#i do have the idea of using as a conceit 'characters have the mutations they have portraits for' but then again i want chicken and robot

[kaaramel]

i conked out at like 2am writing this so weigh that in your mind vis-a-vis expectations of quality

the dialogue is weird and stilted a'purpose, partly as like, 'translation' into english from trashtalk (which i imagine is mostly pretty direct) and partly because fish hasnt held a damn conversation in years

whatever woooo apocalypse time

The day had been scorchingly hot, which was bad, and witheringly dry, which was worse. Time was, he might have preferred a dry heat, but things had changed. Drastically so. Now his water supply was unfathomably precious, and he was wasting half of it by sloshing it over his thin, membranous skin, trying in vain to keep himself moist, to wash off the dust and sand and ash that clung to him.

Once upon a time, the beginning of the end of the world, there had been all sorts of crackpot theories, doomsday cults and conspiracists blooming and thriving on the chaos of the profound, unstoppable destruction. One faction he remembered with particular bitterness had held that the influx of radiation was simply ushering in a new age - the powerful mutagen was gifting stagnant humanity a new method of evolution, allowing them to adapt to their new environments, guiding them to radiate into a thousand brand-new, more powerful, better-suited forms. The cults were long since disbanded or dead or themselves mutated into unrecognizability, but he would have liked to confront them, perhaps. Demand what their oh-so-idealistic philosophy of hyperadaptation could say to explain away being shaped into a fish in the middle of the desert.

He'd kept two legs, two arms, two eyes, one head, and such. That was more than some poor bastards could say. His skin was more like a frog's than a fish's, strictly speaking, scale-free and smooth and a vivid shade of green; it was the fins and the wide, thick-lipped mouth that gave him the impression that he’d go well with tartar sauce. He'd never been near a body of water large enough to test whether he actually had gills, but a certain internal fluttering and other changes in the way he breathed suggested he might. He'd never been much of a looker, even before, but he could run and talk and shoot, all of which were skills that counted, in this new and harsher world.

He was not much more than another desert scavenger, competing with the scorpions and the maggots. The bandage-cloaked bandit gangs were the closest thing to civilization, and they bickered and stole and fought among themselves, endlessly. He survived; that was about all that could be said, and it pained him, when he had the energy to spare for self-reflection.

The bandit gangs had been quiet lately, which really should have been a sign. He hadn't paid enough attention, had just been grateful for the lull in activity. As far as he could gather, several factions had been united under a single strong leader. He had not, unfortunately, deduced this through some sort of brilliantly skilled ex-cop investigative work. It was a guess inspired by his current state of being shot at by a big fuckin' bandit and his swarm of cronies.

Cowering behind cover (the bleached skull of some long-dead fishlike creature, which wasn't particularly encouraging) he worked to reload his trusty, slightly battered revolver. He'd been hit once, but that was fine, he'd always worked better under stress. Think of it as motivation to get this over with quickly. Another flurry of bullets whizzed around him, some of them cracking into his makeshift protection, which wouldn't last forever. He just needed to find the right moment.

The shooting paused. The bandit leader spat some crude and guttural jabbering about cowardice, his voice betraying that he was on the move, angling for a new position. Time to move - he ducked and rolled, came up on his feet, revolver steady -

Something burst out of the rocky wall of the canyon - about baseline human-size and bipedal, purple, faceted surfaces that the sun reflected off. It continued the wild charge, funneled its momentum seamlessly into a furious uppercut that sent one unlucky bandit flying off its feet and crashing headlong into another. Both went down in a tangle of wrappings and rifles. The lead bandit turned, distracted, unloaded a wild barrage of gunfire at the newcomer with a roar of rage. The forgotten loner, not distracted at all, trained his revolver on the towering figure and fired, over and over, until his target crumpled to the desert sand.

The remaining bandits cut their losses and fled, trading frantic accusations and vicious insults (Trashtalk, as its name would suggest, was a language truly rich with insults - even the simplified pidgin the bandits spoke). He approached the big bandit's corpse as the dust cleared, anxious to loot him before any particularly daring bandits chose to regroup. It was a shame about the mutant that had leapt into the fray like that, earning itself nothing but a showy entrance and a point-blank flurry of gunfire, but perhaps it had been carrying valuables as well...

A crystalline formation jutting out of the ground beside the fallen bandit glittered brilliantly in the sunlight, and resolved itself somehow into a humanoid shape, albeit a squat and bulky one, with no obvious neck or any division between head and torso. It was the mutant that had plowed through a solid wall of rock, then taken the brunt of bandit gunfire, and it was clearly untouched. Grinning, it raised a chunky hand in friendly greeting.

"Hello." Its Trashtalk had an odd, eerie echo to it, but was entirely understandable. "Good shooting."

"How you alive?" he demanded, blunter and gruffer than he liked, his voice rough from disuse. He wished he could spare a drink of water.

It grinned, and its teeth were sharp and blindingly shiny. "Oh, that? I'm tough. I can handle a few bullets." The constructions it used when referring to itself were unfamiliar to him for a moment, and then he recognized the form. Feminine. She continued. "Like a rock, see? I reflect -" She flexed an arm, showing an impressive bicep, and it went rigid and sharp, the flat panes of it glossy in the bright desert sun. Pointed with the other, mimed a bullet's path bouncing off of it. "Ka-ping."

"You're very strong." He edged closer to the big bandit's body, wondering bleakly if she would demand the spoils from the kill. His best chance in that case would be to grab what he could and try to outrun her. There was something curious about the dirt near his corpse, a darker shape, a hint of movement.

"You too. Like I said. Good marksman." Her radiant smile hadn't faded. "Call me Crystal. What do I call you?"

Proper names in the wasteland were precious and rare. Too many painful memories were locked up in names from before, and on the flipside there were people now who hadn't been 'people' until the radiation, who hadn't had names at all. Mostly descriptions would do. Something snappy and short enough for your friends to yell, something obvious that didn't give too much away.

He shrugged. "Fish." What else?

"You alone? You want to come with me?"

He lost his train of thought entirely. "I - Alone. Yes. What?"

"Through the portals." He had heard the word, but not what it meant - by way of illustration, she pointed at the yawning purple vortex that had opened beside the bandit's corpse, swallowing a trickle of fine desert sand that swirled and disappeared inside. "I'm looking for something. Special. Important. You should come, Fish-out-of-water. This is no place for you."

What did he have to lose?

"Fläshyn," he grunted. Let's do this.

The bandits had carried nothing much useful besides ammunition and guns. Fish managed to patch himself up, liberated a shotgun and some shells that didn't seem in too dire a state. Crystal slung a machinegun over her craggy shoulder and strode confidently toward the portal.

"We need to stick together," she warned him, bracing her feet against the inexorable suction, and held out a hand for him to take. It was solid but surprisingly warm - not on the surface like a rock that had been in the sun, but truly heated from within. "It'll be rough. Hope you don't get sick easy."

"I'll survive," he said, and the portal drew them in to a dizzying timeless rushing void - nothing solid, nothing still, no way to orient himself or measure how long he'd been inside

- and emerged into clear blue waters.

He gasped reflexively for air and got a rush of warm water that soothed parts of his throat he hadn't known existed. He could breathe! Not labored, painful gasps for hot, dry, sandy air, real breathing!

