#does this actually make sense or am i just waffling a load of nonsense here? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

demoanais · 3 years

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This will all be moot in a month but I feel like I'm in danger of being misunderstood so I wanted to make my position more clear for the record:

I AM happy Sharon is shown to be hurt, angry and cynical. She's more than earned that. EVC is perfect for playing with the dark side of her character, she has plenty of great experience to tackle that duality. Exploring deeper layers of Sharon is a welcome shift.

I AM happy that the show acknowledges that Sharon was wronged after merely doing the right thing and has long been suffering the consequences of a punishment that vastly exceeds the crime. Of course that's changed her outlook, how could it not?

I AM happy that Sharon has still managed to build a stable life for herself despite all this pain; she is extremely self sufficient and capable and takes great pride in that. It's the emotional blow that stings her the most - she has survived but it never needed to be this hard.

I AM happy that she didn't welcome sam and bucky with open arms and chat like nothing was wrong. She gave up everything and look where it landed her; they were being naive and insensitive to think she'd so happily jump back into the fray for their sakes with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

I AM happy that despite her misgivings and distrust, she still lent her strength to sam and bucky's efforts because at her core, that's who she is. She hasn't lost her sense of morality even if her heart isn't exactly in it like it used to be.

I AM unhappy about the execution of all of the above.

For example, you have Sharon ask about new cap. Before bucky can elaborate, she cuts him to the quick by accusing him of blind loyalty to the mantle. But that isn't accurate. If bucky's so-called arc is anything, it's demonstrating how his insecurity and lack of direction are causing his grudges to overtake his better judgement.

For him, *everything* is personal. He was steve's friend before he was captain america's, and that's where meaning dwells for him. He doesn't want the shield back or blame sam for giving it up too easily because of some idealogical obsession with 'stars and stripes bullshit' - he thinks it's a slight to steve that sam didn't honor his choice and that it's more than just government issue gear to be passed around. It represents many things (many of them bad, as the show points out) but he doesn't care about all that. To bucky it may as well be a family heirloom, considering what little he has left from his former life.

Of course, this is all what he has to overcome, to (re) establish his own position and identity in the world, and sharon isn't as privy to those struggles as the audience is. Allowing bucky and/or sam to actually elaborate on their issues with walker could have created an in for her to point out some hypocrisy or naivety on their part. But the opportunity was swiftly torpedoed because we really, really need the audience to get that sharon 2.0 is 'awful' now.

So what could she have criticized bucky for instead? Lucky for her, that problem was looking her right in the face drinking her expensive liquor. There is very little justification for the stunt bucky pulled behind sam's back by freeing zemo, and I can only assume consequences are around the corner. Yet again, bucky isn't seeing big picture, he's consumed by his own personal relationship to zemo and the super serum. He acted unilaterally based on his own fears and self doubts but wants to present his actions as logical and well reasoned. Zemo can help in the short term, but what is the cost?

Sharon, being the seasoned cynic she is now, would have seen through that in an instant. How difficult would it have been to jab at the irony, bucky being 'free' according to his therapist but chained to this person who used him as a tool, who continues to exploit his weaknesses, who seems to be far more in control than bucky is in the situation they're all in. Bucky is trying to prove something, he doesn't seem to be sure what that is yet, but he's stubbornly blinded himself to the possibility that he's going about it the wrong way. That is something that sharon could have rightfully called out, but for some reason bucky's most egregious flaw is presented as.... being steve's best friend.

Then you have her dealings with sam, who's problems are more from the other side of the spectrum. He isn't really allowed to bring his personal feelings to the table, he has to deal with the intense pressure of taking on a loaded persona when it may not actually ring true to him in his heart. He also trusted steve and had faith in what that specific cap stood for, but does that mean he's willing to put the whole system on his own shoulders now? He's trying to think above and beyond, about the legacies before him, about his own place in history when all is said and done.

Sam is all about big picture at this stage, and his journey would presumably have him work from the outside in. That's why the glimpses of his family life are invaluable, they give us that contrast between his day to day realities and the loftier, more abstract idealism of the falcon's (or cap's) heroism. His exploration is about staking his own personal claim on the symbolism of that shield, not just for his own sake but for the sake of those who will now look to him as a leader and an inspiration.

To be fair, I think some of sharon's dialogue with sam is marginally better, but still ultimately misses the mark. I envisioned an exchange where she might belittle his decision to continue acting as a representative of the same organization that failed her so spectacularly, suggesting he should tread carefully lest he find himself discarded once the government no longer finds him useful or compliant.

She...sort of got close to saying that? If I squint really hard I guess? But it's off because it's less about the posturing and politics of their roles and of 'the machine' so to speak, than it is about striving to do right when you can. It feels like she's criticizing the inherent value of what they try do rather than the shortcomings of the framework itself. If I get vibes that this sharon seems to waffle on whether or not she regrets what she did in CACW, that's not a good thing.

Bureaucracy, red-tape, iconography - all of the things walker is being parceled with; can you disentangle yourself while refusing to leave the system in the same state as you found it? If I want to be charitable I can chalk this up to semantics, but they haven't given me many reasons to be charitable so far.

