#he still likes the guy and wants to redeem him

[wickjump]

i like aus where nightmare is freed from his corruption. especially because of how it would affect those around him (in this post it’s mostly killer). because corrupted nm and passive nm are two separate people. and there is an EXTREMELY extremely small chance passive could be brought back even if it would likely kill dream in the process. I think instead of redeeming canon corrupted!nm we should have more aus where passive is freed from his corruption. cause it is possible. that is a thing.

imagine being killer working underneath nightmare when all of a sudden prince lemondrop almost burns his arm off while grabbing Some Random Guy out of your abuser’s chest. what.

and then said abuser just dies?? and this Random Guy who is the closest thing to your tormentor now is scared of you? What!!! he doesn’t want you to be around him anymore?? he literally dead of fucking ass throws up when remembering what corrupted nm did to you??? like he’s so disgusted with it that he can’t handle himself??? and you’re just sitting here???? and everyone is still fighting and nightmare is gone and you have no idea what to do next????? watching as this random fucking guy (who looks a lot like dream now that you think about it) sob his eyes out and continuously and frantically apologizing to you through tears and you’re like?????? This is not the same guy. flat out. who is this weirdo.

and then you’re just left there as you realize that the other nightmare is like. fully gone. what now. what do i do now. this guy literally controlled my life for years and in seconds he’s just gone. like it was that easy the entire time. it was just something dream could do, i fucking guess. never thought to do it earlier but whatever. where do i go. dust and horror are far gone now the moment they realized nightmare wasn’t around. you are left alone amidst the rubble and the only person you can think to go to is the guy you were abused over because you were explicitly not to go near him (this was unclear, here i mean color LMAO). fuck

COME ON PEOPLE. COME ON

[tyrantisterror]

Wife Goals: Harley Quinn

Welcome back, fuckers. It's February, I'm in a bad way, let's talk about the unstable fictional women that I pine for, because fuck you that's why. Last time on this prolonged emotional breakdown, I talked about Ryoko Hakubi, the ancient demon space pirate from the Tenchi Muyo franchise. Today, I'll talk about someone I think we all knew would come up sooner or later - I have a whole shrine to her for fuck's sake.

Funny story - I didn't actually watch Batman: The Animated Series as a kid, despite being a child of the 90's. It, Power Rangers, and Gargoyles were the big 90's shows I just sorta bailed on (and I guess TMNT? I think of that more as an 80's show, personally, but I've seen some people lump it into 90's nostalgia too, so...). I just wasn't much of a superhero fan when I was a kid - superheroes were buff athletic masculine guys, like the bullies that picked on me, and they beat up weird-looking dudes who were obsessed with, like, monsters and spiders and shit, which I related to a lot more, so it just wasn't my scene as a kid. I had Godzilla for my hero-worship anyway, and it's hard to compete with Godzilla for my heart.

I did watch Batman Beyond, though, because it came on after Digimon and what else would I do with my Saturday morning?

Anyway, I don't think I actually saw much if any at all of BTAS until my teens. Pop culture being what it was, I was still loosely aware of Batman and his gallery of rogues, so I knew of Harley Quinn by that point, but I didn't have any particular fondness for the character yet, and even after watching some episodes she wouldn't become important to me until, like, after college.

And to understand why you kind of have to understand what was going on with Harley Quinn at the time. So, ok, Harley debuted in Batman the Animated Series, an exceptionally well-done adaptation of Batman that is specifically noted for taking the superhero comic world's devotion to maintaining a status quo super seriously. And by that I mean that essays have been written on the sort of Calivinist nature of morality in Batman the Animated Series, where if a character is a supervillain, then nothing they do, no matter how well-intentioned, will EVER allow them to break free of being evil. Poison Ivy wants to leave villainy behind and be a mother? Well, because she is Inherently Villainous, she can't help doing it in a way that involves mind control and gene splicing and crimes against humanity. Mr. Freeze wants to save his wife? Well, there's no way he can ever progress that goal without harming people with a freeze ray, and also every evil scheme he concocts to reach that end - a noble goal, mind you - will be foiled, leaving his wife still frozen on the brink of death. If you are a villain in BTAS, you will always, always, ALWAYS be a villain, no matter how hard you try to redeem yourself. The status quo MUST be maintained, no matter how tragic your situation is.

