#This is gonna trigger my joker arc if nothing else does

[makerofmadness]

being a writer sucks sometimes because you need synonyms to keep yourself from using the same word too many times in succession without strategic purpose but you run into situations where you basically don't have another word. Or your pool is super small and you may need more than one

like you're telling me in the entire history of the English language that it still never bothered to develop more than like three words for love that can have a platonic application that aren't like. Huge stretches for synonyms. Like why is it all romantic words i can't just write about family in peace 😭 like majority of the synonyms are either inherently romantic in meaning or have strong romantic connotations to the point that I'd have to be super strategic in my usage in order to make them NOT sound really fxcking wrong like. And even some of the platonic words just wouldn't really fit right in the thing in writing like.

literally and there's only so many times I can use the word "affection" before that becomes repetitive too-

What am I supposed to do with this

(Btw when you look up stuff like "synonyms for love that are platonic" the results are literally shzt like "love without sex" and "chaste love" so that doesn't work either fudging. Society 😭😭😭 can't write for shxt)

[lightborrowcd]

I KNOW NOTHING ABT BRUCIE’S CANON SO TELL ME WHAT U KEEP FOR UR INTERPRETATION AND WHAT U DONT

okay so. canon meaning the Gotham series because i don’t even know what counts as actual canon. even though im ( clearly ) quite canon averse for hp stuff i actually really enjoy what they did with Bruce in gotham / the show as a whole. here is a list of some major things that i’m keeping / not keeping, including stuff from the nolan trilogy since that’s influenced bruce’s adult life. i’ll try and explain them somewhat well for people who don’t know wtf i’ve been taking about this whole time 

keeping:

okay first brucie is a hoe but we all knew that lmao.

keeping the part where he starts self-harming behaviors to “ over come pain ” and they run a fair bit deeper than what’s shown in canon but..... idk if i’ll ever publicly write about that in too much detail, it’s disturbing 

i’m keeping bruce and selina of course, no matter what their adult relationship looks like she HEAVILY influenced not just his preferences for partners but who he is as a person and that’s very important. i’m also keeping the fact that he doesn’t say goodbye or give her any kind of warning when he leaves gotham for and entire decade. 

i’m also keeping him being socially awkward, shy, and an easy target for bullying when he’s younger, it’s part of what makes his whole “i have friends now” arc so much more toxic lmao. 

also the phase where he starts acting out with substances / girls ( and boys in this case ) is pretty important and kind of never ends !! 

i’m keeping + expanding on the whole court of owls thing..... more on this later bc i need to refresh my knowledge of canon but he’s there for long enough to come out with a significant amount of mental / physical training that he didn’t have before, i’m also keeping the deep brainwashing and the part where they send a clone to take his place in regular life also holds up lmao just not in his hogwarts verse. just. if r’as al ghul is his voldemort then he basically joined the death eaters for a second there, mostly unknowingly but still, i hope that explains it well enough

the thing where the jermiah valeska / the joker is fixated with being bruce’s brother / friend and subsequently getting his attention by whatever means necessary... i kinda love that i’m not gonna lie it’s completely cursed

as much as i hate it i’m also keeping both of the times he fires alfred because he can’t process his own feelings or recognize that alfred loves him unconditionally and has literally been his surrogate father this entire time....... it’s cursed but..... necessary

i LOVE the fact that he never really interacts with the penguin in person that much and it’s mostly by oswald’s reputation that bruce knows him. idk shit about what’s in the comics but for my version of bruce, the riddler and the penguin especially are prominent enemies. 

so in the third movie of the nolan trilogy it’s established that he + his parents spent some time visiting the orphanage in gotham and i’m definitely keeping that and expanding that to say that he and his mother specifically spent a significant amount time there and that he had some meaningful childhood friendships with children there. what that changes is that bruce would certainly recognize john blake on sight, and might even greet him like an old friend in private. ( i would give anything for a john blake to write with and not just bc i’m a jgl stan but anyWaYS )

i’m also keeping the part where there’s significant wear and tear on his joints that leaves him in pain a lot of the time. maybe not necessarily to the same extent as in the dark knight rises, but still to the point where he’s suffering by his mid-thirties. 

bruce can and will adopt children. this is kinda sticky because obviously you can’t be batman and have children that don’t know, so they’ll be trained accordingly and he has to be careful with which children he takes in. but he’s definitely much more fatherly to dick grayson / any other children he might take in than in some interpretations. 

not keeping:

trigger warning: holocaust mention. so there’s one specific scene and i don’t remember how bruce is in it but basically. the riddler ( as part of someone else’s Evil Plan ) has bruce and lucius fox trapped in a literal gas chamber and i don’t know that’s just TOO DARK considering that my version of bruce is jewish ( and even just the kid who plays him in gotham being jewish + lucius being black ) and edward nygma is a lot of things but i don’t think he’s THAT evil. i’d need to plot out the specific details of what he does instead with specific eds but..... what the fuck u feel

i’m flexible with poison ivy’s very confusing arc...... i kinda like the version of her where she’s very powerful dumb as shit ( like delphi uwu ) the best it’s iconic 

i’m not keeping rachel dawes as a part of his canon ( although i’m willing to plot for that ) i just can’t find a way to make any of that make sense lmao. gotta find another way for the joker to permanently destroy him.

so in gotham canon bruce and his parents go to see a movie and then leave when it’s finished and that’s when they’re murdered, and i’m keeping that version because the nolan version where they leave the theatre because bruce is scared is literally too sad to even think about

i uh. don’t like gotham’s version of jim gordon lmao i’m sorry i just think it kinda missed The Point of his character. ( not that i know anything but. ) i don’t think the Military Man(TM) that he is ( and in a distinctly different way than alfred is ) is someone that bruce would look up to and i also don’t think that bruce would view his militarization of gcpd as a good thing. i’m open to interacting with an jim gordons, but for my interpretation jim will be more like g.ary oldm.an’s version of him, gentle, unassuming, and fatherly by nature.  

[lokiarsene]

thoughts on episodes 15~17.

thoughts on episode 15:

-- ryuji talking loudly and brashly, and brushing off the others telling him to pipe down about their, yknow, secret criminal activities is just... annoying. is it even remotely possible for him to not get on my nerves?

no, because that's his character type. yosuke was similar, but here's the thing: yosuke had actual character development. he learned and changed. same with junpei. i didn't like him either, but he certainly changed and had a character arc. ryuji's just a flat line to me.

-- yknow, having women who are obviously older than ren make remarks about his body (or in his teacher's case, be some kind of pseudo-romance for him) is yet another really tone deaf decision made to appeal to a certain target audience. if kamoshida (and other rando gross men) are rightly depicted as monstrous for preying on underage girls, how the fuck is this okay?

-- ren's unflabbable calm is almost scary sometimes. it reminds me of the quiet intensity of joseph seed from far cry 5.

-- i type that just as he smiles and sighs in relief when the PT all agree with his assessment that sojiro in no way seems like he would abuse a child. almost like he was worried they wouldn't take him at his word? or did he not trust his own judgment?

-- all this talk about "our justice" and whatnot just makes me think of the best line from devil may cry: the dark knight sparda WOKE UP TO JUSTICE.

thoughts on episode 16:

-- sojiro recounting how he looks after futaba, and how worried he is about her well-being, while the frame keeps moving back to futaba's bedroom door getting slowly covered in caution tape was a fantastic bit of symbolism.

-- ren is reflecting and worrying more intently on futaba's situation than i expected. i wonder why it strikes a chord with him--is he thinking about his own parents? the fact that they're just such a blank slate is really frustrating. i wish we could know what they think of their son, or if they even miss him at all. they don't even write to him once during his 'exile'. have they just washed their hands of him completely? i guess that’s what we're supposed to assume.

in that case, it makes total sense that he'd fret over his guardian's own role as a parent to someone who is likewise lost and removed from her own family.

-- there's a deliberate shot of ren staring at futaba's "i'm going to die in here. this place is my tomb" message. does that reflect his own feelings? maybe not something as severe as death, but something like how suffocating and isolating it is to be cast out of your family?

and futaba hearing voices in her head as a result of her trauma is just like ren being triggered into flashbacks of shido assaulting that woman, blaming it on him, and ren being framed for the crime. could his extreme empathy and intuition make him recognize/sense her mental distress and pain because it mirrors his own? hmm.

-- so the anime removes that shot of ryuji staring down ann's shirt yet it adds in not one but two shots of her cleavage and bra, and makoto's as well. :I i'm really fucking tired of the male gaze y'all lmao it's trash

-- no matter how many times i see it, the words 'cognitive psience' will never fail to make me chuckle.

