the avengers suck*

Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, Amadeus Cho how he found out he was the 7th smartest person on earth

Cloak and Dagger is like. Cloak is like wow, I really love Dagger... but she probably doesn't like me 😔 I can't express my feelings to her because then she'll feel responsible and I don't want to force that onto her and it would probably ruin our whole relationship! I suppose it is better to say silent about the intensity of my feelings and enjoy our friendship and connection and soak in the guilt of my unrequited romantic desire for her! And Dagger is like Me and Ty have been dating for the past 5 years 😊🙂‍↕️

Amadeus and Hercules go as Hercules and mozart on Halloween btw

Thinking a lot about the character trajectory of John Walker because it is kind of fascinating to see how he changes over the course of multiple years and multiple writers and how he honestly isn't even particularly conservative in modern comics for the most part, with brief intermissions where he acts as a parody of whatever notion of American Southern conservative a particular writer has.

John is constantly straddling two very different portrayals, and because he's ultimately a fairly minor Captain America supporting character there's very little effort to try and connect these two portrayals into something that feels whole, so what we instead have is kind of disjointed. See, John as a character has grown a lot in a slow but natural way over the years and doesn't seem nearly as conservative or bigoted as he once was. He makes few, if any loaded jabs, whereas once they were very common, and in his most recent solo project (penned by Christopher Priest) he actively protects the rights and safety of protesters against riot police something I don't think the John Walker of old would have ever have done. I think writers who write John in a solo project or as a primary character in a team book are kind of eager to make him not a conservative, due to a mix of defying expectations, an MCU depiction that was extremely mild and shied away from most of his more complicated and messy personality traits that by virtue of being in the MCU is how most people are familiar with John now, and the reality that John, while a complicated character, is ultimately a heroic one who works with other heroes, and it would reflect poorly on the characters he works with and is in proximity to if he was a bigoted awful conservative man from Georgia.

The other portrayal which I'll touch on later is that when he isn't used in this careful, tentative way, he is usually used as a parody of the red-blooded American conservative traditionalist as exists in pop culture. Best way I can describe this one is that early John, even doesn't believe in evolution John, had a clear general dislike of gun use and did not use them himself, and seemed to look down upon them as weapons and the people that used them. In post 2000s comics, as gun lobbyists and gun use become increasingly synonymous with conservatism, John is portrayed as using them more and more, because that's what people conceptualise of the American conservative doing and being despite it being actively contradicted in previous canon.

I think a cynical reading of John's character evolution would be that this has happened because Marvel is afraid to potentially alienate some "moderate" conservative readers, and to a point I think that argument isn't a meritless one, but I think the major contributor is just the natural shift from being a Captain America supporting cast member and a minor antagonist for Steve, to being a team member of the Avengers West Coast title.

Mark Gruenwald was very particular in his use of John in his Captain America run. John was depicted primarily in opposition to Steve, not directly in terms of an actual fight (although that did happen a few times) between them, but as an ethical and moral inversion of what Steve was. Steve, while a man who would work for the government, would question them when it came down to it, would disobey orders, would call out corruption and harm they were doing when it happened. When faced with the decision of keeping the shield or compromising his morals, he gave up the Captain America name without a fight. John, by comparison, was chosen because of his unwavering loyalty to the United States government. He would not question them, he would not disobey them, he would carry out actions he actively disagreed with because such is his loyalty and willingness to do what he's told.

Steve is experienced, patient, and strategic; John is impulsive, overly aggressive, and hot-headed. While Steve will kill people if he has to, it is a last resort and not something he does without thinking or without extreme circumstances causing it; John ties two men to an oil drum and purposefully makes them explode in as revenge for their part in the deaths of his parents. Steve protects his friends, protects his family, will do his best to stand by his loved ones no matter the cost or the danger it may put him in; John lets his best friend get lynched by a hate mob with no guarantee that he'll survive because he was under orders. Steve's friends are charming, funny, helpful and good people who make his lives better; John's friends commit hate crimes together. In every situation, John is actively contrasted as a warped inversion of not just Steve Rogers, the man, but Captain America, the concept, and that is a reoccurring theme that reverberates throughout all of his appearances in the Mark Gruenwald Captain America run.

