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dearladynightmare · 9 months

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Good day my friends! Today I want to share with you my very well-considered theory about Hordaks “defect”. This idea really makes sense to me which is why I use it canonically for my comics (especially the next one). So, if you are interested in how I spent my nights, not able to sleep because of this head-canon, GO AHEAD! ;)

While watching the show I noticed some inconsistencies according to what Hordak said about his defect and how Horde Prime (HP) dealt with it. But what exactly do we know about his defect? Well, he told Entrapta that he was a clone of Horde Prime, that he had been his “top general” but he a had a defect in his cloning. So Prime declared him worthless and sent him to die to the front lines.

When I rewatched that episode I was confused. Horde Prime had a top general? Horde Prime himself chose a “worthless” clone to be his top general??? A clone who’s not even worth to have a name?? Later we found out that Prime does not distinguish between his clones. None of them was special in any way. Their only reason for existence was to serve HP. The clones also don't have fixed positions or tasks. You can follow this thesis well following Hordak. One time he stands at Prime's side, one time he is a guard in the corridors, one time he is a sentry on Etheria, ... It doesn’t matter to Prime - They doesn’t matter.

My first explanation was that Hordak just made the “top general” story up. A story he was telling himself to feel less worthless. An attempt to ascribe value to himself and in the eyes of Prime. And to give meaning to what he was doing on Etheria. It seemed simple – to simple. So, I thought what was if Hordak told the truth? And now hold on my friends!

Hordak wasn’t like the other clones. He had something which made him special – his defect. And I am not talking about his physical health problems which we were able to see in the show (I`ll come back to this later). I am talking about Hordaks ability of independent thinking and slight resilience against HPs mind control. Sounds weird but pls hear me out!

After Hordak returned to HP, his story could have ended. Prime wiped his mind and Hordak should have been like all the other clones. He should have been unable to remember who he was and his complete past on Etheria. But his story wasn’t over. From that time Hordak showed us that Primes mind control does not really work on him. And I have proof!

1. Prime is barely able to see Hordaks thoughts

Primes wasn’t able to see his thoughts right after their reunion. He seemed to wonder and came closer to touch Hordaks face. Then it worked. Later Hordak started to question everything, he was thinking about Entrapta, the first ones writing, She-Ra, the rebellion and was able to keep all those thoughts from the all knowing- all seeing Horde Prime, even if he was standing right next to him. Even if Hordak shouldn’t been able to remember any of those things in the first place.

2. Hordak remembers things without even trying

Before Hordak noticed that he had forgotten something he already remembered things without trying. For example when he met Catra on the corridor and called her by her actual name and not little sister like all the others.

3. Only Hordak was able to fight the mindcontrol

In the show we see various characters being controlled by Prime. But no one was able to resist as much as Hordak did (and he sometimes didn’t even try). Catra was the first to fall victim to the control. she could only defend herself when the chip in her neck got damaged, and even after that she was barely able to. Later, many other protagonists became victims, without the capability to defend themselves. In the end, even Micah was under the control and would have killed his own daughter if Glimmer wasn’t stronger than him. The mind control was stronger than his fatherly love and the fact that he was a mighty sorcerer!

Fact is, even if the controlled characters stood in front of the person they loved the most, they weren’t able to fight the control BUT Hordak (who only exists to obey Primes orders) found the lil first ones writing and went all like “ENTRAPTA! MY TINY WIFE!” ... Well kind ofxD

He also refused Primes orders when he met Entrapta back on Etheria again. He recognized her and wouldn't hurt her. He let her run off! And don't forget when Prime wanted him to get disposed of her. Prime ordered him personally to get rid of her, and he refused! BETTER he turned against him.

And tbh I don’t think theres a difference between a clone under mind control or an controlled Etherian. After all, the clones also had their own personalities, as we were able to see from Wrong Hordak.

And if all that is true, it is possible that Hordak really was a top general of Prime. Maybe HP recognized that Hordak is “smarter” than the others. Maybe he has used Hordaks feature at the beginning and gave him the post as top general. Maybe in form of a consultant? But we know Prime and we know that he wanted to control everything. And maybe he started to question whether he really wanted to grant Hordak this worth. He created a very own “security gap” and so he got rid of Hordak. Of course he didn't tell Hordak about the real reason why he wanted to get rid of him. He just told him that he was a defect! Hordak wasn't aware of what his actual defect was (that he was special) until he started to experience his body betraying him.

Which leads us to his obvious health problems! But what are they if they are not the original defect? Hordaks body turned out to be very weak. He made himself an amour to hold himself together (btw I think that’s very impressive since he’s „just“ a clone, it shows how smart he was!) because his body was betraying him. Well I noticed sth Wrong Hordak said and showed us. THE NUTRIENT-RICH AMNIOTIC FLUID. Remember? When he cooked together with Glimmer he said “True nourishment comes from the favor of Horde Prime, also from nutrient-rich amniotic fluid.“ After that, he showed off an ampoule of this green liquid stuff that we've seen often in the show. Soooo since I´m sure that HP has better things to do than share his rare food with his clones I think they also ate things like ration bars BUT this green liquid seems to be most important to Horde Primes species… He himself is treated with it and even a “simple and worthless clone” like Wrong Hordak is equipped with it. It´s a property he carries with him, so it must be important. Maybe important for their state of health??

If that’s true… and I think it is… Hordak has had a massive lack of an indispensable substance his species requires! And that over years since he has been parted from Prime! No wonder he was doing that horrible! This would explain why his state of health got worse over time and why he no longer had green eyes. His own technologies helped him for a long time but soon failed. If Entrapta had not been there, to make him a new suit he probably would have died or sth.

But even Entrapta's technologies could not entirely help him. At least not enough. Not until he returned to Prime, because Prime had no trouble healing Hordak. It was Prime's technologies that Hordak needed, so why did he throw Hordak out when his defect was only a thing that HP could easily cure? So the physical defect was just a concomitant symptom of years of neglect.

In the end there’s one question left: Why did Prime accept Hordak into his ranks again if my theory is right? Why would he take Hordak back if he was able to resist the mind control. Easy. Horde Prime is an arrogant and selfish dumbass. He was sure that after all that happened he must be the one Hordak loved the most. He decided to watch and test Hordak and his faith (when he asked him to kill Entrapta). He wanted to see him suffer. And he knew if Hordak wasn’t faithful he could easily get rid of him. But he decided to play that sick game… and he lost because Hordak chose to break the chain of abuse.

