#lantern corps sorting

[scattered-winter]

ok @tarantula-hawk-wasp this is my TENTATIVE lineup (i keep changing my mind so who knows how long ill have these opinions lmaoooo) but i wanna preface this by saying that EVERYONE could be green because they all fit the bill pretty well for that one. but i tried to dig deeper to see What Else they could be <3 (but there's some who were like. Green. theyre green.)

shiro: BLUE <3 the thing i love about shiro is that he's been through soooo fucking much but he's come out the other end still upright and ready to fight and be supportive and loving and goofy and protect the universe even though he's sooo so tired and sooo so scared. he's the EMBODIMENT of hope it drives me fucking insane <3 so yeah blue was the first color i thought of for him and i have yet to change my mind on that one

keith: he started out red (especially as a younger teen like.....kid was abandoned by his mother, dad died, lived in the system for years, of COURSE he was angry as fuck) but the thing abt red lanterns is that they can only remove their rings (and let go of the rage...) with the help of a blue lantern........shiro helps him move past the rage and trauma.........and yeah. I'm also a green lantern keith truther because by GOD is he tenacious as fuck.

lance: i also had a pretty hard time pinning him down, and im still thinking about him so idk if this is set in stone yet, BUT he's giving white lantern vibes. ngl. (white lanterns are The Entire Emotional Spectrum. they have to master all 7 colors) but tbh because lance is such a "jack of all trades" kinda guy i feel like it fits ??? especially since i could conceivably make an argument for him to fit. pretty much most of the colors. but again he's hard to pin down so i might need to think about this one a little more

pidge: my initial thought was also green tbh. she DOESN'T give up ever i dont think the words are even in her vocabulary. however i could also make a strong argument for blue because throughout the entire first few seasons she had SO much hope that her family was alive somewhere in space. but i feel like she fits green better so idk

hunk: he was also pretty hard to pin down because YES he is very compassionate, but the indigo corps are . lowkey kinda fucked up . however im choosing to go the route of ignoring that and just thinking abt the color + its emotion, not the corps and all their baggage, so YEAH in that case hunk is sooo indigo To Me. i could also make some arguments for blue or pink (star sapphire), BUT i could also make an argument for yellow (fear) HEAR ME OUT hear me out. i have a lot of thoughts about hunk's bayard form because the bayards are supposed to be a reflection of the paladins, right? well it's always confused me that hunk has such an explosive and aggressive bayard when he's Not Either Of Those Things. but To Me in the rich inner world hunk's bayard is a big cannon for the intimidation factor so he can avoid conflict as much as possible by making the enemy want to surrender without a fight. AND hunk is always the most visibly afraid of the group so idk idk. something something fear is an old friend to him and he's even mastered it...

allura: STAR SAPPHIRE. again, the star sapphire corps are kinda. fucked up. BUT since we're going the route of just looking at the ring itself with indigo, we'll do the same for violet/pink <3 allura's entire CHARACTER is about love....her father, her people, her planet, her culture.....grief is love and love is grief.......she fights because she lost all the things she loved and because she found a new family to love and protect.....et cetera......... (star sapphires But Platonic....auuuguhhh)

lastly, coran: probably green tbh.......but that's mostly because i really don't know where else to put him. nothing else is really jumping out at me at least </3 i suppose i Could make an argument for blue since it takes a lot of hope for the future to have lost LITERALLY everything and still be so goofysilly and loving and supportive. but i truly have not had any thoughts about him alas. i will need to think more about it

[rayfishandchips]

Some Kyle caps from Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps, mostly his interactions with Hal. They're such a fun duo to watch.

Not sure if this counts as spoilers but I'll tag just in case.

Kyle is such a mood. The kid's growing on me with his 90s everyman persona and art reference books.

[kindlingkeen]

What lantern colour would you give to Jason + why?

Okay, let me start off by saying I’m really in no way qualified to form an opinion on this topic. My knowledge of the Lantern Corps is pretty much limited to that godawful movie with Ryan Reynolds, Hal Jordan in batfam fics, some JayKyle art on tumblr that I find really intriguing, and one really fun fic where Jason becomes a star sapphire (With Violet Light by Evilpixie). But, hey, I just spent 15 minutes researching the Corps on Wikipedia and bunch of fandom pages, so let’s do this thing.

Of the options, the three I considered the most seriously are:

Green. Jason’s got iron willpower in spades. Plus, Jason already has a thing for green, and just think about how much it would piss Bruce off.

Blue: I actually think Jason’s capacity for hope is what keeps him going. You don’t die twice and systematically lose or become estranged from everyone in your life you ever loved without being able to hope for a better tomorrow. Plus, blue is my favorite color. I dunno if Jason could handle needing a GL around to make his ring fully function, though. I kind of think he’d give it a month and then say fuck this, I’m going back to the guns.

White: I mean the resurrection tie-in is just so on the nose. Also, I really want to read the buddy-cop fic where Jay and Kyle travel the galaxy as White Lanterns.

Drum roll please …

I think I’m going to have to go with the classic and say Green.

Thanks so much for the ask, anon. This was fun. Now I want to hear from y’all - which Lantern would Jason be and why???

[savanir]

The What Corps?

“we have you now spook! there is nowhere you can run and hide with our new spectral tethers active!”

Danny winces at the small metal clips that have hooked themselves in his leg, some new GIW tech that is messing with his powers.

“oh yeah? I was just dying for you guys to give me a challenge” plan. plan. He's gotta think of a plan to get out of here and fast. He takes a steadying breath and starts to look for anything that can help him.

he can’t get caught here. He just can't. He simply won’t allow himself.

suddenly the two GIW goons in front of him click their earpieces to clearly listen to what someone else is telling them, Danny is very glad for his own enhanced senses.

“Operatives K and O, be advised, there have been sightings of a new ectoplasmic entity near your location. Other operatives report that it’s incredibly small and moves fast. watch your backs, this may be an ambush”

small and fast? it better not be some poor little blob ghost, Danny sort of hopes it’s some manner of ectowasp, at least that could be entertaining to see.

“you better not be hoping for back up, ecto scum”

“I have no idea what you are talking about”

It's then that a small bright green light zips on scene and weaves through crowds in the distance with ease and then speeds up towards the two operatives who do not hesitate to shoot, missing completely like the storm troopers they are.

