Crossover Chaos

commissioner gordon: Harley and Ivy have hijacked an AM radio station and taken the employees hostage

batman: what are their demands?

commissioner gordon: they haven’t issued any. they, uh.

batman:

[commisioner gordon turns on the radio]

harley: —you gotta walk away, sweetie. His family sounds completely toxic, if not outright emotionally abusive, and he’s too enmeshed to see it.

caller: no, you’re right. you’re right. I gotta do it.

harley: you got this, honey. now, stay on the line a minute, I’m writing down some the names of some books for you and you can get those from Ivy after we’re done. okay! our next caller —

[commisioner gordon turns off the radio]

batman: what station is this?

commisioner gordon: WGTM.

batman: the one that rebroadcasts rush limbaugh?

commissioner gordon:

batman:

"My cat keeps attacking my feet."

"How often do you play with him?"

"Not as much as I should, but he has a basket of toys right there where he can reach it."

Cause the guy's whole deal is him lashing out at society for rejecting him because he has a skin condition (ignoring the cannibalism in certain adaptations), which means radio would be perfect for him. People can't see him, they can only hear him, and I imagine he has a sort of warm scratchy voice that sounds like he chainsmokes and it feels warm like an old wool blanket

Maybe he tells stories, maybe he does interviews, maybe he takes calls, whatever. But he becomes a fixture of late night Gotham, beloved by late shift workers and night owls, and Waylon Jones becomes a household name amongst a decent chunk of Gotham. That way, when he's eventually outed, people stop reacting like "AAH A CROCODILE MAN" and start being like "hey, it's our Waylon!"

The show is sponsored by Wayne Enterprises.

If you ask Bruce in his billionaire-playboy-philanthropist-idiot persona, he’ll tell you talk radio is the fastest-growing communications segment in the country and you’ll be left wondering how the fuck this man runs a successful business.

If you are one of the select few who knows him in his “also I am Batman” capacity, he’ll tell you overall crime has gone down since the villain-run station has hit the air, and also if Harley Quinn can talk someone out of the early stages of an abusive relationship before he—or worse, the Gotham City Morgue—has to get involved, so much the better.

Just imagining Hatter or someone starts trying to use their portion to mindwash themselves an army and all the other rouges barge in on their segment and pummel them mid-talk. Cause-

"You are not ruining this for us Jeffrey!"

While Penguin or someone has taken over the segment and is providing live singing. And all listening just hear between the lovely singing; yelling, screams from their previous presenter and intermittent punching sounds before the song ends and all the noises seem to have stopped not that the station has muted but because they are all holding their breath.

The most tired sigh is let out before "Hand him over."

Shuffling and pained groans are heard.

Before a muffled "Good singing."

'click'

As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.

As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.

In short, that dialogue, more than anything, makes or breaks a fanfic. What do posts like "He would not fucking say that" and "They would NOT have communication skills that good" have in common? Talk. Characters expressing themselves to one another. The faithful recreation of identifiable speech patterns is weighted heavily in the evaluation of a fic's quality. By "speech patterns" I do not just mean the semantic content of a given character's expression, but idiosyncrasies of style and slang, vocabulary and idiom, even gesture, musicality, and rhythm.

Of course believable dialogue is far from the only thing that makes a good fanfic Good. And there are forms of fic writing, particularly highly abbreviated ones like drabbles and ficlets, that in practice tend to de-emphasize its significance. But if we are talking about the romantic, erotic shippy stuff that is the meat and potatoes of online fandom, dialogue does the heaviest lifting short of the consummation itself. Arguably more so! It's the real keystone to the catharsis, and often the catalyst for it. Is there a confession occurring? A provocation? An evasion or ultimatum? Zoom out, big picture: What is the most potent and fundamental mechanic for developing complexity, tension, and transformation within a relationship, getting it to go from one thing to another? Making these two idiots talk to each other! Often clumsily and indirectly and maladaptively, at the worst possible time and in the worst possible situation, about anything or everything but what they should be — but talk they usually do.

What makes fanfic specifically so challenging and rewarding in this regard is that the talking is as much a feat of translation as invention, because both reader and writer are working off an existing model. Liberties taken with plot, form, and even narrative voice have wider buffer zones; you can get creative with circumventing the events of canon while still conforming to its emotional and substantive essence.

It forces me to remember that, no, it wasn't 'just about Ancient Egypt'. My ass can read that with no issue. Not many people can do that. It's a skill, and one many people with a lot less skill in it will try to square up on. It feels egotistical, but at the end of the day, no, I do know more about this than most people.

the club in question:

No, it's not a one to one conversion. I said it's like shorthand, and I meant that. Each sign has its own form, but it's not necessarily anything like the sign it represents. They're quick forms of the signs, designed to be written in ink rather than carved in stone (because they really didn't write in full glyphs in ink unless they were doing something special like a Book of the Dead, and even then that's called Cursive Hieroglyphs) and often they're just lines because there's an assumption that the reader is familiar with what *should* be there.

