#without actually writing the character.

[tachvintlogic]

Summary: Wes finds Nightwing after trying and failing to convince the police to do something about a metahuman trafficking ring after he's done all the detective work for them. Nightwing is so impressed that he offers Wes a job. Wes is not impressed with the pitch.

Words: 2462

“I knew it!”

There aren’t many things worse to hear than that when you’re without your mask in an alley you assumed was empty. NIghtwing turned to the sound and saw a tall, red-headed man with a camcorder who looked like he had no idea how dangerous being outside in Gotham was here at this time of night.

“Wes Weston, junior reporter for the Gotham Gazette,” he said offering a hand.

Nightwing hesitantly took it. “Nightwing, pleasure,” he said and then left go. “So I hope you understand the importance of keeping this quiet.”

“Oh course Mr. Grayson. I would say that you should be more careful about concealing your identity, but that advice would have been more useful years ago. Though there is something I want that you can help me with.”

“An exclusive interview?”

“No, actually. I don’t have a story that would need an interview from Dick Grayson or Nightwing, not yet anyway.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and held up it. “I’ve been investigating a metahuman trafficking ring that’s been operating in Gotham. So far I can link them to the disappearances of seven metahumans in the past two months, but I suspect that may be more. This is a basic summary of what I found.”

Nightwing took the paper and skimmed it. The evidence was compelling, for both the existence of the trafficking ring and their methods of operation. Mr. Weston even had narrowed down the most likely places they were operating out of. “Were you just carrying this around in the hopes you would run into us?”

“No, I just got back from going to the police about it. They didn’t care.”

“Why not?”

“Probably because none of the victims I’ve been able to link to trafficking were white.”

He would take to Gordon later to reprimand whoever it was Mr. Weston talked to. “Is this everything you have?”

“Nope. I can send you all my evidence if you have an email.”

“Yes, that would be useful.”

After saying their goodbyes and Wes left the alley, Nightwing put his mask back on. “Did you get all that Oracle?”

“Yep, check the building on 20 Avenue first, I’ll coordinate with the others to check the other locations they might be hiding.”

“You think it’s real?”

“He certainly is who he says he is. Proceed with caution in case it’s a trap.”

Nightwing smirked. “I always do.”

It ended up not being a trap. Dick and Helena scored the locations where the traffickers were holding people and rescued 15 people, but two of the victims that Wes had identified weren’t there. From Helena’s interrogation of the traffickers she found, they were already out of the city. It was disappointing, but the raid had given them plenty of leads, so it was only a matter of time before they found the rest.

Nightwing was resting up a few bruises he got while Oracle was following up on their leads and going through the information that Wes had emailed. Turns out he couldn’t fit everything he had onto one piece of paper.

“He was very thorough. He’s basically done half of my job for me,” said Oracle, “I can’t believe the police didn’t want to look at all this.” She took another sip of coffee. It was her fifth one in the last hour. There was a lot to go through.

“Their loss,” said Nightwing, “how optimistic are you that we’ll find the last two?”

“With a big enough team, we could probably take down their entire operation within a week. We’ll find them.”

“When it’s done I’m going to give him an interview as Nightwing about this. Kid deserves it.”

Oracle laughed. “You got that right. He reminds me a lot of Tim when he started. We could use him on the team.”

“Well if one of us is going to make that pitch, I’ll do a background check while you deal with all that.”

“Go right ahead.”

He started by searching up Wes Weston and found his LinkedIn profile. He got his start in reporting in highschool where he was part of the basketball team and the newspaper club. He went to college and got a bachelors in journalism and has been bouncing around different newspapers before landing in Gotham. Nothing unusual there. He looked at criminal history and found nothing of note.

Checking the headlines of things Wes had written, issues with discrimination against metahumans and sapient nonhumans was a common running theme, regardless of where he worked. Now for more personal stuff.

Wes Weston, full name West Weston, is the 3rd of 4 children. The first 3 were all named after cardinal directions though one changed his name, and they go by Kyle now. The 4th was a girl named Elle who was adopted when she was 12 years old and whose adoption records are sealed.

