#ultimate expression of love

[sasusakuaudios]

Revisiting this scene~

Hi guys, I was watching Sasuke Shinden a few days back, when I came across this scene again and my mind drifted in a totally different direction.

Sasuke did the forehead poke to Sakura which is the ultimate expression of love, before leaving the village? Does that mean that he already fell for Sakura in the short time he was recovering after the war? Because as I see it, Sasuke shared it only with Sakura and later Sarada. Forehead poke for Sasuke is the ‘ultimate expression of love’, so in a way, by extending this gesture to Sakura alone and not even to Naruto who is his best friend cum brother from past lives, he also distinguished his feelings for Sakura as that for Naruto. Yet again, he did it before his redemption and not after coming back which brings us to the point that he was already in terms with his blossoming love for her. Before leaving, he told Sakura that he wants time to understand his feelings. Does that mean, he still couldn’t call it love because he thought he had lost the penchant for it? Maybe when Chino told him that he has people who love (he thought of Sakura) and care for him, that’s when he realized that whatever he is feeling can probably be love and maybe that is why when he received the letter from naruto mentioning that the Uchiha are like the police force according to Sakura (SP spoiled it) , he found the confidence to make it up to her. I have this head canon in my mind for so long. Any fanfic recommendations for this? Thanks!

[burningtalelight]

Some people argue that forehead tap is actually a sign of distancing and not love as that's how itachi used it. So, sasuke's forehead tap with sakura is not actually a sign of love instead he is distancing him from sakura. I want to say that sasuke is not itachi, he is sasuke. How he perceives things is different from itachi. The only moment where itachi says that forehead tap was to distance them was after the reanimation was stopped by him and he now puts their heads together but what about all the other times. Even in his real death, he does that forehead poke to sasuke, which itself shows that it was a precious thing they shared. Specially to sasuke, it was a sign of affection, it was like, itachi saying, I don't have time for you now but I love you. He loved that forehead tap that's shown by him blushing. Not just that he never forget that. Even in his revenge days from itachi, he always remembered itachi's forehead poke. When he meets the reanimated itachi, he asks the same to him, "you kept poking my head always". A guy like sasuke who doesn't care much about things, remembers this gesture, doesn't that already tell that it is a special gesture. Not only that even after the fight with naruto, when they are unconscious, he imagines itachi poking his head and smiling. That's one more proof saying that the forehead poke is something special and positive for sasuke. It's a sign of affection. Sasuke poking sakura's head is basically him saying, "wait for me". That's definitely the sign of ultimate love as stated.

I would also like to add one more thing here. I believe that the forehead tap is also like a memory to sasuke. I mean after all that shit happened to sasuke during his childhood and teenage, this one gesture remains as the only memory with sasuke that is a reminder of those times which were filled with love and happiness in his life. As now sakura is the one who is filling her life that warmth and love again, he shares this gesture with her and now also sarada. This is also a reason why he doesn't share this gesture with naruto. Since, he did bring him out of darkness and is equally important to naruto as sakura is but the dynamic is not that of filling love to each other's life, it's like we stand by together as the pain we felt, which was similar.

One more thing, sasuke dynamic with itachi is more similar to his dynamic with naruto. Sure, he sees naruto as his brother and sees itachi in him, but way he behaves with him is different, it's actually similar to with sakura. Just how sasuke used to admire itachi and wanted to be by his side but itachi used to ignore and it looked to sasuke that he doesn't care, similarly, sakura has always been chasing sasuke, she admired him, wanted to be by his side, but sasuke ignored her and it looked to sakura that he doesn't care. At this moment, just how itachi's forehead poke affirmed sasuke that his brother indeed loves him, sasuke used the same poke to tell sakura he also does wants to give this relationship a try and he loves her too.

So I believe, the forehead poke really fits perfect with sasusaku and it shows the "bond even deeper than the love" the boruto manga was talking about.

[hinamie]

unconditionally

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

Rhaegar Targaryen is easily one of GRRM’s best deconstructions of the genre and we don’t talk about it enough. He’s prince living in a world full of magic and wonder that has dwindled over time. His own family had a great monopoly on one of the most magical phenomena (dragons) to ever exist, but they lost this control over time and it was due to their own faults. But there’s an all encompassing hope that this magic, these dragons, will come back. They all live within the promise that it will all be back and with a huge bang. It’s all so romantic. Magical forces of ice and fire battling it out in a song.

Then there’s Rhaegar, a prince born for the sole purpose of being this song’s romantic hero. He already has his destiny mapped out and it will be a great one, greater than any other man who ever lived. It’s a song of ice and fire, and Rhaegar is its bard. You’d expect this to give him joy. Yet by all accounts, he was depressed as fuck. I think he’s unfairly earned the reputation of having an ego so big to think that he will be the hero….but that’s quite literally the point of his existence. He was born to be the hero. He paid the price at birth to be the hero. How can he revel and glory in this destiny when he has no say in it?

