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caps-clever-girl · 5 years

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thoughts on endgame.

fair warning, i am not going to be kind. i enjoyed watching this movie, for the most part. it was funny; it had many good jokes and good, pure and well done interactions between multiple characters. but i didnt like it, and here are the reasons why.

unfortunately, this isnt a ‘nitpicky’ post. my main problems are with a lot of the bigger points points of the film, and had quite a few. this is a LONG post.

• “marvels first gay character!!!!!!!!!!!!” shut up. you joined the ‘fad’ late for brownie points and it was a cameo character who got about 3 lines. there are plenty of canon queer and gay characters who could have been introduced, either as cameos or in earlier films. dont even get me started on the fact that tony has more canon bi material than most others and marvel could have taken the time or even the slightest bit of effort to make this. while i enjoyed the jokes about steve being Incredibly Hot and his ass being Gods Gift To America (which honestly??? correct!) that could have been expanded on. several characters made comments about how nice steve’s ass is, and could have been used as actual material for a queer character, instead of sticking a random chharacter in there. i get the whole ‘gay people could be anyone! its normal!’ thing by giving the ‘role’ to a regular person, but you would also prove that by making any one of your 30+ main cast actually queer instead of making gay jokes and hints that could be retconned and explained away by humour.

• slapping someone out of a panic attack, and treating the panic attack like a joke. yeah, i get it, they didnt have a lot of time. still, come on. did iron man 3 teach you nothing? apparently not since tonys ptsd was pretty much never brought up again.

• speaking of thor. now, i am not an expert, but when a person gains weight, they do not keep their abs. certainly not after five entire years - not even asgardians. i also found it odd that thor became the way he did. i understand gaining weight and comfort eating after all the trauma thor went through losing his home and brother and people, i really do, but 1.) do it properly, at least, and 2.) thor is the leader of his people. does he want the task? not particularly. he hasnt wanted to be king since the first thor movie, but hes been forced into the role. even depressed i dont think thor would shy away from it, not completely. hes always wanted to do right by his people and i think that hed stuck to it, especially after The Snap backing him into a corner, if that makes sense. to clarify, i dont have a problem with chubby/fat thor. (IF done right instead of with weird, shitty cgi, that is.) i have a problem with the fact that thor, even though he doesnt want to be king, would abandon the last remanents displaced people to build a new home all on their own and become a hermit gamer boy. ESPECIALLY with valkyrie around. she’s been through a derpressive, alcohol fuelled time in her life and thor pulled her out of it. (mostly anyway, asgardians are party animals and im p sure she still gets trolleyed on the reg) i have bo doubt that after years of wallowing she would do her damned best to try and kick his ass out of it, even if it were just because his people need a leader, instead of letting him drop everything on her and just let him stew while new asgard gets on with it. i also didnt like the fact that all of thors emotional moments were treated as jokes and made to be funny when hes genuinely Fucked Up about eveything thats happening and made his image into a whiny crybaby.

• professor hulk. more of a personal one, this, simply because i just didnt like it. fair enough if y’all disagree on this one, im not going to fight it. i just never saw him wanting to combine himself with the hulk. ever. when he apleared on the screen i was completely blindsided, and his explanation, and the way he interacted with the kids????? i just want to know where all of this confidence suddenly came from. i use the term ‘suddenly’ loosely, since its been five years, but bruce has never been the guy to care about strength or looks or fame. hes always been shy and nerdy. not afraid to stand his ground or make his opinion known. hes bot a catchphrase, posing and flexing ‘hell yeah lets take a selfie’ guy. i get that thats maybe the result of the hulk and bruces combined personality but it just felt WEIRD to me, like, there wasnt a time in the film where i felt comfortable with the character. this was the final avengers film, with all of the original six avengers in it. but it didnt feel like that, it didnt feel like bruce or the hulk was in the film, even though there was a lot of funny and good moments with orofessor hulk, it felt like a stranger with some familiar characteristics. it ruined any feelings of nostalgia for me. i like bruce, and i like the hulk. i like the way their differences add to the story and the way they interact with eachother, and the slow change in their relationship. sorry if its petty but i prefer them seperate, theres just so much more to them for me.

