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Posts tagged: marvel

KATE

mattfractionblog:

So I was driving home and something occurred to me that I want to write about real fast, because i am apparently incapable of experiencing moments of learning and NOT sharing it here. 

I have been, over time, fond of making jokes about Kieron Gillen killing off Kate Bishop. To me, it’s a joke about cavalierly spoiling another writer’s work and filling that writer’s inbox up with concerned emails and asks. I do this because I love Kieron. He’s one of my dearest friends in comics and out and I am on any given day at any given time in awe of something he’s said or written somewhere. And because Actually Feeling Stuff is hard this is how I show affection. Or at least it was. 
For whatever reason I was chewing it over in my head and I started to feel like Lucy with the football. I dunno about you or who you are or what you like but I don’t like feeling like Lucy with the football. 
It doesn’t matter what I thought the joke was, it occurs to me that because Kate is Kate and not, say, Karl, it occurs to me that there’s another angle from which to view that joke from that makes it seem… well, mean-spirited.  Because this is a thing that comics does to Kates.  Frequently.  
Which, uh, which is bullshit.  And I’m sorry for not sensing that sooner. 
So I’m not going to make that joke any more.  And I promise nobody’s gonna off Kate so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done
Not right now, I mean.  Not while she’s carrying that baby.
KIDDING! KIDDING!
Okay, that was the last joke like that. I promise.  

For those who don’t know, Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye (not to be confused with Clint Barton aka Hawkeye aka Hawkguy) has been featured pretty prominently in two popular marvel titles. One of them is Hawkeye which Matt Fraction (the OP) writes, which is about Kate and Clint being Hawkeye and what that title and role means (and also about pizza dogs and adorable things) and the other is Young Avengers, written by Kieron Gillen, which is about a group of young super heroes (and gay love).

What Mr. Fraction is saying here that is so awesome and so wonderfully insightful into the medium he is writing in, is that the jokes he makes about Kate being killed off in the other series she is in are far too reminiscent of a real problem in comics - the killing off of women for the pain and motivation of men - as he puts it, “so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.”

The next line is a lovely jab at both plot twists and conservative politics, because Mr. Fraction is a wonderful man.

Even if  death in Marvel comics doesn’t mean much, the idea that female characters, and the violence enacted on them are tools to further the plot of male characters is a problem, and it is one that Mr. Fraction clearly understands.

It just makes me really happy when people show awareness of the problematic tropes of their medium, and vow to work against them. Also of course that Kate will be around for a while longer.

The Sexualization of Tony Stark

sakuratsukikage:

starkreactors:

The Sexualization of Tony Stark 

If you’re at all familiar with me and my personal thoughts on comicverse Tony Stark, you probably already know that I believe Tony is at least semi-canonically bisexual. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which I plan to address at some point in the future, but this post is only tangentially related to that viewpoint.
This post is mainly about how Tony Stark is sexualized/has his virility or manhood mocked or questioned by villains and antagonists in the comics. At the end, I vaguely describe why I feel this adds fuel to the fire of my theory about his sexual orientation, but in this context that’s more for my personal justification than anything else.
In the 1998 Iron Man and Captain America Annual, upon first meeting Tony psychically, Metallo immediately calls into question Tony’s playboy status. image

This innuendo, while obviously intended to be a throwaway insult to Tony, is interesting because it presents Tony’s sexual promiscuity as something which weakens Tony, thus questioning his power and subverting the typical societal view of a promiscuous male (one that equates male power with sexuality). According to Metallo, because he is suddenly able to resist Metallo psychologically (he intends to mentally stop him from using mind control), his sexual strength must be diminished through his own will, making power and sexuality mutually exclusive. This then calls into question to power of Iron Man, whose identity is still a secret to everyone at this point. Iron Man’s power is clearly non-sexual in nature, but Tony’s reputation has allowed for questioning of his agency and virility on the part of Metallo, subverting traditional views of male sexual prowess.

Keep reading

theatlantic:
“ Iron Man Saved My Life
“ My earliest memories are of comic books, and of my father. He’d bring me to this little bar called The Dead End in Fox River Grove, where I would sit quietly in the corner, going over the pages of the same few...

theatlantic:

Iron Man Saved My Life

My earliest memories are of comic books, and of my father. He’d bring me to this little bar called The Dead End in Fox River Grove, where I would sit quietly in the corner, going over the pages of the same few comics again and again, looking for new details in the stories and the art. On the drive home, I recall the car swerving. I also recall him hitting me, throwing me to the ground.

