#swiggety swag it's a catrintag

[amarriageoftrueminds]

I have to say I am hooked on your anti-peggy metas and with every single one, I just say out loud "You're absolutely correct and you should say it!" Everything that I've read so far is exactly what I've been having trouble articulating for years, and I'm so glad to find another great blog that shares the exact same sentiments.

Oh wow Anon, this is a lovely message to get!

I know just how you feel, too! Nothing better than going from wondering if you're mad for seeing this obvious thing nobody else can (like you've taken crazy pills), only to discover there are a bunch of other people who feel the same way.

Thank you for telling me. 🥰

[amarriageoftrueminds]

All your recent posts about historically accurate!stucky is making me and my history nerd brain kick our feet and giggle and please would you marry me because stucky PLUS history is making me swoon! Yet again I am so happy we're mutuals

😊

Aww, likewise!

I have to say that makes me so happy to hear (despite how often I waffle/reblog meta stuff,there's always a part of me which worries people will find it boring) To me there's something so satisfying about all that nitty-gritty history meta. It's like it satisfies the same part of my brain that likes making lists??

[amarriageoftrueminds]

As an antipeggy myself, I gotta say, gosh I love your blog!

Aw thanks glad to hear it 😅

It's so satisfying to find out you're not the only one who can see the truth of a problematic character / actress and is rightly pissed off about it. For a long time in this fandom it felt in like being the lone person taking crazy pills...

[amarriageoftrueminds]

I'm a total rando who was just scrolling through a post's rbs and I saw your queue tag and I just. Mwah. So clever. My bias is that Ballad of Reading Gaol is one of my favorite pieces of literature but. Still. You're awesome, you rock, you made my day.

[amarriageoftrueminds]

the individuality of the tag for your queue always brings me joy

Awww, that's a lovely thing to hear, thank you!

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Plus an extra gif 💜

[amarriageoftrueminds]

I really enjoy your blog because it's equal parts funny, insightful, informative and gay so thank you for your service :)

'Nonny I'll give you the gay and the funny (after all you might mean funny as in odd) but informative

[amarriageoftrueminds]

I agree with literally every word of your top/bottom ask and just have to tell you how, honestly, comforting it is to see someone hit all the same beats on such a divisive topic! I don't even know how to explain it sometimes when people ask my preference for a ship because I'm like idk I have this weird personality thing that if someone even feels a smidge ooc for sex reasons the Enterprise red alert klaxon starts going off in my head and I have to close out of a fic or just skip the sex scene completely.

It seems I usually end up on the opposite side of what the majority of fandom prefers, too, and maybe sometimes that's a little unintentionally out of spite? I'll scream to my friends about well written, in character, bottom!Steve fics until the cows come home, and then cry about how much I loathe the abundance of ooc overly feminized uke bottom!Buck (I suspect some of this is that it's so overtly obvious when the writer just wants Cevans to [redacted] them and they're projecting onto Bucky, and that squicks me out, but anyways, to each their own, I'm not saying ppl shouldn't or can't enjoy whatever they enjoy, it's just not for me in this instance!) And I don't even *want* to have a preference. I like them switching! It makes the most sense! I just find it hard to enjoy a lot of fics that are bottom!B, unfortunately, with how most people write him.

So, not to ramble in your ask box, it's just such a relief to know someone else who's on a similar wavelength exists cause I was starting to think I was the only one. Lol!

P.S. I love your metas so much, I give myself eye strain from reading them when I should be sleeping. You're so good at saying what you're saying (I envy that so much, my adhd could never let me, I feel like this ask is proof) and everything is so well thought out and worded perfectly and I just. 💖💖💖

(le top/bottom ask)

Omg it's so gratifying for me to hear that I'm not the lone voice in the fandom; to have such rare taste! 😅

I have seen OOC bottom!Steve fics, too (which are guilty of the same OOC feminizing thing as the whiny bottom!Bucky fics), but bottom or switch!Steve fics are already so rare that I can kind of forgive it just because the scarcity means it's less overdone; those writers have far fewer fics to draw comparisons with and see the cliche.

Ooof you're going to get me ranting 😅 but TBH I think that Andy Barber character of Cevans' has a lot to answer for.

As soon as a fic starts describing Steve as a soulless corporate drone in a suit with his sleeves rolled up I'm like 'oh ok let's put money on him also being bearded, rich, firm in the belief he’s a nice guy but is actually controlling, and Bucky being the predictable sleazy uke-brat doormat textbook-victim archetype in ripped skinny jeans who follows him around like a child, and Steve finds this behaviour somehow uncommon and enchanting because reasons??' 🤷🏼‍♀️ 

Only Steve gets to have any class or self-control, as the one with all the power? (Jesus. Things Captain America Would Never!) And the word ‘daddy’ hovers on the horizon like an unseen dog turd on a pavement. 

It feels like these people saw Bucky's suffering and financial struggling in the films and thought 'Mmm sleazy college student brat archetype who looks like he'd taste like salty garbage -- Steve would find that so Hot!!'

Fanfic tropes revealing wishful thinking -- who was it said nobody ever lost money by underestimating public taste?

And then, yeah, the sex scenes are always from Bucky POV, idolising a Steve  who’s so much better than him (Bucky always on the back foot, always flustered and unsure, like a heroine in a gothic novel who doesn't realise her Mr Rochester is an abuser.) While Steve is this... creepy sex demon smirking patronisingly down at his decimated inferior??

Yikes! Not the kind of behaviour I find attractive in men, not my cuppa tea at all.

Too often I find myself staring off into space, imagining fanfic of the fanfic, where Bucky does what I wish the women in my family would do -- punch the smug twat in the face before leaving! 🙈 (Hmm, now there's a fic opener...)

