i love the more well known characters and all but im pushin them all aside to focus on those in the back. i love background characters so fucking much. ino..... ino come back..
baby👶 drawings. these are very dear to me rn.. 2nd pic is my Nelavis with @barvin0k's Varonur 🩵 last one is a baby bosmer and snow elf, hairiest of them all. although the bosmer was meant to be my girl Barletta too lols
Here's some of my favorite Crowley on laudanum moments, just because:
1. Death is "just wrONGGG", Crowley said so. No more dying.
2. Because if you don't get high and improvise the unofficial anthem of Scotland (it's canon, Crowley improvised it), what are you even doing with your overly long life?
3. This lil dance is the best, I swear.
4. Reminder, he's looking at a graveyard, at night.
5. Find me someone cuter, I'll wait.
6. It was dark, he was wearing sunglasses, and he was high. Leave him alone.
7. I am petrified.
And bonus points because I will never get over this:
A comic based on a serirei (from mp100) fanfiction written by @homosexual-fanfiction (@/ch_am on Ao3)! Please go read the fanfic there too because it’s really good!!! T v T
I don’t know if I’ll adapt the whole story (even if I really want to!!!) so for now I’ll try to do as much as I can, starting with that first chapter (which is already entirely storyboarded)!
Thanks to Camp for allowing me to draw their story and for helping me while designing some of the settings and Aimi <333 and thank you again for writing such an awesome and inspiring story!!
You can find Camp here too: @ch-am
I hope you’ll enjoy this first bouquet of pages!!💐
So you're a go to source for all things Dick&Tim bros and you tend to write primarily from Dick's POV. So, odd question, but if you were to summarize their relationship from his POV in FIVE panels which panels would you pick? Keeping in mind that one specific aspect of their relationship that you love needs to be clearly represented by each panel (loyalty, trust etc). I hope this is a fun challenge and not an annoying question so if you don't want to answer that's cool! Have a wonderful day!
No more talk. The same thoughts run through two minds... (SotB 29) / You're my equal. My closest ally. (RR 1) / I can't stop thinking how much I rely on him. (GoG 3)
25 Feelings Dick Has About Tim
This was such a kind ask & a cool challenge which I totally failed; here are TWENTY-five panels of Dick's POV on Tim sdfdsfds Look, I got carried away! Marcia and Cindy! The boys!!
OKAY SO BEFORE I GET TO THE PANELS A FEW NOTES:
WARNING THAT THERE ARE SOME NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN HERE because I love conflict but but but you gotta remember those are not the final word!! They are complicated people and sometimes they get mad at each other BUT ultimately their relationship is so hugely important in both their lives & they love each other and rely on each other so much -!!! <3
Also I have CONCLUDING THOUGHTS at the end about what Dick's POV leaves out (mostly: a lot of Dick defending & protecting & supporting Tim, which Dick does instinctively but isn't very self-aware about most of the time)
I have loosely organized my list into 5^5 format (5 categories with 5 examples each!), so if you want to skip to a relevant one, here are the categories!!