Crystal's chuckle was distorted even more by the water. "Portals aren't always this nice. Lucky you, Fish."

"I will drink. This entire oasis." It was the only word that came to mind for body-of-water. Fish kicked off from the ground, swimming a few strokes experimentally. His efforts were a little clumsy, but respectable enough. Crystal appeared to be heavy enough to simply walk along the bottom.

"Staying here then? I won't make you go. This might be a good place." It was tempting for perhaps half a second.

Other fish - animal fish, not humanoid mutants - were already gathering. The bony, visible ribcages and sharp teeth weren't especially encouraging. A few tenacious scraps of water plants were clinging to the rocky bottom, achingly brilliant rippling green strands, but even as he watched, a few of the starvation-skinny fish got into a fight over the few stringy mouthfuls, snapping and ramming at each other viciously. If this was the state of the local wildlife, he'd just as soon keep moving.

"Was a nice thought." Guns and water didn't mix; he pulled out the only thing he carried that might be effective: a screwdriver, but one large and hefty enough to do some damage. Crystal flexed her fists and shifted into a fighting stance as the school of hungry fish closed in.

[redantsunderneath]

On Analysis - Prologue

I was listening to the Diane podcast today, the third one back from hiatus.  Diane was the best Twin Peaks podcast around the time of the 2017 season, but there’s only so much material you have to work with. So they took some time off and came back with a new conceit: taking a deep look at fictional crimes with a lens somewhere between taking them as reality a.la. a true crime podcast and doing the semi-academic scab picking literary analysis.  The first two episodes were fine, but this latest one made my head explode.  The felony in question? The abduction of Princess Peach.

They made some clever connections and covered some unexpected territory using not just the Super Mario games but the manuals and even the movie as texts, but what lit me off was more the very idea of a Mario master narrative itself plus a few discrete insights that impacted me idiosyncratically (Peach as Helen of Troy supported by the fact that both characters were, at some point in the texts, said to be hatched from an egg).  But my mind spiraled off in directions they didn’t cover or only glanced by…

The games replaced Donkey (King) Kong with, in essence, Godzilla.  The creator was born the same year US occupation ended and knows the metaphors of post war pop culture as story first and metaphor second.  King Kong is about the local spirit of power contacting a colonial cultural muse and falling in love, but being bound by that invading culture.  Godzilla was something something American dominance/the bomb/awe of alien destructive power/etc but by the time the creator was paying attention was a kind of big softy protector that was American influence, or, maybe, Japanese power but Americanized, the economic power that would conquer the 80s. What is a Nintendo Princess anyway? Westernized Japanese culture or American culture captured by the local culture?  What does rescue mean when the rescuer is an Italian American caricature?

Swapping Godzilla into the Kong role is really dizzying. There is textual evidence that Bowser ruined the environment mutating things but wants to make it better and “took” (note scare quotes) the princess because he needs “white magic” to fix the world.  The rescuer is a classic American trope - the black haired immigrant superhero, the working class soldier from Brooklyn.  Helen of Troy seems a real influence on what’s going on, but it’s the Romans that colonized that story (cf: the Aeneid), then imported it to American monster movies which then got imported into Japanese pop culture. Let’s not get into the sexual stuff.

I’d rather not even draw any explicit lines here as the unmoored connections are too fun to kill by tacking them to the interpretive ground.  The first 2 movies of the current monsterverse cinematic universe play with these ideas and inversions, incorporating fear of immigration and American postwar military interventionism (the third movie is hot garbage whose themes seem to be about how fucking stupid misanthropic political policy is, mostly demonstrated by making everyone hate humans and act really stupid).

One of my sons happened to walk by when I was listening, I told him what was going on, and his first blurted thought was “Miyamoto absolutely denies that his games are about anything, and that games should be about anything.  They are games not story.” (I swear this isn’t one of those twitter “my 5 year old said “mommy, why is Trump so mean to Hunter Biden” confabulations - this kid is over 18 and has watched too much you tube).

As a result, I lost all desire to think about Mario but was seized with the need to mansplain to him why it’s probably good that he has so little interpretive insight into his own work because there is nothing that kills creativity as much as being fully conscious of that shit while you are making art.  But I realized, I have never really tried to unpack how I think about this stuff, the position of interpretation of art as part of the process of experiencing art.  I don’t even have copy pasta for discord arguments with people on various sides of the discourse when this shit comes up!

I’m going to try to unpack this, for what it’s worth. 

[myfriendpokey]

Morality Play

What does it mean to have a videogame tell you you're a good person? It doesn't know me, can't see me. I don't know if you can be *immoral* in a single player game outside of some very inventive custom controls. Why should I care what a game says? Any inner moral life that a videogame or a painting might possess would be more alien to me than that of a bug or a starfish. Of course videogames and paintings are made by humans, and shaped by the moral opinion of humans.. but we might make a distinction between what the human says and the object says, we might still feel the latter is more important, somehow. 

The moral authority of an artwork or object comes from the fact that it's not quite human, that it comes to us from outside humanity to an extent, is distinguished from the unreliable back and forth of human consciousness in motion. But this distance is exactly why you might expect those moral verdicts to be unintelligible to us, or at the very best, to be untrustworthy, an imitation. So what's the appeal – that of having a human voice which speaks with the gravitas of an immortal object? The pleasant conceit that the general shape of our minds is universal, like all those Star Trek aliens that are just regular guys with slightly weirder ears or foreheads? The void speaks, and turns out to sound like a computer engineer.

But maybe not necessarily, maybe in fact it's sometimes not universal authority and moral support that we seek from the object: maybe a certain jankiness of verdict around the way these things communicate in human terms is itself part of the appeal. I think of paper fortune tellers, magic eight-balls, "love tester" machines that return a romantic prognosis based on palm temperature. The entrancing bathos of the chance-driven or mechanistic judgement that still speaks with a human voice: I’m sorry, I cannot answer right now. Please shake me, so I may try again. How different is that to the widely beloved and magnificently broken romance system in Dragon's Dogma, where, spoilers: your "soulmate" is not a matter of direct moral choice, but of variables being tracked over the course of the game including who you talked to and what sidequests you completed - which means it could arbitrarily turn out to be the weapons merchant, or a grandpa npc you found a potion for. Which is goofy, but only in a slightly more blatant way than "accidentally unlocking the romantic option in a dialogue tree from just clicking around" or "having your morality score drop 5 points because you pressed the wrong button and accidentally hurled a rock at someone's head while trying to equip shoes". 

I think something I appreciate about videogames is the kind of insectlike moral life that they tend to portray, the sense of value systems which are in some way recognisable but which have mutated in conversion to something alien and horrifying. Lara Croft shooting a wild eagle is unfortunate, Lara Croft shooting a thousand wild eagles is bizarre – but really those thousand eagles are just the one eagle, the one self-contained pulp encounter fantasy, which has been extended, extrapolated, systemised as result of being placed in this machine. The latter may be more egregious but it’s still composed of repeated incidents of the original encounter - and part of the strangeness in these games is just the uncomprehending machine effort to systemise the half-formed gunk substance of our terrible fantasy lives, which only bear a vague and halfhearted relation to any notion of ethics in any case.. We can contemplate with envy and excitement the possibilities of running more realistic, recognisable emotional and moral situations through the meatgrinderof the format in this way. How about a solemn middlebrow videogame about divorcing 50 different wives, each one larger and more powerful than the last (excluding sprite recolours)? 

