the stan lee quote of "i wanted to give myself a challenge to make the readers like a weapons manufacturer industrialist character at the height of the cold war" etc gets passed around a whole lot but nobody ever talks about how he actually went about solving this challenge which is to give the weapons manufacturer industrialist severe mental health issues

hey on your post about the cut iron man scenes confirming rhodey is gay- i don’t understand how it would’ve confirmed it? no hate bc gay rhodey is >>>> but i’m just stupid and don’t understand it, especially that end scene with the guns and stuff?? would you be able to explain it?? :’)

ok so, i wanna make something clear, evidently, because like 50% of those posts are sorta shit-posting: the only actual confirmation of rhodey being gay would be to have him say literally “i’m gay” or “i like guys” or just have him date another man or someone say something like ‘hows your boyfriend?’ or whatevs (hell, i’d even take rhodey dropping a ‘he’ pronoun, idc). that obviously hasnt happened so, whatevs. 

now in the realm of subtext, i feel like there’s a lot about rhodey’s character to take in consideration. the post you mention included (tho, we can argue the canonicity of it since those are scenes that didn’t make the final cut). 

first, we have the fact that rhodey is one the most sexually ambiguous character in the mcu. we’ve never seen rhodey being engaged in flirting with any female character, not even something slightly suggestive that he might be interested in anyone (granted, i guess the same thing can be said about male character which would have us discussing the possibility of an asexual rhodey, but, well, his interactions with tony are my next point) – the only time we’ve seen rhodey dealing with female characters in a sexual/romantic manner was IM1 prelude comics & that one (1) shot of rhodey sorta oggling the lady standing next to tony at the casino scene of IM1. other than that, nothing, zero. (even rhodey’s reaction to carol’s “good luck” quote was ambiguous) 

now, further on the subtextual aspect, although marvel has written rhodey as being ambiguous where interpersonal romantic/sexual relationships are involved, they also have made jokes & puns about rhodey being with guys or just basically had moments of rhodey just not being interested in the attractive women surrounding him: 

the first thing to come to mind is obviously, tony’s quote about rhodey “guessing wrong” (which yes, it reeks transphobia, but statement still stands) in spring break of ‘87. “that lovely lady [rhodey] woke up to, what was his name? Was it Ivan?” – Rhodey tells Tony to stop because ‘they’ll believe that’ (sortof back-hand denying the whole thing, textually) – BUT it’s important to note that DADT policy was still a thing then so it makes sense for Rhodey to try to deny that in front of fellow airmen on an air force base) 

then theres another innuendo about rhodey & guys/dicks that happens actually before this scene: rhodey finds tony at the casino & comes over to him & tony asks him to give him “a little something” as he points his dice to him to which rhodey goes, serious, “I don’t blow on a man’s dice”

then there’s tony telling rhodey “if we survive this, i’ll hold your own” & rhodey replying “you had to make it weird” (again, this can count as a no-homo reply or whatever but it’s still a comment) 

not to mention tony telling rhodey “you have a big gun you are not the big gun”, which is another dick innuendo since we’re introduced to Rhodey’s big gun with Hammer saying “let me tell you something, size does matter”

ALSO in the iron man 2 novelization, which i’m not sure counts as mcu canon but some people count novelizations as canon, tony makes a comment to rhode about how he “needs a boyfriend”. 

AND then, there’s those deleted scenes (& even the actual scene that made the final cut) i put in the post you mention. which brings me back to answering your question on what i meant it confirms rhodey’s gay: there’s an aspect of those two scenes that i find sorta telling: rhodey isn’t actively interested in any of those women. in both the deleted scene & the actual scene of the air-plane, rhodey’s invested in talking to tony about the importance of the air force as a support system & about how he [tony] is a good man. in the deleted scene, rhodey actually comes to notice the girl’s presence going all ‘oh’. & then when being approached by two of them --- i’m not sure if it’s a thing of terrence’s acting or an active script decision -- he doesn’t look exactly engaged only a little chipper due to his drunken state. he even goes to joke about guns to them & im puzzled between reading that as rhodey being gay or just a big ass nerd that has no idea how to flirt with women (i mean, im not ruling out the second option either, i love my some nerd rhodey).  in the actual scene that made the cut, rhodey doesn’t even address the ladies: tony tells him “would you excuse me if i’m a little distracted here?” & rhodey interrupts him yelling, drunk, “no! you cant be distracted right now!” 