But by the end of his time in that title, he graduates. He moves on. He joins the West Coast Avengers, and he is suddenly not a foil for our protagonist, someone who acts as a funhouse mirror version of our hero, but he is instead just one piece of a larger puzzle with a lot of different moving parts. In Captain America, everything centered on Steve, and so there was a lot of time and space given to the ways in which John Walker was vastly different to Steve Rogers, even in stories where Steve technically didn't appear at all. In West Coast Avengers, he is sharing space and time with a lot of other intense plots with different characters, so he's vying for more attention in plotlines and emotional arcs that don't really overlap or mirror his own. And Steve not being there means he doesn't have that emotional, ethical and moral counterbalance, doesn't have that alternate force he is always being compared against and developed in opposition to. Without his core use of being a foil to Steve, he flounders for a bit, and ultimately has a lot of his rougher edges gradually sanded down as they become less important to his core purpose. Having an antagonistic, unsympathetic, anti science, rude asshole isn't really someone reading Avengers West Coast wants to see, particularly, so there's an incentive to move away from those more extreme behaviours, in part because there also just isn't enough space and time to explore those behaviours, along with Wanda's arc and Clint and Bobbi's arc and Simon's arc and Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne and Tony Stark are also there, and we just introduced Living Lightning too, etc etc, so John just becomes increasingly more tame as the series progresses in a very quiet way, which only becomes more obvious in Force Works where he's just A Guy and other than having the American flag sewn into the back of a weird coat, he basically makes no outrageous statements or anything at all. Wanda Maximoff, Julia Carpenter, Tony Stark, etc all clearly like him and have patience for him, so you don't want that guy to be a horrible human being, because then it reflects poorly on our cast of more traditional heroes.

And this is a trend that largely continues when the B portrayal isn't used as the years progress. He remains rude, and oftentimes antagonistic, true, but he goes from a man who is actively friends with people trying to drive out immigrants to actively protecting asylum seekers when they get targeted by hate groups. He goes from being an uncritical mouthpiece of the US government to disobeying their orders openly, something he would have never have done in his first appearances. And I've seen people suggest that the reason for this is because of the MCU's milder, kind of toothless depiction of John, but this is honestly a trend dating back to the Avengers West Coast as John moved from being the narrative counterweight to Steve Rogers to functioning as a team character in a larger cast of players.

But as I've mentioned, there is also the alternate side to John, where he's just a representation of the pop culture notion of an American conservative in parody form, rather than an actual attempt at earnestly depicting at what these people are like and how their actions ultimately alienate them even amongst their fellow conservatives. He hates Russians, not in a deeply xenophobic way of inherent distrust and suspicion, but in a Funny We Have To Beat Commies kind of way. He uses guns, he swears, and he chants USA at crowds, but any deeper analysis on the ideology of these people and how it renders them socially outcast is gone. He's either a joke or he's just ruder, meaner Steve in black instead of blue.

Gd this is a lot of words. Ultimately, a lot of John's most egregious moments happen early on in his character history, and the few that happen later down the line are exceptions to the rule, and not representative of the larger trend with this character, which is a context I think is missing from a lot of conversations I see people have about him.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this change and growth, personally. I think John was a more interesting, more impactful and more nuanced character in the early days. When he was a viewpoint character, but was clearly also a bad person, but also equally was being exploited by the government because of his unwavering loyalty in them, and that loyalty was what ultimately resulted in the brutal deaths of his parents, and with it John's grasp on reality. There's something interesting there about how even the people who support conservative, right wing politics are still crushed by it and are still hurt by it, but it is the momentary power it gives them above other people who are getting crushed more than keeps them still involved in it. And I think contrasting Steve with a conservative Captain America in this way is a very important role to fill if you're going to continue to have Steve represent the American flag on his chest, from a domestic perspective. Obviously, there are larger issues inherent to Captain America and superhero comics as a whole, but from the home audience perspective I think it's good to protect your characters morality and personal convictions in periods of social unrest, uneasiness with the American government and The American Way, by having someone who represents all the worst of those concepts that Steve can fight and rally against.

But equally, there was something very interesting about reading Avengers West Coast and seeing how desperate John was to get to know these people and get close to these people. They were a very tight knit group of people who largely were formed of Avengers originals who had shifted away to make way for a younger generation on the main title while they remained more classic. Wanda, Clint, Hank, Janet, Tony and Simon had all been working together for most of their lives at that point, and reading you can see John's sense of being separated from them, because he was forced upon them by the government. And there's something meaningful there, about how it is only when John slowly but surely separates himself from his reactionary conservative ideals, when he slowly becomes less bigoted over time and makes genuine attempts at being a better person that he can really become friends with the Avengers West Coast and ultimately Force Works, where he is very close particularly with Julia Carpenter, but also Wanda Maximoff and even Clint Barton. It's not a bad story! But equally, it comes at the cost of something very important that John represented, and it is that awareness that's missing.

