#but I DO find it very compelling

[shesmore-shoebill]

"I had choice paralysis :(" is a KILLER line.

He's such a comedic powerhouse, I'm glad more people are getting exposed to him :'D

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

forever obsessed with dynamics between vampires, specifically that of a maker and fledgling, as a way to explore abuse. the creation of a vampire itself can so easily be a literalization of the lasting impacts of trauma and also much more simply the ways a perpetrator might shape their victim’s very identity. the extremes of isolation in the way that the new vampire, in most narratives, must cut all ties to their mortal life, or else go through an elaborate charade to maintain the facade of humanity, while forever still being removed from it. and the sheer dependence and vulnerability of being in an entirely new state of being, wholly uncertain of what it entails, and relying on another person to define… everything.

[notbecauseofvictories]

very strongly feel that moist/adora is the only actual romantic relationship terry pratchett ever wrote.

[radioactive-mouse]

god i do still think it’s so interesting that most wizards (and even gale itself at times) talk about magic as though it’s an exact science, like, fantasy equivalent of being a STEM major, but during the weave scene gale explicitly compares it more to music and art and poetry, like!!

i know he has a thing for the dramatics but this is fascinating!!!

[silverwhittlingknife]

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

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

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

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

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

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

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

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

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

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

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

[galadriel-blue]

TROP S2 SPOILERS

Nobody better say anything bad about my girl Earian she is being manipulated through her grief by the men in power around her and it's making it hard for her to discern right from wrong. I'm not saying that her actions are justified, I'm just saying that she misses her brother and dearly needs her dad, but at the moment she is all alone and that can mess a person up

[jils-things]

happy mothers day to my first and best momma concept ever designed 💚💚

[kindly-gourd]

it’s so funny to me when ppl accuse Shane and Ryan of staging evidence when I’m pretty sure if they were faking it they’d have better evidence 😬

[unspokenstydia]

LYDIA MARTIN And I've got a lot to pine about. I've got a lot to live without.

You don’t care about getting hurt. But you know how I’ll feel? I’ll be devastated. And if you die, I will literally go out of my freaking mind. You see, death doesn’t happen to you, Lydia. / Unbelievable…you have no idea what you are, do you? The wailing woman.

[realbeefman]

very weird to be a show only iwtv fan because my fav is unambiguously louis so i have like. veryyy little interest in either the movies or the books because book!louis seems to be a hugemassive cunt who owned slaves. but also i cannot READ any of the fanfiction or half the fan theories because it’s all RIDDLED with elements from the book canon that will inevitably be brought up in the show/with reference to characters and character backstories i haven’t been introduced to yet which means i’m essentially balancing how deeply and passionately i want to see intelligent character analysis and fantastic fanworks people are making with how much of the next season i can stand being spoiled for me

[spacedlexi]

the post about the mirrors between the Kenny & Jane fight and the Minnie & Clem fight just reminds me of all the similarities between Violet and Kenny. like obviously they’re different characters, I just find it interesting how they share so many traits (being very loyal, may or may not sustain an eye injury, like fishing even if one is rod fishing and the other is spear fishing). there’s some more similarities I forgot to mention but I’ve been patiently waiting for someone to draw Violet and Kenny fishing wearing “women love me, fish fear me” hats or something.

oh yeah, ALSO. they both have moments where you can fight them and calm them down (Kenny on the train, Violet in the ending where you didn’t save her).

this is just so interesting! wish other people acknowledged it.

anon unknowingly unlocking my beef with kenny defenders who hate violet

vi was one of the first characters for me where i realized that a female character can have all the traits people will defend in their favorite male character(s) and yet theyll still find a way to absolutely despise her for some reason

kennys #1 defense is that him losing his family is what drove him to the brink and its soooo understandable for him to act out the way he does (brutally killing people, abusive even if it comes from a place of wanting to protect "his group"). but violet, who acts the way she does (isolationist loner) because.... she lost her family... is a disloyal bitch for some reason 😐 even while shes nothing but loyal to clem regardless of choice (people are quick to defend louis' actions in ep 2 as well and his behavior never makes Him disloyal for some reason 😐 "he lost his best friend!" and vi lost her best friends/gf because of marlon so?), and only has a lapse in judgement after you (determinately) "betray" her 💀 AND she apologizes for it if you do!!

if nothing about violet changed besides her pronouns the fandom reception to her would be so dramatically different and i refuse to believe otherwise

[platypotoo]

I started watching the show assuming (from pictures and such) that Sydney and C*rmy are the main couple. I didn't even know Richie existed.

But having finished the second season just now, I can't feel anything romantic between Syd and C*rmy. I expected to like them together, even to ship them at least a little. But I just don't.

Syd and Richie on the other hand? Wow.

