#I haven't drawn all day cause I went out to do important stuff and I came home feeling very Peter Griffin death pose

[weaponizedmoth]

Every time I don't draw, I itch for it. Every time I do draw, I have a headache. Human being is truly never ever happy with the circumstances. Such is life.

[in-search-of-a-fallen-star]

the fall of icarus

Pairing: Suguru Geto/Reader, hinted Satoru Gojo/Reader

WC: 3269 (do not perceive me)

Content warnings: canon typical violence, for both Star Wars and Jujutsu Kaisen. Also, I borrow some plot beats from the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arcs, so there are some potential spoilers if you haven't seen those yet.

I saw the lovely @strawberrystepmom 's It Takes A Galaxy collab and immediately knew I had to write something for our greatly beloved tragic bastard.

This was so much fun to write, as a mash up of two of my favorite universes. I did kind of play fast and loose with the lore of both series, but it was all in the name of ~drama~ so I feel like it was for a good cause. Two things I do want to mention, just for clarity's sake, is that Reader uses a modified version of Force Empathy, and that when a force user falls to the dark side, their eyes turn yellow. IDK if that's technically canon in Star Wars anymore, but I thought it was a cool detail from the older stuff and decided to use here.

Minors and ageless blogs, DNI. If you don't have an age in your bio or pinned I will block you.

There is a specter that dogs your steps in the halls of the Temple. A name, only muttered in hushed whispers in the shadowed corners. Most will refer to him as the fallen one, as if saying his name will bring misfortune. 

You know him as Suguru Geto. 

He was your friend, once. 

You remember his smile, and the way it made his dark eyes crinkle and his whole face soften. The way his big hands felt warm even through your layers of robes as he would correct your form during saber drills. The low, smoky timbre of his voice that made even the driest of texts hypnotizing to listen to. 

Most importantly, you remember the day he left. Suguru Geto and Satoru Gojo, freshly Knighted and already being hailed as some of the Order’s best and brightest, sent on a mission so important that they couldn’t tell you anything other than they were leaving. Gojo ruffled your hair and promised that he would bring you back something sweet. Geto pulled you into a hug and promised that they wouldn’t be gone long. You remember the sound of their laughter in the hangar, and the smiles on their faces as they waved goodbye from the cockpits of their starfighters. 

Geto was right, they weren’t gone long. Just a few short days, long enough to miss them but not long enough to worry. When you got the ping that their ships had docked, you ducked out of meditation and hurried to the hangar to greet them.

When they emerged from their ships, you didn’t need the Force to tell you that something went wrong. You reached for it anyway, drawing it around you like a comforting blanket as you took in their expressions. Gojo had his eyes covered, a rare sight on Temple grounds, and walked without his usual boisterous charm. He half-heartedly ruffled your hair, resting his hand on your head for a moment before moving past you. 

Geto avoided your touch entirely. His face was dark and drawn, black eyes inscrutable. He met your eyes for a second, before hurrying past you into the Temple. You reached out to him with the Force, and felt a wave of anger and pain so potent it hit you like a punch to the gut. The contact lasted for just a second, severed on his end as he turned to look at you. The expression on his face reminded you of a wounded animal backed into a corner, savage with pain. It was the first time he’d looked at you and made you believe that he could hurt you. 

Things changed, after that. Gojo seemed to recover the fastest, bouncing around the Temple with his usual antics. He started seeking you out more, and finding increasingly transparent excuses to touch you, like draping an arm around your shoulders as you walked in the halls or dropping his head in your lap when he would find you studying in the archives. Each time, you would reach out with the Force, tapping into your abilities to connect to Gojo’s emotions. His control was ironclad, so you rarely were able to forge a connection, but there were sometimes where you caught a trace of a deep sorrow. On those days, Gojo seemed more withdrawn, and would burrow into your touch like a small child seeking comfort. You let him, using your abilities to push feelings of calm through the bond you shared. 

Geto began avoiding you. Like Gojo, he made an effort to return to normal, but it fell through quickly. He no longer joined in on Gojo’s teasing commentary, and avoided your touch. You reached out to him with increasing desperation, trying to rekindle the embers of your connection, and were met with silence at every turn. 

