taran

Here, for all of your "Luis sniping to cover Leon" needs

Man is so competent with a rifle and you never get to see it outside of this dumb minigame.

I'm not very GOOD at this minigame but it means I can take pictures of him whenever I want :)

Okay, I will preface this by saying this all won’t be 100% medicall accurate because we get way too little information for that in the game. And it is Resident Evil, so I will take my sweet ass right to be a little fudgy with how this works and how he recovers. This game isn’t reality. This game has a magic First Aid spray and healy herbs after all. And spine attaching brain eating parasites.

Krauser plunges that knife into Luis’ back. Several little details happen at once there.

Luis coughs blood almost immediately. Which leads to the assumption that most likely his lung was pierced. Other close candidates would be his oesophagus, but that would have bled more.

His aorta was most likely missed, because that would have resulted in him dying far faster than he did.

The knife is almost perfectly in Luis’ middle at his spine. Almost. I take a bit more of liberty here and say that it is slightly angled to the left of his body. Because if Krauser had really managed to slice his spine and thus spinal cord in half, Luis would not have been able to get up again, like he did.

So in my headcanon that knife got ricocheted from his spine and entered him at an angle to the left.

When it comes to the height of the injury? From eyeballing it and aligning some charts and all, I’d say it would be at vertrebraes T4 or T5. Which means the spinal nerve roots beneath those vertrebrae would be most likely affected alongside the ribs there. Thus making his arms mostly unaffected, but everything beneath his chest? Threatened.

The dorsal (back) root of a spinal nerve is for sensation input, the ventral (front) part for the efferent motoric output.

It’s obvious that Luis can still move after the attack. He even makes it down a  whole platform and manages to shoot a knife out of Krauser’s hand. So the damage there can’t be too immediately-ending-it-horrific, not severed instantly and completely.

But we also see Luis soon losing all strength to remain standing. And he stands only with leaning heavily against a crate, plus his left arm isn't used at all. In the end he also loses the strength or coordination to even light a fire for his cigarette with his left hand.

To summarize all this, and because I ignore canon at this point and just say Leon managed to help Luis and make him survive – and then they were rescued from that goddamn island – Luis gets loaded with a ton of healing herbs and that First Aid Spray holds him together.

He is weakened and can barely walk any distances on the island, often takes breaks until they reach his laboratory, where he has some medications that help him, too.

In the end, he gets rescued alongside Leon and Ashley via helicopter.

Already on that flight, they put him under to treat his instability. There surely were some first emergency surgeries happening in Madrid. They did not wake him up afterwards, because he got to go to the USA alongside Leon and Ashley right after that. Washington probably is, where more surgeries happened and Luis found himself groggily waking up in the ICU with an “I lived, bitch” attitude. Though it took him several days to realize that he wasn’t in Spain anymore.

He has the scars on his back, from the knife and from the surgeries.

I will headcanon that at least a small part of Luis’ spine got fused with metal and bolts to stabilize it. So his movement in that part is a little less than before. He has to take pain killers at times, because his spinal nerves still act up.

He occassionally has numbness in his lower left side. He can’t run as fast and far anymore and if he gets tired, his steps become uncoordinated and he is more likely to stumble. His breathing also doesn’t run as deep anymore, he is missing part of his left lung (could be the entire upper lobe of it).

But overall he made a spectacular Resident-Evil-suiting recovery, thanks to Leon probably pulling quite a few strings and favours. Physical therapy was and still is a regular thing for Luis, but he is, as always, optimistic as hell.

Just don’t ask him to run a marathon. Or any kind of race. He won’t.

WIP for Chapter 17 of my ST longfic Don't be a Stranger

something something post season 1 Steve El siblingism. They are Important To Me

@jedijune // Life, Death, and The Force

Some tribal owned grocers that ship:

Bow and Arrow (Ute Mountain)

Native Harvest (White Earth)

Red Lake Fishery (Red Lake)

Wozupi (Mdewakanton Dakota)

Ramona Farms (Gila River)

Tanka Bars (Oglala)

Indian Pueblo Store (Pueblos)

Twisted Cedar Wine (Cedar Paiutes)

Ute Bison (Ute)

Seka Hills Olive Oil and Vinegars (Yocha Dehe Wintun)

She Nah Nam Seafood (Nisqually)

Sakari Botanicals (Inupiaq)

Honor the Earth (? Anishinaabe)

Nett Lake Wild Rice (Boise Forte Anishinaabe)

Passamaquoddy maple (Passamaquoddy)

BONUS: coffee :)

Yeego Coffee (Navajo)

Spirit Mountain Roasting (Yuma Quechan)

Birchbark Coffee (Anishinaabe)

Honor the Earth is an organization founded by Winona Duke of the White Earth Nation (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers (LGBTQ musical duo Indigo Girls and long-time political activists.) You can buy Honor The Earth merch online to support the environmental work they do, specifically to help protest Enbridge Oil’s Line 3 Pipeline routed through tribal lands that endangers wild rice beds which are both a staple crop and sacred to Anishinaabeg.

