#minus the cape

[ca-d]

we don’t deserve her (earth)

[your-ne1ghbor]

he's fine.

epic foreshadowing

@signed-sapphire @oh-shtars @rascalentertainments @tumblingdownthefoxden @spectator-zee @chillwildwave @pennysucks @sewerpalette

WAIT A MIN YA'LL AREN'T SUPOSED TO SEE THAT-

[bluebellhairpin]

"I never dreamed that I'd love somebody like you - and I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you."

"There was a time when the Hound was happy." - "But he's such an asshole, what happened?" - "She isn't around anymore, and so the Hound isn't ever happy anymore."

[jesncin]

I've finished writing the Caped Crusader meta essay on Race representation on the show. I just need to re-read it a bunch of times to catch any typos or messy sentences before posting. Just know, it's almost ready!

[lazlolullaby]

Terry's birthday gift to Tim (Batman Beyond timeline x comic book ish timeline)

fandom telephone is fun! Have a scenario barely extrapolated from canon!

Tl;Dr: Terry Mcginnis VS Tim's infamous 16th birthday message. Mostly born out of a desire for the comic canon Horrible Father Batman to get yelled at.

multiverse happens. Terry Mcginnis from post his series + Return of the Joker gets thrown into close to comic canon timeline.

Since Terry can't go anywhere due to not being born yet and every minute he stays with Bruce and Alfred it gets more awkward, he bunks at Titans Tower with Tim Drake!Robin, Cassie, Bart, and Connor.

Terry introduces himself as "Elderly Batman's emotional support teenager" and "couldn't make the cut for Robin". He cooks, he chills with Young Justice, reminds them how to talk to civilians.

So cut to Tim's birthday. The infamous future message from Alfred that Batman has died due to a close allies betrayal.

Terry is the first to talk as Tim shows the team the message. "Yeah, Alfred kicked the bucket before Bruce did in my time. To be fair, Boss had a whole thirty foot rule about people getting close."

Tim could only stare numbly at the hologram.

"Hey. Yanno what?" Terry taps his fingers on Tim's shoulder. "It's your birthday. Go hang out with your friends. I'll take care of this. I'll start the investigation, make up a nice report and you can take over on Monday."

"That's too long."

"Fine. Two days. 48 hours that you don't have to deal with this. My gift to you."

"if you say so."

Terry rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. He analyzes everything about the video, breaks down the word choices, what tech was used, any recording meta data. Calls up Booster Gold and asks if there's been any "time ripples" or whatever. (The guy is a HUGE fan of Neo Batman. Who knew?) Uses Batman's codes to get access to Justice League files and says it's for a Tim project. "Would you believe that he's growing up and delegating?"

Bruce was expecting Tim. He was not expecting Terry to pop up in the Manor. He just...stares at Terry, looms down and stands in front of him. "Why are you doing this for Tim?"

Terry has seen worse stares, so he's unfazed. "No intention of stealing his work, I'm just getting it started."

Bruce 'hrmm' -ed.

That interaction stuck with Terry. And 36 hours later...Bruce is called up into the Watchtower.

Terry called the Justice League on Bruce's ass. Notably, Nightwing (who usually isn't involved with the League but Terry insisted, but then gave the guy an out after the first debrief.) The Flash, Green Arrow, Superman and Wonder Woman. The first ones specifically because they have sidekicks, and the rest of the Trio for backup.

(Terry does not miss the fact that Clark is hesitant about Connor. And that Connor's impression of his "mentor" is a little skewed. He'll confront him when he's dipped into Tim's kryptonite stash.)

(conversely, Clark can see that Terry is biologically related to Bruce. But research takes time, and it goes slower when trying to dodge both Cadmus and a paranoid Bat.)

So at the 40 hour mark, Terry sends a selfie with the Watchtower "meeting" in the background. (Clark has his arms folded like a disappointed parent. Flash is in Batman's face. Nightwing is blocking the exit.)

An hour later he sends a full report to Tim.

[xshimaeraxx]

:grabs a megaphone:

THE CUPBROS WOULD TOTES DRESS UP AS KING DICE & THE DEVIL FOR HALLOWEEN AS A JOKE AND AS SOON AS DEVILDICE SAW IT, THEY’D 100% DRESS UP AS THE CUPBROS FOR HALLOWEEN THEMSELVES

:turns off megaphone: siri send tweet

[margieargie]

Since I'm using up so many slots that I don't actually have room for separate fall outfits (just reusing the spring ones), might as well draw my farmer's adventuring/mining outfit instead. Except just as a pen and pencil sketch because I have little free time and can't tear myself away from the game right now long enough for something more complex / with color <_<

[sadlynotthevoid]

I need a fic where little Jason, still in the streets and about to steal Batman's tires, has a vision of the future or a seer tells him about it.

