#plus he doesn't want to be weird

[blackmesa-researcher]

So, did you develop that crush yet? 👀

Sh-Shut up. Just shut your face, anon. Shhh. SHHHHHH!!

I do not have a crush.

[flustered wing fluffing]

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[yunmeng-jiang]

that man does NOT think of wei wuxian as his gege

[greenerteacups]

thoughts on Ginny and Harry as a couple?

There are a lot of people who find their romance in HBP forced. I don't think it's forced so much as underwritten, and the books don't get the chemistry quite right (though the movies certainly don't, either). There's potential, but they just don't get enough actual scenes of substance (besides Harry thinking she's pretty or feeling jealous of Dean) for a lot of readers to buy that they're not only in love, but deeply enough in love to break up, get back together, and wind up married.

That's not to say I don't see the appeal. There's a very cool scene in Book 5 where Harry's doing a woe-is-me-Chosen-One act, and Ginny effortlessly puts him in his place about it by reminding him that she was possessed by Voldemort at eleven, which is a rare glimpse into her character and also a great synecdoche for their relationship — Ginny is a grounding presence who, like Ron and Hermione, isn't going to be awed by his past adventures because she knew him before they happened. In that respect, Ginny's probably one of the few women Harry could feasibly wind up with, because he only ever seems comfortable around people (let alone girls) who can see past the Chosen-One schtick and treat him like a normo (see: Ron, Hermione, the Weasleys, Luna, Hagrid). True to type, he doesn't get interested in Ginny at all until she's ditched her celebrity crush and ceased to view him as an idol, because in his heart of hearts, Harry wants to be a normal boy, and it's stressed over and over that part of what he likes about his relationship with Ginny is how normal it feels. He kind of has a horribly supercharged version the celebrity dating problem: after the Battle of Hogwarts, anyone he meets is going to know him first as Harry Potter, Chosen One, Boy Who Lived, and Actually Fucking Resurrected Messiah of the Wizarding World, which is... I mean, it's possible that there are witches out there who could get over that, but Harry's not an extroverted guy, and I'm not sure how he'd go about finding them. Ginny's the one who's been there since the beginning, doesn't need anything about him or his past explained to her, and actually likes him for who he is.

When you look at it that way, it's not surprising he married his high school girlfriend. She's one of the few people still alive who doesn't see him as a demigod.

[ectonurites]

SUPER DARK TIMES (2017) DIR. KEVIN PHILLIPS

[dukethvmas]

So I understand why there’s people who say that Bruce should have killed the Joker, I really do, but I’ll be honest I actually understand more when he says things along the lines of “it would make me just like them” or how he wouldn’t be able to go back from that. Like just bear with me. 

 I think it makes more sense to interpret it as him not wanting to gain that power or the state of mind that would come from killing a person, even the Joker. Like it’s a slippery slope for him or something. Because not only would it be fairly difficult for Bruce to be held accountable as Batman (the whole secret identity thing) but there’s also the fact that Bruce is a literal billionaire, so with all the wealth he has also comes a certain amount of power he’d have in daily life right. It’s about the fact that someone with all that money and power shouldn’t be able to play judge, jury, and executioner with someone’s life. It doesn’t matter that it’s the Joker, it’s still a life. And even if it wouldn’t happen, Bruce wouldn’t want to reach that point of no return with the whole ‘power corrupts’ thing.

[coquelicoq]

my ex, who lives alone, is apparently about to buy a 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom, 2-garage house. what. i'm getting stressed out just hearing about it. tf you gonna do with all that space, bro? how you gonna clean all those bathrooms???

