The one thing about Endgame I can’t get past, the one thing that first WandaVision and moreso The Falcon & the Winter Soldier made brutally, abundantly clear, isn’t even Steve’s super shitty ending, it’s that the Avengers made things infinitely worse by reversing the Blip.
It’d be one thing if they’d made the Blip never take place, or restored everyone one millisecond after they disappeared — things they absolutely could have done, by the way — but they didn’t. They brought them all back five years later. It’s insane. It’s sociopathic.
First of all, a lot of people didn’t disappear that day. They died. People who got hit by suddenly driverless cars, people who went down on pilotless airplanes, people skydiving when the instructor disappeared, people whose doctors crumbled to dust mid-surgery, babies who wasted away in their cribs because their parents got Snapped. None of those people got restored in the Reverse Snap. They just stayed dead.
Second of all, everyone got brought back right where they’d disappeared. Which is fine in theory. Except isn’t it pretty lucky no one was sitting in that chair when Monica got restored? And also that apparently no one had moved that chair in five years? So what if you were on a plane that’s no longer in the air? What if you were on a boat that’s no longer in the middle of the ocean? What if you were skydiving and now there’s no parachute? What if you were on the top floor of a building that’s since been demolished? What if you were in your car in the middle of the freaking freeway? That’s thousands more deaths, conservatively.
But forget about all those dead people for a sec. TFatWS makes it explicit that the world is in complete chaos because of the Reverse Snap. People are displaced, families have been torn apart, people are angry and scared and no one knows what to do. It’s so clear that if the Avengers weren’t going to undo the Snap completely — if they weren’t going to undo it at the moment it happened — then they shouldn’t have undone it at all. That it would have been kinder, better to have let the Snapped stay Snapped. Not just for the sake of the people left, but for the people who disappeared.
Imagine the absolute hell of materializing five years in the future to find someone else living in your house, someone else married to your spouse. To find out your baby died or your mom or your partner. And by the way you have no credit, you have no money, no job history, no possessions, nothing. But good luck trying to rebuild your life and all! Aren’t you glad we brought you back? You’re welcome!
If the MCU ended with Endgame and no one ever had to think about the ramifications, then fine. Whatever. It’s a happy ending. What a cool final battle!
But it didn’t end there. And as such, it’s not a happy ending. It’s deranged. The Avengers are villains.
And it’s just so weird that no one in-universe seems to acknowledge this. That what the Avengers did was bad. That all this chaos, all this suffering, is entirely their fault.
“Yeah, things suck, but I sure do hope Captain America 1.0 is having fun on the moon! Man, we all miss Iron Man!”
W H A T
I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know how we, as an audience, are supposed to reconcile with that. I don’t know how they think they can make that decision seem heroic when every subsequent movie and show just makes it retroactively worse.
An engineer and an anti-vaxxer walk up to a bridge
Seeing as the bridge is the only crossing over a notoriously crocodile-infested river, the two prepare to cross. Just before they set foot on the bridge the anti-vaxxer halts the engineer.
- How safe is it to cross this bridge exactly? - he asks
- 99.97% - the engineer replies confidently
The anti-vaxxer thinks for a moment before turning around:
man y’all remember when the avengers movie came out and everyone headcanoned that all the avengers would live together in the tower and had all these cute posts about various fun ways they could interact and then the movies literally never had any of them even be friends
I want to state, for the record, that “all the avengers would live together in the tower” wasn’t collective headcanon, it was canon. The very last scene of Avengers (2012), the one they left us on, is Tony redesigning the tower, designing a living area for each Avenger. That was, canonically, what was supposed to happen, in canon, and they just changed their minds and decided to… not. For whatever goldarn reason.
GHHFDGJHFDS THATS EVEN FUNNIER WHY IS MARVEL LIKE THIS
One historical fiction cliche that needs to die is aristocratic/wealthy women being surprised that their parents have arranged their marriages like?? How do you think money and property works in this period?? How do you think marriage works in this period?? How naive can you get?? Viola de Lessops in Shakespeare In Love being like “bUt I dO nOt LoVe YoU mY LoRd” like srsly girl wake up.
Elizabeth of York- oh I’m sorry, “Lizzie” in The White Princess being like “but i always dreamed of marrying for love!!1!” like honey… you were raised the eldest daughter of a king, in an age of political instability, where marriages could mean life or death. Even if after you were made illegitimate your ‘beloved uncle’ planned to marry you off to Portuguese royalty. You really thought you could just pick some guy and everyone would be chill? That thought actually crossed your mind? You weren’t raised on the idea you’d marry a prince or a king and leave England?
Where are the characters who dreamed of a doomed courtly romance where they’d never even touch their devoted True Love and are horribly embarrassed to find that they actually like their arranged spouse?
Now that would be something interesting to explore!
sometimes I feel like a sane and rational person, and then sometimes I encounter one of those ships where Person A is seemingly cold and reserved but is secretly FULL OF FEELINGS, IMPOSSIBLY DEEP FEELINGS, MORE FEELINGS THAN ANYONE HAS FELT BEFORE for Person B, and Person B is warm and seemingly flighty & unserious but secretly nursing AN IMPOSSIBLY CONSTANT AND VERY SERIOUS LOVE for Person A
oh god and then Person B says or does something flirty
and then Person A is inwardly like HOW I WISH THIS MEANT SOMETHING BUT PERSON B IS JUST LIKE THAT SO IT MUST MEAN NOTHING AND MY ONLY RECOURSE IS TO REPRESS ALL OF MY FEELINGS, EVERY FEELING, LOCK IT ALL DOWN |:
and Person B is like “wow I guess they hated the flirting, cool, good to know, I should probably hide all my future expressions of feelings in a series of JOKES”
and they are kind to each other and they get along and have fun but also it is PURE AGONYYYYY
“…A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. …Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). …Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
…Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
…For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. …Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”
- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”
If I may tag onto this: it’s really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I’m at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was… a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody’s up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I’m not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled …) and the spinner didn’t suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn’t be easy, but it also wouldn’t be terrifying back-breaking labour.
the best way i can think to describe the experience of reading moby dick is you’re in line at the dmv and this guy behind you very loudly says “well who HASN’T had a gay experience” and then proceeds to tell you every detail about his life in between anecdotes about how great sperm is and how ropes work and sometimes he’ll say the most poetic shit you’ve ever heard in your life and them jump RIGHT back into explaining how a whale is a fish because 1) it swims in water and you’re still only like halfway through the dmv line
