#she has progression now because of all the comics

[a-bad-case-of-the-stephs]

There is an idea that Stephanie Brown was crime fighting as The Spoiler for fun, that she saw it all as a game. This reading isn't out of nowhere, it's supported by the things she and other characters say, especially in War Games (2005). However this understanding of Stephanie Brown's actions doesn't account for the large majority of her time as Spoiler, and oftentimes directly contradicts things she says or does.

This is important because how we understand why Stephanie keeps acting as The Spoiler informs what is true about the character. If she's doing it solely for kicks, it's not exactly unfair to call her a reckless idiot who should have listened when Batman and Robin told her to go home and stop wearing her costume.

So, should she just have listened when she was told to go home over and over again? Did she never take crime fighting seriously? Or was she battling against her father's sins to prove herself worthy? Or is there something else entirely going on? It seems like even Stephanie doesn't know at times:

Robin #40 (1993)

There are points where she makes light of her involvement, likening it to something she's doing for "the fun":

Robin #5, Robin #25 (1993)

And times where she rejects that same premise utterly:

Spoiler/Huntress: Blunt Trauma (1998)

It's very tempting to see this as character progression, she starts her first appearance in a Robin comic calling being Spoiler a "goof" but by the time Cataclysm rolls around, she says she isn't doing it for "the fun of it". However, this idea doesn't align with her first appearance and attitude at all.

I'd like to propose a reading which can account for the multiple reasons stated that she returns time and time again to being the Spoiler: the Spoiler represents Stephanie's agency and serves as a way for her to empower herself.

If we're determining why Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, we have to start where she starts, analyzing the her first appearance, and her motivations for creating the Spoiler mantle.

Stephanie's anger at her father + feelings of helplessness and lack of agency + desire to protect others = The Original Spoiler

I’ll stick to only evidence and panels which refer to or depict her time before becoming the Spoiler, or during her very first Spoiler "mission".

Let’s break it down

1.Stephanie Brown's Anger at her Father

This one's pretty self explanatory. I'll get into how her hatred of her dad has to do with Stephanie's feelings of helplessness and self loathing later. But for now, Stephanie's anger at her dad is pretty clearly one of the main things motivating her very first Spoiler appearance.

Detective #648

2. Stephanie Brown's Lack of Agency

Her father is an abusive piece of shit to Stephanie and her mother. He never stays in jail for long, and now that he's been cured of his clue-leaving psychosis, he might not go back at all.

80 Page Giant: Secret Origins (1998)

Her mom is, as Steph sees it, hopelessly addicted to her pills and drinking, Steph is unable to help, as she states: “talking to her didn’t do any good”

Detective #467 / 80 Page Giant: Secret Origins (1998)

Creating this costume and persona is not only a way to get back at her dad, it’s about her seizing power, it’s a decision to have agency, to no longer be helpless. She is no longer a passive observer in her dad's crimes, she is the force actively 'spoiling' it.

In her first story as Spoiler, we see that culminate to a dark point: she’s so desperate to have some control of her life and by extension, her father who has been robbing her of it for years, that she nearly kills him.

Detective #649

When Stephanie became the Spoiler for the first time, it was about her anger at her dad, and finally having control over his influence over her life.

But most crucially, her first appearance as Spoiler is also largely about her desire to help others.

3. Stephanie’s desire to protect other people

This is established solidly in her first appearance as the Spoiler. She states that she was stalking her father “trying to make sure nobody got hurt”

Detective #468

And later in the same introductory arc, she only jumps into the fight when Batman’s life appears to be in danger:

Detective #469

This applies to her mother too, who she sees herself as responsible for protecting.

Stephanie identifies her father as a trigger for her moms struggle with addiction, and the same shot which shows Stephanie sewing together her first Spoiler costume also features her mother, sleeping next to an empty glass and pill bottles.

80 Page Giant: Secret Origins (1998)

The 80 Page Giant furthers this idea by recontextualizing the scene where she jumps into the fight with her dad in Detective #649 by adding her internal monologue in that moment: clearly reframing her actions through the lens of this protective instinct towards her mother

80 Page Giant: Secret Origins (1998)

I'm sticking to her first appearance backstory stuff primarily, because for now I'm just making a case for her original reason for putting on the costume, but I think it's worth it to mention something Steph says about "one of the first" missions she gave herself as Spoiler.

Steph says she made it one of the very first missions she wanted to achieve as Spoiler to track down the man who nearly sexually assaulted her as a child. Despite the fact that she was severely traumatized by this (unable to stand being alone with men for years afterwards) she didn’t try to do so out of revenge, but specifically because she knew he would go after more young girls.

Robin #111 (1993)

She first becomes the Spoiler in order to stop her dad from hurting her mom, herself, and other people any more than he already had. But why does she keep going? Especially, why does she keep fighting crime after her dad is locked away in prison?

And if she's Spoiler because of her genuine desire to help people, and her anger towards her dad, and her feelings of helplessness, where does the idea that she does it for "fun" come from?

Contextualizing "The Spoiler" as a way for Stephanie to give herself agency is the strongest reading which answers both of those questions.

Much of what we see Spoiler do, is directly paralleled to what Stephanie cannot.

The most obvious example is her stopping The Cluemaster.

Stephanie Brown might be stuck with an abusive, criminal dad who never stays in jail for long, but The Spoiler can make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else.

80 Page Giant: Secret Origins (1998) / Robin #111 (1993)

But there are more covert examples of this as well.

Stephanie Brown might not be able to make her mom get clean, only able to watch as she seems to succumb to her addiction over and over again, but the Spoiler can confront and potentially stop her gymnastics coach from dealing drugs after one of her classmates overdoses, in a way which is shown in conjunction with Steph's relationship with her mom.

Showcase '95 #5 (1995)

Her rage at being misled by her gymnastic coach, her anger at him for betraying the kids who "looked up to you", mirrors her anger at her mom in this same comic for how her struggle with addiction has affected their relationship. Spoiler attempts to do what Steph wishes she could: fight and defeat addiction, as a proxy for her desire to help her mom, and her frustration that she can't.

Stephanie Brown might be in a relationship with a selfish asshole, but as The Spoiler, she gets the attention of a smart, honest, good guy:

Spoiler/Huntress: Blunt Trauma (1998)/ Robin #80 (1993)

Robin (debatably) is the one who instigates this idea. (Kissing a girl on the mouth, even if i was out of relief for her saving your life, sort of sends mixed signals as to whether or not she has a shot.)

Robin #5 (1993)

Tim himself juggles with the fact that he both feels a responsibility to discourage Stephanie from acting as Spoiler, but doesn't, because he doesn't have an excuse to hang out with Steph, but he can spend time with her when she's Spoiler.

Robin #41 (1993)

Stephanie Brown doesn't get loved, doesn't get understood. Not by Dean, not by her mom, and certainly not by her dad. But Spoiler? Spoiler seems has a real shot.

Steph doesn't really feel like her mom cares, and she knows her dad doesn't. She wants to feel powerful, she wants to feel useful, she wants to protect people, and she really really wants to be loved.

She sees Spoiler as a way to achieve all these things, and that’s how she uses the identity.

Therefore, the Spoiler feels empowering, specifically in contrast to Stephanie Brown and her garbage home life and her helplessness and feelings of inadequacy.

This ties into something I haven't really explored yet, Stephanie Brown's canonical self loathing. This seems to linger in the periphery of her earlier time as Spoiler, but picks up significantly during and after her pregnancy arc.

She's dealt with blaming and hating herself in her past, we get a mention of how she had to overcome believing she was a bad person in the wake of her nearly being sexually assaulted:

Robin #111 (1993)

And she deals with feeling of inadequacy and self hatred again and again in her time as the Spoiler as well.

Steph refers to her boyfriend, who is unable to tell her his real name, share the majority of the stuff going on in his life with her, and who always has to wear a mask around her, as potentially "too good" for her. I don't care how cool and nice you think Tim Drake is, I think this is definitely indicative of at least some self esteem issues.

Robin #57 (1993)

Her self esteem issues become more clear during her teen pregnancy arc. She tells Tim straight up that she would understand it if he had cheated on her/left her.

Robin #59 (1993) / Robin #62 (1993)

This ties into why she acts as the Spoiler as well.

Stephanie blames herself in part for her dad's crimes.

She obviously didn't make Arthur Brown commit his crimes. This is just another instance of Stephanie's self loathing informing how she acts, in this case, being part of her rationale as to why she is Spoiler.

Robin 80 Page Giant (2000)

As Stephanie, she was helpless to stop Cluemaster from abusing her mom, unable to stop how his presence pushes Crystal Brown further into her addiction, unable to stop him from hurting other people and herself with his crime. This lack of agency explored earlier combined with her self blame leads her to believe it's her job as the Spoiler to "make up for" the bad she wasn't able to stop before, a responsibility which is obviously not on her. We see this also in the 80 Page Giant: Secret Origins (1998), where she briefly refers to 'spoiling' his plans as "her job", in a way that indicates a degree of responsibility.

It's no wonder that Stephanie becomes so attached to the Spoiler mantle. As Stephanie Brown, she is helpless and unable to control her environment, and she deals with thinly veiled self hatred and blames herself for this helplessness. But Spoiler gives her the opportunity to take control. That's why she returns to it time and time again, against the wishes of pretty much everyone.

This reading also aligns with the instances we get where Stephanie is portrayed as doing crime fighting for "fun". While I think its clear enough by now Stephanie clearly isn't out there for "the thrill", it's absolutely no surprise to me that Stephanie refers to it as a "rush".

It's, quite frankly, a little bit of a power trip. Of course it feels fucking fantastic to finally have a say, to no longer feel useless and helpless and guilty, to finally get to do something about all the shit that used to crush her. To finally stop feeling helpless and worthless, to have a chance at being loved. It probably feels fucking fantastic!

Why in god's name would she ever want to give that up? For her, I think its a very easy choice, the potential danger of acting as Spoiler brings upon herself doesn't factor in all that much at all.

The Spoiler as a symbol of Stephanie's Agency theory accounts for the multiple different and somewhat contradicting explanations we are given for why Stephanie acts as Spoiler.

I want to emphasize that this is not a bad thing, and also not entirely selfish. Agency means the freedom to go after the guy who she was powerless to meaningfully stop as an 11 year old (telling her asshat of a dad about it only got her yelled at and dismissed), but who might still be out there preying on other young girls. Spoiler means having the agency to protect her mom from her dad. Spoiler means having the agency to protect her neighbors.

But Spoiler also means this 15 year old girl gets to feel strong and loveable and worth something for the first time in a long time.

[shitsndgiggs]

Jobe requests you say? I will gladly spawn in here, soooo, maybe something with like Jobe and reader just kinda being under the radar and only like Denise (I think that's his mom's name, feel free to correct) knows and she accidentally blurts it put to jude and their dad and it's like complete meltdown and then it's like complete exsidiential (think that's how you spell it?) crisis for them and like WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE HAS A GIRLFRIEND HE'S A LITERAL CHILD, and Jobe's just like, 'hEheHehehE have fun with your existence crisis'

(I am so sorry for living in your requests, but I need to speak my mind😭)

GIRLFRIEND?! - JOBE BELLINGHAM

Jobe has a girlfriend?!

Jobe Bellingham x fem! reader

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿

It’s a warm evening, and I’m having dinner at Jobe’s family home. Denise, his mom, has invited me over for a casual meal, and everything seems to be going perfectly.

The dining table is filled with delicious food, and the conversation is light and enjoyable. Jobe and I exchange glances, our hands brushing under the table as we share little smiles.

Denise, in the middle of a story, glances over at us with a loving smile. “You two are such a cute couple. I’m so glad you’re coming to the family picnic next weekend!”

Instantly, the room goes silent. Jobe’s fork is frozen halfway to his mouth, and Jude and his dad look at each other, their eyes widening in confusion.

Jude’s fork drops with a clatter. “Wait, what did you just say? Did you say ‘couple’?”

Denise’s face turns beet red as she realizes her mistake. “Oh no, I didn’t mean to—”

Jude stands up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. “Couple? What do you mean, couple? When did this happen? Are you telling us Jobe has a girlfriend?”

Jobe’s dad looks like he’s seen a ghost. “Hold on, Jobe has a girlfriend? Since when? He’s still in high school!”

Jobe, clearly reveling in the chaos, tries to suppress a grin. “Yep, surprise! We’ve been together for a while now. I guess mom accidentally spilled the beans.”

Jude’s face is a mix of horror and disbelief. “But Jobe’s a literal child! How could you keep something this big a secret?”

His dad is pacing back and forth, muttering to himself. “How did we not see this coming? We missed the signs! How did he even manage to hide this?”

Jude, looking at me with wide eyes, asks, “How long have you two been... together? Did we just completely miss this?”

I try to contain my laughter. “We’ve been together for a while. We kept it private because we wanted to be sure of ourselves before making it public.”

Denise, looking frazzled, tries to reassure everyone. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to cause a crisis. I just got carried away.”

Jobe’s dad finally stops pacing and looks at Jobe with a mixture of incredulity and acceptance. “Well, this is definitely... unexpected. But if you’re happy, I suppose we’re happy too.”

Jude, still in shock, sits back down and shakes his head. “I need a moment to process. My little brother is in a serious relationship. I don’t think I’m ready for this kind of adulthood.”

Jobe, now clearly enjoying the spectacle, looks at me with a mischievous grin. “Welcome to the family chaos. I’m glad you’re here to see it all unfold.”

As the evening progresses, Jude and his dad continue to make comical comments about how they’ve missed the “biggest development of their lives.” Jobe and I can’t help but laugh at their exaggerated reactions.

Jude eventually starts to get more comfortable, jokingly asking if he should now start preparing for a “new sibling” or if he needs to give Jobe the “big brother talk” about relationships.

His dad finally settles down, shaking his head and trying to embrace the situation with good humor.

[opossumprints]

I'm Your Guy part 1

Mike Wheeler and Steve Harrington have a complicated relationship. Most people assume that they only barely tolerate each other because of Steve’s past relationship with Nancy. Most of the party assume they reluctantly get along because of the Upsidedown; trauma bonds forged in Hell and a need to survive. 

The truth runs deeper than that. 

Steve knew Mike long before any Demogorgon sunk its claws into Hawkins. Before Steve was Nancy’s boyfriend, he was Mike's babysitter. 

At first, Mike really did hate Steve. He hated Steve for being there instead of his parents, or even Nancy. He hated Steve for the rumors he had heard about the older boy. But mostly he hated Steve for needing Steve. 

The Wheeler parents spent very little time in their own house, leaving several hours when their children would be home by themselves. For a while, it wasn't a problem because Nancy was there but Nancy joined as many after-school clubs as she could on the literal first day of her freshman year.  That meant Mike needed a babysitter. 

He tried to argue that he could take care of himself even though he knew that wasn't true. Even if it was, there was still one problem. Mike couldn't take care of Holly. 

So Ted Wheeler grabbed the first decently responsible-looking high schooler he could find and that was that. 

Mike couldn't hate Steve for long though. Not when Steve would actually play with Mike and Holly, not when he would cook on nights when Mike's parents would be out late and Nancy couldn't bother to be home, especially not when Steve bought Mike The Dungeon Masters guide despite knowing nothing about the game just because mike wanted it and was 4 bucks short. 

So it's complicated.

He gets really annoyed with Steve, like all the time, and sure it pisses him off that his babysitter started dating his sister only to dump her and be a complete asshole. But he hasn't hated Steve for a long time. 

On the other hand, they're not friends. 

Mike isn't really nice to Steve and Steve doesn't really hang out with Mike one on one anymore. Mike doesn't treat Steve like one of his friends either.

Mike cares about his friends, there is nothing he wouldn't do for the people he cares about and there is a lot he wouldn't do for Steve. 

Mike knows he gets jealous pretty easily (and deep down he knows he's a bit too possessive of his friends) but he's working on it.

It's been forever since he snapped at one of The Party for doing something without him. He didn't even complain when Holly, El, and Max had a sleepover and he wasn't allowed in his own damn basement. 

But right now even he can tell all his progress has flown out the window.

Because right now he's glaring daggers across the room where Steve and Eddie are sitting cross-legged hunched over the Wheelers' coffee table, Eddie is Teaching Steve how to play DnD...that's supposed to be Mike's job. 

For the first hour, he rationalized it as having always been the guy to teach people how to play DnD. But if he’s honest, for the first time since he’s met the guy, Mike feels possessive about Steve, Mike's jealous That Eddie and Steve are doing this without him, He is angry that this is happening.

Because it's not just about Eddie Stealing Mike's job--It's not just about Mike.

You see, Steve asks a lot of questions about a lot of stuff and everyone in the party is Steve’s guy for something or other; Dustin is the science guy, Lucas is the comics guy, Will and El are the Upsidedown guys, Max is the movie/videogames guy.

And Mike? Mike is the fantasy guy.  

