#except for blorbo of course

[jonathanbyersphd]

10 characters from 10 fandoms! (in no particular order except for #1)

Thanks @lunar-years for the tag!

Jonathan Byers (Stranger Things)

Penelope Featherington (Bridgerton)

Ace [REDACTED] (Nancy Drew)

Nick Nelson (Heartstopper)

Tohru Honda (Fruits Basket)

Percy Jackson (PJO)

Shauna Shipman (Yellowjackets)

Nathan Scott (One Tree Hill)

Lydia Martin (Teen Wolf)

Kitty Covey (XO Kitty)

No pressure Tagging @faintedloves @faithfulcat111 @maddie-grove @leslie057 @emily-mooon & Anyone else who wants to play

[arom-antix]

I bring to thee some quick late night Viktuuri sketches because I think we could all use some fluff

[jamessunderlandgf]

have some tragic lesbians in this picrew 🫶🏻🩷💎

ཐི♡ཋྀ perpetua & faustina (blasphemous) | ཐི♡ཋྀ anarietta & sibyl (tw3)

—tagged by @pavus 💎 @jacobseed 💎 @loriane-elmuerto 💎 @a-treides 💎 @risingsh0t 💎 @leviiackrman 💎 and @tacticalhimbo 💎 my angelings thank u all 🩷

tagging— idk this has made the ROUNDS already but @bearsgrove 💎 @pitchmoss 💎 @avallachs 💎 @scalpelsister 💎 @shellibisshe 💎 @florbelles 💎 and you 🫶🏻

[greghatecrimes]

If I'm not around much the next couple days, it's just cause I'm absolutely exhausted from work + procedure. But I miss House and hanging out on here, so hopefully answering asks asap and more screencaps and rewatch this weekend :3 Maybe even some In the Dirt planning if I'm lucky

[fisherrprince]

Im about to make a whole osp style video on the importance of pacing and spacing in relation to whump or an authors decision to seriously harm a character

[goatmilksoda]

OK fuck it new ship its Thylkius its Thor, Sylvie, Loki, and Mobius its the worst possible outcome for the entire fandom and only fun for me. It's problematic in all the ways and nobody wins except me who thinks it's absolutely hilarious.

[mewtonian-physics]

just finished bsd season 5 and uh. what

[quill-of-thoth]

The Years When I Wrote Stuff

So it’s the wake of the year 2022 and as of two months from now it will be two years since I spent a significant amount of time writing anything. I watched The Glass Onion last night and I want to write a mystery so badly that my stomach hurts, but also I want to go home and time travel is not an option. Feel free to skip the introspection but I miss Livejournal, and I thought other people also waiting for a dead year to be buried who have also tried to make stuff during the last eternity might find this a little cathartic.

I spent my morning rereading some stuff I previously wrote, back in college, approximately a decade ago, and it’s... good? In ways that I didn’t expect, given a whole host of personal factors like ten years experience, the fact that some of what I wrote then was fanfic for a very small and insular writing and reading community and not actually fanfic of a property that exists*, and that what I remember as communitywide engagement is an average of five unique commenters per chapter. (*People who never lived on Live Journal: there were several of these sorts of emergent meta fandoms, long before Goncharov. I was in a handful of them. One of them was the Sims 2 legacy challenge community, where there is no canon, everyone is trying to win points on a spreadsheet while playing a completely different game, and people just straight up borrowed each other’s characters to write combination screenshot and text stories about. It was considered flattery to do it if you could write your way out of a paper bag. Or if your forum threads / livejournal entries got enough engagement to be equal to or more ‘popular’ than the original author. Other metafandoms involved sporking [critical reading of another work with jokes worked in], and meta-fanfic like protectors of the plot continuum.) So, what did I have in twenty mumbleteen that let me write, and do it pretty well for my level of skill at the time? 

I was not less depressed: the year that I wrote 48k of cathartic mystery investigation that I still like was not a good one, personally, and the year before it was definitely top three worst. I also wasn’t just astronomically talented at the time: I was concurrently writing a non-fanfic attempt at a novel that has fully earned its position in the mental compost bin. (The physical location is somewhere in a folder within a folder on a thumb drive, probably labeled “junk” and “old junk” respectively.) 

