#weird things happen all the time in the dcu
Text
DP X DC PROMPT #28
(#) = Notes at the end of post
✦
Chartreuse
Due to the high levels of ambient ectoplasm, all the citizens of Amity Park gained a permanent change in eye color. They don't glow or flare in response to rampant emotions like true ghosts or the halfas though. They're just an unnaturally bright yellow-green.
The thing is, nobody else on Earth has this eye color, and it's never been seen in the human race until the recently graduated Amity Parkers started branching out to other cities to find jobs.
Nobody paid this any mind at first, though. Many just thought the individuals liked strangely colored contacts or it was a trick of the light. It's not until Danny and Tucker are both hired for positions in Wayne Enterprises that questions start popping up.
At first, the other employees thought the two might be related. It could happen, it's not that strange. However, when both of them said they're nowhere near related, just childhood best friends, it left everyone confused. If they aren't related and they aren't wearing colored contacts, then what are the odds of too completely unrelated people having the exact same strange and unseen eye color?
After a while, everyone just stops asking questions. After all, both men are easy to get along with and are excellent at their jobs, so a strange eye color isn't really something to complain about. Their stares were just a bit more intense than most people, and honestly, they've seen stranger things.
It helps that they've started seeing other people with the same eye color popping up in celebrity, sports, and activist circles. (1)
However, It's not until the power goes out during a late meeting/presentation, and Tim Drake accidentally turns on and shines his cell phone light into Tuckers eyes, that he starts seriously digging.
Needless to say, the animal-like green shine of his pupils scared the shit out of him and got him wondering if two of his new employees were part of a previously unknown alien race that'd recently settled on Earth without anyone noticing. When he looks into the middle of nowhere town they came from, this idea is even further cemented when he sees every person he finds a photo of have the exact same shade of chartreuse eyes. Ignoring the ghost rumors and "sightings" as just a strange tourist trap for the strange little town to make extra income, he brings the info he found to the other bats and birds.
They aren't exactly welcomed when they go snooping around Amity Park, unfortunately... (2 & 3)
✦
Now. To make this a bit more cracky, when confronted, do Danny and Tucker just come clean or do they milk the idea of them being aliens for all it's worth? (4) Add in a few strange, but perfectly normal for them, things they do that have people scratching their heads and make the assumption even worse/more irrefutable. This includes the unexplainable eye shine Tim discovered.
✦
(1) Paulina became a supermodel and is coveted for her striking eye color and beautiful complexion. Dash became a coach for a well known college in Metropolis, while Kwan became a fitness trainer and sponsor for health related items that actually work, also partnered with the college Dash coaches at. Sam became a notorious environmental activist and is the enemy of many companys who are determined to turn the world into a toxic wasteland. With the help of Danny's parents, she's found many eco-friendly chemical compounds that dissolve many of the toxic substances damaging ecosystems around the world. Etc, etc.
(2) Ectoplasm exposure has made everyone a bit more territorial over the town, including their protectors. They don't need outside heroes/organizations interfering with their work and don't/won't take kindly to the sudden interest hero organizations gain over them and their strange little town. That hasn't worked out too well with other government sanctioned organizations in the past and they don't want a repeat, thank you.
(3) Maybe Team Phantom even established themselves right around the same time or even before the Justice League was formed and they just flew under the radar until now. Maybe Amity Parkers feel a bit superior due to their seniority in having an excellent team in the know about the supernatural/non-human side of the world/universe? Who knows? You pick! Amity Park has been through a lot by themselves, so it's no shocker if they have an extreme amount of solidarity towards those they call their own.
(3 cont'd) Also! Since Amity Park has become so rich and saturated in ectoplasm over the years, they were eventually annexed/became an outside part of the Ghost Zone. Jack and Maddy are border patrol and any ghosts coming through need a passport now. Amity Park is basically a vacation hub for ghosts? Ghosts can freely roam the streets, they just don't wreak havoc anymore. That'd basically be terrorizing their fellow citizens at this point anyway and that's a no no. That means jail time with Walker. Amity Parkers also aren't afraid anymore and in fact CAN hit back now. This does not stop the Bat Clan and eventually the Justice League from thinking they're a town full of aliens tho. Some are just more human looking than others. Or they've been on Earth and procreating long enough with humans that their hybrid offspring have also started looking more human, is the ongoing conclusion.
(4) The Anti-Ecto Acts are not an issue here! Team Phantom already dismantled and annihilated the GIW years before they even thought of leaving Amity Park on its own. Before graduating highschool even. Yes, Team Phantom is perfectly self-sufficient and able to handle their own problems and have kept the city-wide ghost infestation pretty isolated outside a few events that were handled quickly and with the world none the wiser. So the world is still pretty ignorant of the existence of ghosts/the Ghost Zone. Would Team Phantom and Amity Park prefer to keep it that way though?
#dp x dc#dc x dp#everyone in amity park's eye color changed to chartreuse/yellow-green#the rest of the world finds this strange but it's whatever#weird things happen all the time in the dcu#tim thinks danny and tucker are part of an alien race#amity parkers are territorial over amity park because of radioactive green juice in the air#amity park is now part of the ghost zone just an outside part#competent team phantom#retired team phantom sorta#they're still on call if a new ghost shows up and gets any ideas but other than that they hung up the capes and ghost hunter gear#amity parkers are also feral enough to handle their own problems now#team phantom might as well be retired heroes turned annual trainers for new ghost hunters/liminal police recruits#danny phantom is NOT ghost king#danny phantom crossover#dp x dc crossover#dp x dc prompt#dpxdc#writing prompt#prompt
666 notes
·
View notes
Text
October recs
*squeezes in at the last minute* Don't mind me, November was terribly busy and also I sprained my ankle - but here's some recs from before all that!
Galagar Gallivant by Quasar (Nine Worlds, genish)
His Radiancy devises a way to fix an anomaly in time. No priest-wizards were severely harmed in the making of this fic.
Completely delightful pre-canon romp, featuring HR being whimsical in response to magical weirdness, Kip being oblivious but also trusting HR to the nth degree (*heartclutch*), and just general charming shenanigans.
A Contract's a Contract, No Matter How Small by @PenAndInkPrincess (Witcher, genish)
Unexpected side effect of Jaskier praising witchers far and wide: children making the logical jump that witchers can handle ALL monsters. Including such subspecies as the under-the-bed variety.
And, well, what are you supposed to say to a child who asks you to fight a monster for them?
Technically this is a WIP, but the chapters are pretty standalone and SO CUTE.
A Dangerous Game by @fabula-unica (DCU, Bruce/Hal)
"You know what I think," Jordan said. "I think you’re one of those people who think they can’t be pranked. That’s what I think.”
“Jordan. There is no conceivable universe in which you could ever successfully prank me – not in your wildest, most attention-deficit-disordered imaginings is that a thing that could possibly occur.”
Jordan gave a quiet laugh. “You wanna bet?”
I am weak for prank wars and this is an excellent one!
The Long Con by @acornsontheground (DCU, Bruce/Hal)
Hal is adamant that he's not going to spend Bruce's money. Bruce intends to change his mind about that. (A sort-of 5+1 fic)
*facepalm* Bruce why are you like this. But at least he's using his powers for good? Very domestic and funny.
Duty of Care by allonym (Harry Potter, gen)
Megwin is two-thirds done with roll call when she stumbles over a familiar name. Harry Potter. Strange coincidence. There’s a student in her muggle primary classroom with the same name as The-Boy-Who-Lived?
A canon-divergent AU in which Somebody Helps Harry Potter.
Creative and satisfying, though it does take Dumbledore's puppeteer tendencies to the worst conclusion, so maybe don't read if you're a Dumbledore stan.
If It's Me You Need To Turn To, We'll Get By by Linxcat (The Untamed, gen)
Zixuan would like to be closer with his half-brother. He would like to skip all the awkward fumbly beginning bit where they don't know each other and just magically arrive at fraternal harmony, where they can joke around like the Jiangs and look out for each other like the Nies and have that spooky synchronicity like the Lans, but the truth is that he's never had a sibling, and he has no script or example for what you're meant to do when you discover one as an adult. They don't have years of in-jokes and growing pains to fall back on, they're basically just strangers who happen to share a parent.
the sickfic fixit in which JGY discovers the Mortifying Ordeal Of Being Known and Zixuan discovers the Mortifying Ordeal of Getting To Know Other People
Really great characterization, and I like how narrow of an escape the last scene is - JGY's damage goes very deep and I like how this author gets that.
#monthly recs#fic rec#nine worlds#dcu#bruce/hal#batlantern#the witcher#the untamed#harry potter#heavy on the gen this month huh
21 notes
·
View notes
Text
1963
THRILL as a bunch of men yell at Superman! LOOK at their Kryptonian clown costumes!
This is in Kandor, the Bottle City, the origin of which I've heard like 6 different versions of and can't be asked to sort them out.
In this comic I think it's the one where Brainiac shrunk them. Some evil scientist tells the Kandor clowns that they can be big again but Superman won't let them because he knows they will all be able to beat him up. The reality is that if they are enlarged they will all melt, which is probably a metaphor for something.
Doesn't matter. This story is only notable because Superman and Jimmy Olsen shrink down and visit Kandor in their Kandoran secret identities, Nightwing and Flamebird.
Apparently they were going to just go as Batman and Robin, but Krypton doesn't have bats or robins, so they didn't want it to be confusing...?
Look. Someone at DC drew two cool new superheroes named Nightwing and Flamebird and was told no and managed to get away with this.
