Loren 30+ she/her, multiple ships, multiple fandoms, Absolute Slut for BCC & Eddie Kingston : ANGEL170 on AO3. I will always excuse my wrestling families crimes not gonna say they didn’t do it they absolutely did but I will excuse it, they have a pass I signed the permission slip
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
yeah i just love it when a character is in an escapable torment nexus for a huge portion of their life and it defines every aspect of their existence forever. also whats cptsd
Which Robin do you think believes in villain rehab as much as Batman does?
In Batman comics (and DC Comics in general) villains are constantly going through redemption arcs or falling back into their old ways. well maybe i think most Robins lean toward believing in rehabilitation but who do you think has the most faith in people's ability to change? Like whose conviction in that is basically unshakable? 🤔
honestly my favorite thing about hardison is that he has no real tragic backstory, he's just like "i am very smart and therefore i should be allowed to do crime" and he's entirely correct
i love everyone reblogging this going "yeah! soft boy!" in the tags bc that's my other favorite thing about hardison (i have many) and that's that he's never particularly treated as morally grey bc he is constantly so kind and loving and good and also he enjoys some crime
Yes!! I love Hardison's orientation towards right and wrong, in part because it's such a fun, powerful contrast with other members of the team.
You have Parker, who has been designated as bad and wrong since she was a very young child and who has let go of any expectation of being anything else, so that identifying and doing what she thinks is the right thing is consistently an overwhelming and scary experience for her;
Then there's Eliot, who can point to exactly when and how he became irredeemable in his own eyes and whose highest ambition now is to do the wrong thing for the right people this time at least;
Nate, who is clinging to all of these ideas about morality and legality and good and bad that are completely inconsistent both internally and with his behavior, because his very normative view of the world was shattered and he never put the pieces back together in any kind of coherent way;
Sophie, who sees right and wrong as primarily about relationships between people, like she does everything else: right and wrong is in how you engage and who you hurt interpersonally, anything more abstract is irrelevant. But within that, there's also this weight to how she engages, this sense of regret at how she's treated people in the past that we never really see the full scope of;
And into this morass of regret and alienation and self-doubt, beautiful sunshine child Alec Hardison sails with this completely coherent, straightforward understanding: he's doing the right thing. He understands the systems creating and maintaining inequality and he's winning against them. He doesn't feel bad at all about breaking the law because he doesn't respect it as having any moral weight, and why should he? He's right. Y'all I love him so much.
...please look up the slang word "nonse" (with an 's'), and consider whether "nonses" might make a bit more sense than "nonces" in the context of a list whose other items are "hardened gamblers", "addicts", and "sociopaths".
y'know, "hardened gamblers, addicts, sociopaths, fools" at a race, rather than "hardened gamblers, addicts, sociopaths, pedophiles".
According to a friend he might have said "nancies". Which would be better, but would also be the literal transmisogynistic slur that nonce comes from. So not great actually!
hi, i was the one who sourced the video in question, it's the teensyville video off no rolls barred; this was a callback bit from earlier in the video, where they had been specifically speaking about lewis carroll, using the term 'nonce'. there is no misunderstanding here; sam reich did, in fact, say that it is quite ironic for a man in heavy makeup to jest about nonces. it is unbelievable for so many people to try to bend over backwards to make excuses for such blatant transmisogyny
it's also particularly upsetting when put into further context!!!! the blood on the clocktower community (which is the game being played in the video) has been heavily praised by transfems in the community for the number of transfems who are prominent players. off the top of my head i can name at least 10 transfems on the botc channel's rotating cast, a far higher percentage than its tme trans roster (and i believe equivalent or close to their cisfem roster, but i don't have an exact count bc they don't keep a documented roster for their streams) not to mention other major channels in the space that feature several very notable transfems. ime its regularly noted how safe of a community has been fostered for transfem viewers and players.
i must, obligitarily, note: a higher amount of transfem cast members (or the presence of them, period) does not necessarily mean a completely safe environment for transfems, either viewers or cast members alike. but at the very least, it demonstrates a marked effort to platform and support trans women as valued community members. an effort which, notably, dropout tv has not bothered to make. nrb in specific, the channel this happened on, is one of the botc community channels striving to make this effort, with one of the key and beloved members in their botc series being mara joy (who is a trans woman, noted not to tokenize her in specific but to highlight her)!!
