I took a chance with you, Agent Carter, and now America’s golden boy and a lot of other good men are dead. ‘Cause you had a crush.
If anyone asks me what’s the most moving scene in the entire MCU for me, this is it. This is it, without question. Because it’s so brief and matter-of-factly, that even myself didn’t really comprehend it the first time around — the utter gravity and courage that Peggy would have to possess, in order to stand her ground and accept the consequences of her decision to help Steve in the first place.
If Steve had indeed failed in his mission, she would have borne it alone. Howard was responsible too, but only Peggy would be taking the fall for it. Only Peggy would be incriminated and blamed for Steve’s death and all the mess that came with it. She would have been court-martialed, dishonorably discharged, her good standing in the military destroyed forever. But still she risks everything, everything that she has because of her faith in Steve, that when she tells him that he’s meant for more, those aren’t just thin air and pretty words.
And what’s the most often quoted line of the Cap fandom? The dignity of a choice. These are the words that will echo long, long after everything is over. Steve grieves for Bucky, but it’s Peggy who honors him. And in the aftermath of CATWS, nothing is more imperative than Bucky being allowed to find his own way again, to allow him to do right by himself as he chooses to. To just let him know that you won’t be alone. And all that any one of them can really do is our best, and sometimes the best we can do is to start over.
There’s a very Tolkienesque quality to Peggy’s quiet heroism and knightliness, in all the ways she perceives the world and how it anchors and guides the people around her.
It’s the beating heart of this tale.
I agree 100% with all of this, though it actually gets even worse, because it’s not just that her career would be over because of this, but it would have gone down in a way that confirmed, exactly, the worst slander her detractors had been aiming at her for her entire time in the war – that she was misled by her emotions, that she was unsuited to making combat command decisions, that she made a stupid career-ending decision because of a crush on a handsome soldier. After all, if even Phillips thinks that (Phillips, who likes her, has worked with her for some time now, and has firsthand experience with her competence), how much worse is the slander and gossip going to be coming from everyone else?
How much courage it must have taken for her to stand there and insist that she was right, that she still believed in her own decisions and stood by them, even if the results weren’t what she had hoped for.
I kinda want to laugh at the idea that burning the heart-shaped herb means the plants are gone, like FUCK…have you ever weeded a garden in your LYFE?? You WISH burning plants killed them, holy shit. Those plants’re gonna come back even thicker AND they’ll have extra fertilizer from the ash compost. They’re vibranium plants, those roots run deep.
Attendants: Are you sure? That’s gonna set us back, like, a whole six months…
Erik: YES I’M SURE. I WANT THEM GONE.
Attendants: …We’re just not gonna mention that this won’t actually get rid of them.
Basically, I think the whole nation of Wakanda was like, “We’re gonna humour this guy to achieve our own ends until we can find a way to get rid of him.”
Fic where as part of N’Jadaka’s punishment/rehabilitation/community service hours he’s forced to replant the sacred flower beds while memorizing their spiritual significance in Wakandan culture
that guy is pissing his pants over that smile this kind of fear is what i aspire to inspire
Okay no but real talk, this was the moment. This was the moment in Cap 2 where I knew the Russos got Natasha. The costuming and everything else, yes, good, on-point, but this is the first time we’ve really seen the Black Widow at her most terrifying. Tony touches on it, certainly, in IM2 – she’s a double, triple imposter; she’s figuring him out, keeping an eye on him (does he need help? Does he need to be taken down?) while disarming him by being the kind of woman he’d bed and discard, has a hundred times…but those weren’t weaponized moments, they were strategic. But on the Lumerian Star, we see Natasha in action in much the same way we see Steve in action, sliding easily from one performance to the other. The first is that of watching Steve for cracks that might appear – trying to set him up, trying to keep him in a world he’s very clearly denying, not unlike what she was sent to do with Tony. And the second (which, notably, is a version of herself she shuts her comm off before producing) is this: deadly, dangerous, and terrifying; playing the role that was placed on her as an insult, a joke, and that she reclaimed as an honor and a horror story against the people that tried to make her a monster.
