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aimmyarrowshigh · 1 year

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List of Jewish Characters for the Panfandom Hanukkah Bingo

I've gotten a few requests for a list of Jewish characters to help people brainstorm for the bingo -- just as a reminder, Jewish headcanons and fanons are totally allowed for the event, so if you don't KNOW whether your character is Jewish, it's totally fine to make them Jewish for your fanwork! :)

But, since people asked, here is a little starter-list of 225 fictional Jewish and Jew-ish characters (characters who are "nebulously Jewish," played by Jews, are Jewish in at least one variation of the character, only make sense if they're Jewish, etc.)

Feel free to add! This list is alphabetized by first name.

Abbi Abrams (Broad City) Abby Stevenson (The Baby-Sitters' Club) Adam Birkholtz (Check Please!) Adam Sackler (Girls) Alec Hardison (Leverage, Leverage: Redemption) Alex Kerkovitch (Happy Endings) Alexis Rose (Schitt's Creek) Amy Green (FRIENDS) Amy Matthews (Boy Meets World) Angela Wexler (The Westing Game) Angelica Pickles (Rugrats) Ann Perkins (Parks & Recreation) Anna Stevenson (The Baby-Sitters' Club) Annie Edison (Community) April O'Neill (Rise of the TMNT) Arnie Roth (Marvel) Arnold Perlstein (The Magic School Bus) Aunt Gayle (Bob's Burgers) Bail Organa (Star Wars) Barney Guttman (Dead End Paranormal Park) Ben Geller-Willick (FRIENDS) Ben Grimm | The Thing (Fantastic Four) Ben Solo | Kylo Ren (Star Wars) Benjamin Sisko (Star Trek) Bernie Rosenthal (Marvel) Billy Kaplan | Wicca (MCU, X-Men) Breha Organa (Star Wars)

Bruce Wayne | Batman (DCU) Carl Foutley (As Told By Ginger) Cassie Howard (Euphoria HBO) Cassie Lang (MCU) Catherine Frensky (Arthur) Charles Deetz (Beetlejuice) Charlotte York Goldenblatt (Sex and the City) Cher Horowitz (Clueless) Chuckie Finster (Rugrats) Cindy Hayes (Orange is the New Black) Cole Tillerman (Central Park) Cory Matthews (Boy Meets World) Craig Manning (Degrassi: The Next Generation) Cristina Yang (Grey's Anatomy) Cyrus Goodman (Andi Mack) Darcy Lewis (MCU) David "Gordo" Gordon (Lizzie McGuire) David Rose (Schitt's Creek) Desi Harperin (Girls) Dil Pickles (Rugrats) Dipper Pines (Gravity Falls) Dodie Bishop (As Told By Ginger) Eddie Munson (Stranger Things) Edward Teach | Blackbeard (Our Flag Means Death) Elaine Benes (Seinfeld) Elijah Krantz (Girls)

Emily Deetz (Beetlejuice) Emma Geller-Green (FRIENDS) Eric Matthews (Boy Meets World) Erik Lehnsherr | Magneto (X-Men) Felicity Smoak (Arrow) Finn (Star Wars) Ford Pines (Gravity Falls) Fox Mulder (The X-Files) Fran Fine (The Nanny) Fran Parker (Girls) Francine Frensky (Arthur) Frankie Landau-Banks (The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks) Gene Belcher (Bob's Burgers) George Costanza (Seinfeld) Gert Yorkes (Marvel Runaways) Ginger Foutley (As Told By Ginger) Gomez Addams (The Addams Family) Grace Adler (Will & Grace) Grace Windkloppel Wexler (The Westing Game) Greg Universe (Steven Universe) Gretchen Weiners (Mean Girls) Hal Jordan | Green Lantern (DCU) Han Solo (Star Wars) Hannah Horvath (Girls) Harley Quinn (DCU)

Harold Berman (Hey Arnold!) Harold Hooper (Sesame Street) Helen (Central Park) Holly Wheeler (Stranger Things) Howard Wolowitz (The Big Bang Theory) Ilana Wexler (Broad City) Isabella Garcia-Shapiro (Phineas and Ferb) Jack Geller (FRIENDS) Jack Zimmermann (Check Please!) Jake Berenson (Animorphs) Jake Peralta (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) Jake Wexler (The Westing Game) James "Bucky" Barnes | Winter Soldier (MCU) James Tiberius Kirk (Star Trek) Jane Foster | The Mighty Thor (MCU) Jane Kerkovitch-Williams (Happy Endings) Jane Smith (Mr. & Mrs. Smith) Janet Perlstein (The Magic School Bus) Janice Littman nee Hosenstein (FRIENDS) Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Parks & Recreation) Jerry Seinfeld (Seinfeld) Jessi Glaser (Big Mouth) Jill Green (FRIENDS) Jillian Holtzmann (Ghostbusters: Answer the Call) Jimmy Brooks (Degrassi: The Next Generation) Jobal Naberrie (Star Wars)

Johnny Rose (Schitt's Creek) Jonathan Byers (Stranger Things) Josh Lucas (Clueless) Josh Lyman (The West Wing) Joshua Matthews (Boy Meets World, Girl Meets World) Joyce Byers (Stranger Things) Jude Lizowski (6teen) Judy Geller (FRIENDS)

Kady Orloff-Diaz (The Magicians) Karen Wheeler (Stranger Things) Kate Bishop | Hawkeye (MCU) Kate Kane | Batwoman (DCU) Kaydel Ko Connix (Star Wars) Kelsey Pokoly (Craig of the Creek) Kes Dameron (Star Wars) Kimi Finster (Rugrats) Kit Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events) Kitty Pryde (X-Men) Klaus Baudelaire (A Series of Unfortunate Events) Krusty the Clown (The Simpsons) Kyle Broflovski (South Park) Leah Birch (Big Mouth) Leia Organa (Star Wars) Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events) Lenny Briscoe (Law & Order) Lenny Bruce (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)

Leo Markus (Will & Grace) Leonard Green (FRIENDS) Lexi Howard (Euphoria HBO) Libby Stein-Torres (The Ghost and Molly McGee) Liberty Van Zandt (Degrassi: The Next Generation) Lilly Moscovitz (The Princess Diaries) Linda Belcher (Bob's Burgers) Lorna Dane | Polaris (X-Men) Louis Stevens (Even Stevens) Louise Belcher (Bob's Burgers) Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice) Mabel Pines (Gravity Falls) Macie Lightfoot (As Told By Ginger) Marc Spector | Moon Knight (MCU) Margaret Simon (Are You There God? It's Me Margaret) Max Blum (Happy Endings) Michael Moscovitz (The Princess Diaries) Michelle "MJ" Jones (MCU) Midge Maisel (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) Mike Wheeler (Stranger Things) Min Green (Why We Broke Up) Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Big Mouth) Moira Rose (Schitt's Creek) Molly Tillerman (Central Park) Mona Lisa Saperstein (Parks & Recreation) Monica Geller (FRIENDS)

Moose Pearson (Pepper Ann) Morgan Matthews (Boy Meets World) Mort the Mortician (Bob's Burgers) Morticia Addams (The Addams Family) Ms. Frizzle (The Magic School Bus) Nadia Diamondstein (The View from Saturday) Nancy Wheeler (Stranger Things) Natasha Romanov | Black Widow (MCU) Nick Birch (Big Mouth) Owen Tillerman (Central Park) Padmé Amidala Naberrie (Star Wars) Paige Hunter (Central Park) Paris Geller (Gilmore Girls) Penny Hartz (Happy Endings) Pepper Ann Pearson (Pepper Ann) Peter Parker | Spider-Man (All variants) Pietro Maximoff | Quicksilver (MCU, X-Men) Poe Dameron (Star Wars) Pugsley Addams (The Addams Family) Rachel Berenson (Animorphs) Rachel Berry (Glee) Rachel Green (FRIENDS) Rachel Menken (Mad Men) Ray Ploshansky (Girls) Rebecca Rubin (American Girl)

Ren Stevens (Even Stevens) Riley Matthews (Girl Meets World) Ron Stoppable (Kim Possible) Rose Krensky (American Girl) Ross Geller (FRIENDS) Roza Wasserstein (The Diviners) Ruth bat Seraph | Sabra (MCU) Ruwee Naberrie (Star Wars) Ryoo Naberrie (Star Wars) Sam Manson (Danny Phantom) Sam Windkloppel Westing (The Westing Game) Schmidt (New Girl) Scott Lang | Ant-Man (MCU) Sebastien LeLivre | Booker (The Old Guard) Sergei "Sam Lloyd" Lubovitch (The Diviners) Seth Cohen (The OC) Shara Bey (Star Wars) Shirley Cohen (A League of Their Own) Shoshannah Shapiro (Girls) Sola Naberrie (Star Wars) Spock (Star Trek) Stan Pines (Gravity Falls) Stanley Uris (IT, IT: Chapter Two) Steven Universe (Steven Universe) Sunny Baudelaire (A Series of Unfortunate Events)

T.K. Strand (9-1-1) Ted Moseby (How I Met Your Mother) Ted Wheeler (Stranger Things) The Children (How I Met Your Mother) The Goldbergs (The Goldbergs) Tina Belcher (Bob's Burgers) Tina Cohen-Chang (Glee) Tish Katsufrakis (The Weekenders)

Toby Isaacs (Degrassi: The Next Generation) Toby Ziegler (The West Wing) Tommy Pickles (Rugrats) Tommy Shepherd | Speed (MCU, X-Men) Tsabin | Sabé (Star Wars) Turtle Wexler (The Westing Game) Velma Dinkley (Scooby-Doo) Violet Baudelaire (A Series of Unfortunate Events) Wanda Maximoff | Scarlet Witch (MCU, X-Men) Wednesday Addams (The Addams Family) Will Byers (Stranger Things) Willow Rosenberg (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) Yelena Belova | Black Widow (MCU) Yitzhak (The Old Guard) Zed Necrodopoulous (Disney Channel ZOMBIES) Zevon Necrodopoulous (Disney Channel ZOMBIES) Ziva David (NCIS) Zoey Necrodopoulous (Disney Channel ZOMBIES)

#hanukkahbingo #jewish characters #jumblr #hanukkah

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arcyouready · 4 years

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general starter call for jane foster. if you hit the heart, this means you are okay with me throwing starters / memes at you whenever i feel like it. might be tonight, might be in a week, but you’re interested! i love my little scientist.

#;general starter call #;general starter call: jane foster #mcu rp #jane foster rp

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freudensteins-monster · 3 years

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You Say “Mad Scientist” Like It’s A Bad Thing

Based on my own tumblr post: 3am thoughts… Has anyone written Jane Foster as a mad scientist, I mean like a villain?

Chaotic neutral Darcy and Jane featuring modern/human SHIELD Agent Bucky.

Available on AO3.

Content Warnings: Implied/Referenced Torture, Aftermath of Torture, Amnesia, Memory Suppressing Machine | The Chair (Marvel), Dark, Sort Of, Ambiguous/Open Ending...

In a world full of megalomaniacs, straight up supervillains, and fricking aliens, mad scientists were a dime a dozen. Dr Foster was one such scientist who was quickly moving from mildly irritating to SHIELD’s Most Wanted.

