Tim Drake has broken shards of glass for a voice and trembling flowers for fingers and a crackling bonfire for a mind and when you first meet him, you want to put him in the eye of a hurricane and tell him to stay there, tell him not to move because you need to make sure he’s safe, and he will agree with you, almost too easily, and it’s only later that you realize he’s been flinging himself into the whirling, whipping winds just outside the calm of the eye for years because he knows without a sliver of doubt that he will survive it.

you know what i want? i want some more of that time when jack drake benched tim after he found out tim was robin. specifically, i want jack drake having to deal with the fact that his son is robin.

oh he’s angry. his son goes around beating up criminals and breaking the law and he knows batman. but the thing is, batman and robin have been these distant, almost mythological figures for so long. gotham thinks of the duo as heroes, as not as people. and jack drake didn’t realize what exactly constitutes as being robin.

jack can’t hear his son anymore, not unless he wants to. granted, he had always been a quiet child. but now, his footsteps were completely silent. his breathing was almost nonexistent. his voice could carry across a room if he wanted, then shroud itself in fog, muffling it instantly. tim would just suddenly appear, at the kitchen counter, in the office, next to or behind jack. jack never saw him coming. and when jack reminded his son of these things, albeit a little shakily, tim blinked in surprise, as if he wasn’t even aware he was doing these things.

there are scars all over his body. objectively, jack knew that. batman and robin fought brutally, of course they would be injured. seeing the marks littered all over tim’s skin, however, is another matter. there are slashes and stabs. puckered skin that looks like a bullet hole. clean lines with little hashes, a nicely healed and well-taken-care-of injury. ugly, jagged streaks that scream pain, that jack felt nauseous seeing, let alone having the strength to bear it. tim acts like they’re normal, acts like assimilating all these scars were a mark of progress, a mark of strength. he rubs lotion on them a couple nights a week, falling into a routine. there’s a story behind each and every one of them, a life saved behind each and every one of them. jack doesn’t know whether to be somber or relieved at the fact that tim will never tell them to him.

tim’s reflexes are catlike, his instincts sharp, his mind always working a split-second faster than anyone else’s in the room. jack will accidentally drop something, and tim will catch it out of the air, easy as breathing, and hand it to him. as a test, jack dropped a ceramic mug filled with coffee on purpose. it landed in tim’s perfectly outstretched palm, not a drop of the drink spilled. tim was still on his phone with the other hand, but he looked away enough to raise an eyebrow at jack. jack didn’t question how tim knew he had done it on purpose. tim knows things, things that he has no reason to know, until he explained how he knew them. he had all of jack’s nervous tics memorized, apparently, and picked up things from other people uncannily accurately. dana poured acceptance and affection into the kid, and jack loved her for that, but he knew that tim scared her, just a little. jack was left wondering when his son had become the modern-day sherlock holmes.

and tim knew people. he’d casually reference batman or nightwing in a conversation, acting as if he knew them personally. which. well. apparently he did know them personally. but it wasn’t just the heroes from gotham, no. someone had once called tim while he, jack, and dana were cooking dinner together, sort of a bonding activity. tim had answered, then put the call on speaker, then continuing to chop a couple vegetables. (he looked far too comfortable with a knife in his hand. tim flipped it between his fingers and in the air with an ease and grace that made it impossible to tear his eyes from. and he wasn’t even trying.) then the sounds of an explosion came in, causing jack and dana to flinch, but tim didn’t even more. apparently, the flash was calling him, all the way from central city, where he was fighting killer robots, and asking for advice because apparently, someone named ‘bart’ had told the flash (the! actual! flash!) that tim had worked out a way to defeat them once before. tim advised them on how to get under armour platings and where the weak spots were while mashing potatoes with a fork. then tim said goodbye and good luck with a cheerful tone before hanging up. because apparently the flash calling him was something that didn’t faze him anymore. jack never said anything about the pictures hanging up in tim’s room, of a too-small kid in a robin suit, a boy in a leather jacket and an earring, someone more hair and goggles than boy, a girl with a confident smirk flexing her biceps, a girl with a bow and arrow, and a literal ghost. he also didn’t say anything about the photos of tim and that boy in the leather jacket, just to two of them. in those pictures, tim was laughing harder than jack had ever seen in his life.

tim was still his son, but he wasn’t entirely himself. jack couldn’t get rid of robin, no matter how hard he tried. tim moved like a predator when he was just walking down the stairs, a new grace in his movements. his eyes flicked to all possible exits any time he entered a room. he was no longer afraid to walk the streets of gotham at night, treading calm and sure even as jack and dana hurried quickly home with their shoulders bent. 

his son was important. his son was powerful. his son walked and talked and laughed amongst gods, and they showered him with respect. jack was beginning to think he was foolish for ever believing he could take robin away. 

