Pruned Down and Branched Out

  • 20 Jun 2023

  • 8

The Pull List

In which I list what fanfics I am working on so that you know what to expect. This post is updated as necessary; its post date reflects when it was last updated. I write my stories in Scrivener and Google Docs, and am currently posting exclusively on FanFiction.Net and Archive of Our Own.

Between troubles with technology and job hunting (hey, gotta grow up sometime), I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like. Here are some (small) updates.

Home Assignment is my newest fic, published for the @dickgraysonbigbang. It’s also my first fic to receive artwork, which is super exciting!

I recently published Note to Self for an exchange, and am currently writing an expanded version that will be cross-posted to FanFiction.Net.

A Jason-centric sequel to All the Corners That Are Left is tentatively in the works.

A long, canon divergent Batfam WIP titled Family Crisis is slowly being written for the WIP Big Bang, and won’t be posted until it’s complete. Here is the summary:

At the close of the gang war, Batman is the target of an attempted deception concerning the life of his former protégé Stephanie Brown, and suddenly nothing is as important as his family. While Dick battles trauma, Tim struggles with grief, Cassandra searches for belonging and Steph recovers from assault, Bruce faces the return of ghosts from his own past and psyche.

A Road to Avonlea fic based on ‘Thursday’s Child’ and titled Pumpkin Winter is being drafted.

You can now judge me by my bookshelves on LibraryThing.

Lastly, I’m doing some beta reading for a story based on the 2004 Phantom of the Opera movie. Here’s the link on FF.net, and the link on AO3. I can verify that it’s a very compelling story with a lot of heart.

Stay safe out there.

—librarylexicon (formerly Lily F. Lux, Delusional Musings, realismandromance)

kartrap:

krawkpaladin:

Reblogging things I like feels a lot more goblinesque than upvoting ever did. The upvotes felt like “hmm yes, I approve *golf claps*” while reblogging feels like furtively staring at something before shoving it in your mouth and scurrying back underneath the nearest piece of furniture.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t like it. But I definitely find myself going “maybe I shouldn’t reblog this because I’ve already reblogged a bunch of things today and I don’t want to look like I don’t have a life,” I say as I close the app and reopen it like one of those little automatic box toys with the switches.

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heroesriseandfall:

zahri-melitor:

silverwhittlingknife:

zahri-melitor:

The other reason I think Red Robin 12 is a moment of trust between Tim and Dick is that Dick catches Tim.

Dick has a lot of issues with the concept of catching or failing to catch someone who is falling. It’s haunted his dreams.

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(Nightwing #4)

It’s not so much the fall itself - Dick is fine with heights and with throwing himself off high places.

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(Gotham Nights #10, Nightwing #140)

It’s about the fact he doesn’t make the catch.

One of my favourite bits of the Freefall storyline is Dick catching the Mother of Champions’ baby. Because it ties back to this fear of not getting there in time.

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(Nightwing #6, Nightwing #146)

Nightwing catches the baby and is able to hand him to his mother. Wu Mei-Xin has never held any of her children before, it’s a lovely moment. It really caps off the growth Dick goes through over his solo.

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(Nightwing #146)

And similarly, Dick being there to catch Tim is important imagery in their relationship.

Dick catches Tim when they’re playing around, train surfing:

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(Nightwing #25)

Dick ‘catches’ Tim when he’s depressed. “You’re not catching me at a bad time”.

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(Robin #156)

Dick is there to catch Tim as he falls apart after pouring out the water from the Lazarus pit.

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(Nightwing #139)

And Dick is there to catch Tim as he falls from a building.

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(Red Robin #12)

Dick’s grasp has never missed, when it’s Tim. It’s IMPORTANT to Dick that he make the catch for anyone, when they’re falling in front of him, but it’s especially important to him when it’s a child (and when it’s his baby brother).

Tim can honestly say to Dick “you’ll always be there for me” because a little part of him, deep inside, trusts that no matter what, no matter how impossible it might seem, Dick will be there to catch him.

