#but ultimately inconsequential

[tinygameroom]

Have we even talked about the trans implications of being a god of change...

Editing to add my tags and context

When I say 'incidental' at the beginning I'm saying it feels incidental and artificial and then go on to partially deconstruct the idea that it actually is incidental and give examples of why it's not. This is not a full analysis which is why the concept is not explored with the clarity and structure that that would imply, but I'm not actually calling gender irrelevant to the game because it's clearly an ongoing part of the text. I didn't intend this to get reblogged at all much less with responses to my tags, so any issues you have with my rambles are due to lack of clarity and finished thought, due to them being rambles, not a correct understanding of my actual point.

Anyway I think there's tons of interesting analysis to be done about how the game approaches gender, and I don't have the energy or interest to actually analyze about it right now which is why I was more just spitballing about it. What's most interesting to me tho is that contradiction where the Princess being perceived as a woman seemingly has nothing to do with anything, yet is ever present as a commentary on agency and perception, and how people who have experienced misogyny will connect with that. I am also fascinated by the Genderlessness/Genderfulness of the Shifting Mound as an entity of change, how she appears so very feminine but her entire philosophy rejects the idea of simple classification, etc.

As a transmasc nonbinary person the ideas of being perceived as female/feminine (and therefore feeble, innocent, alien, small, stupid, etc etc) and the idea of having a feminine role that doesn't quite or always fit me assumed by others despite that are ideas that resonate a lot. I have lots of thoughts and they're unorganized!

[poelya]

seeing people genuinely complain about the deaths in the acolyte and throwing around words like cruel and sadistic just once again has me thinking people need to actually sit and ponder on where a story is going and if it's something they can handle watching. nothing about the acolyte has implied it's anything besides a murder mystery, and features an entirely new cast of characters — something that, the last time we saw this in live action, ended in them all dying. just because something belongs to a franchise you love, doesn't mean you have to watch it, or that it has to be your cup of tea. It also doesn't make it bad storytelling if it's too brutal for your liking. The internet gives you every opportunity to make an informed opinion on what you consume, ultimately it's your responsibility, not the show's, to cater to what you can handle.

[toxifoxx]

How does it make you feel that M Preg is a canonical thing in FNAF?

i mean i kind of have mixed feelings it's obviously used as a tool of horror and is supposed to be gross and shocking, and it's always used as a shocking thing in the fandom too. not that it's unexpected but you can tell people think of a man being pregnant as something hilarious and outlandish/impossible, it's either something to laugh at or be disgusted by. and as a trans man myself it's just kind of like hmm. Hmmmm

[spacedustmantis]

spontaniously getting my hair dyed a colour i've never tried before is the best and doesn't make me freak out at all

[mimikyufriend]

one of the weirdest things that's happened to me on this site is that I unknowingly reblogged a pro-shipper's art of a minecraft bee and they like got so upsetties and @/ed me about it

[gallopinggallifreyans]

not to be that bitch but i genuinely hate when people post quizzes about (specifically) greek mythology and go "percy jackson fans unite" like. i hate that fandom first of all for reasons unrelated, and second of all if i hear one more person go "it's heracles not hercules" and in the same breath say "narcissus" i'm going to eat my marbles

[vounoura]

thematically kind of weird imo that it's the crow bg that gets the extra potion slot and the veil jumpers that get weakpoint dmg, I'd expect those to be switched

[lickthatbattery]

.

[clownprince]

as a nursing student w a psych hyperfixation i wouldn't be able to get through five pages of any comic if i wasn't able to suspend the hell out of disbelief but every time i read these lines in particular it makes my eye twitch. me when i spend time training with monks who teach me their secret monk magic powers that somehow change my body's physiology so i'm immune to every paralytic toxin ever... like what type of gary stu overpowered self insert fanfic bullshit is this. actually scratch that comparing this to fanfic is insulting to every fic writer ever. i would pay money to personally fistfight scott lobdell

[kindahoping4forever]

My takeaway from that YouTube Afterparty thing 😌⭐

[mossflower]

monkeys paw type situation

[hey-scully-itsme]

My husband and I are watching X-Files again and are debating and I wanna know your opinion. Is Skinner romantically in love with Mulder and Scully or does he loves them like a father/a general sort of love.

please know that this ask absolutely made my day. i would've answered it sooner except that real-world things unfortunately prevented me from doing my very favorite thing: giving my opinion, at length. thank you for asking me to weigh in on your marital debate.

