#honestly im kind of considering this angle for a sequel to doubt but i also have another idea for how reader can do stuff there ;) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

weebsinstash · 1 year

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And if one of the batfam just so happen to develop not-quite-so-platonic feelings for the reader, so be it :)

Honestly I've consumed Batman media but when it comes to comics and the lore of the Robins and all that, I'm remarkably uninformed, but the one I'm leaning towards the hardest, besides Bruce obviously, is Jason

I mean, for the sake of informing those not in the know, the original first Robin was Dick Grayson and after he became older, Batman found another protégé in Jason Todd, but at some point Jason is kidnapped by the Joker and horrifically tortured over the course of i think its a full year, beaten with a crowbar, and presumably killed with the "evidence" sent to Batman who believes he's dead and, never finds Jason, who is resurrected with the Lazarus Pit (something something evil league of assassins and also the mother of Bruce's blood son Damian is here, Talia Al'Ghul)

Eventually Jason comes back to Gotham as his own antihero identity, Red Hood, and he has his own take on justice greatly varying from his mentor: he now uses guns and even kills when he deems it necessary. And when Jason and Bruce finally meet and Bruce finds out Jason was alive this whole time, Jason's reaction is "I wasn't mad you never found me. I'm mad you let Joker do that to me and you still let him live" like he was deeply wounded by this betrayal and has to be basically rehabilitated back to being a hero (and also that performance is by Jensen Ackles which I never knew until today lol)

So I can just only imagine the levels of unhinged if Jason gets over his, you know, constant killing and is finally back to being like somewhat relatively normal and a vigilante again and then you have a situation like "oh Reader is kidnapped and hurt by the Joker too, maybe even sexually assaulted" and when Jason finds out it just triggers him being Red Hood all over again. I can imagine him wanting to take you away from this horrible life and this man (Bruce) who keeps getting everyone around him hurt and still doesn't have the balls to get the job done, at least in Jason's eyes

I remember watching this scene from Death in the Family and thinking about, what if Jason is just sitting there in that bed having this angry monologue and his thoughts shift to Reader and he has no hatred or animosity towards them at all, in fact, he's horrified. Why is Bruce risking your life by bringing you into this sort of lifestyle? So the man doesn't love Jason OR you? And he makes the decision that you're only going to get hurt if you stay with "the family" as it now disgusts him to even call it that

Like can you even imagine the rage and trauma and anguish he would feel if you know, the Batfam is gathered around and welcoming him back, and then, after everyone else has gone, you come into the room and you're just an absolute mess, shaking at the sight of him, instantly crying. "I wanted to keep looking for you," just absolutely weeping "they told me you were gone and I needed to move on but I kept wanting to at least-at least find your body and they... they...!" And Jason finds out, well of course YOU never could have rescued him or killed the Joker, because Jason's disappearance and 'death' was the last straw that finally sent you into a mental breakdown after dedicating yourself to Bruce's "mission" and you're not even allowed to leave the manor by yourself anymore and he can tell by looking at you that you've lost so much weight and not in a healthy way

And just like that, Jason readjusts his plans. He is not the only one who is going to escape from this mansion tonight. He feels rage boiling his blood as Bruce finally realizes you've spent so long in his room talking to him and one look at your puffy eyes and ragged breathing and the man decides, well you're just simply too overwhelmed to keep talking to Jason right now, you better go eat dinner and get some rest. And Jason grits his teeth as he sees you just, relent, as if you're used to not even having an option, still crying and obviously not wanting to go, still wanting to see him and touch him and talk to him and know he's still alive, but Bruce says to go, and so, you go.

And Jason would rather die a second time than let things end here.

