Ten Little Chances to be Free

I made a comm for casual MCU discussion! No srs bsns, no content aggregation, just homegrown grass-fed USDA-certified organic shitposts.

mcu_shiptoasting

Was thinking earlier about why I read my Dreamwidth friends list regularly but never seem to participate. Part of it is that I have some notion I'm supposed to post, like, life updates and "things I accomplished this [time period]" roundups and mini-review catalogues of Things Read/Watched/Played. Which seems to be what most other people on my flist use theirs for. But Christ that sounds like homework to my brain, and also a great way to kick off a depression spiral even though RL is going fine right now, so I lurk rather than show my face without having done the homework.

I realize, rationally, and also in my gut now that I've written it out, that that is dumb. Blogging is freeform. I could hit-and-run with random shower thoughts every two weeks, say nary a word about life or activity roundups, and pass it off as ~maintaining my mystique~ if anyone says anything, which they won't. But the other thing I'm realizing as I haunt various platforms in the wake of the Tumblrpocalypse is that the culture of a platform matters. You can post whatever the hell you want, but you get more out of the space if you use it in dialogue with what the existing userbase is doing there.

Back when the Tumblr exodus was still actively underway, I found myself in various Discord servers trying to Explain Dreamwidth to stressed-out Tumblr users. These were smart people who were happy to explore the features, but unsure how those features translated into norms of interaction, content discovery, and what-to-post-where. And I remember being baffled by how intimidated many of them were about posting to communities. To them, friending individual blogs was the natural first step, but comms were A Whole Fucking Thing they were wary to intrude on, like submitting yourself for the approval of judgemental classmates. And I was going "?!?!?!" It's a complete inversion of how seriousness and intimacy worked on LJ, right? Your journal was your combination front porch/living room/blanket fort in the bedroom, a personal space with varying degrees of privacy and choosiness about audience, because it was About You. One of those degrees was "public," but a version of "public" that rude guests would still be intruding on. A "public" where introductions weren't really required, but it still wasn't uncommon for random strangers who'd stumbled across your post to preface their comments with "Hi, I found you through X, hope it's not creepy that I'm butting in," and in fact friendships were frequently made that way. Comms were where you slapped your fandom shitposts and casual discussion about topics of common interest, where random people with no prior acquaintance could interact with it on the basis of shared interest alone. Where it wasn't About You, it was about the thing everyone was there to talk about.

But then the shitposts, and memes, and shower thoughts, and reactions to newly-released canon, and casual discussion threads... moved to Tumblr. And the people who were attached to LJ-style fandoming moved to Dreamwidth. And trickled away by attrition as more and more fans sucked it up and moved to where the center of gravity was, no matter how hatefully obtuse Tumblr-as-a-platform was for their (okay, our) purposes. The more this happened, the more overwhelmingly DW got skewed towards people and activities that relied heavily on the LJ features Tumblr lacked. And the more that happened, the less DW actually resembled old-school LJ in the ways it was functionally used. Which I didn't notice, or didn't see the full implications of, even as it happened under my nose.

So those stressed-out Tumblr refugees were reading the room way better than I was. If all the low-friction, casual fan activity has migrated to Tumblr, what's left in Dreamwidth communities? Mostly things that Dreamwidth has the infrastructure to support and Tumblr is iffy for:
- Events with lots of logistics and participant-wrangling: fests, bangs, exchanges, etc.
- Structured mod-run activities like weekly prompt challenges and roundup newsletters.
- "Submit stuff on a particular theme in a specified format" communities like fandomsecrets and scans_daily that had built their momentum in the LJ days.
- (Kinkmemes and anon memes, which depend on unorthodox use of a very specific set of comment features. And also need to be checked on their own rather than having their activity integrated into your feed, so even though they're major activity hubs, they don't really function as comms.)
- And promos. Promos for comms, for events, for fic and fanart and graphics, for friending memes, always for ways to find and produce content somewhere else than the comm they're posted to.

