#cute story!!! very fun

[orphanbychoice]

from marvel holiday tales to astonish

[ruporas]

hotter than hell

[ID: Digital art of Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun Maximum in their alternative universe form based off an angel Vash and Devil Wolfwood illustration Nightow did. The both of them are sitting side by side, exhausted from the heat, Vash has his arms crossed, leaned against his knees and his head against his arms, eyes closed as sweat drips from his face. His wings spreads over the both of them to shield them from the sun. Wolfwood is sitting with his right leg extended and his left leg with the knee slightly up. His eyes are also closed with a clear grimacing expression. He uses one of his small devil wings to fan Vash, the text effect reads “flap flap”. Being in the shadows, the palette is cool, blues and purples. A sliver of light shines on the parts not covered by wings in a bright orange/yellow. END ID]

[skitskatdacat63]

2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - Sebastian Vettel(ft. Mark Webber & Jenson Button)

[anethiawoods]

playing slay the princess as intended (watching your friend stream it and then roleplaying as improvised ocs for each of ur runs)

[pacing-er]

Dawn of X: Logan Steals Magnetos Helmet COMPLETE

Tbh I skimmed most of Dawn of X bc I'm only reading for Erik and Charles and there are a LOT of characters and side plots. Plus this arc is like 15 volumes long 😭😭😭 There were a few great moments but if you're reading the series for Cherik I recommend just skimming the series online and not picking up the physical volumes 👍

[puddii-ng]

shu's new summer casual is so cute to me.. here is a femstars ver i whipped up today :3

[maxlovespigeons]

Genuinely hoping Peri's blowup will convince people to give A New Wish a chance honestly it's such a good show

[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

[igotsnothing]

Summer🍃 -3-

Beginning/Previous/Next

♫⋆｡♪ ₊˚♬ ﾟ.Om Gam Mantra- Chantress Seba and Malte Marten♫⋆｡♪ ₊˚♬ ﾟ.

[nekromeowncer]

I'm playing DMMD for myself right now...

[lale-txt]

now that i put my Akaashi fic on semi-hiatus my brain keeps begging me to write more Kuroo and i’m afraid i might give in to that

[terracomets]

i have quite the soft spot for both fluffy cat designs and a certain mcsm character, so when i saw @siffrin-stardust's kitty axel i made a mental note to take a stab at the design one day

found myself rather Bummed a few days ago and wanted to draw axel but didnt have the energy to draw humans, then remembered that little mental note. so here we are!

[coconut530]

Bump in the Night & Nevertober Day 23: Restless Spirits & Devil/Angel

[artaintfartwarriors]

[chillinglikeashilling]

I kind of want to make a post about Michael and Jentry's dynamic in the show to finish of the thread of my posts talking about the dynamics between Jentry + Kit, and Michael + Kit respectively but it's hard to know what to say because the show doesn't really give us a satisfying conclusion to Michael's personal arc.

Obviously he's dating Jentry at the end and that's cute but the show seems to just forget that Michael was supposed to confront his parents about his powers, and because wanting to please his parents and meet their expectations is so much of Michael's story, it doesn't feel like we got to resolve anything there.

I really wanted to see Michael get mad or at least frustrated with his parents- the way Jentry does with Gugu.

Especially because it does feel like his parents hiding whatever knowledge they have about his powers from him is a mirror of Jentry's relationship with Gugu (and to some extent her mom). We never get to hear whether Michael's parents believe their hiding the info for his own good or simply for the sake of keeping up an appearance to Michael about a fake normality of their lives.

It feels like that would be such an interesting story to see side by side with Jentry's, especially because even though both Jentry and Michael are racialized people in an American context, it's implied that Michael is a first generation American unlike Jentry. I assume his parents immigrated together from Nigeria (and now I'm wondering if the keepsakes that he mentions being lost in the fire might be related to his powers).

I think there's a really interesting contrast we could have in the story about the lies Flora tells Jentry as a way to protect Jentry (but really mostly to protect Jentry's perception of Flora and her parents) and the secrets kept by Michael's parents which could be looked at as an attempt to help Michael assimilate more fully into American culture in the way that sometimes immigrant parents will not teach children their mother tongue in order to encourage them to speak the common language of their new home.