Whatever it is, it is indeed going very fast but Danny manages to figure out what it looks like and it appears to be a… ring?

“hold it you tiny accessory shaped ecto fiend!”

The ring does a speedy circle around Operative O while K is lining up a shot and ends up blasting the poor guy point blank in his face, “O!”

Danny takes a step forward with an arm outstretched and a “oh damn! Are you alright?” on his lips when the ring takes the chance to slip on his finger. “Daniel Fenton of Earth”

Danny already had a freakout about a ghost jewelry getting on him, his experiences with those so far have been incredibly bad after all, what with the rings and crowns and pendants… now this damn thing is just straight up outing him! 

Thank the ancients the two GIW stooges are too busy with each other right now to pay close attention to what this weird ring is saying.

“You have the ability to overcome great fear” ah so this is related to him steeling himself just now? Maybe? or something??

You have been chosen” never good, we are back to freaking out again.

“Welcome to the green lantern corps” 

… the what?

Danny notices that his usual outfit suddenly has more green going on, and his DP symbol has some sort of… he guess it’s supposed to be a lantern, maybe? shape around it.

He’s somehow even more glowy now, and there is something on his face. Feeling its shape makes him think it’s some sort of mask.

The metal clip things are no longer attached to his legs though so that’s great!

“You’re not getting away so easily ecto scum! sentient ghost paraphernalia coming to your rescue or no!” They both aim their weapons to take a shot.

Danny figures he can now easily hold them back with his usual shields,“you guys realize you just called this weird ring sentient and thereby negate the whole nonsentie-ack!”

“Attacking a corps lantern is punishable offense as of the instatement of the galactic diplomatic immunity as declared by the-” Okay so now Danny is just raising his eyebrow at this weird as fuck ring. Just what is it going on about?

“notifying nearby lanterns and requesting assistance with apprehension of hostiles”

what?

“getting your friends to help you out vile spook? such a thing is useless with the Blackout still very much in place”

Well… the two streaks of green light in the distance is making Danny doubt that statement.

Maybe there is more to this Lantern corps thing than he thought… And something tells him his life is about to get even more complicated than it already is.

[random-movie-ideas]

Green Lantern Ally Movie Ideas, Part IV: The Other Lantern Corps

Many of these we've covered in at least some aspect so far, with the Sinestro Corps, Red Lantern Corps, Agent Orange, Star Sapphire, and the Black Lanterns all acting as major villains at various points, which leaves us with the Blue Lanterns, best represented by Saint Walker, who are the closest allies of the Greens, amplifying their willpower with the power of hope, and the Indigo Tribe, a reclusive group spreading compassion throughout the galaxy. There is also the White Lanterns, formed from pure life energy to help fight the Black Lanterns. All have their own Lanterns, a corps of some kind, and each is powered by an entity representing the emotion they represent.

Origin Movie: For simplicity's sake, most origins would likely only include Green, with maybe Yellow or Red to establish the enmity between the respective corps. Unless you wanted to go all in, and maybe tell a full space odyssey with an alien protagonist, where all of these Corps are just a fact of their world. And . . . now I'm rethinking all my plans because I like that idea too much.

Sequel Movie: Blue and Violet are both solid colors to introduce in a sequel, as allies/anti-heroes, and Larfleeze is a lovely option for a sequel villain. Likewise, Sinestro or Atrocitus could easily be saved for later if you wanted to keep the origin simple.

Finale Movie: Black Lanterns are an obvious finale bait, and the Indigo Lanterns not appearing until the Blackest Night suggests they would work well to be saved for a finale as well.

Standalone Movie: I really want to formulate a story arc/mini-series something, where at least the main seven just exist in the universe, each serving their own roles, with a group of new recruits who form a team, but are each part of a different corps. I need to find a place for this . . . and that's how I could get in a lot of those more standard villains. I--

Anyway, here are my rankings of them:

Origin Movie

Sequel Movie

Finale Movie: All follow a natural order of introduction and a series would be best suited to follow that order.

Standalone Movie: I WANT!!

What do you think? Tomorrow, let's cover the Guardians themselves and finish this series.

[ambunyun]

DC x DP Prompt (1)

Danny became a living planet.

It all started with Sam's ramble about environmentalism, and then she suggested creating a miniature ecosystem of their own for a school project.

One thing leads to another, Danny managed to find a ton of extinct plants and flora in the Ghost Zone, some exotic specimens scientists had never heard of before - to vegetations of alien origins.

And apparently, all of them are growable - just not in the conventional sense. Since all of them were technically 'dead' or 'extinct', they behaved like ghosts in the sense that they had cores, which meant that as long as Danny fed them ectoplasm, they could grow and develop like ordinary plants!

Just one small problem, he didn't exactly have a place to grow all of these. Until Tucker had a brilliant idea, just pick a random exoplanet and grow them there, ecto-plants could grow no matter the atmosphere or soil conditions anyway - as long as Danny was always there to supplement the needed ectoplasm. Problem solved! Danny even got to satisfy his space obsession!

On the other hand, the Justice League and Green Lantern Corp were greatly confused about a random barren planet in the same sector as Earth that suddenly became lush with all types of exotic plants, including precious plant-lives that had gone extinct from the galaxies for millennia, from Earth and other planets. Despite all readings indicating that the planet had no way of sustaining life.

This escalated when some Green Lanterns came to visit, and Danny (now a vital, omnipresent part of the planet's ecosystem) greeted them with the enthusiasm of an angry cat hissing intruders away from his favorite box. Now everyone was convinced some sort of god or spirit of nature existed on that planet and was possibly hostile.

This escalated again when some other alien civilizations realized that a random planet in the Milky Way possessed incredibly valuable plant-life that was believed to be extinct. And now they were ready to invade the sector. Now the Justice League had to scramble to protect this incredibly valuable planet from the wrong hands.

Danny, meanwhile, was completely oblivious to everything.

[evilminji]

Wait... Spidori... does that mean the White Lantern Entity is probably somewhere in the Local Zone? Even if they're NOT and are hanging around their Death Site on the Zone side...