I was not less busy: on top of classes I was writing a thesis that was so bad, the singular time any other living human mentioned they’d read it after I graduated, I blurted out “Oh god WHY?” (I got that job anyway.) In contrast since the beginning of the pandemic I have been unemployed off and on and not exactly super busy otherwise. I may have been doing a less overwhelming amount of the work of living, since I was living in dorms at the time, but... (checks my apartment) I think I’d better not investigate how much work of living is technically getting done around here.  I honestly think the major difference has been community. Don’t get me wrong, I like tumblr. I like twitter too. There is not a lack of people joyfully engaged in making stuff and talking to each other about it on either platform. We are (probably, at least in my case) a little cooler about it too: twitter’s villain of the week and the eternal problem of internet harassment aside, the dominance of short form and mostly public posting has made a lot more people than I remember aware that joining secret locked fandom groups devoted to hating specific members of your community is a bad thing and not a badge of acceptance into the Big Name Fan inner circle. Also, the first time Diane Duane turned up to my livejournal I acted like an embarrassingly star-struck teenager. Given that I was an embarrassingly star-struck teenager and have since managed to have actual conversations with published authors, I think I may have matured some. But with shorter, faster posts, and an internet economy that is increasingly about advertising, and single streams of information, we’ve definitely lost an aspect of the previous writing and fannish community. Not just the ability to off topic chat in a forum or a comments section with days or weeks between replies instead of wading through the discord, or community reading lists instead of reblogs and quote tweets, or spending hours uploading photos and gifs to new third party hosting sites and re-linking them every time free hosting got discontinued. From my perspective here on Tumblr we seem to have lost a huge amount of support for each other’s projects. Let me explain: back in the days of Livejournal there was fandom, meta fandoms, and original work. The three nations lived in harmony until - okay, technically they weren’t three nations, because we were a bunch of individual people doing a bunch of different things and even if you didn’t tag for shit, if you stuck around and commented enough you met other people. You would get invested in one of their projects, or they would get invested in yours. Most importantly, you would talk about things in the comments section. If you went looking for book reviews you would go to the comments for more recommendations. You’d also get arguments between people you’d never met, essays written by someone who appeared to be commenting on the mirrorverse version of the post you’d just read, and a decent number of bots. But you would be at the party talking about your favorite movies, the novel you were writing, and your thesis in the corners with photos of someone’s cat, instead of shouting across the width of the internet. You can still DM people, yes I know. You can still, if you’re too experienced to be embarrassed by being perceived like @seeingteacupsindragons and I, have a loud personal conversation in public via reblogs and tagging other people. It can even be a relatively private conversation if you’re deep enough into twitter replies or you’re only notable to a few dozen or few hundred people who only follow you in case you have more confessions to make about your former feral gremlin exploits back in the years when you wrote things. I can’t imagine writing the usual fandom disclaimer of “don’t own: don’t like don’t read” the way I used to during a spork or analysis. I legitimately once advertised the story that kicked off this round of introspection with “I obviously don’t own [book series we were dissecting to see why we hated it] because if I did you guys wouldn’t love me anymore.” Not just because it’s assuming my audience has strong feelings about me (easy to assume when there are seven of them and they loyally keysmash every chapter,) but because the firehose of social media feels very impersonal. Not on a caring about other people personally level, but on a level where, outside of fandoms, which aren’t built as sturdily as they used to be, it seems a little absurd to assume people care about your ongoing projects.  I’m not saying prior fandom iterations were better. Fandom problems and blog and social media problems have always been the same community building problems dressed up in different posting limits. Human nature has always been that of miscommunication, self interest, and sarcastic asides no matter how low you can sink the stakes. People have always struggled to organize community in the face of corporate censorship, societal bigotry, and Russian government takedown bots.** I’m saying that the things that used to go hand in hand with fandom, like your own oc’s and the ability to spend six months in a fandom and come out with a writing group passionately keysmashing over each other’s original characters and original stories are much, much harder to find than they used to be.  (**The bots are not always russian but false DMCA reports and the other apparatus of modern internet bot problems is not by any means new. And the eventual deathblow of Livejournal was struck by Russia. For more information I’m afraid you’ll have to google it all, due to me failing to locate any of the tumblr posts that filled me in on specifics long after the fact, on the very same day I successfully found my old Livejournal story I had forgotten the time of via a string of related tags. Irony, it turns out, cannot die.) AO3 and tumblr have kept fandom going, arguably stronger than ever, and it’s not like metafandom has died, given that it hasn’t even been two months since a critical mass of tumblr users decided to collaboratively write a summary of a movie based on a pair of bootleg shoes. I’m almost guaranteed to get more “interaction” with this post than my average original story in livejournal days.  But goddamn it, I miss the comments section. I miss replying to people demanding to know what was coming next with cutesy replies like “well you see, next chapter, [redacted] will [spoiler].” I miss having to break five thousand word conversations into multiple comments and the accompanying ability to trade theories and refute assumptions point by point without either flooding the dash or having to shove it all behind a readmore. (I miss customizeable readmores and the ability to put up a summary to click on or make a cryptic comment about the plot. Upon reflection, I don’t miss breaking up comments, I miss having collapsible threads to discuss specific points of speculation.) Most of all, I miss the semi-private space where people overwhelmingly were not shy about saying “hey, this reminds me of some things in my original story, you want to read some?” and where the link you received when you said yes ended either with you giving out a polite comment about the similarity to the original conversation and ‘I might not keep up with it, but good luck!’ or falling madly in love with someone else’s blorbo. I’ve tried to recapture the magic here and elsewhere, but as lovely as most people in writeblr are there is just so much advertising that it hasn’t worked for me, as a vehicle of actually talking to people about writing. Without a word written of the actual story there’s a moodboard and a playlist and a near-constant feeling of talking to yourself in front of a microphone. We all might want to publish this some day: have two paragraphs and an entire tag of endlessly recycled promotional material about the aesthetic. Everything is a pitch contest and the rules of engagement are written down in a completely different post: above all else act professional. Well, professional enough. You can be a clown and you can be a jerk but you cannot just hang out and expect that everyone will get their own turn to talk about their OC’s, regardless of whether you’re seriously hoping to publish or not. I’d love to talk about the process and art of writing again with people I only sort of know, instead of only doing it in DM’s with my oldest friends. I’d love to drag my OC’s out of the metaphorical compost bin and tell you that I don’t currently have a WIP that is anything like ready for public consumption, much less publication, but that if you watched Glass Onion last night and cried over the idea that you can’t have justice for the ones you love and you can’t bring them back but you can damn well be sure their work was not in vain, you’d love them. They’re my children and they’re my self, they live in my brain and they’re in love and better yet they’re best friends who will never, ever loose each other. Whether that’s to the slow diaspora of having to move across the country to make a living or finding that a dumbass billionaire pulled the plug on the liminal space where they gather. They’re part of a family of orphans and outcasts and they’re the spiritual descendants of a lot of people who taught me a lot about community. They know way more than me about how to help the friends who are suffering yet another pointless accident and wring some kind of catharsis out of a world that has not stopped ending in a thousand different ways since before any of us were born, and it’s only partly because one of them can literally do magic. Mostly it’s because when you write for five people who all hated the idea that resistance to the cruelties of the world is pointless even in fiction the exact same way you can actually give them a single webpage where justice exists, the people who are supposed to keep people safe care more about that than maintaining their structural power, and rich assholes who ruin people’s lives are the ones who go to jail. Now if only my perfect, (but not too perfect) darling, useless daughters would bring me a plot so I could actually use the sadness and anger for something. Even if no one ever reads it.

