Wanda 🥺✨💕❤️🥹❤️🥰💕

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2

A joint review...

It’s fair to say that we'd both had quite exhausting days, for various reasons, and so the Shared Brain had pretty much powered down by the time 8pm rolled around. Turns out though that exhaustion increases the hive mind-like thoughts because the notes we made (yes we make notes, we take this very seriously) are almost exactly alike. Make of that what you will.

A quick note. @becksxoxo was browsing the internal jobs at her work, and there is a Film Lecturer role going, to which we thought "well that's the job for us" and @cassandrafey's housemate scoffed at us. SCOFFED. She doesn't seem to think we can be serious film people. We have qualifications, I'd like to add, in film studies, so out of spite we will be including some serious notes on the mise en scene within the film - an analysis which this light hearted film does not deserve! More on that later.

We are concerned that the Marvel writer's have some parenting issues that they've been trying to work on, because once again Marvel based a whole plot and character development around daddy issues. Has anyone check on them recently? For once @becksxoxo remembered more about this film than @cassandrafey and so the moment Kurt Russell showed his stupid face on screen she was enraged. Him and his bloody son, ruining everything. Cass’ first thought was if you could choose to look like anything why would you give yourself a bouffant? A name like Ego and hair like that, red flags all round. Our next glimpse of him is as alarming Space Santa, riding on the back of his egg ship. His relationship with Peter during this film is infuriating, because it just exacerbated Peter's obnoxiousness. And we know he is the villain, so he's doing his job well, but UGH it made us cross. Stupid Men.

Here are some of the moments that made us hate him:

He has a premade museum of his life in the entry way to his house. Hated it.

He and Peter played the most pathetic game of catch we've ever seen. If you are to play any throwing game with your Father it should be kirby, or with a boomerang they had crafted themselves from scratch. Hated it.

He was really hung up on that one song, Brandy, and like it’s good but would you say it was the best song you’ve ever heard? It’s not exactly DUI by Green Day, is it?

He quite easily persuaded Peter that they were gifts to this universe, better than any one, especially disposable women, and Peter quite happily went along with it. Hated it.

And I suppose he killed all his other kids, that was a bit shit too.

As we enter Ego’s planet we got strong Wizard of Oz in the hey day of the Emerald City vibes - again, a clear warning sign this is perhaps not the utopia it seems. We’re pretty sure that wizard was a good for nothing piece of work.

We would like to appreciate here the lovely use of mise-en-scene in the set dressing, which is subtly working behind the scenes to reinforce the total supremacy and power of Ego. The mosaic in the celestial palace is beautiful, but look closer and you will see that the patterns are again an egotistical representation of the man himself. If Ego is a giant celestial brain and he has created all of this, then there is no doubt that it is created in his image. The floor patterns branch out like the neural pathways of the brain, reminding us that in this place we are in his control and subjected to his whims. The pattern also holds a suggestion of tree branches, a nod perhaps to the mythology of the other Gods that we are familiar with in the MCU. If this is the home planet for Ego then this is where the germination of his creation took place, and the pattern seems to reflect not just his brain but the roots of his own Yggdrasil - roots he is using to hold firm the source of his power whilst he strives to connect the rest of the galaxy under his ridiculous self involved rule. There are also a lot of concentric circles used in the design of the garden which are suggestive of the ripple effect of creation itself, Ego being (in his mind) the starting point from which he will spread through space and time, evolving and populating all other planets. Sheesh, what a horrifying thought!

This creation element is reflected all through the rest of the elaborate decor of the palace. Branching cell-like light fixtures illuminate the room where Ego begins his sales pitch/charm offensive to Peter, the lights around him looking like little evolutionary explosions. Nothing is wasted in the design of this set, it compliments the powerful, show boating, self centred pomposity of the character with quiet aplomb. I (Cass) would love to walk around it and explore further treasures but also I do find it almost clinically creepy so I don’t want to. Bravo set designers.

There you go, we can do serious film analysis when we want to, rather than just getting caught in the feelings. We are multifaceted, complex young women. Suck it!

Back to our more usual feelings based brand of reviewing, and we did see some good parenting, of sorts, from the Guardians with Groot. They banded together, and though there was still a lot of peril, they seemed to do a better job than most parents in Marvel.

Then we have Yondu. A history of dubious parenting with Quill, but made up for it at the end.

"He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn't your daddy."

Queue @becksxoxo crying for the rest of the film. *wailing intensifies*

Space Pirates.

This was a film of two halves, after they stupidly split up on Endor (did you spot the Ewoks?) and we both enjoyed Rocket, Yondu and the Ravagers bits better. We love space pirates, and we don't care who knows it. We loved that Rocket had clearly had a great time setting all those boobytraps. The groups of Ravagers soaring into the air, over the tree tops, was beautiful. It was funny until it wasn't and the mutiny broke our hearts. The space version of walking the plank was horrible, and when the camera panned out to show how many of them had met that fate it was very distressing.

By contrast to Ego’s big gold mind palace, the Ravages ship puts Cass in mind of a staple gun. Don’t know what this means, but I do like stationery so good for them.

Taser face is a stupid name, and Rocket was right to say so.

The whole scene of Rocket and Yondu being held prisoner and Groot bringing them things was delightful. A lot of this film is played for laughs, and it can be a difficult thing to get the tone just right, but this was perfect. The eye, the toe, and the underpants (a sequel Cass is penning to the Narnia novels). Kraglin then coming good was also well done, it could have been corny but it was executed wonderfully. (Becks has a soft spot for Sean Gunn so is terribly biased.)

"I didn't mean to do a mutiny...they killed all my friends."

Then Rocket has his priorities straight by getting on that escape playlist, no point breaking out and killing everyone if there isn't some banging tunes on in the background. And Yondu does do a pretty good job of killing EVERYONE. It was a massacre and you know we love to see it. Again one of the best scenes in the film, the Ravagers being tossed about and dying. Chef's kiss. It just looked so good.

@becksxoxo is a simple woman with simple wants and the funny faces of the gang as they went through the jump points was perfect. See the Dark World, this is exciting portal action!

And at the same time Peter, Gamora, Drax and Mantis were up to some stuff...

Relationship building features heavily in the film. Which is a good thing, because it does let you care more about the characters. We see this as they are paired off within scenes.

Drax and Mantis - we love this pair of oddballs and their developing relationship throughout the film. Mantis is creepy cute and Drax is able to let go of a lot of the rage from the previous film with her. Drax really opened up more, and we especially enjoyed hearing him talk about his family and his wife, that he loved her because she may as well have been dead. Who knew he'd turn out to be the most romantic out of the lot of them.

Gamora and Nebula - we get an insight into another piece of shit parenting as we learn more about Gamora and Nebula's backstory. They were both scared little kids trying to survive, and learning to be sisters is hard. It’s good to see them going from actively trying to kill one another to saving each other, although the sheer erratic madness that consumed Nebula as she drove at Gamora, all guns blazing, was also pretty cool. We did notice what a terrible liar Nebula is, and we recommend that she takes some classes along side Sam Wilson (we all saw how shit he was undercover, you can’t tell us he wouldn’t benefit) with Loki teaching. @cassandrafey may also be signing up, for reasons.

Gamora and Peter - we get that there is some unspoken thing, but Gamora does right calling Peter out on his bullshit. She does this repeatedly and we enjoy seeing it. They go through a lot, and you can't help who you love, but we do think she could do a lot better. Peter's selfishness really shows in this interactions with Gamora. He hasn't grown properly, he doesn't get his way and he has a right paddy about it, which is worsened by his new found father and powers, all of which have very much gone to his head. Though 240 miles apart we both scribbled down SELFISH DICKHEAD, and we're not wrong. The problem is that he flies off the handle without thinking, and doesn't learn that this causes more problems than it solves. This will come to bite them all again in Infinity War. We will give him points though for eventually snapping out of his temporary megalomania, with a wonderfully trippy Jaws shot that our film tutors would have been proud of. Had we been watching this in class we would have had to have rewound and repeated at least three times for full satisfaction.

Rocket and Yondu - the scene on the ship with Yondu calling out Rocket on his actions, because they are also Yondu's actions, is both heart breaking and heart warming in equal measure. The Shared Brain was moved.

Drax and Groot - Groot going from actively messing with Drax at the start to wanting to fall asleep in his arms at the end was very cute. Awww.

Peter and Rocket - this pair butt heads right from the off in this film, and there are points when it feels unfixable, but at the end, during the funeral their little passing comments show the true bond.

Rocket: He didn't chase them away

Peter: No

Rocket: Even though he yelled at them. And was always mean. And he stole batteries he didn't need.

Peter: Well of course not.

The Gold People

We enjoyed the Sovereign's giant game arcade they used to fly their fighter ships. Very clever.

We also felt that the High Priestess felt like the Snow Queen if she was played by Paris Hilton, especially as she was teetering along the snow.

We'd both forgotten about Adam in one of the MANY end credit scenes, and presume we will see him again in Guardians 3, or maybe Marvel have forgotten about him too.

Watching Rocket try and explain how to set the bomb with Groot is another iconic scene in the film. Its a lot of fun, and everyone loves a death button. Also it gives heavy Din trying to get Grogu to help fix those wires vibes, which some of us like to hark back to on a regular basis (it’s @becksxoxo, she likes to hark back to it at every chance she can gets, oooooooh the Mandalorian). Although why these space dads keep trying to get children to fix things is beyond us, kids are shit workers and we're surprised the Victorians ever got anything finished.

@cassandrafey: That's what were going for is it? Not that child labour is wrong?

@becksxoxo: Yeh its wrong, cause they're shit at it.

And finally the funeral scene. @becksxoxo was sobbing hysterically from here on in. It’s just very moving. We appreciated that he got to go out with all his precious things, and that the Ravagers all came to pay their respects. It was beautiful, all the colours from the flames and the fireworks, they were like floating Quality Streets. The closure it brought to the rest of them was comforting, and Kraglin screaming with joy with they arrived was just really sweet.

We don't want to end on a sad note so here we will include our most favourite line in the whole film, nay our most favourite line in the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe:

I'm Mary Poppins y'all.

Zardu Hasselfrau

And so that's it. A three star film with problematic characters we will skim over and CGI ones we will forever love.

Next week we'll be back in force with all our feelings as we return to the Avengers in Age of Ultron. Aren't you glad?

Love cass and becks

“Who are you?” The scene that defines Chadwick Boseman’s legacy

Yesterday, the world lost a bright and promising, burgeoning talent in Chadwick Boseman.

I had wondered privately for a while if something was wrong with him, as others had as well online, as he appeared increasingly sicker with each interview he gave over the last two years. I thought maybe I had been looking too much into it, not wanting to jump to conclusions about who he was but now gravely we all know why.

The much too young star of films such as “42,” “Marshall,” and of course, “Black Panther” had been fighting a largely private battle with colon cancer for four years.

It was devastating hearing this news yesterday, the man who undeniably left behind a legacy of playing prominent black heroes, both historical and fictional, passed away just as he was starting to truly hit it big. When you begin to realize the man was dealing with cancer as he performed physically demanding roles in the MCU you begin to see the character and determination of a man unwilling to quit in the face of true adversity.

But he clearly wasn’t just doing it for himself when he continued making and promoting NINE more movies despite his diagnosis, afterall no one would’ve blamed the guy for taking it easy these past four years. He’s had many scenes that define his legacy over his all too short career but I feel it can really be summed up in one particular moment from by far his most famous film; “Black Panther.”

Those who know me or have read my work know that I have a fairly cynical relationship with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While I would not say most of them are “bad” per se, I would say a ton of them are largely interchangeable action comedies with pretty straightforward messages about good vs evil for general audiences. They are largely popcorn escapism and though there is nothing technically wrong with that, I was starved for an MCU film that was sincere about its story finally and had something real to say.

Enter “Black Panther” in early 2018.

“Black Panther” was everything I had long been waiting for in the MCU; a film with a real sense of vision and theme, a killer soundtrack, great supporting characters, a complicated and nuanced villain, and a story that didn’t feel the need to add a joke after every single scene like more typical MCU movies. The tip of that spear of course was Chadwick, who had already proved to be a great Black Panther in one of the few other sincere Marvel flicks “Civil War.” His natural charisma, physicality, and dramatic presence in this role made him a huge standout in frankly the best ensemble cast of any superhero movie ever.

The scene that truly sums up not just the mark “Black Panther” left on Hollywood but Chadwick’s own legacy comes at the very end though (the first of three, of course. It’s an MCU movie, afterall).

T’Challa has defeated his usurper cousin Erik Killmonger, his rule restored in Wakanda but clearly a changed man from the story’s beginning as he reckons with the complicated legacy of his father. He travels to Oakland, the birthplace of Killmonger, with his sister Shuri who he explains the crime committed by their father in this place and how it set off the events of the story. He turns to Shuri, tells her that he has decided to help this afflicted community by creating a Wakandan outreach center for the youth to give them a new hope in life. As he says this he decloaks their ship nearby, surprising the youth already in the area who are immediately in awe of it. One of the kids turns to T’Challa, smiling, a sense of inspiration and intrigue brewing inside, and asks “Who are you?” to which the young King simply smiles, then the credits roll.

