#So I never try to force myself to do comms. Bc that's not fair to me or the person who commissioned

[shima-draws]

I had a conversation with my mom about commissions--she’s of the opinion that you shouldn’t have to wait super long to get what you paid for. I’m the opposite; I think artists should be able to take as long as they need to finish a commission, and I’m totally cool with waiting for months even for them to get back to me. Surprisingly enough I’m very patient when it comes to commissioning other people lol. Maybe I just think that way bc I’m an artist myself so I totally get the struggle. (And I also take time with my comms too.) My mom is not an artist so she doesn’t really grasp the amount of time and effort it takes, so she expects results immediately. Which like. I get that too? I dunno. What do you all think? Are you the kind of patient person who’s totally chill with an artist taking months to finish your commission? Or do you want it to be done within a reasonable amount of time, like 2-3 weeks?

[quickslver]

@purplequvr​   /  wants a dying kiss bc z hates me i guess.

     to say that this isn’t fair is an understatement. there’s a lot of things in pietro’s life that have never been fair but the way happiness seems to get theft out of his grip every time he seems to have a tight hold on it seems to be the favored choice when it comes down to it. he says it a lot i know what i’m getting myself into or we’re avengers, this is the life we’ve chosen. it doesn’t make the realization of the situation any easier. in truth, it’s never easy -- no matter how the story gets spun, losing the one thing that made you happy in a world adamant on bring you down is one of the worst pains imaginable -- and now clint’s going to suffer it for the rest of his life. the guilt is immeasurable. 

he’s usually quick to recover but this? this is something different. he’s tough but he’s not invincible. at some point something has to give. he tries to move but his body fails him. it’s like it’s given up before his own resolve has thought to do so. through hazy vision he sees clint coming at him and all he can think is i don’t want him to see this.  “ -- i’m okay. ”  but he’s not and it’s obvious that he’s not. no matter how hard he’s trying to play it off he is the very opposite of okay. he can barely hear the way clint’s yelling over the comms, even with a device of his own in his ear. that’s not good. he inhales a sharp breath and forces his arm up to reach for clint’s hand.  “ come here. ”

he can barely drag him forward but he can tell that clint’s hand makes way onto his face. the hold is gentle ( he thinks? ) and it’s the only comfort he needs right now.  “ i’ll be fine. i bounce back. always. ”  there’s a smirk there, though it’s weak but he tries.  “ i can make it through anything. i’ve survived worse. ”  the words seem to be little comfort from the look in clint’s eyes and the only response he gets is an intense kiss. it feels like he’s doing all he can to force a little bit of extra life into pietro with just a simple gesture. 

                                             too bad this isn’t a fairytale.

he wants to return the kiss. with all his might he does. but it feels like so much effort and he’s so very tired. very gently he manages to return something before he gives in to how heavy his eyes feel. the last thing he can remember is hearing; please don’t leave.

[panharmonium]

@merlinobsessionist you understand me on a spiritual level

[putting the rest of this under a cut because it just ended up being me grumping at length about fandom trends - which, yes, i am well-aware is a silly endeavour in all cases, but sometimes you just gotta have your little grump regardless, you know, for health reasons. X)  and in this particular case the grumping is probably relevant/entertaining only to myself, and you, and one or two other people here, so, tucking it away to spare everyone’s dash :) ]

the other day i was exploring the mostly abandoned wasteland that is the merlin fandom on livejournal (since that’s my original fandom home and obviously i missed out on being involved in that particular niche of lj when merlin was active, so i was feeling nostalgic and kinda curious as to it had looked like) - i stumbled over a merlin fic-finders comm and looked up my boy william just for kicks, and surprisingly, a couple of the old requests sounded like maybe i WAS involved in the merlin fandom on livejournal back then and i just don’t remember it

i think i wrote this in a past life

this is an eleven year-old comment in a mostly defunct fandom community but i felt it in my BONES

oh, my dear commenter from 8 years ago, i WISH  XD

it made me laugh, and then it made me grumpy, because obviously there were very few suggestions offered in response to these asks - the fics just don’t exist, not in any numbers.

