maybe one day. (yt)
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maybe one day. (yt)
âEveryone says it, first-year knights are so green, theyâre better off ploughed and planted with something useful!â - Keladry of Mindelan (Lady Knight, Protector of the Small by Tamora Pierce)
Home Economics / Open House - by Anonymous
Firstly, thank you legallybooks and avadakatyvra for the first spark of inspiration for this fic. I might have stolen your paint swatch idea 𫣠but I didnât know all of what I wanted to do until I went meandering around the bookstore and saw a book with some architecture blueprints on the cover.
Initially I wanted to work Ilyaâs house blueprints into the cover - but once I pulled them up the house was WAY too long to incorporate. So I found a kitchen as reference and traced it in Procreate to make my own architectural(ish) drawing to incorporate the yellow wall.
The New Yorker cover (obviously) but I picked the one with the cat and dog because I feel like it embodies them.
Hand sewn endbands - yellow + silver, 1 strand each.
Marbled paper from maleeka_mols_creates đ I was super excited about the gorgeous papers anyway. But this paper was a match made in heaven.
These fics can be found on AO3. Please remember to follow fanfic etiquette - leave kudos and happy thoughts.
The chapter headers have some art, but I havenât heard back from the artist so hopefully I can share that at a later date. đ§Ą
are we serious
I bound a little copy of The Witch's Cat by Champagne / @temporalreplicsimile! The story was the perfect opportunity to try my first buttonhole binding and I love the result. It's such a fun structure!
i have so many thoughts about The Bucky i feel like I need to be on a podcast talking about them like some kind of expert on a topic
Bucky is a particularly interesting character to analyze in light of the decisions made in Captain America:The Winter Soldier that changed him from the comics winter soldier.
These changes from comics canon contain some of the things about the character that were compelling, and also the things MCU had no idea what to do with in later installments
In the winter soldier comics, (which are themselves a violent re-invention of the character, he was raised on a military base and became Steve's sidekick after Steve had become Captain America, kind of a darker figure willing to do dirty work that Cap couldn't be seen doing
in the movie, he's Steve's closest childhood friend. They only end up paired up and fighting together because Steve goes on a desperate mission to save his life
in the winter soldier comics, he is something like 7 or 8 years younger than Steve and they still have a mentor/sidekick type of relationship
in the movie they are the same age and steve is no longer a "mentor" figure, that dynamic is eliminated
in the winter soldier comics Bucky loses all his prior memories after his apparent death, making him a blank slate to be groomed into a soviet super-assassin. There is no brainwashing.
in the movie they deliberately erase his memories by strapping him into this scary device that fries his brain with electricity. It's clearly torture: he is shown hyperventilating as the restraints close onto his limbs and then screaming in agony as the device activates.
in the winter soldier comics Bucky as the Winter Soldier is capable of independent thought and snark, and is shown questioning and mouthing off at his superiors
in the movie, Bucky is completely passive. He barely speaks at all; when he does, he is almost childlike, meek and quiet in his interactions with the Hydra characters, stubborn and confused in his fight with Steve. The main antagonist slaps him across the face for not answering a question and he doesn't retaliate at all even though he can obviously kill everyone in the room in the blink of an eye. In the same scene he also lets the scientists manhandle him and eagerly opens his mouth for the mouthguard even as his heart rate is spiking on the monitor and he's starting to hyperventilate because he KNOWS the pain is coming.
(side note: he is shirtless in this scene for no reason)
(second side note: the line "who the hell is Bucky?" is in the movie because it's iconic from the comics, but it's arguably super OOC for mcu!bucky)
The long hair and cyborg arm are straight from the comics, but the most striking change to his appearance is his mask: in the comics, he's wearing a domino mask over his eyes, but in the film, he has an opaque black mask covering his nose and mouth that takes away much of his ability to emote and looks strikingly like a muzzle. The comics mask evokes mysterious wiles; the film's mask evokes dehumanization.
basically the films gave him a much deeper and more intimate connection to Steve while putting the two of them on even footing as friends and partners, and changed him from a morally gray character who indifferently kills people and regrets and becomes angsty once his memories are restored, to a tortured and dehumanized human weapon who obeys despite not understanding anything that's going on because he knows nothing but pain and punishment.