Later on at some point another cousin of Superman's in Kandor becomes an actual Nightwing there, with a Flamebird sidekick.
The weird thing is that the Dick Grayson Nightwing directly descends from this, in that he gets the idea for Nightwing from Superman telling him about the Kandoran Nightwing. I don't know if he just told him the thing about his cousin, or if he explained that THAT only happened because he did this pointless OC-legally-distinct-from-Batman cosplay one time he went there.
...Did Bruce ever find out about this? Because that seems like a weird thing to find out, that Superman and Jimmy Olsen pretended to be KO versions of you and your sidekick, with rocket belts, in a tiny city.
I suppose when you've lived through the DCU Silver Age, your sense of weird is probably pretty abstract.
Especially when this is still what your super-secret superhero hideout looks like:
That damn penny. Let it go already, Bruce.
...He can keep the robot dinosaur that defends the cave. That's just practical. Alfred isn't always free to go down there with his shotgun.
19 notes
·
View notes
Text
several days ago my brain did some calculations and beamed into my conscious thought "if third eye au tim is parallel to both cass and red hood Jason maybe he should have cotard's syndrome after shiva saves his life. he's self aware that it's an irrational delusion, but other than compartmentalisation and meditative techniques there isn't a lot he can do bc mental health care in the dcu is Real Bad"
(cotard's syndrome is a set of related delusions that the sufferer is dead/missing body parts/etc, sometimes called 'walking corpse syndrome')
its a thematically a blending of cass's death wish and Jason's "I died and came back" thing (since Jason doesn't die in this au so tim fulfills a symbolic parallel of his role as a ghost from batman past reminding him of how he failed them),
except rather than seeking death or revenge it turns inward (since Tim tends to live in his own head when stressed. a withdrawn tim is a struggling tim). like, he isn't seeking death. because on a subconscious level he's convinced he already died and is somehow still functioning. anf he's not going to put himself in dangerous situations because he thinks he deserves it, like cass, or seek revenge for his death like Jason. he's very high functioning. but it means he's also weirdly chill about the concept of dying and accepts that shiva is going to kill him some day and doesn't do a lot to avoid that future since internally it doesn't feel like a big deal.
but he definitely doesn't want to kill anybody ever again, consciously because a) his personal moral compass and b) to him his death and the act of killing zsasz are intrinsically linked. but also, on a subconscious level, being dead is terrible and he doesn't want to inflict it on another person.
it starts immediately after he wakes up from surviving the Very Traumatic Exsanguination where he absolutely would have died if it weren't for shiva's healing techniques and getting him a backalley blood transfusion (and possibly his heart gave out/had to be manually restarted for Symbolic Purposes), and is just. unobtrusively laying beneath every decision he makes going forward. it really doesn't help that death isn't a permanent condition in dc, and the more public resurrections there are the more he's like. well shit maybe this isn't such a Weird Situation.
this idea slowly permeated from the back of my head out into third eye canon
potentially, and I'm still trying to figure this one out, a version of the evil future titans plot happens but tim figures out in a private conversation with one of the evil future titans (via deduction from how they treat him as neither a potential threat nor potential ally) that in their future he's dead, and is just very chill about that concept even when he asks for more details and finds out that it'll be three months from now but none of them will be able to prevent it because none of them know the details. he just vanished, and later shiva admitted to having killed him.
so of course rather than start preparing a daring counter move (he already used up the poison gambit) he just gets his affairs in order and waits for shiva to contact him, and when she does vanishes into the night
except at this point in the timeline danny temple/krait is a reluctant teen titan member, tracks Tim down and interrupts the fight (a very bad idea! that is shivas least favourite thing!) but, unlike Tim, he has actually planned for how to prevent shiva killing his bestie/long time crush ever since he found out that she trains people in order to Duel with Them to The Death when they're at their peak prowess. so he manages to take a wounded Tim back to a secret kobra bunker and after some Dramatic Talk tim reveals the whole. 'doesn't really care about dying because he's felt dead since the day she saved him and every time he looks in the mirror all he sees is his own corpse staring back at him' thing. yes he knows it's irrational and delusional. of course he won't tell the other titans. he figured out the secret identities of half the justice league as a teenager and was trained by the world's deadliest martial artist, he cant let anybody know he's got Flaws or Instabilities bc then he'd become a potential threat (somewhere, batman feels a moment of strange validation over his paranoia towards his allies on the justice league. he shrugs and goes back to spying on green lanterns text messages)
after he finally accepts his condition may benefit from actual treatment he can go ~mad scientist~ and seemingly start secretly researching mind control/brainwashing technology but when the team confronts him it turns out he's just trying to treat his own mental health condition diy style bc he justifiably does not trust the psychiatric professionals of the dc universe. he gets a secret villain lab setup as a treat. as an enrichment activity. he and krait take apart stolen kobra technology to reverse engineer it together instead of going on normal dates
#one time I had an experience where i was convinced i was secretly an ai in an android body and it affected me greatly#and also still currently have ocd. dealing with delusional thinking whilst aware it's delusional thinking. yeah I'll project that onto Tim#third eye au#does this makes sense? maybe not. compels me though
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
Justice League (2011) #1-6 Readthrough
Sometimes you want to read a bad comic. And spoilers, Geoff Johns’ Justice League does manage to meet that bar. It is a bad sign that this was flagship book for New 52, because it doesn’t sell you on the quality of the line.
The arc starts with an issue of Batman being hunted by the police while he chases after an alien criminal. And then Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) shows up because alien. The two heroes do not get along, and the alien uses a mysterious device to do a suicide bombing to stop the heroes. We then cut to Victor Stone, young football star, being sad. The two heroes go after Superman thinking that he can help with this mysterious alien situation.
And that is all that happens in Issue #1. You think that a launch of line would be big launch showing the power of heroes, but instead we get Green Lantern and Batman being dicks to each other, and a very paranoid DC universe to the new superheroes.
And Issue 2 manages to continue this weird paranoia from the citizens of the DCU by having The Flash (Barry Allen) being worried that the police are after him. But he doesn’t have time to worry because Superman is attacking Batman and Green Lantern. The fight is going poorly enough that Hal needed to phone a friend to get Supes to calm, and Flash goes quickly to calm everything down.
Better heads manage to prevail, and the group decides to hide away to discuss the mysterious alien attacks. Meanwhile, Victor Stone terrible day continues with him getting his father to admit that he does not want his son to play football. And when things start to advance, the mysterious boxes activate which leads Victor to be seriously injured.
Issue #3 starts with some Wonder Woman moments, and while these moments are one the highlights (especially the scene where Wonder Woman eats ice cream for the first time) it does seem to out of character for Wonder Women. Geoff Johns writes her more like Thor, as ancient being going to modern day but is hungry for battle. Anyway, the aliens come to attack Wonder Woman and Washington DC as well.
Victor’s dad goes to work to save his son’s life, while in Metropolis swarms of the aliens (they’re Parademons) attack Superman’s group. And weird complaint but heroes are a bit kill crazy for something that they don’t know if they are intelligent beings or not. Anyways, Wonder Woman shows up to join the group in battle. The heroes try to figure out what is going on with attack and the pinging devices when Aquaman shows up.
In the efforts to save his son, Victor’s dad has injected him with experimental nanotechnology. This has the side of almost entirely covering Victor’s body in metal, making him a cyborg. Thankfully this gives Victor the ability to talk to computers and use high-tech weaponry like a sonic cannon. Which comes in handy when Parademons attack.
Meanwhile, Aquaman makes a convincing argument that he should lead the group of heroes while also using his abilities to take out some more Parademons. But before much progress is made, the US military goes to attack both the Parademons and the assembled heroes. It does not go well for the military.
Cyborg is seen running from the stress of being more machine than man but the mysterious device teleports him to gathered heroes in Metropolis. And to make matters worse the pinging devices finally manage to accomplish their purpose. Darkseid is on Earth, and he is ready to conquer the planet.
Issue #5 starts with Darkseid quickly managing to capture Superman and have him beat the rest of the heroes. Green Lantern gets the worst of it with a badly broken arm. The moment seems hopeless for the world, so Batman steps up. Bats reveals to Hal that he is Bruce Wayne. Bruce says there is too much at stake, that Green Lantern has to step up and lead the rest of the heroes in battle against Darkseid. Batman has decided that his most goal will be to free Superman. That is harder than it seems for Bats because when searching for Superman he got transported to a hell planet.
Issue #6 starts with Darkseid walking through a wrecked Metropolis killing civilians. But then the Justice League work together and attack the evil god. Wonder Woman and Aquaman work together to stab Darkseid’s eye blinding him and stopping his Omega Beams from working. But Batman is having trouble freeing Superman from Darkseid’s henchmen.
Despite the injuries, Darkseid is still ready to fight the League. But the team gets good news when it turns out Cyborg can communicate with devices that brought Darkseid to Earth. He uses this connection to send the god and his army back to their home world. In the chaos of the arriving Darkseid, Batman frees Superman and the entire team fights Darkseid. With great effort Cyborg manages to close the portal and win the day for the heroes.
The seven heroes bask in their victory and are awarded honors by the president. They figure that might work together again, if only to keep the police away. Thus the Justice League was born…
But every great hero needs an opponent. We see some shadow figures say that with the rise of superheroes, supervillains will rise up to oppose them. And another mysterious figure, Pandora, talks to long-time DC figure Phantom Stranger saying that she can use these new heroes. Pandora will break her curse one way or another.