Because this is what Age of Ultron got wrong. We already know damn well that Natasha is competent; that’s never been a question. But TWS is the first time we begin to see the underpinnings of that competency: where they come from; what they cost her. The Red Room tried to make Natasha into a weapon – they tried to take her body, her sexuality, her agency away from her; tried to make her the “femme fatale” in every stereotypical sense of the term. The Black Widow title was meant to be very much literal: no man could resist her, much less survive her (to paraphrase Bucky in 616). But Natasha saw that; she always understood that. And Natasha was always more than they believed of her. She took the training; she took the mantle. She took the pain and the suffering and the torment that created the Widow, and she took the rage that came with having the name made into a joke, a pejorative at her expense, the “whore-slut-spy” she never was. It’s the same reason Bucky remains the Winter Soldier, despite the fact that his life and body was taken from him in its creation. Because the Soldier, like the Widow, is a legend. And legends are valuable; legends don’t die. Legends grow, and they transform, and they become bigger, and scarier, and more terrifying than any one human being can become.
Natasha Romanoff never believed herself to be any of the things the Red Room reduced her to. But the Red Room gave her a weapon that they couldn’t take away; that they never had control of, for all of their arrogance in believing they did.
This is Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow. But it’s also Natasha Romanoff, the survivor. She knows what they say about her – and as long as she knows who she is; as long as she knows she’s worth more than the pejoratives, the slurs, and the attempts to cage her in…well, then those things, those things are only a weakness to them.
like, heimdall saw that shit right? odin comes back through the bifrost and heimdall is just “…………….”
heimdall: that’s a baby
odin: yes! he’s my son! ………..loki. i’m going to dress him in green and black, because that worked great last time
or odin comes back and is trying to figure out, how to play it, and heimdall and frigga are just waiting for him and completely deadpan
frigga: ah, husband! you have returned from war in time to meet your newborn son. who i had. after being pregnant. secretly.
odin: what
frigga:
heimdall:
loki: *baby noises*
odin: right
honestly, i just need heimdall going up to frigga like “you won’t believe what your husband just did”
odin: he’s a replacement for the child I had to lock away in the shadow realm.
heimdall:
odin: I’ll do better by this one. I know I will.
heimdall:
heimdall: You mean Frigga will.
Odin: Please can we keep it? It’s cute and changes colours and smiles at my empty eye socket. I promise I’ll take care of it I’ll feed it every week and I’ll dress it in green and black and I’ll teach it to throw knives and it will be great!
Heimdall: Frigga, he stole a baby. Say something.
THIS IS THE BEST THING
I like to imagine Frigga visiting Heimdall and they have tea and gossip about how much a mess Odin is.
I fell down a rabbit hole of research about inventions circa the 40s and was surprised by a bunch of things that have been around way longer than I thought and some that are strangely reccent, and compiled them into a list. Aka, a resource for fic writers.
Bananas (or rather, the ones we have today. The ones he’d be accustomed to, the Gros Michel, a sweeter, creamier species, went extinct in the 50s and was replaced with the bland Cavendish banana.)
High-fives (the low-five was actually invented first, around WW2, and he may have been familiar with that)
Buffalo Wings (invented in the 60s)
CPR (not invented until the late 40s, not widely known until the 50s)
Tiramisu (invented in the 80s)
Big Macs & McNuggets (while McDonald’s was founded in 1940, the former wasn’t introduced until the 60s, and the latter, the 80s)
Seat belts (the first car to have one was in the late 40s, and only became mandatory to wear them in the 80s. holy shit.)
Walmart (invented in 1962. Or really, the large-scale supermarkets as we know them today really)
Yellow tennis balls (prior to the 70s they were usually black or white)
Panadol (first sold in the US in the 50s)
The smiley face aka 🙂 (popularised in the 60s)
Now alternatively, here’s a list of things Steve WOULD (or possibly would) be familiar with:
I’m not sure why some of these surprised me.