Below the cut:
I hate him and find him infuriating (#1-5)
On second thought, he's endearing & fun (#6-10)
Grief is complicated & he's all tangled up in mine (#11-15)
I love him & think highly of him (#16-20)
I rely on him & though it's hard for me, I trust him (#21-25)
I hate him and find him infuriating (#1 - 5)
1) He thinks he’s so smart and can psychoanalyze me and Bruce, but he doesn’t know me at all, he should get lost (New Titans 61)
2) He thinks he’s so smart and can psychoanalyze Bruce but he doesn’t know Bruce at all, he should get lost (Gotham Knights 26)
3) He is so nosy about stuff that is MY business (Robin 0)
4) He sounds like an insincere suck-up half the time... but okay, fine, if you push him he's got a sense of humor about it (New Titans 65)
5) I'm sure he's a better vigilante than me. It's my fault for being a failure, but I resent him anyway. (Nightwing 9 - Dick's having a nightmare)
On second thought, he's kinda endearing (#6-10)
6) He worries too much and gets anxious so easily, but it makes him fun to tease (Robin 67)
7) I'm not that competitive - okay, so maybe I'm a little competitive, I gotta make sure he doesn't get a swelled head (Prodigal)
8) I'm supposed to be his favorite! It is not cool for him to be fanboying over my not-girlfriend's not-boyfriend!! (Birds of Prey 19)
9) We have fun together. I can kick back and relax when it's just the two of us. Plus I get to boss him around a bit. (Prodigal)
10) He’s always trying to reassure me, and I guess it's a little comforting, but also he doesn’t really get it. Or me. He makes excuses that he shouldn't, because he doesn't understand that I suck. (Nightwing 64)
Grief is complicated and he's all tangled up in mine (#11 - 15)
11) He reminds me of everything I try not to think about. Sometimes the memories are so strong it hurts to look at him. (Batman 441)
12) WHY IS HE BEING IMPOSSIBLE ALL OF A SUDDEN??? THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING (Nightwing 139)
13) We're the same. He says all the things I don't let myself think about. It's like arguing with myself. (Nightwing 139)
14) He thinks he gets to tell me what to do but he doesn’t, fuck him (Battle for the Cowl)
15) Life sucks, so what. I sucked it up so he should too (RR 1)
I love him and think highly of him (#16 - 20)
16) He’s the closest thing to a brother I’ll ever have. If someone hurts him I will hurt them harder. (Nightwing 6)
17) I can't handle the idea of losing him. (Nightwing 97)
17) He’s so good and I’m not. I'm afraid I’m bad for him. (Nightwing 110)
18) He’s better than me, and it’s kind of a relief because I know no matter what he’ll be okay. (Gates of Gotham 3)
19) In my head he’s the responsible one. (Gotham Knights 10)
I rely on him, and though it's hard for me, I trust him (#20-25)
20) I know I have to trust him but I'm afraid he'll make the wrong choices and get hurt (Nightwing 139)
21) I'm sure I know what he should do because I see myself in him - not that I can take my own advice, but he should (Blackest Night 3)
22) I trust him. When I’m losing my grip on things, he pulls me back. (Gotham Knights 10)
23) I want him to trust me (Red Robin 12)
24) He can tell when I'm lying. Sometimes he sees my weaknesses better than I wish he did. (Detective Comics 874)
25) He’s always there when I need him. (Teen Titans / Outsiders Secret Files)
Final rambling thoughts:
TIM: Uhh, okay, so I'm just skimming this list - do you really trust me? you're not just saying that? - but anyway, I'm confused because you left some stuff out? Like some stuff that's kinda important?
DICK: No? I think I got everything?
TIM (starts counting on his fingers): The time I was having a bad day but then I called you. The time I got captured by Two-Face but then you saved me. The time I fell off a train but then you saved me. The time I fell off a building but then you saved me. The time I fell off a different building -
DICK: I feel like you're trying to make some kind of point but I'm not sure what it could be.
SO THE THING IS, I put 25 panels in here and not a single one has Dick catching Tim when he’s falling!!! But I think that's a central motif of their relationship from Tim’s POV, not Dick’s. I love Dick, but in some ways I think he is spectacularly un-self-aware.