And that is the start of The New 52 Justice League. Boy, that was long disappointing story to start an entire new book, run, and universe. It took 6 whole issues but overall, there was very little story throughout. There are some decent characters moments but I think the team should have gotten together sooner. The paranoia against heroes is just not good starting place for the DC Universe.
But to give a nice mark, Jim Lee sures makes some pretty art for the book. But even the art has some problems. The breakdowns feel kinda bad for this book. And everything is glossy.
4/10
#dc comics#justice league#batman#superman#wonder woman#green lantern#hal jordan#the flash#barry allen#cyborg#darkseid#aquaman#new 52#geoff johns#jim lee#read through
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
Character Profile: Henry King, Jr. (Brainwave, Jr.)
Since I already talked about Jennie and Todd, it’s time to profile the third corner of their weird little triangle: Hank! A.K.A. Brainwave, Jr., a strong contender for the dumbest codename in the DCU. Bless his heart.
CONTENT WARNING: So much ableism and stigmatizing of mental illness, you guys. Also a little brain-related body horror.
Like Jennie and Todd (and Al), Hank first showed up in the 80s as a founding member of Infinity, Inc. Unlike every other member of the team, though, he is not the child or successor of a Golden Age hero, but a Golden Age villain - specifically, his father Brainwave. Hank inherited his dad’s psychic abilities, but luckily not his looks:
A truly unhinged way to introduce yourself to the JSA, Hank: show up in disguise as your evil father, make fun of them, attack them, and then ask for help. Incredible.
During the course of the first Infinity, Inc. arc, the elder Brainwave does the only decent thing he’s ever done in his life, and sacrifices himself to save Hank. As he dies, he transfers his powers to his son’s brain:
This does not end well for Hank. Actually, it doesn’t begin well, either - Hank starts hallucinating his father berating him at inopportune moments:
On the other hand, Hank does end up in a very cute relationship with his teammate Jennie, as we discussed in her profile:
Awww, they’re cute! They probably lost their virginities in that cave! Good for them, I guess!
Hank also makes a connection to another member of the team: their leader, Sylvester Pemberton, the original Star-Spangled Kid and later Skyman. Syl is a Golden Age hero, but thanks to travel shenanigans, he’s only in his very early 20s, around the same age as the II kids. He also has an adopted sister, Merry, who became the obscure superhero Gimmick Girl...and who also happens to be Hank’s mother. How Brainwave Sr and Merry even met, let alone why Merry married a decades-older, extremely evil, crusty little nugget of a supervillain, is never explained.
Anyway, this makes Sylvester Hank’s uncle, a fact that they are both pretty gleeful about judging by the frequency with which they refer to each other as “uncle” and “nephew” throughout the rest of the series. So it’s pretty hard on Hank when Syl is murdered, leading to the disbanding of Infinity, Inc. At this point Merry was dead (she’s later retconned to be alive), so Hank has just lost his last living relative and his only support network, which may partially explain why things suddenly go...really, really badly for him.
By which I mean, he disappears until the mid-90s and then completely arbitrarily attacks a branch of the Justice League:
Oh BOY.
Yeah, so Hank is a villain now, and also “crazy,” in the thoughtlessly ableist comic book-y sense of the word. For absolutely no reason, he has decided to honor his father by attacking a team full of people with zero connection to his dad and barely to him (he met Captain Atom once, back in the 80s). I cannot overemphasize how much this character assassination is not explained and has zero buildup. I think it’s supposed to be funny, hence Hank constantly declaring himself to be “eee-vil”? But, like, it’s not.
Also, he shaved off all his beautiful hair! I’m so sad.
Hank next appears in the Green Lantern/Sentinel: Heart of Darkness miniseries. I talked about it in the Jennie and Todd recap, but suffice to say: everything about it is awful. The plot revolves around Jennie’s mysterious abduction, for which Hank is only a red herring, but it’s revealed that Alan has funded a private asylum solely for the purposes of incarcerating Hank and keeping him away from Jennie. It’s...brutal, and deeply disturbing:
There’s so much wrong with this. The breathtakingly offensive depiction of mental illness. The fact that Alan, a supposed hero, would do this - and Kyle, Todd, and even Jennie don’t seem to care in the slightest. The one doctor we see, who gushes about how fascinating a subject Hank is to study, but says nothing about helping or treating him - and Alan explicitly says all he cares about is keeping Hank locked up. The vague sense that this is Alan’s punishment of Hank for having had sex with Jen. Also, how did Alan even get any of this power over Hank? Why was he allowed to do this? It’s monstrous and I hate everything about it.
A few years later, Hank escapes (how? we don’t know) and attacks Kyle, Jennie, and Alan:
Honestly I’m kind of on Hank’s side here. (His calmness here is explained by having found the right combination of medications, which...may or may not be true, as we’ll see.)
We next see Hank a couple years after that, as part of a JSA storyline. Black Adam and Atom-Smasher (Hank’s old II buddy Al Rothstein) form a splinter group of JSA-ish characters who are willing to cross lines the JSA won’t. The group includes Hank and another former Infinitor, Norda, presumably on Al’s invitation because, like...he’s the one who knows them. I talked about this arc in more detail in Al’s profile, but essentially, they kill a terrorist, then go to Adam’s home country of Kahndaq, kill its current dictator, and put Adam in charge. War breaks out, and the JSA shows up to intervene.
Hank is very in control and more powerful than we’ve ever seen him, but he also seems to have zero scruples left:
That narration is from Black Adam, and his reference to “helping” Hank is also the reason that Hank has gotten so coldly vicious: Hank isn’t driving the bus anymore.
See, when the JSA invaded Kahndaq, they also brought the Atom, who decided to shrink really tiny and climb around in Hank’s brain for...reasons? And he discovered that he wasn’t alone in there:
Yeah, that’s Mister Mind, a Captain Marvel villain. It’s...not totally clear what the sequence of events was here, but I’m assuming Hank escaped from the asylum on his own, Al invited him to the antihero squad, and then Adam put a worm in his brain? I have to assume Al didn’t know about Mister Mind; Al has made some poor choices at this point but he would not do that to a friend.
Anyway, the Atom defeats Mister Mind, the JSA takes Hank back, and then we get the laziest possible resolution to everything that has happened to Hank over the past decade:
Yeah so basically when Hank’s father uploaded his powers into Hank’s mind, it caused a weird, tumor-like growth that made him massively more powerful but also drove him “““crazy,””” for terrible ableist comic book definitions of the term. But Mister Mind ate most of the growth, so Hank’s fine now! And still one of the most powerful psychics on the planet!
Oh, and that woman in the middle there? That’s his mother, Merry. You know, the one Hank believed to be dead, the one who he said he saw die? Yeah, around when he was stuck in the asylum she showed up in Young Justice, totally fine, never mentioning she had a son. So. (This is obviously a continuity error, but my headcanon to make it work is that Senior made Hank believe he’d seen Merry die. Maybe even put a compulsion on Merry to keep her from contacting Hank or Syl? I wouldn’t put it past him!)
(And while we’re talking about Hank’s family, I should also note that Hank technically has a sister, Jacqueline, who briefly took up the codename of Gimmix in honor of Merry. She only appears three times before dying, it’s unclear if she and Hank have the same father since her last name is Pemberton, and she and Hank never interacted in canon. So...there’s that.)
Hank teams up with the JSA once more when they have a problem that requires his particular skill set, and he seems to have made peace with...everything:
Hank, this costume sucks.
Hank then goes to the fictional South American country of Parador and winds up taking care of a bunch of children who have had genetic experiments performed on them by the evil government/drug cartels running the country (this story is WALLOWING in racist stereotypes). He also grows out white guy dreads, which is...a choice:
Like. Hank definitely discovered weed in Parador, and I’m happy for him but also think he should probably shave his head again.
Annnd that was the last we saw of Hank before the New 52 wiped out his entire generation and reset the original JSA back to younger, shittier versions of themselves. Hank and his father do show up in the New 52 but now they are French??? Their names are both Henri Roy??? Also Hank is a teenager. Anyway those versions sucked and they’re gone now so who cares.
Original Flavor Hank was restored to the DCU actually before the rest of the Infinitors, since he had a non-speaking cameo in Justice League: No Justice back in 2018, but as of last year’s Infinite Frontier, he has definitely been restored along with his team, with his full history presumably intact, although he’s only appeared in flashbacks so we haven’t technically seen him recently.
Buuut you can see him tomorrow, in my fic for HankTodd Weekend! And hopefully Hank will return to comics soon now that JSA characters are showing up again. Fingers crossed!
37 notes
·
View notes
Note
So, I know it doesn't have much to do with it, but do you think it would be possible to have two characters carry the mantle of The Flash at the same time in the DCU? Specifically speaking of Wally and Barry, James Gunn will draw inspiration from young justice and there are two Flashes in the justice league (this is mentioned in passing in a season 4 episode and I just think it's such a cool concept overall)
hmm... i dont see why not! it happens a LOT in the comics so... yeah definitely this could (and honestly SHOULD) happen if they choose to follow any sort of correct timeline
upon barry's return from the speedforce him and wally both share the flash mantle. barry has also always shared it with jay. the flashfam isnt really stingy when it comes to sharing titles and outfits! with bart also taking on both the kid flash and flash title at different points.
a lot of different heroes can be weird about sharing titles. like batman (there can only be one batman at a time generally. people usually come up with their own original names i.e. nightwing, batwoman, batwing... etc etc etc.) or superman, even the lanterns kinda have moments where they fight over the title despite being part of an entire corps of people all named the same thing??? but whatever
i think it would be cool to see in the DCU :) especially if they (hopefully) fix the INSANE AMOUNT OF DAMAGE THEY HAVE DONE TO BARRY ALLEN. then they could totally bring in Wally and/or Bart CORRECTLY. please god DCU fix barry allen they have butchered his character beyond recognition please please please pl
#dcu#dc#flash fact#i hate the flash show so much <3 and everything related to it.#i really hated what they did to barry in the JL movie bc they made him almost unrecognizable to the original character#in both appearance backstory AND personality#its a crime in my opinion. its like all they did was google 'the flash' and read his wiki.
