#There's something fascinating about them

[maintitle]

By the by, Final Fantasy VIII deserves more respect JUST for the fact that you can take that first disc and hold it up to literally any other multi-disc Square PS1 game, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better contained story within it.

One of the things about art is that working within the confines of what you have can create some of the most unique experiences possible, and having to use multiple discs for games WAS a constraint that in and of itself could be art. The first disc of FFVIII is the one time I can think of where that format they were forced into actually added A LOT to the story, because within the scope of one disc you learn the setting, the characters, their struggles and best and worst characteristics, and are given a plot hook powerful enough to drive the rest of the story. Add to that an EXCELLENT last few sequences and a jaw-dropping cliffhanger, and I truly believe that disc can't be touched.

It's a stunning experience, and to this day the only disc of any multi-disc game where I remember EXACTLY where it starts and ends, and everything that happens in between. THAT'S an achievement, and I truly think it's the only time it's ever happened with these kinds of games.

[agardenintheshire]

tolkien (a studied linguist) and me (has taken their fair share of linguistic classes) staring at each other after the narrator casually drops that the hobbits just 'forgot' their languages and simply adopted the common speech as if that is a normal thing that happens out of the blue and isn't connected to at best cultural assimilation and at worst colonialism, imperialism, and oppression

[transxfiles]

thinking a lot about the phenomenon of celebrities going through their "baby gay" phase in the spotlight. idk i know it's funny to joke about jojo siwa and "gay pop" etc etc and there's so much valid criticism there. but i also think there's something to be said about how pop culture forces queer people out of the closet which means that if celebrities try to work through their baby gay phase on their own they're considered "traitors" or "liars" or "queerbaiting" etc etc for trying to keep their sexuality private, but if they decide to come out as soon as they know "what they are" they become cringe in the eye of the public bc they're still figuring out what it means to be queer. idk. like even with chappell roan, i know she's a pop culture darling rn and i adore her. but sometimes she says stuff in interviews that feels so baby gay and i have to remind myself that she's just. a young person who is in the spotlight and figuring herself out still. and even with the jojo siwa thing like. again obv she sounds so ignorant when she talks about wanting to "invent gay pop" but it's also like. god. figuring my gender/sexuality business out was stressful enough when i was sitting alone in my bathroom at age 13. i cannot imagine growing up in the spotlight with hundreds of cameras and millions of eyes on me. and then having to be my "cringe" newly out queer self to the masses. idk lots to chew on. i've just been thinking about this a lot recently.

[beaulesbian]

One Piece ep. 257 || "That was really something. They don't call themselves pirates for nothing."

manga ch. 367

It was cute Luffy really did the peace sign in the manga as well!

+Bonus "That was fun."

"No human could pull that off"

[thetrinitytest]

[dailyloopdeloop]

DAY 75: onehat

[marlynnofmany]

Hey, time to overanalyze magic again. It makes sense to me -- follow closely now -- that earthbending would just be the control of rocks. It's all the minerals that come from the ground, and sure, even some artificially created ones as long as they have the same structure. But just rocks. Not dirt.

Why not, you ask? I invite you to consider what dirt actually is. It's lots of things! Some rock dust, yes, but also crumbled plants, and decomposed animals, and a variety of fungus, and bits of poop from creatures both microscopic and large. Basically, it's a mess of all things organic (plus tiny rocks).

You don't want an earthbender for dirt.

You want a necromancer.

[al-luviec]

I got so insanely mad while drawing this

+ closeup and normalness

[sir-adamus]

Raven's semblance is so telling about her character

the facade of the tough disaffected bandit leader crumbles completely under it - it's bonds to people she cares about. it's hard to pretend like she doesn't care when her literal superpower is defined by how much she does

but you can read deeper than that - cos it's defined by those bonds, you have to wonder about the original utility of that power was; what in Raven specifically led her to develop Kindred Link as a Semblance - to be able to open a portal to someone she cares about anywhere in the world? not necessarily the reasons why and how she uses it, but why it manifested like that

was it a desire to protect? a plea for safety?

or a cry for help?