The film's version is really much more interesting. Snarky antiheroes who kill indifferently are a dime a dozen; a character who is palpably, terrifyingly dominating and powerful yet completely powerless in the hands of those who control him, who is hollowed out of all personal identity and who has no agency or control over his own body as it is mutilated, reconstructed and wielded as a weapon, is something much more delicious and fascinating.
We watch this guy slaughter people effortlessly with an apex predator swagger that projects pure dominance and prowess, then we watch him meekly accept abuse and torture with soft, confused eyes.
Of course I'm insane about him. There's a lot to be insane about.
@deus3xmachinablog Peer review
what gets me is like. Ed Brubaker knew what the fuck he was doing when reinventing The Bucky from tragically killed-off sidekick to reanimated cyborg death machine. Sebastian Stan knew what the fuck he was doing when portraying The Bucky. And I'm sure the other people involved with CA:TWS had SOME inkling, because this compelling portrayal doesn't assemble itself by accident.
The rest of the MCU portrayal of Bucky though after that? Clearly no idea what they fuck they had on their hands or what the fuck they were doing with it.
Flattening his character out into "morally gray depression man and he has Gun." And essentially making his story about shouldering responsibility for what he did as the Winter Soldier. A very flat, "guy did bad thing and now he's angsty and guilty about it and trying to redeem himself" (boring) instead of like. the gut wrenching horror of having your memories burned away and your name taken from you and your body reconstructed without your consent and used against your will.
The horror of being a weapon that was once a person and having your very selfhood irretrievably lost to you.
this is where the fanfictions pick it up, and I'm honestly pretty sad that fanfictions are still so widely viewed as Not Real Art, when they are closer to how humans told stories for the last hundred thousand years, and indeed to how storytelling works at its best and most alive and thriving.
We could be telling the most brilliant stories about The Bucky, if we all understood the essential principles (that stories are not Owned by anyone, but become Alive when they are told, in the hearts of the teller and the listener, and to listen to a story gives the gift of the power to tell it again)
And if we could all defeat our enemy, the Cringe (which is to say, that which cringes at sincerity)
God, the writers you put on this earth to write Buckyfic are trying to create something "Original" instead
(because originality receives respect by society as real, legitimate art, and is capable of becoming profitable)
The Hydra Trash Party-goers knew what they were doing, as well.
I think, with hindsight, the main problem the post-TWS movies had with Bucky is the torture.
The broad consensus in modern western media seems to be that Torture Is Basically Fine. It works. Torture is an effective way of extracting accurate information. And because that alone isn't enough to make it seem legitimate, there's another failsafe: Torture works only on bad people. Villains crack under torture, and heroes don't.
This is how media creates a culture that finds torture justifiable. Especially media that is largely sponsored by the US military, of course, who in a post-Abu Ghraib, post-Guantanamo, post-CIA papers world has an interest in creating public indifference (or straight up support) for torture, but there's torture in animated movies for children, too. It's ubiquitous.
In real life, torture is horrific violence inflicted on our fellow human beings, that traumatizes both the victim and the torturer, creates heaps of false information, and has no discernible benefits. It doesn't work.
But in fiction, it must work, every time, because if it doesn't, then that collapses the entire structure, doesn't it?
In comes Bucky in TWS.
He's a character who is tortured into complete submission. Who is given electric shocks to the brain to erase his memory, but he still holds onto his own humanity. He is tortured into doing horrible things - the torture works - but it doesn't work completely. He breaks through it. He's beaten, abused, violated on screen, but - and this is important! - because he overcomes in the end, he's not the villain. His story evokes pity and sympathy, not suspicion.
With hindsight, it is clear to me that the mind wipe scene was meant to inspire disgust in the audience. Bucky's terror without fighting back, his defeated acceptance of the inevitable, the slow, lingering pan up his unclothed body. This is emasculating; at the time a lot of meta has been written about how Bucky is shot like a woman in a rape scene.
He submits. This is meant to be suspicious.
But it completely backfires, because what is shown and what follows is the story of a victim of unspeakable abuse finally breaking free from his abuser in a show of awe-inspiring mental strength.
(and also through the power of gay love but let's not get into that)
That's a problem. By complete accident, the film ends up saying Hey, torture is maybe sometimes bad? And that cannot be allowed. There is a more conventional torture scene in the film, where Steve and Sam throw a guy off a roof to get information out of him, but that almost doesn't matter. This is the one instance that makes the whole house of cards come crumbling down. If Bucky is a victim, then torture is both bad and does not work.
