Latest Posts by lostinthewanderingblue - Page 10
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
shove it, sir
civil war mini comics: 1/?
So I've finally finished Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and not only did I enjoy the last three seasons way more than I thought I would, but I was not prepared for how delightfully unhinged the show became. Some of my favourite plot points included:
The female protagonist has a long-lost sister with superpowers who becomes the key to the entire crew returning to their original timeline through the Quantum Realm. Said long-lost sister is not introduced or even hinted at until the last five episodes of the entire show.
Half of one season takes place in a dystopian 2091 where the young twenty-something scientist couple not only meet their grandson who is the same age as them but said grandson returns to the present, becomes a series regular, and calls them "Nana" and "Bobo" in some Once Upon A Time worthy family tree shenanigans. Oh he also gets stuck in the 80s and claims he wrote Don't You (Forget About Me)
Phil Coulson dies in Season 5 because in order to stop an evil AI -turned-human-turned evil because she got dumped by a small Scottish man he has to become Ghostrider. The entire season builds up to this in a way that makes it feel very much like the actor is stepping away from the show and retiring the character, only for them to cast Clarke Gregg as an evil deity from another dimension in Season 6 and as a Life Model Decoy that may as well just be Phil Coulson in Season 7
Patton Oswalt plays multiple identical characters who all work for SHIELD. This is never fully explained.
“Mata Hari Calamari”
The final season is a decade-hopping gimmick with matching genre episodes that beat WandaVision to the punch
One character is a robot anthropologist who just wants to be best friends with the same small Scottish man. He has canonically been trained to perform in alien brothels and eventually becomes a bartender in the Crazy Canoe in 1955. He is one of the absolute best parts of the show.
One plot line follows said same Scottish Man and robot anthropologist as they get stranded in outer space with their only way home being to gamble in an alien casino while their friends attempt to rescue them but accidentally take LSD instead
"I found that bluffing was much easier if you kill someone and take their skin."
Area 51 is canonically a SHIELD base
a shower scene nobody ever asked for or wanted. bucky ur mascara’s runnin
i can’t talk shit about the pirates of the caribbean films as if elizabeth swann becoming pirate king didn’t hand my entire ass to me and make me the gay i am today
The best of Tumblr: Avengers
(Other photosets: The best puns of Tumblr, Inappropriate audition songs)
things i never expected to learn through a tedtalk but now am glad to know:
the founder of Sirius XM radio is a sapphic trans woman and is currently trying to preserve her wife’s consciousness in a digital file so her wife can be immortal in the body of a robot.
honest to god can't stop thinking about this song about jeff bezos by philip labes (link takes you to his spotify). it's such a good example of politically driven folk music.
Fury: So Steve, it’s great that you brought this random guy with you and Natasha to my ultra-secret bunker that even Natasha didn’t know about, how do you know him again?
Steve: Sam and I met in a park last week and then I visited him at his job one time and then Natasha and I went to his house when we were fugitives and then we all broke into Fort Worth together
Steve: I also put Sam down as my next of kin in case I get horribly injured or anything. Just so you know
Fury: …
Steve: I’d also like for Sam to be an Avenger
Sometimes I remember it's Canon that SHIELD isolated Steve alone in a cabin surrounded by a laser fence for at least two weeks at some point soon after he came out if the ice and I just want to *scream*
Honestly, I don't think at any point Steve and Tony were friends. Maybe some comradery between allies but never true friends. But it is kinda funny to imagine that Tony is so used to his friends, Pepper, Rhodie and Happy staring at him with dead inside eyes constantly annoyed with antics that he didn't understand that when it came to Steve that wasn't a friendship when he did it
I'm now imagining Steve rolling his eyes and giving him that Disappointed Rogers™ look and Stark thinking they're now friends because everyone in his life has the same reaction to his bullshit 😂
They were never friends and I don't care what the Russos tried to claim in CW and subsequent movies. "He's my friend" - "So was I". Uh... when? When he kept the truth about Ultron? When he kept discussing his experience during the invasion as if the rest of the team hadn't been there too and were probably traumatized by it as well? When he made jokes at Steve's expense even though he had just been out of the ice for a couple weeks? When he refused to listen to him in the airport in Germany? When he declined to inform him of the Accords even though he knew about them beforehand and knew Steve, as an enhanced, would be directly targeted by them? When he almost murdered Bucky because he wanted to hurt Steve?
