#bc otherwise the paper WILL be a bunch of bs

[ambersky0319]

I love english classes

until the poetry unit

[tirednotflirting]

hi gonna continue to be emo in text posts ignore me if you wanna.

so the sunday after calm was released was my last day of the like ~extended spring break~ during my senior that was extended bc despite going to literally one of the top public institutions in america, they had no fucking clue how to transition to this online class bs even when they were doing it a week later than most other schools (totally not bitter about that, can you tell?). we were still in that ‘oh this will be over by may’ mentality. like i was certain the no shame tour was still going to happen at this point. in reality, i would travel further than the block surrounding my apt building twice in the next two months and the only people i would physically speak to were my roommate and the cashier at the corner store who would sell me individual rolls of toilet paper for $5. 

calm provided an escape as I took exams in my bedroom and tried to do group projects over zoom. watching insta lives of michael and calum dancing around their backyard would make me laugh when nothing else could. reading little stories about boys in bands would help introduce me to a community that carried me through the horrors of the post-grad job search like three times over. 

basically calm got me through 2020. it made a year i expected to only ever look back on in horror be filled with memories i’ll treasure forever. calm brought me friends thousands of miles away that i never would have had the chance to make otherwise. it reminded me of the power of music and fandom and the joy brought into the world by celebrating a thing.

its the sunday after 5sos5 was released. i’m doing laundry and having an honestly excellent cup of coffee. later i’m going to plan out the outfits i’m going to wear on a trip to nyc with a bunch of people i only know because of calm. we’re gonna dance and sing to so much music (including 5sos when the sun is barely up) and eat bagels and laugh. feels very full circle. feeling very very grateful. 

love you all lots. let’s keep celebrating <3

[shieldandstripes]

quick meta on engame

SPOILER WARNING THROUGHOUT !!

this meta assumes you've seen the movie so no background context provided, but once again: CONTAINS SPOILERS!  

this is a really rough first impression meta, mostly concerning steve, nat, bucky, sam, and tony bc i’ve still chewing on the rest. SO

1. sam offers to go with steve to return the gems, so it's clearly possible (suits & Pym Particles) for more than one person to go. bucky doesn't offer to go; bucky does not freak out when steve doesn't instantly return – because jfc, bucky already knew the plan (even if he looks like he's about to throw up w/ the stress caused by said plan). because steve fucking talked it over with him (bucky being the one, single person steve has ever been remotely accountable to in his life; the one person whose mental health he values more than getting to live his life, otherwise he wouldn't have gone with "bucky's still alive" as the ONE THING he knew he'd lose his own grip over mid-fight). Also, bucky would not be saying "go on" to Sam rather than stalking over there to clip steve upside unless they'd already had a conversation about who would be taking over the shield. even though they both know Sam is the only one remotely OK enough to do so, not giving buck first refusal fits... no facts or character development tbh.

why bucky did not, or did not want to, go back with steve is for someone else to write up.

2. why would anyone who knew about the plan be down with that plan, other than some trite BS about living out your best life? why would steve allow himself a free pass to do that, with premeditation, rather than staying in the future to fight alongside his team? (his need to heal is a whole different meta.)

maybe because that wasn't the only thing steve was going back in time to do?

3. you don't leave a teammate behind -- and you don’t trade lives. i can’t believe Steve spent a lifetime not doing anything to figure out how to make this a win for the people who lost.

nat couldn't be wished back to life due to the way she died. nor could gamora who died the same way. but both "past" gamora and "past" nebula die -- and yet their time-jumping selves are alive in the future.

steve turns back up in the future via living out those 70-odd years. So what happened to that spare time-travel suit and the Pym Particles he was carrying, eh? with all the trouble they had getting the gems due to lack of extra particles, and w/ sam's offer to go along, steve clearly had more pym particles on him than he'd strictly need just in case shit went wrong again. even if we say he only had exactly enough, and he used his last “get home” dose to jump from 1970 back to earlier, Hank Pym was alive and well and making more from 1970 at the latest. so what did he do with the suit, give it to goodwill?? like hell!

natasha. natasha romanoff happened to that suit. they built the friendship b/w nat and steve and they built it well. he wouldn’t abandon her so easy.

it’s possible she leapt to her death because she had foreknowledge that steve had-a-way for her to make it out, though I also believe she would do exactly the same without that knowledge (rage about that in a different post....) but if she did or didn’t know, there is still no way steve watched the Avengers doing their thing – knowing gamora's story -- with a spare time-travel suit in the basement and DID NOT pull nat out of the time-stream at some point before that.

(before that stops making sense, remember, if gamora is pulled into the future from morag, she nonetheless still “existed” in that past, because the snap still happens, which means she still died for the stone in the past of the future she jumped into. bruce explained it a lot better but. handwave, that’s the logic we’re given.)

so picture this: banner freaking out as an older, "doddery" steve shoos him away from the time controls and starts slowly, painstakingly inputting a bunch of what looks to be nonsense from a folded-up piece of graph paper. the machine kicks into life again. boom.  

there’s the suit and nat in the suit.

nebula was “sent forward” to input the data to bring thanos to the future. steve is doing the exact same thing in the same order.

4. why nat not tony? Because nat, dying the way she did, has far fewer options for survival. steve only knows one confirmed way to get around that, and this is it. ALSO because it's canonical that tony created multiple copies of his own consciousness and tony and bruce (with some help from Cho) have already managed to create bio-mechanical life w/ ultron and vision (so could bruce and/or shuri alone, since tony was clear in pointing out this is bruce's field and she...separated vision from an infinity gem like damn). mr “I Am Ironman” has switched out his plain-old biological body for a much less biological one (extremis, holograms, rebooting his corpse after erasing the hero register...) more than once through the years.

5. steve has decades married to the head of SHIELD and all their tech to plan how & when to cross paths with tony, probably post-ultron, in order to download and/or contrive to make a copy of tony's memory file. which he wouldn’t have been able to use or put into effect until he “returns” because tony was still alive until a few days before, but honestly --

6. when steve shows back up, he looks  ..... smug. his answer “I don’t think I will” is very self-satisfied. and while i don't doubt living his best life and years to heal help with that, he's re-united with friends who are still knee-deep in loss, and he's... smug?

the only reason i can see in that moment is because he's taken the limits of what they've got, the ¾ win, and he's managed to play that hand in a way that got a whole lot of something out of a whole lot of maybe. a life with peggy, managing to live long enough to still "be there" for everyone without them having a chance to miss him, handing over the shield, and a second shot at bringing two fellow soldiers home?

maybe, just maybe, that’s a GOOD reason to be smug. and a great reason for giving yourself permission to live.

7. i think steve just rebooted the concept of the secret avengers, and nat & tony are first up w/ bucky clearly in on the time-heist.

now i’m gonna go breathe into a paper bag a while and think about everything else but long live the new queen of Asgard, damn