Dr Foster’s gimmick was portals. She first gained international attention when she claimed responsibility (via an untraceable Instagram account, @dr-mthrfckng-foster) for diverting LA’s 405 to a dirt road in rural Australia. Then came a string of impossible robberies – bank vaults and the private collections of the world's richest assholes stripped bare in seconds. Then she created a portal that caused an Indonesian typhoon to bear down on Wall Street, flooding the trading floor. And then she robbed a top secret government black site of some classified technology.

And that’s when Director Nick Fury made finding and stopping Dr Foster SHIELD’s number one priority.

Agent James Barnes had been stuck on suspension for two weeks, with two more to go, and was itching to get back into the field. He had way too much free time on his hands: he’d caught up on his sleep and everything in his Netflix queue. He’d cleaned out his refrigerator, done laundry and enough meal prep to last him until next month. He’d caught up with his family, cleaned his whole goddamn apartment twice, and now he was well and truly bored.

He was out for his fifth run of the week (and it wasn’t even Wednesday) when his work phone rang.

“Thank Christ,” he muttered before answering.

“Barnes.”

“It’s Hill. How’s the arm?”

“Fine,” Barnes grunted, rotating his metal shoulder irritably. “You got something for me?”

“Are you up for a recon mission?”

Usually he would have protested. He headed tactical units. He was an elite ‘first through the door’ kind of field agent. Not that he couldn’t be stealthy and patient - he’d been a sniper in the army for christ's sake - but going unnoticed in public was kind of a problem for him these days; he’d have to wear jackets and gloves in the middle of August to hide his prosthetic for starters.

On the other hand, his mother had been calling him every second day to feed him carb-heavy meals in exchange for help around the house, all while dropping not-so-subtle hints that he should start dating again. Requests for more grandchildren couldn’t be far behind.

“I’ll be there in thirty.”

Thirty-five minutes later Agent Barnes was back at his desk at SHIELD HQ perusing through the increasingly large file of one Dr Jane Foster.

She had been a brilliant student and had earned a PhD in Astrophysics from Culver University by the age of 25. By all accounts she should have been one of the leading researchers in her field, and if doctoral programs handed out superlatives Dr Foster’s would have been “Most Likely To Win a Nobel Prize By 30”.

Unfortunately for Dr Foster, and the rest of the world, she had been forced from that path by a sexist tenured professor who publicly denounced her theories, and the woman herself, as crazy, discredited her published work, and used his influence to ensure she was denied all of the more lucrative research grants.

When federal agents went to interview him after the 405 incident they found his office looking like a tornado had gone through it and the professor himself was nowhere to be found. A few weeks later he stumbled into a US Embassy in Russia after being found wandering in from the forests outside Vladivostok, half mad and still decrying the evils of allowing women into scientific fields.

He had been placed into witness protection and promptly admitted into a psychiatric facility under his new name, and was being monitored by several undercover agents in case Dr Foster felt like punishing him some more.

Anyone else who had a part in ruining Dr Foster’s legitimate career was also under surveillance, as was her mother in London, a terrified ex-boyfriend in Boston, and a handful of known associates, though Dr Foster hadn’t been in contact with any of them in years.

SHIELD and other federal agencies had tried the usual methods of tracking down a rogue mad scientist. They tried to find out where her base of operations was, firstly by looking for any properties in her name, but Dr Foster had been a broke student with an impressive amount of debt (until the day she decided to wipe it, and the rest of Culver’s student debt, out). So if she had property it would definitely not be in her legal name and all but impossible to trace back to her. Then they tried to look for drains on the powergrid. However she managed to generate her portals - SHIELD scientists still hadn’t figured that out - it surely had to be using huge amounts of electricity. So far they’d found six grow labs and two server rooms running illegal god-knows-what, but no Dr Foster.

Agent Barnes read the file twice, reviewed all the transcripts of the interviews with her known associates, and came to one very important conclusion: she had an accomplice.

As smart as Dr Foster was there was nothing in her academic history to suggest that she had a background in computer science that would account for the notable hacks and the untraceable nature of her activities. To add to that several interviewees had made passing remarks about her not having a cell phone for most of her academic career, and how she had zero interest in social media.

Two days later, after getting the okay for a field trip from Hill, Agent Barnes made his way to Culver University to speak to anyone who had even the vaguest recollection of Dr Foster. And that’s how he learnt about the intern.

He’d started by dropping by one of the physics labs where Dr Foster had spent most of her time, and by pure chance met a doctoral candidate who remembered her, and her intern.

“I think her name was Darlene. Glasses. Always on her phone.”

…which led him to the academic advisor who put the two of them together...

“Darcy. Darcy Lewis. She was actually a PoliSci major but left it too late and Dr Foster’s internship was the only one available. She had only been working with her for a few weeks before… before Dr Foster’s funding was revoked and she was asked to leave.”

...who pointed him to one of Darcy’s former professors…

“Average student. Good debater. Often late, and always had a coffee in her hand.”

...who gave him a few names of some former classmates who might remember her…

“Not the worst person to be stuck with on a group assignment. Pulled her weight. Obsessed with her stupid iPod.”

“I swear she lived off pop tarts and coffee. And not Starbucks either. Some stupid hipster chain.”

“Deja Brew. Serious problem. Went through one of those loyalty punch cards every week. Always complained about having to go home for the holidays and resort to big chain coffee shops.”

...which had him driving out to Darcy Lewis’ hometown, located a few hours south of Roanoke, Virginia, stopping first at the local high school to speak to the school principal…

“She’d always been good with computers but wasn’t allowed to use them at home for some reason so she spent a lot of time at the local library using theirs. We had to suspend her once. One of her classmates accused her of accepting payment from other students to hack the school’s records and alter their grades. Their grades were definitely getting altered, but we couldn’t get any concrete proof it was her.”

...who was able to find a photo of 16 year old Darcy in an old yearbook and told him what bar he could find Darcy’s mother in.

“She knows not to come to me if she’s in the shit, because I would call the cops in a heartbeat. Especially after that stunt she pulled before she went off to college…”

“What stunt was that, Ms Bennett?” Agent Barnes asked patiently, hoping he wouldn’t have to enable her alcoholism to get some useful information.

“I made some mistakes, okay,” she slurred defensively. “I was having an affair with my boss. Don’t know how Darcy knew. She told her stepfather but he didn’t believe her. Then a few weeks later we went out to dinner for my boss’s birthday... all the tv’s in the bar start showing security camera footage of us falling into offices and motel rooms. Took her all of a minute to ruin two marriages and a law firm.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied diplomatically. “Is there anyone she could turn to for help? Her father, perhaps.”

“He died when she was about twelve. They were as thick as thieves,” she recalled with a tinge of bitterness.

“Was there any place that was special to them? Someone she might go to ground?”

She shook her head. “He used to rent this old cabin near the Catskills off a buddy of his every other year. Winter or summer, Darcy loved it. But it's long gone. Forest fire, I think, the year before his accident.”

Back in his car Agent Barnes reviewed the data points.

Dr Foster had a base of operations somewhere. Had to be private, and as best SHIELD could guess it must be off the grid and Dr Foster must be generating her own power.

Dr Foster was a space nut at heart, and while an abandoned observatory might be too much to ask for, she’d probably want somewhere with minimal light pollution.

And while they could portal anywhere, neither of them spoke any other languages and had no familiarity with any international locations, so they were most likely still State-side. (Dr Foster’s mother had moved to London when Jane was twenty-three, but she’d never found the time to visit.)

Miss Lewis was familiar with the Catskills area. A base of operations there could be very isolated.

Dr Foster was most likely building and modifying her own own equipment so she had to be able to access materials. Sure, she could portal to her local hardware store, but having Darcy drive into the nearest town for supplies would attract less attention.

Miss Lewis had an addiction to coffee procured from Deja Brew, a small hipster chain with only a handful of locations along on the east coast. While she could have found another way to get her caffeine fix, people were creatures of habit.

Miss Lewis was also known for stocking up on poptarts. In one of the only images of the other side of one of Dr Foster’s portals there was what appeared to be, if one squinted, a box of limited edition pop tarts on a counter.

He plugged it all into SHIELD fancy search engines and got a few results back. The most promising was an abandoned ski chalet turned abandoned research station halfway up a mountain, an hour drive away from an up and coming tourist town, whose main street hosted a Deja Brew cafe. They also had a small mom and pop hardware store, as well as a post office, and a grocery store that had still been selling pumpkin pie pop tarts around the time Dr Foster’s portal had been caught on camera.

Agent Barnes came to with a groan. The flesh of his shoulder where it met his prosthetic felt like it was on fire, and he was pretty sure he could smell fried wiring.

The research station had come up in SHIELD’s initial search for a potential mad scientist's lair, but had been dismissed for not using any power and for not sending back any heat signature readings. Perhaps they’d found a way to fool the scanners. Or maybe they just weren’t in the day the readings were taken. Whatever the reason, Agent Barnes had a good feeling about it. He filled his tank up at the nearest gas station and got on the highway, forgoing checking in at the Triskelion on his way past in favour of driving all night. He’d call Hill when he had something solid.

** *** **

“Fuck…”

He willed his eyes open and came face to face with Darth Vader.

Barnes reeled back at the sound of the synthesized voice. “Who sent you? Who do you work for?! The Rebellion?”

“What the fuck!”

It took him until his eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting to realise that Darth Vader was wearing a grey knit dress and black tights. Darth Vader laughed and ripped off his mask to reveal a smiling bespectacled brunette underneath. The accomplice. Darcy Lewis.

“Sorry, I was just messing with you, dude,” she teased, tossing the mask over her shoulder. “I’ve always wanted to do that. But seriously, who do you work for? Who knows you’re here?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he lied. “I was just camping in the woods, man. I saw the lights and decided to check it out,” he rambled in a lazy Canadian accent. “How the hell did I get here? Did you electrocute me?”

He used his not-quite fake panic to test the limits of his restraints. He’d been strapped into some sort of junkstore barber chair, with thick metal shackles locked around his wrists, ankles, and chest. His metal arm could probably make quick work of them but the damn thing was not responding. His panic became a little less fake.

“Just camping, huh?” she echoed back with a raised eyebrow, leaning forward to the point where Barnes couldn’t avoid getting a good look down her top and the 15-carat pink diamond (worth about 40mil and reported stolen in one of Dr Foster’s vault heists two months ago) hanging around her neck. “So that wasn’t you poking around town this morning?” she asked pointedly, drawing his attention to the wall of monitors he hadn’t noticed showing various street cameras around the town. “I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, dude. You got into town bright and early in a beat up looking truck with plates that didn’t exist two weeks ago and started flashing my yearbook photo around. So, who do you work for?”

He levelled his best steely-eyed agent stare at her and switched back to his native pissed-off Brooklynite accent. “I ain’t tellin you shit, sweetheart.”

“C’mon now,” she cooed, taking a seat on his lap. “Who do you work for? FBI? Interpol? SHIELD? Crawford County Library Services? Listen, I was totally going to return Eat Pray Love, but we had to skip town in a hurry and it got lost in the move. I will totally pay to replace it.”

