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darbuckle21 · 1 year

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Need me? Beg

Info: fem reader-cussing- use of Y/N

“Prisoner 1035 be nice” the guard warns over the intercom. “I’m always nice sir” I smile at the camera In my cell. I hear the door open followed by footsteps. “Took me awhile to find you” Stark teases. “Well as you can see I’m a busy woman” I smile sarcastically waving my hands around my cell. “what do you want Stark” I smile looking him up and down. “Can’t I be here to visit an old friend?” He asks sticking his lip out pouting. “Not anymore, not after last time sorry Stark” back away returning to my previous position. “Is this all you do now? Yoga?” He teases clearly checking me out while I hold my plank. “What do you want?” I growl out annoyed. “I need your help” he mumbles. “What’s in it for me?” I huff still in a plank. “Your release” he smiles holding the key to my cell in hand. “Has it been that long that you’ve forgotten who your talking to?” I stand up walking closer to the bars. I reach into my pants pulling out the same key. “You can do better than that Stark” I tease. “Your really gonna make me say it” he huffs rolling his eyes while I nod. “Please I need you” he pleads. “Okay fine” I smile. ———————————————————————

“who’s she?” The man I recognize as War Machine asks Tony who smiles as he gestures for me to sit at the table full of hero’s. Namely The Black Panther,Vision, Black Widow, and War Machine or also known as the iron patriot. “This is my old friend Y/N also known as Lady Revenge” he explains as I smile coyly at the new faces. “She’s leveled entire hydra bases and killed countless of human traffickers, she was on the run for awhile before being caught by SHEILD and put in the raft” The red haired woman fills in a concerned War machine. “Ah so we fight one criminal with another, you are dumber than you look Stark” Black Panther teased causing me to laugh. I listen intently as Tony explains the plan and what happened before I arrived. The more I listen the more angry I become. He must be desperate if he thinks I would ever choose him over the real victim in this scenario. I bite my tongue though trying to make it less personal. This has nothing to do with me it’s just a favor for a friend. I tell myself as we prep for battle. ———————————————————————

“Wow, it’s so weird how you run into people at the airport, don’t you think that’s weird?” Stark asks the man I’ve come to know as Rhodey who replies with “definitely weird”. I smile as I float down landing on the ground with a wave. “Hear me out, Tony that doctor, the psychiatrist he’s behind all of this” Rodgers reasons as T’Challa jumps down joining us. “Captain” he greats and Rodgers turns replying “your highness”. Tony now impatient continues “anyway, Ross gave me 36 hours to bring you in, that was 24 hours ago. Can you help a brother out?” Captain only responds with “your after the wrong guy”. “Your judgement is askew, your old war buddies killed innocent people yesterday” Tony is now serious. “And there are five more just like him, I can’t let the doctor find him first, Tony. I can’t” he pleads. I bite my tongue as Natasha mutters “Steve, you know what’s about to happen, so you really wanna punch your way outta this one?” She asks pleading with his eyes. I grow more and more irritated by the second, these people don’t get it, maybe it was the fact I had similar things happen to me cause of Hydra. I don’t know whatever it is that separates me from them, it is making more irritated by the second they don’t understand. “God damn it, sorry Tony I really did try but” I smile sadly as I walkover to Rodgers side. “Fine, underoos!” Tony shouts a kid in a red suit webs Rodgers hands together causing the shield to fly in the air. The kid catches it landing on top of the helicopter. “Nice job kid!” Tony smiles. “Thanks, I could’ve stuck the landing a little better it’s just, new suit. Wait! It’s nothing Mr Stark! It’s perfect thank you!” Tony interrupts telling the kid they don’t need a conversation. “Okay, Cap- Captain! Lady Revenge! Big fan, I’m Spider-Man” he waves I smile waving back, poor kid doesn’t deserve to get sucked into all of this. “You’ve been busy” Captain informs dryly. “And you’ve been an idiot dragging in Clint, "rescuing Wanda" and now you have her” Tony scolds. “Look Tony, you don’t get it okay? I’ve been there! I’ve been trapped by them! You think I was born like this? A freak?!” I yell angrily. Suddenly Captain lifts his tied hands and an arrow flys through then breaking them. Then a man in a metal suit appears out of nowhere grabbing the shield and returning it to Rodger. That’s when the fight breaks out. I have no idea what Captains plan is but I try holding off The spider kid. ———————————————————————“hi! I’m Y/N” I smile reaching back from the passenger seat holding out a hand to the unfamiliar guy in front of me. “James Barnes” he greats I smile. “You know we aren’t on the side of the law with this one?” Steve asks from the drivers side. “What else is new? You’d think they would thank me for what I did? I mean those hydra fuckers deserved it” I smile looking at him. “Where did Stark find you?” Steve asks smiling. “Raft” I giggle turning on the radio. “How do you guys know each other?” James questions. “Me and Tones? He’s Locked me up bunches it’s real fun” now the two men look a little frightened. “What did they do to you?” James sympathizes. “You know what they did, I can see it in your eyes” I reply dryly. “I’ve never been in a quinjet before” I smile to myself. “Steve? I don’t know if I’m worth all of this” the brunette questions. “What you did all of those years… it wasn’t you. You didn’t have a choice.” The blonde comforts. “I know, but I did it” he replies glumly. I turn my seat facing him “I’ve only heard stories from my old cellmate back at the raft about you, he was obsessed with the howling commandos, but from what I’ve heard and from what I’ve seen you are a good guy, I know what it’s like you know? I’m not crazy” I finish the rest of the ride is silent until we get there. ———————————————————————

“how’ed it go?” Sam asks from his cell across from me. “We went to an abandoned Hydra facility long story short Tony showed up Steve and James Fought him but I couldn’t, turns out this mad man named Zemo was behind it all James and Steve ran leaving Tony for dead. I then helped Tony home and caught Zemo and get thrown in here” I finish. “Wow” Clint huffs. “Tell me about it, save the man you love get thrown in raft! At least I get the same cell” I giggle. Just then Tony walks in “if it isn’t Stark? Thought you locked us away and threw away the key?” Clint huffs. I turn away not looking at him, I cant not after what he did. “I’m sorry sweetheart, is that what you want me to say? Huh want me to beg again?” He pleads with me. I shake my head refusing to turn to face him. “No, I get it I understand your anger, he killed your parents, they left you for dead, but I didn’t okay? I love you Tony I always have and all I get back is this” I huff angrily. “I’m gonna get you out of here okay?” He pleads. “We both know they never could contain me” I huff. “I’m sorry, please forgive me?” Tony begs softly “You say that every time, this time Tony, im not listening!” I yell and he backs away before eventually leaving. He didn’t come back again after that no did. Until Steve walks right in breaking the walls of our cells freeing us.

#the avengers #avengers reader insert #tony stark #tony stark x reader #x reader

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iceandfiredrawings · 1 year

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I would like to share a bit how I imagine Daella's life. THIS IS NOT REAL, these are just "inventions", "theories", whatever you want to call it, mine. why? because I love these characters and I like to imagine their plot, especially when George takes time to give us the official information! 😂 Anyway, this is just my imagination running and since I have nowhere to write it, I'll leave it here for whoever wants to read it. Please excuse my English, it's not my mother tongue but I hope you understand... 😅🙌😁

Daella was born in Summerhall, and throughout her childhood she wished to marry her cousin Valarr Targaryen, son of Baelor Breakspear and heir to the Iron Throne. Due to the difference in age and other interests involved, Valarr ends up marrying Kiera of Tyrosh, which causes Daella to hate Kiera deeply...

During her childhood, Daella begins to get close to her brother Daeron, although she got along with all her siblings (except Aerion) she always said that Daeron was her favorite brother.And he said the same about her.

When Daella grew up, she married Edwyn Swann, but he died shortly after the wedding during the third Blackfyre rebellion. After that, Daella did not marry again (at least for a time). Maekar and Lord Bloodraven wanted Daella to marry Daeron, even when he was asked to choose his wife, the prince chose his sister, but despite the fact that she showed certain doubts about whether to accept or not, she ended up refusing that commitment.

Following an incident at Aegon and Betha's wedding, Daella is sent to Summerhall, escorted by a guard led by Ser Duncan the Tall. There Daella became familiar with the common people, whom she began to help. Exile also brought Daella closer to ser Duncan, who despite knowing him for years did not maintain a close relationship... Until now. During that time, Daella and Duncan fell in love.

Eventually Daeron marries Kiera of Tyrosh and wishes to have the wedding and celebration at Summerhall.

—Of all the maidens in the realm, do you choose our cousin's infertile widow? Wise choice—Daella told her brother when she found out about the engagement.

—No sister. Of all the women in the kingdom, I chose you first, but you refused my hand.

During a tournament honoring the newlyweds, Ser Duncan is crowned champion. and names Daella Targaryen Queen of Love and Beauty, ignoring the bride (who was traditionally chosen at weddings). This aroused suspicion in the Hand of the King, Brynden Rivers, and convinced Maekar to find Daella a husband. Again the princess refused, as stubborn as her father, she did not agree to marry. Finally, Lord Bloodraven convinced Maekar to take Duncan away, and Daella lived in Summerhall with Aegon and his wife.

Years later, Prince Daeron dies and Daella travels to Dragonstone to bid farewell to her brother. There an incident happens, where Daella blames her sister-in-law for taking her brother from her. Again Daella returns to Summerhall, this time in the company of ser Duncan, with whom she has a relationship again, hidden from the entire court.

For a time Daella and Duncan have a secret romance, but Maekar sends a raven to Summerhall where he requests the return of the knight and Aegon to go to battle. Daella decides it is time to tell Maekar that she wishes to marry Duncan, but they both fear the King's reaction. Afraid that the King might take the proposal the wrong way, she decides to wait until they return from the war. During that time, Daella discovers that she is pregnant and seeks advice from her brother Aemon. He tells her that Maekar will never forgive anyone who has dared to dishonor his daughter and that Duncan's life could be in danger if the he finds out that Duncan is the father of the baby. Still hoping that her father will grant permission for the wedding, Daella enlists the help of Lady Shiera Seastar, Bloodraven's mistress, to intercede with the Hand of the King on her behalf. She does not tell her about her condition, she only informs her that she is in love with a man, who is lowborn but honorable and wants her father's permission to marry him as soon as possible.

Shiera knows Daella's condition and knows why the urgency of a marriage. Of course she reports it to Blood Raven. The Hand of the King has other plans for the princess, so he lies to her.

He tells her that the King will not allow his daughter to marry a "nobody", that her marriage should be with a noble lord and that if he finds out who is the man she is in love with, he will put his head in a spear.

Afraid of the king's supposed response, Daella decides to follow Shiera Seastar's advice, and marry a lord before her pregnancy begins to show. The chosen one is Lord Tarth, a kind and handsome young man.

Months later, the kingdom receives the news that the King has died in battle, once back in court, the Hand of the King convenes a Council to choose a successor. Duncan, who already knew about the news of Daella's marriage, tells her that Maekar never knew that she wanted to get married. The princess realizes the deception and confronts the Hand of the King, who tells her that he did everything for her good and that of the Kingdom, claiming that it was inevitable to convene a council to choose a new ruler and that an ill-fated marriage to Duncan would affect her claim to the Throne.

During the Council's time, Daella discovers that Lady Kiera has conspired with the Blackfyre to betray House Targaryens and place the usurper on the Throne. She reports this to Brynden Rivers, who orders Lady Kiera's death.

—You will be the one to inform your sister-in-law about her execution, I think you have earned that right.

Some say that Daella was the one who ordered her death, others say that despite the betrayal, the princess did her best to avoid a death sentence. But they all agree on something: the princess was not at all sad with the execution of her sister-in-law, in fact, the day of Lady Kiera's execution, Daella seemed the personification of the Unknown, who had attended only to take the soul of the damned with her. The princess looked pale, haggard, and although she had recently given birth, she was too thin. It is also said that her violet eyes never left the dais where Lady Kiera stood, not even when her head was detached from her body.

Some lords of the great houses of the west agreed that Daella should be Maekar's successor, even the Hand of the King supported her claim, as did her siblings. But Daella still held a grudge against Brynden for interfering with her plans with Duncan, so one day before her appointment, Daella appeared in the throne room and said:

—I am here thanks to you. I am here as a princess of the Seven Kingdoms, and as such, I know that I have a duty to you. I understand that. I have done everything in my power to serve this realm, to cleanse it of traitors, and to help the people. However, I am here today to inform you, that I renounce the Crown, and abdicate all rights I have to the Iron Throne in favor of my brother Aegon Targaryen.

Shouts from the lords of the realm rose to the ceiling of the hall, Blood Raven quickly questioning the princess about her decision.

—What have you done? I have given you the Kingdom and you reject it with this impudence?

—I will continue to serve the kingdom in any way I can from my place as princess, but I refuse to give my life to the crown. What have the Seven Kingdoms done for me but bring me misfortune? Two arranged marriages, they took my dear brother from me, they took my father from me, They took away my chance to marry the man I love. I am not willing to give my life and my family to this kingdom full of crows and snakes.

After that Daella went with her husband and son to Tarth and did not return to the court of King's Landing until years later.

Daella was at court when prince Duncan, King Aegon's son, abdicated the crown so he could marry Jenny of Oldstones. Some people say that it was she who advised her nephew to make such a decision... that decision led to the Summerhall tragedy years later. Daella was not on site when the tragedy occurred, having learned the news from her niece, and now queen, Shaera Targaryen.

When she learned of the fate of her brother, her nephew, and her beloved Duncan, Daella sank into a deep depression. One night, she told her husband that she would be praying for her brother and nephew in the sept of the Castle. She took her own life by hanging herself on the altar in the sept. Her remains were interred in the crypt of Evenfall, in Tarth.

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sappho-knight · 1 year

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hi okay yeah vent blog time

read this from an interview with fushimi and hirasaka about the state of the light novel industry (https://originalnews.nico/388202)

yomi hirasaka may be leaving the industry. and i kinda don't want them to go but like i have no stake in his life except just being sort of a parasocial reader which he probably doesn't like (wow! expectations are scary) but also. i kind of. want him to continue writing. we don't get a lot of light novel writing like his any more in the industry... or maybe i'm not familiar with anything like his work.

i like the topics he brings up and the way he tackles them... his characters are very human... i'm infinitely jealous...

the way the industry sounds structured makes me realize like damn. i kind of want to be around people like that, too. and the way they think... uuuuuuuuu..........

he's really just writing something he wants to read! he really is doing that. i'm so jealous. i wish i knew what i wanted to read (lol) but also imagine the amount of freedom you're experiencing to be able to achieve that. haganai was an absolute banger in japan, so i think he's able to comfortably(?) retire on that money, and honestly thinking about bunny girl senpai being of the same genre/vein, to me it makes sense why these light novel authors, seasoned, are able to survive. same for fushimi and oreimo. they're really living out their best lives, i think...

some part of me feels upset because. goddamn. out of all the people i have a parasocial relationship with, it has to be a middle-aged author on the other side of the world, language barriers, who has a difficult time understanding people/characters like me (me!). and not like some vtuber that's trending right now that we can speak normally of. it feels like an incredibly isolating experience to want to get to understand the author -- maybe not even know him! but maybe, just a little? -- and figure out how his brain ticks so you can continue on that trend on 'his behalf'. if not for him, then for yourself, who wants to see his type of work grow.

i think it would be nice to write, release and consider short stories, like light novels, actually. maybe they're just regular novels/fiction in english. it's not like i've tried to understand a lot of the works under the fiction section. but at the same time, i can't wrap my head around what's the trending industrial model, either. ya books? parents in the us will have my head off the moment i start talking about sexual content. japan's content curation is infinitely more lax than main areas in the west, which is kind of a bust for itself (aka problematic af) but it's kind of also beneficial (aka we get to talk about and showcase really problematic ideas and origins of those ideas).

i don't want to see mainstream ideas that flood the western universe, goddamn. that's like, no got/startrek/wars/lord of the rings/twilight/stephen king novels. i want my momentary/cyclic and maybe intriguing facets of the industry. like whatever jay zhao is doing (iron widow) [but no, i'm not interested in her content either, i do respect it though] but like. all the time.

