping shafts/picks in the weaving draft as well. So how do we get from log cabin into the more complicated and general category of shadow weave?

It's weird to describe how to convert a given pattern into shadow weave. There are multiple very good books with chapters on shadow weave as well as books entirely dedicated to it. Despite my best efforts, all these explanations still got so technical so fast it feels like, to me at least, asking a 6 year old to recite an entire Shakespeare play verbatim immediately after confirming that they can, in fact, sing the alphabet song. So I'm going to give my best shot at explaining it, and if it doesn't make sense, just blame it on me and check out some of the linked books above if you're really curious.

Think of shadow weave as a beauty filter for a black and white drawing. If you create a pattern out of black and white blocks/pixels/whatever, the shadow weave "filter" can be applied to it to create a similar pattern that preserves the shapes in the original, but makes them out of vertical/horizontal lines instead of solid color blocks. So in some of these books you'll find mention of converting a twill or an overshot pattern into shadow weave - that's what this is referencing. The original pattern (usually designated with light yarn) gets a secondary shadow pattern (in dark yarn) inserted into in between every other thread (also called an "end" when referencing warp yarns).

I got stuck at this point for literal years. I could find examples of weaving drafts using shadow weave, but couldn't figure out how to generate ones of my own. I imported some of the drafts I found in books into weaving software and poked around to see if I could push the patterns in the direction I wanted by changing individual elements. My experiments in changing individual warp ends and weft picks always ended up looking like stretched or compressed versions of the original pattern (when I was being careful), or incomprehensible garbage (when I was being daring). I even bought a sample of the fabric from Stansborough in the form of a scarf, thinking I could brute force it by using a magnifying glass to figure out the interlacements. I was able to figure out how large the pattern repeat was (approximately 160 x 80 ends), but otherwise I got nothing but eye strain. I ended up tabling the project and coming back to it every couple years, banging my head against it until I gave up.

Until one day last week when I was flipping through the Strickler book and saw this page:

And I was like

HOLD UP

IT'S HER

...or at least a close cousin of her. BUT IT WAS A START.

So the first step was to identify what about this pattern needed to change in order to make this look like the Fellowship cloak. Overall, the main differences were:

Pattern repeat on Strickler 304 was too small - it was 42 x 42 ends and I needed it to be somewhere in the ballpark of 80 x 80 before altering the repeat.

The Fellowship pattern has a weird vertical dividing line that runs down the middle of the leaf motif, effectively doubling the width of the repeat by creating two similar looking but different leaves. This was the change I was least concerned about, as flipping between vertical and horizontal lines is pretty a straightforward process as shown above with the log cabin draft.

Strickler 304 also has a different number of waves (peaks and valleys, or whatever you want to call them) compared to the Fellowship pattern. There are 3 waves in Strickler and 5 in Fellowship. Figuring out how to add these extra waves was the biggest obstacle for me to address.

And finally, a couple of things I didn't need to care about for the weaving draft: 1) the Fellowship pattern is elongated in the warp direction, but this has more to do with a little extra spacing between weft picks as compared to the warp threads. When weaving this you'd just need to make sure you don't beat it very hard and you'll get that tall rectangle shape instead of a square repeat. 2) Both patterns have mirrored symmetry around a diagonal line drawn through the center, meaning that for treadling I could "tromp as writ" or basically just mirror the threading diagram to get the treadling instructions. For reasons I can't figure out, the Strickler pattern isn't exactly tromp as writ but looks close enough to it that the effect is still there. But I don't really care enough to figure out why - the important thing is that it gives us a threading diagram to start with!

So to start with, here's what Strickler 304 looks like in my weaving software:

(By the way, this is Fiberworks PCW Bronze. The trial version is free, and the only difference between that and the paid version is that the save/print options are disabled. I'm not sure they know about screenshots, bless their hearts.)

This is a design for 8 shafts and 8 treadles, thus the 8x8 square in the upper right corner. And you can see in the threading diagram (upper horizontal bar) and treadling diagram (right bar) that the curvature of the waves takes a similar shape to the curves of the final pattern. We just have to figure out why. And since I had already tried changing individual warp ends and treadling patterns without much success, I needed to approach in a different way.

What ended up helping me see the forest for the trees was de-shadowifying the pattern. It's relatively easy to get the black-and-white version of the pattern from the threading draft - you just need to delete the shadow, which means removing every other warp end. This is what deleting all the dark ends from the warp and light ends from the weft looks like:

We can also see with a little more detail how the threading diagram is similar to the curve in the pattern. The pattern is 21 pixels tall, but it's been chopped up to repeat over 8 shafts, like so:

OKAY COOL COOL COOL. EVERYTHING'S COMIN' UP MILHOUSE IVORIVET. From this green squiggly line we know two things:

The final number of warp ends in the shadow weave pattern is double whatever the height of the squiggle is. In the case of the Strickler pattern, we're going from 21 to 42. Since we know that we need our final height for the Fellowship pattern needs to be 80, the squiggle for that pattern needs to be around 40 pixels tall.

We needed to stitch three repeats of the Strickler threading diagram together in order to see the full squiggle. How many waves does the Strickler pattern have? Three. How many waves does the Fellowship pattern need? Five. How many shafts do we have to work on? Eight. What is 5 x 8? 40!!!

