inkyearnings

[inkyearnings]

"The best thing we can do with power is give it away" - On the leftist critique of superhero narratives as authoritarian power fantasies:

The ongoing "Jason Todd is a cop" debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. [EDIT: I SCREWED UP! This was created in 2019 by the guy who runs the Midnighter-Core page on Facebook, and Joey just reposted it!]

So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:

"A common leftist critique of superhero comics is that they are inherently anti-collectivist, being about small groups of individuals who hold all the power, and the wisdom to wield that power. I don’t disagree with this reading. I don’t think it’s inaccurate. Superheroes are their own ruling class, the concept of the übermensch writ large. But it’s a sterile reading. It examines superhero comics as a cold text, and ignores something that I believe is fundamental, especially to superhero storytelling: the way people engage with text. Not what it says, but how it is read. The average comic reader doesn’t fantasize about being a civilian in a world of superheroes, they fantasize about being a superhero. One could charitably chalk this up to a lust for power, except for one fact… The fantasy is almost always the act of helping people. Helping the vulnerable, with no reward promised in return. Being a century into the genre, we’ve seen countless subversions and deconstructions of the story. But at its core, the superhero myth is about using the gifts you’ve been given to enrich the people around you, never asking for payment, never advancing an ulterior motive. We should (and do) spend time nitpicking these fantasies, examining their unintended consequences, their hypocrisies. But it’s worth acknowledging that the most eduring childhood fantasy of the last hundred years hasn’t been to become rich. Superheroes come from every class (don’t let the MCU fool you). The most enduring fantasy is to become powerful enough to take the weak under your own wing. To give, without needing to take. So yes, the superhero myth, as a text, isn’t collectivist. But that’s not why we keep coming back to it. That’s not why children read it. We keep coming back to it to learn one simple lesson… The best thing we can do with power IS GIVE IT AWAY." - Joey deVilla, 2021 https://www.joeydevilla.com/2021/07/04/happy-independence-day-superhero-style/

- Midnighter-Core, 2019

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0bU6TrKdX6QgMLnUFk64jResHMVwiSyENASvJk7efasgZ94G4c81XJCVgGcLFPgPsl&id=594855544368212&mibextid=Nif5oz

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i wrote a twin cinema poem about two gay soldiers in wwi

context: the two sides, read separately, are the two soldiers thinking about their futures with each other. when read together, it's a reflection of their final thoughts when they die together struck by bullets <3

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and the boy down the street, from my youth, sold his soul to the devil so he could see it all.

i wasn’t very bright at that age, and wondered why he needed to see more when his eyes were like oiled wood at sunset, and his sharp tooth that stuck out inspired me charm. you didn’t need to see more when you saw it all here and it was beautiful, right?

my neighbours worried that he had brought a curse upon the town, but after a few weeks, a few rains and a few storms, few still cared or discussed about the boy down the street. i was too young to understand or watch how his parents wept for him, the notion far away from me and the notion never on my parents and friends’ lips.

“look what happened to the neighbours down the street,” my neighbour shook his head. he was trimming his hedge, as if his comments were merely an afterthought. “that kid was bad news from birth, i tell you.”

i hadn’t seen him in a long time, before word came back of him. speaking of lands where he’d been seen, far away, minds he had graced, help he had given.

outrage he had sparked, just like he did long ago.

a man against science. or, a man of science. i wasn’t sure. i didn’t have time to think about him, just as i didn’t have time back then.

not my problem, nor my friend nina’s problem. we had god knows how many assignments due, laundry to be done, bills to be paid. texts from my parents, who still lived on the same street after all these years, that i should answer.

that’s when i saw him. the boy who was from down the street, standing in the hallway. i still recognized him, although he didn’t quite look the same. he had grown, that much was sensible, his traits sharpened and devoid of childish rounder, and a poise i didn't quite understand. and he smiled at me as i remembered the hide and seek we played with the other kids on the street, and how the neighbours had thought the worst of him for a while. i wondered if they still did.

