"Potraying Dick as a huge slut who's always getting put into fanservice is actually progressive because it normalizes casual sex and is gender equality because female characters get potrayed that way too!!!"I mean sure but i feel like we could prove those same points with a male character who's NOT a multiple time r*pe survivor of color that's gotten victim blamed for at least one his assault's and has been coded as demisexual with a discomfort towards sexual looseness for himself since the 80s anyway

Hey so random ask but, I see a lot of people calling Tim drake sexist, I personally don't think he is but what are your thoughts on that.

Oof. Okay.

Technically I can’t just say he’s not, because as the product of a sexist society he, like any other dude and to a lesser extent any person, has got some passive sexist attitudes baked in there.

It tends to surface in things like, when he went on that first big solo adventure when the Robin comic launched, that started in Paris? And he wound up hunting King Snake with Lady Shiva and this one rogue federal agent, a black man, and he got very decisive. Shiva says something cutting about white men, and she has a point, in that if either of his adult companions of the moment were also white men Tim would probably have been somewhat more conscious of the fact that he was thirteen.

That unconscious prioritization that DC’s sexist narrative tends to favor? That is sexism, and also racism, and it’s valuable to draw attention to it, though not, I feel, to blame it all on Tim because quite often he hasn’t actually done anything, the universe around him has just colluded to make him look good.

(Of course this doesn’t happen much anymore, but back when he was the Main Character it did. Comics is a sexist community in a sexist culture, so of course Tim got some of that muck on him.)

But most of the accusations you see going around are about tearing him down on Steph’s behalf, and that’s...murkier.

Because honestly Tim is less sexist than most of the men in his profession. Significantly less so than Bruce or Dick. I literally cannot imagine Tim talking about a loved one the way Dick used to talk about Kori, or a new acquaintance the way Dick did a lot of the one-episode women from his ‘90s Nightwing solo series. He wasn’t bad to them exactly, he was honestly very normal and probably above average, but the incredible, controlling arrogance and casual sexualization is still hard to get through, sometimes. Almost more so for how much more it comes out when he’s talking behind their backs. And Bruce...well, Bruce and gender is an entire deal I’m not going to try to unpack here.

And I cannot see Tim ever using ‘girl’ as an insult, the way Damian does.

Tim’s interactions with the ladies on Young Justice, for example, tended to be a lot less emphatically gendered than Dick’s interactions with the ladies of the Teen Titans, or even Bruce’s in the Justice League, though there are fewer women there and less casual interaction.

And to a considerable extent this was because the passage of ten years had modernized writing norms, and to a considerable extent this was because his demographic was younger than the Titans and therefore less sexualization was expected of the writers. Young Justice built on some stuff Marvel had been doing with young teams and broke some ground that Marvel has built on even further lately. (Seriously what is with Marvel’s young team books lately they’re incredible.) But there was also that Tim as an individual cares less about gender than most of his family.

(In some ways Jason may care even less, but he also leans really hard into performative masculinity and thought flirting was a reasonable way to interact with older women as a teenager, and he’s been being written by Scott Lobdell for ten years even if I have a hard time thinking of that as canon, so his data is mixed.)

Or take the case of this young freedom fighter (/terrorist) who happens to wear Robin colors, who Tim meets at one point in Europe. Dava. The story creates situations where Tim gets a weird mind-altering stimulant transferred orally to him by Dava, and then from him to Shiva when he’s giving her CPR, and Tim rather notably doesn’t have a single narration box or speech bubble that treats these as ‘kisses’ that he has somehow benefited from obtaining.

Later he crawl-drags Dava’s knocked-out-by-Shiva body out of the middle of the bloodbath Shiva is now staging, because he’s in no state to do anything to stop it, which he hates, and while this is certainly the comic arranging things to put Dava in a damsel status relative to Tim, Tim does not at any point frame it that way.

He is really good about not disrespecting Dava, honestly. It’s an interesting storyline partly for that reason, though it’s not the only time it comes up.

Tim was constantly meeting Troubled Young Women who could kick his ass and whom he respected considerably in most senses, but whom he was able to convince that their particular approach to violence was somehow flawed and needed to be re-thought. Thereby allowing there to be Strong Female Characters but keep the balance of the world in order and not worry the readership, by placing the male lead in a subtle power position even if he had gotten his ass kicked.

It was like. An entire genre. Tied to the way Shiva kept popping in as Incredibly Terrifying Supporting Cast.

This was a major way DC was using female characters in and immediately after the 90s and tbh in some ways it was more progressive than what they tend to do now, even as certain parts of the framing set my teeth on edge.

(Compare ‘Tim on drugs manages to hit Shiva hard enough to take her down because she didn’t expect lethal force from him so he has to do CPR’ to the more recent Red Robin story where we spend a couple of pages with him laying out to her face how she came to town to fulfill a contract on him but he brilliantly out-thought her and she ate the drugged chocolates he sent her so He Wins. Bleh.)

Steph stands out for hanging around instead of being a one-off appearance, and for not really rethinking her life in response to Tim much at all, while also not being a villain.

The crux of the issue is, Tim slid into talking down to Steph on a semi-regular basis, especially when trying to get her to stop vigilante-ing, which he’s getting backlash for some twenty-odd years later, mostly by people blaming him for her narrative deprioritization because it’s more satisfying than blaming DC.

And a major form this takes is declaring him generally sexist.

