Where Every Scroll is a New Adventure
Domhnall Rambles - Blog Posts
I would like to announce that my little brother is a little bitch (nongendered) and I love him dearly.
I was texting him about a recent tragic realization about strawberries. And this little fucker who stole my height and testosterone from before the womb goes:
Little Bro: so that's bananas, pecans, milk, and strawberries
LB: all hurt your mouth
LB: gonna need to Kevorkian you with a banana split in a few years at this rate
Anyway I called him a cunt and I feel justified in that action. We love each other very much.
And that's very much how I see current Tim and Damien's relationship with each other. It's fun to playfully hate on a sibling who can bite back. It's flyting, but without the poetry.
I read a post earlier and then lost it before I could reblog it with some interesting information so I'm gonna throw the information out into the void.
The original post was a comment about how no one who has ever inked a comic has ever met a person of color before. They had very valid complaints about bad shading and inconsistent skin tones.
And y'all know me. I am a fiend for comic industry history.
Color in comics is obviously a huge deal, not just in skin but for iconic costume designs. The oldest and most well-known characters tend to be bright shades of red, blue, green and/or black. This is true across the board in early comics and it's due to a variety of factors. The biggest one being that most comics, to be made cheaply, could only use around 63 colors for a standard issue. On top of that, the way the DC and Marvel printed their comics was basically with pointillism and shifting densities.
Before I wind up regurgitating the whole article, let me link one of my go-to resources.
And
Actually, womenwriteaboutcomics.com in general is a fantastic educational tool and a great way to keep an eye out for opportunities to submit your own comic story submissions.
Thanks for letting me nerd out about comic history again!
Hey! Hey you!
Yes, you! The person who thinks too much about comic book characters and deep dives into esoteric subjects in order to create a free work of art?
How's your typing speed? How quickly could you learn a new way to type? Do you like knowing things, often terrible things, that other people don't? Can you bear the weight of both banality and daily tragedy? Does the idea of a stressful job make you bare your teeth in a feral grin, welcoming the challenge?
Do you get fed up with the American court systems? Does the frustration of injustice and the feeling of helplessness choke you out at night?
Now is a fantastic time to look into the field of a Stenographer, or a Court Reporter.
Every court case must be legally and accurately documented and frankly there aren't enough stenographers to go around. Especially since a great number of them will be moving into retirement age in the coming years.
It's a no-breaker that the government is on fire, but we can't just shut it down until a roiling mass of different peoples somehow agree on a better way to get shit done. There are people in the now who need to have their cases heard sooner rather than later and Court Reporters are essential to that happening.
***I'm not claiming that this is or has ever been my job, either! There's like one person on this site who has confirmation of at most which state I lived in years ago and that's because we're personal email-level friends. Please be careful about what info you share on the Internet.
***That being said, I've held some fairly atypical jobs over the years and so have many friends of mine. They can be honestly fun to talk about and it's always fun to make someone realize that yes, that thing would have to be a job, that's an actual job thing to do. And I like to talk up my friends' wild experiences as well!
Do you think Bruce Wayne became written as a worse and worse parent because the idea of what makes a person "Heroic" has changed over the years?
(Cut for rambling)
At the start of Batman comics there was a very clear need for the audience to suspend their disbelief. The comic was very much a story, a reflection of the world where the reader was to be entertained with tales about a strange detective investigating the strange crimes of Gotham City.
Robin was Batman's partner, a new element to the story that appealed to a younger audience. They were a team that brought in a lot of capital. Authors would write heart-rending storylines and at the opposite page there would be a weird cheerful ad for Batman and Robin using fruit pies to stop crime.
Society evolves quickly and our media can struggle to keep up. The notion that children should be protected is a relatively recent one and it makes the inclusion of child heroes become... unpalatable to people. Modern values have changed and so too must the characters.
But applying current social values to the concept of child heroes would erase them.
Their whole existence is to be young and to fight the people who want to hurt them. To be young and be able to protect one's loved ones is a compelling story.
It's not just comic book heroes who fall under this paradox, either. Avatar: The Last Airbender is full of children learning how to fight and die for their world. Percy Jackson is another. Hell, one could even make a case for Warrior Cats. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were facing off with murderers just as often as any kid hero.
