In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado page 5 / Batman #614 / Detective Comics #790 / In The Dream House / Detective Comics #790 / Batman #614 / In The Dream House / Batman #410 / Batman #428 / In The Dream house / Batman #617 / Detective Comics #790 / In The Dream House / Detective Comics #790 / Batman #618 / In The Dream House / Detective Comics #790 / Batman #614
people who try to bash clark for being a ""bad parent"" already make me roll my eyes, but the ones who elevate bruce fucking wayne as a GOOD parent in the same exact post/fic/what-have-you are truly next level. is it crack?? is it crack you smoke???
people who try to bash clark for being a ""bad parent"" already make me roll my eyes, but the ones who elevate bruce fucking wayne as a GOOD parent in the same exact post/fic/what-have-you are truly next level. is it crack?? is it crack you smoke???
I feel like fanon fans fundamentally just do not understand why comic fans have such a complaint about the way fanon fans interact and contribute to the fandom. Even those that are comic readers, but prefer or enjoy fanon, hold the mindset that fanon is more akin to "goofy crackfic and whump", which does have its place in fandom as a staple.
The issue is, there is a clear difference between fandom staples (like crack and whump) and what comic fanon has become.
Comic fanon has become a monolith in comic spaces where thousands of people celebrate and encourage illiteracy, where fanon concepts are lauded as facts, where non-readers speak as authority on comics, where many many fanon concepts are rooted in racism, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia and classism, where any character that is not a Bat or Bat-adjacent is maligned and mischaracterized to be a prop for their nearest Bat (Hal is Bruce's punching bag, Bart is Tim and Kon's baby). Even the Bats are flanderized into tropes.
Everyone who likes comics and other characters has to endure at some point someone who has never bothered to get to actually know these comics being told their comics are stupid or their non-Bat character is only good if tied with a Bat.
It gets exhausting after a while, so fics that might be rightfully crack or whump, depending on the content, are met with suspicion because they feed this aggressive fanon machine.
They contribute to a problem, and it's a problem that thousands of people outright refuse is a problem because they benefit from the problem (they like the content even if it's racist).
So I get told to kill myself for correcting fanon myth held as fact (Clark abandoned Kon, no he didn't), even phrased in the most gentle of ways.
Then I get people telling me that Bart is the r-slur and a sweet innocent baby (he's capable and his friends' age, curses all the time and tried to get his mentor laid).
Then I get told I'm ableist for pointing out that the "silent Cass trope" is racist.
Then I see fanon concepts held as FACTS where the Green Lanterns are terrified of Batman, or Barry Allen can't solve a crossword, or Clark Kent (an investigative journalist) can't solve a mystery and they need Batman to help them.
Any opposition to this is frequently met with accusations of hating fun, or gatekeeping, and fanon fans refuse to acknowledge that they are being at least little bit shitty.
Anyway, fanon content creators are free to create whatever they want, but comic fans that don't want to deal with being told their comics are stupid have every right to call out inappropriate behavior. At some point you have to admit maybe there is a problem, and you're contributing to it.
We cannot ignore it, we cannot filter it out, it is relentless.
And before someone tries to say this post is intended to encourage bullying, gatekeeping or censorship of people who prefer fanon STOP.
This post is largely about behavior within the fandom and acts as an account of only SOME of the behaviors and attitudes from fanon enjoyers.
People can and should create whatever content they desire, however knowing what the content they are creating is and how it may be perceived is important.
Additionally,
Canon divergent also =/= fanon
Getting a canon fact wrong also =/= fanon
AUs =/= fanon
Fanon is a very specific space with specific wildly accepted world details that people operate in, all of them conflicting with canon and it is frequently presented as FACT.
So, I recently finished a read through of all of Talia and Damian's post-Crisis comics, which naturally included a lot of Ra's too. Obviously they've all been subject to a ton of ret cons (whether on purpose, or because writers simply didn't take the time to read their old comics *cough* Morrison *cough*), but one in particular that really stuck out to me, and that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere, is Ra's' changing allegiances during World War II.
Note that I'm putting a lot of weight on Son of the Demon (1987) here. I know it's status as "canon" is debatable, but I do think it's undeniable that it's been an influence on a lot of writers, and in that sense I think it's an important part of the continuity. Also this thing is fucking. 2,500 words long.