Dreamwidth comms are a communal noticeboard and sign-up sheet for structured, supervised activities. Of course Tumblr-native fans were intimidated and clocked them as a formal, official Thing. I missed it, because LiveJournal comms skewed more towards rowdy after-school sci-fi clubs. But the culture of a platform resides in how it's used.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except that I miss LJ comm culture and it doesn't exist on DW. The features exist, but the critical mass of people using them that way doesn't. And the old LJ norms of public/private, intimacy, openness to public comment, what to post where, and where to look for what... just don't apply anymore. They haven't for a long time, thanks to modern social media. It's seductive to assume DW is a holdover version of oldschool LJ culture because it looks and sounds familiar, but the surface continuity masks huge changes in the norms of everyday usage.

My point here is not that any particular group of fans--Tumblr natives, DW holdouts, LJ-to-Tumblr migrants, Tumblr-to-DW migrants--is "to blame" for the most off-putting differences between the various platform cultures. People went where they went, and usage was most heavily shaped by platform features in combination with what kind of activity was concentrated there. I guess it's more... wistfulness, that LJ along with forums were my native mode of fandoming, to the point where following the center of fan activity over to Tumblr and adapting to its alien methods of interaction was extremely painful and frustrating. And now the DW mode of fandoming that evolved away from the center of activity turns out to be just as alien to me.

I can't do activity round-ups and regular mini-reviews of my Recently Read/Watched list. I'm not up for RL updates that are actually meant to keep anyone up-to-date. I can't do structured fanwork exchanges. I'm not wired for it--it's the most efficient way to turn what I do for fun into one massive stress/guilt/inferiority complex. Yeah, blogging is freeform, be the change you want to see, etc, and believe me if I end up with a project burning a hole in my head that's suited for Dreamwidth, I'll be delighted to post it here. If half a dozen other people want to make a DW comm just for fandom shitposting and casual discussion, I'll give it a go.

But I'm starting to accept that there's a reason I don't post here anymore. I don't like that that's so--I want a fandom home. Discord as the emerging hub of casual discussion is an ephemeral, undiscoverable nightmare, even though it's a really good chat system. Dreamwidth is open-source, self-funded, somewhat interoperable with other sites, has both personal and moderated-communal spaces, balances discoverability with privacy controls, is fantastic for durable threaded discussion... but I can't do fandom the way it seems to be done here right now. And I'm not sure how hard I want to swim against the tide.

(Comments welcome, you are not butting in, etc. But bear in mind that this is more personal musing than any kind of coherent declaration about fandom cultures. If it gets linked to as meta, so be it, but indignant attempts to rebut whatever axe you imagine I'm grinding will be accorded exactly as much patience as they deserve.)

FYI for Hydra Trash Party folks: I kicked a few bucks towards gifting hydratrashmeme some paid-account time. Call it a present for the winter holiday of your choice, or a small consolation for the Tumblrpocalypse.

The biggest benefit: if you scroll down to the search box in the community's sidebar, you can now natively search the full text of every comment ever posted there. Doesn't change the fact that kinkmemes are organizational clusterfucks by nature, but it does improve the discoverability of old prompts quite a bit, without having to wade through fickle half-collapsed site: results on Google. The sidebar also has more information on recent comments and recently-commented posts, which seems to have started displaying automatically.

If this is relevant to your interests and you want to pay it forward, use comment search to dig up an old prompt that hits a bunch of your kinks and write a few hundred words of porn for it. Everyone gains! ...except Bucky and Steve, who are unlikely to have a good time of it.

In other news, Netflix is a horrific enabler and I'm now midway through season 5 of the X-Files. We will see whether anything comes of this. Trashchat is trying to enable me into writing an Agents of SHIELD crossover that sics Mulder and Scully on a sinister government conspiracy that turns out to be Coulson's team at work. Probably far too much plot for me to ever write, but man, would it be satisfying.

(At the very least, I want a gag about Coulson enforcing a zero-tolerance no-smoking policy on the Bus. When pressed about it, he mutters something evasive about a boss he had back in the 90s and pointedly changes the subject.)

