In my mind and in my car

@linalinasin main blog || multifandom || antis dni || prompts welcome

[briar-mosaic]

Radiotrio & Free will

Outside of other ways they overlap, I feel like the main traits that the radiotrio share are being hyper independent, being deeply secretive (or unable to explain), and never being what they seem to be on the outside. But I also think the trio is marked by a shared lack of free will.

Season two reveals that Alastor hasn't been free since the moment he set foot in hell and he has been in hell for longer than he was alive. Alastor is constantly boasting about doing whatever he wants but its been a bluff until he got out of his deal with Rosie.

Character lore suggests his free will was also subjective while he was alive and we have to wonder what a connection to Roo has to cost someone. He is defined by his free will but he is constantly constrained by some system no matter how well he does. He goes out of his way to beat people without breaking their rules just so that he can feel that sense of control over the situations that happen to him. It's impossible to tell what he really wants and what he was told to do with almost any of his actions.

In both lives he had to do a surprising amount of self preservation just to be allowed to have his radio show stay on the air. He is literally the strongest sinner in hell - that's a plot point - but his access to do what he wants is never there. He sold his soul for the chance to have fun. He says he is sure he knows he's going to hell but its also ironic that his faith IN hell is so pure. He choose hell with a smile because it was a choice he got to make.

Niffty's relationship to free will is impossible not to question. She is given a form in hell that makes her read even more as "insignificant" and she is a contraction of truly helpful and truly dangerous. Niffty doesn't seem able to cognitively deny requests or demands. Even though she isn't compelled, we see her attempt to stab Angel Dust, stab a random sinner who requests her to, and even laugh while fully believing she is going to crash into Husk and kill him. Alastor doesn't have to give her orders, he probably has to keep her away from people who would gleefully mistreat her temperament much more (with the irony being that he's is keeping her from killing THEM).

Take Alastor's "kill the butcher not the lamb" leanings and Niffty is that in purity; she is likely brutal karma for people who are devious to her. But she is also the butcher and the lamb herself, and we see her unable to bond or join in with the group when Vaggi is leading the team bonding that episode. Niffty isn't caught, isn't thrown, and the group laughter stops when she joins in. Even when she tells all of hell how she feels for the Vee's camera, no one understands her. In some way, her free will is never considered or never matters. Baxter is shown hunting bugs for her and helping her experiment on them because unlike most sinners he isn't disgusted by Niffty's interests.

Husk's addiction (and the way that builds into his story with Angeldust) is another commentary on free will. We know substance abuse is more complicated than just telling someone to stop the habit. And we know Husk is a character that also struggles with ptsd/cptsd because he is consistent throughout all iterations and by all writers as being this definition of the has-been, and this person who's truly at the end of his rope. He is deeply depressive and stuck in cycles that he uses to cope with how psychologically painful his lived reality is - he is struggling to cope, constantly. Despite this, he can think on his feet even when he is thrown into a fight and has kept himself alive even in a losing streak.

While other characters have names that represent their personas in hell, Husk has no name whatsoever, not one of his human era or to represent him. His name doesn't even try to translate to "no name" or something like that but instead it means "everything is gone" because a husk is literally the shell of what was. But Husk's changing magic abilities and his long lists of talents, skills, and lovers suggest that he is actually someone with a wealth opinions in life and death.

He was an overlord, he has a working system in the background that cycles souls through without having to even be there, and despite his current circumstance he is privy to knowledge about Alastor that suggests he figured something out about him no one else did. And I don't even mean to suggest that Husk figured out who Alastor's deal was with, I imagine he found out by mistake actually, but what he has figured out is how to keep Alastor from killing him despite him being the kill-overlords-guy. Husk ability to survive is almost a punishment for how miserable he seems to feel. So he is very much a character who embodies all of the ideas around feeling like your choices don't matter.

When we see that he has his casino in season two and then the writer is giving commentary on how Husk is surprised to learn how bad Angeldust situation is, it brings up a lot of questions about how Husk has more issues facing problems than he does necessarily overcoming them. Psychological wounds are real, and they swallow people in all sorts of ways and so Husk's addiction and his rumination on his trauma (his valentines day emails titled "I lost the ability to love a long time ago") make his own sense of free will constantly feel subjective to himself.

So basically they should all be allowed to get happy endings where they can do whatever they want. I literally think about the radiotrio so often, please understand that if we get radiotrio content in season three it's going to be a holiday for me.

