Category: Uncategorized

I honestly hate Miller’s batman

audreycritter:

jerseydevious:

yeah, it’s not a characterization that’s for everyone. i find it fascinating, like how people find serial killer and supervillain AUs fascinating. 

but i think i might have given the wrong impression, so i’m gonna hop on this and rectify it: TDKR is actually good. TDKR is a full, complete story – it’s got a powerful kind of energy to it, and i legitimately enjoyed reading it. i’ve said this before, but to me, it reads very much like an exacerbation of the darkest subtext in the batmythos, and it’s pretty fun to see people go ham on it and take it to its darkest possible conclusion – but that means most of its relevance is to the reader, not to the character. cribbing character beats from TDKR is a mistake, because that totally misses the point of its extremity. it’s very much your “what if” kind of thing, and what ifs are endlessly fun, when done right. also, carrie kelley’s googles were fire. 

batman: year one, another miller batbook, is also legitimately good. B:YO actually has one of my all-time favorite batquotes in it: “ladies. gentlemen. you have eaten well. you have eaten gotham’s wealth, its spirit. your feast is nearly over. from this moment on…. none of you are safe.” that’s such a good fucking quote

and the fact that these books are actually good is what makes the hilariously outlandish badness of ASBAR and TDKSA look even worse. if you haven’t read them, it’s not even the over-the-top characterization that’s a turn off, it’s the fact that the writing legitimately makes no sense. “i touched my mother’s breast. there was blood on it,” bruce what the fuck do you even mean? “brutal. brutally. it was brutal,” we got the point, ms. vale. and, of course, TDKSA also makes no sense on an artistic level. these were both massive failures, and honestly? they retroactively took the wind out of TDKR’s sails. good job man

I am not a huge fan of Millerverse in general but I do have to admit I hold a small appreciation for the fact that TDKR is SPECIFICALLY about an older Bruce who was wrecked by grief over Jason’s death. He can’t move on, he can’t get over it, 20 years later and he still won’t even let Jim Gordon mention Jason’s name. There are a lot of things I dislike about how Miller writes Batman, but the fact that he treated child death so seriously when other stories just wanted to move on is something I appreciate.

squirrelwrangler:

So I just want the stupid fluffy Modern AU ASoIaF fic where Robb comes home nervous and excited to declare he just proposed to his girlfriend Jeyne (Westerling) not just because they’re in love but really more because they just found out she’s pregnant. Ned, Cat, and the rest of the family process this news as Robb and Jeyne walk in. Some didn’t even know he was dating the sweet ER nurse he met after breaking his collar bone. Still, the large family replies of “congratulations,” and “isn’t this a little sudden,” and “c’mon this sounds exactly like something Theon would do”… Misunderstandings and a convoluted game of telephone ensues, where Sansa gasps, “Theon got Jeyne (Poole) pregnant?” and their cousin Jon quietly snarks that it’s still weird as hell that they’re both dating a girl with the same name and vaguely look alike. Sam, Skyping from grad school, nods and refrains from bringing up the Stark ginger fetish. Theon wanders into the Stark family pow-wow because he’s always either crashing at their place or his sister’s, plus the Starks have a working laundry machine, only to be ambushed by Sansa (and Arya, because any excuse to punch people) wanting to know why they weren’t told about Jeyne (Poole) being knocked up. After gaping like a fish for a few seconds, Theon denies it as impossible because they’ve been taking it slow and using protection and haven’t even, past behavior to the contrary, he swears, so stop giving him dirty looks, Sansa. (Robb mutters that this was all Theon’s faulty condoms fault in the first place). Cat invites Jeyne (Westerling) in and as they talk she brings out the baby album to coo over and Jeyne shying fidgets and accidentally reveals way too much information about her and Robb’s sex life. Robb nervously asks his dad for advice, to which Ned, still wearing a neck brace from a bad accident last year, reassuringly pats his shoulder and says, ’“you’ll do fine, son.” Jeyne (Poole) comes over with celebratory cake and laughs at the misunderstanding. Jeyne (W) mentions the doctor says it might be twins. Jon is suddenly very glad he’s stationed far north and thus can escape babysitting duties. Asha, having received the mangled version of events via second-hand text from the Mormonts, calls her dumb-ass baby brother to scream into the cell about ‘how dare he knock up Jeyne (P), she’s so much sweeter and nicer than his usual booty calls, too good for him…’ As the two siblings have a shouting match in the backyard, Jeyne (P) giggles. She and Sansa converge onto Jeyne (W) to start planning wedding details, as Arya ducks out the front door to escape with friends. It ends with another phone call to Theon, this time from the rest of his family. Cue trepidation as he answers, and before he can get a head-start to explain that it’s Robb and his Jeyne (W), his father is demanding to know why he wasn’t informed (Theon can hear his mother in the background weeping “my baby boy” and ‘oh well they knew they’d never get grand-kids from Asha anyway’. His Born-Again Baptist minister uncle is loudly denouncing carnal sin from speakerphone and Theon’s thankful at least one of the other uncles is under a restraining order and Jeyne (P) is only ever allowed to meet his maternal side of the family, he decides.)

