#otto was simply born into the wrong time period

[theabysscomeshome]

Honkai Impact Webcomic - Elan Palatinus - Abridged Part 3

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

5000 years later: I definitely did not forget this was a thing haha

Fragmented fast forward so it's kind of a montage existential crisis caused by finding out your best friend is maybe evil:

There's like a whole dreamscape thing in the middle here where she talks with her dead dad? Pretty sure. It's not important. What IS important is:

When the friend who's just found out you're the villain is a literal paladin. Kallen may make for a terrible vigilante but what she IS good at is big damn dramatic entrances.

We actually know Eleanor (brown haired girl) but you'll have to read the comic yourself to find out because we kind of skipped all of her scenes oops. Otto saved her life and she thinks he walks on water, essentially.

More importantly:

MAN her monster form is pretty

The VIBES in this scene [chef's kiss]

The callback to Fu Hua 🥺

Fun fact this scene was apparently censored when it was released in mainland China to remove the religious overtones. Eleanor is instead arguing that they need the box to win the war, which gives the whole scene a MUCH different vibe and is a major reason why Kallen is relatively unpopular in China compared to in other regions.

This Is Fine. Definitely not the result of ten years of stoking Otto's paranoia and dependence on Kallen finally paying off by getting Otto to give in, just a bit, to the voice whispering in the back of his head. I had to cut them because image limit but this is followed by them defeating Eleanor and the honkai posessing? her leaves in a dark cloud, passes over Otto because he's already claimed by "another", and tries to possess Kallen.

"But the Kaslanas true secret is this: they are just too damn pure of heart and dumb of ass to give in to corruption, and thus honkai has no power over them."

I'm RIGHT and will not be taking constructive criticism at this time.

And Thus, The Bosom Friends Are Separated, And We Take One Step Closer To The Ship War.

"But Kallen's a jerk for leaving him when he loves her so much" "But Kallen was right to leave him because he's evil and unredeemable" People it is a TRAGEDY that is the POINT of it. He loved her and he also tore everything they had apart with his own two hands. My favorite part of this tbh is that in terms of the emotional beats and story arc it doesn't actually matter whether Kallen was ever "in love" with him romantically or not. The beats are the same either way. What they HAD together was the same either way. Love when that happens.

Anyway back with Otto, he has learned Zero lessons from this:

It's fine though because that malevolent voice in his head has all the answers and can give him all the knowledge he wants!

The LOOK. He WAS listening to Kallen, at least a little bit. Enough to be wary of this promise.

We're wrapping up the comic and I have exactly one image left before hitting post limit so I will leave with:

A personal letter that he never sent, because he has ~bigger things on his plate now. But the person she wants to save in the village is a miko now being corrupted by the box, who is all but stated elsewhere to be Kallen's sweetheart, and Kallen gets to be the suave and cool tuxedo mask at least once and it's great. They live happily ever after and are not Tragedy 2.0 at all.

[argsoiaf]

(Spoilers Main) All Men Have a Role to Play: Master of Whisperers Part 1

First of all, I would like to thank Max L, @LuchiBelle, and Will Perpetuo Busch (here is a link to his webpage: https://scriptoriumm.com/). They have helped me modify an old (unreadable) essay into a much better one, gave me valuable input on the topic, help improve the grammar (I am not a native English speaker) and even edit some parts. If you like this go check their (much better) stuff.

Introduction:

The position of Master of Whisperers is one of the strangest on the King’s Small Council, with regard to the amount of time it has existed, The array of westerosi (and essosi) who have held it, and its institutional organization. Unlike other Small Council positions, it wasn’t created by Aegon “The Conqueror” to help him rule the realm and council him, but by his second son Maegor “The Cruel”. It had its unofficial founding when the people of the Red Keep and King’s Landing started to call Tyanna of the Tower the “Mistress of Whisperers'' (which has a double meaning; Mistress being simultaneously the feminine for Master and a synonym for lover, which Tyanna was before getting married to the King). It always maintained a semi-unofficial nature with many de facto holders of the position refusing to take the official title. But despite all these peculiarities, we can still see certain constants in the position.

