#lol suck it Donny cates

[feathers-and-cigarettes]

Cackling about Sony choosing to retcon Donny Cates’ shit ass run and taking the one good idea he has ever had and putting it into a romcom.

[agentofagony]

hi!! can you recommend some of your fave or good to start with comics that focus on thor and loki's relationship as bros?? I rewatched ragnarok recently and it seems like a really good and angsty time!! <3 thanks so much for ur help if you see this. I'm someone that doesn't read comics generally LOL

Warning for death in almost every comic I'm listing also suicide as Loki tend to ....ehhhhhhhhh go depresso only getting myself killed will fix this sometimes.

In the comics Loki adoption isn't a secret,everyone knows he's adopted sorry if you already know ( if you think it was a good thing It actually sucked for Loki as Odin loved to rub it in his face everytime he messes up,like if I had a penny for everytime odin be like "is this how you pay me for adopting you?" I would be rich uggufufuf) also the comics are very different than the mcu again sorry if you already know.

Blood brothers,Loki is ugly in that but it's a great angsty comic with Loki just angsting over how Thor stopped loving him. There is also him angsting about being alone and unloved which is like typical from comics Loki but that's beside the point. Don't go expecting a happy ending Tho.

This part is basically a reading list for Kid Loki because kid Loki storyline focused heavily on Thor and loki relationship and it is WHOLESOME with a taste of angst on the side and a very tragic ending.

Since listing all the comics kid Loki appeared in is gonna take ages here is a Wiki page with all his appearance instead

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Loki_Laufeyson_(Kid_Loki)_(Earth-616)/Appearances

Stop reading after Journey Into Mystery Vol 1 645 as the rest will get you very confused as it requires reading other unrelated shit to Thor and Loki relationship.

Agent of asgard has wholesome Loki and Thor moments intill it gose understandably unwholesome by issues #10. It also shows you what I was talking about when I said Thor is part of why Loki gose back to evil even when he actually don't want his brother to end up like that.

Orginal sin Thor&Loki happens in the middle of agent of asgard storyline right after the axis event and before issues 10.

The current Thor 2020 has some sweet Thor and Loki. Stop reading after donny cates leave for a break as Loki becomes non existing after(probably with cuase the writer don't like him or something bad happened to him)

King Thor is another angsty comic about one of the possible futures of the 616 universe (there is too many possible futures lol) where Loki kills everyone on earth then gose to kill Thor .You don't need to read anything to understand what's going but if you liked gor or hated Thor : love and thunder gor storyline definitely read Thor : God of thunder it's the better version.

I feel like you need to read their entire morden characters story lines as it gives a bigger picture on why Thor acts the way he dose to ikol and it's mainly because he has anger issues and tried as fuck and Loki really isn't helping .There is also alot of misunderstandings that gose during the build ups for the war of the realms where Loki is trying to do his own shit( which in hinstaight looks very evil) And is Thor trying to do his own shit with them clashing in the middle.

[dyradoodles]

I'm behind on the comics by like 4 issues but uh. How we feelin' about the whole flash situation rn?

(p.s. your version is better if Donny Cates was on AO3 he would not be getting my kudos)

Oh man, even 4 issues behind you’re still probably way more caught up than I am LOL 

I’ve only occasionally checked to see if Cates has been moved onto a different project, and I got sucked into Witcher 3 again so I haven’t even been doing that much;; I’M AFRAID TO ASK WHAT’S GOING ON WITH MY BOY FLASH NOW HAHA

(also ty!!! Lmao if he was on ao3 I’d definitely find some way to block him)

[softgrungeprophet]

i ranted on twitter about andi benton (being ignored/mischaracterized/etc) so i’m just gonna copy-paste that all here and expand upon it:

i wish we could at least get a solo run written (and drawn) by a woman, who understands how much anger and pain andi has.

she's so fucking passive in venom inc., especially in the ending... it sucks. it's "growth" she was not shown having, predicated on abandoning a person she cared about (mania)

imagine if she reacted that way about losing flash or if eddie did that w symby? like? 