All this is not to say that the casual political and moral stupidity already in videogames should simply be excused or exist outside of critique. But in addition to the body of discourse  around "moral commodities" - commodities invested with moral  or political meaning independent of any brutal labour practices they might entail or monopolistic accumulation of private  wealth they might support – I think it's also worth considering the purpose of the "moral object" itself. The alienation intrinsic to the object form can be a way to think, and also a way to avoid thinking. To project moral beliefs away from the specific context of a creaturely human existence can be a way of expanding that existence, but also of denying it. The paltriness of the human can itself be problematic next to the splendour of the object, and the reflected moral superiority of those with the means of producing such objects.

*****

There's a famous line in the Spiderman comics that with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also kind of a weird line because, while obviously applicable to Spiderman, the person it's actually delivered to is Peter Parker - who is, for all his uncle knows, still a physically awkward and friendless nerd with no immediately visible "great power" to speak of. He does like nuclear physics, though - maybe the advice was intended as a friendly intervention to keep him from turning into the next Edward Teller? Or possibly it's just a kind of unconscious, pulp-writer-trance-appropriation of the muscular liberal rhetoric of the then-current Kennedy administration. Or maybe, and stretching a bit, it's a line that relates more to the conditions of pulp culture manufacturing itself, to the awareness that the stuff you make will be printed thousands of times and sold to kids around the country, poured raw into the national subconsicous. With great sales figures comes great responsiblity.

I mention it because I think it connects to an issue with the kind of cultural criticism that emerged, like it or not, from the specific context of an age of mass media. With great power comes great responsibility - but conversely, to execute your great responsibility you also need great power. And what are you meant to do if you don't have it? Does no power mean having no responsibility? It's possible, but i feel like most people would be dubious about this as a moral lesson - and the inescapability of heavily-financed blockbusters in the culture means that an assumption of already "having great power" sometimes becomes a critical starting point. If you don't have power you should get it, so that you can then have great responsibility and contribute to the discourse. The effect can sometimes be like climbing a mountain of corpses to get a better platform for your speech about world peace.

A good essay on jrpgsaredead.fyi points out the way that certain industry conversations on "accessibility" revolve specifically around access to whatever mainstream AAA action games are currently dominating the news cycle. And the related effect where both problems and proposed solutions are particular to these games, the audience they have, and the resources they can bring bear: More consultants! More characters! More romance options! Better character creators! If you're speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you'd better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving - - fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd - in effect, that it's worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience - which is of course the audience that matters, because what's the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be 'aesthetic')? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative:  a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

****

If the ethical act is that which we'd be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we'd be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies. 

The hobbyist is, by definition, not universal: they are enclosed within the local and the material. What time do you get off work? What materials do you have to hand? Are those materials always legal? The entire western RPG Maker community exists as result of widespread bootlegging; the entirety of videogame history and preservation essentially depends on stolen copies; we find out about it through ROMs, videos and screenshots which mostly depend for their continued existence on copyright holders either not finding out or choosing not to pursue these debateable violations.  It's a complicated discussion whether this stuff can be justified on a general, universal level - but also I'm not sure we can do without it. When Fortnite uses dances from TV and music videos of living memory they're considered to be in the public domain; but Fortnite itself is not in the public domain, even though it's so inescapable that even I have a pretty good idea of what it looks and plays like despite having made a pretty determined effort to not find out anything about it. It's "public culture" in that sense, and it includes public culture within it, but both game and imagery are privately owned and aggressively policed (suing teenage hackers, etc). What does it mean for art to emerge from an ever more privatized sense of public life?

In 2007 the RPG Maker game Super Columbine Massacre RPG was added to, then removed from, the Slamdance festival following complaints; it was a minor cause celebre at the time following concerns about censorship and the lack of protections for expression in the videogame format specifically following the Jack Thompson media crusade in the United States. In 2019 the same festival retrospectively changed their reasoning: now the game had no longer been removed on the basis of questionable taste, but on the basis of questionable compliance with copyright law, since it included music from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins without paying for licensing fees (and also because the author generally "hadn’t created several of its elements" - asset flips!!!). There's some humour in the fact that a benign-sounding concern with "artist's rights" could just be swapped in as a more respectable-sounding surrogate for general prudery with exactly the same result. But also, in this instance, what does it mean about the game? As facile as SCMR is, the bootleg use of graphics and music was its most interesting element: the game was a bricolage of American pop culture at a specific point in time, as were the killers, as are we. The nearness and recognisability of that culture, the sense of not being able to get enough distance from it to properly fictionalise or think about what happened, is what stands out. An "ethical" version of the same game which used original music - Nirvanalikes, some tastefully copyright-adjacent Marilyn Manson clones - would not just be diminished, it would be actively insulting in the false distance it implied.

I don't mean this at all as a request for more edgelord-ism. But it's worth remembering that videogames themselves are not ethical; are, in fact, colonized materials assembled with exploitative labour and dumped aimlessly into public life by electronics corporations looking to make a buck. The bizarre and haphazard ways this long dump of poor decisions has manifested, warped, been adjusted into culture is part of what's worth attending to about the format – I think it's worth looking closer into all these pools of murkiness, before ethical  landlords can come drape a tarp over them as part of the process of divvying up the property.

(image credits: youkai douchuuki, quiz nanairo dreams, trauma center: under the knife, espial)

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Infinity Thoughts

 So I have something of a tradition of reading comics that will in some way tie into upcoming Marvel live action films. To this end with Avengers: Endgame approaching I read through, among other things, the TPBs ‘Avengers vs. Thanos’. ‘Rebirth of Thanos’, ‘Infinity Gauntlet’ and ‘Infinity’ volumes 1-2.

For the most part I rather enjoyed them. My respect for Jim Stalin grew and I’d argue Infinity Gauntlet may well be Marvel’s finest ever crossover event story of all time...Then I got to Infinity.

Hooooooooo-boy.

This was a lame story.

To be crystal clear the trades I read through collected the main issues of the event plus the tie-in issues of Avengers and New Avengers. Since all were written by Jonathan Hickman the tie-ins are actually essential to the reading experience and I was never exactly lost reading the story. There was a brief but well done reference to the Guardians of the Galaxy tie in issues that weren’t collected but that was it.

You know how I said my respect for Stalin grew through reading this stuff? Ell my respect for Hickman sunk...even lower than it already was.

First off reading Infinity seems to have been a waste of time for my personal purposes. Whilst I do not know what Endgame has in store Infinity War took precious little from this story. It just borrowed 4/5 of Thanos’ inner circle of henchmen (Corvus Glaive, Prixima Midnight, Ebony Maw) and also the Outriders, those four limbed footsoldiers Thanos uses to invade Wakanda. Speakin of which the mere idea of Thanos invading Wakanda was also borrowed from this story but it plays out drastically differently.

That’s not really a problem with the story just a personal complaint I had.

