100gamesvictor

[100gamesvictor]

to celebrate 8 years since civil war release, let’s review all the ways tony stark was an absolute loser and actually the reason thanos won in infinity war:

created an omnicidal A.I. that the rest of the team warned him against creating

decided that the entire team needed to become government puppets because he felt guilty for creating said A.I. that, once again, NO ONE SUPPORTED HIM IN MAKING

(also the reason bucky was forced back into the fight bc tony caused sokovia and thus caused zemo’s need for revenge but i digress on that pt)

when members of the team who can’t disconnect from their abilities raised concerns about how the accords dehumanized them, he had them arrested or locked them in his tower

bribed (yes, bribed) a child into fighting on his side because he knew he was outmatched

instructed vision to shoot sam out of the sky and then shot sam point-blank when he avoided the blast that would’ve left him severely injured AND LANDED TO HELP THE PERSON IT HIT

wanda on the raft. this is its own point. he let her be restrained and collared like a fucking DOG as if he hadn’t already done enough damage in her life (killing her parents & brother)

proceeded to break the accords THAT HE HELPED WRITE to chase cap across the globe because he felt left out of the action

blamed a brainwashed pow for BEING FORCED to kill the starks AGAINST HIS WILL and proceeded to BLOW HIS ARM OFF and ATTEMPT TO KILL HIM DESPITE KNOWING THAT NONE OF IT WAS HIS CHOICE

mocked natasha’s trauma because she dared to disagree with his methods (he is, in fact, incapable of letting go of his ego for one goddamn second)

even after receiving an apology, refused to contact cap for three years despite KNOWING about the threat of thanos

in conclusion,

[100gamesvictor]

The difference between Steve and Tony in CA:CW will always boil down to this:

Tony stands up to authority because he was born into immense wealth and privilege and has never had to answer to anyone. He defies authority because he knows he'll never have to face actual consequences for doing so.

Steve stands up to authority because he was born into poverty and grew up a poor, disabled Irish-American during the Great Depression. He defies authority because he knows what it's like to be dismissed, undervalued, and disenfranchised and never wants anyone to face that.

Tony pushed for the accords because he knew he could just break them and nothing would happen to him (which is exactly how it went down).

Steve refused to sign the accords because he would never sign away his human rights and the rights of other people to an authority he knew would abuse them (which, again, is exactly what happened).

So in a way, they were both right about the accords. Tony was just also infinitely more wrong.

[100gamesvictor]

Tony: “We have to sign the Accords now, but we can change them later.”

Anyone who knows anything about contracts:

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Ross: you need acountability

Ross: has a history of overseeing illegal experimentation on unwilling subjects

Ross: orders the extrajudicial killing of a man who turns out to be innocent of the crime he was accused of

Ross: Can imprison any enhanced human at any point with no access to due process, lawyers, or any kind of oversight whatsoever

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[100gamesvictor]

Tony Stark in Civil War

"I'm going to divide my whole team and sign a dubious accord because I feel bad for the death of a college age kid. So, no one gets hurt."

Tony Stark in that same movie.

"Hey, kid who is not even old enough to have a permit to drive. Do you want to join me in a fight across the Atlantic? If you don't, I'm going to tattle to your aunt!"

I want to fight the bitch who wrote the script and didn’t see the big red flags in Tony and Peter's first scene.

[100gamesvictor]

"A Lot of It Was Mine."

Of all the frustrating things I encounter in the Teen Wolf fandom, one of the most mind-boggling takes is that the "True Alpha" storyline came out of nowhere.

For those members of the fandom who started watching with the idea that -- as per the description of the series, the statements of the creators, and the narrative indicators -- this was the story of Scott McCall becoming a werewolf, that conclusion seems utterly ridiculous. Even in the first few episodes of the series, before we even knew where the show was headed, there were clear indicators that his arc would tend toward the heroic.

Take the contents of an entire episode, Pack Mentality (1x03). It starts with Scott having a nightmare where he assaults and possibly murders Allison in a school bus. He's understandably distressed but instead of hiding it, he talks to Stiles who reassures him only for them both to discover that someone got assaulted in the school bus that night.

Think about how he reacts. He's terrified, but he doesn't run. He is relieved when he finds that Allison is unharmed, but he doesn't stop thinking about who did get hurt, especially when he realizes that he knew the bus driver, Garrison Myers. He doesn't hide from the possibility that he might be killing people at random. He goes to hospital and investigates and is confronted by a hysterical Myers. Even more concerned after that, he goes to Derek Hale for real help in finding out what happened in that bus.