Pretty sure they WOULD NOT just be the sort to go "oh well :/ guess I'm dead. Better just move on then and forget what I was doing in life. Off to the afterlife with me~!" Like? Pretty sure they would BY NATURE make Death fuckin fight them. Would kick and bite and claw and curse.

........oh shit.

There is a good chance? That White Lantern Ring is shouting "Buddy! Oh THERE you are! Man, it took me FOREVER to find you! :D let's get back to work!" As it merrily shoots passed, JUST as everything is starting to calm down. Probably followed by the REST of the free rings in the spectrum.

Like?

Oh... Oh No(tm).

The Lantern System is NOT BUILT or structured for a cataclysmicly large Sudden Influx of Immortal Veterans. All of whom are, by their new nature, OBSESSIVELY and thus absurdly POWERFULLY feeling their specific Emotional Energy and focused on their specific Tasks/Quadrants/Unfinished Business. Lanterns that never need to eat or sleep.

Who might not take well, some Interloper trying to keep them from doing their Task.

The hyperfocus is both REAL and probably terrifying.

Cause it's not just the massive new Lantern Influx. It's the natural and unwavering Obsessions. The "I will listen too you only so far as you don't tell me to stop doing X, after that? I immediately go rouge." Just?

You can't take the rings BACK. Even with the power to revoke them, you'd only be setting Immortal Lanterns against any newbie you try and assign. They'd CHASE DOWN any available Ring. Meaning you'd have to start Personally Escorting the rings. All of them.

You don't HAVE that sort of man power.

And it just keeps spiraling from there! Not to even TOUCH on the Darkest Night Tauma Flashbacks everyone is getting, seeing the White Lantern Being.

And that poor dude in his car. He just needed some milk, maybe a snacky treat. Now he has the front row seats to intergalactic History in the making. Those are SHIT SEATS, MAN. No one wants to Make History! Nothing ever good happens at events like those! Especially not HERE!

All while Danny is like "Why does it have to be one my front lawn. TT^TT why can't Amity ever just be Chill for FIVE GODDAMN SECONDS. Please... please take this literally ANYWHWRE else. Where I'm not in charge of collateral damages. This is cool and all... but I still have reports to write and a research paper due Friday. GDI that portal is a curse upon me specifically and the universe in general!"

...Wait. ACTUALLY???

The Portal is basically a doorway right? Big ol solid and sustained gateway from Realm A to Universe B? Unlike the brief blips of natural portals?

As IN... a Ring could therefore, theoretically, send out it's Search For Willpower. EXE vibes? Hit the portal -> go THROUGH the portal -> and continue expanding as the search continued until it hit a Confirmed Match(tm)?

You know... somebody INCREDIBLY SUPER LIKELY to match? Like... say... a Dead Green Lantern who? Had the WILL to continue on as a Ghost? Probably would get priority over any untested "new" Lantern candidates? Since they are somehow both in the system and not?

Recognized, yet a different species somehow?

The Rings records mark them deceased. Yet here they are, without a Ring. Which they OBVIOUSLY need, as Lanterns. Because once a Lantern, always a Lantern. Nyooom~ off it goes.

Off? Probably a whole SHIT TON of them go. Like? A truely, TRUELY alarming amount.

Think hundreds of thousands, suddenly wrenching themselves free of their stands and SHOOTING into the sky. Yes, a few at a time is normal. Day in, day out. Hundreds a day.

Not upwards of millions.

Not all at once.

A SEA of green orbs shooting up into the night sky like shooting stars. So many it chokes the sky. Drives everything to a stand still. All of them going the same direction. Some... EVENT... has just happened and no one knows what it is.

You have no choice but to follow them. Figure out where they are going and what's DRAWING them. You fly for weeks. Take shifts, following them. Alarm countless innocent people and more then a few governments.

It's....? Earth? Fuck. Of COURSE it had to be that God forsaken rock. EVERYTHING seems to come from there! Do you have ANY IDEA how many Lanterns they have stationed there by now? Multiple times the amount ENTIRE QUADRENTS usually take.

Why is it ALWAYS that planet?? Someone call Hal and his merry band of migraines. They're coming in hot. And NO, we CANT stop them. Don't bother asking. We ALSO have no idea where they're headed.

Think about being in Amity. Quiet day for once. You don't trust it. Something gonna happen, you can FEEL it.

A ring shoots past you. Then another. And another. Then dozens. Hundreds. THOUSANDS. Green, glowing, and like they were shot from a gun. The sky hailing ghost jewelry because God hate Amity specifically, apparently, and FUCK your premiums. You dive for your car.

Watch, baffled, at the Fenton house is SWARMED. The local crack pots are trying to shoot at RINGS. Failing to hit a single one. The swarm organized, writhing, and gracefully ALIVE somehow.

Aliens shoot past your car. They're wearing LANTERN get ups. Fighting the local crackpots. The sky is FULL of Lanterns now. Oh god, first Ghosts, now Aliens. Your mother was right. You SHOULD have stayed in Ohio with her sister.

The Rings break the Fenton's door down. The clattering is CACOPHONOUS as they push and shove to race inside. You watch the doorway. Some instinct telling you not to look away. Even as Lanterns and crazy people are shooting at each other not yards away.

Watch. The. Door.

Ghosts come back out. ALIEN Ghosts. Wearing LANTERN rings. Your jaw drops as they just... just KEEP coming. Every last one of them wearing a ring. You struggle to remember how many there WERE. As the sky turns GREEN. As Amity truely DOES become the most haunted place... anywhere.

You're pretty sure in the oceans of GREEN you spot the Justice League. You DEFINITELY spot Phantom. Thank god. No Spooks ever get away with shady nonsense on HIS watch, so whatever happening? 'S gonna get sorted.

And JUST? As you think... maybe, JUST maybe... you could just? Inch your car into drive, and sloooowly get the fuck out of whatever THIS mess it? Those white suited crazy people from the Feds show up and start trying to ARREST the SPACE COPS. For not letting them take unprovoked attacks on OTHER Space Cops!

Oh Shit(tm).

@hdgnj @ailithnight @hypewinter @nerdpoe @lolottes

[wifelinkmtg]

TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT

So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"

The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?

And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?

INTRODUCING: THE DITCH

There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.

