and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.
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Modern AU where Eddie is the frontman of one of the most popular heavy metal bands in the world and Steve is in the comment sections of every single thing he posts like, "Have we considered using a defuser?"
"Have you ever used curl cream?"
"Your hair looks like shit. Fix it."
"STOP BRUSHING YOUR CURLS OUT."
Eventually, Eddie responds to him like, "Fix it yourself, coward."
Steve tells him to come to Hawkins and he will. Eddie is just impulsive enough to do just that and...begrudgingly. His hair looks really good.
The whole time Steve is giving unsolicited hair care tips in his comments, Eddie's fans are there defending him against the haters (Steve).
Steve doesn't have a profile pic so Eddie's fans are accusing him of being bald and jealous.
Steve is just like, "Puh-lease. Jealous of what? Spilt ends? I have great hair. That's why I know Munson's hair looks like shit. I don't have any pics of me on here because I’m hot and you guys are weird horny freaks."
They call him a liar. Steve starts pointing out what's wrong with their hair in their profile pics and how they can fix it.
Eddie - after meeting Steve - can confirm that he's hot, has great hair, and is marginally nicer in person. He's just passionate about hair. It's literally in his name.
I'm gonna be honest, I fuck with a movie that's all about the collapse of a society that perpetuates certain morals and laws that itself is not willing to uphold when it comes to interacting with the rest of the world.
The Greeks used the excuse of a woman and the war of gods to wage war with an economic competitor, then showed up on their enemy's shores and broke their own laws of hospitality to win the war and ransacked the city and its people. The story of those actions traveled the world, making everyone afraid of the "people from the sea," even the Greeks who WERE the people from the sea.
The suitors cried about the laws not being upheld for them but were unwilling to uphold them themselves. The same society was terrified of this invisible enemy that would invade because of their lack of morals, unaware that THEY are the ones who broke the laws first. They are their own boogeyman. The fear of foreignors was never about the actions of foreignors but their own actions.
The gods haunt the narrative as an ideal. If they were confirmed real, then this movie becomes a warning against breaking away from "the correct religion." Instead, it is a warning of how mutual care and respect for your fellow man, whether gods exist or not, is the backbone of society, and without it, morality becomes something to twist and fear monger.
The gods couldn't exist in this adaptation, so a lot of the plot points involving the gods had to be changed or left out. "Nobody" only matters if Odysseus doxxes himself for poseidon to punish. (The crew members insisting that they definitely heard the cyclops say posiedon and jumping to the conclusion that he was poseidon's son and they were cursed was a great change in my opinion.) The wind bag can only exist if the gods exist. Athena can only guide Telemechus and Odysseus if the gods exist. ("Athena" potentially only being Odysseus's guilt for the preistess he let die who only shows up in times where his actions in Troy are thematically important was *chef's kiss*.) The Trojan War is only a war sanctioned by the gods if the gods exist. Odysseus being stuck with Calypso for so long needs another reason (the lotus) if it's not by the will of the gods. What would Circe and Calypso be like if they weren't eternal goddesses? Did the crew go to Hades, or did they just perform a spell that raised the dead?
Magic and Monsters can still exist without the gods, and everything else can be explained by superstition, nature, and bad luck. The ideal of the gods haunt the narrative so wonderfully.
I'm not a fan of Nolan's directorial aesthetic, but for the themes he wanted to explore, I think this was a fantastic retelling of the original. Accuracy isn't and shouldn't always be the goal. Sometimes, taking an existing story and making something new in order to speak to a different aspect of humanity is all we can really hope for.
This doesn't mean people HAVE to like it. There are plenty of "good" movies that I do not enjoy watching. However, acting like it's an objective thing to say that this was a failure of an adaptation is very annoying. It's a subjective opinion of art.
(source) its so funny how actual Greek and Homeric scholars are talking about this movie vs the fact that people on tumblr are acting like Nolan personally dug up Homer's actual bones and pissed on them
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The bow being plucked in the odyssey was the sound of a period accurate lyre by the way. Exactly like how bards would emphasize beats and motifs and movements in their retelling of myths. If you even care.
Cut 2 of the most famous adventures for 6 minutes of fleeing the giants
Cut the Nobody scene entirely
De-hottied Circe and made her overly-emotional and reactive and falsely accuse the men of being rape threats. No nymphs or magic besides the soup.
Had the Trojan horse portrayed as a war crime so bad it ended society and was deeeefinitely the worst and most dishonorable thing done in the Trojan war (cut the rapes from the sacking of Troy while still trying to make it a symbol of lost society so they just stab a lot of women and wax esoteric??)
