#anti what if

[steveandbuckysdaughter]

You know what? I just realized what Peggy’s whole constant inserting in others’ stories reminds me of.

It reminds me of the Y/N povs on TikTok, like, the bad ones.

Not the ones with good editing, characterization and all that jazz, those where the perfect most beautiful and powerful girl who has the same powers as Wanda but stronger and in another color and is somewhat related to Tony or experimented on and has a relationship with either Steve or Bucky or Loki. That’s who she reminds me of.

Because a perfectly healthy, wealthy and respected white girlie with very predictable features having some main avenger’ powers (who casually enough is the only avenger whose storyline is about being a disable poor ass immigrant, but I digress) and being somewhat stronger and better than them, and then going around saving other characters and solving their own arcs really is some Y/N type of shit.

Like, if I told you “random girl who’s a supersoldier and beautiful and amazing and everyone wants to be her gets teleported in another universe as the savior of said world by the most powerful being in the franchise (who is apparently not powerful enough but random girl is)”, would you tell me it’s an actual marvel storyline, or would you think it’s a fanfiction or a pov?

I swear I’m losing my mind over this, it gets funnier every second I think more about it.

[amarriageoftrueminds]

one of the morons responsible for writing What If:

so there's no mention of hiring Nazis at all when Peggy wasn't there to do it? 

gotcha 👍

[luna-rainbow]

What if S2E05

Ew. Genuinely do not recommend watching, purely from a writing point of view. It feels like I've just watched someone wanking off to themselves and walked away covered in goo.

I'm just saying 90% of the fanfics on AO3 is less stomach-churning than this crap.

Cut for language.

This episode starts off with just...the most wankerish introduction ever from The Watcher. What is this, 6th grade creative writing? His speech was basically "the bestest Mary Sue to ever Mary Sue is to Mary Sue in this upcoming Mary Sue episode! Did I tell you she's a Mary Sue?"

They really just...cut Sam out of his first and major appearance in the MCU. I mean...between Sam's glaring omission and somehow having the lead Widow antagonist (other than Melina) being a Black woman, in an episode featuring Ms Brexit...I'm not saying you should join the dots but the dots be damn there.

How come she gets to yell at Fury and Nat for hiding Steve from her but everyone is pretending that Steve would be fine with Peggy never telling him about Bucky. The math ain't mathing.

Fury tells her to sit out of the fight and Peggy whirls on him with the most possessive Karen snarl, "I'm Peggy Carter and we're talking about ~Steve Rogers~" Just. EW.

Steve literally has no personality or character beyond "UwU I just wanna be your lover~" the whole way, which. The writing was just not good enough to carry off and it just comes across like a juvenile self-insert fanfic.

OH FFS Not only is she stealing this whole Winter Soldier storyline she gotta steal NAT'S MOVES of beating up the Winter Soldier just FOR FUCK'S SAKE GET YOUR OWN PLOT WOMAN.

"Even in Russia girls grow up dreaming of being Captain Carter."

EWW WHY???

I can't believe this script got greenlit. She's the best she's flawless she's got a perfect love story and everyone wanna be her! Without showing you anything that proves that.

Pffft the shield dropping and the sob story (which Steve fanfic did they lift that monologue from because it sounds awfully familiar). At least they didn't try pulling the end of the line.

Oh and Steve saves her ass at the end of the day.

So not only is she a Mary Sue, she's a Mary Sue who still fucking needs a man to finish off her job. Like. This is the dumbest kind of story telling.

Sebastian doing an old man voice was the much needed breath of fresh air in this episode until I remember that it was probably a trial run for his Trump voice.

*Scrubs brain*

BTW Bucky clearly was not a morally corrupt character like Pierce and I guess...no shit, he wasn't the one who used Operation Paperclip to recruit Zola into the organisation, but I'm not sure the general audience would make that distinction.

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

Does this author know you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWxH092zj8Q

Because I swear they do...

Okay, before I watched that I will admit you scared the hell out of me. I thought someone had made a video bad-mouthing me or something 🙈😂

I doubt he knows me but I'm glad to see that more people are speaking up against What If and the way Marvel butchered the whole thing. The main premise of the series was to give us alternate stories with the characters we know, but it ended up being yet another pointless piece of content to advertise their cinematic universe. And their obsession with Saint Maggy makes no freaking sense.

