DEAD

every

single

person

i reblogged this less than 2 minutes ago

every

single

person

i reblogged this less than 2 minutes ago

I’M SO MAD.  SO SALTY.  I CAN’T EVEN PLAY HIM.  I DON’T HAVE THE ABILITY TO LET ONE PEC HANG OUT.  

…I do have an undercut and am an older sibling.

IMMA GO BACK TO PLAYING THE OLD BITTER SOLDIER.

@samkyuuby @starsherit @alexalfurinn  If you guys wanna try.

Gravity Falls + colours

is a ball of stress 

is actually the most intimidating person ever

around the right people, his demeanor changes completely and he becomes just the sweetest, nicest person

he’s the king of dad jokes

lafayette knows this first hand since they are buddies

whenever george makes a joke around lafayette now, lafayette just shakes his head and sighs

lafayette still thinks the jokes are very funny

george knows this

lafayette someone once called him ‘the founding father of dad jokes’

he tells people that joke all the time now and he always gets either a groan or a laugh

most of the time it’s a groan 

when he was fighting in the war, he would always go around the camp to see how moral was

he would always tell dad jokes to the nurses who weren’t trying to save someone’s life or tending to a patient

they always genuinely laughed because that was the funniest thing they’ve heard since they joined the war effort

george always gets a sad look when they laugh

he tells dad jokes to the soldiers as well, especially the younger men

the younger men who are fighting in a war for the first time

or the ones who are injured or sick

when jefferson and alex fight, he tries to stay calm very hard

but he usually ends up having to have a chat with hamilton as to why you cannot have rap battles with someone you are supposed to be working with

he makes sure to tell jefferson as well 

they don’t listen

he knows a little bit of french and lafayette tries to help him learn and tells george not to get discouraged when he isn’t getting it

-

These are a few songs that remind me of Batjokes. :)

•Just like Fire - Pink •Wherever I go - OneRepublic •Criminal - Britney Spears •Crazy in Love - Sofia Karlberg •Monster- Imagine Dragons •Over and Over - Three Days Grace •Centuries - Fallout Boy •Addicted to you - Avicii •Sing me to sleep - Alan Walker •(Everything I do) I do it for you - Bryan Adams (because we all need a sappy love song in a list like that :D ) And of course: •Joker’s song - Miracle of Sound

Oh man, it’s probably because I’m a Tumblr Old™, but to me a crackship is something that has zero chances of ever happening because, for example, the characters have never met, or because the very idea is ridiculous, like for example Dumbledore/Giant Squid. 

Batjokes is… not a crackship. At all.

I mean, your bf isn’t wrong, exactly! In most Batman canons Bruce would definitely not let himself ACT on any attraction. There’s a reason it took me like, 10 chapters in HWA to guide him past the intense denial to finally go “uh, yeah, there might be something there.” It’s really tough, and I think it requires an acknowledgment that Bruce does have a dark side which he works very hard to lock up. If you prefer a characterization that relies more on him being a fundamentally good man, you’re gonna have more trouble fitting batjokes into it, especially with all of their history and J’s unfortunate penchant for hurting the members of the batfam. When I first got into the pairing I felt intensely guilty for it because I didn’t think there was a way to get Bruce to act on the attraction and still keep him more or less in-character, and I definitely understand why people think so. Apart from anything else, it would feel like a massive betrayal of the rest of the Batfam, and it all really comes down to how you characterize Bruce, and the circumstances you consider.

But!

The fact that it’s difficult to imagine Bruce acting on the attraction doesn’t mean that the attraction isn’t there. Let’s take a look at some of the evidence, shall we? Meta under the cut!

THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS holy shit this is everything and yes.

I’m not sure how persuasive all of the above is, but it’s helped me personally to reconcile my own shipping preferences and to work around canon obstacles to see if I can find a way to legitimize the relationship from Bruce’s end and still keep it in-character. Which is actually really important to me because a) reciprocation means we can move away from the gross homophobic “predatory gay” trope which treats J’s erotic fascination with Batman as just another proof that he’s EVIL and TWISTED and IMMORAL, and instead, his queerness can suddenly become a humanizing - if not potentially redeeming - feature that adds complexity and depth to his character, and Bruce then stops functioning as the straight macho man being threatened with the effeminate gay homo fatale so the harmful dichotomy disappears and the relationship shifts into far more complex and interesting territory

This is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeverything to me and I’m sorry I basically wrote an essay below but holy shit.

I think about the “homo fatale” designation a lot and how Joker really is in that role in canon. The danger of the femme fatale in noir is the implicit attraction. At her bleakest and most dangerous, she presents a threat that the hero will act on that attraction and compromise his morality. At her most tragic, the threat is that the hero will be unable to save her because their worlds are just too different and she’s locked on a path of self-destruction.

“if Joker was a woman we’d have had a Batman/Joker romance arc a long time ago.”

