Anika Skywalker

there’s a decent amount of talk surrounding the idea that comics, as we know them, are not a particularly good medium for telling cohesive stories. There will be retcons, there will be disagreeing authors and artists, and even the most lovingly crafted and well thought out run will eventually be undercut by something that comes after it, and will likely be undercutting something before it. This is just a fact of the medium, but honestly, it’s one of the things I love about it- because with this contradiction, with it’s indecisiveness, what we end up when a character has been being written for long enough is a portrait that’s… kind of closer to a person, in imitation, than a lot of other mediums can get to? A comic character’s lifespan can include so many small events and conflicting stories and different arcs and hangups, in way that’s very hard to achieve for a character from a play, a movie, even a standalone graphic novel. It’s a level of detail and layeredness that mimics how a person exists. Lives aren’t contained within a single narrative. They’re different people at different times, they have more experiences than any one person could know about. It’s… I don’t know. It’s just one of my favorite things about the genre

it does kinda feel sometimes like barbara gordon never gets any rationalization or deeper analysis of why she behaves the way she does while the men get endless amounts of it. like yeah she’s controlling and abrasive, her entire life was upended and violated while she laid on the ground helpless to stop it. she had to dig herself out of the fridge and the dc female character grave while bruce wayne and the joker shared a laugh. she built herself, her team, her place in the universe largely by herself. i think control issues make sense personally! i think being distrustful and jaded and aloof make sense! this idea of men being doylist and their actions being ripe for exploitation while women are watsonian and always right as they appear….

I think one of the best and unintentionally funniest worldbuilding aspects in Star Wars is the reasoning of why did Bail and Breha adopt Leia instead of having their own children. Leia is first established as the princess of Alderaan before she is written to be Luke's sister. So now we need to figure out how she got to Alderaan. She was adopted because she needed to be hidden and separated from her brother. Bail was placed there to be one of the only people who knew so there would be a reason why it was them who got her. They specifically wanted a daughter. Why? Because Alderaan is a matriarchal society, so they needed a princess. Why didn't the Queen and her husband have biological children? Because they can't. Why? Because the Queen can't have kids. Why? Because she got injured as a teenager and got her internal organs replaced and her body can't handle a pregnancy. How did she get injured so badly? She fell off of a mountain. How did that happen? She was climbing it. Why was the future Queen climbing a mountain in the first place? Because she needed to go through three challenges in order to inherit the throne and one of them required her to go through something physically impressive. Why? Because before that they just held a Battle Royale for all the heirs and the one left alive got the throne and they at some point figured out that maybe they shouldn't be doing that, actually. Oh, okay.

devin grayson's nightwing run finally getting reprinted and collected!! 🎉🎉🎉

honestly i think we kind of lost the plot on "therapy speak" as a bit of media criticism

i swear it used to refer to a story using a very formal, almost workplace safety-type tone of dialogue that's unintentionally jarring in context and feels like the writer is trying to make extra sure the characters come off as healthy and nice even though the language doesn't make sense contextually, now it seems to frequently refer to characters having any conversation about their feelings at all or even stories that are about therapy/are deliberately evoking that sort of verbage throughout as a stylistic choice. very odd.