#anti-peggy carter

[sapphirerogers]

found a st*ggy stan who used "seventy years of sleep" (which if you didn't know, is a stucky poem by cardiamachina) for a st*ggy gifset. Deciding that the original work and its details needed to be known, but also wanting to be nice about it, I reblogged the post mentioning that it was in fact inspired by Stucky, with a Wikipedia screenshot.

Bitch comes into replies saying "yes, I know honey, that's the half of the point, bothering your kind" and this is where I blocked them.

I'm sorry you're free to ship whoever you want in fiction but if your motivation is simply to annoy people who don't agree with you (especially when your ship is a cheap copy of our ship that can't even have a non-toxic, original and convincing storyline, and does grave disservice to all three people across both ships) then all I can say is...I can see why you're a P*ggy stan. Stay mad.

Anyways just in case this post blows up (cause a recent one unexpectedly did),

Here's a petition link with a self explanatory title for Stucky shippers out there. Here is the original post I made about this.

[hail-americas-ass]

💄Anti-Peggy Carter Meta

PEGGY CARTER: A CHARACTER OF ELITISM, PRIVILEGE, AND WHITE FEMINISM

How to (Not) Handle Rejection with a Few Bullets or Less: a Comprehensive Guide By Peggy Carter ft @kestrafagnor

 Peggy Carter: A Mosaic Made from Other Characters ft @amarriageoftrueminds

Peggy Carter: A Patron and Paragon of White Feminism​

More to be added

HYDRA SLEEPER AGENT PEGGY CARTER, AND WHY IT FITS

Peggy Carter and the ‘Noble Nazi Collaborator’ archetype

Cynthia Glass and Peggy Carter: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Peggy Carter shouldering her way into Bucky’s character like a badly fitting jacket

Why did Peggy live peacefully into her 90′s if she was a major threat to Hydra? check out the metas here by @kestrafagnor​

Peggy Carter could’ve been an astonishing villain, perhaps even the best​ ft @lordzannis 

More to be added

[hail-americas-ass]

I wholeheartedly believe that this is the pinpoint moment where Bucky realises that Steve had chosen Peggy over him.

Most people interpret this scene as Bucky feeling rejection from Peggy, but can we step away from the heteronormative perspective?

Clearly that isn’t it. Bucky knows Steve likes her, he saw their reunion when they returned from Azzano, he saw how Steve lit up in a way Bucky wished was projected at him. He knows, perhaps knew ever since that reunion that Steve would choose Peggy, he knew all through the trip back to London, he knew when he was walking with Steve to the pub, but it probably never hit him until this point.

Bucky keeps his head high, keeps a pleasant smile on his face even when he looks at the floor with what I’m assuming is sadness, because Steve is his best friend and his North, and Peggy is Steve’s North. So Bucky will let Steve be happy even if it isn’t with him. He knows Steve isn’t his, but Bucky lets him go because he wants Steve to be loved even if it isn’t with him.

This sharply contrasts with how Peggy reacts when presented a situation where Steve is kissing another woman. What does she do? Shoots him without knowing if the shield actually works or not. She literally shoots someone who she has no claim over because she’s jealous, and fuck everyone and everything if Steve isn’t hers.

Clearly, Bucky is a better option for Steve because he a) isn’t a prick who thinks he’s entitled to Steve’s affection and love b) isn’t willing to possibly hurt Steve for liking someone else and c) isn’t Peggy Carter.

@kestrafagnor thoughts?

[countessravengrey]

Shout out to ships whose canon relationships were sacrificed in order to give the hero a woman as a prize.

[luna-rainbow]

I know a lot of fans are upset about What If and its continual attempts at making Steggy a thing.

But I don't see it as Disney has won? I came into this fandom in 2021, long after Endgame stopped any chance of further canon Steve and Bucky interactions, and I know of fans who came into the fandom long after that.

Because the magic is still there. Because CATWS was a genuinely well-written story and a well-presented movie. The plot, the themes, the characters, the action, the music -- all of it culminating in a climax where the main character reverses 70 years of manipulation and torture with a simple phrase, and in doing so, saves both him and the person he says it to.