It is obvious to me that what followed TWS didn't know how to reconcile that. CA:CW felt extremely jarring because it treats Bucky with so much suspicion; it even retcons in the trigger word nonsense to justify that suspicion. Bucky has to earn trust. He has to redeem himself. From what? Not being able to withstand seven decades of torture?
Well, yes, the film says. Torture only works on bad guys. Bucky allowed the torture to work on him, and so, has proven himself to be untrustworthy. The abuse he suffered sullied him. He has to earn back his moral righteousness.
I want to stress that I do not think any of this is intentional. I don't think there was a meeting in the writer's room where they talked about how they accidentally made it seem like Torture Is Bad Maybe, and how they could reconcile that. If that had been the case, CW would have been a more honest movie. But looking back, it is clear in how the directors talked about the characters after CW came out, and in the baffling writing choices they made, that they were trying to breach this disconnect, without being aware that this is what they were doing.
For the fan spaces I hung around in at the time, where cis men were a minority, this was baffling. There's a reason post-TWS fic almost exclusively talked about Bucky's recovery, not his redemption. There simply was, in fandom's eyes, nothing to redeem him from. CW made clear that w completely misinterpreted TWS.
I'd love to go back in time to observe what the fallout from TWS and CW was in male-dominated fan spaces; how they talked about Bucky in 2015 and 2017.
Anyhow. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to me that no one involved in the writing of CW and what came after took a moment to actually think about the themes and motives of the movies beyond the shallowest surface, and not just with regards to Bucky.
TWS ended up taking the tamest, most inconsistent anti-torture stance possible by complete accident and that could not be allowed. It had to be forcefully retconned. And that's why, in my opinion, post-TWS Bucky ended up being Like That.
Thank you thank you thank you for this. I don't know if you've read my Buckyfic but I've written a lot of meta about torture in relation to my fic and the political context re: torture at the time, to the point that Abu Ghraib is mentioned/discussed in the fic as the thing that broke Steve's desire to be Captain America
I've never thought of it in this light, though; this is actually a great explanation for why the trigger words were introduced in Civil War and why it feels like a retcon. Audiences didn't respond to Bucky as expected, and they had to change the method of his control/brainwashing to make audiences read him as a threat/antagonist for Civil War
You're also completely correct that the scene where the protagonists throw the Hydra dude off the roof is a torture scene. (I realized this after watching Jacob Geller's video analyzing the torture scenes in Call of Duty. Highly recommend if this topic interests you)
It is absolutely true that torture scenes in fiction often serve to show off the (usually male) character's "toughness" and mental resolve, which is a fantasy, one that comes out of this political context at the time of Guantanamo and the torture memos and the political agenda to make torture more acceptable/palatable to the public.
So in this context, the vault scene (where Bucky is struck across the face and doesn't retaliate, and passively submits to torture without complaint) evokes sympathy for Bucky but it's also supposed to show that Bucky isn't a "hero" in the same way the Heroes are heroes. Heroes don't "break" under torture; Bucky does.
Which means that accidentally, the scene was a little more honest about torture than movies are usually allowed to be.
This is what I meant when I said the Hydra Trash Party-goers knew what they were doing, btw. Real life torture is almost inseparable from sexual violence.
The popular portrayal of torture in movies is fully irreconcilable with that: when a Hero is tortured, it's an opportunity for him to reinforce his strength (and masculinity) by Not Breaking and hanging on to his dignity. The reality of what a torture victim would actually go through is so threatening to that fantasy version that it can't be acknowledged.
Wait okay. Dragging some things out of the sewer in my brain where I put them.
Which MCU movie was it where Thor was suffering from PTSD and the whole film was spent constantly belittling him and mocking his trauma and his body, to the point that another character threatens to slap him (or actually slaps him? I can't remember) to "snap him out of" a panic attack?
I think it was Endgame (gagging) and if I remember right, that movie had the same directors as CA:TWS, right? The Russo brothers?
Okay.
So this feels pretty revealing of what the directors think about a "hero" and what makes one, right? Thor lost his "hero" status because he was traumatized and because he gained weight, and it's framed as a personal failing of his character that he has to overcome/"get over."