On the flipside something I can’t really complain about but will point to as a problem is that to follow the main story of Infinity you HAD to pick up the tie-ins I mentioned. A well written event shouldn’t price gouge you like that. Noticeably Infinity Gauntlet didn’t. Reading all 6 issues was a satisfying experience unto itself, I never felt like I was missing anything.

But saying Stalin is a better cosmic writer than Hickman would be redundant.

Another problem I discovered after the fact with this story was how the first 15 pages of Infinity #1 are literally just reprints of New Avengers #6 and the Free Comic book day Infinity issue. So 15/54 pages were stuff you’d either read before or could read for free.

This isn’t even getting into the writing problems in general. First of all Hickman had this insufferable habit of within issues themselves having like chapter breaks in the for of entirely blank pages with a grey title and symbol at the top. So you know...nice that you are paying for nearly blank pages amidst your £4+ comic books.

Second of all Hickman has this habit of like throwing meaningless lore at you.

In Infinity #1 for example he throws at you the brief backstory of this planet you have never seen before nor will see again as though it means something, complete with flashbacks and exposition about this planet’s great champion who’s already dead courtesy of the guy delivering the narration. And when I say it’s meaningless lore I mean Hickman has the guy say “Whatever happened to your proud champion to won the Water Wars and untied the tribes by defeating the Great Beast of Pol?”

Like...who gives a shit no one knows where or what Pol is or what the Water Wars were. The best part is that this is all adding up to this planet giving Thanos’ henchmen a tribute of several dead people.

Basically it stretched out 11 pages with meaningless lore to communicate Thanos is bad, Thanos has bad henchmen, Thanos’ demands defeated planets pay him tribute in dead people. Seems like you could accomplish that in maybe 4 pages at a push, especially for a villain everyone knows about already.

What makes this all the more confusing is that Thanos isn’t even really the central plot or threat in the story. This is in spite of being on the covers, mentioned in the solicits, the story’s name referencing stories that explicitly involve him and the story frankly existing because of his post-credits scene in Avengers 2012.

The story’s central conceit I guess is that it’s a war on two fronts.

Captain America leads most of the Avengers into space to join the Kree, Shi’ar, Skrulls, Annihilus and other alien races in a war against the army of the Builders. Meanwhile the remaining heroes (including Iron Man and the Illuminati) have to contend with Thanos who has invaded Earth looking for the sole remaining Infinity Gem and the last of his children, the half-Inhuman Thane.*

Essentially in spite of the advertisement Thanos is really just one of two antagonists in this story. And frankly clearly the one Hickman is less interested in compared to the Builders, whom shockingly, just so happen to be his own creations.

What follows is essentially a cosmic war story all about military strategy and game theory and so on, with very smart people doing very smart things.

Now in fairness conceptually this isn’t a bad idea whatsoever.

So what if Thanos is just one of two antagonistic forces. So what if it’s a war story. Those are ideas that can be done great right?

Yep...except...they aren’t.

Let’s talk about Thanos first.

His central motivation to kill his half Inhuman son is contrived and whilst it COULD have worked it just doesn’t.

As the lead in issues to Infinity Gauntlet make clear with Nebula, who claimed to be Thanos’ granddaughter, Thanos finds the idea of reproducing an affront to his nihilistic beliefs.

Thnos of course is in love with Death. As in he sees Death as a woman he’d like to make out with. To this end he committed his life to mass slaughter to win her love.

Thus entirely logically his creator Jim Stalin established that Thanos would not seek to have any offspring because, duh, if your goal is to kill as many people as possible you aren’t going to create MORE life.

So on the most basic of levels, Thanos even having any children seems out of character.

But it could have worked because the story does establish Thanos has killed his other children too. So it is entirely possible to argue that Thanos, whilst no celibate, made a point of killing his off spring to balance the scales, possibly even seeing his kids as mistakes of his youth before he’d entirely committed himself to Death.

Except the story doesn’t say anything like that. Thanos simply states the idea of Thane existing keeps him awake at night. In other words one of the 2 central antagonists has at best vague motivations.

To make matters worse Thanos is defeated via a total dues ex machina. Basically Thane undergoes a mutation as a result of Black Bolt unleashing a Terrigen mist throughout Earth, this causes him to inadvertently and instantly murder everyone within a certain radius by waving his left hand. He can only control this with the help of a containment suit one of Thanos’ inner circle, Ebony Maw provides. Maw acts as a kind of evil mentor/advisor to Thane, think Wormtongue from the Two Towers but more powerful and sinister, but we’ll get to him in a minute.

Anyway Thane is captured by Maw and presented to Thanos and whilst Thanos and his last surviving inner circle (they’re called the Black Order btw) Proxima Midnight are beating the shit out of the Avengers. Maw then says some shit about wanting to see if Thane has evolved and how he’s the only one who can beat Thanos. So Thane waves his right  hand and encases Thanos and Proxima in a great big amber cube.

Oh and this comes out of exactly nowhere!

That’s the resolution to the final issue by the way. THAT is how this 2 volume event friggin ends. Pathetic.

More pathetic even than the already pretty pathetic motives and characterization given over to Ebony Maw and the entirety of the Black Order.

Look, the idea of Thanos having an elite entourage as opposed to just hordes of gneric nameless thralls** is a good one.

The idea of them worshipping him and/or Death is fine.

But beyond their looks we get little characterization from any of them. Glaive and Midnight are offhandily established as married. Black Dwarf is just a big dumb warrior thug. We get a mini-monologue about Supergiant’s childhood and why she follows Thanos in the pages just prior to hear death towards the end of the story. And Ebony Maw...nothing. We have no reason for why he acts against his master or what the fuck his agenda is.

What little we know of the Black Order comes from I kid you not a mini Marvel Handbook segment randomly inserted into the story that gives you like a short paragraph on each member and their abilities.

So you know...literally telling us instead of showing us who these people are and to boot it’s not even actually part of the story.

Then the story has the audacity to say that Thane, Hickman’s new underdeveloped character has and will become even worse than his Dad. His Dad who I will remind you literally caused universal genocide when he snapped his fingers and killed half the universe’s population...and THEN murdered all the cosmic beings. Oh but Thane is worse because he...can trap people in amber...?????

There is also precious little characterization or development lent to Thanos in the entire story, whereas the events its trading off of (Infinity Gauntlet, etc) absolutely did. Here Thanos is the big bad villain and little else. He isn’t even the biggest threat nor does he comprise the majority of the panel time.

That distinction goes to the Builders.

Oh lord...the builders. Who also count among their ranks the Gardners known as the Ex Nihili, the Alephs robot soldiers and exist in the superflow of the multiverse having created the Starbrand and other cosmic tools to shape the evolution of species across the universe.

Did any of that sound bland, boring, meaningless and simply pretentious mastabatory science fiction talk?

Well that’s only because it is.

Marvel has a robust cosmic lore to them. The first generation of that was really installed by Lee and Steve Ditko in Doctor Strange and to a much greater extent Lee and Jack Kirby in Thor, Fantastic Four, Avengers and other titles. That’s where we of course get guys like Galactus.

