I've been a part of the MariBat fandom for years now, and more recently become a part of the BatPham fandom since it grew into a full fandom of it's own.
In all that time I have been sitting on an idea for another crossover with DC that I think has just as much potential to become something entirely its own.
So, allow me to present the idea of Tales of Arcadia x Batman, which I've been affectionate calling the BATHUNTER crossover in my head.
More ramblings and fic recs under the cut.
So, first and foremost:
We have a bat bait, blue eyed, black haired, protagonist with trauma. Comparing this to the other two fandoms we've already hit the ground running.
We also have a reason for them to be in Gotham. At the end of Trollhunters we have Claire and Jim going with the trolls to find a new heartstone in New Jersey. Gotham is in New Jersey.
The trolls traveling across the country and founding New Trollmarket right in the Bat's territory doesn't even require an explanation beyond 'They found the new heartstone under Gotham City.'
The opportunities for identity shenanigans are still just as present as ever. If you stick to the full canon of the Tales of Arcadia universe, sans the time travel reset, then Jim, Claire and possibly Toby are both human and the bats could meet them as human civilians and as vigilantes who go around with glowing face covering armor and the ability to just disappear.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of canon past the first half of wizards. So I like the idea of Jim using a glamour mask to go to school while being a vigilante in his half troll form. Make the bat's even more confused.
I also feel like the dichotomy between the three rules of trollhunting and Batman's usage of fear as a weapon and no killing rule would be fascinating.
Just:
"Fear heightens your senses. Fear keeps you alive. Arrogance gets you killed."
-vs-
“You prefer to call me Batman. But the reason you can never escape me … is that my name is fear. And I live within you.”
“Always finish the fight.”
-vs-
"Heroes should never kill a villain, no matter the depths of his villainy."
They would probably agree on rule three, though: “When in doubt, always kick them in the gronk-nuts.” Since Batman identifying weakness in both his teammates and villains is a whole thing.
Lastly, the potential for bio-dad aus is fascinating to me. Specifically, not with Bruce as the bio-dad, but with Commissioner Jim Gordon.
For anyone who hasn't happened on Jim Gordon's backstory, allow me to give some context. Jim Gordon's wife was named Barbara Eileen Gordon. They had two children, Barbra Gordon and Jim Gordon Jr. Barbara Eileen divorced Commissioner Gordon because she wanted to get her son out of Gotham.
From what I understand, in canon she keeps the name and eventually moves back to Gotham after her son becomes a serial killer and inmate of Arkham Asylum.
But this is an AU, canon is what ever we want it to be and Jim Lake being the biological kid of Commishionre Gordon and little brother of Barbra Gordon aka Oracle has some real potential in the right author's hands.
Fic Recs:
Loose Lips, by NerdofSpades
Batman wants answers. Jim wants to be left alone, so he can go back to his not so normal life. Too bad those two things aren't at all compatible with each other. At least Jim gets some new friends out of all of this. Probably. Maybe.
One of my favorite fics in general. Jim becomes friends with the Young Justice team while trying to convince Batman that he's 'just a civilian'.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
three teenagers are loose in gotham (what will they do), by clayr_of_the_lillies
sometimes you become a vigilante deliberately. sometimes its twitter's fault.
aka a tales of arcadia/batman crossover that wouldn't leave my mind.
Very funny and well thought out. I particularly like this interpretation of Gotham's trollmarket and the friendship between the trollhunters and the batfam.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
In Their Blood, NerdofSpades
Barbara Lake saw an uncomfortably familiar pattern in the behavior of James Lake Junior. She saw it in almost everything he did these days. She had seen it in her friends growing up. She had lived it herself. She just wasn't sure how to help him, so, instead, she calls in a friend.
Another fun one by NerdofSpades. Barbara, having been Batgirl, recognizes Jim's behavior in herself. It's a shorter one but still a lot of fun
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
I'm also working on a couple of my own fics set in this crossover, but their still WIP for now
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Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
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You mentioned that Humans have great eyes and hair.
Would you be willing to elaborate as to why?
we have the most advanced eyes out of any mammal species, as far as we know!!! our ability to see the colour red is pretty special among mammals as well. we're REALLY good at seeing red!
I also love how high contrast our eyes are. our white scleras and vibrant irises are REALLY unique for a primate. most primates have scleras that are either not visible due to the size of the iris (tamarin monkeys, for example) OR that are extremely dark (chimps) because eye contact for most primates comes across as threatening. these low contrast eyes allow other primates to look around freely without sending the wrong message to others.
HUMANS on the other hand are WEIRD AS FUCK. eye contact has been CRUCIAL for our survival and communication for a bajillion years, so our eyes evolved SPECIFICALLY to have EXTREMELY VISIBLE signals for which direction we're looking. we're scary!!!! I love it!!!!
about our hair, it's just so crazy!!! we have the longest growing hair of any animal species. it can be so glossy, and there's incredible variation in texture and colour around the globe. I can't think of a single non-domestic species with such a huge variety in hair/fur/feather colour AND texture. our hair helps with sun exposure and thermoregulation, but it's ALSO been important in mate selection, because it can signify a lot about health and youth! not to say bald people aren't attractive. you are. love you.
I'm just really fond of the beautiful variety found in features that also have incredible functional purposes. form AND function. so cool!