"i'm just as badass on my own" kinda missing the point here?! mania's alive!? 

(reply to a comment from rec-rewind about mania being treated like a source of power and not a partner) not to MENTION the way loss and her connection to mania are directly connected, it misses that point as well. going from "that's my symbiote!" to not giving a fuck is just so purely ooc for her and misses so much of the point 

andi benton got shafted as a new and interesting female (probably also mixed race) character with a lot of anger and potential!

she was okay in space knight but since it got cancelled it was obvs a rushed thing...

venom inc ending was bad

have not read venomized but have heard very few good things about it

she wasn't even at flash's funeral...

(reply to a comment from rec-rewind about andi being a prop for the plot) she really is a prop. she's barely present for like, half of venom inc. even tho it ostensibly should [have] been more about her than anyone else... bleh

andi benton deserves better but will probably continue to be white-washed and then get killed off for manpain

she has so much anger! so much hurt! so much potential! but she is only brought out as a plot device to say, well i guess we saved the day. yes, leave me alone in philly. forget about me.

and on my private i also tweeted about how like, tho bunn and shalvey are dudes it’d be nice to see them, as andi’s creators, write some kind of special mini, or to see bunn include her in whatever bullshit event but i really want something ~About Her~, you know? not just an inclusion in the tie-ins.

I certainly don’t trust Donny Cates to write her based on his track record so far and to be quite frank I don’t like the way Ryan Stegman drew her in Venom Inc. so I don’t look forward to seeing how she might look if she makes an appearance... or what will happen to her.

I would love to see some kind of mini written by a woman, like I mentioned, and drawn by one as well. Someone like Stacey Lee would be cool because, to quote another tweet i made this morning in my fit of rage, “her work is so dynamic and refreshing... full of movement, and clean w/o being overpolished... would suit andi's hellfire, or a symbiote like mania, well imo”

and also just cause i’ve been reading silk so her art’s on my mind XD it’s very good. there are plenty of other great artists tho. i wonder how annie wu might draw her... her skritchy fine lines would work really well. i mean like i said, kate bishop x andi benton teamup? that would be sick? get wu on it as the Original Detective-y Kate Bishop Artist, master of extremely expressive.... expressions. 

or like.... Emma Rios, or Leslie Hung... both have great art styles i think could suit a story about Andi (either solo or with hawkeye lol) in different ways, different uses of flowing shapes... you know?

ANYWAY

i love andrea benton and it sucks that she’s been reduced to an oft-forgotten, fairly passive character instead of the rage-filled, emo-goth fire-tornado she could be.....

i have a whole doc about how kate could both validate her anger and help her with understanding that anger can lead to bad choices... i have so many thoughts. i have thoughts about how andi reacted to hearing about flash’s death and how no one told her about the funeral; thoughts about how angry she must have been after flash left her standing in the snow without mania--i refuse to accept that response at face value, she was bluffing, she was pissed, ugh ugh; thoughts about how she would resent kate for trying to mentor her in the same way she resented flash for trying to step into a parental role (even if it was accidental); thoughts about how the cure for her demonic possesion was only TEMPORARY?! ARE WE GONNA?? IGNORE THAT???

thoughts about her fears and future and loneliness....

[casualantiheroism]

There's no fucking excuse to fling vitriol directly at a creator no matter how much you hate what they're doing.

Most published writers are used to it because in order to have any degree of success you have to have a sort of masochistic desire to have people tell you you suck.

I'm telling you this tho as a person who has been that fan, (look at grant ward in my avi and then remember he pushed fitzsimmons out a fucking plane before you @ me with 'I did nothing wrong Don Cates is a monsterous assbag babyman and YOU'RE a monster for liking Ward. - just marinate in the hypocrasy)

Here's some truths that are hard pills but true for you venom fans, marvel fans, dc fans.

CREATORS DONT OWE YOU SHIT.