• clint and natasha’s journey for the soul stone. both times, in infinity war and endgame, a male character and a female character went to get the soul stone. both times the male came back and the female died, and we lost possibly two most developed and main-line female characters in the entire mcu. now i understand the reasoning for both, and out of the characters that went there, i agree with the choice. thanos and gamora; it was thanos who was aware of the sacrifice and who chose to make it. gamora didnt get a choice and was unaware until it was too late. thanos was never going to die there. he knew there would be a sacrifice and chose to take gamora, because she would be the most likely sacrifice to actualky sucsesfully yield the soul stone because she was the most loved by him. i get it, but we lost gamora and i dont like it. clint and natasha; looking at it completely objectively, clint has a family, a wife and three children, that he wants to get back. natasha does not have any children, nor any (blood) family. if i had to choose, based on facts like that, id choose her too. but i still hate it, because there goes the only female member of the avengers. also, nebula (and i think maybe rocket?) KNEW that a sacrifice would be made and either accidentaly or deliverately left out the terms of aquiring the soul stone. it would have been easy to tell, if not easy to solve. but nothinb was said, and two best friends had to make a fucking awful and horrible choice when they might not have had to.

• on the ‘feminism’ tangent; the random congragation of women in the end scene??????? i dont????? okay so i am marking myself as a hypocrite here because i did love this scene!!! it made my lil gay heart go boom to see so many good and strong women all in one place - ESPECIALLY rescue - and it also made me realise how many women there actually are across the mcu??? which was really nice?? but it just felt... so forced? the way they ALL suddenly apleared and stood together even though they were all mixed in around the battlefield. it was a wonderful thought and i did enjoy it, but it seemed too Off and Odd to seem as much more than a bid for Feminism Brownie Points.

• captain marvel. i dont know about you, but i was actually looking forward to her being in the film. for a character so hyped to be the saviour of the avengers and the end of thanos, she was barely in the film. ‘i have other planets to save, the earth isnt the only one affected by thanos’ yeah but earth is the only plannet actively attacked by him. its where the people who are rallying to fight him and reverse what he did are. dont you want to stick around and help them? surely it would be a hell of a lot easier with your help, and faster too. yes, she blasted theough the ship at the end, but she did fuck all to help defeat thanos himself, and the help she did give with the ship came at the end. i genuinely think they kept her out of the movie because she was too powerful, and would have made fighting thanos etc too easy to get all the suffering and noble sacrifices in. if she had been a side character i dont think id be as mad, but she got a whole MOVIE in which she is clearly the start of the entire avengers initiative; she is their HISTORY!!!! she is so powerful!!!! and yet she has 5 mins of screen time!! it pisses me off that she was So Strongly implied to be the character the avengers NEEDED, the one that without whom it would be IMPOSSIBLE to defeat thanos; the woman that really tipped the scales in there favour, and yet she did fuck all. (and lets not even get started on the carol/rhodey and carol+tony bromance we COMPLETELY missed out on.)

• (speaking of bonding what the fuck happened to tony and nebula????? after they were rescued it was like they never met)

• the whole entire concept of time what the fuck!!! ‘dont change anything’ okay well for the most part you did okay, and the PLAN and CONCEPT was actually really easy to grasp, at least to me, which is hard when working with paradoxes and wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey stuff. but that went out the water when past!thanos and his army were brought into the future and disintergrated. does this mean they’re dead in the past - since they would have just. Left and not come back and therefore ceased to exist from that point???? or did tonys Snap simply send them back to their point in time, with no memory of what had occured? idk because it aint explained.

• speaking of; loki. again - his past changed; he managed to escape, with the tessarect. this is not explained nor expanded upon. assuming the events of thor 2 came about - which were impossible if he escaped - then his timeline would carry on as normal, and would PERHAPS explain the tessarects wacky timeline. (i dont know for certain, because i cant work it out anyway). but loki disspearing means he wouldnt have gone to trial on asgard, nor would he wouldnt have been in thor 2 - also by extention meaning that frigga is still alive. technically if he went back to get odin off the throne anyway, everything else after thor 2 involving loki/asgard would still come to pass. either way, we dont know. it was a nice way for endgame to give fans what we wanted; the posibility of loki coming back. but it doesnt make a lick of sense, and we have no idea if hes still alive/escaped or not, and why. personally i have no fucking idea and im pretty sure it was a cop out so they could give us what we wanted. which brings to my other point:

• giving the audience what we wanted. we got loki interaction. we got loki ‘escaping’ and ‘surviving’ (????) we FINALLY got rescue, who many fans have been asking for since i think iron man 2, and even more so since The Badass That Was Pepper Potts in im3. we got morgan stark and tony and pepper married, we got jokes about steves ass, and more jokes about male characters admiring how hot other male characters are. and, most importantly, we got tony having the nice relaxing life he wanted out in his cabin in the woods with his wife and kids (even if it was a horrific way of getting there). i dont quite know how to explain it, but to me it seemed like they were shoving as many ‘fan-requests’ into the film as possible - so that when they killed off 2 of the original 6, and removed another by ageing him out of use, they could lessen the backlash and justify the changes by going ‘but you got so mych that you wanted beforehand!!’. a tactic they drenhed us with because one of those 2 was a fan favourite that people were BEGGING not to be killed off because they felt that he hadnt recieved anywhere near the peace or happiness he deserved so far - and now never will. which brings me to:

