#half of the legacy characters actually

[everything--under--the--stars]

I love comic book logic especially in origins explaining how characters learned to fight or whatever because it's always like:

"We need a safe place to put our one and only child while we go on a dangerous quest for an undisclosed amount of time :( It has to be somewhere that will keep her out of trouble. With a person we trust who will let her live a normal and stable life. Someone that will never put her in any da-"

"How about our best friend Joe the Assassin?"

"Perfect lets go right now"

[ponchcronch]

I’m back to school so I may start posting more since I’ve been sketching out of pure boredom lol

These aren’t anyone in particular I just really wanted to draw sonic characters without any refs

Lookit this perry the platypus looking ahh

[rickktish]

I’ve got a couple of hot takes and there’s nuance to them but I don’t have a whole lot of brain power so I might leave it as-is and elaborate only if asked:

-The kind of people who engage in fandom and specifically those who write fanfiction tend to belong to the same categories of people/sets of identities which are likely to fall victim to the “white people have no culture” lie and therefore like to spice up their writing by diversifying the cast in ways they view as meaningful or reflective of those characters’ personal arcs/histories, which unfortunately means leaning on a lot of stereotypes and accidentally perpetuating, consciously or unconsciously, those stereotypes. (Is anyone else bothered by the prevalence of latino Jason “drug crime lord” Todd headcanons? I don’t speak up about it often but it frequently feels legitimately uncomfy to me. Also while it’s fun to mess around with various flavors of Asian Tim “the smart Robin” Drake, there are some very uncomfortable discussions which ought to be had about why he gets headcanoned as east Asian specifically— usually Korean from what I’ve seen but also frequently Chinese and Japanese— when the fanon interpretation of his character can basically be boiled down to “good with computers, terrible/abusive/neglectful bio parents with unreasonably high standards/expectations, child genius.” Like maybe critically examine your tropes before applying them wholesale is what i’m saying)

-readheads are an unrecognized minority and have historically been and are still in some places presently subjected to the same kinds of stereotyping, discrimination, and fetishization that recognized racial minorities face. The only difference is that discrimination against poc has frequently been legally mandated throughout western history whereas that against redheads has been largely (though not exclusively) cultural. Think for a minute about how many redheaded characters have been replaced by black actors in live action adaptations in recent years and understand that redheads have been on-screen shorthand for “acceptable token diversity” for longer than probably any of us care to think about and they are losing that status as black characters begin to take that place in widespread visual media. Race swapping the Gordons specifically, while pulled off extremely well by a beautifully talented actor in The Batman 2022, is actively participating in the erasure of redheaded characters, especially ones whose roles are more complex than “femme fatale” or “the spitfire,” (or both), from screen

I'm not necessarily against race-swapping hcs and whatnot, but I do think the Bat-Family fandom has a tendency to ignore the actual POC members of the Bat-Family in favor for their hcs, lmfao.

Like I've seen Asian Tim and Babs hcs and I'm like... you do know Cass and Damian are literally right there, you don't have to do that. 😭

[captain-astors]

Finished up my attempt at Deuce within @where-does-the-heart-lie's fighting game AU! Feeling a little iffy about it but I might've just been staring at this for too damn long. Anyways thoughts, symbolism explanation, and sketches I made in the attempt bellow the cut.

Okay! So in general I worked with a rule of 2's when it came to Deuce's hearts with the exception of his camera, but that's supposed to pair with the pen with the little heart cap, I just didn't remember to keep that in my final drawings somewhere. Trying to strike a balance between "Just a guy" and "fun stylized outfit" was hard and I don't think I quite got it, but it was enjoyable nonetheless!

Heart glasses- Representative of how he loves observing the world and aspires to adventure through it. The cracked lens represents how the damage he's received from people he loved has caused him to look at others cynically at times. Meanwhile the unshattered lens sort of represents his tendency to look at those who earn his love with extreme levels of internal praise, half of Ace's first novel is just him waxing poetic about how lovely Ace is and I think that's hilarious.

Hearts on the gloves- He shows his love for the world and for people through the writing he does with his hands! But they're somewhat damaged because they've been utilized for the medicinal legacy that was forced upon him.

Heart on the camera/pen- A specific love for journalism and writing and telling a story, credits to Whery for the first one.

Spade on the shirt- Not technically a heart but it's a little play on how he keeps the Spades close to his heart/tends to be kind of pokey if you try to get close.

Spade/heart on the back of the shirt- Symbolic of the whole life-devoting love within him, so it's large, but it's kept guarded and tethered by the camera strap and can only be seen beneath a layer and if he trusts you enough to turn his back. It's mostly upside-down to look more like a heart if I'm honest, but that as well as that it's on his back and so guarded is all representative of how the family that he presumably once loved shamed and pressured him, making a sort of "weight on his back". It's spade shaped because that's who his devotion and love belongs to, but also when counted with the other one, Deuce!

One of my scrapped ideas was having the coat be a doctor's coat with the only hearts on it being scorched edges because something something fire set him free but he still uses his medicinal abilities to benefit people in his new life, but I couldn't get it to look right so I went with the summery looking thing he's wearing now. It's fine but it kind of lacks a personality, I think that's the main thing I'd try to revise if I redid this but I've already overthought it to hell so. Another day.

Ace in Dr. Robotnik's outfit from the sonic movie is there for facial reference and emotional support I guess, I made that a while ago.

And in one last vaguely related tangent, yours truly has a very distinctly heart-shaped birthmark on my foot. It symbolizes that I'm tired. (Jokes aside I think it's cool, afab actually stood for Assigned Fighting game character At Birth)

[soleminisanction]

That last post really hits on what bothers me so much about the "Tim needs to ~grow up~ and get a new name" fandom opinion.

People who say things like that don't like or respect Robin. They might like "the Robins," as in the collection of characters who have held the title, but they don't like Robin, the actual role and legacy of being one-half of the Dynamic Duo. They're continuations of the same attitude from the 80s where Robin is a "stupid kiddie idea for stupid little kids," only instead of wanting to eliminate it entirely, now it's treated as a training camp that you're ""supposed to"" grow out of and move on to something else that's totally independent.