So that’s it. My theory about Hordak! Thank you so much for reading! I really hope you enjoy!💜

#hordak #entrapta #she ra entrapta #she ra netflix #she ra 2018 #horde #horde prime #theory #headcanon #hordaksdefect

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boyfridged · 1 year

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i’ve been thinking a lot about what is so unique and appealing about 80s robin jay’s moral standing that got completely lost in plot later on. and i think a huge part of it is that in a genre so focused on crime-fighting, his motivations and approach don’t focus on the category of crime at all. in fact, he doesn’t seem to believe in any moral dogma; and it’s not motivated by nihilism, but rather his open-heartedness and relational ethical outlook.

we first meet (post-crisis) jay when he is stealing. when confronted about his actions by bruce he’s confident that he didn’t do anything wrong – he’s not apologetic, he doesn’t seem to think that he has morally failed on any account. later on, when confronted by batman again, jay says that he’s no “crook.” at this point, the reader might assume that jay has no concept of wrong-doing, or that stealing is just not one of the deeds that he considers wrong-doing. yet, later on we see jay so intent on stopping ma gunn and her students, refusing to be implicit in their actions. there are, of course, lots of reasons for which we can assume he was against stealing in this specific instance (an authority figure being involved, the target, the motivations, the school itself being an abusive environment etc.), but what we gather is that jay has an extremely strong sense of justice and is committed to moral duty. that's all typical for characters in superhero comics, isn't it? however, what remains distinctive is that this moral duty is not dictated by any dogma – he trusts his moral instincts. this attitude – his distrust toward power structures, confidence in his moral compass, and situational approach, is something that is maintained throughout his robin run. it is also evident in how he evaluates other people – we never see him condemning his parents, for example, and that includes willis, who was a petty criminal. i think from there arises the potential for a rift between bruce and jay that could be, have jay lived, far more utilised in batman comics than it was within his short robin run.

after all, while bruce’s approach is often called a ‘philosophy of love and care,’ he doesn’t ascribe to the ethics of care [eoc] (as defined in modern scholarship btw) in the same way that jay does. ethics of care ‘deny that morality consists in obedience to a universal law’ and focus on the ideals of caring for other people and non-institutionalized justice. bruce, while obviously caring, is still bound by his belief in the legal system and deontological norms. he is benevolent, but he is also ultimately morally committed to the idea of a legal system and thus frames criminals as failing to meet these moral (legal-adjacent) standards (even when he recognizes it is a result of their circumstances). in other words, he might think that a criminal is a good person despite leading a life of crime. meanwhile, for jay there is no despite; jay doesn't think that engaging in crime says anything about a person's moral personality at all. morality, for him, is more of an emotional practice, grounded in empathy and the question of what he can do for people ‘here and now.’ he doesn’t ascribe to maxims nor utilitarian calculations. for jay, in morality, there’s no place for impartiality that bruce believes in; moral decisions are embedded within a net of interpersonal relationships and social structures that cannot be generalised like the law or even a “moral code” does it. it’s all about responsiveness.

to sum up, jay's moral compass is relative and passionate in a way that doesn't fit batman's philosophy. this is mostly because bruce wants to avoid the sort of arbitrariness that seems to guide eoc. also, both for vigilantism, and jay, eoc poses a challenge in the sense that it doesn't create a certain 'intellectualised' distance from both the victims and the perpetrators; there's no proximity in the judgment; it's emotional.

all of this is of course hardly relevant post-2004. there might be minimal space for accommodating some of it within the canon progression (for example, the fact that eoc typically emphasises the responsibility that comes with pre-existing familial relationships and allows for prioritizing them, as well as the flexibility regarding moral deliberations), but the utilitarian framework and the question of stopping the crime vs controlling the underworld is not something that can be easily reconciled with jay’s previous lack of interest in labeling crime.

#fyi i'm ignoring a single panel in which jay says 'evil wins. he chose the life of crime' because i think there's much more nuance to that #as in: choosing a life of crime to deliberately cause harm is a whole another matter #also: inb4 this post is not bruce slander. please do not read it as such #as i said eoc is highly criticised for being arbitrary which is something that bruce seeks to avoid #also ethics of care are highly controversial esp that their early iterations are gender essentialist and ascribe this attitude to women #wow look at me accidentally girl-coding jay #but also on the topic of post-res jay.#it's typically assumed that ethics of care take a family model and extend it into morality as a whole #'the ethics of care considers the family as the primary sphere in which to understand ethical behavior'#so #an over-simplification: you are allowed to care for your family over everything else #re: jay's lack of understanding of bruce's conflict in duty as batman vs father #for jay there's no dilemma. how you conduct yourself in the familial context determines who you are as a person #also if you are interested in eoc feel free to ask because googling will only confuse you...#as a term it's used in many weird ways. but i'm thinking about a general line of thought that evolves into slote's philosophy #look at me giving in and bringing philosophy into comics. sorry. i tried to simplify it as much as possible #i didn't even say anything on criminology and the label and the strain theories.#i'm so brave for not info-dumping #i said even though i just info-dumped #jay.zip #jay.txt #dc #fatal flaw #core texts #robin days

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jessfandrawer · 5 months

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Have any Jinko headcanons 👀?

Hmm, no one's really asked for my headcanons before... 🤔 Apologies if this runs long. It's mostly Jin's side of things too, since we know a lot about Zuko already.

Jin is technically a war refugee, but was too young to remember much about fleeing to Ba Sing Se. In her mind, she'd never truly lived anywhere else. She'd never met a firebender before "Li" (Lee?), and hadn't had any bad experiences with the Fire Nation (that she remembered) until Azula seized control of the city.

The one, short AtLA comic where Jin appeared is not canon to me; I don't think they saw each other again before the war ended. Jin was hurt by Zuko running off, so she stayed away from the teashop. When she had the courage to go back, "Li" and "Mushi" no longer worked there. She dated around a bit, had one or maybe 2 serious relationships, but always found herself comparing them to that one memorable date.

Jin found out who Zuko really was by seeing an illustration of his face on a news bulletin or announcement poster. This comic I drew happens.😆 Zuko convinces the Earth King to make the Firelight Fountain a protected landmark.

After they officially decide to date (unless you take the reunite as elders after a lifetime apart track), they keep it secret until having what amounts to a "vacation-only relationship" wears on them. Zuko then invites Jin to stay at the Fire Palace for a spell. She loves it, but struggles to be accepted by the Fire Nation upper-crust (she wins them over). As Fire Lady, I think her strengths would be: diplomacy (with the Earth Kingdom especially), supporting refugees and impoverished citizens, and helping the Fire Lord loosen up.

Jin takes on many different jobs across her young adult years, but eventually decides to become a ceramics artist. Zuko helps with her pieces sometimes.🔥

As a final aside, I don't ascribe to the "Jin is Mako and Bolin's grandmother" theory. For one, her name is Yin, not Jin, and remembering Jin's name is as easy as popping on Tales of Ba Sing Se. If the LoK production team truly intended for them to be the same person, there's no excuse for the name mix up. And secondly, being a wildly devoted Earth Kingdom royalist is not the future I'd prefer for Jin.

