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New Outtakes of Sebastian Stan as the Winter Soldier | Sebastian-Stan.org

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manipulated weapon

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i know i joke about rent-lowering gunshots but i cannot emphasize enough that incest and rape kinks are extremely common. wildly popular. this is something that a lot of people fantasize about, because it’s an easily accessible taboo, it intrigues/scares/interests people and there’s a lot of content out there to absorb about it. it’s really not that out there or extreme to have those fetishes; we are talking top charters on pornhub of all places.

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Normal fans: obsessed with Bucky's fabulous new hair Me, with my very specific fixation: obsessed with (what appears to be) a silencer on Bucky's gun

I'm aware silencers are not just used for assassinating and other shady shit in real life and possession of one doesn't necessarily carry any inherent meaning (or at least it shouldn't). But this is not real life. This is a movie. And silencers in movies have very particular uses and connotations. I don't think I've ever seen a Good Guy use a silencer, even when they might benefit from one. They're strictly reserved for villains and antiheroes, characters with questionable morals who do things that many might find unsavory. Case in point, the only other appearances of suppressed pistols that I'm aware of in the entire MCU were the ones used by Klaue and his gang during the museum heist in Black Panther and a couple used by some Kingpin goons in Echo and DD:BA.

It's just a very interesting character choice to me, especially considering this scene is post Bucky coming to terms with and embracing his Winter Soldier side.

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if i was 26 and had just woken up from a 70 year suicide-induced coma with no one in the present remembering who i am and instead conflating me with the ever changing image of the role i played in ww2 that now serves as american propaganda and 2 weeks ago i was watching guys get half of their faces blown off and a week after that the love of my life fell off of a moving train with me only being able to watch and then i had to like... deal with a billionaire nepo baby war profiteer calling me an old man and saying there's nothing special about me i would have started killing people. but unfortunately it happened to steve rogers. and he has, like, morals. so

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THUNDERBOLTS* (2025)

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Isn't it romantic to kiss in mid-air? You might fall but Sentry can catch you again or use telekinesis

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Heyy so i just came across ur kink list from agess ago but what does "forced verbal feminisation" entail?? Is it like calling someons feminine stuff or forcing someone to sound feminine?

Verbal feminization, at least for the purposes of this list, refers to gendered language used to refer to women, particularly terms that are often considered degrading or infantilizing (e.g. bitch, babygirl, princess). The "forced" aspect of course refers to it being used against the recipient's will, generally either because the character identifies as masculine or just doesn't feel comfortable with that kind of language. "Verbal" was specified to distinguish it from forced crossdressing, which is listed separately.

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Hi, I noticed your story has conflict in it, and I was wondering why you didn't just write people who are right doing everything correctly with a note saying "I enthusiastically co-sign everything in this story"? Must be some kind of mistake haha

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Thunderbolts* (2025) // The Avengers (2012)

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One of the largest problems with Centreoftheselights' ship stats is that the numbers are not a count of actual fics. The figures are better understood as a point based scoring system, and the ranking is a list of tags with highest scores.

The points are assigned thus: A new unlocked fic is created: +1 The tag is added to an old fic: +1 An old fic is unlocked: +1 A tag wrangling descision syns an old fic into the tag: +1 A new chapter is added to an existing fic: +0 A new locked fic is created: +0 A new unlocked fic is created and then locked: +0 A new fic is created and then deleted: +0 An old fic is deleted: -1 An old fic is locked: -1 The tag is removed from an old fic: -1 A tag wrangling descision de-syns an old fic out of the tag: -1

We can have conversations about which fics should be counted when we're talking about which ships are most popular within a timeframe. I like to use "created_by" searches in my posts about fic stats because those links are more futureproof, but an "updated_by" search, if you catch it close enough to the time, more accurately reflects fic-writing activity and quantity of new reading material. If we're doing a deep dive, we need to talk about which searches we're using and why.

We can also talk about if we should include archive locked works or not. I haven't heard any convincing arguments for excluding locked works from year-end stats presented to regular users with accounts, but there is absolutely value in doing both counts and comparing them.

But all of the above assumes that the number we end up with is a tally of all the fics on the archive that meet our inclusion criteria, and I don't think anyone is going to argue that a tag wrangling descision that re-sorts a ten year old fic reflects a ship being more or less popular this year.

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The bad fic stats chart tells us that Jayce/Viktor "gained" 13261 works between August 2 2024 - July 29 2025.

But that "works gained" column is mislabeled, because it's actually that ship's score. The thirteen thousand is not a count of individual fics, and so we cannot go looking at those fics to determine anything about them.

When I tell you that there are 14,621 works in the Jayce/Victor tag that were created August 2 2024 - July 29 2025 and give you this link as my source, you can click on it and go read the fics. You can check the same link both logged in and logged out to see how many are archive locked. You can let me know if I'm being an idiot and searched the wrong time frame by accident. You can make observations about Jayce/Victor fic posted during that timeframe -- you can note, for example, that there are very few crossovers and that Trans!Victor is the top freeform tag. Maybe you're interested in how the percentage of Trans!Victor fics might change over time, maybe you want to do an academic textual analysis of how Jayce's ethnicity is approached by fic authors, maybe you're curious about how long Jayce/Victor fics tend to be or what other ships tend to show up in this search. These are all things that you can do when you're looking at a list of the actual fics.

And these are all things that you can't do with a score that does not count actual fics.

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Since the numbers are scores and not counts, we can neither trust nor critique the info in other columns.

Multiple rounds of these stats have inspired wank over the fact that Hermione's ethnicity is listed as "ambiguous". Because the chart lists a score, all we can do is wank about canon. But if, instead of a score, if we're looking at the actual nine thousand Hermione/Draco fics posted in the timeframe in question, we can further filter that search and see that only 33 of them are tagged POC Hermione. And if we have the time and skills for it, we can do a textual analyses of those fics and see how she's protrayed when an ethnicity isn't tagged.

Last January I made a stink about Kirk/Spock being listed as a ship from the reboot movies, despite All Media Types and TOS being more common for K/S fics posted in 2024. I noted at the time that we have no way of knowing if the reboot movies are actually the top fandom tag in the fics in her dataset or not, but on further reflection I realised that her dataset contains no fics at all. New fics are not excluded from the set when old fics are deleted, because her data was never counting fics that exist in the first place. It's a point based score system that cannot be replicated or analysed, and that means absolutely nothing.

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thunderbolts* spoilers lol

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consolidating a bunch of these sambuck requests into one post.

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We love defiant whumpees getting muzzled, but what about broken and conditioned whumpees getting muzzled

Knowing that they don't need to be treated like a rabid animal, and yet whumper insists on it

Knowing that no matter what happens, they wouldn't dare resist or get violent, yet being treated no differently

And both people know this. There's no reason to keep whumpee restrained, none at all

Except to remind them of their utter helplessness

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Всё, На своём месте

support the artist

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It's that time again. Centreoftheselights just released their mid-year 2025 summer stats (why they feel the need to release yearly data twice a year, I don't understand). Please do not spread their garbage data and please send this post to anyone you see using it to actually draw conclusions about fandom popularity.

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.