#i love old ghost stories

[magpiemirroring]

I kinda get where some of these people are coming from because I remember struggling a lot with some books as a teen where I just didn’t have enough lived experience or learned context to click with either the musty old Classics or the new award winners we were expected to read. Part of this was a failure of the classes I was in failing to give us more than three paragraphs of broad background on historical periods and social movements. Part of it was just, well, not every one is gonna click with every book. That’s okay! There’s also plenty of criticism to be made about which books tend to be chosen to represent Classic Lit!

That does not mean we should stop reading classic lit.

We should shake up the list a bit, definitely. Don’t like what you read in class? Maybe there’s an old book you would like better but you were never introduced to it because it’s deemed “silly” today or it just wasn’t part of your curriculum. I loathed a lot of classics that I was forced to read in school, but super enjoyed a bunch of older books I picked for myself later! (plus once you get out of the “i have to write an essay on this.....” mentality, it’s easier to just.....enjoy reading a book!) But also:

1. Making a judgement based on whether or not you and your friends (who likely have similar experiences and backgrounds) find classic lit “relatable” and thus worth reading for everyone, is pretty short-sighted and self-centered of you. Other people with other backgrounds may get something out of that book that you don’t.

2. Part of reading Classics is about looking through a fictional window at people you may not immediately relate to or even like and seeing their essential humanity that you share. That may be uncomfortable. That discomfort may even be the point of the book. “Likeable” is not always an important quality for a protagonist.

3. But I also think the real important reason to read classics is that they are a window to another time and place. Just as modern authors, no matter what they write, are writing their stories within a contemporary worldview, with their personal morals and social concerns at the back of their minds (if not in the forefront!), so did old authors! When you have enough context into a time and a place, seeing historical thought and feeling expressed in the medium of fiction can help bring dry historical facts to life. (For me, reading Frankenstein became a lot more interesting after reading a couple books on the age of enlightenment and the Romantic period!)

That said, you are allowed to hate classic lit that you have read! All the love of the time period in the world can’t get me to love The Great Gatsby! But I’m never going to tell anyone not to read it! Don’t make your personal distaste for certain fiction into a rule everyone else should follow.

tiktokers who say classic lit is bad because its not relatable 1. thats not the fucking point 2. you've clearly never read twelfth night as a trans bisexual

[starry-bi-sky]

danyal al ghul memes because i don't think i've done those yet for this au.

(the jason one is in reference to the fanon headcanon/au that Jason and Damian potentially knew each other and interacted while jason was in the league. I've thought about it before in context of this au, but haven't thought about it enough to feel inspired or motivated to make a post exploring the idea)

(diablito means, as you can guess, 'little devil'. while i'm neutral to latino jason, i think the nickname is cute as fuck and was danny's main nickname from Jason. i don't wanna touch that timeline so im not gonna decide how old they were when Jason was there.)

Skulker: i am the ghost zone's greatest hunter! i capture and hunt creatures both rare and dangerous. Danyal: a poacher?? you're a poacher?? you poach animals??Skulker:...i sense i've made a mistake of some kind.

anyways that was the day that Skulker cemented himself as Danny's no.1 opp, and still remains there to this day even if he and Vlad are both viciously fighting for second. Out of everyone in the the AP rogues gallery, Skulker will be the first to be thrown under the bus in terms of 'o shit here comes phantom fucking RUN'.

[i-really-like-phrogs]

Re-design of my un-named Beetlejuice OC from back when I was thirteen

Original Reference under the cut:

[artaintfartwarriors]

“ahaha no it’s not raining why would it be raining. Let me go drown old man”

[glow-in-the-dark-death]

The Night Security

Danny decides to tag along with Dani and travel around the world. With him now being in his late twenties he decided he could use a break from all the craziness back home, and he's been wanting to spend more time with Dani.

Dani despite it being years still looks the same, they had gone to Frostbite to make sure nothing was seriously wrong, Dani was completely healthy but it seems Vlad's messy attempts at cloning alongside her also being a halfa had made it so Dani would age a lot slower than a normal human would.

Danny until that point hadn't realized that he also looked very young for a man who was almost 30, but he could just get away with it by just saying he had a baby face.

