artemissa97

[artemissa97]

someone asked for this all on its own SO here, the gay johnny storm conspiracy board

#johnny storm #human torch #fantastic four

[artemissa97]

The Fantastic Four Family🩵💫

#fantastic four #johnny storm #human torch #sue storm #invisible woman #reed richards #mister fantastic #ben grimm #the thing #alicia masters #franklin richards #valeria richards #jennifer walters #she hulk #wyatt wingfoot #peter parker #spiderman #ororo munroe #storm #medusalith amaquelin #darla deering #doctor doom #spideytorch #johnnywyatt #reedsue #benalicia

[artemissa97]

On Demand Streaming of Free Shakespeare in the Park productions

"This summer, throughout May and June everyone will have free access to stream The Public’s Free Shakespeare in the Park productions of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (2019), MERRY WIVES (2021), RICHARD III (2022), and the premiere of HAMLET (2023), captured live from The Delacorte Theater in Central Park by THIRTEEN for Great Performances on PBS.

Streaming Schedule:

May 3-June 30: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Click here to learn more!)

May 10-June 30: HAMLET (Click here to learn more!)

May 17-June 30: MERRY WIVES (Click here to learn more!)

May 24-June 30: RICHARD III (Click here to learn more!)"

[ID: 1: Danielle Brooks as Beatrice and Grantham Coleman as Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing.

2: Ato Blankson-Wood as Hamlet.

3: Pascale Armand, Julian Rozzell Jr., David Ryan Smith, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Phillip James Brannon in Merry Wives.

4: Danai Gurira as Richard III. /end ID]

#shakespeare

[artemissa97]

CHALLENGERS! 🎾

#challengers #tashi duncan #art donaldson #patrick zweig

[artemissa97]

#ronald reagan #trickle down economics

[artemissa97]

☕ Damijon and/or Damian & Stephanie

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT BOTH OF THESE THINGS.

Anyway Jon and Damian are soulmates and they are going to be together forever and I don't care what anyone else says including DC. Damian heard Jon existed and IMMEDIATELY kidnapped him and Jon was like "So...are we friends now?" and Damian was like "HOW DARE YOU but yes." Jon thinks Damian is the coolest and funniest and most delightful person who has ever existed. Damian thinks Jon is a perfect ray of sunshine and the safest most reliable thing in the universe. They are both right and they're going to get married and adopt a hundred dogs about it.

AND DAMIAN AND STEPH!!! I love Damian and Dick's relationship but look, Dick had a LOT on his plate at the time and was trying to juggle being Batman and raising a whole entire human being and stopping Tim from falling off buildings, and also only had his own questionable childhood experience to fall back on. Stephanie Brown was the first person to look at Damian and go "Oh, this child doesn't know how to play." And even though Damian had been nothing but a little shit to her, she took it upon herself to teach him, because Steph might have gotten into the whole vigilante thing because of revenge, but she stayed because she believes in making things better. And I love that for her and for them.

#jon kent #superboy #damian wayne #robin #damijon #stephanie brown #the spoiler #meta #WHO WOULDN'T HAVE FEELINGS?????? I love them three 💖

[artemissa97]

the hooded robins

#stephanie brown #the spoiler #damian wayne #robin #batfamily

[artemissa97]

I think the key to writing both Barbara Gordon and Amanda Waller well is that you need to remember they're supposed to be work friends. They aren't super close, but they need to be the kind of people who can tolerate each other and even enjoy each other's company.

If you're writing a Barbara who's too naive, obedient, impulsive or guileless to get along with Amanda Waller, you're doing it wrong.

And if you're writing an Amanda who's too blindly patriotic, sociopathic, or selfish to get along with Barbara Gordon, you're REALLY doing it wrong.