Years of training (and regular poker games with the Black Widow) had taught him to school his features, even if that last one threw him for a loop.

“Nothing? You sure you don’t want to talk to me? Fine,” she whined. “Jane!”

It was only then that Barnes switched his focus from his captor to his surroundings and realised that there was another occupant puttering about on the other side of the large telescope that took pride of place on a hydraulic platform underneath the research station's retractable roof. The infamous Dr Foster.

“Jane!”

“What?” came the irritated reply.

“Come over here and practise your monologue. Look! You’ve got a captive audience and everything!” she announced, laughing at her own joke.

“I don’t have time, Darcy,” the disgruntled voice argued.

“Hey! I spent two days writing up that monologue, the least you can do is spend twenty-five minutes reading it out loud so I can make sure it doesn’t make you sound too much like a cartoon villain.”

“Twenty-five minutes?! Are you kidding me?” Dr Foster stormed out from behind the telescope to wave a wrench at her assistant. She looked less put together than her ID photo, appearing to be long overdue for both a shower and a nap. “I’m in the middle of something. I’ve almost figured the problem with the mobile portal generator, and… Darcy, why is there a man tied to a chair in my lab?”

“This man?” Darcy snorted, taking Barnes’s chin in her hands and wiggling it about. “This is the intruder. You remember the intruder alert, like fifteen minutes ago? Lots of flashing lights and alarms? Well, I found this guy passed out on the lawn. For most people, hitting my force field would be like getting lightly tased, but this bad boy,” she continued, tapping a fingernail against his dead metal arm, “meant you ended up getting the full 50,000 volts to your heart. Thanks for letting me practice my CPR by the way,” she added with a wink.

“It’s not a force field, Darcy. It’s a glorified invisible pet fence, upsized and modified so it reacts to the electrical impulses in the human body.”

“It keeps people out; I’m calling it a force field.”

This was definitely the weirdest interrogation he had endured by a large margin, Barnes mused as he followed their bickering like a pingpong game.

“Who is he, Darcy?” Jane sighed wearily. “What is he doing here?”

“Fiiiine. Janey, meet Agent James Barnes of SHIELD.”

“What?! SHIELD?!!”Jane screeched. “Why did you bring him here?”

“He found us, Jane. What was I supposed to do?”

“Something other than bringing him inside our secret hideout.”

“I am not killing him and burying him in the woods; I just did my nails.”

Jane scowled, turning the full force of her overtired fury on James. “Why can’t you SHIELD issue jackbooted thugs just leave me alone? Can’t you understand how important my work is? I am challenging the very foundations of modern science - of the laws of the universe! I am on the verge of a breakthrough! And if you or Nick Fury think you can stop me, you’ve got another thing coming!”

Before his mouth could betray him and ask how the hell they knew his boss Darcy spoke up.

“A little off script, but I like the energy, Jane. Very much the mad scientist vibe we’re going for. But next time, try not to make it so personal – we’ve got to hide the target of our frustrations, remember? Instead of saying “SHIELD” say “government”, instead of saying “Nick Fury” say “president”.”

“Right, right,” Jane nodded absently, tapping the side of her head with the wrench she had just been waving around like a weapon.

“Now, go back to work. I’ll handle this.”

“Okay, thanks Darce. Oh, have you seen my soldering iron around?”

“It’s in the locked cabinet because you’re not allowed to use it unsupervised, you know that. Gimme ten minutes, I’ll bring it to you.”

Jane wandered back to her side of the observatory, muttering under her breath, leaving Barnes at Darcy’s mercy.

“She’s not the criminal mastermind here, is she?” he wondered, his eyes roaming over the strange cupcake of a woman in his lap.

“Not exactly,” Darcy admitted. “I mean, it’s not like she set out to be a mad scientist. I kind of rebranded her after that little freeway incident.”

“Rebranded?”

“Yeah. She was in a bad way after New Mexico and then when the first live test of her portal engine went a little sideways I didn’t want dudebros on the internet coming after her, so I changed the narrative. Instead of ‘girl scientist makes mistake, should stick to making sandwiches’ I changed it to ‘Dr Foster, genius astrophysicist, causes chaos, totally on purpose.’”

“And all those robberies?”

“I may have encouraged that. I’m all for sticking it to the one percenters, and Jane needed to fund her experiments somehow,” she added with a shrug.

“So Jane’s the absent-minded professor and you’re the brains behind this operation, huh?”

Darcy laughed and slid out of his lap causing a distracting amount of friction. “I’m really not. So you, Coulson, and Fury should be really, really scared.”

“How do you know those names?” he had to know, cover be damned.

“You don’t know? Of course you don’t,” she huffed. “Fury and his clearance levels. I’d tell you to ask him about New Mexico sometime, but you’re not going to be able to.”

“Why not? What are you going to do to me?” Barnes fretted, unable to ignore the sinking feeling that he was in big trouble; she wouldn’t have told him anything if she intended on letting him walk out of here.

“Oh, relax. I’m not going to kill you. I’m just gonna scramble your brain a little.”

She circled his chair, flipping switches as she went, and something behind him started humming ominously.

“So, admittedly I didn’t major in hard sciences. I had an ex who did, but he also fancied himself something of a cat burglar, so when he went to jail I liberated all his college textbooks and gave myself a crash course in electrical engineering. And it helped that those HYDRA designs were really easy to follow.”

“HYDRA?” Barnes cursed.

HYDRA had been the scientific branch of the Nazi regime and believed that discovery required (human) experimentation. They were supposedly eradicated at the end of WWII but Project Paperclip saved some of HYDRA’s greatest minds, giving them immunity in exchange for their genius. If Foster or, more worryingly, Darcy had aligned themselves with some surviving HYDRA faction the results could be catastrophic.

“Yeah, I found them in that SHIELD warehouse when we recovered Jane’s stolen research.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They just call it ‘The Chair’, which is totally not creepy at all,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And this is the Halo,” she added, drawing Barnes’s attention to the whirring circle of metal that was lowering itself over his head.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted, renewing his efforts to break free of his restraints. “Get that piece of scrap metal the fuck away from me!”

“Hey! Don’t mock my work. It may look like I raided a junkyard for the components - and I did - but my welding game is on point. It’s totally safe. Mostly safe. It’s just going to send focused electrical pulses to your…” she paused to consult some smudged writing on her hand, “hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.”

The Halo stopped moving and two metal plates extended, pressing against the sides of his head, holding it like a vice.

“Please… don’t do this,” he begged as she approached him with a rubber mouthguard.

“C’mon, open wide. You don’t want to end up braindead and unable to chew your food,” she jested, waving the thing in front of him. “Oh, just one question before I fry your brain,” she added just when he was about to give in. “How did you find us? I was so careful,” she whined.

Agent Barnes, terrified as he was, still managed to look smug at his small, short lived success. “Deja Brew coffee.”

“Curses!” she wailed theatrically. “Betrayed by my one true love!”

Darcy huffed and quickly returned her attention to the matter at hand.

“Thanks for that,” she said with a smile as she forced him to bite down on the mouthguard. “I’ll know better for next time. Start making my own coffee at home… but it never tastes as good,” she muttered to herself.

She stepped away from him and bent down to pick up a similarly frankensteined industrial remote with long wires snaking back to the chair and a clichéd big red button at its centre. He began struggling anew, screaming around the foul tasting rubber, begging for mercy.

She took great delight in his terrified expression and put on her best supervillain voice, “Give my regards to Nick Fury.”

Nick Fury observed his agent from behind a two way mirror as he sat behind a table in an interrogation room. Barnes had been sitting there for the past hour as still as a statue, except for his unfocused eyes which flitted about the room.

In true horror movie fashion, Agent Barnes’ screams echoed down the mountainside like an avalanche, sending animals fleeing in terror for miles around.

** *** **

Local LEO’s had found him wandering aimlessly down a stretch of highway just outside the ruins of what had previously been Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, and ten minutes after they ran his prints Agent Romanoff had been on a quinjet to collect him. She’d been directed to the nearest hospital and found him sitting up on a bed but not responding or reacting to any of the medical staff as they buzzed around him. Agent Romanoff took a cautious step forward and held her breath as his unfocused eyes settled on her.

“Hello James...”

An excruciating minute later the veil lifted and he attempted a smile.

“Hey Tasha.”

She’d brought him back to base and dragged him to SHIELD’s medical bay for more tests - not that Barnes put up much of a fight, in fact he was terrifyingly compliant. The SHIELD doctors confirmed what the New Mexico doctors suspected: the bruising and electrical burns around his temples and his memory loss were indicative of some back alley version of electroshock therapy. His memories should come back in time - how long was anybody’s guess - but for the moment Agent James Barnes had no memory of the last four weeks.

Fury picked up a tablet with depressingly little information on its screen and stepped into the room, waiting for Barnes eyes to focus on him before taking a seat.

“Agent Barnes.”

“Director.”

“I know you’re probably sick of questions by now, but I have a few more for you, if that’s alright.”

“Yeah, sure…”

It rankled Fury to no end how meak and passive Barnes seemed. Heaven help him, he missed the argumentative sonofabitch.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Being called into your office.”

“What for?”

“I punched Rumlow.”

“Why?”

“He was bragging about taking advantage of a drunk woman at a club when he was last on leave. He didn’t like me calling out his shitty behaviour. He punched me, I punched him back.”

Fury sighed. He hadn't gotten a straight answer out of Barnes at the time of the incident and he couldn’t feel happy about getting one now.

“Do you remember what happened once I called you into my office?”

His brow creased and his eyes zipped back and forth like the carriage of a printer as his mind searched for the elusive memory.

“You suspended me?”

“I did,” Fury confirmed. “For a whole month. But two weeks into it I pulled you in for a special assignment.”

Barnes tensed, shrinking in on himself. The confusion about his lost time seemed to be the only thing that got under his skin, but only when someone brought it up. Once the moment passed he forgot to be concerned about it.

Fury took pity on him. “For the past two weeks I had you running down leads on the whereabouts of Dr Jane Foster.”

“The scientist with the portals? Did she do this to me?”

“It’s not exactly her MO, but then again no law enforcement agency’s ever managed to have a confrontation with her. Never had the chance. Those portals of hers let her keep at a distance. You might have been the first person to have a face to face with her, but I can’t confirm it because I don’t know where the hell you were when this happened,” he grumbled, letting a little more of his usual exasperated tone filter through. “You missed check in by two days. The last we heard from you, you were at Culver running down leads on what you said was a potential accomplice. We found your car in Tromso, Norway, a day after you were found on the side of a road in New Mexico. You don’t appear on any security footage or speed cameras in the area. There’s no activity on your work or personal credit cards. Your activity logs on our highly secure system for the last two weeks are nonexistent, as are your call logs on your work phone. Even the messages you sent Romanoff from your personal phone complaining about your assignment have since been deleted - from her phone too. She’s real pissed about it. As far as your digital footprint is concerned you disappeared from a gas station outside Roanoke, Virginia, last week - do you know how weird it is to know you were headed out towards a place called Roanoke only to up and vanish?” He sighed at Barnes’ painful silence. “Is there anything you can remember, anything at all about Dr Foster or her accomplice? Anything that will help us catch up to you without talking to everyone on campus to figure out what you discovered?”