(Or, y'know, they're people who like the Bat-fam but hate Bruce and thus the idea of any other character choosing to act as the Watson to his Holmes and actually enjoying it is inconceivable).

So they can't wrap their heads around the fact that Tim Drake is a Robin fan. That he likes being Robin specifically, not just any vigilante working with the Bats, but a continuing the legacy of his hero. He's excited to be Robin, beyond stoked to work with Bruce and Dick, and he's proud of what he built the legacy into.

You can't really say that about the others, with the notable exception of Dick for the 40 years prior to the New Teen Titans. Jason enjoyed being Robin but it wasn't exactly something he chose and there was conflict and baggage and nuance there. Steph wanted Robin as a means to an end, whether that end was getting Bruce to take her more seriously or spiting Tim for the assumed cheating. Damian mostly cares about Robin as a status symbol and a stepping stone on the path to his actual goal of becoming Batman.

Tim's the only one who became Robin for Robin's sake, because he wanted Robin to keep going, and who stays Robin because he enjoys doing the job. When people demand that he "grow up and move on," it feels like... idk, a harsher, meaner version "you're not allowed to have hobbies or passions anymore after you turn 25, go do your taxes."

[llannasvsp]

Due to my last post I do feel the need to clarify some things.

I'm totally fine with people referring to Lloyd in the second half of Legacy of the Green Ninja as being "mentally nine", because AT THAT POINT, he would be.

Posts that show him fighting the Overlord and saying "he was only nine years old". Yes. I'm all for that. Because AT THAT POINT the passage of time had not been great enough for him to instantly grow up, adapt, and ACTUALLY get older.

However, when we get to Dragons Rising, where there have been literal YEARS in between Child's Play in Legacy of the Green Ninja to the end of Crystalized, even MORE years in between the end of Crystalized and the Merge, and then MORE years in between the Merge and the actual start of Dragons Rising, that's when it gets a bit infuriating.

Even IF Lloyd had NOT thrown the tea, he would be at the least around 20 years old. No matter what way you look at it, he IS an adult.

"But he threw the tea!" Yea. And if he hadn't, he still would have grown up.

It's also VERY important to remember that things like trauma can age a person. His mental age would have caught up with his new physical age VERY quickly due to trauma, and also the fact that people would treat him as the age he was physically. It probably took the Ninja some time to adapt to his age acceleration, but the general public would not look at him and think, "let's treat him like a nine year old". Because they wouldn't know.

Anyway, just some things to think about. I'm done rambling about this. Sometimes it just pops into my head and I have to yap or I'll implode. It's okay for characters to grow up.

And Lloyd in Dragons Rising is at LEAST 25 years old with the tea, 20 without, which means he's an adult, no matter how you look at it.

[its-not-a-pen]

eunuch rating system: part 2 electric boogaloo! part 1 based on the original post by @welcometothejianghu wherein i continue to rate REAL historical chinese eunuchs! this is a non-exhaustive list and there's honestly no metric to it. i just pick the guys i like.

Han Dynasty (yes, again. the Han was like 400 years long lol) Cao Teng was a pretty normal guy whose biggest claim to fame is his extremely infamous grandson, Cao Cao. Because of this, Cao Teng is the only enunch in chinese history to get a royal title; Emperor Gao of Wei, which was granted posthumerously through Cao Cao’s grandson Cao Rui.

Cao Teng was a good judge of character who promoted a bunch of famous people, one of whom was a guy who had even tried to impeach him previously. After 30 years of service, he retired, got married, and adopted a son. 

i decided to put him on the list because the common perception of the eunuch is a "mutilated" man living a lonely, unfulfilled life. What is often left out is they are highly motivated people who excel at their jobs, exert a lot of influence, and are able to have families and leave a legacy.

the majority of eunuchs came from poor families, and serving at the palace gave them an opportunity to obtain wealth, status and an education they would otherwise never have access to. it does require an unimaginably painful sacrifice, but that shouldn't be the only thing that defines them.

Cao Teng's hard work benefited his entire clan and lifted them out of poverty. But there was a complex interplay between him being a venerable ancestor, and someone marked by the stigma of castration. I imagine there was something bittersweet here for Cao Teng, knowing that he had done so much for his family, but they would rather he didn't exist.

Cao Cao was able to become a prime minister because of the wealth, connections, and education earned by his grandfather. At the same time, he appeared to resent him. The source of his ancestory was a sore spot which was repeatedly brought up by his political enemies to discredit him, something he never commented directly on or attempted to defend.

ming dynasty

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE FOR THE COOLEST PERSON IN THE MING DYNASTY!!!! actually scratch that, MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE FOR THE COOLEST PERSON IN CHINESE HISTORY, PERIOD.

Zheng He was born Ma He to muslims living in Yunan, which was ruled by Mongols at the time. He was captured by the Ming army between the age of 10-14, castrated, and given to the young Yongle Emperor as a servant. Incredibly enough, he was like "no hard feelings mate" and went on to work in EVERY SINGLE JOB. and kick absolute ass in ALL OF THEM. he started out as a soldier on the northern frontier (the toughest place to serve, that was where all the border conflicts were) and fought in several campaigns with the future emperor, distinguishing himself and earning the emperor's trust.

I originally had him drawn in a more stereotypically "heroic" pose, by all accounts he was a tough guy who "walked like a tiger", and while the main purpose of the Ming voyages were diplomatic, he didn't shy away from violence. (he fought PIRATES. like a fucking shonen protagonist). in the end i decided to go with a picture that showcases less celebrated but equally important leadership qualities like curiosity, patience and discipline. I also want to point out that he wasn't the only eunuch on the trip, around half of the commanding officers were also eunuchs. He wasn't an exception to the rule but rather the face of a largely ignored majority; complicated people who were making the most of a difficult job.

Notes: the giraffe he brought back didn't have a name (at least not on record), but the Ming thought it was a qilin (kinda like a chinese unicorn) and i thought that would be an adorable name for a giraffe.

Ming Dynasty

i feel like we've had too much nuance, so lets finish this list off with a properly corrupt and scheming enunch! Wei Zhongxian castrated himself at age 21 to escape his gambling debts, and it unleashed his potiential like Rock Lee removing his leg weights. once inside the palace, he started out as a minor kitchen hand but managed to hustle his way to being the right hand of the emperor, who was an indifferent ruler that prefered woodworking to running a country. for this reason, I decided to make him a ventriloquist dummy.