It’s a simple scene but it truly speaks to the impact left behind by Chadwick and the importance of representation. 

“Black Panther” is hardly the first starring vehicle for a black man, it’s not even the first black super hero movie but what it made it different is it was the first blockbuster to truly lean unapologetically into its African identity to focus on the inspiration of a story centered around that culture. It showed Hollywood that an action blockbuster not just centered on a black star but centered on African culture had vast widespread appeal.

White kids will never have a shortage of white superheroes to grow up with on the big screen; a diverse palette of Supermans, Spider-mans, Captain Americas, and shit we’re even getting our sixth new Batman actor since 1989 soon. But Chadwick gave black kids their first real Superman of their own. 

In the years since this came out, I have seen the influence, at times, firsthand among the youth. I work part-time as a kids martial arts instructor and each Halloween party we’ve held I’ve seen a few more T’Challas among the costumes represented. When I ask kids, black, white, or Asian, what their favorite superhero is, it always warms my heart to see a kid light up when they say “BLACK PANTHER!”

(Seriously, cute AF)

This goes beyond just my anecdotal observations of course; the film grossed a billion dollars, and there are countless videos online of kids yelling “Wakanda forever!” at the top of their lungs while rocking a Black Panther suit or reciting one of the movie’s memorable lines. It’s beautiful because it speaks to that last scene’s key message; inspiration.

Growing up myself, as a half Asian American, there weren’t a ton of role models who looked like me to take inspiration from. I didn’t really understand how much this could affect me until I finally did start seeing people like myself occupy positions of influence. I didn’t start caring for baseball until I saw a slugger named Hideki Matsui smash a couple dingers in a Yankees’ uniform in the early 2000s. I didn’t care much for martial arts, outside my very early youth, until I witnessed a half Japanese Brazilian named Lyoto Machida KO Thiago Silva at UFC 94 in 2009. I didn’t care much for soccer until a striker named Keisuke Honda played out of his mind in the early rounds of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Sometimes you gotta see something happen in order to believe and be inspired by it and it’s easier to visualize it when you see someone who looks like you do it. That’s what representation means and why it’s important.

It’s easy for white America to dismiss the need for representation in media when theirs is so saturated in the culture everyday. Cries of “wHaT aBoUt wHiTe HiStORy mOnTH?!” delivered unironically while their history is proudly given front seat consideration in all forms of media, film, and influence every day. This is why it drives me so crazy when a white person tells me “representation isn’t important” because apparently, they “don’t need it.”

Well motherfucker, of course you don’t need it. You fucking got yours already!

(What every non-white person wants to say when confronted with this tired, out of touch argument...)

“Black Panther” delivered a superhero that not only black children could be proud of and love but someone they could draw inspiration from. Kids are going to want to become film directors cause of this movie, actors, stuntmen, martial artists, scientists, engineers, and so many other different things that the world of Wakanda proudly showcases and it’s all thanks to Chadwick’s leading man performance that made it possible.

Some jokes I’ve heard frequently on the internet is that Chadwick was on somewhat of a quest to play every major black role in story-telling history, what with performances as Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, and of course Black Panther. But I think his 2018 speech at his Alma Mater of Howard really explains why he kept looking to play these major positive black roles.

(I encourage you to listen to the whole thing but the part that’s important here begins at 21:55)

Hollywood likes to pigeon hole certain demographics of people (aka non-white) to play stereotypical roles forever until they are proven to be lucrative in different ways (Qualified Immunity of film-making if you will…). Black people largely could mostly play thugs and drug dealers, Latinx can only be gang bosses and poor servants and gardeners, Asians are either kung fu masters or some other offensive perpetual foreigner. And in worst cases no role at all, instead whitewashed for general audiences (aka white folk). 

Chadwick took a stand that the color of his skin did not define who Hollywood narrowly believed he could perform as and set out to play characters and people who could inspire a new generation of African Americans and show the rest of the country that they were more than a stereotype.

When that young kid in that final scene asks, “Who are you?” and T’Challa smiles its because he knows he’s already changing hearts and minds for the future, just as Chadwick did playing this truly inspirational role.

“Black Panther” is not a perfect movie. I could discuss the ways it could’ve been better and even, less problematic in parts on a different day, but the legacy it leaves behind is one that’s undeniably positive and Chadwick was able to make that a reality. Perhaps he understood that if the world knew his diagnosis it would blunt the impact of “Black Panther’s” release, that if little kids and African Americans alike knew their superhero was already dying it would mar the film’s positivity and influence. I can’t speak for the dead obviously, and in no way am I saying one should just push through a cancer diagnosis and keep it secret, but I can see Chadwick understanding what it would mean for the audience if they just believed for as long as possible that they would have their king of Wakanda forever.

As Robert Downey Jr. said on social media last night “He leveled the playing field while fighting for his life.”

Though I will never know him personally, by most measures Chadwick seemed to be exactly the kind of hero he showed up to be on the big screen and his legacy will ultimately be that of one who looked to inspire others, particularly the next generation until his final breath. If that doesn’t make him a hero, I don’t know what does.

Rest in power, King. Wakanda Forever…

(Via BossLogic)

I am now waiting for fics in which Wanda isn’t seen as a kid during Civil War and before that, and is finally treated as a person who did bad shit and has to own them to properly move on?

(Warning: This is a personal rant post).

Like literally, you don’t even know how angry an infantilization of Wanda makes me, not only because it was often used as an argument against Tony, because “he killed her parents, and he is evil, and she is just a kid” (lol, check Kosovo War NATO bombing and see who killed her parents), but because she is a woman and a hero and infantilising her like that is sexist (I am calling you out, Steve and everybody who repeated this after you seriously, without realizing that you, Tony and Clint are not good judges of the age of young women) and diminishes her character to helpless little child which needs rescuing, which is not what she was in Age of Ultron as a part of Nazi organization and definitely not what she was after she left them to become a proper hero (screw you MCU and your off-screen redemptions which don’t fucking count, you assholes, you should give Wanda a movie or TV series before that, but the only thing you can do, apparently, is to define her through men she interacts with, either those who treat her like a kid (Steve), those whom she hates (Tony) or her love interest (Vision), and I don’t say it to hate on WandaVision, because I love the show).

Talking about “mistakes of youth” is fine. You can make “youth mistakes” either when you’re a minor, 18 year old or when you are in your early or late twienties, BUT talking about those mistakes isn’t “she is just a kid, and she shouldn’t have to worry about that, because her age makes her innocent", which Steve spouts.

I all this time operated on the assumption that she was an adult in AoU and that indeed she made mistakes, she was radicalized and joined a Nazi organization, and it was a horrible thing to do, but she isn’t a lost cause and if only MCU gave her proper screen time to show in AoU that she truly regrets what she did to people who weren’t Sokovians (and I highlight it, because nationalism is usually “I care only about my people and nobody else”), she would have so much better start as a superhero, but ofc nobody did that, because Marvel doesn’t care about giving proper representation to women if it doesn’t make them cash, so they just made her see a total destruction of humanity, make a normal decision, which any sane person in her place would make: to leave the genocidal robot behind and join the Avengers, so then she could spout bullshit about person whom she didn’t truly know and fueled the bias against that person, because her role in the movie didn’t actually change, and then make her force whole population to evacuate to make her more sympathetic (I don’t think wide-area mind fuck can do that, but MCU believes this) to the audience (even though those were Sokovians, so ofc she cared about them, if they truly wanted to make her sympathetic she should have helped someone who isn’t her kin, like I dunno, people in Johannesburg?) and then kill her brother, make her go nuts at Ultron and kill him for that (which is completely valid reaction to trauma, as much as Tony’s reaction in the bunker was, because they are both similar and MCU hates them) to then top it with some off-screen redemption, because apparently she didn’t deserve her own movie as a new Avenger. Black Widow treatment much?

I am talking to you Team Cap part of internet.

Thoughts on Endgame

I need to rant about it because I'm emotional. If you want to know what my opinions are, they'll be under the cut to avoid spoilers.

First of all, that was a top tier marvel movie. It didn't do everything right, but it was beautifully made and did many things amazingly.

I'm SAD, but I honestly think I'm overall satisfied with the way things wrapped up for the characters. Honestly the series is so massive that I hardly think there is a good way of slowly removing the original cast. Tony's and Nat's deaths, Steve growing old with Peggy, Clint returning to his family to (probably) retire like he had wanted to before, Bruce making peace with the Hulk, and Thor coming to terms with being himself rather than being his status were bittersweet and beautiful ways to end/steer their arcs

But speaking of Nat's death- Nebula REALLY just let her and Clint go find the soul stone without telling them of the cost??? Imo she should have been the one to sacrifice herself because it would have solidified her redemption arc in the MCU. She worked so hard to help Thanos, and I feel like this would have been a retribution to her past mistakes. It would have been a sacrifice of love from her for her found family and the connections she'd made, so it should still meet the criteria to get the stone. Instead, she sent those two off knowing one of them wouldn't come back and prioritizing herself as she usually does, and then the movie still had the audacity to state over and over again that she had changed.

I understand that this was also done for logistics because Nebula and Rhodes needed to find Quill. But she could have just given them her intel honestly. Or at least given them a heads up so that way Clint or Nat could have been caught less off guard at the fact that one of them would have to die

Also speaking of Nebula, there is no real reason why her android side should interfered at all. I get that her tech records and archives the memories, but the Nebula from the future was living things that hadn't happened for her 2014 version yet. It was no different from Steve fighting himself. If her head started splitting from new memories, so should have everyone else's. Robotics are usually less durable than an actual brain (unless trauma happens), so her unique "tethering" made no sense. It was used as a major plot point to bring Thanos back and EVERYTHING, but it shouldn't have happened.

Endgame really said FUCK Steve and Bucky's friendship

Like seriously. They didn't interact at all until that last bit, and only then it was for 2 seconds.

I understand Bucky came back in the middle of a battle scene, but if Tony and Peter could have a moment, there is absolutely no reason that Steve and Bucky couldn't either

Also a little confused that Steve literally fought the whole UN for Bucky, was devastated when he lost him to Thanos, but then gave zero shits that he was back? Because (and don't get me wrong, I loved the scene with Steve and Sam at the end) when Steve came back, he really hadn't seen Bucky in what was about 50 years (really around 55 if you count the time skip since the snap). And he chose to talk to Sam and not acknowledge Bucky at all. Are you REALLY with him til the end of the line??

Also I'm happy for Steve and Peggy, I really am, I just think that this continued love story is kind of cruel (and maybe I’m biased because I ship stucky, but still)

For the whole 8 years since Steve had gotten out of the ice, MCU wouldn’t let him move on from Peggy. I get that he lost the love of his life from the 70 year sleep and those feelings don’t go away right off the bat. But he woke up when Peggy was elderly, had dementia, and lived to see her pass away. At that point, time travel wasn’t even an option. But for 8 years, MCU tortured him and never allowed him to accept that he and Peggy couldn’t work out. They made him fight for PEGGY in Endgame even when time travel hadn’t been an option yet. He SHOULD have been fighting for Bucky, his oldest and closest friend who he started a CIVIL WAR for and who he watched disappear to dust in front of his eyes. I think this is a fair point regardless of whether you ship them or see them as friends. Steve was made to be hung up on Peggy for YEARS, and that’s not healthy at all. (Especially since they gave him the completely unnecessary romance with Sharon too??)

Also, if he returned to the exact moment when the infinity stones were taken, he would have been in the 1970′s. Endgame portrayed Peggy as the same age as she was in The First Avenger (even though Howard Stark had aged properly?). She wouldn’t have been in her later 20′s (I think) anymore. She would have been in her 50′s. Which would mean that she should have already been married at that point too since Steve “saved the man that went on to be her husband” as she had said in The Winter Soldier

In staying with Peggy, Steve created a time paradox and an alternate timeline for her since that footage from the museum is still a part of HIS past. And visiting Peggy in the hospital when she’s older and had already married someone else is still a part of HIS past. That’s completely not addressed at all.

It also means that he would have had to be in hiding for the rest of his life basically? Because his younger self emerged from the ice in 2011, so how in the hell is he going to explain that he hadn’t actually disappeared? Like if neighbors from his suburban white picket fence life with Peggy recognized him as Captain America, then he resurfaces 40 years later?? Do you really think 2011 Steve isn’t going to be confused as hell and come after his future self to kick his ass??? Also do you really think SHIELD wouldn’t have contacted or forced him to team up (especially in its beginnings when Peggy was founding it) in 1970′s and that he really would have been able to live a happy, normal life??

