So I Just Went Through The New Gotham Promo At .25 Speed, As One Does, And I Don’t Have Any Discoveries

I love youtube’s suggested video categories feature and its understanding of my interests <3 

This post caused me to look this song up, and it’s very catchy! It has such a swift, unceasing pace to it and an epic buildup, and it captures the feeling of running. Also, of course, very fitting for the Hargreeves, and very nicely paired with these gifs. 

Side note, the rhythm of this song makes me think of Loki’s Song by Lucinda Holdsworth. It’s not an exact match, but enough that it brought it to mind and I thought I might as well recommend it :)

don’t blame me because I can’t help where I come from ♫

Spring is here again and I gave myself another sharpie leg tattoo :)

Okay, so, today on deeply nerdy things I'm working on (and also looking for advice on; vote at the end of the post!)...

So I've been working on coloring Worm's page from the quarantine coloring book (this is what I have so far), and I decided that I needed to put a name on the side of the boat. Because this stream was the first thing I watched with Gerard and Worm, I decided that “Daydream Believer” would be a good name for the boat (fair warning, it’s a pretty violent game they’re playing in that stream, but to summarize, the part I’m referencing is from Gerard’s turn as the murderer when he starts playing Daydream Believer by the Monkees to creep out Worm and the other dude they’re playing with, which is the moment I linked to.)

But then I thought, this is an alien creature’s magical space-boat. I can’t just title it Daydream Believer in English. So I whipped out my D&D player’s handbook (5e) and went to the Elvish alphabet.

But then I thought, I can’t just write Daydream Believer in English with Elvish letters. I need to translate it into proper Elvish first. Which, of course, the only correct Elvish languages to use are Tolkien’s--Sindarin and Quenya. (In any case, I don’t believe that there is a complete D&D Elvish language.) 

So, I brought up a few Sindarin and Quenya online dictionaries and translators, and I came up with a few different translations for “Daydream Believer”, and I wrote them out and transcribed my favorites to try and see which ones looked best in the D&D Elvish alphabet (I know Tengwar is technically the correct Tolkien-based Elvish script to be writing in, but I was already rolling with the D&D Elvish transcriptions, and I think I like the look of them for an alien space boat better, so I stuck with the D&D Elvish). But now I’m kind of stuck between three, and I thought, why not ask tumblr?

The two on the left with the blue highlights are Sindarin translations, and the one on the right with the green highlight is Quenya; I know there are differences in use between the two languages but I figured there’s no particular reason an alien couldn’t speak either of them. The first of the two Sindarin translations is “celain ely thenid pen”. ‘Celain’ means daylight, ‘ely’ means dream, and since I couldn’t find the word ‘believe’ in Sindarin anywhere I looked, I used ‘thenid’ which means ‘faithful’ and ‘pen’ as a pronoun meaning ‘one’. So, the first translation is really “daylightdream faithfulone”, which is fairly close. But I chose that translation mostly for aesthetics, and I worried I had strayed from the truest translation of the words, so I did another. 

The second Sindarin translation I did was “eraid ely esteliad pen”. ‘Eraid’ is just ‘day’ instead of ‘daylight’, and ‘esteliad’ is ‘trusting’, which seemed closer to the meaning of a daydream believer as one who is trusting in their daydreams rather than one who is faithful to their daydreams, although that could lead to a whole debate on the meaning of the original song, which--let’s be honest I’m way overthinking this already. I’m just trying to find pretty letters to write on the side of this boat, lol :) But nerdy linguistic overanalysis for a random obscure reference that pretty much no one is going to get is what I’m here for, haha. 

So, the third and final of my top three translations is the Quenya one, “árë maur savindo”. Quenya actually seemed to translate the phrase more easily, if only because there’s a word for “believer”. ‘Árë’ is day, ‘maur’ is dream or vision (which, I like the idea that the daydream believer’s daydreams are visions of a sort--oh no I’m analyzing the song again, I said I wouldn’t do that, I’ll stop, haha. I actually have thought about the meaning of the song quite a lot), and ‘savindo’ is believer. The Quenya translator that gave me ‘savindo’ warned that it was fan-created, but ‘sav-’ is in fact the Quenya verb for believe, and there was a whole section in the Quenya-English dictionary I looked at for “one who ___” verbs and they all ended in ‘indo’, so I think it’s a correctly derived translation. 