so, to lay it out more specifically, sam reich made this joke on a platform that is expected to be a safe space for transfem viewers. he was a guest star on a show which has far less social pull than dropout tv, was one of the only white cishet guys in the room, and took advantage of that. i cannot stress this enough: sam reich went to a community that has a general expectation of being a safe place for transfems, as a guest, likely for the purposes of promoting his latest kickstarter, and he used that platform to make a "joke" about transfems being pedophiles.
it was also directed towards a gay man, who, like… well, we all saw the clip, it's my opinion that he looks pretty genuinely uncomfortable for a moment before trying to hide it by playing it up for the camera. tbh i find it disappointing that said joke ended up in the final edit at all! but the fact that sam felt so comfortable dropping that kind of quip given the setting and the current overall climate is so frustrating and gross.
i don't know. i don't fucking know!! it's an uncomfortable joke in a vacuum and worse with context on all fronts.
last night was one of the most frustrating nights i’ve had as a wrestling fan in awhile. a 2+ hour show, leaving the women only 15 minutes with the “brag” of saying they get to main event.
that main event didn’t even start till the overrun started. that main event only went 13 minutes. previous to this match, only two women’s wrestlers had been shown beforehand. only eight women’s wrestlers appeared in general last night.
aew has a large women’s roster that they refuse to book. off the top of my head people who were not booked last night; harley cameron, kris statlander, hikaru shida, queen aminata, zayda steel, thunder rosa, nyla rose, marina shafir, red velvet, athena, billie starkz, julia hart, skye blue, thekla, mina shirakawa.
this is not a case of aew not having talent. this is not a case of not being able to build stories. this is a case of misogynistic booking happening. why does hikaru shida have to defend her tbs belt on collision? the show airing on tnt? why couldn’t her defense against aminata happen instead of one of the men’s filler matches? why couldn’t they let two stories progress?
i’m exhausted. i know plenty of other people are exhausted. how are we meant to be excited to watch these shows when this is how the women get booked? when they aren’t given the time of day? because to tony kahn they cannot do the same as the men?
i will continue to be angry about this because it is not an issue i want brushed under the rug. these women constantly push out some of the best matches weekly yet cannot be given the time of day by their bookers.
i highly urge you in times like this to rewatch older matches, find new indies, watch all women’s promotions, and in general just talk about women’s wrestling. i say it every monthly post of mine but fans have voices. please use them.
This post spun a little out of control, but it was inspired by @avaraydrake's tags on my previous Jordanna Spence essay. (Thank you for that, btw. Sincerely, they were great to read and clearly gave me a lot to think about.) Specifically, it started from their comments on this scene:
Which I read as Steph abandoning Jordanna while she's unconscious, while avaraydrake pointed out that this is standard first aid practice. Which is true. I personally expect a superhero to do more than just the standard practice, but it is true... in a vacuum.
The reason this moment stands out to me, the reason I tend to focus on it, has to do with a recurring problem throughout the series that isn't directly related to Jordanna. But to explain what that problem is, I'm going to have to jump ahead a few issues, to Issue 8 -- the Red Robin crossover.
See, all through the Batgirl side of the crossover -- in-between insulting Tim, stalking Tim, and also that weirdly sexist dress thing @mzminola pointed out -- Steph is constantly insisting to Tim that she's "different now." That he has to trust and like and respect her again because she's "changed" from the person who tried to chase him down for attention. Even though she spends the entire issue... chasing him down for attention.
Ultimately, the thread culminates in this page:
Which, if you've been paying attention to the series up to this point, rings completely hollow. Frankly, it feels like Steph is just bullshitting Tim because she wants to prove him wrong about her.
Because see, up to literally this very issue? Steph doesn't help, rescue, or assist a single Gotham citizen. She just fights people.
Her first scene certainly wasn't about helping anyone, given that she beat both the racers up and then got them arrested. The second time we see her suit up, she leaps in to save a cop... only because he is Detective Nicholas "St. Nick" Gage, who gets more page time than Barbara, flirts with Steph constantly, and is (very weirdly) basically the deurotagonist of the series.
And even then, Steph doesn't actually save him -- she swings in, punches one guy, and then while she's busy posing and thinking, "ooooh, the cop is pretty," Nick gets them both blown out of the window.
Continuing on to the party scene, even if you don't think Steph abandons Jordanna at that moment, she's not shown helping her either. No one is, really.
