Marvel Cinematic Universe

I should point out that for all the criticism Storm and T'Challa's relationship got, the X-franchise hadn't done anything meaningful with her in years and she was treated much better than many people remember.

That doesn’t necessarily okay for her to degrade into just being T’Challa’s side character.

Especially since she still has some glamorous positions like regularly leading x-teams.

Being a leader of a team in and of itself is does not mean a character is being written well. Cyclops has been leader of the X-Men for decades and is a base breaker at best much of the time. Storm spent much of her time as X-leader in modern comics being talked down to, undermined or ignored for other characters the writers were more interested in, usually the white ones. Her being "degraded" into being a side character for T'Challa beats being the token black character for the X-Men who still largely focus on white characters.

The early wedding stuff isn't great but Hudlin's run and its follow ups eventually give her interesting stuff to do as queen

I do kind of miss the days when Storm was being Ambiguously Gay with Yukio and wish they'd canonize her as bisexual (and please don't do the Iceman retcon thing and erase her relationships with men in the process).

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 19th 2021 at 4:15:22 AM

For that I recommend Living Heroes by Stephanie Williams. She’s very much bisexual and with Yukio in that comic.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 19th 2021 at 1:21:46 AM

If we're still on topic of shipping, it always annoyed me that Steve/Sam was always overlooked.

Ooh, very nice art!

Agreed. The fact that a lot of their BN Fs then took it upon themselves to attack any and all Dark Fic though, as if that was somehow to blame, not so much.

Hudlin is pretty much the Karen Traviss of Marvel, as far as I've heard. Not just in terms of horrid writing, but also in terms of behaviour online.

As someone who is next to oblivious to shipping, might I ask why male couples are so popular in fan fiction? Statistically speaking, you won't expect it. Is fan fiction disproportionally more popular among LGBT fans? Or is Guy on Guy Is Hot more widespread among straight females than I suspect?

I'm baffled by this list, to be honest.

Edited by Asherinka on Sep 19th 2021 at 12:41:30 PM

Depending on who you ask, Dan Slott is more deserving of that title (though I think many of his opponents are just as bad if not worse).

I haven't heard anything about Hudlin acting badly online.

Edited by windleopard on Sep 19th 2021 at 2:41:39 AM

His very page on this wiki states that he has been caught using fake sockpuppet accounts fanboying his own work.

Googling it also brings some results on this.

Hudlin = Traviss?

...

WAKANDALORIANS

Well yeah, Wakanda is pretty much a Mary Suetopia in his run.

...this is not the T'Challa the movies showed, lol.

x6 Yes to both in my experience. If you don't have official representation, but still enjoy media that's aimed at hetero audiences, then you can just make your own.

Though, a surprising amount of M/M fic from cis women is written and made by the ones who are bisexual, lesbian, and aro/ace. A significant portion of the straight allosexual female demographic go for the M/F ships like Clint/Natasha, Steve/Peggy, and Tony/Pepper instead (which unfortunately does a lot to explain aforementioned "proghet" tendencies from some female M/F shippers). Another reason is that, due to Most Writers Are Male, male characters in popular media are more likely than female ones to get the kinds of traits, storylines, and relationships that often that make them ripe for Fanfic Fuel (this is a big part of the appeal of M/M ships for lesbian fans).

Relatedly certain characters like Bucky and Loki have a lot of popularity less because women think they're hot (though undeniably that's definitely a big part of it), and more to do with the way they subvert and play with notions of toxic masculinity or Always Female tropes, while not being canonically female and thus averting a lot of the usual misogynistic undertones associated with having such tropes in play (Tropes Are Tools, after all).

