bqtgirl - Tumblr blog

[bqtgirl]

au where taylor’s in love with belly not steven

[bqtgirl]

thinking about the differences between the book and tv show tonight, especially about taylor jewel

one of my favorite quotes as a teenage girl was this, when belly thinks about the space between her and taylor after they fight that book 1 summer, and how they stop being close: “She'd known me my whole life. It's hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.”

i think this really applies to not only taylor and belly, but a lot of the threads in the books… the strangeness of past/present/future. adam and susannah (that he loved her and betrayed her and she chose to forgive him and love him back until the very end), laurel and belly’s dad (belly describing her dad moving out and taking all his books, how he would have been happy to stay if laurel had let him, and the sad piano belly never plays in his new apartment), laurel and susannah, conrad and belly and jeremiah. despite the baby-ness of the plot and the annoying lovesick main character, the reason why i liked the books so much was this sense of longing. i was like 14 reading these books and feeling such enormous relief, because i connected with the growing pains, as a teenager. outside of the love triangle, there’s divorce and death, the often bitter end of formative relationships, which haunt the narrative in a way that feels way more intense and serious than expected for romantic young adult novels, you know?

jenny han used to be on tumblr (lol) and i actually sent her a few asks about taylor and belly’s friendship. i told her how much i loved taylor jewel. and even back then, she cared a lot about taylor’s back story too though a lot of it never made it into the book. we only know a little bit about taylor, that she bleaches her hair with sun in, that she’s teeny tiny, that she’s boy crazy, that she’s rude, that she’s been in love with steven for years, that she used to play violin but quit after her parents divorce, that her mom who goes to therapy is a good baker, that she calls belly every year at the same time to sing her happy birthday, that she has a wedding planning binder and remembers what kind of wedding cake belly had wanted when she was eight years old!!!

so i’m 100% not surprised about the direction the show took.

who cares whether belly chose jeremiah or conrad in the end. i loved finding out (in the books) that out of all the colleges in the world taylor and belly ended up at the same one, without meaning to, and that they choose each other.

[bqtgirl]

I'm hearing voices, animal noises!

The crème de la crème, the feminine abyss

And I'm reaching my threshold,

Staring at the truth till I'm blind!

[bqtgirl]

(1) Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (2012) // (2) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) // (3) Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023)

[bqtgirl]

julie and kevin !! :-)

[bqtgirl]

John Romita passed away in his sleep at the ripe old age of 93. He leaves behind him a staggering legacy of creative genius and artistic mastery. Sleep well, sir. You earned it.

[bqtgirl]

Batgirls 015 cover by Jorge Corona and Sarah Stern

Bonus:

[bqtgirl]

Batgirls #15 by Neil Googe and Jorge Corona

[bqtgirl]

i will never understand comic book writers who have no interest in learning about or sticking to the history of the characters they're supposed to be writing at all and instead just like... raze everything to the ground and rebuild it in a way that just invents a bunch of entirely new shit instead of incorporating literally anything from their history

a lot of the appeal of comics as a medium comes from them being this continuous collaboration of hundreds writers all building on & reinterpreting each other's work across decades. the ridiculousness it creates can be annoying & frustrating sometimes, sure, but overall, the fact that a character has a pre-established history & personality that you need to learn about and at least attempt to adhere to in some way is a FEATURE, not a bug! WHY are you trying to erase everything everyone before you did and turn this into YOUR story and yours alone?

like genuinely, why are you even here? why are you insisting on continuing to write in an established universe when you refuse to engage with ideas put forth by other writers and ONLY want to write stories that make no goddamn sense for the world and break every character, rule, and timeline in it in about six different ways?

bitch, if you wanna write stories in a world completely invented by & for you and filled with nothing but characters invented by & for you, just go write a shitty ya novel or something and leave shared universes the hell alone

[bqtgirl]

literally one of the gayest moments in radioactive spider gwen

[bqtgirl]

In 1970s, Marvel let a Mexican publisher put out original Spider-Man comics, and the first thing artist did, José Luis González Durán, was give Gwen Stacy a ridiculously dump truck ass.

[bqtgirl]

*shakes you like a piggy bank* earth-65!! peter!! elaborate!! tel me morre!!!

Ight bet.

