i recently remembered DickTim Week 2024 is happening very soon and i looked at the prompts again to see if i could get anything out for it and. the Hades & Persephone AU prompt for day 1 has got me really thinking so here's a vague concept i plan to write.
i've been pretty burnt out on modern Hades & Persephone retellings because of how they always seem to fall into the same generic "innocent wide-eyed girl runs from her evil mean mother into the arms of a dark mysterious man because actually she went willingly and chose to marry him" which has gotten repetitive for my tastes. (for clarity i don't care if this retelling is your cup of tea personally, so long as you're not actively trying to rewrite the original myth and claim untrue things about it, if this is your favorite flavor i sincerely hope you enjoy the buffet i just have little interest in it since it feels overdone for me and exhausted of it's supposed commentary atp)
but? but. biblically accurate Hades & Persephone AU has me all kinds of interested. because wait listen so hear me out right. Hades!Dick and Persephone!Tim, obviously. i feel it'd be more loosely inspired by with themes and imagery (though playing with death and nature powers could be interesting, i haven't decided) rather than explicitly making them gods and all. but. something dark and fucked up where Dick and Bruce are especially estranged. maybe to do with Jason's return, maybe to do with them just clashing and having their usual explosive arguments. and Bruce knows the peace needs to be kept, if he and Dick are at odds then everyone starts to pick sides and things just fracture so he needs a peace offering.
and the peace offering is Tim.
Bruce (the stand-in for Zeus) offers up Tim. agrees to have Tim move to Bludhaven and be Dick's... whatever Dick wants him to be. knowing that with the implication comes the likelihood of Dick grooming Tim. and Tim has no real say and is hesitant to put up a real fight. he doesn't want this, he knows what this is going to imply Dick will do to him, but he also knows if he says no things have the possibility to just... fall apart. so he's the unwilling bride, dragged off to the metaphorical underworld (Bludhaven) with Dick, away from his family, his friends, the life he built.
and on the flip side, i think weirdly enough, your best pick for the Demeter stand-in is *Jason*. just, hear me out on that. not necessarily on the side of it being motherly, but on Jason being just estranged enough from the Batfamily to be the one willing to call it out for being bad and wrong and raising bloody hell to get Tim back. maybe it's because Jason wants Tim for himself, maybe it's truly out of a concern for Tim to have autonomy, i'm toying with the idea of it primarily being Tim's POV and him genuinely not knowing which of these is true. (and the truth possibly ends up being a complicated middle ground) and because i like Helena, i think you can use her as the Hekate stand in, the one who strikes a tentative alliance with Jason and tries to go find Tim and bring him back. Tim stuck with Dick, getting groomed and hyperaware of it, possibly even getting fucked the whole time as well, knowing he can't go back without causing massive issues for Dick and Bruce because well, Bruce did promise him to Dick. so he has to adjust his whole life, try to figure out being a vigilante in this new city with Dick breathing down his neck the whole time.
and then much like the ending of the myth, a sort of compromise is struck that's a shaky deal for everyone involved. Tim is put on an essential timeshare, going back and forth between Gotham, where he has friends and family and a support system, then getting dragged right back to Bludhaven with Dick in this brutal cycle that he slowly gets used to and stockholm'd into even liking it. Dick isn't so bad, once he gets used to the quirks of their unbalanced 'relationship'. the sex is even something he can adjust to as well. not quite a happy ending but one that sits in this realistic grey area that becomes Tim's life.
i will write this, eventually, but i don't know if i'll get to it before DickTim Week ends so by posting the idea i'm essentially putting it out into the world so the peer pressure holds me accountable. i just. really like the potential of making Hades/Persephone AUs as fucked up as they can be simply by adhering to the source material and making it a raw story of being stolen away and forced to like this new home you didn't ask for.
also a less fleshed-out aspect of this idea i have ties into Persephone becoming the Queen of the Underworld when she's taken and how the transition from Kore to Persephone could be reflected in Tim. how he makes the best of the worst situation and becomes something far more dangerous and dark when he's in Bludhaven, possibly takes on a new vigilante name/identity and leans into the worst quirks of his personality he tries to tamper because there's no point in not going full tilt Obsessively Weird if he has no choice anyway and it being one small way he takes back his autonomy, and that inevitably making Dick *more* into him, because he gets to see Tim finally just. let loose.
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Brain fart yhat doesn't make any sense
re!dipper w his constellation being on his inner thigh close to his dick and bill for once didn't do anything flashy when he picked up dipper. re!dip telling ppl abt bill and they would think that he's faking and dipper would just be rlly frustrated trying to prove that this inconvenience in his life is real (he can't show the constellation mark for obvious reasons and bill is s flighty fucker that moves when ... .. ..... .picture thing
Pls understand me
No worries, I understood!
Dipper insisting that, no, really, the reason he had to skip work was because Bill friggin' Cipher showed up and took him as his mortal - well, yeah, he's got the birthmark, but. No he can't show it. For reasons.
What do you mean he's fired? No he's not lying, for fuck's sake! If he was going to call off sick he'd have come up with something more believable. Bill! Hey! Bill?
