#and come to your own conclusion

[dclovesdanny]

DcxDp prompt

4/5

Teen titans have been attempting to get Phantom to join their team for ages, but he’s always refused, citing other obligations. He has fought side-by-side with the team several times, and gets along with all of them pretty well. Phantom even has Robin’s number. (Everyone on the team knows about Robin’s crush on Phantom, and tease him endlessly about it.)

Robin wasn’t expecting Phantom to call over a burner phone in the middle of the night, after a worrying three monthes of silence, to accept the offer, as long as he can bring his two children to stay in the tower too.

[voltaical-art]

im in agony. a little self indulgent but I think wyll deserves to be told he's loved and have a small breakdown about it

[zan0tix]

CAN U PLZ DRAW A WEREWOLF JAKE N A VAMPIRE DIRK IF ITS NOT DIFFICULT🙏🙏🙏

BACK TO THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED DIRKJAKE POSTING 🫡

I DONT DO REQUESTS HERE but this was an actually good prompt and something i had ideas for previously anyway :) TY FOR THE ASK

I WILL COME BACK TO THEM. I HAVE ALOT MORE I WANT TO DRAW WITH THIS IDEA THERES SO MUCH COMEDIC POTENTIAL. and my comment from twitter

Thats their meet cute

[disorganised-bagel]

is this anything

[tubbytarchia]

Some blood/gore trafficblr inspired animal things. uh

[stil-lindigo]

the candle.

a comic about rediscovering passion and recovering from burnout.

creative notes:

[bugstung]

Bloody kiss 🍷

[tearwolfe]

If hes dead then who is this thing.

tucaca

[luna-loveboop]

I am growing increasingly concerned about Wild and Warriors relationship...

With both Age of Calamity and Tears of the Kingdom, when the games were announced Jojo released a statement about how the game might affect Lu

And in both times she mentioned Wild and Wars relationship:

What does she have planned for them?

Wild has been ignoring Wars for a while now, and Wars has shown anger over the sword breaking, and they were never that close to begin with

...

This is way back, and I could be wrong and I really hope I'm wrong

It's clear from the game announcement posts that she's had some sort of dynamic between them in mind from the start... and then there's this Q&A from way back:

....

[funhouse-mirror-barbie]

I’ll be writing a critique of the way Blitzø and Stolas’ relationship was handled more at length, but I wanted to stop and take a moment to look at this scene from the new episode, “Full Moon”:

This is the sort of power and control that Stolas has always had over Blitzø.

It does not matter that Stolas has never threatened to take away the Grimoire before, or that they were “friends” as kids, or that he offered Blitzø a few months off, or that he’s been nice to Blitzø in the past, or that Blitzø actually does have feelings for Stolas.

When you are in a situation where you cannot say no at the risk of losing your livelihood, you cannot give true consent.

This is the very BASIS of their relationship. It has always been the basis of their relationship—a quid pro quo relationship where Stolas holds all of the power.

I have seen countless people go over and explain in great detail why the full moon deal was not truly coercive, or a quid pro quo situation, or how it was completely consensual.

And it’s just not. It is sexual coercion where Blitzø cannot give meaningful consent. Because if he refuses Stolas, he’s at risk of losing everything.

I want to clarify that my criticism here isn’t with this writing decision. I’m not trying to say anything along those the lines of “because this fictional character did a bad thing the story is bad and people who like the character support sexual coercion!!” That’s not what I’m saying at all.

I am bringing all of this up because my criticism is not of this writing decision, but because of the framing of the Full Moon deal and of Stolas and Blitzø’s relationship.

The narrative often frames Blitzo as if he is the one who has wronged Stolas by not prioritizing Stolas’ feelings and needs above all else. Or, it frames both Stolas and Blitzo as being equally in the wrong for the conflicts in their “relationship”.

This framing, and the extent to which fans try to justify it as being ANYTHING other than what it actually is—Stolas coercing Blitzø into a relationship where he has no power and is at the risk of losing his livelihood—is baffling to me.