Even in Avengers West Coast, the legacy of what John had been previously weighed very heavily on how they wrote him. So when he does make attempts at making friends, it feels like a big move from him, something he would not have done a few years prior, and it has the gravity it deserves. Because we've been in this weird mixed state though where John pingpongs between a disillusioned ex conservative government lackey who only recently grew a spine, and South Park Joke, when he does have a spine it doesn't always have the same gravity it deserves, and the nuance of his conservative opinions and how they impact him and the people around him is sorely lacking the very few times they do get brought up again.

I don't expect this nuance to ever return and I doubt the gravity of John becoming ever so slowly a better person through sheer recency bias from the last person making him ever so slightly a better person than before will be given the weight it deserves, but it was incredibly interesting seeing this progression over time as I read through all of his appearances, and it'll be interesting to see how his story continues to evolve parallel to the left right divide in the United States.

#cewomen25: favourite obscure women → Nekra Sinclair

i know there's more to you than anger. all true revolutionaries are driven by love.

(09/12/24)

I dunno I'm aware I'm just a hater but I just really think it's deeply deeply concerning how people repeatedly refuse to engage with the reality of Chris Claremont being a deeply Zionist person, and his Zionist politics being extremely foundational to how he wrote both Magneto and Charles, and how that legacy reverberates into the mutant ethnostate concept. You cannot divorce Genosha, Utopia, Krakoa from the fact that Magneto, Max Eisenhardt, Erik Lehnsherr owes a very significant portion of his character to the Zionist Menachem Begin, and that was who Claremont based his Magneto on, and the only reason we even talk about Magneto today is because of the way Claremont retooled him. Kitty Pryde calls Genosha mutant Israel, and even in Krakoa compares Krakoa directly to Israel in a conversation with her Rabbi, and you want to pretend Zionism is not inherently linked to the mutant metaphor starting most majorly with Chris Claremont? It's embarrassing, frankly. All of American media has a Zionism problem, don't get me wrong, but it is a particularly prevalent issue in X-Men comics and I just completely detest how people react when you try to call this out or have a frank conversation of the reality of Claremont's contributions to the genre, and particularly to the character Magneto.

Delphadeus.

YES YES YES YES SCREAMING

By your side

Ref under cut! Found it on Pinterest

My homage to the 1980s Secret Wars Doctor Doom!

Robbie Reyes - Ghost Rider Was thinking about the peak that was putting Robbie in the Midnight Suns game the other day and I was like.. I need to draw him Wish he was around more, but hopefully in the future Twitter

Super fucked up to me that the MCU didn't have John have an insane weird nasty relationship with God where he begs to be punished for killing two of his friends in a field, begs for God to even make him hallucinate, begs to know what he can do to earn forgiveness. That man should be on his knees begging for biblical punishment begging to be saved while feeling deep down that he has been abandoned because of how many people he's hurt. He should be mumbling the Ten Commandments like a mantra like that's going to make up for what he's done. He should be deeply weird and off-putting in how intense he is about his religion and how deeply he feels like he has been damned and he has to somehow earn back God's love but God won't tell him how. He won't speak to him. Because he's damned. You get it.

Do you get it. This man should be one hundred times weirder about religion than he is in Em Cee You.

Stop putting vaspider on my dash, they're the one who kicked off the hysteria against Palestinian gofundme's leading to people taking back thousands of dollars they've donated and reporting their fundraisers as fraudulent, potentially dooming families to death

i’ve successfully evaded bad jokes by jeff/writing prompts/drawing prompts for a while i think but just in case he’s still lurking out there he majorly contributed to this too and made a ton of really racist/islamophobic posts

This is especially relevant now that staff deactivated Ahmed aka 90s-ghost's blog, and more than a years life-saving work he did verifying fellow Palestinian's fundraisers.

Ahmed's been on tumblr for more than a decade, has had a news article written about him, been in fandoms, has many close friends on here, etc etc....he's a real human being that tumblr staff very much knows is a real person. Vaspider and Badjokesbyjeff are absolutely responsible for directing organized harassment and mass reporting his way, and staff are going to get Palestinians killed by deactivating 90s-ghost.

He's kept so many people alive this past year through tumblr, and deactivating his account cuts off hundreds of families from their best hope of raising desperately needed funds for survival supplies as Israel bombs Palestine. Ahmed himself is trying to keep his own family, including a baby, alive too - you can donate to him here. Info on demanding staff reactivate his account here.

Posting the full illustration and the lineart because I ended up liking them both very much and wanted to share them in high res.

Hetbait kind of goes harder than queerbait sometimes. Queerbait you understand that the creators very rarely could do it even if they wanted to so implication and suggestion was better and safer than being explicit. Hetbait though there's no such justifiable reason they just want to fuck with you.