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mysterycitrus · 1 year ago

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i dont know who a writer would be who could handle it (more ignorance on my part than lack of good writers though there is that too) but i’m curious what you think a real, earned redemption could look like for jtodd and if you would even want it.

i definitely think there’s a path, esp because so much of bruce’s philosophy relies on a genuine and earnest commitment to rehabilitation and restorative justice, but i also think (and maybe i’m wrong if anyone has comics recs lmk) but i don’t think i’ve seen a comic with the hard work of reaching out and healing/moving on from the past from both bruce + co and jason

i really love his character but especially now i don’t think dc knows what it wants to do with him so he’s in this perpetual limbo where he’s always on the edges of the batfam, a fringe black sheep member but a member nonetheless, still entangled with them

personally i would love either way but i wish dc would either separate him and let him do his own thing that’s not just punisher lite or really actually go through the process of making amends and fully integrating with the crew, learning to love and trust again and all that

omg this really got away from me so apologies for just word vomiting in your asks but yeah im curious dc puts you in charge of j todd’s next big character arc, what would you do with him

i don’t think that’s ignorance — dc is not known for hiring writers who can include and explore complex themes in their comics lol

personally i think the easiest way to trigger a redemption arc for jason would be take him away from the batfamily and force him to interact with other villains, specifically amanda waller and the suicide squad. task force z came kinda close to this, but didn’t push the concept far enough imo. jason’s interactions with black mask were some of the best parts of utrh — i want to see his ideology be questioned by people who do the exact same things as him, and are fully aware that they’re selfish and destructive.

the truth is that while jason is acting out and murdering people, he’s still bound to bruce. he is autonomously making decisions, but fundamentally he is choosing to stay. he’s choosing to be tethered. he’s choosing to care. seeing the indentured recruits of the suicide squad would be confronting to him.

i don’t think the happy family fanon dynamic will ever be possible without ruining every included character simultaneously, but that’s okay. that’s not what jason truly wants anyway.

specifically, i don’t think he’ll ever be able to work with bruce, which is why i find the jason + dick dynamic so interesting. you’re right — bruce’s fundamental mission is about restorative justice, and he would continue to reach out. dick, however, is a realist, and is extremely protective and territorial of the people in his care (tim, damian, the titans, etc) all of whom jason has hurt. jason has been shown on page to respect dick and his position, and simultaneously think he’s pathetic because he refuses to lose control.

for me ideally, he’d be someone on the very outskirts. i feel like dick and babs would be his point of contact — dick because he’s keeping an eye on jason, and babs because she has way less hangups about working with killers. otherwise? i think he’s lost the chance to properly bond with anyone who knew before he died. that’s the risk he took when he decided to become the red hood. that’s the tragedy.

but to be perfectly honest, the most restorative thing jason could do would be to leave the game entirely, and relearn how to live.

#jason todd #dc comics #dick grayson #batfam #the ask and the answer

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jasonsknight3 · 2 days ago

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Officially got this first part out. I’m also using the design I had for Jason. I actually liked it enough to want it to carry over. As always, enjoy! I’ll also put forth a bit more effort for the mini comics for the story at the bottom moving forward so, I’ll add in the scars and what not.

⚠️ warning: sickness, death, weapons, crime⚠️

Pre-show

There are six cities in Gotham, over thirty territories that belong to thugs and grimy people of all kinds, and over thirteen thousand streets. I happen to know all of them. I spent years of my life driving them, memorizing them, making them a part of me.

Growing up I lived in a rough place. Crime alley in uptown Gotham. Two parents, one apartment. Like every other kid in crime alley if they made it past the age of eight. It stayed like that for a while. Parents argued like every other couple over things I can’t even remember now. My mother loved me, a lot. My father was a “tough love” kinda guy. More of a passive show of affection. However, unlike most, I knew they both still had a deep connection to each other and Mr that most don't have a chance to get. It didn’t last for long though.

My mother, Cathrine Todd, died from cancer when I was around ten. My father tried to tell me that it was an overdose of some drug. However, I knew better. One hospital visit, sitting outside the room I heard it. Cancer. When I was allowed to go into the room the doctor happened to leave the result copy in the open. The word was plaster there in bold print. Something in the brain. Stage four. Notably, leading up to her death she was…forgetful. Clumsy. Just odd. What I know now was the pressure of the cancerous tumor she had made parts of her brain to not function properly. Well, that’s what I think. I honestly don’t know for sure. My mother just took meds to try and ease the pain and struggle. I think my dad just wanted to blame it on her instead of something that was out of his control. Yes, he knows it’s not the truth but, I think this lie is easier for him to accept. With her in mind, at eighteen I got her name tattooed over my heart. The place where I held her close. Even when she wasn’t here.

My father, Willis Todd, has been…in and out of my life. Well, more like I was in and out. Willis took care of me as best as he could. It wouldn’t last too long and he’d take me to Ma Gunns boarding school. The woman there was…interesting. As the last name suggests, she knew a lot about guns. She’s how I learned to shoot a gun, break it down, put it back together, and shoot it again. Learned how to faith. The whole timeline from 11-18 I was in and out of Ma’s and living with Willis. Switching like a flipping coin.

Now, at the age of twenty - four, I work with Willis in the mechanics shop. Something I learned to master. Become quite the wizard at all sorts of mechanics. Fixing anything with wheels. A bit later I gained a new job. A bit more tantalizing. Getaway driver. Clients commit the crime and I help them get away from all sorts of crime scenes. It starts with the need, that need turns into a call that gives the rules and rundown of the plan. Drive to the location, give them seven minutes, get in and out in that time. I haven’t been caught. For getaway driving that is. This job was given to me by Willis. He provides the cars that I use for my nightly activities. That is my life.

Jason pulled into the “Todd mechanics” with his 1973 Chevrolet Chevrolet Malibu with a 350 coupé. Red, Jason’s favorite color. Cutting off the engine he stepped out of the car into the third garage. “Willis, ya here?” He called out. A muffled reply came from the back. “Yea, I’m here, give me a minute.” As Jason waited her looked into the popped hood of a ford F-150 nice engine, great gas, not his kind of transportation. Upon closer inspection of the exposed insides, the fan belt was missing. Probably broke or wore out. Knowing Gotham though, it probably was stolen. A 15-21 size fan belt would do for replacement. The sound of the door that leads to the parts in the back dragged Jason attention from his analysis of the car. Willis Todd came out whipping his blackened hands off with a bluish green cloth. “Well, there you are. Been waitin’’ for you, you make the call?” He questions Jason. “Yea, letting them at Iceberg lounge.” Willis nodded, taking the fan belt off his shoulder. “Good.” Jason wasn’t sure why he asked anymore. It’s not like Jason was irresponsible.

He watched Willis as he started fitting the fan belt into its place with practiced ease. “So, got the plain Jane Honda civic?” Willis paused looking at Jason with furrowed eyebrows with the expression of almost disgust. “Cut out that damn fancy “plain Jane”talk. You ain’t in the fancy crowd. Makes you sound dumb.” Jason’s own face scrunched up in annoyance. Jason liek using phrases and big words. Made him feel smarter than he thought he was. Jason rolled his eyes ignoring him. Finally Willis sighed, “yes, it’s in the sixth grade.” Willis straightened back up leaning back, popping his back with a groan of relief. “Remember to come back to your old man.” Willis and Jason clapped their hand together pulling in for a hug. Jason didn’t respond. He never did. He was afraid that if he did say something he’d jinx himself. Either way Jason liked hearing it. It was the closest thing he’d get to a “I love you son.”

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aeterna-auroral-avenger · 7 months ago

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STORY TIME!

This story has been in the works quite literally since I drove home from the cinema after watching Infinity War. It started off as a fix-it, no matter what the MCU outcome would be, and then I watched Endgame and made my fix-it cover as many cracks in that story as I could.

Personally, I like my idea waaaaaaay better. No, I'm not biased, what?

Jump down the rabbit hole with me, my friend because I'm going to infodump so much on you. I will try to keep it brief, but I already can feel it's not gonna happen because I'm so excited to share this story. So apologies in advance @sobeautifullyobsessed

In the comics, there are actually seven stones not six due to some god-like entity with the power of Infinity committing suicide out of loneliness. As a result of this act, the entity split into the six stones we know plus the Ego Stone which holds the entity's psyche; however, that stone was lost to an alternate reality somehow.

I hate the Ego Stone part, but I saw great potential with the idea of seven stones however.

Let's start at the very beginning. After the creation of the universe, the Creator saw it was good and presented it with gifts: Stones that controlled certain elements of the universe. Sometime after, who knows how long after, a secret organization of beings from across the universe banded together to protect the stones and make sure their powers would not be abused. But there was one among them who sought a Stone he wasn't meant to keep. He stole it, killed the Stone's keeper, and used its power to flee. But he was unworthy and unable to handle the Stone's power, and it killed him. But since he fled, the Stone was lost to an alternate reality. Ours. The Stone in question? Light: a power that seems to encompass all the rest of the Stones' powers while also keeping its own. (it may be mary sue-ish but idc)

The rest of this band of protectors searched in vain, but alas, the Stone could not be found. The band was disbanded, and the Stones were spread far and wide for safe keeping. Agamotto was one of the last of this band, and only he had been successful in doing what the rest could not.

And the Light Stone was lost to time and history in their reality. In ours, the Stone grew dormant and even depressed as it searched the future for a way to return to its universe. And it found one in the form of a baby not yet born. Seeping from its Stone casing through the expectant mother, the powers of the Stone lay waiting for the time this baby would bridge realities to get it back home.

Jump ahead to 14 months before Infinity War, and Dr. Strange finds himself wounded and in his attempt to return to his own dimension, he accidentally finds himself in ours where a young woman named Aurora (or Rory to her friends) manages to tend to his wounds and take care of him so he could return home when he was ready. An unlikely friendship arose, and in return - especially after hearing how our reality views his - he gave her a gift: a sling ring and the lessons needed to use it properly. It took some effort, but eventually it clicked. Now she was free to come and go as she chose.

In the time Rory spent wandering their reality, she had successfully wove her way into a world and friendships she believed she wasn't supposed to have but would take anyway (this was well before I learned the consequences of multiverse meddling so I'm going to ignore such things. They don't exist).

Rory was in our dimension when Thanos began taking Infinity Stones, and her unknown connection with them made her hear voices in her head: the Stones begging for help and rescue. And when Dr. Strange peers into so many futures in a desperate hope to find victory, he does find one. The lost Stone residing in none other than his friend from the other dimension. Who was now also stuck in said other dimension. And he had to make sure there was a way to get her back to theirs. Which also required making sure Scott Lang is in the Quantum Realm before Thanos laid the devastating blow.

When all that occurs as the Master Chessplayer devised, he used what last bit of magic he had before turning to ash to do two things: appear to Rory and assure her the task she would find herself taking on would be one she could do, despite it all, and appear to Scott in the Quantum Realm and lead him to a Quantum vortex leading to the right dimension to get Rory (who he insisted was vital to winning) and lead her back to their dimension before that vortex closed again for another 100 years. Success.

