#but if i DON'T have that persona up

[lotus-pear]

the dialogue choices in this game should be more diabolical

[ingoodjesst]

have you put the pieces together yet, detective

[egophiliac]

I love how you draw Grim the size of a small cat. It genuinely blows my mind that according to the game he's actually approximately 70 cm tall... Like, Ortho is 148 cm. That's only two Grims! If Grim stands on Ortho's head, they'd be just a bit taller than Malleus (who is 202 cm and I'm not sure that's counting the horns)! The proportions are just so wild to try to imagine realistically... (and I do like the small cat Grim take more, it's very endearing)

every time I remember Grim is actually supposed to be the size of, like, a medium-to-largeish dog, and then I just...draw him cat-sized anyway. I also think it's cuter that way! 🤷 (let's just say he's not allowed to ride the servant unless he takes the shrinking potion first.)

ultimately I figure we all get a little artistic license in our fanart, and mine are:

cat-sized Grim

Lilia with hair spikes up to the heavens

w i d e Silver

[honeysweetcorvidart]

if i had been given the choice, i still would have chosen you.

hey so i'm totally normal about the lovers reversed

[dollypopup]

one day fans will realize that treating real people like fictional characters and fictional characters like real people is, at the core of things, The Problem

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Ok, I think I have a pretty good idea of why a lot of Akechi's dialogue is... like that.

So, even before his confidant truly started, I noticed that he has a real knack for directing the flow of a conversation. This is very fitting for someone who is both a detective and skilled at interviews - when there is a topic and a goal, Akechi is in his element.

All this to say, he's actually kind of controlling when it comes to conversational flow. He probes for information, or turns the conversation around to a particular topic, usually the Phantom Thieves. He manages to take a few of Joker's dialogue options and spin them so they sound mildly incriminating in the context he's placed them in - the only way to truly get around this is to pick answers that feign indifference, and even then, that's more than a bit telling. He's clearly very good at this kind of thing.

But then, we get conversations where either Joker does something he didn't expect, or else he doesn't have a particular goal in mind - and the conversation stutters. In the first instance, Joker does something (a particularly egregious example is putting his glasses on him and fluffing his hair in rank 3) which both leaves him wrong-footed and no longer in perfect control of the situation. He just kind of... freezes, for awhile. It's hilarious. He has no idea how to respond.

He picks up control again in the phone call afterwards, having chosen to play into it, turning this "fooling the crowds" into a kind of game or secret between them. Nice save.

But in instances where there isn't an obvious topic and the goal is somewhat nebulous, for instance, that one Leblanc scene, it becomes pretty apparent that Akechi doesn't have the right "script" to go off of. Again, it's particularly notable in that scene, because I'm fairly sure he didn't have any specific reason to be at Leblanc, other than him looking for a quiet spot now that public opinion has turned on him. And because there isn't anything specific he's digging for, he kind of just ends up throwing things at the wall to see what will stick. Probing for any kind of recognizable reaction that he can jump on and work with, and that just doesn't really happen in this scene.

He references Sae, a woman in a respectable position, to Sojiro, but instead of that netting a welcome, it earns his ire, given Sae's recent actions against him. He then tries to greet Joker, his... rival? friend? enemy? person who at least seems to somewhat enjoy spending time with him? But Joker's responses are somewhat short, and Akechi practically wilts. He tries to commiserate by oversharing. He tries to involve Futaba and reaches out for the only topic of interest he can think of around "young people". He compliments the coffee. He compliments Joker. He tries to invoke that connection between them. None of it is really sticking, nor does it serve as a jumping off point for him to steer the conversation, or even really start one.

So, he basically just ends up having a one-sided chat with himself and then leaves. Hilarious. Also a little sad, if I'm being honest. It's really giving "guy with no friends who only knows how to speak to adults" energy. If there's no specific purpose to the exchange, or he is not in control of its direction, he seems to be kind of out of his depth. He succeeds only in being a little awkward and confusing, more than anything.

[kaiser1ns]

You thought it was over? It's not. I'm not done yet, understood. (Imagine Endo saying this like aaaaaaaa)

i think i have a type nom nom men with tattoo sleeves. APPRECIATING ENDO'S ARMS BECAUSE HE DESERVES IT. also adding my other man jeon jungkook because why not (⁠｡⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠｡⁠)⁠ﾉ⁠♡

LOOK AT THOSE MUSCLES LOOK AT HIM OH MY GAWD IM IN THE OUTER SPACE SCREAMING HIS NAME UNTIL MY VOICE REACHES ANOTHER GALAXY, ANOTHER DIMENSION, ANOTHER MULTIVERSE.

[corviiids]

i see you tagging Joker Persona5 (his christian name) on that crossdressing post but . . . Have you written him crossdressing-

Lala scrutinises him for a long moment before plucking a fresh q-tip from the packet and smudging his Cupid's bow. Ren feels pampered--observed--the way he might if he were a doll, but it's not an altogether bad feeling. It's kind of nice. Definitely not the worst way he's been observed this year. Far from it, really.

