#my second blorbo in life

[ravenrambles6229]

FINALLY SOME ACKNOWLEDGEMENT FOR MY BELOVED! She is my absolutely deranged blorbo. Her bullshitting puts phoenix and Apollo to shame. She has a gift for being utterly batshit. Putting the parrot on the stand would be idea number 1 for her. She'd see a parrot and say "oh cool easy witness this one can't speed away on a segue" "but Athena it can fly" "we'll just make sure to keep bread with us" she is insane. No sense of direction. Gets lost a lot. Runs to work. Makes Apollo run laps around the courthouse. Will fight God with her bare hands. Genuinely a shame she's only gotten to lead two cases. Just does whatever the fuck in court and gets away with shit usually only the prosecutors can. Sure tie me up Apollo. Let's make me into a phoenix wright statue. Let's play my emotion iPad game. Try to run from court and shed probably beat the bailiffs to catching you. Would convince the judge to go with her to see the steel samurai movie. They make plans in the middle of the trial. She is the definition of "think zebras not horses" which is okay because this is the goddamn ace attorney world. And then she'll have a traumatic episode in the same beat. Probably knows like six languages. One of them is from Star Trek. One is Latin. One is Esperanto just in case. Cries during kids movies. Performs character analysis of steel samurai characters. Has stood with Maya under a waterfall just to do it. Says it "sest luh vie" intentionally. Nearly killed Apollo by forcing him to play ddr with her. In their suits. Makes Apollo feel like an old man. And then just when she feels like she can't get anymore childish she turns around and says one of the most thoughtful or kindhearted things you've ever heard. And they remember she's not stupid she just enjoys life and lives it to the fullest.

Anyway If you haven't played dual destinies, do so. It's worth it for Athena alone.

I do genuinely respect the writers of dual destinies for making Athena completely fucking unhinged. The woman suplexes a man in her first fucking scene and says things while investigating crime scenes that would put Maya to shame. She is feral. She is rabid. She is incredibly smart and yet has zero common sense. This is a series build off the backs of weird little girls and yet she is quite possibly the weirdest of them all. She's absolutely perfect and I love her with every ounce of my being

[lovelydrusilla]

someone: mentions second chances jane: immediately looks at lisbon, then quickly glances away

[lazycranberrydoodles]

COME ON GUYS DON'T LET DIANXIA DOWN

[shayberri789]

Something about how in chapter 4 of trc Adam is insecure about the fray on his second hand sweater, and how it's a symbol of his background and insecurities, and how most people don't notice it, and if they did, they didnt think better of him for it

And how Blue saw it immediately and it was something she liked about him, a girl too good at seeing the vulnerabilities of other people, but Adam didnt want someone to see his insecurities, didn't want someone to acknowledge that life

But Gansey did. Gansey needed someone to see him at his worst and love him for it, and blue did that

And how Adam needed someone to see him at his most unruly, and encouraged that

And Ronan makes Adam loud

[ilovebeingaturtle]

I don’t really ship 87 Ramona (although I do love the idea of them in a QPR) but. If they did feel romantically for each other it would take forever for them to actually get together, if they even do, in sharp contrast to the 2012 “we’ve known each other two hours now we’re committed for life” speedrun. Raphael would have fallen in love years ago but would not recognise this fact once. Mona Lisa is also part of the problem. She has a layer of superficiality she always uses as protection over her true feelings, so how does she even know her flirting is sincere? How would Raphael be supposed to know? She’d overthink it. Also she’s a lesbian so falling in love with your best friend is like mandated and agonising. She’d have accepted her fate and already resigned herself that it’s never going to happen. She’s just happy they’re close to each other. Meanwhile Raphael thinks “huh, I want to marry her” then goes about his day. This realisation occurs multiple times but he never reads into it.

[silverwhittlingknife]

How do you feel about Jack Drake?? What are your thoughts on him and Tim’s relationship?

Anon, I hope you were interested in a novel, because look, I am fascinated by Jack Drake.  He’s key to a whole lot of what I find compelling about Tim as a character, and if I were in charge of DC, I’d bring him back to life.  This would make Tim unhappy but would IMO make for good plotlines.

Jack and Tim’s relationship is Complicated (TM)...

Jack and Tim hug in Nightwing 20 / Jack impulsively yanks a TV out of the wall in Robin 45 / Tim grieves in Identity Crisis

“I could tell the truth.  But I don’t.” - Robin 66

...and it involves a whole lot of Tim lying, and feeling guilty about lying, and thinking about telling the truth, and choosing again and again to keep lying.