Sunglasses (have been around a lot longer than I thought, and were mass produced in the 20s)
Nokia (was first founded in 1865. I’m not kidding. They began as a pulp mill and moved into making rubber respirators for military from the 30s onwards)
Nintendo (been around since 1889 as a toy company, during the 40s they made playing cards. Wouldn’t be implausible that he knew about Nintendo, perhaps from Morita)
Krispy Kreme (opened in 1937, didn’t spread widely until the 50s however)
Kool-Aid (introduced in the 30s)
Oreos (introduced in 1912)
Printed/graphic tees (didn’t become a trend until the 60s-70s, but they certainly existed in the 40s)
Hoodies (originated in the 30s, worn by workers in cold New York warehouses. Meaning, it’s entirely plausible Bucky could’ve been wearing hoodies in the 40s)
Malls (they weren’t called that back then, but they certainly had shopping centres or plazas since the 1800s)
Converse sneakers (invented in 1908 and have barely changed since!)
the docker/warehouse worker bucky image just got an upgrade i had never conceived of
Everyone in Infinity Wars gonna be complaining about how hard these last few years have been for them until Thor rolls up with no hair, no hammer, and one eye.
Don’t forget “my planet had to be destroyed to keep my sister from killing like the whole universe so now me and all my people are refugees. But hey, Loki’s back, that’s good news!”
Peter(raises his hand in the back): “…My homecoming date‘s dad turned out to be my arch nemesis and a building fell on me!“
Thor (smiles and gives a thumbs-up): “Good for you! (aside, to Tony)…Who is that person? Do we know him or did he just show up?”
one thing i really liked about thor ragnarok that i havent seen a lot of folks on my dash talking about was its critique of imperialism and the ultimate message that a nation founded on the violent takeover of others doesn’t deserve to exist and will be the author of its own destruction, though its people may be innocent of their country’s past crimes
another thing i really liked about thor ragnarok is jeff goldblum’s painted nails
also it’s a great story about how the destruction and/or theft of land, though incredibly traumatic, does not signal the end of culture and identity, which is held within the peoples of the diaspora (he’s māori and has jewish ancestry so like!!! holy shit yes).
taika waititi not-so-secretly appropriating a marvel franchise for the purposes of de-/post-colonial storytelling is a power move and now my hype for black panther has been reinvigorated
Played by Tessa Thompson. Immediate awesome points
Finally the major supporting female character is a woman of color in a Marvel movie
Wears practical clothing/armor and doesn’t fight like a damn acrobat coughBlackWidowcough
Zero hints of any forced romance subplot with Thor
Treated with absolute respect by Thor, who doesn’t feel entitled to her attention or affection in any way
In fact Thor openly hero worships her. That’s right, the male hero has looked up to a female warrior and an all-female warrior team since childhood and doesn’t in any way feel threatened or emasculated by it
For once a female character gets to be the snarky, persistently drunk lovable asshole wash-up with a Tragic Backstory™ who needs to be persuaded by the male hero to do the right thing and fight for what’s right
Bottom line is that Valkyrie in this movie is basically a female sidekick in a male led superhero flick done right. She isn’t alternatively sexualized and loathed by the male hero, she isn’t treated as a prize the male hero is entitled to by the end of the film, her fight scenes aren’t relentlessly filtered through dismembering male gaze ass shots and she isn’t the moral “conscience” of the team there to tame all of the male egos around her like their fucking mom. Other Marvel/superhero directors take note.
you know what i love about valkyrie? she’s a woman and the narrative doesn’t hold a knife against her neck for it
that scene of her falling down drunk in her first appearance? amazing! that’s there for us to know she has a drinking problem, but don’t underestimate her because she will still get the job done. it’s not there to make us oogle her, it’s there to show us she is a person.
the weight of her survivor’s guilt and the ptsd and the questioning of her identity because everything that made her a valkyrie, a protector of the throne, a fearsome warrior in the ranks of other legendary women, was taken from her by the people she should never have had to fight
thor asks for her aid because she is a warrior and her reputation precedes her. he doesn’t needle her to join by invoking her gender, but rather her pride.
the things we associate more frequently with male characters like heavy drinking or physical strength are embodied in valkyrie, but it’s not there to make her ‘manly’ or Not Like Other Girls. in fact, it’s to remind us that these are things that can be true of women. women can be traumatized and turn to alcohol. they can isolate themselves and run away from their problems and want to punch their demons in the face. men don’t have a monopoly on compelling backstories!
valkyrie got everything that make men shine in the marvel franchise and it didn’t come at the expense of her gender or her race
Question of Smoke 