Barnes’ brow creased in painful confusion.

“I think… I think I saw Darth Vadar.”

Director Fury blinked. “Right…” He took a deep breath to stop himself from venting his frustrations at Barnes, the sorry bastard looked like a kicked puppy as it was. Instead he got up and tapped the tablet against the metal tabletop harder than strictly necessary. “Well, I’ll just go put out a BOLO out for Darth Vadar then.”

“Okay,” Barnes murmured, and promptly zoned out again.

Agent Romanoff exited the viewing room looking uncharacteristically unsettled.

“I want a full detail on him at all times,” Fury ordered as he stormed off towards the elevators. Hill had just stepped off and was looking even more grim than usual. “Until his memories come back he’s vulnerable, and once they do he’ll be a target.”

“I’ll get a STRIKE team on it. Not Rumlow’s.”

“Get another one along with any assets currently not on assignment. Flood that campus, interrogate everybody. I wanna know who the hell Dr Foster’s accomplice is, and I wanna know yesterday. Understood?”

“I think we might have more pressing concerns, sir,” Hill reported, tapping at her tablet as it beeped erratically. “Coulson’s said there’s an issue with the Tesseract. Dr. Selvig read an energy surge from it fifteen minutes ago.”

“NASA didn't authorise Selvig to test phase,” he grunted, taking the tablet from Hill.

“He wasn't testing it, he wasn't even in the room. Spontaneous advancement.”

“Motherfucker.”

#you say mad scientist like it's a bad thing #freudensteins-fics #mad scientist jane foster #competent assistant darcy lewis #shield agent bucky barnes #torture #aftermath of torture #amnesia #winter soldier memory wipe chair #darcy lewis #jane foster #bucky barnes #natasha romanoff #nick fury #maria hill

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fragilemxnds · 3 years

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hw event # 11 - starter call

below is a general starter call for all of my cute lil beans. currently, none are capped so please feel free to go ham. also, please reply so i know who you want specifically. xoxo.

kate bishop - attending with fred weasley - (6/?): america chavez, jean grey, fred weasley, oliver queen, jane foster, & cassie lang

ciri barnes - attending solo ( can be changed) - ( 8/?): martin blackwood, bucky barnes kirei monsula, ariana dumbledore, cassie lang, vic lakota, alicia clark & leia organa

lois lane - attending with loki laufeyson - ( 1/?): dinah lance

felicia hardy - attending with childe - ( 5/?): miles morales, gwen stacey, childe, peter parker,grace shelby, mj watson & buffy summers

clea strange - attending with vision - ( 3/?) grace hargreeves, astrid hofferson & melinda halliwell

#hw : starter call #hwevent11 #[ all characers ; starter call ]

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darthspideys · 5 years

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My thoughts on Phase 4

I AM SO EXCITED FOR PHASE 4 let me just start with that. Just generally, without knowing much about the movies or trailers or anything I am pumped. It looks so cool and there are going to be so many more heroes in the universe and that makes me so happy. I know some people want more focus on like the characters from previous phases but I love that they're staring out with new stuff because its the end of the infinity saga and they want to showcase that before immediately going into sequels and threequels.

Before I get into specific series and movies I want to talk about a couple of general things:

Disney + : I don’t like that “phase 4″ also includes the series(s). don’t get me wrong, I love them like series(s) were my favorite announcements of the night but like it’s weird that they're technically counted in the phase. It makes me feel like if you don’t watch the series you're going to be missing a plot point from a movie which would irk because its a lot easier to buy a movie ticket once or twice a year than to pay for a streaming service every month (though I’ll give Disney this 6.99 isn’t a bad price that's only like a dollar more than Hulu with commercials) .

The logos: Look I know logos aren’t everything but like some of those were... how you say garbage? terrible? a crime? Like some of them were spiderman far from home advertizements bad in terms of graphic design (I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of people using the ‘graphic design is my passion’ meme and it's totally appropriate). Not all of them we’re bad though, like The Eternals one was soo good, I liked how the background was kind of like a starry night, and the Shang Chi one good and the Doctor Strange one was okay. The Hawkeye logo was *chefs kiss* perfect, I love how they took the Fractions Hawkeye logo and updated it a bit because wow yes. The Loki logo was so bad I can’t even look at it, the fan made ones were so much better, loki I’m sorry you deserved better than some clip art that I think makes a word.... and the wandavision one was just werid but then again everything about them is werid so

The casts: MARVEL HAS THE BEST CASTS EVER that’s it im saying it, no I do not take constructive criticism. Say what you will about the movie but like the amount of talent that has been and will be in the mcu is astounding I mean we had RDJ and Chris Evans, who are amazing and Brie Larson (who by the way has a freaking oscar) and now we’re going to have Salma Hayek, Richard Madden, Kumal Nanjani, Natalie Portman is back, MAHERSHA ALI IS BLADE LIKE WOW (I think he has an oscar too correct me if I’m wrong), Awkafina is gonna be in chang chi (I love her sm), and so many others just the amount of talent is astounding.

The diversity: SO MANY WOMEN. AHHH JAne foster as female thor??? Our first LGBTQ character (confirmed at least) is going to be a bi black woman??? AMazing??? Another headlining black superhero with blade??

Moving on to the actual movies and shows. I’m putting a read more because idk if I’m going to talk about every individual announcement but I might so-

My favorite announcement by far had to be the Hawkeye series, because KATE BISHOP BABEY. She is my favorite marvel comics character and soon to be mcu character :) and now she’s going to get the love she deserves and more people will know about her which makes me so happy. Also it’s interesting that they didn’t announce her casting, so I have hope that maybe they will cast someone asian since that’s always been my headcanon for her even though she’s white in the comics. I’m trying not to use a lot of screaming in caps sentences but just know when I think about Kate being on my screen I AM SCREAMING. When I first saw the post about the series I cried because I was so so happy. And fingers crossed this series is taking cues from the fractions hawkeye comics because that really encapsulated Clint’s character in a way the mcu... hasnt (I really hate mcu clint but that’s a story for another time) so I hope that while they introduce Kate they also fix mcu’s clint and make him actually likable. (if you couldn't tell I really really don’t like MCU clint.) or at the very least not screw up Kate like they did mcu clint.

Next up THE SAMBUCKY SERIES. (I know it has a real title but like thats long and I can’t spell soildier to save my life sooo yeah I’m gonna call it the sambucky series in tags and stuff). I know not alot of people are talking about this because we already knew that it was happening, so it’s like yeah we already saw that but seeing Mackie and Stan up on stage together just made it feel so real and it made me so excited. And then Mackie was holidng the shield and I was like ahhhhhhhhhh hes freaking captain America!!! I could write a million essays about why its so important that hes cap and why it means to much to me and a lot of people but,,, another post for another time. But anyway these characters and the actors who play them have so much good chemistry that I can’t wait to really see it. One thing I’m not so excited about... the logo. There was a totally different logo when Disney + originally announced it and I liked that one so much better, this one is just... clunky?? idk but it’s not having that big an impact on my life lol its more of an annoyance then anything.

I feel like now I should mention an actual movie..

THE ETERNALS. I’m going to admit I don’t know that much about the characters or the team (which I will soon fix when I do my wiki deep dive to find out everything) but if your judging just by the cast, this movie is going to be great. I mean the amount of talent in this movie is outstanding and I really have high hopes for what it could be.

Doctor Strange: The multiverse of madness intrigues me more than I thought it would. Like for starters the name is pretty ominous, and the fact that we’re getting an actual confirmation/movie about the multiverse (far from home really let me down in that regard) is really exciting. Also it’s supposed to be the first “scary” mcu movie, I don’t know how scary they can get with a PG-13 rating (which I’m going to guess there going to try to keep because there’s a big chunk of the fanbase that’s young) but that really made me interesting. ALSO WANDA MAXIMOFF IS GOING TO BE IN IT, so that makes me so excited for it because although I’m not the biggest fan of Wanda's character (which I blame J*ss Wh*don for completely and her lack of characterization in the rest of the mcu and the complete nerfing of her powers.... another post for another time.) I’ve always wanted to see her and Steven use magic togther and I’ve seen a few panels where Wanda, Strange and Loki form a little magic squad which I WOULD VERY MUCH LOVE to see put on screen (minus Loki I’m guessing), also maybe this movie will fix a little bit of her characterization? One thing that makes me nervous about this though is the teaser that it “directly connects” to the wandavision series, if I’m not able to get Disney plus and watch the show I don’t want to have missed out on plot points for the movie but I guess we’ll see.

since I mentioned it already, lets talk WandaVision. The logo as a mentioned earlier is so very bad, but- yeah idk it’s just very bad. Also the name is really werid? like wandavision with no space? It’s like they went to tumblr, found thier ship name and was like ‘that sounds like a great name for a show’ (that is their ship name right?). I was not planning on watching this show at all UNTIL I found out that FREAKING GROWN UP MONICA RAMBEAU is going to be in it. I didn’t think they would ever bring her up again in the mcu so I’m so happy that she is going to be in this show and I hadn’t even heard any rumors about this so it was a really fun suprise. Am I sure that they are only putting her in the show so that people will watch the trainwreck that is wanda and visions relationship? Yes. But will I fall into the trap because of Monica? YES. But I think this show could be good if your willing to get past the obvious weridness of human girl is in love with basically a robot, a human looking robot sure if your being generous and maybe not fully a robot (a synthoid?) but it’s still werird because he's not human. I’m curious to see what timeline they use for this, because vision is still dead at the end of endgame. I guess they could use the 2 years between civil war and infinity war but that’s just not a lot of time for a complete story (and if this show “directly connects” the doctor strange 2 then that means that movie takes place pre-thanos as well which would be werid)

That all being said, I am really excited to see Wanda’s character done by someone who isn’t J*ss Wh*don or the R*ssos because they screwed her up so bad and she was such a badass and powerful character in the comics (my personal theory is that all of these men saw that and went ‘a powerful woman? more powerful then men? we can’t have that around here’ like what was done with Carol in endgame).

BLADE. We don’t know much about this movie and I don’t know much about the character but I AM PUMPED even though we don’t have a release date for it yet. I just think Mahersha Ali is so talented and I love Black lead heros so yeah.

THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER am I a little sad they didn't use Thor Four: More thor as our queen Gina Linetti suggested? Yes. But I love this title and it’s just crackhead enough to be acceptable. I’m so happy that this movie is being made, because 1) someone has to make up for the first two thor movies somehow, 2) someone has to fix the mess the R*ssos made of thors character and 3) Thor Ragnarok made me actually like thor as a character, so I want to see more of that Thor. ALSO JANE FOSTER AKA NATALIE PORTMAN IS BACK??? AND SHES GONNA BE FREAKING FEMALE THOR YES YES YES (that picture of her holding the hammer? wow. powerful. showstopping. amazing) I can hear all the dudebros screaming about how much they hate it but 1) who cares what they think? and 2) its completely comics accurate which is thier usual lame excuse for misogyny so they can suck it. ALSO VAL IS THE QUEEN OF ASGARD AND TESSA SAYS SHES GONNA FIND HER QUEEN so we’re gonna get REAL CANON BI VAL (aka out first lgbtq mcu character who is also a woman of color which is so amazing and important!!!!) ANYWAYS THOR IS GOING TO BE AMAZING, its the movie I’m most pumped for AND THE LOGO IS AMAZING and thank you takia watiti for coming to save us.

