everyworldneedslove:

ATTENTION fans of captn-sara-holmes:

Sara suffered a head injury today. She is going to be okay, but the current prognosis is 4-5 weeks to be fully back on her feet. Right now, her thought processes are sluggish and she can barely type.

She asked me to post and let everyone know that both Counterpart and Keep You Safe Here With Me are, of necessity, on indefinite hold, for which she is sincerely sorry. (Even once she’s mostly recovered from the injury, there will be Real Life Stuff which will likely take precedence over fanfic as far as getting caught up, so I’m afraid there’s no way to offer an estimated return date. I wouldn’t start holding your breath until probably the new year, though.)

PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR and reblog this so that Sara’s fans who do not follow me have a better chance of seeing it. (I’ll also do a post on AO3 for her subscribers there.)

Thank you! Everyone please keep Sara in your thoughts!

Fandom news, everyone — please pass it on. I’m a huge fan of Counterpart in particular, and I’m hoping Sara will have a smooth recovery unmarred by worries about her fanfic or folks pestering her to post.

How fandom reinterpreted Captain America’s politics for the 21st century.

copperbadge:

wintercyan:

hellotailor:

In the 2011 Captain America movie, Steve Rogers’ first mission after getting his supersoldier powers is to go on a propaganda tour.

Rather than saving kittens from trees or battling supervillains (or fighting the Nazis, which is what he actually signed up to do), Steve ends up as a USO performer, touring with a team of chorus girls.

Each night, they perform a song called “Star Spangled Man,” during which Captain America punches a Hitler lookalike on the nose and implores the audience to buy war bonds. The whole thing is a perfect parody of 1940s sepia-toned Norman Rockwell patriotism, and Captain America—or rather Steve Rogers, behind the mask—grows to hate it. He wanted to do his duty back when he was an undernourished, asthmatic artist, but now he’s a muscle-bound Adonis, it turns out his main job is to sell comics and appear in propaganda movies.

Captain America: The First Avenger follows a pretty typical superhero storyline: an underdog character gains superpowers, battles adversity while trying to do the right thing, suffers a loss, and finally defeats the bad guy. Of course, the movie ends with Cap crashing his plane into the ocean and waking up in 21st-century New York , but the lack of a happy ending is the only major departure from the traditional superhero narrative.

The interesting part is how Captain America’s fandom chooses to interpret him not just as a character, but as a symbol.

“Star Spangled Man” is a perfect example. In the movie, it’s a cheesy musical number that’s used to illustrate Steve Rogers’ growing frustration with being a “performing monkey” rather than a real soldier, but fans remixed it to have a more nuanced meaning. Ryan Sanura recorded a haunting acoustic cover of the song, inspired by a fanfic by author and Marvel fan Sam Starbuck, in which Steve Rogers comes across a modern-day interpretation of the song. “It’s not an anthem to raise money for a war or get enlistment numbers up,” Steve realizes. “It’s a cry out for help. Who’ll rise and fall, give their all for America?” In the 21st century, the answer is no longer clear.

[READ MORE]

An article on Steve Rogers as Marvel’s most politically engaged superhero, written pre-CA:TWS; it’s fascinating to consider those of the article’s predictions which came true in the movie (and the aspects of the movie which the article didn’t manage to predict), the speculations on the fandom’s interactions with and influence on the source material, and the description of the fandom’s ongoing mission to redeem Marvel’s villains.

I was also happy to see a reference to copperbadge, whose works in the Captain America fandom I’ve come to greatly appreciate (and whose original fiction novel Trace I enjoyed reading recently – go check it out, guys, it’s free!).

Oh, and do yourselves a favour – don’t forget to check out the music tracks embedded in the article for ultimate feels.

I thought I had reblogged this but according to my drafts NOT SO MUCH.
D:

Oh, hey look, it’s a fandom-positive article about how fans and their transformative works can expand and enhance themes in a canon and give them broader, greater meaning to their audience. Also namedrops Sam, so it’s pretty much awesome.

Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.

At this late date, fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse that the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and probably a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality. Culturally speaking, this work used to be the job of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take that role. If the mainstream has been slow to honor it, well, that’s usually the fate of aesthetic revolutions. Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever.

Anne Jamison. Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World. 2013

(via notenoughgatorade)

actuallyclintbarton:

csrcalloway:

theorlandojones:

amandageddon:

acafanmom:

professorfangirl:

jenoshmellark:

When an actor stumbles into their fandom on Tumblr:

When Orlando Jones stumbles into his fandom on Tumblr:

theorlandojones really should see this one… 😉

Paging theorlandojones…

Approved with some slight proposed modifications:

When an actor stumbles into their fandom on Tumblr:

When Trollando stumbles into his fandom on Tumblr:

I love him too much for this.

