I Don't Know Any More than You

It's left up to interpretation. A lot of the conversation is, I imagine deliberately so.

Here's how the reveal goes down. This is shortly after the confrontation that kills Ulysess's siblings:

You can read Steph's answer to Tim's accusation as her reciting Batman's direct orders to her, meaning that she came up with the plan on the fly. Or you can read it as her admitting that everything was Bruce's plan, that he laid it out to her during their "Batman Talk," and now trying to explain his reasoning for it and, by extension, hers for going through with it.

Both readings are backed up by the events of the storyline. Scarab is the only element that Steph had to call in from the outside, and she just so happens to be the last criminal Steph took down as Robin so it's well-established how her mind could formulate that plan. Or it could be that Bruce went with Scarab as part of the plan precisely because she was familiar to Steph and he knew about the other moving pieces because he's Batman and being hyper-prepared for everything is his whole schtick.

Serenei of Lys why did you give your daughter a Westerosi name 🔍 why were you “cold and haughty” were you tired of the fake accent 🔍🔍Jon Hightower how do you even know some random foreigner from a conveniently extinct noble house 🔍🔍🔍 Jon why does she look like half your family JON 🔍🔍🔍🔍

Vic and Camille are both killed/driven to death by Vic's experiments, their rivalry leading to both their deaths (Camille to prove it doesn't work, Vic to prove it does), immediately after they get left by people they are using in professional/personal ways - Camille hires Toby and Tina to sleep with them, Vic dates Ali to get her to work with her on the heart mesh.

Perry and Frederick both die in the same warehouse, looking at the ceiling, waiting for death to come to them - Perry with a look of ecstasy, Frederick in terror. Both of them are in that warehouse because they've been humiliated by Roderick and are now determined to prove themselves. Both get led here by drugs. Both involve the mutilation of an innocent, Morrie. Both of them see Verna not as another character, but something like her true self. And there's the parallel between all the mercy that Verna offers Perry - the most she offers any of them, other than Lenore - and her glee in explaining to Roderick exactly why he deserves to die like this.

Me: It’s the Pirates of the Caribbean theme.

Him: Ah.

Me: Mashed with Carol of the Bells. On a harp.

Him: *stares*

the fall of the house of usher + seven cardinal sins (insp)

Lionel Luthor had three sons.

Lex, who he damaged beyond repair, molded, cut, struck, abused, bullied, coaxed, threatened until he was a monster that Lionel could respect.

Julian, who would have no mark of Lionel's failure as a father (which is why he is so fixated on the baldness, I think)--but died--sudden, chaotic, random, out of Lionel's power and control, like the meteor shower that scarred his heir.

Lucas, a mistake, an accident, a distraction, an opportunity? A way to turn a sour scandal into a great dynasty? He must get him away, from foolish influences like his hysterical mother. Lionel has visions of powerful warrior sons, perhaps in an uneasy alliance but with tension, a violence he bred into them. But then--just as he grasps for control--Lucas is dead, another marker of Lionel's failure.

Lex feels grief for his father and his lost brothers.

kory’s arc begins and ends when dick is involved. when dick isn’t involved and the company decides to push dickbabs, kory has nowhere left to go because george perez and marv wolfman didn’t perform the labor involved to make kory a woman in a relationship instead of the relationship. for god’s sake - what do wolfman and perez give her as a job? this ex-princess refugee, this survivor of war trauma, who could’ve been consumed by the desperation to not let another planet fall to the conflict that so shaped her. she could’ve been anything. she could’ve worked her ass off to learn of this world and nurtured the desire to protect it from what destroyed her home, became an outspoken activist - or it didn’t even have to be that large in scope, it could’ve been simply that she wanted to defend human rights as a lawyer on a small scale. kory has the history and the motivation for all of this. you know what they gave her?

model. she’s a model. because she’s the perfect girlfriend - princess, model. beautiful, sexy, implied to be independent but not too independent, goes where her (male-led) team needs her. her backstory is mined for plot. it’s not allowed to be an experience she lived, a thing she lived that hurts her still, that inspires her. no, of course not. this narrative is the thing that has dogged kory since her inception - it’s the thing that has held her back time and time again, as she was shuffled from meaningless team to meaningless team, and it followed her even when she finally got a series of her own, because no one cares enough to dig in deep and try and change how she’s written fundamentally. kory was written into every sexist pitfall imaginable, and fans have come to expect that narrative for her. her worth is scaled down to how much better she is for dick than babs. and no one gives a singular shit whether dick is actually good for kory’s longterm development as a character. why care about her? she’s just the girlfriend.