-- sojiro speaking to futaba through the door ;_; reassuring her that she doesn't have to leave if it's too hard for her, and that it's all right as long as she doesn't feel sick. fjaslkfsd meanwhile she's curled up in a ball, trying not to cry, because she IS sick. it's just not in a way that anyone else can see. ;________;

-- aaaaaand here come the waterworks about futaba's story. any/all stories of troubled mother-daughter relationships will make me cry hysterically. it hits too close to home. and while i know that wakaba really did love her daughter, futaba's worry that she was nothing but a burden on her mother, unloved and unwanted, is just... too real.

-- ahh, now i know why i really liked futaba's segment of the game. it reminded me of persona 4, where you have to confront the shadow selves of your teammates! man that was great. it gave them so much development.

-- hey so uh. how is futaba able to see her shadow self in the real world? how is futaba's shadow self allowed to manifest in the real world? is that ever.... explained... at all...........

thoughts on episode 17:

-- akechi talking about the guns at the shop look "just like the real thing." .......... huh.

-- i like that he has a habit of talking to himself out loud. i could make a sad headcanon about that, but i'll try to refrain. he makes me sad enough.

-- wakaba's shadow-monster was much more intimidating and terrifying in the game. not sure i like this change. her voice seems to be missing most of its distortion, too.

-- so futaba's shadow reminding her of the truth is a little odd to me. is it proof that futaba always knew or at least suspected that she was being used and lied to? i'm guessing that has to be it.

-- STOP DOING GRATUITOUS ASS SHOTS OF ANN

-- oh dude the white rider pesrona looks so fucking cool in the show

-- !!! JOKER SHOOTING THE SHADOWMONSTER IN THE FACE! NICE FORESHADOWING TO HIM HEADSHOTTING YALDA. also it's very devil may cry lol.

-- ????? so is the wakaba that shows up after the fight like. her ghost?? is that why she says futaba can't 'come over here' (here meaning death?) or is that futaba's memory of what her mother was really like???? i have so many questions.

-- "i sense an oddly powerful eagerness." gosh i love it when the PT are allowed to just be... teenagers, i guess? having fun and bonding, cracking jokes. i forgot how endearing that was.

-- ren's surprise at sojiro offering to take him out to dinner too fjdakfdjskl ;-; i think my speculating about ren thinking of his own parents as he sees how sojiro and futaba interact might not be too far off. maybe he’s hoping that sojiro sees him as a temporary son?

-- MONA SINGING ABOUT HOW HE WISHES REN WILL BRING HIM SOME SUSHI FDAKJFDSL. i’m gonna assume ren brought him back as much as he could ;;

[tumblunni]

OH MAN GEEZ IM FUCKIN EMOTIONAL ALREADY black butler: book of circus spoilers below:

oh god, the ways they expanded the story for the anime are SO FUCKIN SAD I kinda like that they made it so you actually do see the circus crew kidnapping children this time. I mean, I dont think its made to make them any less sympathetic, but it definately reminds you that the playing field is even here and they’re morally complicated rather than just poor innocent victims of mr evil protagonist. Also its REALLY GORY and REALLY PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

Its so messed up, seriously These poor kids are being sent to kidnap other kids, by a creepy asshole murder pedophile fuck. And they dont know WHY theyre kidnapping kids, they don’t know what happens to the ones they hand over. And they’re all JUST FUCKING KIDS, they’re fucking children who’re all heavily disabled in different ways and LITERALLY owe their life to this horrible villain man. And they dont know why they were saved and why these other kids are.. going.. somewhere else. And they really dont know whether to trust their ‘father’, but its pretty clear they all have their suspicions that the kidnapped kids might be dying. But they dont have anywhere else to go if they disobey their father, and he’s fucking with their heads so they all feel like they’re the only onw with doubts and they cant even question it or everyone will turn on them and they’ll get kicked out on the street again and never see any of their siblings. And they all VERY MUCH know what its like to be dying on the streets. And this time they’d had a chance to know what its like to have prosthetic limbs and medical help and be able to eat three solid meals a day and wear pretty clothes and have a family. Having all that taken away will hurt even more than if they’d never known what it’s like..