The first comic books I bought on my own were a stack of Iron Mans from a little shop not far from the one-bedroom apartment I shared with my mother. From time to time, I’d add to this collection, shepherding and obsessing over it like only a five-year-old could, spreading it out on the pullout sofa I slept on. I constantly pleaded with my mom to buy more comics. Sensibly, she usually said no. When she did say yes, I always picked Iron Man.

As with the Robert Downey Jr. film adaptations, the original Iron Man character is defined as much by his intellect or technology as by personal troubles. Starting in 1978, with issue No. 120, in a story arc known as “Demon in a Bottle,” David Michelinie, John Romita Jr., and Bob Layton took Tony Stark’s billionaire playboy attitude and added the specter of alcoholism. The story begins with Stark flying first-class, pondering his life as he asks the stewardess for a fourth martini. When questioned by her, he rationalizes that he’s is drinking for two men, his civilian persona and his costumed identity.

Read more. [Image: Bob Layton/Wikimedia Commons]

snoozingcat:

sometime I just think about how easy it would be to market superheroes toward little girls and I am filled with rage

like do these people not realize how fucking easy this shit would be

there’s the dazzler she’s like a popstar and a superhero do you know how many 4-12 year old girls would dig that shit

there’s the wasp and her superpowers are seriously like zapping jerks, flying, and being cuter than everybody else. also she’s a famous fashion designer. and she’s better than you. (like she shrinks and stuff too but mainly her power is being better than you)

she-hulk is like this nerdy chick with the power to get bigger and greener and be spontaneously tougher than everybody in the vicinity like I don’t even know a little girl who wouldn’t slit someone’s throat for the ability to be stronger than all the boys when they pissed her off

little girl likes magic? scarlet witch

little girl likes science? invisible woman

little girl likes spies? black widow

little girl likes aliens? karolina dean

little girl likes bionic arms? misty knight

little girl likes flying horses? wow. guess who has one of those? valkyrie. valkyrie does.

My point is that’s it’s so fucking easy so chop-chop, Marvel, get on it. Seriously, I went ten years of my life thinking superheroes were boys. That’s ten years of you not profiting off of my inability to refrain from buying even the crappiest merchandise you offer if it has a character I love on it. Little girls are an enormous market; they will buy all your shit if you just suggest to them that maybe they’d like to.

or you could just keep on not profiting when you could be making money selling literally any object that has enough space to plaster a female superhero’s face on it. that’s cool too.

redcardforwolverine:
“ chujo-hime:
“ scratch-the-maven:
“ silvercenturion:
“ rdjinspiringlybeautiful:
“ Total unpopular opinion but:
Way to support your man, Pepper. Walk out on him when he’s in the middle of a ptsd attack. ……Yeah, that’ll show him...

redcardforwolverine:

chujo-hime:

scratch-the-maven:

silvercenturion:

rdjinspiringlybeautiful:

Total unpopular opinion but:

Way to support your man, Pepper. Walk out on him when he’s in the middle of a ptsd attack. ……Yeah, that’ll show him how much you love him.

**

The above statement is exactly what I thought. Really it started in the lab though when he was pouring his heart out to her and she was clearly not caring. To watch him suffer a bout then snark @ him and leave him alone was painful to watch. WTF. I’m still not over it. At least Rhodey showed he cared about how Tony was doing. 

Yes, because when she walked over to Tony and practically held him in her arms she was really uncaring wow so heartless.

and god forbid a woman choose her physical safety over taking care of her man’s emotional state, which you know, just put her physical safety at risk there

(and I’m sure accidentally hurting Pepper with the suit would do wonders for Tony’s ptsd attacks) >_>

I hate to butt in but I was really pleased with this scene because this is PTSD done right and reactions by someone who doesn’t have PTSD done right.

I have high-level PTSD and have had to deal with it for about eight and a half months now. I have night terrors worse than Tony’s. I thrash in my sleep, kick, fight, and scream. In the time that this has been going on, I’ve had two friends who have spent the night with me in an attempt to see if someone calming and strong sleeping next to me would ease the night terrors. Out of three collective nights that they stayed with me, it was successful only once. The final night, my second friend had to leave the bed and sleep on the couch because I was thrashing so much in my sleep. He’s 6’2” and a military officer who can definitely kick my ass in a fight if I were awake. I was hurting him so much in my sleep and scaring the daylights out of him that he had to leave. When someone with PTSD is in the grips of a really violent night terror, they fight tooth and nail more violently than if they were awake. Yes, it hurt me that he did that but I get why he did it. He was scared for his safety because I was fighting so hard in my sleep. My other friend that stayed with me watched me suffer through a night terror like Pepper did with Tony and tried to wake me up after a few minutes of me whimpering and kicking in my sleep. I nearly decked him coming out of it because I was still swamped in the dream and had idea what was going on.