And I think that’s great.

Below the cut:

Shorter version - key points about Jack

Really long version - my gentler take (vigilantism is choir and Jack loves sports) vs. my harsher take (Jack has some major flaws)

Final thoughts

Shorter version - key points about Jack:

He’s a bad parent.  He’s self-centered, he consistently prioritizes his own comfort and interests over his son’s, and when upset, he does things like order Tim off to boarding school.

But he’s never a bad parent in an actionable way.  He’s not like David Cain or Arthur Brown, who are abusive monsters.  Jack’s not a monster!  He just...kinda sucks.

He genuinely loves Tim. If Jack’s aware that Tim’s disappeared or is in trouble, he’s always worried and upset.  He periodically resolves to be a better dad, and IMO he’s always sincere.

And Tim loves him, a lot.  Tim’s protective of him and worries about him when he’s kidnapped or in danger, and when they’re reunited, Tim’s really relieved and usually hugs him (and Jack hugs back!). 

...But they have very little in common, and that’s a problem. Jack doesn’t value the things that Tim values, or respect the people that Tim admires, or care about the things that Tim’s interested in.  Tim lies to him a lot, but that’s partly because he correctly guesses Jack wouldn’t respond well if he knew the truth of what Tim’s up to.

The Batfamily is a surrogate family that Tim’s drawn to because of the ways his real family doesn’t meet his emotional needs…but also he feels guilty about that and disloyal. (And to the extent that his dad recognizes what’s going on, he's jealous and resentful!)

Very long version:

(LISTEN I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS)

Okay!  So first: Jack’s a character who IMO is pretty up for interpretation.  You can interpret him very charitably, and make excuses for the bad behavior, and fill in the blanks sympathetically when situations are ambiguous; or you can interpret him uncharitably, and emphasize the bad behavior. I don’t think either approach is invalid - it depends on what kind of story you’re interested in!  I have enjoyed Bad Dad stories and also stories that redeem Jack.

My personal take on canon is that Jack and Tim’s relationship is in a gray area.  Jack's definitely neglectful, and he does prioritize other things over Tim, but he’s never so bad that Tim can easily reject him, and he's never so bad that Bruce could justify taking Tim away.  He's just...not great.  Tim loves him, and feels loyal to him, but it’s a very mixed-up complicated love.

I have a gentler take and a harsher one which I switch between as the spirit moves me. xD

My Gentler Take (tl;dr: vigilantism is choir and Jack loves sports)

Here’s the core conflict: Jack and Tim are very different people with different values.  Tim idolizes Bruce and Dick and vigilantism, and secretly gets involved, knowing his dad will hate it. He gets increasingly wrapped up in his secret world and lies to his dad...because if his dad finds out, he’ll make Tim quit.

This is a great setup for an ongoing comic.  It’s practical, because it provides endless potential for plotlines, and it’s nicely thematic, because it maps closely onto relatable real-life situations with extracurricular activities:

Tim the drama nerd whose dad thinks he’s playing football and not in the school play; 

Tim the closeted-queer kid secretly getting involved in his school’s politically-active Gay-Straight Alliance; 

Tim the choir kid whose dad only values making money and wants him to go into the family business (and Tim keeps promising himself he'll give up choir soon, definitely soon, but maybe he'll stay in just a liiiittle longer, because they need him, you see, the last tenor left town, so...); 

Tim the computer geek with the sports-obsessed dad (this one’s just canon);

etc. etc.  

The extracurricular metaphor works pretty well for Tim’s relationship to vigilantism.  Tim's involved in his "extracurricular" because he genuinely thinks it's important and fulfilling, and he values it and wants to be good at it. He idolizes Bruce and Dick because they're good at it. He's been collecting information about it since he was a little kid, and hiding it from his parents because he knows they wouldn't approve. And mayyyybe there's also an element of low-key rebellion against his dad, and maybe that's secretly part of the appeal. And yet also as Tim gets more and more invested, he starts to daydream: maybe I could tell my dad and he'd be proud of me and supportive. But he doesn't, because actually he knows his dad would be upset and angry and make him quit.

And - again, just like with lonely kids and extracurricular hobbies - one of the things that happens is that Tim starts getting his unfilled emotional needs met ... by people he knows through this secret hobby. And people like Bruce and Dick start turning into a surrogate family. Which Tim feels guilty about. And also as Tim gets more and more wrapped up in their world, he has to lie to his dad even more, which means the distance between Tim and his dad gets bigger and bigger and more and more unfixable.

