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silverwhittlingknife · 9 months ago

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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 enjoyed thinking about this so much i wrote a novel with All My Thoughts sorry sdfsdfs #tim drake #dick grayson #somewhat tangential but as i was writing this i was thinking about zahri's post #about how different types of stories offer different kinds of emotional payoffs #and i think for me for dick and tim the main two payoffs are:#1) someone who sees & understands your grief for deaths that will never get fixed or get better #and who will face your ghosts with you EVEN WHEN you're also mad at each other #2) someone who you look at and you see all the ways that you suck & he's better & you're a loser who's failed him etc etc #but it turns out that you're wrong. that you're good enough. not that none of the failures were real or that they were all in your head #but it turns out that it's okay that you didn't always immediately do or feel the right thing #and it's okay that you weren't perfect. you can fuck up six thousand ways & everything you did right will still matter #not because of making excuses or allowances or somebody pityingly trying to make you feel better #but because in the end the things you did right are just Genuinely More Valuable than anything you did wrong #all the times you tried & everything that you tried to give - everything you think wasn't good enough - it was.#IN OTHER WORDS they are both convinced they're not good enough & they are both wrong <3 #anyway dick and tim are both INCREDIBLY SIMILAR and also CONSTANTLY misreading each other and i love that for them #and like. they will sometimes totally misread each other & then never figure out the part that they misunderstood #but then they manage to keep going anyway. we love each other on purpose <333 #ask tag #dick&tim

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beneathsilverstars · 9 months ago

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been thinking about the differences between SASASAP and ISAT lately. because looking just at ISAT and the two hats ending, you'd think loop went through the exact same house as our siffrin, but looking at SASASAP, it's different. it's mixed up. it's obviously a condensed prototype.

but. that doesn't have to mean it's a different universe entirely.

maybe that's just what happens after a thousand loops.

the house warped in act 5. siffrin lost their shit and the house got changed and corrupted, far past its baseline king uncanniness. so it wouldn't be too out-of-the-question for it to be able to warp in more subtle ways as well, due to a more subtle breakdown.

like a jpeg uploaded and downloaded a thousand times, siffrin changed, and the loops changed. over a thousand loops of efficiency, the house got more efficient. rooms combining. items moving. data compressing. and of course, run in a changed house, the script changed as well. it did so slowly, one bit at a time, over a thousand loops of zoned-out half-listening – and by the time siffrin would have noticed each difference, they were already used to it. (and in the moments that they did look at a room that was less familiar than it should be and realize that they had no idea where to find the key, well. that's just classic siffrin, isn't it.)

through sheer repetition, siffrin was corrupted, and the loops and the house along with them. all purpose lost, all signals distorted, until finally they couldn't recognize the meaning in any of it. it was all noise and despair.

so they made a wish. and the loop restarted. not just a reboot, but something more complete.

the data was backed up onto a star – a guide, a warning, a reference – and the loops were factory reset. and for the first time in a thousand loops, siffrin woke up to a clear mind and the crisp sound of birdsong.

#but NO MATTER HOW FAR LOOP WALKED they would STILL BE MADE OUT OF MUD!!!#sorry i love writing metaphors about loop i guess #here's a couple i had to cut. for cohesion. :#you ever sing along to a song so many times you could sing it in your sleep? you no longer use the same kind of music player that you first #listened to it on. but you still sing it in the shower and tap it onto your steering wheel and whistle it in the rain #and then one day you re-find the original on another platform and realize that somewhere along the line you'd started getting it wrong?#it was a little like that.#siffrin changed and the house changed and the script changed. one board of the deck and one thread of the sail at a time.#until one day that wreck of thesues could no longer recognize himself and made a wish.#in stars and time #isat loop #loop #isat #isat spoilers #in stars and time spoilers #sasasap #anyway. thinking of it this way makes it make a lot more sense to me why loop can't get magicked back to their old timeline #it doesn't exist. not any more than any of siffrin's 108 failed loops do.#siffrin is siffrin is siffrin #thoughts #thoughts about loop #thoughts about worldbuilding

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uniiiquehecrt · 7 months ago

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Voice actors are NOT the same as actors.

It takes a specific kind of skill-set and training to be able to warp and meld the voice. It takes a certain kind of talent and dedication to hone that talent into the ability to meld the voice and invoke emotion with one's voice alone. Actors are used to using their voice secondarily to their body language and their facial expressions. It's all mirrored back on camera. They do have nuance. But it's a different kind of nuance and a different kind of training to produce that nuance.