Both men reacted similar to Pepper. They were scared, they were hurt, they were terrified for me, about what I was doing and going through, and had no idea how to handle it, save walking away to breathe. When you don’t have PTSD, but your partner does, it is incredibly difficult to understand what they are going through and how their mind operates, especially when asleep when the PTSD manifests in nightmares and night terrors.

So don’t you say that Pepper wasn’t supporting Tony by walking out. She was putting her physical safety first, which is a perfectly legitimate action to do in that situation. It hurts Tony obviously, but she still supports him and loves him and helps him through the PTSD in the morning. She listens to him when he rambles and tries to articulate what it’s like inside his head since New York as he’s trying to express why he’s acting the way he is. Listening and still loving them at the end of the day is the best thing you can do for someone with PTSD.

I was incredibly pleased with how they handled the rather touchy subject of PTSD in this film because I’ve had to live through that hell for eight and a half months now and know what it’s like day in and day out to struggle with your own brain, especially against nightmares, night terrors, and panic/anxiety attacks.

So to all the people hating on Pepper for her reaction in this scene: shut up. You have no room to talk. Had you been in her position, you would have left the room too. Don’t try to speak authoritatively about something you know nothing about. Thank you.

gearsinthephoenix:

No, but you don’t understand why I liked Iron Man 3 so much.

In all the other Avengers movies, we see characters going through pain and trauma and heartache.  We see Steve lose practically his whole world and still carry on.  We watch Bruce struggle with trying to figure out just how the Hulk fits into his life and his psyche; it is implied that he deals with depression and tries to end his life.  We hear Clint and Natasha and their angst about the “red in their ledgers”, the things they have done, and we watch as Thor essentially comes of age and deals with the pain of having his brother fall down deeper and deeper.  We KNOW the pain and the issues and the upset are there.

But Iron Man 3 is the first time we actually get to witness—REALLY witness—the aftermath of heroics.

In the first part of the movie we see Tony Stark dealing with real, honest-to-god PTSD.  He has panic attacks, he can’t sleep, he gets reckless and has a harder time taking care of himself, he obsessively spends hours working on suits so he can protect Pepper—even though in doing so he is unintentionally threatening their relationship. Rarely has such a thorough job been done in showing that all the flash-bang-let’s-save-the-world action would, in real life, have some serious psychological consequences.

Then, as the film progresses, we see him laid low.  REALLY low—we see him get taken apart piece by piece.  He loses his home, he loses contact with the people he cares about, he loses his suit—which means, in the context of the past few films, that he is in some ways dead.  “He is Iron Man”, after all, isn’t he?  The public sees him as one with the suit, and in a sense, so does he—a good deal of his self esteem, his sense of being able to defend people, is locked up in what he can do in the suit.  And now he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere—he can’t fly, he can’t fight much, he’s still suffering from PTSD, he’s being actively hunted by the few people who don’t think he’s dead.  All of his real ability is locked up in his brain, a place not everyone would think to look.  We see him almost completely broken down.

And then we watch him build himself back up again, but with one major difference: he does it without the suit.

In most of the second half of the film, in almost all of his major victories, Tony is not in the suit.  He breaks into Killian’s mansion essentially with odds and ends he’s cobbled together.  He saves the passengers from Air Force One with a suit he’s remotely controlling.  He wins the final battle with a whole bunch of suits that he is not in at all.  Rhodes saves the president, and Pepper kills the villain.  Not Tony.  And at the end of the day he blows up all the suits and tosses his mini arc reactor into the ocean.

Iron Man 3 is brilliant and underrated precisely because it lets the hero be a real man—a man, not a man in a suit.  A person who can still work wonders even when he’s at his very lowest, when he’s stranded and battling mental illness.  Someone who can’t operate completely alone, who lets other people have some victories as well—heck, who needs his friends and teammates to win.  And as he says at the end of the movie, while he may not always wear a suit, he will always be Iron Man. 

And personally, I think that is an A-freaking-plus storyline to bring into this franchise.