Post reblogged from Hey, What's the Matter? with 33 notes
in the avengers au with jane instead of selvig
does jane even bother to build a killswitch into the wormhole generator?
I mean, why would she?
Jane builds a wormhole generator that is not necessarily better than the one Erik Selvig would have built, but it is fundamentally different. Erik Selvig is a Swedish ex-pat who met his childhood God a few months ago, and would have spent most of his time in SHEILD custody wishing for a stiff drink. Jane Foster is a young astrophysicist disregarded by the science community, and whose latest boyfriend proved her theories of the multiverse correct simply by existing. She spends most of her time in SHEILD’s underground facility developing carpal tunnel and bullying her guards into allowing her onto the roof. Erik Selvig, infused with a cosmic force beyond his understanding, would have despaired and asked “Why?”. Jane, thinking always in some way of the space beyond the stars, asks “How?”
When the generator is turned on, it does not shoot a solar beam *up* into the atmosphere, but instead acts as the grounding for a solitary electron cosmic ray traveling *down* to the Earth, from the remains of the Bifrost. Jane knows so much about the Bifrost now. Jane knows so much about everything.
Yggdrasill is not a tree made of ash as Thor had explained, nor of dark matter as she had first hypothesized, working for SHEILD in the dungeon laboratory Thor’s people, the Aesir, had called it a tree because it was stretching and expanding, and isn’t that what trees do? But the Cube has shown her the truth. Yggdrasill is dark energy.
The wormhole around the thin ray widens, and a squad Chitauri fighters slip through. The first creature-ship descends on Manhattan as the wormhole widens further, distorting Earth’s atmosphere around it. Next to Jane, the cosmic ray remains thin and constant, but light-eons away, the Bifrost remains twist inward into a black hole, rapidly approaching the golden city Valhalla. The night sky above Jotenheim brights and glows as the stars crowd in closer. In frozen Niflheim, Hel plunges her hand into the flames of Múspellheim, and the halls of the Vanir shake as the worlds slam together.
Jane Foster stands on the roof of Stark Tower and squints up at the darkening sky, waiting for it to be filled with stars.
this is amazing you should read it also the tags
#GIVE JANE THE CUBE AND WATCH HER WILLINGLY STRIP AWAY HER HUMANITY
#FOR SCIENCE
BECAUSE YES I was just typing a thing that is not unsimilar but also not even close to be this awesome holy wow of course Jane makes hers different, of COURSE.
Photoset reblogged from i'd rather have you with 8,474 notes
I was going to tag spiral about this, but I quickly realized that I was going to go well over the limit of what tumblr would allow, so instead, okay, here, have some word vomit.
I have a lot of intense feelings about Chris Hemsworth as Thor and how entirely overlooked he too often is. It’s not that the other actors don’t deserve the kudos they get and god knows I plaster Tom’s perfect fucking face all over nearly every blog I have. But my appreciation for Chris’ acting is a different sort of thing, if no less intense for it. Because—and not to take anything away from the brilliant performances, because they are brilliant performances—it’s sort of easy to stand out when you have a lot of hilarious lines to work with or these big dramatic scenes. But Thor’s not necessarily that kind of character. Thor is almost understated, for all that he’s one of those larger than life sort of characters, because he’s not prone to screaming or flying off the handle or quipping at his enemies.
So there’s not a lot of chances for you to point to a specific scene and say, oh, that’s why Thor’s my favorite. Not that there aren’t some—you know when I really lose it and start to tear up in the Thor movie? As much as Loki’s utterly blank face when he’s hanging off the Bifrost builds it up, it’s not until you see it dawn on Thor’s face, it’s not until Chris Hemsworth is yelling, “Loki, no—!” when Thor realizes that Loki’s about to let go that I really break out the waterworks. It’s the devastation and horror on Chris’ face in that moment that really cuts into me.
Thor is a character of deep feelings and deep motivations, both happy and sad. He loves and laughs with as much passion as he mourns and is furious. But he expresses it in a way that I think a lot of people overlook and it’s not just Chris’ acting that gets overlooked, but FAR TOO OFTEN fandom overlooks Thor’s character as well. Too often he’s just used as a cardboard prop, he has no presence or affect on a scene, and it leaves me feeling restless and empty, because that’s not Thor at all. And that’s even setting aside the “dumb jock” stereotype that’s just… completely inaccurate.