crocordile replied to your post:
Footnote on the Harry Potter “I was spoiled for…

Ahahaha I also like CoS a lot, I have a lot of good memories of reading it at the same tima as a friend… also lmao don’t kill me but at age 12 I thought Lockhart was hilarious

Lockhart as a character to read about is one of the best creations in HP, followed by Umbridge. They provide so much plot and conflict and humor and also are the sort of villains kids will know and deal with all their lives. The reason I rank PS over CoS is because the one to start the series off always has a leg up on ratings and because of the sisterly bonding memories- but without those two things, CoS ranks higher.

Footnote on the Harry Potter “I was spoiled for Book 2 and 3″ story:

My mom heard about Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone/Sorcerer’s Stone back in ‘98 from a friend that worked with children’s literature and strongly recommended it. This was when it was on the best seller’s lists and getting awards but before any of the Pottermania had started (Aside Note: My sister has an advanced editor’s copy of New Moon for the same reason, even though none of us had heard of the Twilight books or read the first one. I’m not she if she even read it, but when the Twilight craze started, we noticed that cover looked familiar). 

I read the book and liked it enough that I wanted to read it to my sister, who was four years younger than me. I read it chapter-by-chapter aloud to her, doing my best to keep the twist ending a surprise (I tried to make sure she didn’t get a long look at the chapter image for “The Man with Two Faces”). Then we read it to my younger sister who was just learning to read. Eagerly I read the synopsis in the back for the next book coming out, Chamber of Secrets, and wanted to read it. But we didn’t see it, and it wasn’t in book stores yet. Okay, moved on. 

Third book comes out. Pottermania is starting to kick it in, marketing everywhere. My mom and us recognize it because we had the first book, but she doesn’t buy the hardcover third one because she waited to buy all our books as paperbacks because they were cheaper that way (and we voraciously read our way through books. Library cards were the top priority when moving to a new home). She buys us some of the board game toys and this slim ‘Unofficial Guide to Harry Potter” to tide us over. That damn thing. Aside from interviews with kids about favorite parts and recipes and activity suggestions, well, you bet the ‘favorite parts/favorite characters/last chapter where the fans wrote their predictions and hopes for what would happen in the next book’ basically spoiled every major plot twist for not only Chamber of Secrets but Prisoner of Azkaban. Yeah. It takes a month or two but my parents go with my sister to buy the third book in hardcover, and that became the tradition that my mom or dad would take either sister up early in the morning starting with Goblet of Fire to buy the newest book on opening day. (rotation of which person read the book first rotated each time.)

Before the fourth book came out, even knowing the twists now from the spoiler book and the third one, I still wanted to read CoS, so I found it at my school library. Eventually we bought the paperback to complete the collection, but I can’t remember if that was before or after GoF.

Now, maybe because it was still the backstory I was more curious about (Voldemort) than the ones I didn’t (Harry’s dad), or that CoS survived having less of its twists revealed and that it wasn’t dependent on those twists for plot impact, but the thing is unlike probably the vast majority of Harry Potter fans, PoA was my least favorite book, and CoS ranked only a little below the first book as my favorite. I was surprised that it had the reputation online as the least relevant one (until come Half-Blood Prince and more pensive flashbacks and Tom Riddle and I was cackling in vindication).

