#People in general really need to stop thinking too hard about inconsistencies and stuff in a show with 5yo target demografic

[set-wingedwarrior]

People really be talking about peace and love and understanding of others and social justice, then the moment a villain in a children cartoon sees the errors of their way and gets redeemed through love and understanding they yell outraged that they didn't use a guillotine

[ljjsims]

Greek Goddess Legacy Challenge: Generation #12 Iris: Complete

Last one in our line, end of this challenge.. And what better way to end it than to revisit all our previous stories? Iris, goddess of the Rainbow and Messenger of the Gods, is here to tell you every story you want to hear. Give it up, for Iris!

From a young age you have loved stories and writing them for your family. it turns out, you have a talent for it, making even the bleakest stories interesting. Your favorite stories are the ones you hear Growing up. the stories about your ancestors. Great stories about strong women and the challenges of their lives. You hear how every one of them had their own uniqueness and strength to them. There are some blanks in their stories already, And you hate to think that those stories go to waste after people stop telling them. So you decide to write them all down. you will be a published writer, famous for the great stories about your family. After all, every story is worth telling.

Little bit explanation with the sheets: - First sheet is for describing your current generation, with the challenges you need to do each life-stage. Also, because I love the myths, a bit of mythological background. May it inspire you :) - Second sheet is the preparation sheet for this generation, with important characters for your story. It is technically optional, but I love seeing sims with a backstory in my world, so I would highly recommend it. - Third sheet is for your gens children. They all have their own little challenges if your interested in those. I try to make all of them a bit different from each other, so it doesn’t get boring. Your heir is also on this sheet, but I’ve put their challenges on their own sheets. Stay tuned for those ;) - Fourth (and Fifth!) sheet is completely optional. If you want sims with names from the myths and love making sims to see them in your world, this is for you! All with a little mythological background ofc, you know me. Previous Generation was Artemis First Generation is Gaia

The Greek Goddesses Challenge by LJJ-Sims is a challenge based on the ancient mythical creatures and stories from Greece. I fell in love with Greek mythology in high school and have not let that love go since. In this challenge you will follow 10 deities in their journey through life. Every goddess has a different take on and goal in life. Special about this challenge?  All your kids have little challenges of their own, not only your heir. These challenges are optional, so if you feel like these are too much or just too restricting for you: by all means let them go. I also have sheets for characters that you can make before you start each generation. This gives your challenge a lot more personality and makes it frankly easier and more fun!

A little disclaimer: because I made these gods and goddesses into a legacy challenge, the relationships in the myths don’t exactly match the relationship in this challenge. There is a lot of keep it in the family in mythology, to put it lightly. And apart from the fact that you can’t do that in the Sims, I don’t really like that part. So I didn’t include it, thus the inconsistency. An example: Ares is now Hera’s stepfather instead of her son, which she conceived with her brother  and husband Zeus. This inconsistency can also be found in the stories. It’s just based on and not copied exactly, as Sims live lives that are a lot shorter than those of immortal gods. And it takes a way from the creativity if we just copy the myths. Even if we wanted to do that, it’s quite hard, as every myths has its fair share of variations and some are just completely different stories.

I use the MCCC-mod to alter the length of life states. You can find the days-years ratio here: the boring stuff.

I get all the information from several sites about mythology, but mostly use https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/goddesses. This is a great place to start if you want to know the myths surrounding a certain god or goddess. Wikipedia is also a friend of mine in this challenge, although I automatically doubt a lot of information that is on there. More of a book person? I absolutely adore Stephen Fry’s Mythos, which is very beginner friendly, and Nathalie Haynes Pandora’s jar. For little synopses of gods, I would recommend Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook by Liv Albert.

[ozwuv]

I would like to draw more but I find myself overthinking it and then losing motivation. So, I was wondering if you ever had a similar issue and if so what do you do to stay motivated and not overthink?

Really good question actually!

What nipped the overthinking for me was just completely dropping the planning stage of drawing. I don't put much thought into composition, colors, etc. I don't have any solid ideas of how I want things to look before I begin. Obligatory disclaimer that this is from my perspective as a hobbyist and therefore not practical for an aspiring professional, & this is gonna sound like BS but hear me out lol

Most of the time the only things I have in mind are 1. What character(s) I want to draw and 2. A vague idea of the atmosphere I want the finished product to convey. And "finished" can mean a lot of things -- a messy sketch can be finished, a fully rendered piece I spent an entire day could be finished. A common pitfall people fall into is having an impractically rigid idea of what a "finished" drawing is and subsequently what they want their art to look like, all the bells and whistles etc, when realistically your art is never going to look exactly how it did in your head. But is that really such a bad thing?

I guess the overarching concept is to just fall in love with the process and enjoy the journey rather than the destination. This obviously sounds easier than it is in reality, but imo people focus way too hard on what they're producing rather than how and why they're producing it. Other people loving what you draw and praising it is wonderful, but if you don't enjoy the process, what was the point? Drawing (and I would venture to say most other forms of art in general) becomes a chore with that mindset applied.

A lack of planning may very well mean you wind up drawing a lot of stuff that doesn't seem interesting, maybe haphazard, difficult to parse, etc, but this is all your perception. It's cliché, but there is always going to someone out there that adores something you think looks like a dumpster fire, and that applies to the things you draw too. Over time, just doing whatever you want and enjoying the process has this trickle effect that will improve your output. In the same vein, constantly overthinking will also inevitably trickles into your output. You can often tell when someone enjoyed the process of something they drew vs when it was just a slog for them to get through (at least relative to their other works).

I would venture to say that you could spend your entire life studying and could be the most technically knowledgeable person about illustration ever in the world, but if you don't genuinely love the process, your work will never be as good as it could be if you did.

If you finish something and think it looks like shit that's always a bummer, but if you had fun with it, I think that was time worth spending. I've said this before, but most of the time I only truly dislike something I've drawn when I spent any part of the process frustrated with how it was going. It's counterintuitive, but I really think that placing so much emphasis in how you want the finished product to look is what ultimately is going to make it look like shit to you.

All that being said, once you do get past that initial overthinking phase, you can start to get more specific with planning and whatnot. The key is to just stop holding onto the idea of what you want and allowing things to develop as you go. Your art will naturally improve this way since you're actually enjoying it. To me, that's what people mean when they say they can tell something was made with love.

Side note: Let go of the need to be consistent/have a developed style. Just let yourself be inconsistent. You don't need strict consistency unless you're like an animator who needs to keep characters on-model or something. Experimenting is not only way more fun, but leads to improvement and discovering new things to implement into your process/style at large.

Tl;dr just get a lil silly w it :3c

[anxiousopium]

The Owl House, World Building, and You (Should Really Be Quiet)

I've been seeing a lot of people complaining about the lore and world building in The Owl House. Complaining about inconsistent locations and rules for magic. That's fine, really. Because it is true that stuff like that started taking a backseat half-way through season 2. I take issue mostly with people assuming that the writers could have done a better job of it. Some even saying that they could do better job (despite, you know, never having worked on anything even remotely close to a tv show but whatever.)

Hey, you know what else happened half way through season 2's production? The crew found out that the show got cancelled, meaning they had to scramble to make the story as lean as possible to fit in their new run time. And I'm sorry, really I am, but world building and lore are the LOWEST thing on any decent writer's priority list. Especially for a serialized, animated television show.

You know what's infinitely more important? A show's theme's and over arching message. And no, I'm not talking about accepting POC and LGBTQ+ people for who they are or not forgiving people who refuse to be better.

I'm talking about the promise The Owl House makes for an entire generation of kids.

Kids growing up in a world where hatred and othering run rampant. A world where they don't see themselves growing up safe or loved because of how different they are from the norm.

TOH promises that, yes as a matter of fact you do get what you give. You probably won't get it immediately, it may even take a long time, but it will come around.

It says that there is a place for you. A place that, if you keep an open mind, and love with your whole chest, will love you back. A place that will see you. A place that will reach out to you, and hold you for as long as you need. A place that will allow you to make mistakes, and grow, and breathe. A place where you can stop fighting. A place where you can heal yourself, and others too if you try hard enough.

A place that will not be perfect, but that can be change. A place that you can change.

And you may need to change it a little to fit in just right.

But you will fit in. You will fit in.

It's out there, somewhere. You can find it, I promise.

And it says all that without telling you exactly where Latissa is, or how witch puberty works. Or even whatever the hell Hooty is.

So please, if you genuinely think that you could do better than that, go right ahead! I want nothing more than to hear the story you want to tell. But don't sit there and talk shit about this show's wonderful crew. Because if you can write a message like that when the most powerful multi-media conglomerate in the world straight up kills your show right in front of your eyes? You probably know what you're doing.

[laststandx3]

Spoiler for twd daryl dixon ep 3 I'm once again buffled by the amarican wank that is daryl dixon. It's not possible that a whole country speaks english for him but he can't manage ONE mercì. I fuckin hate him. Learn the fucking language. And he speaks too american for people to understand him.

Then everyone acting like that kid is jesus back on earth. For fuck sake. He's just got some antibiotic blood.

You want me to believe that's the same little girl from last episode? It's been 12 fucking years in the story timeline: that child is dust. You can't ignore that much physics

Even for post-apocalypse standards the demimonde is low tier for a nightclub. Great music. But are they supposed to have electricity? There's a girl with pink/purple hair. How do they still have all those stuff 12+ years after the apocalypse. Im not saying everyone should be sad and gloomy and never dress up ever, but it seemed to me that even eating was a hard task. Where do all those party people live? Don't they have to grow their food? Having a nightclub in a post-apocalypse setting isn't wrong per se. but the society around it needs to match up to that level of surplus. we're shown 3 guys and a grill who grow all the food for the community that's hosting dixon. nothing else, except the zombies. now to have at least alchol (admitting that for electricity they have a generator and if you want to eat you eat home bc the demidome isn't a restaurant) there should be people growing fruits or potatoes or anything really bc you can be a wonderful singer but if there's no food not only people won't have time to listen but you'll be to hungry to sing. anyway i feel like i'm digressing so back on the story:

we're 34 minutes in (48 total) of french people bending over backwards to accomodate daryl dixon's need. (like you know french people are just like that. that if you ask any european we do love to help americans, it's like second nature here, we respect them so much we don't want them to go back to their country asap and never come back. I think i understand why all those people are trying to give dixon a boat now. i hope they manage to get rid of him fast.) what was I saying? yes 34 minutes in AdNag shows up in the classiest outfit i've ever seen him in. everyone say thank you to tdw costume dept who saw him in that blue acrylic adidas zipper and said we can aim a little higher with this one. So it's been 12 years and Quinn is still crushing hard on Izzy, simp. and in the same sentence we find out he saved her after a suicide attempt we also discover that (spoiler), 1) he sort of tried to kill sister, and 2) HE FUCKED THE SISTER!! he's little jesus' dad!! smelling god-complex already, but that would be putting to much faith in the writers So for the privilege of getting rid of dixon, izzy would introduce laurent to his dad (who if you forgot, has tried to kill her sister not once but twice, although leaving her to die is a technicality, but i think the point was he REALLY wanted to not have sister around) dixon calls the "deal" off, ruining the lives of french people once more bc the evil militia guys are back, and this time instead of nuns they kill those 5 poor souls who made the mistake of inviting dixon in and not kicking him out right away. And you'd think that since dixon and izzy just had a fight and he's packing to leave alone in the night he'll take this opportunity to leave those people alone and stop endangering them. but no, he tells them to meet him later in a different place. Genuinely tho, does he understand 20+ people (mostly nuns) died bc the evil guys are after him? Is he asking team-jesus to follow him bc he cares or does he wants human shields? I'm really confused bc if i knew bad guys were after me SPECIFICALLY i wouldn't invite people i care about with me.

let's finish on a bright note: compared to the other 2 episode this one was well written. Izzy's actress is good, she's just given a very inconsistent character that is badass until the writers need her to be a sad womanTM. i don't think the writers put effort and depth in the character but surely she's doing what she can since she just got the vibes of the character instead of a backstory. I said bright note: great music. great plot twist (i mean maybe it happens a lot in other genres but I'm not used to secret father subplots). AdNag.

[funkymbtifiction]

hi, charity! i’d like your opinion on my possible type? sorry this is so long lol.