Which adds a meta-textual layer of bleakness to the already incredibly bleak life of Harley Quinn. Harley is a psychologist who fell in love with her patient, and said patient happened to be the Joker, i.e. one of the most notorious supervillains of all time. She turns herself into a supervillain to impress him, throws her career in the toilet in the process, and ends up being used as a disposable tool and punching bag by said villain over and over again. Harley suffers horrendous abuse from the Joker, commits horrible crimes to gain his favor, suffers terribly when she's caught by Batman, and basically repeats this cycle over and over and over and over again.

Because the status quo must be maintained, no matter how bleak your situation is.

It should be noted that, in the (intentional or not) Calvinist nature of the show, Harley's misery is clearly intended to be a direct result of her flaws. In Batman the Animated Series, pre-villain Harley is explicitly stated not to be a good psychologist to begin with - she was not smart enough to earn her degree honestly and slept with her teachers to raise her grades. Never ethical or talented, it's kind of treated as though her situation is her own fault for not growing as a person like she should have in the first place, which, uh... I don't think that element aged well at all, honestly.

But, luckily, Harley proved popular enough that the Batman the Animated Series take on her didn't remain the ONLY take for very long.

In fact, Harley's popularity grew so big over time that by the 2000's she got her own solo series, which came with a big problem to solve: how does Harley Quinn, a character who revolves around the Joker, who in turn revolves around Batman, work as a character without the two characters she was designed to orbit around? She's a moon, not a star, how can that work?

Well, Harley had to change, and that meant the status quo had to change.

Harley breaks up with the Joker and tries to, well, not go legit necessarily, but be a more low-profile kind of supervillain so Batman stops punching her in the face so much. More mischief and misdemeanors and less murder and manslaughter, and when she does kill someone it's, like, a serial killer or assassin, so basically fine. Because her relationship with the Joker is, like, the PICTURE of an abusive relationship, Harley becomes this picaresque figure, escaping from her chains to run free and rampant, and inviting us along for the ride.

And with that independence as a guiding theme, Harley got retooled a bit. She's always been a cheerful goofball, so it's not really out of character for her to help people now and then, albeit in a chaotic, mayhem-filled way. And hey, she has a degree in psychology - what if we just ignored the original intent and presented her as legitimately good at it? That brings a new sort of pathos to Harley Quinn, if she was a genuinely talented and dedicated person who stumbled once and paid severely for it - and it makes us invested in her quest to find some way to pull herself together after falling so hard.

And... that's kind of sympathetic, isn't it? It's hard to screw up worse than Harley Quinn did, it's hard to ruin your life more than she did, and yet here she is, still trying to pull it together in spite of that. She lives in a town so dark and depressing it has "Goth" in its name. Her ex-boyfriend is a killer clown who is infamous in-universe and out as one of the most cruel and monstrous villains of all time. Her resume consists of "psychiatrist who slept with her patient" and "moll for the most notorious serial killer alive." In many continuities she has permanently dyed her skin chalk white. You simply cannot fuck up worse than Harley Quinn has.

And yet she keeps trying. There's something heroic about that.

Harley has been beaten and abused by the man she gave up everything to be with, and yet she keeps trying. She is hated by most of the world because of her villainous past, and yet she keeps trying. She can never, EVER go back to the life she had, to the career she went to college for, to the stable, normal life she at one point wanted, and yet she KEEPS TRYING. She lives in the world of superhero comic books, where any significant change to the status quo is (almost) ALWAYS undone, where character development is considered a mistake that has to be unwritten, where redemption is impossible because once the narrative decides you're a villain that's what you will (almost) ALWAYS be...

