Thinking of the damian "blood son" rhetoric in fandom and I think people don't like to admit they yeah he does think he's better than other people but many times it is bc his training or his feats, he constantly makes allusions to his training, bc then they can't just say "oh he's a spoiled kid who just got everything handed to him for being bruces/ras son/grandson " but like... he clearly worked hard for what he has (including a place in the batfam)

In canon he also usually gets punished if the writer reverts him to the "I'm Batman's only true son" stage.

"Adopted children are just as valuable as biological children!" Yeah, congratulations, DC doesn't actually disagree with you, which you would see if you could be bothered to read the comics guys.

The hard truth is that just because adopted children exist that doesn't mean Damian as a biological child (and the youngest member of the batfamily! Most of them are in their late teens or even adults) has less of a right to get his father's love, attention and respect and in canon he usually didn't get lots of it.

He suffered a lot and worked hard for what he has (is Damian maybe even leading the list of batfamily members dying for the mission? It feels like at least every second book of his includes him sacrificing his life), he didn't get everything handed to him on a silver platter and it's annoying when people act like he did.

The thing with the DC and fandom is that they are so hyperfixed on "Adoptive family is valid" mindset that they condemn Damian for being biological.

Yes, adopted families are as valuable as biological ones. I'm not saying they are not. But whenever Bruce is showing Damian attention and love, fandom is saying things like "see? Bruce cares more about his blood son!" When that's not the case at all.

Or whenever Damian is trying prove himself to Burce they are like "He only cares about blood"

But the thing is Damian is a child while all other Batfamily member are adults. Bruce is supposed to show more attention to Damian because he is a child. And while all the Batkids had their own fathers in their life, good or bad, Damian's only father is his blood father. So saying that he cares more about blood is not very logical.

And because Damian is biological, the fandom (and DC) is thinking that he has to earn his right to be in the family, that he can't get a free pass just because he is the blood son.

But that's really fucked up. Damian was 10. He didn't have to earn anything. It was supposed to given to him unconditionally, like every child deserves. And Bruce's and Talia's love towards Damian is not unconditional. Damian really had (and still has) to earn it.

Damian trained and fought all his life to be perfect for his parents because his parents wanted it. What was he supposed to do?

I wonder if this is where most of the "Dick is Damian's dad!" opinions stem from. Damian can't see his actual father as his dad, it has to be someone he's not related to by blood.

Dick and Damian have a special bond, but at no point during their time as Batman and Robin did Dick act really fatherly towards Damian. And Damian didn't want Dick to be his father, Damian was proud to be Bruce's son and he felt insecure because he hadn't really gotten to know Bruce before his "death" and was unsure if Bruce would let him stay on as Robin once they knew he was still alive.

Yes, he insulted Bruce and praised Dick when he was working together with his father, but he also insulted Dick and praised Bruce when working with Dick. That's just what Damian does. It doesn't mean he rejected being Bruce's son and wanted Dick to be his dad instead.

Damian is Bruce's son and he wants his father's love. I see nothing wrong with that. Of course he went about it completely wrong at first, but he was acting under the rules he knew. Yes, they were morally wrong, but that wasn't his fault, he was taught that securing your place by taking out your competition was not only right but worthy of praise. And Tim being all "if he wants to be a part of the family he'll have to earn it like the rest of us" was an understandable reaction considering that Damian tried to kill him, but it was also wrong. It shouldn't be treated as valid.

Did Tim have to earn his right to be his bio parents son? No. He was simply treated as such because he was and even his stepmother treated him with love.

And the other batkids do care about their biological parents too, no matter what fandom says. Dick holds his biological parents in high regard and still misses them, he just doesn't let himself be consumed by his grief like Bruce does. Originally Jason's dad was actually a decent father who turned to crime only to support his family and Jason died trying to protect his biological mother even after she betrayed him. For most of his Robin career Tim had a father and step-mother he cared about and that cared about him in return even if there were sometimes tensions between them. Stephanie might resent her father, but she doesn't see Bruce as her dad. Cass was raised to be an assassin by her father, but despite that she clearly cared for him in her own way and he for her.

In the end a child shouldn't need to earn their place in a family. Especially if they have trauma. Dick did the right thing by taking Damian under his wing and integretating Damian into the family even if it hurt Tim at first. What was Dick supposed to do? If Bruce had been in his place what was he supposed to do?

"Sorry Damian, can't stay here with me, I'm sending you back to the league of assassins or a foster family and I will deny you to get to know me because it hurts Tim's feelings, bye!"

