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spacedace · 7 months

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okay reading "Death and the Maidens" because I want to get a sense of Nyssa's character for fic reasons and I'm barely into the first one and just...

What do you mean Bruce sleeps in a replica of his parent's bed??? And that he only uses the sheets they owned before he was born??? Sir??

Like I know just about every single aspect of who Bruce is could have the statement "Please for the love of god get Therapy" applied to it but this feels like it's up there on the list.

Not at the top, but at least like, upper part of the middle of the list. An item or two down from "Micro-doses on Scarecrow Fear Toxin to try and prepare for the worst possible things that could happen instead of getting restful sleep"

#love the Alfred snark that comes like five panels later tho #Alfred should drag Bruce to therapy by his hair but the man's sass is always on point lol #Batman #Death and the Maidens #Bruce Wayne #Bruce Wayne Go to Therapy Challenge 1939 - Present #(he keeps failing)#literally every single time I start reading a Batman comic there's at least one panel that hits me across the face like a wet fish #that's not criticism I have ADHD & I like the novelty of how many different types of fish DC has in their bucket to slap me with

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spite-and-waffles · 2 years

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I feel like neither the pro-Talia Al Ghul camp or the anti-Talia camp really care to delve deeply into the fact that she has been abused and used by her father her whole life, and is as tragic a character as Jason. Her fixating on a man as emotionally distant and obsessed with his mission as Ra's, knowing full well that he will never choose her or his children over it, is a completely accurate showcasing of the way people perpetuate their own trauma cycles.

And while I hope more people refuse to take anything Grant Morrison wrote about Talia to account, making her a good mother in reaction to it also just does not make sense. Just like Bruce, she's an example of someone who loves her child fiercely but is too traumatized and emotionally stunted to express it in healthy ways. Unlike Bruce she grew up in a literal terrorist cult and raised Damian in it as well. Her being exacting and teaching Damian to be ruthless and trust no one were all incredibly damaging and abusive, but it's also the only fucking way he could have survived the League or Ra's. Yes, she could have sent Damian to his father and keeping him by her side was selfish, but this woman, who had been starved of love and had never been anyone's priority since her mother died, finally had a person to be hers and only hers. It's horribly, tragically human to guard that love jealously and possessively.

The Tiger Mom as a trope is racist, but the emotional effects on women made to prove their worth as humans via motherhood is very much a reality that women of colour can relate to, and one not confined to just Asians. I'm only going to speak for my own people here, but the way Asian mothers make their sons their whole reason for being stems directly from the oppressively patriarchal cultures we grow up in, where a woman's worth is predicated on being a wife and mother and the highest honour she can aspire to is having a son. Ra's is the original patriarch who drilled into his daughters that they could never inherit his legacy no matter how much they proved their love, and that they owed him male heirs. Damian's very existence is tied up with Talia's idea of her own personhood and worth and achievement, which is why she piles on so many contradicting expectations on him - that he's fiercely independent but also stays by her side, become his father's perfect heir but take only her values, never be a pawn like she was, but align with her own wishes.

However you want to negotiate the racism of the way Talia is written is up to you obviously, but I feel that there's no realistic way that Talia can be a good mother (even in Son of the Demon she acted in Bruce's best interests, deceived him and abandoned her child, which actually might have been kinder than attempting to raise him in the LoA). I feel that making her one is an extremely simplistic way of dealing with the racialized misogyny her character is subjected to, and a disservice to real-life children of mothers like her, who love their children fiercely but perpetuate abuse cycles because of that very love.

For me, deconstructing and reaching past the misogyny and racism means humanising her and not making her value and sympathy as a character contingent on how good of a mother she is to Damian and Jason. Trauma and abuse slows or arrests your emotional development and makes it difficult to regulate your emotions and impulses, which is why it's a requirement for traumatized people to cognitively work on themselves in order to be good parents to their own children. Talia cannot. There's absolutely no therapist she can trust, the last time she felt close to someone she was decieved, tortured and brainwashed by her, and not only can't she get away from her father but she received a harsh object lesson from her sister on what happens when you try. This woman is a goddamn victim in every possible way, even more than Jason. It's also one of the reasons I don't buy that she allowed herself to be close to Jason, maternal feelings notwithstanding.