Voice actors might get their likeness transposed on their character's design, and maybe their mannerisms might seep into the character's animation. But when it's all said and done: their presence is in their voice. They are bringing a character to life, showing that emotion in their voice, trying to keep a specific accent, drawl, pitch, tone in that voice and keep it consistent for their recording sessions.

The voice actor is like a classically trained musician who can play first chair in a competitive, world-renown orchestra. The actor (who fills the voice actor's role) is like a moot who played violin in beginner and intermediate high school orchestra and thinks they can get into Juilliard with that 2-4 years of experience.

This doesn't mean that the HS orchestra moot can't play. They can even be really good at it. Maybe they won competitions and sat first chair. But they are not in the same league as the person who's been training their whole lives and lives and breathes to hone their craft using the instrument and all of the training they've ever acquired to perfect it. They are not meant for the same roles. They are not in the same caliber. You do not hire the HS equivalent when you want to play complex music in a competitive orchestra.

Actors are not the same as voice actors.

And furthermore, actors - especially big name actors - taking the roles of animated characters for big budget films or TV pilots makes no sense anyways when - at least in the case of TV pilots - there's not a point to hiring a big budget actors anyways. That money could be used elsewhere (like paying your animators), and the talent that is brought onto the screen for X character could then be hired on to voice said character no recasting required.

I wouldn't say voice acting as a profession is in danger exactly, but it's certainly being disrespected and overlooked for celebrity clout, and this has ALWAYS been an issue. Shoot, even Robin Williams knew that much - which is why he tried so hard not to be used as a marketing chess piece for Aladdin and got royally pissed off when it happened anyways. People shouldn't go to any movie (but especially not animated films) because "oh famous actor is in it". People should go because it's a good movie and the voice acting is good.

People who honest to god think that voice actors are replaceable because "oh well anyone can voice act" or "I like xyz celebrity so naturally it'll be good" ... Honestly I just wish you'd reassess your priorities because you're missing the point and are part of the problem.

Voice Actors ≠ Actors.

#(i am incredibly passionate about this)#(and seeing celebrity voice actors in what should be a voice actor's role completely burns my buns it doesn't matter WHO it is)#(hemsworth as optimus? someone tell me one good reason why they couldn't get a good v/a to replace mr. cullen properly for the future)#(ben shwartz as sonic? dude literally isn't even a good voice actor OR actor anyways-)#(- A N D jason griffith AND my boy roger craig smith are still RIGHT HERE)#(jason griffith IN PARTICULAR would have pulled back SO many sonic fans that went to watch the film anyways. if not /more/.)#(and on top of that he has the same tonality and energy they tried to force this moshmo to try and emulate anyways so GET THE REAL THING)#(chris pratt as mario? i can at least defend /him/ and say that barring his failure to do a NY accent consistently he wasn't terrible)#(but mario's new voice actor could've been used instead and people would've clearly appreciated that WAY more)#(vanessa hudgens as sunny starscout in mlp g5's pilot movie? literally why. they replace her and hitch's va in the show.)#(don't even get me started on the concept of hiring celebrity singers to do musical theatre roles or not letting musical theatre singers-)#(-dub the celebrity voice actors you just HAD to hire for your film bc you're so worried about not getting enough clout to get ppl in seats #(that you're putting it all in this (1) big name hire bc turns out that you have no faith in your writing ability much less-)#(-animation as a medium.)#(and no before anyone says anything : no this is not me saying that ALL celebrity voice castings are bad.)#(there are some that aren't that bad and others that are actually pretty good.)#(i especially appreciate it when actors are damn well aware they aren't voice actors and try to LEARN from voice coaches-)#(-and/or their va predecessors if applicable.)#(that does not change the fact that the celebrity shouldn't have been hired just because the film wanted to have bragging clout-)#(-oh look at this FAMOUS PERSON we were able to hire — yeah ok. sure wendy. i want to know if this film is quality or not.)#(and 9/10 times the SECOND there is money spent on a non voice actor to voice the main character especially)#(that usually means somewhere along the way animation IS going to get shafted. if not w the animators themselves then in the way of-)#(-the actual animation itself and ESPECIALLY the screenwriting because it's especially been so dogshit lately even before the strike.)#(a celebrity being hired to fill a voice actor's role is such an immediate red flag to me and it is VERY rare that i get to be proven wrong

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