#cliff — interaction .

[shorthaltsjester]

watching the sdcc panel and i am just very :) about how sweet their answers to “what are some of the micro moments from the game that have stuck with you the most over the years?” are. taliesin saying what the fuck is up with that which was the first like The Party Gets To Know Each Other moments of c3. travis saying asking his wife if he could kiss her in campaign. marisha going way back to the cannonball competition in campaign one. ashley choosing the beauyasha date but also just the silly goat noise matt made. liam adding onto that to compliment matt roleplaying grass so well and then saying his favourite moment was writing a story for laura and reading it to her as caleb for jester. and then matt saying that was his answer, and that his favourite moments of the game are when they find ways to give gifts to each other whether tangible or not. and sam saying his favourite moments have less to do with the story and is more so when he can just. see his friends across the table from him. when marisha perches and when laura and ashley are (badly) drawing dicks and liam saying he loves when sam sneezes and ashley tells him to stop it and just. yeah. they Are an extremely popular online powerhouse, but i’m so happy that they’re also friends building a world together out of gifts to and love for one another.

like i Am so enamoured with the characters and the world of exandria but the moments when you can feel the love that those people have for each other reach out from behind the stained glass of their performances (to steal a metaphor from brennan lee mulligan) are so extremely special and i am endlessly grateful that they decided to share their silly little home game with the world.

[wasabi-gumdrop]

oh

i am. unwell.

[akiacia]

social call at the Montgomerys'

[dcdreamblog]

i Know Your Home Town Heroes Are The DOOM PATROL so i Have to Aks

How did The team Go form This

( Old time Superhero team With a Uniform )

to This

( They look like a 70s or 80s Punk band )

to This?

( Back With a New uniform )

and Why to They Have so Many links to the titans?

just Whats Up With DOOM PATROL

( i Aks With to so Them Being Your Home Town Heroes i Think? And i found i lot Of posters for Them at My Uesd Things shop i Go to a lot )

The Doom Patrol are an...interesting case because they're not superheroes in the traditional sense. at least not by choice. The original members, Cliff Steele, Larry Trainor and Rita Farr were all brought together by terrible accidents that left with with fantastical abilities, yes but also left them mutated or otherwise scarred in a way that set them apart from humanity. Cliff was a former race car driver whose brain was transferred into a robot body after a crash left his old body in ruins. Trainor was a military pilot whose experimental guidance system sent him sailing through a dangerous radiation belt And Farr was an actress exposed to strange vapors on a movie set that granted her the ability to alter her size at will. They were offered what seemed to be safe harbor by a genius scientist Dr Niles Caulder who was, in reality, the architect of the accidents that mutated them all in the first place. Bringing them together as The Doom Patrol he sent them out on suicidally dangerous missions against various supervillains and scientific menaces, most often the members of the Brotherhood of Evil whose leader The Brain was actually the original victim meant to be implanted into the Robotman body until his intelligent gorilla companion was able to spirit him away. Their clashes eventually leading to a showdown off the coast of the town of Codsville, Maine where the heroes were seemingly killed by a blast of their greatest enemies' ultimate weapon. That was not to be their end, though. However as time went on, especially after Caulder's treachery was discovered, the Doom Patrol really became a supportive family group for those who had been effected by his ethical lapses in one way or another. Even beyond that they become embroiled in all the weirdest, strangest and most metaphysical threats possible. They became a refuge for, well for lack of a better term, the weirdos. Those whose powers are too obtuse, or whose powers are matched with sufficiently virulent if mundane mental illness that they had nowhere else to go. In the aftermath of the Lazarus Rains, they've become a group seeking out those who have been empowered by the disaster and offering them safe haven away from the public eye. They're forced into the spotlight because of their powers, which in their cases usually seem closer to a disability than a gift. Though they are respected and trusted by other members of the superhero community especially because one of their earliest inductees, Garfield Logan (yes, the one from Space Trek too) became super, globally famous both as an actor and as a member of the Teen Titans. They're...reclusive is the wrong word. They just want to be left alone, operative more as a support group than a willing superhero team. Which is why I use their real names rather than the superhero names they've been given over time by the media. If you or someone you know has a metahuman ability and a comorbidity with some kind of mental or physical disability, their contact information is publically available.

[artuurle]

the issue with most of my creative process being very "in the moment" is i end up with a bunch of doodles for things i then decide isnt "canon" to things or i get REALLY DERAILED, so last night i drew some love and loss au doodles that kinda occur later on. Huzzle sweep.