This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:
You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else
I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free
You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them
There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it
But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all
This is important! When I first started doing the food distributions, I’d feel really weird about taking a leftover box of produce or an extra meal home. Then my volunteers started feeling weird about taking theirs and very quickly we developed a culture of “who really deserves/needs this food”? I realized what was happening and started taking a little bit home myself, and then everyone got much more comfortable with me and people who were originally just standing in the line to get food began volunteering and doing other things to help out.
This one thing that like clicked for me since doing mutual aid is that capitalism’s overproduction is so deep. The Food Bank in my city, in order to maintain its grants at certain financial volume, ends up giving families soo much food it’s like they handed out boxes that came direct from Costco.
10 cans of peaches, 2 5lb cans of crushed tomatoes, 6 loaves of bread, a whole box of tuna packets, 8 mangoes, 6 1lb bags of rice, 10lbs of frozen chicken tenders or fajita meat. And it’s like wtf? They gave this to a family of 4??? They can’t even fit some if that in their fridges/freezers half the time so it gets donated to us.
I had my neighbors stop me before last distro to hand me all those items, plus other things. This one of many small examples, that pounded in my skull, that if I want/need it, I’m taking it.
One of my partners hit me with some wisdom a few months back, “Are you trying to build a community that you dont get to be a part of?” And that shit just echoes in my brain these days.
watched three girls who reblogged its new blog mutual aidpost (made literally 15 minutes ago) already disappear from its notifs. transfems are not included in their pride :/
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So, I fell down the Project Hail Mary rabbit hole and, though this is probably woefully inaccurate, I can't get the notion of the Eridians not knowing the dangers of radiation out of my head. Therefore...
What if the Eridians have always believed that fertility issues are just a natural part of life?
Like, yeah, they make eggs, but the likelihood of them maturing enough to hatch from their metal shell is statistically unlikely, often requiring multiple attempts before one became viable. Even historically, when they buried them in the soils of Erid to protect them and keep their internal temperatures hot enough, there was still a low chance of them actually hatching.
So, it just became the norm.
Until Rocky and Adrian announce to Grace that they are trying for young, and Grace sees the newer technology that they are using as incubators, and he just- he just bursts into tears.
Because they've been using ionising thermal radiation to keep them warm.
They don't know the dangers of it. Their knowledge of energy is incomplete enough that they have been completely unaware that they've been dosing their young with small levels of radiation for years, pinning it down to just the "normal" when their young don't mature. Something entirely preventable, but they just don't know.
And their new, local, bleeding-heart empath decides then and there that he won't let another Eridian (especially not Rocky and Adrian's child) be subjected to the same fate by accidental ignorance anymore.
Grace, quite literally and rather alarmingly to his Eridian friends, doesn't sleep until he finds a substitute to keeping the eggs at a steady and high heat without the use of radiation. The first thought is "well, humanity has been heating things up since the beginning. Surely fire is the way to go?"
But, at first, it is difficult.
On a planet without biology similar to Earth, there is nothing like oil that can be used as a fuel. Everything is either rock or metal or quite comfortable at high temperatures, and, well, setting them on fire has historically been noted as quite difficult, nevermind in Erid's atmosphere. So, he somehow has to find a way to set, naturally occurring, liquid metal on fire-
And it is possible!
A gallium/aluminium alloy in water produces hydrogen gas, which is flammable... but it's finding a way to make it sustainable and controlled. Easy enough to be implemented everywhere.
Thankfully, with Grace's human understanding of combustion and safe-fire practices, paired with the Eridian talent of scientific engineering, they somehow manage to make a fully functioning, overly complex, 'heater' that functions well within the Eridian atmosphere.
Without radiation.
--And for the first time in Eridian history, their young start hatching. Consistently!
Without the interference of radioactive elements and an irregular heat cycle, the Eridian young are able to mature at a rate previously unheard of. And it is wonderful. Families begin to grow, and Eridian parents are no longer plagued with the doubts of never successfully having their young mature. The relief of a species is palpable, and the resulting celebrations last months into the Eridian year.
Grace, incidentally, becomes the Eridian equivalant of the 'Patron Saint for Children' for all that he has done for them, and is gifted title after title onto his name that he always gets embarrassed hearing.
Because he doesn't care about the titles or the celebrations done in his honour, he didn't do it for that... all that matters is seeing Adrian and Rocky's first child hatch without any issues.
And so it comes to pass that the Very Large class of New Pebbles that Grace teaches at the end of the movie? Were *all* incubated safely thanks to Grace.
Talking college experiences at work and casually mentioned "one of those semesters where you're so overloaded that you're basically living off gummy worms and five hour energy" and a younger coworker was like wtf why would you do that and I am absolutely heartbroken that the COVID-remote-college generation never got to experience the mid-November double-all nighter on campus slamming weird snake-themed energy drinks from Hmart debuggin gyour FUCKING robot that won't turn left. Tragic!!!
Or when you order delivery to campus and one Dominoes pizza is dinner for two nights in a row and you don't go home in between because your drone isn't following the red ping pong ball on a stick. Please just follow the ping pong ball its literally red.
We definitely learned some bad habits and wrong lessons but I'll be fucked if the experience didn't teach us how to lock the fuck in when the chips are down.
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