and like, the thing is, i don’t particularly care about the shipping side of things for the most part; i always lean towards gen and that’s mostly been it, for me; that’s always been my MO in every fandom i’ve ever participated in, but - look.  if i have to witness (*checks ao3*) 23,830 (twenty four thousand. twenty four THOUSAND!!!!) instances of merlin getting together with arthur hecking pendragon, over and over and over again, in every AU configuration under the sun, then you had better believe i am ready and willing to plead the case of the only person in the merlin-verse who did not think arthur pendragon deserved merlin’s entire life.  

and of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with arthur and merlin as an item, obviously (i mean, i can name a few things about it that don’t appeal to me personally, but that is not the same thing as a value judgment) and everybody should have fun with their own ships, always - but for me, personally, there is just...enough of that out there.  i have seen Enough.  it’s hard for me to even determine where the rest of the fandom is, under the ever-present spread of merlin/arthur content; a picture of merlin/arthur should literally be next to the dictionary entry for steamroller.

and of course, i knew it would be like this from the beginning, and i know complaining about the ubiquitousness of a particular ship in fandom is utterly silly, in the end, because it’s not like there’s anything wrong with something being ubiquitous - the whole point of fandom is to make what you love, and if that’s what everybody loves, well, hey, that’s just how it is!  that’s what people should be making - the stuff they love!  that’s what fandom is here for!  i only mutter to myself in the bubble of my own blog because the ubiquitousness makes it almost impossible for me to find what *i* love, because i don’t want to read about arthur/merlin in the first place, no matter who else appears in the fic, and also because my fave minor character, while he gets a pretty good amount of fannish screentime for someone who showed up in one episode, also suffers from the curse known as “virtually everything he features in is actually about merlin and arthur getting it on”

like - by the numbers, when you exclude merlin/arthur from will’s character tag, will retains less than 20% of his fics, some of which are already like...you know, he’s dead, or just mentioned, et cetera.  

and his poor ship tag...he and merlin have 136 fics in their tag, and at first you wanna look at that and be like - ‘hey, not bad, pal, that’s p. good for a rarepair!’  but in actuality, less than 20 of those fics are actually about him and merlin.  like...12% of his own ship tag actually belongs to him, and the rest is him being used as a plot device to get arthur and merlin together.

and i am sure that a lot of other side characters probably suffer from this, too, given the general fic distribution in this fandom, though the only person i’ve looked at for comparison purposes is freya, who is a (mostly) one-ep character like will.  she, despite that, doesn’t appear to get hit quite as hard - she seems to keep more of her fic for herself, which is nice (when i exclude merlin/arthur from the freya/merlin search, freya still retains about 65% of her fics, as opposed to will’s sad little 12%).  i’m glad for her, though - she of all people does not need to be losing fic to arthur; she has suffered enough. 

to put things in perspective, though - merlin and uther have more fics in their ship tag that earnestly focus on the tagged....hnhhmgnhn i can’t say it...relationship than merlin and will do - even filtering out every instance of dubcon/noncon.  

(and yes, i did in fact want to die when i had to actually click the merlin/uther tag on ao3 in order to check that factoid, thanks for asking.)

so, that said - i don’t generally read canon-era fic anyway, when i’m actively writing for a fandom, but since the merlin fandom sometimes feels like it consists solely of modern AU’s anyway, all i am trying to say is that it would be nice if i could pick up an AU including a character i enjoy without seeing him constantly reduced to:

merlin’s loser ex

merlin’s abusive ex (w h at)

merlin’s ex who’s kinda sorta tolerable-ish, maybe, if you squint, but just ultimately Not Right for merlin - holding merlin back, or being too overbearing, or too pushy, or Just Not Enough - or being someone who merlin stays with only bc he’s familiar and merlin’s settling for something safe and unrisky and stagnantly unfulfilling

the dude who merlin cheats on to be with arthur

the dude who cheats on merlin, bc the fic needed a reason to break up merlin and will so that white-knight!arthur could swoop in (cue me shouting ‘IN WHAT UNIVERSE DO YOU THINK WILL WOULD EVER - ’)