The father works as a patent lawyer while the mother’s employment has been more sporadic. Shortly after Wes was born, she was institutionalized for six months and dropped out of college. Digging a little bit deeper netted him an official diagnosis: schizophrenia.

Neither parent had a history of violent crime, and the mother was only institutionalized one other time, so Nightwing moved on to Wes’s hometown, Amity Park.

Amity Park had a few notable quirks. One was that many of the streets and buildings had ghost themed names, and it had a lot of places purported to be haunted. It also had a very low crime rate and an exceptionally low murder rate for a town its size. There was also a high metahuman population, and it was rated as being the least discriminatory towards metahumans, something the town itself was very proud of.

Nightwing could very easily imagine Wes being an amateur paranormal investigator, going into haunted houses looking for ghosts with his camcorder, being so outraged by the trafficking of metahumans that he investigated far beyond what anyone would expect of him, and being really boring in college because a lot of the fun drugs are a very bad idea for people at risk for schizophrenia.

“So how’s the background check going?”

“Comes from a decent family, standup citizen, and very into investigative journalism from a very early age,” said Nightwing, “is at risk of developing schizophrenia, but nothing suggests he has it.”

“He doesn’t. So, have you checked Bat’s profile on him?” said Oracle grinning.

Bats has a profile on him?” Nightwing checked the files from the Batcomputer remotely, and sure enough, there was a file with Wes’s name on it. Nightwing stared at it gobsmacked as he read through the list of vigilantes and superheroes that Wes apparently knew the secret identity of, often because he admitted it to their face.

Suddenly the fact that he bounced around new outlets made a lot more sense.

“Did you know about this?”

“I helped make it.”

“So you’ve already done a background check.”

Oracle chuckled. “Not a thorough one. Never needed to. He’s been just an annoyance until now.”

“Oh, well I'll add anything you haven’t already found. So how do you know this part?”

“Which part?”

Nightwing read off the profile. “Mr. Weston has an enormous difficulty with keeping secrets, but only in front of people who already know said secret because he doesn't believe he can do harm by telling someone something they already know. He is remarkably self-aware about his need to be seen as smart and seem impressive that results in him blurting out sensitive information.”

“That's because Weston told Bats that to his face.”

Nightwing was skimming through the unconfirmed list. Superman was on there. Suspected but has not yet been approached. “When was this?”

“Last week. After that, we asked around the Justice League and that is where the list you’re looking at came from.”

“I didn’t even know Captain Marvel had a secret identity. Is he a metahuman? A physic or mind reader, maybe?”

“Not that I know of. The rest of his family is fairly normal. The gene isn’t in his family history.”

“Interesting. You’re right about him being like Tim. This is like a more extreme version of how Tim became a Robin. He didn’t just figure out Batman, he’s figuring out everyone. His talent is wasted figuring out supers identities. There’s always more room for another detective.”

“Ask him during your interview. I doubt he’ll accept.”

“What makes you say that?”

Oracle shrugged. “Just a feeling.”

A week and a half later, Wes interviewed Nightwing about taking down the trafficking ring. They had found everyone that Wes had initially identified and many more from other cities and even other countries. The entire Justice League got involved rounding up the trafficking and their clients. It was quickly turning into huge operation, and over a hundred metahumans were found and rescued.

“So after you got the anonymous tip about the trafficking ring, what did you do?” asked Wes.

“You’re calling yourself an anonymous tipper?”

“It’s my story, I can call myself what I want.”

Nightwing laughed. “Okay, well after the ‘anonymous tip’ the other bats and I went to the locations we were told about, and it turned out they were right on the money on where the trafficking ring was operating in Gotham.” He went on to describe breaking in, beating up the traffickers, and rescuing the victims. They discussed the investigation and what would be appropriate to include in a news article.

“Afterward, we knew that we hadn’t found everyone again thanks to the anonymous tip, who later gave us a wealth of information about the trafficking ring and their operations in other cities, and from that jumping off point, we’ve been able to take down the entire organization and going after their clients.”

Wes smirked and scribbled down his answer. “So what do you think about how metahumans are treated by contemporary society, especially in light of this?”