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/105932488971/the-pie-initiative-shinelikethunder-more)

More musings on writing advice:

Honestly, I think “yes, you are allowed” is something a lot of fandom needs to hear right now. We had, what, a decade of “what not to do” writing advice, starting with anti-Mary-Sue campaigns and on through sporking and fanficrants and RaceFail, and now everything is this cracked parody of social justice and ~this is problematic~ is the ultimate “what not to do.” And just look at the messages we’ve taken to heart: don’t get too big for your britches, everything has to be accurate and realistic, no one the reader is supposed to sympathize with should be within shouting distance of “problematic.” We’re writing about these larger-than-life characters whose lives are full of over-the-top, implausible events, and it’s like we’re afraid that if we handwave or take narrative shortcuts or spin crazy yarns about their adventures or don’t treat Bad Shit Happening with the expected amount of solemnity, somebody’s going to call us out for not doing our due diligence.

In fact, the one “yes, you are allowed” message we’ve taken to heart is that we’re not beholden to the original canon, which is a phenomenon I… have mixed feelings about. But the point is, that message combined with the fear of fucking up, of writing “unrealistic” or “problematic” stories about monsters and aliens and superheroes, means that mundane AUs and domestic fic are the path of least resistance. And not only is fic being pushed towards the generic, the moral pressure that drives fandom SJ makes it feel almost… risky?… to stray from the fanon status quo. Breaking the mold, instead of being a sign of creativity, increasingly feels like a sign that you’re Doing It Wrong and may in fact be a bad person. I have seen people say that they want to write about post-CA:TWS Bucky but don’t, because they don’t want to slog through dealing with the “obligatory” recovery issues. Or that they’d feel guilty, like they were committing some sort of erasure, if they wrote pre-war fic without Queer Brooklyn and The Docks a bunch of romanticized-poverty porn.

For the love of God, fandom. You are allowed to come up with whatever fictional means you feel like to undo the Winter Soldier’s fictional (and almost totally unspecified) brainwashing. He’s an amnesiac cyborg assassin hopped up on a knockoff version of the super-serum that lets Steve Rogers get flung off a freeway overpass hard enough to overturn a bus and get up with barely a scratch. He starts getting memories back whenever they leave him out of cryo long enough. If you want the serum to heal his brain damage and leave him twitchy, angry, and guilt-ridden, but more-or-less compos mentis, so that he can go face down his demons without spending months on Steve’s couch eating soup and relearning how to be a human? YOU CAN. YOU ARE ALLOWED. THAT IS A STORY YOU ARE ALLOWED TO TELL. The “it was the super-healing” handwaving already puts you about fifteen realism steps ahead of the comics, where Steve used a magic monkey’s paw ex machina to bring back Bucky’s memories with the power of his love. And then a bunch of stuff happened and Bucky wrestled a bear in a Siberian gulag, okay, and this is the level of Srs Bsns we’re starting from.

You can do whatever the fuck you want. If you want to dwell lovingly on all the interpersonal issues and mental scarring that resulted from that time aliens made them do it because they got fake married in space, go for it. But do not pull out the DSM and start checking off PTSD symptoms out of a sense of duty if what you actually want to write is banter, UST, sarcasm about absurd situations, reckless displays of loyalty, and porn where they realize the depth and true nature of their feeeeeelings about each other. Both of those things are okay things to want.

tl;dr Internal story logic > realism. Write whatever ridiculous tropey or out-there shit you want, and use exactly as much judiciously-applied realism as you need to sell the story.

the-pie-initiative:

See, the thing about this critique is that I thought these stories where Bucky has PTSD were written by… people with actual PTSD. Or with eating disorders. Or who have some other actual trauma or disability they can apply to Bucky’s story.

