Awww, Stevie, You Are Number One For Me ))

Some time ago I quite unexpectedly became fond of this superhero. I started researching and this post was one of the first things I’ve read about Steve. He is one of those people (real and fictional) who inspired me to try to change things around me and be more outspoken.

And this analysis is such a good introduction to nuances of Cap’s cbs historical context. Especially for us foreigners

I need to hug this post. Seriously.

1/4 Hello! I'm sorry to bother you with this, but you're a really chill person from what I've seen and you love Steve, you're willing to listen and answer politely, and I don't know who else to turn to with this. I'm just so fucking sick of how Steve is used in fandom even by people who supposedly like him. Spoiler, they don't. They just want him as a trophy for [insert X]. Like, I read this hugely popular fic where Steve is essentially written as a selfish, incompetent idiot

2/4 who harangues Bcky and Sam into joining The Good Fight TM (post-CW) to the point where Bcky (lol) has to ~give him a lecture~ about how to treat Sam properly. It ends as OT3 (where Steve is treated as a sex-cessory, of course, lmao), it has hundreds of kudos, & yet no one seems to give a damn that Steve was basically character assassinated in it. Cherry on the cake is that when Steve mentions he went to Sharon for help getting Sam’s wings back, Sam is offended. Calls her “Carter”. Ok then.

¾ I get that fandom enjoys having Steve be pathetically codependent to their faves, as if he has no other friends who love him. I get that the angry!chihuahua Steve interpretation is popular to the point where that’s ALL he seems to fucking do in fic, as if there’s nothing else important to him. But to disregard his trauma, depression, suicidal tendencies, debilitating survivor’s guilt and the fact that he’s a damn veteran who has given up his life for his country and the rest of the world –

4/4 into “Steve doesn’t know how to live without war or violence! Ofc he’d keep dragging his (Fandom Approved) friends into this! He’s so selfish & boringly depressed, here we go again, Bcky/Nat/Sam/Chewbacca need to clean up his messes ~obvs~ since he’s so incompetent LOL can’t wait for him to die so someone else can be cap” is beyond galling. I’m tired of this. I’m sick of it being lauded. I can barely read halfway through a fic these days without back-buttoning in disgust and disappointment.

__________

Oh my dearest Anon, you have vented to exactly the rightplace. I know! I share your pain. Trust me on this. I am very, very picky aboutwhat fanfic I read all the way through. Part of that is not just that I’m ahuge Steve Rogers fan, which I am. He’s my main guy. I love him. But I also work full-time,I’m a wife and a mother. My spare time is precious. I have so, so many tabsopen for stories from authors that I trust that I have yet to read just becausemy reading time is so sparse. If a writer wants to catch my attention, to beplaced in front of the queue above the writers I already know are balanced andfair in their characterization, they had better be good about characterization,because characterization is the one aspect of writing I am most picky about. Itis the writers responsibility to build a trust in their reader, and to buildthat trust they need to follow the basic rules for character construct infiction writing, if the writers cannot follow those basic tenants, something justone creative writing class would show them in a heartbeat, or hell, even just alittle research into the craft, then I’m out. And I’m not likely to return toread anything else they produce. Basically it’s a writers job to sell thecharacters, even the characters who aren’t their favorite, especially thecharacters who aren’t their favorite. If their biases manage to leak throughtheir writing they are not doing it right.

Part of this might be the age of fandom. While there arethose of us, like myself, who are over 30, who have schooling and/or experience,a large section of fandom is very young. Some still in high school. Some incollege but they haven’t really learned yet or fine-tuned their craft. It is myhope that the more they write the better they’ll be at it. That one day they’llrealize that a) when you make one character the all-knowing, ‘right’ one, let’suse Bucky since that’s the example you gave me, you are actually not doingBucky’s character any favors, it’s not just Steve’s characterization who suffersin this. Gone are the Ian Flemming days when readers gave a pass to a lack ofrealism when it comes to building a protagonist. Were Ian Flemming try to sellJames Bond today - ingenious, undefeatable, sexually flawless James Bond - hewould be turned down. As a society we’ve evolved past that. We look forrealism. Identifiable characteristics. The biggest mistake a writer could makeis to make their character, any character, a stereotype.

As for how the fandom treats Steve in particular?  Using him as a whipping boy to prop up theirfavorite? Also, again, that’s immaturity. And also an act driven entirely byemotion with total absence of logic. Let’s say you, as a writer, or just areally big fan of a character, want to sell your favorite character so thatothers may come to appreciate him. Or, in the very least feel empathy towardsthis character and their situation. Let’s again use Bucky in this (just as anexample, I’m not trying to pick on Bucky). But here is the thing, you don’tneed to convince fellow Bucky fans. They are already convinced. They are onboard. They get it. What you need to do is appeal to the people who don’t giveBucky a thought. And how do you convince them? It sure as hell isn’t byattacking another character, that’s for sure! If I, as a Steve fan, see a Buckyfan attack Steve to prop up Bucky, I am going to be closed off to anything thatBucky fan has to say. It’s a defensive mechanism. i.e. ‘You’re attacking myguy, you’ve just made yourself and your character the enemy, I’m not givingyour words any credence’. Thus this person has not achieved their goal of convincinganyone of anything. In fact they made the situation worse because now the onlything I’m convinced of is that this characters’ fans are rabid.