(or is it that like romcom in the light novel industry is vastly different from how we judge romcom in western society? but that can't be it. there's something very special about yomi's writing that we're losing from him leaving the industry, and i don't have the capability of knowing why. so losing him not only feels sore, it makes me feel helpless.)

i think, for sure, i don't really care about what yomi does after he leaves the industry. i think at best i care about his wellbeing, and that whatever prospects he seeks out next be well to him. i'm just struggling and trying to process my grief for what we lose from him leaving the industry, but from like a parasocial point of view. he's going to be a pillar of my writing journey, always, but that's not his fault and i don't think he should feel guilty for going where he wants to go.

i just really, really like yomi's work a whole lot.

#commentary #yomi hirasaka #haganai #vent #rant #i'm going to miss him.#he's even writing/written a yuri novel as one of his final books for the time being.#if that's not a goodbye gift to me #i don't know what is #thank you for all the good times and so long hero ;_;)7

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joshsheart · 1 year

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realized that if i have a lot of thoughts on something and no one will listen to them i can put them on here!

So today I was thinking about animation. You know how people don’t respect animation as a form of entertainment or media? I wish I knew why because I feel like, if anything, animation takes a lot more effort than live action movies or TV does. Of course, that might not be true in all cases but in some it definitely is.

I assume that some of the reason animation is not respected as much is because it is often associated with children entertainment. But this is stupid because yes, children entertainment often is animated but it’s also live action! And! wait till you here this! There are animated adult shows! Family Guy?? Family guy has a bunch of awards and is a respected show. It’s stupid but adults respect it and watch it. But the moment there’s something that’s animated (that’s not some dumb show like Family Guy (no hate to Family Guy)) these people won’t even bother watching it.

Well then I started thinking about Super Hero movies. God. Marvel, DC, whatever, I’m so sick of it. I understand that fans of these franchises are sick of hearing this and it also doesn’t necessarily apply to every single super hero movie ever, but this genre is so played out! If you look at Marvel specifically, you have some movies that are good and fun but then you get to a point where every single movie is the same idea with big battle, we’re almost dying!, how are we going to win?, we have to use this weird ancient/alien technology to save the world! It’s boring now!

And then you have the hero repetition. Like The Batman. Sure you can say they made that Batman movie because there was a different villain or something like that but it’s boring! I don’t mean that the movie itself is bad or boring, I saw it in theaters myself, it’s just a boring concept (same with the Marvel movies, they’re not necessarily bad, just overdone and are boring concepts at this point). Further with this, why are there three Spidermans? And do not get this twisted. I love Spiderman, Andrew Garfield’s being my favorite, but why are there three? Maybe there’s a real reason but to me it just seems like an excuse to keep profiting on the popularity of Spiderman by bringing him back several times.

Further, I’m already finding the current era of hero movies to be (Mostly) insufferable but imagine what they will look like in the future! Years down the line what will they do? Keep making new Spiderman and Batman films (and don’t forget about the tv programs)? When will the next Superman come out? I can’t imagine.

I also want to make a point that I understand that DC and Marvel movies are based on comic books. My knowledge of how accurate the films are to the comics or how many of them are actually based on the comics is very limited. I mean was Infinity War in the comics? What about Suicide Squad? I genuinely have no idea. If they are, it really doesn’t change my argument at all. It’s still boring to have all these heroes with their stories get pushed down to be a constant retelling. Also, I’m not saying that a movie like Avengers is boring. That’s probably when it was good! But then the shit kept going! Like... That’s the repetition. It never concludes. It’s like when a show should’ve ended at like season 5 but kept going for 15. And I’m bored of it. Another point to make is that certain some new hero movies say, Black Panther, I wouldn’t necessarily fall into this category but, put the Black Panther cast into a movie with Iron Man (RIP I know), Thor, Black Widow, Hulk, Tom Holland Spiderman, Dr. Strange, and any of those other bitches in a big battle to save the universe...

Anyway, straying from the new, boring hero movies (Black Adam, Shazam, etc.), I started thinking about newer (kind of) hero movies that I thought were good and realized all three were animated. The three I came up with were Megamind, Lego Batman, and Into the Spiderverse. HEAR ME OUT! First of all, I’m not saying that Lego Batman is the best superhero movie ever made or that Megamind is better than the entire MCU or anything like that. Just listen to my thoughts here.

So first, Megamind. Megamind will never be taken seriously by everyone and I’ve already accepted that but it is a magnificent movie. It plays with the tropes of hero and villain so well. The entire concept of a villain beating the hero, getting bored in his victory and take over, creating a new hero so that he has someone he can have someone to defeat again, and in the end defeating him as a hero is insane! Completely flipping the idea of hero and villain like that is such a refreshing and entertaining thing to see. I’m so bored of seeing the repetition of some guy is a hero and has to face this big villain, whether the villain is human or not, and has to save the world or some shit. Seeing the villain become the hero is just so much more interesting! And it’s not like a Loki or Crowley (Supernatural) situation where viewers question whether they’re truly villains or not or see them as a good guy either way; Megamind was a villain but had a real change where he realized that he had to go in another direction.

Lego Batman is one that I will need to strongly defend here I’m guessing. I know I talked about the repetition of Spiderman and Batman yet two of my good hero movies are Batman and Spiderman? Well if we compare Lego Batman to the 2022 Batman with Robert Pattinson, I would argue that one of them is a lot more interesting. The Batman was a good movie, but it’s been done before. Even if it was a slightly different storyline or had some different main characters or something, we’ve all seen the basic Batman story. So why is Lego Batman different? Lego Batman sort of plays on the overplayed Batman tropes. So Batman is his usual foreboding, dark self, but at the same time it’s kind of weird in a way that sort of pokes fun at that part of Batman. They do the same with the other characters, like Robin and the Joker. It’s still Robin and Joker but they play with their characters, making fun of their relationship with Batman. I understand it’s for comedy, but the change of classic Batman characters and tropes make it a more interesting and entertaining Batman movie. Now I’m not necessarily saying that Lego Batman is better that any other Batman movie; I’m saying that, in this era, instead of making a basic, overdone Batman movie, Lego Batman provides a new interesting take on the Batman story.

And Into the Spiderverse. For starters it is different than the other Spidermans because it is not about Peter Parker, it’s Miles Morales. The whole concept of Into the Spiderverse makes it different than the other Spiderman movies. Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland all have great Spiderman movies (like great movies, I love them) but isn’t doing something new with Spiderman and different Spider..people? crossing universes and coming together better than if they had just made a new Spiderman movie with Donald Glover or something? And that was not a dig on Donald Glover, I am an advocate for him in a Spiderman movie, Spiderverse sequel maybe??

And I know you’ve been thinking it. What about Spiderman: No Way Home? It was a great movie!! In the same way Spiderverse was but in a more nostalgic and cool way. Bringing the old Spidermen together with Tom Holland was a great idea and I’m glad they did it. 10/10 much more interesting than Infinity War.

So is this argument for animation or against hero movies? I guess I don’t know. I was just thinking about all these things and thought I’d write them down. Some closing thoughts: I am not saying that any hero movie is bad. I’m sure there are some bad ones but I am not saying that. I just think that the entire concepts and main plots of a lot of these movies are overdone and becoming boring. I’m also not saying that Megamind and Lego Batman are thee best hero movies. They’re some of my favorites but I wouldn’t say that they are undeniable better than most or anything like that. I guess my main point might be why is animation not taken seriously when some of the more interesting hero movies, which has become a draining genre, are animated? Of course that’s heavily based on my opinion but I was just thinking about it.

#my thoughts #please no one get mad #animation #movie #superhero #dare i tag marvel #marvel #megamind #i love you megamind #batman

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moontheoretist · 3 years

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MCU timeline, if they actually cared about the characters as much as we do:

Phase 1 (setting up the universe)

- Iron Man - Incredible Hulk (+ Bruce’s DID is included and well represented, Hulk is not shown as a monster which cannot control himself so much he hurts everybody around including Betty, in fact he is shown to avoid hurting anybody who isn’t actively shooting at him, Dr Samson and Rick Jones are a must for this origin story, post credit can stay the same) - Hawkeye (includes: his childhood with an abusive father, his brother Bradley, his past in the circus so basically his origin story, his deafness, him being conscripted by SHIELD, and post credit scene with him choosing not to kill Natasha) - Black Widow (includes: her childhood in the Red Room, the fall of USSR and change in Russian politics, KGB being dissolved, Natasha’s breaking of her programming, her leaving the Red Room thanks to meeting Hawkeye, the assassination of Dreykov’s daughter, What Happened in Bucharest, Natasha joining SHIELD, and post credit scene with her taking place of the PA which was supposed to apply to Stark Industries) - Iron Man 2 (+ more info about Howard’s abuse of Tony, Natasha is there, but it’s not her first appearance, and also she isn’t shown as if she knew she was in a movie) - Thor - Captain America: The First Avenger (I think that his stupid behavior in CW is completely set up by his origin story, so I wouldn’t change anything if we wanna have that conflict with him being more concerned about Bucky than literally anything else going on) - Captain Marvel (because her existence makes Fury think about Avengers and explains why Fury wanted to create them in the first place, also action happens mostly on Earth) - Avengers (+ Jane Foster and Darcy are part of the science team and greatly contribute to the plot as scientists, because I am fed up with women being sidelined)

And because Avengers has a post credit with Thanos we should get some movies in space now related to Thanos first, before Iron Man 3.

Phase 2 (we learn about the ultimate badguy)

- Guardians of the Galaxy - Thor: The Dark World (but hopefully better written, + no damselling of Jane) - War Machine (Rhodey’s only movie, Tony is busy doing whatever) - Hawkeye 2 (how Clint dealt with everything which happened during Avengers, how SHIELD agents treated him, introducing his family?, maybe bringing back Barney and showing his relationship with Mockingbird and stuff like those) - Iron Man 3 (without the ableist meta message that all disabled people just wait to become murder machines, but still introducing Extremis) - Black Widow 2 (could be the same story as we got in 2021, introducing Yelena Belova) - Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch (includes: their childhood, how their parents died (Yugoslavia being bombed by NATO, but I doubt Hollywood would ever wanna say it out loud), them growing in orphanage, possibly attending university (universities for citizens in Serbia are free and because Sokovia is based on Serbia, and it is a slavic country we can assume they have that system as well, and there are also social support programs available from both the government and possibly the university as well), the difficulties of a life in which they have to cover their costs of living themselves, because they have no parents, American army stationing in Sokovia, twins getting radicalized, protesting against foreign influences in their country and joining Hydra, experimentation, if they were trained by Hydra to use their powers or not and how were they trained, Sokovia being shown to be normal country instead of breaking apart state which Americans see each time they think about it) - Falcon (Sam’s origin story, his mission in Afghanistan and stuff - I don’t know his origin story, so I dunno what to say here) - Captain America: The Winter Soldier - TV show about the consequences of the movie above. Possibly something akin to Agents of Shield. What happened to the agents, how world reacted to Natasha’s “fuck you”. - Ant-Man (introducing Hank Pym) - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Ultron is Hank Pym’s like in the comics, but in some versions of this Tony helped or provided tech so he still wpuld feel quilty afterwards, + no dying Pietro)

Phase 3 (everything gets complicated, but they prevail)

- Incredible Hulk 2 (what happened to Bruce and Hulk and how they dealt with the idea that Steve literally had his well-being in his ass by inviting Wanda and Pietro to the team, what is going on with Thaddeus Ross and Betty Ross, we meet Jennifer Walters) - Black Panther (different one than the one we got, introduces T'Challa and his family) - Spider-Man: Homecoming (could be earlier, just after Avengers, but *shrugs* this story is written in such a way it is better after Iron Man 3 and Age of Ultron) - Captain Marvel 2 (basically setting up why she didn’t participate in Civil War, my idea was to depower her, but not take her powers away, so she could have some more down to earth stories instead of stories set in space, maybe even explore her alcoholism that way) - Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch 2 (deradicalisation, becoming heroes) - Captain America: Civil War (Accords are better explained, Matt Murdock or Jennifer Walters show up to do exactly that, RAFT is explained as American prison not related to the UN, Steve this time has valid concerns about the Accords, but he still goes ape shit over Bucky, still lies to Tony about his family, because those traits were all set in his origin movie) - The Wasp (Hope’s origin story) - Hawkeye 3 or Hawkeye TV series - Black Widow 3 (something something about Ross hunting her, but Red Room was already taken down, so different story is here instead) - Ant-Man 2 (Wasp is here too, but this is Scott’s movie, previous Ant-Man and The Wasp) - Black Panther 2 (about Kilmonger and T'Challa’s scuffle for the throne) - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (didn’t know where to put it, because it is mostly unrelated to any other movies with this story about Ego, but it develops Nebula more, so let’s be here) - Doctor Strange - Thor: Ragnarok (I am not opposed to Planet Hulk, but I am more inclined to not put Bruce into a movie which is supposed to be about Thor and Loki so… more time for Brunhilde) - The Winter Soldier (solo Winter Soldier movie) - Avengers Infinity War/Endgame (it makes no sense to make two movies if we can have one, the snap was used as a plot device more than actual defeat of the Avengers, so it can last less than 5 years and also no time travel which then you have to explain why TVA didn’t put everybody in jail for that, Tony doesn’t die and Carol and some other powerful people (LIKE HULK, Hulk is NOT less powerful than Thanos or fearful or something) take down Thanos instead and Tony finally retires and is left alone by everybody goddammit)

Phase 4 (new era, some heroes retire, others take their place, while different ones just get the grip of whom they truly were all along, and also we get a new ultimate bad guy and possibly set a stage for his defeat) <- this one not really well set up, because we don’t know most of the movies and TV shows which appear in this phase so dunno how to set them.

- Spider-Man: Far From Home - Photon (origin story of Monica Rambeau) - War Machine 2 - WandaVision (or Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch 3, adjusted, so it would not repeat some facts and would only remind about the most important stuff. Also, Pietro lives in this timeline so no Bohner guy lol, he is just insufferable brother-in-law to Vision, and weird uncle to kids) - The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (but with Steve who didn’t go back in time, because there was no going back in time in this timeline, he just finally is learning what accountability is and has to forfeit his shield, because it’s time to retire) - Falcon 2 - Winter Soldier 2 - The Wasp 2 - Loki TV series (Loki survives Thanos and is taken by the TVA, it basically doesn’t force the story to make him quickly develop feelings in the first episode and bypasses that issue, + more Loki Variants, all genderluid and presenting in various ways in the show) - Incredible Hulk 3 (Bruce and Hulk finally start communicating and Hulk becomes gradually smarter, and we meet Bruce’s another alter Grey Hulk and the circus with getting along starts all over again, because Grey Hulk hates Green Hulk xD, is setting up She-Hulk) - Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings - What If…? TV show - Ms Marvel TV show - Eternals (feels like should be in different phase) - Spider-Man: No Way Home - Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness - Thor: Love and Thunder (about Mighty Thor - Jane) - Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (about Shuri?) - The Marvels (Captain Marvel 3 basically) - Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quntamania (setting mutiple Kaangs I suppose) - Moonknight TV show - She-Hulk TV show - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - Blade (feels like should be in different phase) - Fantastic Four - Avengers (in which they fight Kaang?)

I was going with the idea that every superhero should get at least 3 movies ONLY about them. As of now, I managed to put 3 only for a few, and some were swapped for TV shows instead to fill the place and better show the character and what they’re up to, because TV shows have more hours than movies.

I know there are supposed to be TV shows for Armor Wars, Iron Heart and Secret Wars, but I dunno when, so no idea where to put them.

#mcu critical #mcu #mcu au #marvel cinematic universe

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notallthosewho-wanderarelost · 3 years

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I keep seeing very salty posts that are like “what’s the point of a Black Widow movie now that we know she dies in Endgame” or complaining that the movie is an attempt to replace with Natasha with a younger, hotter model in Yelena, or saying that it’s basically beating a dead horse for the money and I just. The point is that it’s a Black Widow movie. The point is that it’s exploring Natasha’s character on her own, putting her in the spotlight and diving into her psyche and her character and her story, instead of putting her in a secondary role next to someone else. Do you also complain about the existence of the Star Wars prequels because you already know Anakin becomes Darth Vader and dies 23 years later? Because if not then that’s a bit of a double standard.