If they like her so much they should give her a series and promote it accordingly. Unless they know that shit wouldn't sell. We saw what happened with Sylvie post-S1 of Loki - it didn't work and (from what I've been told as I haven't seen it) S2 mostly forgets about her and the romance.

If the articles in entertainment media are to be believed, the movies are bringing in a lot more money than Disney+ is, in fact from what I've seen the platform is not being profitable at all. So naturally, they want asses on seats in those theatres so they use the series as a way to lure people in... but they're not giving us something new and interesting. They're insisting on the Main Story™ (Multiverse) over and over and over and over... and if they were doing it well, then maybe it could interest us but all the variants are the same as the OG. So... nah.

They have forgotten that we cared about the Main Story™ during the Infinity Saga because we cared about the characters, they made us care about those characters. Now they're doing it backwards: they want us to care about the Multiverse so that we'll want to see what happens to the characters. And that shit just doesn't fly.

[darlingitsagathaharkness]

The more I read about What If then more I think Sam should be the one with part of the Captain Carter role ( and say part because focusing in one character should not be a thing in What If stories, also the Infinity Stones plot is a non sense after having Quill a half celestial barely surviving ONE STONE ,and Hulk and Thanks being very damaged by all).

[ashasdramadrawer]

Are they even pretending anymore?

What If was usually the place to explore off-the-wall, weird ideas for Marvel back in the day. You never new what would happen. My favorites were things like “What if Blink hadn’t died?” and “What if Mystique hadn’t abandoned Kurt?” or “What if they had never escaped the Beyonder?”

The stories would vary in how good they were, and it was usually an excuse to kill characters willy-nilly, or deflect criticism from a story by showing HOW MUCH WORSE things could have gotten.

What we’re getting from Disney isn’t What If. It’s the CC show.

There was no continuity between What If episodes. Honestly, there wasn’t a Watcher watching.

A lot of people, self included, has come to the conclusion that all of this was a backdoor to getting Captain Carter introduced and for no other reason. And they are doubling down, trying to make Carter into the Batman of Phase 4. (Ala, the ‘mortal’ who is edgy and cool and the biggest Mary Sue of the moment, the acceptable to white fanboys character because people are terrified of Sam and what he means)

Here’s the thing. Peggy Carter’s time was over. The only reason she’s had any kind of revival is the reaction against 1) Sam, a black man, being made Cap and white people being afraid of having their feelings hurt 2) Bucky had been impossible to extricate from Steve’s story. What If is revising ALL of Steve’s story into Carter’s, and not in a good way.

It’s destroying the premise of What If, along with trying to replace Sam as Captain America and rewrite everything amazing about Steve.

Fuck that show.

[callsignavenger]

Skipped ahead to the last two episodes of What If out of curiosity and it’s really disappointing that they’ve just made it the Captain Carter show. There’s so much they could have done with the concept but instead it just feels like Hayley Atwell is clinging to the last threads of her fame and someone in the studio is arguing for her to do so.

[iiammrandi]

[artistotel]

hey! for todays protest, i made this little zine about palestine (holding just simple and basic information).

you can download the zine here, fold it yourself, and distribute it around.

no credit is needed. feel free to leave it around bars, protests, or wherever. simply print it (borderless) and fold it. here is a tutorial on how to do it.

dont stay silent. there is a genocide of horrendous, atrocious proportions going on. also if you are a zionist here to argue with me, i dont plan to entertain you at all, not on my art blog. fuck off, you'll be swiftly blocked. i see enough of you clowns on my main and i have no energy for you. you can skip the death threats too bc i dont give a shit.

(i'm off to get ready for a surgery now, i just wanted to post it before this. if you need anything, i might take a bit to reply)

[usernamesuggestionsarefunny]

I hate you, slash fics whose entire premise is blatantly disrespecting replacing a female character with the male character you want for your other male fave scene by scene super non-creatively.

[steveandbuckysdaughter]

Personal review regarding what if…? season 2 episode 8 (spoilers)

No ok, I must admit, the episode was good in some aspects.

