#Punch Fear in the Face

[demigods-posts]

walker being so much taller than leah allows for the perfect opportunity for annabeth to be completely baffled at how much percy grew over the last year. imagine annabeth punching that bully in the jaw bc he messed with her friend. only to turn around and be face-to-face with percy's chest. and he's oblivious to her confusion bc he's smitten and happy to see his smart, and pretty, and kind, and strong, and badass best friend. and annabeth is just fuming.

[livelivefastfree]

fear as a counterweight

[kenobihater]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The most terrifying creature of all

[First] Prev <--> Next

[vinceaddams]

My tolerance for hot peppers is fairly low, but when it comes to mustard I have yet to find one that's strong enough. I've heard they have spicier mustard in the UK, but if there's anything similar in Canadian grocery stores I haven't seen it yet. Currently working through a jar that says "extra hot", but it's even less hot than the horseradish mustard I got before that. 4th in a line of disappointing jars in my mustard quest.

If I saw a jar labelled "Violent Mustard Attack" I would happily buy it.

[ants-personal]

this is ranson to me

[daresplaining]

I'm going to need to know your FULL opinion on the erosion of Elektra Natchios in The Red Fist Saga ASAP!

OOF. Okay, here goes...

Elektra's role in the Red Fist Saga directly follows the Woman Without Fear mini-series, so I feel like I should start there, especially since I haven't really talked about it yet on this blog. Woman Without Fear was an Elektra solo comic that came out just as Devil's Reign was ending and the creative team was gearing up for the Red Fist Saga. The mini-series's purpose was to introduce big, shocking changes to Elektra's origin story. These changes didn't end up having much to do at all with the Red Fist Saga, or with anything else really, but they did functionally strip her of her agency and autonomy and made her motivations instead revolve around Matt. Now, Elektra's origin story has changed before. Frank Miller himself gave us three versions: the original, introduced in Daredevil volume 1 #168 and #190, a slight variation in Elektra: Assassin (he changed the timeline a bit and modified the character of Elektra's father), and then an entirely new, in my opinion much less interesting version in Man Without Fear-- which was not intended to be part of the 616 continuity, though that didn't stop later writers from drawing from it, including Zdarsky, who seems to have used it as a core text to inform his characterization of Elektra in general.

I know you know Elektra's original origin story, but I'll provide the general gist for anyone who might be unfamiliar: Elektra Nachios was the daughter of a rich Greek diplomat and his wife. Her mother was gunned down by assassins while pregnant, but Elektra survived. Her father, now paranoid and fearful, put Elektra in martial arts classes from a young age, while also keeping her sheltered to protect her from harm. She ended up attending college in the US, where she met Matt Murdock, another sheltered kid with a beloved but overprotective father. They fell in love, but the magic was destroyed when Elektra and her father were taken hostage by terrorists. Matt tried to be a hero, and Elektra's father ended up getting killed. Shattered by grief, Elektra left school and traveled across the world to train with Stick, who had trained her childhood martial arts teacher before casting him out (in Elektra: Assassin, the timeline is slightly different; Elektra trained with Stick before attending Columbia, though the end result is the same). Stick saw Elektra's skill, but judged that she was too emotionally compromised to complete the training and kicked her out. Elektra devised a desperate plan to prove herself to Stick: infiltrating the Hand and taking them down from the inside. She failed tragically. Turned cynical by grief and hardship, she used the skills she had picked up from all of her training as weapons to protect herself from a harsh and unforgiving world. She carved herself a life from the tragedies she had endured. She became an assassin.

Note that I mentioned Matt's name a grand total of two times in that synopsis. It's not to say that Matt isn't important to Elektra, of course he is, but he isn't that important to her origin story. The star of this beautiful tragedy is Elektra, as she should be.

Woman Without Fear introduces something new-- at least, new to the comics (more on that in a moment). It takes the Elektra: Assassin timeline and suggests that she trained with Stick when she was still a child. (It also brings in things from the Man Without Fear Elektra origin, but I don't think I'm going to get into that here because that is a whole other rant and this post is long and tangent-y enough already). It then suggests that when Stick rejected her, she still ended up with the Hand-- but not of her own will, with the intention of destroying them. No! She was successfully recruited. And once the Hand had her in their clutches, they sent her out to go after another target: Matt Murdock. In this shiny new backstory, Elektra and Matt run into each other at college not as two kindred spirits, but because Elektra was ordered to hang out with him in order to bag him for the Hand...before, oh no!, accidentally falling in love with him. To add extra insult to this character assassination, we're told in the main series that even her behavior during her father's hostage situation was intended as a test for Matt.