I myself both love and hate the “wounded warrior” trope because I come from a rural area where a lot of my old high school friends actually have PTSD from fighting in Iraq. I hate it, because seeing Bucky in therapy is almost too real… and I love it, because there is at the same time too much silence and fear surrounding this topic, and I can tell that people are using fic to work through these issues in a way that is without precedent in most of the popular fiction I read.

The anger doesn’t come from a place where people see writing about anything but a hyper-realistic recovery story to be bad. The anger comes from the fact that fictional stories almost never got it right in the first place. For the love of God, please write more stories about Bucky wrestling bears… but also give us this space where we can work out the issues we still have after years and years of silence and misrepresentation.

Broski, literally nobody is attacking the right of people who want to write recovery stories to do so. “Write what you want” means “write what you want,” because the stories you’re itching to tell will probably end up more compelling and meaningful than the ones where you’re just going through the motions. And I have no doubt that a lot of the driving force behind the wave of recovery fic comes from people with that itch. But it’s such a dominant fanon trope that a lot of the people along for the ride are there because “that’s just what you do” or because they’re under social pressure to include it in their post-CA:TWS fic whether trauma/recovery narratives are what grab them or not. Where does that pressure come from? Uh, mostly from stuff like the immediate assumption that reminding people they’re allowed to skip over it is an attack on recovery fic and a dismissal of the experiences of people with PTSD.
If you wanna write it, write it. If you don’t, you’re better off skipping merrily over it and digging right into what you want to write than dutifully cooking up a halfassed Wikipedia version just to cover your bases. The problem isn’t that people want to write nitty-gritty explorations of PTSD, it’s that a lot of people whose fic ideas don’t involve focusing on PTSD (or Picturesque Poverty in Queer Brooklyn, or endless kink and relationship negotiation, or whatever) feel morally obligated to shoehorn it into the story anyway.

arsenicjade:

See, okay, I find all this interesting—I mean, I agree, one hundred and ten percent that fanfiction should be fanfiction, and that internal story logic trumps realism and all that—because I actually DO feel like those of us who WANT to write that recovery trope but who ARE NOT going to get out the DSM and go get our masters in clinical psych for our piece of fanfiction often do kind of get thrown to the wolves. Like, right after I posted one of my Bucky recovery fics, which I wrote because holy shit, I love recovery fics, I came across this tumblr post about how, if you had Bucky going to therapy, you were doing it wrong, and why. I can’t even tell you how terrified I am one day that I’ll write a rape recovery fic, since I legit love that story focus as well, and someone will rage at me about healing-cock. And the thing is, it’s not that I think cock heals a damn thing, okay? But I really do believe that if healing cock is your bag? You should get to write it without being shamed about it. Idk. I mean, do I think there are limits and things that shouldn’t be written? Yeah, I guess I do, because there’s been like, Holocaust glorification fic where I instinctively flinched with my entire SOUL. And yes, in the privacy of my heart, I judged that writer. But at the same time, I can’t be a hard core First Amendment believer, and believe that you know, Nazis should be able to march on Skokie, and not think that writer A shouldn’t get to write her Holocaust-kink porn just because it legit makes me want to be sick.

I guess, in the end, I’m just saying, I get that there are important social issues, and we should be kind to each other, so kind. But I think kindness also involves not shaming other people’s kinks. I.e., I like torturing people in my fic. I do NOT like torturing people irl. Consequently, I’m not going to assume that someone who writes something like healing cock actually thinks it works like that irl. I mean, maybe they do, and that’s a DIFFERENT discussion. But if it’s just their kink? They should be allowed to wallow in it as much as they want.

Nod nod nod. And the thing is, yes, a lot of the prescriptivist “what not to do” writing advice does come from tropes that ended up annoying a lot of people because they were so overdone and so cringe-worthy in their most hackneyed, badly-written forms. I’m the first to admit that I have a mile-long list of fic pet peeves. But the thing about those tropes is, most of them became overdone because there was something deeply appealing about them in the first place. If you start stressing yourself out about whether your fic contains the faintest whiff of healing cock, you’re already long past the point where trope familiarity has stopped helping you avoid the abyss and started making you shoot yourself in the foot.