And yet. She keeps. TRYING.

In a world that is determined to treat her as a punching bag, Harley finds a reason to smile, to hope that life will get better, to laugh and try and find love and happiness and joy. And her hope was so strong and so infectious that it changed the status quo. Harley being the Joker's punching bag hench-girlfriend used to be all she could aspire to be, but now? That's just her origin story, and she's become so much more than that.

She's a mess of Red Flags, an absolute fuckup of a human being, a terrible person, but goddammit, she is TRYING to be better, she is trying to make herself a good person, she is trying to make the world smile, and through all the shit thrown her way, she still believes in love and happiness. I don't just like Harley Quinn or crush on her the way I do with other fictional characters - I'm inspired by her. I strive to have some fraction of her resolve, her determination, her steadfast will to survive and thrive. Because if she can make it, if she can laugh so loud that the immutable law that is Comic Book Status Quo will bend for her, then dammit, any of us can do it.

...

Plus she's a hot lady in clown makeup who wears leather jackets and skin-tight acrobatic tights, I mean c'mon now almost everyone's down for that on some level

[webbedphantom]

"... I wouldn't say I pity Akechi necessarily, though... I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some truth to that-"

"I grew up with the guy. I know he can do better, but... it can be a little frustrating when he doesn't."

"Still... I guess that's kinda what friends are for. To root for you when you do right-"

"-and to smack the absolute shit out of you when you do wrong."

[tiredandoptimistic]

I'm thinking thoughts about Agent Curt Mega today. Specifically him at the end of Doing This, when Tatiana ends their kiss. I highly doubt that he's ever come out to anyone other than the men he's slept with, and he's still too afraid to say it out loud. But it's not just that he explains through a euphemism ("you're not my type"), it's that when Tatiana tries to say it more plainly he cuts her off ("so you're into-" "yeah"), because he can't even handle hearing it from her. He is fully expecting her to hate him for being gay, and when she doesn't, and just continues the conversation as normally as she can, even saying she still wants to be his friend, he is blown away by positive emotions because this man has probably never had a real friend before. It's just so.

What I love about the ending of the musical, when Curt kills Owen, is that he realizes that he deserves better. He realizes that his relationship with Owen isn't worth fighting for, and that his friendships with Barb and Tatiana are. And that's really meaningful to me, seeing platonic love held up as a happy ending and romantic love acknowledged as fallible.

[quadrantadvisor]

Sometimes I still think about The Owl House Gang all trying to watch ATLA together but then Zuko's backstory in The Storm retraumatizes Hunter so bad they have to stop

[meownotgood]

ok I'm awake and a little more sentient. there is a whole lot of stuff I really really like about the episodes but I think my main disappointment right now is just that. viktor became the machine herald because of his own conviction. he forced himself to become stronger, specifically attempted to remove his own emotions because he felt they made him weak. but now this viktor just gets thrust into this situation, like the hexcore is just manipulating him to do whatever the fuck, he didn't even get to choose what he wanted because jayce chose it for him

[eternallovers65]

Thoughts about dramatrio as a forever viewer (and occasionally bad and baghera viewer)

RP WISE!!!! DON'T GO BOTHER THE CC'S

From q!forever's perspective, you can see how the dramatrio was always a duo and not a trio. qbad and qbaghera do not trust forever, and if they do, they don't trust him enough for their secrets.

- They never supported qforever during his presidency (qbad did vote for him, tho). qbad always complained about everything forever did, even tho qforever always tried to listen to him and everyone else.

- qbaghera did not told him the secret about her childhood, but she told qbad. Just like bad didn't tell qforever about the fed worker he kidnapped but he told qbaghera.

- "Oh but qforever took his waystone first" he did that because he asked for an item and no one helped him, so he got tired of helping people but no one helping him

- Also, qbaghera is dapper's mom, and qbad is pomme's dad. qforever was never included in this conversation.