There were moments where you would wake up at night, sensing Geto’s presence outside your door. He would linger just outside your room, as if he couldn’t bring himself to knock. Each time, you would get up and go to the door. At first, you would open it to invite him in, but he would disappear before the door could slide open. After, you would stand behind the door, feeling his presence and letting him feel yours. You would rest a hand on the cold plasteel, and for those moments in the dead of night, it was almost like you could feel the warmth of his hand on the other side.

You also began to feel eyes on you. It’s not uncommon to be watched in the Temple, but it usually happens during lessons, sparring, or meditations, with instructors keeping an eye on students who might need assistance or masters looking at prospective padawans. Those eyes are usually calm and detached, the gaze feeling almost clinical as it passes over you. This gaze is heavy, like a physical touch. It feels almost… covetous. You feel it most when you’re alone, usually poring over a holocron in the archives or practicing your lightsaber forms late into the night. In those moments, you can feel those eyes following a bead of sweat that slips down your neck into the loosened collar of your robes like a lover’s touch, soft and possessive. 

In your heart, you know who those eyes belong to. The Jedi teach their students to let go, and that attachment leads down a dark and dangerous path. But you can’t deny that you’ve looked at him the same way- stolen glances admiring the curve of his jaw, or the way his muscles flex under his tunic as he moves effortlessly through his saber forms. You’ve felt it, a need that simmers low in your gut, a dark whisper to sink your teeth in and never let go. It’s something that you’ve spent many hours of meditation trying to will away, very carefully thinking about anything else. It’s an honor to be chosen, to be brought to the Temple and trained. You won’t let this temptation lead you astray, and you won’t let this feeling call one of your dearest friends away from the Light. 

Geto begins to spend more and more time in the archives. You see him moving like a specter, the light of the holocrons casting strange shadows over his bone white face. His eyes are dark and the bags under his eyes are darker, and you notice that his robes hang more loosely on his body. The next time that you see Shoko, you bring it up, and she shrugs helplessly. 

“You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help,” she sighs. “All we can do is be there for him. Don’t worry too much, little light,” Shoko ruffles your hair affectionately. “He’s a big strong boy. Focus on your studies for now. Look for some fancy theological problem you can argue over with him once he pulls himself together.” 

You swat Shoko’s hands away from your hair and smile. A voice calls her name, and she hastily puts out the very against Temple rules cigarette and throws it into a nearby wastebin. “Duty calls. Take it easy,” she gives you a little salute as she makes her way in the direction of the voice. 

The smile on your face is weak, and fades when Shoko turns her back. She’s older and more experienced, and has known Geto longer. Still, you can’t shake the feeling of wrongness that has been dogging your steps, and is getting steadily more insistent as Geto continues to withdraw into himself. 

Gojo is the next person on your list, but he’s been increasingly more difficult to pin down. Since being Knighted, he has fully come into his powers, and is a darling of all the masters. You hear whispers in the halls, calling him the strongest knight the Order has seen in over six hundred years. He is regularly dispatched on high profile missions and sent as an envoy of the Order to the Senate- you hear his name everywhere but rarely catch a glimpse of the man himself.

You never see him without his blindfold, anymore.

Geto is the moon to Gojo’s sun. He is still respected as one of the strongest of this generation of knights. He takes the missions he’s assigned without complaint. He never tells anyone where he’s going or when he’s going to be back, and you have to make a nuisance of yourself to have any idea where in the galaxy he is. When he is at the Temple, Geto makes an effort to act like things are normal. He laughs and jokes with Shoko, and assists with the training of the younger knights when he can. His smiles don’t reach his eyes, and he still won’t touch you. You’ve reached out to him with the Force, and it’s like there’s an obsidian wall between you, glittering black and diamond hard. 

Looking back, you think the catalyst was the Jinata mission. You don’t remember the details, but you vividly remember the pyre.Yu Haibara was your age, a new knight sent on one of his first missions without the supervision of a master. He was outgoing and friendly, liked by everyone around him. Even though the body was covered during the funeral, you could picture his warm brown eyes and bright smile. Kento Nanami, another young knight your age, had gone on the mission with him. His face was badly beaten, the firelight of the pyre flickering across the yellowing edges of bruises that spattered across his elegant features. He was stoic, face set and hands folded in the deep sleeves of his robe. You wished you could offer him a hand, any reassuring touch to soften the grief you could feel roiling off him like a storm cloud. 