And “healing cock,” like “manpain,” is one of those names that were coined to describe a very specific lazy-storytelling move that cashes in on the emotional impact of a particular narrative (reclaiming your sexuality after rape, grief over the suffering of someone you love) with blatant disrespect for the character whose suffering is being exploited. Fandom has an awful tendency to generalize both terms to include all writing about those subjects, which is poisonous bullshit because the whole reason those tropes suck is that they cheapen something powerful and important. Diluting them has a chilling effect on the very thing they were supposed to defend. “Healing cock” now means “any sex that ends up playing a positive role in rape recovery, and doesn’t meet some arbitrary standard of difficult, painful, fucked-up, and bleak.” So you know what? Give me all the healing cock. That is a story I want to read. I don’t give half a shit if it’s an “improbably” fluffy power fantasy. That’s why I want to read it. Wanting, and eventually having, certain kinds of sex was crucial to my own recovery from the get-go–you fucking bet I want to suck down the fictional version like delicious crack-laced candy.

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/102251767226/dialogue-pet-peeves-i-didnt-even-realize-i-had)

- The Winter Soldier gets like half a dozen very short lines in the entire movie that’s named after him, and even that is enough to tell that he doesn’t talk like a robot. Or a small child. JFC.

- Sam Wilson doesn’t speak fluent DSM-IV when he’s bonding with Steve over their Shared Life Experiences, no matter how traumatic those experiences might’ve been. He speaks plain old everyday English. He talks about beds that are too soft and being stuck there just to watch your wingman go down in flames and figuring out how to carry the stuff you’ve brought back with you. He talks about the shit that terms like ‘traumatic’ were coined to describe. This is probably why Steve bonds so easily with Sam. It’s definitely why turning Sam into the Designated Avengers Therapist robs him of a lot of his charm: once he’s tossing around terms like trauma and triggers and ~boundaries~ and giving everyone glib advice on how to proceed, he loses the show-don’t-tell angle that made him so approachable in the first place.

- On a related note, if you’re looking for a way to avoid the “making Sam’s existence all about Steve and Steve’s problems” pitfall, canon actually hands you a pretty good one. Sam doesn’t get Steve to open up by poking and prodding at him. He offers up bits of his own life that he thinks Steve might be able to relate to. He’s not even really trying to get anyone to open up, at least not for its own sake–what he’s doing is seeking out common ground, and he does it by opening up about some of his own problems and experiences when he suspects the response might be “holy shit, me too.”

#the more i run into it and the more i think about it #the more i want to dig my heels in and just say it: #psych terminology porn IS YOUR ENEMY AS A WRITER #IT IS THE ULTIMATE IN TELLING NOT SHOWING #write about the messy individual human experiences those terms were coined to describe

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/98127824576/having-recently-rewatched-the-more-watchable)

Having recently rewatched the more watchable episodes of Agents of SHIELD, I am struck anew by all the creepy authoritarian vibes–not just from the characters themselves, which is plausible on a show that’s all about the shadowy government Men in Black whose job is to put a lid on paranormal occurrences, but in which characters the show chooses to back up and the situations it constructs. I’m not even going to touch the nasty indoctrination Skye goes through to mold her from a freedom-of-information hacker type into an agent of SHIELD, because that mostly happens in the less watchable episodes. But the way the fallout of CA:TWS was handled–holy balls.

“Oh, that pesky, naïve Captain America and his cohort, dumping all our secrets onto the Internet! Taking down SHIELD along with Hydra! That was so mean of him, look, the totally plausible fallout is that now we’re all being persecuted as a ~terrorist organization~ and threatened with indefinite detention of the type we’re so fond of springing on people we’ve deemed to be threats! Why? Because there's no way to tell who might be Hydra. No way whatsoever. If only all of these meanie bureaucrats had some magic list of who had ties to Hydra. Like, some set of secret files with their recruitment data or something. If only, I don’t know, all of Hydra’s records had been dumped onto the internet or something.”