Wei Zhongxian then proceeded to go on an extravagant and over-compensating ego trip. actually, it was more like a 40-year-long, olympic worthy, ego-long jump. things came to a terrible end when he tried to stage a coup (it failed and he decided not to hang around the capital, and go hang on some rafters instead). by then, decades of corruption had weakened the Ming, the emperor's only son got exploded in horrible incident that also wiped out most of the Ming Dynasty munitions--and what's this? here comes the Qing Dynasty with a steel chair!!!! notes: I decided to make Wei Zhongxian's design a human version of my cat, because he is also an incredibly devious but rather low-wisdom individial.

[autumnwoodsdreamer]

I’m not gonna get too into this, but I was going through Sabine’s wiki last night (because there was something in the legacy section I half-remembered and mentioned to my sister and she wanted to know more). Honestly, I was hesitant to even open it because I haven’t touched it since Ahsoka came out, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it actually hasn’t changed much at all.

But the thing that interested me was how her “Force” stuff is basically just a little paragraph wedged in at the end. That’s basically all it amounts to. You scroll through volumes of her story from Rebels and the comics.

Compare that to Ezra and Kanan, who have the Force, their connection to it and relationship with it woven into every section of their wiki because it is such an integral part of them. You can’t clip it out and keep their story or their characters intact. But with Sabine, her story revolves around her Mandalorian heritage, it’s rooted in such formative things as her time at the academy and her rift with her family, that you can just clip out the Force stuff and the only thing that unravels is her Ahsoka appearance. Try to erase her Mandalorian side (which I might argue they basically did in the live action show) and she’s not recognizably Sabine anymore.

I’m not writing this to beat a dead horse and I’m definitely not coming at anyone. I’m just kinda relieved. Seeing it like that somehow just makes it so much easier to go, yeah, the Ahsoka show’s a thing, but I can ignore it, cut it out, and just keep the part of the story I love—it’s a good, long story.

[theperfectquestion]

TWENTY YEARS TO MIDNIGHT

The Venture Brothers starts out as a show that makes fun of the past, but lasted long enough to be one that truly understands it.

So I rewatched The Venture Brothers in one big splurge over the course of two weeks, from Turtle Bay to Baboon Heart.

One of the most charming things about the show is a product of its lengthy creation process and the fact that it was written almost entirely by just two people. The story nearly has a tight continuity, so if you take it at its word then all the events of the story take place over a period of two and a half years, while the actual show was made over a period of twenty years.

The outcome of this curious time dilation is that we follow the Venture Brothers, Hank and Dean, through those difficult years between 16 and 18, but we also follow the writers, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, through the difficult years between their twenties and their forties. The show begins irreverent, contrarian and cruel and changes, cell by cell, into something wiser and more profound.

The treatment of Rusty Venture, former boy adventurer and long-suffering heir to the poisonous Venture legacy, is a fascinating thread to follow. In the very first episode he steals his son's kidneys like a ghoul, and his various addictions and neuroses are firmly treated as quirky objects of pity. I don't know much about the personal lives of the writers, but I imagine a certain amount of tragedy would have found them over the course of twenty years. A certain empathy for Rusty's position kicks in around the second season and develops strongly throughout the years. By the time the writers have reached the age that Rusty is when he is introduced, there are delicate attempts to reach out to the poor man, to understand and maybe counteract some of his own personal tragedy, though careful not to smother the comedy that such a character brings to the table.

But the thread I enjoyed following the most was that trailing behind Action Johnny. If you have ever heard of The Venture Brothers, you already know that the show began as a parody and deconstruction of the 1960s Hanna Barbara cartoon Jonny Quest, which was itself an attempted relaunch of the Edisonade craze of the 1910s, riding on the coattails of the far more successful and popular Tintin and Uncle Scrooge comics.

Jonny Quest was the son of a world famous scientist and adventurer, Doctor Quest, who led an extraordinary jet setting life where he accompanied his father to exotic places to experience exciting, often racist, science-themed thrills instead of going to school. He was watched over by his lantern-jawed bodyguard, Race Bannon, and joined with his adopted brother, Hadji.

The Venture Brothers stole this set-up entirely, and Rusty's backstory is a carbon copy of Jonny's. We are first told that this is something more than a swipe early on in the first season of The Venture Brothers when Race Bannon appears, as himself, as a secret agent belonging to the same organisation as the Venture family bodyguard, Brock Samson. It's a clever shorthand for saying that boy adventurers are not singular in this world, they are a type, one which occupies a distinct social strata along with their bodyguards, enemies and other supporting cast members.

The way that we are told this fact, in the seventh episode of the first season, is peak 2004 adult swim: beloved cartoon character Rave Bannon drops out of the sky, lands in front of one of our characters, dies, then shits himself. This was vaguely subversive at the time, but twenty years of Robot Chicken and the like have rendered it a tired, hoary gag. Venture Brothers itself has proved that this moment is at least a wasted opportunity. There was undoubtedly more comedy and interest to be mined from having Race Bannon around as an older counterpart to Brock Samson. But there was fun to be had with squandering opportunities and biting the hand that feeds for writers in their twenties in 2004.

When Jonny Quest himself appears in 2006's season two episode, Twenty Years to Midnight, things aren't much different. Jonny is found haunting the bathyscaphe from the cartoon, injecting heroin, waving an antique pistol and ranting about his father. He has a teardrop tattoo and missing teeth. He is discovered by Rusty's brother, the overachieving but naïve Jonas Junior. It's a much better gag in execution than the Race Bannon one, despite being essentially the same beat, but there is some pathos thanks to Brendan Small's delivery. Jonny is left alive, unlike Race, but the capper to this scene is somehow more humilating and tragic than when Race's corpse shat himself: Jonny is brought on side by Jonas Junior who, pressed for time and not as accustomed to being threatened and menaced as Rusty is, is unable to apply superscience to this situation and simply offers Jonny a supply of heroin.

