#marvelmeta

[dannielricciardo]

in tfatws sam is always framed mid frame with not a lot of negative/empty space because he has connections to this world and his place is solid in it. 

bucky has a ton of negative/empty space around him because he has no tethers keeping him here. the only time he takes up space in the frame is when he is either talking about his past or trying to atone for his sins

[momentofmemory]

Steeeeeeeve do Steve.

bless u. just as an fyi i’m gonna stick to mcu!Steve for simplicity’s sake. 

it’s still going to be absurdly long and i’m not sorry.

How I feel about this character

ahksdlfjsk

ca:tfa - fell in love with him. the movie’s a great character study until the montage of him as cap starts, regains its footing at the very end. the i had a date is the best and most heartbreaking closing line in the entire mcu. my favourite thing is that he just cares so much and his motivation is literally just that he wants to do right.

a1&2 - joss does not understand cap at all and i’m still salty about this. main positives are the brief depictions of his not insignificant ptsd. The text of the dream in aou is especially great even if joss doesn’t fully understand the meaning (steve does not fear going home because he doesn’t know how to leave war; he fears leaving war because he don’t know how to go home and this is an important distinction). fav thing is his consistent willingness to see the good in people/give second chances (bruce, clint, natasha, the maximoffs, etc.)

ca:tws - masterpiece. perfection. tearjerker. fight choreography. fav thing is that it highlights the power of friendship and believing in people in a spy movie of all things and i dig that. also the helicarrier scene makes me cry every time.

ca:cw - really annoyed me the first time i saw it bc a)the marvel fandom went NUTS and b)i didn’t think it was a cap movie so much as an avengers movie but you know what, it grew on me. fav thing is the fact that he honestly does try to explain his reasoning for his actions several times and i really wish this had been fleshed out more.

a:iw - listen. listen if you told me i was going to see steve literally just a)walk out from behind a train and b)hold back a shiny glove for like 30seconds and it would be amazing i would have laughed at you, but here we are. 

a:eg - steve lifting the hammer and taking on thanos is my second favourite moment in cinematic history, but my favourite one come right after, when steven grant rogers, just a kid from brooklyn, beaten and broken and in no shape to win whatsoever, stands up to face the entire army all by himself. because that is why i love steve rogers. it’s not because he knows he can win. it’s because he knows he can’t, but he’s going to do it anyway. it’s all very samwise gamgee: “they kept going because they were holding on to something: that there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.” and i resonate with that, you know? people lose for doing the right thing every day, and maybe it’s not enough to save them. but it might be enough to save the next guy down the line.

 “you start running, they’ll never let you stop. you stand up, push back — they can’t say no forever.”

All the people I ship romantically with this character

don’t usually ship peeps so i’ll just go with canon, as i do think steggy works quite well. most of the other popular ships have enough implicit canon to support them so as long as no one drags peggy through the mud to AU their ship i’m pretty fine with that too (but lord am i ever done with people dumping on steve bc their ship didn’t get fulfilled… like dude, if you only love a character if they’re romantically entangled w a specific person you don’t actually love that character).

My non-romantic OTP for this character

u know it’s gotta be my girl natasha romanoff; pairing them up in tws is still the best mcu character decision to date. i just really really love how mutual their friendship is. they’re fully fledged characters on their own and clearly have lives outside of each other, and they acknowledge that they won’t always agree. they also read each other very well and respect the other’s opinion, two things i highly value in a friendship.

another facet i find really important is that they’re mutually vulnerable with each other?? like, nat has seen steve cry and steve has seen nat cry. nat has fallen apart with steve there and steve has fallen apart with nat there. it’s a level of reciprocity we don’t get in most of the other mcu friendships (also why i hate hate hate bruce/nat why the valhalla and hel is nat exposing her deepest trauma to make bruce feel better in aou??), so. basically they just embody the kind of friendship where having the other one around makes them both better people, which, imo, is pretty much the definition of what friendship is.

My unpopular opinion about this character

depending on what’s floating in the suggested tag i sometimes feel like liking him is the unpopular opinion. 😅uh but in seriousness my unpopular opinion is that he did not make the decisions he did in cw just because “but bucky uwu,” though that’s obviously a factor. the accords came out of nowhere with a 1000 page law right after he’s experienced a)the world security council try to nuke new york and b)shield being hydra, and that’s in-canon. real world events would include him coming right out of seeing the us impose japanese internment, discovering we nuked civilian cities in japan twice, vietnam and everything that was the cold war, etc. like, i definitely think the general concept of some kind of restrictions on super heroes makes sense, especially when it comes to respecting other countries’ borders. but do i wanted it to be headed up by general thaddeus “i want a hulk”? heck no.

also an unpopular opinion might be “it’s super possible to think a character is wrong about something without hating them.”