11 notes
·
View notes
Note
Comics this week?
Danger Street #1 - Enjoyable! Not sure if King can handle all these characters, he's not a writer who is the best at giving everyone their own voice, but I liked the first issue. Haven't seen anyone offer a guess who the villain that traumatized Lady Cop is, must be a deep cut.
Dark Crisis: Big Bang #1 - An entire issue devoted to Waid indulging his Silver Age fanboy, but in a manner I don't enjoy compared to World's Finest. What the hell is the point of bringing back all these obscure worlds from Pre-Crisis that no one except Waid and a few other boomers know or care about? Why do we need two official vampire worlds? Or the Justice Lords and Injustice? Or the Crime Syndicate and apparently a Pre-Crisis Earth where the names stayed the same but the moralities flipped? Yippee I guess, must make sure that every evil Superman has their own official Earth. Morrison wanted to make sure that the Multiverse was more than just "hey here's Superman and Batman but this time they're Egyptian", they wanted the Multiverse to support different characters as being equal to the usual A-Listers. This new Multiverse is regressing back to the old status quo of there being a million Earths and Superman and Batman are the stars on every one. Weird that they left off the Arkhamverse, Tomorrowverse, and YJverse but included Injustice and DCSG. No films or TV Earths besides the Reeve/Keaton one, and even that is just meant to stand in for the Superman '78/Batman '89 comics. If this aimed to get me excited about the Multiverse it failed, I just want the damn thing to go away for a while and let DC focus on Earth 0 for a bit.
WildC.A.T.S. #2 - Breezy read but fun. Didn't expect Mr. Majestic to make his return so soon. Lot of Superman analogues, and actual Supermen, running around the DCU, somebody should do something with all of them.
Superman: Son of Kal-El #18 - Well this issue encapsulated this entire run in a nutshell: some interesting ideas that are failed by terrible execution resulting in a bland book. At least I can finally hop off Taylor's ride, won't be letting sunk cost tricking me into reading the next miniseries. A recent interview by Taylor made it sound like AoS will indeed be the finale for his time with the character, he was talking about how other people will be writing Jon after him and how Jon will be a big player in what's coming up. Until Taylor finishes writing Jon I've got zero interest in Jon anymore. Let his era be over soon please, this issue was clearly not meant to be the end of the series which tells me this was a sudden change, likely caused by editorial losing faith in Taylor as Jon's caretaker.
I Am Batman #16 - Huh. Didn't see that coming but I am intrigued where it goes. Ridley also gave an interview recently where he talked about other people writing Jace after him. Maybe Jace will be getting his own follow up mini just like Jon is, but by someone else.
Batman Incorporated #3 - Ghost-Maker is a total asshole and I'm not sure how long I'll keep reading if he remains the star. Dude needs to get humbled fast.
Invincible Iron Man #1 - Fine. About the same level of quality as Duggan's X-Men for what that's worth. Should have gotten Hickman on this, it's insane that Iron Man was the breakout star of the MCU and Marvel cannot seem to get him that modern day epic run he desperately needs.
Planet Hulk: Worldbreaker #2 - Pak is sleepwalking through this it feels like. Either that or it's decompressed for the trade, because not much is actually happening issue to issue. Jen's fate reminds me of the 40k God-Emperor.
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Fic Interview Meme
Tagged by @cosmonauthill all the way Last Year.
This gets long so I’m putting it below a cut and as ever, I am tagging no one for I am where tag games go to die.
--
How many works do you have on AO3?
At time of writing, 321. More to come soon.
What’s your total AO3 wordcount?
~1.2million at present
How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?
Cutting duplicates/overlapping fandoms:
Marvel Cinematic Universe & X-Men
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Critical Role & TLOVM
Star Wars - All
A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Les Misérables (Film)
Hannibal (TV)
Riverdale (TV)
Norse Religion & Lore
Crimson Peak
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
In the Flesh (TV)
Hellboy (Movies 2004-2008)
Forgotten Realms
Elsewhere University (Webcomic)
Mad Max Series (Movies)
Pacific Rim
Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Penny Dreadful (TV)
The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Flight Rising
Daredevil (TV)
John Wick (Movies)
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Gotham (TV)
Shadowhunters (TV)
Dunkirk (2017)
From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
DCU
What are your top 5 fics by kudos?
Questions - Set in @fialleril‘s Double Agent Vader verse, Leia has some questions.
A Whisper On My Shoulder - The first arc of Ghost Cass, where Cass does die but her ghost is lodged in Percy.
unafraid of toil - Oneshot where Harry sorts Hufflepuff and likes to bake.
A Snake of Red and Gold - Oneshot where Draco sorts Gryffindor.
That balance may return - Percy Whump. First chapter is hurt, the rest is healing.
Do you respond to comments, why or why not?
Usually! If someone takes the time to not only read my fic but tell me their thoughts on it it feels only fair to reply and let them know they were heard.
What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?
I... do not know. I write almost exclusively angst but I tend to end things with at least the hope of things getting better. You’d be better off asking my readers what they think is the angstiest ending.
Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?
Probably the MCU/Les Mis oneshot series.
Have you ever received hate on a fic?
I received some... interesting comments from tonkies when I was writing MCU fanfic. If I think someone has a point I’ll address it, if it seems clear to me they’re just being a shit I generally delete the comment.
Do you write smut? If so what kind?
So. For the longest time I didn’t really write smut - if I did I wrote it indirectly or with humour because I wasn’t very comfortable with it and every time I tried to sincerely write it it felt clunky as fuck. But... it got to a point where, for some things I wanted to write, I knew I need to improve in that area, so I went out and read some smutfics I liked with the express intent of learning what about them made them work mechanically.
It did not help. I could see the puzzle pieces but could not make them fit non-awkwardly.
And then I wrote Ripley’s Assistant. And I realised I can write smut - when there’s trauma in play, or some other emotional fuckery to add an extra level to the smut. I cannot write simple, straightforward, horny smut. I can write all the weird stuff going on in a character’s head while the smut also happens, because the split focus prevents me from getting awkward and lets me swap as required to avoid frustration.
I am not sure how I feel about this, but! Progress!
Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Had to deal with someone plagiarising a whole chunk of story beats from one of my fics one time. AO3 handled it. Also have had people use stuff from my monsterblog without attribution before - but everytime I’ve messaged someone about that they’re very quick to fix it; usually they didn’t realise what exactly the useage policy meant and were happy to provide more complete crediting links.
Have you ever had a fic translated?
A couple times! A few of my Maximoff fics have been translated into Russian. It’s very flattering when I get a translation request.
Have you ever co-written a fic before?
I am credited as Co-Author on a friend’s fic, because I helped them iron out plot problems, plot a whole arc, and have written portions of chapters with characters they struggle with before. I do not consider it co-writing really, because I was originally asked to help as a beta reader and general help with the Maximoff twins and for the most part Aster writes it all, but I am credited as such there because Aster feels it’s fair. So. *shrug emoji*
What’s your all time favorite ship?
I don’t really get into shipping. For the longest time I did not understand people getting into arguments over ships. I did not understand how they could be so invested - I wrote ships based on what seemed interesting or plausible and that was about it.
And then Critical Role happened to me.
It’s Perc’ahlia.
What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?
Several of my old HP ideas. I want to finish them! But also JKR is a TERFy piece of shit and I don’t know if I can actually be bothered to wade in and arrange the story how I want given the uh... pretty extensive backlash fandom has had to other members of fandom - punching sideways or down instead of up.
What are your writing strengths?
I can pin out a pretty nice niche AU in a small vignette. Also, angst.
What are your writing weaknesses?
Smut, fluff, comedy & crack.
What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
I usually state it’s another language in dialogue tags and if there’s a few words I can easily put in I do that (have done that with German, Drow and Elvish so far) to give some idea of what the language looks/sounds like. I generally only write an accent for dialect or niche verbal tics and even then I try to keep it to contractions and sentence structure.
Also one time I used glitchscript because there were no Infernal or Abyssal swearwords I could find.
What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?
HP. I wrote ficlets for it for yonks.
What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?
Far and away to cancel half a Line. Yes, even now. When I finish certain of my Critical Role fics perhaps they will supersede it, but not just yet - I’m so proud of this obnoxious niche beast of a fic and new comments on it always make my day.
3 notes
·
View notes
Photo
For as little as the SID folk have on their desks in the main room, there’s still a lot of personality there. They all have the same basic desks, which have a lamp, a monitor, a wireless keyboard and mouse, a phone, and their nameplate, plus a couple tissue boxes that get passed around as needed. Everything else varies person to person.
Wang Zheng’s desk hands-down has the most stuff on it. She’s got a whole rack of folders and binders, a globe, a multi-page stapler, a whole collection of pens and pencils, and two separate phones. She also usually has things open or in stacks. She is a busy little bee.
