January 29th, 2046 Most Stressful Day In Nigel's Life Ever - Running To Luce To Kill Him And His Servants

The truth is they just all feed off of each other’s stupid.  I love all these stupid Peepaws so much.  

Gotta credit all these amazing creators: Odd Man Out @cherrytraveller Mutant Ninja Midlife Crisis by @mutantninjamidlifecrisis Trial and Error by @apatheticrobots We’ll Meet Again, Soon @chiangyorange

Still thinking about how Morally complex Babs truly is. I mean, let's think about what she's done that other heroes (that she is commonly associated with; Core Birds and Bats) don't.

1. She attempted to snipe Black Mask. This is the crux of my reeling but it's still worth mentioning. Yes, Helena has shot at people and so does Red Hood, but I don't think they ever did so from a distance like Babs was going to.

2. She embezzles money from criminals to fund her operations. It's canon that she has stolen money from various crime lords including Blockbuster digitally. I would not be surprised if she also pinched some profits from various corporations as well. This funding is so extreme that it causes the Hunt For Oracle arc itself.

3. She was thrown in prison and shot a government agent. Thanks to someone recently posting them (I found them via a mutual follower reblogging them), she was thrown in prison after she took the bait and downloaded a file meant to catch hackers, and thrown in prison. She gets broken out and is only in 2 of 12 issues for The Hacker Files, but this is still huge.

And finally, 4. Barbara has actively worked with villains and morally grey assassins more than once. Lady Shiva, Savant, Poison Ivy and more have all worked with Barbara, and she has helped give Savant and Creote a second chance. Few of the Bats have done anything similar.

Tl;DR, Barbara is a Morally complex and fascinating character, and the fact that she basically had her soul torn out is horrific of modern DC. This is the Barbara we love and hold dear.

Pawpaw Leo and Babey Casey doodles

Could i please get a small mammal cursed bio fact if u have one

the grasshopper mouse of the southwestern United States looks like a standard house mouse but is almost entirely carnivorous and is known to kill and consume everything from less homicidal mice to goddamn rattlesnakes, which they kill by jumping onto the snake’s back and gnawing through its spine

Big brother Mikey! (someone help him)

i love this panel so much and i wish i had the like thinking and art analysis skills to explain why other than "he looks like a sopping wet cat and i think thats wonderful"

Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can't someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)

but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.

it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.

and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.

(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)

but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.

someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.

I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.

accident

Hey, we need to talk about the way Batfamily fans write Cass using ASL, because a lot of it is really fucking ableist

But Cass can't speak, of course she needs to sign!

Not true! There is nothing physically wrong with Cass's vocal chords or mouth, there's nothing in her brain stopping her from making sounds, and she is not an elective mute. She actually learns to speak individual words really quickly after she puts herself into an environment where that's a useful skill. Basil teaches her to quote huge chunks of Shakespeare in Nu52, and that's easier for her than forming simple sentences. That would definitely not be the case if she had any physical limitations on her speech.

Cass's disability is that she was not taught any language, and so she is having to grok the entire concept of language from the ground up. Grammar and syntax; tonality; how to combine words to convey more complex ideas; how putting two words next to one another can change their meaning; how to break down a whole idea into the individual parts needed to turn it into words; the fact that people's words might not line up with their tone and body language so you have to pay attention to both; how to tell if someone wants a response or is stating a fact; how to work out meaning from context if a word is new or someone has an unfamiliar accent; how to know if someone is using a new word or if they actually just have an unfamilar accent and all the ways words can be bent and changed before they become something new; the fact that two words can use the same sounds but have the same meaning; the fact that there can be two different words that mean the same thing. This is all stuff she didn't learn as a baby, and not knowing it would be just as much an impediment to learning ASL as learning English (for accent, swap out things like having limited movement in their hands, or having learned slightly different forms of the same sign, using a lot of home-signs etc, it's the same concept in a different medium).

There is no language on earth Cass wouldn't have these problems with. ASL is not any kind of shortcut.

But she reads body language, and ASL is kind of like body language right?

Not true, also pretty abelist! Just as the sounds which make up spoken language are essentially arbitrary (there's no objective reason why the sound "gud" should mean good, English speakers just all agree it does) so most of the signs in ASL are arbitrary! There's no reason for

to mean good. ASL users just all agree that it does. Cass knowing body language would not help her any more with ASL than it would with English, and if anything, it might make it harder, because sign uses the whole body and therefore changes the way people use body language so unless she saw a lot of ASL users as a child (and there's no particular reason to think she did), she would have to adjust what she knows about body language to account for those differences!

But she signs in the comics!

Nope! She uses hand gestures to communicate sometimes, but that's not signing. Pointing at food and miming eating to convey hunger is not sign. Pretending to punch someone and pulling it at the last second to convey you could hurt them but won't (Cass's actual first communication with Bruce in the comics) isn't signing. I've done the point and mime thing in countries where I didn't speak the language, that does not mean I knew that country's native sign language!

But she learns ballet, that's like a physical language, so sign is the same thing!

Nope! Also low key kinda abelist. Dance is a method of communication, but it isn't a full language. There's almost no grammar or sentence structure, the vocabulary is extremely limited, and also you can just make up new dance moves or use moves from different styles of dance together and still convey your meaning (you cannot just make random gestures or use BSL and expect ASL users to understand you, because they're full complex languages). Cass vibes with dance pretty hard, but that's precisely because it isn't a language, it doesn't require any of the skills she struggles with in order to communicate emotion.

But ASL isn't like a real language, it's not as complex or nuanced as spoken English so it would be easier for her to learn

That is so fucking gross I don't even want to have this conversation with you. Go and sit in the timeout box and think about what you've just said, and then commit to doing better.

But I just think that once she learned it, she'd like using ASL because [it's very expressive/she's used to her world being very quiet/she can use it on stealth missions more easily/etc]

Valid, understandable, have a lovely day

But I'm writing an AU were she uses ASL because her backstory is too comic-book-y to fit in no-capes AUs but I didn't want to erase her communication difficulties so I've written her as having a different disability

Cool. Send me a link when you're done.

But what if I write her using makatong?

(For context, makatong is a form of sign developed for people who have intellectual or phsyical disabilities that affect language use, which uses more descriptive signs which require less precise hand possitioning than other sign languages, and which has very simple grammar, making it easier to learn than ASL). Yes this would be easier for her, because it's intended for people with similar difficulties to hers, but since her difficulties stem purely from a lack of experience which can be (and are, in canon) overcome with practise, it would be kind of needlessly limiting compared to her just starting out with very simple spoken language, and wouldn't give her as many chances to develop those language learning skills. Makatong is also not mutually intelligable with any other sign language, so she couldn't easily transition from that to ASL once she got used to signing, she'd have to start learning it from scratch.

But I HC her as deaf

There is 0 comics evidence to support that, but it's a headcanon, so who cares. You do you. Have fun.

But learning sign language would be better than learning to speak anyway because it's a universal language!

That is not even slightly how it work. Go read the wikipedia article on sign languages around the world or something. Do some research.

TL:DR; Cass does not use ASL in the comics, and nothing about her disability or sign languages in general would make learning ASL easier or more convinent for her than spoken English. That does't mean writing her signing is inherently bad, but you should examine your reasons for doing it to ensure you're not just perpetuating ableist stereotypes about the language.

They beat Toguro but at what cost