therenegadesexualmystic

[therenegadesexualmystic]

I saw a post you made about Anthony Mackie being homophobic and I was really disappointed by him. I never would have thought he was so bigoted.

I got soooo much shit for the post that post was in response to, it basically drove me off of tumblr for a bit. Stupid ass “performative allies” who don’t know shit about Black people & claiming that I was “feeding into a trope” instead of acknowledging that Black people can be homophobic (note I didn’t say Black people are more homophobic than white people—mostly cuz it’s not true but is instead racist bs white conservatives push that liberal white gays & their dick riders are too willingly isolated from Black people & too willingly ignorant to question).

And only one person circled back and apologized after actually doing their research (plus Mackie saying more stupid shit). I don’t give af how many gay men he has portrayed, he’s a fucking homophobe. Just the “benign” kind. Like he never says “homosexuals are shit”, he just says stupid “no homo” type shit (while mercilessly teasing Sebastian Stan until the poor man blushes). He goes out of his way almost every time he opens his mouth to make sure you know he’s not a homosexual. I don’t even think it’s in the “he doth protest too much way”, just in the “homophobic frat bro” way.

[therenegadesexualmystic]

(917): True life: I inadvertently fucked a while friend group. More details to come tonight.

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Just started bingeing Castlevania. Who’s hiding the good Isaac/Hector Modern AU slash? (I can’t believe that there aren’t even tags here for it, what gives?)

#castlevania #Hector x Isaac #Isaac x Hector #Hector/Isaac #Isaac/Hector #forgemaster #forgehusbands

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Just asking y'all to stop this bs PLEASE

[therenegadesexualmystic]

White MCU fanfic writers, I beg of you:

Can you start reading more Black fiction before you write any more Sam characterizations? You clearly don’t have any Black friends & have no idea how Southern (or NY, depending on if you’re doing more of the comics) Black men in their late 30s/early 40s actually communicate & it’s fucking up your fic. It’s jarring as hell & takes us (meaning Black people who do know how Southern Black men in their late 30s/early 40s communicate) out of the story every other time your Sam opens his mouth. It’s worse when the rest of your fic is really good.

I’ll give you this for free. There is no way that a man who calls his aunts “Titi” says “Moooooooommmmmm!” when talking to his mother.

Also learn AAE from the region you’ve decided Sam is from. AAE is just as regional as any other type of English. You can’t use West Coast AAE for Sam, it doesn’t work. You can’t use whatever ridiculousness you got from TV characters written by white writers. Not if you’re trying to have him sound like a real person & not whatever caricatures & stereotypes white people *think* Black people are.

Consume Black media made by Black people for Black people to inform your writing or fucking stop writing Sam at all. I’m embarrassed for you.

ETA. TLDR My family is from the South, I grew up in the Midwest, spent my young adulthood on the East Coast, & my middle-age on the West Coast. No I haven’t met every other African-American, but your Sam’s speech sounds more like some pastiche of TV & bad movies than a recognizable Black man. Please learn how Black people actually talk (even those of us who grew up around white people don’t sound like your Sam sounds).

#sam wilson #marvel mcu #mcu

[therenegadesexualmystic]

I can only seem to keep up with one social media app at a time, so I haven’t been here in eons.

I was reading a Stucky/Clint OTP on AO3 & it had background Bruce/Natasha/Sam. Which intrigued me. When I tried to do a search, *nothing* came up, not even the story I’d just read.

What would the ship name even be: Green Widow Falcon?

If you delight in challenges & rarepairs (rareOT3s?), I’m begging you to write some good Bruce/Natasha/Sam. I don’t even need porn, just like some slow burn or even curtainfic.

Please and Thank You

#Bruce x Natasha x Sam #rarepair #rare OT3 #Avengers OT3 #ot3 #Bruce x Sam #Bruce/Natasha/Sam #Green Widow Falcon

[therenegadesexualmystic]

I loved Mason Alexander’s acting and I was early on “Desire is non-binary so it makes sense that a non-binary actor would be playing Desire”.

But seeing Desire portrayed as non-binary didn’t actually work for me.

I now think that in the comics Desire was very binary, just not committed to either side permanently. Sometimes a she, sometimes a he. Desire even says at that (SM party?) when she comes for Del “Sometimes I’m her sister”.

So to me, more like genderfluid, or bigender.

Knowing that Neil updated the adaptation in many ways, was the decision to remove Desire from the binary an update, or cis conflation of “non-binary” and “genderfluid”? Because they don’t seem to be the same thing. :

(My understanding is that he *will* have trans writers for Game of You, not that he *currently* has trans writers, but if there are, my question still stands—not the “cis” part of course).

