#rolls my eyes. whatever

[arttheclown]

man it’s really been crickets on here since monkey band dropped their latest album huh 😬

[parin-gurumin]

Okay here's Tavros for my bf's request

Below the cut for the version without colors

[faunandfloraas]

[daenystheedreamer]

can u guys not do madonna whore dichotomy with alicent and rhaenyra for 5 seconds please

[bruciemilf]

I feel like everyone’s fandom experience would maximize in joy once it’s established that enjoyment is very much subjective, and cannot impact you unless you allow it

[babygirlbuckaroo]

i can’t believe the several months’ worth of what we thought was delusional clowning and ‘how funny would it be if…’ spec we did about bucktalia breaking up off screen before s7 is now just… canon. 10 mins into s701 and they’ve. broken up. off screen? just like we joked about? and for the reasons we said they would? ok!!!

[booksandabeer]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Never. The answer is never.)

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

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

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

--------

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

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

[wildpeachfarm]

a literal therapist on tiktok said this: if someone is upset with you and you don’t know why, it’s not your responsibility to bring it up, it’s theirs.

yes exactly. Because the person who made you upset can't read your mind and definitely can't understand the scope of the situation unless you communicate your feelings maturely and entirely.

No one is going to know why they made someone upset if all the person does is cry and whine that someone isn't doing what they want. They need to actually TALK to the person like an adult 😭😭😭

[solradguy]

I thought the early 2000s "strong yet naked/mostly naked woman kept in her place by stronger, bigger, beast/monster or gang of racist caricatures" trope* was known by basically everyone but I mentioned it as a criticism of this older art book I'd flipped through recently to a friend and it turns out it isn't lol Maybe I've just read too many Heavy Metal issues... It used to be HORRIBLY inescapable in any sort of mature art scene back in the day lmao

*This trope is different from the pre-2000s one because the women usually look like they COULD fight back for at least a little bit whereas the previous trope had them be completely helpless damsels in distress

[chiyana]

Jon: Damian, I have a suggestion that you're going to hate, but I need you to bear with me and seriously consider it Damian: very well Jon: *takes a deep breath* I think we should go on an adventure with our brothers (Kon and Tim) instead of our dads Damian: *visibly vibrating with anger* *deep inhale* ...eXpLaIn Jon: our dads are constantly talking about responsibility and the importance of a well-balanced SuperBat partnership, working together as a single unit and approaching things seriously Damian: they are respected heroes, above reproach in their conduct and two of the three main founders of the Justice League Damian: meanwhile our "brothers", as you say, have a public history of being reckless and idiotic when teamed up together and are regularly involved in inane, useless shenanigans Jon: they would let us ride laser dinosaurs into battle without question Damian: they- Damian: -later- Damian: father Jon and I are going on an adventure with Drake and his clone boy

[useyourglutes]

not to get all sappy but for the first time in years i'm genuinely glad i'm alive right now, that i'm able to sit on my bed and listen to the line can't change what you've done, start fresh next semester over and over and over again because i can, that i can obsess over my favorite things and cry over them and squeal and kick my feet and feel happy, all because i didn't succeed that day. all because of them. all because of some silly songs.

[potatobugz]

flower and lollipop fight eachother in a dennys parking lot

[sieglinde-freud]

anyways actually reading through awakening’s story and i really wish they had like owain or morgan or literally any other kid be a mandatory recruit because lucina has absolutely no one to talk to in the main story? and its like “well chrom is there” but then. thats it. i get to the part after the basilio vs walhart scene and lucina is just off in a corner while everyone was else talks and the dialogue is literally just

Lucina: Gods, I could’ve stopped him… I should’ve stopped him…!

Chrom: ok so castle next?

Lucina: Is everything I’ve done for nothing? Twice now, I’ve failed to change fate!

Flavia: yeah we have to go hit walharts castle

Say’ri: it’s what my brother wouldve wanted

Lucina: Maybe all I’ve done is prolong the inevitable… Maybe the future is doomed no matter what…

Robin: real ok check out this sick strategy

and then the scene fades to black. NO ONE IS TALKING TO HER its honestly really sad like. oh my god. owain is in my party just let him join or something. why is she even here right now

[hanzajesthanza]

i think it would be really funny if regis had a kind of fucked-up haircut

“he could save everyone except himself” but like with regard to the barbery, and not the surgery. kind of like when chefs don’t cook very well for themselves. or when fashion designers wear sweatpants all day.

but moreover. i think the aesthetic effects of a bad haircut would help to dampen his natural lugosian allure and good looks. to reduce any potential suspicions

[telffiin]

words cannot describe how over i am the whole early days tim vs damian feud. i don't fucking care. I DON'T CARE!!! IT'S SO BORING!!! can we please move on. write something else. something more interesting maybe? something that doesn't cause tim to be woobified by fandom even more than he already is, perhaps? i mean. i really don't care about him as a charater, but come onnn!!! LET IT GO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

[skunkes]

Im sosorry to say this and it's maybe the sleep deprivation but your art looks like RCDart. I'm so sirry

hi

i used to get this a lot when i was in high school bc i had an oc with hair that looked like how they drew a characters hair, and i could see it

No It Doesn't. Actually.