#// bc it might show up in the tags

[wasabi-gumdrop]

Kabru has a secret admirer in the castle!

[ask2ps]

in the 2P takeover, alfred struggling to retain some level of consciousness while allen puppeteers him backfires in the end, as it only really allows him to be personally present for matthew's (permanent!) death at his own hands.

anyway i'm representing this through a discord meme redraw.

[fraternum-momentum]

HAHHAHA JOKES ON YOU I WON EITHER WAY./j, lh

I love toxic yuri… thanks for blessing us 🧎‍♂️🧎‍♂️

!!!!

[charliespoorasshole]

as much as i enjoy the idea of jitka finding out about hansry and helping them hide it and hans and jitka having a friendly platonic marriage while the three of them de facto raise heinrich together, i personally cannot wait to see hans being the worst husband ever

jitka, despite being nervous and scared out of her mind still being hopeful, and immediately losing that hope when she sees the dead and empty look in hans's eyes at the altar.

any excuses she had thought up fleeing her mind like a gut punch as she pretends not to notice hans slipping out of the bed on their wedding night and not coming back.

pretending how it doesn't feel like she's being strangled that hans couldn't be happier whenever he's being called away from her company, that he never stays in her bed chamber longer than he has to and that he never slept through a whole night with her.

eventually coming to terms with the fact that let alone hans's love, she will never even have his affection or a scrap of his attention. eventually not caring, and growing just as distant when she bears him his son, and trying not feel stung when hans doesn't even seem to notice.

but when she stops caring, she starts letting herself notice. starts to notice how whenever she sees him around, it's beside kobyla's bastard. how he can't seem to ever run out of reasons to summon him, how he never runs out of jobs for him to do, to keep him around, keep him close. how he always has a reason for him to accompany him on hunting trips, on political talks, on 'just needing to get away for a while'. away from her, away from their son.

how he always insists he's the only entourage he needs.

and how eventually she decides, fine. if this is how you want to play it, so can i.

[a-lonely-dunedain]

this is so sad her head is a metal potato...........

[prince-liest]

I wonder if Alastor's owner is forcing him to follow every request and command Charlie or the hotel gives him. Essentially, Charlie is like a pseudo owner--not that Al would ever tell her. That would be giving them too much of an advantage! 

So the times he is asked to clean or make a commercial ? No way to get out of that. Maybe that's way he made a deal with Vaggie to ensure he is never asked to handle television again. Wouldn't want them commanding him to collaborate with Vox or be chummy with him again! It's just an extra safety measure that gives Al some of his autonomy back

I also think it's weird he makes a demonic deal with Vaggie just so she can't ASK him to do television related things. If he is that uncomfortable, why not just refuse her requests later on? Unless he is prohibited from doing so 

-N

Yo, I LOVE that concept... I don't know if I would be easily convinced that it's true in canon. I took his deal with Vaggie to be more of a "never fucking annoy me with this again" type of thing, especially after how harshly he initially reacted to some aspects of the suggestion, and him not wanting to even hear about television (read: Vox) because of their past beef. That said, I think it's a delightfully fucked up idea and I can definitely see it being true in a less literal sense - ie, forcing him to work toward Charlie's success or something.

HOWEVER. Alastor getting, intentionally or not, the Ella Enchanted treatment from Charlie, or the hotel administration, or even the royal family, without her initially knowing is a fanfic that I now desperately want to read.

[ink-the-artist]

I love your artwork so much! Your colors are so vibrant and none of the white speckles in the paper ever shows, its so impressive and I really dig it! I was wondering if you use any sort of blending medium? Like baby oil or anything? Either way, I really enjoy looking at your artwork and I'm always excited to see whatever you'll make next

I use a colorless blender (prismacolor, which is wax-based so baby oil probably wouldnt work) but my scanner is also rly bad about picking up white specks in a way photographing the art with my phone isnt, so I usually have to do some digital editing to get rid of them as well.

I do this by duplicating the layer, setting the one on top to "darken," and using the mixer brush to blend out the white spots + just use the eyedropper tool to select the color of that area (needs to be a slightly lighter shade of it) and color over the white spots with the brush tool

i edited a small bit of the original scan to show what i mean

original:

with the edited layer:

heres how it looks set to normal instead of darken, I used both the mixing brush and regular brush just to demo it

[every-sanji]

[sukugo]

question!! if tumblr does go down, where are you guys going to? or at least where are u most active outside tumblr?

[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

[azaracyy]

a lesson on good karma digimon survive week 2024 day 4: supporting characters

[nanaba]

the search for peace

[finaltimelineau]

I am just a teensy bit sick atm and I don't trust myself to do the next story page justice in this condition, so instead here's some misc sketches :')

[chipjrwibignaturals]

gempearl to me

[iknowwhereyousleepatnight]

pissed tf off because 1) i have once again put on a new show thinking i could work on shit with it in the background without getting distracted (and failing miserably)(when will i learn). 2) i have a new character that i want to tear apart with my teeth which pisses me off even more because 3) it is EMBARRASSING how much i like this character i could fucking feel my pupils dilating and my prey drive activate literally immediately 4) it is even more embarrassing bc he is so embarrassingly my type that im pissed tf off that i never watched this before now or literally any time i wasnt busy. and this all leads to 5) now i have to think about killing him when i am TRYING TO GET SHIT DONE and it's making me mad it's pissing me off so bad i'm fucking enraged they should invent a way to physically harm fictional characters just for me i think

[ifyougoillfollow]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead/Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic, Aizawa Shouta & Kayama Nemuri & Shirakumo Oboro & Yamada Hizashi Characters: Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead, Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic, Kayama Nemuri | Midnight, Shirakumo Oboro Additional Tags: Spin the Bottle, not tagging who smooches who but thar be smoochin here, Fluff and Humor, Banter, Friendship/Love, Rooftop Gang Shenanigans, Teenage dumbassery, cannot stress enough how teenaged in their dumbassery these fools are here, To whit:, Underage Drinking, Gay crisis, Unrequited Crush, Crushes, Pining, Mutual Pining, these losers have it all!, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Shirakumo Oboro Lives, You're Welcome, Gay Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead, Oblivious Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic, Feelings Realization, Getting Together, Non-Linear Narrative

Summary:

In the end, it's Yamada's painfully obvious and just as grating attempts to spare Shouta some mild embarrassment that makes Shouta abandon all sense of logic and agree to just play the stupid game. There are worse fates to endure than being patronized, Shouta's sure, but if there are, he's having trouble imagining them in the face of Yamada freestyle rapping for fifteen straight minutes to a chorus of increasingly heartfelt boos from the other two idiots.

And so Shouta finds himself watching Yamada and Kayama suck face for the third time this evening. That's certainly a worse fate, Shouta decides, all the more so because he should have seen it coming.

They're playing spin the bottle, after all. ___ Rooftop Gang plays spin the bottle. Need I say more?