#per aspera ad askra

[ciboriaadastra]

HPW R U DOING IT SO FAST IT KEEPS CRASHIGN FORME

The king of booping is asking *me* for secrets???

[ciboriaadastra]

At least the ameri-whites are getting in water. Europeans straight up not showering for weeks on end.

True. Water is half the battle, like trying to get a dog into a bathtub.

[ciboriaadastra]

Naw, what you mean? Paul McCarthy himself told Joe Jackson to beat his kids into stardom

damn, I guess I missed that unit in my Negrology 102: Music of the Night People class 😔 I'm gonna fail the final. This is what I get for not learning my own history

[ciboriaadastra]

the key bridge is 1.6 miles long it has plenty of space under it for boats to pass but that is way too long for there not to be structures in the water to hold it up which is what the boat crashed into.

Makes sense.

[ciboriaadastra]

i found a guy on instagram and im just constantly pausing his reels to gawk at the amount of comics in his room. not just the amount but also how iconic the titles are im like HOW DID U EVEN FIND THAT

https:// www.instagram.com/p/C2z_CgkxybH/ if ur curious

That's SO MANY???!!!! How can you have just an entire box and shelves? The big books can cause upwards of $100. I couldn't drop that on a single book.

I'm convinced that people just...knew an older comic nerd and got their collection when they died or there's crazy auctions going on somewhere or there's some secret way to pay a fortune to get an out of print comic reprinted for you. Or there's something going on at conventions <- has never been to one

Or people have figured out how to take good scans of comics and do print jobs themselves. That's still crazy costly to do yourself and people would still charge out the ass for them. And that's a lot to go through both as a fan and for just interior design aesthetics.

[ciboriaadastra]

out of curiosity have you designed any conlangs?

Technically, no. In that I haven't progressed to the point of creation where you could construct conversational sentences with them.

I made an attempt to design a conlang for my angel characters a year or two ago, but my energy for it fizzled out as I struggled with figuring out the direction I wanted to go with it. Designing a conlang requires more thought in decision-making rather than throwing a bunch of different language features into the pot and seeing what happens. Still enjoyed the process, though, which is why I keep it on my interests page.

I can show you what I do have, and if you know anything about conlanging you can probably point out an immediate beginner error lmao

This is my consonant chart

Too many consonants. 40 is entirely too many consonants. I initially justified it as I wasn't making a human language, so I could utilize as many as I thought might be useful, but it ended up being harder to work with.

And here's the word list:

I designed verbs to have a differentiation based on how violently the action is done, indicated by harsher sounds. I thought it would be interesting for angels to think it integral to communicate whether an action happened gently (implying virtues of humility and patience) or with a lot of force (implying potential for injury, wrath of the gods, or a lack of humility/patience/generosity/kindness/etc.)

For example, "aad" would be used to describe a leaf falling from a tree while "a'adz" would be used to describe a ceramic plate that fell and shattered on the ground. Since the plate could have injured someone if they were hit by it on the way down, if they accidentally cut themselves trying to clean up the mess, or if they stepped on the shards...the fall is assigned as violent. A'adz is also the term used to talk about an angel being exiled (the Fall of Lucifer).

"Kos" has harsh consonant sounds because seething implies anger, which is unvirtuous behavior.

My choice of consonants was mainly to construct words that imitated the sound the action made. Take biq/biş/biź for instance. The uvular plosive (q) in biq is meant to imitate the sound of water dripping, the palatal fricative (sh) in biş the sound of water running, and the palatal fricative (zh) in biź the sound of water splashing the ground when you drop a full bucket.

"Aad" also imitates sound in that that's the sound you make when you fall: aaaaa *thud*. "A'adz" is similar with it adding the sound you make when you realize that fall really hurt (hissing or sucking your teeth).

"T'ah" is imitating the clicking sound people make at crying babies to try to soothe them.

I think the rest of the words can be inferred from there.

I didn't end up making a vowel chart, I think that's where I started to struggle. I did note down some other things, though:

Word roots are in (C)V(C) order. Nasal consonants can't cluster, except for m + ng at the onset

The first syllable is always stressed

Apostrophes indicate glottal stops and aspirations

Nominative case marker (I'm gonna be fr I don't remember what a case marker is anymore)

[ciboriaadastra]

the most charity I can give them is like maybe they use another form of thing instead of a washcloth? like a loofah or smth

It's possible, but that hinges on them knowing what a loofah is in the first place. Not to mention cis people unnecessarily gender loofahs to be a "girl thing" to use, so the likelihood of a cis white man using anything to scrub his body becomes dangerously low.