in the second scene i put in that post (later on, as a reblog), kind of the same thing happens again, this time in IM2, at tony’s birthday party: tony has a conventionally attractive girl in a short dress flying above him with his tech, rhodey comes over & the scene could’ve had rhodey trying to subtly oggle the girl (like he did in the second-long shot of IM1) but instead it has him unbothered by her & just annoyed at the situation. 

even taking from behind the scenes aspects i got material because don cheadle has talked about a lot of rhodey things in interviews since he’s played him since 2010 & he never once has made a comment about rhodey being romantically involved with anyone -- except in one interview during the CW press tour, where he said, jokingly i presume, that rhodey “has a crush on clint”. tho, he did call brie ‘darling’ a few months ago on twitter. 

now, what i mean with all of this is: there’s a somewhat solid foundation for them to make rhodey canonically gay in the mcu, if only proven by the fact that he’s almost the only secondary male character that’s never actually been shown to have an interest in female characters (not even extras) -- not to say that they cant have a character whos been previously shown as “straight” suddenly be gay bc i believe anybody can be gay at any given time of their lives but yk, i feel like rhodey is one of the top easiest choices

out of curiosity why'd u say wanda, tony, and stephen were one of ur favss??

OOOOH BOI prepare urself for this long ass answer:

one of the things i love most of the mcu movies are the character arcs. these are literal comic book characters brought to life and i always find myself paying a good amount of attention to the characters quirks. that being said, when i first saw wanda in aou, i didnt think much of her. however, after like weeks of research and reading i found her to be sUPER interesting in terms of how she deals with her powers and how its apart of her but at the same time one of her biggest insecurities. i love how elizabeth olsen portrays her and i find her powers to be supersuper interesting. i think its p cool that one of the strongest avengers is so unsure of herself (in comparison to thor who knows he is one of the strongest avengers and is so sure of himself). that being said, i think the juxtaposition of insecurity and powerful-ness in one character is so interesting and my infatuation with her powers just adds to my immense love for her. i’m really excited to see how her character grows in the near future. OKAY on to tony :) tony stark is literally a matryoshka doll. there are layers upon layers upon layers upon layers to his character. i literally can dedicate a whole essay for him but im not gonna do that so ill keep it short and simple. tony stark has made mistakes. multitudes of them. but he knows this. and the way he handles them is, in my opinion, what makes him such a commendable character. bc at the end of the day tony is fighting for the betterment of the people around him and could give less than two shits about himself if it means saving the world. we see this in The Avengers, Age of Ultron, etc. this is such an important part of his character and it’s what makes him a hero. he is one of the few avengers who is human. he doesnt have super soldier serum in him, hydra hasnt experimented on him, he was never in The Red Room program. he is a man from Long Island with a vision. it’s not about him being iron man and saving the world. it’s about the decisions he makes as iron man to save the world and that’s why i appreciate him as a character so much. FINALLY Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange. i’m going to be honest, i wasn’t fond of him at first. i remember watching doctor strange and reading a little bit on him before, thinking he was just an ass. but then iw came out and i did more reading beforehand and his character has grown on me. you can clearly see the motives behind his actions in both iw and doctor strange and i think his justifications and reasoning behind his choices are interesting in that they are well thought out. this guy has got a brain that’ll give anyone either a migraine or something to ponder on. in my opinion, i think what makes him such a remarkable superhero is his mind, not his powers. the way strange takes situations, analyzes them, and plots out his plan of action (with the help of his powers) is what makes him such a peculiarly interesting character.  i might do another briefing on his character later so i can address anything i left out here. i’ll prob do it with the other characters as well. (maybe) anyway this turned out way longer than i had planned but i think it answers your question :)

x

Hey what’s mdzs?

thank u for giving me an excuse to rewrite my big post i did a few weeks ago and im sorry for writing an essay for a 3 word ask 

its kinda a romance/supernatural/mystery/horror/drama/kinda tragedy story? 

