#we got things to a much better place.

[thisisadecisionimayregret]

spent a little over two weeks leading up to black friday telling my boss repeatedly "hey we have like. 100+ boxes of accessories in the back of house that haven't been put out yet and space hasn't been made for them and with how few people and how little time you're giving us to work on them, we won't get the accessories out in time for black friday" and she kept being like "don't worry about it, we'll get it done, it'll be fine"

and low and behold. wednesday before the black friday, last day to prep stuff beforehand, and we still have 25-30 boxes of stuff in the back that we didn't get to. and I'm not gonna say I told you so, but. I fucking told her so.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji goes to Lotus Pier (No relation to the AU of the same name)

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[turtledotjpeg]

@hxhbigbang24 time!!

I drew for this fic which made me SAD and also made my HEART WARM!! I will not say too much to avoid spoiling future chapters, but I illustrated a few moments from this scene near the end of the story that I loved!

[i-dare-say]

You know what I love about Binghe's character? His role in the story and the way it changes our perception of him through the narrative.

We first meet him as this poor boy and we, just like Shen Qingqiu, get swept by the image of the white lotus. He's a teenager, and we're told that at this age he didn't have any of the darkness that would reign over his life after the Abyss. We're only shown an obedient and sweet Luo Binghe. He is the "young and innocent protagonist".

But we know about his future. Shen Qingqiu tells us so many times that the Abyss will corrupt him irreversebly, that he will come back and take his revenge on the scum villain. The problem is that we see the story through Shen Qingqiu's point of view, he is our protagonist, making Binghe our villain. So we read about the disciple days with the constant thought that this boy will one day become the antagonist.

And see, there's a slight difference between villain and antagonist. A villain is perceived as someone with bad intentions, while an antagonist is just someone who opposes the protagonist.

When Luo Binghe comes back from the Abyss, he is both villain and antagonist. He goes against Shen Qingqiu (antagonist), and the story tells us he wants to kill him like the original PIDW (villain).

Then it's revealed that it may not be exactly like that. First, we're shown that Binghe has romantic feelings for Shen Qingqiu (which, yeah, it's obvious to everyone but him, but still), giving Binghe a new possible role in the story: love interest. This immediately reduces the perceived danger of his actions. It brings him closer, it makes him a safer character.

Yes, there are stories with villainous love interests that do horrible shit, but we're dealing with the most common way narratives treat this type of character: generally, the love interest is good. And so, the moment this role is put upon Luo Binghe by the narrative itself, it also influences the reader.

But Shen Qingqiu, and consequently we, don't lower our guard. Despite being the love interest now, we also know that Luo Binghe has conspired to take down his master and organized the sower plague. He's attacked Huan Hua Palace, killed Gongyi Xiao and many others, putting the blame on Shen Qingqiu. By the end of book 2 he's villain, antagonist and love interest.

But it all gets proven wrong. That almost everything that happened to Shen Qingqiu was not because of Luo Binghe. We discover that there are other villains in the shadows.

The sower plague and the the attack at Huan Hua Palace was caused by Tianlang-Jun and Zhuzhi-Lang. Qiu Haitang's involvement and Shen Qingqiu's imprisonment was one of the Old Palace Master's schemes. All of this destroys Binghe's role as villain and antagonist.

This is the moment Shen Qingqiu decides to trust Binghe, pushing the reader to do the same. Because he's just "love interest" now and by the standard conventions, he's good. We trust him to be. Shen Qingqiu himself starts to project onto him that same image of white lotus. Since our image of Luo Binghe was so bad previously, this makes it jump way higher. It lulls us into this much better perception of his character.

The Old Palace Master was a villain and he died, as villains are often destined to. The only obstacle remains Tianlang-Jun, who doesn't harm Shen Qingqiu because of Zhuzhi-Lang's wishes (not an antagonist), but also wants to merge the realms (villain).

So our protagonist and love interest move toward the action, the big battle against the final boss. The villains get defeated easily and after the truth of what happened to Su Xiyan, Tianlang-Jun gives up his plan. His role as villain ends there. But the story has more antagonists to reveal.

Luo Binghe has never stopped being one. The narrative only hid his real motivations and let him cover himself with the role of love interest. And at this moment, he drops the mask and lets all of his feelings out, everything he didn't tell Shen Qingqiu nor the readers. He becomes the final antagonist, the one we've had since the very beginning.

