The Big One

So.

I’ve managed to get myself back into an MCU mindset, and have decided The Time Has Come to start working on my master fix-it fic. Or rather, what’s going to become my master fix-it fic series.

The to-do list so far includes:

-Natasha comes back after Steve returns the Soul Stone, but thanks to time travel screwiness she pops back into the Compound with everyone else and participates in the final battle against Thanos

-Tony still sacrifices himself, BUT! Another version of him, from a timeline where they lost the final fight and Thanos decided to be petty by erasing the entire human race from existence except Tony, gets brought to this universe a couple years later. Supposedly the two are nearly identical up to that fight, so he’s more than a little alarmed when no one recognizes the name Peter Parker

-Steve puts all the Stones back and comes home, passes on the shield to Sam, and moves on with his life instead of that bullshit ending that made no damn sense for his characterization

(-I have yet to watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier, so I dunno what will or won’t remain the same with those two, but I can promise There Will Be Shenanigans)

-WandaVision mostly plays out as per canon, but dagnabit, I want my Scarlet Witch to remain a superhero and a decent person. So! She stumbles across America Chavez, they find a universe where Agatha won and kept Billy and Tommy around as pets/servants, kick her ass, and bring the boys back with them to start a new life

-Eventually Vision will return as well, with newly constructed Viv as a peace offering. The twins are quite taken with their android sister and immediately start figuring out the best ways to get into trouble together

-May Parker receives medical attention soon enough to survive her wounds, albeit in a coma; Peter can’t legally visit her in the hospital but sneaks in a few times as Spider-man, and I promise I’ll eventually have her wake up for their tearful reunion, just gotta get through a few other things first

-Back to Tony: it’s a little awkward, feeling like he’s taking over another man’s life, but Morgan’s delighted by this turn of events and that’s really hard for anyone else to argue with. Even so, as grateful as he is to get his family back, Tony can’t help but feel frantic over what the heck happened to his other kid. The photo of him and Peter is still in the kitchen, and Pepper recognizes it when he shows her, knows that it’s been there ever since they moved into the house, but she has no clue who the kid is

-Eventually we get a big family reunion style event with all the Avengers and spouses and kids, new and old, and from there find a way to bring Peter back into the fold with a handy dandy loophole to restore memories of him at the same time. There will be fluff. There will be tears. There will be old characters and extra ones, a few gratuitous mentions and some background cameos, and I’ll find a way to wrap it all up with a big bow

...

-With an Epilogue, of course, featuring my Champions kids, because they’ve given us a fantastic Kamala Khan and I need to build on that

I love comic book logic especially in origins filling in how characters learned to fight or whatever because it's always like

"We need a safe place to put our one and only child while we go on a dangerous quest for an undisclosed amount of time :( It has to be somewhere that will keep her out of trouble. With a person we trust who will let her live a normal and stable life. Someone that will never put her in any da-"

"How about our best friend Joe the Assassin?"

"Perfect lets go right now"

AK! Jason managed to escaped the Asylum by Nat20 persuasion check to Slade.

“That’s murder! We’re not killers!”

“Let’s chain him onto an eternal wall for the rest of I am guessing eternity that’s so much more humane than killing him”

Stg, sometimes it feels like comic writers just don’t really understand the concept of “moral”. They just think “killing = bad” so they don’t let the heroes kill. But by the gods, they’ll do things infinitely worse than just killing their enemies instead and the whole entire point of giving your heroes a “killing = bad” philosophy just completely went over these writers’ heads.

It’s not about the killing. It’s about valuing life, about believing everyone, even the worst of them, capable of change, and also about keeping your own soul intact.

Quite frankly, playing judge, juror and executioner of a fate worse than death I think still delivers severe damage to your soul like something is definitely more fucked up with you if you pull shit like that instead of just. Killing. Him.

If Deadpool were to donate organs as transplants would that work? I can see three possible outcomes: The recipient would be fine because the donated organ could regenerate itself and possibly even give the recipient some low level healing factor. Or, the cancer that is eating at every part of Wade would kill the new host without Wade’s healing factor to keep it in check. The third and most horrifying option is that the transplanted organ would try to grow an entirely new Wade inside the other person. I know that might not work, because Wade loses limbs all the time, but what if he gets obliterated and the largest chunk of him left is the organ he donated?

Duke’s full narration about how you have to be crazy if you’re Robin

Guys, we can’t kill them, that would be murder!

Let’s stick them in the zoo instead, that’s so much more humane!