#amanda waller #barbara gordon #oracle

[artemissa97]

Another thing I love about this Rebels rewatch is how much I’m feeling both Kanan and the clones’ trauma at what was done to them.  I felt it the first time through, of course, but the build-up to it (now that I know what’s coming) and the looming sense of having a bad feeling about all this, really adds a lot. Knowing who they’re going to find on Seelos, Ahsoka’s, “Trust him.” adds a whole lot more looming dread.  Ezra stating Rex’s birth number and Kanan’s realization, knowing that they’ll eventually have to put all this aside to work together, Gregor’s, “It’s the Jedi!  They’ve come for revenge!” and the fear that must have haunted them, knowing that the Jedi were betrayed and who wouldn’t be angry about that?, Rex telling him to ease up, “They weren’t the ones who betrayed us.”  Kanan’s struggle to trust them, when they lie about Zeb being bait for the joopa, when Wolffe alerted the Empire that Jedi were here, how many old feelings that brought up.  All of it has more weight for me now, having spent more time with all of them in The Clone Wars and settling into Star Wars and reading Kanan: The Last Padawan to actually witness the horrible betrayal on both the Jedi and the clones. Kanan:  “It was at the end, the end of the war. Our fellow soldiers, the clones, the ones we Jedi fought side by side with, suddenly turned and betrayed us. I watched them kill my master. She fought beside them for years, and they gunned her down in a second, and then came for me. Later they said they had chips in their heads that made them do it. Said they had no choice. Rex:  I didn’t betray my Jedi. Wolffe, Gregor and I all removed our control chips. Quoting it or even giffing it wouldn’t do justice to the way Kanan’s voice is breaking during this entire scene, how much this still hurts him every single day. It’s heartbreaking, because the show doesn’t deny Kanan’s trauma about the genocide of his people at the hands of the clones and the slaughter of his Master right in front of him, the horror of being hunted by the people you worked side by side with, who were your friends, who were laughing with you one minute, then trying to kill you the next.  It doesn’t deny that Kanan knows they had chips in their heads–what initially sounded like a denial of it, on rewatch, doesn’t quite seem like Kanan thinks that’s a lie, just that it doesn’t wipe away his hurt and anger and distrust, that it doesn’t mean he has to immediately forgive. “[They] said they had no choice.”  His voice is so angry and so hurt by this, it sounds like he’s rejecting that whole-sale, but the more I think on it, the more I wonder if it’s not that he doesn’t believe it (because it certainly would explain a lot, how could you go from being friends with someone to coldly gunning them down in a heartbeat?), but that he’s rejecting it as an excuse that it’s all okay. It really wasn’t the clones’ fault, even if some of them chose to have their chips removed and some chose not to, they had no reasonable way of knowing that was coming and it wasn’t on them, that Palpatine took their agency and their very minds away.  They were victims in this just as much as the Jedi, that both these groups can be victims of this horrifying shit without that negating the others’ pain, even when one group hurt the other side and that can be so incredibly hard to forgive. I love Star Wars because the message isn’t that Kanan’s pain isn’t valid or that it doesn’t matter, because it very clearly does.  But that ultimately keeping that pain inside him ate at him and he had to face it and eventually shed it, to let it go, to find his way back to the Jedi path he wanted.  Rewatching Rebels, knowing that that’s Kanan’s ultimate path, to find his way back to being a Jedi and everything that means, having this thrown in his face, the symbol of such terrible damage done to him and his entire people, seeing Depa gunned down in front of him, knowing the clones were used to wipe out his people, knowing they weren’t in control, but that doesn’t deny the valid hurt he feels from them, the difficulty he has in trusting them again, that it’s about the process of letting go, rather than never having to walk through it. That it doesn’t diminish the horror of what happened to the clones, that they faced a terrible betrayal from Palpatine as well, that both Jedi and clones were victims and it’s a complicated mess that both sides have a right to their hurts.  AS WELL AS ME.  I HURT FOR ALL OF THEM AAAUGGHH.

#star wars rebels #star wars #kanan jarrus #hera syndulla #captain rex

[artemissa97]

#star wars #leia organa #darth vader #anakin skywalker

[artemissa97]

Today is the day to think about what the Tatooine government and justice system look like beyond "Jabba is in charge and taxes water"

#star wars #meta

[artemissa97]

The Battle of the five Armies countdown - day 21 of 30

Bonus: 

#lord of the rings #legolas #thranduil

[artemissa97]

☕️ talia al-ghul

An absolutely fascinating character who has been done soooo dirty over the years. Talia fills one of my favorite niches in superhero comics, which is "character who isn't really a hero and isn't really a villain, but has their own agenda that may or may not dovetail with the hero's." (Shado and Eddie Fyers also fit here.) I think she loves Damian very deeply but has no idea how to be a parent or have healthy relationships because why would she? She was raised in a magical cult by a multi-centenarian and has had to claw her own agency out of her father's clutches an inch at a time.

