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modernday-orpheus · 7 months

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Okay, hear me out. If Tim idolized Batman instead of Robin, Bruce would be dead.

Disclaimer: I am not perfect and don't know everything there is to know about comics! Some shit here may be accidentally based on fanon rather than canon! Please be nice!

Tim, of course, respects and looks up to Batman. Bruce is his mentor and his father, so it's safe to assume he loves him as well. But his Hero™ is and always has been Robin, Dick at first but especially Jason judging by the timeline. Most people in Gotham view Robin as an addendum, an extra, nothing more than a kid sidekick. They’re disappointed if her shows up without Batman, and question his abilities. Tim’s hero worship combined with his knowledge of their identities, in this case, allows him to see things as they truly are. For Tim, Robin is a light in the dark, a balancing act with Batman, not his sidekick but his partner. He’s a necessary part of the Dynamic Duo because while Batman represents Justice, Robin represents this Hope for a better future. Sure, he’s just a kid; by all accounts he shouldn’t even be out there fighting, but maybe, if he is, no other kids won’t have to fight as hard just to survive. He represents the soul of Gotham, underneath the criminality and corruption; a city full of people, tough-as-nails, saying “No, fuck you, this is our city” despite the constant danger. He represents the people who come together in times of crisis, who help out their neighbors when each new disaster strikes. He’s trained in martial arts, of course, and he’s a skilled fighter, but Robin’s primary job is always the safety of civilians. He’s the one that gets scared little kids out of a burning building while Batman keeps the villain of the week busy, the one who stays behind with SA victims walks them home because Batman is too much for those things. He uses fear where Robin uses kindness, compassion, and love.

Tim sees this. So, when Robin dies and Batman is getting rougher, more violent, more careless, he notices. He notices that Bruce is picking bigger fights than he can handle, taking hits he could dodge, breaking four ribs instead of two, barely making it back to the manor each night. If he idolized Bruce, at this point, he would trust him the way the rest of Gotham does. He would assume it was a rough patch, and Bruce would recover, and that Batman would always save the day. He would see a solitary hero, the way Batman wants to be seen. He wouldn’t think it necessary to reach out to Dick for help, and even if he did he would think Nightwing would be enough help. He wouldn’t understand the importance of the Robin mantle, the specific role that needs to be filled. Nightwing can represent a lot of things; fluidity, positive change, and freedom come to mind immediately, but there's no world where Nightwing represents Gotham and Hope the same way Robin does. He can’t serve the same purpose anymore, not in that uniform. Bruce would die at Two-Face’s hands in that very first arc, I have not a single doubt in my mind.

Then, as Tim comes back to Gotham post-training and actually starts to help out, it’s common for him to be the conscience. He falls easily into the role of Robin, the role that makes him protector of the innocent. He’s not like Jason, raised by these streets in a very different way, though I wouldn’t say either is better or worse. Where Jason struggled and had to fight, out there each night pre-Bruce out of necessity rather than choice. He knows all the best hiding spots and back-alleys because it kept him alive. He chooses to be Robin because he needed a hero and wants to be that for other people. Tim chose those streets, and he chose them for Robin. He knows the best hiding spots because they put him closer to the action, because he raised himself on all those cold nights alone on rooftops with his camera. He knows the back-alleys because they made him faster, made it so his little kid legs could keep up with his hero so he wouldn’t miss a moment. He lives for Gotham nights, for the thrill of seeing everything, getting to know everything. He chooses to be Robin because where his parents failed to teach him how to be a good person, Robin stepped up. He bases his morals off of watching Robin help people, and because he’s a kid he assumes that it’s normal to behave with altruistic intentions and prioritize others.

There’s a point to be made here, briefly, about how this lends itself to Tim’s self-worth issues and insecurities. If his job is to assist, supplement, guide, and fill in the blanks when Batman fails, he doesn’t have the option of failure. He expects that how he does his job, as long as the job gets done, doesn’t matter because he doesn’t view himself as the hero. He never views himself as a main character in his own story; he truly thinks he’s doing what anyone else in his position would gladly do. This is why he overworks himself, why he’s known for living, for lack of a better term “like a goddamn ninja turtle”. It’s why he’s always Robin or Red Robin or even his public persona Timothy Drake-Wayne but rarely Just Tim. Very few people get to see Just Tim, normal Tim, because if they’re seeing that then he’s not doing his job.

All of these factors lead to Tim’s conclusion that if no one else can get Batman out of this state, least of all Batman himself, of course the next logical conclusion is that it’s his responsibility to step up and do the job. Furthermore, it’s only because he idolized Robin that he can fill the role properly because his relationship to Bruce, especially in the beginning, is nothing like Dick and Jason’s relationships with Bruce. He’s not his kid, doesn’t bring Robin’s joy and hope home, so instead he has to work twice as hard in the field to keep Bruce away from the edge. He’s the first of the Robins to view himself as Batman’s protector rather than the other way around, and he’s the only one who Bruce acknowledges when he tries to fill that role. Bruce accepts it when Tim manages him, reorganizes his files, forces him into the medbay, even when he very occasionally goes as far as to outright scold him rather than just pressure him to make the right choices. He’s given an inch and takes a mile, because he believes (rightfully, in my opinion) that if he doesn't then all hope is lost. And Bruce allows him to help, to guide, as much as he’s willing to because he’s not his kid first. He’s Robin first.

This mentality carries over to the Red Robin arc, where Tim spends an entire year chasing after Bruce to save him. He does it alone, and although he asks for help he doesn’t actually expect it. Furthermore, because his morals are based off of Robin in his infinite altruism rather than Batman with his rigid rules, he doesn’t mind working with Ra’s al Ghul. He doesn’t mind betraying Ra’s by killing his men, by blowing up his bases. He doesn’t tell Bruce about it to protect Bruce from having another murderer under his roof, and because he doesn’t think it matters enough. Bruce isn’t surprised when Tim is the one to save him. I believe he would have been if any other Robin had shown up. He and Dick have had a strained relationship for years, he and Jason aren’t even on speaking terms, Stephanie was so often full of rage at him throughout her run as Robin and is dead at the time, and he doesn’t even really have a relationship with Damian. Aside from all of that, he’s assumed dead. He can’t assume the Justice League will spend their time saving a dead man. And yet, despite all of that, he isn’t surprised when Tim is the one to pull him out of the time stream. He’s disoriented, sure, and a little surprised it was possible for him to be saved at all, and he even wants to hear about how he figured it out, but his doubt is never placed on the fact that Tim would be the one to understand and tear the world apart to bring him home.

I believe this also helps to explain Tim’s struggle with letting go of the Robin mantle, outside of the fact that he was the first to have the choice to move on taken away from him. If he’s always been Robin first, always felt the weight of that on his shoulders, what is he supposed to do when his very identity is stripped away right as he loses everyone who got to really know him as Just Tim? How is he supposed to cope with having to reconstruct his own idea of who he is with no one around to remind him? Humans are social creatures. We learn and grow with and because of each other. He’s encouraged by Dick to grow quickly out of Robin to fill a new role, which is a nice sentiment from Dick’s own point of view, but he’s lacking a sturdy foundation. Not because it’s not actually there, or because he lacks personality or morals, but because he truly views himself and all of his good decisions as just what anybody would do and what Robin is supposed to do. He doesn’t consider that following these morals makes them his, makes them the building blocks for wherever he goes next, he considers them to be traits of a character he no longer plays; a purpose he no longer serves.

(This is the second time I've posted this, so if you see another version that's why!)

#tim drake #red robin #robin #batman #red hood #dc robin #dc comics #dc batman #dcu #robin dc #Dc #nightwing #Dick grayson #Bruce wayne #damian al ghul #damian wayne #damian wayne al ghul #tim drake wayne #character analysis

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yletylyf · 3 months

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Mysterious Lotus Casebook timeline

I put this together for my own use while writing my fic, but haven't seen anyone else share one, so here goes!

This is live-drama canon, not novel canon. I don't speak much Chinese; I followed iqiyi's subtitles which are rather awful. Additions/suggestions/comments/corrections more than welcome!

As should be expected for a comprehensive timeline of all pre-canon events, this is not spoiler free. Below the cut, as it's long:

Timeline

130 years ago:

Princess Longxuan is born, in the year of Ren Yin, Wu Shen month, Geng Jia day, at the hour of Geng Chen. [It could be any year of Ren Yin, but since it has to be more than a hundred years ago, this one is the only one that makes sense.]

100 years ago:

The night before Nanyin was overturned, Princess Longxuan marries Crown Prince Fangji, the eldest son of Emperor Xicheng, granduncle of the current emperor. Princess Longxuan becomes Consort Xuan. Consort Xuan secretly initiates the revival of Nanyin and plots to use the Rama Vessel.

Prince Fangji conspires against Emperor Xicheng and fails. He is ordered to commit suicide. Consort Xuan is sentenced to be buried with Prince Fangji.

Princess Longxuan writes a letter to magician Feng A-Lu asking him to save her son at the bamboo forest. She tells him to contact Jin Yu Huang Quan and revive Nanyin.

Nanyin craftsmen build their tomb and Nanyin sorcery hides it for 100 years.

The throne passes to Emperor Guanqing.

Feng A-Lu does not meet Princess Longxuan's son. He goes to kill the imperial family and falls in love with Consort Ying instead. They have a son who Consort Ying passes off as the emperor's son. Feng A-Lu is buried in the collapse of the Pagoda of Bliss.

Jin Yu Huang Quan did not revive Nanyin. They used the amassed wealth for themselves and passed the Rama ices onto the next generations.

Unknown time:

Li Xiangyi's parents save Qi Mushan.

Bandits attack the Li family; Li Xiangyi and his older brother are the only survivors.

25 years ago:

Teenage Shan Gudao finds four-year old Li Xiangyi and his older brother on the streets. Older brother dies.

Qi Mushan rescues Shan Gudao and Li Xiangyi and brings them to Yunyin mountain.

20 years ago:

The Feng clan, having searched for Princess Longxuan's descendant for over a hundred years, learns that her grandson had a ten-year-old son who is presently studying under Qi Mushan.

[Note Shan Gudao is over twenty and Li Xiangyi is nine or ten at this time, but anyway:]

The Feng clan takes Shan Gudao as the long-lost descendant of Princess Longxuan.

Ostensibly 18 years ago, but probably more like 21 or 20:

[Note there is some debate about how old Fang Duobing is supposed to be. Di Feisheng claims he has a letter showing that Fang Duobing's parents broke up 18 years ago while He Xialan was pregnant, but other sources state he is 20 at the time of the show]

He Xialan was in a relationship with Shan Gudao. They break up while she is pregnant. Fang Duobing is born a few months later, and Tianji Hall announces Xialan has died of illness. Fang Duobing is raised by Xialan's older sister and her husband as their own.

15 years ago:

The Demon of the Blood Realm challenges Li Xiangyi and Qiao Wanmian begs him to give Li Xiangyi one more year.

