stuckydrewx

[stuckydrewx]

I've been doing a lot of thinking about my family and how I was treated as a child, and honestly, my father has never seemed more amazing in my eyes.

I used to love Luigi(Mario's brother) when I was little. Like, he was my favorite character ever, and I had multiple plushies of him. Didn't give a fuck about Mario, vaguely tolerated Peach, but I loved Luigi.

On my first day of kindergarten, my dad gave me the number for his work phone and said it was Luigi's phone number. "If anything happens at school, call Luigi."And not even twenty minutes into my first day, I was having a panic attack. So I went down to the principal's office and called "Luigi."

Now, at the time, my father was in a meeting with his manager and his supervisor, along with most of his coworkers. And when I called, he picked up before he even left the room.

And he put on a very awful Italian accent and said, "Itsa me, Luigi! Whatsa the matter?"In front of his boss and coworkers. Without telling them what was going on. So they were absolutely bewildered, and he carried on like they didn't even exist. He only explained what was happening after I had calmed down and hung up, to which most of them responded with "Aww, cute."

I continued to call him whenever I got upset at school, and eventually his coworkers got in on it. I distinctly remember one of them impersonating Toad. I don't know why I'm telling you this, I just thought it might make you smile :)

this is so delightful I love your Luigi dad

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Another thing fandom needs to start doing more of is projecting on tops.

There are delicious amounts of psychological distress you can inflict on that guy once you get into his head. The brainworms of forcing agency and initiative on someone who genuinely is Not Fucking Ready For It are exquisite.

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favourite mcu visuals 1/?

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

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a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.

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This was a commision from @buck-b-barnes! 

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Im watching CA:TFA and i have yet another critic for the whole ‘peggy is so important in steves stiry even though if you replace her with a lamp, there’d be no difference’

The part where steve is getting the serum and they show peggy in the booth with the senator, the colonel and that hydra spy, why the fuck do they keep focusing on peggys reaction, when a literal hydra spy is right there? Like how is her reaction to the serum so important but the guy who was sent by the leader of hydra’s was not?

Oml i have so many complaints about this movie 😭

YES, you can really see how comphet is the main priority! Also how they've forgotten to make Peggy competent by having her, eg. notice both the spy, or the spies hanging around outside that should've clued her in too. Too busy thirsting over power to notice. Typical! 🙄

(And how egregious that What If...? treated the moment prior, when Erskine told the non-scientist, non-medical, non-engineering person to get out the way, as if this was somehow misogynist and exclusionary of him... Conveniently forgetting all the unnamed female nurses he allowed to stay 'in the room,' because they're actually of some use, and supposed to be there, doing their jobs! I guess centring female characters only happens when they're dating a man?)

I think I've mentioned elsewhere my headcanon that CATFA is the events of Steve's life as told from Peggy's POV; that it's like a propagandised 1950s version of events, to whitewash all the interesting stuff (all Steve's politics, the uncomfy relationship with his male bestie, all his missions with the Howlies, all his time in the USO with unsuitable-because-non-Peggy women) ...to really drive home that the only message you should be thinking about is that Captain America is definitely straight and taken, okay??

If you've ever seen the show Frasier, you might remember an episode where Diane, a deeply obnoxious ex of Frasier's, shows up with a play she's written about their past life. She shows him the play and it's a horrific Mary Sue-lead warping of events, made to frame her as this beloved figure whom everyone adored (in actual fact they couldn't stand her).

That play... that's CATFA all over. It's the Play What Peggy Wrote. Her memoir would probably be titled something like 'The Woman Who Made Captain America.'

Even Steve's Smithsonian exhibition she manages to make about herself -- while married to someone else! -- though it's supposed to be about Steve and the Howling Commandos, of which she was not one. They don't even show Howard Stark, and you'd think a showman like him would be all over that free PR! 😬

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Jake Jensen trying to flirt.

bonus:

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I was just reading this ask you answered (luna-rainbow/785155534556905472) about how Peggy was positioned in CATWS as basically the founder of SHIELD. and my memory of endgame is murky, but Peggy was shown either co-running SHIELD or a high-ranking member. in that ask & answer, both go over how strange it was that peggy wasn't targeted by hydra.

but the other question is - HOW was Peggy even allowed to found and run SHIELD? it's extremely unusual that a non-US born citizen has held a high-ranking position in an intelligence agency. IRL, it has never happened that a non-US born person has served as the head of one, let alone actually FOUND one.

IRL, there have been a handful that have had Cabinet-level posts, but not led intelligence agencies (perhaps the two most notable: Madeleine Albright, and of course, Henry Kissinger).

Of the two, the most direct comparison to Peggy would actually be Kissinger; served in the Cold War era, and was considered a master of strategic power politics. Kissinger is seen as a central figure in “realpolitik”, where power, national interest, and strategic advantage is considered better over ethical considerations, and diplomatic intervention is better than idealism or peaceful negotiation.

This was SHIELD in a nutshell, especially working with Zola, and would have been the only way that Peggy would have been allowed to serve as a high-ranking intelligence figure in Cold-War America (I mean, even Operation Paperclip is an example of this kind of politics, and in MCU canon, SHIELD [Peggy and Howard] are the ones to bring him in, even knowing what he did). And it fits with Peggy’s characterization in the MCU. It’s the central point of her characterization, and why in the narrative esp in TFA, she is the foil to Steve’s idealism and “righteousness”.

But, funnily enough, there is at least one other character who is a Kissinger-based intelligence official in the MCU: Alexander Pierce. His goal was to secure and advance survival and power (not of the state, but of Hydra), and where the ends justify the means (he is also the narrative foil, even physically!, to Steve in TWS). And like Kissinger, Pierce was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which many see as controversial.

