#actually appears to be crisis era

[northwestofinsanity]

Supertramp and their Crisis? What Crisis? umbrella

[umbrellajam]

Tim Drake Reading List - before his Robin (1993) solo

I'm sure this has been done many times before, but I'd been meaning for a while now to put together my own reading list for Tim prior to his 1993 solo, as I so often see that recommended as the starting point for him, but. Well. There's a lot of key material for Tim before that and Robin 1993 also starts very weirdly in medias res smack dab in the middle of the Knightfall event, which throws people off all the time, lol.

So anyway, a list! Not 100% comprehensive, but hopefully a helpful overview to somebody, somewhere :)

PRE-TIM CONTEXT

A Death in the Family (Batman #426-429) – Jason is murdered by the Joker. We all know this one, hopefully.

New Titans #55 – Dick finds out about Jason’s death, and comes to Gotham aiming to both console and confront Bruce about it. They have a fight; Bruce backhands Dick and tells him to leave.

Batman: Year Three (Batman #436-439) – despite the above, Dick returns to Gotham soon afterward due to Tony Zucco’s parole hearings, and we see him continue to worry and reach out to Bruce as the man fails miserably at dealing with Jason’s death; we also have the first appearance of Tim in the flashback to Dick’s origin at the circus.

INTRO AND PRE-ROBIN ARCS

A Lonely Place of Dying (alternating Batman #440-442 and New Titans #60-61) – Tim’s proper intro arc, tracking Dick down at the circus to try and convince him to become Robin again, as Batman continues to go off the rails and “Batman needs Robin”. He ultimately gets accepted for a trial/training period before he can become Robin.

Batman #443-445 – cute training-period issues where Bruce awkwardly starts to teach Tim and Tim is an eager beaver.

New Titans #65 – Tim shows up on an exasperated Dick’s doorstep in New York, and we get a really great Dick & Tim training issue.

The Penguin Affair (Batman #448, Detective Comics #615, Batman #449) – a fun early Bruce & Tim arc that includes the introduction of Harold Allnut as the Bat team's mute engineering genius, Bruce angsting and second-guessing himself about having a new Robin but still wanting to encourage Tim (“Remember to thank him later. The boy needs reassurance.”) and also civilian!Tim taking part in the operation with adorable pre-Robin code names (“Little bat to big bat. Target in cross-hairs.”)

Batman #450, Detective Comics #617, Batman #451 – a short arc about the Joker resurfacing for the first time since being presumed dead at the end of A Death in the Family. Tim appears minimally because Bruce panics and sends him out of the country immediately (along with his entire school class lol), but there’s lots of angst and introspection from Bruce on Jason's death and Robin in general.

Rite of Passage (Detective Comics #618-621) – includes Tim’s parents being kidnapped, his mother’s death, and his father ending up paralyzed and in a coma.

EARLY ROBIN ERA

Identity Crisis (Batman #455-457) – includes Tim’s devastation and struggle in the wake of what happened to his parents, wrestling with the legacy and meaning of Batman & Robin in a way he hadn’t understood before, and whether he’s prepared for it. Also Janet Drake’s funeral, and ultimately Tim’s official graduation to the Robin mantle.

Robin I: A Hero Reborn #1-5 – Tim’s first solo mini-series as Robin; his first of many trips to Paris as part of his training, where he first encounters Lady Shiva and King Snake. This is also where Tim picks up his iconic bo staff for the first time, with training from Shiva.

Batman #465-469 – Tim’s first actual patrols with Bruce, and the return of King Snake.

Detective Comics #635-637 – the “Bruce & Tim have to fight video games come to life” arc, lol. I would call these fun but optional.

Robin II: The Joker’s Wild! #1-4 – Tim’s second solo mini; the Joker returns to Gotham while Bruce is out of the country and unreachable, and Tim as a barely fledged Robin has to thwart the clown’s plans with only Alfred to aid him.

“To the Father I Never Knew…” (Batman #480) – An important issue on Tim’s relationship with his father, especially now that he’s woken up from his coma and is suddenly interested in Tim, when he barely had been before. Lots of Tim angst and struggle, framed through a bitter letter he’s writing to his dad. Alfred also slyly nudges Tim to look into the estate next door to Wayne Manor, when he’s trying to figure out how or even if he’ll be able to continue as Robin now that his Dad is awake.

Electric City (Detective Comics #644-646) – includes Batman’s heart getting stopped due to electrocution, and Tim viciously threatening the villain to get him to defibrillate Bruce back to life. (“You’re going to shock Batman’s heart back online or I’m going to tear you apart.”)

Batman #481 – the notable bit here is Tim and Jack check out the estate next door to Wayne Manor and basically decide to take it.

Detective Comics #647-649 – the introduction of Stephanie Brown as Spoiler, including her thwarting/attempting to off her dad and also the infamous scene where she clobbers Robin in the face with a brick, lol.

Robin Annual #1 – Tim’s first team-up with Lonnie Machin/Anarky.

PRELUDE TO KNIGHTFALL

Batman #486 – Tim driving Jack to his medical appointments with Dr. Shondra Kinsolving, and worrying with Alfred over Bruce’s growing self-destructiveness in the prelude to Knightfall.

Robin III: Cry of the Huntress #1-6 – Tim’s third solo mini, and his first team-up with Helena Bertinelli as the Huntress. Also, Tim’s first meeting with Ariana Dzerchenko, who will be his first girlfriend, and friction/fights between Jack and Tim as Tim skips out on school and tries to cover up his Robin work. Includes a blow-up fight over Jack threatening to send Tim back to boarding school for his misbehavior. ("Who is the son you know, Dad? You don't know me. You never bothered. You shipped me from one boarding school to another and nobody paid any attention as long as my grades stayed high. You and mom were too involved running around the world.")

Batman #488-490 – the Bats start working with Jean-Paul Valley/Azrael, including Robin recruiting him to fill in temporarily as Batman when Bruce is ill. Bane’s plans to exhaust and break the Bat ramp up in the lead-in to Knightfall.

Showcase ‘93 #2-6 – Tim’s first time teaming up with Catwoman as they take on the crimelord Bracuda. This storyline will later cross over with one of Dick’s in the Bracuda & Chulo arc for Dick & Tim's first real team-up.

KNIGHTFALL

I won’t go over this whole period in detail as it’s quite a long storyline (link to the fandom wiki for all the info and issues), but some highlights for Tim are:

Detective Comics #660 – Tim tracks Bane down to his hideout but then gets captured and caught in the middle of a fight between Bane and Croc in the sewers.

Batman #494 – Tim drags himself home and presses Bruce to accept help in the wake of the mass Arkham break-out organized by Bane.

Detective Comics #661-662 – Batman sidelining Robin again while fighting Firefly and Tim again repeatedly badgering Bruce to accept help; Tim later takes down Firefly largely alone.

Batman #497-498 – Bane breaks Batman’s back; Bruce appoints JPV to succeed him as Batman despite Tim asking about Dick. JPV as AzBats goes increasingly off the rails during his time as Batman.

Batman #500 – Tim refuses to be party to the new Batman’s brutal methods, but is blown off by an increasingly unstable JPV. Dick finally shows up in the storyline while Tim is brooding outside the Manor. Dick is angry that he had to hear about Bruce’s devastating injury secondhand and that Bruce chose someone else to take up the mantle of Batman.

The Flash #81-83 – optional context, but this is Dick’s side of the build-up to the Bracuda & Chulo crossover with Tim. Dick and Kory visit Wally after their disastrous interrupted wedding (which Tim attended) and Dick’s ouster as leader of the Titans in New Titans #100-101. Dick ends up embroiled in an investigation of the criminal Chulo.

Showcase ‘93 #11-12 – Dick and Tim’s first proper team-up as Nightwing and Robin! Extremely fun and character revealing interactions as they navigate working together while barely knowing each other. My notes on these quote practically everything in both issues – they're fantastic.

Detective Comics #667-668 – Tim finds out that JPV has walled off the secret tunnel from Drake Manor to the Batcave. He also gets his driver’s license early (at 14) as a special dispensation due to his father’s handicap. This issue leads directly into the first issue of Tim’s solo, ending as he's caught sneaking back into the Cave. AzBats grabs and lifts Robin by his neck, choking him, which is how Robin (1993) #1 opens.

Finally, alongside the early issues of Tim’s solo, be sure not to miss the full Batman: Prodigal arc (https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman:_Prodigal), which covers Dick’s first stint wearing the Cowl of the Bat with Tim as his Robin. This is the period where they first really spent time together and bonded, and includes Robin (1993) #11-13. The whole thing is a banger, and essential reading.

[baeshijima]

u know what would be a cool genshin fic idea? isekai/transmigrated reader, but instead of appearing within the general timeline, you come into the genshin world 500 years prior to the start of the storyline in khaenri'ah.

honestly it could be either a little before the cataclysm, giving enough time to delve into some relationship building + explore some world building with characters like dainsleif, traveller's sibling (which would probably be lumine bc i actually do like her as abyss sibling & aether as traveller), and npcs like halfdan (still crying over him to this day ;w;) and possibly the khaenri'ahn royal guards (assuming you either join them or have a good enough relationship with them), OR it could be you appear during the crisis, completely and utterly lost as to why you were brought amidst the chaos and bloodshed as you watch everything you barely knew about this nation crumble before your very eyes.

either route will still result in reader's existential crises and constant "why am i here? just to suffer?" monologues because really, who would be fine after going through that after coming from /our/ world? and not to mention you've had to endure the next 500 years wandering with no real set path because you don't know this world— this era of teyvat or of genshin. you're merely stuck, unable to die, and forced to live a life of uncertainty with no clear direction for you to go to.

despite it all, you've at least been able to see dain during this course. while your meetings pass far too quickly for your lonesome, and his solemn demeanour is something you're yet to be accustomed to after having been with him before the fall of khaenri'ah (assuming it's the route where you appear before the cataclysm), you're glad to see a familiar face every now and then. after the messy departure with the lumine who left for the abyss order, you've come to appreciate his quiet presence more and more each time.

and then you decide it might be time to settle. you soon realise it's difficult to do so when your lifespan has become far more than that of a human's — of a mortal's — and so you find yourself becoming used to staying in one place for a few years before setting off for the next. rinse and repeat. over and over. it's come to a point where you've witnessed the nations undergo various changes each time you visit. you know change is inevitable, and yet your heart stings each time you witness it; a testament to how the world is ever-changing, yet you're stuck in place as a bystander.

one thing you're grateful for, however, are the bonds you've established amid your back-and-forth over the centuries. from archons like zhongli and venti to long-life beings such as neuvillette and the adepti to regular mortals who have showed you kindness as if one of their own... you've grown to cherish those memories, often reminiscing them when the nights get too long and surroundings too quiet. it was difficult at first, and still is, but you've become used to the inevitable change and the passing of those you once knew.

and after 500 years, you find yourself face-to-face with one you haven't seen since before you appeared in this world; the protagonist of this world, and the one you eventually join in hopes of finally finding a means to an end, aether.

little side notes/extras:

from /our/ world, you would probably know the storyline from up to around current (5.0) or maybe a little after the fontaine aq conclusion. it gives a lot to work with, but you definitely won't remember a lot of the lore after so long other than some main events, especially since most of your knowledge is pretty irrelevant for the next 500 years,,,

i think it would be cool if you had an inteyvat on your person as a little homage of khaenri'ah, which may or may not invoke some opinions from certain characters (*cough* aether immediately being reminded of lumine and having an existential crisis *cough*)

post-cataclysm you would go through a, uhm, long phase of helplessness, wondering why you were even brought to this world so far back if you couldn't even make any contributions. it does eventually morph into a resolution to do what you can to help those you come across if it's within your capabilities, but the nightmares and helplessness come back every now and then as a reminder for what you can't do :D yippee :D

honestly i'm on the fence whether you would have a vision or some other type of abilities (think on the similar lines of aether/lumine's and dain's), but i think having some type of purification mechanic would be a must in your arsenal !! would definitely lead to some moments between you and characters like dain or zhongli who suffer from the erosion as you give them a slight reprieve from what rages within and corrodes them

a little self indulgent, but i'd like to think your first /proper/ meeting with zhongli happens during a lantern rite festival, wherein you're admiring the lanterns in the sky after making a wish of your own and he comes up from behind with "they're beautiful, wouldn't you say so?" and !!

also as for love interests, as much as i would love for human/mortal characters, a part of me feels like this story would be better suited for the immortal/long-life characters as love interests?? idk i feel like considering that 500 years is, well, a long time, the bonds you would have with them compared to characters like, say, alhaitham or diluc would be way too different ?? though i would definitely still add them as love interest bc i am a sucker for so many of the human characters ;w; it would also add to the angst and hurt/comfort ahahha...

anyway thank you for reading this massive brain dump of a fic bc i absolutely would put this as a long term project, and if u made it this far then i would like to say that dain solos—

[ben10-lostandfound]

Moving Forward

So, we've come to this. Perhaps the beginning of a Bennaisance as it were.

-Dwayne Mcduffie's website updated and gave us incredible insight into the inner workings of the UAF Era, as well as Dwayne's original vision for Omniverse.

-We've had new merch drops, such as these Ultimate Alien bag clip blind bags, or these two shirts. And we're expecting a collab with Daylight Curfew.

-Some other rare media was recovered, like Game Generator 5D, or the (unfortunately useless currently) installer for Ben 10 Alien Force: Bounty Hunters.

-We've had ongoing updates to the official Ben 10 Roblox game, most recently they've added Slapback, Ultimate Cannonbolt, and skins for Grey Matter in the form of Omniverse Teen Grey Matter and Brainfrog. And we'll be seeing Surge added as a code unlock once the game hits 60k likes. (Which you guys can help with.)

-The new run of comics by Dynamite Comics slated for 2025.

-Ben getting to appear alongside some of his classic CN brethren in Jellystone!: Crisis On Infinite Mirths. (which currently has yet to release outside of the Comic Con screening.)

-And most recently, the popup marathon being recovered for the first time since April 2008, ending a long search for the original event.

So, where do we go from here? If I didn't know any better, I'd be tempted to say my work is done. But I know that isn't the case. There's always going to be something.

What about the live plays that debuted Rocks, Squidstrictor, and VilEon? More rare and interesting concept art that could turn up at any moment? The missing Hyperscan cards? An actual playable version of Bounty Hunters or Omniverse: Rise of Heroes?

To close out this post, I just want to thank every one of you who've stuck with me for as long as you have. Despite the ups and downs, I've really enjoyed doing this blog for as long as I have, it's helped me make something of a name for myself in the fanbase.

I've gotten to help preserve the history of our favorite kid superhero. I mean, a lot of the stuff might've not even turned up if it weren't for me making noise about it. 2025 may just be the year we get to see Ben at his full potential again. And perfect timing too, since that'll be the franchise's 20th anniversary as well.

-Rahk-Zi, Galvan Archivist Extraordinare... and the real admin, Roxana Sinclair.

[dcdreamblog]

Going to ramble a bit before my latest question.

My scrapbooks aren't a reliable primary source of information. Their contents seem to shift every time there's a furshlugginer Crisis event, and there's a missing volume but every time I try to think what's in it exactly, it slips my mind. Plus of course they only contain the newspaper and magazine articles I or someone who knows about my hobby happen across, and some of those newspapers, like the Metropolis Whisper, are known to give false information.

Still, it's a fun hobby. The first clipping I started with was one my slightly older cousin pointed out to me about the Justice League fighting Doctor Destiny in 1966 (yes, I know). The mask Wonder Woman had to wear during that case was shown and fascinated me. Mom suggested making a scrapbook for the news items I was interested in, and it quickly became all superheroes and mystery men.

Once it turned out I was serious about this, I also inherited loose clippings on the general topic that my parents and grandparents had randomly saved. And now we're getting closer to my question.

I've got six items from the 1930s about a New York City mystery man, or urban legend, named the Shadow. Two are straightforward news reports of gangsters going to prison, with a mention that "the Shadow" was somehow involved. One is an official announcement from the NYC police commissioner of the time that no such person as the Shadow existed. Then there's a snippet from a gossip columnist where Orson Welles, the radio celebrity, allegedly claimed to have actually met the Shadow and helped him on a case. Finally, two letters to the editor, one claiming that the Shadow was made up by reporters as a hoax to sell newspapers, and another positing that the reason the Shadow had never been photographed is that he had the power to turn invisible (which was also why no one could catch him.)

From what little I could find in a cursory search, the existence of the Shadow appears to be controversial.

So, what's the current scholarly consensus? Was the Shadow a for real person, an urban legend, and either way, what's actually known about him?

Establishing the existence of a superhero or mystery man can be tricky in some cases and utterly trivial in others, making the hard ones even harder by comparison. For instance, it's pretty easy to establish that Superman exists. He acts publically on a daily basis, the world over, his face, his costume and his abilities are globally known and he interacts with the public and the media enough that establishing a profile on him is background radiation. It's just KNOWN. Establishing that a mystery man existed back in the late 30s and 40s is also usually easy. Green Lantern is attested in dozens of newspaper articles, photographs, newsreels and of course the man is still alive and directly connected to many other well known superhero organizations. Then there's the tricky ones. Superheroes who show up once and then never again, strange costumes and images that don't quite fit with any other report, things that mix closer to legend than fact. This is one of those.

