Are YOU gonna let THE GOVERNMENT tell YOU what YOUR GENDER is? That doesn't sound like Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to me! PROTECT your individual FREEDOMS and call your senator: we want the GOVERNMENT to stay OUT OF OUR PANTS! GENDER FREEDOM NOW!
This is probably meant to be ironic, but I swear this would work on so many people
It's not. This is literally how I get my coworkers to mind their business.
dumbass 4 dumbass, red and green dynamic duo strikes me again
when ppl act like leaving gifts for fairies is to get the fairies’ attention so they’ll be kind to you~~ when really leaving gifts for fairies is the supernatural equivalent of a mafia protection racket
gotta pay off the Mab
“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you” …..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??
“This creature with no natural social instincts outside of mating allows me to freely interact with it, while causing it little stress” is fucking DOPE AS SHIT
also… are you SURE? like, we’re still finding out so much about animals. Wolverines fathers, who we thought were not involved in caring for kits, turn out to travel around and collect all their kits from multiple mothers and take the whole group out on camping trips. Some spiders have tiny frog pets (!) or group up to communally raise their young. Wild sharks, crocodiles, and snakes have formed strong, documented relationships with people.
this man Gilberto (Chito) Shedden nursed this crocodile back to health after it was shot in the eye, and they were best friends for the rest of the crocodile’s life.
this python came in out of the wild as a baby snake and curled up next to the family’s infant, Oun Sambat (or Oeun Sambat?) and they were inseparable for 12 years
Cristina Zenato removes hooks from sharks and they let her stick her hand down their throat to do it and they even bring other sharks who need help to see her.
It’s a relationship that goes beyond a single helpful interaction. For example one of the sharks that would show up when she first started swimming with them was a shark she called Foggy Eye who really didn’t like to be touched. One day, Foggy Eye showed up with a hook in her mouth that Cristina Zenato removed, and ever after, Foggy Eye cuddles when she visits, putting her head in Cristina’s lap and enjoying some petting
We don’t know SO much. Some wolf spiders will adopt unrelated orphaned spiderlings and raise them. We recently discovered that the ant-mimicking jumping spider (below) produces “milk” and suckles its young until they are nearly fully grown.
SO. Don’t assume we know all about what creatures do or feel or whether or not they form social connections or bond with others.
Avengers Endgame GAG REEL
This is going to work, Steve. I know it is. Because I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t.
I’m wheezing 😂
Steve Rogers: master of the four elements (x)
you know. sometimes i think. in the face of tony’s obvious trauma and ptsd. in the face of the more obvious pain that bucky has suffered. we forget that steve’s motivation in the film isn’t just his tendency to hold stubbornly fast to his ideals, to do what he feels is right and damn the rest.
steve’s hurting too.
like. guys. we are so ready to give weight to tony’s emotional boiling over point at the end of the film, to say “this is why he tried to kill bucky, and it’s not right but it’s understandable.” we are so ready to acknowledge the fact that bucky was a victim and motivated to run by his fear of further persecution and hurt from nefarious forces. what about steve, though? when do we acknowledge that steve’s not just acting with righteous arrogance, but a deep anger, isolation, fear, loneliness, sadness, and hope?
steve died. like, his last memory before waking up seventy years in the future is a few days after watching his best friend fall from a train and he was unable to stop it he willingly flies a plane into the fucking Arctic, ostensibly to his death.
guys. guys. tony was fucked up for years because of untreated ptsd after falling from space and thinking he was dead. why is it so hard to remember that steve probably is fucked up, too?
this dude, he wakes up seventy years in the future and he has to make his way without really anyone or anything familiar, and the only person who is familiar is suffering from memory loss, and he’s now operating under the thumb of shadowy organization that he’s not 100 percent does good things and that continuously lies to him. there’s no war to fight, but that’s all this body is good for. it’s all he knows.
he doesn’t know what makes him happy. guys.
