The Young Avengers were not formed because "Hey there are multiple superheroes under the age of thirty"
They were formed because the Avengers were literally destroyed, and New York needed heroes
It was not this after school club
It was "there's so much villainy going on in this city, and Kang the fucking Conqueror is coming in three days. we are the only people with some link to the Avengers therefore we must stop this"
Eli became Patriot to honour his grandfather and fight crime
Teddy became Hulkling to protect people and figure out his identity
Billy became Asgardian/Wiccan to stand up for the little guy and to honour the Scarlet Witch
Kate became Hawkeye to beat up bad people and save the people with powers
Cassie became Stature to honour her father and carry on his legacy
Nathaniel became Iron Lad as an attempt to stop his evil future from coming to pass
Vision became a Young Avengers to honour Nathaniel and the original Vision
Tommy became Speed to right his wrongs
It was never "you're under thirty, I'm under thirty, wanna team up?"
something i've been thinking a lot about is that just surviving is often both the least rewarding recovery experience and also the absolute most critical skill.
i think many of us have spent the last few years of our life just... holding the line. our legs trembling under all that weight. many of us backslid in the sand; and that was agonizing. we have spent so much of our life pushing, and to be forced backwards... we are already so exhausted. it is unimaginable to think we must remake the progress that had already been hard-won.
there's a graph that exists of how you can roughly expect any artistic skill to grow. we all go through periods of rapid growth and discovery; only to plateau. there is often a little sorrow in the plateau, because we're not moving quickly. we don't see those huge strides. there's no obvious sense we're learning.
but the art we're making in that plateau matters. it can still be effective, evocative, exciting. you can still feel inspired, happy, creative in that plateau; because the skills you have are growing, it's just that you're a spot where you don't need to focus on skill-building, you've finally reached a place where you can focus on actually making things. and at some point, without you expecting it, and as long as you work for it - another sharp increase in skill will happen. if you ask any of us how we did it, most of us would tell you the same thing: i just kept trying.
i have spent a lot of my life believing that just-surviving was the same thing as stagnating. i don't have any tangible goals or desires and the idea of making longterm plans makes me want to set my hair on fire. i am fucking tired. i don't want another year of scrambling, of falling down, of slipping in the mud. I love my friends, but i'm watching them settle down, have a life, get what they want: and i'm still here, in the part where i beg my life to be barely functional.
i think... maybe this whole time it wasn't standing still. it was still learning. it was still growing. i just got used to the plateau and forgot that "even surviving" isn't something i used to be able to take for granted. that in all this horrible, thankless effort - certain things are easy enough now. i can forget them.
i have spent so much time hating that i'm not getting better faster. i forgot that it used to be unthinkable to me to even consider recovery. these last years; i've been comparing my plateau to my eras of quick-discovery. i've been unfair to myself. no, the progress isn't as obvious. that doesn't mean it's not still-happening.
we make the mistake of saying "this year i want to live, not just survive," as if the effort of just surviving is useless, or could be shrugged off. the effort of surviving is beautiful. your years spent like barely-here are enough. you're not wasting time. you're not wasting your one precious life. "just holding on" means you were able to actually find and grab the rope. you're here; and the effort of your survival is work. you've been seeking the sky when it used to be impossible to imagine putting down roots. i know it is hard, and i hope you are able to feel better soon. i hope we both reach our next quick-climb. and i know - the weight might never ease up.
it's just that, over time, with effort: we will get strong enough.
we talk a lot about how current kids, teenagers, and parents never learned internet safety in this age of social media, but i think we also gotta be honest with ourselves that most of us, adults on the internet who participate in fandom, never really learned how to engage with young people without setting them up for disaster.
might be weird to say it like this, but it's important to leave people how you met them or better. like hiking or going to a nature reserve. if you are regularly talking to people on the internet, especially teenagers, you need to consider whether your behavior with them is how another, shittier person would take advantage of them, because you have no real way of protecting them if that happens. like if you're going into discords and saying 'hey i'm mom! let me help you with your homework and irl issues. also please feel free to vent to me if you have any mental health issues or problems at home" you have to understand that the next person who says that to them may be leaving out the end of their plan; "that would make you easier to abuse."
sometimes you have to say "you seem fun and have a lot of great ideas but you are also 15, so if you wanna talk fandom, here are the boundaries we're going to follow, because these are the boundaries other adults should be following with you." or just refuse to talk to kids.
you decide what your responsibility, is but what you can't do is build an illegal fire pit on the hiking trail, if you catch my drift.
so when building the Racer family home in TS2, I keep coming back to the fact that I have no idea where the bedrooms (besides Speed's) are supposed to go, and this has been an issue! so I uhh. did something.