People mourned when sherlock holmes died. Like full on victorian mourning with black armbands and holding wakes. People stormed sailors coming from the UK when Dickens wrote the old curiosity shop asking about little nell- his protagonist's friend. They waited months to read installments of the story.

Those two dudes shaped literature and when Doyle died his last words were about his wife and Dickens was asking to be made comfortable. No one, not doyle, dickens, alcott or stan the man lee thought about the fans on their deathbed. Why are you willingly pissing people off hoping they'll remember you? They won't. You're not the first 'fan' and you won't be the last. When you take critique directly to the writer that amounts to 'your mother is a llama and she should have aborted you' you have more in common with the fans of the bible who were SO WILLING to pursue THEIR version of the truth that they started a series of wars over it called the crusades.

PLEASE CRITIQUE DON'T BITCH

Donny Cates is being an overbearing manchild who is seeking attention by actively responding to every troll when he should just keep on keeping on. The man is extremely talented- even if you haven't read his other work his other work is actually pretty damn original AND breaks out of the patriarchal standards for dudes.

That said, responding to every fucking troll has the air of 'my mommy and daddy said I'm special fuck you'.

It's obvious also that a lot of blog sites are confused by VENOM. Everybody could be worrying over nothing but Cates is blowing it our of proportion because he is a comic wunderkind apparently who shits sprinkles and talent. Next fucking Alan Moore? What??

See I'm not telling this to the man's face and fuck anybody who does. The whole point of opinions is that I can have mine and he can have his and despite responding to every troll which is starting to look like a plea for attention the guy is young and he'll learn.

You know that phrase opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one? What are assholes for? Shitting. It feels GREAT to take a shit we all know this. Would you really do it in public tho? In front of someone? This is my private toilet (I'll shit as I please) but every time you dump a critique or opinion or a fucking threat in front of a creator why take a dump in public? Trust me

Writers are masochistic enough even if you want to make a point or bitch I can promise you they'll see it. The 'yes daddy tell me how much I suck' attitude is as old as the first caveman who told the first story. Why embarrass yourself and shit in public?

Writers may get the privilege of not acknowledging the fans as they die, and live, and function, and make money off fans. They pay for that privilege fully aware that there will ALWAYS be people out there who despise every thing they do. Respect that. Shit in your own toilet.

VENOM IS ANTI-GAY NOW

This one pisses me off the most because as much as the internet wants to pretend otherwise venom was NEVER fucking gay and gay people deserve better.

I say this as a big bisexual queer agender person thinking of transitioning. We deserve better then an alien and a guy who started off with a shared quest for revenge who spent most of the 90s crawling around in a sewer. We deserve people cheering. We deserve villains and heroes. We deserve wiccan and teddy from young avengers getting married and adopting a baby and teaching the new young avengers

We deserve eddie coming out as bi and maybe finding this sudden!!lady!!!ex??? (Wtf Cates??) But idk maybe fucking patrick? Or the lady? Or both??

Gay people deserve better then venom and people who ship it y'all should acknowledge that you want to see better mainstream gay rep cause it was eyeopening a.f. for me. I'm AFAB and masc. Agender. Most marvel gay representation is super femme and marvel stuck iceman back in the closet.

I deserve better and I'd rather ask Marvel for that then yell at one writer. And I know it sucks when you realize the yawning casm of pain that opens but everything worth having is worth working for.

So listen you hate venom? Hate Cates's run? Want your gay slime back? - @ marvel on social and ask where the gay male folx are. Go to cons and politely ask. Take whatever anger you feel about something that doesn't exist and put it into working so people who come after will be better.

VENOM IS ABUSIVE NOW

It always kinda was?? Most relationships in comics kinda are because there is nothing normal about a man who puts on tights and goes out to fight crime? Also its made by a bunch of people who have a masochistic need to be yelled at?? Also a bunch of people yell at them if they fuck up??

Comics for all the fun they are are also really fucked up period and its really fucked up that its the only outlet so many of us have and honestly I've got nothing I was a grant ward stan some days in my heart of hearts I still pray for a meteor to kill me.