Black Widow... hmmm... I’m not as excited for this because one it’s not that much of a surprise since we’ve even seen set photos for it and because Scarlett Johanssen, I just don’t like her. I like Nat as a character even though Scarlett has the acting range of a celerity among many other issues but yeah. I’ll still go see the movie because girl power, and the more female led movies are successful the more they’ll make and more it’ll make the stupid dudebros and misogynists in training at my school mad. Also Rachel Wietz is talented and I liked David Harbour in Stranger things (or you know the 5 total episodes I’ve watched)

Shang Chi looks like it’s gonna be good, and idk what the ten rings is but uhh I like it. And I love that we’re getting the actual modern and hopefully they’ll do a little flashback or callback to iron man 3. ALSO AWKAFINA

What if? I love what if comics just because it’s a cool concept and it’s nice to see what if but this feels kind of pointless almost??? Idk I just don’t know why its here (also I originally thought this was going to be on hulu so I’m bitter about that). But I’m interested to see what kind of animation style they’ll go with (which honestly is a huge factor in whether or not I’ll watch it), and depending on what stories they do, if I watch it I’ll probably just end up skipping around and only looking at certain ones.

Spiderman 3, Captain Marvel 2, Black Panther 2: I’m super pumped for all of these!!! I mean especially after that cliffhanger at the end of spidey (which I’m still shook about). I cannot wait to see my girl carol again, and hopefully her movie will explain what’s going on with the “kree sleeper cells” that skrull maria hill talked about in ffh along with what the heck talos and his wife were doing on earth while fury is in space? (also a cute little reuinion scene between fury and carol?) (also also what the heck has carol been doing since captain marvel and before endgame) (also also also plz give me carol rhodey and intoduce jessica drew thanks) okay so maybe I’m asking a lot of this movie but yknow..and I’m always up to see more Okoye because she is iconic and I love her.

Fantastic 4, Look I know there's been a bajillion fantastic four movies and they were all bad ( I personally liked the one With Micheal B Jordan, Miles Teller and Kate Mara) but I have faith in marvel studios. I mean they did take a basically unknown hero and turn him into one of the most beloved heroes and launched that single movie into a cash cow 23 movie freaking franchise (I’m talking tony stark and the tony stark cinematic universe by the way) so I think they can pull off the biggest miracle of all time and make a good fantastic four movie.

Mutants... I don’t really know what they mean by this? Like do they mean X men? Or a new movie called mutants? Or mutants themselves will be peppered into the mcu? I think that it shoud be one of the last two options. Just because even if the x men don’t show up for another 2-3 years its still kinda soon to just reboot the whole thing? (also I don’t think that Jean Gray should be recasted because Sophie Turner slayed that role despite the writing being terrible), even the fantastic 4 movie the lastest one will be 6-7 years old by the time marvel reboots it so- also the x men have just been so overdone by fox in bad ways that I feel like if theyre going to use mutants which they should they should do a new team and pull out some lesser known characters and or just put mutant heros in the mcu which I would love to see.

annnnd an hour later.. here we are. If you made it to the end, thank you because I had a lot to say.

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years

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Secret Wars 2099 #1-5 Thoughts...kinda

As I have no memories, nor apparently any records, of covering this story when it originally released I figured I’d do it as part of my re-reading project.

So the first things I should make clear is that I DID read these issues cover to cover...but in the trade. So if the recap pages of the original issues did something wonky I don’t know about that. Also I’m not covering these issue by issue. There are a few reasons for that.

For starters that’d be more time consuming and whilst I’m never going to make this deadline I’m trying to blast through Spidey 2099 volume 3 as early into the upcoming 2099 event as possible. My pie in the sky plan was to get it done before ASM #833 but that’s not happening now because shit got in my way. Secondly I’ve already read these issues as they were coming out and so I wanted to make the experience more novel for myself and see how they held up as one big story not a set of individual ones.

Due to this I’m likely not going to get into the nitty gritty of this story as I would issue to issue, pulling out ‘this one panel was weird’ and so forth. I’m going to try and discuss the story as an overview.

And from that perspective this was very enjoyable but does have you scratching your head when trying to reconcile it within continuity. On that fro there are three ways to view it.

a) Within classic 2099 continuity

b) Within the then current 2099 continuity off the heels of Spidey 2099 volume 2

c) And within the continuity that’s yet to come. Maybe I even mentioned that in the posts I did for Spidey 2099 volume 3, I don’t remember and don’t want to spoil myself by checking. I DO remember Roberta/Captain America returns which makes continuity confusing

In fact continuity from all 3 POVs is confusing. I think the best thing to do is to treat this as kind of like the RYV Secret Wars continuity. That is to say it’s not about the ACTUAL versions of the characters you’ve come to know and when we next see the new characters introduced here those will be alternate versions of these guys.

In a sense this is a kind of conceptual part of PAD’s over all story. It exists so you know that there are/could be versions of these characters and concepts ‘out there’ and they could show back up in his main story. Similarly the All-New X-Factor issue that hinted at this series did so more conceptually. The idea being a big corporation who own their own superhero team. This series doesn’t directly pick up those plot threads but it’s conceptually similar, maybe even the intention is that Miguel got the idea for his Avengers from that story.

I don’t know though because this Miguel is drastically different to the one we’ve been following from Superior onwards. Now I’m not familiar with the 90s 2099 stuff much but IIRC Miguel does become the head of Alchemax and his father Tyler Stone is wheelchair bound so is this supposed to be diverging off that? I dunno.

Enough about continuity though, taking this story in isolation as I said it’s enjoyable. There isn’t much wrong with it beyond one notable thing and a few nitpicks.

Nitpicks would be stuff like how the ending feels kind of weird. It bookends the start of the story but I just feel outright showing us something that we already knew (that Black Widow 2099 acts like a literal black widow and kills her lovers) just wasn’t a fitting end for this story. It’s not that it is gross so much as it just feels odd and out of place. Like there was a more fitting coda for this story than following the minor exploits of a minor character amidst this story.

The more notable problem is a plot one. This isn’t a deal breaker but I just don’t really understand the relevance of Mordo 2099’s business card being in the Specialist’s pocket. It’s the instigator for most of the plot and yet the Specialist didn’t seem to have anything to do with Mordo. Was it just a coincidence? Was it planted there to throw the Avengers off Tyler Stone’s trail? It’s never explained. I suppose it could be a coincidence but then that’s rather lazy writing beneath PAD’s usual talents.

Beyond that the story is fun but fairly simple.

Essentially this boils down to the Avengers and Defenders meet, fight, interact a bit more, fight some more (with some Avengers siding with the Defenders) and then they team up to beat a bigger threat.

Not much else goes on, but that’s not a bad thing.

This story didn’t need to be Kraven’s Last Hunt or Watchmen.

It was just a fun superhero action story, which frankly is usually all that Avengers or Defenders stories ever amount to. Substance is a rarity for ether team, you want that check out the F4 or X-men.

What this series excels at is filling in some blanks from the original 2099 universe line, revisiting some old characters from it, introducing some new versions of old faces (like Silver Surfer and Hercules) and just giving you enough for each character for there to be some fun interactions. Maybe that’s all a bit basic but fun is fun.

We never had an Avengers nor Defenders 2099 back when the line exists, at least not as far as I know. And the idea that classic characters like Hercules, Valkyrie and the Surfer would still be around makes a lot of sense. The 2099 reimaginings of older characters are also quite fun. Black Widow literally being a woman who eats her lovers was obvious and yet novel. Hawkeye being a hawk/human hybrid was something different from the 616 version. Hercules being a standing for Thor was a brilliant balance of something new yet familiar. Iron Man and Vision 2099 were novel twists on the classic characters. The characters bounced off each other nicely (especially Hercules and Sub-Mariner) and there were some fun match ups.

The stand out (possibly because PAD had plans for her) though is Roberta Mendez, a.k.a. Captain America 2099. If anyone was the main character in this it was her. She was the most out and out heroic and a worthy heir to Steve’s legacy.

In recent years there has been much, shall we say, ‘heated debate’ regarding female characters, poc characters, female body depictions in comics and legacy characters.

Roberta has oddly been left unmentioned in this discussion which is strange as she ticks all the above boxes and yet is also one of the best examples of how to do such characters.

She is not stereotypically sexy, and the story points out the ‘wrongness’ of that. But it places it in the mouth of a minor character who is bad, and beyond that doesn’t dwell on the topic. I think this is smart because it acknowledges potential backlash but also doesn’t become self-indulgent in calling it out. I think that’s part of the umbridge a lot of people feel. The lack of subtlety and the frankly obnoxious degree to which a lot of modern comics attempt to call out bad actors or problematic views. PAD demonstrates the right way to handle this rather than Jason Aaron’s tactics in his Jane Foster Thor run for instance.

More importantly Roberta isn’t built up as heroic or better than her peers or anyone else through unearned tactics. This isn’t Riri Williams or Rey from Star Wars who’s acclaim in story is rather handed to them. She is a corporate stooge and a tool (one who’s literally activated and deactivated), but one with a conscience. And that conscience lets her fight back and make the right choices, but she isn’t a true blue enemy of ‘the system’. She’s morally and ethically compromised as Captain America and entirely clueless and vulnerable as Roberta. But she still saves people, she still helps people, she still has a moral code and she still believes in Steve Rogers’ values. She is a capable combatant and yet far from invincible.

In short...she’s a flawed super hero. It’s a feat of balanced writing that is worth of applause on PAD’s part as I count myself a fan of Roberta a lot actually.

The second most interesting character in this is Miguel.

Miguel’s portrayal here is interesting in general because it’s a departure from what you would expect having read volume 2 or possibly 2099 in general. He is absolutely the head of a big bad corporation. And he uses people. He is willing to enforce his corporate authority unethically. He is NOT a good person. In volume 2 you could describe him as anti-hero lite. He was more violent and clearly more willing to take life than Peter Parker but he wasn’t the Punisher or Wolverine. He was on the side of the angels but wasn’t one of them basically. Here though he’s definitely not on the side of the angels...but he’s also not on the side of the demons either. Rather he occupies this interesting spot in the middle as his Alchemax Avengers are doing good things and he does let the Defenders go at the end of everything. And yet he does safeguard Alchemax’s safety and legacy and manipulates Roberta.

This is another feat of writing as Miguel can’t be easily put into a box marked good nor bad or even anti-hero.

As for the art, I feel it’s a step down from what Sliney was doing in Spidey 2099 volume 2 but it’s still good, it gets the job done and the reinventions of older heroes works.

All in all if you have the time and cash, and aren’t expecting anything mind blowing I’d recommend checking this out.

