#and another of which just wrapped up the Gotham Knights Transference arc | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

umbrellacam · 6 months

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Cape comics truly are an inescapable rabbit hole vortex where attempts to make forward progress only dig you deeper

Goal: Read Gates of Gotham with robust context on concurrent batfam dynamics, for a clear picture of how things stand for them at the end of the post-Crisis era

Step 1: okay so Batman and Robin (2009) and a Red Robin re-read for Dick (+Damian) and Tim, as main. And Blackest Night: Batman, of course. Also Streets of Gotham probably, and selections from Dick's Batman.

Step 0: okay but for lead-in to those I need Battle for the Cowl

Step -1: and for the lead-in to BftC I need Bruce's death in Final Crisis (YAY DONE) and the arcs with Dick and Tim reacting/processing, so add Search for a Hero from Robin and The Great Leap from Nightwing (Batman RIP)

Step -2: and how can I really understand their grappling with Bruce's death if I don't get a clear picture of their relationships with him at the time, so let's add Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul (DONE YAY), Freefall (DONE YAY), Tim grappling with Steph's return (DONE YAY), Heart of Hush (Batman RIP) (DONE YAY) and Morrison's whole Black Glove storyline (DONE YAY). Now I can move forward into the BtfC lead-up, yes???

Step -3: .....shit, Jason is in Search for a Hero, Tim's lead-in arc. And also BftC itself. I've got everything up through Hush for him done, but that just means I finally need to do Under the Hood and a refresh of his Titans Tower appearance. And his ridiculous TentaTodd storyline in Nightwing Brothers in Blood after that.

Step -4: and for the proper lead-in to Jason's return, gotta do War Games. At least I've already done Dick's Renegade arc and Bludhaven getting nuked.

Step -5: okay so to do War Games, I need Jack finding out Tim is Robin and Tim's forced quitting (YAY DONE), and Steph's Robin run (YAY NEARLY DONE). Woo-hoo, almost ready to start War Games!!

Step -6: Hey this scene in the 'Tec #796 back-up with Bruce and Cass staging a fight with Onyx and Orpheus in Penguin's club is really fun, I want to know more about Onyx and Orpheus as undercover Bat agents, and I know Onyx is going to be in both War Games and UtH. Lemme back up a bit further and add 'Tec #794-795 for the context.

Step -7: Wow this L'Shea lady seems like a badass - wait what does she mean Batman delivered her baby?? I'd better go back a bit further to 'Tec #791-793 to find out!!! :D

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LIKE IT'S SO DANGEROUS, I want to read one thing and it spirals and spirals and every time I cross a few issues off my list I end up adding like 5-10 more that are clearly very necessary, and the to-be-read list just keeps ballooning.

....I love it, though. Comics are fun.

#it's such a mess every character is such a mess it's so entertaining #the DRAMA #Cam reads comics #dcu #meanwhile I'm also skipping around to various in-progress chronological read-through points #one of which is in Aftershock post-Cataclysm #and another of which just wrapped up the Gotham Knights Transference arc #oh and I also did Joker's Last Laugh about a week ago which was interesting #(Bruce's complete non-reaction to Tim's apparent death was ????)#(alternatively did he take one look at that skeleton and realize it wasn't Tim's and then just NOT TELL ANYBODY ELSE??? BRUCE PLS)#Cam posts

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irisbleufic · 4 years

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Happy 2020! Can I tag you to do that 2019 Fic Year in Review thing?

Happy New Year to you, too! Sure thing. I can’t remember the last time I did one of these; since 2019 is the end of a decade, it feels fitting. Here goes…

14 February 2019: After spending 14 of my 15 years (2020 marks the start of my 16th year) in Good Omens fandom working on it, I finally finished and posted the 75th and final installment of Crown of Thorns [The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse] ’Verse. LiveJournal was still the fandom’s primary posting hub when I posted the first-ever installment, A Better Place, on 1 October 2005. The series didn’t get its second installment (The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse) until 2010, but work on the series from that point forward was pretty much constant. 2012 saw a higher number of CoT updates than any year previous; that was also the year I transferred it to AO3.

25 February 2019: I finished and posted the last chapter of my third Good Omens collaborative fic ’verse with @procrastinatingbookworm, Turn In Your Arms. We couldn’t believe there was no Good Omens fusion with Tam Lin, so we went for it. Given our first collaboration in 2018 was a Good Omens fusion with Groundhog Day (Game Over, Insert Coin), that wasn’t a stretch.

27 February 2019: @aspiringjedi and I posted the first of our two Good Omens meta-essays, Making An Effort: Queer (Trans) Masculinity in the Ethereal & Occult Beings of Good Omens. Yes, it’s 1,990 words due to the novel’s publication year. When you’re just under 2,000 words anyway, why not?

28 February 2019: @procrastinatingbookworm and I followed up Turn In Your Arms with a brief sequel, Burn After Reading. All of our collaborations to date have ended up as multi-story mini ’verses.