The last one above is traveling to another god domain really hurriedly looks like in my head to be 100% clear. mini rift <3. no time for flair we needs to GO NOWS.

if you cannot tell I love drawing huzzle a lot. my cunty lamp <3

[cj-ghostemoji-destielpie]

Does anyone else notice similarities between Doom Patrol characters/story line and the X-Men/Charles Xavier/Xavier Institute for Gifted Children?

[ratatatastic]

so youre telling me senko solely based his decision on the cats locker room vibe by mikksy... youre telling me he saw mikksy smiling laughing and telling stories in the locker room and decided yes this team is good because in the blues locker room never said a word FOR 2 YEARS. YOURE TELLING ME THAT. YOURE TELLING ME SENKO WHO WAS IN COMMUNICATION WITH MIKKSY THROUGHOUT THE 2324 SEASON AND MIKKSY WAS PRACTICALLY BEGGING HIM TO COME TO FLORIDA AND KEPT TALKING UP THE TEAM. BUT SENKO ONLY DECIDED WHEN HE SAW IT WITH HIS OWN EYES. THAT THIS TEAM WAS SPECIAL. BECAUSE MIKKSY. FELT COMFORTABLE ENOUGH TO BANTER.

[torchickentacos]

The fact that Brock hates Drew is sooo funny to me but understandable tbh. Imagine being Brock. You've questionably made it your life goal to woo every woman you come across, and it goes poorly despite all of your best (and worst) attempts. and then some random bratty green 10/11 year old with a pet houseplant has more game than you and gets a canon-adjacent ship in like a sixth of the time it took you to accomplish nothing at all. like yeah I'd be fucking pissed too. what's even the point anymore. how do you survive that.

[rosyhoneydew]

on my unrealistic wishlist for this season is an episode where the 118 gets separated at a call, and we get to follow them as they separately assist in the emergency in different ways, each of them showing off their unique competencies

[selfshippingmayhem]

HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!

[mistressemmedi]

Went to my usual tea purveyor to stock up on my favorite loose leaf but I forgot the word for "gunpowder". My brain came up with the closest thing to it, so instead of asking for gunpowder tea, I asked for some shotgun tea. Which. Uh...

[strawberryclementine]

Better Call Saul should've had a scene where Howard recites poetry. He's kind of Gale-coded if you squint (and IMO you don't really have to squint too much) so I would've loved to see him read something he cared about to maybe Jimmy or Chuck. It doesn't even have to be poetry, it could've been a treatise or novel or something, but it would/should have been about ethics or justice.

[girlwiththegreenhat]

having just made it to KITT vs KARR i stand by my point that KARR has done nothing wrong ever in his life

[mrmeepsmadmind]

i'm very interested in creating a multi - muse tf rp blog & was wondering if there were any suggestions you guys might have on who to follow? pls don't @ anyone actually though, as i don't wish to disturb !!! i have experiencing writing literate roleplay, but just never on tumblr, so i'm very new to the who's & whatnots!! i'm mainly interested in the idea of you guys asking some of my favs stuff though that i could maybe even draw responses to! (mainly like faces, i'm a bit too fearful on the quality of my art to draw elaborate poses & such, haha 💧) anyhow, if you guys have any suggestions on who to folllw, feel free to let me know 🩵

[dcdreamblog]

In your piece on Gernsback, you touched briefly on Robert Crane, the first Robotman.

I'm wondering if Cliff Steele, the second Robotman, was in any way connected to him, or if it was simply a matter of a similar situation and a codename that no one was currently using?

(I am aware that Mr. Steele prefers to be addressed by his birth name from a brief appearance on television back when we first learned about the Doom Patrol.)

First of all, yea, I often wonder about how one is meant to refer to the members of the Doom Patrol these days too. Out of respect I usually lead with their birth names, just like you did. So no big.

The answer to your question is: Yes*. See the asterisk is always the interesting part.

*As I said in my original post, the post war life of Robert Crane is mysterious, probably on purpose. He vanished a few years after the war (though his original career was among the longest of his era, not dropping off the map until 1950).

Through comments from his teammates and attendance lists from Squadron reunions conducted in the decades since, we know two things.

He's still alive.

He was transferred back into a human body that was not his original one, we can assume he is living under that body's given name.

As with any other superhero's right to privacy, any attempt to "track down" Crane's current whereabouts and activities is explicitly against my field's code of ethics.

That being SAID. Niles Caulder, for all his faults did manage to masquerade as a legitimate scientist during his early days and in the medical paper he published about the operation that saved Cliff Steele's life we find this.