(A sketch of the most well attested version of what 'The Shadow' may have looked like) Reports of the Shadow's existence stretch back as far as 1931, the better part of a decade before The Crimson Avenger and the Sandman would bring the era of the mystery man into the full public consciousness. There have always been theories, some more fringe than others, that they were NOT in fact the first Mystery Men of their era but in fact simply the two that went public and maintain their identities long enough to be well attested in the historical record. That's never become a mainstream position simply because all versions of it either fail to meet the definition: The Crimson Avenger and the Sandman are the first BECAUSE they directly lead into their generation being birthed as a social force. Even if other came before them they only arguably count as part of the same wave because they obviously didn't reach the war years. OR like in this case, because their existence is impossible to prove. I don't believe the Shadow exists because the more you try to dig into him the more his existence becomes something worse than unprovable, it becomes unfalsifiable. He can turn invisible, he's a master of disguise, everyone who has ever seen his face is dead, he can mind control people through hypnosis so even standing in the center of a well lit room he won't be noticed, he has dirt on literally every possible person in or out of power that's so airtight no one would dare leak his existence, etc, etc, etc. The more questions are raised about lack of evidence, the wider the circle becomes to justify how nothing about him has ever been pinned down. None of the other heroes who were active in the very early 'gangland' days like the Sandman, The Crimson Avenger or The Atom ever confirmed working with or against him, he was never a member of any team or organization, no photograph was ever taken of the man beyond a shadow of a doubt. Eventually it comes down to the fact that a theory that can't be DISproven can't be trusted.

[zahri-melitor]

Hi! I’m a steph fan and your steph post really is good. IDK what post/person you’re talking about (I assume it’s going around, because I’m seeing the tumblr posts about it) but I love steph, and I think her sense of retributive justice and almost like instinctual violence towards men makes complete sense with her character. Even if I don’t think every writer was doing it intentionally (BQM certainly wasn’t thinking about Steph’s history with men when he had Steph get startled and punch Tim accidentally or whatever), these traits I think speak to feelings a lot of abused and wronged teenage girls have. I think it’s genuinely bizarre to want to remove these traits that IMO make Steph interesting in order to make her more palatable.

While I can actually understand people wanting her to grapple with restorative vs. retributive justice (again, i think this is a really common thing for young abused people to question and struggle with so seeing it on-page could be interesting), I think there’s more and more this sense of because Dixon wrote her this way, you should throw it all out which is so catastrophically boring to me. As much as Dixon is a conservative, and wrote Steph as a bit of a mouthpiece (and leaning on stereotypes about young girls in her characterization), plenty of it i think makes complete sense and genuinely works for her character.

Which, again isn’t to say I think every single aspect should be immutable forever (I think that would also be boring, especially for Steph who very rarely has gotten to be seriously introspective or have a fully realized arc in which her beliefs change past like 2000), but plenty of them straight up work for her teenage years in particular. Like of course the girl with no friends we meet on-page and no real support system when shes introduced is going to be possessive and desperate and catty! She started coming on to Tim after he REMEMBERED HER VIGILANTE NAME. That’s what it takes for teenage steph to like a boy, which I think speaks a ton for her dynamics with her male peers in her life. Like the minute you think even a second about what Steph’s life was probably like pre-Spoiler, I think most of her character flaws as a teenager (even those born of a conservative era or sexist writing) make complete sense.

I understand people not liking Steph (although I think she gets a lot less leeway than her male counterparts), but I think buffing out her canonical traits and flaws so she’s just like this freakish exaggerated version of herself (a perky, hyper-feminine stereotypical blonde thats super chaotic and doesnt think and does everything unintentionally) that only exists as a character foil to Tim or Cass or as a like cookie cutter snarky young female sidekick is way worse.

The thing about Steph in particular compared to a lot of other characters is that she has two very distinct, separate versions of her story that exist in an overlapping form (rather than before and after a Crisis like a lot of other characters who have a similar discontinuity in their characterisation).

The main character Steph you get reading Batgirl 2009 and Batgirls 2022 is a quite different personality to supporting character Steph that forms her appearances from 1992-2004, Batman RIP, Tynion's 'Tec, and Mariko Tamaki's 'Tec and One Bad Day.

Now personally, what I enjoy in a character is complexity and personality traits that are simultaneously assets and flaws (This is part of the reason I adore Barbara Gordon: she's a stubborn, grudge-holding hypocrite, and it gives her character so much depth). Another thing that you particularly see with female characters is they often develop a lot of complexity via stories that don't quite line up but when analysed turn into patterns of behaviour that various writers didn't even realise they were contributing to.

Supporting character Steph tends to be allowed to be messy (to help move stories along!) and that's where a lot of her most interesting personality traits pop up. As you say, there's a lot of solid background to why she hates to see criminals 'get away with it' based in her background and childhood and storylines. There's reasons for why she seems such a loner who has trouble forming friendships and who clings to the people who do put up with her for validation, and is so territorial over her relationships with Tim and Cass. She's desperate for approval and will cling to any shred of it she gets. And that desperation and determination is where her stubborn commitment to get back up again and ignore everyone trying to convince her to stop comes from, and how she keeps fighting, to prove her naysayers wrong.

While I tend to feel the Batgirl 2009 and Batgirls 2022 version of Steph is really flattened out into Generic Perky Blonde Optimist, because she's not allowed to face consequences of her actions or be at fault for anything in those titles.

It also obviously makes discussions difficult, with the overlapping contradictory characterisation versions, because if you're talking to someone who's only read a small chunk of her canon, you have to work out which bits they know, and with the added problem that what looks like obvious entry points (her solo or Batgirls) tend towards more uncharacteristic and flattened personality versions of her. Someone who's only read, say, Batgirls, has a very different view of who Steph is than someone who's only read Steph's Robin appearances, and if they try to discuss it without realising the significant differences in characterisation they're going to end up talking at crosspurposes.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

My Spanish lacks the proficiency of Markle's so some of this was lost in translation. No matter because Joan Callarissa still managed to expose MEgain & Sparry's fakery in every language.

A delicious megflop REVIEW. Chef's Kiss 😘

Five years after their escape from the palace, Meghan's Netflix series shows that they have become little more than two international clowns to be mocked on social media.

Llegir en Català|Leer en castellano BARCELONA

When the Sussexes decided to flee to the spirit of Buckingham, public opinion was sharply divided. There was no common ground between those in

favor of the runaway marriage and those in favor of the rest of Windsor. Both inside and outside the United Kingdom, the weight of both sides was very evenly matched, something that never usually happens because the British royal family always plays with a significant advantage. But the susexito –as the farewell of Enric and Meghan Markle was then called– had been very erosive for the royal family in terms of public opinion. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had suddenly created so many opponents of the Windsors that there were even people who thought it was the biggest crisis in the British monarchy since King Edward VIII abdicated for love, married Wallis Simpson and he went away to live in Paris.

Harry and Meghan garnered so much popular support by announcing they couldn't stand palace life that some believed the British royal family would never recover from the miseries the couple would explain once they left. Although somewhat exaggerated, those fears actually had some basis at the time, since the Sussexes had made the right decision at the right time and had all the winds in their sails. They had managed to play the victim, lead the narrative, become bearers of truth against the dark conspiracies of the palace, and, above all, they had reaped the full benefit of appearing to be a modern family, infinitely more aspirational than the rest of the Windsors combined. January 18 marked five years since that moment, and of all that popular capital the Sussexes had, they have nothing left. Or practically nothing.

A Farce

A sample of their decline has been given by the last project they have signed, Cone love, Meghan, in which she appears alone but is clearly the work of both of them. This eight-part Netflix series shows how the retired actress invites people over and organizes activities. eco-friendly, child-friendly, health-friendly, dog-friendly and, above all, avorrifriendly. So much so that twelve days after its premiere, the pseudo-documentary has received nothing but negative reviews on every possible platform where a format can be criticized. Parodies on networks like TikTok, destructive tweets, and extremely low ratings from both professional and amateur critics have turned this series into a global laughingstock. Amidst all this negative effervescence, the furious reviews published by the series stand out.

TheTelegraph –"The format is this: Meghan invites people to her fake house and they tell her how incredible she is. And so it goes for eight episodes"– and

Variety –"It was made with a lot of love, meaning love as the greatest love a person can have for themselves."

– Two among many others equally powerful.

But without going into the details of the content, which would only spoil the weekend, it's worth highlighting some things about the format that make no sense when compared to his real life. The first is that it's a blatant scam to present the format as a documentary when in reality, not even the house where it's filmed is his... Even the docureality María Teresa Campos and her daughters used the journalist's house. And Campos wasn't exactly from the era of reality TV. It's clear that in a format of this type, the content is controlled to modulate the image projected of you, but trying to seduce someone when you don't even have the minimum generosity to use your house as a background is disrespectful to the viewer, who will easily feel cheated.

