Yes, Guardians Vol. 3 was excellent. But just stop there. Don’t start using how great Guardians Vol. 3 is to bring up how terrible you think Endgame was. Honestly. You silly geese.

No because natasha was the team's therapist for years,she was there for all of them in the time of need yet those bitches didn't know a single thing about her

The MCU has always had a quip/comedy problem

This isn’t only a Phase 4/5 problem

Endgame turned Thor’s trauma from the events in all the other movies a joke about his weight because of his binge eating. They undercut the intensity of Scott coming back from the quantum realm and how that’s the solution to the problems by making him randomly say, “is that a sandwich?” In the middle of it

Infinity War constantly undercut the stakes with terrible humor. Seriously the leads stopping to quip at each other in battle with the big bad of 10 years is a joke, and the worst offender of this Tony, Peter, and the Guardians. Did we really need Drax spoiling the emotional moment that Quill and Gamora had about her making him promise to kill her if Thanos shows up with his stupid slow motion joke. Peter Parker is a joke in this movie, being clueless about what’s happening and just making jokes and being awkward

The MCU caring more about quips and humor than serious stakes and character moments because they can’t let it get “too dark” has always been a problem, people just didn’t notice before because it was characters they love doing it. Now it’s characters that don’t have any nostalgia attached to them, and people see how grating and annoying it is

Is this a problem with every MCU project? No. The Captain America trilogy has never had this problem, the OG avengers, and in phase 4 WandaVision, Loki, and Doctor Strange (even though that movie had other problems) didn’t have this problem. But it is still a problem that the MCU as a whole has

friendly reminder that steve rogers was a victim of bad writing and weird self insert coming from creepy writers, he would never chose to abandon bucky and his found family, he would never chose to live in the past for no woman.

One of the tragedies of Steve’s character assassination is that neither Sam nor Bucky were allowed to mourn his absence. Unlike with Nat, where Yelena and Clint were able to lay bare their grief during Hawkeye. Nominally, Steve went to lead “the life he wanted”, and the narrative was afraid to open the can of worms around how uncharacteristically irresponsible that was. Hence neither Sam nor Bucky could discuss his loss, nor could they voice their own negative emotions around his absence. Not only were they not allowed anger, but they were also deprived of grief and bewilderment and regret. There was a Steve-shaped hole in TFATWS, and as much as the narrative tried to pretend it didn’t exist, the story was warped by its unshakeable presence.

to make this clear to the whiny bigots

if bucktommy break up, and buck dates no other men and his "endgame" LI is a woman, he is still bisexual

if bucktommy stay together through the end of the series and buck never dates anyone else, he is still bisexual

if buck had figured out he was bisexual without dating tommy or any other guy, and if he continued to date woman, he would still be bisexual

if bucktommy break up and buck doesn't date anyone for the entire rest of the series, he is still bisexual

I'm getting real tired of seeing the take that bucktommy can't be "endgame" because it's his first relationship with a guy, when we know y'all would be fucking silent if it was buddie. it's biphobic bullshit

"Bucky was happy for Steve!"

Yeah, totally.

You know what's not a hot take and actually really dumb? Saying that people who are invested in the love story in The Hunger Games are just as bad at the Capitol. A lot has already been said about this to show just how dumb of a statement that is, but I want to add something I haven't seen talked about. And that's how the people of the districts were just as taken by the love story as the Capitol. They just understood the gravity of the Games and saw Katniss and Peeta's love as a successful rebellion against the Capitol, which inspired them as well. Katniss acting like a girl driven to madness with love doesn't dissuade the rebellion at all, and in fact she figures Snow put her up to it during the Victory Tour to distract her rather than as a tactic that would actually dissuade the rebellion.

We get little direct contact with the people of the rebellion, but one of the times we get it, during the visit to the hospital in D8, this is what Katniss narrates:

Despite his controversial interview with Caesar, many ask about Peeta, assure me that they know he was speaking under duress. I do my best to sound positive about our future, but people are truly devastated when they learn I've lost the baby. I want to come clean and tell one weeping woman that it was all a hoax, a move in the game, but to present Peeta as a liar now would not help his image.

For the people in the districts, their romance is real, the hope of these two rebels bringing new life to Panem is real, and its loss is a devastation. Are you going to tell me that these people who are literally dying for the rebellion are just as bad as the people from the Capitol?

So the people who compare those who are interested in the romance in THG to the people in the Capitol, get better critical judgement. The fans I've seen who are invested in the romance are far more akin to how the people of the districts feel about Katniss and Peeta. We love their love because it is a rebellion against the Capitol. It is what sparks the rebellion and inspires people to start fighting back against their oppression. And we the readers know everything from Katniss's perspective (which neither the Capitol nor the districts had access to) and there is still every reason in the world to ship these two characters because they looked at what the Capitol was trying to make them do and at every turn and said "I'm choosing my humanity over submission to you." And they did that together every single time.

