#thelurkinglark

[bedlamsbard]

This is actually 3 things because ongoing breakup situation fried my brain so I kept forgetting. 1. That Peggy meta was a thing of beauty and I love that you managed to make her imperfect without ever falling into "this British aristocrat is a Relatable Underdog." 2. I kinda want to write my "alt!Loki hitting both his own and Thor's avengers beats" theory, but I don't want to make you feel like I'm trying to get you to go back to morning when I like Home a lot, your call? 3. Talk about Howard?

Aww, I'm sorry to hear you're not having a good time. <33333

I CANNOT get over the fact that the MCU tried to (a) make Peggy's and Whitney Frost's situations equivalent to each other in AC S2 when the flashbacks themselves made it clear that Peggy had every advantage Whitney didn't and (b) make Peggy's and Steve's situations equivalent to each other in CATFA and What If. I can actually see Peggy assuming growing up privileged but expected to fit into a certain role is equivalent to growing up poor, second gen, sickly, and with a single parent, but the narrative itself seemed to feel like those were identical, which is seriously uncomfortable.

I would be delighted to hear your alt!Loki theory! I don't get bothered about Morning the way I do with my Star Wars fic; I know exactly what's going to happen and how this story is going to end, I just haven't felt like working on it lately. So I would love to hear your theory!

Howard is a freak, which I say quite often and with affection. I don't think the MCU in any way intended him to be; it's a consequence of Howard mostly appearing in other people's memories, more as a plot device than a character, which is what he is in Tony's narrative. (And Tony says as much in his first scene in CACW.) We only see Howard as a non-constructed character on very few occasions and the only really extended occasion is CATFA, which is a much younger Howard than we see in Ant-Man or Endgame, or even his very brief flashback appearance in CACW. (I count IM2 as a constructed Howard because he's on camera and he knows he's on camera, he's just constructing himself here rather than being created by other people's memories/needs/etc.) Because Howard plays this wide variety of roles -- distant father, industrialist, inspirational father, casus belli, domineering boss, etc. -- it's easy to overlook what we see of Howard which isn't filtered through other people. I mean, literally, our introduction to Howard in IM1 is in newspaper articles about him. In IM2, it's Tony's memory of him, it's Fury using him to manipulate Tony, it's recorded videos -- and then CATFA we actually meet Howard, who is already at this point living the double life that Fury tells Tony about in IM2. Nobody knows he's involved with the SSR, just like for seventy years no one knew he was a member of SHIELD -- twenty years after his death! -- no one outside of SHIELD knew he was a member of SHIELD, including his own family. And the fact that Howard is the kind of person who not only could keep that secret, but actually did is such a major characterization note that should be the first thing anyone thinks of when it comes to him. Because everything else he does should be filtered through "this man is keeping a huge chunk of his life a secret." (and, I mean, one could definitely look at that as a metaphor for "Howard Stark was in love with a man for fifty years," but also it's...not a metaphor, he literally did that.)

#I could talk about howard a lot but it helps if I know which way to go! #thinking recently about the cartwheels I turn to take the best possible interpretation of not great stuff howard was involved with #I'm honestly surprised I don't get called on it more often (i.e. vibranium the manhattan project the cacw super soldier serum) #thelurkinglark #bedlam replies

[eighthdoctor]

How does getting name change work? I'm gearing up for the 2024 round of grad school applications (yes it's early). I don't want my academic career on my dead name/my family's last name and I'd like to have this straightened out by the February grad app deadline and I suspect it will take the rest of the year

The bad news is it is VERY location specific. The good news is once you get the court order it's just a matter of tracking down every other piece of documentation you have ever had, sending them the court order and a specific form and probably some other proof of identity, and yelling at them until they sort their shit out.

The other good news is you don't need to disclose as trans, most people changing their names are doing so because they got married, and in circumstances where it's clear that you did not get married the assumption is that it's a nickname/misspelling/family drama that they don't want to know about. My mom just legally changed her name to a different spelling. Nobody needs an explanation.

(Unless you want to of course. I disclosed to my vet office and was rewarded by being the first person the vet tech introduced themself to in person. Which was ADORABLE.)

Anyway. Start here. I also highly recommend googling "[your county] name change court order". There might be places where you DONT need a court order to get started but I highly doubt it and most of the federal documents need a court order so you'll want one eventually.

The other thing you should start ASAP is making a list of literally everything that has your name on it. Insurance. Bank accounts. Pet licenses. Amazon. Email accounts. Some of these you don't need any proof to change, some of them will require obscene amounts of proof.

This is not, at least in Washington, a super expensive process--the court order/documentation came to $300, which is An Amount Of Money but since then the only thing that's cost anything is my driver's license and even then only because I chose to upgrade to an enhanced license. It would've been $5 iirc if I hadn't. Everything else (banks, social security, insurance, etc) has been free.

It's just time consuming as fuck. And boring. And so much stupid bureaucracy.

#asks for ts #thelurkinglark #i learned yesterday that my heath insurance for reasons best known to them have changed my name BACK #like they GOT the new name they CHANGED to my new name and now they have changed it BACK #good times good times #i am forbidden from dealing with bureaucracy tho until i'm off the opioids for hopefully obvious reasons #alphabet soup

[hazard-and-friends]

4, 28, 75

4. Do you have plans to add another dog to the family?

WHAT ARE YOU, SPYING ON ME??? (yes. no. maybe. maybe. I need to get off my ass and send the email.)