However, Winona also heads up a hemp farm called Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm located on and run primarily by members of the White Earth Nation. It seeks to general local wealth for the tribe by encouraging the production of hemp as a fast-growing renewable and regenerative crop resource to be used for everything from non-plastic textiles/clothing, housing construction and insulation, food products, and CBD products! (They also grow other crops there such as heirloom varieties of corn, beans, squash, Jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, and ceremonial tobacco in an effort to help re-establish and increase tribal food sovereignty!)

They have both a brick-and-mortar shop called The Hemp Market Store and Coffee Shop in Osage MN where they sell their products and others by Indigenous-owned & -run companies! (They also sell those seasonal tribal heirloom crops there including Lakota squash and Ojibwe purple potatoes.)

it looks like some shops’ products are seasonal and arent avaliable at this time of year (november 2023), but it may be at a different season

new or fixed links in green with ✳️ emoji inactive/closed website in red with ⛔️ emoji

Grocers: from salamanderinspace’s reblog of product list

Bow and Arrow –> Cornmeal, Polenta

Native Harvest –> Maple Syrup, Plum Syrup, Coffees, Jewelry

✳️Red Lake Fishery –> fish (Walleye, Perch, Crappie, Northern, Whitefish, Smoked Fish)

✳️Nawapo (formerly Red Lake Nation Foods) –> Mixes & Batters, Teas & Coffee, Fruit spreads, Wild Rice, Personal care, Handcrafted gifts

Wozupi –> seasonal produce [no online ordering right now]

Ramona Farms –> Beans, Wheat Berries, Whole Wheat Flour, Corn Meal Products, Grits, Pinole, Chickpeas/Garbanzo beans

Tanka –> Buffalo-cranberry snacks [no online ordering right now]

✳️Indian Pueblo Store –> Housewares, Apparel, Mugs, Jewelry, Decor, Baked goods mix, etc

Twisted Cedar Wine –> Wine

Ute Bison –> Bison jerky sticks, skulls, and robes

Seka Hills –> Olive Oil, Wine, Vinegar, Nuts, Beef jerky, Honey, Body Care / Soaps, Pickled Asparagus

⛔️She Nah Nam –> [website is closed]

Sakari Farms –> Hotsauce, Tea, Seasonings, Lotions, Medicinal herbs & oils, Squash Candy

Honor the Earth –> [see the reblog above]

✳️Nett Lake Wild Rice –> Wild rice (website features recipes)

✳️Passamaquoddy maple –> Maple products (syrup, sugar, candies), Pancake and muffin mix, Seasoning

✳️Ioway Bee Farm (Iowa, recommended by watcherscrown) –> Honey, Lotions, Lip balm, Beeswax, Candles, CBD products, Honey sticks

Online retailer: partnered with some of the grocers in the list above, so you can order several grocers’ products from 1 place

✳️Tocabe (Osage, recommended by killmecoward) –> Pantry food staples

✳️Indigenous First (recommended by pingnova) –> Handmade crafts/art, Foods & Teas, Personal care, Decor, Seeds, Books, Jewelry supplies

✳️SweetGrass Trading Company (Winnebago, recommended by watcherscrown) –> Handmade crafts/art, Foods (of note: Salmon), Coffee & teas, Personal care, Books (website features recipes)

Coffee/Tea:

Yeego Coffee

✳️Spirit Mountain Roasting

Birchbark Coffee

Thunder Island Coffee

✳️Owl Lightning Coffee (Ute (?), recommended by c4-magic)

Bow & Arrow Brand, Ute Mountain Tribe

Native Harvest, White Earth Band (wild rice recipes)

Ramona Farms, Gila River (bean/corn-based recipes)

Sweetgrass Trading Co., Winnebago Tribe

Across the (several) novels I wrote as a teenager, nothing ever fit into the "rough draft -> more polished drafts -> final draft" sequence.

I would write something that was supposed to be a first draft, then completely rewrite it to the point that I didn't have a first draft and a second draft, I had two different first drafts. My sense of what I wanted to write evolved very quickly, and I never reached a stable enough sense of what my stories were about that I could begin to refine it instead of being trapped in an endless cycle of scrapping everything and starting over

My adventure with Bucky Barnes fanfiction (first reading it, then writing it) led me to these things:

multiple different, mutually contradictory versions of the same story can exist and all of them can have value at the same time.