So, Jason, smart park row habitant with self preservation instincts and no emotional attachment to Bruce or the Batfam, decides to turn around and avoid Batman until he's at least 18 years old. He refuses to become into some rich furry's punching bag. He's not a convenient tool to someone's disposition. He's not anyone's cautionary tell to keep children on line. He's not a ghost in someone else's life to point fault at when he fucks up. He's himself, his trauma is his own and his decisions will be taken for him.

Curiously, he still gets involved in a lot of crazy shit— much of it magic shit— but with a lot of less emotional trauma involved. And with more healthy relationships in his life.

He gets to go to college as he always wanted. He has hobbies he enjoys and places where he and his friends meet. He goes to the kind lady two doors away for dinner twice a week and spends time with the children on the neighbourhood. And he doesn't feel he and the other future Jason are that different. Maybe he's just lighter and less sad. So he does his best to protect this little piece of happiness that for him is brighter than the Sun.

When Batman shows signs of becoming that horrible man he foresaw, he decides to pay more attention to the bats' activity. Gotham is his home too. He won't let that guy ruin her. Plus, not all the bats are assholes. The purple one is cool.

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

Also, with everyone else putting on their older costumes (and Jubilee getting an upgrade at the mall last episode), I am just picturing Morph looking around and shapeshifting themself a new outfit to feel included.

[toskarin]

How is pagan catholic and a Mori Calliope au? Wouldn't God reject that?

see, Sytry is culturally catholic but not religiously catholic. she has her own sincerely held beliefs as a result of being raised in a non-catholic monastery, but likes the power structure and discipline mechanisms of catholicism, so she happily plays the part of a priest and just doesn't bring up that its for something she doesn't entirely believe

she happily converts other people just because she thinks it could "do them some good" and that's just how she is

she does, however, believe in hell and is convinced she's going

[lcatala]

My top 6 movies discovered in 2023

I watched 52 new-to-me movies in 2023. Not nearly enough , as I could only find 6 movies that stood out sufficiently to be worthy of a personal top, in what was otherwise a pretty meh year — yes I'm a picky watcher — and yeah The Boy and The Heron didn't make the top, you can read the long rambling I wrote about it if you want to know why; I haven't watched Barbie, Oppenheimer or the Super Mario Bros. Movie, and haven't watched any Marvel-related movie since 2015.

6: Nimona (2023)

I didn't really expect to like the animated adaptation of N. D. Stevenson's comic, and I went in reluctantly, only because a lot of people who seemed trustworthy recommended it. Despite having some of the flaws I've come to expect in modern 3D animation, this was a very good surprise. You can read my detailed review here.

5: Suzume (2022)

The plot of Suzume stays very much within the bounds of the "modern artsy anime film", with a rather predictable 3+1 acts structure and an exploration of themes and human interactions which has some subtlety and nuance but overall stays very safe and on-the-surface. Nothing offensive, but nothing truly groundbreaking either.

But.

Suzume had, by far, the best animation of any movie I've seen this year. This movie is an absoluteely beautiful, every-frame-a-painting kind of deal. If I was to rank every animated I've ever seen solely by the quality of their animation, Suzume would easily be in the top 10.

4: Cape Fear (1962)

American cinema achieved maturity during the New Hollywood era that started in the late 1960s, marking a shift toward more naturalistic and more adult filmmaking and themes. But there were a few notable precursors before that.

The most famous of those is of course Psycho (altho tellingly, it was from a British director). But Cape Fear followed close behind, and is another example of an early 60s movie which you don't expect to be this dark and this raw, starring an absolutely get-under-your-skin-terrifying Robert Mitchum — if you thought he was creepy in The Night of the Hunter, you haven't seen nothing yet…

3: The Outwaters (2022)

This was the biggest surprise of the year, watched the same day it was recommended to me, having heard absolutely nothing about it before that (I didn't even know this movie existed). I got treated to a no-budget yet beautifully-shot found-footage horror movie — in fact the best found-footage movie I have ever seen, with a lot of attention put toward making the gimmick plausible, making the characters realistic and likeable, making this look like the kind of actual footage you'd find on a personal camera — while also having amazingly beautiful cinematography — all while slowly building up the tension.

Because that's just the first half.

Oh yeah, it's one of these horror movies in which you think you know where the story is going, and then second half just explodes in your face and becomes completely, utterly batshit insane. This is on par with Men (2022) for how weird and fucked up the climax is. Don't expect any kind of explanation or closure here, the second half of this movie turns into one of the most fucked up and bizzare horror movies you'll ever see.

2: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Yeah so this one was a surprise late-year hit for everyone, not just me. First live-action Japanese Godzilla film in 7 years, with rather tempered expectations — we all knew that Shin Godzilla was an odd one out, that the average Japanese Godzilla movie is not like that, that we shouldn't expect this kind of quality on a regular basis.

Well we played ourselves.

This was incredibly well made as a blockbuster — Japanese cinema has completely caught up on American cinema, for a fraction of the budgets — one of the best Godzilla movies ever made from an action and visuals point of view, and a reminder that Godzilla, as a character, can also be scary, a terrifying incarnation of destruction and disaster.

