#how old he is... is that so much to ask

[psychobind]

COOL HERO STUFF

Relevent Translations from the LOV cards mostly regarding Noel and Bokhohn

NOEL

Age: Two years older than Rocbouquet

Height: 6'2"

Weight: 110 kg

Maximum Speed: Exhibits his greatest speed, 30 m/s

Blood Relative: Rocbouquet's older brother

Crony: Sagzaar

Sworn Enemy: The Desert Guards

Subject of Absorption:All people who are masters in their fields/trades

Role: Supporting everybody

Fatal Technique: Moon Shade

Favorite Technique: Counter

Special Skill: Shaking hands with the opponent

Hobby: Astronomical observation

Past Objective: To contribute new knowledge to the human race

Current Goal: To acquire all the knowledge in the universe

Searching for: A dimension transfer device

A word to the Emperor: "I am not a frog."

Favorite Spot: Ueno (the town he was named after)

"You're a kind of hero, aren't you?"

I've never thought of myself as a hero. I simply spend my days on the battlefield.

"That's exactly what makes you a hero. Isn't it something that ordinary people couldn't do?"

If that's the condition for being a hero, then perhaps I am.

"Don't you feel there's something similar between the way the Emperor's power is passed down through generations and us?"

"Oh, brother, what kind of joke is that? There's no way they could resemble us. Impossible." Rocbouquet winked.

"Even in a crisis for the Seven Heroes, you remain carefree. I suppose I should see it as a chance to absorb the Emperor's power myself."

----------------------------------------------

BOKHOHN

Past Goal: Entering politics

Hobby: Games he can win

Profession: Lawyer

Objective: To leave his mark in history

Absorption Target: Puppet master

Current Goal: Life under his control

Role: Strategist

Preferred Vehicle: Land Battleship

A word to the Emperor: "Fool, you're too soft!"

Future Strategy: Surprise attacks

Special Move: Waterfowl Sword

Favorite Thing: Marionette

"Why must I follow the commands of someone like you?"

Here comes yet another hopeless savior, it seems.

"You're just a young upstart. All you need to do is follow the strategy I've devised. Act on your own, and you're bound to fail."

"Next, let's pit the Emperor against Rocbouquet," Bokhohn mused to himself in a room within the land battleship.

"If Rocbouquet defeats the Emperor, all the better. And if Rocbouquet is defeated… well, I can't wait to see Noel's reaction. I almost want the Emperor to put up a good fight, heh heh heh."

Meanwhile, the Emperor was initiating an infiltration mission into the land battleship.

-----------------------------------

Heroes do some chattings

Noel's Card

"A new secret technique that surpasses the Law of Assimilation?" Wagnas asked, intrigued.

"Yes. It doesn't just assimilate the body but also absorbs abilities and knowledge,"

Wagnas' eyes lit up, "That's incredible. Perhaps we should call it... the Law of Absorption."

Noel gave a thoughtful pause, then added, "However, there's a significant risk involved."

Wagnas' Card

"There's a possibility that one might be influenced by the personality and experiences of those they absorb," Noel said quietly.

"If you absorb a killer, you might start to find pleasure in murder."

Wagnas laughed. "That's exactly what I want. Without that level of resolve, how could we possibly save the world? It doesn't matter what happens to us as long as the world is saved."

Subier's Card

"Subier, will you continue to fight by my side? As Noel said, there's danger ahead," Wagnas' smile had faded.

"No need to ask," Subier replied with a hearty laugh. "I don't fully understand Noel's complicated talk, but I trust you. That's all that matters, right?"

The three exchanged smiles and (something I couldnt translate properly...)

Dantarg's Card

"I can become stronger, right? That's exactly what I want," Dantarg's reply was straightforward.

"You might end up absorbing more than just strength-- things like kindness, or even love," Noel teased.

"Hmph. I'll just be selective about who I absorb. I'll go after those who live purely for battle, the crazed and monstrous types. Just like me." Dantarg's hearty laughter echoed around them.

Rocbouquet's Card

"Am I a burden? Onii-sama!" Her eyes filled with tears.

"Noel is only concerned for your safety. He doesn't think of you as a burden at all," Wagnas tried to console her, but it only made things worse.

"Even Lord Wagnas is leaving me out. It's terrible, so terrible! After everything we've been through together…"

Noel knew well enough that once she reached this point, there was no stopping her. "Wagnas, please include her as well," he pleaded.

Bokhohn's Card

"Why didn't you call on me?"

Wagnas and Noel exchanged glances.

"Well… we thought matters like this wouldn't interest you," Noel replied, only to be interrupted by Bokhohn.

"Your selection was clearly a mistake. There's a lack of strategy here. Dantarg and Subier are just brute strength, and the need for Rocbouquet is... questionable. This group requires a mind like mine. Surely, you understand that, Wagnas?"

Kzinssie's Card

"Don't leave me behind!" Kzinssie pleaded.

"Tch, pathetic worm," Dantarg scoffed, spitting dismissively.

"You're of no use to us," Bokhohn ignored him.

"Stop it, don't come near me," Rocbouquet shuddered in disgust.

"You don't need to come," Subier said firmly.

"You've done enough," Wagnas' gentle voice held a hint of rejection.

"Please, give me a chance too," Kzinssie clung desperately to Noel.