The entertainment industry's relationship to its back catalogue of intellectual property has changed a lot in the last two decades. Characters like Jonny and Race were embarrassing curios in Ted Turner's garage in 2006. Why not dust them off and kill them in a cartoon to make college kids giggle? Why not give them a crippling drug habit and have them collapse to their knees, bellowing, "I'm in real pain!" But within ten years the media behemoths realised they could spin their old straw into gold, and instead of selling sheink rays at a yard sale, so to speak, they were putting the Flintstones in ads for Halifax bank.

So the Venture Brothers show renamed their tragic, adult Jonny Quest to 'Action Johnny' and in doing so was forced to consider him as a character rather than a skit. And the colossal strength at the heart of the Venture Brothers is in taking ridiculous things like boy adventurers seriously. Jonny Quest was allowed to become a valuable (?) piece of IP, forever a child, forever innocent and marketable, while Action Johnny could live his life unfettered by the parent company's fears.

Action Johnny appears two years later in Season 3, sober but shaky, doing a favour to Rusty by running a seminar for his ill-fated summer camp. He undercuts the spirit of the event by warning the children of the long term effects of adventures on the psyche and unravels into rants about his father. It's a solid bit by itself, especially when contrasted with a neighbouring table from the Pirate Captain (who, despite being an important recurring character, the show refuses to give a name) about the joys of being part of the 'rubber mask set.' Though the world of the Venture Brothers is nominally organised through a bureaucracy of licenced 'protagonists' and 'antagonists,' the biggest tension on screen is between the characters who chose the life, like the Pirate Captain, and those who had the life forced upon them, like Action Johnny. It just so happens that the former tend to end up as tortured, resentful good guys and the latter wind up as joyful, carefree villains.

Bringing that point home in the same episode is the appearance of Doctor Z as the summer camp's headliner. Doctor Z is the final borrowed character Jonny Quest, and one who the writers clearly take the brightest shine to, probably because he has the funniest voice to imitate. Doctor Z also represents the goals of show's resplendent second half - having deconstructed the boy adventurer genre in the early seasons, the Venture Bros very carefully puts the pieces back together into something wholly new.

And so Doctor Zin, the generic yellow peril villain of Jonny Quest, becomes Doctor Z, the retired and contented former archfiend of the Venture Bros. Doctor Z is treated by the other characters as something like a national treasure, a beloved old star who made the game his own. The joke of Doctor Z is that he seems genuinely bemused that his lifetime of villainy seems to have had a lasting negative effect on people. When he appears at Rusty's summer camp, all theatre and terror, he is delighted to meet his old foe Action Johnny, while Johnny is thrown into a whirlwind of trauma at the sight of Z, one that will drag him down into further troubles.

Doctor Z will become more of a feature than Action Johnny over the following years as the show becomes more interested in its older cast members - the ones whose personalities shaped the world, and who have sunny memories of the days that were so painful to Rusty and Johnny. He is part of a larger rehabilitation arc on the meta level, where characters with reprehensible aspects to them are held up for the audience to inspect so that they may find some empathy with them. Sargent Hatred is the poster child of this era, who is a repentant paedophile who joins the main cast as the Venture Brothers' new bodyguard. He's a whole other topic, but Doctor Z has the same function as Hatred, but on a metatextual level. His ancestor, Doctor Zin, is a hideous racial stereotype of the sort that makes modern revivals of the adventure genre so unpalatable. In its first deconstructionist half, the Venture Brothers show would simply wave Doctor Z around as shock tactic - 'look how racist Jonny Quest was, and by extension the company that made it and, logically, its audience!' and then maybe give him a violent and undignified death to wash their hands of the whole matter. But the reconstructivist Venture Brothers show embraces Doctor Z, and takes him beyond his tawdry origins to become an integral part of its story.

In 2009, Action Johnny helps Rusty to articulate this in the episode 'Self-Medication' from Season 4. Johnny and Rusty are in the same therapy group for former boy adventurers, a premise that would later be stolen wholesale by the She-Hulk show. A trail of tenuous clues leads the group to Doctor Z's house in the middle of the night. Johnny forces a confrontation with Z, accusing him of murdering their therapist to perpetuate the spiral he has been in since he saw Z take the stage back at Rusty's day camp. Doctor Z immediately groks the situation and invites the former boy adventurers into his home for tea with his beloved wife, who proudly proclaims herself to be his beard. Doctor Z is proud of what he has done in life, and so has the ability to put the past behind him. Sat between Z and Johhny, who is unable to move on, Rusty realises that he has more in common with the antagonist in the room than the protagonist. Rusty has many such insights throughout the length of the show and they lead him to an interesting end point where he seizes the nettle and becomes a parental figure to the whole weird superscience community.

The final encounter between Action Johnny and Doctor Z takes place nine years (!) later in our timeline - 2018's 'The Terminus Mandate.' Doctor Z is retiring from active villany and, according to the ceremony-obsessed fraternity of organised supervillans, that means he must menace his archenemy one last time. Action Johnny's father is long gone, so Johnny inherits that dubious honour.

It's the first time that we see Doctor Z not being fully committed to the bit. Johnny is resident at a posh rehab clinic and Doctor Z is conflicted between genuinely wanting to see Johnny again but unsure of how to interact with him in a way that doesn't cause actual, lasting harm. Doctor Z even brings a prop from a Jonny Quest cartoon as a gift, in a sequence lovingly reanimated to translate Jonny Quest's vocabulary into the Venture Brothers' language. The sequence chosen is virulently racist, almost too racist to be believed: a mask of the god Anubis lands on top of Johnny's dog, and Doctor Z's Egyptian henchmen suddenly believe that the mask is a vengeful god come to punish them and so abandon the young Doctor, giving the advantage to Johnny's team. In the lobby of the rehab centre, in the late to evening, Doctor Z struggles to articulate why the Anubis mask means so much to him and Johnny cringes at the memory while enjoying the act of reminiscing. He offers to go and run and hide, so that Z can find him, and they both discover they are delighted by the idea.

It's a touching, uncomfortable and deeply weird scene that, to me, is the pinnacle of The Venture Brothers as a creative endeavour. Behind it is a group of people who have been mulling over the implications of Jonny Quest as a short-lived but impactful cultural phenomenon for most of their adult lives. They have been mining the absurdity, the legacy, the implications, the pathos and the bathos of those 26 half-hours of cartoon and found incredible treasures. It starts with finding a silly old thing in the attic that you want to ridicule and it ends, twenty years later, with you acknowledging the attachment one has formed to that silly old thing, and how it has informed your life, for better or worse, in ways you can't deny.

