Opinion Freedom

Witch: And that is?

for an example when bruce tells damian alfred's death is his fault, it's bruce's struggle with grieving and blaming his kid and saying the wrong thing at the forefront, not damian's devastation and self-blame at hearing that. when damian walks out at the funeral after he gets blamed again and bruce does not defend him or even say anything, it's bruce's grief over alfred that is rendering him unable to react that is centred, not the kid leaving in tears even as babs yells at bruce for not saying anything.

it's not that dick, jason and tim's perspectives always get centred in comics where bruce is displaying such behaviour but that they at least get that in their own comics where their perspectives get centred and they are allowed introspection or mental monologues. their comics where bruce is written to be an asshole just to create angst for them (dixon's nw, rhato, can't really think of an example for tim in regards to bruce atm but the sentiment stands) at least get to exist. with damian this rarely happens in comics even where he is centred. this is even more blatant in the fandom.

Yeah it's like... I feel like Dick is allowed to get justifiedly angry at Bruce a lot more than Damian without being demonized for it. Even when Bruce isn't being abusive but is being kind of a loser.

Jaosn has a bunch of angst in rhato i can't bring myself to care about b/c it's written terribly and by scott lobdell

WRT Tim I don't think Bruce is generally portrayed as consistently abusive to Tim. Like there was that stupid Tom King plot point I've heard of but haven't read* but that's all that's popping up.

Overall its frustrating b/c just... the way fraction is writing Damian is so much like he has to apologize for existing, for being 'a hard kid' which. is a terrible message to send and also doesn't really fit damian (he wouldn't be apologetic, he might angst about it but he reacts by withdrawing or in ways that are unpalatable to whoever he wants the approval of often). and it's interesting b/c you go back to 2009 era batfam and this is present there as well, just with less angst about it... like everyone acts like it's hard to put up with damian, like he's just a kid you deal with, more focus on how he annoys the adult characters than how he feels.

I cannot remember if I was going anywhere with this anon... but anyway! thank you for sharing the observations!

Jason fans only have badly written or out of character bruce to utilize and its both from poorly written events or moments. rhato, in THAT scene (rooftop confrontation) that even they acknowledge is so ridiculously ooc, even for bad dad bruce. and the fear chip from Gotham war, which EVERYONE HATED, storywise and plot device wise, cause they did nothing with it, and it's so disproportionately punishing to him in comparison that people naturally felt the tim favoritism from a mile away.

Tim fans have to make up their bruce whump material cause it doesn't really exist in Canon. Most whump is stuff taken out of the necessary context or just making him more pathetic than he should be. I think there's like a couple minor scenes that could count, but then they have the narrative and him justify it as needed for the mission and all part of the plan anyway. So not whump if he never breaks. RR2009 don't really count since a lot of it is self inflicted, which is just general whump. Not bruce whump.

Damian should have a lot of whump material right now, but a good chunk of it is constantly being excused by the narrative and the fans or is being outright ignored for less interesting plot lines. Even more sad is it's often fans who are only just learning about the character, are misinformed/only base it on the new52 movies/bad fandom simplification, and don't know to look and research deeper to see where the potential is.

(Also like dick doesnt need Bruce whump. He's fine as an independent adult vigilante who's got his own problems that aren't daddy issues)

I'll confess lots of fandom whump also seems kind of... bad to me. Like yeah damian has been treated unfairly by the narrative and Bruce but I don't want to see him have a conventional fandom crying jag and being comforted by some boring older brother figure. Hes going to react how he does in canon.

But to clarify, I'm talking about at least unique conflicts that stem from their relationship with bruce/batman. Like, when I say dick's drama. I was talking about like when he first became nw or when he and bruce are initially mourning jason. Like conflicts that would naturally occur because of this progressive sequence of events.

It's why tower of babel is probably one of my favorite stories and why I'm so pissed everyone took the wrong lesson from it. Jason from utrh as a meta commentary and a naturally frustrated son who was promised violence from his father at one point and wasn't given it. That's a natural conflict to come from Jason's resurrection, just done with a lot more drama and theatrical energy.

for an example when bruce tells damian alfred's death is his fault, it's bruce's struggle with grieving and blaming his kid and saying the wrong thing at the forefront, not damian's devastation and self-blame at hearing that. when damian walks out at the funeral after he gets blamed again and bruce does not defend him or even say anything, it's bruce's grief over alfred that is rendering him unable to react that is centred, not the kid leaving in tears even as babs yells at bruce for not saying anything.

it's not that dick, jason and tim's perspectives always get centred in comics where bruce is displaying such behaviour but that they at least get that in their own comics where their perspectives get centred and they are allowed introspection or mental monologues. their comics where bruce is written to be an asshole just to create angst for them (dixon's nw, rhato, can't really think of an example for tim in regards to bruce atm but the sentiment stands) at least get to exist. with damian this rarely happens in comics even where he is centred. this is even more blatant in the fandom.

Yeah it's like... I feel like Dick is allowed to get justifiedly angry at Bruce a lot more than Damian without being demonized for it. Even when Bruce isn't being abusive but is being kind of a loser.

Jaosn has a bunch of angst in rhato i can't bring myself to care about b/c it's written terribly and by scott lobdell

WRT Tim I don't think Bruce is generally portrayed as consistently abusive to Tim. Like there was that stupid Tom King plot point I've heard of but haven't read* but that's all that's popping up.

Overall its frustrating b/c just... the way fraction is writing Damian is so much like he has to apologize for existing, for being 'a hard kid' which. is a terrible message to send and also doesn't really fit damian (he wouldn't be apologetic, he might angst about it but he reacts by withdrawing or in ways that are unpalatable to whoever he wants the approval of often). and it's interesting b/c you go back to 2009 era batfam and this is present there as well, just with less angst about it... like everyone acts like it's hard to put up with damian, like he's just a kid you deal with, more focus on how he annoys the adult characters than how he feels.

I cannot remember if I was going anywhere with this anon... but anyway! thank you for sharing the observations!

Jason fans only have badly written or out of character bruce to utilize and its both from poorly written events or moments. rhato, in THAT scene (rooftop confrontation) that even they acknowledge is so ridiculously ooc, even for bad dad bruce. and the fear chip from Gotham war, which EVERYONE HATED, storywise and plot device wise, cause they did nothing with it, and it's so disproportionately punishing to him in comparison that people naturally felt the tim favoritism from a mile away.

Tim fans have to make up their bruce whump material cause it doesn't really exist in Canon. Most whump is stuff taken out of the necessary context or just making him more pathetic than he should be. I think there's like a couple minor scenes that could count, but then they have the narrative and him justify it as needed for the mission and all part of the plan anyway. So not whump if he never breaks. RR2009 don't really count since a lot of it is self inflicted, which is just general whump. Not bruce whump.

Damian should have a lot of whump material right now, but a good chunk of it is constantly being excused by the narrative and the fans or is being outright ignored for less interesting plot lines. Even more sad is it's often fans who are only just learning about the character, are misinformed/only base it on the new52 movies/bad fandom simplification, and don't know to look and research deeper to see where the potential is.

Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Obviously there are black string players. We just don’t see them because they “don’t look like” string players.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

She is what interests me in either of you

Like why are you even here if not for her story bro

This leads to a triple reasoning of 1) more dynamic, 2) more “deserving”, and 3) forbidden homosexual relationship to have the two guys leave the boring unworthy hetero female lead for each other just to subvert expectations.