The Masters of Whisperers, unlike other “Masters”, has no default bureaucracy; all their power comes from the webs of agents they build and is entirely personal. This is also made possible by the lack of supervision from the Hand or the King; having a lot of freedom to conspire against the crown if they want. Being in the Small Council appointed by the King they seem to be legally capable of whatever they want unless it goes against a direct order of the King, or it is treason. In other words, they can do whatever they want to do even if it is illegal with no reprisal from the King, at least until it is known when the King would have plausible deniability (this question was a source of debate in the Learned Hands Podcast in a great episode featuring u/JoeMagician)

The Holders of the Title and their Nature

“The King's Justice must be fearsome, the master of coin must be frugal, the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard must be valiant ... and the master of whisperers must be sly and obsequious and without scruple. A courageous informer would be as useless as a cowardly knight.”

-A Game of Throne, Eddard XV

Before starting to talk about the different Masters of Whisperers and considering most of them belong to the backstory of the series, I will leave you a link to another reddit post where I make a summary of all Master of Whisperers. If you already know the gallery of Varys’ predecessors, or simply aren’t interested in the specifics, I will recommend you skip that part.

The Masters of Whisperers are the smallest number of all of the King's councilors across the years since Aegon’s conquest (even counting unofficial ones), and the Masters of Whisperers also held their title for the shortest overall span of time compared to other positions. Counting only when they use the title it sums up to 47 years, and if you add Rego Draz alongside Bloodraven’s period as Hand it increases to 80 years.

In any case, it is an amazingly small number if we compare it to the 300 years that the Small Council has existed. This is probably because the Lords and Kings of Westeros consider espionage as unhonourable and cowardly, with the title being held most of the time by women, bastards, and foreigners with one great exception being Larys Strong (but due to his disability he is unfit to fulfill the traditional knightley roles of a Westerosi noble). Another reason might be that most Masters of Whisperers were very unpopular, so Kings might want to avoid the bad image having one would have given their predecessors. For example, Jahaerys no doubt wanted to distance himself from the rule of his uncle, while both Aegon V and Jahaerys II tried to avoid the appearance of being controlled by their Master of Whisperers like Aerys I. Most Masters of Whisperers served in moments of war or crisis (Rego Draz, for example, started to act like a spymaster after Elisa Farman stole the dragon eggs) and during reigns of especially paranoid Kings.

All of this shows how Larys Strong and Varys holding the title in relatively peaceful times with lazy Kings was exceptionally rare and unique. One major possible explanation for Varys remaining at his position for so much time is that he finds ways to remain useful. We know he pretended to be Cersei’s friend and he probably gave Jon Arryn useful information. Possibly the early Baratheon regime had not enough people to replace all positions, so they decided to keep him.

In Larys' case I think he was not named by King Viserys I himself, but by his Hand Ser Otto Hightower. Larys had probably started building a web of spies during his father's Handship, and Otto wanted to add him as an ally to his cause. We should also consider that the court was divided among different factions, and a civil war seemed imminent after the King's death. Adding him to the Small Council meant adding a great asset for Otto’s grandson's future struggle for the throne.

So, if the position is so unpopular, dangerous and rare, why have it in the first place? Why not simply use external spymasters that do not sit in the Small Council, as Kevan did with Qyburn and Rhaenyra with Lady Mysaria? But the advantages overshadow the inconvenience: it puts fear in your enemies and prevents plots against you (for example, Doran Martell being so afraid of Varys that he drives his daughter to rebel against him) and it also gives the Westerosi Lords a false sense of security. We can see how Cersei believes when she appoints Qyburn, who gains a lot of Varys’ former contacts, that the spies come with the position. It has been suggested that, like most things Cersei believes, this thought is BS, since Varys' little birds remained loyal to him.

Span of their Influence, Webs and Power

“How many eyes does Lord Bloodraven have? the riddle ran. A thousand eyes, and one.”

-The Mystery Knight.

Like I mentioned earlier this position is unique compared to every other one on the council, due to the lack of a formal bureaucracy behind it. It appears that the size of the Master’s webs and the amount of power they are able to accumulate are entirely dependent on their own personal ability.

