#what a wild time the 80s was for dc

[arunneronthird]

WAIT same anon as the last one you answered I know the answer to this one! so nowadays, people thatve read jasons og robin run love him. but back then? fans HATED him. like, hated him hated him. so basically they were pissed dick was no longer robin. and look, they loved his growth, and they loved nightwing. but uh, nightwing's not robin. but fans thought, hey, since dick isn't robin anymore, we can get a grittier batman right? back to how he was before robin. so they were hyped for that, and they expected that. but dc went nope, and boom! new robin! new robin who isn't dick grayson but looks uncannily like him and dyes his hair to look even more like him (until he's retconned to have black hair)! and fans are PISSED. because they don't want a new robin; dick can't be robin, so batman can't have a robin. who does this kid think he is anyway? so he was unanimously hated by fans and writers alike, then the vote was put up, and it really wasn't a surprise when more people voted for jason to die. nowadays we adore the kid; we look at his death like a tragedy, and mourn him and what he could have had if people just loved him, loved that darling boy for who he was and didn't hate him for who he wasn't.

anyway, yeah, mini history lesson! whoo

before i say anything else: thank u so much! it makes me really happy to know these things and im glad people are willing to explain them to me, pls consider this an open invitation to drop more history of dc on me anytime

in all honesty i find it fascinating that such a hated character was actually cool, i think early jason (the criminal not the ginger) was incredibly fun so good job writers who hated him u did great

in even more honesty than that i... oh god im sorry but i like that he died, i think the story of jasons death with the poll and the actual consequences in the comic might be my favorite thing dc has ever done, im obsessed with like the few chapters where bruce is completely in denial and lil timmy is losing it trying to fix a grown up man who doesnt know him and dick is just confused... it was madness and i think about it constantly

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XXIV)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters  for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

🖤Chapter navigation can be found here🖤 Click to browse previous updates.

💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts 💚 (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)

Where we last left off... PHYSICAL!! THERAPY!! LET'S GET TO IT!! *80s aerobics music is piped in from nowhere* Also Flash numbero two was there.

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

“Green one,” the quickfast one says. The masked teenager groans.

Danny looks down at his cards. He’s got a green eight. He drops the card onto the pile, and waits, perfectly aware that the girl is only down to her last two cards. The card flutters vaguely toward the pile on Danny’s bed cot.

He’s sitting with his legs crossed now, he admires. Holy crap. This is what dreams are made of.

“Bruce two,” the teen in the leather jacket demands, slapping down a—Oh, it’s a green 2+ card. It’s take two. Right.

The blonde girl scoffs, but her two cards bloat back up to four. Quickly though, with a little shuffling, the four become three with a green three slapped down on top of the deck.

Everyone is down to only a three or four cards. Danny is sweating through his medical issue tee and shorts.

Danny has not won a single game yet.

Danny really wants to win.

The masked teen (why is he wearing a face mask?? Like…over his eyes?? Not even his mouth??) opens with a new complication: a red three.

The red-haired quick-kid flicks a wild card plus four down with a smirk, pleased to make this Danny’s problem. “Blue, cnytte four!”

Okay, so what is cnytte?? Danny just got used to ‘take’. What is this new synonym. Why is everyone determined to hurt him like this. Why couldn’t these people just use Esperanto.

Whatever. Danny bites his lip and pulls the trigger: wild card plus four. He quickly points to the leather-jacket teen. “R-red. Br-take eight.”

The kid splutters. “Hey! That’s not the riht!!”

That is for sure how he and Jazz used to play it in after-school. The other kids never complained. “Is.”

“No, it’s not??”

Danny sticks his tongue out. The leather-jacket wearer squawks theatrically; it takes the mask-wearing kid thirty seconds to find the official pdf of the rules of UNO, and a new argument is off to the races.

“Atredde!!” the teen demands, snatching the phone out of the masked teen’s hands to show Danny the screen. “Þær, there!!”

“I can’t read,” Danny points out cheerfully. He can read some things, sure, but not when he refuses to look at the phone.

The phone gets closer and closer to Danny’s face, and Danny looks anywhere else—at the ceiling, the floor, and his bed, all without letting the guy point it out to him.

“Atredde,” the guy demands, the glass of his screen mashed against Danny’s cheek. Danny struggles not to laugh. “Atredde, atreddeatreddelooklooklook, you wearg—“

“No aðs, no aðs!!” the only girl of the group yelps, grabbing the spare pillow from underneath herself to start beating him with. Danny’s assailant shrieks. “Do you want to get in trouble with Wonder Woman?!”

“Wonder Woman wolde take my sid!” the teen hollers. Danny ponders if biting him would solve anything for all of two seconds before the doors smack open.

Everyone looks at Diana. Diana looks at everyone.

“I win!” Danny cheerfully announces, and sets off more yelling.

Danny does not, in fact, win anything other than a late lunch. Still, it is enough that he won, even if he has to sit through a gentle, brow-raised scolding as the nurse cleans his port and replaces his stomach-hole bag.

Lunch is a smoothie with powered vitamins and some pain medication mixed in. Life goes on.

For the first time, though, Danny doesn’t eat lunch alone; since he can, like, keep his bed relatively clean now that he isn’t constantly leaking ectoplasm everywhere, there are four teenagers crammed onto his bed with sandwiches, wraps, and sodas of their own. Danny can phonetically pronounce the brands on the side of the can, he notices. He has no idea what they mean, but sometimes the girl in the blonde bob and the too-fast teen will ask him to pronounce them, and they only snicker sometimes.

The teen in the mask makes a noise. “I want a lið. Wha want anything?”

“Nah,” No,” “Na þancs,” all echo.

Danny sucks on his smoothie straw. It tastes like bananas today. Ew; potassium. “What is… lið?”

The teen holds up a can of soda in his ungloved hand. Danny makes a face. He’d love a Mountainous Dunk right now, but gas in his bag…eugh. More trouble than it’s worth.

“No.”

The teen shoots him a pair of finger guns and darts out the door, leaving the rest of them behind to argue over UNO rules in at least two languages and without any expectation of resolving the issue.

Danny peaceably polishes off his smoothie. He’ll have to get the back done again, but eh. As long as no one’s directly looking at the process while it’s going on, he doesn’t super care whether or not anyone’s in the room, per se? Is that weird? Is this weird??

It’s probably weird. But also. Danny has fuzzy memories of roaming the building and leaking goo the entire time he was out and about, so… Suck it, he can do what he wants! He’s sick!! And maybe even dying??

“What is þæt andwlita??” the blonde girl asks, only for the quick-fast teen to poke Danny in what can be assumed to be a grumpy expression. Danny feigns a bite just to be mean. The other teens don’t even pretend to think it’s a threat—the blonde even laughs.

The teenager comes back and sits on Danny’s bed again, mattress barely bouncing as he makes himself comfy. It takes Danny a second to realize that he didn’t come back empty-handed, though—but instead of sodas, the guy brought back a tablet and a weird expression under his mask.

“…Look,” the teen finally says, and flips the tablet onto his lap so that the screen is visible. The teen clicks on a browser, and types in a word Danny isn’t familiar with, and pulls up a stock photo straight out of a photo frame Danny could buy at the craft store. He points to the smiling woman, the man, and the kid in the picture. “Moder. Fæder. Dohtor.”

Danny glances at the photo, and then at the teen. …Okay…?

The teenager bites his lip, and picks a new photo. This one has two men and a child, but it was basically the same. He points to each person as he named them: “Fæder and fæder, and sunu.”

Danny looks at the photo. He looks at the teenager. He looks at the photo again, and the masked teen backs out of the photo he onscreen to pick another one—with a woman and a man crouched around three kids and a dog.

“Moder. Father. Daughter. Daughter. Son.”

Realization breaks over Danny—oh. These are supposed to be families. These are family titles. Huh.

Danny scrutinizes the image. They…you know. They look happy. Danny used to…

…Mom, and…

It hurts too much to look at the photo for long. He knows that it’s fake, and he knows that models just get hired for show, but even the imaginary families hurt. Happy, loving people exist out there in the world.

Danny was in a box. Danny was in a box.

Danny—

The teen makes another noise, and Danny drags his focus out of his melancholy doom spiral with every tooth and claw. He manages. Barely. The masked teenager switches over to a drawing app and pops a tablet pen out of—nowhere, actually? Where did that come from??

The teen hems and he haws and he fills out a stick figure with some red and black clothing details—and a mask, and a bowl cut, which is how Danny figures out it’s a scrappy little self-portrait. It doesn’t look at all like the oversized tee tucked into the teen’s short shorts, but you know, whatever.

Next to him, the dude draws a giant, brick-wall-broad, no-eyed, man-shaped blob with upright pointed ears.

It’s. Uh. It’s sure…something.

“Son,” the teen labels himself, and then draws an arrow to the giant, colorless blob. “Father.”

…Danny squints. Is that normal? To have a huge hulking entity-dad, and then have a short, shrimpy-looking teen waif?

Like you, imaginary Jazz interrupts, since he was thinking about her.

He carefully bats the thought away before it can make him cry.

“My father,” the teenager adds, since Danny probably looks like he’s mostly paying attention. “Stincende.” And then the guy draws a bunch of stink lines coming off of him, just to prove a point.

Danny chokes more than he laughs. The teen’s friends laugh outright, teasing with words that are a little too quick for Danny to parse and snickering under their breath. The masked teen smiles quietly.

“So mean,” the teen in the leather jacket declares, cackling mercilessly. The orange-haired teenager wheezes breathlessly.

“Stincende hlaford of the trask,” the teenager adds mildly, cheerfully without mercy. “Very boring. Very stif. Very grimm.”

Okay, so some of those words were definitely straight-up cognates. Mr. Lancer gave Danny a C in English last semester, but Danny’s going to guess that, based on how their language is pretty much entirely similar, that the stink lines are more of a metaphor than anything.

“Gross,” Danny decides. He’s not sure if the word actually means gross or if it’s more of a medical-trash-and-waste-disposal sort of word, but his audience of four snicker and bump his shoulder and that’s good enough.

“Mmhmm,” the masked teen agrees. He clicks on an eraser tool, enlarges it, and wipes himself clean off the image. In his place, he puts a little white-haired figure in a white medical gown.

…Oh.

Between them, the artist puts speech bubbles, giving both the drawn Danny equal part in the imaginary conversation.

“Talking,” the teenager says without looking at Danny. Eventually, when the speech bubbles are done, he lifts his head. “Yes? No?”