And the thing is, I’m sure his unconscious view of himself as more competent to make judgment calls because Main Character Demographic did play into the way he approached those conversations! I have never met a dude with any self-confidence whatsoever for whom that wasn’t a factor. Sexism, like racism, is the air we breathe, you have to actively extricate yourself from it and even then it will crop up at odd moments.

Classism played into it, too--especially once he knew she was a C-list villain’s daughter; there was that sense that often crops up in Batman properties that not only does greater access to resources make it safer and less self-destructive for the moneyed class to go vigilante-ing, noblesse oblige means it’s also somehow more just. The old ‘the outsider has a more objective approach’ canard. This was even more subtextual than the gender stuff, but I’m sure it was there.

Intellectual elitism is sort of a subset of both that and gender issues--Tim knows he’s smart, it’s the core of his pride, and Steph is not as smart in the same ways and has not had the same educational opportunites, and there are definitely moments of high-handedness tied to this.

And then there was the territorial aspect; it was official Bat policy to discourage all other Gotham vigilantes, usually in a much more absolute and commanding way than Tim ever tried, not to take them in and train them.

That might have been an option for Bruce if he’d wanted to, but it wasn’t really on the table for Tim unless he wanted to stage an intense campaign to totally disrupt his own life in order to bring this person who introduced herself by hitting him in the face with a brick after he mistook her for a villain into private Bat training and spaces. They’d known each other for a while and been having this argument in various forms most of that time, before they ever dated.

Please also remember that the last time Tim wanted to take a troubled blond under his and Bruce’s wings and show them the ropes and make sure they could do this safely as part of a personal healing process that would help everyone, that person took less than a week after starting to show signs of instability to have a complete psychotic break, beat him into the ground, build a brick wall in the Batcave to keep him out, lock down the computers, and start killing criminals with the knife-hands he added to the Batsuit, while failing to prioritize civilian safety.

This was not that long before Steph’s debut. If I were Tim I would not trust myself to sponsor further new team members either!

All of these things besides the Azrael trauma are directly from Bruce, who is often way more emphatic and more of an ass about them. Robin was mirroring Batman (consider the way he talks to Selina sometimes egad, sometimes it only doesn’t look awful because she’s playing along) and following Bat-policy; it is totally nonsensical to hold Tim accountable for this and not Bruce.

It’s also important to note that Tim wasn’t significantly less condescending to Anarky or the General, who were white guys around his age with roughly his class background whom he was trying to talk out of villainy, and honestly Lonnie’s motives were baller. (The original Anarky was a hacktivist based on a design somebody drew up for the third Robin, but Tim got made instead.) Tim’s entire character design back to his first appearance holds that when he’s trying to talk someone into something he tends to fall into a lecturing approach.

This can be very annoying! The first time he did it to Nightwing he got grabbed and shaken and snarled at. And of course it’s worse when he’s talking down a demographic slope, rather than up one.

I am very aware of how fucking annoying it is when guys do this, even if it is their normal mode of interaction. I have come very near to punching faces over it, when it’s really bad.

Tim doesn’t usually approach that line, but the problem is his writers didn’t seem to know the line was there, so if you’re reading some of his interactions with Steph from the perspective of having that chip on your shoulder already, especially if you’re not immersed in the narrative’s assumption that he is The Main Character, especially now that language norms have shifted slightly so wording that was considered neutral in the 90s is now obnoxious, it can ironically make a deeper impression than the much more blatant and decided sexism going on all around him.

So that’s my take on the situation. Tim has some mild passive gender prejudice which he has never taken enough notice of to seriously compensate for, made more visible by being in a deeply sexist world and by being kind of an annoying person sometimes, and this has been blown wildly out of proportion by people who feel that he and Steph are in competition to be The One Who Was Not An Asshole in that relationship.

This is not a winnable competition. They were both assholes sometimes, and even if you could prove Tim was a terrible boyfriend/person it wouldn’t validate all of Steph’s behavior--she was often forced to behave very badly or stupidly, because back then one of her major narrative functions was as a stick for the writers to hit Tim with.

And the thing is. If you’re going to exculpate Steph of awful behavior because it was ‘just’ the writers being sexist, let alone let Dick off the hook on similar grounds, I think it’s really unfair and messed up to then turn around and hold Tim-the-individual accountable for sexism that mostly wasn’t even situated in him so much as baked into the narrative, though to his benefit.

Like. When sexism (or other -ism) benefits people in real life it can be useful to draw their attention to their systemic advantages if they seem not to get it, but drawing Tim’s attention to his narrative prioritization would be extraordinarily meta (lol somebody write that fic). And in neither situation is it productive or fair (though I do know it is so so tempting) to treat the very existence of someone’s privilege as an offense they have personally committed.

They literally cannot help that. That’s how systemic works.

Daughter of the Demon: on writing the Al Ghuls

I can’t make any promises about when the next chapter of Gotham Ghoul will go up, but I can make the promise that when it does, it will include the first appearance of Talia Al Ghul into the narrative proper.

She’s been there in the meta-narrative since the beginning, as she always is in stories featuring a younger Damian, but it’s been in hints and allusions. This will be her first chance to speak for herself.

And that got me thinking, about Talia as a character, about her history, and about the way I write her, and I thought I would share those thoughts with you here.

Talia, probably more than any other major DC character (certainly more than any other Major Bat-roster character), is defined by her relationships. Specifically her relationships with men. She is Raas’s daughter, Bruce’s 'one that got away’, Damian’s mother, Jason’s ‘it’s complicated’. She isn’t her own anything.

