#vs order

[bacchuschucklefuck]

she turns, makes direct eye contact with you, smiles,

[sage-nebula]

Lots of talk about how much Marina gushes over Pearl, which she does, but not enough talk about how protective Pearl is over Marina (including just being very attentive to her needs in general), and how feral she goes when she thinks Marina has been threatened. A few examples (including one from Octo Expansion in Splat 2):

Pearl wears a crown and goes by the stage name MC.Princess, but I think she acts much more like a knight, and treats Marina like the princess she wants to protect, in all senses of the word. 💜

[demonoflight]

Happy five year anniversary to them 💕

[the-apocalypse-is-upon-us]

are you guys seeing this shit

[megamindsupremacy]

You know, our natural assumption is that Peter Parker is just SO genius and crafty that at age 16 he developed a web formula in his high school chem class that even twenty years later teams of scientists can’t replicate with millions of dollars in supplies and equipment but like. No offense to Peter but no 16 year old in a high school chem lab could outsmart 20 years worth of technological process+the greatest chemists of their generation+millions of dollars in funding. My theory is that Peter’s formula is so basic (but ingenious!), using such shitty supplies and equipment, that no scientist worth their degree would even consider trying to replicate the formula with his methods. He accidentally took the Glass Onion route to outsmarting these guys which was “just go dumber” and it’s worked for literal decades

[inkopolis-news-official]

they always get you eventually...

[stealingpotatoes]

In TL4J, do Morgan Elsbeth and Merrin ever meet?

probably not, but if they did that meeting would NOT go well

(donation doodles! // tip jar)

[much-the-millers-kid]

This probably has been done before like when the movie actually came out, but I haven't seen it so here it is.

[eeveeights]

dont have the energy for real dedf1sh stuff so . this

[spn-lesbian]

obsessed with the fact that Dean and Cas could break heavens mind control with their love and John and Mary couldn’t even break a ghost possession

[whetstonefires]

Man sometimes I still think about Alfred's Bandit Anecdote in The Dark Knight (2008).

So, the most straightforward reading of this sequence seems to have been the one Nolan intended, because he is not actually a subtle filmmaker, and the further we got into the series the more heavily he committed to making Alfred a mouthpiece. Old man provides words of wisdom that frame the correct understanding of the situation; you can tell it's meant to be correct because subsequent Joker appearances reinforce its thesis statement.

Intended takeaway: some men (like the Joker) don't have rational motivations, they just 'want to watch the world burn,' and you have to account for that when trying to counter them. Chaos agents, basically unstoppable by reasonable means.

But the thing is. This is not a story that stands up to even mild interrogation. The number of assumptions Nolan wants us to swallow without blinking is kind of stunning.

First of all the obvious timeline questions that arise: the Anglo-Burmese Wars and periods between and leading up to them where this kind of white man's burden 'delivering jewels to local elites In The Burmese Jungle to sway them toward British interests, but getting waylaid by bandits' scenario makes any sense all, happened in the 19th century.

The Burmese resistance in the 1930s was centered on university student protests and that sort of thing; it was reasonably successful in moving Myanmar toward independence by increments, though who knows what would have happened without WWII. But it did not provide anyone with reasons to be hand-carrying huge gemstones through forests.

Even if we assume this was somehow a 20th century event, it has to have been before WWII unless we want to postulate a complete alt-history setting, and since The Dark Knight leans heavily into being a modern 21st century story with like, cell phone networking as a major plot point, this still makes Alfred old as balls. Born no later than 1920, and probably earlier.

But that's whatever; comics time. Batman Begins did some fun stuff (possibly in imitation of Batman (1980)) with making it ambiguous what decade it was supposed to be set in, though the sequels dropped that conceit. And anyway, people can be 90 years old.

So that's basically fine, although good god Wayne hire some more servants, this man should be fully retired already.

More problematic is the unfettered colonialism of it all, the confident proclamation that since this guy's motive wasn't profit, since he didn't keep the jewels, he had no motive. Because 'inconveniencing the Raj and weakening their control over the locality' isn't a Real Person Motive that a real person could have had. During or soon after failed wars to resist colonial subjugation.

Like. Come on??

The place where this story utterly shoots itself in the foot, though, is the clever bit at the end, where Bruce asks how Alfred's military unit solved the 'bandit stealing jewels he didn't even want' problem and Alfred's like: 'we burned the forest to the ground.'

Because this is so punchy! In screenwriting technical terms, it's quite well done. It's useless advice that loops the story back to its themes; obviously Batman can't burn Gotham down to get the Joker. Even in a Batman movie that doesn't like Batman very much, this is still obvious.

But at the same time this totally takes the legs out from under Alfred's words of wisdom about human nature. Because if that bandit 'wanted' to 'watch the world burn' then what his unit did wasn't so bad, right; he was basically asking for it. Burning a forest down with all the inevitable collateral damage and economic and ecological cost, all for the sake of horribly killing a group of people in the name of government revenues was totally okay guys!

It transforms the whole thing into a pretty obvious post facto rationalization of colonial violence. Which makes the Insights Into Human Nature bit real questionable!

But the movie gives absolutely no sign of having noticed this.

[sevenines]

i saw this tweet and found it interesting for two reasons. one is that some people base how good cartoon network would be to toh by how it treated su, and despite the fact that su’s treatment by the network was considered poor at the time, now its thought to be exceptionally good in comparison to modern shows.

two is how exactly su got impacted by a limited budget. a common criticism is how characters like connie, peridot, and lapis are left out of missions. but balancing a lot of characters is not only hard but also costly (extra animation, extra voices—it’s been revealed that the show is limited to a set number of characters per episode otherwise they’re over budget). animation mistakes are not uncommon since retakes cost extra. the entire reason the original show got cut short was due to loss of funding!

[h0ped3lusion]

Comfort Characters ATTACK!!!

[pouletpourri]

happy (late) valentines, here's some cards I forgot to post ft the silly bird men

[allelitewrestlings]

[greenmcgee]

A little bit of ChoDarkKing