To gain money for their travels Danny decided to start doing random jobs normally he would end up with being night security since those positions weren't very popular and always had a position open or where willing to have an extra pair of eyes on the job.

With that being said Dani and his sleep schedule were completely flipped over now being practically nocturnal. They would go out shopping or have fun while the moon was still high in the sky.

Now with that being said, he had no clue why there always was at least that one person at whatever job he would have that seemed to believe he was a vampire,

Yes a vampire, and he could brush it off if it had only happened once or twice but no! This has happened in the majority of his jobs.

And look he gets it, he only gets night jobs, he hangs out with Dani outside only when the sun is nowhere in sight, and yes both he and Dani were sensitive to the sun but that was normal for people with pale skin they would burn easily and considering that pale blue eyes tend to struggle seeing with too much sun clarity especially since they're not used to being around the sun as much as before.

See he gets all those can kinda be vampire things but they where also just very normal and common human things as well.

So yes he was out here fighting vampire allegations instead of ghost ones like when he was young.

~

" Mr.Kent sir you dropped this."

Clark turned around slightly spooked he hadn't heard the young man a moment ago, which should be impossible with his super hearing. Focusing on the man In front of him he realized that the heartbeat he was now hearing was... too slow, unhealthily so. If he had just been hearing the heartbeat he would have been sure it was from someone dying, but the man In front of him showed no struggle or weakness in spite of that.

"Sir?"

Clark snapped back into the present. "Oh! Right sorry about that, it's been a very long day usually I'm out of here long before the sun sets."

"No worries man I totally get that, I just saw that you dropped your glasses case near me and wanted to quickly return it."

"Well thank you Mr.?"

"Fenton, Danny Fenton I work the night shift here."

~

Danny doing his job

His coworkers spraying holy water to prove he's a vampire:

~

check my tags for some extra ideas I had on this

~

Just an Idea

[wikitpowers]

little mina deserves to have her story told :(

art: @cassandrajean <3

[silentgrim]

𝒟𝑒𝒶𝓇 𝒹𝒾𝒶𝓇𝓎, 𝐼 𝓂𝑒𝓉 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝓃𝑒𝓌 𝓉𝑜𝒹𝒶𝓎. 𝒯𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝓌𝑒𝓇𝑒… 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔.

[nyan-bynary]

As cute as satosugu is, it's SO important to me that no matter how much they loved each other (romantically or platonically idrc to argue w/ ppl) they did NOT tell each other. That they lost their chance bc they were young and strong and full of hope and they thought they had all the time in the world to tell the other how they felt, y'know, like how teenagers are supposed to feel about life. But they couldn't be together, they couldn't have each other's company the way they really wanted. Their youths were forcefully taken away from them their emotions that they were still not fully settled on forced out of their hands because they had bigger more grave things to worry about now. It's so important to me that they were always doomed no matter what.

[naggingatlas]

please stop making sense

[pestercide]

...

[starry-bi-sky]

"Stillborn? No, no, still born." -- DPXDC AU

Based off a comment I saw where Bruce knew about Talia's pregnancy in the earlier comivs, and was ecstatic to be a father. So much so that Talia feared he'd give up being Batman for it, so when she gave birth she put the baby (Damian) on a doorstep and (seemingly) told Bruce that the baby was stillborn.

Instead of Damian, that baby was Danny! Meet Daniel Brown, the 14 year old foster kid whose been living with the Fenton family for the last two years. He's about two years older than Damian.

His last name, "Brown", was a generic surname given to him because the note he came with didn't have one on it. It just had the name "Danyal" on it, but albeit 'Daniel' was the one that had been put into the system for, I'll be totally frank here, racism reasons.

(I looked it up to make sure, and it's generally not permissible for foster parents to change the names of their foster kids even if it's a permanent residency, and for that reason Danny doesn't have the last name "Fenton".)

Danny's got ✨~issues!~✨ He's been through a handful of homes growing up, most of them terrible for a variety of reasons. Which has, as a result, left lasting scars. He's generally a very sweet kid, just very distrustful and jumpy. He's got the signs of a kid suffering from PTSD, and a handful of other issues including attachment and insomnia. His inferiority complex could rival Damian's, and that's going to make for an interesting mutual hatred for when they finally meet.