the dude merlin “makes mistakes with” when things with arthur aren’t going well

the friend-with-benefits who’s apparently chill with a casual arrangement, thus keeping himself conveniently out of the way of the oncoming merlin/arthur train

the friend-with-benefits who’s secretly NOT chill with a casual arrangement and who’s pining for merlin, except we all know that ain’t ever going anywhere because arthur exists, and in the meantime merlin only ever gets together with will to try and forget his problems

the friend-with-no-benefits who’s still pining for merlin (which situation, i might add, would be read completely differently if it were arthur in will’s shoes, because if that were the case then the audience would 100% be rooting for him)

the “best friend” whose only purpose in fic is to provide space for conversations/debriefs about merlin’s relationship/pre-relationship with arthur (like - i’m sorry, but there desperately needs to be some type of bechdel-esque test for will; e.g. do will and merlin have a conversation about something other than arthur pendragon?  if yes, u win, u may pass go, collect 20 dollars, congratulations)

the friend whose dislike of arthur always, ALWAYS ends up being framed as a mistake.  as will’s stubborn unwillingness to give arthur a chance, until at last will sees the light and succumbs to the irresistible beauty of merlin and arthur’s eternal love. -_-  there is vanishingly rare acknowledgement in fic of the fact that in the canon universe, all of the criticisms will makes about merlin and arthur’s relationship are not only accurate, but made in merlin’s best interests (and also, ultimately, proven right, by the end of the show - merlin tanks his whole damn life for a series of empty promises prophesying arthur pendragon’s future potential, and he gets NOTHING for his devotion.  merlin is more alone at the end of the show than he was at the beginning, when his only dream was to be loved and accepted by more than the two people who’d comprised his entire life up until that point.  and he spends at least half a decade in between the show’s hopeful beginning and its miserable end being told that he’s evil by the very person for whom he is expected to sacrifice his future.  

so what, exactly, makes will so wrong to be wary?  who among us wouldn’t be angry if we saw somebody we loved being forced to sacrifice themselves on an unforgiving altar like this?  

i don’t know the answer.  i’m not sure what it is that earns will his spot on the “destined to be shafted for arthur pendragon” list.  i don’t know if it’s an unconscious backlash to will’s refusal to hop on the arthur/merlin train, or if it’s just a superficial understanding/lack of genuine interest in his character, which, in that case, sure, i’ll give people that one, in all fairness; not everyone has spent a year picking his character apart (though i still don’t think it justifies tossing him in there just because the fic needs a random insert who can be positioned as inferior to arthur’s gloriousness).  either way, the end result is that we usually end up seeing a will who has very little in common with his source material, or who needs to ultimately step aside to make way for arthur - arthur, who never displays the same level of care toward merlin in canon that merlin shows toward him, and who actively oppresses merlin’s people for the entire duration of their relationship.  

like...it’s all just fic, obviously, and we can make characters as OOC as we want; have fun; go wild.  but at the same time, it’s impossible for me not to balk at how arthur in some of this fic is just - utterly unrecognizable.  in comparison with fic!will, arthur is the most Solicitous, Gentle, Understanding, Deeply Concerned, Invested-In-Merlin’s-Welfare-and-Inner-Thoughts creature you ever did see, and I’m just over here like - it is not like that!  it is NOT LIKE THAT!  IT HAS LITERALLY NEVER BEEN LIKE THAT.  arthur pendragon in fic sometimes interacts with merlin like - he tilts his head and listens like a therapist and affirms absolutely everything merlin says and tells him ‘gosh, i understand. tell me more. how can i help you’ - he goes about his day thinking about merlin and putting merlin first and i just - i literally have never seen this person before in my life.  who is this man?  who is this unbelievably attentive paragon of caring?  i’ve never met him before.