[alhyde]

how they are

[eggcats]

Would Vox be fixed if Alastor just put him in a mating press and ****** his ***** until he bluescreened and then when he woke up flipped him over and **** in his *** until he couldn't move and was dripping *** out of every ****?

Probably not.

But he should try anyway to be sure.

[eggcats]

my hot take is that i understand people doing it and that it's just fun but obsession doesn't make sense for radiostatic, it's actually valangel coded

[glorious-sinners]

want due to some kind of plot contrivance people from heaven to be able to come down to Hell in some circumstances... bc I want Val's mom to come down (possibly due to a brilliant idea of Charlie's that it could maybe motivate Valentino to act better) and all the chaos that would ensue.

Val slamming into the Porn Studio and yelling at everyone to put clothes on because his mom's curious about what 'movies' he's working on.

Someone hastily putting a hand-written sign saying 'Normal' or something over the 'Porn' on the sign.

Angel, wrapped in a trenchcoat as of three minutes ago: Yeah uh it's a movie about how I uh... get a pizza delivered but can't pay for it so... I play dice with the pizza guy to see who wins it *trying to interpret the signals Val is making from behind his mom's back* and then we both repent because gambling is wrong

Vox panicking for reasons he can't articulate and frantically going into Must Impress The Family of Date mode, which unfortunately consists of him constantly dropping references to how much money he makes and trying to make himself sound more upper-class, which doesn't work very well. Cue more panic.

Val how do I impress your mother. What do you mean STOP ACTING WEIRD. I am acting SO normal. How do I make your mom like me.

Velvette's usual issues with the concept of mothers and her baseline distaste for older women conflicting with Valentino asking her to please be nice (something neither of them thought would ever happen) and resulting mostly in her sitting around smiling fixedly and answering in monosyllables to direct questions only if she has to ever be in the same room as her.

this is kind of terrifying

Val's mother meanwhile is like mijo I would love to be proud that you're apparently rich now but it's in Hell. did you stop going to church after you left home? 🥺 why don't you want to try to get redeemed the white clown girl at the hotel seems nice 🥺 although she didn't have a priest around someone should tell her she needs a priest. how long has it been since you went to confession? 🥺

Val: mama the last thing I want to do is upset you but I don't think you could find a priest in this neighborhood that hasn't done some very specific crimes that make them a less than desirable authority figure

[damicest]

uh huh. for sure

definitely. all my friends are saying this

[iconuk01]

Ah yes, Devin Grayson's "Inheritance" which is... a whole thing.

I mean, the above isn't even as weird as it gets... as Ollie talks about Roy...

Dear god, Ollie... o_O

Look, I know I'm weird in some of my preferences, but at least I'm addressing the situation as as consumer of fiction, not internally as if it were real.

[dickgraysonsptsd]

grayson's own words on inheritance from dick grayson: boy wonder (2011), emphasis mine for the most relevant quotes:

Interviewer: Your novel Inheritance went about as far as any DC publication has in acknowledging the homoerotic subtext some fans like to see in that couple (albeit that acknowledgment coming from the unreliable mouth of Oliver Queen). How did editorial attitudes change?

Grayson: So, this is interesting.

My intention there was to have Ollie acknowledge that reading without suggesting that it was necessarily accurate. He basically just says, “I can understand why people would jump to that conclusion.” Again, this circles back to my idea of trying to acknowledge, and trying to have the characters acknowledge, the entirety of their legends. They’re not dumb. They know what people say about them. And not all people say the same things. So let’s walk up to as much of that as possible.

I was also contrasting Batman and Green Arrow’s partnering styles. There’s a chapter in the book where Green Arrow is partnered with Nightwing and basically teasing him about being sexually ambiguous, and this material is arguably more offensive than Ollie’s line acknowledging the gay subtext. It’s got a lot of bad homoerotic innuendo and it’s poorly written and I don’t remember but I have to assume that I was hugely over-caffeinated and desperately trying to make deadline when I wrote it. It goes too far and there’s no reason for it in terms of the plot or even the characters. It is one of those hugely embarrassing learning-in-print experiences. I so wish I could rewrite that chapter—it’s undisciplined and fanfic-y in the worst sense of that designation—but I assumed that had it been truly egregious, harmful in any serious way to the characters or the company, somebody would have said something.