In her earliest appearances, she’s as close to a strong female character as you were going to get, given the time it was written and her race (more on that below). But’s she’s still a stereotype. She’s a non-white woman, physically strong but emotionally vulnerable, who falls in love with a white man who can’t return her feelings (nominally because of her morality, meta-narratively because she’s not white) and betrays her culture for him, only to be abandoned later on. It’s not a new story - it’s one Hollywood loves. Most often it gets assigned to women from East Asia, but Arab and Indian women got it a lot as well. Talia is certainly one of the better examples of this, she has a lot more freedom than most women trapped in this trope, but ultimately she is still a trope.

After that, she was mostly just... gone. She popped up from time to time, but she’d already played out her assigned role in the hero’s life, so even though Raas stuck around, she was very much shunted into the background.

Then Grant Morrison came along and turned her into a villain by creating Damian. We find out she had a child with Bruce a decade ago and chose not to tell him. She raised Damian to be an assassin, taught him how to kill, and then basically dumps him on Bruce’s doorstep with a note around his neck saying “please look after this child”. And there are a hundred possible reasons for this, but they’re never given. She is made a villain by silence.

She managed to remain morally grey for a few years, but it didn’t take long for the demonisation of Talia to begin in earnest. (Probably didn’t help that this was the mid-2000s - not a good time to be Arab in American media). The recent introduction of Damian into DC’s animated movie universe included the reveal that Talia just straight up didn’t love her only son. Seriously, that’s the big end of movie plot twist - Talia is evil and doesn’t love her son. In more recent comics, Talia actually clones Damian because Damian isn’t the obedient killing machine she had wanted. This clone goes on to kill the original Damian. (It’s okay, he got better).

In between tragic love-interest and evil step-mother stereotypes, she has one other notable appearance. As the mother-figure and lover of a teenage Jason Todd. When Jason is brought back from the dead, it’s Talia who finds him, takes him back to a League of Assasins base and uses a Lazarus pit to heal him. She defies her father to protect him, cares for and comforts him, spends what is probably a fortune in money and favours getting him the training he wants, buys out a major corporation for him, makes no attempt to stop him from killing Batman, and begins a sexual relationship with him. He’s 15 when he dies, and 19 or 20 when he leaves. It’s not clear how old he is when the sexual relationship begins, but given his mental and emotional state, and the age difference between them and her position of power, the answer is too damn young.

When you add all that together, the picture it paints is not a positive one, and there’s a risk of her more recent appearances colouring her earlier storylines. It’s happened a lot, writers both professional and fan, assuming that Talia’s interest in Bruce is mercenary, that she never loved him, that he would never have had unprotected sex with a villain so she must have tricked him in some way in order to get pregnant. (That last one is at least supported by the confused timeline in which it is both 10 years and approximately 12 years between contraception and Damian’s first appearance, leading some to suggest later artificial insemination using Bruce’s sperm collected the night they slept together).

That’s one way to reconcile the various tropes that makeup Talia, but it’s one I hate. I hate that she went from eccentric but loving mother to emotionless monster in only a couple of years. I hate that her story is always one of tragedy or villainy.

For me, the key to writing a Talia who is sympathetic without being unrecognisable is her age. It’s never been established (as far as I’m aware) just how old Talia is. We know Raas is ancient. We know Damian is ten. Given that she appeared to be an adult in her first appearances, that puts her age at 30+. Beyond that, we have no idea, except that a lot of her behaviours make more sense when looked at from the perspective of great age. She kept Damian from his father for ten years, but ten years is an eyeblink if you have access to Lazarus Pits. She began a relationship with someone who was a child by the standards of his own culture, but to her, all mortals are little more than children, and he was a warrior who had seen battle - to her that it probably a far better measure of age than mere years.

Talia, as I write her, is a loving mother with very little idea of what motherhood entails beyond her memories of her own upbringing. She is at least 200 and considers all humans younger than their mid-40s to be little more than children. She kept Damian away partly because to her, ten years is nothing, and partly because she had no real guide for how Bruce as a mortal American human would treat a young child beyond the way he had treated Dick, Jason and Tim, and so waited until Damian was a skilled warrior before allowing them to meet. She is largely amoral, unlike her father, and her primary motivator is, above all else, love. Her life is defined by her relationships to other people by choice, because relationships provide anchor points in time. Technology might change, but from her point of view humanity has remained more or less the same. The reference points, the moments that mark out the years as different from one another, are her relationships. With Bruce, with Jason, with the lovers who came before both men and women (because my Talia is bi), and with her son. Her only son. The only biological child she has allowed herself to have in her long life. Keeping these people safe and well is her only moral code, but she isn’t a monster. She has no reason to be a monster. It offers no advantages (except occasionally when it is useful for protecting her loved-ones).

Her feelings for Bruce were genuine, she would have married him given the chance, but she was also willing to let him walk away, to leave her, because mortal lovers are always fleeting, it is something she has accepted about life before even Alfred was born.

Also she and Scandal Savage have hooked up in the past.

So yeah, this was a bit rambly, and my Talia may not be your Talia, but I wanted to have there here as I begin introducing her into Gotham Ghoul. This is Talia al Ghul as I see her.