• tony’s death.

there are two parts to this.

one, i was incredibly pissed off because strange’s Big Plan, the ONLY reason he saved tony in infinity war, was so tony could use the gauntlet and kill himself anyway later. anyone in that film could have used that gauntlet - and many wouldnt have suffered fatal injuries; captain marvel, steve, t’challa, peter quill to name a few possibilities - basically, anyone who is in anyway enhanced would have had a better chance of surviving and would have therefore been the better choice; aka, half the mcu. i think it was a proximity thing; tony was closest. he had the oppertunity and the others didnt. but tony didnt know about the option of using it until strange looked at him and gave him ‘the signal.’ the signal to sacrifice himself. and of course, this is tony stark. when is he ever going to refuse that.

but reason two, and this is the one that stings the most; tony started the mcu.

in my opinion, he is the character who has put the most in during the whole ten years. he, of ALL the characters, deserves his happy ending of marrying the love of his life and having a kid, without constantly fearing that hes foing to have them ripped away from him, that hes going to have to fight to the death to keep them safe.

one of my friends, when i complained about tony dying, said; “it was his time. plus, he had a legacy! with pepper and morgan, and the iron man name. how can you be upset?”

i can be upset because tony got the happiness he wanted after losing exactly 50% of what he held dearest. i can be upset because hawkeye got his family back, but tony only got five years with his wife and less with his kid, instead of getting the oppertunity to grow old with his wife and watch his kid go to collage like clint will. i can be upset because the character that has gone through the most trauma, both physically and mentally, who spent the last ten years trying to better the world and everything in it and protect it, who got the most shit for every decision he made and who ended EVERY SINGLE FILM with a broken limb or his face littered with bruises and cuts while every other film centric character ended the film usually scrape free, didnt get his happy fucking ending. sure, he has a legacy. but i dont give a shit, because that legacy - of iron man, of morgan and pepper and stark industries - would have been there whether tony was alive to see it flourish or not. but he wont be.

this goes beyond being a ‘tony stan’ or tony being my favourite character. out of every single character, from start to finish, anthony edward stark fucking deserved a happy ending and by god he deserved it the most. i will argue that until my end of days.

i watched tony stark on screen for ten years, and i watched him get progressively more scarred and fucked up. his parents. the ten rings. losing yinsen. obie. vanko and hammer. the palladium poisoning. new york; the nuke and the wormhole. the ptsd, the panic attacks. the iron legion and retirement attempt. killian and extremis and the end of that returement attempt. wanda’s vision. jarvis being destroyed. the accords and subsequent civil war. finding out about the winter soldier and his hand in his parents death. finding out that steve knew. siberia. struggling to balence iron man and the accords. losing peter. being stranded on titan, in space for weeks.

tony in that wheelchair, shaking and rail thin and unable to stand for more than a few moments will haunt me forever.

i watched him suffer for ten years - longer, even, in-universe - clawing for his quiet, happy ending while fighting for the happy ending he thought the rest of the world deserved, and instead of getting rewarded he just got beaten down and beaten down. after ten fucking hears of watching the backbone of the entire franchise get nothing but shit piled on him until he struggled to breathe for it, excuse me for thinking he woukd finally get the chance to crawl out from under it and be happy. no strungs attatched, no awful, sacrificial price to be payed, just for a man who had given so. fucking. much. to finally get something for once, and be allowed to keep it.

well i was wrong. and i feel so incredibly fucking stupid for even hoping otherwise.

and thats what i didnt like about avengers endgame.

#thanos might have snapped first but now its my turn #endgame spoilers #marvel #avengers #thor #bruce banner #tony stark #squeak.txt #rant #avengers 4 #captain marvel #iron man

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thereinafter · 6 years

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I'm signing up for the Yuletide fic exchange this year; looong Dear Yuletide Writer letter below.

Dear Yuletide writer, hi! This is my first time writing one of these letters, although I’ve read Yuletide fic for many years. I’m excited about whatever you write for me and I hope this makes it easier. I’m thereinafter (isyche) on AO3.

I will be delighted if you write me something shippy for characters I ship (and I’m entirely cool with that being explicit if you’re so moved), but I am also delighted by gen fic, especially building on/exploring aspects of the world or backstory. I am the kind of person who enjoys Tolkien’s appendices and songs and reads all the codex entries in video games. I’ll always love something that’s like a bit more of the canon.