And I think he especially has a lot of blind spots about Tim. He kinda intermittently gets that Tim admires him, and he enjoys it in a playful I-get-to-boss-you-around way. But Dick tends to consistently underestimate all of his own good qualities & skills, and he meets Tim at a point in his life when he's especially down on himself & his abilities. And so he's unable to see his own influence on Tim, & therefore unable to fully understand a lot of Tim's priorities and loyalties and motivations, because you can't actually understand Tim without understanding Dick's impact on him. There's a fascinating moment in Bruce Wayne: Murderer when Dick's completely blindsided & upset to discover that Tim doesn't entirely trust Bruce, even though this has been a definitive fact of Tim's whole thing ever since he showed up with his Batman needs Robin theory, and Barbara has to actively remind Dick of the obvious-to-everyone-except-Dick fact that a lot of Tim's loyalty is to Dick, and Tim loves Bruce but feels free to be more wary of him. (And to give Bruce credit: this is not something he ever begrudges.) But anyway Babs points this out, and Dick manages to sorta process it for about five seconds, but he cannot actually accept it into his worldview so instead he discards it at the speed of light and goes off and has an argument with Tim instead sdfsfdsf
All of Dick's virtues - Dick's kindness at the circus and Dick's determination to fight through grief and Dick's rigid sense of morals and Dick's vigilante skills and every time Dick has ever backed Tim up or listened to him or protected him or saved him from something or just been casually kind to a stranger in Tim's presence etc etc etc - all these things loom really large in Tim's mental story of Who Dick Is, and What Dick And Tim's Relationship Is. Tim meets Dick before he meets Bruce, trusts Dick more than Bruce, aspires to be Robin instead of Batman. And so in Tim's default version of the story, Dick is the super-special and admirable hero and Tim is... nobody in particular, a tagalong outsider who's barely managing to be a hero, not part of Dick and Bruce's family and not part of their story, who, if he's VERY LUCKY and tries REALLY HARD, might be able to fight his way to proving himself and offering something to Dick that Dick will value, if Dick doesn't get fed up with him first.
But that's not Dick's version of the story!!!
Dick's version of the story is almost the exact opposite, a story where Dick's an outcast failure black sheep who's screwing up everything he tries, and meanwhile Tim is The Sudden New Perfect Robin Who's Better Than Me And Probably Bruce Loves Him More And Probably They Gossip About What A Loser I Am, mixed with a complicated edge of Tim Thinks He's So Smart But He Doesn't Know Me/Us At All. Dick gets much more attached to Tim over time, and Tim gets unnervingly better at the know-it-all psychoanalysis so then Dick gets to have complicated feelings about him being right instead of just annoyance at him for being wrong, plus Dick's relationship with Bruce improves a lot, so Tim stops feeling so threatening. But Dick never fundamentally changes his basic theory of their relationship in which Tim is highly impressive and capable, and Dick is not so much.
And so asking Dick about Tim is kinda like if you asked George Bailey to tell you about Harry Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life; like, you'll be there for five hours while he tells you how great Harry is, and how accomplished Harry is, and how he doesn't really get how or why Harry does the things he does, and maybe George does feel a little resentful or jealous sometimes, but that pales in comparison to all his admiration and trust for Harry who he loves so much, who's better than him in so many ways, and he's not gonna openly gripe but secretly he can't help but feel sometimes like he's such a failure in comparison to Harry, a perfect person who emerged fully formed from Zeus's head with all the virtues and also all the accomplishments, etc. etc. etc. --
-- and he will not actually remember the part where he changed and saved Harry's whole entire life unless you literally send him to an alternate timeline in order to force him to remember it. <3
I don't know how everyone isn't also always constantly thinking about how burial rites seem to be potentially one of the few things Siffrin instinctively remembers about their culture. But rest assured. I am in fact always thinking about it.
Textless version where they're just hanging out. It's fine!
France has been feeling like a police state this week, there were 5000 cops deployed in Paris yesterday (watch this video and tell me this is a normal amount of cops and they're behaving normally) and they keep acting like they have total immunity*, to beat up protesters, to arrest protesters, or just random people walking in the vicinity of a protest. My 70+-year-old dad tried to go to a peaceful protest and had to abandon the idea because of all the tear gas being used by police.
*Which they do—as Le Monde pointed out, the cops who are violent risk nothing because they can't be identified because almost none of them wear their identification number even though it's supposed to be mandatory. They're not being penalised for not wearing them, so why should they?
If you can stomach it, please have a look at the photos and videos on this Twitter account documenting French police brutality against protesters—as I write this, the most recent tweet is about a journalist who was beaten up by a BRAV-M cop* using his steel baton; he had his head cracked open and his hand broken.