To this day while I know on technical merits I should rank it high, when I list the Harry Potter books in personal preference order, I put PS/SS at the top of the list, muddle around with the rest, and put PoA barely about DH.

Now I know it’s not just because ‘all the twists –werewolf, wormtail and sirius black, animagi, time turner, boggarts and patronus– were never twists’, but because I strongly disliked Sirius Black’s character and that this was the one that felt like the sidetrack plot. But I can’t help but think of what could have been had I not been spoiled.

started listening to an in-depth Young Justice Podcast, was more or less liking it the first episodes, it was the analysis and details I prefer to have. Then the host in the third episode while going over the history of Robin admitted that he not only disliked/wrote off Jason Todd as a bad robin but actually paid the toll call to vote to have him killed off. Sorry, I am that petty. unsubscribe.

I don’t have the comic with me to pull the direct quotes- but anyone else want to complain about the speech in Batman: Hush that bashes Dick Grayson and Jason Todd to shill Tim Drake as Robin, that not only is that the bad writing happening here but that it also rings very false?

*brief google search later*

Here’s the panel:

image

Now, Hush was the very first Batman comic I read, though I had watched several movies, tv shows, read the wiki articles and followed and listened to the fandom for years – so I wasn’t going into this blind. Preconceived notions and a general idea of what backstories were and thus what would logically fit those.

Then this page. I couldn’t overlook even in the first read-through that this was a) Gross Victim Blaming WTF and b) didn’t line up to what I understood of the bare-bones of why these three characters (Dick, Jason, Tim) became Robin.

Everyone knows Dick Grayson’s backstory – his parents are killed by a mobster, he becomes Robin with Batman so to get vengeance on his parents’ murderer. Distinctions of vengeance versus justice aside, when I read Dark Victory a few months later, that I was seeing an angry little robin gave me vindication. That Dick could find exhilaration, ‘a thrill’, in being Robin and that he was -in comparison to Bruce- more lighthearted about how he went along with life outside and in the cowl, I found to be in-character. Was the thrill why he did it? No. Dick leaving Bruce to become Nightwing was a superhero equivalent of going off to college, wanting some independence from his father-figure when entering adulthood. The nuance seemed a little off, but not terribly so.

Then we get to Jason and Tim.

Oh-boy.

So first a confession of what I knew and my biases coming in. Sometime when I was a kid in the late nineties I learned that there was more than one Robin, that the two other robins were some kid who killed by Joker via crowbar and then another replacement. Something, maybe because young me thought the word crowbar was inherently ridiculous, latched onto the absurdity and later the tragedy of ‘Robin #2 killed by a crowbar’. Then I learned more details of their one-sentence backstories. Jason was a street-kid that stole the Batmobile’s tires. That was very memorable and awesome. Tim was the kid that figured out who Batman and Robin were by following them and taking pictures. Okay, less plausible, less entertaining. More I read up on who Tim was, my strong early impression was “He’s a Batman fan self-insert.” You could have told me he knew who Batman was because he read Batman comics and he got pulled into the comic universe from the real world – because that fanboy character was the exact vibe he had to me. Last Action Hero.

Jason was latching onto becoming Robin because his alternative was poverty and a life of crime. He was the opposite of sheltered rich kid. I couldn’t and still can’t understand this concept of Jason treating dangerous crime-fighting as a game.

But Tim? Whose character was built around a distant admiration of the symbols of Batman and Robin? I could see the “wanted to be the world’s greatest detective”. It made Tim sound like the Riddler, driven by ego of being smarter than everyone else. But if I had to pick which Robin I would expect a comic-book to say “he saw being Robin as a game”, I thought it was obvious that quote would be in regards to TIm. That his arcs would be all about learning the reality behind being a hero. That it was dangerous. What the impacts of crime and social inequalities would be on real people. Basic rookie arcs. And yet the implication of “Tim the best Robin, the only one to know what it’s about”….what.

Still baffled by this.