Zhu Hong’s is perpendicular to Wang Zheng’s, presumably on account of boys are stinky. Her little desk keepsake is a tiny model of the Clock Tower with a Union Jack on the side. It’s cute if she’s an Anglophile but isn’t allowed to visit the British Isles on account of what happened to all those snakes that one time. In later episodes, she also has a tiny hourglass.
Wang Zheng and Zhu Hong are the only ones without inboxes on their desks; instead, next to their desks is a separate short little table with drawers, with an inbox on top that may belong to either or both of them. The ladies are also the only two with the brown wheeled desk chairs.
Lin Jing’s desk is clearly not his primary desk; that’s back in the lab. Still, even out here he’s got a spiffy three-monitor setup. Sometimes he’s got a little silver molecular model, presumably for science reasons.
Guo Changcheng’s desk is pretty empty. However, it makes up for that by having the single most annoying prop in the entire show, which is a Swinging Sticks perpetual motion toy. And oh boy, is it perpetually motioning. I wonder if some days he walks in to find it’s been gently tumped over on its side by someone whose peripheral vision just couldn’t handle it any longer.
Chu Shuzhi’s desk is all business. He’s got two inboxes and not much more, keeping it simple so he’ll have somewhere to put his feet. Sometimes Lin Jing’s little molecular model winds up behind one of those inboxes, where I presume it gets to stay until Lao Chu notices it. Early on, there’s also a pair of studio headphones, probably to help keep him from murdering his co-workers.
All three of the boys in the triangle formation have the same green four-legged desk chairs. Lao Chu and Xiao Guo’s desk phones are little cordless phones, not the multi-button office phones everyone else has. Lin Jing is the only one of anyone here without a phone or lamp on his desk.
I actually missed the first time through that Da Qing’s desk is Da Qing’s desk, on account of how rarely he sits at it. It has a normal lamp but also the weird snail lamp from the DCU faculty lounge, and a chartreuse pencil holder that never has anything in it. Da Qing has two chairs - one a padded wooden folding chair, the other a grey bucket chair. I assume they are for when he has a person butt and a cat butt, respectively.
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Stranger Things In Gotham Have Happened
read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/EebX2S7
by jayybirdfeathers
When Steve heard that he was accepted into a university, he was more than a little shocked. It made a lot more sense when he saw where said university was.
OR
College Student!Steve is way too equipped for Gotham and adopts and gets adopted.
Words: 1342, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016), DCU, Batman - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Steve Harrington, Mike Wheeler, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd, Damian Wayne, Leslie Thompkins
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Additional Tags: Smoking, Not Canon Compliant, no beta we die like jason, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Work In Progress, canon is dead i killed it in a dennys parking lot, College Student Steve Harrington, Gotham City is Terrible, joyce is a bat here, Safety Knives, Weird Gotham City, Gotham University (DCU), no romance is planned dont get your hopes up, DC’s Sliding Time Scale, college exams, Bruce Wayne is Bad at Communicating, Steve Harrington-centric, Steve Harrington is Petty, a lot of stranger things characters are just mentioned, Steve Harrington is Willfully Oblivious, Nursing Student Steve Harrington
read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/EebX2S7
0 notes
Text
Ayo it's late but 2023 Digital Art Progress
I drew the most digital stuff I've ever drawn last year. I finally pushed past a lot of my issues with the digital medium and figured out how to actually Do The Thing per se. so I think I got a lot better over the course of 2023. I definitely changed my visual style a lot, that's for sure.
Unfortunately I did lose my USB in 2023 as well so I lost a lot of my files. much sadness.
LONG POST. lots of drawings to get through and I have Thoughts.
Anyway these are dated in my files as March, which is my earliest I have rn, so this is kinda a representation of how I started the year.
I was busy most of April so May has two files. these were both a part of my semester one project of my degree.
I've got a lot of things dated for June, which is surprising. and not a lot of things dated after. I'm all over the place with starting wips and when it comes to finishing them... ehhh it happens eventually.
I really wish I could go back in time and fix that leg. I just wanted to avoid drawing toes lmao. the thick line art really is a problem to me but that's neither here nor there.
I think I finished a bunch of thing in June, because these are dated two days apart and I definitely started one before the other lmao. hell I think the one on the left was started in 2022.
I'm not sure when this was but it was early in the year. I tried to veer away from the harsh lines and ended up swinging too far into semi-realism. I loved how it was looking (this is still a wip) but the amount of time it was taking was too much for me to replicate again.
This definitely a June piece, because I wanted to do one character every few days throughout Pride Month. Didn't finish it.
last year my friends and I considered starting to record and post our dnd games, so I did some arts of the characters of our current campaign.
I think the solid black line art all of the same thickness was one of the main things I always disliked. I could never quite make it work with everything else I was doing.
This is probably the only work I did with solid black lines that I really liked. it seems to work okay here.
The July came around, and artfight with it! (this character belongs to Crimson_Deceit. You can find Crimson on instagram as Lova.cos or twitter also as Crimson_Deceit)
and then the DCU rarepair exchange came in September and I didn't have time to write treats so I drew them, which spawned a new attempt at shading things that I've been messing with ever since. I prefer the way my linework looks with it.
I messed around with clown oc designs in October, cause that was a mini trend on instagram. didn't finish fast enough to post it but i really like some of the designs.
in December I drew the OCs of some of my friends, as we finished our playthrough of CoS last year. this is our cleric, a changeling who went through many names and faces, depicted holding hands with their player @angelicsky64817
Last piece of the year was this muck around. I'm still trying to figure out some of these new style choices I'm making.
Finish off with a sneak at what I'm currently doing in the new year! I've been drawing one big piece so it's stretching over from january. It's still a wip. And it's such a big image I've gotta compress it.
woo! now I gotta go finish that thing. there's gonna be three more characters to the right of the yellow one. why have I done this to myself.
i hope that in 2024 i can get more of a grip on the saturation of my newer styles of drawing. and learn some more colour theory. and also get better at drawing skin, cause I think I'm mostly okay at clothes but skin always looks boring or weird.
#original charater art#2023 art summary#retrospective#digital art#2024 art goals#jab rambles#jab art
1 note
·
View note
Text
Weekend Top Ten #574
Top Ten Casting Suggestions for the New DCU
They're rebooting the DC Universe. Perhaps you’ve heard? What used to be known as the “DC Extended Universe” has had rather a rocky time of it in the cinema; this came as a bit of a surprise, really, as for decades it was DC who had the really successful, critically-adored comic book movies. Beginning – as we must – with Superman, and then Batman, and subsequent sequels and reboots – most notably the seismic Dark Knight trilogy – it was the older, classical comic book company that held sway at the global box office and in the hearts and minds of fans of the spectacular across the globe.
Things started to change, a bit slowly, from around the Millennium, after the success of first Blade and then X-Men – hits, for sure, popular films; but not quite the blow-the-doors-off cultural zeitgeist moments that exploded, like a distant planet, in the wake of Richard Donner and Tim Burton’s movies. But then Sam Raimi made Spider-Man, changing the tone, and shortly after came first X2 – the best movie about the X-Men that didn’t just feature Logan looking sad in the desert – and then the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And, yes, in between Christopher Nolan redefined what a superhero movie could look and feel like with the gritty, down-to-earth Dark Knight trilogy, the second of which becoming the first comic book adaptation to clear a billion dollars at the box office; but really that’s an aberration, because the story of the 21st century is all about Marvel.
It's weird, really, that it took DC so long to get its act together on the shared universe front, as all of the characters were right there under the umbrella of Warner Bros. Sure, there were hints - “this is why Superman works alone”, the multiple attempts to get first a World’s Finest and then a proper Justice League movie off the ground – but it was Marvel, the company that saved itself from bankruptcy by selling off its biggest characters to a bunch of different movie studios, who first managed to get crossover superhero movies working properly. The slow build-up of films released from 2008 to 2011 set the stage for 2012’s The Avengers, which just knocked everything and everyone over with the scale of its success. The future belonged to Marvel and the future was now.
Of course both DC and their parent company WB wanted some of that action. It just made total sense to create the Justice League cinematically; fans wanted to see Bruce and Clark and Diana all in one frame. And Warner Bros wanted a billion dollars three times a year.
What happened next is sad, really, because it involved a bunch of really talented people with the best intentions coming together and, well, making a few mistakes but also suffering from tragedy, rotten luck, and bad timing. Zack Snyder’s vision for a united DC universe has fans, of course – enough to persuade Warners to fork out millions of dollars for him to “finish” his Justice League years after he had to walk away – but it’s probably fair to say that most people didn’t really gibe with his view of these beloved characters. Man of Steel presented a grounded, grumpy Superman, which was kinda cool in some respects, but the scale of its destruction and its climactic scenes of death turned off a lot of people. Snyder doubled-down on the misery with the bombastic tragedy of Dawn of Justice, before everything just went horrible both behind and in front of the camera in Justice League. Spin-off movies ranged from the bad to the mediocre – apart from Wonder Woman, which everyone liked – and really only succeeded when they stepped away from notions of a shared continuity and just did their own bonkers thing (Aquaman, Birds of Prey, The Suicide Squad). And all the while there was this dreadful din of backroom shenanigans and bad blood that – outside of claims of racism and mistreatment – probably reached its creative nadir with the decision to burn entire films as tax write-offs.
