#interacting ... I just ignore them!

[xanderscollection]

"Growing up is realising a (random ship) you loved is actually weird and bad"

Yeah? Is it? Great, I love it even more. The worse it is the Better.

[aflamboyanceofflamingos]

In order to turn a very embarrassing moment of my life into something funny have this stupid Timbern au:

The Drakes are alive so Tim is still on track for being the heir of D.I. but is interning at W.E. for the summer because Bruce offered a position

Bernard has been interning at W.E. as well, for volunteering hours

The both work in a small, newer branch of W.E. that focuses on cultivating more information about Gotham’s history

Bernard’s there because it's the most teen focused thing and Tim’s there because he wants to figure where exactly the Lazarus pit is under Gotham so he can mess with Ra’s

They are currently stationed at an old house that was made into a museum which is managed by Wayne Enterprises, but since most of it is a museum there are only a few rooms to actually work, however it being a teen thing it’s very much choose your own hours so that prevents too many people from being there at once

Tim, who doesn’t want someone to come in a see the fact that he’s already finished cataloging all of the 2023 Donations to the museum and is instead using the time to further research the numerous curses in Gotham and/or watch Demon Slayer, is very happy about this fact and only comes at either the earliest or latest times so he gets a room to himself and only has to pretend to be going through boxes when someone checks on him

Bernard immediately messes up Tim’s plan

He’s always there- morning, night, even when Tim changes up his schedule

And no matter how many how many empty rooms there might be he always finds Tim and sits with him, even the time Tim tried to hide in the attic under the guise of organizing a couple boxes up there

Being the paranoid idiot that he is Tim assume that Bernard is a from the League of Assassins and enacts a 46-step plan to figure out what he’s planning (read: stalks him) and in the course of it ends up falling in love

Meanwhile on Bernard’s side, the first week of the internship he walked into the room Tim was in and wanted to be friends with the cute boy

The reason that he kept finding Tim was that he was talking to Dick Grayson, his gymnastics instructor, and Dick had realized that the boy in question was his honorary little brother and told Bernard that “Timmy’s shy, you just have to break down his walls to get to know him” and tells him when Tim’s going to the museum

Dick is well aware of what Tim thinks the situation is because he’s the one Tim rants to, but he thinks it’s funny and will make for a great story to tell at their wedding

[marisatomay]

“you don’t owe anyone anything” actually you owe everyone everything!!! you OWE your table server and your coworkers and the elderly person you pass on the street and the dog on its walk and the child toddling along in the park and the driver trying to merge next to you and the pregnant person standing on public transport KINDNESS in return for theirs!! the connections we build are what give life meaning!!!

[zrllosyn-art]

In which naru has a proper older sibling moment, for once.

prompted by smth @eizaamkc mentioned in the KN8 discord

(go check out her art!!! its good!!)

[thousandsonny]

[rainofthetwilight]

I'm sorry but are we really bringing up the 'why didn't geo and bonzle recognize the ninja" thing again, I thought it was already self-explanatory enough??????????

also how in the WORLD does it imply that in all those years, cole did not tell the finders shit abt the ninja...people CAN be told about others a million times and still not recognize them when they see them, ESPECIALLY if they haven't seen a photo of them, which is pretty much the finders' case here. I have been told about family members by my parents more than 100 times and I still don't recognize them when I see them until I'm told who they are, and that happens especially when I've never seen them before. scratch that, I sometimes don't even recognize family members I already KNOW, and why is that? because I haven't seen them in a while!! now just imagine the finders' situation!!!

and it actually makes alot of sense bonzle didn't recognize jay because he's literally on the enemies side, of course she wouldn't think that's the 'jay' cole would tell her and the finders about (AND before anyone goes 'erm actually' on the powers bit, one of our theories for s2pt2 is that nya wouldn't recognize jay under the mask and thinking he's a new person with his powers, why doesn't that logic also apply to bonzle w/ jay??)

and in such a stressing situation with ALOT to focus on, including her life that's literally in danger, of course bonzle didn't tell cole and zane about her seeing him at the mysterium monastery, it was the least of her worries lets be fr rn (plus, it was literally confirmed by doc himself that bonzle didn't recognize jay, so this whole discussion was over from the start)

[sukibenders]

Not people talking bad about my girl Helaena just to support Aemond. Like, she had a right to ask him if what he did was worth it because, even if Aegon is atrocious, Aemond is the reason that her son was killed in front of her, the reason that she had to choose which of her children dies, and is the reason why she has to live with that now. While other characters played a part in that, without Aemond killing Luke, Jaehaerys would probably still be there or wouldn't have died in such a cruel way. B&C are sent there to kill Aemond, and when they can't find him they follow through with their next order of "a son for a son". And while Aemond may be smarter and more strategic (and not a disgusting man like Aegon) as prince regent, he is still, as Alicent called out, volatile and brewing with unchecked anger. I wouldn't feel safe having him on the throne just as much as Aegon, but because he served face and is the lesser evil I'm supposed to be okay with it? No, Helaena can question this man as much as she likes, for the rest of her life given what she has to go through. (Also, she literally just asked him a valuable question that deeply needs to be considered, so why are people mad at her?)

