noxious weed of the month club

they/them * resting bewildered face * femslash partisan * indeterminately queer

[foggyeyes]

[xahhhhh-deactivated20251106]

it does kinda feel sometimes like barbara gordon never gets any rationalization or deeper analysis of why she behaves the way she does while the men get endless amounts of it. like yeah she’s controlling and abrasive, her entire life was upended and violated while she laid on the ground helpless to stop it. she had to dig herself out of the fridge and the dc female character grave while bruce wayne and the joker shared a laugh. she built herself, her team, her place in the universe largely by herself. i think control issues make sense personally! i think being distrustful and jaded and aloof make sense! this idea of men being doylist and their actions being ripe for exploitation while women are watsonian and always right as they appear….

[thefailurecult]

[maggierockets]

What story is this from? Haven’t seen it before.

[thefailurecult]

[nuclearbummer]

[wiigiwaamcore]

David Cusick was a Tuscarora (Haudenosaunee) artist who self-published the first known English-language record of Indigenous stories told BY an Indigenous writer-illustrator. His book is called David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations and you can read it for free online.

[memento-mori-1999]

Bozos are out here acting like Barbara Gordon being insanely manipulative and having no sense of privacy isn’t why 99% of her fans adore her. Just admit you like your characters BORING. She’s absolutely awful and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

[oraclewings]

i bring a "making barbara batgirl again and curing her paraplegia is ableist and misogynistic and a disrespect to kim yale's work & legacy" vibe to the dc fandom that dc editors don't really like ✌🏽

[snapdragon76]

She wasn’t cured. She’s still disabled. She has an internal mobility device, and not acknowledging THAT is pretty ableist in and of itself.

[oraclewings]

I say "cured" because that's how most writers write her invisible disability, by not acknowledging it at all, or giving her mobility aids that don't fit her disability (the chip itself doesn't exist in real life, no implant can give her the amount of mobility she has now with her type of injury and considering how old it is).

apart from how problematic it is to erase the representation of paraplegic people who are full time wheelchair users for no good reason (because dc certainly didn't have pure intentions of representing the disabled community, they're a multimillionaire company who wanted to nostalgia-bait with barbara back as batgirl considering how popular the redhead batgirl is), let's also consider how her disability is written – or not written – right now.

a fake spinal implant that gives her more mobility than able-bodied people have, a constant threat of "the chip malfunctioning with overuse" but she's been beaten multiple times pretty bad and nothing happens, the only time she was referenced to have chronic pain and muscle tension as well as used multiple mobility aids as during batgirls (2022).

combine this with the fact there was and there isn't any genuine sentiment from dc editorial, they didn't give her an implant for representation OR for good story progression. if you read oracle stories after the killing joke, you know a huge part of barbara's development is accepting her disability and learning to live a good, BETTER life as a paraplegic woman and wheelchair users. there's multiple instances where she talks about liking her life better, knowing she can do more as oracle, learning to let go of batgirl and pass it on. that was all erased for her to be infantilized and forced back into something she had outgrew.

her disability exists in a way that allows writers to pretend it don't, so they disrespect not only her being disabled, but decades of stories where the character became someone they actively erased by forcing her back to batgirl. a reminder babs is obsessed with her autonomy and indepence and she could have both while being a wheelchair user, but now her implant can be literally HACKED and WAS by THE JOKER. the man who originally took her agency, violated her body and will. and he does it AGAIN by controlling her body through the implant to the point she has to take it off herself!

barbara would never choose mobility she was more than capable of living and thriving without over her autonomy. she wouldn't accept the risk of losing control when she's a trained martial artist in combat specific for disabled wheelchair users.

nothing about the spinal implant represents disability in a genuine, sensible way. there's no effort or commitment. a mobility aid exists to assist, if the character isn't show still having consequences of their disability but with aid, what's the point? the chip doesn't give her anything the character needed, on the contrary, it takes away so much from her story and the resilience and stubbornness that makes oracle. she's not her disability, but disability is a part of her life that can't be erased without erasing part of who she is.

[gusvanscant]

'Repo Man' (dir. by Alex Cox) [1984]

[foggyeyes]

that's how i would react if this happened to me. "hmm...looks like a big-ass tower is about to crush me...?"

(blood of the demon #5)

[73chn1c0l0rr3v3l]

We have to thank our brave soldiers in fandom who write femslash fics. We have to thank our brave soldiers in fandom who look past the popular juggernaut male characters to shower attention and Situations on underappreciated female characters. We have to thank our brave soldiers in the fandom trenches writing ignored female characters raunchily fucking each other sloppy style. We have to get on our knees and thank the brave soldiers in fandom who flesh out the female characters canon didn't care about and ship them with other women. I know it's hard to care about female characters in a world that seems to only revolve around men but I see you. And I love you

[preheville]

people on here make ocs and they're mostly men and they ship characters and they're always men and they have favourite characters and they're always men but sometimes they say the men are like women not trans ones though because that would be guh-ross and harsh the vibe of the #fandomspace and they write fanfiction about men and talk about how complicated and #deeplywritten their male favs are and they'll watch movies and tv shows with mostly male casts in every way that matters and not question it because well what do you want them to do about it and they don't even care that that's what they're doing to them it's pure coincidence they always like the male characters better it's pure chance that women are only interesting as yaoi cheerleaders and actually when they write female characters as yaoi cheerleaders they're doing them a favour because they were just so poorly written in the source material it's the charitable thing to do men men men men men men men and if you say anything about it well you're being a killjoy you're being no fun you're being homophobic you're being a misandrist god what is it about women right what is it about women always trying to ruin our fun? why do they care so much? they're just women. who wants to think about women at all.

[markovchaingang]

the media literacy on this website may be piss poor but still when i see someone handwringing about media literacy ~70% of the time they're just complaining about the fact that other people disagree with them

[txttletale]

Television producers who find their message ‘failing to get across’ are frequently concerned to straighten out the kinks in the communication chain, thus facilitating the ‘effectiveness’ of their communication. Much research which claims the objectivity of ‘policy-oriented analysis’ reproduces this administrative goal by attempting to discover how much of a message the audience recalls and to improve the extent of understanding. No doubt misunderstandings of a literal kind do exist. The viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition, is unfamiliar with the language, finds the concepts too alien or difficult or is foxed by the expository narrative. But more often broadcasters are concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they — the broadcasters — intended. What they really mean to say is that viewers are not operating within the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ code.

Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.

[foggyeyes]

once, about 8 or 9 years ago, i had my bag searched going into a pool bar (the country club in new orleans) and they found a glass buttplug in there that i had pretty much forgotten about, and they held it for me (not literally, it was in a little pouch) because "no glass in the pool area." yes, this really happened to me, and sometimes, without warning, i remember it. and i am overcome by a great wave of strong and varied emotions.

[coolcomicbookcovers]

[foggyeyes]

me going into my roommate's bedroom while she's at work to see if all the plates and forks are in there

[cherry-blossom-honey]

Dinah talking about Babs in Birds of Prey #03 🫶

[vivacias]

What's a book written by a woman that changed your life or that you consider a classic? Any genre, any language.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

did Scott McCloud transition or