Like...what do some people think would have been a better course of actions in that situation? Tim was 17 when Damian joined the household. I don't think it should be a controversial opinion that taking care of the 10 year child gets priority. And it's not like they didn't try to be there for Tim either, he just rejected it.

In fact making Damian "earn his place in the family" would just deepen Damian's belief that love and acceptance by his family needs to be earned through work and sacrifice and I hate every story that does that. It's such a terrible message. Damian is a child. A victim. Even if he's not a "perfect victim". He still deserves care, respect and help.

It's not his fault he wasn't born into a stable normal american family like Tim was and it shouldn't be held against him that he wants the love of his biological parents who are both still alive.

So true. Fandom is disregarding the Batkids parents. The only occasions I've seen in fanfics are "Tim's parents were so abusive and neglective that Tim had to survive on his own 🥴" kinda thing. Which is..... absolute bullshit??? Do people even read any source material before writing fanfics????? (That's a no. Why am I asking?)

Tim saying very insensitive things like "Damian has to earn his right to stay here" or "you're parents' death was my trauma" or "my dad is caring for me and so I can't be Robin whenever I want" shows the environment Tim grew up in. Privileged, rich and without any discomfort. He didn't have to work for anything. And it shows how flawed he is and not the "Perfect" Robin as DC and fandom labeled him as.

I can understand Tim's jealousy towards Damian to some degree. He was the youngest and he was the Robin. But when Damian came and Bruce died, Dick did the only thing he could do to not send a traumatized child to the abusive place he grew up in. To teach Damian how to be a hero he and Alfred gave Robin to Damian. And that was the best choice they could've made. Even if Tim was edgy about it.

I mean he was a teenager who had no siblings when growing up. He would resent Damian even if Damian had never become Robin.

Tim, as a hero, should've understood that Damian was a child who needed love, care, respect and recognition. He should've understood that Damian was a traumatized child who needed healing. You know, that's what heroes are for.

And the fact that Damian believes that he has to earn the love he gets from his parents, he has to 'redempt' himself for the things he had done in the past... That's why Damian keeps sacrificing himself. Because he has to earn. He has to prove.

The thing is, it's okay that Tim was unhappy and felt mistreated when Damian entered the picture.

It's okay that Damian thinks he needs to sacrifice his life to redeem himself and earn his keep both as a member of the batfamily and as a hero.

That are character flaws that make stories interesting.

But when writers stop treating these behaviours as flawed and start acting like they are valid it becomes a problem. No, Tim wasn't right when he said Damian needed to earn his right to be part of the family. No, Damian sacrificing his life to redeem himself shouldn't be needed for him to be accepted.

Character flaws can make a character and a story extremely interesting. But what the writer needs is awareness when it comes to ignoring or even validating those flaws instead of having characters overcome their flaws or being shown that their perception of things was wrong.

Narrative is very important when it comes to make a character likable or unlikable. DC treats Tim's flaws as something good and something that doesn't need fixing. As if punching a ten year old in the face or treating him like crap is a good thing.

It happens for Bruce too. Narrative doesn't let his enemies to die. Even if it's a fatal injury or a fucked up thing to do, narrative pretends like it's a okay thing to do and Batman is doing the good thing and he is a hero. While if a different character had done it, they would be a killer (coughDamiancough).

Another example I want to give is Miraculous Ladybug. Marinette is stalking Adrien, trying to enter his house without permission, memorising his schedule, stealing his phone, and a lot of other things are narrated as good things because she is the main character. She doesn't face any kind of consequence or learn to be better. She treats her classmates badly a lot of time but it is still ignored. Or using Ladybug for her own benefit.

If the narrative doesn't let you be bad, then you are not bad not matter what you do.

A lot of stories suffer because the writer doesn't think about the fact that we as the audience might know the intentions of the protagonist and are encouraged to see things through their perspective, but if we're being honest the protagonist should come off as a total asshole or creep to the people around them and its kinda weird that they don't face consequences for that.

Most romcoms feature basically stalking and harassing someone until the other party "finally" realizes the protagonist was their true love all along. We think it's okay because we know that the protagonist is right and they'll get together eventually, but if what if the other person truly didn't feel that way about them? Then it's just creepy.

But to get back to comics, another part that was very frustrating to read during the time Damian was being turned into a villain was that writers tried to write an edgy/dark Bruce as well, so basically while Damian was crossing all the lines Batman should have in theory, Bruce was doing almost everything Damian did too because Batman writers haven't understood yet that mentally breaking Batman isn't a new concept anymore.