(Bill has, once again, inconveniently fucked off. Just when Dipper needed him to be around for once. If only he'd fuck off when Dipper wanted him to 😔)
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Heyo, so um... I wrote a really long thing. But because homophobia and transphobia is mentioned (not endorsed or condoned, but I used a couple of quotes so I don't know if that counts as being explicit about it?), here's your warning now!
You know, one of the biggest challenges of being trans, for me, is realizing that not everyone's out to get me. Granted, I was set up for failure from the beginning; both of my parents were (and still are) homophobic and transphobic, and though they wouldn't throw me out of the house or disown me for it, they heavily disapprove of it in general. And that was a traumatizing experience for me, as a kid that has such a close relationship with them that I tell them everything even now. To open up to the people I love the most and be told, "No you can't be trans," or to admit to both them and myself about a crush and be told, "But that's ungodly." And besides my brief experience with the general queer community, barely enough to realize that being queer and trans was a thing that you could be, that was my first main experience with being queer, and it set the tone for almost every other interaction between me and queerness for years. Every time it came up, I stiffened, preparing myself for someone to argue it didn't exist or that queer people were just maliciously tricking others for some reason or another, and even when my school friends and teachers accepted me immediately, I couldn't relax and was stuck thinking, "But when will everything go wrong??"
Cut to a few years after and you have me, in college, going by my chosen name on literally everything that's not legal and (a lot of times) openly telling folks my pronouns. But it's taken a lot of character development to even get here. It took me a month going to early college and being completely away from my parents to realize that people actually won't care too much and will just use your chosen name and whatever pronouns you ask for (even neopronouns, to some extent; though there will be a lot of stumbling and questions involved, people close to you will be willing to go through that even just for your comfort). It took me until literally a few months ago to fully come to terms with the fact that people automatically (and accidentally) misgendering you isn't malicious at all, and in fact they'll often feel kinda upset if you don't correct them. And also, you don't need to tell everyone your pronouns. (I've taken to not correcting people who I'm not especially close to, especially because even though I am a boy, none of my body is changed and I can't blame others for assuming. Plus some people find connection in a shared identity [like being the only two girls in a group], and I don't have to feel pressured to correct them and break [or at least somewhat fray] that. But other people have different boundaries and comfort levels.) It didn't take me long to get comfortable with being feminine once I realized I was trans, but it took me so much longer to realize that if you tell the people around you that you're a boy, they won't see you as a girl just because you dress or act more feminine one day versus another.
But for all this to happen, you need to tell people about your identity; be comfortable with answering questions about (almost) anything and everything, because people might be confused and it's best to approach that with an open mind rather than a closed and boobytrapped one. My wonderful college friends are a great example of that—they consistently call me a boy and make man jokes and call my hawaiian shirts dad shirts and call me a femboy on my feminine days. But months before now, I had to have a bunch of conversations with one about how I saw myself, my relationship with gender and sex, what body modifications were involved in my view of myself, and more. (Some of these conversations are more than you'd just give a plain friend, but I didn't mind getting a little personal so that was my boundary. Also there were many days when I felt myself getting reflexively defensive and I had to leave, think about the topic for a week or so, and come back with a calmer mind.) And even now I still give my friends feedback on what pronouns feel good, if how and when they use them feels nice (since I like having my pronouns mixed), etc. because I've had to teach myself that showing that I like something won't get me scorned or ridiculed. It's a very, very slow process and it involves learning just as much about yourself as it does telling that to other people, but let me tell you it's so rewarding.
Now, there are still times when people are legitimately homophobic/transphobic to me. Like, I haven't even come out to my parents yet, despite literally telling one of their sisters that I'm nonbinary, because I know that I likely will never be able to change their views and I don't want to put myself through that pain again. So when I hear them talk about queerness (which doesn't happen often, thank goodness, but still occasionally does), I still prepare myself for the worst. But part of my healing was restricting that response to just them and people who have already proven themselves to be queerphobic. I don't want to be a person that gives someone a bad experience with the queer community just because I'm defensive thanks to my own experiences, because though I can't control them, I would never want to be someone that, even unknowingly, causes someone else pain.
(And yes, a major factor in my ability to even come to this conclusion is the fact that I'm no longer constantly living with my parents. I waited 2 and a half years to finally not be under their roof, and during that time that was all I was doing: waiting. It's only been since I could leave that I could truly process everything and try to form thoughts on the matter because I'm no longer just trying to survive. So I'm not talking mainly to those people who are still waiting, but still, if you're stuck having to wait, don't feel bad that you can't grow. Sometimes all you can do is wait, and in the end, that's just as important.)
So yeah, that's the mindset that I've been trying to build over the past year or so of finally being free to be myself. And I'm trying to carry it on to other parts of my life (the autism/ADHD, the nonhumanity, the blackness) just because it's a happier and more productive way to spend my life than constantly being on the lookout for bigots and avoiding people who could just be ignorant. Because I can't control them, but I can control me, and I don't want a bigot to decide how happy I live my life even after they're gone.
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