Because I needed something to keep track of all the cool stuff out there.
All who come here, please expect fandom stuff (mostly Avengers, Supernatural, bits of Doctor Who), character meta-analysis, art, anti-bullying and anti-harassment posts, pretty landscapes, feminism, pictures of delicious food, occasional heated and lengthy debates on a variety of subjects and on sometimes bits of personal stuff.
„You DO realize that Wilson couldn’t act his way outta wet paper bag, right? He’s just as bad as Steve where it comes to pretending to be something he’s not. This has a snowball’s chance in hell of working.”.
On the way to Madripoor, Barnes nixes Zemo’s plans in the bud.
The Soldier shows his hand and there’s more than one ace up his sleeve, but regardless of whether Zemo folds or not, it might end up costing him a bit more than a pound of flesh and a drop of blood.
___
So, the last few days I had a writing itch that I badly needed to scratch. This is the result. You can find the fic here.
Basic premise is that the bargaining chip in Madripoor is Zemo, whose knowledge of HYDRA and Supersoldiers could help the Powerbroker hunt down Karli and that the Winter Soldier (plus a few extras) will provide the muscle, for a price.
Of course, in order to pull it off, Zemo needs to convincingly look the part.
In the process, Bucky and Zemo get a little closer than either had intended.
i hope the scenes with isaiah bradley, the cops cornering sam, sam telling bucky he cannot tell sam what he does or does not have the right to do, sam being flat-out “this is something neither you nor steve would understand” regarding his decision to give the shield back, i hope none of that goes over yall’s heads.
isaiah bradley was forgotten about by history because (canonically) he was part of a project that experimented with the super soldier serum. experimented. remember what that word means.
the cops cornered sam because they thought he was bothering bucky, and likely would have arrested him FOR NO REASON had bucky not been there to testify to the fact that he really was an avenger.
and it has finally been straight-up addressed now that the shield carries a notably different burden in relation to sam than it would to steve and bucky, and isaiah stands as a living testament to the complicated legacy of the shield.
I just realized the reason so many people will call someone “an abuser” when the facts of the matter indicate instead that the person is actually simply “an asshole” is because you can’t just create engaging social media guilt by association drama by demanding people unfollow x or y if they’re simply an asshole, but if you re-reframe banal assholishness as genuine psychological abuse it means you can also start shit with anybody who associates with the asshole in question. That might also explain why people say “this person is a gaslighter” when they instead mean “this person says lies”.
After years of living in the adulting world, I think I’ve come to a realization: Manners exist to guide you to good conduct even when you’re in a bad mood.
When you’re happy, when you’re feeling generous, when you’re pleased with your gift or your service or your outcome, it’s easy to be nice. It’s easy to tip the waiter well when you’ve had a good day. It’s easy to thank the teller or the clerk when you got what you wanted out of the transaction. It’s easy to smile and chit-chat with strangers on the road when you’re in a good mood.
It’s hard to tip the waiter when you didn’t enjoy your food. It’s hard to thank the clerk for their time when you’ve just been told there’s a problem with their account and they weren’t able to fix it for you. It’s hard to think of something nice to say when your aunt gave you a crappy sweater you neither need nor want. It’s hard to be nice to people when you’ve had a shitty day. It’s HARD.
That’s what manners are for. Scripts and phrases that you learn by rote to say when you can’t think of a single nice or good thing to say from your own volition. Yes, they’re scripted. Yes, the sentiment is empty. But the scripts work in every situation, and the emptiness provides a buffer between your own unhappiness and the rest of society.
Because most of the time, it’s not the waiter’s fault that the food you ordered wasn’t what you expected. It’s not the clerk’s fault that your account is overdrawn. It’s not the fault of the barista or the stranger on the subway that you got fired today or your favorite aunt died. But even when you can’t summon a smile or a cheery word, you can still have manners, because they will serve you the same in sunshine or rain.