[bandtrees]

this has always been one of my favorite lines in this scene it’s so striking to me. i think debating over callum’s level of lucidity and what can or cannot “fix” him is deeply antithecal to what the story is trying to express with him - but the idea that callum is still there and still a person who does have the capacity to love mingus, just not in a way she can ever comprehend or accept, because she can't comprehend or accept anything outside her narrow worldview, is sooooo good.

there is no way of actually knowing if callum is proud of mingus, much less recognizes her at all - but it's added to by the fact there's only so much of that she would accept even if he could. ultimately, she wants validation and power, his prestige, from him, she wants a supportive parental figure she never had - there's only so much of that callum is able to provide even in a world where her stint to fix his memory actually worked. he's like a hundred. he never even MET her. to say nothing of all he's missed in the past fifty-odd years. to say nothing of how his age may have messed with his mind deteriorating even without the pre-existing brain damage.

and mingus' phrasing here implies he doesn't even look at her when she visits - which brings me to the visit that radicalized her: the one after her surgery, where he was watching gingi out the window.

obviously, callum watching gingi is mostly for the thematics of it all, how similar the two of them are in ways mingus refuses to recognize, but theres also the thought of... callum's been sitting alone in that room for over half his life, barely lucid if at all. of course he's going to be drawn to a brightly-colored thing making noises and knocking stuff over outside. if he can't respond to stimuli of the people around him he's at the very least going to latch onto something more visually interesting than Brown Wall and Brown Figure.

but it's not like mingus can think of it like that, because she's internalized so much about her grandfather and built up such a specific, personalized vision of him - she doesn't see him as an elderly man with (a fictional equivalent to) dementia, she sees him as President Callum Crown™, the man she personally has to please and live up to the legacy of and make proud, disregarding the fact that's not something he has the mental capacity to even do - because she's so obsessed with validation and complete control that the only way she can get it is by either subjugating others and forcing it out of them (what she does with her townsfolk), or just completely projecting on someone who, for her purposes, is basically a blank slate.

which is maddening to her in its own way, see how crazy she drives herself trying to restore callum's memory in the first place - but also, would she be happy even if callum could see her for who she is? post-game, when she's working on herself, that's an irrelevant question as she's pushed past that need, but as we know her? absolutely not.

i love the ch3 standoff between norm and mingus as a show of "Okay guys let’s see who can dehumanize this disabled guy harder (via pedestal-putting) and justify themselves for it better" and why i think it is so important that it’s gingi who reads the postcard and ultimately speaks for callum instead of either of them, or even the narrator. they can’t read, and they struggle to, but they manage to get it right even when people are telling them to stop. and the fact they’re able to do it at all, are given the chance to do so, and are ultimately the one to wind down this conflict shows that the world of dialtown, while not perfect, really is how callum would have wanted it.

both gingi and callum are some of the most altruistic and human characters ever, and the crux of their parallels is that they are denied this by close-minded people because they happen to Behave Strangely. it's why seeing mingus act the way she does hits so hard - she loves her paw-paw, yes, but if she were to see him in a vacuum, a one-limbed man who can hardly think, much less speak for himself: or even his younger self, who was struggling to make ends meet with his odd inventions...

...well, the feeling norm's imagining here would probably be mutual. mingus' relationship with bigotry is a very fascinating one, she's very close-minded but views certain oddities (ie her flesh-head) as having earned their place and thus being fine - she's a freak too, by her own admission, but she's doing it for a just and wider purpose, so it's fine. which is, ironically, the ideology callum forced upon himself.

callum was obsessed with helping people, pushing himself to do more and more, because it was the only way he ever found respect. if he didn't help people and have grand visions for the world and make himself "useful" to society at large, then what would he be, if not a freak?

mingus and her paw-paw are very similar people, from their well-intentioned extremism, to their stubbornness and paranoia, to their inability to view themselves as anything more than a vessel for that grand cause they believe in (callum in the dialup, mingus in restoring her paw-paw's memory) - which is funny, because if mingus was able to view callum, and herself, as a flawed human person, she would come to understand how similar they really are.

:(

[applestorms]

i love near so goddamn much. i finally read the c-kira and a-kira post-canon one shots all the way through last night and AAAAAAAAA my heart. nate river 🫵🫵🫵

c-kira in particular hits me hard bc you can really see that he's still reeling from the events of the main story. it’s a very specific era of near that’s so horribly awkward and insecure about his place in the world, about his role as L, and has so very few people left behind to support him-- really just lidner, rester, and gevanni. so much of that story is about near struggling to figure out who he is and who he wants to be in the wake of Everything, scrambling around in the shadows of all these false gods and blown up egos, trying to grow up and be a Person in the smoking remains of all these people who killed themselves with their own hubris. i mean, just look at this page:

LOOK AT THIS. near is almost shockingly expressive in this story, his grief and regret is fucking Palpable in a way that you very rarely see with a guy like him. it really gets to me that this is the story where near actually opens up about his mixed feelings surrounding the original L, about the interview he held where he picked near & mello out to be his two successors, and all while hiding himself within these massive card towers that you only see to be these giant L's at the end-- a kid barely out of his teens already getting dwarfed by the enormity of the history he is expected to continue and represent. the winner of the game who's only prize is the legacy he now holds on his shoulders, the grief he is cursed with as the only one left behind. this kid barely has anyone now, never even got the chance to truly, fully know what he lost in the first place, these all-powerful figures that have dictated every inch of his life from the moment he stepped foot in that damn house.

and i mean, goodness. what did we expect? i can talk all i want about the cinematic parallels of light & L as opposites, but look at near & mello in literally every piece of official art-- near truly loses his other half when mello dies, and you can just Feel the discomfort, the deep-seated, underlying imbalance in his soul through this shit.