(Queer cis woman open to being told I don’t get it)

#the sandman tv #desire of the endless #non-binary vs bigender #bigender #non-binary

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Debarking The Good Ship Morphienne for The Good Ship Gaulienne. All aboard!!!! Form one line, no pushing. The ship is preparing to leave the harbor. ALL ABOARD!!!

#Gault/Lucienne #Lucienne/Gault #DID YOU SEE THAT WINK? #Sandman #The Sandman Netflix #the sandman tv

[therenegadesexualmystic]

So I was being a basic bitch the other day and listening to my true crime podcasts when it occurred to me just how suspicious Nile’s “death” would look to everyone not in the Guard, leading me to a train of thought that, 2200 words later, absolutely got away from me but I can’t let go so I’m inflicting it on all of you!

To set the stage, we know the movie takes place over approximately a week. Here’s what happens to Nile from the military’s point of view:

She dies is very seriously injured

She heals without a scratch

Just before she’s supposed to be shipped out to Germany, she vanishes, leaving two men concussed (and presumably reporting being knocked out by a woman with short hair wearing civilian clothes)

She goes AWOL for several days

They get word from the CIA that she is to be reported killed in action (details unclear)

So, at the beginning of this very weird week, the USMC has to tell Nile’s family of her death critical injury. What her family was told depends on how long she was dead – a Google search tells me that family will be notified in person within 8 hours of a soldier’s death, but we don’t know how long her first death lasted. For an injury, however, they’d get a phone call to notify them and the unit would arrange for them to visit as soon as the soldier is transferred out of a combat zone. Like I remember when I was in high school, a guy from my church who was a Marine was really seriously injured in a helicopter crash in Iraq and from what I could tell, his parents were told immediately and were flown out to Germany to see him, so it stands to reason that Nile’s family would have been informed relatively quickly after her throat was slashed, one way or another.

And then, she goes AWOL. Her family would be notified while the USMC tried to figure out where she went, not least because the military would want to know if she’s contacted them. (And it’s possible that her family may have been on the way to Germany to see her since we know that’s where she was supposed to go!) So for several days:

Nile’s mom and brother have no idea where she is

They know she was seriously injured and most certainly should not have been moving around on her own

They can’t get a hold of her

The military can’t tell them anything

And the next thing they know for sure is that she was “killed in action.” After being injured and vanishing into thin air. And they presumably cannot produce her body or any concrete evidence of her death. In any case, something sketchy is going on, so they’re like. SMELLS LIKE A MILITARY COVERUP.

In a surprise to probably no one, there is a well-documented legacy of mysterious US military deaths, particularly of women of color (TW for sexual assault in these links). The cases of LaVena Johnson and Vanessa Guillenin particular have made national news because of their families’ persistence in seeking justice. Likewise, Nile is a Black woman, and her mom and brother are most certainly hypercognizant of (a) state violence against Black people and (b) these high-profile cases of suspicious military deaths. So her family are seriously side-eyeing the situation, knowing that (a) the military has a serious incentive (and a documented history) of covering up things that make them look bad and (b) nothing about Nile’s disappearance and supposed death are adding up.

And Andy’s right. Nile does come from warriors. And you know who else does? Her brother.

Don’t get me wrong. Nile’s mom would absolutely not back down. She’d know something was up and want to get to the bottom of it. But based on what I know about Gen X parents (mine), they’re not the most technologically savvy. Like they can use the internet, but they didn’t grow up with it the way we young millennials and Gen Z did. So Nile’s brother takes the lead. And what do zillennials do best?

Social media.

Nile’s brother starts going hard on any site he can, trying to get the word out to see if anyone knows what happened to his sister. He starts a Reddit thread. He starts a Facebook group. He reaches out to the media and true crime bloggers and podcasters à la Sarah Turney, getting loud and being a general nuisance in hopes of getting some answers. He gets his friends and Nile’s friends involved. Maybe eventually Dizzy, Jay, and others from Nile’s unit hear about it and reach out, telling him what they saw and how weird it all was. He’s drumming up interest, and soon “Nile Freeman” becomes a household name (at least among the true crime fans).

Copley is, of course, trying his best, but at this point there is just so much that it’s impossible for him to scrub everything. Sure, he can erase new footage of Nile and the Guard, but what can he do about Reddit threads and podcast episodes that are speculating something weird has happened? Maybe he could hack the sites and shut those things down, but honestly, that’s the last thing he’d want to do, because that only adds weight to the theory that Nile’s disappearance is a military coverup. So eventually he has to tell Andy what’s going on.