And then that, of course, leads into her big confrontation with Scarecrow which... also isn't about saving anyone. It's about how Steph is so strong and stubborn and full of hope (I think?) that she's able to overcome "her ''''worst''' self" (people telling her that she's a shitty superhero), and that's what makes her so inspiring and is why she deserves "a second chance."
That pattern continues for almost the entire first year. Steph doesn't save anyone until Issue 8, when she helps Tim protect Leslie Tompkins. The first time she so much as thinks about protecting "the people of Gotham" comes in Issue 9, and even when it does it's with this... really uncomfortable dynamic, which actually starts back in Issue 4.
See, in Issue 4, during Steph's first patrol in her shiny new ugly Batgirl costume, the first thing Steph does is knock a pair of robbers off a skyscraper, only thinking to ask how much weight a grapple line can hold after they're in free-fall. She winds up swinging them down into a tour bus. It's unclear if Steph is even aware the tourists are there, but to be fair she is trying not to die.
The tourists immediately swarm to start taking pictures (starting with her butt, of course), when Steph is suddenly approached by a certain doe-eyed little girl.
This girl is named Nell Little which, in addition to never being spoken in the text (we only know because of an interview Brian Q. Miller gave at some point), is suspiciously close to Little Nell, Charles Dickenson's archetypal too-good-for-this-sinful-earth angel-victim-child.
Nell Little is a semi-recurring character throughout the book, having 4 appearances over the course of the 2 years. Her personality is sweet and innocent; her likes are Stephanie, trying to be like Stephanie, and watching Stephanie beat up bad guys; and her role in the narrative is to admire Stephanie's every move, tell her what a good job she's doing, and occasionally be put in danger so that Stephanie can rescue her.
I find this recurring dynamic to be extremely off-putting. It doesn't help that this is neither the first nor the last time DC will give Stephanie a young black sycophant and... I dunno, it just hits a weird note.
That note is then amplified by the fact that Nell is present at Steph's first-ever civilian rescue in Issue 9, which ends like this:
...with a literal "and then everyone clapped" while the guy that Steph literally just finished beating up calls her "beautiful" and immediately develops a massive crush on. He's the one who winds up being the Gray Ghost, btw, and when he turns back up he starts addressing Steph exclusively as, "My Violet Avenger."
I'd forgotten that was a thing. Gross.
Also doesn't help that the only thoughts Steph has during the sequence (aside from mindless comedic set-up about her mundane evening checklist) come in this panel:
Where she's literally preening and singing her own praises, with the people she saved boiled down to nothing but, "Zero collateral damage," which just as well might be referring to train.
Then the second rescue we see her do (Issue 10), ends like this:
While the third isn't actually a rescue, it's the big saving-the-world moment from the end of the first year's arc, which just happens to also involves Steph saving Barbara.
(This arc also ends with a still-shot of Steph while someone -- I think the Gray Ghost, but it's left deliberately vague in the panel -- declares, "She's amazing, isn't she?" Put a pin in both of these snapshots for later).
The fourth rescue is a team-up with Damian, which is also the third encounter with Nell Little in Issue 17. It's the closest thing Nell gets to character development, in that she ends the issue thinking that Robin is totally the coolest now, too, and also she's portrayed as sooooo pure that she can help Stephanie make Damian act more like A Real Boy.
Notably, she doesn't trip over herself to tell Damian what a great job he's doing. He just gets a goodbye.
And the last one -- if you stretch the definition of rescue -- comes in Issue 18, the Valentine's story where Steph helps return Teekl, and that instantly wins Klarion over as her best buddy. He ends off that story telling her how unique she is -- sincerely, while the context and the pause in her line makes it read as a backhanded compliment, like she was stopping herself from saying, "Weird."
And that's it for rescues, but Steph does have one more interaction with the public, in the very last issue. It's just.... ugh.
If you read a lot of superhero comics, I kind of hope you see the trend here that makes me so uncomfortable. This isn’t even including all the times she runs into Detective St. Nick, who ends every single one of their interactions (and half of his interactions with Barbara) singing Stephanie's praises, right up until he has to shade in his Tragic Backstory.
Or all the encounters with the aforementioned Gray Ghost, who cannot shut up about “My Violet Avenger” and how gorgeously wonderful she is.
Or how Barbara, Dick, and Wendy are all made, at varying times, to say something to the extent of: “Golly! Stephanie is so amazing!” while the closest Steph gets to returning the sentiment is the moment linked above when she calls Babs, “The only person who’s ever really given a crap about me.”