Yes it’s late, and yes it totally sucks that it only happened after she died stupidly in Endgame, and that we’re not going to get more of this for a very long time if ever, but that doesn’t change the fact that the movie is actually phenomenal. Maybe watch the movie before you complain about problems that it doesn’t have.

And that also goes for people preemptively saying that it sexualizes all the female characters. It absolutely does not. You can even see that in the posters and trailers if you actually bother to look at them instead of just assuming the worst because that’s what you’re used to. I’m not going to go into specific details here because I don’t want to spoil anything for people who haven’t seen it, but you can absolutely tell this movie was made by women. There’s a thing about a certain piece of clothing having pockets. All the women have their hair pulled back when going into fights. This movie takes Whedon’s “Natasha is a monster because she can’t have children” and turns that on its head in such a great way that tells us something about the characters and their trauma and is a hilarious scene to boot. Actually, it’s multiple scenes and they’re both great.

Yelena is not being set up as a “younger, hotter, better version of Natasha” or whatever. (Though ironically that IS explicitly her goal in her early comic appearances, and it makes her a really interesting foil to Natasha.) She’s her own character. She has a great arc and she’s an amazing character, but this movie is about Natasha. You can’t talk about Yelena as a character in this movie and therefore in the wider MCU without talking about Natasha and their relationship and how it impacts her, because it’s Natasha’s movie.

Lastly, because this post was made in response to a specific post I just saw on my dash that was just the last straw for me but I didn’t want to respond directly to because I don’t feel like wading into that drama, can we please stop equating actors with the characters they play? If you don’t like Scarlett Johansson that’s fine, but don’t slam Natasha because of who plays her. And the same for Jeremy Renner and Clint. Also, stop blaming Clint for Natasha’s death. He wanted to sacrifice himself for Nat too; he didn’t think her life was less valuable than his just because he had a wife and kids. Blame the writers and directors of Endgame for Natasha’s crummy death and all its implications, not her best friend who she loved and sacrificed herself for. It’s M&M and the Russos who did Natasha dirty, not Clint.

PS: I hate to tell you this, but if you thought Natasha’s braid in Endgame was ugly, you might want to know ahead of time that everyone in Black Widow wears braids. There are so many braids. Braids are good and there was nothing wrong with Nat’s Endgame braid or with any of the braided hairstyles in Black Widow. You’re fully welcome to your opinion on braids, but I’m not sure why Nat’s braid is being dragged into the way Endgame mistreated her.

#black widow movie #bw movie #natasha romanoff #yelena belova #clint barton #mcu #marvel #anti endgame #a rare text post appears #my stuff #i just fully ran out of patience i’m sorry #actually no i’m not sorry #this is a vaguepost cause I don’t have the energy to wade into the drama of replying to the post i saw #also i am SO GODDAMN TIRED of people/supposed fans bitching about this movie’s very existence when we asked for it for YEARS #we finally GOT IT AND IT’S PHENOMENAL and people/supposed fans are posting bad faith takes #about how it’s unnecessary and pointless #if you don’t care anymore that’s your call but don’t act like you speak for everyone

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keouil · 3 years

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how you forget to be human

“so is she like,” scott hesitates. “cap’s first lady or something?” rated t. 2k+. steve/nat. also on ao3 / twitter / cc

Scott hasn’t been with the team for a long time, but he thinks he at least has enough working knowledge of how everyone operates.

The Winter Soldier—Bucky to Steve, James to anyone who dared—quite frankly still scares the living shit out of him, and that’s Magneto on a good day. It didn’t take much to deduce he seemed wholly uncomfortable in his own skin, his jaw coiled perpetually tight and the rigid set of his shoulders always in alert. It was uneasy just being around him, his discomfort bleeding over others and charging the air around his space with its own brand of disquieting; but always, without fail, Steve cushioned whatever apprehension anyone aimed toward his bestfriend.

Most of it came from Sam, and almost always in good nature as if to ease the brainwashed supersoldier into some semblance of normality; and Scott would fear for Sam’s life every time he opened his mouth, were it not for the also very obvious fact the Falcon held his own and didn’t appreciate handouts and the three of them seemed to be getting along uniquely (if not a little oddly) well enough.

The witch was a small problem, however. Simply for the fact she was a witch and Scott is wary because history taught him they burned all of them down in Salem.

He sees her wiggling those voodoo fingers around sometimes, almost unconsciously, and feels the hairs on his arms rise with every flick of her wrist. The energy around her isn’t suffocating the same way Bucky’s is. It was more a subtle nervous tingling; like she herself was afraid of the gravity of her own powers she had yet to have complete reigns on. Scott is oddly humbled by the fact and even empathises with her a little.

Steve keeps an eye on her and doesn’t bother hiding it, but it’s the archer who gets past her when it really counts. Clint Barton, who, surprisingly is the one he’s on the most similar wavelength with out of all of them: family man and all.

Clint Barton whose also friends with Natasha Romanoff.

Hawkeye who has simultaneously the most complex and impossibly simple relationship with Black Widow.

“I swear to god if you ring me up next time you’re out of goddamn Fruit Loops,” Natasha warns, digging through one of the five grocery bags on the kitchen island. She fishes for a few more seconds, before popping a colourful cartoon box out from under the bag and tossing it to Barton. “I’m bringing you in for real.”

Clint scoffs, placing the carton on the top shelf. “How many times have I heard that before?”

“Apparently not enough,” Natasha glares at him from her peripheral, scooping out Nutella and a pack of store-bought pryanik to lay on the table. Russian biscuits. For Wanda. “If I’m still stopping by an abandoned boarding house in the slums of Siberia every other week. Y’all grown men can’t do grocery shopping by yourselves?”

Scott blinks from his spot by one of the stools.

Of all the things he expected to wake up to in hiding from 117 countries from possible charges of aiding and abetting a war criminal, Black Widow casually arranging and organising their weekly rationale was nowhere near the top of the list. She did this all the while supposedly fighting for the other team.

This one needs no introduction.

Scott knows who Black Widow is. Scott knows Captain America, after all.

You don’t grow up in the land of the free without knowing his legacy even in minute passing. The man has been plastered on nearly every surface of the continent since the dawn of America. Scott has seen the news footages, read the official accounts, willingly devoured every single documentary or biopic helmed in honour of their nation’s greatest hero: he knows, down to the bone, the star-spangled man with a plan.

A forgotten and revered and rebirthed war hero.

How he came to know of her, however, is an entirely different story: because come the news footages, zoom in close enough you’ll see the infamous shield covering a much smaller and daintier figure; go over the accounts with a fine-toothed comb, they speak of a levelled dynamic between a commanding officer and a shadow leader; and, lest history not forget, the documentaries: Peggy, because behind every great man is a woman, Natasha.

“Now why would we do that if we got you?” Sam. He comes up from behind the hallway to playfully grin at Natasha before enveloping her in a small hug. She returns it easily.

Scott braces himself for what’s to come, because they came in a pair, and so: “Nat,” Steven Grant Rogers, in the flesh himself, pokes his head in not a moment later with a barely indisputable frown on his face. “You came here again?”

Natasha clicks her tongue at him. “Someone had to make sure you boys were fed.”

“That’s not— We can—” Steve stutters as he strides in, and Scott has to very carefully school his features into nonchalance because Captain America does not stammer. He sighs deeply before settling next to her, nudging her with his hip. “Tony atleast know you're here?”

Natasha gives him a pointed look. “Who do you think paid for all this?”

Scott watches their silhouettes grow smaller and smaller by the distance.

Even from afar, he can make out Steve’s absolute hulk of a frame: back impossibly straight in a way that bespoke authenticity, years of rigid military training drilled into his bones; only he seemed to mellow, somehow and very slightly, the fine lines of his shoulders angled in the direction of her voice. And Natasha: brave and lithe, nearly a head shorter and so much more smaller, facing forward in full confidence and a leisurely stride in her steps.

Siberia has a biting night air that seeps deep into the bone. But it’s also comforting somehow; all of them knowing, in one way or another, what it was like to be iced out from society.

They were all huddled by the makeshift campfire Barton fashioned out of some wooden logs and a matchstick. Sam, in charge of roasting marshmallows, was gently coaxing Bucky into eating one and promising him it’s not poisoned. Wanda was handing out steaming cups of hot chocolate brewed from the pack Natasha brought in a few hours ago, a staple in her weekly grocery runs because apparently the kid witch liked sweets.

Scott gingerly takes a sip from his mug, some of the warmth seeping into liquid courage he was building up for weeks now. He takes a deep breath before plunging himself into the waves.

“I can’t be the only one worried that the enemy has infiltrated our territory, right?”

To their credit, neither of them kill him on sight.

Wanda pauses in levitating one of the wooden logs above the hearth, a single bark of kindling hovering uncertainly over the air. Bucky has an unreadable expression on his face when he regards him. A look passes between Sam and Clint, betraying nothing of their inner thoughts at his outburst.

The fire is nice and toasty, but the air is stifling now and Scott has never felt more the outsider than at that very moment.

Until Sam breaks into a hearty laugh. “Widow?” he shakes his head amusedly. “No, man, Steve and Nat are tight. They’re past stuff like that.”

Scott furrows his eyebrows in concern. “But isn’t she—”

“On Tony’s side?” Clint quips, poking at one of the planks. Wanda finally drops the floating bark, and Scott doesn’t miss the flash of something in her eyes when she glances at him from the other side of the fire. He thinks he saw a spark of red for a second. “Sure, I guess. Technically she’s Team Iron Man or whatever that means. But Natasha is also fiercely loyal, especially when it comes to Steve.”

“What does that mean?” Scott asks in genuine confusion.

Sam opens his mouth to elaborate, words already forming on his mouth; before he seems to come to a belated realisation, blinks, and manages a nonchalant shrug. "Damn if I know,” he admits, turning over a puffy mallow and watching the crackles of fire burn its edges. “But she’s good for him. That’s all I care about.”

“And he’s good for her,” Clint returns easily, not an ounce of hesitation in his voice. “Maybe sometimes it’s just that easy.”

They hear the crunching of footsteps on snow creeping up behind them, and Scott takes this as his cue to stash the conversation for another time.

He watches them stroll in together carefully.

Steve holds the gate open for her and places a small hand on her back as they advance in the small patch of woods by the backyard. Natasha settles next to Wanda, hands going up and down her arms to warm the younger girl despite being the one having only just gone out for a walk in the middle of Russian winter: because, and at this Scott is now confident, the jacket resting on her shoulders three times her size was keeping her warm enough.

The quinjet doesn’t start up right away.

Scott is slowly panicking, because the realisation that he was truly out of his depth at fighting in the next greatest civil war of the century notches above his pay grade only viscerally begins to take hold.

He has a family back home, pets to feed, a little life saving every now and then; but never this colossal of a scale, never with the stakes stacked up so high against them, that it really could only ever be toppled down by the likes of fucking Iron Man and Captain America.

But Steve is still confident.

It’s so bloody obvious he was always going to keep at it, gunned down the concrete walls of the airport and clawed his way out of it brick by brick if need be. He was really and truly the good man underneath it all, and at the back of his mind, Scott still finds himself awed at the fact.

But he doesn’t know how on earth the man came out of that airport not visibly rattled, not at all unlike how Scott was currently feeling; and, as he processes the rest of their wayward expressions, he knew he wasn’t alone in thinking so.

“Cap,” Sam wheezes by the floor, fighting to labor his breathing with a hand clutched on his dislocated shoulder. “I still got the jeep parked outside. It’s not too late. We can hike the rest of the way.”

“No,” Steve replies, an edge of conviction in his voice. There is not a single tremor in his stubborn hands gripping the wheel. “That’s gonna hold us back days. We just need to be up in the air for now. We need—”

“A woman to come to your rescue again?”

This time, it’s Scott who sighs in deep relief at her voice. This time, Scott doesn’t fight the churn in his stomach at the prospect of having someone who nearly nicked him lifeless not even hours ago this close a range with them again. This time, she is not Black Widow, but simply Natasha Romanoff; Steve Rogers’ friend.

This time, Scott thinks, he will let them be easy just like that.

There was no more a sign of tremble in his voice or hands the entire battle, but at the lilt of her voice, he just crumbles.

“Nat,” Steve breathes out when he turns to her, hands fisting at his sides in an attempt to regain control. Just like that, he unravels; so easily and without preamble in the face of her steeled strength. “I can’t get it to turn on— And I— We have to get Bucky—”

“Work through it, Steve,” she cooes in probably the most placating voice he’s heard of her, but she doesn’t move to touch him when she comes close. Her hands are going a mile a minute over the control panel, pushing buttons and lifting levers. Steve is hovering by her side like it's the only thing holding him together. “You know how to fly this thing, right?”

Steve is visibly taken aback and angles his body to face her. “You’re not coming with us?”

The question hangs in the air.

It charges the silence around them and quells any of their growing uncertainty, because, clear as it was of Steve’s well-founded and undeniable leadership skills: they also knew, intimately, she anchored him through it all.

Sam was putting pressure around Bucky’s human arm as he looked back and forth at them tensely. He could feel Wanda hitch her breath behind him.

Natasha’s fingers keep flying away at the keyboard, until they feel the telling signs of an engine rumbling underneath and the overhead lights spurting back to light. The whole jet roars to life in the next second, heating fans whizzing and technical sounds beeping. She shifts some gears around and locks in a destination with the GPS navigation.

When she turns to look at Steve, it is then Scott forces himself to pry his eyes away and not bear witness to this part of his already over documented life. In that single moment of uncertainty, the what does that mean is meant like this: an intimate baring of a soul, heart, trust: in a way no words could ever begin describing or should even attempt to put to paper.

It is friendship at the most intimate level, it is soulmates on the most soul-crushing departure, and it is the everything else that comes after.

“Not this time, Rogers,” he hears her say, and Scott doesn’t have to imagine the slight fracturing of his iron-clad footing in the world swaying ever so slightly, when he replies with: “Then I guess I’ll see you around, Romanoff.” .

“So is she like,” Scott hesitates. “Cap’s first lady or something?”

They’re some seventy feet off the air above the Pacific Ocean, the moisture from the ocean drifting up to the open barracks and making the air glisten around them. Bucky is fast asleep somewhere down the lower levels with Wanda keeping watch over him, upon the fervent insistence of Steve arguing he needed rest. It came as no surprise that he also self-assigned himself the first watch of the night.

Sam is sharpening his knives, the grating sound of sandpaper slicing over iron piercing through the silent hum and drum of the night.

“Please,” he scoffs, looking over at him. “If anything, Steve is her first lady.”

#romanogers #stevenat #fic #natasha romanoff #steve rogers #romanogers fi #stevenat fic #marvel fic

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alloftheblackwidowfeelings · 3 years

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Almost every reviewer on YouTube wasn’t satisfied with this movie IMO they said it was just Marvel combined some elements from other marvel movies so they could throw fans a BW movie so we could stfu, it didn’t do justice to the the character ,what do you think, is it really that bad.

To be honest, I've been working on this one for a while but I keep writing and deleting my response. Because all the things I want to say sound gatekeeper-y, in one of several ways.

I think you can be a Nat fan and not read the comics. I think you can be a Nat fan and never talk about her. I don't think you need to know everything about canon and be an "expert" to be a fan. I'm not interested in a locked-gate version of fandom. I don't think this movie should just be for die-hard Nat fans. And I don't think that all Nat fans will like this movie, for a variety of reasons.

Despite all of that, a lot of the comic book/movie expert reviews I've seen feel, to me, like they were evaluating a movie that isn't the one this movie was ever trying to be, and missing some of what the movie explicitly says it is because that doesn't fit what they want from it.

A bit more spoilery and a lot longer under the cut. I am so sorry I'm like this.

This movie felt tailor-made for me. Not because I loved every answer they gave, but because the questions they asked are ones I've been waiting to hear since 2012, when I first saw Avengers and then immediately went back to see the rest of phase 1. I think people disliking the answers is a legitimate opinion, and I'm looking forward to detangling that with people. What surprised me in reviews was not reviewers disliking the answers, which is legit, but not even seeming to realize the questions had been asked.