This contrasts greatly with another position of the Small Council, the Master of Laws. Theoretically, the Master of Laws has such a vast number of responsibilities he should be third in the realm, only to the Hand and the King, but the truth is that most of them are unremarkable nobles with very little influence across the vast history of the continent. Meanwhile, we see how many Masters of Whisperers turn into very important figures in their respective regimes. Tyanna and Qyburn are good examples of those Masters who became the right hands of their monarchs. The same phenomenon also occurs with other members of the Small Council, like Littlefinger, who has a great web of spies. There may be even more cases, but as I mentioned earlier The Master of Whisperers is perceived as dishonourable, and most of them will prefer to keep the extent of their power and influence secret.

Regarding the size of their webs, they seem to remain pretty localized to King’s Landing and the Crownlands during most of recorded history. Tyanna was only able to extinguish the grand scale conspiracy of Aegon the Uncrowned rising against his Uncle King Maegor because she intercepted messages that had been sent to Alyssa Velaryon at the capital. Rego Draz does extend his web mainly into Essos because of the type of mission he is assigned with.

The first one to extend the web to a continental level is Brynden Rivers. He expanded the position using magic and his important status at court to gain information of distant regions. Maybe the scale of the web was overblown by the people fearful of his “eyes”, but this is equally useful because like I mentioned earlier creating this fear already made people less willing to plot against him.

It goes without saying that Bloodraven was the first Master of Whisperers to expand his influence in the regime and turn into the Hand of the King. He did not follow the usual image I mentioned earlier about the Masters of Whisperers. Being born at “the wrong side of the sheets” he is admittedly seen as lesser by the Westerosi Noblemen, similar to Larys Strong. But he is also very capable in some of the fields traditionally held by the nobility and not by the usual Masters of Whisperers, being a great fighter and commander. This combination of different abilities made him a capable Hand for years. His victory in the Second Blackfyre Rebellion before it even properly started is a great example of this.

There is also a lot of overlap between Master of Whisperers and torturers. For example, Tyanna oversaw the torture of Prince Viserys and Alys Harroway and Larys was also the Lord Confessor. He is the only other recorded case of a Master of Whisperers expanding to other positions while remaining officially at the original position, even if it is similar to the original one. He is also the first person to be named officially Master of Whisperers. Rego Draz would not count as occupying another position, because he made the opposite transition, he started as a very successful Master of Coin and only later did he use his contacts in Essos to do some information gathering.

Qyburn might have a similar process to the one Bloodraven had, with the only difference that he will achieve such power by being Cersei’s bootlicker. He has already absorbed many functions related to the Grand Maester and some seemingly opposite ones, like the royal torturer. This contrast between Grand Maester and Master of Whisperers can be seen in the attempt at a rivalry Pycelle wishes to have with Varys, with “The Spider” not even noticing him. The opposing duality of the two positions can be seen in how most Small Council meetings start with the Grand Maester bringing the official information brought by the ravens, while the Master of Whisperers brings the unofficial one brought by his “little birds”. Qyburn is just this phenomenon being brought forward in a more obvious way, with him using a Maester-like robe, but instead of being grey, it is white.

We can see that the influence of the Masters of Whisperers has varied over the years, but we can also notice how it has increased in recent times. With their webs being bigger and bigger and having more important roles at court.

Conclusion

Here ends the first part of this Essay. We have discussed the nature of the position and the span of its influence. There is an inherent contradiction in a position that exists in the center of westerosi nobility, but where outsiders can take control. A position for bastards, cripples, women, and foreigners, in which they can extend their webs of spies and influence to control history. Even though it is the most informal of all of the council members, or maybe because it is, many of the holders of the title have risen in their respective regimes to be highly influential political figures.

In the next part, I will be analyzing the loyalties of the Masters to each of their individual Kings and the Throne, and their overall use of magic. Both relevant topics to the ideas previously discussed.

[n-ctarinenga]

New Wallapaper [ awsten knight ]

a @calmlftv​​​ birthday special! | word count: 2,302 | masterlist

After probably the longest birthday of your life, you fell back into the warm embrace of your bed. 

Your day had started early, your best friends and roommates waking you up with breakfast in bed, before promptly shoving you downstairs and insisting on pampering you. 

By lunchtime, you'd played an intense game of monopoly, had a sparkling manicure, tasted endless mocktails with stupid pun names, and watched all of the 5 seconds of summer cocktail chats videos on the large TV in your living room. 

