Yeah, I’m just leaning into the fact that’s what this blog has become | she/her | Just a 20-something rediscovering the same stuff I liked at 13 but this time with adult money 🦇
So I’ve never actually done one of these before, but I figured, why not…
Welcome to my little corner of the internet where I fly-tip every one of my thoughts
Hi, my name is Em, and this is my blog 👋
My pronouns are she/her
I’m in my early 20s
I’m from London 🇬🇧
I speak English, Angloromani, Ancient Greek (in theory, though I am incredibly rusty), and I’m very slowly learning Italian (which, at the moment, is basically just holiday-level, plus some weirdly specific archaeological terms 🤷♀️).
As you may be able to tell from the name of this blog, I am a gypsy. More specifically, I am a Showman, which is a British subgroup of gypsy/traveller wherein we’re from the fairground/circus. The closest US term would be Carney. It’s a lot to explain so if you want to know more, I’ve explained it previously here.
I don’t really have any ‘anti-characters’, but I’m definitely more of a fan of the Bats. 🦇 My favourites are: Dick Grayson/Nightwing, Jason Todd/Red Hood, Barbara Gordon/Oracle/Batgirl.
Currently, I’m trying to read more Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (my socialist king 👑), Stephanie Brown/Spoiler, John Constantine, Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, Cassandra Cain/Batgirl, and the non-YJ appearances of the YJ lot. I’m always open to recs!
Your ship is not my ship and that’s ok, but that being said, I personally really do not enjoy any Batcest (by which I specifically mean shipping of any of the Waynes. Dickbabs/Timsteph/Stephcass doesn’t count.), so you won’t find that here. 🖤
I also don’t enjoy any NSFW content, so again, that’s something you won’t find on my blog. However, I do sometimes discuss more adult themes from canon (e.g. SA), but these will always be tagged.
Personally, I prefer canon to fanon, but honestly, have fun, and I don’t mind the occasional bit of fanon stuff.
Outside of DC, my main loves are horses, archaeology (I specialise in second century AD Roman sculpture and its curation in eighteenth and nineteenth century country houses, but I’ve also worked on Achaemenid archaeology and stuff to do with horses before, and I have an interest in Roman Egypt), history (my favourite period is the Regency era) and reading. I’m always happy to take asks about these, too!
My favourite books are Pride and Prejudice, and The Count of Monte Cristo.
I am a Christian, and that’s important to my world view personally, but in the sense that my beliefs are that we should love everyone, and always choose faith and love over fear. I’m very much a socialist. This is a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community, POC, immigrants, people of all religions and none, etc 💙 if there is anything you feel I can do to support you, drop an ask or a message
My asks are always open, and I absolutely love getting them! Sometimes, it will take me a while to reply to them because I am a yapper and want to do them justice, but I promise I’ve not forgotten about them! I also currently have anon turned off because I’ve been called a dirty gypo enough times irl, so I can’t be bothered with dealing with that here. If you have any questions about anything I’ve missed out here, drop an ask!
Look, I know realistically that expecting employers to have hyper-specific ethnicity IDs on their onboarding is a bit far-fetched, but I will say it is annoying when I have to technically lie about my ethnicity by choosing the one that is ‘close enough’ because there’s not enough options or no box to type my own answer.
One of the things I love most about AO3 is that it’s free.
In a world where everything seems to cost an extortionate amount of money, whilst public libraries are closing down due to lack of funding, I am still not without something to read because of how dedicated fic authors are. And a lot of these words are phenomenally good pieces of literature, and I get it for free. And it’s not like we’re pirating these works, either – even if you haven’t read the source material, you still have equal access to these works which are intended to be provided completely free of charge, without any kind of ads on the page, because the authors, volunteers, and donors are all doing it for the love of it. It’s absolutely fantastic.
Guys I’m going on holiday for a few days so I need some long fic recs again! I’m pretty open in terms of fluff vs angst, etc, but no batcest or AOB pls🖤
Wrong. Sometime between Lost Days and Hush, he slipped on a banana peel and split his head open. And if I could write for DC, I’d make that canon just because I could.