…Is this a request? Is this a demand? Danny fists the sheets between shaking fingers. Nowadays, they always shake at least a little. There are no perfectly still days.

“Have to?” Danny asks, hesitant. It’s a common enough clarifier to use when he doesn’t want to do something. They try to explain what they can to him here, but the language barrier is thick and impenetrable in many places.

“No. He just wants to.”

“…Why?”

The masked teen frowns. He takes the tablet back from his lap and begins to draw something way more complex.

Everyone else slowly works on their food, but the masked teen doesn’t return until he has, from what Danny can tell, a thickly complicated organizational tree chart.

He recognizes a few headshot photos in the middle. The green guy. The human-looking guy in red that Danny does PT with sometimes.

Towards the bottom are the teenagers—both ones Danny does and doesn’t recognize, and some of the teens around him are photographed in different hats and outfits and masks. The quick-fast-red-haired teenager Danny’s come to recognize used to have shorter hair, apparently? Now it’s down to the teen’s neck. Meanwhile, the blonde girl’s got a haircut; her new look has a shaved undercut and a body too short to prop back up into her photographed pigtails.

The guy in the leather jacket looks the same.

…Danny holds up the tablet to compare to the teenager himself, who kindly poses the same way as he does in the picture in the same way: suns out, guns out. Yep. That’s him alright.

At the top of the organizational tree are three people—a dark-haired guy who Danny’s seen in passing, Diana, who is both a superhero and a super-minder, and some scary lookin’ dude who looks exactly like the doodle Danny just saw absolutely smothered in stink lines.

The tablet falls out of Danny’s hands. He’s not mad or anything, but he tends to drop stuff when holding it becomes too much of a burden.

So.

The masked teen’s dad, is, like…one of several bosses. One boss is the person watching Danny at all times, which is…weird. Danny isn’t sure he warrants, like, constant security from a high-ranking super-someone. He mostly just sits around all day. Sometimes he gets his stretches in. Sometimes he gets wheeled out to look at the stars, and then he just…sits some more.

Danny shifts in his seat. So maybe he. Maybe…

…Okay, so even if talking isn’t good, per se, at least maybe he’ll figure something out? Maybe?

Like. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out, like…why he’s here. Why he’s in space. Why they’re taking care of him.

Danny doesn’t look forward to talking. But it’s. Fine.

Probably.

He nods.

“…Yes?” the teen asks again, double confirming that this is what Danny wants. Danny doesn’t want this, but he wants answers, so he nods again, more firmly. But still. Staring. At the sheets underneath him.

“Okay.” The teen opens up a messaging app, and types something into the address bar. “Now? Or later?”

“Later.” Danny’s got to rest and digest lunch first.

“Okay.” The teen types into the tablet with the little pencil. Danny sees verbatim what the masked teen wrote when he turns it around: very literally, “Yes,” and “Later.”

There’s a little spot for Danny to sign his name. The teenager gives Danny his pen.

…Danny just hits the send button and is done with it.

[roosterforme]

roosterforme's '80s Rocktober Playlist fic challenge

For those about to rock, we salute you!

Let's rock 'n' roll the Top Gun way! Choose an '80s rock song (or pop or country or rap...), and write a fic about one or more of our favorite Top Gun characters! Just make sure the songs are from Rooster's favorite decade, the 1980s!

Or create a banner or mood board! Go with an '80s vibe or a specific song to inspire you and run wild.

Banner credit to @mak-32. Rock on, Mak.

Rules for fics:

Please use the #top gun rocktober hashtag!!!

Once you have your song selected (first come, first served, no duplicates), please send me an ask letting me know which song and character(s) you want to write about. If your song is not listed below, just let me know what you want with your ask and I’ll add it (as long as it fits the decade). If your song has been claimed already, I'll let you know so you can choose another one.

You can use the song in the fic however you would like. Use it as the title, use some lyrics, have the song playing in the background, use it as inspiration, anything you want!

There is no real time limit, but please try to post in September or October.

Please make sure you tag me (or send me a message) when you post your story so I don’t miss it. I can’t wait to read and reblog!

Please reblog and share this with anyone who may want to participate. And reblogging fics is always a treat for writers!

If you’re under 18, do not submit or read smut.

Rules for banners and mood boards:

Please use the #top gun rocktober hashtag!!!

If you want to use a specific song, please send me an ask letting me know which song. If you want to participate with the '80s vibe and no specific song, just send me an ask and let me know you'll be submitting an image or images.

Please make sure you tag me (or send me a message) when you post so I don’t miss it. I can’t wait to reblog!

Please reblog and share this with anyone who may want to participate.

Songs and fics we are rocking out to:

1 @roosterforme What's Your Name by New Order (Bradley)

2 @beyondthesefourwalls Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper (Bradley)

3 @sylviebell Faithfully by Journey (Natasha)

4 @wkndwlff Love Walks In by Van Halen (Bob)

5 @desert-fern Jump by Van Halen (Bradley)

6 @yanna-banana Like a Prayer by Madonna (Jake)

7 @fanboyswhore9 Addicted to Love by Robert Palmer (Mickey)

8 @cherrycola27 Born to Be My Baby by Bon Jovi (Bradley)

9 @trickphotography2 Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones (Bradley)

10 @blue-aconite Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by The Police (Jake)

11 @roosterforme Do You Wanna Touch Me? by Joan Jett (Bradley)

12 @startrekfangirl2233 Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! (Mickey)

13 @bradshawsbitch Hungry Eyes by Eric Carmen (Bradley)

14 @bellaireland1981 Can't Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon (Bradley)

15 @wkndwlff Lay Your Hands On Me by Bon Jovi (Bob)

16 @beyondthesefourwalls Jessie's Girl by Rick Springfield (Javy)

17 @thedroneranger Boys of Summer by Don Henley (Bradley)

18 @cottagecori Dancing With Myself by Generation X (Bob)

19 @sweetwhispersofchaos I Hate Myself For Loving You by Joan Jett (Natasha and Jake)

20 @sometimesanalice Straight Up by Paula Abdul (Bradley)

21 @lovinglyeternal Call Me by Blondie (Jake)

22 @roosterforme Adult Education by Hall & Oates (Jake)

23 @beyondthesefourwalls Your Love by Outfield (Bradley)

24 @mayhemmanaged You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC (Jake)

25 @topherwrites Love Shack by The B-52's (Bradley)

26 @ficsilike-reblogged Take On Me by A-ha (Bob)

27 @cottagecori Rock You Like a Hurricane by Scorpions (Bradley)

28 @jupitercomet Kissing a Fool by George Michael (Bradley)

29 @startrekfangirl2233 Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds (Jake and Bradley)

30 @topherwrites Just Like Heaven by The Cure (Jake)

31 @sweetwhispersofchaos As the World Falls Down by David Bowie (Natasha and Bob)

32 @inmyloveworld Open Arms by Journey (Bradley)

33 @thedroneranger Centerfold by J. Geils Band (Jake)

34 @gretagerwigsmuse Can't Hardly Wait by The Replacements (Bradley)

35 @bellaireland1981 Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar (Jake)

36 @blurredcolour Push It by Salt-N-Pepa (Jake and Bradley)

37 @blackwidownat2814 White Wedding by Billy Idol (Jake)

38 @keep-on-burnin The Look by Roxette (Bradley)

39 @cherrycola27 Secret Lovers by Atlantic Starr (Natasha and Javy)

40 @topherwrites Uptown Girl by Billy Joel (Bradley)

41 @jynxmirage If I Could Turn Back Time by Cher (Jake)

42 @notroosterbradshaw Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks (Bradley)

43 @ficsilike-reblogged Hungry for Heaven by Dio (Beau)

44 @callsign-magnolia Who's Crying Now by Journey (Bradley)

45 @trickphotography2 Every Breath You Take by The Police (Bob)

46 @sarahsmi13s Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard (Jake)

47 @roosterforme Cover Girl by New Kids on the Block (Natasha)

48 @bobfloydsbabe Alone by Heart (Jake)

49 @ughthisisntright The Stroke by Billy Squier (Bradley)

50 @wkndwlff Special Secret Song Inside by The Red Hot Chili Peppers (Jake)

51 @sylviebell Thriller by Michael Jackson (Natasha and Javy)

52 @xoxabs88xox Why’d You Come in Here Lookin' Like That by Dolly Parton (Jake)

53 @paigewinchester67 I'm On Fire by Bruce Springsteen (Bradley and Jake)

54 @sarahsmi13s Fishin' In the Dark by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (Bob)

55 @callsign-joyride Need You Tonight by INXS (Bradley)

56 @foreverrandomwritings Paradise City by Guns N' Roses (Beau)

57 @cherrycola27 Whoever's In New England by Reba McEntire (Bob)

58 @1234-angelika The Bluest Eyes in Texas by Restless Heart (Jake)

59 @decantedenchanted Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx (Mav)

60 @the-authoress-writes Black Velvet by Alannah Myles (Jake)

61 @withahappyrefrain Somebody to Love by Queen (Bradley)

62 @valhallaas Hold on Loosely by 38 Special (Javy)

63 @talktomegooseman The Chair by George Strait (Jake)

64 @foreverrandomwritings Master of Puppets by Metallica (Mickey and Bob)

65 @poetrieshouse Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran (Mav)

66 @tongue-like-a-razor Poison by Alice Cooper (Jake)

67 @1234-angelika Real Love by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers (Bradley)

68 @the-authoress-writes The Flame by Cheap Trick (Ice)

69 @hangmanstigerlily Can't Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon (Jake)

70 @samsgoddess Hysteria by Def Leppard (Bradley)

71 @eternalsams Cherry Pie by Warrant (Jake)

72 @love-in-light Livin' on a Prayer by Bon Jovi (Bradley)

73 @thatdammchickennugget Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams (Bradley)

74 @whatislovevavy Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears (Jake)

Totally rad cover art:

@ryebecca She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals

@bettycooper Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) by Kate Bush (Bradley)

@ryebecca The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News (Bob)

@mak-32 Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car by Billy Ocean (Bradley)

@laracrofted I Love Rock 'n' Roll by Joan Jett (Bob)

@sebsxphia Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners (Bob)

Need some song inspiration? Check out these bangers:

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - The Police

Start Me Up - The Rolling Stones 

Livin’ On A Prayer - Bon Jovi 

Eye of the Tiger - Survivor

Shout - Tears for Fears

You Give Love A Bad Name - Bon Jovi 

Every Breath You Take - The Police 

The Final Countdown - Europe

Angel - Aerosmith

Edge of Seventeen - Stevie Nicks

Uptown Girl - Billy Joel

Call Me - Blondie

Take Me Home Tonight - Eddie Money 

Free Fallin’ - Tom Petty 

Hysteria - Def Leppard 

I Hate Myself for Loving You - Joan Jett & the Blackhearts 

Just like Heaven - The Cure 

I Won’t Back Down - Tom Petty 

Magic - The Cars

Love Is A Battlefield - Pat Benatar 

Addicted To Love - Robert Palmer

Love Shack - The B-52’s 

Without You - Motley Crue 

Material Girl - Madonna

Legs - ZZ Top

Paradise City - Guns N’ Roses 

Can’t Fight This Feeling - REO Speedwagon 

Cum on Feel the Noize - Quiet Riot 

[zahri-melitor]

Batman v Ra's Al Ghul, by Neal Adams: A Bronze Age fever dream of a comic, written in 2019-2021.