[nostalgia-tblr]

started another fic D: didn't mean to, but i went to bed and then had to get up and write 1000 words (!!) of a sylki alternate s2 fic. i shall put the plot/idea below to ENTICE and so I don't forget it myself.

it's not a fix-it as such i just kept the S2 look and locations and characters (OB!!!) and there is a different stupid scifi thing that needs fixed (and also no sad ending because fuck that).

instead of time-slipping loki was sent back the TVA at the right time and he's trying to fit in there and thinks sylvie will be mad at him and besides how would he even find her in such a huge expanding multiverse? oh no! he daydreams a lot and has some odd moments like forgetting how he takes his coffee, and seems to in some be mentally connected to sylvie in a weird scifi way.

obviously he doesn't do anything sensible like tell mobius, so he sneaks off to ask OB who knows all about Variant Entanglement, which is like quantum entanglement but with less science and more selfcest. OB explains that ALAS loki and sylvie are currently entangled variants, which is rare and OB is very excited to get to see it happen but also he's annoyed that apparently nobody told loki not to touch himself if he met himself. (...not in a euphemistic way, this time, just you shouldn't touch your own variants or this might happen.)

it's gone a bit comedy which i think would be a nice change from writing ANGST all the time (and i need to switch modes for the Con Artists AU anyway), though there is a bit of angst (Sylvie does not like the TVA, of course, and some kind of shipping angst will happen as well) and i think i will add some weird pornographic shared sex dream thing just for the hell of it. not sure how that will work, probably involves what i like to refer to as "a confusion of pronouns."

i think OB fancies Casey in this, so there's a 'subplot' for you i suppose. i don't know how long this fic would be but the roughly 1200 words i somehow have so far (this includes some dialogues that need to be not just dialogue though) have not yet got to the point of sylvie showing up aside from in the opening scene which is a flash-forward because... eh, it is just is. but it won't be that long, surely? (this is what i said about the 8800 word sifki fic too.)

ANYWAY LOOK, here is a snippet for some idea of the general tone, in which Loki meets OB but in a different way from in S2 (ooh!):

“Ouroboros.” The man on the other side of the desk looks up from his work. “Oh hey, a visitor!” “I’m told you’re the man to see if I have a technical problem,” says Loki. “Who told you that?” “Casey.” Ouroboros looks pleased. “Casey remembers me?”  “Apparently so.” Loki drops the document he brought with him onto the desk. “You wrote ‘Towards a New Theory of Variant Entanglement’, considered by many to be the seminal work on the phenomenon.” When Ouroboros opens his mouth to ask the obvious question, Loki cuts him off by answering; “According to Casey.” “Wow, he really does remember me!“ “Why wouldn’t he?” asks Loki.  “That’s what I always ask myself!” Determined not to be put off by the oddness of his potential saviour, Loki tries to push the conversation in his desired direction. “I need to ask you some questions about this paper,” he says. “Sure! Ask away!” After an awkward pause, Loki admits, “I didn’t understand a word of it.” Ouroboros’s excitement deflates a little. “Oh.”  “But Casey - yes, he does remember you, I think he might be a bit of a fan, actually -” “Oh, wow! That’s -” “- says that the answer I need is in here.” Loki taps his fingers on the work in question. “So I was hoping you could translate this for an interested but woefully underqualified layman. Please.”

[autumnrory]

this fic had steve in physical therapy after the end of catws but then sam thinks he should've healed fast enough after siberia to rescue them from the raft with more immediacy? make it make sense

[neirmetes]

Another highly specific LMK reader insert fic idea that I am unsure if I will or can write

So y'know the Isekai trope. On one hand you have someone gets abruptly inserted into the narrative and on the other hand you have someone actively replace another character

Well how about this, Reader gets Isekai'ed into the LMK world. The body they wake up in isn't quite theirs and doesn't seem to be a character from the show. At first it doesn't seem like they're even in the show, other than being somewhere near Metropolis and the occasional news report about Monkie Kid

Until they investigate the pictures and albums hidden around the house and it all appears to be them and a gradually growing Xiaotian. A frantic search around the house reveals that it is indeed Xiaotian aka MK's childhood home

Yup, the Reader got Isekai'ed as MK parent

But that's weird, MK doesn't seem to have any biological parents in the show, what could've happened?