Most prominently, what felt like the huge thematic arc of the movie to me has been nonexistent in so many reviews that I've started to feel like I made it up, even though I took notes of exact quotes so I could reference them. The movie isn't a Nat origin story, and it's not about her as a cool edgy villain, so not seeing either of those didn't bother me. It's a movie about Natasha's trauma and how that manifests, and how her attempts to break free of it have harmed others in the past, and how she can move forward from that. We never get the key that unlocks the history of Natasha's past, so if you approach this as a puzzle box, it's going to fail.

THIS INDENTED PARAGRAPH IS THE CLOSEST I GET TO DIRECT PLOT POINTS, FEEL FREE TO SKIP

Specifically most of the reviews seem to view Nat's motivating guilt as over how she escaped the Red Room, particularly one casualty she deemed an acceptable sacrifice. But as I interpreted it, Nat's guilt in this movie came from a much closer place: the other Widows were all she'd had, and Nat being able to escape the Red Room made the Red Room hold on to the other Widows that much tighter. She thought she'd taken it down, but she was wrong. So her freedom, essentially, came at their expense. Natasha working to take down the Red Room this time is personal both to avenge her own trauma and to make up for her guilt in the Red Room still existing and creating more trauma for her peers. Without this context (and to be clear, I have gone back over the quotes several times to see if I'm misinterpreting and I really don't think I am), the idea that all of her guilt is over what she did to a single person makes more sense, but it also makes the movie a lot less interesting. If Natasha is justified in blaming Alexei and Melina for condemning her back to the Red Room, how could the other Widows not blame Nat? To me the entire story swings from that, and by not acknowledging Nat's (inadvertent but still very real) responsibility for continuing the cycle, the movie would feel hollow.

PLOT POINTS OVER.

Many critics they seem to feel like the potential this movie introduced was wasted because Nat's dead, so what's the point. First of all, the point is she's Nat and we care. It's not like we went in to Iron Man expecting that we'd have a decade of a franchise; we cared in the moment, and this movie is asking for the same thing. It delivers for over two hours of NOT murdering Natasha, which is more than I can say for Endgame.

To be clear, BW does set up other things for the MCU, and it's but if you're only watching it for what it's going to tell you about the future of the MCU (and I get it, because that's how I'm watching Loki, and it's a very different type of watching than I did for FATWS), this probably IS going to be a disappointment, because this isn't a big crossover event movie; I mean, none of Sam's "Big Three" show up at all. But again, that's about the movie someone wanted it to be, not the movie this was aiming to be.

Is this like a lot of other Marvel movies? Kinda. It's definitely taking a lot from Civil War for its set-up. Its arc felt like a close mirror of to Winter Soldier to me, to the extent that I'm planning to rewatch that on Thursday so I can see how much that's just me projecting my fave onto it. The third act is very Marvel-third-act-y, as adapted to Nat's character; the adapting to Nat's character are the parts I like and the rest is kind of what I consider the MCU price of admission.

I also kind of hate that it feels like the last few movies- Black Panther, Captain Marvel, now this and some rumblings about Shang-Chi- have all been kind of dismissed with "it's just the Marvel formula." It is, but that doesn't change the fact that different protagonists make it different. Dr Strange is pretty much just "Iron Man 1 with cool magic" and people didn't mind, but "how does this formula change when the protagonist is fundamentally different than the archetype to this point?" is apparently not different enough. I get Marvel fatigue, I really do, but for me it's tempered by how, in this case, Nat doesn't have the moral clarity Steve or Thor or even Tony or Scott has. No one in this movie lets her forget that she's a trained killer who little kids look up to.

Again: there are parts of this movie that don't work. I also don't ever ever EVER want to seem like I'm saying that if someone didn't like this movie they're not a real Nat fan or they're wrong. I know there are reasons to not love this movie, and I'm sure I'll figure out more the more I watch- it may not make me not love it, but it will at least complicate it for me, and i think we all know I live for that shit. Moreover, I intimately know how much it sucks when something you've been enthusiastic about and anticipating for ages doesn't pay off and everyone else seems to like it- it's isolating and upsetting and you just sit there wondering why no one else understands, and that's bullshit and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. People who don't like this movie are valid!

But if someone has a history of seeing Nat as just background, or considering her as a T&A deliver system more than as a character, or caring about hot women with guns but not care about the trauma that turned them into that, or saying they like movies about women but just not THIS woman for every comic book movie about a woman not there for them to ogle, or claiming to be experts in all things comics while doubling down on their theory that Yelena wouldn't appear because she was in Agent Carter (YES THAT HAPPENED, MORE THAN ONCE, THE NORTH. FUCKING. REMEMBERS. AND WISHES THEY KNEW WHERE THEY SAVED THOSE SCREENSHOTS), I don't need to weight their reviews heavier than the adrenaline rush I felt watching this movie.

So in answer to your question, I don't think the movie was really "that bad." I think this movie delivers in very specific ways, which definitely are not the flashy ones or the "every Marvel movie builds to the next great EVENT" ones or the male power fantasy ones, and if those ways aren't the ways you care about, it's going to be a disappointment. Even if those AREN'T the ones you care about, it could be a disappointment for any number of reasons, some of which I noticed during the movie and some of which I'm sure I'll be surprised to read about Friday morning.

But it wasn't one to me. For whatever it's worth, despite the movie's flaws, I loved it, I haven't stopped thinking about it in five days, I can't wait to see it again, and I hope that whether other people do or don't like it, they want to roll around in it as much as I do to pick out every single shred of canon worth overanalyzing.

If this is all we ever get for Natasha- and it is a CRIME if this is all we ever get for Natasha but that doesn't mean it's not so- I am grateful that this is what we got.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #I mean I tried to make this not that spoilery but I'm sure I didn't completely succeed #also warning for long post #extremely long post #again: I am so sorry I'm like this

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coffeestainsandcashmere · 3 years

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Let No Man Steal Your Thyme - (older Dramione), Part Four

Well, here’s part four for you! It’s really just part three continued, but since I didn’t want the previous part to be 7k words or so long, I split it up. The total wordcount is 12.4k words now!!

Thank you very much to those of you who’ve commented and sent me lovely owls on here to let me know you’re enjoying it! (this is a sideblog for me, so I don’t respond to comments on posts, but I do answer asks as Cashmere).

I know a lot of folks (me included) don’t like starting to read WIPs that are unfinished, so thanks to those of you who have hopped on now. Consider yourselves honoured beta readers! It’ll go up on AO3 when it’s all posted on here and completed.

No real warnings for this one, just some discussion of their past relationships (for both Hermione and Draco) before the plot thickens and things warm up a bit in part five. Not sure when that’ll go up - it kind of depends on how much feedback I get on this one I guess! Comments and reblogs feed an author’s muse after all.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

___

At her wry smile and tiny shrug, Malfoy laughed, apparently reassured. “A little,” he repeated softly to himself under his breath.

After a heartbeat she shot him a sidelong look and added, “You’ve changed so much, Draco. I can hardly believe it, but it’s clear as day.”

He did a little double take at the sound of his name on her lips, and then he smiled. It was such a tiny, fragile melting of his expression that she nearly missed it.

“I mean it,” she said, tightening her fingers on his steel-cable forearm for a fraction of a second. “I don’t know if it was the war or your marriage, or becoming a father, or something else entirely, but… you’re not the same person you were back at Hogwarts. Not at all.”

“Thank fuck for that,” he hissed. “I had a hell of a lot of growing up to do. I think I did ninety percent of it in the space of sixth year. But Astoria helped steady me after… after Hogwarts and all the bollocks and bullshit of the aftermath of… of… you know.”

“‘Bollocks and bullshit’ is a mighty casual way to say ‘a short stay in Azkaban and three years of house arrest’, Malfoy. That’s got to change a person, for sure.”

He shrugged. “I’m just glad it’s all in the past now. For the most part, anyway.” The silence that followed spoke volumes of the baggage that they were all still hauling around with them, of one kind or another.

They wound their way across the park’s pathways with no particular direction in mind. As the glittering waters of the Serpentine drew into view in the deepening dusk, she murmured, “I’m glad you came tonight.”

“Me too,” he said, voice little more than a low rumble above the sussurating wind in the trees. “Theo seemed on fine form, and it was nice to see Pans again. It’s been a few months. Longbottom looks good too,” he added as an afterthought. “He grew into himself, didn’t he?”

“Mmm,” she nodded. “Never would have called his and Pansy’s relationship though. I thought she went for the bad boys like you and Blaise…”

Malfoy snorted. “I’m a ‘bad boy’ now, am I? That’s an interesting spin on my past.”

“Maybe not so much ‘bad boy’ now as ‘grumpy reclusive Mr. Rochester’. How about that?”

“He one of your Muggle heroes?” he asked without sting.

“Yeah. He’s Jane Eyre’s leading male. A bad-tempered rich man who has a big house in the middle of nowhere and a secret deranged wife in the attic.”

“Well, I hit three out of the four criteria…” he said and Hermione’s heart lurched as she remembered he wasn’t a bachelor but a widower.

“Shit, Draco, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was thoughtless of me.”

He shook his head, the silver hair of his forelock tossing about as he chuckled, an entirely unfamiliar sound which she decided she wanted to hear again almost immediately. “It’s fine, Granger. You haven’t got a malicious bone in your body. Besides, it was a long time ago.”

They came naturally to a halt in front of the man-made lake and stared out at the lapping water for a time before she uncoupled her grip from his arm and shucked her coat back on.

That done, she drew in a deep breath and paused, leaning her forearms on the back of a cast-iron bench overlooking a flock of huddled, plastic pedalo boats moored up offshore. Malfoy remained a pace behind her, back straight as an arrow, his hands tucked into his pockets now that she was no longer hanging onto him.

A fair few Muggles were out and about, some walking lazily as she and Draco had been, others pounding along the pavement on their evening run, and a good number were walking dogs. The sheer mundanity of it all struck her deeply for a moment and her breath caught in her throat.

“Granger?” he asked in a soft voice.

She straightened and turned to look back at him over her shoulder. “I was just thinking how close we came to losing all of this… Sometimes it seems like a million years ago, and others…”

“Like yesterday,” he finished a beat later. His eyes glittered in the half-light, pale lashes ghostly and ethereal, and in the dark, his pupils were wide and black and inviting.

“Let’s keep going, hmm?” she chirped.

In fact, he walked her all the way back to her rather modest apartment in Muggle London. “You didn’t want to live closer to work at the bookshop?” he asked as she fumbled for her very ordinary, Muggle keys with half-frozen fingers.

Giving up, she murmured a quick ‘alohomora’ and pressed her hand to the extra ward she had placed on it. “I’ve lived here since I moved out of the house with Ron. Never seen any point in looking for something bigger or whatever. It’s cosy, and it’s just me anyway. You want to come in? I’ll have to tweak the wards if you do.”

“I… I don’t want to be a bother,” he said, his expression pinching.

“No bother. It’s a three minute job, if that.”

He looked torn, teetering on the edge of a refusal, but as she swept her curls back out of her face and blinked up at him, he seemed to waver, and finally he nodded. “Alright. Yes please.”

“Stay put. I’ll be right back,” she said, and left the door open so that he wouldn’t feel like a stray dog shut out in the cold.

After setting her bag and coat down on a sofa in the main living room, she stood and centred herself, reaching for the wards with her magic. They thrummed reassuringly as she wove a slightly different pattern into them, allowing Draco Malfoy to come and go, and then she released the magic once again.

“Ok!” she called to him and he stepped tentatively inside, shutting the door with a polite click behind him and levering off his fancy dragonhide Oxfords at the doormat.

There was something so intimately sweet about seeing him pad across the fake-wooden lino of her living room floor in his dark socks that she couldn’t help grinning.

“Those are some powerful wards you’ve got up,” he commented as he blinked curiously around the room.

“Hangover from the Ministry days, I suppose. Plus this is technically a Muggle building, so I can’t have anyone noticing anything strange. There’s another witch here, up on the seventh floor, but we don’t see each other often. You want something to drink? I’ve got tea or coffee, and a small selection of wine, though nothing nearly as nice as what Theo has on tap…”

He smiled. “A tea would be lovely.”

She ducked out into the tiny galley kitchen and lost herself in the simple task of filling and boiling the Muggle kettle. She turned to find Malfoy leaning his shoulder against the door frame, hands cupped under opposite elbows, watching her with that owl-like intensity again.

“Muggle kitchen,” she grinned almost sheepishly. “Magic is great for a lot of things, but some routines just can’t be beaten.” Ron had always hated and mistrusted things like electric kettles and refrigerators, not quite fully understanding the way it grounded her in her Muggle upbringing.

“I’m not judging you,” he said, voice low and slightly hoarse. “I’m just interested. Do you mind?”

“No,” she said, fishing in the cupboard for her selection of teabags. She held the cardboard box open for him to select one and her eyebrows rose when he chose a delicate mint and chamomile one, but she offered no comment. “I can give you a masterclass in using Muggle kitchens if you like.”

His lips pulled back into a broad, dazzling smile and he laughed. “Go on then.”

“Fridge,” she said, opening it and showing him. “Keeps things cold; powered by electricity. Freezer, keeps things, well, frozen…” She continued her tour while the tea steeped, and by the time she was done, the tea was ready and they made their way back out into the humble living room, with a second-hand sofa and a battered old coffee table with more ringed coffee-stains on than visible surface.

Her stomach rumbled and he raised an eyebrow at her.

“I didn’t get a chance to eat anything yet, other than nibbles at Theo’s,” she cringed.

“Don’t let me stop you having something for supper then,” he said.

“I’m not going to scoff a freezer dinner on my own while you sit there and watch me,” she blurted, laughing. “Unless you want to join me? I’ve got a couple of pizzas in the freezer. Nothing fancy, but they’ll be ready in twenty minutes or so if I put the oven on now.”

Malfoy looked like he’d missed something somewhere but was too embarrassed to ask, so he just said, “Pizza? Sure. The last time I had pizza was when I took Scorpius to Rome.”

“Well,” she said, setting her mug down on the table and heading into the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she called, “I can guaranteed these won’t be nearly as good as those were, but they’re pretty tasty. I think they’re both chicken and pesto - is that alright?”

“Perfectly.”

Oven on, she returned and folded herself into the squashy armchair which sat at right angles to the sofa, tucking one leg up beneath her and drawing the other foot up beside her. Malfoy, of course, sat like he was about to take tea with the Queen, while she felt like a pretzel on a shelf. A comfy pretzel though, she thought as she reached for her mug.

“I’m glad we walked back,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe I worked myself up into such a tizzy over Ron like that. It’s so childish…”

Malfoy sipped his tea and then cradled it between his long, pale fingers for a moment. “What happened between you two? I thought you three were —”

“— the ‘Golden Trio’?” she purred, voice laden with sarcasm.

He made a conciliatory gesture with his head but said nothing more.

She sighed. “We were. I mean, Harry and I are still super close - I’m James’ godmother after all. Ginny’s the sister I never had, but something went wrong with Ron somewhere along the line.” She knew exactly what the final blow had been, but there had been a myriad other issues on both sides before that. “I think… I think he felt like he never had a real niche, you know? He was always second fiddle to Harry in the heroics and quidditch departments, and, well, everyone knows I was the brains of the trio,” she said self-effacingly. “That’s not to say that he’s stupid — he’s not.”

Malfoy scoffed at that, and for a moment she saw the petulant, petty little thirteen year old he had once been. A deeply sceptical look filled his eyes, and he looked like he was physically biting his tongue to keep himself from disagreeing with her.

“No, really,” she scowled. “He just makes stupid, split-second decisions without thinking anything through. I’m not defending what he did or how he behaved at the end of our marriage, but…” she sighed heavily and drank a mouthful of too-hot tea that scalded her throat on its way down. “He’s in a pretty good place now with Lavender. We just… rub each other up the wrong way, even now I think.”

“Theo said he was being an arsehole earlier,” Malfoy pushed.

She shrugged. “A bit. I think he carries a lot of bitterness towards…” she gestured vaguely in Malfoy’s direction, “… Slytherins? I’m not really sure. Stupid house prejudices that a lot of witches and wizards clearly never get over. As if one moment in our history defines us for the rest of our lives, or as if we’re limited to the characteristics of the house we were sorted into at the age of eleven… It’s just so fucking dumb, Malfoy!”

