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anna-scribbles · 2 months

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thirteen update 💕💍🍽️🩸

chapter 5: february

summary:

“These things do not concern you,” Papa told him flatly. “I will run my household however I see fit. Your concerns are with your schoolwork and your modeling.” Blood pumped heavy and fast through Adrien’s heart. That wasn’t—fair. Concern was about all he was capable of these days. “And what about Maman?” Adrien asked, exhausted, reckless. “May I be concerned about Maman?” Something shifted on Papa’s face, all his emotions smothered in stone.

excerpt:

The best day of Adrien’s life was eight months and six days ago. No contest.

It was a crisp kind of cold that day, the Paris sky blooming a bright and brilliant blue overhead. The sun pierced right through the brisk February air, a shock of spearmint and adrenaline in his veins. He couldn’t stop widening his eyes, couldn’t stop smiling. The city was so alive. Strains of love songs poured out of open cafe doors and onto tourists, their hands full of red roses and lovers’ hands. The cobblestones sang with the patters of paired footsteps all down the street. It was the city of love always, but today especially. Today Adrien was made of the stuff, just bursting with it.

And, like every other day in the running for the best of his life, Marinette was there.

“You’d better not pull anything,” she warned, tightening her grip on his hand as they passed by a tourist couple looking very… engrossed with each other in the middle of the street. “And—and if you do, you have to tell me. Right now.”

Marinette’s brow was lightly furrowed, the bridge of her nose just barely scrunched up. Her hair was pulled half-back with a pink ribbon, matching the shade of the skirt she wore beneath her velvety black peacoat. Her Mary Janes clipped anxiously down the road and Adrien’s heart danced and swelled and spun in his chest.

“Pull something? Me?” Adrien stepped aside so their arms were outstretched, and then pulled at Marinette’s fingers, sending her tumbling back into his arms. She looked up at him, trying to frown, smiling. He grinned. “I would never.”

“I’m serious.” Marinette untangled herself from his arms and interlocked her fingers again with his. Her hand was the warmest thing in the world. She looked at him sternly, wagging a finger in his face. “I need to know so I can—prepare. Especially if it’s something crazy. No funny business.”

“Marinette,” he moaned, draping a wounded hand over his heart. One corner of his mouth quirked into a smile, eyes darting to meet her gaze. “You think I’m funny?”

She groaned. “I think you‘re—I think you’re ridiculous, and sappy, and romantic, and I think it’s Valentine’s Day in Paris”—this part she shouted, which drew a few stares—“and I think you’re about to take me on an insanely adorable date, and I think Alya took me to get my nails done last week—!”

“You’re so thoughtful,” Adrien remarked, swinging their hands back and forth. “And observant. What a beautiful mind you have, my lady.”

“You have to tell me,” Marinette insisted. She stopped them on the street and frowned at him, pink flushing the apples of her cheeks. “Is it—are you—?”

“Hm?” Adrien murmured, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. Marinette’s cheeks went ablaze.

“I—you—you know what I mean!” she spluttered. “Are you gonna…you know!”

He tilted his head to the side. “Am I…?”

read on ao3

#ml #miraculous #miraculous ladybug #my art #thirteen #adrien agreste #emilie agreste #she's there. just look #don't be worried about the blood emoji it's actually a very funny story #and doesn't involve death at all I promise #shout out to the procreate perspective tools for this one. owe them my life #happy february it's march. are any of us surprised #maybe march will be in march this year but I cannot make any promises #the first 2k of this is just the cutest adrinette fluff i've ever written and I love that for me #(me making my own content) I stay winning #anyway. adrien is having a hard time etc. read more

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squirrelno2 · 22 days

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All right so I haven't been active in the Julie and the Phantoms fandom in a long time, and although I know there are definitely still people creating and reblogging in the fandom it tends to be a much smaller handful of people than it used to, which for me felt disheartening and was part of why I've backed off from it. I'd love to see new stuff more regularly and start recirculating older things just to remind myself and anyone else who needs it how much I love this silly little show.

All this to say, I am putting out feelers to see if anyone is interested in a blog that runs consistent, casual event-type things for the fandom to try and revitalize interest in jatp fanworks, like featured weeks for individual characters here, fic rec events, etc. I'm toying with ideas to inspire people to pick up their wips, spark new stories, and highlight older content that didn’t get much attention or would just be nice to see again. I’d like to create a community space to liven the fandom back up for people who miss the show or got into the fandom after the hype died down. Does that seem interesting to anyone?

#julie and the phantoms #jatp #I'm filled with both hubris and resolve and I feel like. with other people modding the blog as well. this would be doable #i already have a LOT of ideas about wip events to get stories written that have been sitting untouched i know i'm not the only one w/h thos #so i guess if that sounds good to you interact with this in some way? and if you're interested in being involved/have ideas #please share! if it's just me on a reblog spree it won't work but if we all pitch in to talk to each other #(and i know. if you know me you know i'm not always great at that. but having a Format for it makes me good at it so)

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rawliverandgoronspice · 4 months

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I think what chronically upsets me about TotK is that. So much of it could have been so good with so little change.

I am into Zelda as a sacrificial, wondrous and silenced creature who must literally carry the blade of the hero as a wound inside her forehead and silently wait to be humanized again --and the injustice of a kingdom built on such a premice doomed to repeat itself, especially if the kingdom was founded on such dubious grounds to begin with. I am into Ganondorf forcing the present to reckon with the past through the most violent clash, forsaking everything that made him a person while sinking down into petty vindictiveness until no connection and no humanity remains, even though independance was what he was trying to protect in the first place. I am into Link as somebody trying to hold onto his most important connection to the world he once knew being used to force him into a conflict that has ultimately nothing to do with him (sure that's SS again but, it could have been explored even further). I am into Rauru as this self-important, self-made king who used his own association to godhood to live out a power fantasy that refuses to ever be acknowledge as such, maybe compounded by the fact he is one of the last of his species and feel, himself, the crushing weight of their fading heritage?

I don't know, the Tears of the Kingdom or something????

But, it all tragically depends on one crucial thing, which is to allow hylians to be wrong sometimes.

And it's wild to me how all of this incredible potential to comment on the series' history and the characters' role in it is just. Flattened into nothing, because Good must be Good and Evil must be Evil, and Hyrule must be righteous at literally every cost --even if it means nervously rewriting their own history through convoluted logic that rejects conflict and depth and vulnerability at every turn.

#totk #totk critical #rauru #zelda #link #ganondorf #when will my brain return from the imprisoning war...#what offends me personally is that the game pretends to have written this heartwrenching tragedy #when objectively nothing has consequences and nobody (except maybe rauru and that's weak af) learns anything about their own flaws #look nintendo tragedies are My Shit you can't fool me into pretending you did a good job #especially when the execution is so so botched #you can't punch sonia's spine off and have ganondorf make a gary's mode face about it and pretend you wrote a good story like come on #also “man sad because wife died because bad guy is bad :(” is beyond level 0 of tragedy #it *can* be pulled off without making me roll my eyes with enough depth given to everybody involved #but this just wasn't it

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possessable · 6 days

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for the record i've been talking to my friends about Captain Underpants for 4 days straight but i haven't even drawn him a single time yet somehow

#sorry he's such a pure and distilled presentation of Tropes that i Enjoy it's like looking at jokes i would've written but #supported by a whole movie budget. it's beautiful #i mean most of my jokes involve ''why am i soaked in blood'' but ''why am i soaked in water'' is good too #for the record number 2 yes i watched the movie when it first came out and i did enjoy it because i'm predictable as fuck

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brinconvenient · 1 year

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How to Have ADHD

1) Be walking around

2) Think or say “Oh, when I sit down at the computer, I should [do thing that involves being on a computer/look up thing I’m curious about/send message that I need to send]!”

3) sit down at computer

4) Absolutely do not do thing in Step 2. Forget that you EVER had a thought resembling Step 2. Do many other things instead on the computer.

5) Stand up and walk away from computer

6) Go to Step 2.