The problem with working in the Quantum Realm though is once Scott and Rory get back to the right dimension, two years have passed (screw the five year gap). The pair make their way to the Avengers compound, and Scott has been devising a plan the whole way there. Once the remaining Avengers give them all the full story, Scott explains how Strange put a lot of emphasis on Rory’s importance, much to her chagrin. But he and Bruce convince the rest that Strange’s way is the way to go considering they’ve seen how legit he is. Scott gives his first plan: the time heist, and Rory, who has heard Strange speak of the wonders and dangers of Time, said absolutely not.

Then Scott came up with plan number 2: a Quantum Heist. A dangerous plan to send all of them and Thanos to the Quantum Realm where the Infinity Stones would be rendered useless and the playing field would be leveled. The reason why the Stones still exist is because in this story, Thanos needs all the Stones to destroy them. Since he did not, he could not do that even though he tried, rendering him weaker than before.

In the process of everyone working on making sure this plan would actually work, some plot things happen. Rory discovers what she possesses and what her infinite heritage is, uses that power to restore Mjolnir and remind Thor he's still worthy, and test her newfound powers in the Quantum Realm to make sure those Infinity powers really would be useless.

But there was a problem during testing. Rory accidentally fell into one of those Quantum vortexes which led her to a time and place where she meets (and has a philosophical debate with) Thanos himself. Too little too late, she realizes she is not in the same Time she left and Thanos learns there will be a group to go against him in his quest with her at the lead with the power he wants most of all.

She manages to get back, but now the Avengers know Thanos will be waiting for them which will make the job extra challenging. Not only that, but Thanos is rebuilding his army just for confronting them. So they have to cut him off from his army to get him alone and then get him to the Quantum Realm via the bifrost through Thor's axe. By some miracle, they manage to do not only that, but get the Stones from Thanos in the Quantum Realm too! But he escapes them before they could finish him off, and they use the Quantum Tunnel built in Endgame to return to the compound in the right time and space.

Bruce snaps his fingers, reverting himself back to Bruce/Hulk instead of Professor Banner, right at the time Thanos unleashes his attack on the compound.

Cue the epic portals scene plus one human woman with the blazing powers of Light at her disposal. Major fighting ensues, and mostly everything plays out similarly but Strange knows one extra thing the rest do not. Tony is still meant to snap his fingers, and he will survive as long as Rory helps him carry the burden of the Stones. And with milliseconds to spare, Rory gets to Tony in time. The only real casualty on the heroes' side is Rory takes a lot of the damage from the snap, leaving Tony with lightning scars on his arm. Strange, Shuri, and Dr. Cho take care of her injuries.

So the war is over, and it's a happy ending, right? Not yet. The universe is very scarred and weary from such a war, and it needs a jumpstart. It needs an outpouring of love to heal such wounds. And using the power of all the Stones, Rory manages to do something pretty incredible. She came from a universe of untapped love for the marvel universe, and she acts as a catalyst, a bridge between universes for all that outpouring of love to go right to where it needs to go. And like a great tidal wave, the love and devotion of the fans practically floods that universe, giving it the medicine and jumpstart it needs to move forward like the Infinity War never occurred.

But the cost of such an act was high, and the Infinity Stones were returned to their Creator. Forever. Rory was allowed to live, and since the Light powers were basically fused with her soul, remnants of said power were left behind. Only time will tell if it will be useable or not as she heals.

And that is a rather large synopsis of my Endgame rewrite.

#my thoughts #sobeautifullyobsessed #avengers endgame #endgame #tb writing #tb stories #rewrites

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moltensmusings · 2 months ago

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Alright current thoughts after I spent 4 hours trying to figure things out last night/got a few issues into the 80s titan run.

The dynamic between Raven and kid flash is cute. It very well could be mind control since I feel like they keep bringing attention to him being confused for a reason, but I wish they'd bring back him and raven having a friendship

I definitely need to go back and fully read the 60s run, but the way Slade/deathstroke seems to be a more evil/morally gray Batman does interest me and knowing half the crazy stuff they write for him as the series go does make me a little disappointed. I would've loved if he took in teens and his hatred of the titans bled into them without things getting sexual or weird.

If they aren't going to put kori and Nightwing together they should've explored Kori and Donna. The fact that they haven't in spite of all the various other ships they've tried does make me side eye DC a bit.

Yeah things are a bit dated but there's a certain level of joy and camp in the older comics that I wish we could revisit. The costumes felt more experimental and fun. Specifically I love starfires design with my whole heart.

The writing can be a bit confusing at times. The way they start chapters often makes me feel like I missed something only for them to jump back to an earlier point and explain a page or 2 later. I'm guessing it was for hooking the audience but binge reading is a different story. It doesn't ruin my entire experience though. More just a note.

Starfire getting her name because she just kept blasting people for a solid week because no one could understand her and she didn't bother trying to learn the language is deeply funny to me. Go crazy girl. Like initially it seems like tamaranian powers were through basic skin contact with kissing being the fasts. All she had to do was hold someone's hand for a while to get a base understanding but she said "nah." Which is so fair.

Again: they are dated. But I'm having fun. I actually enjoy that I do have a starting point to work with and that we get scenes of the characters chilling together. I wish we got another run that didn't make me feel like I was missing a huge chunk of the story.

Let me go into som gripes I have with DC as a whole/some frustrations about the teen titans under the cut:

The writers of the more current stuff have completey forgotten that titans content should allow dick grayson to be his own entity. Him being tied to the batfamily so heavily at this point when him and Tim are the 2 to get proper real content beyond it is disappointing. Say what you will about the 03 show but at least batman was never a major part of the story

I don't know if the titans have ever properly been rebooted and that frustrates me. Every time I looked at a different run it would reference them already being a team, a new line up taking over, or in general just be written like the readers should know they've been doing this together for a minute. It makes it easy for them to trivialize what starfire meant to nightwing though so I guess it is what it is.

On that same subject, them completely retconning that starfire was a major reason for Dick choosing the name Nightwing, what if I commit arson.

I love the og kid flash design, but I much prefer them actually changing his race like they did pre rebirth because it makes him more distinct from flash. One of my biggest gripes with most of the teen titans is how much they looked like young versions/children of their respective mentors. I wish Donna (and maybe even dick a bit) had gotten a similar updated design rather than them backtracking.

#molten rambles #dc comics #teen titans

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thessalian · 1 year ago

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Thess vs The Co-Workers

So there's some good news - I don't have to work overtime today and I might not have to work overtime anymore. That is ... basically it for good news in the work sphere.

The bad news? Oooooh let me count the ways.

First off, it's entirely possible that I might have to work Saturday. See, Goblin's away again tomorrow. I mean, not that she does all that much anyway, but given how things are going at the moment, it'll be enough.

The reason I say this is because "how things are going at the moment" have devolved into every other person who even touches the typing throwing all the hard shit at me while meandering through the short easy stuff. See, we have some new junior doctors (YES, AGAIN; we have so many more junior doctors than our current typing pool can handle even if we weren't inundated with unexpected absences), and they are both very, very bad at dictating. Guess who gets stuck with them? Not to mention the ones with the difficult accents, the ones who handle complicated cases, and the ones who dictate unnecessary bullshit and make the dictations longer than they need to be? That would be me; everybody's punching bag.

The end of the day today was particularly cheeky, as I'd ploughed through several longer bits of typing already and happened to notice that someone else had taken the other two, which was great, I thought! ...At least until those two ended up back in the queue at 5pm. So someone took them out of the queue, ignored them for a good chunk of the afternoon in favour of short snappy reports, and then went, "Oh, I guess I don't have time to do these ones; back into the queue they go! [Thess] can handle them!"

(Side note: I only had the time to handle one of them because the guy who did the dictation for the twelve-minute nightmare made such a mess of the block key that I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what the fuck he was doing before I gave up, bolded the problem areas, saved it to PDF, and emailed it to him - copied to our quality control department as per protocol - with the professional version of "THIS IS A MESS; SORT IT OUT".)

It's only now that Scruffman bothered to tell me that he was having issues with putting in my overtime hours; that apparently I had to if he was signing off on them. Of course, no one has ever actually demonstrated how to do that on our system, but I think I figured it out. I say "I think" because I don't see any evidence that the applications are pending and Scruffman apparently didn't have time to get back to me about whether or not there were any issues. That's a significant chunk of overtime pay, and if I don't get it in this month's paycheque, I'm going to be pissed. Though I guess if push comes to shove, it's extra Christmas present money instead of extra MCM Comic Con money.

So at this point, odds are pretty good that while I may not have to work today or tomorrow, I'll end up putting in a few hours on Saturday. Just because my colleagues (including the new temp, who I shall simply call Newbie; I have seen that this individual exists, though they're taking lessons from Temp insofar as leaving me with the long bullshit goes) are lazy fuckers.

Anyway, point is that I'm not committing to doing anything on Saturday because even if I don't have to work, I am a fucking wreck right now. I hurt very badly, I haven't been sleeping properly, I have a stress headache and sinus pressure that's probably going to turn migrainous fairly soon, and overall it's just not good. Like, at all.

Don't even get me started about what's going on in the UK at the moment. I cannot even think about the shit being spewed at the Tory Party Conference. I'm miserable enough without the reminder about how much this country hates me. I would love to say it's not specifically me they hate, but they do hate almost everything I am - or rather, everything I'm not - read, a British-born able-bodied wealthy cishet white male, since I only have one of those going for me. I don't really want to talk about it but it's there. Lurking. It adds to the stress, y'know? And I need way, way less of that.

But my Placid Plastic Duck Simulator has more ducks thanks to a certain bestie. So that's something.

#Thess has a day job #Thess vs the Tories

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disco-troy · 2 years ago

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it shouldnt be contriversal that u cant just murder people sdkfjhsadjksahf and yet- True you also can't go out and beat up criminals. All super hero comics are about the idealization of violence. Many are about the idealization of violence as a trauma response. Also revenge stories are a cornerstone of human art so even with all that being true it is still a useful, worthwhile, healthy, and helpful type of media. See for example the Count of Monte-Cristo.

Okay, I can see where you are coming from, but I hope this response helps you understand where I'm coming from as well. I will be mostly talking about preboot Jason here, because that contains most of the moments that bother me, and also I refuse to read anything written by Lobdell anymore.

Murder in the DCU is, in general, frowned upon. Like I understand where you are coming from with the whole suspension of disbelief bit, but while heroes and fighting villains are a part of the constructs of the universe, murder, really isn’t? The moral line of not killing is very much still present in dcu, especially for heroes, and in Gotham. Death is still a big deal, and most people don’t come back to life, and when a hero kills someone (or thinks they killed someone - like in the case of Black Lighting) it is very often a big deal.

I think Jason has a lot of interesting facets as a character, and things that people can engage with that are super interesting. He is a character who was a victim, and a hero, and remembered in a distorted way. And that hurts. But at the same time its not fair to put this on the batfam either; the mourning process is for the living, and you are not expecting them to come back to life! In addition, Jason took that pain and anger and hurt and killed a lot of people. I think we should be able to acknowledge that Jason is hurting a lot, and it is sympathetic that he is lashing out but it does not justify the actions he is taking. If have a different interpretation, all the more power to you! But unfortunately, canon does not really back up this interpretation, and by trying to make it canon, it lands in some pretty unfortunate implications.