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

I need to kill him (derogatory) vs I need to kill him (affectionate)

[dangerliesbeforeyou]

the thing about having a hyperfixation is that i'm SO into it that i find it hard even talking about it lol ??? like it's part of why i draw the things i love because sometimes i just cant express my love for the thing in words but sometimes i dont even have motivation for any art but the fixation is still THERE so like ur just spending hours staring at pictures of that man and just smiling like an idiot with no way of talking about it OR no motivation to do art of him pfft...

[ex-vespidae]

honestly think the confusion of wether sectonia is a bee or wasp is by design.

now I do wholeheartedly believe she is 100% a wasp, in fact I could name the wasp I believe she is based on. (Its Euchroeus Purpuratus, basically a purple cuckoo wasp)

but. Think about it. The defensive strong wasp masquerading as a bee to give her a more comforting image to her people? Ooooo that's full of such interesting implications... MmMrmemmr

[soarrenbluejay]

Since I’ve been encouraged to actually share my funny little blorbo ideas here’s another one gang;

Danny moves to Gotham on scholarship for engineering, because the Fentons may be infamous but they’re also insanely brilliant and besides both he and Jazz are showing every sign of embarrassed child of a super genius syndrome, so while the bats are keeping a close eye on him Just In Case, duke is also thinking of introducing him to the Our Parents Are Maniacs But Anyway club maybe after the first month or so.