- i would say i’m pretty impulsive. while my mom is very structured and loves planning (which is very alien to me), i prefer to leave things until the last minute. i’d also rather do things, than talk about stuff. things that are exciting and adrenaline-pumping really appeal to me. <- Se / SP

- i do like daydreaming especially when listening to music, but after a while, i realize it won’t really happen and stop. <- Se / SP

- i find that i mirror others. if someone texts super enthusiastic, i do the same; if it sounds more distant, i do the same. when doing something in school, i look to other people to see if i’m doing an assignment right. <- attachment core, probably 9

- i hate crying, especially around others. if anything, my first emotion when i’m upset is to be angry. <- likely gut type (9)

when i get upset, i withdraw from others. <- withdrawn type + Fi (9)

if i feel bad in that moment, it’s hard for me to picture that i won’t feel bad in the future. <- ISFP (how I am feeling now is all that matters, all I can see, what if this lasts forever?)

i don’t like to explain what i’m feeling and actually find it difficult to <- Fi

but when it really gets bad, i do seek out other people to talk about my problems. <- attachment, could be 9 or 6.

- i can be passive during conflict with friends. i’d rather have everyone get along, so when someone’s fighting with another, it bums me out that we all just can’t hang out. i like to keep things lighthearted and if it gets too serious/tense, i get uncomfortable. <- more 9

- i’ve chosen to taken up a major that my parents really wanted me to do, not that i actually wanted to do it. <- 9 "going along" with other people's agendas

it’s very difficult for me to think to the future, such as schools i’ll have to transfer to next semester and what i’ll have to do to prepare for that. thinking about the future in that way makes me feel anxious, since it’s not something that’s tangible right now. <- weak Ni

- it’s difficult for me to brainstorm or think of something random in an instant. <- no Ne

- i constantly debate with my mom about her political and religious beliefs. it’s not that i’m dismissing it, but she always takes it personal. there’s just so many logical inconsistencies in the religion i was raised in that i question, but i do know that religion is mainly to have faith in something. otherwise, you’d feel hopeless. <- doesn't mean you're not a 9

- if i’m in a situation i don’t like/enjoy, i immediately try and find a way out. i tend to run away when things get difficult. <- more 9

- i hate feeling like i’m doing nothing with my life. i compare myself to my peers a lot and sometimes even lie to make myself look better, such as about romantic relationships, grades, and stuff (nothing too crazy lmao). i also don’t like doing nothing in general, i have to constantly be doing something and feel like i’m being productive. <- strong Se and a strong 1 wing (super ego, I need to accomplish stuff and not be lazy!)

- i feel like i have a grey type of thinking rather than black and white. i can see all sides, so it’s hard for me to strongly choose one. i can even empathize with the villain sometimes. <- 9 core.

ISFP 9w1.

[cheekygreenty]

Little Witch - Part 10

The Darkling x Reader

*I’ve changed this part like 5 times so if there’s any inconsistencies I do apologize 😝

In a perfect world, you and Aleksander would have spent the day in his luxurious bed surrounded by his soft silk sheets. You felt an overwhelming feeling to open up to him, to tell him everything that happened to you since you saw him last, nearly a century ago, but life has a way to ruin perfect opportunities.

Wars didn't take breaks or vacations, they got more deadly as time went on and each side got more nervous as more people gave their lives to the cause. A solution was necessary and from your understanding, Aleksander still had the same plan as he did all those years ago he just had a different way to go about them. No doubt Alina was at the center of them.

You had business to attend to too. The first on the list was a meeting with the council. The King and his advisors were to be there to 'greet' you with open arms, but you were sure you'd have to put on a quick performance of your abilities to satisfy their curious minds.

Maybe that's why he gave me the shadows, to ensure my position. You quickly brushed off the thought. It didn't really matter to you why he did what he did. You had your shadows back. He claimed protection, but you knew there was a different reason behind it as well. It seemed too quick and too easy in your opinion but who were you to judge what kind of trust he truly had in you. You felt comfort that you always had piece of him wherever you went.

On a lighter note, you could finally wear a black kefta. The thought itself had you quickly leaping out of his bed and skipping to your chambers in a mere robe through the secret passages of the Palace. You didn't want anybody to see you leaving his quarters, not in the state you were in. You needed to grab a Healer and get rid of those very visible marks on your neck that Aleksander took his time creating. He intended to mark you as his own but jokes on him, you never wanted to belong to anybody but yourself.

Time passed and servents scurried in and out of your chambers, carrying information from here there and everywhere. You were already overwhelmed with tasks and your position wasn't even announced to the Palace yet. You were still the mysterious Grisha that served with the Darkling, not for.

Your vanity was covered in papers and reports in handwriting you had trouble reading and your bed had maps strung across it. Aleksander truly meant it when he said he would get you started right away and share his responsibilities as soon as he got the chance.

When the time finally came, you were escorted to the Grand Palace with Aleksander walking right next to you. The conversation was devoted to work and nothing else, Fjerdan intel, rumors of West Ravka and Zlatan, and upcoming skiff journeys but you didn't mind. You were damn good at your job, having started out in the First Army and then joining the Second Army had given you experience not even the General had, it's what made you the first pick when dealing with plans involving otkazat'sya soldiers, they respected you. I wonder if they will now.

You had spent 3 years in the First Army once upon a time. You came from a wealthy merchant family, a family full of drunks and abusers and cowards. You gave up the feeling of a full stomach and duck-feathered beds for the rations of the army once your mother admitted to you being a bastard and not worthy of the family name. What a shame. Look at me now.

You never knew what you could do, but a slip-up with a Tidemaker had you served to the Darkling on a silver platter. He was meaner then, more unforgiving. Your years spent with him after that had changed him, made him better in your eyes. You fell for him, hard, even though there was so much death and destruction in his wake. When you love somebody, it’s easy to see past all of the nasty stuff and focus on whatever is left of the good and Aleksander still had an abundance of if.

You could still remember his cold stare as he asked you what the hell you were. After pleading with him that you didn't know and his Heartrenderer confirming it, he whisked you away to the Little Palace where soon enough you had become his equal, if not his superior.

'I actually wanted to ask you something about one of the Grisha in the Palace. I seen her with Alina, red-hair, big blue eyes... she wore a white kefta?' You said as you wlaked down a mirrored hallway in the Royal building.

'Oh, that's Genya Saffin. She works for the King and Queen.' He said with an underlying tone of irritation.

'What does she do? She wears a white kefta so I'm just curious'

'She's a tailor. Member of the Corporalki. She should be wearing red, I know. But trust me the time will come' He ushered us both into a guarded room of glitering gold and pearly white walls. So tacky. I could make out the king slumped in an overdone throne-like chair.

'Moi tsar' you and Aleksander bowed much to your distastes. You hoped nobody had seen the brief look of disgust wash over your face as the Lanstov King rose and gave his advisors a raised eyebrow, signalling to you. A man wearing a navy uniform looked at you like a piece of meat ready to be devoured. I'm gonna throw up.

'Deputy General Y/L/N is it?' He took your hand in his own sweaty one gave it a wet kiss. 'You Grisha are always easy on the eyes aren't you?'

You took a step back and cleared your throat. 'Yes, Moi Tsar, it is an honour to make your acquantance' You tried so hard to keep your fists at your sides.

'And what can you bring to the war table, apart from the newest fashion' He let out an obnoxious laugh and his advisors followed. They all looked smug and spoiled. None of them had any idea what the real world looked like and yet had the audacity to sit this council. I'll show them what it means to be powerful.

Aleksander stepped away to the side and gave you a nod. You slowly unravlled your fist and plunged the room into darkness while simultanseoly blowing a strong wind throughout the space, letting papers fly in all directions and the fire go out. You relit it, and every candle in the room. The man in the navy unifrom got the runt of your powers, as you slowly medled with his heart until he breathed a worried laugh 'Stop it Girl'.

But you didn't stop, you carefully stared at the chair the man sat in and pushed it just enough for him to let out a yell. You accidently let out a chuckle that was meant to be in your head. You felt Aleksander move toward you 'All right, that should be enough' He said visibly amused too. You let it all drop.

'It's Deputy General to you' You looked at his fearful face that tried to cover by fixing his jacket and whiping away invisible dust off of his shoulder.

'I must say I am impressed. With the Sun-Summoner and... you, we will have West Ravka and the surroundings begging for our alliances.' He sat down on his chair once again and pointed to an empty one across from him and to the right of Aleksander, who unbeknownst to you had already seated himself.

'Please, Deputy General, do take a seat, we have business to tend to'

****

A painful 2 hours later you and Aleksander walked out of the Grand Palace. You had a headache and your hands hurt from clentching them so hard.

'I'm assuming you sitting the King's meetings for me is off the table now?' Aleksander mused and all you could do was give him a side-eye.

'I think I want to kill him'

'In due time'

You weren't even surprised. If he didn't do it himself you definitely would have taken one for the team. That man is unbearable; like a child in a grown man's body.

As you wallked into your home, Aleksander gently took hold of your wrist and pulled you in the direction of his quarters.

'Come'

Your head was pounding too much to say no so you obliged. The hallways were bare of people, not a Grisha in sight.

You reached his war room doors and walked in after him. He pulled out a map and laid it down.

'I've sent out a First-Army search for the Stag.'

You paused. The headache suddenly gone. Morozova’s Stag. He had tried once before and failed. The weeks following his failure sent him into a frenzy, he questioned Morazovas journals and almost burned them all, but you had gotten to him last-minute. You never doubted the stag to be real. You just never believed he would use it. He's powerful on his own unless- it's for Alina.

You audibly sighed and leaned your back against the table. Alina.

'Does she want it?'

'Does that matter?'

‘Of course it matters!’ You scorned but he stayed silent.

You turned to look at him and whispered 'What are you planning this time?' He had been dropping hints here and there, but so far there was no plan you knew of. 'I can't help you if I don't know the plan'

'No. You're better of not knowing anything. I can't lose you again' you turned you head and looked at his side profile.

'But you need me. I'm powerful, I can lead an army'

'If anything happens you can take over for me then, Deputy.' He cocked a sad smile and left a lingering kiss on your forhead before he left you standing in the war room alone and confused.

Part 11

Taglist

@theonelittleone @searching-for-gallifrey @0-artemis @lostysworld @xceafh @fire-in-her-veinz @patdsinner33 @cleverzonkwombatsludge @wizardwheezes @aleksanderwh0r3 @tomhollandisabae @hotleaf-juice @justmesadgirl @exo-1204 @houseofdupree @oberonpascal

[lossie92]

21-tbrm

I really love outsider pov, so I love imagining what other people think of like tbrm being a total bamf.like his jutsu inventions,his ration sword,his prettiness,just him in general.

Hello there! 😄

Hmm I gotta admit I don't really like reading/writing BAMF. I like characters to be badass, yes, but not in the way BAMF usually handles it. In a lot of cases, the character's core traits are completely erased or so overblown they stop resembling themselves and instead read very OOC to me. In case of Tobirama specifically, I find it kind of hilarious how a lot of writers make him into this superhuman being that can do everything and never makes mistakes, and is just this perfect robot with no emotions. It makes him seem so fake that I can't take it seriously or find much enjoyment in reading such stories.

For Tobirama, I like it when he is aware of his own limitations and I really like it when he sucks at doing things. In my fics, he can barely do any healing and has zero talent for cooking, he fails regularly at inventing stuff (because guess what, experimenting is a process and sometimes you don't succeed at it despite working on a project for years), he is mouthy and too honest for his own good, he is shit at taking care of himself, he doesn't always win or come out of the fights unscratched... These are just a few of the most prominent characteristics that I like to include to make him seem human.

And no, I'm not saying I'm the best at writing him the way I like to read him or that the way I write him is better than how others do it. It's just an example to illustrate my point.

Seriously, from a literature major here: Characters need flaws to be likeable and feel real, people. Actual flaws. Not just quirky traits that only emphasise how strong and awesome they are. Make your characters too proud, make them reckless, make them selfish, make them self-absorbed, make them mean, make them blunt, make them assholes, make them struggle and fight. I don't want to see more and more of this "can do no wrong" approach. I'm honestly tired of it.

