Meta Buck

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS

WHY ARE THE ABS SO DETAILED AND NOT THE FACE WHAT

“C’mon, Buck, let’s get this off too.”

“But, Steve…”

“We promised never to hide from each other, remember? Please, I need to see all of you… feel all of you…”

“Well all of me’s not here! I… I’m not - ”

“You’re perfect, Bucky.”

(Just my thinking that Bucky might be a bit self-conscious after losing his metal arm… I was also inspired by the reveal that Steve did visit Bucky a couple times in Wakanda prior to Infinity War! ^3^)

BONUS SCENE BELOW!

Hulk has also canonly stated “hulk is tired of the guns and the noise and the fighting”

And the few people that approach him nicely he defends the hell out of.

Thor Ragnarok and Black Panther are both about an evil thing, colonization, taking something not yours to take and fashioning it to your own needs. But Guardians 2 forms the first part perhaps of Marvel’s anti-colonization trilogy. Ego is the ultimate colonizer, having no purpose in his life other than taking things and making them into more of himself. To this end he’s become the ultimate eugenicist, too. Every time he creates offspring - potential second versions of him, not even people in his eyes - he tests them and if they’re not what he wants he kills them. He’s a slaver (he owns Mantis in every way that matters) a killer, a manipulator, an absolute monster behind a smiling face.

There’s a running theme in GOTG 2 about the evils of treating people as things.  The Sovereign do this too - they’re gold in colour, but they’re essentially white supremacists. (The slight satire of them also being basically really hardcore video gamers, who sit behind drones and make mass murder into a competition, was not lost on me either.) And Yondu, Rocket, Gamora and Nebula are all where they are because they were treated as things - slaves, experiments, disposables. The movie explores their traumas, and makes it clear that they’re justified in their rages.

GOTG 2 does with Ego what Infinity War somehow didn’t manage to do with Thanos, and completely and utterly kill the monster at the end of its story. Peter is granted by Ego all the power he could possibly want, as well as the promise of the family he’s always craved. But once he discovers that it’s all built on bones, he rejects it utterly, even at what he thinks is the cost of his own life. Ego’s not given an ounce of mercy or sympathy, not even from Peter, his own son.

We can have conversations about patterns we see in fanworks. We can discuss how we portray characters and relationships, how to effectively convey what we want to in writing, how to sensitively approach representations of marginalized characters. But having those conversations productively requires that we approach each other in good faith, and it requires the ability to self-regulate–including recognizing that often there is no hard line, no black and white answer, and we won’t always come to the same conclusions.

It requires an understanding up front that eliminating all fanworks we don’t care for is not the end goal of these conversations.

I’ll give a personal example. There is a ship that deeply, viscerally upsets me in like 95% of its iterations. I can explain why I don’t like it if asked. I’ve written about why I don’t think it’s handled well in canon.

And if I wanted to–if I wanted to–I could make a very convincing-sounding argument for why that ship is objectively bad and wrong and no one should ship it. Not because that’s objectively right, mind you, but because I’m good at arguing. I could slap that together in like… ten minutes, probably.

I don’t do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, it’s as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me. I don’t seek it out to get riled up about it. I don’t seek out content that upsets me, read it in its entirety, and then leave angry comments and send my friends to harass the author. I don’t choose a high-profile writer for the content I don’t like and engage in a targeted campaign of harassment against them all while claiming to be addressing a general problem.

If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself. You are not engaging in healthy behavior or productive coping mechanisms. You are not keeping yourself safe, and you are not helping to make fandom safer for others. You are not engaging in good faith.

If you find that you do this and you can’t seem to stop, you may need to take some kind of further steps up to and including taking a break from fandom. I’m serious. I’ve taken breaks myself for that exact reason. There’s no shame in it.