I love this dilemma. It's simple, it's recognizable, it provides endless sources for conflict, and there's no obvious solution! Tim can't tell Jack: he'll make Tim quit! And Tim doesn't want to quit, because he loves choir / art / theater / whatever.  Yeah, it’s difficult, and there are challenges, and sometimes he has doubts...but at the end of the day, he cares about it a lot.  And everything he values is there, and all the people he admires and cares about are there, and all he wants in the world is to feel like he's one of them and belongs there. So he has to lie, even though he doesn't want to lie, and he feels guilty about it...

...but also he ends up lying more and more.

(Sidenote: I think it's important that Tim chooses to keep lying - Tim's narration often glosses this as "I have to lie to my dad," and that's certainly how it feels to Tim, but this... isn't quite true. He has to lie to his dad, because if he doesn't, his dad will get mad at him and try to stop him, not because he literally has no choice about it.)

Other Reasons Why I Like The "Secret Extracurricular" Interpretation

(tl;dr it complicates not just Tim's relationship with his dad, but also all his other relationships)

Tim's problems have some obvious parallels to Steph and Cass, who both become vigilantes while rejecting their evil supervillain dads. But Jack isn't evil. And that means the Tim-and-Jack relationship is ambiguous and complicated in ways that I like. Steph and Cass can just leave their Bad Dads in prison, and say good riddance, and feel very righteous and triumphant about it! Tim’s more complicated. Tim gets into vigilantism ostensibly out of duty and altruism, but secretly, he's also involved for straight-up selfish self-fulfillment reasons. He's lonely, and bored, and his life feels pointless, but he thinks that Bruce and Dick are cool and amazing and he wants to be a part of the things that they do.  When his dad gets jealous of Tim’s relationship to Bruce, and feels like Tim’s looking for a surrogate family, he’s... not wrong.

And the ways in which Jack is not Actionably Bad complicate things from Bruce's POV.  If Jack was a straight-up villain, it’d be an easy call to keep in touch when Jack finds out and makes Tim quit...but he’s not a villain, not really.  So what do you do?  Do you try to surreptitiously stay in touch with Tim even though you’re ignoring his dad’s express wishes and thus forcing Tim to sneak around?  Do you respect his dad’s wishes and stay away from Tim even though you have a years-long relationship at this point?  

Again: a bit similar to the extracurricular analogy.  Say you’re the choir director and you’ve built this whole relationship with a kid in the choir, and you’re an important mentor to him and you care about him etc. etc. etc.... and then right before a big performance, his dad finds out he’s been secretly involved, and yanks him out.  How would you react?  Well, maybe kind of in some of the ways Bruce reacts.  You replace him. You’re annoyed with him. You miss him. You want him to come back. You’re also worried about him.  You’re upset with his dad.  But also... what should you do, exactly?

Bruce and Alfred and Dick care about Tim as if he were part of their family, but he’s not part of their family, and there’s a lot of interesting tension there.

My Harsher Take

Jack never hits his son.  But his temper is a big deal.

In his worst moments, he takes out his anger on Tim’s stuff - wrecking his room, or ripping his TV out of the wall and confiscating it.  When he’s worried about Tim, he usually expresses that fear by yelling at him / punishing him / sending him away - threatening to send him to boarding school in Metropolis in Robin III, or threatening to send him to military school abroad in Robin 92, or actually forcing him to go to an all-boys' boarding school post-NML.  

This is bad behavior!  It is Not Good!  

And you can easily connect the dots to a bunch of Tim’s terrible coping mechanisms, like the constant lying and or the fact that Tim’s go-to methods for dealing with interpersonal conflict are 1) repress it and pretend it never happened (most of his fights with Bruce), 2) withdraw from the relationship until he can pretend the conflict doesn’t exist (when his friends get mad at him in YJ, he quits the team for a while), or 3) literally run away from home.

Also, Jack is a Manly Man with firm opinions about how men behave vs. how women behave, and he thinks boys shouldn’t be scared and thinks Tim should date hot girls and pushes Tim to work out and wants him to play football and expresses period-typical sexism, etc. etc. etc. ... and though obviously this wasn’t what the writers had in mind at the time, all of that is certainly interesting to read backwards in the light of Tim as a queer character.