28 answered

75. Share your favorite picture of your dog

#asks for ts #thelurkinglark #hazard to society

[dhaaruni]

My conservative Texan father is thrilled because roe v. wade could get overturned tomorrow. I have PCOS and take birth control pills for hormone imbalance, which is mild compared to what some women have to go through, but does it never occur to these people that some women simply can't carry a pregnancy to term safely?

No it really doesn't occur to them, or at the least, even if they realize it, they don't care and it freaking sucks.

Sorry to be a doomer but I don't actually think so. Maybe a couple of swing house districts end up breaking for Dems when they otherwise wouldn't have, but I don't think it'll be enough to keep the House let alone get more Senate seats out of it. It could potentially flip a couple legislatures though, or at least prevent Republican supermajorities.

Megan McArdle is getting yelled at for this thread but she's completely right and liberals need to stop sticking their heads in the sand about how popular our policies are.

The fact is, most REPUBLICANS support abortion in the case of rape/incest etc. but support for keeping abortion legal goes way down when you talk about on demand/without apology especially for married women who just don't want any more children or can't afford more kids. Obviously birth control fails and condoms break and people are busy and don't notice missed periods etc. but the percentage of women that get pregnant that were as diligent about birth control and tracking their periods as I am for instance is very small and everybody knows that! If my period was over a week late and I had unprotected sex (which I've never done in my life for the record), I'd run right to the store and buy a pregnancy test!

Like it or not, freedom and autonomy and personal responsibility is really valued in this country. Like, if someone is getting an abortion after the first trimester unless it's to save the mother's life, people are going to ask how that's justified. Did they not know they were pregnant? How did they not notice they'd missed more than one period? Why didn't they schedule an abortion earlier? Also like, the American public isn't actually sympathetic to poor women so framing it as poor Black/brown women suffer but rich white women can pay to get abortions even when Roe is overturned doesn't actually build support for abortion rights!

So, what's the answer to keeping abortion legal at least on the state level in the face of Roe falling? We talk about the women whose abortions let them have successful careers. We tote out CEOs and executives who had abortions when they were younger, we tote out Congresswomen and senators who had abortions. We tote out people who would have died without having an abortion. We tote out rape victims. We have to play hardball and yelling that people that already aren't sympathized are going to be impacted by abortion bans doesn't help keep abortion legal! Talking about birthing bodies and the 3 trans men per year that get pregnant doesn't help keep abortion legal! Sympathetic victims are a real thing whether or not that framing is "fair," and traumatized 13-year-old rape victims are much more sympathetic to the vast majority of people than 30-something moms with 2 kids who didn't use a condom but can't afford another kid.

I'm not condoning this brand of messaging from a moral perspective but like, honestly, abortion remaining safe, legal, and accessible for EVERYBODY who needs an abortion is much more important to me than like, catering to activists who want to pander to the least common denominator. That makes sense right?

#thelurkinglark #answered #abortion tw #politics

[bedlamsbard]

Talk about Peggy backstory and such?

Sure! So some of this is extrapolation based on details from CATFA and Agent Carter; some of it is entirely made up. I privilege CATFA over AC when they contradict each other and try to go for historical accuracy (or historical adequacy, as I prefer to call it) when possible, which does occasionally contradict canon. Some of this has already been in Home but not all of it has. Also a lot of this is not the most flattering thing in the world.

This also turned out to be really, really long -- it also has the backstory and timeline for the SSR -- so it's behind a cut.

I give Peggy a birth year of 1916, making her two years older than Steve (born in 1918). This is an earlier birth year than the year given in canon (the Avengers deleted scene gives a 1919 birth year) for a couple of reasons: I wanted her to have already gone to university, to have given her time at both Bletchley Park and the Special Operations Executive during WWII, and most importantly, because in CATFA she's in a command position in the SSR ("I supervise all operations in this division") and I don't think she would have been in that position if she was significantly younger. A 1916 birth year puts her at 27 at the beginning of CATFA and 29 at the end and makes her 23 when WWII began in 1939.

In AC 1.02 she says that her father and Senator Palmer were "dear friends." I've found a couple of congressmen (not senators) named Palmer, one who served as a Missouri rep from 1929-1931 and one who served as Pennsylvania rep from 1927-1929. This could be the New York state senator Harry Palmer, who served 1929-1934; a New York state senator would be most relevant in the context of a personal reference, and Palmer was still alive in 1946 when the show takes place. More realistically, the name was just made up for the show, like Senator Brandt's in CATFA, and Senator Palmer is supposed to be a U.S. senator, not a state senator. The important part is not "who is this specific person supposed to represent," it's "what does this say about Peggy's family background?" which is that her father was a personal friend of a U.S. senator.

There are any number of ways that could have happened; I personally go with her father being either the British ambassador to the United States, being one of the consuls-general (probably in New York, which could explain Peggy's familiarity with the city), or being a member of the embassy staff. I have also assumed, based on her early Bletchley Park service, the house we see in the AC S2 flashbacks, and that mention of her father being the personal friend of a U.S. senator, that her father is or was a baronet. So not a member of the peerage, but someone with a hereditary honor. I think with this background Peggy would have been a debutante and presented at court, but I don't know enough about debutantes in the UK during this period to say for sure.

