#trick or yeet | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

comicaurora · 4 months

Note

Hey Red, sorry if this was asked already, but do you have any advice on writing a trickster hero? And do you have any favorites yourself?

Huh! This is something I've never really thought too hard about before, but I do have some loose and unformed thoughts!

So the trickster archetype is, broadly, a character who wins by being cunning and tricking the people around them. Typically this is because they are an underdog facing a powerful opponent, and if they face that opponent on the terms that opponent defines, they'll lose. For instance, a physically strong opponent might want to make everything into a contest of raw force; a politically powerful opponent might want to make things a legal battle; a commander of a large army might want to battle on a flat terrain-less battlefield and overpower the smaller enemy force through raw numbers; etc etc.

A trickster doesn't have the raw power to make a scenario happen. Instead, they achieve that scenario by making other characters make it happen, usually by misleading them into thinking it'll have some other outcome they want.

A classic example of this is found in a Brer Rabbit story where Brer Rabbit has been snatched by Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit begs and pleads with him to not throw him into that briar patch, oh the torment he would experience in that briar patch would be unimaginable, drowning or burning would be bad but still better than that briar patch. Brer Fox naturally throws him into the briar patch, at which point Brer Rabbit vanishes into the underbrush and helpfully clarifies that he was born and bred in a briar patch. He was unable to escape through his own power, so instead he convinced Brer Fox that yeeting him into the briar patch would give Brer Fox something he wanted (Brer Rabbit's unimaginable torment) when in actuality it gave Brer Rabbit exactly the cover he needed to escape. It only worked because Brer Rabbit understood that Brer Fox was fundamentally not just hungry, he was cruel.

Tricksters usually achieve victory through lying, stealing, sneaking around and generally being dishonest. These are usually not seen as heroic traits, but the trickster hero is an archetype of character who is broadly heroic - and uses trickster tactics to win. It's an interesting suite of character traits to balance. In order to make a trickster heroic, them being the underdog usually needs to be played up. It's not really easy to root for someone with power to manipulate people for their own ends, but it's easy to root for someone scrappy and underleveled to manage to gumption their way to a victory over a broadly superior opponent.

A sympathetic trickster usually isn't someone who picks fights. Trouble comes to them, and then they need to find a way to escape or stop it. This is the paradigm that makes Bugs Bunny work as a trickster hero - he starts off basically every adventure minding his own business, and when someone comes around with a blunderbuss and a hankering for rabbit stew, their actions are what prompts him to unleash absolute hell on them by using toon physics and trapping them in ironclad social conventions to completely unbalance them until they're eventually defeated.

If we see a big, loud, powerful jerk try to stomp on someone small and innocuous, we're inclined to root for the small and innocuous person. This setup makes us very eager to see the small and innocuous person use tricks and shenanigans to make a fool of the powerful jerk, and it automatically makes us more okay with the sympathetic character doing on-paper unheroic things like lies and manipulation as long as they're doing them to someone we're primed to dislike.

So trickster heroes are usually fundamentally reactive characters. Something bad happens and they respond by unleashing hell. Another easy way to make a character instantly more heroic is to give them an even weaker, even more sympathetic character to protect or assist. Thus, many trickster heroes have a suite of supporting characters they're protecting who are not tricksters by nature, and are instead just there to be endangered or bullied by Nasty Mean Powerful People. Our trickster heroes stepping in to aid and protect other people thus gives their actions an even more heroic cast, because not only are they reactive to an outside threat, they're selflessly reactive.

This is the framing that's used in Leverage, where every episode has a victim of the week being cruelly taken advantage of by a jerkass of the week, at which point our team of liars, grifters and thieves roll up to ply their trade on the jerkass and award the spoils of war to the victim of the week. Because the person they're tricking is proven unequivocally to be truly awful and completely insulated from legal consequence a solid 98% of the time, we don't feel particularly bad seeing our team of heroes manipulate, gaslight and eventually absolutely destroy them over the course of a crisp 40 minutes. The vileness of the villain combos with the innocent powerlessness of the person they're advocating for, and thus their assorted unheroic qualities become reframed as absolutely heroic due to the circumstances under which they use them.