The second misery worth highlighting about Markle's show is its overflowing snobbishness. She and Enric, who left the royal family because they were people who adored a simple life far from the trappings of the palace, now turn out to have their own beehives in the garden to be able to add honey to their recipes, which, on top of that, they have to collect with a beekeeper who comes to them. home To do so. It has also been widely reported that while making dog treats, he specifies on camera that he makes them with filtered water. These exaggerations suggest he's seeking market positioning. healthy obsessive that turns her into Gwyneth Paltrow's heiress. It's a shame it's not possible to take the Guinness record away from Hollywood's Oscar-winning darling. All of this is believable about her. Not about Markle. Besides, this personal branding that someone has devised for the Duchess is ten years late to the market. The thickness of Instagram, currently, loves the smash burgers much more than the flower petals she puts everywhere.

'Tradwife'

Thirdly, it's worth mentioning that the feminist, anti-racist, combative, and critical Meghan who couldn't fit into the palace corset has completely disappeared. If this is a documentary about her life, we must note that she has either abandoned all her struggles—since they are not mentioned at all—or she had only invoked them previously through fake activism. In her show, she is seen only in the role of an upmarket housewife who makes every effort to become a perfect hostess to her visitors. tradwife textbook but dressed like a rich Californian. It's hard to believe that this Meghan can continue to be aspirational for the target who idolized her when she burned the ships with Buckingham.

Finally, there is also an overacting in her positionally sought echo version of the Desperate Housewives from Beverly Hills.

Cooking with gold jewelry that can be seen from London, she betrays the desire to be appreciated as a celebrity first division to position herself as an ideal candidate to announce –on her newly launched Instagram account– any luxury item that is proposed to her in a short time.

This is also evidenced by the very deliberate phrase she says to Mindy Kaling when she goes to visit her your house The actress and comedian is being criticized for referring to her as Meghan Markle when her current "family name is Sussex." If she had told us this five years ago, we would have called it a poison campaign.

Generate rejection as a claim

The product really doesn't work conceptually because Sussex is blatantly pursuing an impossible market positioning. They want to look like a lot of VIPs and much of the people simultaneously, and to do so, they have created a product that makes no sense. They want to be characters premium to sell the brand's products that—oh, surprise!—Markle has just launched at a premium, and at the same time, they want to be straightforward and accessible to show how snotty and insufferable their royal family members are. Unfortunately, they may not achieve either of these goals, and their only option may be to continue making ridiculous televised shows.

However, the series includes enough details that make people feel both infuriated and embarrassed to make plenty of people watch it and then hate it, a very common phenomenon these days when you're paid per view and it doesn't matter whether they watch you out of affection or hatred, because the important thing is that they watch the content. In fact, some of these hateful things they do seem done on purpose.

You can't make a series where cooking plays such a prominent role and cook spaghetti as badly as she does. It can't be a coincidence. Someone with good judgment, seeing that this would be a... egoxou Insufferable, he must have asked him to include elements of edginess so that viewers would at least support him when they criticized him. He can't possibly normalize making ice cubes with water other than tap water so they're clear and putting petals inside them, not knowing that this is an insult to the working classes who watch Netflix.

Markle was one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to the magazine Time in 2018 and also in 2021. After watching the series, this fact seems implausible. But it's easy to understand the reason for his decline. The distance between the Meghan of then and the Meghan of today has only one reason:

the unbreakable will to live without working.

It's better not to talk about Enric, because he sells so little now that he barely appears in the series. After becoming two clowns International pop stars who have only demonstrated their talent by becoming the focus of sterile debates have accepted a new check from Netflix, and there will be a second season. In fact, dancing to the dream of the platform that finances their lives is the only thing they've ended up being good for. On the platform, they'll already be making brainstorming to see how they can make the next installment of the series worse so we'll keep talking about it. They know it's the only way anyone will even look at it. Hoping someone will buy it out of affection for them is a completely lost battle right now."

[boyfridged]

how do you feel about the dynamic between post crisis jason and bruce as a whole? I have such a hard time reading it because so much of it feels like the build up to "getting rid of robin" and not actually about batman and robin/bruce and jason

no, i agree!! and to be honest, this is what it is. i talked about it before, but collins did lose the run early because it was "not dark enough." the editorial and the narrative was truly working to expel jason from it. his initial appearance was way too hopeful for dc's dark age. everything that comes after that is weirdly fragmented, with no proper development, and jason getting practically no voice on his own until aditf. the relationship is very much stunted and strangely formal at times. the only exemptions i can think of is barr's tec and bruce's conversation with jason in legends. we were truly robbed of jason's robin era, and along with it from any feel of authenticity when it comes to his dynamics with anyone at all. bruce, first and foremost, but also dick. post-mortem they tried to patch up much to it, probably realising that the tragedy could not be impactful without establishing some sort of closeness between the character ensemble... and as a result, it truly feels like just for a moment, before the victim blaming fully hit, post-crisis jason was loved more while dead.

this is also why i always recommend reading pre-crisis moench's run -- even if you do not care much for pre-crisis jason, i like to think of it as a taste of what kind of parent bruce would be to post-crisis jason as well, if he was properly written as a parent to jason at all.

[fantastic-nonsense]

I'm not sure if this is exactly your area of expertise but your comic reccomendations haven't led me astray yet, so I figured I'd ask. Do you have any good recommendations to get to know Black Canary? Preferably post-crisis continuity, since that's most of what I read. I've read a bit of Birds of Prey but I don't actually know much of what she's up to before that.

You're right and this is unfortunately not my lane, but I have multiple friends who are absolutely in that lane, so I hope you don't mind the fact that I outsourced your question to my friend @thatpersonwhosaidtheywouldnt!

My own recs were "The entire post-Crisis Birds of Prey run, including Birds of Prey: Manhunt and the other oneshots leading up to the beginning of the ongoing, and Black Canary/Zatanna: Bloodspell."

My friend's recs were as follows:

"Secret Origins vol. 2 #50: origin, growing up, her mom's death

JLA: Year One: Origin of the Justice League where she helps form it

Justice League International: runs a bit concurrently with the grell run, which is a tad confusing, but better to her than that run

Then there's Green Arrow: Longbow Hunters…I don't recommend in terms of it being good for Dinah, but it is a vital read for understanding everything that comes later

She appears a lot in Grell's Green Arrow, but I rarely like how she's written there

The better stuff to read during that era is Action Comics Weekly back up #609-616 and Black Canary (1991)

Showcase 96 #3

Don't especially recommend her 1993 second solo cause it's a lot of 90's extreme nonsense, but if they want context of why she's a disaster coming into BOP, it's here. Also important to note she's broken up with Ollie at this point because she thought he was cheating (he wasn't)

From here there's a lot of random appearances, but really, BOP is where she starts mattering again and gets good writing."

Hope this helps, and feel free to ping them with any other questions about Dinah!

[dirt-piper]

The TF2 problem

Don't take anything I say here as gospel - much of it is my own speculation and musings.

TF2 is my favorite game of all time. I started playing it wayyy back in 2012, and while I don't have that many hours racked up total (a meager ~1K), I can at least consider myself to be a few rungs above 'total n00b' in terms of familiarity with the game. I've experienced the best and worst eras of the game - from the Love & War update to the current botting crisis, and I have loved TF2 every step of the way.

But just because I love it, doesn't mean I think it's flawless!

Around 2015-2016 I noticed (alongside damn near everyone else playing TF2) that TF2 was changing, and not in a particularly good way. Love & War was in many ways a perfect update for TF2 - it gave attention and goodies to both the highly casual and the highly competitive ends of the playerbase, with a fancy new taunt system bundled with some pretty fun new weapons. At about this time, Blizzard announced the imminent release of their new game Overwatch, which was directly inspired by TF2 - and now presented itself as being a direct competitor to TF2 in its own niche. This, of course, turned out to be bogus - Overwatch is its own game with its own niche that has a playerbase nearly wholly separate from TF2's.

A common trend amongst the TF2 playerbase at the time was this sense of dread regarding Overwatch - either that it would suck up the entire TF2 playerbase, leaving the game to die, or that Blizzard would try their damnedest to manifest such a reality. Either way, a ton of die-hard TF2 fans began to absolutely loathe Blizzard's new game (before it even came out, I might add) for so much as daring to 'unthrone' TF2.

This entire premise is stupid. It's stupid now, and it was stupid then. But the fear became so pervasive throughout the community that, eventually, it seemed like VALVe was getting scared too. The tone and focus of TF2's updates began to shift far more heavily towards the competitive end of TF2's playerbase - which has never been the majority - as VALVe appeared to try to pivot TF2 into a stance where it could better "compete" with the upcoming Overwatch. Bits and pieces of this started showing with Gun Mettle and Tough Break, before Meet your Match completely revamped the game into a more competitive-focused format.

Why they would do this didn't really make sense - if VALVe wanted to compete against Blizzard's new AAA FPS with a competitive scene, then why would they try to remodel TF2 to position it as a "more valid competitor" to Overwatch when CS:GO was already a proven champion in that space? TF2 doesn't need to compete with Overwatch. It never did. So why would they expend so much effort to change TF2's course when, frankly, it was doing fine as-is?

