There’s been a common theme throughout most of these smut fills, and that is “Fucking in Places We Shouldn’t Be Fucking.” I am absolutely delighted to conclude this round of prompts with more and in an official capacity.
18th Century, Historical AU, nsfw, 1300 words (woops)
Also, crossdressing.
When his brother had started down this path, Thor hadn’t understood. But the first time he’d seen Loki standing there in a shift, clinging and sheer enough to leave nothing to the imagination, and silk stockings held in place with garters at his knees, he had gotten used to the idea pretty quickly. “Help me with my stays,” Loki had said, holding out a corset and reaching for his petticoat, but they hadn’t gotten to that until some time later, since Thor had taken it from him, tossed it onto a nearby chair, and then carried him to bed.
But never until Thor had told him breathlessly one day, “I wish everyone could see you like this, and know you’re mine,” taking him from behind over the foot of his bed, Loki’s skirts rucked up in a cloud of silk and lace around them, had they ever entertained the idea of Loki leaving the house dressed this way. He hadn’t so much as set foot out the back door in one of his gowns, even though their garden was lined in high walls and hedges to maintain their privacy.
Loki had cried out and made a mess of his petticoats at that, but it had still taken nearly a year to convince him to try it.
Imagine the Avengers getting hit with some sort of spell that makes them revert to their first language
and everyone expects to be unable to understand Natasha’s Russian or Thor’s Norse (Allspeak is great but it isn’t his first language according to the spell)
but then Steve starts spouting Gaelic, because he grew up speaking English in public but his immigrant mother taught him her own language first
Tony speaks either Spanish or Italian, because that’s what his first nannies spoke
and the spell considers ASL a language just as much as any spoken language, so Clint is just signing and making faces at people
and Bruce is just very confused (“Why do you expect me to be speaking a different language? I’m from Ohio.”)
The Vision flying around screaming “ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE”
so over on tv tropes one of the articles talks about how modern approaches to writing steve rogers are politically correct revisionist history bc people write steve now as being super accepting of all races and sexualities and genders etc.
which
is not an argument i particularly understand bc it assumes all people in the past by default held the prejudices associated with their time period
and anyway like you do know the whole point to steve rogers becoming captain america is that he’s an exceptionally decent human being which is what makes him a great super soldier
Ok, I have to chime in on this. There is a mistaken belief that cultural attitudes in the past were monolithic, that everyone and everywhere was “of their time.” This is not true; even in the past, there were people and places who saw past conventional wisdom and social pressure and looked to a better future.
This is especially true for Steve Rogers, because unlike other patriotism-themed characters, Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding) to a working class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side (the digital comic book First Vengeance changes this slightly, shifting his birth to 1918 and moving the family to Brooklyn, but the details are the same). This has political meaning: given his class and ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that. Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother (his father died when he was a child) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother dies of TB. And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and there was a growing and militant anti-racist movement that equated segregation and Nazism that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.
Then he becomes a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, you couldn’t have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.
And this Steve Rogers becomes an anti-fascist. In the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, he volunteers to join the army to fight the Nazis. This isn’t an apolitical patriotism forged out of a sense that the U.S has been attacked; rather, Steve Rogers had come to believe that Nazism posed an existential threat to the America he believed in. New Deal America.
Peter Parker releases a thirty minute documentary on youtube of life in the Avengers Tower and twelve minutes of it is just Tony and Steve arguing over what would win, a Thanos-sized tarantula or a tarantula-sized Thanos
Not one of the real ones, the other. The fake one his father brought with him from
Asgard, the kid with fair hair and fairer skin.
The one that’s now Loki’s same color, because Loki is
a master of magic, and the boy was dying in the harsh winter of Jotunheim.
Loki hates him, because Thor is no giant, just like
him, but no one looks upon him with poorly veiled pity, Thor is not a lithe,
feeble runt. Pure unrestricted thunder flows under his skin, his arms hold a strength
known to no one on Jotunheim.
And Loki hates him, because they should have been
equals, but Thor is so much more in the eyes of their peers, something Loki
will never be, even as the heir of the throne.
Thor is respected not just feared. He’s loved, not just
tolerated.
“Come, brother, night’s upon us already. I’m cold.”
The Anti-Defamation League publishes an annual report on incidents of anti-Semitism in the United States. This year’s audit, made available in November, showed a significant increase in relation to the previous year: 2017 saw a 67% rise in anti-Jewish hate speech, harassment, vandalism and violence.
It’s a disheartening measure of a terrible phenomenon. Yet in the three months since the audit was released, it’s garnered little attention.
Some public comments hint at why. In a video for Jewish Voice for Peace posted to Facebook in April, the anti-racism campaigner Linda Sarsour addressed the issue. “I want to make the distinction that while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans, it’s different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic,” she said. “Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or maybe on an individual level… but it’s not systemic, and we need to make that distinction.”