The whole 'I can solve any case but one, that of my significant other/loved one' with Timber

(Let's set the mood: one of those Black and White detective movies that are overly dramatic)

Tim in a Noir protagonist-narrator voiceover: I move the police tape aside, joining the officers standing over the body, there's blood running down the gutter as the rain splatters over this poor soul, lost to another unforgiving Gotham night. Can't say it's the first, and it's definitely not going to be the last.

Noir-Tim-narrator, as Tim leaves the scene, walking down the sidewalk, wearing a trenchcoat over his Red Robin outfit: As Gotham city's Red Robin, I'm always busy. I'm a detective who can solve any case thrown at him, all but one that is, and that one that drives me crazier than a pack of ciggies with no lighter drives a smoker wackadoo

Noir-Tim-narrator, as Tim walks into an apartment, shutting the door behind him, tearing off his mask: the case of my husband, Bernard Dowd

Onscreen Tim, cutting in: Oh, don't worry, Bernard isn't dead or anything, he just really confuses me a lot.

Bernard's voice, coming from offscreen: Hey Tim, is that you?

Tim, walking over to the Room Bernard is in: Yes hon- I mean, You stayed up toots? Thought you woulda went to bed hours ago.

Bernard, sitting on the floor, leaning up against the couch, papers and photos scattered all over: Look, as much as I'd love to play 1940s Noir Detective with you right now, we have more pressing issues.

Tim, hopping onto the couch behind Bernard, wrapping him in a hug from behind, still in his trenchcoat and Noir voice: Lay it on me sweetheart

Bernard: Protagonists have their loved ones fridged

Tim: What?

Bernard: Like a hero or vigilante, you guys would count as protagonists, which looking at the records means those you love who are not also protagonists are 97% more likely to get-

Tim: fridged? What is fridged? And are you gonna get fridged cause you're not a vililante?

Bernard: Fridged is a term for when a loved one is hurt, killed, maimed, assaulted, or otherwise traumatized in order to motivate the protagonist, name coming from Green Lantern Volume 3 Issue number #54, where his girlfriend gets murdered and shoved in the fridge as a means for the antagonist to get to him-

Tim: Green Lantern Volume 3 Issue #54?

Bernard: nevermind, just know in 1994, Green Lantern had a girlfriend shoved in the fridge by his antagonist to motivate him and that is only the tip of the iceberg

Tim: Are you going to be okay? Do you want me to stop crimefighting?

Bernard: No, refusing the call to action is not only one of the steps in the hero's journey, making you more of a protagonist, but also giving them more amble reason to kill me off to motivate you and drive your plot forward

Tim: Whose them??

Bernard: oh please, you already think I'm crazy enough, I'm not even trying to go there

"she's trying to stop more innocent people from being killed by offering a different path. She's taking a harm reduction path as much as she can. Yeah, they're going to make mistakes, but if she can still reduce those mistakes, isn't it worth trying? Or is one mistake enough that she should never try any other path ever again, even though it means they'll immediately go back to killing lots of innocent people?"

chiming in to say i think the problem with this view is that, as Jason points out, she has ZERO actual control over the people she's ostensibly "employing". she can have all the good intentions to reduce harm she wants, but acting like good vibes and promises are enough to keep things from ever getting out of hand is practically on "positive thinking cures bipolar disorder" levels of oversight (note: i'd actually finished this post and was about to hit ask when i realized how on the nose that comparison is considering scarecrow is fucking with this plan. gonna leave it.) there have to be some fire safety measures here, and her repeatedly insisting they aren't necessary and she's totally got everything handled is ultimately going to hurt the people she was trying to save when the building burns.

which, i agree with you that she's absolutely smarter than this, and it drives me up the wall that they keep having her double down on it.