Seriously, though, he was dropped into an entirely new society, one he had Z E R O knowledge of, and he adapted incredibly well in THREE DAYS. He didn’t have a meltdown of self-identity, despite that everything he’d known for his incredibly long life had been ripped away from him, even Mjolnir would no longer answer his call, and he still managed to pull himself together. He had help, he had friends to lean on in that time, but it’s still something you have to do yourself—adapt to the new life you find yourself in. He has no way of knowing what computers are or what cameras are or how food is served or what kind of pets are available. But he adjusts quickly, we see him riding in Jane’s van later and he understands what it is. He knows how to find his way around New York to go chasing after Loki.
No, he probably doesn’t know how to work a computer but a) he’s not had reason to ever try before, b) he could probably figure it out relatively quickly, and c) frankly, I don’t think Thor really gives a shit about mortal technology. It doesn’t really vex him, he gets the basic idea of it (we see Coulson showing him stuff on the computer even and Thor clearly understands what he’s seeing), he understands why mortals use it and probably thinks it’s clever for them, he just doesn’t really have a personal use for it, I don’t think.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is, there’s so much to Thor’s character in the little touches that Chris puts into the role, like with this moment where you can see how disillusioned he is about his brother, how badly he wanted to believe that things could be fixed, but his hopes have been dashed. Or the scene in the field where he hesitates before picking Mjolnir back up, where you see everything written on his face: What Loki just did/tried to do, what it means when he has to pick Mjolnir up again, knowing that it’s truly come to having to use Mjolnir against Loki. Not just to pin him down this time, but to truly fight against him, to use his beloved weapon against his beloved brother. You see that all on Chris’ face. That this character has to be willing to do that now.
Chris isn’t Thor to me just because of how he looks or how fucking huge that dude is. It’s because he understands these things about the character and brings them out in his acting. He understands the difficult sides of Thor and the side that makes friends wherever he goes, because Thor’s that guy you can count on, he’s that guy who’s always direct and genuine with you, who will always let you know where you stand with him, and who will do the right thing.
He’s Thor to me because he carries his scenes and is an actor that a film can be based around. He’s Thor to me because I did not give a shit about the character beforehand (I’ve tried a fair amount of times to read Thor comics before, but nothing ever really stuck) but he made the character interesting to me. He made me understand this character and what he goes through and what his motivations are.
That’s why Chris Hemsworth’s performances are always some of the best in the MCU for me and why I will always go on (at length, obv.) about how great they are for me.And then if you ever wanted to know how I felt about Chris’ performance as Thor, well, there you go, too.
Source: hemsworthchris
Post reblogged from This is not a blog. No, seriously. with 6,523 notes
Jay Gatsby was black: an explanation
So let me explain this theory for those of you who haven’t heard it before already.
The Great Gatsby is a story of a man that makes his fortune bootlegging and throws countless magnificent parties all in hopes of attracting the attention of his old flame Daisy.
But it’s really a story about insurmountable class barriers. Daisy will never be with Gatsby, no matter how much she claims to love him. No matter how hard Gatsby tries, he will always be stuck on West Egg, only able to admire the ‘green light’ of upper class american romanticism from afar.
Themes of insurmountable class barriers permeate the entire novel right from some of the famous opening lines:
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
And so here’s the theory:
Jay Gatsby was black, passing for white (“High yellow”)
Lower class vs upper class. Old money vs new money. East Egg vs West Egg. White vs black. Don’t believe me?
- Early in the novel, Daisy’s beau Tom goes on a full fledged rant about the oncoming threat of the rise of the black race in society
- Another reference to race is made when Nick and Gatsby pass by a limo driven by a white chauffeur with “three modish negroes”
- Numerous references are made to Gatsby’s notably dark skintone in comparison to Daisy’s lighter skintone
- “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t— at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t— drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”
Not only was the insurmountable barrier between him and Daisy one of class and upbringing, but also one of race.
What we take for granted as Gatsby’s whiteness is actually a omission of detail rather than a specific indicator that he was white.
From the article Was Gatsby Black?
Thompson adds, “When I ask people what basis there is for Gatsby being white, I get silence. I have asked students, colleagues. They don’t know. They cannot give me any evidence to back up the speculation. And why haven’t people made this argument so far?”
Of course as with any theory or reading of a classic text, there’s room for disagreement:
Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli has one answer. “Because it’s mishigas! If Fitzgerald wanted to write about blacks, it wouldn’t have taken 75 years to figure it out. If that’s what Fitzgerald wanted, he would have made it perfectly clear in April 1925. Great works of literature are not fodder for guessing games. This kind of thing is bad for literature, bad for Fitzgerald, bad for ‘The Great Gatsby’ and bad for students who get exposed to this kind of guessing game.”
But why shouldn’t we play a guessing game with it? We don’t have Fitzgerald around to verify any of these details so why not have a bit of fun with the text? It’s a very modern reading of the text and it makes it not only more relatable but more heartbreaking.