So I sympathise with them, I really do. And I really believe they could have been rescued, and could have been redeemed, and ultimately we shouldnt be blaming them for what they did, only blaming the man who forced them into it and gave enough illusion of choice that they were able to feel guilt about it... BUT STILL that was REALLY FUCKED UP AND DISTURBING AND SAD AND DISTURBING AND SAD

seriously they PUT ON A FINAL CIRCUS SHOW for every single kid they kidnap part of it is about luring them in so they trust them, but also it seems they take it way too far for it to just be that. They almost got caught because they spent so much time doing their performance for this poor lil matchstick seller girl! and its equal parts heartwarming and DISGUSTING because this poor kid is like.. I dont even know if they drug their victims or if she was just going insane from having to see them killing the policeman that tried to save her they’re just horribly gorily fighting the policemen, stabbing a fucking knife through some guy’s eye, and the kid is sitting there having a complete mental collapse, laughing as if this is all part of the show. And we get this twisted vision of her point of view, seeing the nice clown man doing a funny show smacking mr teddy bear with a mallet, as the dead body of the policeman falls at her feet. And then they bundle her into the carriage and thats just the end. We dont find out what happens to the kidnapped kids, any more than the kidnappers know... We just got to learn so much about this poor kid, and that poor policeman, and have a bunch of heartwarming moments of them becoming friends, and then she just turns the corner for like five minutes and the policeman is like ‘wtf is that flute music’ then sees a fuckin ENTIRE CIRCUS IN AN ALLEYWAY and gets stabbed through the goddamn eye trying to reach the kid in time. And she’s so out of it that she couldnt even see him. His last thoughts were probably seeing her glassy eyes staring right through him... And we know that he had a daughter that this street urchin reminded him of, and we know she had a sick little brother who really needed the money the policeman gave her, and an abusive mother that’ll probably be forcing that poor brother to go out panhandling now her daughter is gone.. And just... GAHH my fucking emotions my sadness and also A LOT OF FEAR so much blood

and I KNOW HOW IT ENDS i know that the kids don’t fuckin go to a happy place with a nice new dad and ‘father’ only spared those few kids so they could be pawns he could manipulate into capturing more kids, and test subjects for his evil science team’s freaky bullshit and they dont even KNOW that they’re test subjects! they dont know that their prosthetic limbs are MADE FROM THE OTHER KIDNAPPED KIDS WHO NEVER CAME BACK god, im already imagining how they’d fuckin animate the poor ringleader guy throwing up as he realizes his arm is made from someone else’s bones and then he just DIES they all just die horribly in service of this disgusting fucking child murderer pedophile that they thought was their father half of them never learn that they were the villains all along, the other half get to know it just in time to despair utterly as they’re killed off too

and evil bastard’s trump card that kept them all obeying him it DIDNT EXIST he fucking held it over their heads that their other siblings were still out there somewhere, at his ‘orphanage’, and they had to work with him so he could send money back to them so they could all be happy too when really he’d killed them long ago, and for all we know they could be the ones that joker’s prosthetic arm was made from T_T and ciel’s fuckin only chance to do something to help the people he completely failed who all died hating him and thinking he’d betrayed them, that they were the good guys and he was the villain... that last chance was a fucking lie he tried to save the ‘other kids’ and the fucking ‘orphanage’ was an empty abandoned building full of nothing but maybe a stray doll they left behind before they were all horribly murdered so we just end on our protagonist being the absolute villain of this arc, and the actual villains being sympathetic kids, and him laughing like a madman as his last chance of redemption blows away on the wind

oh, and he fuckin personally murdered a bunch of kids too, even though he didnt kill all his villain friends with his own hand. he found some of the kids in the lab that were test experiments, the few who hadnt been killed yet. the few who’d had to watch potentially HUNDREDS of friends be dragged kicking and screaming to that operating table, and see every second of them being eviscerated into pieces. And ciel just sees himself in them, they’re all so catatonic that they cant even see him and all he can see is himself and he knows from personal experience that a kid can come back from that, but he knows how much of a monster he’s become and he thinks the kids would be happier if they could die as they are instead of losing themself so he just sets the whole building on fire and i end up crying for him even as he’s committing a horrible act! fucking moral ambiguity: the show