Neal Adams caps off his over 50 year career with DC comics by...them letting him write a book for the first time in a decade.

Now, Adams is famous for his Bronze Age artwork, not his writing, and it's deservedly so: this is not the comic you would pick up if you were interested in award winning writing. But I have to say, it's actually something far more fun than 'good writing'.

I think the easiest way to describe the incredibly wild vibes of this title are 'Adams writes a multiverse Bronze Age time travel AU fic', where the cast technically consists of a modern set of characters (Dick is Nightwing and both Tim and Damian are Robin), but all of the characters are drawn, talking and acting like they just walked off a page in 1974 or so.

For assistance, that's: Dick in the yellow with the very 70s black vest; Tim in the blue t-shirt; Damian in the red t-shirt; and Bruce in the suit. You end up keeping track of them in this title by their haircuts.

Bruce and Damian here cannot remember anything about being Batman and Robin; Dick and Tim appear to have shown up with a fantastical story that cannot be proven (as I said, this has INCREDIBLE reality hopping AU vibes).

Some of the characters have been mindwiped. Some of the characters are robot duplicates. A whole list of characters Adams helped create show up largely because he created them (seriously Kirk and Francine Langstrom show up for a couple of pages mostly to give Dick and Tim an airlift into a difficult to reach entrance to the Cave). Nobody sounds particularly in character at any point, but that's not really a problem in this comic, because what it really is is a giant jolt of Bronze Age style writing nostalgia direct to the brainstem.

They don't make comics like this anymore and reading one written in the 2020s like this reinforces why.

Deadman's brother Aaron and sister Zeea show up; his brother is busy pretending to be an alternate Australian version of Batman called Marvin O'Hearn, and his sister is a psychic running around in the most 70s outfit imaginable controlling things and mindwiping Bruce on Ra's orders.

(And yes, if you too just asked 'Boston Brand has siblings???' the answer is 'kinda sorta but definitely not these two', however given Adams was writing Boston in 1968 at one point he's got as much right as anyone else to claim there are additional siblings)

There's a group who PRETEND to be the Court of Owls but secretly are a group of industrialists called The Money who want to control the world via paying for legislators, judges and industry (and yes I realise that sounds exactly like the Court's thing, but Adams was almost 80 when he wrote this, he can have an expy Court if he wants one).

Bruce pretends to be Matches for a good chunk of the back end of this comic and it actually acknowledges that Matches Malone was a real gangster before he died and Bruce stole his identity (something other writers and the fandom often forget), because Adams wants one more spin with the character he designed.

There's also a moment in the sixth issue where one of Ra's pet scientists tries to sell a panel of Gotham execs on a perpetual motion machine based on electrolysis as his replacement for the current Gotham power generators and at this point I lost it giggling at the portrayal of Ra's as a cheap charlatan.

(There is also a sneaky joke that only works if you know what British salad cream is; there's this sequence of the kids talking about Alfred making sandwiches with 'crappy salad dressing' instead of mayonnaise, only this tray has been made with mayo...and it's a hint that Alfred has been replaced by a robot. I laughed; I suspect it might be non-obvious to American audiences)

This is not a comic to read if you are interested in 'main continuity' or 'coherence' or even 'good writing'. However if you want some wild antics that feel like someone's 3am fanfic AU written in pure Bronze Age vibes and to see the last work of one of Ra's Al Ghul's creators? Give it a chance. You'll never be able to predict what's on the next page.

[cephalog0d]

Okay, but like. There's the whole joke about Bruce recruiting children to be his sidekicks, but honestly there's only really one that fits that.

And it's Jason. And the whole story there is, frankly, unhinged. Aaaaand then he died.

(I'm specifically talking about "first post-crisis origin stories" here because Jason and Dick, in particular, have both had multiple major retcons and revisions over the years, and some of them dramatically change how things happened.)

Like okay. Going backwards, you've got Duke who joined/led a whole Robin-based gang at a time when Bruce wasn't even Batman. You've got Damian and Cass, who were both literally born into the world of masks and capes and heroes and villains, so they weren't ever really not going to be part of it. Steph might have taken inspiration from previous heroes but she made her own identity and repeatedly refused to stop involving herself in the vigilante lifestyle. Tim, obviously, basically strong-armed Batman into letting him be Robin, despite Batman's protests.

Dick's a little more complicated just because there's so many versions, because that's what 80 years of comics and multiple universe reboots will do, and there's kind of a general trend that earlier pre-crisis versions were more of Batman being like "hello, child, would you like to be my sidekick" and later versions have leaned harder and harder into the idea that Dick was absolutely going to do this anyway, regardless of what Batman had to say about it. But even in the first post-crisis version, the flashback in Batman Year 3, Dick says he wants to find a way to keep people like that from hurting others again. When Alfred questions Bruce's offer to train him, Bruce says that Dick should learn to do things the right way if he's going to do it. It's not hard to extrapolate that, much like later versions of the origin story, Dick was going to get himself into this one way or another. (Batman (1940) #437)

And then there's Jason. Whose backstory has also had a lot of (sometimes major) revisions over the years (remember when his adoption was, like, some kind of Joker-originated long con? Fucken Nu52, man). But the original post-crisis version is pretty straightforward. Steals Batman's tires, gets caught and sent to Ma Gunn's Secret Criminal School, intervenes when Batman goes to investigate, immediately gets offered the chance to be Robin based entirely on that.

Which is itself kind of unhinged. That Bruce saw this kid who was living on his own stealing tires and went "Hey you would make a good Robin" as his very first instinct.

But if you've never read Jason's post-crisis origin, or it's been a while, it's honestly even more unhinged than that because that arc starts with Dick getting "fired" as Robin specifically for the reason that he got shot by Joker and Bruce freaked out about how the Robin identity has too many enemies and therefore Dick, a legal adult with approximately a decade of training and experience, should not use the identity anymore.

(And it's specifically about the Robin identity, in this version, because when Dick says he's not going to stop the crime fighting thing Bruce's response is basically "I know and I didn't expect you to". Honestly I could also say a lot about this version of the Robin/Nightwing transition vs. later ones and how this one definitely feels like the Heavy Hand of DC Editorial in the fact that they had no contact for so long afterwards, because the interaction really doesn't feel like it warrants that in this case compared to some later versions, but that's a whole other too-long ramble.) (Batman (1940) #408)

And then a few weeks later Bruce turns around and picks up a random kid, a literal child, and goes "Hey you would make a good Robin!"

And I think a lot about how fucking wild that is. And it's not like the people writing just didn't notice. Dick's big argument with Bruce when he finally comes back to Gotham and meets Jason isn't about the fact that Bruce took in another kid, or even necessarily about Dick feeling proprietary over the Robin identity, the thing he's angry about is that Bruce said it was too dangerous for him, an adult, someone who has trained with Batman for a decade and was already highly physically trained before that for his whole life, to be Robin, and now Bruce has turned around and painted that target onto some random new kid. He pushes, repeatedly, trying to get Bruce to justify himself and this absolutely irresponsible decision, and Bruce gives a lot of answers about how Jason was on a bad path and needed this outlet and eventually just admits that he missed having a partner. (Batman (1940) #416)

And like. Dick's right, is the thing. He is 1000% in the right in this argument. If he can't be Robin anymore because of the danger, how in the hell is it anything like a good idea to hand it over to someone way younger, way less trained, way less experienced, and expect that that wouldn't end in tragedy?

And then it did.

And yeah, Bruce, it is kinda a lot of your fault.

[crazylittlejester]

If Wars did have noise cancelling headphones, would he have music playing on them or just use them for the noise cancelling? If he did have music, what would he be listening to? I like having music on, and I find that I listen to Zelda soundtracks more often than not.

(My favorite one has to be the Lorule Castle Theme.)

Now that I think about it, what type of music would the others listen to? Just on a daily basis or for special occasions

hmmm… I think for him it would depend on the day. I think music could overwhelm him sometimes so he’d just use the headphones to muffle the noise, but other times he’d listen to music

I actually think a lot about what their music tastes would be alskdkkd and most of the playlists I have for them include the type of music I personally think they’d listen to

Time: 70s/80s rock and shit. I’m talkin’ Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Metallica, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, etc.

