Or rather, really long stream of consciousness ramblings, with spoilers for everything. Before you embark on said ramblings, have a fun and fluffy fanfic rec, set post Winter Soldier and pre Age of Ultron, in which the team hangs out and enjoys some leftover weed. As you do.

Weird Science

( Now, hear me ramble on. )

Because apparantly I can go through years of only writing Yuletide stories, but once the muses start yapping again... Anyway: this isn't the story I've written for the Agent Carter ficathon mentioned in the last post. It's the one I wrote after writing both my ficathon story and the one before that. Personally, I blame Civil War.



Funeral Games (5693 words) by Selena
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Peggy Carter & Howard Stark, Joseph Manfredi & Howard Stark
Characters: Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, Joseph Manfredi, Whitney Frost, Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Peggy Carter's Son, Peggy Carter's Daughter
Additional Tags: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Male-Female Friendship, Relationship Study, Grief/Mourning
Summary:

A chance encounter with a face from the past at Howard Stark's funeral causes Peggy Carter to look for the truth - about Howard's death, and about their relationship.

More Civil War triggered thoughts, this time about someone who isn't in it (with a good reason), Pepper Potts. Because the explanation for her absence reminded me of a couple of things, and made some thoughts about Pepper and her characterisation in the movies versus fanon come together.

( Pepper ramblings ensue; no Civil War spoilers beyond an early scene dealing with Pepper's whereabouts and the reasons )

On another note, here is a Rolling Stone profile of Chris Evans, in which Steve's actor has this to say about the central conflict of Civil War:

" It's a nice role reversal," says Evans. "You have a company man like Steve who always believed in the hierarchy of the military, but in the last couple of movies has seen the people he was loyal to misuse their power. Whereas Tony, who's always danced to the beat of his own drum, is feeling guilt for the collateral damage they've left. But that's why I like this movie: There's no clear villain in terms of right and wrong. And the truth is, I actually think Tony is right. To see Steve prioritize himself over what other people need is selfish. That's what makes it interesting."

I'm a bit wary of WIPs, not least because such a lot of them never get finished and are endlessly dragged out or lose quality. But every now and then, I come across one that's just so captivating I risk following it, and then, when it's satisfyingly completed, I'm one ecstatic reader. This is the case with this story:


An Early Thaw (129841 words) by ironychan
Chapters: 26/26
Fandom: Captain America (Movies), Agent Carter (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Steve Rogers, Howard Stark, Peggy Carter, Tony Stark
Summary:

An alternate universe: the year is 1986. Ronald Reagan is president. Peggy Carter is director of SHIELD. Howard Stark is CEO of Stark Industries and father of a fifteen-year-old son. And a survey team in the arctic has just found Captain America

It has that rarity, a real plot, while at the same time being a great character piece (for several characters). It's a well executed AU that tackles an intriguing "what if?" without giving easy answers. (Peggy and Howard in the 80s aren't Peggy and Howard in the 40s, because decades of experience and compromises, and the way they relate to Steve and vice versa can't be what it was.) It avoids the clichés I've complained about in other posts. It has a strong sense of setting - the 1980s aren't chosen randomly, the fact this is Reagan era America, the last years of the Cold War, and that the space program is still a thing, all this is key to the plot. Teenage Tony is very convincing (again: avoidance of clichés complained about, see above). In conclusion, I love it, and you should read it immediately.

One good thing about less than good movies (going by who directed them, I have admittedly no intention of watching this one): they inspire interesting essays. Stonewall being a case in point. There are three essays up already at the excellent website "A Historian goes to the movies", dealing both with the movie and the actual Stonewall Riots, from various angles:


A Butch Too Far: about the movie itself, compared to the historical events.

Saturday Night is all right for fighting: about the five other riot nights the movie skips over, and why they're important.

There's got to be a morning after: what followed the Stonewall Riots.


