#with the same skillset of decades ago (except that he is older)

[bigskydreaming]

Say, what's your thoughts on Dick's Harem of Morally Ambiguous Older Men (TM)?

Not a fan. Tbh, I just hate the trend of ‘surround Dick with uneven power dynamics and never ever let him interact with someone on an even playing field, and requiring every relationship in his life to be heavily loaded with advantages the other holds over him, or obligations he feels towards them.’

But even more than that, I hate the fact that said harem exists not because of canon, but because of fandom’s absolute INSISTENCE that Dick’s ‘suitors’ all be predatory and so much his better in terms of fighting, experience, strategy, that they’re usually written as more toying with him as much as they are....engaging in an actual relationship. Because, idk, that makes the relationships ‘dangerous’ and that’s sexy? Meh.

But the reason why that bothers me so much in particular, is because like.......the vast fields of difference in skill and expertise that we so commonly see in S/ladin fics and the like.....

LITERALLY DON’T EXIST IN CANON.

This dynamic where Slade is wholly Dick’s superior who has so much to teach him if only he would deign to learn from him.....like, the ONLY place that actually exists is the one Teen Titans cartoon from like twenty years ago, and its fine if people want to go with that for whatever reason, but when everything else about the fic screams “this is very much a comic-based story except for that one element”....that’s when it gets frustrating. 

Because you can do what you want of course, but I’m always gonna wonder WHY it was deemed so necessary, that Dick always be at a sizable disadvantage to Slade instead of an enemy he respects as being equal in threat to the threat he poses himself.

Because as I’ve said many times....Slade does NOT consider Dick a relative novice, still years away from being an actual threat to him in combat or capable of interfering with his plans.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.

The entire REASON Slade started out as a Titans villain, a nemesis for the whole team, and eventually just became Nightwing’s enemy and occasional ally, but with all of Slade’s attention usually focused on him and ignoring the other Titans entirely most of the time....

Is because Slade views Dick as being personally responsible for the times the Titans defeated him or foiled his plans. He chalks it entirely up to Dick’s strategic mind and leadership abilities, as well as his effectiveness in combat when the two of them engage hand to hand.

Slade focuses on Dick not because he thinks he has so much to teach him or Dick still has so much to learn or ‘could truly be a threat someday’.....but rather, because Slade ALREADY VIEWS DICK AS THAT THREAT AND HAS FOR YEARS.

He’s compelling and frustrating to Slade in equal measure because of all the Titans, Dick is the one Slade views as an actual threat, the one he has to either get out of the picture or else get on board with him if he wants to proceed with his agenda of the moment without it being thwarted by someone aka Dick Grayson.

Like yeah, Slade’s decades older than Dick with the experiences to match that, but the Titans and Dick himself have always defeated him or driven him off ON THEIR OWN, without having to call in ‘the adults’ to back them up or be the cavalry or whatever......so how do you figure they can manage that, if their leader and strategist and the one most directly/immediately targeted by Slade each encounter.....is like.....at the same time, significantly lesser than Slade in skill, expertise and ingenuity?

IT DOESN’T WORK, LOL.

What, like Slade just ‘lets them win’ all the time out of the goodness of his heart? This is the same guy who nuked Dick’s whole city just to spite him personally!

But anyway, my point is, using Slade as my primary example here though it applies in some form or another to all of the members of the Harem of Morally Ambiguous Older Men.......

Dick doesn’t need to ‘level up’ ten or twenty years into the future before he’s finally on Slade’s level. Slade doesn’t view him like a college recruiter scouting for talent and going ‘hmm, that one could have potential after putting a certain amount of work into getting him to a higher level.’

Slade ALREADY views Dick as his primary threat and personal antagonist, and that’s 100% the reason why he focuses on just Dick off on his own doing the solo hero thing just as often (if not more) than he takes on the whole Titans. Because for all the Titans’ vast powers, Slade has a way to beat each of them. He’s studied them, he knows their strengths and weaknesses, how being dependent on a superpower rather than acquiring a broad arsenal of skillsets can make them particularly vulnerable if their power is countered or negated in some way.