So it’s genuinely funny that when given the chance, Rhaegar immediately pivots to someone else taking on this burden. But how tragic for him that he cannot escape it too far. Because it will be none other than his own son who, under a “bleeding star”, is marked at conception for this great destiny without a say. More than his ego, Rhaegar is marked by the inability to escape this duty. His whole life is dedicated to fulfilling a duty he can never escape. He isn’t just a future king, prophecy dictates that the world’s survival is placed squarely on his shoulders. Even when he isn’t the hero, he’s now responsible for raising him…

…but then he makes one decision and it all comes crumbling like a pack of biscuits. He escapes this burden…but dies. And his successor dies too. And now the ones who will inherit his legacy are two people who never knew him. They never knew of his burdens, of this prophecy. But they too cannot escape its jaws. I think this does bring up some interesting questions about the nature of fate and destiny in the world of ice and fire. Can you really escape it? Rhaegar tried to, and paid the price for his defiance, but he never truly made it out because the burden instead jumped to the son (and sister) he never knew. Funny thing is that in a bizarre (and tragic, in its own way) twist of fate, this son was brought up entirely without the trappings of power that depressed Rhaegar. Rhaegar was a dazzling prince, Jon is a bastard. Rhaegar was marked by his great inheritance, Jon is marked by the lack thereof. Does fate say “well the first one got too depressed by having too much so let’s give the next one nothing?” Even Dany, who grows up a princess does not have the privileges that Rhaegar did. So how does upbringing craft a hero and the choices they make? Welll, GRRM had given us two versions of Rhaegar’s tragedy in Jon and Dany for us to see.

Rhaegar’s impact on the meta-narrative is honestly so massive. Like I’d put him right up there with Quentyn, Sansa, and Bran as one of the best genre deconstructions in the series and no one can tell me otherwise.

[jack-o-laa]

Seras vicroria,,, my beloved

[bugcatcherkit]

I finished reading trimax and here’s a compilation of some of the things I wrote in my 51 page document of notes I took while reading

Life changed. Whatever.

Shirt that says Come closer. I engage normally with medias.

[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

[smkndfbb]

inspired by a song "ножевой" by shortparis (my favorite band💪💪💪💪😤😤😤😤)

a very rough lyrics translation is something along the lines of "lets lay somewhere on the side for us to rot - if only next to each other"

experimenting with my style and stuff cus im kinda tired of the hyper rendering tbh

[ruporas]

can’t help falling for you

[batwingsandblackcats]

Absolutely fascinated by Laudna’s “she has a debt to pay. She owes me her life like she took mine.”

This isn’t just a “I’m worth nothing so might as well smoke em if I got em” mindset with Delilah. It’s some of that, but it’s not the whole picture.

This is “might as well smoke em if I got em, and if this is the end of me god damn it I am taking this bitch with me.”

[the-woman-upstairs]

It’s just…so painful to watch Armand readily submit in order to obtain the love he so desperately craves. And while it’s most assuredly a manipulative tactic, it’s still one borne out of fear and desperation. He cannot lose this person he’s come to love and so will become whatever they want, do whatever they want just so they’ll stay with him. But it won’t be enough. No matter how much he acquiesces or seeks to control (himself, others, the environment), he won’t be able to make Louis stay with him in the perfect life, perfect self he built in the hopes of finally being loved. It will all crumble with Armand left alone in the rubble of what he created, the author of his own abandonment.

[mochimouiemarty]

mime bomb redesign/drag persona!?!?!? ARGH. I will do more research and update design as I go.

very simple, a bit too similar to another persons awesomesauce design (person whom made this idea im looking at you), but he's pretty and that's all that matters/j

wanted to keep his outfit a bit breathable? flexible. idk.

i have so many more thoughts but I'm currently )()([)![)(#)@()+((1111?11?!?!!!1!1!1!1!1!1!!1!1!1 tired

( @artisthoi might wanna see this gang!!!)

[mattiebluebird]

And if I said genderfluid Cissie would anyone care

[simcardiac-arrested]

hey

THIS IS LITERALLY MAKING ME SCREAM THANK YOU SO MUCH HAAHAHA THIS IS THE BEST THING EVERRRRRRR!!! i fucking love this meme so much this is actually perfect

[authenticcadence18]

Twice this week I have received comments on Can’t Help Falling in Love critiquing my use of tags and I’m just like?

those “extra” tags have been there for four years? no im not going to delete them?? I think if it truly was a big issue one of my moots/writer friends would’ve brought it up to me by now???

I use tags to express my creative voice and personality. And I DO include lots of real tags.

if someone makes something FOR FREE and it’s not harmful maybe just say what you like about it and move on?

like? do yall like my tags?? have my tags dissuaded you from checking out my stuff??? because I’ve been posting on ao3 since 2019 and this is the first time anyone has ever brought it up :/

[natp20]

I am alive. I am alive for the first time. And I am alive, not because I was made by D or Dancer or even the Changebringer. I’m alive because they made me alive. And it’s the connections that I made with all of them. And it’s a feeling of joy.

And I’m happy to do this, because they saved my life and I’ll save theirs.

And some connections are made with wire, some are made with blood, some are made with bone, and some are made with wood. But they all matter. And even in this dark cave they make it a smiley day. But they all matter. And even in this dark cave, they make it a smiley day.

wheat fields/finale ultimo - starry, a musical about vincent van gogh