Ra's against the Axis
In Son of the Demon, Ra's and Batman team up to fight his former associate, Qayin, whose parents were Ra's' operatives during World War II. "During the last World War, I had an organization of my own, which I often used to combat the Axis Powers," he explains. "We had much to fight for in those days. Years earlier, my trusted Lieutenant, Landor, had been blessed with a son, and I had been made his godfather. I cared for him when his parents were off on missions, such as the mission I sent them on to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. A date of some historical significance, I think you will recall, Detective."
Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham, Son of the Demon (1987), p. 27.
Both the text and the illustrations frame Ra's as heroic. His statement that his organization "had much to fight for" implies not just a cynical support for the Allies, but also an emotional and moral commitment, while the sunset tones and superimposition of Ra's, his then-wife Melisande, and baby Talia, over the US bombing of Hiroshima invoke Romantic pathos in the vein of a classic war movie. Ra's is our hero who fights for his family and does what is right, even if it costs the lives of innocents (Qayin's family and, perhaps in a more politically progressive interpretation than I should credit comics with, the residents of Hiroshima). It is interesting to note that, while Ra's wears a stylized military uniform, he's never identified as being with the Allies (and indeed, he seems to have no fore-knowledge of the bombing of Hiroshima), only against the Axis.
In any case, the bombing of Hiroshima is not presented as a point of political radicalization for Ra's. It does not change his views on the United States, war, or mass violence against civilians (as interesting as that would be). Instead, it is Qayin who is transformed by grief, becoming "moody, fatalistic, [and] obsessed with the subject of death," until eventually he kills Melisande (SotD 28).
When we catch up with him in Son of the Demon, he's thrown in with "General Yossid of Golatia," a fictional country situated at the real-world intersection of Turkey, Iran, Armenia, and Iraq. Yossid took power in a coup 10 years ago, and has "recently signed a pact with America after years of courting both the USA and the USSR" (17). This imaginary conflict is in dialog with the very real Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). During this war, both the US and the USSR sold arms to both Iran and Iraq. If you don't know what the Iran Contra scandal is, you should probably stop reading comics and pick up a book, but news of it broke in late 1986. Son of the Demon was published in December the next year.
The point is that, in this story, Qayin is the one who is identified as "a terrorist and a murderer" (17), aligned with an undemocratic Middle East regime prone to Cold War flip-flopping. Yossid's ambition is to "no longer have to curry the Americans' favor for protection from the Soviets;" he wishes to "have power of [his] own!" (35). Ra's and Batman ally against him. Indeed, while Ra's regrets the destruction a device in Qayin possession that generates natural disasters on command, a device which "would do much for [his] cause to see the planet purified…made new" (72), he ultimately destroys it, preventing Qayin from provoking the US and USSR into nuclear war. Then, Ra's makes Qayin a very Batman offer: give "the authorities" your knowledge of terrorist networks, and they may spare you (of course Qayin refuses and is killed, 74).
Ra's Allegiances at Other Points in World History
A brief (lol from the editing desk) aside that's not related to World War II, but does support my final point. In Talia's first appearance in Detective Comics #411, she's identified as a student at the University of Cairo, where she studies medicine. This issue has a cover date of May, 1971, which positions it at a crucial time for US-Egyptian relations during the Cold War.
Neal Adams and Denis O'Neil, Detective Comics (1937) #411, May 1971, p. 8.
After the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, his successor, Anwar Sadat, began a program of reforms that largely oriented Egypt away from pan-Arabism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Soviet Union. The most dramatic of these changes (normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States and recognition of Israel) were yet to come, but at this point Sadat was still seen as a moderate in comparison to Nasser; putting Talia in Egypt in 1971 has far fewer anti-American political connotations than it would have even a few years prior.
Batman: The Chalice gives us another interesting data point. During in 1812, during the Peninsular War (1808-1814), which was itself part of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), Ra's sought the Holy Grail (look it's still comics) "at the head of another man's army. Once again it disappeared almost within my sight and my rage was great at being three times cheated. The city that sheltered the cup from me paid in rapine and slaughter that is still remembered today" (37-38).
Chuck Dixon and John van Fleet, Batman: The Chalice (2000), p. 37.
The "other man" is Arthur Wellesley, the Earl of Wellington, which means that Ra's is fighting against Napoleon here. Obviously, that does nothing to diminish the fact that Wellesley's forces raped, looted, and ultimately killed thousands of Spanish civilians after taking the city, but it's still significant to me that Ra's is positioned against one of history's stock "overzealous conqueror" characters.