It's so insane bc I watched Endgame in theaters right when it came out, I have had yearssss to get over Steve leaving Bucky. Getting into the fandom and getting more into sambucky has been like. A good way to find people who feel the same way about Endgame and also engage with happier stucky or sambucky narratives so I've kinda gotten past it but like. This bullshit "if stucky was het it would be canon" thing that Marvel is doing is soooo frustrating because it really has become so obvious in retrospect that the people who wrote and produced Endgame were so horrified, so petrified that people might think Steve could be queer that they needed to shoehorn in the most out of character ending for a beloved character and absolutely ruin the arc that was started in CATFA and continued in every one of his appearances since.

And ALSO like??? The message it sends about trauma survivors?? Genuinely, the message of Steve leaving Bucky for Peggy was "even if you think you can be loved and redeemed despite your trauma, the people who love you more than anything in the world might (will?) leave you for someone easier" like??? How devastating. It is so abundantly clear that Marvel doesn't know how to deal with characters like Natasha or Bucky who have done bad things in the past. Their answer for Natasha was "have her kill herself to make up for the shit she did in her past" and I'm 90% sure that's gonna be the MCU ending to Bucky's character arc as well.

you find me on the floor sobbing about them cause they mean so much to me

Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny

So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.

What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.

This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply scroll on by.

First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.  

In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.

You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.

As to the “standing in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can stand in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.

So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.

The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.

I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.

(Never. The answer is never.)

And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.

So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.

But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes it at its own word.

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¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.

² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.

The funniest thing was when I once saw someone on Reddit say ‘the Cali plot was boring/stupid/badly written because they focused more on Will being gay and sad rather than Mike saving his girlfriend’. Like you are this 🤏🏽 close. Those dots are just begging to be connected!

they really made two guys and said these two have been inseparable since the school yard and they are just as inseparable on the battle field, they are soulmates, one was a very eligible bachelor who instead of settling down lived in a tiny tenement with his best friend, he was the only one who saw him and valued him as he was before the serum and didn't understand why all the girls didn't see the man he did, one became a hero by saving the other, the other who was drafted and tortured decided to stay and fight (then die) by his side, they have a bond transcending almost a century which is strong enough to break through decades of brainwashing, their story revolves around the lengths one will go to protect the one they love from everything damn the odds and damn the world, who has always said "you are worth it to me" a pair that would rather die than be parted, giving us one of the most powerful and profound love stories of the 21st century, the most organic queer couple across their cinematic universe

and expected us to be happy when they ripped them apart and told us none of that was the right kind of love story because they're both men

The way I am insulted by this email I got after I watched CA:TWS last night:

Hey, did you enjoy Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Did you enjoy Steve Rogers as a character? Did you enjoy literally anything about Steve and Bucky's relationship? Well, we actually hate when people like those things. We hate it so much that we're going to suggest you watch MCU movies in an order that makes absolutely no sense and would confuse you deeply if you really did it. We're going to suggest you make a totally illogical jump in films and watch Endgame next!

Like, I don't really think that whatever algorithm Disney+ uses to send out these marketing emails takes any of that into account. But. For fuck's sake.

It's Oct 16 aka the day that natasha romanoff sacrifices her life to save the world, so her friends/family, could see their loved ones again, and what did steve rogers do after seeing bucky again? he leaves him, making nat's sacrifice insignificant for him.

friendly reminder that endgame ruined two amazing characters: natasha and steve

So…I saw a Blu-ray featurette on Bilibili where the writers and directors talk about Bucky, with key quotes like:

Cap 1 and Cap 2 both show that Cap’s allegiance, more than anything, is to Bucky Barnes, his best friends since when he was Steve Rogers, the 100 pound weakling. (Nate Moore)

The Winter Soldier has such a complicated history. We wanted that to have a real presence to it, to see the harshness with which he was treated. He’s both good and bad, hero and villain. (Joe Russo)

That’s the most heartbreaking scenario in his life, Bucky was the guy who’s always been there. Those are the scenes that make the action scenes worth it. What are you willing to compromise and sacrifice and forfeit for the greater good? And that is close to home for Steve. (Chris Evans)

Here’s Bucky Barnes, who’s been the Winter Soldier for 80 years, who in his own way was a Prisoner of War (Nate Moore)

Members of Hydra in Russia secreted him away to a missile facility in Siberia. He was treated with the same level of security as a nuclear weapon. (Joe Russo)

Suddenly, the main guy you have to defeat is your best link to the most pleasant memories you have of your childhood and of your past. (Kevin Feige)

We all know what happened between “Bucky is Steve’s strongest allegiance,” “his biggest sacrifice,” “his best link to his most pleasant memories” and Steve needs to retire into another timeline.

But what exactly happened between “Bucky Barnes was a prisoner of war and treated very harshly by Hydra” to “he needs to make amends for what he did under Hydra”?