my friend @heavensblade-starbright got her lorebook today and was showing me around some of the Xaela lore until we came across…?
???
…. these kinda look like…
…?
…
Ah.
@drferox I saw this and thought “That looks… wrong… that would be some weird selective breeding maybe?” then I saw the bit of text in the picture and yeah ancestors probably didn’t look like that and these were bred for food and wool.
They still make VERY CUTE noises though (now I’m staring at the bone being part of the nose, which is off putting but at the same time I could try to explain as being used to dig the same way some tusks are??)
Let me preface by admitting I have no idea what these Opossum-Sheep are but they are cute.
They also look very wrong.
What’s going on with that thorax? The sternum is sitting in the middle of the body with all this undefined flesh below it. Is it fat? Can’t be all muscle, the sternum isn’t big enough for them to attach to. Is it an awkwardly placed fat pad? Why is it there? Are these things attacked from below or something? I suppose a large fat pad is useful to breed for if you’re trying to turn these livestock into candles but that body shape makes no sense.
Big abdomen might be fine though, if it’s eating a lot of fibrous plants. Suggests it only has few offspring at a time though.
That neck doesn’t let the head reach the ground. I don’t know what it uses that nose for, but probably not digging, or at least not when standing.
Those are awfully big horns for a very tiny head, with much of a sagital crest or anything to attach them to.
I made some very crude improvements to the skeletal structure, but this species is clearly artistic rather than anything else.
If Dick waited for Bruce to initiate these conversations, they would literally never discuss anything, seriously.
You know what kills me about this, though? It’s not that Bruce doesn’t care about Dick or what he’s doing with his life, IMO. If there’s one thing that’s been established over and over in Batman canon, it’s how much Dick means to Bruce and how much Bruce cares about him. But somehow, he trips over himself when it comes to expressing it, even with something as simple as saying “Hey, Dick, how are you?”
I also wonder if, to some degree, Bruce saw (sees?) Dick’s new life as something he doesn’t have the right to get involved in, even by asking about it. Like he says here: “I assumed you wanted to get out of my shadow, make a name for yourself. You’ve done that. Created a life. Fought your own fights… I didn’t have the right to call you back.” I wonder if in Bruce’s mind, that mentality went so far that he thought he needed to distance himself completely from Dick’s new life. Even though he was the one who created the separation. Even though Dick was clearly trying to reach out and bridge the gap. I think in Bruce’s mind, that rift had been created and he just didn’t know how to close it. So instead he reacted by lashing out at Dick, and pushing him away, and generally acting like he didn’t care. And acting like the whole thing was Dick’s fault even though, of course, he was the one who fired Dick in the first place. (Not that that’s my preferred canon, personally, but it’s crucial to understanding these scenes.)
But what just kills me about all of this is that Bruce just can’t see, or doesn’t care, the way this sounds to Dick. Like, when he’s all “Uh… well…” when Dick asks if Bruce has any interest in what he’s been doing since he left, you can just see Dick hearing that as “Uh, well, actually I’m not particularly interested, no. I’ve replaced you with a newer, sassier model, and I honestly don’t care terribly much about you or what you’ve been doing with your life anymore.“ (Bear in mind, this confrontation is what happens right after Dick finds out Bruce replaced him with Jason behind his back.)
And Dick could so easily leave it at that. Honestly, in his place, I think I’d be tempted to just say “Well, okay, screw you. If you can’t be bothered to act like you give a damn about my life, you don’t have to be part of it.” It’s certainly the logical counterpoint to how Bruce is acting.
But Dick doesn’t. Because that’s not who Dick is. And it doesn’t matter how hard Bruce tries to shut him out, it doesn’t even matter if some part of Dick himself believes it’s a wasted effort and Bruce just doesn’t care, he’s still going to try. He’s still going to reach out and include Bruce in his life, and if Bruce can’t be bothered to open his damn mouth to so much as force out some pleasantries, then Dick’s just going to do the talking for both of them. Like it or not.
It’s just, ughhhh. Dick. My darling boy. These are the moments that make me just want to fling my arms around him and hug him for about an hour, because it’s not a wasted effort, and Bruce does care, but even when Dick can’t see that, he’s trying anyway. And he shouldn’t have to try nearly that hard, and a person with a lesser capacity for love would have given up on Bruce long ago, but Dick just doesn’t have that self-protective instinct, for better or worse. And so he’ll just keep putting himself out there, and he’ll keep on trying to get through to Bruce, even when it’s like talking to a stone wall.