I hope it doesn't come off as mean or too aggressive. I just have an Opinion about this (in case you couldn't tell lol). Also, my mind just works this way. I’ve studied literature for way too long and spent way too much time analysing the shit out of things to be able to read stories without going into Editor Mode. Which is a shame, honestly... 😞

One thing I have to totally agree with you on is his prettiness. Though his character design is very inconsistent imo, it's hard to argue that he's a very pretty man, which is part of the reason why I love drawing him so damn much 🥰

-

Character ask meme

[five-rivers]

Orb/Reanimation

Another part of Doorways!  Link to series here.

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“What’s his name again?” asked Danny, picking at the hem of his shirt.  Today had been… stressful, for a number of reasons.  Partially the long drive and the disastrous breakfast stop, but also the fact that they were driving to meet a guy who was possibly:

a)       Vlad Masters version 2.

b)      A horrible hole in reality that would try to kill him.

c)       Possessed, like the Keens.

d)      Using ghost stuff without knowing it was ghost stuff.

e)      Messing around with ghost stuff while knowing it was ghost stuff, but without any of the skill to keep it from messing him up in turn.  

f)        Crazy in some wonderful, unforeseen way.

Or, finally,

g)       Mom and Dad’s one and only normal friend.  

Danny really wasn’t holding for the last one, if he was being honest.  After all, unlike Marianne, this guy had been part of the Paranormal Research Club.  

Okay, maybe there were other, positive, options.  It was completely possible for someone to be weird or crazy and not be evil or even particularly threatening.  Most ghosts were like that, in fact.  

Still.

“Frank Stone,” said Dad, cheerfully.

“If he turns out to be a Dr. Frankenstein type, I quit,” groaned Jazz.  “Just so you know.”

“You won’t quit,” said Danny, with complete confidence.  

“He is a doctor,” said Mom.  “He was studying biology when we met him, for his undergraduate degree.”

“I quit; I’m telling you.”

“If you were really quitting,” reasoned Danny, “you’d just open the door and jump out.”  He was pleased that Jazz was taking her turn as the resident overdramatic teenager.  She carried that burden only rarely, but it did seem like long trips in the GAV really brought it out.

Maybe they made her remember the whole Youngblood thing.  Who knew? Not Danny.  

“I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle. That’s more of a ‘you’ thing.”

“I can’t really dispute that,” said Danny, remembering all the times he had, in fact, jumped out of a moving vehicle. “In my defense, I can fly.”

“Why you can fly completely negates that as a defense.”

Danny held up a finger.  “Okay, so, first off, reality is not a moving vehicle.”

“Anything can be a moving vehicle, depending on your reference frame.”

“I agree on the moving part, but I dispute the vehicle part.  Vehicle comes from the Latin vehiculum, which is ‘a means of conveyance.’ Reality is not a means of conveyance. Ergo, it cannot be a vehicle.”

“Not so fast, brother dear.  Words change meaning over time.”

“Yeah, but that’s still what vehicle means,” said Danny.  “Unless you’re doing the medicine definition, anyway.  I think.”

“Reality is a metaphorical vehicle.”

“Well, if it’s metaphorical, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s moving.  Does it?”

“I’m… not sure.”

“I think this is the place!” exclaimed Dad, pulling into a parking lot.  “Golding City University Medical Research Lab.”

“He doesn’t live here,” said Danny, slowly, “does he?”  They weren’t ambushing this guy at work, were they?  Even if he did turn out to be just as bad as all of Mom and Dad’s other friends, that was kind of mean.  

(Except, the Keens had been acceptable, once they were no longer possessed, and even the ghost possessing them hadn’t been too terrible.)

“He’s in the building behind the lab,” said Mom. “They let the teachers live on-campus, here.  He’s expecting us, anyway.”

Right.  Because they had called ahead, giving warning to their potential enemy.  Curse you, common courtesy and sundry social conventions.

Jazz was glaring at the small name sign on the building, which was just barely visible through the rain.  “Golding City University,” she said, eyes narrowed.  

“Uh, is something wrong?”

“Frankenstein,” she said.  

“Um,” said Danny.  He looked more closely at the name.  “Golding City.  Ingolstadt.” Oh, no.  Now he was glaring at the name, too.  Because Jazz was right, and it would be his luck.  Their parents’ luck.  Whatever.  

“Do you feel anything?” asked Dad.  

“No,” said Danny.

“Well,” said Mom.  “We’ll have to run a bit, try to stay out of the rain.  It’s too bad there isn’t a closer parking lot…”

“I could also just make us all intangible,” said Danny.  

“What?”

“I could make us all intangible.  I do it all the time to miss the rain when no one is looking too closely.”

“Huh,” said Mom.  

“It isn’t as if my powers disappear when I’m not fighting ghosts,” said Danny.  “I get to use them for other things.”

“I know, I know, it just seems… petty.”

“Petty is one of the best words to describe ghosts with,” said Danny.  

.

Frank Stone did not look like a Frankenstein. Not the monster, and not the ‘doctor.’

(Because Victor Frankenstein had not, in fact, become a doctor, had he?)

He was actually pretty average looking.  The same age as Mom and Dad, of course. Brown hair.  Glasses.  Skinny, but not that skinny.  Could Dr. Stone rob a grave?  Probably. But carrying the loot away without some mechanical advantage was probably out.  Unless it was old loot.  Dried out. Maybe just bones.  

Corpses were heavy.  

(No, Danny was not going to elaborate.)

Dr. Stone appeared to be somewhat confused about why Danny and Jazz were there.  Evidently, Mom and Dad had managed to give the man the impression that they wanted to fund his research with the fortune they had inherited from Vlad.

Which, incidentally, had been inherited by Danny, who couldn’t really do much with it until he was twenty-five.  Not that he was particularly keen on funding… Whatever it was that Dr. Stone was researching.  

Maybe that would be different if he could tell what Dr. Stone was talking about.  Danny wasn’t stupid, far from it, and had a good background in any number of esoteric subjects, but, well.  It was hard to rival an adult lifetime of learning and research.  Especially when he didn’t have any context.  

Mom and Dad’s briefing on Dr. Stone had generally focused on what he had been interested in as a member of the Paranormal Research Club, not his true field of study.

“Oh,” said Mom, suddenly, “this is about your organ transplant project, isn’t it?  You really need to provide more context.  When you just jump right in like that, even we’ll get lost!”

Okay.  Danny felt better.  

“Well, yes,” said Dr. Stone.  “I have been working on this off and on since college, you know how it is.  I know you kept up with that portal business!”  He flashed a nervous smile and set his coffee mug down on his coffee table.  It made a soft chinking sound against the glass.  “But the university gave me a grant, Vladco’s been donating some supplies—From their chemical division, mostly—and I’ve been having a lot of success!  I can’t wait to show you.  We’ve actually got a few specimens in near-stasis right now, all from mice.  We’re going to be implanting one tomorrow.  See how it functions.”

“Have you implanted any before?” asked Mom, leaning forward.  

“A few, but, well.  I can’t say they were resounding successes.  The most recent subject only lasted a few days… Although, that is better than the first! We’ve been adjusting some of our ratios.”

“Say, Frank,” said Dad.  “What chemicals are you using for this, anyway?  I know you’re using them in conjunction with low temperatures, but keeping crystals from forming in the flesh—”

“Yes, yes, that’s always been the problem with cryogenics,” agreed Dr. Stone.  Then they dove back into jargon and technical language.  

Danny glanced sideways at Jazz, uneasy.  Chemicals.  From Vladco. Yeah.  Not suspicious at all.  

He leaned over.  “Ten dollars says that he’s using ectoplasm to reanimate dead bodies.”

“I’m not taking that bet.  Do you feel anything weird from him?”  Jazz whispered back.  

“Weird, yes, but…”  Danny bit his lip.  “I’m not sensing any… doors.  Or ghosts.”

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “So, when we do find his mad science lab full of dead body parts, what do we do?”

“Well…  Nothing? As long as they’re legal dead body parts, I guess.  You know, from organ donors, or people who donated their bodies to science.  I mean…”  He shrugged.  “You’ve read Frankenstein, too.  And met Ellie.”

“Hm.  True,” said Jazz.  “I have to check my biases.  I’m still quitting, though.  As soon as we find his Frankenstein stuff.  Just so you know.”

“No, you aren’t.”

Jazz just sighed.  

.

Danny walks silently through the halls of the research facility.  True, Dr. Stone was planning on giving his family a tour of his workspace first thing tomorrow and had implied that other researchers would be doing the same, but Danny believed in being prepared.  

Well.  Sometimes. He was allowed to be inconsistent and contradictory.  Like any teen, he was still learning how to exist.  

Maybe he should stop comparing himself to ‘any teen,’ though.  It was beginning to feel dishonest, even in his own head.  Even though, technically, it was true.  

Anyway.  

This place was kind of creepy.  At least, he presumed a normal person would find it creepy. Too bad he didn’t know any normal people.  Sam would think it was cool.  Tucker would be freaking out because it was a medical research lab.  Ancients, Danny was as bad as his parents.  

It did have a number of features that one would typically only find on the set of a horror movie, however, so he felt fairly confident in his assessment of its creepiness.  Also, he had encountered at least five different crimes against nature and sanity (it took one to know one), and he hadn’t even gotten to Dr. Stone’s lab yet.  

He was impressed.  He hadn’t expected such a high concentration outside of Amity Park or Vlad’s hideouts.  

At the thought of Vlad, Danny drooped. Yeah.  He still wasn’t over the stupid fruitloop.  Still hated the fact that he had died.  

Back to the crimes against nature.  Ectoplasm was definitely a component, if a small one. Hard to get things to glow that precise, reality bending shade of green otherwise.  Also, well.  Danny can sense ectoplasm.

And…  Now he was in a room of jars full of diluted ectoplasm and… He sniffed. Formaldehyde?  He frowned and decided the number, size, and arrangement of jars was suspicious.  He walked around the table.  Yep. That was in the outline of a human body. Yep.  

Honestly, this wasn’t any more alarming than the living mice impaled with various glowing needles, or the disturbingly brown heart beating in a fish tank a few rooms back.  It was, also, significantly less alarming than the prosthetic face (mainly because, dang, that thing looked realistic), the (fresh) skeleton someone had been injecting ectoplasm into (yikes), and the weird flesh… blob… thing that someone had just left out in their workspace.  

Still.  This was another point for the ‘someone is building a Frankenstein’s monster in this building’ theory, and Danny had kind of been hoping that he was wrong.  

He walked out of the room, on alert for random murderous corpse monsters (or sad corpse monsters that needed a shoulder to cry on, a restraining order against their creators, and a loving home).  Or mad scientists.  Because, at this point, he was fairly certain that everyone who worked here was crazy, and not necessarily in the fun way Mom and Dad were.

He was glad they had decided to sleep in the GAV and ignore Dr. Stone’s invitation to stay in his apartment.  

Dr. Stone’s office was just next door.  His lab, just beyond that.  Danny approached cautiously, his ghost half on high alert, and his deeper self stirring uneasily.  

He laid a hand flat against the door, and that stirring became wakefulness.

Crimes against nature.  Hubris.  Pride.

Superbia.  It had to be.

A hole.  A wound.

Well.  This was fast.  Even with the Keens’ list of Paranormal Research Club members they had encountered while possessed, Danny hadn’t expected to find another thing like Gula so quickly.  

He hadn’t wanted to.  Despite his outward pessimism, he had hoped that there weren’t any more.  

After several frozen moments where Danny braced himself for an attack, he realized one wasn’t forthcoming.  The tear beyond the door had not noticed him, was not trying to consume him.  

So, he had a choice.  He could either try to deal with this alone, right now, or he could sneak away and tell his family what he had found.  Both choices had pros and cons.  

Before even a second had passed, Danny was easing away from the door.  He hadn’t quite promised to share if he felt anything strange, if he had detected anything bad, but…  It was a near thing, and he didn’t want to be dishonest with his family after they had been so accepting of all his… Stuff.  

Yeah.  Call it stuff.  Nice and generic.  Covers everything.  

Plus, his encounter with Gula had confirmed that he needed backup.  

He refrained from calling on his powers on the way out.  He didn’t want to draw attention.  The limits of the doors to the place which should not be mentioned were largely unknown to him.