In summary, Endgame really said FUCK Steve and Bucky’s friendship. They missed the chance to 1) have Steve move on and be happy in his current situation and/or 2) to have bisexual representation in order to really reinforce h e t e r o n o r m a t i v i t y

Speaking of heteronormativity, that very advertised gay character was really something :)))) 

Overall, Endgame was really good, I just have some qualms with it

Overall, I think Avengers: Endgame was... about as good as we were going to get, given who was involved in making the film and what had already been established (or had failed to be established) in previous films. It was for sure massively better than Age of Ultron and a noticeable improvement over Infinity War. But there were still plenty of flaws (including things they easily could have fixed) and a few things that outright frustrated the hell out of me. 

My thoughts on Endgame follow under the cut. There will obviously be spoilers. This is for @pantsvaporation, but anybody else is welcome to read/comment/etc. as well.

I was pleasantly surprised that there was a minimum of obvious “actors swinging at CG enemies that hadn’t even slightly been described to them.” And while there were definitely places the film could have been tightened up, I had been expecting the three hours to feel noticeably slack, whereas the plot never seemed to me to drag at all. In retrospect, maybe I should have been less surprised by that, given that it was directed by Russos, who were also responsible for CA:TWS, which remains the most perfectly paced action movie I’ve ever seen.

Given the length of the film, however, I am fucking furious that the only (and MCU first-ever) LGBT “representation” we got was one of the Russos as a nameless extra in Steve’s support group who was framed as a mlm through the pronouns of who he was on a date with. 181 fucking minutes, and you couldn’t find room for less than 60 seconds to show us Valkyrie with a girlfriend? Carole Danvers got that amazing (as my girlfriend often describes my current look) ‘90s dyke aesthetic after the time skip, but she couldn’t have a wife? And, of course, anybody and everybody else was given a Big Case of the Not Gays, including and especially the male characters people have enthusiastically been shipping with each other due to the historical nigh-complete dearth of women in the MCU films (Tony, Steve, Sam, Bucky... and I will have more to say about Steve).

I did cry a few times, especially towards the end, which I honestly hadn’t expected to. But it all felt very... emotionally manipulative? For example, I didn’t cry at Tony dying, per se. I did cry at Pepper reacting to his death, his daughter, Happy, etc. It felt like they sort of realized that by this point Tony had become extremely unsympathetic and that they’d probably overly telegraphed that he was going to die, so they needed to make us sad about it by ensuring we were thinking about how other characters would feel about his death, versus how we ourselves felt about it.

And we sure did get a whoooooooooole lotta time to show the audience how sad everyone felt about Tony to ensure we did, too. But there was (a) very little for Natasha, who died in this film saving the universe even more tragically than Tony did, given that she didn’t even know her sacrifice would work to get the Soul Stone, let alone whether the rest of the plan would work even if she did; and (b) almost none for the characters who died in Infinity War and didn’t get a Comic Book Death resurrection through Bruce snapping or past!Nebula breaking literally the entire premise of the film (more on that in a bit). The Vision got a two-second reference, not even by name. Loki got just a flash of a cameo, with Thor not bringing him up once that I can recall, being completely focused on their mother even in a time when they were both still alive. Heimdall didn’t even get that much, nor was he even referenced; nor were any of the Wakandans who died so that Scarlet Witch didn’t have to lose her creepy robo-boyfriend (which, whoops, she did anyway). Regardless of how obnoxious some of these character and/or their fans may have been, they still very much should have mattered to the other characters, who should have been mourning them just as much as they were mourning Tony. And yeah, sure, anybody who didn’t get Thanos’d had had five years to mourn the ones who died in Infinity War, but (a) to anybody who’d just been brought back, they were still freshly dead, and (b) even the people who were around for those five years are probably dealing with that grief all over again, not least of which because they had the others who died then returned to them, and because not everybody (especially not Thor) had even properly gone through the whole grief process in the first place.

On the topic of Thor, boyyyyyyy howdy was it frustrating how thoroughly Endgame finished off the way that Infinity War had started cutting the entire legs of his Ragnarok character development out from under him. If it weren’t for the momentary appearance of a handful of characters from Ragnarok, the movie literally might as well not have happened: Thor no longer cares about being a leader for his people, he’s back to leaning on weapons instead of relying on himself, and he seems to have completely forgotten Loki after having finally reconciled with him. And making Thor fat as a joke was not only fatphobic and unfunny but really undercut the narrative’s ability to make the viewer take his trauma seriously, because of a continuously competing tension between “you’re supposed to laugh at how he looks” and “how he looks is supposed to make you sad” that was never really resolved. There was no “you’re laughing at this, but then you realize what it actually means, and you feel like an ass for having laughed.” It was clearly set up to be, “you’re laughing at this, but then you realize what it means, and you feel a little sad, but don’t worry, there will be plenty of more times when ‘Thor is fat now’ is a punchline.”

As for the film’s humor as a whole, while there were some genuinely funny moments that were well positioned in the narrative, the movie overall felt like it frequently ran into the same problem as Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where the writers were so desperate to have characters constantly quipping that they constantly undercut their own poignant moments.

Probably the biggest actual plot hole is, unsurprisingly, the time travel. They initially did an... okay job of justifying why the characters couldn’t just change the past (though it wasn’t until Bruce got to have his chat with Mx. Yellowface that it actually got in any way coherently explained). But after they did all that work of establishing that they couldn’t just change the past, for capital-R Reasons...

They did uhhhhhhh a whole fucking lot of changing the past. A few of these things could be at least fanwanked away. Maybe past!Steve forgets future!Steve telling him Bucky’s alive because he got knocked unconscious immediately afterwards. Maybe Tony’s chat with his dad had always happened. Maybe Steve had always spent decades with Peggy. But there is no way Sitwell et al. wouldn’t remember Steve pretending to be a member of Hydra, which would significantly alter the events of The Winter Soldier if they weren’t smart enough or lucky enough to verify that Steve wasn’t also a mole and therefore realize he was an “imposter” before one of those Hydra sleeper said something to past!Steve to make him suspicious. And Loki grabbing the loose Tesseract and poofing is a massive change in the timeline.

Their enemies did a whooooooole lot of changing the past when past!Nebula brought past!Thanos and The Gang through to the future, including effectively permanently restoring Gamora, i.e., someone who’d been “irreversibly” sacrificed to obtain the Soul Stone.

Once these things happened, there was literally nothing to explain why (a) the future!Avengers couldn’t at least bring back Heimdall, Loki, all those Wakandans, the Vision, Natasha, and Tony by pulling them from earlier points in the timestream, and (b) why the future!Avengers couldn’t just take their set of Infinity Stones to a point before all of this shit happened and prevent it from ever having happened. Which isn’t to say the writers couldn’t have cooked up some sort of internally consistent explanation, e.g., “this Gamora is basically stolen from the other timeline, which still exists on its own independent axis, and the Avengers wouldn’t kidnap their friends out of another timeline and leave that version of themselves without the person they want to restore just to have that person here.” But they didn’t bother, which presumably means no one involved in making the film even noticed the utter inconsistency.

Speaking of utter inconsistency... Steve. Steven fucking Rogers. Hooooooooboy. That ending was the biggest, stupidest, cheapest piece of schlock I’ve seen in a movie for a long fucking time. Let’s leave aside the fact that he chose to leave behind two perfectly good boyfriends and the fact that he barely said boo to Bucky, despite the film having reminded us how important Bucky was to him by having his name literally be the thing that so shocked past!Steve that future!Steve was able to beat him. You’re seriously telling me that Steve was still pining soooooooo badly for Peggy that he would literally risk the entire timeline so they could have their Hetero Happily Ever After? (Bucky, Sam, Tony, Angie: I’m so sorry, bbys.)

Yeah, sure, Peggy and Steve being parted was sad when it happened. But they’d been colleagues for a handful of years, then maybe sorta friends, and then kissed once, in a speeding car, just after they finally admitted they’d both been crushing on each other pretty hard the whole time because they were on the way to possibly both die. That is not “the love of your life” who you spend the rest of time sighing over. That’s, like, the guy I casually dated for a bit over a month in 2011 because, while we hit it off amazingly well, I didn’t want to get serious when he’d be moving in about a year once his postdoc was done, who sure enough moved to the east coast a year later and then abruptly died of a heart attack a few years after that. Is it tragic that he’s dead? Absolutely. Have I sometimes thought, “Gosh, I wonder what could have been”? Sure. Did I decide that I would never ever again date or even look at anyone else, because he was the only person for me in all of space and time? Lmaoooooo no. I am, in fact, deliriously happy with my current girlfriend, who I also happen to think is way better for me than he ever could have been.

It was already established that Peggy got married in the original timeline (in CA:TWS, Steve watches some footage in which she mentions that during the war he’d saved the man she eventually married). This means that either (a) Steve supplanted her original husband, which is pretty gross, especially if he didn’t tell Peggy “oh hey btw you originally married this other guy, wanna go check him out first,” or (b) Steve was Peggy’s husband all along, and she just obfuscated that. Either way, in the timeline we end up with, somehow for 50+ years this incredibly well-known woman and sometime Director of SHIELD was married to a man she kept absolutely secret and hidden, which somehow no one ever discovered the secret of or even ever commented on, apparently. It also means that, when Steve showed up on her doorstep, both of them agreed that (a) it was more important for them to play house than for Steve to ever openly use his abilities again and (b) Steve would sit on his ass and twiddle his thumbs through every major crisis he knows is coming over the next half-century. If the MCU serum slowed Steve’s aging the way the comic serum did, this might be slightly understandable, because they could justify it as, “Well, Steve will go back to adventuring after he closes the loop with his original timeline, and this will basically be an extended vacation.” But Steve did age (and they presumably had no expectation that he would not), meaning that he wasted decades of active time at most acting secretly and anonymously from the shadows. You really think that these two incredibly dedicated and driven heroes would both agree to that? Sure, I could absolutely believe they’d take the opportunity to finally get that dance. But there’s no way that Peggy wouldn’t have booted Steve’s ass out of bed and back to the 21st century, and it’s highly unlikely Steve himself would have so much as seriously considered staying for more than a more leisurely farewell and proper closure.

Steve’s Hetero Happily Ever After also further complicates the issue of that time travel plot hole I mentioned. If the stones were plucked from one or more divergent timelines (or changes made while grabbing the stones then caused the creation of divergent timelines at those points)... how did aging!Steve end up staying in the same timeline as the rest of the future!Avengers? It seems like it should be impossible for all these things to be simultaneously true, which means either I’m missing something huge or at least one of them is a huge fuck-up in terms of the plot’s internal consistency. EITHER the changes to the past happened in (or spawned) one or more divergent timelines, which is why, e.g., Gamora could be brought forward from her past and now be alive in the future without altering the past that led to her being brought forward in the first place, in which case aging!Steve would have spent his life in an alternate timeline and old!Steve wouldn’t have been able to come visit all his buds on the day young!future!Steve left to return the stones; OR everything took place in a single, unified, undivergent timeline, which would mean Steve could drop into the past and take the long way back to the exact point in spacetime he left, but the changes to the past would have altered the past events, meaning that because Thanos and The Gang skipped forward and Loki is at large with the Tesseract, the events of Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Infinity War, etc. never happened, and we’re also back to having no reason why other dead people couldn’t be pulled forward from their past timeline, why Thanos couldn’t be stopped by time-traveling the stones to before he retrieved them and using them to stop him, etc.

Various other issues:

The “monstrous” single woman who can’t get pregnant sacrificing herself so that the virile man will have his wife and children restored to him is... not a good look. Also, it’s weird how “we don’t trade lives” when it’s about a robot coded as a white man sacrificing himself to save half the universe (though apparently even at the time a whole bunch of Wakandans was fine, whoops, remember all the Black people who died trying to stop Thanos from getting to the Vision, weird how those lives were okay to trade), but when it’s about Natasha or Clint throwing themself off a cliff, immediately they’re both all, “Yeah, it’s gotta be done for the greater good.”

Thor getting to be the one to axe Thanos’s head off instead of, you know, like, oh, I don’t know, Nebula? The woman he abused and tortured pretty much her entire life? Bad. Inappropriate. Disappointing.

Everybody kept talking about how the characters who got Thanos’d in Infinity War were their “family.” For Rocket, I believe it; one thing the GotG films actually did well was to establish that level of relationship for those characters. But the Avengers? Lmaoooooo. The MCU Avengers were not a fucking family. The MCU Avengers spent every single movie at each other’s throats. If you wanted us to believe they were even friends, you should have given us at least one film of them seriously working as a team instead of against each other.

Holy shit, do I not care about Clint Barton’s Manpain(tm). Also, if you want us to see how far he’s “fallen,” maybe do something other than giving him the worst mohawk I’ve ever seen (including one done backstage after a show and one a friend gave me in my bathroom in college) and a boring tattoo and having him badly pick up an ugly katana-esque sword to kill objectively bad guys.

