sholio | Comics and fandom stuff

I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I like the new Ales Kot/Marco Rudy Winter Soldier comic. I was kinda expecting to dislike it, or at least to be unhappy with the new direction of the character, and instead I love it and I'm really looking forward to the next issue. I think partly this is because it has a nice indy vibe -- the overall feel of the comic is much more like an indy sci-fi comic than a superhero comic; some of the reviews compared it to Heavy Metal which I think is also accurate -- but also, I was honestly expecting wall-to-wall angst, darkness and manpain, and instead it's entertaining and fun and even funny at times, with gorgeous (if confusing) art. I'm not familiar with Daisy Johnson as a character, but I like her a lot so far, and her dynamic with Bucky is a lot of fun.

Also, the comic pretty much had me when Bucky steals a sacred animal from the Syro planet because "it was alone, and looked scared". (Subsequently he's hiding it under his coat and feeding it off his plate in an alien restaurant. BUCKY YOU WONDERFUL DORK. ♥) There were a lot of neat little bits like that -- I'd have loved to have a few more pages of Bucky and Daisy on his satellite (!!!) or wandering around the Mars space station in lieu of the Bucky-Namor action sequence, but really, it's a much more quiet, interesting, and introspective comic than I was expecting.

I also really like that it's not just Bucky being a fish out of water in the outer-space setting. He actually seems to be adjusting really well; I guess he's always traveled the world for his job, and now he's traveling the universe, and he doesn't seem to be treating it that differently than going to, say, Hong Kong or Copenhagen in pursuit of spy shenanigans. I like that!

(Also, on a very shallow note, I like that Bucky's hair is long again.)

My only real complaint is that I wish the art wasn't so hard to follow -- although I love the actual look of it. And it's complex enough that you have to go back and reread pages to pick up details you missed the first time, which is always a plus for me.

But yeah, ever since this was announced I've been thinking it was going to be very much not my cup of tea, and instead it very much is, so I'm really happy about that. (And now I need to track down some of the other comics with Daisy in them. THE COMICS RABBIT HOLE, IT JUST KEEPS GOING DOWN.)

In completely other news, Tim DeKay was cast on Agents of SHIELD ... playing Grant Ward's brother. *cries* Among other things, it means that the TDK tag on Tumblr is now full of AoS stuff from the Grant Ward side of the fandom, which I had been doing so well at avoiding. Thanks a bunch, casting gods.

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Yeah, normally I'd be happy to see an actor I like turn up in another franchise I'm into, but NOT LIKE THIS!

I like going on the Tim Dekay tag on Tumblr -- it's a quiet little tag and, aside from some occasional sniping at Tim/Peter from disgruntled fans unhappy with Peter's actions on the show*, it's mostly just happy gifs and pictures. Now it's all AoS stuff from exactly the part of the fandom I've been trying to avoid. Do not waaaaant ...

*one of the main reasons why the Ward fans going off on people for "tagging their hate" boggles me so much, because -- have they never SEEN a character tag for a contentious or unliked character? You get that with EVERYBODY! Even the biggest fannish darlings; I've seen uncomplimentary things in the Bucky tags too, and tumblr as a whole adores him. It's just how Tumblr works: the good and the bad all clumped together.

I'm actually a little predisposed to be sympathetic to the Ward fans about the whole "tagging your hate thing," or at least I would be if they weren't so awful, and if what they counted as hate didn't amount to "Ward murdering Victoria Hand wasn't very nice." (I mean, yes, some of the stuff said about Ward is very negative. But the fans take even the slightest criticism as "hate.") It's one of those ways in which tumblr is totally broken function wise. Because the tool that's used to indicate "I am talking about this subject" is the same one people use when they like X and want to find more of it. But that just means you're right, stuff like this happens all the time. When I went into the Rebecca Lowe tag and then the Rachel Turner tag during WC season five, unsurprisingly, there was a ton of negative stuff posted. It wasn't what I was looking for, but I couldn't be surprised. The Kate Moreau tag can be a little disappointing because there's so rarely anything posted, that it's a let down when it's something negative (and it often is). On the other hand, the Sara Ellis tag is surprisingly focused on the positive.