Luckily, the doors weren’t alarmed, and he got back to the GAV without a problem.  He poked Jazz awake first.  

“Hey,” he said, “we’ve got a problem.”

.

“This portal is just… Sitting there,” said Mom.

“Yep.”

“In Frank’s office.”

“Well, I think it might actually be in the lab, but yes.  It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“Is Frank sleeping in his lab?” asked Dad, stroking the stubble on his chin.  

“No, I checked that before I went in,” said Danny. “He’s in his apartment.”

“You just… broke into his apartment?” asked Mom.

Danny shrugged.  “I didn’t break anything,” he said.  “But, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, it looked like Mom was about to argue or scold him, but she shook her head.  “Alright, then someone else is in his office.”

“Maybe.  I’m not sure if these portals need a person attached or not.  Using person in the very loosest of senses, because…”  He made a gesture he hoped would be interpreted as a soul being forcibly removed from a body without killing the body.  

“You don’t think it’s in the, um,” Jazz also made a vague gesture.  

“You mean the hypothetical Frankenstein’s monster he’s made?  Yeah. I think that’s likely.  Also, judging from the sheer amount of, um, weird stuff in the other labs, I’d say it’s influencing everyone and everything around it, too.”

“Is that a thing it can do?” asked Mom.  

“I mean, I can do that,” said Danny.  He paused.  “’I’ in this case being the portal.  Yeah.  That’s why Amity Park is so…  Amity Park.”

Mom breathed out, slowly.  “Sweetie, trust me on this, Amity Park was strange long before we made the portal.

“Well, yes?” said Danny, not seeing what that had to do with it.  “So?”

“So, that strangeness couldn’t be caused by the portal.”

“Mom.  I’m—It’s a hole in reality.  Do you think it’s going to obey the laws of cause and effect?  You went to Amity Park because it was already a ‘thin spot,’ right?  I was already there.”

Mom looked vaguely ill.  

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “Let’s table that discussion for right now.  What are we going to do about this?  Break in?  Wait for our ‘tour’ tomorrow?”

“I don’t like the idea of waiting for Dr. Stone to give us a tour,” said Danny.  “I don’t want to give them time to prepare for us.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re here for, though,” said Dad.  “Does he?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny.  “I can’t read minds.”

“Yet,” added Jazz.

“Do you think he even knows about the…”  It was Mom’s turn to enter the gesturing game.

“Let’s just call it a hell portal for the sake of communication,” said Danny, despite the fact that the term did not do the actuality justice.  “Or Superbia for this particular one.  I think this must be Superbia, anyway.”  He didn’t want to imagine the possibility of even more of these things out there.  

“I’m not sure how he couldn’t notice that something strange was going on,” said Dad.  “Even if he was using ectoplasm and other supernatural elements in his research, we gave him a good grounding in what to expect from ectoplasm in college.”

“Yeah,” said Jazz.  “But not everyone is like you and Mom.  Your college days were over two decades ago.”

Something moving in the dark and rain beyond the GAV windows, catching Danny’s eye.  He pushed past his family to get a better look, blinking to adjust his eyes.  

“Heck,” he said.  “We have a mob.”

“What?” exclaimed Dad, rushing to the console to turn on the GAV’s exterior floodlights.  

They illuminated Dr. Stone and a crowd of college and graduate students quite nicely.  Their eyes reflected a dim red.  The GAV was, as far as Danny could see, surrounded.

Very briefly, the thought of gunning the GAV and crashing through the crowd crossed his mind.  It was just as quickly dismissed.  

He didn’t know what the line between influenced and mind controlled was, or how easily Superbia could cross it.  It was even possible that the ‘hell portal’ could vault over both of those and land directly in possession.  

“Ghost shield?” suggested Danny.  

“Will it do anything?” asked Mom.  

“Won’t hurt,” said Danny with a shrug.  

Mom flipped the switch.  

“What are we going to do?” asked Jazz, softly. “Wait them out?”

“Realistically,” said Danny, “we don’t have enough food and water to do that.  With this many people, they could take turns watching us.”

“Call the police?” suggested Maddie.  The other three turned to look at her.  “They are still human, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, frowning.  “But I don’t know how much, um, agency they have right now.  If we were in Amity, I’d say sure, our police understand, mostly, but…  Also, bringing extra hostages into this might not be a good idea.”

“If it’s the campus police that would get called, they might be affected, too,” said Jazz.  

“They have campus police?  How do you know?”

“This college sent me a brochure once.”

“Right.  Um.  I could always just fly us out of here,” said Danny.

“Assuming they don’t have ranged attacks,” said Mom, dubiously.

“Hm.  Yeah.  I think I could lift the GAV, and then we could just leave the shield on.”

“Assuming the shield does anything.”

Danny shrugged.  “I can always just try to fight them outright.  I’d prefer not to do that, though.”

Mom inhaled as if she were about to say something but was cut off by a loud noise from outside.

“Jack~  Maddie~ I know you’re in there.”  That was Dr. Stone’s voice, warped by a megaphone speaker.  “Why don’t you come out and see what I’ve done?  I dare say I’ve exceeded even our wildest dreams from college.”  A long pause.  “I even made a portal…  Weren’t you trying to get one of those?  Isn’t that what got good old Vlad hospitalized?”  There was laughter.  Too much laughter.  

The mob was laughing, too.

Superbia.  Pride.

Danny knew what he wanted to do.  He wanted to walk out and deal with the threat that was grating on his every sense.  But…  He knew that prideful actions were contraindicated under the present circumstances.  

Influence.  Right. How much could Danny be influenced?

How much could his family be influenced?

He looked up at his parents, seeking guidance. They seemed uncertain, too.  

“I didn’t destroy any lives- I made new life. New life!  Powered by an interdimensional portal, oh, yes…  Can you imagine the application?  Can you imagine a new world?”

“Okay, he didn’t seem like this in the apartment,” muttered Jazz.  “We have human nonlethal weapons, right?”

“Still have to worry about running people over,” said Danny.  He looked back at the lab building.  “We could try to cut this off at the source.  They aren’t protecting the building.  They’re using it as part of their perimeter.”

Eyes turned to the dimly lit building.  

“We can cover you,” offered Dad.  

“I don’t like this any better than you flying off with us,” said Mom.  “But…  It offers a more permanent solution.”

Danny should have gone after it when he was in the building the first time.  Well.  Time only rewound for one ghost, and that ghost wasn’t him.  

Unless he counted…  Never mind.  The point was, despite all his other wonderful and troubling features, Danny couldn’t go back and change a decision he’d already made.  Agonizing over it was a waste of time and brain power.  

Dad got behind the wheel.  Jazz crawled up into the well-disguised turret.  Maddie manned the other weapons.  

Danny stood at the door, ready to run, ready to transform as soon as he was through the shield.  

Family bonding activities.  So much fun.  

.

The mob attacked before he got the door open. He still made it to the building.

.

Danny didn’t bother with doors or windows or halls. He remembered what floor Dr. Stone’s office was on, and, now that he was sensitized to it, he could feel Superbia. He went through the walls, straight as an arrow.

(He wondered, briefly, if he was being as bigoted as he’d often felt his parents to be.  If he was ascribing more evil to the portals to the Red Country than was warranted. If he was simply holding up a dark mirror and seeing what he feared from himself.)

(But no.  He did not command like that.  He did not force his people to assemble armies in the night or attack people.  He kept them safe.  He had rules.)

The lab was awash in sick red not-light that burned in Danny’s mind.  It was barely physically perceptible, more present in senses that couldn’t translate to human terms than anything to do with Danny’s eyes, ghostly or not.  

In the center of the lab, on an operation table, was a stitched-together corpse.  Perhaps, under other circumstances, it would have been a very pretty corpse.  A young woman with long dark hair and broad shoulders.  

Its chest had been torn open.  Half-in half-out of the cavity was a red orb, the source of the not-light, like some sick imitation of a ghost core.  

(It reminded Danny of Freakshow’s staff, and he realized that he never did find out where that horrid thing had come from.)

They had been trying to make something like Danny.

He felt like he had eaten those blood blossom pancakes.  

Danny gritted his teeth and let his light, white-green and clear, fill his hands.  Ectoplasm fought against the miasma in the air, an oddly purifying presence. It wasn’t enough to chase away the wrongness.  This wasn’t his space.  

The fight against Gula was different.  Both he and it had been within nominally living bodies.  They had been next to the heart of Danny’s territory, his home ground.  Danny had been tricked and trapped, taken off guard, unable to use the tricks he had grown used to while fighting ghosts and Vlad.

(He could feel Superbia in his mind, pride urging him forward towards error.  Pride in his abilities, in his mind, in his family.)

Danny drifted sideways, watching.  Listening.  Other things in the building were stirring.  Sparks of wrongness growing and twisting, warping into fountains and springs.  This whole building was full of it.  Rotten to the bones.  It pressed against his teeth.  

Careful.  

He had to be careful.  

The orb shone.  

(Too much like Freakshow’s staff.)

(Influence, Danny remembered.  Just how close was it to mind control?)

Doing this as a human was impossible.  Trying to fight that as a ghost was unwise.

The always-open always-closed door that both contained and laid within Danny’s soul shifted.  So did the corpse on the table, its constituent parts sliding over each other gruesomely.  Death had lost its hold, lost its meaning.  The ghost that was Danny twisted, and he was too human, too alive.

Special little thing.  You think you can defeat us.

He could.  He could open himself and wash all this away in an instant.  He could burn with electric fire and the cold of deep space.  He could reach out.  The orb would be as dust under his hand.  

He didn’t move.  

In thinking you become…

Un-light burned up from the grooves in the tile floor. It didn’t reach the soles of his boots, didn’t reach his soul.  He gritted his teeth.  

US.  

YOUR VICTORY IS OURS.

“Wow, you picked the wrong person to use that strategy on,” said Danny, out loud.  Internally, he pulled on the delicate and frayed strands of reality that persisted even here. “I have so much imposter syndrome and anxiety that it isn’t even funny.  I know I can’t beat you.  Not here.”

But then, he didn’t have to.  

He found the right string and pulled.  He found the key and opened the door.  Death was in the room again.  Danny could move again.  Not so much the pile of flesh in front of him.  It was hard, it hurt, to keep hold of something like this, but half of Danny was this, was dead, even if he had far too many halves to ever be whole.  

Ice coated the floor, the tiles cracking under the sudden temperature change.  He dropped to the floor and was human.  

An impossible thing.  

And behind the human—

Well.  Danny didn’t have to defeat Superbia.  It wasn’t like Gula, didn’t have that strength, that experience.  He just had to make it so the things that would, could.  

(Danny had rules.  Some of them were to protect himself.)

He walked over to the orb.  Ultimately, it was just a representation, not Superbia itself. Still.  He put his foot down on it and slowly transferred his weight to it until it cracked.  Until it splintered.  Until it shattered.  Until he ground its dust under his heel.  

Then, the building collapsed.  Danny didn’t move, didn’t have to move.  He was a ghost again, floating in the air, exactly where he had been, all the floors having passed harmlessly through him.  

Outside, the faculty and student body of the college were sprawled in piles on the ground.  The GAV was, somehow, halfway up a tree.  A shockingly sturdy tree.  Several statues were in pieces.  

The sun was coming up.  

Danny put a hand to his chest and assessed himself. Yes.  Still here.  Still himself.  The Ghost Zone still sang in his bones, in his core.  He was still anchored in Amity Park.  Everything in order.  

This place, though… This place would be tainted for years, a thin spot forever.  He could feel it, now.  Why couldn’t he feel it before, when they drove in?

He shuddered.  Then he flew down to the GAV and knocked on the window.  Mom rolled it down.  

“Want me to fly us away to somewhere secluded before the cops get called and we get asked a bunch of awkward questions?” he asked.

Mom closed her eyes.  “Please do,” she said.

[whetstonefires]

Hi Whetstonefire. I have a question about the comic where Nightwing cheats on Starfire with Barbara: What happens directly after that? Does Starfire find out that Nightwing cheated on her? And, if so, how does she react? I've read online that (according to Marv Wolfman) Starfire is the opposite of everything Batman taught Nightwing to be and that Batman taught Nightwing to be repressed and cold. What did Nightwing contribute (emotionally) to the relationship between him and Starfire? (Cont.)