And some short fanfiction in various fandoms:

Black Sails:

Caution: in which Admiral Hennessey and Alfred Hamilton have a little chat. Great missing scene.

Star Wars

Reasonable Sacrifice: meta-story which offers both good Anakin characterisation and a good explanation for force ghost Anakin's switching appearances in the various editions of Return of the Jedi.

Agent Carter or Captain America or MCU in general:

Loneliness and his friends: in between missions conversation between Howard Stark and Steve Rogers, with Peggy the main subject, well written for what Howard doesn't say as much as for what he does in the light of Agent Carter's season 1 finale.

Sometimes it really seems that the time between fannish expressions being coined and them being used in a way that's far from their original meaning gets shorter and shorter. The most prominent example being "Mary Sue" which after a gazillion people used it just in the sense of "female character I don't like" lost all its usefulness. Two or three days ago, I started to add "man pain" to the number, after reading a tweet wherein the writer of same talked about Steve Rogers' "man pain" in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier."

Errr.

Steve isn't even my favourite MCU character. Or comic book character. But. If there is one superhero who reliably puts saving people first and his own angst for later, it's Steve Rogers. This, btw, is something I like about him. "Man pain", as far as I know, was coined to signify a character (usually male, though I did see people use the expression for the occasional female character as well) making not only something bad happening to him but something worse happening to other people into fodder for his own angst, and his own drama. (Come to think of it, wouldn't the female version be the expression "white women's tears"? Though that one is strictly related to poc's fates being used as angst fodder for a white female character, which "man pain" is not.) Meanwhile, Steve throughout "Winter Soldier", where he gets a couple of shattering revelations both general and personal, never loses sight of what's most important (that would be: no fascist surveillance state taking out its enemies) while finding the time to comfort Natasha through her moment of of "what the hell was my life about?"' angst. The point where he whited for spoilersprioritizes Bucky isn't until Hydra is already defeated. When it's solely his, Steve's, own life n the line. Which he's prepared to sacrifice rather than kill his friend. But when everyone else's lives were still at stake, he did fight, and he did finish that mission. Again: if there's one superhero currently in the MCU who never prioritizes his own pain over anyone else's danger or pain, and who certainly does NOT make other people's tragedies about himself, it's Steve Rogers.

End of MCU Captain America Has No Man Pain rant.

Meanwhile, via lonelywalker, a fabulous interview with John Logan, the creator of Penny Dreadful, in which we find out that Vanessa Ives is a Wilkie Collins kind of heroine (of course she is!), the Ives-Murray abode in London is the bridge of the Enterprise, and Victor Frankenstein isn't likely to find out happiness in season 2 (naturally; he's Victor). Consider me more thrilled than ever we'll get more of this show.

I reread Sansom's Shardlake series - there will be a new novel this autumn - and concluded again that this might be my favourite current series of mysteries set in a historical era. (Here is an earlier detailed review.) The novels definitely are my favourites set during the reign of Henry VIII. Yes, even above Hilary Mantel's Cromwell novels, possibly because the later give me the sense of Mantel being just a bit too much in love with Cromwell (who shows up in the early Shardlake novels, too, since our hero starts out as a lawyer working for him, and is much thought about in the later novels after his death), or it might be the freedom of not knowing how the main regular characters (Matthew Shardlake, Jack Barak, Tamasin) are going to end up since they're all fictional. Also, Sansom knows his Tudor lawcourts like no novelist I've ever seen and makes being a Tudor lawyer as fascinating to layperson me as The Good Wife does it currently for Chicago lawyering. Speaking of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell novels, though, or rather, the movie versions currently being shot, here's a hilarious picture of Henry VIII, as played by Damian Lewis, taking a selfie. Okay, I should have phrased this "Damian Lewis taking a selfie while in costume as Henry on the set", but who doubts Henry would have LOVED taking selfies?

(Also: is Damian Lewis the first genuine redhead to play Henry VIII?)