Looking back now, with nearly a decade of hindsight and a bit more insight into VALVe actually works, I think the picture is a bit clearer, or at least the one I've formed in my head is. I don't think TF2's sudden drastic shift in focus was the result of VALVe scrambling to shore TF2 up against the onslaught of Overwatch - I think it was, rather, the TF2 team scrambling to shore TF2 up against VALVe.

VALVe is not a normal game studio. VALVe is not only lucky enough to be their own publisher (therefore making them a completely independent studio - yes, VALVe games are 'indie'), but also extremely lucky enough to be the de-facto publisher for nearly the entire PC game industry, thanks to Steam. VALVe makes money off of every single game sold through Steam whether they made it or not, essentially guaranteeing them a constant stream of exorbitant income regardless of their own output. They have a complete vertical monopoly of their own industry - they own themselves (VALVe has no shareholders whatsoever), they own their products, they own their publisher, they own their distributor - and now, with the Steam Deck, they own their hardware platforms too. VALVe answers to nobody but themselves, because they own everything that could possibly impact their business.

VALVe is, in a lot of ways, in a somewhat similar situation to AT&T (aka 'Ma Bell') back before the breakup of the phone company back in 1982. AT&T owned the entire phone network - from the switching equipment to the phone lines to the handsets plugged into them - and they charged every person in the country who leased phone service from them (you couldn't own a phone back then!) a subscription fee. AT&T, then, had basically infinite money to do whatever the hell they wanted with (though the government strictly regulated their commercial activities so they could not compete in any industry but telephony). As a result of this, Bell labs, the core Research & Development branch of AT&T, was in a very unique scenario - projects undertaken by Bell labs researchers weren't given budgets - they were given quotas.

AT&T didn't care how much money or time was spent on a project by a Bell labs researcher, so long as it ultimately resulted in something that benefited the company. And this model worked very, very well - Bell labs' researchers gave the world the transistor, the laser, the CCD, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and received 10 Nobel peace prizes.

VALVe, through Steam, has a free, infinite revenue stream. VALVe's staff, then, effectively have infinite money and time at their disposal to make whatever they desire - so long as it ultimately results in something that benefits VALVe. Or, at least, so long as the people who hold the most seniority at VALVe think it would benefit VALVe.

It's no particular secret that the old guard at VALVe are, largely, unenthusiastic about TF2. Remember - Team Fortress is VALVe's oldest franchise. The original Team Fortress mod was released in August of 1996 - a mere one month after the Nintendo 64's initial release - a full 2 years before Half-life. Sure, VALVe didn't initially create Team Fortress, but they bought Team Fortress Software for a reason - Team Fortress was insanely popular. And it's not just TF2 that has absurd longevity, it's the entire Team Fortress franchise; here's a match from a Quake Team Fortress competitive tournament that is currently ongoing as I write this post:

VALVe acquired Team Fortress software with the premise that the sequel to Team Fortress would become an expansion to Half-life, thereby increasing Half-life's desirability by attaching it to the sequel of one of the most popular FPS games available at the time. TF2, of course, took a bit longer than expected - so Team Fortress Classic, a more-or-less direct port of Team Fortress to goldsrc, was released in 1999 to satiate people until the real TF2 came out.

That took another 8 years.

When TF2 finally released, it pioneered the concept of games as a service - that you could buy a game once and it would receive new content, features, fixes, etc. indefinitely - for free. These were not paid expansions or DLC, these were actual updates made directly to the game that anyone could get access to so long as they happened to own the game. And, once TF2 went free to play, the deal became even better. This model was utterly groundbreaking in 2007 - it's the standard for how most games operate today, sure, but only because TF2 proved how well it could work.

The issue, of course, is that VALVe was eternally working on TF2. By 2015, Team Fortress 2 had been in development in some form or another for 17 years. With this perspective, it seems understandable why some of the more senior members of VALVe would have grown sick of Team Fortress - they'd been doing or dealing with the same game for nearly 2 decades.

But, of course, newer hires at VALVe would have nowhere near the same level of fatigue - many of them were likely still very passionate about the game, and eager to continue its lifespan - but when the people who sign their paychecks and review their employee performances are sick and tired of hearing about Team Fortress, it becomes less and less attractive to pour effort into the game, no matter how much they may personally wish to.

Under these circumstances, the tonal shift TF2 experienced around the release of Overwatch appears more as an internal struggle - the remaining TF2 team trying desperately to prove to their seniors that TF2 was not yet ready to be phased out, that the game could modernize and remain relevant in the modern competitive gaming scene, that just because they were sick of TF2 didn't mean that everyone was.

So, they gambled. They bet TF2's future on a new revamp to adapt it to the then-modern world of competitive e-sports... and fumbled it pretty hard with Meet your Match.

The problem with the TF2 team's attempt to make TF2 more suited to the modern world of competitive gaming was that they seemed to overlook that, to the average non-competitive TF2 player, the game as it was was perfectly fine. Through Quickplay, any player could be automatically placed into a server matching their desired criteria and just... play. A server would stay on a given map for roughly 45 minutes (though players could vote to extend the map timer) regardless of how many rounds there were, meaning that everyone got the same amount of time to play the map regardless of how good or bad either team, as a whole, performed. This game players plenty of time to just... have fun playing TF2. There was no rush or hurry or incentive to play the game in any way other than how you wanted to.

This made TF2 very unique in the FPS world - the truest example of a "casual shooter". There were no ranks or rewards or incentives to play every day beyond random item drops and the enjoyment derived from simply playing the game itself.

The TF2 team's attempt to 'modernize' TF2 in Meet your Match effectively ruined this.

In addition to the introduction of a new, dedicated 6v6 competitive mode, Quickplay was replaced with 'Casual' - a matchmaking lite that tried to find a middle ground between the chaotic ad-hoc freedom of Quickplay and the more rigid, competitive structure of Competitive. It didn't work. Most TF2 players just wanted to play TF2 - casual forced them to stop and wait for the matchmaking system to find a server for them matching its desired criteria, stop and wait every other round for the server to change maps, stop and wait for matchmaking cooldowns to run out if they left a game in progress - so much time was spent stopping and waiting to play the game that hardly any was left to play the game itself. Yes, some of these problems have since been smoothed over, but Casual still forces the play to spend less time playing the game than Quickplay did. In my opinion, Casual, as it was released, could have been perfectly fine if Quickplay was kept alongside it. Instead, in one fell swoop, the way the vast majority of people played TF2 was effectively removed from the game.

In fairness to the TF2 team regarding this gamble, they were under enormous pressure - not just from a TF2 community growing increasingly paranoid about TF2's future due to the imagined threat of Overwatch - but also from the higher-ups at VALVe they were trying to convince.

However, the TF2 team snuck a back-up plan into Meet your Match - the Heavy vs. Pyro war. By outright promising a future major update (or perhaps two, even!), the TF2 team could at least insure that, no matter what their 'bosses' thought, they could justify their continued work on the game as fulfillment of a promise made to the community. And, if the new update was enough of a hit, it could perhaps inspire their 'bosses' to let TF2 continue to live on, at least for a little while.

So, the TF2 team pulled out all the stops for the next update. Jungle Inferno had an animated short, new maps, new weapons, entirely new features (ie. the contracker), it had a massive hype-spiraling 4-day-long update announcement, major weapon rebalances and overhauls - they clearly tried their damnedest to make the best TF2 update possible.

Whether or not the team managed to convince their superiors is unknowable. Jungle Inferno was followed by the fanfare-less Blue Moon update in early 2018, followed by radio silence. The TF2 team may very well have still been hard at work on the elusive Heavy update, but the double-whammy of the all-hands-on-deck push to get Half-life: Alyx finished and released immediately followed by the COVID pandemic likely reset whatever momentum or motivation the TF2 team had left.

This scenario, as described, is painful enough. From the outside, it appears as though VALVe had rebounded from Meet your Match, and was doing its best to improve the game in the wake of their own missteps, only to suddenly drop TF2 with zero explanation given. TF2 was left in a state of indefinite limbo with no clear outlook whatsoever on the future.

What made this infinitely worse is that VALVe had left the game in a state that wasn't just unfinished, it was broken.

TF2 has literally always had a botting problem. For the first span of the game's life, this generally manifested as idling/trading bots, but later on more and more bots began to appear that sought only to disrupt gameplay. Micspam, false votekicks, aimbotting, speedhacks, etc. - purely for the sake of irritating real players. Until Meet your Match, these cheating bots were relatively uncommon - real players could very easily either kick them from the game or simply join another server via Quickplay. Their impact on gameplay was no more than a minor, brief annoyance, and thus they were considered a non-issue.