Bringing Scott back was easy enough that a rat walking across a panel after five years of that shit sitting in a storage facility could do it, and yet no one else tried even once? Somebody saw all that shit set up, and went, “Welp, guess they’re all just dead,” instead of, “Hey maybe this running equipment indicates an experiment in progress that we should maybe investigate”?

The “let’s line up all the named women” shot in the final battle was the most patronizing display of pandering I’ve seen in the entire franchise. Not only did it make no sense for them all to be in the same place at the same time with no men even in the shot, but... they were utterly ineffectual? It was like, “Gosh, how will Carole ever make it through that??? Oh, she’s got US, GIRL-FRIENDS, DID WE MENTION WE’RE ALL LADIES, BUT NOT QUEER OR ANYTHING.” And then... Carole immediately blew straight past them, because her power level is so off the charts compared to almost every other named woman in the MCU, many of whom are simply very, very skilled peak human heroes versus being superhuman.

Speaking of superhuman abilities: Why wasn’t every time-travel suit an Iron Man-style suit like Rhodey’s? Obviously he needed an exoskeleton bit to walk, but since Tony took the time to build him a beefed-up full suit, why didn’t he do the same for everyone else?

Along that same line of stupid decisions made around the Vitally Important, We Only Get One Shot At Fixing This time-travel mission, why didn’t they wait until everyone was in better shape? Thor was clearly still an emotional wreck, and if Rocket hadn’t been on the ball, it would have cost them one of the stones. As soon as you’re traveling back in time to fix something, unless there’s a hard limit on how far you can go back (which there wasn’t), you literally have the rest of your lives to get ready for it, so can and should take as much time as you need to prep (and even over-prep) for that mission. A little more lead time also would have given someone the opportunity to go, “Hey, wait, why don’t we first make a quick stop to just grab more Pym Particles, so we have more flexibility with destinations and do-overs?” Or even, “Why don’t we make these suits modular? That way, they can join into a single unit for each team on the way there, thereby saving a bunch of charges, but also split off into individual suits with everyone having enough juice to get home individually just in case someone gets split off. That will leave us with a bunch of extra Pym Particles in case something goes wrong.”

Other than meta reasons like “we want there to be a big epic fight,” why was it such a struggle to fight Thanos? The Avengers very nearly beat him in Infinity War, when he had five of the six Infinity Stones. Here, he had none, and they still barely squeaked out the victory by the skin of their teeth.

Thanos’s rapid switch from “I’m gonna kill half of all living creatures to uhhh save the universe somehow” to “I guess I’ll just wipe out everything and make an entirely new universe” once again highlighted how deeply stupid his original plan was. If he has the capacity to re-create the entire universe, why doesn’t he just... make more resources, if that’s such a fucking problem? I mean, also, spoiler alert for the real world: It’s not. It’s always been an issue of distribution, not amount. People aren’t starving to death because there’s no food; people are starving to death because of capitalism. So unless you target your population elimination at capitalists exclusively, killing off a bunch of people is going to maintain exactly the same problems of unequal resource exploitation and distribution.

Speaking of which: Why is post-Thanos Earth presented as a mellow semi-paradise (except for everybody being sad about all the dead people)? The loss of half the world’s population would have been catastrophic, cascading into many more deaths. Nor would it have solved inequality... or even resource “over”-utilization. Earth hit a population of 3.85 billion (i.e., half the current ~7.7 billion) around 1972, which many people currently alive have personal memories of not actually being particularly idyllic. This also highlights once again how deeply stupid and nonsensical Thanos’s original plan was, given that his “solution” could easily become obsolete in another 50 years... or even sooner, given that Thanos also cut all non-human creature populations in half, which would have not only reduced related resources available for human consumption but devastated ecosystems worldwide.

There has been a huge official campaign to persuade audiences to not spoil the movie for others. As a general principle, I’m a fan of encouraging anti-spoiler culture, but I think it says a lot about this movie in specific that the studio has put in so much effort to try to stamp out spoilers: i.e., they’re worried that the only real draw it has is people finding out assorted plot points. If your film can be easily replaced by a bulleted list of who’s alive or dead at the end of it, it’s... not actually a good film.

ADDENDUM MAY 5, 2019:

Okay, so, per the Russos, the reason Steve's Hetero Happily Ever After DOESN'T break the entire rest of the film is that it happened in an alternate timeline, and he just jumped back to the MCU prime timeline later... somehow. I still think that's shitty, lazy filmmaking, because in three hours they absolutely should have, you know, made that more clear (or... at all indicated that's how it played out). But at least it keeps their time travel mechanics from completely breaking their own plot.

But that means that in THAT timeline there were two Steves. Which means the BEST-CASE SCENARIO is prime!Steve hooked up with that timeline's Peggy after being 100% honest about who he was, alt!Peggy... chose a different version of Steve over her own Steve, for... reasons?, and then together they found and revived alt!Steve, at which point prime!Steve was like, "lol sorry bro, she's my wife 'cause I missed my chance with prime!Peggy, but at least now you're not frozen for any longer than you already have been."

Other options include:

Prime!Steve pretended to be alt!Steve while leaving him in the ice, counting on him not getting rescued until alt!Peggy would be nearly dead.

Prime!Steve helped rescue alt!Steve, then left alt!Peggy and alt!Steve to have their personal Hetero Happily Ever After while he... married some other random person?

Prime!Steve straight-up murdered alt!Steve to take his place.

Prime!Steve and alt!Peggy rescued alt!Steve, and she married both of them. (Somehow I don't see Disney going for that option.)

ADDENDUM MAY 12, 2019

I just read another interview, this one with the writers. Buckle up, because there’s even more embarrassing shit.

McFeely: I mean, we did all of this before Ragnarok.

Markus: Yeah, initially we were writing drafts prior to Taika coming onboard. And it was once they got underway and they were off in Australia making the movie and it was clear that they were discovering new facets to Thor, Chris Hemsworth wanted to make sure that this new loosened-up Thor didn't vanish immediately upon returning to the Avengers world. And so he and Taika flew to Atlanta and we had long meetings with them and watched some footage and got a sense of the new Thor tone, and it worked perfectly with where we wanted to go.

... ... ... ... Literally WHAT FUCKING PART of Infinity War and Endgame matches AT ALL with Thor's character development from Ragnarok? I was all ready to go, "Oh, okay, that makes sense" at the reveal that this was written before Ragnarok. But then, nope, they admit that they just have no fucking idea what they're doing and think they actually integrated its changes WELL. JFC.

McFeely: So where we hit upon it was in order to become their best selves, Steve had to find a life, and Tony had to lose his.

Boring idea and poorly executed to boot. (Not to mention the extreme cringiness of “finding a life” necessarily requires “marrying a woman and having babies in the suburbs.”) How are they getting paid money for writing this trite?

Fandango: So people are asking... Does this mean an old Captain America was hanging out this whole time while another Captain America was saving the day?

Markus: That is our theory. We are not experts on time travel, but the Ancient One specifically states that when you take an Infinity Stone out of a timeline it creates a new timeline. So Steve going back and just being there would not create a new timeline. So I reject the "Steve is in an alternate reality" theory. I do believe that there is simply a period in world history from about '48 to now where there are two Steve Rogers. And anyway, for a large chunk of that one of them is frozen in ice. So it's not like they'd be running into each other.

HAHAHAHA HOLY FUCKING SHIT okay so NOT ONLY do the director and writers have COMPLETELY DIFFERENT IDEAS about what the fuck happened at the end (did they... not discuss this with each other? at all?), but the WRITERS' version is the one that is THE MOST OUT OF CHARACTER. HOLY SHIT.

McFeely: So we've always thought that the most perfect conclusion to [Natasha's] arc would be to die for her new family, or to sacrifice greatly for her new family.

GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG

McFeely: We toyed with not doing that, and we had another version, and several women on the crew said, "Don't you dare take that choice away from her. The heroic thing is for Natasha to do it, not for Hawkeye to do it."

these are definitely real women who actually exist

Fandango: Do you think there's a world where we see the adventures of Captain and Peggy either on the big or small screen?

Christopher Markus: Possibly. I think maybe all I did was Steve was a stay-at-home dad and Peggy went to work at S.H.I.E.L.D. I don't know that there were any adventures.

lmaoooooooooo

Imagine being this bad at knowing your own characters. Imagine thinking either Peggy OR Steve would just give up their life to play house when there's important work they could be doing.

Ok so I watched endgame on friday and basically I was so disappointed with what they did to bucky/steve and how they literally had one (1) second together onscreen and it was like they were saying goodbye for an hour not that buck knew steve was leaving forever??? also idk if I believe that he'd abandon his best friend to go back and marry peggy because she already had a family? Basically I'm just upset they didn't do justice to bucky/steve...but I'm curious - what did you think of the film??

ENDGAME SPOILERS AHEAD (AND IN THE ASK, so don’t read it either)

Hey anon! I stared at this for a good ten minutes before deciding how to answer it, and settled on keeping my answer under a read more so here we go:

Let me start by saying that I haven’t seen a Marvel movie since Captain America: Civil War (with the exception of Black Panther) and I haven’t been to see Endgame myself nor am I going to. But I got a play by play of the movie from close friends, read multiple articles, and heard every opinion before reaching the conclusion that I was very right in deciding not to watch the movie bc I hate what they did with it, and I would have fumed even more if I had to sit through it in a cinema. Let’s break down what I think about it and clarify some things first though.

The whole time travel plotline with Steve was shitty writing that left a lot of people confused, but basically there are supposed to be two versions of Steve by the end because he created a new branch in time. Basically, one Steve did go into the ice and live out his life until the moment he went back in time and created the second Steve that lived out life with Peggy in the new branch of time. This supposedly means that Peggy’s family wasn’t erased (even tho I personally still don’t get it lol) but I have read like five different accounts on whether or not this makes sense, and to me that means that the movie failed spectacularly. If you need article after article and essay length explanations for your audience to understand what you did post-movie then you didn’t do your job right. Here are two articles on the time travel and you can decide which one you agree with: article 1, article 2.

Now let’s leave the technicalities of it behind and focus on characters. Steve Rogers has meant the world to me for a long time and I adored his character. He and Bucky got me through a tough time in my undergrad uni so they mean a lot to me, yes, but I want to point out that my opinion isn’t solely formed bc I shipped them together but because I truly believe the ending Steve was given ruined his character. Like listen I am bitter that they threw away the only love story that made sense to me in MCU (Steve and Bucky) but this isn’t about that. The fact of it is that the same writers who made Steve kiss Peggy’s niece at her funeral in Civil War and said it doesn’t matter because Peggy was a one month thing to Steve are the ones who wrote endgame and decided that Steve’s love for his friends who are a found family, his best friend, this new world and new life he has, and everything he built basically didn’t matter just bc he didn’t have a romantic love interest and that.. really grates on my nerves with the message it sends. 

This message is also reiterated with them killing off Nat. The fact that they killed of Nat bc she can’t have children and doesn’t have a family sends the same message. Once again Marvel says that unless you follow certain heteronormative criteria then life isn’t worth living or having. They sent Steve back to be stuck in his past and walk away from his family and future, and they killed Nat off in the spirit of the same underlying message of unless you have Het Love and a family then whatever else you have doesn’t really matter. And I truly despise that. This post  explains it well I think.

As for the Steve/Bucky part, which yeah kills me too.. we all know that had one of Steve or Bucky been a woman then they’d be played up to be Marvel’s greatest love story ever written. I never hoped they’d let them be together bc I knew better but still… sending him to be with Peggy (who I love, this isn’t anything against her I swear) when he knew her for so little and they had no more than a fling, and making him walk away from everything else he has is the epitome of them doing one last hurrah to prove he’s in heterosexual love with someone. I just find it so insulting bc they mocked his and Peggy’s relationship before to justify him kissing Sharon and it’s adding insult to injury. 

I wanted Sam to get the shield (only good thing that happened) and I wanted Steve to walk away and have a life… hell, fine what fucking ever give him a new blonde girl as a love interest but. Not this quick-fix poorly thought out ending that negates everything Steve stood for. Him walking away from the best friend he fought the entire world for, and the other best friend who fought the world with him and became a brother for someone he knew for a month in the 40s… who moved on and had her own life and children (and deserved way more than being an afterthought fix-it in this stupid movie) makes me really angry and sad to think about.

My last point is their well known queerbaiting which they did once again here. They queerbaited saying there’ll be a gay character you’d never expect in Endgame, and it turned out to be a nameless background character who’s in the scene for like 10 seconds. That lgbt representation! Side note: I will forever be bitter that marvel queerbaited the shit out of Stucky. Remember when they released an entire alternate universe comic promising Steve and Bucky will be together by the end of it then killed Bucky off at the very end? Yeah lol I will never forgive them that one.

I also heard they put Thor in a fat suit and made a bunch of jokes about it???? Which is seriously disgusting, I don’t even have words for it. 

Anyway, in conclusion: Fuck Marvel.

I’m going to put this all under a cut for people who haven’t seen it yet etc, but... some thoughts about Endgame. 