In canon, Jason: - Is a drug lord - I have a lot of thoughts about this decision for Jason - especially with Robin!Jason being against drugs and his own mother dying from overdose, him profiting from the sale of drug is a little uncomfortable (upwards of 40% of all drugs trade ://). In addition, people act like Jason is some perfect drug lord, when in reality UTrH, Jason is never seen making rules against selling to addicts or anything. He does make rules against selling to kids, which, I guess if they just turned 18, or if an adult buys it and gives it to them that’s okay then? He also preforms CAPITAL PUNISHMENT on people who haven't committed much of a crime other than selling drugs to a 17 year old or whatever. - Blows up a school to prove a point (?) to a teenager - Kills like 81 people? to escape prison - Breaks into a tower to beat up a teenage hero - actually lets just make this one bullet point shoots and attempts to murder a lot of heroes, and like his actual family a bunch of times

I see this pattern in the fandom of defending these actions - Jason being a drug lord, Jason demonizing and murdering common criminals just because they committed a crime, and that makes me really unconformable. Its dehumanizing poor and marginalized people when you dismiss every henchman Jason murders without a second thought. They don’t deserve to die just because they made bad decisions, and especially in terms of drug dealers comes uncontrollably close to war on drugs propaganda.

Its a general feeling I have about putting antiheroes on a pedestal because they can "do what the hero can't" or whatever, without properly engaging with the text and realizing these actions are wrong.

I understand what you are saying about revenge stories, and if UrTH was about Jason killing just the Joker or people who hurt him, I could see your point more. But Jason hurts people totally unrelated to his revenge quest and he doesn't want to kill the joker; he wants Bruce to. Numerous times Jason can kill the Joker, he can stop him from killing, but he decides that his vengeance, him feeling avenged is more important. Jason will not kill the Joker; he wants Bruce to to do it, even though he knows it will hurt Bruce and so many others. He just wants absolution. He just wants to know he's loved, and he doesn't care who he hurts in the process. Its understandable! Its sympathetic! He's been through a lot. But at the end of the day, this isn't behavior that should be glorified and defended and justified. That's what I mean by it shouldn't be controversial that murder is bad. In count of Count of Monte Cristo, you aren’t supposed to think that Dantes blind revenge is good - there is a part in the book where he reflects and realizes that he’s hurt innocent people. And though he eventually goes forwards with his final revenge or whatever, there is an acknowledgement that he’s hurt people - innocent people (he ended up hurting his first love and her son Albert for instance). Jason never has that, in canon or otherwise, and a lot of people talk about him as if he has nothing to apologize for. In addition, Dantes only targets those responsible for his imprisonment, and they are taken down by their own vices which is what makes his revenge quest satifsying; Jason targets a lot of people that have nothing to do with his death. And this isn't to say you can't like him or that characters should never do bad things; Jason is a super interesting character to analyses and go in different directions for! Its just important to remember he isn’t a reliable narrator, and to not blindly justify murder. Anyways, I hope this initial dump of words helps you understand what I'm saying more? I'm in the process of writing a longer more comprehensive post on this topic for another ask, specifically what war on drugs rhetoric entails and its history, but that probably won't be out for a few months.

#asks #asked and answered #im really sorry if my inital tags were aggressive in any way #i was just frustrated about the way a lot of people portray jason and engage in this sort of rheoric that harms real people!!#dc comics #dc meta

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joachimnapoleon · 4 years ago

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May I ask you the question on a rather delicate topic (which bothers me from time to time, when I stumble upon Murat’s mentions in Poniatowski’s biographies etc.)? It is often repeated that they resembled each other in some areas, like their love for parties, dances, horses and women...

So my question will be on that, latter topic.

We all know about Caroline, but what about other women in Joachim’s life? Did he have other significant “love interests”? Was Caroline the first woman he proposed to? Did he... cheat on her???

If you know anything on the topic could you please share it with us? ))) (Because I am very curious why did prince Murat earn such a reputation ;)

Thanks in advance!

Oooh this is going to be a fun one. :)

Murat did acquire quite a reputation for womanizing. Napoleon would say on Saint Helena that Murat "needed women like he needed food." On another occasion (and for some reason Napoleon returned to the subject of Murat's sex life on numerous occasions) he exclaimed "How many mistakes did Murat not commit in order to establish his headquarters in a chateau where there were women! He needed them every day, so I readily tolerated a general having a whore with him, in order to avoid this inconvenience." (From Gourgaud's diary, 3 April 1817.) Apparently Napoleon was quite fixated on this subject because Bertrand records similar remarks from him in an undated note assumed to be from some time in 1820: "Murat supposedly needed a woman each night, but every woman was good to him, and nothing stopped him, whether she had the pox or not." (Vol. 2 of Bertrand's Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène, pg 438) Which is likely a reference to one of Murat's more well-known mistresses, Madame Ruga, a lawyer's wife, whom he met (and possibly fell in love with) in Brescia.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. We'll get back to Madame Ruga.

Murat's early life is very poorly documented. Some of his early biographers allude vaguely to him womanizing while he was still a student in the seminary, and even claim that he fought a duel over a young woman before abandoning the seminary to become a soldier. Take it all with a grain of salt. The first actual evidence of Murat having an attachment to a woman, lies in his letters referencing a young woman named Mion Bastide, from his hometown. It's hard to tell how deep his feelings for her ran; he repeatedly asks his older brother for news of her--and also what her "intentions" are, and if she is flirting with the young men of La Bastide while he is away on his military duties. Perhaps they had spoken of marriage at some point while he'd been home. Anyway, he eventually got tired of her not responding to him and moved on. While a captain in the chasseurs à cheval, he apparently had an affair with a woman named Eléonore; I haven't come across any details about this, but his attachment to her was strong enough that he kept a pocketwatch with "Joachim Murat, capitaine de chasseurs à cheval: Eléonore to Joachim - do not forget her" inscribed inside; he only relinquished this watch during the 1812 campaign, as a gift to a Cossack.

During the Italian campaign, Murat had affairs with two men's wives; the aforementioned Madame Ruga, and one Madame Ghirardi (more on her shortly). Madame Ruga is described in Desaix's notes as "young, pretty; wife of a lawyer; like all the Milanese, loving pleasures, having suffered from the venom"--"the venom" (le venin) being a tactful way of saying she'd had venereal disease, which she soon passed on to Murat. "Murat is ill," Napoleon writes to Josephine on 22 July 1796; "the goddess of the ball, Mme Ruga, properly gave him une galanterie," which is another lovely old-fashioned euphemism for giving someone VD. Napoleon continues that Murat "is furious; he wants to put his adventure in the gazettes." But in typical Murat fashion, his fury burned out quickly, and he seems to have been quite infatuated with Mme Ruga--he continued the affair, which is probably what spawned Napoleon's later disgusted recollection on Saint Helena. He even temporarily neglected his duties, until Napoleon sent him a mild reprimand, to which Murat replied with indignation. "I have never had any idea which could be the least disfavorable to you," Napoleon responded drily on 21 June 1797, "but I thought that you were more necessary to your division than to your mistress in Brescia." When Murat was sent back to Italy in 1800--months after marrying Caroline--there's a very good likelihood that he resumed his affair with Mme Ruga. At any rate, they maintained contact for some time; she delivered a letter to Eugène de Beauharnais for him in 1805.

Now on to Mme Ghirardi. Apparently he also met this woman, wife of a General Lechi, in Brescia. Eventually Napoleon sent Murat to Rastadt for peace negotiations at the end of the Italian campaign. According to an article in the January 1908 Revue Napoléonienne, this is what happened next:

But Murat's conquest does not intend to let him go. Desperate to hold him back, she follows him. The beauty flees from Brescia, crosses the Alps and falls into Strasbourg; when Murat returns from Rastadt to Paris, she settles there with him and stays in the same hotel, rue des Capucins-Neufs, number 20. The adventure here is complicated by a comic novel. The husband, worthy and notable citizen of Brescia, makes a lot of noise about his misadventure and instantly demands the lost object. He brings his complaint to Milan; he comes as far as Paris to address a mournful petition to the Directory. He begs Barras and his colleagues to set themselves up as defenders of outraged morality: "Put this young woman betrayed by a vile seducer on the path of righteousness and virtue, give a mother to an innocent child; it is an honest husband who asks for this act of justice. He will be able to publish it throughout the Cisalpine and to his fellow citizens who expect it from you." (...) A singular crossover facilitated the outcome. While the husband brought his action in Paris for restitution of wife, Murat, perhaps judging that the follies of youth should not be prolonged, adopted the part of bringing the fugitive back to Brescia and resuming his military career in Italy.

Napoleon writes to Berthier to inform him that Murat is coming back to Italy to return "this heroine of Brescia," take a vacation in Rome, and then rejoin the army. And that is the last we know of Mme Ghirardi and her affair with Murat.

The short answer to your question as to whether Murat cheated on Caroline is, unfortunately, yes.

And, not to make excuses for him, but it's hard to see it turning out otherwise given that Murat was pretty set in his ways by the time of his marriage. He had long since gotten into the habit of flitting from one woman to another, and he was in his early thirties when he finally married. On top of that, his military duties made it inevitable that he would spend long periods far away from Caroline--which he did--and I just don't think he had either the self-control or the interest in remaining faithful after awhile.

(I'm just going to excerpt this next part from a post I did on Murat's relationship with Caroline awhile back, since it fits in perfectly here.)

They endured a long period of separation very early in their marriage–the first of many, adding up to several total years spent apart between 1800 and their final parting in May of 1815. Murat was sent to take command of a force in Italy in November 1800 while Caroline was pregnant with their first child; they did not see each other again until May of the following year. There are a couple of letters within Murat’s published correspondence that hint that, though he at first attempted to remain faithful to his wife during this interim, he may have given up on the endeavor prior to their reunion. The diplomat Charles Alquier, who befriended Murat in Italy, wrote to him in April 1801, lamenting not being able to spend a few days with him in Florence, teasing that he “would like to witness your gallant successes there and hear you talk about your marital fidelity, without believing it in the slightest.” The following month, after the arrival of Caroline, Alquier teases Murat again along these lines, in a postscript that reads “It was about time that Madame Murat arrived in Florence, or your hard-pressed fidelity was about to escape you.” He had almost certainly resumed his affair with Madame Ruga during this period.

There is a rather fascinating little affair that takes place early in 1806, in which Napoleon and Murat were having a simultaneous affair with a young woman named Éleonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, who was staying with the Murats at Neuilly at the time. Napoleon abruptly put an end to his affair with her when he discovered that she was also sleeping with Murat. Éleonore gave birth to a baby boy at the end of the year, and Napoleon believed the child was probably Murat's--up until he saw the boy in person prior to embarking for Saint Helena. What's particularly fascinating to me about this episode is the fact that Caroline pretty much arranged this affair for her brother--the Bonaparte siblings were so hell-bent on getting Napoleon to divorce Josephine by this point that some of them were acting like glorified pimps, hooking Napoleon up with girls left and right in hopes that he'd eventually produce a baby and prove that he wasn't to blame for the lack of an heir. But the timing of Murat, a man of proven fertility (he had four children by now), swooping in to plant a few seeds of his own at the same time that he undoubtedly knew Napoleon was bedding Éleonore just... let's just say I have theories about this. Suffice to say I think the Murats' sexual dynamic took some interesting twists and turns, and I'm fairly convinced that they each weaponized the other's sexuality on occasion--the Éleonore affair being the first example, and Caroline's affair with Metternich later on being another. This is totally, 100% my own personal theory and there's no way in hell to prove it either way, it's just my own reading of the situation given my current understanding of the personalities involved.