What this change indicates to me is a fundamental lack of understanding of Elektra's character; or worse, a lack of respect for her complexity, or a conviction that she operates at her best as a tool to further Matt's narrative.

What is possibly most baffling to me about all of this is that this change had pretty much no bearing on the Red Fist Saga. Why was it made? What was the point? The term "MCU-ification", referring to changes being made in Marvel's comics that seem aimed at aligning them more closely with the MCU, gets thrown around a lot-- possibly too much-- but this really does seem like a case where there's no other clear explanation for the change other than to shift 616 Elektra's backstory closer to that of her live action counterpart. (In the Netflix show, Elektra recruited Matt for Stick; something I, as a huge Stick and Elektra fan, actually thought was a cool What If?/alternate universe because it presented an opportunity to explore a different take on their relationship). The new backstory is mentioned a few times in the main Daredevil series, but otherwise it seems irrelevant to the plot. And that's because Elektra herself is kind of irrelevant to the plot. She seems to have three purposes in this story: 1. To serve alongside Stick as an exposition machine and provide details about the Hand/Fist/Pinky Toe/etc.; 2. To be someone Matt loves and thinks about in moments of danger and conflict (despite the fact that they have very few moments of actual emotional connection in this story, despite getting married!), and 3. As a warm body onto which Matt can project his perpetual internal musings on good and evil ("Elektra was Bad, but she is Good now. She, like all people who have done bad things, is still worthy of God's love and is capable of rehabilitation, and look! Her decision to take on the Daredevil identity is proof that she is now Good! She has become a worthy soldier of God." Man, I wish I was exaggerating.)

Elektra's appearances in Daredevil comics have always centered around Matt to some degree, simply because it is his comic. There's miles of difference between reading a DD comic with Elektra cameos and reading an Elektra solo series. But that doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have comics like the Blackman/Del Mundo run, or the Dark Reign solo tie-in, that delve so deeply into Elektra's rich psyche, that truly do look at her worldview in a way that is complex and morally difficult and so, so compelling, and then to have comics like this where she barely even feels present because so little effort has been made to do anything other than slap some vague morality lessons onto her and make sure she and Matt sleep together every other issue.

[pwurrz]

another iconic moment in quincamo history has been captured everyone!!!!!!

[olyphantastic-world]

PAVEL PRILUCHNIY Show: Run! (2016)

Bonus:

[medeasmenagerie]

So I just went into one of my English electives and we had a whiteboard dedicated for book suggestions. Normal, right?

Innocent,

Normal,

Except...

Why would you do this?

Suggest this terror to your classmates?

Inflict this suggestion on a unsuspecting visitor?

Chaos? Anarchy? I don't care, but why?

Why would you do this?

[male-duckk]

thinking abt joe/carlos

[im-smart-i-swear]

very importrant oc diagram

more in depth descriptions of this stuff below ig

omg same trauma - sympathy and respect but also acknowledging youre not the same. propably the most normal out of the three options. you know very intimate stuff about this person but you have never met and its weird. you live your life normally but sometimes you wonder what it would be like to meet him

i will never be as cool - constantly comparing yourself to him to the point a big chunk of your personality still revolves around your connection to him (in ryous case this is mixed with seeing shiro as a sort of idealised perfect father figure despite never having interacted with the guy before)(its really weird and he tries to be secretive abt it but the others knows anyway)(like kiddo they can tell)(youre not subtle at all). he is soooo good and so pure and perfect and you will never live up to that no matter how hard you try. there must be something wrong with you

gender dysphoria - what it says on the tin. you have this guys memories and voice and body and face and it makes you want to scream and cry and kill him and bury his body in the woods so nobody can ever find it

(also to clear things up this diagram and the explanations are written from a point in the timeline before the whole 'stickbug gets mind controlled' thing so the clones havent met shiro yet)(also also obv this is pretty simplified)

[fox-guardian]

oh to be a scare actor in a funky haunted house

[johnnycagesrightnut]

Thinking about the fact that in E-93742 Mason is Batman instead of Spider-Man which means he doesn’t have Juno which means he doesn’t have EITHER of his siblings

@johnnycagesleftnut lore, brother. Of my spidersona and this character I have based on you with the names you have selected

[scorpiusmalfoylovesoscarwilde]

GOD I FUCKING HATE RISHI SUNAK

[haarute]

had a bad bout with mother ✌️