“That’s a complicated question, isn’t it? Well, these traffickers clearly only saw their victims as tools and merchandise and not people. That definitely needs to change, or things like this are going to keep happening.”

“Did you know that metahumans are 100 times more likely to be kidnapped than any other demographics?”

Nightwing exhaled. “No, but that doesn’t surprise me.” He thinks he might’ve known that if he read some of Wes’s articles in full. “It makes me angry too, because I’m friends with many metahumans personally, and they and their kids shouldn’t have to live in fear of criminals like these traffickers, and I along with the Justice League are going to do everything we can to make the world safer for them and all people. And I can think of one person in particular who would be an essential asset to take down more people like these traffickers.”

Wes didn’t take the bait. “The metahumans that you know, do you know any that aren’t vigilantes or heroes?”

“Yes plenty,” said Nightwing.

“That aren’t in Arkham or that you know primarily from your civilian life?”

“A few,” said Nightwing slowly.

“Well, I ask because the public’s most visible representation of metahumans is from superheroes and supervillains, both seemingly larger than life figures. From many interviews I’ve made, the general public in many cities have a hard time conceptualizing metahumans to anything more down to earth or, well, human. The idea of metahumans as the victims as violent crime, rather than the perpetrators or the rescuers, is quite alien in the mainstream. Is that surprising to you?”

He… hadn’t really thought of that. “I don’t think the idea that metahumans can be victims is strange at all. Meta is not omnipotent, nor omniscient. Even my teammates who are metahuman have been captured or needed rescuing. A person doesn’t need to not have powers to be your average Joe, just like how you don’t need to have powers to be a hero. I don’t really know how to solve the issue of representation, but it’s definitely an important one.

“But I think that anyone with the drive to do what we do should do it, like the anonymous tipper without whom we couldn’t have stopped those traffickers.”

Wes dropped his pencil. “What?”

Nightwing leaned over in his chair. “Wes, you’re a great detective. If what you sent Oracle is any indication of your quality of work, I want you on my team.”

Wes laughed nervously. “Eh heh heh, no. No. No. Absolutely not.” He waved his arms in front of his himself just to emphasize his point.

“Wes, you have a real talent in detective work, and frankly it's wasted on being a mere ‘junior’ reporter for the Gotham Gazette.”

Wes scrunched up his face like he was offended. “No, I don’t want to be a vigilante. I can’t fight, like at all.”

“I’m not asking you to fight. Oracle doesn’t fight much, not anymore anyway. We can always use more detectives.”

“No offense, but I would rather quit my job at the Gotham Gazette and find work as a journalist in a different city,” he said and started packing his things. “So do you have anything else to add or can I consider this interview concluded?”

“I don’t have much else to say,” admitted Nightwing, “but you should send a message if you decide to reconsider.”

“I will not do that.”

“So how did the interview go?” asked Barbara.

“It went fine,” said Dick.

“Did he accept your offer?”

Dick sighed. “No, I think he’s going to job and leave the city.”

“Shame. I wonder where he’s going to end up next.”

Sometime later, long after Wes had quit his job at the Gotham Gazette and moved out of Gotham entirely, Dick was recuperating from his latest battle when he got a text from Barbara.

Barbara: Remember how you said that Wes was wasting his talent being a reporter?

Dick: Yes?

Barbara: He just got Luthor to admit that Superboy was made from Superman’s and his DNA.

Dick: WHAT

Barbara sent him a link to the news story. He watched Wes, who was now working at the Metropolis Star, shove a microphone in Luthor’s face and ask what should’ve been a ridiculous question if it wasn't right on the money. Then he saw Luthor’s reaction. The follow up questions. Luthor leaving. Wes’s little smirk just before he was out of frame as the camera followed Luthor.

The news correspondents were already speculating the meaning of this, that Superboy had two fathers one of which famously hated the other. There was no way they were going to let this go until there was an explanation. Luthor would never live this moment down.

Okay, maybe saying his talent was wasted was a bit too strong.

--------

This references 2 fics by me. One about Wes bouncing around different news outlets, and one where he gets Lex to basically admit that he is Superboy's father.