Whether you choose to see them as romantic or platonic or anything else, that unbreakable bond is there.

What If and Rogers Musical are cheap knockoffs trying to capitalise on the same magic without understanding what created the magic in the first place. It's the sacrifice and the loyalty, the shared loss and shared experience, the same wanderlust and same homesickness. It is the thematic relevance and the narrative significance. It is the fact that Bucky was tied to Steve's identity as much as Steve is tied to Bucky's, that every key beat in Steve's journey to becoming Captain America and upholding his values involved Bucky.

The real tragedy about the Steve-Peggy story - as a Peggy fan had pointed out actually - is that even in What If, her story remains subservient to Steve. Not What If Steve, but canon Steve. Unlike other stories in What If, where a simple change leads to a butterly effect of an unrecognisable future, the direct effect of copying Steve-Bucky's interactions beat for beat is that "Peggy" becomes the least consequential factor in the story. "She is just as good as Steve", the writers want to say, "she brought forward feminism by 2 decades". But the reality is…she continues to be a non-character and a non-factor, because even in a timeline as significant as a woman becoming the first super soldier, the universe barely changes. It simply fills in the holes with other characters and continue on the same inevitable path.

Bad stories are forgettable, good stories last forever. Remember when we had that hilarious poll against OFMD and a bunch of people came out of the woodworks to vote for Stucky even though they had long left the fandom? Because a good story has magic, and it's left an indelible print on many people's lives.

Disney had already lost the day Steve uttered, "I'm with you to the end of the line, pal." The characters belong to us now.

[lavenderpanic]

Steve "I won't stop until all of HYDRA is dead or captured" Rogers skipping off into the sunset to marry the woman who knowingly held open the door for Nazis to infiltrate SHIELD is like. Possibly one of the worst decisions ever made ever.

[imposterogers]

mcu peggy carter is so fucked up bc they wanted her to be a # girlboss. which they attempted by having her shoot at steve when another girl flirted with him (not even him flirting with another girl) and canonically recruiting n@zis into shield (an organization made in cap’s honor) including the scientist arnin zola who she knew experimented on steve rogers best friend. like y’all couldn’t have figured something else out or…

[ivysos2001]

Anyone else find it weird/unrealistic that (in endgame) Peggy kept pre-serum Steve’s photo on her desk for DECADES after his ‘death’

Like in Agent Carter we saw her find and hold onto that photo which I think makes a lot of sense (his ‘death’ is still pretty recent and obviously she’s still grieving him) so ofc she might want to keep that photo in her possession etc (even her holding onto the photo permanently makes sense bc of how important he was to her) but I seriously can’t see Peggy deciding to put that photo on her desk let alone keeping it there for 25 years after she lost him

And I could give you a whole list of similarly weird Peggy-centric Steve examples from endgame (randomly bringing her up as ‘the love of his life’ and staring at her photo in that compass all of the sudden after like a decade long moving-on-in-the-present arc) but I find it kinda ridiculous (and honestly semi-character assassinating) for both of them that marvel (specifically in endgame) was so committed to preventing either of them from moving on (or even rewriting/discrediting their individual moving on arcs) in the years after they lost each other

Their love story in catfa is such a beautiful one in a tragic kind of way with both of them ultimately losing each other and having to move on without each other and I feel like their mutually being forced back together in endgame kind of corrupts the beautiful tragedy that their relationship was in the first place and hurts both characters’ overall development

Edit: ok coming back to this post and rethinking it a little I feel like it wasn’t actually Steve’s picture on her desk or Peggy’s picture in his compass that pissed me off in endgame - it was more the strictly romantic implications that both of these seemed to have within the movie bc (as I said above) I feel like marvel forcing strictly romantic feelings on both sides of Steve and Peggy’s relationship undercuts the larger importance of this relationship to both of these characters in catfa

I just wish that Steve and Peggy keeping each others’ pictures close were just allowed to be signs that both of them still cared about each other and kept each other close in their thoughts and values etc (esp bc we’ve literally seen them both move on romantically)

[hail-americas-ass]

Literally the plot of that horrendous What If episode starring stucky but het eww

What if one of them were a girl

[biwoop]

[queerextremity]

BTW FUCK PEGGY AND HOWARD

[booksandabeer]

Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny

So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.