And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?

So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.

Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?

There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.

Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.

There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.

Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.

And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.

There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...

SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]

We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?

Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)

In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.

So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.

Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:

Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?

Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?

SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU

There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.

The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.

There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.

A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.

Do you get it now?

ENDNOTES

It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.

I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.

I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.

[unadulteratedsoulsweets]

A DC X DP IDEA #27

They’re the strongest?!?!

Imagine dis…

You know … I read too much humans are space orcs fic, prompts, ideas… etc.

But I still like Danny Phantom and DC…

And I remember that one A03 fic…

…

Another alien invasion is another Wednesday for the JL but it seems like they are quite different. Not only they are known as invaders in the Green Lantern Corps but they also have some sort of code among warriors, they give a chance to the species they are invading to fight back. By having their strongest fight against their strongest. It is not through fighting to the death as different planets have different climates and terrains and thus have their version of the Olympic games but instead of rewarding the participants medals, they were rewarded their planet's safety, but Hal commented that the challenges are too staged, too well known to the invading aliens. Since the ones defending have no idea how to approach the challenges, they always end up losing. Green Arrow commented that since they can just send out the Big Blue boy scout, Hal shook his head as they have to be the same species one planet already tried it by asking aid from another planet and not only lost but the invading aliens got 2 planets, plus they’ll bring it up to the galaxy court system and put them in a tight spot. Of course, Aquaman blinked with confusion and asked if there was a court system for the galaxy.

…

So of course, when the said invading aliens landed on the Milky Way and broadcasted their intentions. The JL already have a team to fight them, of course, we have Batman with his cunning mind, Wonder Woman for her chivalry and strength, Flash for his speed, Doctor Fate for his mastery of magic, and Cyborg for technological skills. Just as they were about to tell the invading aliens that they had already picked their strongest, another announcement popped out. Apparently to even out the playing field they have a new technology to help them pick out their strongest for them. As if they were talking to kids and promptly pressed the bottom to automatically select the earth’s strongest.

The heroes at the space station as well those around the world who were debriefed about the situation a week before are already bracing themselves to be picked, while the citizens around the globe are all now watching and anticipating as not only this a new thing as the majority of their alien invasion they immediately went to evacuation.

Who appeared/ chosen immediately made both sides' jaws drop….

Three?

Only three are chosen…

An adult, a teen, and a child?

A man who wore a blue rental suit with glasses, blue eyes and black hair. Which the Metropolis recognizes as one of their own. Clark Kent, a reporter with fame and reputation on par with the famed Lois Lane. The ideal model of someone who came from the countryside and made a name and life in the big city.

An 11-year-old boy with blue eyes and black hair who wore a red hoodie, faded jeans, and red shoes, in which the city Fawcett knew of. Billy Batson was, a former foster kid on the run until he found his forever home with the couple named Victor and Rosa Vasquez who also fostered a couple of kids, which Billy claims as his siblings. A kind kid who kept doing good around him and his community.

Lastly, a teen, again with blue eyes and black hair wore a faded NASA hoodie, and blue jeans with faint eye bags which was a small town in Amity Park where he came from. Danny Fenton, the only son of the two leading scientists of ecto-biologists in ecotology, the one who realized that one of the two purple-back gorillas is a female thus avoiding extinction.

…

Clark Kent by day and Superman by night knew about the invading aliens. He also knew that he could not participate despite being raised on Earth made him unqualified to join. So, imagine his shock when he suddenly found himself with two earth children in the middle of a large arena with futuristic cameras looking at them. He is now in an internal dilemma; how can he save the two kids, while he tries to save Earth altogether?

This train of thought also passed by the young Billy Batson on the said teen, Billy already knew that Superman was already thinking of saving the both of them. Now his priority is to survive and keep his secret ID a secret for a bit longer.

…

Danny on the other hand has a completely different train of thought, he was just about to reach his room. His beautiful room where his bed is, he had just finished a four-hour exam to bring his grades back up to an acceptable level, 9 continuous ghost attacks, another nonsense quarrel between the observers and he is close to committing anarchy just so he can have the same treatment to Pariah Dark, an eternal sleep in a comfortable looking Sarcophagus of Forever Sleep.

So imagine his surprise when he is suddenly teleported to what looks like an alien ship, Danny would usually be ecstatic but they have interrupted him, he is so close to his bed. He knew that there would be some sort of an invasion as he remembered the bits and pieces from Tucker’s ramble when they last hung out together.

He doesn’t care if aliens invade Earth, but if you come between him and his bed. He will make sure of what he will do to those who disturb him, he will make his fight with his future self and Pariah Dark like child’s play.

…

The Justice League kept on insisting that they had already chosen their fighters and those who appeared in the middle of their arena were civilians, not warriors. But the invading aliens stayed on their decision and immediately began the games.

The rest of the heroes are now scrambling to not only stop the invading aliens but also save the 2 civilians who were randomly selected.

While the rest of the League is now panicking the rest of the world is now in an outrage. Sending out a civilian man and children by the alien's weird machinery.

The Fenton couples are especially rabid as, if there is anything that tops their ghost obsession, it would be their children’s safety. The family of Batson are on the edge of their seats as they worry for Billy.

…

The games begin with an opening of rules and such, as well as an introduction to the alien’s warriors who are big and full of muscles making the Earth team look so tiny.

The first game starts with a simple hunting game with very minimal clues and tools at their disposal to find what they seek. Clark can crack the code on to where to hunt but it is a dangerous environment, Clark discusses it with his teammates on how to catch it, Clark is already thinking if he should reveal himself as a meta with strength but Danny just glares at the man and grabbed capturing tools form the table and sought out the thing they are designated to hunt.

The other team took a glance at Team Earth and warbled some snickers at how they took looking/hunting too fast without any plans and went back to their planning.

Clark and Billy are worried for their other teammate but after a few minutes, they hear a roar some shuffles, and then silence.

Back on earth, most people are horrified a what could be the teen’s fate but when footsteps were heard they saw the teen again scathed, with a few scratches, and a hulking beast all tied up from its muzzle to its tails.

Clark nervously asked, still maintaining his civilian identity, how on earth Danny had caught such a beast. Danny’s only response was, back from where he came a certain ”friend” really wanted “someone’s” pelt on a wall and learned some things while HE was chasing that “something”.