and god, even this episode’s goofy friendship fun parts were horrifying too! it starts off with the whole ‘ha ha ciel doesnt know this kid is Doll, cos she ~looks like a boy~ when she’s not in costume’ random stupidness but its still cute cos she’s being so kind to the newbie, and you can learn a lot about her character from it how she’s trying to be all smiley and goofy and giving him candy and saying how she’d never even tasted it before, and now he can stay here and be her lil brother and never get hit by anyone and never go hungry and she knows the goddamn price she has to pay for all this, and she wants to keep ciel innocent of it she doesnt know he’s already just as corrupted, and he’s really a spy sent to take them down and then just DEAR GOD THAT SCENE THAT IS NOT OKAY but it was absolutely fucking necessary I think, to keep the moral ambiguity and not make us just hate ciel forever she fuckin.. accidentally triggers a ptsd flashback in the poor kid he’s never been homeless before so he doesnt realise its a group bathroom, and then freaks out and tries to run. but she’s just teasing him as part of her cool big sis persona, and doesnt realise he has an actual reason to be scared. So they end up fighting and she accidentally reveals the scar on his back to everyone the fucking brand that was burned into him when he was kidnapped and enslaved and the episode just ends with our usually unflappable protagonist curled up in a ball under a towel, shaking and crying and his only comfort is the demonic butler he’s using to enact his revenge, and all he says is just ‘you’re better than this, you’re a badass’ ciel never really has any form of actual sympathy, does he? the only person who knows about what happened to him is this morally ambiguous monster minion guy. and the whole hook of the series is that we never really know if Sebastian actually gives a shit about ciel or any of the other humans, or if he’s just waiting for the poor kid to fuck up and leave an opportunity to devour his soul. I wanna believe that Sebastian does have some sort of fatherly affection for ciel, or at least they both care about each other in a sort of.. mutually evil way. But even if thats true, its not like sebastian is gonna really be any good to talk to in a time like this. he;s just gonna sass ciel for showing weakness. he just has this fuckin motivational speech of ‘yo ciel youre a fuckin evil bastard, remember? get up and continue your evil bastard ways’. and somehow it actually kinda works and actually kinda feels affectionate in context :P BUT STILL SERIOUSLY POOR CIEL he could have turned out a lot better than this if he had someone in his life who could actually give him a goddamn hug but I guess thats not really what he wanted, even though its what he needed instead he wished for the power to enact revenge on the one who killed his family and enslaved him and he set off on this long horrible path of becoming an evil bastard to track down this other evil bastard when he’s only fuckin ELEVEN and he’s happy to throw away his soul, and doesnt care if sebastian betrays him in the end and he burns in hell forever, as long as he can stop that evil bastard from doing the same thing to more children and this arc is so fucked up cos he failed so horribly to stop some OTHER evil bastard from doing the same thing to more children and he’s become so twisted and antiheroey and cynical that he missed his chances to redeem those poor other twisted kids, and maybe he could have done better in stopping the real villain if he had.. and the only fuckin thing we got out of this arc was that the bastard kidnapping these children was a copycat criminal of the one who did it to ciel, so we at least finally have one clue that might lead to a resolution someday but EVERYONE DIED and ciel’s even more fucking traumatized! and he’s jumped off the deep end and become full antihero evil bastard and all the character development he had during the arc has been negated and fuckin completely reversed cos of how it ended and he lost a bazillion friends and he was betraying them the entire time, and they died resenting him, or resenting him AND learning that he was right and they’d been working for the villain all along, and then he couldnt even save their other siblings cos they were long dead and just THIS FUCKING ARC IS SO FUCKED UP GAHHHHH

I guess sometimes you just wanna watch depressing cinema, yknow? I do hope that someday this series actually ends with at least a bittersweet ending, not an equally fatalistic one that means everything was all for nothing. i want the poor circus kids’s deaths to actually mean something...

Also, randomly and incidentally, I want the giant creepy pedo incesty shipping fandom to die in a fire. Before I even started watching it, Black Butler was famous as ‘that pedo anime’, everyone acted as if Sebastian x Ciel was canon and they kept teasing it in every episode or something. BUT NOPE. NONE. NICHT. NON. NAG YDW. Where the FUCK did they even get it from, seriously?? We don’t know if Sebastian is gonna betray ciel or not in the end, but im PRETTY FUCKING SURE that he doesn’t have a boner for a fucking ten year old! I know the idea of a demon servant is a common romance novel thing, but seriously wtf is wrong with you... I know I’m mad that this arc ended so horribly, but still I feel like the various moral ambiguity discussions are super interesting and I would have regretted if I’d never read any of this manga just because of some awful fanbase members.

ANYWAY IN SUMMARY bunni cry over episode