You were happy you'd agreed to a chill day at home for your 23rd, taking the day off work and scolding your friends when they decided to do the same. You had taken the time to celebrate with your workmates and extended friend group over the weekend, having dinner with your family the night before on Sunday before finally settling in to take time out for yourself, which your friends were happy about considering you were always the first to help everyone else before yourself. There was no doubt in your mind that you were loved by the people around you though, all of them reminding you of it constantly through the day.

At first, you didn't understand why they insisted on having dinner early, and grew suspicious that maybe they had something planned for tonight that you were yet to be told about. 

"Who has dinner at two pm?" You ask, watching one of your friends prepare a filet steak just the way you like, the large fat of the meat being put to the side for her dog later.

"We do, now stop questioning it." Another answers, shoving yet another red velvet cupcake iced to look like a sunflower into your hands. 

You narrow your eyes at the three of them, all glancing at each other and speaking in eye movements and hand gestures so you couldn't decipher their words. 

Your attention is pulled away though by your phone that sits in your lap, a new text from your boyfriend, Awsten, filling the screen. 

While you wished he could be with you for your birthday, you knew what you signed up for when you started to fall in love with a musician, and that was weeks and months on end of facetimes and texts while miles apart. 

Awsten was currently on the other side of the country, but that didn't stop him from blowing up your phone any moment he could with his newest invention, birthday bombing, aka putting a party hat on anything he could find to show you that you were being celebrated even if you couldn't see it in person. 

The thought alone was enough to make your heart swell with joy, but as you received yet another picture of your boyfriend wearing a line of hats like dinosaur spikes down his back, you couldn't help but burst out laughing.

At the sudden noise, one of your friends looks over your shoulder, laughing at the picture you were quickly setting as your lockscreen. 

"Your man is a nerd." She chuckles, and you shake your head with a laugh, smiling fondly as you lock your phone again. 

"Yeah, he is." 

Little did you know, Awsten was a lot closer than the 200+ miles away you thought he was. 

In fact, Awsten was currently running around Houston searching for the exact perfect items he needed for your surprise, periodically sending you the pictures he had had Geoff, Otto and Jawn help him stockpile before his flight back this morning.

He pocketed his phone after sending you his personal favorite of the bunch, his fantastic dinosaur impersonation, and returned to picking out his birthday cards for you, drawn to the biggest and most decorative ones on the shelves. 

Ever since the day you told him about your lack of celebration for your birthday in your teenage and recent years, Awsten had the idea in his head to make sure you got to celebrate the special day in some way, someday. After all, it was the day his favorite person was born. 

Adding a 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd birthday card to the growing pile in his arms, Awsten walked to the counter, where the assistant gave him a suspicious look. 

"Girlfriend's birthday." He explains with a smile, earning a small nod from the woman as she placed them all into a bag. 

"Either you have a lot of making up to do or you have a very humorous girlfriend." She comments, handing him the back and grabbing a pen from a display beside the counter, throwing it in too. 

"You're probably gonna need it." She whispers, a kind smile on her face as a grin spreads across his. 

"A bit of both, and you're right, thank you." He laughs, sending her a nod of thanks as he walks out. 

With the cards and your present already taken care of, all that remained was the picnic basket he had to fill and the flowers he was set to pick up next. 

While you sat at the head of the dining table, your friends hands over your eyes as the other two carried and lit your cake, Awsten was already walking into the flower shop packed to the brim with fragrance and colour. 

"Happy birthday, dear y/n, happy birthday to you!" Your friends cheer, eyes uncovered to see a large, delicately iced red velvet cake, very similar to the cupcakes you had been handed throughout the day, but this time with two gold and white candles lit on top, a bright and shiny 23 right in the middle. 

You can't help the wide grin that covers your face once again as you make your wish, blowing out the candles with light dancing in your eyes as a friend snaps pictures of you for later.

Cake and presents are taken care of before the hour is up, and after showering you with buckets of affection all day, your friends finally let you escape for some time alone, letting you know if you need absolutely anything to just call them, all of them still heavily dedicated to their role as birthday elves. 