Thanks for asking, @pedanticat ! Most of this isn't very cute, whoops.😅

#jinko #atla jin #asks #headcanons #jessrambledrawer #jin x zuko #zuko x jin

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scintillyyy · 1 year

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so i want (finally after months of this sitting in my drafts) to say some things about dana winters-drake, because she, along with jack and janet fascinate me. and i'm going to preface this and say: yes, i know she was created and written by terrible sexist writers, a lot of her more negative traits are because terrible sexist writers don't understand or care about how to write women and write them as laughably wtf, and none of what i'm saying means that i think she deserved her ultimate fate (she definitely did not, and i am mad about it). but! she is more complex than just a generic good mom and she has some really interesting negative characteristics to me. and i'm gonna put this under a read more, because this is probably going to get long

#1 dana as the worst physical therapist in the world:

so i'm going to start with my main point of contention(? i don't know, maybe not that strong) with her: her introduction. she's introduced as jack's physical therapist, and i will not lie, this comes very, very close to absolutely ruining her completely for me and the only reason is doesn't is because i'm aware of who created her, so it's not her fault. i'm am absolutely biased about this, i will admit it. i find this personally abhorrent on every level due to personal reasons, and there is no way anyone will ever convince me that this is not that bad. there is no situation in which dana is not a total monster for this. and i am correct about this. i promise you i can argue every "but" you have about it. i'm sorry. (unless, of course, your argument is 'but this is comics and we don't ascribe that much real life morality to comics', in which case: fair. that's true.)

because i want to make it clear: jack sucks, but dana is the one in the wrong here when it comes to them getting in a relationship. i see a lot of "but she was way younger than him" kind of framing her as an innocent young ingenue to jack's older, predatory ways and i'm over here like...that's not how this works at all.

because dana was the professional in the patient-provider relationship. jack shouldn't have been weird or flirty with her, absolutely, please don't harass your health care professionals (but it also tracks! a survey of physical therapists showed that 84% reported being sexually harassed at work from a patient during their career. so yes, of course jack, a man in his 40s-50s would absolutely try to flirt with his PT, 100%) but the thing is...there's nothing actually stopping jack from trying to flirt with his PT. it's annoying and he shouldn't, but there's no laws against it. dana is the one who has the moral, legal, and ethical obligation to maintain a solely professional relationship with jack (yes, even if she is younger than him-also, i promise you, she was at least 24-25 even being introduced in the 90s. at that time physical therapy was largely a master's program following a 4 year bachelor program. she has a fully developed frontal lobe. she's old enough to know her responsibilities. you don't graduate from school for physical therapy or any other rehabilitation job knowing anything but getting with a patient is the #1 no-no, go directly to jail, do not pass go, etc). she is the healthcare provider in this relationship. jack can flirt with her until the cows come home and it's her responsibility to shut him down every time.

because!! there's a little thing called a practice act. it governs what a licensed professional is and isn't allowed to do. and look, i found new jersey's. highlighted just for you. no amount of ~but they're in love~ will help here. no excuses dana!!

i just live in a world where she loses her license to practice after she gets together with jack, okay. like, tbf, she doesn't get shown actually going on dates with jack until after he can walk again in robin #15, but this is nowhere near at least 3 months after he's done with his rehab. like. it's heavily implied that their relationship basically started while she was actively treating him. like. is he even done with his rehab at this point? he mentions he's almost there wrt his walking so is she still his physical therapist? it's never made clear when she stops. dana starts sleeping with him a few issues after this, so god, i hope so.

anyways, even if she had waited three months after terminating their patient-provider relationship, there's various other reasons why her choosing to get together with jack at all after being his physical therapist is a little morally sus even if technically legal. because here's a list of things that dana would technically probably have access to/know about jack as her patient:

does jack have erectile dysfunction issues as a result of his neurologic damage from the poison? she has access to his medications, so she knows.

does jack have depression/other mental health issues from the loss of his wife/is he getting therapy/is he on anti-depressants? it's probably in his chart as a part of coordination of care. is that mental health stuff relevant to his care at all? in this case probably, given the fact that his quadriplegia is wrapped up in the incident that also murdered his wife.

has she worked with jack at all about modifying sexual positions on account of his impairments? pts will discuss this with patients if it's relevant to their care. they actually learn in school on how to educate patients with quadriplegia on how they might have to modify their intimacy with their partners in case it's relevant to care.

patients tend to confide in their PTs a lot. a lot. since they tend to see their rehab providers a lot more than other providers, patients are far more likely to confide a lot of really personal stuff to them because of the rapport/trust that builds between them over time. has jack cried over janet in his sessions with dana? has jack talked about his insecurities about how things will never be the same for him or his mobility and how that makes him feel? has he discussed his frustration at his progress or lack thereof? i cannot stress how much dana has probably gotten to know jack over the course of their rehab together, really sensitive stuff, and then to turn around and get into a relationship with a patient after having been entrusted with that sensitive information about them? would be extremely sus on the part of that provider. would you feel comfortable if that was your dad? you shouldn't.

like, this is fundamentally a very intimate and delicate patient case given everything that jack has been through. which makes it even more important that a clear line of professionalism is drawn and maintained. and dana didn't do that, clearly.

#2. dana prioritizes her position as jack's partner over her position tim's "mom"

now, i don't think this is a bad thing, necessarily! she is, after all, tim's step-mom and she made it clear from the beginning she had no intention of taking tim's mom's place. and she and tim do see each other as family and clearly care about each other. i think she's a very good step-mom, actually! she's willing to listen to tim and she tries to be a mediator between him and his dad/advocate for tim.

that being said, she almost always will capitulate to jack's position in the end. she might try to get jack to ease up, but she never really actively fights against jack's final decision on what to do with tim. remember the tv ripping out of the wall incident? in robin #45?

this happens after dana came in and talked to tim and said she'll talk to his dad about jack hearing out tim's side of the ariana story. she does, because jack comes in hoping to talk things out and when tim is ignoring him he does this lovely move. so what does this have to do with dana? well here's the thing: dana is still only dating jack at this point. she's not married to him, she can leave at any time. if she's over at their house, there's no way she missed this happening. did she wonder why jack came back from his talk with tim with tim's tv at all? did she shrug it off when she heard him start screaming at tim (remember, drake manor is big but it's not that big)? she clearly accepted that jack grounded tim for weeks after this. she's clearly not opposed to staying in a relationship with a man who would do this to his son. which says something about her. no matter how awful jack treats tim (in front of her even) she maintains a very harmonious relationship with the man and continues to want to be in a relationship with him, so as much as she might try to surface disapprove of jack's treatment of tim, in the end she'll shrug and accept it because she won't implode her relationship with jack over his treatment of tim. she definitely prioritizes her place as jack's partner. see robin #66, jack yelling at tim for running away back to gotham city right in front of dana. she's still not married to him!! this could be a deal breaker for her and it's not!!

here's her being clearly fine and going with jack on a vacation to blizzard central chicago, il right before the holidays in the dcu holiday bash iii.

here she is being more concerned about when jack is going to ask her to marry him when he's sending tim to boarding school as punishment for no man's land in robin #74:

like none of this is mutually exclusive with her being a pretty nice step-mom to tim. just that is she's okay and is a person who wants to be in a very good relationship with jack drake, she has to be someone who accepts jack's treatment of tim. she doesn't want to actually rock the boat with jack in a way that would actually jeopardize her relationship with him, as much as she tries to soften his treatment of tim.

she's clearly okay with jack just calling tim in robin #78 to tell him they're getting married. she's popping toasting to celebrate as he does this. she never said, hey jack, maybe we should tell tim in person?