#i will always be feral over this line because#is he lying? is he telling the truth?#and the answer is: yes#because before dick saved him tim clearly had no thoughts he was going to be saved#but after dick did save him well#clearly the fact that dick will always catch tim is a fundamental truth to tim#so he’s both lying and telling the truth <3 (via @scintillyyy)

#YEAH red robin is VERY intentional with imagery and callbacks and this is such a great moment ;_;#i think mmm how to put this#a lot of the subtext of red robin is about dick not catching tim / tim not having faith that he would#he isn’t there for tim at the start of the story and he’s initially pretty wary/reluctant in collision#but he comes through at the end and the end is what counts#and that’s why i find it so satisfying#because dick’s a character who’s high-key obsessed with failure and with failing loved ones#and he very much /is/ failing tim at the start of the story in that he’s not being the person tim needs him to be#but that’s okay!! he can fail and it’s okay!! because he does care and his heart is in the right place and he comes through in the end#so at the end of rr 12 he saves tim which is what tim needs#and tim tells him that he did everything perfectly which is what dick needs to hear#just like in resurrection when dick says all the wrong things first before he figures out the right thing to do#and - negativity alert but - i just find these sorts of stories so much more satisfying than the way taylor writes dick nowadays#where he’s just chipperly incapable of any meaningful failure and wanders around being effortlessly perfect all the time#older comics let characters be bad at things and screw up and not say the right thing sometimes#and it makes the triumphant moments like the hug at the end of resurrection or the catch at the end of rr12 hit so much harder#and it’s also!!!! thematic!!!! because it mimics the tension of the fall and then the catch!!!!#and dick and tim had lots of good stories like this that balanced both the tension and the love#and i really miss that for them#i feel like so much of this dawn-of-the-dcu stuff involves squashing dick into a very boring stepford-smiley figure#but like… i didn’t get attached to dick because i wanted him to be a perfect plastic saint incapable of failure#i like him because he’s relatable and tries hard and fails sometimes and keeps trying anyway#and the catches that he /does/ make are more important than the ones he misses <3 (via @silverwhittlingknife​)

Yeah, Silver, Red Robin’s just a comic that is SO referential to so many parts of Tim’s 20 year history in the imagery and callbacks that Yost piles into it. It just means SO much more if you read it knowing all that history and catching all the references stuffed into it because there’s so much mirrored imagery happening and narrative repeated beats.

It’s just another step in a very long conversation between Dick and Tim as characters about how important they are to each other.

Especially Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul. The Dick and Tim (and Dick and Damian) plotlines of Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul are almost a mini guidebook to Red Robin 1-12, because they do it ALL OVER AGAIN there and you see the new prioritisation Dick is making take place there too, but in Resurrection you get to hear Dick’s side of events and reasoning while Red Robin doesn’t have them and so you have to fill them in yourself from the way Dick’s reacted every OTHER time.

Because Dick wants (needs) to catch the baby. And up until Resurrection, the baby he had to catch was Tim, but now he has TWO babies to catch and the newer smaller baby (Damian) is just that much more vulnerable and so Dick feels he has to catch Damian first and THEN grab Tim and trust that Tim can cope until he gets there. And his prioritisation succeeds overall both times but there’s still that hurt. Because he used to grab Tim first. But he’s still able to get there in time to make the more important catch.

And we know how Dick reacts when he can’t catch the baby. (Here’s Tim catching Dick instead, in Gotham Knights #10 and Last Laugh #6, because they catch each other)

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And so yes Dick fails but he fails in a way that’s understandable and Dick and to understand why Tim still trusts Dick afterwards (and he does trust Dick! That’s his brother!) you need to know the history and that they’ve fought before and made it up before and every time they’ve pulled back into place and recovered. (Insert the Gotham Knights #26 argument here)

And so yeah “you’ll always be there for me” is a lie but it’s also a truth. But to read that truth properly you need to know *waves* 500 issues of their history and your whole spreadsheet and that Ra’s might have kicked Tim out the same window that Bruce kicked Ra’s out of in ‘Tec #840 and so the only people who could have known that to look for Tim were Bruce and, as we see, Dick himself (because on the balance of evidence if you line those panels up, it IS the same window and Bruce MUST have put it in the after action report, and Dick read that), because the only way to get there in time was to know where to look.

Exactly exactly! Also I would like to add this panel because I find it very important that Tim spent his childhood having nightmares where Dick (as Robin) would save him with Batman, and then once Tim joined the Batfamily that became real life and Dick saved him over and over and over……

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Batman #441 (A Lonely Place of Dying: Chapter Three)

Like Tim’s early adoration of Dick was when he didn’t really know Dick. But even when he DOES know Dick and sees him stumble and lose confidence a million times, Tim still has this absolute faith in Dick (even when Dick doesn’t have it for himself!), because when it came down to what was important, Dick always caught him, even when Tim didn’t expect him to.

Also this panel, because I love it:

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Detective Comics #723

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