“Are we going to talk about the actual consequences of a leak on this scale, like all the deep-cover agents it burned? Ha ha ha, why would we waste time on that when we could be constructing elaborate strawmen about how Big Brother was the only thing standing between the world and chaos for the sake of chaos.”

“What does Hydra want, you ask? To take over, duh. Are there any ideological differences between Hydra and SHIELD? Um, we’ll get back to you on that. Does it bother us that ‘who’s Hydra?’ might as well have been a randomly-assigned game of Mafia because we’re indistinguishable from our own neo-Nazi conspiracy? Uh… YEAH! Yeah, we would totally have believed Victoria Hand was Hydra, how fucked-up is it that she made it to the top, what a hardass, am I right?”

“Guys. Guys. Hey, guys. I’ve got a great idea. The BEST idea. Let’s pay exactly zero attention to anything CA:TWS might’ve had to say about authoritarian bullshit and extrajudicial killing, and rebuild SHIELD.”

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/96605348471/okay-i-almost-agree-with-you-but-i-do-think)

( Lots of meta exchanged between other Tumblr users, cut for length )

( And my response, cut for Even Moar Length )

(Archive of a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/92561700584/swanjolras-ohhcaptainrum-swanjolras)

[Image: A mashup of the SHIELD and Hydra logos, with the caption "This isn't freedom. This is fear."]

ilvalentinos:

#[sharp inhale] #these are the times that try canon; seriously this is the point in time where i’m going to ignore agents of shield for THIS PRECISE REASON #the immediate decision to rebuild shield cheapens this turn so fucking much i dont CARE about what cap 2 does for your mediocre tv show #you cannot mistake this film for anything except what it is - a movie made in the 21st century when we’re moving#out of the immediate recent past; it couldn’t have been made at any other time other than now and to TEAR! AWAY! THAT MASK! #and show you that anyone and anything is capable of being /this/; that this rot can grow anywhere and that #we’re not as different as we like to think - is such a smart decision #it topples the status quo it is very decidedly moving forward and goddammit this show had to go and ruin it #man fuck it fuck it so hard fuck it to hell

swanjolras:

#mal flawless as per usual #shield was toxic because it was hydra but shield was ALSO toxic because it was shield #BECAUSE SHIELD AS AN ORGANIZATION WAS ROTTEN FROM DAY ONE #you cannot ‘rebuild shield from the ground up’ because shield and hydra WERE ALWAYS TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN #those helicarriers were not horrific BECAUSE hydra was in control of them #they were horrific because TO HAVE THAT KIND OF WEAPON IS INHERENTLY IMMORAL AND TYRANNICAL #because shield is not an organization of good men! it is an organization of perfect soldiers! #any organization like shield would have become rotten and corrupt and ultimately evil #whether! or! not! it! had! nazis! #the nazis were not the REASON that shield was evil #they were a DEMONSTRATION of JUST HOW EVIL SHIELD WAS CAPABLE OF BEING #this movie’s politics were the smartest politics #please marvel don’t take this away from me

bropunzeling:

#yeah. YEAH. #THE POINT IS THAT SURVEILLING AND SIGNIFYING ANY HUMAN LIFE AS IMMEDIATELY WORTHY OF DESTRUCTION WITHOUT THEM DOING ANYTHING WRONG #IS NOT! A GOOD FOUNDATION! FOR A GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION! #WE CANNOT PREDETERMINE HUMAN LIFE AS DISPOSABLE; WORTHY OF DESTRUCTION; PART OF A MASS OF OTHER THAT WILL DESTROY US #WE CANNOT CHARACTERIZE SOME HUMANS AS GRIEVABLE AND MOURNABLE AND OTHERS AS /NOT/ #THE WHOLE POINT OF CAP 2 IS YOU CAN’T HAVE THE DRONES. BY HAVING THE DRONES; YOU HAVE EMBODIED THE IDEA THAT SOME HUMANS ARE MORE GRIEVABLE; #RECOGNIZABLE; WORTHY OF CARE #YOU CAN’T HAVE THE DRONES AND EXPECT THE ORGANIZATION TO STILL BE ‘GOOD’ #YOU CAN’T HAVE THE DRONES!