Sidenote: I said earlier I was going to talk a little bit about Talia’s race. So. The way Raas collected bits of other cultures he likes and claims them for his own, his utter conviction that he knows what’s best for people better than they do themselves, the fact that we have no idea what his name is, the fact that most of his furthest flashbacks are set in Japan and China have lead me to headcanon Raas as not being Arab. Actually, I headcanon him as being white, and no one has the guts to call him out on it, although in at least one continuity his father is from China. Either way, I don’t think Raas is Arab. He chooses the Arabian peninsula as one of his bases for the same reason traders did - it’s a gateway between Asia, Africa and Europe. His disciples are primarily locals, and it’s them that give him the Arab title, which he likes enough to adopt. (In favour of this is the fact that none of his children have Arab names - Nyssa has an Arabic meaning, but it seems unlikely he’d call his daughter ‘Woman’. Talia is Greek, Nyssa may well be as well, and Dusan is Slavic). Talia’s mother is a local - Melisande is a French name, but it was also the name of a queen of Jerusalem in the 10th century, and I think it’s likely that that is what the writers were referring to when they named her. Alternatively, it may be an assumed name. Either way, Talia is ethnically half Arab, but the Arabian peninsula is her home in a way it isn’t ever really shown to be for Raas. The Cradle (located in the UAE) is her primary base of operations, and I write her with the assumption that Arabic is her mother-tongue. Damian is therefore ethnically a quarter Arab, although culturally it’s much more significant since he spent most of his childhood in the UAE talking to and working with Arabs, and it was the language his mother spoke to him most. He was raised to be totally multi-lingual, but Arabic will always be the language he has the greatest attachment too.

Top 10 Reasons Not to Support the Developer of Yandere Simulator (Yandere Dev/EvaXephon/Alex Mahan)

Yandere Simulator: A game with a good idea but with a very corrupt developer. Yandere Dev/Alex has become a epicenter of controversy ever since people discovered all of his dark secrets, causing him to lose supporters left and right and this list is dedicated to alerting people about his twisted personality and why people should NOT Support him.

And also because my previous list on this subject got taken down on thetoptens.com by a snob-nosed, dick-sucking, twat, I'm going to remake it with even more evidence again that little shit-licker’s master!

1. Yandere Simulator is a Revenge Act Against High School Girls Who Rejected Him

This is not only the biggest reason as to why Yandere Dev sucks but it also coexists with several other things on this list. Back in Alex's high school days he was constantly trying to get with several high school girls but ultimately got rejected - for obvious reasons. And so when Alex made Yandere Simulator - a game about slaughtering girls as a whole, he can feel like he's getting revenge on them by killing them in brutal, painful and horrendous ways. Disgusting! And because the male Senpai in the game is a self-insert of Alex and he made him so "perfect and flawless" and has a lot of busty, mindless girls swooning over him, Alex gets of recreate what he thinks his life in school "should've been". Alex if you are reading this: leave the internet for good!

2. He is a Pedophile

Is there any limitation as to how low this a-hole can sink?! Anyways there is a TON of evidence that point towards his pedophilia like in his cesspool of a game in where even though it takes place at a high school you get to look up girl's skirts, take pictures and sell them and Alex is planning to make it possible to get female students in his game get kidnapped and sold off to sex slavery! Theres also a pedophile teacher who's name is literally "indecent" in Japanese who is after your crush and on top of that nearly all of the girls in the game have unnaturally large breasts, some of them have boobs bigger than their heads. And when people called Alex out on this he said that all of the students are 18 years old, but really there are other grades in high school - four to be exact - and the age gap in practically all high schools is ages 15-18 on average. He only likes girls with large breasts as he once said "Does she have big breasts? Then why should I care?". He should be more worried about what women can do with their fists and feet if they get anywhere him if he keeps this up. He's also been having disturbing affairs with underaged girls as young as 14 years old and he knows that they're too young for him despite the fact that he says "he didn't know", he asked her for nudes and Alex even tried to defend pedophilia by calling it "a sexual orientation". He also hires a lot of former hentai artists like kjach to draw extremely perverted drawing of his characters and one of them has Iyano (you ready for this) getting raped by a dog. (face palm) And of coarse we can't forget about his "lovely" fan fictions. One of them being called "I Am Your Slave" which is about a submissive, dumb, woman who is a slave and is happy to be so - Alex's type of girl, and the other is "Life of a Sex Slave" which is about a woman who grew up as a sex slave and only knows how to live as one. I swear Alex here is making the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray books look like masterpieces and I thought that was impossible! There’s just no hope for this guy, he is just gone.