#3. dana is kind of judgemental about tim's girlfriends in defense of tim/lowkey a little sexist and she's a fair representation of a republican woman.

now, this one is fair to ignore because it was written mainly by dixon and willingham, but also the sexist things she's said/implies about them is actually fairly realistic imo because the republican older women i know have said things along the vein of things dana has said. in robin #45 she says this weird thing about ariana

by saying she is implying that she knows that ariana is actually the one at fault for this entire mess and tim has to protect her reputation and saying that ariana would have a "reputation" if it came out that she was actually the one at fault. which. maybe in the 90s, but also this is a very old, conservative viewpoint on women so.

and then in robin #124 where she defaults to blaming stephanie for corrupting tim (also, she's like "jack we shouldn't do this" but then. like. doesn't actually fight him and stop him from doing this she let's him do this. then is like sigh, guess i'll make tim's favorite lasagna rather than actually fight and stop jack from doing this).

which yea, willingham. but given that dana has defaulted to defending tim over his girlfriends in the past re: ariana, i actually think it's quite in line for a more conservative woman like dana to be super nice to their son's girlfriends up until their son potentially looks bad and then immediately turning their backs on them because or the idea that their sons ~could never~. like. i hear the following things from conservative women at least 3x/week (paraphrased):

oh, well, girls you know. they're so much more drama than boys.

my boys were so easy, but my daughter? oh god, i can't even begin with her

girls are so catty. boys are so much easier to deal with.

my son has this girlfriend. i just. i. hmmm. i just don't know about her. she's. she's. she's okay, i guess. i have some concerns.

as for how i know she's a conservative woman? she's happily and harmoniously married to jack and she's a PT in bristol township. i am 110% certain she's a registered republican. with her moral ambiguity and slighy sexism she reads as a fairly realistic conservative to me.

anyways in conclusion, i think she's actually a lot more complex than just generic good step-mom! she has a lot of failures and negative characteristics that makes her more interesting to me than just good sainted woman who puts up with jack and tim. she has her own faults. we do have to remember that she had a very good relationship with jack and saw how he treated tim and was largely okay with it. maybe jack was someone she thought she could change. maybe she agreed with him on a lot of things. jack and dana have the harmonious relationship that fandom wants jack and janet (a very volatile and ultimately ill-matched relationship) to have had!

anyways here's one final panel from robin #100 of dana saying that tim could just get a job and help out with the family finances after jack lost the company that i couldn't think of where else to put it (like, she's probably joking. but clearly this is something both she and jack find funny to joke about.)

#dana winters #jack drake #tim drake #batman #dc

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bigfan-fanfic · 10 months

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How do you feel about Damien’s Mom Talia Al Ghul? Because some people said she’s a victim of bad racist writing and she’s had a bad portrayal in the animated movies. Is Talia really just victim of bad writing or she’s actually a horrible mother/person? I’m just confused because when I read the comics about Talia and the bad things she did and I just assumed that’s was part of her character because she’s a morally questionable villain of course she’s not a “good civilian person.” I knew DC is a dark adult comic book series and I already expected going in that the villain characters like Talia would committed terrible/horrible actions against the heroes. Like for example when she drugged Bruce and took advantage of him, I was slightly shocked but wasn’t surprised. Cuz to me this was the dark stuff DC was known for doing.

Alrighty, so the answer is a little bit of both!

TW for sexual assault mentions, miscarriage, parental abuse, etc.

There's a TL;DR ("too long, didn't read" summary) under the cut if you don't wanna read my report which is pretty awesome and was fun to write.

So, nobody seems to be able to agree on who Talia is at her core, and that's generally par for the course for a comic book character with multiple writers. She's been around since 1971, so that's already 52 years! And like Greek myth, there's just a lot of different interpretations of the character.

Let's get to the nitty gritty before we talk history. In 2006, writer Grant Morrison established that Talia drugged and raped Bruce, conceiving their son Damian (and also for some reason adding a whole unnecessary "artificial womb" thing? I don't get it either). However, this is based off the fact, which Morrison later admitted, that they misremembered the story they based the Batman and Son arc off of, and later comic arcs (in 2012 and 2014) would retcon the incident as consensual. Put a pin in this.

Talia was originally more of a damsel in distress slash prize for Bruce. Remember, this was the 70s. Her main deal is being the daughter of Ra's al Ghul and thus if Batman marries her, he becomes the heir, which Ra's wants. Despite not wanting to succeed Ra's, Bruce and Talia do share romantic attraction and Ra's considers them married. Then, later on, they do actually marry and she gets pregnant, and then Talia realizes that Bruce will always be in danger having to protect her and their child, so she fakes a miscarriage and they dissolve their marriage. She gives the child to an orphanage, and he is given the name Ibn al Xu'ffasch, or "son of the bat". This is the story arc Morrison adapted later.

Talia was kinda badass in the period before 2006, where she was sort of an anti-villain. She breaks out and starts having her own self after Ra's engages her to Bane whom she despises. She, under the name Talia Head, runs LexCorp as CEO while Lex Luthor is President of the United States, and basically not only tips Superman off about all his plans, but sells LexCorp's shares to Wayne Enterprises leaving Lex functionally penniless. Then she gets brainwashed and basically evil-fied by her half-sister Nyssa Raatko who literally kills her over and over, resurrecting her each time in the Lazarus Pit as an extreme form of torture and reprogramming. She usually does more evil shit after this like joining leagues of supervillains and such. However, her motives of helping Jason Todd recover and train are usually ascribed to her love for Bruce and not wanting Jason to kill him.

Then after 2006 she goes full tilt crazy ex girlfriend and murders people, trained Selina Kyle to resist any and all psychological coercion to reveal Bruce's identity, and PLANTS A DEVICE IN DAMIAN'S SPINE THAT LETS HER CONTROL HIS BODY, and reveals that she's started cloning him because she thinks he's too weak and disowns him.

Then comes the New 52 (the part where DC did a reboot to make everybody darker and "more realistic" that absolutely nobody liked, so it started in 2011 and then DC did another reboot in 2016 to make it better) and Talia is just off the wall completely evil. Genocide, cloning Damian, killing Damian, being resurrected, then fighting an ancient alien cult and claiming she's redeemed, then literally rejoining the League of Assassins moments later.

Incidentally, apparently Grant Morrison wrote Bruce, Talia, and Damian from their own experiences as a child of divorce, which is just... wow. Like... that's just a lot to unpack there, but we're just gonna step past it.

As of the DC Rebirth reboot, Talia is more or less sort of back to being anti-villain, still yes a killer, but also more emotionally open and supportive of her son and back to trying for true redemption.

Let's take, as I usually try to do, the sum total of these experiences and from other sources and try to average it out.

Unfortunately, despite the retconning, a lot of people now still see Talia's rape of Bruce as canon. I did too for the longest time, and honestly, although it makes Talia despicable and completely irredeemable in a very visceral way, it also does allow for interesting dynamics for Bruce and Damian, the batfam and Talia, Bruce in general, and allows there to be discussion for the tragically underconsidered circumstance for female-on-male sexual assault, and by having Batman, who is often used by hypermasculine dudebros for their weird ideals of stoic toxic masculinity be a victim, and be vulnerable, and go through this could be a deeply powerful arc that nobody in comics really wants to touch. It does however, deprive us of an interesting and nuanced Talia and instead catapults her right into mustache-twirling evil.