14 years ago:

Li Xiangyi passes Qi Mushan's test. He receives the Shaoshi sword. He departs the mountain for the first time.

Shan Gudao and Li Xiangyi go to rescue the He family of the Changma Blade sect, who was massacred by Dongling Three Gang for the cloud iron. They find one survivor, a child, and take him to Louyang. Shan Gudao ditches Li Xiangyi and kills the kid.

Li Xiangyi defeats the Demon of the Blood Realm.

At an unknown time between 15 and 10 years ago:

Di Feisheng, Wuyan, King Bai of Fire, Four-faced Qingzun, and King Zunming of Yama found the Jinyuan alliance. Di Feisheng makes his first famous kill: the Monk of the Blood Realm, Kuang Jiezi. He removes the Golden Jade hoops from his staff and hangs them on his dao as a trophy.

Li Xiangyi fights with Wuyou and nicks the Shaoshi sword to avoid killing him.

The 12 Guardians join the Jinyuan alliance just before Jiao Liqiao does.

Jiao Liqiao was following Li Xiangyi around. A girl from Fengling Sword Sect provoked Jiao Liqiao and she massacres the Fengling Sword sect. Li Xiangyi stops her and attempts to kill her, but Di Feisheng saves Jiao Liqiao.

13 years ago:

Li Xiangyi establishes the Sigu Sect. Sigu sect makes an agreement with the court dividing the affairs of the people and the affairs of the jianghu. Everyone agrees to follow the legal code of Da Xi.

Scholar Sushou robs the imperial mausoleum in the south of the capital.

Di Feisheng rescues Jiao Liqiao from a gang led by Guishou Fenglie, whose martial arts techniques she tried to steal. Di Feisheng was just there to challenge the gang leader for his spot on the martial arts rankings.

12 or 11 years ago:

Just before Li Xiangyi turns 18, Shan Gudao gives him the Wenjing sword as a birthday present.

At the age of 18, Li Xiangyi acquires Yangzhouman.

11 years ago:

Sigu sect destroys the cult in Mobei and the sect's vitality is damaged. The Jinyuan alliance becomes more powerful. Di Feisheng and Li Xiangyi make a peace treaty: they won't interfere with each other or draw a war in five years.

The royal court agrees to ally with Shan Gudao.

Ten years ago:

[Depending on how old you think Fang Duobing is; he says this happened when he was ten] Madam He introduces Shan Gudao to Fang Duobing as her long-lost brother. Shan Gudao teaches Fang Duobing martial arts in secret before he can walk. Fang Duobing briefly meets Li Xiangyi, who gives him a wooden sword.

Li Xiangyi trespasses into the Royal Palace grounds on Mid-Autumn night to watch the Epiphyllum festival.

Lian Quan, Lord Of The Netherworld, is last seen in Shishou Village.

Shan Gudao tries to break into the Yipin tomb but cannot get past the Bagua (eight trigrams) Formation. The 14 Thieves of the Netherworld break into the tomb and die inside.

Li Xiangyi receives a message that the three kings of the Jinyuan alliance have besieged Shan Gudao in the Yangsha valley, the Jinyuan alliance's secret hideout. Meanwhile, the three kings receive a challenge from Shan Gudao but the letter was not his handwriting. The three kings arrive at the valley to find Shan Gudao already dead. Other members of the Sigu sect claim: they followed Shan Gudao to run some errands but were suddenly attacked by the three kings; Shan Gudao sent someone to go for help; Shan Gudao lured the three kings away to protect his subordinates.

Li Xiangyi cradles his shixiong's body and vows revenge. Shan Gudao's body is stolen in an ambush by the Jinyuan alliance. Li Xiangyi declares war on the Jinyuan alliance.

Li Xiangyi gathers Shan Gudao's belongings into a box in his room at the Sigu sect headquarters.

Yun Biqiu, at Jiao Liqiao's direction, administers Bicha poison to Li Xiangyi.

Jiao Liqiao and Fang Qing are working together. Someone from Nanyin purchases gunpowder from Thunder Hall in Jiangnan with funds from the Wansheng clan. Ding Yun, Wind and Thunder Emissary and Wan Renshan, Star and Moon Emissary used thundering fire bombs to trap the Sigu Sect and blow up the Jinyuan alliance headquarters. The 12 guardians of the Jinyuan alliance die. 58 heroes of the Sigu sect die.

27th day of the 12th lunar month, year of Xin Chou: Li Xiangyi and Di Feisheng battle at the East Sea.

Someone alters a corpse to look like Shan Gudao. He survives, under the influence of wuxin huai. Shan Gudao kills Qi Mushan and takes his inner power.

Li Xiangyi fakes his death and disappears. The Sigu sect disbands. Its surviving arm, Baichuan Court, rounds up the remnants of the Jinyuan alliance. Di Feisheng goes into seclusion for ten years.

Ten or nine years ago:

Xin Lie, Thunder Chaser of Jinyuan alliance, Five Poison Palm, escapes from prison.

28th day of the 5th month, year of Ren Yin: Shi Hun writes a letter to the Sigu sect to thank them for releasing him.

Unknown, between ten years ago and present day:

The Jinyuan Alliance surrounds Lian Quan's mansion for the Rama Heavenly Ice, he escapes with Li Xiao and Li Xiong to Xiaoyuan City to live in hiding.

Li Lianhua finds Scholar Sushou, helps him and lets him stay with him. Scholar Sushou passes away.

Li Lianhua saves Tiexiao, who jumped off a cliff and was buried; Li Lianhua heard him shouting.

Four-faced Qingzun dies in prison and gives the Rama ice shard to his wife, Liangyi Xianzi.

Fang Duobing takes bitter medicine; bathes in cold springs; pierces his 12 major acupoints every day and faints many times but refuses to cry. He can stand up, walk, and learn martial arts.

Five years ago:

The Hall of Wind and Flame took the Shi family's secret book as their own. This includes Qi Mushan's recipes.

Three years ago:

Fang Duobing takes the Baichuan Court entrance examination, but they refuse to accept him.

One year ago:

"Last March": Li Lianhua saved Shi Wenjue, third son of the Shi family (he faked his suicide because he wanted a career in public service and his family didn't approve, Li Lianhua saw it). The Shi family in Weapons Valley were the ones who forged Cloud Iron armor and the wind sword.

Present day:

The show begins sometime after the sixth day of the fourth month of Ren Zi year. [We know this because in episode 2, Wangfu is sixteen and we are given his birthday as April 6th of Bing Shen Year]

Red Mountains (Girls' Mansion episode arc) takes place on month 9 day 9 of Ren Zi Year.

Episode 37/38 is the ten-year anniversary of the dong hai duel, so it takes place on the 27th day of 12th month of Ren Zi Year.

#mysterious lotus casebook #reference guide #timeline

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ddesertmoon · 1 year

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Batman Fic Recs Feat. Time Travel

My favorite time travel fics with the batfam. I’ll mention if there are any ships :)

The View From Jade by lowflyingfruit

“Being transported to the past is not the sort of thing one normally expects. But this having happened, and with no easy way back, Jason's determined to make the most of it. Though the Bat still stalks Gotham's streets, the city's crime is run by the mobs instead of the rogues. There's no Joker yet.

There's no Robin.

Maybe there shouldn't be.”

I love this one! It’s got a lot of interactions between young Dick and Jason and they’re just precious

Fairy Godbrother by envysparkler

“What are brothers for?

(Or: some minor dimensional travel, pseudo-kidnapping, and a whole lot of meddling.)”

(I think it’s technically dimensional travel because there are two separate timelines, but one of the dimensions is moving at a different pace so I’m counting it.) Great interactions between the batfam:)

The Rule Stands by Engineered

“‘I know what you’re going to say, Batman,’ Damian said, shrugging the hand off his shoulder. ‘You’re going to tell me that Nightwing is dead, and that people don’t come back from the dead. Well, clearly you are wrong, seeing that you were dead and I was dead and Red Hood was dead and even Superman was once dead-’

‘My parents are dead,’ Father interrupted. ‘Nightwing’s parents are dead. There have been a few notable exceptions in extenuating circumstances, Robin, but the rule stands. Everyone can die.’”

Damian and young Dick bond and Damian learns that his big brother wasn’t always the dependable hero he knew him as.

A Good Place by LemonadeGarden

“Damian Wayne is kidnapped and sent back years through time. Together, he and Father – who's only been Batman for a mere six months –must figure out how to return him to his own time.

Over the course of the next week, Damian discovers that Mexican gangsters do not mess around, that social workers find Bruce annoying, that Bruce might be a little messed up, and that crystal chandeliers create the fondest memories.

Oh. And Alfred has hair.”

Pre-children Bruce bonds with Damian, who is able to see how much becoming a father changed Bruce.

Two Dead Birds by InsaneTrollLogic

“There's some lunatic in a red helmet running through Jason's territory. He wants to think it's a copycat.

He's wrong.”

Jason Todd regretting his past decisions and trying to work with his family? Fuck yeah.

show me yesterday, for i can’t find today by indent

“Then: The year is 2013. Jason Todd is alive, fourteen years old, and about to follow Sheila Haywood, his birth mother, into the hands of the Joker. All he wants is to save her life.

Now: The year is 2018. Jason Todd was dead. But now he's a nineteen year old vigilante about to take down the latest C-Lister rogue. Unfortunately for him, its a rogue that specialises in time-travel technology. And what starts as an easy takedown...ends as a time travelling phenomenon.

The two Jasons swap places.”

A reconciliation fic with *jazz hands* time travel!!

Take It Back Now Y’all by TimTheToaster (tabletoptime)

“There was absolutely no way this sunshine was from Gotham in April.

Not possible.

Which meant, Tim was no longer in Gotham, in April.

(In which Tim finds himself in the past, and tries to do the right thing. It's more complicated than he'd like.)”

Incomplete

Tim goes back to Dick’s Robin days and fixes shit

What Would You Do (To Save a Life) by 12pt_timesnewromanfont

“Here lies Timothy Drake

He lived so others wouldn’t die.

He died so others would live.

Damian scowls at the smooth stone, at the carefully etched epitaph.

He can’t help the fury building inside, rising up and clawing at his insides.”

Major TW for suicide

Tim’s evil future self comes back in time. Really well written.

Displaced by CamsthiSky

"Bruce’s vision wavers, and only once he steadies himself does he look up to find—Dick. But not Dick. Because Dick is eleven years old, and this man is clearly only a few years younger than Bruce himself is. If that. But no. Bruce would know those bright blue eyes anywhere. This is Dick. This is his son."

Bruce, who recently adopted Dick Grayson, is switched w his older self… younger Bruce meeting all of his kids again does special things to my sad little heart

Mint Chocolate Chip by LemonadeGarden

“Summer vacations have been going on just long enough for Jason to start getting bored, when he gets an unexpected visitor.

From the future.”

The amount of fluff in here… insane. I love it

Days of Future Past by Speechless_since_1998

“‘Why are you doing this?’