Tl;dr--those are the three best translations I came up with, and I highlighted where I wrote each of them out in Elvish in the image above. So, now I’m asking you to vote: which Elvish translation of Daydream Believer should I write on the boat on my coloring page? “Celain ely thenid pen”, “eraid ely esteliad pen”, or “árë maur savindo”? Vote in the replies or reblog with your vote! :) 

Postscript: If anyone wants to see my full Elvish translation scribblings which led to this, here’s what my process in my sketchbook looked like:

(There was a reflection from an old art class in the top left so that’s what I roughly photoshopped out if you were wondering.)

It’s always fun to have an excuse to mess around with translations and practice writing things in Elvish script :) 

Do you ever consider alternate names for ships? Like Spuffy could’ve been Billiam, or... or Bike.

Bike

Bike

As promised, here is the Nygmobblepot fanmix I mostly put together this fall. (See the end of the post for links.) I’ve come across a few very nice fanmixes for them, but not a lot of the ones I found had rock music, and since Nygmobblepot is such a hard rock sort of couple I felt like the need to make a more rock-heavy playlist for them. (Plus, it’s just the sort of music I listen to most often, and so these are the songs that come to mind for me.)

I focused mainly on their season 3 arc, especially the angst. I tried to put the songs in a sort of narrative order, so it starts out with songs that are a bit more focused on their love; Lydia is meant as the turning point where the Isabella murder happens and things start heading south, and the songs thereafter are more focused on their darker dynamic in the latter part of season 3 (though they’re all on the dark side; this is meant to be an angsty playlist). Not every song precisely follows this arc; Bloodfeather, for example, leans towards that darker side of things, but it also fits them so well that I wanted to open the playlist with it. I think it works as echoing the foreshadowing of their relationship in season 2 as well. 

1. *Bloodfeather by Highly Suspect: “In the name of love, I’ll follow you. And if my body’s dead and cold I died for you; in the name of love I’d kill for you.” “You’re fatal but I love who you are. Be my death or my forever; you’re my little bloodfeather.” (Our Penguin does tend to get his feathers bloodied... Granted, that’s not what a bloodfeather is, but the image does fit.)

2. Song 3 by Stone Sour: “If you take a step towards me, you will take my breath away, so I’ll keep you close and keep my secrets safe. No one else has ever loved me, no one else has ever tried, never understood how much I could take. There’s a darkness down inside me that I know we’ll both enjoy. Did I save you? 'Cause I know you saved me too.” 

3. I’m Not Alright by Shinedown: “All messed up and slightly twisted. Am I sick or am I gifted? Maybe it’s me, I'm just crazy; maybe I like that I’m not alright.” (Honestly this one fits Gotham in general--”all dressed up in a white straight jacket” is actually a very Jerome line--but I figured I probably wasn’t going to get around to making a general Gotham playlist and it suits Nygmobblepot’s mutual madness, I think.)

4. Little Monster by Royal Blood: “Hey little monster, where’ve you been hiding, and can I come this time? Heartache to heartache, I’m your wolf, I’m your man. I say run little monster, before you learn who I am.” 

5. Glycerine by Bush: “We live in a wheel where everyone steals, but when we rise it's like strawberry fields. I treated you bad; you bruised my face. Couldn't love you more, you’ve got a beautiful taste. It could have been easier on you, I couldn't change though I wanted to. Should’ve been easier by three; our old friend fear and you and me.” 

6. Possum Kingdom by Toadies: “I’m not gonna lie. I'll not be a gentleman. Behind the boathouse I'll show you my dark secret... Do you wanna die?” (I’ve heard and thought of many interpretations for this strange, dark love song, but somehow or another, they all seem to fit Nygmobblepot.)

7. *Lydia by Highly Suspect: “I am the hungry shark, fast and merciless. But the only girl that could talk to him just couldn't swim, tell me what's worse than this. Your eyes alive in pain, black tears don't hide in rain, and I tied you to the tracks; when I turned around, I heard the sound, I hit the ground, I know there's no turning back.” (It’s particularly interesting how Oswald circuitously killed Isabella with railroad tracks, echoing the old mustache-twirling villain trope of tying the damsel to the train tracks that this song also references. Although if Isabella had had the presence of mind to realize that even if her breaks were out, her steering wheel was still working, she probably wouldn’t be dead, but that’s a rant for another day.)

8. I Only Lie When I Love You by Royal Blood: (the title says most of it but) “Go ahead, pull the plug; broken finger, sticky trigger, now I can't get it off my chest... you know I’m up to something.”