Short DPXDC Prompts #684

Wes Weston cannot believe it. He just saw Nightwing remove his mask in an alley. Does he inform Dick Grayson that he knows or does he keep it to himself?

[anneapocalypse]

So, just curious how many writers and creators will have to be forcibly outed by relentless harassment before we acknowledge that "This queer characters was written by a cishet person and that's why they're bad" is not good criticism.

[sparticus2000art]

I made the somewhat questionable decision to spend the last two days slapping out a bunch of character portraits to pop into a planning document for a personal project I’m working on!

So here’s a bunch of au sans portraits.

Woooooo

Nightmare and dream by jokublog

Eclipse’s concept by llamagoddessofficial , design by me

Horror by sourapplestudios

Cross by jakei

Dust by askdusttale

Error by loverofpiggies

Killer by rahafwabas

[jvlianbashir]

"the creator said in a reddit thread -" "the official twitter account posted that -" "the actors confirmed in a livestream that -"

i don't care and that's not real to me. put it in the text.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Turtle Takedown Teamwork.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[epiphainie]

i've just finished my s7 rewatch and it's kinda so funny to me how much discourse people created over every bucktommy interaction when their whole arc boils down to tommy being patient and vulnerable with buck and showing up for him. like when you are not wearing shipper goggles under the name of "analysis" and don't try to reverse-engineer every word and look and shot with utmost bad faith, that's what it is. a simple and sweet story of a new exciting relationship with a guy who's understanding and willing to show up. literally the two things buck needs from a relationship but never had with his previous love interests. they are kinda sickeningly sweet and well-communicating actually lol

[rema-rin]

Y'all know what, I've been progressively amassing a collection of art, doodles and shitposts all surrounding one of our ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaigns // aka I've had character brainrot for a while// and I think Tumblr might actually be a good site to try and start figuring out how to even just,, start, posting about it in a semi-cohesive manner - it'll be quite self-indulgent. So. I'll be tagging content and art related to this campaign as "CA Campaign" since the server dedicated to it is named "Capitalist Apocalypse"

[jonsnowunemploymentera]

And remember kids, the next time someone tells you, "George R. R. Martin wouldn't make Jon Snow the typical fantasy hero because that's cliche".....

Oh yes he would!

One viewer wants to know what character would you play (on the show)? GRRM: If I could magically clap my hands and become a different person, it would be cool to play Jon Snow who's much more of the classic hero. Everybody wants to be the classic hero! ABC Interview, 2014

GRRM: And the character I’d want to be? Well who wouldn’t want to be Jon Snow — the brooding, Byronic, romantic hero whom all the girls love. Meduza Interview, 2017

In fact he already has ☺️

[transmascutena]

the poor little meow meow-ifictation of saionji in this fandom has got to stop i can't take it any more

[unisongakikoeru]

this tweet helped me realize that yes, when mizi appears and till reacts positively to her, he does seem panicked (or at least something similar) from...losing control of the situation. because yes luka is someone who likes to have control, isn't he? especially on stage, because...it's the only place he can have, feel this control. this pretty much confirms it, already telling us a lot about luka's character

toying with mizi gave him control. toying with till gave him control. and it may explain why he looks somewhat ecstatic(?) in this frame— he's relishing in it

(let's also not forget if he loses, he literally dies, which makes it an easy motivation to win, even if it means playing dirty. let's also not forget he literally doesn't know anyone else aside from hyuna, so he also simply doesn't care about them, why would he?)

it also ties back to how he wants to make hyuna his, have control over her to protect her— just like how the aliens "protect" him by having control over him. it's...kinda all he knows

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my favorite parts of phase 2 (and indeed one of the few moments I resonated with IDW Prowl) was when the neutrals were coming back to Cybertron and Prowl said that he refused to let Autobots be pushed aside and overruled after they were the ones who fought for freedom for 4 million years (the exact wording escapes me atm).

And I mean, that resentment still holds true even once the colonists come on bc like. As much as it's true that Cybertron's culture is fucked up, and as funny as it can be to paint Cybertronians as a bunch of weirdos who consider trying to kill someone as a common greeting not important enough to hold a grudge over.... The colonists POV kind of pissed me off a lot of times, as did the narrative tone/implications that Cybertronians are forever warlike and doomed to die by their own hands bc it just strikes me as an extremely judgemental and unsympathetic way to deal with a huge group of people with massive war PTSD and political/social tensions that were rampant even before the war?