This framing, coupled with the writer’s absolute refusal to ever have Stolas held accountable for his actions (including Stolas still not actually apologizing for the situation he put Blitzø into—he acknowledges that the relationship being transactional is wrong, but does not acknowledge that he was wrong to coerce Blitzø into that relationship. He says “…it isn’t right…it never was”, not “What I did wasn’t right, and never was”) is why I can’t consider St0litz to be just a “complex” or “messy” relationship.

It don’t think it can be, because it’s not a relationship. Not a real one. It’s a transaction, where Stolas treats Blitzø like a sex object. And whether that was the intent or not, Blitzø’s reaction above and saying that he would do anything to keep the grimoire makes it really hard for me to see St0litz in any other light.

As a final note, I’m not saying that you can’t write dark relationships, or have complex and unsympathetic protagonists. You can ship whatever you want! You can have characters that sexually coerce and abuse others, you can write every dark and twisted thing your mind can come up with.

But it’s very clear that Helluva Boss’s writers want to frame Stolas as being the wronged party, and the one who we are supposed to sympathize with—and you just can’t have it both ways.

You can’t act like you’re writing a complex love story between two very complicated and real people, when the relationship that you’re describing is so utterly one-sided and unbalanced.

[appolojustice]

I'm not saying this to excuse some of the shortcomings that I definitely agree datv has but I think some would benefit from learning how to take a story and fill in the gaps yourself. The narrative doesn't always have to spell out every little detail for you and sometimes those gaps are intentional

[carlyraejepsans]

for real WHERE does the idea that [utdr humans] are nongendered so that "you can project on them" come from. their literal character arcs are about NOT being a blank slate to be filled in by the audience

i think i understand the assumption on some level for undertale, because there is a very intentional effort to make you identify with the "player character" in order to make your choices feel like your own (the beating heart of undertale's metanarrative lies in giving you an alternative path to violence against its enemies after all, and whether you're still willing to persue it for your own selfish reasons. YOUR agency is crucial).

of course, the cardinal plot twist of the main ending sweeps the rug from under your feet on that in every way, and frisk's individuality becomes, in turn, a tool to further UT's OTHER main theme: completionism as a form of diegetic violence within the story. replaying the game would steal frisk's life and happy ending from them for our own perverse sentimentality, emotionally forcing our hand away from the reset button.

i think their neutrality absolutely aids in that immersion. but also, there's this weird attitude by (mostly) cis fans where it being functional within the story makes it... somehow "editable" and "up to the player" as well? which is gross and shows their ass on how they approach gender neutrality in general lol.

but also like. there's plenty of neutral, non PCharacters in undertale and deltarune. even when undertale was just an earthbound fangame and the player immersion metanarrative was completely absent, toby still described frisk as a "young, androgynous person". sometimes characters are just neutral by design. it's not that hard to understand lol.

anyone who makes this argument for kris deltarune is braindead. nothing else to say about it.

[doodlejoltik]

my favourite writing device is having an un-Rei-liable narrator

[odetoscavengers]

God of Nothing

[heyclickadee]

This was originally going to be part of the second half of this post listing all the things which are both left unresolved by the end of The Bad Batch and conveniently just to happen to be tied directly to Tech. That post was getting unwieldy, though, and I think I’m just going to be breaking up the different sections into their own posts.

So, with the disclaimer that I’m arguing that Tech is alive and still coming back and was always planned to be, just on a longer timeframe than any of us expected: One smaller thing that I think needs resolution is the inherent conflict between Tech’s willingness to put himself in harm’s way at the drop of a hat for the people he loves on the one side, and his intense will to live and ability to pull a win out of an impossible situation on the other.

Because Tech is very often willing to put himself on the line when there’s something threatening the others. We arguably see this as far back as “Aftermath” where his solution to dealing with the new problem of the practice droids having live rounds and the batch’s weapons being useless against them is to reprogram one of the practice droids—good—and then get on its shoulders so he can steer and aim, which is necessary for making the plan work but also makes him a bigger target. Then there’s (arguably) “Cut and Run,” where he decides the best way to get access to the chain codes is to get the ship impounded and risk getting caught (this one goes a little sideways because Echo is involved and Omega unexpectedly tags along; “Spoils of War,” where he runs out into the woods with a broken femur because Echo and Omega might need his help; “Faster,” where he repeatedly risks his life in a race to keep a mafia don from coming after his family (and to save Cid); “The Crossing,” where he jumps down a chasm after Omega; arguably “Metamorphosis,” where he goes to turn the power on alone knowing that there’s something dangerous on the ship; and of course “Plan 99.” And probably a number of other times I’m not remembering off the top of my head.

