#don't think like an elephant

[therealgchu]

everyone needs to read George Lakoff to understand this.

to a conservative's mind, the most important thing is hierarchy. it's god, downwards. and, if you question the authority of the person above you, you are inherently bad. for a conservative, it's the moral duty for someone lower in the hierarchy to bend to the higher one.

so, a child telling an adult no is automatically a bad child. it literally doesn't matter what the adult is doing, the child is rejecting the authority of the adult.

this is why the march for our lives kids, greta thurnberg, etc., are vilified by the conservative press. they would LITERALLY rather see dead kids than their hierarchy and power destroyed.

there was backlash from homeschooling "parents rights" advocates in my area before because of a daycare teaching kids about consent...all they learned is that you don't have to accept unwanted physical intimacy. one scenario that happened is a parent told her toddler boy to kiss a toddler girl in class. toddler boy comes back and says that toddler girl didn't want a kiss. it turns out the kids were taught that you don't touch someone if they say "no". parents thought this was ridiculous. I felt crazy hearing them talk about it, why in the world would you be upset by kids respecting each others boundaries, and why are you asking your toddlers to kiss each other in the first place as if they're toys and not human beings?

[spacedace]

Had a thought about the Reluctant War and made myself a bit sad and I have no idea if it'll make it into the story proper so I'm going to inflict it upon all you guys:

Dick Grayson on the streets of Gotham trying to do everything he can to help as everyone join the ghosts in fighting the GIW, suddenly has a version of the GAV barreling down towards him and for some reason he can't get out of the way in time.

He thinks he's about to join the army of the dead in a whole new way, when the tank fo a vehicle is suddenly sent flying as something massive charged it from the side. He hears a familiar bellowing and then realizes that it's Zitka, a ghost after passing away peacefully a few years before.

She wasn't apart of the army of the ghosts, wasn't brought in to fight. She's just been following her tiny human child around all these years and now that there's enough ecto in the air to do so, she's going to protect him with all her might.

Dick is emotional, so thankful to have his old friend back, but the city is still in a state of chaos. He gets onto Zitka's back and they get to work, running - flying - around helping to grab the injured and whisk them away to safety or take out other GAVs and the like.

It's absurd and freeing and wonderful all at once to be literally flying through the skies of Gotham on the ghost of his elephant best friend, and if Dick wasn't already on the side of King Phantom he is *now* and -

He gets shot off Zitka's back.

A GIW agent was aiming for the Ghost elephant but somehow *missed* and hit Dick instead. Not enough to injure him too badly, but enough to send him flying off Zitka's back and plummeting to the ground. His grapple is broken, and Zitka is diving for him but she's being shot at and she's not going to make it in time and -

A hand, reaching out to him in midair, familiar with its callouses and strong grip as he reaches out and grasps it, body suddenly swinging in a different direction and muscles acting on memory as he falls into the old, achingly familiar routine of his childhood. His mother, ethereal and bright as she smiles down at him, hanging upside down from a bar suspended from nothing but open sky as they swing and he is let go, flipping on instinct and caught by the steady strong hands of his father.

The Flying Graysons reunited in the skies above Gotham, Dick's ghostly parents determined to ensure their little bird never falls the way they did.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[bacchuschucklefuck]

species medley ft. gorgug and riz

[sysig]

[hipsterfrankcastle]

justified series 1 is a hilarious comedy of errors about a beautiful simpleton who must follow one rule: don't shoot people. except every day he's forced into situations where is quite literally compelled to shoot people.

walton goggins is also there.

[onwardmotley]

hello I saw your tags - can i ask about alectophant theory?!

Alectophant is my exhaustively researched and very serious theory that Alecto's problem with the body John made is not that it's a blonde barbie body, nor simply that it's a physical or human body at all, but:

Nona chortled. “Not one bit.” Nona hated having hands.

“Well, tell me your theories,” Nona demanded, feeling much better from sheer excitement. “Say them out loud. Am I nice? Am I good-looking? Do I have lots of friends? Does everyone listen to me? How many legs do I have?"

Nona made her body stand on its two feet. Two feet—the worst number for feet; not so many that they were ever useful, not so few that you didn’t have to think about them.

John had made her so ugly, so unbearably ugly. The terrible face, with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, and the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief.

her ideal body is an elephant.