Rescuing people… it’s a standard trope. The exact frequency varies a lot depending on the era, but if you pick up a random issue of a superhero comic there’s a fairly decent chance that you’ll see your hero(es) dejour saving a random civilian, or even multiple if there’s a disaster situation. I’ve probably read thousands of rescues from hundreds of heroes over the years.
Yet, off the top of my head, I can’t remember a single other rescue that ends with the recuee(s) tripping over themselves to tell the hero how great they are. I’m sure they’re out there, I’m sure plenty of heroes get a big, triumphant, "You're our hero and we love you!" moment at some point in their career. But to make that the default, universal response every single time she saves someone, or even just speaks to the public, for an entire series? That’s weird, right?
In other series, majority of the time the rescuee doesn’t do anything at all, they just get swooped off-panel. If the hero’s lucky they might get a thank-you and a chance to give a heroic one-liner. Because y’know, the act of rescuing is supposed to be enough to establish that our heroes are heroic. That they only sometimes get thanked—or heck, that people might even lash out or turn against them—helps to reinforce that the heroes aren’t just doing this for praise and affection, but because of some other, more powerful motivation.
So for Steph to only be showered with adoration at every turn, while her internal monologue focuses exclusively on how good it all makes her feel? That only reinforces the opposite feeling, that Steph's primary motivation is her own reputation and feelings, not a drive to defend other people. That these rescues are far outnumbered by big, showy spectacles where Steph can fight something and look awesome while doing it really doesn't help matters.
This is all exacerbated by two other factors, which come together with everything mentioned above to make it impossible to take her singular, isolated claim of being a hero "for the city" seriously.
The first is the way Steph reacts on the very rare occasion she feels her hero efforts aren't being appreciated. We only see this twice, once in her original meeting with Detective Nick:
(Remember that this is literally her second night out as Batgirl, and she's pissy that he didn't know her on sight.) The second incident is the protest Jordanna organizes in Issue 16, which is only done to make Jordanna look bad.
The other exacerbating circumstance is how the series ends.
Again, there's two factors here. The first is the Black Mercy illusion that Steph is put under, where again, a huge deal is made of how special Stephanie is for being able to break herself out of the illusion, before going into an 8 page montage of Steph getting to be the main character of the entire universe forever, and everyone's favorite superhero, while people sing her praises.
I don't have space for it here because this post is already too long but one of these days I'm going to break down what that whole sequence says about Steph's character when you analyze it in-universe. But more pressing to this post is the conversation surrounding that montage, the last scene in the entire series.
Just for comparison—Tim ends both Robin and Red Robin thinking about his responsibility to Gotham. Cass's Batgirl series ends with her unhappily killing her mother at Shiva's request and walking dramatically off into the night. The contemporary Nightwing series ends with Dick taking Babs tandem skydiving, asking her to “let him do the flying.” Impulse ends with Bart bonding with his new guardians, and Superboy with Kon moving to Kansas and talking about making Clark proud.
Batgirl (2009) ends with Stephanie talking about herself, how many wonderful adventures she's been on, and how this moment is hers and that makes it special and also did we mention she likes purple? Babs is also there to tell her how special and wonderful she is for always being a happy widdle Pollyanna.
And that's really the central problem here.
I am not inclined to give Steph's actions the benefit of the doubt throughout this series because the series is utterly Stephanie-obsessed. Steph only saves people so they can tell her how wonderful she is. All the supporting cast, all the people in the entire city, are only there to stroke Stephanie's ego and tell her she's so amazing.
That line, waaaaaay back up there in the Red Robin crossover? Is the only time Stephanie ever spares so much as a second thought for the people of Gotham. And like I said, that comes across more as her trying to show Tim up, because she spends the entire issue trying desperately to convince him that she is "different now."
If Steph really was supposed to be "doing it for all of them," if her motivation was supposed to be for the sake of others, the writer utterly failed to communicate that because he was way too interested in sucking her dick.
So yeah. Long post but, again, thank you @avaraydrake, because I've been trying to put this sentiment into words for a couple of years now and for some reason your tags gave me the perfect starting point.
Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:
She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.
Yale University, 1969.
Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.
Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"
The faculty answered firmly: No.
Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.
Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.
So she started looking.
She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.
There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.
But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.
Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.
But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.
It wasn't random. It was systematic.
Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.
Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.
She needed a name for what she was documenting.
In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.
In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.
The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.
Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.
For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.
Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.
Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.
Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.
Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.
Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.
Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.