(something I'll get into later)

He still has the blanket he was found in. It's made of a very high quality material and is a beautiful emerald green with little golden thread accents, it's high quality as a result has Danny clinging onto a desperate hope that his bio family might be out there, and the only reason they gave him up was because of some outside factor. It's been taken a few times in old foster homes, and he's flipped out each time.

While he still calls Jack and Maddie by their names, he likes them well enough. The bar isn't that high though, and while they're some of the better foster parents he's had, "better" doesn't equal "safest". Their laboratory malpractice. Basically, C- Fenton Parents. They're negligent by virtue of being engrossed in their work, but they do care equally about Jazz and Danny. So he doesn't hold it against them that much.

He kinda prefers it that way, their loud affection is overwhelming and Danny doesn't know what to do with their attention, even if he craves it. It's a bit of a complicated situation.

They took in Danny because they genuinely wanted another child, but didn't want a big age gap between them and Jazz. It was actually Jack's idea to foster, and they discussed it with Jazz beforehand. She was all for the idea. Thus, a handful of weeks later, a ton of paperwork, and inspection later, and Daniel Brown entered their household with a trash bag in one hand and eyes like shards of stained glass.

His relationship with Jazz is kinda strained, but that's by virtue of her constant psychoanalyzing and helicoptering. Like with the parents, Danny's overwhelmed by the attention and also just, straight up doesn't like the fact that she's telling him that there's something wrong with him. He knows that, thank you. He pushes her away when she does this.

Other than that though? When Jazz isn't smothering him and is acting like an actual sibling and not a third parent, they're pretty close, and Danny really likes her. They've hung out a few times on their own volition, and Jazz showed him how to take better care of his long hair.

His school situation,, pretty similar to canon with the bullying, albeit with a few more instances of him blowing a fuse and lashing out against his attackers. He's a rather angry kid, but it's quiet. It builds up, piles on top of itself, until eventually, like a volcano, it erupts and burns everyone within radius.

Danny's got a fire core, not an ice core. Phantom's hair is made of white magma; thick and heavy, setting itself on fire when his anger runs hot. When he gets angry, his skin begins to char and split open to reveal pulsating lava underneath, and he crackles and pops like a raging forest fire.

I haven't decided yet on how he meets the batfam -- i've got two ideas but they're both in opposition to each other, and drastically alter how the rest of the plot goes. But I do know that him and Damian hate each other in the beginning. And it has nothing to do with inheritance or "being the blood son" -- although their blood relation absolutely plays the major role in their disdain for each other.

Simply put, they're jealous of each other for the same thing: thinking that the other was wanted.

Damian hates Danny because, unlike Damian, Bruce knew about Danny since conception and wanted him from the moment he heard about him. He had a whole nursery set up, and still does. He never took it down -- just locked the door. Damian was thrust upon Bruce without warning, and he feels like he forced himself into the family. And while on some level Damian knows and understands that Bruce wants him and loves him as much as his other children, that doubt and feeling of inferiority still remains. He looks at Danny and sees him with what Damian always feels he needs reaffirmed.

Meanwhile, Danny hates Damian because he looks at him and sees him with everything Danny's ever wanted. He hates him because Damian grew up knowing both of their parents, with one of them for most of his life, and then moved over to the other. There was never a moment where Damian was (seemingly) left to doubt his place within the family. Damian was raised with the very same woman who left Danny on a doorstep, with no clue to his identity beyond a little green blanket and a note with only a first name. Damian was wanted everywhere, and Danny was wanted nowhere. Damian is Danny's replacement in his eyes.

(It's the little revelation that Damian grew up with their mother that elevates Danny from being quietly envious of Damian to downright despising him. What did Damian do, that Danny didn't? He could live with Damian living with Bruce -- Bruce didn't know Danny was even alive. But him living with their mom? Are you fucking kidding him?)

Damian never outright attacks Danny physically, but it's not like he hides that he didn't like Danny. Meanwhile, Danny, in all his repressive anger, quietly despised him from a distance until finally one wrong snide side-comment has him blowing up and it becomes a screaming match. They're both just enough similar to each other that when they look at each other they really just see a mirror.