He laughed softly at that.

“What? You don’t agree?”

“No, I absolutely agree with you. I was enjoying hearing you swear, that’s all. Forgive me.”

She flushed and looked away, anger leaving her as swiftly as it had come. “Ron has a lot of insecurities, and a few of them centre around me, but… I guess I just wasn’t enough for him in the end.”

“How could you possibly be ‘not enough’ for someone, Granger?” Draco asked in a hoarse whisper. “And you were the bloody Minister for Magic for Merlin’s sake…! What more did he want from his witch? Morgana herself reincarnated?”

She laughed long and loud at that, and Malfoy seemed to relax a little in the wake of his little outburst. “My reign was very short though,” she said as she stood and took the opportunity to put the pizzas in the oven. When she returned, she asked carefully, “What about you and Astoria?”

“What about us?” he asked, voice even and steady, though his eyes swirled softly like Trelawney’s crystal balls, hiding their secrets behind a shifting sheen of silver.

“Were you happy?”

Malfoy’s eyes slid away from her to stare unseeing at a point across the room, and he sat back against the sofa cushions, still nursing his cheap, Tesco mug between his hands.

“Yes,” he said eventually. “For the most part we were. It wasn’t… earth-shattering or anything, but it was pretty good, all things considered. It was arranged by our families, you know?”

She nodded.

“I knew Astoria’s older sister, Daphne, far better than I knew her, but Daph promised to an Austrian count already. He’s actually very nice. I’m glad for her.”

“I vaguely remember Daphne from school, but I didn’t have many classes with her as we got older.”

“I’d met Astoria a few times before it was all formally arranged, but even then, we only met a total of perhaps five or six times before the wedding proper. It wasn’t the huge event my mother had always dreamed of throwing for me, but with my father in Azkaban and me under house arrest, the mood wasn’t really there, you know?”

Hermione did some quick maths and realised he must have been only nineteen or so when he’d been married, and her eyes widened. She’d only been twenty-two when Ron and she had tied the knot, but still, that struck her as very young. Scorpius hadn’t been born straight away though, and there had been vicious gossip about blood-curse-related infertility until the little mandrake had arrived. Hermione been about to make the leap to Minister at the incredibly tender age of twenty five when the attack on the Manor had taken place, and Scorpius had been mere months old at the time.

“Toria and I grew to know each other better,” Draco went on, “And in time, I think we came to love each other, in our own way. She certainly adored Scorpius before the blood curse took her.”

“What was she like?” Hermione asked in a whisper.

Again, Malfoy sighed and closed his eyes with his head tipped back to rest against the sofa cushions. “Quiet, intelligent, articulate, easy-going most of the time, but when she got passionate about something, she could be pretty stubborn. Scorpius inherited a lot of that from her.”

“He looks like you though,” she said. “I mean… almost exactly like you did at that age. It gave me quite the turn when I saw the two of you on Platform 9 3/4 you know?”

He smirked and cracked an eye open. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Mother is always calling him ‘Draco’ instead of ‘Scorpius’. It drives him nuts.”

They shared a laugh at that. “Your mother lives with you at the Manor then?”

“Yes and no,” he said, shuffling a little and getting comfy again, relaxing his torso more casually against the arm of the sofa at last. “She moved out of the main manor when Toria and I married. Now she lives at what we affectionately call the Dower House. Officially it’s called Nightshade Cottage.”

“Ominous name,” she said and he smiled again.

“Apt though. There’s a rambling, stone-walled potion-garden round the back of it, full of all sorts of interesting plants, and a stunning rose garden at the front. It’s really beautiful in spring, and rather potent in summer.”

“You make it sound almost welcoming,” she said without thinking and he huffed a dry laugh.

“Parts of the estate really are lovely, Granger; its sordid past notwithstanding.”

When the beeper went on the timer, Malfoy jumped and looked confused, but she laughed and showed him. She did use her wand to cut up the pizzas though, and by the time they were seated back on the sofas with plates in their lap, they resumed their easy talk as if they’d never been interrupted. Watching Malfoy in his fancy clothes and eating pizza with his hands was almost too much for Hermione to bear, but if she focused on his voice too much instead, she found herself mesmerised on that front too. Who’d have thought that Hermione Granger would have found herself growing more and more attracted to Draco Malfoy all these years later.

Long after they’d finished eating, they spoke a little more of Scorpius, and how Malfoy guessed he was getting on after his first week at school. “Of course, he hasn’t written to me yet, but I’m hoping he might pen something this weekend…”

“You worry about him, don’t you?”

“Constantly,” he snorted. “One of the burdens of being a father, I suppose.”

“Of being a good one,” she amended, and she didn’t miss the way he swallowed thickly and blinked his glassy eyes rapidly a few times.

Then he sighed expansively and then levered himself to his feet. “It’s late, Granger, and I should probably be going. I’ve got a meeting to get to early tomorrow morning in Scotland, and I still have a bit of paperwork to do tonight.”

“But it’s the weekend, Malfoy,” she said as she rose too. “You can’t have to work, surely?”

He nodded and shrugged, but made his way to the door and slid his feet back into his shoes without further comment or explanation.

A little, fluttering, doxy-wing cloud of nerves shimmered to life in her chest as they stood face to face at the door. Malfoy swallowed again and hitched a tiny, lopsided smile. “Thanks for tonight, Granger. And…” he faltered and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said roughly. “Thank you.”

“I feel like I should be thanking you,” she said. “You got me out of my funk and walked me safely home.” She ran her fingers through her mass of curls and didn’t miss the way his eyes flickered to watch the movement before he blinked and turned away to open the door, clearing his throat.

With his fingers still on the handle, he paused and looked back over his shoulder. “My pleasure, Granger. Sincerely.”

Hermione barely managed to offer him a watery smile before he was striding off down the corridor.

She lingered in the doorway long after his footsteps had faded down the stairwell — apparently using the Muggle lift alone had proved too daunting for him. After she locked the door and recharged the wards behind her, she picked up his empty plate and mug to put them in the dishwasher.

As she passed the dresser that had once belonged to her mother, she caught sight of a moving photograph of Crookshanks. The half-kneazel was staring at the flat’s front door with his yellow, lamp-like eyes wide. “What do you think of him now, huh Crooks?” she asked the photo. “Bit different, eh?”

Photo-Crookshanks purred and circled in the bottom corner of the frame a few times, bottle-brush tail twitching, before returning to his fireplace and curling up with a look of contentment on his face. God, she missed that cat.

“Yeah. I think I like him too, Crooks,” she said. “Merlin help me, but I think I like him too.”

Part Five

___

I’ve only written all 12,410 words of this because people told me they liked it, otherwise it’d have stayed on whatever the first chapter was, so if you want more, let me know with a reblog! Feel free to send me an anonymous owl too if you’re more comfortable doing that.

Anyway, take care, and more soon, I hope. I’ve got a fair chunk plotted out, and it should take us up to Christmas in the storyline (it’s September now for them).

writing masterlist | Ao3

#dramione #dramione fic #older dramione #draco malfoy x hermione granger #hermione granger x draco malfoy #draco x hermione #draco x hermione fic

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megafandomfreak · 4 years

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The most beautiful Marvel quotes

(In my opinion)

“There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if we could become something more. So that when they needed us, we could fight the battles they never could.” Avengers: Infinity War Trailer

“A thing is not beautiful because it lasts.” Vision, Avengers: Age of Ultron

“Some people move on, but not us.” Steve Rogers, Avengers: Endgame

“Because if we can’t protect the earth you can be damned well sure we’ll avenge it.” Tony Stark, The Avengers

“Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from ships, because they knew death was better than bondage.” Erik Killmonger, Black Panther

“Whatever happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing. That you will stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.” Abraham Erskine, Captain America: The First Avenger

“The world has changed and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over.” Peggy Carter, Captain America, The Winter Soldier

“Death is what gives life meaning. To know your days are numbered. Your time is short.” The Ancient One, Doctor Strange

“You’re ancestors called it magic, and you call it science. Well, I come from a place where they’re one and the same thing.” Thor, Thor

“I assure you brother, the sun will shine on us again.” Loki, Avengers: Infinity War

“I shouldn’t be alive...unless it was for a reason. I’m not crazy, Pepper. I just finally know what I have to do. And I know in my heart that it’s right.” Tony Stark, Iron Man

“I can’t control their fear. Only my own.” Wanda Maximoff, Captain America: Civil War

“It’s not about saving our world. It’s about saving theirs.” Hank Pym, Ant-Man

“This lone gunslinger act is unnecessary... you don't have to do this alone.” James Rhodes, Iron Man 3

“Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye , and say, “No, you move.”” Sharon Carter, Captain America: Civil War

“The measure of a person, of a hero...is how well they succeed at being who they are.” Frigga, Avengers: Endgame

“At some point we all have to choose between what the world wants you to be and who you are.” Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow trailer

“Look, when you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.” Peter Parker, Captain America: Civil War

And my personal favorite...

“I have nothing to prove to you.” Carol Danvers, Captain Marvel

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twdeadlysins · 4 years

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not the same

pairing: loki laufeyson x reader word count: 1.5k+ summary: you’re used to death because you can see the dead, but nothing prepared you for this. // set during infinity war warnings: infinity war spoilers, major angst, a hint of fluff if you squint, usual marvel themes, and possible typos by yours truly a/n: get the tissues bc this one hurts my soul

gif is not mine

He won.

Thanos won despite all your efforts — despite all the small victories along the way. It really seemed like you were winning and getting the advantage, but maybe you let that get to your head too much.

Maybe, it just wasn’t enough.

No matter how hard you and everyone on your side tried.

Vision died at the hand of Thanos while fifty-percent of the population turned into dust, some right in front of your eyes that were soon blurred by tears.

How were you going to get them back?

Your knees had given out and collided with the ground after witnessing Bucky turn into ash and his gun meet the dirt.

Staring at the spot he once occupied, you even didn’t comprehend Steve trudge over to where his best friend had once stood until he called out your name. You averted your eyes to the blonde with a tear streaming down your dirty and bloody covered cheek, mouth slightly agape with shock and realization at what just happened to all your friends — to your family.

“Y/N, can you see them?”

Attempting to blink the tears away, you sharply inhaled and wandered your eyes around frantically before peering back at the captain with a shake of your head. He combed his fingers through his locks with a defeated sigh as he moved from his crouched position to sit down and hang his head.

The power you had wasn’t exactly the most helpful in fighting bad guys, but it proved handy only if the person no longer existed.

Seeing the dead wasn’t something you were born with, it occurred when you had a near death experience.

Kinda ironic.

The city was under attack and there was an explosion at the cafe you regularly visited. You had flat-lined twice on the operating table and when you woke up, you were met with Tony Stark.

He felt responsible since he couldn’t prevent the explosion and wanted to make sure you were okay. You were in shock, not only because the Tony Stark was in your presence, but your deceased father was in the room.

Tony wanted you to be a part of the Avengers, promising that he and Bruce could aid you in learning and adapting to your new ability. You didn’t think you and your new found “superpower” was worthy of being part of the team, but you accepted nonetheless.

Figuring out your ability was when you also met Loki.

In order for him to stay with the Avengers, he was forced to work with you, Bruce, and Tony in your training and experiments as some sort of punishment.

At first, Loki was a bit of an annoyance, always making snide comments since it was obvious he didn’t want to be there — but they were never directed at you. With the help of the God, you eventually learned that you could summon the dead, but only if they allowed you to — they could choose to stay or leave.

Although most of the time, it was out of your control.

People would show up out of nowhere and you had to concentrate on shutting them out — to decide on whether or not they could be there.

Eventually it was a two way street, either you both agreed to see each other or one of you declined.

During your training sessions whether it be sparring or the fact that you could see the dead, you grew fond of the mischievous man. The two of you soon spent time together outside of your work, learning more about one another and it led into something more — a bond — an undeniable connection — love.

Loki understood the thoughts and concerns you had about seeing ghosts, and the emotional toll it brought upon you. He helped you in any way he could and you did the same for him when he was fighting his demons and his past.

He wanted to be a better person — for you. You were his motivation — his light at the end of a dark and seemingly never-ending tunnel.

“Y/N?”

The blank stare you had on the ground jumped up, orbs searching your surroundings with confusion and desperation.

It was Loki.

Thor had come down with a strike of lightning in the midst of battle, accompanied with unfamiliar guests to join the fight. Loki must’ve been with him and you didn’t notice somehow.

“Loki? Where are you?”

“Right here, my love,” he softly called, causing you to zone in on his figure with a relieved smile that he wasn’t gone like the rest of them, missing the way his voice was filled with sorrow.

“Thank God.” Placing a palm on your knee to stand up, you whimpered at the ache in your muscles, and the pain of all the cuts and bruises you received, especially where a deep slash was made on your bicep.

Before you could trudge over to Loki, Steve spoke up, now standing with a bewildered expression.

“Y/N, you see Loki?”

The bizarre question felt like someone swung a metal bat to your gut as you halted your movements, peering at the captain who searched in the spot where the man you loved was.

“Do you not see him?” you asked, glossy orbs bouncing between the two men.

Steve shook his head and a strangled sob left your lips as you glanced over at a pained Loki. Your knees gave out once again, stating that he was in fact there before your very eyes — that he had to be.

A pair of cold hands grasped your wrists that were entangled in your hair and you gasped, seeming to be in a ship with Thor, Loki, Thanos and his goons.

There was a quick white flash and next thing you knew Thanos had his gigantic hand enclosed around Loki’s throat, cutting off his air supply.

Another flash and his lifeless body was lying there, face blue and eyes soulless. His brother gripping his form, mourning the loss he witnessed — and now you did.

Flash.

Your wide, traumatic eyes met Loki’s worried ones, not knowing what just occurred.

That had never happened before — seeing someone’s death — seeing it so vividly as if you were there in the flesh.

“Thanos, he kil- he killed you,” you cried, squeezing your eyes shut, letting the tears spill. Your hand was against his chest where his beating heart would be pumping for you, but it was hollow — like the way yours felt.

He was a ghost.

He was dead.

“How did you-? Did you see what happened?”

You nodded your head, breaking down even further, unable to steady your breathing.

Loki pulled you in, wrapping his arms around your middle as you wept. “Love, I’m so sorry you had to see that.” He cradled your head as you angrily balled the fabric of his clothing in your fists, grieving at the loss of who you believed to be your soulmate.

“Although I’m not physically here, I’m still here with you, dear,” he assured, drawing away to hold your battered face within his delicate hands, making you look in his eyes.

“It’s not the same,” you murmured, voice broken along with your heart. “You’re not actually here — not with me. You’re gone and I’m the only one that can see you.”

He was aware of how you felt about that. That you couldn’t live your life talking to the dead or you’d go crazy. You wanted to surround yourself with life — with the living, not the dead.

And now he was the dead.

“But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up. I’m going to get you back, Loki. I need you.”

He couldn’t help, but smile. He also couldn’t help the thought of you letting it consume your life, to become so obsessed in getting him back that you didn’t have a life of your own.

Stuck and unable to move on, to grieve properly.

But that was an argument for later.

“I love you, Loki,” you exclaimed, holding back a sob as he kissed your forehead before pressing a chaste one on your lips. His lips felt so cold and you would give anything to experience the softness and warmth of them again.

“And I love you. Summon me whenever you’d like, love. I’ll accept it.”

He was gone when you opened your eyes.

Steve’s heart ached even though he couldn’t see or hear Loki, your side of the conversation was enough. Thor and Nat finally stepped up after watching from afar, not wanting to interrupt, and the latter sat down next to you, enveloping you in her arms.

Nothing could prepare you for today.

Losing the battle.

Losing your friends.

Losing your family.

Losing your soulmate.

All at the hand of one person.

Thanos.

“We’ll get everyone back. We’ll get him back,” the Black Widow reassured while you glared into the distance, clutching onto her arm as water pooled from your eyes.

The captain was already peering at you with remorse when you connected your orbs to his. As you wandered them over to the God of Thunder who felt responsible, you uttered something that caught his attention.

