#in a very pro way?

[ofduskanddreams]

oh how the mighty fall / cold hard ground

HAPPY BIRTHDAY @separatist-apologist! MB, you are such a light in this fandom and an inspiration to me and I'm so grateful to count you as a friend 💕 You once requested that I make Azriel suffer a bit, I know it has taken a while but I never forgot so here you are. I hope you don't mind an angsty present.

TITLE CREDIT GOES TO FALLOUT BOY AND TAYLOR SWIFT iykyk

Summary:

He had known that Elain and Lucien were getting married today, of course he had. Months ago, when Gwyn asked him to be her date to a wedding on the same day, Azriel had felt like it was Christmas come early because it gave him a viable excuse to counter Rhys and Cassian’s insistence that he “was a part of this family” and “he should be there regardless of their history” because “it’s the start of a new chapter, Az, wouldn’t it be better if it began with the past being laid to rest?” Azriel didn’t think it was unreasonable that he would want to avoid his ex-girlfriend’s wedding but everyone else thought differently. Gwyn’s invitation, thought to be his saving grace, turned out to be his condemnation. OR A slightly bleak exploration of Azriel's relationships, past and present.

rated: M ◆ 7.4 k words ◆ read on ao3

Please check the tags and the A/N at the beginning before reading <3

tagging: (this isn't exactly a shipping fic so I'm just taking guesses, sorry if I missed you) @ablogofsapphicpanic @areyoudreaminof @spell-cleavers @iftheshoef1tz @damedechance @octobers-veryown @krem-does-stuff @panicatthenightcourt @thelovelymadone @foundress0fnothing @moonpatroclus @itsthedoodle @archerofmagnusheart @catboyjamesbond @wilde-knight @valkyrieassassin

[sistertonin]

*wink*

[turtleblogatlast]

Every day I’m haunted by the fact the boys happily swim in sewer water

Even if it’s filtered somehow there’s no way it’s not still nasty 😭 Bet they can defeat any of their villains just by accidentally giving them diseases I swear

[oxfordsxbrogues]

“Wait no not like that.”

OR: Results? To MY own self-sabotage? More likely than you’d think!

OR: I don’t CARE that the prophecy was self-fulfilling, I’m still angry about it! 😤

OR: Blitzø sweetie pie please go to therapy I know this great lady with a hotel where you do trust falls and talk about your feelings she’s like a block away from your office just pop in for thirty seconds please I’m begging you 🥺

[uncanny-tranny]

It's fine to be loveless as an aro. It isn't the end of the world, actually, and you aren't a threat, nor are you an annoyance. If others feel threatened by your completely loveless aromanticism that says more about them than it does about you <2

[moonlightdancer26]

Me whenever I remember that Snape canonically outlived all of the Marauders:

[bahoreal]

the keyboard types for you. they can be customised as much as you like (e.g. additon of numberpads) these are just examples of each of em

mechanical / slim / touchscreen

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

forever annoyed by daeron the war criminal and his unearned moniker. cause what exactly did he do that was so special to earn him ‘the daring’ nickname? the answer is nothing. imo, it’s a classic case of medieval nepotism—he was given something he didn’t truly earn. though he at least showed some self-awareness based on his retort to being dubbed ‘ser daeron the daring’. but tbh, i think the fact that he was given that moniker shows how terrible the green princes PR was at the time. so it seems likely that this was a political ploy to make daeron stand out favorably compared to his brothers and to help the greens better compete with the blacks, who had the more favorable reputation at that point. so while dubbing daeron ‘the daring’ was certainly a smart move, i still find annoying af, especially since some parts of the fandom act like the moniker is deserved.

[syscultureis]

Plural culture is sometimes being afraid of healing because you know it means alters are going to fuse and go dormant, and for so long this has been your only real support system you can rely on and even though you know that it would be better in the long run, it's still terrifying to think about sometimes

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

End of Empathy (time for violence)

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[canonkiller]

do you consider your self made?

[sadiegirl2021]

Rereading ACOWAR for the plot.

The plot: Lucien, Lucien, Lucien

[radical-thots]

I do not get why people call Aemond ‘pressed’ or ‘bitter’ when he calls the strong boys ‘strong’ in the dinner scene. His insult is a reaction to Luke intentionally laughing at the pig in front of Aemond - a call back to the time Aegon and the strong boys bullied and humiliated him. Luke was giggling, acting as if all was well, as if he didn’t take Aemond’s eye out. His lack of remorse probably triggered Aemond - he had to sit/dine with the person who took his eye, only to find that person laughing at him. Yall keep forgetting that Luke wasn’t punished or held accountable for maiming Aemond, and instead it was Aemond who was ‘sharply questioned’ and even threatened by Viserys, his freaking father. He could’ve resented Luke for that and even hated him. He is rightfully triggered after seeing the person who cut his eye in a 4v1 fight, laughing and mocking him. This boy literally stared into Aemond’s eye and preceded to laugh/scoff. Homeboy never showed remorse, which is no surprise considering he was never properly held accountable. That’s what happens when people aren’t held accountable. They turn smug, mock the people they’ve hurt and even feel as if they have done nothing wrong. 

It was Aemond who had to live with one eye, not Luke. It was Aemond who had to watch his mother beg his father to get justice for their son. It was Aemond who worked twice as hard in his training. What has Luke been doing? Resting comfortably in his mother’s lap? Blissfully ignoring what he did? So excuse me because Aemond has every right to be pissed, triggered, because he has lived with the trauma of everything and because the preparators never apologized or even showed remorse for maiming him. 

[mainalias]

thinking about compiling screenshots of golden/silver age batman exclusively calling dick his ward to combat the allegations that it was “initially a father-child relationship”

[bogkeep]

new characters i finally got around to designing...! prince Larkspur (he/him + any) and his knight Dor (she/her + whatever) because i wanted some really genderfuckery characters to play around with.

idk what's going on in their story but i imagine they travel together on some kind of undercover quest. prince larkspur is more than happy to play the part of a lady and most people can't tell that dor is a woman and she can't be bothered to correct them. i'm pretty sure they've got a mutual pining thing going on that they're very stupid about.

[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