Crucial to the formula is the horrendous nastiness of the villain of the week, because if we were even kind of sympathetic to them, the schemes of the protagonists would be kinda scary. They are very good at quickly getting the bad guy to trust them and then taking apart everything they've built, and that's only fun to watch if the audience is 100% sure the villain deserves it and is not going to spend too much time thinking "wow, it would be terrifying if that happened to me." The fact that our heroes almost always take them down simply by leveraging (heh) the bad guy's badness is a big part of what makes the formula work. Almost every episode is functionally similar to a Briar Patch scenario - "oh gosh I sure hope no SOULLESS CAPITALIST VAMPIRES take advantage of how MANIPULABLE I am to try and get my MONEY and/or VALUABLES", and then the villain's own established cruelty cascades into their downfall when it runs into the dominos our heroes have set up to expose them. And that does a lot to make the audience sympathize with a crew of four self-admitted terrible people (and Hardison, who's an angel and we're delighted to have him)

Another way to get the audience to root for a potentially nonstandard protagonist is to set them up against a villain who is smug. Smugness is a very dangerous trait for any character to have, because it primes the audience to want to see them break. A villain who thinks they are too powerful or too strong or too smart to be defeated has the audience immediately rooting for them to be proven wrong just so they can watch the expression on their face. This is the strat they use in Columbo.

Every Columbo villain is rich and powerful and very insulated from legal consequences, and we start every episode seeing them arrange and execute an attempt at a perfect murder. We know from the start how they did it and usually why, and because they are smug - they are almost never regretful or reluctant - we become invested in seeing how Columbo figures out what they did, how they did it, and how he can prove it and get them arrested. Columbo is a nonstandard kind of trickster hero, because he is deeply and fundamentally a Lawful Good archetype, but he is also a very casual liar. The only time the audience sees Columbo almost certainly telling the truth is when he's dealing with background characters, his fellow policemen or his dog, or when he's by himself silently putting the pieces together; at all other points in the episode he will typically conceal how much he knows, how he knows what he knows and why he's asking specific probing questions. The audience has a tremendous amount of dramatic irony in terms of information about the perfect murder Columbo has to disassemble; we'll see Columbo zero in on exactly the one small detail that pokes a hole in the supposed airtight alibi, but instead of saying "I think you killed them and I am determined to prove it" he'll dance around why he's focusing on those details - just curiosity, just a desire for completeness, his superiors told him to continue the case and he doesn't know why, his wife is just such a big fan of their work, etc etc.

As a rule, the first time in any given episode that Columbo admits he's suspicious of the villain is the beginning of the last scene of the episode when he proves that they did it and they subsequently surrender. When Columbo is dealing with the villain, absolutely nothing he says can be trusted until that final scene - and it's a rare treat to get a glimpse of Columbo showing an honest emotion, especially something like genuine fury. Most of the time he maintains a very harmless and affable attitude, but sometimes when the villains are very smug and they know he's suspicious of them but can't prove anything yet, his righteous anger peeks through and we see why he does this.

He's a trickster hero because he can't unravel the case, the villain's motivation and the shape of the crime if the villain knows everything he knows and can correspondingly keep up with him. But he is 100% committed to exposing the truth of the situation and making the murderer face justice. Their perfect alibi is supposed to protect them from everything, but it's their confidence and certainty that they could never be caught that Columbo leverages to win. They never know entirely what to make of him, and he's never wholly honest with them - and with the audience - until the very end of the episode. It's good, cathartic payoff to an episode's worth of lies and manipulation from both main players, and it's always fun to see the non-smug party on the side of justice come out on top.

Some trickster heroes are more like standard heroes with trickster tendencies that occasionally surface. These guys are usually pretty straightforward, but in a pinch they can bust out a surprisingly cunning scheme or two - one such moment hits at the climax of Across the Spider-Verse, and it's a great moment of characterization for Miles, who has thus far been a pretty typically heroic guy who has unfortunately spent the entire movie thus far being lied to by people he trusted. It kicks off an enormously long and complicated chase sequence that takes the entire spider-community out of the home base chasing him through an absolutely massive complex and eventually onto a space elevator. It's such a fluid scene, you kind of just accept that it's a desperate chase sequence - Miles is just running. It doesn't occur to the other spider-people that Miles might have a plan beyond running until he basically tells Miguel that, hey, he did just get every other spider-person out of the facility that has the portal to get him home. He wasn't just running away, he was luring everybody away so he can leave.