Red Robin looked at him from above the Riddler, ‘What?’

‘Help us. You don't want to be here. We could help you get back to your time.’

‘No. I have to be here. One week to go.’

‘A week for what?’ he asked, in frustration.

‘You told us you're here to avoid the worst moment in Batman's life, the one that will almost drive him crazy and shit like that. You didn't tell us what it will be, though.’

‘You don't need to know.’

Jason snorted, ‘Don't need to know? We're talking about what will turn Batman from a semi-decent parenting figure into a total bastard. Of course, it is necessary.’

‘For your good, you better not know.’"

Kind of angsty, but really good. Tim goes back to save Jason.

#batfam #batfam fic rec #batman fanfiction #batman #dick grayson #damian wayne #jason todd #tim drake #fanfiction #dc #fic rec #alfred pennyworth #time travel

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apocalyptixs · 11 days

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“I pretty much lost everything. And then you show up.” Atlas & Will @zombiebcit

Now that - that was a heavy weight deposited right there on Atlas's shoulders, and they didn't know what to do with it. The whole world had gone to shit, they'd all lost people... and more than a decade of time had gone by since. Atlas had lost everything - time and time again, they'd say. Up until now they'd lost everyone they'd known in the pre-outbreak world. They'd seen communities build up and then fall apart, and lost everything and everyone in the process once again.

They'd all lost everything, hadn't they? At one point or another. Unless you were fucking lucky as hell to still have people by your side from day one...

"I - uh," they hesitate, passing a hand over their face as they try to formulate a proper response. But what were they supposed to say to that? You're welcome? Thank you? Sorry? None of it seemed to fit quite right. "I dunno...I dunno uh - what you want me to say to that...I mean. Everyone's lost a lot in this shit." Was it a good thing for Will, that Atlas had made an appearance after all this time? Or was it just another confusing tick on the timeline to add to the stress and uncertainty of the world they lived in?

"Don't expect me to be pulling any miracles or anything. Everything's still shit."

#m; atlas grimes #w; will grimes #meme; atlas & will 001

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carbondated · 1 month

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RE: Perception is everything.

no fancy graphic for this one, but i think it's important to note that River has very carefully crafted the image/s for herself that she wants people to see. What I mean is, everything, down to what she wears, how she speaks, what emotion she conveys in certain situation, is more often than not a very deliberate choice.

. PRE- LIBRARY

We see this several times in canon. The most prominent instance is when she goes as far to break her own wrist and keep it a secret from the Doctor and Amy. ( TV: The angels take Manhattan ) When Amy asks her why she lied her response is 'Never let him see the damage.' why? because she would rather the Doctor have the illusion of hope than admit defeat. That he thinks River Song can miraculously change the future.

But even when the Doctor or her parents aren't around, this cultivated image of an amazing, awe-inspiring figure never ceases. You'd never catch her out under dressed, she's not the type to lounge around in her pyjamas in her living room all day, this is a woman who dresses to the nines to slink around in the dead of the night playing private eye in New York in the 30's, explodes an airlock and get's thrown out into space in a full evening gown and a pair of platform heels. The woman who jumps from buildings looking like she's stepped out of the pages of vogue, or climbs out a wrecked spaceship only after she's put on a fresh face of makeup.

She also very clearly tones down how vicious she can really be when she's around both the Doctor and her parents. This is the another facet of that persona, a woman that, in everyone's eyes, has come away from her time with the silence completely unscathed. Its something that the Doctor notes. ( TV: The husbands of River Song )

DOCTOR: Is this what you're like when I'm not RIVER: Not what? DOCTOR: You're talking about murdering someone. RIVER: No, I'm not. I'm actually murdering someone.

We see her happy to abandon, maim or murder anyone who gets in her way the entire episode right up until the man who's seen her do all of this is revealed to be the Doctor and then suddenly, she cares about the fact that the spaceships crashing with everyone onboard. She's not willing to show The Doctor her true face, regardless of everything the Doctor themselves has done, or the fact that the Doctor now knows what she's really like and I strongly believe it's not something that she can control at that point. It's become a reflex.

She loathes it when anyone sees behind this persona she's constructed, which is one of the reasons she never sticks around long enough for anyone to catch on. In her eyes, being anything less than perfect is a weakness. When she thinks she is dying of radiation poisoning, ( AUDIO: Signs ) she is extremely frustrated at herself for showing any signs of illness, and frequently pushes herself to do more than she possibly can. Even sleep is regarded as a weakness to her. When it's later revealed that it's in fact copies of herself with her own consciousness attached that have been dying in her place, she's very quick to dismiss them as weak copies of her. She has no pity for them, they didn't escape the way she did.

. POST LIBRARY

Post library River's mind fluctuates between dropping these tendencies and bringing them back with twice the strength depending where in her timeline she is, though she shows some self awareness in the sense that she acknowledges it's an unhealthy trait.

At first. while she still had gaps in her memory, she still wouldn't be caught dead ( again ) in anything less than her very best, whether she was in the field or the next big gala. She can still be very critical of herself sometimes if she shows weakness as well. She was particularly frustrated at herself for not remembering certain things, and remained that way right up until the fall of the final cluster. ( see this headcanon )

The image she crafts often extends to her aliases. ( this headcanon) They all have their respective backstories, she goes as far as to either complete an entirely new degree, or she'll doctor one if she already has the credentials from somewhere else, just to keep up appearances. Eventually, years after after the gradual loss of her entire department at Luna University, her subsequent resignation and self imposed exile form the universe, she realises she needs to make a change, or she'll meet the exact same demise that her previous incarnation met. From here on out she actively strives to dismantle these personas she's created.

#out of character.#I'm sorry it's been sitting in my drafts for a month now AND I JUST CANT LOOK AT IT ANYMORE SFHFGHJK #i made a garland for her head. and bracelets too. and fragrant zone; ... headcanons #i'm an archqueueologist from the future. i dug you up ! ... queue

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warriorsparked · 9 months

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// This is just my personal opinion, but innocence and Megatron don't often go together well for me. I mean this from an entirely pre-war perspective when I say innocent. I often see people portraying him as this sweet, kind, innocent person, and although we know a 4 million year war can totally change people (and Megatron dealt with a LOT), I still feel like those things stem from a deeper place of violence and trauma that he'd had to cope and deal with from the beginning of his life.

I've never seen Megatron as an innocent. Innocent in the sense that he was obviously not born/created as a killer. No one is (although there's that funny little nature vs nurture argument that we still haven't managed to put our finger on). At the end of the day, people are all shaped by what is around them and how they manage to cope with those things. Some people snap, some people don't. What makes those people snap, though? Well, we've not quite figured that out yet.

if you put two people in the same scenario, they could still turn out completely different--whether or not genetics makes a difference (as a twin, I find this stuff interesting as well, because despite that, twins can still grow up to be very different people). People perceive things differently and uniquely, and thus we all feel differently and cope differently.

Megatron grew up in one of the hardest environments on Cybertron, I just can't see him being sweet and innocent. There's always been a gruffness about him, a temper, and a broodiness.

I have big issues with how soft MTMTE made him, because it just doesn't feel entirely Megatron. And therefore, it doesn't feel genuine to me, but a way for them to just slap a "good guy" badge on him (let's be honest, it's not that black and white and it never should be). It feels like we're supposed to believe this lovely, sweet, innocent peace keeping poet just dropped everything he believed in one day to become a warlord that murdered and killed whenever he pleased, and it's just not believable to me.

Megatron Origins did a really good take on his earlier life. It showed the harsh conditions that Megatron lived under, it showed the pressure building, and it showed a reasonable young mech snapping beneath that pressure (which we also know people can do). But it being a one shot comic, it was enough to get that GLIMPSE and not have to expand too much on it, which MTMTE ended up doing as it was a much longer running comic series. It then felt... pressured? To me, I guess? That we must see this nice, peaceful mech who Megatron once was if we're to believe he's REALLY going to keep the peace post-war. Fools energon makes him weak (even if it's a placebo), because everyone is worried he doesn't snap, and I'm kind of... annoyed he doesn't? Because people CAN heal, yes, but not often without setbacks and taking one step backwards before taking another forward.

And I think that's my biggest gripe. Megatron never came from a happy place. That doesn't mean he can't be kind (people choose kindness over violence every day even though they've been brought up around it). Like I said, Megatron wasn't born a killer. But there's just something that never sits well with seeing him as some sweet, innocent mech who is cheery and kind.

I want to see that inner turmoil that was building up to the point of exhaustion. I want to see his frustration at the state of the world, and the PASSION behind the words that he wrote. I understand he was a "peace keeper" in MTMTE's flashbacks, but honestly, I wish he was the young, angry, passionate revolutionist that we missed out on seeing. Because that anger, that passion, that crazed and twisted world he ended up making came from those feelings. And I have a hard time with MTMTE's version of Megatron and seeing how he turned out to be the thing he hated most when there's no real UNF in that younger Megatron.

Another reason why my Megatron is just heavily HC based tho and I don't follow the MTMTE timeline.

Anyway, night time ramblings...

#ooc #headcanons #meta #// These are just my thoughts you don't have to agree with me :)

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akaikami-cherryblossom · 9 months

Text

Hey guess what my kid has a relationship timeline now

Year 1

Pre-Mankai

-Lu and Saku barely cross paths. They saw each other at auditions for Hana High’s drama club, but only she got in.

-Lu also tends to catch his monologues by the riverside on the way home from practice. Why is he always there so late?

-(This is expanded on in the lore post)

Spring

-Saku’s monologues slowly become more cohesive, and it’s always one show: Romeo and Juliet(or Julius? The name seemed to be wrong). Lu assumes it’s a newfound interest in one show, but he’s been leaving school earlier these days, as if there’s somewhere he needs to be.

-He’s also been stopping by her classroom more often, typically to pick up or drop off the boy every girl in her class seems to be infatuated with. Masumi’s never really struck her as more than an acquaintance, but looking at Sakuya up close, he’s kinda…cute?

Summer

-The more time Lu spends at home, the more kids she notices popping up in the Mankai dorms next door. Of course, that strangely included Masumi of all people, though Sakuya was showing up more in her mind. Was that why the monologues started to fit together?

-She wonders when the last time the abandoned building was so lively…

Autumn

-Another one joins the trio of Hana High boys. Lu can’t help but see Sakuya as the only sane one.

Winter

-Not much, honestly. Was that an audition sign out front? But it’s for men…

Year 2

Spring

-Looks like someone landed the spot for the Spring Troupe. That’s fine.

-Sakuya…graduated? That was surprising. She always thought he was the same age as her. Oh well, there goes the highlight of her day.

-Though there was one way to see him. Lu works up the courage to buy a ticket to Mankai’s performance of The Wonderful Charlatan of Oz. Sakuya had really improved from when he was clunkily reciting Shakespeare during her first year of high school.

Summer

-Another missed chance. Seems the audition was only held for one person. If only they truly auditioned people and didn’t just steal them.