Remember, this is the same Derek Hale who, as Stiles reminds him, they got arrested for murder the episode before after Derek broke into Scott's house, threw him into a wall, and threatened to kill him. But Scott walks right up to his house anyway, because it's the responsible thing to do.

Using Derek's self-serving advice, he goes back to the bus and discovers the truth. The alpha (who Scott doesn't know isn't Derek yet) summoned him to the bus in the middle of the night to kill the bus driver together as a right of bonding, but Scott resisted him, trying to help Garrison Myers. As he breathlessly tells Stiles -- "And the blood - a lot of it was mine."

Then, after Garrison dies, Scott immediately goes to confront Derek only to finally discover, after three whole episodes, the existence of the Alpha who killed Laura Hale.

In this episode, the third episode of the series, Scott has every reason to be afraid. He has every reason not to confront what happens. He has every reason to avoid Derek Hale. But he doesn't hide or run from his problems; he takes responsibility for finding out the truth behind his own nightmare.

The "True Alpha" storyline DID NOT come from nowhere.

Of course, if your empathy gap for minority characters makes you miss how terrified Scott is through the first half of the episode, if your white prioritization only makes you think about Stiles not wanting to be Robin or Derek's sad life in the burned-out shell of his family home, or if your misogyny makes you tune out when Scott goes on a date with Allison, you might possibly miss exactly how many times Scott demonstrates virtue, strength of character, and sheer force of will in this episode.

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Why is Scott McCall the only person who's not allowed to be complex and have flaws like everyone else in the show?

Why is he the only one being demonized and villianized for making mistakes like a normal human being?

(well I know the reason but I'm still pissed off about it)

Please free my boy from media illiterate Teen Wolf fans!! 😭

[100gamesvictor]

There was a reviewer or commenter who said "I always keep track of how many mistakes the protagonist makes and after three, I stop reading the story and never look back".

I think about that person pretty frequently. We read for our own enjoyment, and therefore there's no wrong way to read a book so long as you're enjoying yourself, but ... maybe I don't actually believe that. Maybe there are wrong ways to read a book, and this guy found one.

[100gamesvictor]

ok i want to talk a little bit about Cassandra Clare and the use of incest as a plot device because i always see stuff, mostly on tik tok, talking about how CC keeps continuously writing incest into her stories and about how weird it is. but the thing is, she only ever writes it to depict how thoroughly the adults in these kids lives abuse and manipulate their kids. 

like in tmi with jace, sebastian, and valentine: valentine told jace that him and clary were siblings because valentine saw that for once in jaces life, jace might choose someone over him. so he lied and said jace has demon blood and was clary’s brother so that jace would think that he was dirty and vile and disgusting and wrong. that clary was good and pure and angelic and jace was evil and demonic, because how could he be anything else when he was in love with his sister, so he might as well join up with valentine. with sebastian, sebastian was so desperate for his fathers love and approval that even after valentine died, he wanted his love so he tried so hard to be like jace. he thought that loving clary would be the thing to fix him, because it was the thing that “fixed” jace. and jace had their fathers love. so did sebastian really have feelings for clary? probably not. but he couldn’t see any other difference between him and jace and how they were brought up other than jaces love for clary, so why wouldn’t he try loving clary too?

in tlh with grace, jesse, and tatiana: tatiana only ever viewed grace as a possession not a daughter, shown through the fact that she continuously used grace to further her own agenda and disregarded any and everything grace ever really cared about, including graces familial relationship with jesse. tatiana was willing to marry grace off to jesse the moment it suited her, regardless of the fact that grace always viewed both tatiana and jesse as family. because tatiana never viewed grace as family. grace was only every a possession, and tatiana bought and used her like one.

none of these depictions of incest are actually romantic. CC is not saying “oh haha brother/sister relationships so sexy” she’s using it to show just how terrible and fucked up these parents are that they would use their children and make them feel like shit in this way. she uses it to show abuse and manipulation and evilness, not to promote sibling fucking.

[100gamesvictor]

You know whose deaths hit me the most in TSC? The characters that we just barely saw before their lives were cut short. The ones that don't get brought up much and we don't see a ton of grief over in most of the books. The ones you can't even really find fanart for. It's characters like...