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

i don’t remember who said it first, but peter parker is very much the perfect combo of Steve’s and Tony’s best characteristics and i would have loved to see him interact with Steve more. training sessions, arguments about what counts as the better half of new york, run-ins with our favourite blind ninja, etc. just so much lost potential right there.

i would have also liked more closure between tony & steve than what we got in endgame, but eh. i’ll live.

[laporcupina]

Punisher through the looking glass

Tweaked from a convo with @primarybufferpanel about how to achieve a flip of the script for The Punisher and have the murder marshmallow be Karen.

Karen : the shenanigans with United Allied happen, but Matt and Foggy aren't in the picture. She is arrested, arraigned, and incarcerated pending the outcome of the murder trial. Which doesn't get put on the docket for ten months because of the back-up of cases [like real life!] and then gets rescheduled for six months after that because of boring reasons, also like real life! Karen's public defender can't get her bail reduced, so she has more than a year at Rikers to get lessons in how to survive, plus a lesson in how the criminal underclass operates in NYC. Two weeks into The State of New York versus Karen Page, Ben Urich breaks open the United Allied story, with the help of a certain costumed freak he's a little hesitant to accept help from. Karen, who has been interviewed by Urich, and her lawyer seek a dismissal of all charges because there's circumstantial evidence that UA paid for someone not her to murder the guy she's on trial for killing. The DA's office goes along because there is too much probable doubt to make a conviction a slam dunk.

Karen helps Ben work on the story and she is with him, talking to one of her old UA colleagues in a hipstery pizza joint on 51st off 10th Avenue when the bullets start flying from outside in. Daredevil shows up before the cops do and subdues the would-be assassins, who still warn Karen and Ben and Colleague that their lives are forfeit should they talk.

Three weeks later, Ben and Colleague are murdered and Karen barely survives her own gunshot wound to the head. She recovers well, except not -- there's enough of a personality shift, enough damage to the parts of the brain that work to keep people socialized, that the Punisher can be born. She doesn't need Frank's martial skills; she has what she learned in prison and she's a lovely white girl and that gets her closer to who she needs to be than sneaking in wearing a hoodie. (She'll futz with her appearance enough that it's not immediately obvious who she is to those who most need to know.) The only skill she develops is her marksmanship, especially long-distance. She knows how to shoot a rifle -- her family hunts -- so it's not like she's starting from scratch. She's not against the concept of a Devil of Hell's Kitchen, but she's a little eye-rolling about the Vigilante Who Will Not Kill. She's been in prison long enough to realize that some people are just bad humans and can't be redeemed; she and Matt get into debates about repentance and grace and leaving vengeance up to God on the tops of various buildings when they're both dressed for work.

Frank : Frank is still a marine, but leaves active duty for the reserves after Maria's mom get sick. Camp Lejeune is too far from New York for Maria to be there for her folks and, even if they were to go back to New York while Frank was deployed, she can't be both a full-time single parent and a full-time parental caregiver. It's meant to be a temporary thing -- Frank will use the time to get the PME credits he needs for promotion, Maria will do her thing, they'll return to the Corps once the inevitable occurs -- but it becomes permanent when Maria, the kids, and Billy Russo are killed in a single-car crash on Long Island en route to Jones Beach. [optional: the kids live because they can here!]

The car, Billy's, had been tampered with -- something more sophisticated than a brake line -- and Frank is a suspect; there's video footage of him going in to Billy's garage the day before and completely unfounded but nonetheless circumstantial evidence that Billy and Maria had been fooling around behind his back. [Actual story: Frank went to Billy's garage to borrow some gear for his upcoming drill weekend; the beach trip had been planned because there were going to be fireworks, Billy was driving the Castles because Maria's car was on the fritz and Frank needed his to drive to drill.]

Enter Nelson and Murdock, brought in by Curtis because he knows Frank didn't do this. Matt and Foggy (and Daredevil) get Frank off the hook. [Billy was the target, the way Frank was, and the Castles are collateral damage.] Frank sticks around the office because he's now unemployed and because he's going to study criminal justice at John Jay, which is in Hell's Kitchen. [John Jay is where everyone goes to become a cop/fed/whatever.] He's not the office manager, more a legal assistant and investigator and voice of common sense. He's there because Curtis convinces him that he should do something productive to recover from the trauma and going back into the Marines is the absolute worst idea for healing. Also, Frank isn't ready to leave NYC -- his wife and children are [buried] here and he needs to be close to them.

Karen's quest for vengeance puts her in the NYPD's crosshairs and she's eventually brought down and brought in under DD's guidance, like on the show. Matt takes the case, Frank and Karen bond in reverse.