So how about we make a NEW squiggle, only 40 pixels high instead of 21? (We're gonna drop the pixels in blue, since threading diagrams won't work if you put a single end through two shafts.)

Next, we're going to chop up that squiggle and use it to create a new threading diagram in Fiberworks. I'm also using "tromp as writ" here to create the treadling pattern.

LOOK AT THAT. IT'S GOT MORE WAVES!! FIVE OF THEM!

And then we add back in the shadow by creating a space for a new end between each existing end:

And then add in the shadow. I'm using 4 as my number for the shadow offset since we're using 8 shafts. So shaft 1 shadows to shaft 5, shaft 2 shadows to shaft 6, etc.

And we're going to apply tromp as writ again to get:

AYYYYYY WE'RE GETTING CLOSE! I'm fairly certain that the reason why the Strickler treadling wasn't exactly tromp as writ had something to do with centering the pattern repeat a little more than this, but I don't really care about that so I'm going to leave this treadling the way that it is.

From here out, we need at add that weird vertical dividing line that chops up the center of the leaves. So we double the pattern repeat along the horizontal axis, and offset a 40 pixel section in the middle of the threading diagram by 1 pixel. I've also colored in the differences between the dark and light ends to help differentiate the original and shadowed curves a little bit more. (I also tried offsetting the colors of the warp ends by 1 as well like what we did in the log cabin example, but I ended up liking the way that this looked more.)

THERE SHE IS!!! MY PRECIOUS!!

From here on out, there is still a ton of work I need to do if I actually want to weave this cloak from scratch. I did buy roving in quantities that could be used to spin both the dark and light yarn (dark gray Gotland for the dark yarn, and dove gray merino + white alpaca for the light yarn), but there's still the matter of, like, handspinning a cloak's quantity of extremely fine yarn. I did start spinning the Gotland several years ago as fine as I could possibly manage, and got through maybe 20 ounces of it. However, I'm a much better spinner now and I'm not sure if the my skeins from several years ago would be suitable for weaving, or if it would be worth replicating what I did back then vs. just starting over with a new standard. There's also the possibility of just... buying weaving yarn if I want to skip that step, which would definitely save me a significant amount of time.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far and I hope it helped break down why this was so exciting for me!

[long-live-astronerd-ghost-king]

DPXDC prompt. Dead on main. Singer! Phantom x Red Hood!Jason

Laws are easily changed if businessmen smell money.

Paulina and Sam suggest Danny to try to become a singer in order to change society's opinion about ghosts a little. In the end, the otherworldly sound of his voice can at least be used for the benefit of Realms.

And it seems like the Everlasting Trio is really liked by the public. At first they just release a few songs (Exams kill, Battle with myself, What an Autopsy Won't Show, Among the stars). But a mysterious atmosphere mixed with understandable teenage problems begins to take over teens playlists. Their fans want more and more.

So, when under the pressure of the public and profit-hungry bigwigs all bans on the presence of ecto creatures in the United States are lifted, the Trio goes on their first Tour.

~~~~~

Jason stumbles upon Phantom's songs completely by accident. It was painful to hear them for the first time but at the same time it was as if he could breathe again because he had found someone similar. Someone who understands, and who doesn't judge him for coming back wrong. Jason listens to his voice on repeat and the rage seems to recede and subside. There is sadness of loss and fear in the songs but most of them end bringing some hope and this thought gives Red Hood more strength not to break down for another day. and then another, and another..And one day, the green eyes in the mirror do not scare Jason but shows him that he belonging to something more. Todd can't explain it more precisely, but it was as if the waters of Lazarus inside him had calmed down and he was no longer enemies with them. He even jokes with Tim that he is finally rest in peace and ready to live a full undead life when his brother (God, his lil brother whom he wanted to hurt recently because of his own stupidity), asks him about his strange behavior.

~~~~~

Jason forgets how to breathe again. His favorite band, and most importantly his favorite vocalist, is coming to Gotham with a concert. For many years now, none of the nonresidents have dared to take such a risk, but it seems like Phantom has absolutely no instinct for self-preservation. Well, as a true fan, Red Hood will do his best so that none of the gothamites spoil the Trio's impression of their first concert here. Danny is beside himself with excitement. Their concert in the hometown of the Red Hood was approved. Of course, there is no chance that he would be able to meet such a busy vigilante but Phantom continues to dream. If he'll fly a little over the city instead of sleeping after rehearsals, maybe he'll get an autograph from at least one member of the bat clan.

~~~~~ Phantom: Thank you very much Mr. Nightwing sir. Just sign it for.. Nightwing: For a Phantom, right? Huh, I recognized you, my brother has poster in his room. Nice hairstyle by the way. Danny*urgently*: Which one of them?

Nightwing: Jeez, and I thought it was just a stage image. Ghosts are kinda creepy. Terribly persistent, to be precise. And yeah, Jason, he absolutely not against you as a vigilante. You can safely ask Phantom to sign your helmet, I promise. Man was so happy when find out you're listening to his songs, you have no idea.

Jason *holds out a hand*. Nightwing: What? Jason: If you dared to meet Phantom before me, then where is my autograph? Nightwing: Em..oops? I gave him mine if it helps.

Jason: *sounds of an angry lazarus demon*.