Happy 10th year of me doing this dorky comic! Hope people don't mind the fact that I haven't really dabbled in Cap stuff for a few years, except for my weird yearly July 4th ritual. On AO3 here, and tumblr tag here. (2022 was about Dobbs, 2020 was about seeing the stars, 2019 was about building new systems, 2018 was about voting, 2017 was about immigration.)
@histrionic-dragon tagged me yesterday and posted a bunch of cool links of ways to help: https://histrionic-dragon.tumblr.com/post/721837010124488704/almost-captain-americas-birthday
Rail workers paid sick leave: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
Lots of posts out there on the 2023 Minnesota legislative session, but here's the OG tumblr roundup post.
California is trying to divest its two largest pension funds from fossil fuels, but apparently today they decided to table it until next year. :/ I guess more meetings are needed! (productive ones, not ones that could have been an email.)
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Imagine looking at a character whose entire premise is that in every stage of his life, he's made every version of himself into someone that inspires people to such a degree that EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF HIM has people wanting to literally follow in his footsteps in some way or another.....
And coming to the conclusion that like.....the most important things about him are the sum of all his trappings. His entirely homemade developed from scratch could not exist if not for what he already was and brought with him BEFORE crafting this newest version of himself trappings, with his greatest trait throughout all of it being his adaptability; his ability and willingness to roll with the punches and not try to simply weather any opposition or changes to his life but instead reshape himself as needed to better fit INTO whatever new shape his life and the world around him takes. All while managing to carry the most innate, fundamental and necessary aspects of himself from one version to the next. Thus every single version of himself is different but simultaneously every single version of himself is also undeniably the same person.
The strength of this character, to me, will always be that he can be so many versions of himself, he can become so many things, all without ever actually losing or discarding any of the aspects of himself he considers most essential, the things he's not willing to lose or give up just to keep going. Finding that road not taken by most, usually because most never even think to look for it as an option. But one that he's always able to find because the one trick he's mastered in his tumultuous life is threading that needle of not just digging in his heels in an unproductive way but rather being selective about when and where he makes a stand and decides "this is not a thing I'm willing to compromise about" but here are places and ways I can and will change and evolve and adapt in order to make it possible for me to hold onto these parts and keep them as they are.
And that's why its always so mind-boggling to me that so many writers can't seem to think of anything else to do with Dick Grayson other than invent some new reason for him to just....not be that person, or to like just take the character whose most basic fundamental trait he's NOT about to compromise on is willingly giving up his spot in the driver's seat of his own life.....and make him just a passenger in his own life and stories.
Dick Grayson at age nine....at age nineteen...at age twenty nine....the one core thread running through all versions of him is the only way he's standing back and letting you call the shots for him or putting him on the sidelines in some way is over his dead body.
HOW he goes about that, what that looks like, who he becomes and what aspects of himself he plays up at some times and what traits he lets fall by the wayside at other times when they offer less in service to his primary goal here....that changes constantly. He changes constantly.
But those changes are almost always (or at least they used to be/should be IN MY OPINION) made with the intention of keeping certain things about him or his life as consistent as possible.
That's the duality of Dick Grayson that I'm here for. The inherent contradiction of him that COULD allow for endless conflict and breaking new narrative ground in all sorts of ways if mined properly:
His eternal willingness to compromise....but only ever in pursuit of doubling down on the ways he's not willing to compromise.
Forever walking that tightrope in ways that only a kid born and raised in a circus could ever hope to.
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you know, an interpretation of ct that I don't see that I personally really love is that she's a fuck up. like yes she's cool and she has some good fight scenes, but a huge part of her character is that she makes mistakes. the mistakes that she makes are ones that on their own aren't the end of the world, but she keeps making these little mistakes, and they eventually add up until she's out of room to make any more.
a really good example of this phenomenon in action is the actions she took leading up to her final confrontation with carolina and tex.
strike one, she thought she saw something in the water, but when asked by the leader what it was, she brushed it off as nothing when even if it had been nothing, it would've been smart to tell him what she thought she saw.
strike two, she didn't sense or notice florida's presence when the leader did, and she looks at the leader twice, once as she pulled out her magnums, and again after she did a scan of the room, almost like she was looking at him for guidance before he finds florida and takes him out with one good axe throw.
strike three, she couldn't convince the leader to leave when they had the chance to get away, and her cheap tricks were not enough to hold off either tex or carolina in a fight. they were only good for incapacitating her opponents enough for her to get away, which doesn't work when she has no escape.
ct is not tex, or carolina, or south. she is not a one woman army who can get herself out of trouble when she's stuck in tough situations. she needs people who can watch her back, she need a team who can cover her when she does mess up, and the leader and his team were not those people. she couldn't bring herself to trust them, and they couldn't bring themselves to trust her, and that cost all of them their lives.
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Ringlord High King of Everything Elrond, inspired here
(@the-writing-goblin)
I imagine in this situation elrond would have been partially tempted by boromir's declaration, but instead of trying to fight sauron with it (because even in the weirdest crack au i can think of elrond is still too genre-aware to try that) he tried to use it to supercharge his use of vilya and protect everyone.
basically Ringlord!Elrond turned the entirety of Eriador into a mega-gondolin situation: massive walls (courtesy of numenorean/eregion tech) around the regions bordering the north or Mordor, fortresses along the mountain range and several layers of gates along every road in or out. Everybody goes in; nobody goes out; everyone is safe.
and he ended up claiming the kingship to give him more authority in the process - he's High King of the Noldor and Sindar and King of the Edain (given that there are like three half-vanyar in middle-earth, he's more or less king of all children of iluvatar) and so he can have command over the entirety of the West.
and with the help of the Ring, this actually works! but the corruption starts to show eventually
he uses his kinship to Gondor to forcefully drag them into his neo-gondolin-empire-creation so he can ensure none of his great-nephews will ever have to face sauron. he extends the walls to encompass Mirkwood, because he's the high king of the sindar and has a duty to protect thranduil's realm, and unleashes the full might of his melian-lite powers to purge Sauron's Shadow and the spawn of Ungoliant from the now-Greenwood.