I suggested prompts in case that helps you, but feel free to mix them up or come up with your own idea.

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General likes:

Canon divergence AUs

Time loop stories, and other kinds of variations on a theme, generally (I do like “five times” fic)

Casefic for canons where there are cases or missions

Epistolary or “found documents” stories

Unconventional story structures

Worldbuilding/exploration of the canon world

Stories set around holidays and festivals, and balls, masquerade or not

Relatedly, characters doing things in disguise, whether they’re good or bad at it (and bodyswap, as a subcategory of this and forced intimacy)

Heists and rescues/jailbreaks

Court plotting, intrigue, spying

Road or sea trips/wilderness survival

Forced intimacy tropes like fake dating, bedsharing, huddling for warmth, marriage of convenience

Hurt/comfort (generally in the sense of one character in a pairing enduring hurt from external forces and the other saving and/or tending them)

Swordfights, training for all kinds of fighting, feats of arms

Characters creating things for others

In-universe stories, songs, mythologies, histories

Scenery and costume porn in the “rich description” sense

Lighthearted fluff and humor

Angst with happy endings

Us against the world pairings

Pining and extended UST, especially between work partners who are busy with saving the world or some other important task

Longtime friends to lovers, old friends meeting again, old enemies who aren’t really anymore, rivals who respect each other

Ascetic/hedonist or repressed/libertine or inexperienced/more experienced pairings

Stoic women who have a lot of hidden feelings

Characters who are very good at what they do (but may be awkward or lost in other contexts)

Loyalty/dedication/faithfulness/devotion, knight/queen dynamics (either one-way or where both consider themselves the knight to the other), love conflicting with other loyalties

People who know each other so well they can read each other wordlessly or sense each other across distances

Noble self-denial and sacrifice

in sex scenes: cuddling, laughing, eroticized hands and voices, clothed/semi-clothed sex, complicated undressing, extended making out, enthusiasm/eagerness/desperation, first times or first times in a while, talking whether emotional or joking or dirty, having to keep silent or hold still, interruptions and delayed gratification, sex against walls, mutual roughness, spontaneous/informal kink, magical or magic-enhanced sex in contexts where that exists

DNWs:

Coffeeshop/high school/other mundane AUs, soulmate/soulmark AUs, issuefic, non-canonical polyamory, non-canonical nicknames, non-canonical pregnancy and kids, A/B/O, formalized D/s, sexual violence/noncon, male dominance in het ships, daddy/mommy kink, incest

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Fandoms I requested (in alphabetical order):

Alpennia Series - Heather Rose Jones

Barbara, Margerit, Jeanne, Antuniet (I requested all four but any one or two or three of them is also fine)

In this series I love the canon ships as they are (don’t want them broken up or reconfigured), the women finding happy endings together despite their society’s prejudices, the Regencyesque setting with balls and seasons and duels, the way the magic works (especially Antuniet’s alchemy and how we see mysteries constructed through music and art), the way Margerit’s house becomes a refuge/salon for queer and intellectual/artistic women.

Prompt suggestions:

one of Barbara's adventures pre-Daughter of Mystery? Her first efforts at being a duelist?

if you’ve read “Three Nights at the Opera” it says it's the story of Barbara’s glorious imprudence but in fact leaves most of it untold, so you could tell me more about her affair with Jeanne?

In DoM after Barbara and Margerit kiss the first time, a lot of the romance is off-page in the same way; you could show me one of the undescribed scenes from, e.g., their time in the convent with all the feelings and details.

Domestic fluff in one of their households as of Mother of Souls? a holiday celebration? Margerit creating another private mystery for Barbara? an elaborate ball or secret party thrown by Jeanne?

Some kind of magical accident or student mistake results in a time loop or amnesia or h/c?

A road trip leaves one of the couples stranded in the mountain wilderness (Antuniet’s harsh practicality and Jeanne being used to luxury could make this interesting for them)?

One of them is kidnapped by one of their political rivals and the others have to rescue her?

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The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe - Kij Johnson

Vellitt Boe, Clarie Jurat, Gnesa Petso, Reon Atescre | Nasht (here, I also requested all of them but you don’t need to include all of them; see prompts)

This is a novella that turns Lovecraft’s Dreamlands inside out and subverts him delightfully while retaining the weirdness/horror/atmosphere I do like about his stories. I absolutely love the setting, the descriptions, Johnson’s extension of the existing worldbuilding, and the character of Vellitt Boe herself (an older woman with a past life of adventures who leaves her settled academic life to set out alone on a new one). I’d love anything that shows more of this version of this world. If you want to bring in more elements from the Lovecraft stories and treat them the same way, fantastic.

prompt suggestions:

It seems like Vellitt and Dean Gnesa Petso have a long history, did they know each other or travel together before working together at Ulthar Women’s College? (and you could make that a romantic history if you want). Did Gnesa convince her to stop adventuring and start teaching there?

