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.
Tag: head canon
man, all you gotta do is to imagine steve doing all of these post-cap2:
1. pressed shoulder to shoulder with bucky on the couch, watching their old war tapes, ha you looked like such a weiner with your hair like that
2. getting calls from natasha!! all hours of the night and day. steve’ll be jogging or something and his cell will buzz and it’ll be from an unlisted number, hey what is your opinion on [deep philosophical/moral/political issue] and also rhodey wants your rsvp for the batchelor party, he knows you’ve been avoiding him and wants you to know that despite what tony says there’s NOT going to be strippers.
she also gives him rides to and from visiting peggy. on the drives back she plays harry james and lets steve be silent and nostalgic, looking out the window
3. sam loves open-air cafes, loves any excuse to eat outside. every sunday, he and steve will pick a new one to brunch in, obstinately to round out steve’s 21st century culinary education, but mostly so that sam can update his not-so-secret foodie blog. as they sip their coffee after the meal, steve brings out a small sketchpad and draws buildings, people, and a lot of sam’s face as he hunches over his laptop, muttering about the consistency of chocolate mousse.
4. bucky’s crammed into that seat by the window, leaning into steve’s space as he hotly debates the artistic merits of inception versus early hitchcock films with natasha, who’s sitting in the perpendicular seat. it’s dissolved into russian and steve’s worried that they’re either conspiring to kill someone or go halfsies on a wedding present for tony & pepper without cutting steve in like they promised. sam’s hanging onto the rail by steve’s shoulder, scrolling through imgur on this phone. occasionally he’ll shove it in steve’s face and 9/10 times it’ll be a picture of some kid dressed up like captain america. or falcon. steve can’t help but smile, soft and ridiculous, every single time.
(they’re going out drinking, they’re going home to crash, they’re going to kill a man. doesn’t matter. they’re young-ish adults in the city that never sleeps. they’ll figure it out.)
It helps, it really helps
this gif becomes like 8000% more gay when you realise steve is surrounded by a world he can finally see in colour but he just keeps staring at bucky
This whole “color” issue needs to be mentioned at least 10000% more in fics. And if it’s not mentioned already…it really should be.
Steve Rogers has never seen his Bucky Barnes in color.
Steve Rogers has never and will never get to see his old neighborhood in color.
(Of course when I mean “color” I mean the difference of what he saw pre- and post-serum; there are different types of color-blindness after all, and if the serum sharpens all of Steve’s senses….it’s still dramatic)
One of my favourite fandom head canons of Steve’s vision is from Silverlace_Vine’s Perspective series, where the author describes post-Serum Steve as a tetrochromat. So he literally went from having poor, colourblind vision to being able to see colours and details that most non-enhanced humans just can’t.
I love all the fics and headcanons about Hulk and Clint, because let’s face it, Clint would be the best with the Hulk. He already can’t walk down a street without accidentally adopting a dog, and he’s amazing at talking to kids at entertaining them. he’d probably spend every post-battle teaching the Hulk to fistbump him and building a pyramid of hotdogs for Hulk to eat and he can relate to Hulk because he knows what it’s like to be hated and ostracized by society and to have done terrible things that he regrets, and Hulk probably calls him Birdy and catches him when he jumps off buildings and i just-
HAWKEYE AND HULK OKAY
Watching Earth’s Mightiest Heroes for the first time totally gave me all the Hulk and Hawkeye feels.
oh right, i rambled about it on twitter but i forgot to post it here: it’s official, aos is a fandom, which means SORTING HEADCANONS!
skye is definitely a slytherin, with some secondary ravenclaw traits (more reasons to love skye to pieces,…
I think you mistake wanting to be strong, which could be equally Gryffindor or Slytherin, with wanting to be brave, which is what really defines Gryffindor house. Pettigrew, despite his later choices, really and truly desired to live up to the Gryffindor ideal of courage and nobility. He wanted to do the right thing, but ended up failing out of cowardice. Ward never once envisioned himself as brave or noble, probably not even at age eleven. He did what he had to in order to survive, which is an incredibly Slytherin trait. He wanted to be strong, yes, but not because he wanted to be able to live up to his own morals (of which he apparently has none). The only reason he wanted to be strong was to either defeat his enemies (i.e. burning his house down) or to keep surviving under the direction of those stronger and smarter than he is. So yeah, he’s basically Crabbe and Goyle type Slytherin.
I’d also note that while the Sorting hat does take personal choice into account, it does occasionally decide that it knows better. Neville Longbottom asked to be in Hufflepuff because he was intimidated by Gryffindor’s reputation, but was overruled. If Ward asked to be in Gryffindor, I’m guessing the same sort of thing would happen.
Less mistake, more I think that Ward, at age eleven, might mistake one for the other. I think Ward at age eleven is a different prospect to Ward as an adult, too, and I was thinking more about what he would have been like at that age, before The Well, before that ‘defining moment’, where cruelty and abuse has already happened, but he hasn’t embraced his hate in the way he describes, the defining moment that led to the arson, that led him to Hydra.
Also, digging deeper (probably too deep for a casual Sorting, oh well) there’s a lot of influence of culture and family in what happens in Sorting. If we’re working on the premise that Ward is Wizardborn, there would be pressure to be where his family was, and if his family were traditionally Slytherin, then that’s where he’d be likely to be placed. However, if his elder brother was already at Hogwarts and already in Slytherin, I can see Ward pushing with all his might to be Sorted into the House diametrically opposite it. If he’s Muggleborn, and the first of his family to go to Hogwarts, I think the waters are a bit more murky, even though Slytherin isn’t traditionally a House inclined to Muggleborns. (Incidentally, my first ever Potter fic was about the fate of a Muggleborn Slytherin during the Books Six and Seven.)
knitting in the dark 