Then you have the whole utterly nonsensical bargaining over her pardon (the stupidity of that particular exchange pointed out multiple times on reddit, of all places) and sharon's not-so-subtle suggestion that sam is basically lying to her when he says he can get her pardoned.

If she's trying to say she doesn't believe he actually has the pull to accomplish that, or that he's underestimating how difficult it would be, it's one thing. But saying that he's merely 'pretending' to clear her name is completely unfair. I don't care how ~jaded~ sharon is, there's no plausible reason for her to consider sam capable of such a lie and I find that an insult to them both. Naturally, I place blame squarely on kolstad's writing, and not on sharon herself. It's plain as day he didn't give a wink to a single implication he made with his script, nor does he care to do so.

Am I foolish for thinking her arc could be handled with more coherence? I like to think I'm already controlling for the lackluster quality of MCU writing in general; this actually surprised me. I expect basic and juvenile, but at least there's consistency. Frankly, I think Feige put a little too much slack in the reins here and the characters are paying the price.

Could I be crying wolf too soon before giving everything a chance to pan out? Of course, that's always a possibility and I'd be more than glad to eat crow if things turn out palatable in the end. Are the odds favorable that this will happen? Magic 8 ball says don't count on it, and I'm not in the habit of constantly lowering my standards until they're miraculously met.

#sharon carter #emily vancamp #anti mcu #sambuckysharon

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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@destielonfire replied to your post “You've been around for a while in the SPN fandom, right? I was...”

i'm sorry about the chronic pain, I can understand how that doesn't leave much room for enthusiasm or writing or anything else..... I was wondering though, you say you got what you wanted from the characters, but is that also true about destiel? Or does that no longer matter to you in the sense that you'll just be happy to see it play out however the writers want? (not a wanky question, I am honestly curious)

Thanks :) And, yeah... Destiel too, but in a weird way where obviously I still want it to pay out MORE and BETTER and more easy to read as canon, but literally since I got invested I have been pretty much non-stop since season 9 convinced that I knew exactly what the last shot we'd ever see of those two together was:

- that was how it was gonna happen. Cas said he loved them, and then bam before Dean knew it, he's dead at his feet and that's a wrap, folks!

As you can see, with more canon to come and Cas returning along with it, I'm at a bit of a loss to process past my point of "welp that's going to happen one day" in my bitter grumpy "oh they'll make it canon alright" feeling here. I mean I'm not even THAT bitter about stuff in general on the show, but I sort of nurtured in my heart of hearts the grim acceptance this was my worst case but also 70-90% likely endgame scenario for making it canon, to keep my expectations sensible. And this model is not how Cas dies in general - this is the very specific "this is how canon happens" thought. If the show ended on this shot, we'd have had that to work off to yell forever about if it was canon or not, and maybe got a Korrasami-style explanation later but without the happy ending.

Breezing past the endgame before it was meant to happen is a bit confusing :P

And other stuff like the Sam and Dean development, or their personal growth - again, this season tidied things up in such a way the spoilers for next season about character development are like, "and then Sam carries on being chill and in charge" and I'm like, one, cool love it all aboard, two, who is this guy. Because the whole long painful Carver era grind through all the meta and spec was a grim hope that ONE DAY MAYBE the show would even get to MAKING its point instead of waffling around hinting while putting almost the opposite picture in the main text with only subtextual clues that it was all fucked up and meant to change.

By the time it started getting to the point it was all going too fast - like, I should have braced myself to speculate beyond this point after Sam was like "it's called sublimation Dean" and Dean snarked about that's him alright. Like, seriously. Miscalculation on my part, and then we barrel into season 12 in full force and systematically work through entire checklists that have just been sitting around gathering dust on everyone. And even if we're not at the END of the checklist, it's like, Carver just wrote all the points on the checklist up for us and made us aware of everything that had to change. And even when little bits of character change came, they were still quite quiet, and not really addressed as solid changes that paid off, and then the end of season 11 was all crowded and messy trying to wipe the slate clean, and only with the last conversation with Amara and Chuck, and then the promise of Mary coming back, do we get an idea change is coming...

I mean I have been browsing old meta tags on and off this hiatus and we all made the required checklists for what we hoped Mary was going to do in the narrative, but something about Carver era just really wore me out like we could say all this needs to happen but would we just get more and more nonsense showing the problem without delivering the answer? And with no clue how it was supposed to look or could play out or, again, that anything could continue after it. Most spec was hedging bets on, well, we'll get some resolution with Mary but then they'll kill her off... and they're like hey we removed Mary from the board but she is SO not dead, she's kicking more ass than ever! Like... okay. Cool. Cool cool cool. What?

