#Striker Wasp asks
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Into the Anthill pt 49 - Schism
Following in the footsteps of the X-Men comics, Avengers Academy had their own schism of sorts. Jocasta and Veil both went out of their way to say the academy was a dangerous waste of time and tried to poach Hank’s students for Briggs Chemical. Only two left (and they were minor characters at best) but Jocasta still tried to tear down everything Hank built and erase all of the campus systems to prove that his way of teaching was reckless and self-aggrandizing. She also criticized him for turning to the Avengers when times were hard and he needed support, but like. That’s literally what friends are for??
On the bright side: Ultron’s creation of Victor Mancha means Hank’s got another robot grandchild to hang out with now.
🐜🐜🐜
Avengers Origins: Ant-Man and the Wasp vol 1 #1
In this new version of Hank’s origin story his serum was denied funding because of the potential military applications and he met Janet on his way out of the committee hearing. Hank was chased out of his lab by a rat after his first time shrinking and he escaped the anthill by asking the first ant he encountered kindly for help. Jan asked him to dinner with her and her father where he admitted his plan to shift his focus to entomology. He consulted with Jan about the colors of his potential suit and within two months he’d suited up as Ant-Man. Jan asked if she could join him in his secret new hobby, but he told her no. He was still too raw from Maria’s death to let anyone get close to him yet.
Her father’s death happened as it did originally. Jan came to Hank for comfort and help, so he revealed his identity to her and swore to help. Jan had already figured out that he was Ant-Man and readily allowed him to subject her to the procedure that gave her her powers. She took the chemicals on her own to kill the Kosmosian once they arrived on the scene. The story ended with cheesy narration about how insect can’t love but these two can.
Needless to say, I thought this lacked the charm of his real 1960′s origins.
Venom vol 2 #14-15
Agent Venom, Red Hulk, Ghost Rider, and X-23 stopped Blackheart (Mephisto’s son) from turning Las Vegas into Hell on Earth. Captain America arrived once the battle was over to take the Venom symbiote into custody but Red Hulk vouched for him as a hero. Hank and Beast theorized that it could be kept under control, so Cap invited Flash to join the Secret Avengers. His symbiote would be kept in a secure facility until he needed it, at which time it would be shrunken down subatomically and sent via broadcast to whatever device he called from.
Avengers Academy vol 1 #23-28
In an effort to guarantee his future timeline, the impostor Reptil had Hybrid, a mutant/dire wraith hybrid, recruited to the academy. He kept his identity a secret and intended to have him kill all of the other students save for his close friends. After luring several students to him, Reptil had a change of heart and sounded the alarm to have everyone that was left fight Hybrid off. He brought back Humberto’s current psyche and Hank worked with Lightspeed to quickly assemble a door to Limbo to shove Hybrid into. Juston’s Sentinel delivered the final blow despite being broken down, apparently Jocasta’s doing. Adult Reptil’s last act was to call in Jocasta (who’d faked her death to observe the academy) and Veil to help. Jocasta claimed that this was further proof that Avengers Academy was a failed experiment and should be shut down.
Hank and Clint stopped her from dismantling all of their systems, but she still insisted on pitching Briggs Chemical as an alternate option for the students like Veil had chosen. The students were free to choose but only a few of the part-timers switched sides. After they left, Striker held a press conference to come out of the closet and The Runaways snuck in by disguising themselves as press.
The Runaways came to seek help finding Old Lace, their deinonychus who’d been lost in an alternate dimension. Victor Mancha had the idea to seek out the Avengers Academy for help and Hank agreed, rigging up a machine that used Reptil’s amulet and Nico’s staff to open a portal to Old Lace’s location. While they went out to rescue her, Nico discovered that Hank and Tigra planned to make Molly and Klara stay at the academy since they were so young. The teams briefly came to blows, but the Academy students quickly took the Runaways’ side and stopped. Nico cast a spell that allowed all of them to understand each other and they came to the agreement that Molly and Klara would at least take a robot Hank loaded with educational material. He offered Victor a place in their team if he ever wanted it and the two parted on good terms when he left with the Runaways once more.
Minor/Cameo appearances from this period:
Avengers Origins: Vision vol 1 #1
Avengers Origins: Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver vol 1 #1
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Jeanne Foucault: The A in Avengers stands for Autistic
[Long post warning]
I really enjoyed recently re-reading Avengers Academy, and in particular it reawakening my love for the character Jeanne Foucault, AKA Finesse.
If you’ve never read the series, Finesse is basically a teenage girl version of Taskmaster. (In fact it’s alluded that he’s her biological father.) Meaning she can duplicate the physical skills of anything she sees. She’s also like a sponge when it comes to learning just about anything academic.
