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A Holiday Story

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen. “TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point.  “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?” “We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.    Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages. Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

Who, me? Why, I’m Batman, of course!

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Endlessly torn between a Bruce who’s brutalism and savagery is just barely concealed by his genuine kindness and hard line rules and a Bruce who’s deep well of kindness and compassion and gentle bleeding heart is barely hidden by a thin front of aggressive assholery

Usually what flips it is how protective I want him to be over someone at the moment and honestly I think that’s pretty on character

since there is a lot of nostalgia for the avengers/mcu fandom circa 2012, here are some of the most commonly used tropes in fanfics and fanworks that we all just, for some reason, accepted (feel free to add more!):

they all live in the Avengers Tower and have their own custom rooms/floors designed by tony

clint in the vents

thor loves poptarts and coffee and all the food in general 

movie nights!

taco/pizza/sushi/etc dinners where one of them is assigned to wash the dishes afterwards

bruce does yoga and can cook all kinds of cuisines

natasha cleaning and sharpening her knives

steve struggling with the Internet

tony rarely sleeps, he’s always in his lab creating new suits and equipment for the team. coffee is his main source of sustenance until steve or bruce convince him to sleep and eat something pls

steve, in his downtime, draws draws draws. bonus points if he does it in the workshop while tony is working

tony and bruce Sciencing Out

steve is the momma hen, tony the dad (or vice-versa tbh)

nick fury/coulson/maria hill act as the Avengers’ publicists

clint/coulson (ok y’all i read some of those fics AND THEY WERE CUTE OK DONT @ ME) 

loki pops up every now and again pretty much as a glorified magical prankster

bruce loves tea and is always brewing that matcha 

clintasha

team teaches steve and thor about modern life and pop culture

natasha is the sage and constant source of wisdom 

thor always speaks IN! A! BOOMING! VOICE!

“what really happened in budapest” 

rhodey and pepper also make appearances. and in the latter part of that era, sam and bucky

sleepovers in the living room! where they sleep all huddled together!! :(((

So.

As you might imagine, my inboxes have been flooded over the last few days.  My fic represents, for a lot of people, either their start in Avengers fandom, or the safe place they retreat to when the angst and infighting and shipwars got too intense.  Which I get, and I appreciate, and I’m so glad if my old fics can give people a little happiness, even after all this time.

But there’s a thread I keep picking up in comments, that kind of worries me.

That things that happened in the MCU have taken the fandom away from them.  That the way things happened in Endgame have left people distraught, or angry, or just grieving.  And a lot of people have worried that they’ve ‘lost’ these characters.

And look.

Look.

I say this as a fandom old.  I say this as someone who reads comics.  Who came from the Trek fandom.  Who’s lived through bad movie adaptations and subpar ghostwriters and writing staff changes that have destroyed tv shows before they had a chance to really fly.

Don’t let canon take anything away from you.

You can be disappointed in a thing.  You can have your heart broken by a writer.  You can hope against hope that something that means the world to you will be ‘true,’ but don’t let a corporation take your heroes away from you.

Every one of us has to pick and choose what we keep and what we leave behind.  But every single version of Captain America has been fanfiction since Jack Kirby and Joe Simon put their pens down.  He’s owned by a corporation, and they can decide what’s on screen, who gets paid to write him, who gets the big platform.  They get to decide canon.

But canon is meaningless.

Canon is a way to win an argument in a bar or in a schoolyard.  It’s knowing publication dates and issue numbers and who wrote what arc and when the reboots happened.  It exists.

But when I think of Hawkeye, canon is only part of the picture.  I do think of Matt Fraction’s run on the comics.  I do think of those early years, sneaking my brother’s issues of West Coast Avengers.  I think of the weird, wild, off beat run of Secret Avengers.  But I also think of @dr-kara’s art of him.  I think of fanfic long since deleted, that introduced me to the fandom tropes of Clint living in the vents.  I think of the Tumblr posts, diving deep into the psychology of trauma, into his place as the most human and the most pointless of the original six, into a thousand stupid memes.  Caw-caw, motherfucker.  I think of the comments I got, telling me he was OOC.  I think of the Hawkeye cosplayers I’ve met, including the one guy who was in full gear at Star Wars Celebration in Florida.  I asked him why, and he shrugged and said, ‘Clint would’ve.’  I agree with him.  

I think of the first time a friend put a bow in my hands, and showed me how to shoot, wobbly and uneven, at a straw target all the way across the yard.

I think of the bruises that dotted my arms afterwards.

So canon can add new things.  Take bits away.  Make me think.  Make me hurt.

But nothing canon does will ever cause him to be different, not on any fundamental level.  Clint Barton started forming in my head when I was eight years old.  He belongs to Marvel, but the version I carry with me has a lot more sources than that.

Guys, this is a long way of saying: find your own version of the character.  Find what you need in a fandom.  And think of canon like that one fic that has a million kudos on AO3 and you just. Don’t.  Know.  Why.  That one fic, that everyone talks about, that you just can’t stand.

If canon doesn’t work for you, then discard it.  And move on.

But don’t let a corporation take a character you love away from you.

Don’t ever let that happen.

A love story where the two protagonists just refuse to fall for each other even though the plot keeps pushing for it.

Warmth

So, this was a random piece I wrote a long time ago, in the pretty severe lack of actual friendly Russia.

Summary: Sometimes, you can find friends in the strangest of people.

It was a rare occasion indeed that the anthropomorphic personification of Russia found time to leave the wastelands of wintertime Siberia in favour of the warm tropics. His favourite haunt was a small group of islands off the north coast of Madagascar, Seychelles (though this may have been as much because it annoyed England and France, overprotective bastards that they were, as the warm sun).

He could relax here, without America’s obnoxious suspicion, or his little sister’s disturbing obsession for him. Just himself, the sun and warm sand, and of course, his beloved Magical Metal Pipe of Pain (it never hurt to be too cautious).

This was how Michelle, also called Seychelles, erstwhile adopted maybe-daughter of France and/or England, found him – coat, scarf and even trousers discarded in favour of swim trunks (complete with a dubious palm tree print) and pale skin and hair gleaming like silver in the sunlight.