I want Talia to be ruthless, yes, but it's not that she's evil - it's that everything about her life has taught her to view what it logical and what is right through a completely different rubric than, say, Bruce. (Damian has inherited a lot of this but he's young enough to be more malleable.) She's not a cackling supervillain. She's just operating by a different set of rules than Batman, and doing what is right according to her lights, not his.

Also she is the best dressed person in the entire DCU, the end.

#talia al ghul #al ghul family

[artemissa97]

[artemissa97]

I read your ollie and SA post and I def agree with how they don't treat that incident as rape but I'm also....I'm not excusing it but I don't like this history of making Asian women villains casually or not that DC does....

Having cool, complex villains is one thing but they disappoint me so much

Again I def don't think this at all negates what's happened to ollie, it's all terrible

Oh 100% agreed!

DC is in love with this trope of the sexy ambiguously evil rapey dragon lady Asian woman and her noble white baby daddy and the child torn between the two. See also: Talia, Cheshire, Shiva. (I know David Cain is not a good guy but Bruce essentially fills the role of the noble white baby daddy for Cass as well as for Damian.) (Also I should note that of all four of these characters, I would only classify Cheshire as an out-and-out villain - Shado was originally more morally ambiguous than anything else, Talia goes back and forth, Shiva was originally a heroic character. But DC has definitely used them all as villains at times.)

It's a huge part of why I try to be really careful in talking about Shado and this history, because again, it's important that we recognize that what happens in that story is rape because our culture is bad enough about consent already - but the writer (Mike Grell) clearly was not intending to portray Shado as a villain there and I don't want to toss out an interesting, complex Asian character because a writer steeped in rape culture made a mistake 35 years ago.

It comes back to holding multiple ideas in our heads at once, and all of these can be true at the same time:

DC has historically been enamored of a really racist, sexist trope.

Some of these characters have committed rape and we need to call it what it is (Shado, Talia although that's been retconned out, and there is some real murky stuff with Cheshire and Roy in Rebirth Titans).

(Actually it's not clear whether the Shado incident is in canon anymore either or if the New 52 totally overwrote it. If it's still in canon then she had an affair with Ollie's dad that resulted in Emiko and raped Ollie and maybe also made out with Connor, which...fucking yikes.)

These characters have all been written as complex and nuanced and sympathetic at times.

They've also been written as villains and it's not racist or sexist to acknowledge the things they've done on page (murder, nuking an entire country, whatever the hell Damian's upbringing was like), but it's fair to acknowledge that often the writing that sparked those random heel turns was racist and sexist.

It's okay to enjoy them as villains, or to want them to be more heroic, or both.

It's important to have diverse villains as well as diverse heroes.

It's more important to not turn every Asian female character into this trope.

So yeah, it's messy and complicated for sure! But I think that's why it's important to look at the context behind these stories instead of just saying "she did a bad thing, throw her away forever" or "I like this character so I refuse to acknowledge that this bad thing happened." Which is basically what you said but a lot more long-winded lol.

#meta

[artemissa97]

☕️ what if I want the rant about ollie cheating now (or whenever you're up for it)

Oh good, because I mentioned it as bait and I'm glad someone took me up on it. 😂

CW: Sexual assault.

Yeah so here's the thing: Ollie has definitely canonically cheated on Dinah at least once, maybe twice depending on your definition. But the idea of Ollie as a serial cheater and womanizer comes from a story where he is raped. Which uhhhh is absolutely NOT cheating.

So for nearly 30 years, Ollie had exactly zero love interests. The closest he came was Miss Arrowette/Bonnie King (Cissie's mom), who appears in exactly 3 stories in the early 60s where Ollie only regards her as a pest...but in a 1969 issue of JLA where all the Leaguers bring dates to a carnival, he brings Bonnie because up to that point, she was literally the only woman he had interacted with besides Wonder Woman.

Also in 1969, he meets Dinah. Within a few issues, he's declaring his love:

Note that there's nothing to indicate that Ollie knows Bruce is stalling for time. He's just down bad.

Anyway, Ollie and Dinah are soon in a committed relationship and remain that way for over 20 years. Starting in the 80s, various writers introduced a couple of brief relationships with other women in Ollie's pre-Green Arrow past, but that's not cheating either - he dated them before he knew Dinah.

