who: @wadecalhoun where: Canal Cakes

She's at the local bakery and anyone who claimed that the Cambion was eating her feelings would be quickly denied with a swift kick in the bum to follow. She's not entirely used to feelings so complex, past the urge to party and horniness and her mind won't allow her to forget, her ability is strong for memories and it haunts her still, she couldn't bury anything deep to not be touched by muscle memory. She sees faces in the street who carry oblivion and forget the horrors but she sees the mud and the blood that they choked on. It's a face she recognizes who also seems to be drowning himself in cupcakes and she can't forget the spores or caps that had grown from his skin. "How are you? No residual after-effects or waking up covered in rot and decay? Haven't been sleep walking and waking up underneath trees?"

who: @wadecalhoun​ where: Parco Savello

Flora felt like a criminal as she walked quickly down the streets of Rome, her hands shoved deep in her pockets and her hood over her head. She had walked these roads a thousand times over, insomnia from a bad childhood that derived from growing up where the streets were safer then home. The lines were drawn in the sand and she had her part to play. A chance encounter in the park and it was a face she hadn’t seen in awhile, her heart skipped a beat out of nerves and he had a bottle of whiskey in a paper bag on the park bench. He looked like trouble and it had been awhile. “Long time no see stranger, how are you?” She kept her stance confident, even though there was a risk now that she knew he worked for the Eye which was their enemy.

just thought I'd share this here too, please stay safe you guys </3

here's the link to the tweet, there's more information about this in the replies, please read them <3

edit: DO NOT USE DUCKDUCKGO, IT SHARES UR INFO !!

edit # 2: trust DuckDuckGo, don't trust DuckDuckGo, completely upto you, y'all are missing the actual point of this post. stay safe

Walton Goggins (The Unicorn, 2019) | Backyard Barbeque

Petition for folks writing non-radiostatic fics on AO3 (eg. radioapple, staticmoth) to not put radiostatic in the main ship tag list just because it's one-sided or past radiostatic. QQ Just add it to "additional tags" instead so that it is tagged and filterable but doesn't come up in the radiostatic relationship tag search!

nobody look at me

Quick doodle of Wade and Ember from the movie Elemental before bed

yeah i dont rlly care about genderbends unless theyre doing something particularly interesting *imagines character but butch* holy shit

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.

--------

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.

who: @wadecalhoun​ where: Killjoys

Two bars had recently sprung up on the landscape of Rome, they could have been there all along -- forged in history and cobblestone, holes in the walls became to emerge like finding crystal within stone. There was always much to discover in the Vatican city and it served the cambion well, boredom never sat well on the tongue of the wanderer and so she ventured out to some new sights. It’s a standard bar, wooden walls and round tables, sticky floors and darts set up in the corner. She’s interested in a game of pool, competitiveness often surges through her and it’s enough to be entertainment for the night. There’s a tall man with dark eyes that waits at a bar stool at Killjoys, he looks familiar to her -- like she met him while she was fighting for her life. An itch to push buttons, to see how he’ll react to a general sort of discomfort -- it was those that were resilient and a making of hell of their own that she took too. “Want to play a game?” Her head tilts to indicate the pool table but a devil’s smile on her mouth speaks other words. “Tell me one of your biggest fears and I’ll buy you a shot.”

who: @wadecalhoun​ where: flora’s house, the morning after. notes: whose bed have your boots been under?

First thing she sees is the boots as she blinks blurrily awake in the morning sun, it takes a moment to gather her wits from all the whiskey she had drunk the night before -- memories coming back like flashbacks, dark eyes, a smile that spoke of danger and a disposition of a southern gentleman that made her weak. Things have been so hard lately that she wanted a night to forget and as she turns over to greet her bedfellow, she sees the abs and nods to herself -- what a great distraction. She’s happy she didn’t return to her ex, whose more happy then ever in his catboy relationship and shacking up with Andreas between the stacks at the library had been less fun lately with the full knowledge of how much he was deeply in love with someone else and she knew that someone else, liked them as a person and everyone was just waiting for them to get together so she thought she’d see herself out and keep the friendliness between them all.

Her hand goes to tousle her roots and it’s quite tangled from the night before. “Morning. Fancy a cup of coffee?”

🥂seeing double...

...and some mutual admiration 💍

my peter design

sometimes i see the complete river monsters collection dvd on my bookshelf and remember that my earliest serious hyperfixation was this extreme fishing show about a guy who went around chasing stories of giant murder fish. i was absolutely obsessed with catching every episode, i begged my dad to take me fishing even though he didn't fish and said i would just be bored and scare all the animals away, wanted to be a marine biologist for years just so i'd have a chance of meeting The River Monsters Guy, was completely unbearable to be around whenever i got a chance to visit an aquarium, and even sent an email to jeremy wade on the family computer once telling him what a big fan of his show i was. he didn't answer because i'm sure he was busy having a life and got a lot of emails but i think it's so funny that the target audience for this show was like. middle-aged dads who spend their weekends camping on the bank and one weird 12 year old.

Hi sci! What do you like the most about deadpool?

his... houhgh... his... his...

h-his...

Me when slowly having an epiphany while on a mission with Deadpool:

Wade a minute....

Do you eat peahen eggs? If yes, what do they taste like?

My wife raises geese and their eggs are huge, 3x the size of a hen’s eggs, and are generally fluffier and delicately sweeter.

I do! They taste like an egg.

I'm not allowed to answer anything more, apparently