In #2, Jeanne questions if she's on the autism spectrum when reflecting on her inability to understand emotions, but is doubtful as she says she doesn’t display other signs... except she does. I guess she just does not recognize this. And it’s also why I’m really not happy with how she was used and her depiction in The Unstoppable Wasp.
“I’m an expert at everything. Except what I need to get through every day for the rest of my life.”
As said above, Jeanne outright identifies herself as having Alexithymia. (She even uses that exact word.) She does not understand emotions very well; those of others or her own. This includes recognizing emotion through faces, though she ends up teaching herself a little of this by memorizing things in a scientific fashion. That, and flash cards.
“I have difficulty with emotions as well. I’ve constructed flash cards.”
(//Cue the war flashbacks of high school special ed)
However, this does not mean she is an emotionless rock. It just means she doesn’t understand her own feelings, nor is she very good at expressing them.
Reptil: Uh... How do you feel about it?
Finesse: I don’t know.
Jeanne really struggles with social interaction and forming friendships. The biggest reason is that she often misinterprets what her peers mean, takes things as literal, and isn’t a good judge of when to speak and when to not.
Reptil: Okay, Hazmat... just for the sake of argument, what if I’d had a girl in my room?
Finesse: Unlikely. I read the report on your escape from Norman Osborn’s research facility. In it, you indicated you’d never kissed a girl.
Mettle: Oh no she didn’t.
Striker: Dude, really, it’s not like anyone’s surprised.
Finesse: I don’t understand, Veil. Statistically, it’s not unusual for a sixteen-year-old--
Veil: Maybe not, but no sixteen-year-old boy wants anyone to know that.
Veil explains here that what Jeanne said humiliated Humberto, because despite it being perfectly normal and expectant that he not have much experience with women at still a young age, social customs (see: toxic masculinity) makes that a taboo thing to actually say. This is something that Jeanne does not understand.
Reptil: I’m supposed to be class leader. I should never have let this happen.
Finesse: Yes, you shouldn’t have. You displayed no leadership whatsoever.
Reptil: Go to hell.
Finesse: Reptil, I was agreeing with you!
In another example, Jeanne attempts to get along with Humberto by agreeing with what he is saying, but this is a situation where he does not want someone to agree with him, (what people really want to hear when they say things like this is for you to say nice things to them, to make them feel better,) and that’s why he’s angry. But she doesn’t understand that.
Another method she uses besides flashcards is observing the way others interact and trying her best to replicate it in order to fit in and make the teachers like her. Unsure of how to approach Pym, she copies Veil’s behaviour towards Justice--whom she has a ‘schoolgirl crush’ on. Pym quickly shuts this down.
Jeanne doesn’t understand why this would make Vance like Maddy but Hank not like her, also displaying trouble instinctively remembering such a thing as circumstantial differences.
While she does not normally let it get the best of her, she also has social anxiety when everyone at once looks to her expectantly for answers:
“Why did I hesitate when they asked my opinion? I knew what the best strategy was. Was it because they were all looking at me? This is ridiculous. I understand the mechanisms of psychology. My fellow students’ self-hate... the tension between our instructors... all so obvious.”
The first friendship Jeanne ever forms is with Laura Kinney. Their friendship really warms my heart, actually; it starts off out of them both finding it hard to relate to the other students, and they end up meshing really well. That they are both so direct and straightforward is like a breath of fresh air for each other. Not to mention the whole shared “I’m feeling really angsty so I’m gonna beat up some shit” thing.
Laura: People tell me I must determine what I want. Irrespective of others. Then they seek to direct my actions.
Finesse: Contradictory behaviour. I find it off-putting.
Laura: As do I.
Finesse: I have worked to expand my knowledge base, in hopes it would help me understand.
Laura: Has it?
Finesse: No.
I have to say, I really didn’t like how things ended between them. I can understand Laura being angry over Jeanne initially lying to her, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that Jeanne using Laura’s claws while she was unconscious to take out the bad guy as being the same as the scientists who used her as a weapon. It felt kind of contrived to me. But I digress.
Jeanne does not have a strong desire to socialize, and is often voluntarily alone--it’s one of the first thing she says when introduced actually, that she’s not there to make friends but to train--but that doesn’t mean she does not wish it was easier for her to do so. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t try so hard to learn what comes naturally to others. What is also really telling of this is how the series ends with her walking through the school, witnessing her classmates happily socializing, then sits down next to Pietro--the only person left in the school she feels connected to, as he kind of takes her under his wing--and quietly cries. This is also the first time we see her allow herself to do so. Pietro ends up comforting her by telling her that her life will get better.