- They say forever will get easily manipulated by the federation because he's the president, but yesterday both bad and baghera said they don't think cucurucho is bad

- They both banned forever from their houses

Anyway, they like to have forever around for the fun part of it, to joke and all but when stuff get serious they don't tell him anything and keep talking about him behind his back. And the only people that actually trust qforever is the favelafive

[asterbats]

i think for the shitty scorpion family, their entire dynamic is definitely toxic (heh) but also neither dusk nor bruno is an inherently terrible person? its just that they’re a) horrible together longterm as they are and b) people who should not have had kids.

[dbphantom]

Hate having adhd went to go work on my fallout modpack, got distracted while going to disable the steam overlay, ended up in the points shop, went to go edit my profile, decided to change my pfp, found a buried folder I forgot existed, found some old Veneer art I forgot existed, spent 45 minutes looking at all the old photos, STILL HAVE NOT TOGGLED ONE SIMPLE OPTION THAT SHOULD'VE TAKEN 30 SECONDS AT MOST

[leviiackrman]

I just found out what happens to dabi at the end of mha. Don’t talk to me.

[emmodii-mode]

Just finished my first playthrough of BG3. Romanced Lae'zel, but ending up turning into an Illithid because the idea of making Orpheus or Karlach do it didn't sit well with me (or my character).

I told Lae'zel to leave with Orpheus in the end (I heard she wouldn't stay with a ghaik anyway, which she's valid for, but also, it doesn't feel right to ask her to stay when I know how much her people mean to her). And like-

Her face before she flies off---

She looks so heartbroken and sad.

[queenerdloser]

one thing i found extremely funny about veilguard is that there's an obvious angle to make you try and trust solas or feel sorry for him leading up to the big act 3 plot twist of his betrayal. and i get why - it's much more emotionally resonant if you think well of him or trust him or count him as an ally and then he betrays you. but. the ENTIRE GAME my rook was beating his lil drum and going: HE! IS! THE GOD! OF LIES! AND TRICKERY! and keeping him at an arm's length and rolling his eyes when people sidled up to him and went "wow solas actually seems SO regretful huh... seems like his heart might have been in the right place maybe..."

so in the end when solas betrays you (not once! but twice!) it was literally just my rook looking into the camera the office style going SEE? SEE????

[nenoname]

still thinking about the axolotl poem flat out saying that bill's "redemption" would be to reincarnate

[wisteriander]

literally still thinking about that post but the only reason luke succeeded at all was because of padme. the child he fell to save showing up echoing the words of the mother he killed. he didn’t stand a chance.

[merchantziro]

Now I'm just imagining the Justice League were able to isolate the present Phantom and move him onto the Watchtower, preparing to stop him by sealing him away for eternity.

"Please... Stop. It hurts."

The ghost attempted to plead, but the heroes weren't gonna budge. Not when they knew what he was capable of, not if it meant ensuring the safety of everyone.

In a few minutes John, Zatanna, Fate, Raven, and the other powerful magic users in the Justice League are just about ready to finally get rid of Danny for good to ensure the bad future will never come to pass.

Phantom breathed out an icy mist with widened eyes before giving a weak smile.

"He's here..."

The members of the Justice League not focused on the ritual immediately became defensive at the ghost's utterance, especially when moments later the future Phantom appears, having broken into the Watchtower.

He appeared in the room so suddenly to knock the Magic users away and disrupt their sealing ritual on his past counterpart.

"It's alright kid, I'm here. You can take it easy."

The larger Phantom, lifted up his younger self looking protective over him.

"Th-Thanks, Dan."

Danny slowly closed his eyes, passing out in Dan's arms. He was exhausted and heavily weakened from the magic users and their failed sealing attempts.

"Now then..."

He looked over to the Justice League members, some got up with brave faces and others looked fearful.

"Are one of you twats going to explain what in the hell you think you're doing?"

"We can't leave a danger to roam free, not when the future of the world hangs in the balance." Superman, ever the beacon of hope, got up and shouted with determination, preparing to rally his allies to fight.