13 years (or 16 if its the drama) before the start of the story one of the main characters, wei wuxian, died after getting real into necromancy and pissing off everyone in charge. he’s brought back from the dead and the story covers what happened leading up to him becoming the most hated man in the world and after he comes back it follows a supernatural/political mystery type thing. it also shows his romance (or ““friendship”” if its the drama (still called soulmates though)) with the second protagonist lan zhan. 

There’s the book which is 113 chapters long with 13 bonus chapters. This is what all the other versions are based on. It does have wei wuxian and lan zhan in a romantic relationship but the relationship is not very well written most of the time imo. It has good scenes here and there that i really love but it’s bl written by a straight woman who is very obviously homophobic and fetishy at best and at worst writing weird rape porn (seriously if you read the book do Not read the incense burner bonus chapters. The chapter between them, villainous friends, is perfectly fine but those two are so bad they literally almost made me stop liking any version of this story). The main story itself also has some consent issues with the romance every now and then and those scenes suck but i like the scenes that dont suck enough for it to kinda balance out. Not to make it sound like it’s okay that its written that way because like. It isn’t. I can just put up with it for the most part. 

I like the way the book has some of the story elements better than the other versions I’ve gone through so far but it has the issues with the romance like i said and the translation isn’t very good so it made it kinda a weird read for me. Overall i did like the book and will probably read it again eventually but it does have a lot of problems. 

There’s also an animated version (also officially on youtube), a comic (both of which are still ongoing), and two audio dramas (one in chinese and one in japanese which i think hasnt actually come out yet or just started coming out?). I haven’t finished any of these versions yet but I’ve gone through some. 

I’ve watched about 7 episodes of the animated version and tbh i dont really like it so far. I don’t like the art style, there’s been a handful of changes to the story that i just kinda don’t like very much and the characterization of pretty much everyone just feels kinda weird. To me it really feels like one of those shows with a target audience of 14 year old girls so if that is the case the fact that im a 20 year old gay man might have something to do with why it’s not really my thing. It’s not the worst show i’ve ever seen and it does seem like it’s mostly sticking to the book so far though. 

I’m barely into the comic but it’s fine so far. It seems like it’s going to follow the book pretty well and I’ll probably keep reading it. I like it’s art better than the animated one at least and so far it hasn’t changed any of the things that other versions have that i preferred in the book. 

I know nothing about the audio dramas but they’re out there and you can probably find them with subtitles on youtube or something. 

The drama (also officially on netflix and youtube)has a different name (the untamed) and diverges from the original story kinda a lot and doesn’t have the relationship be explicitly romantic but it’s still very gay and is still very much a romance imo. Tbh i actually think it handles some parts of their relationship better than the book since it doesn’t have the bl tropes or consent issues in the way. 

There’s a decent amount of structure and plot changes between the book and show, most noticeably a whole new storyline revolving around the wen clan and the yin iron, changing who invented demonic cultivation from wei wuxian to a show only character, and general changes with him being morally gray and a necromancer because of censorship issues. It also changes the order things happen in sometimes or has characters that weren’t involved in something be involved for some reason. Oh also if you do watch it as a first just know that the whole dumb second flutist thing is show only and it sucks lmao. Most of the changes are perfectly fine tbh they’re pretty much just to streamline the story or for censorship so i understand why most of them are there even if a handful of them i don’t like. 

It’s also got two spin off movies, the living dead and fatal journey. Living dead wasn’t very good tbh it kinda just felt like a rehash of an arc we’ve already seen but worse and not focusing on characters you actually know and care about. Points for giving the villain guy really good eyeshadow at the end tho. Fatal journey was pretty good though. I liked it. 

Seriously “he’s got enough strength of will to be able to take xemnas’s place if he only got the chance” and “he has a nerdy loser type feel to him and this was an intentional thing we consider to be a positive character trait” are like THE BIGGEST AND BEST ODD COMPLIMENTS TO GIVE ICE DAD Its always such a nice feel to have the creator of some game you like actually mention your underappreciated fave for once and practically say “we have a soft spot for him too”