i didn’t know what to thinkof him now. and turns out, i didn’t need to think of anything.

he wasn’t here for me, but for all of us, he said. he just wanted to help, and now i’m back to my youth and i remember his deal with the devil. what deal had he made? to see it all for... what? in exchange of what?

had he seen his parents again, after leaving them to be destroyed?

who am i kidding, though? if he ran away, or rather got chased away, it wasn’t his fault for his parents’ hurt. he was a kid, and his parents hadn’t cared enough for him. the responsibility was on the parents, on the village.

the kid, now a man in an elegant suit and friendly smile, sharp tooth always sticking out but dulled.

some people called him a buffoon, some couldn’t care less of him, some, from my hometown, were happy to see him. he was here to stay, for a while.

but what was a while, in college? i was busy, and i never noticed when some of my professors had started listening to him, my peers charmed by him even before that. it was a tuesday, when my last essay of the semester was due, and i had to write it on one of the man’s books. a streak of genius, a collaborative effort, the book that was the culmination of humanity.

collaborative with who?

nina hadn’t even read it, just happy that the class was done after this last essay.

the man had written this, but wasn’t he busy conquering hearts and minds across the land, helping others? perhaps the devil had help him see more, be more. “the culmination of humanity”

and, from the book, it was clear he had seen it all. accounts of lands far and wide, stories i’d only ever heard a wisp of before. and there was merit to it. i’ve only ever imagined how the fisher on the west coast felt like at sunrise, the ceo at bankruptcy when an angel, the man himself this time, came to whisper solutions to him. even a chapter on the boy down the street’s parents when they lost their child.

but there is no essay worth to be written on this story. i hate these stories he published but i can’t help but love them and feel like the boy down the street who wrote this book spat on my face.

it was truly all that had ever existed, and that was the problem. it was as if me and the boy down the street and everyone i had ever known or not had spoken in this book. all the flourish and pain and emotion as we might’ve wrote it. it touched me, even at the fictional parts. a combination of the best that could be seen today, and nothing more.

it was unnatural.

and he could’ve picked only a few stories to share instead of all he’d seen, but it wouldn’t have fixed it. nothing would have fixed it.

that is, unless the boy with the crooked tooth had wrote it. and then he might’ve wrote "neighbour" as “neighbor” because it felt more american that way, and it might’ve been about an underdog superhero because those were the stories that he’d loved growing up, and he might've wrote in a cat that added nothing to the plot but was inspired by his lover’s cat, and it might’ve been fictional or not or both, but at least it would have meant something. it could’ve been shit, or perfect, or just alright, but it would have meant something.

that week i watch the man leave, while his deal with the devil stayed with us all.

and i realize i haven’t seen the boy down the street in a long time, and i’m not sure what the deal he made with the devil created, but i’m sure that it destroyed him.

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Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

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this situationship 😭😭😭😭 lord

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Goodnight.

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i don't know what else to tell you except to be brave and to be kind. take it day by day. go outside and watch the clouds paint the sky. call a friend.

we are still here, and furious. you are still here, and that matters. you can still do and make and be something important. i promise. stay alive. it matters, and you matter. i know it is easy to succumb to anxiety and exhaustion and defeat.

communities can start with tiny ideas. google "dnd meeting near me" or whatever your interest might be. google "volunteering near me." google "support groups near me." start journalling. start a discord. start a book club.

when you close your eyes and hear hamlet, answer his prayer: it's better still to be.