What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.

This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply keep scrolling.

First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.  

In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.

You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.

As for the “getting in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can get in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.

So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.

The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.

I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.

(Never. The answer is never.)

And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.

So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.

But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes them at their own word.

--------

¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.

² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.

[hail-americas-ass]

Honorary additions to the discussion ft @lordzannis

Been thinking a bit about how long we’ve been saying that if either Bucky or Steve was a woman, stucky would be considered the most epic romance in the entire MCU by far by the mainstream. One too many “Steve got to be with his True Love” comnents by st3ggy fans got me wondering – how would it have played out if Peggy was a dude? Would ANYONE ship that outside of a small community of primed slash fans?

Obviously not every scene translates perfectly because some (like Peggy being the prize they won for getting the flag) depend on her being a woman, and the one (1) time they kissed is ? I mean I don’t think marvel would include that, but if they did I think it’d read more as a gay awakening for Steve rather than True Loves First Kiss, yk?

Other scenes, e.g. Peggy SHOOTING HIM (!) and Peggy throwing heraelf at him at the bar and being rebuffed and Peggy being extremely callous about Bucky’s death which benefitted her (doubly so if Bucky is also gender swapped here) for the most part I feel come across more like “sad gay man won’t understand his crush doesn’t like him back/is only being polite and slowly turns evil because of it”, although maybe thats because I’ve been villain-peggy-pilled. At the very least I don’t imagine many people would be insisting that the smattering of scenes in CATFA and CATWS was proof that they were soulmates and the only satisfying ending for Steve would be travelling back in time to be with him. Even if they were read as Steve being mlm I think it’d just lead to more people shipping Stony or Samsteve or whatever.

IDK. I know this would be partly/largely because society is primed to see Dudes Being Pals, but. I don’t even think they’d really be seen as pals? Or as soulmates even by the majority of people who do accept and look out for m/m ships?

[buckymilf]

marvel for the love of god PLEASE STOP forcing down steve and peggy down our throats, we get it, you ruined his character so they could be together now let us REST, we can't take this anymore.

[kamwashere]

steve and bucky’s story being given to steve and peggy in what if OHHHH THE HATECRIME IS HATECRIMING STILL

[captainwidowspring]

I am currently writing a paper on the music of the Captain America trilogy, and this has caused me to notice an exceedingly interesting detail that I previously missed. In The First Avenger, after Peggy shoots at Steve, a melody that sounds very similar to the Captain America theme plays. This repeats twice: one time when she puts the gun down and stalks away, and again while Steve and Howard are so shocked by what Peggy just did that they stare after her even as they continue their conversation.

This is quite disgusting, as it rather implies that Peggy just did something noble and honorable, or something that Steve would approve of, when this is not even close to the case. Steve would never be so thoroughly irresponsible and reckless, nor would he approve of such pettiness, or partake in it himself. Indeed, it is clear to see how betrayed Steve felt when he was cautiously ensuring that she was done shooting at him. The music also disingenuously tries to reframe the characters' reactions to her outburst as positive. The fact that the almost-Captain-America theme continues after Peggy leaves Steve and Howard staring after her endeavors to make it seem like their reaction is because they're impressed, rather than because they are stunned and dismayed as is far more likely.

And what's worse, this is not even the only time that the music disagrees with how the characters are acting in its haste to glorify Peggy and promote Steggy. Later in the movie, after Peggy kisses Steve without his consent, a happy little horn melody plays, even though it is pretty clear that the kiss upset Steve, and did not please him. The music seriously did a surprising amount of heavy-lifting for Steggy.

But in any case, this does help explain why so many people have no problem with Peggy assaulting Steve, and even see it as a good thing: the music is encouraging them to see it that way. This is yet another example of how influential framing can be.