Wanda was majestic. Loki and Scott were hilarious and I loved every single moment with them.

Thor was amazing, dark and serious out of loss but still enjoyable, and the crumbs of his relationship with Hela were very nice.

I’ve actually liked Tony for the very first time in my life, probably because I tend to like him a lot more in AUs and fanfictions than I do in the normal timeline.

And then… there were those two.

I will never comprehend why marvel wants Steve to be so dependent on Peggy. And I will never comprehend why, to make him interact with her, they have to destroy or sideline every other relationship he has built, or make his character flat.

Bucky being friends with Scott was amazing, but the fact that him and Steve interacted like two times was extremely disappointing. You’d expect “best friends in every universe”, if you dislike the romantic pairing so much, to acknowledge themselves for more than a few scenes, in only one of which they’re in frame together (Bucky was literally 😐 while his best friend disappeared, come on now).

And the storyline about Peggy coming from another world to save the universe was just… Mbah. It could’ve been executed in another way without including her and it still would have made sense. It really feels like a Y/N insert.

Seeing literally any other character was so good, so fun, and they had to ruin it this way, making Peggy once again the self insert and girlboss she didn’t need to be.

Plus, forgive my constant complaining, but it’s extremely infuriating how all of Steve’s friends were eliminated to put the focus solely on Peggy. Where’s Sam? Where’s Nat? Where’s Clint? It’s not an underrated friendship we’re talking about, a big chunk of the fandom loves the cap quartet or team cap, and after civil war it would have been nice to see them interact, especially after its popularity and popular demand. Outlaw team cap would have been glorious, a good chance to bring back many characters who aren’t here anymore in the right way, and involve characters that are rarely involved in What if in the storyline, for a change.

The treatment of Sam in this series particularly angers me, and even more so in this episode. I understand not involving him in other storylines, but Sam was a big part of CATWS and he wasn’t even in the episode centered on that film. What, because Steve met him while running he can’t be introduced in any other way? And oh, there’s no excuse for this episode. If there was one episode they could have placed Sam in, it was this one. Sam was there in infinity war, where the mess happened, and he should have been with the other avengers in this one.

If marvel wanted to involve someone from another universe so bad, it should have been a Captain America Sam from another universe. Can you imagine the poetry of seeing Steve and Nat again after endgame? Can you imagine having closure with them both, and having fun in the process? It would have been so great.

Another great storyline without involving characters from other universes would have been one where Steve, who touched the time stone, accidentally brought everyone in the past, and he was the only one to remember it. And to go back and prevent everyone’s distraction, he had to recruit the avengers, who don’t know him and don’t trust him but that in the end become his friends and companions. It would have been so interesting to see the original avengers involved in something different from being some side characters or extras in the one woman show that seems to be What if, constantly centered around the same bland, one dimensional reimagined side character. Peggy’s blandness is so obvious in these episodes (aside for some random remarks that made me smile) that literally everyone who’s involved directly with her must be bland like her, otherwise risking to overshadow her.

I don’t think I was supposed to cringe and look away as much as I did during Steggy’s forced scenes, but I did. If they had to force Steggy and Peggy down our throats, at least they could have done something different from the same bland and boring storyline as always. I wouldn’t be as mad as I am now if Peggy and Steve’s relationship wasn’t as bland. I would have preferred an enemies to lovers type of twist or change, where Steve doesn’t trust Peggy and struggles with her because he sees in her a different version of the Peggy that died in that universe. But noooo, god forbid, let’s go with the same old song.

An episode five or ten minutes longer with a better, avengers-centric or Steve-centric storyline would have been much better than what we got.

And given that this was my most anticipated episode, I was very disappointed by it. I hope for the next seasons, if there’s other ones, Marvel will listen to the general complaint regarding Peggy and will give her a break. I don’t think any of the original avengers or relevant MCU characters made as much appearances as Peggy, and being a main focus in four episodes out of nine is ridiculous.

[amarriageoftrueminds]

But wait! There's more!

when I say she's a dumb person's idea of a smart person... this is exactly how dumb I'd expect that person to be ^

(related to)

[luna-rainbow]

I haven't watched all of What If (and have no plans to) but is it just me or is there are dearth of POCs from all CC-centric episodes (except the one where she worked with Star-Lord T'Challa for some reason)?