WRITE YOUR OWN SHIT AND I'M PRETTY SURE THE DUDE WILL THANK YOU.

Already there are fan comics and really fucking talented fan artists basically setting out to 'fix' this run and NOT @'ing Cates with 'kill yourself sucky garbage man' and whatever the man might personally think, as an artist I like to believe the dude might offer a small nod of respect since he sees our tumblrs I guess (lol hi??)

Sometimes all you can do is make something.

Instead of writing this tho maybe can you write out nice things? Like original work about two guys falling in love and maybe one of them has superpowers and there's some drama but then they keep falling in love and there's lots of cuddling and cute and some drama but its the healthy relationship y'all claim to want and partner A can actually hold partner B who has autonomy?

I need that. As a trans person I need that. I need it to not be weird and fucked up I need us to face our shit as a community and make something better.

Please.

Please.

That's all I've got stop sending death threats.

[softgrungeprophet]

it’s that time again. time for me to be annoyed/frustrated at the comics that came in the 20-teens that simultaneously responded directly to the 2000s, followed in the 2000s’ continuation, but completely glossed over and ignored the very serious topics that were brought up. and then we get the fucking 2018 run which does NEITHER and just seeks to make it worse for shock value without being even remotely thoughtful about anything it does! wow.

we could have had some really interesting growth for eddie and the symbiote’s relationship by honestly addressing things like eddie’s illness, hypocrisy as anti-venom, his status as a victim of abuse, and so on...

of course i know if i say “eddie is a victim” people will get hissy but like.... i’m not saying he’s an innocent blameless baby who was manipulated into being the weirdo he is... i’m just saying... he’s a victim of abuse. he’s been taken advantage of a lot. almost any help he’s received has required some kind of reciprocation.

he’s a shithead and he went off the deep-end after new ways to die because remender’s version of eddie fucking sucks, he’s smug and weird and violent, and also he’s been neglected and tortured and abused and experimented on and he needs therapy and blah blah blah

he’s also not some fuckin accidental drunk driver who was hit into thinking he’s innocent. that’s so fucking--jeez. everything about these retcons donny has been doing miss the point even more than the comics he says he loves so much. it’s wild. like i don’t like new ways to die OR new ways to live, remender’s run was okay but i hated the way he wrote eddie, marvel knights spider-man just sucks in general, the hunger 03 also sucks, but like they do feed into each other in a way that.... sort of makes sense....

i just wish there was a way any of the comics would have said, “hey look there are some ways in which eddie is a victim but there are also some ways in which he needs to take responsibility for his actions”

but that kind of nuanced take is impossible for the way these comics are put out and canceled and retconned and so on forever.. it’s so ... ugh.....

the hunger 03 sucks... it also influenced over a decades’ worth of Venom comics including costa’s in its own weird way.... and i just wish we could simultaneously be like, Yes the symbiote is not inherently evil or corrupting but Also it did abuse Eddie, and Yes Eddie has been treated poorly for a great deal of his life and Also is a motherfucker who needs to be held responsible for his actions.

Is this hypocritical to be like, “can we address the 2000s” while also saying “2018 run is not valid”

in my defense even the shitty 2000s were like a continuity and didn’t try to fully retcon every single aspect of venom lore that ever existed (tho it sure did plenty of retconning....) whereas the current run... is doing exactly that....

of course this goddamn run will probably also influence the following comics unless the next writers retcon the retcons or like, ignore it and it gets put into its own earth or something. idk. like no one really counts dark origin right? and that works cause it also had a negligible influence on the rest of the comics. but like, the bad hunger had a very lasting impact on the comics. so i guess we just hope that donny cates, despite currently selling super well, does not actually influence any of the comics that come after?

i don’t fuckin know. i just think it kind of sucks that like “eddie was abused” is something that gets used as either a “lol no that never happened and if you talk about it you hate the symbiote” or else an excuse to demonize the symbiote even after its own character growth arcs in the apparently supremely unpopular gotg and space knight stuff... lol

maybe if every fucking series from 2013 to 2016 (minus costa which is honestly more 2017) didn’t get canned we could have gotten more. like honestly, 2016′s Carnage--for all its flaws--seemed like it had something to say about Eddie as a character, about his flaws and so on, and I gotta wonder where that was going. It flat out says “Venom didn’t make Eddie Brock a bastard” so like? But then at the same time all of the symbiotes in that series were completely silent so? I don’t even know.