Gotham does not go for standard dorm living bc of his ‘condition’ and lack of wanting to constantly spook/gaslight a roommate. Besides, living with two small children is a dorm sounds like a disaster in action.

So Danny signs up as a mechanic in Crime Alley, buys himself a teeny weensy lil apartment and Makes It Work. He has been all year after showing up with a de aged Dani and Dan in Amnity after all, and that had gone,,, fine? (The entire town, observing how Danny had been getting increasingly more uncomfortable around his godfather prior to the cloning incident, then just dropped off the face of the earth for several months, the first two weeks stuck in Vlad’s basement enduring horrors and the next Too Many desperately fapping around in the Ghost Zone to get everything handled. All the clones live, all 13 of them. Bunch of them are stuck in the Ghost Zone due to constant need for ectoplasm, but eh, plenty of Zone born never leave, so. One, in the future, apprentices under a green warrior lady on Pandora’s suggestion, another is working in the Eternal Library with Ghost Writer, etc etc. so Danny eventually came back to Amnity with one small child under each arm very obviously traumatized by Somethingn with vlad and doesn’t like being alone with him,,, or touched without warning,, and immediately and passionately proclaims the kids his but struggles to explain how or why,, look some very reasonable assumptions are drawn okay. So the town does the very reasonable thing and does the midwestern equivilant of excommunicating Vlad, except it’s a lot more run him out with pitchforks vibes since he’s the Mayor. Anyway)

He is immediately loved, because while non Gothamites are usually more of a pain than they’re worth, everyone in a while someone even from out of town will just fit in so nicely it’s uncanny for everyone involved. Addams family vibes, it’s referred to as ‘making it home’, just personal hc. He is protective of all the kids playing in the parks and street girls that can totally take care of themselves on their corners but find it HILARIOUS when he just tackles a dick like a wild animal full force no warning. He can fix anything it seems, but refuses to work with weapons. Reasonable enough, people get twitchy about gangs sometimes. Danny mentions being not against Hood or anything, but he’s not going to work for him, littles to take care of and all, but had past experience with ‘Dora and that inheritance mess with her brother he was being a real prick about’ so everyone assumes it’s the equivilant of him having Done His Time and being plenty good for a life time and respects it as long as none of that petty midwestern small town hotshots bring any of that shit over here. And they don’t, because said individuals are on the other side of the mortal veil, so happy day.

See I really love deaged!Dan because he’s just a grumpy lil guy. But he’s also killed millions. He’s so protective of his loved ones, but held back by blending in and also being Smol that it comes off more bitey kitten than anything else. Dani, of course, is a terror, so she fits right in with the crowd.

And sorry gang, but a bunch of kids on their own in Gotham in a poor side of the city just isn’t going to get any attention: that’s just business as usual really. What first gets attention on Danny is not his ‘condition’ or being mistaken for a meta (which he legally probs has an argument for even without the gene bc like these bitches don’t know how metaism works anyway so) or alien (I’m 90% sure he’d be covered by the alien protection act by virtue of being half ‘not from earth’), but because Danny despite best efforts is a Weird Guy.

He grew up in what could only be described as a low level villain level and spent most of high school dealing with smack downs and spiritual invasion. He’s never really processed that any of that is not in fact Normal. Also, he’s capable of making Anything if given the insides of a toaster, blender and alarm clock, and could probably rewrite the circuits of the apartment blindfolded and improve them 1000% even if it ABSOLUTELY would not be up to code.

And sure, things slip every once in a while, bits of spectral ice here, small floating incident there, but everyone just Minds Their Buisness ya know? You really gunna mess with the guy that personally ensured that when your car got flattened by a fight with Killer Croc, you were still able to get in to work the next day by some wizardry? Really?

But Gotham is a city so cursed it’s probably in the exponents countwise, so of course there is a) a flourishing community of magic users and assorted supernatural weirdos and b) a whole lot of shit for Mega Overpowered Ghost King Danny to idly pick at day to day in order to help with his protecting other Obsession. Gotham has plenty of heroes, but by god do they need the spiritual equivilant of an electrician/priest.

