I Don’t Know If Anyone Has Ever Done This Before But, Here Ya Go… The Different Types Of Fanfiction! 

How would an omega mutant lose to a tin can? Storm could fry his ass using a lighting bolt with her pinky and iron man would be over.

Mcu stans need to get serious for once in their lives.

Captain America vol. 6, #19 by Ed Brubaker

I think about these pages a lot, every time I read meta about Steve not being as… expressive or emotive in the MCU as other characters. 

Steve is an artist. And a bookworm. Who loves fantasy most of all. This is canon, none of these things are indicators of someone who is stoic and taciturn by nature. So what we can deduce from this is that Steve learned to keep things close to the chest through nurture not nature.

Why?

Three factors, all summed up above.

1) Steve was heavily bullied as a child. Picked on, beat up, tormented. There have been depictions of this in almost every single Cap run I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of Cap. I could show you panels that would make you cry, where a child!Steve is laid out on the pavement bleeding because his childhood bullies got a hold of him.

This is not solely indigenous to 616!Steve, as in the MCU!Steve also indicated to Peggy that he was beat up a lot as a child.

Someone who is targeted by that kind of physical and mental abuse learns to keep it all in, so as not to show any weakness less his tormentors use that against him.

2) Steve lived through the Great Depression during his most informative years. The small, sickly child of a single mother. The dialogue here breaks my heart:

“And with every broken bone or black eye I knew I was letting my mother down. Sure I was scared of the bullies waiting for me but my REAL fear was that I’d get home and she wouldn’t be there. I knew it was irrational, she was a GREAT mother, but that’s just how life felt back then, like it could all fall apart at any moment.”

Loss. Steve’s greatest fear and the heartbreaking thing is that it’s he’s had to live through again and again and again. And it all started because he was raised during a time when the bulk of America had lost everything and were starving in the streets. If we look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the most basic necessities for survival weren’t being met for a very large population of people: food, water, safety. 

Steve’s words here are actually very accurate. I have a 96-year-old grandmother who can personally collaborate the sentiment expressed here. In fact she told me that it was very common for children to be sent away to relatives who could feed them, for families to be split up because the parents could no longer afford to provide basic necessities. And in other families children were actually put to work in factories. In fact, Steve worked. As early as six he was selling newspapers when he wasn’t in school (Remender’s run, Cap vol. 7).

3) War. The most destructive war in recent history no less.

The highest suicide rate in the country goes to veterans. This is fact. 

In 2014, an average of 20 Veterans died from suicide each day. 6 of the 20 were users of VA services.

source

Any war related issues such as PTSD and Survivals Guilt would have been even worse during WW2 because no one recognized PTSD as being valid. In fact General Patton once slapped soldiers who were bed ridden due to exhibiting PTSD symptoms. This is also fact.

source

So, as a soldier, your choices were try your hardest to keep a stiff upper lip or exhibit your symptoms and be considered a coward and a traitor.

And yet despite all of this Steve said this…

“And I think THAT was what shaped me. How the whole world felt unfair… unjust. That’s why I tried over and over again to enlist before we were even in the war. Because I wanted to punch Hitler in the jaw.”

This is it, this is the essence of Steve Rogers.

The underdog. The defender of the maligned and the targeted.

Steve Rogers took his pain and rather than letting it make him bitter like others would in his circumstances, he became determined to help others.

….I just think that maybe we, as a fandom, should not assume that the silent type aren’t grappling with unimaginable pain just because they’re silent. I think we should recognize that perhaps the silence, itself, is also a symptom.

Gotta start treating english like monolinguistic english speakers treat other languages

Did you know English doesn't have a word for the Irish word 'mar'? Instead they have to say 'is the cause' of or 'because' for short

Hello! So sorry to bother, but have you had any updates on the Word-Stream/Speechify situation?

Just one: like I posted on Xitter and Bluesky last night, as of yesterday afternoon, the links to individual works as they were listed on WordStream are gone from both Google and Bing. Hurray, right? Surely we’re all sick of this whole debacle and there’s far more important things to worry about. If all is well that ends well, surely there’s no need to still be angry.