Like with all things in the MCU, you can’t tell if Marvel did this on purpose, but in a structural way, the character that is most comparable to Peggy in the narrative is Pierce, which further deepens the question of “hey, why didn’t Hydra go after her, and hey, how could Hydra thrive under the nose of a woman who was otherwise characterized in the script as being presciently capable?”

How interesting.

Thanks for the detailed commentary!

I do tend to think that it’s mostly unintentional, because it feels like most of the main movie writers didn’t put much thought into what Peggy represented with her actions. The way she is treated (eg Steve going to her for advice) is directly at odds with what she’s implied to have done in canon.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts but Peggy (and Tony) feels a product of the 90s and 00s — not just the “not like other girls”/“one of those boys” trope common during those years, but her morality being “willing to get her hands dirty” and “doing what must be done but no one else would do”. There’s a reason that Steve is mocked in the Whedon movies as the uptight morality police who yells “language”.

CATWS is fairly unique in how it allowed its hero to be unapologetically and unashamedly good. In other movies, particularly the Iron Man ones, there’s a sense that being “good” is pretentious. I think it’s taking the idea of “humans are allowed to be imperfect even as heroes” too far into “being good is too try hard”.

So yeah, I agree and I think the Steve from that movie would have re-examined how Hydra was built and what that means for Peggy’s part in it.

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I'm rewatching The Winter Soldier, and I'm seriously baffled by the situation of Peggy being the head of Shield for so many years while Hydra slowly infiltrated Shield all that time. Meanwhile, Howard and Maria got killed for taking the super serum, Nick Fury almost got assassinated for being suspicious about Project Insight, Captain America almost got captured and almost also got assassinated (along with Black Widow) because he didn't want to tell Alexander Pierce about what actually happened to Nick Fury, heck even Jasper Sitwell was immediately killed when he was forced to the Avengers the truth about Project Insight. But Peggy??? She managed to stay as head of Shield for so long until the present day. Something doesn't seem right at all. Why are the people who are suspicious of Hydra or forced to tell the truth about Hydra almost killed or killed, while Peggy, who supposedly is on the good side, managed to be alive until the present time. I've always had the feeling Peggy was actually part of Hydra also. That's the only explanation that I have for her.

Thanks for the ask =D Coincidentally, I was rewatching CATWS when I got this.

I completely agree. Peggy's role in the movie is...very odd. I don't know how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just misogynist writing on the writer's part.

What I mean is, up until CACW, she was always Steve's token love interest, i.e. she had minimal sway on the plot/Steve, but she was there in a largely male-dominated film (particularly CATFA, less so in CATWS) to remind people that Cap is definitely not gay! Look, he has 1 (one) special woman interested in him! And as other people have pointed out before, quite possibly she was not killed in the end ala Cynthia Glass-ending because someone realised it would look really bad for one of the two named female speaking roles to end up dead (while the other one is...random harlot to test the MC's will?)

Then in CATWS she was, unexpectedly, given the "founder of SHIELD" retcon. Her role is so tiny in this movie that it's impossible to say whether this was just a piece of charity on the part of the writers "yes let's give a woman a boss title", or if it was leading somewhere in a later movie.

CATWS did have a very tight story with very strong themes so I almost want to believe it's intentional. I did a meta once on how a lot of the story is about trust, and Steve's strong aversion to people, especially perceived allies, who keep secrets of things Steve deserve to know. He gave Fury and Nat a lot of grief for "compartmentalising" and "truth is a matter of circumstance". Steve would be equally aghast at Peggy's omissions. She didn't tell Steve about Operation Paperclip and the recruitment of Zola, and by extension Bucky's recapture and creation of the Winter Soldier (a connection that Steve himself made, after seeing Bucky with his mask off). When they go to the bunker at Camp Leigh, Nat asks Steve "who the girl is", Steve says nothing. It makes no sense for Nat to genuinely not know who Peggy Carter is -- she's in his museum exhibit, FFS, and this is Nat we're talking about. So the more likely explanation is Nat was teasing Steve, but Steve simply stares at the picture, marches over to the shelf and says coldly, "If you're already in a secret office, why do you need to hide the elevator?" It is my thought at this point, Steve was already very suspicious of Peggy's role with SHIELD, and his later discoveries of Zola, then Bucky, made him very disappointed in Peggy, hence his very adamant, "SHIELD, Hydra, it all goes" declaration to Fury -- a huge contrast to his stance earlier in the movie, which was "Knowing that you helped found SHIELD is half the reason I stayed."

Agreed about the fact that she survived all these years, when Hydra was very ruthless in eliminating any opposition...says a lot about either how useful she was for their ends, or how useless she was in her role. But more likely the former.

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Because of some unknown dark magic, Bucky turned into a baby. And Steve became his babysitter. For sure.

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Chris Evans as Steve Rogers & Sebastian Stan as James Bucky Barnes Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

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can we talk about that second long glance Bucky gives in CATFA when everyone is celebrating Steve's return and the liberation of the Howling Commandos? I'm talking about that brief look of disappointment and bitterness right before Bucky yells 'give it up for Captain America'. A look of JEALOUSY too. He used to have Steve all to himself and now he's gone and turned himself into a hot weapon and Bucky realizes this is how it's gonna be from now on: everybody wanting to brush their shoulders with Steve for all the wrong shallow reasons and he HATES IT. Hates that he'll have to share Steve like that.

And you might say I am insane for reading all this into a glance that is on screen for the 4th of a second maybe but I assure you, it's all there. Mr Sebastian Stan, you went SO hard and I saw you, I was there!!!!!!!!

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steve and bucky always knew how to be soft with each other. much like breathing, it was second nature

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The ability to turn reblogs off has really added a new dimension to shitty posts

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love how Sims players call themselves simmers. you mean like a stew