It's a common and loved story because we've all been children who have had to carve out a place for ourselves in the world.
So the existence of Robin, of child heroes in general, becomes an awkward duality. The character is too profitable to retire. Many people can still suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the story. Other people struggle to accept that a "hero", a "good Dad", could allow his children to fight at his side.
So authors are tasked again and again to try to explain Robin. To excuse the existence of a child hero in a day and age when most responsible adults would freak the fuck out at the idea of a kid going out at night to fight criminals.
And sometimes, more often than many of us would like, they come up with writing Bruce as a bad parent. A bad leader, even. It doesn't help that writers don't often get to have stories published that have significant influence on Batman as a character. He's purposely, perpetually trapped at one starting position for every new story.
Which is a valid take. In my opinion it's uninspired, but I understand the rationale behind it. They're working against a lot of baggage. There's nearly 90 years of culture shift to account for and hundreds of authors. Even the way comics are written now is very different from back then and that also messes with perceptions.
To me, Bruce is a deeply flawed man. He's been a shitty dad, yes, but not because Robin exists. He didn't have a choice with Robin - that was decided by forces beyond his control. I don't know how to judge canon Bruce Wayne; there are genuinely too many stories for me to feel like I have an accurate read on him.
I know that he tries very hard to do good. I know that he has the potential to make better choices and take kinder actions.
I'm not going to hold my breath, though. Even if we get a canon Batman run where he gets therapy and apologizes for his mistakes and past actions, where he has some real, meaningful dialogue with the people he loves... The next writer can ignore that for a more dramatic plot where he acts like a complete drip.
Pick your preferred version and warp canon to fit that guy - it's what DC does.
Thank the goddess for fanfiction.
Lemme share a story with you.
I got my first laptop as part of my school-provided college gear back in the day and back then the only places for fanfiction were either niche circles where each author had their own website that hosted their works and a small selection of other authors who were their friends all connected by hyperlink... Or fanfiction.net.
It was wild times on the Internet, my friend. It was very difficult to keep track of stories.
But! I visited home after some time and mentioned to my little brother that my computer was running slow. He, being the more tech-minded of us, volunteered to check it out, so I opened it up and brought up a new tab for him to look stuff up if needed.
It was not needed.
"Deadname." My brother was taking very calming breaths. "I know having multiple tabs open is convenient... But you should not have so many that they look like a Mario SPIKE PIT!"
Zero lessons have been learned since then, but it was very funny to watch his face changing colors.
I be like: I wonder why these pages are taking so long to load :/
My thirteen opened tabs:
Casual Life Update:
Remember that cat my grandparents stole a few months ago? His name is Dos. Because he was part of a litter of 4 kittens. So they were named Uno, Dos, Tres, and Kevin, because the neighbors couldn't remember Quatro.
Grandma calls him Do-si-do and he follows her around when she takes care of her chickens.
I've been thinking about my farmer grandparents a lot lately, about the people they knew and the lives they've lived. About how American culture has changed so much in their lifetimes. About how Grandma had to leave her schooling to help support her family after her mother died of cancer. About how teachers would often lock my Grandfather out of their classrooms when he was excused for religious services and they'd humiliate him in front of his peers before letting him back in.
About how a lot of people - especially in these Internet spaces - see them now, as old farm folk, and dismiss them as uneducated. As stereotypes and caricatures to be derided. Without a word to them, people will assume them to be of no use, to be able to contribute nothing of value by their experiences, and capable of no grand thoughts.
It's a bitter taste to recognize, hypocrisy.
I think about how my Grandma insists that everyone should write at least one book in their lifetime. She has books of short stories, books of poems, books of essays, books of local recipes collected by the women's societies in the area. So many of them are self-published and freely given to her by her friends and family. I love that she can pick each one up and tell me about the author and how she, and I by way of her, is connected to this person whose thoughts are inked on cheap paper.
She has her own book almost ready to go. It's full of little poems and daily devotions, letters to people who are no longer around to receive them. It scares me, because she had been in my life for so very long and I do not want to trust her to my faulty, frail memory.