the entire running problem with merlin and arthur’s friendship in canon is that arthur, while he absolutely does care about merlin, tends to take merlin for granted.  merlin is just another feature of arthur’s landscape, until something dramatic happens and arthur has a little scare and saves merlin’s life, and then things go back to the way they were.  arthur doesn’t See merlin the way he should, not in the ordinary moments.  merlin goes home and spends his evenings thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person and to keep arthur safe and happy, but arthur just goes home and eats supper with his wife.  arthur does not go home and spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life.  he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’  he never feels like he’s supposed to be half of some two-sided coin.  i know people like to give arthur this quality in their fic - and that’s totally fine, of course, it’s fic, have as much fun as you want - but in canon, that is just not something arthur pendragon does.  it’s not who he is shown to be.  

and yet almost every time when i go to explore fandom, i find that the person who does put merlin first in canon is perpetually elbowed aside for this extremely generous interpretation of everyone’s favorite prince.  

and i just...i always try to find the good bits in everything, and i am sometimes willing to overlook a ship i don’t personally enjoy if there’s something else about the piece that i think is great, but there’s only so many times i can read the sentence “merlin had never felt like this with anyone, not even will” in fics where merlin and will are supposed to have been dating or even married/engaged, or “will was merlin’s best friend, but he just didn’t understand” (not like arthur, of course, who merlin literally just met a week ago), or “will was great, but there was only so much of him merlin could stand in one sitting/will was great, but he was best enjoyed in small doses.”  there’s only so many times i can read a hundred different variations of that before i start to get real grumpy.  and that’s not even touching the fics where will’s portrayed less favorably than that, even.  

so, you know.  i feel grumbly about it sometimes, how this particular character is trapped in a perpetual net of always being less-than, when one of the nicest parts of fandom for me is that every character/ship can have an infinitude of possibilities, even the ones i personally think are unbelievably bizarre (which category merlin and will do not even fall into, like - it’s not an incredible leap.  merlin/mordred is a leap, okay; mordred is like seventeen years old!  leon/morgana is a leap - how on earth did that become so popular??? - but will and merlin?  that’s not a leap.)

what is it about will that makes him so tempting to trample over?  will’s only sin in canon was to look at arthur pendragon and pronounce himself utterly unimpressed.  his only crime was to tell merlin ‘this dude isn’t good for you,’ about which fact he was CORRECT, by the way - he is the first person who ever chooses to care about merlin, the first person merlin ever chooses to trust, the first friend who loves real!merlin without needing to be coaxed and convinced and taught that it’s okay.  he is the only one who ever tells merlin ‘you deserve better than this mess,’ the only one for whom merlin has always been priority number one and in whose eyes arthur isn’t even on the map.  merlin’s friendship with will (and lancelot, afterwards) is the healthiest one merlin ever gets to experience, and i wish more fannish material acknowledged it as such, as opposed to using will to set up merlin and arthur’s epic romance.  

all of this, i suppose, is just a very long way of saying that now that i am no longer avoiding spoilers and have actually started testing the waters of the wider fandom, i have come to the obstinate, utterly inflexible conclusion that will deserves his own collection of happy endings, and i don’t care if i have to write them myself.  i’ve already got the gen angle covered.  and even though i’ve never written ship!fic in my life, the fact of the matter is that spite can be a hell of a motivator, and i will bite the bullet and learn how to do it if i have to.  if people can really be out here tagging their merlin/uther fics as “schmoop” (YES. REALLY.) then by GOD, i swear, there are no excuses - this fandom can accommodate literally anything; there’s no reason it can’t accommodate stories where will wins.  let this kid have his good ending.  arthur pendragon can fall in love with merlin 23,830 times despite his and merlin’s ship flying in the face of canon, and that means will deserves his own tiny handful of stories to be actually about him, without his and merlin’s relationship being used solely as a stepping stone on the way to merlin and arthur’s 23,831st triumph.

i am just saying - if uther pendragon can fall in love with merlin and have it tagged as ‘fluff,’ then for the love of all that is good, we can give will his moment.  let will enjoy the respect he should have earned from us when he died saving both merlin and arthur’s lives.  let will be a person in his own right, instead of a plot device sacrificed to the (in)glorious altar of merthur.  let will have an inner life of his own.  let will have a best friend who doesn’t treat him like an accessory to The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.  let will himself live out The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, for once.  let will get his guy.  i may tend to focus on friendship in my own work, but there are a lot of universes out there, and when it comes to someone who has always been so alone, and so singularly focused on merlin’s wellbeing, i’m not entirely sure if friendship even feels anything different to “in love” for will at all, in at least some of these places.