So yes, of course the universe needed a bit of a spring clean. And now James Gunn and Peter Safran – steady, capable hands who really know what they’re doing and have made some of the best superhero films of the last decade – are in charge. And it’s sad that we’ve lost Henry Cavill, an actor who could have been a great Superman if he’d ever really been given a chance – and possibly even sadder that Ezra Miller might still get to be the Flash despite, well, everything. But the view of this new universe looks like hewing a lot closer to the optimistic, moralistic fable of the DC Universe that I grew up reading. James Gunn keeps referencing Grant Morrison. That is a very good thing. At least one of the newly-announced films seems to be actively adapting a Morrison comic. He thinks Superman should be kind! The fact that that’s a sigh of relief is ridiculous, because that’s literally the first thing Superman should always be, but that’s where we were. Yeesh.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah. I was gonna do Gunn’s job for him by suggesting actors to cast in the new DCU. I've done this before! Back when we knew we were, finally, getting a shared DC movie universe in the first place, I made some suggestions. That list wasn’t very interesting, but hopefully this one will be.
And that’s it! Here are ten actors to play characters in the newly-minted DCU. Do please enjoy!
Boyd Holbrook as Batman: I think people are making some assumptions regarding the new DCU Batman that won’t really pan out. What do we know about the character? We know he’s old enough to have fathered a child who’s now – presumably – 10-12 years old. We know, according to James Gunn, that he’s likely to be “a few years older” than a Superman who has “been around a couple of years” and “is not in his forties”. This all, to me, suggests they’re not looking to cast a guy in his fifties. After all, Bruce is usually depicted as having started his costumed career in his early twenties, so even a 40-year-old Batman could have been jumping off rooftops for a good fifteen years. And so, after much deliberation, I present to you Boyd Holbrook, a good-looking and more than capable actor who can easily put across a brooding sense of menace, who looks tough but scrappy in a Daniel Craig mould; a broadsword with a brain, a henchman with a heart. Assuming The Brave and the Bold is released in 2026, he’ll be 44, the same age Ben Affleck was when Dawn of Justice came out (so, if anything, he might be a touch on the old side!). But, hey, maybe Holbrook can persuade regular collaborator James Mangold to direct the movie, because holy perfect helmsman, a James Mangold Batman movie would be a sight to see, I mean a sight to see.
Austin Butler as Superman: okay, I'll confess straight up: I've still not seen Elvis. But Butler is good in his small role in Hollywood, and the fact that he’s just won a BAFTA and is up for an Oscar suggests that he’s got the chops. And he really does look the part. He's pretty tall, he looks good with dark hair, and technically Clark Kent is from the South so he’s got the accent. I’d wager he needs to build his frame up a bit, but what you’ve got here is a good actor, the right age, the right look, with experience already of playing one of the 20th Century’s biggest pop culture icons. And maybe we can get Perry White to say “Great shades of Elvis”.
Cush Jumbo as Lois Lane: my idealised version of Lois Lane is essentially Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy; a really tough, incredibly fast-talking woman who’s whip-smart and fearless and stands up to men in power. I always imagine scenes in the Daily Planet newsroom as playing out as a screwball comedy written by Aaron Sorkin. So we need someone with experience delivering dense dialogue at a fast pace in a confident fashion, someone used to wrestling knotty topics with a sense of humour. Jumbo excels at that in The Good Wife/Fight. I think she’d be good stood next to/arguing with Austin Butler. And I’d love to see her leading a massive blockbuster, quite frankly. And whilst we’re filling out the Daily Planet offices, let’s have Tom Hanks channelling Ben Bradlee as Perry, and Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo as Jimmy.
Jamie Foxx as Lex Luthor: I'm sticking with Superman Legacy again just to recommend a new Lex. Foxx has a really strong, solid sense of charisma that he could bring to Luthor; enough to make him seem like what he often is, the anti-Clark Kent. You need someone who can do something different to the pantomime villainy of Gene Hackman and the techbro arseholery of Jesse Eisenberg. Foxx would be likeable and funny, but also intense and genuinely threatening. Think of how he played Electro in No Way Home – basically a different, sexier, more confident character than the sadsack of Amazing Spider-Man 2. Not sure if he’d be happy being bald, though; he even had hair as Daddy Warbucks.
Jonathan Groff as Apollo: Groff is a tall, built, good-looking dude who is absolutely superhero material. He can sing and dance, and Mindhunter shows how not only his range but also how he can handle incredibly dark, disturbing material. All this combines to make him a terrific fit for a character who is, in many ways, an analogy for Superman himself, but in a team and a story that hews much darker. And I’ll be completely frank: it’d be nice what’s arguably the first gay lead character of a huge superhero movie actually played by a gay actor. But who to be his gruff, cynical, Batman-esque boyfriend Midnighter? Personally I’d quite fancy Gerard Butler.
Stephanie Beatriz as Catwoman: this might be a bit of a cheat as – technically – we don’t know if Catwoman is actually going to crop up in one of the first lot of films or shows (if it’s not apparent, these characters are otherwise all from the announced productions). But let’s face it, if there’s a Batman there has to be a Catwoman too. And whilst she’s most recently been a beaming Disney Princess, making categorically sure we did not talk about Bruno, Beatriz also has a penchant for steely-faced badassery with her role on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I think Selina Kyle would split the difference; she needs to be funnier and chattier than Rosa Diaz, but I think a good twist for the character – something we’ve not really seen in other film portrayals – would be to emphasise the street-smart, rough and tumble aspects of her character, a woman who grew up poor in the slums of Gotham. I think the edge she gave Diaz would be a cool trait to apply to Catwoman. And whilst she looks about ten years younger, she is basically the same age as Boyd Holbrook.
William Jackson Harper as John Stewart: in another universe Harper would be the perfect Clark Kent. He’s got very, very strong Clark vibes in The Good Place. Whilst he’s probably more famous for playing slightly more nebbish and introverted characters – including in his small role in Quantumania – he’s got the frame to handle a bit of action, too. And John Stewart would be a great fit, because whilst he often seems to be portrayed more as a military man in this day and age, when he was introduced in the comics he was actually an architect. I think Harper would thread that needle expertly, and I think his demeanour would be great when put up against a brash, bombastic, Maverick-esque Hal Jordan in the Lanterns series. Speaking of Jordan, who could play him? Chris Pratt would have been good, but maybe that’s too similar to Peter Quill. I dunno. Bradley Cooper?
Elizabeth Debicki as one of the Amazons: this might be a bit of a cheat as I’ve not listed an actual character, and if I’m honest it’s actually bleeding through from one of my tiny peeves about The Rings of Power on Amazon; that Morfydd Clark – great as she is – is too short to play Galadriel, whereas Debicki is about six-three. Anyway, I’d quite like to see her take on a really cool, strong action role, and the presumed political intrigue in this series would be a good fit too, allowing her to stretch her acting muscles as well as her, er, muscle-muscles. I’ve no idea what this show will end up being like or about, but as, say, a more junior Amazon investigating some conspiracy or the other on Themiscyra, she’d be terrific. And she’s already got the James Gunn connection in Guardians. And then she could wind up somewhere in the present-day timeline. Oh, I dunno, call her “Troia” and make her Donna Troy’s mum or something; she ends the series fleeing Themiscyra, coming to “Man’s World”, and centuries later having a child who inherits some of her powers and, Bob’s your aunt, there’s Wonder Girl. Look, that’s legitimately 2000% more sensible than her actual comic book origin, okay?
Daniel Radcliffe as Swamp Thing: there are three main things going for Radcliffe here in my opinion. Number one, he’s instantly convincing as a frazzled genius scientist; no one would doubt his ability to carry off the Alec Holland part of the character. He can even do an American accent if that’s what they want. But then we all know from his theatre work and his performances in films like Swiss Army Man that he’s incredibly versatile; I can picture him now, channelling his inner plant in a mocap suit to play Swamp Thing. And finally there’s the fact that, huge star as he obviously is, he’s mostly shunned mainstream blockbusters, certainly never having anchored one since Potter. I think he’s one of the few A-List actors who’d gladly spend the majority of a film unrecognisable as a giant talking heap of moss and leaves. And he’d probably be up for the weird sex scene in that one issue too.
Leslie Grace as Batgirl: to be honest I’m torn about this one but I wanted to get her in there. See, I think Grace was really, really done dirty by what happened with the cancellation of Batgirl. I want to see her given her dues and have a shot at that role. But if I’m honest, the way The Brave and the Bold is panning out, I’d actually like it to have something approaching what I consider the platonic ideal of the Bat-Family: that is to say, Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, and Batgirl. Which means Barbera Gordon has to be in a wheelchair, and in that case I think I’d rather go with someone slightly older and maybe with an identifiable edge or flintiness to them (although to be fair, I’ve not really seen Grace in anything, so maybe she could totally pull that off). How about we split the difference, and introduce Grace as a more “realistic” version of Batgirl, playing Jeffrey Wright’s daughter on The Batman 2? As for the rest of the Bat-Fam, I’d go for Joe Keery as Nightwing, Richard E. Grant as Alfred, and let’s say Russell Crowe for Gordon. If Grace was Oracle not Batgirl, I’d recommend having Cassandra Cain, but I’m not sure the girl from Birds of Prey could play this version of Cassandra, so you’d probably have to recast. And I’ve no Earthly idea who could play Damian Wayne.