And no one's *fixed* and some of these things aren't exactly OVER, like, performing!Dean symbolically died and we had a whole rebirth followed by breaking down Mary's walls too thing, but I still expect Dean not to act magically cured, and he was wearing short shorts in 11x04 anyway so it's a fluid development that's been going on for ages, but tiny nods like the shorts that he might be feeling better and more comfortable were great but not playing a role in the narrative, while now it has BEEN the narrative and his entire conclusion to season 12 in his personal arc was this great coming together of his personal arc Carver set up and the new angle to attack his childhood trauma Mary brought to the table, and it's DEEP and actually getting to the heart of things and unpacking the characters and exploring how they feel and putting it all out there.

And I can't even explain Sam - just know that until this season I only had one thing I ever really cried about in this show, which was Bobby's death, and then somehow out of nowhere, Berens hit me so hard I SOBBED when Sam uncovered the Colt and looked at it in tears with his eyes, so clearly SOMETHING epic happened there in his characterisation and his own personal growth. (Sam's personal growth tends to hit me in hindsight about what it was all about... It's almost like I need to be 3 seasons clear to understand it properly >.>) And then 12x22 managed to completely beat me up on both Sam and Dean AND Mary's behalf and I cried a bunch more times, very confused about when the show changed to something I cried about the emotional stuff in... I cry very easily at OTHER things. I spent the last couple of days WEEPING about [static noises] in The Adventure Zone, and the Orphan Black finale, and I've got a low investment in OB, I just like watching it. I cried at its previous season finale as well. SPN just isn't a tear jerker for me, and it's not tuned that way in general? And this season the writing has changed to doing SOMETHING with the characters that puts it into the territory where they're wringing our investment in the characters in a GOOD way and I think it's to do with the changes and the sense of finally overcoming and growing and being free of the weights piled on them over the years. Even just the PROMISE that that might happen is shocking enough, really :P

Like long term 12x22 is probably going to lose some of its punch once we see where this development goes and HOPEFULLY we work our way to the real resolutions. But just in terms of emotional attrition from Carver era, it's just a massive RELIEF to have some things spoken out loud, and other things like the grenade launcher game they put in the subtext, to be acknowledged and played with in a way which really really WORKED to convey that they WANT to positively develop their characters and maybe it's a waiting game but they seem to want to actually DO it.

And I'm basically just in shock :P

And with the Destiel stuff, then, to go back to how it all makes me feel, I feel like there's maybe a very real possibility they're going to do some pretty amazing things with it, canonical ending or not, for a subtext gremlin like myself I can't even BEGIN to grapple what they might throw at us, because I can barely process what they already have given us, because it's almost completely unbelievable to me because I've lurked in fandom so long waiting for them to actually make a move? Practically, the meta I read at the end of season 9 still broadly applied at the start of season 12, but immediately and mercilessly got resolved or changed up or turned on its head and shaken all about, and I'm too tired to keep up :P

So I don't know, there's a large part of me that's now content to watch it play out, but mostly because I feel like the way it's pandered it's crossed a lot of lines with the stuff they have given us like mixtapes and an "i love you" and angel/human romance episodes and Dean being singled out to kneel at Cas's lifeless body... I mean 12x10's actual concept was like a ridiculous dream back when, reading meta about all these season 8 human/monster relationship episodes, and the interspecies romance in Bloodlines using 6x20's dialogue and so on. They explored it all obliquely, and some parallels like the one in the LARP episode or the Prometheus episode were pretty blatant Crypt Scene foreshadowing to the point people were speculating it before it happened in good detail, AND romantic AND interspecies romances at that. But an actual episode unpacking not just angels and humans and how they mix, but to tie it to Cas, and to tie Cas to Dean directly? If you dropped 12x10 in the middle of season 8, the meta writers would have literally exploded. No survivors :P

And that's the positive remains of the season 8 meta bubble I still read when I was there in season 9 and it was getting bitter, and then I weathered season 10 and with the plot accordion and the beginnings of putting Cas somewhere else to delay everything with Dean, getting back to it with 3 personal episodes and loads of other moments which explored how Cas REALLY felt and related to humanity and "humanity"? I mean... wow.

And there's a part of me desperately trying to keep everything in context, to remember this journey as it unfolded from right back in the days where it was all snide and borderline cruel gay jokes and now it's a narrative goliath... And even to remember how sparse and painful and scavenging for Destiel subtext scraps season 10 was or something... But that part of me that's trying to keep it all in context literally can't handle season 12's context because it defies all the previous ways you're supposed to handle it. It's too hot to hold onto and you have to drop it. Which I appear to have done, because in the sense of waiting and expectations and wondering wtf canon would look like or what the writers would dare to do... All the things like that, they've actually just ALREADY crossed all the lines my careful expectations were set to? Because I always tried to listen to the bitter, careful, don't get your hopes up side of things because it sounded much more healthy to take it all as a pleasant surprise...

I don't know where it's all going and I can't take it as a promise of canon or even dare to raise and sort of hope that it's going to get more canon from here. But's going to get more INTERESTING from here, for sure :P And I feel like in season 13 I will be in business to write a LOT of meta. I just can't even begin to grapple with what they're going to throw at us before we see it...

#replies #destiel #season 13 speculation #ish #season 12 kicked my butt and it was Bobo's fault #12x22 #12x23 #riverboat gambling

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