From Tudors to Avengers:

The planned (and unused) Hawkeye scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Would have been a cool scene, but I can see why they cut it, if that was supposed to be Clint's only appearance in the film. It depends on the audience knowing him for the emotional impact, and strange as it may seem, not everyone watching one or two of the Marvel films has watched all of them.

Incidentally, while pondering why, when I loved Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a movie, Bucky and Steve/Bucky aren't relevant to my interests, so to speak, at one point I thought it was because we don't see much of non-brainwashed Bucky in the movie and what we saw of him in the previous CA film just felt like standard best pal stuff, so there wasn't much for me to get attached to beyond an abstract "poor guy, what a life" level. But then I realised that in terms of screentime, there is even less of Clint Barton, who also walks around brainwashed through most of the only film where he's in so far with any sizable amount of screentime (that one minute in Thor really doesn't count), and yet The Avengers immediately managed to make me emotionally invested in the Natasha and Clint relationship, and in Clint, with all the attachment I can't muster for Bucky and Steve/Bucky. I would say it's because I care about Natasha and that her concern for her brainwashed partner and determination to rescue him moves me on her account, but I care about Steve, too. And yet. *ponders*

Meanwhile, a missing scene set during the first Iron Man movie which celebrates the Rhodey and Tony friendship, lovely to read:


They Don't Know Where We Come From (4699 words) by ladyflowdi
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Avengers (2012), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man (Movies)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tony Stark, James "Rhodey" Rhodes
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, Arc Reactor, Missing Scene, Medical Procedures, Medicine, Psychological Trauma, Trauma, Recovery, PTSD
Summary:

“Shrapnel,” Tony says, and alarms go off around his ears and he can’t breathe and the pain is going to eat him up from the head down. “In my heart. I made it. Not the shrapnel. ...Well. The shrapnel too.”

The other day I came across about a great post about Tiana from Disney's "Princess and the Frog. Among the newer Disney heroines (i.e. last decade or so), Tiana is still my favourite, and that article made me go and rent the dvd to rewatch her movie. Yes, still my favourite. And still so unusual in its genre, if you ask me. You've got herones wanting freedom (either for themselves or for their family/country), you've got heroines who want romance, but Tiana's ambition - to have her own restaurant - doesn't owe anything to either romance or fantasy. Ambition as a trait is so often treated with suspicion in YA fiction, unless it comes in a tomboyish form (i.e. heroine living in vaguely medieval, sexist fantasy world wants to live like a man) , and here it's treated as a sympathetic key motivation of the heroine. I'll always love that ( spoilers for Disney under the cut. )Incidentally, for all that so much was made about Frozen putting a relationship between sisters in its centre, rewatching The Princess and the Frog reminded me that actually all of the most recent Disney heroines have meaningful relationships with other female characters in their narratives, and as opposed to Frozen, there are more than two important female character around in Tiana's case - her mother, her friend Charlotte and Mama Odie, all of whom are important to her and the story. (Post Princess and Frog, we got Tangled which had a dysfunctional mother/daughter relationship in its centre and Merida with a mother and daughter relationship in need of repair at its center, and the witch who is key to the transformation as a third important female character. Disney products have their problems, but all of the more recent ones are actually doing pretty well in including important relationships between women.)

Avengers and the actors who play them:

- a nice profile of Mark Ruffalo, talking about politics and acting


- RDJ tweeting a photo of the cast and Joss having lunch while shooting Avengers II

Post-Cap 2 fanfiction:

The Favored Sons of History (1570 words) by zeen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Captain America (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alexander Pierce & The Winter Soldier, Nick Fury & Alexander Pierce
Characters: Alexander Pierce, Nick Fury, James "Bucky" Barnes
Additional Tags: Abuse of Authority, Parallels, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Seventies Robert Redford
Summary:

Alexander Pierce and his justifications.

I'd been hoping someone would tackle Pierce (and his relationship with Nick Fury), so was delighted to see this.