The whole time I worked in comics the understanding was that writers were supposed to push the envelope and that, because these characters are such icons, editorial would, whenever necessary, push back. Sometimes you would really click with an editor and they would become a genuine creative partner and sometimes you weren’t quite as much on the same wavelength, but either way, they were always very involved. If you ever wrote something unacceptable the editor would hopefully call you and give you a chance to rewrite it or sometimes they’d just get in there and fix it and you wouldn’t even know it had been changed until the issue came out, but there was no rubber-stamping. These characters were guarded. And although that may sound stifling, it’s actually hugely reassuring, because you’re never alone with the responsibility of safeguarding a legend’s reputation. As a creator working with licensed characters, you anticipate and accept and even to some extent rely on that editorial pushback. When you go too far with a mainstream superhero story, someone is always there to reel you in.

So I was delighted when I didn’t get any pushback for that line or those scenes. The licensed publication novel department is a wholly separate entity from the comics: different editors, different corporate culture, different floor of the building (at least at the time I was writing Inheritance) … so I figured that maybe they were a little less dogmatic than the guys downstairs. The edits I did get were about another issue entirely, a structural problem I had to address, so apparently the handful of cringe-worthy lines spread throughout this 336 page book that was written in three months weren’t as bad as I had feared. The novel also contained, I thought, some strong writing, and overall it accomplished what they had asked me to do. All of the material made it through editorial into publication within a company that does not hesitate to ask for rewrites, so although I would have happily rewritten the material in question, there was never a request or an opportunity to do so. And with no one giving me any feedback about it one way or another, I assumed we were okay.

In fact, I assumed we were okay for years—literally nearly a decade. I assumed we were okay until less than a month ago, when a friend in the industry let me know that there was, in fact, a huge uproar over that line of Ollie’s (or possibly the material surrounding it)—a couple of people very high up were apparently apoplectic. Again, I had no clue, but looking back now at the timing of my dismissal from Nightwing and Batwoman it’s actually quite possible that this played a major role in my being suddenly and thoroughly blacklisted at DC. And if that is the case, it’s almost worse than if those firings had in fact been arbitrary. Because although it’s a personal and professional low point and I take full responsibility for how awful that writing is, it also isn’t anywhere close to the worst of what DC has put out. I have never seen a male colleague cast out as quickly or as thoroughly as I was. And more to the point, I would have absolutely rewritten any or all of that without a second thought had I been asked to. I wasn’t the least bit wedded to the material, it was just manic silliness. And I wish I could say that it somehow forwarded the cause of gay rights or something, but it really doesn’t, it’s just dumb, coy banter. But it’s just dumb, coy banter. It’s hard to imagine that it was worth tanking someone’s career over.

It’s puzzling to me because I had always gone out of my way to be an extremely cooperative freelancer. There’s a saying that freelancers can be brilliant, fast, or easy to work with, and that the really good ones are at least two out of three. There’s not much you can do to guarantee that you’re brilliant, so you make damn sure that you’re fast and easy to work with. I was very aware of being in somebody else’s sandbox with these characters and although, as you can see from my answers to other questions in this interview, I have very strong and sometimes off-the-wall ideas about them, I honestly never made any attempt to push any kind of personal agenda or stray too far from the company line in my professional work. The mistakes I made came from rushing, and there was no reason anyone at the company would have been afraid to approach me and ask me to pull back. It’s kind of horrifying now to think that there were people that offended by it and that disgusted with me and that no one said anything. The turn-around in publishing—especially serialized publishing—is so fast that there are inevitably times when something makes it into print that never should have. I don’t know what the institutional policy on how to deal with that is, but I hope it’s not to just reflexively dismiss the creator, because they stand to lose a lot of good people that way.

In any case, I love working in long form prose and I loved working for that department and I’m very sad to learn, so many years later, that there was so much going on behind the scenes that I was not aware of. I guess the real answer to your question is that editorial attitudes have not changed very much at all. There have always been, and still are, people around who are so comfortable with gay references and humor that they hardly even notice it, and there have always been, and still are, people around who have absolutely no tolerance for it.

[dickgraysonsptsd]

the thing is the ollie thinking dick is cutieful and sexy stuff in inheritance is like. yea. it probably should have been edited to some degree in the final draft just to move it away from perverted old man territory somewhat. but the editor did not ask her to edit it or cut it down, or in any way express disapproval of it, and then she was fired for it. a scene the editor had approved for publication. and i really think it's impossible to look at that, and look at how grayson defended other marginalized creatives at dc and fought for the female and black characters didio was killing off, and look at didio's hatred of women and queers, and not think: oh yeah they let her publish it unedited so that they had an excuse to fire her, huh

[lualuadraw]

yes

[memopmiff]

Funny kids

[j-walking]

Can I have an avatar too 🥺

[papayafromtv]

i’m all for the angst potential of Dick Grayson being the one kid that Bruce never legally adopted and rather just kept as a ward and that causing insecurities for Dick, but at the moment all i can think about is how much funnier it would be if it was the complete other way round regarding who felt rejected about the whole thing. Tim and Damian find out Dick isn’t a legal adoptee of Bruce Wayne and rally to ‘have their brother’s back’ and go to confront Bruce on the matter, and Jason’s next to him when it happens and he starts crying laughing while Bruce just gets a really uncomfortable look on his face.