Meet your Match's new Casual system, however, dramatically restricted the player's ability to hop to other servers when bots arose. Not only this, but the ability to switch teams at will was disabled on Casual servers, meaning it was now impossible to deal with bots on any team but your own (previously, if the other team was too slow to kick their own bots, it was possible to just wait for an opening on the other team, hop over, and call a votekick against the offending bot that would usually end up succeeding). Now, the disruption caused by a single bot was far more impactful than it had been before - because it was a far greater chore to either kick the bot or find a different server. Moreover, Casual outright incentivizes players to stick to the same server until the end - awarding them extra points the more they play, and nullifying any progress they've made towards a given contract that match if they leave before it ends. Players are thus, in effect, forced to play even when bots have made the game unenjoyable.

This resulted in a feedback loop - bots were now more irritating, so people complained about them more, so bot hosters hosted more bots, making them even more irritating - and that feedback loop has continued nearly unabated until modern day.

The TF2 community has been begging for an end to the botting problem for ages - and there have been genuine efforts from the TF2 team to try and fix the problem, but they have been too small and too infrequent to make much impact. And, to be frank, there is no way to effectively, permanently remove the bots. Attempting to keep any and all bots from the game would require enormous, constant effort from the TF2 team - something which is a very tall ask given VALVe's attitude towards the game for the past decade.

What can be done, however, is to simply make the bots less impactful. To let players more easily avoid them, to let players enjoy the game for longer so the bots are no longer such a nuisance, to let players have enough freedom in how they play that they are no longer forced to suffer through games with bots. It won't outright remove bots forever, but it will make them so much less of a nuisance that bot hosters will likely lose the incentive to bother with them. As soon as that happens, the feedback loop will be broken, and the botting issue will decline in severity as their potential impact on players' enjoyment of the game is neutered.

The simplest way to do this is to make Casual just as free as Quickplay was.

45 minute map timers, extensible by vote.

An Indefinite number of rounds per map.

Ad-hoc joining, leaving, and team switching.

Progress on contracts not erased by leaving mid-round.

These are not overwhelming changes. If anything, it's something of a return to form - not outright bringing back Quickplay, but making Casual into a suitable replacement for it - at long last.

And - most importantly - it's a one-time fix. It does not require an eternal arms race against bot hosters, nor a full return to frequent, massive content updates (though those would be nice).

One update to make TF2 more fun, to make the bots less impactful, and to give the game a better standing for the future.

One update to fix TF2.

-DirtPiper

[supermanshield]

Superbat and the Kryptonite Ring: A Reading List

The quick guide, if you just want to jump right in:

Superman (1987) #2

Optional: Action comics annual #1, Adventures of Superman #466, Action Comics #653. These lead up to Dark Knight over Metropolis.

Dark Knight over Metropolis: Superman (1987) #44, Adventures of Superman #467, Action Comics #654

Superman: The Man of Steel #21

Superman (1987) #126 (+ Action Comics #737)

Superman: Lex 2000 (one-shot)

Superman (1987) #168

Detective Comics #756

Batman #612

Optional: Superman/Batman #6, #12, #44-#49, Justice League (2011) #19-20, Batman/Superman (2019) Annual #1

When I think of Superbat, I think of trust. And when I think of superbat and trust I think of this:

panels from Action Comics #654

(and other things, but that's beside the point for this post). Superman trusts Batman with his life, and the decision to stop him if he ever needs to. But Batman also trusts Superman to make the right choice, giving the ring to him first. Even though at this point in post-crisis continuity they're not really friends - they know each other and their secret IDs, they've hung out a couple of times, but that's about it - Bruce doesn't make this choice himself and keeps anything from Clark, but gives the choice to Clark. This is not (yet) the paranoid Batman that keeps things like this from Clark.

So, where does this symbol of their friendship and trust come from, you ask? What happened to and with the ring throughout the years of post-crisis canon? Let's get into it under the cut.

The origin

Superman (1987) #2 (beware the Byrne-era Superman)

(Optional: Action comics annual #1, Adventures of Superman #466, Action Comics #653)

Dark Knight over Metropolis: Superman (1987) #44, Adventures of Superman #467, Action Comics #654

The kryptonite ring first makes its appearance in post-crisis continuity when Lex Luthor fashions a ring from a sliver of kryptonite that came from Metallo. However, its radiation causes him to get cancer and subsequently lose his hand. He keeps the ring in a safe after that. It eventually gets stolen by Amanda McCoy, who has found out that Clark is Superman, and goes to confront him with it. She panics and flees, leaving Clark behind, and she gets mugged and killed. The ring makes its way to the streets of Gotham, where it ends up in Batman's hands.

Dark Knight over Metropolis tells the story of Batman investigating the ring and its previous owner and her death. In the end and after saving each other multiple times, Bruce tells Clark about the ring he found and gives it to him. Eventually Clark shows up at the cave to give it to Bruce, the only man he can trust with his life.

Lost... and retrieved

Superman (1987) #126 (+ optional Action Comics #737)

Superman: Lex 2000

Superman (1987) #168 and Detective Comics #756

In Superman #126, Lex claims he needs the ring when he's on trial. Clark goes to batcave to pick it up himself and hands it over for tests, after which he gets it back, because he believes in fair trial. However, when Clark gets the ring back it's been replaced by a fake (something he doesn't notice because in his Superman blue era he was not susceptible to kryptonite). Luthor has the real one again, right before he becomes president.

panels from Superman (1987) #126

In the Superman: Lex 2000 one-shot, one of the stories shows Batman breaking into Lexcorp to threaten Lex to give back the ring, but this backfires.

panels from Superman: Lex 2000

In Superman #168, Lois then finally decides to take matters into her own hands and asks Batman for help stealing the ring back from Luthor, because Clark won't tresspass into the White House to steal it.

panels from Superman #168

This very chaotic but fun story is continued in Detective Comics #756. In the end, the ring is back with Clark, Lois, and Bruce. Though we never actually see who of them gets to keep it, I'm going to assume it's Bruce, because he has it in Batman: Hush, which takes place some years after this story.

Could Bruce use it? And Batman's paranoia

Superman: The Man of Steel #21

Batman #612

Superman/Batman: the Search for Kryptonite (#44-49) (specifically #49)

Justice League (2011) #19-20

Clark trusts Bruce enough to give him the means to stop him if he ever needs to, but could Bruce actually go through with it if he had to? Now, there are other contingencies that he has for a rogue Superman, as shown in Tower of Babel, but green K is the most direct one.

In 1993's Superman: The Man of Steel #21, set after Superman's death, there is a page that shows Bruce brooding in front of the case where he keeps the ring and contemplates if he could have used it. He sounds doubtful and above all reluctant when he says he would have had to, though ultimately it wouldn't have mattered anymore since Clark was dead at the time.

panels from Superman: The Man of Steel #21

This is much different from the Batman we see in Hush, where he keeps the ring on himself instead of in a case, and uses it without any doubt. In Batman #612, part of the Hush storyline, when Clark is under Poison Ivy's control, he uses it freely on Clark, enough to subdue him and snap him out of Ivy's control, but no more than that.

Of course, Batman doesn't kill, but from the moment Clark gives him the ring, the implication is given that there might be a scenario where it's a last resort and he actually has to stop Clark. I believe there is a comic that explores this in the Armageddon 2001 crossover, but I haven't read it. Or any other Elseworld stories where Superman goes evil, so I'm not aware if Bruce has ever used it like that. I like to think that even if he needs to, Bruce finds another way, because that's what Superman and Batman do.

Finally, in Superman/Batman: The Search for Kryptonite, Clark asks Bruce to help him rid the world of Kryptonite, after the large asteroid that carried Kara had come to earth. They go about this together very meticulously, and in the end, Clark decides to give Bruce the final piece of kryptonite. But when Bruce goes to deposit it in his cave, we see that he has all varieties and a stockpile of green K.

panels from Superman/Batman #49

This first of all is weird because doesn't Clark know that Bruce already has a kryptonite ring? Unless continuity was wiped somewhere inbetween again. But it also shows how paranoid Batman has become, how far we've strain from the Bruce that really trusted Clark and gave him the ring first in 1990 to do with it what he wanted. Instead, Bruce now keeps a lot of kryptonite unbeknownst to Clark. I personally like the 1990 version of Bruce much better.

During the New 52 era, Bruce also had a Kryptonite ring that was given to him by Clark, as shown in Justice League (2011) #19 and #20.

Extra appearances

Superman/Batman (2003) #12, Superman uses it or a different piece himself on Supergirl.

Batman/Superman (2019) Annual 1, a very fun Superman vs. Batman story :D

In animation: Justice League Doom, loosely based on Tower of Babel.

Fun fact: in JLA: Tower of Babel, Bruce's contingency for Clark has nothing to do with green K, unlike in the movie. I'm assuming that this is because at the time, in the comics, Bruce didn't have the ring, it was in Lex's posession (during his presidency). Besides that, Bruce's contingency for Clark in Tower of Babel is something that would affect him no matter where he is.