(Cont.) From what I can tell, from online, Nightwing was adamant about standards of mercy and monogamy - how do you think, if Starfire were to be written as her own character and not written around Nightwing and his emotional needs, she would handle and react to that? (This bit is an FYI for other readers: this is just speculation, not hate. Sorry about that.) Sorry about the questions! Have a nice day! 

Okay there are so many separate questions packed in here! I may miss some of them lol and I do not want to put in the hours it would take to produce an orderly response to all this, so this post is going to be a mess.

Initial query and important point: the cheating story was out of continuity. Like, literally, not just by ‘being rejected by the fanbase,’ it was just this weird retcon oneshot that seems to have been some sort of fuck-you to Nightwing or his fans or something. So no, it had no in-setting fallout lol. It, in more ways than most comics, didn't exactly happen.

It was just this weird thing where Dick hooks up with Babs before giving her a wedding invitation, which is both out of character for him in general and out of step with where he was leading up to the wedding--he was desperate to get married so they could have some Normal Stable Adulthood Happiness; the choice to recharacterize him as a fuckboy who regards it as a loss of freedom isn’t congruent, on much more than the level of principle.

As far as how Kori would feel about it, if she had learned...that is very hard to say. Apart from how it would require her to reinterpret everything about where their relationship stood at that point, the data is very unclear, and I don’t even have all of it. Gonna back up to cover some of the rest of the ask, get some context here.

So this actually brings up two of my biggest gripes with Wolfman’s NTT--weird Kori characterization and the weirdly negative interpretation of Batman as parent that backwashed heavily into other titles and influenced the character for the worse, in ways we're very much still dealing with today. 😩

The latter is pretty self-explanatory, though Wolfman’s take that the main thing Bruce taught Dick was repression does shed light on some writing choices and make others funnier. But Kori. Oh my lands.

So, item one, I wouldn't say that Kori is overall opposite Bruce, or even of his philosophy? There are just some very major points of opposition. She isn’t emotionally buttoned-down like at all, especially about positive feelings, although considered realistically with all the bullshit they’ve piled into her backstory she absolutely leans on repression to cope and stay positive, which makes her a lot like Dick actually.

To an extent, she was clearly written around foiling Dick’s Batman-derived traits in the same way that Robin was written to foil Batman, bright and glad and aerial. A Flamebird to his Nightwing in theme if not in name.

You could do some interesting stuff with that, and the bildungsroman aspects of this period of Dick’s life, like he has two roads forward in terms of how he’s going to define ‘adulthood’--does it necessarily require becoming more like his mentor-father, for good and ill, or can he make Kori in part a destination, as it were, and create an adult self that is derived from who he has always been as well as the man he’s modeled himself after?

To an extent I think this even was one of the things going on in ntt but like. Only a little bit.

(Given how much like Bruce Babs is in most of the ways Kori isn’t, especially once she’s Oracle, you could make a case for her as love interest being like. Symbolic of his not being in a rebellious phase? That gets weird and oedipal really fast tho lol.)

Okay stepping down one meta level lol, the thing about answering the 'what would kori' question here is that her character is deeply bound up in her culture, about which we are told and shown a great many contradictory things. Any attempt to read her as an independent character has to tackle not only the gender stuff you allude to and these inconsistencies, but how much of the sheer mess of her is rooted in racism.

'Fantastic' racism, technically, because Tamaraneans aren't real, but the 'taming the savage' narrative that kept surfacing between them and the language used in reference to it is just. The existing racism of presumably the writers, placed in Dick's mouth, and it's super gross. I hate it so much.

(I had a faint hope when they cast her for live action it was with a deliberate intent to directly tackle and better that history, but lollllllll nah. At least they didn’t double down in it tho! Can you imagine, with a black actress, in this day and age....)

So to predict and comprehend Kori, you have to make a lot of calls about Tamaran as a civilization. I like to slightly privilege stuff established earlier if there's no good reason not to, so while much is made over time of her inappropriate rage and the violence she was raised to normalize, I think what she says in her first appearance is good to keep in mind: in her culture, kindness is for friends and cruelty is for enemies. She doesn't understand why the Titans seem to have this backwards.

Kori is not a merciless person. She’s very empathetic, as a rule. With people she loves, she is self-destructively forgiving. That's not a trait only Dick benefits from--her family keeps betraying her in new exciting ways, and she keeps letting them.

Her arc of growing away from that habit is however greatly crippled by centering Dick in the narrative and by the awful 'civilizing' overtones that keep coming into it. When she comes back after the 1986 breakup, still married to Karras, she brings with her a commitment to doing things the Earth way--to eschew lethal force as more than a compromise with her friends’ values, but as a deliberate choice.

This deserved a lot more space and time than it got, and the fact that it didn’t get it is only somewhat due to her being subordinated to Dick and to general writing fail; a lot of it’s just the team book problems of everything happening to everybody all at once.

I mean, Dick’s journey later on to deciding he loves her enough to date her even though she’s married and it’s technically against his principles was packed into this absolutely heinous issue where he was inspired by a woman refusing to separate from her husband who’d just threatened to kill her and their kid with a knife, until being stopped by Nightwing. Because he’s apologizing for what he did.

This is his inspiration for accepting Kori’s marital status! It’s supposed to be heartwarming, as far as I can tell! Not heavyhanded messaging that this is a self-destructive terrible choice in which Kori will inevitably harm him somehow! This issue is pro ‘consensual open relationships under certain circumstances’ and also ���giving abusers another chance’ as expressions of love. Welcome to the 80s ig.

(Notable is that the wife in this issue was black and the husband and son both looked very white, so it’s probably her stepkid and she probably wouldn’t get to keep him if they separated; this is not even vaguely treated as a factor.)

Point is, everyone was getting too little space to actually go through the amount of development they were getting, and it was clumsily handled; it’s not just her.

In an overlapping period Gar processed his issues with his adoptive father with whom he constantly fought and their shared trauma over the rest of their family (the Doom Patrol) having died violently not long ago via a batshit several-issue storyline where Mento went crazy, created supermutants, and abusively mind-controlled them to attack the Titans. It is literally all like this.

Back to the infidelity thing, now. So much to unpack. So like I mentioned above, their first big breakup, while partially driven by Dick’s existing conflicted feelings about their different ideas about things like ‘killing in battle’ and ‘her identity and loyalties being tied up with her home planet,’ is explicitly over different takes on monogamy.

When Dick is breaking up with her, Kori makes it clear she thinks it’s totally reasonable to have both a husband and a love, since Karras also has someone he loves and they’re both fine with it, but the story doesn't really explain how nonmonogamy works on Tamaran, or even if it's practiced outside the context of political marriage. They do do a sort of...soulbond fusion dance...thing, as part of the ceremony, so marriage is definitely serious business. There are so many levels of cultural difference that get poor to no development.

But to return to the weird ooc retcon cheating story: because of this context, no matter what her personal norms are, Dick specifically casually sleeping with someone else would be something for Kori to be mad about, because of the hypocrisy.

Then there’s the Mirage Incident, which I haven’t read through properly and which was very poorly handled by the writers. Kori is upset about Dick having slept with someone impersonating her and there’s a general vibe of this being treated by Dick’s social circle as unfaithfulness even though he was in fact sexually violated by deceit; it famously sucks.

We still don’t learn a lot here about Kori’s ideas about monogamy, from what I have seen, because her focus is mostly on feeling like Dick doesn’t care about her enough or in the right way since he couldn’t tell the difference. Which is an understandable feeling, even if it’s not an appropriate reaction to have at him at this time.

What Nightwing contributed emotionally........hm. This is a mess, honestly; he was all over the map, and not just because of having Brother Blood in his head. I cannot speak definitively on this, it’s too inconsistent.

For most of their relationship, Kori was the more intensely invested one, the one to initiate and the one who was shown at length to be excited to come home at the end of the day to their shared apartment because her boyfriend was there to see and talk to. If we set aside his more egregious white male bullshit, Dick was pretty emotionally available most of the time, though? They were cute.

Since they split up a lot of ink has been spilled making him less into her in retrospect, but he was pretty invested--leaving her coincided with mental breakdowns both times, and it wasn’t even mostly because she was doing his emotional processing for him, because she wasn’t, although it’s fair to say he often fell into using the relationship as an emotional crutch. Kori was definitely doing the same thing though so...it wasn’t the most balanced relationship in fiction history, but apart from slight codependency and the racism, it was decent enough.

She gets more evenhanded development than most superhero love interests, honestly, because she was costarring in a team book. She had her own storylines. She had other friends.

Mostly both of them just needed some space to finish growing up and stop being retraumatized long enough to process some of the existing trauma better, and I think they could have gone on being good for each other for a long time.

[thefirsthogokage]

Why did you rage quit the rookie?

(this turned out longer then I meant it to be, but I kept remembering reasons why I hate this show now)

The writing went down the drain. Hard. I was so pissed because it started off well in season one. Granted, it had a couple big ridiculous things that happened, but overall it was pretty good. Especially for a freshman show. One of the best I'd seen in years.

Then season two came along and it became progressively/exponentially worse.

Obviously going for shock value over good content with extreme circumstances in most episodes, often not making sense (why the fuck did Nolan's son and his girlfriend go to that trailer park?)

poor plot lines with female characters (Lopez and Wes getting engaged after only being together a few months, Lopez trying out to be pretty damn toxic and "I was poor, you should have been happy you were rich" and "sorry you're embarrassed of me (which is the same abousive shit my mother would pull), Grace going back to her ex because they had a kid even though their marriage sucked and it was outlined earlier in the season that was a bad idea, Jessica killing that one guy and that was never followed through on and her being psycho and following Nolan around and that never being addressed, Chen never given psychological damage she should have absolutely had even of she did self-therapy, Rachel getting her "dream job" in NY and the writers couldn't even take the time to tell us what said dream job was.)

Poorly planned plots in general (stunningly so)

Most characters not feeling like a proper continuation of who they were in season one. Going a ong with that, Chen and Bradford being way too close basically over night when that isn't natural progression from season one

I was for Chenford after season one, but they escalated it in a very cheesy and non true to character way, which also happened way too quickly. So many of their interactions felt too romantically tinted when they shouldn't have been there yet. HEART EYES ALL THE TIME! Like, I stayed watching the show for them until I couldn't tolerate anymore. Then I tried staying for Nyla and just gave up because I hated the rest of the show so much

obvious lack of research (the serial killer with pathology that made no sense, never finding out the connection between him and the lady, the guy apparently also got a job a prison with a stolen social security number from a disabled person - both of which would have been flagged in a background check!!! Such a genuinely poor writing episode and the season just went even more downhill from there)

Nolan being the hero even more in most of the episodes, and his intellect or lack thereof being a plot device

not letting Chen actually suffer from PTSD like she should have and just had her basically quickly move on in an impossible way (I am including this twice, thank you)

throwing her into a relationship with a guy who was a jackass and went all "leave my woman alone" on Bradford when she absolutely didn't need help

Jackson going to a very public premiere with his actor boyfriend even though he was an active cop. What the actual fuck were they thinking with that? Jackson isn't that dumb, he would have never done that.

this show clearly is not keeping a a continuity or character bible of any sort, getting basic facts of their characters wrong (especially Tim, I just can't remember the specific thing that it was, but it could have been inconsistencies in his wounds. Now that I think about it, Chen said something about him getting shot more then once and stabbed and the only time we ever saw evidence of any injury was after he was shot in episode one. Which actually brings me to my next point...)

they never had Tim have a scar from his gunshot wound

Tim getting his 12-year-old-acting girlfriend out of trouble when she bats her eyes at him. He shouldn't have even been dating her in the first place. No way Tim would have ever dated a friend of his rookie. Completely unprofessional of him, in a way that was not believable for his character.