A smile still plays on your lips as you relax on your bed, the sound of Daphne Blue by the band CAMINO playing on your record player across the room letting you relax as the day sank in, a content sigh escaping you as you recall the events of the day.

You're confused though as you hear the sound of music still playing well after the end of Honest, the needle on your vinyl travelling to the middle of the record and waiting on you to flip it in silence. 

With a confused frown, you climb off your bed, walking over to your window to investigate the source of the noise. 

Catching a sight of bright green, a small scream escapes your lips as you see Awsten standing below your window, a bluetooth speaker held above his head playing Blink 182 on full volume. 

"Happy birthday babe!!" He cheers loudly, his heart racing as you hang your head out of your window, shock evident on your face.

"Awsten!! How the fuck did you get here so quick, crazy??" You call back, happy tears gathering in your eyes. 

"For you? Yeah. Now are you gonna let me in so I can kiss you or what?" He asks teasingly, making you shake your head at him, grinning as you close your window and run out of your room, basically flying down the stairs and past your grinning best friends. 

You swing the door open, and hit Awsten's body full force as his arms wrap around you tightly, tears starting to fall as you actually get to touch him again. 

"Hey sweetheart." He grins, kissing the top of your head and drinking in the familiar scent of your shampoo and conditioner. 

"You're home." You cry into his chest before pulling back so you can hold his face with both of your hands, still in shock that he's real and in front of you. 

"And I still like you even though you're twenty three." He jokes, his hands on your hips pulling you closer to him so he can finally kiss you after so long apart. 

The small action made your heart burst, the feeling of having him so close again like taking a breath after feeling your lungs burn under water. It made your skin shiver and your heartbeat race, even with your best friends wolf whistling in the background. 

"Speaking of, why did you go all 'boombox outside my window'?" You ask, pulling back and frowning at him. 

"I wanted to be romantic." He shrugs, making you shake your head as you laugh. 

"Dork." You say lovingly to assure him, making a wider smile spread across his face. 

"Okay," He pecks your lips one more time, nodding in the direction of the stairs, "there's more surprise to go so you go wait up there while I get everything else." 

You try to fight his instructions for a moment, wanting to help, but give up when he gives you a look that says 'don't even try'. 

It takes Awsten all of three minutes to run from your door to his car and back again, picnic basket and presents in hand as he mouths a thank you to the girls in the living room, them helping him all along without your knowledge. 

Confusion washes over you as you see the picnic basket in his hand as he walks in, proudly and confidently walking towards you and dropping a bag down on the bed beside where you sit. 

"Open." He instructs, pointing to the bag that you eye suspiciously. 

"What have you done here, Knight?" You ask, watching as he takes the blanket from off the end of your bed to lay on the floor and opening the bag to peak inside. 

"We are having a very special edition air conditioned picnic where I don't have to worry about my gorgeous girlfriend being bitten by ten million mosquitoes." He explains, still making your cheeks heat up at his words just as easily as he always had. 

Awsten occupies himself setting up the indoor picnic as you take the top envelope from the bag, opening the small pastel pink package to see a very glittery, very girly happy 1st birthday card. 

"Sweetheart," you laugh lightly, "I think you got the wrong card." 

"No I didn't, I got you a card for every year you've been alive because we're celebrating all the birthdays you didn't before." He states simply, but it hits you as anything but simple. 

"Awsten…" You trail off, opening another few cards with tears in your eyes. 

"Do you… do you like it?" He asks, walking over on his knees to kneel in front of you, suddenly unsure of the gesture of the cards. 

The tears start to fall as you look down at him, pulling him into a kiss that makes him melt like putty in your hands. 

"I absolutely love it. I'm gonna put them all up like another wallpaper." You laugh happily, while he wipes away the tears that fall down your cheeks. 

"Sounds like a plan to me. But first," He points to the open picnic basket on your floor, "we have some tacos to take care of." 

You thank your lucky stars for the bright, in every sense of the word, man in front of you as you eat, happily exchanging stories of nightmare customers you'd had in recent weeks for his stories of venues that made your toes curl. 

When the tiredness finally took over, Awsten pulled you into bed, legs tangling together and his arms around you once again as he fell asleep, while you stayed awake a little bit longer, reading the messages placed all through the 23 cards you had been given while relaxing back into the arms of the man you love. 

