flashfuture

[flashfuture]

how?? just how?

[flashfuture]

Batman AU where the original pre crisis proposal Dick gave of adopting Jason happens. He's 19, a two time college drop out, leader of the Teen Titans, and was explicitly the reason Jason was an orphan to begin with. Could have been great

#dc comics #dick grayson #jason todd

[flashfuture]

Too many writers are obsessed with Jason and Dick being identical when they explicitly rebooted Jason after crisis to be Nothing like Dick after their pre crisis attempt at Jason was an identical copy.

Like the imagery, they created with turning Jason into a delinquent. Someone with no practical skills to be Robin. Someone with anger issues in comparison to Dick Grayson the shining golden star. The boy raised in a golden age with Batman and Superman showing him the ropes. But Jason, now Gotham runs in his veins. The new grit of the post shining golden and silver ages into the bronze age have hit him. He's a diamond in the rough Batman never got to polish.

Jason didn't listen. Jason didn't play by comic book rules. Jason wasn't allowed to be on the Titans to keep him isolated now (they retconned that away but this was an original change). Jason wanted to enact change that explicitly went against Bruce and Dick personal vow to each other to follow the path of the righteous. Under the Red Hood Jason did not come out of nowhere and was not a massive personality change. It was a natural conclusion to that version of Robin who wanted to kill the bad people.

But since the writers want to assign Dick similarities with Jason but are unclear which Jason he's supposed to mimic now we have to go back in time and pretend Dick Grayson had anger issues as a child instead of environment and personal relationships causing a genuine sense of friction between him and Bruce. And this rips away Jason's one defining character trait. Dick was never the angry Robin not until fans saw angry Nightwing and the writers figured he was always the same and a static character. Boring as people find Tom Taylor his current Nightwing is silver age Dick Grayson before the first crisis to a T.

They even have begun discussing this in parts recently. How Dick's childhood was light and bright and things were just less serious <- the golden age was very unserious. But with their everything is canon their retcon of Dick being an angry kid fits so poorly into the puzzle of he's the shining light who showed Bruce the way in the dark.

Overcoming anger issues was never and should never have been Dick Grayson's role. It was always Jason's. But Dick is so much easier for them to write because all they have to do is throw up leader of the Titans, Batman's pride and joy, 80 years of history next to some pretend flashbacks about moments Dick was so angry >:( and then voila it's like character growth happened. But Dick was never At that stage. Dick's been an adult since 1969 so everything is a flashback to a hypothetical childhood they don't actually have to explore outside of whatever point they want to make then. (For example trying to retroactively establish Two Face and Robin feuds to give Tim something to do) And whenever they want they can flash up something from Dick's real childhood that was fun and awesome.

My point then I suppose is editorial likes to make the Robins indistinguishable in lots of ways broad strokes for readers. What's one Robin to another. But that is lazy and boring. The 80s writers may have wanted to kill the idea of Robin but really they inspired the idea of Robins being anyone, instead of Robin needing to be Dick Grayson. To the point the writers don't even think Dick Grayson's Robin needs to be Dick Grayson. So where we're at in 2024 is you say the angry Robin and DC wants you to ask which one. Only Tim remains with a single defining feature of being 'smart' but DC would really rather you think of him as the bisexual Robin instead of any personality traits.

#dc comics #robin #meta post

[flashfuture]

im sorry i literally cannot get this out of my head since last night

[flashfuture]

Johnny Storm is such a weirdly handled character. Because the writers keep being like oooh every time he gets in a relationship he regresses years of maturity see how immature he is. what a playboy and then you check out the relationships and it's always;

Crystal who left him for Quicksilver and was really dating him as a placeholder for Quicksilver anyways

Frankie Raye who leaves him to be a herald of Galactus

Lyja the skrull wife pretending to be someone else who was sexually assaulting Johnny the entire time and then continued to harass and freak him out to the point he lost control of his powers something he is beyond in control of usually. And ruined the concept of a safe relationship for Johnny

A woman who filmed their sexual encounter without Johnny's consent and then was blackmailing him with it but somehow Johnny is at fault cause he slept with her??

Wolverine's son who may or may not have been using his mutant pheromones to roofie Johnny constantly but was taking advantage of and manipulating him.

Medusa who is Crystal's sister and again a placeholder relationship she's Black Bolt's wife that will always be the status quo return

And Skye who forced Johnny into a made up soulmate bond and tried to accuse him of cheating on her when it was only in her brain that they were even together. And Johnny was particularly rattled because his abuser Lyja had Just made another appearance pretending to be the new girl who is still forcing something on Johnny.

Like it should really be addressed that since he was a teenager people have viewed Johnny as free game. And even in instances where he explicitly tells people to stop they force kisses on him. So I think they should explore that yes Johnny does regress. Yes Johnny is immature in his relationships. Because mature relationships have been bad for him. Intimacy fails for him. A celebrity pretend relationship to put up a front (he has three or four of these) does make sense to someone who has been assaulted so. many times. He can't even trust his family to understand because they have constantly pushed him into the arms of abusers and admonished him for not going along with it. And Johnny canonically does get fed up with his family wanting him to grow up and settle down.

Like it's just the frame work is all here but the writers keep dancing around saying that Johnny's mental state about sexual relationships is incredibly damaged. And I think going for full on age regression 30 year old man acts 16 about his relationships because he's been unsafe in love for next half of life is absolutely implied. But they just say Johnny is immature and won't grow up and is too much of a playboy when that's not the context they put in the comics and it's really confusing sometimes. Because Johnny is incredibly mature in every other area of his life especially now that he has nieces and nephews all grown up. Frustrating to read.