Warriors: that 2000s-early 2010s pop era. He’d fuck so heavily with Brittney Spears’s music, but I can also see him liking other things like Arctic Monkeys. I just think that 2000s-early 2010s music era he’d enjoy. Plus Queen, Chappell Roan, and David Bowie

Twilight: Do I even have to say it… But also I can see him enjoying 50s music. He just has that vibe to him. and Laufey

Sky: He’s either the motherfucker that listens to exclusively instrumentals or Mitski, or some lethal combination of both. You listen to one of his playlists and it’ll punch you so hard in the feels you WILL cry. God he’d also love Hozier-

Hyrule: He listens to musicians you have never heard of before in your life, but it’s always alternative sounding mysterious and whimsical music. His music taste makes you feel like a little guy going on an adventure. He’s also the one who would have 15 songs on a playlist that are NOT in a language he speaks but not realize he can’t understand what they’re saying until someone listens to said song with him and goes “What language is this??” I also think he’d like TV Girl and The Oh Hellos

Legend: Fall Out Boy, Will Wood (and all the groups Will Wood has worked with), had a P!ATD phase and denies it to this day, MCR, stuff he can scream to in the car. But ALSO: Mitski. And this JUST came to me in a vision but Michael Jackson and ABBA. He definitely has the broadest music taste out of all of em

Wild: He just puts on the fucking radio. He doesn’t like groups/artists specifically, he collects little songs that he likes, or that get stuck in his head

Four: Alternative but like… softer (?) music? The kind of music that’s like calming and soothing but also very layered in the sense that a lot of ‘waves’ of instruments like swoop in. An example would be like, Runaway by Aurora. Stuff like that

Wind: Whatever genre Puppy Princess by Hot Freaks, Everyone Talks by Neon Trees, and Hot To Go by Chappell Roan is, because he’d fuck so heavily with up beat shit like that. Or just songs that have a lot of energy and remind you of driving in the summer heat with the windows down surrounded by friends, that kinda shit

if anyone else has headcanons about what their music tastes would be id absolutely love to hear it alskdmkd

[phantom1fanatic]

Em | 25 | She/Hers | PST | Minors DNI | 21+ preferred

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♕ LGBTQ+ member and friendly

♕ Searching for fandom and original universe roleplays

♕ Doubles and multiples preferred over single pairings

♕ I can play either gender

♕ Any gendered pairing is welcome

♕ Expect 200-2000+ word replies depending on muse and time

♕ Response times vary

♕ Love to chat ooc, share pinterests, memes, aesthetics, tiktoks, music, etc about our roleplay and characters

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Fandom Interests

Crossovers/Multifandoms

Spiderman: Across The Spiderverse

911/911 Lonestar

The Rookie

Ted Lasso

Z Nation

Marvel (MCU)

DC (cartoons mainly)

Young Justice

Detroit: Become Human

The Walking Dead

Arrowverse

Umbrella Academy

Prison Break

Midnight Texas

Suits

Kingsmen

Good Omens

Supernatural

Shameless

Disney Retellings

Deception

Jurassic World

Code Black

Station 19

Man from Uncle

Man from Toronto

Pokemon

Stranger Things

Altered Carbon

Terra Nova

LA Brea

Watch Dogs

Mr. Robot

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Reacher

The Boys

Hazbin Hotel

ATLA

Merlin

Note: I am more than willing to play multiple canons against an oc for you if asked. Would like if you could play at least one canon in return!

Note 2: Pink is what I’m craving most atm

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General Themes

Reincarnation

Time Travel

Natural Disasters

Past Lives

Soulmates

Hurt/comfort

Divine Enti

Dinosaurs

Hackers

Hanahaki Disease

Apocalypse

Deserted Islands

Fantasy

Sci-fi/Space

Slice of Life

Dark Themes/Dead Dove

Paranormal

Wild West

Medieval

Superpowers

Modern

Period Dramas

Mafia/Criminal Underworld

Egyptian Mythos/Pantheon

Dragons/Dragon Riders

Mermaids

Decade (20s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s)

Slowburn

Note: I’m always interested in your ideas, please feel free to reach out.

━━━━━━━━━━━━

Pairing Ideas

Throuple/Poly

Fallen Angel/Angel

Fallen Angel/Demon

Fallen Angel/Human

Angel/Demon

Angel/Human

Human/Demon

Half Angel/Demon

Half Angel/Human

Angel/Demon/Human

Angel/Demon/Fallen Angel

Human/Supernatural Creature

Supernatural Creature/Hunter

Royalty/Commoner

Rivals (sports, spies, etc)

Detective/Sidekick

Detective/Criminal

Ghost/Nonbeliver

Hero/Villain

Mermaid/Pirate

God/Human

God/Lesser Deity

Enemies to Lovers

Roommates

Arranged Marriages

Fake Dating

Opposites Attract

Forbidden Romance

Note: Love mixing/matching pairings so just lmk if you have any ideas!

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Are you interested? Perfect, I’d love to hear from ya! PM me for my discord and we can get to plotting!

Happy roleplaying 🌸

[jerrythebug]

I took a break from BOP and returned to finish Booster Gold's first run. I screamed when Michelle showed up!!!!! Her outfit, her pose, her hair, the gun!!! Friendship ended with Michael, now Michelle is my best friend ❤️

I will put the rest of my rambling under read more though, cause I had a lot to say.

Trixie! I have to say, she's really cool! She doesn't want to be a heroine, good for her! But she did what had to be done to help her friend. And later had sort of a thing with Dirk the Manager? Weird, but okay, that mustache of his is kinda hot I guess? Still, I did not expect to love Booster's supporting Ladies this much! They were a delight!

I'm sad Michelle died, even if I knew it was coming. But also I know that she returns decades later in Booster's second run so I'm mostly okay with that. From what I've seen I much prefer her in the 80s art style, in comparison the 00's version looks kinda boring to me. Or maybe I'm just being weird and based towards more retro art. She should have kept the shoulder pads is what I'm saying! And the wild hair! And I wish she was around for longer in general, she seemed really cool! Too bad she had to die for her brother's character development. Hate when that happens to women...

Also! Ripley? My boy Ripster the Ripper? Doctor Rip Hunter? Hmm, that man looks kinda like Booster (he's blond), I wonder why. Was it his first appearance? I don't know, I have to look it up. And read his appearances too, just for fun. I wish Ripsteroo stayed blond, but also it's kinda funny that he's not blond now it makes him look like his other dad.

And doctor Jack casually fixing Booster's future suit like it's nothing made me remember that a decade later Ted won't be able to do the same when Doomsday destroys Booster's suit again. I wonder if there's an explanation for that. Teddy should've read Booster Gold vol 1 and called doc Jack from STAR, that man could fix a time sphere, made Goldstar outfit and fixed Skeets. Is he the smartest guy in DC????? Or maybe something happened to him in the decade that passed. I hope not, he was a chill guy. He and Rip seemed like nice friends. Maybe something did happen to Jackie and that's why Ripley Rippo is the way he is.

So overall, Booster's origin story was neat. I love that Superman doesn't like him. I love how messy his life got by the end of his run. I will miss Trixie and Michelle and even Rip and Jack. I will have to draw team Gold! I really enjoyed the way Max broke into Gold Mansion to recruit Booster, was that really the best way to do it? Idk, I think Max is a little crazy.

It was a nice comic to read, I love the bright colors and art, even if modern comic art often looks much better. Now that I've made my way through Booster's story I can start on Beetle's. And continue reading BOP. And then re-read JLI after I'm done with Ted's story. And make my way to Superbuddies. And next- And then I can read Mister Miracle. What, OMAC? What's a countdown? I don't know of them. I will postpone reading them as much as I can. But I will do it eventually, even if I cry. At least Ted's alive in the new continuity, right? So it's fine he died.

[mikeywayarchive]

SDCC 2024: Mikey Way Rings in Holidays All Year Long with Christmas 365 (Interview)

By Justin Epps - Published Sep 7, 2024

Dark Horse Comics

☰ SUMMARY

• Christmas 365 from Dark Horse Comics releases this year, a festive series about a family celebrating Christmas all year round.  • Co-writer Mikey Way talks about the nostalgia and magic of Christmas, and the importance of family in his work.  • Way collaborates with Jonathan Rivera and Piotr Kowalski to craft a dream project embracing the 80s/90s Christmas movie feel.

Full interview under the cut:

Christmas has come early for Dark Horse Comics readers. During this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, the publisher revealed it would be releasing Christmas 365 later this year. This festive new series comes from the creative team of Mikey Way, Jonathan Rivera, Piotr Kowalski, Brad Simpson, and Joshua Reed.

Christmas 365 tells the story of a family who has gone through a particularly challenging year and their attempts to come back together through a Christmas season that lasts the whole year round. Screen Rant caught up with Christmas 365 co-writer Mikey Way and dug into his thoughts behind this unique holiday story.

Screen Rant: From the premise I'm guessing you're a big fan of Christmas. But why Christmas 365?

Mikey Way: As a child of the 80s, a lot of my favorite movies were Christmas movies. I think the holiday stuck with me, the the mythology of it, the imagery really resonated with me. I know I'm not alone on this, the world is obsessed with Christmas. You go in stores and the Christmas stuffs out in August. It was after 9/11 I noticed Christmas started earlier at the store. I remember taking a mental note of that. People needed it at that time. I feel like with social media people have been able to express their love of Christmas and find like-minded people that are like-minded. There's Christmas podcasts, there's Christmas basements.

Mikey Way: Anyway, child of the 80s. Christmas Story, Scrooged, Christmas Vacation, Gremlins, Die Hard, Santa Claus: The Movie, all those great Jim Henson movies. These were important stories to me. And so I've always had that itch in me to tell a Christmas story. And I think it was around 2013 I watched a bunch of Christmas movies in a row and it wasn't Christmas time, it was summertime, I think. I remember watching Home Alone and Christmas Vacation and being like "What stories are left to tell?". Then it hit me like a bolt. "What about a family that're kind of disconnected and one of them gets the the wild idea to celebrate it all year long?". Like that's gonna fix everything.

With Christmas, there's this effort to see the world through the eyes of a child and recapture that feeling of wonderment. Is that what you wanted from your story?

Mikey Way: It's the one month out of the year where you can forget about life's pressures a little bit. And there's wonder and magic and hope and promise. Especially when you have children. It's the Super Bowl. For a child things revolve around "Christmas is coming!". So getting to see it through my two girls' eyes...that's what it's all about. There's so many layers to it. It's a layered holiday. But it's just something that's so great. In a world full of gloom and doom, it's something that's just awesome and great. Like there's a velvet cloud around you in December. Even November.

Mikey Way: There's there's a lot of bad stuff that happens in the world. People get busy, people get stressed, people have responsibilities. And it's the time where you can celebrate being a family, celebrate the people you love, and you could show them how much you love them.

You're co writing this with Jonathan Rivera. Both of you guys did books for DC Young Animal which was definitely a more experimental line, but you guys are trying to tell a more grounded story here, correct?

Mikey Way: We're very like-minded. He went to art school with my brother. We all like the same stuff. Trainspotting, Britpop, Stone Temple Pilots, The Crow, action figures, X-Men, anime. Jon was a kindred spirit. He's one of my best friends in the world. He's someone I wanted to write a story with. This was the perfect opportunity because he feels the same way about this 80s/90s Christmas story. He's got the same itch to scratch.

Your previous book, Collapser, had a real strong family theme to it, which seems carry on in Christmas 365. What is it about family that speaks to you so strongly in your work?

Mikey Way: Family's everything. As you get older you start to realize that. And it plays into the holiday of Christmas. When it comes down to the family's all you got. You can have an important job. You can have all the material possessions in the world. You could have fancy this and that. But when it comes down to it, who's sitting at the dinner table with you? Those are who's important and the people that pick you up when you're needing it. They're there for you, you're there for them. So the family unit has always been something extremely important to me. Especially as I get older and have children and extended family. That's really all you got in this world and it's the most beautiful thing there is.