The idea that writers imagine "their own" stories and characters out of nothing is a cultural idea we made up. Nothing is really "original," we just have a (legally enforced) cultural norm of making stories appear separate by giving characters distinct names, using different plot and worldbuilding elements, not deriving too much from any one particular influence

Being a storyteller is deeply connected to being a story-listener. You have to hear the story before telling it yourself.

the concept of "originality" makes it really difficult to learn the storyteller/story-listener thing, because the way we're taught to see it is that writers can somehow, like, sublimate everything they read into raw Ideas and then use those ideas as ingredients to create Their Own Thing.

Which, yes you can pick and choose what tropes you want to use, but breaking something down to its atoms means you can no longer see how the thing works as an organism, because you took it apart.

I think our culture has difficulty seeing stories holistically because the idea of "originality" is so pervasive.

Playing in an environment where the storytellers are exchanging the same story, telling and re-telling different parts and in different ways, deriving ideas from each other and refining those ideas with further iterations until they become their own "canons" that sprout more stories, helped me understand a lot of things I didn't understand before.

In the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem, those ideas and tropes that were assembled to form the whole weren't just interchangeable parts anymore: it was clear how they supported certain themes, evoked certain emotions, explored certain ideas, and so on.

The "nodes" of story that clustered together and intensely cultivated new variations were functionally entangled with imagery, symbolism, and particular literary techniques, and seeing how different storytellers engaged these things taught me a deep understanding of their possibilities.

Therefore when I got it in my head to write my own fanfiction I had done a lot of deep thinking about what my take on the story was going to be "about" and the themes it would engage and the techniques it would use to do that. Because I had already read 30+ different iterations of the story of Bucky Barnes, the man who would become the Winter Soldier, that were all compelling in their own way.

I'm starting to think that this is a fundamental part of the storytelling process and the idea of "original fiction" has grimed it up a little bit. You have to hear the story before you can tell it.

Is it possible, I thought, that this is what a "first draft" often functionally is? I ended up writing so many "first drafts" that were just sloppy assemblages of ideas I imperfectly guessed I might like, and once they were assembled, I realized I didn't like those ideas and what they communicated.

So I thought, What if all writing is fanfiction, and when you write a first draft, you are essentially writing something to write fanfiction of.

This way of thinking of it is fascinating in what it implies. Fanfiction is not a linear continuation or refinement of the original; it can be a retort, a further extrapolation, a complementary piece, an antagonistic refutation. There's always an inversion: listener becomes teller. In other words it implies that first draft and further drafts are a call and a response, rather than an increasingly "improved" version of the same thing.

It suggests that it's actually fine or even expected to have multiple drafts that aren't necessarily linear improvements on each other. It also suggests that a first draft shouldn't be read thinking "okay how do I improve this" but "what sticks with me about this?" The failures or inadequacies of the first draft are not so much things to repair as things to respond to.

I don't know what I think about this, because honestly, after experiencing fanfiction, the intensely private nature of writing original fiction seems to run contrary to the nature of storytelling, which is communal.

Okay, so.

It would take an eternity to completely re-narrate my Bucky fanfic journey, so here's some links to my post threads from last year as I was getting into the Bucky fanfic world myself, where I discuss and recommend the fics I was reading. Part 1, part 2.

Part 1 has a lentil soup recipe in it as well if you're into that.

However, the rec list in these posts is my path exploring a lush, tangled, complex ecosystem of stories, and it would not be accurate as a description of everything the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem is.

A narrative of one walk through a forest does not capture everything about that ecosystem. I have learned that you can walk through the same forest a hundred times and see a hundred different forests. Living, breathing systems are labyrinthine. They are endlessly new with each path you follow through them, each change in the clouds and each shift in the slant of the light...

anyways. in the 12 years since Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released, stories have emerged and evolved and exchanged ideas and developed and refined new tropes and concepts and dug deeper into many fascinating themes.

Part of the reason the story-ecosystem is so well developed is just that it's huge; MCU being a massive mainstream franchise that, in the years of 2012-2018, most people had some contact with whether they cared for it or not, there were just a LOT of people into it at once.

and it reaches this point where the fanfiction is not just a work someone wrote based off of a blockbuster movie, it starts to become fanfiction of fanfiction, storytelling emerging from a seethe of ideas and themes tangled in this call and response between tellers and listeners who exchange places and read each other's work and create new stuff and pull new people in and pass the stories on.

I'm making it sound very grand and magical. It is, and it isn't. I go through Bucky's tag on ao3 and scroll past 20 fanfics in a row that make me think "You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to read that."