Dixon, who wrote The Chalice, would later go on to further complicate Ra's relationship to French politics. In his Bird's of Prey (1999) run, we learn that Ra's purchased the title of "Comte de Renaut de su Mer" in 1612 (#32, August 2001, 11). In the next issue, it's revealed that Ra's "was the leader of the blood cult who broke from the Toltecs. And…also the Castilian nobleman who came centuries later to end to reign of murder with more murder. And it was [he], as a deserter from the French Foreign Legion of Napoleon III, who led a contingent here, to slaughter the villagers who settled in this place so that it may forever be forgotten to all but me" (#33, September 2001, 19).
Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, Birds of Prey (1999), #33, September 2001, p. 19.
I earnestly do not want to get into centuries of French and Spanish politics, so what's important here (besides the casual anti-Indigenous "Nahua peoples loved to do blood sacrifice" racism), is that Dixon is establishing Ra's as a character who will play both sides of a political issue to protect his personal interests (in this case, a Lazarus Pit). Ra's was a French nobleman who later fought against France in the Napoleonic Wars. Then, half a century later, he allies first with Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III, during the second French intervention in Mexico (1861-1867), only to later desert and pursue his own aims, again killing civilians to do so. Dixon has him pulling a similar switch in alliances between the Toltec (and their Aztec successors) and the Spanish conquistadors.
Ra's as a Nazi
While the above examples demonstrate in-continuity flip-flopping/disloyalty on Ra's part, his later reinvention as a Nazi is fully a ret con. It comes in the Death and the Maidens book, in 2004, which invented a second (but older) daughter for Ra's, Nyssa. Nyssa is Jewish, and is taken prisoner by the Nazis after the Battle of Kiev in September 1941; at this time she is estranged from her father. By 1945 she is imprisoned at Ravensbruck, where Ra's comes to visit her.
Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson, Batman: Death and the Maidens (2003), #5, February 2004.
In this encounter, we learn that Ra's is allied with Hitler. Though he was not directly responsible for Nyssa's imprisonment, nor the rape and murder of her children, he has the power to free her and her surviving family members, but refuses, telling Nyssa that the deaths of her family (his own family), as well as millions of others, are "a necessary evil" and "sacrifices…for the greater good." Though he claims to "care nothing for Hitler of his agenda…his war will kill millions and that leaves millions less for [Ra's] to deal with" (#5). He has meta-textually switched sides.
Academic Scholarship
To conclude, I want to investigate the potential reasons behind this change. Obviously, on a very basic level, making Ra's a Nazi makes him more evil in a way that is very intelligible to American readers. However, it's notable to me that, between 1987 and 2004, Ra's went from fighting Nazis and terrorists to being one himself. There's obviously a lot going on here with the War on Terror and post-9/11 perceptions of the Middle East, but my point of interest is earlier. In this final part of the post, I'm going to apply ideas about and legal frictions experienced by Muslims in Europe to Ra's. While he's never textually identified as a Muslim, Ra's is patently an orientalist caricature, in the vein of Said, who in 1978, established "Orientalism" as a critical concept referring to an imagined "Orient" (nebulously, the "Middle East," a term which itself was not popularized until the mid-1900s, North Africa, and Asia) which exists only in the minds of (and media produced by) Westerners (we don't have time to do a full breakdown of Orientalism either but remember when I told you to read a book earlier? This one would be a good start). Therefore, as a cultural product, his characterization is influenced by the interpretation of real historical events.
In her 2021 book, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe, the historian Emily Greble identifies two points of contact between Muslims in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (so, Europe), and the occupying Axis powers that are useful to me here. First, for Muslims, identity was linked to religion, not race, ergo conversion could meaningfully change an individual’s status. Therefore, under Islamic legal principles Muslim Roma, or converts from Judaism to Islam, should not be subject to deportation. The Nazis occupiers and their Ustaša (Croat nationalist) allies disagreed, and went forward with deportations. While some Muslims "participated in and benefited from the new system...many others vehemently rejected the idea that an outside, secular government could subdivide Muslims into different kinds of categories and unilaterally decide those categories mattered more than the shared bonds of Islam" (219).
