Cthulhu is R'Lyeh hard to spell

but also...it would be extremely funny if the soldiers did come to life...but not in the way qin shi huang expects. they've had 2000 years to reflect on their situation and decide they're Mad As Hell, and Not Gonna Take It. while the emperor might be a ghost, his face lost to history, his un-openable tomb buried under a mountain, locked in the past and unable to move past his own failings in life, his pawns on the other hand are able to live on in the minds and hearts of people. in a way, they've taken on a life of their own, and are able to develop their own agency. they may be locked in time and space, but they have been able to see the world, because the world has come to see them.

Literally every version of his origin story I can remember involves him realizing that he can’t just treat the symptoms as Batman, he has to treat the root cause as Bruce Wayne. A huge part of the plot of “The Dark Knight Rises” is that his company is on the verge of bankruptcy because Bruce keeps spending all their profits on things like “clean energy” and “food and shelter for orphans.”

The opening of “Arkham City” shows him campaigning against mass incarceration because the majority of the inmates in Arkham City are not public menaces like the Joker, they’re desperate people with no other options, and Gotham should be providing them with legitimate means of stability rather than punishing them for having none.

Especially since the majority of his villains are independently wealthy people (doctors, lawyers, business executives) who are exploiting people’s desperation in order to get themselves henchmen, and the henchmen almost always have jobs with a living wage waiting for them on the other side of their sentence, and Bruce has a standing offer to pay out-of-pocket for the therapy of any of his villains whose crimes are the result of a mental illness (which Bruce is sympathetic to since he is mentally ill himself)

But what’s really damning about these posts is that a lot of them suggest Bruce should use his money to give the police the resources they need to deal with crime on their own, which makes it clear they’ve never actually consumed a piece of Batman media, since the issue with the Gotham Police is not that they’re underfunded. They have a bloated budget, they’re almost militant, and they’re so corrupt that they actually encourage crime, both violent and economic, because they’re on the payroll of the richest criminals. 

Absolute Wonder Woman

One of my pieces for the @absolutefanzine (which is available to read for free!! And is so cool and you should totally check it out)

The amount of ‘Kris is meant to be a self insert’, ‘Kris’s gender is up to the player’s interpretation’ and whatnot just make you wonder if these people have…played the game past chapter 1, actually not even past chapter one, this is established even before chapter 2.

total understanding with no love: a batman-joker dynamic emerges

Sky rods [modern cryptid]

Sky rods (or air rods, or sky fish) are a great example of a modern-day folklore creature, or a cryptid. Supposedly, these creatures are mysterious elongate animals that are occasionally captured on film but cannot be seen by the naked eye. They move at incredible speeds and live in the higher layers of the atmosphere. These creatures are supposedly between 10 and 90 cm long. The rods appear on old film footage, both home-made films and actual movies, but the actors and other people who were present always denied seeing them. Cryptozoologists immediately theorized that the bodies of these creatures are made from an unknown biological substance that is not visible to human eyes, but can be caught on camera.

In reality, they are an optical phenomenon produced when a flying insect (usually a moth) moves at high speed when filmed, giving the impression that a rod-shaped creature with propeller-like extensions (the wing tips of the insect) is moving around. These extensions are often described as undulating fins.

In 2005, the existence of the rods was disproved by the Tonghua Zhenguo Pharmaceutical Company in China: the researchers confirmed the presence of the rods with camera footage and capturing them with very fine nets. No aliens or supernatural jellyfish could be found in the nets, but they caught plenty of flying insects.

The third image shows the sky rods as they appear in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. I really love it when authors give us a pseudo-biological explanation of fictional creatures and cryptids like this. The rods inspired a number of fictional creatures like these ones, including Castlevania enemies for example.

Regardless, there are still conspiracy theorists who claim that the rods are real animals, some even claim that they come from outer space or that they are native to the sun. There are also theories that they are not biological at all, but tiny spaceships. Others claim that SOME of the rods were obviously flying insects caught on camera, but others were genuine sky rods. It’s all nonsense of course, but it’s fun to think about.

Sources:

https://non-aliencreatures.fandom.com/wiki/Flying_Rod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon) https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Air_Rods

(image source 1: cryptidz.fandom.com) (image source 2: Chr-ali3 on Deviantart) (image source 3: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean)