Tag: interesting

He’s both a foil and a tether; an anchor. I was interested in the two of them having a blood-is-thicker-than-water relationship. The last time they had seen each other Barney was threatening to murder him and Clint had stolen all of his money from him. Barney’s been a super villain and a killer and a real monster, and not just to Clint — so I wanted to show that when Barney was really down on his luck and needed somebody to help him, the one person who couldn’t say no to him was his baby brother Clint.

I suspect there’s lots of ways to interpret their relationship. [Laughs] And I’d much rather let readers interpret than give them my interpretation. I don’t know if there’s a right or a wrong answer. It was this or Clint talking to a sock puppet for five issues.

Matt Fraction, on Barney Barton’s relationship to Clint (via fuckyeahavengingarcher)

spiralstreesandcupsoftea:

raiining:

“So I’ve decided fandom will forever be confused about Natasha’s name. Not, uh, coincidentally, comics writers have been confused about it for even longer. The tricky bit is this: Natalia and Natasha are both forms of the Russian name Наталья. The Natalia/Natasha equivalency doesn’t exist in English, leading to all kinds of tail-chasing confusion re: which is real and which is fake. Natasha is a diminutive form of Natalia the same way Bill is for William. “Natalia” is not more authentic or more Russian, it’s just a bit more formal. And “Natasha Romanoff” is not an alias the way “Nadine Roman” or “Nancy Rushman” are. The Romanoff/Romanova issue is just a question of transliteration. The Russian surname is Рома́нов, which is written as Romanoff or Romanov depending on your history book. Traditionally, Russian ladies take feminine endings to match their grammatical gender— Ivan Belov becomes Yelena Belova, Aleksandr Belinsky becomes Aleksandra Belinskaya. But the feminine endings often get dropped in English translation, e.g. Nastia Liukin, not Nastia Liukina. It’s a matter of preference. If that’s too confusing, don’t worry, until about 1998 the comics had no idea what they were doing either. Natasha’s name has been Natasha since her very first appearance, where she and her partner Boris Turgenev were the butt of the obvious joke. Her last name wasn’t revealed until the early 1970s. Yeah, she went through a whole solo series without getting a last name. Weird, but it took dozens of issues for Hawkeye to get a first name. Romanoff: a name no one knows or knew. At the time, Natasha was being written as an aristocratic jet-setter, a glamorous countess. Since Romanov is the most famous Russian surname, and superhero stuff isn’t codenamed subtlety, I figure Gerry Conway just went with what he knew. And so Natasha Romanoff was her name through the 1970s. Instead of “Miss” or the Danvers-ian “Ms.”, Natasha used “Madame”, contributing to that Old World mystique and invoking feelings of a boudoir. By 1983 someone on staff realized that Romanova might be more technically correct. (Might being operative, here, the best way of translating the feminine endings is still debated.) Anyway, her Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe page listed her as Natasha “Romanoff” Romanova. The next big change would occur when someone, and I’m thinking it was Chris Claremont, realized she was missing a patronym. A full Russian name has three parts: the given (first) name, the patronym, and the family (last) name. For example, Grand Duchess Anastasia, the one who had that Bluth film, would be formally called Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, or Anastasia “Daughter of Nicholas” Romanoff. Her brother, the Tsarevich Alexei, was Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, or Alexei “Son of Nicholas” Romanoff. Basically: everyone in Russia has a middle name, and it is their father’s. I think it was Claremont who realized Nat’s was lacking because he is a phonetic accent wizard and an expert on Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin da tovarisch. Also, because the first time I could find a patronym for Natasha was in a 1992 issue of X-men that he wrote. The weird thing about Alianovna is that it would mean her father’s name was Alia or Alian or something else not really common. Maybe that’s why Kurt Busiek, continuity repair man, pretended it was something else in his Heroes Return Iron Man run. Ivanovna, or daughter of Ivan, is a much more common patronym and also meshes with her backstory. But it didn’t stick. Everyone and the guidebook uses Alianovna. What did stick was Natalia. Yeah, this is the first comic I could find that uses Natalia, and you can tell by context that Busiek’s using it to emphasize formality. When talking to Tony, she calls herself Natasha, when declaring her total identity before an epic beatdown, she takes the “my name is Inigo Montoya” route. From the late nineties forward Natalia started popping up with some frequency, usually in formal or impersonal contexts. Yelena speaks of “Natalia Romanova” as the Red Room’s greatest legend, Natasha demands that the he-was-evil-all-along Ivan Petrovich address her without the diminutive. There are exceptions. I figure some writers check wikipedia, see her name listed as “Natalia” and decide they’ve done their homework. Daniel Way has Logan refer to Natalia, his surrogate daughter, completely bizarre for the quasi-familial relationship and for the nickname-happy Wolverine. Brubaker had Bucky refer to her as Natalia, at first— an odd distancing from a previously intimate relationship. Since they’ve gotten back together, though, he uses Natasha, or Nat, or ‘Tasha, or in any case, he’s dropped the formality.”

— Fuck Yeah, Black Widow: The Name Game  (via eppypeninc)

interesting!

kryptaria:

wintercyan:

etharei:

buckysexual:

rocks0cks:

JUST NOTICED LAST NIGHT THAT BUCKY WAS ALSO ON A DRIP IN THE ENTIRE CHAIR SCENE

I know it’s a fucked up scene, I do, but that to me just is nOPE. What the fuck are they putting into his system on top of the mind wiping and the physical abuse and the conditioning. 

wait, what?

image

THE TUBE ON THE BACK OF HIS RIGHT HAND, IS THAT A DRIP?

Dr. Cyan calling in here, and yes, that is absolutely a peripheral IV cannula on his right hand. Watching the scene carefully you can see the IV stand on his right, with two infusion bags attached (sorry for the crappy images, maybe someone can grab a better screenshot if they have the DVD):

image

image

If you watch frame by frame, you can see that Bucky pops the connection tube off when he attacks the med tech; it dangles freely from the IV bag when the guards move to point their guns at him. In real life he’d probably have torn the cannula out of his hand entirely; it happens all the time with little old ladies in my ER so I was disappointed the directors didn’t draw on that particular body horror/’ouch’-factor here.

The infusion bags appear to be one 1,000 mL isotonic saline or D5W/D5NS (dextrose/glucose in a saline solution) for tissue rehydration, and one 500 mL isotonic saline, most likely a diluent for injectable/parenteral drug administration:

image

Which drug? Well, it could be any HYDRA concoction, but I’d put my money on the tried-and-true fallback of some benzodiazepine. BZDs/derivatives are anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing), hypnotic (sedative/sleep-inducing), anticonvulsant (good for when you’re electrocuting someone’s brain), amnestic (affecting memory), and myorelaxant (muscle-relaxing), a nice cocktail for working with the Winter Soldier – and hey! paradoxical BZD reactions include aggression and violence (such as attacking attending medical staff), and it may also cause anterograde amnesia as well as internalised feelings of turmoil, anxiety, depression, and loss of the ability to experience and/or express feelings. Plus, withdrawal can cause depression, depersonalisation, derealisation, hypersensitivity, psychosis, and suicidal ideation – sounds like a lot of Bucky-in-from-the-cold fanfics, am I right?

Seriously, writing this, I’m wondering where the withdrawal!Bucky fanfics are – the fics I’ve read all focus on his mental issues, but what about the physiological ones? I’d really like to read a fic about Bucky coming off whatever HYDRA pumped him full of – now that’d make for some neat hurt/comfort (and a lot of curling up on Steve’s bathroom floor shaking and puking his guts out).

(When I get my hands on a HD copy of the movie I’ll have a look at the rest of the medical setup in that scene. I’m especially interested in the screens behind the chair – maybe some more medical meta to be explored? Please send any screenshots my way if you have them!)

Hey, zooeyscigar – angsty fic reference here!

star-anise:

last-snowfall:

verysharpteeth:

n-a-blue-box:

pierce’s death was too good for him.

How hard he hits him though. He nearly knocks him off the chair he hits him so hard and Bucky’s head bounces on rebound. And Bucky isn’t even being defiant here, just stuck. He’s caught in his own thinking and isn’t really resisting, just not reacting. He’s still Winter Soldier here, but Winter Soldier trying to figure out what just happened with his day and we know he could stop Pierce mid swing if he really wanted. But he doesn’t, just sort of pulls himself back upright still clinging to the fact that SOMEHOW the Soldier knew him and can’t figure out why. The little bit of Bucky that’s left frantically trying to organize fragments of memory.