Some of the notes in that one post about gen z and cults going around: “I would start a cult but I don’t have money 😔” “lol new heavens gate here we come” “aren‘t fandoms cults already lol”
Me, a tired cult survivor: you have no idea what you’re talking about. shut tf up.
seriously.
everytime i ssee a “join thhe ___ cult uwu” i have a fuckijg stroke
stop. please.
also the posts about Gen Z having a cult boom are 100% true
and its partially bc no one litsens to cult survivors
no one takes us seriously when we say stop normalizing this shit
and now no one knows the actual signs
we think we’re safe from cults. we think its a thing of the past
when you hear cult you think of blood rituals and shit on tv right? well the one I was in was on a fucking google classroom
so learn the fucking signs and stay aware for goodness sake holy shit
Hi, my name is Nina and I left a cult in 2006.
It is not a joke.
If I told you the name of this church, you’d look it up and go “but Nina, that’s a normal branch of evangelical Christianity, which has its own problems but is not necessarily a cult,” and you would be correct, so we’ll leave the name out of it. This was one specific church that decided to spin right off the rails, in the same way that Westboro is “Baptist.”
It started when a new preacher came, and it started small. He and his wife made us feel special. We were family. Truth-seekers in a frightening world. And at first it seemed so normal. Christians shouldn’t smoke, for example, because the body is the temple of Christ. Okay, sure! Reasonable. It’s not anything that’s not backed up by medical science, even.
Then they started introducing this concept called “Bible quizzing.” It’s actually a whole thing with that denomination, basically teaching kids scripture by having them memorize it and take part in competitions. So far, so good—except that for some reason….if we failed a question, we got in A LOT of trouble. I missed one once because of a typo and I was DESPERATE to get the judges to change their ruling. And this was not a huge error, either. It was like “will enter in the kingdom” instead of “will enter into the kingdom.” The reason for the error did not matter (even though it was outside my control). The tininess of the error did not matter. Only the error mattered, and I was pulled aside by the pastor’s wife when we returned home from the competition to find out if I was “really serious about learning the word of G-d” or if I was “struggling in my faith.” She was “disappointed” I had “allowed Satan” to “confuse me.” And I was devastated. If I was a victim of Satan then I wasn’t special. I wasn’t one of the truth-seekers. I didn’t belong….and oh, I wanted to belong. I had no friends at school. At church I was part of a family. Everybody loved me. I couldn’t “fall away.”
Over the next few years, the weirdness intensified. It became unacceptable for girls to show their knees because it was a “temptation” to “our brothers in Christ.” I picked out a dress for the homecoming dance and was told I should “cover my knees and then get on them and pray for forgiveness” because the hemline of the dress hit mid-knee. I was shamed in youth group because one of our youth leaders said he was going to trace his genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve and I said “but that’s impossible, even if your family had written records all the way back the ones from before the flood would’ve been destroyed.” The pastor began speaking of receiving “visions from G-d” telling him about the sins of the congregation, which he recited in detail while exhorting us to come to the front and pray. At one point I brought the whole service to a screeching halt by saying my grandfather was an atheist and I wanted to pray for his soul to find Jesus. (And oh boy did they pray.)
All of this culminated in me being kidnapped.
That was the point where I was starting to have doubts. Things between the old and New Testaments didn’t add up and also I didn’t understand how I was supposed to be going to hell for wearing jingly earrings when earrings were right in the Bible. At this point I was seventeen, and I stopped attending. My family moving made it easy; I had to find a 20-mile ride most weeks to attend, and it wasn’t easy. But then I started college literally within walking distance, and my previously-clockwork attendance remained patchy, and became moreso after I got enmeshed in what very quickly (like, two dates quickly) proved to be an abusive relationship. The pastor told me it was my duty to stay in this relationship because I’d been “chosen by G-d” to “heal this man’s soul.” I’d already tried to kill myself once for the sake of the church, because I couldn’t pray myself straight and I didn’t want to go to hell for lust.
So here I am, 18 years old, for the first time telling my pastor “I’m not so sure.”
Within two days the youth leader showed up at my door and told me I’d been sponsored to go to an event called Acquire the Fire. I said I couldn’t go because of midterms and was told that I would go, or they would tell my professor I’d had a family emergency and they’d pick me up.