There are shrinking men and Hulk and the Scarlet Witch in 1602, but no Sam? Don't get me wrong, I do love the Scott-Bucky interactions but...Sam would have slotted in perfectly to that bickering frenemies role. And Sam being deleted wholesale from the CATWS rewrite still makes me astounded. Like you had time to fit in Rumlow but no time for Sam?

Going back to the CATFA episode, the only Howlies to get a speaking role was Bucky and Dum Dum Dugan, two white characters. Gabe had one shot lasting for about a split second where he was in the foreground. You'd barely even notice Jim Morita being there.

It seems the CC-centric episodes, especially when it's ripping off the original CA franchise, has a major colour problem.

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

Captain Brexit never won any of her battles. That makes her no symbol of feminism.

Red Skull? Killed by the Kraken he tried summoning through the Tesseract.

Red Room? Steve took them out, not Peggy. And Peggy didn't care about the fact that the Black Widows were brainwashed.

And it seems she didn't care about Bucky being the Winter Soldier either. From what I've read, both her and Howard were happy to use him and then they let him go as if he wasn't their problem.

Compare that to Sam in the movies. Bucky tried to kill him at least twice, but Sam still spent time looking for him after DC not only because Steve asked him to, but Sam understood what Bucky had gone through and that he had no agency at all. He gave him a chance, he cared. Saint Maggy and Howard just used him and then tossed him out like trash.

And that coming from a woman who supposedly loves Steve? She loves him so much that she doesn't move a finger to help his best friend? She can't be arsed to help Bucky, she doesn't care about the Black Widows, it's always about her and what affects her at any given moment. Whatever happens around her that affects other people is not of her concern and she never thinks twice about it.

I think that is what doesn't make her a symbol of feminism. You're not a feminist just for being born a woman and holding the most power of everyone in the room. Erskine's words "not a good soldier, but a good man" are referring exactly to that.

Saint Maggy is not Steve, she's Hodge. She's not all that capable in fights either, how could she be? She's so self-centered that she's awful when it comes to team-ups, and she's no leader. Gotta thank the lazy writing for that. What I don't get is why they insist on bringing her back again and again and again if they're not interested in writing her story, if her dialogues are so bland and she has no personality... and she can't even win a damn fight unless she's written as the Queen Victoria of all Mary Sues.

[thunderboltfire]

I have unwittingly witnessed a new level of the absurd. Behold, the AI-generated equine anatomy models.

Ah yes, my favourite parts of the equine body. Paster and... *looks at the smudged writing on hand* boob. At least this one looks purely decorative and the being actually looks like a horse. But don't worry, it gets worse.

If we completely ignore the hipopotamus musculature of this one, there's still a lot of things that don't make sense in this one, like a tail that ends in a series of bone spikes and a complete lack of molars. You could make a cool pokemon on the basis of this, but it's not even in the realm of being an actual anatomy help.

I'm firmly convinced this is not a horse, this is something that really, really wants you to think it is a horse. The more you look, the more things look... wrong. The more details turn out to be shifted, bones crammed in to fill in the familiar form, its shape merely implied so that the human mind fills the gap. Of course the text seems like gibberish, because its anatomy is incomprehensible. it's either a parasite or a monster and in each case, it's an eldtrich body horror. I'm kind of angry at how well this joke writes itself.

[scruffylookingpiratecaptain]

I think people have truly lost any ability to be patient with storytelling.

‘I don’t understand this’ They’ll explain it if you wait.

‘I don’t like how this episode left things hanging’ There’s a continuation next week.

‘This character is flat’ Wait for them to be fleshed out.

So many of the complaints I see about shows lately are people being confused by things THAT THE SHOW WANTS YOU TO BE CONFUSED BY THATS THE FUN OF MYSTERY AND FORESHADOWING YOU ABSOLUTE GOBLINS THE MAIN CHARACTER IS ALSO CONFUSED AND THEYRE GONNA DO A BIG REVEAL AND EXPLANATION LATER IF YOU WOULD JUST FUCKING WAIT