[ciboriaadastra]

🔥khoa and/or talia

I can do both! :3 under a cut because I talk too much

Talia my lovely <3

Preface: I won't get into the violent racism of the Morrison retcon and any characterization that builds upon it or the orientalism in pre-Morrison canon because those are obvious popular opinions people should be against. Anti-racism is not a hot take, basically. And there are people on this website who have already talked about this better than I can with the insight of being directly targeted.

Talia shouldn't be the focus of man pain or the target of blame for it, because—aside from the fact that this is lazy, misogynistic writing—she actually has little to none to do with the source of angst for those characters (namely, Bruce and Damian). Fanfic writers are extremely annoying about this.

I cannot read a regular batcentric fanfic that involves Talia, because she is always utilized to be a source of angst when at best she's a vehicle for it and it becomes quite clear this is the writer's way of dumping their misgivings about Talia, either as a potshot at her in a different shipfic or the fanfic's premise is [Character] stands around and yells at Talia for a thousand words.

The angst for Bruce and Damian specifically has less to do with her as a person and more to do with the theme of loss (abandonment trauma, loss of childhood, loss of control in your life, etc.) for which she happens to be a key character in facilitating the events that allow its exploration. Considering that loss is a major theme in her story, it's only natural that characters who are tied to her development experience a form of loss in relation to her.

Neither of them should hold any grudge or contempt towards her over their own pain, because she did not do anything to them that would warrant it; people who think that they should overblow the effect of her actions vs. the effect of the status quo they all operate in. Bruce has abandonment trauma because he developed it after an unalterable traumatic childhood event. It will always be unsafe for Damian to grow up existing as a part of the al-Ghul bloodline just as it was unsafe for Talia. Bruce's issues are internal, Damian's are systemic. It's hardly Talia's fault (especially not solely hers) that these issues rear their heads and strike.

Could they irrationally blame her for their problems? I guess, but most people aren't coming from a perspective where they would purposefully have characters behave irrationally for the realism after which they may check themselves (or be checked by someone else); most are rationalizing the irrational because they would behave that uncharitably to others. And its the misogyny.

Idk. I think Talia's a great character when you don't constantly have a bitch in your ear telling you she's a horrible mother and that she's an example of Bruce having terrible taste in women. My house is open for MILF lovers and women enjoyers.

Talia should have friends who have nothing to do with the Batfamily (or being adjacent to it) and don't know anything about her family or the League of Assassins.

Pretty self-explanatory, but I think it's not enough for her to have friends in the League, friends in fellow assassins, or friends in the bat-network, because it still creates a space where Talia is looked down upon by somebody for factors outside of her control or for not being the kind of woman they think she ought to be.

I also think she should be at the club.

She's transfem because I said so.

The transgender narrative, if you would.

Speaking on a meta level, it's about how trans women and transfeminine people are treated as if everything is their fault (indicted on false, bigoted narratives for things they would never do), having such a small network due to being isolated from a healthy source of community, being a target of fetishization, a constant trend of loneliness due to these factors outside of their control.

It's also about Talia leaving men (manhood) behind to discover who she is as a woman. The transition from an old life to a new one that provides a better sense of power and control over oneself than what existed in the old life. The transgenderisms in the concept of death and rebirth, a theme associated with the al-Ghuls as guardians of the Lazarus Pits.

I know transfem hcs are not popular (especially for canon female characters), so this isn't meant to be a hot take...I just haven't seen anyone else consider transfem Talia before. At least not outside of t4t Brutalia, which is often mostly about making transmasc Bruce make sense in the overarching story (Damian) than it is about both of them having trans narratives/themes. That is a problem more generalized to tmasc4tfem hcs than it is specifically a Brutalia problem, in that usually the transfem character's transfemininity is treated as an afterthought.

Though that last bit is not as annoying as people who reinvent the test tube eugenics baby backstory for Damian because the idea of Talia being trans is so beyond them for some reason. Like...why is eugenics more plausible than transfemininity to you? That's weird!

Minhkhoa you are so... *punches wall*

People who see zero value in his character just because he occupies the same archetype Two-Face represents (childhood friend turned foe) are needlessly obstinate.