(Also her sleeping with him was pretty gross and unnecessary of Winick, whose writing is far from unproblematic when it comes to WoC, but it makes for a fascinating character deconstruction because afaik it happened right after Nyssa tortured her until she was brainwashed against Ra's and Bruce. So at that point in time she was basically in tatters and locked in the same self-destructive spiral as Jason, and maybe she wanted to nuke her sense of maternal care towards him in a bid to feel less emotionally vulnerable. I love this kind of psychological yarn balls in fiction.)

Absolutely none of this should absolve her choices. None of this means she's a good anything or that she should be seen as a purely sympathetic and wronged character. She's obscenely rich and powerful, ruthless, cunning and manipulative. She's one of the most dangerous people in the world. She's not fit to raise anyone. But if you can't accept all of that and square it with a fiercely loving heart and find a deeply human character then I really can't relate to you.

Let female characters of colour be human, morally grey and complex. Let fictional mothers be traumatized and deeply damaging without demonizing them. And stop moralizing female characters, I am begging you. We're far past Victorian England. Making them be on their best behaviour all the time to be sympathetic is oppressive as hell and not what storytelling is for.

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mysterious-secret-garden · 13 hours

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Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes - Death and the Maidens, 1872.

#Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes #Death and the Maidens #apparition #death #dead #death and the maiden

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battlships · 2 years

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I will never understand why DC made Nyssa torture Talia when literally all she had to do was say "I'm your sister but you never met me because our dad left me to the literal Nazis. Wanna fuck him up?"

#talia al ghul #nyssa raatko #nyssa al ghul #nyssa raatkovna #I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who uses that name for her but raatko isn't a last name lol #death and the maidens #terrible comic #loved Nyssa though #up until the torture part

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theonewiththecrown · 1 year

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Like aunt like niece

After it was told in Batman: Shadow and Shadow war, that Nyssa still exists in today canon (and probably her story's just the same, focusing on how Talia loves her) I'm assured that Nyssa took part in raising Athanasia as well.

First, they were raised with manners, boys:

Second, Ath has a very familiar appearance, not inspired by Talia. (Plus black hair, ha-ha) I mean, Talia had some "rock details" a couple of times, even a ring in her nose, but black lipstick and nails are Nyssa's cup of tea:

Talia used guns very often, but Nyssa did love them too:

Both had daddy issues:

Both are emotional after the Pit:

And can be cold and tough, too:

If Ath was raised by Ra's, we can conclude that Nyssa helped with her after loosing all her own children.

#athanasia al ghul #nyssa al ghul #nyssa raatko #Al Ghul family #Ra's Al Ghul #Batman #Batfam #Injustice 2 #Bruce Wayne #Talia Al Ghul #Death and the maidens #My post

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onewomancitadel · 1 year

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Land of the living

If they follow the rules that since V4 Cinder can't step on living land except through magical means (e.g. Raven's teleport - underworld passage ala Persephone via her being the Spring Maiden (Kore, another name for Persephone, means Maiden)) and/or walks in symbolic dead places (e.g. the place where Fria is kept in a symbolic coffin, the Vaults, the Yellow Brick Road, even the 'underworld' she's kept enslaved in as a little girl, even the passage of travel to Atlas is at night and she brings up when she first brought Death) because she is symbolically dead as she is cursed with a Dark Curse (Grimm, the figment of death and despair) and magically enslaved (enslavement is death - technically speaking even since she's been onscreen she's been in the living world through subterfuge, a figure of death cloaked as something else until she reveals herself and takes Ozpin and Pyrrha's lives), then that means...

Well, it's why she can't go to the 'underworld' (which is called Ever After - it seems like it's a Special World, maybe a 'more alive'/magical world as opposed to a literal underworld, but monomythically serves the same thing) and why she couldn't be reborn in the same sequence of the Yellow Brick Road that everybody else was (or not having passed through but fallen down). That's why she turned right around. She's symbolically dead and can't be reborn yet.

(That is also why Penny dies in the Yellow Brick Road and then Winter can finally pass through from the dead Vault. All Maidens are Death and Maidens. You can read more here).