Dick is the wildcard. Always has been. Right back to their very first encounter in the Judas Contract, where Slade decided the fact that Dick alone had escaped being captured was a negligible problem, because he figured Dick presented the least threat out of all of them. And was proven very definitively wrong, lol.

Because Dick’s ultimate strength is in his adaptability. In how his life has shaped him to be a fucking paramount grandmaster of thinking on the fly, reacting to changes in his situation, environment, and anything else that disrupts his own plans, and requires he adjust to a new status quo and make new plans based on that.

Dick has been doing this to EXTREME degrees since before he was even ten years old, and he is fucking GOOD at it by now.

And the ultimate threat to a meticulous planner and strategist like Slade.....is always going to be a genius strategist whose specific strength lies in thinking on his feet. Someone capable of upending the whole chess board and rendering all pre-planned moves irrelevant, and then already being ten steps into a new plan before his opponent has wrapped their mind around the fact that most of the preparation that went into this encounter is useless and irrelevant now. 

A lesson Dick taught Slade in their very first encounter, in the Judas Contract, when he was the only Titan who slipped free of being captured by Slade....and when Slade made the mistake of thinking this was no big deal, as he viewed Dick as posing the least threat, especially on his own without the rest of his team.

And its  a lesson Slade has never forgotten. 

And see what I mean, just from my phrasing there? How often in S/ladin fics is it framed as though there’s even the CHANCE of Dick having anything to teach Slade instead of just being taught? Or even just surprised and having his ego checked by the fact that this decades younger hero has just defeated or outwitted him AGAIN?

They don’t do that, in my experience. Because they’re written to DELIBERATELY be imbalanced, like the uneven playing field is basically the POINT of the relationship, given that......the authors have to reshape Slade from the archnemesis of equivalent standing to Dick, into this vastly more skilled and experienced figure who Dick has no prayer of defeating on his own, unless Slade like, decides to stop toying with him on his own, or Dick’s saved by the intervention of family and/or teammates.

And to me, that defeats the entire point of Dick Grayson. The guy who saves himself time and time again, the survivor who doesn’t NEED anyone to save him or for those with more power than him to take pity on him and stop rubbing it in his face while not changing the power dynamic in the slightest.

I mean, that’s LITERALLY the basis of my being so invested in his character, lol, so even though I’m not a fan of sizable age gaps in romantic relationships in general, in this case, SPECIFICALLY - there was never a chance in hell that any of those relationships were ever going to interest me.

Especially since, as I said with Slade.....the entire actual dynamic Dick has with the other character has to be altered specifically so that Dick is in a more vulnerable position than they occupy, in any relationship they form.

Sorry not sorry, but I will never understand why a fandom that talks such a good game about Dick’s status as a survivor, seems at the same time to be constantly fixated on finding new ways to stack the deck against him....all while continually eroding his ability to fend for himself - thus REDUCING him from a self-saving survivor who picks himself up and dusts himself off each time he’s knocked down, to a victim who is measurably less powerful/skilled/capable than the threat he faces, and thus doomed to fail if he’s on his own, meaning he inevitably needs to be saved by others.

[transcending-chaos]

You're taking an art school/course, right? Are any of your classmates the annoying/pretentious artist types?

Yes, I’m going into my senior/final year of my art college experience so far :D

Alright, so before I answer your question in earnest, I should give some more context to the general atmosphere of my school. I won’t go into the other majors because I don’t really interact with them too much or know the dynamic of their curriculum, nor should I judge people with vastly different skillsets or workloads from mine (except for my neighbors from last year who were film students and partied at least three to four times a week and kept both me and my roomie up and scared our kitty multiple times with their loudness: fuck those guys).

I’m in Illustration, basically technical/applicable drawing. EVERYTHING is Illustration, and it’s so broad that you can honestly take your craft into whatever area/direction you want. You want to do cartoons, comics, visual or graphic novels? Cool. You want to do logos, skateboard/surfboard designs? Go for it. You want to be like John Singer Sargent, Norman Rockwell, and the other golden age illustrators? Me too, buddy.