No way Chen could have been an undercover cop after that documentary episode. And if that episode was mean to be a stand alone, it should have never been in the show. That episode also had continuity issues, and that's not including the absolute insanity of whatever the fuck they did to Stirling. (That poor actor, he really wanted to come back and continue the story with his character and Jackson)

THE WHOLE FUCKING BULLSHIT TIMELINE AND PACING OF THE SHOW! examples: They made the stupid thing current to whatever the real world year was. The problem with that was they had an in-universe schedule set up. The first two seasons should have spanned from like October 2018 to October 2019, and yet, in the episode where Wes got stabbed (earlyish season 2), it was November 2019 when it should have been around like May, 2019. They said it was 2021 early in S3 when it should have never been around that time. Infact, it was supposed to be during their last 30 days of their rookie year, meaning THAT should have been October or November 2019. The time pacing of this show is so bad. They should have done a real time skip in season 3, instead, the first NINE FUCKING EPISODES WERE THOSE LAST 30 DAYS! And, according to someone else's math, because of the bullshit with the timeline, Lopez was pregnant for 11 months. Absolutely fucking insane. Timelines and timetables that are so thoroughly screwed up in a show that it's THAT obvious they are flying by the seat of their pants are just impossible for me to stand. That is so dumbfounding to see on any tv show and alone enough for me to rage quit. It's so bizarre they stuck to a timeframe in-universe, then so obviously screwed up what year it was every damn season at least once (in S3 2-3 times).

Just such piss poor writing. No real planning ability. No writing talent left in that writer's room after season one. Just people who throw words down on paper and hope that people will like it. Which so many people still do for some reason?

There are so many other things wrong with this show, but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. Granted, a couple are second hand because I stopped watching after the rookies did stuff with the DEA. I couldn't watch that. That was such and insane idea. OH AND THEM GOING ON A FUCKING SECRET OP? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!

And that's not including what I've heard was their "After School Special"-style take on fighting racism in the police force.

And I don't always pick up on these kinds of things specifically. I generally don't pick up on missteps like that in plot or timelines or whatnot or just things that even someone who doesn't have much specified knowledge in certain things should miss (the "job at a prison" thing I mentioned earlier). I'm good at telling the chemistry between actors, - or lack there of, - not the other stuff. When it's so bad I - of all people - am noticing things that are normally pointed out to me, a lot of fucking up is happening. In multiple departments. Like, normally when anything happens in other shows, it isn't as blunt, on the head, painfully obvious, and frequent as it has been in this show.

So, yeah, if you made it though my rant, congrats. If you don't get irritated with the show and bullshit that happens in it now, power to you I guess.

I really wished I could still hate watch this show, but it checked way too many "this is exceptionally poor craftsmanship: tv show edition" boxes for me to put up with it anymore. It was so promising at first, even with it's various hiccups (that I didn't notice until later on all of them) but I hadn't seen a show crash that hard in quality before. I mean, since then I had to experience the travesty that was Supernatural going from 15x18 to 15x19 and 15x20, but that was after I gave up on The Rookie.

Anywho, I would say I hope that answers your question anon, but I have little room for doubt that it didn't.

[hermitcraftheadcanons]

i feel like u mentioned having some kind of personal hc bout evil x at some point?? maybe it was another blog, just curious

Yeah, I do have one! It's a little bit hard to explain (and maybe a bit overboard with the lore), but I'll do my best:

TL;DR: Evil X is a past version of Xisuma who got consumed by the unlimited power of admin abilities. Due to timeline weirdness he developed differently than X did and never gained a moral compass.

Way, WAY too detailed analysis under the cut, if you're interested.

Disclaimer: I'm analyzing lore because I like to analyze lore, I am in no way trying to say anything about X as an actual person

So. The three main info sources we have on EX are his abilities, his characterization/personality, and the way X interacts with him. A lot of this stuff is pretty inconsistent in canon but if we're willing to overlook some bumpy patches we can get a few key points.

First of all, to me it seems like Evil X's power set is basically just admin abilities with a lack of moral limitations. He can summon other entities (minions, tnt, etc.), he can replace blocks with other blocks, he can summon lightening. These are all things you can do with commands: aka, things Xisuma himself could do but doesn’t (because self control and loving your friends and all that stuff)

Then, we have EX's characterization (which I'll be honest with you, isn't a lot). If we're going on purely canon information, he's usually portrayed as kind of immature. He does things seemingly on impulse with no backup for if plan A doesn't work, he tends to rely on brute force more so than strategy, and he doesn't really think ahead much. In my opinion, he's also portrayed as very lonely. On multiple occasions his plans relied on trusting an entity or entities (his minions, the voice in the Nether) that later betrayed him, and any time X has tried to be friendly to him he really seems to be in need of that connection and understanding. In general he just gives off the vibes of a lost and hurting younger person in need of some guidance and experience.

That brings us to how Xisuma interacts with him, which is very interesting. He's willing to do whatever it takes to stop EX if he's trying to destroy the server, but as soon as the immediate danger is no longer present, Xisuma shows kindness to EX startlingly easily. It's almost as if he knows somehow that the thing EX needs is just someone to understand him, to listen and help him see more constructive uses for the power he's found himself with. Or at least, he thinks he knows this. In the end X does seem to give up on that goal by banning him, but we'll get to that later.

Now, my own personal headcanon about admin powers is that they can be taught and learned, but some people are spawned in already having a natural affinity for them. I think that X was one of those people, and that Evil X is a version of him from way back when he was first exploring his abilities.

Imagine: having only just come into existence, and then having the power to create and destroy the very fundamentals of your world itself with a single typed command. In the beginning, the temptation to push that power more and more, to stretch it and see just how far you can go, just how effectively you can warp the universe to your will...it must have been overwhelming. (If you don't believe me, just look at the amount of tnt used by the average child in creative mode lol)

I think for the first few years of having his abilities Xisuma kind of let it go to his head. It's easy to distance yourself from every other living thing when you can destroy them so easily, easy to stop thinking of them as living.

Obviously in X's case he moved away from that stage. As much of a rush as this power was to use, he did not want a legacy of ashes. He eventually started learning new ways to use his power, ways that created instead of destroyed, and he found that he liked it much better. He started seeking out people he could connect with, trying to find his own humanity again. He built and protected and felt at home in the peace he'd made, for himself and the Hermits, his new found family. He swore he would never use his abilities like that again.

However at some point in the height of those early days of power madness, X did something that split the timeline. The universe fractured and created a parallel version of himself that never developed beyond that initial destructive stage. How and why Evil X crossed over to the main timeline is up to interpretation (I have a few ideas but this post is way too long already), but when he showed up X knew exactly who he was looking at.

Xisuma thought he knew how to save Evil X because he knew what he'd needed at that stage of his life: to find his humanity again. So, he tried to make a genuine human connection at every possible opportunity. He was always willing to fight if necessary to protect his friends, but whenever EX wasn’t posing an immediate physical threat, he would try his best to reach out, to give him a chance.

What he failed to realize, of course, was that by interacting with EX he'd just changed the timeline. Evil X is now not set on the same path as Xisuma: different events have happened to him, therefore he is turning into a different person. With that fatal flaw in mind, X realized it was not a guarantee that EX would ever move past the stage of power-drunk sabotage. I think Xisuma eventually decided that the risk to his friends and all they had built together wasn't worth the reward, and banned him. It wasn’t easy, but he finally had to accept that the person who’d been haunting him was no longer him.

Wow, that was a long post! I have to say I really do like the various brother or clone headcanons for EX, but I really like exploring the more original concept of an “evil self”.

Still, even my Evil Xisuma isn't necessarily "evil", or at least he doesn't have to be. He just spawned in with incredible power and no experience, and didn't really know what else to do with himself. It's awfully hard to know right from wrong when you have no moral frame of reference. However, if someone were to come along and offer him that frame of reference...say, a certain superhero... who's name starts with a W and ends with "ormman"...maybe he could still be redeemed :)

[ganymedesclock]

So... What do you think about revisiting Danny phantom in general? Revisiting the fandom I've noticed a lot of fanfic that have Danny's parents finding out his deal rather violently, or generally having more violence/angst than the original show..

I’m assuming you’re sending me this ask because of my recent burst of Danny Phantom art, so, it’s probably not a surprise to say I’m doing a certain amount of revisiting myself, and certainly not about to shame anyone else for it. It was a very dear cartoon to me in many ways and left some enduring hallmarks on my own writing, and I can absolutely understand people feeling the same way.

That said, as someone who’s been in this fandom for a while, albeit quietly- there certainly is a thread of macabre interest in fandom spaces, one I don’t always know that I agree with, especially when it comes to the Fentons.

My personal verdict on the Fenton parents specifically is I think they are not handled fairly by canon. This is a problem that Danny Phantom as a show shares with Fairly Odd Parents, though I would argue the Turner parents in FOP are quite a bit worse at this.

Roughly, I think how the Fenton parents are canonically depicted suffers from a phenomenon that affects many parts of the show: DP, as a series, has a bit of a sense of confused priorities between comedy and drama, and as a result, what’s 'real’ in-universe and what’s “just supposed to be a joke”. The kind of humor that DP tends to spring for is exaggerated or shocking behavior- it also tends to be a humor that hinges on the idea that other people are generally inconvenient to the main character. So humor-characterization is inconsistent here- Jack is negligent until it’s more inconvenient to depict him as overbearing (see: Girl’s Night Out and other cases he desperately wants to bond with Danny) he’s a recluse only loved by his wife until it’s more inconvenient to depict him as having an active social life (Masters Of All Time and that he and Maddie are going to a themed party so they’re dressed ‘weirdly’ in public)

A big victim of this is Jack’s sense that ghosts aren’t people and his desire to dissect them. Because here is the thing: it’s all talk, in the worst way. It hinges on the idea Jack- someone who knows enough of what he’s doing that along with Maddie and, in the past, Vlad- ripped two different holes in reality hard enough to permanently alter someone’s relation to undeath- has never seen a ghost before the series as he says in Mystery Meat.

The series has a big problem where it hinges on the Fentons’ inventions and expertise but also wants to treat them like idiots constantly. And if you notice how much I’m talking exclusively about Jack- that’s part of the problem. Maddie, in many ways, outside of episodes that throw her a bone, despite constantly being told by people she’s too good for Jack, is really treated as an extension of Jack. Masters Of All Time even suggests that her choosing Jack in the first place was just a path of least resistance between her two college friends, and she’d have married whichever one stuck around. 

The Fentons are not respected as experts, so Jack is given his ignorant line about dissecting a ghost. The Fentons need to remain exaggerated, ridiculous, an inconvenience to Danny- so they threaten his alter ego and point guns at him, but this is funny and not serious and not a reason to be worried about them as parents, because they are not on Danny’s level. Nobody is ever on Danny’s level. There is literally an episode called The Ultimate Enemy. The antagonist is an evil future Danny. The only person who could ever be Danny’s ultimate nemesis is Danny himself. 

And when the series stops milking the Fentons for jokes about how they’re so stupid and how Jack is an idiot and Maddie married that idiot but even she doesn’t respect him even though she loves him and dutifully follows him everywhere and god how can these people care about ghosts they’re so ignorant and out of their league- 

-then it kinda shuffles its feet awkwardly and goes, yeah. the Fentons love each other, and love their kids.

Yeah, Jack has framed photographs of Maddie, Jazz, and Danny on his personal workstation.

Yeah, in Mystery Meat Jack was seriously debating walking away from his lifework because it upset one of his kids. 

Yeah, every time in canon the Fentons find out Danny’s secret they’re immediately all in supporting him.

Yeah, even not knowing it’s Danny, Jack has an amiable conversation with him in Million Dollar Ghost and the ghost containment units designed by the Fentons get some jokes about that they’re a little cramped but they aren’t horrifying prisons of inhumanity- and as soon as Danny Phantom the ghost boy has a good point, Jack lets him go on purpose. 

Yeah, Jack is a competent ghost hunter who can take on Skulker and win as well as beat down the giant lake monster Skulker brought with him in Girls’ Night Out and would do this in a heartbeat, no jokes and no sidetracks, because that monster just chewed on his baby boy and nobody does that to his baby boy.

Yeah, Maternal Instinct is an entire episode of Maddie throwing hands with (or deceiving and manipulating) literally anything she thinks was responsible for getting Danny in this dangerous situation.

...And then the series says “but that’s not funny! Here, have jokes about the Fenton Stockades, that exist and have spikes and Jack wants to put his kids in them for time out, when the spikes apparently don’t hurt given Jack is not injured for being put in there. Here, have a joke about Jack attacking Jazz with a vacuum cleaner because he gets hellbent on the idea she’s possessed for no good reason. Here, have an uncomfortable joke about how badly Jack Fenton wants to vivisect a ghost while it screams. Funny funny funny. Why- why are you flinching?”