The excuse is essentially that they don't want to read about a concept that is like a pre-existing concept but with a different perspective/spin on it. Which is an odd opinion to have when you're reading Big Two cape comics and you are constantly reading new perspectives/spins on the same concept, because an end does not and will not exist for them. And it may in part have something to do with Harvey's canonical whiteness vs. Minhkhoa undeniably being a SEAsian man.

Idk. It's strange to me, because Harvey and Minhkhoa exist in different periods in Bruce's life that do not overlap. Harvey and Bruce went to school together when they were little and reunited when Bruce returned to Gotham. Minhkhoa occupies a specific timespan between Bruce's highschool years and his return to Gotham. Harvey is not present during Fear State when Minhkhoa breaks the truce. When Bruce seeks out Harvey during Gotham Nocturne, Minhkhoa has long left Gotham to train Clownhunter.

In addition, the reasons they are important to Bruce's character are different. Harvey's deal is that Bruce cannot be so personally removed from the politics of Gotham and the plight of the average Gothamite and still think he can make a meaningful difference. Bruce was oblivious to Harvey's personal struggles, so all the help Bruce tried to give him generally did more harm in the grand scheme of things.

Minhkhoa on the other hand encapsulates one of the overarching themes introduced in BTK: think bigger. Bruce is not maximizing his potential to help the world; he's focused on a dinky rotting city off the coast of mainland New Jersey, a small state in the imperial core. He could renounce his status and generational wealth to commit himself to taking down criminal/capitalist empires all over the world exploiting people in countries in the Global South, to no longer be of the exploitative class and instead become an avenging angel for the exploited. Bruce is a one cause, one dedication type of person. Which isn't bad, just different. The point is not who is more right but to contrast different approaches to vigilantism and to critique a different aspect of what makes Bruce's status as a wealthy, ruling class American an obstacle to his efforts to reduce crime.

I hate fanon interpretations of Minhkhoa </3

If I was paid $100 to wallop people with a wooden baseball bat every time they said the word "psychopath" as a legitimate description of him, regurgitated ableist stereotypes around AsPD and personality disorders in general, or elected to flat out erase the struggles Minhkhoa had since his childhood despite it being an important aspect of his backstory and characterization simply because the concept of a person who struggles with low empathy is deeply uncomfortable to them; I would have enough money for a down payment on a house.

I've talked at length about this to you before here last year, but it still holds up. You'd think it'd be hard to fuck up the characterization of a character who only has like...three points of complexity...but then you will always be surprised.

I'm also :/ at the growing trend of Minhkhoa getting sucked into the fanon Batfamily vortex of doom. It will not end well for him.

I don't like the Wight Witch being added to Minhkhoa's lore. She should be her own independent character.

This is part of a bigger issue with Minhkhoa's characterization in which other DC writers strip important things from what Tynion established and adding relationships that don't provide his character with any meaningful development to make up for it. The singular L I've seen Ram V take when writing Asian characters.

I like Rhea Sinha. Her story is interesting and engaging on its own. I don't think Minhkhoa (and Bruce by extension) needed to be part of it. You could replace them with any other men and it'd still be compelling. For once in my fandom life, I want my blorbo (Minhkhoa) out of the good story.

It's also that this is a pattern of women being linked to Minhkhoa just as in-universe proof he exists outside of Bruce. You see this with Angelbreaker as well when she makes a comment during the Shadow War arc about Minhkhoa just wanting her to be his Catwoman. Which was extremely corny. You can have Minhkhoa attempt to emulate Bruce for the parts of himself that he believes is lacking or to outdo Bruce in ways he thinks Bruce could have been better without trying to make them 1:1 in every single way possible, else he just comes across as goofy and like he has no principles of his own besides spite for a man who dumped his ass 20-some years ago. Like...I get he's obsessed with Bruce to an embarrassing degree, but why do women have to deal with his mess?

I'd rather comic writers create characters who are just made to flesh out Minhkhoa's existing lore (at least what can be made cohesive of it) than create characters who are clearly supposed to have their own stories who just get linked to him just to be linked, if that makes sense. Like how Alfred exists to explain who raised Bruce when his parents were murdered and who helped Bruce in his early Batman years and who is there to help Bruce when he's too injured to retreat to the Batcave on his own. Flat and static characters have a place in media.