#takes place in the 90s

[thepehbat]

[umayashla]

posting my fave two kon drawings in this blog too

[cronchy-baguette]

they're listening to california girls

[colbycheeseslice]

But what if Young Justice was a band? 🤔

[not-another-robin]

Picture in Alfred's wallet circa 1991

[canisalbus]

I'm sure you've already answered this but is Machete styled after a silken windhound? He is so very shaped

His breed is fictional, but it closely resembles modern day Ibizan hound. Both Silkens and Ibizans are sighthounds though, so you're not far off.

[flowerycoffin]

Guys, I know Chappel Roan and „Pretty please” became the Maxley songs but can’t we play a bit with 90’-00’ music?

Like „I hate everything about you”? Hello? Or „I miss the misery” OR „Misery bussiness”? This are the ones on my maxley themed party playlist

[tinytalkingtina]

Tater tot

Written for the @steddiemicrofic bonus challenge prompt "birthday". Happy birthday @steddieas-shegoes, hope you have a lovely day :)

290 words | rating: G

Tags: Parents Steve Harrington and Eddie Munson, fluff, parenthood

Ao3 link

Steve stared through the window at the tiny bundle wrapped up in front of them, tearing up only a little at the sound of another lullaby wafting through the hospital intercom. Robert Wayne Munson remained oblivious to anything in the bassinet. The tiny blue hat perched on his head almost completely covered his even tinier eyes. His nose is so small, can he even breathe okay through those mini nostrils? “He looks like a potato.” Startled out of his spiraling thoughts, Steve snorted a watery laugh and punched Eddie lightly in the shoulder. “Only 3 hours old and already facing the peanut gallery. Don’t be mean to our son on his birthday.” Eddie looked around before he briefly squeezed his hand, stroking his thumb over the band from their illegal backyard wedding five years ago. “I never said he was an ugly potato. But he’s an oval swaddled lump, they’ve spudified him! Our-” Eddie stopped for a moment, his eyes widening before choking out “Our son. Steve, oh my G-d, we’re parents now.” Steve had been a blubbering mess alongside Robin during the entire ride to the hospital and delivery, but Eddie had managed to keep it together. Now, it was as if the floodgates opened. By the time the nurses brought their infant — their son! — back into Robin’s room, Wayne had arrived and Eddie pulled himself together enough to take the baby into only slightly shaking hands. “Hey there, happy birthday little guy, I hope you know how much you’re going to be loved, always” he whispered softly as he ducked his head down to place a soft kiss on his son’s forehead. Steve stepped in to place a kiss in the same spot, his heart bursting.

[jonahmagnus]

One day I'll make the args I have inside my head

[corydoric]

University professors Frank and Jamie. Frank is intimidating at first, but if you go to his office hours he’s actually a really cool guy. Jamie teaches like she’s telling a story and class is actually really fun.

[silverwhittlingknife]

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

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

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

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

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

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

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

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

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

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

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

[ffverr]

Illyana and Kitty alive and on that board...which could also mean nothing.....

[chronologically-challenged]

We are in too deep. I am overthinking the lighting logistics in fantasy France.

Both sasasaap and isat show the House having torches and a lot of them, which brings the implication that torches were the central lighting system.

HOWEVER, in the prologue specifically they also mention the latent House's energy lighting up the House itself. THAT has the implication that the House's energy can also provide light on its own.

What does this look day by day? Is there a constant low glow in the House so people can always navigate it? Are torches there are supplement? Or do they provide the primary lighting and the glowing only exists because the House was frozen? If the glowing is a feature of Houses, are they always slightly lighted up? As a beacon in the night? As a way to see? Even when sleeping? A dull glow that shows that Change itself is always alive? Or does it dull with less activity, where the House itself reacts to the people in it?

If I were to get up in the middle of the night, would I be able to get up and walk from the third to the first floor without problem? Do I need a lantern? Is there a Housemaiden's whose job it is to light up torches to navigate the House during the night and then to snuff them out in the morning?

Did the King freeze the House during the night, and that the reason why the stars are out and the torches are lit? Or are the torches always lit, and they aren't a problem because they're crafted in a particular way to last a long time and to mitigate the fire hazard?

The lighting situation in the House fascinates me. You could lean into the fantasy elements and say there is an entire system of lights created by the craft born from Housemaidens pouring their time and energy into the very stones itself. Or you could lean into a more historical side of things and have plot points dedicated the logistics of how to keep House alight while being livable. Or a mix of both!

Or ignore it all! Probably that last one. I have never read an isat fic and wondered how they were able to navigate the House at night. These are all theoretical questions/musings that probably do not need to be answered ever, and I'm overthinking all of them.

[ot3]

AX: Cassie has been leaving me some of your human books to read during the days when we have no missions. I have learned much about this planet and it's various creatures.

MARCO: Oh really? Let's hear some earth facts then.

AX: among all of the animals of earth there is no nobler warrior than the wild forest cat. They live in clans and follow a complex code of honor with a formal hierarchy. It is in many ways a far superior societal structuring to what humans have done. I suggest we adopt some of their principles.

CASSIE: Ax those books are fi-

TOBIAS: So that would make Jake our clan leader, right? Then who's the deputy.

MARCO, RACHEL, AX: Me

AX: Excuse me, I don't believe you two understand. As the only aristh present, I am the nearest approximation to a warrior in service of Prince Jake. The rest of you all are much closer to apprentices.

JAKE: I'm not the clan leader. And please stop calling me Prince Jake.

AX: Yes, Prince Jakestar.

[softpine]

→ black forest ham

It’s happening again; they’re talking about nothing.

note: you actually don't need to know anything about frozen pines to read this, it's an alternate universe

[lgbtlunaverse]

I have been thinking on the nature of mdzs as a deliberately vague text that leaves many things up to interpretation, and how i've slowly come to understand "up for interpretation" less as "there is One True version of this story i must find" and not even as " Everyone has a different One True Version of this story inside their head be based on their interpretations and the differences don't make one wrong and the other right" but as "There is no One True Version. Even in my own subjective interpretation of the text multiple things can be true at once" specifically, in regard to Jin Guangyao and the many things which are left up in the air as to whether he did them or not, most notably killing his son.

There's evidence for this, but it's non conclusuve (jgy saying he killed him while also saying he killed Qin Su, who very much killed herself. The speculations on how he'd have killed him being sect leader yao just saying shit. ) it is, esentially, just up in the air enough that if you decisively fall on one side of the debate is probably says more about you and your general opinion of jgy than it does about the "true" events of canon.

I have, as a proud apologist, always fallen on the "he didn't kill him but felt in some way responsible for his death." Side but recently have become more okay with the interpretation that maybe he DID kill him, and that at the very least, that when he tells Qin Su their son "needed to die" he is being genuine. Which, once you look at it beyond. "Is jgy a poor lil meow meow who it is Okay to Like or an irredeemable baby murderer" becomes both INCREDIBLY tragic and deeply interesting. Because here is a man condemned for who his parents were and who wants nothing more than to live, saying that it is possible to be so cursed by your heritage that you need to die. There is no existence for you. The exact same thing that has been said to him.

Of course being born out of wedlock to a sex worker and being a product of incest are different things, but that begs the question: where is the line? What crimes of the father can mean death for the son? How cursed can you be until your existence is so incompatible with society it is you who needs to give? And if there is... where is it? Qin su clearly thought she was past it. Was his son really past it? Is he?