Ultimately, Talia is the daughter and heir of Ra's al Ghul. She sees no problem murdering people, and in fact she usually shares her father's genocidal ambitions of culling much of the human race to help preserve the planet. Ra's boils down to an ecoterrorist and genocidal maniac, and Talia his henchman, though when she does strike out on her own, I can't quite get a handle on her motivations. She does tout a desire for "equality and peace" but there's really no standard she gives for what this means, so I can't really see if she's just crazy or if she has good intentions.

I think, even at her best, Talia is a perfectionist and is very strict, intent on Damian being who she wants him to be. I think she has very little empathy or compassion for others, although parts of her, at her best, regret this and she tries to grow. At her worst, she is irredeemably evil, and at her best she is... morally shady to the point of never really being able to be thought of as a good guy.

I can't speak to whether or not racism plays a part in her portrayal either as mustache twirling villain or whatever. I don't know that it's necessarily bad writing because I don't know if Talia was ever intended to not be a horrible person or morally ambiguous, apart from the early days when she was mainly a figure to be pursued by Batman. When it comes down to it, adding sexual assault to her list of crimes is not going to change much because she's a mass murderer, an ecoterrorist, an abusive mother any way you slice it because she's training her child as an assassin, and generally just not great. A fascinating character, yes, but a terrible person.

TL;DR: Talia al Ghul is a terrible person in general, but the Big Incident you refer to has been retconned and is based off a poorly-remembered story. However, considering she's a mass murderer, assassin, eco-terrorist, and also let's face it classist villain, she's still not great even if you remove that from her rap sheet. She's done some cool stuff like putting Lex Luthor in his place and that one Elseworlds story where she left Bruce and gave her son to an orphanage to protect him, but otherwise, once she was made her own character and not just a love-interest-of-the-week, Talia has been morally ambiguous at best and irredeemable at worst. I can't say if it's racist or not because I don't know the motivations in her writing, but I don't know that it's necessarily bad writing to make her unsympathetically evil.

#talia al ghul #reports outside the fic #comic history #please read I actually did research on this

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romeoandjulietyouwish · 2 years

Text

You know that comic about the witch giving her hand to the person who gets the key to her house from around her cat’s neck? Here’s an Imogen/Laudna fic about it :D

There’s a witch who lives in a small cottage in a clearing in the woods.

She is known by all in town as the most beautiful woman in the village, with her soft purple hair that falls in waves down her back and her pink lips that look like roses on a sunny day. Polite and quiet, she’s tried to keep to herself. But since arriving at the secluded town, she’s been chased after by many men and women alike, trying to win her favor and her heart.

But it’s not just her hand people seek, but her magic as well. Wherever she goes the smell of ozone and lavender follows, the scent of her magic. Magic that can levitate things, repair things, and delve into minds. Magic like that is rare in these parts, even rarer to come from a beauty like her.

Laudna has only seen the witch a few times, never for longer than a brief moment. Imogen Temult, that’s what everyone calls her. She’s seen Imogen in passing in the market or drinking tea at the shop. She is wonderful, Laudna thinks and she’s always been somewhat drawn to her. But she’s never had the confidence to say anything. Besides, it’s not like Imogen would ever be interested in someone like Laudna.

On this cool fall day, Laudna is doing her shopping as quickly as she can. veil drawn over her face and gloves on her hands to hope to dissuade the stares and rocks being thrown at her. Monster, they called her. And maybe they’re right, it certainly seems like it sometimes. Thankfully, she’s been able to fly under the radar today thus far.

Laudna goes about her business, buying some vegetables and bread. From behind her, there is a wave of chatter, it doesn’t sound bad or mean, so Laudna doesn’t pay attention to it at first. Not until she hears the man shopping beside her say, “Gods, she’s beautiful.”

Laudna turns and gets her first real look at her, Imogen. Her purple hair is pulled from her face with a yellow bandana, a teal dress with yellow and purple embellishments making her stick out in the crowd with their bland dress. And immediately Laudna knows that beautiful is not the word she would ascribe to this woman, unearthly, remarkable, powerful would all come first.

Laudna watches as the woman tries to go about her shopping as well, only to be quickly stopped by a young man, “You are most beautiful, miss, might I-”

“Please leave me alone,” Imogen says politely, pulling away from him as she turns to the vendor. Only for another young woman to step in front of her, presenting her with a single rose. Just as politely, Imogen dismisses her. Laudna watches as it keeps happening, the witch will try to do her shopping only to be interrupted by someone propositioning her. Laudna aches to help her, but she knows that in doing so the ire of the people will quickly turn to her.

It’s incredibly easy for Laudna to tell that Imogen is getting frustrated and overwhelmed in the crowd, her hands clenching into fists, the smell of ozone growing stronger. A woman touches Imogen’s waist, tucking a flower behind her ear, Imogen pulls away quickly, careering into a tall man with a love struck smile. People begin to crowd around her, chatter growing louder and louder until finally-

“Enough!” Imogen shouts, her voice crackling with the boom of thunder.

Immediately the market falls silent as everyone looks at the witch, her hair flying up around her, veins of purple lighting starting to crack her skin as she floats a few feet off the ground. Laudna watches in fascination at the display of magic.

Imogen glares down at the people surrounding her, “I’ve had enough of your advances and your compliments and your propositions,” Imogen says loudly. “If you want to win my affections, you must take the key to my house from around my cat’s neck. I’ll give my hand to whoever enters my house with that key. Until then, I ask you all to leave me alone.”

read the rest on ao3 (3k)

#my fic #critical role #bells hells #imodna #laudna #imogen temult

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decepti-thots · 1 year

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If it's not too much trouble, could you explain in simple terms what makes Spotlight: Arcee transmisogynistic? I feel like I must be missing something.

I get that it probably has to do with her being crazy violent and out for revenge because of a forced sex (and gender???) change and that she didn't ask for or agree with, but is that all there is to it?

This is an honest question and I am not trying to troll btw.

I'm happy to share my thoughts with you on it (below a cut, because the subject matter is less fun than I usually tackle on this blog), but with a couple caveats.

First off, I wouldn't answer this if I felt completely ill-equipped to give an answer, naturally. But I do want to stress that this is an answer, one particular perspective from one particular person, and not a claim to any kind of authority; for context, while this opinion is heavily informed by the opinions of trans women I have spoken to and read the thoughts of regarding this comic over the years, I'm not one myself. And more broadly, nobody's opinion is ever going to cover every possible angle on a serious topic, and I can only speak for my own opinion on the matter, informed by the opinion of a few more who I respect. I'm just some rando. You should only ascribe the below as much respect as you think Some Rando Online TM deserves; probably not all that much, hah. ;)

Now that context has been established, what I actually think is below the cut.