And those are only a few, there are more. I don't see a friendship there.
A point could be made that this is true for the entire Avengers team. TWS was a breath of fresh air as it gave us Steve, Nat and Sam as a group of actual friends and that was carried out until the end (even though I'm still pissed that Sam is not allowed to say anything about Nat, he never mentions her, I don't like that). But the others? Besides Steve and Bucky, the other relationships are romances: Wanda and Vis, Clint and Laura, Nat and Bruce. Thor seemed somewhat closer to Steve than anyone else but they never quite explored that -- which is a huge shame because in the comics they're AMAZING.
With Steve and Stark we're told they were friends and EG tries to paint them even closer but that's utter bullshit. They were co-workers who tolerated each other only when they needed to. I mean, who was Steve hanging out with at the party in AoU? Sam and Thor.
I don’t really like to post negative stuff, but like I really struggle to understand why people actually like Tony Stark.
Even discounting a lot of his shadier stuff, like selling weapons and essentially war profiteering which happens pre and during Iron Man 1, he does some pretty shady stuff. One of the things that still leaves a sour taste in my mouth is the whole Peter Parker thing in Civil War.
I wasn’t a Tony Anti when Civil War came out. In fact I actually liked him at the time, but the scene where Tony locks the door when he’s trying to recruit a 15 year old Peter really made me feel anxious, mostly because it mirrored a not so pleasant memory for me.
Also the fact that Tony uses Peter’s anxiety about telling aunt May about his powers to blackmail him into fighting team cap in Germany, and then essentially abandons him afterwards? Yeah that’s not good.
Tony was never a father figure to Peter, he simply used the kid like a tool against Steve and threw him away once the fight was done, because that’s how Tony has learned to treat people, like objects to be thrown away once he has no more use for them.
imagine coming out of an ice-induced, 70 year coma then being hired by the us government to fight aliens and one of your coworkers was the most insufferable, entitled billionaire who constantly made jokes about your past without knowing anything about you and you weren’t allowed to knock him out bc it’d be an HR nightmare.. yea i’d start jumping out of planes without a parachute too
the thing about “angry chihuahua” pre-serum steve is that on a vacuum, I get why people like it? like it’s cute, smol steve being angry and sassy, it’s funny, not everything in fandom has to be 100% serious and angst-driven etc etc, i understand that
but at the same time… it bothers me so much because it’s just. so. condescending. like… “awww look at this poor disabled man thinking he can stand up to people, haha, so adorable, thank god he has bucky around to keep him alive!111!”.
(i don’t want to get too much into how this devalues the stucky dynamic bc i don’t even go here, but bucky! respected! pre-serum steve! immensely!! he didn’t see him as a reckless idiot who needed him to survive! it’s like people take the “the little guy from brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight” quote and only remember this part and forget the rest, the most important part, “I’M FOLLOWING HIM”! bucky knows pre-serum steve was way more of a hero than some dude dressed as the american flag shooting a fake gun at movies!!! that’s the POINT!!)
it’s just so… dismissive of steve’s bravery and cleverness. people take ONE scene in the first avenger where steve gets into a fight he’s clearly not going to win, ignoring that a) the framing of the moment when the guy stands up and steve’s face makes very clear that he KNOWS he’s in trouble, he has no delusions about ACTUALLY being able to win the fight; b) the dude is being an asshole and disrespecting others in the theater and steve! gets! him! to stop!!!! The guy LEAVES to beat him up in the alley, thus accomplishing the main point of Steve’s intervention, aka to let the grieving lady watch the tribute to the troops in peace.