A few days later, Geto disappeared. 

At first, you assumed that he had just followed his normal procedure- taken a mission and left without telling anyone. So you waited, despite the anxiety clawing at your stomach. A week later, you woke up, gasping from a dream filled with so much blood and fire you could taste the iron and smoke on your tongue. You hadn’t been able to make out any faces in the carnage you had witnessed, but your instincts told you that something had happened to Geto, wherever he had gone. You threw yourself into meditations, playing the dream over and over, trying to glean any clarity or information from the chaos. You knew the masters would dismiss this as an anxiety fueled nightmare without proof, so you searched for some kernel of truth that would prove this was a Force premonition. 

You were still searching when the news broke. Suguru Geto, Knight of the Jedi Order, a murderer. He hadn’t returned within the time allotted for his mission, so the masters had dispatched a team to investigate. The knights had arrived to find the village Geto had been sent to help burned to ash, and every one of the villagers dead. The damning evidence was the distinctive wounds of a lightsaber blade on the corpses, burned almost beyond recognition. 

Flight records showed that Geto’s ship had returned to Coruscant, and the Temple began a manhunt for the rogue knight. Gojo and Shoko joined the search, both of them dropping everything. The masters squawked in indignance at having their most recognizable knight and one of their only healers leave their posts to trawl Coruscant’s underbelly, and in the resulting chaos you were able to slip out and search. 

Your abilities made you uniquely qualified for this. Closing your eyes, you reached out to the Force and let it wash over you. The noise of the endless city faded away, and the duracrete jungle bloomed with color as the auras of the people around you came into view. You shuttered your mind against the rising tide of thoughts, focusing your attention, looking for one signature as familiar to you as your own. You cast your net wide, and let yourself float in the sea of noise. You could be patient. 

It caught you off guard, when you finally sensed it. A presence, so close to you that you could taste it in the back of your throat. You recoiled at the seething mass of anger and malice, and opened your eyes to see a figure shrouded in black, backlit by the flickering neon at the mouth of the alley you had hidden yourself in. You scrambled to your feet, putting a hand on the hilt of your saber. Before you could make another move, the figure moved, so fast it looked like they teleported the short distance down the alley. One hand caught yours, gently pulling your wrist away from your saber. The other grasped your chin, thumb and forefinger softly but firmly pulling your gaze up to their face. 

Under the hood, you met their eyes. Blazing yellow irises, set in familiar fine boned features you’d dreamed about running your fingers over. Geto stood over you, radiating a power that he had kept locked away all your years together at the Temple. You felt your knees weaken under you, and the corner of his lips quirked up as he felt you sag in his grasp.

“Hello, little light,” he murmured, eyes sweeping over your face. “So brave of you, to leave your pretty tower and come looking for the murderer.”

“I don’t believe it,” you bring a hand up to his face, and he lets you touch him. His skin is warm, almost feverish. There is more color to his face than you have seen on his features for a long time, and the bags under his eyes have all but disappeared. All you can look at is his eyes. His deep inky gaze used to draw you in, and now you can’t look away from the burning gold of his irises. “Suguru, please. Tell me it isn’t true,” you beg, hand dropping to rest on his shoulder. 

He grabs your hand, flattening your palm over his heart. You can practically feel it racing through the layers of muscle and black robes that now cover his chest. “Look for yourself, little light. All my secrets are finally open to you.”

You close your eyes. It’s not strictly necessary, but you find yourself looking for solace from the way his eyes seem to pick you apart. Taking a deep breath, you focus on the beat of his heart and tap into the Force. Geto fully opens himself to you, and you have to fight to orient yourself as the riptide of his emotions and memories threatens to drag you under. You find yourself choked by feelings that are not your own; grief so sharp it feels like a knife in your ribs, rage that feels like a fire in your throat, and beneath it all a yawning chasm of despair that slowly begins to drown everything else out. 

Frantically you search through his memories. His most recent ones are a mess of blood and fire. You recognise the burning structures from your dream, and through his eyes you bear witness to the humming green of his lightsaber blade cutting through villagers. 