Problem Solving (4544 words) by persiflet
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man (Movies), Captain America (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Pepper Potts & Natasha Romanov
Characters: Pepper Potts, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanov, Maria Hill, James Rhodes, Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Background Relationship, Neuroatypical Characters, Moral Dilemmas, Female Friendship, Panic Attacks
Summary:

( Spoilery stuff happens )

. Pepper Potts deals with the aftermath.

By now there are a lot of "other Avengers and friends reacting to Cap 2 events" stories. This one puts Pepper Potts in the spot light, remembers her backstory with Natasha from Iron Man 2, doesn't forget Rhodey exists - something that used to happen a lot though less so after Iron Man 3; hopefully Sam Wilson won't suffer the same fate -, and assumes an established three way relationship between her, Tony and Bruce which is so my headcanon until we're explicitly told otherwise. It also falls under the rare category of story that doesn't assume everyone is best buddies post Avengers. I've seen a lot of people wondering why there is no Watsonian reason given for Steve and Natasha not contacting Tony during The Winter Soldier, which I didn't have a problem with. I mean, I like the stories written pre Cap 2 in which everyone became friends and moved into the tower as much as the next fan, but: what we actually know is that Tony kept contact with Bruce, not with any of the others, and that Steve kept contact (and work with) Natasha and Nick Fury, not any of the others. In The Winter Soldier, it's noticable that while Steve refers to Howard Stark as "Howard" in dialogue, Tony Stark still is "Stark" (in both a Steve-Fury and a Steve-Natasha conversation), so chances are that MCU Steve at this point still thinks of Tony as "my friend Howard's annoying son who turned out to be a good comrade in arms when we were busy saving earth but who otherwise gets on my nerves", not as a friend in his own right. Moreover, ( spoilery arguments ensue. )

As for Natasha, Natasha who was SHIELD's mole in Stark Industries during Iron Man 2 has better reason than anyone to be aware of the likelihood Stark Industries may still be infiltrated, which means a phonecall to Tony in the middle of the Cap 2 events would alert far more people than Tony. (In fact, given that Nick Fury in Cap 2 ( admits to spoilery things )

, I'm 100% sure Natasha had a successor as a mole at Stark Industries.) In conclusion: not calling Tony Stark during Cap 2 made Watsonian sense to me. Doesn't mean he's going to be happy about it, which the story also deals with.


Once upon a Time:

Once in Purpose: bugging your friends about stories they need to write so pays off, she says smugly. This one deals with, to put it as unspoilery as possible, Rumplestilskin's mental situation at a certain point in s3.


Harry Potter

The Journey of a Thousand Miles (7069 words) by igrockspock
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Luna Lovegood, Xenophilius Lovegood, Severus Snape
Summary:

After the end of the war, Luna makes two surprising discoveries: her father attempted to give Harry to Lord Voldemort, and Severus Snape is alive.

This is both a beautiful Luna character exploration and a story featuring a surviving Snape which manages to avoid the most popular clichés, i.e. pairing him up with one of his former students and/or ignore he really is a pain to live with.

Or, Return of the First Avenger, as it's called in my part of the world. In English, I kid you not. At a guess, the change of title is caused by the raging popularity the US currently enjoys over here and the assumptions people tend to make about superheroes called "Captain America". Which is a shame, in a way, because this film happens to be the first addressing the decade-and-more trade off between liberty and "safety", the instrumentalization of fear, the way the various secrent agencies have run completely amuck in their megalomania head on. That's right. This comic hero block buster is a spy thriller worthy of the 1970s classics of the genre, pitch black in its view of what has become of us - and I'm saying "us" because that trade off wasn't limited to the US (while Germany doesn't have a camp in Guantanomo, we outsourced people to be tortured by the CIA; shame on us, and all the power to the one who is currently sueing because of that) - and yet also not cynical; it has a belief in the capacity of humans (and not just those who are in the title credits) for decency that fits its main character, even and especially under pressure. Oh, and it also happens to change the status quo of the cinematic Marvelverse in more than one instance, and in one particular regard breathtakingly so. It's definitely the best of the Phase II films so far (and I'm saying this as someone who loved Iron Man 3 and enjoyed Thor II, and who also thought that Captain America, while enjoyable in its own right, was the weakest of the Phase I origin movies).