[inkyearnings]

Okay bear with me folks, I have some ~thoughts~ about the Vanessa/Wade relationship (or frankly lack thereof) in Deadpool & Wolverine. I should start by saying that I am analyzing this with the (likely erroneous) assumption that everything on screen is 100% intentional and mindfully written to deepen the characters and inform their arcs. For the record, I don't necessarily believe that's true - there is certainly room for mistakes, lazy writing, confusing plot elements, or in this case, sidelining a potentially strong and important character for nebulous reasons (I'm guessing scheduling conflicts + run time concerns + actor's strike complications but idk for sure). (Also thanks to @gossippool and @kendyroy for encouraging me to post my thoughts instead of just rambling in the tags in the first place, y'all are the realest)

Long rambly post below the cut fyi

Now, granted, it has been a while since I watched the original Deadpool so I am not as well-versed in their early relationship as I am in the handful of scenes Morena Baccarin has in dp3, but I do think it is pretty canon that Wade generally struggles to express his deeper worries and feelings (without filtering it heavily through crude humor, sex, and pop culture references of course), especially after the events of dp1 and the physical and mental damage he sustains, and Vanessa is frankly no exception despite how much he cares for her. The entire first movie hinges on the fact that he doesn't really believe she could love him in his post-Francis mangled state, which is pretty contrived imo given that the film has established already how bonded they are, and she doesn't strike me as being written to be so shallow as to reject him based on a physical deformity. I mean iirc she wanted to stick around through chemo despite him being literally riddled with inoperable cancer, so she clearly is in it for the long haul (at least in dp1), messiness and all.

Now, in dp2, obviously she is shot and killed early in the film, and Wade spends much of the rest of the film wallowing in his very profound grief, trauma, and guilt over losing her due directly to his violent lifestyle. He goes to prison, he basically gives up on life and seems very resigned to dying once he has the power suppressant collar on, even excited to do so so he can be reunited with her. She is mostly sidelined as a Fuzzy Dead Wife trope basically, but the important thing here is that he spends weeks if not months in the throes of despair over losing the love of his life just as they were trying to start a family, and trying to reach across the boundaries of death to be with her.

Now, my first couple times watching dp3 I was frustrated by the trite narrative presented in the interview scene towards the beginning - specifically Wade's whole "my girl is getting tired of my shtick and I need to show her I matter". It felt contrived and disingenuous, and I just brushed it off as iffy writing, a means to an end, but the more I reflect upon it the more I think it is based in an emotional reality that is just handled with a very light touch by the film in favor of fanservice and Poolverine content (NOT that I'm complaining in the slightest - I think this movie is a masterpiece in many ways, albeit a flawed one but that's beside the point here), which for the record I am not against because I think it lends it an air of realism. This is Wade's story after all, Vanessa is a part of it but it is ultimately about him and his journey.

Basically, I think the combination of what happened to him in dp1 (the brain damage, the trauma, the awareness of the fourth wall, etc) followed by the events of dp2 (Vanessa's death, his grief and the associated guilt and trauma of being the direct cause of her death) led to an unbridgeable emotional gap between the two of them that ultimately leads to their breakup.

It's important to note that I don't think Vanessa has any recollection of her own death, given that Wade goes back and saves her before she can take the bullet, and so of course she can never fully fathom what Wade went through grieving her and their life together and their potential family, for however long he spent between her death and bringing her back with Cable's device. She can try (and she clearly does in the one scene I'll talk about next) but I fear she accepts, maybe even in that scene, that she can never succeed. He is beyond her reach by this point, and vice versa, his experiences having fundamentally changed him.

The one scene we really see from their relationship between dp2 and dp3 is the one where Cassandra mind-gropes Wade in the Void and we see Vanessa struggling to reach Wade across this aforementioned gap - she wants him to open up, she wants him to share what he's going through, she wants him to be the person she initially fell in love with (not even selfishly - to her nothing has changed really, because to her no time has passed). But not only does he not understand what she's really asking for but he responds in such a way that makes me think he has unprocessed issues that are only tangentially related to what she's saying - ie the stuff about mattering, about asking her if she even wants to be with him, etc. And he's not the Wade Wilson she met back in dp1 anymore. He watched her die and grieved her and brought her back, believing it would make everything go back to normal and they could resume their life together as if nothing had changed, but he has been fundamentally changed in a way that she can't grasp, even if he WAS good at externally processing his trauma openly without the artifice of wry jokes. She didn't "come back wrong" - instead, she came back exactly the same as before, but HE'S different now. Not wrong, per se. But changed.