[laporcupina]

Marvel’s Immersion (piss christ)

The image-heavy explanation of everything Marvel is doing vis-a-vis HYDRA-Cap and rebooting the universe and all that jazz.

It’s head-bangingly frustrating, at least to me, but I’m the gal who gave up on the DCU at Flashpoint/Nu52.

.

.

[spoilers: Kobik-the-walking-Cosmic-Cube didn’t innocently turn Steve into HydraCap when she rejuvenated him. He was always HydraCap and she instead woke him from his sleeper agent programming. Steve is now using the trust and respect he accreted by pretending to be a decent man to take over the world on behalf of HYDRA.]

There is an undeniable appeal of dirtying up Steve Rogers for people -- @bactaqueen is not the only person who loves Ultimate Cap, who is pretty much an asshole -- but... but.

Back when I wrote Preserved, I had quite a few people tell me that they couldn’t read it because taking the Steve-is-the-Winter-Soldier arc seriously was more than they could bear, no matter if he was rescued or redeemed or however positively I might have ended the story. There is something fundamentally discomforting with perverting Steve Rogers’s life story like that and they didn’t want to expose themselves to it.

I admittedly didn’t get the squick -- it’s just fanfic, an AU fanfic at that. But now I sort of do because Steve is going to exploit and betray everyone who knows him and loves him and he is going to do it of his own free will. And it’s is going to be canon.

[and if you get the entry title reference, congrats, you’re old]

[queenologies]

STRANGE & BEAUTIFUL; remember me for who i was, not who i am (for wanda maximoff) (♬) (keepies)

[queenologies]

if you don’t hear this song and think of Wanda Maximoff and Magnet Dad, there’s no hope for you

[thevanishedteacup]

there will be civil war spoilers in this, BUT if you’ve seen the press conference they did in berlin, you’ll already know about the thing i’m talking about. no further spoilers, i hope.

this is not a hate post, so i won’t be putting it in the tag, and i tried to see this without slasher eyes of any kind, cause i personally don’t like it when people do that.

okay so i thought long and hard about this, but i just need to get this out of my system. and to be honest i don’t even know if people agree with me or not. so here goes my take on the steve/sharon kiss in civil war.

first of all i want to say that i honest to god can ship steve with almost every single person in the mcu. may it be peggy, tony, bucky, sam, nat or whoever. so don’t start saying i’m not behind steve/sharon because i see him with someone else then tony or bucky or whoever - that is not the case. and we all know that they won’t go the road of a bisexual captain america… (hopefully, one day)

so, we first meet sharon in the winter soldier and it’s not like she is the next big thing, she is basically just there - we get introduced so to say. the thing i’m not okay with right from the startis the fact that she lied to steve and still flirted with him, cause i’m not a big fan of building any kind of relationship on a lie - and that’s kinda what happened here. you could argue that she was just doing her job, but there was no need to try to get this close. nothing happened after that and i really hoped she would just be a good asset (because gimme for woman in the mcu) at this point and in future movies. that is where civil war starts with her as well. she is doing a good job, nothing mayor seemed to have happened in the meantime. and since i don’t wanna spoil anything i’ll just get right to the kiss.

so what exactly is my problem? that there is no fucking build-up. they have one scene where they actually do connect for a second before one of them gets called away. that’s it. it’s been made pretty clear that nothing happened between them after the winter soldier. no meetings, nothing. and bahm we get the kiss after a short talk in their next scene. that is not steve rogers. not at all - i am not one of these fans who think he is a delicate flower, cause he is NOT, but this? way too fast for the kind of character they build in the mcu.

i think that the russos have a pretty good handling of how steve works - so what the hell happened here? do we need a love story? no, we really don’t. these movies work very well without them. so why not actually build up a relationship between them before they kiss? make it happen in a future movie? cause it seems like there might not be another cap movie? (we all know the schedule and there are the avengers movies and i think that might be it for this steve rogers) still no. they could have had build up between the winter soldier and civil war (easily) or put something in the next avengers movie. just don’t rush into it like this.

i know a lot of people will say: “but they were in a relationship in the comics” - i don’t care. the comics are not the movies. believe me i know. i still don’t think that they handled the friendship between steve and tony very well. i am talking about both avengers movies (joss just wasn’t good with writing steve, at all. sadly.). they did good in this one - finally. okay this got kinda out of hand. but what i’m trying to say is that they would have needed more something in the movies to make this work.

the other thing, emily (nothing against her as a person) just cannot fucking act - the main problem with her is that she has difficulty with chemistry and that she hardly does anything with her face. i’m a fan of understated acting, but that’s not what she is doing. i mean come on. chris had chemistry for 10 people during that scene and there was nothing coming from her side. it sucks and it makes me mad. cause this at least could have been avoided with better casting. marvel usually does so well, here it seems like they didn’t cast for chemistry - which is weird. they knew this was coming, we all kinda knew this was coming, cause in some parts they do keep pretty near to the comics.

i could go on about this, but i guess i did make my point. so really while civil war was perfect, that tiny little scene still struck a nerve that could have been so easily been dealt with so much better.