I have Peggy as having gone to an all girls public school (or private school, if you're an American, since these mean exactly opposite things in the U.S. and the UK) and then to a Swiss finishing school in the early 1930s. That is partially for class reasons and partially for giving her a reason to be very fluent in French and to pick up German. I then have her going to university at Oxford and graduate with a degree in French literature. I went back and forth between having her go to Oxford (which granted degrees to women) and Cambridge (which did not), trying to work out which worked better in terms of her "having every door shut in her face," but I do think Peggy would have gone to the school that would have granted her a degree, so: Oxford. French literature, again, to give her that fluency in French that SOE would have wanted during the war. I thought about other fields, but I think this was also a period when Peggy was trying to be, quote-unquote, "normal" for a well-bred young woman and French literature is pretty normal and useful for her later life.

This is something that's not come up in Horizon, but is part of my backstory/worldbuilding: when Peggy was in university she had an affair with her tutor, who was an older married man. That was her first real romantic and sexual experience, it went on for a while, and Peggy expected him to leave his wife and marry her after she graduated. This did not end up happening and the fact that it did not really shook her. I see Peggy, especially pre-CATFA but throughout her life (and I think we see this in AC), going back and forth between wanting to be really rebellious and wanting to be really ~normal and living up to expectations about her sex, her social class, all of that. She fluctuates wildly between the two and whenever one of those backfires on her, she overcompensates by going in the opposite direction very aggressively. So the affair was her being very rebellious and after it ended she was being very cautious with her romantic entanglements, which is how she later ends up with that fiancé who's in the AC flashbacks.

In summer of 1939, prior to the invasion of Poland that started WWII, the Government Code and Cypher School (today it's GCHQ) moved to Bletchley Park. A lot of the early women at Bletchley were from very well-to-do families that got their jobs via word of mouth and family connections, and later Bletchley was recruiting college women. The vast majority of them were not codebreakers, but having French or German or Italian was very, very useful. As war became more and more likely, there was an uptick in people (men and women) wanting to get involved, which is what seems very likely for Peggy just out of university. I have Peggy as being one of the early Bletchley girls that started in 1939, getting there via one of her parents calling up the commander and going "have you got a job for Peggy?"

(This is a real anecdote from one of the early 1939 Bletchley women: "My mother simply rang up Commander [Alastair] Denniston [head of GC&CS], whom we called Liza because we'd known him all our lives, and asked him: 'Have you got a job for Diana?' He said, 'Yes. Send her along.'" The Debs of Bletchley Park, Michael Smith.)

So Peggy goes to Bletchley Park and is there from summer 1939 to fall 1940; she meets Fred Wells in London, where the Bletchley girls are all going to socialize in their off-time. (This is the AC fiancé, for those going "...who?") He is very, very normal, Peggy is still in her "overcompensating from previous romantic mess" phase and he is the opposite of that, which is very reassuring to her at this point.

At this point I just follow Agent Carter, even though the Special Operations Executive was not that obvious in their recruiting and I don't think the show thought overly hard about the dates. (also Peggy saying the words "did I tell you I was recruited to be a spy?" out loud in public should have been instant disqualification right there...this show consistently proves that Peggy doesn't think the Official Secrets Act applies to her. which is interesting characterization, tbh, and goes with what she does in CATFA.) SOE was established in late July 1940 as an espionage and irregular warfare: it did put women in the field very early on, although the bulk of SOE operatives were not women. They initially recruited through personal contacts (as Michael Carter does with Peggy in the show), but were very much specifically looking for people with language skills and later on were recruiting for fluent speakers in French, German, Italian, etc. -- which is why I gave Peggy French and German. Peggy is recruited, initially turns it down, and then later ends her engagement and takes the SOE position after her brother is believed killed.

Peggy was probably a civilian at Bletchley (especially starting in 1939, that changed later on), but would have joined the military when she was in SOE, either the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) or the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). I have her as a WAAF, though I probably should have had her as a FANY because most of her documents from AC and CATFA say that she was a nurse; I just missed that initially. The WAAFs didn't fly (that was the Air Transport Auxiliary); most of the FANYs weren't nurses. The reason that SOE women agents were in the military was in the hopes that if they were captured, the fact that they were commissioned officers would give them the protection offered to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, they were obviously not going to be in uniform if captured in Nazi-occupied territory and spies did not have that protection. (Also the Nazis were not exactly believers in the Geneva Convention.)

We are now into late 1940 and early 1941, which is when the timeline starts getting tighter, because in June 1943 we know that she was with the SSR, and presumably given her position as director of operations for the SSR had not just joined prior to Rebirth. So let's detour for a second to lay out the SSR's timeline.

For the SSR, I looked at the background of the Manhattan Project, because they probably began parallel to each other, and the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA and the American equivalent to SOE). This ignores any backstory that is not onscreen in the films. This is a mix of real history and extrapolation about the SSR based on the foundation of similar projects and agencies.

October 1939: Advisory Committee on Uranium meets for the first time to discuss using nuclear fission as a weapon with the fear that Nazi Germany is also working on it. Howard Stark might have been invited to join the committee, but does not attend.

June 1940: National Defense Research Committee formed by FDR, absorbs the Uranium Committee. The NDRC's mission was "to coordinate, supervise, and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development, production, and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare." They worked on hundreds of experimental projects; Howard Stark is a member of this organization, but not an executive member of the committee.

June 1941: The NDRC becomes the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

December 7, 1941: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; the United States enters WWII (against Japan on Dec 7, against Germany and Italy on Dec 11)

December 18, 1941: The S-1 Section meets to begin work on nuclear weapons. Howard is initially involved here.

January 1942: FDR authorized the atomic bomb project.

January 1942: The OSRD deep science section is set up in response to Hydra; Howard transfers to the deep science section from S-1.