At least, speaking for myself, this latter aspect is a large part of why I find Bucky so interesting, even if current-day Heteronormative AF Marvel seems to love playing chicken with those implications before retreating into more tradmasc archetypes. That he's also an Ambiguously Bi queer darling in a general sense, and Marvel knows this, to the point that they're shamelessly dangling the ol' Bait-and-Switch Lesbians on us as a backhanded acknowledgement of his LGBT Fanbase, is equal parts amusing and infuriating. Likewise a lot of what I like about Natasha and Peggy at their best (i.e. not AOU and Endgame) is the way they utilize positive tropes traditionally associated with male forms of agency while averting Real Women Never Wear Dresses.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 19th 2021 at 6:17:20 AM

I see there has been quite a bit of discussion on T'Challa. Did people like him most in Civil War or something? Black Panther is one of my favorite MCU movies but I don't know if T'Challa himself ever left much of an impression on me. Obviously what happened to the actor is incredibly tragic though, but I was a little puzzled when it was thought he would be a shoo-in to win a posthumous Oscar over the legendary Anthony Hopkins.

Not going to lie, I saw Civil War with some friends when it came out and I remember vaguely liking it but not thinking about it at all since. To be fair that was before I really started following the MCU so I didn't understand what the plot was really about. In 2018 I caught The Avengers coming on TV once and wound up watching the whole movie, then when I saw Thor: Ragnarok with my family a month later I didn't feel lost anymore. Maybe it helps I used to watch a lot of superhero cartoons when I was younger - the MCU feels to me like a live-action film version of those. In the best way.

T'Challa was fine, but yeah, he was just starting to hit his stride when his actor died, tragically.

That's not an uncommon opinion I've found. To the writers' credit T'Challa is still liked well in his solo movie for being a noble character with a solid arc of his own, but he's definitely outshone by everyone else around him being that much more interesting and hammy. In Civil War he could afford to be a lot more engaging and bombastic as the shiny new sidearm.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 19th 2021 at 6:26:13 AM

T'challa had a lot of potential as a character and part of my main excitement for phase 4 prior to Chadwick's death was seing T'challa move up to being one of the main movers a shakers now that older MCU characters were getting less movies.

On the shipping topic: I can also second the issue that in cannon, Male to Male friendships are often the most intesting dynamics, simply because women can often be underwritten. While as a lesbian, shipping two female MCU characters is more appealing to me, it requires me to add in a relationship justification ontop of cannon, where as shipping the male protagonist with his male best friend usually requires me to just have the characters realise they're attracted to each other.

There just aren't many great female friendships in the MCU you can just spring off of like that. Carol and Maria is a notable exception. Moreover when female relationships in the MCU do happen, they also tend to be sisterly.

Actually is weird to me that people don't ship Nebula with Gamora more. It's squicky but the inferiority complex is an angst goldmine.

x4, So do I understand correctly that in fanfiction a male character who is In Touch with His Feminine Side is often an Audience Surrogate for female fans who find existing female characters too stereotypical or plain to empathize with?

Edited by Asherinka on Sep 19th 2021 at 1:44:07 PM

The movie generally softened T’Challa a good deal, he is normally a very stoic figure and even somewhat cold cause he is very often wearing that king mask.

He is also more of a chess master, being a genius able to constantly manipulate and outplay everyone around him, with an absolute drive to do whats right. While well-meaning this also means he is constantly pissing off his friends and family cause he’s constantly tricking them or doing shit that is outright devastating like at one point crashing the Wakandan economy to prevent villains from gaining control of it.

This can be most seen in his relationship with his best friend Everett Ross who while T’Challa protects at all costs, he constantly infuriates Ross by placing him in strenuous situations. Like at one point giving Ross his kingly duties to do which annoyed the guy to no end.

Which these changes are more excusable since movie Wakanda is a different place. It’s not as actively horrible in the comics and T’Challa grew up with a loving family so he didn’t need to grow a kingly mask to hide his emotions. Granted you can arguably say these changes make him less dynamic of a character especially compared to grand planner Killmonger.