And this moment is fantastic on a meta-level, because Spider-Man is traditionally a bit of a trickster hero. Most of his enemies are able to physically outpace him, and he needs to use mobility and strategy to take them down, often luring them into environments that work against them - like a fun moment in Spectacular Spider-Man where Spidey defeats the Rhino by luring him into a steam tunnel and basically giving him heatstroke through his armor plating. But because the entire core theme of this movie is "Miles isn't a real Spider-Man," it literally doesn't seem to occur to the other spider-people that Miles's seemingly panicked running might be him pulling a Spider-Man on them. We're so used to being in Miles's head and knowing when he's got a plan or a ploy that this is a very fun moment to watch. He's successfully deceived an entire army of spider-people, and the audience is just as blindsided as Miguel - and a little less electrocuted, so it's a lot more fun for us.

So yea, trickster heroes are a fun little space of character, but you gotta be careful to put them in the right kind of situation, lest their fundamental dishonesty come across as alarming rather than extremely rad.

#I also have a reboot example but I shan't inflict that on you guys without due cause #asks #writing stuff #not aurora

1K notes · View notes

doubleedgemode · 2 years

Text

Bridget from gg obvs and Yugo from Wak.fu friendship send tweet

#Is important for their plot? Check #Blue hat? You know it #Bridget holds Az and goes aw and Yugo sees Rupert and goes. Hm. That's a weird shushu #Oops tags got messed up. Thr first one should be:#Roughly the same age? Check. Sweet kids with an ammount of expectatives and weight put onto them? Check. Have a twin whose relationship #guilty omelette #kinda..#also bridget yeets her yoyo inside his portals to do tricks n stuff #text tag2b named

0 notes

prokopetz · 6 months

Note

Trick or yeet?

#tumblr #halloween #hallowe'en #trick or treat #memes

577 notes · View notes

cryptomiracle · 1 month

Text

more creepypasta headcanons

(+ marble hornets)

WARNINGS:

Ooc? Idk

I started this at 2 am and you can tell

Cursing

I write on my phone so the format may be a little weird

Any brands, games, or characters mentioned in this do NOT belong to me, nor am I sponsored by them in any way.

This is very unserious, I've noticed that a lot of my other hcs usually take a "dark" turn and so I decided to make some that didn't.

You could even say they're a bit... silly.

You should totally check out my masterlist for more hcs (it's pinned)

◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎

Characters: masky, hoodie, ticci toby, jeff the killer, and BEN DROWNED.

◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎

Jeff:

he's extremely hard headed, he WILL argue/fight with someone over the dumbest things and he'll never stop arguing, even if he knows the other person is right.

He has an "emo accent"

He likes to start drama between people, and then leave the crime scene.

He is so ashy you could strike a match off of his elbow

He's been wearing the same beat up converse since 2012, them things are being held together by duct tape and a prayer.

His favorite animal is a raccoon, he says they're sneaky and nocturnal like him.

He refuses to get a new phone, he won't even steal one.

He curses all the time just cause he can, sometimes he'll even jumble random curse words together.

BEN:

He listens to vocaloid and he doesn't play about miku

He runs one of those "rage bait" accounts that are painfully obviously bait

Still quotes old memes and refuses to let them die

Example: yeet, t-posing, and "sanic the hedgehog"

He scams old people on Facebook and e-daters, he doesn't feel bad about it either.

He uses the money he gets from scamming to buy v-bucks and overwatch coins

He once doxxed someone for dissing miku

slender had to take away his mic privileges because he was keeping everyone up at night by yelling bloody murder at people on fortnite/overwatch

once showed up at someones house because they emoted on him after killing him in game

Toby:

He vapes, and thinks he's so cool cause he can do "vape tricks" and he makes people watch him while he does them

Someone once gave him apple cider, told him it was alcohol, and he pretended to be drunk.

His phone gallery is filled with random photos, like there'll be a low quality picture of a tree and then right beside it a picture of a ceiling. Just random stuff

Mint chocolate chip ice cream enjoyer

He's really flexible, although he has bad posture he can do back bends, the splits, etc

more on his terrible posture; when he sits he literally looks like this: ) )

When he first started working for slenderman, he REFUSED to live in the manor and lived outside. While he lived outside he became friends with a lot of the wildlife, slender eventually made him move into the manor because there was a rumor that toby was going to make a "possum army" and try to overthrow slender

He will fight anyone and anything he really doesn't care about his, or their well-being.

Had a "weeb" phase when he was in middle school and he still has nightmares about "naruto running" away from his bullies.

Hoodie:

He can make a killer sandwich (lol) he's not the best at cooking other things, but if you get him to make you a sandwich, he'll bless your taste buds.