(* BRAV-M is a motorised repression corps—cops on bikes—a unit that was dissolved in 1986 after some of them beat a student to death, who wasn't even attending a protest but walking near one. Macron changed the unit's name, from Voltigeurs to BRAV-M, and reestablished it to suppress the Yellow Vests protests. This week, a BRAV-M cop deliberately drove over a 19-year-old's leg at a protest after chasing him on his bike. The victim said he heard a cop say to others "Smash him." Another BRAV-M punched a protester unconscious on March 20. And today Le Monde published an article about BRAV-M cops being recorded bragging about "breaking elbows and faces.")
In Paris last week the CRS arrested a 14-year-old kid because they took him for a dangerous black bloc protester I guess?? A child spent a night in police custody without knowing why. They've also arrested several 15 / 16 year-olds. Let's teach the youth what happens when you exercise your right to protest!
On March 16th in Paris, within one evening, they arrested 292 people, and 283 were released without charges, which means they're mass-arresting people for peaceful protests as a strategy of intimidation. The student I mentioned in my post the other day, who spent 48 hours in custody and was eventually charged for refusing to have his DNA samples taken and filed, asked the cops why they were arresting him + 4 other people who were walking down the same street and they said "Because you look like fucking leftists."
The government tells us "We fully support our brave police forces" when the cops are arresting people for "looking like leftists." How are we still a democracy? The guy also mentioned that during the time he spent at the police station, the police was mostly arresting Maghrebis, though they made an exception for him, a Black guy. There are videos from the past week of cops beating up women, tear gassing protesters in the face from 20cm away, kicking protesters in the face when they're already on the ground, crushing their heads under their boot, brutalising a homeless man and old ladies, tear gassing crowds with young children in them. I'm having trouble finding links to these specific incidents I remember because there are so many videos circulating.
Look at this video, they're violently striking the back of people's heads with steel batons even when the protesters are already going in the direction they're told to. The little old lady shoved around and trying to protect her head from the strikes is breaking my heart.
Surely at the point when enforcers of state authority are arresting middle schoolers, beating up citizens for exercising their rights and gassing and pepper spraying elderly people, children and babies in strollers, the government might want to make some sort of statement condemning this state of affairs, but instead they have been telling us they're proud of & grateful for their police forces, which of course angers people and makes protests more violent. The Minister of the Interior, who supervises the police, praises them wholeheartedly and excuses all instances of deliberate brutality as 'isolated incidents' due to 'tiredness'.
Here's a thread in English describing a protester's experience—"Yesterday (March 23) the level of arbitrary police violence clearly leveled up. I was tear gassed three times without being able to move in a very dense crowd; policemen took advantage that people were unable to move more than 20cm to pounce on us and bludgeon us in a totally arbitrary manner." (you can see an example of this behaviour in this video from a different protest)
Yesterday, after a day of nationwide protests that brought a fresh new wave of video evidence of cops beating up protesters and making reckless use of tear gas—at the end of a day when a special ed teacher at a protest got her thumb torn off by a tear gas grenade—this is what the French Prime Minister said:
They're not even trying to play it off like "both sides made mistakes" they're telling us they condone everything the police is doing, that this is what they're deploying them for:
(screencap from this video)
(this is from this video, in which you can hear a woman screaming "Stop it! You're strangling him! You have no right! I'm filming you!" The cops don't seem to care about being filmed. They're beating up citizens with the government's full blessing after all.)
Macron's government is trying to intimidate people into giving up their right to protest, by deploying cops in huge numbers and publicly voicing complete support for their behaviour, by allowing them to beat and arrest hundreds of people and to use tear gas indiscriminately. Tear gas has been completely normalised as a means of state violence, it's very practical that it doesn't leave traces of blood or broken bones I guess, but it's still violence, it burns, it's a chemical whose effects on people's health we don't know a lot about.
^ Paris (from this vid; caption: "one tear gas grenade after the other")
Macron condescendingly told us there's no "magic money" which is why the pension reform is needed, but he did find the money to stockpile these apparently unlimited amounts of tear gas grenades to suppress protests against his reform to make poor people work longer.