Slander Menelaus and Helen. :’-] he did not drag her back as his slave queen they’re literally one of like 2 endgame-still-ok Greek couples. (Speaking of weird changes in the family, they keep Agamemnon killing his daughter, but totally leave out what he did to Cassandra)
Odysseus actively doesn’t want to get home to Penelope and Telemachus
Mentor is just some guy 100% of the time instead of usually Athena.
Odysseus is neither a wife guy nor sufferer of hubris (that is not my beautiful king that is not my beautiful general)
The gods just aren’t there. They de-god Calypso and also sort of do the lotus eaters as just her (but not. It’s bad). Hermes? Gone. Poseidon? Poseidon who. Zeus? Helios? Nah. Athena? You think so but no, that’s just Odysseus and his PTSD talking to himself.
The gods aren’t there but one of the messages is to give yourself up to God’s control and to let go of trying to carve your own path? Which Odysseus does??? Confusing and off target. 0s across the board.
They cut all the humor. No naked Odysseus. Not a laugh was had.
Odysseus won’t let Telemachus help him fight the suitors bc ‘you’d be exiled’ and then runs away with Penelope at the end instead of the remotely normal ending to the book. Why? I don’t know
I can’t tell you what it’s about bc even though it was 3 hours every scene felt like the sparks notes version, but my best guess is ‘it’s ok if society collapses bc it will rise again’???
Shot like someone who didn’t go to film school made it. Scene 1 Nolan was cutting to people every time they spoke I was dying. No audio off-camera so cringe. Also insane camera movements like did we need a push in for the 0.5 second cut to a servant listening in? Was that 0.5 seconds not gripping enough? Really??? Dude what are you doing
Why was Tiresias moving like a worm in the sand
The hunting dog got more screen time and character arc than Calypso
Every woman was handled badly. Every single one. Actually Clytemnestra was fine she was there for like 15 seconds but they were ok. Otherwise though just badly handled every single time and in gods’s bizarrest ways (what if Telemachus and Penelope fought over which one of them was good for the throne. What if Calypso wasn’t holding Odysseus hostage or sacrificing her eternal happiness by letting him go. What if Circe was a crazy emotional middle aged woman who sees all men as rapists and turns them into pigs for no reason but she’s neurotic)
seriously it’s so weird to get back to Ithica without seeing Hermes, Athena, or Poseidon once — but they’re not plot relevant, right?
Odysseus is personally responsible for the fall of Greek civilization bc of the Trojan horse trick. He basically nuked civilization. (Yes all of it bc that’s the only civilization at this time. What do you mean no it’s not that’s crazy I mean I’m p sure it’s just Greece)
Cut the whole ‘only my husband would know that’ thing with Penelope and the wedding bed
Stole the exact amount of one of Jorge’s songs you legally can
Didn’t let Odysseus go full feral in the finale
Not a Greek in sight in the main cast. Just lots of Americans and other Europeans. Really bad costume design too. And set design.
Literally start ‘the Odyssey’ with Odysseus home in Ithaca already. 98% is a flashback. First version of the Odyssey ever both thematically and literally not about going home
i thought the “this is the face that launched a thousand ships, although now it would maybe be five-hundred.” line was just an internet joke but apparently that's a line Menelaus actually says in Nolan's Odyssey??
Not only that the language itself sounds straight out of a marvel forcibly funny haha moment, but Menelaus? The Menelaus who all thoughout human history, from Homer, to Sappho, to Euripides, to Virgil, to Shakespeare, to Brooke, to Barth; from Classical vases to Medieval poetry to Reinessance art, has been known as the man whose sword fell from his hands at the sight of his wife after 10 years apart?
"What joy for me to hold my wife" Menelaus?
"He flung the sword away, and kissed her feet" Menelaus?
"I believe all. I understand nothing. I love you" Menelaus?
"I have no fault to find; my wife, he daughter of Zeus and Leda, is mine again, she whom her brothers on their snow-white steeds, whilst torches blazed, made my happy bride, but gods removed her from my home." Menelaus?
The Menelaus who was picked out of the suitors by Helen herself? The Menelaus who couldn't kill a begging Trojan so his brother had to do it for him? The Menelaus who rescued Odysseus and got out Patroclus' body? The Menelaus who volounteered to fight Paris one on one so everybody could go home? Who kept expressing his guilt about himself being the cause of war through every assembly he spoke at in the Iliad? Who after 10 years away at Troy, took his wife through a 7-year long journey at sea back home, where he reinstated her as the queen of Sparta? Who wept like a child in front of Telemachus recalling the war and his brother and all the friends he lost and the only consolation being his wife' gentle hand on his?
