besides the well-known fact that tony stark's arc reactor literally powered his heart and symbolised his second chance at life, it's been not just alluded to but clearly stated by marvel from the very first iron man film that it represents his heart:
this point is made very clear again when it's used to portray his death:
of course they did this; they're such obvious metaphors that are easy to rely on for beautiful visual storytelling. they undoubtedly were aware of the potential for these scenes and carefully considered them since the beginning.
but you don't really get to use each of these moments more than once if you want them to matter, so they had to choose which one of tony's stories needed to be told through carefully picked parallels.
and who did they use them on?
yup, that's right. steve rogers. steve, who literally ends their painful fight by breaking his heart.
steve, whom tony literally hands his heart and says "here, take this" while he's devastated, disappointed, and at one of the lowest moments of his entire life.
so, platonic, romantic, alterous — the intricacies of his feelings don't even matter. they're only for tony to know.
but what we as an audience know, what we were explicitly told by marvel, is that the feelings tony had for steve were so strong that they were the equivalent of getting his heart actually shattered into pieces, and being reduced to offering your desperate, mourning heart on a platter as a way of saying "take it all, there's nothing left of me that you don't own now".
these were not accidents. we were meant to understand how profound his feelings were. so many things spiraled out of their falling out — the entire universe's faith was at stake as a result. tony was not indifferent to him. his problem was that he felt too much.
tony's achille's heel was always steve rogers, and that will forever be the backbone of the marvel universe.
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miwi holding hands on a snow day cause they’re my babies fr fr
Mike lost stick privileges cause he kept hitting trees and knocking snow onto himself (and onto other people), now he’s just following Will as he draws things in the snow
(Joyce took the picture)
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The genius of Byler in s1 (the significance of Mike and Will spending all season separated)
Y'all, I started a ST rewatch from season 1, and I just wanted to make a post about how genius the setup of Byler and Mike and El's relationship is from the very beginning of the show. Actually, I believe that Byler has only been able to progress as a slowburn love story and eventual plot twist because of how strategically it was initially set up.
Mike and Will are introduced as having a "different" sort of relationship with each other, as opposed to the standard friendships they share with Dustin and Lucas. Right off the bat, we see that Will values being honest and vulnerable with Mike more than he values things that would otherwise benefit him. Around Lucas and Dustin, he acts as though he is fine with winning the DND game as long as Mike doesn't see the roll, but as soon as they leave, he admits to Mike that he lost and that the demagorgon got him.
We can also see that Mike has a different sort of relationship with Will than he has with the other boys. What is important to note, though, is that in s1 we only see the special care and affection Mike has towards Will in the context of Will not being physically present, as he has been taken by the demagorgon. Mike acts a good deal more concerned about Will and more eager to find Will than Lucas and Dustin do. He is the character of focus or the "protagonist" in s1, so we see him talking about Will to his family, and we see how upset he gets when he sees Will's "corpse" at the lake. El, Lucas, and Dustin all stay at the quarry, and Mike has an emotional meltdown and bikes home crying and hugs his mom. In this way, the show is suggesting from s1 that Will is special to Mike in a way that is different from how Mike views/treats Lucas and Dustin. But the thing is, we assume that Mike's perspective is only highlighted BECAUSE he's the protagonist/character of focus and not because his relationship with Will is unique and something we should be paying attention to.
I fully believe that if Mike and Will had been together in s1 the way they are in s2 and if we'd seen the way Mike acts around Will in s2 from the very beginning, then Byler would have been a lot more obvious, and I think we would've been able to recognize from the very beginning that Mike and Will are gay and that their relationship is building up to a romance. But because we only see Mike's care and affection for Will in light of Will's absence in s1, we can't connect those dots and recognize the love they have for each other. Also, we are introduced to El right after Will gets taken, and Mike spends all season with El, developing a relationship with her: a relationship that for all intents and purposes holds the appearance of a romance, even leading to a kiss. It's no wonder why the audience ships M*leven in the beginning instead of Byler, because all we have to go off of is Mike and El's close relationship and the high amount of screentime they spend together vs Mike and Will's one shared scene. We don't see Mike's sweetness and protectiveness over Will until season 2, but by that time, we have already had the expectation set for us that Mike and El are in love, so we never stop to consider that maybe the show is actually building up Byler. S2 is a direct reversal of Mike's relationships with El and Will in s1, with him looking for and missing El the way did with Will in s1, and sharing a lot of screentime/sweet moments with Will the way he did with El in s1. But because s1 already set the precedent that M*leven is romantic and Byler is platonic, we have no reason to assume that the roles are actually opposite from what we were initially shown.
The only reason Byler works the way it does is because 1. we are tricked into thinking that we are only shown how much Mike cares about Will because he is the protagonist and not because his relationship with Will is special, and 2. s1 builds up Mike and El's relationship while never properly showing us Mike and Will's relationship, only introducing the true prospect of Byler once we have already grown attached to Mike and El's relationship and the idea of Mike and El being in love. In s3, Mike and El date and make out all the while Mike and Will's relationship is rocky, so we have reason to believe that Mike is in love with/cares about El primarily and struggles in his friendship with Will because he is too focused on El. Even leading into s4, we assume that Mike and Will's friendship is still rocky bc Mike has been neglecting Will in favor of El and not because he's coming to terms with his feelings for Will and dealing with internalized homophobia. Yet, once Byler becomes canon and people go back and watch the show in light of it being canon, they will see that Will has always been special to Mike and that their relationship has always been highlighted as being noteworthy and different. We simply weren't able to recognize it from s1 because we never saw Mike and Will together: only how much Mike cared about Will while he was gone. And by the time their relationship turned blatantly romantic and special in s2, we still couldn't recognize it because of the expectation of M*leven. The writing for Byler is just so genius and well thought out even from the start.
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Happy birthday to the one and only Will Byers, my son, i love him way too much for my own good ⭐️💙
I missed drawing him so muuuuch
If y’all have drawing ideas please ask i need prompts 😔🫶
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