Still, Danny, as a baby ancient under a facet of Kronos and KING OF THE DEAD is like, way, way out of their scope to be able to grok, so it mostly just comes off as you know, a family of banshees or something. When asked, Danny very haltingly says he was briefly dead but then revived, which neatly explains his Weird Ass aura and makes it SPECTACULARLY AWKWARD to ask further about. So everyone nods politely, and goes back to their lives after double checking no nefarious bullshit was being pulled.

Then, of course, Vlad finally tracks them down. The whole neighborhood is altered in short order because he doesn’t bother trying to hide being a Rich Bitch or how he’s sneering down his nose at people on the sidewalk. Every connects the dots when Danny paniks. Dani and Dan’s daycare are staffed with some extra, very buff set of hands within the hour. Jerry, Hood’s third in command, personally shows up to the garage Danny is working at to talk things out with him bc he knows he does t like the deal with this stuff due to past unspecified circumstances but well, they guys had already started fucking with him, you see. Stole his tires, spray painted the windows, pickpocketed him blind, and when he retreated tipped off the police to the drugs they’d planted in the glove box.

Danny might not have been born in Gotham, but he was one of them. And the Alley takes care of it own.

[tizeline]

Well. Every tmnt artist has to turn them into humans eventually, I suppose.

Sorry for not posting a ton lately, I have been................. playing fire emblem three houses.............. busy............ Also I've been feeling a little burned out on art, admitedly. Don't worry, it's very much temporary! Last month was just pretty high tempo for me, expecially with the Cell Talk comic, so I just needed to take a short break from drawing to also play fire emblem but I'm getting back into an art-mood now! I decided to draw humanified turtles as a bit of a warm up basically, I've been wanting to do it for quite some time so it was just a fun little thing for me :]

Anyway, some thoughts about the designs-

A lot of people draw Leo as blonde, and I was fully intending to draw him blonde as well, but then I just wanted to see what he'd look like with brown hair instead and I just.... liked that a bit more, so he's a brunette now. Also he has dimples because of course he has dimples. And Mikey has freckles because OF COURSE he has freckles! And Donnie ALSO has freckles because he's my blorbo and I give all my blorbos freckles cuz they're neat. All of them have pretty small eyebrows except for Donnie because he fills them in with makeup. I thought for a while of how I would translate Leo's facial markings into his human design, and I ended up settling for birthmarks (also some red eyeliner cuz his face needs a bit of red on it)

[morgan-the-lonely-brick]

I put two rivals in my book just so one can get hurt and the other has to take part in caring for them. Bonus points if they specifically ask for their help

[evilminji]

You know what would be both Cool(tm) AND Pants Shittingly Terrifying? Eldritch Space Whale Danny!

Except NOT! Because he's not a whale! Just snoozing and Giganto-Fuck-Off HUGE!

Imagine it! Danny. Joint Custody Child of The Ancients Of Time And Space. Space is SALTY AF because their BITCH OF AN EX has used his FUCKING POWERS, AGAIN, to CHEAT. Clockwork how DARE YOU.

You knew he'd be our Son in advance!

YOU SNUCK IN AND STARTING BONDING WITH OUR CHILD BEHIND MY BACK!

YOU [REDACTED]!

Danny? Sitting off to the Side as a Sentient Everything and Nothing made of galaxies and starlight, howls expletives at their Ex, who is being... REALLY snippy back? WOW, Clockwork. I mean, JESUS, man. Danny's from "oh bless their heart" Nowhere, Midwest. And even HE thinks that last one was both backhanded and cold af.

......he should take notes. *continues to eat his popcorn*

Anyway! APPARENTLY, Space Parent has taken him in the divorce. With much huffing. Tucked under their arm Like The Football(tm). And honestly? This is kinda hilarious, so he's cool with it. Byyyyyy~ Clock Dad! See you on weekends~☆!

*Exasperated Time Noises*

It's pretty cool! He learns a lot. Learns he's probably? Gonna be SOME variation of Space Ghost. Might even take over Space's... well, EVERYTHING, should the unforeseeable occur. So obviously, gonna have to learn The Family Business, as it were!

Which?

UNSPEAKABLY HYPED, YES PLEASE.

SPACE AND STAR STUFF! HECK YEAH!