I think the main themes in Earth-65 are power, responsibility, and corruption. Murderdock wants to corrupt Gwen as badly as he himself is, Harry juices himself up because he wants the power to avenge Peter, everything Gwen goes through culminates to her eventually risking corruption in the Gwenom arc until she takes responsibility and unmasks herself, and that wouldn’t have happened if Cindy-65 or Murderdock weren’t gleefully exercising power over her by commodifying her actual superpowers.

Peter-65 is an insanely interesting martyr figure because he was on the road to succumbing to that same corruption too (assuming he wasn’t already) and no one who knew him can bring themselves to grasp that. It’s why he’s drawn with his eyes obstructed by his glasses even in pictures and flashbacks because there’s a part of him that was closed off from everyone and they’re perfectly fine keeping it that way even if they’ll never admit it.

And I think earth 65 NY feels more like a colorful Gotham City than 616 NY (in a good way).

[bqtgirl]

The thing I find most fascinating about Spider Gwen in general and Matt Murderdock in particular is the way their narrative and themes so directly contrast and contradict and comment on 616 canon.

Like. I just read the Death of the Stacys, and these are such iconic moments in the history of Spider-Man, but at the end of the day Gwen Stacy's death is so much more about Peter's grief than it is about Gwen's life being cut short. Meanwhile in Spider Gwen we don't even get to meet Peter before he dies; his entire purpose is to haunt Gwen, to be her Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy and Green Goblin combined, even before Harry turns into earth 65's Green Goblin. He is the one who drives her to be a hero, who drives so much of the plot, a stand in for her failure and yet also the reason she continues to do what's right. His death haunts her not exactly in the way Gwen's death haunts Peter, because they weren't romantically involved, but also not exactly like Uncle Ben haunts Peter, because they were peers, childhood friends.

The fact that Peter is so much of a character in Spider Gwen comics but only after his death is a direct commentary on the fact that Gwen Stacy is often relegated in 616!Spider-Man comics to "the dead girlfriend", maybe his biggest failure as a hero, but not much else. In the introduction to Death of the Stacys, Gerry Conway calls her "boring". She was Peter's girlfriend, but not much else - the TASM movies made her incredibly interesting, smart and funny and charming, but the original comics, back in the 60s and 70s, weren't particularly interested in making her much of anything at all.

65!Peter has, on the other hand, such strong characterization that even though we never once see him alive we can't help but feel Gwen's grief even without having spent much time with him. There's also the fact that while by the time 616!Gwen dies she has no family left, 65!Peter's Aunt May and Uncle Ben are very much still alive and actively mourning their nephew's death. It's difficult to impossible while reading Spider Gwen comics to not constantly compare these two stories and see how much more deftly handled 65!Peter is than 616!Gwen.

The fact that traditionally Daredevil and Spider-Man are friends, then, is part of what makes Matt Murderdock such a compelling villain. By all rights he should be Gwen's closest ally; and while he is drawn to her, it is from the perspective of someone trying to ruin everything she stands for - everything 65!Peter's death has taught her to try to be. He, himself, is 616!Matt's complete inversion - he's a killer, he's a member of the Hand instead of fighting against them, he's actively the Kingpin (and previously friend to Wilson Fisk) instead of fighting against organized crime, and while he was roommates with Foggy in college, they are not partners in a productive fashion, but rather in a way that shows corruption in 65!Foggy that 616!Foggy is constantly learning to fight against. Murderdock is a lapsed Catholic, a man whose morals are in complete opposition to 616!Matt - and yet, in a way, he feels as though there's something deeply wrong in who he is, and that is what drives him to try and corrupt Spider Woman. He says it himself - it is a selfish need to prove that he is not the only one who is corruptible. In a way, it actually proves that at his core, given other circumstances, he would have grown into someone very similar to 616!Matt.

This is what compels me so about Murderdock and the Spider Gwen narrative. Yeah, Murderdock is a sarcastic twink and I love him for that too, but on a thematic level it is not only its own story, but also a story about our main continuity. What 616 did wrong, and how it could have gone wrong. And that's just... So interesting to me.

Anyway read Spider-Gwen

[bqtgirl]

[bqtgirl]

[bqtgirl]

Jean Grey #1 preview

[bqtgirl]

I'm so tired