Anyway. The interesting thing about Murat's alleged affairs is that so few of his mistresses have been written of by name, the ones above being the exceptions. I've seen it written that he had a brief fling with the actress Mademoiselle Georges--who also allegedly had a short affair with Napoleon--but it's another one of those things that isn't well-sourced, at least from what I've found so far. As for his mistresses in Naples, I haven't come across the name of a single one. General Guglielmo Pépé only refers to them in the most general terms, remarking that King Joachim considered it dishonorable to refuse to grant a woman a favor "even were she not his mistress," and that he was especially susceptible to the "entreaties of the ladies about the Court". He also recounts Murat telling him once that "The Queen does not much like my giving audience to ladies," to which Pépé rejoined, "I pity the Queen if she notices the gallantries of Your Majesty." But I do find it extremely interesting that there seems to be absolutely no information whatsoever on any of Murat's alleged mistresses in Naples, which makes me wonder if his reputation in that area might be a bit exaggerated and if a lot of his so-called "gallantries" were simple flirtations. He never stopped being a massive flirt or enjoying having women's eyes on him. "He was very vain," Madame Fusil, an actress who met him in 1812, wrote of him, "and he liked women to watch out for him."

I hope I didn't forget anything! And thanks for the ask! ^_^

#asks #Joachim Murat #Caroline Murat #Caroline Bonaparte #Napoleon #Napoleon Bonaparte

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jostenneil · 3 years ago

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Hi, same anon who asked about Dixon's anti-abortion rant in comics? This isn't about Dixon, but have you heard of Frederick Wertham? In the 50's, he wrote a series of papers that the US later used as basis to create the Comics Code Authority. At the time, (don't take my word for it) single men could not adopt children and it was mostly couples who could do so, and later on, DC got accused of nasty stuff in the 1980's similar to what Wertham wrote. This might explain why DC's so adamant on (1/2)

(2/2) pairing Bruce in a romantic relationship, being constantly obsessed with Bruce's masculinity, and destroying his relationships with his adopted kids. Like, yeah the 50's and 80's were different eras, but they had far-reaching consequences on this character and media in general. And, I also feel like this is further seen with the other superfamilies? Not that they're stereotypically conservative, but many of them do seem rooted in that and this goes in tandem with the lone warrior thing

SO like i said in that ask a few hours ago, yeah, i read about the seduction of the innocent a while ago and it was really fascinating tbh! the impact on and perception of selina specifically was hilarious, like they thought she was antifeminine and homosexual and what do you know! there are some post-crisis interpretations of her that actually took those qualities into account, which i think is nice in an ironic sort of way, bc obv we'll never know if those developments were actually responses to things wertham said decades ago. with regards to bruce and dick, at least according to some of the articles i was reading, there was a misconception that aunt harriet was added to the adam west show to throw off the alleged homo vibes from their chemistry on the show due to wertham's papers, but his papers were released more than a decade prior to her appearance so it seems there's a consensus she was added for other, unrelated reasons. i definitely think the desire to portray heteronormativity as some moral pinnacle has influenced comics at large, but it's also interesting how that's impacted bruce over the years bc i think for him it's actually a bit different. with denny o'neil's era of writers esp i think they were just so focused on the idea of a lone, vengeful knight committed to his cause that they were uninterested in a romance that lasted and capitalized on the interest readers would have in a dark, brooding hero. and so for about twenty or thirty years you had a bruce who was still somewhat balancing his relationships with dick and jason but who was also constantly thrown into shadow bc his romantic relationships never quite panned out properly. and then we began to move into the dixon era of comics and really build the bat family at large, and that to me lasted as a pretty important focus into the last few years before the reboot despite bruce still having romantic pursuits here and there. the reboots to me (esp rebirth) really shifted things with the imbalance between bruce's family life and his romantic life bc of how comics canon was shifted and changed to sort of paint a new canvas. it shook the foundations of previously established relationships and so where writers wanted to make new ground they did, and i think with bruce that's where romance finally became a primary element rather than a secondary one bc the writers who had pushed for that image of him as a lone knight who would always put justice before self serving romantic pursuits, had kind of phased out and been replaced with a new generation of writers. there's actually interviews here and there from some of denny o'neil's proteges too (rucka and grayson in particular, as much as i dislike the latter) about how once he left it was just a years long process of editorial driving out every last o'neil protege they could so they could exact their own agenda

#asks #mine:media analysis

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whetstonefires · 5 years ago

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Do you think the DC fandom maybe, Infantilizes Tim a little too much? Like for a rich kid character who's main trauma for a long time was a getting left home alone too much there's an oddly amount of meta abt how much how much his parents hurt him~ compared to, y'know the two poor characters who grew up with physically abusive dad's+druggie mom's, or the two that were raised assassin cult's, etc

…well, yeah, I do kind of think that? His whole schtick for so long was being too old for his age in ways that didn’t sacrifice his jokey, relatable teenager energies. It’s weird how little of that we see anymore, sometimes.

And then DC broke him and discarded him and he’s sort of awkwardly hanging around getting reimagined as more woobie with every fan generation. It is weird!

But tbh I do get it. And I think the reason his parents’ failure of him and his vulnerability get played up so much, and Jason and Steph’s sufferings (while used a lot for things like motivation and context) not dwelt on quite so much in the same lugubrious style, are kind of the same reason.

Which is that canon didn’t commit to it. Jason and Steph’s experiences with bad parenting were foregrounded and retconned more dramatically awful several times. (There’s some definite classism in how that was approached imo, and I’m never budging on being mad about DC retconning out Catherine being sick and then ignoring her forever in all Jason characterization because a drug death invalidates a person ig, great message during the opioid crisis guys.)

They engaged and coped with it–Steph (and Cass, our #1 canon batfam parental abuse victim) pretty directly, Jason a little less so because of the dubious and fluctuating canon status of most of the content more specific than ‘poverty, homelessness, theft, parental drugs and crime in there somewhere,’ so most of his parent issues have been focused on Bruce. He sure has dug into them tho. 😂 Rarely well or productively, thanks DC, but it’s explicitly part of his character, is my point.

Whereas upper-middle-class Tim was always treated by the narrative as fortunate and unharmed by his experiences with his parents. Even though they were clearly behaving badly in several ways, and Tim showed signs of being harmed by it.

Tim outside of immediate moments of frustration always was of the opinion he was Fine, and Very Fortunate Actually.

Therefore a huge chunk of the numerous everyone who’s got parent-related mental and emotional harm, but has struggled to have that validated and hasn’t responded with a lot of anger toward the parent, identifies with Tim. The only one who’s never really lashed out at his parents for fucking up with him. The one who still needs it explored, because canon ultimately didn’t.

[editing post to put in a readmore because lol it’s long, post otherwise unchanged]

(Dick obviously didn’t ever have any Issues with the Graysons, but he Angry Teenagered at Bruce so hard it changed Bruce’s characterization permanently, rip.)

The things Jason, Steph, and Cass have been through are dramatic, obvious, and fit stereotypes because that’s what they’re based on.

That’s important content to have, but because it’s right out there in your face even people who identify with it quite a lot are less likely to feel the need to work all the way through it again in fanworks. That part’s there. It’s text.

(Well actually Jason having been physically abused kind of wasn’t? I think? It was mostly assumed on the basis of stereotyping and Jason’s not caring about the man much even as he felt possessive of information about his death, which is valid. I don’t actually know what’s up with Willis now, Lobdell did some weird shit that lacked emotional resonance or staying power because he’s Lobdell and has no soul.

Cass’ wandering years are also ludicrously underdeveloped. But very very few comics fans or writers can personally relate to being amazing child warriors with no grasp of language living feral under bridges. That part of her life is consistently represented in terms of absences, in terms of its deviation from the norm and the deficits of normality it left her with, which is typical but unfortunate.)

The interesting things to do with these characters are often informed by the bad stuff in their childhoods, but there’s relatively rarely that much more to say about the fact that those things were bad. They know they’re bad. They’ve had a lot of on-panel rage about it, as discussed above. Steph and Cass both beat the shit out of their dads.

Jason is, in fandom especially, a sort of Platonic ideal of a kid who’s mad about his bad childhood and really bad at figuring out where to point that rage.

(Damian is a whole other kettle of fish, because he’s been lumbered by so many detailed retcons coming so fast no two people can seem to construct compatible models of what his early childhood was like, and even more because he’s still ‘a child’ enough that he’s necessarily in a different stage of processing than someone who’s officially only a few years older than him at this point, but still functionally 8 and also 20 years older, and whose parents are no longer in the picture to continue screwing up.

Also there’s no question that if he brings up an abusive thing the League did, he will be validated by his current environment about his realization that it was in fact bad. There’s a lot of fic on that theme! But it doesn’t have the same tone precisely because it is usually understood that that support will be there if he wants it. Realizing that his previous context contained things that were wrong keeps being made the focus of his arc.)

The badness of Tim’s childhood, on the other hand, was mainly in subtext. Even when we were clearly meant to understand Jack was fucking up, like when he canceled plans with Tim at the last minute to go on a date with Tim’s stepmother, or that infamous time he came to apologize for not being a great parent and got mad Tim was distracted by a crisis on TV so he flew into a rage and took the TV and smashed it and was like ‘that’ll teach you,’ it wasn’t leaned into.

The story didn’t treat Jack as a minor villain to be overcome but like a sort of environmental hazard of childhood, like homework, to be endured and coped with. Tim said things like ‘it’s fine’ and ‘at least he left the computer.’

(And like. It’s not about having a TV and computer in his room. It’s about not letting a child have boundaries, pointedly not respecting a child’s possessions, creating an emotionally insecure environment, punishing minor infractions in proportion to their momentary impact on your own ego, physically lashing out at a proxy for the child…)

Rather like Tom King later didn’t understand about the punching from Bruce, whoever did that story (probably Dixon? I don’t care enough to check) did not understand how serious a case of bad parenting that scene was. That is most definitely textbook abusive behavior. (It’s a hell of a lot more common abusive behavior than being a lame supervillain or shooting you when you screw up, and a lot more specific than ‘was a thug, might have hit me, dead now.’)

And Tim was never allowed to be mad at his parents about it. It was fine. He needed to be ignored so he had the freedom to be Robin. He deserved his dad being mad at him because he was keeping secrets. He complained too much, although objectively he did not.

The universe punished him for ‘complaining,’ more than once. We cut straight from him shunting aside his disappointment that his postcard from his parents was just to say they weren’t coming home yet after all with ‘if it will stop all the fights they’ve been having lately it’s more than fine’ to them getting kidnapped.

He agreed not to come on the rescue mission. His mom never made it home, and his dad was in a coma for a while. And then ultimately Jack died as a result of Tim’s decision to be Robin, immediately after finally deciding to accept it.

