#Bruce gets paranoid that this could lead to them getting identities exposed and stays in the manor

[spectral-snippets-and-drabbles]

@fandombrainrots, I have a question and a few additions of my own, if you don't mind.

So what would happen if someone pulled one of Danny's tails? I can't recall exactly how it goes but it's said that how pulling one of the Kitsune's tails would give the person some serious bad luck or get burned by the Fox Fire, burning their souls to nothing. He has an ice core in fandom, yeah?

I can see Danny running from the Batman and his flock one night close to Crime Alley after several months in Gotham and under Hood's protection and getting one or all of them pulled by either Bruce or maybe a younger, trigger-happy Damian (He'd probably threaten to cut them all off if Fox didn't stop running.) to interrogate the meta teen/young adult and stop him from running away...only for it to blow up in their faces when someone gets partially/completely frozen in unmeltable ice or getting cursed with bad luck so severe that they can't go out on patrol because of it due to risks.

If Danny is King of the Infinite Realms in this au, the curse could be powerful enough that it could even affect the entire vigilante roster (minus Jason) in Gotham as retribution on Danny's mythical vulpine instincts.

Where as normal Kitsune's Fox Fire can burn the soul into nothing, the Fox Frost will slowly freeze the soul and body until it eventually shatters both and melt the remains out of mortal existence. It's a race to find Fox before time runs out, but the vulpine doesn't want to be found.

Meaning Alfred was exempt from the blast and could probably play an important part in this story. Maybe he can coax the clearly traumatized young fox-man into lifting the curse after explaining everything during a nice hot meal? Maybe get some silver shotgun shells ready for a certain "fruit loop" because the butler won't hesitate to put this 'Plamus' fellow another 6 feet under after what Fox told him what the S.O.B did to the fox boy and his family.

Just because Bruce hesitates doesn't mean he won't.

The butler also wants his idiot son and vigilante family to keep their distance from the boy until he's ready to talk. They've already made things bad by assaulting him and Alfred will make it worse by taking an extended, lengthy vacation with Fox in tow if they don't leave the poor soul be.

~•~ ~•~ ~•~ ~•~ ~•~

The Justice League Dark Members can't do anything because the puller's/family's very soul(s) has been branded by an abnormally powerful bad luck curse and tampering with it can destroy said soul.

John Constantine doesn't even want to get near the Batfam and the idiot who was stupid enough to grab the tails of a very young, freakishly powerful Fox Spirit with death magic on Venom because it could risk anyone who tampers with it getting irreversible bad luck and dying. He can't have his luck or life getting affected, so John just tells them over the phone to simply find the fox and sincerely grovel at his feet with meaningful gifts so the curse can probably be lifted. Attempting anything funny will only made things go from bad to worse...like, turning all of Gotham into the Kitsune's personal playground to play with and break as he saw fit levels of worse.

(So now the odds are stacked very heavily in Danny's favor and the Batfam must appease him or suffer even further.)

...The only problem is that Danny has never let anyone touch his tails before without his consent since they emerged with his ears while he's was running and is still very scared (he just doesn't show it). The only times where they did get yanked on were by children who were scared and didn't want 'Mr.Fox', Jason's/Hood's bodyguard, to leave them alone after he rescued them.

(No literal threat on his literal tails = No curse upon ye.)

So this means Danny literally has no idea of the extent of the danger he has put on the Batfam and thereby all of Gotham by cursing the Caped Crusaders into being benched. To make matters even worse, the bad encounter has triggered Danny's fight or flight response, making the traumatized meta go into hiding with no means to contact anyone.

~•~ ~•~ ~•~ ~•~ ~•~

Everyone in Hood's turf knows the crime lord is absolutely furious as they are at the Bats because Danny was finally starting to warm up to Crime Alley and Hood himself before he was attacked by the Dark Knight and his posse before running away to wherever it was that he fled to. The people who live there hurl insults and anything they can find at the Bats if they try to enter Crime Alley to search for Fox, telling them to fuck off and to not come back.

Jason saw how cautious Danny was at first when he saw the small, bushy tailed...person(?) and how it was practically borderline paranoia.

The only times he saw his bodyguard's defenses go down was to reassure the civilians he saved from rival gangs and traffickers with gentle reassurances. That soft, loving voice he used for the youngest children who clung to him like glue, making ice figurines for them to take home...Only to raise them back up when talking to the adults who weren't victims of crimes committed by non-Crime Valley gangs.

The way Fox would keep his eyes on exits and potential escape routes if the need to run arised, refused to be touched by anyone, not eating or drinking anything given to him out of fear it was tampered with and making his own or getting take out. That sort of trauma and stress makes Jason sympathetic to Danny and spreads the word to give him space. He's been brought a lot.

The kicker was the fact that the Fox had bluntly told Jason about the origin of his pit madness like it was no big deal and swore a steely-eyed vow to heal it made the crime lord feel something blooming in his heart and wishes he could get a fraction of that anger back so he could brandish it at his family for chasing Danny away.

Ok just a random idea that I had to put down before I forgot it- and it feels so silly but it makes my brain go brrrrr

So, Kitsune AU Danny after a classic reveal gone wrong, the kitsune is from a meta gene he discovered while on the run. He winds up in Gotham, hiding his ears and tail as he starts trying to settle in. Cue Red Hood’s gang approaching Jason, telling him he needs to get himself a body guard, because everyone knows he has a thing going with sweet book-nerd Jason Todd. Red hood catches Danny saving a child, and just goes, “ya I’d let him protect me.”