I mean. The first thing y’all should know (if you don’t already) is that I am a long time Tony Stark fan. My first MCU film was Iron Man. My first MCU character love was Tony Stark. Tony is my favourite, has always been my favourite, will always be my favourite. 

(It may also help to know that I am autistic and my love for Tony Stark is definitely also tied up in Special Interest territory, and also in making-me-feel-better-during-depression-and-shit-life-circumstances territory)

So.. I’m admitting a bias for Tony Stark right off the bat. Just, getting it out there etc. 

With that said.

The more I think about Endgame... the more I hate it. 

1. This film. THIS FILM. Did Tony so fucking dirty. I am perfectly capable of understanding why the writers went with this end for him. Hero’s death. Let him rest. End of an era. Maybe RDJ wants a clean cut. etc. But it was shit. It was badly fucking done. Tony Stark had ten years of character growth. Tony Stark made sacrifice after sacrifice after fucking sacrifice, until he made the ultimate sacrifice. That was a not-payoff. That was... I don’t even know what that was. I hate it. I understand that I am biased, but... that was fucking bullshit. It was also bad writing. It was also entirely predictable - I knew going in that this was going to happen. I... legitimately cried in public. 

2.a. Why the hell was Tony’s payoff given to Clint? Clint had barely been in the last few films. He’s been supremely underused and he was an asshole in AOU, CW. Like - really? Why am I suddenly meant to care about a guy who was an asshole and then disappeared?

2.b. Why the hell was Tony’s payoff given to Steve? And in such a really fucking stupid way? Steve’s ending was... seriously, what the fuck was that? You can come at this a hundred different angles and in all of them, it’s stupid and bad writing. A sample: So... after WS and CW, where he spent two whole movies being obsessed with saving Barnes and fucking over... literally everyone over it... he’s now abandoning him to the future alone? By going back and marrying Peggy, he’s just wiped out her entire line of descendants. Or, if he was always her husband in secret, he... spent 70 years in hiding? and Peggy... kept him secret somehow? And he had a brief romance with his own niece? Oh, and he also... left Bucky with HYDRA? He left HYDRA to infiltrate SHIELD? He.. left behind all the innovations and cultural shifts and so on etc to go.. and live in the fucking 40s? Where women and poc are less than secondclass citizens? I could go on. but I’m also just going to say: uhhh.. The serum severely slows down ageing. 

3. They fridged Natasha. Really. Really. Bad writing. The sacrifice that would have made better sense there would actually have been Clint, accepting that he’s gone too far down the path of darkness and using this opportunity to make a sort of amends for it. But no. Instead, we get ‘Natasha has lost purpose, is depressed, dies’. Right. 

4.a. Where the fuck was Carol? She’s the literal heavy hitter of this collection of enhanced people for fucks sake? What the actual fuck was all the build up of her film, and the extra scenes at the end of her film and IW? Setting her up as an important character for Endgame? And then... nothing? I mean, she’s stronger and more resilient than .. Hulk. Anyone else think of that? like, hi? She could have EASILY wielded the damn gauntlet/stones and survived unharmed? Hello? No? No. Apparently having her godmoding self turn up to kill the ship was what they wanted to go with. It looked cool, sure, but... 

4.b. An alternative to Tony literally sacrificing himself AGAIN. 

The gauntlet is thrown his way. Stephen gives him the hint. Tony goes to grab it, perfectly ready and willing to commit the ultimate sacrifice again, kill himself and his future, his hopes and his dreams, to save his family and the rest of the universe.

At the last second, Carol grabs it, ‘It’s ok Doctor Stark! You’ve made enough sacrifices, let me get this one.’ 

Carol fixes everything and her godmoding power means she’s barely scratched. Tony learns he doesn’t always have to make the sacrifice, it’s not always on him to fix other peoples messes, there are people around he can rely on... he can rest. 

5. Fuck the Russo’s. Cowards. Absolute fools. 

6. Also, what the fuck was that 30 second Russo cameo as a gay guy? Are we meant to be patting the Russo’s on the back for that throwaway never to be seen again ‘representation’? When we've got Brunhilde? Loki? Carol? You know, actual canon queer characters? Double fuck you Russo’s. 

7. ALL THE FEMALE ENHANCED/HEROES TO THE RESCUE except... wow... is that really all we had? Through, like, twenty films? I know that was meant to be an awesome look at these baddass ladies scene, but all it did for me was point out quite how few of them there were. Pepper-as-Rescue was awesome, though. 

8. Fatphobia. Fat. Phobia. Again, I know it’s a visual shorthand. But it was the fucking laziest, disrespectful, fatphobic bullshit writing. 

9. What the.. fuck was that Professor Hulk? 

10. Give me Tony back you cowards. 

---

I mean. I generally hate time travel stories anyway? Because they’re so.. stupid. But this film... This film did not do time travel well. Like. At all. I also knew that time travel was the only way they were going to do it. I knew that going in. And I still hated it all. 

But... there were some things I enjoyed. 

Tony and Peter reuniting. That goddamn bearhug. God. Crying. 

Tony telling Steve exactly how he feels, finally. (Except, Steve... still didn’t apologise...) 

The look on Stephen’s face as he gave Tony the hint, clearly knowing it was going to kill him.

Pepper as Rescue. Carol killing Thanos’ ship. Everyone turning up at the battlefield to save the day. Morgan. ‘I love you 3000′ Literally everything about Tony as a father, actually. 

Thanos’ expression of utter defeat as he finally realised that was it. 

‘It is America’s ass’ ‘Hail HYDRA’ 

Loki mimicking Steve in the penthouse. 

... 

None of it made up for what has.. basically killed me. I’m not sure if my relationship with MCU can survive this. Tony Stark IS the MCU for me. It started with him, I’ve been with him through it all. It may.. have died with him. For me. I guess I’ll see. 

Odd question but what do you think of the “fujoshi” community? Harmless fun or harmful fetishization?

Oh, oh I’m getting a headache just reading that question…

No, it is not fetisihzation that is utter bullshit. No it is not harmful, that is even more bullshit.

The people accusing fujoshi of fetishization do the exact same thing. They write the exact same stories and draw the exact same fanarts about the exact same gays. But because the creators in one case are females, they are the devil and they are fetishizing.

By every definition of the word, I am a fujoshi too - a female fan of mlm ships. Yaoi or shounen-ai, if you wish to continue using Japanese terms.

What fujoshi discourse boils down to is a group of people being misogynistic crybabies and not allowing females to have genuine interests.

The term “CIShet woman” is thrown around like a slur in this discourse - disregarding that not all fujoshi are CIS or het. I, for my part, am a lesbian. It’s literally only about those people’s hatred for women, really.

Because the exact same content is totally fine if it is made by a gay man.

They don’t even realize how ridiculous that is.

If we would ever only get representation if it gets written by a person from the group in question, we would literally barely get anything.

Most gay stories were written by straight men and women. Most stories involving characters of color used to be written by white writers. Someone has to pave the way - and it is the group that is most “accepted” to do the job. In the case of writing for Hollywood, those would be the white men. Does that mean we have no right to see movies about women or characters of color or non-straights? No, no it does not.

As a lesbian, I can still enjoy Willow and Tara as a lesbian couple on Buffy even though they were written by a CIShet man. I still get to enjoy Elena’s coming out story on One Day at a Time even though the show was not written by a lesbian.

So if you, as a gay man, can not accept seeing a mlm couple written by a woman, then the problem is not the woman who invests her time into writing this, it is with you.

Especially since we are talking fandom here.

We’re not even talking Hollywood. We’re talking about authors on AO3 and fanarts on DeviantArt and on here. We’re talking about fans, people who love something and dedicate their own time into creating something for free, something that you and everybody else gets to enjoy without getting any form of payment for it.

So instead of being grateful for the content, those people insult, belittle, bully and even threaten the creators.

THAT IS WHAT IS HARMFUL.

A woman creating art or stories is and can by definition not be harmful, because it is fiction about fictional characters and it is on the internet where you can just avoid it if you do not agree with it.

But those people who made this into a “discourse”, they are the ones being harmful because they mistreat people who do something they enjoy.

People crying that “Those women enjoying what I am enjoying and what is clearly aimed only at me because it represents me, they are ruining the thing for me!!!” are the exact same type of whiny babies as the men who started crying this exact same sentence when women started showing interest in nerd culture - you all do remember that, right? The uproar against female fans in the MCU and DC and Star Wars and Star Trek culture because how dare women show any interest in these things that “belong” to men. All this shit about “fake nerd girls” that female fans of those shows and movies have to put up with, just for being female and interested in this thing.

Women aren’t allowed to have interests.

That is literally what this boils down to.

95% of canonically gay anime and manga were written by fujoshi - most of the things those antis consume was created by fujoshi.

The most ridiculous thing I ever saw on the topic was an anti making a post that fujoshi aren’t allowed to go and see Love, Simon because it is not meant for them, it is meant for gays.

It is not.

I, as a lesbian, wish to see this movie about a gay teen romance, because heaven knows I won’t get my lesbian teen romance any time soon on this big scale.

And the wildest part? Love, Simon was literally written by a fujoshi. By the very thing they hate - the CIShet white woman. The very kind of person they want to forbid from seeing this movie. That is the author of the book.

It’s a ridiculous double-standard and it baffles me that so many people on this hellsite don’t seem to grasp that.

Representation only matters if it is written by the minority represented and no one else aside from said minority is allowed to enjoy this.

That is literally like saying white people and non-black POC aren’t allowed to watch Black Planther or make fan content to it because it solemnly belongs to black people? Aren’t allowed to see Coco because it is clearly only aimed at Latinx people…? Oh yes, it is very clearly created for this group of people and from everything I’ve seen on this site, they’re the ones who get the most enjoyment out of it and out of the representation it brought with it - but that… that doesn’t mean that no one else is allowed to enjoy this.

I saw Coco five times by now and I’m white as fuck and I highly doubt that Latinx people in the fandom will give me shit for writing fanfiction for it, or accuse me of “fetishizing” their culture just because I’d write fanfiction for this movie. Which I am, literally working on a fic for that, hence the example.

Just because something is aimed at a certain group does not mean only they can enjoy it.

It’s a ridiculous concept of double standard that is being used in the fujoshi discourse.

I’m a woman, but I’m still allowed to consume media aimed at men - holy shit, aren’t we literally trying to break gender norms these days, like, seriously?

I’m a lesbian, but I’m still allowed to consume media featuring straights and gays and bisexuals and everything else under the rainbow. It’s not like I am only allowed to watch lesbian shows… because then I would literally have nothing to watch.

I’m white, but I’m still allowed to consume media featuring and focusing on characters of color. Because holy shit, I also don’t want the all-white casts anymore, it’s intensely stale and boring and outdated?? We are literally glad that we finally broke this kind of writing when it comes to representation in this aspect, so how could you want to revert back in the case of representing sexualities…?

If everyone is only allowed to consume media that focuses on representation of themselves, then you are really living in the stone-ages. They do know that this led to Hollywood and TV shows being predominantly white and male, right?

Fujoshi are female fans creating content for other fans.

Fujoshi discourse is overgrown babies crying about women having interests, using bogus claims like “Stop fetishizing ME!!!”.

No one is fetishizing you, unless you are a male celebrity and reading RPF about yourself. Those are literally the only people who can cry out about personally being fetishized. Celebrities who are being directly lusted after and have smut written about them.

Someone writing about something that includes part of your identity does not and will never personally fetishize you.

Hentai anime about big boobed girls? Does not personally fetishize me just because I’m a busty girl. It’s gross as fuck and I don’t like it, but I can just avoid it and I don’t feel personally victimized by its existence.

That is fetishization though. Women with waists that should break under the laws of physique and boobs trice the size of their heads. That is fetishizing women.

If fujoshi would be fetishizing gays, then they would be with such emphasis of their glorious cocks and mighty balls or some shit.

Essentially 50% of the things fujoshi create are soft. Fanfiction, fanart, doujinshi - fluff, about cuddling, two characters holding each other, that 50k slow-burn coffee shop AU you read last month.

Writing about a healthy, slow relationship is not and never will be “fetishization” - and it sure as heck will never be fetishization of you personally, because it isn’t about you.

Now to get back to a point I mentioned earlier.

Not every fujoshi is CIShet. For me, personally, writing about mlm relationships and reading about them was dealing with my own homosexuality - because we don’t get female gay love.

I could walk into any bookstore and thanks to Japanese fujoshi authors, I could just buy a manga about two teenage boys, discovering their sexuality and dealing with it. No sex involved. Not a single manga I own written by a fujoshi is even yaoi. Sex doesn’t have to be in it. Like I said, most content is impossibly soft and fluffy in nature.

And it helped me come to terms with my own sexuality, with the fact that it is possible to not be straight.

It’s harder to write about wlw ships than it is to write about mlm ships by sheer math alone.