Everyone has their own reasons why they can’t be with their own Daisy.
Why shouldn’t Gatsby be black? And why can’t he really be with Daisy?
In this discussion about whether or not Beethoven was black, the point is made:
Another tight question along these lines: Was Jay Gatsby black? Again, it’s probably not literally the case (as Fitzgerald intended it) –- but what’s much more interesting is everyone’s utter inability to take it seriously as a legitimate reading of the text, which it is.
So in high school I never had to read The Great Gatsby (we read The Dubliners instead, and then one of us found out about Joyce’s uh, love letters, so endless giggling), and never had an interest in reading it on my own because come on.
Another novel about a white man’s life? Nah bruh, I’m good.
But reading it within the context of Jay Gatsby as a white passing black man, suddenly my interest is piqued.
Source: pollums
Photo reblogged from Cyg Nautilos with 9,260 notes
The above statement is exactly what I thought. Really it started in the lab though when he was pouring his heart out to her and she was clearly not caring. To watch him suffer a bout then snark @ him and leave him alone was painful to watch. WTF. I’m still not over it. At least Rhodey showed he cared about how Tony was doing.
Yes, because when she walked over to Tony and practically held him in her arms she was really uncaring wow so heartless.
and god forbid a woman choose her physical safety over taking care of her man’s emotional state, which you know, just put her physical safety at risk there
(and I’m sure accidentally hurting Pepper with the suit would do wonders for Tony’s ptsd attacks) >_>
I hate to butt in but I was really pleased with this scene because this is PTSD done right and reactions by someone who doesn’t have PTSD done right.
I have high-level PTSD and have had to deal with it for about eight and a half months now. I have night terrors worse than Tony’s. I thrash in my sleep, kick, fight, and scream. In the time that this has been going on, I’ve had two friends who have spent the night with me in an attempt to see if someone calming and strong sleeping next to me would ease the night terrors. Out of three collective nights that they stayed with me, it was successful only once. The final night, my second friend had to leave the bed and sleep on the couch because I was thrashing so much in my sleep. He’s 6’2” and a military officer who can definitely kick my ass in a fight if I were awake. I was hurting him so much in my sleep and scaring the daylights out of him that he had to leave. When someone with PTSD is in the grips of a really violent night terror, they fight tooth and nail more violently than if they were awake. Yes, it hurt me that he did that but I get why he did it. He was scared for his safety because I was fighting so hard in my sleep. My other friend that stayed with me watched me suffer through a night terror like Pepper did with Tony and tried to wake me up after a few minutes of me whimpering and kicking in my sleep. I nearly decked him coming out of it because I was still swamped in the dream and had idea what was going on.
Both men reacted similar to Pepper. They were scared, they were hurt, they were terrified for me, about what I was doing and going through, and had no idea how to handle it, save walking away to breathe. When you don’t have PTSD, but your partner does, it is incredibly difficult to understand what they are going through and how their mind operates, especially when asleep when the PTSD manifests in nightmares and night terrors.
So don’t you say that Pepper wasn’t supporting Tony by walking out. She was putting her physical safety first, which is a perfectly legitimate action to do in that situation. It hurts Tony obviously, but she still supports him and loves him and helps him through the PTSD in the morning. She listens to him when he rambles and tries to articulate what it’s like inside his head since New York as he’s trying to express why he’s acting the way he is. Listening and still loving them at the end of the day is the best thing you can do for someone with PTSD.
I was incredibly pleased with how they handled the rather touchy subject of PTSD in this film because I’ve had to live through that hell for eight and a half months now and know what it’s like day in and day out to struggle with your own brain, especially against nightmares, night terrors, and panic/anxiety attacks.
So to all the people hating on Pepper for her reaction in this scene: shut up. You have no room to talk. Had you been in her position, you would have left the room too. Don’t try to speak authoritatively about something you know nothing about. Thank you.
Source: rdjinspiringlybeautiful
Link reblogged from x^2+7x+53 with 2,230 notes
What is wrong with Doctor Who? →
I thought it was time to give some thought to what the Doctor-assistant relationship is, what function the assistant has on the show, how Doctor Who distributes personal qualities by gender, and why I now hate this lovely show that I used to love.Damn, this rings true and it breaks my (1) heart.
“[in Moffat’s Who] the woman is not of interest for her character or her abilities, but for some fundamental mystery in her being. The mystery isn’t even a secret she’s keeping, something over which she has control- it’s something she does not know about, that the Doctor must puzzle out in his own mind. It’s not about her- it’s about what’s wrong with her. When Steven Moffat took over Doctor Who, women became a problem.”