More Disorganized Thoughts on Jack Drake

Tim’s our hero, so we’re naturally more sympathetic to him, but it’s also true that relationships are a two-way street, and Tim doesn’t value any of the things his dad values, either.  Jack at various points is shown to care about grades, business, money, boarding schools, archeology, football, a kind of macho bragging-about-dating-hot-women ethos, and a very public and performative kind of caring. Tim tends to respond with discomfort or disinterest or even disgust.  When Jack gets on TV to try to rally the government to save his son from No Man’s Land, Tim isn’t touched—he’s mortified.  When Jack makes some bad investments and loses money, Jack’s deeply upset and his self-image is majorly impacted, and far from being sympathetic, Tim’s annoyed and kind of contemptuous of the idea that this is a problem.  Jack thinks fishing in the early morning and going to tennis matches is a fun father-son activity; Tim finds it exhausting and tedious.  And so on.

This means that Tim often longs to be closer to his dad in theory, but this longing is more tied to fantasy than to reality. He rarely seems to enjoy spending time with His-Dad-The-Actual-Person.  So for example, when Tim’s deadly ill with the Clench, he has an extremely poignant fever dream about telling his dad the truth and getting hugged…even as he insists in real-life to Alfred and Dick that he does not want them to tell his dad what’s going on.

The same is true of Jack, who IMO genuinely wants to be closer to his son and is continually declaring that he’s going to turn over a new leaf and get closer to his son…and just as continually backs out of activities or loses his temper when faced with spending time with his actual son.

Tim and his dad sadly get along best—by far—in Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder situations.  When Jack gets kidnapped or is in danger, Tim worries for him (and Tim grieves him deeply when he dies).  When Tim disappears or runs away, Jack’s genuinely worried about him.  So e.g. they have a really moving emotional reunion and hug when the earthquake hits Gotham, and Tim panics about his dad’s safety and comes running home (and meanwhile Jack’s been panicked about Tim’s safety!).  It’s the day-to-day, regular life stuff where they don’t connect.

Jack's written quite differently by different writers. Mostly, Tim's parents are at their least likable in his early appearances and early miniseries (this is where you get, for example, Jack and Janet being nasty at each other while a pained employee looks on, and Tim disappointed to once again get news of where his parents are via postcard - "I guess that sums them up! Never know where they’re going to be–or when–or even how long!” - and Tim alone on school break, and Bruce and Alfred thinking there's something weird going on with Tim's parents, etc. etc.). Jack's more sympathetic but still often unlikable in most of Tim's Robin solo, and he's almost invisible (but positively treated if he does show up) in Tim's team books.

For obvious reasons, Jack's remembered way more sympathetically after his death. Tim's completely devastated by Jack's murder, which he arrives moments too late to prevent, and he basically never gets over it. We see him grieving Jack again and again in Robin, and also in Teen Titans, and also in Resurrection, and again in the Halloween Special, and again in Batman: Blackest Night, and all the way up to the end of Red Robin. Tim also grieves for an extended time over Janet - he hallucinates a happy reunion with her when he's feverish in Contagion, and hallucinates her in the final issue of Robin, and the reveal-your-buried-emotions song in Robin 102 brings up his grief for her too (meanwhile, other characters dance or laugh or otherwise get giddy).  Tim’s grief over his parents’ deaths is intense and long-lasting.

I'm not going to clip comic panels because this is long enough, but if you're curious, here's a nice and fairly lengthy compilation of comic panels with Tim and Jack.

If you're interested in a Jack-centric story with a softer-but-still-recognizably-canon take on Jack, I really like the way Jack’s narration is written in the one-shots Heart Humble (set shortly before Jack dies) and Never a Hero (Ra's resurrects him during Brucequest, and Jack's archeology skills turn out to be unexpectedly useful).

[non-un-topo]

My Neekeys over the last two-odd years. I was curious to see the changes 🤔

[oh-meow-swirls]

i think this was funnier in my head.

[night-triumphantt]

it’s Kiyazan anniversary!! Well, it is an hour before midnight so technically it’s tomorrow BUT that matters not the entire world must know now, immediately, ab the reason @cashweasel and I have moved to the goofy pool

[the-indie-owl]

Toddler-Year-Old Me who never really knew who this Character was (since their only exposure was Season 2) & only saw him in a One Video Game Adaptation review through a Critic Gameplay Video (which I never really did care nor crush on him that much) but when re-trying out Season 1, did I not realize that this Obscure DILF is one of my Long-Lost Crushes that I've never seen as a Kid until now as of Recently.

[cherubchoirs]

A thought for plant!mike(dk if youd decide it to happen ornot so i'll treat it as an au) gives such a great sense of hope if you think about it. Like a new era sprouting and it causing old wounds to heal slowly but surely. Obviously it needs new tending to, new ways of tending to oneself, learning how to treat oneself better, but there IS hope. There IS a way to keep going, even if it's not like it used to be.