#marvel comics #johnny storm #human torch #sexual assault tw

[flashfuture]

(Detective Comics vol 1 #33) (Detective Comics vol 1 #38)

There is also a tonal shift very early on with Bruce. Early days Bruce swore on his parents deaths to have a war on all criminals and lots of writers still see that as his ultimate goal. they even referenced it in a really recent Batman issue. It's Bruce who swears "we two will fight together against crime and corruption and never to swerve from the path of the righteousness" which is his oath to Dick Grayson. This is very evidentently Batman's new goal as he swaps from serial killer to genuine hero at this time in the 40s. A very early example of character growth (ie they wanted a new direction)

So Bruce will fight to be righteous not fight to be the savior of the world.

So the whole “Batman’s mission is impossible and futile” thing is… eh, to me, because I feel like the read on Batman should be like. The fable about the girl throwing baby turtles into the ocean, knowing she can’t save them all from the seagulls swooping in to eat them. It shouldn’t be this nihilistic hopeless thing. Batman’s perspective shouldn’t be “I can’t save everyone so it’s meaningless and everything I do is just self-punishment”, it should be “It means everything to the people I CAN save.”

[flashfuture]

I love it when the narrative focuses on Kyle's role in the universe and they're like yeah no one could ever do his job. yeah he's by and far the most powerful person to ever hold a ring and that was maybe a mistake. he's inherently connected to the concept of existing don't even worry about it

[flashfuture]

Kyle: exists Wally: Bitch.

#its so funny how hard wally projects #he's like will i ever live up to uncle barry #and kyle in his first week as a hero saves the universe blows up a planet loses his girlfriend #and gets saddled with protecting the whole rest of the universe #and he just does it #wally would throw himself into the speedforce forever if he had Kyle’s job

[flashfuture]

Apparently Miles is a JJK fan (in the comics)

If you put these two in a room together I think the result would be adorable 🥺

[flashfuture]

So I was writing a small paper in Microsoft Word and the program suddenly crashed (I saved a couple minutes before, thank god) and I get this message in the corner of my screen two seconds afterward

what the fuck

[flashfuture]

they makeme ill

another kiss on the cheek drawing as a treat 4 me

[flashfuture]

I was in a JJK space last night and I'm obsessed with how we veered off course around 2 am to start discussing how terrible Nightwing is treated in the comics

[flashfuture]

Oh, those silly boyfriend 🙄🙄🙄

🗽🗞️

[flashfuture]

The YouTube content creator community was wracked by macabre tragedy this morning after Amelia Bedelia was instructed to hang streamers for a six year old’s birthday party

[flashfuture]

The ACAB Spider-Man discourse gets esp weird with the TASM films bc I feel like they really get upheld by fandom as being very anti-cop, but to me at least, they're some of the most blatantly copaganda Spidey media, and I'm saying that as a Spidey fan - the first TASM film literally has Captain Stacy get the last word in about how Spider-Man sucks and that's what actually inspires him to become a hero who saves people, rather than Uncle Ben, whose murder only inspired him to beat up a long line of random guys for revenge, then the cops help him in the climax, and Captain Stacy gets to die a hero; like you pointed out, re: comics, the cops don't actually hate him for ACAB reasons.

ACAB just doesn't work in Superhero media. You either work With the system or you work against it and are a villain. even 'anti' heroes are usually just murderers who've decided they're murdering the 'right bad' people. Also in the spider-man comics that is very much the conclusion Peter comes to which is if he'd been More proactive about beating up robbers then his uncle wouldn't have been shot so that's why he goes around like that. no one is writing a story that isn't about beating people up cause then it wouldn't be comics. so it's a lost cause really when i see people say it's acab. like no matter how much ollie queen rants about cops and the establishment he still gotta catch his bad guys and put em in jail

[flashfuture]

Also, I just remembered that in the MC2 universe, which is generally considered the good ending for Peter Parker if Marvel editorial hadn't written Mayday out of relevance in the 616 comics, Peter does actually become a cop after he has to retire from being Spider-Man, and this is framed as a good appropriate career where he still gets to be a hero, so 😬

it's like Nightwing being a cop is only framed as bad cause he used a gun and Bruce doesn't like it. Unlike being a vigilante which is good

[flashfuture]

"spider-man isn't a cop" discourse is so funny because I don't think it's really a route we wanna go down. Like no Peter Parker is not a cop.

Instead, he's an impossibly strong completely unregulated vigilante prone to extreme acts of violence that could probably end up qualified as domestic terrorism. It's not even about the supervillains. It's regular ol criminals he beats the shit out of them and then suspends them from lamposts and shit. no due process no potential for holding him accountable. Not even the other heroes in Unvierse over decades of comics can get through to Peter that he's a bit of a thug and should try to do more than beat people up.

Peter goes abroad frequently to beat people up then come home. On two occasions he fucking killed people abroad then when back NYC facing no repercussions for his actions. (The guy he blew up to avenge his parents was retconned he survived But the comic made it clear Peter intended to kill the guy and thought he did. This was an early days comic. And Charlemagne the spy he killed mixed up with Wolverine in Germany we're talking 80s the Berlin Wall was still up. And it was just in a recent Daredevil comic he admitted to Matt he murdered somebody)

Hearing there are drug dealers or whatever other criminal, breaking and entering all over the place, and then beating up anybody involved and leaving them for the cops. Like you need need a reallll bendy spine to twist your way out of how that's not cop behavior and was not Always cop behavior.