I don't know what the point of that was, other than to agree with you, then ramble.

Oh, it's not that I'm unsympathetic to the actual sentiment of "oh shit, I just wanted some happy pictures of my OTC, not people talking about how awful they are ;__;". I get that, I get people complaining about that -- but, piggybacking on what you said, it's the virulence and aggressiveness of the complaints that bothers me, combined with the implication that their character is the only one who ever gets that kind of treatment or who deserves that kind of defense. I think I'd be less inclined to roll my eyes at them if they were out to improve the fandom's tagging policies in general, policing the other characters' tags as diligently as they police their own, or if they even seemed to recognize that people hating on Ward is not a completely-unique-to-Ward phenomenon.

... but yeah, the way tumblr makes it impossible to separate personal and public space is a big part of the problem here. I do sometimes forget when I make posts that the tags are going to come up in a general tag search; I tend to tag for my own journal and not think about the wider context. I suspect a lot of people do. And OF COURSE people looking for character meta (both positive and negative) are going to peruse that character's tag, as well as people looking for pretty pictures and gifs. There's really no way to separate them out, with the way tumblr is organized.

I mostly tag for my own journal, but I do think, "Do I want this coming up when people search a tag?" If the answer is no, I don't use that tag. I frequently don't tag Ward even if I'm talking about him simply because I don't want the headache.

Which can be a shame, because I really like meta, and if the character tag (for any character) must be all positivity, and if people posting in the anti tag are the type to froth at the mouth (not always, but there's a tendency), then where's the nuanced exploration?

While Ward apologists seem to have a particularly enhanced victim complex, fans of villains can be like that in general. It's one thing to complain that people are calling your favorite character a horrible person; it's another if that character is a mass murderer. And I get that sometimes people will try to shame fans of villain characters, or act as if liking a character means approving of all their actions, and that's not cool either, but sometimes there's a lack of self-awareness among fans. I am Natasha in so many situations, even with characters I love, such as Regina.

Which can be a shame, because I really like meta, and if the character tag (for any character) must be all positivity, and if people posting in the anti tag are the type to froth at the mouth (not always, but there's a tendency), then where's the nuanced exploration?

nggghhhh, I know!!! And yeah, I find the anti-ward tag just as boring and repetitive as the ward tag -- somewhat less rage-inducing for me personally since I'm more inclined to agree with their rants, but it's still a whole lot of ax-grinding and not a lot of nuanced exploration of character. In a way the entire Ward thing is basically the tumblr problem writ large: the polarization and tendency towards extreme viewpoints and yelling in lieu of thoughtful discussion, to the point where it's literally impossible to engage with anything to do with Ward without aligning with one of the two camps that are engaged in flinging shit at each other. No thank you.

And yeah, I don't get why people don't seem to understand that loving a character does not mean defending their every action! I reblogged your Peter meta on tumblr to add my own agreement, because yeah, I adore Peter a really unreasonable amount, but that scene with Kate was a fucking troublesome scene and it'd be equally troubling for me as a Peter fan to take his side in that scene just because he's my favorite.

Yeah, most the of the anti-Ward people don't treat him as a three dimensional person any more than the apologists do. Between the two groups, he just becomes either evil incarnate or a sainted darling, and there's no room to think that he's a deeply damaged, self-absorbed adult, who is capable of great cruelty for little gain, and who has done terrible things, but who is also a very lost person who lacks a sense of self, so he latches on to others in ways that are damaging to himself and potentially to them.

...Well, that's my take on him, anyway. In nutshell.

It's probably the most divisive fandom I've ever been in. Other fandoms have been bad, but AoS is a particular kind of unpleasant, not helped by the fact that it's so tumblr based.

Comics and fandom stuff

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