Then in 1987, DC introduced Shado, a Yakuza assassin and the best archer in the world, better than Ollie. Ollie and Shado have an immediate and intense emotional connection, but he is in a committed relationship, and neither Ollie nor Shado even vaguely hints at him leaving Dinah for her.

But then Shado shoots Ollie (long story), and then nurses him back to health through his injury-induced fever and delirium. And a little while after that, she turns up with a son, Robert, who looks a lot like Ollie. Dinah is suspicious, so Shado tells her that Ollie didn't cheat on her: Shado had sex with Ollie while he was delirious and thought she was Dinah, and Ollie has no memory of it and has no idea that Robert is his son.

To be clear: this was rape. The story doesn't treat it like rape, and it's clear the writer didn't understand that it was rape. To this day, no comic has acknowledged that Shado raped Ollie. In fact, when Ollie finds out about it years later, he's happy, because he wanted a biological son (this was pre-Connor).

(My feelings about Shado are complicated. I think she's a really interesting character, and I'm loath to discard her because of this one incident that was not intended to be interpreted as rape, but I also think it's really important that we acknowledge that it was rape because our culture is not good about consent. I think we can hold multiple ideas in our heads at once, like "Shado is interesting and cool" and "this is a fucked up story and male survivors should be supported and believed.")

The original comic also didn't treat it as cheating, but subsequent writers did. It didn't help that in the early 90s, there was a scene where Ollie (canonically in the back half of his 40s) is kissed by a college-age girl named Marianne who has a crush on him, and kisses her back. Dinah caught them and eventually broke up with Ollie over it (among other reasons). I think this is one of those things where some people would consider it cheating and some wouldn't, so YMMV.

Ollie was then killed off and replaced by Connor, and Connor's book was written by Chuck Dixon, who really hyped up Ollie's legacy of sluttiness (citation needed, Chuck) in contrast to Connor's virginal but definitely totally heterosexual purity. (Lollll sucks to suck, Chuck.)

Then Ollie was brought back. And as much as I love Quiver, the story that brings him back, it absolutely depicts what happened with Shado as Ollie cheating, which: NO, KEVIN SMITH. IT WAS RAPE. (Interestingly, Dinah seems to consider what happened with Marianne to be cheating, while Roy does not.)

This was also at the start of the post-9/11 era, where there was a real preoccupation with depicting heroes as deeply flawed, dishonest, and generally harmful, with feet of clay - just generally fucking up and being assholes pretty much all the time. (See Identity Crisis, Civil War.) And so Ollie then definitively cheated on Dinah, having sex with Black Lightning's niece Joanna, who was almost immediately murdered by a supervillain afterwards which was also largely framed as Ollie's fault because superheroes ruin everything. (And because Joanna was a triple threat of female, Black, and sexually active, so she HAD to be fridged.)

Dinah dumped Ollie again, and the way Ollie was talked about in the comics - and outside of them - rapidly escalated, with basically every character constantly describing him as a cheating horndog who couldn't keep it in his pants. This dovetailed with Ollie being portrayed as worse and worse in flashbacks around Connor's conception and birth - originally he didn't even know about Connor, then he knew but lied to everyone, then he was actively cruel to Connor's mother, etc.

I think the peak (or nadir) of all this for me was when Dinah told Babs she was marrying Ollie and Babs shrieked that she couldn't because Ollie was a CHEATER who had "fathered Connor with that Shado woman!" Um, Connor's mother is Sandra Hawke, Connor is a good 15 years older than Robert Jr., Ollie had not even met Dinah at that point, and I don't remember who wrote that issue of BoP but if you can't tell the difference between two entirely different Asian women, you're a racist hack.

Thanks to the New 52, this is all pretty much in the past (the New 52 had entirely different Green Arrow problems, including him being raped again but a completely different woman).

But in conclusion: yes, it's canon that Ollie has cheated on Dinah. However, he only cheated after getting a reputation as a cheater when he was in fact a victim of rape. Before that, he was a horndog, but specifically for Dinah and Dinah alone, and he was faithful. And I'm glad that the discourse on this has shifted so much in the past decade or so, because Ollie has done plenty of things we should blame him for, but this wasn't one of them.

#oliver queen #green arrow #meta #dinahollie

[artemissa97]

#bart allen #impulse