#honestly im kind of considering this angle for a sequel to doubt but i also have another idea for how reader can do stuff there ;)#yandere stuff #sinprompts

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morwensteelsheen · 3 years

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WIP wednesday thoughts:

willow cabin is utterly fucked because i changed my intended ~moral~ halfway through and now im stuck trying to integrate this shitty political intrigue plot into what should’ve been a more interesting story about éowyn adapting to life in gondor. hugely fucking annoyed by it and just totally unsure how to proceed. i could significantly increase the chapter count, but im worried that because the initial framing device was this bandits shit that closing out that plot and then still going for ages afterwards would be really shitty? i honestly don’t know, it’s so difficult. really i just need someone to read my outline and tell me if im being a dumb twat about it lol

meanwhile I know exactly where I want to go with AFTA but for some unaccountable reason im stressed that my ass is gonna get roasted for the direction i want to take it in. it’s all based in both tolkien’s personal politics and (some) historical precedent, but im worried people are gonna see it as a marysue-ification? but also im hoping to do sthg of a sequel to afta to practice the political intrigue writing so i don’t make the same mistakes i did in wc, and to do that it would require this specific set up in AFTA. im gonna put my AFTA thing under the cut so don’t click read more unless you’re gucci with potential AFTA spoilers!!

this royal affair au is definitely gonna get published at some point but im trying to decide if i want to do ~tasteful~ smut that drives a longer narrative or if im really just gonna do a whole 3,000 word build up to some run of the mill, old fashioned PWP lmao

okay so i have spent a Lot of time thinking about what impact i think éowyn and faramir would have on each other in a pre-ring war setting, and the honest to god conclusion ive come to is that they would somewhat inadvertently egg on each other’s (wildly divergent) idealism.

faramir’s an idealist politically in ways that, as Big D rightly points out, are not super productive in a wartime scenario. but so far as im concerned, the war doesn’t feel as warlike until they have to blow the bridge at osgiliath. until that point, there’s not really anything to say that faramir’s whole throwback optimism isn’t a perfectly justifiable position to have.

but what that idealism is and how it manifests are two really important considerations. the crux of his idealistic politics is that he looks at númenor and sees something valuable in it, and looks at gondor and sees a lot that he thinks is fucked up. outside of articulating a general angst towards the glory hunting, it’s not like he’s spending time talking about his specific policy prescriptions. however, we do know a few things that can guide us to a more coherent reconstruction of his politics:

he’s pretty rigidly hierarchical (when it’s convenient for him). as seen in: him basically telling sam to fuck off and stay in his lane in WOTW, and in how and when he chooses to refer to his father as ‘father’ vs ‘my lord’ or ‘lord of the city’ in the aftermath of the osgiliath retreat and then before he gets his ass sent back there. i don’t want to go into too much detail here but if i go with this i’ll definitely justify it more thoroughly in the footnotes.

so we’ve got faramir’s emphasis on hierarchy and his occasional (when convenient) belief that the upper echelons of a hierarchy are there because they’re intellectually and/or morally better. or, maybe to remove the causation from that instance, because they are in those upper echelons, they have an obligation to be more morally/intellectually upstanding, and the people in the structure below them have an obligation to show deference. unless you’re faramir and you’re dealing with denethor in which case that all goes out the window. classic.

we know there is some sort of nascent pseudo-democratic tradition of popular sovereignty in gondor. we know this because faramir asks the masses at aragorn’s coronation if they’ll accept him as king. faramir is a lot of things, but he is certainly not a progressive political radical, and i cannot imagine any situation in which he cooked up that rigmarole himself. that then implies to me that it’s building on some sort of political/cultural expectation in gondor. so: some sort of relationship to popular legitimacy. the people of gondor are subjects, but perhaps not as totally passive and unconsidered in the power structure as we might assume given the comparability to feudal europe/asia.

given those two things, i want to use AFTA to argue:

that faramir, in looking to assign blame for the faults he sees in gondor, would not directly assign blame to the lower classes, but rather to the aristocracy, because he will have seen them as failing in their moral obligations to the people they rule over. this is not to say that he isn’t fucked off about The People™ valorising war, but i think he’d take the position that they couldn’t possibly be expected to form those values and opinions of their own volition, and the fault lies in their rules. faramir: not gramscian.

faramir lacks any power that is non-military, and even that is of questionable worth because the rangers seem to be fairly distinct to the general structure of the army, and are not exactly a huge force.

faramir lacking any political power isn’t necessarily a huge concern for him (as in, he’s not actively trying to change that), because he knows he’s not going to lead a moral revolution and isn’t interested in taking up the responsibilities having political capital would engender because he’s stuck dealing with this war, that he fucking hates btw has he mentioned that he hates it?

however, given that he is apparently eminently versed in lore and scholarship, he is probably keenly aware that there is this incipient notion of popular legitimacy somewhere in gondor’s culture. it’s not, for most of his life, knowledge that actually does anything for him, but it is there.

