So Long, and Thanks for All the Memes

As hilarious as all the “how oblivious ARE you?” jokes about Stede are, I think we’re missing the big picture. This isn’t about obliviousness, it’s about trauma.

Stede isn’t ignorant of the fact he’s in love with Ed. he’s been abused his whole life for his queerness and is having trouble conceptualizing that he’s allowed to be.

Notice how Stede immediately has the instinct to walk back his comment of Ed being “lovely”? This is the same man who didn’t even pick up that his very obviously mutinous crew was planning a mutiny, that shit was learned behavior. He’s speaking as a little boy was tied to a boat and stoned for picking flowers, and as someone who was told mere days ago a man falling in love with him was “defiling a beautiful thing.”

Homophobia/ heteronormativity is alive and well in this world and Stede, being forced to live in the conservative circles he does, would’ve absolutely been painfully aware of it. The fact that he feels the need to ask a woman what it’s like to be in love with a man speaks volumes after he’s already been happily kissed by one and has roleplayed being married to him when lonely. He’s not just casually making conversation then has a eureka moment when he happens to notice the description applies to him and Ed too, he asked specifically to compare them.

It’s him testing the waters and thinking that maybe “they” were wrong. Maybe he’s not broken or pathetic, maybe he never deserved to be treated as such. Maybe he didn’t “seduce” Edward, or “ruin” him, or “defile” him. And maybe his feelings for Ed are just as loving and romantic as Mary’s feelings are for her boyfriend.

It’s such a beautiful moment when he slowly smiles, let’s out that little breath like a sigh of relief, and tells his wife of an arranged marriage with nothing less than wonder in his voice that what he’s found at sea is in fact love. Fuck, it gets me every time.

all sorts of echoes in these caverns

Crowley + being a dramatic bitch

please think 8 times before expressing any of them, especially if you’re planning to go on anon to some poor ukrainian’s askbox and accuse them of being a tankie for caring about their homecountry or what the fuck ever. a few reasons for that are:

- rude

- dont

- please?

i understand that western culture (for the sake of this we’ll assume it exists as a complex but stable set of ideas from like the xviii century) values personal beliefs and encourages people to make them be heard. great! let’s stay in this box of thought! then if you are so woke, if you understand the concept of pride, empowerment, representation and the role a person’s Words play into that — choose yours very carefully.

respect the creators’ effort in making the series as credible as possible. do your research as thoroughly as they did. respect their willingness to humanize soviet people for the audience that is probably still affected by red scare. don’t try to assume anything. if we are still the Other, don’t try to measure us by your standarts, we probably won’t fit. if you are on board with the show’s crew and you actually want to learn more about ussr and the history of its countries — read some critical theory for god’s sake, read up diaries of people who lived there, watch actual soviet cinema, whatever suits your interests best. just don’t assume you know us better than we do ourselves - a very western sentiment if i do say so myself. we don’t ask you to change your whole belief system, just stay true to it. i don’t even think we ask much more than for you to accept that we exist - our parents and grandparents exist - as humans. and we deserve to be seen as humans. we haven’t been for quite some time, i believe.

how at the end of Iron Man 3, we were reassured that Tony Stark would be back.

while for the other MCU heroes, we got this…

… not “Steve Rogers will return” or “Scott Lang will return” or “Peter Parker will return”

and at the end of BP, we see “Black Panther will return in Avengers: Infinty War”

We get their masked identities. Their superhero aliases. Their alter egos.

When we think of Captain America, Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Black Panther, etc., we think of them as the heroes who we could rely on to help us, kick ass, and save the day, right?

And what do we think of when we hear the name Tony Stark?

Here, Tony’s actual name, not his alias, is in the same position as the others, reminding us that Iron Man may be powerful, but the true person we can trust to come and save us is Tony Stark. Iron Man has firepower, but Tony has more to offer the world than just his armor. If he ever finds himself in a situation where he doesn’t have a suit, you bet he’ll find another way to save the day.

That’s what he does. He’s a mechanic. He sees a problem and he fixes it. Yeah, he has an awesome suit of armor that helps him kick ass, but that’s just a high tech prosthesis, an extension of himself, an amplification of his true superpower — his brain and his heart.