The second generation I’d argue was Jim Stalin who set up Thanos, Drax the Destroyer Adam Warlock, the Infinity Gems and also Chris Claremont along with his collaborators who birthed the Phoenix Force and the Shi’ar and so on.

The third generation was Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Keith Giffen. These guys added a few things to Marvel Cosmic but really their forte was more adopting stuff already in the Marvel universe and expanding it or using it in interesting ways. The best examples of this being their Magnum Opus, Annihilation which made Annihilus a Big Bad for the Marvel Universe, and ESTABLISHING the Guardians of the Galaxy that the movies took inspiration from. Whilst they didn’t necessarily create any of the Guardians they were the guys who essentially made them the space Avengers.

Hickman is essentially the headliner for the fourth generation and by far and away the most creative.

And by creative I mean he is very good at dreaming up ideas. He’s a classic ‘Big Concepts’ science fiction writer.

Where he falls down is in executing said concepts.

Whilst the past generation of Marvel Cosmic creators vacillated between going for something sweepingly epic or else fun and bombastic or something in between, Hickman’s work is devoid of the fun bombast of a Silver dude riding a surfboard in space but is also if anything trying way too hard to be ‘Epic Cosmic’ than anything the older creators did. And they at least were doing it at a different time when standards for comics were different.

Let’s take the Galactus Trilogy and Infinity Gauntlet as an example. In the 1960s presenting us a science fiction comic book antagonist who was an allegory for God was really impressive and him engaging in a debate with the Watcher about the nature of humanity was deep stuff.***

Similarly the Infinity Gauntlet was concerned with the burden of Godhood and acted as something of a bizarre love story between Thanos and death, the ultimate character study of the Mad Titan.

Hickman in Infinity though mostly just throws Big Science Fiction Concepts (tm) at you and expects you to be impressed by their mere existence, as though ‘the Avengers fight a big space war’ is something to be impressed by in 2013 when we’ve had how many stories like that?

Worse his Big Concepts aren’t just expected to be impressive via their mere existence but are also just...rather dull. There is little personality to the boringly named Builders and only slightly more in the pretentiously named Ex Nihili (Hickman loves throwing around very impressive big nonsense words for his science fiction crap, God forbid they be something simple and/or silly but memorable like ‘Galactus’, ‘the Infinity Gauntlet’, ‘Annihilus’, etc). The Gardners/Ex Nihili kind of look interesting but the Builders themselves are just the most boringly designed aliens ever.

When you see the Watchers or the Celestials you BUY that they are the oldest race in the universe, you buy they are cosmic beings on a higher plane than mere mortals. The Builders are just grey vaguely buggish dudes. Their footsoldiers the Alephs are worse. They’re generic Terminator rip off robots.

The art throughout the story looks pretty but it’s design sense is lame at best and it has the eternal problem of so many 2000s/early 2010s comics that the art looks beautiful panel to panel but is also stiff and looks like a series of very pretty portraits that lack life or the illusion of movement. Comic book art shouldn’t be  a series if paintings next to one another conveying the highlights of a scene but an organic flow from one panel to the next creating the illusion of movement. Want to see this done well in a big event story? Check out Mike Zeck on Secret Wars or Perez/Lim on Infinity Gauntlet. Or hell anything Ron Frenz draws.

Okay, they look boring, they sound boring, their concepts aren’t used that effectively BUT...surely the Builders storyline has merit? Surely this cosmic war story is at least a good war story.

Well...yes and no.

The military strategy used in the story is pretty realistic and well thought out, speaking as someone who isn’t familiar with military strategy history or stories rooted in that stuff.

If nothing else the core concept of Thanos attacking Earth whilst the Avengers are off fighting on another front and the X-Men are divided (because of Schism) is basic and interesting use of strategy.

And the space warfare for the most part seemed reminiscent of Star Trek, speaking as someone who’s got novice knowledge at best of that franchise.

Here is the problem though...it’s also painfully dull for anyone who isn’t hyper into that stuff.

Which would be fine...if the story was solely contained within the main Infinity book.

I’ve long defended Secret Wars 1984 on the grounds that as it’s own mini-series it wasn’t obliged to follow thematic conventions or writing conventions of the solo or team titles, it could be it’s own sandbox. So if it wanted to be a light war story/series of fun action set pieces, fine.

So if Infinity wanted to be an Avengers space military strategy comic book for 6 issues okay fine. Except it wasn’t, it roped in Avengers and New Avengers into it too.

And at that point the tie-ins at the very least needed to have something more. You know like...personality.

The single biggest problem with pretty much any Hickman story I’ve read is that far too often the characters talk stiffly and unrealistically, with a coldness to them, a functionality. There is precious little personality or emotion to them. Even when the art is showing us emotion you simply see it as opposed to actually connecting with it.

There are only the briefest of smatterings of truly emotional or personable moments in the entire story and as a consequence they kind of stick out like a sore thumb. Smasher and Cannonball hooking up (out of nowhere in the story like there was no inclination they had the hots for one another earlier) and Sunspot quipping about it is the most human moment in the entire story closely followed by Manifold expressing exhaustion over constantly fighting.

The closest thing to a charismatic character in the entire story is friggin Maximus the Mad!

How do you do that in a story with Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Panther, Reed Richards, Namor and friggin Thanos!!!!

All this and the story exists for anything but a genuine creative drive. It exists because

a)      Marvel needed to make bank off of Thanos’ cameo in Avengers 2012

b)      Marvel needed to remind people Thanos exists after his cameo

c)       Marvel needed to workshop some possible concepts for the then inevitable Thanos movie on the horizon

d)      Marvel needed to amp up the Inhumans via their stupid cloud unleashed in this story so they could begin their dastardly master plan to supplant the X-Men with them

 Ugh. I recommend you simply skip this story wholesale.

*The other 5 Infinity Gems were destroyed

 **By the way in Stalin’s stories Thanos’ armies comprised of a diverse group of alien baddies. Here...there are different kinds of aliens but they seem to be a few species who all look the same. Hardly what Stalin and other artists rendered, which gave you an idea of the scope of Thanos’ travels.

If we’re going to be paying more money for comics nowdays could they maybe put in at minimum the same effort as cheaper comics from 40 years ago!

 ***The Watchers and Celestials by the way, Jack Kirby creations, get supplanted by Hickman as the oldest and most powerful race in the universe for the sake of his boringly named ‘Builders’

[gojonstonego]

Modding the Waste Land: Intertextual Mutation Between Games and Poems

I’m presenting an extended abstract at the DiGRA 2019 conference in Kyoto this coming week, based on my practical PhD research. This is the final introduction/summary text:

In Ludic Mutation: The Player’s Power to Change the Game (2012), Anne-Marie Schleiner describes how artists and players alike resist the mechanically and culturally imposed rules of digital games by finding unconventional, expressive ways to interact with game content. In doing so, they reclaim play environments from commercial games publishers, treating games as sources of “play material” that can be endlessly appropriated, hacked, remolded and recontextualised. Fan art, fan fiction and other kinds of creative adaptation inevitably exert a transformative effect upon the material they adapt. Thinking of this activity in the light of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality – the understanding that all texts absorb, transform, and are in dialogue with other texts – we arrive at the idea of intertextual mutation: conscious alteration of a text or texts by creative reconfigurement through another text. This can be thought of as an extension of play, akin to the work performed by modding communities when they change the code or otherwise tamper with a piece of software directly.