“Whatever it takes.”

taglist: @gruffle1 @mysterious-398 @impala-1979 @sourwolf-sterek32 @imnotrevealingmyname @therantygeek @alwaysasadaesthetic @tallyovie

#loki x reader #loki laufeyson x reader #loki odinson x reader #marvel #marvel fanfiction #mcu x reader #mcu fanfiction #loki fanfiction #loki fanfic #loki angst #loki x you #marvel x reader #loki oneshot #f.#loki #loki laufeyson

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unmaskedagain · 4 years

Text

Marinette: Iron Man’s Minion: Rising

Over 30 people sent me ask requesting a sequel. I usually don’t do sequels. Its messy and rarely as good as the first. Hoepfully, you like this.

Tony just sighed at sight four kids and his robot picketing his workshop. Rhodey just looked overly pleased. The sun was had rose. He had just finished up for the day. Only to be met with… whatever the hell this was.

Honestly, he hadn’t thought they were serious. At least he didn’t think Peter was serious. Peter was the sweet one; 90 percent of time, he followed Tony’s rules to the letter, never giving too much problems.

…Harley, on the hand, liked to start shit.

“What we want?” Harley called again.

“No curfews!” The other three, Peter, Riri, and Marinette yelled.

Riri liked to instigate.

As for Marinette, Tony was certain at this point, she just wanted to see the world burn.

“When do we want it?!”

“Now!”

Dummy beamed loudly. A little sign in his claw.

Tony pinched his nose, “I swear to god, Harley.”

Harley smirked, “He says our sugar intake should be limited. I say we want candy. I say Sugar High and Die.”

“Sugar high and Die!”

Dummy beamed again.

Tony glared at his firstborn, “You can’t even eat.”

“Unlimited lab access!”

“Yes!”

“Breakroom for Interns,” Harley sniped. “We are not Avengers. We shouldn’t have to share with Avengers.”

“Not my Pop tarts!” Riri shouted, a big grin on her face, framed by her wild dark curly locks.

Marinette was having the time of her life, “Death to Baby monitor protocols!” Ever since it was revealed she was Ladybug, Tony put her on the same restrictions at the other teen Heroes. Karen watching her from her new, Stark approved, mask.

The others went nuts. “Death to Baby monitor protocols!”

Rhodey looked smug, “Karma.” He said easily. “For everything you ever put me through at MIT; you have to deal with four versions of yourself.”

Tony narrowed his eyes, “Okay time for the big guns,” He spun around. “PEPPER!” He yelled. “Jarvis get Pepper.”

The kids looked at each other and braced themselves.

“We will not go quietly into the night,” They all said together. “We will not vanish without a fight!”

“Oh my god,” Rhodey said, looking like a five-year-old on Christmas morning. “They’re doing the speech from Independence day!”

“We're going to live on!” The kids said, dummy beeping with them. “We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day

“PEPPER!” Tony screamed again.

First thing, Tony said when the redhead arrived, “Pepper, the minions are revolting. Do something!”

“Well maybe if you didn’t call them minions,” Pepper suggested just looking so done with the world. She could just barely believe Jarvis when he told her the interns, and teen heroes, were protesting. “And why is Rhodey holding a sign?”

Tony huffed, “The twerps called him Uncle Rhodey with those big puppy dogs’ eyes. And he went full traitor!” He explained. “Those things should be weaponized. Fix this!”

Pepper sighed and walked to Harley, the one with the megaphone was usually the leader. She smiled, “Lets negotiate.” This would be easy and over quickly. They were just kids, messing with Tony.

Marinette stepped forward, “Sure,” She smiled pleasantly. “After our lawyer gets here.”

“You’re what now?!!” Tony shouted.

Pepper eyed the bluenette approvingly. “Bring it on!”

Matt Murdock had no idea that when Spiderman called to ask him to his lawyer and defend his rights, that he was talking about Peter Parker’s rights as an intern. He was on the avengers’ roster and most knew he identity. Foggy was confused but elated to test his wits against the force that was Pepper Potts.

The two lawyers sat across from Tony and Pepper. The kids and Rhodey, who Stark called traitor every time he spoke, sat beside them. They were in a conference room at a large table.

Matt began, “Our clients have made their requests very clear. Most of which are easy to employ and some would say are their rights.

“Their minions,” Tony stated. “They don’t have rights.”

Pepper placed a hand on his shoulder, “Never say that again,” She said slowly.

“All employee should have a breakroom,” Foggy stated. “Even interns. It’s non-negotiable.”

Pepper nodded, “Agreed. They will be given their own breakroom; that Jarvis will ensure only fellow interns will have access to.”

“That means Tony can’t go in,” Peter laughed.

“You little shit!”

“Baby monitor protocols are too extreme,” Matt said.

Pepper pinched her nose. “As a hero yourself, Mr. Murdock, you must understand that we in good conscience cannot allow minors, even superpowered minors, to perform their heroics without proper supervision.”

Riri slammed her hands on the table, “I was a little late for curfew and you sent freaking Thor to track me down,” She said accusing to Tony, who looked completely unrepentant. “Thor. A god.”

“Alien,” Rhodey and Tony chimed.

“I snuck out one time,” Peter glared. “And the Avengers crash a house party.”

Pepper winced. That had been a PR mess. “Tony will limit his use of GPS tracking provided all parties adhere to the rules and regulations they originally agreed to when they began their mentorship under Tony.”

“You mean when we sold our souls to the man,” Marinette snipped.

“The-The man?” Tony looked flabbergasted. “No! What?”

The meeting went on for another thirty minutes. It was nearly adjourned when Pepper inquired if there was anything else.

Marinette looked Tony dead in the eyes, “Karen no longer reports to you.”

The other kids blinked in surprise before grinning.

Tony leaned back in his seat, and nodded solemnly, “So its war you want.”

“Oh my god,” Pepper and Matt groaned.

Foggy and Rhodey looked far too entertained for their own goods.

Eventually it was agreed that Karen would report that if they were in any danger and agree to disclose if the young heroes were fine or not. Plus any messages they wanted to relay. Pepper didn’t budge on the candy issue; citing parents had enforced a healthy diet rule on the summer internships. Instead, the kids got a pool table to the breakroom and unlimited healthy snacks for the fridge provided at Stark Industries expense. But they would not dictate what the kids bought on their own.

Marinette had been living at the tower for a month. One morning she decided to make herself her favorite dessert; chocolate and mint AND chocolate and raspberry macrons. She made little over a dozen and had left them in the fridge, a clear ‘Do not Touch’ sign on them.

When she finished with Tony and the other interns for the day, Marinette washed up and rushed to the kitchen to get snacks so she could start binging watching Batman the animated series. However, when she got to the kitchen, opened the fridge, she saw her beloved snacks gone.

Marinette eyes narrowed and she hissed. She marched into the living room and saw the plate she had used lying on the coffee table. The avengers sat watching TV. Marinette picked up the plate, “I made macarons for me. I left them in the fridge with a sign that said do not touch. Someone obviously can’t read. Who did it?”

The heroes shared looks. No one answered.

“I’m not mad,” Marinette promised. It was lie. By the looks on their faces, they knew a trap when they heard it. “I just want to know the truth. I know it can’t have been Tony or Bruce, because they were with me in the workshop. Natasha is out with Pepper. So…”

Nothing.

Thor shifted uneasily. Bucky blinked innocently at her. Steve gave her a boy-ish grin. Clint looked vaguely terrified. Sam kept eyeing the window like it was an exit. Scott looked seconds away from calling for back up.

“Oh,” Marinette nodded. “It’s like that. Fine then.” With that she marched out of the room in a huff.

When she was gone, Bucky sighed, “She’s going to make us pay for this.”

“One of is just going to go missing,” Sam nodded.

Clint shrugged, “Sorry, Scott.” And went back to watching TV.

“Yea-What?” Scott yelled. “What do you mean Sorry Scott? Why is it me?”

The next morning, the heroes woke up to find… things missing. Steve couldn’t find his shield. Bucky’s arm was gone. Thor’s hammer was missing and would return to matter how much he called for it. Clint’s was missing his custom arrows were. Sam’s AI redwing had vanished. And as far Scott, well…

No matter how much they searched, they couldn’t find their missing stuff.

They all arrived back at the living room, wondering what the hell was going on. They figured one of Tony’s cleaning bots had gone haywire… Again. But that didn’t explain how no one realized it happening. Maybe it was Loki. Still they decided to talk to Tony first. Natasha was with him, and thoroughly amused at the sight of the ruffled men.

The genius had looked confused, “No. My bots are all up to date. They didn’t even clean last night.”

Thor nodded, “Then it was my brother. I shall have to speak with him at once.”

“Wait,” Steve said looking around, “Where’s Scott.”

…And as for Scott? Well, he was missing.

Bucky’s eyes narrowed, “She has him.”

“Well shit,” Clint said. “I was just joking yesterday.”

“I’ll miss the little dude,” Sam whined.

Tony looked around, “What are you? No!” He laughed. “Marinette? Frenchy took your stuff? You’re the world’s greatest heroes! She is a fourteen-year-old girl, you know that, right?” He chuckled. Lil Dominator strikes again.

“Natasha,” Steve sent pleading eyes to the Spider.

“I’ll talk to her,” The Black Widow sighed, “But she’ll never respect you if you don’t fight your corner.” With that, she left to speak with Marinette.

Natasha came back ten minutes later looking rather disgruntled, “She said no.” She told them. “Something about macrons and vengeance. And feeling her wrath. I think you created a supervillain.”

“No,” Tony chimed in. “No supervillany anything. Until she’s twenty-one. It’s in the minion’s contracts” He had made sure to add if after they threated to riot of the good grade addendum; anything lower than a B, and patrol is cut. “She’ll stick to her word.”

“Your interns have contracts?” Clint asked.

Tony just shrugged, “They do now.”

“Let’s all go talk to her,” Steve suggested. “We’ll apologize and everything will good again.”

This caused Tony to cackle. “Yeah, okay!”

The heroes found Marinette on the roof with the other interns. The avengers and the minions eyed each other.

Marinette spoke first, “I want three dozen macrons from the French bakery on 8th street, near Franky’s deli; all chocolate. Then you get your things returned.”

“You can’t just,” Bucky began. “That’s blackmail.”

“Its extortion,” Riri corrected.

“Marinette, how about…” Sam started but Marinette cut him off.

She crossed her arms, “This isn’t negotiable.”

“Where’s Scott?” Clint asked. “How do we know he’s alright? We want proof he’s alive.”

Peter leaned toward Harley, and whispered. “Hey, it sounds like they think we kidnapped him.”

Harley leaned back, “That’s because technically we did. I think we’re a crime syndicate now.” (Peter yelped, “What?!). “Shhh. Just go with it.”

Marinette pulled out a walky talky, and headed it to Clint.

“Hey Scott, you there, over,” Clint asked into the radio.

“Help!” Scott’s voice screamed from the radio. “Giant hamster. Giant mean hamster. Oh god why?”

“He’s name Sir Grumpy paw,” Riri said brightly. “I have to keep him here now. He tried to take out my mom’s cat.”

Bucky just looked at Steve, “Can we just get her the damn macrons.”

“No!” Steve said. “We can find Scott and our things.” He promised. “You’ve gone too far,” he told Marinette.

The bluenette grinned, “Oh captain, I’ve only just begun.”

Steve stalked off with the other guys trailing behind him.

An hour later, Thor was missing...

“She took out a god,” Clint yelled. “Anyone could be next.”

Sam used the radio to try and communicate teammates.

“Good spirits, friends,” Thor said. “I shall conquer the vile beast Sir Grump Paws. And return victorious.”

Bucky was gone by the next hour. “What the fuck is wrong with this hamster?” The greatest assassin in history yelled once they contacted him via radio. “Who taught its fatass how to glare.” It went quiet. “Stevie, I… think it understand English. Shit.”

“Marinette took out the Winter Soldier,” Natasha said with raised eyebrows. “Impressive.”

Sam went after that.

“Oh god, oh god, oh god,” Sam just kept repeated. “We’re in a maze. Plastic tubes. We’re running. It’s after us, Steve. The hamster is after us.” It went quiet. “… I think it ate Scott.”

Steve sighed, “Can you just talk to her?” He pleaded with Tony, “Clint’s freaked out.”

“Can’t,” Tony said. “Contract. Tony Stark cannot interfere or choose sides in an event of a Minions vs Avengers war.”

“Damn it,” Clint shouted. “This isn’t a war. This is an execution. They’re taking us out one by one, man.”

“Shouldn’t have at her macrons,” Tony smirked, proud of his minions. “She knows it was you by the way.” He told Clint. “She knows you were the one to take them.”

Clint gulped.

He went missing ten minutes later.

“Cap,” Clint’s voice came from the radio. “We’re going to do it. We’re going after Sir Grump Paws. It’s time. We can’t live like this, not under his reign. That monster has to be stopped. If we don’t make it, just, just… Tell our story. Tell Nat, I’ll miss her. My sister and her kids, they get all my stuff”

Steve just looked up at the ceiling, and just looked so done with the world. He got up and went to find the interns, “What are you demands?”

An hour later, he came back with four dozen macrons, a dozen cupcakes, sticky cheese, peppers, and a pound of gummy worms. He sat the goods on the counter. Natasha, Tony, Rhodey, and Happy looked stunned.

“You… surrendered?” Tony asked perplexed.

“Captain America doesn’t surrender,” Rhodey stated.

Happy shook his head, “You can’t give in, Cap. I know these rugrats. You gotta set boundaries.”

Steve just shrugged, “Eighty percent of our team is missing. They just want junk food.”

“It’s a good trade,” Marinette said as she led the other interns, including Pepper’s intern MJ and tech Intern named Ned, into the kitchen. She held the Captain’s America shield proudly. Peter carried Bucky’s arm. Thor’s hammer floated behind Riri, carried by Plagg and Trixx. Harley had redwing and Clint’s arrow. The kids placed the weapons down on the table.

However before they could grab the goodies, Steve crossed his arm, “Nope. My friends first!”

“Right behind us,” Riri said.

Suddenly a squeaky voice was heard, “I have vanquished the dreaded foe, Son of Rogers.”

Everyone looked down.

In five different hamster balls, were the missing avengers, looking like they just fought a war?

“Why are they tiny?” Tony pinched his nose.

Mj shrugged, “How else were they supposed to have gladiatorial death matches with a hamster?”

“Oh, of course,” Tony said sarcastically. “Silly me.”

It took the tiny avengers half an hour to get back to normal. Hamsters were added to the tower’s banned list.

Fury showed up later that day. He glared at the interns, Stark’s minions; Ladybug, Spiderman, Iron Heart, and WarIron, “I’m here to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative.”

“No, you’re not!” Tony yelled from wherever he was.

Marinette woke up a few days later; thirsty. She saw it was close to midnight so she decided to rush to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. As she headed to the kitchen, she saw something out the corner of her eyes that had her quickly backtracking.

In the dining room was Loki, Bucky, Tony, Natasha, Rhodey, Clint, Plagg, Wayzz, and Trixx siting around the table, playing what looked to be poker.

“The girl who tormented by brother and the avengers,” Loki said approvingly. “With a rodent.”

Marinette nodded, “Deal me in.”

She’d sleep when she’s dead.

The next day, Steve and Pepper would both find themselves knocking on Marinette’s bedroom door. One to get an arm back. The other the keys to Tony’s Lamborghini. Only to find Thor already there requesting his brother’s helmet back.

Gambling with Marinette was added to the Tower’s banned list.

#ml fic #ml salt #Avengers #tony stark #steve rogers #marinette dupen chang #Marinette deserves better #pepper potts #thor #loki (marvel)

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jackoshadows · 3 years

Note

Is it possible that Robb's will is a red herring? That it's actually a thing or be relevant?

I do think that it will play an important role in pushing forward Jon Snow as a possible candidate for KITN. Without that decree, Jon will not in any way be relevant to the politics of the North.

IMO, the only reason Jon even became King on the show is because that’s a book plot. Considering how much Benioff and Weiss wanted Queen Sansa, considering that there is no way the North would have made bastard Jon Snow king when Ned Stark’s legitimate eldest daughter was sitting right there, and considering that the show hand-waved away both of Sansa’s marriages, I think KITN Jon Snow is a book plot that they inserted in there without the writing to back it up.