Like, imagine living in a society rife with bigotry and discrimination where you get locked into certain occupations and social strata based on how you were born. The political tension is so bad there's a string of assassinations of politicians and leaders. The whole planet erupts into an outright war that leads (even unintentionally) to famine and chemical/biological warfare that destroys your planet. Both sides of the war are so entrenched in their pre-war sides and resentment for each other that this war lasts 4 million years and you don't even have a home planet any more. Then your home planet gets restored and a bunch of sheltered fucks come home and go "ewww why are you so violent?? You're a bunch of freaks just go live in the wilderness so that our home can belong to The Pure People Who Weren't Stupid And Evil Enough To Be Trapped In War" and then a bunch of colonists from places that know nothing about your history go "lol you people are so weird?? 🤣🤣 I don't get why y'all are fighting can't you just like, stop??? Oh okay you people are just fucked up and evil and stupid then" ((their planets are based on colonialism where their Primes wiped out the native populations btw whereas the Autobots and OP in particular fought to save organics. But that never gets brought up as a point in their favor)) as if the damage of a lifetime of war and a society that was broken even before the war can just magically go away now that the war is over.

Prowl fucking sucks but he was basically the only person that pointed out the injustice of that.

And then from then on out most of the characters from other colonies like Caminus and wherever else are going "i fucking hate you and your conflicts" w/ people like literal-nobody Slide and various Camiens getting to just sit there lecturing Optimus about how Cybertronians are too violent for their own good and how their conflicts are stupid, with only brief sympathetic moments where the Cybertronians get to be recognized as their own ppl who deserve sympathy before going right back to being lambasted.

Like I literally struggled to enjoy the story at multiple points because there was only so much I could take of the characters I knew and loved being raked over coals constantly while barely getting to defend themselves or be defended by the narrative so like. It was just fucking depressing and a little infuriating to read exRID/OP

[waterlinkedgirl]

Musical Touken Ranbu: Michinooku ~ Hitotsu Hachisu (Michinooku ~ A Single Lotus)

Here we go! Only a few days after the archive release and toumyu's ninth anniversary (congratulations!)

Michioku, or Michihasu, is a myu I have many conflicting feelings about, both positive and negative. However, I do believe that with the right amount of care in the next Mika-related story myu, the negative can still be cleared. Plus, I'm glad about a lot of things being re-established. The writer does need to step up her game a little on the plot-writing side of things, as well as the understanding-and-respecting-past-myu side of things, but as long as she does, this can still be given a proper place within what was already established.

Keep in mind that these are only the subtitle files, timed and tled to the DMM senshuuraku and the bluray respectively. The archive version will have a talk at the start, so the starting times of the subs will have to be delayed accordingly.

You can find the subtitles and my TL notes document here!

[eugene-da-potato]

Thinking about possible fanfic/au idea, where Paper after the end of second season decides to leave Hotel for a while to develop his own self-identity outside of his life with OJ, and OJ, living without Paper for the first time in almost a decade, realises how codependent with him he actually became and how much of his mental state were tied to Paper being by his side. Both of them learn to live without one another and find their own separated support systems and when Paper eventually comes back (because, still, all of his friends live here, duh) we're both self-sufficient but still appreaciate each other's positive traits and now are able to form functioning healthy relationships...

Yeah I think about them a lot

[crookedfivefingers]

3.13 | ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴏʀᴅꜱ

link to the post I accidentally wound up prattling endlessly about in the tags 💀

[sockdooe]

I don’t know if maybe it’s just me, but is anyone else seeing a rise of people claiming that they could do a better rewrite of Voltron and then immediately say they’d make K/L cannon or Adash/ canon?

I don’t know about anyone else but I genuinely don’t think making ships canon would make the show better.

In fact I think It’d make it worse.

And considering shiro isn’t even mentioned in these and if he is it’s just to be Keith dad…. Is telling.