Generations 2 #3, page 20 by John Byrne & Trish Mulvihill. 2001.
Supergirl by John Byrne. 1979.
After finally reading The Dark Knight Returns, I have to say that it is simultaneously one of the best comics I’ve ever read in terms of presentation and craft, and one of the absolute worst in terms of actual content and themes.
Batman continually acts unnecessarily brutally, completely ignores the rights of anyone deemed a “criminal”, and expresses contempt at those who mention those rights. Said contempt extends to the narrative as well, which depicts anyone who advocates for compassion and points out the social and medical causes for increased crime as naive at best and sinister at worst. It proposes that science and empathy cannot help criminals, but rather that they have to be conquered through force by “great men” who are placed above the lowly rabble, and treated by the narrative as if rules do not apply to them.
Criminals are treated as monsters who kill and rape for the sake of it, their humanity taken away by body modifications and inhuman proportions. They are the other, more a ravenous horde of orcs than actual human beings, and anyone who tries to treat them differently meets with a gruesome fate. But of course Batman, riding in like Napoleon, “tames” them effortlessly because he’s not “afraid” to treat them “as they are”.
The story worships mindless action over consideration of consequences, brutal retaliation over empathy, and the idea that people like Batman are simply superior to others, and that those like Clark who try to deny it are fools.
Basically, it’s a terrible comic made with exceptional skill.
Frank Miller’s whole creepy fascist/might makes right bullshit in his comics is one of the many reasons they are unreadable…and people copying the way he writes Batman is why I find so many stories starring Bruce just AWFUL as well…
Like I will take any version of Batman over the terrible Miller version or the versions that try and imitate him
Frank Miller’s attempt at writing Batman comics is the reason for like 90% of the problems in Batman comics today. Arguably a lot of other superhero comics as well.
(Well, that and the whole “Batman and the Joker are exactly the same because they both wear costumes, break the law, and have traumatic backstories” nonsense)
The fact that Frank called himself “the guy who gave Batman his balls back” says a lot, because point me to one thing about 1970s Batman that could be considered emasculating. Compassion? Planning? The Wayne Foundation being a thing?
Honestly, it was O'Neil that gave Batman his balls back. He’s the one that went back to the gritty pulp-noir roots. He’s the one that brought back the Shadow-like element to him. Him and Marshall Rogers and Frank Robbins. But they did it without losing the humanity at the heart of the character
Yep, I agree entirely
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let's try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.
"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it
I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.
a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.
a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!
I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.
now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.
but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.
...huh. My thanks to @bemusedlybespectacled for putting NAMES to those things, “horse fantasy” and “unicorn fantasy”; because I’ve come across those concepts before, but never with WORDS for them. I hope that those terms become commonly understood, so then people can have discussions about them without having to spend an hour ahead of time just making sure that everyone’s talking about the same thing.
"why do comic fans hate the mcu/dceu literally just don't watch it" as if the popularity of those shit movies don't affect how future writers interpret/view the characters and fuck with comic canon
comic books as a medium is so often purposely disregarded in favour of actors. i'm never talking about the actors, i'm talking about the illustrators and colourists
this post blows up again every time there's some rancid change to a comic character because they want them to reflect their live action counterpart. this post blows up again like once a month im so serious. someone PLEASE tell marvel that their mcu fans aren't going to read the comics after watching whatever they put out and that even if they were, there are so many other dedicated fans apart of an entirely different fanbase who appreciate the already existing comic character. why would you disrespect the fans and change it for virtually no more profits than you're already getting considering it doesn't bring in new fans from the mcu
gretaghostgirl asked:
being a Chris Kent and a Jon Kent fan at the same time is so hard forreal
obsidianstrawberrymilk answered:
It’s an actual nightmare bc yes Jon exists to replace Chris as the ‘good bio son’ to his detriment but he also could be a legitimately interesting character in his own right and also I think they should be goofy brothers but also Chris has been turned into a hollow villain version of himself who holds none of the charm of who he used to be directly bc of Jon but-
MY FRIEND IS FINDING OUT THAT HES COLORBLIND AND WE’RE ALL HELPING HIM THROUGH IT LMAOOOOOO
UPDATE WE HAVE TWO COLORBLIND BITCHEZ IN THE SERVER
what the fuck is going on
On the last one Deuteranomaly and Protanomaly are identical though
What I’m getting from this is that there are a lot more colorblind people in the world than even colorblind people know.
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If you have glasses or get any eye doctor visits I would definitely recommend talking to them about it. I was always teased for calling one color another color, reds and greens, blues and purple, olive green and gray, and when I talked to my doctor about it he took out a book with the dots and he was like ‘oh yeah you have mild red-green colorblindness and a color anomaly on blue.’ It helped me understand more about my eyesight and really cleared up the truths from the myths for me.
Deuteranomaly and Protanomaly are absolutely NOT the same. The colors are similar but the spread is different.
Parallels || Lan Wangji as the Yiling Patriarch
- LWJ losing his core during the attack in the Cloud Recesses
- He is thrown in the Burial Mounds while he still has a piece of yin metal hidden in his robes
- As he cultivates the “ghost path” and has broken the Lan sect rules he is on a self-imposed exile and stops wearing his headband
“If it’s about a dad dating other dads, how come some of them have kids???”
everyone stop reblogging the chains that don’t include the trans flag challenge
korpikorppi