Jeanne’s memory is not just superior with her superpowers of copying others abilities, but can also perfectly recall conversations she’s previously had, or events she’s witnessed.
Finesse: That’s the first time you’ve called him “my father.” Not “Magneto.”
Quicksilver: That’s ridiculous. You expect me to believe you recall every conversation--
Finesse: In perfect detail. And no. You’ve never called him your father before. Our sessions are making you realize how impressive he was, aren’t they?
Jeanne is very intense in just about everything. She will spend hours in training until she deems things perfect. This may also be tied with the fact that she isn’t fully sure what is actually ever expected of her, and only guesses at this. Even in mid conversation, she tries to put things together as to what she is supposed to say as it goes.
It is unfortunate that Jeanne is not always treated the best by others because of her neurodivergence. Striker describes her as having a voice like a “Discovery Channel narrator” (yet another characteristic being that she does not speak in a way that is considered ‘proper’) and then goes onto call her “Rain Man meets Ninja Assassin.” When Striker says that she’s annoying, Jeanne says she doesn’t care, grows bored with the conversation and leaves.
Even the instructors treat her differently; Iron Fist, when visiting the class, tells her that she needs to learn how to be more human, (insinuating that because she thinks differently, she is less than,) and Jeanne reflects on how the teachers look at her different, and interprets this as them being afraid of her.
The fact that Jeanne is placed in this school where she knows the teachers all think they’re going to be the next super-villains really plays into her wondering if she is a psychopath, even though she instantly rejects this in her inner monologue a minute later. And indeed, if you want to look at the whole Hare Psychopathy Checklist shebang, she would only score a 5 at the absolute most. Jeanne is not a psychopath, but it’s not unusual for people with ASD to be rudely and ignorantly called such, to the point of fearing it ourselves despite knowing better. And that is what Jeanne does in the above situation.
Also somewhat in line with this: there is a difference between being confident and being arrogant. I’ll never stop being tired of seeing female characters get called arrogant for simply not being insecure about their looks or abilities.
It’s also important to stress that Jeanne’s character is not the result of her time with Norman Osborne, either. Even as a young child, she experienced all of these things, and was ostracized by her classmates.
“So while I could pick up any skill I was exposed to... what I mostly got... was cruelty. Fear. And I started mimicking that. Giving it back. But in the process, isolating myself.”
This all culminates into why I was disappointed to see Jeanne written the way she was in The Unstoppable Wasp. Suddenly she was nothing but a lackey to make quips at and fight Nadia; if I didn’t know any better, she’d been replaced with a skrull or something, because she was basically an entirely different character. She certainly could have been replaced with any stock one. I was paranoid actually, that the implication was that she was “cured” after graduating from Avengers Academy, or if she was trying to replicate the behaviour of others in order to present as neurotypical for some reason... but as I’ve not too long ago discovered, sometimes my desire to find answers to why questions goes beyond that of the writers own thoughts. Sometimes it’s just bad.
I’m most definitely not going to hail Avengers Academy as the pinnacle of autism representation, especially when you also have characters like Veil saying that she’s using her powers to work on “curing” it. But it’s a desert out there for superheroes canonically confirmed to be on the autism spectrum, and of the extremely few I can think of, they’re all men.
I’d love to see Finesse in more things, and would really love to have a direct confirmation about her ASD, rather than just dancing around it, mostly in the form of insults. (See: the Rain Man comment above.) But as it stands, if you’ve never read the Avengers Academy series and this post peaked your interest, I recommend checking it out. There are more characters than just Jeanne who are pretty cool. But she’s got a special place in my heart.
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Crew of the Damned Doradus
Everyone has skeletons in their closets and Star Seekers have a cargo bay full of them. Everyone is here for one reason or another, whether their petty crooks looking for their next paycheck, wanted criminals who are running from the law, fighting for a lost cause, searching for something better than what life handed them, or just here for the thrills. Honestly, Lazarette couldn’t give two frack what your life story is, as long as you follow her lead and play by the rules, then you’re alright in her books.
Note: Besides Lazarette, the rest of the crew are essentially NPCs. You cannot request a thread with an individual crew member, as this is NOT a multi-muse blog. Your muse is free to interact with them during our threads for plot related reasons, and I’ll even answer any asks that are directed towards them, but they are not the main focus of this blog. Their sole existence is to expand the world, provide exposition, help make Lazarette seem more approachable, and serve any function that we require.
