Tim Drake would be an incredible supervillain, and in a less fortunate universe, someone else realizes how smart he is before Batman figures it out.
my new Tim fic is titledhand in unlovable hand (a chokehold). Black Mask gets ahold of a very smart eleven-year-old Tim and realizes he can make use of that. and Tim realizes, eventually, that he can make use of Black Mask to fight crime in Gotham.
the first chapter is up now on Ao3! it’s pre-written, beta-ed by a friend of mine, and will update weekly. we start a little heavy on the angst so check warnings as you need to!
this fic is now complete with an epilogue! it’s also gotten out of hand and other works in the AU are coming up, so check it out!
speaking as a fan of both, why do steven universe fans talk about it like it’s miraculous ladybug. steven universe was actually good
see this is what I’m talking about. literally no one came after me for this. everyone has been agreeing with me that steven universe is good.
like. you don’t even NEED to put disclaimers before mentioning you like anything “cringey” anyway. you can just not say that part. you don’t have to apologize. cringe is dead blah blah blah I’m literally a miraculous ladybug fan.
but like. steven universe was good. not badgood or “bad but fun to watch” it was GOOD. even the height of the “su critical” era was like. obviously irrational and bad faith arguments made by people who think they know how the animation industry works.
and yet people act as though the simple act of admitting you like it will put you on a hit list. the extreme dichotomy of perception & reality is jarring to see
I should also add, and this goes for cringe culture in general, is that how you present yourself can invite the reaction you’re trying to avoid.
Like, a couple of people have mentioned the “in defense of Steven Universe” video that’s been going around. the fact that they’re framing it as a “defense” implies the status quo ought to be offense.
by apologizing, you are locking people in the position of forgiver, as if they SHOULD be angry with or critical of you. you’re casting them in a role and people will play the part without even realizing it.
so consider what status quo you actually want to present. if you want people to like the things you like, maybe don’t give them a reason to think they’re not supposed to
Agents want to love your book. Hiring managers want you to be exactly the person they need. The person on the other end of that blind date is hoping beyond hope that you’re their huckleberry.
i think one of the reasons i get mildly annoyed about worldbuilding threads that are 200 tweets of why you should care about where blue dye comes from in your world before saying someone is wearing blue is that so few of them go up to the second level of “and that should impact your characters somehow” - i don’t care that blue dye comes from pressing berries that only grow in one kingdom a thousand miles away if people are casually wearing blue
a couple of people reblogged this so i was thinking about it again (ok i’m almost always thinking about material culture worldbuilding tbh) & a lot of my problem is that these kinds of worldbuilding threads and posts treat it like an obligation and not an oppurtunity –
“blue dye is rare” is a world fact that could be a plot obstacle (character is a dyer and needs blue cloth, of the right shade, for a festival); a clue (main character notices someone wearing blue and realizes that they’re in disguise); a way to inform character (main character sees a blue banner and thinks its owner is showing off); and any number of other things, from small to large.
and if the rarity doesn’t serve any of those functions in your story, then the existence of blue dye is not important enough that you, as the author, need to consider it.
i’m a trends and forces guy - i believe any given worldstate is created by billions of coinflips leading up to that moment, some random (the sun rose on the day of the battle and gave one side victory) and some more directed (a law was enacted with a specific intent). expecting, as an author, to have generated a worldstate that coheres and connects in the same way and with the same complexity as ours is going to lead to paralysis more often than it is to interesting worldbuilding, or worldbuilding that supports the story you’re trying to tell.
Yeah you don’t need to know where everything comes from. What you need, which I think a lot of these demands are actually angling for, is a good intuitive sense of where your setting differs from your present reality.
I don’t care where they get their common blue dyes if it’s not relevant to the story, but I do care if the narrative’s handling of clothes and their color reflects a ‘pick out entire readymades from the mall’ relationship to wardrobe in a technological and social milieu where that is not logically an option, and there’s no sign they’re going for one of those surreal modern-pop fantasy settings.
You really do see this quite regularly, coming from writers who just haven’t thought about it; they haven’t noticed their own cultural framework is historically contingent and actually super abnormal.
'Who domesticated wheat’ and 'where does the blue come from’ are very handy as sort of shortcut checkpoints to make sure you’re making regular contact with material worldbuilding at all–if you know where the blue is from you don’t need to decide where the red is from also; you’ve done the important bit of aligning your thoughts about clothing color with premodern dyeing practices. Other details will tend to accrete on that surface now as they arise.
But yeah if these are approached as literal dictums you just overbuild to no purpose.
Just to give you some idea of why even rags were very valuable in any pre-industrial setting, here are some facts about fabric production throughout history.
In the Viking era, when drop spindles and vertical looms were the height of technology and every step had to be done by hand, it too about seven hundred hours to make a blanket big enough for one person. First you had to harvest the fiber that you were going to use, then you had to clean it and prepare it, then you had to spin it, then you had to weave it and then you had to finish it.
To support a household of five, and keep them supplied with a bare-minimum of fabric needs (so they weren’t naked or cold), took approximately 40 hours of work per week just on textile production. In a reasonably prosperous family, everyone would have two outfits (one for every day work, and one nice one, and when the nice one became too worn or stained to be “nice” it would be your everyday outfit and (if you were lucky) you would make a new one to be nice, and your old everyday outfit would be either passed on to someone or (if it was in too bad a shape for that) would be cut up for various other uses.
As technology progressed, all of the steps in fabric production ended up taking less time; for example, the spinning wheel spins thread much more quickly than the drop spindle does. But it was still a hell of a lot of work.
In the 18th Century, here’s the life cycle of bed sheets:
They start out as sheets (flat, both top and bottom) and are needed because they are MUCH easier to wash than your sheets than a blanket. As sheets get used, they develop worn patches to the middle. Those get darned. When even darning is not enough to save them, you cut them in half down the middle, flip the pieces, and sew the edges together so that what had been the edge is now a seam down the middle and the worn parts are on the edges (where the fact that they’re worn doesn’t matter much). When the new center gets worn out, you cut the fabric apart and turn the usable bits of fabric into pillow cases. When the pillowcases get worn out you turn the usable bits of fabric into handkerchiefs.
And the pieces of fabric that are truly too worn to be used any longer were not thrown out: they were sold. To a ragpicker. Someone whose entire job was buying rags and scraps from households and then selling them on to merchants and tradesmen who could use them. Rags too worn to be used as fabric any longer could be made into paper, for example. Or used as stuffing padded/quilted garments or cushions.
And there wasn’t any level of wealth at which that wasn’t true. Being rich didn’t mean treating textiles (and most other goods) as disposable–it meant hiring more servants to do the mending and remaking and repurposing for you.
Because it was always going to be cheaper to pay for the human labor to eke every bit life out of those textiles than to pay for new textiles.
all goofing aside I genuinely don’t understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene™ is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you’re willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I’m not even saying you can’t enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.
Isn’t Lady Gaga bisexual?
yes that is indeed why she’s on the list of famous women who like women
why have multiple people reblogged this with some horse-assed “um actually most of these people are bi or pan” did I fucking stutter I said they like girls. what is your point. I’m going to kill you.
POV: you make a good post and then encounter tumblr reading comprehension
btw to just clarify for anyone who sees this reblog of this post
op is basically saying something along the lines of “yea ik taylor swift is bi but like. why is she y'all’s only lgbtq+ pop icon when there are all these other lgbtq+ people in the pop scene???”
i might have worded this badly but hopefully i got the main point across
hi op here I certainly did not fucking say Taylor Swift is bi
delilahsdawson