And it's easy to get caught up in just...the sheer glut of it all, the heaps and heaps of formulaic and generic fanfics that erase anything distinct about the characters to plug them into standard tropes. But that's what abundance looks like. Art that isn't necessary or even good, art that isn't cream skimmed off of the top, art that hasn't been judged or approved or selected or granted value by anyone. But it's part of that ecosystem, and it's a sign that the ecosystem is thriving.

So. I meandered my way aimlessly through Bucky fanfiction, through these entangling vines of context and connection and evolutionary relationships that I could only get a glimpse of. I started to recognize how certain ideas in fanfics were derived from other fanfics, further developing and expanding upon what previous storytellers had done.

Broadly speaking, some fanfics are interested in Stucky as a pairing, but don't delve deeply into what I consider to be THE hallmark of Buckyfic proper: the unmaking of Bucky Barnes into the Winter Soldier. The fundamental Thing about Bucky as a character, for me, is that he is formed out of a person's shattering.

And, yes, there are fics that are deeply interested in Bucky as a character as opposed to Bucky as one half of a slash pairing, that still treat him as basically the same guy but with PTSD now post Winter Soldier, so this categorization is wrong, but the unmaking aspect is what Bucky fanfic seems to iterate upon and extrapolate and develop most intensely.

Bucky fanfic is absolutely lush with explorations of what it means to be unmade. I plunged straight into a dense layer-on-layer sediment of storytellers "yes-and"ing what other storytellers had developed, exploring the ways that a man could have selfhood and personhood ripped from him.

The canon gives us these wrenching hints at a story that could be told: Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, wears a mask that looks like a muzzle; he is completely passive and lets the antagonist slap him across the face without retaliation; he cooperates placidly with his own torture; he hurls his body around as though it doesn't matter what damage he takes; he is scarred where the metal prosthetic that replaced his severed arm attaches to his body; he looks confused and scared and childlike and it's a shocking contrast to how brutally and swaggeringly he tears apart cars and slaughters people.

It's dripping with awful implications and that's what fanfic writers delved into so ravenously. Bucky was stripped of his name, his memories, his identity, and treated like a thing. His body was rebuilt to his captors' liking and used for their purposes. And fanfics explore every aspect of this.

For example, it's very common in these fanfics to have Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, be referred to with it/its pronouns. This is not the case in the canon but it's an accepted part of the story in this corner of the ecosystem.

There are several fanfics that portray Bucky as having Dissociative Identity Disorder, but even among the fanfics that don't explicitly conceptualize it this way, there are TONS of stories where Bucky has multiple "selves" that are like different persons that co-exist within the same body, to the point that some level of "plurality" is almost accepted as a standard part of the character.

The Winter Soldier is sometimes understood to be a separate personality from Bucky, as if man and machine are two persons in the same hybrid, cyborg body, and it's common for him to "switch" from one to the other. The Soldier can be conceptualized as nothing but a sucking void, an absence of self, or it can be its own "self" in the form of the remorseless killing machine, or (and this is where it gets really interesting) it can be this necessary darkness that was always part of Bucky, a self that fully unfolded when he was a sniper in WW2. Sometimes, the scared, broken man that is left after Bucky is rescued from Hydra is a third distinct "self" from the Soldier and the Bucky from before the war. It's fascinating. I could talk about it all day.

In fanfic, Bucky is very often physically disabled in multiple ways from his treatment as the Winter Soldier. It's fairly common for him to need to be tube fed, temporarily or permanently, or to have GI tract difficulties; I've read multiple fics where he suffered from seizures; I've read multiple fics where he suffered from drug withdrawals after escaping. Sometimes the prosthetic arm needs to be removed and he has to live as an amputee. Bucky's speech patterns vary wildly in fanfiction, but it's common for him to have a stilted, robotic way of talking, and sometimes his speech is impaired to some extent.

Relatedly, there's a subset of fics where the Winter Soldier's mask is somehow attached to his face or he can't remove it. Since this changes the canonical identity reveal, it's not as common, but it is one of those collectively iterated tropes (denoted by the tag maskfic, sometimes)

I've also read multiple fics where he was chemically castrated as the Winter Soldier, which sometimes caused lasting problems.

There is, I shit you not, an entire canonical tag on Ao3 for portrayals of Bucky with erectile dysfunction.

When I read, these things did not seem like individual decisions by writers to iterate upon canon in a certain way. The fanfics that used these ideas had clearly been influenced by each other. Once a certain aspect had been refined, other authors could just accept it as "their" canon and run with it.