#Marvel 2099 #Secret Wars 2099 #Secret Wars 2015 #Spider-Man 2099 #Peter David #Miguel O'Hara #roberta mendez #Captain America 2099 #Avengers 2099 #Defenders 2099

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venmousbite · 5 years

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hi you beautifully, amazing talented writers !! I can’t wait to delve deep into my characters, but first I need some more threads going. am I right ?? anyways, please comment below which muse you’d like yours to interact with. if you’re a mumu, please tell me which one of yours AND mine, pretty please. if not then i’ll randomly generate it.

chloe decker ( lucifer/dc )

crowley ( supernatural )

harley quinn ( dc )

jane foster ( marvel )

rebekah mikaelson ( the originals/vampire diaries )

rose tyler ( doctor who )

OFFICIAL CALL. WILL BE LINKED ON MY PAGE UNDER STARTER CALLS.

#hw: plot call #hw: starter call #I just woke up and am rushing can you tell? I have to leave in two minutes #then I swear you all will be spammed with my babes

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irishsunshine-n-l-l-h · 5 years

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Alrighty guys, I wrote this for my grad school writing sample. Be honest. Tell me what you think!

Jane Doe #2

As soon as I saw Ali Bello standing outside Harry’s Auto Parts Store as I was walking in to start the early shift, I knew her car had eaten yet another starter.

I unlocked the employee entrance on the side of the building, leaving her out there in the summer morning cold. It was more for the farmers in the area that we opened at seven a.m.—though with how many times her starter’s gone to shit on her way to work, maybe we opened early specifically for Ali Bello.

I went into the back and grabbed the starter off the shelf and set it on the counter before I unlocked the front door for her.

She was standing there with her arms wrapped around herself, pulling her loose sweater closed. She whipped around when I opened the door, making the bell chime and her dark hair wrap around her face.

She looked worried like I’d leave her out there and she’d never make it to work on time, but luckily, she only worked at the animal hospital in town.

“I need a starter,” she said and pushed past me.

I let the door fall closed and followed her up to the counter where she was already waiting and getting her wallet out of her oversized purse.

I walked behind the counter and took my damn time, not to piss her off, but because I wasn’t awake enough to embody her panic.

“Jack? Did you hear me?” she said. “I called Lucky, but he doesn’t open the repair shop until eight, but I know he’s there by seven-thirty, and I have to be at work by eight and I don’t—” She cut herself off when she saw the starter sitting there in front of her on the counter.

She looked at me and I gave her my best effort of a smile for that early in the morning.

“I’ll even install it for you, if you’d like.”

She smiled and her face lit up in a way that made me actually want to smile back.

Now, small town, plus the fact that Ali Bello and I knew each other, quite well, to say the least, from high school, I knew that she only lived about five minutes from the auto shop. It wasn’t like she had hiked twelve miles to get there.

I locked the store back up and I drove her back to her house where her car was parked in the driveway. I could hear her dog, Tony, barking at us from inside the house.

She sat in a folding chair next to the car while I worked, and she’d hand me whatever tools I asked for. She didn’t want to go sit inside like I told her she could. I think she felt bad for taking me away from work.

The whole thing only took about a half an hour, but at least it was quiet.

I hadn’t really talked to Ali since high school. She was one of the lucky ones that got to go to college, but now, with student debt, she couldn’t afford to buy a new car. She lived with her grandma, who’d gone deaf over the years and I swear she wouldn’t have let Ali keep her Jack Russell terrier, Tony, if she’d been able to hear him bark as constantly as he did.

Ali promised to pay me back in some way. She used to bake a lot when we where younger, and not like how most high schoolers bake, but she’d always have cookies or brownies to share at lunch. I’m surprised none of us weighed a hundred tons by the time we graduated.

When I came back from my lunch break just after one o’clock, Marcus Guerrero sat on the tailgate of Doug Potter’s dented and beat up ’82 Chevy pickup. And when I say beat up and dented, I mean it looked like someone took a baseball bat to it.

“Hey, Cowboy,” I said. I looked over the truck.

“Hey, Lawman.” He slid off the tailgate, his work boots hit the ground with a thud.

When I looked at Marcus, I noticed a few red scratches on his face.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Protestors!” he threw his arms up. “I picked up the feed this morning and when I got to the farm they were everywhere. Apparently, the locals found out that good ol’ Farmer Doug supplied the wine for that town history tour the museum is putting on. The tour, which includes Doug’s farm because of the dead girl they found in the field.” Marcus rubs his face. “They took a damn shovel to the truck while I was still in it.”

I looked at the truck again then at Marcus. “Well, on the bright side, the truck runs well enough to get you here.”

“It’s not funny, Jack. The people in this town are psychotic. I was lucky the sheriff showed up before they got a chance to set the feed in the back of the truck on fire.”

Marcus had a tendency to overreact and overdramatize his stories, but I could tell just by looking at his face, looking at the truck, and knowing the general mindset of this town, he wasn’t making any of it up.

“C’mon, Cowboy, I’ll get the first aid kit.”

I let him in through the side entrance. Harry wouldn’t care if Marcus was behind the counter. Before he got his job at the farm with Doug Potter, Marcus frequented the auto parts store just to hang out with me after we graduated high school.

Marcus was smart enough to go to college, but he didn’t get a chance to save up much money when he bounced around a couple different foster homes.

Marcus’s parents left him at a church in Missouri when he was six. They were heavily religious and thought Marcus had the devil in him. He’d been placed with a few different families, but no one wanted the teenager with a record after he beat a man with a bat at age of thirteen. Marcus never talks about what happened, and it happened during the two years when he moved in with a foster family in the city. He’d been gone only a few months and I got a call from him once he was in juvey.

My first thought was that our old babysitter, Mrs. Hargrove, was right. She was a little weird and always insisted that she was psychic. She said that Marcus had the heart of a cowboy. He was polite, rough around the edges. He liked being alone—he liked the quiet. She also said that I had the truth in my blood and that if Marcus ever got in trouble, I’d be the one take him in like we were two sides of the same coin or some shit. I always wanted to be a cop when I was little so the thought excited me and terrified me at the same time. When Marcus’s hearing came up, I managed to get a ride to the train station and took a bus just so maybe I could speak on his behalf. The man he beat didn’t die, but they considered the bat a deadly weapon and Marcus was lucky that he only got eighteen months under the circumstances, which I never found out what those circumstances were, and Marcus never talked about it. When he got out early, a year later, they placed him back with his old foster family and back at school with me.

“All this over a twenty-three-year-old cold case,” Marcus muttered while I cleaned up the cuts on his face.

They never identified the dead girl in Doug Potter’s field. She’d been out there too long by the time someone found her, and her face was eaten off by bugs and other wildlife. Artists had done renderings of what they thought she might’ve looked like, but this was back in 1994 in our tiny little town, so she remained a Jane Doe and the town buried her in the cemetery across the road from the Harry’s Auto Parts. The only things they did know about her was that she was about twenty-three and had recently given birth. No child was ever found, and they looked at the local hospitals for any abandoned children.

Marcus took off his backwards baseball cap—the one from when he was on the team in high school—and pellets of glass fell onto the cement floor. I pulled a few more pieces of glass out of his curly hair and from the collar of his shirt.

“Did Sheriff Bell take anyone in?”

Marcus bent over and fluffed up his hair to make sure there wasn’t any more glass in it before he but his hat back on. “Just the ones that destroyed the truck. And to be honest, we’re lucky that’s all they went after. It’s hard to come by parts for some of the older equipment.”

“I’ll put in a call to Tina at the junkyard, see if they have any trucks we can take parts off of for the pickup.”

Marcus shook his head.

“You sure you’re okay?”

Marcus shrugged it off. He had a tendency to do that.

Everyone that came in the rest of the day asked about the beat up, broken windowed, truck out in the parking lot, asking if it had anything to do with what happened over at Doug’s farm. News and gossip in this town always spread like wildfire.

Marcus didn’t go back to work. He sat beside me behind the counter reading car magazines until my shift was over at three. He told Doug he was getting the truck fixed and left it at that. I got the notion that he wasn’t ready to go back to the farm just yet.

Things quieted down the following week after the town tour was cancelled in light of the protestors. People complained that the tour was a good idea because it would get that artist rendering of Jane Doe out in the world and maybe someone would recognize her, and others wanted the whole thing dropped to allow her to be at peace.

I felt like shit the last couple days. Maybe it was the heat or maybe I caught something. The weather was seventy percent rain and a hundred percent sweltering heat. There were people who would just come into the store because it was cooler inside with the fans running.

Harry asked me if I wanted to go home, he said I looked like shit, but whatever it was it wasn’t something I had before. I was drained. I’m sure I was running a fever but didn’t exactly have a thermometer or money lying around to go to the doctor. The headache was the worst part of it.

I never got an order wrong, or given someone the wrong part, or given bad advice when it came to fixing cars, but I did all three of those things on Thursday.

I stayed home on Friday. Sleep was my best bet. I woke up around five in the afternoon and was thirsty as all hell. I drank two bottles of water and after I pissed it all out, I felt better. I called Harry and told him I’d be able to come in for my Saturday shift.

It was already boiling hot outside by nine a.m. and it wasn’t letting up. By the time I got to work by noon, it was damn near unbearable to be outside. Doug Potter’s pickup truck was parked outside the store again, but this time with the mismatching colored doors and hood, along with new windows and windshield that Marcus and I found at the junkyard a few towns over last weekend.

Also, sitting there was Ali Bello’s car and my first thought was that the starter went again, but when I got inside, Marcus and Ali were chatting by the watercooler in front of the counter. Ali had a plate of cookies in her hand, which made me smile. Some things never change.

Ali smiled when I came up behind the counter and Marcus just titled his head.

“Hey, Lawman.”

“Cowboy.”

Ali gave us an odd look but pushed past Marcus to deliver the plate of cookies to me. “Payment in full,” she said. “I remembered you liked the banana ones.”

Marcus tried to hide his smile and laugh, and had I been within distance, I would’ve smacked him.

He knows about me and her. He knows everything, which is funny considering how we both tried to forget about it altogether. We acted like nothing happened; that everything we went through didn’t happen.

I would’ve done it for free. I’d do anything for her for free. I promised myself that I’d never take anything from her ever again, but I also know she doesn’t like taking charity. She’s stubborn like that.

Marcus was just there to hang out and Ali stuck around for a while. It reminded me of when we were in high school. The three of us just being around each other like that.

The day was perfect. I wasn’t screwing up any orders and I didn’t fight with Kyle Franklin when he insisted his car needed 10W 30 oil when I knew it takes 5W 30. It wasn’t until Tim Ridgefield walked into Harry’s Auto Parts Store and declared, “There’s a body in the cemetery!” that the day crashed.

Harry, who was standing just beside me behind the counter, didn’t think much of the statement, replying with, “There’s a lot of bodies in the cemetery, Tim, that’s kind of their function”. He didn’t even look up from the papers he was looking at.

“No, I’m serious, Harry, the cops found a body in the cemetery across the street. Like a dead, murdered one,” Tim insisted.

I looked at Harry. “I did hear sirens earlier.” That was all I said. That’s all I could think to say. I didn’t think much of it because people were always speeding on the straightaway in front of the store. I knew what Harry was thinking though. He was thinking that it’s happening again. That girl they found in Doug’s field and now another body.

Harry stood outside the front door for a while watching the cops across the road. They were moving about just on the other side of the hill in the cemetery.