He loves karaoke, he can't sing for shit but he still does it anyway

He acts like a millennial (I'm sorry) not to the point where it's completely unbearable, but he will send people "relatable memes" every now and then

He enjoys online arguments, he'll never participate but he will scroll through different threads of people arguing for hours on end

He likes for people to say stuff like "GO WHITE BOY GO" to him

He blushes when he lies, he's a scarily good liar but if you ever want to catch him in a lie, point out the fact that his cheeks are red.

Whenever he has a drink with a straw, he holds the straw in-between his tooth gap.

he sends streaks.

Masky:

He has a NASTYYY side eye, and sometimes he'll scrunch up his nose while side eyeing someone just to make it sting even more

Contemplated getting a mullet once, he never went through with it though.

He coughs like someone's grandfather who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years

If someone says a word that reminds him lf a song he likes, it'll automatically get stuck in his head and he'll hum it all day after that.

he isn't weak when it comes to stinky smells, but if it's stinky enough to make him gag he's extremely overdramatic.

he learned how to sew because of how much he ripped his jeans, shirts, etc.

Sleeps so hard sometimes people think he's dead, he'll just be laying there looking casket ready but everyone is too scared to check on him cause he gets super grumpy when woken up.

he always keeps a little money hidden somewhere, even if it's just a 5 dollar bill.

he's superstitious, if he sees you attempt to walk under a ladder he will physically drag you back and make you walk around it.

he has a pair of brass knuckles which he only saves for "special occasions" they're his favorite things ever, he even named them.

he only uses his phone to call, text, or search something up, and that's it.

he doesn't even have YouTube installed.

◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎◎

I will be reading over this to check for any errors, ty for reading - M

#creepypasta #headcanon #creepypasta headcanon #jeff the killer #ticci toby #marble hornets #brian thomas #hoodie headcanons #jeff the killer headcanons #ticci toby headcanons #masky headcanons #masky marble hornets #hoodie marble hornets #ben drowned #ben drowned headcanons #tim wright

184 notes · View notes

methoughtsphantom · 3 months

Text

DP x DC

not me thinking about imaginary scenarios of ten year old Tim Drake in the ghost zone (pariah’s castle)

where Tim thinks it’s strangely soothing that despite being the only one whose steps connect to the ground, there’s not that eerie silence that befell drake manor

strange blob creatures chitter softly and nip at his hair and swooshes and wisps of wind betray the presence of an invisible ghost

which after following he realizes it’s almost like he’s trailing after the black dark shadow that is batman again

which gives him the idea that, maybe, just this one time, he can play the part of robin

that in mind Tim makes out a game of sneaking to the side of ghosts that look like they’re brooding and if they can spot him he loses

most just grunt in response (very in character) while others fuss over him and ask questions which Tim uses to infodump

he also politely asks the ghost that always asks him how he’s doing to instead say the word “report”

(the ghost looks at him weirdly but humors him and besides the answer would be the same anyways)

Tim also(!!)

gets on the case of why the walls lack tangibility when he is the one leaning on them (he doesn’t live down the time he wanted to look cool only to fall through the wall)

hyperfixates on how gravity works in the ghost zone because he couldn’t do a skateboard trick he has pulled off many many times and he’s salty about it

tries to figure out where they are getting human food from (cause it’s hot enough to be homemade but also there’s no kitchen —so how could it be) (also he wants coffee)

finds out the dude that often gives him a side eye when he finds that Tim knows how to do something (math homework), is next in line for the throne and yet doesn’t have a single “mingle and talk people up” bone in his body. (despite it his networking is a solid 7/10)

gets a ghost horse to adopt him what

discovers pretty quickly that there are rooms to which he can’t phase through (a.k.a. he’s not allowed entry) to which he begrudgingly backs off even though that stands in his way of doing a very thorough layout™ of the place (robin would)

sulks over the lack of extreme sports in the place

(Danny takes him to the Far Frozen where they go tire sliding in the snow and where tim learns how to use a skateboard skate and also that ghost ice cream is just as good as normal ice cream)

sulks again cuz he caught a common cold

also because there’s no sun or moon poor Timmy’s already screwed sleep schedule gets more messed up to the point no one knows when or where he will fall asleep

(ghosts find him in the most unhinged of places with a signature purple cloak draped over him every. single. time.)