This helps contextualize Bucky's portrayal: a character being "heroic" means being untouchable, and being affected by trauma is at least partially Your Fault.
I remember nothing of most of the character portrayals in later Avengers because I threw it in my brain sewer, but I do remember the climactic scene in endgame where Tony Stark sacrifices himself saying "i am Iron Man," and I thought it was stupid at the time (his last words are erecting a monument to his ego? and we're supposed to think this is cool and heroic?) but it's a message about what makes a "heroic" character: a hero is, above all, defiant.
So in light of this, it does seem likely that Bucky's torture scene is supposed to be unflattering to him.
I know the term "male gaze" has been used wildly inappropriately, but I feel like the real actual sense of the term might actually apply here? The viewer of the films is assumed to be a Dude, and not just a dude, but a dude that subscribes to a certain ideal of toxic masculinity.
Men that don't break down or get vulnerable (or who get over it fast when they do), who are defiant and untouchable to the very end, are supposed to be admirable. Bucky is completely broken and compliant and accepts his abuse, so even if the movie portrays him as sympathetic, he's still not heroic; he's not supposed to be a character that audiences admire and project onto.
However, the directors didn't consider as much who a female audience (broadly) would relate to or find admirable. They didn't consider as much how someone (male or female or other) who doesn't subscribe to toxic masculinity and the idea of heroic males as untouchable would perceive Bucky.
It's possible that the directors never really thought about Bucky being viewed from the perspective of a person who has experienced abuse. From the point of view of toxic masculinity, men are never victims and if they are, they aren't real men.
Which means that a lot of people (many of them women) watched The Vault Scene and instead of thinking
"oh, he's letting the bad guys control him, unlike what a Real Hero [read: a real man] would do, so he's sympathetic but still bad"
they thought
"Oh. Oh. I don't like what this is implying. Oh. Oh no."
OH yes the gender dynamics!! It's so interesting how Bucky's dehumanization reads essentially as feminization, doesn't it? Because it's usually women who are treated like that, not men. Men who are tortured are beaten (usually on the upper half of the body), electrocuted, waterboarded, but they aren't violated like that. They don't have their mind and body fully invaded. They aren't stripped and when they are tied down, they are usually handcuffed, not spread out on examination tables.
Bucky is completely broken and compliant and accepts his abuse, so even if the movie portrays him as sympathetic, he's still not heroic; he's not supposed to be a character that audiences admire and project onto.
YES and wouldn't you expect that role to be filled by a woman! Even his design: The long, flowing hair. The facemask that obscures everything but his big, soulful eyes. Kind of feminine aesthetic, isn't it? One might even say, Bucky is queercoded, but stops just short of being the queercoded villain. He is this close to being a perfect foil to golden, shining, completely heterosexual all-american Steve Rogers. And of course, in the queercoded villain, it's also his effeminacy, his failure at traditional masculinity, that marks him as suspicious and evil.
(Well. Steve also has very interesting gender dynamics going on, if you don't already know it, I'm gonna rec you this excellent meta on the topic by @elementilda)
This is what I meant when I said the Hydra Trash Party-goers knew what they were doing, btw. Real life torture is almost inseparable from sexual violence.
Yes very true! In that it is, above all else, about power. Not desires. It's about getting to feel powerful and in control, about subjugation. It's about violating someone's bodily integrity to force whatever you want out of them. And you're right when you say that, accidentally, TWS was a bit too honest about all that.
In a way, I think Bucky became so popular because he filled a gap that this kind of hypermasculine action movie usually leaves open: The human cost. Heroes just shrug off pain and the emotional turmoil of villains does not concern us. But we kind of want to see the fallout, don't we? We want to see the hero affected by the pain. We want to see them scared and vulnerable. That's the whole appeal of whump, no wonder TWS inspired the greatest whump and darkfic community fandom has ever seen or ever will see. HTP is legendary.
TWS stumbled into being about violence and dehumanization, and the terrible human cost of war, and then got scared of itself. Instead of taking an honest look at their own story, in the stuff that followed everyone desperately tried to retreat back to safe ground.
Cowards, the lot of them.
So this feels pretty revealing of what the directors think about a "hero" and what makes one, right? Thor lost his "hero" status because he was traumatized and because he gained weight, and it's framed as a personal failing of his character that he has to overcome/"get over."