#ADHD #actually adhd #This is my whole god damn day #all the time #I have written so many messages that I've never sent #I have thought of so many very answerable questions that I have never answered #I have remembered so many bills to be paid before their due date that have never been paid #This also applies in the reverse #I will very frequently remember something that involves NOT being at my desk #while seated at my desk #that never ever happens because I completely forgot the thing I needed to do #powered completely by the act of standing #I have hungered for so many meals I've never made or eaten

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itsrainingbubbles · 13 days

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Law keeps a journal and he doodles L+L in a heart all over his journal along with the 'luffy loves Law' thing to see how much luffy likes him

He's just a silly little guy having his teenage girl crush moment where he constantly takes flowers and does the he loves me, he loves me not thing

He's over here looking up the compatibility of their zodiac signs and his crew is absolutely sick of him, just ready to throw him overboard

Like this man is just such a loser when it comes to luffy he looses every single braincell he has and his mind is just an internal monolog of everything luffy does but describing it all as cute and pretty and so on

#lawlu #lulaw #trafalgar law #this man is whipped #drawing hearts all over the page where his plans are written when luffy is involved #dotting his i's with hearts

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inthefaceofadaffodil · 9 months

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ngl I was considering reading Fourth Wing but after seeing a tiktok by a Gaelic speaker saying that the author throws in random Scottish Gaelic for the names of things because it sounds “fantasy-esque” presumably without consulting anyone who actually speaks the language so some of it doesn’t actually make any sense and the audiobook butchers the pronunciation has put me right off. Anyways here’s her caption because quite frankly some of you need to read it.

#Fourth Wing #Scotland #Scottish Gaelic #Gaelic #this was super disappointing #because the book sounds really good but alas 😒#anyways THIS is why I refuse to read books involving anything Scottish that are written by Americans #I don’t even speak the language and this drives me nuts!

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cancerseasons · 3 months

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ODESSA SLOANE, lead singer of NEON DEMONS

"An unforgettable performance was put on by band NEON DEMONS and all eyes are on lead singer, ODESSA SLOANE, but not all of them are for the right reasons. With recent cheating allegations and a reunion with ex-bandmate and ex-boyfriend, SEVEN LAWLESS, this new season of BATTLE OF THE BANDS will be one you won't want to miss!"

Give the band a listen!

MC for @infamous-if

#𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘢 sloane .#infamous if #infamous if oc #oh how i love her #but she's always involved in drama somehow smh #also if u listen to the playlist #the song 'ghost' may or may not be written abt seven...#template by dayslily

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ffc1cb · 1 year

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i’ve always found it peculiar how during meeting the chargers cutscene the game just assumes your character automatically understands what krem is talking about when he mentions binding (though, granted, it’s all very unsubtle). like, this is a roleplaying game. what if i want to play a character who just doesn’t get it

#dragon age #cremisius aclassi #inquisitor trevelyan #at least give me an in game explanation of why the inquisitor would Know this right away #it's not like transgenderism is a widely explored topic in da lore. the most you can find about it in inquisition specifically excluding #krem and seras countless transmisogynistic lines is one codex that mentions that some previous divine mightve been a trans woman #and the way it's written sucks ass. the infamous sex in thedas codex also mentions nothing on the topic of transness. so like #whats up with that #art stuff #before anyone says anything i fully realize how i look critiquing a bioware game that came out in 2014 on its faulty queer representation #please trust me i know. im just thinking out loud #ALSO. in case it isnt obvious. parsley transed they gender. the joke is that theyre a nonbinary femme now #its hard for me to show it through art because it would involve misgendering them but they dont actually start going by they/them pronouns #until after halamshiral. so like technically if i made them refer to themselves as he/him at any point before that it would be canonical but #its not like my art is chronological by any means and cannot be taken out of context by virtue of it existing as an individual post online #if someone were to reblog an art of them saying hi im a dude theyd go cool! hashtag male inquisitor. or something #the tragic case of sacrificing narrative in order to not get second hand discomfort at seeing parsley misgendered #ANYWAY..........

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ofdreamsanddoodles · 1 year

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buddy daddies is really great at making miri super annoying & i mean that extremely positively. like kazuki absolutely adores her & even yells at her mom the last episode about how she should have loved miri despite any hardship she encounters & yet even with rei helping him out theyre BOTH exhausted by spending all day with her. it’s very obvious that if they couldn’t get miri to daycare they would have absolutely lost their minds, which imo is an extremely normal part of raising a kid. doesn’t stop her from also being completely adorable though. she’s well rounded

#i know someone involved in making this is a parent #bc that government office scene was written way too well for them to not have feelings on it #buddy daddies #aster speaks #also i keep seeing ppl complain that she's annoying but like they dont get it #if she wasnt this annoying i wouldnt love her #its like watching a baby cousin

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13eyond13 · 3 months

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Something I think fiction does sometimes is make sex represent the end goal for relationships so often that if two characters sleep together it causes readers to automatically see them as truly in love / that it would solve all problems for the pair to be together forever, even when that isn't necessarily what the narrative is trying to say / depict otherwise.