You could feel his breath on your neck behind you, comforting and familiar as you finally reach card 23, a gasp leaving you as the simple but gorgeous necklace tucked inside falls onto your bed beside you.

You pick up the small tear shaped ruby gem necklace from beside you and hold onto it tightly, unknowingly moving closer to the man near squeezing the breath out of you even in his sleep. 

Reading the card in the soft light of your bedside lamp gets harder as tears cloud your vision, but you do your best to push through it. 

Today, we celebrate 23 years since the love of my life was born. You, not Carlos Santana. You know I toe the line of being cheesy every day, but I apologize in advance for diving over the edge for a moment. For a long time I felt like I had to escape who I was, and for a while, I did, but I lost a home that I couldn't find no matter where I searched for it. The closest I ever got to that home was your arms that night you pulled me in, and thank god you didn't let me go, because you've proven to me over and over again that I do have a home, and it's in the spot right by your side. You're the one thing in my life I know I got right, and you deserve to feel like the most important person in the world, because to me, you are. There would never be enough space in a card for me to tell you how much I love you, but I plan on letting you know every day for the rest of my life. I still like you, I still love you, and I still think you're an actual angel. Happy birthday sunshine. 

taglist | @spicycal​ @calmlftv​ @irwinkitten​  @mrandleer​ @candidcal​  @lukeskisses​  @wallflowercal​  @brooklynsninenine​ ​ @whereveryouares​ @everyscarisahealingplace​

[pluckyredhead]

Hey! No pressure to answer if you don't wanna, but you've mentioned liking comics!Ollie a few times and I mostly know him secondhand through Birds of Prey. So my main impression of him is "cocky asshole serial cheater Dinah is better off without" and I was wondering if you'd be interested in talking about what I'm missing about his character not reading his own comics? Thanks!

Sure! So here’s the thing: Ollie-as-cheater is a retcon. The timeline goes something like this [CW: rape]:

1941-1969: Ollie has no real recurring love interest. (There’s Miss Arrowette, aka Bonnie King, Cissie’s mom, but she’s only portrayed as a potential love interest for Ollie in one of her four Silver Age appearances.)

1969: Ollie develops his leftwing hothead personality and falls head over heels for Dinah (who originally was a good ten years older than him, which is a dynamic I love).

1988: While in a committed relationship with Dinah, Ollie is raped by Shado, who bears a child as a result. He has no knowledge of this happening and doesn’t know the child is his.

1993: Ollie is kissed by a teenage runaway he and Dinah have taken in, and Dinah dumps him for not pushing her away.

1995-2000: Ollie dies. Chuck Dixon relentlessly portrays Ollie as a lovable but incorrigible horndog in both Connor’s Green Arrow and Dinah’s Birds of Prey, largely to contrast virginal, shy (and likely queer, deal with it Homophobic Chuck) Connor with his father and to explain some of Dinah’s issues during this period.

2000: Ollie is resurrected in Quiver, which is my favorite Green Arrow story, but has a few terrible moments in it, including one in which he is depicted as willingly cheating on Dinah with Shado.

2002-2016: Ollie is dragged through a decade and a half of character assassination in which more infidelity is retconned into his backstory, he’s revealed to have knowingly abandoned Connor and his mother after Connor was born, he cheats on Dinah some more, their relationship becomes increasingly toxic and physically violent, and everything is terrible. Honestly, I’m not sure how bad it eventually got, because I jumped ship completely after Lian’s death.

2016: Green Arrow: Rebirth happens and my big dumb romantic hippie rascal came BACK and I love him so much I want to cry about it!

Ollie has definitely never been perfect. The only part of your description I disagree with, actually, is “serial cheater,” because he is cocky (but I like cocky) and he is an asshole (but I like assholes) and he isn’t good enough for Dinah (but no one is). And he and Dinah weren’t perfect during the 25 years or so they were together before his death. She ostensibly dumped him for kissing Marianne, but this was coming on years of being impulsive and irresponsible (one time he went out to run errands and ended up in a dog race in Alaska).