In addition to Rivera, you're also working with Piotr Kowalski. How was it crafting this dream project with him and his art?

Mikey Way: What's interesting about him is he's mostly a horror guy, really. When we got his artwork, most of the demonstration pages and pieces were horror and then I went on his Instagram recently and it's all horror and I'm like "It kind of works, because this is supposed to be an 80s/90s Christmas movie.". If you watch these movies, they're all dark and they always tried to sneak a horror element into it. In Home Alone there was the scary boiler.

For me, it was A Christmas Story when Ralphie goes on the slide and the Santa just boots him down.

Mikey Way: There's always a moment of playful scariness in those movies. So I think it fit the tone, because you want it to look a little VHS. I feel like he was able to tell it exactly. Like if we closed our eyes and we were envisioning Christmas 365 as a movie, that's what it would look like. Me and Jon saw his art and were like "This is the guy.".

You previously spoke about the influence of suburban genre movies like The Burbs and Better Off Dead. How did these movies inform your Christmas story?

Mikey Way: So the story goes me and my brother watched Better Off Dead probably a couple of times a week for years. That and One Crazy Summer, those those two movies for me and my brother were very important. There was this Gonzo stuff in it. It was a slightly grounded, suburban comedy that had all these kind of wacky, fantastical ideas in it. All those movies had a sport. Better Off Dead was skiing.

Oh, like Heathers and croquet?

Mikey Way: Team Wolf had basketball. They all had a sport. Also there's a weird claymation dream sequence, remember? There was all this weird stuff, but there's something about that movie that struck a chord with me and my brother and we watched it literally once or twice a week for decades. But yes, Savage Steve Holland was a big influence on me and Jon Rivera.

Christmas 365 #1 is available on December 4th from Dark Horse Comics.

[slippinmickeys]

Three Part Harmony (18/?)

Twelve hours alone in a cell, and then back into the interview room, this time shackled to the floor. When Skinner walked in, Mulder had a distinct sense of Déjà vu.

“When I asked for a lawyer, I wasn’t expecting you,” Mulder said. “We tried that once. Didn’t go so well.”

“I remember,” Skinner said, dropping heavily into the chair across from him.

The room didn’t have a window, just a bluish fluorescent light that hummed at a frequency that made Mulder want to hitch his shoulders up over his ears. Skinner’s countenance was grave.

“What is it?” Mulder asked, his first thought: Scully, Scully, Scully.

Skinner sighed. “They’re sending me back to DC. My task force as well.”

Mulder unclenched a little. “We got a whole task force? The girls at the salon will never believe this.”

Skinner ignored him. “I assembled it myself,” he said. “Level heads. Uncompromised .”

The man was warning him, Mulder realized.

“You worried about the local yokels?”

Again, Skinner breezed past his glib comments. “You’re to be transferred to a federal facility in Utah,” he went on. “Transportation by US Marshals, the whole nine yards.”

“They’re really rolling out the red carpet. I’m humbled.”

“Once I leave, I can’t help you, Mulder,” Skinner said plainly. “The agent taking over was sent from on high. The providence of which stinks to high heaven. You’ll need to be extremely careful. And you are going to need a shit-hot lawyer.”

“Think the mesothelioma guy I saw on TV is available? I’ve heard good things about class action.”

Skinner leveled a crestfallen look at him. “You’re being awfully flippant.”

“That’s because I remember how this goes,” Mulder said, suddenly weary, thinking of a baton ringing off the bars of his military cell. Wrong answer!

Skinner sighed. “Your fate may well be decided, Mulder,” he said sadly. “But hers isn’t. His isn’t. If they’re nearby, they should go. And they should not stop moving.”

Everything inside Mulder went flat. It felt like Mount Weather all over again. He sighed. “Can you tell her?” he said quietly. “Can you let her know what’s happening?”

Skinner licked his lips, nodded solemnly.

“Before you leave town, you really ought to try the pie at this one diner on route 80. Coffee’s good, too.” Mulder gave him a significant look.

“I know the place,” Skinner said, his eyes soft. “I’ll be sure to stop in.”

XxXxXxXxXxX

When she was a girl, just up from Georgia, the stink of burning crosses still sharp in her nose, Rhonda Fitzsimmons befriended a wild doe with black-tipped ears.

The deer had a noticeable limp in her right foreleg, and would frequently bed down under the trees behind Rhonda’s uncle’s cabin with her small matriarchal herd. But when the other deer would wander off in the morning to search for food, Rhonda’s doe would stay put, sometimes lolling for the entirety of the day in the soft, fragrant needles of pine.

Rhonda would watch her from the back bedroom, thinking at first that the deer was just comfortable and lazy, but realizing, when the poor thing tried to stand, that she was in fact hurt, and wasn’t moving on with the other deer because she couldn’t .

The girl recognized in the animal a familiar, as wounded as Rhonda was, equally as unable to move on. She named the doe Peaches, and imagined her fur was as soft as the stone fruit from the fields Rhonda had so recently and regretfully left.

She began sneaking carrots and apples from the crisper drawer, wilting celery, various vegetable odds and ends that she quietly plucked from her uncle’s composting pile, and took them all out behind the house, walking softly and quietly, and throwing them as best she could through the stands of trees toward the injured deer.

The other deer, if they were around, would leap from their beds as Rhonda approached, their tails flung up to reveal the white danger! signal intrinsic to the species. But Peaches, unable to leap like her sisters, would remain prone, her ears swiveling, following Rhonda’s every move, her glistening black muzzle bobbing, sipping the air for information hidden from less sensitive noses.

Rhonda would then back away respectfully and turn to go back inside, watching from her window as the deer would slowly and shakily rise to her feet and limp to whatever Rhonda had left for her, chewing lazily with her right leg pulled awkwardly up, the smooth cloven hoof an arrow pointed at her underbelly.

Peaches and her herd would sometimes disappear for days or weeks at a time, and Rhonda would wake in the night, squinting into the dark, trying to see through the inky black night, convinced the deer had finally succumbed to her injuries. And then, at times she would least expect it, like a soft, rare apracity after long gray winter days, there Peaches would be; thin but whole, her liquid eyes seeming to search out Rhonda’s.

The deer, her leg injury never quite mending, would go on to visit Rhonda for two more improbable years before finally disappearing from the mountain and Rhonda’s life, as though she had waited for the girl to heal where she could not. As though she was a quiet answer to a silent prayer.

Rhonda remembered Peaches now, as she watched the mother and her young son, reminding herself that the chances for a miracle, though infinitesimally small, were not exactly zero.

XxXxXxXxXxX

When Agent Bryson walked in, Mulder pinched the bridge of his nose. He tried to recall if he’d ever seen an episode of Law & Order that took place entirely in an interrogation room. He would have turned it off.

He wondered if the Sheriff department’s door had even shut on Skinner and the rest of his team before Bryson barged into the interview room carrying a thick Manila file folder and the acrid scent of stale cigarette smoke.

The man looked Mulder over eagerly, which irritated him to the point that he casually looked down at his wrist, as if the booking officer hadn’t taken his watch.

“Mr. Mulder, my name is Special Agent Bryson with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I believe we were once eligible to share the same credit union.”

Mulder ignored him, again looked at his wrist, then rubbed the strip of pale skin.

“You have somewhere else to be?” Bryson asked, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice.

Mulder shrugged. “Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.”

“I’ll say. You’re in some trouble.”

Again, Mulder shrugged, sensing that his blasé attitude was getting under the other agent’s skin, and drawing a small amount of satisfaction from the offense.

Bryson narrowed his eyes and lowered himself into the chair Skinner had vacated.

“You no longer have the assistant director to protect you.”

“That much is obvious,” Mulder finally spoke. “I’m going to exercise my right to remain silent if it’s all the same to you.”

It was Bryson’s turn to shrug. The other man studied him for a long minute and then opened the file in front of him, scanning the contents for far longer than he needed to. Mulder was willing to bet the guy knew that file inside and out.

Finally the other man flipped the folder closed and sighed, looking at Mulder frankly.

“How about we both stop pretending that we don’t know exactly what each other wants.”

The buzzing from the overhead lights seemed to get louder, and Mulder cracked his neck before speaking. “You’re willing to admit that you have no interest whatsoever in justice? That you’re merely a tool in the machinations of more powerful men? That’s unexpected, but refreshing.”

“I’m talking about what we both want, Mulder,” Bryson said. “And only some of those wants are at cross purposes.” The man looked at him as if willing him to get on his page. Finally he asked, “How’s Scully?”

At the mention of her name, his stomach rocked in upheaval, but Mulder remained stonily silent.

“Dry climate, high altitude,” Bryson went on. “Either of you ever get vertigo? Short of breath?…Nosebleeds?”

His inflection on the last word made Mulder’s blood run cold.

“We don’t really care about you, Mulder,” the man went on, not knowing what kind of storm he’d ignited in Mulder’s heart. “And though Scully has proved useful in the past, her contributions… Well, we have what we need from her. In fact, I could probably be talked into dropping the charges against you. Letting the two of you walk free.”

Wants, Bryson had said. The bastard wasn’t off the mark.

“In exchange for what?” Mulder asked, already knowing the answer.

“I have two…colleagues…with a very interesting story about something that happened to them in a little boy’s bedroom across the state line in Montana.”

With the birth of William, Mulder’s wants had shifted. Seismically. With the same kind of tumult currently running roughshod through his heart. In a flash of rage, Mulder pulled on the chains that secured his handcuffs to the floor in impotent fury. Bryson had the temerity to laugh.

“William’s number had been called, but his priority stature has gone through the roof, Mulder. The next time we come for your boy, we’ll be sending a lot more than just four mercenaries.” All pretense that Bryson was an upstanding federal officer whose sole aspiration was the interest of justice was gone.

Mulder tried to stand, but the chains held his hands at knee-level, forcing him to stoop. He wanted to throw himself at the agent, could understand why chained dogs still hurled themselves against their restraints. He wanted to bark, growl, slaver, rip the man’s throat out with his teeth. If Bryson noticed, he didn’t care.

“The forces coming to take William will be like the very hand of God. People will get hurt.” ‘People,’ Bryson said. Scully , Mulder heard.

Mulder dropped heavily back into the metal chair, beads of sweat on his upper lip.

“Bring the child to me, and nothing will happen to Scully. You’ll both be free to go, to get back to your lives in DC, if you want. See your families. Reacquire your assets. No more running.”

Mulder’s mind reeled, but Bryson continued to sit there casually.

“The two of you can make other babies, Mulder,” he then went on. “You’ve certainly had a lot of practice lately.”