This is like how i felt when i got that one Charon trading card thats his only piece of merchandise ever and its this unexpected kinda cute not-so-evil looking thing of him being cute with a tiny pokemon friend. Plus out of all the admins he was the only one who even got a full artwork card! PLUS the whole fact that this card if depicting an event from his super fuckin rare ridiculous wifi rotom event and its the closest we’ve ever got to confirming that the Cute As Fuck Sympathetic Backstory Diary was meant to be him and not cyrus. Tho I mean I thought it was plenty obvious when the dude signed his name on it, its written in his distinctive speech pattern, and both of these things were translated correctly to match how they were changed in the english dub. Also like seriously the dude fuckin has an entire secret basement lab full of rotom machines all painted in rotom colours and the rotom is in an OLD house with an OLD journal and rowan talks about an OLD coworker in an OLD conference telling an OLD story about a rotom and charon is OLD and cyrus is NOT OLD and also has been stated that his childhood home is in sunyshore not eterna. Also the second rotom room in HGSS chronologically earlier in the timeline which looks identical and implies that Charon worked for team rocket before team galactic so even if you go with the theory that “oh the signature is just saying the ROOM belongs to charon but he actually stole someone else’s rotom journal and just went looking for rotom to steal it too” then i dont think it could be cyrus then if he had it before team galactic was formed and he ever met cyrus? Also how and why would he be able to have all this completed research on rotom and all these functioning rotom machines that are painted showing he knows exactly what rotom looks like? If he only just found this journal and hasnt captured a rotom yet? Also you’d think that the player would find the one rotom capture spot in the entire game inside this particular lab and find it locked in a cage or something, instead of .. yknow... NICE AND CUTE ROOM FULL OF DECORATED MACHINES AND NO SCARY CAGES and also the rotom is in the OLD house of an OLD guy which is just down the fuckin road from this secret lab. like if he was looking for rotom he’s a dumbass to miss it being five metres away the entire time, and also a fuckin psychic to even have his own door key have a plastic figurine of the pokemon he hasn’t ever caught. 100% EVIL DUDES DO NOT MAKE CUTE FIGURINES OF THE MON THEY ONLY WANT FOR WORLD DOMINATION

*pout*

tfw ur fave is never confirmed for sympathetic OR unsympathetic and you just get caught on the tiny evidences that seem very convincing but might be completely false and you just read too much into it and the specter of Finally Someday New Content For This Man That Will Answer All The Questions is hovering around on an indeterminate relase date and you dont even know if he’ll make an appearance in it at all

vexen and charon really do have a lot in common lol

So yeah i’m excited for kh3 to expand more upon Vexen’s role and give us some damn answers as to whether the ‘he is actually good and also a dad’ headcanon is remotely possible. even if im still gonna make fanart of it even if it ends up being non canon, i’ll just know to label it as a “this would have been better i think” au, yknow? And maaaan i really hope we get sinnoh remakes someday and charon gets a chance of having his hanging questions get answered too. I can’t believe its really been 11 years now! It’d be ironic if it ends up being exactly the same length as the wait for kh3, lol

Anyway thats why even “he was intentionally meant to be a funny underdog that you felt sorry for” is a real big revelation for characters like this, when you’ve put up with literally over a decade of being told He’s Bad And Creepy And You’re SUpposed To Hate Him Thus You’re A Terrible Person For Being His Fan. Like yo its funny how bigger villains who do bigger evil things like i dunno maybe ALL THE CANONICAL MURDER THAT AXEL COMITTED BEFORE GETTING REDEEMED can get easier forgiveness for it just cos theyre pretty and not pathetic. I love axel as much as everyone else but ive gotta agree that it sucks that vexen is more hated just for being mildly shrill than this dude is for burning him alive while he begged for mercy >_> And charon is more hated for wanting to be rich and not succeeding at completing even one single evil plan, than cyrus is for wanting to destroy the entire world and succeeding in very many bad things before you manage to stop him. Again, i fuckin love cyrus and i absolutely agree that he has sympathetic motives and is possible to redeem, i just get frustrated that because he’s more.. i gues.. mainstream likeable? that he gets more easily forgiven for bigger stuff. and the same people turn around and say charon is a terrible character who shouldnt have been there and he’s somehow more evil for committing less crimes but in a less serious way. JUSTICE FOR THE COMIC RELIEF GRAMPSES!!!! THE COMIC RELIEF GRAMPSES THAT KINDA ALMOST RHYME!!!

why am i like this. what are even the odds id find two of them. why do i have the most specific type in the world