Yeah, I feel like there's a couple of things at war within this storyline execution: 1 - Comic book logic is absolutely a thing and trying to map hyperrealistic complex real world consequences onto a story that is being written by imperfect authors who are not experts in the fields this would be touching on is always going to mean that there are going to be major flaws in the logic of the story. Superhero comics as a whole can have just as many flaws pointed out about their logic, like I don't believe for a single second that someone like Bruce Wayne would be able to be Batman without it being known publicly, between the coincidences piled up or how freely they all use real names in the field. If we can accept that people just don't recognize Clark Kent with his glasses on or don't recognize Bruce Wayne's jawline (while I absolutely can goddamned recognize George Clooney or Val Kilmer's jawlines even when they're in full cowl), I feel okay giving some leeway to Selina being written into a dumbass plan for reducing crime in Gotham. 2 - And the story, while pointing out the flaws in her logic (a person died in the kick off issue even!), it also points out that her way had reduced innocent people getting hurt, so it's reasonable for Selina to think this is a viable plan. No, she doesn't have actual control over these people (well, she has some, in that they respect her and are loyal to her, to at least some degree), but nobody has control over others when offering a different path of any kind. Like, if she was offering college courses or trade school classes for people, she wouldn't have any control over them there, either. Presumably, she's not ignoring that getting innocent people hurt will send them to jail, that they're warned about this ahead of time and know the consequences, she's just trying to offer something, anything that's better than what they had before, even as deeply imperfect as it is. Like, I'm in agreement that I think this is a bad plan, but I'm not sure how much of that is me coming from a real world perspective where this could NEVER happen, but costumed vigilantes at a baseline could NEVER happen in the real world, either, but we've mostly accepted that that's part of the genre, you know? Versus how much am I just trying to meet the narrative where it's at? How much of this is that they're writing Selina badly and how much is it that it's just the same logic of vigilantes being allowed to exist (which are also often criticized within the narrative, just as Selina's plan is being criticized from within the narrative) that applies to Selina's plans as well? There's just as much accountability from Batman as there is from Catwoman--he might have more money, but ultimately nobody actually is able to hold Batman responsible for anything and the only control he has are the training he's given them and the loyalty and love they have for him as a person. Should we say Batman's ideas are bad, because the rogues kill people based around their obsession with him and those he trains? He's not training the rogues directly, but his actions are leading to those deaths of innocent people that he's trying to help, just as Selina training these people, trying to give them non-lethal options, still lead to deaths, even if she doesn't have direct control over them. I don't even really like Selina's plans or that she's being written to propose this idea because I don't think she'd believe in it, but I feel like there's a lot of Comic Book Logic going on that I'm trying to be generous about, you know?

"okay but what ACTUALLY happened in that minor characters backstory" "what did that character SPECIFICALLY do to become like this" "how does the plot device ACTUALLY work" oh my god i don't care! i don't care about your cinemasinsing about every little detail! does knowing this technical detail improve the audience's emotional understanding of the story? no? then i don't want to fucking see it in canon!

anything you come up with in fanworks is going to be more fun for you than what the author can do in canon! any attempts by the author to explain something technical in the story takes away time and investment from the main plot! so if the technical explanation doesn't inform the main plot then it's just useless trivia for completionism's sake! this shit should be written about in fanworks! or spinoffs! or idk the writers can tweet about it or smth! i don't need it in the actual main story!

if you don't mind me asking, and if i just missed something again somewhere thatd answer my question, i am so sorry. but. it seems like even tho with the assumption that korvin is basically from our world, he doesnt know all that much about general comic book lore. so like. how aware is korvin that he was isekai'ed into the comic book world?

don't mind, will clarify.

let's think of it like this. at what point does it matter how much you know about the world you've isekai'd in? especially for a comic book world, in which canon and continuity are already loosely defined? what about it being so close to the real world for most of the time, and then jarringly different during the highest stakes?

are you willing to bet your life on assumptions?

korvin's not.

he knows of batman from the cultural zeitgeist but has my general...uh, disinterest and skepticism in the messiness and narratives of comics and superheroes stories.

and on his general mindset (my mindset): it's folly to walk into something assuming you have the ground truth. a lot of the work i do day-to-day is interdisciplinary aka working between specialties to connect them into a larger analysis. and by god i work with some of the most brilliant people... in their field that can't for the life of them understand and articulate their working assumptions that only WORK FOR THEM. knowledge bias is real and it's a barrier for this type of collaboration. so, i'm extra-wary about going into things treating it like it has to be some way. i rather rely on a more abstracted and fundamental set of first principles and adapt as necessary.

and so you get korvin.

this panels are now coming to the front of my mind every time a bat complains about another hero's use of "excessive" force btw:

catwoman vol. 2 #90.

like, okay

outsiders vol. 3 #8

how about when you lot just electrocuted *checks notes* a cat burglar...

I’m on a CEC kick I guess. here have a drabble from a couple years ago that I’m finally posting

CEC and Dev are @audreycritter ‘s sorry to keep tagging you I just don’t want to steal credit

Watching season 1 of Superman & Lois all I could think about with John Henry not recognizing Clark as Superman was

TV Shade 🤝 Comics Shade

Accidentally sending a loved one to the Shadowlands and feeling guilty about it

“😂 who even are you?”

Hahaha why does it matter

well because one faceless shadowy figure in sunglasses may just be a plot device, but when it's clearly the same person popping up and pursuing a theme with their identity cloaked that's a mysterious character.

you're supposed to want to know who that is, and if it's someone you know doing a bit, or a stranger with an unknown agenda.

tuxedo mask of strangely intense random analysis demands re: superhero comics.