You feel tears running down your face as you watch the carnage in Geto’s memories. Gasping, you sever the connection, jerking your whole body away from the man in front of you, achingly familiar but now wholly a stranger. He doesn’t let you get far, pulling your hand back to his chest and looping his other arm around your waist, preventing you from pulling away. 

“Don’t run away, little light,” he croons, looking down at you as you fight to catch your breath through your tears. “Let yourself feel. You tried so earnestly to reach out to me, to ease my burden. The perfect little Jedi,” he sneered, his face twisting into something ugly for a moment before his features smoothed out again. 

“The Order teaches us to be ashamed of feeling anything other than tranquility. They train us to be perfect little emotionless soldiers, ready to fight and die for their cause. How many friends do we have to watch die, how many funerals do we have to attend without being able to grieve?” he smoothed a hand over your hair, cupping your cheek with a gentle hand. “It shouldn’t be like this, little light,” he turns your face to meet his eyes. “We shouldn’t be running around the galaxy, solving every little problem for every person too weak to fend for themselves while being afraid of our own emotions, our own desires.”

“The Force made us strong so we could help the weak,” you counter. 

“Why should we be given all this power to only serve those without it?” Geto asks. “Do you truly believe that because you were born with this gift, you are to live your entire life in servitude?” You see a gleam in his eye, a teasing twist to his mouth that sends a shiver down your spine. “Tell me, little light. When was the last time that you did something only because you wanted to? How many chances have you passed by to take something that you want?”

“I know of at least a few,” he purrs, his hand sliding back to the nape of your neck, his lips close enough to yours that you can feel the soft puffs of his breath. “I don’t need your empathy to see the longing glances, the way you would start to reach for me but catch yourself.”

Geto closes the gap between you, pressing a slow, teasing kiss to the corner of your mouth. “I’m right here. You don’t need to stop yourself anymore,” he whispers against your mouth. He’s so close, all it would take is a slight movement of your head. He waits for you to close the gap, and in that moment you think of all of the times you wished to be in this exact position, wrapped up in his arms and a breath away from the kind of kiss you’d only dreamed of.

He is a siren. The promise of his kiss and what it would mean calls to desires long since hidden in your heart. He is offering you everything you’ve wanted, and for a moment, you almost give in. 

Almost.

“Not like this,” you whisper against his waiting lips. Calling the Force to you, you blast him back down the alley with the palm still pressed against his chest. You meet his wild eyes and settle into a fighting stance, pulling the hilt of your saber to your hand. The blade ignites with a hiss, the light casting harsh shadows in the dark alley. “Suguru Geto, I must take you in for crimes against the Galactic Republic.” 

“So this is how it’s going to be,” he says with a sigh, standing to his full height and running a hand through his hair that had been blown out of its tie by your push. He pulls up the hood of his dark cloak, and steps out of the alley. You run forward, saber in hand, only to be greeted by a busy street of underworld denizens who recoil at the sight of your ignited blade. You frantically search for a trace of your old friend in the crowd. You feel a tug at your neck, as a familiar hand reaches around you to grab the pendant you wear.

 “I’ll see you again, little light,” Geto whispers in your ear. He waves at you when you whirl around, your pendant twinkling in his hand, before he fades into the crowd around you.

[sibyl-of-space]

oOOOOooohhhhhhhh i get it now. i have Identified the Problem that has caused the most recent amadeus-related crisis/spiral/whatever you want to call it.

there are 5-ish "roles" that i have taken on as a solo dev:

project manager

musician/sound director

programmer/implementation engineer

writer/narrative lead

artist/art director

and for each i THOUGHT i had figured out how to tackle them.

project management: I've had some experience managing collaborative projects (GBA collab album, mystery jam game), I also solicited advice from other indie devs I met at Seattle Indies Expo, and I *also* applied what I learned about how we manage projects in facilities at my day job using Asana and have applied that to Amadeus. I very consciously treated this as a skill to learn and taking that specific skill seriously has helped a lot.

music: ...I straight up went to grad school for this. I took like a billion units every semester so I could learn as much as possible about composition AND mixing/production. This is the one thing I actually have a strong background in. I have the skillset and I also have People I can ask for feedback and advice. The music is lowkey going to carry this whole project.