3. He Can't Handle Criticism

As we all probably know, when someone becomes an artist and no matter how well we do we can't exactly please everybody. And what normally separates a good artist from a bad one aside from their work is their ability to accept criticism and Yandere Dev/Alex is NOT one of them. He has attacked several people including my own sister for leaving anything other than praise or most especially: sad but true facts about his poorly made game that frankly deserve all the criticism he gets. If he finds anything on the internet directed towards him that isn't mindless praising he goes down the Donald Scum route and attacks the commenter, and he will ban anyone form his streams about his hilariously bad gameplay skills that don't praise him like a god. He often makes really lame replys like "You dirty SJW!"(real mature and clever) like what he said to my sister one time. But other times he sinks lower than that, a good example is when Yandere Dev banned a mod called the "Size Mod" from his game which allowed you to change Yandere-chan's height and a lot of fans downloaded it but some emailed Yandere Dev instead of the original creator, and Alex called the mod "stupid" and Stickman - a Youtuber who downloaded it told him that was very disrespectful and he told Alex to fu*k off to which then Alex replied by saying "No, you can fu*k off, go stick your dick in a beehive" I don't think he even came up with that insult himself and besides at least Stickman has a real dick! He attacks Kiwifarms.net a lot for telling the truth and there was this artist who used to be a fan of Yandere Simulator who goes by the username of "swoomzie" on PrettyUglyLittleLiar.net who used to draw fan art for Alex's game until she heard about how he loves to steal artwork for his game (Look at "He Constantly Steals From Other Source Materials" for examples) and when she confronted Alex about this and asked him to sign a contract with her to make sure she gets credited for her artwork, he got offended, called her rude and didn't what to work with her anymore. And when people criticized Ayano for being an emotionless plank of wood - same with her Senpai, Alex admitted that he didn't want to give her a personality because he was afraid that he would be criticized for giving her a specific personality. So basically he just admitted that he can't handle criticism and he seriously thinks that giving a character no personality is better than some personality? Why do you think everyone likes Yuno from Future Diary - the most famous Yandere of all time or - who a few people like - male yandere: Damiya from Beast Player Erin? It's because they have a ton of personality, same with virtually every character in Marvel, DC, Persona, Metal Gear Solid, Prince of Persia, Ratchet and Clank, the Tales games and the superhero megaseries that I'm working on myself. And finally another great example is when the original creator of Stop Yandere Dev on Tumblr who was an autistic (no insult) woman called out Alex and pointed out a lot of dark facts about him and Alex found out about this and called her an autistic b**ch. Yeah well f**k you Alex, you ugly, pasty Linguini look-alike! Anyone who uses autism as a slur for "stupid, retarded, freak" or whatever don't deserve to live, because thats talking down to a group of people with a slight mental abnormality. Most autistic people have a sensitivity to loud noises and bright lights and may experience reoccurring daydreaming, but they often have a higher IQ than the average person, are very creative and have a few different ways of learning and I should know because I'm autistic and I'm anything but stupid! I'm one of the highest graded students in the schools I went to and I'm doing a great job at designing my own series mostly because I don't rip off everything I like and I don't throw an Alex Mahan temper tantrum whenever something doesn't go my way or when I receive something thats less than praising. If you can't handle criticism, than you should stay away from doing anything on the internet but try telling that to someone who's whole life is the internet.

4. He is a Misogynist

Speaking on how he goes against what SJWs stand for he does not know how to treat or even cares about women in the slightest. For starters a vast majority of the girls in his game are oversexualized with massive breasts and are about as dumb as the guy looking down on them (Alex Mahan) and he loves to hire former hentai artists like kjech to draw the most disgusting, pedophiliac pictures of his characters and they are disgusting and unnatural to say the least. And he goes even further with his sexism to where he will pretty much call any girl he doesn't like a b**ch. He writes rape fan fictions like "I Am Your Slave" and "Life of a Sex Slave" and they're about downright stupid, submissive girls who Alex, Trump, the GOP and every deplorable degenerate loves! Plus the man in I Am Your Slave is an insert of Yandere Dev. His deplorable fan fictions make Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey look like Hunger Games and Shakespeare and I though that was impossible! Also he once said that he hasn't interacted with a woman in real life aside of his mom in over a year, gee I wonder why. Maybe it's because he does not know how to treat them properly and that he groups them based on breast size and good looks (Just like the evil orange he likes: Donald Scum) rather than personality, interests, intelligence, skills, social skills?! And that he considers flat-chested women to be deformed and not deserving of his worthless attention? He often slut-shames any woman who talks down to him and anyone who's "not good enough for him", after all he did say one time: "Does she have big breasts? Then why should I care?", DEGENERATE! Now I like hot and beautiful women too and I do admit that I like look at hot girls on the internet and would love to marry a beautiful lady one day, but I draw the line in the sand when it comes to his porn or hentai and I stay away from it. Plus I'm a strong supporter of women's rights and if a marry someone I want her to have some pride in herself and have a good personality as a whole like how all girls should be. If I found someone with the most perfect body but is anything like the women Alex writes in disgusting fan fictions than no thank you! And need I remind you that the female human species is just as important as us men, without one or the other there is no us, so why not treat them with dignity and respect just like how men have been getting it for several centuries? But of coarse the abomination know as Yan Dev who probably couldn't care less about women's rights if it meant saving his own skin just wants to see them as male accessories rather than real people. Screw you Alex, you sexist Trump-spawn!

5. He Constantly Steals Form Other Source Materials

Despite the fact that he mostly has volunteers working on his game that he doesn't pay, he still manages to rip off content after content from other game designers, video games, anime/cartoon shows etc. He likes to pleasure himself by watching, searching on the internet or playing something instead of working on his game and as soon as he sees something he likes, he'll take it, claim ownership and not credit or even mention the original artist. And even when we expose of him for it (like I've said on "He's a Liar") he'll say "It's just a place holder" TRANSLATION: "It's mine now suckers!" He just thinks that if he makes some slight adjustments like changing the color in one or two places, that automatically makes it his, if you get inspiration from somewhere, change about 50% of it so that way: 1. it can't be a rip off and 2. you show respect to the original artist/s. Like what I do for my own franchises! Examples of what he stole: - He stole Doug Clayton's grass texture 3 times! - He's stolen a lot of lines from Undertale. - Like I've said before on "His Characters are Horribly Designed" most of the characters are stolen Unity Store assets. - There's a character named "Fureddo Jonzu" (Fred Jones from Scooby Doo) - let me cry for you. - A lot of the hairstyles are stolen MMD assets. - A lot of the environments in the game are stolen like the gymnasium, the classrooms, the town outside the school, Iyano's bedroom and a few others. - The character "Nemesis-chan" was completely copy-pasted form someone else's work. - He stole a lot of assassination mechanics from Hitman. - He's planning to steal a lot of content from Persona 5 - a game from a critically-praised series with some of the best, most creative and most well-written characters of any game series! Honestly I'm highly surprised that no one has sued his sorry ass yet, if someone did though Alex probably won't be able to live with his parents anymore, and I'm okay with that.