I will flesh this out more later I swear-

( psssss @stealingyourbones can I has opinion)

[seriousfic]

New Krypton

I’m skipping over Final Crisis because it’s long, incomprehensible, and self-indulgent. I don’t mind Grant Morrison doing his thing, but he should either have an editor who can make his work legible without annotations (seriously! annotations!) or he should be writing non-canon or small-corner-of-the-DCU works instead of massive, universe-shaking events. Also, his take on the New Gods is borderline embarrassing. Darkseid and Orion have their prophesized duel in the streets of Armaghetto off-screen. The other New Gods are barely in it, and when they are, they’re possessing human bodies. That is some Smallville bullshit, people.

The new big Superman event is New Krypton, a return to the era of all the Superbooks blending together to tell one continuous story (albeit with different focuses). Having established Zod and Chris Kent in Last Son, and Brainiac and the Bottle City of Kandor in Brainiac, the Kandorians are freed and construct their own planet on the opposite side of the sun. Clark leaves the Earth to become ‘Commander El’ on NK and keep an eye on the new military leadership, General Zod, while newbie Mon-El takes over as Metropolis’s protector. As well, an aged-up Christ Kent and one of Kara’s friends become the new Nightwing and Flamebird (at the time, Dick was Batman, before Bruce came back and went all Baby Boomer on him). 

You might say this event occupies a ‘sour spot’. It goes on and on and on before getting to the point, with Samuel Lane racking up more and more atrocities and General Zod being obviously evil until, in a surprise twist, he turns out to be obviously evil. It’s just too complicated and expansive, with everyone from the Golden Guardian to Jimmy Olsen to Captain Atom to Adam Strange to the LSH to JEMM showing up and having a little storyline, many of them just serving as henchmen to Lane. 

And yet, part of the reason it doesn’t work is that they rush an ending and return to the status quo instead of letting this situation play out. It’s like they were told they could plot it as lazily and slowly as they wanted, then abruptly they only had a month to wrap everything up.

Add to that how, oddly, a lot of the Superfamily stalwarts barely make a showing. Jimmy gets a ‘reporter’ storyline, but Lois is barely in it, despite her father and sister being some of the primary villains (and neither her nor Jimmy actually end up exposing any of Sam Lane’s misdeeds, making for a real shaggy dog of a tale). Steel spends a lot of the storyline in a coma--they hint at a grudge match between him and Atlas, but it ends up being just one panel in the climax. And Power Girl doesn’t show up at all. Odd for someone who’s been so unsure about her place in the world and desperate for connections. You’d think she’d want to check out (a version of) her people returning, or at least that she’d be affected by the worldwide ban on Kryptonians. Maybe she was dead at the time. Occupational hazard when you’re a superhero, of course.

I think the biggest demerit is that of the villains, Sam Lane and Zod, both are practically evil for the sake of evil, provoking a war for little to no reason. Lane is a frothing-at-the-mouth-xenophobe who will kill innocent people on his own side to frame Krypton, making you wonder how someone could be so bone-dumb stupid as to want a war with 100,000 Supermen (even if you kill all but two, those two Kryptonians could pretty much fuck Earth irrevocably, right? So, guess what happens...). And Zod is, of course, Zod. He started out a child abuser in Last Son and he never really sheds that. So what we end up with is a political thriller where two of the major players are mustache-twirling whackjobs. I can’t help but think how much stronger the story would be if they were a little more nuanced, had a little more shades of gray. Maybe Sam Lane could be paranoid, but he only wants a strong defense in case of attack, and he’s manipulated by Lex Luthor (who we can all buy as a frothing at the mouth xenophobe). Maybe Zod really does just want Krypton to co-exist peacefully, but provocation from Earth leads to him flying off the handle and going into a downward spiral. They can still be bad guys who do bad things, they just don’t have to be complete psychopaths for the story to work. 

Honestly, though, I think this is a case where Supergirl could make a good go of adapting a storyline that isn’t (solely) Superman’s. A two-hour movie really couldn’t fully explore an arc like this, but a TV show could do justice to the good of the storyline and maybe make a silk purse out of some distinctly hoggish body parts.  

As for consequences, we have the Grounded story arc, which has been well-covered elsewhere, but I’ll do my damnedest with it. Famously, it has pretty much nothing to do with New Krypton, the near-genocide of Superman’s people, or any of that, with a woman instead blaming Superman for her husband’s cancer, of all things, and Clark deciding in response to walk across America, of all things. And getting really pissy when people point out that’s a pretty stupid waste of his time. Maybe it’d work better if it were just Clark going on a road trip. Flying into a town, changing clothes, staying there a few days, getting to know people--that is the point of his Clark Kent identity, right? It seems like walking across the US to get in touch with ‘the real America’ (just watch NASCAR and get a MySpace page, ya rube) would A. result in a lot of wasted time as he walks across empty space. B. Have him meeting people as Superman who are too starstruck by his celebrity to really connect with him or give him any insight into their lives. 

We also have, as compensation for helping General Lane, Lex Luthor being pardoned by the government and getting Lexcorp back (pretty sure that second one isn’t constitutional). I could only with the bitterest of irony declare that to be a ‘change to the status quo.’