So Tim walks around feeling a huge burden of responsibility for his parents’ deaths, and completely unable to process any hurt they did him as real or valid, especially in comparison with the far more blatant awfulness other people have been through, and canon is clearly never going to address it. Or even acknowledge it properly.

Let me repeat that because it’s kind of my main point:

People are fixated on getting Tim’s emotional abuse validated because that’s an incredibly important step in recovering from emotional abuse, and it’s one canon consistently denied him.

How ‘bad’ things are ‘in comparison to’ problems other people have is a bad and unhealthy way to engage with trauma. Okay? That’s just a really harmful framework to apply to pain.

It’s also a way that both Tim and people with experiences similar to Tim’s are encouraged to engage with their own experiences, compounding the existing problems.

So. Not a form of relatable DC was ever actually aiming for when they tried so hard (and pretty effectively) to make him a relatable character as Robin, but an enduring one for a lot of fans.

So Tim’s childhood is a natural target for fanworks in a different way than the traumas that have been made explicit and taken seriously by the text. And then a lot of that got compounded by the way the introduction of Damian as Robin was handled, and the lack of resolution that got. And his current status as not quite having a place in the family anymore.

So between the level of projection encouraged by that context and how relatively difficult to access Tim’s Robin run has become ten years after the fact, this has led to a lot of fanworks on these themes that are based mostly on other fanworks, and stray further and further from the original content.

So at this point there’s an entire wing of Tim’s fandom wherein this side of him has expanded enormously, and he primarily exists to suffer, frequently in ways that 1) escalate to a point that is inarguably ‘valid’ and hard to dismiss and 2) set him up to rebound from it in whatever way the writer finds emotionally satisfying or useful–being ultimately cared for and reassured by people who value him (the most infantilizing option but like, popular for obvious reasons), or unveiling his brilliant scheme that was causing him to pretend to be passive in the face of mistreatment, or turning around and using his genius ninja skills to wrest power back from his abusers, or just laying down some sick burns about being treated fairly.

But not that many of the last one, because that’s mostly done with other batfam members.

Tim’s become a vehicle for a lot of vicarious coping that Steph and Jason just aren’t appropriate for, because they get angry and they get even. And those are stories that exist already, so there’s less scope for telling your own.

And because Jason’s reaction pattern is ultimately so masculine (i’ll make them all sorry! with my guns! blam blam!) while Tim’s is pretty gender-neutral, the demographics of fanfic mean that the bulk of the people using Tim vicariously in this manner are female-aligned, which has over time feminized this archetype of him a lot. Sometimes in ways I find really uncomfortable, like there’s a lot of forced pregnancy stuff which activates my panic buttons. x.x

But, ultimately, it’s fandom. People are going to do what they’re going to do, DC in their perpetual fail has hung Tim out to dry in narrative terms, and I’d rather the people who are using Tim for victimization narratives over the people who can’t dismiss or discredit him fast enough now that his position has been filled. 🤷‍♀️ What we gonna do? Fave’s in an awkward spot. DC hates us. This is the life in this comic book pit. XD

Also if you’re the same anon who left me a callout about op of that weird Steph post in my inbox, or if you aren’t @ that person, 1) I refuse to get involved so I’m not answering that ask 2) those aren’t even particularly dramatic fandom crimes? That’s pretty normal? That’s just…Caring Too Much About Ships And Disagreeing With Me.

Do I also feel those opinions are kinda bad? Yeah. But I disagree with everyone about something. Chill.

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autoplaysdigimon · 4 years ago

Text

Top Five Villains

HERE WE GO, THE FUN LIST.

#5 Gatomon

Controversial, maybe, to have her be on the Villains list as well, but she was a villainous character for a while.

I’m a real sucker for a good redemption storyline; failing that, at least a turncoat character. While Gatomon didn’t really commit any real atrocities onscreen to atone for later in the story, she still proved a fun villain while she was one. She was no nonsense, efficient, knew exactly what she was doing... if she’d stayed on Myotismon’s side, she could have been a real force to be reckoned with. One of the things that I’d have really liked to have seen explored more in this series was Gatomon’s time with Myotismon, and how much she’s changed since then.

Plus there’s something so weirdly entertaining about a group of creepy, ominous, obviously evil monsters and then a small white kitty cat who’s just as dangerous as them.

#4 Myotismon

This guy.

When this guy came onto the scene, the entire show changed. Devimon’s arc was fun, if a little generic; Etemon’s was very similar with a different villain, and then Demidevimon’s arc came along and we got a fun, goofy villain who can’t Evil properly. Even so, we knew he was following orders from a higher power, and Myotismon’s eventual appearance changed the dynamic from “Team Rocket Fools Children Repeatedly” to “oh shit an actual vampire is going to kill us”. And then the whole Eighth Digidestined thing happened... Plus, that #aesthetic, amirite?

To tie into Gatomon’s thing up there, the Eighth Digidestined arc was one of the best of the season, if not the best. Taking the fight to the Real World made it more, well, real. It was fun as hell watching the parents interact with the Digimon, both good and bad, and finding out exactly what the kids had been up to lately. The kids watching their families getting dragged into the fight was TOP. NOTCH. Plus Myotismon actually knew what he was doing as a villain so.

He knew to go after the one kid without protection. He knew how to cut everything off effectively. He did take a shot at some of the kids when they were on their own, instead of thinking only of killing Kari. Death didn’t stop him the first time. Even when he pulled the classic villain “You Have Outlived Your Use” thing and killed his own minions, it was on Digimon who had already turned against him, like Wizardmon, Pumpkinmon, Gotsumon and (arguably) Darktyrannomon.

(No, wait, they’re still alive because he sent them to his Dungeon, isn’t that RIGHT DUB TEAM.)

(Even though pieces of them were left behind and dissolved on their own.)

(No, I’m still not over that.)

#3 Ogremon

Another redeemed villain! I just like them, okay

Maybe it’s just me, but just the act of Ogremon turning good at the end made me like him. He was a little bit generic in the Devimon arc, though at least he had the feud with Leomon to make him interesting. (Any logical reason to that, by the way? Was it just that we had these two Digimon who could fill in the character roles we’d set out for them? Nothing mythological about lions and ogres hating each other or anything? No? Okay then.)

All Ogremon really did in that first arc was serve as the henchman. He made some... interesting choices, and then he was absorbed into Devimon for power. And then he came out of the back of Devimon’s knee. Sure. When Devimon was defeated, he ran screaming off into the distance, shaking his fist and yelling “NEXT TIME, GADGET. NEXT TIIIIME.” The very act of bringing him back when he wasn’t employed by the Big Bad of the moment made him an interesting character, who had to atone for what he did. I’m a sucker for redemption, like I said, and the best part of it is watching them go soft.

Plus, how great is it to have multiple conflicting alliances within a group? When Leomon returned, even though Ogremon was firmly on the Digidestined side now, he had absolutely no problems with trying to immediately murder Leomon. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? They’re rivals, it’s just natural! He’s also kind of a shithead in general, even still.

Also, Ogremon is incredibly hard to draw. I’d just like to bring that up.

Okay, next!

#2 Etemon

HE’S A MONKEY WHO TALKS LIKE ELVIS, NEXT QUESTION.

But for real, Etemon is such a fucking great villain. Great character all around, I’d love a version where he was an ally or something, but how else would we get the trademark Elvis-laugh-turns-into-villainous-laugh thing that Etemon has going?! Come on, that’s great.

Devimon’s villainous style was one of corruption; he wasn’t all that powerful on his own, but by using the Black Gears he could build his own damn forces and control small areas. He only managed to control a handful of Digimon in the end. He was also taken out by a single Digimon in a single one-on-one, though you could argue that the others had weakened him by that point, they hadn’t really.

Etemon’s style was drastically different - he was far more comical, but far more dangerous. His introduction scene involved him panicking over the Digidestined already being in the area. He sang a lot, he cracked jokes, he threw childish tantrums, and again, he was a monkey who sounded like Elvis. There is nothing not awesome about this guy. And yes, he was deadlier - his main attack can undo Digivolutions and leave the Digimon vulnerable as hell. He ended up taking a couple of episodes to take out, only losing because another villain tried to sabotage him in the end.

And coming back partway through the Dark Masters arc as Metaletemon?! FUCK YEAH. Every pun he made, I laughed at and I don’t apologise for that. Even starting a series-wide tradition, he was stylish until the end.

Also he called Ikkakumon a goat that one time.

#1 Demidevimon

T H E B A S T A R D O R B

Nobody is surprised that he’s my #1, right? It was a close call between him and Etemon, but ultimately I just like Demidevimon’s arc more. We have Devimon and Etemon, as I discussed above. After that wave of villains who are dangerous because they’re powerful, we have one who is dangerous because he’s just a little bastard.

Demidevimon wasn’t strong. Most villains had their huge beatdown happen in the form of a Digimon Digivolving to Champion, Ultimate or Mega for the first time, Demidevimon had his when Patamon reached Rookie level again. In his debut episode. He was never a threat physically once the kids realised that he was not to be trusted. His arc came right after two arcs of the kids being stranded in this strange world together, only briefly separated - and then everyone was torn apart, and he could manipulate them individually.

I’ve argued in the past that Demidevimon was a more effective manipulator than even Puppetmon, one of the Dark Masters, and I stand by it. Puppetmon managed to physically manipulate them with the dolls, sure, and he had Cherrymon convince Matt to attack Tai. But, uh, he didn’t exactly have to twist his arm very hard to get that to happen, and that was Cherrymon’s doing anyway. Plus you could argue that physically manipulating someone isn’t much of a social power as it is more a matter of strength. (also Puppetmon is more of a “play with them like toys” type, but still, being a literal puppetmaster, you’d think that manipulation was more of his domain than a BAT.) Demidevimon, however, managed to:

convince TK that Matt didn’t want him as a brother anymore and to ditch Tokomon

nearly have TK, Tai and Agumon eat poisonous mind-wiping mushrooms

convince Digitamamon to keep Joe and Matt in the restaurant, simultaneously threatening Joe to help keep Matt there and sabotaged them constantly to manipulate them all further

trick Izzy and Tentomon into Vademon’s trap

tell the Gekomon and Otamamon about Mimi’s singing voice, somehow knowing that they’d end up hindering her progress somehow(???)

And, even after knowing that he’s an evil manipulating Digimon, he managed to convince Sora that she’d never manage to activate her crest, causing her to believe it in a self-fulfilling prophecy, even as she worked to sabotage his efforts otherwise.

I mean, apart from all that, I just like Demidevimon as a Digimon. He’s a tiny flying motherfucker and that’s great! He had some of my favourite lines, even his death was kind of tragically funny, and I have a clear bias when it comes to his voice acting, because I just like Derek Stephen Prince. He does it well! I don’t know how Demidevimon closes his eyes like that, though, those appear to be his pupils closing. I don’t even know.

Really, I just find great nostalgia in comical villains. They were all the rage back in the day, especially in children’s media. They’re still around sometimes - Doctor Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb, the Rubies from Steven Universe, the Ice King from Adventure Time, even Team Rocket from Pokemon are thriving still. Good, menacing villains are great and all, but where’s the fun?

