Gin in Silver

If you know me at all, then you know vulnerability is something I struggle with. Ask my family and friends and any ex boyfriend who’s ever tried to figure out the emotions in my head. Most of the time my thoughts and feelings stay locked away tight. If I think I’ll be perceived as weak or fragile, then count me out. So every single time someone says, “I don’t want to hurt you”, my first instinct is to punch them in the throat. Every time someone hugs me and asks if it was too tight, or asks if I’m okay after walking two feet, or refuses to let me help carry stuff in from the car, my hand forms a fist and I have to remind myself that it’s not acceptable to throat punch people and my cancer card can only get me out of so many things.

Tonight was especially hard in this area for a number of reasons. But as I was lying in bed cursing God for making me weak and vulnerable, He reminded me that maybe that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be. He longs for us to be broken in front of Him, to come to Him and say “it does hurt and I hate it.” There’s something so sweet about the moment when you admit the weakness and allow Him to take over. Sometimes once is enough, sometimes it’s a daily battle, and sometimes it takes freakin cancer to make you realize how many walls you have up.

lmao grooming

Text courtesy of kissmywonderwoman.com

Karen Page (as played by Deborah Ann Woll) is really scary as a character in all the best possible ways. She is also the driving force behind season one of Daredevil, far beyond Matt or Foggy or even Wilson Fisk. Karen Page is the person calling the shots, it’s her crusade that the season hinges on, and it’s her character development that we most closely follow. Karen Page is the actual main character of Daredevil, and it’s freaking phenomenal.

Karen very effectively blow the whistle on Union Allied and then eventually finds her way to working as a secretary for Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law, but her story doesn’t stop here. With your average female character in this position, once she was introduced that would be it. Over and done with. But not with Karen. 

Instead, Karen starts investigating her old company and the corporation that owns it. She digs deeper and deeper. She gets Matt and Foggy invested in cases they’ve never heard of because she thinks it might be related. She hides things. She lies. She suffers from a pretty horrible case of PTSD that she tries to keep a lid on around her bosses. She fusses over the boys and cares for them when they’re hurt and does secretary stuff, but that is by no means the sum total of her contribution to the story.

Karen digs so hard and so deep that she gets herself put on lists. She bands up with Ben Urich, star investigative reporter, to write the story of the century. She does corporate espionage. While Foggy and Matt are sorting out their emotional problems and Matt is off being frustrated at things as Daredevil, Karen is the only one driving the plot forward.

There is no takedown of Wilson Fisk without Karen. If Karen were just a nice normal girl who looked the other way more often, then Matt Murdock would probably be dead and Hell’s Kitchen would be razed to the ground. She is the actual hero of the show, and I’m sick and tired of people saying she’s there to just be eye candy.

Her crowning moment of badass (and terrifying) ends up being the only real reason that Matt is able to get one up on Fisk at all. After she manages to track down Fisk’s mother, visit her in a retirement home, and subtly interrogate her, Fisk’s righthand man, Wesley, comes to find her. He wants to know what she knows. He wants her to suffer. In general, it’s a pretty by the books scene. Wesley is threatening, Karen is close to tears, etc. But it gets downright shocking when Wesley puts a gun on the table, and instead of backing down and tearfully admitting she can’t shoot anyone like the script demands of her, Karen picks up the damn gun and fires six shots into Wesley’s chest.

She’s even more scary because in that moment she implies that she’d shot someone before, and then she seems really comfortable covering the crime up. Not only that but as the season progresses, Karen doesn’t actually tell anyone what she did. No one knows. Karen is the sweet, pretty, blonde secretary with an apparent penchant for murder and designer dresses. She’s so nosy she nearly gets herself killed, but it’s not presented as “oh there goes that plucky secretary again”, it’s shown to be more like “Karen is going to single-handedly destroy a criminal empire using paperwork.”

But if I have to name the number one reason why Karen is kind of the best thing ever, it’s this: she cries. Like, she does all these things, she kills someone and she delivers devastating exposes and she is super competent sometimes, but she also cries. She cries and she has panic attacks in the night and she doesn’t let it be a source of weakness. She doesn’t call her fear or her sadness weak. She calls it what it is, and that is necessary.

It’s really sort of funny when I get down to it. Because the reasons I like Karen Page on Daredevil could just as easily be the reasons I hate her in something else. The deciding factor appears, in all honesty, to simply be the acting and the writing. Nothing else. Her character is entirely execution based.

This is Garnet           Back together. 

A reminder that Steve’s first instinct was to defend, not attack.

I’m firmly convinced the Steve categorizes everything he sees as “can be shield” or “cannot be shield”.

in fact, I’m going to go ahead and headcanon that he keeps a list of things he’s tried using as a shield and whether or not they’ve worked out:

It has some striking parallels with emotional abuse. 

They make you change the way you speak or even present yourself. (Offensive vocabulary must go, or vocabulary that they’re typically uncomfortable with. Sjws forbid you to say those words.)

Isolating you from friends and people you love. (They’re bigots in our eyes, you shouldn’t speak to them if you can’t “convert” them.) A common one I see is people dropping their friends because they claim their friend is “racist”,  sexist,homophobic, transphobic, all or some of the above. 

Blaming their problems on everyone but themselves. (White privilege made me do this. Minorities have a right to be bigots because they’re oppressed! Women have no fault because men practically control their lives and they’re 10 times worse than any woman!)

Instilling Fear. You don’t want to be deemed problematic by these types of people. You want to be accepted by them. They’ll threaten to call you “problematic” or whatever “-ist” word if you don’t agree with everything that they say because that’s the last thing you want to be called. 

Edit: They also make sure to remind people that all white cishet men are to be feared and they are not to be trusted.(Because deep down inside they are inherently sexist, racist, transphobic and that those qualities are dangerous.)