I am thinking about this because of Guts and Casca... to me they sleep together initially almost as an act of friendship? A way of experimenting with each other and learning about sex, perhaps of distracting themselves from the person they're both more actually into, and of course also because they do care about each other and maybe are attracted to one another on some level, and want to see what it would be like to try to get even closer together. But I think the story also makes it pretty clear that Guts is more emotionally invested in his relationship with Griffith than with Casca, in what you might call a narratively romantic sense... and Casca is shown sort of seeing the futility of her feelings for Griffith and eventually growing apart from him that way pre-Eclipse, even though she still cares for him the most out of everyone she knows (though I don't think he ever feels nearly the same way about her). So getting with Griffith isn't end game for Casca (and she herself eventually realizes that), but I also don't read Casca as a character for whom getting with Guts is the end game character arc-wise, either. I'm not sure Miura even had a concrete end-game character arc in mind for her, to be honest. I feel as though unfortunately she was written mostly as something to be used between Griffith and Guts rather than to end up having her own fully realized narrative journey in the same way that Guts (and maybe also Griffith) will. I want to see her and Guts as friends and at peace more than I want to see them live happily ever after together as a couple, because I feel like that's actually more how they really feel for one another than anything else. Granted, there's a bit of an interesting ironic twist in the story that happens during the Eclipse, where Griffith (unintentionally?) drives Guts and Casca closer together than I think they might have been otherwise with the trauma that he causes them both (even though I think their relationship is probably something he'd be jealous of and read as more romantic than it actually might be and wish to destroy, simply due to his own insecurities and his own possessive feelings for Guts). But I also didn't really read Guts' reactions in the Eclipse scene as Guts being jealous and possessive over Casca in a sexual / romantic sense - I read it more as him feeling empathy for her pain and desire to protect her from harm / from the darker side of Griffith he maybe knew about a bit better than anybody else. I DO care about Guts and Casca's relationship a lot, and find it one of the most emotionally compelling things in the story. But I don't think shipping them together for a happily ever after is really what I'd want for them, nor something that the narrative was actually trying to work towards / suggest to be the best ending for anybody involved? I don't know if I think shipping Guts and Griffith necessarily is either, particularly because of how irredeemably awful Griffith behaved during the Eclipse... but I DO think the story intentionally hinges more around the Griffguts relationship and their emotional journeys / character developments than it does about any other pair/relationship in the series, and that both of them have intense unresolved feelings for each other that come off much more suggestive and stronger than ones of just simply wanting to be friends. And I think all of these characters are pretty explicitly aware of that themselves even in the story as well.

Haha I don't even know what I'm trying to even say here except to work out some of my own thoughts about the main 3 that I care about, I suppose!

#like it became especially apparent to me when starting to read berserk fic #that the griffguts fics seemed more interesting to me to read than a gutsca fic would #which was weird to me because when i read canon i feel after the eclipse #i was almost more invested in guts and casca having a resolution of some kind #and cared the most about the two of them #but now that im reading fic i want to skip anything thats about getting guts and casca together as end game #and wanting to explore the 'what ifs' involving griffith and guts #and i think a lot of that is just due to how the story is written and what is still left unknown about the ending?#people make griffith easier for me to understand in fics as well #berserk spoilers #p #berserk

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utilitycaster · 2 months

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hm. in the process of doing some informal research re: Kollok I found this line on Polygon:

"One of the show’s gimmicks is that players who subscribe to the channel on Twitch can then make their own characters and are then allowed to embark on a freeform text-based role-play via Discord."