and that’s like… THE ONLY TIME IN THE MOVIE where pre-serum steve does something like this. right on the first enlistment scene, some dude is clearly trying to tease him with the “makes you think twice about enlisting, huh?” talk, and steve just goes “nope” and IGNORES THE GUY AND DOESN’T TAKE THE BAIT. because it doesn’t matter! it’s just some dumbass who isn’t threatening anyone! steve doesn’t need to get into a fight because someone is underestimating him - if he did, he’d fight with everyone all the time, because guess what, as a disabled man in the 40s, steve is barely considered an actual man. there’s a LEGITIMATE scientific view in this time period that argues that people like him should be murdered at birth. he KNOWS how he’s perceived. he’s aware. when he’s talking to the doctor, he’s not brattish - he asks give me a chance and is there anything you can do?. his tone in the latter line specifically is TIRED, not defiant.
and then!! the One Scene apparently everyone who thinks pre-serum steve was a moron with a macho complex didn’t watch: the training montage! where that hodge guy deliberately fucks with the barbed wire just to get in steve’s way and STEVE! DOESN’T! REACT!!!!!!!! he just grits his teeth and tries to keep going and the officer has to be like “rogers take this rifle out of the mud”. there’s no indication that steve EVER tried to fight this guy in the movie, despite the fact that he’s constantly shown laughing/bullying steve during the training. why? because it’d be a pointless fight to pick. it’d be a fight picked out of nothing but pride and steve can’t afford to do that. he stands up for what’s right, not for everything and anything that pisses him off.
it frustrates me that people don’t seem to get this because it’s like… the very core of steve’s character. he’s not a wannabe bully. he’s kind and polite to others (meeting peggy, talking to dr. eskrine. eskrine isn’t just impressed by the “i don’t like bullies” moment, he’s clearly also very pleased by the fact steve doesn’t show prejudice against him for being german). the only moment where he adopts a “fight me” posture that gets him in actual trouble, it’s to protect and help others who can’t stand up for themselves. i get that in theory the idea of smol bean steve fighting everything and everyone might sound fun, but in reality, a person who craves violence and sees it as a prime way to achieve their goals is the opposite of who steve rogers is meant to be.
(and that’s not even getting into when people write POST-serum steve with this “fight me” attitude which is like… how… do you think… that’d be ok… how do you not see a difference between a ninety-pound disabled man and a literal supersoldier trying to intimidate people physically… which part of “a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion” you didn’t understand…)
so imo, this characterization weakens not only steve’s character, but his arc, and even the story of tfa as a whole? the serum works on steve because he’s already a noble, brave, good man. if he was an asshole who bites off people’s hand for looking at him wrong, none of this would make sense. by this logic, eskrine might have as well picked hodge.
The person who figured out the actor who played Pierce looked like Steve when he was younger and created the head canon that HYDRA hired him to be Bucky's handler for that reason has to answer for the pain they have caused
honestly steve deserved to be a little meaner in civil war
“steve you have to sign the accords”
“oh right i totally should sign my rights away to a government who i exposed to have been infiltrated by nazis for DECADES. i’m sure nothing bad will happen if i do that”
“i should let the government dictate my life when all i’ve ever done is save the world by going AGAINST the government. sounds like a great plan”
like t0ny stans love to say he was being horribly selfish and mean in civil war, which he… wasn’t, but i think he should have been
Fun Fact and History Lesson!
The 'no beta we die like [character]' originated from this damn photo that went viral on Tumblr in 2016 and changed Ao3 tags and fanfic vernacular forever.
Meaning: it's a tag used on fics that were not beta read (the author didn't get someone to read it for them before posting). Betas read fics to check for spelling, grammar, consistently, etc and often edit it.
*
Similarly, 'Dead dove' or 'dead dove do not eat' is from this scene in Arrested Development.
Meaning: if there's a warning of something really dark/bad, don't open/read it and expect something different. Or: 'mind the tags this is dark, don't read if you don't like it'.