programming: I went into this knowing full well I have exactly One semester of Unity/C# under my belt and have no idea what I am doing. I have experience learning basic HTML and JavaScript and have reverse engineered most of Ghost Trick's code via ROMhacking, so I have a sort of janky skillset, but it's very amateur and I knew that. I have asked SO many questions to people who are more experienced. KNOWING that this is my weakest suit has let me ask for help when I need it, and also accept that even the most polished possible form of this game is still going to be jank as fuck. That's fine. My #vision will still come through.

writing: the whole reason I set aside an entire month to just focus on the Mystery Jam game was because I knew I needed more experience writing, and specifically writing mystery. I've spoiled the whole game to two different people who have writing experience in order to bounce ideas and get feedback. I've asked for workflow advice from a third person with writing experience. Identifying this as a weakness has helped me focus on improving it, and because of that I am really happy with where it's at right now.

Which leads us to....

...art.

My problem with art is that as of about 2 years ago, I was much more confident in my art than I was in basically anything else except music, because I have drawn stuff my whole life and have a shitload of informal practice at it. So I focused very heavily on the other stuff that was very obviously a weakness.

But, as we approach the final months of Go Time to finish the first episode... I'm like, hm, it turns out that the art and art direction of a visual novel are kind of important.

I *like* all of the assets I've drawn for the currently existing demo, but there are specific things about the overall look I don't quite like, and there is a specific metanarrative Thing that I have been trying to evoke with what I'm doing visually and I feel like sticking to that is at odds with making assets that look and "feel" right.

Basically I haven't really thought as much about art direction as I should have since finishing the demo because I kinda figured I could coast on the fact I consider myself a pretty good artist. I can make things that look Nice. But now that I've worked hard at my other areas of weaknesses, the fact I haven't really sat down with my art direction in the past 4-5 months is really starting to become obvious.

All this to say.

My "assignment" for this afternoon is to sit outside listening to all the tracks I've written (including new WIP ones no one but me has heard yet CUZ THEYRE AWESOME im SO excited about the new tracks im writing for this) and reading through my revised narrative with certain finalized plot points and concepts, and just sketching out visually what the game Should Look Like. I am almost certain I can still use the assets I've already drawn, like the sprites and backgrounds and icons and such, but I may edit them differently, or add to them, or otherwise change something about them. I just need to make some choices because I'm feeling stuck and I need to get un-stuck if I am going to finish this game AND I AM DETERMINED TO DO SO.

[marshmallowprotection]

Sorry to bring this topic back now, but I'm honestly glad to see you talking about the passport tequila(?) thing. I haven't read your passport post yet because I wanna avoid spoilers for the passport just in case I manage to get it one day (but it'll take a while till that happens, seeing Cheritz still isn't shipping to Finland and I still haven't got the bodypillow I ordered from them in May), but I've seen two pictures of some of its contents already. The second one a photoset of him and MC (which btw was seriously adorable and made me wanna get the passport immediately, man he's so cute) and the first one I saw was the doodle of Saeran being passed out.

My friend messaged me about it, also pretty devastated and disappointed that the artist had drawn something like that in the passport, completely forgetting his past and trauma with alcohol. Honestly, because it was the first ever thing I heard about the passport's contents and the first doodle I saw, I was really disappointed and felt hesitant about ever getting it. I went on a whole rant about it back then and then later started feeling like I overreacted a bit...

But not gonna lie, it kinda upset me too because it just seemed so OOC for him to do? You pretty much already put how I feel about it into words really well. I just don't think he'd drink alcohol, seeing that's pretty much where his trauma came from, and also when I think about the friends and mutuals I have who've had alcoholic parents and swore to never drink themselves thanks to that, and how Saeyoung doesn't wanna drink because of his mum and they share that trauma…

Then after talking about it with a few friends I began to think that hey, maybe he wanted to try it out once and already after ONE sip went "too bitter DX" and didn't want more. He likes sweet stuff anyway, even if he didn't have all the trauma, I doubt his sweet tooth would like the taste of alcohol. The first impression my friend and I got was that he was DRUNK, but nah, now he just looks like he's suffering because it was too bitter lol