And I gotta ask but has anyone from the Polygon TTRPG/Actual Play writers every been on social media because I'm like, pretty sure any fan of any show can make up an OC and do text-based roleplay on a Discord server; it just might not be an official Discord server. I really do increasingly feel like Polygon capes so hard for Kollok and the heavily film-edited D20 seasons because they don't actually have a good grounding in basic actual play and fandom culture and are honestly a little embarrassed by it. Unfortunately this also means that they're like "Gadzooks! What are these Incredible New concepts like Text-based Roleplay and Longform Campaigns Of Undetermined Length!" and overall it gives off the vibe of a not terribly bright and profoundly stoned college sophomore trying to appear knowledgeable about music by acting like the guitar was invented in 1995 by Oasis.

#anyway 1. should i watch ep 1 of kollok tonight and 2. what booze should be involved #but uh. how shall i put this. again i'm hard stem the longest paper i've written in my life was a thesis that had a bunch of graphs in it #but i'm reading an article by the AP/TTRPG Polygon EDITOR and i'm like. this is simply not well written.

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scintillyyy · 5 months

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actually there is another super interesting way in which you can tell dixon is trying to narratively reward steph for her perserverence (aside from writing her to fit his sexist worldview and rewarding her for that) & almost the... "pick oneself up by their bootstraps and succeed no matter your circumstances and what barriers there may be" narrative he kind of has for her and that is with the evolving nature of her social class through her appearances while he writes her imo (the ultimate bootstraps story that conservatives love) (which also contributes to the vast difference of interpretations of steph's economic status)

so honestly, in her first appearance in detective comics #647-649 she is very much coded as coming from a background of lower class/working poor/welfare stereotypes with a criminal father and an addict mother.

their house is visibly run down & not taken care of. crystal is emaciated and wears a robe all day/doesn't bother to get dressed, doctor shops for pills, and is whiny about how she'll get sicker without the prescription pills she's addicted to (you know nothing about crystal's initial aesthetics screams welfare queen imagery to me, tbh. they certainly don't seem to be implied to be "scamming the system just to live it up on steaks and lobster" and dixon would be way more overt about welfare fraud. i would call this more "white trash poor person" imagery as i imagine he sees it.).

interestingly though is the framing of steph by dixon as incredibly positive in comparison to her surroundings. in a way she's conceived as someone who is fighting against the poor circumstances that she was born into--she's going to be spoiler and rise above her criminal father and compared to her mother who can't be bothered to get dressed because she's always high, steph's going to dress nicely. those jeans she's wearing? that back pattern pocket is pretty iconically calvin klein. those were like. status symbol jeans of the 90s. now i'm not here to argue about affordability indicating she's way richer than she actually is here, because this was the 90s and steph very much could have afforded nice clothes and a vespa for herself on her summer/part-time job (in fact the clothes she wears on her vespa are pretty implied to be some sort of part-time job uniform), but it's a very interesting contrast that dixon draws, especially considering his biases. like you can tell he thinks that steph is in no way responsible for her circumstances (it's not her fault that her dad is a criminal and her mom is an addict) & and that being born into her circumstances don't mean she's doomed to end up like them--as long as she works hard and does the right thing, she'll be rewarded. in this case, she'll present herself as higher class/act classier than her unfortunate surroundings (via her external presentation of herself--she'll work hard and get the things she deserves for her hard work and effort) & resoundingly reject following her criminal father's footsteps by becoming the spoiler in order to cement herself as Not Like That. like he went out of his way to make her circumstances be more stereotypically poor and then show her as being above all that. she's the noble poor to her unfortunate white trash circumstances. (which is in line with dixon's classism and conservative viewpoint that it's okay to be poor, as long as you're white and don't act like those people do and hate your circumstances/are motivated to rise above them).

and this thread of how crystal is/stephanie's circumstances continues through crysal's next two appearances in robin #3 and showcase '95 #5 (though this was was written by keri kowalski, not dixon). she's still presented with very stereotypical aesthetics: she's never dressed, at this point, it's not implied she works...

and again, you can tell that dixon likes steph despite the fact that he wrote her as poor in her initial appearances because he often writes her as though he considers her above her circumstances (because those aren't her fault and she's working hard to not be like that).

the interesting thing is how this evolves once crystal kicks her addiction. which. frankly, i don't believe we ever see exactly when this happens? she's still an addict in showcase '95, but by her next appearance in robin #43 in 1997, she seems to. certainly be different than she was portrayed in her few initial appearances and appears to probably be sober at this point.