"I think you're decent," Lala decides.

He'd expected, maybe, some level of surprise from her when he'd asked her about this. Some lighthearted teasing, perhaps? Shouldn't have. She's a consummate professional. It's almost a shame, because maybe if she'd interrogated him about it he'd be forced to verbalise what exactly this feeling is. Now he's just going to have to figure himself out without the comparative comfort of doing someone a favour.

Lala turns him to the mirror.

No grand revelations there. It's Ren in the glass, it's just Ren in a dress. He doesn't feel any different. Doesn't feel any nicer, doesn't feel more right, any more himself. Just Ren in a dress.

Prettier, though.

He adjusts his belt, self-conscious.

"You like the colour?" Lala asks him. She's still holding the lipstick; it's a sweet, cool red. She's businesslike. "We could go darker if you want, but you're young. Bright is good."

"I like it," Ren says.

"Dress isn't too tight?"

"No."

"How you feeling?"

Mostly the same. A little more painted. It's been a year of finding comfort in some kind of veneer like it's a trade. Hiding his eyes to swap vulnerability for a roguish streak, for instance, or for a bit of plausible deniability. His glasses are off now. He'd asked, but the false lashes were too long and they'd smudge the lenses, or so said Lala. And of course the domino mask is nowhere to be found. Ren's face is exposed. But it's painted.

He tilts his head and watches his mirror self do the same, inquisitive like a bird of paradise. The gloss makes his lips look pursed all the time. Lala's shadowed his eyes, too, made them glittery and hooded. It's a wide-eyed look that makes him look curious and mysterious all at once. Doesn't look like him, but it does. Feels like meeting a twin and then taking her place.

Lala is watching him. She's too professional to let that knowing expression pierce her own immaculate makeup.

"You're coping well with those heels," she offers, and does not ask further.

"Thanks," says Ren. "I think I can take my shift now."

"Watch that lippie if you eat or drink," she warns him. "It'll smear. Anything else you want, hon?"

His mirror self tilts her head again, coy. No mask. Joker winks out from a sparkle in her eye.

"Do you have gloves?" Ren asks.

[kumakuma-circus]

i don't have anything to add tbh.

[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

[ianashas-palace]

So what if they flirted even more in Leblanc

[daily-hanamura]

[profounddefendorcrusade-blog]

Starlo's personality

I'm still confused about this man's 'true self,' gotta admit. How much of 'himself' IS there in 'North Star'?

What we know about real Star:

He's a nerd/geek obsessed with westerns; that's where he got the inspiration to build WE

He looks different than with the hat on and used to wear braces

Was shy in his teenage years around Ceroba (no idea how he acted normally) + couldn't confess to her

His mom (after killing him) says how he's never been the one to follow rules. I wonder what she meant by that. Rules, like, you're supposed to hate humans like everyone else or rules, like, no sneaking off to practice your shooting and lasso skills? Both?

Ed describes the 'old him' as a fearless leader and as a monster who could 'make his own fun in the little things' (you mean he used to be more humble but at the same time remained an ambitious risk-taker?)

Is insecure about where he comes from and what he looks like

We don't have enough info to know what he was like as a kid. I'm curious if absolutely everything about North Star is the opposite of Starlo (I don't think it is); both are kind and protective. Still, I can't help but wonder if the Starlo after Showdown, in both routes, is the real him or not. Maybe 50% yes and 50% no

Just from the end credits, the only thing I got about him was that he's kind and friendly and optimistic and charming (North Star is this way too, but more exaggerated). Nothing new

So maybe Starlo IS North Star, but more modest (aka not as exaggerated)

I'm curious about your thoughts guys.

Also I forgot to mention how he wanted to plan a PARTY for Kanako, in neutral says that the PARTY in the saloon was great (and the letter he sent was pretty charming), wants to accompany Ceroba in the Steamworks, is open about how he feels (immediately openly confronts Ceroba and calls her out; he's assertive), not afraid to get physical if it means protecting Clover & Martlet, can be pretty loud (like when he spotted Clover after sparing him in neutral, he was like "DEPUTY!!!"

I'm left wondering if all this is the real him or not. I think it is. Just maybe toned down a bit :) It's the only explanation for the fact he's been doing all this for a really long time and never showing signs of wanting to stop/that it exhausted him

[jyfrnd]

"She's calling out to me. I can feel it." / "Sora saved me once. And...I heard him call my name. He needs me."

[rosemarydisaster]

I have this massive AU for the Batfam (and DC in general) that spawned from a very sleep deprived "You can't just gender swap Batman, there are implications" and honest to God, it's the one thing keeping me sane.

[crescentfool]

forever thinking about minato's swag moment (courtesy of @mymp3) <3