6. Some of His Fans are a Basket of Deplorables

Of course I'm not saying that all of Yan Dev's fans are bad, in fact - most of them are innocent people who just find his game fun and that's that and even if they are aware of all the stuff that we say about him or even know that it's true they still show some dignity to us and just want to have some fun times with Yandere Simulator. But a minority of his fans are just disgusting deplorables that just have to say the most vile, bigotry, bullcrap in existence just because we have a negative view of Yan Dev and his games. And a lot of those particular fans are so loyal and submissive they will follow Alex all the way to hell and to which I hope they do because like I said: they're attack dogs ready to pounce at the first negative comment about Yan Dev they see. The best example on this is what one low-life commented on Oni's Tumblr page "Stop Yandere Dev" and that particular abomination said: "Should I get a penis for "Oni" on her birthday? She seems to really want one. Just a reminder- Tans "men" aren't real men. Why don't you go make someone a sandwich or some babies? That's all women are good for, other than tapping material. You should've never talked s**t about Devpai” Me to Yan Dev deplorable #36667-KKK: F**king degenerate! Two can play at that game - Say what you want to think about trans-men but they have real penises something you obviously lack, and you must feel safe in your mother's basement behind your computer as you are so ugly and gross no woman would never make you a sandwich or a demon spawn in your name and you wouldn't be able to say all that deplorable talk to Oni's face, for the fact that you are afraid of women because they are so much stronger than you and Oni herself could effortlessly bash your head in so hard it will come flying out your tight a**hole. And speaking of penises, how does Devpai's nonexistent dick taste? Keep sucking on it until you choke or get one of the many diseases Devpai is carrying as it will rid the world of one less problem we have to concern ourselves about! I really would love to leave that one comment to any Alex fanboy, I would love to.

7. His Game and Characters are Horribly Designed

Aside from the fact that Alex's game is like a hentai without the sex with brainless women that have breasts and butt-cheeks bigger than their empty heads and guys with di*ks so big that they will have to pee in the bath tub, that is if they can fit them through the bathroom door. His characters are by far the most poorly made shells-of-men and women i've ever seen! For starters most of his character's names are just really lame puns that more or less reflect what little personality they have, an example is Osoro which means "awful" in Japanese and heres a few more: - Osana Najimi (Childhood Friend) - She's not even fully implemented in the game yet. - Geiju Teuka (Artist) - Mai Waifu (Means: my female anime crush) - Midori Gurin (Green Green) - Sakyu Basu & Inkyu Basu ((Sound like "Succubus & Inkubus" )Obviously) - Mida Rana (Indecent) The game also takes place at high school but the students all wear sailor uniforms, only middle-schoolers wear them while high-schoolers normally wear neckties with blazers. Plus virtually all of his characters are stolen Unity Store Assets - which he says he's going to replace in the future but he won't, just watch! And on top of that, they all have even less personality then the Twilight characters in which their only character trait has something to do with their pun names. Also Yandere-chan (Iyano Aishi) - the character you play is described as an emotionless, dull, empty killer-in-love that "inherited" her Yandere trait from her mother which is NOT how a Yandere should be! Yanderes are solely motivated by emotion especially love and fear and will kill based off of their emotions if they see any potential rival in their crazy obsession over the man/woman they want to be with if it kills them. Alex loves Japan yet he knows nothing about them and their culture, and he knows about as much on making characters as Donald Trump knows about being a President, in other words: HE KNOWS NOTHING!!!

8. He Hates Social Justice Warriors

Social Justice Warriors or SJWs are good people and I'm one myself, their only goal is to stop all sexism, racism, homophobia, and just all forms of bigotry and prejudice in general so that everyone, no matter how they're born don't get treated as second class, as objects or even as criminals just because they're not white, straight, Christian men. The only people they don't support are actual criminals. And fun fact: people who usually hate SJWs are often racist, sexist, homophobic, hateful, Nazi-loving, KKK, fascist, deplorables like about half of Donald Trump's supporters as well as Trump himself and Alex Mahan (Yandere Dev) - who also supports Trump. Some SJWs may go a bit too far and take their ideals to the extreme to where it's white men above everyone else being reversed, but those "SJWs" are extremists and unfortunately they give the rest of the SJW's a bad name like "extreme liberals". But I know that it goes both ways, there are both extreme liberals and conservatives and they both have terrible ideals on how one or two groups of people "deserve" more respect than the others and normal SJWs are not like that, we are EQUAL RIGHTS not ethnic or gender dominance - because that wouldn't be "equal" now wouldn't it? And when you see all those stupid, unfactual anti-SJW memes and rants on the internet calling SJWs "bullies", "bigots", "racists", "criminals", "stupid", "hateful", "whiny", "cancerous" or whatever, those dumb memes and rants were made by REAL bullies, bigots, racists, and criminals that ARE stupid, hateful, whiny, and cancerous low-lifes! On top of that, Yandere Dev has been seen making friends with people on 4-Chan - one of the worst anti-SJW cesspools on the internet. And the people on 4-Chan talk like Nazis and KKK scum and Yandere Dev likes to pander to them about making Yandere Simulator the most anti-SJW game in existence and he's on a roll with that as it is already filled with, incest, misogyny, pedophilia and indecent exposure. Oh how I dream of the day when I can ban all anti-equal rights garbage from the internet, as well as Alex himself.