I think it can help to put the stuff you bring up in this ask into a broader perspective to explain why these elements are transmisogynistic, which is something we can look at on a couple of levels. One of these is in the sense of how these elements interact with a broader history of similar tropes in pop culture, and another is a discussion of the surrounding context of Arcee having this kind of story told about her given the history of her representations in prior incarnations of TF comics. So let's tackle the former first.

So there's the trope of a forced "sex change" invoked as horror you highlight in this ask, which works to present the concept of "changing sex" in a shocking, traumatic and frequently graphic light; this is something found in all manner of schlocky horror media, hence why I refer to it here as an established and recognizable trope. Spotlight: Arcee did not invent it; the comic is riffing on a stock concept it understands an audience will recognize. (For a recent and particularly blatant example, google the 2016 film 'The Assignment'.)

While an argument can be put forth (and often is) that this only presents involuntary "sex changes" as scary things, distinct from the concept of someone undergoing a voluntary gender transition, that... well let's put it this way: involuntary forced gender surgeries are not a real problem. But they are often invoked as though they are a real problem to cast doubt on the ethics of all transition in real-world transphobic rhetoric, and so the use of them as a horror trope is far from neutral. Simply by suggesting such a thing really is something to be feared, you're implicitly acknowledging the existence of, basically, a transphobic conspiracy theory.

(A similar argument is often had in relation to the famous 'is Silence Of The Lambs really transphobic if it has a passage about how the serial killer isn't a REAL trans woman', regarding the fact that positing that there might be violent men pretending to be trans women to do terrible things is in itself simply an invitation to scrutinize trans women for signs of that supposed dangerous "fakery".)

Spotlight: Arcee on a conceptual level relies upon the idea its audience can accept this invocation of the concept and revel in the horror it inspires in them. Some things in fiction we accept despite them being clearly bullshit, obviously, but we are motivated to suspend our disbelief, and that motivation is often telling. Zombies aren't real, but we pretend they are because of what they do for a zombie story. (Or, if the zombie story sucks, we don't, and we laugh at its failure to convince us.) In Spotlight: Arcee, the motivation to accept the deeply unrealistic concept underpinning it is one that is motivated primarily by a misogyny it assumes is present in the opinions of its audience. Put a pin in that; we'll come back to my arguing that case later when we discuss Furman's prior work. The main takeaway here is that the comic invokes a common transphobic trope that exists to associate transition with violation and threat.

There is also, as you mention, the fact that the comic makes Arcee a woman (by its own internal logic, where surgically altering someone's body non-consensually does that by default) and then has that as the direct cause of her going into a violent frenzy. Needless to say, 'once she was given some indefinable Woman-ness, she lost her shit and became unreasonable' is uh. Well nobody ever accused Furman of being good at writing women of any description, did they.

This isn't specifically a transmisogynistic issue as much as it is just. A generically misogynist one. The transmisogyny comes in basically because it exists in the same story as the above, and so can't be separated from the whole 'forced sex change' trope.

It's especially worth mentioning Arcee is given some innate, obvious "woman-ness" attribute in-text, like it's something that emanates out from her in a way other characters cannot help but notice despite not knowing what a woman is. Arcee is like 'you can't HELP calling me 'she', you just KNOW that something about me is NOT LIKE YOU' so the metaphor is uh. Not subtle. Women have a Thing and the Thing is Woman-ness and also if you have it you go nuts. (Sidenote: as well as being offensive, this comic is just... REALLY badly written. This part makes no fucking sense.)

So those are the two main reasons it gets called transmisogynistic. Not only because of the things that happen in the comic, but because of how they interact with pre-existing stereotypes in broader pop culture and media.

But there's another reason Transformers fans specifically will point to this comic as an issue, and it's that this whole thing is Furman doing a meta-commentary on why he thinks "woman in Transformers comic bad". Furman has made it clear many times since his original run with Marvel that he thinks Transformers "having gender" is stupid- specifically, he thinks Transformers being women is stupid, because only women have gender and the default is implicitly masculine to him. (Optimus Prime being a masculine looking guy embodying stereotypically masculine traits voiced by a man who is called 'he' is fine, but Arcee is a no-no.)

He wrote a comic for Marvel about how Arcee was created to appease angry stupid human feminists, like this is in-universe why Marvel Arcee is a girl there- it reads completely as some sort of commentary on what he sees as 'political correctness' being forced onto the franchise.

And he kept doing this. His never-realised plans for the female characters in Dreamwave included all the women being revealed as Quintesson sleeper agents. Then, Spotlight: Arcee, where her existence as a woman is an artificial, deeply wrong imposition into a universe that has no need of her or anyone like her, a corruption of what these characters are "supposed" to be.

That it leans specifically on transmisogynistic tropes is less because it's deliberately going for that I think, and more because pop culture often pulls out transmisogyny to communicate a lot of the ideas here about womanhood as artificial or bad or corrupted or whatever. So when you reach for tropes to communicate these concepts, the overlap with media more specifically evoking transmisogyny is pretty much inevitable past a certain point. I don't think Furman wrote Arcee in this comic intending her to be a trans woman, even a horrible stereotype of one. I think he wrote her to be a metaphor for how "forcing" women into things where they "aren't needed" is unnatural and bad, and the easiest tropes that communicated that idea were ones about trans women, and what this says about society's broader transphobia is telling.

This was a lot of words to say about a short, bad comic that almost nobody has read by a guy whose career mostly consists, these days, of comics almost nobody reads. I probably wouldn't have wasted so many words on this comic except that I think it is a useful case study in how to recognise these sorts of things in works that sometimes evade notice because they profess not to technically "be about" trans folks. The key is not in what the "identities" of the characters are (they're fictional; they don't "have identities") as some defenders of S:A have insisted, but in what the tropes they use communicate and reinforce in a broader context. S:A is a shite comic. Don't read it. But if you read it, that's probably the most valuable thing you'll get out of it.

#transphobia w

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thequiver · 2 years

Text

I’m gonna say something controversial

DinahOllie shouldn’t be endgame

Yes the appeal is that they’re incompatible but work anyway. However- how long they work has a time limit imo. I still ship them, but I ship them within a certain timeframe of character development and a certain era of comics.

Ollie at his core is an unreliable man built by unreliable people who is trying to be reliable despite the circumstances he’s often in (sometimes through his own doing, sometimes through no fault of his own). Dinah’s past? Doesn’t allow her to concede to this. She can only tolerate this so long, and no amount of how well Ollie treats her, or how kind and respectful he is of her issues is going to fix that. Furthermore we see disparities in politics, something which we all know that Ollie doesn’t take lightly (she’s canonically a union buster I mean come on).

Similarly, Dinah has been hurt and burned by the idea of family and motherhood. Depending on the origin you ascribe to (I’m personally an Earth-2 Dinah truther) the death of her husband or her young divorce when coupled with her multitude of issues with her mother is a recipe for an unhealthy relationship with the idea of motherhood. An unhealthy relationship that Dinah canonically has, and a canon where Dinah has expressed on multiple occasions that she has no desire to be a mother. Putting this next to Ollie who takes to being a father like a fish to water, and who wants kids, and is even willing to give up being Green Arrow to be a present father. At some point the rift there is going to grow- and as we saw in GA Vol. 2 it was already there when Dinah said that she couldn’t share Ollie with Roy and Robert II.