I hope i dont sound like mad ramblings but michaels healing and becoming a living garden is just such a gentle thought of hope

i really think so too...michael is ultimately representative of god's rule, he defines himself purely in terms of god's kingdom and what he did for it. so naturally, in god's absence, he becomes a living corpse - everything he was, his whole identity, has died yet he has not, a body given so wholly over to its service passing away while michael himself is left behind. i talked about this a bit, but the archangels are meant to reflect the fallout of a fundamentalist family after a fracture, with michael as the child that took over the place of someone who "betrayed" the family (in lucifer) and so forced himself to become the perfect version of faith and loyalty. he didn't want to end up like lucifer, he didn't want any other angels, especially his siblings, to suffer in the same way, so he hollowed himself out to be nothing beyond a perfect servant. he is the prince of heaven under god's rule, and so in god's departure he shambles on, a zombie rotting away even as he becomes more desperate than he had ever been to be perfect for a now absent father. an ideal martyr, yet repellent to the cloistered halls of heaven.

but that world is falling apart as much as he is and he can now only collapse entirely to ruin...or he can adapt. he can find his place without god, something once unthinkable, revolting even, but that comes into more clarity as he grows close with v2, as his brothers continuously reach out to him, as he sees a heaven still in need of help. like gabriel, it isn't something that's easy or clean, instead revealing a staggering amount of regret, a terrible, suffocating guilt he'd forced away so he was no longer michael but just a prince. so often in it, he can't believe he actually deserves a second life, but he is stilled by the plants that cling to him, the plants that slowly stitch him back together with the help of v2 and raphael. they need him....humbling in so many ways, but they weave into him and bring him back to life. he lives through them and they through him, a symbiotic life forming out of a crumbled empire closed up in the body of its prince. he is the whole world reclaimed by nature and revived from the dead - his body the skeleton of decayed monuments now made more beautiful by the verdant life that wraps all around them. his trips to earth with v2 would be so much more then, he would see himself all around and see this is what life is, what god left to them all. he knows he is still a corpse beneath it, but he's blooming with life again, he can care for this new self and actually find his true happiness in this body. he feels through the flowers, he sees them change their colors for him, and to care for them is to care for himself once more.

[icarusflightplan]

fucking killing me that i cant look up my blorbo on tumblr bc shes from a dnd module and my dm has forbidden us (our group) from the tags because of spoilers

[tarmac-rat]

Hey hey I need to uuh hum fight you at the back of a Denny's or something over those tags on my cyberpunk post lile wtf? That's such a good analysis of his character I love your work a lot in general but this is doing me in I'm gonna cry, you're so fucking right about this dumb broken man 🥺😠

I will not fight you I will bake you a cake and give you a kiss because you're very sweet I appreciate your kindness 😘

I really love your perspective on Johnny's disabilities and addictions impacting how he sees and interacts with the world-- as someone who herself isn't disabled I tend to overlook the way people view the world through that lens and as a result have realized that I haven't touched upon it much in my own analysis of Cyberpunk, and your insight really was spot-on and spoke to me in a way I hadn't considered before.

I talk a lot about the themes and meta of the game but Pondsmith himself came out and said, like, before the game came out that Johnny is not the hero of the story. He THINKS he's the hero of the story but the way people and even himself idolize him and his actions are in many ways his biggest shortcoming. Johnny is addicted to the image of himself, much like he's addicted to his vices and addicted to his cause. He needs his anchors no matter how detrimental they are to him, but in many respects those anchors were never his choice. Now he's stuck in his place, dug in and unable to move, and that's the way he dies. Alone, unmoored, and stuck in his ways.

He's a very tragic and even empathetic character-- I do understand why he does the things he does and feel for him when he suffers tragedies-- but treating him as a hero of this story is wrong, in my opinion. He's a disabled, traumatized war veteran who was set up in life to fail at a very early age. His flaws are of his own making. They are not of his own design.

[just-spacetrash]

🦾

[big-urchin-energy]

truly we could not rid the world of any au, the fandom ecosystem must have balance, and so, as much as it pains me to admit, much like the humble mosquito, or the wasp i fucking guess, we have to keep soulmate aus

(but they should go on a high shelf until alloros learn how to behave)

(if you said omegaverse aus, grow up. stop being a baby. they're not for you, they are for the furries, the touch starved, and those with breeding kinks, and where would we be without them?)

[arolesbianism]

Oh god the new cotl trailer is dragging me right back in... Damn you goat why must you relight my interest in this game so