Look, say, at the Avengers - you had one female character and five male characters in that lead team. There wasn’t even an option to write about a wlw ship, while you have ten possible mlm ships. So, what are you supposed to write about as a woman? Natasha masturbating for 20k words, or what? Because I, as a woman, am not allowed to write about men…?

Look at the Voltron fandom, where you have five male characters and two female… but oh my, one of the females is literally 15 while the other is an ancient alien; not the kind of ship I sail, so again no wlw ship to write about, but just as many mlm options as in the above mentioned.

And that is a pattern.

Franchises - anime, manga, cartoon, TV shows, movies, books - are dominated by male characters. Most lead characters are male. They are more fleshed out, better developed than the rare female characters.

Even nowadays, the male characters are still mostly more dynamic and more interesting than the females, because the females are either the Mother Character, the mere bland Love Interest who doesn’t get developed beyond being a love interest to the male lead, or the Badass Female whose only real trade is that she can kick ass, but real personality mostly still comes short.

So yeah, it’s virtually not a surprise that fanfiction authors - male and female alike - mostly latch onto mlm ships and write and draw about them, because there are statistically speaking more male characters in fandom and more mlm options than wlw options.

And if you forbid women from being interested in male characters and their relationships, if you forbid women from participating in fandom, if you forbid women from creating for the things they love…

There would be no fandoms.

Literally.

Fanfiction started because women wanted to see Spock and Kirk fuck. While there are many male creators by now, fandom has always been rather dominated by women, who created and set the path.

So we are good enough to put you where you are now, but now we are forbidden from participating in the very thing we created? Literally, the thing we created - because most of your boyslove manga and anime were created by fujoshi. So you are allowed to consume that but you do not allow the people who are like the author to also enjoy it…? Really?

And then there is also still that accusation that, somehow, “we” evil CIShet women get off to fetishizing “you” poor gay men.

I’m ace. I don’t get off to the smut I write. I write the sex scenes because they are part of the relationship, just as I write the wooing and getting together. It ain’t about “getting off”. It’s about the enjoyment of writing.

And while I, personally, don’t identify as a fujoshi because I don’t like the term, others do - and others have a right to. Just like I would never call myself a stan of anything, because I don’t like the term - but by definition I most likely do stan a lot of characters and shows and things.

I think a big problem is that fujoshi, translated, means “rotten woman” and somehow the butthurt crybabies who feel personally victimized by fujoshi see that as meaning something bad.

Yes, the words rotten woman do not exactly scream “Oh, this is a nice thing!”, but those people don’t even bother looking up the meaning - because words have meanings, connotations attached to them. And meanings change. Just because something seems to “say” one thing if you do a literal translation of it does not necessarily mean that the word also means the same thing that said literal translation offers. That is not how language works.

And at its very core, all that fujoshi means is “female fan of mlm”. The term itself was coined during times where liking gays and being gay was even more scandalous than today. You were rotten if you liked gays, a disgusting, rotten person - and yet still those women weren’t stopped. They created.

They created things that future generations got to enjoy. They created a pathway.

And if people today want to call themselves fujoshi because they identify with the term, then absolutely no one has a right to judge them, has the right to assign a different meaning to that term.

How do we, today in this day and age where we are all about claiming our own identity, have people out there who think they can dictate the identity and interests of others?

How is the gay community so rotten that there are people not allowing women to have an interest and condemning them for the label they chose for themselves…?

That is the disgusting and harmful part of the fujoshi discourse, really.

The Predator 2018

So it's 12:02 am and it turned 01 on the journal when I posted it on Deviantart. Now it's 12:03 am and I have a lot to say also I put tags first before typing I had this copied. 12:04 am.

I've actually seen the film.....even though I talked about mainly on Tumblr of not seeing it. But I went with my bro and his friend......but I've seen it.....

I thought it was okay. But I'm gonna be honest including thinking more about it. I don't want Shane Black to never direct another Predator movie again. Including a actual quote from my brothers friend and I asked him quite some times or three to remember. He described the movie as a, "One Big Meme" I just seriously went into my brothers room and his friend is staying the night I actually asked him in case and I mentioned one big and it seems to be that.....which says a lot about the movie in a way I suppose.

Yet I wanna talk about something. After the movie and eating some ice cream when I called Uber over time my phone died and we weren't at the right place so the Uber cancelled. So after some stuff my mom decided to pick us up I guess after my bro tried to download Uber or whatever. I'm grateful for her for picking us up and told her it was because I didn't charge my phone all the way and that I should of been prepared. Even though these days it's been dying quick. Seriously I was stressed out and paranoid but I'm supposedly better now.

Now back to the movie.

Yeah I seriously thought it was okay. But again as time went on especially when I was in the shower I kind of gotten more angry.

I'll admit it made me laugh or whatever quite a bit. Even though I think I didn't understand some jokes. In fact I've been thinking I seriously agree. I'm a causal fan of the MCU and you know what the film weirdly feels like that. This film seriously feels like a R rated MCU film in a way. Especially while I like humor but the thing is this being a Predator film. While yes some serious moments but especially towards the ending. Their was a lot of humor. Honestly my theater laughed a lot.

The action was pretty excellent on quite some parts. I felt some parts should of been more brutal but that's just me. Especially just the action works most of the time.

Now the characters especially the Loonies basically all of them. They were enjoyable, they had their moments. But they were some nice characters to see interact with each other.

Henry Jackman's score was great in some parts too or whatever. I also liked those nods to the score of the original Predator.

Now really I wanna get to the negative parts and.....I forgot to talk about this.

Before this movie I was thinking of the worse. Especially what I was gonna say. I was gonna say this shit and I'm gonna tell you this stuff.

I was thinking of saying shit like I'd wouldn't just have Zack Snyder work on a Predator film or AVP. But I'd also would rather have the likes of Rebecca Sugar and the Crewinverse(Steven Universe), Ian Jones Quartey(OK KO Let's Be Heroes), Matt Burnett(Craig Of The Creek), Craig McCracken(Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends) and shit even Alex Hirsch(Gravity Falls) even if I don't like his work much. I'd rather have these folks. Or shit even thought of these Michael Bay which would be horrible so God no or Collin Trevorrow and I like him.

Also shit like Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is better then this, The Meg is better then this and I personally liked those films. Especially the Sonic movie next year will be better then this crap.

Even after seeing this movie....I weirdly feel like that. Especially yeah I'd would weirdly rather trust some cartoon creators then what Shane Black did.

I'm gonna be talking big spoilers especially what they did it being Shane Black aka Hawkins from the original Predator film. Also after the Zack Snyder mention my bro and his friend just being weird wearing purge light up masks they went after quite a lot of seconds.

Basically with the humor being a bit much. But it's the biggest thing that pisses me off. Especially I was thinking I'm feeling what Alien fans went through with Alien Covenant.

The idea that the Yautja in this movie even with fun little easter eggs like shots of Diablo(which they some what have) and Ghost. But the idea of making the story about the Yautja are not a species and this is basically hinted for all, the sport and honor is not a thing. It's thrown away with this stupid bullshit that they want to evolve as a species but hybridization being the answer to their survival. Especially the spinal cords of the strongest is where they get them at. Despite the fucking fact even the first film and even Predator 2 is referenced shows they are a clan based society. Also the idea that they wanna invade our planet so it could be their new home.

This is bullshit. Especially as the last half of the movie goes.

So Rory our autistic 12 year old kid. The fact they seriously fucking say that being on the spectrum is the next step in evolution....are you fucking kidding me. Especially I'm an autistic person. Listen all autistics are different. But seeing it for myself that the Upgrade/Assassin Predator wants to take this kids spine. The idea of that is so fucking crazy that I thought no offense to autistic people it would make the Upgrade go fucking insane in ways if he was even successful.

I'll be honest I'm shit at writing autistic characters. Especially their have been stupid ideas from me. Including I want more representation of people like me in more media. But when it's treated like this I don't know. The idea of treating it like a super power like people have said. I honestly don't want to see something like this in a film like this ever again. Unless it's dealt with respect but maybe it's just me and it was a kid. But I basically hated it I'm sorry. I'm not trying to sound like a SJW or say we shouldn't have autistic representation. Especially Rory was alright but seriously never again.

Also the film is paced too quick and for some reason while it helps in the end this fucking Predator dog is pretty alright with our characters.

Including the fucking ending. While it seriously feels like an MCU film but seriously if I remember correctly I was just disappointed seeing what I read about. I think my mouth was opened and I was just shocked with disappointment or whatever by the Iron Man like Predator suit seriously called The Predator Killer.

Especially what's amazing it seriously looks or remind me of that Mecha Predator idea I had.

What was interesting after the movie ended I actually talked with my bro and his friend about the movie. While not going extremely deep. But I told them about how I didn't wanna see this film because of Shane changing the lore. Yet for some reason my brother said this stupid shit twice that I should try new things. But that's bullshit because he didn't understand what I was talking about.

Including I mentioned the scene with the first Predator. Basically the Fugitive Predator was the best thing of the movie or something. Even if it had human dna but it was more of a Yautja then the fucking Upgrade Predator.

You know even though I said this film was okay. But this film is basically not a Predator film. It's just using the species as some sort of placeholder. Because what I witnessed wasn't a Predator film.

Too much humor while funny but some humor was weird or maybe off not needed, the ending, some of the writing especially some moments that weren't needed. Especially some stupid fucking dialogue or whatever. Also Fox indeed cut out shit and they seriously did reshoot stuff I remember the old set photos with Yautja wearing military pants and teaming up with humans bunch of shit was different which I basically remembered.

But those fucking lore changes. I'm gonna say while AVP2R isn't my favorite at least that respected the Yautja lore. Including as such a big fan of these creatures you don't fucking do that.

I'd don't give a shit if people are tired of hunt films I'd rather have more of those instead of this. I almost said this instead of those uck. Especially I'd rather stick with ideas of mine and other expanded lore that doesn't treat the Yautja mythos like shit. Seriously I'd rather I've been thinking of it and it couldn't be in line with the Alien timeline or maybe. I'd rather have some story where all of Earth knows of the Yautja probably because of Bad Blood's fucking up. People on Earth shit themselves and prepare to be ready but the Yautja still hunt on Earth despite it's more difficult now.

Especially the Upgrade/Assassin Predator isn't a real Yautja. Real Yautja are ones like Diablo(Predator 1), Ghost(Predator 2), Scar(AVP1), Wolf(AVP2R), Broken Tusk(AVP original comics), Scarface(Predator Concrete Jungle game), Prince(AVP2 2001) and many more. Even the Bad Blood(Predator Bad Blood) is even a real Yautja despite being a psychopath.

I think I've said enough.

∞Guardians commentary time, because I was honestly too wiped out to get to it last night but I’m still very up for it now. 