Unfortunately? Still a Halfa. Bleh, squishy need to eat and sleep. Why they get in the way of Hyperfixation? Why no more space dust? Nooooo, don't drag him away from the controls! He can still learn! Sleep is for quitters! Cowards! *whining in Give Me Back My Blorbos, You Monsters*

But, no. He apparently has to "take care of his body" and "not burn out". Eat "real food". A protein bar counts! He probably ate one of those! Give him back his STARS! He doesn't CARE if he sounds like a toddler! That's DIRECT ACCESS TO THE SECRETS OF SPACE ITSELF! He'll BITE, so HELP HIM-! *Is scruffed like a cranky infant being carried off to beddy bye*

Injustice! D:<

But, none the less, body's require sleep. He shovles down his food, washes up, and flops down in his bed. In the nice lil cozy "Safe For My Half Apprentice Who Is Also My Adopted Son" corner. He passes out in that corner. Starts to float, as he has done countless times before, when agitated before bed. Floats OUT of that corner.

That Safe Little Corner.

IN THE CENTER, THE BEATING HEART OF SPACE.

You know... the place ALL OF SPACE connects too. Where Universe Form and Die. The Grand Recycler. Dust to Dust, from the ashes of old, to the creation of new. Where PORTALS are randomly assigned. So that the Omniversal Ectoplasmic Levels may always be balanced at near to perfect levels, allowing free flow of Souls through the various Reincarnation cycles.

Space, of course, doesn't MANAGE the Ectoplasm itself. Nor the Souls! Different Ancient for THAT, but they DO manage the PORTALS. We live in a SYSTEM after all. Everyone has their "departments" as it were. So really, it's quiet... Danny? Honey? Awful quiet back there! You, uh, fallen asleep, Starlight?

*empty room*

(O.O)

*inhale* AAAAAAAAAAA-!!!!!!!

Meanwhile! He be Snoozin'! And Ghostin'! Ghost Snoozin'! Is extra comfy, cause he weightless and got not booooones~☆!

But! He? Is not a child anymore! Has learned to... for lack of a better term, Let Go. To finally ACCEPT his Death. His inhumanity. His Amortality. Death no longer holds him, can no longer let him go. He is... not immortal. He is disowned, by his own doing and his own choice, at his timeless moment of Ending.

When Life let go of his hand and Death kindly offered theirs, he did not take it.

And that's okay.

It took awhile. Talking to older ghosts. Most vague and vast, near formless. Because it's... it's scary. And it's all you know. All, really, you've EVER known. Inherent to your identity, even after you leave that part you behind.

You are "human". "Martian" or "Xy'xeruian", something else, and you never question it. Even when you've left behind everything ELSE. Your name, your eyes, your history and skin. Yet you fly around and pretend. Still alive, still human.

But is that YOU?

Or just the form you found your start in?

And like? It's okay if it IS! Sometimes, yeah, you ARE. You look down deep and find a "don't know what you were expecting, buddy" sign stapled to a mirror. But more often? It's that last hurdle. The final step in Letting Go.

Everyone mourns at their own pace.

And they are the ghosts of who they were.

It helped. Mourning for the kid he was. Who was fourteen and wanted to be an astronaut. Who died and will never have a grave. The longer he exsists, for he can't technically be called Alive, the more painfully young that child seems.

It was okay.

To cry for Danny Fenton.

Then? To let him go. Let his memory, be memory. And his Past be the grave that child rests in. Loved dearly and remembered, but no longer binding his soul.

He doesn't have to wear that face anymore.

No tributes to the Dead.

He got? Kinda... BIG. Like REALLY big. Spiraling, serpentine, cracking ice, and burning galaxies. Like a fourth dimensional dragon, of ice and stars, somehow forcing its way into a three dimensional space. Atop it all, between two vast, impossible horns? Made of glacial ice coating the warping hearts of black holes, who's shape themselves seem to shift in unknowable ways? There burns, like comet trails, with super novas, compressed to decorative gems beneath glittering morning frost, a Terrible Crown.

He? Thinks? He MIGHT have wings.

He can't tell.

Because APPARENTLY he's a fuckin tesseract! Oh, no, sorry. He might me a Zone DAMNED PENTERACT!!! Is THIS what he gets for hanging out with Clockwork all the time? He just liked the quiet! Now his "true form" is PHYSICALLY PAINFUL for most people to look at!

Clock Dad WHAT THE HELL?!

(You see, now, why Space broke up with him? An ASSHOLE)

So! Danny stays, usually at least, in his "Hi, yes, I am Normal Human Man" Ghost form. But NOW? Now it PINCHS. Because it's TOO SMALL. But hey, that's fine! It's not like he has an ingrained habit of transforming when super tired and stressed! To float sleep for Maximum Restfulness(tm).