If Batman is constantly "crossing the line of what Batman should do" then it keeps getting harder to keep track of what those lines even are except for not killing people.

And even if it comes to killing people, Bruce does some very brutal things (like getting Cheshire get hit by a truck) that if Damian had done them would have gotten the other person killed and Bruce would have been disappointed in him. The only reason Bruce hasn't killed anyone yet is that the narrative doesn't allow his methods to result in death, they are not all that different from Damian's.

Secret prisons, torture, damaging someone's netves so much they will never be able to use their hands again, breaking someone's neck and leaving them to die, throwing someone off a building and only throwing their jet pack after them to grant them a chance at survival...Bruce has done all that and much more, yet we are still supposed to see him as a positive moral benchmark when it comes to judging Damian's actions as a hero.

DC tried so hard to make Damian a villain, but except for him killing Brother Blood at the end of Teen Titans he was actually kind of Bruce's best pupil if we judge him by what Batman actually does and not by what we think Batman should and shouldn't be okay with.

"You had a secret prison, used torture and shamelessly lied to your team members, son? Me too! Good job!"

But no, Bruce can commit basically almost every human rights violation as if it's a checklist and still be counted as a "great and good man".

That's why the whole "good vs bad side" conflict with Damian's family never really worked, Ra's/Talia and Bruce are not opposites, they are very similar. Batman is not a "goody two shoes" hero. Batman does all kinds of morally wrong stuff all the time.

This. So much this. All of this.

Damian was and is a child. And a child should not EVER have to EARN love. It's a parent's responsibility to give out love, to love the children, yes unconditionally, not the child's right to EARN it. To say otherwise is gaslighting, even abusive.

And I will die on this hill.

(You can tell how upset I am bc I'm actually taking time to capitalise my sentences.)

TIM gets the attention in fanon as "the poor abused kid" with the "neglectful parents" who "were never home" and he "earns" his place in the fam that way.

Oh. I'm sorry. I said that word, didn't I?

Silly me.

Perhaps I should have said that in fanon's view, Tim "deserves" his place in the fam because of that.

So where does that leave Damian? (Or any of the other 'kids' in the fam, who've also been through trauma.)

Damian has also been abused. He's been neglected. More to the point, he was a child when he joined the family. (In some ways, he's still a child, because he's never been allowed to experience childhood in full.) It is not "on him" to earn his place... to try to be more "deserving."

Like belonging to this family means having to take part in the Trauma Olympics first or something.

The beauty of fics is that we, as writers, can fix this.

Be the change you want to see in the world, and all that.

STAR WARS APPRECIATION WEEK 2023 MAY 25: FAVOURITE MOVIE ▸ EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH (2005) + trivia

[in/sp]

ADHD

Not sure why ADHD is trending on Twitter, but sure, here’s my big post about ADHD, because now it’s too long to be a Twitter thread (ADHD, amirite?):

this is the first time i heard about the information retrieval thing and god, it’s such a relief that that’s a thing and not just me being broken. i mean it is me being broken but not in a way specific to me

this is such a thing. i joke to people that my phone is my brain, but it honestly is so true. i could not survive without my phone remembering and storing things for me.

“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.

“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement. 

“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”

“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”

Things I didn’t know

“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”

You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.

Okay, but someone please explain question marks when followed by a dialogue tag. How do?

“The speech tag is still part of the previous sentence,” she explained, ‘so it isn’t capitalised.“

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

She reblogged the post again, because she had recently read far too many potentially enjoyable stories marred by poor dialogue punctuation.

I’ve only seen this post in screenshots till now..

NOICE. Can’t wait to use this

“There are two more ways"—she pointed to the blackboard—“to punctuate interruptions. One is with the em dashes outside the quotations marks to indicate continuous speech. The action occurs at the same time as speech. The other—” she sipped from a glass of water “—is em dashes within the quotation marks to indicate interrupted speech.”

“Neato,” she said, impressed by the easy-to-follow formatting.

hey now...

well, i do adore a good time-travel fix-it, so, uh, yeah, that's me.

except for making barbies kiss. i'm more about the emotional whumping part of the fix-it trope :D

Me when fans think of Dick Grayson as a happy family loving himbo (He can be the most manipulative person you ever met if it's for the greater good)

Me when fans think Jason Todd is an angry bull (He is such a master strategist that he was pretty much running circles around Bruce during UTRH)

Me when fans think Cass is a mute doll, and infantalize her-- (This one's just horrible racism and fetishization. She taught herself how to communicate as a form of rebellion guys)

Me when fans think Stephanie Brown is just Tim or Cass's love interest and is reduced to the 'dumb blonde' compared to the rest of the bats (She has the potential to be just as good of a detective as Tim, with the way she spoiled Cluemaster's plans)

Me when fans think Duke Thomas is the normal one of the Batfamily and is timid, shy and levelheaded (He's actually really determined to do what's right and headstrong. He will go against Bruce's orders if he thinks they're wrong)

Me when fans think Damian Wayne is a feral child who needs to be put on a leash (that one's also just racism actually. If anything, I think he's tame compared to his siblings.)

