Although it is the first time to renovate, there are some mistakes, but the overall effect is unanimously liked by everyone. I am also very pleased. Two years have passed, and the more I live in it, the more comfortable and comfortable I feel. Now I rarely envy other people's houses!
I feel like I've complained about Tim's email situation in Gotham Knights before (edit: I have), but the truth of it is just so funny.
He's signed up for so many podcasts, video game streamers, and random news alerts; it's just a constant barrage of data going straight into his constantly whirring brain. Hell, he even floats the idea of the Batfamily having their own podcast as a way to correct misinformation about them (which Jason shoots down instantly), and it's made me realize something.
Timothy Drake would be a YouTuber.
In this universe specifically, Timothy Jackson Drake, the heir to Drake Industries and the foster son of the late Bruce Wayne would be a YouTuber.
Think about it. It'd be the perfect cover. Who would ever suspect that some 16-year-old nepo baby with a YouTube channel could ever be Red Robin? You'd have to be mad. I mean, look at him.
Red Robin just dropped out of literal thin air and garotted someone four times his size, and you expect anyone to believe that's the same kid who does 24-hour Minecraft charity streams and occasionally drops 6-hour video essays (his last one was on Lex Luthor's illegal bit mining operation on the moon)?
I was walking to the subway last night, when it occurred to me that there’s no way Tech doesn’t have an in-universe fan club.
After he wins that riot race, he immediately became a number of people’s favorite racer, and the fact that he disappeared absolutely fueled their fervor. People spend inordinate amounts of time breaking down his strategy. There are definitely message boards on the holonet speculating about his “real” identity and “where is he now?” Tech-stans fight with dudebro equivalents about whether or not his win was a fluke.
oh but the clothing choices are SO interesting here.
right when mew finally seems to be letting ray in, mew starts dressing in a style that's awfully reminiscent of ray himself:
meanwhile, right when ray is finally getting to receive the type of affection from mew he's yearned for ages - ray's not dressed the way he usually does for nights out.
in fact if i didn't know any better, i might even say he's dressed up in an outfit that's awfully reminiscent of a style a certain someone picked out just for him:
what a coincidence, that right when mew's external appearance finally seems to imply he's ready to be on the same page as ray...........ray's external appearance has shifted to reflect the lingering influence of someone new.
there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.
and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.
idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.
which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'
*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.