Problems Nona has with human form:

hands are dumb

two is a dumb number of feet

(her only specifics about the body John made) nose too short, ears too brief

Features of an elephant:

zero hands (who needs them!)

four feet (a useful number!)

enormous (and practical!) ears

a VERY long nose that's way more useful than stupid hands

And, finally:

Nona looked down at the animal she had drawn, and thought perhaps she understood. She said, “No, I made it up. It does work, I promise. See these things? They’re its ears,” she said, in much the same tones as she would have explained to Kevin. “This thing is its nose, and you can’t see it because I didn’t draw it, but the mouth is under here. When first it was born it used to live in a river, but then it got cold so it had to get large. I know the legs can’t rotate, but you don’t think that’s stupid, do you?” She looked up at Camilla and the Angel, then said, “Am I in trouble?”

She draws one for the Angel.

In conclusion:

[diazwake]

okay so i have to just ramble about why i think buck and tommy have been doomed to fail from the jump.

i've been thinking about the discussion tommy and buck had right before their first kiss. tommy telling buck to stop being jealous. that he could never take the place buck has in eddie's life. that buck is not replaceable to eddie. tommy talking about how christopher would riot without buck in his life and buck going 'really?' with the brightest happiest goofiest smile on his face just thinking about how much christopher and eddie want him and need him and love him.

these are all things eddie has told buck before, but buck has so much guilt from hurting eddie in his jealousy, that the thought he might have caused the end of his most valuable friendship makes buck's past trauma rear its ugly head. in that moment buck needed someone to tell him he didn't fuck it all up and that he didn't lose his best friend.

this is where i start getting delulu. but i think it’s here, right after tommy reassures buck, that buck starts processing his feelings on what eddie means to him, what they mean to each other, and what they ultimately are. but buck, in an avoidance to fully take in and accept the reality of his feelings for eddie, performs an exercise in subconsciously pivoting those feelings onto tommy.

buck does this because he has nothing to lose with tommy, but he has everything to lose with eddie. he was just reminded of that. "trying to get your attention has been kind of exhausting" is an insane thing to say to tommy, and even tommy knows it. those words were meant for eddie.

it's buck's luck that tommy can see the gay of it all and is also a little greedy, so tommy makes the choice to fill in some of the gaps for buck with the kiss. in exchange buck takes this opportunity to use tommy as a blank canvas for what a relationship with someone like eddie could be like, without any of the risk. tommy knows buck is only going to be with him for as long as it takes for him to figure himself out, but tommy's not leaving that exchange empty handed. tommy gets to not feel alone, because he admitted he's jealous of the found family the 118 have built since he's left.

tommy knows it's temporary. i think that's part of the reason why tommy's character is so polarizing in the context of his relationship with buck, and why their relationship so far seems to superficial despite them dating the entirety of 7b. because why would tommy get invested in a relationship built on misguided feelings, fully knowing it's doomed?

[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

[that-spider-witch]

Seeing people constantly put HAL 9000, GLaDOS and AM in the same character group or drawing them together or next to each other in any context is so funny to me because... bro, do you really know these characters, no seriously do you really, do you realize how utterly innocent those first two are compared to the sheer embodiment of pain and petty hatred that is AM?

Of the two at least GLaDOS does happen to have a cruel and sadistic sense of humor, and even then I don't believe for a second she and AM would vibe with each other at all, at least not for long. As for Hal... Do not put my man in the same category as that psycho, he didn't do shit! Free him!

[greencheekconure27]

Hot take

[ee3y]

"and that Mickey fella you mentioned?" disney be honest do u hate me personally

[branwinged]

not to gotpost but my god they hated catelyn. like it was quite obvious they were not comfortable adapting a mother character who was emotionally abusive to one of the children in the household, and they either didn't have the time or didn't care enough to talk about the systemic prejudice bastards suffer in westeros and how that intersects with the disenfranchised status of noblewomen and the fundamental inequality of marriage, which obviously doesn't excuse catelyn's behaviour towards jon but gives you context to understand why she is like that. instead they framed it as an exclusively interpersonal conflict wherein catelyn was sort of made to look like the only one in the blasted continent who took issue with bastards and then this was turned into half of her personality which is how we got that incredible monologue about everything bad that has ever happened to the starks is because she 'couldn't love a motherless child'. now the really insidious thing about this is i'm certain the writers thought they were doing her character a favour, making her more likeable by having her expound on her flaws, because to them nothing was more discomfiting than a woman who would go to her grave completely unrepentant about being an inadequate mother, and i think this is also why they made her out to be so passive, constantly wanting to leave robb so she can return home to her youngest, because isn't that what a good, devoted mother would do? having littlefinger trick her into releasing jaime instead of it being a conscious and risky gamble because god forbid she exhibited any agency, even the agency to make mistakes in a tragedy. they turned her into a poor helpless woman who exists largely in the background for some audience sympathy, which is arguably the genre expectation her character is intentionally set up to fly in the face of in the books. because the northern war effort in books 1-3 was never robb's story, it was catelyn's. and they didn't get it. they didn't get it.