Blood was rushing through his head in such a roar, he barely heard the viscous words coming out of his own mouth.

“Fuck you.”

Bryson shrugged. “Suit yourself. Juries don’t take kindly to kidnappers. Though it will take months to bring you to trial. Lot can happen. Life has a way of…metastasizing.”

Mulder had to breathe through his nose to calm down. He had to remind himself; they had sent the chip to Agent Doggett when they’d removed it from Scully’s neck. Should anything turn sideways with her health, she would go to him and they could reimplant it if necessary.

William would need to separate from her until they could figure out a solution, but, Mulder hoped, Bryson’s threats were more empty than he realized. Mulder could withstand anything so long as he knew Scully and William were out there somewhere safe. He could withstand separation. He could withstand death itself.

He’d done it before.

“Tell me where they are.”

Mulder breathed deeply, regained his composure. “Over my dead body,” he said.

Bryson sucked on his teeth, nodded.

“You’re far more useful to me alive.”

When Mulder didn’t respond, the smile that crawled up Bryson’s face was serpent-like, revealing wide, brilliantly white teeth.

“Wherever you are, Dana Scully is never far away,” he explained. “And I know your son is with her. She gave him up once. She won’t make that mistake again. She’s terribly predictable.”

Dana Scully was many things, Mulder thought. ‘Predictable’ didn’t make his top twenty.

“So what does that make me?” he wanted to know.

“Bait,” Bryson said, flashing an incisor.

[noritaro]

What's your favorite Batman media?

OH BOY!!! BATMAN AUTISM TIME!!!

I have a list booboo cakes- Most of my favourite Batman media I mostly put emphasis on the villains, cause admittedly I don't give 2 shits about the Batfamily (lmfao)

we gonna ignore comic books for this, like obviously I fucking love comic books but theres... so much, just soooo much, 80+ years of history man, I've read the golden age shit

for starters- BTAS, the obvious ya know? It's a super good cartoon that added so much to the Batman mythos, I mean... Look what it did to Mr. Freeze! Such a good introduction and starting point for new Batman fans

the Arkhamverse games I'm always a little slut for- and of course, emphasis on the villains I lose my mind over Eddie, Jonathan, Joker and well all of them really!

60s Batman, it's camp and goofy! What more could I possibly even want?

couple Asian made (albeit it's very little) Batman media, I enjoyed Ninja Batman, One Operation Joker, Batman Justice Buster, Batman of Shanghai... ACTUALLY- DID YOU KNOW BATMAN HAD A CROSSOVER WITH A GACHA GAME? SINoALICE! I think it's neat that DC is willing to experiment with their IPs and let them run wild like that

[boyfridged]

i have talked a lot about the classist undertones (or rather several evident classist strands) in the general plotline, esp. re: politics and crime, but i think something worth paying more attention to is also just the image of jay, both in canon and fanon. i will be talking mostly about the latter here because somehow fans (who often pose as progressive and empathetic) make it even worse. some of it might seem inconsequential in isolation, but the broad set of headcanons and assumptions about him create such an ugly, grim sight that i genuinely can't interact with most of fan content at this point.

to start with: how widespread is casual referring to jason as a street-rat (127 works on ao3 even use it as a tag), which is an obviously derogatory term? many writers are so deadset on picturing him as a kid as "feral" or "wild," unpredictable, quick to anger, someone with years of experience in street fighting (? laughable), casually disrespectful to everyone around even when in a safe environment, going out of his way to annoy people-- and i'm sorry but i just have to presume that some of you are not normal about homeless children. do you realise that this a 1:1 depiction of how bigots usually talk about kids on the streets (and how they treat them)? and the thing is, it's of course not an issue if a child is any of these things, they're children-- it's the projection of that stereotype that is highly alarming. because the pre-death (80s) depiction of jay is by no means perfect, but it is a fact that he acts in a similar way only in extreme circumstances. (no comment ab the retcons at this time, you all already know what i think.)

it's not much better when it comes to post-res jay (especially that dc does not give much to work with), but for instance, the association of a very particular concept of masculinity with him... everything starting from the skillset (again, the whole "street" fighting style? as if it was not described as acrobatic numerous times?) to jokes regarding his hygiene-- the over-exaggerated accent, 570+ (i just checked) works in "rated T for jason's language" (despite very little evidence in canon that he swears more than any other character, if at all)- and oh, he might read and even cook, but it's so often written like some quirk, another joke, because it stands in opposition to the picture at large.

and as i said, these things matter little in isolation and are not inherently bad by themselves. it's the conflation of all of it that is despicable. it's not even a character anymore, it's a cardboard cutout of how upper-class folks think of the poor. get better soon

[kneeslapworthy]

What I think TMBS characters’ Spotify Wrapped would look like based entirely on vibes and my incredibly biased opinions:

Reynie

Reynie is introspective, the most openly emotional one in the group (i mean he literally declared how much he loves hugs in the S2 finale) and I 100% headcanon him as a hopeless romantic. We also know that he really likes literature and language, so I think he would like music that puts a lot of emphasis on lyrics. The first obvious artists I could think of were artists like Taylor Swift or maybe Conan Gray, and while he would probably enjoy these artists, I get the feeling he probably leans more indie-folk (because he’s a hipster and we all know it). Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and maybe even Bob Dylan would suit Reynie’s confessional and heart-on-his-sleeve sort of attitude. For his more casual listens I could see him enjoying the likes of Fleetwood Mac, The Zombies and for more modern music perhaps Lucy Dacus, Flyte and Fleet Foxes. Now Reynie is definitely the type of person to have a ton of hyper-specific playlists for every single emotion he’s feeling and he also makes playlists for his friends and family all the time (he’s the sole cause behind Mr Benedict’s embarrassing 80s synth-pop phase). Ms Perumal plays a lot of Norah Jones, Duffy and Amy Winehouse so naturally, that trickles down into the bottom tracks of Reynie’s Spotify Wrapped list. 

Top artist: Fleetwood Mac

Top track: Wild World - Cat Stevens

Sticky

While I could easily dismiss Sticky by saying that he probably only listens to classical music because that’s what smart people do that’s boring so let’s. have. fun. Given Sticky’s anxiety and overall state of mind, I think he would enjoy artists like Leith Ross and Orla Gartland whose music he can easily relate to. I also think he’s the kind of person who listens to everything his friends (though mostly Reynie let’s be honest) recommend, so his Spotify Wrapped would be a weird mix of everything from show tunes (thanks to Mr Benedict) to metal to hip-hop. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Sticky likes to listen to male manipulator music, but not because he’s actually like that, he just appreciates the music (plus some “cool” people at Boatwright recommended it to him). So The Smiths, Radiohead and dare I say Weezer would be on his playlists. I feel like Sticky is the type of person who reads/studies in complete silence, but for those moments when he wants some ambience I can totally see him pulling out some nice jazz records. Sticky likes to be organized, so he has playlists divided by genre and artist (though not so much the overall mood of the music). 

Top artist: Orla Gartland

Top track: Back To The Old House - The Smiths 

Kate

My headcanon is that most of the music Kate knows is from the circus where every night they’d get together and play on some janky DIY instruments and out-of-tune guitars (Kate would play a washboard or kazoo. argue with the wall). So when she finally gets the chance to listen to recorded music, she naturally gravitates towards what she recognizes. This ends up being a lot of classic rock like The Rolling Stones, AC/DC and of course Joan Jett & the Blackhearts as well as more folk-style musicians like Bob Dylan and The Mamas & The Papas. I can also see her and Milligan sitting together out on the farm and enjoying a Bob Dylan or Patsy Cline record together. Because of this, Kate doesn’t listen to a lot of newer music, but like Sticky, she’d be open to most genres and whatever her friends recommend. As a result, I think Kate would have the widest range of genres on her Spotify Wrapped. On the one hand, I feel like she’d be drawn to Florence + The Machine and Odie Leigh, but I can also picture her sitting in one of the apple trees at the farm blasting some The Cranberries or Green Day when she’s feeling extra angsty. Maybe even something more Soul/R&B like Al Green and Lauryn Hill? Despite this large variety, Kate would also be the type of person to have just one playlist titled “Kate’s Playlist” that contains like a thousand songs (it hasn’t been edited in four years and she skips most of the songs). 

Top artist: The Rolling Stones

Top track: Crimson and Clover - Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, 

Constance

Given Constance’s vocal distaste for rhyming poetry, I get the feeling that she would have an equally vocal distaste for music. She’d call it “grating noise for simpletons” or something, but Mr Benedict gets her a Spotify account anyways because he just knows. And indeed, when no one’s around, Constance will blast some aggressively juvenile pop and dance around her room, because ultimately, she’s still a child. I feel like she would also love The Oh Hellos (who don’t fit into the “aggressively juvenile pop”-category, but still) and their storytelling. We do learn that Constance does appreciate art, so I think an artist with a particularly striking voice like Leontyne Price or Luciano Pavarotti (both Opera singers) would move her to tears. Overall, however, I feel like Constance doesn’t listen to a whole lot of music and when she does she doesn’t pay much mind to the artist. She also refuses to have any playlists (except for the ones she’s created by accident). 

Top artist: Honestly, who knows (in my heart of hearts i want to say Carly Rae Jepsen just to be chaotic) 

Top track: Soldier, Poet, King - The Oh Hellos

Bonus! SQ (because i love my son) 

Much like himself, SQ would like music that’s softer and sad as hell. The first to come to mind are Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver and Gregory Alan Isakov (and I know for a fact that SQ listens to Phoebe Bridgers and Boygenius). But I could also see artists like Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and The Smiths with their more upbeat melancholia be added to his playlists (along with any song about having a complicated relationship with your father/parent). Apart from that one cursed scene in S2, we don’t see Curtain enjoying any music, but I can definitely see him making sure that SQ doesn’t listen to anything he deems “unsophisticated” or “vulgar” (so no Rage Against The Machine for SQ unfortunately). When Curtain and SQ do listen to music together, it’s often classical music when they’re sitting in silence together in Curtain’s office. Since SQ is a very creative person, I can see him being drawn to more experimental stuff like Björk, Radiohead or Kino. 