Phew! That was hard. I spent a long time whittling this list down and sadly a few people fell off the bottom end (including Zac Efron and Justice Smith as Booster Gold and Ted Kord). I could probably have done separate Top Tens on possible Batman and Superman actors. And then there were tons of characters not included in the announced films and shows – Jason Blood, Zatanna, Poison Ivy, Raven, Professor Pyg, Clayface, Animal Man, Knight and Squire – that I diligently fan-cast. And I’m still annoyed at myself about not being sufficiently well-versed in Central Asian cinema, or knowing enough Asian actresses, because I’d have loved to suggest someone to play Talia al Ghul – almost certain to crop up in The Brave and the Bold – but just as I feel the new Bane actor should be Hispanic, I think whoever plays Ra’s and his daughter should probably be of Middle Eastern descent, as that’s where the character is supposed to be living and – arguably, as his origin is a bit vague – from in the first place. Having a Japanese guy playing a Tibetan guy as a stooge for an Irish guy with a daughter who’s a French woman probably won’t cut it anymore.
Anyway, James, Peter, if you’re listening – you could do worse than this lot.
1 note
·
View note
Text
Originally Darkness Falls was to be a twelve-part series:
But after looking back over High Cost of Living and some of the Death and Tim Hunter scenes, I decided to incorporate them with this AU's Death. And to expand the last part significantly to incorporate aspects of that one scene from The Books of Magic.
The first eight parts of sixteen were at that higher/cosmic level, the second half incorporates views from the 'lower deck' and includes how ordinary people, as well as superheroes, deal with the world where Death died in 1916 and a direct glimpse at cultural effects.
It's not quite what TV Tropes would call the Umasqued world where the whole veil on the supernatural falls given this is the DCU we're talking about here, but the whole impact of a sudden and abrupt implosion of death and dying that started on Earth and at the end of 1916 reached multiversal scale and affected every single one of the fifty-two earths and all of hypertime does not fade readily.
Comic book death is already weird enough in the regular DCU, in this particular version the death of Death made it much weirder and more unpredictable in its effects. Among the smaller changes are that the Lazarus Pits produce a kind of catatonia (meaning Ra's always comes to on his throne and there's a wee bit of a 40K Corpse Emperor vibe to him in post-Pit states and Jason Todd abruptly falls in and out of catatonia at unpredictable intervals), that the Blackest Night insofar as it happens happens vastly differently, religion and magic function very differently (the death of Death was an unintended hard reboot of magic at multiple levels and some of the dead gods and demons that resurrected never went back to the grave).
Also Adolf Hitler and the Nazis never took over Germany and the Bolsheviks never took over Russia, though there was still a second world war that started as a general European war and spilled over into a war in Asia (in reverse to history's pattern in reality) upon the death of Field Marshal Hindenburg, the Ottoman Empire is still alive and well in the 21st Century and facing both Jewish and Arab terrorists fighting for homelands and working together and shooting at each other impartially......
And the East Slav Federation (as greater Russia is called in this AU with quasi-independent Belarus and Ukraine and a Transnistria equivalent with Ruthenia) invented the atom bomb first because the Khozyain said "split the atom" and Russia didn't need to worry 'bout no measly budgets or accountability to the Duma.
The USA is in a global imperial rivalry with the East Slav Federation headquartered in Petrograd, (read: Greater Russia with a somewhat more competent Putinist type nationalism absent the USSR) as the British Empire was fatally weakened after the world wars and played the historical USSR role of backing the national liberation movements while the ESF played the US role in backing white supremacy.
So this is the geopolitical backdrop to the AU DCU's modern era, a Cold War very much active and like the historical version backed by a nuclear balance of terror where the USA started behind and then vastly outmatched the ESF at every possible quantitative and qualitative level (which the Russians are very much aware of and resent immensely), superhero organizations that are superpowers in their own right and more caught up in strife with villains who couldn't care less about Cold War rivalries save insofar as it suits a scheme to work with one or the other side, and the entire world aware that in 1916 for a year nothing was born and nothing died.
There are a bunch of different theories about what happened and why, but the occultists of the world all have the basic picture. That one Roderick Burgess, aspiring Aleister Crowley wannabe tortured Death to death in a basement and then reality nearly came unglued as the maddened things of the Source Wall had their fun just like they did the first time when Death left in the very dawn of time.
Christian fundamentalism is a virtually moribund because a very real apocalypse did happen with WWI and then Jesus *didn't* come back, though other brands of extremist cuckoo elements have taken their place. Among them cults of the Second, which means essentially that with the recognition of the overlap of the Year Without Death with the hidden occult teachings of a death deity who is life and death both and whose previous mishap led to the implosion of both, the dying goddess is worshiped in a manner that Death of the Endless is *very* aware of and detests.
#darkness falls au#worldbuilding#what happens if death of the endless dies in the middle of wwi?#death of the endless#well as it turns out a lot of very bad things#most of the historical 20th Century genocides never happened#other genocides took their place as a part of decolonization and Russian imperialism rebuilding itself#as well as the expansion of the us version and the usa being unscrupulous about national liberation movements much like the ussr#technically in this au's cold war the usa has some of the ussr's role and the esf is the usa but more grimdark#russian autocracy in a semi-liberal fashion is never going to accept the legitimacy of anti-colonial movements#the usa equally allows its national liberation movements opportunities it never intended to allow pocs and Black people at home#this creates a big mess for everyone that is much like reality
0 notes
Text
It is time. It is finally time for the new Suicide Squad rant (and spoilers will be plentiful):
As someone who was into DC Comics and comics in the mid to late 2010s and had so much hype for the first Suicide Squad movie only to be let down, I was so nervous for this one. I knew it was going to be a roller coaster, but whether I would come out happy or disappointed was up in the air. Having just seen it I will say this: I have no idea if this was a good movie-movie. It was insane. The comedy. The violence. The high emotion. I’m still trying to take it all in. But one thing I do know is that this is an amazing Suicide Squad movie. Gunn and co took the best parts of the comic concept and went batshit with it and that is how this property should be handled (in my opinion). Screw edgelordisms, we need full on insanity free of aiming for shock-value or sexy brutality we want chaos baby.
Starting the whole movie as they did, with Savant as the POV for a mission (or part of the mission) that just goes to hell immediately and kills off so many before the title arrives is the perfect way to start this movie. Like the second I realized this was how they were doing it I was just smiling from ear to ear, this is the spirit of the property.
Part of me wishes we got more Amanda Waller, but what we had was impeccable. Then again, this is Viola Davis we’re talking about, and if she was born to play any character in a superhero story, it is Amanda Waller.
And points to her tech team, introducing them with the death bets was just a lovely way to show how regular this is and how awful everyone is in this movie.
I’m not going to pretend like Deadshot and Bloodsport didn’t have the exact same character- and plot premises… but I will say that Bloodsport felt better executed.
I love that they kept some of the past members and not just Harley. Rick Flag got to have a full personality and interactions with his team members and to be a true leader and it made me so happy for someone who initially did not give a single shit about his character. The Harley friendship? The Dubois friendship? The friendship with that guerilla leader? Amazing. The one American soldier in fictional media I genuinely like. You go Mr Flag.
The new members were… they were insane in the best way. Gone are the shitty stereotypes and present are some of the wackiest creations to ever grace the mainstream movie-sphere (aka the slightly less normal comic creations): A man who has to shoot out polka dots two times a day so as not to die from a space virus. A giant child murdering weasel. A guy who detaches his limbs and slaps people with said detached limbs. King Shark. The second person to command rats with a fancy gadget. They are all crazy and all weird and all more or less morally repulsive people and I love them.
The amount of times I did a double take over the soundtrack I swear. Jessie Reyez? The Pixies? It was so much fun to pick up on once I did.
Was the depiction of a vague Latin American country stereotypical? Yes. Was the secret American involvement predictable and felt mildly patronizing from a non-American, part Latina point of view? Yep. But damn it if I didn’t have a good time with those stereotypes and laugh my ass off at how well executed some were. I don’t know if it was meant as parody, but that one secretary has me thinking so — and if so I am pleased.
Speaking of Latino dictators Harley’s one day romance with one of the villains was something I never knew I needed. Like it was so perfect for Harley that when it happened I almost hit myself for not realizing that this kind of plot should be a normal thing for Harley. And the end of it? Perfect not only in this standalone movie, but also in conjunction with the first and with BoP.
The Taika Waititi cameo??? Oh my god??? I did not expect that and I love it?? Sir, What We Do in the Shadows is impeccable.
Rick Flag’s death actually surprised me. It shouldn’t as this is Suicide Squad, but I kind of expected him to be on Harley’s level of unkillable (because let’s face it, no one kills Harley). What I will say is that his death was good and his final words and actions made me love him all the more. I hope this spawns more Rick Flag content, or at least inspires me to look at what already exists, if he already is as this movie made him (it’s been ages since I read one of the Suicide Squad reboot comics okay).
Starro. How can a villain be so wacky and so terrifying at the same time? I did not expect a literal alien starfish to have more terrifying powers and a more tragic plot execution than Enchantress. But here we are. And that damn star just wanted to be floating in space, and instead it was stuck getting revenge by killing and puppeteering human corpses. Wow that thing was creepier the more you think about it.
I don’t know what I think about Polka Dot Man. I loved watching him on screen but also damn those mommy-issues were on a new level. Not just in his backstory but how he literally sees her in every person around him that was insane. Very funny but like also the kind that makes you laugh just because you’re uncomfortable and don’t know how else to releive the tension.
When Waller got knocked out by a staff member I immediately thought «oh my god Amanda Waller is going to kill half the staff for this», so I’m mildly surprised and disappointed that I didn’t get to see that happen. But also I should maybe expect something like this in a potential future Suicide Squad movie. We can’t have everything in a movie as packed as this.
Peacemaker was very horrible and worked really well. Don’t really have much to say about him, not because I didn’t enjoy him but because I already feel like the film itself has said it for me. But the planting and payoff for his death? Chef’s. Kiss.