overall, be a menace

see-> the time he threatened to build ghost weapons he’d somehow memorized the blueprints of cause Danny wouldn’t let him visit the radium girls factory but yes the renaissance period

see-> that time he went through the whole ghost energy and how to work with it book section in the library and half an hour later had a prototype of a star wars laser beam made

(note: bribing only works for hot chocolate, not for letting him keep cool-looking guns)

just tim having the time of his life

clockwork being no help at all (the ghost loves being a cryptid)

and danny trying not to get attached while he progressively gets more concerned over this chaos child he emotionally adopted as his little brother

(to fit canon cause i want it to this would just be until Danny finds the dimension little Timmy is from, then they can safely yeet the child back to the moment he first went missing)

anyways before anyone knows it’s been three months

#tim drake #danny phantom #dp x dc au #batman #dc #dp x dc #danny fenton #like this little guy practiced with ghosts #which don’t breathe #tim comes back to gotham and can sneak up to batman better than an assassin #don’t make sound on the floor if they don’t want #and have heightened senses #you are gonna tell me that in all the bats career they never saw the little tiny child that followed them around with a camara??#whelp now you got an explanation as to why #also upon realizing Danny didn’t know anything about how to mingle Tim who has been going to galas for years self appoints himself #to teach him don’t frett #little headcannons in my own au #this in my head is fic #it’s more extensive but it was getting long #i was going through some mental hoops to find the correlation between his hobby and tim this time deciding to be robin #instead of the shadow chasing AFTER Batman #but basically it’s because this time tim had someone to make of Batman #he’s not alone #and he’s a kid #he wants to play #and now that he can play With someone of course Timmy is gonna chose his hero

190 notes · View notes

bogleech · 6 months

Note

trick or yeet?

This eyeball guy sold in I think 2001 or even earlier had stretchy rubber bands inside the arms and little pockets on the hands specifically so you could get a really good grip to pull him back like a rubber band and let him launch across a room!

I no longer have him and they are impossible to find I think

#Halloween

184 notes · View notes

ike-mcswains-mortician · 1 month

Text

i went to a roller rink today with friends and now i am thinking of dndads characters at a roller rink so here you go

henry: absolutely horrible at roller skating. coordination of a baby deer. he considers it a personal victory if he can make it one lap around the rink without eating shit or clinging onto darryl. the twins mock him endlessly for this.

darryl: you can’t convince me darryl didn’t get bored one day and join a roller skating league. he is a little out of practice (and henry isn’t helping) but he has a ball. he’s the designated “help you up when you eat shit” guy.

glenn: is at best mediocre, he doesn’t fall but he also only goes a couple of laps before just hanging out by the wall the rest of the night. makes frequent trips to the dj to complain about the music choice. also spends more time at the arcade than on the rink, and wins a LOT of tickets.

ron: inexplicably amazing at roller skating. the pants were holding him back and he is just sailing around the rink. terry jr doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or impressed.

lark and sparrow: also quite good. they’re the type to switch and skate backward, to spin each other around, to throw each other and conveniently hit henry, etc. lark is a little more coordinated than sparrow when it comes to the tricks, but sparrow wins the limbo game.

nick: spends a lot of time with glenn at the arcade. he gets on the rink for YMCA and some of the games, but that’s about it.

grant: a little out of it while he skates, cause it makes him think of yeet. he doesn’t let darryl help him up when he falls either. sits on the sideline after a while and joins the close boys at the arcade.

terry: takes it slow with grant for a while, but when grant leaves terry is actually REALLY good at skating, sometimes joining the twins in their antics and sometimes trying to keep up with ron.

scary: is also really good, apparently it’s a stampler-marlowe thing to be cracked at skating. but she stays by the wall for most of the night cause skating is lame. but she does kick ass when she wants to.

taylor: eats shit a lot. im sorry but he talks a big game up until he tries to actually stand in the skates and then his gusto is gone. he uses the provided walker and sometimes linc gives him a ride with it.

linc: boss kicks? roller rink master. he’s got shins of steel and though it takes him a minute to get used to the feel of skating, once he does he’s unstoppable.

normal: i want normal to be a great roller skater so bad but i just can’t see it. athletically he should be able to but i just think the wheels throw him off. but that doesn’t stop him from trying and by the end of the night he’s actually pretty solid.

(bonus, hermie: is god awful at roller skating until he pretends to be a character from a skating movie. switches between skating with normal and keeping him upright when he slips, and laughing when normal eats shit from across the rink.)

#tag yourself im henry /j #idk what this is i am bored and tired lol #dndads

100 notes · View notes