Intertextual mutation taking place between games and poems is one dimension of a broader, emergent field of ludic-poetic interplay that includes games behaving like poems (poetic games), poems behaving like games (ludokinetic poems) and poem-game hybrids. In this sense, intertextual mutation might mean the reconfigurement of poems by their inclusion, partial or total, in a game, or it might mean using poetry as a means to play with and alter the content of an existing game. Since authors have always engaged in the activity of reworking other texts, and poetry in particular works on the basis of finding symbolism and meaning in artefacts both textual and non-textual, as well as in creative iteration of established patterns, it is not surprising that a number of volumes of poetry have already been published that use material from computer games and computer game franchises. These include The Mario Kart 64 Poems by August Smith (Cool Skull Press, 2015), But Our Princess is in Another Castle by B.J. Best (Rose Metal Press, 2013) and Level End by Brian Oliu (Origami Zoo Press, 2012). Myself and Kirsten Irving co-edited an anthology of computer game poems by UK poets in 2013, at a time when we sensed that a generation of younger poets were beginning to look to games for fresh poetic material. A number of the poets we published in this volume have gone on to win major awards, and among the books shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the UK this year is Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019), which borrows its structure and much of its imagery from Super Mario World.

The position of the poet engaging with the content of games is unique. Since there is little crossover between the audience for commercial games and the audience for poetry, they cannot easily rely on reader familiarity with the text they are reconfiguring. On the other hand, they do not face the same legal restrictions that fan artists, fan fiction writers and modders do with regard to copyright law. This is because fair use and fair dealing exemptions generally permit the use of copyrighted material both where there is a substantial “transformative” effect, and where it is being selectively quoted for the purposes of comment or criticism. Poets are very much in the business of metaphor, and metaphor is a process that is fundamentally both transformative and selective. As phrased by Philip Wheelwright, metaphor is marked by “the double imaginative act of outreaching and combining” (1968, p.72), an act that changes what it uses. The poet who works with the play material of digital games wields it as the semantic vehicle for something “more obscurely known” (Wheelwright, p.73), and in so doing articulates and expands on the symbolic properties of that material. 

A typical strategy in the volumes of poetry I have mentioned above, therefore, is to redeploy characters, items and specific ludic situations from games as elements of a poetic conceit directed at broader themes of identity, intimacy and modernity. Oliu’s poems in Level End, for example, are staged as “boss battles” or “save points”, but each frames an account of events occurring outside the world of the computer game, mixing details we recognise as being derived from real-life experience with other elements imported from the unreality of games. The latter are invariably put to work as metaphor, enhancing both the immediacy and the polysemantic essence of the poetry.

As a poetry practitioner myself, I have found that characters from games can be used as personae, as imaginary interlocutors and as rich sources of imagery in exploring personal, interpersonal and sociopolitical issues, as well as simply inventing new unrealities. I consider this exploration to be both a form of play, connected to and extending out of the play engendered by the games themselves, and a kind of critical intervention. Furthermore, I would argue that the flexibility of metaphor allows the resulting poems to lead a double-life, both independently of the texts on which they draw, and as paratextual add-ons or modifications to them. In the full talk, I will develop these claims with examples from my own practice, giving particular attention to intertextual mutation as a creative-critical act related to both play and theory.

Best, B.J. 2013. But Our Princess is in Another Castle. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press.

Kristeva, J. 1980. ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’. In L. S. Roudiez (ed.), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (pp. 64-91). New York, NY: Colombia University Press.

Nintendo Entertainment. 1990. Super Mario World. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo.

Oliu, B. 2012. Level End. Origami Zoo Press.

Schleiner, A-M. 2012. Ludic Mutation: The Player’s Power to Change the Game.  Accessed 19 January 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.378401 (published in print in 2017 as as The Player’s Power to Change the Game: Ludic Mutation. Amsterdam University Press).

Sexton, S. 2019. If All the World and Love Were Young. London, England: Penguin.

Smith, A. 2015. The Mario Kart 64 Poems. Somervilla, M.A, USA: Cool Skull Press.

Stone, J. and Irving, K. Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge. London, England: Sidekick Books.

Wheelwright, P. 1968. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington, USA; London, England: Indiana University Press.

[hellomissmabel]

“Bubblegum pink really ain’t my colour, doll”

MASTERLIST

Pairing: Bucky x reader

Warnings: FLUFFY

Word count: 3.634

Summary & A/N: It’s originally based on an idea I got from @hymnofthevalkyries but then I saw this prompt and it actually comes pretty close to what I had in mind. I also took the liberty to use the four prompts (in bold) provided by @the-vigilante who requested a fluffy Bucky x reader. Here you go hun ❤

When I look at pictures of when I was younger, I barely even recognise the girl in them. I was such a sickly child, with long white hair, light grey eyes and a translucent skin. That girl is long gone and has been replaced by a grown-up woman with rainbow coloured hair and a hard to pin down eye colour. Born with a mutation that allows me to switch from one colour to another depending on my mood, I caught the eye of Nick Fury and was recruited by the Avengers shortly after he found out about my other ability.

I’m not a kick-ass assassin like Natasha Romanova or a super soldier like Steve Rogers, but I do know this pretty neat trick that certainly comes in handy during interrogations. You see, I know fairly quickly when you’re lying to me and when you’re telling the truth. I’m basically a human lie detector and it annoys the hell out of Sam but hey, I can’t help it that I was born this awesome!

Other than that, things are pretty fly at the Avenger’s compound. Like I already mentioned, I was born with white hair, associated with light, goodness, innocence and purity. I mostly return to my original shade when I’m either sleeping, not paying a lot of attention (and Steve always scolds me for it, bummer!) or just very concentrated on something.

My eyes usually have this silver glow about them, yet their hue changes into the same colour as my hair given how I’m feeling at the moment. For example, when I’m excited I look like a rogue canary with amber eyes and Sam just can’t resist the urge to tease me about it because he thinks yellow is such a shitty colour.

Whenever I’m running about the lab, conducting experiments with Tony and Bruce, it’s always a soft olive green. It symbolises peace and safety which is only fitting as the lab is the first place I go to when things get a little too much to handle. It’s not easy adjusting to a life away from my family and friends and I get overwhelmed pretty fast when I sense someone’s not being completely honest with me which, frankly, happens quite a lot – you would be surprised at the amount of white lies that are told around the compound!

Fortunately everyone understands and they leave me be until my true colours resurface, indicating it’s time to get out of hiding again. Slowly but surely the green will translate into a paler shade of blue, linked to depth and stability as well as loyalty and wisdom. It’s the exact same reason why my hair and eyes take on a dark blue hue when I’m around Steve, the personification of knowledge and integrity.

I try to keep my Nymphadora Tonks game strong when I’m at the base but prefer to keep a low profile when walking the streets. Having this particular mutation can get me in quite a lot of trouble when I’m out there in the field and I used to wear a wig every time the team went out on another assignment. But wigs are itchy and I just don’t feel like myself whenever I wear one.