Now, considering that it is a thriller with twists and turns (some predictable if you know the genre, some not), I would advise you to watch it unspoiled. Everything below the cut will be spoilery in the extreme because I do want to talk about details. Above cut, let me just add one more thing: pre-movie, one reason why I was looking forward to the film was that the later trailers made it look as if Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff would be an important supporting character. In fact, as it turns out, she's basically the second lead, and until we finally get a Black Widow movie, this is the next best thing, and a very fine thing it is, too. If you're familiar with her comicverse connection to the person mentioned in the original title, this is actually not what her role is about in the movie and not why she's so important in it. The film also settles something fans have been wondering, i.e. whether or not movieverse Natasha would, like her comicverse counterpart, herself be a relic of the Cold War, kept young via serums etc.; we get a definite year of birth for her (1984 - of course it was!), which means her biological age is just what it looks like, which is useful fanfiction information to have. :)

( And now, on to spoilers! )

Today's sacrifice for art involves listening to Tannhäuser in Bayreuth at 35° Celsius. In case you're unfamiliar with the conditions, the opera house Wagner cajoled out of Ludwig II and other supporters to produce his own music dramas in has fabulous accoustics, but partly because of that only the most basic of airconditioning. (Anything else would spoil said accoustics.) This is why the musicians, whom other than the conductor the audience cannot see due to the Bayreuth orchestra being cunningly hidden beneath the stage, always show up in t-shirts. (This is true, and shezan will vouch for it because we demonstrated it to her.) The audience, of course, does not have this option and shows up in formal dress. My Aged Parent has threatened to leave his tie at home this time, though.

Incidentally, and speaking of Wagner, yesterday I got around to watching Captain America, and there is inevitably (inevitably given the WWII setting and the fact the main villain is German) a scene in it in which Wagner is played. To be precise, Siegmund's "Ein Schwert verhieß mir der Vater..." from the first act of Die Walküre. While listening to it, I wondered whether someone in the production team was trying to be clever, because here's what Siegmund actually sings in case you're not familiar with Die Walküre, only slightly shortened: "My father promised there'd be a sword for me in my hour of greatest need. Well, given that a man who hates my guts has locked me up without weapons and threatened to kill me in the morning, and given he's an abusive jerk to his wife to boot and I think I fancy said wife who seems strangely familiar anyway, I'd say this is it. Down with abusive bullies! Damn it, Dad, where's that sword?" Spoiler for Die Walküre: he does get the sword, but it fails him and breaks, and Siegmund dies, partly because Dad is actually Wotan/Odin/Mr. Wednesday and involved in a big time supernatural powerstruggle. Anyway, given this bit of Wagnerian music plays when the main villain demonstrates the effectiveness of the superweapons with which he hopes to conquer the world (as supervillains do), I thought it might have been meant as ironic foreshadowing. Or not. Probably not.

The film itself was entertaining and far easier to take than I'd feared re: WWII setting, because we're so firmly in not-touching-any-reality fantasyland as soon as the action transfers to Europe, and it did the most important thing, making you care about its characters, especially the main one. It was a smart decision to let the audience spend not just a few minutes but a sizable part of the film with Steve Rogers pre transformation, i.e. scrawny-kid-from-Brooklyn Steve who tries and tries against the odds, had to learn how to think on his feet because he doesn't have size or brawn to protect him, and throughout demonstrates that fundemental core of decency that stays with the character through the decades and is so hard to get across in films without coding characters as either wooden or hypocritical. ( Spoilery observations follow. )