Sir, I’m gonna need to ask you to stop, you’re going to kill someone with your awesomeness.

tofixtheshadows:

I think my favorite thing about the fandom culture on tumblr are the headcanon posts. They’re all revolutionary, because they almost invariably come from marginalized voices. We who have been unloved by the world imagine our favorite characters loving us, fighting for us. Where their creators expect us to exalt them through uncritical worship, we do it by humbling them instead. We make them better by making them one of us.

We racebend, or we explore and celebrate the cultural backgrounds of non-white characters whose ethnicities have been canonically overlooked. We reclaim them as queer or non-binary or neurotypical or disabled, and then we imagine them loving themselves and being loved by their communities. We take characters who have been broken in their battles and envision for them days of quiet happiness, of rest and healing and small comforts, because we’ve been there and we know exactly what you need. We turn them into the role models we should have, that we desperately need, and I think it helps us love ourselves more too.

So don’t ever stop writing posts about Scott McCall hearing his mother sing lullabies in Spanish or Bucky Barnes helping kids get prosthetics or charity-starting bisexual Steve Rogers who stands up for women’s rights or Hogwarts houses validating their trans students. Give me all your fan art of fat Feferi and hijabi Rose Lalonde and the Avengers in a big cuddle pile of mutual self care. This is so important, don’t let anybody tell you differently. I appreciate it all so much.

scifigrl47:

pravdagirl:

neierathima:

clio-jlh:

wrangletangle:

clio-jlh:

wrangletangle:

secretlymartinfreeman:

i find it enormously funny how there’s an actual ao3 tag for Ceiling Vent Clint Barton

My question is, why are there only 37 works tagged with it? Come on, fandom!

I feel that this tag arose after I wrote this particular trope. However, I will retag immediately!

(A High Road Out From Here, in case you’re curious)

The tag was canonized in either August or September 2012, if my memory serves, so you are correct.

I’d really love it if someone could do an analysis of when and how this trope developed. It’s one of the more distinctive and pervasive character-specific tropes to have absolutely no basis in canon whatsoever. It might make a good example of how character traits are developed and codified within fandom.

I saw someone mention William Brandt but my mind keeps going to that story where Tony turned all the roombas sentient and they ended up in the ducts at SHIELD? Does anyone else remember this?

I know the fic you speak of that is quality. But what I recall is that was a thing before the Avengers movie, when it was actually canonized as “Barton likes high places.” Maybe it’s a sniper thing?

The roomba thing is scifigrl47, but I don’t think she was the originator? Anyone know the source of this trope? Because I pretty much love it. I think it happens so much because you say spy/sniper and people think of surveillance from a hidden vantage point, and who expects murder to come their way from a ceiling vent?

I originated the Roombas, but not Clint hiding in the vents. I don’t know where I picked it up. Pre-Avengers, I was super excited to find out that my childhood favorite Hawkeye was going to be in the movie. One of my first acts upon discovering AO3 was to read the Clint fics. All of them. Clint/Nat, Clint/Phil, Clint/Darcy, Clint/ANYBODYANDEVERYBODY. I did not care, if it was Clint, I read it.

The sniper thing did factor into it, and there’s a solid background of ‘sneaky Hawkeye sneaking’ in the comics, but for a guy with a bow and arrows in a purple suit, he spends a lot of time attacking head on. If I had to guess, I’d say I picked it up from a sequence of Clint/Coulson stories that have since been taken down by the author. I seem to recall it factoring in there, but they’re gone now so there’s no way to double check.

I was literally only having this discussion the other day with actuallyclintbarton and actuallykatebishop, and I theorised that two stories in particular were pivotal to the development of the trope. My pick for the actual origin is the Adaptations series by snack_size, which was written for a kink meme prompt, but clio_jih’s story predates that, unless there was a significant delay between meme posting and AO3 posting.

agents-of-frickle-frackle:

let’s be real though for as big a dad as coulson is he’s an even bigger fanboy

News just in: Skye does some IP lookup sneaking and discovers that the biggest BNF fanfic writer in Captain America RPF fandom is on the Bus with her.

Bonus points: the slash is super hot, and now she’s slightly freaked out that her mind has unknowingly (very happily) gone to the sex place with Coulson’s Cap fantasies. She always thought she was up there writing reports or some shit, but now she knows The Truth.