she's well put together and clearly employed, a far cry from the initial imagery dixon initially used for her. now it doesn't say she's a nurse here, just that she works at the hospital, but the white shoes and dress are an imagery giveaway. and now making steph's mom a nurse is actually kind of a soft retcon of her previously implied situation and a pretty interesting one at that because nursing--nursing and teaching occupations back in the 80s and 90s (and even today for nursing) iirc were considered good jobs to the middle class, on account of them being professional and steady jobs that required a degree of some sort that couldn't be automated or sent overseas (and there's a shortage, they need nurses!), like other jobs that were being lost at the time. so by making her mom a nurse, dixon was explicitly cementing their family circumstances as middle class as opposed to implied poor like their very initial appearances (or even what might've been considered "working class" at the time by certain economic theories, given that nursing isn't necessarily considered an "unskilled" job and does require college + it may be considered a pink collar job but in general there's good job security so it's such a gray area) (forgive my use of quotations here, i don't personally believe that jobs are unskilled and that the working class is a nebulous term that is illdefined and covers many different jobs with vastly different potential salary opportunities. a union working class electrician could very well be upper middle class based on salary, low cost of living, and lack of debt compared to someone who works at minimum wage, lives in a HCOL area, and has 75k in college loans but both are considered working class because they provide labor for wages) (i'm thinking of a 90s working class that was viewed between the middle class and the poor that consisted of a lot of what people considered blue collar or routizined work, but again, that means almost nothing in terms of salary potential and economic opportunity. plumber and warehouse worker are both considered blue collar, but their economic circumstances can vastly differ, but i digress-)

which is actually a pretty interesting evolution to her initial implied socioeconomic circumstances. because if her mom is a nurse & has a middle class job, then their economic issues previously weren't necessarily just that they were poor. it's that they were middle class fallen on hard times. which also coincides with the shift in the 90s where people were starting to be frightened of the middle class getting ravaged by the opioid/drug crisis. so now crystal isn't a stereotypical poor white trash addict, she's a middle-class worker who fell on hard times. and if they were struggling with finances, it wasn't that they were poor, it was more to do with struggling on account of crystal's addictions and having to deal with steph's dad/pay for him/he used their money and house for his villainy. and you end up because of this retcon having this issue where yea, she was initially presented as poor. but for the vast majority of her appearances, when she more consistently started to have a presence, she's written as middle class fallen on hard times. and you get this dissonance in her reading where it's like, yea, at the beginning, she was poor (and in far more stereotypical circumstances), so you can't say she never struggled financially. but also to claim she's just poor is to go against a lot of imagery that indicates more of a lower middle class (middle class, but struggling/tighter finances/no significant wiggle room), such as having a mom who's a nurse, having a home computer, etc. and in this case i really don't think this was just a case of dixon not knowing how to write a poor person (though that's definitely somewhat involved, this is dixon after all), because the choice of profession for her mother and giving her access to a home computer in the 90s and the overall improvement of her perceived home environment as the series progressed do seem like a deliberate choice on dixon's part. he probably would have known that nursing was considered a "good, steady" job to have.

anyways, i don't necessarily think this retcon is. necessarily worst thing in the world. it's much less stereotypical than poor/bad people are in poor/bad situations because of their choices and it acknowledges that people in all socioeconomic tiers can struggle with issues like crime and addiction.

alright, continuing on. there's an interesting thread in the steph pregnancy arc that has crystal ruminate on how steph ended up that way because crystal was a bad influence for marrying arthur and the pills. but because chuck has decided that the browns are more lower middle class than straight lower class there's a bit of a redemption/reimagining of his initial poor view of crystal once she gets sober and a marked improvement in the appearance of their socioecomonic status. take robin #58 for example.

crystal gets to support and affirm steph, be present (unlike her initial appearances). and in robin #84 after she's aware of steph's going out as spoiler after having recently found the spoiler costume (and trying to put her down about it--compared to when steph was doing spoiler stuff in the kitchen and her mom didn't even notice because she was high) and the visual design of the inside of their their house has definitely improved from run down to standard middle class, fairly nice looking.

which again feels fairly deliberate to me. because it doesn't just seem like dixon not understanding what it means to be poor, there's a deliberate moving of steph's socioeconomic status up more towards middle class once her mom gets sober which i feel like aligns nicely with chuck's viewpoint that if you're poor, you're poor because of bad choices and once you make good choices you can settle back into relative comfort.