a-kira near, on the other hand, has had the time to grow a bit more at ease with himself, but he still gets to me in a slightly different way. i cannot emphasize enough how utterly fucking perfect the decision to make his hair longer is-- for so simple of a detail, it really sums up so much about his character. this version of an older near feels like a guy who's been stuck outside of time for ages, barely even noticing the constant shifts of the outer world as he holes himself up in his room, hardly aware of the way that his own body stretches and grows and changes with each passing day. doing his job, all just for a bit of entertainment. there is still that distinctly privileged, childish part of him that hides in his forts of toys and makes whatever demands he pleases, but it's more smoothed over, more exhausted, more Done.

he's packed away the grief by this point. dealt with it properly? not necessarily. but the wound isn't as raw now so he can set it aside to be ignored or looked over more easily, focus on the things that he wants to. blow up his toys when they don't meet his standards.

i strikes me as important that near's view on the new kira's shifts so much over the course of even just these two little stories. in the c-kira story, near is so Quick to shit on the new guy as fast as possible, literally snarking him into submission with the fear of his presence alone until he writes his own name down. we never see this "cheap" kira, this pathetic fake that couldn't possibly stand up to the original. (projecting a little there, nate?) he's barely more than a panel or two of hands, and then he disappears from the story forever.

in a-kira though, you get something a little more desperate, a little more hungry-- near really fucking wants to meet this new guy, purely for the sake of talking to him, and is a lot quicker to respect him & the depth of how well he's thought through this plan. at first it seems like he's intrigued by the idea of finally finding yet another equal, someone to match his freak after years of standing on his own, and knowing DN you're inclined to trust that the mind games will eventually happen. but, in the end...

he loses. and doesn't he seem so happy about it?

minoru really is the perfect match for near in a way-- a new, passive kira, uninterested in the bullshittery of killing and shinigami and evil murder diaries, to reflect and match the tired, new L who was done with his job before he even started doing it. RIP minoru dying due to shinigami bullshit, but i'm genuinely happy that this is the ending near gets, the chance to finally lose at something without having to pay the price of human lives for it. winning has almost never been a truly positive thing for near-- his winning wammy's house only gave him the many pressures & stresses of a job as L, his winning against light only gave him a dead mello and a notebook to quietly burn, hell, all of this shit happening at all is what made mello resent him so much in the first place.

but now he can lose. and i think he's all the better for it.

near is immature, yes, he bossy and snarky and blows up his toys without giving a fuck what anyone else has to say-- but he doesn't get ahead of himself in the way that light and L and the others did, a trait which ultimately lets him win but also leaves him behind to shoulder the grief of a generation. but now he can lose, he can let the fate of the world fall of his shoulders for just a moment, and everything is still going to be okay. it's good to see him getting older. it's good to see that you can still move on and grow, even when it seems like the legacies of the past are locking you away in a cage. i'm glad these manga exist, and i'm glad near can still make it out alive.

[bookie-bookdust]

Unhinged Headcanons: Where Hogwarts Legacy characters would work (modern au)

Sebastian Sallow: You thought I was going to say Barnes and Noble, didn't you? No he's banned from there because he kept stealing books. He just haunts the parking lot sulking and drinking slurpees.

Ominis Gaunt: Express in a half abandoned mall. He judges you as soon as you walk in, folding the same pair of pleather pants for the fifteenth time with a stank face as you pick up the fugliest shirt he's ever had the misfortunate of touching.

Poppy Sweeting: Build-a-Bear. And each adoption is a full ceremony, music and all. She also cries. A lot. Her manager keeps telling her to stop.

Leander Prewett: Wetzel's Pretzels. No explanation needed.

Amit Thakkar: Excitedly holding down the fort in one of those Sharper Image/science stores that no one goes into. But he doesn't even notice. Actually, even when people come in, he doesn't notice because he's too distracted by all the gadgets. The theft is ridiculous.

Garreth Weasley: Lush. And he keeps corralling people to try the bath bombs in that weird ass sink they have, spritzing sprays at passerby. Has had to stop so many people from eating soap that now he's given up and just lets it happen.

Natty Onai: Her mom won't let her get a job lololol.

Anne Sallow: She keeps quitting jobs after two weeks and somehow gets rehired. Always has fifteen used tissues in her pocket. Wears pajama bottoms and hasn't gotten written up?? Her weird ass unemployed brother picks her up at the end of her shift and tries to hit on everyone.

okay byeeeeee

[super-subraminion]

apple white is so horrible but she is also so kind and thats why she's awesome

(super long yap session below because i want to ramble about apple because she is so interesting to me just as a warning lmao)

i feel like i see sm ppl on like tiktok and all (which maybe my first mistake was expecting nuance on tiktok) acting like she's like the evilest character on the show and i feel like thats just so reductive of her character

like apple is so kind she genuinely loves her friends so much; she's always been so excited and kind around raven when everyone else was afraid of her; despite the fact that her happily ever after is essentially nepotism, she works so hard to prepare to be a good ruler and wants the best for her future kingdom; she's constantly seen helping people and trying to enact change as leader of student council(i.e having the duck crossing or smth along those lines, i don't remember exactly), etc etc.

but at the same time she fails to realize how cruel she can be at times and thats why shes so awesome. like hello, the daughter of snow white, this elegant, perfect, delicate princess also simultaneously being so selfish is so good?? even though she loves her friends so much, she fails to realize or understand why they wouldn't want to uphold the status quo; even though she is kind to raven, that kindness comes with the expectation that raven will sacrifice her life to uphold the system for apple's happily ever after; even though she grinds and grinds to be a good ruler, she is still unaware of the privilege she has; even though she helps people, she can just as easily say out-of-touch and cruel things(like when after legacy day, she takes a dig at the rebels because they don't have happily ever afters)

honestly apple's privilege in and of itself is so interesting to me- because she does go through so much and she is a victim of the system— imo everyone is a victim of the system because even those with happy endings have to sacrifice their free will in order to obtain it(i.e ashlynn's ending is good but she'd have to sacrifice her relationship with hunter for it, cerise also technically has a good ending assuming she goes w the red riding hood destiny but she sacrifices half of her identity for it). in apple's case, she was conditioned to accept everything that came with her destiny with a smile on her face, conditioned to accept a man as her destined prince when in reality they had no idea who her destined prince was and she's gay so she would've just been trapped in a loveless marriage, lied and manipulated to so she could maintain the system. assuming that eah's snow white follows the canon of the original fairytale(ik there's some differences like how raven technically wouldn't become apple's stepmom, and raven's mom wasn't apple's mom's stepmom), apple has to knowingly go through 2 near death experiences and one that basically works, only to have a someone she doesn't even love beyond accepting the fact that that he's destined for her to wake her up. one detail i've always liked about dragon games is how they went all out in the scene where apple is poisoned- the detail is visceral and horrifying, she is genuinely struggling, etc; and the reason i really liked that they animated it that way is it adds to the horror of apple's story, because the path to her happily ever after is horrible.