25 March - 20 April 2019: I went about as livid over Gotham’s Season 5 as I did over Season 3 and wrote Darkroom to address how dirty the show did Bruce and Jeremiah. I had a stand-alone Season 4 fix-it story (focusing on Oswald and Edward, like most of my other Gotham work) called Triage from 2018 that had never quite felt like it was meant to be a stand-alone. Triage and Darkroom became the first two installments of a series called Playing for Keeps, to which I added another 6 stories by April 20th. Darkroom somehow got more traffic than any of my other Gotham pieces since When You Find It, Run over in DDO ’Verse (although those two stories are keystone pieces in much larger series, they can both be read as stand-alones).

4 April 2019: In the midst of working on the aforementioned, @aspiringjedi posted our second Good Omens meta-essay, Southern Pansies: Subversive (Trans) Masculinity in the Ethereal & Occult Beings of Good Omens.

8 May 2019: Brief blip back into Pacific Rim fic! I posted a missing Anthology correspondence/inset ficlet called L’amour, c’est comme la guerre. For anyone who ever wanted more of the email correspondence in Anthology’s final chapter, this fills in some gaps you didn’t know were there.

16 May 2019: Thanks to some behind-the-scenes persuasion from several really tenacious Gotham readers who didn’t want me to abandon it / shut down DDO ’Verse, I completed The Knights’ Tour after almost a year on hiatus from it. This turned out to light a fresh fuse on DDO, because TTK didn’t end up being the final story in the series like I had once planned.

18 May 2019: The only His Dark Materials fic I’ve ever written, also a Gotham fusion, got a belated new final chapter. Gold Dust is sort of an alternate take on DDO ’Verse, one in which Dust and daemons are present.

23 May 2019: I posted what I thought would be a stand-alone Gotham story called The Meaning of This City. It manages to be a marginally less dark and complicated take on the Bruce-and-Jeremiah situation (than Darkroom over in PfK ’Verse, that is) without sacrificing some of the most difficult features of what they need to overcome. More on why this didn’t remain a stand-alone in a bit.

6 June 2019: Good Omens requests came around, one of which led me to follow the Imagine Hastur Ficlets (which themselves exist thanks to the accidental prompts at @imaginehastur) interlude in CoT with The Imagine Hastur Epilogue. This was a sort of neat in-narrative way to deal with having gradually come out about my biological (inter)sex and (nonbinary) gender identity over the 14 years I worked on CoT.

15 June - 1 July 2019: I posted another Good Omens collaboration-set with @procrastinatingbookworm called Have Faith at the series-title level. The two stories in it, You Bloody Snake and Enough of a Bastard, focus almost entirely on Hastur and Ligur. Seeing Aziraphale and Crowley through different (and less favorable) eyes was a weird pleasure; seeing people indignantly realize they were enjoying fic about Hastur and Ligur was even more of one!

15 August 2019: @verumx persuaded me to watch Jamie Marks Is Dead with her and @one-eyed-bossman, and then implored me to fix it. Using Our Words is the stand-alone that resulted, which is no shock given I can’t resist ghost stories. It’s unique among this year’s stories in that it may be the only genuine stand-alone aside from the Gotham piece called Gold Dust.

17 August 2019: After an experimental in-character snail mail letter-writing exchange that lasted about 6 weeks, @verumx and I transcribed the letters and framed them in a piece of collaborative Gotham fic, We Were All Forgiven. Since about late April, I had been getting progressively sicker and sicker (didn’t know yet that I had cancer). Keeping busy as things got worse helped at least in the psychological sense, but by mid-August my exhaustion and difficulty eating were hitting their peak. I was hiding it from everyone except my partner.

1 September 2019: Returning to two stories I’d written for Batman: Europa, I created a series umbrella called Once Is Not Enough and explicitly placed London (Letting Go) and Five Love Affairs under it as companion pieces. Between Thursday Friday of this particular week, I experienced an increasingly more frightening set of symptoms that landed me in the ER and got a sequence of diagnostic tests finally rolling.

22 October 2019: After receiving a diagnosis of colon cancer on 10/1/19 and starting medical leave Monday of Halloween Week, I decided to complete the sequel to The Meaning of This City, which was a Gotham piece I’d left hanging mid-progress for weeks. The Maze of Your Ingenuity was hard for me to complete due to constant blood tests, CT scans, and outpatient procedures in the lead-up to my Thanksgiving Week major inpatient surgery, but I did it.

23 September - 11 December 2019: My longest Gotham fic ’verse (Delicate, Dangerous, Obsessed, a.k.a. DDO), having refused to die even once The Knights’ Tour was complete, got an entirely new ending stretch of stories focusing on, of all people, Jerome Valeska and Five (514A). They were the only two characters from canon who I had mentioned and/or shown briefly in passing earlier in DDO, but whose arcs from canon (and onward into my fic) I had done nothing to wrap up. Challengers, Thicker Than Blood, Take This Waltz (It’s Yours Now), Finally Fair (In Love and War), and What We’re For (And What We Want) may, collectively, be the best writing I did during the entirety of 2019 (unless you count what I wrote in February to finish CoT). The experience of terrifying, unexplained illness and harrowing treatment was entirely too timely to one of my two protagonists in this set of stories. They were worth their weight not just in distraction, but also in catharsis. Five survived, and so did I.

#good omens #gotham #wayleska #fic year in review #fanfiction

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