But then I saw someone here mention that it might not even be an alcoholic drink (or that he passed out from the heat) and hey, I'm just gonna go ahead and headcanon that now, it was just way too bitter for him

In the end I do think that the artist who worked on that passport wasn't entirely aware of his past, which is a shame. Or just didn't think about it. I think someone told them to "make some cute and funny doodles of him" and they thought "hey drunk Saeran lol that could be funny and cute" without thinking about it more, and that's how the doodle became a thing

You’re still waiting for that? Jesus, I hope that the mail service is able to open up soon for your country and that it’s okay for them to ship things around. It’s been a while now, I would’ve thought that they might have been able to work around to get it to you! Well, precautions are precautions, and those are important when the world is like this but huh. Odd that it’s not working around yet. 

It really unsettled me when I saw it. I thought, “Okay, maybe it’s not actually just straight-up tequila or booze, I can rationalize this away as something else cause it’s really not okay to me.” I know someone said in the post that it’s on the Wiki that Saeran’s not a big fan of soda because it gives him headaches, and I know that feeling, so if one wants to think it’s soda, they can. It’s easy to say, well, it’d be possible that it’s the dry heat of the country and he’s flopped over from that after finally getting something chilled. 

It’s easier for me to rationalize it in that manner instead of saying that it’s alcohol even though it’s clearly intended to be seen as that. I’ve unfortunately got similar trauma and I see myself in the Choi boys. Do you know how rare it can be to find characters that are adults that don’t drink or aren’t invested in drinking culture as a whole? I’m fine with people enjoying their vices and doing things in moderation but—

I just cannot relate to it. I’m nearly 24 and I cannot stand even the smell of that stuff. It’s fine if you enjoy your wine or liquor or whatever, it just feels in such poor taste to draw out someone drinking that has made it very clear that they aren’t comfortable with drinking, and they shouldn’t have to explain out their trauma to have their feelings justified. The whole, “Just one sip, it won’t really hurt you,” is so toxic.

Can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that when I’ve made it very clear that I’m uncomfortable with that and I would rather chug dish soap than be subjected to booze. 

I’m proud of Saeran for how far he’s come in his AE. I sincerely am, emotionally he’s doing so much better and he’s working on himself, but I really don’t see him or his brother ever trying alcohol. There could be a point where maybe they just say, “What the hell did she even see in this? What do people even see in this stuff?” and they try one singular sip, and go: “Yeah, no, this isn’t the thing for me, no thanks.” 

I’m cool with that if that is what they choose to do. It’s their body, their trauma, and their choice. 

Saeyoung and Saeran have very clear trauma from Alcoholism. It’s made very clear from the both of them that they don’t drink. Seven notes that he’s about as straight-laced as they come when it means alcohol or smoking. Unknown can’t really be counted as a smoker, he literally used that as an excuse during the SE to contact Mint Eye. So, I’ve never read him as a smoker, either. It was a good excuse. Neither of them gets involved with addictive vices that are legal for you to use. 

I struggle with fanon content sometimes because I’ll find stories or imagines where the writer has shown Saeyoung or Saeran drinking, and I just have to nope out of that setting. It’s not cute or cheeky. I personally don’t answer any requests that involve the boys drinking because I’ve made my stance very clear on the subject and how I feel about depicting characters that do not want to drink and have made it known that they do not want to drink as drinking. The rest of the RFA? Sure, some of them drink occasionally, fairly in moderation, which is alright. 

The Passport itself is really cute, no spoilers, but that’s the only thing within its contents that made me uncomfortable. The rest of it was definitely worth what I paid for and it made me smile if that’s any comfort to you. It’s just that one little doodle that just... yeah, I think I would go with your theory on this one, and that being that the artist might not have known specifically about the brothers or what they’ve dealt with in their lives, and just went with a cute idea they had and it’s not really anything huge. 

It’s fine to drink and all, but it’s equally important to respect when someone says that they don’t want to do it. That is a personal choice, and I just wish more folks would consider Saeran and Saeyoung’s feelings on the matter since it’s been stated in the canon plenty, specifically by Saeyoung during his Routes events in the game, and you can infer from Saeran fairly easily given what he was subjected to in his life. 