Cullen Bunn was clearly going somewhere too but I have no idea where other than “symbiote is alive but has trouble communicating” and “eddie is coming down from his murder spree as he realizes flash thompson is in fact helping people as agent venom”

the two fit together in a very strangely complementary way. sometimes i gotta wonder about a universe in which those two comics in particular ran concurrently to address venom, flash, toxin, and eddie’s many issues. but toxin’s probably gone... though in my heart they are with jubulile and her mom in south africa, learning what it’s like to be part of a loving family...

man. the resigned “Okay.” at the end of twav...... twav good imo.

anyway

i don’t even know what the point of this is. i’m all over the place in this post. it’s frustrating that donny has made it kinda impossible to bring up eddie’s victimhood without like... qualifying it to the ends of the earth to clarify that you don’t think he’s some kind of pure cinnamon roll who’s been dreadfully manipulated for 12 years....

I feel like I’m not making any sense!!! Words are hard.

I feel like I’ve kinda been avoiding writing about the symbiote though in part because it’s hard for me to balance that many characters and in part because of Donny’s stupid bullshit, which is dumb as fuck but I guess that’s what he wanted huh!!!! Need to read Lethal Protector to cleanse my palate but it’s taking forever to get it from the library because they only have one copy.

ugh

The symbiote is not an evil creature like he wants everyone to think... goddammit.... but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t carefully address both its and Eddie’s mistakes without fabricating new different mistakes to obscure the previous ones. Or whatever. Fuckin I don’t know lol the entirety of the continuity is just a bunch of bullshit. 80s-90s continuity largely separate from 2000-20...15ish continuity largely separate AGAIN from the 2016 continuity yet also directly tied to it, against completely separated from the 2018 continuity which is off saying “fuck you” to literally every venom writer to ever exist since Eddie’s conception, ironically including the guy who wrote the cursed hunger

What am I trying to say! I don’t know! i feel like a broken record. There’s a lot of empty space between Agent Venom and 2016 that was never filled! also between 2016 and 2018 lmfao.

Donny “everything went wrong and I’m not going to explain how other than ‘God’ and ‘Eddie lost his job cause screaming symbiote’“ Cates really pullin some shit. what do you mean eddie tends to work toward solving his own problems EVEN WHILE DYING. waid’s mini-story in NWTD showed that eddie, despite being sad and sick and exhausted was still like.... eddie, stubbornly searching out his own solutions and getting angry. ofc i’m not sure how well it succeeded at parts. the comics in those days were still pretty steeped in the weird symbiote hallucinations that it was never clear if they were meant to be caused by the symbiote or just eddie’s sick brain. like the Last Temptation. I have a love-hate relationship with those two issues... I think they’re pretty well-done but also something about them just rubs me the wrong way. 

Anyway back to Cates: it’s not like there wasn’t space for a spiral after FH or anything. You could have really dug into Eddie and the symbiote’s insecurities wrt family and parenting. but nah. let’s just make it so there’s a SECRET CHILD, and oh the pre-established sibling? we could have dug into her and made her a real character. but no, she doesn’t exist, women are either fake or dead or violated.

asshole.

but again like..... the 03 hunger, cursed and bad... like... it’s still workable. you can work with the corrupting forces, the addiction metaphor (on the SYMBIOTE’S part, with adrenaline) and the intense codependency, and still have them move on and into a healthier-by-comparison relationship.