This immediately caused Dan to tilt his head before immediately becoming angry with realization.

"The future of the- Is that what you think this is about!?"

One of the Flashes got closer, now confused, "What do you mean by that Phantom, we thought it was obvious?"

"Look, if you heroes have beef with the Phantom who destroyed the future, me, then I get it and wouldn't blame you. But I also think you idiots are probably missing a few CRITICAL details."

Dan took a deep breath and looked away in thought momentarily.

"The event that caused my descent into madness has been long since adverted, and you can thank YOUR timeline's Phantom for being a stubborn little bastard to not become me."

He motioned to the teenager in question, still unconscious in his arms as he was exhausted from being in the unfinished sealing ritual.

"But you're here and-" Booster Gold raised an eyebrow, only for Phantom to cut him off.

"Hanging with him? Has it not occurred to idiots that MAYBE even the worst person CAN change? That everyone could be a good person if they just tried?"

A few of the heroes who got the reference snickered as they were making jokes about having a bad time, but were silenced by Batman glaring at them.

"Listen, I'm not gonna pretend I haven't killed most of you in my timeline and didn't destroy 90% of all life on the planet. I've got a hell of a lot to make up for.... But don't, for the love of Clockwork, take it out on HIM."

Phantom looked back at the younger one, before turning away to leave the way he came.

"Now then. I would highly appreciate it if you stopped trying to take care of a problem that has long since been taken care of by someone else, before you assholes do something to turn him into the monster you all think he will become."

He looked back with a glare before he flew through the wall, leaving the heroes to think upon his words.

Bonus

(I don't think enough people are capitalizing on specifically Eobard Thawne in this prompt)

Dan and Danny are just dealing with the Justice League and their attempts to change the future, but Reverse-Flash is watching like a stalker with what is DEFINITELY not a crush. (Shut up)

Maybe he gets petty enough to try and go back in time to erase Jazz just to get under Phantom's skin...

...only to immediately find Danny and Dan there wearing Time Medallions just to piss Thawne off further and kick his shit in for attempting to erase Jazz from existence.

Reformed Dan but misunderstandings suck

So, Dan has been Reformed for Years at this point. You could go with the Fandom Typical version of just chilling out, or you could go with the AGIT version of the Redemption. Either way, Dan is fully reformed and trying to find his way in the World.

Unfortunately, not everybody knows/believes him.

You know all those Time Traveling Heroes who came back to stop some great catastrophe? That was Dan.

Impulse is fucking terrified of this guy, cause he Grew Up in the Central City Stronghold and saw Phantom tear down the Walls protecting the City in person.

Booster Gold grew up in the Metropolis Stronghold, so while he never really saw Phantom in his timeline he still did know of him. I mean, obviously, he murdered every hero on the planet and subjugated most of the world, but he doesn't have much personal stake in that.

Eobard Thawn hates Phantom. Thawn himself grew up in a world where Phantom killed every Hero in the world, and he was terrified that Phantom would track him down when he tried to become the new Flash. But once he became a Walking Paradox he saw as Time itself changed to erase Phantom from existence, he got really jealous. Why did Time decide Phantom was bad enough to erase, why not him!? He's Evil! He's a Terror on the Timeline! He deserves Clockworks attention dammit!

And then, they discover evidence that Phantom has come back in Time,

So now, any and all Time Travelers are trying to find the guy who single-handedly was the Apocalypse, and want to kill him to save the world. Or out of Jealousy in Thawns case.

Either way, no matter where Dan goes to try and settle down, a bunch of annoying Heroes always find him and attack him, yelling about "Stopping his Plans" and "Saving the Timeline!" And "It should have been me dammit!"

Honestly Thawn is the most annoying one, he just runs in and rants at him about how he is jealous of how much attention Clockwork gave him. Dude, just sdmit your crush already and leave me alone. (I'm not sorry)

[mbat]

i feel like the biggest problems with lucifer wouldnt be there if it wasnt a show written by christians for christians and i do mean that