March 1942: The Strategic Scientific Reserve is founded as a separate inter-service agency, Colonel Chester Phillips is put in command of the overall project, with Howard in charge of the science side. Peggy Carter is transferred from SOE to the SSR and becomes the SSR's director of operations.

June 1942: Office of Strategic Services founded.

August-September 1942: Manhattan Engineering District (from which the Manhattan Project got its name) founded; Colonel Leslie Groves is put in command of the project.

1942, dates unknown: Abraham Erskine escapes to the United States and becomes involved with the SSR.

1942-1943: The SSR works on a number of projects and eventually focuses on Project Rebirth. (The SSR, headquartered in Brooklyn, and the Manhattan Project, initially headquartered in Manhattan, have a friendly rivalry over who's going to finish their top-secret project first. The SSR has at least one separate science facility at what at the time was Alamogordo Army Air Field; I've also posited that they had a Pacific division.)

June 1943: Steve Rogers is recruited for Project Rebirth, but following Erskine's murder and the attack on the SSR, the SSR pivots to active combat on the European front, while Steve Rogers leaves the SSR and joins the USO. Colonel Phillips takes command of the 107th Infantry Regiment.

November 1943: Steve Rogers rejoins the SSR and the Howling Commandos are founded as one of several special operations units.

December 1943-February 1945: the European division of the SSR focuses on Hydra, with Captain America and the Howling Commandos active and with the 107th directly under the command of Colonel Phillips.

June 6, 1944: D-Day, Allied invasion of Normandy

February 1945: Bucky Barnes is (believed) killed, Arnim Zola is captured, Johann Schmidt is killed, Steve Rogers is believed killed in action. (I put this in February because the ROGERS DISAPPEARS headline from the newspaper in CATWS is March 5, figure there are at least a couple weeks before the SSR releases the news.)

March-May 1945: The SSR mops up the remains of Hydra, with Peggy Carter taking command of the Howling Commandos.

May 8, 1945: Victory in Europe Day (following Adolf Hitler's suicide on April 30)

September 2, 1945: formal ending of WWII (following the dropping of the atomic bombs and surrender of Japan in August)

This gives Peggy a period of about a year and a half at most with SOE. Most of that would have been spent in England, but I have her undercover in France for an extended period of time. I made the decision early on that Peggy actually screwed up her field operation very, very badly, in the kind of way where she did achieve her objective, but in such a way that a lot of people killed on both sides and it made SOE extremely hesitant to put her in the field again. (Peggy touches on it in Home 5, but she doesn't think of it that way.) It's not that Peggy doesn't have the skillset, but she doesn't have the temperament; she is not a good covert operative, which is fine in most circumstances, not in these. I also had to give her a reason to actually be transferred from SOE, which really needed people, to the SSR, which arguably did not need someone with Peggy's specific skillset, and to be honest, I think it's interesting if she's sent over with that background rather than being perfect. And also if she was perfect, they wouldn't transfer her; they needed the people to badly.

1940-1941 Peggy gets trained for her operation in France -- most women SOE agents were couriers or wireless operators. In 1941 Peggy would have been one of the earlier woman agents; there were women with SOE from the beginning, but a lot of those who got dropped into France were doing so in 1943 or 1944. (Not all!) She has her op, it doesn't go well, and when she comes back to England, she spends a lot of time at various SOE stations before she's transferred to the SSR and because she has all this SOE experience, she becomes the director of operations for the SSR -- CATFA treats her like she is the second in command of the SSR's European division. (AC does not for various narrative reasons, but it doesn't actually line up with how she's presented in CATFA.) She does specifically say in CATFA "I supervise all operations for this division," which could mean numerous things; when we meet her in June 1943 the SSR is not a combat division, but later on it doesn't seem like her duties change at all.

Peggy is an adrenaline junkie, she can do undercover work for short periods of time, but isn't good at it for longer periods; she's a loner who doesn't like to trust other people when she knows she can do something herself, even if they're better at it than she is. She only goes for other people when they have a skillset she doesn't. She is very, very straightforward and has a tendency to see things in black and white; her shades of gray are variable and based on her priorities, which are not always what other people prioritize. She wants to be a knight in shining armor, which is not necessarily compatible with covert ops. She was a front-line operator at various points during the war and if you asked her, she would not say that she looks down on people who were not shooters, but post-war she does definitely have the attitude of being a little scornful of people (particularly men) who were not in the war with a gun. (Look at the way she treats Howard in AC, and she knows that Howard Stark was flying behind enemy lines while being actively shot at, because Peggy was there when it happened.) (But the way AC treats Howard is another discussion entirely.)

I think that one thing that becomes very clear in AC is that she doesn't necessarily understand why the men in the SSR don't treat her as someone who was a shooter, because she expects them to know it. She also acts in AC as if her grief is more legitimate than anyone else's -- she tries to pull it on Dum-Dum Dugan and he calls her out on it ("I miss him too") and she listens to him about that when she doesn't listen to Howard, maybe because he's a shooter too and she believes that he has that right, which Howard, as a civilian, does not. (Obviously there is other stuff going on at the time.) And these are not unique problems, especially for a veteran; they happen all the time IRL, both today and post-war. Peggy treats her post-war problems (and to some extent her problems during the war) as Uniquely Bad (which everyone does! we all do this!) and they really were not; they're shared by a lot of woman veterans and honestly, losing her brother and her sweetheart in the war is very, very normal in WWII.