let will have his happy tags.  he’s been on his own for so much of his life - let him have his simple ‘friendship’, his ‘platonic love,’ his ‘found family.’  let him have his lovestruck ‘pining,’ ‘friends-to-lovers,’ ‘angst with a happy ending,’ too, and let him keep those tags for himself.  let characters who aren’t arthur pendragon have their love stories.

i may not care much for shipping, and i would rather read gen any day of the week, but let me tell you right now, i would rather write will and merlin settling down in a haze of domestic bliss 23,830 times before i would ever want to watch merlin ditch him yet again for a dude who never matched merlin’s level of caring and investment in the canon ‘verse.

[agent-ccarter]

past. bucky barnes.

Request: Could you write smth where the winter soldier and the reader are fighting on different sides but he saves her at some point bc he remembers her from his past somehow and they're both in shock but they gotta fight n do like their job so it's a quick fluffy moment of them xoxo 

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader

Warning: lil angst, swearing

A/N: ahhh this is kinda cute. I’ve inserted Y/N into Civil War, and she’s a mutant that was used by HYDRA. She can teleport and is super strong, like, the same strength as Bucky and Steve, and was put in cryo.  I kind of used the Clint/Natasha fight as a basis! I’ll stop blabbering now, enjoy!!

Tony found himself a little desperate for heroes to join his team; sure, he had a fair few people, with Spiderman helping to bulk out the group, but he wanted one more, just in case Steve had found a lot of people to help. He found a lot of dead ends, heroes who didn’t want or were unable to help, and Nat was the one who finally came through with an idea. I kind of used the Clint/Natasha fight as a basis!

“I think I’ve got someone,” she said as she flicked through a couple of files she had routed out of the drawer beside her bed, an act Tony of course picked up on. She finally pulled out a file, featuring a girl with seemingly normal features, the only abnormality being her strikingly bright eyes.

“And she is?” Tony muttered, continuing to flick through the remainder of the files. Natasha passed hers along, allowing the man to look through the papers.

“Y/N Y/L/N. She was used by Hydra, exploited the same way Wanda was. She was a high profile assassin for a long time, I had a few run ins with her, and they used cryo to keep her young. She escaped a few years ago, but she’s been popping up across New England for the last couple of months.”

“Perfect,” Tony smiled, seeing as he looked through the paper that she has super strength abilities and the ability to teleport short distances, allowing her to quickly confuse her enemies, “Can you speak to her?”

“Me, what makes you think she will listen to me?” Nat chuckled slightly, earning a groan from Tony, “She’s gonna take some convincing, Tony. She picks her battles carefully, she needs a good reason to help out.”

When the pair finally tracked you down, hiding out in a small apartment in Massachusetts, it quickly became clear that Natasha was right; you’d take a lot of convincing.

“I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to look elsewhere. I can’t help.” You sighed, returning your mug to the kitchen sink.

“But Nat says you’ve been working for a couple of months now. Why can't you help us?” Tony questioned, almost exasperated.

You felt yourself chuckle slightly, “The only ‘work’ I've been doing is stopping Hydra agents that have come looking. I’m only doing this to help myself.”

“Well, Y/N, if you don’t help, you’ll be subject to government sanction for helping yourself,” Tony sighed once more as you shook your head, “Listen, Y/N. I’m Tony Stark. I don’t beg or plead. But we are here, begging you to help. Please.” The look on the familiar assassin's face confirmed his pleas, breaking you down a little.

“Who am I fighting?”

When you arrived at the airport that day, along with other members of the group, you found yourself confused; here you were, in a foreign country, with people you didn’t know, fighting a battle you still didn’t understand. Here you were fighting battles that weren’t yours to fight again.

“Hi,” a man in a silver suit walked to you, offering his hand, “I’m Rhodey.”