"Special commendation is given to Dr. Robert Crane, without whose expertise and consultation this operation would have been impossible. My sincerest thanks to him, who knows so well the second chance Mr. Steele has been given."

Now "expertise and consultation" could mean anything from "he answered a single question he was asked." to "he was literally in the surgical room with Caulder, helping the operation"

Him suggesting the Robotman alias is doubtful, neither Crane nor Steele seem overly fond of being saddled with it but we know that, somehow, he was connected to the operation. Any relationship of the two men beyond that is pure speculation.

[your--isgayrights]

Probably a bit silly and you’ve likely answered this before, but do you think you’re going to come back to “at the Very least, the Wall will change?” I’m just getting into ORV and I want to read some fanfic! I promise I am patient but I’m hesitant to start reading something that’s abandoned. I hope this doesn’t come off as disrespectful! I completely understand burnout (med student here hehe) and there’s no shame is shelving a project for a time if it no longer speaks to you. I just wanted to check

You're right that I've answered this before but like it's totally fair to ask me again after how long it's been lol. Bc like I think about this a lot too and thus the answer/feelings I have about it kind of changes?

Like my journey with this fic has kind of been tumultuous because I started it before I had access to ADHD medication and a lot of my life can be divided into the Before times and the like Now Times where my baseline happiness/standard of care of myself is vastly improved. I outlined all of wall fic before publishing the first chapter and then the scenes I wanted to include took up a lot more time to create than I initially thought they would and that like frustration was really harmful to like my sense of being a "writer," I guess?

Sorry, getting into this bc I'm trying to articulate my own feelings to myself, but I'll tldr; it at the end probably.

Like when I first started wall fic it had like a strangle hold on my imagination and was a way I was able to articulate feelings about things in life. Truth is, I'm someone who has called 911 for suicide/self-harm of friends/classmates like 4-5 times before turning 18. There is this feeling of helplessness I always had as a minor that the world was always ending around me but even when I was up till 5 am making sure my friend got to the hospital ok without any way of really knowing except waiting for a text back, I still had to just buck up and go to school the next day. The emotions I have towards these times in my life really latched onto omniscient reader, because the way it discusses suicidal ideation and what can help with it rang really true to me. I love KDJ a lot, part of that is, in my interactions with suicidal ideation, his sense of narrative inevitability really describes the emotions behind it well, the feeling of "this is the only Solution that will Actually work" is sewn into the fabric of the universe as "probability." And I've actually been thinking about that term "probability" a lot lately, and how it relates to ideas about Narratives. We're always estimating the likelihood of future events based on past experiences, calling things "realistic" or not. But the function of this system in my own life has often been to convince myself to 'give up' on certain things, conserve the energy it would take to try them. Sure that has helped me when Ive not had any free time/energy in crunch times or big projects, but when something is actually important, giving up feels like shit to be honest. Which is part of why I really love and kind of idealize this character of Yoo Joonghyuk, someone who 'never gives up.' To me KDJ and yjh in wall fic represent these two radical sides of a spectrum where someone becomes unhappy by giving up caring about everything and someone becomes unhappy by never giving up on anything. KDJ is then sort of this love letter to people who give up on themselves, people who could never imagine living past a certain age and yet somehow implausibly remain. YJH is a love letter to people who have been left behind and are So aware of their choices and their power over situations that they blame themselves for things that were actually out of their control in the first place. It's these two different ways of interacting with helplessness and grief and fear, giving up knowing you never could have made a difference in the first place or being convinced you could always have done Something and blaming yourself for failing, constantly stressing about what you could have done and what you ought to do the next time it happens.

Codifying these themes into Characters is originally this fun way of exploring emotions I have about them and sharing the experience of feeling them with others without having to tear too much of my self a part. I feel like when we're young it feels like a sense of self is something like a wall, an image of ourself that we have Built and must put in work to Maintain from erosion. This sense of self and protection makes us feel distinct from other people, the line we draw where we begin and end in the universe, and they become rules dictating How we will Act and Appear towards others. Drawing these walls and lines is pretty important to KDJ's perspective in wall fic, but i now realize I had sort of started doing to myself? Towards the middle of writing it?