So I spent countless nights trying to figure out how to control my biggest problem, my unruly hair, which means control my emotions until the intensity would subside into a more neutral colour like, say, black. Black, connected to power, elegance and mystery. Exactly my cup of tea.

On other days however I’m fuming with rage, like that one time when one of Tony’s conceited new interns called me a fat, brainless and immature bimbo. My hair almost caught fire by the angry red shade it turned into, my eyes a violent shade of black pushing back my natural light grey irises.

Such situations quickly subside and I usually find myself into a transitional state for a couple of days, orange indicating the shift between passionate red and cheerful yellow. When the emotional storm inside of me blows over and I’ve cooled down a bit, I find myself staring at a brown-eyed brunet in the mirror, brown equalling stability of mind.

Although the colour spectrum is very wide and I’m basically a hot mess, there’s one colour I’ve never exhibited before. That is, until the day Bucky Barnes walked into my life and I surprised everyone, including myself, with just how much I instantly took a liking to him.

“Avengers assemble!,” Tony declares loudly as he steps inside the common area, followed closely by Bruce.

“Stop stealing Steve’s lines, Tony. It’s hardly original,” Nat calls out from on the couch where she’s snuggled up to Clint.

Tony sends her a dirty look. “Well, I’m sure Capsicle doesn’t mind. Besides, it’s not like he’s taken a patent on it or something,” he snaps back with his usual amount of sass and sarcasm. “Now, what I wanted to talk to you about. We’ve got a new guest, Steve decided it’s time for the Winter Soldier aka his brother from another mother to move in with us. They’re down the hall, waiting for my signal.”

“You mean THE Winter Soldier? As in, sergeant James Buchanan Barnes?,” you gasp in excitement, your brain going into overdrive as you try to assess this new and exciting information. You’ve heard countless rumours about the Winter Soldier but that didn’t stop you from hacking into the security system and reading up on his more personal files. Based on what you’ve gathered so far, James Barnes is a man of outstanding character and a born leader who you have been dying to meet ever since he resurfaced again.

“That’s just bloody brilliant,” you exclaim while nudging Wanda’s side who just rolls her eyes at your child-like enthusiasm. Well, it’s not every day you get to meet the man you’ve heard Steve gush about so many times in the past.

Yet nothing could have prepared you for this, your mouth dropping open at the sight of the metal-armed soldier walking next to Steve as they enter the living room area. He’s dressed casually in black slacks and a red Henley, showcasing a generous amount of muscle and you gulp audibly at the inappropriate thoughts screaming for your attention. You know Thor is a God but damn, if Thor is a God then what the fuck does that make Bucky Barnes?

“Oh fuck me already,” you mutter under your breath. You were so caught up in your thoughts you didn’t notice the team staring at you, collectively amused and grinning like complete fools.

“I believe that can be arranged,” Sam replies in a sing-song voice.

“You’re seriously like a man-child,” you retort instantly.

“And you’re Satan,” Sam hisses through his teeth.

“Did you just hiss at me?,” you huff in disdain. “What?,” you try again, getting angry at their obstinate silence, addressing the crowd gathered around you only to be met with a fit of giggles once more.

“Y/N, your hair,” Natasha chuckles whilst pointing at you with mischievous eyes, “It’s pink, like cotton candy pink. It’s never been pink before.” She gives you a knowing smile and her remark was met by a series of oh’s and ah’s from other team members and even a snort from Clint.

Pink, the colour of romance and femininity. As if it’s not bad enough that your cheeks are already flaring up with the heat running through your system, sending colour rising from your neck all the way up to the tips of your ears.

“The colour of looooooooooove,” Sam chimes in and Steve playfully jabs him in the side, Sam retaliating instantly and swatting back at him.

“Oh, look, her eyes are beginning to turn pink too!,” Tony exclaims, clutching his chest as a bouldering laugh escapes his lips.

“Guys, guys, shut it! Can’t you see you’re embarrassing the poor girl. Let’s give her some space, we can resume introductions later,” the blond super soldier interrupts and you thank your lucky stars for his consideration. He winks excessively at you (always the drama queen) just before sneaking out of the room, albeit dragging Tony with him who can’t stop snickering.

The room clears out pretty fast, Wanda blowing you a kiss before she disappears around the corner with Nat. You release a shaky breath thinking you’re alone at last. Well, alone if it wasn’t for an intriguing super soldier and former assassin staring back at you with fascination and borderline obsession.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do about it, this has honestly never happened before.” Your eyes drop to your lap only to glance back up and meet his curious gaze, a fond smile playing on his lips.

“Your hair,” he begins as he inches a few steps closer to where you’re leaning against the couch. “It’s very pretty.” His voice is low and hoarse, with an edge to it that makes it all the more sexy. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bucky says as your hair goes from fuchsia to magenta to shocking pink at the obvious wonder lacing his gruff voice.

You take a moment to appreciate his handsome features, finding it soothing to just look at all that is Bucky Barnes, steadying your breathing in order to take your rampant hormones down a notch, his 5 o’clock shadow not helping one bit. But the true centrepiece of this Greek sculpture is his eyes, a stormy blue-grey you’ve never encountered before and you reckon will soon become your latest nightly fixation.

As your eyes scan his body as well, you notice the way his breathing picks up when you focus on his luscious lips. Meanwhile his eyes dart from your hair down to your eyes and even further down to your lips as well. “Pink suits you,” he chuckles darkly and you swear the temperature in the room has picked up a couple degrees. His eyes are pensive, concentrated on the phaenomenon playing out in front of his eyes.

“Th-thank y-you,” you stammer as he twirls a lock of salmon hair around his finger and your breath gets caught in your throat. Judging by the light red shade of your hair, you’re slightly (very) aroused and it looks like Bucky is struggling too. He then gingerly tucks the lock back behind your ear, clearing his throat and excusing himself before walking away in long strides.

Ever since that first day, there’s only one colour popping up whenever Bucky is around and you are rarely able to change it back. Some of the other agents even thought you’d dyed your hair pink permanently and even Steve is now giving you shit for it. It happens at the worst possible time, like when you’re busy sparring with Natasha when the door suddenly flings open to reveal a scarcely clothed super soldier, his shirt nowhere to be seen and his chestnut hair loosely tied back in a messy bun.

It doesn’t take much more than that, his eyes locking with yours and instantly colour rises to your cheeks. Soon your entire appearance gives away how truly affected you are by this glorious apparition. Natasha takes advantage of the opening in your guard and flips you over on the mat, landing flat on your back and grunting in pain. Bucky rapidly comes to your aid and offers you a helping hand, swiftly pulling you back to your feet. You thank him and he graces you with a shy smile telling you he likes this new colour on you.

Stunned by his words you turn around on the heels of your feet, jogging over to the life-sized mirror at the other end of the gym and sure enough, your hair is a watermelon pink and your pupils are blown wide, already glossing over with a soft pink hue. Let me remind you, pink evokes romantic feelings and you wish you could just turn invisible instead of being confronted by Nat’s prying eyes and avoid being pulled into a cross-examination later on. But now you just have to get out of there.

Hurriedly saying your goodbyes to Nat and Bucky, you rush past them towards the locker room, Bucky’s hand missing yours by an inch. He wants to ask you what is wrong, if he has said or done anything to upset you. Nat isn’t of much help either, she just shrugs as she murmurs “I’m too sober for this” followed by something about Y/N being a little nervous around new people.