In season 1, where they absolutely hate each other most of the time, their interactions are already so meaningful:

- The first time that we as viewers see Richie be vulnerable, Syd sees it too.

- His worry whether she is okay after the gunshots. Should be normal between colleagues, but... they used to dislike each other so much...

- When Syd resolves the fight between the gangsters, Richie looks at her in irritation, but also almost... awe? It also makes him actively change at this point already, actively change himself and how he sees certain things.

It's really a testament to the writing of this show, to the complexity of its characters that Richie is such a scumbag in season 1, in some ways saying exactly what you'd expect a guy like him to say, yet he could have been so much worse. He never crosses a certain line. And then in season 2, he becomes so much better.

Their interactions kind of hit me like a freight train - completely unexpected, raw, realistic, extremely emotional, almost forceful.

Thematically, too. The very new one and one of the oldest. At the beginning: always at each other's throats. Fighting, pulling, pushing. Is it possible that they might find peace with each other? Find even more?

The structure of season 2 had the main cast interact less, and since Syd and C*rmy were the ones working most closely together, I was sure that the strange vibes I got between her and Richie would disappear in favour of Syd/C*rmy. But except for the table scene (which I just didn’t read as romantic, more a continuation of Syd's personal arc), there were very few meaningful scenes between Syd and C*rmy.

There weren't many big scenes between Syd and Richie either, but... nobody really expected them to. However, we did get two scenes of weird awkwardness, like they didn’t know how to behave around each other without fighting. (her jumping away when nearly bumping into him! Their weird interaction when she's seeing him in a suit for the first time! "You smell good"?! Wtf? Ultimately it probably means nothing but I can't stop thinking about it!!) And of course the one scene in the last episode, when they are more than amicable colleagues - they are the perfect team without ever training together, same focus, same drive to make things exactly as they should be, helping each other, supporting each other and being impressed by each other.

It's just so weird how Sydrichie completely surprised me. I wouldn't even call it only "chemistry" or something. It's their entire dynamic, the way they made each other madly, almost exaggeratedly emotional in season 1, then went on parallel paths apart from each other - did some soul searching, improved themselves - and ended up as this weirdly perfect force together. I never expected it. I've never seen anything like it.

Right now, I think there's a 50:50 chance that in canon nobody of The Be*r's staff gets romantically involved, or that Syd gets together with M*rcus. No other option is realistic. But I'll be thinking about her with Richie for a good long while.

[bambeebirdie]

This is for @bluepeachstudios ‘s Ghost in a Shell. It’s really good you should read it.

I looked at exactly one picture of Jupiter Jim and went “yeah this should be enough to draw him.” I will not be answering if it actually was

Have some bonus content under the cut!

And sketches

(I love any character who can say “I don’t want to go back to prison” it’s like the funniest thing to me)

[wormchaser]

you are complaining about complaining too much while complaining about the fact that maybe people dont like you because you complain too much while complaining about being alone. just stop complaining and do something about it. talk to people. reach out. dont just wait for someone to come to you first.

i have tried reaching out to different people in the past year or so but it never works. i understand its my own fault for letting relationships decay because of my own insecurities and issues but that doesn't mean i can just will myself to think or believe different things about myself. it's a self fulfilling prophecy ; i think people don't like me so i don't reach out so people don't like me etc . i am sure you do not want to hear me list all the things i want to say in response so i will put them in the tags.

[boasamishipper]

if it turns out that anirudh pisharody will in fact not be returning for s8 i can't say i'm surprised or disappointed. ravi showed up three seasons ago and all we know about him to this day is that he's a landlord and had cancer as a kid. he doesn't have a particularly close relationship with anyone in the 118. he didn't partake in the cruise ship rescue. he didn't visit bobby in the hospital. i'm not saying ravi couldn't have been an interesting well-rounded character but if the writers couldn't figure out a way to bring him more organically into the fold and give him some depth (and actually make us feel his absence when he's not on screen) after three years then i can't blame them and the powers that be for allegedly writing him off the show

[drinkingdeadpeopletea]

Title: "flash-frozen in the driver's seat" Fandom: Midst (Podcast) Categories: G, Gen, No Archive Warnings Apply, Complete Word Count: 3613 Characters: Phineas Thatch, Tzila Guthrie

“Why do you have that?” Tzila asks. Phineas opens his eyes. She’s pointing at his abacus with the back of her pen. He looks down at it and frowns. “It’s my abacus.” “I know what an abacus is,” says Tzila, rolling her eyes. “Why do you have Caenum? Didn’t being a soldier and solving mysteries or whatever get you a ton of Valor?” Phineas and Tzila have a conversation in the quiet halls of the Lazaretto.

(hi everyone it's ME again! back with another midst missing scene i couldn't stop thinking about.)