I love this article.
Source: dancingcabinet
Post reblogged from eloquent as fuck with 11,078 notes
Why The Mandarin needed to be portrayed as he was in Iron Man 3
or, why the MCU didn’t ruin your favorite supervillain.
below the cut: Iron Man 3 spoilers, discussion of cultural appropriation, narrative arc, and analysis of how ridiculously, wonderfully meta the advertising scheme of IM3 was.
Post reblogged from This is not a blog. No, seriously. with 300 notes
Elementary!Holmes and kinky asexuality
Anonymous asked you:
Sooo you can be asexual and a sub? (genuine question from someone who’s neither and should be less ignorant before making an opinion on Elementary Sherlock’s sexuality)
—
[content notes: BDSM, discussion of sex, NSFW, brief mention of self-harm via car crash, mentions of food]
Yes! Absolutely! BDSM and kink roles really don’t necessarily have anything to do with sex at all, and even if sex is involved, sexual actions don’t necessarily have anything to do with one’s own sexuality.
For instance, someone can be a sub because:
- they want to consensually give up control (physical, psychological, and/or emotional) to someone else for a while,
- they enjoy a receiving a particular sensation (masochist and sub don’t necessarily equate but can go hand in hand),
- they want to serve and take care of others in a power-differentiated role (i.e. sub prepares food and brings Dom breakfast in bed coughJoanlockcough),
- they want to be taken care of by others in a power-differentiated role (i.e. sub spoon-fed dinner then kissed on the forehead and tucked into bed by caretaker Dom),
- they want to be given specific structure, orders, or discipline, or
- many other non-sexual reasons people feel like subs.
However, subs can also have sexual reasons and experiences in their subbiness and still be asexual. Asexuality is simply about not experiencing sexual attraction to other people. So, for instance:
- maybe they have a sub-related kink that they’re sexually into that gets them off, but it’s not about sexual attraction to another person, it’s about sexual arousal via that kink,
- maybe in the course of subbing they want to consensually give sexual pleasure to someone they like or love, but not because they’re sexually attracted to the person, and they won’t receive sexual reciprocation in return,
- maybe they do want to orgasm with the other person, but it’s because they want the release and they trust the other person, not because they’re attracted to the other person,
- maybe they’re gray-asexual in the demisexual way and do develop sexual attraction after a deep emotional connection, but are still on the asexual spectrum, or
- many other reasons.
You can also have kink attraction to someone without having sexual attraction to someone. I experience this a lot as a gray-asexual kinky person. Like I really want to consensually tie up, gag, slap, and hair-pull BBC!Sherlock (kink attraction) and consensually make him cry, lose control, and beg for mercy twice, after Irene Adler put the idea in my mind and after B.C. talked about having sensitive follicles. This idea is extremely appealing to me at a very subconscious, base level, but that doesn’t mean I’m sexually attracted to him (I’m really not).
So now that I’ve written the longest reply in the world (as I usually do when writing about kink and sex, because I love these topics), yes. Someone can be asexual and kinky at the same time.
And going back to Elementary!Sherlock:
- his disinterest/repulsion in sex from the first episode,
- but his beam of happiness at being a sub,
- plus his discussion of needing the release sometimes,
- plus his overall enthusiastic subbiness (including but not limited to for security/comfort like longlittleness’ theory about his shirt collars, keeping himself handcuffed while discussing emotional things, etc),
- plus his enthusiasm about Gwen and Olivia as a consensual experiment…
All lead me to the theory that Elementary!Sherlock is:
- a kinky asexual sub,
- who enjoys bondage/restriction,
- masochism as emotional grounding (I gathered this from the car crash),
- discipline,
- and power differences in daily tasks,
- is willing to partake in sex as long as the loss of control part for him is kinky, not sexual,
- his own sexual release might infrequently occur but is not sexualized,
- and the sexual fluids, noises, etc are part of a “yuck” (his words) but academically-interesting experiment.
Other interpretations of course welcome, but those are my thoughts!
Source: quequieresmrmorden
Photoset reblogged from I did it all for you with 12,416 notes
Allonsy.
How in the fuck did he survive this, yet the fourth Doctor fell off Jodrell Bank and thought “sod it”?
If you’re interested:
Fall injuries are weird, and a bit random. It really depends on how you land, and all sorts of other circumstances. Some people manage to literally walk away from falling off buildings with nothing worse than a sprained ankle or a broken wrist. In other cases, someone can slip and be killed instantly from falling only the length of their body.
