#zitka the elephant

[91-1lover]

Bruce: About the elephant in the room

Damian and Tim: ....

Bruce: Anyone wants to explain?

Tim:Not really, no

Bruce: I'm not mad, I'm quite impressed actually

Bruce: How did you put her in my living room? And what is she doing here?

Damian: Grayson missed Zitka

Bruce: So you put her in my house? How?!

[spicy-apple-pie]

HE DID IT!!! HE SAID THE THING!!!

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Commission Info / Kofi

[moonlight-stalker]

# Dcu x Dp 187

Zitka did not want to pass on she wanted to see the flying tiny human again and was determined to do so and No one was going to stop her not even the ghost boy was gonna keep her from seeing the flying tiny human

[spacedace]

Had a thought about the Reluctant War and made myself a bit sad and I have no idea if it'll make it into the story proper so I'm going to inflict it upon all you guys:

Dick Grayson on the streets of Gotham trying to do everything he can to help as everyone join the ghosts in fighting the GIW, suddenly has a version of the GAV barreling down towards him and for some reason he can't get out of the way in time.

He thinks he's about to join the army of the dead in a whole new way, when the tank fo a vehicle is suddenly sent flying as something massive charged it from the side. He hears a familiar bellowing and then realizes that it's Zitka, a ghost after passing away peacefully a few years before.

She wasn't apart of the army of the ghosts, wasn't brought in to fight. She's just been following her tiny human child around all these years and now that there's enough ecto in the air to do so, she's going to protect him with all her might.

Dick is emotional, so thankful to have his old friend back, but the city is still in a state of chaos. He gets onto Zitka's back and they get to work, running - flying - around helping to grab the injured and whisk them away to safety or take out other GAVs and the like.

It's absurd and freeing and wonderful all at once to be literally flying through the skies of Gotham on the ghost of his elephant best friend, and if Dick wasn't already on the side of King Phantom he is *now* and -

He gets shot off Zitka's back.

A GIW agent was aiming for the Ghost elephant but somehow *missed* and hit Dick instead. Not enough to injure him too badly, but enough to send him flying off Zitka's back and plummeting to the ground. His grapple is broken, and Zitka is diving for him but she's being shot at and she's not going to make it in time and -

A hand, reaching out to him in midair, familiar with its callouses and strong grip as he reaches out and grasps it, body suddenly swinging in a different direction and muscles acting on memory as he falls into the old, achingly familiar routine of his childhood. His mother, ethereal and bright as she smiles down at him, hanging upside down from a bar suspended from nothing but open sky as they swing and he is let go, flipping on instinct and caught by the steady strong hands of his father.

The Flying Graysons reunited in the skies above Gotham, Dick's ghostly parents determined to ensure their little bird never falls the way they did.

[ky-landfill]

[ethmaron]

an older wip i finally finished up

[batfsm]

Is Zitka, Dick’s stuffed Elephant that is in a lot of Fanfic, fanon or canon?

I’m hoping it’s canon but I still love her if she wasn’t.

I love when she goes from one sibling to the next and then back to Dick’s bed in the Manor waiting until she’s needed again. Or when even Bruce uses her, which I swear I read a fic like that but it just might be my headcanon. Alfred does also but no one knows for certain.

It’s a right of passage in a way to cuddle Zitka. You have your own stuffed animals but Zitka is always there, waiting to be used. She’s the best kept secret that isn’t a secret.

[bludhavens-finest]

I heard somebody say something about you owning an elephant, do you actaully?

It’s a little complicated but in a way I do

Her name is Zitka, I’ve known her since I was 4, obviously I can’t keep an elephant in a 2 bedroom apartment so she lives in one of the Wayne animal reserves now

When I have time to I still try to go see her

[scarletlunarosa]

A boy and his elephant

[i-fell-in-a-hole]

bby dickie and zitka

[apollenaria]

Meet my new son

She hath been dubbed Zitka

[allanalightwood]

i imagine that damian knows and hears what they're talking about. but at this point, he's been living at the manor for more than a year already and knows that kids his age play with toys and he got curious so he started playing with the toys dick gave him

Jason: "Dick, there you are, I--"

Dick, holding up his finger to his lip: "Shh."