Just because I've been on the Internet so long, I know the sort of "narratives" of being different "kinds of authors" online. Because of this, when I started posting wall fic, something that was of a lot of concern to me was how I appeared as an Author to people reading. I honestly think now that the performance of things I associated with like Being an Author were more sort of motivated by a fear of failure and disappointing others than anything else. It's kind of only been recently that I've realized that I have a choice to do things because I enjoy them instead of the fear of not doing them, which sounds a little crazy/obvious to be honest, but forcing myself to be an honor roll student for like more than a third of my adolescence while completely unmedicated kind of made that sort of intrinsic fear of disappointing others the ole'reliable of Task Motivation. Participating in ORV fandom has sort of been this emotional tight rope walk for me of like. Kind of really desperately desiring validation from others but also being afraid of receiving it bc of like the pressure it then puts on to Keep Doing the thing that Works and otherwise feeling like a Failure. But obviously like creative writing isn't going to have the same like Fear/Urgency factor as life stuff and it shouldn't feel that way, anyway, tbh. I'm kind of having to like. Re-invent the idea of writing being Fun and Relaxing for myself. And the idea that talking to other people on the internet (also like. People in general I still do this at uni even) does not actually have to have like any performative elements or factors of like? Disguise? Because like my sense of self doesn't actually have to be a wall I keep building and have to repatch whenever someone comes along with a pickaxe like my sense of self doesn't actually need a metaphor attached to it because it just is what it is lol. Like whatever I am RN is my "self" and that meaning would only suffer under the restraint of comparison, lol.

It's been easier to like feel normaler/better quicker in like my day to day stuff, but because a lot of the time I spent previously trying to write wall fic lies in that like that brain space where I felt afraid and stressed out etc I think I currently have like an aversion to sitting down with it out of like a fear of returning to that mindset. Because I'm like looking it in the face and such I do have like strategies of getting over it like doing warmups or taking time to make nice writing spaces and having a name to/strategies to access the creative part of my brain, but that stuff takes time and because it's a lot less likely I'll have writing on the brain than go through my every day life like the process of becoming normaler/feeling better goes a lot faster day to day than in my approach to writing.

Because in my brain the progress of wall fic is a sort of gentle curve I've been trying to shape the growth of upwards, I wouldn't say it's abandoned at all. But also like because the next "update" is not really guaranteed and I'm kind of hesitant to force myself to commit to a timeline for finishing/releasing it, I think it makes sense to like hesitate about starting it as a reader? In terms of a sense of completion, the chapters are organized in such a way that each one concerns a sort of complete Section of KDJ's life/relationships, tho. Like, Chapter 1 shows KDJ and YJH's first meeting as kids and establishes the "soulmate" setting. Chapter 2 shows the life KDJ carved himself to thereafter, how he and YJH's paths have diverged, established the stakes of KDJ's current "world" in a way parallel to the first few chapters of wos/orv. Chapter 3 focuses on how the soulmate worldview and KDJ + YJH's characters/past interact with the way they view children/the idea of "childhood/youth." Chapter 4 is meant to show how that worldview encounters adult life/ adult friendships/relationships, but the final part of it is something I'm still working on a bit. The structure is such that I tend to bring the end of the chapter back to a moment of peace/resolution/settling in the "new world" after the events of the chapter and then writing a one sentence cliff hanger about what the next chapter includes. So if you want to give some of it a read but don't want to be left feeling too incomplete, I'd read up till before the last sentence of Chapter 3, tho that's a bit silly, lol.

I will say again and have said before, I don't mind that much getting thoughtful comments/messages like yours at all. Thoughtful in the sense of like, desiring a response from me as a person, I suppose? Towards the start of writing online i really like needed the validation of little comments to feel good about myself/my work, but now I realize that the thing I like actually desire that ao3 comments aren't often a good format for is that I just like talking/discussing these things with other people. Sometimes comments will make me feel more like an unpaid customer service representative getting feedback or a student looking at a quick note on my report card. The kind I like most are messages where people want to ask me questions, argue with me about something, share something of their own interaction with the text that there's room for me to interact back with them as a person. The thing I hate most is feeling like I care too much about something/talk/think too much to the point that people are tired of hearing from me/form a bad opinion of me.

So like typing this all out has actually put myself in the brain space of remembering some of the things I like to write about and feel and how the current part of wall fic explores them. I'm kind of setting up my computer and such to start working on it like rn actually, hopefully the like feelings I'm having towards wall fic won't evaporate when i have to go to my class in 1/2 an hour or when i try to reread some of what I've written so far lol.

TLDR; Wall fic isn't abandoned or on hiatus or anything, but I am super slow about it lol. If you wanna give it a read I recommend stopping before the last sentence of Chapter 3 if you don't want any "cliff hangy" feelings. Questions like yours that ask me to interact with orv/wall fic/related themes do honestly help me start thinking about it again and I'll probably try to work on some of it tonight bc of you so thanks 👍