I just. How can you not love this boy?!
They CAN talk, they just pretty much stopped for a while after they retconned Jason 1.0 (in whose timeline Dick simply matured into Nightwing because he realised he couldn’t be Robin, and handed over the name and costume to Jason,
while Bruce nearly burst with paternal pride in the background)
th into Jason 2.0 (which had all the angst with Bruce firing Dick and them not talking for months at a time)
This next sequence is also from the Jason 1.0 timeline, when Jason was (for complicated reasons, adopted by someone else for a while)
One reason I never particularly warmed to the Jason 2,0 timeline was how much mature conversation between Dick and Bruce it just wiped away to be replaced with emotionally constipated
Bruce
and an emotionally needy Dick.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Turning the relationship of Dick and Bruce from a natural progression and maturation to a fight and falling out was a giant mistake.
(Though really, Circus Jason should have kept the costume with the pants)
This is so my gaming table. Just to name on possible character combination, we can end up with a black dragom who hoards driftwood, the world’s must unfortunate lich, an alien fungus with a raygun and a vampire named Steve.
Very possible, and probably even likely. Very few “herbivorous” animals today DON’T eat some meat (beyond carrion, even – deer will kill and eat fish and birds!), and there’s no reason to think dinosaurs were any exception.
Ok most of you won’t care about this but I need to vent
I was super cheesed off when Power of the Primes released 3/5 of an all female combiner team composed of characters who have never gotten proper toys outside of, like, Transformers Convention Exclusives. We got Moonracer and Elita One and FireNovastorm, which was awesome, those characters deserve to get their due. And they could combine into one big robot, which is also awesome…except the combining system they use needs five robots, one for each limb and a big one for the torso. And they were a trio, which means they would need to borrow two other guys. And it’s not like there aren’t other female autobots to use – Moonracer, Elita One, and Firestorm were actually part of a group called the Female Autobots (because Transformers has never really been good at equal representation until recently, and even now the record is spotty) with THREE other characters, Chromia, Lancer, and Greenlight. Of them, Lancer and Greenlight also lack proper toys (outside of, again, convention exclusives).
Anyway, the point of this is that today Hasbro revealed a new retailer exclusive toy of Greenlight that’s compatible with the previous trio. It’ll be a bit hard to track down since only one retailer will sell it, but that retailer will probably be Amazon or Wallgreens (because Toys R Us is dead) so it won’t be TOO hard to get.
And part of me is like, “Oh fuck yeah, they’re completing the team!” while another part of me is like, “What if they stop here and you end up with 4/5 of a combiner, wouldn’t that be EVEN MORE ANNOYING than when they stopped at three?”
Also so far three of the four figures share almost the exact same mold (different heads and hands but other than that the exact same body) which kinda sucks, but look female transformers toys are still a fucking rarity so we take what we can get.
Dazlestrike is kinda underwhelming compared to the boxart colors.
Ok most of you won’t care about this but I need to vent
I was super cheesed off when Power of the Primes released 3/5 of an all female combiner team composed of characters who have never gotten proper toys outside of, like, Transformers Convention Exclusives. We got Moonracer and Elita One and FireNovastorm, which was awesome, those characters deserve to get their due. And they could combine into one big robot, which is also awesome…except the combining system they use needs five robots, one for each limb and a big one for the torso. And they were a trio, which means they would need to borrow two other guys. And it’s not like there aren’t other female autobots to use – Moonracer, Elita One, and Firestorm were actually part of a group called the Female Autobots (because Transformers has never really been good at equal representation until recently, and even now the record is spotty) with THREE other characters, Chromia, Lancer, and Greenlight. Of them, Lancer and Greenlight also lack proper toys (outside of, again, convention exclusives).
Anyway, the point of this is that today Hasbro revealed a new retailer exclusive toy of Greenlight that’s compatible with the previous trio. It’ll be a bit hard to track down since only one retailer will sell it, but that retailer will probably be Amazon or Wallgreens (because Toys R Us is dead) so it won’t be TOO hard to get.
And part of me is like, “Oh fuck yeah, they’re completing the team!” while another part of me is like, “What if they stop here and you end up with 4/5 of a combiner, wouldn’t that be EVEN MORE ANNOYING than when they stopped at three?”
Also so far three of the four figures share almost the exact same mold (different heads and hands but other than that the exact same body) which kinda sucks, but look female transformers toys are still a fucking rarity so we take what we can get.
Monsters and Stuff 