So, when it comes to interpreting ambiguous relationships or events in any canon i don't usually settle on any one interpretation. this is because i like to be able to argue either side,* a habit with which i was cursed after my parents, unaware of the monster they were creating, signed me up for a high school debate club. that said, here's my take:

I love the reading that skinner is romantically in love with mulder and scully. unspoken ambiguous love is basically the show's whole deal so throwing skinner into the acts-of-service soup that creates adds spice to the whole thing.

i hadn't put a lot of direct thought into skinner's character before this ask but i do think he provides a fun contrast to both mulder and scully. they devote themselves to causes and people, wholeheartedly and with only a few reservations, whereas skinner, for most of his career, has been trying to walk the line and play both sides, as he says in S.R. 819. we know, though, that he used to be the same kind of passionate, active person that mulder and scully are, given what he says about his choice to volunteer for vietnam in One Breath.

i think mulder reminds him of who he used to be and scully is in some ways the ideal skinner strives for. plenty there for respect and admiration to grow into something else! his protectiveness of both of them can also lend itself to a romantic interpretation.

while their relationship stays very professional ('yes sir' and 'agents' and all that) over the course of the series those formalities start to feel similar to the way mulder and scully still address each other by their surnames, habit-as-affection/familiarity.

additionally, if we accept the reading (which i've occasionally seen elsewhere) that skinner is in love with, or at the very least interested in, scully, we can extrapolate from that that he's unlikely to openly pursue a relationship with either. he doesn't seem the type to make his feelings other people's problems and he also seems to keep very much to himself, emotionally speaking, which really piles on the ambiguity. he absolutely could care about them in an entirely platonic way and it would look more or less the same from the outside, i suspect.

all that to say, i very much think that within the text of the show it could go either way, which is very fun and also does not answer your question! hope this helps!

TL;DR: yes.

[brw]

Simon Williams, Marvel's Wonder Man, their first evil Superman, or why out of all the obscure characters I could have latched onto, it's fucking Wonder Man.

I'll preface; the first reason why I ever gave more than a cursory glance at a wikipedia page at Simon was because he was attached to my favourite character, The Vision, and was heavily related to my other favourite character, Wanda Maximoff. I'm not going to lie & say that it was love at first sight or anything; I was a fan of Vision & Wanda for a while, & upon discovering Vision had a whole twin brother I never knew about, but one who had also dated Wanda later, I found it weird that I could find almost jack shit about the character online.

In the fandom spaces I was in, Simon was mostly "that asshole Vision is kinda related to and was weirdly quick to start flirting with Wanda when Vision got Byrne'd". I, new to marvel comics, was curious about this mystery man, and fell into a strange world of Marvel before the MCU was really the big thing people knew about it but also still sorta... there, as this is before they got completely overshadowed by the surge of new fans coming in from an increasingly amibitious production who were not versed in comic lore & therefore did not know nor care about Simon Williams, Wonder Man.

Anyway, I made it my mission to learn more about this guy because of my involvement with Vision & because it's just generally weird when you discover your favourite has an entire twin brother who had not one, not two, but three whole solo title runs where he headlines the comic (by the way, if you're not counting Vision & the Scarlet Witch or Ultimate Vision, is more solo runs than what 616 Vision has.) and appeared in comics almost 5 years before Vision was ever a thought on Roy Thomas' mind or before the man was even fucking hired at marvel. Needless to say, I became obsessed, and as of writing this am on my second comprehensive readthrough of every issue he's appeared in since debut in Avengers Vol 1 #9.

This out of the way, here is my very long & indulgent essay on why I think Wonder Man is great, subversive & when done right, a really good commentary on comics generally, with some vague gestures that I really hope some of these aspects will live on in the fabled Wonder Man series which I'm almost convinced is a psy-op to get me to do more unpaid work analysing Simon fuckin' Williams.

First point of this; Simon is an evil Superman. We've seen this trope a lot recently but I think it's always been a concept since conceptualisation of a character like Superman. A character must have an adversary for conflict, and while villains serve that purpose well initially, eventually the Man vs Man conflict enters into play; for what is more potentially crippling than ourselves?

Now, Simon isn't actually evil (usually), which kind of knocks him out as a proper evil Superman, but he is certainly a failed one. Superman gets his powers from the sun & from birthright, being the sole (ish) survivor of a tragedy that wiped out almost all of his people. It's what he chooses to do with these powers that truly define the character; his innate compassion & kindness towards others. Simon gets his powers after getting bribed from a weird Norse goddess after getting arrested for embezzling, and then gets experimented on & subsequently empowered by a weird Nazi scientist. He does betray these guys almost immediately after realising hey, maybe the Norse goddess & Nazi scientist don't have the best outcomes in mind for the Avengers, but still, it's not a flattering start to the character.