And, I can say personally, from the experience of reading fanfiction and later writing it, that it's virtually impossible to keep canon and the broader story ecosystem separate in your mind: even if you can remember what is and isn't "canon," part of you just knows that they fed the Winter Soldier through a tube and bathed him by hosing him down, because that's the way you always heard the story told.

The Bucky fanfic ecosystem has done a lot of fascinating things with the lasting psychological effects of being the Winter Soldier as well. A really common theme is that Bucky is so accustomed to his dehumanization under Hydra that he switches to viewing the Avengers as his new "handlers," who he knows will abuse him if he doesn't placate them correctly. I believe Ao3 has a canonical tag for this as well, but I can't remember what it is. In general, Bucky fics delve deep into how the survival behaviors created by abuse don't go away after you escape the abusive situation. In more extreme iterations, Steve or someone else has to basically pretend to be Bucky's "handler" to provide some kind of stability for him mentally. It's fucked up and a lot of fun.

It's the same with the lasting impacts of having his pain disregarded and treated as unimportant: there's a recurring thing that happens in several different fics where Bucky, when he is hurt and someone asks how he is, responds "functional" (because his functionality is all that matters, not whether he's in pain). It's a little phrasing that spread like a virus between different stories written by different people.

It is, of course, impossible to discuss the Bucky Fanfic Ecosystem without discussing Hydra Trash Party.

In the posts at the links at the beginning of the post, I discuss how it's a really, really common element in fanfic for Bucky to have been raped during his captivity as the Winter Soldier. At some point I say something like, "Wow, this [the rape] shows up in a lot of different stories, I'm not sure if it's an unusually common thing with this character for some reason or what..."

This is so funny to me looking back. I really had no idea.

To quickly summarize what took me literal months to figure out: Bucky fanfiction, back in the day, was basically the Dead Dove Cambrian Explosion, except that Hydra Trash Party came before "dead dove, don't eat" and in fact is sort of what "dead dove, don't eat" is based upon, as per the post that literally coined "dead dove, don't eat" as a fandom term.

(There's a Fanlore page that explains everything, you can look it up. )

Technically, Hydra Trash Party can refer to a variety of things related to horrible awful nasty things happening to the heroes of the Captain America films, but in usage, it overwhelmingly refers to the idea that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, was sexually abused by his handlers. As a tag, it essentially communicates that the fic is going to explore this idea graphically, extensively, or in detail.

I was like "Wow! So this is the fucked up and immoral fanfiction I've heard so much about!"

Obviously, a lot of fans are not interested in reading about these disturbing topics in depth. There's a lot of Hydra Trash Party that I can't stomach myself. However, the idea that sexual violence happened to Bucky when he was the Winter Soldier is everywhere in fic, even if it's only alluded to with a single line. It's another of the things that is commonly accepted as part of the story everyone is collectively telling in the story ecosystem.

For me, this idea comes part and parcel with this essential broader theme of unmaking. Bucky's body and mind are profoundly violated; he is powerless despite his strength and prowess. He is tortured and surgically altered against his will. He has no control over his own body. The deep, nasty, visceral horror of all of this fascinates me. Conceptually and thematically, sexual violence fits perfectly with this story, to the point that it almost feels implicitly present even if we don't say it out loud; when reading an academic book about torture I came across the quote, "all torture is rape and all rape is torture," and while I believe that of course there's a reason those are separate words, it's expressing a truth about torture that is often erased.

Part of the reason it came to fascinate me was my initial reaction to reading a story where Bucky was portrayed as a survivor of sexual violence. At first, I thought, "Wait, does that even make sense? He's a super strong murder machine who could easily kill anyone in a matter of seconds." Then, I thought, "Wait. Rape isn't about whether the victim is able to physically fight back or not. That was a really shitty assumption to make." Then, I thought, "Wait. This is actually realistic to what happens with torture, and fits with the villains' philosophy of power and dominance."

It's rare to get caught off guard like that by a piece of fiction, caught in the act of automatically thinking some shitty thing that society programmed into you even though consciously, you would never, never, never endorse it. I got kind of slapped in the face by the fact that my first instinct was to doubt that someone physically strong could be raped. I think that communicates how important it is to tell that story.

The stories people have written from these ingredients, I have found to be cathartic and moving and thought-provoking.

It's the story-ecosystem that fascinates me, really, not the "canon" itself; the aliveness and interacting of all these elements. When I wrote my own Bucky fanfic, I picked out the things that had compelled me in other fanfics, I delved deeper into things that I wanted to be explored more deeply, I dug into new ideas that I felt would interact in interesting ways with the existing ones, and I grounded it very strongly in my own experiences and interests.

Claire Redfield RE9 leak 🤔