Second, as war in the Balkans continued, Muslims were disincentivized from participating in anti-Axis resistance groups, which, no matter their political or ethnic orientation, were anti-Muslim. This drove Muslims to seek state protection, "proposing the creation of an autonomous Nazi protectorate" in occupied Croatia, and securing "the formation of a Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS unit" in 1943 (220), which the Nazis would go on to propagandize "as part of a global alliance between Muslims and the Third Reich" (221). I want to stress that it is not Greble's desire (nor mine) to call Muslims Nazis, or to imply that they allied with them for antisemitic reasons--that is not the case. Rather, she is making a more nuanced argument that Nazi conceptions of race as biologically innate directly contradicted centuries of Muslim law, which privileged religious affiliation (which was changeable) as the determiner of identity. Furthermore, at the time of World War II, and since the retreat of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans, Muslim law and community autonomy in Europe had increasingly been undercut by successive state regimes. Muslim community leaders came to (correctly) view state sponsorship and institutional power as a necessary means to the preservation of their religion and way of life and, lacking any other allies during the occupation, turned to the Nazis, whose support for them was short-lived and superficial.
Conclusion
How does this relate to comics? Well, Ra's al Ghul is a character who was born before the concept of the Western state. The League of Assassins is incompatible with the legal concept of the bordered nation-state, and indeed with race-based notions of citizenship more broadly. However, under the lens of orientalist stereotype, this epistemology looks like an incompatibility with modernity. It looks like political fickleness--playing both sides during the colonial conflicts, during centuries of French history, and during the Cold War. It looks like supporting the Axis for pragmatic reasons, even as the Clear-Eyed and Rational Western reader shakes his head. "The Nazis don't actually think you're Aryan either!" he smugly declares. "They're going to kill your whole family, and then Batman's gonna beat you up and bone your hot daughter!"
Still, it takes him a while to get there. In Son of the Demon, Qayin is our Muslim-coded character who, lacking any values but his own self-aggrandizement, plays the US and the USSR off each other, content to sacrifice millions of innocent lives. Likewise, Talia was only located in Cairo after Nasser's death, and the end of the pan-Arabist threat to the superpower-dominated Cold War status quo. Muslim-coded characters are never allowed to pursue their own autonomy or independence.
By the 2000s, Ra's disloyalty to various historical causes, both intentional and retroactively canonized, ultimately serves to characterize him as untrustworthy, a born-betrayer, incapable of pursuing anything besides his own self-interest. However, his lack of belief is also his downfall. His changeable ways are passed down to his daughters, both of whom betray him eventually/repeatedly. He is not a sly, double-crossing fox, but rather a fool whose own shortcomings prevent the realization of his utopian civilization. He is both fundamentally evil (a terrorist and a Nazi*) and completely facile--deserving of violent recompense and no threat at all, the perfect foil to Batman's "morally correct" Western values, which are at once righteously violent and unassailably clever.
One final point. The characterizations of Ra's as a terrorist and a Nazi are in fact deeply linked. While yes, some Muslims did collaborate with the Nazis, the concept of the "Muslim Nazi" has been ahistorically over-emphasized as a means characterizing anti-colonial movements in the Muslim world as fascist. Principally, this is done to discredit anti-Zionist resistance to Israel, and to further perpetuate the narrative that Israeli statehood (and the ethnic cleansing/genocide of Palestinians) is justified recompense for the Holocaust. Which I hope I do not have to say is wrong on multiple levels.
Danny Phantom, looking at the batfam member funny: What do you mean you almost killed each other for the title of Robin? You can just, share it???
Batfam member: no you don't understand-
Dani Phantom, popping up through the floor: hi Danny what's cooking.
Danny Phantom: Hi yourself Dani. Just explaining how we share our names.
Batfam member, not liking the implications: you're not... duplicates?
...
For the purpose of this one I think the Phantoms is with the YJ, probably. So they're talking to Tim?
Also like, they're both Phantom. At the same time. They didn't try to hide it at all, everyone else just assumed they're the same person because duplication is one of phantom's known powers. And because they usually called each other by name, and have chronic under-explaining things syndrome, and does things in sync a lot, and look almost identical.
So in their teammate's eyes Phantom is one single entity, just casual with his duplication power and also genderfluid. Even when Dani occasionally calls Danny template, people think of dupes before clones.
...Which leads to the next hilarious situation where Tim only tell the other members there's more than one Phantom, making them questions every dupe they see.
Playing hot and cold (or 'cold and freezing' as Danny had once put it, to groans from Sam and Tucker) with their ghost sense wasn't the fastest or most efficient way for Danny and Dani to find each other across Gotham, but it was the most fun, and it was Danny's vacation, so there. If it gave Danny the opportunity to scare the crap out of some muggers, too, Batman wouldn't mind. And if he did, he could deal.
Regardless of how territorial Batman was or wasn't, that's how Danny spotted one of the Robins on the roof of a building, throwing things - Batarangs? Birdarangs? Honestly, some heroes were worse at naming things than Danny's parents - at a mannequin with a photograph of one of the other Robins taped to its face.