^ Nantes (screencap from a vid in which the cops throw three or four grenades at once and you can hear people say "oh come on, seriously? this is crazy. Why? go fuck yourselves" in a tired tone)
We've also found out yesterday that three Corsican MPs were pressured not to support the Assembly's no-confidence vote against the government—by being told if they didn't vote it, a teaching hospital would be built in Corsica.
The island of Corsica is the only region of France that doesn't have a teaching hospital; due to lack of medical resources Corsicans often have to travel to mainland France for healthcare. Just last month the Minister of Health said sorry, still no teaching hospital for Corsica, it's just not possible right now. Then last week some "magic money" was apparently found to build it but only if the Corsican MPs didn't support the no-confidence vote. I know this kind of thing isn't exactly unique in politics but Macron has been slashing hospital budgets to the point that 20% of French hospital beds are closed due to lack of staff, and he used the health of 340,000 French citizens as a bribe to save his ass. The three Corsican MPs ended up voting in favour of the no-confidence vote despite of that, as it was what their constituents wanted (honour to them). Macron's government survived the no-confidence vote by only 9 votes.
Whatever legitimacy Macron has as a President right now is being clung to by MP corruption and police repression. How do we move forwards knowing that, I don't know. How does he have legitimacy to govern on any issues after the way he handled this reform and the following protests? His police forces are drowning city centres in tear gas, a chemical whose effect on birds and other fauna is not known, and we're supposed to listen to him talk about the environment? They're wasting thousands of litres of water using water cannons to disperse protesters, and we're supposed to listen to him talk about low groundwater levels and how we need to save water? I was going to say, what about his legitimacy abroad but other Western governments don't seem too bothered so far by his handling of the protests—though I'm grateful that Amnesty International did condemn it, and that a Belgian deputy made a speech in Parliament this week asking his government to condemn Macron's use of violent police repression.
[Wait, I just saw that as I was writing this post, the Council of Europe condemned the "excessive use of force" in France. Saying that 'sporadic acts of violence' of some protesters can't 'justify the excessive use of force by agents of the State' or 'deprive peaceful protesters of their right to freedom of assembly'. This is the opposite framing as the one our government is standing by—sporadic acts of violence by cops that are either justified or excusable—it's refreshing.]
Between that and Charles III cancelling his visit (and lots of tourists cancelling trips to Paris which is bound to piss off the tourism industry) and our own media waking up and starting to talk about the government's brutality, I hope Macron starts being held accountable. He has been fanning the flames of this crisis at every turn, by telling us that the crowds protesting in the street have 'no legitimacy', by sending cops to break strikes even though striking is a Constitutional right (but the only part of the Constitution he cares about is the one that starts with 49.3), by condemning the protesters when asked to condemn police violence—saying "When [protesters] use violence, unregulated, absolute, we're no longer in a Republic." I agree, but he's describing himself.
When you resort to using article 49.3 to bypass the National Assembly for the 11th time this term to impose a reform that 70% of the country is against (and 93% of working people) that will force the poorer classes of the population to work longer, and your only response to people's distress at being told to work until they die is to force them to accept it by allowing your police forces to beat up protesters, to arrest them and to gas them, you have failed as a democratic leader.
The next organised protest and strike is next Tuesday (if you want to give something to the strike solidarity fund, here it is); in the meantime spontaneous protests are still erupting pretty much every day and cops are getting burnt out (good! There are fun videos from yesterday's protests of cops accidentally tear gassing one another, or a police car accidentally running into another as people laugh and clap.) And yes some protesters are getting more extreme and destructive, but Macron is the one choosing to stand by his reform at all costs and let this country burn. And when I look at what we're being expected to tolerate and to normalise, I'm kind of proud that French people's gut reaction was "burn it all."
Some popular Twitter hashtags for the protests:
#ToutCramer - Burn everything
#CensurePopulaire - People's no-confidence vote
#MacronDémission - Macron resign
#OnLâcheRien - We won't cede an inch.