9. He's Notoriously Known as "EvaXephon" on Other Sites

When Yandere Dev is not working on his game for two minutes a day, he is doing terrible streams on other sites under "EvaXephon" by streaming video game playthroughs for up to 21 hours straight with horrendous gaming skills. I've seen some of his streams and he has played quite a few games that I've played myself and I'm SO much better than he is, in fact - for every time I've died in a level Alex has died like ten or even twenty times and if you suck at video games don't show it on the internet, unless it's for a comedy of errors. Anyways one such site he's been streaming on is Twitch and he often likes to leave links to his crumby streams and a lot of people hate him for it. On a side note: Yandere Simulator got banned on Twitch and while Alex says "It's those dirty SJWs" I'm sure we all know why it got banned in the first place, am I right?

10. He's a Liar

This may be one of the more "mild" cases of Yandere Dev's guiltiness but he does this often, like on a daily basis "often" and a lot of his fans believe him but you don't have to have a camera in his room to see what he's doing. Because he records himself doing other things! A perfect example is on how he always says that he works "very hard, nonstop" on his game but really he just works on it for 5 minutes a day and then spends the rest of the day streaming his crappy gaming skills for several hours straight, one time he did it for 21 hours in one day. And I know how he feels, after all I need "some time off" every time I finish one math question at school, my school was so brutal! I'm joking of course but other examples of when Alex lies is when we question him on how he doesn't pay any of his volunteers who work on his game for him but he says that he does. Yeah, and Donald Trump cares about Mexican and Muslim lives! (Not!!!) But probably the best example is when we point out how he steals something from other (real) artists or source materials and he either says that he stole nothing and it's his or he says "it's just a placeholder" but in reality he's saying "It's saying there forever whether you like it of not". - This will come back later...

Alright, bit of a ramble/rant incoming. 

How is it that DC and Marvel both have made the idea of Ghost Rider/El Diablo super lame? 

When I think of someone who would be called ‘ghost rider’ or ‘el diablo’ I think of a dude on a horse like he’s War of the Four Horsemen, all fire and death and terror. Unfortunately, Marvel’s original Ghost Rider was renamed Phantom Rider, and while he is a cowboy, he looks silly as all hell because he’s a dude in all white riding a white horse that is illuminated at night. Meanwhile, El Diablo was a whip-cracking outlaw type of old western comics, before they turned him into a weird anti-american gang member for a bit and then rebooted him as a whiny, clinically depressed criminal who makes up the least interesting member of the constantly shifting Suicide Squad. 

I admit, it probably seemed like a good idea to have Ghost Rider be a motorcycle riding badass back in 1973 when the character debuted. This is the year Magnum Force came out and became one of the most successful movies that year. You know, the sequel to Dirty Harry? So it’s obvious why someone might want to make a character with a flaming skull who rides a motorcycle. It sounds cool. 

Meanwhile, El Diablo debuted in Western Comics in 1970, and while he’s been used sporadically, the character wouldn’t make the impact that Ghost Rider did. Except El Diablo did the whole ‘spirit of vengeance’ thing first. In fact, I lump these two characters together because on paper, they’re the same character. 

The problem is that times have changed and the characters haven’t adapted. Bikers aren’t really ‘cool’ the way they were then. More than that, the trope is played out. And worse than that, both characters have fallen prey to the industry idea that all heroes must be whiny bastards. 

I’m not sure when making a character more ‘human’ meant making them complain all the time and making them entirely unlikely dickbags or crybabies, but it doesn’t work for heroes. It especially doesn’t work for heroes meant to be intimidating. Look, you can have Spiderman complaining, because he’s just a dude. Having Iron Man, billionaire playboy complaining is like listening to paris hilton complaining. It’s ear grating. The same goes for the rest of the Illuminati, Marvel’s attempt to collectively destroy all of their biggest characters by making them all unlikeable dicks. 

But Ghost Rider/El Diablo are in a different category. Because these aren’t characters weren’t entirely supposed to get behind so much as marvel at. They’re supposed to be objects of terror. And that all goes out the window when you attach them to people who absolutely do not fit the part. 

Look, in 1973 is was probably cool to have a character named Johnny Blaze be a counterculture asshole with a flaming skull and fighting demons. But decades have gone by and nothing about the character improved or changed with the times. And El Diablo’s horrible fuckup in 1989 as a reboot meant they didn’t use the character until 2008, almost twenty years later. 

And unfortunately, both Marvel and DC cast the same character again, though I have no idea if it was an accident to make the same latino youth character who takes on the power of vengeance and also rounds out the company’s ‘we totally have poc characters now!’ checklist. Of course, El Diablo was rebooted in 2008, and Robbie Reyes wasn’t created until 2013, so again Marvel was slow on the draw. 

Let it not be said that the problem with the character is that he’s mexican. Because honestly, that’s a great thing to use and dwell on and focus on. The problem is that the stories and character they’ve given to these characters fall into awful, tired, boring tropes. And when they aren’t doing that, they’re making the characters lame. Hey, let’s have El Diablo, a man calling himself the devil, be super haunted all the time and hate his powers and also totally complain all the time about something he did! That’s gripping right! Hey, let’s make Ghost Rider a teenager in a muscle car because that’s super cool and not lame right? 