You want me to believe that man scarred Helen's face and called her only worth half the ships because of it?
I'm actually physically sick just thinking about it.
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Theo Hagan, a twenty-five year old, picked up a ringing phone at two in the morning and now he's an hour outside of town to pick up his drunk fifteen year old brother and his equally drunk friends.
He's tired. He wants to go to bed. He's a little pissed that none of these bozos had an actually plan on how they were going to get home when they decided to go to an out of town college party but..
This is a good deed.
This is a great deed because he'd prefer it his brother didn't die (so he can kill him himself) and because good things happen to those who do good things, right?
Wrong.
Theo just got sucker punched with, "You're like a dad to me."
"No," He says to the drunk teen in the passenger seat of his car. "No, Steve. No, I’m not."
"Yeah."
"No."
"You're my dad," Steve insists, slurs. Twists the knife in deeper and ages Theo twenty-five additional years. "Wish you were my dad."
"I’m your brother," Theo says because it's more or less true. "I’m like a brother to you. Not a dad."
"No," Steve shakes his head and then stops when the world shakes with it. "You're like - no, I mean. I wish you - I wish my dad was like. Was like you. I wish he was like you."
That was...better? Maybe. Not by much.
"Why?"
"You're nice to me," Steve says heartbreakingly simple. He takes a breath and then asks like every other overly emotional teenage drunk, "Do Tommy and Carol hate me?"
"No. If anything, they like you too much."
"They left me."
"They went into McDonalds to get us food before we drive an hour back home, remember?" He says, looking up to see where those idiots are and... "They're getting handsy. Great."
He lays on the horn.
Tommy and Carol stop kissing to laugh when Theo yells out the window, "Get in the car, assholes."
"Do you like me?"
"I love ya, kid," Theo says as Tommy yanks open the door to the backseat and spills in.
He reaches into the backseat to grab the food and to slap Tommy upside the head. He tells Steve, "You're my favorite."
he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.
Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”
The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.
To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.
The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.
White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.
So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”
At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.
White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.
TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.
Hey girl I love your workkk like LOVE IT and can I ask another Nicole/ Jecka like reader but like more… cannon accurate? Like don’t get me wrong I LOVE the independent reader but if you play the game you know that reader would rather sell crack then get a job on a dinner lol and they would more then gladly accept Damian’s money, hell, shamelessly ask for more, or go and try to blackmail Bruce with what they think faux information (him being Batman) only to be right at the end and then being like… oh shit. We can make a bank out of this. Like those girls would be jorking (badly mind you) for a villain if the pays good enough lol like those girls are UNHINGED. And while I do adore that fic you did it’s a bit OoC. Please please do not take this badly. I’m being genuine when I say i love your fics.
Okay I am CACKLING because you are so right and I love you for this correction. Nicole/Jeka coded reader is a completely different beast and I was writing her too soft.
Net Positive
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You meet Damian Wayne because he throws a birdarang at someone two feet from your head, and you drop your groceries.
Specifically, you drop the eggs.
Six dollars and forty cents, gone. Splattered on the Crime Alley pavement like a tiny yellow tragedy.
The guy he was aiming at — some low-level something, you don't ask questions in this neighborhood, it's a survival trait — runs. Damian lands from wherever he came from with the particular energy of a very small person who has been trained to kill since before he could read, looks at the egg situation, and then looks at you.
"You were not supposed to be there," he says.
"I live here," you say.
"Crime Alley is an active patrol zone."
"Crime Alley is where I buy my groceries because the bodega on Fifth doesn't have the good hot sauce." You look at the eggs. You look at him. "That's six forty."
He stares at you.
"My eggs," you clarify. "You owe me six forty. And actually, the bag ripped when I dropped it, so let's call it an even ten because there was bread in there too, and now it's on the ground."
Damian Wayne, aged seventeen, heir to one of the largest fortunes in the continental United States, looks at you for a long moment with an expression you will come to recognize as his recalibrating face.
He reaches into his utility belt.
He produces a hundred-dollar bill.
You take it immediately.
"Keep the change," he says, like he's read that line somewhere and is trying it out.
"Obviously," you say, already picking up the non-destroyed groceries. "Same time next week if you want to make it a regular thing."