[cubbihue]

I've been reading a lot of your AU, and I was wondering if Timmy has interacted with the genie Norm? What would their interaction be like?

He has! But only once. Timmy had to release Norm to let him know that he was being sent back down to Earth, as per the Genie-Fairy Treaty.

Norm was very very annoyed to hear that his 20 years of plotting has been thrown down the drain, what with Timmy becoming a Fairy. But, hey, it just means he has all of eternity to find something to make Timmy's life worse! Or just to make him suffer.

Afterwords, Norm's lamp was thrown back to Earth for any person to find.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[choccy-milky]

seb wants to be pet, too 😤💕 ((TYSM to @angel-fr0m-venus for asking how seb would react to clora petting all the cats around the school/hogsmeade BAHAHA. like a neglected puppy, thats how🐶))

[spearxwind]

Happy 10th birthday to Cercerion!

OUGHHH UR RIGHT CERCIE IS 10 YEARS OLD NOW !!!!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY BOY BELOVEDEST DID NOTHING WRONG EVER IN HIS WHOLE LIFE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[hojichasunrise]

Katara playfully splashes water at Aang, who responded by sulking in a brooding cave and then exploding lava in her face and storming off without any apology. From The Lost Adventures.

Golly gee why don't I want to ship such a wholesome wonderful healthy ship like this? Gee whiz, it's great Katara didn't end with Zuko, otherwise she might get lava thrown at her in an argument from an immature, emotionally unavailable, abusive jerk! /s Oh, right, Aang is the one who did that.

Aang has always been the one to hurt Katara. Funny Zuko hasn't. Remind me again who scarred Katara's hands, who blew up into the avatar state leaving Katara to pull him out lest he destroy her, her brother, and everything around him? Who stormed off right before the finale without communication leaving his friends to die in the invasion? Was it Zuko who did those things? Was it?

Such a wholesome ship!

[aardvaark]

im so glad that we never get a clear picture of sophie’s background in leverage & i hope we never do. however i also really like making up various, often conflicting backstories for her in my head. perhaps they’re all backstories for an alias of hers, ones she laid to rest back in season two.

[asmogorna]

MARIO CONTE REBLOGGED A STEAM POWERED GIRAFFE POST ON HIS ANCIENT TUMBLR ACC BACK IN LIKE 2012. WILL WOOD AND STEAM POWERED GIRAFFE OFFICIALLY HAVE A CONNECTION I CAN FINALLY KILL MYSELF

Everyone is always connected

[franken-shits]

Thinking about punk herstory again...

[sysig]

Twin skeletons need twin carriers (Patreon)

[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

[firstofficerkittycat]

i need to find that fic where kirk and spock were in iowa in the middle of winter and spock insisted on going out to help him run errands and fell in the snow and got hypothermia and kirk ran him a bath to warm him up and then it turned out spock was actually having a great time and hgave himself hypothermia on purpose just to get jim to takw a bath with him because he is a masochist

[evelynpr]

Zhongli for the Genshin ask game please!

Genshin Character Ask game: Zhongli <3

There are entire several page long essays about the cultural inspirations of his character, stories, design, everything. Imo, he is Genshin's favorite in terms of level of cultural inspiration and pride to this day. You can read about a lot of them here!

One of these is his left thumb ring, which is called a 韘 / Shè in ancient China, and 扳指 / Bān Zhǐ now, implying he can shoot arrows with his left hand!

The English translation did not do justice for a number of translations in his 2nd Story Quest, which you can read about here!

Most notably, Azdaha (aka Re Tuo in Chinese), wrote a whole poem about just how amazing Morax is, and that the title of the question "No Mere Stone" is also inspired by a Chinese poem: "我心匪石 不可转也, 我心匪席 不可卷也"

[ilovefredjones]

[spearxwind]

IT IS TIME. BASTARD FAMILY LINEUP 2023 BABY!!!! WOOO!!

[laniidae-passerine]

I made my post about Dean Highbottom and then as I was writing my tags realised that his Hunger Games counterpart is Haymitch. and now my head is in my hands and I don’t think I’ll ever recover

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Elias Mannix is such a tragic character, when you think about it. He was doomed from the start. Either he accepts to go with the time loop and

a) has a shitty childhood (shitty to the point of not thinking anyone ever loved him and to the point of accepting to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to feel that love he was promised)

b) has to go through with the killing of hundreds of thousands of people! And I know future!Elias doesn't really show any remorse about it, but it has to fuck up a person. Especially when his decision was made pretty spontaneously in the moment, without really thinking about the consequences (I personally think that he wouldn't have done it if he had taken the time to breath, calm down and think about it). And especially knowing most of these people didn't just die at the time of the explosion, but had to suffer a slow and painful death, that Elias probably heard about/saw pictures of on TV. We don't see him as a young adult, but those years must have been tough.

c) has to make sure his childhood is shitty so that he can keep existing, and become his own abuser!!

His only other option is to not do any of that, choose to not make the bomb explode, to do the right thing, and what does he get for that? Nothing! He stops existing!! And it's not just as if he dies, he will never have existed, no one will know he ever existed, no one will remember him! Can you imagine that??

His own life is dependant on a cycle of abuse and death he created himself and it's SO. SAD.