Honourable Mentions

Scorpiomon, who probably benefited the most from the dub’s style - his constant cried of “hey, stop it, come baaaack” while chasing Joe and Mimi are more remnicient of a kid trying to get his toy back from the bully who just took it away from him than someone trying to murder children, and that’s just fucking hilarious.

Mimi, when she was briefly an antagonist in that one episode. Just as I really like Heel-Face turns, I really like Face-Heel turns, even temporarily, and even as petty as this whole thing was. It was the perfect trap for her, who just craved the comfort of home, and who could be easily confinced to go for more. And it was the perfect trap because she was the jailor and the jailed at the same time, trapped as long as her own selfishness would allow. It was one of my favourite episodes.

Datamon, who had his own agenda and didn’t care that he was stepping on Etemon’s toes to get what he wanted. Just like Leomon and Ogremon had conflicting alliances on the protagonist’s side, Datamon and Etemon were opposing forces on the antagonist’s side, and multiple villains fighting each other are always fun to see.

Actually, Etemon later fought Puppetmon as Metaletemon, didn’t he? Wow, dude just doesn’t get along with other villains.

Gizamon. Give them more lines, you cowards.

The Dark Masters, as a whole. Just as Myotismon changed the entire tone of the show, these guys took the entire first half of the show and murdered every safe thing about it. They immediately started playing with the Digidestined, fully intending to off them all right then and there as a team. They were competent, for the most part - only failing when they were forced to split up, and their dirty tricks could be dismantled one by one. I’ve never seen a more co-operative group of antagonists, who never tried to dethrone each other and take everything for themselves.

And okay, sure, Kokatorimon. Purely for this.

Dishonourable Mention

Apocalymon.

Look, dude, I’m sorry, you’re cool and everything, but where the fuck did you come from? We killed Piedmon, it’s over, no, wait, here’s one last guy, no wait he’s dead, nevermind. What?

The fact that Apocalymon didn’t get any fanfare before being dropped on the Digidestined without warning made him seem like an afterthought, like the writers forgot their own endgame until they got there. Even if there had been a mention of the effect that caused his existence before he showed up - a “hey, did you know that not every Digimon survives Digivolution? Their data just gets deleted or something,” really would have helped, but even then.

Apocalymon’s existence in the show really highlights how disjointed the series as a whole is - Devimon has no relation to Etemon, who has no relation to Myotismon, who has no relation to the Dark Masters, who have no relation to Apocalymon. The kids face a constant load of “okay, so we beat this guy and we can go home, right? ...no, maybe this guy??” where every new villain is dropped on the like a hot potato, making their first appearance in less time after their existence is revealed in less time than it takes to heat up said hot potato. Myotismon is the only one who gets any decent buildup before his first appearance before the children, and he’s often said to be the best villain of the show, so see how that works?

Digimon Adventure is the story of a bunch of kids who were brought to the Digital World to take care of one guy, and hey, while you’re here, we’ve also got some sort of demon on this island causing trouble, and there’s this monkey threatening us, and also a vampire, and then these four have joined together... It was a fun adventure, and I love that it could be part of my childhood and my life, but wow it really needed a more cohesive throughline for the story.

I hate to leave this post on a negative note, because it was full of mostly nice things, so here’s another picture of the bastard orb.

Hahahaha, oh you silly little man.

#digimon #digimon anime #digimon adventure #auto plays digimon #auto watches digimon adventure #character analysis

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wafflebloggies · 4 years ago

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A Little Light Mischief

When you moved at the speed of light, boredom was a problem.

Mr. Flare hated being bored. He could find and experience the entire back catalogue of a YouTube channel in the time it took most people to type the first letter into the search bar. Information or entertainment, a good 99 percent of the content he devoured tended to slip straight through his consciousness without adhering to anything on the way through. He could read faster than a panicking defence attorney before an important court date, but books were for losers and it was hard to turn comic pages when you were a discorporate entity with no opposable thumbs.

Cartoons were okay, but watching twenty-four frames a second slapping lazily one over the other like a flip-book moving through treacle made him feel pretty queasy after a while.

It was hard, being the world’s coolest lens artefact. Flare needed excitement, fun, drama. He liked to be in a place where things were moving and happening, bopping along, and for a while, things at Disillusion Industries had been slow, frustratingly predictable. A video would be produced, a video would be released. Despite his best efforts and clear charismatic radiance, a criminally low percentage of these videos starred or even featured Mr. Flare.

That was before the nerd had quit.

After that, everything got much more interesting. For a solid week, then two, then three and more, not even Mr. Flare could have predicted where D would be or what he’d be up to next. He might be spending days rendering obsessively accurate reconstructions of scenes from classic movies down in the edit bay, muttering furiously to himself the whole time, or he might be floating face down in the skypool, butt-naked apart from a pair of shutter shades and one waterlogged Yeezy. It was all pretty hilarious to watch, and when he thought about it, Flare had to admit that the nerd had only ever really been in the way. The last thing Disillusion Industries had needed, if you really looked at the bigger picture, was a methodical, anal-retentive wet blanket underfoot, harshing the buzz for everybody. Humans kind of sucked, it was a basic objective fact.

That was why when the email showed up, he’d been less than pleased.

Flare could see things the way the Captain could, by and large. He just did it better, clearer, and faster. Much faster. He could see the pink-white glow of an incoming message flicking down the tubes and jumping through routers and splitters, and he could catch up with it as it dawdled along, as easy as hopping on a slow-moving trolley. He could see the nerd’s digital fingerprints all over the thing, even before he read the actual body of the email.

Blah, blah, blah. Flare liked drama, but this was the snoozefest kind of drama, just feelings and reasonable statements, the kind that wouldn’t even make for a good commentary video. You couldn’t even leak this shit- nobody would care. Whatever the subject matter, it was another basic objective fact that the entertainment value in people discussing things calmly and rationally like adults was practically zero.

--Anyway, I know you’re probably mad at me, but I just wanted to say that it’s okay if you want to talk.

Ugh. Yawn-o-rama.

If Flare had had a tongue, he would have stuck it out good and far in disgust. The place had been way more fun for the last few weeks, without the nerd hanging around getting nerd-stink all over everything. For one, he’d taken the cat with him, and the cat had always been under the mistaken impression that Flare was a great thing to chase and try to stick in its stupid tuna-breath cat-mouth.

D was way more fun, too. He was explosive and weird- well, weirder- with a mood as stable as a revolving door falling through a black hole. It was a wild ride, like witnessing a very prolonged jet-ski accident in zero-gravity. It was fun. If the nerd came back, he’d probably clean up the entire epic record-breaking trashpile that had been accumulating on the bridge. He’d probably ask D to put some pants on. And he’d bring his goddamn cat.

Flare stretched his digital flex out thoughtfully through the ion stream surrounding the nerd’s message, and wrote.

--Go fuck yourself, fleshbag.

Direct and nicely to the point, but maybe a little OOC. Flare had been in enough serious erotic roleplays in his time to know the importance of properly finding one’s character. He flicked the draft out of existence and tried again.

--Listen, Alan, if you want to come crawling back just say so, but I’ll be honest, we’ve streamlined our workflow up here a lot over the last couple of months, and I’m not sure if I could find much for you to do right now. I should probably point out that I’m not your shrink and I don’t have time to help you work through your commitment issues or whatever.

P.S, you left your dumb cat’s treat pouches in the mess hall fridge. I can have them FedExed if you want, but the orbital courier fees are on you.

“Mr. Flare, you are a literary genius,” said Flare, admiring the message proudly from a couple picaseconds distance. The junction to D’s inbox was coming up, yawning like a highway off-ramp, so he sent his reply fizzing back towards its sender, and flipped the nerd’s email straight into the spam folder, snickering happily as he zipped away across the overflowing virtual landfill and into the real world.

#Captain Disillusion #mr. flare #alan amelik #my writes

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soyouareandrewdobson · 5 years ago

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Alex ze Pirate Mini Review 3: About pacing and terrible dark revelations played as jokes.

And here we are at the second part of the arc, which was titled “Abandoned”. And just as a word in advance: While “Underappreciated” was mostly defined by the shitty behavior Sam experiences by his crew and how Dobson crossed comedic lines to the point Alex and her crew come off more as abusive than “funny” in the way they treat Sam or interact with their environment, this one is defined by another major issue Dobson has in his bigger stories overall: Pacing.

See, the right pacing in a story is really one of the most important basics a creator kinda has to grasp. He or she needs to know primarily the following things in relation to pacing, when planning out a story: What are major events/storypoints/key scenes I want to work towards to, what happens inbetween these points and at which speed do I get from point A to B, C etc.

Cause the truth is, a lot of stories out there follow certain tropes or expectations, particularly when they are part of a certain genre, so people more or less have ideas when a certain “point” is hit, what the next point, if not even the endpoint is going to be down the line. And people also kinda want to reach the endpoint of a story, particularly if they expect doing so will finally give the protagonists they care for (and the audience itself) some sort of satisfying conclusion.

The one thing you can now do however, which can in the worst scenario totally kill an audiences/readers enjoyment of the story and even break your creation apart, is get the pacing wrong. For example by unnecessarily dragging out your story instead of just getting to the point, especially when people just want to reach the next major beat, resulting in increased annoyance by them. This can e.g. be seen in a lot of fanfics when writers create damn arcs within their own shit, or (to give a professionally published work of fiction as example) the manga Bleach, when instead of fighting Aizen and his two major supporters directly, the “war” against him was unnecessarily dragged out by having e.g. a pointless flashback sequence that barely shed new light on certain characters and gave EVERY damn main and sub captain of the Shinigami a shot at some random villain/minion Tite Kubo created on the spot but no one cared about really, just to make the story arc run longer.

Obviously, the opposite can also be the case, where people just rush too fast from one point to the other instead of giving the audience time to even properly comprehend or explain what happened and why it happened. Which can get additionally frustrated, when by rushing through plot points the work of fiction gets overloaded with concepts and ideas that may on first glance look interesting, but don’t have any real payoff in the big picture of things, making it come off as pretentious in some cases and pointless overall. Like the movie Southland Tales, which deserves to be burned off the surface of the planet.

The “best” case scenario when pacing a story, is to know when you need to slow things down (give characters and the readers e.g. moments to breath and emotionally comprehend a situation they are in, giving also insight into a characters emotional state or personality) and when to speed things up (e.g. when there is a big battle, to know which moments are meant to focus on, but also when to be “faster”, giving really the impression that time is of the essence, that high stakes in a short amount of time are given and to hit a key event at the right moment to get a satisfying reaction from your audience)

And now, after giving a glance on my general opinion on pacing, in order to avoid me commiting the cardinal sin of dragging things out, lets just get to Dobson’s actual artwork.

As you can see, the chapter starts off again with the island, but this time now with Sam not part of the picture and its consequences (no one cleaning up the place in the morning). This is not really a bad thing to start the chapter of, primarily because it creates a nice contrast to the beginning of the first part.

Page 3 to 5 however…

Lets just say I get what Dobson tries to show here, but I think is exaggerated to a degree that kinda hurts the narrative; the fact that without Sam, shit does not quite get done.

