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Some fanart of @starry-bi-sky 's blood blossom prompt and fic. Featuring a bat-notyet-dad and the personification of childhood trauma. The fic is called "Late at night, when the nightingale sings".

THANK YOU.

I’m honestly glad I was not the only one skeeved out by this because honestly - I’ve been wanting to say it for years, but I was always terrified that someone would say I was just reading into it too much.

I mean…let’s be frank (especially if we are talking about parallels to rape/sexual assault):

Tony was a playboy - he was not shy about his drinking, sexual history, or lifestyle. He had garnered a reputation for it. While fun loving and a good time kind of guy, he makes sure that consent is present during any liaison.

Here’s Obediah - this huge wall of a guy, acting like a friend and mentor. It gives him an in to be close, touchy-feely under the guise of a friend. Tony trusts him, hence why the closeness doesn’t bother him. That’s just how Obie is! Right? Right….

Tony has a traumatic encounter that changes his entire life….and no one takes him seriously. Pepper, Rhodey, Obediah - they are all guilty of trying to tell him that he just needs to sit back and get over it/get his mind straight/threaten to walk out on him because they think he’s crazy.

Huh….what does that sound like? Sounds like dismissal - a regrettably loathsome reaction many have towards victims of trauma and while not malicious (except for established douchebag Obediah), it can make bad situations worse and gives Obediah the perfect in for Tony’s downfall (the injunction, claiming it’s for his own good, all that jazz…exerting a shit ton of power over Tony and simultaneously trying to strip Tony of what power he has left)

To make matters worse - the scene itself where Obediah assaults Tony: Tony is alone. He is vulnerable. Obediah overpowered him, incapacitated him, but left him fully aware of what was going on. He penetrated him without consent (the mechanism literally punched in and pulled his “heart” out), gas lit him to hell and back by using not only his own past but his father’s past to justify his treatment bring “deserved”…..and then leaving him broken and for dead.

The reason a lot of people didn’t view it that way: we don’t normally see a man - especially an outgoing superhero type - being stripped of his agency in a brutally visceral manner. Its s shocking scene to begin with….but it gradually gets worse when you put it through the lens of a rape victim.

(yes i spent way too much time making that.)

When Tony gets back from Afghanistan, gets out of the car with the burgers, Obadiah has at least one of his hands on him the entire way into the building. As someone else mentions – he buttons up tony’s shirt which - yeah tony has a busted arm, but he unbuttoned it relatively easily – so the creep factor still applies. and then you’ve got the other examples too. Also the fact that they’re business partners//mentor/mentee//father/son dynamic …. and obadiah deadass calls tony shirtless. like i dont know much about grown men but im pretty sure thats not that common even among friends. 

and anyway if we look at the other characters who touch tony in this movie, it’s rhodey and pepper and christine. Tony in this movie doesn’t initiate touch nearly as much – he usually reacts to it (e.g. even though he’s the ‘playboy’ christine is the one who takes the lead in sex. rhodey is the one who initiates almost all of their contact, etc). after this movie that changes. You can definitely see him start to initiate almost all touch, except with pepper and rhodey (e.g. him poking bruce, him slapping steves hand off him, but putting one on steve). this is definitely a way of asserting contol over a situation – idk if the writers did it purposefully…probably not, but it is interesting. one could argue, i suppose that afghanistan/torture is the cause, but….i think him being scarred by obadiah is more likely.  

also, Obadiah used tony’s name. A Lot. We don’t really think about it bc with the Avengers it’s always last name, last name, last name. (the ones who call him tony are easy to notice – fury, pepper, rhodey, sometimes steve). But Obadiah uses Tony’s name a lot more than seemingly necessary. And we all know calling people by their first names is a way of acknowledging them as a person, but also it also indicates familiarity/fondness aka a bond. Someone compiled a video of it. 

I’m actually quite upset with Pepper in this scene because Tony sees Justin approach and whispers to Pepper “Don’t leave me” and she still walks away. 

At one point Justine is literally leaning on Tony and Tony mutters “god that’s awful” as he tries to pull away. Putting his sunglasses on so that no one can see his eyes.

It is only a few minutes later that we see Tony testing his blood for toxicity levels and decides to take over driving his own car in the race. This could just be seen as an attempt to just be reckless, but it is also a desperate need to assert control over something when he just escaped a moment where he was once again stripped of his choices and support by the people around him. 

Cause I’m always shocked when Obadiah calls Tony in Afghanistan, and he’s

half naked

in bed

calling Tony m’boy!

I’m always appalled. This always struck me as flat-out harassment, exactly the insidious kind you don’t know how to report, cause men can be topless, right? and it was a business call? and nothing lewd was said, so I guess it’s not really harassment?

And Tony reacts exactly the way women do, which is playing it off like a joke even though you know it isn’t. “Why aren’t you wearing those pajamas I got you, lol?” It’s funny now, right? He knows I’m uncomfortable and that I sort-of called him out for being shirtless on a business call? That’s surely enough, right?

Obadiah exists in that nefarious little sludge-hole of deniability of harassment, and that’s what makes him such a disgusting—and incredibly significant—character.

Of course, what was supposed to be a short term service industry job before he lived for his art has bloomed into just being his life, and life as a poor artist is never as romantic as one imagines. While the cost of living of Bikini Bottom is low enough that even a frycook can be a homeowner, it's not quite so low that he can afford the luxuries he was used to growing up.

His view of the Working Class as the downtrodden masses were rather tattered by years of living between SpongeBob and Patrick, who were not so much temporarily oppressed intellectuals as they were, well, SpongeBob and Patrick.

Still, through thick and thin he's never gone back on his decision to leave the money behind. The great irony is that he is ignorant of his greatest achievement—his superiority to Squilliam isn't turning a bunch of randos into a functioning Marching Band or turning a burger joint into a fine dining establishment, it's having the strength of character to look at all the advantages Squilliam had and choose to leave it behind.

Which is all to say, sometimes Ma has to call Clark to come and find the cow before it makes it too far down the interstate. Sometimes the cow is in other farmers’ fields looking for Clark. One time someone picked the cow up and actually took it a farm not far from the suburbs of Metropolis.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

and promptly became obsessed with chapter seven

so i HAD to illustrate it

ENJOY (pt 1)

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