#every hero has one

[drbatsponge]

Not me seeing people dislike the Harley fight in BoP when we have context for this in Batgirl/Joker Vol. 1.

Cass fans, I GET we want her to win every fight, but a hero having a known weakness isn't bad, I would rather writers treat Cass like this rather than what we saw in the recent Batman issue which is completely ignore any research altogether.

And I wouldn't want writers to prop her up like Bruce where we end up with moments like that where she somehow 1v1s Flash or some shit.

Also NO ONE WINS THIS FIGHT! There is no clear winner, Cass even says Harley ALMOST beat her, sheesh.

Just focus your hate on this, aight?

EDIT: TBH with you it's probably not even a “weakness” but more or so a tactic to stall Cass/Shiva, as everytime an example has been shown they still win technically, this most recent example being a stalemate.

I get it, this moment with Tim especially sucks and that's because he uses it to win, the other examples are actually less egregious because no one really loses.

But yeah, I can understand why Cass or even Shiva fans dislike this potential “weakness” for either character.

[starii-void]

going to chb must be crazy like imagine sharing a camp with

-one of the strongest demigods ever who's saved the world like at least 3 times, fought multiple gods & titans and WON (and is a tartarus survivor)

-the literal main architect of OLYMPUS who's also saved the world multiple times (also tartarus survivor)

-THE lord of the wild who's also close friends with the first two (and has helped save the world multiple times)

-an emo kid from the 1930s who again helped save the world and is also a tartarus survivor (TWICE)

-a son of apollo who survived tartarus with nothing but cargo shorts and sheer will (pun intended)

-the main designer and builder for the argo II, also the first hephaestus kid to have fire powers since hundreds of years ago (did i mention killed gaea? no? yeah he did that too)

-a girl who somehow charmspeak-ed gaea into falling back asleep (also side note daughter of super famous actor because why not)

-pretty much everybody is a two-time war veteran

-THE GOD APOLLO who just sometimes comes down to visit in the form of a teenage boy

-did i mention dionysus, god of wine madness and theatre

-also chiron, trainer of pretty much every greek hero ever

[lilislegacy]

first of all, annabeth is not subtle at all??? our girl is often just casually saying “you’re gonna make a great dad😍” to her literal 17 year old boyfriend?? girl has got ZERO chill. like none whatsoever. there is no chill in the room with us. and i adore her for it.

and then there’s percy who’s like oh my god guys give me one goddamn second. he’s all ‘hold on let me learn how to keep myself alive before i have to keep someone else alive’

it’s giving the vibes of the wife/mom who has constant baby fever and keeps wanting another kid, and the husband/dad who just wants a nap and a vacation lol

[morethansky]

ARC TROOPER ECHO | The right thing to do “No matter what, we are united. Rule one: We fight together.”

Bonus:

[waterdropsfall]

Tried to do a rim light type thing :]

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 183

There’s a loud snarling noise outside the window. 

Not that Jazz is concerned. She’s just also trying to study for med school and would appreciate some quiet. And preferred her brother not contracting rabies whenever he tried to square off with the local rogue or three who tried to use the alley. 

As he had put it, it was his alley, he’d claimed it for tinkering. Though perhaps she should maybe ask him to quiet down on his insisted territorialism, even if she understood it. She would also probably maul someone if they tried to enter their apartment flat. It came with the territory of being ecto contaminated, or as the rest of them were now calling it, with being a liminal. 

Once the more draconic aspects started to emerge well, one wasn’t just contaminated anymore after all. Hence the whole school-worth of them leaving Amity while all their parents waged war against the guys in white. Last she heard it was going well. 

Which meant she could focus on her studies as soon as- okay it wouldn’t be quiet, it seems the rest of the kids joined in on mauling the poor idiot who tried to steal their things from the alley. Damn…

[screenshotsonpinterest]

It’s nothing it’s just Annabeth having to watch Jason fall in love with Piper, even as he’s gaining back his memories, knowing that her Percy is alone somewhere with no clue who she is and could very well be doing the same

[turtleblogatlast]

I think a lot about Leo’s tendency to push his way into the spotlight despite clearly being a natural in the shadows. Hell, you could argue that his worst moments are when he’s forcing himself onstage, and his best are when he does things no one notices until it’s already been done.