Jason, losing his mind: you think- you think BRUCE excluded DICK?! no no no bubba, it’s the other way around,

Bruce: *looking at the ground intently*

Damian: i don’t understand. why did Father not adopt Grayson then?

Jason, genuinely struggling to breathe: he- he tried- *high pitched, now on his hands and knees on the floor to wheeze* Dick- god this is my favourite story ever- Dick didn’t want him-

Tim and Damian:

Tim and Damian: what.

Bruce, blushing slightly: it wasn’t that he didn’t want me, we were just in different places in the relationship,

Jason: *wheezes*

Bruce: Jason shut up.

Tim: i don’t understand.

Jason: he- he asked Dick if he wanted to be adopted, and Dick looked him right in the fucking eyes and went ‘nah, thanks.’ and walked away,

Damian: …are you being serious?

Bruce: he didn’t want anybody to take a legal role that could replace his parents, which is fully understandable and i respect it completely; he’s my child regardless of the legal specifics,

Jason: *dry heaving on the floor*

Bruce: …though it did sting a little bit when i told him ‘you know in my heart you are my son, right?’ and he looked at me and said ‘yeah.’ and nothing else.

Jason: *painful wheeze*

Bruce, starting to get slightly indignant: …-it’s also just slightly awkward whenever people come up to me and bring it up- all ‘why don’t you adopt Dick, don’t you want to?’ and then they list off all the benefits of legally adopting him and i have to stand there staring at them thinking ‘yeah i fucking agree.’

Tim and Damian:

Tim: i’m starting to think we’ve struck a nerve here,

Bruce: -you know i really poured my heart into that ‘i want to adopt you’ speech—had a powerpoint and everything, told him i loved him, basically got down on one knee with the contract. and this little shit stared me in the face wearing my fucking hand-me-downs, and was like ‘i think we should just be friends’ like how in the hell-

Jason, weakly from the floor: god i’m- please, i’m in pain,

Tim and Damian: *awkwardly watching Bruce rant while Jason cries on the floor next to him*

Tim and Damian:

Damian: this may have been a mistake-

Tim: does this mean that Jason being adopted was basically just Dick breaking up with Bruce and Bruce being so heartbroken that he went and rebounded with the first kid he found on the nearest street corner?

Bruce: *pauses rant*

Bruce:

Bruce: WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP SAYING THAT?

Jason: *starts laughing even louder*

[just-alex-iguess]

Back on my DC era

[thcyn]

Happy Birthday Timmy (^O^)/

(eat up ;D)

all i could think of while drawing this was the cock shame meme (im sorry tim :/)

[detectingcomics]

The World's Finest #112: The Spy in the Arrow Cave

Guys that's literally his son

[thatswhatsushesaid]

/picks up my megaphone

whether you interpret it as romantic or not, jin guangyao did genuinely and sincerely care about and value lan xichen. their friendship was one of mutual affection, understanding, and ongoing support. they genuinely liked each other and they liked spending time in each other’s company. it wasn’t fake, and it wasn’t an act.

ok that’s all bye 👋

[orangei-sindy]

tw: sexual assault

Valerie D'Orazio, a comic writer and editor, posted on twitter in 2023 about how she was sexually harassed/assaulted by Stephen Wacker, Marvel's newly chosen Editor in Chief. More detail under the cut.

[orangei-sindy]

UPDATE: Valerie D'Orazio has made a followup post on twitter.

please reblog this version

[dickgraysonsptsd]

comics industry so miserable for women that a man putting his hand under a woman's shirt in the workplace with "flirty" intent does not even rank in the top 10 worst things men have done to her. not unexpected but still fucking awful. and her #1 is still a guy in the industry. ok. we have to start running these men over in cars

[dickgraysonsptsd]

i fear that we have to care about things men do to women that aren't the worst events of a woman's life.

[alltheshadesofamber]

Any classmate of Tim Drake’s who has ever asked him if he wanted any pot or anything would inevitably get an at home visit from Robin with a lecture on the evils of substance abuse