I was scrolling through my MCU hate tags, and I found this post I think you might enjoy (sadly OP has deactivated)
tumblr, whyyyyy are you hiding the blog names of all the different contributors in a reblog chain??? do not like. I want to know who authored that post! I want to know who left those inspired additions! how else am I meant to seek out the blogs that have correct opinions or make good art??
update: it appears some settings in Tumblr Savior got borked. have poked buttons until my dash is again satisfactory.
tumblr, whyyyyy are you hiding the blog names of all the different contributors in a reblog chain??? do not like. I want to know who authored that post! I want to know who left those inspired additions! how else am I meant to seek out the blogs that have correct opinions or make good art??
What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the Moon as seen from the Earth; and it seemed even bigger because of the Moonâs foreshortened horizon. It was not the full Earth so familiar from pictures, but just a slim crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and burning with a fierce green-blue radianceâa light with depth, like the fire held in the heart of an opal. That light banished the idea that blue and green were âcoolâ colors; it seemed hot enough for one to warm oneâs hands at it. The blackness to which it shaded was ever so faintly touched with silverâa disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the old Earthâs arms. Across that darkness, pale golden city lights traced out the shapes of North and South America. But at this distance the planet and everything on it looked small and somehow fragile.
Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane
If you enjoy my work, you can support me by buying a coffee. âď¸â¨ď¸ https://buymeacoffee.com/kamceyrij
things that are enjoyable:
showers
things that are not enjoyable:
getting in the shower
getting out of the shower
The thing about 'Ilya should've stayed in Boston' that bugs me is that it ignores the fact that Ilya wanted to move to a Canadian team because the States were becoming unsafe for him. Like, the cottage vacation happened halfway through Trump's first year of presidency. Russia's influence on American politics was at least highly suspected, and even if it wasn't confirmed, Trump's aggressive admiration of Putin's everything wouldn't exactly have given Ilya a ton of confidence on where the country was going. Going to Ottawa might have been about being closer to Shane specifically, but Ilya wanted to go to a Canadian team because he wanted to leave the States.
Yeah so donât get me wrong, I love Boston AUs, many of my favorite fics are âShane lands in Bostonâ fics. But the idea that Ilya staying in Boston would have prevented his issues is just a misread of the situation.
If Trump happens in HR, itâs so obvious that Ilya should move to Canada that it honestly makes me side eye Americans who say otherwise. Like yes he probably would be fine, heâs still a wealthy and talented athlete at the end of the day, but the stress of being an immigrant in the US right now is extreme. And being a highly visible anti-Putin Russian? Yeah, not great.
But maybe Trump doesnât happen in HR (thatâs Reidâs take). Even so, Ilya wants to move, because he isnât happy in America anymore. Thatâs kind of the whole point.
Metaphorically, in the HR-verse, Russia represents Ilyaâs childhood trauma and familial baggage. America represents his unhealthy coping mechanisms and his belief that wealth and fame will fix him. Canada represents love and stability. (We can quibble about the accuracy of this geopolitically, but itâs a metaphor in a romance novel, not someoneâs IR dissertation.) So metaphorically (and literally, in the rest of the story) Ilya staying in Boston means him sticking with his unhealthy coping mechanisms.
I think when people protest this theyâre mostly annoyed at the cliche of the reformed rake having to give up his old life to âearnâ the heart of the pure heroine, which is fair enoughâthough I donât think thatâs quite whatâs happening in HR, itâs close enough to trigger that reaction. That said I think thereâs something really beautiful about how nothing âfixesâ Ilya, not his relationship nor going no-contact, not living in a fast paced city or a quiet suburb. The problem is within him.
I also am sympathetic to people who want Ilya to win, because I too am crazy for the hockey. I do kind of wish Ilyaâs timeline was a little shorter with getting into mental health care and that he was able to do more with the centaurs before Shane swoops in. That said he drags the team from the bottom of the table to beating the Voyageurs in the playoffs, which is a sports story for the ages. If not for the leak heâd be a shoo-in for the Hart in 2021, Iâm not sure if heâd win with the hint of scandal but he definitely deserves it.
Sometimes my little cat will approach me all "what if there was a little cat now" and it's always an excellent idea I love when there's a little cat
Girlfriends or whatever