#Bro went on a whole ass existential rant

[facelessfinest]

I think it's time we all admit that What if?...Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead Of His Hands? has been the only genuinely interesting and well done episode of the show so far.

High stakes, good pacing, phenomenal animation, and a story that actually deviates from the original in a meaningful way. It actually feels like such a small change lead to a vastly different reality.

I think what makes a What If? story interesting is the ties it has to the main timeline; if you want to showcase how a small choice can utterly change a whole universe, then you have to start in a universe that is comparably the same as what we already know, and show how one character choosing one different option can be catastrophic. Otherwise, you aren't really exploring branching timelines/butterfly effect, you're just looking at unrelated universes.

Even then, not every idea is interesting enough to warrant spending so much time on it. *ahem* captain carter *cough*.

Strange Supreme's appearances are just so fascinating because we get to see the new highs and lows a character can reach when their hearts are in a slightly different place. We get our unique factor in the form of him being genuinely in love with Christine instead of his job, and then our diverging path with him choosing to seek out dangerous knowledge, a choice which is highlighted by showcasing what would have happened if he hadn't done so! In the end, the universe is fundamentally changed, completely collapsed around him, despite starting off so normal. And that's not even the end of it!

He shows up in more episodes because of the power and knowledge he has attained, and as a lesson to the Watcher that choosing to sit out is only selfishness in the face of a danger that is ready and willing to take advantage of your compliance. It is genuinely fun to see the power he has in action; Ultron tried to blow up the universe in the finale, and Strange DEVOURED THE EXPLOSION. Like, that's fucking awesome!

And then there's Carter... Whose reason for being everwhere is just "I'm Captain Carter!" How dull...

Anyways, Strange supreme is goated and I will have no sass.

[dendrite-blues]

Given the events of today, this seems an appropriate time to tell an embarrassing story about myself.

Me, 2 me:

It’s about Loki, and 2012 fandom, and growing older. In retrospect, I suppose it’s not actually that funny, but the irony is pretty strong.

The first MCU movie I saw was Avengers 1. I had never read a comic book or seen a super hero movie. I just happened to be in the common room of my dorm when a bunch of nerd bros were going to see it, and a good friend insisted that I had to see it.

I was ENTHRALLED the entire time. Start to finish. Every joke, every fight seen, all the characters being introduced and meeting each other. The hot ass villain that stone cold just WHACKED a guy with his cane and drilled some motherfucker’s eye out. Like WTF?!

My mind was blown. I opened AO3 on my phone in the car ride back, I couldn’t even wait to get home. Mind you, AO3 had only been started like... a year before that. It was baby. I got it so I could comment on some BNF’s Sherlock fics in 2010, but stopped using it until 2012 because there weren’t any fics on there. For real! there were like, maybe 100 fics on there when I joined. I remember telling my wife it was a cool idea, but it’d never work. No way would they get the whole fandom to leave FFN. LOL!!

But there were stories already popping up on premiere night. There were stories from visionaries who’d written shit before the movie even came out. Bless them, they made my entire week!

I thought Tony Stark was fucking incredible, so I looked up his ships. Fell into Science Boyfriends. Didn’t so much like Stony. Fell even harder for team fic and found family stuff.

I remember when Howard Stark’s A+ Parenting was first used. I vividly remember Tony Stark Has a Heart being coined and abruptly being tagged on EVERY SINGLE FIC for a week. Fun times.

Anyway, time passes. I moved into an apartment with 2 roommates and my (now) wife. We were all fujoshi, and conversation in our house would have be completely indiscernible to someone who didn’t know the fandom lingo.

We all go to see Age of Ultron together. It was a great time, but as a Tony/Bruce shipper I was understandably distressed by the sudden yeeting of Bruce from planet Earth and essentially removing my OTP from the entire 2nd Phase of the MCU.

“What the hell am I supposed to read now?” I wondered. 