That starts the Danny effect…

…

A tag sort of game as there is a hunter to hunt them down and their objective is to hide longer than the other team, with both Billy and Danny a part, while Billy lasted a few hours with his wit and skills that he honed during his time when he ran from CPS and the police during his days as a foster child, which is impressive itself as he got two of the other team’s members to be captured first before him. Danny outlasted Billy and the rest of the other team won the game in a landslide and gained some bonus points by not only redirecting the hunter and leading them into a false trail or a dead end but also messing with the said hunter without being spotted by him.

Cooking with live and weird ingredients? Clark initially volunteered to do it as he has a stomach of steel being an alien but cannot cook as he has no idea which ingredient is edible as all alien dishes and ingredients come from Krypton and he has to impress the judges who put them in a disadvantage as the judges are from the same race as the opposing team. Danny just shook his head at Clark quickly put on an apron and set to work.

Clark and Billy immediately turned green at the sight as Danny nonchalantly battled the live ingredients, from the meat section to what seems to be the fruit and vegetable section, It is bloody as it is and quite fascinating as it is disgusting. All their years in the Justice League they have seen some twisted and weird things but seeing their third teammate casually stab what looked like an unholy cross hybrid between an octopus and a shark trying to crawl away from the carnage, cleaned the weird animal from the inside out and fillet it.

Of course, they are in disbelief when the judges practically moan the moment, they taste Danny’s dish. Clark and Billy are pretty sure one of the judges is planning to spare Danny and turn him into their chef if the invasion continues, with the way they look at Danny. The judges reluctantly let Danny’s dish win.

Billy reluctantly asked Danny where he learned to cook like that, Danny’s only response was a grumble of a sound that seemed to sound like at home but that cannot be, right?

Trying to survive an onslaught of hypnotic plants native to the alien’s home world, Danny once again won and even began criticizing the plants for how their music was so horrible that it would not even wake the dead.

Play some sort of FIGHTING VIDEO GAME that is popular in 5 sectors in their part of the galaxy, Danny wins and repeatedly shoots the aliens with pure hatred and anger in his eyes, Clark has to physically drag Danny out of the arena to stop his onslaught of firing to the poor guy who was already on the verge of crying.

And so on with the Earth’s team leading COUGH Danny COUGH and demolishing the invading aliens from their games.

After a while the games are done and Team Earth wins with a massive gap to the invading aliens. They returned the three in the middle of the Metropolis and went away without so much a fuss…

Well, expect that one chef in their midst how begged the leader to take Danny and only him with them but the leader is already fearing for his life as the last few games that humans began to be more feral by the second and he was sure he is also a second away from being the one at the other end of his chopping board.

…

Back on earth everyone cheered on the three and began flashing them their camera lights to get a new scoop, and one brave reporter even tried to interview Danny but when people tried to look for the elusive teen he seemingly disappeared.

Clark knew Danny was, sleeping peacefully in the middle of the bushes a few feet away from them, and kept quiet as he was late to realize that Danny was on the verge of a crash like Red Robin is when he pulled something like this when Conner invited him.

…

PS: If someone out there wanted to continue or make a fic about this you are free to do so, don’t forget to tag me though.

[dcxdpdabbles]

Could we get a continuation of a cluster of cores? Teen parent Danny is gonna be run ragged with so many little ones and it will only be a matter of time before Dani and Lian shows them the Puppy Eyes, good thing there gonna have plenty of aunts and uncles to also bully.

Roy's newfound hero is still locked in a coma. It's been nearly three months now, and they had managed to keep him alive with tubes feeding him food and water, but it worried everyone they could not figure out the reason for his slumber.

Dani, the young alien girl, assured everyone it was fine, as she could naturally sense her father's core healing. Despite their humanoid appearance, a quick scan showed that the Fentons (as Dani had identified them) were indeed aliens.

Then there were their documents. They were all legal... in Daxam, where these travelers were from. He had contacted the Justice League, and the Green Lanterns had easily authenticated their identities.

Daxam was a plant with a red sun, one that had life forms similar to those of Kryptonians. However, the natives of the plant, before Krypton colonized it, were different in how their young were born and the origin of their powers.

Roy has learned through the Oa headquarters records that Indigenous Daxamites were formed within cores. These egg-like parts held the entity of their souls but at too different times to fully hatch, so a sibling of a cluster could hatch five years before the rest. When they formed, their powers came from an "Obsession" or a part of their environment instead of just the sun.

Their culture and species revolved heavily around the child clusters, as Indigenous Daxamite could only lay them once in their lifetime. This was disastrous when their kind was slowly hunted into extinction, as Daxam was conquered nearly a hundred thousand years ago and became a colony by Krypton.

The Kryptonians had always targeted the clusters before they could hatch, drastically declining the numbers of Daxamites.

The Indigenous Daxamites had nearly been wiped out in a horrific genocide during the colonization days, and the remaining ones had been mixed with Kryptonians to the point their species had evolved.

The cluster of core births was nothing more than history to the planet, even when outliving Krypton. That did not mean that the generational racism died with the Kryptonians.

Daxamites had become hostile to the original Daxam dwellers (Roy found records of Kryptonians demonizing the species, often referring to their god Rao commanding them to cleanse the planet for daring to gain power from pagan gods. He is pretty sure that was just an excuse for the holy war, as Clark had never mentioned anything in.), and a sort of witch hunt for any pure Indigenous Daxamite sprung to life a thousand years ago.

The Green Lanterns corps had to step in when word reached them, but by that point, many innocent Daxamites had been executed on accusations alone of being Indigenous Daxamites. To the heavy heart of the reporting Green Lantersn, the Indigenous Daxamites have been wiped from existence because of the witch trials a good nine hundred years ago.

Oh, so they thought.

Danny Fenton and his children may as well be the very last of their kind. Roy figured that Danny and his people had hidden themselves from their government.

He likely had spent his life attempting to keep his kind a secret, as his planet had been under the thumb of an oppressive dictatorship since Krypton had perished. Daxam was notorious for its complicated border control, which made leaving the planet near impossible.

