Arctic Light

By way of a gifset showing off Daniel Bruhl's puppy eyes in one particular Civil War scene (the rational part of my brain: let's not forget there's a dead body in the bathtub throughout this scene, however) I ended up rewatching the Zemo scenes in Civil War tonight, as you do ...

(How is this my life now.)

... and thinking about something that sheron and I were talking about recently, which is that while he is absolutely ruthless about his goals, and there are certain categories of people that he seems to kill without remorse (supersoldiers, Hydra, people who are actively trying to kill him), he actually seems to try to go out of his way not to kill, hurt, or even attack most people if he doesn't have to. This is underscored much more heavily than I remembered in his establishing scene with the Hydra guy:

Zemo: Hydra deserves its place on the ash heap, so your death would not bother me. But I'd have to use this book, and other, bloodier methods to find what I need. I don't look forward to that.

It's really interesting to me that they went with this method of introducing him, where it's true that his introduction is ruthless and brutal, but also he appears to be trying to avoid what he considers unnecessary bloodshed or collateral damage, and the plot of the movie is actually his backup plan when the first one doesn't pan out. At the end of that scene, if anything, he looks resigned and unhappy - as he said, he doesn't mind killing the Hydra guy, but he really didn't want to have to do the rest of it.

(There's a deleted scene with an alternate method of Zemo acquiring the book, which appears to involve Zemo killing a room full of people - possibly only knocking them out, but that really didn't look gentle. Anyway, it's one of those narrative decisions where it turns his arc into something very different than if gassing a room full of people and then moving on to terrorism was actually his plan A.)

On the other hand, this rewatch impressed on me all over again how absolutely batshit his Plan B is.

Presumably his original plan - while obsessive, ruthless, and not how we handle emotional trauma, Zemo - was relatively straightforward, with a minimum of collateral damage aside from wrecking the lives of a handful of people he blames for his family's deaths: Interrogate the Hydra guy for the information he needed, fly to Siberia and kill the other Winter Soldiers and get the video, and then, idk, perhaps mail the video to Tony and off himself in Siberia.

But no, that didn't work!

Then he had to go to plan B, which was more like:



"Step 49 of 1107: create a realistic Bucky face mask."

(I mean, it's in character, but also, why are you so extra, Zemo.)

Anyway, I really like how consistent the CW part of his character development actually is with the TFATWS part, allowing for the fact that he's obviously unhinged with grief in 2016 and by the Falcon & Winter Soldier time period, has had some time to deal with it and develop a new Reason For Living (at least 50% less unhinged, though still kinda fanatic).

.... that have been bouncing around in my head. Spoilers for the whole show.

( Under here, in no particular order )

So about that post I made only yesterday about my hoped-for villain redemption arc ...

( Captain Marvel 2 advance spoilers )

Here's the list!

My unpopular(?) Marvel opinion is that I'm kinda hitting superhero burnout. I'm not that enthused about anything upcoming, and I think it's mainly because I just kind of want it to stop for awhile. They built up for ten years to their ~big finale~ and then put out the next movie in the franchise two months later! Let it breathe, guys.

That being said, the handful of things I'm looking forward to ...

( A few spoilers )

What are you looking forward to? My normal spoilerphobe policy is on hold for this; feel free to talk about anything that's been revealed about the upcoming, unreleased shows/movies so far, since there isn't much yet.

Seen it! I'm cutting my general emotional reaction to avoid spoiling, but you might want to click on that before clicking on the spoilers if you are planning to read them.

( General reaction )

( Spoilers )

I'm not responding to this on Tumblr because no good ever comes of arguing with people on Tumblr about things like this, but ... seriously ...

Cut for those who want to either a) avoid spoilers for Captain America: Civil War, or b) avoid discussion of the movie, period.

( Under the cut )

sheron just watched CA: Civil War and is looking for Tony-focused fics (Steve & Tony, preferably) that deal with the fallout from the movie and AREN'T terribly skewed towards one character or the other. (As the entire fandom tends to be post-CW, thus missing the point of the movie entirely.) She's okay with Steve/Tony if that's the only way to get the feels, but prefers gen friendship fic for these characters.

I am completely unhelpful since I haven't read anything in this fandom in over a year, but I offered to ask, since I know there are people hereabouts who are still in Avengers fandom. Anyone seen any good post-CW fic around?

Relieved to be able to stop the spoiler blackout, mostly.

( General thoughts )

I'm finally getting around to reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The reason why it's taken so long for me to read this book is because, when it won the Pulitzer Prize and got famous about 15 years ago, this immediately compelled everybody in my extended family who vaguely knew I was into comics to go "This book has comics in it! sholio likes comics! sholio should read this!" Which of course made me obstinately not want to read it, combined with a suspicion that it was going to ping my wrong-dar in all kinds of ways. A few years ago my mother-in-law gave me a copy, and I finally decided I needed to either read the damn thing or get rid of it, so I'm now reading it ...

.... and it's borderline un-putdownable, damn it. XD Considering this is a topic I know quite a lot about (the comics business), it really does seem to be hitting most of the right notes, allowing for a bit of Chabon's over-the-topness. There have been a few little things that have made me twitch (I need to make a post about the Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Artists one of these days) but in general I'm really enjoying it.

Actually, it's interesting reading the book now instead of 15 years ago, because I'd gone into it with the idea that it was a fictionalized version of Seigel & Shuster creating Superman (I think that was the general impression that reviews of the book left me with, probably because Superman is the superhero the public is most familiar with, or was back in the early 2000s before the Marvel Universe got so popular in films) but no, it is FAR MORE NERDY than that: it's a fictionalized version of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon creating Captain America.

In fact, the main characters themselves are a fascinating mash-up of actual Kirby/Simon (working-class Jewish cartoonist) and fictional Steve Rogers (Brooklyn-based disabled son of a single mom who works as a nurse). After reading a ton of MCU fanfic in which 1930s Brooklyn is basically a post-apocalyptic dystopia, it is definitely a change of pace to switch over to a historical novel which has literally the exact same setup as most 1930s-era CA fanfic -- poor Brooklyn artist and son of single mom tries to get by -- in which Brooklyn is a place where people actually have rather happy and fulfilling lives rather than a wasteland of rat-infested tenements, and being working-class immigrant poor equates to not always paying the rent on time and having to be careful not to use up all of one's drawing paper before the next paycheck, as opposed to eating out of garbage cans and blowing sailors on the docks for rent money.

In the part of the book I'm reading right now, ( relatively minor spoiler continuing the Captain America theme )

I think it threw me a little because I was not expecting the book to be this ... nerdy? Or quite this affectionately, blatantly pulpy? Or something. However, I think I can honestly say that the book approaches comics and 1930s pulp fiction in almost exactly the same way that The Yiddish Policeman's Union approached noir mystery: it actually is the thing it's commenting on (more or less), but it's also a meta-commentary on the genre itself. It's also very funny, in an often bleak kind of way.

(I am still quite a ways from the ending, so PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL ME, thanks!)