It's an interesting scene because it's obviously a memory, and a crucial one at that, but you can see how Wade is misunderstanding what she's saying, viewing it through the prism of his own lack of self-worth and his own hopelessness - he takes away that she thinks he doesn't matter (even though like he says she didn't actually say that, but I don't think Cassandra invented that wholecloth - I think she pulled it out of his psyche because that's what he believes deep down, hence why his fixation on mattering even though she never said those words exactly), he takes away that she doesn't want to be with him, that she thinks he's nothing. Which would be frustrating as an audience member to witness as a pretty simple misunderstanding which could potentially be solved with one conversation, but it feels believable to me that these two people who have shared a great love would be fundamentally separated by unimaginable, cosmic trauma, and the on conversation they would need to have to rectify the misunderstanding is one that is impossible for Wade to verbalize and equally impossible for Vanessa to conceive of. It was one thing when they had shared trauma like violence and SA in dp1, but what Wade has gone through in dp1 and dp2, humor aside, is unfathomably traumatic, brain-breakingly so even, and that's not even factoring in the possible mental illnesses he now struggles with (I've seen folks suggest schizophrenia, DID, depression, etc. but I won't get into armchair diagnosing a fictional character here - suffice it to say he is canonically unwell as a result of what has happened to him, and yes it manifests as quirky fourth wall breaks and cheeky one-liners, but within the universe of the movies he is undeniably profoundly mentally ill, and that includes this humorous alter ego he created to cope with his trauma).

I think off-screen Vanessa probably really tried to reach him, maybe for years (the six year gap implies to me that they didn't break up immediately, that they tried for a while to stay together), trying to get her Wade back, but that Wade is gone. He struggled to express that to her until eventually he started to feel rejected because he couldn't express his trauma or how much he has changed, because even he can't fully conceive of the gulf that has formed between them. The truth is, he WANTS to be that Wade again, for her and for himself, but that Wade died when she died. Or maybe he had already started dying when Francis got a hold of him in dp1.

Anyway, all this is to say, I think Morena Baccarin WAS criminally underutilized in dp2 and dp3, but I think there is a strong argument to be made for the believability of their breakup regardless. I think even relationships built on enormous love can crumble due to trauma, and what Wade suffers over these movies is mind-bogglingly enormous trauma. It's especially heartbreaking that he blames himself for their relationship ending, talks like she just got tired of him, thought he didn't matter, whatever. But it is a credit to him that he never seems to feel anger towards her about it. He doesn't seem to feel entitled to her, though he longs for her and what they had and what she represented (hope, love, a future, a family), but ultimately she becomes more of a symbol of what he lost when he gained his powers, because let's be super fr right now - even if they had succeeded in having a baby, not only would they have lived in fear of her or the kid getting killed, but ultimately Wade would likely outlive both of them even if they managed to die natural deaths. The moment he gained his powers he was already destined to lose her, which is heartbreaking because she was the only reason he opted for the treatment in the first place - so he could stay with her.

I think a big part of Deadpool & Wolverine is watching Wade continue to process his own motivations (vis-a-vis Vanessa but also his other friends) and how he does eventually let go of the idea of "mattering" in favor of just saving the people he cares about (*cough* and being saved right back *cough* by Wolvie, as the final line and shot implies). And in the process he finds someone new who cares about him, who thinks he matters, who tries to sacrifice himself for him and his friends after mere days of knowing him, who comes home with him at the end of the story, who breaks his own centuries-old patterns, who has also experienced unimaginable grief and trauma, who has struggled with wanting to die and being unable to, who not only matches his crazy but matches his FREAK and also not only won't die on him but CAN'T die on him - and more importantly cannot be randomly killed by a stray bullet.

Idk if any of this makes much sense but I do think if you read between the lines and consider the potency of trauma and grief, guilt and emotional damage at play here, Vanessa and Wade's off-screen breakup is actually pretty realistic, and really heart-breaking to boot.