Ha ha!

Why does that feel like foreshadowing?

BECAUSE IT IS!

Danny? Snoozing! Space? Has LOST THE BABY! Portals? Have done a Jood Gob in Portalling, something they are vaguely sure they are supposed to be doing! Yay them! They have no brain cells but still enjoy helping! They moved a thing! That's helpful right? Yay! Probably!

And on DC's planet Earth?

They? Just choked on their fuckin coffee. One moment? La dee daa~ oooh~ look! Stars! Deep space! Oh, hiiii~ Watchtower! The NEXT? *every alarm in the building starts LOSING ITS SHIT* Giant World OBLITERATING SHAPE completely takes up the screen.

From near PLUTO.

There are NO WORDS TO DISCRIBE HOW FUCK OFF BIG THIS THING IS, MR. PRESIDENT. It will eat our nukes and LAUGH. Call! EVERYBODY!!!

Obviously? Superman. I mean really, OF COURSE Superman. Frankly, all the Supers. Because we would like to KEEP having a planet, thanks. Only? The more reports that come in? The more everyone is getting "oh fuck. This is a Workd Eater" vibes.

A massive, massive, Sleeping Titan of a Planet Destroying World Eater.

That MIGHT BE MAGIC.

*highly stressed Everyone noises*

And WORSE? Superman? Can't TOUCH it! Oh sure, at FIRST he could! But then he apparently pushed too hard in just one spot! And it felt POKED AT. So now, after flicking superman HALFWAY BACK TO EARTH to make him stop? No one can physically touch it!

But! There is hope!

Because? The creature is GREEN. Bright, luminous, Lantern Green! And Earth's Lanterns have already sent for back up. Combined? The were able to move a... hand? Paw? Something. But! With the combine forces of several nearby sectors of Lanterns? They promise the power to either relocate the creature or at least hold it in orbit until FURTHER forces can be deployed!

They refuse to harm the creature until it proves actively hostile, as it could have been seeking a place to nap and chosen one inconvenient to established planetary life. Frankly? Earth doesn't CARE where you relocate the giant Eldritch Space Dragon. Just NOT IN OUR BACKYARD, PLEASE.

....YES WE ARE SURE! We don't CARE if the scientific community of our planet is begging you to set up an area for them to place an "observation satellite"! No giant Eldritch Space Dragons in our solar system! It might WAKE UP!

Naturally, about half way THROUGH this Highly Delicate Operation?

Danny Wakes Up.

@hypewinter @hdgnj @lolottes @babbling-babull @nerdpoe @the-witchhunter @mutable-manifestation

[elexuscal]

the longer i stay in fandom, the longer i think a huge amount of bad takes and discourse come from an... abundance of identifying with a character

to be clear, i don't think it's bad to identify with a character. far from it! i think that's part of what makes fiction so powerful.

and it's only logical people often attach to a blorbo because they're just like me, for real. a person will see some element of themselves-- their race, their gender, their sexuality, their hobbies, their family life, their specific flavour of neurodivergence-- and something just resonates. it gives them a way to explore and name this important part of themselves, a part they maybe didn't even know existed before it.

and everything is well and good until some split between them and the character shows up

because of course, no character, except an explicit self-insert written by yourself, will ever be a perfect 1:1 for your own experiences. so sooner or later-- maybe in canon, maybe in a fanwork-- your blorbo diverges from your lived experience in a huge way.

I think this is why shipping culture in particular gets so toxic. While it is by no means the only way to indulge with shipping, a significant portion is 'if i was in that character's shoes, i would choose X'. the fight becomes for your own self-identity.

but this gets expanded in other ways. a character who is revealed to be black when the majority of the fandom had just assumed they were white. or revealed to be queer, or maybe the 'wrong' flavour of queer. or fuck, even some more innocuous part of their backstory, one that's nonetheless so meaningful for SOMEONE, but now it feels like the story is saying, fuck you, we're doing something else

i don't know. i just feel acknowledging this perceived-attack-on-identity helps me understand why people react it what seems to be such outsized way to canon and fanworks alike.

at the same time, i think it's a really important thing to check in yourself.

it's nice, to see a character who you identify with. who resonates with for being like you. but it's also nice to acknowledge and appreciate the way characters are not like you at All. how great it is to get insight into this totally different lived experience. and to muse on how wonderful that recognition might be for someone who does have that background.