Welp

[gwyn]

So that was a thing that I saw.



Because I am petty and small and vindictive, I loved the fact that when Tony (and anyone else) first appeared on screen it was quiet, but when Steve appeared on screen our nearly sold-out theatre erupted into cheers and applause. Marvel has this idea that people only care about Iron Man and Spider-Man, and I loved hearing the audience prove them wrong, even if Marvel and especially Feige never listen. (Also loved the cheers for Thor and his axe.)

I leaned over at one point and said to minim calibre, who loves Cumberbatch and tolerates my intense hatred of him as an actor and Sherlock as a character he plays, "I am absolutely loving him in this. What is happening to me?" Every time he dragged Tony I wanted to high five him, he was freaking hilarious. I…the universe is unsettled. I not only liked Crumplesnatch, I liked freaking Dr. Strange, a character I have never cared one molecule for.

Totally called Red Skull. No one believed me when I said that.

I don't see this as producing a lot of fic, or at least, what I want to read. I see this as the fandom I've known and loved for four years, Steve/Bucky and the Cap Family (with Sam and Nat), either rage-quitting or just drifting away in sadness. I've watched this happen before to open canon fandoms with deaths or cast culling. I'm feeling very sad about this. I'd love it if fandom proved me wrong, but I've been in fandom a damn long time… And I'm already hearing from people that seeing Bucky die in front of Steve's eyes again was a bridge too far, even with comic-book rules.



I'm going to have to see it again just to process things. Plus catch all the lines I didn't hear!

Comments

[gwyn]

I think a large part of it is that literally the only kind of fic anyone's talking about is fix-it, and that…isn't really what I want. I'm very much a source material sort of gal in some ways, and I like variety in my consumption--like, I love chocolate, but I can eat some good chocolate and be done for three or four months, and a steady diet of only chocolate stuff would kill me. That was what I loved about Winter Soldier--there were SO MANY different types of stories we could write, OMG. (Bucky coming in from the cold! Everyone accepting Bucky and living in the tower as a team fam! Bucky and/or Steve as avenging angel on the Hydra murder trail! Fluff and silliness! Steve and Sam and Nat up all night to get Bucky! and on and on and on.) And Civil War just shut that wide-open door and made it really tiny and narrow and we had to squeeeze our way through, and this feels like…well, you'll get fix-it fic and you'll like it now shut up and eat. Maybe there will be more creativity than I imagine, but it feels really limited to a specific type of story (and I've written my share of fix-its, and read a lot, but as the only type, it's just not as much my flavor, I guess).

All that said, though, I am hoping to see myself proven wrong, and I don't necessarily mind seeing it from Steve's POV because I feel like he got really, really shafted in this and we had almost no reactions from him, so I hope you will write that and post it. I hope all my friends list will write stuff and post and I can sit there in my wrongness and be wrong.

[spikedluv]

I'm sorry that's not your jam. :( I could read hundreds of fix-it fic (and have; see: Clint/Coulson *g*) because everyone is going to have their own twist on it. I expect a lot of people are going to write 'denial' fic, too. In one of my (smaller) fandoms the fans even created a community for denial fic because of character deaths that we are all still in denial about. It's great to see so many people going, no, just no, and doing their own thing with these characters. But that's probably not your jam, either. Unless you just kind of pretend you never saw this movie and revert back to reading/writing post-TWS fic.

[kore]

That was what I loved about Winter Soldier--there were SO MANY different types of stories we could write, OMG. (Bucky coming in from the cold! Everyone accepting Bucky and living in the tower as a team fam! Bucky and/or Steve as avenging angel on the Hydra murder trail! Fluff and silliness! Steve and Sam and Nat up all night to get Bucky! and on and on and on.) And Civil War just shut that wide-open door and made it really tiny and narrow and we had to squeeeze our way through, and this feels like…well, you'll get fix-it fic and you'll like it now shut up and eat.

YES, YES. I think for me it's a combination of feeling nearly all the solo movies finished their individual stories but still left stuff open, so there was room for fic, but the team movies closed everything down (BUT also left us hanging in limbo for the next team movie). And LBR, the solo movies have become more and more like sub-team movies because everything is marching toward these big two conclusions (case in point, "Captain America" Civil War). What I'm hearing people talk about is "what if Bucky's in another realm and he and Steve could still communicate and people are in another dimension" and I'm....just not thrilled with that. Or super duper Steve angst, and I'm just like, poor Steve has had ENOUGH angst. Watching his lifetime BFF crumble into CGI dust was just piling on the agony.

And in this case I've just hated the canon for a while now (Aou, CW) and I don't even want to read fix-its for all that. Those aren't the stories I fell in love with that made me want to write about the characters.