Jon Cartwright - I hated Jon Cartwright in Tales From the Shadowhunter Academy. Then I loved him so much it hurt. He began as this elitist, thick necked lunk that you were designed to intensely dislike from the start. He went from regularly spewing awful things about Downworlders and harassing the dregs in the Academy to a guy who carried Marisol Garza's lunch tray around while she told him about mundane culture and who the Cohort hated in TDA. A guy who cried whenever they would reminisce about George, a mundane who failed to ascend. He showed so much growth, could have been such a help in reforming the members of the Cohort.

George Lovelace - Where do I even start with George? It was impossible not to root for him. He was such a constant friend for Simon in that shaky time when he didn't have his memories and was finding his way. He was so kind and there was so much potential to explore his character further in the successive books. For him to be a solid reference of an ascended mundane who turned into a true Shadowhunter hero. Then it all ended before it could even truly start even though his flower card reads future promise. George Lovelace, you deserved so much better, you will always have a place in my heart.

Max Lightwood - With Max, I know that we do see people grieve over him in the books but it just hits me so hard how much potential he had, all the things he didn't get to do. How we didn't get to fall in love with his siblings-in-laws Clary and Simon who would have taken him to Forbidden Planet and turned him into a proper nerd. How he never got to meet Magnus or the Alec that was sure of himself. How he didn't get to be a part of the TWP gang who he was the same age as. My heart aches at the loss of all those special moments that never to be for Max Lightwood.

Julie Beauvale - I don't know why, but her death hit me the hardest in TDA even though it was only touched on briefly in two separate paragraphs (which I know sounds insane because of everything that happened at the end of LoS and into QOAAD). It's just, she had such an arc. Like, she was traumatized by seeing her sister die at the hands of a faerie and clearly hated them deeply when she first arrived at the Academy. She was also very classist/elitist. But did she stay like that? No, no she didn't. Through the friendships she made at the Academy she changed and let go of that part of her. Julie fought for Livvy's watch in QOAAD even though she almost definitely would have been a Cohort member if it wouldn't have been for her time at the Academy and meeting Simon. So how did her story end? By intercepting an arrow that was shot by a faerie and meant for his faerie brother. Her life coming to a close because of the people she had spent so much of her life hating but came to respect and appreciate to the point that her last moments were spent fighting against people whose entire identity was based around hating them. It was just such an awful full circle moment.

Ave atque vale Jon Cartwright, George Lovelace, Max Lightwood, and Julie Blackthorn. Hail and farewell you dear souls.

Art: @cassandrajean

There's no art to be found on the internet of Jon or Julie, especially not official art :(

[100gamesvictor]

i thought the narrative did allow for sympathizing with jet and hama? hell, the narrative structure with jet and hama has their sad backstories and motives placed first, then after that they do things that make katara more and more uncomfortable until it gets to something horrifying. jet even tried to make a new life afterwards and his death is nothing but tragic. azula was introduced as a terrifying sociopath and wasn't given sympathetic attention until season 3.

Weirdly this ties in to some of the themes from the Vietnam War ask I just answered! Let’s see what I can do.

The thing is. You’re allowed to pity Jet and Hama, but they aren’t presented to us in sympathetic terms, no. We aren’t meant to empathize too closely with them, or even see them as immense tragedies. Jet’s death is sad, but it’s also a relief; it isn’t framed to stick with the viewer as even a major story beat.

We are explicitly discouraged from identifying with both of them; their role in the story is as negative examples, warning the main characters away from senseless violence and extremism.

Putting their sad backstories first and then following it with a Dark Twist actually works against making them sympathetic, because it means the motion of the narrative is away from them--we start out with a positive impression that gets worse, which leaves a much more negative psychological imprint than starting with bad and getting even a little better. It draws the attention and the story away from what was done to them and toward what they did, while the order in which Azula is shown to us moves the other way.

So their traumas are provided as context for their actions, though in a very outline version in Jet’s case, but they aren’t dwelt on; we don’t get into their heads and feel their agony with them; the narrative’s engagement with their motives is restricted to explication, and the assertion that their suffering does not justify their actions.

Which isn’t exactly wrong--they both were targeting noncombatants in a way that wasn’t likely to be terribly helpful to anyone, and that really is something that deserves warning away from because it’s very tempting when you have a lot of pain, and the proxies for your real enemy are so much easier to reach with the strength you have.

(Lateral violence is born from this process of reframing, though what they were doing was not that--they both were managing to target the actual group they had beef with, which is better than a lot of people in real life manage rip.)

But that’s a specific narrative choice that was made with these characters, to create them and deal with them as dark-reflections-in-the-world of other people’s (mostly Katara’s) wounded anger, and nothing more.