Well that's for the Reader to find out, now with the knowledge of the future and a need to protect their newly acquired son.

They go out to search for Pigsy's Noddles, except the moment they ask for MK as his parent, Pigsy is not at all having it. 'He's out on delivery right now and you better leave before he comes back'

Granted, considering that it seems that MK has been with Pigsy for a long time and that the pictures back at home stop at a pretty young looking MK, that's an entirely valid way to react.

In an attempt to stay to at least meet the kid, the Reader resolves to feigning amnesia. 'I don't know what happened or what's going on but all I know is that my son is somewhere and he hasn't been home for who knows how long'. There's some truth to that, as the Reader doesn't know where in the timeline they're in (if we're being honest neither do I), and there's a lingering thought of 'that is my son now I gotta take care of him from now on'

Pigsy sees this distressed parent and relents, allowing them to stay until MK comes back. Tang arrives some time later and while Pigsy is absolutely seething, Tang tries to be a little more polite. It is entirely awkward, the whole time.

MK finally arrives and the poor guy fucking freezes upon seeing the Reader. Neither really know how to react. For MK, this is someone who he hasn't seen in years while for Reader, they are technically masquerading as his absentee parent. So good times all around

This kicks off a very awkward re-introduction and explanation. For obvious reasons, Reader wants to know what happened between them. For even more obvious reasons, MK doesn't wanna talk about it. No one pushes it as of now.

It's settled that this is a very sudden development, something the poor boy needs to process first. So Reader is willing to leave without MK, with a promise that if MK doesn't want them in his life, they'll understand. With that, Reader leaves their contact info with Pigsy and makes their way off.

Aaaaand this is a good time to stop before I end up writing out everything I've thought about for this fic.

Like the other one (though not explicitly stated) if these kind of posts get enough traction I'll genuinely start writing them

[hirazuki]

So, I'm having that fancy dress + sword shoot later this week...

[shoyowo]

sorry to keep harping on this but i finally figured out what bothered me with the "naruto is a loser bootlicker" stuff! it doesn't take into account his trauma and the fact that he was also a victim of konoha.

id even say that if someone from, say akatsuki, got to naruto "first" instead of iruka and they helped him and acknowledged him first then he'd have latched on to them! naruto craves acknowledgement and companionship so much that he'd latch on like a leech to anyone who provided him that.

so the problem isn't that naruto is a "bootlicker" it's unresolved trauma, which is konoha's fault all over again. i think it's a little cruel to call a victim a cog of the system bc like that's the whole point, he's made a cog of the corrupt system unwittingly.

i didn't want 2 touch on boruto bc i don't consider it canon, but this also explains why in boruto he's miserable all the time. bc the village beat out any semblance of rebellion and made him a part of the very system that let him down and he's not allowed to even acknowledge that they let him down! he's not just unhappy bc of the passionless het marriage (which im SURE the village pushed for as well) and bc he isn't with sasuke, he's unhappy bc this is furthest from the life he envisioned for himself and for other shinobi. we can absolutely blame him for getting to this point all we want but that doesn't take away the fact that konoha used his unresolved trauma and issues (that they caused!!) to mould him into this. well, it's that + shitty writing.

[justalittlebluetiefling]

Shepard is still too small to get up on the dining table so that’s where we’re feeding Rex right now and I have to football carry her the whole time I’m setting his food down or she’ll use the chair I work at to vault up there and tackle him out of the way. 

[himemeika]

Johann literally is just letting his corpse rot in his own home

[fazcinatingblog]

Favourite things about Ned Long:

Calling him Neddyyyyyyy

That he played faz percent of his debut game (faz also played that percent of the game for Carlton)

Pretending he's Ned Flanders or something

The fact that Alex Fasolo presented him his jumper and told him to always have a shot and never pass it off

[coffeeastronaut]

i would love to watch doctor who .