Well, I am. Here’s why:

When I checked on Wednesday, the links to my own work on WordStream were still listed. So rather than it taking a week after Cliff Weitzman first hid the fanwork from view, it took a little over a week from the moment he first promised privately that they would be deleted. Which, fine. Perhaps Cliff didn’t really know what he was talking about when he gave that timeframe. Or maybe he told a little white lie to create the impression that he always intended to do the right thing. It seems more likely to me, though, that Cliff still believed—even after the backlash he received—that he would get away with honoring only individual takedown requests. Or worse, that he needed just a little bit more time with the stolen material to figure out an alternative way to profit off it—preferably without us noticing, this time.

But who knows? I certainly don’t! All we can do is speculate, because publicly, Cliff Weitzman has remained completely silent on his copyright infringements. All we got was the initial justifications he and his sockpuppet accounts used in comments on the original Reddit and Tumblr posts. After those were so understandably ill-received, Cliff only ever communicated with a few individual authors who contacted him directly and repeatedly, blocking people who addressed the issue on Twitter and quietly distancing himself from WordStream by deleting a blog he’d posted to Speechify.com dated December 20th—where Cliff promoted WordStream’s platform specifically to fanfiction readers. (See my enormous timeline post for details and screenshots of said posts before they were taken down.)

And this is why I’m still angry: As long as Cliff Weitzman faces no real consequences for his actions, he won’t see a need to own up to his mistake; and as long as he’s able to delay taking responsibility, this isn’t over. This didn’t end well.

After all, wasn’t this the next-best scenario for Cliff, second only to him turning WordStream into a (for him) effortless, infinite money-making machine? He took something we provided for free and fed it to AI so he could more easily put it behind a paywall; we found out and protested; Cliff quietly erased all evidence of his crime; and we went—almost equally quietly—away.

I want to make sure you know that I continue to be genuinely amazed and intensely grateful for how quickly the news about WordStream’s copyright infringement was shared—and continues to be shared—throughout fandom, on tumblr in particular. If it hadn’t been for our collective outcry here and on Reddit, WordStream would very likely still be up in its original form, and Weitzman would be reaping the benefits (those subscription prices were steep) today.

But it’s been frustrating to see that, with the exception of mentions in articles on Substack and Fansplaining (the latter of which is a particularly awesome and thorough read on fandom’s decontextualization) and a Fanlore listing, our outrage never really spilled out beyond the safely insulated, out-of-the-way spaces that are tumblr, a handful of subreddits and bluesky. And I believe that—unfortunately—we are collectively responsible for that part, as well.

Most of us seemed content to only spread the word by circulating the same two posts on tumblr. (Have we all given up completely on every other social media platform? Am I the only remaining straggler?) And soon after Cliff Weitzman hid WordStream’s fanfiction category from view, our interest in the issue took a sharp dive even there. Are we genuinely deceived into believing the issue has been fully resolved? Do we truly fail to realize that Weitzman’s refusal to admit that what he did was wrong left the door wide open for the next greed-driven tech bro to wander through? Or is the true naivety in thinking that, as a community, we can keep this kind of attack on fandom from happening again? Has our disillusionment already gotten that bad?

However the situation spins out from here, Cliff’s actions will set a precedent. If we fail to show Cliff and his ilk that attempts to profit off fandom’s unpaid labor have consequences, their tech companies will keep trying until something eventually sticks. They might be a little smarter about it next time; obscure their sources a bit better, maybe leave the titles and the authors’ names off. Or maybe they’ll go a bolder route: maybe next time they cross the line they’ll do it boldly enough for IP holders to take notice and stop tolerating fanwork entirely.

Doesn’t that make you angry, too?

There’s this whole other mess of thoughts I would love to be able to untangle about how commercial influence is contributing to the steady erosion of fandom’s foundations, but I’m tired, and other people have said it all much more eloquently than I ever could. Seriously, go read that article on Fansplaining. Or listen to the podcast version of it. Better yet, as long as you’re wearing your noise-canceling headphones, go listen to a podfic of one of your favorite fandoms’ works, and enjoy the collaborative joy and creativity of the people who Cliff Weitzman refuses to believe exist. (In one of Speechify’s other blogs, Cliff claims there are only 272 podfics on AO3. Would you like to run that ChatGPT prompt again, Cliff?). Honestly, much like Cliff Weitzman’s infuriating denial of the fact that fandom fucking has this covered, thank you very much, there’s so. Many. More. Things for us to talk about. There’s the connotations of WordStream’s dubious ‘upload’ button, for instance, or the fact that the app scraped (and in some cases, allegedly, still lists) copyright-protected original fiction as well, or WordStream’s complete lack of contact information, which is illegal for an internationally operating app. And oh! Has anyone reported more thoroughly on Cliff’s app’s options to ‘simplify’ or ‘modernize’ uploaded works, or—my own very favorite abomination—to translate them into something Cliff calls ‘Gen-Z Language’? Much like his atrocious AI book covers, it would be hilarious, if it didn’t make steam come out of my ears.