I went. It was three days of hell—Christian death metal bands physically hurting me due to problems with my ears, and a “laying on of hands” right in front of the speakers while I sobbed because “the devil is in you, or the name of the lord wouldn’t be causing you pain.” (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t the name of the lord, it was the insane decibel level.) At one point the pastor’s daughter took me outside to get away from it. It was three days of being told so many lies, hearing that I should completely obliterate my identity in the name of Christ, being told AIDS was a judgment from G-d, cancer was a judgment from G-d, Starbucks was a tool of the devil, that the speaker could hear our thoughts and none of us were heavenbound.
I got back home and alerted campus security that I was under risk.
I never went back—that was one of many reasons, but it was the biggest, and I was done. But I spent another five years slowly deprogramming. “Our G-d is an Awesome G-d” is still a trigger for me. I’m religious (I eventually converted to Judaism), but walking into a church for any reason makes me profoundly uneasy.
And it all started with a lonely ten-year-old who wanted to be special and was told you are, you are, you are, that’s why you get to know so many special things, that’s why people are cruel to you, they just don’t realize the truth….and it ended with me nearly dying.
You may think this sounds wild. It is. But I’m still in touch with another survivor who’s here on Tumblr, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make themselves known.
It isn’t a joke. It isn’t funny. It is a very real danger and the smarter you think you are, the worse it is, because these cults are savvy and they know just how to deal with people like you.
Don’t fuck with cults unless you want to die miserably, probably alone and in pain.
Just don’t.
I never managed to get that deep into shit at any of the churches I went to, but I know it was going on. Hell, I’ve been to Acquire the Fire rallies, more than once, willingly because that level of fervor is how I was raised, and lemme tell ya that shit is insane to look back on, it’s the worst kind of big tent revival hellfire stuff but it’s aimed at teenagers. Fucking children.
Hell, a close friend of mine had ended up in a household-sized cult of personality that revolved around one very manipulative abusive person (very Andy Blake in many many ways, and google that mofo if you want to see how that shit can get heavy fast)
And there was the period of me and my wife’s life where - very recently - our finances were almost entirely managed by a cult bc my dad helps us financially and he was friends with the “Pastor”/cult leader, and decided he wouldn’t help us anymore unless we let the cult be in charge of a bunch of shit in our lives. We knew basically from day 1 what it was, but we didn’t have a choice, and even though we were members they tried their damnedest to control us a lot more than they had any right to.
Cults are not funny. They’re not quirky. They’re destructive and terrifying and I am begging all you younger folks who don’t know about red flags for shit like that to please educate yourselves, and be wary and cautious, because this shit can fuck you up for life, even if you escape it.
Also a quick google showed the cult that we had running our finances for a while is now reaching out to gen z/teenagers specifically, so if you see the accounts @nffrecovery or @nffgenz anywhere, or hear about a group called New Found Family in the Largo/Clearwater/St.Pete area of Florida? STEER FUCKING CLEAR, they are manipulative abusive bastards, and they will fuck your life up. At least four separate people who worked directly with us - including the Pastor’s wife - ended up leaving or being full on driven out of the group because they weren’t blindly obeying the things they were told to do, and saw how culty and manipulative things were. Stay away from them, and learn to recognize cults on your own.
No bull shit about Acquire the Fire. I only spent 1 night at that rally before I noped out. It’s not ‘just a concert.’ Things get scary.
My mom covered the Jonestown cult as a journalist in the 70s- one of her classmates was an escapee prior to the suicide event. If you dont know this reference, please be careful looking it up- the photos are extremely triggering.
But even knowing the signs of a cult, she still fell into one after a Chrysalis retreat. This almost broke up my family and we all had to go to therapy over it.
You are never too smart to join one. You are never too wise to be fooled. Even 'joining to troll’ is dangerous.
Cults and cult behaviors have been a special interest for me ever since and I do not take any of this lightly. 21st century cults dont look like bowing down to a leader because he has divine visions (though, that did happen to a bible study I was in. I noped out of that one, too.)