[batsplat]

random throwback to fabio's response to casey saying he should've been black flagged for the whole open leathers situation

[hussyknee]

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[massiveladycat]

meme aside, if you like to go into the tags of characters just to harass and attack people who actually like said character, you disgust me. there is something called the block button and filtering. there are anti tags made for a reason, holy shit. literally no one wants to hear that. they are trying to have a good afternoon and you're fucking it all up. some people find comfort in the characters, and when you openly decide to go out and scream at them for liking them, you're just raising the chances of them being afraid to come back to fandom. if you really want to talk about how bad you think a character is, make a damn post and ONLY tag it with the anti tags. yes, that will not stop pro character's from finding you, but it's much better than going after people i agree that people are entitled to say that they dislike a character just as much as someone is entitled to say they like a character. the only problem is when it's blown way out of proportion

[c-53]

Yay, the stalker is back. And now roping in people I haven’t spoken to in years, and would have required substantial digging to even find a connection to…..

[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

[napping-sapphic]

i love sapphic people so much we’re all so beautiful and deserve so much love i love you i love you i love you

[crabsnpersimmons]

question on tumblr etiquette:

if you fall under a user's DNI list, but that user reaches out to you via ask or DM, without knowing you fall under their DNI list, do you still respond?

hypothetical example: user A specifies on their blog "DNI if you're over the age of 18", but then user A reaches out to user B. User B is over the age of 18, but user A does not know this because user B doesn't mention it on their blog. User B does know that user A does not wish to interact with people over the age of 18. does user B respond to user A?

[thebubblemaster]

Sometimes I go to reblog a post with a counter opinion but then I realize that it is not worth it and people will continue to interpret media the way they want until the end of time and i should just make my own post.

Anyways I do think it's important to remember that they film these seasons in quick succession. The PCs have not had 5 months to grow attached to the NPCs like the audience has. It's been like 2 weeks for them. Also yall are acting like this was the finale. The season isn't over until it's over, we still don't know what will happen. They could lose for all we know, Brennan has been prepared for that in past seasons.

[weird-tea]

Thinking about the fact that Ingrid has two younger half brothers, one maternal and one paternal, both of which were passed off as her full brother when they were babies (Barry/Wolfie for only a few days, Vlad for years), both of which are given a name at birth that they don't use/go by (Wolfie was called Vlad for awhile, then named Barry, then called "Wolfie", while Vlad was named Adam by his mum and renamed Vladimir by his father) and both of which she is very loud about disliking and are at various points rivals displacing her as the Dracula heir but when it comes down to it she cares about them greatly and is pretty protective. And both are half vampires, Wolfie being half vampire half werewolf while Vlad is half human.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this it's just intresting. Like when they were writing the show I don't think they had the ending planned at all, or the Vlad is half human twist, so you can't really call all the things he has in common with Wolfie delibrate forshadowing but in hindsight it's really intresting. Especally the counts willingness to surplant Vlad with the new baby because at the time he beleived that his beloved Magda had finally given him a son, as apose to Adam/Vlad who wasn't Magda's and only half vampire making him actually quite a dangerous bet as an heir. And Ingrid imerging as the true Dracula heir in a lot of ways despite being a girl actually makes a lot of sense because she is actually the count and Magda's only biological child (while not legitimate since they weren't married, they are basically common law married and act as if they are a devorced couple so Ingrid is as legitimate as the count is gonna get) and also out of the three Dracula children (counting Wolfie in this group as he was claimed as a Dracula at birth and then the count technically raised him for a bit) she is the only full vampire non-hybrid.

Also the fact that Vlad and Ingrid's sibling dynamic is super important to the show and that they both end up with younger maternal half siblings that they do care about a lot but the primary sibling relationship seems to remain Vlad and Ingrid because of their expirences growing up together... it just feels important. Like they both having younger half siblings is something they have in common despite it being completely different siblings. (makes me kinda sad we never got a scene of George and Wolfie interacting and maybe teaming up to help Ingrid and Vlad somehow).