Anyway, there it is. I highly recommend you do all of that. And then, if you aren’t familiar with it already, go do some research re: fair use and your rights as the copyright owner of your works. A good number of people commenting on this controversy expressed stunned surprise or fearful hesitation about claiming any sort of ownership of their fanfiction. The more informed we are about our rights, the more willing we will be to defend them.

Please don’t stop writing or sharing your work. If you can’t bring yourself to work on your WIPs today (trust me, I get it), post about this situation instead. Tweets, skeets, whateverthefucks—about WordStream’s theft, about how this reflects on Speechify’s already shady business practices, about how Cliff’s actions and justifications have personally affected you. You’re welcome to share or copy my posts on these platforms, but since Cliff already blocked me, I very much prefer you post your own. If you do, call Cliff Weitzman by his full name and tag or include both WordStream and Speechify to ensure Weitzman will recognize he has both a personal as well as a professional stake in handling the situation with integrity. Leave your concerns in reviews on the Speechify app. (We weren’t provided with a more appropriate place to put them, after all!) Consider calling for a Speechify boycott until Cliff accepts accountability for his actions.

Do avoid making exaggerated claims, and don’t call for physical retaliation against Cliff’s person or his property. We don’t want to give him or Speechify even the weakest of grounds to claim defamation or threats of violence. Focus on the facts: they’re incriminating enough by themselves. Show Cliff that we’re determined to keep bringing up his company’s wrongdoings in public spaces until he demonstrates that he understands why taking these freely shared fanworks and monetizing them was wrong, and takes steps to ensure it won’t happen again.

One last thing—and this is really more of a general reminder—please stop suggesting I handle this situation for you. People have come to me asking for action items. The resulting flashbacks to my days as an office assistant were extremely upsetting. In all seriousness, casting me as some sort of coordinator or driving force behind this backlash actively hurts the cause. Not only does it downplay fandom’s collective efforts, it also makes our message extremely vulnerable. It would be all too easy for Cliff to silence one singular source. Wikipedia will not maintain mentions of this controversy as long as it leads only to Easter Kingston’s attempt to summarize what happened as it was happening. You only know my name because I stumbled upon WordStream’s theft and decided to get my friends involved. I am not more knowledgeable, more skilled or more angrily invested in this issue than you are (or can, or should, be). I draw pictures and I write stories and I worry about the shift I’m seeing in fandom after having been on this ride for even a few pre-livejournal rounds.

I’m not going to stop doing any of those things. But I am going to allow myself to step away for a bit, make my wife dinner, and catch up on our shows.

I trust you’ve got it from here.

oh god, Lan Zhan obsessed besties gather the fuck around

Hanguang-Jun has a whole nother 500 layers of meaning now

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

I would love to hear more opinions on this, but Deadpool Wolverine did come off as homophobic to me.

To clarify, it seems like Ryan Reynolds is an ally and I don't think any of it was malicious but there were some concerning trends.

For one, Deadpool has never, even in the comics, had a romantic relationship with a man. Only recently has he dated a nonbinary character, which is a good step, but he had been pan for a while with his attraction to men merely being a joke.

The other thing that bothered me was the amount of "woke mob" jokes, it got to the point where it was excessive and made me question the director/script writer's politics.

Thirdly, while this movie is being called a gay masterpiece by some (eye roll), the only gay rep were punchlines. The scene where Deadpool goes on and on about sexual positions with the TVA specifically seemed like the joke was emasculating men who bottom. Let's remember that this is written by straight men, not queer people in on a joke.

Timor Python (Malayopython timoriensis), family Pythonidae, Komodo National Park, Indonesia

photograph by James Hunt Photography