You walk home.
Behind you, you are almost certain Robin is standing in the middle of Crime Alley, having some kind of experience.
He comes back.
Not next week — three days later, which you note but don't comment on. He lands on your fire escape at ten PM like this is a normal thing people do, and you open the window because your apartment has no air conditioning and it's August and the window was already open.
"You live here alone," he says, looking at the apartment with the expression of someone who has never seen water damage before.
"Congratulations on your detective skills."
"It's not safe."
"Yeah, Crime Alley's rough. I've noticed." You're making ramen because it's Tuesday and Tuesday is ramen night, not because you can't afford other things, mostly, but because you like ramen. "Did you come back to tell me that, or did you want something?"
He looks at you.
"I don't want anything," he says, in the tone of someone who wants something.
"Okay." You stir the ramen. "Fire escape's yours then."
He stays for two hours.
You don't ask him to leave because, honestly, the company is fine, and he's seventeen and clearly has some kind of rich kid socialization issue, and also at one point he fixes the latch on your window that's been broken since March, and you weren't going to turn down free labor.
He leaves at midnight.
He comes back on Thursday.
The blackmail attempt happens at the three-month mark.
In your defense, you'd been putting pieces together for a while. The Robin visits. The Wayne name. The way Damian moved, the way he talked about his family, the very specific comment he'd made once about his father's crusade, like it was a real thing and not a metaphor.
You'd done some research.
Publicly available research. You hadn't hacked anything. Technically.
You present your findings on a Tuesday over ramen because the timing feels right.
"I know your dad is Batman," you say.
Damian's chopsticks stop moving.
"That's a significant accusation," he says, carefully.
"I have a whole thing." You gesture at the folder on the table. "Timeline of Batman sightings versus Wayne family public appearances. Photo analysis — your dad's jaw is very distinctive; someone should tell him about that. Plus, you literally showed up here in a Robin costume, and your last name is Wayne, so."
Damian looks at the folder.
He looks at you.
"What do you want?" he says, flatly.
And here is where a normal person might say nothing, I just wanted you to know that I know, we can trust each other now, something emotionally intelligent and relationship-forward.
"Forty thousand dollars," you say.
Damian blinks.
"That's — "
"I've done the math. That covers my rent for two years, gets me out of this apartment, pays off my remaining debt, and leaves me a cushion." You fold your hands on the table. "I'm not greedy. I'm not asking for a million. Forty thousand is reasonable."
"You're blackmailing me," Damian says, slowly, like he's testing the word.
"I'm presenting you with a mutually beneficial arrangement. I keep your family secret. You compensate me for the service."
"That's blackmail."
"It's a service fee."
He stares at you.
You wait.
Damian Wayne, who has been trained by the League of Assassins and the Batman, and arguably Alfred Pennyworth, who is scarier than both, looks at you across a bowl of ramen in a Crime Alley apartment with water damage on the ceiling and says, slowly:
"You're serious."
"As a heart attack."
"You could be arrested."
"For what, having a folder? This is all public information." You tap it. "I haven't hacked anything. I've done journalism."
"This is not journalism."
"It's investigative."
Another silence.
"I need to make a call," Damian says.
Bruce Wayne arrives at your apartment at eleven-thirty PM in civilian clothes with the particular energy of a man who has heard something unbelievable and come to assess it personally.
He looks at you.
He looks at the folder on the table.
He looks at Damian, who is sitting on your couch, eating the rest of your ramen with the expression of someone who has decided this is no longer his problem.
"You," Bruce Wayne says to you, "put together a dossier on my identity from public information."
"Folder," you correct. "Dossier sounds like I work for someone. I'm freelance."
"And you attempted to blackmail my son."
"Attempted implies failure. I'm still at the table."
Bruce Wayne looks at you for a very long time with an expression you genuinely cannot read, which doesn't happen to you often and is mildly alarming.
Then he pulls out a chair and sits down.
"Walk me through the timeline analysis," he says.
"...Sorry?"
"The sighting timeline." He nods at the folder. "Walk me through it. I want to know where the gaps are."
You stare at him.
Damian, from the couch, says, "I told you" to no one in particular.
You walk him through it.
Bruce Wayne listens. He asks three questions, all of them specific, all of them smart. At one point, he takes out a pen and makes a note, which means you've correctly identified an actual pattern gap in their public appearance management, and Bruce Wayne is taking notes from your ramen table research.