As I have written about here, autumn represents multifaceted ideas (more than winter = death, spring = life) and I think there's a reason they've chosen to centre their main character, Ruby, in it, along with Cinder (and Jaune). Of course you might be wondering why a story which rejects literal resurrection might celebrate symbolic resurrection, but this is just a way to represent themes of reconciling with life and death (redemption and healing), spiritual death that can be healed, and complete redemption of the world of Remnant, Ozlem, and the relationship between humanity and the Grimm. There's so much packed in there that is simply described with these ideas interacting, so there's room for nuance.

I had really wondered if the reason she rejected the rebirth of the Yellow Brick Road was because of rejected growth, but it's because it's literally symbolically inappropriate for her right now. It's not the right context. From a more simplistic structural consideration her redemption arc has only just started, she's not at its nadir yet.

Add in the fact that the rebirth will presumably involve Ruby's silver eyes - removing the figure of magical enslavement and the symbolic figure that makes her explicitly Death (awarded to her after her first sequential kill in the story, but take note it's associated with all her enslavement) - and likely Jaune's Semblance (for spiritual rebirth) then of course it's not happening for her yet.

So I wonder what the 'land of the living' is going to look like or if it's only going to be represented symbolically - e.g. she finally walks on living land without magical aid or bringing death to others and she's accompanied by major figures of life (Ruby and Jaune) whom she's fully reconciled with (as Shadow and animus). That would be pretty major.

One of the things I wonder about if this were deliberate or not is that the fact Cinder is enslaved and has to navigate the world through subterfuge, that means symbolically/visually associated dead places are probably just more likely for her to be sequestered to, and it may not be a hard-and-fast rule - but it did make me happy writing this lol.

#cindemption #death and the maidens

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sictransitgloriamvndi · 3 months

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#art #sculpture #danish #denmark #Døden og pigen #death and the maiden #der tod und das mädchen #marble #naturalism #symbolism #elna borch

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ex0skeletal-undead · 7 months

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Hand embroidery by Adipocere on Instagram

#art #embroidery #dark art #horror #macabre #skeleton #fantasy #cats #black cat #death and the maiden

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anatomicalmartyr · 7 months

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Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

#horroredit #classicfilmblr #filmedit #the cabinet of dr. caligari #das cabinet des dr. caligari #cesare the somnambulist #conrad veidt #lil dagover #he is so poor little meow meow coded in the three middle gifs #my posts #horror #film #death and the maiden #demon lover #beauty and the beast #a lot of motifs apply here

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weirdlookindog · 2 months

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#burlesque #1930s #photography #death and the maiden

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spacedace · 7 months

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Okay, finished Death and the Maidens and uh, yeah. Everything I saw that said it was fucking terrible was right. Absolutely hated it. -10000/10.

There was exactly 3 things about all of that I liked:

The concept of Nyssa as Talia's older half sister that's been running around doing humanitarian efforts for centuries (and literally nothing else about her backstory because holy fucking shit what).

The single moment of Talia being happy and enjoying herself and briefly vulnerable and open about how she doesn't have many friends (could have truly been some great character moment stuff in something else)

Alfred's sass.

That's it. That was everything I enjoyed about that story line. What the absolute fuck did I just read?

Anyway, uh. I'm gonna take the 3 things I liked about the story, try to scrub the memory of literally everything else, and work out what I would have liked to see happen with Nyssa & Talia instead and figure out how to incorporate that into a fic.

#batman #death and the maidens #i hated this story line so much yall #seriously what the hell did I read #who wrote this?#WHY did they decide to go with *that* backstory for Nyssa?#Like the humanitarian stuff that was briefly & quickly mentioned at the very end was interesting #but literally everything that they actually *showed* in the comic was fucking horrifying and made no sense #like to be clear I'm not saying that authors can't delve into some darker places for a character's backstory #but like #this didn't feel like a heartfelt examination of the darkest moments in human history and have a genuine attempt to examine what that might #do to an pseudo immortal character that survived something so incredibly horrible and life ruining #it felt entirely like it was for shock factor and to be edgy #like fuck man #also what the *fuck* did they do to Talia??? Who was this random character they had with her name & face #cause I know that wasn't Talia al Ghul I saw in this

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fine-arts-gallery · 1 year

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