Our freshman year is tough, it’s meant to ‘break’ you; the teachers and course work are meant to make you want to quit so that only the people who really, really want to be here end up sticking it out. It’s a bit predatory, yes, but hey, my school wants to make sure that whoever is here isn’t wasting the time of both themselves, the faculty, and the other students. Furthermore, it���s meant to break your ego. Some teachers will have the class line the work up from best to worst, with the person in last place getting their work shredded and put into the trashcan in front of everyone else. Basically, you have all these people who’re used to being the best -or one of the best- at their respective high schools; they’re used to being the ‘biggest fish in a small pond’ so they come in thinking “yeah, I’ve got this in the bag.”

No, honey, you fucking don’t.

However, you get the kids who become -what we call “*college name* Famous” and have HUGE egos because they either have gone to art school before and thus they’re older and have more experience, or they were immensely skilled already so getting a degree for them is a formality. They’re good, they came in good, and now they’re great -and that’s when some of them turn into jerks.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to talk a little about one of my classmates.

They’re older than the rest of the people in my class/year by about a decade and their work is incredible. They’re fantastic at rendering and composing, at perspective, at pretty much everything we have to master. HOWEVER, keep in mind that the majority of my class is around my age, coming to this school at the ages of 17-20, and graduating at the ages anywhere from 21-24. We’re younger, we don’t have that extra decade, we don’t have the same amount of experience yet, and YES, this is a huge factor.

This student knows they’re good, and that’s not a crime, but some of the stuff they do is pretty douche-y. They like to hog the teacher’s time in class, be it in critique when we have a lot of other people to go through or just talking to the teacher. Conversation isn’t bad, but keeping people locked in one where there are about twenty other students all needing the input of our professor -who’s literally there to lead the ENTIRE class, not just this one person- is not only undercutting the other kids’ time with the teacher IN CLASS SO WE CAN ACTUALLY SEE AND TAKE THE NOTES AND FIX THINGS FAR EASIER THAN WHEN TRYING THROUGH EMAIL, but it’s also like this in critiques; they rush through other peoples so they get from 2-5 minutes whereas this one person always manages to get 5-10 minutes on their pieces.

When interviewing or portfolio reviewing, the same thing happens. My Roomie unfortunately had to share a space/time slot with them and guess who ate up all the time?

Another thing is that this student has also tried to get the teachers away from other students, hogging their attention out of class. One of my friends didn’t get to talk to his professor at all that day so he decided ‘fuck it, I’ll just wait until after class’ and then proceeded to do just that. The other student then tried to get the professor to go out to lunch with them, and the professor finally noticed my friend hanging back in the room -so he had to stay and actually check in with my friend. (To be fair, this student just decided that they didn’t like my friend to begin with -for whatever reason they felt threatened by a then 19 year old boy.)

This student also likes dating freshman girls (17-20 year olds) when they have a decade on them in age. Now I don’t care what consenting adults do, but seriously, when you have about a decade over someone you’re interested in and they’re only just becoming an adult and getting introduced to ‘the real world’ it’s pretty creepy. :l

Their ego is also stroked a lot by some of the professors. They got an award a few years ago for being ‘the most outstanding in the class’ and when discussing it, their current professor actually got into a fight with my then current illustration professor. One argued ‘they totally deserve it, they’ve always been incredible’ while my teacher was like ‘they’re among younger kids who have less experience, it’s like comparing professionals to amateurs, it’s unfair’ and then he walked out because there might have been a fight if he stayed.

All in all though, there’s a lot of pretentious attitudes that some people have because of their expertise with some of their skills, and then that usually gets beaten out of them. Sure, we all don’t get along but most of us usually have the decency to be polite to each other and want to see others improve. TBH it’s the super competitive kids that have the big egos and personally, I don’t really care for that. ‘You do you, and I’ll do my thing’ is a good way to get by down here as long as you’re still applying yourself and want to improve.

#chaos speaks #chaos ama