TLDR; It’s fine to drink when you want to do it, and there’s nothing wrong with it in moderation; but, it’s important to respect that not everyone wants to drink or get involved with that sort of stuff. 

[davidmann95]

I haven't been able to tolerate a comics news site since ComicsAlliance shut down so what news out of SDCC is actually worth knowing about?

I’ve gotten so many questions regarding SDCC-related news that I figured I’d just do one big post, and this seems as opportune an ask to build that off of as any. To kick off, in terms of news that’s not for me but is a big deal, there’s a trailer for the next season of Doctor Who, and Star Wars: Clone Wars is shockingly coming back for a final reduced season years after the fact. Congrats to the fans of both franchises! Plus yesterday we got the announcement of Orlando and Foreman’s Electric Warriors for DC (as well as Orlando’s Dead Kings with Matt Smith at Aftershock Comics) and the Wonder Woman/Justice League Dark October crossover.

So first and foremost in terms of the reaction it picked up, OH MY GOD:

It’s like the Bat In The Sun team handed over their production to their shitty kids but made them work off a third of the budget. I kept seeing the jokes about it on Twitter, and I kept thinking they were surely hilarious exaggerations, AND NOT A ONE OF THEM EVEN SLIGHTLY WAS. At least it now makes sense why Hawk and Dove is here, given the Liefeld connection: this is 90s as helllllllllllllllllllllll, and while a part of me hopes it swerves unexpectedly in a couple seasons into Fun 90s DC with Starman and Wally West and an Electric Blue Superboy and Titans One Million, I can’t pretend I wouldn’t gleefully hatewatch this if it wasn’t behind a paywall. What it really comes down to is that, as I saw someone mention, the over-the-top content warning at the beginning isn’t actually by any means to get rid of anyone under 18, but specifically to appeal to them over anyone over it: there is nothing about this show not precision-crafted to appeal to teenagers watching something they technically aren’t supposed to, since anyone older than that will just laugh until the stars grow cold. And while it’s one line in particular that’s rightfully drawn all the attention, to me the clear defining moment is Beast Boy taking his big goofy dramatic leap, and you expect him to transform, but that ain’t happening (I fully expect he’ll just have claws and growl and do assorted Wolverine shit instead), because that kind of thing is for STUPID KIDS, whereas this is RAD. 

RAD, dare I say…to the EXTREME.

Also, the pilot Robin’s scene was presumably drawn from was written by Akiva Goldsman, Greg Berlanti, and Geoff Johns. So was it the guy behind Batman & Robin, the guy behind the CWverse, or the recent President of DC Comics who ushered FUCK BATMAN into the world? Because all three of those possibilities are equally hilarious. In any case, the rubicon has been crossed: easily one of the top ten, probably one of the five or so most iconic superheroes of all time said fuck in a piece of mass media. Where we go from here, nobody knows. But at the very least I’ll take the L for my original certainty that this would take place in the CW DCverse, because that clearly isn’t going to be the case. Though boy, imagine if it was. Personally I like to imagine this is a totally normal DCU, and suddenly going full 90s and murdering a bunch of people is their universe’s version of normal teen rebellion.

Additionally, it’s now seemingly set in stone that the fourth DC Universe live-action show alongside Titans, Doom Patrol, and Swamp Thing will be a Stargirl show where Courtney Whitmore learns about her legacy and tries to track down the Justice Society, described as in the flavor of Superman ‘78 and Wonder Woman. Again, if it wasn’t behind a paywall I’d check it out.

And before turning to comics proper, we learned from WB itself that there are no plans to idiotically pour millions into making a functional Justice League Snyder cut a thing, unsurprisingly making some of the worst people on the internet be just the absolute worst (I’m interested myself in it artistically even if I don’t think it would be very good, but at this point it would feel like a validation of some really rotten people’s behavior if this happened). Meanwhile the first trailer for the Dragon Ball Super movie dropped, and yeah, I’m still happy to see Broly. This looks big in a way Dragon Ball for all its action rarely gets, and seeing Paragus suggests Toriyama understood what worked about the original flick, which is a very good sign. Did they swap out Vic Mignogna as Broly though? Wouldn’t blame him, I know he’s said he hates the part, but surprising nonetheless. And the Spider-Man game dropped another trailer, along with a ‘Velocity’ bonus suit designed by Adi Granov.