It really doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing, the very second Bucky makes an appearance, your hair looks just as flustered as your cheeks, not to mention your dilating pupils and skyrocketing heartbeat. You mostly manage to talk (stutter) your way out of it, throwing some flimsy excuse about having forgotten something at the lab unless you’re actually at the lab and then fortunately Bruce comes to your rescue, asking you to fetch you a couple things for him in an adjoining room. But once you weren’t fast enough to slip away and Bucky’s metal hand caught your wrist causing you to stop dead in your tracks.

“Y/N, wait,” he says softly, his plump lips moving so deliciously the words almost fall on deaf ears, completely absorbed by his sinful mouth as your hair instantly turns darker.

Bucky seems to be debating what to say next, his teeth keeping his bottom lip hostage as he mulls over the words in his mind. “I – I might have said it before but this shade looks beautiful on you. It reminds me of a blushing rose.”

Completely and utterly dumbfounded by his admission, your brain having frozen over by the cold touch of the metal appendage, you throw him a quick smile before hurrying towards the nearest exit like you usually do. Bucky watches your retreating form intently, a pained expression and an ugly frown obscuring his features.

“What did I do this time?,” Bucky asks sadly, turning to Bruce for an explanation as to why you’re acting so off lately.

Bruce looks up from the petri dish he’s been working on, his brows knitted together in a thoughtful frown, smiling sympathetically as he sees the apparent distress in his friend’s eyes, saying “Maybe she’s just not feeling well. I dunno, maybe you should try asking her yourself?” before he focuses his attention back on the work in front of him.

You’re sitting on top of the kitchen counter at three a.m. in the morning, munching on a sandwich you made from some leftovers you found in the fridge. Since you can’t control your powers anymore around Bucky, you can’t accompany the others on missions anymore. Long story short, Steve benched you indefinitely until you either get a grip or tell, rather than show, poor clueless Bucky how you feel about him. You still haven’t made up your mind.

There’s a glass of milk resting on the counter next to you and as you blindly reach out to take it, you hear something rustling behind you, startling you from your inner monologue and you knock over the glass. Praise the Lord for Bucky’s quick reflexes, scooping up the glass mid-air and preventing it from spilling even more milk on the kitchen floor.

Gently balancing the glass in his hand, he sets it down on the other end of the counter. He then turns to look at you with a small smile playing on his lips, shrugging slightly and oh so adorably you feel a familiar heat pooling in your panties once more. Bucky is wearing nothing but some track pants slung low on his hips, exposing the ripped muscles of his chest alongside a perfectly sculpted Adonis belt. It takes every ounce of your willpower not to start drooling on site and you don’t need a mirror to know your hair has done it again.

“I’m so fucking clumsy. Sorry, Buck,” you apologise whilst trying to either evaporate into thin air or disappear into the surface of the kitchen counter instead of melting into a muddle at his feet in utter embarrassment.

“No worries, Y/N,” he chuckles softly, leaning against the kitchen cupboards opposite of you, crossing his arms over his chest and you can’t help but gasp a little at his bulging biceps. “Can I – uh, ask you a question?,” he inquires quietly, his voice barely a whisper compared to your raging heartbeat pulsating in your ears. While he’s waiting for your answer, his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip, smirking a little when he sees it has got you all hot and bothered.

“S-s-sure, fire away,” you mumble, averting your eyes to study the floor instead of how sharp his jawline is and how good that scruff would feel between your thighs.

He clears his throat, sporting that classic lopsided grin of his that has you weak in the knees and you’re fairly sure he can smell how turned on you are right now because surely that super soldier serum must’ve heightened his sense as well. Just your luck.

“I saw you talking to Steve the other day and your hair was this azure blue that matched the colour of his shirt and your eyes were such a deep cerulean and it got me thinking, why does she never show these kind of colours around me? Or when you were bickering with Sam over who drank the last bit of Thor’s Asgardian liquor and your hair was a gorgeous crimson. Or that time you and Wanda were so caught up in a tickle fight you didn’t notice I was staring at you and your hair was scarlet. But it wasn’t so much your hair that caught my eye as that golden spark in your eyes and that must’ve been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He momentarily stops his soliloquy to take a deep breath before continuing to speak his mind, baby blues set in determination. “I guess what I’m trying to say here… I mean, not that I have anything against pink, but… Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid to show me? Is pink like your safe colour or something because I completely understand if you don’t want anything to do with me,” he blurts out, suddenly very unsure of himself.

“I just think you’re drop dead gorgeous, Y/N, no matter what colour you’re wearing.” Bucky scratches the back of his head, missing the cheeky smile tugging at the corners of your mouth. His eyes flick downwards before shooting back to your face as you release a shaky laugh.

“Oh Bucky,” you coo as you jump of the counter and cross the distance between your body and his, moving to stand between his legs, leaning the tiniest bit against his broad frame for support and gently placing your right hand over his heart, squinting your eyes just a little as his muscles flex under your touch. He totally did that on purpose.

“I – I really like you. I’m incapable of thinking about anything or anyone else but you when you’re around. My mind just goes blank and all my thoughts, they all revolve around you. I guess what I’m trying to say is…”

Bucky stares at you expectantly, wide-eyed and amused at your insecurity. His hands cups your face and he delicately brings his lips to yours, kissing you tentatively and tenderly before breaking away to gauge your reaction.

“I really like you, too” he confesses gingerly when he sees your mouth hanging open in surprise. “But bubblegum pink really ain’t my colour, doll,” he jokes and you let out a light laugh, lacing your fingers around his neck and pulling him back in for another kiss, sensually slanting your lips across his before kissing him deeply and passionately and with all the feeling in the world. Everything that’s left unsaid you pour into the kiss, every single emotion you are not capable to breathe or voice out, you evoke through the sheer power of love. Because you love this man and you have done so from the very moment you first laid eyes on him.

You part ways, panting and trying to catch your breath when Bucky twirls a lock of your hair around his pointer finger, much like he had done that first day. “Now this is more my colour,” he chuckles and you step away to retrieve your phone from the table top, using it as a mirror to assess the damage done. Your hair is a deep plum and your eyes have that violet hue you love so much. Bucky snugly tucks you in his chiselled arms and it’s a perfect fit, Bucky is even more beautiful up close. He’s holding you tightly, pressing a chaste kiss to your temple.

“Purple just happens to be my favourite colour,” he hums against your forehead, a low rumble resonating through his chest and sending shivers up and down your spine.

“Technically it’s lilac,” you retort with a grin, laughing lightly as you lean into him, your lips coming dangerously close to his again.

“I don’t care,” he breathes out, rough and raspy, his breath tickling your lips as his nose bumps against yours. “I love it.”

“And what about me? You love me?,” you ask hesitantly, a mixture of worry and longing swirling behind your eyes.

“I love you,” Bucky confesses before connecting his lips with yours in a searing kiss, a smile crossing your features once more. You both moans into the kiss when Bucky tilts his head in order to deepen the kiss and you run your fingers through his loose strands, sighing softly at the feel of his lips finally on yours.

You’ll never wear another colour more proudly than this one.

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