Danny didn't know the Robins well. Sure, they'd teamed up a few times, after Danny had joined the League, but Amity Park, small as it was, was a full time job. Natural portals to the Ghost Zone were bad enough, but those weren't the only side effect of being a thin spot in reality. The only reason Danny was taking a vacation now was because he'd bailed Constantine out of-- Well, that was another story entirely, but the man was extremely leery of owing anything to Danny, and had insisted on paying off his debts right away.
He was probably regretting that decision, right about now.
Point was, Young Justice, Teen Titans, whatever, those guys were more Dani's friends than his, so he had no idea of this was normal. It how Robin would react to Danny suddenly being there.
As Danny watched, debating getting involved, Robin stalked over to the mannequin, tore off the picture, and replaced it with a picture of yet a different Robin. He walked back to where he'd been standing before, throwing things at this new picture and growling imprecations under his breath.
Okay, normal or not, this couldn't possibly be healthy.
"Uh, Robin?" Danny ignored the weapon that sailed through his intangible body. "You okay?"
"... Phantom. I've told you not to sneak up on me like that. One day, I'll be testing anti-ghost gear."
Danny didn't remember Robin saying anything like that to him, but it wasn't like Danny had a photographic memory or whatever, so he just shrugged.
Robin went over to the mannequin and started to pick up his weapons, either ignoring or forgetting Danny's earlier question. Probably the former, since All of the Robins did seem to have photographic memories. Fair enough. Danny had startled him.
"Robin?"
The other boy whirled. "Apparently, I'm not good enough to be called that," he hissed, "between Hood and the brat both trying to kill me over it--"
"Whoa, whoa, wait," said Danny, holding up his hands. "Kill you? Your siblings are trying to kill you over your name?"
Robin (Or not-Robin? Danny was unclear.) scowled at him. "It's more than a name. It's a title."
"That's... just a different kind of name. Unless it comes with, like, powers or a job or something. Are they kicking you off the team?"
"What? No. They've got their own things going on."
"I guess I don't really get the situation, then."
Robin ran a hand back over his hair, which made it stick out in funny directions.
"Red Hood was Robin before me."
"Sure." And Nightwing had been Robin before him. Trading around identities wasn't all that uncommon in the superhero community.
"He wasn't too happy that I took his place when everyone thought he was dead. He beat the crap out of me, told me I wasn't good enough, tries to get me to quit. But I didn't."
Danny was pretty sure, from the few times he'd run into him, that Red Hood had been more than 'thought' dead, but that wasn't the point of this conversation, so he just nodded.
"And now the demon brat comes out of nowhere, pushes me off the dinosaur, tries to stab me, and Batman's going to take Robin away from me and just give it to him."
"Okay, um. That's a lot to unpack." Danny used his telekinesis to scoop up the rest of the birdarangs, because he was starting to worry that Robin would cut himself on them, his hands were shaking so badly. He shuffled them together in a neat stack. "I obviously don't know the whole story here, but have you guys considered sharing?"
Robin huffed and took the birdarangs from Danny. "You don't understand, it's--"
"Hey, Danny, what's up? Oh, hi, Robin," Dani added as a birdarang sailed through her body and embedded itself in the wall she was half phased through. "Someone is jumpy tonight."
Robin yanked his birdarang out of the wall as Dani flew the rest of the way through it. "Didn't I just tell you to stop sneaking up on me?"
Dani shrugged. "What are we talking about?"
"Just about to explain to Robin how we share our names," said Danny.
"I get the point you're trying to make," said Robin, and Danny just knew he was rolling his eyes behind the white cutouts of his mask, "but it's different. You two are the same person."
Dani gave Robin a look of disbelief. "Sure, and Kon is the same person as Superman. What happened to you tonight that you're spewing anti-clone crap?"
Robin went very still. "Clone."
"Uh, yeah, it's not exactly like I've been hiding that. Wait. Rutabega."
"Airplane."
The conversation paused for a minute as Dani, Danny, and Robin went through the 'we have not been replaced by shapeshifters' call and response.
"Okay, so if you aren't a shapeshifter, what gives?" demanded Dani.
"You know that clones are different than duplicates, right?"
Danny and Dani looked at each other, then back at Robin. "You thought we were duplicates?" they asked, together.
"You're not?"
They burst out laughing.
"Did you somehow not notice that we look different?" asked Dani, gesturing to her hair and Danny's. "It's not as if we're identical twins."
