#robotmango

Here’s my latest fanart for a fantastic fic: Fearson’s Floating Cigarette by @robotmango (orange_crushed on AO3).

Set in the world of professional stage magic, where Cas is a virtuoso children’s magician and Dean is a rising star in the high-stakes stunt scene, it only seemed fair to pay tribute with a faux-vintage magic show poster. 

(This is all hand-lettered, by the way, because I am nothing if not bonkers.)

steve rogers watching the honeymooners after supper, not even bothering to comment on all the domestic violence gags. "gotta fit in," he thinks, and wakes up screaming

steve, shakily, at 4am: i... i think i’ll try that therapy stuff now

bucky: one the one hand, hooray, but on the other hand, what the FUCK were you dreaming about steve

  umbrella academy is fun, but i feel like it...

@yeahcoolduck “a pattern Americans don’t whine in” you are SO RIGHT! i think what i’m reacting to positively is that out of all of them, klaus is the most obviously fucked up? everyone else is playing it like they had a “distant father” and a tough childhood and he/his character is like actively damaged by being part of a team of kid supers who KILLED PEOPLE GRUESOMELY??? like we’re not just dealing with silent dinners here, but the plot/characterizations are not there.

The KILLED PEOPLE GRUESOMELY thing, holy shit!  That’s another aspect of the wonky world-building, where everyone responds to things as though they’re all working at Macy’s, but meanwhile, not only do people casually travel to and from the moon, twelve year old children can extrajudicially execute culprits of non-capital crimes in full view of the public and be celebrated for it.  

So yeah, as you have it, Klaus is the only one reacting as though there was something fundamentally fucked up that fucked him up about the Umbrella Academy, while the rest of them are like “well, Dad was an odd one for sure, but hey, whose parents didn’t fuck them up at least a little bit, amirite?  overall I’d rate our childhood 7/10.”

It doesn’t bother me that the characters are barely critical of Dad, but that the story itself seems barely critical, except in the case of Klaus.  We don’t see the rest of the characters dealing with particularly harsh fallout of having been raised the way they were.  They mention it sometimes.  Frequently, even.  But saying “Dad fucked us up” and actually being fucked up are two totally different things.

But then I feel I have to somehow address the central issue of Vanya, whose issues from their upbringing are supposedly central to the story. Yet, her issue for most of it was that she wasn’t allowed to commit acts of gross violence.  Again: I’m okay with the character feeling this way, but it’s that the story itself seems to think that that, in and of itself, is the problem: that her father alienated her and made her feel like she wasn’t special.  Meanwhile it only pays lip service to the concept that the ways in which the others were considered special was deranged.

just picturing steve and bucky ripping through a hydra base. entrails on the walls. steve stops to pull a nice ham sandwich out of his bag. "gotta take care of yourself, buck," he says sweetly to the eight foot tall sawtoothed horror whose ears he's petting

After their arcane experiment was successful in creating their own pet lycanthrope, what Hydra failed to account for is they didn’t really know how to control him. They tried everything they could think of: verbal commands, choke collars, shock collars, cattle prods, muzzles, curb bits, drugs, catchpoles, and numerous combinations thereof. Every success they had was tenuous at best.