Question, do blogs that openly love a specific character enjoy being pm-ed or ask-ed about them and asked questions about said character? Or is it uncomfortable when that happens
chris redfield you are so dear to me. wdym you raised your little sister despite your small age gap because your parents died young and left you two all alone in the world? wdym you play guitar and got you and claire matching leather jackets? wdym you were in the air force but your values overrode your training and you disobeyed your superiors and then got into stars? wdym you co-founded bsaa and watched it decay under the same greed as umbrella? wdym you are an expert marksman and combatant and pilot and strategist and technician etc. wdym you laughed at wesker when you heard his ridiculous grand plan, straight up giggling? wdym you got amnesia and yet remembered leon the second you saw him? wdym you watched piers die? wdym you raised your friend’s daughter after you failed to save him? wdym you are fully aware that america is a capitalistic hellscape and yet the individuality of its people can be salvation and undoing? wdym you are slutted out in sexy add-on outfits more than every other protagonist in the franchise? wdym you’ve smoked all these years? wdym your eyes are either brown or grey and change? wdym you wore a hawaiian shirt to go to a vacation spot that was not even mildly tropical? wdym your brown hair is reddish in the light? wdym you punched a boulder and word got around so a decade later strangers are making fun of you for it? wdym you only got more muscular with age and you’re STILL bigger than leon despite barely being taller than him? wdym your bestie is jill valentine? wdym you make your teammates call you alpha? what did you mean by that?
came from ao3 cus i LOVEEEDDD PLUTO it’s so so so good, would u ever consider writing a pt 2 to it?
hi!!! thank you so much <3 i have indeed considered it! i started writing a sequel and some extra scenes almost immediately after i published it back in 2023 and i did post some stuff about it on my pluto!bruce tag, but i'm afraid that i havent revisited it in a while ): but i do hope to continue it one day!
bruce wayne & jason todd comic parallels with DC K.O KNIGHTFIGHT (2026) #2&3 that were most definitely probably not done on purpose at all but i cant stop thinking about them (<- guy who can not stop thinking about this 4 issue arc)
batman is one of those characters where i can read one of his comics and think “man. what a great guy. despite all his paranoia and obsessive tendencies he has a deep love for humanity that pushes him to make the world a better place. i don’t understand why so many people hate him.” and then i read another one of his comics and i think he should die in a glue trap
okay thinking about that crack Alfred Pennyworth/Jim Gordan au and i have worked out a timeline based on gordons status at the gcpd. hear me out.
they properly meet after the wayne's death. theyre both young, gordon is only an officer and recently married, alfred is grieving and now raising a child on his own — they just keep running into each other (the investigation, police escorts, check ins etc). they become tentative friends.
now gordon is corporal. it's been about a year since the wayne's died, so they dont see each other as often. maybe alfred is attracted to gordon when they do run into each other, but he's got bruce to worry about first, so who cares. gordon is too busy being a deadbeat husband and trying to get a good grade at not being a corrupted cop to notice.
gordon gets promoted to sergeant. he gets a divorce. they run into each other after a long few months of not seeing one another, and friendship rekindles. at this point, barbara senior is pregnant, but they've already got divorced, so it's a co-parenting thing.
lieutenant gordon. they want each other SO BAD. but gordon is in denial and raising a baby barbara and alfred's main priority is always bruce. bruce is twelve and really, he's too old to have playdates with a two year old, alfred.
a bit before gordon becomes captain, bruce leaves gotham to train around the world. alfred pulls away. gordon stops reaching out after a while. they do not talk to each other.
chief gordon. they haven't spoken to each other in years.
many years later, commissioner gordon is now frequently terrorised by the new gotham vigilante, batman. unrelated, bruce returns to gotham after his time studying abroad, so gordon pays a visit.
from which point OLD MAN YAOI ENSUES. friends to strangers to friends to yearning, pining, not-actually unreciprocated love, bruce and babs being totally embarassed by it all. and the whole lot. okay that's it that's all i got
All bonus prompts can be used in place of or alongside the week's prompts.
If you create something for Duke Thomas Week 2026 tag this blog @dukethomas-week to be rebloged here!
