#sebastian blocks fans on ig during the press for itonya for making a take the knee joke: silence

[afro-elf]

Did you see Anthony Mackie's statement on the exploitation of pure and beautiful homosexuality?

i agree and have always agreed that anthony is the absolute king of bad old man phrasing and talking too much but the rage feels odd to me because like evans and stan have responded in similar ways to the question of shipping (with evans being lukewarm and stan responses being on a spectrum because press that caters to fandom is aware that a lot of bucky fans Only care about who he's fucking for some reason) and people got upset for like two hours and then went back to talking about how badly they wanna lick their abs, anyways i have a bit of a ramble and it's kinda unrelated but this situation just dug up my feelings about it SO

i obviously can't and won't be the one to decide if mackie's comments were homophobic, but i can tell you what i've observed in the tfatws fandom alone. a lot of y'all (and you know who y'all are) were only here for bucky. you made this abundantly clear from the moment the trailer premiered to the closing shot of the show itself. now, as i said before, a huge loud chunk of bucky's online fanbase is very concerned with who he's sleeping with to the point where most conversations about bucky outside of like... interviews where sebastian stan is actually asked what's going on with him, tend to favor questions about bucky's sexuality. now, as i've said in the past, it sucks that marvel and disney are deeply homophobic companies so the fans are left to make prominent characters overtly gay in fanon and fanon alone, but the obsession with the shipping potential of bucky really took a strange and annoying and frankly racist and misogynoiristic tone during the show's run and it also felt less about bucky being a canon gay character and more about bucky being a widely shippable feature

first, it was the former st*ckies' refusal to not let the show be about sam. they inserted steve into every scene, every piece of dialogue they could manage. they made the show's web reception all about bucky and bucky's "post-steve life" and bucky trying to date and bucky's tears and "ooh bucky and zemo and ooh NO not bucky and leah and ooh bucky and john and NOT BUCKY AND SARAH eh i guess bucky and sam sure i guess sure i guess whatever i guess bucky and sam since there are no other options i guess bucky and sam". and, as much as i H A T E D the politics of the show, holy shit, why did it feel like every major conversation about the show revolved around shipping when it was so busy trying (failing, cannot emphasize this enough) to talk about race and class sorta but not really?

when black fans expressed discomfort with the fandom and the show's treatment of sam, they were drowned out. when black fans wanted to talk about bucky's microagressions, they were drowned out by fanon ideas of bucky's woke levels. when black fans were interested in bucky and sarah being an item the idea was deemed idiotic and the show was accused of baiting an audience it never meant to court (remember who disney/marvel is) but had to try not to displease for the sake of audience retention. scenes meant to show us something new about bucky as a character were made into ship fodder, like the scene where they're undercover and zemo basically implies (in my interpretation) that, as the winter soldier, bucky didn't just murder people but was also used as a sexual object, which was fascinating but so beyond unsexy and uncomfortable that the idea that there were fics written because of that scene still kinda makes me nauseous

but since the focus was so on bucky and seb it seemed like the (mangled) themes and center of the show were forgotten until after it was over and we were all like so that was bad, right? mackie was asked a LOT about seb during press for the show as a result of the fandom hyper-fixation and i feel like that never would've happened if shipping were not a primary function of mcu fandom to the point where no one actually cares about the plots of the movies as long as they get a chance see two men kiss or a hint that they could kiss. the truth of the matter is that if the mcu was better written we could maybe have a discussion about the richly depicted personal and sexual lives of the characters but instead we're left with the cinematic equivalents of action figures and people getting very mad that kevin feige's play style with those action figures is fundamentally whack and homophobic so like i say all of this to say the displeasure mackie feels with all relationship related and really all discourse in specifically the mcu fandom being reduced to two men kissing (and this being exploitative of gay relationships and identities- even if he worded it worse than me) isn't unfounded even though i am not mackie cannot speak for him and do not know him personally so i can't call him and be like "hey what did you mean by this?" y'know? i guess i'm saying that i think fandom rage in this case would be more understandable to me if the canonical basis for a romance between the two men they wish had kissed was truly as fleshed out as it is in fanon

anyway i hope i carefully explained myself well and also comics!sambucky owns, comics!sambucky fat juicy pussy supremacy throwing ass and making cash