but cates’ run is like... much harder to recover from if it has as lasting of an effect, because it leaves no part untouched, and goes beyond “normal” abuse into really weird unforgiveable territory... like the canon of that comic is the canon in which everything has been completely changed into something unrecognizable.

i joke about my AUs being unrecognizable because, visually at least, they WOULD be unrecognizable for most Venom fans, but the comics inform them as characters a lot in the stories i write in those AUs, from the 96 good hunger, to the 03 bad hunger, to space knight to venom inc, and so on. But donny cates really is out here essentially reverse-engineering retcons to justify his characterizations.

barely related: the way eddie was raised and the way he coped by overachieving and so on and so forth makes me think he would have--despite presumably gaining a great deal of confidence in college once out of his father’s home--been really vulnerable to being taken advantage of by like, other students or teachers, but idk how exactly to articulate what i mean like... uh... not even that he WAS taken advantage of but that his need for validation would have left him open to it... i guess??

that’s got pretty much nothing to do with this post though but kinda ties into what i’ve said before about how i think eddie was a withdrawn and isolated adolescent who only opened up in college. why i disagree with donny’s retcon for that reason in addition to other reasons--the way he’d been shown to be bullied as a kid in previous comics, as well as the lack of history of alcoholism, the clarification in lethal protector that carl wasn’t physical, so on and so forth.

again that’s not related to this post really... and it’s like, a good 50% headcanon, but it makes sense in my head as something that fits his history?? i guess?

[softgrungeprophet]

i haven’t read it yet tho i look forward to it

pre-having-read-it thoughts are....

1) Horny. It SURE is, from the bits of dialogue I’ve seen lmfao. In Venom comics, the intimate physical-mental-emotional nature of symbiosis lends itself to sexual comparisons pretty easily... and so on... So i’m fine for that, especially as A) the bad Hunger has been one of the most sexually-queer-subtext comics with uncomfortably religiously sexual dialogue (with some implications there) used for a pretty negative purpose to make the audience think “ew gross bad” so it’s nice to see a comic that isn’t like... that. (Dark Origin is also pretty horny)  aaaand B) queer relationships are often only allowed in media if they are sanitized and desexualized, even though straight couples get to constantly make out and be horny like 24/7 in all media... (this varies obviously when it involves poc or other forms of marginalization, in both straight and lgbtq+ couples, which can involve either desexualization and not even allowing something as simple as a kiss OR hypersexualization/fetishization particularly when the characters in question are female) but that also gets into a whoooole fuckin analysis that is maybe more than “man and slime get fucky” warrants right now especially since I’ve mostly just seen a few pics and not most of the dialogue. So... Verdict on that is: I’m for it.

2) m/m slash... i was hoping that because of that label it was actually eddie and some guy and not symbrock simply because the symbiote is not a man but that’s arguably kinda nitpicky and probably just bugging me because of some other things going on right now unrelated to comics... but i’d still take that a thousand times over what cates is peddling, or his “the symbiote has no gender” statement coming immediately before a series of awful plot twists that led to showing how it’s manipulative and deceitful (lol thanks great)... also cause i don’t want to be too critical of a bisexual woman not using perfectly correct labels (esp considering who gets criticized the most for that...) when all the other authors have been straight dudes who i bet you either view the symbiote as A Thing or “basically male” lmfao

ALSO leah williams seems like an infinitely more funny and nice person than donny cates and she’s not a straight dude so like, finally, thank you, i’ll take this, it seems cute, whatever

i just wish cates wasn’t relevant at all but he is casting his stupid hack shadow over everything venom related with his macho need to make an impact on Venom and focusing on EPICNESS and SIZE and trying to see what he can get away with instead of like, actually writing a story that makes sense and is consistent.

Anyway.

i’m going to the aquarium today and when i get home i will probably read the horny venom content and be glad that there’s something that doesn’t completely suck ass and isn’t written by some guy who thinks he’s woke and doesn’t even know what “queer” means (which like, you can be an ally or whatever without knowing the details of words and labels and what they mean but i don’t think he’s as woke as he acts)