Keep reading

Richard Grayson the boy wonder

There is no friends in victory. Friends are nothing but those who follow their bloodlust with you along the way. Friends are those who you expect to betray you eventually because only one can win. Friendships are only alliances even when you team with others. Friends are those who must die before you else you’d be the one dying and friend are only friends because they are not enemies. Alliances can break and burn and everything is full of sorrow and distrust and the ending of Secret Life could of gone a lot different. Scar chose to stay with Pearl over that of Scott and Gem despite the alliance they had together. Everyone knew that they’d all turn on one another eventually. This was just the way things would end. The friends that Scar may have ever had weren’t true friends, they knew they’d betray each other. They expected each other to do so. Victory is a bitter struggle that had to occur to someone. Scar wanted a fight. He wanted to earn this victory. He had nobody and so he couldn’t hold back. There was no honour in this end. No honour shared between them. Pearl didn’t want to win yet Scar wouldn’t let her die without a fight. He won and didn’t realise. He was alone again. Perhaps throughout everything he always had been alone. He was treated like the villain, made to be a villain so he became one. He was actively disliked by the server and even his alliances weren’t too strong. His victory was deserved. He fought tooth and nail for it. He took many hearts. He took many lives. And he won. In the end he pressed the succeed button. He didn’t die but it all ended with him being alone. There are no friends in victory because there is nobody left to be friends with.

(ID: two memes using the "it's 2023 i'm done arguing / if you hate X i'm straight up murdering you" meme format. the first says "asexuals" and has a picture of the ace pride flag, and the second says "aromantics" and has a picture of the aro pride flag. end ID)

GENERATION LOSS: A Minecraft Youtuber's Statement on the Horrors of Capitalism and Streaming Culture

Warning: Discussions of Violence, Suicide, and Lack of Autonomy Generation Loss is a statement on capitalism, and nobody, not even Ranboo, can convince me otherwise. I watched all three episodes recently and even watched a lot of Ranboo's and Slimecicle's behind the scenes content where they go over how the series was made, and it seems that Ranboo's writing relies a whole lot on their gut feelings. I don't know how much Ranboo knows about literary analysis, how to structure character arcs, or even whether he has thought about a theme for Generation Loss or rather has just compiled a bunch of cool scenes and horror elements together with a well structured plot concept that he didn't think about the implications of that plot or the messages it brings across.

However, what I can say for certain is that come episode 3, to me, the story becomes quite clearly a statement on capitalism.

The first bit of evidence is the setting. Malls, shopping malls in particular where once considered the apex of capitalism, a single building in which you could find all your consumer needs, and with food courts being widely available your average consumer would literally, never have to leave except to sleep. A town built up around the concept of purchasing. And now an abandoned mall, a representation of the failures of that consumerism, is where "The Company" has decided to set up their plan, a one stop place for entertainment.

The Company, is Twitch, or rather, live streaming platforms in general. The comparison between the mall and The Company, seems to be pretty direct, that The Company is trying to do something similar to the great malls of old, and set up a place of consumerism, a town for people to live in full of their favorite streamers. Generation Loss is showing us the similarities between these two things, the mall is as representative of faceless consumerism as the company is.

This becomes an explicate connection when Ranboo makes his way down to the food court in episode three. They see that twitch content has been set up in empty shells of the food courts, "individual" content being served like Subway or Papa Johns. But it isn't individual at all. Because even if those content creators were to choose which content they do, they're still coerced into a system where they MUST produce content.

And that's ultimately the final choice at the end of the episode, a binary choice set up by a capitalist system, work or die, produce content or die, stream to your millions of followers or risk losing brand deals, perform funny bits in front of a camera or risk losing your career, your house, your car, and even the food in your fridge.

And Ranboo shows us the consequences of making the choice to dance. What the company wants, what it runs it's back bones on, are people easily able to be controlled and reprogrammed, faceless beings filled with wires. I don't think it's a coincidence that Hetch calls them "Once Human". They might be representative of corporate Twitch workers, or perhaps they were individual streamers themselves who lost their individuality trying to conform to a system, trying to stay alive forever and ever, refusing the choice of death.

And even in the end, what's horrifying, is that ultimately the decision on whether or not Ranboo should live or die, isn't even left up to him. In a weird way it makes the concept of "living for others" seem as if it is a box restraining ourselves, rather than what it's supposed to be, which is a way to realize that you're important to other people. But being important to other people IS the problem in this situation. The Company wouldn't produce entertainment that people didn't find to be important. So it sucks all the life and autonomy out of the individual choice to live for others and puts it in the hands of systems outside of our control.

What's even more interesting though is the vote, it kept flip flopping until Ranboo shouted, "let me die" where it then planted itself firmly into the red. So while the choice wasn't fair, while it wasn't up to Ranboo ultimately, enough audience members recognized Ranboo as an individual with autonomy and acted with his wishes. It wasn't fair, but it was a win for Ranboo that he was able to make an individual choice at the end of the series.

And more than that, of COURSE the button didn't work. Defeating systems that are as complicated as capitalism, consumerism, or even just Twitch, takes more than a single button push to end them. They take systemic action. If Ranboo had tried to free more streamers stuck in the food hall, perhaps they would have had more resources to escape, or fight back. Ironically the best way to defeat soulless collections of systems, is to also become a collection, but a collection of people willing to make the individual choice to fight back against these corruptive companies.

I had so much to say about this series and I hope it made sense to everyone reading it, at where I'm going with my analysis. I hope to see more from Ranboo, and Generation loss in the future.

please read this entire piece

*about the Batfamily*

Wally West, to Dick Grayson: So you’re girlboss… is Tim gaslight?

Roy Harper: Which one of you is gatekeep.

Every single robin, at some point

I bet he gets all the sunflowers!! 🌻

EDIT: The sunflower types I picked for each spider! They picked the ones that reminded them the most of Miles. ;w;;

this fucks

?

barbie day

Spider-Society Zoom Calls

just find a way out

looking out for his drummer