June 1st: Eclipse
-Elaine & Duke
-Badly Injured
-Luke Fox
-Post-Crisis AU
June 2nd: Community
-We Are Robin
-Trans Duke Thomas
-Pre-Robin
-Duke Thomas Joins the Batman-Family Early AU
June 3rd: Light & Shadow
-Fears & Phobias
-Glowing Eyes/Blood
-Hallucinations
-Band AU
June 4th: Growth
-Team Leader
-Physical Affection
-Zero Year/The Riddler
-Reverse Robins AU
June 5th: Sunlight
-Time Travel
-Poetry
-The Power Company
-Immortal Duke Thomas AU
Bonus Prompts:
Duke is Batman, The Outsiders, Signal & Static, Fantasy, Wrestling, League of Assassins, Vampires, Soulmates, Symbiote, Jedi, Gnomon, Future Career, Villain AU, Fashion, Found Family, Wings, Avatar The Last Airbender, Bumblebees, Young Justice, Dungeons & Dragons, Demigod, Pokemon, Robin War Aftermath, Animal, Civilian, Running Away, Medieval, Lantern, Knightfight, Wolfwalker, Jace Fox
thinking about reverse robins AUs and young bruce and duke thomas in dick’s place. rr!bruce and duke would be much closer and sure of their importance to each other than canon and it would be a similar dynamic to bruce and canon!dick (necessary for the conceit of reverse robins to work) but if pressed they would not call what they have a father-son relationship. dick lost his parents and family entirely and was alone in the world except for bruce and alfred, so while their relationship is father-brother-mentor-friend-partner, the paternal side is what they end up falling back on when pressed, especially when dick is an adult.
duke has parents, though. elaine and doug are still alive and gnomon is… existing, and overall duke as a person is not the kind of kid to be as codependent as dickie was. i think rr!duke and bruce would be much more comfortable labelling their family dynamic as brothers: fundamentally connected, but with a level of independence and reciprocity.
cue a few years down the line and damian shows up in gotham older than duke (teen pregnancy with talia early in bruce’s training, wrap it before you tap it man) and immediately starts to get huffy about being the true son before duke goes whoa whoa whoa i’m not bruce’s kid that’s so weird. he’s my family but i’m not, like, he’s not my dad. he’s more like my brother. i’m like your uncle. yeah call me uncle duke. and damian, wind taken out of his sails staring at this short preteen in yellow, flatly says I Am Not Doing That.
something small that i find utterly infuriating: stephanie brown is NOT from crime alley she is NOT from the inner city and she does NOT fit whatever stereotype about class you think she should. stephanie brown was raised in a cute little ranch house on a tree-lined street in the gotham suburbs. she’s a suburbanite! a girl-next-door! she rode to crime scenes on her bike! this idea is not incompatible with her dad being a violent criminal and her mother being addicted to downers and her own teen pregnancy because the image of the perfect squeaky-clean suburbs is a conservative myth and you are playing into that when you erase this aspect of her character!
Hi!! First I just wanted to say your fics have been an inspo for me to write my own fics and I enjoy them immensely. Second, I’ve been wandering something and I want to ask something about how Jason Todd is portrayed after his death.
I don’t really understand why so many just kind of lie? Or exasperate who Jason Todd is and isn’t. Like the Cass and Bruce scene in front of Jason’s grave, or that scene in Gotham Knights where Alfred tells Bruce “Jason was determined to disobey him.” I know out of universe it just has to do with the mischaracterization of Jason but I’m having a hard time on finding an in universe explanation. Is it out of guilt? Out of misplaced love? It’s confusing me a bit
first of all, thank you!! i'm so glad i could inspire you that is truly the highest complement i could receive <3
secondly, this is a really interesting discussion! you're right about how in a meta way it's the deeply routed classism in jasons writing, as well as many writers (example: grant morrison) just really hating jason for some reason and doing everything they can to make him absolutely insufferable. not even in a cool evil villain way, but in an embarrassment point and laugh kind of way.
for the purpose of this discussion lets (with much difficulty) ignore the writers predispositions and implications and just focus entirely on what this means for the characters. it's good you mention the cass and bruce at jason's grave scene, because i think that example alone is a good way to deconstruct some of character's (for this post: bruce's) perspective of jason's death.
to summarise before dumping a billion paragraphs developing the point; let's not dance around it and accept that much of people's understanding of jason's death falls into the victim blaming variety, but in such way that the characters don't seem to realise that's how they perceive him, which is almost worse than them purposely retelling it in such a way. as well as that, aside from this indenial misunderstanding of jason, i think this shows the sort of flaws the other characters have.
