#feel free to ignore though

[emystic-a]

@fxtelism​

     The woman looked down at the child and wordlessly gave him half of the cookie she was going to eat. This was the kid, her sister, Zesa and her mate was keeping here for some reason. Frankly, she frowned upon the idea of them adopting unknown beings due to what she could guess was paternal instincts when they’re on a important research project, was they going to take in every orphan they find? What can she do about it? All her job was to do was look after the base and that null boy.

   He looked hungry and her eating a snack in front of him, felt rude. “Do you want more than that?”

[hypewinter]

Hal bent down as the little girl approached him. Even then, he still managed to tower over her with how small she was.

"Hey there little lady," he said. "Anything I can help you with this fine evening?"

The little girl looked at him anxiously, fiddling with her hands. Ok so not a nervous fan. Hal immediately switched to serious mode, scanning the crowd for anyone who could be her parents. He didn't see anyone running up to the two of them or even so much as keeping a watchful eye from a distance.

"Is something the matter?" Hal questioned, making sure to keep his voice even and calm.

The girl continued fidgeting, her big blue eyes scanning from side to side. Finally she spoke. "You wiff da space po-eece yes? Not da am-ear-ree-ca one?"

Hal smiled at the girl. "Yes, I'm with the space police." Honestly that was oversimplifying the Corps a little but he had long since gotten to citizens calling him a space cop.

The girl offered up a small nervous smile of her own. "So you won't tell da gov-ment what I tell you wight?"

Hal was on high alert now. Just what was this little girl trying to tell him? "I won't tell. I promise," he said after a second.

The girl broke into a big smile at this. "Really? Dis way den." She started tugging Hal along and he began to follow.

"Where exactly are we going?" he asked.

"You see," was all she replied.

Hal was led down a couple different alleyways and was beginning to think he was walking into a trap when they reached an abandoned building. The girl dashed in and up the old rusted stairs, with Hal following closely behind her.

If this really is a trap, I'll never hear the end of it from Batman, he thought morbidly as he cleared the last step. Instead of finding himself facing an ambush however, he saw a boy curled up on an old mattress. The girl was already by his side as Hal approached.

"Don wowee Danny, I got help. Like I said I would," he caught the little girl whispering as he knelt down next to the boy. He had to have been older than the girl. Three years older maybe? Yet he was still so small. Hal took sight of his condition. He was in pain. That much was certain by his little face scrunched up in agony and his quiet moans. He was also sweating profusely. His raven black hair sticking to his forehead. Fever maybe?

Hal continued his observations as he scanned down the boy's body until he got to his stomach. The boy was clutching it and Hal could make out blood bleeding through from underneath. Oh no.

He quickly yet carefully removed the boy's arm to get a better look at the wound. The kid let out a groan as his arm was peeled away. Hal couldn't help but thank Oa for all his training that helped prevent him from letting out a gasp.

The boy's chest was covered in blood. Dark red mixed with flecks of green soaked through his shirt and there were bandages that had been amateurishly tied around the wound.

"How did this happen?" Hal asked, turning back to the girl. He did his best to keep his tone as gentle as possible.

Her smile was gone now, and her eyes welled up with tears. "He pwotected me," she said. "Dey wanted to huwrt us. Dey shot at us. Danny pwotected me."

Anger boiled within Hal. Who would shoot at these children? They were only little kids. If what the girl had said earlier was anything to go off of, the answer had something to do with the government. He would have to take care of that later though. For now, this boy needed medical attention.

"Let's get Danny to a hospital," Hal said resolutely, as he got up.

"No!" the little girl screeched. "No has-pee-tail. Too dan-er-us!"

"But he needs-" Hal started but then he met the girl's eyes. There was abject fear in them. As if going to the hospital would be a death sentence for both children. Where else were they supposed to go though? The boy- Danny needed medical attention stat. That much was certain.

Hal paused. There was one place. He sighed. Batman was going to kill him for this.

"Okay okay. No hospital. But what about space?"

"Space?" the girl repeated.

Hal nodded.

The little girl smiled. "Danny lobes space!"

"Well then. That's perfect."

Hal constructed a new bed for the boy, carefully easing him onto it before putting a protective dome around both children. The little girl giggled as he lifted them up. He then turned to the wall where he created a giant hammer to knock it down. Then they were off. Flying higher and higher, towards the atmosphere. As the Watchtower got closer in sight, Hal couldn't help but groan. Taking civilians to the Watchtower? Oh yeah, Batman was definitely going to kill him.

[spellbcok]

"um, yeah, i'm fine—" annie said unconvincingly, her gaze moving between the two options at the fork in the path she abruptly stopped at. "i just seem to have lost track of the supposedly easy for beginners hiking trail i was on..." this was exactly the kind of scenario she imagined would happen to her someday, and why she begged to join girl scouts. darn her mother for saying selling cookies would waste valuable studying time. "do you know which way i should go to get back?"

@spellbcok (emma woodhouse)

"Are you alright, miss?" Alfred looked up at the young woman standing nearby. "You seem lost. It's easy enough to get turned around in here." That was one of the things Alfred liked best about this particular park, how easy it was to forget that he was in the middle of a bustling city. "If you need some help, I'm more than happy to assist. I know my way around well enough."