and so he goes through another trauma when he discovers this villain who is trying to kill him is in fact the dead best friend who—surprise!—was actually captured after falling and losing an arm and his brains were scrambled to turn him into a murder assassin. we know for a fact steve feels tremendous guilt over this. but imagine beyond guilt, the sorrow, the nightmarish possibilities, that are turning over in steve’s head. the idea of what his friend suffered. remember when rhodey fell from the sky and tony blasted sam in the chest? imagine the anger in steve’s heart at the idea of what bucky’s suffered and the unwillingness to let that go unchecked and unsaved.
oh, plus. that shadowy organization he’s been fighting for? the people he’s been taking orders from? the top dog in the neat little hierarchy that’s arranged his world? yeah. hydra. everything steve has known turns upside down. he can’t trust anything. imagine the paranoia. the suspicion. imagine the fear that must take seed at that betrayal.
and then! of course, then he begins fighting these battles with the avengers where the collateral damage is on such a bigger scale than it was at war. where there are aliens. aliens, you guys. and he’s tasked with leading this motley crew of superheroes in a world he’s still getting used to and people die, lots of people die, and we know that even if it doesnt visibly affect him like it affects tony (who always seems shocked when he’s confronted with loss, because it’s presented to him on a personal, individual level) it does affect him. that steve feels the guilt of lives lost. imagine that burden. imagine the weight of the shield, the mask, the responsibility. imagine the loneliness. the fear.
so then. then. in the space of a few days. steve deals with more guilt from the deaths in lagos. he shoulders that burden. then he deals with the moral quandary of signing the accords. he wrestles with that decision. peggy dies. he grieves, oh goodness does he grieve. vienna fuckin blows up and that elusive best friend is now the suspect. so steve is grieving, he is confused and conflicted, and now he feels doubly guilty—that’s the person he has been looking for, should he have already caught him? did he do it? he couldn’t have. does he bring him in? does he shoulder this responsibility too? what will they make him do when he catches up to bucky? what should he do? steve might act like he always knows what’s right, but a decision like this isn’t easy. it messes with a person. and when you’re dealing with all that mess in your head, sometimes you don’t think. sometimes…you act.
like when bucky is triggered, when steve stops a helicopter with his bare fucking hands, you can feel the desperation. that’s not ordinary heroics. that’s not steve just trying to stop bucky from escaping and possibly hurting others. it’s steve fighting for bucky. for this piece of his past. for the possibility of an end to loneliness. for the possibility of redemption for letting him fall.
and when they go on the run, when they know they have to stop the supersoldiers, when they clash with tony’s team, can you imagine steve’s sheer frustration that no one gets what is at stake? that no one is willing to listen? and yes, he didn’t even try—but why is that, you think? is it possibly because steve is used to institutions and those in power ignoring what he thinks is right and causing disaster anyway?
when steve says, “pal, so are we.” when steve acknowledges to natasha that he’s 90 not dead, when he openly references the fact that he and bucky are 100, can you imagine knowing that? adjusting to that? being 20-something in body and memory but 100 in actuality? living in a body that people perceive as a weapon so strongly that you’ve become a weapon when you are still longing to rediscover the man you were? steve’s not just cap. steve’s steve, and he doesn’t know what makes him happy you guys. he’s a guy, he’s a human, and he’s dealing with A Lot.
i get that he makes some bad calls in the movie. so does tony. my beef is that while tony’s decisions are often supported by his very obvious trauma and emotional burden, we rarely seem to give enough weight to the very real and very similar turmoil that is going on inside of steve.
when tony is fighting him in siberia. when steve says, “he’s my friend,” so simply, so sadly, without any righteousness, just clean tired truth, that’s steve as steve. when he hid the truth from tony, that’s steve as steve. when he drops the shield, that’s steve reclaiming himself as steve. we expect cap all the time, because often, steve is cap. it’s easy to see him as the moral police that way, if reductionist.
but we forget to see steve as steve. that he is a kid, in some ways. and a grieving, lost, lonely kid with a lot of anger, sadness, confusion, and power boiling under the placid-seeming surface.
^This
And can I just bring up a tiny little point that my nasty, suspicious mind threw in about Peggy’s death and the timing thereof? She was old. She was expected to die at pretty much any time. Who would perform an autopsy for such a frail patient dying in her sleep? Who would bother to run a drug tox screen to figure out if she was helped along in order to put pressure on Steve at a critical time? Ross would absolutely stoop that low. He proved it in the Hulk movie.