This is the difference:

The second image here is the *original* text, whereas the first image is the transcribed version into hieroglyphs which is easier for most Egyptologists to parse than the Hieratic original.

Some signs *might* look like their hieroglyphic counterpart, but the majority of them have a different form all together, and you have to be able to parse that. For instance, you have to know what you're looking at to understand that:

is

The full section is easier, but you still have to know some things:

You've really got to know what you're looking at to understand that the edge of the cartouche, the sun symbol, and the wsr (jackal head on a stick) symbol are all rolled into that sign that looks like a 13.

It ain't easy.

so if i understood your explanation, unlike Coptic which is alphabetic (it is based on the Greek alphabet), Hieratic is still logographic and represents each Hieroglyphic symbol as a Hieratic symbol? well aside from what i can best describe as "ligatures"?

also if it is a shorthand and based on your explanation, i presume that you cannot list an "enshrined" sequence of graphical representations of the glyphs (and their ligatures) as you could for Hieroglyphs (or Coptic), so it's closer to a writing style or variant rather than its own separate and self contained script? and i'd imagine scribes of the time who wrote in Hieratic would still be fluent in reading/writing Hieroglyphs since you apparently cannot really use Hieratic without that knowledge?

No, it's a script not a writing style. There are graphical representations of each sign, but as I said, they're not 1:1 identical to the Hieroglyphic counterpart. The water sign 'n' 𓈖 in the Hieroglyphic script is a zig-zag line, but in Hieratic (shown in the examples above) it's a straight line, it's still the same sign, it's just not a complete match. If it was, it would defeat the purpose of the script in the first place.

Take this sign (Gardiner's sign M8) which represents a pool of lilies. It has a recognisible shape because there is a 'set' way of writing this sign in Hieratic. However, you'll notice that each example, which are all from different scribes, across different texts and time periods, are all slightly different. This is because they're all handwritten, so there will be variations.

Again, while they all clearly have 'there is a set way to depict this' some signs are consistent and others are not. It all depends on who is writing. Sometimes they're not even consistent within a text written by the same scribe and that's because handwriting is just like that.

Think of it more like typing versus handwriting. Hieroglyphs are a 'typed script' because they are quite literally carved into something. That takes precision, and thus the only variation is in art style. Hieratic is the written script, which is the same thing, just adapted for a different medium.

So I can type here 'This is a standard typed version of English'

Then:

The difference in how I write the letters is based on the style of the handwriting I'm using, not the script it comes from. The letters are set, I just write them differently, and this is how Hieratic works.

In an attempt to keep this post from getting any longer, it's very tempting to post the wikipedia page for Demotic, which would tell you the same information, but I won't because we've come this far.

Demotic is the stage after Hieratic. I swear I explained this in an ask or a comment in the last 48hrs, but I don't remember and I'm not searching for it rn. But essentially, when they come into contact with the Greeks and others in the Mediterranean/ANE, they start adding Greek and Aramaic words to their lexicon, and adopting new grammar. Thus the Hieratic script shifts to accommodate this change, becoming Demotic, but the monumental inscriptions remain in Middle Egyptian (it's a weird quirk, but only Old and Middle Egyptian ever appear on monuments/tombs. Late Egyptian is exclusively written in Hieratic).

Initially, though, Demotic does get used on a few monuments instead of hieroglyphs, but they quickly switch it to handwritten text only. Even then, it's only used administratively. Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and Late Egyptian Hieratic still get used on monuments (Hieros) and written literature (Hieratic) respectively. It's a weird time where they're essentially using three different forms of language. I can only liken it to current times by comparing it to how we use language in legal documents (usually pretty stilted and formalised (like Middle Egyptian, it's from a different time in the past), the writing in published novels (structured/more formal but much less so, just like Late Egyptian), and then how we're all speaking on a day to day basis (colloquial, informal, and how Demotic comes to be). Basically, it's reflective of the change in populace and therefore speech patterns, and how the Egyptians adapted their language as these changes occurred. Linguistically it's fascinating to watch the slow change from Late Egyptian where vowels are beginning to soften to better reflect how they're spoken (r's become l's and all that jazz) to Demotic where there are far more loan words that need to be spelt phonetically also with softened vowels, so the original Hieratic script gets frankensteined to represent these new sounds.

Demotic then supercedes Late Egyptian, which falls out of use entirely by about c.400 BCE when the Ptolemies arrive. The language gains a higher importance and begins to be used for religious texts and literature instead of Late Egyptian. This continues right through to the Roman period when it basically becomes the every day written text (more people are literate in Egypt in this period compared to any other, so it's not surprising it becomes the default). But after the death of Cleopatra, and being under full Roman rule, Greek becomes the main language (because the Romans spoke Greek and Latin) by about 200 CE. Demotic still gets used on labels after this but it's largely died out by c.450 CE. Since it is the Greek script that's most common, the Egyptian language switches from the Demotic script to the Greek script, which is how you get Coptic. Though, I should note, that its first appearance is during the Ptolemaic period when Demotic texts were transcribed into Greek lettering to make them easier to read, and has preserved some pronunciation.

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.