#Even if only just brief ones

[kittykalliarts]

For decades, the blank vision that Iudex Neuvillette wears near his heart has been subject to much discussion in Fontaine. Nobody remembers who it had once belonged to or why the ancient dragon protected it so jealously. It is said that if the Chief Justice would to stare at it for a long while, it would be sure to rain right after. Oh, how beloved that person must've been.

[darksonofsparda]

[{ 🗡️ }] - "But of course, it's more fun to mix it up, rather than play the same old tune."

He answers back, seconds, before he unleashes the explosion of light with his fist, as Lady lays absolute waste to all of the other remaining demons that were stunned in place by the flash of light from the Darkslayers, trusted secondary Devilarm, the Beowulf, by the time the white light goes out, the demons that were frozen by the light and were riddled with bulletholes by Lady's barrage of gunfire fell to the ground lifeless before drying out and disappearing into dust.

Just like that, within less than ten minutes, Lady and Vergil had annihilated the entire group of shadow demons, in a much quicker amount of time than he thought. It was remarkable how much some things changed. Never did he think he would be here, fighting alongside Lady, someone he never really bothered to talk to back then, mainly because of how different he was. All those years ago, he only had a one-track mind, power, and nothing more, casting aside everything else all for power, a pathetic choice now that he looked back on it.

The half-devil was sure Lady wouldn't like him, and while it started off a little disjointed, now here they were, taking out an entire horde of shadow demons, even having a bit of fun doing it. Lady was more of an interesting person than he thought, he had definitely misjudged her. It was a shame he never cared to make any friends or connections of any kind back then. Despite all the time lost, at least there was now to make a fresh start -- something he felt like he was finally starting to achieve, albeit slowly, but it was still a significant improvement.

After the amazing chemistry of perfectly coordinated teamwork from the two Devil Hunters, the area was clear, and now they could focus on locating the nest, and then destroying it on sight. As Lady compliments the use of Beowulf, he gives her a nod of acknowledgment, not expecting this from her, but he did appreciate it. Seconds later, he unequips the Beowulf, and in a dim glow of white on his fist and leg gauntlets, they disappeared back into the depths of his soul, the Yamato reappearing and returning into the grasp of his left hand, the dark blue ribbon tie gently swaying in the slow, calm breeze. Hearing Lady's words, he fully turns around to face her, she was right, they made a fantastic team, and this joint mission was going along very well so far.

[{ 🗡️ }] - "I agree, we do make an excellent team." A short pause as he thinks back for a moment.

[{ 🗡️ }] - "You know, most demons in the underworld laugh at the idea of human Devil Hunters, but with you're skill, you have always continued to prove that you most definitely belong in this field of work."

It was strange, to feel a sense of unity with her. but with how things have been going so far, he was starting to feel a bit more confident that the two of them would be able to get along better. The future was unknown, and this was definitely not the result he expected, but admittedly, Vergil was looking forward to getting to know her, especially now that he wasn't actively trying to push everyone he came in contact with away, not anymore.

[{ 🗡️ }] - "The demon nests are usually created in closed-in spaces, so we'll want to check inside old building ruins, caves, or sometimes at odd times, the back of old transport trucks." Vergil informs, as the two finally continue their trek, in search of this area's demon nest.

[{ 🗡️ }] - "I heard you and Trish had a job in what was left of New York City, how did that go? I recall hearing about that place having at least five or six nests." He asks, making conversation as they continue their search.

It was with a lot of planning and a lot of pockets and pouches that Lady was able to have such an expansive arsenal. But it was certainly necessary! One could never know what kind of demon they'd be faced with. Some of them were immune to a number of weapons and the last thing Lady ever wanted to be was unprepared.

The strategy had done well for her, even if it did mean carrying around a lot of heavy gear.

On the upside, it seemed that the other Sparda son was capable of having healthy competition. While it was the first time Lady was witnessing Vergil utilize the gauntlets he had now he was no less skilled with them as he was with the Yamato.

"Good to see you aren't a one-trick pony!" she shouted over the carnage they created.

Focusing on the stragglers with her pistols for faster firing. Bullets flew through all the space that the Vergil wasn't. She didn't waste a single shot, nailing them all in the head.

A flash of white from Vergil's gauntlets wiped out the ones that remained.

"Neat trick that thing has! I'd say that was very efficient. We make a pretty good team, don't you think?"

[muzzlemouths]

Wait! So Sun and Moon can talk to each other!?! (DFtR au)

Not only that, but they're usually conscious/aware no matter who's fronting. Consider the moment in chapter 1, when Sun appeared distracted after seeing you there, and again, in chapter 2, when he went quiet but reacted like he was being scolded. These are both scenes where he and Moon were talking to each other.

They often disagree on how to go about handling certain situations, especially when Sun fumbles and says or does something he shouldn't (like the rambling fish metaphor, for example).

This results in moments between them that often look something like this 👇

[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

[mcytegg]

the clip where zam, thinking ro has joined the empire, laughs abt him not sticking w his team (yet again)

[nabaath-areng]

Sometimes I think to myself "actually maybe I'm exaggerating the terror I felt from being stalked", but then I remember that the person in question followed me and waited for me outside my school every day, tracked me down on every website I'd spent even the slightest time on, left physical letters in my mailbox, sent creepy as hell novel length messages on a near daily basis on FB. And then when I was living abroad and I answered the phone I told the caller to text me cause I couldn't hear, after which I had to read "I was saying that you would probably be VERY scared if you knew who's calling... hehe" with my own damn fucking eyes...

And then I'm like yknow what nevermind!!!! the fact that I'm still terrified of being perceived and seen in public not just IRL but also FFXIV might be understandable actually!!!

[corpocyborg]

(⊙ˍ⊙)

[mariocki]

A tiny Frazer Hines pops up as an unnamed bellhop in Overseas Press Club - Exclusive!: The Littlest Sergeant (1.10, ABPC, 1957)

[unproduciblesmackdown]

has happened plenty around iconis goings on but what an all-timer

[lettherebechaos]

Arcane writers ik y’all did not spend the last 3 weeks getting me invested in vi and jinx rebuilding their relationship only to kill one of them off at the end…

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID: a digital illustration featuring Luz, Eda, King, and Papa Titan from the owl house. The image is set in the in-between realm. Papa Titan looms large in the background, winking at us with his claw outstretched into the foreground. The hooty in his eye socket also extends into the foreground, staring at Eda (who's in harpy form) menacingly. Her, King and Luz are floating in the space, Eda looking at the hooty unhappily, King faced away and turned back to look at us, one hand outstretched to Papa Titan, Luz looking at stringbean (surrounded by light spells) with tears in her eyes. Written overtop of the image is the lyrics "and here's to you, Mrs Robinson!". End ID]

💫🎶and here's to you, Miss Noceda! The Titan loves you more than you will know, wo oh oh!🪶✨

[tenwhiteandalusians]

is episode 8 the domitian arc ? more on this and EVEN MORE narratives i’ve been ignoring that the show said “actually,,,” about in 5

[talkorsomething]

I have Got to get more transgender

[the5n00k]

Getting increasingly harder to get my body what it needs while doing what's expected of me <3

I tried sleeping in to combat my later free time schedule and to see if I would stop being tired

[bumblingbabooshka]

Tuvok noting that the number of crewmen with framed photographs of captain Janeway is alarming. There's nothing to really DO about it but it is alarming nonetheless.