[agirlking]

“The Sullys didn’t owe Spider anything, they didn’t adopt him.” It is basic decency to not leave a child with the murderers that kidnapped him. Much less a child you knew since infancy, much less a child who at least two of your children love like he’s their own brother.

[swan2swan]

Okay, so, maybe the campers ARE going to Saudi Arabia next season. Or rather, the United Arab Emirates.

Because that's definitely the Burj Kalifa.

And while that doesn't NECESSARILY mean anything (there's the slightly-antisemitic lizard-people-Illuminati picture with what might be Jared Leto?), we got pictures of Daniel Kon in the third season of the first show, a drawing of Yaz's mom in Season 4, and a number of other dinosaur models throughout the show that showed up later.

They drew Dubai for a reason!!!

Are we going to Downtown Dubai? Maybe, maybe not. But it would be neat if it was on the horizon.

[astarlightmonbebe]

i'm only at the beginning of li tongguang's descent into obsession (eps 17-18), but already it's both hurting and hitting. hurting, because we know li tongguang's capabilities, and his level headedness, and the potential he has, that he seems to throw out due to this obsession. hitting, because when you think about it, the obsession storyline and characterization does make perfect sense. obsession like that is a double edged blade, which can turn from love to hate, childish belief and joy to embittered rage in a second.

on one hand, it's painful to watch ltg's childlike desperation when faced with ruyi again. we want to grit our teeth and think of him as idiotic, unable to take a hint. but the reality is that it's a completely normal response to be expected from him. i mean, it's a dream come true, to see the person you 'love' the most in the world to be whole in front of you. it's probably what he could only dream about, especially being the one to apparently find her bones and bury them.

on a deeper level, ltg's initial reaction is very much a manifestation of his inner child, almost peter pan-like in the 'child that never became an adult/grew up' way. by that i mean to say the desperate urge to please, the constant worrying, and the oscillation between hot and cold moods are all so indicative of someone who grew up in an insecure/unstable environment, usually with volatile or simply unavailable authority figures. from what we can gather, he had no father, his mother wasn't in his life ("she doesn't want him around, nor can she bear for him to be away, so that's why he's like that" per empress zhaojie's words to ruyi). the one authority figure that entered his life to offer some semblance of guidance was ruyi, and even though it's clear that she held care for him, she was also a twenty year old assassin used to training subordinates, not children. her mentorship style is clearly so different when you hold ltg and yang ying side by side, and we know from ruyi's own mouth that she doesn't consider herself to have taught ltg well, and wants to remedy that through/with yang ying (i'll probably make a whole different post comparing this and the affects of this after watching some more episodes lol - there are bullet points in the drafts). so even though ruyi was his authority figure, she was still an emotionally unavailable one who couldn't meet ltg on the level he probably needed at that time in his life, and which no one probably ever did. hence his up and down reaction and actions.

it intrigues me, too, because i think, in a very subtle way, ltg is very much a character foil to ruyi in that he reflects some of her worst attributes, or more accurately represents the sort of person she was, or at least acted like (yuan lu's comment about how ltg has ruyi's gaze was meaningful outside of the jealousy arc - to me at least). i saw someone make a really interesting comment on how ltg's devotion to ruyi parallels ruyi's own devotion to empress zhaojie, which i'll also probably comment on more later.

obviously, ltg's obsession stems from an issue much larger than ruyi herself - she just happens to be the unfortunate target of it. and, clearly, i know his descent into it will be ugly, if understandable. i understand ruyi wanting to leave that part of her life behind, but also - to think that maybe many of the issues faced in future eps could have been avoidable if she'd been upfront with li tongguang about her identity early on.