This is something I come back to all the time, and especially when comparing it to pairings like Bruce and Talia. A friend and I were recently looking at an extremely cool but very conventionally attractive custom figure of a female Joker design, and talking about how if he actually looked like that everyone would take for granted that they were sleeping together. In almost any mainstream discussion of Batman comics, I see people just assuming that Bruce has banged this or that attractive female character, or wants to, regardless of textual support. it’s never in question that Bruce has sexual or romantic tension with his female villains, even if they’re abhorrent people. And this ask and response got me thinking about shipping and how LGBT pairings (and even some straight pairings) have to struggle to have their legitimacy recognized even when deliberate storytelling choices are screaming “pay attention.”

This is such an excellent elaboration on pretty much ALL of the problems I have with people who keep denying the existence of subtext in shipping in general - and slash in particular - but especially in batjokes, from Bruce’s part as well as Joker’s. It puts it all into words so beautifully and insightfully and reading it was therapeutic. Therapeutic, I’m telling you!

I think the, often willful, denial bothers me so much in this particular fandom because batjokes is the first ship I got invested in that has so much canon subtext AND text supporting it. Previously the ships I was into had an interesting dynamic but no chances of getting that canon validation you so beautifully describe here, and I was perfectly fine with that, content in my own little fannish circle of creativity for the most part, using canon mostly as a springboard for the stories I wanted to tell or read about more. But with batjokes the evidence is all over the place. It’s not even subtle; it just smacks you right in the face the moment you get even a little familiar with their history. Again, I’m not saying that the tension necessarily has to be read as romantic, but then again - why shouldn’t it? If the coding is there, if the language is there, if the storytelling structure is there, why shouldn’t we take it one step further to its logical conclusion? This is why I get so worked up by people who either blatantly erase Joker’s CANON queerness to suit their own - purity standards, I suppose? And also by people who do acknowledge the attraction, or maybe the gravitational pull, is there, but insist on framing it in entirely platonic terms, like, “oh, sure, Joker is using the language of courtship and sex to frame his relationship with Batman, but actually he’s only doing that as a metaphor/to get under Bruce’s skin/to make people uncomfortable.” I had a (straight, white, cis male) academic colleague trying to straightsplain it to my face after a presentation I did on Joker’s queer-coding in just those terms: the relationship was never supposed to be romantic, you’re reading too much into it, you don’t understand the DEPTH and a queer reading is somehow cheapening the great conflict between them. 

And, like… no. No, it’s not. I get why a platonic reading would seem more likely, or preferable, to many fans, and if I wasn’t so spiteful I’d get behind it more readily, but the thing is, if the coding is there, why shouldn’t we build on that? Why shouldn’t we want to accept it for what it is, and co-opt it to transform it into something elevating rather than damning? Why do we have to assume that Joker is necessarily insincere when he’s making his declarations? (I mean, I know why.) Joker ticks almost every single item on the queer-code checklist. Effeminate body language? Check. “Flamboyant” sense of dress? Check. Slim, willowy figure plus grotesque appearance, giving off the sense of physical weakness compared to the more typically masculine figure? Check. Overy sophisticated speech? Check. Disdain for women? Check. Gets overly flirty around men? Fucking check. He even gets the box for “nasal, whiny voice” - his first cartoon appearance and the voice they gave him was classic queer coding. Not to mention the correlation of him being a villain, a threatening, disruptive force putting himself deliberately outside all social norms in actions AND appearance and encroaching upon the status quo to endanger and overthrow it; AND he’s branded with the then-acceptable form of vague fictional mental illness meant to serve as a shorthand for evil, because that’s how things used to be done back in the 1940′s and onward, especially under the Hayes Code when you could only have vaguely queer-coded characters in media if they were evil and/or “insane”. Ha-fucking-ha. The guy even chooses lavender as his signature color, which, along with pink and darker purple, was the standard color for coding gay men back in the day (the Lavender Scare, anyone?) For more insights on that I really recommend “The Celluloid Closet,” a fantastic documentary that breaks it down far better than I ever could here. But the thing is, he is ours, and has been for over 70 years. The same tropes that were meant to condemn him and so many other characters are the very tropes that allow us to take ownership over them and use them as vehicles for our own, explicitly queer stories and readings. Even though those tropes are upsetting, and yeah, they are. Terribly so. I get why many LGBTQA+ people would rather move away from characters who embody them entirely, believe me, I do. But personally, I’ve always had this preference of co-opting those characters and using those tropes to subvert them, and reclaiming those characters rather than erasing them, because it’s so much more satisfying to me, kinda like giving the bigoted media a giant finger, “fuck you, this character isn’t yours, they belong to me now and I’ll do what I want with them.” This is part of our heritage, for better or worse. This is how our people were able to slip queer characters past the censors. So when I see a character like Joker who is practically the poster child of that, then hell yes I’m going to take the most obvious reading at face value and run with it to reclaim his queerness into something positive and complex, which by the way is not cheapening anything, thank you very much, homophobes. It’s taking something that was rooted in bigotry and rebranding it to defy the culture that spawned those stereotypes to begin with, while at the same time celebrating the counter-culture that has been using those stereotypes for their own purposes for ages. And such a huge part of reclaiming that narrative is the other, traditionally straight-coded character reciprocating, because like I said before, then the dichotomy of bad=gay/good=straight falls apart, the status quo remains challenged, stereotypes are flipped on their head in the best possible way and we’re left with something we can work with to fit us.