I broke down and requested a cameo vid from Paulie Litt (who played Spritle in Speed Racer), asking him if he knew where the bedrooms were supposed to be. xD
but ofc I figured there's a chance he wouldn't! I mean, I knew the set probably didn't connect in a way that showed where Spritle's room was, and even if it did, he was...thirteen? I think? when that movie was filmed? so there's no guarantee he'd even remember.
but still! I figured I'd try, so here's the message I sent with the request:
I'm making a model of the Racer house, and I can't figure out where the bedrooms are. Do you happen to remember how the house set layout worked? If not, alt question: was Spritle flipping off Royalton improv'd by you? (bc it's not in the script.) ty!
(it's really hard to write things and stick within the 250 character limit)
and today, the request was fulfilled! so here's this!
(tl;dw - he didn't know anything else about the layout of the house because the set didn't go that far, but he did tell the story about how the Wachowskis directed him to flip off Royalton!)
so even though I didn't gain any new knowledge about the Racer house, I did learn something else! and it's great that it was the Wachowskis who (last-minute) told him to flip off Royalton xD
so i started this show and it just gets worse and worseeeee not only did it lift the romance subplot directly from twilight (and not well) but they also are trying to play the forbidden love angle hard in the fantasy racism vein except it's a "cross-species" relationship between the two whitest people i've ever seen in my life and there are three people of color in the whole (first season of the) show who aren't villains and it seems that every other episode (and sometimes ebery episode and sometimes twice an episode!) there is a man physically or magically subjugating a woman and i keep waiting for the big reveal at the end to be stolen from fucking rainbow rowell
So I've heard people give other etymologies for the name "Maugrim" in LWW, but to me it seems clear that it's derived from Managarm, the wolf who eats the moon in Norse mythology. My reasons for this are (a) Lewis was a noted Norse mythology enjoyer and also friends with Beowulf translator JRR Tolkien and (b) he had the name changed to Fenris Ulf in the American version.
Fenris Ulf is the name of Managarm's much more famous brother/father (?) in Norse mythology. So my theory is that this is basically a Philosopher's Stone situation in which Jack didn't think his American readers would get his obscure Norse mythology reference and thus replaced it with a more mainstream one. I am not an expert and could very easily be wrong about this, but as far as I am aware from reading Lewis's letters and stuff, no one can disprove me.
the stuff happening in moderneo is indicative of a trend i've been seeing in neoclone art contribution, which is that artists who come in to work on pet colors often clash because they're coming from two majorly different viewpoints:
its for fun so don't take it too seriously and just be creative- if the site runner likes it then its good to go
its for a website that's seeking to recreate the neopets experience, so we should strive for the art we make to match the existing art in style and quality
neither of these are incorrect approaches for a volunteer collaborative project, and i think its up to the people in charge of each respective neoclone to clearly establish which of these ways they want their art team to approach the pet colors, in order to prevent conflict
i'm definitely in the latter camp, and have also been called a bully on a couple different occasions for offering gentle critique. seeing very level headed and reasonable points be reacted to as though they're evil bullying makes me want to spontaneously combust. sometimes, on a collaborative project, you'll end up feeling bad when you receive critique or pushback on an idea you had. and that feeling sucks!!! but that doesn't mean that the people who gave you the critique were bullies. seeing professional artists get treated like dangerous cruel people for approaching a project like professionals makes me feel insane.
like okay, if its not a professional project and the more 'anything goes' atmosphere is whats wanted, then fine!! but you have to make that clear- and even IF that's the goal, i think its unreasonable and immature of any participating artist to demand zero critical feedback on the designs that they're submitting to the website for everyone to be able to adopt. also, if the project isn't going to be approached like its professional work, you can't expect consistent professional quality artwork, because you cannot get that from an environment that doesn't allow for critique or style direction