#way too emotional about them

[flowergirlava]

rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead TO YOU. in my head they're still out there having gay little adventures.

[dudethatsmyundeaduncle]

Had this Headcannon that when Multi-Lingual Dick and Jason get drunk they start singing Ballads in Spanish. Yeah some classical shit like Vicente Fernandez but also the most wild Selena you've ever heard.

[vero-niche]

they balance each other out <3

[slythereen]

sometimes it feels like lewis has a degree of distance from the rest of the grid that makes it hard to connect to him (i, a newer fan, took a while to even get a proper sense of his vibes). he’s such a legend and icon in the sport there’s always a little bit of separation i think — maybe subconsciously for some of the older drivers, but i think it’s more prevalent in the younger drivers because so many of them actually idolized him for years and are suddenly racing with him. max may be getting there but he also grew up with most of the grid, and he has his funky little hobbies (twitch streaming sim races) that give fans a glimpse of him casually. i’m not sure why lewis doesn’t participate in grill the grid/f1 videos but when you think about it that’s how a lot of people get some more casual impressions of the drivers they don’t follow as closely (or at all), and then he’s not there. there’s just this air of legendary about him so when you see him standing alone it seems intentional, in a way. he is always standing on his own as a leader in many (metaphorical) ways so i can understand why the drivers might see him minding his business during the parade and think he wants the space.

anyway all this to say there is a special kind of happiness in seeing charles decide to break through the wall of godliness to keep lewis company and bring him back to their level. lewis seems so much more engaged and lively and mortal when he’s happy chatting with the other drivers and being a bit mischievous and it’s like oh, i’m finally seeing the lewis hamilton he was before the myth and fame and weight of leadership. i think he’s really going to seem like a whole new person next season with charles and ferrari for those of us who didn’t know that lewis and i really really like the idea of getting to meet him ❤️

[hensel-x]

blood.

[inkly-heart]

please don’t be sad little sprout, you are loved 🌱 🖤

🌱

[dykedivorce]

stuck on the fact that a small part of Dongsik hoped for 20 entire years that Yuyeon was still alive. he fantasized about coming across her in random places and was anxious about recognizing her as a 40 year old woman because he genuinely still held onto a glimmer of hope for two decades. ten years and another ten years after than. half his life picturing his sister dead and alive turn by turn. maybe even when he burst the wall open he still thought there was a chance it would be empty.

and isn't it supremely fucked up that for the enormous, cataclysmic impact that Yuyeon's disappearance had on Dongsik and the central place that his love for her occupies in his motivations as a character, the only time they interact on-screen is when he finally finds her body and tenderly cradles her long-dead hands in his.

[arctic-bookclub]

god i can’t stop thinking about how the (core) death family really is such a well fitting puzzle that when even one piece js gone it shows and affects the rest :(

like the death family is incomplete without qmissa, he carries such a huge role in the emotional wellbeing of things, he shines were qphil lacks; the death family is incomplete without qphil, the man consistently keeping the kids alive and fed, he can keep the kids alive but he struggles with the things beyond it, things beyond mere survival; and the kids, we saw how thoroughly their absence affected qphil and qmissa, how tallulah sleeping alone at her old home made the bunker feel so empty and incomplete, how without chayanne this little family would’ve never been formed in the first place. they all fulfill roles that no one else can perform in their place, tallulah and qmissa carry the artistic side and emotional knowledge of the family, qphil and chayanne carry the survivalist aspect of the family with experience and cooking. the family has had to adapt to the absence of members in the past, especially when the kids disappeared, and the toll it takes shows so clearly every time. they are only truly complete with each other, they are a family with so many troubles and ailments that could so easily be fixed by just them all being present, and yet they’re cursed to always miss one. they are always stuck adapting and filling roles to make up for an absence, and crumbling under the pressure each time

[mellasso]

jason sudeikis.

[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

[ymeisli]

happy gay month i drew codywan as the lovers tarot card + i got attached to the strawberry mana doodle i have a version where hes just in the corner

[myrmica]

its so funny that all minute—the guy who once upon a time hoped to redeem zam—'s team has accomplished is getting him to consider giving up his remaining honor in order to match the level they're playing on ?

[cherry-bomb-ships]

Aaaaaah I know I've been talking abt this art for like 3 days but I FINISHED IT HEEHEE 💖💘💖💘💖💘💖 The thought behind this was Cherry was getting mugged during their walk back to her apartment cuz Townsville be like that, and this is the moment Mojo swooped in to her rescue (How did he know it was happening? He deeeefinitely wasnt spying on them lol) ANYWAYS ENJOY If you want more thoughts look at my tags!! 💖💖💖💖💖💖

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[kabutoden]

i love it when people introduce their coolass adult trolls like yes. this is slayer martin the cruel. five sweeps ago he killed his way through his enemies and earned the title of worlds best assassin. hes the most competent warrior with swordkind in all of alternia and he had to duel his matesprite to the death when he was 7 sweeps old so hes rejected love and compassion from his dictionary literally and its like so cool bc it’s like. wow. i love slayer martin hes just like a real cool adult troll he’s so badass and epic and his themes and story is so complex i love it!!! but when i make homestuck ocs its like:

this is my babydoll cringe mcpeeper she’s 6 sweeps and her talent is screaming. really into defying the system these days. yes thats an ankle monitor. she shaved half her head a sweep ago. her mommy does not love her

[quietwingsinthesky]

i really do think the desire to paint ten as unambiguously The Worst™️ when it comes to his relationship with martha is out of this desire to uncomplicate their relationship. to decouple them as friends and people who profoundly impacted each other’s lives. it’s just an easier narrative to swallow: that ten was Awful to her and then martha kicked him to the curb when she realized she was too good for him. easier, maybe, then dealing with the troubles of unrequited affection don’t have to be anyone’s fault, or that ten shut martha out in a lot of ways but let her in in others that he wouldn’t let any other companion near, or that they were still friends, they still wanted to see each other and be around each other, even though it was messy and sometimes hurt. you know?

[silusvesuius]

nnnnnnnnnnnnno maa'am