Autumn

-Seriously, when was the audition? Did it just never exist?

Winter

-Masumi hasn’t been in school for a week. That’s strange. She saw him completely healthy recently, and he was seen at the dorm right before he disappeared!

-Oh, he’s back. And there’s a new guy in the troupe. No way she has a chance now….ensemble member auditions? These seemed reliable…

-Lu goes in to finally test her acting skills, hoping she’d pass as a boy. She didn’t expect to pass so well that she got in.

-Masu says he recognized her off the bat, Saku does once she’s not in “boy mode,” and even knows her name.(he knows???? My name????)(girl that is just something he’s good at)

-It’s decided it would be best to hide her gender for shows, yadda yadda it’s in the chara bio, this also allows her to continue in Hana High’s drama club because her roles are always small.

-It’s also quickly discovered(by Masu at least) that she has a crush on Sakuya, even if she isn’t fully aware of her feelings.

Spring(Harugaoka)

-Ok I know we skipped a year but bear with me.

-During this time, she’s gotten closer with(read: bothers) Masumi, and goes home with him often because she lives so close. (It’s also definitely not because she wants to spend more time with Saku)

-Saku also invites her along on a lot of outing events! Things like Queen Camelia, A Springtime Snooze, etc. If Saku’s there, so is Lu.

-This is also coupled with stuff like street acts!!

-The more time she spends with him, the more her feelings grow, and eventually her confusion spills over and lands itself in the Masumi cafe fic. Bro also fully feigns ignorance to her feelings until this point. V silly.

-This is also where the Azu cafe fic takes place.

-Skip a few weeks. Tenma-Saku fic.

-The next week is where the confession fic takes place, during the last tech rehearsal for Harugaoka Quartet. Sakuya spent a week writing and rehearsing the script, checking it off with Tsuzuru, and making sure he could find a time to do it.

-Turns out, telling Citron about your plan and feelings late at night isn’t a good idea because he can and will set up an elaborate plan to force you to confess your feelings to your crush.

-That’s it for now!!! More to come as the fics roll out :3c

#yume time #acting angels

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sehtoast · 7 months

Note

A few of the OTP questions for Benlander!

Pre-relationship 3, 7

Love 2, 11

Domestic 8, 9

AAAA THANK YOU FOR ASKING !!

Pre-Relationship:

3- Did any of their friends or family want them to get together?:

Neither's friends or family were aware! For keeping his supe life hidden, Ben's friends and family had no clue that he was dating Homelander. And, since Homie lacks both of those things (sorry to my babygirl but you have no circle sir), there was nobody to support the concept.

7- What would their lives be like if they had never met?

I think Homelander's life would continue on however the canon of the show itself decides to carry him. Ben, I think, likely would've died fighting the waves of rogue supes Homelander's leaking of V unleashed into the world. (As Tender Threads chapters release further, this point will make more sense.) In TT's timeline for season 2, Ben (reminder, reader is based off of him) very nearly dies during a fight, and actually would've had Homelander not intervened at the last second. Alternatively, for a less sad outcome, he may just spend his days living in a shitty apartment, barely making ends meet while he denies himself a life beyond work and heroics- because that's what he has to do. Because, if not him, then who?

Domestic:

8- How do they celebrate holidays?:

Christmas ain't the only thing coming early. I like to think they bounce between visiting Ben's family out of state or just doing something small with each other (and Ryan, of course). One of my favorite ideas that swirls in my head every so often is Homie's first New Year's Eve after losing his powers. He and Ben bundle up and pick a nice, high building to sit and watch the ball drop in Times Square. Have a lil new year's day kiss hehehe. Or him and Ben decorating their first christmas tree together.

9- Who’s more likely to convince the other to come back to sleep in the morning?:

Depends on the 'verse timeline. When Homie still has his powers, Ben suckers him into five more minutes constantly, until they've wasted the entire morning snuggled into each other. Adding also, when they're together, Homelander is able to relax enough to genuinely sleep. Sure, he doesn't need it, but he finds he enjoys just how peaceful it is to allow himself a true rest with someone he loves so much. He's safe.

For depowered Homie, he looooves a good snooze. He clings to Ben like a leech and whines a ton when Ben has to leave and head over to Vought Tower- not that it takes much convincing. Without any kind of V to keep him energized, he finally understands why Ben always hated crawling out of bed in the morning.

Little does he know, Ben just never wanted to leave because of him.

#THANK YOU SM I LOVE TALKING ABOUT THEM #ask game #otp asks #the benlander agenda

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skell3 · 7 months

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RP Muse: Jonathan Sims

I figured I may as well start with Jon.

I enjoy playing him pre Season 5. Kind-of aware and understanding to a degree, but not yet seen the full horrors the world has to offer him, yet. I could write him at just about any timeline, and I do actually have an idea for an 'Epilogue' Jon... but I haven't written him any at all.

It's a bit long, so most of the details are under the line. This is mostly just how I imagine him in my head as I write him.

Jonathan Sims stands at about 5'4" with long, curly hair. It is dark brown with salt-and-peppered in whites and grays, especially at his temples. He wears glasses that he doesn't always need, and he has warm brown eyes. Around his pupils is a halo of glowing green, as if a light were beaming out from within. Thin, but with wide bony shoulders, he seems rather frail and could be easily mistaken as a man in his later 30's, though he is more likely to be in his late 20's, if not very early 30's.

Scars from all his encounters litter his body, including: cuts from various persons, pockmark like circles from the worms, a burnt hand from Jude Perry and fainter marks from the rubble of having been within a building as it was being blown up. None of them seem particularly out of the ordinary, other than the fact that he has so many and where he got them from. Work attire tends to be button-up shirts, sweater-vests and fitted pants. His casual wear actually tends to be looser things, like skirts and wider-leg pants. Most clothes look oversize on him, so he sort-of goes with the theme, wearing rather large sweaters in the winter and only keeping his more fitted wear for outings and job stuff. He keeps his hair pulled back into either a ponytail or a bun most of the time, so it's pretty rare for him to let it down, even at home. Jon lives in a small flat on his own, after having to move out of his prior one and all that. It's a 1 bedroom with a tiny kitchen and his living room doubles as an office. If he could keep plants alive, he would have a couple, but as it is the place is sparse in the way of furniture and personal items, most of which are still in boxes and tucked off to the side. He spends more time at the institute than at home, so there really hasn't been a lot of time to get settled in. Plus, he half expects to not be there long, just in case more stuff happens.

As an avatar of the Eye, Jon has more than glowy eyes of his own marking his connection to his Fear. His shadow sometimes also possesses eyes, usually when he is Looking at someone or something. This includes some of the shadows of his hair, especially if he's got it in a pony tail or down, which almost gives him a sort-of halo'd effect. The glow of his eyes also grow more intense, and when he's using what 'full power' he has, they go completely green and intense. Aside from all the basic information about him (I'm sure he fits a general line of how people think of Jon), I've primarily written Jon in an RP with a friend that has a sort-of open Multiverse setup. We've got the 'now' (Pre-S5) team, we've got some years ago with Gertrude and Gerry around, and an older group with Eric Delano and Michael Shelley and stuff, so. Pretty open with interacting with just about any character- The Institute is pretty weird and just about anyone could show up one day.

#tma #tma fanwork #tma fan content #Jonathan Sims #creative writing #writings #musings #muse #TMA Multiverse

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streetlights-was-taken · 1 year

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🌗🌙☀️: character notes ii

I think about this fic idea every day but I don't feel ready to write it yet. however, I can think up more backstories for the other characters!

this might be even more disorganized than the last post. as with all my pre-writing posts, I'm just making things up as I go along and word vomiting ideas. not even sure if I'll use all of them tbh.

btw, I have to preface this post by admitting that, in between the last post and this one, I started reading oshi no ko and have taken huge inspiration from it. thematically, there are some similarities since the conception of this fic idea, though they're still quite different.

but what I like about onk is how the past of the character heavily affects their actions, and the slow revelation of their past to the reader. this is something I want to get better at, so it's actually really great that I'm starting with the backstories right now before actually plotting the fic (which... I honestly don't know at the moment. all I have is the premise, and I think I'll just let the characters do what they want and see where the story goes). anyway.

> timeline

as I was working on the backstories for other characters, I realize that I needed to make a timeline of events to see where everyone was at in their lives relative to each other. as it turns out, I've thought about 13 years' worth of backstory for most of them. the fic starts at around year 14 in the table. numbers in parentheses show the characters' ages in that year.

this isn't set in stone or anything, but it'll be a rough guideline that I'll follow to get an idea of the character's past once the story is set into motion.

> character backstory: albedo, xingqiu, lumine

I've always wanted to make albedo the protagonist because he's the most uninvolved character in the fic's entertainment industry, so it will be easier to world build around his point of view. similarly, he's the outsider who doesn't know these people he's about to meet, what their secrets are, how they're all connected to one another.

however he is a bit of a blank slate since he's the most disconnected to all of the other characters I've already developed in my head. which worried me, for a while, because I do want to give albedo depth beyond just being "the researcher" character, the person who helps aether grow, or the outsider. so I'll just throw ideas into this post and see what will stick.

first, the basics. albedo is a young prodigy who grew up with alice and rhinedottir and all the other witches, most of whom have very loose views on morality, gender, etc. and are all accomplished writers or researchers. as such, albedo hasn't really thought of gender as something that really plays a role in his identity. he also grew up already wanting to work in academia and becoming a scientist. he entered university at the young age of 16 and already started getting involved in research projects at the age of 24. he is two years older than venti and aether.

every child of mondstadt grew up loving music, and albedo is no exception. he doesn't keep up with celebrities, but he does enjoy listening to music when he works. so he's the type of person who casually knows the popular artists like barbara, eula, LUMI, etc. but isn't into idol culture and the like. everything he knows about idol culture is something he learns through osmosis because he's friends with xingqiu.

xingqiu is still the second son to the guild master of the feiyun commerce guild, he's still an author, he still practices guhua arts, he's basically the same as canon xingqiu, but modern. I'm taking fanon drummer chongyun into this fic-verse though. chongyun is a drummer to xinyan's band and xingqiu is very supportive of them. xingqiu is also a LUMI fan.

there are actually some key scenes I already envisioned albedo to be in, but I wasn't sure of when it happens in the story until I started making the timeline above. I figured out that one of those key scenes happens in year 11 of the timeline. LUMI is on tour and albedo is already on his second research project. he accompanies xingqiu to a concert and then to a fanmeet. only xingqiu goes up to LUMI and talks to her, and he comes back to albedo feeling elated and happy. he doesn't tell albedo why, but the reason is because he mentions to LUMI that he related to her music so much because it felt like he was seen through it and that the song validated his experience with his own gender, even though he thinks that might not have been LUMI's intention. LUMI winks at him and lets him in on a secret: that it's exactly why she wrote that song because she's going through a similar experience herself. "but please don't tell anyone! since you shared an intimate secret with me, I'll share mine with you. let's keep each other's secrets until we're both ready, okay?"

