#like in s1 when he was full out crushing on carter and the life he was living?

[terrainofheartfelt]

Sort of inspired by your discussion of Jenny needing to go to London alone to really grow into herself and mature as a person, in an ideal world in which none of the main characters were forcibly tethered to the UES or its more toxic inhabitants post-high school, how do you generally - like broad strokes - imagine them developing as people in college and throughout their twenties? I always wonder where everyone might have ended up had they not been constrained by the type of narrative they were living in, and I’d love to hear any headcanons you have on the subject!

I've been thinking about this on and off since i received it (an embarrassingly - for me - amount of time ago) and now finally feel like I can answer.

because, like, what if we weren't constrained by the harsh realities of making tv? what if the rules meant that they could leave new york?

well, first, let's dovetail off jen moving to london and blossoming, and send eric along with her. he can go to cambridge, or any of the other big name universities in the area, and he and jenny would be flatmates and live their own hilarious queer sitcom of being students in london.

I've already plugged nads' yale au in my answers this evening, but I still really like the idea of dan and blair attending yale, and outside of the maelstrom of manhattan drama, they settle into their own selves and learn they could actually...like each other? and then they fall in LOVE as far as careers, they are the most driven. and we've talked about novelist dan and editress blair and art historian blair and college prof dan.....but lately I've been thinking about blair working in costuming. It's not high fashion design, but I think it's a great synthesis of the things we know blair loves: literature, film, history, art history & fashion history, Evil Dictator of Good Taste, being a specialist and big boss on a niche subject...yeah...

i still enjoy the idea of vanessa being at nyu, or at another arts college in nyc, and making her own way and building her own story (without being boxed in to the secondary character of anyone else's story!) I like the idea of her attending Tisch too, and expanding her skill set into screenwriting in that way.

to plug another au by a friend, S's goodbye stranger introduced the concept of Serena attending Berkeley, and I LOVE it. I love that for her. Berserk-ley. I think that school in that part of the country would be where Serena would really thrive. She becomes a full glamorous SF queen. perhaps she opens a coffee shop. Blair is outwardly mortified but inwardly very proud.

As for Nate, I think he is the character who really should take a gap year. It's never questioned, but the way he is yanked around by the collar those first two seasons, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that nate would decide that he needs some time to figure out what it is he wants. sidebar: bc the serena gap year felt disingenuous in many ways, yk? serena was so eager to leave new york and go to school and study. she likes learning, we see it, and the opportunity to reinvent herself that college would provide....why would she walk away from it? except for TV Reasons. so, I like the thought of nate taking at least a year. traveling, volunteering, maybe he takes a community college course or two. he falls off the grid for a while and he realizes how healthy and how happy he feels without the constant eyes and pressure of his family & gossip girl. and after that time, he's found what he actually wants to do, and goes to school to do it. -- as always, I'm fond of nate working in health care, as a nurse or pt or something, but it could really be anything. teacher? chef? social worker? children's librarian? (actually culinary student nate has come up in convos with ivy & cherry before and I am into it.)

and uhhhhhh i guess chip wiskers can crash his inherited business and money into the ground bc lets be real that fucko would try to launch his own cryptocurrency and since he seems to hold such disdain for education and self-betterment, he stagnates and falls off the face of the earth byeeee

[marvelundercover]

MARVEL UNDERCOVER 2020 WEEK 3 ROUND UP

This is our final round up post before reveals! Check out the submissions we’ve gotten this week! 

Title: put her love down soft and sweet Pairings/Characters: Sharon Carter/Natasha Romanov Rating: Teen Wordcount: 1656 Prompt #: S1 Warnings: none apply Summary: Natasha is impossible to look away from, whether she moves or sits still, every bit as graceful and alluring as the swan she plays. In her long-sleeved black leotard and dark leg warmers, fiery hair slicked back into a severe bun, she looks like the ballerinas Sharon saw in her storybooks as a little girl, full of awe at the glamorous women balancing on their tiptoes in tulle and satin.

Read it here!

Title: I Want to Dance with Somebody Pairings/Characters: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff Rating: Teens and Up Wordcount: 9062 Prompt #:S27 Warnings: No Warnings Apply Summary: Steve does not dance. In fact, he can't dance and everyone in his life knows it. So when the time comes where he has to fill an important role in his sister's wedding, he has no choice but to learn. He's absolutely sure it'll be a miserable experience, with Natasha as his teacher, until he catches sight of the mysterious pianist in the corner. Maybe things won't be so bad after all...