Underlying this pervasive point of view is the notion that Jews, who are often conflated with whites, should “check their privilege,” because anti-Semitism just isn’t as bad as other forms of racism. On campus, where the ADL notes an acute rise in anti-Jewish hostility, alarmed Jewish students are sidelined for being white and middle-class and the Holocaust is trivialized as “white on white crime.” …
This erasure of anti-Semitism isn’t simply callous. It exposes a huge moral failure at the heart of the modern left. Under the enveloping paradigm of “intersectionality,” everyone is granularly defined by their various identities — everyone, that is, except white Jews, whose Jewishness is often overwritten by their skin color. Not simply a moral failing, this erasure is deeply hazardous, inasmuch as the fight against racism happens by and large in sectors where the left perspective dominates — the academy, pop culture and much of the news media.
But this failure of the left is less a result of malice rather than unconscious wiring. As I will argue, the left is doomed to erase anti-Semitism because it’s ill-equipped to understand it.
For in a key sense, regular racism — against blacks and Latinos, for example — is the opposite of anti-Semitism. While both ultimately derive from xenophobia, regular racism comes from white people believing they are superior to people of color. But the hatred of Jews stems from the belief that Jews are a cabal with supernatural powers; in other words, it stems from the models of thought that produce conspiracy theories. Where the white racist regards blacks as inferior, the anti-Semite imagines that Jews have preternatural power to afflict humankind.
This is also why the left is blind to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism differs from most forms of racism in that it purports to “punch up” against a secret society of oppressors, which has the side effect of making it easy to disguise as a politics of emancipation. If Jews have power, then punching up at Jews is a form of speaking truth to power — a form of speech of which the left is currently enamored. …
In addition to the belief in a shadowy group with the power to effect large-scale outcomes, conspiracy theories also reflect a worldview in which reality is the product of a timeless and cosmic struggle between good and evil. These kinds of dualistic narratives are especially enticing to groups that view themselves to be under existential duress … Jews under Roman occupation and early Christians under Jewish ostracism and gentile persecution developed theologies of the oppressed in which the devil and his demonic host squared off with God and his angels. …
The crude theology of the cosmic showdown between God and the devil, along with the stereotype of an anti-human, demonic collaborator, and life-and-death struggle over the forbidden knowledge of magic and heresy, fused to ignite the infamous persecutions of the European Middle Ages. These included the witch trials, the inquisitions of heretics, and the perennial persecution of Jews as child-murdering, blood-feasting, well-poisoning sorcerers and agents of Satan.
When Europe entered the modern era, Jews shed this company. Industrialization, urban migration, democracy, and the flourishing of science weakened the otherworldly framework many used to understand the world. Witches and heretics faded in relevance. But the Jews survived, though the role they played in the gentile imagination changed to reflect the times.
As they were emancipated, Jews loomed as direct competition in economic and political life. As the pre-eminent historian of anti-Semitism, Robert Wistrich, writes, “Alongside the dominant cultural matrix of late-nineteenth-century nationalism, volkisch racism, and imperialism,” a new “populist social dimension” recast Jews as collaborators with the secular demons of laissez-faire capitalism and liberal democracy.
Thus, as the center of civilization shifted from church and king to the nation state, anti-Semitism, at least outwardly, lost its religious focus. Foes of the Jews who aspired to power cast them as diabolical puppeteers who controlled the state; anti-Semites in power libeled them as seditious parasites who undermined it. This was the milieu that produced the foundational document of political conspiracism, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Purporting to be the minutes of an international meeting of evil Jewish elites, “The Protocols” was a detailed outline of how the Jews would enslave and exploit humankind. First circulated in the Russian Empire, it was then exported by charlatans and military officers and spread throughout the world. Effectively the first “fake news,” the pamphlet, which [historian Norman] Cohn memorably called a “warrant for genocide,” still flourishes today, especially in Arab and Muslim countries. …
[I]t’s anti-Semitism’s source in conspiracy theory that renders it so different from non-conspiracist forms of racism, like anti-blackness. As with most racism, anti-black bias constructs an underclass to be exploited or avoided. It positions blacks as inferior to whites and charges them with stereotypes that signal weakness: They are libeled as lazy, stupid, lustful, criminal and animalistic.
The conspiracy theory of anti-Semitism turns this on its head. The Jew becomes a magical creature: brilliant, cunning, greedy, stealthy, wealthy and powerful beyond measure. Anti-Semitism imagines a diabolic overclass to be exposed and resisted.
Take it from the experts. In Article Twenty-Two of its charter, Hamas describes the preternatural power of the worldwide Jewish cabal:
“With their money, [the Jews] took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.”
Above all else, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about the maleficent Jewish elite. And it’s this that makes it easy to disguise as a politics of liberation, or, at least, to embed anti-Semitism quietly in efforts for social justice. …
For its part, JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] launched a national effort to promote the idea that Israel teaches U.S. law enforcement how to inflict “systemic” racism on people of color, “including extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.”
It’s critical to note that Americans are not accustomed to recognizing, let alone understanding, a sizable portion of anti-Semitism, because it typically doesn’t resemble anti-blackness — the horrific down-punching form of racism that haunts American history and reverberates into the present.
But this blindness doesn’t just make space for anti-Semites to operate domestically; it occludes our sense of the history of other parts of the world. (Do you remember the concept of conspiracy theory coming up during your education on the Holocaust? Me neither.)
Anti-Semitism is a poor man’s revolution. And so long as it doesn’t present as a far-right or “alt-right” cartoon, it often flies under our radar.
Loki is the Philosopher King 