Pax Soprana

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

I have said before that, for example, the Hashtag Accurate Mycenaean boar tusk helmet looks ugly as fuck. No one is going to want to watch someone clad in a boar tusk helmet because our touchstones for Epic Thing don't include that. Will you shut up and enjoy the mass market adventure story in the way it was originally meant to be enjoyed (as a public spectacle expressing a mass market adventure story).

I think there are some places where accuracy matters but they're largely in terms of plot events and character motivations, and the broader social/cultural/religious contexts that those events and motivations spring out of.

like I do think it's useful to know (for example) about Zeus and guest right and justice done to those who are harmed despite being under guest right, or useful to know about how mortals are (in Homer at least) completely unable to refuse gods' sexual advances and therefore Penelope is deeply worried about her fidelity to her husband being compromised against her will. I think it helps to understand libations and animal sacrifices and the ways those things impact the story, or the broad strokes of how the early Ancient Greeks perceived the underworld and death. I think understanding Odysseus's fidelity to Penelope as something that sets him apart as unusual (compared to, say, Menelaus, who is a Good And Moral And Admirable King by the standards of his society but who also keeps a ton of concubines and has many sons who are acknowledged but aren't in line for his throne) is helpful when crafting an adaptation for a modern audience, because you can communicate what makes them unique to the people watching your movie. if we're talking about the Iliad I think it's useful to know things like "Achilles and Patroclus were carrying on a sexual relationship long past the point when it would have been socially acceptable for them to do this in any other context except being isolated in a foreign country while at war, and in fact both of them seem to be aware of the hothouse orchid nature of their situation and view the transition back into heteronormativity with varying degrees of dread and trepidation".

E.g. Bucky's speech patterns in dialogue in fanfic are very much comics!bucky rather than MCU!Bucky. The idea that Bucky was intended to function as Cap's partner who does the dirty work that Cap couldn't be seen doing onscreen in propaganda films (killing people) appears in a lot of fics and that comes from here.

MCU did a couple of things that lit the fuse for this story to be truly explosive in the Collective Sicko Consciousness, though: for one, exchanging the domino mask for a mask that covers the Winter Soldier's mouth and nose, evoking the idea of a muzzle, paired with some sick ass eyeliner. Whereas comics!winter soldier does some snarking and bantering when he's fighting, and engages in dialogue with other characters, MCU!winter soldier hardly talks at all; iirc it's not quite clear if he can while he's masked. He's not a Darker and Edgier, evil iteration of the same person (as in the comics) he's a black hole.

The other thing the MCU did... okay, two closely related things. One, it made Bucky and Steve roughly the same age and eliminated the hero-sidekick dynamic. Two, it completely failed to sell the idea that Steve is in any way attracted to women.

In the comic version of this storyline, Sharon is a major secondary character whose relationship to and history with Cap is a major source of tension, conflict and uncertainty; in the same storyline in the movies, she is completely sidelined and Steve shows zero signs of genuine attraction to or interest in any female character.

Seriously, MCU!Steve is shown being kissed three times by women, twice non-consensually and causing him clear discomfort, once with dubious consent (iirc, he didn't seem distressed when Peggy kissed him, but he didn't really reciprocate). The conversation he had with Peggy about dancing with her was when he was psyching himself up to face death so I don't think that reads as an expression of romantic interest?

Steve's awkward, stilted, half-forced romance scenes were clearly not played solely because someone was angling for signaling him as gay. if the audience can see it, there's no way active professional filmmakers didn't know.

but if you compare Tony and Steve, what is the absolute major difference there? not in personality or anything. but character?

like they couldn't wrap their heads around it.

so when we get his flirting, it's awkward and forced, and when we get his kissing scenes, it's as if the kisses themselves elicit no response.

because they can't imagine a man fully respectful of women to be an active participant without showing off his "male prowess".

and so we get "so obviously written as gay MCU!Steve Rogers".

that's my theory anyway.

I think what they were trying to go for is portraying Steve as sexually naive. Part of this is because his enhanced body is new to him and he hasn't experienced people being attracted to him, but part of it is that Steve is a deeply good character and writers and audiences consistently misunderstand that as meaning "straight-laced"/goody-two-shoes/Allergic to Fun.

This says a lot about how the writers view men and manhood.

particularly I feel like the godawful ending he was given in Endgame was one of the most misogynistic plot points pertaining to this because of the logic underpinning why it was seen as a resolution to Steve's arc... he is granted access to a woman, as though he's earned a prize. There is never any question of whether Peggy would WANT to be with him, even though she literally married someone else.