“Y/N.” You replied shortly, tightening the gloves on your hands.

Rhodey was clearly taken aback by your tone, muttering a sarcastic “Nice to meet you too.”

“I’m not one for niceties,” you muttered, “the last time I trusted someone, I ended up being experimented upon and taken captive.” You knew you probably shouldn’t act this way, that the man was only trying to be kind, yet your years of torture made you harsh and skeptical of all. HYDRA didn’t wipe you like they did other assets; whether that was a blessing or a curse was a mystery to you. You remembered your past, your family, most of whom were long dead by the time you escaped HYDRA, you remembered every single person you killed, the threat of losing your own life or further cruel torture from your captors enough incentive to do so, you remembered every ounce of fear and pain you’d ever felt. Thus, to you, your cold, concealed nature was understandable.

“Noted.” The man nodded, and you were sure you saw a solemn smile across his lips before he walked away. 

It wasn’t long before Tony rounded up his forces, walking outside to wear the other man stood. Tony had told you little, just about the Accords and his friendship with Steve. Unlike other members of your team, you were not afraid; they were fighting their friends, while you were fighting people you had never met. Or, at least that is what you thought until you saw a metal arm mirroring the sunlight across the tarmac. You’d recognize that face anywhere; Bucky Barnes, a super soldier manipulated by HYDRA, a man you’ve trained with more times than you can count. A man you once viewed as a friend, but are now sure wouldn’t even recognise your face.

“Tony,” you shouted as the group walked, making the man walk over to you, “why is he here?” You nodded in the long haired man’s direction as he stood, talking to Captain America.

“Barnes? He’s Steve’s best friend, why, do you know him?”

“I want him.” 

“Sure. Got a personal score to settle, be my guest.” He smiled, tapping your shoulder gently, “Just don’t rough him up too much.” You nodded, keeping your composure with no smile on your lips.

It happened quick. Words were exchanged between the two men, and before you knew it, you were running straight towards Bucky. When he started, he ran faster than the others, eyes locked on you, but as he got closer, he slowed, before stopping completely a little in front of you. 

“Do I know you?” He frowned.

“Y/N. Frankly, it’s a little rude that you don’t remember me.” You smirked slightly, allowing your guard down for once. As you said your name, you saw realisation hit the soldier slightly, allowing almost a look of relief to come across his face.

“Y/N,” he smiled slightly, something you’d very rarely seen before, “How’d you get out?”

“They forgot to lock the door properly, it’s easy to escape when you can teleport,” he smiled, almost laughing slightly at your statement. The pair of you almost forgot about the purpose of your meeting until you heard Tony come over the comms.

“I’ve got a job to do Barnes,” you muttered, knowing you’d rather just go then fight a man you’d grown to love.He was about to say “me too”, but before he knew it you were suddenly in front of him, swinging your leg and knocking him to the floor. He laid in shock for a second as your hand grasped tightly around his neck and you leaned over his face.

“Don’t pull your punches this time, Barnes.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he smiled, before you felt his metal fists fly into your side, sending you flying. The soldier attempted to mimic your previous position, but before he knew it, you’d turned to thin air, “shit.” he groaned as he felt your arm around his neck once again. You were one of the only people who could pull such a move on the man, and have him genuinely fear for his life. The two of you continued, moving in a seemingly choreographed series of flips and punches. You heard commotion over your earpiece, but you ignored it as the pair of you continued to fight, and you were only halted by a shout from Steve. 

“Gotta go,” Bucky said, stopping the punches he was throwing and attempting to leave.

“You do realise I can’t just let you go.” You laughed, somewhat shocked that he expected to just get up and walk away from this. But, from the look on your face, you could tell by the look on his face that he needed to go. 

“Punch me.”

“What?”

“You wanna go? Punch. Me. I can’t just stand here and watch you leave.” 

So, he did; Tony watched as the man punched you across the face, your head jerking swiftly to the side and you dropping to the floor. And even though your face hurt like a bitch, you desperately hoped that this wouldn’t be the last time you saw him. 

*************

Requests are open!