I still don’t feel any flutters for Steve, Tony doesn’t know Bucky exists yet, and I’m still living with some intense internalized misogyny that prevents me liking any straight ships.

So my roommate, quite reasonably, mentions Frostiron.

And this is where the story gets embarrassing, because I immediately wrinkled my nose in confusion and went on a five minute, idiotic rant about what a dumb, weird-ass crack ship that was. Tony and Loki? Excuse you? What, is that some kind of “ship the two hot fandom heart throbs even though they have nothing in common” ship? He threw Tony out a window FFS? He’s a VILLAIN.

Queue the laugh track.

And my roommate, bless her, she was a total champion and a good friend and she just completely let me get away with it.

She shrugged and said, “Welp, sorry I mentioned it.” and life went on.

FLASH FORWARD SEVEN YEARS AND TWO EXISTENTIAL CRISES LATER

I’m now a 27 year old Hollywood washout whose lost my career, my apartment, and all of my friends in a matter of months. I’m back home in the Bible Belt with my homophobic parents and experiencing the most intense depression, self hatred, and gender dysphoria of my life.

I’ve been so busy working to keep my head above water as a film worker that I haven’t seen a movie I didn’t help make for six years. I have no fandoms, I don’t even know what’s popular anymore. I go looking for anything familiar, anything that can reconnect me to a time in my life when everything didn’t royally suck.

I go to the MCU.

Now, it’s important to note that when I was into MCU before I did not know I was on the trans spectrum, or the autism spectrum, or the asexual spectrum. I thought I was just another slash loving lesbian that really, really liked to cosplay men, and maybe felt a bit sad that I couldn’t be like that all the time, and also kind of wished I could be masculine without going through scary, expensive surgeries, and OH MY GOD I’M NOT CIS OH MY GOD.

Ahem. So. I was processing that at the same time as my life was utterly imploding.

And I found intersex Loki. I can’t overstate how important to my recovery Loki fic was at that time. They felt my struggles, they felt my confusion, they embodied gender in a way I could only dream of, physically changing genitals and all, AT WILL! Whenever they wanted! It was a powerful fantasy, and an escape from the reality of being gender non-conforming in a conservative state.

But I’m sure the irony has already occured to you at this point, you see my dillema. 

Because the options for intersex Loki shipping are, by and large, Frostiron and Thorki. 

Now I had always been intensely squicked by Thorki. My family follows a similar dynamic to the Allfamily, with me being the golden child and my sister being the scapegoat. So I was (and admittedly still am) incapable of reading that ship without thinking about my actual sister, and that’s not sexy.

Which left Frostiron.

[pause for reader to laugh at my shame]

I naturally fell into a deep obsession with the ship, reading the top 80 pages of fic in less than two months. I started writing my own when I ran out of the kind of Loki I craved. I projected so much of my pain and frustration and feelings of isolation onto them, and I even got support and appreciation from the fandom community! It was amazing, and not at all something I expected.

...but in my heart I always knew the truth.

I had dismissed the ship outright years earlier. I thought I knew better. I looked down on the shippers as Tumblr hoes that would ship anybody hot regardless of character. I thought that just because characters didn’t get along in canon that there was no reason to ship them. I thought that you couldn’t possibly write a good story based on one scene. I didn’t bother looking deeper into the characters to see their similarities.

So basically, I’m a giant hypocrite!

If there’s a moral to the story, I guess it’s to be suspicious of your biases and that you can always change your mind. Years have passed but I still look back on that conversation and cringe. 

The one mercy is that I didn’t do it on the internet, so there wasn’t a record. I was allowed to leave that childish arrogance in the past, known only to me and my faithful friend who has been kind enough not to mention it.

But in my true heart... in the back of my mind... I know the truth.

I was an anti of the ship I’ve now written 500k about. And now you all know too.

Thanks to anyone who read to the end! I hope it was at least a little entertaining. Let this be a warning to the youngins. Careful the things you say, you never know what the future holds. Don’t be a clown like me!