Andy, obviously, does not take the news well. However, she is also completely computer illiterate, because that’s Booker’s job and he’s the only one who ever bothered to learn what the internet is in any meaningful way. (She probably calls Booker for advice, and for the record, I think Booker would have no qualms about shutting down conspiracy threads, tinhats be damned, but Copley is too concerned about the consequences. He’s ex-CIA for crying out loud, he knows how it’ll look if they scrub every mention of Nile’s name from the internet.) Maybe she confers with Joe and Nicky but, let’s be honest, they’d be equally unhelpful. So at this point, she knows they have to bring in Nile.

But the thing about Nile is that she, too, knows how to use the internet (duh). Aside from her being a young millennial/digital native, we know from the cave scene where she’s giving Booker suggestions on how to track Copley that she clearly is even more computer savvy than the average person. And for that reason she almost definitely took over the day-to-day tech stuff after Booker’s exile. So I think it would be foolish to expect her to be unaware of what’s happening. She’s not contacting her family or posting on the message boards or anything, but she knows what’s up. So Copley and the team probably sit her down to “break the news,” but we know the girl does not have a poker face (see: literally shooting herself in the foot and not being able to play it cool whatsoever) and cracks immediately, telling them she’s seen everything about her case – she’s not interacting with any of it, she certainly didn’t instigate anything, but she knows. (And she is so goddamn proud of her brother.)

At this point, I’d like to pause and consider Nile’s role in the overall narrative of this movie. She’s set up as a foil to Andy, obviously, but she’s also a foil to Booker. Booker, who, like Andy, is a serious pessimist, but who, unlike Andy, still has very fresh memories and trauma associated with being the new kid, which have destroyed him. In his mind (and Andy’s), if Nile communicates with her family, she’ll become just like him in a century or two – bitter, alone, and stuck with her grief and memories of watching her family die and knowing they died resenting her. It’s a small sample size, but this is the only experience they have to go off of.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

There’s been a lot of discussion of TOG being a fundamentally queer movie – a group of people brought together because of something inherent about themselves that is different, that must be hidden, that causes others to hate, fear, and reject them. Booker’s backstory is the archetypal traumatic “coming out” story – his family learns who he is, hate him for it, and attempt to cast him out of their lives. He’s stuck with his trauma, his pain, his loss, and it consumes him.

But what if Nile’s family would be the opposite? What if her “coming out” to them as immortal is met with acceptance, love, celebration? What if her family is just overjoyed to have her back, and they don’t care what the circumstances are? I'm reminded of this incredible post from @shitty-old-guard-deaths a while back, where Nile’s mother hits Booker with a frying pan because “my baby let me believe she was dead for FIVE YEARS based on your bad advice???” (which may or may not have inspired this whole tangent). Nile takes the advice of someone who did the same thing she wants to do because she doesn’t want to risk her family’s rejection. She wants the good memories with her family and is afraid that showing them her true self will bring her unbearable pain, forever replacing those memories. But, with high risk comes high reward.

Anyway. Nile and the team are trying to come up with a plan for how to handle this whole thing, but she’s not really participating because she’s too afraid to hope. Until finally, quickly, so she doesn’t lose her nerve, she suggests she reach out to them, knowing that, realistically, that’s the only solution before things snowball even further out of control. The team is shocked, but realize that she has a point. They decide that Copley should actually be the first point of contact, posing as a US government official to talk with them and test the waters.

So Copley goes to Nile’s family’s house to talk with her mom and brother. They’re probably distrustful and apprehensive, but nonetheless secretly ecstatic that their work has paid off. They talk and review all of the information that they’ve collected, including testimonials from the people on Nile’s base and recent sightings (along with photos) of Nile (with the same three people) over the last few years that people have sent them but they haven’t posted publicly. At this point, Copley’s like, yeah this is about to blow up, we gotta put our cards on the table. He convinces them to come with him to some safe house/black site/whatever he can get that is technologically impenetrable (I’m picturing them in like, an interrogation room at a police station kind of deal), takes their phones, locks the doors, and brings in Nile.

What follows is the most delightful reunion scene of all time, bringing Joe, Nicky, and even Andy to tears as they watch and listen from outside the room. With Copley’s help, Nile tells her mom and brother about her immortality and what’s been going on since she died (within reason, of course), and they are thrilled. They don’t understand why (because no one does) but they don’t question it and they see it as a gift from God – she’s been resurrected, she will live, and she has a purpose. Her mother and brother are so happy to see her again and are willing to agree with pretty much anything to stay in her life as long as they can.