Pirate Captain
Art credit: Ephdraws
Designation: Lazarette
Altmode: Submarine
Gender pronouns: She/Her/Femme
Skills: Piloting, negotiations, fencing, intimidation, drinking
Instrument: Violin (previous), Vocals (current)
Quartermaster (1st Mate)
Art credit: Bionicdirections
Designation: Fetlock
Altmode: Horse
Gender pronouns: They/Them/Bot
Skills: Finances, administration, accounting, settling arguments
Instrument: Fiddle
Helmsman (2nd Mate)
Art credit: Gutterdopts
Designation: Tripwire
Altmode: Sports car
Gender Pronouns: He/him/Mech
Skills: Piloting, reading and recording charts, map making, knowledge of constellations
Instrument: Trumpet
Master Gunners/Armourers (3rd mates)
Art credit: Hazardous-Outlander
Designation: Muck & Fathom
Altmode: N/A (Cybertronian Golems)
Gender Pronouns: He/Him/Mech & She/Her/Femme
Skills: Brute strength, handling heavy artillery, technical knowledge, aquatic capabilities.
Instrument: Drums
Boatswain (4th Mate)
Art credit: ConstellationCat117
Designation: Dragline
Altmode: Large arachnid
Gender Pronouns: She/Her/Femme
Skills: Maintenance, engineering, design, weaving strands stronger than steel.
Instrument: Piano
Medic
Art credit: Putt125
Designation: Gaba
Altmode: Emerald Cockroach Wasp
Gender: She/Her/Femme
Skills: Sharp precision, knowledge of the Cybertronian autonomy, making antidotes, Paralysis
Instrument: Oboe
Striker
Art credit: Crimson-Nemesis
Designation: Cuirass
Altmode: Mini tank
Gender: They/them/Bot
Skills: Scouting, spying, hunting, fighting, cooking/refining fuel, worldly knowledge
Instrument: flute
Cabin Boy
Art credit: UNwanTED-arT
Designation: Caestus
Altmode: N/A
Gender Pronouns: He/Him/Mech
Skills: Climbing, punching, acting as look out, running his mouth off
Instrument: Harmonica
#[the crew] we are here to drink your beer#I may have gone a tiny bit overboard on the adoption spree#but I couldn't help it!#I just love them all to bits!!!!#I didn't mean for them to be colour-coded#it just kinda happened
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Get to know me
Ok so I thought as I have a pretty chilled evening, I’d let you all get to know abit about me! So let’s go:
I was born in Chelmsford, Essex (about 30 miles from London to you beauties not familiar with UK Geography!
I’m half Northern Irish through my dad, and half English through my Mum! They met at university, married in 1985 and been together ever since! I also have a younger sister 😊
I’m a 2nd Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo!
I love Football (Soccer) and primarily play as a Striker, however I’m not currently playing.
My main fears are wasps, going blind, rejection and Eels?! (Don’t even know)
I have a Degree in Sports Coaching with Sports Therapy and a Masters Degree in Coaching Science.
I plan to become a Personal Trainer this year!
I love rock music! (My parents were rockers at uni)
I also love horror films 👌
I worked in Mid West USA during the summer of 2014 coaching Soccer!
I play PS4 and my all time favourite game is Red Dead Redemption.
Ok so just a brief outline of what I’m about 😊 as always feel free to ask anything/ inbox me!
Ellen x
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The best footballer’s autobiography of recent years is probably I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović. In it, the Swedish striker recounts his rise from an ethnic ghetto in Malmö to greatness. Zlatan (as he is usually known) is currently banging in goals for Paris St Germain.
…
Once you get past the obligatory snigger prompted by the phrase “footballer’s autobiography”, you can see that Zlatan’s book strangely resembles an earlier immigrant’s tale: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Philip Roth’s classic novel about growing up Jewish in 1930s and 1940s Newark, New Jersey. Each man’s story illuminates the other. Moreover, each illuminates the increasingly typical yet rarely heard immigrant experience. Most of the talk about immigrants comes from politicians pontificating about them. These books are wonderful first-hand accounts of what it’s like to grow up in an immigrant family. Though Zlatan and Roth are separated by an ocean and four decades, the overlaps are remarkable.
Zlatan’s book is a confessional autobiography; Roth’s, fictionalised confessional autobiography. Roth’s narrator Alex Portnoy is, like Roth, a Newark boy born in 1933. (Roth, who recently announced that he had given up writing, turns 80 on March 19.) Both Zlatan and Portnoy are angry prodigies looking back on the ghetto from early maturity – Zlatan narrates aged 28, Portnoy aged 33. And both books, in large part, are odes to the native blonde girl.