at the same time, the reason apple is willing to go through any of this is because she can afford to. i don't think(???) her parents die(someone pls feel free to correct me on this because im not actually sure) unlike ashlynn's (im only assuming because its explicitly mentioned for ashlynn but never talked about for apple). she isn't poisoned for long. she may not truly love daring, but he's a good enough guy, conventionally attractive, heroic, and a nice friend to her. and she goes through all this to be the most beloved person in the world, the ruler of like everyone, and get a life of absolute luxury. in the long run, she pays pretty small prices to get the best life ever. i think most of the fandom is in agreement when i say that she easily has like the best destiny on the show.

but from apple's perspective, her destiny isn't the best. she only knows her hardship, and she does have to go through a lot for her destiny— the point i mentioned earlier about how horrifying the animation is when she got poisoned is proof of that. its so telling that she cant understand why her friends would be hesitant of their destinies— especially her formerly royal friends like briar and ashlynn. briar and ashlynn similarily also get ultimately happy endings of a life of wealth and being beloved— but the price they pay is a lot greater than what apple goes through(not to mention ashlynn also has the extra motivation of being in a relationship with hunter). i feel this is especially obvious in thronecoming where apple tells briar that "we all have a part to play"— apple feels that she is also sacrificing a lot to uphold the system anyway and the way i see it is that she thinks its unfair that others are questioning their roles when it's the natural order of the world to make big sacrifices. but what she can't grasp is the others r willing to risk it all because their destiny is so tragic— like how raven tried to find everything she could about potential rebellion before she rebelled because if there was even a chance she didn't have to contractually obligate herself to a hellish life forever it was worth the risk(mostly emphasized in the books). apple upholds the system not only because of the way she has been lied and manipulated to, but also because she can afford to make sacrifices; raven rebels against the system because her sacrifice is sacrificing everything about her, including her wellbeing and life.

like shes so much more interesting than just being "the real villain of ever after high", she's another teenager a victim to the system— except she has more to gain than others so she simultaneously religously upholds the system. shes so interesting because of her sharp contrasts in character and i feel that reducing her like that takes away from the complexities of her character

obv i get why people don't like her character anyway, a character being complex doesn't mean people have to like said character. i'm definitely biased towards her because i do like her a lot but i get why people don't but idk man i feel like going in the direction of "she's the real problem!" takes away from the entire idea that this system is harmful to everyone, even those with privilege, and it also just makes her less interesting because part of why i like her and why she is such a compelling character is because she's so crazy in the sense that she is so kind and horrible at the same time— she's so hypocritical but her headspace makes sense at the same time and i find the duality she has to be really strong writing

if you made it all the way to the end thanks for reading my long ass yap session i wrote this instead of preparing for my lit essay i think i should get diagnosed-

also feel free to correct anything i said if i accidentally spread misinfo- theres always tiny details about this show that i get confused about every now and then and i always want to know more about this show

update i did my lit essay and unironically writing this helped me somehow so my lesson is that not doing my homework and yapping about ever after high is always the solution

[zahri-melitor]

Telling apart your Black Canaries:

Dinah as a character has a complicated publication history. It's probably fair to say she's less tangled than some other characters but:

Dinah Drake, later Dinah Drake Lance was a JSA character. She's a street fighter who married Larry Lance, a detective who used to work for the GCPD, and retired/died when her daughter was in her teens. Dinah Snr does not have an active metagene (no Canary Cry). You can generally distinguish her from her daughter by the fact she is basically always depicted wearing a mask and she's got the turned over top black pirate boots. Dinah Snr is always wearing a blonde wig. She has primarily only appeared in Golden and Silver Age stories (officially any Black Canary appearance between 1947-1969 is Dinah Snr) but occasionally pops up in flashback situations since COIE.

Dinah Laurel Lance is the daughter of Dinah and Larry and one of the nieces of the collective JSA elders. She is an extremely talented martial artist who supplements her skill with the Canary Cry, which is due to a metagene she was born with. Her on and off again long term romance is with Oliver Queen (and homoerotically with Barbara Gordon). You can tell Dinah apart from her mother by the fact she’s had dozens of different costumes, but the main distinguishing factors when she’s in the leotard and fishnets are: Dinah Jnr doesn’t wear a mask, and while she does wear the pirate boots up to the early 90s, they’re generally closer fitting and less floppy. Modern art of her is far more likely to use the gold buckle boots instead with the classic outfit. Dinah Jnr also started dyeing her hair blonde rather than wearing a wig in the mid 90s and that continues to the present day.

They used to be the same person, and WERE considered the same person up until the early 1980s, when a retcon was put in place to separate the two by the period when Dinah acquired the Canary Cry. Retrospectively Dinah Snr actually died back in 1969 and her memories were transferred to Dinah Jnr, leading to the confusion; Dinah Jnr actually believed she was her mother for about a decade and a half. (The retcon is complicated and the details aren't really necessary to understand this).

Dinah Snr and Dinah Jnr continued to be separate characters right up until the New 52, where as part of the process of ‘simplifying’ the stories for the relaunch, they decided that the legacy was unnecessary, given all JSA characters were being dropped as part of the timeline shortening to 5 years, and remerged the characters into one. Dinah therefore became Dinah Drake Lance, with an ex-husband Kurt Lance, but functionally was the younger version of the character with a few traits from her mother and a new backstory. Once they started writing the title in n52, the team rapidly worked out that Dinah’s struggle against the legacy of her mother was actually an important plot to them, so invented a NEW Dinah Drake to be Dinah’s mother, who is significantly different to Dinah Drake Snr in a number of points (for one thing, new Dinah Drake Snr walked out on Dinah Jnr when she was a kid for mysterious reasons, leading to Dinah Jnr becoming a street kid who got adopted by a random martial artist named Desmond Lamar and living in his dojo).

