i want so badly to like this scene because on the surface it has so many elements that could have and might have worked if they were implemented any differently but god it's still such a surface level display of a plot that's been hanging around since season one.
like yeah, she would be! persephone has not seen her rapist since he threatened to expose the photos he took of her during the assault, and it caused her to break down and run away. she knows he's manipulative, she's seen first hand how apollo has warped and twisted so many people to hide his crime, she knows he's powerful and dangerous. even surrounded by so many other people, the nineteen year old girl who was asleep in her bed is still terrified of apollo.
i have zero issue with this part - in fact, i really sympathized with persephone here. the idea of not only having to play nice with your abuser, to pretend to give them an ounce of respect or kindness they do not deserve, but knowing they are not sorry for what they did, knowing they want still to hurt you in some way? you can be queen of the underworld or the mortal realm or of all the gods, and that is still a horrifying prospect.
but then we run into this:
and it's not a bad sequence, or a problematic one; the issue is that persephone has not done any of the work to get to this point.
and by work, i'm talking about therapy, about sitting down and talking to someone about this on her own terms. she had one therapy session where her assault was tacked into the last five to ten minutes of the session; there is no indication she's ever gone back. she's been confronted on her assault - hades, hera, artemis, eros, and hermes have all found out about it without persephone telling them, or wanting to tell them, and hephaestus is aware (which it seems persephone does not know) because he deleted the photos of her assault. hera and hephaestus literally saw her assault in those photos. all of those people and instances are outside of persephone's control; she has never, not once, told any of her friends or her husband of what happened to her of her own choice. in at least three of those instances, she had to comfort the other person who is finding out about her trauma.
and that leads to another issue, which is that persephone has categorically refused to bring apollo to justice. in the past, when apollo had leverage over her, and she was still coming to terms with what happened to her, it was understandable that persephone didn't want anyone to know what happened. the problem is that in the time between her rape and current time, apollo has tried to kill one of her close friends, brought demeter to zeus in exchange for persephone's hand, attempted to kill the king of the gods, and is now weaponizing the deadly winter to become king. at least three members of the olympians know persephone was assaulted, including the queen of the gods. persephone has witnesses and backup and power, and she is still not using it to put apollo away.
so this promise to protect herself, to protect the nineteen year old girl who was alone with a monster - it rings a little too hollow for me. because persephone isn't protecting herself, she's running from herself. she's running from who she used to be and what she once was and what led her to that point. and as so many abuse victims can attest to, running often feels like the easiest thing, and the most protective thing. but at some point, you have to stop running, because it isn't protecting you - it's wearing you down.
persephone doesn't need to run anymore, and as much as i like to trounce this comic and all the narrative choices, i say this with a lot of compassion and remorse: this isn't protecting herself, and i want better for her.
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Au where one day Daniel Thomas Fenton, 16 years old, retired ghost vigilante finally decides to tell his parents about the Accident when he was fourteen.
It… doesn’t end well. To say the least. Physically? Danny’s fine. But it blows up into a huge argument that ends with Danny getting disowned. And Danny, sick and tired of the years of neglect and fear and hate that’s radiated his house for years. Well, he just leaves. He doesn’t want to be part of the Fenton Family, he wants nothing to do with it.
He changes his name. Daniel Thomas Fenton to Thomas Nightingale. Before he was born, his parents asked Jazz what she thought her brother’s name would be. Two years old, she said Tommy. So when Danny was born, he was named Daniel Thomas Fenton.
Danny might not wanted to have been connected to the Fenton family, but he still wanted to be connected to his sister. He leaves town, but they keep in contact. And he stays in touch with Sam and Tucker too. They, along with Jazz, helped him change his name.
For the sake of continuity, I’ll keep calling him Danny.
A few months after Danny leaves Amity Park, he catches news from Eli. His little sisterdaughterclone contacting him to let him know that she snuck into Vlad’s to cause some mischief, and discovered that he was at it again.
He’d cloned Danny again. And this time it looked like it might be a successful boy. He was a baby. Danny rushed over to Vlad’s as fast as possible.