Sources -- I've looked at a lot of things, I do a lot of googling; the two main books I'm pulling from for Peggy are The Debs of Bletchley Park by Michael Smith and The Women Who Lived For Danger by Marcus Binney. In terms of fiction that deals with these types of characters, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein is The One (and the other books in the Code Name Verity cycle), and there's a lot of Julie in how I write Peggy. (Including the fact that she has one very bad, very fatal screw-up.)

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #bedlam watches the mcu #home behind the scenes

[bedlamsbard]

1, 21, 13 for the choose violence

1. the character everyone gets wrong

STEVE ROGERS. There's an overwhelming tendency to smooth down Steve's sharp edges and generally make him softer, sweeter, gentler, more innocent. This man is all sharp edges and while he's not always going to push himself past his limits, when he's holding himself back from them you can tell and it's -- it's very weird to see. It's most common in the ensemble films, like Avengers and AoU and Endgame, there's this air of like...restraint? And then the sharp edges come out when he gets too tired of holding himself back. One of my favorite Steve scenes is in CATWS, during the fight with Batroc, because it's a perfect kernel of Steve characterization. Not just the on va voir part, but the actual fight itself.

But also, like, Steve is mad ALL THE TIME. He's probably the angriest character in the MCU, Bruce Banner included. It's true from CATFA onwards. (I talk about his anger in CATFA a little in Horizon, so I won't reiterate it here.) I see Steve as someone who's always struggled with depression, and his anger is part of that, because he does have those lightning flickers from being functionally depressed and going through the motions to suddenly being blindingly, furiously angry -- Avengers is the most obvious example of this, but it turns up in AoU, CATWS, and CACW too; I don't think he ever hits angry in Endgame, though. He's functionally depressed but there's nothing in that film that kicks him into the anger side of it. (Caveat: my specific brainweasels function this way, which is why I read Steve's as doing so.)

also, uh, here is probably the really controversial read on Steve: there's a tendency in this fandom to give credit for anything and everything Steve does to his feelings about Bucky, and I don't...think that's true. yes, Steve cares a lot about Bucky, but it's a huge disservice to his character to say that Steve only went to Krausberg for Bucky or that he only crashed the Valkyrie because of Bucky or that he only destroyed SHIELD/HYDRA for Bucky or that he was only opposed to the Accords because of Bucky. sure, Bucky is a factor in most of those situations, but Steve would have done all of them anyway. give the man some credit for his own agency!

21. part of canon you think is overhyped

outside of this side of the fandom, probably Endgame, but that's a given. on the Tumblr/AO3 side of the fandom I don't think that's true at all lol.

in this side of the fandom -- uh, Thor, the first one. I've been going through Phase 1 lately and the first Thor film, which a lot of Thor and Loki fans I know feel very strongly about, is a chopped up mess -- I think it's the only film in the MCU that really, really suffers from having its deleted scenes removed, but even with those it's trying to do too many things at the same time and it can't give any of them enough space, plus its Asgard design is a hot mess -- TDW and later Ragnarok had to essentially bend over backwards to fix it. It does a lot of things very well, but it also does a lot of things not well at all. The Thor films are all inconsistent across the board, though; it's the weakest line in the entire MCU.

13. worst blorboficiation

I have THREE answers for this, all of which are bad in their specific ways, but for absolute worst: Tony Stark. I like Tony! He actually is a character I like! He is also super fucked up in ways that Tony fans just ignore or soften or whatever; the weirdest part to me is the desire to make Tony a ~soft dad to Peter, Shuri, Loki, Nebula...Morgan sometimes. This man took a fifteen-year-old kid to Germany to fight Captain America without telling him why, y'all. what about that says "good father figure" to you. he's also brutal to Bruce in IW.

the other two answers are Peggy Carter and Loki, which are pretty self-evident. I think I'd also actually put Natasha on this list, too, because she's another character who people really want to soften.

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #bedlam watches the mcu

[bedlamsbard]

Talk about the howling commandos in Home pls? Steve's unit is super important to me

They are showing up in Chapter 2! Peggy goes to fetch them from RAF Tangmere (which is one of the RAF stations used by the real life special duties squadron that used to insert Allied spies into occupied France during WWII) and in the mean time tells them her suspicions about Steve's return -- "your dead CO is back but he claims he's from the future and was fighting aliens" is, tbh, batshit insane, so when the Howlies show up at SSR HQ they are already primed to look for the cracks in Steve's story. (I swear Peggy's not just being suspicious for the sake of ~conflict, it really is an extremely unlikely story if you haven't been dealing with Avengers-level nonsense for the past six years.)

Sounding like he was thinking out loud, Jones said, “We know Schmidt had people working on psychological conditioning and memory manipulation, and some of them got pretty far.  The only problem is that we still don’t know who or where they are.”

The SSR only knew because they had had the unfortunate experience of running into the products of Hydra’s experimentation on those lines, usually Allied POWs who had been plucked out of the factories and labor camps along some unknown metric.  The Commandos had run into four so far over the course of the past five weeks, an experience Peggy knew they all found profoundly disorienting; as former Hydra prisoners it was only luck that none of them had ended up in that position.  The Commandos had been forced to kill two of them, the third had killed himself after being taken prisoner, and the fourth was in an SSR cell insisting he was a German named Karl Menzel from Pforzhelm, instead of Jeff Myllyharju from Staten Island, a lieutenant in the 107th Infantry who had been captured at Azzano in 1943 and vanished out of the same Hydra facility in Krausberg the Commandos had been at.