Read it here!

Title: I want you around Pairings/Characters: Sam Wilson/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes Rating: T Wordcount: 1,985 Prompt #: S61 Warnings: No Archive Warning Apply Summary: “Hi,” Steve mumbles where he, as always, is hiding his face in Sam’s neck.

Sam clings to him just as much, arms tightening a bit now. “Hey, Stevie,” he whispers back.

Read it here!

Title: Adrift in a World of my Own (series: High Notes, part 3/3) Pairings/Characters: Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios Rating: Teen and up Wordcount: 6808 Prompt #: Self-prompt: The Great Pretender sung by The Platters or Freddie Mercury, Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, canonically presumed dead character, a little whump Summary: Matt suspects Elektra isn't quite your regular kind of ghost...

Read it here!

Title: After All These Years Pairings/Characters: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark Rating: Explicit Wordcount: 3,132 Prompt #: #S47 Warnings: Male Slash, Explicit Sexual Content, Angst Summary: When Tony decided to step back from a public life, going off the grid saved his sanity. How will three words change everything?

Read it here!

Title: everytime you smile I feel tremors in my heart Pairings/Characters: Sam/Steve Rating: T Wordcount: 3076 Prompt #: S44 Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary: Steve finds himself immersed in Sam's music collection. Turns out he and teenaged Sam have a lot in common.

Can a box of mixtapes, an old crush and a handful of tootsie rolls bring our boys together? (yes.)

Read it here!

Title:  the end is the beginning Pairings/Characters: Bucky Barnes/Darcy Lewis Rating: T Wordcount: 1,544 Prompt #: A14 Warnings: memory flashback, mentions the death of jim morrison Summary: Sometimes the most random of songs can bring Bucky back to historical events that the Winter Soldier was witness to. He tries to let it flow instead of fighting it.

Read it here!

Title:  I Want to Hold Your Hand Pairings/Characters:  Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers Rating: G Wordcount: 2K + Prompt #:  S57 Warnings: None apply Summary: The first time Bucky Barnes extends his hand to Steve Rogers, Steve hesitates only a moment to take it. After that, it's a given.

Read it here!

Title: RISE Pairings/Characters: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers Rating: M Wordcount: 12.2K Prompt #: Self Warnings: No archive warnings apply, mentions of vomiting Summary: “I don’t need you to be sorry!” Steve shouted. “I need you to love me and fight for this.”

Bucky’s smile was watery. “I do love you Steve, but I can’t fight for this, not anymore.”

Or: In order to come together, you have to fall apart first.

Read it here!

[agentxthirteen]

What if Agent Carter is Peggy’s daydream?

I just had this thought earlier, so please bear with me. What if Agent Carter isn’t canon, it’s one of Peggy’s daydreams while working at the SSR?

Evidence below the cut

Howard There’s a dichotomy in how Howard is portrayed in the movies versus Agent Carter. We know from the Iron Man movies that Howard is - at the very least - distant - to Tony, and the tie-in comics show he’s emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. The movies work this in by showing Howard’s digs to his son, his yelling at Tony to stop playing around in Iron Man 2, how much more Tony got along with his mom in Civil War. The First Avenger shows that Howard is a huge fan of his own - it doesn’t show him being abusive, but it shows him to be fascinated with two things: Himself, and Steve Rogers. And we know one of Tony’s problems with Steve is that Howard always seemed to like Steve more.

But in Agent Carter, Howard is a bit of player, but he’s essentially a good guy. Why? From the narrative aspect, we need Howard to be a good guy because we, the audience, have to be able to root for him, and root for Peggy to succeed in helping him. This Howard is one where no one would ever dream of him hurting Tony or being a bad guy. He might be busy with his job, but he’s not a bad guy.

In the interest of this theory, though, this is the Howard we get because this is the Howard that Peggy knows. She can’t imagine that Howard would ever hurt his child - hell, she can probably barely conceive of Howard turning into a family man, and so we get a version of Howard where no one would ever dream of this Howard striking Tony. We get the version of Howard who goes to a woman he knew years before to help him when he’s in a tight spot, instead of a virtual army of lawyers and private investigators, and who will happily repay in an opulent apartment so she’ll never have to worry about where to live ever again.