The big comics news of the day was of course the long-awaited confirmation that Green Lantern is being relaunched - apparently as The Green Lantern - in November by Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp. What’s surprising is that Morrison’s currently insisting that since the last decade or so of the franchise has dealt with constant upheaval and cosmic apocalypse, his run is going to scale back down to a character-focused study of Hal (“He’s a loner and a drifter and he’s an unreconstructed man. It was nice to do that and to go a little bit old-fashioned with it. He doesn’t belong here at all, you know? He’s longing for the heavens, and to be back up as a Green Lantern. We’re doing Hal Jordan where, you know he’s a good cop, but is he really a good guy? And we’re looking into his relationships and how he deals with people. And also the fact that, if you’ve got a job as a space cop, it’s hard to be stuck on the planet Earth. He has other lives on other planets.”) amidst him going about his duties and dealing with weird alien crimes and space threats, such as stopping aliens from ‘parking’ a planet-sized artificial megastructure near a sun and causing damage to nearby worlds, and solving the murder of a gaseous lifeform.

I doubt it’ll necessarily stay there forever - his Batman and Action Comics runs, after all, were both initially marketed as staying on the smaller side by his standards, and the one idea we know of Morrison having once had for the Green Lanterns back in the day was making them a multiversal force. But it’s remarkable how, well, normal this sounds coming from Morrison. Clearly this must be a passion project if he’s doing a monthly again for the first time in 5 years, especially since DiDio mentioned he had to be persuaded (ultimately persuading himself as his attempts to brush off the proposition led to him thinking about the possibilities and rapidly talking himself into it) to make time for this amidst an incredibly busy schedule of surely more profitable and creatively unshackled projects, but on the surface level? This sounds like the closest Morrison has come since his JLA days to writing a regular superhero comic. At this point in his career, I’m very, very curious what that’s going to look like. Just hoping he read the King/Shaner oneshot on whatever reread he surely went through to catch up on current continuity. And also hoping this guy was right that it’ll turn out “the REAL construct that was limited by our willpower and imagination all along was…REALITY.”

On smaller notes:

* Kelly Sue DeConnick and Robson Rocha are taking over Aquaman, with an opening arc that shows him washing up amnesiac on an isle of forgotten sea gods. DeConnick seems to be like the Jeffs Lemire and Parker where my appreciation of their work is limited to very, very specific slivers: none of her Marvel superhero stuff I’ve read did anything for me even if I could see the talent behind it, but her Lois story in the last issue of The Adventures of Superman was pitch-perfect (and also had a great Aquaman bit!). This gets at least an issue from me.

* DC announced new titles for DC Ink and DC Zoom, including Cassandra Cain, Oracle, Dick Grayson, Creeper, and Wonder Woman books, while also announcing some artists for the existing titles.

* Geoff Johns is doing (ugh) Shazam with Dave Eaglesham, who showed off a really great, fun cover suggesting the possibility of a tonal shift away from Johns writing the absolute worst version of that character imaginable. On the likelihood of said possibility though, I think @intergalactic-zoo put it best. I might just check it out in trade if word of mouth is overwhelmingly positive, but then, lots of otherwise rational people liked or at least saw merit in his original crack at it with Gary Frank, and you were all deliriously, impossibly wrong back then, too.

* And finally, speaking of Johns, he’s doing Batman: Three Jokers as a 3-issue mini with Jason Fabok, a smart move given that is precisely as much as I’m willing to invest in this out of morbid curiosity. What’s really baffling though is that it’s being released under Black Label. It would seem to destroy the stated purpose of the line by immediately releasing Very Important Continuity Comics under it, but maybe this means Batman’s gonna follow in his protege’s footsteps and say a fuck. Anyway, I’m mostly just hoping it isn’t revealed Fun Golden Age Joker is actually not the original in order to rub out the prospect that he was ever truly anything but a terrifying sidekick-butchering murder machine at the center of very serious stories, because that feels to be like a real possibility. And absolute no question one of the three is gonna turn out to be the lost child of Marionette and Mime in Doomsday Clock.