It basically creates a comedic situation where the show is constantly winding up like it’s gonna punch you- with the idea that the Fentons are bad parents and this has consequences for Danny and Jazz personally- and then laughs in your face if you flinch. It’ll never actually punch you- but it will sure keep swinging its hand really close to your face and laughing at your reactions.

This is, I’m just gonna say- one of the worst elements of the series, this weird relationship it has with “hahaha are we depicting an abusive family or not? ;)” where its actual point is that Jack Fenton is a person who should be shamed for being overzealous, for caring about this niche field, because nobody cares about ghosts! (unless the entire premise of the show does) Nobody wants to think about ghost science! That’s LAME! (unless Vlad does it)

So I think ultimately this creates a polarizing experience in the fandom. What part of this information do you take?

Do you take, say, my personal approach, which is: 

“Hey, so it’s pretty clear and consistent that the Fentons love their kids and wouldn’t hurt them. The Fentons are nice people. They can be obsessive or headstrong but there’s nuanced and salient ways to examine this in the basic framework that they care, both about their family specifically, and in general- and while I think they can have flaws or conflicts with their kids, and with ambient ghosts in the world, I really don’t think they’re in danger of torturing a sapient entity in their basement and it frustrates and annoys me that canon ‘makes a joke’ of them doing these things because it thinks they’re so incompetent that these things are not really malicious actions, when- whether or not you successfully shoot them, it takes a certain kind of person to point a weapon you know is dangerous at something that looks, and talks, like a fourteen-year-old, especially when you’re a parent who has probably at least once in your life worried about something happening to your kids, and the ghost of a teenager means something happened to someone’s kid, in a general sense.

So my end conclusion on the Fentons is I think they are being depicted in a kind of metatextual bad faith, that they are not cruel or malicious people, and in my personal take or understanding on the series, I’d massively dial down those elements, and if any remain, take them seriously as problems they have in their relationships with other people.”

Or do you take an approach more rooted in,

“If the Fentons are shown to be negligent parents they are negligent parents, I’m going to examine and depict them as that, and I find this very hard to forgive, so it’s going to have real and nasty consequences.”

Both are basically valid. The place where I tend to get a little uncomfortable is twofold:

First, I think sometimes people just really want some fictional tragedy to either create or consume, and to that end, you aren’t going to get much juicy drama out of the Fentons being reasonable people. This isn’t evil or unforgivable, but for me, it’s definitely my least favorite fannish content to create or consume. I’m no fan of angst for angst’s sake, and I feel like there’s enough misery and heartbreak in the world that I’m not interested in wallowing in it unless it’s got something interesting to say.

Second- and this is a point I’m gonna be saltier: A lot of abusive Fenton fics that refuse to forgive them for the poorer-taste jokes the series makes, simultaneously give Vlad a blank check, when he has done targetedly malicious things to Danny. 

Now- do I also have a more sympathetic read on Vlad, and feel like canon also gives him a bad rap? Yeah! But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say, “I can’t forgive the Fentons for stuff that was tagged onto them because canon thought it was funny, but I’m gonna editorialize Vlad’s depiction to lionize him as the ideal parent figure for Danny to run into the arms of.”

And the main reason I get so worked up in this, is I feel like Jack in particular (when Maddie is characterized as subordinate to Jack, following his cues, etc., and that’s its own demon) is... characterized as kind of a mocking caricature of traits that I personally recognize as an autistic and ADHD person.

Because the reality is? In many practical ways, I am Jack Fenton.

I like a bunch of weird stuff people find unacceptable or gross, like bugs

I’m hyperlexic (that means I talk, a lot)

Scatterbrained, forget words or where I left something or, sometimes, to do something important

Passionate and excitable including and especially in situations where it’s not normal, or expected, to have this much energy

I absolutely can forget birthdays, even for people I love dearly that mean the world to me! It’s horrible! There’s almost nothing I can do about it! My brain refuses to hold onto this information reliably and no amount of caring fixes it.

And being this way, living like this? My worst nightmare has always been that people think I either don’t care or that I’m just too much of a stupid, flippant buffoon to get right.

The thing about Jack is he’s “a person like me” and he’s “a person like me” who was designed to be a joke. We’re clearly expected to view him as untrustworthy, stupid, just like a big dumb dog of a man who barks in the wrong directions, who sometimes, when it counts, fetches a stick like he’s supposed to. Good job, Lassie. You got little Timmy out of the well.

And I am going to say with certainty and confidence that feeling like this is how people see me is the most unbelievably crushing feeling I have ever experienced in my life. That my excitement and passion means I’m unprofessional, stupid, don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s nearly painful for me, as an adult, to watch Danny Phantom because the show can never get off Jack’s case. And the few times it does, he hauls overtime arduously to make a difference, to help, to build something that will protect others, to put his own life on the line to stop hostile ghosts.

And immediately, then he goes back to being stupid stupid dog man. ha ha. why does his wife love him? no wonder his kids don’t ever want to be seen with him. no wonder his best friend is trying to kill him and he doesn’t even know, the big idiot.

(never mind that we see a scenario where he does know. and admits he would’ve forgiven Vlad anyway. but he can’t forgive Vlad hurting Danny.)

So to rein in this wild tangent: I’m not saying all must love Jack Fenton and despair. I’m not even telling people to hide their angst. If I have a sincere request, it’s this:

If you’re inclined to thinking of Vlad as a cool, troubled, complex person (as I do!) and are haunted by the implications of The Ultimate Enemy specifically for Vlad, that when Danny lost everyone else in his life that Vlad really genuinely tried to help, and was not gloating and happy and victorious to have Danny as his protege, and when that went badly, he was haunted to the end of his days by not having been able to help-

-but immediately turn around and think Jack is just a rotten awful person who’d absolutely hurt his own kid in spite of canon to the contrary (when there’s just as much, if not more, canon of Vlad being willfully hostile)

It might be good to examine why you’re feeling this way, and if this might not come down to the fact that even when canon has people call Vlad a desperately lonely fruit loop, it has a lot more respect for him than it does for Jack, and this isn’t because it’s actually taking a stance against any of the qualities it gave Jack that someone might find disagreeable- it’s because Jack’s just “a big old fat idiot nobody likes, right?”

and that’s... not something comfy to buy into.

[inkdemonapologist]

Okay but I do actually want to know both the things you love and the things you could rant about from DCTL?

OH BOY UHHHHHH okay lets see, I'm gonna see if I can do the "add a readmore after you post it" thing and see if that'll keep it stable.......

But also, much like Sammy, I am incapable of shutting up unless you strike me in the head with a blunt object, so uh, forgive my wordiness:

THINGS I ENJOY:

- DCTL gave us Sammy's ink addiction and like, if you had asked me before all this "what would you most like to see in a franchise?" I would not have answered "one of the characters drinks ink accidentally and then discovers that he can't stop" but boy that sure is my favourite concept that I LOVE to see handled literally any other way than how the book handled it!!!

- I like what it added to Tom and Allison and Norman!! Like, it's not big twists on their characters or anything -- we already knew Tom felt he was doing the wrong thing, so getting to see his CRUSHING GUILT over creating the machine isn't New Information, but it's nice to see and understand more of him; for all of them I feel a lot more attached to them after getting to see more of them as people.

- Like 90% of the "I LOVE IT" category for me is how the book handled Joey, and Buddy's relationship with Joey. The way Joey isn't a Sinister Mastermind Who’s Just Screwing With Everyone but just manipulative in a more mundane way -- someone who thinks of himself as just the guy with the vision to call the shots; he wants what he wants and this is how he's learned to get it; he exploits people not through devious schemes, but just by offering them something that they want or need and asking too much in return, expecting their loyalty for his favours. And the way he interacts with Buddy, making Buddy complicit with him and keeping Buddy off-balance and insecure while making him a favourite and treating him as Special is just PERFECT --  gives a lot of content to kind of extrapolate off of when pondering what must've drawn the others in and convinced them to ignore the red flags. I was initially frustrated with the idea of Buddy not being an artist and jUST DECIDING TO LEARN TO ANIMATE ON THE SPOT ("I've never done this before but I'm sure I can just do an artist's job" is a weirdly common throwaway thing in media and as an artist iTS A PET PEEVE) but actually the way they use his plagiarism to make him trapped in a lie in ways Joey doesn't even realise ends up being a neat echo of other employees (coughTOMcough), who were involved in much graver sins but suddenly felt they couldn't object or they'd lose their one chance, just like Buddy. There's a lot here that I think is really great.

OKAY THATS THE GOOD STUFF, LET'S COMPLAIN ABOUT SAMMY:

- Uncomfortable Bigotry Vagueness that we all knew was gonna be in this list -- I dunno man, a guy committing a microaggression and getting startled and defensive when he's called out for it doesn't necessarily completely ruin his character I GUESS, but the way this was handled is just SO WEIRD AND VAGUE that it's uncomfortable and it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose. "Is Tom black?" is a question I actually have to ask because the text sort of implies he is while also dancing around it and apparently Word of God said he's not??? which makes Buddy's comment nonsensical???? And I mean, you could go that route, since Buddy wonders to himself if Sammy talks to everyone like this -- HE ACTUALLY DOES!! Even within the text of the novel, he uses "Joey" instead of Mr. Drew, which is consistent with his audiologs in the game -- but that makes the writing suggest "this character THINKS this guy might be racist but actually they're reading too much into it and it wasn't racially motivated at all, he's just a jerk!!" wHICH IS SOMEHOW EVEN MORE ICKY??? Anyway like yeah I guess it's not inconsistent with his character that while Sammy Lawrence may not have any specific grudge against minorities he has probably not checked his privilege or done the work to challenge his own internal biases, but “Your Fav Probably Contributes To Systemic Racism In Ways He Hasn’t Considered, As Do We All When Our Assumptions Go Unchecked” is still a wild thing to wade through in a fun story about demonic cartoons

- but yknow so is T H E   H O L O C A U S T

- Sammy's voice is wrong. I'm actually okay with him being a weird awkward asshole, I already kind of assumed he was and that's part of why I like him!! but there's so many places he doesn't quite... talk like himself? And not just in terms of word choice, like -- so in his monologue at the end, he's described as talking so quickly that his words are "tumbling out faster than he can speak them," which initially seems fine; like yeah, that's a Standard Scene we're familiar with, the person who's been Driven Mad With Insight becoming more and more manic as they try to convey it -- until I tried to imagine it and realised that Sammy doesn't talk like this. That's a really consistent quality I always notice about his voice; whether he's almost giddily excited in prophet mode, or he’s his irritated and overworked human self, or he's violently angry and his voice has that echo effect -- he always speaks very deliberately. He enunciates carefully. There's some circumstances where I'd buy this as showing that he's Not Himself, but I feel like those would kind of need to be in the middle of his transformation, not at the end of it.

- In fact a lot of the scenes with Sammy kind of have this feeling -- that it's not necessarily an exploration of Sammy as a character, but that he is filling a trope or archetype role here. Once he's fully transformed he excitedly describes the process as more of a mental compulsion, which is in contrast to his weird yeerk-infected behaviour when trying to get ink from Miss Lambert. Both of those scenes don't seem wrong on their own because they fit tropes we know -- but they feel weird when you try to fit them together.

- I also just in general am not a fan of the ink acting like a weird yeerk. It can be a parasite I guess but when it starts overwriting and puppeting people and crawling around to enter their body that's just a completely DIFFERENT kind of supernatural story and it’s not what im here for!!!

- THE FREAKIN!!! HE WILL SET US FREE!!!! WHY????????? SAMUEL LAWRENCE WHAT IS HE SETTING YOU FREE FROM??????? Sammy has No Motive for any of what he's doing, other than just Ink Made Me Do It. The whole thing that was INTERESTING about Sammy as a character is the contrast between this frustrated, ornery musician with no specific love for the cartoons he works on, and the manically devoted cultist he becomes. What happened in the middle there? What made him desperate enough to shift his mindset so much? "Something supernatural made him do things that don't benefit him in any way" is a very boring answer to this question!!! Susie was a victim who implies that her transformation has forced her to do things she didn't want to do, but we can still see her motive -- she wanted to be Alice, so she took a sketchy offer to try to get what she wanted. Even now, her violence echoes that goal -- to be a more perfect Alice. What did Sammy want? WHO KNOWS. Even in his ink-addled state at the end, we don't understand what he hopes the Ink Demon will even do for him, and in fact he seems to be responsible for creating the very scenario he's begging Bendy to reverse in the game.