Robin was blushing. "You're shapeshifters! We thought you were genderfluid!"
"We are," said Danny, "but that's unrelated."
"Wait, but you always seem to know everything we tell the other--"
"There's this really awesome thing called verbal communication," said Dani, dripping in sarcasm. "I know your dad isn't big on it, but it's a whole thing."
"Hey," said Danny, realizing something. "What did you think was going on with Dan if you thought we were clones?"
"He's not you?"
"Okay," said Danny. "Okay. That's just- that's offensive. I'm offended."
"Then... he's your genetic donor?"
"Ewww," said Dani and Danny.
"Then what?"
"He's--"
Danny put his hands over Dani's mouth. She licked him, but he was wearing gloves, and he got way worse things on those then little sister spit, so joke was on her. "Think about how funny it will be if he has to figure it out on his own."
Dani stilled, then nodded. Danny released her.
"Anyway, I don't see why you and your siblings can't share the name."
Robin glared at them. "I'll admit, it seems to have worked for you... somehow. But in the field we need to know who is talking to who."
"Then take turns."
"Or numbers."
"Adjectives."
"Or whatever the Flashes and the Green Lanterns do. There's always like a bajilionty of them."
Danny sighed. "So many Flashes, and they all find their own unique way of screwing up the time stream."
"I did mention that the demon brat tries to kill me over this, right?"
Dani shrugged. "And I was part of a kill and replace scheme. There aren't a lot of nice reasons to clone a teenage superhero, you know."
"It was a very trying time. I don't hold a grudge."
Robin pinched the bridge of his nose. "Can we just drop this until... later. A lot later. I'm still wrapping my head around you being three different people."
"Sure," said Danny. "Want to get burgers with us?"
the way that movie rly doesn’t seem to know what it is ppl like in a dg and jt dynamic. Why are they the same age? Why are we using the word ‘street rat’ in 2026? Why are we crushing down jt’s backstory to its most boring form and giving it to dg when im sure even his own fans don’t want that. Why is the red hood gang in this ???????? Does Jason even get to be Robin ?
Cassandra finding out about Bruce's identity in Murderer is objectively one of the coolest superhero identity solves of all time. Second only, of course, to Mia Dearden immediately clocking Oliver Queen
like the betrayal’s always going to be worse if they cared about you and it didn’t matter. someone discards you because they didn’t give a shit, then you can be angry about that, you can feel vindicated in that, you can get over it. but if they can look you in the eyes and say “I love you. I would make the same choice again.” You will never sleep peacefully again, is all.
“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.
“I thought they cared about me, and I was right, and every minute they were there for me, every time they said they were proud, every laugh we shared leaning against each other bruised and breathless, all of it was real. and they still left me behind. They could put their love aside. I couldn’t.” <- insane. will never leave you alone. reminds you that even the worst people are still people and can still care about even the ones they hurt the most and that undoes neither the harm nor the love.
I kinda hate it when people go "heroes would not be shocked by Danny being cloned etc etc because they have had more wild things happen to them!" Because this is Danny Fenton saying this most of the time. If it was Danny Phantom, small town ghost hero with superpowers saying this then yeah I can see why u refuse to suspend disbelief. But like when its civilian nobody Danny Fenton, I get it. Like none of this bullshit is supposed to happen to him, and not often enough for the casualness he displays in these prompts.
Like if you learn Jim the zoo keeper got his ribs broken from a zebra kick it would be worrying, but hazards of the job. But if u learned joe the accountant, who's nearest zoo with zebras is an hour and a half drive away and has never stepped in one besides got four broken ribs and a punctured lung from a zebra kick u would be loosing u're mind too. And imagine he got mauled by a tiger too at a different incident and THATS why he's not in shock with the zebra thing. I would bubble wrap the man. I would start side eyeing the pigeons. I would never take joe on a hike.
I mean, frankly even with Phantom, if you're going with small town Amity Park, you're still gonna get a bit of that.
Especially with cloning. Like, not just any old rogue has the resources and/or expertise to pull that off. That's, like, major supervillain type plot. So it begs the question, what's an A tier supervillain doing fighting a dead prepubescent teenager in Small Town, Midwest, USA?
Imagine if Joe the Accountant's neighbor, Bob the Animal Control Officer, tells about the time he had to wrestle a chimpanzee in their hometown of Rawlins, Wyoming; as explanation for why he's not really fazed about this whole Zebra thing.
I was gonna wait and see if I could find a prompt that fit this but I decided fuck it we ball. Challenged myself to make a drawing with only analogous colors
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