Steve Peggy and Steve are supposed to be an epic relationship in the MCU, but what if it wasn’t? The movies show them having a crush on each other, kissing once, and then Peggy moving on to a husband, kids, and grandkids, and Steve eventually trying to move on, too. Markus and McFeely confirmed that the two of them only ever kissed once. According to the Marvel timeline, Peggy and Steve knew each other for less than two and a half years. And we see in The First Avenger that they have crushes on each other for even less time than that. Peggy only gets one scene in The Winter Soldier (where she explicitly talks about how she had a full, happy life, and her only regret is that Steve didn’t get the same chance), and she gets a funeral in Civil War, where the writers and the Russos confirmed that Peggy was Steve’s last tie to his past, other than Bucky. There’s no mention of romantic love, because, well, Peggy moved on decades before and was no longer in love with Steve, and Steve had accepted that they would never have a relationship in 2012, possibly even when he went into the ice in the first place, and had been trying to move on himself for a couple years. So why do people think Peggy and Steve are this huge, epic romance when the movies don’t present it that way at all?

Because of Peggy, that’s why.

Peggy had a crush on Steve. All it ever came to, canonically, was a kiss. But her crush on him didn’t disappear when he did. Suddenly, she has this mission/daydream where she has a physical part of him. Her daydream helps her let go of him. And while the movie had to deal with the fight against Hydra, Agent Carter has more time to delve into her crush. Remember, she was possibly 19 but lying about her age to serve in the US and saying she was 21 (depending on what source you use - I saw a post somewhere long ago that showed two different DOBs, making her 21 in the States but 19 in the UK at the same time). Either way, she was YOUNG in The First Avenger. She had a crush on an international hero. It’s perfectly normal that the crush would run deep for her, particularly given all Steve did.

It also explains why the other Commandos referred to her as “Cap’s girl” and why there was a radio show where a character clearly based on Peggy is rescued by Steve, but why we never see any of this anywhere else. In Peggy’s fantasy, she and Steve DID have a chance to be together, and everyone more or less knew it and approved. She was the Chosen One. Which... anyone who’s been on earth for any degree of time knows that if a woman is dating a famous guy that others want to get with, it’s... incredibly unlikely that the woman is going to be liked. Look at fandom’s treatment of women, especially canon love interests, even in the MCU.

In her daydream, she and Steve had more than just a kiss. She was a respected member of the Commandos, respected enough that they would come if she called them, whereas in the movies we rarely saw her with them because she was assigned to Phillips. Again, we don’t see her close ties to the Commandos in the films - she storms the base with them and Phillips, is present at some planning meetings, that’s it. After the comforts Steve about Bucky, she refers to him as “your friend.” That’s the extent of their interactions. But in her daydream, she’s a heroine who was deeply loved and respected by everyone, where even the Commandos follow her orders because she’s amazing and because she’s “Cap’s girl.” 

Ultimately, her daydream helps her get over her crush on Steve and move on to the guy in her office who might have a crush on her. Which brings us to...

SSR & the resets Why the hell didn’t Peggy jump to SHIELD at any point in the series? Why, at the end of S1, do we get Peggy saying she knows her own worth, and that’s good enough for her, but no one else except her office crush recognizes her worth, even though she has constantly outsmarted them and proved her worth?

Because in her daydream, she has no conception of SHIELD happening. This daydream takes place at the SSR, and she knows that when she comes out of her daydream, she’s still going to be where she started. So the daydream ends the same way it began, as far as her work goes. A bunch of coworkers who don’t respect her as an equal.

So she starts and ends each season almost the same way she started, quietly back at work at the SSR, with the exception of a transfer to Los Angeles to be near Sousa in S2. Which might mirror her considering a transfer in S2, and this daydream is the way of trying it out for size?

Jarvis While Howard is on the run in S1, he leaves Peggy - not with his legion of lawyers or investigators or their investigative tools - but with his butler. Who also follows Peggy’s orders and acts essentially as her sidekick. Her Bucky, her junior agent.

Am I saying she imagined Jarvis? Nope! We know he exists because Tony named his AI after Jarvis. I’m saying that she might have met Jarvis once or twice and she incorporates him into the daydream because she needs someone outside of the SSR, who has ties to Howard, and who will do what she says and can come through in a pinch. She might know that he’s married - but doesn’t know much about his wife - i.e., why we don’t see her in S1. So she imagines him to be what she needs to solve the case. This also indicates that each season is a different daydream - she didn’t know Jarvis’s wife in S1 because she didn’t yet know enough about his wife to imagine her well enough yet, only meeting her after S1′s daydream and thus including more about her in S2.

Michael The daydream theory also explains the set-up for Michael to return. The writers left it open-ended, but they implied that HE was the “M Carter” in the file, meaning he was alive after all.