Galadriel and Glorfindel very much see where this is going and are very very worried. galadriel won't let him build walls around lothlorien (because she lives next door to a balrog and knows exactly what happened to gondolin) but celeborn thinks it's a good idea, since after all Doriath wouldn't have fallen if Melian's girdle had still been up. glorfindel tries to talk him out of it but the ring has taken hold
the Ring's power also enhances all his natural weirdness and powers - he has his wings and maia markings permanently activated now, with or without finwean anger. he can fully shapeshift, and he goes from raising waves in the bruinen to raising tsunamis in the great sea.
except the finwean anger seems to be permanently activated now, too, and anyone who harms someone he's deemed under his protection finds themselves the target of a rather ironic vengeance quest. the shapeshifting is looking weird now - his teeth are always sharp now, and his eyes have gone fully inhuman. sometimes he has claws and his wings look more like bats than eagles. and his water powers are more like osse's- he can't calm the waters now (goldberry is the first to notice something's up) and can only stir them into massive ship-sinking storms and tsunamis.
this progresses until he's basically Evil Luthien ruling over a continent-wide Mega-Gondolin, slaughtering orc-hordes before they even reach the white walls and sinking any naval fleet Sauron tries to send around the coast. Everybody is brought in; nobody leaves; everyone is safe...?
he figures out that the dwarven legend of "Durin's Bane" has to be one of the few first age balrogs thats still unaccounted for. and well, it's living right on his border, and he can't risk another fall of gondolin, right? so he leads a small force in there to clear moria, and they shove the balrog off the edge, but it takes one of his captains (except glorfindel) with it (maybe erestor?) and he uses the ring and saves erestor, (and maybe floods the balrog for good measure), and glorfindel is sure he saw elrond's eyes go yellow for a moment.
and even fully corrupted, he knows he can't take the ring directly into mordor. but he can wipe out sauron's armies outside the walls, to protect his kingdom - because turgon's mistake was thinking he was safe even when there were balrogs and dragons and orcs outside, right?
somewhere along the way, arwen realizes what's happening and goes to live with galadriel. one of the twins goes with her; the other stays out of loyalty but eventually follows.
elrond's kingdom has become a cross between doriath and gondolin now, with all the surrounding lands warped by ring-magic to hide it, and layers of stone walls and iron gates preventing anyone from leaving. because everyone is here; nobody leaves; everyone is... safe?
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really fucking sick and tired of people who really fucking love the eddie book jumping on people who don't like or are even remotely critical of it's posts and like crusading their opinions around from the top of their high horses and shoving it down our throats.
if you like the book, great! that's awesome! love that for you! i am genuinely glad that you were able to find good in it and enjoy it!!
but not everyone did, and not everyone is going to agree with you. so, instead of going on some grand crusade where you find every single post that includes anything even remotely negative or negative adjacent or even neutrally critical and spending ALL this time and effort trying to provide unwanted rebuttals to every single thing, maybe you should just stay in your lane and find people who DO like the book and chat about it with them.
because i can PROMISE YOU, none of us appreciate it when you come onto our posts and start accusing us of "hating on" the author or "being rude" about her and her work and RIDICULOUS shit like that.
being critical of something and pointing out it's flaws is NOT inherently hating on it. i, frankly, do not know where people got that notion, but it's not fucking true so can we fucking quit assuming it is? and, critiquing something is also NOT the same as saying this is shit and it sucks and the author is a piece of garbage. again, where the fuck that came from is beyond me. you can be critical of something and still enjoy it. as soooo many of you love to point out, it's not perfect, why should it be perfect? so D U H. of course that means criticism can and should arise???
also. hot take (by which i mean ice fucking cold because it's NOT a fucking hot take), but going around toting FALSE facts as part of your "defense" does not make you or your argument look good. you, like the author, should maybe do a basic fact check first. ���
tldr, if you like the book, that's genuinely great, but stay in your fucking lane and stop seeking out posts from people who didn't like it to start shit in the notes.
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So Bucchigiri...
I still have hope for more thing from this show especially considering every episode title is food related, the lead live and works at a restaurant and Marito seems to have connections with food.
Everyone has already clued into Marito with some serious tongue action.
He also happens to really love his kebabs.
Then in episode 4 we see him having at LEAST 6 of his kebabs
Then later he takes the kebab he was already eating and shoves it at Arajin.
Arajin decides to show off his eating ability and just shoves the thing straight into his mouth whole.
Is this an indirect kiss? There's also a nice popping sound when he gets his hands out of his mouth.
Then there's this VERY important line. Which considering how he's been eating and what happens to Arajin next, I think is literal.
"I eat and eat, but it never satisfies my hunger."
But because he wants "Ara-teen" to be with him and on his side, Arajin ends up like this.
Arajin has been stuffed so much, he's literally waddling home.
So... there's already belly related things going on in the series, so I'm hopeful for more. Basically just feed everyone.
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