It wasn’t hard to break into the lab. Vlad was as cocky as he was stupid, and Danny had long since learned his tricks. The baby was being cared for by the vulture henchmen that Vlad used. Who were about as competent at taking care of a baby as the three fairies were in Maleficent.
Danny stole all information about the clone — how he was made, what Vlad did. Everything.
Turns out, the baby was more Danny’s son than he was a clone. Vlad had somehow rubbed two braincells together hard enough to have an epiphany of some sort. Rather than use Danny’s unstable DNA to make a clone from scratch, he used Danny’s DNA and an unnamed girl his age to make him.
(Safe to say, Danny was seriously creeped out.)
He also, somehow, figured out why Eli came out as Danielle rather than Daniel. It was the same reason that Danny’s suit went from white to black and his hair black to white when he went ghost. It was the ectoplasm’s weird inverting properties. Vlad had tried to make a male clone, but the ectoplasm he used inverted to make a girl. So, he tried the same thing, and instead tried to make a girl. The ectoplasm made the baby girl into a baby boy.
He had also, Danny seriously bet it was unintentional, somehow made the baby completely, utterly human. Well, almost completely human. The little boy was liminal in the same way Jazz was, with the minuscule changes to match. Sharper canines, a small ghostly sense, and eery eyes.
All in all, the baby was useless to Vlad. He didn’t have the powers Vlad wanted. Which Danny bet dollar to dollar was the biggest drawback to the egomaniac.
Well, what one crazed maniac found useless, Danny found he adored. It didn’t take long to dispatch the vultures, and Danny found himself hovering over the baby’s crib, unsure of what to do as the little boy’s bright blue eyes stared up at him with innocent wonder. He didn’t even know to fear strangers yet.
“Hello,” he said softly, and lowered his feet to the floor, changing back from ghost to human. “I’m Thomas.” He’d developed a weariness to his original name after Dan, and after his disownment, disliked it entirely.
The baby latched onto Danny’s finger with a gurgle, and that was it. Close the book, the end. Danny’s heart squeezed itself in his chest, a low coo trapped itself in his throat. And with hands that had never held something so small before, he picked him up.
“I bet he was gonna name you Daniel, wasn’t he?” He asked, trying to remember what the safest way to hold a baby that couldn’t keep its head up was. He cradled the baby to his chest. “He’s crazy. Don’t worry, I’ll take you with me.”
The baby just stared up at him, one chubby hand crushing his shirt. Danny couldn’t help but smile, now he knew why people always got so mushy around babies. There was so much to love about them. “I’ll come up with a better name.” He said, and walked away from the crib — there was probably something in Vlad’s lab that helped the baby. Some kinda diaper bag or something?
As he looked, he wracked his head for names. As well as that, he tried to think about what to do moving forward. The baby wasn’t like Eli, who was independent enough that she traveled the world and did whatever she wanted. He was a baby. Tiny, vulnerable, dependent. And legally, he didn’t exist.
“Why don’t I call you Bruce?” He said aloud, looking back down to the baby. Bruce. He liked the name. Bruce just looked up at him, and then tried to eat his shirt.
Danny didn’t think it was possible to fall in love so fast. “Okay, Bruce it is then.” He was smiling ear to ear. “Hi, Bruce.”
He found a diaper bag soon enough, it was near Bruce’s crib, tucked on it’s side under a chair. Danny slung it over his shoulder, switched forms, and flew out of the mansion
…
First thing to know about taking care of babies; it was hard. Danny flew miles from Vlad’s house, intangible and invisible, before he finally stopped at a gas station. He switched back, and then called Jazz
Who… immediately tore into him for making such a reckless, impulsive choice to go willingly into Vlad’s house
(Eli was a snitch)
(But not a big enough snitch apparently, she left the surprise baby to Danny to talk about)
And after the subsequent tearing into, Danny told her about Bruce
“What are you gonna do with him?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t just *leave* him. He’s so small Jazz.”
“Are you gonna keep him with you little brother?”
“…”
“…Just until I can figure something out.”
“I’ll send you some articles about taking care of babies then.”
Danny undeniably gets attached
He swore he’d figure something out by the end of the week. One week stretched into two. Two stretched to a month. And then a few months. And then Bruce was learning how to crawl, and he was babbling.