Like many children of immigrants, Portnoy and Roth grew up segregated from the native mainstream. Portnoy explains (the novel is told as a long session with his mute shrink, Dr Spielvogel): “In my cousin Marcia’s graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven goyim and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie.” In short, the dominant American caste of the day – white gentiles – was almost wholly absent from Newark. As for Zlatan’s concrete ghetto of Rosengård, in Malmö: “It was crawling with Somalis, Turks, Yugos, Poles and north Africans, but there were no native Swedes.”
…
Like many immigrants, Portnoy and Zlatan grow up under the shadow of a disaster happening in the old country. For Portnoy, it’s the Holocaust; for Zlatan, the Balkan war. Both boys sense mostly unspoken anxiety. Zlatan writes: “The war was something strange. I was never allowed to hear about it. I was protected … I didn’t understand why my mother and my sisters went around dressed in black. It was totally incomprehensible, it was like a fashion trend.” But he does know that his father’s Bosnian village was massacred and ethnically cleansed by Serbs. Early in Portnoy’s Complaint, 1941 is mentioned as the quasi-innocent date when Portnoy’s family moves from Jersey City to Newark. Later, however his sister reminds him where he would be had he been born in Europe: “Gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive.”
Portnoy is an intellectual prodigy just as Zlatan is a sporting one, but neither man’s parents have the nous to guide his life-path. Like many ghetto children, both boys are caught between an old country and a new one, in neither of which they belong. No wonder they grow up angry. “That extended period of rage that goes by the name of adolescence,” muses Portnoy. He expresses his anger with words, Zlatan with words and violence. “I was aggressive,” Zlatan writes. “I pulled down trousers and held boys tight.” As his former headmistress once told a journalist: “I’ve been at this school 33 years, and Zlatan is easily in the top five of most unruly pupils we’ve ever had. He was the number one bad boy, a one-man show, a prototype of a child that ends up in serious trouble.”
…
Both men spend their youth feeling awkward, unsure of how to behave. They are at ease only in one place: the sports field. Portnoy’s game is baseball, where he masters every mannerism of the center fielder, so that he looks like a pro even though he’s not very good. He asks Spielvogel: “It’s true, is it not? – incredible, but apparently true – there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees?” The novel’s famous ode – “Oh, to be a center fielder” – helps elucidate why, in both the US and Europe, so many of the best athletes come from ethnic ghettos.
…
Both Zlatan and Portnoy yearn with wonder for that incomprehensible being: the blonde native girl who, miraculously, feels at home in the place where she lives. To attain her would be to conquer this alien society. But she seems unattainable. Zlatan recalls “being at the Borgar School in Malmö and seeing chicks in Ralph Lauren polo shirts and practically wetting my trousers when I wanted to ask them out”.
Thirteen-year-old Portnoy skates around a frozen local lake behind gaggles of gentile girls, and marvels: “The shikses, ah, the shikses … How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde?” He dreams of skating up and introducing himself as a goy named Alvin Peterson. (“I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it.”) But he is sure his big nose will expose his origins. Similarly, Zlatan (equally anxious about his own big nose) admits that hard as he tried in adolescence to dress like a posh Swede, he always ended up looking “Rosengård from top to toe”.
Both men first encounter the dominant native class aged 17: Portnoy goes to college in Ohio, Zlatan becomes a professional footballer. Gradually, through the medium of blonde native girls, they start to integrate. During Portnoy’s freshman year at college, he spends Thanksgiving in Iowa with the family of his gentile college girlfriend. Unused to Wasp etiquette, he is astounded when her father greets him before breakfast with the words, “Good morning.” It’s a phrase never heard in the Portnoy household. “At breakfast at home I am in fact known to the other boarders as ‘Mr Sourball’ and ‘The Crab’.”
Compare Zlatan’s wonder at his future partner, the perfect Swedish blonde Helena Seger: “She came from a model family from Lindesberg, one of those families where they say, ‘Darling, would you please pass me the milk?’, whereas we at table mostly just hurled death threats at each other.”
To Helena, Zlatan is “a miserable Yugo, with a fast car and a gold watch … who played his music too loud”. She teaches him about fish knives and forks, and how to drink a glass of good wine. (It turns out you don’t down it in one like milk.) Portnoy briefly shacks up with a posh Wasp who “knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could pick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon – like a Chinese with his chopsticks! … )”
…
Just as a generation of novelists told the story of Jewish America, and music the story of black America, the arts are now creating a narrative for the European immigrant experience. Zlatan was given a podium because he is a brilliant footballer, but there must be countless other second-generation kids sitting in their bedrooms around the continent, aching to tell their version.
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