Lets also not forget that Howard Stark was Steve’s friend. He watched his best friend Bucky kill Howard, and of course, he had become friends with Howard’s son in the meantime.
And while Steve was fighting to save Bucky, he was also trying to save Tony because Tony would regret it, when it was over.
And a few other things.
I know this has been stated multiple times, but Steve fought in WWII. A lot of people didn’t get to go home. A lot of people’s bodies didn’t get to go home. The death count was so high that if somebody died, there body was left and the family found out through a letter. The tomb of the Unknown Soldier (established in 1921 for World War I) has two tombs dedicated to those lost in World War II, filled with ashes of soldiers whom we’ll never know the names of. It was a horrible war.
And Steve found out Howard died through Zola in the secret underground facility, having been killed by the Winter Soldier first. Then he found out the Winter Soldier was Bucky. His best friend, whom Steve feels that he let die, but no it was worse. He was tortured by an enemy who was supposed to be dead and gone, but instead was a part of an organization he was working for that was set up by Peggy. (Guys, theres so much about Steve too….He’s had it hard. )
You raise an interesting point, and one I think a lot of people forget… the sheer enormity of the horrific nightmare that was WW2. In some battles they were still engaging in trench warfare. The amount of deaths, on a global scale. The deployment of horrible weapons never before used. The new and inventive ways mankind found to kill and torture one another.
Steve was special ops. He wasn’t spared ANY of the more terrible aspects of the war. And the serum gave Steve an eidetic memory, that was one of the serum’s properties. So not only did he live it, but he has to remember the entire thing, everything he witnessed first-hand, with clear contrast. He’s not afforded the luxury of time healing all wounds.
Honestly, it’s a testament to Steve that he’s not catatonic - I probably would be! Let alone the fact that the time difference between waking up in the 21st century and the events of Avengers 2012 was literally just days. He had almost zero time to adjust before being thrown back into the line of fire. And with Thanos coming, if they follow the Avengers vs. Thanos battle from Infinity Gauntlet in all its gruesome detail, he’s about to be traumatized even more.
My father fought in WWII. He could NEVER talk about. NEVER. What he saw, what he experienced, was so horrible that it never left him. Not even after 60+ years.
Steve Rogers never got a chance to process that trauma or heal from it. Then the horror of being thrown 70 years into the future, with everyone he ever knew dead or dying, was heaped on top of that. He never got a chance to process or heal from that.
And he just keeps soldiering on. So most of the fandom ignores or dismisses his pain.
Reblogging for @feliciates excellent addition. My dad fought in a different war (Vietnam) but same. Never talked about it and would be dismissive when asked. The only time he willingly spoke of his service, that I can remember, was once, he mentioned randomly that he hated this dish he called SOS (‘shit on a shingle’… some kind of meat gravy over toast) because they served it a lot when he served and he couldn’t ever bring himself to choke it down afterwards. That’s it, that’s all I ever got.
My uncle, different war yet (Korean), underwent a complete personality change according to my aunt, and my mother, and everyone who knew him before. He has a Purple Heart and a lifetime of being haunted. My husband and I lived on Oahu for a few years, and we took my uncle to the Arizona memorial on Pearl Harbor once when he visited. We thought, because he’s both a veteran and a history buff with an interest in WW2 history especially, that he’d appreciate it. Big mistake. There were some tourists on the memorial, laughing and taking pictures and I’ve never seen my uncle so livid. He left, more like stormed out really, so disgusted by their behavior he couldn’t speak and scarcely did the rest of the day. To be fair the Arizona is a tomb and that behavior was disrespectful. And there are signs everywhere reminding people that while it may look like just a sunken ship it is actually very much a graveyard. He’s not one who usually shows anger so readily. It was the first time I’d ever seen him that mad, and I was an adult and married. His reaction has stayed with me. And my fathers silence - his way of saying it all by not saying anything.
Steve really is a well done character. It might not be so obvious to those who don’t know a veteran, particularly the young who are generations removed from a major war, but he is. There is a chord there that touches people.
sirius black: imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, escaped to go commit that crime as fast as possible