But, the thing is, we never see Tech just being reckless or giving up in a no win situation. In almost if not all of these cases there’s a calculated risk and a tendency to fight to survive the whole time it’s happening. Yes, he’s visibly spooked during the whole power-up sequence in “Metamophosis” and runs headlong into the zillo beast at one point later, but he’s also ready to fight anything that comes around a corner and is actually the one to everyone out from being cornered by the zillo by simply keeping his head on his shoulders. The riot race is incredibly dangerous, yes, and taking that left tunnel even more so, but he knows what he has to do to win and make it out alive, and does so, confidently, in his way, with aplomb, despite Omega and Wrecker begging him not to the entire time. He gets cornered and just about collapses from the pain in “Spoils of War,” but he powers through, takes the other troopers out, and ends up winning that close fight behind the tree despite being at as severe a disadvantage as he was. He doesn’t let himself pass out until he’s taken care of the immediate danger to himself and the others.

(Slight sidebar here, but I think killing that poor trooper is probably the most harrowing thing we see Tech do, and probably the best indication of how hard he’ll fight to live if he has to. It’s rough and dirty, he’s badly hurt and pinned down, he’s farther away from the blaster, and in all likelihood he probably doesn’t want to kill that guy. But he does, and he fights through that broken leg, because dying is the other option and he’s not about to do that.)

Furthermore, Tech is almost always the one providing solutions to the no-win scenarios in which the batch finds itself. Flanked by droids and trapped by a huge drop? No problem, we’ll jump and let these flying reptiles carry us out. We’re about to be incinerated alive? Nah, we’ll just blow the cone off and roll around away from the blast. Wrecker’s about to be overwhelmed by weird cave bugs? Here’s a flash bomb. Zeffo Giraffe rampage? Well okay, we put the crystal back. Lists of people are going to get killed by a tsunami? Okay, we give them multiple avenues to get to safety. And so on and so forth.

That’s a guy who’s looking for solutions and exit strategies, not someone who’s ready to lay down and accept the inevitable. And the thing is, Tech’s deliberate optimism and one-in-a-million plans? They work. The story pretty firmly establishes that he’s a master at pulling whatever win he can from unwinnable situations. And there’s a natural tension between that—the tendency to fight and find a way to survive even against terrible odds—and being as self-sacrificial as he is.

Now, you could say that this tension was resolved in “Plan 99.” He’s a soldier and he sacrificed himself, therefore the resolution comes out in favor of the self sacrificial side. Except…eh, not quite.

This could have been resolved in “Plan 99.” Easily resolved, in fact. Show Tech accepting that he’s about to die. Have him embrace it, say goodbye, take his helmet off and keep looking at them all as he’s falling (or, hey, change the circumstances so that he actually dies instead of falling into the Ambiguous Mists alive). Have his last line be something about how the others need to keep the mission going or saying goodbye.

Instead, what we get out of Tech’s current last line is a little defiant. “When have we ever followed orders?”* Basically, “You can’t stop me from doing this.” “I know what I am doing. It’s called ‘strategy.’” He closes his eyes for a second as he falls but then he very deliberately flips himself over—which is what you’re supposed to do if you find yourself falling from that high. It gives you a better chance to control your speed and steer. He’s not surrendering, he’s trying to take control of the situation in any way he can.

Which means that inherent tension is still at play. Yes, he’s sacrificing himself and taking a huge risk for the people he loves. Yes. He’s trying to find them all a way out of this impossible situation. And yes, he’s going to fight to live the whole way down, no matter how bad his chances are.

If that’s a tension you don’t resolve in “Plan 99,” then, well—you’ve got to resolve it somewhere. At this point, after he comes back is the only place you could.

*I can’t emphasize how weird it would be to have a character’s actual last line forever for good be a question, especially if it’s one left without an answer. Meanwhile if Tech was CX-2 and lived (and is still alive) you actually end up with a really interesting answer to it.