While Azula got a whole episode wherein the emotional arc of the A-plot centered largely around her feelings about her own social awkwardness and relationship with her mother.

And like. This is, for the most part, a side effect of Azula’s centrality in the story and her relationship with Zuko!

And of the way the Fire Nation royal family is used as a narrative microcosm of how the ideology behind Fire expansionism is toxic and abusive all the way down, and has to be dismantled.

So it’s not bad, exactly.

But it does mean that we’re encouraged to engage far more closely and in a much more nuanced manner with the self-image and lived experience of the homicidal, consciously sadistic young fascist from the industrially developed expansionist empire...

...than we are with the experiences and decisionmaking of the oppressed people victimized by the system of which she is a leading part. 

And that’s kind of a pattern in American media, and deserves to be pointed out and critiqued where it crops up. It’s kind of inevitable, but it would be better if it could not be an unmarked default.

The narrative, in part because of the perspective from (and to) which it was being written, can more comfortably engage with Azula’s experiences because they’re ultimately personal--they interface with the broader, institutional reality in terms of allegory and in terms of consequence, but they are built on and about, and can be discussed in terms of, the interactions of individual persons.

While otoh Jet and Hama’s formative traumas are institutional in nature--it was the Fire Nation as military power that took their families and their homes and the lives they should have had away from them; it was the Fire Nation as administrator of colonial-political prison that destroyed Hama inch by inch.

And how do you resolve that? How do you parcel that down and let that go and make peace within yourself, when the thing that destroyed you is still there in the world, still taking and hurting and still beyond your reach? It hurts and it expands as if to swallow the whole world, that question, that irreconcilable need.

Katara only comes to terms with her own, in-comparison contained, experience of being traumatized by that same institution by drilling down until it’s a grudge against a single human person, who isn’t worth it.

But of course it really was the Fire Nation that took her mother away from her. And that’s difficult. That’s beyond the scope of the children’s cartoon. So they lock it away.

And Azula is locked away in the end, too, but she’s locked away as a person, whom we came close to and watched very intimately as she broke. While Jet and Hama are to a considerable degree locked away as ideas, not allowed to escape the confines of their rhetorical roles.

Making Hama a serial kidnapper/torturer/maybe-killer and locus of horror, and sending her back to Fire Nation captivity in a community with every reason to hate and fear her, and abandoning the character there with no follow-up (except using her legacy as a characteristic of villains in the sequel series) was a narrative decision that the people writing Avatar made.

There were good reasons for it in terms of the plot and Katara’s arc and it was even good storytelling! It doesn’t Ruin Avatar and there’s not an easy fix for it.

But it was a decision, and it has reverberations in terms of the history of representation of institutionally wronged people and particularly indigenous people in American media.

Having Jet be first almost a straw man of a resistance fighter, then betrayed and victimized by his own people, and finally literally disposed of, and take his rage and struggle with colonial aftermath with him, was a choice that was made, and which also has implications and an impact on the worldbuilding.

It’s a children’s series, and it’s a plot that needs to be resolvable on Aang’s terms; there’s only so far they could pursue either thread, but those decisions--especially with Hama--carry a certain subtext, and stand in stark contrast to the depth Azula in all her glorious shattered monstrosity was permitted.

And it’s worth talking about!

I mean...Korra had a lot of writing issues, like the pacing and the horrible love triangle, but a major underlying one (at least in Season One I didn’t get any further haha) was that it tried very hard to get out of realistically engaging with the aftermath of colonial violence in any depth whatsoever, despite specifically choosing to set season 1 in a place founded on the aftermath of colonial violence.

You cannot have America without genocide and colonialism, and when you try to have expy-America without talking about the genocide and colonialism you already established in the setting...you’re shooting your narrative in the gut. 

And this situation was created out of the same limitations that let Azula be more human than Jet or Hama, and dug into the ethical complexity of her situation with far more care than either of them merited.

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On the one hand, this is correct, marrying again was always going to sow the seeds of rebellion. On the other hand, at the time, marrying again was very important for House Targaryen.

Keep in mind, Viserys chose Rhaenyra to be his heir specifically to prevent Daemon from taking the throne. But that means that Daemon is only one accident away from being back as Viserys' heir. This accident doesn't even need to come from Daemon himself; Rhaenyra could fall from a horse or die in childbed or a whole host of other tragedies. If you consider his remarriage was about securing the succession for House Targaryen while Rhaenyra was still a bit young to marry (she was around 7-8 in the book and around 14 in the show), then he really did need to remarry. This is especially true after Daemon steals Dragonstone and proclaims himself the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. That is a clear attack on him (Viserys) and Rhaenyra. Increasing the number of heirs between Daemon and the throne absolutely makes sense when you keep in mind that at the time of his remarriage, Daemon was the biggest threat to Rhaenyra's throne.