Pierce died too quick.

Here’s where it gets worse, though: a brief couple minutes later, Pierce tries to give him a speech. It’s a speech full of praise and glory.

And why would you bother? Because it works better, if all your violence comes with another option. It works better, conditioning, if you have a carrot and a stick. It works better if you are the font of all things good and make the frame so that the recipient thinks they deserve all things bad.

Now given where they’re keeping him, and everything else, let’s adjust this in perspective: “good” becomes not actually good. It becomes an absence of pain, of punishment. It becomes a positive word. It becomes the presence of another human being in a life of constant isolation and imprisonment.

And then if you really want to get upset, you can think about what Pierce would have looked like mid-century, when he was younger, and when the Winter Soldier starts making his mark.

You’re welcome.

You’ve heard this story before:  He’s imprisoned and tortured and experimented on, until he hardly remembers his own name.  And in the depths of his despair this blond man comes to him like an angel, like a halo, and says: Come with me.  Come follow me.  Come fight with me.

But this isn’t his true angel, because this time disobedience comes with fire and pain and freezing cold; and he never looks like the man the Winter Soldier keeps expecting to see.  But Alexander Pierce is the closest thing that he remembers, so he’s the one the soldier obeys.

Clint Barton

haforcere:

1. Clint is an unreliable narrator.

I think Clint bullshits himself a lot, and will tell himself one thing, even while acting out another. “What’s it to me?”, or “This is isn’t my problem,” for instance, even while going to huge lengths. I think this is especially true for situations that involve letting his emotional guard down, even to himself.

I think his thoughts have to come through his actions, so a Clint-POV driven narrative is hard, because he’s often telling himself things that are complete and utter crapola.

So, even in other POVs, with Clint it’s actions, not words.

Steve is the pep talk guy. Clint is the foot-in-mouth guy who is, as Fraction says, “Genuinely good. He’s the guy who will help you move your couch in the rain.”

2. Clint is good, and selfless, and brave, but doesn’t know it.

Clint’s the guy who became a good guy, through no supporting circumstance (uncle killed by criminal to put him on the straight and narrow, witnessing death by weapons he’d built, etc), but just because he wanted to be good.

I think Clint acts for others—his motivation is someone needs him, or needs him to do a thing, rather than self interest—and if something needs to be done, Clint will do it, and he won’t think about if or how it’s bad for him, or how he might get hurt.

But he’s still always trying to play catch-up to a bar of heroism that he’s already reached. Also because he’s probably internalized a lot of bad messages he’s heard about himself. I think in a lot of ways Clint is one of the most worthy Avenger, but he probably hears a lot that he’s the least.

3. Hurt is normal.

I don’t think Clint angsts too much. Sometimes, you need that moment of, “Look at these things I have done,” but I think a lot of the time, Clint expects things to come out badly, so he’s not shocked or upset when they do. Like that saying, “pessimists can only be pleasantly surprised,” I think Clint’s the guy who’s (seemingly inappropriately) cheerful when things go kinda wrong, because you guys. I thought it would be so much worse.

This also goes for relationships. I think Clint’s surprised when it doesn’t go bad, when he doesn’t get kicked out of the Avengers for his latest mess-up, when Cap says something to praise him. I think those mean a lot to Clint, because he doesn’t really expect them.

Also, sort of related to 1. I think he’s running constant damage control, engaging in negative self-talk to downplay emotions/attachments in case he loses them, even though he’s already totally attached, which I think results in a kind of unacknowledged loneliness and lone wolf type behaviour.

4. Clint is funny, and weird.

Clint isn’t sad. Sad things happen to Clint. I think he’s a guy who jokes in bad situations, especially if they’re his own. In this way, I think he’s a lot like Tony, but I think the tone and reason behind his humor is different.

I think he’s crankier than Tony’s happy-go-lucky randomness front, but also amusingly awkward. Probably from Clint’s POV, it’s not that amusing. Probably, Clint is like, “God, act normal, Barton. Just act normal. Goddamit,” but externally, I think he’s probably pretty entertaining.

I think he also probably has weird knowledge. Like the kind of thing, where people go, “What?” and all you can say is something like, “HEY. I JUST KNOW STUFF, OK?

You’re oddly socialized, Barton. It’s ok.

5. Clint acts on emotion.

Which is good, because he’s always telling himself bullshit, but bad because it means he’s always acting on un-thought out impulse and is always instantly in over his head, because it’s emotional investment that made him act in the first place.

Also, I think Clint has a lot of emotions and he doesn’t understand most of them. I think that could make him easy to manipulate, if someone knows the strings to pull.

allrightcallmefred:

fredscience:

The Doorway Effect: Why your brain won’t let you remember what you were doing before you came in here

I work in a lab, and the way our lab is set up, there are two adjacent rooms, connected by both an outer hallway and an inner doorway. I do most of my work on one side, but every time I walk over to the other side to grab a reagent or a box of tips, I completely forget what I was after. This leads to a lot of me standing with one hand on the freezer door and grumbling, “What the hell was I doing?” It got to where all I had to say was “Every damn time” and my labmate would laugh. Finally, when I explained to our new labmate why I was standing next to his bench with a glazed look in my eyes, he was able to shed some light. “Oh, yeah, that’s a well-documented phenomenon,” he said. “Doorways wipe your memory.”

Being the gung-ho new science blogger that I am, I decided to investigate. And it’s true! Well, doorways don’t literally wipe your memory. But they do encourage your brain to dump whatever it was working on before and get ready to do something new. In one study, participants played a video game in which they had to carry an object either across a room or into a new room. Then they were given a quiz. Participants who passed through a doorway had more trouble remembering what they were doing. It didn’t matter if the video game display was made smaller and less immersive, or if the participants performed the same task in an actual room—the results were similar. Returning to the room where they had begun the task didn’t help: even context didn’t serve to jog folks’ memories.

The researchers wrote that their results are consistent with what they call an “event model” of memory. They say the brain keeps some information ready to go at all times, but it can’t hold on to everything. So it takes advantage of what the researchers called an “event boundary,” like a doorway into a new room, to dump the old info and start over. Apparently my brain doesn’t care that my timer has seconds to go—if I have to go into the other room, I’m doing something new, and can’t remember that my previous task was antibody, idiot, you needed antibody.

Read more at Scientific American, or the original study.

I finally learned why I completely space when I cross to the other side of the lab, and that I’m apparently not alone.

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’

It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?

Sandi Toksvig (via womanbythesea, learninglog) (via finger-print) (via nakedbearhugs) (via jeremy-ruiner) (via selenay936)

theappleppielifestyle:

evaanverlaine-blog-deactivated2:

You and Pepper share a track of the film just together that was interesting because it wasn’t a jealous, “We’ve both been with the same man” kind of thing. It was all business.

Rebecca Hall:  To be honest with you, it’s one of the main reasons why I took the job. When I initially heard about it, I thought, okay they’re bringing another woman in, it’s going to be two females in this, it’s going to probably end up in this horribly reductive, stereotypical cat fight. When I saw that it wasn’t and that it was actually daring to write something that was grown up and sophisticated, where women are actually bigger than being defined by the people that they’ve slept with, I thought it was kind of great! I applauded it and I applaud Marvel for keeping it in because it would very easy for them to have gone, “Well, no one’s interested in that sort of stuff in a film like this.” But the truth is, actually, that they are because I have yet to do an interview with someone who hasn’t said exactly that.

Have you heard of the Bechdel Test before?

Rebecca Hall: No, what’s that?

It’s by a cartoonist called Alison Bechdel. The test for a movie is, is there more one woman in the film? Do they talk to each other about something other than a man? And most movies will fail it.

Rebecca Hall: I’m sure! That’s brilliant! I’ve never heard of that. That is brilliant.

They’re talking to each other about technology. The guy they slept with is almost incidental to the whole thing.

Rebecca Hall: Exactly. They’re smart women. That’s what people want to see now, that’s the stuff that women are complaining about when they say, “Nobody writes good female characters.” Sure, you can get big characters in movies that are women, but nobody’s writing them particularly interestingly or making it real. It’s that sort of stuff. [Iron Man 3 is] taking a different take, not the obvious one. That’s great. (x)

#okay but honestly MORE#M O R E#like wow it’s 2014 we’re surprised we can have wOMEN NOT IN A LOVE TRIANGLE?!#CAT FIGHTS?!#WOW FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS WOW – via aglassfullofhappiness