Since the Valkyrie went down the Howling Commandos and the rest of the 107th have been doing Hydra cleanup, looking for all the little outposts, labs, and bases that they didn't find when they were looking for the big facilities in CATFA. That's where all the really weird stuff was going on, not just the construction of the Valkyrie and the mainline Hydra energies weapons.

Since they didn't arrive with Phillips and Peggy (for limited transportation reasons), Steve wasn't expecting to see them at all. It is a very emotional reunion that leaves the Howlies even more confused, because Steve isn't acting brainwashed. (Steve doesn't realize that Phillips/Peggy/the Howlies all think he got captured and brainwashed, because, like...why would he. He's been dealing with Avengers-level nonsense for the past six years. Increasingly bizarre things happen to him and he just deals with it, because what else are you going to do?)

The Howlies are not at all certain what to think about Natasha, since they went in with the suspicion that she's a Hydra plant, or possibly a Soviet plant. They do agree that she's exactly Steve's type. And if the cover story -- Steve bailed out of the Valkyrie, walked back to the Allied lines, ran into OSS agent Natasha along the way and they were instantly smitten -- was actually true, it would be very believable.

(I haven't written the actual reunion yet, so this is still a little nebulous.)

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #iw time travel concept #btw no one except steve or natasha would use the word brainwashed because it wasn't invented yet #which is wild

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Favorite moment in CATFA?

oooohhhhh so much of CATFA is so good; I don't think anything specifically is jumping out at me right now as an absolute favorite! so here's a sequence in it that I really like, and that's Steve breaking into the Hydra facility in Krausberg --

-- because Steve is playing Captain America. Why does Steve stay in his Captain America sweater? He has normal clothes; he's still an Army officer and we see him in various versions of the normal U.S. Army uniform both before and after he ~becomes Captain America for real, back when he's still with the USO as well as after he goes to the SSR. Why does he take the shield? It's not like he doesn't know it's not Army issue. Why take the "A" helmet (which is not a normal part of his costume, since he borrows it from one of the chorus girls)? He could acquire a ~normal helmet or even not use one at all, but he's doing on the fly adjustment of the Captain America costume to make it something that actually works for combat. (And some of what he does later ends up transferring over the main uniform.) Then once he's actually at the HYDRA facility, when he's interacting with people that either aren't Bucky or that he's not just punching out, he's still very much playing Captain America -- that's how he introduces himself when he's breaking the POWs out. When he's having his first interaction with Schmidt, that's the really interesting part -- because "Captain America" is also how Schmidt addresses him.

(I don't think Schmidt ever knew what Steve Rogers looked like before the serum -- there's no indication that he knew about skinny Steve, because he looks Steve up and down and says, "So Dr. Erskine managed it after all. Not exactly an improvement, but still, impressive," and I'm pretty sure the "it" is just the super soldier part, because the physical transformation is such an outlier as far as any version of the super soldier goes. If you don't know what pre-serum Steve looked like, post-serum Steve just looks like a really fit but otherwise normal guy. There's no indication that Hydra knew who Steve was pre-serum and possibly not even until he literally showed up on their doorstep; the surveillance photos are only of Erskine, not Steve, and Project Rebirth was running on such a tight timeline that it's very likely Hydra only knew the project was going forward but not who with.)

Steve goes out to meet Schmidt on the walkway like he's heading out onto the stage that suddenly isn't a stage, but it's still a performance to him; the "you've got no idea" in response to Schmidt's "impressive" feels like he's playing the role of Captain America, who is, to him, at this point still a role; it's not the much more genuine responses that he has to Schmidt in their later confrontation. And punching Schmidt straight in the face -- that's his "knocking out Hitler" punch, very showy. (We've just seen him punching out people otherwise.) He doesn't go for his pistol until Schmidt hits him back (or rather dents the shield) at which point he very abruptly realizes that oh shit this is the guy who's also a super soldier. All of a sudden it's very real and you see that realization go over Steve's face, the instant he manages to get space from Schmidt and Zola pulls the walkway back. Like, there's so much going over Steve's face in this scene, the whole time after Schmidt's punch all through Schmidt pulling his face off while Schmidt is giving his whole "You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind" speech.

LOOK AT THIS! because the thing is -- he's terrified that Schmidt is right (it's something that's only very lightly brushed over elsewhere in the films, the bit in AoU when Thor is going "this is not meant for mortal men!" and then hands the drink to Steve), and it's very much also the moment when he realizes that this isn't a role, this is for keeps, and he's the one who has to do it. (Not to mention the sudden realization that he and Schmidt really are essentially, at this point in time, two of a kind, especially because Schmidt himself acknowledges that.) He blusters up the "Then how come you're running?" but part of him is just panicking before he shoves it away to never deal with again ever, thanks, not ever, since just then he suddenly has something more pressing to deal with (not blowing up).

But I do think of that as the moment when "Captain America" stops being a role and starts being him, Steve Rogers, so to speak. The SSR would honestly probably be perfectly happy for him to not be Captain America and just run a ~normal commando unit, since having your top guy be a celebrity is not ideal for what otherwise seems to be a pretty top-secret unit. They would probably have preferred that. Steve is, presumably, the one who makes the decision to keep the Captain America parts of the uniform -- Steve's the one who decides to keep the shield, but he calls the shots on which shield he wants (Howard Stark seems to have made them all in a sleepless one night binge session; I have no evidence for this, but it feels right) and I'm sure he painted it himself. He doesn't have to do that. It's a wild thing to do. (I have a lot of feelings about the shield and how I don't think for Steve the shield is indicative of "Captain America" the way it is for everyone else, especially during the present day.) But Steve is the one deciding "okay, I am going to be this person and I'm going to be this person, Captain America, as I think they should be, not how anyone else thinks." And he puts those bits and pieces together all through that sequence, figuring out not only who he wants to be, but who he wants Captain America to be.