9. Roll Me Under by Stone Temple Pilots: “Do you believe in something beautiful between chaos and the light?” (harks back to their earlier romance, but) “Roll me under, I'll pull the trigger for you. Do with me what you will. Hold me under, the water running over...” (harks forward to the first dock scene. Really I could’ve put this later in the mix but I also put it here to keep the hard/soft balance of the songs cycling back and forth just for auditory balance. Narratively it probably should’ve been #11.)

10. *House on Fire by Rise Against: “I’m in over my head and she's a high tide that keeps pushing me away. I thought we would build this together, but everything I touch just seems to break. Am I your sail or your anchor? Am I the calm or the hurricane?” “Till then I’ll hold you like a hand grenade. You touch me like a razor blade. I wish there was some other way, but no. Like a house on fire, we’re up in flames. I’ll burn here if that’s what it takes.”

11. Disarm by the Smashing Pumpkins: “Disarm you with a smile. Cut you like you want me to. The killer in me is the killer in you, my love. I used to be a little boy; so old in my shoes.” 

12. Say You’ll Haunt Me by Stone Sour: “I will give you everything to... say you'll never die, you'll always haunt me. I want to know I belong to you; say you'll haunt me. Little soft pulses in my dead, little souvenirs of secrets shared, little off guard and unprepared.” (Basically Ed to Oswald in s3e15.)

13. Let it Die by the Foo Fighters: “Did you ever think of me? You’re so considerate. Hearts gone cold and your hands were tied; why’d you have to go and let it die?” (To clarify, I don’t by any means want to suggest that the ship is dead by ending my playlist on this note; I still have hope for Nygmobblepot in season 5, and if nothing else I think season 4 very clearly showed that the ship didn’t die for good in season 3. I just love how powerful and raw Dave Grohl’s voice is at the end of this song and I wanted to let it linger, to let that sound be the note this playlist ended on. Like I said, it’s an angsty playlist.)

Here are links to the playlists. I made two because the songs I’ve marked with an asterisk all have the f-word in them; in the case of House on Fire, it’s only once, but it’s several times in Bloodfeather. If you’re alright with that, here is the playlist with the original, uncensored songs. 

If you would prefer clean versions, here is a version of the same playlist with clean versions of those three songs. 

Fun fact: there was no clean version of House on Fire by Rise against on youtube, so I made my own using a handy editing trick. I probably could also have made better versions of the clean edits of the two Highly Suspect songs (no offence to the original editors but they’re not perfectly smooth and Bloodfeather has a weird gap at the end) but I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. If you would like me to make different edits of those, though, let me know and I’d consider it. I should perhaps also mention that Possum Kingdom does use the name of Jesus, but as long as you read the singer’s request as sincere it’s not taking it in vain. But, I do admit that it could be interpreted that way, for the sake of fair warning. 

So, I hope you enjoy this dark, angsty, rocking season 3 Nygmobblepot playlist! Here’s to hopefully some great Nygmobblepot scenes in season 5.

Hmm, I could list a few things I've seen that strike me as fairly common, though of course they'll be different for everyone. These are just generalizations I feel like I see crop up a lot; maybe they'll help you get your feet wet with the fandom’s lore.

Obviously, the Fab Four are barely in the comic, but there seem to be some commonalities to their characterization that the fandom has built. For example, I feel like Fun Ghoul is typically fairly chaotic, probably the most so out of the main four, and on the reckless side. He’s probably the funniest. Also, he’s often skilled with explosives and quite fond of blowing things up. Party Poison is the leader, sassy, and often has a temper. Party laughs loud and shouts louder. I think Poison is also the one of the Fab Four most frequently cast as non-binary, but the gender of all the characters varies quite widely across fanon. There was a movement recently against Jet Star being cast as the Mom Friend, but I feel like he's still widely regarded as sort of a mediating force and generally a bit more on the thoughtful side, though obviously they can all be wild at times (there’s a certain minimum of chaotic energy required to be a Killjoy). Kobra Kid typically loves his motorcycle and likes to race it; I feel like he's usually kind of a cool dude(tm), or at least tries to be. And, naturally, Kobra and Party are almost always siblings.