In Superman comics, his powers are something great that he has to be careful where he applies them to do good for other people, to create the best possible outcome for others. For Simon, they're something he's quite literally bribed into, experimented on with a definite lack of strong consent, & is unfamiliar with & doesn't even really use for good when he formally joins the Avengers. They're not something he works towards through intellect like Hank Pym and Tony Stark, it's an unnatural state for him to be in that kind of informs his actions unlike Vision & Thor, and it's kind of an accident he ended up as incredibly overpowered & superman-like as he has.

At the core of the character, there's this skeevy, unearned way in which he gains his powers, and there's this element that Simon doesn't even want them in the first place which I think get's stronger after his secondary character trait becomes defined. It's interesting, in that he sort of more simiarly references Beast in his power acquistion, of making a stupid decision in a moment of panic, drinking the beaker of glowing green/allowing yourself to get bailed out by some random woman you don't know but knows you well enough to bail you out, and having to deal with powers far greater & lifechanging than what you intitially wanted. Of course, in publication dates it's more like Beast references him, but either way it's an avenue I'm suprised no writer has taken their friendship.

Simon is also an evil Superman because ultimately, there's no nobility or inherent desire to help people that Simon has. At least not in the same way. Clark Kent will throw himself in front of every danger he can to protect those without the invulnerable skin or flight or eye lazers, and even his day job is protecting free speech & informing the people. Simon has a noted anxiety disorder in almost every fight he's in when he's first in consistent Avengers publication, and was raised an entitled rich kid who embezzled everything away & tried to run with the cash when things fell apart. His nobility was only achieved in his death, giving up so the Avengers could survive, and he's rewarded for that narratively with... a near crippling fear of death & of dying that prohibits him a lot from standing up or applying himself. In all fairness, he does get over this in ways, but it still remains something worth talking about; Simon has to work way harder, in my opinion, to act as a good person, that Superman, but even in universe, than the person who's brainwaves / soul they share, Vision. You know, there's a reason why Simon has murdered people in two separate comics by two separate writers in two mainline 616 comics in cold blood, and they fit in with his character & not just edgy bait for Superman or alternate universe shit. Simon is an incredibly anxious, very privileged boy who tries to scheme his way out of bankruptcy, fails, gets powers he can't imagine, and immediately dies & stays dead for like 13 years, and when he returns is a nervous wreck. It makes sense that Simon is easy to trick emotionally or, when just having a bad day, might punch too hard & kill someone. He was doing this in 1991.

Why is Simon like this? Well now we get into the other cornerstone of many evil Supermen, and indeed many general evil comic men; bad parents. It's not fair to say this only applies to villains, as many, many heroes can attest, having bad parents is not a trait exclusive to the baby-eating genocidal manics. That said, the ratio of villains having a happy & prosperous childhood to heroes is quite staggering. Superman is always notable for his origin with Ma & Pa Kent in Smallville, to the point of which they made a very long tv show just about Smallville Superman. Superman grew up to loving parents. Simon grew up to an abusive father & to a mother, who while loved him, never seemed to be able to connect with him before Simon died in the way she'd wished possible. Clark Kent grows up in Smallville, a well-named small town in Kansas. Simon grows up wealthy, the heir to a well-off company in New Jersey. Clark Kent's background unquestionably influences him as a person, his values and his interactions, and ... Simon's can, and almost does, but obviously the bar for consistency in background isn't as high for random C-List Avenger Wonder Man than the single most archetypal hero ever, Superman.

See, Simon being a victim of abuse both at the hands of his father and at the hands of his brother have very interesting potential implications for his relationship with afterforementioned Vision. The reason why I found nothing about Simon in my standard Scarlet Witch and Vision centered fandom experience is because he's an asshole to them. Specifically, in the John Byrne WCA run, the tragic ending of the long time staple of Avengers B-plots that was Wanda Maximoff and her synthetic robot lover, the Vision. Specifically, he doesn't give Vision back their emotions & memories when Wanda asks him too, because he has a crush on her and that gives him the right to effectively ensure the death of his own sibling & Wanda's spouse, something that yeah, will definitely make her start viewing you as a potential boyfriend. I think there's a very interesting potential narrative here about cycles of abuse & how in his own relationship with Vision, Simon becomes the perpetuater of the abuse rather than the victim. He gets into a big aggressive fight with Vision during the events of Operation: Galactic Storm, and even says right there and then that he considers Vision... his child. You would think with such a big weird statement that there would be a narrative about how both Simon & his brother, Eric were abused by Sanford, and how Eric in turn and as a response abused Simon. It would say a lot about Simon's relationship to the very concept of brotherhood & fatherhood, but it's just a bizarre throwaway line in a random event nobody remembers and there's just this entire fucking decade where Simon does a completely 180 in characterisation and there is zero effort to explAIN OR EVEN TALK ABOUT THE FACT THAT IT HAPPENED, WE JUST SWEEP IT UNDER THE RUG EXCEPT FOR MULLET FLASHBACKS, I FUCKING HATE JOHN BYRNE SO GDDAMN MU--