On the topic of Robert II, there’s also the issue of Dinah victim blaming Ollie for the assaults he suffered in Green Arrow Vol 2, accepting that they weren’t his fault in BoP, and then trying to force him to apologize for them while knowing he didn’t remember what had happened upon his resurrection in Green Arrow Vol. 3. There’s also the issue of Dinah accusing Ollie of sleeping with Mia in Green Arrow Vol. 3, which is not a light accusation to make and certainly not one to make off the cuff in front of the man’s son.

And while there’s no denying the physical chemistry between them (DC does a wonderful job of showing us how horny they are all the time)- they can’t give each other what they need emotionally long term. They have pretty severe communication issues some but not all of which can be attributed to Ollie’s autistic coding, but others can be attributed to the sheer stark differences between the two of them.

There’s also the issue of Dinah’s pattern of hitting Ollie and of speaking down to him- I’m currently working on a post detailing this pattern as a response to an anon I got a while back. So no details here but they’re coming.

DinahOllie has a lot of AMAZING stuff, and they’re an incredibly fun couple to explore, I absolutely adore both characters, I’m even working on ship fic about them right now - but I guess I’m a little frustrated by the way that they always seem to be boiled down to “soulmates” in such a way that removes the humanity and messiness from both characters. And am tired of the ways in which their relationship is so often portrayed as one dimensional or even often one sided where all of Dinah’s faults are erased to make her some perfect woman that Ollie has to “earn” as though the appeal of a romance like theirs isn’t built around loving someone completely despite their faults.

#oliver queen #ollie queen #green arrow #dinah lance #black canary #dinahollie

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felikatze · 10 months

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Do you feel Awakening's plot was let down by the need to be a male power fantasy, IE: kill lots of ugly people without remorse, get praised by everyone, all the woman want the avatar, ETC?

hmmmmm. good question. I don't think it's a power fantasy, per se - FE heavily ascribes to the design philosophy of "only beautiful people can be good", which is horrible for a lot of reasons, but I feel in this aspect it's plot structure is more hampered by the fact that it is a video game, and every chapter needs a Battle.

That's how you get basically every single generic brigand. There's a lull in the action, as characters talk, get to know each other, travel to the next relevant location. But you can't put any important battles inbetween, because those moments need to be slow - thus, an enemy who could just as easily be removed from the story without changing it.

In another game I like, Lord of Heroes, it's almost a running gag - the protagonist sees someone important, and wonders when they'll have to fight the next new guy, cuz We Need Boss Battles, even when the characters have no real need to fight each other. This is how you get comical misunderstandings only resolved after trashing each other, or your typical "I need to test your strength first" shtick.

These characters are engineered to be unimportant, for their deaths to mean nothing except some extra exp. It's just a problem baked into every FE game's chapter structure.

To compare to another SRPG, Triangle Strategy - you don't have plot unimportant combat in the story, ever. It's all optinal. Like yeah, there's bandits now and again, but the bandits are actually reoccuring characters, one of whom you can recruit, so they are made to be enjoyed as characters and sympathized with. The bandit characters even make good points sometimes! There's a part in the game where the main characters are involved in a black market smuggling deal, and bandits catch them transporting illegal goods. So, the bandit questions, what makes you rightous in this situation? Why is it right when you're doing it, but wrong when she does? What, because your goal is noble? What does it matter when you've sunk to the rock bottom of morality already?

However, Tristrat has an entirely different plot structure to FE. It also has a chapter system, but not every chapter includes combat. Some chapters only feature cutscenes, or exploration segments.

The game is just set up differently in a way that lets the plot breathe without forcing conflict. Combat gameplay isn't the main draw or a necessity. I'd fucking adore Tristrat if it had no combat whatsoever - It's the opposite of FE. Plot doesn't exist because combat needs to happen, no, combat only exists because the plot occasionally necessitates it.

Okay, this has been my triade on the disposable enemy archetype of Generic Brigand. To the next point - well, is Awakening a male power fantasy?

From the main plot? Not really. Like, yeah, sure, the avatar is the only person who can marry whoever. That's to give the player the opportunity to romance their favorite, I won't deny it. But the main plot itself doesn't have anyone fawn over Robin (besides Chrom). Hell, you could even go without finding out about Tharja's devotion to them if you benched her and never read her supports. Since her whole thing with Robin isn't included in her recruitment chapter at all. That utterly blindsided me when I played, cuz all I knew about her was "Robin simp." and then she didn't even simp robin in her first appearance.

If we're talking "recruiting lots of girls to your army constitutes a harem" then like, every FE game would be a harem. They're not. The game even forces you to be monogamous. I'd argue Fates is worse in this, because characters start falling in love and blushing profusely by A-support, even when they're already married, so everyone is Schrödinger's Cheating. In Awakening support chains, there's never really any romance outside of the sudden S support marriage proposal. I'll admit S-supports are well put together in recontextualizing the previous supports as falling in love, but all of them can also be left at A for a perfectly fine platonic dynamic between all characters.

Robin themself doesn't emphasize their own strength and intellect much, even if it is impressive in the world of the game. It's all about their bonds with others, how others give them strength and hope and all that good stuff. Robin is a well-developed character with positives and negatives. They're not just a blank slate. Hell, man, there's a whopping three choices you can make in the plot, and only one of them actually changes anything, and the first one is actually a choice for Chrom instead. Robin has their own thoughts and feelings and a great arc and if you ignore that in favor of "they're just me fr" then that's a you problem tbh.

You can argue till the cows come home about beauty standards and colorism in FE enemy design, fuck knows that I can freely admit a lot of Awakening enemy designs are racist as all hell, but that's sadly not unique to Awakening. Generic Brigands are ugly to signal that they're unimportant and morally corrupt and it's fine to kill them because only pretty people have morals. The only black people in Awakening are the shadowy desert cultists and the leaders of the "barbaric meathead" nation, so go figure what the game was trying to signal on that front. It's just shit design.

Awakening's finale actually makes me think of your typical fairytale hero story, and it's a great subversion of "the knight in shining armor kills the evil dragon to save the land." In that way, it's also a great subversion of other FE stories, since that summary is a lot of them in a nutshell.

Binding Blade did the subversion first though. Grima is just Idunn 2 (actual bastard edition) and I adore them for it (that much is obvious).

So like TLDR no, I don't think Awakening is a male power fantasy, because the main plot itself doesn't focus on romance or how awesome the main character is whatsoever. Less power fantasy, more "power of friendship" fantasy.

#Feli gets asked #do i dare give this main tags #it's gonna show up in search anyway. eh.

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starvels · 11 months

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Cw: Fatphobia, body shaming, disordered eating, suicidal ideation

We talking about that “””banter””” in Marvel’s Avengers when the team bullied Tony about his weight and he talks about being on a juice cleanse?? Because I hate that so, so much. Like. Tony was depressed! and isolated for 5 years!!! And like, Not Doing Ok!

