#guys who say fascinating

[mynnthia]

was talking with a friend about how some of dunmeshi fаndom misunderstands kabru's initial feelings towards laios.

to sum up kabru's situation via a self-contained modernized metaphor:

kabru is like a guy who lost his entire family in a highly traumatic car accident. years later he joins a discord server and takes note of laios, another server member who seems interesting, so they start chatting. then laios reveals his special interest and favorite movie of all time is David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), and invites kabru to go watch a demolition derby with him

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Dog Meshi.

[raepliica]

Take to the skies

...and fly free

[mamawasatesttube]

my ideal timkon don't get together until they've both already done some queer realizations and dated other guys a little bit, in part because on tim's end, i think he's been in love with kon since he was 17, but at 17 tim didn't even know he was bisexual, forget anything else. and his feelings for kon were so big but also so constant that he didn't even realize they were there or significant because they've always been there and been huge. for years. so he putters along and does his time in the torment nexus (the closet) and languishes a bit but slowly starts to figure it out.

meanwhile kon dates someone, mostly like omg im dating a guy this is ALLOWED !??!?! and its pretty lowkey and casual and doesnt last bc like . super identity issues, right. kon would Never just tell someone, but secrets and casual relationships dont last long etc etc. but just the entire principle of kon dating someone and then being like yeah idk im not really feeling it like hes nice and all but i think hes more interested in like… yknow, my hot bod, than me. its whatever tho. and tim just being SOOOOO mad that someone would date kon and not absolutely adore him. tim will not be unpacking why hes so mad about kon having a shitty boyfriend. obviously its just bc kons his bestie and deserves better. (😶)

so he's just grouchily tinkering on some upgrade for his car to get the grumpy energies out. like WHATEVER! (angrily turns socket wrench) he's not saying kon should dump the guy or anything (angrily turns socket wrench) but he's just SAYING, kon can do BETTER!!!!! (angrily turns socket wrench) and kon DESERVES better!!! kon deserves someone who will treat him RIGHT!!!!! (angrily turns socket wrench) like if TIM was gonna fuck kon he wouldn't do it like a goddamn quickie and just fucking leave (angrily grabs the next size socket and scoots further under the car) like kon OBVIOUSLY doesn't like that so why won't this guy GET THAT!!!! (angry tinkering noises) if he's that shallow he can go find himself a sexy body pillow to screw!!! leave kon alone!!!!

and cassie sitting on a chair nearby is just like. sorry what was that? "if i was gonna fuck kon"? did you just say--hey tim? hey. can you go back a step?

and tim's just. obviously this is a hypothetical everyone considers about kon. look at him he's . you know. besides, tim's just talking as his best friend who wants the best for him! ugh stop trying to read into it cassie, that's not the POINT--

[mcybree]

coughs. Everypony who wishes to hear about scott secret life episode 7 and is old enough to catch their own prey please gather under pride rock or whatever the fuck they say to call an emergency meeting these days. I need everyone to know why this episode is so unusual for him… I take back anything I have ever said about gem in my entire life that implied disinterest; Gem and her zombie apocalypse scared the SHIT out of Scott. NOBODY HAS EVER MANAGED TO DO THAT BEFORE.

[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

[echo-starflower]

I FINISHED THE GUY!!!!!!

(Pattern by @ghost-cinnamon)

He’s perfect and I love him

But Echo! some of you might ask, isn’t the body supposed to be red like his bones? To that I say! 1: I’m impressed you saw it under the layers of clothes! /silly and 2!

BAH BAM

Embroidery!!!!! (I’m so proud of this hehe it turned out way better than I expected. Also faceless doll jumpscare>:3)

And of course, credit must be given to my amazing little sibling whose immediate reaction to seeing my doll was “ooo he’s spooky! He needs a top hat!!!!”

(She proceeded to make not one but two top hats hehe)

[travalerray]

the kink got out of hand, sorry

then what ARE the words you want to say

I can't believe they really went with "antagonist gets amnesia, vaguely recognises the protagonist and decides that they are besties actually" trope

[typenull]

While the climax of Dunmesh [here’s your warning for spoilers] gives us an extremely thorough look into Laios’s psyche and his own desires, we don’t actually know that much about Falin, despite her “death” kicking the entire story into motion. The only bits of Falin we get to see are through the lens of other characters, who inherently show us their own biased perceptions of her. I’d go as far to say that Falin is actually the character in Dungeon Meshi who’s true desires we know the least about!

We know with absolute certainty at least a few things: Falin is gifted with powerful magic, wants to follow behind and travel with her brother who she deeply respects, loves her friend Marcille, likes fruits and creams, loves insects and is curious about monsters, once again like Laios… most of the things we learn about Falin are things that she has in common with her brother, but what does SHE want, deep down? How does she feel about everything? I don’t think we’ll fully get an answer to that question before the manga is over. This is definitely on purpose though, and has even been hinted at in the text (which I’ll get to later).

