Bucky with both short term and long term memory issues, tho:
Keeping notebooks with detailed notes for himself, not just on recovered memories but about things he’s learned recently. He has three separate pages dedicated to “movies I like”, “movies I didn’t like”, “DO NOT WATCH AGAIN FOR FUCK’S FUCKING SAKE”.
Rereading the same stack of shitty mysteries over and over because he forgets whodunnit.
Getting frustrated with board games because he can’t keep the rules or the game state clear in his head; by the time they circle around to his turn he’s blanked on his strategy. He covers by either playing on his phone or cheating blatantly and outrageously – fronting like he never cared in the first place.
Checking. Everything. Constantly. His keys are permanently glued to his left front pocket, his wallet on the right, and he shoves his hands in his jeans nine times a minute to make sure his stuff’s still there. When he can’t find one of his important items, he freaks until he can pat himself down.
Feeling awkward around new people because he sometimes spaces their names and has to pick them up again from conversation. He’s gotten good at asking his friends to come over and introduce themselves so he can eavesdrop what New Person’s name is all over again.
Constantly throwing out leftovers because once food goes into the fridge he doesn’t remember that it exists. He has to set up a weekly alarm on his phone to clean moldy dim sum out.
Tracking his life on an oversize wall calendar, not only appointments but small goals for himself too. He writes a list each day of the small things he’d like to accomplish and writes down a note about how it went. That way he can look back and see how far he’s come.
medievalpoc blocked me because i keep reblogging their material to point out how the blog is run by a white woman without any art history qualifications profiting via pateron (to the tune of £670.69 ($1000)/month last i checked) off the misuse of contemporary race categories and their transposition into historical narratives.
medievalpoc, claiming King David wasn’t Jewish but was “black” instead. medievalpoc failing to make distinctions between art periods and calling everything “victorian”. what a fucking bunch of shit. please don’t ever put that asshole anti-semite on my dash.
medievalpoc once photoshopped a man in painting to be darker-skinned, called the man ‘POC’ because it’s a painting of an Italian guy, then, when an Italian woman from Italy called her bullshit because Italians living in Italy are not and have never been ‘POC’, talked over her and accused her of whitewashing herself.
If we’re doing greatest hits here, my vote goes to the time we had to consider the possibility that Urraca of Leon and Castile was Muslim.
They have a history of really being unable to deal with race outside of any box but American critical race theory. Jews are white, Jewish oppression doesn’t matter, etc. This has been ongoing for a long time. Roma activists have talked about the problems with that blog, Jewish activists, you name it. I asked once why they insisted on using BC/AD, which centers the Christian experience of time over everyone else, and was told basically that Jews complain too much and ordinary people wouldn’t understand BCE/CE, so I should shut up. Because apparently, a concept used in high school history books is too sophisticated for a Tumblr blog.
The worst part is, we do need historians to talk about the presence of PoC in European history. But medievalpoc is not that historian, and frequently shuts down any critique or dialogue that is essential to the scholarly process because they’ve got a niche that’s making them money, and if they aren’t right, that puts their income in jeopardy. Because academics are taught that popular history damages our careers, and our careers are already in jeopardy from the aca-business model, few academics do this kind of public history and education. Which leaves gaping holes to be filled like this – and filled very, very badly indeed.
I just generally won’t reblog from them. If something looks interesting, I do my own research, but I won’t reblog their stuff anymore. Too much of it is flat-out wrong and their combativeness on being called on any racist behaviour of their own makes that blog useless, frankly.
The sixth-grade textbook we use at the school I teach at uses BCE/CE.
The idea that you’re going to completely reeducate people (incorrectly) about race and medieval history, and at the same time assume they can’t figure out terminology they may well have already been taught in middle school is insulting beyond belief.
during her panel at wiscon, I had to correct her when she brought up a myth as history.
it was not confidence-inducing.
Oh god ALL OF THIS. medievalpoc is A VERY VERY BAD SOURCE. It drives me NUTS that they get people citing all over the place because they are SO OFTEN FLAT WRONG.
Ok that is a very delightful image but also WAIT JUST A SECOND
Are we meant to believe that the Soviet Union had the Red Room at its disposal for the entirety of the Cold War and DIDN’T use it to try and win as many Olympic gold medals as possible?
I mean Bucky couldn’t compete obviously because of the arm situation but … Natasha?