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #meme response #bedlam watches the mcu #mcu meta #steve rogers #captain america

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The think about Steve/Peggy is...(a) total erasure of Peggy's actual role in the narrative in a way that feels like a demotion (full disclosure here: I mostly ship Peggy Carter with women she interacts with on Agent Carter and on my cranky fandom queer days I view her as a lesbian b/c Steve Rogers is exactly the kind of safe person I would've had a comphet crush on b/f I was out). The unattainability is the point 1/2

So, no amount of canon can sway me from my Peggy and Dottie had a fling and then Peggy settled down with Angie. But besides that! Turning Steve and Peggy into each other's One True Love simply does not work! It's how you get the weird "what do you mean Cap wasn't a virgin except for Peggy bs that she-hulk stirred up, it's a narrative demotion for Peggy, and Steve has simply known Bucky and Nat longer so the whole thing feels like a slap in the face 2/2

I honestly don't have strong feelings about Peggy Carter ships except that I really dislike Steve/Peggy after CATFA (because the point! is that! the potential was never realized! that's the whole point!), but I do have strong feelings about Steve ships so it's *flips hand* but the Endgame decision just fucked both of them over. (and don't get me started on What If, that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.) but I always feel like I'm not quite objective on it since I have a different ship, so I haven't really wanted to touch it either in meta or fic. (which is the reason there's a concept I'm hesitating over.)

I haven't had a chance to see She-Hulk yet since I was on vacation when it came out and since term starts this week I've been running around the past two days, but like...almost the ONLY commentary I've seen on it has been the Steve's virginity thing. Granted, I'm in Steve-heavy circles, but STILL.

(As an aside, "the first woman Steve slept with was on his USO tour" is actually how I write Steve, though it's never actually like...come up...in any of my fic, so I'm eyeing all of this with some bemusement. but like I said I haven't seen the episode yet.)

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies

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Since it sounds like you're having a real one, you might as well know that your fic helped me come to terms with being poly. It's been a literal age since I last read Gambit but I just thought you should know you helped me figure myself out. Idk if that helps with your imposter syndrome around writing OT3s, but your ObiAniDala was foundational for me

Aww, thank you. <33333

#I don't know if I will ever write another true ot3 but I have a soft spot for the pt trio #thelurkinglark #bedlam replies

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I've decided to have emotions about Steve tonight. Do you have any snippets of him and his very bad indeterminate period of time?

Sure! Here he is having a lovely drug-induced hallucination.

He pulled back from Howard’s hands, shaking his head. “This isn’t real.  This didn’t happen.  This never happened.  This isn’t real.”

“Steve?”

He looked up to see Peggy standing in the opening made by shoving the curtains back and whispered, “Peggy?”

“Oh, Steve –”  She took a step towards him and he jerked back, almost tripping over the bed.

“This isn’t real,” he said again. “This isn’t real.”  He shut his eyes, breathing hard; there were tears on his cheeks, because he still had dreams like this.

Peggy put her hands alongside his face; he could feel the pistol calluses on them and could smell her perfume, which hadn’t been made in decades. “Steve, my darling, it’s all right.  You’re safe.  You’re home.”

Isn’t that the ‘why we fight’? Tony had said three years ago, in the middle of the Ultron mess.  So we can end the fight.  So we can go home.

Some of us don’t get to go home.

Steve had been born in July of 1918, four months before Armistice Day had formally ended the First World War.  His father had come back to Brooklyn from Flanders just long enough to die there; most of the men in the neighborhood who had gone with him hadn’t come back at all.  Bucky had already been deployed once by the time they had gone to the Stark Expo in 1943; Steve had been aware of the empty spaces back home for almost two years by that point, men and women who had gone off to the war and hadn’t returned.  He had known even before he had stepped into Howard’s machine that there was a good chance he wouldn’t make it out.  He had known that every day of the war.  The shock had never been that he couldn’t return.  It had been that he had to live with it.

#my brain always inserts the 'some of us don't get to go home' into that scene #turns out it's NOT AN ACTUAL LINE #he just rips that log apart and changes the subject #thelurkinglark #bedam repl #roleswap endgame au concept

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Hey, I just want to let you know that Horizon was my fic of the year. The back half of 2022 was a mess for me on a personal level and I stopped keeping up with it because I really couldn't read anything for months but I'm really looking forward to finishing it and I love the way you write Natasha

Aww, thank you! I hope 2023 is able to be better for you; Horizon's always going to be there when you're ready. <3

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #feedback

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And Home is making me ship Steve/Nat/Howard (or at least want them to hook up). It's a great dynamic. 10/10

Aww, thank you! This story is not going to a threesome place (with any combination of Howard or Peggy), which I made the decision about very early on, but the dynamic is fun.