With age comes wisdom and hopefully fandom will get pastthis. But yeah, they do it, and it’s awful and it makes no sense and uses nologic but we learn and grow and hopefully one day the people doing this willrealize that they’re creating this either/or situation, creating sides, whenthere doesn’t have to be any. That Marvel fandom is actually big enough foreverybody. And none of the leads are going anywhere. Disney owns these guys,they are going to milk them for every marketing and merchandizing penny theyare worth, so if anyone honestly believes they are going to kill off a popularcharacter whose likeness is sold on everything from lunchboxes to Kleenix theway Steve Rogers’ is, and this while they can have a Captain America, a Falconand a Winter Soldier all at the same time thus three times the amount of potentialproduct, a reality check is long past due. The people believing that need toget a clue. Disney is not the comics and they are not going to do anything thatwill affect the bottom line. Fandom needs to get over the mantel passing thing becauseit’s not going to happen in the MCU unless the actor requests it because they’redone. The only reason they killed HanSolo is because Harrison Ford asked them to, if he hand’t? They would havemilked him, too. Also, another thing to remember, online fandom only makes uproughly 1% of a movie’s viewing audience, so even if a fic like this seemspopular? It’s only popular amongst percentage of a percentage of 1%.

Until then I read pretty much every Steve-centric pairingthere is and I have a list of really talented authors I trust with Steve, andtrust me, I’m very picky about that, so if you’d like Anon, I can make a reclist for you. Just let me know. Also, you are most welcome to come vent to meabout this at any time. I feel you. As a Steve fan who genuinely cares andidentifies with the character I get exactly what you are saying. We can bepained by this together.

This is your daily reminder that NO ONE asked anyone on this site or any other fandom site to be the goddamn fandom police.  If you don’t like a fic or if it has a trope that pisses you off or is “problematic”, there’s a back button or a block button you can use.  Hell, you can bitch about it to your friends or even on your blog.  But you do NOT get to attack the author.  These are real people you’re bullying.

(And yes, if you attack an author for writing something you don’t like or think has a “problematic” trope, you are a fucking bully, period. And if you ALLOW anyone to bully an author, or sit idly by while it happens, then you’re part of the problem, no exceptions.)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Audio Commentary:

“If you’re not a comic book fan, when you think ‘Captain America’, you probably think ‘jingoist’, a propaganda piece. But if you know the comics, every time something happens in the world, he gets to address it: the hippies, the civil rights movement, the Watergate. And our MCU Cap missed all that, he missed 9/11. So he gets to address where we are now without having seen what forced us to make these decisions. He did not have the same slow descent into the cynicism that we all had over the last 40 years. He comes out with fresh eyes. One of the great things in the comics that we hoped to replicate in the movie is that his reaction is never the sort of knee-jerk old man conservative reaction you would think the man dressed in an American flag would have. He exemplifies the spirit of America, not a party, not a government. He’s never going to fall on a political line. He stands for an ideal and he stands for principles that are translatable across the board. What he is against in this film is subversion, subterfuge and lies, that line between freedom and fear.”

What I don’t understand is why would he be suicidal in TFA? He obviously had plans for the future. He had a mission (there still was war and people who needed saving), he had a team, there was an amazing woman who he could have a future with. He was grieving after Bucky's death but he didn't want to die, he wanted to fight.

Ugh. If I read one more post in the Cap tag about Steve crashing the Valkyrie being about him wanting to commit suicide I may scream. So, in that vein…

Friendly reminder that the Valkyrie (aircraft, not character) was powered by the tesseract, which had, inside of it, the space gem, an infinity gem we’re about to get up close and personal with again here pretty quickly. As such it moved at extraordinary speed and stealth with technology completely unknown during the 1940′s. Hell, it would probably be unknown even in this time, through SHIELD tried their best to harness that power, re: Avengers. And it was made clear in Avengers that SHIELD didn’t know what the heck they were doing even in 2012.

Friendly reminder that the controls of the Valkyrie were damaged during Steve’s fight with the Skull.

Friendly reminder that Steve had no idea how to operate the aircraft nor did he understand it’s systems. Trying to figure out who to fly it in seconds (see again: extraordinary speeds) was simply not an option. Don’t believe me, the Marvel/MCU wiki describes the scene exactly that way here. 

Anyone who thinks that Steve could have done anything other than crash it is severely cherry picking. 

Steve Rogers sacrificed himself to save countless lives and I resent anyone trying to take that sacrifice away from him.

As a side note, here is the power of the space gem, described by Marvel themselves:

…do you see the part about increased speed? Okay then. I’m glad we had this talk.

Wow that man is so cool!!

Actor Hiroyuki Sanada (“The Wolverine,” “47 Ronin”) has been cast in a supporting role in #AvengersInfinityWar!

“The most difficult thing I had to achieve in this film was creating the fabric for the Captain America Stealth Suit.  The Russos were very specific that they wanted a suit that was made of textured, woven, hard fabric like a Kevlar and not a printed stretch suit like you see over and over again in these films. But in reality it needed to be made of a stretch fabric that would allow movement and comfort, as well as the ability to be constructed into a more realistic military type trouser and protective top. I went through many incarnations of printed textures on stretch which then posed a whole new set of challenges and problems.  The HD cameras made raised textures strobe or moiré.  So finding the right one became a trial.  Then the printing ink would shine like plastic, which I disliked.  It took four months of research and development to create a texture that seems so simple and was yet, so complicated.” - Judianna Makovsky

“Two things only the greatest fools do: throw stones at hornets’ nests and threaten a Witcher.”

Happy (belated) Birthday, @spacebuck! 💜Here’s Steve as a witcher, come to fuck shit up.

my art

Awww. Steve would be embarrassed. Poor guy.

today I learned the Avengers’ Chinese nicknames and now I’m crying