that's basically what I had in mind for albedo up until the writing of this post. one thing I realized today while creating the timeline is that I think it would benefit the story to develop albedo and lumine's character together.

see, a detail of lumine that I wanted to write but didn't think would affect the story much is that, while aether is pursuing his degree, lumine tried getting into the entertainment industry by auditioning for a children's show. I'm not sure what kind of show yet. but think think hi-5 or the wiggles, or maybe even just voice acting.

this was more of a trivia about her character that shows other ways she tried getting into the entertainment industry, or showcasing her talents in another way before she was on the road to becoming an idol. but I think we can tie this detail to albedo. see, if lumine works in a children's show, it's likely that klee has seen it. she might even be a fan! and maybe that's how albedo first learns about lumine.

maybe he takes klee to a live broadcast of the show and albedo meets lumine for the first time. lumine, who isn't an idol yet but dreams big. lumine, who is charismatic and talented and good with kids. lumine, who works hard and has a brother who just started attending university. lumine, who is good at dancing and has stage presence and has so many creative ideas, but is herself not that great of a singer (yet!). she isn't a music prodigy like her brother, and even though being an idol is more than just music, to lumine the music is the most important thing.

this is the lumine albedo meets for the first time. this lumine is a dreamer, but she thinks her brother is a bigger dreamer than she is and that he'll do many great things in the future. all lumine wants to do is become an idol. but aether? in her eyes, aether could be a scientist, an idol, he can be anything he wants to be! he's so good at so many things! he immediately understands and intuits venti's music process, unlike lumine who has to work harder about it. he got into a good university and is reading all these books and papers that lumine would never read. he lives in two different worlds like it's easy while lumine is struggling to even survive in this one (the entertainment industry). sure she has natural charisma and "star power" but that can only get her so far. aether can learn it, she thinks. aether can go farther.

which is why lumine works extra hard to make up for it. (unbeknownst to her, the more she works hard the more aether thinks he's dragging her down).

anyway, so albedo meets lumine at a tv set where klee is one of the kids in the audience for that episode. maybe this happens a handful of times. during those times, lumine enjoys albedo's company and confides in him that she dreams of becoming an idol. she tells him about her brother, how wonderful he is and how he's going to be a great scientist and idol.

lumine: but the most important thing is that we'll debut together! just you wait, albedo. if klee loves me now, I'm sure she'll love aether. and maybe you will too. maybe you'll even write a paper together. albedo: then I'll look forward to your debut. good luck.

god, imagine his surprise when LUMI debuts as a soloist. where the heck is her mysterious brother? did he end up pursuing academia after all? but albedo is in the same field as he is, and he hasn't heard of him at all. and he would know any graduate of mondstadt university who studied ley line related courses.

I'm still playing around with this idea. it's not thoroughly fleshed out, but I think this would offer a new lens on lumine in the story that aether doesn't provide. and this would also add a new layer to the relationship between albedo and aether.

> character backstory: kunikuzushi, kazuha

I've decided pretty early on that this will be a scaraven fic on the side. I think venti would totally understand scara's whole deal since he's friends with aether, and I think venti needs to grow and not be stuck in his past with lumine and aether as well.

so scara's story is pretty straightforward. I already mentioned (edited) it in the first post, but to summarize: kunikuzushi was named after his aunt who passed away, makoto. he didn't really connect with the name or identity his mother gave him, so he changed his name to kunikuzushi. I am still not sure what his relationship with ei is like... and I'm not sure it matters much in the fic, so I'll probably just decided on it when it comes up in the plot.

kunikuzushi spent two years performing in kabuki theater, where he first meets kazuha. they become close friends as they performed together. later, he decides he wants to become an idol and kazuha decides he wants to become a choreographer. they both leave the theater to pursue their dream.

do you know 1MDS? I'm thinking that beidou's crux fleet is the equivalent of that, and kazuha becomes a choreographer there. he has dance classes, but he eventually also choreographs for artists as well. when aether debuts as Æsir, I'm thinking that kazuha helps with the choreography for his "eclipse" album. kazuha looks similar enough to aether so they can do a lot of fun mirror dancing with aether's sun and moon motifs.

kunikuzushi debuts in the FATUI idol group as scaramouche. now, FATUI is kind of a weird idol group. taking inspiration from the commedia dell’arte, it's a group where everyone has a stage name and when the idol for that stage name leaves (for whatever reason) a new idol can take up that stage name and join the group, or choose a new stage name that's part of the commedia dell’arte. those who take up an old stage name will have to learn the choreography and lines of their previous incarnations. in this way, the group will be "forever" and they can make money re-releasing songs with new idols every now and then. but each idol that debuts into FATUI always announces their debut with their own unique solo song.

for example, as a reference to the dottoclones, there have been many idols who took up the "dottore" stage name and there have been songs re-recorded with different idols singing dottore's lines. but all of the dottoclone idols have their own solo debut songs. kunikuzushi is the first to take up the "scaramouche" stage name. FATUI also has some really convoluted subunits and lore in their mvs because of this, but that's exactly what the fans love about them.

basically I want the FATUI group to have their fans creating youtube videos titled "a complete guide to the fatui idol system (all members)" or "FATUI explained (2023 update!)" like some people do for nct. I mean, just look at the chart here. I want FATUI to have a chart like this.

(I... still do not actually understand how nct and their subunits work, so this chart does not make sense to me. sorry.)

anyway, as explained in the first post, kazuha and kunikuzushi meet aether while he's trying to do his disappearing act and they help him get back up on his feet.

now, about their idol careers. it's known in the fan community that scaramouche and LUMI are close friends and everyone is dying for a collab (which never happened in a song, but they do show up in a variety show together and a choreography video with kazuha). scaramouche becomes very popular and is known for his sharp dances, his rapping (which he writes, and he has his own tag/signature in songs to show that), and overall having a cool, can't-be-bothered-but-you-know-I'm-better-than-you / I'm-trouble-but-you-love-trouble stage presence, as is expected from the "scaramouche" stock character from the commedia dell'arte. clever, has villainous traits, gets into trouble, obsessed with one thing. kunikuzushi actually enjoys this work because it really is kinda like theater in a way. he's just playing a role, a mask.

all of this ends, however, over a "scandal" that goes completely out of control before the label can do anything about it in time. what happens is this: aether (as aether, not as lumine, so nobody really even recognizes him), kunikuzushi, and kazuha are hanging out somewhere when someone (a stalker?) starts harrassing them. he recognizes kunikuzushi as ei's child and calls him as such. as makoto. kunikuzushi is rightfully furious and punches the guy in the face. maybe several times.

you can maybe get away with that as a normal celebrity, maybe even as a non-idol singer. but alas, kunikuzushi is an idol, and these kinds of things will kill your career as an idol. videos of the incident goes around the internet and the fans turn on him, saying that he really is like the "scaramouche" mask that he puts on. he really is villainous, he'll assault even his own fan, he was always rude and arrogant!!

even when they clear things up, his reputation has been ruined. and they can't even tell the public the real reason because kunikuzushi, understandably, doesn't want them to know. his career as "scaramouche" is over, and he knows that anything he does after this will not be received well by the fans. he leaves the group and the label over this incident.

this affects aether while he makes his own music after that. this, combined with his own identity issues, is what causes him to go on hiatus just six months after kunikuzushi leaves the FATUI.

I am not sure how he meets nahida after this, but it doesn't feel right to write kunikuzushi without getting nahida involved. I'll think about this some more. nahida is involved more with the academia side, so I think she'll be the bridge to how albedo meets kunikuzushi. this is a good time for kunikuzushi to check up on how aether is doing too now that they're both out of the limelight.

eventually, kunikuzushi decides to become an independent artist. he meets venti through aether and they start writing songs together. he'll debut with the stage name "wanderer" and his music from here on out is a fusion of hip-hop and traditional inazuman music, a kind of mesh of influences from his time in kabuki theater and as an idol. a lot of his promotion is probably theater-inspired as well, just like his constellations in the game.

> fic plot

as I mentioned before, I can write extensive backstories but I have no idea what the actual fic plot is lol. that's fine. of course, I can always just change the premise of the fic and write about everything I just said here instead. but... I don't think that's the story I want to tell. these are all just background information I have to guide the fic when I need that guidance on the characters.

but the story I want to tell starts when aether meets albedo as his research assistant, and not a year earlier than that. this, I am very sure of.

edit: oh my god I haven't even touched on dainsleif and diluc in this post............ but I have thought about their backgrounds too, btw. diluc is still the wine industry head and the music company is just something he does on the side. dainsleif was just starting a music company and lumine and aether was supposed to be his first artist, but with the car crash the company just folded and he joined diluc's company instead. so aether seeking him out again was, in a way, dainsleif's second chance as well. but for most of the fic I think he'll just be a stressed idol manager lol.

#fic: eclipse #appendix

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felassan · 4 years

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player.

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded.

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #morrigan #solas #video games #queen of my heart #mass effect #lgbtq #jade empire #fenris #the Fenaissance #alistair theirin #lul #fav warden

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oh-mother-of-darkness · 4 years

Text

Timeline: Batman

google doc / ao3

This is my best attempt at a post-crisis timeline based on age-- specifically Bruce’s age every time he adopted and/or met one of his children.

List of events:

Bruce’s parents die

Bruce becomes Batman

Dick’s parents die

Dick becomes Robin

Jason becomes Robin and is adopted

Jason dies

Tim becomes Robin

Cass appears

Dick is adopted

Tim is adopted

Cass is adopted

Damian becomes Robin

I’ll be citing my work by issue and panel. This isn’t my most organized work, and I don’t know how well tumblr will let me translate it, so I do recommend the google doc. I imagine the image quality here won’t be great.

Notes:

This is a post-crisis timeline (1986-2011). I’ll be referencing a few pre-crisis panels, but I won’t be touching the New 52 or anything after it. That’s a different game of ball with its own, extremely bad, timeline.

Crisis on Infinite Earths is a 1985-1986 series that rebooted the DC timeline and altered some backstories, including Jason’s. Pre-crisis, his backstory was almost identical to Dick’s. Post-crisis, he changed to the “steal the wheels off the Batmobile” origin. Anything written before 1986 is a weak source for my purposes.

My original question centered around Bruce’s age through the process of meeting and acquiring his children. In this timeline, those children are (1) Dick Grayson, (2) Jason Todd, (3) Cassandra Cain, (4) Tim Drake, and (5) Damian Wayne. I was envisioning an interview where the kids explain their family timeline to outsiders. I did not anticipate the project taking this long.

We’re talking about 72 years of content here, which means decades of contradiction, conflation, and rewrites. I’m pretty satisfied with my work product, but please understand that there are no perfect answers. I’m going to cite my sources, and I’ll do my best to explain why I chose those sources specifically, but it’s pretty likely that for every panel I pull, there will be others with different numbers. We’re all going to have to live with that.