Now, while it's true that anyone Viserys chose would cause problems for Rhaenyra in the future, Alicnt was probably the best choice to limit those conflicts. She and Rhaenrya were friends, her father was the one who suggested Rhaenyra be named heir, he was Viserys' Hand (in theory, his most loyal councilor), and they are not the main branch of the Hightowers (meaning they have no lands of their own and might not be able to call on the vast resources of the Hightowers). Since he did need to marry someone to stave off Daemon, Alicent probably was a safe option. I don't think she was the best option (someone from a smaller house like the Rosbys or the Darklyns would probably been safer), but Alicent wasn't a bad choice.

Now, I agree completely that marrying Laena would have been just as, if not more, catastrophic than marrying Alicent in a far more predictable way. Corlys and Rhaenys would never have tolerated their grandson being passed over (unless Rhaenyra also married Laenor, but then there would be grumblings about the Velaryons getting so much influence, which would just cause further problems from other Great Houses).

Ultimately, Viserys really was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He did need more heirs. The fandom likes to dismiss Daemon as a threat, but he was actively causing problems for Viserys and Rhaenyra. Problems that securing the Royal Line would solve. Could he have handled the marriage better? Sure. But the marriage itself wasn't the mistake, and he did do his best to secure her claim (he had the lords swear fealty to her, he had her on the small council, he let her rule Dragonstone as the heir traditionally does, he married her to the second-most powerful house of Westeros, he defended her to the death). Frankly, his ultimate issue is that there was no good way to handle this.

people will always blame alicent and rhaenyra or even daemon for sparking the start of the civil war but at the end of the day it will always come back to viserys and his cowardly decisions. as soon as he allowed himself to be bullied to remarry and to have more kids again, he officially sewed the seeds together for future conflict after his death no matter who he married. like if he had married laena instead of alicent and had sons with her, would the outcome have been so different? do you think rhaenys and corlys would have stood on the sidelines and watched their grandson get passed over? especially after rhaenyra had illegitimate sons that weren't even laenors? that they wouldn't have petitioned their own dance? the snake will always eat its own tail for power, and viserys doomed rhaenyra to her death with his own

[100gamesvictor]

Except in Westeros, the absolutism of a king's word is the very basis of their government system. We can disagree with it all we want, but that's the way Westeros works. As such, from a purely legal standpoint in Westeros, if the king says, "Rhaenyra is my heir," then that is the legal succession. Anything else flies in the face of how their government works.

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TOM HOLLAND  © Chen Man // Esquire China Magazine

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“they will see me as a ruler, and my symbols of authority will not be jewels and gowns, but the shield and the sword.” people are already doing so much vapid discourse about this line from rhaenyra in a tv spot with the usual “omg feminine women can be powerful too!!” thing. but the thing is, they can’t. not in the position of feudal kingship rhaenyra is aiming to occupy in the social terrain rhaenyra is looking to occupy it in! one big reason women like empress matilda were disqualified as rulers because they could not lead armies, and thus failed at perhaps the key responsibility of feudal rulership. matilda needed her half-brother robert to lead her armies; rhaenyra needs her uncle-husband daemon. they are actively at war, and the fact rhaenyra cannot be the head of that effort in the way a man could, because she was not trained for it because of her gender, matters. its a keen source of insecurity and a key way her enemies will articulate her unfitness for the throne. rhaenyra is not a queen consort: she is a king. she is not even articulating an individual desire for gender expression in that scene, but political ideology, and she’s right. it’s also not unique to the show: in the book, when she finally sits the throne for the first time after taking king’s landing, she is clad in armor.

[100gamesvictor]

As a Targaryen, the easiest course of action you have when faced with a problem would be to simply get on your dragon and burn defenseless people.

Which is why Jace setting off and establishing diplomatic relationships with major houses will always be more impressive to me than the 19 y/o who burned a whole region in a pissy fit or his brother who took part in the bloodiest sack in Westerosi history.

Killing is easy when you’re on a beast high above the air facing people who can’t even outrun your flames, but convincing people to pledge their loyalty and men to your cause with words alone is hard.