I couldn’t bring myself to look. I just stayed behind the counter. Even after Marcus and Ali left, people came in asking about what was going on across the street, but I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t tell these people that there was another body in our little town. It’s been twenty-three years since the last one and all I could do was pray that they identified this one.

The store was empty aside from me and Matt behind the counter. Matt was about to make a delivery when Sheriff Bell and one of his deputies came in. I figured that they just wanted to ask if we saw anything or if we knew about what was going on, but the way Sheriff Bell looked at me, made my stomach turn.

“Jack,” he said quietly. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I was wondering if you know who this is?” He turned the phone so I could see the photo on the screen.

It was definitely a dead girl. She had long brown hair and her face looked…wrong. Christ, how long had she been dead for before they found her? How many days went by and none of us noticed her.

“I don’t recognize her,” I said quietly, and it was the truth. I didn’t recognize anything about her. Not her hair, her clothes, what was left of her face. I peered across the counter at Bell. “Am I supposed to know her?” It seemed like a dumb question, but I thought maybe he wanted me to implicate myself or something, before he told me that she was an old classmate or a customer.

“We found her body in the cemetery this afternoon. She was lying on your father’s grave, I just thought maybe it meant something.” Sheriff Bell put the phone back in his pocket. “You boys didn’t see or hear anything odd around here the last few days, have you?” He looked from me to Matt, who just shook his head.

“I was sick this week, so I wasn’t really paying attention. I wasn’t even in yesterday.” My mind was already going over my alibi for the last week or so, but I spent most nights home alone and the only one to confirm that would be Coach Teller. He would’ve seen my truck in the driveway and Christ, I lived in his used-to-be but now-renovated shed and I—.

I didn’t kill her, so what the hell was I so worried about?

#my writing #feedback is appreciated #not fan fic

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mercysought · 5 years

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❛ You are extraordinary. ❜ ((for Zofia!))

personalised starters: jane foster ( ACCEPTING ) // @goldenornstein

A drop of incense, a drop of sugar and a drop of blood. She wonders if it is something that he does consciously, have those smells become so entrenched into his armour that it is hard to separate. A smell that remains even after the polish and cleaning of it. In his hair, though she would not say such a thing, not while knowing how that sounded. It was a strange thing, to smell so different and to feel so different than the city around him and yet be so fitting. Zofia chose not to say that as well.

His armour is silent, though she knows that it exists. Or she assumes. Everyone in that city did, though they all bit at the air in a far louder manner than his. Skin like scales. Zofia smiles, her teeth hidden by freckled smiles as her eyes remain hidden, shielded away by heavy eyelids. Her hair brushes against covered shoulders though she can almost feel each single hair brushing against the fabric. Her husband used to tell her that was simply the wind counting them; that it was impossible for anyone not to fall in love with her if they were allowed to stay within her presence for more than a couple of minutes. The wind was no different.

Zofia would smile, the briefest gleam of white teeth with sharpened edges, a slight tilt of the head; blush rushing to the skin beneath the small dots that crossed her skin. She called him a foolish, foolish man. Cute, but he had no need to bloat her ego in such a manner. He smiled; she could hear it in the way that his lips moved, the slight movement of is mouth. The way that his arm wrapped around her arm, his hand landing on top of hers.

She smiles, though closed as it is it is still warm. Both hands rest against the head of her walking cane, hiding the raven head “I have been told.”

Extraordinary. Like a princess of a foreign land, it could only be for the way that the birds seemed to always find their nests around their house. Like a princess for the generosity, for the calmness, the humility. Zofia had never told him, not the full extent of it at least. People like her do not get to live for so long without paying for their lives with their own humanity. She had fought to keep them; and she had survived but the scars of such battles were perhaps the starkest reminders that she should remain strong.

It had been harder still after she buried him. In the whirlwind and the numbness, the sadness and the anger. To remain calm, generous, humble. People like her did not survive without paying for their lives with their own humanity.

“I appreciate the compliment, ser Ornstein.” head tilts and the curls on her head drop slightly, covering her collarbone. After all, it was one given by his own volition, one that was offered without anything in return, without prompt “I have heard many great things about you. It is almost unbelievable that you should stand before me,” a rumble is born at the mouth of her throat. A soft chuckle that weaves itself effortlessly into the wind and the rustling of leaves above them “That a real man exists behind all the stories.”

#goldenornstein #zofia czajkowski ( muses )#raven received ( meme replies )#( ornstein: is nice to zofia )#( me: wow my heart has now grown 4 times bigger what do I do with this )

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wazafam · 3 years

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The newest trailer for Marvel's upcoming Loki series once again features a shot of a redheaded woman sitting with Loki – but it's entirely possible this character is Verity Willis, not Black Widow or even Lady Loki. The third Marvel series for Disney+ will follow the exploits of the God of Mischief after the events of The Avengers, when a 2012 just post-Battle of New York version of Loki snags the Tesseract and poofs out of S.H.I.E.L.D. custody.

However, that action ends up breaking the timeline and so he's conscripted into service by Owen Wilson's Mobius M. Mobius of the Time Variance Authority, who capture and recruit him in order to help them fix the universe he messed up. The trailers make it appear as though Loki will be bouncing around various timelines and running into a number of new characters. One of those new characters is one some believe will actually be an old character: Black Widow. And, it's true, the trailer shots of a redheaded woman with a short bob sitting next to Loki in what appears to be an alien world does bear a rather uncanny resemblance, at least from behind and at a distance, to Avengers-era Natasha Romanoff.

Related: Loki Trailer 2 Breakdown: Every New Secret & Reveal

But there's another character being largely overlooked to this point, and it's one who has important ties to Loki in the comics: Verity Willis. Here's why it's entirely possible that the redheaded woman people keep spotting in the trailer is Verity, not Natasha - or even Lady Loki, as others have posited.

As with many Marvel movies and TV shows, the Loki series looks to be a very loose adaptation – call it a spiritual adaptation – of the Loki: Agent of Asgard series by Al Ewing & Jason Aaron. In that series, he's not working for the TVA, but the All-Mother. Determined to erase his past as a villain and become a truly good person, Loki agrees to be a secret agent for Asgard. For every successful mission he pulls off, one of his sins is stricken from the gods' record book and replaced with a good deed. Though it appears that in the series he'll be helping the TVA for slightly less noble reasons, at least at first, but the core premise is the same: Loki acts as an agent sent on various missions across time to right wrongs and atone for his crimes.

While Loki establishes himself on Earth, one human he meets becomes more important than anyone to him: Verity Willis. Verity is a human who, through an accident when she was a baby, possesses the ability to see through any lie or illusion, whether told for good or ill intention – making her an intriguing and formidable match for Loki, the master of lies, even with his magic. While he's shocked she immediately sees through his guise of an old man, eventually, the two form a bond that blossoms into a close friendship. Over time, Verity becomes Loki's best friend, arguably the only real friend he's ever had. While Verity hasn't made any appearances outside of the Agent of Asgard comics, she had an enormous impact on Loki.

It's unlikely that the woman in the trailer is Natasha. For starters, it's not generally been Marvel's way to reveal something that big in the trailers. Secondly, it just doesn't make much sense to bring her back. While Black Widow is now coming out a month after Loki, it was originally supposed to be released well before the Marvel Disney+ show and its new release date was only decided upon a few weeks ago. With Natasha's death in Avengers: Endgame, Black Widow director Cate Shortland and Scarlett Johansson both have said that the movie was meant to serve as a final goodbye to Natasha and give her the proper send-off she deserves. With that in mind, it would be incredibly odd for Marvel to bring back Black Widow for a cameo in Loki as it would undercut the emotional impact of her sacrifice in Endgame and everything her solo film is trying to accomplish.

Related: Phase 4 Needs To Explore Black Widow's Death For Bucky's Sake

Of course, it is possible that it is Natasha in an alternate timeline: After all, of all the Avengers Loki has gone up against, Black Widow is likely the one he's closest to having a grudging respect for seeing as how she played him at his own game in Avengers to learn his plan for the Hulk. The others he doesn't have much use for, but Natasha's successful deception is something that, in his own perverse way, Loki would approve of. But even that doesn't make much sense.

Nor is it likely to be Lady Loki for no other reason than that it would be a wild reimagining of how she looks in the comics. In the comics, she's literally just the female form of the genderfluid Loki and as such looks exactly like him: Black hair, green eyes, pale skin. That's not to say Lady Loki won't be appearing in the Loki series - in fact, it seems almost certain she will, especially now that the trailer has confirmed there are "variants" of Loki in different universes or timelines – it's just that it's unlikely she's the redhead people keep spotting in the trailer. Even more than Black Widow, Lady Loki would be a character Marvel would absolutely not give away in trailers.

There is admittedly a third option: It's Lady Loki glamoured to look like Black Widow. If that were the case, technically, that shot in the trailer would neither undermine Natasha's end as it's not actually Natasha, nor would it give away that it's Lady Loki as it doesn't reveal her on the surface. Still, for everyone convinced it's Black Widow or Lady Loki in that scene are overlooking what Verity could bring to the series.

The Loki of the Disney+ series is not the Loki who found himself on a redemption arc after the brutal blow of his mother's death and helping Thor save Jane Foster in Thor: The Dark World, losing his adoptive father and defending Asgard against Hela in Thor: Ragnarok, or attempting (however uncharacteristically poorly) to kill Thanos and keep the Tesseract from him in Avengers: Infinity War. This is the Loki who was under the control of the Mind Stone until recently and who had attempted to take over the world by destroying New York. If he wants to be redeemed, something or someone will have to propel him toward a redemption arc. That something could very well be Verity Willis.

Related: Loki Trailer Confirms Loki Is Behind The MCU's Multiverse Problem

In the comics, Verity was the only person Loki couldn't fool and because he had to be completely honest with her, she was arguably the only person in this world or any other who got to know Loki for exactly who he was. It was Verity's faith in Loki and her true friendship that gave him the encouragement he needed to cast off his title of the God of Mischief to become the God of Stories. It mattered to him that she always knew he was telling the truth after a millennium of him lying so much for so long that no one believed him when he actually did tell the truth. As he says to her in Loki: Agent of Asgard #6, "Verity-- I'm sorry. I'm not used to having friends, and I don't know how to be a good one. But I'm trying. And I want to change. I want to be better than I am. [...] Just... trust me. Trust in me.”

While the Loki of the series is a pre-redemption Loki, it doesn't mean he's a completely different Loki. He's still the same Loki, just from an earlier point of time. All the willingness to become a better man and grow closer to Thor is still theoretically inside him – he just needs a bit of a push and a reason to want to become a better man. There are a number of different ways Loki could set him on a path to becoming a true hero, but it would create the most interesting dynamic if it were Verity Willis, and not Black Widow or Lady Loki, who helps the God of Mischief do it.

More: The Loki Series Needs To Show Thor's MCU Journey From Loki's Perspective

Loki Theory: The Woman In The Trailer Is Verity Willis (Not Black Widow) from https://ift.tt/3rUvto9

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compendiumofconstellations · 4 years

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Marvel Cinematic Universe Interest Call -- This lets me know for starter calls, meme calls, unspecified memes, and interactions in general who is interested in interacting with what muses.