"The charity gala cross-reference is good," he says, almost to himself. "We've been sloppy about the October window."
"November too," you say. "There's a cluster."
"Mm." He looks up. "You have good instincts."
"I know."
"The blackmail attempt was stupid."
"The blackmail attempt was financially motivated, and I stand by the reasoning even if the execution needed work."
Bruce Wayne almost smiles. It's very brief. You clock it, though.
"Here's what I'm going to do," he says. "I'm going to write you a check."
You sit up straighter.
"Not forty thousand," he says.
You sit back down.
"Sixty," he says. "Because the November cluster is genuinely concerning and you found it from a Crime Alley apartment with no resources, which means you're either very good or we're very bad, and I prefer to believe the former." He looks at you steadily. "In exchange, the folder goes away, you sign an NDA, and you never do this again."
"Define this."
"Blackmail. My family specifically."
"What about consulting?" you say.
A pause.
"What?"
"If I found this much from public information in three months," you say, "imagine what I could find if I was actually trying. For you. Paid." You look at him. "I'm just saying there's a version of this conversation where you walk away with an asset instead of just a liability management situation."
Bruce Wayne looks at you.
Damian, from the couch, says "she has a point" in a tone that implies he's been thinking this for a while.
"You tried to blackmail me," Bruce says.
"And now I'm pitching you. It's called a pivot."
The silence stretches.
"The NDA covers everything," Bruce says finally. "What you know, what you find, what you're paid. Everything."
"Understood."
"You report to Alfred for administrative matters. To me for assignments."
"What about Damian?"
They both look at you.
"He's here every Tuesday and Thursday," you say. "That's just a fact we should probably acknowledge."
Damian looks at the ceiling.
Bruce looks at Damian.
"Alfred will contact you tomorrow," Bruce says, standing. He picks up the folder. "This comes with me."
"I made copies," you say.
"I assumed." He tucks it under his arm. "Burn them."
"After the check clears."
He stops.
Turns.
Looks at you with the Batman face, which he is technically not wearing but is absolutely making.
"After the check clears," you say again, pleasantly.
Bruce Wayne leaves your apartment.
Damian stands up, puts the empty ramen bowl in your sink, and says: "I told him you'd do that."
"Told him I'd do what?"
"Hold the copies over him. He thought I was underestimating you." He picks up his helmet. "I wasn't."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"It's a statement of fact."
"Still counts."
He leaves through the fire escape.
You sit at your ramen table in your Crime Alley apartment and look at the space where Bruce Wayne just was.
Sixty thousand dollars, you think.
Plus a salary, presumably.
You pick up your phone.
The check clears on Thursday.
You burn the copies on Friday.
You keep one. Obviously. But that's just good practice and also insurance, and also you're not entirely sure you trust a billionaire vigilante whose son you technically blackmailed, so.
It lives in a safety deposit box at a bank that is not in Gotham.
Just in case.
Alfred calls Saturday morning at nine sharp, which tells you something about Alfred before you've even met him.
"Miss," he says, "I understand we'll be working together."
"Looks like it."
"I've prepared the necessary paperwork. There are a few items I'd like to discuss regarding professional conduct expectations." A pause, perfectly timed. "And I understand you're in the market for a new apartment."
You sit up. "I am."
"I've taken the liberty of identifying several options in a slightly less — " another pause, gracious this time — "dynamic neighborhood. If you'd like to review them."
"Alfred," you say.
"Yes?"
"I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"Indeed," Alfred says, with the warmth of someone who has decided something. "I rather think it might be."
Three months later, Damian is on your new couch — nicer building, no water damage, the good hot sauce from the bodega on Fifth is a twenty-minute walk but worth it — and you're showing him what you've found on an Intergang cell that Bruce had assigned you last week.
"This connection is circumstantial," he says, pointing at your laptop screen.
"It's not circumstantial, it's triangulated."
"Those are different things."
"They can be both."
"They — " He stops. "No. They cannot be both."
"I'm going to need you to trust my process."
"Your process found my father's identity from a ramen table."
"And got me sixty thousand dollars, so."
He makes the face. The recalibrating face. You know all his faces now.
"The connection is interesting," he allows, which, from Damian Wayne, is basically a standing ovation.
"Thank you."
"Don't be smug."
"I'm always smug when I'm right."
"You're always smug."
"I'm right a lot."
He looks at the screen. At your notes. At the work, which is good, genuinely good, the kind of work that has made Bruce Wayne say hm and good catch twice in the past month, which Alfred has informed you is high praise.