Top artist: Sufjan Stevens 

Top track: Should Have Known Better - Sufjan Stevens

[wonderlesscomics]

Batman: Three Jokers (Geoff Johns & Jason Fabok)

Issues # 1-3

Read January 2024

Story: 9/10

I’ll never forget when I was young reading the finale of the Geoff Johns New 52 Justice league run and watching Batman sit on the möbius chair and asking the question “What’s the identity of the joker” and the answer later revealed to be their was actually three. Wow that answer led to so many questions and it took soooo long for us to finally have the answer and all I can say is that it was worth the wait. I truly love this book. Geoff Johns pays off on the wild claim of three jokers in a way that isn’t cheesy or backs down from the bold thesis. He doesn’t spin it to make his job easier, he puts three jokers in Gotham and makes it work. While the interaction between the jokers is rich and fun, and the mysterious plot that sends Batman on a chase through his history with the joker is intriguing and twisting, the strength of the book is actually found in the bat family members helping with the job. Barbara and Jason hard carry the emotional weight of this story as the two individuals who have been traumatized the most by the clown prince of crime. We get to watch these broken people respond differently to the swelling emotions brought back by the terrible revelations in the book and see what makes each character special. Geoff John at the core, understands these characters and doesn’t back off to fit his plot, he lets them be themselves in a fucked up story that triggers them both.

Art: 9.5/10

As I was reading this book all I can think is Jason understands how to make a book feel classic. His art is nostalgic and familiar for long time fans while still being modern and fresh. His art is timeless however, it could have been drawn in the 80’s, 90’s or 2000’s. His art allows you to put the story in whichever era of Batman you personally identify with. You can read the book as a sequel to the killing joke, or death in the family and you would seamlessly believe they were of the same era. Even his character designs are sharp and bold. He allows Jason to be handsome and Barbara to be beautiful. But none the less his characters are strong, confident and triumphant. Jason Fabok draws heroic figures of myth. His art stands out as more than just another serial issue, but as a historic and will be cherished for decades.

Special Notes:

- Batgirl and Jason are special in this book and some of the best interpretations of the characters.

- The jokers are all unique and easily identifiable which is really hard. Shoutout to their designs and personalities

- Barbara is gorgeous in this book!

- I love the ending a lot, a beautiful meaning and an answer to if Batman knows the identity of the Joker.

Overall Rating: 9/10

This book will stand the test of time and I will find myself retreating to this quick read once a year for the rest of my life. The story begs you to check it out and the art makes you stay and admire it. A well told tight story that keeps you guessing and emotionally engaged. Art that makes you stare at individual panels longer than you have at most books. A piece of DC history was made with this book and I’ll continue to revere it as such.

[hey-have-you-heard]

Hey, Have You Heard These 50 Tracks from 2023?

Another year comes to a close and the music lover pulls up their trusty spotify playlist to document the high points of their year in music. You know the drill by now but in case you're new here... Songs are in alphabetical order (there is no internal rating to the 51) but if I had to choose a single song for everyone to listen to, it would be "Why Am I Alive Now", please listen to that track if nothing else. A Spotify playlist of the included songs is linked below for your listening pleasure

Fontaines DC - ' Cello Song Kicking things off with the only cover song on the list, Grian Chatten and band spin Nick Drake's song into something entirely their own, paying homage to Nick Drake's songwriting whilst pulling in the intricacies of their own unique sound and appeal.

Boygenius - $20 Screw star-signs and wizard school houses, which member of Boygenius do you align yourself with? I'm a Julien Baker stan but I adore them all, especially when their voices and styles are weaving in out of each-other in rapturous noise like this.

XL Life - Baby Steps Hardcore and punk has had a great year, a really great year, and XL Life have been a standout part of that. Backed up by a guest verse by Bob Vylan's own Bobby Vylan, Baby Steps is bursting with soul and emotion, driven by breakneck drums and heart-on-sleeve positivity

100 Gecs - Billy Knows Jamie 10,000 Gecs (the much anticipated follow up to 2019's 1000 Gecs) truly gave us the as-promised 10 times as many gecs, if a Gec is a unit of measurement for what can only be referred to as wild-genre-fuckery. Billy Knows Jamie gives us full on Bizkitesque nu-metal, including record scratches, a bass line Fieldy would be proud of and a rapid descent into utter chaos.

Algiers, Billy Woods, Backxwash - Bite Back Bite back is a masterpiece of ever-building tension, Carpenterian synths weave the track together as one musical idea gives way to another. With every new phrase and trade-off between vocalist, the threads pull tauter and tauter. The switch up at 3:10 still gives me chills every time I hear it.

Glass Beach - the CIA My favourite theatre kid emo's are back and doing what they do best, which is whatever the hell they feel like. You know when all the 70s prog rock bands fell into the 80s and needed to get radio-play so they fell into this weird sort of choppy watered down down art-pop sound (e.g. Yes)? This feels like that, but there's no actual need to conform, so Glass Beach are still free to get as weird with it as they want, whenever they want.

Blood Command - Decades Deccades is a very bad representation of Blood Command as a band (at this point I'm unsure if a good representation of the band exists), but it's a very good song. Hardcore and "Death pop" is out, R&B is in. Reverb soaked synths and horns, skittery hi-hats, layered vocals and lyrics about lost love and the Heavens Gate cult.

Liturgy - Djennaration I'll be the first to admit that Liturgy are an acquired taste (the first time I saw them live it made me feel physically ill), but if you can put on some headphones, turn up the volume and lose yourself in Liturgy's "Transcendental Black Metal" there is no other feeling quite like it in music.

Kesha - The Drama The continual evolution of Kesha's sound has been a fascinating thing to watch ever since Tik Tok put her on the brat pop map back in 2009, each album cycle has seen her stripping back elements of character, delivering ever rawer and more honest depictions of self. The Drama pulls away from pop almost entirely, what starts as a Lorde-like slow ballad tumbles into a nightmare-collage of upbeat synths, a circus show of theatrical excess as Kesha's desparately laments on a loss of faith in humanity and self. The song ends on an absurd mix of housecats and Ramones, oh the drama of it all.

Fever Ray - Even It Out Even It Out may not be the technically best song on Radical Romantics, but the idea of Karin Dreijer teaming up with Trent Reznor to make a gleefully unhinged song about violently attacking a child is just too funny to me. The rest of the album is also incredible and well worth a listen.

Follow You - Saint Agnes Oh, hey, speaking of Trent Reznor, Saint Agnes channel Nine Inch Nails on the massive distortion drenched choruses of this stand out track from Bloodsuckers. Lead singer Kitty's vocals soar over wailing guitars and crunching bass, this is the sound of a band triumphing through adversity.

Johnny Booth - Full Tilt I remember seeing a comment when this first released that summed up how ifelt about it perfectly. "This has slap fucks". Yes, selppin2, I couldn't of put it better myself. Johnny Booth have been consistently hitting it out the park for the past few years and this is no exception, absolutely brutal stuff.

Creeper - Further Than Forever Creeper's Sanguivore is an album to be devoured in it's entirety, I couldn't choose a single song so this is merely a goth-punk-opera overture. A nine minute long homage to the theatrical tendencies of Jim Steinman. If you enjoy any part of this, Sanguivore is a must listen for you.

Crosses - Ghost Ride Chino Moreno swaps out the rumbling wall of guitars of Deftones for pulsing bass synths and sparse electronic drums with the second album from his side project with Far's Shaun Lopez. Ghost Ride is a sultry slow build that crashes into industrial-pop(?) choruses.

Idles - Grace Idles (to my surprise) were my most listened to band of last year, and if Grace is a sign of things to come on Tangk, they're in with a shot for 2024 as well. Grace finds Joe Talbot swapping out the political battering ram of a growl he's employed previously for a soulful tone, a message of peace and love, and its hauntingly beautiful to behold. No God, no king, love is the thing.

BENEE - Green Honda You may remember BENEE from tiktok's 2019 supahit Supalonely, she's still writing bops. Two middle fingers up, leave you in the rearview, bops.

Free Refills - Grounded What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good bassline, and this is a great bassline.

Pendulum, Bullet For My Valentine - Halo (Matt Tuck Rework) On his rework of Halo, Matt Tuck keeps all the energy of the original mix but ups the aggression. This is the sound of Pendulum at their heaviest and best.

Tokky Horror, Scottish Gabber Punk - HAMMER 2 THE FACE (Scottish Gabber Punk Remix) Speaking of energy and aggression... it doesn't get much more energy and aggression than this, hammer 2 the face is a fitting title for the brutality of this track.

MSPAINT - Hardwired MSPAINT are a hardcore punk band with a notable lack of guitar, the instrumentation instead filled out with colourful synths. The result is a unique and engaging sound unlike anything else in the genre.

Empire State Bastard - Harvest ESB are my kind of supergroup, formed of Biffy Clyro's Simon Neil, Oceansize's Mike Vennart and Slayer's Dave Lombardo (yes, you read that right). Simon Neil is delivering career best vocal performances, Mike Vennart is stirring up unholy hell on guitar and Dave Lombardo is doing what Dave Lombardo does best.

Alice Longyu Gao - Hëłłœ Kįttÿ I didn't think we could get more unhinged than last years MONK, with it's thrash metal guitar and vib ribbon solo, but here we are in the year of our lord 2023 and I'm listening to car clown horns. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Bob Vylan - He's a Man Do y'all remember the Lindsay Lohan Freaky Friday movie? There was a great song in it called Take Me Away... anyway, I forget why I mentioned that, but this song is really fun.Great cheeky lyrics and love that guitar riff.

Fall Out Boy - Hold Me Like A Grudge This may just be a nostalgia pull, but that intro transported me back to hearing Dance, Dance for the first time. Hold Me Like A Grudge does a masterful job of pulling together elements of FOBs classic sound and their more recent poop sensibilities that has had me enjoying their sound in a way I haven't since Infinity On High

Evie Enby - Homies Oops, how did this get in here? Please appreciate the one note guitar solo.

FIZZ - I Just Died My general lack of enthusiasm for The Beatles is fairly well documented by this point, but one of the best things they did for pop music was use the clarinet on When I'm Sixty Four. Well good news, I no longer have to listen to The Beatles to get my clarinet fix. Now that the Beatles reference for this year's list is done.. I just died is a song about an absolutely mortifying experience delivered with great mirth. It's a fantastic, sing-along-in-the-shower bop, and have I mentioned the clarinet solo?

CLT DRP - I Put My Baby To Sleep (It's pronounced Clit Drip) What can I say, another explosive, genre defying, track by one of the best bands in the world. Now go listen to the entirety of Nothing Clever, Just Feelings.

Orla Gartland - Kiss Ur Face Forever Joyous, peppy and "let's play a game of emotional monopoly, in the name of monogamy" may be the best couplet I've heard this year. It's just fun, so much fun.