So. They set up some complicated agreement (they bring in the other three for support/intimidation as needed) setting the terms of their relationship. They swear Nile’s family to secrecy, maybe bringing up the lab to show how high the stakes are, and they readily agree. They come up with some cover story for Nile’s brother to share on the message boards (maybe that the government has opened an investigation but because it’s an open case he has to shut it all down? Tells people to direct their tips somewhere else? Something to that effect). There’s still speculation, of course, but without Nile’s brother at the helm providing the energy, the hype dies down as news stories are wont to do without any movement. And Nile’s family goes to work for the team. The experience has taught them that Copley can’t possibly do everything himself, especially when it comes to social media, so Nile’s brother takes the lead on the day-to-day tracking/social media while Copley and her mom focus on finding jobs and scrubbing their traces afterward.

So there you have it: Nile gets to integrate her biological family into her found family and spend the rest of their lives with them as it should be, Copley gets some badly needed help managing the reality of social media, the team finally has a positive narrative surrounding outsiders Knowing About Them AND about interacting with people from their previous life, and the audience gets the happy ending to this very lovely and very queer story to counteract the pain associated with Booker’s family.

Plus, you know, I’m a sucker for both a good government conspiracy theory and for Nile getting every good thing she deserves.

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Just finished episode 3 of Sandman on Netflix.

I NEED MORPHEUS/LUCIENNE FIC ASAP.

They had *major* chemistry. Even though they’re clearly both bottoms. But I could be convinced that Lucienne is a switch. As silent as Morpheus was, he comes across as a really mouthy bottom who needs to be put in his place.

Also Lucienne reads as non-binary (not androgynous), and I’m not saying that because of the bald-head and the very dapper suit.

#the sandman #Netflix #netflix sandman #lucienne #morpheus #Morpheus/Lucienne

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Giving “young Gary Busey” vibes.

the asshole vibes are ASTRONOMICAL

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Today’s PSA:

You realize that Quynh knew Lykon, right? And that Black People (people with a lot of melanin) have always existed, yeah?

So just maybe not with Quynh being all “the woman with the strange dark skin” the first time she sees Nile, ok?

#The Old Guard #Black People Have Always Existed Since People Have Existed #Lykon was not the only Black Person Quynh ever saw #People with dark skin are not a modern invention #le racisme #racism is boring why are you so boring #white people are not the default human

[therenegadesexualmystic]

So what I want to know is, was Pedro Pascal using a Spanish (as in “From Spain”) accent when speaking Spanish in TUWOMT or his own Chilean-Californian accent?

#tuwomt #the unbearable weight of massive talent #spanish accent #pedro pascal

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Just finished watching The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent & it was hilarious. Pedro Pascal & Nic Cage have incredible chemistry.

There’s less than 100 works on AO3 & almost all of them are Javi/Reader or Javi/You.

I want some Javi/Nic, but like the Nic of the movie, not actual for real Nic Cage (I am extremely uncomfortable with RPF).

Bueller?

#the unbearable weight of massive talent #Javi/Nic #Javi/Nicolas Cage

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Ok I was warned that seasons 4 & 5 of Blindspot were ridiculous, but I didn’t think it was this ridiculous.

My friend asked what I was watching. And I was all “a show that started out really strong and then got worse. They came up with a strong mystery but gave away the ‘who’ before the end of the first season.”

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Today’s PSA: If you don’t really know AAE, please stop trying to write it into Sam’s dialogue (Spoiler: you don’t really know AAE). You would think it would be impossible to make an African-American sound like someone pretending to be an African-American, but a lot of y’all are doing it effortlessly.

It’s not a “vernacular”, it’s not a “dialect”, it’s not “bad grammar”, it’s a goddamn language. With its own goddamn grammatical rules (not just Standard English with “ain’t” thrown around willy-nilly). So treat it like one, so at least this one ADOS can stop having her brain make the train brake noise when Sam starts talking in your otherwise adorbs story.

#TFATWS #AAE #African-American English #African-American English is an actual language #your imaginary “jive talk isn’t AAE #That is not how Black People talk IRL #AAE isn’t bad grammar #sam x bucky #SamBucky #code switching is a thing but this ain’t it

[therenegadesexualmystic]

Yeah it’s me looking for a fic again.

It’s The Old Guard, but with an outsider-POV.

The gang is somewhere in the UK at a consignment shop that gives most of its proceeds to an org helping immigrants. They appear to be have come right from a job and are looking to replace what they’re currently wearing, or the clothes they just lost.

The outsider is the cashier, a retired woman. Joe leaves a huge donation in the donation box. And then the woman sees them again huddled over a fire.

#the old guard fanfiction #The Old Guard #Outsider POV