You can tell she still cares about him in so many ways - she shows up for his birthday party, she shows up to his welcome home party at the end, she finds excuses for physical contact multiple times, her eyes get soft when she looks at him, but there is a distance there that Morena Baccarin does an incredible job of portraying. She cares about him deeply, she has mourned the loss of their potential life together, she has let him go and accepted that the Wade she fell in love with is gone, but she wants him in her life even though she's moving on because she realizes he's gone somewhere she can't follow (literally and figuratively). And she wants him to be happy which is why I fully believe she would immediately clock the Poolverine of it all and not-so-subtly encourage them to make it official.

Anyway. Poolverine forever. Nothing against Vanessa at all - I think she delivers a nuanced and beautiful performance, I think their relationship is sweet and heart-wrenching in large part due to her acting chops, especially given how little she is given to work with - but I think their relationship was sadly doomed from almost the very start, because Wade becomes this traumatized superhuman and Vanessa would always be at risk in his orbit, but also would always on the outside of his multiverse superhero experiences. I think it's weirdly beautiful, even if I am filling in a lot of gaps and giving the writers maybe undue credit.

Anyway... thoughts? Please DM me or write in the tags, I am feral about this movie and just want to talk about it with anyone haha. If you have further insight into these characters too I'd love to hear it - I am by no means an expert in these movies or characters!

[inkyearnings]

[inkyearnings]

You are a person who covers your counter space in clutter and inadvertently makes a shrine to a long forgotten god who shows up to thank you.

[inkyearnings]

i don't know what else to tell you except to be brave and to be kind. take it day by day. go outside and watch the clouds paint the sky. call a friend.

we are still here, and furious. you are still here, and that matters. you can still do and make and be something important. i promise. stay alive. it matters, and you matter. i know it is easy to succumb to anxiety and exhaustion and defeat.

communities can start with tiny ideas. google "dnd meeting near me" or whatever your interest might be. google "volunteering near me." google "support groups near me." start journalling. start a discord. start a book club.

when you close your eyes and hear hamlet, answer his prayer: it's better still to be.

[inkyearnings]

"ai is making it so everyone can make art" Everyone can make art dipshit it came free with your fucking humanity

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The Shape of Ideas

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if you don’t know the difference between a hare and a rabbit you’ve never gazed into the cold wild eyes of a hare and known that if it could speak it would speak backwards

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oooooofk ok I watched fan letter and I got so many thoughts rn.

I love how you can just tell that this was directed and written by people who grew up loving one piece. I love that the main character was a girl who idolized nami. I dunno it just feels so much more personal than if it was a boy who looked up to luffy (or god forbid a guy who was horny for nami like in the novel this short loosely adapted). Just looking up to this person not for their strength but for what they represent, for how much their accomplishment inpires you. Especially when it's in an environment filled with men. I know I'm not a woman so I can't speak for anyone but I definitely can tell this was relatable to a lot of women who grew up watching one piece and looked up to nami

And oh my god the Marine who was indirectly saved by luffy. This shit made the summit war look terrifying my god. Just seeing all the normal people who get crushed by every attack. It really does feel kind of crazy to think that luffy had such a profound influence on this man's life when he just so happened to be on the same island as him on one specific day. Or how nami simply existing serves as a daily inspiration for the girl. It's such a moving message, how your accomplishments can change and shape the lives of people you won't even know existed. Even if nami will never get the girls letter, she managed changed her life for the better whether she knows it or not

And also it's just really funny. I love the guys in the bar just dunking on zoro and sanji lmao. Or the marine who is just so in love with chopper (same, dude). And all the little cameos oughh. Thank you usopp for helping that girl for no reason. That's why you're the goat. Ouurggh and perona oh my gahhh. Dude and the animation my lord man. Absolutely wonderful short. Seriously, quit stretching the contents of the manga out for the anime, just gimme more filler if it's on the quality of this episode holy

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writing fics be like

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twenty years across the sea