And then there’s the things GRRM has mentioned in interviews:

I have a question, since Robb actually legitimized Jon and named him his heir for Winterfell and the North before the Red Wedding (granted no one knows about this and is still alive or free, the Greatjon knows as does Edmure, but I dont see them getting out of the Twins any time soon and Catelyn would probably die before telling anyone) does this make Jon's rejection of Stannis' offer moot?

Edmure and the Greatjon are prisoners, true... but you are forgetting the envoys that Robb sent to Howland Reed... Galbart Glover, Maege Mormont, Jason Mallister... they are all alive and free.

As to what is and is not moot... the key point is, only a =king= can legitimize a bastard......

GRRM SSM, August 06, 2000

It is GRRM who brings up that Glover, Mormont and Mallister are still out there and alive and free and were witnesses to the will. I think this implies that this point is going to be relevant.

GRRM has also stressed that at the end of the day, might is right. Meaning, whomever has the most houses and armies supporting them is who gets to be King. Robert Baratheon’s will was torn up to make Joffrey Baratheon king. The same can be done to Robb’s will. And that is even without considering that Robb was considered an enemy traitor and not a king by the Lannisters and Stannis.

I had forgotten that all the others signed and witnessed Robb's decree. Also, wasn't Robb a King when he signed the decree? Granted not king of much, with the North lost but he was a King wasn't he?

He was a king in his own eyes and those of his followers... in the eyes of the Lannisters and Stannis and =their= followers he was a rebel, traitor, and would-be usurper.

GRRM SSM, August 06, 2000

On inheritance in Westeros:

Well, the short answer is that the laws of inheritance in the Seven Kingdoms are modelled on those in real medieval history... which is to say, they were vague, uncodified, subject to varying interpretations, and often contradictory.

A man's eldest son was his heir. After that the next eldest son. Then the next, etc. Daughters were not considered while there was a living son, except in Dorne, where females had equal right of inheritance according to age.

After the sons, most would say that the eldest daughter is next in line. But there might be an argument from the dead man's brothers, say. Does a male sibling or a female child take precedence? Each side has a "claim."

What if there are no childen, only grandchildren and great grandchildren. Is precedence or proximity the more important principle? Do bastards have any rights? What about bastards who have been legitimized, do they go in at the end after the trueborn kids, or according to birth order? What about widows? And what about the will of the deceased? Can a lord disinherit one son, and name a younger son as heir? Or even a bastard?

There are no clear cut answers, either in Westeros or in real medieval history. Things were often decided on a case by case basis. A case might set a precedent for later cases... but as often as not, the precedents conflicted as much as the claims.

The Wars of the Roses were fought over the issue of whether the Lancastrian claim (deriving from the third son of Edward III in direct male line) or the Yorkist claim (deriving from a combination of Edward's second son, but through a female line, wed to descendants of his fourth son, through the male) was superior. And a whole family of legitimized bastard stock, the Beauforts, played a huge role.

The medieval world was governed by men, not by laws. You could even make a case that the lords preferred the laws to be vague and contradictory, since that gave them more power. In a tangle like the Hornwood case, ultimately the lord would decide... and if some of the more powerful claimants did not like the decision, it might come down to force of arms.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that inheritance was decided as much by politics as by laws. In Westeros and in medieval Europe both.

GRRM SSM, November 02, 1999

I have seen some people state that no one can be disinherited and that legitimized bastards come after legitimate children. As seen above, GRRM has left all this deliberately vague. It’s very possible, that Robb’s will disinherits Sansa and legitimizes Jon, decreeing him as Jon Stark, KITN and Lord of Winterfell - directly putting him ahead of the rest of his siblings. People can be disinherited in Westeros - the question is if being disinherited will be recognized by everyone else.

Reasons for why this is possible - Robb Stark was adamant that Tyrion should not get Winterfell through Sansa. Even Catelyn was agreed on this. Robb would not have allowed for any loop holes for this to happen in his will. And second, Catelyn was strongly against Robb legitimizing Jon and naming him heir precisely because it would put Jon ahead of her children. I can see this as a plot point in the North in the next book.

Questions with the will:

Robb assumed that Bran, Rickon and Arya were all dead when it was written. Many houses like Manderly now know that this is not true. Rickon and Arya will both be back in the North in the next book. So will Robb’s decree still hold true if it’s drawn up with false information?

It all comes down to which house supports whom. I get the feeling that with GRRM’s SSM above, that houses Glover, Mormont and Mallister may push for King Jon Snow. Manderly and others may move for Rickon. And of course there is no way that Littlefinger and Vale Lords would acknowledge or accept Sansa’s disinheritance as valid. Littlefinger does not even acknowledge Robb as king.

All this deliberate vagueness regarding inheritance would also apply to when Daenerys comes to Westeros with a claim to the Iron Throne. Whomever has the most armies and support among the houses would have the better claim. With her dragons, Dany easily wins this one.

At the end of the day, who will become King/Queen is upto whatever GRRM wants for the story - that’s why he’s left it undefined and nebulous.

#Robb Stark #Jon Snow #Robb's Will #Robb's decree #GRRM #GRRM's SSMs #House Stark #inheritance in asoiaf #asoiaf

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craftymuffinspyflower · 3 years

Text

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy Part IV

AU: When a chemically enhanced teenage girl shows up, and a wave of conspiracy follows behind her, the Avengers (and Yelena) are forced to do the one thing that even a group of superheroes can't seem to hack: caring for a minor.

a/n: so incredibly un-canon! (is that a word?) set after black widow; there was no civil war.

warnings: some curse words. mentions of fighting and of past abuse. nothing explicit.

- - - - - -

"Maya! Oh, my darling! I was so worried about you."

As the figure made its way through the smoke and dust, her arms outstretched, both of the Avengers witnessed as the teenager bolted backwards. They watched as she fell over multiple mounds of debris in her effort to scramble away from the woman in the shadows.

"Who are you?" Wanda demanded, her magic moving straight towards their assailant.

"I am this poor girl's mother," the woman said, sweet as pie. "Who are you?"

Maya began to stand up, her legs physically shaking beneath her. "Mother I-"

"Shush," the woman snapped. "The grownups are talking." She never once took her eyes off of Natasha.

That was when Clint burst into the room, or what was left of it, his bow drawn and ready to shoot at whatever, or whomever, was the cause of all this destruction. Tony ran in behind him. He was fully clad in his iron suit. Steve was stood beside him; Thor behind the three of them. Bruce was stood off to the side, his arms crossed over his chest in a small gesture of comfort to his alter-ego, but he looked angry. Angry enough to turn green. Not good.

"Mother-," the teenager spoke up again, but one look from the woman across the room and she instantly retracted. She looked terrified.

That was when Natasha decided it was time to intervene. Taking up a protective stance in front of the girl, shielding her from the woman that stood across the room, she slowly began to lower her hands towards the gun that she kept permanently attached to her leg. "You need to leave. Right now."

The woman across the room laughed out loud, eyes falling from the redhead to the girl standing behind her. "Not without my daughter."

Natasha looked straight through the intruder, fingers grasped tightly around the handle of her gun, and let a cold stare land upon her face. "That isn't going to happen."

The woman didn't look at all amused. She smiled, all sense of sweetness gone. Her look was cold. Dark. She made a move forward, stopping inches from Natasha's face.

"Stop."

Maya rounded passed Natasha, worming her way between the assassin and her mother. She was smaller than both women, more so her mother, but she didn't falter. Natasha could see her small body trembling. She wanted to reach out and grab a hold of the girl's hand, show her some kind of comfort, but held herself back. The past twelve hours had proven that she wasn't the biggest fan of touch and she didn't want to give the teenager any more reason to feel uneasy here.

"Stop it." Maya's voice was firm. It had taken a lot of control to keep the tremor out.

The woman laughed down at her, bitterly, before grabbing hold of the girl's neck with lightening fast speed. She began to squeeze tightly. "Did you just step up to me, little girl?"

That ignited something in Natasha. Something that she had assumed was long since dead. She snapped to attention, charging at the woman that held Maya by the throat. Without any hesitation, the redhead grabbed the wrist that held tightly to the teenager's throat and whipped it backwards with enough force to sprain something. The woman didn't flinch. She just stared at Natasha, an unreadable expression, before pushing the same hand into the assassin's chest and sending her flying across the room. The redhead harshly collided into one of the remaining pillars that was still managing to somehow hold up most of the building. Her body fell to the floor, unmoving.

Maya screamed out. All semblance of fear was gone, she looked completely enraged. Grabbing hold of her mother's elbow, she dragged her forward and slammed her left foot into the back of the woman's knee. They both grunted, the elder moreso than the teenager as she fell to the floor. The blonde grabbed a hold of her mother's head and threw it onto the metal table that somehow still stood in the middle of the room. Everybody just stood there silently, staring in complete shock at the scene unfolding in front of them.

She didn't let go of the back of the woman's head after her first act of aggression. Instead, she slammed it down again and again and again with enough force to break the makeshift bed in half until a small hand grabbed hold of her shoulder. She fought against it, but the arm slipped down to her waist and physically heaved her backwards. Maya kicked out, her foot connecting with the shin bone of whomever had a hold of her.

"Hey, calm down," the voice whispered into the back of her ear. "It's okay."

It was Wanda. The teenager turned her head slightly to get a look at the Sokovian's face.

"Look," the witch said solfly, gesturing with her head to the other side of the room. "She's okay."

Maya followed her line of sight to Natasha. The assassin was slowly standing up from the floor, her hand grasping at her side. She was alive. Maya started to struggle less and, by the time she was completely still, Wanda placed her back down onto the floor and stepped away slowly. Her hands were raised into a small sign of surrender, just as she had seen Natasha do earlier that morning. Before all of this chaos.

Natasha looked over to the teenager and then down to the woman on the floor. She raised her eyebrow at the girl.

"I totally had her," the redhead said, limping over to the rest of the team. They were all still stood there in various states of shock. Clint had finally dropped his arrow and Tony rolled back his helmet. Steve let go of his shield, leaning it against a pile of rubble, and started to walk towards the teenager.

Maya caught sight of him advancing towards her and bolted backwards, just as she had done when the woman, her mother, had made an appearance. She threw herself back with enough force to crash into Wanda as they both toppled to the ground.

The Sokovian didn't have enough time to register what was happening before a boney elbow dug harshly into her side and she hissed, feeling the weight on top of her trying to roll away. Out of instinct, she grabbed a hold of it and pulled. The weight landed back on top of her with a small thud and the kick to her thigh was enough to knock her out of her small stupor. She tightened her hold, blonde curls attacking her chin, as she felt the girl on top of her start to struggle again.

"Hey," Wanda whispered gently into the back of the teenager's ear again, standing them both up with ease. "Stop squirming. It's okay." She held on tighter.

"Fuck off!" Maya growled. "Let me go!" She tried to pry the witch's hands off of her, but the Sokovian just tightened her hold.

"Language!"

Natasha.

The girl eyed her, the same disdain as minutes before evident on her face. She looked as though she was a fraction away from spitting at her.

Steve wrapped his hand around her flailing upper arm, faltering slightly at how easily he managed to fit his entire hand palm around it, before he made a move to lower it down to her side. It was completely innocent; he didn't want her to go smacking somebody in the face as she struggled, he didn't want her to hurt herself, but Maya let out a harsh scream at the unexpected contact, launching her other arm up to punch him in the face. He took a step back at that, complete shock overtaking his features.

Maya's breathing had started to become erratic, Wanda pulled her further into her chest. It was alarming, to the witch, just how easily she was able to lift the teenager off the floor; how easily she was able to feel every single bone protruding through her clothes. She pushed that to the back of her mind, however, when she felt the painfully laboured breaths coming from the girl in her arms. She had stopped her struggling, just hanging there limply. Her face was scrunched up into a look of pain and her hands were clawing sharply at her neck as if to fend off an invisible force.

Wanda looked to Natasha, panic etched across her face, completely unknowing of how to handle this situation. The older redhead tentatively stepped forward, her hands were held up in that same sign of surrender. Not that the young blonde was able to see with her eyes so tightly closed. Natasha, throwing caution to the wind, took a hold of the girl's hand and once again brought it up to her own chest just as she had done after their first interaction.

Maya's eyes snapped open to attention, her struggling beginning anew, but Wanda just slinked her arms further around the girl's torso, holding on tighter. She began whispering little words into her ear, just like before, as Natasha started to coach her through a breathing exercise.

In for seven. Out for four.

Moments passed before Maya's eyes began to look a little less cloudy, her hands dropping back down towards her side after stealing one back from Natasha's grip. She looked incredibly small.

"You're okay," Natasha told her soothingly. "Big breath."

The teenager obeyed. Her breath hitching a little, but she still complied.

When Wanda was sure that the blonde wasn't going to bolt, she placed her back down onto the floor. Her boots making a soft click when they landed on the hard wood.

"I'm sorry." Maya whispered, though it came out more of a whimper. The same reply as last time.

The older redhead gave her a stern look. "What did I say, hmm?" She paused, trying to catch the girl's eye. "You don't have to apologise. I get them, too. So don't be sorry, okay?"

Nothing.

"Okay?"

Maya rolled her eyes. "Yes. Okay."

"Good," Natasha smiled. Everybody smiled a bit at that.

Bruce, finally feeling a sense of calming safety, joined them from his occupied corner, plodding over to the others.

"What are we going to do with her?" He said, gesturing to the woman that lay unconscious on the floor.

Everybody looked to him and then to the body in question and, just like that, the woman on the floor began to stir.

"You wait until we get home, little girl." The woman said, spitting out a mouthful of blood. Her eyes were directed at Maya and the others watched as the girl physically gulped. "I think that a trip downstairs is in order for you."

Natasha walked over to where the intruder was laying on the ground. Looking down at the woman that was sneering up at her, she landed a punch straight to the side of her face and everybody watched as Maya's mother slumped back down to the floor.

"She isn't going anywhere with you."

- - - - - -

The Avengers, and Maya, were able to make it out of the building before it fully collapsed. Maya's mother had been handcuffed and handed over to Fury. They didn't envy her.

Natasha had taken the teenager to a safe house, Wanda following behind them. The others had decided to part ways there and then, deeming the situation handled. So now it was just the three of them. Wanda sat comfortably on the chair, her legs crossed in a depiction of proper elegance. Natasha was sprawled on one end of the sofa and Maya sat on the other side, looking as stiff as a board.

"Relax," Wanda spoke up. She had offered the teenager a cup of tea when they arrived, they had simultaneously tried to offer her something to eat, but both proposals had been met with refusal.

It was bizarre to both of them. Wanda had grown up with a twin brother that ate her family out of house and home; Natasha had grown up in the Red Room where mealtimes were complete anarchy. It was every Widow for themselves. Neither wanted to force the teenager to eat something, but both knew that she needed to.

So Wanda had made up some simple recipe with the ingredients that had already been in the kitchen, whilst Maya and Natasha had showered and changed, and layed it all out on the coffee table in front of them in hopes that it would peek the girl's interest. It did not. Instead, both Avengers had found themselves picking at it for almost an hour and Maya had yet to touch a thing.

"Maya," Natasha began. Her voice softly stern. "You need to eat."

The blonde never once took her eyes off of the hands that were placed in her lap. She was absentmindedly playing with her fingers, a faraway look in her eyes.

"Hey, look at me." Natasha leaned forward in an attempt to catch the girl's eye, but it had only resulted in Maya bringing her legs up to her chest and curling herself into a small ball as she began to shake like a leaf. The redhead's heart ached for her.

Her hands went up into that familiar sign of surrender as she leaned backwards just a tad. She was still trying to catch the teenager's eye.

"Maya?"

Nothing.

"It's really good!" Wanda interjected, a little more enthusiastic than she was going for. She leaned forward to pick up another piece of food and placed it in her mouth, moaning exaggeratingly. "So good," she said between mouthfuls.

Maya looked out from where her eyes had been hiding behind her knee and eyed the Sokovian wearily. "This isn't a trick?"