[kathonyy]

BRIDGERTON SEASON 3 PROMO ↳ FULL POST

[misiahasahardname]

finds character i relate to immensely, immediately starts projecting

[koushuwu]

Vanitas

[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

[waystarresourceco]

Alan Ruck on Conor and Logan's relationship (and a little look into why Connor wasn't a contender for heir apparent). (x)

[psychicdisaster]

The. Idiots.

(affectionate)

[humming-fly]

Inktober Day 26 - Discarded

Once again I've started rereading @post-it-notes7's fic Heart and Soul and am as always having a Wonderful time with it unlike the protagonists

(will probably go back in and add the shading later but for now it's 2am so it's gettin posted!)

[waterfallofspace]

Anyone else not able to say 'bless you', either because it feels too personal, embarrassing, slightly erotic or a mixture of all of the above-

Buuuuuut also whenever an event interrupts the conversation, you feel so much more awkward not saying anything/commenting on it at all, and so you wish you could just... say that phrase, or have some other thing that makes sense to say to just- shrug it off???

[rainbowstargazerlilies]

FIC AND RELATED NONSENSE AD MOMENT!

IF you have not read The Stars Claim Them as a Magnus Archives and Mechanisms fan, why should you do so?

Slow burn fun times!

We are trekking, we are moving along, and the story is continuing!

This is an excellent time to get into things, as I, your author, am currently on a bit of a break with posting, and will be back to a regular posting schedule in the near future.

What is the story about?

(. . . insert word count joke here)

Becca.

All right, here's a quick summary :) Lyfrassir Edda, the viewpoint character of the Bifrost Incident, survives the apocalypse, and eventually ends up crashlanding on Earth before the events of the Magnus Archives and getting very involved in things. Events spiral from there. We've got Mechanisms, we've got TMA folks, we've got a few too many Michaels, we've got some OCs I love a lot, we've got unexpected leaps back into Mechanisms albums. . . I've been having a blast for the past two and a half years, and I hope you all have a blast too.

IF you at one point have read any part of The Stars Claim Them. . .

This is a perfect opportunity to catch up! I've been taking a break from regular posting since finishing posting the fourth part, and I'll not be returning to that until I've got enough of a buffer built up that I feel comfortable posting once a week again. As well, we've got some fun stuff, like a fun and very normal discord server, some side stories and AUs I've written over the past year or so and the like. I hope you have a blast!

If you're interested in the discord server and haven't seen a link before, let me know and I can shoot you a link!

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

My hot take is that marcanne has as much potential for toxic yuri as any other calamity trio ship and it's not nearly as soft and fluffy as one may think

[hyperkitten224]

I haven't had the motivation to draw for a while so. here have a WIP I'll probably never finish lol

[yoohyeon]

« ɪ'ᴍ ᴀᴡᴀᴋᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʀʏɪɴɢ ᴡʜɪʟᴇ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ꜱʟᴇᴇᴘɪɴɢ

ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ʙᴀʙᴇ ʙᴇꜱɪᴅᴇ ʜɪᴍ

ɪ'ᴍ ᴏɴ ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴇᴅɢᴇ ᴡʜɪʟᴇ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ꜱᴏ

ɢᴏᴅ ᴅᴀᴍɴ ᴘᴏʟɪᴛᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴄᴏᴍᴘᴏꜱᴇᴅ »

Marianas Trench - Fallout (2012)

Do not repost!

[pentition]

Gonna probably be in the minority here but I'm kind of frustrated that an entire tier was dedicated to a fan favorite. Don't get me wrong, I really like Logan. So I'm not criticizing his character in any way. The idea of him having a reason to show up is fun.

That said, if it's not a huge plot point and a tacked on thing, I wish they'd just use spare money or treat it like a DLC thing rather than dedicate a whole tier to it. If we get to Logan but we don't get to height sliders or something else, that's disappointing. Things more suited for the next game installment, that affect what goes into its development, I feel like is more important.

That isn't to say Logan wouldn't enhance a story. But if he's just visiting and is a side note for Evershine, why not just have it be a side thing and not take up a full tier? I'm using Logan as an example here but there are also other things on the tier list that has me feeling the same. As much as I love my Sandrock builder, I'm a little confused why narratively she'd show up. From what I've heard, at least.

This doesn't diminish my excitement any, of course. I've just haven't been able to click in my head why these are dedicated tiers vs dedicating those tier goals to Evershine-specific content. I know Logan is a fan favorite, I like him a lot too and the wild arc of 'if we thirst hard enough a romance will be born' was great. But I also know there are plenty of people indifferent, lukewarm or whatever else to him. So dedicating a huge tier like that instead of dedicating the funds to Evershine's other romance options or any of the other goals that affect it nore specifically is making me feel hrrm.

Not to be a buzzkill. I'm aware it probably sounds like I'm butthurt or something but it ain't that deep. I'm just opting to ponder on it here outloud because I don't want to ruin the hype over on the subs or in discord servers. :')