Event timeline

*I’m defining Jason’s age by the time elapsed since his birth, but you could make an argument for using time he has been alive, which is, of course, different. That’s why the parentheses are there.

Age differences

As Robin

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Bruce’s parents die

Pretty consistently, Bruce is written as eight years old the night his parents died.

Detective Comics #0 (1994)

This is a zero issue where Bruce thinks back on his origin story. It was written long after Crisis on Infinite Earths (1986), and I tend to give a lot of weight to ages written in summaries of past plot lines, my reasoning being that it’s easier to be consistent in one issue than it is to be consistent through a month to month story.

Bruce first appeared as an adult in Detective Comics #27 (1939), and the Waynes were already dead at that point, so flashbacks are the only available material anyway.

Gotham Knights #6 (2000)

The text is Hugo Strange talking about Bruce, and the image is Tim and Dick playing at Wayne Enterprises.

I’ll take a second here to note that I did find at least one alternate age for Bruce— in Superman/Batman Secret Files & Origins (2003), Bruce was 10 when his parents died. I’m disregarding that in favor of the stronger 8 year old timeline, especially in light of Batman #404 (1987).

Batman #404 is the beginning of Batman: Year One, which was explicitly written to clarify the Batman timeline post-crisis, and it’s the basis of most of my calculations for Bruce and Dick’s ages.

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Bruce becomes Batman

According to Year One, Bruce was 26 years old when he became Batman. I’m using his age at his parents’ deaths, his age when he returned to Gotham, and his 18 year timeline.

Batman #404 puts Bruce at age 25 when he returned to Gotham in January.

Batman #404 (1987)

Bruce gives his dramatic, “Yes, Father, I will become a bat,” line in March. In the same scene, he says that it has been 18 years since his parents’ deaths. Knowing that they died when Bruce was eight, that puts Bruce at 26 years old the day he became Batman, which makes sense considering Bruce’s birthday is usually set at February 19th.

He was 25 in January, turned 26 in February, and became Batman at 26, 18 years after his parents’ death.

Batman #404 (1987)

Post-crisis, DC built timelines off the “Year” model. Year One is Batman’s beginning, and events after that are measured by how far away they are from the year Bruce became Batman. I’ll be using the Year model for Dick’s life events next.

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Dick’s parents die

The Graysons died in Year Two. Using the Year Model, Dick was 12 when his parents died, and Bruce was 37.

Year timelines appear a fair amount, especially in issues titled “Secret Files & Origins.” I pulled this bit from Batman Secret Files & Origins (1997) because it was the easiest to screenshot.

Batman Secret Files & Origins (1997)

Year Two would place Bruce at 27 years old. I’m calculating Dick’s age backwards, based on him being 13 years old during Year Three.

Batman Secret Files & Origins (1997)

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Dick becomes Robin

Dick became Robin in Year Three, when he was 13 years old and Bruce was 28. I’m using two different issues to calculate the number.

Batman #441 (1989)

Batman #441 is from Tim’s introduction story. It takes place “months” after Jason’s death. We’ll get to that part. In Batman #441, Tim asked Dick to be Robin again in order to help Bruce, who was visibly unstable after Jason’s death. Dick says that he can’t go back to being Robin, just like he can’t go back to being 13 years old. The strong implication there is that Dick became Robin at 13, which corresponds to Dick’s statements in Batman #416 (1988).

In Batman #416, Dick as Nightwing returns to confront Bruce about Jason becoming Robin. He says that he was Robin for six years, and he stopped being Robin at 19.

Batman #416 (1988)

If Dick stopped being Robin at 19, after 6 years, that would put him at 13 when he debuted as Robin, the same number from Batman #441 (1989).

Dick was 13 during Year Three, so 12 during Year Two, the year his parents died. Those numbers answer the first bit of my original question. I wanted to know how old Dick and Bruce were when Dick became his child. It’s a bit more of a complicated question for Dick, since he was originally Bruce’s ward, then adopted as an adult.

Based on the timeline so far, Dick became Bruce’s ward at 12 years old, while Bruce was 27.

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Jason becomes Robin and is adopted

As previously discussed (see Notes), Jason’s timeline is complicated by Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986). Pre-crisis, Jason first appeared in Batman #336 (1983) as a former circus acrobat very similar to Dick.

Jason’s origin story reboots at Batman #408 (1987), which describes the switch-off between Dick and Jason. I’m building a lot of my timeline off of that issue. At the beginning, Dick gets shot by the Joker, and as Bruce carries him away, the media ask if Robin is dead. Dick isn’t dead, but back at the manor, Bruce decides to retire Robin as a role, based on the idea that crimefighting is too dangerous for a child.

Batman #408 (1987)

This version is more or less from Bruce’s point of view, but there’s a contrasting version from Dick’s point of view later, in Batman #416 (1987). That one has a significantly different tone, and I already cited it once (page 13) because Dick talks about his age and the amount of time he was Robin.

Batman #408 (1987)

The second part of the issue takes place “weeks” later. Bruce goes to Crime Alley to mourn his parents on the anniversary of their death. He comes back to find that somebody stole the wheels off the Batmobile. The somebody was Jason, and by the end of Batman #409 (1987), Bruce is calling Jason “Robin.”

Batman #408 (1987) seems to divide Dick’s departure and Jason’s introduction by only “weeks,” in the post-crisis reboot. Dick’s version of the story in Batman #416 (1987) is much less charitable to Bruce— instead of ending on a panel of Bruce smiling, it shows the aftermath of Dick in tears as Bruce walks away. Dick goes on to describe leaving the house, going to college for a semester, then dropping out. According to Dick, Bruce didn’t even say goodbye.

Batman #416 (1987)

I don’t think the stories are contradictory; they’re just different experiences of the same events, separated by only eight issues. Dick tells us that he was 19 when he left Wayne Manor, and Bruce chooses his new Robin “weeks” later.

As a summary, we know that Bruce’s parents died when he was eight, and that 18 years passed before he became Batman at 26. One year later, Dick’s parents died while Bruce was 27. One year after that, Dick became Robin at the age of 13. From those facts, Bruce is 15 years older than Dick.

All of my calculations of Bruce’s age are based off of the age gap between him and Dick. Dick was 19 when Jason became Robin, so we know that at that time, Bruce was 34. We also know that at that time, Jason was 12.

I can’t show a source for that number because it appears on the letter page of Batman #408 (1987), Jason’s introduction.

Even after a significant amount of investigation, I can’t find a copy of the letter page, but it’s cited by enough secondary sources for me to be comfortable using it. That issue is specifically written to show Jason’s origin, so it makes sense that it would contain Jason’s age at inception, even if the number wasn’t in the actual exposition.

From Jason being 12, we can establish a seven-year age gap between Jason and Dick, who was 19 at the time. Now we know Bruce, Dick, and Jason’s ages, and the age differences between them.

Back to my original question— when did Bruce acquire Jason? We know that Bruce was 34 when Jason became his ward, and Jason was 12. The next question, however, is when did Bruce adopt Jason? On this one, I’m making an educated guess.

Again we have to differentiate between pre-crisis and post-crisis timelines. Pre-crisis, there’s a full storyline about the fact that Bruce did not adopt Jason, although not for lack of trying. In Batman #374 (1984), the Child Welfare Bureau investigates Bruce when it notices that Bruce has not adopted Jason— and is not even, in fact, his legal guardian.

Batman #374 (1984)

The rest of the storyline is about Jason’s custody. A villain named Natalia Knight (Nocturna) adopts Jason in an attempt to get Bruce to marry her in order to become Jason’s father. In the court scene in Batman #377 (1984), Bruce says that he filed to adopt Jason sometime beforehand, although it’s unclear to me whether he means he filed between those issues or the CWB documents were incomplete.

Natalia does adopt Jason in Batman #378 (1984), and he briefly lives with her before returning to Wayne Manor in Batman #381 (1985), directly before the reboot.

I’m including all of that for two reasons: first, I do think it’s important to clarify both this version and the post-crisis version I’m about to address. Second, I spent years under the impression that Bruce adopted Jason pre-crisis because of one, well-known scene.

Batman #377 (1984)

Batman #378 (1984)

Batman #381 (1985)

Donna Troy gets married in Tales of the Teen Titans #50 (1985). At the wedding, Bruce and Dick have a conversation about Jason and about their own relationship. A few of those panels get spread around because they contain what I would consider a defining moment between Dick and Bruce.

I’m certainly not complaining about the amount of times I’ve seen the wedding conversation, but I think that, in regards to Jason, seeing just those panels has created a misconception.

Tales of the Teen Titans #50 (1985)

Without context, it looks, at least to me, like Dick is saying that Bruce has adopted Jason pre-crisis, which isn’t true. This issue takes place between the Natalia adoption in Batman #378 (1984) and Jason’s return to the manor in Batman #381 (1985), and the panels directly before the exchange make that clear. I just didn’t see those panels until I looked through the whole issue for this project.

I’m reasonably certain that in the past, I publicly cited this issue as evidence of Jason’s adoption, and I was wrong about that. [Note: As it turns out, I was only partially wrong. See section Correction.]

Tales of the Teen Titans #50 (1985)

As we see, the wedding conversation is in the context of the Natalia adoption. With that cleared up, and with the pre-crisis timeline filled out, let’s move to post-crisis.

In my brief read-through of Batman #404-427 (1987-1988), I didn’t find any direct references to Jason’s status. Those issues begin at the reboot and end at Jason’s death. However, Dick and Jason’s statements after the fact do tell us that post-crisis, Bruce did adopt Jason.

In Batman #436 (1989), Dick returns to the manor in the direct aftermath of Jason’s death, and while he is there, he sees that Bruce removed any trace of Jason from the house. There aren’t any trophies in the Batcave, and there aren’t any pictures of Jason on the nightstand displaying Bruce’s family photos.

Dick says that Jason was Bruce’s son.

Batman #436 (1989)

I think it’s fair to ask whether Dick is being literal here, because even if Bruce hadn’t legally adopted Jason, it would still be more than appropriate to call them father and son. I’m not going to place my opinion solely on this kind of statement, even if it does appear pretty regularly from 1988 to the end of the timeline.

Green Arrow/Black Canary #4 (2007)

We get a more definite answer later, during Tim’s first appearance. In Tim’s origin story, he deduces Batman and Robin’s secret identities after he sees footage of Robin doing a type of flip that only the Flying Graysons could do. Tim was at the circus the night Dick’s parents died, so he saw Dick do the flip there, then saw Dick become an orphan.

Because Tim knew that Dick was the first Robin, he correctly identified Bruce as Batman and Jason as the second Robin. He tells Dick all of this in Batman #441 (1989).

Batman #441 (1989)

Tim does specifically use the word “adopts” here, and that’s good enough for me. The last part is guesswork— I don’t know for certain how old Jason and Bruce were when the adoption took place, but I’m electing to say Jason was 12, the same age as he was when he became Robin.