This mostly got sorted back out in the transition to Rebirth in the final issue of Black Canary 2015, altering things back to the post-Crisis relationship division between Dinah Snr and Jnr, though unfortunately the backstory retcon about streetkid Dinah and Kurt’s existence hung around like a bad smell for a bunch more years. It’s essentially been ignored by every title since 2020 or so.

(So, they’re sort of three separate people, only two of which have ever existed at any one point in time, and in some periods they were only one character)

All of that is part of the reason that Dinah and Ollie’s relationship is complicated and comes with a lot of baggage: because Ollie and Dinah started dating way back when it was OLLIE dating a slightly older woman in Dinah Snr. Then they retconned in Dinah Jnr’s existence, leaving Ollie dating Dinah Jnr, who is substantially younger than he is. Now, the numbers on this have always been very murky, but it’s probably fair to say: if we take Ollie as presently being in his early 40s, and Roy as being about 30…Dinah’s on best guess about 35. Due to various retcons, they first started dating when Dinah was in her VERY early 20s.

Yes, this has been exploited for drama over the years. I think it’s fair to call Dinah/Ollie a ‘rocky’ relationship; they are very on again-off again, where when they’re on they’re all over each other and having so much sex (seriously I think they have more explicit ‘and then they had sex’ moments than any other couple in DC), but when it gets bad, they are at each other’s throats, behaving terribly, and genuinely hurting each other. Their breakups are no joke; there’s generally a massive issue that means they can’t stand being around each other for a while.

When they’re off again, Dinah can usually be found living on top of Barbara where they both are deniably flirting at each other. The issue of Birds of Prey right before the Dinah/Ollie wedding literally reads like Babs saying through gritted teeth “if he makes you happy, of course I’ll be there for you (and I’ll be waiting to pick up the pieces when he inevitably breaks your heart again)”.

The big age gap also means that Dinah’s often been positioned as having a big sister-like relationship to Roy in particular, and her relationship with Lian is frequently depicted as aunt-niece, rather than the grandmother-granddaughter it technically is.

[empressofthewind]

i know i talk about this a lot but i really cannot emphasise enough just how insane this makes me. like Christ. they really designed two characters with perfectly complementary skillsets who had the potential to achieve unprecedented greatness together and then never followed through with that at all. like yeah they're two halves of a whole and together they're the pinnacle of intelligence but oh sorry one of them is actually dead. here's his corpse and here's his full name written in the book of death. there's no ambiguity at all. he's dead and gone and the other half has to spend the rest of his life carrying a legacy that he was literally designed to be incapable of fulfilling on his own. What The Fuck

[soleminisanction]

Once again got a bee in my bonnet to spend a night doing obscure fandom research to make a point, so. For all those people who keep making the annoying, "Tim keeps '''stealing'' other peoples' names" comments -- have a table.

EDIT: Updated version with some mistakes corrected.

Everyone with a check mark has used that codename at some point in DC's 80+ year continuity -- Elseworlds and alternate dimensions/timelines count, adaptations (movies, video games, cartoons, etc.) don't unless they've got comic book tie-ins, and neither do in-universe dream sequences/illusions/fantasies/other narrative elements that are objectively "not real" within the boundaries of the fiction.

A purple marker indicates an element that only applies in Elseworlds or alternate timelines. Yellow is for the originator of the legacy title. Star symbol is for borderline cases/extenuating circumstances/it's open to interpretation (with some further elaboration below).

The "other" column is just there to account for people who've held lesser or non-legacy titles, like Renegade, Wingman, Arkham Knight, Drake, Redbird, Talon, Deadman, Black Bat, Orphan and Catwoman.

Point being: the people who have actually gone through the most legacy titles in this family are Dick, Babs and Jason, tied with 5 each (again, not counting "other;" if we counted those separately Dick would've had by far the most). Tim is tied with Steph AND Helena Wayne, so unless you're whining about them "stealing other peoples' names" you're just wrong, and they're all only one higher than Damian, Carrie and Bruce.

This is a legacy family that passes their codenames up and down the inheritance line. It's what they do. It's not a legitimate criticism to level at one character and not the others. Please get over it.

---

Further elaboration on some of the lesser known/niche cases:

- Bruce uses the Robin ID in Superman & Batman: Generations, as well as the pre-Crisis Detective Comics #226 story.

- In the second half of Thrillkiller ‘62, Babs cuts her hair and dons the Robin costume worn by her deceased partner Dick to get revenge on his killer; however the only name ever used for her in the series is Batgirl

- Cassandra was a member of the Robins orphan gang from Dark Knights of Steel.

- Duke was a member of the We Are Robins gang, as well as the aforementioned DKS orphan gang, and has appeared as Robin in a couple of Elseworlds, including I believe a White Knight spin-off.

- Cass was Batwoman in one of the versions of the Titans Tomorrow, as was Bette Kane, depending on changes to the timeline.

- Babs is Batwoman in the Batman ‘66 comics and in the 1980 story “The Secret Origin of Bruce (Superman) Wayne”

- Earth-3 Steph is Batwoman in Young Justice 2019.

- Helena Wayne is Batwoman in the possible future story Last Rites

- Tim is a member of the Batgirls vigilante/little league baseball team in the DC Bombshells universe, as is Cullen Row. Some call them the “Batboys” instead. I call those people cowards.

- Helena Bertinelli wore the costume that would later become Cass’s signature Batgirl look during No Man’s Land. However, she was more often referred to as “The Bat” and her Batgirl status is up to individual interpretation.

- Dick didn’t originate the Nightwing name, it started with Clark in the Silver Age.

- Steph has never been Nightwing. The panel where she appears in the costume is a Black Mercy illusion that happens only in her own mind. It’s a dream sequence.

- Barbara was Nightwing in the Smallville Season 11 comics.

- Terry was briefly Nightwing in volume 4 of Batman Beyond.

- Damian briefly became Nightwing after accidentally killing Dick in the Injustice series.

- Dick is Oracle in the “Eight Wonders of the World” version of Earth 2 (aka the Black Superman dimension)