Outside of the Fab Four, Cherri Cola writes poetry and has a poetry corner segment on his radio show; he's usually sweet and rather melancholy. Show Pony is even more chaotic than Ghoul, highly flirtatious, and even more widely headcanoned as nonbinary than Poison--I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone use "he" pronouns for Pony (though the actor in the music videos does for himself, but that’s not really relevant to fanon about the character). Dr. Death-Defying is something of a guardian of all the Killjoys, borderline omniscient at times with his radio broadcasts, and he serves as the grounding force behind a rowdy, chaotic gaggle of teenage rebels. His couch is always there for new Killjoys to crash on. He’s a comforting presence and a source of wisdom (though again, I’d say a certain amount of chaotic energy is present in all Killjoys, Dr. D included). 

Anyways, I'm basically trying to summarize the headcanons of a bunch of people at once, and as it’s been said before, things are different for everyone. Just because I see these as throughlines for these characters doesn’t mean that they will be for everyone. But, those are some general impressions I’ve gotten through the fandom.

Also I realize I really only went for basic character descriptions, rather than anything about the setting or other lore, so let me know if there’s any other area of fanon I should attempt to sum up and I’d be happy to try :) 

Could you maybe give a crash course on killjoy fanon? Like I read the comic and I just got here and I’m hella confused. I almost feel like I read a different comic than y’all lol

Okay my answer won't be good, you came to the wrong blog for something coherent, but if anyone sees this and would like to add on, please do!

I'm gonna start by saying basically there's just what little canon they gave us and you just make what you want with it, your own set of hcs and worlbuilding and characters' races and sexualities and genders and whatnot, it's free real estate.if the canon doesn't spark joy, you can throw it away,have fun with this.

I've been trying to write an answer for a couple of hours but i have nothing, I'm sorry this wasn't helpful at all. Someone give an answer to this?

I was genuinely sad that Mr. Penn got killed off (again), but at least his demise facilitated this great Nygmobblepot moment. Ugh, I don’t know, Mr. Penn was weirdly sweet and I actually quite liked his... odd fondness for/relationship with Oswald, and I’m glad we got this episode where they hashed out their issues. I was happy that Oswald didn’t want to kill him. 

I actually quite like the idea of Penn being part of the accidental party on their secret submarine, too, with Os and Ed and Selena and Barbara and her unborn Jimling (I’m sure she’d strangle me for calling it that but too late) and Penn aaaaalll together in a confined space. Now I want that fic. Maybe I should write that fic... but I’m already working on a season 5 AU with Martin... but maybe I could incorporate this phenomenal cosmic party in an itty bitty submarine? We’ll see.

But anyways, yes. I’m sad for what befell Penn, but the moment of mutual acceptance and maniacal Nygmobblepot laughter that followed had all their strange, dark sweetness. I’m happy to see them bonding back together :)

Happy New Year 2023!!

I bought a fancy paper hat at the grocery store (because I'm a sucker for shiny purple paper fedoras* with clocks on them apparently), consumed a little wine+, and knelt on the office floor and kissed my boy cat on his fluffy little head at like 12:04am because I was trying to finish my annual blogspot post**, do a Duolingo lesson, and find whatever TV channel has the ball drop all at once and I sort of missed it. But here we are nonetheless!

*Actually I think it might be kind of like a short top hat? I could post a picture later if anyone is particularly interested. It’s blatantly cheap and kitschy but I also think it’s really pretty actually. Also, as you can maybe tell, I’m still in pajamas; did not leave the house today.

+Technically I got strawberry daiquiri wine (it’s a cheap brand, Mom laughed when I showed it to her because it’s something they used to joke about in like high school or something), coconut creme liqueur rum (easily the strongest of the batch but still pleasantly sweet), and Bailey’s irish creme (definitely the most expensive but also probably the tastiest). I was just going to buy one but I don’t drink very often at all and I was curious to try something new and also I’m chronically indecisive so, here we are. I think I did pretty well picking sweet things actually though. Goodness gracious am I sleepy now though. I swear alcohol pretty much only ever seems to make me sleepy. Barely made it to midnight. Although I guess it’s almost one now. I have been rambling here for a while somehow. 

**link maaaybe available on request? I haven't fully decided whether I'm willing to own up to my blogspot on here just yet. I started it in 2011 so. I’ve been through a lot of phases with it you could say. Actually it was a school blog initially, but it’s spiralled out from that. 

Anyways here’s my mildly incoherent, slightly alcohol-soaked, new year’s post! I mostly wanted to show off my cute little boy cat’s reaction to our new year’s kiss. I love the way he looks at me, like, “I don’t know what’s going on but I love you <3″ is just written in his eyes. 

THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, 1.16 ‘There Goes The Neighborhood’