1. So here’s my question about the opening sequence on Morag. If Ronan had hired the people that faced off with Quill in the opening sequence on Morag, was it just the case that Ronan’s men arrived 2.5 minutes too late, like Peter arrived just early enough to beat out Yondu? Because initially my impression was that they were indigenous and guarding it, but I know now that not to be the case because Korath is very much a devotee of Ronan, etc. But even if it is the case that Peter beat Ronan’s people, holy timing Batman. Seriously kudos to Quill for being even if incidentally two steps ahead of even Ronan’s game. 2. Okay one, Nova Prime Irani Rael is a hot piece and two she definitely deserves to be the girlfriend of General Leia Organa you can disagree with me but that makes you a suspect human being. Anyway, Rael making the diplomatic call to the Kree to denounce Ronan was not out of bounds for normal statecraft. Especially with a new and tenuous alliance, she’s not only right in calling bullshit that the Kree empire has said nothing to denounce Ronan, but she’s also right in advising they make a statement to stabilize their early peace because early peace is amazingly fragile. But like way to not maintain an alliance at all Kree Empire. You suck. 3. The actual diversity of felons on the Kyln is pretty neat, I’m not going to lie. Not just interspecies representation but also body type representation. There’s big very obviously non-straight criminals. There’s cool as shit looking alien species. There’s chubby feminine looking criminals! Tell me who they are Marvel! Tell me. 4. Now that Thanos’ real character has been revealed in the course of IW it is no damn wonder why Thanos thought of Ronan as a petulant child. Granted, Thanos’ logic is worse in that it is slightly better, but by comparison Thanos is an overly dire pragmatist were Ronan is very much just a racist bigot with a power complex. Thanos predictably find’s Ronan’s racial shortsightedness pithy, and I really have zero doubt that if Ronan had actually gone to piss on Thanos’ front lawn he would not have lasted long. 5. On the other hand, really Thanos. #1 piece of advice in the universe is don’t torture and dismantle women and then trust them to be complicit. You will die. 6. If anyone doesn’t feel pelvic sorcery during a close listening to Fooled Around & Fell In Love they are definitely soulless. 7. I also really really want to know what the hell they were drinking on Knowhere that got Rocket and Drax drunk (I mean who knows they might both be lightweights but I doubt it.), because Stephen wants some. 8. I’ll come right out and say it it’s a fucking shame that Tivan’s collection gets blown to hell. Not because Tivan isn’t twisted as hell keeping live specimens and slaves to himself, but more on the “holy crap what cool stuff just got destroyed that the universe will never see again” kind of way. It’s like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, only somehow worse. 9. The nods given to Thor: The Dark World and The Avengers are of course interesting given there’s a Dark Elf and a Chitauri, but I’m super curious about what made those particular specimens of each special enough for Tivan to keep them. Tivan deals with the depths and breadths of the universe coming in and out of Knowhere, and he doesn’t just snag one item from every species or race he comes across. So was there something interesting in particular about that Dark Elf and that Chitauri? Was the Chitauri one of the only remaining survivors after the nuclear explosion? Was the Dark Elf one of Malekith’s higher ups? I’m just curious about them, and curious about Tivan’s reasoning for keeping them. 10. Okay but adding to this whole Tivan’s collection tangent, Cosmo the Space dog cracks me up and not just because it’s funny for Tivan to have a doggie cosmonaut in his collection. Cosmo is a legit character in the Guardians comics, and he’s head of security on Knowhere and telepathic. So even if Tivan is keeping him in his collection or is just trying to keep him out of the way for something, just imagine what it’s like having an angry Russian dog thinking at you all the time because you’re getting in the way of him doing his job. 11. Slightly different bend on the Tivan train, but Carina legitimately just heard Tivan talk about how the stone was capable of destroying even a whole group of people who tried to wield it, and she was still willing to take the risk of being incinerated rather than living with her current conditions. Carina wasn’t resolutely making the hero play - she was making a suicide play knowing full well it would end that way if the hero play didn’t work. 12. When Yondu states that Peter doesn’t give a rip about Terra like. Dude. How many fucking references in this movie has he made to Terran culture? Music and movies and art and holy shit would you look at that, he sure as hell talks like a more culturally integrated human than anything else you twat waffle. Great way to piss him off though and get him to play it your way, which granted is what I think Yondu was probably doing the whole time but still. You don’t look at this boy who idolizes Footloose and knows who Jackson Pollock is and tell him he doesn’t care about Earth. Caring about Footloose and Jackson Pollock at all is a labor of love. 13. Speaking of Yondu, how the fuck is that the jewel frog bauble considered by anyone to be worth of the “high end” community? On top of it just hurting me, it does really raise the question of how is trite crap like that so valuable? Does it have some vector of worth and rarity because its origins are weird, obscure, or finite? Are the gems magical artifacts of some kind? Are the wealthy in space that mother-fucking self-ironic? Because if they are I want to know them. 14. Peter Quill, everyone, who makes a dick message to garner trust 15. Not for the first for for the last time will I say this, but Ravager tech is impressive. And I am amazingly intrigued at how Ravagers got such good technology and resources on their hands. True, they steal things and make money off of trades and pilfering. But that isn’t the only way to acquire goods and it’s not the only thing a viable pirating economic model can survive off of. Half the reason the Ravagers succeed is because they run like a business, have clientele, and are clientele for certain sects, right? So what kind of powerful connections do they have that allow them their advanced fleets? That’s the kind of shit I want to know about. 16. Also what the hell are Ronan’s pilots with the weird glowy psychic spheres on the Dark Aster? Is the Dark Aster itself Kree technology, or something Ronan got from Thanos who appropriated it from some other world he’s conquered? Because we know so little about the Kree in the MCU it’s hard to say, but I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if the Kree ever do become a part of canon so we can have more data with which to make a comparison. 17. Guardians does a pretty good job of taking at least some time to portray how terrible aerial dogfighting is on a mass scale because honestly it’s a bloody nightmare. It’s pictured so often and so carelessly in film that it’s not something we often think about, and the only movie I’ve ever seen that addresses how it feels in human terms is Dunkirk, but the intensity and messiness of it in Guardians is still pretty realistic and I give it props for that. 18. It occurs to me that maybe the younger, post-GOTG Groot is so bitter and antisocial for a while because of how giving the elder Groot was, and the seedling felt the sacrifice and his existence was under-appreciated? It was just a thought that crossed my mind. 19. Also Ronan you twat. “Engage Immolation Initiative” is just Big Mean & Fancy for “light ‘em up fuckers,” don’t pretend you’re any cooler than anyone else. 20. I really really appreciate the design that went into the Xandarian cityscape as a fully intergalactic multicultural society that shows it even in the way the city and buildings are assembled. The city isn’t uniform like a lot of science-fiction cities are - it’s got texture. Different sectors have different styles of buildings and different architecture. Like a real metropolitan area, it’s a patchwork of influences and it’s very well done. 21. Kudos to Rocket for identifying that ground-to-air is a super viable defense strategy. One thing that people tend to forget about ground-to-air is that aside from clouds, there’s no obstacles behind which to hide in the sky, so while ground defense might seem clumsy at times, air offense is hugely precarious because there is absolutely no defense mechanism against any attack except maneuvering, and when a defense is fully able to target that weakness it’s pretty damn effective. 22. It’s interesting to me how well superhero movies integrate climaxes within battle sequences? Some people might call it lazy but I call it interesting when when defense lines break, plans fail, and when teams encounter interference to push the plot forward. Plot movement in Marvel movies curry a lot of momentum from these events, but actually they’re pretty interesting replications of how modern society has been built on the results of such events within our own history. History has been moved by these exact same sorts of events, which is why they make sense to us in storytelling. 23. Peter protecting Groot from Rocket’s crash into the into the Dark Aster? Golden. And then Peter immediately going to Rocket from the wreckage? Stellar. Peter Quill you are a gem. 24. I will never forgive Marvel for hurting me as bad with “We are Groot” as Warner Brothers did with “Suuuuuperman” in Iron Giant. Stop giving Vin Diesel more opportunities to rip my heart out of my chest, please. 25. My mom and my uncle, her brother, both adored the entire GOTG soundtrack so much and it brought them so much joy watching it together that it got me into Motown. Even though it was oblique and dorky, Marvel did something amazing with this movie and gave my parents a piece of their own youth back, while giving me a chance to share in their knowledge and experience. It’s stuck with me ever since, especially because fundamentally that experience is the reason I got into Motown music, which I now adore with all my heart.

Alright, done with that. These are... just getting longer and longer I’m sorry guys no one should have ever allowed me to do this. Oh well. Too late to stop me now. Captain America: The Winter Solider is up next, and oh the pain.∞

Not sure if ya’ll have noticed but talks about representation in superhero comics has been ever so slightly popular these days.

 Sarcasm deactivated.

 In all seriousness, yes there should be more though I have problems with certain approaches adopted by Marvel and to a lesser extent DC in recent years and the way a lot of fans have handled the situation on both sides.

 Like saying Miles Morales shouldn’t exist is not okay but nor is saying Peter Parker should be shelved for his sake. Writing Titania in Jane Foster’s book as having solidarity with Jane because she’s a woman stepping into the role of a male hero is not okay (because seriously, Titania’s main enemy is goddam She Hulk and she despises her) but nor is saying sexist shit about Jane (who lest we forget was awesome long before she became Thor, arguably moreso).

 But most of the time I personally feel disabled and mentally ill characters don’t get talked about as much whenever discussions like this pop up. Representing women, black people, gay people, etc, etc happens all the time but not so much with disabled and mentally ill characters.

 What’s even stranger though is that on the occasions where those types of characters are discussed people seem to not recognize a lot of the ones among the classic established heroes. 

 Oracle, Daredevil and Xavier get brought up a fair amount but Tony Stark had a heart condition that early in his series required him to hide a great big metal chest plate under his clothes which then compromized his former playboy lifestyle. Among the truly mainstream and major Marvel/DC heroes Tony Stark genuinely was the first physically handicapped hero (unless I’m getting my dates mixed up and X-Men preceded him, even then though Xaiver was a mentor more than the lead). 

 As for mentally ill characters, whilst people will cite Deadpool and Harley Quinn as mentally ill protagonists within the Big Two (and you could arguably put Wolverine in there too due to his legitimate anger issues, though they are contextualized as part of his bad ass appeal so...maybe not) both those characters are fun, wacky, violent former villains who even when they aren’t on the side of evil still do amoral things. They’re mental illnesses are rarely treated with too much gravitas. In fairness their core concepts is for them to be wacky and fun (at least nowdays) so it would be possible in a debate to argue there is a certain amount of justification for not going too deep with their problems and touching them lightly.

 Meanwhile you have Tony Stark and Carol Danvers who are both alcoholics. And if you know anything about that illness (and it IS an illness) you know it’s not one you really cure so much as manage. 

However multiple runs of Iron Man since the iconic Demon in a Bottle storyline have at best touched upon it rather or else avoided it altogether. From what I’ve seen of Bendis’ run it’s mentioned but off handily and wasn’t a focus before Tony died. Maybe creatively you could justify that too but technically speaking Tony is a mentally illl hero due to that illness so if you want representation viola it’s right there if writers bothered to make use of it outside of showing him relapse or something. 

 The same is true of Carol Danvers except in her case it’s worse because you could be forgiven for simply being wholesale unaware Carol was ever an alcoholic since multiple runs don’t even bring it up (I suspect because people legitimately forgot). Nevertheless the female hero Marvel is most keen to promote and who will be getting her own movie soon enough is canonically mentally ill. That should be brought up more but I can see why people who ARE aware of it might not want to count her because like I said it’s hardly touched upon.

 Which is why the next character I’m going to talk about is so important.

 He’s never been a legitimate villain.

 His mental illness(es) are integral to his character and impossible to ignore because of that fact.

 He’s got a history of physical and emotional abuse which led to his illnesses and isn’t thrown out as cheap backstory or motivations for his character.

 His illnesses have been showcased to ostracize him from wider society who often fear, hate and hound him either out of a desire to exploit him or else because they simply do not understand him. Which sadely echoes the experiences of a lot of mentally ill people.

 He’s portrayed sympathetically with the hardships and tragedy of coping with mental illnesses showcased routinely (albeit often on a metaphorical and not strictly accurate level).

 And most importantly he’s been repeatedly showcased as a truely heroic and caring figure in spite of his illnesses, even using them for the benefit of society as a whole when given the opportunity and right help.

 I am in fact referring to...the Hulk.

 Bruce Banner canonically was physically and emotionally abused by his father and developed serious anger issues and issues of self-worth because of that treatment. All of which led to him eventually developing Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder or more commonly referred to as having a ‘split personality’; and INCORRECTLY referred to as schizophrenia.

  That’s not me interpreting anything or extrapolating either. That is an objective in-universe canonical FACT about the character. In fact he first ‘hulked out’ when he got mad and attacked his father...BEFORE he encountered any gamma bombs. In one iconic issue he even tried to resolve his problems via therapy where the different sides to his personality were integrated together.

 Whilst it involved superheroics and super powers and happened after ONE session that is the real life goal when it comes to helping most people who have DID/MPD.

 Whilst there is so much to talk about with canon Hulk let’s just use the MCU as a microcosm of the Hulk’s character.

 Bruce Banner in the MCU is so depressed over his condition (which involved being incapable of physical intimacy and constantly monitoring his stress levels) that he tried to commit suicide...only to discover he was physically incapable of doing so due to the Hulk’s healing factor.

 As Banner he wants to find a cure for himself and as Hulk he wants nothing but peace and solitude. But he gets neither because representatives of the government seek to exploit him and neutralize him as a threat as opposed to trying to HELP him. And the guy spearheading things is straight up an old guy who doesn’t want Banner ‘consorting with his daughter’.

 At any given time for reasons beyond his control Banner can become dangerous to those around him despite not wanting to truly hurt anybody, and yet he has been shown to be capable of managing his illness for altruistic ends, such as defeating the Abomination.

 When given help and support from the Avengers (who with his CONSENT employ mental exercises and when NECESARRY use non-lethal equipment to keep him under control) he’s been shown to be an invaluable force for good. His brains help resolve dilemmas and provide vital intelligence and as Hulk he is the Avengers’ biggest gun against physical threats.

 Which is why Age of Ultron was so heartbreaking. Once more he got exploited and hurt people without meaning to, looked upon in fear and scorn as a monster by those who just don’t understand him. So distraught was he that he opted to just go back into isolation.

 Of course Banner’s condition doesn’t realistically line up with real people who have MPD but when understood the character exists for drama and also deals with anger issues the character is actually an incredibly (heh) well constructed character and the legitimate (though relative) representation he provides should be celebrated.

 In fact I would argue it’s actually MORE important than the Asian representation Amadeus Cho provides because there are definitely more Asian protagonist characters than mentally ill ones. And also, though this sounds harsh...being Asian isn’t as compromising to your day-to-day quality of life as the kinds of illnesses that Banner/Hulk are analogous too.