On Jaybin’s sense of justice, and how it compares to Bruce’s justice and the Bats’ morality
I often think that the reason that modern references to Jason’s Robin run fall flat is because people fall into the trap of arguing that Jason’s defining trait as Robin was either his anger or his joy (be they DC editorial or just fandom discourse). And whilst neither of these descriptors are wholly satisfactory, and also run the risk of two-dimensionality, a lot of the problem is that these two emotions sit almost entirely at opposite ends of the spectrum from one another, so are hard to remedy.
Instead, I would argue that what most jumped out at me from Jason’s Robin run was his sense of justice, which I think can be applied to both the more whimsical joyful and the more angry sides of Jason’s personality as Robin, kind of bridging the gap between the two.
Sure, all of the Robins have a sense of morality, which is usually quite strict and, often, easily summarised by the ‘no killing’ stance, but I think it is Jason out of all of the Robins who most embodies the idea of justice (people getting what they’re due), as opposed to just morality (having a code/sense of right and wrong). For Jason, every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. It’s not that Jason doesn’t believe in redemption or even in shades of grey – I’d argue that even as Robin, he knew that being able to be a bit ethically grey was necessary for both life and vigilante justice – but he does view his role as a vigilante as ensuring that people get that justice, and feels it personally when it doesn’t measure up to what he believes they are owed (most infamously with the Stanson case).
Sure, the other Robins and Bats do, too, but I think that they are more concerned with harm-reduction, stopping whatever is causing the harm and focusing on rehabilitation as a way to reduce further harm, than anything else. That’s Bruce’s sense of justice; when his parents were killed in front of him as an eight-year-old, it destroyed his entire world, and Bruce’s mission, yes, aims to stop any more preventable deaths which helps the victims, but it’s ultimately for the little boy who lost his parents and had destroyed his entire world – his commitment to harm-reduction in all cases, no matter his personal feelings, is the equal and opposite reaction for the harm he and his parents experienced down that alley. Bruce’s mission, despite helping others, is very centred around his own trauma and what he feels he needed and wished he had that night.
Sure, this is very similar to what Jason’s mission becomes in UTRH, but it’s still slightly different to (though an understandable progression of) Jason’s sense of justice as Robin. As Robin, Jason (perhaps informed by his past, though I’d argued this is more the case in post-UTRH comics, such as BFTC) is mostly focused on justice for the victims, first and foremost (perhaps because, at this stage, he doesn’t yet view himself as a victim), and unlike Bruce and the rest of the Robins, this often has a far more literal eye-for-an-eye mentality to it. Harm-reduction for future victims does come into it, but not at the cost of forgetting or ignoring what has already happened to the victims that already exist. It is justice in the truest sense of the word. And it’s focused on how Jason perceived the world and the people in it, as opposed to how Bruce sees himself reflected in the world.
If whatever Batman film James Gunn’s DCU makes doesn’t leave me walking out of that picture house all emotional about Bruce’s endless optimism (despite what he looks like) THEN WHAT IS THE POINT
So there’s a heat wave in the UK at the moment, and it got me thinking about how absolutely fucking insufferable it must be to have Clark Kent as a coworker during the heatwave.
Everyone’s sweating half to death in the office, there’s desk fans blowing paperwork everywhere but everyone’s too hot to care, when Clark motherfucking Kent turns up in his usual polyester suit, heads straight to the coffee machine, and then moves to stand right by the window where he tips his head back to try and get even more sun. When he casually comments, “Nice weather we’re having!” the fans don’t quite muffle the sound of snapping pencils.
So there’s a heat wave in the UK at the moment, and it got me thinking about how absolutely fucking insufferable it must be to have Clark Kent as a coworker during the heatwave.
Everyone’s sweating half to death in the office, there’s desk fans blowing paperwork everywhere but everyone’s too hot to care, when Clark motherfucking Kent turns up in his usual polyester suit, heads straight to the coffee machine, and then moves to stand right by the window where he tips his head back to try and get even more sun. When he casually comments, “Nice weather we’re having!” the fans don’t quite muffle the sound of snapping pencils.
My brother saw a Nightwing edit and has now agreed to read some!
He prefers physical books but that’s expensive so I only had my Tom Taylor compact to give him but hopefully I can redirect him to everything else after