Is there some kind of Red Room trophy case rattling around somewhere with the names of major heads of state they’ve bumped off and also a bunch of medals for the uneven bars and the balance beam and the women’s shooting events?
did Bucky ever train a bunch of grim little baby black widows in artistic floor exercises in order to gain honor and glory for the motherland?
did he wear a special leotard
well, according to comic book canon along with being a top notch ballerina, natasha is also a very skilled gymnast who, if the following cover is to be believed actually did make the soviet olympic team altho i’m not sure if she actually participated
I KNEW IT
…and now I’m picturing Bucky watching the Olympics with Steve and the God damn Kids and running commentary/critique.
When we’re discussing villains, anti-heroes, and/or a complicated character who has done bad things, but has an in-universe reason for doing them, you cannot take race out of it, okay? You cannot pretend that the fact that this character is being played by a conventionally attractive white man has no bearing whatsoever on how the story is shaped or how you react to him.
Your media does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in a continuous timeline of marginalized people being used as fodder for straight white men and their pain, their motivations, and their humanity. Characters of color are never as humanized as white characters are, and don’t get to play as many complex characters as white actors do; and even when they do, they get erased, vilified, and devalued by the fandom because they don’t fit the stereotype we’ve come to expect. Look at Nick Fury. Look at James Rhodes. Look at all the recent bullshit with Sam Wilson and Antoine Triplett. That’s what happens when you get complex, interesting, well-rounded black male characters: fandom tries to argue that they could be villains in disguise and/or write them out to focus more on their white male characters.
Even with villains, only white men get to play the kind of complicated, intelligent, sympathetic villains we all love, like Loki. Imagine if Loki were played by Michael K. Williams. Do you think fandom would’ve embraced him with open arms if he were played by a black man? Do you think Michael K. Williams would be at Tom Hiddleston levels of adoration by fandom? Would people be writing tons of meta trying to excuse Loki’s actions if he were black? Do you think Loki would’ve been in three major movies, one as an outright villain, if he were played by a black man, especially a black man who is as an amazing actor and Shakespearean thespian as Tom Hiddleston, maybe even more?
If you said yes, you weren’t paying attention when the internet screamed the walls down for Branagh casting Idris Elba as Heimdall. Or Fantastic Four casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm. Or Quvenzhané Wallis being cast as Annie. And I’m sure it’ll happen again because people get astonishingly angry when people of color, especially black people, get to play characters who are heroic in any fashion.
Meanwhile, black and brown men are cast as thugs or drug dealers or terrorists, with no backstory to explain their motivations and no moments to humanize them to elicit empathy or sympathy. When there is an intelligent, sympathetic villain in a big box office movie that could have a person of color in it, sometimes specifically because the character is chromatic, it’s given to a white man because no one would believe that there is a chromatic actor out there who could play a cunning, ruthless yet sympathetic character better than a white man.
So yeah, love your villains, support your anti-heroes, and argue for their humanity if it’s needed, but please don’t act like the fact that they’re usually played by good-looking, able-bodied, cis white men does not play a big role in how much you empathize with them, and how much that is a specific calculation by a media industry that does not give enough of a fuck about marginalized people to represent them accurately, or at all.
Characters of color do not get the same treatment and opportunities as white characters, and it matters, especially to those of us who had to grow up never seeing any kind of positive representation of ourselves, and had to fight to get what little we’ve gotten.
It matters that we get two Chinese-American female characters, like Skye and Melinda May, who aren’t stereotypes and are allowed to express emotions without the narrative punishing them for it; it matters that we have a character like Rhodey who is heroic yet down-to-earth and someone that Tony can trust, no matter what; it matters that we have a heroic black man like Antoine Triplett, who is a legacy, and another heroic black man like Sam Wilson, who is a genuinely good man that is trusted by Captain America; it matters that we have a complicated, morally ambiguous black man like Nick Fury who can be fearless and vulnerable and a father figure to Natasha Romanoff; it matters that we get a mixed-race character like Raina who has her own motivations and complex morality; it matters that we have someone like Mike Peterson, who has been kidnapped by Hydra and forced to do evil with threats to his life and his son’s life, but he clearly doesn’t want to, and it eats away at him every time he has to do it.
You cannot take race out of it, especially when the default hero is a straight white man, and you have been trained your whole life to automatically be sympathetic and understanding of white male characters. You cannot pretend that a character being white and male does not have a significant impact on the way you relate to him, and the way you relate to the rest of the cast.
It has a significant impact or people still wouldn’t be arguing that Sam and Trip could be Hydra, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It’s so weird that Daisy Ridley is eyeballing that Lara Croft role in the Tomb Raider reboot, like, sure Star Wars was really big but you can’t just be a beloved space hero in one franchise and also be a big name as some kind of combat archeologist. Who’s ever doubled up like that?
Tumblr Exodus 