Detective Comics #790
at first glance this seems like a really touching and emotional moment where bruce is sharing his grief with cass (especially when the entirety of #790 is about bruce struggling to do just that), but then you really read it and you're like what the fuck... why are we standing in front of this kids grave slagging him off? not only are we hearing all of bruce's regrets about how he raised jason as opposed to his son's actual death, but we are dragging steph into this too.
to bruce, jason's death is an accumulation of everything he let the boy get away with finally reaching it's tipping point. that jason's ambition to "prove something" lead to his seemingly inevitable demise.
now i do think it's important to note that WE (the readers) know jason died saving sheila. that despite being beaten, betrayed and left for dead, he tried to save someone and paid the price for it. no one else knows that, because the two people that did are dead. as a result, bruce is left with the facts that;
prior to his death, jason was acting uncharacteristically (<- important point) violent and aggressive towards himself, borderline passively suicidal. bruce himself acknowledges this.
that jason ran away from home in search of someone who may or may not be his mother. this is because losing his parents is a hurt jason has still not healed from and a topic bruce has handled badly in the past (example: willis todd). jason does not trust bruce enough to tell him about this.
once they find his mother, jason is instructed to not get involved in the joker related problem. to the extent of bruces knowledge, jason reveals himself as robin, and decides to get involved despite the instruction not to. either because he again, didn't trust bruce to believe he would handle it, or that jason was trying to prove something to bruce, to sheila, or to himself.
sheila dies, jason dies and bruce is the only one alive from the tragedy with only half the story.
All of this can be found in A Death In The Family, but I don't feel comfortable sharing panels of it given where the story takes place right now.
bruce spends the next few years blaming himself at any given point, but the blame is misplaced. bruce feels as though HIS negligence of JASON'S personality and HIS allowance of JASON'S freedom as robin is what allowed JASON to go and die. instead of seeing what he knows to be true about jason (his empathy, his kindness, his grief and loneliness) bruce can now only see how his allowance of all these things played a part in JASON disobeying him (whether maliciously or not) and dying.
in short, bruce is projecting big time onto his dead kid.
bruce is, as per usual, coping with loss by antagonising it. he did the same with babs, with steph and later on with damian. for a character like batman, who upon failing immediately turns these losses into lessons (for himself and all those forced to comply), it's the only way he seems to 'move on'. if he can understand that jason died because of all the things bruce let him do wrong, then he can convince himself that the guilt he feels for it is necessary. that jasons death is on him and that it mattered.
unfortunately, in order to do that, bruce is indenial about what he LITERALLY KNOWS ABOUT JASON! it's not like he was an absent father to jason in the slightest. but hey, if he can vitiate jason's enthusiasm to help people as jason's impulsiveness to fight (two things that can be true but not in accordance to the context he describes them in), then the blame is on jason for being brash, and on bruce for being lenient.
he shoots jason in the foot and himself in the knee to keep them both down. because, well, jason's dead anyway, and bruce unfortunately isn't. this is the closest thing they'll get to sharing the truth bruce knows he's missing and he knows it's his fault for favouring the mission of his son — so at the expense of jason, bruce lets them both be the lesson to learn from.
it is why jason is used as a cautionary tale, and why bruce is so unstable on allowing people (especially children) into his life emotionally. the second robin is a lesson for any young vigilante eager to join the mission, and batman's part in the death is a lesson for bruce wayne to... be even more emotionally untrustworthy? instructions unclear.
the final part of the grave scene is also important, because bruce is admitting that he is not so different to jason. that "for some of us [Bruce and Cass] there is no turning back". he is projecting these flaws about jason not only because that's the only way he can cope with jason's death, but he is projecting these flaws because regardless of what actually happened, he (and cass) are destined to meet the same fate. jason died for a multitude of reason that bruce may or may not have caused knowingly, and these reasons only exist because bruce knows them to be true in himself and anyone else damaged enough to find themselves on his side of the blurry line.
so, now looking a bit less zoomed in, i think it's unfortunate that jason's time as robin is often perversed by the people who should know better (bruce & alfred), and while it is bad writing on jason's character, it is great writing to show the flaws in the characters around him.
especially how it shows that grief is not always something that can become healed. bruce's guilt about his parents death amounts to something hopeful (batman), but his guilt about jason's death makes bruce cruel and childish.
tldr: no one knows the true story, so they compensate from what they do know — but by doing so they project and misinform existing characteristics of jason in order to compartmentalise the gravity of his tragic death. bruce is unable to cope normally and everyone is forced to follow the same fate, because batman's lessons are rarely wrong, even if they cause ten other problems and misunderstandings to understand.
dailybridgerton
titsay
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
stormborns
izzy806
ellievsbear
