dhrachth

[dhrachth]

I’m organizing the adult summer reading celebration for my library system, and it’s been one little problem after another: printing issues, one branch still hasn’t picked up their prize, the registration link on the website keeps going down (if you can even find it).

So I keep obsessively checking my stats, like you do.  They’re okay, but not as good as I’d like and I really need to stop checking hourly.  And the part that’s dragging the average down, the online portion, is totally out of my hands--but it still makes my overall stats look not that great.

If you’re in the Mobile, AL area and want an ipad, sign up for the prize drawing here: http://src.mobilepubliclibrary.org/  Because of all the technical difficulties, there’s currently less than a hundred people signed up and only three more weeks to go--so not bad odds.

[dhrachth]

Commission for @greyishbasia 

Patreon | Commission me on Ko-Fi

[dhrachth]

(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

[dhrachth]

finally joining steve/bucky hell

[dhrachth]

What I wanted from Endgame.

I’ve been thinking about what would have made me satisfied with Endgame and there’s a lot of different things that bugged me, but the main thing is the unsatisfying conclusion to Steve’s arc.  It just didn’t gel, narratively.

They couldn’t get Chris Evans back and didn’t want to kill him, fine.  What I wish they’d done was take away the super serum.  Let him live out his own life, not some alternate universe life that’s kind of creepily stolen from another version of himself.  With modern medicine, he could live a full life community organizing and picking back up his art and never being asked to kill anyone ever again. 

Sam and Bucky could make the odd mention of going to a baseball game with Steve or Steve giving Sam tips on using the shield and Chris Evans would never have to appear on screen--because Steve Rogers can’t go up a flight of stairs without an inhaler and should be kept far away from the super villains.

[dhrachth]

Home Screen!

Part one of “the Camera Roll of Steve Rogers”! Available as a downloadable background on Patreon!

Patreon | Commission me on Ko-Fi

[dhrachth]

“Two things only the greatest fools do: throw stones at hornets’ nests and threaten a Witcher.”

Happy (belated) Birthday, @spacebuck! 💜Here’s Steve as a witcher, come to fuck shit up.

my art

[dhrachth]

Trainspotting alternative poster.

[dhrachth]

uhhhhh back on my stucky bullshit

[dhrachth]

Bearded Cap is all we need.

Join me on Patreon! <3

https://www.patreon.com/takingmeds

[dhrachth]

“Can I buy you a drink?” 

Wanted to create Mr Barnes in colour rather than my usual Black and White. Would love to know what you think  xoxo :)

[dhrachth]

aka ITHLYN 2: WE HAVE A FUCKING TITLE

ch 1 posted! also yes i was doing live edits up until literally just now so if u opened it right away from email u may want to refresh

[dhrachth]

Ditto all of that.  I feel like the movie was a bunch of fanservice character moments strung together by a plot that made zero sense.  It’s like no one gave it any thought as to what they were actually doing or how it was supposed to work.

I think I’ve figured out why Endgame frustrates me (beyond what it does to my favourite characters). It’s related to the discussion about stakes being too high. And it really boils to this: you can’t show darkness on that level if you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences.

As far as I understand it (and… I don’t, really), the film ends with the dusted characters being brought back five years after they were dusted. Which means that half of the population remembers those five years, had to live them. The other half didn’t and now has to live in a world with the consequences of that snap.

Now… look… I realised going into this film that we weren’t going to have a proper exploration of what exactly it would mean for half the population to disappear. There just isn’t the time to capture the scope of it, so all the film did was hint at it. Steve’s support group. The kid who wouldn’t answer Scott’s question. (Weirdly undercut by the reaction to Bruce - enthusiastic fans of an Avenger who failed to stop the devastation they were living with? Considering how Thanos’ name was common knowledge surely their failure would be too?) But we didn’t get much beyond that. Which is pretty frustrating, because it makes the MCU feel kind of small, with masses of civilians we are never given reason to care about unless they are directly connected to one of the protagonists. Sometimes it almost feels like the protagonists wouldn’t even care without those connections.

It’s not ideal. But I get it. I get that it’s too much, and the film was already pretty dark as it is. But then they… they didn’t completely reverse it for some vague and illogical time stream reasons. Which means that the MCU-present should be 2023, right? With all that - all that - as part of that universe’s history.

What does this mean for FFH? Half of Peter’s classmates should have graduated by now, right? Is that film going to deal with this? Unless the trailer was widely misleading, I doubt it! Even the idea that after all that they’d have a field trip to Europe and that parents who had lost their children for five years would actually let them go is a bit *head scratch*.

But beyond that… imagine how devastating those consequences would be. Imagine how many people would be utterly traumatised! Governments collapsed, much of the world presumably descended into anarchy. Food shortages (especially since half of plants/livestock were snapped, thanks Thanos), power plant failures, riots… you name a catastrophe and it probably happened somewhere. On the personal level, some people will have moved on! Imagine coming back to your partner and seeing that they’re with someone else, that your children call someone else mother/father. Imagine coming back to find out someone you love has been killed in the aftermath. Will anyone who has been gone for five years still have a job? What about that person who searches for years to reunite with their loved one only to find out they were killed when the plane they were both in crashed when the pilots got dusted? All those people were brought back to were they were - are we to assume that people started dropping from the sky (putting aside for a moment that Earth does kind of move: it wouldn’t really be the same place)?

And you can hand-wave some of those points away! Maybe Bruce used that big brain of his to make sure everyone was in a safe location, whatever. But not all of them. Maybe I massively misunderstood the ending of Endgame, and I kind of hope I did, because to be honest this ending leaves me at an utter loss. How do you go on from that with happy superhero films? Now this wouldn’t be as big a problem if Endgame had indeed been the end of the MCU. But it’s not. Setting aside prequels (like presumably the Black Widow film) and space-based adventures (like GotG3), I assume some films (like SM:FFH) will have to deal with this. And I just don’t think they can.

The thing is, you can’t have it both ways. I don’t want the next phase of MCU films to be an angsty exploration of how a temporary genocide on a universal level would affect society! That’s not what I see superhero films for! But you can’t have that there and then pretend like everything’s ~mostly~ gone back to the status quo. Don’t give us the stakes if you’re too scared to show us the fallout. IW and EG are films that demand to be taken seriously - they’re dark! they’re grown-up! the stakes are high! - but aren’t willing to go all the way with their ideas which the Russos have done before. Thanos as a character is almost begging us to be taken seriously: a comic book villain with a ludicrous motive that is nevertheless played as a tragic or at least earnest figure (there’s a whole other essay to be written about how weirdly this film understands power and its wielding). But what does any of that mean if you cannot deal with the fallout? How can we care about the lives of the people within the MCU beyond that select few? Post-Endgame Earth would essentially be a post-apocalyptic society. The MCU can’t deal with that, not really. So presumably it won’t. And that just isn’t particularly satisfying to me.

The obvious solution to this would have been to revert everything to the moment of the snap, then lie to everyone about what had happened because even knowing that half the universe had disintegrated would be ridiculously traumatising. I don’t know whether they felt that would have been too cheap, or whether they felt like they couldn’t do that with Morgan. But man… forget the protagonists, I just want to give the civilians of the MCU a break.

I will say this, though: the idea of trees just popping out of the ground at random places is kinda funny.

[dhrachth]

Commission for @porgsandpops!

Commission slots are currently full

[dhrachth]

All the things wrong with Endgame

This is going to be chock full of spoilers, so read at your own risk.

First off, the plot is one big plot hole.  I love time travel stories.   If it’s got time travel in it, I’m always like ‘awesome, I’ll have to check it out.’  The people who made this movie clearly don’t like or understand time travel stories but tried to make one anyway.  The key thing is you have to set up rules and stick to them.  They actually talked about the rules in this one and then just did what the fuck ever.  No matter how you look at it doesn’t add up and makes no sense.

That would have irritated me regardless, but it still would have been an okay movie if they got the character arcs right.  But those were a disaster too.  From best to worst:

Tony - This was the only one that was okay. The fact that he died in the end was sad, but it made sense.  Heroically dying to save the world was a satisfying conclusion to his character arc.

Natasha - Kinda half okay.  One of her defining traits is trying to make up for the bad things she did in the past.  Dying to save the universe to redeem herself makes sense.  However, after the ‘not being able to have children makes her a monster’ bit and the last five years of her holding it together when the rest of the Avengers peaced out--ending her arc with her flinging herself off a cliff feels like a cheat.  It can be read as misogynistic.  All the guys got their endings, but she’s just gone and didn’t even get a funeral.

Bruce & Hawkeye - Both mostly wtf?  I don’t even know who that Bruce/Hulk mash up was.  I don’t think I saw that guy in any of the previous movies.  And for Hawkeye, the haircut and randomly hunting down gangsters, yeah, that made sense.

Thor - The big conclusion to his journey in the MCU is to be a sight gag?  It looks like he might be back in later movies and there will eventually be a satisfying conclusion for his character, but this was just disrespectful.  This was like Cap in Avenger’s 2, but worse.  They didn’t get the character and completely ignored all of his previous character growth.

Steve - The worst of the lot.  Even if the time travel element worked, which it didn’t, this is still god awful.  They decided the best end for Steve is for him to runaway, abandoning his present day family, and go back to the past where he leads of full life of blatantly ignoring evil and refusing to help people, most likely with a woman who would absolutely hate him for that.  That’s not Steve Rogers.  They should have just killed him. It would have been sad, but it would have been an end for the character we’ve watched all these years, not some strange pod person that just looks like Chris Evans.

There were a few bits I liked.  I liked that Tony got at least a few years with his family.  The moment where Spiderman came back was great.  Cap catching the hammer.  The bits where Tony and Thor talked to their parents.  And a handful of other things.  But, overall, this was a terrible movie.

[dhrachth]

Except it can’t be two timelines.  If it were two timelines, Steve couldn’t have been on that bench in the end and given Sam the shield.

The time travel in this movie was just bad.  If you’re going to do time travel you have to pick.  There are three choices: 

1) Alternate timelines, in which case the alternate timeline would have ended up with 2 Steves and no Thanos, but the main MCU timeline never would have seen old Steve again.

2) You can’t change the past.  This usually means everything they did when they went back had always already happened, they just didn’t know about it previously.  That could have worked with the borrowing the stones and putting them back before anything was missing.  But that doesn’t work at all with Thanos coming from the past to be killed in the future or Nebula’s younger version.

3) You can change the past.  (Back to the Future-style)  But then where’s the fall out from past Thanos being killed before the first snap?  Nebula killing herself? Or Loki swiping the Tesseract?  Or Steve saying he was hydra?  Or telling his younger self Bucky was alive?

It was random mixing and matching that ended up nonsensical.

Endgame has a lot of time travel plot holes, but 2014Thanos being able to appear in 2023 (5 years later post snap) when he was already dead in 2018 by Thor’s hand is the one that bugged me the most. His timeline has ended in 2018, he is already dead, he’s not supposed to go any further than 2018? I mean no one has a complete understanding of how exactly time travel works, but when you’re dead, your life force has ended, your timeline stopped and you can’t travel beyond your death right,,,  it was also explained in Doctor Strange:

you can make up your own rules for time travel and explained away the paradox with present nebula killing past nebula and not have any consequence for her present self, but this thing with you can’t travel beyond your death is already established and Doctor Strange so @ russos, explain??