Harley’s wardrobe was beautiful. Ratcatcher 2’s combat outfit felt like a steampunk plague dream. Bloodsport’s mask was supercool. Rick Flag’s t-shirt was amazing. But the best little outfit was the Mafalda-keychain and her red dress, hands down. Oh and King Shark’s fake moustache finger moment.
King Shark is shaped like a friend I don’t care how many people he ate alive on screen he looks so huggable. It feels like wanting to pet a bear. You know it will kill you but damn it look at those paws and those cute eyes!
I really need to give it to not just James Gunn but the entire production team for this movie. The aesthetic was perfect. The story was the right blend of whimsical and violent. The finished product was a literal rollercoaster and I mean that in a good way. If superhero movies have to be like amusement parks, I hope they’re more like this one and BoP.
I’ll finish on the note that while I think this movie was great and hopefully a step in the right direction for the DCU/DCEU (as in stop trying to play Marvel’s game and just do your own thing/ let your creative teams run wild and free), it is not the first step. Cathy Yan, Birds of Prey and the production team for it took a step first, and they deserve due credit and attention. If you loved this Suicide Squad movie and haven’t watched BoP yet, do so. Because they really are in the same ballpark while doing things in slightly different ways. And any good DCEU movie deserves more attention so the studios know that creativity and risks should be rewarded. I want more DC movies like this, not necessarily in genre but in creative risks. I want a Black Canary rock movie. I want Alfred in a reverse heist movie alone in the batcave against Gotham villains. I want Gotham Academy on screen play by play from the comics. I want a fully animated psychedelic-like Khalid Nassour as Dr. Fate movie. I want elevated horror movie Constantine. I want weird ass Lois Lane journalist movies with a heavy side of Superman. And I want DC movies I didn’t even know I wanted.
Support creativity in mainstream comic movies. Help me become a DC fan and happy about it again.
#I don’t want to give myself too many ideas and hopes#because last time I felt excited and giddy about DC they shut down my favourite run and replaced it with a bunch of stuff I wasn’t into#not to mention finished off or cancelled so many of my fave comics#but damn it between this and BoP I’m getting hopeful#at least on the movie end#the suicide squad#the suicide squad spoilers#suicide squad#suicide squad spoilers#harley quinn#rick flag#bloodsport#robert dubois#ratcatcher 2#cleo cazo#polka dot man#abner krill#king shark#nananue#peacemaker#weasel#amanda waller#task force x#savant#DCEU#DCU#dc comics
803 notes
·
View notes
Note
Who's your favorite Batman villain?
The Penguin. Was gonna put off this ask for a bit but I got surprised today with an incredible rendition of him, so now the dastardly bumbershoot waddled and squawked his way into my thoughts again and I gotta talk about him.
Penguin's not just my favorite Batman villain, he's my favorite DC character and comic book supervillain, the main reason I even want to write a Batman story someday.
I love the imagery that surrounds him, the trick umbrellas and the birds he so lovely dotes after and the WAKs and the Iceberg Lounge, which has become maligned in recent years as a sign of his downfall, but I very much appreciate as a concept in general still. I love a lot of the performances and actors who've taken him over the years. Burgess Meredith and Danny DeVito are some of my favorite performers of all time, Paul Williams has a wonderful voice and starred in my favorite film of all time. Tom Kenny, David Ogden Stiers, Robin Lord Taylor, Penguin's just had such great, terrific performances and adaptations. Batman Returns is my favorite Batman film by far and it was what got me to start paying more attention to Oswald.
I love the roles he can play in any given Batman story and how he's managed to endure all of his falls from grace by becoming an indispensable part of Batman's worldbuilding. I love his varied dynamics with Batman and Riddler and Catwoman and Gordon and his henchmen and those who get close to him. I love his style and the way he conducts himself when he's allowed to be more than just a generic mob boss. Penguin's design has, by simply staying unchanged over the decades, gone from "common rich person wear draped over a funny cartoon gangster" to "he is so out of touch and desperate for respectability that he dresses like an 1930s capitalist caricature, like a little kid's idea of what a rich and respectable man looks like, and Penguin's still stuck in that mindset". I love how absurd and plausible he is.
I like that Penguin can very easily fit just about any kind of Batman story, from the campy supervillain plots to the gritty urban crime ones. You can tell stories about Penguin falling in love, pretending to be legit because he doesn't want his aunt to learn he's a criminal, and opening up a comedy act with a talking penguin, or stories about Penguin terrorizing the city with giant robots and guided missiles and driving people to suicide. I like that he's a character who both relishes in his lifestyles of supervillain and crimelord alike, and yet is perpetually restless because the minute he acquires what he wants, he immediately starts wanting something else. He could have Batman and the Batfamily and all other supervillains wiped out and have Gotham in his pocket and maybe even become President of the United States, and he'd still want more. Because Oswald is nothing but wants, the wants of a traumatized manchild in a funny costume throwing money and toys and brute force and tantrums at the world until it makes sense, which only makes him far too fitting as a Batman villain.
Everyone forgets that Penguin was canonically the first villain to ever successfully escape Batman at the end of a story, completely bypassing the usual "villain swears revenge behind bars" ending to instead escape scot-free, and went on to establish himself as one of his biggest, most inventive and most cunning villains, second only, if not equal, to Joker. I love that he's ruthless and inventive and classy and cunning and brutal and how his main trick is using the fact that everyone underestimates the short fat man to his advantage. He's taken traits that got many of us in real life relentlessly tormented for them, and he uses them to pull the wool over those who think they are better than him.
It'ss a trick that works because even in real life people can't stop looking at this weird and silly little man and think "that guy's too silly for a Batman villain, he's not a murder clown or musclebound monster, what's he gonna do" and, yeah, that's the point, that's been the point from day one, he doesn't look scary or intimidating or even that evil, and he's the guy who pulls the rug under supergenius fighting machine Batman and becomes the top crimelord of Gotham City, a city ruled by terrors and manias and monsters infinitely bigger and scarier and stronger than he is, and he STILL made it to the top and he STILL maintains it, time and time again even when newer and flashier and scarier villains come and go. Batman is, at it's core, a fundamentally absurd character, and Penguin acts as a reminder of that. Because the minute we accept a man can terraform himself with training and money into a living legend on the level of gods, there's no reason why a tiny fat man with similar drive and resources can't likewise throw his weight with monsters and warriors far above his station.
Despite how ridiculously often he's disrespected by writers and fans alike, how far he's fallen off his former position in Batman's Rogues Gallery, and how often he's used as just a punching bag for assorted Bat-people, Penguin never goes away. He's the biggest survivor of all of Batman's villains, more so than the genuinely immortal ones, because he's the cockroach that won't go away no matter how many times you flush it.
Because once you get past the piles of money and the lounge fortresses and the armies of goons and the piles of cartoony gadget toys not too dissimilar from Batman's own, what the Penguin has is brains, and spite and hatred on a scale no other Batman villain has. He hates Batman, because Batman is nothing but yet another bully who thinks he can push Oswald around just because he's bigger and stronger. He hates the lower class for it's unsophisticated brutes and boors that made his childhood hell. He hates the upper class that's rejected and also tormented him since infancy, that he desperately spent so long trying to be a part of. He hates the monsters and supervillains he works with and has to associate with to stay alive. He hates the city that he fights to rule over tooth and nail.
And although he may never admit it, he hates himself, because he'a short paunchy man with a beakish nose who's brutal and immoral not just because those are the cards life dealt him, but because he likes what it affords him too much to give it away. Because he's never going to have the love and acceptance he desperately craves, he will never be able to accept it or keep it. Because he can never fully be a gentleman, or a monster, but instead a sad mix who belongs in neither of their worlds. Because at the end, he doesn't look like anyone else. He looks like one of him.
And still, I like Penguin because he's a Gentleman Villain. The one Gentleman Villain of Batman's rogues gallery, even if that's faded from a lot of his recent appearences that pushed the crimelord aspects to the forefront. He dresses like a gentleman thief, he's canonically a huge A.J Raffles fan, he's one of the most cunning brains of Gotham, he's got the money, resources, and adventurous spirit. Problem is, he's The Penguin. And suddenly, all that he has becomes overblown, outlandish, theatrical, and out of touch purely because it's him trying to do all those things. He's a gentleman adventurer gone rogue, the Count Fosco of the DCU, and that only makes it amusing, even endearing, when Penguin does engage in the swashbuckling antics he's so fond of.
When all his plans go to hell and so he starts fencing Batman, or when he commands henchmen with superflous fancy language, or even when Oswald gives the whole "hero" thing a shot and we see he's actually not bad at it, maybe he actually could have been one if it wasn't for the bile drowning his heart and the hellscape that warped innocent young Cobblepot into Gotham's Penguin, a name that immediately denotes something silly and ridiculous, and he carries it with pride, because he will make you respect that name.
And that's just a couple of reasons. I really, really love this character to the point of obsession and the main reason why I ever wanted to write stories for DC was to get to write Penguin and at least try to do the character a little more justice. But if nothing else, Penguin endures, regardless of what happens to him, in and out of universe. If nothing else, that's a very admirable quality in a supervillain. Oswald is the best.
515 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
carmeen-mv
Nutrición y dietética
alistairillustrates
Alistair Illustrates
joesevennumbers
Kyoka Fugawarina
cloudsdaleapp-blog
Cloudsdale
let-the-gay-rise-blog
Currently not rising