We know she used to travel with Reon Atescre before he became the high priest Nasht; I like their friendship. “They had parted ways in the infamous demon-city Thalarion for no reason but the restlessness that is in the young”—what were they doing there?

“In her far-travelling days, she had walked in god-blasted wastelands …” what did she encounter there?

Why did she finally leave Randolph Carter and what happened after she did? Why did she change her name?

One prompt without Vellitt: Clarie Jurat returns home to fight the gods; I’d love to see how she does it.

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Elemental Logic - Laurie J. Marks

Zanja na’Tarwein, Karis G’deon

I fell pretty hard for these books, especially Fire Logic, about which I love so many things; I feel like Marks has some kind of direct connection to my personal id. All the circumstances of the way they meet with Karis breaking Zanja out of the prison, all the h/c, all the pining and angst, all their rescuing of each other, Karis’s eventual healing of herself and rediscovery of feeling, give me an absurd amount of feelings. I also love how the books are overall about the struggle to establish and hold a peace more than fighting a war, and the fact that Karis uses her amazonian strength to be a healer and creator/fixer of things while Zanja is the fighter, and all the other opposing elemental/mystical traits that mean they are often baffled by each other.

To sum up, I very much love them as a ship and would like a story focused on the two of them (Emil and Medric are fine characters, but I’d rather not focus on the whole group family; that said, if you write something that needs secondary characters, I’m fond of Norina and Clement and Seth and Garland too, and I love the ravens).

Prompt suggestions:

The two of them keep getting separated and almost dying or symbolically dying and then reuniting/bringing each other back. Which does work for me every time, so if you want to write something plotty that continues that pattern, I would be here for it.

We’re told Karis loses her powers over water and thus avoids it, but we don’t ever see much of that; what would it be like if she had to sail somewhere? (I could see this going in a light funny or fraught angsty direction.)

I’m intrigued by the implications of Karis sensing what happens to objects she forges, as with Zanja’s knife.

A little mission/case they decide to handle together? There must be a lot of problems around Shaftal to fix still.

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Sunless Sea

Presbyterate Adventuress, Brisk Campaigner (you could focus on either or both)

I've been in love with the Fallen London/Sunless Sea world for a long time and I will adore anything you write that evokes the atmosphere of the games. I'm fascinated with the story possibilities of every port (while not having managed to discover all of them even with my luckiest captains). I'm requesting the Adventuress and the Campaigner because I’m intrigued by their possible canon relationship, but if you want to bring in other characters too, go for it.

prompt suggestions:

Backstory! What were their lives like before they joined the crew? Had they ever met before?

Tell me about an adventure onshore when the ship is in one of the ports and the captain is busy (for one or the other of them, or them together).

Or an adventure on the zee, fighting creatures or dealing with crew madness in the dark.

Medical situations in this world could get very weird; what kinds of things does the Campaigner deal with as ship’s doctor?

Abbey Rock particularly fascinates me; you could tell me more about the Adventuress’s deal to fight the Sisters’ Adversary for them, and her battle (and leave it tragic or fix it somehow after her victory if you choose).

——

Tam Lin

Janet, Tam Lin, The Queen

I’m a big fan of the Child ballads and traditional folk/story songs in general. My favorite sung version of “Tam Lin” is probably Fairport Convention’s [lyrics]. There are many retellings, but I’d love another one or a story that spins off of it or fills in some of the blanks.

The thing I love most at the heart of the story is Janet’s courage and steadfastness in enduring the fairy queen’s test to rescue her beloved. But I’m also fascinated by the darkness surrounding that, like the warning away from Carterhaugh at the beginning, the queen owing a tithe to hell, and the body horror of the transformations and having to hold on to these things. You could keep the pregnancy in or leave it out, whichever works best with your story.

Prompt suggestions:

An f/f retelling would be very my thing, but not required.

An AU in a very different setting, like space or virtual reality or another historical period or a culture with a different mythology around fairies/spirits (for an extra challenge, it could also be interesting set in one of my other requested fandoms, if you know them)

Something from Tam Lin’s POV or the queen’s that fills in their backstory together?

Something that elaborates more on Janet/Tam Lin’s initial and subsequent encounters between the lines of the ballad?

Something set after the end that deals with the repercussions or further consequences? (are there permanent effects on Tam Lin? if there’s a child, is the child affected in some way?)

#yuletide 2018

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