I picked that number both out of convenience and because Tim seems to be putting Jason’s adoption and the second Robin’s appearance at around the same time. With that in mind, I think that Jason was 12 years old both when he became Robin and when Bruce adopted him. Using the age gap we already established, that would put Bruce at age 34.

Circling back to my original question, Dick became Bruce’s ward when Dick was 12 and Bruce was 27. Jason became Bruce’s ward, then adoptive son when Jason was 12 and Bruce was 34.

At this point in the timeline, Bruce is 34 with one former ward and one adopted son.

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Correction

A few days after I wrote my section about Jason’s appearance and adoption, I realized that I was missing a panel citation in my discussion of Jason’s death. The panel is from New Titan #55 (1989), and you’ll see me cite it when I talk about Jason’s death certificate.

New Titans #55 (1989) is the issue where Dick, who is with the Teen Titans, finds out about Jason’s death. While I was combing through the issue for the panels I wanted, I reread a scene I had completely forgotten about. Dick goes back to the manor to speak to Bruce, and it doesn’t go well.

New Titans #55 (1989)

I have three comments here. First, I do think this scene is inconsistent with the simultaneous story in the Batman title. In this version, Dick and Bruce have a very aggressive confrontation, but in Batman #436 (1989), Dick appears to be returning to the manor for the first time since Jason died, and there isn’t any reference to a prior fight.

Putting that aside, Bruce does explicitly say that he adopted Jason, and that’s more, stronger verification of a post-crisis adoption. Lastly, it’s pretty clear that Bruce and Dick are talking about the wedding scene.

I already explained that the wedding scene is pre-crisis, and in the original text, that conversation is about Bruce wanting to, but not being able to, adopt Jason. New Titans #55 (1989) carries the wedding scene into post-crisis canon, changing the language in the process. In this version, Bruce has adopted Jason.

I was still wrong about the wedding scene because in the past, I used it as evidence of a pre-crisis adoption. It isn’t pre-crisis evidence, but it is, in a roundabout way, evidence of the post-crisis adoption. I wanted to clear that up before I move on to Jason’s death.

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Jason dies

Jason’s death is by far the shakiest point on my timeline, but I’ve chosen to put him at 15 the day he died in Batman #427 (1988).

I think it’s safe to say that Jason was either 14 or 15 when he died, and my basic conclusion is that running numbers doesn’t give me a definite answer. There’s a cop-out option based on an extraordinarily poor source, and I’m taking the cop-out.

The general consensus seems to be that Jason was 15 at his death, citation to Jason’s death certificate. Jason’s death certificate appears in two different places, and I think most folks conflate the two.

To my knowledge, the only copy of Jason’s death certificate in full appears in The Batman Files (2011), where it does list Jason’s age as 15.

The Batman Files (2011)

Now there is a partial copy in Batman Annual #25 (2006), which I would argue is a very reliable reference when it comes to Jason. That issue is part of the Under the Red Hood story, the one where Jason returns to Gotham for the first time after his resurrection. In fact, the specific annual issue has a timeline for Jason’s events counting forward from his death.

Here’s the problem: the issue doesn’t say his age at death. The partial copy of his death certificate looks like this.

Batman Annual #25 (2006)

I think that when most folks remember a death certificate, they think of this one, the one from a very important issue, instead of The Batman Files (2011) which, as noted, is a very bad source.

I have three issues with The Batman Files (2011): the format, the publishing date, and the other information on the certificate. First, The Batman Files (2011) isn’t a comic book at all. It’s a commemorative book published in collaboration with DC in 2011. Now I don’t think that fact completely removes the book as a source, but it certainly damages its value as one.

My problem with that date, 2011, is that it’s the year the New 52 premiered. I called it a commemorative book because it’s meant to be a look back at a fully complete timeline, a kind of “this is us saying goodbye” product. The date and format alone make me hesitant to cite the certificate, but on top of that, the certificate is inconsistent with prior canon.

I am intimately familiar with retcons and conflicting numbers in the DC timeline. I made a point at the beginning of this paper to tell you that although this is my best attempt to make a cohesive timeline, assuming that I can carve out a cohesive timeline is fundamentally flawed.

I’m not saying that a single contradictory number is enough to make me disregard a source. I am saying that in this particular conversation about an already suspect source, I’m going to take inconsistency into account.

In New Titans #55 (1989), the issue from Corrections, Dick finds out about Jason’s death because a team member notices Jason’s status is set at “unknown.” Dick uses Bruce’s passcode to access restricted information, and he and the Titans see that Jason’s real status is “deceased.”

The death certificate in The Batman Files (2011) marks Jason’s height at 4’6 and his age at 15. In contrast, Dick’s scene puts Jason at 5’4, and its only reference to Jason’s age is a very relatable question from Donna. “How old was he, anyway?”

New Titans #55 (1989)

There’s a substantial difference between the two heights, and I think it’s also worth noting that for a 15 year old American male, 4’6 is in the 0.1 height percentile. In the past, I and many others have tried to justify that height along the lines of Jason being malnourished or similarly afflicted. Personally, I liked the parallel between this height for Jason and Damian’s height at his own death in 2013, and I know I’ve talked about that in the past.

I’m not criticizing anyone for using the 4’6 number, but I do think the unlikelihood of a 15 year old that size is worth bringing up.

In summary, The Batman Files (2011) is so bad of a source that I’m only willing to use it as a last resort. Unfortunately, it’s time for a last resort.

I mentioned a timeline in Batman Annual #25 (2006) that counts forward from Jason’s death. I’m not going to use image cites here because they’re just isolated text boxes labeled either “six months later” or “one year later.”

Using that timeline, we know that Jason’s resurrection took place six months after his death. He spent one year in a coma, then one year on the street, then one year with the League of Assassins. Finally, he spent a nebulous time training before he returned to Gotham.

We know that Jason was gone for a minimum of three and a half years, then whatever time “training” includes. Personally, I’m applying my best attempt at comic logic to say he was missing for somewhere between three and four years.

To understand the next bit, I need to point out that from Jason’s death on, I’m going to be using Tim’s age to track time in the same way I’ve been using Dick’s so far.

As a reminder, I know what age Bruce was when Dick became Robin (28), and I know Dick’s age at the same point (13), so I know there’s a 15 year age difference. As I track Dick’s age through the timeline, I add 15 to get Bruce’s.

In the same way, I know what age Dick was when Jason became Robin (19), and I know Jason’s age at the same point (12), so I know there’s a 7 year age difference. I can use that number ongoing.

I know that Tim was 13 when he made his first appearance as Robin, and I’ll get into that in the next section. After that, I’m placing Dick, Tim, and Cass’s adoptions based on Tim’s age.

To do that, I need to know how much older Dick is than Tim, and I can only get that by knowing Jason’s age at his death, sort of.

How long was Jason Robin? If I had that information, I could establish Jason’s age by counting up from 12, the age when he became Robin, then establish Tim’s age from there.

I can’t really answer that question. There is a panel from Batman #436 where Dick, apparently in his first time at the manor since Jason’s death says the following.

Batman #436 (1989)

My instinctual interpretation is it’s been two years since he stopped being Robin at 19, making Dick 21 and Jason 14. In my opinion, that’s straightforward plain language, but it seems like I’m in the minority on that one, and most folks read it as Dick saying it’s been two years since he was last at the manor. We know from Batman #416 (1988) that Dick’s last visit to the manor was 18 months after Dick left home.

Batman #136 (1988)

I think the most honest thing to say is that Jason was Robin for an indeterminate amount of time that was somewhere between two and three years. I don’t know which number is closer. I also, if you remember, think that Jason was gone from Gotham for somewhere between three and four years, but I don’t know where in that range the real number is.

Here’s why absolutely nothing I’ve said in the past seven pages matters: I need to build my timeline based on the age gap between Jason and Tim.

I don’t know how old Tim was when Jason died.

I know how old Tim was at his first appearance as Robin, and that’s a different number.

We’ll finish this conversation in a moment.

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Tim becomes Robin

We begin, thankfully, with a straightforward fact. Tim’s first storyline spans Batman #440-442 (1989). The arc is called A Lonely Place of Dying, and we already talked about it. Tim, having watched Batman and Robin from the shadows for years, comes forwards in the aftermath of Jason’s death in an attempt to convince Dick to become Robin for a second time.

Batman #441 (1989)

We know that Tim was 13 years old at the time, but I do need to clarify exactly what time that was— an indeterminate amount of time after Jason’s death.

The word that pops up a couple of time in Tim’s first arc is “months,” from Tim and Two-Face. How many months? Who’s to say.

Batman #442 (1989)

So, from the top. We know that Bruce was eight when his parents died, 26 when he became Batman, 27 when he met Dick, 28 when Dick became Robin, and 34 when he met Jason.

Dick was 12 when he met Bruce, 13 when he became Robin, 19 when he left home and Jason became Robin.

Jason was 12 when he became Robin.

Bruce is 15 years older than Dick. Bruce is 22 years older than Jason.

Dick is 7 years older than Jason.

How long was Jason Robin? Unknown, but somewhere between two and three years. At that point, he died. “Months” after that, Tim was 13.

Here, we need to acknowledge that Jason could have been either 14 or 15 at his death, and at the same time, Tim was either 12 or 13. We need to know how far they are apart to calculate Tim’s age in relation to Jason, Dick, and Bruce— ongoing, we will always know exactly how old Tim is, so (if we know how far apart Jason and Tim are) we will always know Bruce, Dick, and Jason’s age from there.

How much older than Tim is Jason? Somewhere between one and three years, I guess, but I can’t really go beyond a well-researched guess. In my opinion, there isn’t a straightforward answer for this one.

Having presented my facts, here is my conclusion. Jason was 15 when he died. At the same time, Tim was 13. They are two years apart.

Why? To begin, I’m more comfortable using the number we already have for Tim, 13, than I am dropping him to 12 on the mere possibility that he could have been 12.

Second, even though The Batman Files (2011) is a terrible source, it does at least sort of indicate that the official DC position is a Jason who was 15 years old at his death.

Third, visually speaking, Jason looks closer to 15 than 14 at his death. Is that good evidence? No, absolutely not. Comic book art is definitionally variable, but I am going to pull a few panels for you to look over.

Batman #427 (1988)

Finally, I feel that Jason and Tim are, in later works, treated as if they are different ages. I’m not going to go into much detail on that one because it is purely a personal reaction, but I would refer to Teen Titans #29 (2005) as an example. That issue has Jason and Tim’s first meeting, after Jason comes to the tower specifically to attack Tim.

Teen Titans #27 (2005)

Another well-known issue to check out is Teen Titans #47 (2007).

My basic position is that there are so many ways, all uncertain, to slice Jason and Tim’s ages that I can take my pick. I chose the ones that most closely mirror later canon, fall most squarely into the possible range, and feel the most intuitively right.

They also have the benefit of simplicity, which was very much a factor.