Both women froze at that. Wanda pausing mid mouthful and Natasha halting the mug of coffee that was currently making its way towards her lips. The older redhead was the quickest to catch her bearings. "No, love. It's not a trick. Why would you think that it was?"

Maya looked at her skeptically, then to the array of food that was currently covering the coffee table. She uncurled her legs and crossed them underneath her, barely taking up a full cushion. Natasha would have probably cooed if it wasn't to the seriousness of the situation. The blonde had changed, after a lot of coercion and reassurance, into a pair of the assassin's lounge pants. She was small enough that they completely covered her socked feet. She wore one of Wanda's long-sleeved tops, to complete the look, that was currently engulfing her upper body.

The teenager took a deep breath before staring back down at her lap. She restarted playing with her fingers. "Mother would always trick me," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "She would make something for me and then when I would go to eat it, she would slap it away from me or throw it at me because I hadn't done anything to earn it."

Natasha visibly tensed, regretting wholeheartedly that she hadn't put a bullet in the woman. "This isn't a trick, Maya. You can help yourself if you're hungry. I promise."

Maya looked across at her, an unreadable expression taking over her face. The assassin could see the struggle raging behind her blue eyes, though. She nodded her encouragement, leaning forward to get a piece of bread for herself and popping it in her mouth. The blonde did the same thing. Leaning forward slowly, fully alert, she took the corner off of a piece of bread and brought it up to her mouth. Halting it there, she never once took her eyes off of Natasha. She was waiting for her to make a move; waiting for a fight. When she looked down at the tiny bit of food grasped between her fingers, she let a breath escape her before softly putting it into her mouth and chewing awkwardly. It did taste lovely.

Both Avengers let a small smile grace their lips at the sight and Natasha couldn't help the grin that spread across her face when she witnessed the teenager lean forward and pull off another corner of bread.

A comfortable silence fell on the room before the spy spoke up. "Maybe after you've finished your lunch, you will let me run a brush through that mop of hair?"

Maya groaned at that. Wanda chuckled.

- - - - - -

a/n #2: i still have absolutely no clue about anything to do with fighting so i'm sorry if it's no good! i tried!

#the avengers fic #the avengers #original character #natasha romanoff #black widow #wanda maximoff

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Marvel Phase 4: Where Does the MCU Go After Black Widow?

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This article contains Black Widow spoilers.

The wait is finally over, as Black Widow has arrived in theaters and on Disney+ to end a two-year drought in which no new movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe were released. Of course, the powerhouse company kept the flag flying with the premiere of three well-received series on its streaming platform — WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the outstanding Loki — but the MCU was born on the big screen and there’s something reassuring about seeing it return there.

But now that Black Widow is out more than a year after it was first slated for release, what happens next? Ironically the film that is kicking off the MCU’s long-awaited Phase Four is a look back at the past, the filling in of a chapter in the back story of one of the founding Avengers. But aside from the introduction of the woman who is clearly going to take over as the Black Widow going forward (Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova) and a key post-credits scene (more on that later), Black Widow doesn’t offer up a ton of insights or clues into the future of the MCU.

For that we have to look ahead.

Now that the pandemic is (hopefully) fading into the rearview mirror, Marvel is getting aggressive with four new movies in the second half of 2021, four in 2022 and anywhere from two to four in 2023. But following Black Widow, the studio’s next two releases are perhaps its riskiest bets since Guardians of the Galaxy defied the odds and became a pop culture phenomenon back in 2014.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Ironically, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (September 3) harkens back to the earliest days of the MCU, with the Ten Rings organization first mentioned in 2008’s Iron Man. Of course, fans have been waiting for the real Mandarin as well since 2013’s Iron Man 3 fakeout, and they’ll finally get him in the form of brilliant Hong Kong actor Tony Leung. But the focus here is introducing Simu Liu as the title’s master of martial arts and the first Asian character to headline a superhero film — a groundbreaking move that Marvel no doubt would like to have the same response as Black Panther back in 2018.

Shang-Chi has two more unexpected MCU connection points that were revealed in its latest trailer: a brief scene at the end gave us a glimpse of a cage match pitting Doctor Strange right-hand man Wong (Benedict Wong) against the Abomination, a character last seen way back in 2008 in the nearly forgotten The Incredible Hulk. Scattered rumors suggest that the film may take place during the five years of the Blip or Snap or whatever you want to call it, which is how Wong ends up here; either way, he’s one link to the MCU, while the Abomination — also slated to return in Marvel’s upcoming She-Hulk series on Disney+ — is another.

Eternals

It’s hard to tell which Marvel title is more obscure to the general public — Shang-Chi or Eternals, the latter of which arrives on November 5. Based on Jack Kirby’s cosmic tale of immortal humanoid beings called the Eternals waging a secret, ongoing war to protect Earth from the evil Deviants — with both sides the creation of ancient entities known as the Celestials — Eternals is directed by Nomadland Oscar winner Chloe Zhao. Its first trailer gave us a look at a film that doesn’t quite track with anything Marvel has done before, and it remains to be seen how this experiment feeds into the greater path of the MCU.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

There’s nothing obscure about Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the film — the third and possibly last co-production between Marvel and Sony — is expected to be a pivotal one for the MCU with the long-rumored introduction of the multiverse to mainline Marvel canon (although technically Loki has already broached the subject). Tom Holland returns as Spidey, Benedict Cumberbatch appears as Doctor Strange ahead of his own crucial movie in 2022, and while we don’t know yet who the main villain is, it’s the worst kept secret in the biz that Alfred Molina and Jamie Foxx are encoring as Doc Ock and Electro from previous Spider-Man iterations (thanks Al!).

No Way Home is due out in just over five months — on December 17 — and Sony (which controls the marketing for Spidey standalones) has yet to release a second of footage from the film. Has director Jon Watts (also back for his third go-round with the wallcrawler) packed his movie with too many surprises to show us anything at this point?

Each MCU film is important in its own way, but No Way Home may alter the very fabric of the mythology in a fundamental way, as will the movie coming hard on its heels. But before we get to that epic, however, let’s take a brief break and see where things stand with Marvel on the Disney+ platform.

What If…?

With Loki about to close out its run, the next Marvel series will be What If…?, the first official animated series from the MCU. Just like the comics of the same name, the show will feature reimagined events from the history of the MCU, featuring characters like T’Challa, Peggy Carter, Thor, and more. While the show is speculative in nature and will likely have little or no direct connection to the larger MCU, What If…? (premiering August 11) certainly will promote the idea of alternate realities even more and help to pave the way for the emergence of the live-action multiverse later in the year.

Ms. Marvel

Ms. Marvel will introduce the popular teen Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) from the comics and will also serve as a springboard for the Pakistani-American superhero and Captain Marvel fan to join her idol in The Marvels, which is due out in 2022. Full details about the plot and additional characters have yet to be disclosed, but the six-episode show will continue Marvel’s major push to diversify the MCU.

Hawkeye

We know, thanks to the post-credits scene in Black Widow, that the next Marvel series in the chute, Hawkeye, will directly play off events occurring on the big screen. In that scene, which takes place in the present, Yelena is standing over Natasha’s gravesite (which is presumably empty since she died on Vormir in Avengers: Endgame) when she is approached by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) about seeking revenge for Natasha’s death against Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner).

Pugh is all but confirmed to appear in the Hawkeye series, which will likely focus on Barton’s recruitment and training of Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) as the new master of archery for the Avengers. Louis-Dreyfus is not listed in the cast yet, but seems likely to appear as well.

As usual, Marvel is playing its cards close to the vest and will adapt the comic book characters and narratives as it sees fit, but the introduction of heroes and anti-heroes like Bishop, de Fontaine, John Walker/U.S. Agent (from TFATWS), Belova and others point to everything from the Young Avengers to the Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers.

Both Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye are expected in late 2021, with premiere dates TBA.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

With 2021’s theatrical MCU slate focused on introducing both new characters (Shang-Chi and the Eternals) and new concepts (the multiverse), the four titles scheduled to arrive in 2022 will bring out some of the universe’s biggest guns.

First out on March 25 is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, directed by the great Sam Raimi (Spider-Man), and you can bet that this will be one of the most important titles of Phase Four. It says it right there in the name: the multiverse is coming, and there’s no question that the film will play off events in both Spider-Man: No Way Home and WandaVision, since the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) will be showing up in this movie too (Olsen described the movie to Glamour as having a “horror show vibe”).

Loki head writer Michael Waldron has written the latest draft of Doctor Strange 2, which is very encouraging news, with Rachel McAdams (Christine), Benedict Wong (Wong) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Mordo) all returning and Xochitl Gomez as America Chavez in the latter’s long-awaited MCU debut. Plot details are non-existent, but we can fully expect this film to have an enormous impact on the MCU as it barrels into the future — or many different futures.

Thor: Love and Thunder

Thor: Love and Thunder will blast its way into theaters after that, on May 6, and promises to be one of the biggest and most fully stacked spectacles of Phase Four. Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi returns, as does Chris Hemsworth (of course), while Natalie Portman will reprise the role of Jane Foster (and also debut as The Mighty Thor) for the first time since 2013’s Thor: The Dark World (not counting her repurposed Endgame footage).

As we said, this looks like a packed film, with the Guardians of the Galaxy showing up as well (for how much of the picture remains to be seen), Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, Jaimie Alexander’s Sif, and Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster all returning, and Christian Bale making his MCU debut as Gorr the God Butcher. How it might or might not connect to the events happening back on Earth and the introduction of the multiverse is also unknown at this point, but we expect this film to be perhaps even bigger in scope and more outright bonkers than Ragnarok.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Also shrouded in perhaps more mystery than usual is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But considering the circumstances — losing the lead actor, Chadwick Boseman, who defined the character of T’Challa for tens of millions with just a handful of appearances, it’s something of a miracle that cameras are now actually rolling in Atlanta on this motion picture.

What’s it about? No one knows, but if movies like Doctor Strange 2, Eternals and No Way Home will delve into the cosmic and/or mystical side of the MCU, than we suspect writer/director Ryan Coogler may keep Wakanda Forever firmly rooted in the geopolitical end of the universe, especially since some of Wakanda’s Dora Milaje turned up in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Of course, Marvel geopolitics may involve nations like Latveria or even Atlantis, but that’s another story.

With nearly everyone returning from the first Black Panther — aside, of course, from its newly minted and now fallen king — we suspect that Wakanda Forever (out July 8, 2022) will address the loss of Boseman in a way that is full of grace, heart and majesty. Just don’t ask us how the hell to pull it off.

Captain Marvel 2: The Marvels

As you can see, the further down we get in the schedule, the vaguer the details are. Which brings us to The Marvels, formerly known as Captain Marvel 2. The title makes sense, since Ms. Marvel will cross over to the big screen with this November 11, 2022 release, but we also know that the adult Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) — now imbued with powers of her own — will be coming over directly from WandaVision. From what we recall, Monica wasn’t too pleased every time the name of Carol Danvers was invoked on that show either, so there’s potentially a lot to explore in that relationship.

Nia DaCosta (Candyman) is directing The Marvels, which will also feature Zawe Ashton as a yet-to-be-disclosed villain. With Monica Rambeau and Kamala Khan both in the mix, it seems as if this adventure will be a bit more Earthbound…but don’t forget, the Skrulls are still out there too, which leads to our next section.

Moon Knight

The Marvel Studios series slate on Disney+ gets a little fuzzier once we get into 2022, but we know that Moon Knight, She-Hulk and Secret Invasion are all going to premiere, along with possibly Ironheart, Armor Wars and an untitled Wakanda-based show.

Of those, Moon Knight may have the least direct connection to the overall shape of the MCU in Phase 4. Oscar Isaac will star in the title role, with The Exorcist TV series creator Jeremy Slater as the head writer/creator on this one, but we suspect that Marc Spector and his multiple personalities will pursue his own journey onscreen, at least in the short term.

She-Hulk

She-Hulk may pursue a similar tack, least of all because it’s said to be in a more comedic vein, although it’s confirmed that Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer Walters will be joined in the show by Marc Ruffalo as Professor Hulk and Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky/Abomination. Does the latter’s now-confirmed appearance in Shang-Chi (or at least a CG version of him) take on greater significance as a result? Or does simply plant a seed for his return in She-Hulk next year? Stay tuned.

Secret Invasion

With Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn returning as Nick Fury and Talos respectively after their stints in Captain Marvel, it’s obvious that Secret Invasion will feed directly off the Skrulls storyline that was started in that film.

While the Skrulls we’ve met in the MCU so far are ostensibly “good guys,” there certainly seems to be room for Fury and Talos to have to defend the Earth from a rogue Skrull faction looking to infiltrate the highest levels of human society and government. “Secret Invasion” was a major Marvel Comics storyline, so it will be interesting to see whether Marvel Studios keeps it contained to this Disney+ series or expands upon it in the movies as well.

Armor Wars

As for the others, Armor Wars is the one we have the most info on, since Don Cheadle has been tapped to lead the show as War Machine. With the show reportedly revolving around the black market for Stark Tech — and Sharon Carter now apparently very much involved in that black market — some elements of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier may find their way into this narrative (same with Ironheart, since that show’s main character, Riri Williams, develops her own version of the Iron Man suit).

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Arriving on February 17, 2023 is a film that could — believe it or not — be the most important of Phase 4. We say “believe it or not” because until now, the first two Ant-Man movies stood largely on their own, with little direct relevance to the bigger MCU storylines.

But with the Avengers traveling through time via the Quantum Realm in Endgame, with the multiverse becoming a major factor in Phase Four, and with the name of the damn movie actually being Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, we suspect that the true nature and potential of the Quantum Realm will finally be tapped.

But just as importantly, Quantumania will introduce a villain who is very likely to be the big, Thanos-sized baddie of Phases 4 and 5: Kang the Conqueror. With Jonathan Majors confirmed for the role, Kang’s MCU debut has widespread implications for the overall arc of the franchise. Putting in simple terms, he’s intent on conquering the universe and travels freely through time to achieve his goals. In the comics, he’s a descendant of Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards and also has a relationship with Ravonna Renslayer, who we just met on Loki.

While some of this may turn out to be nothing more than Easter eggs deliberately planted by Marvel to make fans nuts (which it does), the truth is that we may even be seeing the seeds of Kang’s agenda right now on Loki, and there’s a very good chance that he will be one of the main antagonists faced by a new iteration of the Avengers either late in Phase 4 or in Phase 5.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

The galactic end of the MCU will again take center stage in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, set for release on May 5, 2023. Writer/director James Gunn has hinted that this is the last film to feature the squad he first assembled in 2014, but other than that — and the long-awaited and heavily hinted debut of Adam Warlock — little is known about the plot except that it will follow the events of Thor: Love and Thunder, in which the Guardians also appear.

Fantastic Four, Blade, Captain America 4, and more!

That is all we have for the known, confirmed MCU Phase 4 movies. Fantastic Four, with Spider-Man director Jon Watts at the helm, is definitely in development, as is a reboot of Blade with Mahershala Ali as the title character. There are also three unfilled Marvel release dates in 2023 — July 28, October 6 and November 10 — so two of those could be filled by those two films, with a third to be determined (possibly Captain America 4? Or Deadpool 3?).

The Big Picture

The MCU is clearly moving along several narrative tracks: the Earthbound, geopolitical drama most clearly defined by movies and shows like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Hawkeye and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; the bizarre multiverse madness of Doctor Strange, Loki and Spider-Man: No Way Home; and the galactic intrigue of Thor: Love and Thunder and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Lurking in the background of all this is the arrival of Kang; the impending MCU debut of the Fantastic Four — which may lead in turn to the appearance of such major Marvel figures as Doctor Doom, the Silver Surfer and Galactus — and eventually the presence of mutants and the X-Men, who themselves may arrive through the collision of multiple universes.

Whether Marvel Studios chief creative officer Kevin Feige and his team have all this mapped out, and all these narrative strands eventually coalesce, remains hidden from us at the moment. But make no mistake: Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now underway, and barring unexpected changes, catastrophes or the worst kind of apocalypse of all — the box office kind — it’s going to get a lot bigger.

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Black Widow is out in theaters and available via premium access on Disney+ now.

The post Marvel Phase 4: Where Does the MCU Go After Black Widow? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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