and notably he gives even bigger reward to crystal for kicking her habit and make better choices and renouncing her husband's criminal ways (when she found out steph was spoiler and turned him in she was like "hah, serves him right"--compare this to when she was implied to be visiting him in steph's first appearance and she was being presented poorly): she, like steph, will now get sympathy for being put in a situation out of her control and the hard times that have fallen upon them. in robin #93 and #94 arthur comes home and parks himself there and nobody likes it.

and yea, they're shown to be struggling--crystal doesn't have extra money laying around to hire a lawyer to kick our her husband--a long, arduous, expensive process (+in robin #94 she's shown as being fed up with the court process as well). but rather than her being treated bad by narrative for not having money, she's presented quite sympathetically. she doesn't want them there or have anything to do with them. she's a hardworking, middle class woman who maybe fell on hard times because of her past addictions and having a criminal husband, but because she did the right thing and got clean and renounced those ways. she's not being seen as culpable to the situation--she's being seen as a victim of it this time. anyways, dixon eventually resolves the situation by sending dinah over to kick out the villains inhabiting her home, which shows that he thinks that they're (crystal and steph) deserving of being saved from the circumstances that keep them down (because they're hardworking people who are actively trying to get out of their situation and better themselves). and it aligns quite nicely with his conservative view of the world, that people who work hard get rewarded for their hard work and good things happen to them.

like i'm not going to pretend that the browns are rich by any means. they're clearly not. but there's an interesting way in which dixon improves steph's class as a reward for her perserverence. the last mention we get of any potential class by dixon is her conversation with tim in robin #100 where tim is catastrophizing about the loss of his money (which i know is nagl), but it also doesn't exactly imply she's poor and she's not exactly mad at him for being tone-deaf. she's just matter of fact about not understanding the big deal--just that she fights crime on a budget. so it's more her way of telling tim that he doesn't have to worry about the money thing/going down to middle class when it comes to being robin--after all, she's done just fine as spoiler by being smart with her money. which is actually fairly in line with dixon's viewpoint that if you make good decisions with your money, you'll do just fine and can/should afford to do what you want.

his biases and politics are sooo obvious with the browns tbh. all in all, the way he writes the browns (crystal & stephanie) wrt class i get a lot of flavors of that stupid fucking hillbilly elegy book. they're not poor welfare recipients because they're the true, hardworking people who deserve to be middle class. they were down on their luck and made bad decisions and had unfortunate things happen to them (arthur, crystal's addiction), but they overcame that like good hardworking americans (became spoiler, got sober) and as a result their economic situation improves as god intended. anyways, like i said before. it makes it so hard to be like "yea, steph was poor!" without leaning into dixon's stereotypes of poor people (addiction, criminality) and when he does write them as poor/struggling he writes them as the "true poor" "the good poor people who would never depend on aid, they just work hard to reject their circumstances and elevate themselves as they should". but it's also hard to uncomplicatedly say she was middle class, because despite being presented as lower middle class for a lot of her appearances, it's also another part of dixon's classism that has him improving their economic class over time because it's an improvement inexorably linked to his belief that hardworking americans can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps because he shows steph and crystal doing just that.

& i think of how it was initially dixon's idea to maybe make steph robin in a storyline & i can't help but feel that's almost a continuation/conclusion of the bootstraps narrative he has for steph.

idk it's just hard for me to say that dixon looked down on steph for being poor/being lower middle class because her story of self-improvement is so tied to the conservative belief of upward mobility with hard work. it's extremely classist. and yet it's still there. on the paper.

bonus, just to prove he sees them (the browns) as a lower middle class family who wouldn't be struggling so much if the government would just stop taking all their money in taxes:

#listen tim gets to be a dixon mouthpiece a lot to extoll the virtues of the rich #but the browns are also very much written as his way of extolling the 'poor dears plighted by taxes to pay for the poors' lower middle clas #and it's hard to be like well that's unrealistic when that socioeconomic class has gotten convinced of the ideals of conservatism #it's just another one of the unfortunate realities of her creation and the fact that she was dixon's darling #no matter which way you perceive her...classism and conservative ideals of economics are involved

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