[mamawasatesttube]

Okay I waited until you were done with WW87 to ask: please share your thoughts on Vanessa and the wild turns her story took? I’ve been really interested to hear your take as my dash’s premier DC Women Expert.

and GOD do i have thoughts on vanessa and the wild turns her story took!!!! i'm still sorting through them but MAN. it really just felt like they did NOT want to give her a break 😭😭😭

i really loved early vanessa's relationship with diana. i think one of the most striking things to me about perez's run was that he did really understand how to write a teenage girl who read like a teenage girl, and her preoccupation with things like comparing herself to her friends or struggling with school and juggling how it felt to be popular bc of her friendship with diana... it all struck a really nice contrast and balance to the supernatural and mythological and whatnot higher stakes stories going on with diana a lot of the time, and i thought the diana-julia-vanessa dynamic was overall really sweet. it's a little funny bc as i was reading, when i got to byrne's run i was actually like "i wonder if cassie and vanessa are ever going to meet, i bet they could have some fun interactions :)" and then. um. well.

overall i feel like silver swan vanessa was a) WHAT? and b) unfortunately rushed and never actually given space for the appropriate gravity and nuance it deserved. val's silver swan era got a lot better buildup and explanation than vanessa's imo. i think vanessa's silver swan era really suffered from having both major arcs with her coincide more or less with dc-wide crossover events starting up, first owaw and then identity crisis into omac stuff into infinite crisis.

because like - the shock of vanessa getting turned into the silver swan against her will could really have been something!!! however, pretty much all of it was offscreen and only really implicit. we see flashbacks and bits and pieces of ballesteros doing some insanely violating and horrifying shit to her, twice over even bc she gets kidnapped from the hospital and when she shows up again she's been horrifically altered with cybernetics grafted onto her body ? ? ?!? ?! ?!?! !! ! but at No Point in any of this do we actually get any more than a line or two about vanessa herself, how this happened to her, or how she's actually feeling under it all. i think that's partly because of the poor timing bc of the events, and partly also just her being used for shock value and more for diana's suffering (and to a lesser extent, julia's) instead of having her own consistent character arc.

i also think the fact that while brainwashed and tortured into being the silver swan, she did kill cassie's friend tammy, kind of got majorly glossed over, especially in her second appearance as the silver swan when people were going "she's a murderer????" and diana was like "well i'm granting her asylum anyways and taking care of her." like - don't get me wrong, i think that's very in character of diana, especially because she feels like she failed vanessa, but i think cassie in particular should've gotten to react to it more. i really liked the bit where cassie said to julia that if this worked out, she'd get her daughter back, but that tammy's mother would never get hers back. i wish cassie having those feelings got explored more - i didn't really like the parallel set up between vanessa vs cassie and ballesteros vs barbara minerva, re: themes of vengeance, because like... vanessa was a victim, but cassie shouldn't have to forgive her for killing her friend. these two concepts can coexist. (frankly, i would have LOVED an actual conversation between cassie and vanessa about this during/after vanessa's recovery.)

it's probably also due to timing stuff, but the plot threads with veronica cale being directly involved in torturing vanessa into the silver swan (and then threatening leslie about it) got Super dropped when identity crisis and the omacs stuff all started happening, and i think that's a shame because that plotline could've been the key to actually explaining what happened and why - it could've actually tied together the "vanessa got tormented by doctor psycho" and "vanessa ended up with ballesteros" bits because like. what. how. that feels like such a big deal to just leave to the background.

so i guess overall it's like... i don't hate it, i think it's a fascinating concept that has a lot of potential, but the execution was so rushed and so focused on diana and not on vanessa herself that it really just felt heavyhanded to me most of the time. (frankly i would also have loved to see val return as a civilian to confront and attempt to talk vanessa down, but that's probably also just personal taste.) i'm very curious what the original plans for her might've been before owaw and infinite crisis diverted them, though.

[jewish-sideblog]

I think we are encountering the dawn of a kind of decolourized supremacy. By that, I mean that many white and otherwise privileged Westerners are keen to dismantle their own internalized White Supremacy in our modern era, and that is a good thing in theory. But while many of them do a decent job of deconstructing the externalized expressions of racism, ie the Whiteness, very few actually manage to address the underlying ideals of Supremacy.

Lee Edelman touches on this while critiquing reproductive futurism in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. He quotes the White Supremacist slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children". Edelman argues that this slogan is not repulsive exclusively because of the word "white"-- if you take the racism out, it still represents a very harmful and repressive colonialist ideology. The idea that we survive through our children and that we must secure their future at any cost is harmful to feminist, queer, and other minority causes. When held by US Republicans, it is the ideal that led to the Dobbs repeal of Roe v Wade, and any number of oppressive anti-Queer legislation targeted at "protecting children".

Yet it is also a harmful ideology found in many Western liberals and leftists-- The idea that we can't have kink at Pride because a shirtless gay guy in a leather dog mask could somehow be harmful to a Queer child. The idea that we have to combat the climate crisis for the sake of future generations, as if the Third World is not already experiencing the effects of climate devastation firsthand today. The idea that we have to enact common sense gun reform in the USA to protect children from school shootings, not to protect adults and children alike in communities of colour who have been dying to gun violence since long before Sandy Hook or Columbine. None of the examples in this paragraph are explicitly homophobic, imperialist, or racist, but they can and do still carry those effects. The ideals of supremacy linger, even when the whiteness is cut out.

Jewish communities right now are seeing a deeply insidious form of this decolourized supremacy. The explicit racism is gone, but the underlying currents of antisemitic and colonialist supremacy are still going strong. Hence the shift from targeting Jews to targeting (((Zionists))), but not ever targeting evangelical Christian Zionists, who outnumber Jewish Zionists by the millions. Hence the disrespect and trivialization of the Jewish connection to our native lands, and the hatred towards the most successful land-back movement in history, while they still offer lip service and slactivism towards the native groups whose land they actively occupy. These are convenient ways for them to perpetuate supremacist ideals without an indefensible appearance of racism or coloniality.

It is a new and disguised racism, and the most terrifying thing is that it’s disguised internally against the very people who are being racist. They’re incapable of seeing their own bigotry or wrongdoings. Their own supremacy has convinced them that they are right, that they are righteous, that they are good and can do no wrong. We’ve seen this before— it’s the same kind of supremacy responsible for Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden. They act as though they know better about our own cultures and people than we do, and that they somehow know what’s best for us, even as they talk over us and disregard the pain they are causing.

This is rapidly becoming the default position of liberal and leftist activism. And, mark my words, it will destroy progressive movements in the Western world if left unchecked.

[artbyblastweave]

It's so funny how Cap just COINCIDENTALLY seems to be physically unable to go through a SINGLE Republican presidency without having a crisis of faith that causes him to not be Cap anymore. Nomad with Nixon. USAgent with Reagan. Death and Buckycap with Bush, then HydraCap with Trump. I like to think him dying was the universe's way of identifying "...well he doesn't seem to be changing yet. Better balance this out real quick"

This is true, and moreover this ask dovetails nicely with another Cappost I've been thinking about making. Given the sliding timeline, who should we assume was in charge of the Secret Empire?

Loose, possibly at-least-partially misremembered background for those who weren't aware of this batshit plot point- In the early seventies, concurrent with Watergate, Captain America shut down a scheme by a neofascist group called the Secret Empire to, I dunno, hold the country hostage with a mutant-powered nuke or something, the specifics aren't important, what's important is that Cap cornered the leader of the group in the Oval Office, where he killed himself to avoid capture, and you never get to see the guy's face but it was all but directly stated that the Leader was Richard Nixon attempting a Coup D'état (possibly to get out of being prosecuted for Watergate?). This shakes Cap up pretty badly and he temporarily retired the Cap identity in order to operate as Nomad, The Man Without A Country, it was a whole crisis of conscience situation. Anyway, the whole situation is still vaguely implicitly canon, they refer to the Secret Empire, and there have been successor heroes who've taken up the Nomad identity after Cap got out of the funk. But It also can't have been Nixon who killed himself in front of Cap due to the sliding time scale- the rule of thumb for Marvel is that it's generally only been about 15-20 years at most since the Fantastic Four did their thing, which does hilarious things to the worldbuilding. My understanding is that you're supposed to assume that if the president is depicted in a marvel story you need to just mentally "swap in whoever would have been president 10-15 years before the present day, but given the specificity of this situation that quickly gets insane. Did Bush kill himself in front of Captain America to escape the consequences of the 2008 recession? Did Obama?! Was it just not a president at all at this point- in which case, why did Cap react badly enough to quit and become Nomad? And so on, and so forth. They basically gotta memory hole it, but I will not let them forget! Cap saw a U.S. President off themselves! But to tie this back to Civilwarposting- what I think about a lot is that from a worldbuilding perspective the actual political moment that generated Civil War is perpetually in flux. This is true of every Marvel comic but it's especially notable here because of the extent to which the comic itself is emphasizing the political moment and what created it. It's a Bush-era comic, a reaction to the politics and the rhetoric of the War on Terror and the post-9/11 years, Bush actually personally appears in it. But if it hasn't already, eventually it's going to have implicitly been pushed through Congress during the Obama Administration, and then during the Trump Admin, and then during the Biden Admin, and so on and so forth, and like. setting aside that there's already an entire swath of the marvel timeline that's very blatantly trump-admin-coded, produced in reaction to that atmosphere, The situations and arguments and rhetoric and battle lines that would have gotten that bill through each of those admins looks very different each time! And I'm not gonna say it's interesting to see how they'll resolve this, because they won't resolve it, they don't need to, they're politely asking everyone to let this one go and that's not the biggest ask these comics make of me, so fine. Whatever. But it's very very funny

[ectonurites]

Are Tim and Cass Cain actually close in canon? Or is that more of a fanon thing that gained canon status?