And he was just as attached to Danny as Danny was to Bruce.
Danny was all the way northeast by then, finding himself in Gotham. He was seventeen now, almost an adult in the eyes of the law. He was going to stay a week, if even that long, in Gotham.
And then he saved an eccentric elderly couple from being mugged. And by the end of the week he was staying in the elusive Wayne Family Manor as a special guest.
The Waynes were childless. They’d had tried for years to get a son, until eventually they gave up on it. But if you looked at their younger portraits, you’d think Danny was theirs by birth.
Days turned to weeks to months to nearly a year. And then more. Bruce was walking now, and he called Danny ‘daddy’ and he was still just as clingy as he was when he was on bottles.
Danny adored him.
And the Wayne couple were so kind to him. Danny had waited for weeks for the other shoe to drop. Nobody this rich was this kind, at least not anyone that Danny had encountered besides Sam, and Sam’s family were guppies in a pond compared to the behemoths that were the Waynes.
There was no other shoe drop. The Waynes never expected anything from Danny other than he ate well and slept well and that he stay as long as he like. They didn’t force him into attending anything, not their rich people parties or events, nothing. They bought him clothes and let him decorate his room, and spoiled Bruce positively rotten.
Danny quietly, where no one but his thoughts could hear, started to think they were better parents than the ones who gave birth to him. It changed things.
On Danny’s eighteenth birthday, the Waynes gifted him adoption papers. Danny couldn’t have grabbed his pen faster.
Danny Fenton became Thomas Nightingale, and Thomas Nightingale because Thomas and Bruce Nightingale.
Then, finally, Thomas and Bruce Nightingale became Thomas and Bruce Wayne.
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"now she even gets to parade around wearing that Uchiha crest like the trophy it is to her, while having done nothing to earn it!!!"
She's literally an Uchiha do you expect her NOT to wear it???💀 sakura haters get a brain challenge
Ah, yes, hello anon.
No time to chit-chat, let's break this down:
The fact that Sakura has that symbol plastered everywhere, even when Sasuke himself either never wears it or does so discreetly, is proof of how much of a trophy he is to her.
She doesn't love Sasuke. No, she doesn't love him, but she does love his status, the influence, the aura that comes with the Uchiha name.
Does she even know the truth about his clan? Is it even confirmed? And whether she does or doesn't, you realize how, well, not okay it is for her to wear that symbol so casually?
If she does know about his clan, then why is she okay with burying it under the rug? Why has she not raised a single concern about it ever? The fact that she would take no issue with Konoha, the system or just the injustice happening to the supposed love of her life, and still have the audacity to wear that crest is revolting.
And if she doesn't know? (Something that wouldn't be surprising, considering she didn't even know if he fucking wore glasses) Then that's a testament to how little she cares. And how little Sasuke cares too**. Because she could never truly understand who Sasuke is and why he's done what he's done, if she doesn't know the truth. And that she never cared to ask? It's either that she's delusional enough to assume she already knows him (which she doesn't; she knows the made-up idealized version of him) or that she doesn't truly care about Sasuke at all.
Plus, does she even truly understand what the Uchiha symbol represents? Does she, again, even care to learn?
Either way, she looks like a horrible person, and doesn't deserve nor has she earned the right to parade with that crest everywhere.
Sure, she might be an Uchiha on paper, but she shows no true respect for the clan, the symbol, and her husband.
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**In case you don't get what I mean here, anon, I'm saying that if Sasuke doesn't really care to tell her, well, that puts into perspective how few the fucks he gives about what Sakura thinks of him are. And if he doesn't tell her because he doesn't trust her, then shit, that might just be worse.
Anyhow, I love how you didn't even bother addressing any of my other points. Kindly saying this, don't even bother. This isn't an invitation to, I'm not interested.
(And I say that in an entirely neutral and good-natured tone, I actually feel very guilty the moment I say something even passively mean. Forgive me though, I can't resist sometimes)
And please, spare both of us from any escalation of this argument. We see things differently, it happens, it's a waste of energy ,especially because I'm right, you're wrong and maturing is realizing it /jk
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