- [sighs loudly into my hands]

- Overall I'm left wondering if the author just..... didn't like Sammy Lawrence? And I don't mean that in the sense of him being a rude jerk -- like, Joey is not a good person, but the author seems to be interested in him and in what makes him tick. There doesn't seem to be that same interest in Sammy. Sammy's role in the story is that of a monster, transformed into something murderous, unable to prevent or choose it. He's not a victim of anyone but the ink, no one had to manipulate him or figure out how his brain worked or what he wanted or what he feared or give him any reason to do the things he does -- ink got in his mouth and overwrote his personality. And we don't even get to see that change, not really. He starts out angry and defensive and continues being angry and defensive up until his very last scene, denying his ink-stealing but not really much else. We see all his prophetic sketches but we never see hints of this in him, we never see him start to act more excited and hopeful, we never see him seek out the demon he desires to please. Why do we never see Sammy struggling between his dismissive angry front and a building religious fervour he can't quite suppress? We don't get to see any of the in-between. There's no interest at all in why or even what it looked like as Sammy became what he became, when, to be honest, I suspect interest in precisely that is one reason he's such a big fav.

- It's funny, in a "cries into my hands" kind of way, when Sammy is just knocked in the head while monologuing and immediately removed from the story without further mention, like...... that sure is the pattern with him, isn't it, he just tries very very hard and never actually gets to matter, but it also fits right in here, too, in this book that doesn't want to think about his motives -- he rambles nonsensically, explaining nothing, gets one trademark phrase, and then is hastily removed so the story doesn't have to think about him anymore.

...................I think that's most of it.

...

Y'all............ I'm not ready for Sent From Above.......... I'm just not.... I'm not emotionally ready...... like..... Sammy has to be in that right..... he’s Susie’s boss and she has that big crush on him..................................... I’m not ready

[charcolor]

ok. because nobody was asking about it, here's my proseka group ranking

25-ji - i am mentally ill and also i kin one of them. their covers/songs are all so good. it's also unique in a lot of ways (only group where none of the characters meet at school, only group with only 1 first year, only group with a sekai manifested from someone that isn't the leader, only group that was an established music group before their main story, etc) and i like that. and because i'm edgy i like their aesthetics, story, and characterization. there's lots of interesting and realistic scenarios with them. kanade has trauma and blames herself for her father's illness, mafuyu has ultimately been driven to suicidal depression mostly due to her overly controlling parents, ena has a severe inferiority complex because she works super hard on her art and gets no recognition or praise outside of 25ji even from her own family (kinnie moments), and mizuki has resorted to skipping school to avoid transphobic harassment from other students. these are real problems lots of people relate to, someone could even relate to all of them at once, so it makes the stories so intriguing and the characters so memorable

wxs - my gf likes this one so i have bias. i love the clowns because they're all totally autistic. i love tsukasa and emu's noises. i also like how colorful they are and i think they all have very good backstories. i'd really like emu in particular to be expanded on she definitely seems like she'd be a "my family is rich and cares more about money than my own happiness" kinda character but i might be reading too deep into it.

vbs - definitely the gayest of units. they also get the giga-p songs AND echo so huge bonus points for that. i love their styles, an in particular is my favorite character design in the whole game. their story also rules, the only thing that kinda bothers me is i think kohane should have kept her glasses. the haircut i understand, it's cool, but i don't like the trope of "character stops wearing glasses to signify Change" bitch she needs to SEE!!!!!!!!! i know she has contacts but i don't get what was wrong with the glasses :( (also i know kohane is first in the lineup but i'm not the only one who thought an was the leader at first right. like she's the one they show at the beginning of the vbs story, kohane doesn't show up til like halfway through chapter 1 and i dont think they even display her name at first. actually that kinda bothers me too)

mmj - i like them, i don't have any strong opinions. i like some of their songs but i definitely feel like the songs they cover are very inconsistent, in some cases i think they should have gone to other units (like i think patchwork staccato fits in more with 25-ji, maybe near as well). i think the concept is super interesting, 1 aspiring idol + 3 girls who quit being idols, and the story behind those 3 girls and WHY they quit being idols. the characters just don't really stand out to me though...they're not like, boring or copied from other characters or anything, they just don't super interest me. BUT i do really appreciate how their story is handled, and their subsequent event stories are realistic idol stuff like finding an agency or managing live streaming sessions, i think it's a good take on that stuff

leo/need - i think the story is very well done, and the individual characterization too, but i gotta be honest. the more i think about leo/need the more upset i am. it has everything to do with their songs. i don't generally like deco*27's style, he's very talented but his style is just not for me (but i like hibana and ghost rule). pretty much every song leo/need has other than teo, roki and hibana (though even with hibana i play with the meiko cover) is sooo boring to me to the point where i actively dread having to play through them in multilives. not to mention that ichika gets WAY more emphasis than any other group leader. off the top of my head i can think of 5 songs (hibana, teo, roki, dramaturgy, and umitetie katiyetan or whatever it's called. whatever that one is) that are just ichika and miku duets, which is way more than any other group leader. in fact the only other miku/unit member duet i can think of is hated by life itself (with kanade). ichika even gets a solo cover (night sky patrol of tomorrow) which im pretty sure literally no other unit member has (not counting another vocal versions obviously). saki, honami and shiho get NO songs of their own, or even like individual duets with ichika or miku (and luka has NOTHING. vbs and mmj let her sing with them but not the unit that she was literally assigned to!!). in the mvs for teo and roki they just play their instruments together in the background without singing. i get they're the band unit but all the characters are meant to be singers in some form, there's no reason the other members shouldnt get to sing. (and it's not like ichika herself doesnt have an instrument!! like it's not like everyone else is too busy!!) LITERALLY DURING SHIHO'S BIRTHDAY LIVE SHE DIDN'T SING AT ALL IT WAS ICHIKA AND MIKU DOING TEO. i didnt see honami's birthday but i imagine they didn't let her sing either. it just really pisses me off how they just, neglect ichika's friends way more than they would for any other unit. but yeah i just think their songs are boring

[aries-writes-shit]

I'm gonna be completely honest here; Likely going to info dump/ramble excessively, high possibility of it including personal issues, fair warning.

To put it as simply as I can:

Romantic or platonic is fine

I am demi-pan(or omni)romantic, not looking to have biological kids for personal reasons also honestly I don't know how much gender would affect my attraction. I just find people pretty and am vibin. Usually I just say I am of the ace/bi spectrum.

I identify as female, going by she/they, gender neutral pronouns I just think should be normalized as a default when you don't explicitly know and even then be respectful.

I've driven myself into excessive isolation leading to being easily overwhelmed even if it's given certain tasks as I am forgetful and need explicit instructions as I believe I'm a visual learner but to be more specific things need to be explicitly spelled out for me a majority of the time. It's often a tedious process as well as me getting overwhelmed when put on the spot even if it's saying what I want to eat or even retrieving the food myself even in my own home.

But I need excessive time in retreating to isolation which consists me usually pacing around the kitchen, specific I know but even in other environments like hotels I often pace the kitchen space even if it's very small, and indulging myself in maladaptive daydreaming fueled by music to which I normally speak/mumble out loud, do random stuff with my hands animatedly which I don't always do when actually indulging in conversation with others, or just dancing late at night with my highly inconsistent and likely unhealthy sleep schedule of which I am nocturnal at this point. I do also sing a bit though I need another voice to go off of in feeling more comfortable in harmonizing with others.

I find interest in psychological subjects which I love to share with others if I hopefully am no bother so it's a mutually exchanged topic others can indulge in as well. Also I am a sucker for depth in stories tied to characters, development, details no matter if it's very small or if it is significant to the story or it's characters themselves.

I also am iffy about exchange of material items, though I do love specific silverware, cups, trays, the occasional jewelry (I favor rings or bracelets I guess? Necklaces sorta) if it means something to a close individual, and other small trinkets for me to admire or put to use.

My love language is quality time but what I love most is unapologetic, unfiltered, mutual conversation. With my tendency to overshare a lot of things despite my insecurities and hesitance I don't just want a listener. I want them to be invested as well. I myself do often put myself in the listener role though and am referred to as one's local counselor sometimes.

Very much radiating the burnt out gifted kid and mommy/daddy issues vibe because I've had enough trauma and damaged self worth from it but it's mostly inflicted upon myself rather than from others or in being inthe bystander/observing role or in being neglected. I grew up praised and spoiled really, even now referred to as such in my family, but in the present it overwhelms me and if anything I'd rather not do anything for others and them do nothing for me and in dismissing my existence.

Honestly I've developed a toxic mentality against myself, even being aggressive in trying to validate or dismiss issues involving myself alone.

I've made progress including ditching a habit of mine I've had all my life through sheer power of will and have stopped excessively apologizing for laughing as I find it annoying to some extent, though not as much anymore which is good. Though I will apologize for laughing when by myself and when breaking down in tears I end up having a personal therapy session in uncertainty about turning to someone else even though I am very open about my issues. I have no problem sharing information, I just overthink how it's recieved or if it's dismissed and insignificant so why try? Of course I'm also a hypocrite and validate others, trying to do so for myself gradually though it can be hard and becomes an aggressive battle mentally.

But yeah I usually put myself in the supporting role for others including friends and family even though I myself am the youngest to some extent.

I try to encourage a space of comfort and validation for others and as emotionally assertive or reassuring/validating I can be, often turning heartfelt though significantly more blunt and assertive, I also have crackhead energy sometimes to be honest. Often with strange mental conversations or comments spewing out, a significant questioning being related to society. People confuse, frighten, or entertain me a majority of the time.

Anyways yeah to put it simply (and sorry to go on a long tangent and apologies if I contradicted myself or if I sounded repetitive);

Chaotic individual of the ace/bi spectrum that is highly emotional with abandonment issues, familial trauma, high insecurities related to my mere existence, and I obviously ramble a l o t.

A (not so) few other details; compared to some of the giants I am a small marshmallow (not too fluffy but kinda-) standing at around 5'2" with an internal inferno of emotions I currently withhold inside me and instead giggling excessively or spilling tears when I get emotional. Or aggressively cussing but that's usually by myself, but I am a bit clumsy and forgetful overall. Also my sleep schedule is a total mess of which I may have previously mentioned and I have significant words and phrases taking up the majority of my vocabulary I put to use in writing or conversing. Also I can get significantly fired up about topics related to terrible parenting, terrible people in general, unnecessary gendered stereotypes and objects for no reason what so ever, and in validating others. Also I am a forgetful mess as I've stated I believe two other times. I can forget a topic entirely midsentence or go on tangents about unrelated topics while having originally interrupted myself. Also last minute note/s, I wear glasses and often joke about being blind as hell and needing my access to sight. And regarding what I wear I typically avoid branded material cuz of my unreasonable insecurities, and I go for more subtle things of black/blue but I do have other options. I just mainly go for subtle/reserved in appearance that's comfortable for me and I typically wear jeans and just- sneakers or crocs for the indoors. Also I can imagine the slight possibility of me snagging tops from my partner if they didn't mind, an example of me wearing other's things typically being my dad's shirts on occasion and the rare item of my mom's originally or my older sister.

Yep definitely went off, sorry if this is overwhelming or if it includes a ton of unnecessary details :')

Don't stress yourself especially at my expense please—

Sorry it took so long, heres your match!

C!Philza

Oh no, look the old man adopted another kid /s

This man raised two boys on his own, hes so ready to help you if you become overwhelmed

Learns what you order so you dont have to talk to the cashier if you dont want to

If you need to pace, he will step back and let you do your thing

Checking in occasionally to make sure your alright

Will definitely try and make you have a healthy sleep schedule

Will definitely listen to you rant about any topic you start to rant about

Its healthy to get things like that off your chest