#they look WAY better than the other ones

[sassyeddie]

Buck & Eddie | Talking With Your Boyf Best Friend

(2x01) (3x09) (8x06) (8x07) (8x08)

[kimwexlersponytail]

No. No. Just tell me what I need to do to change, okay? Just tell me what it is and i'll do it. Jimmy. No, Kim. You make me happy. We make each other happy. How can that be bad? Hey... I love you. I love you, too. But so what?

McWexler in Every Season

SEASON SIX

[screwpinecaprice]

Made adjustments with an older winter connverse because sometimes I like to revel on what improvement I had by 'correcting' my earlier stuff. Lol

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I think is cute is that - y’know how Raph’s eyes are more on the yellow side?

Well, you know who also has slightly yellowed eyes? Donnie.

While Raph’s are more yellow, I think it’s cute that this is something that they share and I don’t see it pointed out too often?

It’s also something they both share with Draxum and Splinter’s current form (though again, these two have much more yellow sclera than the boys do.)

But yeah, I like that there’s this little detail that ties Raph and Donnie together, even if it’s small.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[dykedvonte]

Curly had two days to act and Swansea had two months.

I think it’s just interesting that every defense of Swansea not immediately acting are the same ones that are argued against for Curly. “He didn’t want to alert Daisuke or makes things worse for Anya either Jimmy!” I mean people also assume that about Curly and the crew. “He has to think about his plan of action and a right moment!” Again so did Curly, power and authority aside, he still would have to think of what he had to do. “He makes sure he doesn’t have to be around Jimmy!” So did Curly and they only do this to an extent, both give Jimmy more than a few opening to keep harassing Anya.

This isn’t defense of Curly nor a damnation of Swansea. Their actions are very parallel to each others in tragic and sour ways when it comes to how they approached helping Anya. In the grand scheme of it all they both did the same thing: Nothing. No action either took stopped the inevitable outcome of her death nor Jimmy’s continued damage to themself.

The only real difference is Swansea didn’t like Jimmy which is pretty substantial, but also just as damning as Curly knowing how bad Jimmy could get to an extent. He had even less of a reason to wait, even more of a reason to act seeing as he was now worried for Anya AND Daisuke. He is not bound by the possible procedure as Captain and actively does not care about what happens next. So what does it matter if he acted in the moment? Why did he wait? I think he’s just as morally complex and grey as Curly and we hold him on a pedestal that still perpetuates things in rape culture the game critiques.

It’s not just enough to dislike and be abrasive to predators/abusers like Jimmy. It’s not enough to just put yourself between them and the other person. It’s not enough to hold tensions when you know someone is vulnerable. He and Curly do the exact same things but on different sides of the coin. I ask how is it better to not turn a blind eye but still not really do anything about what you are seeing? Not until it affects you atleast…

The game makes a big point to not put men doing the bare minimum or who wait to do more on pedestals and I’m actually surprised so many are missing that point.

[worstloki]

there is a difference between being born to a throne, maliciously vying for a throne, stealing a throne, and having a throne thrust upon you when you are already in the midst of an identity crisis. And I fear Loki's place in the line of succession has people unable to differentiate between any of these

[lgbtlunaverse]

Thinking of the Nie disciple that told Nie Mingjue it was Meng Yao who stayed behind to clean up corpses on the battlefield today.

Nie Mingjue didn't just randomly stumble upon poor lil meowyao eating bread in the novel, he was already looking for him to thank and reward him for his work.

That's what makes it so fun that nieyao's first conflict will end up being about someone else taking credit for Meng Yao's work.

And I'm sure that Nie Mingjue's actual opinions on plagiarism are a lot more nuanced, all we really get from him in this scene is "well you shouldn't kill someone over it!" which leaves a lot of room for what punishments he thinks are appropiate. But I bet that it isn't occuring to him in this moment that the only reason he knows Meng Yao at all, the only reason he got such a capable deputy, is that he noticed someone was taking care of the dead and cared enough to want to know their name. And then the Nie disciples didn't lie to him. The disciple he asked could have said "it was me, Zongzhu" to rise in the ranks himself, but he didn't. He went and asked others, who all also could have taken the credit, but they didn't. Someone saw Meng Yao working and decided to be honest about it and that simple decision is the catalyst for Meng Yao becoming Nie Mingjue's deputy.

Meng Yao can't just work hard to get results, others have to acknowledge that work. If they don't, it's as if he didn't do anything at all.

[iknowicanbutwhy]

wait. did one of the loops actually become a red giant? petition to call that one Loop-king (like looping. get it. hahah. ill see my self out.)

Haha yeah!! Loop-king, King of Loops, figurehead of the universe, constellation formed by the collapsing stars and wishes that bind them, that define them, a responsibility and love born of generations of dying stars and supernovas and stardust and new stars - or something like that!

A Loop, certainly. We're all Loop in these parts.

[grimalkinmessor]

Fucked up Mouthwashing fix-it AU where Jimmy is able to grapple with his homo/bisexuality properly but instead of this making him healthier or more normal it just causes him to noncon Curly instead of Anya. As a result he doesn't crash the ship and they all make it safely to their destination and Jimmy manipulates and guilts his way into living with Curly afterwards even as the rest of the crew goes their separate ways. Everyone is happy except Curly :)

[fatedroses]

Zenos viator Galvus and him trying to deal with actually feeling things for once (Even if he doesn't really understand how to handle the comfort he receives from others for it)

I am also giving this man a dad that actually cares, because this brainworm have gotten me and there is no saving me from them.

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[vanmarkus]

"you don't have to ship x just enjoy—" how about i ship whatever i want without some rando making it into their calling to hand out permission slips? maybe i'll enjoy the source material my way? maybe i find whimsy in shipping certain characters that others only see as platonic? what then? are you gonna steal my pillows?

[sprimpfriedrice]

White dungeon meshi fans sound like this to me:

It's extremely fascinating and frightening to me how hateful some of you people are towards shuro, a man who is clearly depicted as japanese, (a man who could look like me or literally any member of my family in real life) for being a normal, complex, and flawed human being.

Why do you single him out for getting frustrated with and mad at laios when chilchuck and marcille do the same literally all the time? What's the difference between them and shuro?

Why do you feel the unnecessary need to protect these white women from a japanese man?

Do you expect that this japanese man is inherently going to have some kind of ugly negative quality that has not been once hinted at canonically? Do you know what that's called? Because i do and it's fucking racism.

You people get scared the moment a character that is a person of color isnt a quiet little model minority or a sweet mammy archetype. You grasp at your pearls the moment they are revealed to have complex personalities and histories; when they feel negative, big emotions that are literally part of the human experience. Or god forbid, when they show romantic interest in a pure, helpless, little white woman.

And when a person of color stops behaving good and docile the way you want, when they decide that theyre not going to put up with a situation that makes them uncomfortable or miserable or RIGHTEOUSLY FURIOUS, they become the bad guy. As seen countless times in the medias demonizing depiction of the Black Lives Matter protests and even of black people who get punished for just living their lives. It happens so often i shouldnt have to reiterate it to you but it somehow keeps flying over your head.

And when that dirty, conniving, perverted, slant eyed, buck toothed, stumpy little japanese man understandably snaps at the white person you guys are projecting onto and all you see is this:

So dont be surprised when i say that id rather kill myself than entrust the safety of my oldest aunts and uncles or my youngest cousins with any of you who act like this. Im terrified of what could have happened if people like you worked at the facility that my great grandmother lived out her final years in. Would you have seen her as a wild animal that needed to be subdued too when she had one of her many dementia-induced violent episode?

I will not apologize for saying that i find it deeply disconcerting to see so many of you happily posting hateful vitriol or even about committing acts of violence against a man that looks like me, solely because he was experiencing his humanity

[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

[sysig]

Off to make mischief and terrible decisions for everyone (Patreon)