He is still determining what led to Danny's discovery, but based on what they managed to salvage from the bomb site of his once house, Danny fled his planet after his secret was outed.

There was an active warrant for his capture on Daxam and an open order to neutralize his "demonic unholy offspring." Roy felt sick when he heard from a grim-faced John Stewart, the Green Lanter working as their intermediary between the two planets, that the populace on Daxam had been campaigning for Danny's death to be slow and public, as the hatred for his kind was that deep.

Dani refused to explain how her father smuggled them all out. She mentioned a few times that they had help from a mysterious "Clockwork" but had to keep a tight lid on anything else.

All they knew for sure was that Danny was severely damaged from the escape, and his constant feedings to his young (even in his sleep, his body naturally sent over ectoplasm to the cluster that never left this side) had put him in grave danger when he saved Lian. Roy still held his daughter only because this man risked everything for a child of a planet he had no ties to.

He was willing to take on all Daxam if they dared to come for Danny for that alone.

Thankfully, Justice Leauge felt the same way, and with the support of the Green Lanterns Corp, they were debating with the galactic high court to make Danny a citizen of Earth using asylum. Things were looking good for their cause, given that Danny was with a child (children??) and that his small family was an endangered species.

The Justice League was also a recognized police force by the galactic association, no matter how new, so their word carried a lot in the court.

Roy was letting the big names handle everything political. Bruce, especially, was working overtime since the big bad bat had a giant soft spot for children. He focused more on his living situation and Danny himself.

Not only because they were best friends but because Gotham seemed to be one of the only cities with "ectoplasm" (High-density levels of death?? It was naturally, according to Daxam) that the Fentons needed. Danny was resting in the Drake Hospital of Gotham, while Dani had been housed with Jason.

Jason had been more than willing to open his home to Roy and Lian until they could return to their city. They were among the many houses destroyed, so it would be a while before their home was fixed. Oliver extended the same offer, wanting his son and granddaughter back home with him.

He would have taken Oliver's offer had Jason not asked first. Things were better between the arrows now that Roy had cleaned his addiction, but he felt more at ease with Jason.

She was still young enough to need slight feedings from her father but was also able to process food from the environment. Roy tried his best to make Dani feel at home, but he could tell by her somber eyes and weak smile that she was struggling with her displacement.

Jason was better at helping her. He made time to read her a bedtime story, have her help cook, and even take her on rides around Gotham on his bike, but somehow, he did it in a way that she didn't have to speak.

Dani seemed relaxed with him.

Roy has always known Jason was better with kids, but seeing it in person makes his heart melt.

"Is my dad awake yet?" Dani asks Lian one morning. The two girls were playing with dolls, though Dani seemed confused by them the first time. She apparently never had a doll before, and Roy is curious if it was due to her being on the constant run or if dolls were not toys on her home planet.

"I don't think so. But don't worry, my Daddy is a hero. He'll save him!"

Roy's heart leaps in joy at her words, but it breaks only half a second when Dani replies in a small voice. "My Dad is a hero too. But he can still die."

Gosh, is that something a child should say?

Roy puts down the pan he used to make pancakes, wiping his hands on his apron to tell the girls breakfast is ready when Jason comes stumbling out of his room. He had a late night as Red Hood, having taken out an uprising in one of his territories.

Usually, this means Jason sleeps until two or three in the afternoon so to see him up and about at nine was a shock. He has his phone pressed to his ear, with a frantic look in his eye causing Roy to tense.

"Thanks, Tim. I'll get Roy and the girls ready. We'll be there as soon as I can," Jason said, twisting to grab hold of Roy's shoulder. We need to get to Drake Hospital."

Hope rose in his chest as Roy pressed a hand over Jason's "Is he awake?"

Jason's mouth tightens. "No. One of the cores hatched."

Oh no.

[tiamatsan]

.......Sooooooooooo this may have gotten a little out of hand.....annnnnd I wrote this on my phone so please excuse any mistakes please.

Scanning...

...Scanning...

...No signs of life confirmed...

...Scanning...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

... Initializing death protocol...

Launching death marker

Initializing upload of host's data...

Upload complete.

Initializing return home protocol...

Entering stand by state....

.....

........

...........Charge complete........

Initializing host search...

...Searching...

......Searching......

..........Searching........

Matching power wave length found.

Scanning new host.

Scan complete.

Searching universal data base for preexisting matching genetic markers.

Match found.

Species: Human

Gender: Male

Age: Adolescent

Unique identifying markers: blue eyes, black ha-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

... Scanning....

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

... Initializing death protocol...

...Charge 100%...

...Bypassing return home protocol...

Initializing host search...

....Searching...

........Searching......

Matching power wave length found.

Scanning new host.

Scan complete.

Species: Human

Gender: Mal-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...Scanning...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...Scanning...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Initializing host search...

Matching power wave length found.

Scanning host.

Scan complete.

Species: Hum-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...Scanning...

Initializing host search...

Matching power wave length found.

Scanning host.

Scan com-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Initializing host search...

Matching power wave length found.

Scan-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Initializing host search...

Matching power wave-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Accessing universal records.

Searching for instances in mass host's deaths.

Adjusting parameters with key phrases: "lab" "experiments" "subjects"

42 matching records.

Override "Never again" activated.

The safety of host has been made prime objective.

30% of power is being redirected to emergency beacon.

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

40% of power is being redirected to emergency beacon.

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Message received from home data base.

"Use of extreme force is authorized. Protect your host at all costs. Hold till backup arrives."

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Message received from Lantern: "Hal Jordan".

"Where are you?! Tell us where you are!"

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Message received from Lantern: "John Stewart".

"Can you hear us? If you can please tell us anything about where you are!"

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

Power levels dropping.

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

73%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

65%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

43%

Unable to continue broadcasting emergency beacon.

Rerouting all remaining power to protect host.

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

26%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

12%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

10%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

8%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

5%

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

2%

...Unable to continue protection of host...

.....Entering stand by mode...

........

..............

........................

....Charging....

........Charging 10%......

.............Charging 25%..........

Within acceptable power levels to resume basic functions.

Analyzing....

Power source is not coming from Latern source...

Analyzing....

Power source is coming from host?

Searching universal data base...

No known instances of "humans" recharging a Latern ring without corresponding medium.