One of the long lost things in comics is any sense of continued tone or impact. Characters should logically have impact when they are used. If you say that ‘this character is possessed by the literal embodiment of vengeance’ then this guy should be presented like he’s Jason Voorhees. He should be presented like he’s Judge Dread. This guy should be an unkillable, unstoppable dread inducing nightmare. This guy should make everyone reading go ‘oh shit’ when he shows up. But unfortunately, because comics water everything down, we’ve not had that from anything or anyone in forever. 

But a larger issue is that these comics really like to try and focus on the people under the spirit. Which is a mistake. Because no one cares about them. What’s worse, it’s almost always portrayed in the haunted/possessed way, wherein the character struggles with his inner humanity against a demon because oh woe is him he now has to kill horrible people and he can’t handle that. Again, this does not make a compelling character. No one reads Ghost Rider or El Diablo to listen to the human whine about having super powers. Again, this is another reoccurring trope in comics as of late. 

Part of the problem with the whole ‘possession’ thing is that it takes agency away from the character. Writers love the ‘chosen by the powers’ thing, but it’s far less interesting compared to characters that choose the powers themselves and aren’t corrupted by them. Characters that have a strict moral center and don’t deviate from it. 

Here, I’ll fix your character for you. 

Ghost Rider/El Diablo is a Mexican caballero turned catholic priest in the mid 1800′s after a life of sin and debauchery. He restarts his life, thinking he’s left it behind, when ore is found nearby, turning his small monastery town into a sinful mining town, where he must then deal with a demon that has been attracted to the town due to all the sinning. Said character faces down the demon and defeats it, but only after killing far too many people and seeing all the sin and vice that’s in the formerly peaceful and holy town. The demon, thinking he can at the very least make the priest give up his faith, says there will always be evil in the world and more bad men to summon creatures like him, and even if he finds them, at some point he too will die, and there won’t be anyone else to take his place.

The priest, after thinking a moment, agrees with the demon, which confuses the hell out of him to say the least. The priest cannot be everywhere and help everyone, and he is not strong enough on his own to combat all the evils of the old west. Thus, he forcefully binds the demon to himself and his person, taking its power to keep him alive and becoming a Spirit of Vengeance who seeks out and descends upon the most sinful of people, and demons when they appear. Thus, you have your flaming skull man on a flaming red horse, again, like he’s war of the four horsemen, which makes it all the more striking when he shows up somewhere in a modern context. 

See how easy that was? I just took all of the agency and gave it to the character and that creates character development. You have person with a clear defined character motivation and a direction, you have a side character in the demon who is along for the ride and scared shitless of the mortal that bound him on this plane, and you’ve got what essentially works as a buddy-cop action movie between a lawman and a demon. 

Again, a character named Ghost Rider/El Diablo should show up and scare people shitless. They should ride up on a flaming horse, with flaming hoof prints in their wake, and deal with people like you would expect them too. They should be treated like a big deal, which heroes these days often aren’t, because what you’re dealing with is a stone faced killer with a demon strapped to his soul come to pay you back for all the terrible shit you’ve pulled. You don’t need to give him fancy powers or anything either ( let’s get away from avoiding characterization by giving character fancy new toys thank you ), you simply need evil people for him to come across and for everyone else to doubt his will and sincerity only for him to come through because this is someone who purposefully took upon himself a demon and made himself a spirit of vengeance upon the unholy. 

This in contrast to the idea that the character is ‘cursed’ or ‘wronged’ or ‘regretful’ or anything else that you always see in our emo-avenger types that monologue endlessly about how unfair everything is and/or how they need to redeem themselves from some great tragedy. 

A character should make the conscious decision to become this thing. To take upon themselves all that anger and hatred and deal with it, rather than trying to get rid of it. No more of this slice-of-life teenage coming of age bullshit also starring Ghost Rider or our redeemed cartel gang member turned government agent. This should logically be a character that serves no one, follows no one, and when they arrive should make everyone take notice because it’s like death themselves arriving. Speaking of, stop making death a personified character who dates people. It’s not cute, it’s not funny, it’s stupid, and it diminishes what is ostensibly a force in the cosmos by making it a love interest. Stop it. 

Anyway, I think I’ve harped enough on how a character like this needs to have agency, that is to say, the character shouldn’t be tricked or harassed or pressed into service. This should be a character that takes charge and makes the hard decisions, moving beyond the ‘humans are weak and prone to giving in’ trope. 

Hell, it might work better as a female character. Have it be a nun who only wanted to live in the walls of a monastery far away from civilization only for it to come anyway and ruin everything and destroy everything she loves, making her decide that the only way to stop that from happening is to leave the safe walls of the convent and bring hell upon the sinners who deprive others of life and liberty? Again, the core requirement is agency. And the secondary requirement is that they must have a strong moral center. This should be someone who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be bought off, cannot be moved from their trajectory, because the only reason they have come somewhere is because something has brought them there. 

This of course sets up lots of fun stories about other heroes having to deal with them because this person is also judging them and oh by the way is not going to be a part of your little hero vs. hero squabbles because apparently everyone forgot heroes are supposed to fight villains and not each other. 

There, I’ve fixed your paint by numbers stereotype filled mess of a character DC/Marvel now stop ruining everything by trying to make it all morally grey and blob-like like whatever they make chicken nuggets out of.