Jason, raising a brow: "What's going on?" Dick, gesturing into the living room from the doorway: "I gave Dami some of my old toys a few days ago, and look, he's playing with them." Jason, holding back laughter at the sight of Damian moving a stuffed elephant and toy soldiers around the floor: "I didn't know he had it in him." Dick, whirling on Jason, his anger palpable: "No. Don't you dare. This is the first time I've seen him doing anything remotely close to what he should be doing at his age so don't you dare make fun of him for it." Jason, holding his hands up: "Jesus. I wasn't gonna... Okay, maybe I was, but whatever, I got it, no teasing baby bat for playing with toys."

Dick, nodding: "Good. Now come on, we should leave before he notices us and stops."

Jason: "You got it Dickie bird."

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[1nsan3g0dd3ss]

DCxDP AU: Danny and Damian are actually twins but were never raised together- Talia would divide her time between bases, spending time with them separately (but spending more time with Damian). Jason technically only met Danny in his time with the LoA.

It still a very tenuous truce that Jason has with his family when he finally joins them for breakfast after a late night of busting a drug ring. And sue him, he's never cared to look at the little one that closely when he's not pointing a knife in his direction. But then the little Bat Brat turned his face towards the ray of light streaming into the family room of the Manor and Jason caught a closer look to the… green color. Huh.

“Hey demon, when you died did you come back with those green eyes?” Jason calls out, and perhaps it’s a little antagonistic but something deeply unsettles the crime lord about this.

“Tt. I’ve always had green eyes Todd. Your observation skills remain dulled-“ Damian begins to berate him but Jason’s scowl deepens and he interrupts.

“No, they were definitely Bruce’s color blue when I met you with Talia- I punched your lights out because of it remember?” Jason supplies, looking perturbed and having a small child look equally perturbed back at him.

“You never met me in Nanda Parbat. And mother would have never allowed you to attack above your station and live.”

“Kid I literally have the scars from my punishment. My memory from that time after the pit might not be great or even good but I know, I know I punched your lights out.”

“No doubt you have been fooled by a clone then-“ Damian says but he looks upset.

“Talia called you Dami then, you’ve never let us call you that.” Jason supplies further, he was certain that Talia had introduced him as her son.

“I was never called such an informal name.” But Damian looks disturbed more than he looks like he wants to fight.

Eventually, after combing through their collective memory of Talia's where abouts and Damian's lack of interaction with Todd, it’s decided that they have to talk to Drake who was there the most recently. Neither wants to add the fact that he's also the most knowledgeable family member when it comes to the LoA now.

“Huh? Yeah, it looks like Talia kept ledgers dividing her time between two places- the journal reads like there is Dami as Damian but… maybe it’s Dami AND Damian…” Tim reviews the books he robbed them of with a fine tooth comb and suddenly this pattern of using the “nickname” and the “full name” start to show a “first child” and a “second child”.

Damian was clearly the favorite. The ‘Dami’ kid was sent away on a suicide mission pretty early in their lives, he would have left right after Todd did at the age of 8-ish. They all groaned at the cold trail following this assignment he failed to return from- it meant that they had to involve Bruce with a DNA search of the local areas the kid had been sent to across the globe. One of which, weirdly enough, was in Illinois.

…

“My name isn’t Daniel” Danny sighs at yet another event the Mansons brought him to with Vlad looking over his shoulder every five minutes.

Then the weird skinny kid who’s the big talk of the town approaches him with some guy built like a tank and says: “It’s Damian, isn’t it?”

Danny literally sinks through the floors, but in his attempts to run out the back door he’s stopped- By a guy that has Danny's own face and a very sharp looking knife pressed to Danny's throat.

In short- Danny introduced himself to the Fentons as “Dami” but they misheard him and called him Danny and fuck it, it’s close enough.

Now it turns out that their mother only planned on one surviving the artificial womb and gave them very different amounts of her time- so she just gave them the same name and reported it like she only had one child.

[frogaroundandfindout]

A typical middle school class project in Gotham is drafting a fake Will where they leave stuff to classmates and family members. Friendships have been made and broken over who gets what doll or cool lunch box.

[dramatisperscnae]

A boy and his elephant. hashtag just circus things >w>