Tag: iamanartichoke

2, 10~

Finally getting around to answering the writing meme questions. Thanks for asking and sorry for the delay… my travel connections yesterday were a lot tighter than I was anticipating.

2. Favorite piece overall?

Hmm… I think The Tree of Knowledge is probably the best-written, but The Abyss Gazes Also has a special place in my heart because it’s still the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my dissertation. It has been a labor of love, pain, and trying to get some people to fucking read it instead of complaining on Tumblr about how there’s no fanfic about what happened to Loki during the year between Thor and The Avengers, no fic about what happened between him and Thanos, no fic where Loki does cool stuff and uses his powers…

10. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you’ve written

Since “lines” is an option, I’m going to be self-indulgent and pick several.

From my first fic, The Third Time, Loki talking to Thor: “You want to know where it all went wrong before you lose the chance forever. And you want to know whom you’ll be mourning when I’m gone. So here’s your answer: it was all me—all the lies, the schemes, the illusions. I don’t believe in souls, and I don’t believe in true selves. My brain is a bag full of cats, remember? Well, it’s cats all the way down.”

From “Abyss,” Thanos to Loki: “You still fear madness. You think it a dangerous weakness. But I will show you: madness is strength. It is a danger to others, yes, but not to you. It is your safety. It is your only safety.”

And then a really long one from Starting Over, my fantasy Thorki version of Thor and Loki’s reunion after TDW (which is, in my humble estimation, better written than Ragnarok), Loki ranting to Thor about Odin:

“Let me enumerate his sins. He lied to me all my life about who and what I am. He could have told me at any point during my childhood—he could have explained to me why I was so often ill as a child, why I could never bear the heat, why things frosted over when I was angry or afraid. But instead he let me find out under the worst possible circumstances—when I was fighting for my life against them, fighting for our lives—that I am the kin of our most hated enemies, a creature that I had always been taught to regard as savage, vicious, cowardly, scarcely better than a beast. He claimed that he never told me ‘because he wanted to protect me from the truth,’ ‘because he never wanted me to feel different.’ Well, he failed spectacularly at that, didn’t he? And then he conveniently fell asleep when I needed him most, leaving me with a weight of responsibility that would have been difficult enough to bear even if I hadn’t just had my entire sense of my identity shattered, but since I had… well.”

Loki paused his tirade, apparently just for breath, but Thor still took the opportunity to try to calm him down. “Loki, please…”

“Oh, but I’m not finished yet!” Loki stood up from the throne and began walking toward Thor, slowly and inexorably, taking a turn at driving him back. “When he did finally wake to see how well the little Jötun foundling had ruled in his absence—which is to say, when he woke to find me suspended over an abyss, in the physical as well as every other sense—all he could think to say to me was ‘No.’ And then, when I returned after a year in the Void, having miraculously survived the suicide that he drove me to, did he ask me why I tried to invade Midgard? Did he ask me what had befallen me during the year I spent Urðr-knows-where? Of course not; he simply assumed I am as power-mad as the father he stole me from—as power-mad as the father who raised me—and threw me away, left me to die forgotten in the dungeons to hide his shame, the shame that he could not civilize the monster after all.”

Thor’s heart seemed to twist in his chest; this was what Loki thought of their father? Thor could hardly find it in himself to defend him, but still he felt obligated to make the attempt: “Loki, I’m sure that’s not what he…”

“And you still think two years’ exile in Midgard is enough? I suppose it must be, if three days was punishment enough for nearly starting a war…”

“Loki, listen to me, please,” Thor tried again; his attempts to rein in his brother’s mounting anger were growing increasingly desperate.

But Loki did not want to listen. “He never asked!” he repeated, his face contorted with rage and pain. “He never asked what happened to me, why I did what I did. ‘All this because Loki desired a throne’—that was all he needed to know. Did it never occur to him to ask why that throne? Did he never wonder why the boy who fell was not the man who returned? Was it what he’d expected from me all along? Why did he never ask?”

iamanartichoke
mentioned you on a post “I’ve been thinking about this line a lot. And I’m not sure it’s given…”

@philosopherking1887 re: your tags, what’s the deal with tumblr and joss whedon? I keep getting snippets here and there but I’m not sure what the story is haha

@iamanartichoke I’m honestly not sure. There seems to be a pattern on Tumblr of idolizing a celebrity to a ridiculous degree and then collectively turning viciously on that person when they turn out not to be as impossibly perfect as the fans made them out to be; I’ve seen people predicting that Tumblr will shortly turn against John Mulaney en masse because the level of adoration is becoming unsustainable.

I have been told that a similar thing happened with Joss Whedon, but I never saw the worship phase. I joined Tumblr in late 2015, and being an ordinary geek, I liked his work a lot (and still do). I had watched Avengers: Age of Ultron and I really liked that, too (and still do!), probably because I wasn’t steeped in The Tumblr Consensus that it is Sexist and Terrible. There are stories about Whedon treating actresses badly, and after his wife divorced him, she published an essay saying that he’s not really a great feminist and he would complain to her about all the beautiful young women throwing themselves at him and not being allowed to touch them. He also does sometimes fall into sexist tropes with storytelling, characterization, and visual depiction of women, and arguably he does this with Black Widow in both Avengers movies. (I don’t think she was saying in Age of Ultron that she’s a monster because she can’t have children, though it is easy to hear it that way, and he should have been more careful about the potential for misunderstanding.) I have not read his draft script for a Wonder Woman movie that’s floating around online, but I’m told (by people I generally trust, but who are susceptible to being swayed by The Tumblr Consensus) that it is full of sexist crap.

Tumblr being what it is, the fact that Whedon is morally imperfect, and that he is an imperfect feminist (if not the completely fake one that Tumblr has decided he is), has led everyone to conclude that he must be a terrible writer in every way. People will make offhand comments about how the scripts of the Avengers movies were “terrible”; they claim that he doesn’t understand any of the characters and exaggerate the extent to which his dialogue is made up of jokes and pop culture references. One of the most absurd, infuriating examples of this that KEEPS GOING AROUND is a pair of gifs of Steve/Cap, in one saying “Son of a gun” and in the other “Son of a bitch.” The original caption is “character development”… but then someone reblogged with someone else’s tags saying that it was actually the difference between Joss Whedon’s gee-whiz boy scout version of Cap and Steve Rogers the scrappy Brooklyn kid and WWII Army vet, and a bunch of people piled on with the insistence that Whedon got Steve All Wrong. Now, I think most of this stems from a shallow understanding of what was going on with Steve in the first Avengers – and in fact, I think the criticisms of Age of Ultron also stem from shallow understanding (which is rampant not just on Tumblr). But the most glaring irony is that the second gif of Steve saying “Son of a bitch” (which is supposed to be the accurate, appropriately vulgar characterization) is from Age of Ultron… which was also written by Joss Whedon. Say what you want about the recurring “Language!” joke in AOU (I have a theory, but I don’t want to go into it here); you can’t say that the gif on the right is an improvement from Joss Whedon’s terrible characterization if it is also by Joss Whedon. I think people must assume that it’s from Winter Soldier because they don’t remember that the ironic punchline to the “language” joke is that Steve swears, too.

So yeah. That’s the story.