[shorthaltsjester]

the mighty nein - critical role

this is a place where i don't feel alone. this is a place where i feel at home.

[sugawara--san]

new challenge where they show pictures of deku aged literally anywhere between 5 and 25 and try to guess how old he is there

[fantastic-nonsense]

most of the discourse surrounding the question "are the Robins child soldiers?" could be solved if people simply read other comics. like, do y'all have this energy for Flash and Green Arrow and the Marvels and the Teen Titans? Do you call Donna Troy and Jaime Reyes child soldiers too? I am begging people to simply accept genre conventions and set yourselves free from this nonsense take

[starry-bi-sky]

Thinking about the CFAU and marveling at how much Danny and Jason care for one another. Does anybody else figure out that Danny is going to kill the Joker, or is that knowledge Jason exclusive? I can't see Danny being close enough to any other Batfam member to disclose his plans, but I wonder if he drops hints. They're a family of paranoid detectives. I'd be surprised if they don't figure out Danny has a PURPOSE for being in Gotham at some point. Whether Danny's able to disguise it as wanting to be closer to Jason or not is another burning question.

Its def Red Hood exclusive! You're right in that Danny isn't close enough to disclose his revenge plot to any of the batfam members -- hell, not even Sam and Tucker know his true motives for returning to Gotham, and they're his best friends right after Jason! And Red Hood knows only because Danny accidentally slipped up ;].

I do also think that the Waynes kinda think something might be up with Danny -- at least Dick and/or Bruce might since they're the only ones who actually know him beyond brief mentions of him. Tim knows about him due to his stalking, but doesn't really know him -- and Danny plans to keep a healthy, friendly distance from the family so he can carry out his plans.

It's not that he holds any dislike towards them -- quite the opposite. He appreciates what they do for Gotham and recognizes the hard work that goes into keeping their Rogues Gallery at bay (even if he is bitter about Joker, but there's an obvious reason for that) -- but, well. He knows they're the vigilantes, he doesn't want to risk them sniffing out his murder plot before he can even go through with it.

Luckily for him he can excuse any distance he puts between them as just being busy with life and trying to settle in, and they're not close enough to him anymore to find it suspicious. I do think they figure out he's back in Gotham for a reason, Danny's not going to exactly hide the fact that he's back to find some kind of closure -- but what that closure is?

I think the only person who might suspect something sinister going on would be Bruce, who saw the sinking rage in Danny's eyes at the funeral -- it was part of the reason he didn't tell him who killed Jason (beyond secret identity reasons). But that depends on whether or not Danny reveals some of his hand, and the fact that he was still holding onto that rage (somewhat unwillingly) all this time.

[marimeeko]

"Kacchan, youre crying! That's not like you! You must be exhausted right now, that's all!"

No izuku

IZUKU HONEY.

This is VERY. LIKE KACCHAN.

[anodymalion]

The hero's sword arc of Frieren is only a single chapter but it's probably the chapter I think about the most... You have the classic sword in the stone that can only be pulled by the hero who is destined to save the world. So of course Himmel, the legendary hero, is the one who freed it.

Except: he didn't. He failed. He couldn't pull the sword from the stone. He wasn't the prophesied hero who would save the world.

And he went, okay, well, people really need a hero right now. So I'll just pretend to be one anyway. It doesn't really matter if I'm a fake or not if either way we're helping people.

And he did. He was a pretend hero. And they saved the world.

And now eighty years later there is no one left to remember that he never pulled the sword from the stone at all. It's easier to believe that he did, because he saved the world, so he must have been the destined hero. But he wasn't. The sword saw him and rejected him, and he simply went on anyway, because he wanted to help people, and that's what it takes in the end to be a hero, really. The four of them saved the world, and the true hero's sword sits quietly in a cave somewhere, rusting away, forever, unneeded.

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[ruegarding]

we do not have five entire books full of percy's philosophical thoughts for rick to pull this shit. if annabeth was in character, she would be looking at this architecture and consider what she'd do different (and since she's redesigning olympus, she'd maybe also consider if she'd use any designs there). her fatal flaw is hubris and it should be a staple characteristic of hers.