But man, the writing of the two of them after he came back to life and Kevin Smith left the book was just dreadful, and I largely blame Judd Winick for that (although I goddamn hate what Brad Meltzer did, too). Winick turned their banter into toxic fighting - at one point, Ollie calls Dinah a slut and accuses her of sleeping with an entire football team, she hits him, and then they get really turned on by this and do it. No, Judd, hitting is not “sexy” when women do it, especially when they’re one of the top ranked martial artists in the world. Around the same time, Babs is shocked to learn that Dinah is marrying Ollie, “who fathered Connor with that Shado woman” - except Connor’s mother is Moonday and Shado raped Ollie. It’s a combination of comics not accepting that men can be raped (and Grell really didn’t write it as rape, just a ~thing that happened~), and writers basing their characterizations on retcons instead of the original text and that particular aspect of Ollie’s character snowballing.

I’m willing to accept that Ollie’s a tomcat, no problem. The man has two (or three! I personally believe that Cissie is his) illegitimate children with (two (or three) different women, none of whom are The Love Of His Life. I have no problem with a characterization of Ollie as Enthusiastic About Sex. But the cheating retcon really gets my goat. (As does the retcon that he knew about Connor from birth, which I simply refuse to accept. It’s my Green Arrow Rubicon and I won’t cross it.)

As to why I like him: again, he’s not perfect. He’s a mess. (I like messes! Look at Booster Gold. Look at Daredevil.) But he’s a try-hard mess. He’s so passionate and he cares so much. He makes the spiciest chili and yells at people about recycling and spends half an hour waxing his beard into points every morning and accidentally brings a new teenager home every time he goes outside. He is cranked to eleven 100% of the time and even if he sometimes goes too far or gets it wrong, it’s never out of apathy.

Ollie is a showboater and irresponsible and he fucks up all the time - with Roy, with Connor, with Dinah. But he loves with his whole self and he wants the hero community to be better than they are and he has committed to a silly theme to a truly ridiculous degree and I just adore him.

If I have convinced you to give Ollie a shot (ha, arrow pun), here are my recs:

Green Lantern/Green Arrow by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, otherwise known as the Hard Traveling Heroes era. Be warned that this is 70s liberalism so there are some well-intentioned but reeeeeeally dated Hot Takes on race and class, and some real opposition to women’s lib. (But oh boy does Adams draw a beautiful Dinah.)

Hunter’s Moon by Mike Grell. The Grell era on GA actually starts with the miniseries The Longbow Hunters, which spun off into Ollie’s first ongoing series; Hunter’s Moon collects the first issues from that run. But The Longbow Hunters, though visually stunning as well as important (it moved Ollie and Dinah to Seattle, introduced Shado, and temporarily removed Dinah’s Canary Cry), has a lot of sexual violence (against Dinah) and Orientalism in it. I’m sick of books with violence against women being the Important Comics so I’d rather boost Hunter’s Moon, which shows Dinah going to therapy and working through what’s happened to her as a person with agency instead of using her trauma as a plot point to motivate Ollie. But I’m including Grell in here because Dinah’s assault aside, he depicts Ollie and Dinah’s relationship as healthy, complex, and joyously sexual, and I love it.

Quiver and Sounds of Violence by Kevin Smith and Phil Hester. Ollie’s resurrection and the sequel. As noted above, Smith hits a couple sour notes for me, but I mostly love his Ollie, plus he introduces Mia here and I would die for her. And Hester’s Ollie has imprinted on my heart forever as my Ollie. (Weirdly, Smith and O’Neil share the odd distinction of writing my favorite Green Arrow and my least favorite Daredevil.)

Green Arrow: Rebirth and the current ongoing series by Benjamin Percy and Otto Schmidt. Can be clunky, but the heart is there, as Ollie tries really really hard to unlearn his privilege, be worthy of Dinah, and repair his relationships with Diggle (!) and Roy. Also features his kid sister Emiko Queen, who was created somewhere during the time that I was ignoring Green Arrow comics but she is PERFECT and I would fight a mountain lion for her. In some beautiful parallel universe Mia and Cissie and Emi all live with Ollie and make fun of him 100% of the time and it’s beautiful.

In conclusion, THANK YOU if you made it through all that nonsense, and please enjoy this ridiculous macro from LJ user parsimonia that I saved a million years ago and which makes me laugh every time I look at it: