#ITS JUST VAL

[hellcvoxtek]

@hazbinned gaslighted:

"How much gaslighting do ya think I'd have to do to convince everyone I'm a butterfly?"

"I thought you were a moth fly. Are you trying to say you weren't this entire time? You've got the same antenna and other traits I've dotted down."

Brightness grows to accommodate the seeing impaired ( get some contacts ). FLICKER. FLICKER. F-FLICKER. All flies and never a moth or a butterfly; they all share the shit taste in common. He attempts to trick Val, playfully. With a worthy argument of comparison. It was all to perfectly matched. . .what if he were a fly? Pesky and never able to lose them.

"If you fooled me, you'll fool everyone for sure."

[bloggerspam]

Mechanic!Val AU, but make it gay and sapphic.

ya'll can thank the HH discord for this one. Specifically the menace known as @clockwayswrites (and @impyssadobsessions for the art that inspired the damn thing)

Dead on Main and with some future Val/Steph >)

also @belfry-ghost did a doodle for this AU and everyone should go love on his art. Val's so unf.

===

Val’s pretty sure her new boss Jay is actually a crime lord.

She’s pretty sure he’s The Crime Lord, actually. She’s like, 98% sure she works for Red Hood now, and she’s low key mad about it. She squints at the man now, with his white streak and almost imperceptible green sheen to his eyes. 

The problem is that Val did perceive it. Because she used to date a guy whose baby blue eyes changed ever so slightly in the same way. Thinking about Danny makes her even madder.

To be clear, she’s not mad about Red Hood himself. 

She’s just mad that, of all the mechanic shops in all of Crime Alley, she just had to work for her ex-boyfriend’s third place Hall Pass pick. It also makes her miss her friends way more, and Val is hardly what one would call a well-adjusted woman, so she’s mad about it.

She huffs as she lifts the hood of the second car she’s working on today. Being a mechanic wasn’t really on the docket for Val’s life goals, nor was being in Gotham, but she got a full ticket ride on Wayne Foundation scholarships, and honestly? 

Gotham is Amity Park Lite: Gargoyles and Furries Edition. 

Between a full ride to Gotham U and being stuck at Elmerton Community College? The choice was easy. 

So here she is, working for the resident Crime Lord in his civvies. 

Jay pays good, teaches her what she needs to know, and bonus: he sometimes helps with her English Literature class. He’s flexible on hours, and she’s even got rudimentary insurance. 

All in All?  It could be worse—she could still be working for Vlad, after all. 

It's the little things.

[triona-tribblescore]

Started making Angel's birthday art, had a breakdown, Bon appetite! His birthdays before he joined the hotel probably weren't the best :<

[lycanr0t]

protective

[bigbluehorse]

cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other. even when they're both woman adjacent.

(cowboy au of my dnd ship between val (top, she/it) and hana (bottom, she/they). tumblr allows kissing, right? in joe biden's america?)

[valtsv]

this part is so, so important to me, because as fatalistic as it sounds, it's refreshing to hear it, and from the mouth of a character as complex and nuanced in their portrayal as both victim and perpetrator of violence as VAL no less. because the fact is, no matter how much you put in the effort, and work on yourself, and change for the better, none of that will make any difference if the world doesn't change with you. if the wheel keeps on turning. if the cycle keeps on being repeated. you'll only remain a cog in the machine, or fall out and be discarded among all the other useless, broken disappointments before you. what does it matter, if you grow around the hurt, tear down the walls you've built in a futile bid to keep yourself safe, only to find more fences bristling with spikes awaiting you on the other side? what use is it trying to better yourself when there's nowhere to go? in voicing this, VAL highlights the abject cruelty of telling people that they're what needs fixing, that it's their responsibility to change, and that the world will surely follow if they're only willing to take the first steps, when there was never any intention to dismantle the corruption and violence upholding the systems that led them to that point in the first place.

[unbloodiedmartyr]

These were the silt verses, and here are our disciples in order of... well, whatever random order I decide to draw them in tbh

Tryna make a reference sheet for my character designs so we can get some consistency up in here!! Up top we have our S1 crew, as I envision them then, below, the government gang from S3. Coulda added Tainsely but idk what he looks like yet lol

[staticmothlimbo]

chapter 15's doodles for Cake Slices Are Shaped Like Vs

collab I did with @staticmothhell

[popfizzles]

Can we see how the cup Brothers act with Goldie and Smith?

I have spend the past 5 hours throwing together the world's quickest thumbnails regarding the relationships between the main four and the apples :)

[the-huxler]

radiostatic week: day 4 - "who did this to you"

[skapediem]

omg i watched the best movie the other day it was this like crime comedy sorta thing set in la about these two (kinda homoerotic?) private detectives trying to solve the murder of some girl directed by i think shane black... what was it called??

[no-where-new-hero]

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

[theyapper0]

THE VEES!!!!!!

Here's my designs for them :) i think theyre pretty fun and have the potential to be some wacky, yet pretty threatening villains

Velvette is my fav out of the 3 of them <3 i hope we see her more in the next season ^^

[valeovalairs]

Right I can’t put this in my pd reactions thread but this clip is so funny to me I’ve watched it like five times already

What they’re saying below the cut

William: Guys I’m William Wisp and I hope I don’t get shot today!

Charlie: FUCK ME

Bizly: What did you-

Charlie: I rolled a two

Condi: Am I rolling too-

Bizly: CHARLIE

Charlie: Hey don’t worry. Plus five. Seven.

Bizly:… ITS A GUN?

[valtsv]

i've finally represented their height difference accurately. i can retire now.

based on this classic

[unbloodiedmartyr]

never dreamt of such sterile hands. you keep 'em folded in your lap and raise them up to beg for scraps. you know he's holding you down with the tips of his fingers, just the same.