But somehow this also managed to be a powerful and well filmed drama — no lazy endless shot/reverse shot dialogues here, a lot effort is put into framing choices, blocking… — a movie that actually touches on difficult questions and goes against the message of many other war or action blockbusters.

When so many stories glorify the idea of sacrifying your life for a greater cause, here's one movie that says "hey maybe expecting people to sacrifice their life for your cause is actually pretty fucked up, and maybe it's actually better to choose to live for the sake of your loved ones than to die for the sake of your own pride". Yeah a Japanese movie is saying that, a Godzilla movie is saying that.

1: Skinamarink (2022)

So, speaking of low-budget independent horror, back in 2022 I had foolishly overlooked Skinamarink. I had vaguely heard that it was good, but no particular detail was mentioned that would have picked my interest, and the poster looked fairly generic, so I skipped it, even tho I should have been more intrigued — 2022 was already shaping up to be a really good year for horror films…

Skinamarink was a tough proposition from the get go, in the "experimental" kind of tough: an entire film made in the analog horror genre — usually short videos made to ressemble old media from the 80s and 90s, advertisements, warning messages, weather channels, documentaries and informercials, with a disturbing twist; a format usually made of short segments. Trying to tell a film-length story in that fashion is an entirely different exercise, but that's fine, I've sat thru Begotten (1989), I can do this.

Right away, this is not framed like a movie: it's more as if someone had negligently left an old camera on the floor — but this is not even found-footage, there is no camera in-story, we just happen to be seeing this world thru stolen, furtive points of view. The image is grainy, the sound is bad quality (subtitles are provided), the frames are often askew, you never even see the actors' faces. We get no narration, no exposition, just a succession of disjointed scenes that slowly form a story.

This shouldn't work. And for many people, this will not work. Most will turn this off not even 5 minutes in. But if you're among the exceptions, then howdy does it work. The format is not a gimmick at all — it's completely in service of the story. The grainy image, the low quality sound prey on your pattern recognition, never quite certain if something is there or not; the framing by a "forgotten" camera contributes to make the atmosphere hyper-real in its intimacy, yet alienating and uncanny.

The director of Skinamarink deals with one very specific topic: nightmares. Not the idea of nightmares, not the heightened nightmares of fiction, but the literal nightmares that real people have; he started by making short videos representing common nightmares that people would tell him about. When it came time to make a full-length feature film, he kept the same approach. Skinamarink doesn't really use any of the classic themes or structures of horror movies; it largely ignores that folklore and instead focuses on deep childhood fears, the kind of stuff your mind used to conjure up long ago and that you have forgotten but not erased from your brain.

If you manage to enter into this very peculiar format, this very unusual and seemingly disjointed way to tell a story, and if you identify with the kind of fear material the movie is drawing on, this is a truly scary experience. Not really in a jump scare or suspense way, more like a deeply haunting and unsettling atmosphere, a strong ambient uncanniness where things are almost normal but just broken enough to give you a constant feeling of unpleasantness, of wanting to run the hell out of here while being trapped, a sense of horrible lurking threat while having nothing concrete to fight against or protect yourself from.

Of course, this isn't exactly a fun experience. This is very, very intense, I'm talking Antichrist-levels of playing with your nerves, and the story, as simple as it is, is tragically harrowing and cruel — you're essentially watching two young children getting psychologically (and eventually physically) tortured by a sadistic, unseen entity for a hundred minutes.

It's hard to recommend, and yet recommendations is how this movie ended up grossing 2 millions on a 15k budget — promotion included ! Most people actually didn't like the movie, but those who liked it liked it so much they can't shut up about it (case in point!) It's one of those horror movies that completely break the boundaries of the genre and do something truly new and unique. It's what horror should be for: imagination gone wild, format-breaking fantasy, and realism thrown out of the window.

[darkartistyt]

Please draw Luke Triton in a cat ears hat like dis!

i got way too tired to color it in full (maybe another day) so for now here's a somewhat messily colored sketch

and now that that's done, time for this to sit in my wips for all eternity

[jessicas-pi]

do you ever see an opinion that is...simply...wrong...and youre like...i dont want to be mean to you, random internet person...but you are having a dumb opinion...sorry but...its stupid

[wingedarrows]

I'm so mad, I had a dream that a toh mini series was released and in the latest episode hunter discovered a wild witch refuge and there was an ex-golden guard there but then I woke up and it's not REAL and I woke up before I could LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT HIM and I was ROBBED.

He exists to me.

[thewynne]

I want to meet him

The Worst Attraction in Every State

[lightkidshenannies]

had a dream that there were two new seasons of sky, season of moths and season of veterans. moths had spirits of rising, falling, gliding, and soaring, and veterans had spirits of secret places, storytelling (lore), friendship, and fashion. all the cosmetics were really cute and for moths they were all igc, but for veterans they were all IAP :/