[thevanishedteacup]

random bunch of thoughts review of civil war

SPOILERS AHEAD - if you haven’t seen civil war and you don’t wanna get spoiled? skip this or like it to read it after you’ve seen it. ;)

it was perfect

the amount of heartbreak in one movie was too fucking much, i was more then happy about steve’s letter in the end, cause that would have been a few horrible months - still not happy about it though

domestic avengers before everything went to shit - so much fun and i want like 10 hours of that. gimme more!

the big battle was fucking amazing. i don’t know how they keep doing it, but they never get boring. and i mean the one with all the avengers, cause the steve/tony/bucky one was one big fucking heartbreak - i really feared for everyone at one point. just the way they edited and filmed steve’s final blow against tony. FUCK ME. and him leaving the shield behind after tony telling him he doesn’t deserve it. wow… i wanna cry so much about this broken thing.

seriously though all the fights were awesome. steve pulling that helicopter back? holy shit!

--

team cap

steve: holy shit there was some heartbreak going on… there really was not one second of him not knowing what side he’s on, cause it’s always bucky and it makes sense, even though it will break your heart. evans did another fantastic job - he honestly cannot do any wrong with steve. LOVED the little bit about his legs being his weakness.

bucky: the reason everything really went to shit and i could totally understand, hell i would give my left arm for bucky. sebastian finally had more lines and more screentime and he did shine. the little comedy they did give him was perfect and so on point.

sam: damn i loved red wing (nice touch) and sam being his awesome fun self even though everything was kinda horrible. mackie and his comedic talent should get their own movie though. basically gimme a buddy movie with bucky and sam.

wanda: okay I LOVED that they choose her for the final blow, cause it works so well and elizabeth can totally play the emotions that were needed for this. i still want to see more of her power.

clint: my baby, he was once again perfect and i am so digging this whole protecting wanda that is coming from him

scott: okay i just fucking love paul rudd and there could not have been a better casting. nice touch about giant man. plus i laughed so hard during the entire scene. him getting introduced to steve was so glorious.

--

team icon man

tony: i will keep saying this, because rdj was so amazing during the reveal that bucky killed his parents… seriously i teared up because it felt so real - i could totally understand why he wanted bucky to die, because even though bucky had no choice, being brainwashed, it still must have hurt so much. i loved to see him in a suit for more of the time and damn his scenes with steve - THIS is what i want. no fighting. ;) young!tony SO made my day.

rhodey: i really thought for a second they were gonna kill him, thank god they didn’t - there would have been no coming back from that. i hope they include him in infinity war.

vision: DAMN SON! he is totally falling in love with wanda… and he cannot deal with that. it’s amazing and i want that story. and how cute was he wearing normal clothes?

spidey: AHHHHHHH! he was amazing. fucking perfect to be honest (i still love andrews peter, but tom really was the perfect choice) he has the comedic timing and the face to make peter lovable and little bit of an asshole at the same time. the entire scene of his introduction was so much fun. just wow! and him talking bullshit during the fight? THAT is what i want.

t’challa: what an amazing addition, really made me wanna see his solo movie, cause he is interesting and can totally hold the scenes he’s in. chadwick was a great choice to play him. he even moved like a fucking cat. LOVED HIM.

nat: kindaaaaa team iron man. she was amaaaaaazing through the entire movie. she had many great one on one scenes that i loved.

--

others

zemo: gosh i love daniel brühl and i’m so happy he had a part in this. i liked him as the villain and i loved that they made him human. a human who can destroy the avengers with so little. his plan unfolds quite beautifully and while i had the feeling it might be tony’s parents from the start, if you’re not that into the whole franchise you won’t get it till later.

sharon: why i love her as a character i’m just not behind that relationship. well, there is that. i have a whole post lined up about this. the one good thing that came out of it was bucky and sam in the car looking like some fucking idiots.

martin freeman felt underused, but i guess there might be more coming up?!

so fucking upset about peggy dying even though i knew that before the movie. that steve/nat scenes was fantastic though and showed the amazing chemistry evans and scarlett have.

--

one thing at the end. if you live in berlin you will be SO FUCKING CONFUSED. first vienna was shot in berlin, then bucharest (pretty sure the cars had berlin plates on them) and later actually berlin. i seriously had some issues with this, cause i couldn’t fucking remember where the hell they were supposed to be.