#that’s how he will entertain himself

[evergreen-endo]

chika will take any opportunity to put his fingers inside you

[querren]

The cast of The Acolyte just talked about episode 5 with Entertainment Weekly and this jumped out at me:

So... everyone on Tumblr just lost their minds sobbing over Jecki and Yord, while their actors were on set like this the whole damn time:

I love it.

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[corsairspade]

there are many reasons I like the "Erestor son of Caranthir" headcanon but secretly the main one is that I'm imagining all of the remaining noldo auditors sighing of relief when Caranthir dies and they don't have to try play 4d chess with multiverse time travel trying to catch this guy doing tax evasion. life is good for exilic auditors now.

and then suddenly Elrond and Elros turn up again! even better! oh who's this, Elrond? your good friend Erestor? he's helping you with your taxes? oh how swe- what is this Elrond. What is this. your paperwork for your taxes you say. not a declaration of war? because it looks like a declaration of war on the exilic auditors, Elrond.

and then all the auditors are so busy doing "extreme tax auditing™" for the first time since the second Kinslaying that they don't tell anyone they're pretty sure there's another scion of the house of Fëanor running around.

[professorjirt]

I’ve discovered my favorite genre of Bagginshield art is where Thorin is a lovesick idiot who is Losing It and Bilbo is unbothered or oblivious to Thorin’s suffering LMAO

[superbat-lmao]

For all those skiing accidents Bruce gets into, he must have to actually go skiing a couple of times just for the press coverage.

And before he buys the Planet, Perry sends Clark out to do a piece on the skiing industry and hopefully get an interview with the walking safety hazard that is Bruce Wayne.

Or honestly, have them meet as civilians at any of Bruce’s extreme sport covers. Because galas are boring as fuck and I wanna see Brucie Wayne try and teach Clark Kent how to ski.

[saturnniidae]

I think Astrid Hofferson has a bad case of the 'my childhood was wasted, I grew up too fast for something ultimately proven pointless.' Syndrome and that she deserves to get to do silly things she missed out on and take up new hobbies, even if she's not particularly good at them–it's purely for the experience yknow, and learn to finally breathe no longer needing to be on constant high alert and get to be truly happy

[fatedroses]

And some days, I just wish you wouldn't look at me at all.

[bruhstation]

man who enjoys every single second he's dedicated to hating to the point it pisses everyone except him off

[kacievvbbbb]

The Red Hair Pirates Navigator gets sick or something while Mihawk is visiting and Mihawk, who rides around on an overgrown raft and has probably never steered an actual real ship in his life but loves a challenge, volunteers himself as a stand in while acting like they've forced his hand.

So it's just like

Absolutely No one:

Mihawk (sighing) : I guess since you've begged I'll do it 🙄

And Shanks is so excited because Mihawk is actually taking a vested interest in his crew and this is probably the closest he will get at having him as an official rhp and of course watching Mihawk do piratey things he rarely does is very hot.

Everyone else has a couple of......questions

Benn: I've never seen Hawkeyes use a map before, I'm not even sure he own's a log pose.

Shanks (insanely whipped would let Mihawk crash them into the rocks like a sailor to a siren call) : But he get's where he needs to go and that's the important bit.

Mihawk gives directions that the helmsmen has never heard of in his life, never actually opens a map navigates soley on memory, they don't see a single Island for days and he leaves the crew wondering how exactly it is he ever gets anywhere. They still somehow arrive 3 days earlier than expected.

[whywishesarehorses]

Today we raced a nine year old child for about 45 minutes. He was delighted and Thea had a blast with the game

[noraigo]

JACK & JOKER: EPISODE 3 — jack's ring.

while i wholeheartedly enjoyed the entire episode, this part stuck me the most. that ring not only symbolises the only memory jack has from his parents, but it's also a representation of his heart.

his heart is captive and joker only wants to free it from the boss' hands, but jack refuses. he doesn't acknowledge what his heart wants, yet joker incites him to start his life anew. even if jack doesn't want to admit it loud, a part of him is kept safe in joker's hands. that's why he didn't hesitate to let him go with the ring, even if it was wrong.

he's not safe under the debtors' control, but at least, his heart can be at ease with joker — unconsciously, but certainly, and joker is aware of that, despite jack's hatred towards him.

jack is slowly forgiving him by giving his most precious thing in the world, because he simply knows.

[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

[pushing500]

Ah, I knew it wouldn't take long for him to come around. <3

These two dorks. I love 'em.

look who's back to visit us again!! Leading a trade caravan, no less!! It's so good to see that Angst has recovered from her paralytic abasia. She's actually not so bad, all things considered.

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[kalashnikovlobotomy]

omgg nooo, please post the fucked up rusrom that's why we're here in the first place...

thank you anon❤️ here is the hidden draft idea i keeeeep rotating in my head today👨‍🔬

[skateboardtotheheart]

watching ghost files: alone is honestly a really interesting experience because we all know that ryan is anxious when ghost hunting but it's usually cut with jokes or shane effortlessly distracting him but we obviously don't get any of that during this

it's really interesting and honestly emotional to see ryan doing all of this alone and being so open and vulnerable on camera. i'm fully a skeptic but i have so so much more respect for ryan than i already had for how impressively brave he was for doing this. you can genuinely hear the anxiety in his voice when he's investing in a way that i don't think we ever have with regular ghost files. i think it's impressive the level of vulnerability he's showing by talking about his anxiety and how he is truly getting so mentally exhausted

major props to ryan because not only is it a really fun and fascinating thing to watch from an entertainment perspective but it also shows the fact that he is truly stronger than his fear and i really admire him for this