[valtsv]

to be clear i don't ship them - honestly the thought makes my skin crawl - but i really hope that if shrue and VAL ever meet they have a divorced exes who use snark to poorly disguise how much they fucking Loathe each other dynamic, because there is something so psychosexually horrifying about their mutual boss using VAL to gaslight shrue into doubting the reality of their spouse and kids to the point of blowing up their entire life over it to me

[gingermintpepper]

One of my biggest pet peeves is the assumption that something has to be sad for it to be tragic.

I've always been a big believer of the 'Apollo has an awful love life'/'Apollo is plain unlucky with love' line of thinking but it does bother me that the general reasoning for that statement is given to the concept of 'Apollo is somehow undesireable and thus rejected' (Cassandra/Daphne/Marpessa) or 'his lovers die young and thus their love is unfulfilled' (Cyparissus/Hyacinthus/Coronis). I personally think that's a very unfortunate way of looking at things - not only because it neglects the many perfectly cordial entanglements and affairs Apollo has had, both mortal and divine - but because it presents a very shallow interpretation of the concepts of love and loss and how loss affects people.

Apollo can still grieve lovers that have a long, healthy life. The inherent tragedy of an immortal who knows his lovers and children will die and cannot stop it does not stop being tragic simply because those lovers and children live long, fulfilled lives. The inherent tragedy of loss does not stop being tragic simply because someone knows better than to mourn something that was always going to end.

What is tragic is not that Apollo loves and loses but that loss itself follows him. Apollo does not love with the distance of an immortal, he does not have affairs and then leaves never to listen to their prayers again. He does not have offspring and then abandon them to their trials only to appear when it is time to lead them to their destinies. He raises his young, he protects the mothers of his children, he blesses the households that have his favour and multiplies their flocks that they may never go hungry. He educates his sons, he adorns his daughters and even in wrath he is quick to come to his senses and regret the punishments he doles out.

Apollo loves. And like mortals, there will always be some part of him that wishes to protect the objects of his affections. Apollo, however, is also an emissary of Fate. He knows that the fate of all mortal things is death. He knows that to love a mortal is to accept that eventually he will have to bury them. There is no illusion of forever, there is no fantasy where he fights against the nature of living things and shields his beloveds from death. Apollo loves and because of that love, he also accepts.

And that, while beautiful, is also tragic.

[dent-de-leon]

can you imagine being Essek and watching this tiefling on a total power trip turn into a 10 feet tall--incredibly ripped??--god and kill the boy you're catching feelings for?? And brand you with some kind of evil cursed hivemind magic you're worried might corrupt you forever?? This thing that your friends swear was once family, but all you see is something monstrous and otherworldly and tearing himself apart at the seams, screaming when all their loved ones call out to him??

Just. the way it must have felt to see Lucien go from that to. Just the most sweet and affectionate little tiefling. Gentle and curious and so full of joy and wonder. He's got the brightest smile and warm eyes and this mischievous playfulness. He runs off at first--startled, scared. But then once he's calmed, the first real word he says other than Empty is Love. And right after that he calls out for his Magician, for this man who did everything he could to save him, held him close and kissed him so tenderly on the forehead--

And Caleb throws his arms around Essek and Veth and just watches the Nein all descend on Tealeaf and embrace him amidst laughter and tears and Molly's starting to smile again and Caleb's so so happy just to see him finally alive and.

In that moment, Essek understands why they came all this way--

[adhd-merlin]

[xenomorphicdna]

This is an on the string propaganda post

Brought to you, by me (with love)

It's time for machine comforts. Comforts we can't understand, or experience. Let them be happy, let them be at peace with their body.

Does a breath of cool water feel nice on their systems? When it's quiet do they listen to their own heart and feel the electricity pulsing? Does it remind them that they are alive and a part of this world? Do they have dreams? Hopes and projects they wish to work on, hobbies?

Why get off the string into the harsh and deadly world, fighting for survival and losing everything they've ever known to love about themselves?

What about the safety of their bodies? How scary would it be for a machine with thousands, maybe millions of throughs to suddenly have just a handful. The horror of everything going silent.

They have hundreds of eyes to see the world for all its beauty, they capture moments that would otherwise go unseen. Why blind themselves of such things?

[capcollector]

sorta companion piece to these doodles

something that’s crossed my mind in the context of deacon and bunny getting together/starting a family. how do you react when two ppl you really respect but maybe don’t exactly Love say they’re having a kid together.

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3