learn to love the skies I'm under

[lotesse]

I voted absentee weeks ago, so all I've got left to do now is sit and wait and try not to think about it. last-minute psa'd my students yesterday on where/how to vote. God, y'all, everyone keeps talking about voter fraud and recounts and I'm not sure we can do another 2000 right now.

So here are other things I'm thinking about that are more fannish and less anxious and more fun:

- over the course of grading midterm papers, I've managed to rewatch both seasons of Shameless US, and holy shit y'all I love this show. I want the new seeeeeasooooon, but it won't be around until January, bloody hellcakes. This show hits all of my "siblings on their own form pseudofamily" kinks - yes I did really like the Boxcar Children, and holy balls I would read porn of that in a hot minute, come on, someone's got to have at least shipped the older sibs. Except that Shameless also has (relatively) realistic poverty and some race/gender/sexual diversity, and passes the Bechdel test and also contains some not-half-bad sex scenes. And Fiona's hair gets dirty and Lip is awesome with his smartkid rage and Debbiiiiieee is my favorite and Kev reminds me of every older dude I grew up with back home.

- listening to an audiobook of Shadows of the Empire - there's no frelling podfic in this fandom, I'm reduced to EU recordings and the old radio serials if I want audio engagement - and I've got to say, if Dash Rendar was a real thing that really happened, oh my god Luke had so much angsty self-loathing sex with him between ESB and RotJ. Of course, Dash Rendar probably wasn't a real thing that really happened, because he's an example of the same storytelling tactic that frustrated me so much in Captain America: a regular character (Han, Tony) are unavailable to the narrative, for whatever reason, so the writers create a knockoff character (Rendar, Howard) so that they can keep working with familiar dynamics. But 1. that undersells the impact of the character's absence and 2. creates these kind of boring cardboard cutout fake surrogate characters.

-(Marvel tangent: because Howard Stark isn't supposed to be that much like Tony, guys. Tony's flash and flip are the defense mechanisms you develop when you grow up in the spotlight, when you're the inheritor of something and everyone keeps looking to you and you don't quite know how to deal with that kind of pressure. Howard seems like a much more "self-made man" archetype, all gravitas and teeth, the guy who went out and built himself a fortune and made himself get kind of cold in the process. CA!Howard Stark is one of the hardest things in the MCU for me to wrap my head around, because the archetypes just don't make sense that way.)

Comments

[wishfulclicking]

CA!Howard refers to Captain America, right? I'm not familiar with comics canon that much (I've only read 1602 and Civil War) so I am nor familiar with Howard Stark, but do you think his characterization in part was built on the writers going backwards from Tony's characterization?

[lotesse]

Yeah, I do - even physically they cast to type, with Howard Stark from IM1 and IM2, the kind of WASP Atomic Daddy character, being replaced by shorted darker more mustachy Dominic Cooper. I see a lot of difference between Howard's presentation of the Expo in IM2, where he's stiff & paternalistic, with his presentation of the "flying car" in CA, where he's doing Tony-style vaudevillian dramatics. I guess we all know it's fun to bounce Cap off of Tony, and they needed a Tony, so they turned Howard into one. But I think in earlier MCU canon Tony's not much like his daddy.

[anthimeria]

Re: CA!Howard, I wonder how much of it was influenced by the fact that Disney bought Marvel between filming IM2 and CA. Because in IM2, Howard is very clearly mocking Walt Disney and his whole "let me show you the world of tomorrow" thing. Seriously, it was the first thing that struck me about that scene in IM2. Even the room setup was similar! With the model and everything! He was basically Walt doing EPCOT, only not. He even looked a bit like Walt. But Howard is also presented as a bit of a self-serving fuckup in just about all canons, and Disney cannot have that!

So, yeah. I wonder.

[lotesse]

I ... hadn't thought of that! I totally had the same association of IM!Howard with Disney, though. Anyway, you know my other fuss with the Howard thing - that I think it's much more interesting/historically dynamic to read Howard as a WASP and Maria as of fairly recent Italian extraction, and CA!Howard completely messes that one up. Sigh.