My contribution, copied out of tags and into the post body:

#shield was not unamerican because Secret Nazis #shield was unamerican because Authoritarianism #because so very Authoritarianism that they’d been nurturing a faction of secret nazis the whole time and nobody could tell the difference #the principles behind what shield was doing do not suddenly become Evil or Not Evil depending on whose name is on the letterhead #(does one of the WSC members use ‘not if it was your switch’ as a clever retort? yes #are we supposed to trust the moral authority of the WSC? HAHAHA no) #the point is that some things are evil even in service of *your* cause #and yes they are alluring even to smart people like fury #and that is how groups like hydra and the RL fascists they’re standing in for come about in the first place #this entire movie was like a followup to that erskine quote: so many people forget that #the first country the nazis invaded was their own #captain america only works as a character because if #by some accident of birth and nationality #he’d been captain germany instead #he still would’ve gone down fighting nazis

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/90592189381/chinhands-did-somebody-say-rumlowsteve-trash)

*chinhands* did somebody say rumlow/steve trash

serumsoldier:

did you mean: /my legacy/

seriously tho, taking advantage of the situation, deception and utter betrayal, how great is that trash.

deception, utter betrayal, and steve suffering: MY CATNIP

also all sorts of awful twisted mirroring, if you start thinking about how rumlow being steve’s right-hand man on the strike team basically positions him as Evil Replacement Bucky

also just like. that shot of rumlow breathing creepily down steve’s neck and going “not here” is so inexplicably drawn-out that i had to split it into two gifs and one of them is STILL too big to load consistently

serumsoldier:

It also goes back to everything steve thinks he knows being a lie. But not only that, it’s also about just how lonely steve is in the 21st century

even if you remove any trash ship element from it (i could go on about that for a long time, but lets refrain for a moment), Rumlow being part of the strike team means they develop that comradeship like soldiers do, a relationship that is built entirely on trusting the other to have your back, probably even more so with the shit SHIELD teams have to deal with. Steve trusts him, and that trust is so important to Steve, his whole life has relied on trust both pre serum and post serum.

and Steve is so on his own a lot of the time so i doubt Steve has any other relationships outside the people he works with. Which then bring it round to the ‘nothing personal’ line in the elevator scene because you can tell Steve takes it personal because it’s not like he has any other ‘friendships’ and all of a sudden he can’t even trust the people he works with which just shakes the foundation of everything Steve knows and ugh, HYDRA look what you’ve done

on another, trash shipping note: the whole ‘not here’ drawn out moment can be so uncomfortable because how many times has Rumlow got that close into his personal space to speak in a completely different context and it’s so /messed up/

YEAH. And it also ties into Steve's unease about SHIELD and his role in the 21st century–he wants so badly to be able to trust his job and his co-workers and the orders he’s being given, but he just can’t, and the beginning of the movie is full of Steve second-guessing himself all over the place. Is it him, is it SHIELD, is he just having problems adjusting, is it the whole damn 21st century? And of course what we see over the course of the movie is that his misgivings were well-founded all along, but the fact that he’s taken a leap of faith and made an active effort to trust SHIELD and his teammates even though it’s not easy makes it even more of a gut punch when they all turn on him. (AND THEN take the one person Steve has ever absolutely, unequivocally trusted and turn him against Steve, AUGH.)

And I love that Steve is never blamed for wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt and trust the people who will eventually stab him in the back–the ability to trust and rely on other people is one of Steve's strengths, as is the refusal to blindly trust institutions even though he works best when he’s working as part of something bigger than himself. And I just. Steve.

...sorry, this is the problem with talking trash ships, it eventually comes out that my entire interest in pairings like Rumlow/Steve boils down to “AND I JUST. STEVE ROGERS.”