But what if he isn’t? What if Peggy just daydreams that he might be alive. That there might be some sort of Russian program like she encountered in S1 with Faustus that might have taken her brother? In her daydream, she has the chance to rescue him. She would have saved him, they would briefly have been happy - or had the hope of it - and then he would have gone off before the end of the season again, and things would have gone back to being the same at the SSR, only this time with the hope of seeing Michael again, alive and more or less well. She’s setting herself up for another daydream, this time where she gets to save her brother.

Angie It would also explain why Angie didn’t feature more in S2. Plenty of people have noticed it was odd that Angie wasn’t in LA for acting and was written out of the show until pressure convinced them to feature Angie in at least one scene (the musical scene - a daydream within a daydream). But when you’re daydreaming about a different place, you tend to also cut back on which people you know would be there and then daydream entirely new people - both heroes and villains. So it would kind of make sense, right? Angie might have been a friend or a roommate in S1′s daydreams, but they aren’t close enough (assuming Angie found out about Peggy’s spy career in a daydream and still doesn’t know IRL) that they’re besties, and thus Peggy daydreams a different crew for her LA daydream adventures.

Jason Wilkes & the love triangle There were also complaints about the love triangle in S2, but if Peggy is daydreaming, it makes sense that there would be some romance to her daydreams, even daydreams where multiple people love her at once. Hell, her crush died, her last daydream was about getting over him and letting go, and now she’s bored of that sad crap and ready to daydream about something new. Working how crushes might work with different people, deciding which one she wants to follow up on... Peggy might have preferred to weigh the options in her mind, which is not only fine, but smart. Consider before engagement, etc.

As for Jason Wilkes, if the show is really just a collection of Peggy’s daydreams (S1, S2...) then he makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE. People have talked since the show came out about the show’s problem with white feminism, but this explains why. Because it’s from Peggy’s POV. She isn’t going to know enough or understand enough to portray racism realistically in the late 1940s. She might have heard things, she might even have witnessed some things (the MCU likes to gloss over the brutality and ugliness of racism), but she has never been seen seeking to understand the depth of racism the same way she seeks to understand the depths of sexism, because one of these doesn’t apply to her. So her daydream version of Wilkes lacks the more subtle presentations of racism. Outright racism? She’s there, calling it out and being an ally. But as the writer of the linked article (which is incredible, btw) points out, there’s no way that some people at the SSR wouldn’t be outright racist, and no way others wouldn’t be at least a little bit prejudiced. I posit that we don’t see that because the daydreams are from Peggy’s POV. She doesn’t see them as racist, she doesn’t see the microaggressions, the subtleties, the intricacies, and thus, she doesn’t think to put them in her daydreams, glossing over them the way so many people gloss over ugly things they don’t understand, things that make them feel awkward and uncomfortable, and thus things that they don’t want to see or address.

The technology Peggy has access to all sorts of technology, thanks to the SSR and Howard. Do we ever see it outside of the show? It doesn’t turn up in the movies, as far as I’m aware, and I haven’t watched enough of Agents of SHIELD to know if it turns up there. But Peggy grew up in the golden age of science fiction and worked at the SSR. She would have been able to imagine these weapons for herself. And it’s no surprise that Zero Matter tied in to Doctor Strange, because dark matter isn’t an entirely new concept.

The one-shot I think the Agent Carter one-shot is canon and was always meant to BE canon. The problem is, both the show and the one-shot are set in 1946. When they were writing the series, though, McFeely said he wanted Peggy to grind away in the SSR for a while longer, that they didn’t want her set up SHIELD that fast.

But if the show is just a daydream, it still allows for both to be true. S1 would be her daydream in S1 before Howard sets up SHIELD. She imagines herself working for a different boss - Dooley, who dies respecting her and her skills. Meanwhile, her boss IRL, Flynn, is never so much as mentioned.

Then there’s the S2 daydream, taking place later in the year, where she thinks about transferring to LA to be with Sousa, who has already transferred.

There was going to be another daydream, where she rescues her brother, but then the phone call comes in, and, knowing her skills and built up on heroic fantasies where she’s more than equal to the task of taking out one little gang, she takes on a mission Flynn didn’t want her to take. After that, she’s busy building SHIELD.

I.e., the show wasn’t cancelled so much as Peggy had to wake up and go to work.

Flaws with the theory I’m sure there are some? I’m interested to see what other people think. LET’S DISCUSS.