Another element to consider; even beyond just being personally unfit for the job of Superman, Simon has other engagements. Simon has dreams of being on the silver screen, a big movie star! This is probably the second thing you know about Simon other than the relationship to Vision & Wanda; he's an actor, and trying to make it big. This is often either played as Simon just being a sellout with no artistic integrity, or Simon actually having too much integrity, and struggling in an industry that takes big action sequences over moving, heartfelt Shakespearean dramas or whatever. Whatever the case, what makes Simon feel different to other similar characters in my opinion is that the superhero gig is the day job he puts up with to support his REAL love, acting. What makes some of Simon's contemporary depictions unfulfilling is that they swap them to the more conventional way, that he's bogged down in acting work but really wants to be taking on Galactus. This is a problem we run into where Simon is given an opportunity to be a genuinely interesting character subverting very common tropes & doing it well & in a satisfying way, only for the next schmuck who just got Simon's name out of a random hat of names and did whatever they saw written on the Wonder Man tin; shit Superman.

Not only does Simon not have a heroic origin of his powers, not only is he as a person is fundamentally unsuited to superheroics because he refuses to go to therapy, but Simon doesn't even have enough committment to the superhero gig to make it his primary job, instead choosing acting, which isn't even something he has a stake in. It's a completely new field for him, and as Simon soon learns, the world of acting is not as welcome to a complete newcomer & novice with very little actual professional work to his name. Not only does he effectively give up being an Avenger to persue acting, he's not even that good an actor. Simon has powers he doesn't want, is associated with a team he doesn't really want to be in, and puts all his eggs in the acting success basket and really it's a miracle it takes Deadpool to officially bankrupt him. We open up with his first ever appearance with him getting arrested & found guilty of embezzlement, it's not like he's established to be financially safe or intelligent with his money.

Simon, I genuinely think, fits the bill as an evil Superman. I mean, he's even got a solely red & black colour scheme with a weird trademarked symbol on the chest. He is the opposite of Clark Kent in so many ways, and yet somehow... tries to be heroic? And hero Simon is way more interesting than villain Simon, I mean, that's why after the character reaches the end of his arc in Wonder Man '91 he almost immediately just fucking blows up in literal issue 1 of Force Works until Kurt Busiek, an obvious big fan of the 70s & early 80s stuff brings him back completely reimagined and firmly established as a good guy, evil Simon is just too obvious a route. What keeps me coming back to this character enough to do two comprehensive readthroughs though, is the fact that in being so much an apparent antithesis of Clark Kent, he's a subversion of most comic book hero tropes, while remaining a hero. Were this character created today, I imagine after coming back he would just stay... an antagonist. Red & black colour scheme, yup, disinterest in helping others, yup, horrible traumatic upbringing, yup, an arguably power-hungery acquistion of his abilities, yup, antagonistic relationship to a primary coloured, established heroic character, in The Vision. In fact, I think having a gothier, more evil big brother archetype in the Grim Reaper / Eric Williams is a contributing factor as to why Simon ends up a surpisingly nuanced portrayal of the conventions of the superhero genre and how a character who goes against that can still be a hero when he's given time to breathe & not given a random time travel / future plot mixed with Big Brother, thanks Peter David--

Simon Williams, Wonder Man, is to me the best case scenario when rehashing old ideas. It clearly wasn't LeeKirby who figured "yeah let's bring back the guy we created to die in issue 9 of Avengers", but as time went on & more ideas were tacked on but never really expanded upon it's created this incredible incident where we have a bunch of really good ideas in a shared soul in a gay anxious ball of ionic energy who has tricked itself into sentient thought and an android associated with Marvel's first Human Torch who is also famous for their connection to the now incredibly recognisable Scarlet Witch. Simon is the evil Superman trope, but a hero still. Simon is a failed actor who actively prefers that to being an Avenger. He doesn't like helping people and has panic attacks and stops fighting vs supervillains more than once. His best friend is furry ape mutant who he's got this bizarre sexual dynamic with. He's dating Carol Danvers & Scarlet Witch, but his position as a C-List character means he's fundamentally never going to have a real shot with them, and he seems narratively relieved whenever they break it off. He's related to an evil necromancer with a scythe hand who abused him as a kid & felt so bad about that he dedicated his life to bringing Twink Simon back without ever changing his relationship dynamics with Simon when he comes back. And yet Simon remains often a footnote, and occasionally gets some focus when people remember he was supposed to have gotten Hulk to a stalemate once. Thanks again, Peter David.