The problem is the execution of the idea. See, instead of putting the fact Sam is missing into the forefront, the fact stuff has not been done is. Stuff the crew should be able to handle after a very short time of adjustment easily. I will admit, Talus suspecting they were robbed but then asked if he had also looked into the cabinets, is kinda funny. I mean, it fits the character (and sometimes people in real life) to be so adjusted to seeing a certain situation as routine every day, that when it is slighty changed they may initially assume the worst but in reality just one convenient step of the routine was left out. Less forgivable I think is the fact that seeing how Sam did the clothes the day prior, I have to wonder how dirty those guys are that already everything is left in piles of dirt to the point they have only the following alternative as wardrobe.

Halloween costumes.

…. Ok, why is there Halloween, and likely a modern day variant of its celebration, in a comic set in a fictional world compared to ours, in a time period it would not exactly exist anyway? Christ on a pogo stick, consistency is all I ask for. Oh and of course NOW they realize Sam is gone. Because they finally put together that their daily luxuries they took for granted are no longer available.

Hey now, Talus. You all are guilty of being terrible friends. In fact yu are so terrible, you would make Twilight Sparkle vomit at the sight of yours. Also, why of all characters are you wearing a costume? Unlike those two bitches, you still had clean clothes on a few pages ago. Speaking of bitches, Atea in the middle panel looks readyto be edited in a cumshot video. Just saying for all those “creative” editors out there.

YAY! Lets get our slave back so he can do all the stuff we care about but do not want to do.

Seriously, if Dobson tries to convince us they want to get him back because they care for him as a person, he fails miserably. Both by the choice of wording in this page, where Atea and Talus react angrier about the fact that without Sam things don’t work smoothly, rather than concern about his well being, as well as any behavior expressed in the previous chapter. These people are not reacting like friends in worry, they act like spoiled brats. Especially Talus who could still get his stupid burgers if he, as the cook of the crew, would just do his job. All he has to do is additionally open a few cabinets. Also, where in the heck is Uncle Peggy? Oh just go to the next pages so we are getting this over with.

Oh great, the lolcat pirates are back. Because they were so hilarious the first time. And look, they got defeated again. And what is their contribution to the story? To give information on where Sam may have gone.

And it is here now where I have to stop and come back to the pacing issue. Cause the last ten pages here? They are a good example of what I meant with rushed pacing and how it ruins things.

Once more I need to say, I get it. I get the major points Dobson wants to get across. That a) Sam is gone that b) without him things are not all that good for the crew anymore c) they decide they want to find him d) they get information of where he is by going after the one feline that can provide a potential hint. Four major story points Dobson wants to get across. And he is free to get them across. But the way he does it, is just way too fast. Neither the characters, nor the reader really gets time to comprehend that Sam is gone and what that means aside of the surface level loss of luxury Alex and Co are now experiencing. The emotional weight of Sam’s “loss” is pushed aside for the sake of cruising through the plot defined by its surface premise, as fast as possible. And considering that the meat of this story is supposed to be how much Sam means to the others as a person as well as his personal tragedy, intend and execution, thanks to this pacing, does not compute.

Pacing and overall structure are way off and fail to engage us in addition to just killing any suspense in what is going to happen next or surprise us in an interesting fashion. In other words, I am not entertained by this story. It is not funny, it is not sad, it is not “adventurous”.

Personally, I would suggest to actually use the “premise” of those ten pages and turn them at least into two independent chapters of this story overall, to give the premise actually some meat on the bone. The first chapter being a multipager with the crew realizing Sam is gone first BEFORE realizing that without him their luxuries are gone (putting also emphasize this way on the fact they care for Sam also more as a person instead of just the things he does for them) and then once they realize he is missing, deciding to go after him. Only to realize that when they want to prepare themselves for the task (getting their gear together as well as lunch e.g.) that everything is dirty or damaged because Sam normally takes care of it. Leading to a sequence of them having to experience doing Sam’s work for once, making them already there indirectly in part realize what he all does they took for granted.

The second chapter would then be them on the sea, trying to think of where to look at and eventually stumbling upon the cat pirates. Only instead of defeating them easily this time and getting the information, expectations are subverted and the cats actually fight back first, leading to a more hilarious confrontation where Alex and her crew can actually also show how they can be funny and badass, instead of Dobson just always “talking” and trying to convince us they are cool. And look, I do not expect a multi chapter One Piece like battle against the cat captain who turns out to be a master of Scratch Jutzu or something the moment he sniffs catnip. But please, give me something in this story. Some conflict, some diversion, something for characters to actually do that shows they can be badass, funny and awesome. Something that is as cartoony as Dobson likes to claim Alex ze Pirate is, but has never shown in its entirety.

Instead we get to this page, where of all characters Talus is the one who finally seems to realize how he and others took Sam for granted.

And again, even this page is a good example of terrible pacing. Cause this realization, now shoved in within this and the next page? It would mean so much more if it happened in parts somewhere else in this story before or after, slowly to everyone stepwise. Cause then it would actually feel like a “development” of a chain of thoughts and internal realizations. Instead it is half heartedly thrown in all at once in those pages, to get the point across that NOW Sam’s “friends” finally realize, they took him always for granted.

Congratulations on realizing that you are the real scum in this story. What do you expect from me now? To give you hugs and feel pity for you like you are characters in Steven Universe, all because you had an epiphany? You do not deserve mine or any readers sympathy, just because NOW you feel bad for your terrible behavior. Cause if I did, it would just feel rewarding in a certain manner. And you do not deserve a reward. You have to make things up first or at the very least put in some sort of effort to show me, that you are not just feeling bad, but are willing to change for the better. Otherwise you are in the future still just the same toxic abusers you were two pages ago.

... man, that really felt like me already venting at Steven Universe.

Anyway, we have reached the town where Sam is from…

And it looks NOTHING at all like the artwork from Legends implied parts of the town to look like

Where are the badly drawn docks? The houses that imply this is not just a small village on the beach but an actual small town? The twon square where they sell underaged boys as slaves? Jesus Christ, what is the orphanage going to look li-

Nevermind. The orphanage is crushed. And all the people that lived in it are dead.

... WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU, DOBSON! This is genuinely a sick joke here. Look, I am all for black and dark comedy myself, but this feels cruel. I need to remind you, Alex ze Pirate in Dobson’s eyes was also meant to be a comic for all ages. Meaning something also little kids should be able to read and enjoy. Pushing aside how much of that would be bullshit by the shitton of sexist and sex jokes in other strips of the comic alone, this here is not the kind of joke I would like to see a little kid being exposed to when reading any form of story.

Look, I am not saying you can’t make fun about death. But Death is also a major part of life, which many of us are already being exposed to at an early age. And I think it is important that when we talk about death as a subject in a story for kids, we should actually address it in a “mature” manner the kid may understand. That death, as in the genuine loss of a life and not e.g. an awesome interpretation of the Grim Reaper as written by Terry Pratchett, is tragic. That it means permanently losing someone you or someone else loves. That when talking about it, we should talk about it in a serene manner. And there have been great kids stories who tackled the subject directly or indirectly. A Land Before Time for example, the loss of Littlefoots mother and how he “copes” with it while the majority of the plot still focuses on an adventure to find the Great Valley… that is great. But this thing here that Dobson does? To create a shocking revelation and then sell it as a joke based on the fact that Alex, Atea and Talus react with jawdrops to it? It is not handling the death of those children with any form of gravitas in a story that supposedly is meant to be emotional and play with your heartstrings. And yes, we know nothing about those kids, they are essentially non entities to further the plot. But in context of the story, you have to consider, those kids that are “unimportant” to the reader? For the character of Sam, those people were family. At page 14, we as readers start to realize what Sam finding this locket and going back to his hometown only to find out everyone he knew is dead must mean for him. We, people with even an ounce of empathy and understanding how tragedies should be in part written realize, that shit just hit the fan for Sam and that the story should genuinely focus on how Sam would deal with such a tragedy. But does Dobson treat this revelation with any grace or dignity? NOPE!

It is just a bunch of information dropped on us randomly by an old guy who (I guess similar to Dobson) does not even care that kids died. They are just a plotdevice. Oh and also most of those kids died of an infectious disease where most people die of dehydration after literally shitting non stop. Just to add additional gravity and dignity to the loss of prepubescent lives that should count as Sam’s siblings.

You know, I have to change my opinion on Alex. She is not the worst abuser of Sam. The worst person to ever abuse Sam is Andrew Dobson himself. Cause at least Alex did not kill his extended “family”. And to think this “children comic” was written by the same guy who made a “So you are a Cartoonist” strip where he talked about how kids media can tell more mature comics with more gravitas than live action stuff and novels meant for people that aren’t just children, young adults or mentally stucked manchildren. Dobson, after this page you have no right to call your stuff “appropriate for children” or mature anymore.

I am genuinely furious at this page right now as that I can go on. So here, have the last page of this chapter so I can wrap this up and enjoy some good forms of fiction…

Well Atea, everyone he knew from this village and potentially cared about died in an house collapsing with no one having removed the remains still and he is going on a cemetery. UNLIKE DOBSON WHEN WRITING THIS, USE YOUR BRAIN YOU INSULT TO LESBIANS!

#Andrew Dobson #adobsonartwork #syac #alex ze pirate #sam the cabin boy #fuck you tom preston #tom preston #webcomic #comics #comic review #talus #atea #loss #so you are a cartoonist

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fredheads · 5 years ago

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Tell me about Fred being friends with other parents as a kid...

i think the parents he hung out with as a kid would have been hal, alice and fp the most. so....

alice and fred were inseparable when they were little kids! they were fiercely loyal to each other and no matter how dumb alice thought freds problems were and vice versa they’d move mountains to stick up for one another or help each other fix a problem. they absolutely did a blood brother oath and cut their hands. alice was mostly too smart and cynical to be into that stuff but she took her friendship with fred really seriously so she did the pact and meant it. she had long long blonde hair and scuffy hand me down clothes and she was a fighter through and through. fred was skinny and freckly and cute and always in muddy jeans or short gym shorts and a tshirt. idk if alice had a bike but she rode on the back of freds if not. their favourite thing to do together was them always doing dumb things that didn’t require money like climbing through the woods just picking up sticks and horsing around or playing sandlot baseball or climbing trees or pitching pennies or hiding in their “clubhouse” (probably just some random bush or log out in the woods) and maybe alice even showed him her secret hiding place thats up to you to say. but i can picture them crawling through various sewer pipes regardless. alice was considered one of the boys and she was always good to be the ninth for baseball or any sport. she felt a degree of protectiveness for fred cause she saw him as more sheltered than her. sometimes if fred had extra money he’d treat alice to a movie downtown or a bottle of pop from the convenience store (which he really didnt have to do because she was a deft shoplifter but it meant a lot when he bought it) and while alice sometimes resented owing him one and slugged him on the arm if he was too nice to her she secretly really liked the days they spent at the movies or in town or doing something special and nice. it was never awkward between them they understood each other really well.