They'll work it out together, eventually. But it'll be ugly and cruel and explosive, and they'll start mending the bridge to become brothers in more than just blood relation in the end.

But yeah, stillborn Danny has... a lot going for him.

[abluescarfonwaston]

Hey... What do you think Mia called her Dad? Papa? Father? Daddy?

Because she must have been at least 9 or 10 when he died if not a little older. Like. She remembers him. Even if he was always outside the village for work she remembers him. Remembers Misty losing him. Had to explain to Maya, or maybe worse- never had to at all - why he wasn't there. How she got his sense of humor and his laugh and neither of them can be held tight by him anymore but she can hold Maya tight and maybe then he doesn't feel so far gone.

What did she call him? Did she love him? Did Maya ever get that chance?

[birdsareflocking]

I’m gonna say something slightly controversial

The Cap we know in the Ghosts universe is not in love with Havers anymore. It has been over fifty years of repression and eventually acceptance and he knew Havers for only a couple months.

However, he did love Havers and I’m pretty sure he knew Havers loved him. He might not have been able to say it but he knew who he was where his affections lay and I think deep down he accepted it even if society couldn’t. Havers is tied to that whirlwind of emotions that he has to keep buried otherwise he will collapse with the effort of knowing them, Havers is tied to the oppression he had to face knowing he couldn’t be allowed to love who he wanted to love, Havers is tied to his death and the shame and the guilt he felt at impersonating an officer at the front as well as the shame of not being able to fight at all. Havers accepted him through all that and let The Captain be himself, he knows the Captain is sorry, he knows the Captain is ashamed and he knows that James loves him.

That was in 1945, it has been over fifty years and The Captain is more himself then he ever was, the passionate feelings of a love like that have faded to a bittersweet nostalgia that makes his heart ache. He knows that he can let go now, that’s what Redding Weddy is all about. He will always carry a bit of Havers with him literally and figuratively but it feels more like a soft spring alone in the sun then a passionate summer romance. He’s not in love any more. But he was. And he knows that he was loved back. That’s the importance of Havers, not that the Captain is still reeling from the yearning and passion but that the Captain was loved and he was in love, he wasn’t able to say it but they both knew. The memories are painful, awkward and sad but they are his memories he can look back on, and maybe he can just about touch on the feelings he once felt but it doesn’t really matter now, he has his family who love and accept him for who he is. That’s enough for him.

[liones-s]

old remedies

[llycaons]

black water sister is so good I'm ordering the ebook on libby instead of sticking w the audiobook bc I want to experience reading it. this audiobook isn't good enough. like mask of mirrors is fun silly political fantasy but black water sister is actually really fucking good

[dragon-swords-prophecies]

okay, so, i'm thinking

we've got our guy, right? old-ish, late 50s to 60s, dubiously human, definitely gay and possibly trans. I'm thinking of naming him julian? or maybe albert. henry?

and so Julian/Albert/Henry, he lives in a little cottage near/right next to a cemetery. graveyard? definitely a graveyard. sounds better.

anyway.

he lives next to the graveyard, and he takes care of it. cleans the stones, makes sure they're upright, waters the flowers, etc. he knows what all of them say, even the faded ones.

his partner died, maybe 10, 15 years ago? from what I'm not sure, but it was some sort of a disease, probably. whatever it was, they're buried in the graveyard, too. he's taken care of the graveyard since the old caretaker died, in the late 90s/early 2000s. they're buried there. when he dies, he'll be buried there too.

the world is sort of a modern-with-magic type of thing. there's magic, but there's also cellphones, cars, etc.

anyways, sometimes people come into the graveyard. the church that was there is gone, now, but people still visit. mostly people visiting relatives, but sometimes there's people who just like graveyards. generally our guy leaves them alone, but one day there's this teenager, there, and they're crying. and on a whim, he goes to talk to them. there's often people crying--its a graveyard, after all, he's no stranger to it--but this person isn't standing next to a grave or anything.

and he helps them. I dunno how, yet, but he does, and they start visiting more often; become friends. the kid's trans, too, I think.

oh, and he has a gray cat named Lady Eloise, called Ellie or El, for short. She's probably immortal (no one knows), and almost definitely magic. sometimes he swears she talks.