In my opinion the main difference between Falin and Laios is that Falin doesn’t want to hurt anyone besides herself (for the sake of others, and she barely knows who that self is) and Laios wants to hurt anyone who he “doesn’t like” (anyone who endangers him and those he loves). Both of these feelings stem from the same shared events of their childhood where they both began to feel “disconnected” from humanity so to speak, but they reacted to it in opposite ways.

Where Laios stubbornly ran away and refused to deal with being hurt and surrounded by hurt, Falin, who we rarely see making choices based on any desires for herself (staying in the academy for 8 years after being sent by her father despite not thinking it’s for her, nearly agreeing to marry Shuro just so that she doesn’t have to deal with being asked later, etc.), doesn’t object to anything she’s subject to because the only person being “hurt” in these scenarios is herself, which to her is acceptable. She accepts the fact that she’s considered “othered” extremely easily, and this reflects openly in both her behavior and in the few things we know about her: she connects with and cares deeply for spirits despite being ostracized, admires insects and monsters like her brother, and is even fine planning to take on a job that’s revered in her hometown. To Falin, being “othered” is more normal to her than the alternative

The only people in Falin’s life that make her feel like *more* than just an outsider are Laios and Marcille. As a result Laios and Falin end up with similar sounding mindsets on the surface; "As long as [the people I love] are okay, I don't care about anything else" — but underneath, they actually manifest completely differently! Where Laios “doesn’t care about people”, Falin cares deeply about them despite barely being treated as one.

The only *active* decision from Falin we see that most obviously reflects her deepest desires is her choice to die for those she loves, which I think says a lot about her.

I think that if Laios is “a human who wants to become a monster” because he hates humans due to his past, the most obvious foil to him is Kabru, “a human who wants to destroy monsters” because of his past in Utaya (and feeling like a monster himself). Thinking of them as two ends of a spectrum, in the grey middle ground of this is where I think I’d put Falin.

She’s simultaneously a human made subhuman, a monster made to follow Thistle, a “ghost” of her former self haunting Laios and Marcille — she really IS the absolute epitome of a “chimera”.

The Lion cursing Laios was the “hinting in the text” I talked about earlier: forcing his deepest desire into something seemingly impossible to achieve, a chimera. The surface level conclusion when reading this is that Falin won’t be revived, but I seriously don’t think it’ll be that simple in the end. After all, a chimera is multifaceted.

My hope for the final chapter of Dungeon Meshi is that, *if* by some chance Falin is revived, she will finally have to grapple with not only having to look deep within herself to answer all of these things for her own sake, but also with having the one opportunity in which she chose to use any sort of agency to act upon her deepest desires not only be completely reversed, but also hurting so many people in the process. When Falin is revived in the Red Dragon arc, she doesn’t even remember sacrificing herself for her friends — but she promises Laios to never do it again, falling back into her typical submissive obedience. How would she react the second time? Will we even get to know? Something tells me, probably not.

[edge-oftheworld]

do you ever just stop and think about how each band member is so incredibly talented in their own way and we get to watch not only that but the magic that happens when they work together?

[gottagetgogottagetattahere]

Knives is such a hypocrite and a liar and he lies most of all to himself and i hate him but i also love it. Bro's so coked up on copium all the time.

Claims to be doing it all for the sake of Plants, then arguably takes away their agency and freedom way more than humans ever could. Claims to be doing it for his brother and literally ruins his brother's life in every possible turn. Claims humanity never learns from their mistakes and it literally takes dying for him to stop doubling down on his bullshit. the medical abuse done unto tesla horrified him so much and yet he is directly responsible to the same abuse being subjected to countless of children.

Given the chance, I would love to be his sleep paralysis demon. i do not think I could fix him, but I think I can drive him to early retirement from super villainy.

[kayvsworld]

sorry to be doing mcu throwback complaints again and EXTRA sorry for it to be about cacw and aou, sorry, i just am thinking again that if marvel had. in aou. committed to letting steve rogers see that captain america graffiti calling him a fascist with his own two eyes i would have forgiven many of their subsequent deeds and crimes

[puppyeared]

people who do STEM or administration as a career full time and continue to do art as a hobby, I am scared of you but like in a hot way. youre like if we were allowed to have cold drinks in winter. i look at you and think of miles morales with his two cakes. do you want to make out sometime

[twinstxrs]

there’s probably something deeply wrong with me because every time i see someone react to the pok gukgak interrogation scene it’s like “oh no oh my god is riz’s dad a bad guy?” when the first time i saw that scene my only thought was “oh my god is riz’s dad HOT??”

[andrewknightley]

Maybe is my very particular interpretation but for me gods are very much a Concept more than people so the whole gale/mystra thing is very much a wizard falling in love with magic itself as an artist falls in love with art itself. And oh man no matter how much you love it that cant never love you back. Not like a real person. But you feel something is missing and you dont know what it is (it is real human connection and people who actually love you) so you are like. "Ah i see i could become Better At What I Am I just need to Improve." And thats your thing ! and what people said you were good at since you were a kid thats where your value is isnt it!!

[moeblob]

Demyx (my beloved)