Muses Include: Thor Odinson (Heavily Canon Divergent), Jane Foster (Heavily Canon Divergent), and Hope Van Dyne

#ooc #interest call

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wendyimmiller · 4 years

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Lingering Springs, Bittersweet Memories and The Evolution of a Gardener

The latest in the on-going correspondence between Marianne Willburn & Scott Beuerlein.

__________________________________

May 14, 2020

Lovettsville, VA

Dear Scott,

My heart aches for you and your family coping with the loss of your mother. In a normal year it would be emotionally draining, but right now, with the ability to have less than ten people at the funeral? I am deeply sorry you have had to cope and grieve while normal life is upside down – I cannot imagine. It was this time last year that we lost my father, and that was hard enough.

The arrival of spring has brought back a lot of that tension and sadness. Memory adheres gently to seasons. For years I could not see pumpkins on porches and smell cinnamon in stores without experiencing waves of psychosomatic morning sickness brought on by having not one, but two, romantic Septembers. And now, Dad is messing with spring.

I have had words with him about it. Proper out-loud words to the sky when I’m in the vegetable garden, which is one of the reasons we needed to live somewhere without visible neighbors. That and the outdoor restroom facilities.

I have wondered many times over the last year what Dad would think about my garden now. It is very young, but the last time he saw it, it was a newborn, and for the most part not to be seen. Dad never went in for ornamentals in the same way that he loved his vegetables and the natural world around him. My guess is that he would have nodded gently, raised his eyebrows over some of my kaleidoscope combinations, and then pulled up a chair in the vegetable garden and asked for a beer.

Dad and I in the garden that fed our family during “the college years” in Iowa.

My very earliest memories of a purely ornamental garden and the high ambitions of its creator – a good family friend – are equally strong memories of the bemusement my father felt for such frivolous things. I can still see the marble statues…hear the plans for an amphitheater being discussed with animated hands as mosquitos danced around us in the dusk…and I can still see my father shaking his head.

I must have been ten or eleven and no doubt more focused on one of the wonderful treats Mr. Willson had prepared for us indoors to care what an amphitheater was. Now I routinely stand with gardeners in their Edens and discuss overreaching plans that are based in fantasy and a glass of red wine – including my own.

The only shot I have of Mr. Willson proudly standing in his California foothills garden.

He is gone now too, but I so wish I had had more time to see his garden and his marvelous plans with wiser eyes. I have an aloe pup (of a pup of a pup) he gave me that sits on my desk next to this picture.

Speaking of wiser eyes – or at least, eyes that are now wise enough to recognize how thoroughly un-wise they are – what a brilliant column on the evolution of gardeners in Horticulture this month! No rebuttal from this quarter – you nailed that one. Judging from my young adult children, and my own memories of being supple, invincible and insufferable, it is not only gardeners who go through this “I-know-everything-I’m-a-rock-star” phase.

The fermenters for one. If I am lectured one more time at a party on the merits of lactobacillus by a bearded, gym-ripped Adonis with a koi tattoo on his calf, I may lose my carefully curated reputation as a well-behaved guest. Or as you might say, ‘my shit.’

I get it dude. You can pickle cabbage. So can I. So can three-quarters of the population of Poland. May I assume you’re also fostering a rare sourdough starter you brought back from a hostel in Bratislava last summer?

Whew. That’s obviously been building up.

But as you say (much more wisely, gently, and 100x less arrogantly than I seem to be able to express), it’s payback. I cringe to think of the party-goers I have annoyed with my new gardening discoveries that read to them as ancient history.

And the ones I’m currently annoying for that matter. It’s all relative. Until we leave this Earth with cherubims and seraphims at our heels, there is always someone older and wiser that wants to punch us in the mouth.

Perhaps all this confidence is as it should be. If in those earliest days of discovery, we were to come up against the enormity of all that we know right now that we don’t know, and not experience any wins that made us feel special…made us feel like we alone knew the answer…I think we’d most likely run scared, and turn our talents to ditch digging or politics. I have never felt less able to call myself an expert on growing things than I do now, more than twenty-five years into growing things.

And I feel almost panicked over how little time there is to absorb all that I’m hungry to learn. I’m at it 24/7 and there still isn’t enough time. Life gets so complicated so quickly that dropping everything and offering my unpaid services to Keith Wiley or Fergus Garrett or Panayoti Kelaidis for a year in exchange for knowledge unbound requires that I fake my own death.

One view (amongst hundreds) of Keith Wiley’s garden at Wildside in Devon. Yes, I know we’re back to England and it’s a sore point with you, but when I see a garden like this I realize the enormity of what I have left to learn.

Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Why can’t we have two decades in our twenties? One to try everything and one for keeps. Or is that what our thirties are supposed to be?

But enough of philosophy and supple young joints.

We too have had one of the most glorious springs in memory. Long and lingering, it has allowed so many early bloomers such as epimedium, dicentra (I know, lamprocapnos, &$%@! taxonomists), claytonia, brunnera, trillium, mertensia, narcissus, leucojum, kerria etc. to hold those blooms for weeks – right up until the freezes we had that you sent from the Midwest.

Self-seeded and superb – Brunnera macrophylla

Even the sanguinaria held on longer than two days. After the freezes, the temps stayed cool and revived almost everything. My newish ‘Rose Marie’ magnolia took a huge hit – both blossoms and leaves – as did ‘Jane’, but as Michael said, now they can boast of a tough childhood.

Sanguinaria canadensis ‘Multiplex’

One of the most surprising semi-casualties was a Rodgersia podophylla ‘Rotlaub’ I have grown for five years since I brought it back from Dancing Oaks Nursery in Oregon. It has weathered much in the way of crazy springs, flagged a little, but never been hit so hard by a cold snap. As I thought of it as an early emerger, I was gobsmacked that it couldn’t pull itself together for a night. But when I went back to my records, I realized that the warm winter had gently made me think that we were later than we were, and with all the days blending together right now, who the hell knows what day of the week it is, much less where the rodgersia should be.

Still, lesson learned, filed away under ‘fail,’ and thankfully the plant has begun to re-sprout. I understand from a friend in Colorado that this is a normal state of affairs in a region that giveth and taketh away every May, but it’s hard to see such a gorgeous plant on its knees. Again, this is where you cannot beat hard experience – and many years of it.

The Lord giveth….

And the Lord taketh away.

Meanwhile, in more resilient quarters, each spring I come back to epimedium and brunnera as two genera that are woefully underplanted by the general public. It’s not their fault. For whatever reason neither is commonly sold. It probably has much to do with how they present in 6” pots – not as much come hither as a greenhouse begonia. But so much ease, and so much to offer shade gardeners tired of staring at hosta. Unaffected by the freezes, and by most things really Except for Southern blight on the brunnera in the summer months – yep, that scourge is in my soil in places.

A little ‘Jack Frost’ brunnera in the midst of some blushing E. x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’

I share your enjoyment of ostrich ferns and try very hard not overuse them in my quest to conquer Japanese stilt grass. They are overusing themselves I fear. Plant one, you have a hundred; and as you say, late freezes halt them only for seconds. They have already shoved out a robust stand of Arisaema triphyllum and are heading for the A. ringens and A. consanguineum if I don’t pull out the shovel. And move the arisaema. Such beautiful Jurassic monsters.

Do you grow vegetables somewhere on that plot of yours? The asparagus are coming in well this year and the kale is putting a little green in my juice every day.

Wait, that’s every week. I’m forgetting. It’s the wine I drink every day. The wine.

Especially at the moment.

I have put off mentioning COVID-19 and the unbearable state of things until the end of this letter, and quite frankly, I am tempted to sign off and leave it there, the entire business is so upsetting. But in response to your question – should we build gardens for nursing homes and tend gardens for first responders during this pandemic – the answer is of course yes; but then, we should build gardens and help our struggling neighbors where we have the ability at every opportunity.

Though it seems like this will never end, it will. The true question is, will we do these things when it is all over? Will the new Victory Gardeners keep gardening without a pandemic to worry them? Will people still remember to bring a bouquet of tulips to a nurse’s door, or plant up a windowsill garden for an elderly friend when there are stores to be shopped and weekend recreating to be done. Will I?

I hope so. We are not judged so much I think by what we do when the emergency is obvious and push comes to shove, but what we do when the world stops shoving and we can quietly return to familiar routines. Your thoughts are laudable and wonderful however. Do not let my cynicism blight them.

As for your promise of you both joining me in the UK next year on a garden tour, you might want to ask yourself if you are truly safe in a country whose beloved horticultural institutions you’ve publicly disparaged. I’m not saying I would rat out your identity, but then again, I’m not saying I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t let them hurt Michele – she’s one of us.

Make sure Michele brings this picture tucked into her passport. They may require proof.

As for me – do I want an Olympic level smart ass sitting in the back of the [exceptionally comfortable] coach, sipping red wine and throwing out occasional witticisms to the raucous laughter of all present? I sat through that once already remember.

What the hell. But I’m telling you right now, I’ll have the microphone this time and I know how to use it.

My best to you both,

Marianne

P.S. We got a new puppy. An Irish Wolfhound named Nessa. Mungo is currently seeking legal representation.

P.P.S. Love your mossy walks. LOVE them.

Lingering Springs, Bittersweet Memories and The Evolution of a Gardener originally appeared on GardenRant on May 14, 2020.

The post Lingering Springs, Bittersweet Memories and The Evolution of a Gardener appeared first on GardenRant.

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turfandlawncare · 4 years

Text

Lingering Springs, Bittersweet Memories and The Evolution of a Gardener

The latest in the on-going correspondence between Marianne Willburn & Scott Beuerlein.

__________________________________

May 14, 2020

Lovettsville, VA

Dear Scott,

Dad and I in the garden that fed our family during “the college years” in Iowa.

The only shot I have of Mr. Willson proudly standing in his California foothills garden.

Whew. That’s obviously been building up.

Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Why can’t we have two decades in our twenties? One to try everything and one for keeps. Or is that what our thirties are supposed to be?

But enough of philosophy and supple young joints.

Self-seeded and superb – Brunnera macrophylla

Sanguinaria canadensis ‘Multiplex’

The Lord giveth….

And the Lord taketh away.

A little ‘Jack Frost’ brunnera in the midst of some blushing E. x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’

Do you grow vegetables somewhere on that plot of yours? The asparagus are coming in well this year and the kale is putting a little green in my juice every day.

Wait, that’s every week. I’m forgetting. It’s the wine I drink every day. The wine.

Especially at the moment.

Make sure Michele brings this picture tucked into her passport. They may require proof.

What the hell. But I’m telling you right now, I’ll have the microphone this time and I know how to use it.

My best to you both,

Marianne

P.S. We got a new puppy. An Irish Wolfhound named Nessa. Mungo is currently seeking legal representation.

P.P.S. Love your mossy walks. LOVE them.

Lingering Springs, Bittersweet Memories and The Evolution of a Gardener originally appeared on GardenRant on May 14, 2020.

The post Lingering Springs, Bittersweet Memories and The Evolution of a Gardener appeared first on GardenRant.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/2WTIAZp

#GardenRant

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