Mike has always been Steve’s fantasy guy, he's always the one Steve asks about how magic works or what Moradoor is.

Mike should have been the guy Steve asked to teach him how to play. 

It's not fair that after everything they've been through together, Eddie gets to swoop in and be Steve’s new go-to fantasy guy just like that.

What if it doesn't stop there? Now that the Party is officially in Highschool Steve does have much reason to hang out with any of the party just by themselves besides them being Steve’s guys. What if Eddie becomes Steve’s guy for everything? 

Mike can't let that happen.

[bomber-grl]

Peter Parker Dating hc 🕸️

Pairing(s):Peter Parker (Tom hollands)x Gn!Reader (both civilian and superhero included)

As a civilian you were probably unaware of his secret identity for a good awhile

Until you inevitably found out and began dating

How you found out well, well let’s just say it wasn’t ideal

You had been friends for awhile and the only way Peter would ever let you near him or his room (while having a crush on you) would be if he forgot something at your house or something

So you knocked and May let you know he wasn’t there but still let you in

I mean she wasn’t just gonna let you stand outside waiting for him, if anything he was to blame for not being responsible about the time you two established for meeting up

Queue you walking into his room and he’s half suited up and the both of you are just staring at eachother

That interaction led to some discourse, obviously

But after the initial shock you (surprisingly) moved on

Now if you’re a superhero working for stark for some reason then you met that way and there’s no secret identity reveal

Tbh the two of you have to have something in common

Whether its interests in comics or “nerd” stuff

something had to have led to the two of you getting together

Or maybe you’re just into easily flustered, needy men, who knows 🤷‍♀️

Like if you’re a hero then you met that way and share that in common (including tech if you’re into that)

So just imagine Peter, whose very nervous/ excited, just absolutely rambling about some interest that was briefly mentioned and that you both shared

The thing is, you’re on a date right now and he’s absolutely embarrassing himself (in his opinion)

He’d try to plan everything to perfection and gift you what he can even if he feels it might pale to what you’re used to (if you’re wealthy)

Your first date was especially memorable since not only did he display his nervousness so obviously but it was as if the universe couldn’t let his plan run smoothly

He had tripped, stuttered, made too many mistakes to count, just a piece of work all in all

To you though? It was endearing

He had wanted your first date to be the upmost perfection, even if it wasn’t an average persons “ideal” by the end-

It didn’t matter because you could tell the genuine affection he had for you so much so that he had planned this all, and unfortunately (for him) embarrassed himself beyond return in front of you

“Kill me now”

- Peter probably

He doesn’t really seem like it, if anything he seems pretty self actualized but there’s obviously moments where he feels a bit sorry (?) for the lack of a better word

He’s just always clumsy, and getting flustered easily

Especially around you

So although he might think that you probably think less than ideally of him, he couldn’t be more wrong

If anything it adds to his charm and anything he does is pretty endearing

So when you decide to share such words with Peter while you’re chilling in his room

Well, he’s floored

He thanks you but then that spirals into him stuttering and tripping over himself

Despite the fact that you complimented him to not only ease his worries but also to just let him know-

He’s groveling (exaggeration) and apologizing for, again, being himself…

Blud needs to chill out…

Usually after missions or whatever they’re called- Peter usually has minor injuries or cuts

How do you know this? You’re his main source of comfort so he’s sneak in through your window into your room as often as he can

A particular moment was when you both decided to have a sleep over at your house

It was definitely a huge progress in your relationship but you should’ve known better

While you were asleep, he snuck off and att the end of his little escapade, he snuck back in

Only thing is that he returned back through the window he snuck out from just to be met with the lights on

He visibly sunk at your disappointed gaze once he noticed you up

He isn’t in the best state so you take it easy on him and just go rummaging through your cabinets- you hoped to have something for his wounds around there somewhere

As you’re searching, Peter has taken it upon himself to convince you his injuries are nothing, just go back to bed, and is just overall downplaying his condition

You pause and just stare at him

Obviously he’s taken by surprise but he realizes he can’t do anything to stop you and just lets you continue

Even while your cleaning his wounds or bandaging him up he’s making jokes about the situation

Well maybe not jokes but we all know how rambly he gets when he’s nervous

Somehow digging himself a grave right there

On that same page

We’re all aware of how difficult it is for Peter to balance his civilian and superhero life

I’m not up for debate- it might as well be canon

He’s always having to leave school for superhero work in which it has consequences or he leaves superhero work and still has consequences in the franchise so respectfully: 🤫🤐)

Peter tries super hard to be there and include you in what’s going on but sometimes he needs to cancel or leave hang outs abruptly

You understand this obviously but it’s still upsetting, not as much if you’re a superhero id imagine

But yknow

Still annoying asf

You don’t give him hell for it even if you want to because either 1. You do the same thing (superhero) 2. He can’t help it and he already gets enough shit

He’s also super protective

Especially if you’re a civilian

It’s sort of endearing/ annoying- somehow both simultaneously

Now if you’re a hero/ avenger then you both understand things about your secret identities

Particularly about hiding them

Yknow how Ned would always help Peter out? Well you and Peter do that for eachother

If u have family or others who aren’t aware like friends- Peter has your back and vice versa

It’s just the price you need to pay

Especially since it’s not easy balancing lives

[nymphbroadcast]

I had no idea how to go about this, but if it isn’t much to ask, could I request the Diasomnia boys with a Twilight Sparkle! Yuu/Reader headcanons. Romantic or platonic is completely up to you.

(P.S.A. Is it alright to put General Lilia instead of Present Lilia? I just really love Lilia in his General era, you don’t have to do this though.)

Diasomnia x MC! Like Twilight Sparkle

Sinopsis⊹ೃ🐉⋆ The Diasomnia boys with a MC! / Yuu Or S/O like Twilight Sparkle.

⊹Relationship⊹ೃ🐉⋆ Fall in love/ Free of interpretation.

⊹¡FEM! MC/Yuu/Lector ⊹ೃ 🐉

⋆⊹Clarifications: AAAAA I really loved this idea! Thank you anonymous for your request! Twilight is my favorite of the Mane Six and who I identify with sometimes, so I was really excited to imagine an MC! like Twilight with the Diasomnia boys, especially because of the plot that surrounds Twilight during the series, I kept many canon things about Twilight and Yuu from the game and the mangas, enjoy your request! PD: I'll also add Spike, because I love the older sister-little brother or mother-son relationship they both have ;)

⊹Twilight's Context⊹ೃ 🐉⋆

• Twilight is a character with great duality, she is very skilled in magic, she is intelligent and is always willing to acquire new knowledge, but that made her focus too much on just her studies and leave aside her social life, It is reiterated on several occasions that Twilight represents the Element of Magic and Dircord mentions that Twilight is the embodiment of magic, and in the comics Twilight's true magical ability is explored. On the other hand, more familiar, Twilight belongs to a family of high aristocracy, with her parents in noble positions and her brother as captain of the royal guard and she as the private student of Princess Celestia, who would later be her heir... At the beginning Twilight was apathetic to social events and even teamwork, which over time she began to fall aside and accept that friendship was not something like a distraction but rather an instrument to grow, both personally and intellectually. Twilight is a great leader, said on many occasions, she is able to recognize her mistakes and weaknesses, she also knows when to stop and does not put her pride before rationality for the common good, Although that does not mean that she does not have her negative sides, she can also worry too much and her tendency to worry about others often makes her fall into despair and paranoia, as well as when she is given a task of great responsibility and In her anxious process she begins to plan excessively and put all the responsibility on herself. Although as shown in the series, she always learns different lessons from her friends, who also help her constant personal improvement and as a future ruler.

Malleus Draconia

🐉 Oh someone catch this cute dragon boy because he's falling in love!

🐉 You are like a gift that his own magic has brought to him, you are so similar to him but so different from him too...

🐉 Something to sayis that you both are solitary (at least at the beginning) although you did it of your own free will and because of your desire to study, unlike him... Although that no longer matters, now you are his friend! and maybe... something else ;)... Something else that you both also share is your prodigiousness with magic, although since you were little you have the desire to learn more and you are talented and skilled through your own efforts and not just because you were born special.

🐉 Technically you come from a very high society, since being a star student of a famous princess **insert ur fav disney princess** surprises Malleus with your incredible social and magical position.

🐉 As your relationship progresses you introduce him to your little dragon companion, Malleus goes blank when he sees the young dragon even without his wings fully developed (don't even think about introducing him to Lilia, because Malleus's adoptive father will release the baby album Malleus) However, due to your friend's young age, Malleus does not see him as competition or in a jealous way. Over time, he may even come to see him as a son, believe me, he will become fond of him when he sees him being so close to you. and seeing you as a mother or older sister will soften Malleus' heart... Although, when you tell him that technically the little dragon is your son since as proof of the talent of your magic Malleus does not know what to say, since he has not even done something like effecting the birth of a being, he begins to respect you when he sees the magnitude of your knowledge and magic.

🐉 Although, returning to your flaws... Malleus doesn't know exactly what to do when he sees you enter a nervous and almost psychotic state when something happens that upsets you, he has never had to calm someone down before and the fact that that someone is you... Malleus decides to follow his instincts and Lilia's advice, words of comfort and physical touch, he hopes that that and his presence will calm your turbulent mind and to no one's surprise, it works.

🐉 As both have great magical potential, it would be necessary to see who has more knowledge, since Malleus has had some of the best magicians as teachers, but you have a Princess as a teacher and you have mastered countless spells with little effort, even mastering the light and dark magic (The return of the Crystal Empire, Twilight replicates Celestia's spell to open the door, in fact it is King Sombra's magic) and you handle different situations very well, which not only depend on your magic... Although anyway, you and Malleus meet to read and practice magic especially, since the magic that the Draconia possess makes you very curious and Malleus actually loves that instead of fearing his magic, it makes you very thirsty of knowledge.

🐉 Malleus is surprised how in a short time you have managed to learn the history of Twisted Wonderland and many of its nations, in fact you may be one of the few who really don't get bored in Professor Trein's classes, which is already an achievement, but see that you are seriously capable of storing all that data in your memory really amazes Malleus.

🐉 (Only a variant of the 'Cutie Mark' and a small suggestive hint are described here) Due to the type of NRC uniform your body is not exposed enough, but if you both reached 'that' moment, Malleus would quickly notice a cutie mark. a star and others around it on your hip, although he does not ask you directly, he investigates about this brand and discovers that in Twisted Wonderland this brand has been used multiple times to represent absolute magic, which leaves Malleus speechless and with heart pounding... Seeing that you are practically the incarnation of magic, he feels luckier that you are his and promises to take care of you and love you forever.

🐉 You are definitely someone very interesting in their eyes, in fact too much, you are always thirsty for knowledge and surrounded by books of all kinds, however from your side more people can see that you are a born Leader, loving and empathetic but firm and strict in the Maybe, for some reason, he feels that destiny has prepared a future for you as Ruler and he deeply hopes that it will be by his side.

🐉 Assuming that your promotion to princess would be soon, as well as Twilight's, you will have the big dragon boy attached to you for good and shouting to everyone in Twisted Wonderland that you will be his wife, he hugs you and coos at you whispering compliments and loving words of congratulations on your new status: "I always knew you would make it", "You look so beautiful even before you were an official princess" and "Now there is no excuse to hide that I love you, that we love each other, my dear~"

Lilia Vanrouge

(Present and General Lilia!)

🩸 The current Lilia would be fascinated in a good way by you, in his eyes he can really distinguish the pure magic that makes up your being and it amuses him to see how others seem to ignore it, even knowing that although you do not "belong" to Twisted Wonderland you are perfectly capable of using spells the size of Malleus himself.

🩸 While General Lilia would be intimidated and defensive, he is also able to sense your magic due to his proximity to Maleanor, but not knowing you or your intentions, it is normal for him to believe that you want to attack them, since that happens in wars and even more so. in one like that.

🩸 The present Lilia would have a lot of fun watching you deal with the Overblots and challenges that exist in the NRC, especially when you don't know the things like traditions and customs of Twisted Wonderland.

🩸 We already saw how shameless and to some extent cruel General Lilia can be, so don't be surprised when he doesn't believe that you are the student of a powerful princess or that you are equal or superior even in terms of magic to the Draconia.

🩸 The present Lilia would be absolutely delighted when she meets your baby dragon and memories of baby Malleus come like a waterfall, he does not stop fawning over the dragon and telling you anecdotes about when Malleus was a small lizard that barely existed (because don't tell me he didn't , there was nothing in that Malleus baby head) and also praise you because unlike the one who took 200 years to make Malleus born by giving him his own magic, you did it in an instant and without sacrificing your magic.

BABY MALLEUS SREAMER!!!

🩸 Unlike General Lilia, he doesn't know what to say about your little dragon companion, he's obviously not a draconian and although there are other dragons in Twisted Wonderland it's hard for him to associate them with the little one and he's even more stunned when he hears that your own Magic was what caused the birth of the dragon.

🩸 Lilia can see your strengths and vulnerabilities, he sees your constant anxiety and can't help but come to calm you down with words of support and, if necessary, knock you out so that your mind can rest, even for a minute. (In the case of General Lilia, he only use the last option.)

🩸 Although in the end, he ends up liking you for your duality in any way, he feels that somehow you will be someone great in the future and he hopes to be able to see you when that time comes.

🩸 In case you go out with one of his three sponsored children, Lilia would feel proud to see how you are a balance between 'humanity' and 'magic' and how honest you are in your affection towards the boy, and it has just been proclaimed adoptive grandfather of your little dragon.

🩸 On the other hand, if you are his partner, he will promise to take care of you and pamper you, make you feel at home with him and be a good father to your little dragon.

Silver

⚔ For Silver, you're so... Strange... In a good way, we all know he's not very social, so I don't think he's ever met anyone with as much thirst for knowledge as you.

⚔ However, if there is something he admires about you, it is your great capacity for leadership and self-sacrifice. Silver fully trusts you to wake him up if he falls asleep... Eventually.

⚔ In his free time, Silver likes for you to read a book aloud, it helps him relax and sleep better, regardless of the topic, Silver loves to listen to your calm and at the same time very interested voice in the topic of the book. +Bonus points if you let him put his head on your lap!

⚔ At the same time, you are incredible in magic and unlike General Lilia and Sebek, Silver has no problem comparing your magical potential with that of Malleus, for him you are actually admirable, given that you must not be more than 100 years old unlike Malleus. and yet you can cast spells of his Young Lord's level effortlessly.

⚔ Although more than your magical talent or the magic that emanates from you, what attracts Silver to you is how capable you are of facing situations that you possibly never thought you would experience.

⚔ It's not hard for him to believe that you're a student of a famous princess, considering he's seen you deal with Overblots and Dire Crowley's irresponsibility with ease.

⚔ Although it takes a while, he eventually becomes convinced of your magical power when he meets your little dragon companion and learns that you caused his birth and is practically like your son/little brother, Silver loves animals of all kinds as can be seen when he they surround him while he sleeps, so he will eventually become attached to the little dragon.

⚔ Although he won't believe you when you tell him that you used to be extremely asocial before coming to Twisted Wonderland, since he has always seen you accompanied by another first-year student and one of your two (Grimm and Spike) creature companions.

⚔ Although like Lilia and Malleus, Silver also notices the negative side of your personality, you are extremely anxious and prone to panic, not to mention when Crowley puts something important on you because he doesn't want to, although Silver wants to be careful and gentle when dealing with you to calm down, thanks to being educated and raised by Lilia, he ends up being a little... Brusque... With his words, although it surprisingly works. (Imagine Applejack kind of scolding Twilight, more or less)

⚔ Silver may be a lost prince and possess great magic from his dynasty, but even in his 'ignorance' he manages to identify your brand as the representation of the concept of magic itself and that makes him feel luckier to be with you.

⚔ Silver recognizes you as a great Leader, full of unknown potential and an attractive personality, even with flaws, Silver continues to see you as a beautiful balance between Magic and Humanity, something that attracts him more deeply to you, He promise to be the Knight to your future as a Princess, from now on. (And Malleus, of course)

Sebek Zigvolt

🐊 Sebek... Sebek... This is a complicated boy, at first he doesn't see you as anything more than a curious human with inferior, otherworldly magic.

🐊 And I'm sorry to tell you that this would be like this for a long time, until I can see more of your true identity and your magical power and as a person.

🐊 Rather, in Chapter 7, when he sees you fighting with your magic and comforting and helping Silver and Lilia.

🐊 Seeing you like this will make him remember your attitudes and why he suddenly changes his mind about you.

🐊 He understands your almost endless thirst for knowledge, he has seen you a couple of times in classes and admires that about you, no matter the subject you are always attentive, even with your energic friends on top.

🐊 Also remember your anxious side due to your worries and take note to help you (in your own way) with your anxiety attacks when you witness them, trust him, he is skilled with comfort even if it doesn't seem like it.

🐊 He obviously knows your little dragon and to be honest... He likes him much more than Grimm... He, incredibly idolizing Malleus and the Draconias themselves, will be incredibly delighted with your little friend, praising him for his helpfulness to you and his 'worthy' nature... Although he stiffens when you tell him how he was born, he slowly accepts that maybe... Just maybe... You could be much more skilled with your magic than he thought... Even almost like his Young Master.

🐊 Although yes, he is a little suspicious when he sees the symbol that you usually wear, he quickly recognizes it as the representation of magic itself and in reality, Sebek doesn't know what to think so he is patient.

🐊 Don't worry because this guy is slowly maturing and will eventually find you worthy of admiration and affection, without or with magic.

Nymph's Note:

I still don't know how to write to a romantic or loving Sebek, sorry T-T and sorry for take me too long, but I'm back again ♡

I hope you enjoyed!

Remeber to tune in, end of this broadcast!

Diasomnia Dorm x MC! Like Twilight Sparkle Done!

[cherrrydragon]

➤ find something worth saving (it's all for the taking)

CHAPTER SIX: MAKE OUT FAKE OUT

← back to chapter list

SUMMARY ↳ An unlikely ally appears! “I know you’re Spinnerette.” . . . What. The. Fuck. pairing: jon kent x gn!reader x damian wayne warnings: (the non-existent) threat of blackmail wc: 4.4k

Victoria’s been acting weird. You suppose it’s normal given the events from last week. Since then, multiple articles have come forth speaking of Robin and Spinnerette saving the day. The people of Gotham seem to be taking to their new arachnid friend well.

But back to Victoria—she struggles to maintain eye contact with you for more than a few seconds. It doesn’t stop her from being a stern teacher though, so you guess nothing other than that has changed. Whatever, you have better things to worry about.

Progress has been… progressing with the badassium. You’ve begun assembling the makeshift particle accelerator, but Karen estimates that you’ve only built three percent. And it took you that long. Have mercy.

You’re currently in the Den, looking over your creation.. The walls are lined with various tools and blueprints, and the centerpiece is the skeleton of the particle accelerator. You sigh, wiping sweat off your brow. This is going to take longer than you thought.

Karen’s voice chirps in your ear. “Perhaps taking a break would help clear your mind, [Name].”

You glance at the clock. It’s already past midnight. Maybe she’s right. “Yeah, I guess so.. Let’s call it a night.”

Robin meets you on the rooftop you’ve perched yourself on. He crouches next you, watching the streets below. Robin’s eyes follow the movement below with a practiced vigilance, his dark cape fluttering slightly in the breeze. The city's nightscape is a blend of lights and shadows, with the occasional sound of sirens breaking the relative silence. He glances at you, his expression giving nothing away.

“Long day?” you ask, breaking the silence.

“You ask, why?”

You groan, stretching out your stiff muscles. Robin tracks the movement. “Surely you wouldn’t come hang out with me just because you felt like it. I doubt one night of ass-kickin’ makes us friends.”

“This is not ‘hanging out’,” he grumbles, making you nod your hand in a ‘you’re proving my point’ fashion. “I am simply taking a short recess, you happen to be in my resting spot.”

“Yeah, uhuh.” You don’t believe him for a second, but you can’t bring yourself to really care.

“Batman wants you on the team.”

You damn near fall off the rooftop. “What.”

“Perhaps you are older than I thought, if your hearing isn’t on par,” he smirks.

“First of all, my hearing is way better than yours, fuck you,” you quip, quickly righting yourself. “Second of all…” you hesitate, “can we take a raincheck on that?”

Robin looks at you. “I… am busy right now. And do not have time for a team… yeah. Also, I just prefer to be alone.” The words come out choppy, as if you’re coming up with them on the fly (you are). That last part is a straight lie, you love your Avengers.

You know Robin obviously is skeptical, but he says nothing. “Why does Batman want me, anyway?”

Robin shifts slightly, his expression unreadable behind the mask. “You share the same goals we do. It only makes sense to join forces.”

Robin's words hang in the air, punctuated by the distant sounds of the city below. You shift uncomfortably, trying to process the unexpected offer. Joining Batman's team? The idea both excites and intimidates you. You've always admired the vigilantes of Gotham from afar, but becoming a part of that world was another matter entirely.

You don’t belong here. It was different when you were asked to officially join the Avengers, but fictional comic characters turned real? Your mind wants to melt. You don’t want to drag them into your mess.

“I really do appreciate the offer, but…” you sigh, and lean back. “...not right now.” And probably never. You clear your throat and stand up, Robin following. “Well, it’s been awkward. See you!” you rush out, quickly swinging away. Robin eyes you until you swing out of sight, thinking.

“They denied.”

Bruce sips his tea, humming. “Did they say why?”

Damian comes to sit next to his father. “Their reasoning was that they were ‘too busy for a team’ and preferred to be alone. It was very obvious they were hiding something, father.”

Bruce sighs, putting down his cup. “We’ll keep trying to convince them, slowly,” Bruce adds as he sees Damian moving to get up. “Stay cautious, but also stay amiable, Damian.”

Damian scoffs. “I am amiable.”

Bruce chuckles as Damian leaves.

Ms. Varley announces a project at the end of class the next morning.. The class groans loudly, of course. “It should be fun for you young folks,” she emphasizes, like it disgusts her. “It is a partner project,” the class lights up for a second, “with your tablemate.” You swear you see a glint of satisfaction in her eye as the class slumps. You and Damian look at eachother. “Together you will explore unconventional perspectives on any known superhero or vigilante of your choosing.”

The projector shows a powerpoint labeled “Hot Takes”. A few snorts are heard. “I want you to to challenge yourselves boldly,” Ms. Varley states, walking around to pass out the rubric. “You’ll select a figure that intrigues you and craft a thesis that challenges the traditional view. Support it with thorough research and present your findings in a persuasive manner."

“It’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about being able to defend your point.” Ms. Varley takes her place in front of the classroom. “This is your final project. From now until winter break, we will be spending our Fridays working on it. Only Fridays, so I suggest working on it with your partner outside of school.”

She sits down in her chair, signaling that she’s done talking for today. Buzz fills the classroom immediately, peers chattering and making plans. You scoot your chair closer to Damian. “I know what I want to do,” you declare.

“As do I,” says Damian, facing you.

“My take is better,” you challenge, crossing your arms.

Damian scoffs. “I sincerely doubt you are capable of coming up with something adequate to the challenge.”

“Don’t be a hater Damian, it makes you look jealous,” you tease.. The bell rings, filling the class with sounds of hustle and bustle as students pack up. “Oh! Before you go,” you say, grabbing Damian’s wrist. You hold out your phone. “Number?”

Damian looks at your phone in confusion. You huff. “Your phone number, Dames. So we can contact each other and plan our project?” you clarify in a ‘duh’ tone.

You watch as he stares for a moment, before taking your phone and putting in his contact info. “You will come home to the manor with me,” he declares.

You blink. “Huh?”

“We will start working on it today,” he elaborates, handing you back your phone. You fumble with it for a second before shoving it in your pocket. “The faster we get it done the better.”

“Um, ok. Yeah, makes sense,” you gulp.

This time you’re the one distracted in ballet. Victoria huffs and snaps at you multiple times, so you figure she must be back to normal. Art class proceeds as norma, Ms. M making you practice your color theory. You hold back on designing new iterations of your suit, something you did a lot of back home out of sheer boredom.

Damian guides you out of the school with a hand on your back, like he did at homecoming. You wonder what exactly he is doing, since you know he feels the eyes and points at the two of you from other students. You sigh, hopefully nobody bothers you about it.

Alfred greets you at the gates, this time you make sure to actually get his name officially. Damian gets in the car first, pulling you in by the hand. Your shoulder bumps into his as you land with an ‘oof’. The ride to the manor is silent, leaving you twiddling with your thumbs. Thankfully, the ride isn’t too long.

The manor looks imposing, standing here looking at it. It’s different from seeing it from WEBBERs point of view or from an inked page. Damian grabs your arm, snapping you out of your daydreaming. He leads you through the grand halls of the mansion, his steps confident and purposeful. The interior is as opulent as you imagined, with rich furnishings and tasteful decor that speak of wealth and history.

"Your family's home is... impressive," you remark, trying to break the silence as you’re dragged along.

Damian nods curtly, saying nothing. You sense there's more to his demeanor than just his usual aloofness.

He leads you to a spacious study lined with shelves of books and a large, fancy desk at its center. Papers are neatly organized, and a computer hums softly in one corner. Damian gestures for you to take a seat. You do, placing your bag down beside your chair. Damian sits next to you.

You take out your laptop and open a new powerpoint. “My idea was that we do it on Batman,” you state, turning to Damian. “I think Batman is part of a cycle of violence. I think that he does help and protect people, but he also enables a lot of the behavior from criminals.” You stand up and begin to pace the room.

“He inadvertently contributes to a culture that normalizes violence as a means to solve problems. I mean, all of his criminals eventually break out of arkham. Scarecrow literally attacked our school a while ago! Criminals respond to Batman’s intervention with heightened aggression and increasingly dangerous tactics, which results in a cycle where each side justifies escalating their actions in response to perceived threats.”

You pause, stopping your pacing. Damian is staring at you. You cough. “That’s all to say, violence begets violence, hurt people hurt people, yadda yadda,” you grin sheepishly.

Damian nods intently. He leans back in his chair, tapping his fingers thoughtfully on the armrest. After a moment of silence, he speaks, his voice calm yet decisive.

"Your perspective is not entirely without merit," Damian begins, his tone measured. "Batman's methods have indeed perpetuated a cycle of violence in Gotham. His reliance on fear tactics and physical force against criminals often leads to heightened retaliation and more extreme measures from his adversaries."

He shifts in his seat, eyes narrowing slightly. "However," Damian continues, "one must consider the broader context. Gotham City is a cesspool of corruption and crime, where conventional methods of law enforcement have repeatedly failed. Batman's presence, while controversial, fills a void where the justice system falls short."

Damian stands up abruptly, pacing the room with a controlled energy. "His actions, while extreme, have prevented countless tragedies and protected innocent lives. The criminals he faces are not ordinary. They are deranged, relentless, and would wreak havoc unchecked if not for his intervention."

He stops in front of the window, gazing out at the expansive grounds of Wayne Manor. "Batman's commitment to justice is unwavering. He sacrifices his own safety and personal life to ensure that Gotham's citizens have a fighting chance against the darkness that plagues our city."

Damian turns back to you, his demeanor earnest. "Our challenge will be to present a balanced argument," he concludes, returning to his seat. "Acknowledging the complexities of Batman's methods while critiquing their consequences. We must delve deep into both sides of the debate to craft a compelling thesis."

You nod, absorbing Damian's perspective. You’re impressed, but yeesh. He could’ve been more subtle, in your humble opinion.

“I’m impressed,” comes a voice from the doorway. You and Damian turn around to see–

Bruce Wayne. You sigh deeply inside your mind.

“Father,” says Damian, looking a bit lost. “How long…?”

“Since your friend started speaking. I apologize, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I only meant to introduce myself when I heard your compelling argument, I didn’t want to interrupt,” he says, looking awfully apologetic. Of course, Batman himself heard all that.

He turns to you and sticks out his hand. “Bruce Wayne, Damian’s father.” You shake his hand humming in affirmation.

“Nice to meet you, sir,” you smile. Alfred comes in with some snacks and refreshments, placing them down on the table. You and Damian thank him, seemingly on autopilot. Bruce smiles at Damian.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he says, and then he’s out the door.

You rub your palms on your pants. “Welp,” you hum, sitting back down and pouring yourself a cup of tea. “I think he likes me.” You pour a cup for Damian and pass it to him. He sits back down as well, accepting the cup.

“I think he does, as well,” mutters Damian, sipping his tea.

The rest of the evening is spent refining your argument and laying out the skeleton on your powerpoint. Despite Damian's initial reservation about your abilities, you find that you complement each other well in terms of ideas and research methods. You check the time, it’s a little past nine.

“I should get going, I don’t wanna leave Nari alone for too long,” you say, beginning to gather your belongings. Damian raises a brow. “My cat,” you clarify.

Damian's eyes brighten very subtly. You know what he’s thinking, so you show him the picture you took of Jon holding Nari. “He’s cute, right?”

Damian analyzes your picture like it’s an art. He nods in approval. “You shall have to bring him over to meet Alfred.”

“The.. butler?” you question, as if you don’t know better.

“The cat.”

Damian walks you out of the manor where you find Bruce. His eyes spot you two approaching and nods in acknowledgement. “Alfred is already waiting outside for you,” he tells you. You nod and step outside, feeling the cool air hit you. You thank Alfred as he opens the door for you, stepping inside. Damian and Bruce are standing together on the porch. Bruce is telling Damian something, but he is only looking at you.

You send him a hesitant smile, and he nods at you.

Bruce watches the car drive off. “Still suspicious?” he asks.

“Nothing of note has happened,” Damian begrudgingly tells him. Bruce warmly chuckles.

“Well,” he starts, looking at Damian. “I like them.”

Damian narrows his eyes. “I do not like what you are insinuating.” Bruce shrugs innocently, stepping back inside the manor. Damian stands in the cool air for a moment, before following him inside. 

The dance instructor has a headache, so she says that you all can do whatever you’d like, as long as you don’t bother her. You sit against the far wall, laptop on your legs. You’ll use the time to finish the assignments you’ve been procrastinating on.

Victoria surprises you by sitting next to you. She surprises everyone else to, if their wide eyes are anything to go by. They quickly look away at her glare. “Hey, Vicky,” you mumble, unbothered.

She pretends to look interested in what you’re typing. Her eyes watch your fingers as they rapidly move across the keys. She clears her throat.

“I would like to practice some more after school. I expect you to be there,” she says primly.

You raise a brow, still looking at your screen. “There’s no practice today.”

“Obviously,” she scoffs. “I wouldn’t be asking you if there was. I just think… it would be beneficial to us.”

You look at her. She’s crossed her arms and is looking down at her lap. You exhale and nod. “Yeah, okay.” You didn’t have anything planned after school anyway. Victoria nods, sitting beside you for the rest of the period.

Damian suggests that you come over again to work more on the presentation, but you have to deny. “I have a ‘special’ practice session with Vicky,” you wink.

Damian ignores your innuendo in favor of furrowing his brows. “You don’t have practice today.”

“First of all, what do you know?” you huff, putting your pencils away. “Second of all, you’re right. However, Vicky has ordered extra practice. Just the two of us.”

Damian grips his bag a little bit tighter. You wave goodbye as you leave the classroom, heading to the dance studio. Victoria’s waiting for you, still in her uniform. You place your bag down, suddenly tense. Victoria crosses over to you, grabbing your hand. “Shut the door,” she demands.

You obey, curious. “Something wrong?”

She fidgets with your web-shooter-turned-bracelet, like she’s looking for something. You’re not worried, the form it’s in right now gives nothing away, but you are really confused right now.

“Vicky?” you implore, trying to catch her eye.

“I…” she hesitates, before straightening her shoulders. “I know who you are.”

You furrow your brow. “What exactly does that mean–”

“I know you’re Spinnerette.”

.

.

.

What. The. Fuck.

You blink, because that’s all you can do. “What?”

“Don’t try to deny it. There’s no use,” she crosses her arms.

“Vicky, this is crazy. I’m not Spinnerette! Was it the Scarecrow attack? Are you still scared? Maybe you should see someone–”

“Spinnerette called my Vicky!” she snarls, pointing a finger at your chest. “No one calls me that but you.”

Your tongue pokes your cheek, stepping back. You never would’ve thought Vicky would be the first to figure you out. Though you suppose you haven’t been as careful as you thought. Fuck, how could you be so careless? Do you still try to deny it? Surely it won’t be that hard, but clearly Vicky is smarter than you think.

“Perhaps she could be a formidable ally,” suggests Karen. “She may have access to resources we need.”

You straighten at Karen’s voice. She’s right, of course. Victoria’s loaded. She can throw money at people to get you the materials you need. Expensive, high quality material. There’s just convincing her…

And maybe… it’ll be nice to have someone else know in this universe.

You sigh and hold out your arms. “Fine, you got me. I’m Spinnerette.”

Victoria smirks victoriously. “Show me.”

“Show you…?” you mutter.

“Show me some proof.”

You blink at the audacity. She was just accusing you of being Spinner, and when you admit that you are, she tells you to ‘prove it’ to her!? You sigh, tired of it all.

You walk to the wall of the room, placing your foot on it and climbing up. It’s a comical sight, the way your body completely changes rotation effortlessly. You walk along the ceiling, moving back to Victoria. Jumping down, you purse your lips and spread your hands. “Happy?”

Victoria’s got a glint in her eye that makes you nervous. She nods, and you set your hands on your waist.

“Okay listen, you know now, there’s no going back from here. If you tell anybody–” you begin, voice taking on a threatening tone.

“–I want to help you!” she blurts.

You blink. “Pardon?”

“Let me help you do your… saving people thing!” she says, waving her hand around. She steps closer to you, eyes shining. Huh. Well, you were going to threaten her and her parents' credibility as members of society. Rich people always have some skeletons in their closets, and you sure as shit are capable of finding them. This is a surprising turn of events.

Still, you scoff. “This is insane–”

“I can be your sponsor! Like whoever makes all of Batman's stuff!”

“I would’ve never expected this from you—why do you want to help me?” you ask incredulously.

“Nothing I do satisfies my parents!” she growls. Oh dear, backstory time. “They literally left me the company to inherit, but doubt my ability to run it. I pay attention, I get good grades and I do everything they say, but they still doubt me. I even try to get with stupid Damian Wayne.” She throws her hands up. “I don’t even like him!”

“I know I can’t tell them you’re Spinnerette, but if I can successfully help you do what you do…” she curls her hands together. “Then at least I would know that I’m good at something.”

You’re left speechless. It’s like you’re listening to a brand new person. You place your hands on her shoulders. “You already are good at something, dance!” You gesture to the room. “You work harder than anyone else here!”

“Dance isn’t my future,” she scowls.

You purse your lips. You have no idea how she feels. The adults in your life have always let you be yourself. Even if they didn’t you’ve always had the backbone to tell people to step off and let you do your own thing. Rich people like Victoria’s parents can get pretty extreme. You wouldn’t be surprised if they disowned her for not wanting to inherit the company.

You sigh, running a hand down your face. “Okay,” you mutter. Victoria stiffens in anticipation. “You can help.” You’ve been evaluating her this whole interaction. She’s a sheltered rich kid looking for adventure and on a weird journey of self discovery. She isn’t looking to rat you out (she kind of needs you, anyway).

She squeals and claps her hands, before clearing her throat and composing herself. “I look forward to our partnership.”

Arms crossed, you grumble out, “uhuh.”

“How do they work, anyway?” she says, grabbing your wrists, pressing around your bracelet.

“Uh, it won’t work in the state that it’s in–” a web shoots out of it, sticking to Victoria’s blazer. You guffaw. “Karen!” you gasp, knowing in the web-shooters’ bracelet form it wouldn’t shoot unless she made it.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” she asks cheekily. Traitor. God, she’s been waiting for someone else to talk to, hasn’t she?

 Victoria looks mystified by the web actively attached to her. “Who’s Karen? she asks as she tries to grab the web.

“Do not–!” you grab her hand. “–touch it.”

“Why? Oh, right. It’s sticky, huh?”

“Yes, Vicky. The spider webs are sticky–” the door to the dance room opens, and you stiffen. Shit, the web–

Victoria closes the distance between you two, jumping on you and wrapping her legs around your waist. You instinctively hold her thighs to support her, looking at her in alarmed confusion.

“What–” she silences you by pressing her lips against yours. All coherent thought goes out the window, because literally what is your life?

Her hands wind around your head, and her lips caress yours with a soft yet firm pressure. Your heart races, pounding in your chest as you instinctively tighten your grip around her legs, pulling her closer. The warmth of her body against yours and the taste of her lips make everything else fade away.

After what feels like an eternity, she slowly pulls back, leaving your lips tingling. She gazes at you with a mix of mischief and satisfaction, running a hand through her hair to tuck a loose strand behind her ear. You stare at her in awe, your breath coming in short gasps. She's got balls of steel, no doubt about it. You just gained a whole new level of respect for her.

She looks to the side. “Oh, hi Damian.”

Oh god. You look to the entrance of the room and sure enough, Damian’s there. He’s looking at the two of you with wide eyes, unable to school his expression. He’s stopped dead in his tracks with your phone in his hand.

Wait… your phone!

You shift so Victoria’s back is facing him. You balance her with one hand, reaching between you two to get rid of the web that’s squished between you. You do it quickly, balling it up in your hand and setting down Victoria on the floor and heading over to Damian.

“Thanks, I didn’t even notice I left it,” you smile casually, internally screaming.

Damian says nothing as you take your phone from him, stuffing it in your pocket. You place your hands on his chest and guide him out. “Okay. Bye now. Talk to you later!” He seems to finally realize what’s happening, brows furrowing and looking at you before you close the door in his face. You lean against it, listening. There’s no sound for a bit, before you hear Damian walk away. You sigh.

“Holy shit, Vicky. What the hell?” You can’t help but laugh. You throw the balled up web in the trash, making your way over to her. She’s got a cheeky smile on her face, hands behind her back.

“It’s like I don’t know you anymore,” you tease. She’s looking at you.

“I like you,” she says, making you freeze for probably the tenth time this afternoon. When will it end?

“I have feelings for you,” she elaborates, pacing. “I know that you don’t feel the same. I just…” she stops, turning to face you. Her eyes peer earnestly into yours. It crushes your heart. “...I know your secret. Now, you know mine.”

You whisper, painstakingly soft, “oh, Tori…”

She sniffs, swatting your shoulder. “Don’t flatter yourself, I’m not in love with you or anything.”

Still, you feel like the worst human being ever. It’s not your fault you don’t have feelings for her, you know that. And yet… you’re probably the first person she’s ever shown this side of her to. Dare you say, her first real friend.

You pull her into your arms. “I’m so sorry.”

She melts into your arms, gripping you tightly. Her light sniffles fill the room.”I’ll get over it,” she promises. You only hold her tighter. After what feels like an eternity, she withdraws from you, wiping her tears.

“Okay, some ground rules,” you say, hopefully providing a much needed topic change

“Number one, you can’t tell anyone.”

She nods. “Obviously.”

“Number two, I call the shots. If I say do something, do it. I know better, it’s for the best.”

“Number three, this changes nothing. We can act like friends if you want, but if your grades start dropping or people start noticing you acting strange, we’re done. Got it?”

“Got it,” she agrees. You heave out a sigh. “Go home, Tori.” You web over her bag and hand it to her. She goes sparkly-eyed again.

“Will you patrol?” she can’t help but ask.

“I think I deserve the night off. The Bats can handle it.” You grab your stuff and turn towards the door. “I’m gonna take a long nap when I get home.”

“Let me take you home then!” she blurts.

“Jesus, do all you rich kids have chauffeurs?” you ask. She shrugs. “Yeah, sure. Whatever. I just wanna lay down and not wake up for three years.”

Victoria bids you goodbye as you make you enter your apartment. You drop your bag, groaning at your stiff shoulders. You sag your way over to your bed, flopping face first into it. You knock out almost immediately, letting the stress of the day leave you. Spideys never have it easy, do they?

notes: y'all i've had that tori scene in mind since i first made her LMAO

[sabertoothwalrus]

OK PREFACING WITH IM SORRY IF I ALREADY SENT THIS EXACT ASK BUT MY WIFI KILLED ITSSLF AS I SENT IT SO IDK IF IT ACTUALLY WENT THROUGH. but in case it didn’t . i know youve gotten this countless times in the past because i blog stalked just in case youve mentioned something similar before but i need to know if you have any specific inspirations when you draw exaggerated expressions specifically like these two images of marcille. ive actually cried laughing over this comic and being able to communicate this type of visceral emotion is such an insane skill and ive followed your art for probably close to a decade through various fandoms so watching you develop this style has been fucking awesome and epic. like i cannot articulate how funny these are to me i just need you to understand i look at this comic to inspire me to draw now. the closest comparison i can draw to the feelings they evoke are like those mspaint reaction images and also mspaint tails i included for reference even though you probably know exactly what im talking about anyways but its actually so much harder to do that intentionally when you study art. also i lied you literally don’t even need to answer this i just had to let you know how obsessed i am over your silly comics and now ive written out a whole ass discussion post about it. im sorry if this is weird at all i think my daily prescribed amphetamines r wearing off and i know this is such a dumb specific thing to fixate on and im so sorry if its not something you want to hear about your art. ive just always seen that as an artist this type of expressive stupid silly style is something that comes after a significant amount of time and practice and study and style development despite being “simple” in theory. its just so cool to have worked with your own style so much that youre able to go “off model” from it and still maintain consistency with the rest of the piece. i said it already and im sorry this is actually rendundant now but the ability to communicate such raw emotion somehow decreases from at its height when someone is a beginner artist learning how to proportion and keep a steady line and what looks “normal” but somehow it all comes full circle because taking all that experience and using it to almost return to where you started but in a fully informed and intentional way so you can make choices to draw characters like this when the situation calls for it is just dhcidogakgoshfhw. i think i need to cut myself off or im going to talk in circles im sorry tumblr user sabertoothwalrus i just am fascinated by your style and progress and the years you’ve dedicated to art can be seen in so many places but this is just one that stands out to me specifically.

MMMMM what a fun question!!!

I'm not gonna lie, I think it's just Letting A Drawing Be Bad. I definitely think the people that struggle with this the most are people who have genuinely very pretty art styles, to the point of being kind of perfectionist about it. and to Draw Funny often means Drawing Fast and Weird. Pretty is kind of the antithesis of funny (unless being pretty is the punchline). do drawings that make yourself laugh. tracing/lining funny sketches almost always makes them less funny.

one of my favorite types of humor is when it skews more deadpan, actually. This is one of the reasons I love Adventure Time. minimal expressions and flat line delivery + absurd context is a really good combo. the key to comedy has more to do with contrast! if your drawings are allllll crazy ren & stimpy all the time, they're not funny anymore cause it's just "normal". if it's all subdued UNTIL it's extreme, and vice versa, then it's funny. The reason this comic is so funny is because of the complete lack of any expression. I feel like the one you sent of Marcille shouting "WHAT" is funnier when you know how much she tries to be dainty and feminine and delicate, how much she values her appearance, and how averse she is to "gross" or "weird" things.

something I find really annoying (and this is with comics/animation in general, not the expressions themselves) is when the joke goes on for too long. Like you'll have the joke, then the punchline, and THEN the characters reacting to the punchline??? Like the author didn't trust that their audience would find the joke funny, so they basically drew in a laugh track. But, this is distinct from a character's reaction being the punchline (like how the examples you gave from my Marcille comic are). MY POINT IS sometimes expressions aren't as funny on their own as you think, and context can affect how you feel about it!

as far as inspirations go!

my own face! even if I don't have a mirror, I like making the expressions myself so I can "feel" where the points of tension on my face are, and it gives me a sense of what to exaggerate.

my brother's art, believe it or not! we've been trying to make each other laugh with our drawings since we were kids, and he's really good at it.

ATLA has some great expressions

OK KO has been a reallyyyy good source for me lately. That show is so tailored to my sense of humor and the expressions and line deliveries feel exactly like the kinds of things I'd come up with. The tone, timing, and art style are all really close to the tv show pitch I'm working on, so when I feel like I've "strayed" too much from it (like after drawing a bunch of dungeon meshi, and my art feels tighter and... idk "manga-ier"?) I like to go and watch a couple episodes of OK KO to loosen back up

A lot of things like OG Spongebob, Calvin & Hobbes, the Simpsons, Chowder, etc etc

memes in general. if it makes you laugh, keep it in mind

and lastly, I wouldn't say I ever try to mimic funny expressions I see. Like if I watch a show for inspo, I'm not pausing it to copy specific drawings, I'm just trying to notice patterns and pay attention to what about it I find funny.

talking about being funny is really bizarre and I dunno if it makes it lose some of the magic. Ultimately it's something you can't think about too much, and just gotta go with your gut.

[phoebepheebsphibs]

I mentioned in a reblog thing that I'd wanted to make a Rise comic series called "ROTTMNT: UNPAUSED" and I hinted to one of the finale episodes being called "Mikey's Birthday Bash"

Well I'm gonna infodump about that now...

So basically the episode started off with Mikey waking everyone up for a special breakfast to celebrate his bday, only to discover that not only did his brothers forget his bday, they all made plans of their own. To quickly make up for it, the guys take him into the Hidden City for a quick shopping spree before they all have to leave for their engagements. While Mikey is looking for something to buy, he overhears his brothers conversing about how in the next year, Raph won't be a TEENAGE mutant ninja turtle anymore (he is 17 currently). Donnie adds that he is already looking for colleges to join and hopes for an early admission. Leo also admits he has been planning for the future. Mikey realizes that his brothers are all planning to leave and grow up, which he is not ready for. He runs away crying, and meets a strange old hag who sells him a "special" birthday candle, which she promises will grant his biggest birthday wish.

Mikey finds his bros again and uses the candle on a meager cupcake they got for him. As soon as he blows the candle out, the four are transported into a version of the Battle Nexus, trapped there along with every other character from the show (and my comics) by the hag who sold Mikey the candle. She reveals that Mikey's wish was for "everyone to spend my birthday together", and the only way for them to escape is for the turtles to win the tournament! The bros are furious at Mikey for making the wish, and Mikey promises to get through the games as quickly as possible so they can get back to their plans and leave.

The hag states that the turtles will be pitted against their previous enemies, and with each round they win they'll will receive more allies. Anyone KO’d will be eliminated from the round and sent to watch in the audience, and upon the ending of the game all contestants will be returned to their last location. The enemies will get progressively more challenging until they defeat all of their opponents.

Round 1, April is with the guys, and they are up against Baxter Stockboy, Albearto, and the Purple Dragons.

Round 2, the Casey Joneses join the fight against the Foot Clan.

Round 3, Draxum, Splinter, Big Mama, and the two missing siblings hinted at by the writers join against the evil league of mutants and the Mud Dogs. April is KO’d after getting slammed into a wall and knocked unconscious by Heinous Green. Cass is KO’d by Hypno after he hypnotizes her to knock herself unconscious as well. Draxum is KO’d by Meat Sweats after he steals his power.

Round 4, Several characters (such as Agent Bishop and Mona Lisa) join to fight against the Triceratons (which were introduced in my series). During this round, everyone is K.O.'d except the turtles. However, Mikey sees that he didn’t finish the battles in time and his brothers have missed their appointments. He feels guilty, and his brothers are admittedly irritated.

Round 5, the final boss battle. They are pitted against the Shredder and the Kraang. Before the fight begins, Mikey has a blowout with his brothers and finally admits that he was angry they were gonna leave because he was scared of growing up, as he is not ready to be an adult yet and he doesn’t want to be alone. The Kraang interrupts stating “I can help you with that” and captures Mikey. However, the Turtles get one last team member… Karai. The Shredder -- having been defeated and Oroku Saki redeemed -- turns against the Kraang and sides with the Turtles and his daughter. The boys defeat the Kraang using the special formula from the movie, but not before the Shredder and Karai are K.O.'D by the Kraang. The Kraang are defeated with the last of the mixture, but to the boys' horror they see that Mikey was kraangified, and now have to fight against him as their last opponent. They try, but are unable to defeat him due to his increased strength AND his ninpo. Leo refuses to admit defeat, saying “Mikey never gave up on me… I can’t give up on him.” He tries one last attack, grappling with Mikey and holding him down...

I happened to make sketches of what came next...

The game finished, everyone is returned home. Mikey apologizes for everything, but Raph admits that he isn’t ready to grow up yet either, and he never wants to leave Mikey alone. He found out the hard way what that felt like, and the brothers agree to wait a little longer to grow up and enjoy being the teenage mutant ninja turtles while they can. Back at the lair, everyone bursts in to make sure Mikey is okay. They spend the rest of the day with him, enjoying his birthday...

So yeh that's that

[olderthannetfic]

Until I read the comments on that one post I had no idea the Bechdel Test was a joke and wasn't supposed to be a serious measuring stick by which you gauged if something was feminist or not. Everywhere I'd ever heard it brought up, it was brought up as a very serious thing, and it was a failure of media if it didn't pass it. I remember the debate about Mako Mori from Pacific Rim and if she was a character you were "allowed" to like as a progressive person despite the fact that Pacific Rim doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, the discourse, the discussion of if the director was sexist for not writing in another woman for her to chat with about non-men related stuff, the camp of people trying to insist that having a fully realized character arc and being as developed as any of the male leads = good writing even if she doesn't talk to another girl...

And I've also had the remark about my writing not passing the test, just not to my face. I searched my fanfic's name once, curious to see if anyone was discussing it outside of tumblr and AO3, and found a Tiktok complaining about it not passing the Bechdel Test. The top comment was "motherfucker YOU don't pass the test but we still watch your ass". I cackled and moved on, but neither the commenter, poster, nor I had any awareness this wasn't Feminist Media Critique 101 theory and was, in fact, a goof.

Right now there's a segment of fandom debating if Blue Eye Samurai is feminist since when Mizu and Akemi talk, they do bring up men, since, y'know. Women aren't considered people with rights in their era in Japan and thus it's something they mention instead of only talking about being cool girlboss badasses who never bring up gender. If something doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, a smug segment of the internet high-fives itself and congratulates one another on being More Feminist Than Thou.

They then get really angry if you disagree, even though by this metric, Sleeping Beauty (the original animated one, where Aurora has only 16 lines of dialogue) is more feminist than Blue Eye Samurai.

--

*DYING*

Okay, so, nonnie....

Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) was a long-running comic and major piece of lesbian media. I grew up buying compiled volumes at the bookstore. To be honest, that kind of 90s-ish lesbian culture isn't really my scene despite me being bi, but it was very nice to have this slice of life-y somewhat realistic, occasionally somewhat parody, look at the queer communities around me. It's up there with Tales of the City for me in terms of being a window into a particular culture and time and place.

If anybody is interested in queer history, in addition to looking up factual info, I think a read of the complete Dykes would give a really good overview of how people were thinking about things and what issues came up a lot. You'll see things like Barnes & Noble increasingly putting feminist bookstores out of business in the 90s, attitudes towards porn in lesbian circles—all kinds of cultural issues of the day.

I drifted away as I got later in my teens and found more genre fiction I cared about, but at one point, this comic was a very welcome antidote to the glurgey coming out stories that made up a lot of the more realistic media.

Anyway, here's the comic itself, reproduced in its entirety because I think it's important to actually understand the context.

This is from 1985, so the era of Rambo, Conan, and Death Wish, each of which you can see being made fun of here. It's based on Bechdel's friend Liz Wallace's actual rule for seeing movies.

That's it. That's the origin of this whole stupid test.

"LOL, fuck 80s action movies". That's it. That's the joke.

The fact that blockbusters still routinely fail to pass in the 2020s is shameful, but that was never the point of the strip.

[heycrymeariver]

five and many more: a timeline summary

(For legal reasons, all of this is alleged.)

Ref. links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

1984, is the first time Neil Gaiman released a book. 

In 1985, he got married and started his career as a comic book writer and in 1986, he assaulted Julia Hobsbawm.

This took place in Chalk Farm, London, where he forcibly kissed her and shoved her down on the sofa at her own studio flat before she escaped. According to The Crown Prosecution Service, “sexual assault is where one person intentionally touches another person sexually without their consent. The touching can be done with any part of the body or with an object.” In her own words, she described it as “an aggressive, unwanted pass” and that she still remembers it even now. 

Through 1987 and 2002 he progressed his career and published the famous book Coraline. A new year happens and he is in his early-forties and is thriving off of the success of his several money-making works, at a book signing event in Sarasota, Florida. There he hits it off with a young 18 year old (K) and they start dating. Two years later, in 2005, with two more awards under his belt, he forcibly penetrated that young twenty year old who told him not to because of a painful infection.

After another two years, he and his first wife divorced.

It's 2012, five years later and one year into a new marriage and at another book signing, Neil, age 52, immediately assaulted Claire (pseudonym) with a non-consensual kiss. Throughout keeping contact Neil had escalated this with video and phone calls that had a heavy sexual connotation where he appeared to either be naked or tried to instigate something. All of this accumulated into sexually assaulting her on a tour bus. Neil’s contact with her lasted until 2014 where he had promptly accused her in a text message that she had used him for sex.

Within the same year, Neil had enough money to buy a property, and met Caroline Wallner, 55, and her at-the time current husband. With a deal to do odd jobs for Neil and his wife to live there until she could own a five-acre plot, it wasn’t long before things turned sour. A divorce in 2017 sent everything spiraling, with her former husband fired, she in a once financially stable position, was now completely dependent on Neil Gaiman who used that to his advantage. Using her lack of financial stability to get himself sexual favors, he coerced her into a sexual-only, notably uninformed BDSM-entering territory while she was emotionally vulnerable, not accepting denials. This lasted until the summer of 2021, and in December of that year she and him went to court, what awaited her was $275k of compensation and a non-disclosure agreement (nda).

It wouldn’t take long for another woman to experience Neil Gaiman’s repeated offenses as well because in February of 2022, Scarlett (a pseudonym), age 23, a newly hired nanny, was sexually assaulted in the bathtub at his house. Neil, age 61, climbed into the bathtub with her and coerced her into having sexual relations. He too, in his coercion of her, made her financially dependent on him and brought BDSM elements to an inexperienced young woman who could not say no.

Since July 3rd of this year, 2024, five women have come out with sexual assault allegations aimed at Neil Gaiman. They all have several things in common with each other: either being young and naive, a fan of his, or put in a vulnerable spot financially or emotionally. Throughout the years and according to the stories, Neil progressively gets more bold and aggressive in his attempts for sexual gain. There are many more stories out there and whispers on the internet of how predatory Neil Gaiman has been in the industry. However, focusing on the five women who came out to speak and pushing their voice is an important part of the discussion.

Staying silent will only protect his peace.

(If you want to help keep this topic alive, please check out this post by @taraljc to see what steps you can take.)

[cyborgartalchemist2]

Imagine being so fucking aggressive about a ship you make jokes about Magneto and that very groomer scene from X-Men 97 that just... excuse the behavior? Because that doesn't sound very progressive in my opinion. Like yeah... rape culture in relationships just permeats fucking shipping but lets do nothing to argue against it. Lets make jokes that perpetuate the behavior and excuse men taking advantage of women.

To me having Magneto take advantage of a much younger mutant under his tutelage because she's desperate for physical connection and he's the only one she can touch is meant to showcase A) how Gambit contrasts Magneto and B) remind us that Magneto is never above using mutants for his own gains.

If this were reality most people would be calling Magneto a groomer and worse. We know Rogue was still a teen when Mystique took her in. We know that she's been an X-man for a few years. So Magneto was patient enough to wait until she turned 18?

Historically he hasn't done well with his love life. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's mom left him without telling him he fathered children because she was scared of him! (I'm only going on TAS and 97 here since this is an adaptation.) So where in the high heavens does everyome think he would be good for Rogue?

I don't care about the 'better than Remy' arguments because that's not the point! The point of who you ship Rogue with should be about if it's a relationship that is good for her! Is she their equal? Does she get treated with respect? Magneto looked at the Genosha council and without asking Rogue said "I'll lead but only if this woman I am trying to get back is my queen". LIKE DOES THAT EVEN SOUND MATURE? Magneto shows up, sees Gambit and Rogue being even mildly affectionate and starts pulling asshole moves on Rogue. And the narrative did nothing to make Rogue stand up for herself (which she would have) she should have told Erik "I'm a big girl I can get my own sugar for my coffee." She is shown numerous times to remind everyone she is no one's 'territory'.

Also wish to address the fact that making Rogue x Magneto comes with a 'sex is the only thing that matters!' Flavor that is exactly what so many of us are tired of in shipping. When did shipping stop being about the drama of a couple fighting against a narrative that pushes them apart or about finding love in the most unconventional of places, like alien hunting? And become solely about how nasty they can fuck? Seriously?

AND it's so blandly hetero it's not even funny. Because honestly the ways in which a couple can experience pleasure that don't involve traditional p in v penetration is vast and wild and there are enough types of gear and costumes and the like to facilitate that between Rogue and Gambit. Because that's all the argument has to stand on, is which man can fulfill her sexual needs. WHICH SHE HERSELF REALIZED WASN'T ENOUGH. She kisses Erik and goes "nope they're ain't any sparks there. This isn't going to be fulfilling ever."

Not to mention the fact that I can't genuinely see Magneto offering to die for Rogue. Sorry that grandstanding in Genosha was not the same. It was barely a heroic move... he still didn't save the Morlocks he promised to protect... he still failed. He couldn't save Leech and he couldn't stop the Sentinel either. Because yeah Magneto attempted to save Rogue and Gambit, but he did nothing to save the Morlocks at his side and he also survived without taking out the giant killer robot... but Gambit? Gambit said fuck it, gonna take this motherfucker to hell with me. He stopped Rogue from facing the sentinel so he could. And he actually stopped it. All on his own. Because that's what an x-man would do. Sure Magneto protectdd two people but sacrificed the morlocks yet again...

AND ON THE SUBJECT OF ROGUE x GAMBIT

Has Gambit always been great with Rogue? No, but that was the 90s and now look at how he handles shit? Comics writing has grown. It was a lot more heternormative and still had lots of rape culture hold overs in it.

Look at the episode when Cody shows up. He uses Rogue's connection to him from the past and then puts her in a situation that almost takes away her humanity. Her powers, which was what lured her into this trap in the first place, saved her from a man taking advantage of her. And the one time Gambit (in TAS) takes advantage of her, Morph in her form, told him to come and get some from her first. (So while he should have paused and woke Rogue up before kissing her, he had what he thought was an invitation.)

Gambit takes Rogue's decision to rule Genosha with Magneto incredibly well. He doesn't get mad, he doesn't call Rogue names, he doesn't do anyhting to hurt Rogue the way she is hurting him. He accepts it like a gentleman. Unlike Magneto who pursued Rogue's affections in unhealthy ways.

So uh... yeah that's my fucking rant.

[apocalypse-shuffle]

RED HOOD | BATFAMILY (assorted canon)

—

“Long Overdue” (Jason Todd & Batmom!Reader) and (background Bruce Wayne x Batmom!Reader)

| Reader was with Bruce in the past but grew distant after Jason’s death. No one tells her when he comes back from the dead until Bruce is forced to bring her in on a raid when they’re overwhelmed. -Jason and Batmom!Reader reunion.

| SFW, canon typical action/violence, cursing?, crying?

| This is like half fanon half UTRH/Batman:Hush. I’m really just fucking around with canon rn. Also the pictures used are just for aesthetics and have no contextual meaning to the story. (pic source - Batman: Three Jokers comic)

| 2k+ words

| parts: one, spurt, two, three, four, five, six/six point five, seven.

Ma. God, no one called you that anymore. The way your eyes begin to prickle is a clear indication.

With you Dick wasn’t the type. Once he’d worked himself up to it he’d called you mom; slightly different from the few ways he referred to his bio mother, but something shared between the two of you all the same.

And Tim? Well he wasn’t your child plain and simple. Tim still had his parents for one, and for two he was intrinsically Bruce’s. By the time he’d figured his way into the Batcave you’d been gone, most of your shit moved out of the manor, and desperately waving divorce papers Bruce refused to acknowledge in the air. You didn’t have anything to do with his indoctrination outside of exactly one instance of him finding you to ask if you’d reconsider the separation. Some Batman needed a Robin and Bruce Wayne needed his wife type shit.

Either way Tim didn’t call you any rendition of mom because you weren’t his. The most you got was him addressing you by your maiden name and then eventually your first and you were content with that.

Then if he didn’t call you mom, the girls sure as hell didn’t either. Outside of Barbara the others never even became regular conversation partners. Cass was a rare sighting in your life and Stephanie and you’s relationship would never progress past the casual advocacy you tried giving her because she was another dead Robin to add to what’s now technically a list.

At the end of the day, out of all the people who considered you a mother, only Jason added that ‘a’ and you wanted to grip that name tight and hold it to you. Break your ribs open and force it into your chest cavity. The need to fulfill that ache cuts deep and you take a step forward.

Jason startles though, undoing all his own forward progress, and you falter. That’s right. Jason didn’t like for people to touch him. Definitely didn’t like hugs either. Not surprise ones at least. Before his death you’d gotten close enough he didn’t mind when you swooped in, but now?

“Can I-? Can I hug you?” You press trembling lips together for another horrible swallow. “Please…?”

Jason jerks, two hastily aborted movements at once, before his obstructed voice meets your ears.

“Fine.”

You practically fall on him before pulling him into you. Unfortunately he’s just as stiff as his voice and you have to take a second to figure out how to slot against him.

Jason fits in your arms differently than he used to - broader and taller by a mile - but after a few beats he relaxes into them just the same. The subtle addition of weight makes a sob bubble up your throat.

You rap your knuckles on the side of the helmet.

“Take this shit off.”

He hesitates and a sharp pang manages to worm its way into the already shitty cocktail of emotions you’re feeling. It hits your spine like lightning, forces you up and has you an arms length away in half an inhale.

Maybe before now you’d been going through too much all at once for the trepidation to hit, but it was hitting now. You’d never seen Hood without- well without the Hood. Only Jumbie raised from the dead the way Jason did, and while you’d take your son anyway you could get him you wouldn’t accept some Thing parading around in his skin.

Reading your burst of movement for what it is, Jason backtracks, rising arms dropping to his sides. “Maybe I shouldn’t…”

“Jason Peter-” you inhale deeply, catching yourself, and hold a hand up to stop him. You both ignore the obvious way it trembles. “-only… if…if you want to. I’m not trying to force anything.”

He’s slow to nod, weight shifting from his left to his right leg and back again before he says something too low for you to hear. You’re about to ask him to repeat when he speaks up, this time aiming his voice somewhere around your shoulder while bowing his head.

“No, I- Alright. Just hold on.”

Haunches suitably raised and heart in your throat you pay close attention as the helmet comes up, Jason having released some catch in the back.

It goes over, the helmet clatters to the ground, and the man who stares back at you is…hard to place.

The low fluorescent lighting of the narrow room combined with the concrete walls casts soft enough shadows over his face that while his features are warped they’re not discernible. Which means you can’t completely rule out the uncanniness wafting off of him as just your brain (along with your entire perception of the universe) splinting in half.

It makes your face heat up. He looks familiar, but you can’t say you wouldn’t have passed him straight if you’d seen him on the street. He’s too big for one, even for how you’d all imagined he’d look grown up, standing more than a foot taller than the last day you saw him. Taller than malnourishment would’ve ever let him be.

The sob you let out makes you both flinch.

One hand snaps to your mouth, the other waving him off.

“I’m sorry I- I don’t-. This is just-”

Even with the way he’s leaning away from you he shakes his head. “I get it, it's fine.”

His voice is faint, cut up and hoarse like he hasn’t used it in a while, and it’s the prettiest thing you’ve heard in ages.

“Oh,” you laugh. The wet kind that makes your throat sticky. You can only stare at him, blurry form and all, words lost to you.

Eventually, after watching your fervent effort to wipe away tears that are in no way inclined to give you a break, arms crossed Jason takes a half step forward with a shrug.

“We can…try again?”

The next little laugh you let out you practically choke on but you nod all the same.

When Jason’s the first to move your heart starts speeding away like an overexcited middle school drumline. You roll with it though, pressing the heels of your palms into your eyes so they’re dry enough for you to actually see him clearly for a few seconds.

When he’s directly in front of you your hands come up slowly, giving him plenty of opportunity to move away. Or maybe to vanish.

When he does neither, only giving you a guarded look, you allow yourself to touch.

Problem is, the domino mask he’s wearing very quickly gets in your way and on your nerves when you move to frame his face. Quickly feels like if it’s not gone, if you can’t see his eyes, you’ll throw up.

To stop yourself from taking the risk and ripping it off you have to take a deep breath. Have to force down the thick build up of saliva gathering in your mouth so it pushes back the bile climbing up your throat.

“I’d like to see my son, Jason. All of you.”

To emphasize your point you tap the tip of your nail against the mask. There’s no intention on your part to cross his boundary but Jason’s hands snap up to hold onto your wrists all the same.

You look into the white lenses of his domino, fingers buzzing along the corner of the mask closest to them. His mouth twists into a frown.

“Please?”

You beg with the same ferocity a grieving mother once used when begging for her child back.

“You’re asking for a lot.”

He lets go and he takes a couple steps back and you don’t cry.

No, instead you swing your hands behind you. Clasping them together in a poor attempt to stop the buzzing sensation that travels from the tips of your fingers to take over your entire hand.

“Mmm,” you incline your head. “Well. I did help a boy get over first date jitters with a made up song once. Let that same boy talk me through an entire dissertations’ worth of his analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God - as choppy as it was - because TWMS wouldn’t allow him to present it in class. Let him skip going to that same school and cry to me for hours after the death of Gloria Stanson. Remember a knife hidden in the corner on the highest shelf in his closet, and I remember not revealing any of that when I gave his eulogy because he once asked me to keep the important things between the two of us. So you don’t have to show me, but I think I make a pretty good qualifier when it comes to keeping this safe.”

You point straight to where his heart is tucked safely behind layers of gray armor before shrugging.

From the way his brows furrow over the domino you know he’s at least thinking about it so you step away to pick up your disregarded mask and stuff it in your waistband.

One blink. Six.

“You remember Rena?”

In front of him again, you rock back on your heels. “Mhm. And the ‘how to tie a tie’ lessons me and Bruce walked you through even though you didn’t wear a suit to that date. Remember that too.”

Jason’s smile is crooked on his face but it’s nonetheless present as he makes a noise of agreement.

“I’d just wanted to spend time with you two, I was never planning on wearing a suit to go to the skating rink.”

“We figured.”

You’re rolling onto the balls of your feet when that small smile drops and he shakes his head.

“I’m not that same boy anymore.”

You take in the way he could raise his hand and so easily touch the ceiling without having to jump. You clear the phlegm from your throat.

“I can tell.”

Jason grunts and makes a general gesture indicating something somewhere behind you.

“And I got no interest in trying to live up to whatever fucked up embalment Bruce’s got going on with my burnt suit in that case.”

That suit. Bruce’s memorial. His warning. Your breath hitches as you think of the smell of crisped blood and methanol. If Jason didn’t want to talk about it you sure as shit weren’t going to.

“I will one hundred percent take that into account.” You keep it simple, rocking on your heels again. He wasn’t asking for anything unreasonable so there wasn’t really any debate to be had. “You wanna be treated as you are? I can do that.”

Moments pass once you’ve said your peace where Jason does nothing but stare at you. The only indication he’s at all alive being his shoulders still moving - and you are watching. Eyeing that tell tale up and down like your own life will end at its falter. The pattern is slow enough to come off as pacivity but the time between each rise and fall is too measured to be uncontrolled. Exactly three point eleven seconds one way and three point eleven seconds the other. Every time.

Then he sighs, curses, and the little veil of dissolvent for the adhesive that adheres the mask to his face is in his hand. A different vial and color than when he was Robin; you don’t know why you thought it’d be the same. Or why it makes your heart clench that it’s not.

Between one thrum of the fluorescent lights and the next Jason is peeling away the domino, and you would be lying if you claimed to know where it disappeared to after that. Too caught up on what he’d been hiding to track it.

Blue. Nothing more and nothing less. Just blessedly familiar, vibrant blue. Not the dull gray they’d become by the time you were given the chance to put a gruesome sight of a child six feet under.

The “Oh wow,” tumbles from you without permission and then there’s zero hope for the waterworks you’d been holding back. The levee fails and you’re bawling before you know it. Barely holding back snot and who knows what else since you already feel like screaming.

At that point there’s no carefully thought out sentence for you to spew, no more hesitancy, no more measured breathing, and linear thought. Just the crushing need to have him close to you again.

You’re rushing forward before you know.

Wrapping your arms around Jason the next go around is both the best and the worst thing. You accommodate his new size faster, already writing over the ways he used to fit against you with the ways he does so now, but he’s still so stiff and he’s not reciprocating the hug either.

Maybe you should let go. You crossed the boundary too fast. Were too reckless. You literally have training on this and now you’re crowding him.

Okay, you’re pulling away. It’s a herculean effort but you’re forcing your arms from around his middle. You’ve got to, you don’t want to scare him off. Not when you just got him back.

There’s a soft “Not yet,” mumbled into your shoulder and then arms finally come around yours and you don’t hesitate to snap your own back into place.

He’s hugging you back.

You cry a little harder and bring one of your arms up to drape across his shoulders, pulling him closer. When you start rocking and Jason copies your momentum you press a kiss onto his temple.

“Hi,” you stutter out. Another sob. “Hi baby.”

Since he’s finally letting his arms wrap around you you don’t hesitate to run dark fingers through the truly unruly mass of black curls on his head. His hairs’ damp - most likely from sweat - but cool. Probably being tempered by the cold air blowing into the room.

It’s when you press a kiss to his forehead that you feel something else wet and your breath stutters.

“It’s okay. I got you, everything’s okay,” you whisper.

“God Ma-” his voice cracks and then you can hear the sobs he’s trying to muffle into your suit. “No it’s not.”

“I know,” you sob. “I’m sorry- so so fucking sorry.”

You sniffle and pull away to see him better. Jason’s face is flushed, his eyes wet, and cheeks streaked with tears shed. You hold your hands up to frame his face for a second time and run your thumbs through the tear tracks. His chest heaves as his body tries to regulate his breathing.

Jason clears his throat, gaze boring into yours. “Hi,” he says.

You smile, finally beginning to map out his face. First you move to frame his cheeks, too feel the warmth in them. To see if they still feel familiar. They don’t; you force yourself to accept that fact without letting it show in your expression, letting out a measured exhale before continuing. You find his jaw is more defined now too, cheeks devoid of the baby fat of five years prior.

From then on brushing your thumbs along his brows, over the bridge of his nose, traveling over his ears and skirting around his hairline - it all fills your mind with incoherent cheers.

Your thumbs hover over Jason’s eyes and you hum when he closes them for you.

The skin underneath your shaved off pads is soft. The thin layer of protection allows you to feel how his eyeballs shift, to see the way his veins show stark under light skin, to clock the life thrumming through him.

It makes your heart feel so goddamn light. You can’t stop smiling at the sight of him. Eyes still wet but clear.

“I feel like such a horrible mother,” you hiccup, hands slide down so you can once again cup his face. “I barely recognize you.”

Jason’s breathing shakes nearly in tandem with yours and his eyes squeeze tighter shut, head turning away.

“Don’t.” He takes a second to look up. Look right through you. Lashes wet and glassy eyes open, voice grating over his next words. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. I don’t blame any of you for that, but especially not you.”

What you want to do is argue. You should’ve never let him put on that suit in the first place, one fucked up son should’ve been the end of it. You should’ve dropped the case you were working the second you’d heard he’d run away and you should’ve found him. Instead you keep your thoughts personal, pinning them to your brain as if it’s a cushion so that you’ll never forget, and pull your son closer. An action which he allows, resting his head on your shoulder.

“I’m glad you’re back,” you whisper into his hair. The way he instantly shakes his head makes the cool strands tickle your jawline.

“You can’t mean that.”

“If I didn’t mean it I wouldn’t have said it, Jay.”

Jason tenses before responding, words spewing without warning.

“Yeah except I’ve killed people, and I don’t regret it, and Bruce hates that - and you probably do too - but his way isn’t good enough. The people in this city deserve better so I’m doing what’s necessary-”

And that has you bristling. He must notice too because he stops short and edges away, face steeping. Caught somewhere between wanting to leave and wanting to fully kick start an argument.

…TBC

NOTES: Hope you enjoyed! I had to split this bitch in two cause it was 5,000+ words and I’m not in the business of under-indulging myself.

Listen, I’ve looked into it. Every mother/mother figure Jason’s ever had he’s referred to as “Mom”, but me personally, I didn’t grow up addressing my own mother that way so I wanted to play around with “Ma” (differentiate a little). What's funny though, is that I’ve read Dick referring to his mother as both “Ma” and “Mom” so that’s fun.

• TWMS = Thomas Wayne Middle School

btw: if you’d like to leave a comment I’d very much appreciate it. this is a sideblog tho so I won’t respond.

Tagged: @aarinisreading, @niphredil-14, @mxtokko, @calsjack, @brunnetteiwik

[ecoterrorist-katara]

Katara would’ve been such a good diplomat (it’s canon)

everyone rightfully hates on the ATLA comics because the politics are baffling and the characterization is even more so…but if there’s one thing we can take away from the dumpster fire that is The Promise, it’s that Katara was BORN to be a diplomat and an international force for peace, okay? Especially since her besties, the Avatar and the Fire Lord, aren’t actually very good at this.

If you haven’t read The Promise, the Wikipedia summary is pretty good. The TL;DR is that Zuko and Kuei agree that the Fire Nation colonies need to be returned to the Earth Kingdom. The colony of Yu Dao is not happy about this because the people of the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom have been mixing together (under inequitable conditions) for more than a hundred years and “just kick out the Fire Nation” is not as straightforward as it seems, since there are blended families now. Zuko refuses to kick out the Fire Nation people from Yu Dao, Kuei wants to play hardball, and they almost launch another war. Oh and there’s a weird plot about Aang debating whether to put Zuko down like a rabid dog

For all that the Wiki page does a good job of summarizing the events, it forgets some key facts: 

It’s Katara who first starts thinking about new solutions after witnessing the situation on the ground, and then comes up with the idea that Zuko and Kuei should meet and talk about the colonies:

It’s Katara who tells Kuei that Zuko has legitimate concerns (without saying that Zuko is right), when Aang tries to hedge and sugarcoat the truth: 

And it’s Katara who says to Kuei, wait, what the hell do you mean that you have no idea what your people want, that Yu Dao is just a dot on the map for you? We’re getting you out of this stupid blimp and you’re gonna talk to people before you make a decision that affects their lives, you coward

To recap, Katara demonstrates some pretty freaking key political skills, like: 

finding out what people want before making a decision for them 

seeing people as people first and foremost, not as fire nation or earth kingdom 

encouraging her loved ones, the Avatar and the Fire Lord, to resolve a conflict by beginning negotiations instead of brawling like a couple of drunks at a bar / kids on the playground (both analogies fit btw, 13-17 is a weird combination of ages)  

realistically reporting tricky disagreements without sweeping them under the rug

kidnapping a king to the middle of a battlefield to give him a reality check about listening to the people he’s trying to rule

Anyway, Katara is hyper competent at both war AND peace! We see this in the show, with her compassion for the prisoners of the Earth Kingdom (by inciting a prison riot) and the suffering people of the Fire Nation (by committing ecoterrorism), only now that compassion is backed up not only by her fighting prowess and speeches about hope, but actual ability to manipulate the levers of power. 

And have I mentioned that she has the ears of both the Avatar and the Fire Lord and her dad is Chief of the Southern Water Tribe? Even if Katara didn’t get a diplomat position based on her skills, or her status as a war hero, she could nepo baby her way in. The fact that she does not pick up a career in international diplomacy is a crime & a colossal oversight from the creators. At minimum you know Katara would’ve established Healers Without Borders or something. She deserves to be yelling at people at ATLA UN and then drafting world-changing resolutions. 

And as a bonus, Katara demonstrates her gift for diplomacy by not smacking Zuko up the head for attempting to legitimize colonization through the argument of economic progress…

…and by not smacking Aang up the head for seriously considering anti-miscegenation as a viable political solution: 

This patience is a new development because show!Katara did not have this in her, but maybe this is what growing up is all about and not just yet another strike on the “comics are wildly OOC” tally

TL;DR: ATLA boys lost their brain cells post-canon. All hail Katara, Sugar Queen of international diplomacy. 

[genericpuff]

Can you call Tina Belcher driving through a parking lot at an anxious snail's pace a driving "style"? So why do we try to use "style" as a defense for LO's pacing problems?

There's something about how Lore Olympus engrosses people within its weekly doses of H x P content and cliffhangers that makes people not realize just how long Lore Olympus takes to get to the point of, well, anything. Many plotlines are setup, and then go untouched for weeks, sometimes months at a time, before seeing any sort of progress, much less a resolution. In this, I'm going to actually give you time ranges on some of the more egregious payoffs and continuations of plotlines that were setup - some that are now resolved, others that have yet to see the light of day.

CONTENT WARNING: I will be discussing the SA plotline, and there will be spoilers for Episode 265. I will also be showing pictures of some rancid ass tattoos, I know that sounds random for what we're discussing, but trust me on this one, I have a point to make. Also there's a Junji Ito panel from The Enigma of Amigara Fault... yeah, that one.

LEUCE

Let's start with an easy one that's not exactly tied to the main plot. The Leuce plotline. She was first introduced in Episode 201 as a 'bargaining chip' from Zeus to Hades, in a misfired attempt to get Hades to call a truce over the embargo between the Underworld and Olympus.

At the time of this episode's release, by all accounts this seemed to be a cut and dry reference to Hades' first wife, Leuce, unfortunately reduced to a mail-order bride who Hades, of course, turns down, because he doesn't want the "I can't believe it's not butter" Persephone, he wants overpriced, tastes-the-same-but-costs-more-because-of-the-brand-name Persephone.

But then she came back, 36 episodes later - in real time, this was roughly 38 weeks for free-to-read users as the series went on a 2 week hiatus near the start of S3 - only to be used as a cliffhanger leading into a recycled Minthe plotline, in which she attempted to seduce Hades in Episode 238, only to be shot down for the second time.

If you're having a tough time wrapping your head around how long 36 weeks really is, that's nine months. If you got pregnant when Leuce was first revealed, you'd be entering the final window of pregnancy by the time she returned, assuming the baby didn't come pre-term.

Another 7 weeks later, enough time to actually get pregnant again following that first baby, we got the sudden continuation of that plot, with Persephone invading her home and filling it with barn animals, with a not-so-subtle threat to Leuce to stay away from her husband.

"But what about the text messages? Were they really from Hades?" Well, if you were someone reading this comic in real time, you wouldn't have this question answered for another SIX EPISODES - that's a month and a half in real time - and the answer would ultimately be "she made it up, she was 'manifesting', none of it's real, they should call her Deleuceional!" Six weeks for a nothingburger answer to wrap up a nothingburger sideplot, all in the pursuit to 'prove' for the 1275903729 time that Hades and Persephone are truly meant to be together.

EROS AND PSYCHE

This is a big one. The Eros x Psyche plotline was one of the most popular romance subplots, second only to Hades and Persephone, throughout the comic. And yet, despite people holding their breath to see what would become of the star-crossed lovers, a mortal and a god-

-readers in September 2021 would not find out how their recent skirmish with Apollo in Episode 171 would resolve itself until Episode 218, A YEAR AND TWO MONTHS - ROUGHLY 60 WEEKS AND A MIDSEASON HIATUS - LATER, and even then it would only show us Eros, who quickly summarizes what happened to him during the entire trial and Kronos arc that his anticipated romance storyline got sidelined for - he got married and now he has a child.

And it wouldn't be for ANOTHER six weeks that his wife and the mother of his child would actually show up, not alongside Eros, but Aphrodite and Hephaestus, in Episode 224.

What happened to her after finally having her 'true form' revealed to Eros? Well, that's not shown for another three weeks in Episode 227. During this a bunch of info about how Psyche got out of that sticky Apollo situation is dumped on us and we just have to go along with it as she becomes a goddess, not because she earned a place among the Olympians, but because Zeus needs her to spy on Apollo, which was actually shown one episode prior in 226.

So let's say you got knocked up again after that Leuce baby, when Eros and Psyche were shot out of the sky. Welp, in the time it took for Rachel to get around explaining what happened to the both of them, now you just had your second baby and for all we know, you could have gone for a third and already be well into or near the end of your first trimester, if you really wanted to get busy. You'd have a Dionysus, a Melinoe, and maybe even a Demophoon. Congratulations.

And speaking of Melinoe-

MELINOE

Turns out the interloper and the child in Tartarus were one and the same, or at least that's what I'm assuming, because otherwise that would mean there's some whole ass other baby to worry about that we haven't even been introduced to yet.

Melinoe, or "the child deity", was first established in Episode 218.

But as per LO tradition, the child would only mentioned in passing every now and then until finally being revealed as Melinoe in Episode 252, a whopping... THIRTY EIGHT FUCKING WEEKS LATER.

And that waiting is still ongoing as Melinoe is, of course, still trapped in Tartarus, with no end in sight. Since then, Hades and Persephone have gotten married, kidnapped a child, Persephone has terrorized a nymph and caused yet ANOTHER genocide, and they've resurrected a child that was suddenly revealed to be Demeter's. Thirty eight weeks and counting of dragging on a plotline that we're supposed to believe is dire while the characters do sweet fuck all.

What was the name of that other dream baby that Rachel referenced from some obscure non-legitimate source?

Riiiight, Brimos. Congrats, there's pregnancy number 4. But can we find a way to make a fifth happen?

KASSANDRA

We're first introduced to Kassandra, another implied victim of Apollo's, in Episode 226 when a photo of her is found on Apollo's pen drive which was conveniently left on the ground for Psyche to swipe.

In Episode 227, they theorize on how they could track down this mystery woman, using either Eros or Aphrodite's abilities to find her through the power of

✨love✨

How will that actually work though? Has anyone ever been in love with Kassandra, or has she ever been in love with anyone else?

Any bets on how long it would be until we'd get our answer?

Episode 251. The same episode where we're finally told about Leuce's delusions, we suddenly skip to the reveal of Kassandra being Apollo's personal oracle.

And it still doesn't end up answering our question as to how Kassandra was tracked down, by the way. Eros and Psyche sorta just conveniently find her at the same time Apollo happens to be there when he's getting her to deliver her big prophecy to him.

That's twenty four weeks, meaning you're now near the end of your second trimester with child #4. Whoever the child is remains to be seen but I'm sure Rachel will find a way to shoehorn another helpless baby into the plot for Hades and Persephone to rescue who we can use for this metaphor.

But none of these come close to the greatest unresolved plotline of them all, the one plotline that has outlasted even the main H x P plotline of Lore Olympus' story-

APOLLO

Or more specifically, the SA. Rachel has tried so hard to twist Apollo into a villain of Disney proportions, through his sudden involvement with Ouranos, while also using him as a mouthpiece for her own critics by having him literally dish out word-for-word the criticisms that have been made towards Rachel's writing of Persephone-

But the core foundation of his plotline goes all the way back to 2018, when he assaulted Persephone, a plotline that has yet to resolve itself or show any progression beyond Rachel's half-baked attempts at speedrunning Persephone's healing process, while Apollo is still at large and hasn't been brought to justice.

We've seen her in very poorly-written therapy where her assault was addressed once. We've seen her grapple with the potential consequences of the SA through a gynecologist scene that, as I've discussed before, does more harm than good in helping the discussion around women's sexual health. And of course, Rachel will pepper in vague references to the SA every now and then when she's bothered to remember that it's a plotline she wrote and still hasn't resolved:

And judging by how the story has been progressing, Rachel seems far more intent on simply using Apollo as a mouthpiece for criticism and a puppet for Ouranos rather than focusing on the bigger issues, all while Persephone has helped more people cope with the assault that happened to her rather than receiving help herself.

What's really telling is that despite half of the Olympians at this point knowing what Apollo did, not one of them even tries to convince Persephone to come forward, or say something themselves. Daphne has more than enough reason to come forward. Artemis, Hera, Eros, Hermes, and Hephaestus all know what he did, and yet none of them say a thing, even when those of them who haven't been conveniently shoehorned out of the plot are still in the same room as him-

The assault scene happened in August 2018. It's been five and a half years since it was established, and while there have been small efforts made to resolve it - from Hera and Hephaestus having the photos deleted to Persephone seeking therapy - there's less reason now than ever for it to not be addressed, especially with so much at stake. I could side with Persephone not wanting to say anything in the beginning, when he was blackmailing her with the photos and her TGOEM scholarship was on the line, but now that she's a Queen, rich, and married to Hades, living in the Underworld where he can't get to her, without any schooling or scholarship or job to worry about or the photos hanging over her head, it comes across as flat out irresponsible that not a single person thinks it's worth mentioning. Even the narrative itself seems to be trying to undo the SA entirely.

At this point, I'm not confident it will be mentioned at all, and that Apollo will be conveniently dealt with as a pawn of Ouranos rather than as a perpetrator of violence towards women.

A FINAL ANALYSIS OF LO'S PACING

There are certainly far more examples of this weekly edging happening throughout LO, but I hope the ones I provided get across the point I'm trying to make about its pacing.

Of course, none of these gaps in time are happening back-to-back-to-back. This is Lore Olympus' writing "style", if you can call it that - constantly bombard the reader with separate plot points so that they'll either not remember the ones that were left behind, or so that Rachel can buy herself time to get herself out of the corner she wrote herself into. It's the equivalent of clickbait, constantly grabbing your attention with shiny new things that will replace whatever you just saw in your brain, on a constantly repeating cycle. It's the writing process of inexperienced amateurs, like what you'd see in short stories written by fifth graders - "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened", with no theme or overarching meaning tying them together; and if you were to ask them why a certain thing happens, especially if it logically doesn't make sense, the answer is just, "well, because it does." There's no rhyme or reason, they just thought it was cool.

And I say "style" because while fans of LO have definitely defended the story's pacing as just a writing style, the actual execution of what they're implying is painful to watch and not what any experienced writer would call a legitimate style. It's not uncommon at all in long-running series like this to jump from plotline to plotline, often times longform stories like these have to balance multiple side plots at once to keep things engaging and to bulk up the plot with more actual content.

But in most cases, the reader will expect the speed of a plot's resolution to be relative to its urgency. If a casual B plot with low stakes is introduced, it's not necessarily doing any harm if it just sits there for a bit before finally being resolved. After all, it's low stakes and no one is being hurt by it existing on the sidelines. It might feel a bit like pointless fluff, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with fluff and it can offer fun and relaxed reprieves from the overarching narrative, assuming you integrate them well so they're not drawing attention away from those more urgent plotlines at the worst possible times (looking at you, Stranger Things S2 Episode 7-)

But when even the high stakes plots are being hung out to dry and treated like distractions and fluff, it comes across less like a decisive writing "style" and more just directionless pantsing from an inexperienced writer who's gotten themselves in way too deep.

And that's what really separates Rachel's writing problems from "style". Style is decisive. Style is the act of referencing over a set period of time, crafting what you like and what you've learned into something new, with rounds and rounds of fine-tuning. Style is experience put into action.

And, while I don't typically like using my own work as a comparison, LORE | REKINDLED is meant to try and recapture the original magic of Lore Olympus' art style and writing foundations - and even then, you can still see the clear difference between Episodes 14 and 44, which use the same panel from the same scene, but look vastly different due to the improvement and refinement that's happened over time.

Same style, but different levels of experience and skill, which is to be expected after weeks and weeks of fine-tuning and deliberate practice.

If you're lacking in your fundamentals, whether in art or writing, you can't equate that lack of skill to "style" because you're not choosing to be inexperienced, you just are. And that's okay! But to try and pass it off as 'style' implies that you're choosing to be inexperienced - when in reality, if you tried to put out anything beyond your skill level, you simply wouldn't be able to, because you haven't gained those skills yet. Like fifth graders writing short stories with the "and then this happened" model, "it's just my style" is often used as an excuse by young artists and writers who don't understand that style is not exclusively an end result of inexperience.

I'm gonna go on a tangent here, but there's this controversial but trendy style in tattooing called 'ignorant', and it's best defined as "tattooing badly on purpose".

These tattoos are regularly praised for their simplistic ingenuity and visual aesthetic but equally criticized for being the opposite of what many artists have worked to overcome - being "bad at art". After all, who would willingly pay for a bad-looking tattoo? It's because it's the style that's in demand. I would argue that it takes a lot of confidence and mastery of the craft to be purposefully bad at it and make it look good, as contradictory as that sounds.

As much as the lines may be wobbly and the anatomy poor, ignorant style tattoos are done purposefully by experienced artists who still know how to properly tattoo. As much as they may look like they were drawn by a middle schooler, they will still heal properly, the lines will hold up, and the client will not (or at least, should not) experience any excessive scarring or unhygienic practices as one would experience from an actual inexperienced artist-

In a genuinely poorly-done tattoo, the evidence of the inexperience is literally written all over the body. The skin swells, the ink bleeds out, the lines are inconsistent in their depth, and there's clear signs of trauma to the skin that will undoubtedly result in a poorly-healed tattoo (and that's not even getting into the larger health risks such as contracting blood diseases due to a poorly kept space). It's not hard to see the difference between a bad tattoo and a tattoo that's intentionally bad.

It's the age old saying in a different medium - only once you learn the rules can you properly break them.

Rachel never learned these rules in her writing and it's evident to anyone who knows these rules and is viewing LO through a critical lens - or in my case, experiencing it on a week to week basis. It's a regularly occurring problem in the medium of webcomics as a whole - thinking that knowing how to draw is enough, and that writing comes dead last, if at all. When in reality, comics are a marriage of art and writing, you can't simply do one really well and allow the other to drag behind. That's not to say there aren't comics that succeed at having bad art and good writing, if anything a well-written comic can save bad art-

But if you have a comic with good art and bad writing, that's when a comic opens itself up to harsher criticism. As much as art may be the visual forefront of comics, if you want to keep your audience along for the long road that stretches ahead, you need to have a strong foundation in writing, or at least, enough of a plan to ensure you're not driving in the dark. The art can be as gorgeous as you want it to be, but if the plot is weak, then no one will have any reason to check back in week to week.

And such is Lore Olympus' biggest weakness. Much of what we praise LO for back in its first season was simply its foundation. It's very easy to praise a story's writing when it hasn't had to payoff what it's setup. Having ideas is easy, and early LO is rife with good ideas - but many of those ideas have since fallen flat, even the ones you wouldn't expect.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, but actually executing them in a way that can be engaging from start to finish and resolve itself in a way that's satisfying is a whole other challenge that many creators, including Rachel, find themselves unable to tackle; and nothing is a greater example of that than LO's third season, which is now fumbling its plotlines that have failed to resolve themselves properly after 5 years, while introducing new ones that serve as mere distractions, as if they were a laser pointer aimed at a cat.

I hear the argument, "LO is a better story if you binge read it" a lot, which - while I can certainly understand in today's culture of content that's churned out to be binged - I still fail to see how it actually makes LO a better story. Binge-reading LO doesn't remove the pointless plotlines. It doesn't fix its blatant timeline problems, its retcons, or its inability to stay focused on one topic for more than 5 panels. All it really fixes is the waiting, the ritualistic toiling over each and every cliffhanger that caps off the weekly episodes just for them to either be resolved in the next week or left behind with no in-between. And while having all that waiting removed certainly makes the reading experience a lot smoother, it doesn't make the story or its writing better.

The relationship between a story's writing and how the audience experiences it shouldn't be overlooked. Many stories depend on how the audience experiences it within the mind to succeed and leave an impression.

Junji Ito utilizes the dreaded page turn to scare his audience, an effect that can only be truly gained and appreciated if you read his books in traditional print.

Marvel spent years meticulously building up its Avengers franchise, culminating in a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic event through Avengers: Endgame, which is truly the epitome of "you had to be there", because if you watch Avengers: Endgame in 2024 in your living room, you're likely not going to experience the same level of hype as audiences experiencing it in the theater in 2019.

The same can be said for James' Cameron's Avatar, which entranced audiences with its innovative motion capture CGI and immersive 3D effects, an experience that could only be lived to the fullest if you saw it in 3D in IMAX theaters back in 2009. Without that experience, most people in 2024 find the movie to be pretty generic and uninteresting, a reverse Pocahontas with blue people in space, but when it first released in IMAX theaters in 2009, it was a cultural and technological phenomenon due to how advanced it was in its VFX. I can't even share with you clips of it, because obviously it would just be proving my point to try and show you how groundbreaking Avatar was in theaters through a bad shaky cam Youtube upload of its IMAX release on Youtube, but let's just say that it wasn't uncommon for people to brag about how many times they'd gone back to watch the same movie just to feel what they felt from the first showing all over again.

All that's to say that while Lore Olympus may offer a 'better' reading experience when binge-read - regardless of whether or not it actually helps the story's pacing problems - the reality is that LO is still being written exclusively with the weekly format in mind, and its been very much to its detriment, both in the short-term and in the long-term. Readers are often left in the dark on plotlines for weeks at a time, Rachel loses track of what she has and hasn't addressed, and the extended waiting times trick readers into believing that weeks have passed in the comic's story, when in reality it's only been a day or two, sometimes as little as hours depending on the sequence; meanwhile, if you binge episodes that had those problems in hindsight, you'll likely be a lot more quick to notice how many plot beats are either retconned or abandoned entirely, because you don't have the weekly waiting times artificially inflating the pacing of the story and causing you to forget what was established weeks before, because when binged, those weeks are reduced to hours and minutes.

And worst of all, with the assumption that you're reading on a weekly basis - as it wants you to do - Rachel tries to pull clever stunts by matching up LO's episodes with real life dates and holidays, which often just makes the story beats feel rushed or random in their execution - because to the vast majority of readers who haven't caught on to this or are reading the episodes through the physical books, they are rushed and random, and they can't exactly explain why.

Binging these episodes doesn't solve the problem, if anything it exemplifies them because, as a shining example, Hades and Persephone suddenly get married right in the middle of an ongoing issue, which isn't exactly the best time to wrap up the story's main plotline. Since then readers have become less and less interested in their story, and can you blame them? By all accounts their story is over. Everything now just feels tacked on to give them something to do in a story they no longer fit into.

There's an episode behind the FastPass lock right now, Episode 265. It unlocks for free on February 17th, three days after Valentine's Day. Guess what episode it is?

Ah yes, the episode where Hades' initiates sex without consent with his wife who's suffering from panic attacks, who also happens to be a rape victim. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

I actually made this particular discovery while writing this essay, so that was a very unwelcome surprise, but it explains the sudden random shift from Persephone being so stressed over the ongoing situation that she's passed out to Hades just deciding for the both of them that now's the time to have sex. As much as the fans will defend this as a husband and wife's last chance at intimacy before diving into a dangerous situation, they'll also still conveniently forget - just like the narrative and Rachel herself - that Persephone is a rape victim, and Hades initiating sex with her after nearly having a panic attack isn't exactly a good look.

This is why our theories as to when LO ends are so firmly cemented in one specific time range, because the story's pacing and distractions seem only intent in one thing - getting the story to last until spring, when the series will most likely conclude. It's basically been all but confirmed by Rachel, from her stating the series would be ending in early 2024, to Inklore - an imprint that seems designed specifically for Rachel and LO - launching officially in spring of this year, undoubtedly just in time for Rachel to wrap up LO for good.

(and boy, do I have some words about Inklore and its plans for "Rachel Smythe Presents", but that's another essay entirely.)

At the end of the day, LO's pacing is equivalent to paint drying on the wall, but it relentlessly convinces us to keep watching because the paint is blue and pink and maybe, maybe it'll turn into a piece of art. But as is evident in the comment sections of the newest episodes, even the fans are starting to realize that paint will not magically turn into the final piece of art they've been waiting to see if the hand that wields it doesn't know what it's doing.

Though style may be gained as an accidental side effect of one's influences and experiences, what Lore Olympus' intent is remains to be seen, and the longer the story goes on, the blurrier whatever intent it could have becomes. Unless it somehow manages to pull off a twist of Attack on Titan proportions that thoroughly explains and ties together the plotlines that have been left in the rearview mirror, the vehicle that is LO will continue to trudge along at a snail's pace, until it inevitably either crosses the finish line or crashes - but by that point, anyone waiting for it could very well be gone, their good faith left behind at the starting line when there was still plenty of time to change its trajectory or stop.

Such a time is long, long gone.

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

Would you mind sharing your planning process of the comic? I'm starting to brainstorm a fiction idea and right now the ideas are very messy and I wanted to know if you could show how you plan what happens on a season and on an episode, maybe with an example of a season episode you already published, so I can learn how to organize myself?

I really, REALLY appreciate you coming to ask me for help with this. It's awesome to hear that you respect my writing enough to seek me out as an authority on such things, or at least enough to ask for advice.

But I'm gonna be real with you - what you're asking for is not a quick slapdash reply that I can whip up in my free time. What you're asking for is an hour long video essay (with examples) on the level of an educational creative writing online course.

And I--I don't know if I have it in me to do that right now. Not with everything else I'm trying to do. (Sorry.)

BUT.

What I can give you instead is a basic rundown, and maybe some recommendations for where to this stuff.

To be absolutely brief: For me, the best way to visualize how I plan would be to make a flowchart.

Keep in mind that....... I don't ever actually.......MAKE. A flowchart.

Mostly, I am just using this as a visual representation of how my ideas flow from and to each other in a coherent way. The reality is that this skill is something you have to develop until it becomes second nature.

As an example, let's take the episode(s) where I introduced Seaglass.

This little arc was planned in season 3, but really started to come into play in Season 4.

To make it happen, I started with the obvious main idea: SEAGLASS.

I then broke it down into multiple smaller ideas:

If you notice, the main plot of this doesn't even start when the Seaglass exposition does. Steven makes Seaglass back in season 3, but doesn't know about it. But these ideas are still important to acknowledge as being a part of the main plot.

I then fill in MORE space between these larger ideas.

This whole set of steps is just a logical progression of me playing 'how do we get there'. I make up plot points and say 'what happens to get from A to B?'

And keep in mind - this may seem kinda obvious. That's because... it should be! But that's how the planning happens.

Realistically, it's just a bunch of asking myself questions. The same exact questions I refuse to answer in asks.

"What happens next? What would happen if....?" "Why doesn't Steven know about ....?"

"How would Steven find Seaglass if he doesn't know she exists?"

Well she's small and green, kinda like Peridot. So he goes looking for Peridot and mistakes Seaglass for her.

BAM! You've got yourself a plot point. That's a plan, baybee!

And then just kinda rinse and repeat.

And eventually, you want to make sure that you have some sort of connection back to the main plot point. In this case, it's the realization that Steven CREATED LIFE.

Again, I want to stress - I don't actually........plan.... by writing this down.

I do this process in my head. Often, multiple times per chapter, writing and editing to make it make more and more sense. The important part is about asking yourself questions. The same questions your readers should be asking.

"Why is this character doing this?" "Why is this event happening NOW?" "How will A find out when they realize what B has done?" "What is the BEST time for B to find out...? What is the WORST time?"

All of this takes imagination. It isn't about organization. It's moreso about learning to tetris plot events into their most snug spaces. It's about thinking of events as a staircase, which eventually leads to a larger staircase of plot arcs.

And as a final note, I will say that someday, when I'm less busy, I may make a video about plot. But it will take more time and effort, and for now, please just watch videos by other creators! I'm sure they're just as good at it as I am.

[nobodyfamousposts]

Why Scarlet Lady Is Better Than Canon: Lila Rossi

I had mentioned before at length regarding my distaste, dislike, and dissatisfaction with the character of Lila Rossi in Miraculous Ladybug canon. A character so horrible, so poorly written, and so two dimensional that I did not think it was possible to make any iteration of her I wouldn’t dislike.

And yet it seems @zoe-oneesama has come through for me yet again in Scarlet Lady by taking what was quite possibly one of my biggest issues and most despised characters within canon and with only a few changes, turning her into something enjoyable. Dare I even say…likable.