hal was a good friend to have because he could always be counted to be thoughtful and practical. he could also get you out of trouble with grownups really easily because he had such a squeaky clean record himself. hal actually got things done. much like ben he knew how to build a dam and a clubhouse, he would actually do it methodically using knowledge from books (and school... he actually paid attention) rather than just throwing stuff around and making the most of what you could do (fred). he was already learning stuff about cars from his dad and he could handle tools and knew how to build a go cart properly. he was absolutely invaluable because of this knowledge and while fred would have been his friend anyway, hal always felt cheered by the knowledge that fred and the other kids liked having him around because of the things he was good at and he could genuinely help. he was also a good friend for playing cards or reading comic books or doing quiet things. and his mom made amazing snacks when you went over to his house after school and he owned and knew how to play every board game under the sun. (tbh this is because he was lonely a lot of the time and had to play by himself or with the teacher at recess... i wont get into that.) but oddly enough hal seemed happier when he and fred got to go away and play outside or over at fred’s for awhile. he loved his mom and he was comfy at home but sometimes when he was free for a bit he looked older and looser and more confident. but fred never told him this. he had his own bike and while it took a lot of exertion to get it going he had the best balance and could pedal harder than anyone else and still keep an eye on the road as not to get taken out by a truck. so if they ever had to carry anything or anyone important they went on hals bike.

fp as a kid is so interesting to think about. he was unfortunately already a really battered, cynical child and his table manners weren’t the best. with adults he was sulky and immature. with other kids he could be really standoffish and either mean and rude or withdrawn. but whenever he was around fred it was like something magic happened and he became a thousand times more animated. fred could draw out this comfortable side of him that no one else did where he would make jokes and initiate banter and games. he had a mischievous streak that came out. it was like suddenly he was wholeheartedly committed to the role of being freds sidekick and he was always trying to make fred laugh and smile. fred definitely saw him as more than a sidekick though, he considered fp his best friend and equal in the world in a really special way and looked up to him in turn. he would have given him half of his friendship necklace. once he found out fred wasnt going anywhere, fp got more confident in the personality he had when he was with fred. he could still get aggressive, withdrawn, mean, etc but only with people he didnt know. once they clicked they were best friends and they were always the ones to make friendship pacts/oaths etc. his friendship with fp was the first time fred started thinking in terms of having a designated Best Friend. Alice was always his best friend before but they didnt say it. fp was rarely bored doing things with fred, even if they were a lot more pointless and wholesome than the kind of play the trailer park kids did. fred had a way of making everything cool and important even if they were just kicking a can or playing a game of cards. they were bad at egging each other on, however, so they did get in trouble a lot... and they also didn’t have a lot of brain in their heads so they were always doing dangerous dumb things and paying for it. falling in the stream, falling off the roof, falling off their bikes, breaking windows, breaking bones, stealing things, setting off fireworks, etc etc... if fp had a bike it was some rusty trailer park thing and he was just as happy riding on the back of freds.

#we can talk about fredsythe childhood friends now cuz the flashback introduced that they all knew each other since kindergarten #but then said theyd never interacted?#sounds like bullshit #i think canonically these 3 would have been his closest childhood friends #or whatever passes for canon nowdays #canon to my world anyway #canon to my delusions #if i didnt hate f/lice so much id be interested in exploring fp/alice/fred as a childhood trio too #that would be interesting cuz fred is the only northsider in that group #idk if the 3 of them would hang out together.... much 2 think #i have a whole separate set of headcanons if we think of all of them hanging out as a group including mary and hiram and everyone #i would like to see baby hiram and fred also....#this is just gonna spiral into my it au but thats not important right now #thank u for the question i owe u my life #halcooper

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scripttorture · 5 years ago

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Torture in Fiction: The Umbrella Academy: Episode 1-6

I tried to start this saying I was only going to review episode 2 which has a prominent torture scene. Several hours later I am… significantly closer to the end of the series. So I thought I may as well include what I’ve watched.

The Umbrella Academy is a Netflix original series based on an independent comic book. With great acting, excellent music and a cast of deeply flawed characters it was (I understand) quite a hit.

I’m enjoying it a lot more then I thought I would. It’s violent but it’s also ridiculous in a way few stories but superhero comics tend to commit to. There’s a 60 year old man stuck in the body of a thirteen year old after travelling to an apocalyptic future and being in a thirty year relationship with a mannequin. And I just- I love comics.

This series feels very much like a superhero comic book on screen. With all the good and the bad that goes with that concept.

But I’m not here to tell you what I think of the superhero genre and it’s relationship with violence. I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the series itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

Umbrella Academy is the story about a group of very damaged people with super powers. Adopted as babies (born in extraordinary circumstances) by a millionaire ‘adventurer’ six of the Hargreeve children were raised to be superheroes. The seventh, apparently without powers, was isolated in a world of talking chimps, robots and extraordinary abilities.

The story starts with Reginald Hargreeve’s death and the five surviving children (including one who’d been living on the moon, apparently for years) meet for the funeral. In the course of this ‘Five’, teleports back from the future.

While the story overall focuses on the way an emotionally abusive and neglectful upbringing effects all of the major characters I’m going to be focusing on the clear instances of torture in and solitary confinement in some of the episodes.

Both Luther and Five are subjected to extreme solitary confinement. Luther is isolated on the moon for four years, Five is isolated as the last person alive for several decades.

Five stops up in a donut shop late at night and sits next to a tow truck driver. They have a brief conversation and the driver leaves. An armed gang then attacks Five. He kills them and two more people (Cha-Cha and Hzael) are sent after him, apparently by the same organisation.

Believing they’re looking for a man in his 50s they go after the tow driver. They torture him and while they eventually believe that he isn’t Five, they continue to torture him to get information on Five. The driver tells them everything that happened the night before.

Later Cha-Cha and Hazel mount a raid on the Hargreeves estate looking for Five. They don’t find him but they manage to capture his brother Klaus.

Klaus is an addict (what he takes is not explicitly defined) and talks to dead people. The two are linked throughout the story with the heavy implication that Klaus avoids sobriety in order to escape his powers.

Klaus is tied to a chair for about a day and a half. He’s beaten, strangled and ‘waterboarded’. (Cha-Cha calls it waterboarding but didn’t actually carry it out properly. I’ve assumed that was for the safety of the actors).

Klaus escapes and shows no mobility problems after being cut off the chair. He then spends several months in 1968 (as you do). On his return his mental health problems seem to be no worse then they were before he was tortured.

I’m giving it 0/10

The Good

The actual forms of torture shown in The Umbrella Academy are reasonably realistic. They’re not always accurate to the time period or place, but when time travel is involved I’m willing to let that slide. The electrical torture shown, with a battery and bulldog clips, could be taken directly from Alleg’s accounts of his experience at the hands of French troops in Algeria. The stress positions and strangulation are shown realistically. And while the waterboarding isn’t shown realistically I think it was done this way to protect the actor and allow him to breathe.

The Bad

I’ve covered solitary confinement before. The estimated safe period for most people is about a week. While both Luther and Five has a strong sense of purpose during their confinement (and this seems to be a protective factor) that wouldn’t help a lot when they’re confined for such an unrealistically long period. At four years Luther should be a complete mental and physical wreck. At several decades including puberty, Five shouldn’t be able to interact normally with people and should be more obviously mentally ill then Klaus. Both of them are shown without symptoms and this downplays the damage of torture that’s routinely depicted as harmless.

Umbrella Academy shows torture ‘working’ with victims giving up accurate information if only you know how to hurt them. This isn’t true. Torture can’t result in accurate information. This kind of misinformation encourages torture in real life.

Klaus’ response to torture is to thank his torturers for inflicted pain with the strong implication that he’s enjoying being tortured. It’s implied that he’s turned on by pain so ‘can’t’ be traumatised or hurt by torture. This is ridiculous and insulting to both the BDSM community and torture survivors. BDSM practitioners don’t stop feeling pain and they aren’t immune to trauma. There is a world of difference between a consensual and non-consensual encounter. Personally I think this kind of portrayal is akin to suggesting that victims can’t be raped because they’ve previous enjoyed sex. It’s unacceptable.

Klaus is held in a stress position for at least a day. This is a survivable time frame but on release he should have significant mobility issues and should have needed help escaping. Instead he’s perfectly capable of making his way out with a heavy time-travel device. He can walk and move his arms freely. This completely ignores that the way he was held is torturous.

Neither Cha-Cha nor Hazel show any of the mental health problems typical of torturers. They’re portrayed as competent and able to investigate effectively, even though they torture. Torturers are not good investigators and torture consistently undermines effective investigation. Realistically a character can be one or the other, not both.

Cha-Cha and Hazel are also depicted as good fighters and generally skilled. In reality torture produces a deskilling effect in torturers, they get worse at what they do.

Cha-Cha and Hazel are shown as obedient to their superiors, only targetting people who have information or are ordered as targets. This isn’t how torturers operate. They disobey orders, ignore superiors and target a wide array of people who usually have nothing to do with anything the torturers are supposed to investigate.

No one in the series so far has shown any long standing mental health problems as a result of torture or isolation.

No one has shown any memory problems as a result of torture or isolation.

The end result is that the series suggests torture doesn’t have any long term effects at all.

Overall

I think this series really highlights something I’ve been saying a lot on the blog: It’s very easy to find realistic depictions of how torture is carried out and it’s very hard to find realistic depictions of the effect it has on people.

These episodes, and I suspect (from what I’ve seen) the series more generally handles torture terribly. It’s unrealistic and it’s parroting a lot of tropes that either excuse torture or belittle survivors.

That didn’t get in the way of me enjoying the series outside of these scenes. There are a lot of great characters and character moments.

But none of that excuses this senseless repetition of torture apologia.

For a series that works so hard to highlight the effect of childhood emotional abuse it downplays the effects of physical abuse at every turn.

It uses torture as a short cut in the plot. It portrays torturers as smart and restrained badasses.

It basically does virtually everything I advise writers not to do.

And this comes about simply by repeating the same old genre tropes without bothering to look up the subjects involved.

There are other ways to have your bad guys find out the information they need to know. There are other ways to establish them as terrible people.

There are realistic ways to show people resisting torture, which don’t diminish the pain they suffered.

I think what I want to stress most of all is that this apologia is unnecessary. It doesn’t add anything to the story. The fun stuff, the super heroics, the ridiculous time travel escapades and carefully choreographed fight scenes can all happen without apologia as the background noise.

For once- I’m not really mad. I’m disappointed. That these tropes creep into genre after genre, put down roots and keep coming back up. The mainstay of this story wouldn’t be any different if they took out torture or even used it in a more realistic way.

Five’s isolation in an apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t last. He’s picked up by an agency of time travellers and offered a job. This could have happened more quickly, especially since the time he spends alone and the time he spends with the agency are both poorly defined.

Luther’s trip to the moon functions to build a wall between him and his siblings. And again, that could have happened in a much shorter time frame.

Cha-Cha and Hazel could have just interviewed the tow truck driver for their information. They’re shown conducting successful interviews later.

Klaus’ resistance could have been framed as natural and there are several points in his dialogue already that could have supported that. The story could have used the fact that Klaus genuinely does not know where Five is.

In the end The Umbrella Academy’s use of torture is a waste of narrative space. None of these torture scenes are essential to the plot and every single one of them is handled badly.

It’s an example of a narrative that wasn’t prepared to commit to showing the consequences of torture.

We can all do better.

Edit: I forgot the full title. Oops.

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#tw torture #tw rape #torture in fiction #the umbrella academy #torture apologia #solitary confinement #mental illness #superheroes #writing victims #writing torturers #torture and memory #stress positions #electrical torture

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