I even read a fic once where I was like 'hang on, this is literally the plot of a TED Talk I listened to about how to tell when you're in an abusive relationship.' And it was the exact same dire unhealthy stereotyped top/bottom=dom/sub dynamic you'd expect.

The recent rise in Steve/Reader fic speaks volumes -- it may squick me out, but hey, at least it's bloody honest!

I seem to remember blogging semi-recently about stumbling across a fic with BAMF!Bucky in, and the moment when I realised he wasn't going to be this weak, useless, cringing infantilised figure; that I could Relax, and the writer wasn't going to fuck his character up?! Wow. The sheer Relief of that gave me such a rush that I literally got goosebumps! 🤯

Those fics, when you do find them, really are precious.

.

.

PS. Thank you for reading! It always gives me a thrill when people compliment the metas cuz it's such a recent thing for me to do, and I tend to go back in again and again, edit and tweak and rethink them often. I'm never quite satisfied with how I've put things, so to hear that someone finds them readable - and legible - is wonderful. I'm only sorry for your eyestrain! 😉

[amarriageoftrueminds]

😩 Help I can’t stop going back to the ‘Do you headcanon Bucky as bisexual or gay?‘ Anon to add in more points it’s stupid long it’s now the ‘Steve is not bi because-’ anon 

[amarriageoftrueminds]

@reijamira said in reply to: 

@amarriageoftrueminds, when I read your first sentence I couldn’t believe my eyes! It was always one of the most nagging questions for me why Bucky is deemed weaker than Steve in fanon. And then you come along and tell me you’ve already written meta on that matter. That was just too good to be true. And what satisfying and conclusive meta it is! It was such a delight to suck it all up. Thank you!

I 100 percent agree with you. We have no evidence whether Bucky is weaker than Steve or not. You can’t just draw that conclusion from what we’re given in the movies. (By the way, I loved your little commentaries in the Fights section like what a bitch, the fools, and Bucky you useless bisexual. Lol)

And you are right. It would make absolutely no sense that a mastermind and genius like Zola was not able to recreate a perfectly working serum. Absolutely no sense at all.

Your explanation why Bucky is often a target for Wimpification is also conclusive. I haven’t thought about how Bucky’s character combines all of three reasons why he can’t be stronger than the male hero.

So feminine + sidekick + villain = that’s a triple dose of ‘he can’t be as strong  as the male hero, he just can’t!’ If you put it like that the guy just stands no chance at all.

Thanks again for this insightful meta! It was a delightful read!

Thank you for such detailed feedback!

(Since then I’ve added even more because I had an epiphany about the Erskine dates; also, I realised that dislike of Nazis is another reason on top of why fanon doesn’t ‘want’ Bucky’s serum to be a success. So it’s actually a quadruple whammy!) 

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Being on the east coast of America and going to sleep and waking up to see your post on my dashboard really gives me that xmas morning excited to see what presents santa left me basically you are my tumblr santa ^-^

[amarriageoftrueminds]

what did you even do to his face in that one manip? did you just duo reflect it? change his nose?

im so shit with faces i can't he just looks normal to me

😅 I guess I should take this as a compliment, if it’s invisible!

I've been watching this fascinating YT channel lately which discusses sexual dimorphism (how the sexes differ) and the anthropology of global beauty standards, and coincidentally also obsessing over a/b/o AUs.

And those two things came together in my head to get me wondering how Bucky would look different as an omega, or maybe trans, or both; just subtly different, without seeming female?

So I was looking up the effects of oestrogen (versus testosterone) which would be the stand-in for omega-'mones in an a/b/o au and it was saying that the various effects are to: broaden the middle face, brighten eyes and skin (called neoteny, apparently it's a big deal), thicken the head-hair, lower the brow bone and plump up the lips.

With this manip; to AyourQ, in line with all this ^ what I did was:

plumped up his lips a teeny bit (no more than they were back when he was a twink, didn't want fishlips; it’s surprisingly tricky to make them look natural!)

lightened the shadow of his brow bone (as if it weren’t so deep, kind of like when trans ladies get brow-shaving feminising surgery?)

then slightly lightened his eyes and his under-brow area to mimic that decreased shadow (but again only a little bit, I still left most of it as-is!)

while simultaneously giving him a dab of mascara, eyeliner, and brow-filler cuz if omegas did minimal make up I figured Bucky would be that kind of lowkey type

and, because all these anthropology vids were saying that repeating-proportions are what makes a face especially attractive (i.e. if it can be vertically divided up perfectly into thirds), and since he should be having thicker hair, (and they should've given him a proper wig from the start gdi!) I lowered his hairline a smidge to make his forehead proportionate to his cute lil nose.

And that's it!

(Apart from adding long hair, obviously).

But his eyes and skin and jaw and his natural symmetry are so ridiculous it looks like I must've added some insane kawaii instagram filter to make him look all unearthly. Nope! His face just did that! 🤷‍♀️

[amarriageoftrueminds]

How r all of ur tags so hilarious. Give us some tips 😭🤲

all I can advise is:

have no inner monologue, just let it all come out in the hash,

always start by being relevant and end somewhere totally irrelevant in a loop-de-loop

also have no sensible tagging system cuz if it weren't for xkit quick-tagging things for me I would never find anything again, ever

and then

[amarriageoftrueminds]

[amarriageoftrueminds]

@kiwi-indomitus said: i personally feel someone should give you a medal for every 5 points on this list on average 🎖🎖🎖🎖

😩😭 I would have so many medals; as many medals as Bucky deserves

[amarriageoftrueminds]

@princesscas​ said: your bucky hair manips gives me life