Bring Me The Horizon - LosT When LosT first dropped, I referred to it as the geccification of BMTH, I meant that in the best possible way. I really enjoy how the hyper-pop elements lift this track up. "The next time that I open up to someone will be my autopsy" is one of the finest Oli Sykes-isms we've had in a long time.

Swans - No More Of This Okay, so the actual Swans track that should be on this list is The Beggar Lover (Three) but apparently putting an uncompromising, nigh impenetrable, 43 minute long epic in the middle of a playlist is terrible for retention, and I'm a coward. But if you have a spare 50 minutes, go give it a listen.

Pupil Slicer - No Temple Pupil Slicer continue to prove themselves to be one of the most exciting bands in Mathcore. Pushing against the boundaries of genre in a genre where pushing against boundaries is a core philosophy, No Temple is, according to the band, the heaviest song they've ever written. The bass guitar work is an exceptional standout for me here as it pushes against the rest of the song.

Carly Rae Jepsen - Psychedelic Switch With every CRJ album project comes a B-sides album, and with every B-sides album comes an absolute banger. Psychedelic Switch is undoubtedly this for the Loneliest Time/Loveliest Time project. You'd be forgiven for thinking Daft Punk themselves reunited to produce this french disco flavoured bop.

Soft Play - Punk's Dead Who the fuck are Soft Play? Sound like a bunch of lefty snowflakes. I've missed these boys, doing this kind of thing. The Robbie Williams feature is inspired.

Chappell Roan - Red Wine Supernova Red Wine Supernova is sexy, self-assured, feel-good, sapphic fun. It's a testament to how good a song is that lyrics like "I heard you like magic, I've got a wand and a rabbit" doesn't detract from it, but actually elevates it's effortless charm.

JAAW - Rot JAAW are an industrial metal "supergroup" formed of members of Therapy, Three Trapped Tigers, Sex Swing and Biglad. That is likely mostly gibberish to the average music listener, but to a niche few, it's a very exciting prospect. What it sounds like is swelling, tumultuous walls of noise, tortured screams, screeching guitars and pulsing distorted bass. Catharsis through noise.

Better Lovers - Sacrificial Participant More supergroup! Greg Puciato teams up with ex-members of Every Time I Die and Will Putney (of Fit For an Autopsy). I was devastated by the split of ETID, (off the back of the phenomenal Radical adn jsut before I was due to see them live), but Better Lovers is one hell of a silver lining. Puciato's energetic vocals bounce wildly off of the erratic musicianship that was the cornerstone of ETID's sound. It's a perfect match on record and is even better live.

Architects - Seeing Red Bless Architects. They're a band that are truly a victim of their own success, as they've tried to pull their sound and ethos in new directions it's been met with a huge amount of negativity from their own fanbase. Seeing Red is a reaction to this. "You want heavy? Here's heavy. Are you happy now?". Blegh.

Teen Mortgage - Sick Day Sick Day is a 2 minute punk blitz about how you are worth so much more than your labour and how having a cute cat you want to look at is a perfectly valid reason to stay at home. Capitalism 0 - Cats 1.

Purity Ring, Black Dresses - Shines Purity Ring and Black Dresses are both Canadian electronic duos and that's about where the similarities stop, but that just makes this collaboration all the more interesting. There's so much going on here, the chaotic harsh frenetic noise of Black Dresses, Ada Rook's screams, the twinkling synths of Purity Ring and sing-song melodies of Megan James. Somehow it pulls together to create something of true beauty in its own weird way.

Dream Nails - Sometimes I Do Get Lonely, Yeah Dream Nails take on the rising issue of incel culture and red-pill ideology, with grace and empathy. Pointing fingers not at individuals but at the systems and powers that enable and create these pipelines to hatred and bigotry. It's a bold and challenging idea, executed superbly.

Baby Dave - Sounds Good When a fan sends you an unhinged voice message out of the blue offering you a bite suit and dogs to shoot a music video, obviously the thing to do is make a song out of it, then take them up on their offer and use it as the video for that song. There's a great OPM era The Streets vibe to this track that plays off nicely of the grounded reality of its subject.

Sleep Token - The Summoning Sleep Token do the impossible, they make prog-metal (the unsexiest of all genres) , undeniably sexy. Nowhere is this clearer than on The Summoning, a 6-and-a-half minute epic of a track with multiple time signature changes and tonal flips, that somehow still oozes with a swaggering sexuality throughout it's runtime. The out-of-nowhere funk switch up on the end of this track is perfection.

Lambrini Girls - Terf Wars Love those Lambrini Girls, they say what I'm thinking, and they say it loud.

Ezra Furman - Tether This one had me in floods of tears from the first listen. A classic string-laden piano ballad about inescapable pasts and the desire to cut yourself free from who and where you've been.

The St. Pierre Snake Invasion - That There's Fighting Talk This track does two things it builds and it STOMPS, like real "put on your heaviest boots and then strap lead weights to them because they need to be heavier" stomps. An industrial-mathcore floor-filler, the song crescendoes then continues to crescendo into ever greater insanity. Get Stomping.

Calva Louise - Third Class Citizen Calva Louise's sound has evolved so much since I first fell in love with the band listening to their 2017 debut single Getting Closer. Third Class Citizen has elements of Muse in it's bass-lines, stadium-sized guitar riffs and fizzing production. The vocals and lyrical content make it something altogether its own though, the palpable fury in vocalist Jess' voice as she demands "Respect, motherfucker" is real and visceral.

HEALTH - Unloved Off the back of their genre spanning, multi-release collaboration project, DISCO4, RAT WARS sees HEALTH back in a focused mode and delivering their heaviest album to date. Unloved is a moment of relative respite on the album though, a Depeche Mode tinged track, soaked in 80's reverb and ready for the goth club. HEALTH pull you into their world of misery and beauty with catchy hooks and pulsing bass.

Anohni and the Johnsons - Why Am I Alive Now This year saw the release of "My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross", Anohni's first studio album with her band since 2010's Swanlights. The abrasive electronics of her solo albums are traded in for warm soulful tones and a raw almost live-feeling instrumentation. It's a beautiful, deeply emotive, and incredibly present sounding album. Feeling as if you are being drawn into the recording process itself, Why Am I Alive Now? is an existential lament on finding purpose in a purposeless world, in navigating through suffering to find hope and love. On learning why to be, when it feels like the world is set on stopping you from being.

HMLTD - Wyrmlands THE WORM IS HERE! Wyrmlands is an example of one track on an album that should be listened to in its entirety. The Worm is a concept album at its most conceptual, eschewing genre and at times structure entirely in favour of narrative and ~vibes~. It's a dizzying disorientating listen, that will leave you' with more questions than answers, but thankful for making an attempt 're mind awash with unanswered questions and fresh ideas.

Billy Woods, Kenny Segal, Danny Brown - Year Zero Year Zero refers to an apocalyptic cultural reset. Society has reached a breaking point and we must start from scratch, everything before was for nothing. Billy Woods and Danny Brown play two different sides of the same coin. Woods, stony faced and deadly serious "My taxes pay police brutality settlements" is the herald of the end "Burn it down with us inside". Danny Brown, the manic joker, revelling in the freedom of a new world, rhyming Good Will Hunting with Cool Runnings and dropping bars about ice cream machines. It's a compelling way to deliver a narrative.

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

The Wild Bunch (18 Metal Masters) 1985 Heavy Metal / Thrash Metal / Glam Metal / Progressive Metal / Speed Metal / Hard Rock

Oh man, I swear that I'm about to go to my local thrift store to buy a denim jacket and then tear its sleeves off and start securing patches to it with safety pins after listening to this thing. Back in 1985, the cassette-only, New York-based ROIR label, in conjunction with Hit Parader Magazine, put out this ephemeral mid-80s snapshot of all things metal, from the glam to the prog to the speed to the thrash, and it just goes so satisfyingly hard, you guys 😤👊🤘. If you were a metalhead in the 80s, this feels like something you'd definitely pop into the tape deck of your boxy red sedan and then cruise on into your suburban high school's parking lot with, looking like a total badass with the volume cranked up and the windows rolled down. It's really such a whole goddamn vibe 😎.

A lot of folks rightfully make fun of most of the stupid and inane hair band material that ruled the Sunset Strip back in the 80s, and, outside of the thrashing big four of Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer—the latter three of whom appear on this album itself—that highly commercialized sound does really seem to have defined what 80s metal was for most people. But the heart of that enormous, MTV-aided boom really occurred a little after the release of this tape, so what you end up getting here is a bunch of sweet tunes that, unless 80s metal is already your domain, you probably haven't ever heard before.

And one really need look no further than this cassette's tone-setting opener for a prime example. "Pull the Trigger," by Seattle's Q5, is just a quintessential piece of some straight-up hard and heavy 1980s rock music if I've ever heard it before. These guys reunited in 2014, but prior to that, they had only managed to put out a pair of albums in the mid-80s. And on this particularly fierce tune from their debut LP, lead singer Jonathan Scott K. sports an impressive and passionately scratchy yell that smacks of a higher-pitched Brian Johnson from AC/DC. And, of course, the song also comes with a kick-ass guitar solo too.

Then, not too long after that, we get another band that also only put out a couple albums in the mid-80s before getting back together: a quintet of speed demons called Agent Steel, whose absolute fit of fury, "Taken by Force," should have you going totally ballistic by the time the back-to-back solos hit. It's just so utterly jaw-dropping what these guys were able to conjure up with all their energy in that one 🤯.

And then another fast gem on here happens to come from—say it with me now—yet another band that only blessed us with a pair of albums in the mid-80s before they ended up reuniting too: LA's Abattoir, who provide a swifter cover of one of speed metal's biggest ever commercial hits, "Ace of Spades," which is originally by the band that many regard to be the first ever in speed metal history, Motörhead. Basically, if you love the original version of this song, I don't really see how you couldn't love this newer one too. It's high-octane fuel for a flying-motorcycle-riding skeleton whose skull is perpetually on fire, which, in other words, means that it's a total banger 🔥.

So, outside of the dumb and tacky hair metal hits that the irony-poisoned side of me really can't help but love, I've never been much in the habit of actually listening to quality 80s metal before. But this little cassette tape here appears to have opened up something of a brand new world for me. I always assumed that there was good 80s metal out there outside of the big four, but I never really seemed to have found much of it; until now 🙂.

Highlights:

Q5 - "Pull the Trigger" Shok Paris - "Marseilles de Sade/Battle Cry" Agent Steel - "Taken by Force" Anthrax - "Metal Thrashing Mad" Megadeth - "Chosen Ones" Abattoir - "Ace of Spades"