The thing that saves him is his status as love interest, because no, he's not the only one to blame for what is happening. There's Xin Mo, who has fed on his insecurities and negative feelings, and Shen Qingqiu himself. He is the one who has constantly pushed Binghe to the side, believing himself to do the right thing, first by giving Binghe his death and then by trying to keep him "protected" from his father.

In the end, Luo Binghe wasn't a villain. Shen Qingqiu was, and he dies. But since he's not a real villain, he's allowed to come back.

When everything is over, their story comes to an end. The narrative itself leaves them free, to be whoever they want to be.

[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

[luck-of-the-drawings]

EPISODE 2 AND 3 HAVE BEEN SOOOO FUN im already so emotionally attached to each of these characters.. if anything bad ever happens to any of them im killing everyone and then everyone.

[ubejamjar]

ffxiv rarepair week || jantoirel

artoirel's eyes are 'forget-me-not blue' and jandelaine could never forget them, forget him.

[b4kuch1n]

you’re created with hands circling your wrists. there’s never any offense meant, you must understand - it’s simply that you’re a story, and someone’s come by this desperate need to learn how to let the hell go.

[thedreadvampy]

My housemate is moving out in January

She told us this a week or two ago, when she sat down and, after sitting with us watching TV for over an hour, said "hey so I bought a house and I'm moving out. We agreed on 2 months notice so I won't move until the end of January."

The last time she talked in the immediate terms about buying a house was in 2021, when the sale she was working on fell though and she was unemployed so it was a "when I'm back in a position to look I'll start looking again." Since then I've occasionally asked her how she's doing on the house buying front and she's been like "oh I'm getting there financially" but hasn't mentioned anything concrete.

She didn't tell us she was looking at places. She didn't tell us she had put in an offer. She told us when the offer was finalised. A week AFTER she emailed the letting agent about getting out of her part of the lease. And, it increasingly feels like, only because the letting agent's response was that we had to agree to change the lease.

The letting agent's response (which our housemate obviously didn't copy us into; we had to follow up separately and they copied us into the email chain) also includes that when we change the lease, they're empowered to change the rent, quote, "no cap". Rent was already going up in January - there's no possibility of Sam and I paying her share of the rent.

The really fucking upsetting thing is we're not strangers. This isn't a casual "housemate we found on flatshare" thing. She and Sam have lived together literally their entire adult lives. Me and her have known each other well over a decade. I lived in her and Sam's flat when I was homeless. We were the first people she came out to as trans. We're not super close but I thought we were fucking friends. And she's literally gone out of her way to not talk to us about this for what must have been months while the sale completed - which means she's lied to my face at least once cause I've asked her about her finances in that time (cause she's in a job she hates that she only took to get the house money, so it's like. when we've been commiserating about work stuff I'm often asking 'are you almost free?'). she literally went out of her way to talk to the letting agents before talking to us about putting us in a situation where we could lose our fucking home.

And she keeps. trying. to pretend nothing's happened. Every time I've seen her since then she's not mentioned anything or apologised or anything, she just keeps chatting away and offering hugs and fistbumps like nothing's happened. Like we're still fucking friends.

All it would take for us to still be friends and to be happy for her would have been one fucking sentence in the groupchat like "hey, just put an offer in on a house" or "I'm looking at properties, just so you know, that might happen in the next few months". Like nobody begrudges her for buying a house! It's very cool for her! She's 31 she's worked really hard to get the money I would love to be happy for her! Unfortunately she decided avoiding conflict is more important than giving the people she fucking LIVES WITH (who btw fronted her a month on the rent here while she was unemployed and agreed to take on a larger proportion of the move-in cost back in 2021, if we're still holding ourselves to shit we said 2.5 years ago), so no, you are not entitled to our friendship or to going back to normal.

like if she'd been honest with us it would have been something to process but we'd have had time to figure out our next steps. instead she's left us in a position where we have to find a new roommate before she gives her one month notice, which means finding someone by the end of December, which oh look that's the middle of the fucking Christmas holidays. and she didn't tell us anything until the START of December, or copy us into her conversation with the letting agent, meaning we still don't know what the rent on that space will be so we aren't yet in a position to advertise it. Has she offered to help find a roommate? Has she fuck. Has she offered to help out by moving her move-out date? Nah, she's moving as soon as she gets the keys because, quote, "that means her finances won't have to change". SOUNDS LOVELY. NOT HAVING YOUR FINANCES SUDDENLY CHANGE. I THINK THAT SOUNDS LIKE A REALLY REASONABLE FUCKING GOAL.