We can see in End of Time (and in this gifset) exactly how Ten lands. His arm hits the ground first, then his leg, then his cheek (notably the part of the head where the brain isn’t). His chest/torso doesn’t touch the ground until he collapses, and he hit his face instead of his head.
What this means is that, while he’s hurt, the parts of his body which are most badly damaged are not the vital, life-supporting parts. Essentially, either he knew exactly how to land in order to survive, or he got very lucky. Plus, we never actually get to see the extent of his injuries in full- it’s a high adrenaline situation which he spends the vast majority of sitting down. Then, immediately afterwards, he gets blasted with radiation and dies/regenerates. If he was injured in a way which would have affected him more slowly, it doesn’t get a chance to.
Also of note: The glass slowed him down in a way which may very well have been crucial. There have been IRL cases of (non time lord) people hitting power-lines or tree branches on the way down which slow their descent to the point where falls which should have been fatal result in only relatively minor injuries.
Now, transitioning to Logopolis. We don’t actually see Four fall. We see him lose his grip, then it cuts to the Master, and when we see the Doctor again he’s lying flat on his back, dying.
We don’t know exactly how he hit the ground, but given that he fell onto his back, he did not break the fall with limbs. This means that the first point of impact would have either been his back or the back of his head. What this means is that nasty fatal things like head injuries and organ damage are significantly more likely.
There’s also the Doctor Who science of regeneration, which is a bit dodgier than real science, but also makes sense in this case. As far as we can tell, an individual dying Time Lord has some control over the speed of the regenerative process. It appears as if they can trigger it at several different points along the spectrum of ‘dying’, ranging from immediately after a critical injury/illness (including one which could be theoretically survivable with treatment), to after the point of death.
Ten does not want to regenerate. That’s where 3/4 of the emotional arc comes from. He’s also capable of holding the regeneration in. So, indeed, if he was dying from his injuries here, it’s very possible that he’d have just been holding the regeneration back completely. He was busy, and he didn’t want it to happen. Again, the radiation happens so quickly after the fact that we can’t tell what would have happened without it.
Four, on the other hand, knew he was going to regenerate and seemed to be pretty much okay with that. Unlike several other Doctors, he didn’t try to hold off his regeneration at all- he let it trigger as soon as he was injured. It’s possible he could have survived for a bit longer, but he didn’t, for some reason.
tl;dr: The science of this actually does sort of work. Fall injuries are weird, Ten was very lucky, Four wasn’t.
This fandom is amazing
To go along with the strange science of regeneration it’s also important to note that 10 is older then 4 was and that he’d gone through 6 regenerations. It’s entirely possible that time lords simply get stronger the older they get older/spend more time in the time stream. Ten also had survived the Time War and had held the heart of the TARDIS inside him for a brief amount of time both of which could have made him physically more capable of surviving a fall then four was.
The real world science works as well as mentioned fall injuries are weird especially where head injuries are concerned.
Source: oswinsleaf
Post reblogged from Cyg Nautilos with 6,801 notes
on a textual level, a female character can dress however she wants and shouldn’t be slut-shamed and hated for what she prefers to wear.
on a metatextual level, she might still have been designed with an intention to provide fanservice.
this means that criticising a design, as opposed to a character, is neither misogyny nor slut-shaming. being displeased about the way a character has been designed is not synonymous with hating her.
have i made myself clear?
This is giving me thoughts on Emma Frost and how her character at least attempts to flip around the metatextual fanservice so common in comics. Aside from the fetish elements, Emma isn’t comparatively more naked or more sexual than any other female character. She’s wearing lingerie and gravity-defying outfits while everyone else is wearing skimpy low-cut leotards, and there really isn’t that much difference. But unlike nearly everyone else, Emma consciously chooses to dress provocatively and present herself that way. Her character is constantly preforming and reminding the reader that she’s performing. She’s not being dressed up by an offscreen omnipotent artist, she designed herself to be fanservice.
It’s not really a huge step, and the end result of titillating the reader is the same, but I like that bit of extra agency she has. At least the titillation is being acknowledged in the text and Emma is using it to control the viewer instead of being an unknowing metatextual sexdoll.
Source: durendals
Quote reblogged from This is not a blog. No, seriously. with 610 notes
After two and a half years, we know less about Amy Pond than we did about Rose, Martha or Donna in their first episodes. In fact, due to ret-cons and time manipulations, we actually know less about Amy now than we did about her in her first episode. Who are her family? What’s her relationship with them? Who are her friends? What are her dreams? What is she unsatisfied with? Once we disregard the no-longer-true details revealed in the first episode, we’re left with one compelling answer to each question: Rory. It is all Rory.
Source: burntlikethesun
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