I'm not insane enough to argue that Simon was secretly Marvel's best character all along. Most of this is honestly due to Simon being too obscure to majorly fuck up because that would require insider knowledge. These are just mind-bogglingly happy accidents that resulted in an actually okay deconstruction of the evil Superman trope like 20, 30 years before that was actually the thing to do. Simon is a character honestly prime to enter the spotlight, which is exactly why it’s so terrifying it’s happening. On one hand, largely what we have heard about the production & rumours surrounding the show is positive. We have an established actor in the comic book adaptation genre, and experienced writers in comedies. On the other hand, Simon is not a major enough character to attract ire if core aspects of him are lost, and I will mourn certain things that may be lost like the evil Superman of it all, the fact that Simon was pretty much established Jewish in 2005 & has a history of queer-coding that warrants it’s own post that I may one day get brave enough to write, with certainly more panel input than this. I don’t think Simon is a character with genius writing or implementation, but I strongly believe he has potential. There are so many potential storylines just by asking the fundamental question, “What if Superman was gay and had an anxiety disorder and was also a theatre kid and actively avoided the Justice League?”. The answer, somehow, is Simon Williams, and that’s an opportunity for stories that Marvel has sat on for a while, and while this may start to change I am wary of getting my hopes up about a character who I initially was calling D List when I first started writing this.

Ultimately, Simon Williams is what most characters are; a character glued together by fan speculation & connecting the dots from various storylines to make an attempt at a linear narrative when the writers do not care and will continue to not care. Still, I found that, as fans of Vision and Scarlet Witch, but also as an Ant-Man fan, the reaching I have to do to make everything in Simon's publication make sense is me hunched over my laptop like I am right now compared to the ritualistic intensive yoga I have to do to make the 90s & 2000s make any sort of interpretation of those other characters intelligible. Simon is a character with a rare potential in comic books; to make sense. Maybe not by ordinary standards but it's easier to argue that Simon would recreate a toxic relationship with his sibling who he considers a child given his own relationship to his elder brother & father, than whatever horse shit Avengers Disassembled & House of M are supposed to be. I want to believe badly that this vision is getting seen; why else would Simon get three different solo series & an entire fucking show with an actual good actor if there wasn't some understanding that this was a potentially interesting character. I want to believe. so badly.

This is my end, I guess, & I'll say that if you're interested in any specific sources for something I've said send an ask & I'll dig out the panel somewhere. A problem with reading a character with exactly 666 appearances in like, one month like I did the first time around meant I didn't save a lot & limits of my technology that haven't translated well to where I am now. My second time around, I'm being much more methodical with posting panels, which you can see in @wonderbeast if you're interested. But I'll be happy to dig out Marvel Premiere or Avengers V1 #184 or #15 of Wonder Man (1991) for you. Really. It's fans like us who REALLY make this company go around & man I'm not letting marvel forget that. Especially with an MCU project attached.

[legend-of-cupcake]

Ahh this does make me laugh. Gale and Wyll are distracted by the plot, while my Durge and Minthara are just like "??? Who let Gale be the main character???"

[essence-flux-primed]

ezreal would be a ken in the barbie movie if he was real. not the ken, but definitely a ken.

[normalwars]

I'm sorry idiots aren't respectful of the rules you've set from the start and I hope they didn't upset you too much

If people want to exclude harmful material from their poll, I don't understand how others allow themselves to ignore their wishes and are bitchy about it

I mean I would support you excluding characters you don't like for no reason because it's YOUR poll so characters from a franchise supporting transphobia and including antisemitism in its material...

Take care of yourself. For every TERF out there, there's someone -someones, I believe- willing to slap them in the face with/for you

tis the nature of the internet, some people will never be able to comprehend the idea that you aren't directly insulting them when you say something they don't like concerning their favorite characters.

thank you for the support! we are running off into the sunset together, to a future where TERFs are nothing but a distant memory.