I'm trying to prove a point to my brain: Reblog if you think fanfiction does not need sex to be good.

There is a trend I’ve noticed that smut fics tend to be much more popular than anything else and honestly I just want to have something to look at to remind myself and that writing doesn’t have to have sex to be worth putting out into the community.

I’m using ao3 the way god intended: via 36 open semi-abandoned tabs on my phone at 2 AM the night before work

how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims) 

the archive/tagged trick is a lifesaver!!

a caveat on op’s caveat is that if your blog/the blog you want to search is older than [whenever they forced everybody into the tumblr.com/user change], most of these tricks will still work whether or not they have enabled “custom theme.”

tumblr works it’s just a closely guarded secret

Bothering the beast

The Beast that Bothers

Of caves, poisonous arrows, and futures

AO3

Word count : 5168

Summary:

Note:

Dick blinks. There is something hard and cold pressing on his back. The smell in the air and the lack of light is very characteristic. He’s in a cave. It’s not the cave though, the one that fells like home and long nights and relief. This one just feels cold and empty. How many caves are there in Gotham anyway? Too many, that’s it.

He’s not alone. There is someone here, very close, talking. He can’t really understand what the other person is saying, but the voice doesn’t sound very happy. It also sounds inhuman. Synthetic, his mind supplies, artificial or modified voice. Ally or enemy? He blinks again, willing his eyes to adapt to the dim light, his brain to understand what’s going on. Finally, he makes out the known features of a red helmet. Ally then. His days as enemy with Red Hood are long gone, replaced with something else. He can’t say they’re brothers now, because in a way, they’ve always been, even in the darkest times, when none of them wanted to. But friends doesn’t exactly cut it either. Allies, depending on the day, might be the closest thing. He still doesn’t really get what Jason is saying, but his attention focusses on something else. There is a third person.

His shoulder hurts and then everything comes back.

Alright, to ao3's soon to be arriving Wattpad Refugees, a basic guide to general user culture:

1.) Unlike Wattpads vote system that let's you like each chapter, the ao3 equivalent kudos only allows one per work. Everyone is generally quietly annoyed about this. To engage with each chapter, you're heavily encouraged to comment. Trust me, it makes people's day.

2.) Ao3 has no algorithm. By default it's latest updated work first. You can find things to your taste through searches, filters and tags.

3.) 'No archive warnings apply' and 'user has chosen not to use archive warnings' mean two very different things. No archives warnings means the work is free from any content that could require a warning tag (character death, graphic depictions of violence, non-con, etc). User has chosen not to use archive warnings means it could contain any of the warning content, be it hasn't been explicitly tagged. Treat it like an allergen. No archive warnings apply is allergen free. User has chosen not to use archive warnings, may contain traces or whole chunks of the allergen. If you're likely to have a bad reaction, maybe don't take the risk.

4.) Speaking of warnings, ao3 has very few restrictions on the type of work that's allowed. Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings on that are, thats how the site is. You're likely to run across some dark subject matters and a lot of people are uncomfortable with reading that. You're well within your rights not like these works and have your opinion on whether they should be allowed, but harassing the authors of such works (or any works) is more likely to come back on you than them. Ao3 operates on a strong policy of 'don't like, don't read'. Use the tagging system to your full advantage to only engage with the kind of works you want to see.

We look forward to welcoming you all and seeing the fantastic works you create. Happy writing!

Learned most of this through trial and error about ten years ago when I made my own migration from Wattpad and FFN to AO3, and it would have been nice to have this friendly guide to help ease me into things, so imma just reblog this in the hopes someone who needs it but wouldn't find it otherwise will see it

Reblog if you didn’t write My Immortal

We’re going to find the author by process of elimination.

holy server b@man! is opening invitations for 24 hours

(from 10 AM CST on April 22nd, to 10 AM CST on April 23rd)

in HSB, you can chat with other batfam fans, get fic recs, share awesome art, make friends, create headcanons, play games, stream your art, and more!

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