 Of course that isn’t saying we shouldn’t have more of both but...taking away one character who represents an even more marginalized group who frankly suffers in worse ways (even if wider pop culture fails to appropriately recognize him as representing those people) for the sake of a group that comparatively speaking has it better is not a good thing. It’s made worse when you consider the shitty way Hulk was treated just before and during Civil War II.

 Bottom line: Let’s celebrate the old characters who represent mentally ill and disabled people more than we do and not throw them under the bus for other characters...especially the Hulk.

5/9-15: Went Chicagoan Jewish for a Day (or not really) (aka ‘antek-antek Yahudi!’ as some jerk would say)

33rd WEEK, MAY 9-15, 2016.

Many exciting things happened this week.

But I have the right to prioritize which one deserves to be mentioned first.

This Thursday, I finally (finally) watched Captain America: Civil War.

And if you’re reading this blog for quite some time, it can be seen that I am sort of a hardcore MCU fangirl. At least compared to my friends.

I just died watching the movie. Imagine my heart is an egg and the movie screenwriters and actors were some extremely good scrambled egg makers.

I just can’t.

I cussed and swore so much during the movie, even though I was there by myself (actually—it’s because I was there by myself), and just being emotional in my own little world. By the time the movie was over entirely, I didn’t even have the mood for anything. I was either about to explode or just melt and let myself washed away to the drain and to the Puget Sound. And never come back again.

Huh. I wish my fangirl fellow Darin or Ica was here. They have been the only ones qualified enough to talk the shit out of any marvel movies with me. We can handle each other, and other people, apparently, just can’t handle or understand me being emotionally overwhelmed over some fictional stuff.

Anyway.

Summer is approaching, and on Wednesday the 11th the day hit the thermostat a good 26 Celcius, so after school I went to Capitol Hill and bought myself an unapologetic cup of frozen yogurt across the street from Seattle Central.

However, the highlight of the week, like with almost all cases, came on the weekend.

Karen’s nephew, Gabe, was having his bar mitzvah that weekend. Good news: his family, of course, invited Karen and her family over for it. Good news #2: Karen’s sister and her family lived in Chicago, IL.

Hell yeah! It’s not everyday you can go to big cities like Chicago (unless, well, you live in or nearby Chicago) AND go to a bar mitzvah (unless, well, you happen to have a lot of Jewish relative or friends).

For those who haven’t known, bar mitzvah (or bat mitzvah, for female) is a coming-of-age ritual, meaning a ritual that marks a young person’s transition from being a child to being an adult, that is practised by the Jews—

“Jews?!”

—is probably what your response would be if you’re a typical, religiously conservative Indonesian Muslim who credit most of your knowledge to controversial-titled articles on Facebook that are shared by friends from exclusively your own circle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I’m not supposed to talk about my tolerant/intolerant country in this entry, so let’s get back to my main point.

Gabe here was 13 years old, so, in order to mark his coming to adulthood, a bar mitzvah was held. Let’s say... uhm, a bar mitzvah is an equivalent to Indonesian ‘khitanan’, a ritual after a boy’s circumcision to celebrate his first steps to adulthood.

Karen and Eric and I left Seattle in the afternoon, which means I had to leave school a couple hours earlier to catch the plane. After we arrived, we rented a car and drove to the hotel. Later at night, I finally met Ayesha, Karen’s mother, and us four spent some time talking.

Saturday morning, we went to Downtown Chicago to have breakfast and walk around. We crossed the Chicago River and passed by the Trump Tower. But our main destination was Millenium Park.

You see, when I thought of Chicago, I thought about this particular piece of art I wanted to see for myself. It was this sculpture, sitting right in the middle of the park. The sculpture has a power to amaze everyone who sees it, and at the same time providing a new perspective to see the Chicago skyline and the buildings surrounding it. Designed by an Indian-British artist Anish Kapoor in 2004, the stainless-steel sculpture was initially and officially named “Cloud Gate”. Thanks to public’s creativity and appreciation of its shape, the sculpture is more widely known as... The Bean.

To be fair, it DOES look like a bean. However, I felt somewhat sorry for the artist that had surely thought about the philosophy behind the name Cloud Gate and how the name will inspire people and all that. But I guess the first time people saw the sculpture, they went “oh, it looks like a giant bean!” hence the name.

Think about nicknames that you give to your friends or that have been given to you by your friends. It’s like how a person is named Richard, but everyone just end up calling him Dick. Or a name as pretty as Zahra but everyone end up calling her Ijah. Or something like that. There are indeed some people in my school who are so widely known by their nicknames, anyone hardly know what their real, birth names are.

However, in any way, The Bean (or Cloud Gate, whatever) is so pretty, no matter the weather. It can be sunny or cloudy and it still manages to reflect the whole scenery around it perfectly.

And right under the bean structure was ever crazier. The structure was bent and shaped in such a way that it provided multiple reflections of you in different forms, like a kaleidoscope. Looking at it was hypnotizing, and making me dizzy if I stared at it for too long.

Oh, and it’s cool that I could see the photographer in the picture because he was reflected by the bean behind me. Ehe.

Then we moved to the next block, the next cool thing about the city, the Art Institute of Chicago. (which is what we could cram in a day of Chicago) More than a place where people study—like the sound ‘Institute’ gives—it was more like a museum, like the Met. It had everything in there, for real.

I would say that the Met has more complete collection than Art Institute of Chicago just because the Met is more famous and the whole building is probably as vast as my neighborhood back home, but AIC contained a lot of artefacts and other kinds of old stuff from different times and places, like Ancient Greece and Roman Empire. There were also extensive collections from the Middle East during the rise of Islam, from India, Africa, China, and Europe, with artefacts related to their respective culture and certain religion the region was dominated by.

I’m a statue person, and most likely not a painting person. Seriously, though, my art senses are probably dull enough that I don’t enjoy paintings as much as people do in general (especially those of abstract paintings). Thus, what I did when Eric and Karen and pretty much everyone in the room were philosophically and emotionally connected to an acrylic representation of grass, I took pictures of them.

Alright. Time to bail as evening was approaching and we needed to be at Karen’s sister’s house for dinner before the ceremony. Karen told me to dress real formal—because maybe last time they took me to a formal event—that was a wedding—I wore a cardigan over a long-sleeved shirt and—wait for it—a pair of sneakers. Karen made sure I did NOT wear sneakers (or shirts) for the bar mitzvah, and thus, left me with the only acceptable shoes I had: a painful pair of high high heels. It was black and fancy and I looked good in it, but it was for sure after the event I decided to throw those elegant representation of hell.

When we got to the venue, it became clearer that it was indeed a black tie event. Good thing about having a dinner party with the Jews: kosher food! Kosher is like food guidelines for Jews, the same way us Muslims categorize food and beverages into halal or not halal. Now, I don’t know the full scope of what makes a food or beverage kosher, but I do know that both kosher and halal guidelines strictly and entirely prohibit swine (or any kind of pig product), and that is good enough for me in this kind of situation.

Quick tip: when you’re in the US and is really self-conscious about your belief in halal diet, if you can’t find a proven halal food, look for kosher ones. (especially for products in packaging like salt or biscuits and such kinds, finding a kosher mark in the packaging is good enough if you can’t find products with halal mark on it)

After dinner we moved with our respective vehicles to the synagogue for the ceremony. Synagogue is a Jewish house of prayer. Before we entered the main room, the men were given this small head covering—that was so small it didn’t really cover the whole head—that I’d later figured is called a kippah. Gabe, the man of the hour, besides wearing a kippah himself, also wore a kind of prayer shawl called tallit.

(illustration--photography was not allowed during the ceremony--at least the one i attended)

During the ceremony, there were chants and songs—in Hebrew—but the main event was the reading of the Torah—big rolls of Jewish scriptures. Presumably just about everyone in the room paid attention to the reading but me, but to be honest it’s not even easy for me to concentrate when an imaam—the leader of a Muslim prayer, when done collectively—recites long verses of the Quran during prayers (being able to read and write Arabic doesn’t help when you can’t understand the language itself), let alone a set of long verses in Hebrew. So what does a girl with zero understanding of the Torah and a quite short attention span do during this time?

She decided to open the holy book in front of her seat and tried to decipher the Hebrew alphabet.

Prepare for a quick elaboration on her observation regarding Hebrew and its comparison to Arabic. (<--calon judul skripsi S1 Sastra Arab/Ibrani)

I guess now I understood why people who don’t understand Arabic see nothing but unreadable wiggly lines—even I’ve heard people said to me that all the scribbles look the same. It took a while for me to figure out that Hebrew and Arabic have pretty much the same system. (uhhh I don’t know how to explain this. But like in Arabic a letter needs to have an accent that serves as a vowel, in order for the letter to be readable. So, for instance, if there is a certain accent above the Arabic letter ‘s’, that accent’ll give an ‘aah’ sound so the letter will be read as ‘saa’. Another accent gives the ‘ooh’ sound, hence ‘soo’, and another gives the ‘eeh’ sound, hence ‘see’) (why am I suddenly giving Arabic lessons)

Anyway, it’s not exactly the same, but some letters in Hebrew, if accompanied by certain accents or additional wiggly line, will be read differently than without accents.

(I can’t give you an example) (because by the time we all got home in Seattle I already forgot the whole thing) (not that you asked for one anyway right)

(well, I guess it would be kind of cool if I preserved on deciphering Hebrew. Albeit the language itself I can’t understand, at least I can write things I don’t want people around me to know in Hebrew letters)

After the whole ceremony ended, we moved to another room, which was a vast hall, where we had dinner (again) and heard speeches and overall celebrated Gabe’s first step into adulthood. Pictures would’ve been cool, but photography weren’t allowed during such ceremony.

The next day, on a nice Chicago Sunday morning, all the family members gathered in a cafe for brunch. Got into some more talking with Karen’s extended family members, since I didn’t do so much talking during dinner the previous day.

It was quite a small place for such a big family and it wasn’t as easy to move around, but I got to one point where I met one of Karen’s family members (I forgot who, sorry) who happened to be the heart surgeon for Indonesia’s back-in-the-day famous General A.H. Nasution. (General Nasution was a member of the military who was lucky to escape the terror attack from rogue members of Indonesian Communist Party in 1965) (it took a while for me to figure out when he was telling me he did a surgery for Nasution, because apparently if you pronounced the name ‘Nasution’ the English way it sounds waaaaaay different than the Indonesian way)

As if it weren’t enough, I met Karen’s brother-in-law and he told me he’d met Indonesian former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Give me a break. I technically live closer to President SBY and I’ve never seen the guy live, or even General Nasution.

(well, probably NOT General Nasution, as the guy had died long ago)

We went back to the hotel and took off to the airport right after, Karen’s mom Ayesha came with us to the airport so she could tell me about my personality and prospect for the future through my birth date and place and chakra flow. Accompanied by good thick Chicago pizza. Mmm.

It wasn’t exactly a trip to Chicago a tacky tourist like me would expect because we barely got around Chicago, because it really isn’t a tacky tourist kind of trip, but a family event. Nonetheless, if I think wide and positive enough, chances of me visiting Chicago as a tacky tourist is bigger than chances of me attending a bar mitzvah. Therefore, one shall not remorse on being unable to explore Chicago, because one can always come back.

(aamiin)

(brb melamar jadi buruh cuci tetangga)

And I shit you not, the experience of attending a bar mitzvah is one of the most impressive point in my exchange year I will always remember. Thinking about the time where I could casually walk into a synagogue without being questioned (maybe Karen gave a heads-up to the family, I assume?), and imagining how a Jew—or anyone else, for that matter—should always be treated the same way if the situation were to be reversed.

Peace out.

Salam dari yang baru pakai high heels dua kali langsung dibuang,

Nabila Safitri.

@jilylicious had this on their profile so I'd figure I'd try it out. Relationship status: Single and not ready to mingle Lipstick or chapstick: I don't really use either. I use Burt's Bees lip stain though Last movie I watched: Captain America: Civil War become I'm marvel trash Last song I listened to: Selfish by Pnb Rock. I've never listened to that genre before but my brother was playing it and it's pretty good. Top three shows: Okay, number one is Person of Interest even though no one knows about it it's so good with great representation of poc and disabled and lgbt characters and just ugh, love it. Second is Friends because it helps with my anxiety and I may or may not have watched the entire series eight times. And third is probably Doctor Who because it kills me with emotions but it's do great and gives amazing messages. Top three ships: oh god, this is going to be hard. Ummmm.... Stucky (Steve x Bucky) from the mcu and omg so much gay it's so great it has ruined my life. And John Reese and Harold Finch (no good ship name ;( ) from Person of Interest. I swear to god that whole show is like a big gay fanfiction with explosions. But seriously, these two complete each other, give eachother a will to live. That's some powerful shit. And last is Hannigram (Hannibal x Will) from Hannibal. I haven't finished the show but this ship is just so fucking amazing. Gahhhhhh love it! And that's it folks! Holy cow, I rambled. Okay then. Anyways, feel free to do this too. And seriously, everyone should watch Person of Interest. Do it!