éowyn, meanwhile, doesn’t really have many strong political convictions (yet). not because she’s a dumbass or whatever, but because she looks at court politics as kind of a farce, and doesn’t believe that power legitimately emanates from anywhere that isn’t a Big Fucking Army. and why, strictly speaking, would she not think that? the event that brought about the creation of her kingdom was not careful, soft spoken negotiation, it was her ancestors being in the right place at the right time with a Big Fucking Army.

and the internal politics of the Riddermark actually seem to be fairly stable, all things considered. i sincerely doubt that Théoden or Théodred are having to negotiate complex politicking in the way Denethor and Boromir are. so where, then, would éowyn see that kind of political behaviour outside gondor? with gríma.

éowyn, then, will see the immediate contrast between gríma (backroom dealer, manipulator extraordinaire) and théoden (owner of Big Fucking Army). and gríma goes and fucking wins that fight. that forces éowyn to confront the fact that, jesus christ, maybe there are different types of power.

at the same time, she’s going to be in minas tirith and needing to cover for théoden letting his shit get wrecked. not just because she’s prideful, which of course she is, but because if denethor/gondor think that théoden is too weak to hold up his end of the bargain, why would they ever go help the Mark? éowyn, seeing that théoden’s f-f-fucked, knows that there’s a very very good chance the Mark will need help.

against her feelings about courtly politics, she starts to accept that she’s going to need to do something to get power in gondor. not anything substantial, it’s not like she’s trying to overthrow anybody, but enough that when push comes to shove she can force denethor to help out the Mark (if he doesn’t do so willingly).

but, as ive sort of already shown in AFTA, she’s a bit of a dogshit diplomat. good for a little big-brawny-enforcer stuff, but not exactly brimming with cultural sensitivity. by the time she realises théoden + the Mark are fucked, she’ll have burnt quite a few bridges with the gondorrim nobles, and it’s not like she’s the sort of person to go running cap-in-hand begging for mercy.

so: she has to look elsewhere. and wow! a chance for faramir to do his favourite thing — talk about his opinions! and by god, his weird idealistic politics are… actually kind of helpful? because he’s like, look, you’re never gonna be a diplomat, but there are other ways of consolidating power. and one of those ways is by appealing to The People™. so why not work that angle?

and actually, we know that this is a viable route for éowyn because hama, in arguing for her to take up the mantle of théoden’s heir when théoden and éomer fuck off to helm’s deep, basically says that The People™ love her and would have willingly chosen her to lead them.

we also know, based on faramir’s middle men speech, that the people of gondor and the mark have grown alike in nature. not totally unreasonable to then think that the people of gondor would take to her like the people of the mark did.

éowyn, then, in various ways begins to try to win over the people of minas tirith. i need to do a little more research on this bc what ive got on the practicalities of that so far are a bit, uhhh, sketchy, but the least jargony way to describe this is to point to when natalie dormer’s character in GOT gets out of the carriage to go hug and kiss some babies. (marc bloch, eat your heart out)

this would later segue into a potential sequel where, while trying to secure the way for aragorn’s coronation, éowyn actually plays an interesting role because she’s fallen into this incidental Diana, People’s Princess™ role and so is better positioned than almost anyone to go advocate on his behalf. wow! cool! éowyn getting to be politically useful in more ways than just getting hitched!

so yeah. that’s how i am thinking it might play out. this would obviously have a rolling impact on the remainder of AFTA and how certain (🔥) events pan out later, but i think that building up part has to begin pretty much now, narratively. also this lets me get in a reference to “and then her heart changed, or else at last she understood it” and have it not be almost entirely about wanting to shag faramir, but actually about her gradual evolution from valorising war above all else to being like, hmm, maybe there are other ways of being powerful. which i think still largely captures the “no longer I will vie with the great riders” stuff, but more subtly and without feeling quite so… deferential, I guess? Like it’s not that she’s swapping one form of power (violence) for nothing (gardening?? healing?? tolkien accidental articulation of necropolitics??) but swapping violence for a different type of more sustainable power.

yeah. that’s the take, basically. who fucking knows.

#e writes

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