You're not the only one. While Nebula and Gamora are officially adopted sisters, it's too dysfunctional for me to buy it as a traditional sisterly relationship, and some of their interactions did have quite a lot of what I thought was sexual tension of a Foe Romance Subtext nature. Though sadly the MCU has a lot of issues with the way Gamora was handled in general, and that cuts into interest from those who would've otherwise made fan content for her and the Gamora/Nebula ship. Which I think is a shame. There I said it, now come at me fandom Moral Guardians.

Sort of? Though I'm not the self-inserting type so I don't gravitate to fic that treats Bucky as an Audience Surrogate in the second and third sense, I do think though that he's a good character to use for that kind of thing. I tried to write some of my thoughts on this matter in more detail here, if you'd like to take a gander.

In short, it's not that Bucky is In Touch with His Feminine Side in the sense of having girly interests and presentation, but the opposite: he's traditionally masculine and the kind of guy who would be typically seen as a power fantasy, but is subjected to the same kinds of objectifying and disempowering tropes usually given to female characters, especially female love interests.

Which I think is where some of the appeal of the Steve/Bucky ship comes in. Romances, especially traditional heteronormative male/female ones, tend to follow a certain set of blueprints to the point that you can map them to a (often cliche and sexist) formula. Bucky is given those kinds of female love interest tropes a lot more aggressively than Steve's official love interests, to the point that the "Not" in The Not-Love Interest becomes increasingly implausible to such viewers. Being a Damsel in Distress multiple times over, who is tortured into submission with what is implied to include sexual violence, and denied control over one's own body, before being rescued by the male hero, and is nearly Stuffed in the Fridge by the antagonist specifically with the intent of causing the hero manpain until being rescued by the hero again, is a lot less misogynistic on another man than a woman. He's also directly analogized to being an Unrequited Tragic Maiden toward Steve at one point in The First Avenger, though that's less The Not-Love Interest and more upfront Homoerotic Subtext.

A few trans male fans have also mentioned this to me as a possible reason for why they find Bucky so relatable. They identify as men, and may exhibit many of the interests and characteristics typically associated with cis men, but hateful people deny them the social status that comes with presenting as a manly man, and demean and abuse them in the same way that cis women typically get, for reasons they can't fully control.

I have much less direct experience with Loki fandom, but from what I've seen, some of Loki's appeal to women is related but opposite in nature. Whereas Bucky is a masculine man who is passively "feminized" by the storytelling, Loki is an actively feminine man/genderfluid person who uses his femininity as a kind of female power fantasy, relying on his "feminine" wiles to become the hero of his own tale the way traditional heroes like Thor rely on their masculine traits as their source of power. I can't confirm this but I'm curious if this makes Loki popular with trans women for the same reason that Bucky is popular with trans men?

This last bit is also speculation as I also don't really spend a lot of time around xReader fans, but I do wonder if the popularity of these fics for Bucky and Loki is related, where their "femininity" makes them less threatening targets of attraction for AFAB audiences. I guess it does also help that canon depicts Bucky as gentlemanly around the women interested in him. Also probably why there's not as much Tony/Reader, though that doesn't explain Loki, who has a few instances of being openly hostile to women.

Among the openly queer AMAB authors who write Bucky Slash Fic that I've personally read stories from, they also seem to lean towards making him the Point of View character more often than his partner (usually Steve, of course, though not exclusively), for what it's worth. Though some of the language used also indicates attraction to him as opposed to just wanting to be him. Then again, speaking as a bi woman I've also been in that kind of situation where I'm not sure if I'm attracted to the ladies that I am because I want to be with them or to be like them. So, still a kind of relatable perhaps.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 19th 2021 at 2:32:51 PM

I have to as a gay man I find the idea of women relating to us cus they deem us feminine deeply uncomfortable.

So while I agree this is true in a broad sense wrt fiction (this tweet was discussed in the male/female roles thread in OTC) I also think MCU Team Cap has some of the most egregious Relationship Writing Fumble, and I say this as someone who doesn't particularly ship Stucky. Shipping Goggles off, Bucky is The Not-Love Interest way more than Nat and Sam are, and it's one of the reasons Steve's Endgame ending felt so bizarre.