Thirteen fucking years she's lived with Sam. Four fucking weeks over Christmas she's left us to figure out a way to not turbofuck our living situation. And she's got the fucking nerve to try and pretend we should be interacting like nothing's changed. Jesus Christ. What a fucking unhinged way to treat...anybody, honestly. never mind the friends-your-entire-adult-life part. literally cannot imagine a scenario in which I would buy a house without telling the people I lived with.

(haha actually this is what my parents divorced over so apparently it's not unusual. although at least my dad had the decency to tell the woman he shared finances with at the point he put in an offer not the point the fucking sale went through.)

Like we'll be fine. It's a huge city centre flat with decent rent and queer housemates, hopefully even when the rent goes up it'll be an easy sell in a city with a huge housing shortage and big queer community. We've got a couple of people interested already, sight unseen - worst case scenario we have to live with someone we don't get on with. And it's given Sam and me a push to look at our own finances and as of today, we've got a mortgage decision in principle and can start looking at flats in the area - mind, we'll be transparent upfront and tell any prospective housemates that yeah, we're looking to buy and move out in the next 6-12 months, and we'll tell them if we put an offer in, because we're decent fucking people who aren't going to spring that on someone out of the blue.

But it's been I think 2 weeks and I'm so fucking angry I could spit. It's such a fucking betrayal. And frankly you know selfishly like. I just had a breakup a couple of months ago, I'm in the middle of moving jobs, both me and Sam have a history of housing instability and this has been the first decent, stable, safe, not-mouldy not-freezing home I think any of us have had, and this is so fucking triggering and upscuttling I could just start biting. like I was talking to my friend about it last week and it's just like. Can I have One Fucking Thing of the three main tentpoles of survival - home, work, relationships - that are fucking stable right now? because shit has been In Flux lately. and at least the work and relationship stuff has changed because of my decisions. going through all that work to make myself short-term unstable to gain long-term stability has been really hard and draining and then just as I was reaching the crisis point with work stuff BOOM, IT'S HOUSING INSTABILITY WITH A STEEL CHAIR. fuck. seriously fuck this and fuck her. we're going to make something good come of it but what a deeply, unbelievably shitty thing to do.

[lightasthesun]

just wanted to thank everyone that's been encouraging me or offering some kind of support the last few times I talked about getting a cane... because I went and got one today and I didn't think it would make that much of a difference. I underestimated how much it would change for me.

So thank you <33

[treesbian]

sometimes the kids at work will say things and all i can think of is how our families have different financial situations. yesterday this one kid was talking about his travel plans for this year and next year and in my head i was like. you can travel internationally??? and for two years in a row???

[fatcowboys]

im done w moving and out of the shitty apt w the shittier roommate (who did not let move out happen without adding as Much drama as possible) and have just. been feeling so much better. living w my two friends who actually communicate well and all work together on our needs and gah. so less stressed and anxious now!!! and also in a week kitty introductions have gotten farther than they ever did w shitty roommates kitties (they were kinda bullies, so we had to move glacial speed even w oregano cat expert) and just. thank u the universe things are so much better now

[sysig]

Grump and not so grump (Patreon)

[evansbby]

[mariemariemaria]

Does anybody else feel the waves of history crashing over them constantly and like they can't escape the generational trauma that permeates and poisons every interaction they have or do I just need to chill and have a drink lol

[dandyshucks]

me waking up at 6am this morning and immediately having the thought "maybe Guz still gets angry a lot because strong emotions are difficult if not impossible to control esp if its rooted in abuse trauma BUT he learns how to apologize, and thus - especially in the beginning - he would lash out as an automatic response but quickly realize what he's doing and apologize for it and we'd move on and be okay" like it had been beamed into my brain from some divine source.

also junebug (waves. thats literally just me.) would have to do their own hard work to learn to not automatically fawn when someone starts seeming the littlest bit potentially displeased or unhappy (because that is unhealthy for all parties involved). they'd BOTH be putting in the work to make it work !!!!!! 🎉