More than that, even. It says something when my least favorite character in Miraculous Ladybug canon can somehow become one of my top favorite characters in a different variation of it. 

It’s because Zoe shows an understanding of the characters and what makes them engaging, and other than SL Adrien, it shows the most in the form of SL Lila.

See, Canon Lila Rossi is a selfish, manipulative, egotistical, petty, and self-centered liar.

Scarlet Lady Lila Rossi, on the other hand, is a selfish, manipulative, egotistical, petty, and self-centered liar.

Now I’m sure all of you are looking at those two sentences and noting that they’re the same thing. And you are right. That’s the point! Because the difference between the two versions isn’t who Lila is but rather in how the narrative and writing treat her and what Lila ends up doing because of it. And it’s why Scarlet Lady is superior in its handling of Lila.

Lila in Scarlet Lady is not a good person. Nor does she become a good person. She admits that she lies for fun and just to see how far she can take it. She’s fully on board with continuing her lies and trying to fool her mom and the school to get away with staying out of school for a year. This is all in lines with regular Canon Lila and shows that they are still the same person, it’s just the events and situation and narrative that differentiate them. It’s in how the Scarlet Lady story handles Lila and her character.

For the sake of convenience, I'm going to be using Scarlet Lady to refer to the comic itself and Scar to refer to Chloe's hero identity specifically.

Let’s review and compare Lila in Scarlet Lady to canon:

1. Lila in Scarlet Lady is NOT a plot device. 

She doesn’t need to be. It’s clear that the plot is and has been moving forward on its own without her. Even if Lila were to have been removed from Scarlet Lady altogether, it’s pretty evident from everything else that’s been happening that we would still be getting to some plots and story points without too much difference or delay.

Scarlet Lady has a natural progression. The story and characters aren’t so rooted in the status quo that sudden additional character like Lila or Felix are necessary to throw in just to move things along. And Lila isn’t simply forgotten about when she’s not needed to do so. She doesn’t vanish without an explanation only to return also without explanation just to be able to force the plot to move.

Events within a story can be dependent on the characters, but the plot itself should not be dependent on what feels like a third party to show up and force things to happen when they should already be happening. That speaks of bad writing.

Canon Lila existed for the purpose of getting the Grimoire into Marinette’s hands so she could be the one to take it to Fu and learn about the Guardian and Miraculous secrets, as well as to be a future helper to Hawk Moth. Up until that point, the plot had done nothing with Fu and had done nothing to move things forward in learning about the Miraculous or why Hawk Moth would want the specific two. And after Volpina, the episodes that feature Lila are the ones that display more plot progression or involve Hawk Moth having layers to his plans. Lila only appears when she’s to be used to further a plot, then disappears until needed again.

In Scarlet Lady, by the time Lila appears, it’s already clear to Adrien, Plagg, and Fu that Scar is a horrible person and that she had no business being a hero. It’s also clear that Adrien is handling the hero work on his own and needs help. This is part of what causes Adrien to know that Lila is a liar and call her out on his own because in addition to Lila stealing his book, he already knows Scar well enough to know Lila’s story of Scar saving her would never happen. Lila isn’t the reason they find this out, nor is she the reason that the book is discovered and gets to the Guardian because Plagg chooses for himself to take Adrien to Fu. And afterwards, Lila’s appearances are more natural. Plot progression happens with and without her. Her appearances involve her interacting with her classmates like a person. They don’t have to have a plot-relevant purpose.

Narratively, there are three reasons to put in a scene.

Plot

Expansion/information/character focus

Entertainment

In canon, all of Lila's scenes are plot-focused and plot-driving.

In Scarlet Lady, they vary. Some are plot (like Lila's anti-Scar attitude getting more focus and validity over time). But more of Lila's scenes are focus in on her character and entertainment. This builds Lila as a person and makes her enjoyable to watch.

Lila is not a plot device as the plot doesn’t NEED her to progress. But that’s not to say that Lila doesn’t matter…

2. Lila has a role that nobody else in the story could cover.

As I’ve stated before, Canon Lila is pretty much another Chloe and there was nothing she was used for that Chloe couldn’t have or wouldn’t have been able to do. As a rival/foil to Marinette, as another love interest for Adrien, and even as a helper to Hawk Moth—by the time Lila started any of these roles, Chloe was already there and fully capable of filling them.

In Scarlet Lady, due to Scar being the hero Lila is butting heads with and being outted earlier on, SL Lila ends up not filling those same “roles”. She’s not a rival to Scar or Marinette, just a hater/critic of the former and a friend to the latter. She was called out by Adrien so she is shown to have no further interest in trying to pursue him. And as of yet, there has been nothing of Lila helping Hawk Moth.

Instead, Lila’s scenes show her engaging with the other classmates. More of the results of her being revealed as a liar. Her being a queen of sass and snark. And most importantly, her going head to head with Chloe and Scarlet Lady in verbal lashings that prove her silver tongue is no duller for people knowing of it.

In fact, she’s a part of people starting to realize that Scar is in fact horrible and her popularity starts to break down. 

Yes, yes, we do have both Adrien and Marinette who realize how horrible Scarlet Lady is and hate her, but other than some snarky comments at her expense, they don’t do much about it. Mostly because they can’t. Especially early on, it’s clear that they’re forced to keep Scar around because as useless as she is otherwise, she is the only one who can purify the akuma and undo the damage. And as Fu has told them, Scar is still too popular with the city that trying to take the earrings from her would result in more problems. The two of them have to focus on dealing with the akumas more than trying to deal with Scar. Plus let’s be real: even as snarky as they both can get, they’re just too nice.

Others are also similarly of no help. Alya is still completely wrapped in Scar’s facade of a hero to see how selfish and unheroic she is. Most of the other classmates also go along with this narrative. But even the ones who DO know like Alix and Nino aren’t that active. They know but they don’t do anything with that knowledge.

Lila has no such barriers. She’s not a hero. She doesn’t know how “necessary” Scar is in akuma battles. And she doesn’t have to worry about not upsetting Scar since the “hero” already hates her. And thanks to Marinette and the other classmates with their “we still care about you for you” bit, she now has no reason to put up a mask…or a filter.

This makes Lila in prime position to try to push more against Scarlet Lady’s popularity and talk at length about how horrible she actually is. Something she is MORE than happy to do.

Lila is essentially the first main civilian hater of Scarlet Lady.

And with that in mind…

3. Lila’s actions are reasonable. Perhaps not intelligent, but they are reasonable.

She commits a number of the same acts as canon in Volpina. Stealing Adrien’s book, buying a necklace to be a fake Miraculous, trying to claim herself as the hero’s best friend for attention, and trying to claim she is a hero herself to get Adrien’s attention.

SL Lila is not a master manipulator or an up and coming villain. We are not expected to view her as a real threat to anything except Chloe’s ego.

Sure, she wants to speedrun the popularity and attention and maybe a nice rich blond boytoy to be her arm candy, but it’s clear in the very first comic she appears in that Lila has NO IDEA what sort of people she’s interacting with or telling lies about, and so has no way to prepare for what happens. First in that Adrien is so DONE with everything that he calls her out himself from the get go. Second in that Scarlet Lady appears to “save” Adrien from Lila’s lies when it was no longer necessary, proclaims aloud to the multitude of bystanders that Lila is a fraud, and then dumps her in a fountain for good measure and further insults her to boot. And at the end of it all, Scar doesn’t apologize for her actions, doubles down, and only further insults Lila. And as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, still being wet AND being on top of the Eiffel Tower results in her getting sick.

As such, Lila’s hatred of the Ladybug Hero in this version of events feels more understandable and based on a legitimate grievance. Several even. Scar’s actions go well beyond canon’s version. We clearly see how hurt and humiliated Lila is. Plus we have all of Scar’s previous antics to look back on and…well, we already came into this with more reason to hate Scarlet Lady than Lila, and Lila simply jumped on the bandwagon that was already there.

It also makes more sense then that Lila never even pretends to forgive Scar. Scar never apologized. She caused emotional and physical harm to Lila. And unlike Ladybug, Scar never tried to make an offer of friendship so Lila isn’t losing out on any opportunities out of spite. Heck, Scar’s treatment of Alya shows us that there is nothing to be gained from even pretending to be a fan of Scar. So Lila’s hatred of Scar is understandable and her refusal to be friends with Scar makes perfect sense.

When she hides away at her home, there’s a valid reason behind it due to her being sick. Her “plan” to fool her mom and the school in order to avoid going back also makes sense given the fallout she knows she would have to face if she did. (At least more sense than it made in canon for her to disappear for months just because Ladybug outted her to one guy who clearly seemed to be on her side more and neither of them did anything to inform anyone else of the truth.)

And when she returns to the school and the classmates, it isn’t out of nowhere. Once she was no longer sick, she was planning to continue some ruse. We clearly see how despondent Lila was over her situation and the feeling that she’s on her own and no one would side with her over Scar. This was deep. It shows real fears and feelings on Lila’s part. And it’s telling that it was the assurance from Marinette and support from her classmates that convinced her to rejoin the class. It doesn’t look like she would have had the willingness or perhaps the courage to do so if Marinette hadn’t reassured Lila that they had her back and had taken steps to try and help her, even when she wasn’t there and as of yet had done nothing to warrant it.

Here we see a Lila who is vulnerable and real. Who is clearly impacted by events on a deeper and more personal and meaningful level—or at least better than “GRR! Superhero revealed I was lying about her to a boy I like! I shall join the terrorist attacking the city and potentially destroy the WORLD for revenge!”

In this way, Lila is portrayed more like a normal girl. Since the narrative isn’t trying to play her off like she’s supposed to be some master manipulator the way canon does, Lila for all intents and purposes IS a normal teenage girl. A normal teenage girl who was humiliated and injured by someone with more power and social status than she can fight back against. She’s less of an archetype and more of a person with her own thoughts and feelings and ultimately choices which—even if we don’t like or agree with, we can at least see and understand.

Her actions are reasonable. Not just in that we as the audience can empathize with them but that they make sense. For Lila’s character, for her personality, and for someone in her position.

4. No plot armor.

SL Lila’s plans don’t just seamlessly work out. If anything, they go very wrong very quickly. Even before Scar calls her out, Adrien already made it clear that he knows she’s a liar. This effectively ruins her plan to try and get his interest and not just in the “Adrien being nice but not in to her” way. Furthermore, as she’s revealed as a liar in front of the entire class, we clearly see some of her classmates (Alya) continue to take issue with her later on. And even the ones who don’t have such issues are at least fully aware of Lila’s personality and don’t allow her to fool or manipulate them.

Sure, she still tries to manipulate her mom and the school to avoid having to go back, but that doesn’t last that long. And in Lila’s defense at that period of time, she was legitimately sick as a result of her dip in the fountain.

So it’s pretty clear that Lila lacks the plot armor that she had in canon. But it’s not just that Lila experiences losses, it’s also in the ways she succeeds. And unlike Canon Lila, SL Lila is not reliant on the plot to accomplish anything or make things work in her favor.

Some classmates still consider her friends. She’s still welcomed back—even with a bit more trepidation than before. She gets some epic zingers on Chloe and Scar. She got to have another interview with Alya just to be able to go on at length about how horrible Scar is. She manages to get on live TV just to heckle Scar. And over time, more and more people are seeing the problems with Scar.

Lila still gets some victories. Certainly not as many and not as big as what she gets in canon, but at least they don’t feel so forced. And they’re entertaining to see.

Which delves a bit more into an additional point I wanted to make…

5. There are consequences and responses to Lila and her lies.

With Canon Lila, everyone is in this weird sort of limbo where they automatically believe Lila JUST ENOUGH to not question her but at the same time NOT ENOUGH to actually follow through with some of her lies. In Chameleon, Lila claims to have and then magically be cured of Tinnitus and Bustier believes her just enough to rearrange the seats for her at her will but not enough to require some doctor’s note or confirmation of either the presence or recovery from the medical issue—even in the event the former could be overlooked, the latter could NOT and any school or teacher worth their salt would require SOME proof to discontinue an accommodation for someone with a disability because that would be a liability. In Ladybug, Lila claimed Marinette pushed her down stairs and the adults believed her just enough to admonish Marinette but not enough to get Lila actual medical attention, which is a liability and gross negligence. In Ono-chan, Nino believes Lila’s lies about needing Adrien to help tutor her just enough to give her an opening to go to his place but not enough to follow through, check up on her afterwards, or reasonably consider that maybe the supermodel with the super strict father might not be the best person to tutor her and he should ask for help from Max or Sabrina instead?

Each and every time, Lila is believed in the exact way she wants to the exact extent that would most benefit her with minimal effort on her part when it shouldn’t work that way. Even if we disregard how stupidly obvious many of her lies are, there is something wrong when they believe her enough to trust what she says over anyone else telling them otherwise but not enough to follow through on what that belief should then involve. They believe her when she says someone pushed her down the stairs but not enough to get her medical attention? Make sure she has no broken bones or internal bleeding? This has the issue of ruining the suspension of disbelief and making it look like the problem isn’t Lila being amazingly smart and evil so much as it is everyone around Lila being infuriatingly stupid and negligent.

Scarlet Lady nixes that problem in one episode by having Lila be revealed as a liar immediately, but furthermore follows up on it and the fallout of those lies. Nothing big or major or life-ruining—it’s middle school, after all. But the impact is still there.

Even episodes later, we see effects of Lila’s earlier lies. Chloe of course keeps referencing them in their encounters and yeah, it is reason for no one to really take Lila’s word against Scar’s—at least at first. Alya and Adrien both give her some pretty evil looking stares, showing that even five episodes later they both still very much remember what she did and do not approve of her getting free jewelry. Alya in particular stands out. She is shown to bear such a grudge against Lila for lying on her blog that she holds no sympathy for her being sick. And in the second intermission, she looks physically pained when she has to ask Lila for an interview on why she hates Scar. Something she had apparently sworn she would never do again after being fooled the first time. And something Lila looks completely overjoyed to do. There are people who are angry with Lila. They have every reason and every right to be. But it doesn’t have to mean the end of the world for her. It just means that there needs to be something.

The classmates don’t have to be made out to be stupid to make Lila work. They are canonically very kind and forgiving people. But canon makes them come off that way more because the lack of continuity seems to erase the lessons of previous episodes or somehow make them forget that certain people are horrible.

Zoe fixes this and a lot of problems in canon by having not just the classmates but EVERYONE in Paris remember and respond to things that have happened previously, even if just in little ways. Given how little room Zoe has to work with, this is HUGE. Simply adding comments here and there puts the scenes from canon in a new light and makes the classmates feel more fleshed out and like…dare I say it: PEOPLE.

The difference from Canon has a lot to do with how everyone else reacts to Lila, which makes these other characters and Lila appear more real and like fleshed out people rather than caricatures who only exist and move as the plot requires. They don’t have to bash Lila or try to light her on fire for it to be clear that Lila isn’t a good person and that there are consequences to her actions.

This is all leading up to the real possibility of…

6. Character arc?

It says something that contrary to most expectations, Lila is not what one would consider to be redeemed in Scarlet Lady. Lila is not a good person here just because she rejoins the class and becomes their friend and Zoe at no point tries to pretend that she is.

Marinette and other classmates made the choice to reach out and try to befriend Lila, but unlike most other arcs in other stories, this doesn’t result in Lila being redeemed. And she in no way got Lila to admit she was wrong and try to be a good person. 

Lila is not necessarily forgiven or absolved of what she did. Nor is anything Lila did magically erased. All Marinette did and all she had to do was encourage Lila to not run away now that the truth was out. She helped convince her to return to the class with everyone fully knowing what she’s done and the type of person that she is and move forward with that. She informs Lila that despite her lies, there are people in the class who genuinely care about her and are worried about her. 

Hell, it’s not even all up to Marinette. We see Alix sending messages to Lila encouraging her to join the class for Marinette’s birthday party. Sabrina fully admitted to inviting Lila to that party. Same with Rose, who has also been expressed to be worried about Lila. There are members of the class who are shown to care about her and who were noted to have made an effort to help Lila even after what had happened. Because they consider her a friend despite what she did, and that’s what friends do. All they asked was that Lila stop with the lies, stop with running away, and give people a chance.

And the result is the more mellow but passive aggressive Lila Rossi we see in Scarlet Lady. Not a Lila who is a good person or who is redeemed. This is a Lila who is at least honest with everyone about the sort of person that she is. She’s not pretending like she was in canon. She’s not being fake. She’s not putting on a mask of niceness anymore. This is a Lila who is fully acknowledged by everyone to have been a liar, to still be very selfish, and in some ways...a bad influence.

With a few episodes left, perhaps there is more we’ll see of Lila’s development and who she’ll become. Maybe we’ll get to see her take the steps to become better. To be a good friend, a good person, and maybe even a better hero than Scar. I don’t know for sure just yet what Zoe has planned for a character like Lila, but I do know what I see here:

A good start.