@blossomsinthemist was talking about it and like :(((((( https://www.tumblr.com/blossomsinthemist/721606463816105984/nat-may-claim-she-never-broke-cover-to-help

Plus the fact that it’s heavily implied Nat, that takes part in the bullying, KNOWS Tony was depressed and suicidal https://www.tumblr.com/blossomsinthemist/721588267817025536/i-need-more-fics-out-squareenixs-steve-coming-to

And like you said, he is still thin in the game, but like, so what if he wasn’t? Tony can be any shape and he wouldn’t deserve that! He could still be any shape and still kick ass in a literal power suit. Like. :(

(I kinda liked how I’m the game Tony seemed to have a bit of a hunch to him, man’s a workaholic that is either typing or leaned over a work table and I liked seeing that in a character design (tho it might just be a bad rig and all the characters have it, it’s just hidden under their costumes), but -11000099999 points for the ““banter””. EG Thor all over again)

yeah! that is what i was referring to in this post. as i'm watching playthroughs to make MA content for STG, i found this scene so off-putting and it reminded me of a lot of other ones i've seen in comics. & feeling just the general vibe reading a comic that i am never gonna get to see fat people be heroic. especially not at least, without emphasizing that they're a fat person sure, but they are still heroic, don't worry!

fat heroes' heroism always comes as a caveat to their body shape and weight.

nasty!!!!

but yes blossoms' point here abt tony and perception of self and internalizing a lot of judgement values about his appearance and how fun it is to explore that are so apt!

blossoms always handles tony's relationship with his own body in such compelling and intricate ways that are very tender and vulnerable. and i agree! i also like exploring these themes and playing with how tony relates to being a public figure, as well as how he relates to himself and the ways in which he feels pleasure or contentment or beauty or pride.

to blossoms+anons second point, abt nat knowing, yeah. if you read it just in-text, it can be really complicated by their own individual and combined relationships to trauma and processing and how much info they are sharing between them. that's always very interesting to eke out of interactions w the two of them -- two people who can guard their hearts and heads so intensely.

but taking a meta-textual approach to it, i flat out think when people ascribe their own -isms to characters, they are not thinking about how it fits a character's personality or interpersonal relationships.

we, as the fans, do the labor of asking how it can be internally consistent for a character that grew up without bodily autonomy, that knows intimately how loss and trauma affect your bodily functions, who knows exactly how tony fights and what it takes to do that, who knows that bodies are only one tool in a whole box -- makes fun of someone who trusts her, on her team, for potentially gaining weight. we hypothesis and convolute the relationship and infer from the absences of a canon text. the writers don't have to do any of that work. and that more than anything generally proves to me how shoehorned in all the -isms people apply to characters are.

they're not thinking three levels deep. and to be honest, i like our collective 3 level thoughts better than there, so ! phooey on them!! they don't get a seat at our table.

it literally doesn't matter what your body looks like if you're designing a metal suit to go around it that is based on non-physical input to function. and tony's found family should abso-fucking-lutely not be (even jokingly) shaming him for disordered eating and suicidal ideation, esp not during a battle lol. but yes, tony should have a hunch and neck problems and whine and use a heating pad and tiger balm too much <3 beloved greasemonkey sun.

#our talk #tony stark #marvel's avengers #fatphobia #natasha romanov #character talk #comics talk #my talk

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princesssarisa · 1 year

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Character ask: The seven dwarfs (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)

Favorite thing about them: In all versions of the fairy tale, I love their kindness in accepting Snow White into their home and how devotedly they come to love her. As for Disney's iconic dwarfs, I also love their comedy and their endearing individual personalities: especially adorable Dopey, and Grumpy with all his funny lines and his arc of gradually warming up to Snow White. I love the fact that despite being silly cartoon characters, they're still such warm, engaging figures that back in 1937, they moved an audience full of tough Hollywood moguls and stars to tears with their grief at Snow White's apparent death.

I also enjoy seeing the creative ways that different adaptations portray them. Their names and personalities vary, of course, as does whether they're gnomelike creatures or humans with dwarfism, and exactly how comically or seriously they're portrayed varies too. They've also been portrayed as a brotherhood of priests, as a band of thieves, as the last survivors of a noble Tolkien-esque race, as rainbow gnomes who control the weather, as magical craftsmen who made the Queen's magic mirror, as seven average-sized human siblings whose surname happens to be Dwarf, and as seven formerly-handsome princes transformed into green dwarfs as a punishment. I love the variety!

Least favorite thing about them: That some people with dwarfism, like Peter Dinklage, view them as ableist, dehumanizing figures.

Three things I have in common with them:

*I like gold and gemstones.

*Like Disney's dwarfs, I can be messy.

*If a person fleeing from danger were to arrive at my door, I would also take them in and try my best to protect them.

Three things I don't have in common with them:

*I've never worked as a miner.

*I'm of average height.

*I live in a condo, not a cottage, and I thankfully don't share it with seven other people.

Favorite line:

From the original tale, after Snow White "dies":

"We cannot bury her in the black earth."

And when the Prince offers to give them anything in exchange for the glass coffin:

"We will not sell it for all the gold in the world."

From the Disney version:

When they discover the sleeping Snow White and Bashful compares her to an angel:

Grumpy: Angel, ha! She's a female! All females is poison! They're full of wicked wiles!

Bashful: What are wicked wiles?

Grumpy: I don't know. But I'm agin' 'em!

When Snow White asks "How do you do?":

Grumpy: How do you do what?

When Snow White offers to cook for them:

Doc: Uh, can you make dapple lumplings? Er, lumple dapplings?

Grumpy and Sleepy: Apple dumplings!

Doc: Yes! Crapple dumpkins.

(Sneaking a little toilet humor past the Hays Code on that last line, eh Disney?)

When the other dwarfs are washing:

Grumpy: Next thing you know she'll be tyin' your beards up in pink ribbons and smellin' ya up with that stuff called, uh... perfoom!

brOTP: Each other and Snow White.

OTP: None.

nOTP: Snow White, unless it's a retelling where one of them is portrayed as her love interest.

Random headcanon: I firmly ascribe to the belief that Disney's dwarfs are gnome-like beings, not humans with dwarfism. They have a magical connection to the earth, which explains why the gems they mine appear cut and polished. They're also immortal, and already several hundred years old when they meet Snow White – some of the movie storybooks and earlier drafts of the script make this explicit.

Unpopular opinion: While I love Grumpy's character arc of resisting Snow White's presence at first but ultimately learning to love her, I don't have any desire to ship them the way some do. I'd rather view his love for her as more fatherly; he's an old man and she's a young girl, after all. I'd sooner ship him with Doc (assuming they're not brothers – whether the dwarfs are related to each other or not is another thing that varies between adaptations), because their blend of closeness and bickering gives off an "old married couple" vibe.

Song I associate with them:

"Heigh-Ho."

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"The Washing Song (Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum)."

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"The Silly Song."

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Favorite pictures of them:

This illustration by Anastassija Archipowa.

This illustration by Warwick Goble.

This one by Angela Barrett.

This one by Trina Schart Hyman (who allegedly modeled all her dwarfs after people she knew, including herself – the young-looking one with black hair is a self-portrait).