Alright, so the tldr answer is that yes pre-reboot they were close—but it wasn't something that happened immediately/right off the bat, it took time, and they didn't always perfectly see eye-to-eye. But like, it's not just some totally fanon thing, they were absolutely close.

I'm using past-tense in the above though because it's like... all the actual content with them becoming/being close is pre-reboot. Anything post-reboot with them either had them back at square one (during N52 stuff) or like, just sort of handwavey 'oh they're close again' without much actual elaboration/explanation. Theoretically nowadays everything's canon again so all the old stuff applies, but as far as I'm aware nothing has really dug all that deep back into the two of them/their dynamic.

Now, to give a brief crash course on Tim & Cass's relationship in canon...

Early on they weren’t all that close because Tim was absolutely intimidated by her & her background and like, in general seemed to just find her kinda off-putting:

(Robin (1993) #73)

However Tim eventually gets over himself & after working side-by-side with her a little bit realizes he shouldn't let being intimidated by her stop them from being friends and working together:

(Batgirl (2000) #18)

After this point they work together on several occasions, definitely communicating much better than in their initial appearances together and clearly getting along well. They're a fun lil duo:

(Superman/Batman Vol. 1 #5, Superboy Vol. 4 #85)

Then… after a while, War Games happens. Gotham goes to shit, Steph dies (well, we nowadays know she didn't really, but they sure were both grieving) and so they both independently move to Blüdhaven, which leads us to the Robin/Batgirl: Fresh Blood crossover. Which has some fun little moments with them:

(Batgirl (2000) #58)

As well as some on the more tense side, as they both navigate mourning Steph and the clashes in their ideologies/approaches to hero work—the fact that Cass wants to be & be like Batman, and the fact that Tim absolutely does not:

(Batgirl (2000) #59)

After the crossover they mostly do their own thing staying out of each other's ways in Blüdhaven—though they do get another little story together in this timeframe in Batman Allies: Secret Files & Origins that sort of rehashes the above conflict during some training together & a team-up.

And we DO also get the cute (and oft-mentioned by the fandom) moment where Tim mentions she frequently breaks into his house to shower & steal rice krispies (just for clarity sake, while fandom almost exclusively calls her 'Cass' largely to avoid confusion with Cassandra 'Cassie' Sandsmark, within the comics themselves both Cassandras get called 'Cass' and 'Cassie' at various points—considering Cass is the one who lives in the same city as Tim at this point in canon, that's definitely who he's talking about here)

(Robin (1993) #138)

So like, at this point they are absolutely comfortable with one another and pretty close, but just, they don't see eye-to-eye on everything so it's not some flawless friendship (and I say friendship specifically because at this point we're still a few years out from them actually becoming siblings). But it's absolutely an interesting dynamic!

Then… after Infinite Crisis we get to the One Year Later/OYL era which is... bad for Cass. Terrible horrible character assassination we all refer to as the 'Evil Cass arc' which began in Tim's book. I don't wanna pull panels from it because it's just... it's bad!!!!!!!!!!!! There's a reason it got retconned into Cass having been brainwashed—because it was bad.

I guess the only thing worth bringing up here in relation to Tim & Cass's relationship though (because as mentioned, Cass gets retconned into it having been brainwashing so anything from her in this era is irrelevant/moot) is the fact that Tim was obviously very upset about the whole situation because Cass is someone he cares about and he even says he considers family.

To fast forward through that mess, when we get to the end of it and the 'oh it was brainwashing haha!' retcon, Tim was the one to have on hand a counter-serum that could free her from Deathstroke's control:

(Teen Titans Vol. 3 #44)

Once Cass is no longer forced to be evil and ooc, she gets a little mini at the end of which Bruce formally offers to adopt her (and Tim, who had earlier been adopted by Bruce, is present for this—so from this point on they go from a more general 'we're like family' to actually 'we are adopted siblings').

Buuuut then Final Crisis & Battle for the Cowl both occur and Cass gets extremely pushed aside by DC, giving up the Batgirl mantle to Steph and heading off to Hong Kong.

At which point we find out that Tim & Cass have actually kept in contact (just... off-panel) during this time when she's been out of Gotham and he's been off doing all sorts of stuff:

(Red Robin #17)

When they see each other in person again, Tim urges her to be a Bat again. Maybe not Batgirl if that's not what she wants, but to wear the symbol and be part of the family. (Which she does take him up on, keeping the suit he brought her and becoming Black Bat).

She pops up again at the end of Red Robin to save Tim & also help him pull off a fake assassination attempt on himself—ya know standard stuff.

And then right before the reboot we get to see them working alongside Damian and Dick in Gates of Gotham, and see one final time that yeah—these two have kept in touch after everything, and are definitely far more on one another's wavelength nowadays than they were back in the 'fresh out of War Games' era:

(Batman: Gates of Gotham #2, #5)

So like, does fanon over exaggerate them and their relationship? Aaaaabsolutely—that’s what fanon does. But they did definitely become close after everything they went through and had a fun dynamic together!

Sadly though, as I mentioned at the start of the post, the n52 wiped everything back to a clean slate. And while nowadays post-Infinite Frontier everyone’s histories have been restored their dynamic has never really been the same again.

[dcdreamblog]

What's your opinion about those movies or series based on real superheroes that clearly take some liberties with the actual events and/or people? For example, the million of WW2 movies that always try to cram an All-Star Squadron member in there (even though there is proof that they weren't present at that specific event/battle) or that one movie a few years back that made up their own backstories and civilian names for the JLA members ("Cal Smith" and "Brandon Keaton" became memes for a while)

I certainly don't envy the task of any film maker trying to make something based around superheroes who actually exist in our real world. And the well known challenges that come with making a historical film almost certainly don't help. That being said, yes of course they bug me slightly.

(A frame from WB's "Justice Society WWII" movie) When you're making a wartime period piece I understand the strong pull of including a member of the Society or the Squadron even as a cameo. They're such a specific texture of the era. This original generation of "mystery men" just weren't thought of or treated the way we treat superheroes now and any actor worth their salt would jump at the chance to play a living legend on the silver screen That being SAID, if your movie is going to be taking place during any of the actual combat fronts of WWII there's a pretty big historical inaccuracy you are choosing to make: Very famously, the Squadron COULDN'T operate directly on Axis territory during the war because of the influence of the Spear of Destiny.

Now there were exceptions of course, the mythical field around Uncle Sam allowed the Freedom Fighters to do some work around the edges of enemy lines especially as the war was coming to a close and the Spear's influence was faltering but none of the Core JSA set foot in Axis Occupied Europe until the Yalta Conference at the earliest and the events of THAT day weren't declassified until years decades the war. As cool as the scene is in your head, Green Lantern was not dog-fighting the Luftwaffe over D-Day it just didn't happen. Stories set on the home front can play with this slice of history far more but if its sent DURING the fighting then you have to be a bit more creative. Nose cone art, pin ups, USO shows, newspaper headlines, newsreels, having them be treated as common cultural reference points in conversation or the like. Sometimes the most immersive use of the Squadron in your WWII movie is using their influence sparingly. That being said when it comes to MODERN movies I think its unethical on its face to try and speculate or color in the personal lives, thoughts and feelings of still living and working superheroes. While it comes from a good place of trying to humanize them for a wider audience, the reality is that you're needling at something we as the public don't have a right to poke at. I respect movies more when they too use our heroes in these tales as we see them, appearing on the scene, fighting the good fight and then taking their leave before being too buried in praise. Which means that movies based around superhero centric can also choose to focus on the perspective of a regular person who was also there. People will grouse about the "normal people" characters in movies like Metropolis: Crisis of Infinity or No Man's Land but at least that gives some props to normal people who are actually willing to share their thoughts and experiences. Plus if your POV character comes off as a drag on the movie then that is the writer's problem.