kory needs what barbara got to have - complex relationships outside of who’s she’s dating, and independence. babs gets to be a motherly figure to cass, babs gets to be close with dinah in a way that has ups and downs like a normal relationship, she gets to be defensive of her dad and close with the batfam even still. she gets to bark orders at batman, and batman listens. she gets to lead a team of women in an interesting way. babs is the rare female character given agency over her trauma - she gets to tell the joker to fucking suck it, and even though she’s done that she still gets to handle that moment not fixing her. babs got redeemed from a long, and frequently sexist history, and in a matter of years was transformed entirely into one of the most well-developed female characters in comics. her writing isn’t consistently perfect, and some writers plop her into the crazy domineering bitch/crazy ex-girlfriend stereotype, because she’s threatening. oh god, a woman, with development? complex emotions? trauma that doesn’t define her but also doesn’t affect her? lads, we’ve got to find a stereotype to tear her down -

Kontober day 9. It's hard being a big city boy stuck in a small town. Being unable to express yourself how you want to. Feeling trapped.

I didn't know Glastonbury Tor has a Welsh name

It's Ynys Wydryn, which Wikipedia says means "Isle of Glass", but my dictionary says more accurate would be "drinking glass", not just "glass" (as in glazier, or as in the lake that once surrounded it, if you'd like to be poetic)

Which I suppose can be used to put greater proof to the myth that that's where the Holy Grail is, being a drinking glass once

I have another dictionary (this one from the 1950s), which says gwydryn means "a small glassful", and that Stonehenge is called "Gwaith Emrys" - Emrys's work!

I'd also forgotten that the word for dragonfly is gwas y neidr, snake's servant

Apparently there are two words for butterfly - pilipala, which I knew, and "îar fach y haf", which I didn't - "little hen of the summer"?

Also the name for Liverpool in the 1950s dictionary is Llynlleifiad, and in the one from 2009 it's just Lerpwl, which is the one I knew

Trying to properly translate the older name, like you can do with place names usually, is a bit tricky

If I split it, lle ifiad - lle means place, or where something happened, and ifiad has no entry cs it's not a word

But, it'll be mutated from the vowel of lle, possibly, so it could be gifiad or hifiad, neither of which make sense either, but then there's a table of how vowels in the middle of words also can be mutated, so I don't know at all what's going on and anyway it's probably in like whatever the Welsh version of Old English is (Old Welsh?), so who knows

Certainly not me, I have the least amount of Welsh these days

Lleif sounds like it should mean something

The "vowel mutation and affection" table in the 1950s dictionary has "ei" being from "a, ae, ai", so llaf, llaef, llaif - that brings us back to little (llai, lleiaf, smallest, somehow from bychan meaning little), or to llafar meaning sound/speech, llafn meaning blade or youth (how does that mean both?), llafur, labour

The modern dictionary has blade and least and speech the same, and llef meaning voice

I don't know what -iad means really, but it's sort of a plural or a verb or smth? Idk the correct grammar word but like, cyfarch and cyfarchiad, greet and greeting, or cyfeiriad direction and cyfeirio to direct (yes I have just been reading through to find things that have that ending)

I do not one bit understand the connection there

So llafn really means, like, "a flat piece" I guess? Hence blade, plate and flake. But the "flake" definition is what then gives rise to the "lad/lass" part, because the child has sort of flaked off the parent. And then, you know, add various cultural understandings and dialects to it and the connotations change until you get what you do.

Lleiddiad meaning killer, right? That makes sense too, really, I mean, England

It's very interesting, this book, tho

As I said, my Welsh isn't very good but there's a lot here I didn't know

On subject of place names, tho, London, which I only know as Llundain, is also listed as Caerludd

So Caer = fortress, correct, equivalent to the Latin "Cester" (side note - the English Town of Chester is literally just called Caer in Welsh; direct translation. I like that.)

Classically, Llundain is the name because it's the Welsh corruption of Londinium, which was the original Brythonic Celtic name. But, here is an Alternative! Now, it could be that it's another example of a verbal corruption, so Caerllundain -> Caerludd. Those aren't actually unheard of. Our capitol damn city has one, actually, since Caerdydd was once Caerdyf.

BUT, those normally happen either because the letters are verbally similar (like f and dd), or because it's an example of hypercorrection where the incorrect new world seems to make more sense and so is presumed to be correct. That's what happened in the case of Cardiff - the original 'dyf' part was itself a corruption of the river Taff, but people didn't recognise it. But when it became 'dydd' it was suddenly a familiar word, and thus Cardiff's name went from the functional and banal "fortress of the Taff" to the fantastical and poetic "fortress of the day".

So I don't think it's happened here. In Welsh, dd and f are very similar, but dd and d? At the end of a word? Doesn't ring true.

BUT ha, step forward Welsh mythology.