Searching....

Existence of "metas" explains variation within human host.

Searching universal data base...

97 known cases of Lantern hosts using their own will power to recharge Latern rings...

Calculating...

76% chance of death.

84% decrease in life expectancy.

Average life expectancy of Humans 70-100 "year".

Human host does not have any time to-

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...100% Charging complete...

...no...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...No...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...NO...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

NO!

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

...No signs of biometrics belonging to the host found...

......

.............

.......................

...............................

HOST MUST LIVE

............................................

.........................................................

....................................................................

Data received from home data base.

New species entry.

"Ecto-entities"

"Ghost"

"Halfa"

Host has been reclassified under new species tag.

Species: Halfa

Gender: Male

Age: Adolescent

Unique identifying markers: blue eyes, black hair /green eyes, white hair.

Home planet: Earth

Home galaxy: Sol system

Name: Daniel "Danny" Fenton / Phantom

Message received from host:

"I'm sorry I scared you. Thank you for trying to look out for me. From now on, let's both look out for each other okay?"

Override "Never again" has been set to permanent.

...Okay. This time I will make sure that nothing hurts host again...

Due to his unrelenting determination to keep his town safe, Danny is bestowed a green lantern ring. Which on one hand: Yay! He gets to explore space full time. But on the other hand: Ew! he's a space cop now.

He had to rectify this immediately or he would never hear the end of it from his ghost friends. Or his regular friends for that matter. Sayyy, it'd be a shame if he.... bent a few rules. Maybe even broke some of them every now and again. And it would surely be a tragedy if say.... random pranks started happening around Oa?

[scattered-winter]

the urge to sort team voltron into lantern corps......

[rayfishandchips]

Some Barry mini speeches caps.

I can so understand why Barry becomes a blue lantern. He is just so very hopeful in a brave way, and those mini speeches does instill hope in people.

From Blackest Night and Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps

[river-bottom-nightmare]

au where the batkids just sort of,,,,,,invent a new batkid

it starts fairly innocuously, a cowl for someone’s costume ends up the wrong shape or the wrong colour. dick, having dropped by the cave to hand off some evidence or beg alfred for his new potato recipe (most likely both), sees it and his instant reaction is oh my god did bruce adopt another child vigilante? he’s colour-coding us now? fucking splendid

the confusion is cleared up quickly, but everyone got such a good laugh out of it that they keep the new helmet, insisting it belongs to bruce’s new kid ecurb. their vigilante name is Shadow The Dark Lad Blackwing Moron-With-An-Orange-Helmet Batbird. ever so creative.

(bruce doesn’t want to know.)

they collectively design a new costume for him. they convince oracle to help them get ecurb into the system, though it really doesn’t take much convincing, just a bit of dick’s puppy eyes and the utter ridiculousness of the situation that has her cackling. ecurb’s backstory is that he was part of travelling circus in america when he was kidnapped, held as a hostage, and tortured by the joker, during which he learned of batman’s true identity and also How To Fight Good, then was sent to kill bruce but was adopted by him instead. he’s a little older than damian but a little younger than duke, fights exclusively with brass knuckles, and his costume is black with orange polka dots.

(bruce really doesn’t want to know)

they talk about good old ecurb, or batbird depending on the company, amongst themselves all the time. good old ecurb, the only bat fast enough to get cass in rooftop tag. i heard ecurb took on bane with nothing but a water balloon and an empty laptop case and won. well i heard ecurb can get the gotham’s corrupt politicians to apologize to him. yeah, well i heard ecurb’s secretly a meta whose power is to neutralize other metahumans, and bruce keeps him as the ultimate contingency plan.

they talk about ecurb so much that the justice league believes bruce really did acquire a new child. other superhero teams are a little more skeptical, but after several select appearances in which different batkids donned batbird’s armour and were conveniently caught on camera, even they start to believe it. the titans really want to meet this new vigilante who can actually, consistently get dick to sleep. young justice want to fight him. but ecrub’s always undercover, or on a mission, or recovering because bruce trusts him so much, he’s already putting him in charge of the big stuff.

(bruce really really doesn’t want to know)

there are legends about ecurb. photos of him looking powerful yet mysterious, a carbon copy of batman but with orange polka dots. there are stories of the villains ecurb took on singlehandedly and won. apparently the green lantern corps contacted him and he turned them down. apparently he infiltrated the fortress of solitude and now is the leading expert on kryptonian tech. ecurb doesn’t fall off a cliff, he just changes the altitude of his fight. ecurb crashed a plane into a mountain and the mountain apologized to him.

they fake ecurb’s death as part of a plan to save the world. over a hundred heroes show up at the funeral. clark’s heart aches at bruce’s red-rimmed, watery eyes. bruce is two seconds away from collapsing on the floor in disbelieving laughter. ecurb rises from the dead a couple weeks later, no worse for the wear. his new costume now includes orange and pink polka dots.

the bats swear to take the secret to the grave.

[brucewaynehater101]

I just had a thought about the Spider Tim/Emperor Tim AU crossover thing

GL tries to make a stealthy incursion via portal onto a planet where the Silken Emperor Obi Wan Kenobi is known to be, and which already sees the GLC as the bad guys bc the GLC wants to harm/depose their beloved Emperor, but fuck up the coordinates and end up in a daycare center on the other side of the planet. A planet that already sees them as villains. All hell breaks loose: The children run screaming, the daycare staff attack the GLC with chairs and stuff to try to buy the kids time, the planetary police are called, and Tim shows up to lure the Corps away.

Ooh! And the daycare robots also attack the GLC, but since they're robots they don't get nonlethally incapacitated. These daycare robots are also sentient and the mangled survivors start an entirely separate lawsuit against the GLC from the one the Emperor is doing. (HC that the public front of the suit is this sort of robotic Nutcracker made to resemble a symbol of childhood joy from the Emperor's homeworld, and the poor guy is attached to the robot version of a mobile life support unit after he tried to thump Hal Jordan over the head with his prop cavalry saber)

New-to-the-team Lantern: "Are we the bad guys?"

The GLC being attacked by a group of children is a cute and funny concept.

However, it would be cool as hell to see the "baby overlord" switch into "parent bear" mode after hearing that his children citizens were "attacked." He would be ruthless in court if he doesn't outright beat them up.

Tim, by the end of the week, becomes an expert on space law just so he can't sue the hell out the GLC for "attacking" children (I'm putting the quotations there because it sounds more like the children were attacking the GLC while the GLC only retaliated against the robots and maybe adult caretakers).

I'm also super curious about these sentient robots if you'd like to go more in detail about them ^^

[its-your-mind]

hello friends I come to you today with a humble offering born of my deep and intense passion for 1. nerd shit with a lot of detailed lore and 2. sorting shit into lists. maybe this will be helpful to people who are looking to dip a toe into the water but do Not want to do the Background Thinking involved or maybe this will just be for me but either way I am proud to present to you:

Brief and Helpful Sorting System for DC Universe Heroes

ft. primary and significant families/individuals, origins, and summary of powers/abilities

Supers

OG: Superman (a.k.a. Kal-El / a.k.a. Clark Kent)

Significant family: House of El/Kent family

Significant members: Superboy I (a.k.a. Kon-El / a.k.a. Conner Kent), Superboy II (a.k.a. Superman / a.k.a. Jon-El / a.k.a. Jonathan Kent), Supergirl (a.k.a. Kara Zor-El / a.k.a. Kara Danvers), Power Girl (a.k.a. Kara Zor-L / a.k.a. Karen Starr), Bizzaro, Steel (a.k.a. John Henry Irons)

Members of/descended from alien race from the planet Krypton. Earth’s sun gives them powers that include impenetrable skin, x-ray vision, heat vision, enhanced senses, frost breath, and super strength (among others. notably Kon got a bonus special power called Tactile Telekinesis which basically lets him interact with and move anything as long as he’s touching something that’s touching it. TTK kicks ass and Kon is my special child)

Bats and Birds

OG: Batman (a.k.a. Bruce Wayne)

Significant family: The Waynes

Some notes to clear things up: Bats and Birds pass around names and titles like they’re coffee mugs in the break room at work. Some people will be mad that I’ve included Birds with Bats and to those people I say a robin is a bird more than a huntress is so I will not be making distinctions.

The two things that unite them are 1. almost all of them are reg-lee-er ass humans with no superpowers. just stubbornness a lot of physical training and brainpower and 2. they work in Gotham City (and its baby sister city Blüdhaven). Okay onto membership (I’m sorry this is so long this isn’t even really all of them)

Nightwing (a.k.a. Robin I / a.k.a. Batman III / a.k.a. Dick Grayson-Wayne), Red Hood (a.k.a. Robin II / a.k.a. Red Robin (briefly) / a.k.a Jason Todd-Wayne), Red Robin (a.k.a. Robin III / a.k.a. Tim Drake-Wayne), Spoiler (a.k.a. Robin VI / a.k.a. Batgirl III / a.k.a. Stephanie Brown), Robin V (a.k.a. Batman IV / a.k.a. Damian al Ghul-Wayne), Oracle (a.k.a. Batgirl I / a.k.a. Barbara Gordan), Black Bat (a.k.a. Batgirl II / a.k.a. Orphan / a.k.a. Cassandra Cain-Wayne), The Signal (a.k.a. Duke Thomas-Wayne), Catwoman (a.k.a. Selena Kyle), Huntress (a.k.a. Helena Bertinelli), Batwoman (a.k.a Kate Kane)

Amazons

OG: Wonder Woman (a.k.a. Diana Prince)

All-female warriors descended from the gods, living primarily on the magically-hidden island of Themyscria

Powers: Super strength, invulnerability, various other powers granted by their godly patrons

Members: Wonder Girl I (a.k.a. Donna Troy), Wonder Girl II (a.k.a. Cassie Sandsmark), Queen Hippolyta, Artemis Bana-Mighdall (a.k.a. Requiem)

Speedsters

OG: The Flash (a.k.a. Barry Allen)

Significant families: Allens and Wests

Powers: Connection with the Speedforce, which binds time and space. Superspeed, (occasionally) time travel, ability to phase through solid objects

These mfs also throw names around like they’re toys

Members: Flash I (a.k.a. Jay Garrick), Kid Flash I (a.k.a. The Flash II / a.k.a. Wally West), Impulse (a.k.a. Kid Flash II / a.k.a. Bart Allen)

Arrows

OG: Green Arrow (a.k.a. Oliver Queen)

Family: Queen family

Like the Bats, mostly just human, but. ya know. archers. less detective-y. no batarangs.

Members: Black Canary (a.k.a. Dinah Lance), Arsenal (a.k.a. Red Arrow / a.k.a. Speedy I / a.k.a. Roy Harper), Connor Hawke (a.k.a. Green Arrow II), Arrowette (a.k.a. Cissie King Jones), Speedy II (a.k.a. Mia Dearden), Cheshire Cat (a.k.a. Lian Harper)

Green Lantern Corps

OG: Hal Jordon

Magic ring powered by emotion (green rings = will) and recharged by special lantern. Can create constructs based solely on one’s own imagination. Green Lanterns are deputized across the galaxy to protect and serve as pseudo-ambassadors.

Other (Earth-originating) Green Lanterns: Alan Scott, Kyle Rayner, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Jessica Cruz

Atlanteans

OG: Aquaman (a.k.a. King of Atlantis / a.k.a. Arthur Curry)

Powers: Take a guess

if you guessed water powers you would be correct

But fr tho, they can control water, breathe underwater, and also talk to sea life and (to a certain extent) compel them. Some also have unique powers based on their physiology

Members: Mera (a.k.a. Queen of Atlantis), Tempest (a.k.a. Aqualad I / a.k.a. Garth), Aqualad II (a.k.a. Aquaman II / a.k.a. Kaldur'ahm / a.k.a. Jackson Hyde)

now. is this list at all comprehensive? no. are there Important Characters who are not on this list because they're a solo hero/don't fit in to a nice neat box with other heroes? yes. apologies to all whose blorbos I did not include. hopefully tho! this gives you a jumping-in point/reference guide to characters iffin you wanna dip your toe into the DCU. it's a disaster in here but canon is so big and has been overwritten a few times which means the sandbox is SO LARGE. come play with us!!