Don’t agree with me? Fair enough. I think I’ve given you enough information to make an educated judgment, and I’ve also gone ahead and made a timeline in the alternative. In this one, Jason was 14 at death, and he and Tim are only one year apart.

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In the Alternative

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Cass appears

Having progressed beyond Jason and Tim’s age gap, we reenter simple canon. I hope you’re as pleased as I am.

Cass was 17 years old at her first appearance, which we can establish easily based on two different issues. Cass first appears in Batman #567 (1999), during an arc called No Man’s Land. At the time, she is working for Barbara Gordon in the aftermath of an earthquake that destroyed most of Gotham. We learn Cass’s backstory through that issue.

Cass’s biological father is David Cain, a villain, who raised Cass in isolation, never exposing her to a verbal language or allowing any kind of socialization. By comic book logic, her upbringing gave her a near-superhuman ability to understand and anticipate physical actions, as those actions are her only form of communication.

Cain trained her as a child assassin, then took her to her first kill. Cass murdered a man and experienced, through his body language, the pain he felt at his death. Immediately afterward, she ran away from her father.

Batgirl #62 (2005)

We know that Cass was eight years old when she killed and ran. We also know that her first appearance in Gotham was nine years after she ran, thanks to Barbara Gordon’s file.

Batgirl #1 (2000)

Simple enough. She was 17. How old was everybody else? We find out from Tim’s timeline.

This next bit will come up a few times. We know that Tim was 15 from at least 1993 to 2003, established by three different issues. We know from Detective Comics #668 (1993) that Tim was 15 during Knightquest, the arc where Jean-Paul Valley was briefly Batman. Barbara tells us in 2002 that Tim is still 15, and Tim turns 16 on-panel in 2003.

In Knightquest, Tim gets his driver’s license early, at age 15, because Jack Drake is in a wheelchair. I suppose the wording here is ambiguous on a technicality, but I don’t think there’s any significant argument against Tim being 15; if he was only 14, the language would be different.

Detective Comics #668 (1993)

Next, in Batgirl #24 (2002), Barbara says she’s “sending a 15 year old” as she reaches for Tim’s com line.

Batgirl #24 (2002)

We could stop here for Cassandra’s appearance, since that happened in 1999, between the 1993 issue and the 2002 reference. For completion’s sake, however, let’s note that Robin #116 (2003) is about Tim’s 16th birthday. He forgets about it, so his step-mother throws a surprise party.

Robin #116 (2003)

Okay, so Tim was 15 when Cass appeared at age 17. That puts Bruce at 39, Dick at 24, and Jason at 17 if you’re counting by years elapsed since his birth.

Bruce met his daughter when he was 39 and she was 17, in reference to my original question. Cass is 22 years younger than Bruce, seven years younger than Dick, the same age as Jason, and two years older than Tim.

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Dick is adopted

This one, having already established Tim’s timeline, is very simple. Dick was adopted in Gotham Knights #17 (2001).

Gotham Knights #17 (2001)

Again, Tim was 15 from 1993 to 2003, and 2001 falls within that range. Tim was 15, which makes Dick 24 and Bruce 39.

At this point in the timeline, Bruce, a 39 year old, has two adopted children, one of whom is deceased as far as Bruce is concerned. His adopted children are (17) and 24. He has already met two of his future children, Cass and Tim.

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This is PART ONE. I’ll reblog Part Two onto this post when I wake up, which should be around the same time this posts.

#PART ONE of two #I'm going to reblog the last 10 pages onto this post as soon as it comes off the queue #timeline #mine #really lame that I can fit 50 pages into a post but then the last10 is too much

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pynkhues · 2 years

Note

yes please make a timeline! i totally missed alan saying there's a 15 year age difference. that's interesting because 15 is such an emotionally intense period in life and by that age you are pretty firmly set in only child ways! i feel like connor really threw himself into the big brother/father surrogate role partly bc he felt abandoned by logan and this was a way to 'secure' his position in the family and logan's life (part 1)

(part 2) plus i do think connor probably wanted siblings as a kid and was happy to get them even at 15. connor probably had a lonely childhood if his mom struggled with mental health and logan was focused on building his empire. suddenly having 3 little kids was a big change but probably welcome for connor.

(part 3) i wonder if connor's distance from waystar reflects his childhood - at that point perhaps logan didn't use the business as a stand-in for family matters as much as he currently does and did during the trio's childhood (i think the dynamics w connor's mom played into this too). so for connor waystar was just his dad's job and not something to be used to gain his dad's attention or affection but just a demanding job that took his dad away a lot from him. just some thoughts!

(x)

I agree on all counts, anon! Fifteen is such a tricky age, because it's one where you're both still a child in so many ways, but also are at a point where you're having your own, independent lived experiences that are shaping you into the adult you're going to become. It also really tells us that he doesn't have a shared childhood with Kendall, Shiv and Roman in the way they do with each other.

Gosh, I was re-watching 1.08 the other day, and Connor telling Roman about getting high and having a spiritual experience listening to Fleetwood Mac in 1986 is one of my favourites in that sense. He's talking about a bright, young adult experience in a year where, canonically, he would've been about 22 (s1 is set in 2018) and Kendall would've only been six or seven, Roman and Shiv even younger. It's really reiterated across the episode with Connor chiming in on the dog pound story, remembering as an adult what Kendall and Roman are remembering as children (Roman's only four in the memory after all, and depending on what you think the age gap between Kendall and Roman is [I tend to think it's about three years], Kendall's a very little kid too).

But yes! To your point, Connor going from the isolation and loneliness of being his father's only son to suddenly having three little siblings would've been stark in any instance, but if it came after a period of abandonment from Logan, I think it would've been a really difficult cocktail of want and happiness and resentment and confusion. What that meant at the time is hard to know, but I think the show underlining just how much Connor stepped up for them in s3 tells us he developed a real attachment and protectiveness and love for them. I think he probably wanted to give them what he didn't have, and while I doubt he was always successful, I think he gave them something, y'know?

That's a really interesting thought about Waystar too! I think you could be onto something, especially given Logan and Connor's exchange in 3.05 when Connor asks him for a job at the firm:

It makes for a really interesting and loaded beat, especially when you consider Shiv, Roman and Kendall have each been 'not interested' - Shiv with politics, Roman with quitting after the Waystar Studios fiasco pre-series, and Kendall trying to get out in 3.08 - and Logan's never really cared. He wanted them in, regardless, and he never stopped trying to get them there or get them back.

What that says about his relationship to and expectations of Connor - - it's hard to say, but I think you're right in that it was likely fueled by a different upbringing and a different family life, something likely cemented by Logan being so much younger when he had Connor, and Connor's mother being, well, we don't really know, but I think very, very different from Caroline, haha.

#i imagine it must've been weird too #going to see your father at what #twenty? and he's got a five year old and a pair of toddlers #of course i imagine the golden trio were left with the nannies more than logan and caroline at that age but still #connor's done the hard yards in so many ways #i really hope we find out more about his mother at some point #connor roy #logan roy #connor + logan #hbo succession #succession 3.05 #welcome to my ama #succession meta #succession 1.08

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inevitably-johnlocked · 3 years

Text

30 FAVE BOOKMARKS of 2020

Happy New Year’s Eve-Eve, everyone!!

And welcome to the Last Fic Rec Wednesday of 2020! No one asked for this at all, but I enjoy making unprompted lists for everyone, and I’ve been doing this list since January 2020 :P

I’ve read some FANTASTIC fics this year, and now seems like a good time as any to share with y’all some of those amazing fics I’ve added to List of Love! I had to even whittle it down today to get it to 25 – the number I like as a “top xx” thing, so I am very disheartened that a lot of my bookmarks this year didn’t make the list :( It’s been a long time since I’ve done a “last XX bookmarked fics” list, maybe I’ll do one of those soon.

First off let’s start with 5 honourable mentions of Other Fandom fics, because I spent a lot of my summer indulging in my renewed Rimmster ship so I have a few amazing RD fics y’all should read LOL

FIVE OTHER-FANDOM HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Réveillon by Big_Edies_Sun_Hat (T, 6,431 w., 3 Ch. || GOOD OMENS || Christmas Eve, Angst, Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Relationship, Established Relationship, International Travel, Moments in Time, Historical / Biblical Interpretation) – After a gloomy history with Christmas, Aziraphale shows Crowley how he has learned to seek out the good in it by traveling around the world on Christmas Eve. Highlights include: the Annunciation; potholes; international teleportation; peace and hope; arson; Lupe gets a doll of her very own.

Out With It by Clipped_Ionian_Vowels (T, 10,255 w., 1 Ch. || RED DWARF || Post-Ace, Reclaimed Slurs, Getting Together, Sexuality, Coming Out) – Rimmer finally comes home, hangs up the wig and decides to set the crew 'straight' about one thing; he's not. And neither, it transpires, is Lister.

Standards by Kahvi & Roadsterguy (E, 11,725 w., 2 Ch. || RED DWARF || Hard Light Rimmer, Bickering, Humour, First Time, Over-Protective Kryten, Cranky Rimmer, Exploring Derelicts, Arguing Leads to Awkward Flirting, Showering Together, Intense Orgasms) – Yet another supply raid on a derelict leads Rimmer and Lister to an argument, which in turn leads to... something that's still fairly close to an argument. You get lonely in space, but you do have standards.

speed limits (and how to break them) by darcylindbergh (E, 13,750 w., 4 Ch. || GOOD OMENS || POV Crowley, UST/URT, Mutual Pining, Romance, First Kiss/Time, Crowley’s Anxiety, Gift Giving, Humour, Touching, Awkwardness, Love Confessions, Sussex, Fantasies Become Real, Marriage Proposal, Sensuality, Bottom Crowley) – There is a trick people do with a mint candy and a bottle of cola which results in a small eruption, and something very like it, for much higher stakes than a laugh in a car park, is about to take place in Aziraphale’s back room. Or: what happens when you finally unscrew the cap on a six thousand years of repression, and drop in Valentine’s Day.

Hand in Glove by lizardkid (T, 14,223 w., 1 Ch. || RED DWARF || Post-S9, Internalized Homophobia, Repression, Hurt/Comfort, Lister Whump, Worried Rimmer, Ableist Language, Cuddling) – Lister is mortally wounded in an accident. Rimmer is forced to reassess everything.

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AND NOW: The reason y’all are here! Please know I love EVERYTHING I’ve read and bookmarked, just these ones have really stuck with me and I’ve already re-read a few of these, so yeah, please do enjoy.

Please note that these fics aren’t all necessarily NEW fics for 2020, more like they were new to ME, and ergo, I bookmarked and started reccing them this year! There are a few newer fics, though, so yeah, apologies if you were expecting only new things.

Hope you all have a good New Year’s Day, and I hope this list makes the long weekend a great one until my FIRST Fic Rec Sunday of 2021! I might do two on Sunday just to celebrate the new year, hahah. <3 Love you all!

TOP 25 JOHNLOCK BOOKMARKS OF 2020