"You're useful," Damian says.
"To the Wayne family crime-fighting operation."
"Yes."
"For a salary."
"Obviously."
"This is the best job I've ever had," you say.
"You tried to blackmail us into giving it to you."
"And it worked." You pick up your coffee. "That's just good initiative."
Damian is quiet for a moment.
"Don't tell anyone how you got this position," he says.
"I'll tell anyone who pays me more to keep quiet about it."
"That's — that's blackmail again — "
"It's a service fee." You smile at him. "You should know the difference by now."
He steals your coffee.
You let him, because you've found, over time, that Damian Wayne's version of you're my favorite person in a given room is expressed entirely through property theft and mild insults, and you have apparently become fluent in it without meaning to.
Outside, Gotham does what Gotham does.
Inside, you find a second Intergang connection that isn't circumstantial or triangulated, but is both, and send it to Bruce with a note that says you're welcome before he's even asked.
He sends back: good work.
You send back: annual review is next month. Just a reminder.
People are often in disbelief that I WILL spend the extra 10 seconds to refuse all cookies. Don't track me to advertise to me!!
People are shocked I take the time to remove all the litter at the end of a url. Remove everything starting with "?si=..." Don't track me!!
Email had a link? Remove all the utm_campaign=... bullshit. Don't track me!!
Install an adblocker. "this action requires certain cookies turned on" Oh yeah? In all but the most necessary circumstances, that's too bad! Guess I won't be using your website then! Goodbye. Don't track me!!
Have you ever been sent a post from say, tiktok or instagram that says "join [x person] who has shared this post with you on our app"? That's what the "?si=" does.
Let's say a friend sent you a funny post about guitarists on Instagram. When they shared it, it got sent with the IG version of the tracker, instagram dot com/reel/whatever?igsh=trackingID. When you click their "igsh"-included link, it tells instagram that your friend shared the link, and you clicked the link. It has linked your identifiers (your IP address, your account if you log in, general things about you like your location (from IP), the time of day) and key interest points from the reel that was shared to you that you clicked on, to draw an "anonymised" profile of you. It also links you to the person that sent you the link, telling IG (or others) that you both are "in the same network". (This allows them to possibly advertise things that may be "shared interests" between you.)
Next, cookies. Allow Instagram to use cookies? Sure. Now what happens is, say you close the instagram page and open a new browser tab and go to google. Cookies allow "tracking history across the web". This means IG is allowed to talk to websites you went to after visiting them and exchange information. So when you go to Google, instagram knows you're on Google. Further, IG can (and does) perform "handshakes" with the next site, which might futher request information about what you saw before coming to their website. Instagram tells google you're a person from [city] who has just been looking at reels about guitars. Voila! Suddenly you're seeing music related ads.
This is the equivalent of walking out of a grocery store and having a strange man follow you silently to go back to the shop and report on where you went after doing your groceries. Not just the next shop you went to: every other place you went to, and everything you looked at in every other place, for the whole week.
The supposed purpose of this is when you next enter the grocery store, they can have your milk of choice in the aisle closest the entrace for you. So they say. Why does my grocer need to know I like guitars? They have nothing to offer me that could be remotely to do with guitars. But maybe they can put up an ad on aisle 1 about an ally store of theirs that has paid to put up advertisements in their shop.
When a business does it, it's seen as a more aggressive KYC ("know your customer"). If an individual did it, it would legally be called stalking.
On the principle of laziness, we are handing over so much more information about ourselves than most shops would have any use for in a million years. When I post on instagram, it shows me the countries, age range and genders of my audience. Personally, this information is of no use to me. It is being compiled for me anyway. In CASE I ever need to blast ads that overlap with the "interests" of my audience. And even when it's far more than I need, the pathways are already in place: you don't need your own henchmen to track your audience for you. Instagram has all the big data mining tools to do it for you.
Stop handing over your shit to them! Use an adblocker! Clean those links! (look into firefox extensions called things like "clean urls" or "remove tracking") Remove those tracking IDs! It doesn't matter whether the profile they build of you is truly "anonymous" or not. If they have everything bar my physical body through the internet, am I truly anonymous? If they can pinpoint me down to my location, my daily internet usage habits, can draw a profile of my age, gender, job area and much more using "educated guesses" (big data/models), then am I truly anonymous?
Advertising is not benign! It is surveillance! Take out 10 seconds from your online life to build a few good habits. They go a long, long way. You should be actively hostile to survei advertising.
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If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
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