#endgame discourse

[mid-knight-black]

Buck went from “what do we need him for?” to “i need you to not leave me” 🫠🫠🫠

[thebatsandthebugs]

my 'hottest' dc take is that dickbabs and dickkori are both interesting, complex ships which can be written to have one be endgame/one break up without reducing/mischaracterising any of the characters involved. It literally comes down to personal preference on which you like better. Can we stop fighting (and give babs and kori solo runs please)

[mariigoldzz]

I'm not team Gale but why do people ALWAYS have to compare him to Peeta? He's a well written character on his own.

Book Gale is a cautionary tale. He's a product of radicalization and manipulation. He was angry at the Capitol for what they did to the people he loved and as a result made the biggest mistake of his life. (causing the death of Prim.)

Instead of actually appreciating what Collins was trying to say, ("War changes people.") y'all just compare him to Peeta. He's a boy who was changed by his environment and lost people he loved because of it. It's hypocritical for a fandom that complains so much about media literacy and criticizes the movies for pushing the love triangle to water Gale down to "Katniss's asshole love interest."

Did he do bad things? Yes. Do you have to like Gale? No, but perhaps we should look at him from a different angle and stop attacking people who appreciate his character and the message Collins was trying to send.

Edit: People are trying to tell me he's a bad person in the replies. This post is NOT about that. I'm talking about the themes of his character, not his personality. Don't try to correct me on my own post when I'm not even talking about that?? Y'all act like he's worse than Snow 💀 I literally wrote "Did he do bad things? Yes."

[tothestarsinvelaris]

I knew El/cien wasn't endgame when he said he wanted to see if Elain was "worth fighting for".

Like... bro that is your mate wtfdym 'if she's worth fighting for' ???

That's not even a respecting her wishes thing, that's him deciding if she is good enough for him ?!??!?!

The other mating bonds we have seen since the beginning were Rhys and Cass. Both of those males were ready to fight for their mates from the second they saw them.

Azriel though... ready to kill anyone in his way and die himself to save Elain...

that is endgame behavior

[queen-of-hawkins-why-ler]

“Mike Wheeler isn’t hot or a bad boy, he’s canonically an uncool loser with zero rizz” to YOU maybe, but Will Byers happens to find him very handsome and attractive and appealing and there’s nothing wrong with describing him that way from Will’s perspective?? Ppl throwing fits over this type of characterization in the name of preserving canon??? Or is it bc the idea of Mike and Will having sexual desires for each other would taint the pure, angelic, sanitized idealization of them u have in ur head??? 🧐🧐

[reb-the-wise]

i can’t believe somebody just said the duffers’ writing is bad because of the PARALLELS dude you’re just densely superficial i’m afraid

[drsantosgf]

"my sources say-" "word on the street is-" "i heard that apparently-" "according to leaks-"

[shaylogic]

Inevitable Payneland

I heard some folks were worrying that Payneland wasn't endgame suddenly? What, cuz we're exploring Catwin, Cryland, and hopefully Montwin before we get there?

Have you not seen the signs? Look for the red and blue everywhere.

Cat King's sign isn't blue and ORANGE, now is it?

Monty's red-blue plaid and two-sided red-blue scarf, even under his solidly blue-yearning jacket.

Difficult to see, but despite Crystal's red socks (starting to fall for Charles despite herself), Niko's got one red and one blue shoe on.

They literally never give us a second to doubt.

Please rest assured and enjoy sipping on your slow burn. <3

[loulou-land]

You know what I find funny, I don’t follow a single toxic bvddie account, I don’t got out of my way to see what they’re saying, what’s currently got them in a twist and I don’t even know any key usernames related to that ship.

Yet…it seems like they’re always lurking around this side of the fandom, harassing people, sending anon hate and dumb takes. It’s just baffling.

For finally getting the breakup they wanted, they’re sure still overly concerned and pressed about bucktommy and Lou lol.

[mid-knight-black]

“Do you love him?”

Buck:

[he literally went 🤨🤨🤨]

[walkingbandtee]

I'm not even a big byler shipper, I would've been fine either way. BUT now I need them together just to spite those whiny, annoying ass bitches going "byler BETTER NOT happen😡😡😡" like stfu. It's a show, you'll live. And queer representation is important. They get so fucking pissy about it. I'm sorry, is your whole world going to shatter if precious Mike ends up with a boy instead?

It's just the fact that they have no real reason to be against it.

[booksandabeer]

Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny

So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.

What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.

This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply keep scrolling.

First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.  

In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.

You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.

As for the “getting in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can get in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.

So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.

The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.

I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.

(Never. The answer is never.)

And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.

So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.

But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes them at their own word.

--------

¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.

² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.

[midnightrings]

Honestly, one of the things that annoy me the most in fandom spaces is when people can’t distinguish between their personal preferences/wishes/headcanons and what the writer’s actual intention was.

Love the little corner of the internet that is the santhony fandom (and I know that some of them don’t like to hear this) but I hate when people try to argue that Anthony and Siena should’ve ended up together and that breaking them up at the end of the season makes their entire storyline pointless. It was never about them overcoming societal boundaries. The whole purpose of their storyline was for Anthony to end the season at rock bottom. It was not meant to advance beyond that.

That doesn’t mean you can’t wish that they had been endgame – and I love exploring a possible happy ending in fics myself – but claiming that the writing screwed them over is not only wrong, but imo diminishes their entire story.

Siena was literally begging Anthony to let her go, because she couldn’t deal with his shit anymore. And yes, Anthony worked on himself and grew throughout the season, but the moment Siena rejected him, he immediately reverted to his old ways and decided that love had no place in his life. That is not the reaction of an emotionally mature man. He was very clearly not ready for Siena and Siena was probably better off without him. And that’s fine. Love isn’t always enough. And while societal expectations obviously played a huge role here, their storyline is also incredibly character-driven. They made their own choices. There was no external force separating them. Their entire storyline is shaped by the decisions they make, and trying to erase that essentially means erasing who they are as characters.

There’s nothing wrong with talking about how they could’ve made things work – but that’s only possible when you can acknowledge why they didn’t work out in canon to begin with.

[fiona-fififi]

"Buck stated clearly he wasn't in love with Eddie without even spiraling about it."

Can someone please explain to me how Buck obsessing over what Tommy said about Eddie so much that he had to rant about it to Maddie hours later is NOT Buck spiraling?? That conversation literally displayed the spiraling that was happening. The fact that he was able to say he's not in love with Eddie so "confidently" in that scene is precisely because he spent the time in between convincing himself that Tommy couldn't possibly be right. Hence how he got from so much anger he slipped up and admitted to his feelings for Eddie to ranting annoyance in which he loudly proclaimed too vehemently he could not possibly be in love with his straight best friend.

Like, come on now. They literally showed us the spiraling.

[alienfailboy]

do y'all remember when endgame said

"yeah the avengers left Thor to rot and become a alcoholic" ?

like yeah okay???? no?????? you mean to tell me bruce banner sacrificed his own autonomy to save Thor and his people and he didn't check on him ONCE after the death of his brother? after the death of Heimdall?? after the destruction of the refugee ship and desecration of half the universe, that Thor BLAMES HIMSELF FOR???? not bruce, not one avenger? not for FIVE YEARS????

yeah. okay. sounds fake but sure!

[silassstingy]

i have this big long rant saved in my drafts but what it comes down to is-

they have had YEARS upon YEARS to do something significant with buddie when it would've meant something and i no longer think it would benefit either of them in-story, and that's my final thoughts on it all.