#I actually DID logic out why it wasn't going to happen besides 'I don't want to' #since normally I like that sort of thing #steve's terrified of doing anything that's going to make it harder for him to leave #and I have very specific ideas about natasha's relationship with sex but that's a whole other thing #thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #feedback

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I'm thinking about Horizon b/c I'm doing the world's slowest and most detail-focused reread and damn Rhodey can't catch a break. He (and Vision) are the ONLY official on duty avengers from Civil War to the Snap, he spends the first six months post-Snap running around putting out fires, and now he's reliving his Tony trauma with Steve MIA. It's great, action focused characterization

Rhodey is having a very, very bad time! Plus he almost definitely blames himself for Tony being on his own in New York when Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian came calling, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man aside, and he probably wasn't dealing with that very well either while Tony was missing, after the world ended. It's hinted at but not explicitly stated that in Horizon that he and Tony weren't on good terms pre-IW -- it took a while after CACW to find out about Peter Parker (possibly right after Homecoming) and Rhodey pretty much lost it with Tony then, so he feels guilty about that. And he's the only one Ross sort of respects (not very, right now, but more than the others) so he's the one who had to Deal With Everything.

I do think it was something of a relief to him to get the other Avengers back in the compound, because that's a lot of space to rattle around in on your own, but it would have gone over better if Steve hadn't been kidnapped about thirty-six hours later.

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #roleswap endgame au concept

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Horizon, Thor, cat, kissed

no cats or kissing in this chapter so far!

“Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you sent the Destroyer to kill Thor,” Darcy said dryly.

#thelurkinglark #meme response

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Talk about the AoU references people aren't catching in the already-posted chapters of Horizon?

Oh, the big one is something that's in the current chapter in progress, and because that's a later-chapters reveal... *hands* People are catching some of them (sorry to the person who said "hmm, I've never seen AoU, maybe I should watch it..." I did not expect people to watch AoU, lol, I expected people to go, "ooh, maybe I should watch The Incredible Hulk" for context on Betty and Sterns.)

The biggest one is Madame B, who is kind of a tough case because she's never named onscreen in AoU -- she's the Red Room trainer who Natasha sees in her Wanda-induced vision. I didn't want to explicitly say "Madame B" in Horizon because it's just kind of an awkward title/name, so she's only referred to as "Madame," no B, but she's the same character. Since she doesn't appear or come up at all in Black Widow I'm doing some backfill on how Natasha's Red Room experience differed from what we see in BW and how Madame played in. She was planned to be the big bad from almost as soon as I started working on this story as a chaptered, plotted story, as a movie villain who had very little screen time but was not explicitly dead, and using her means I had a direct tie to Natasha. This was always going to be a story about the super soldier serum as soon as I decided not to use a Thor villain; it was "who's a character who's unaccounted for right now who could be in a position to pull in Sterns and Hammer," who are two other characters I wanted to use from very early on. Using her lets me deal with a lot of Natasha's unaddressed Red Room trauma, including the stuff from AoU that is apparently not consistent with BW. (I was a little worried people would think she's supposed to be Madame Hydra, who's a comics villain who has appeared in, I think AoS in one form, and Valentina in Phase Four is supposed to be Madame Hydra even if she hasn't used that name. She's not; she's Red Room, even if she has some as-of-yet-unrevealed backstory with HYDRA.)

(At one point I considered using a character from Thor's rogues gallery, when it was going to be more Loki-focused, but that was discarded in the planning stages; I wanted to use a movie character and I wanted to use a character who was from an Earth characters rogues gallery, because part of this story is Loki having to function as an Avenger dealing with villains who are, in all honesty, well below his weight class in terms of power.)

The Hammer-adapted Ultron-bots are explicitly mentioned; they're not identical to the ones in AoU but they're mostly a red herring for the characters as well as the audience. (You can tell they're weaker than the Ultron-bots from AoU because Steve's actually punching straight through them, which he doesn't do in AoU.)

There are a handful of dialogue references to AoU -- one of the things I really like to do as a fic writer is to bring relevance back to stories that can get swept under the rug by canon, regardless of my actual feelings for them. So Steve has the "well, maybe Ultron was right" about "maybe I don't know how to live without a war" line in 5; the Hulk-Widow Natasha fights pulls a couple of lines that are meant to invoke Natasha's vision-conversation with Madame B -- the "sloppy" and the "you have no place in the world" are both from that vision.

More explicitly there's Natasha's conversation with Bruce and Betty about her brief relationship with Bruce -- there was actually supposed to be a Bruce and Natasha conversation about that in 7 that didn't end up fitting there, so hopefully I'll get in later, maybe in 10. With Bruce, it's also -- he has not been on Earth since AoU. That is his last point of reference to...everything, and everything changed between AoU and when he returns in IW.

Thor and Selvig's trip to the Water of Sight is referenced in this last chapter -- that was one I had to do a bunch of checks on, because I couldn't remember what was from the cut extended version and what was in the actual film, and I wanted to use what was on the actual screen; they're not consistent with each other.

Madame's the biggest one. There's characterization stuff with Nat and Steve and Bruce and to a lesser extent Tony (a lot of his dialogue in his return-to-Earth scene is straight from Endgame and that calls back to AoU), because I don't not think it's consistent with them even if it's not, like, ideal in terms of my characterization for all of them, but that's what it is. I knew almost no one was going to get Madame without me saying so because she appears for like fifteen seconds in a scene that people don't like in a film that people don't like. A few people did.

The thing I was checking today was actually a setting thing, which is potentially something that readers could recognize; like, it's going to be A Reveal but it's the kind of reveal where readers can go "oh, I should have realized because XYZ," so it's fine if people recognize it, I just don't want to say it in advance. And that's from AoU; it's definitely recognizable if one remembers the physical geography of the film. It's also very lightly hinted at in previous chapters, but it's not supposed to be recognizable earlier.

#thelurkinglark #bedlam replies #horizon behind the scenes