Okay, I want a superhero story in which the superhero is one of those ‘normal kid gets superpowers through freak accident’ and goes out and fights crime, and of course runs into the supervillain at some point and tries to take them down. And the villain, a couple minutes into the fight, realizes they’re fighting a literal child and just has an internal freak-out about this new development. Because, fine, I’ve got plans to steal all of the world’s largest gems and I’m generally not a nice person, but holy fuck there’s a kid coming at me. This is a kid. I can’t with this.
So the supervillain instead of trying to kill/hurt their nemesis goes through all these complicated plans to trap them or put them to sleep or stick them in a large tank or something so they can go ahead with it. Sometimes it works and the supervillain spends a harried half hour lecturing the superhero about maybe going to school and being safe instead of doing this, that would be nice.
The supervillain staying up at night occasionally wondering if the tiny superhero is out there trying to get themselves killed right this moment. The supervillain sending supervillain henchmen ninjas out to tail the superhero and help out if it ever looks like the superhero is going to get killed. The supervillain takes to pacing around and muttering to themselves occasionally about PARENTING and RESPONSIBILITY and how they never signed up for this shit. Actually petitioning their version of the Justice League to have someone step in and do something about this, that kid has to be like twelve and what is everyone thinking???? Bonus points if the kid has no parents and the villain finds this out and spends a night internally screaming about it.
Basically I want a supervillain unwittingly becomes the super worried parent of the kid who is actively trying to foil their every plan and topple their evil regime.
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
Everybody wins. Nobody dies.
THE SHAKESPERE AU I NEVER KNEW I NEEDED
DUDE DID YOU JUST FIX ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC PLAYS EVER CREATED?!
ONCE AGAIN EVERYTHING IS SOLVED BY THE QUEER LENS.
they are a witch’s two familars and have never gotten along, but one day the witch disappears and so they must go on a cross-country search in order to bring her home. along the way, the cat learns to loosen up while the crow gains worldly experience, and they both become better friends
ok look i know its not comic canon but ever since i found out pietro and wanda were jewish (back when all i knew was x-men evolution) i’ve wanted them to be buds with kitty pryde
we are several years a couple of movies and so many comics past that point but, i still want it
the maximoffs are jewish mutants and need to have jewish mutant seders with kitty that is all bYe
Headcanon that Magneto “kidnaps” all Jewish mutants – and probably several Jewish non-mutant heroes for a Seder every year, because he knows it’s the only way they’ll be able to make the time for it, since there’s villains attacking every two seconds.
The Avengers and X-men track down their missing teammates roughly around the time of “Chad Gadya”.
I would read this comic
R-who-is-not-on-Tumblr and I have QUESTIONS
Does using a mutant power count as work? Is it enough to not actively use your power, or would really Orthodox mutants look for a temporary suppressant?
Who would be the Shabbos non-Jew for Magneto? I mean, Charles, obviously, back in the day, but now? Pyro, maybe? 99.9% sure Nightcrawler would be there for Kitty.
Would creating this as a LARP be as amazing as I think?
Don’t forget Ben Grimm in your Jewish Marvel Characters group.
When did this blow up
anyway Kurt is def the Shabbos goy for Kitty bc Kitty is the guardian of whatever he gives up for Lent
Magneto probably got Toad to do that during the brotherhood days but who knows
Ben Grimm is the uncle who hides the afikoman in the same place every year
anyway if someone does the art I’ll write this marvel hire me
Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes talking post-mission stuff when suddenly, Bucky’s metal arm points upwards and he winds up being carried away. The last thing he hears Bucky yell before he disappears into the sky behind Magneto is “I RSVP’d this year, Magnus! This really isn’t – “
“It’s tradition that I kidnap you, Barnes. And after all, tonight is all about tradition!”
i have just been informed moon knightis also jewish so i will be reading all his comics immediately
anyway imagine patrilineal bobby drake mind his own business doing x-men business like teaching kids how to kill things with their powers when suddenly
nYOOOOOOM
and he’s gone
on the ground there’s a note like
“you’re invited to the maximoff family seder 5776, please RSVP and indicate preferred method of kidnapping”
and there are little boxes next to options like “reality portal” “speedster pickup” “metal”
did someone say they need a rromani jewish artist? SUP GUYS
you me wombatking lets make this happen
Dr. Walter Langkowski drops by from Canada. No one bats an eyelash when the 8-foot-tall Sasquatch walks in. It’s not even in the top ten bizarre things that happen when Magneto hosts his annual seder.
If this actually becomes a comic I will buy 20. I know a lot of people I need to gift it to.
it’s almost passover, i’m bringing this shiz back
ok but I want to know more about how Magneto leads the Seder
is his style “mumblerush through all the liturgical text as fast as possible and skip bits if everyone is bored” or “every single word gets read aloud and translated since most of us don’t know a lot of Hebrew” or “find a new variant text every year to keep things interesting” or what
does he pick individuals at the table to take turns reading aloud (and assign the bit about the Wicked Son to whoever he’s most annoyed with at the moment)
is there singing
Um. This is fairly obvious, I think. There’s a tradition of leftist seders, of feminist seders, of stonewall seders. A family we regularly did a seder with at least two years out of three had half the wobblie songbook at the back of their hagadah.
Magneto would run a MUTANT SEDER. It would have a lot of the liturgy, but not all and not strictly (no one is going to argue Magnus is particularly observant) but it would also have a lot of sidenotes about the oppression and coming liberation of the Mutants. A reading about Genosha-as-Mitzrayim. A genetic sample on the seder plate. A reading about inviting all mutants in to come eat and how Eliyahu is probably masquerading as a Morlock with teleportation powers. Very pointed shade thrown at En Sabah Nur. “If he had destroyed Master Mold and not returned the Phoenix Force Dayyenu If he had returned the Phoenix Force and not restarted mutant births Dayyenu.”
Moon Knight is, of course, always embarrassed during the seder. He’s Jewish, but he’s also the champion of an Egyptian god, so he’s very conflicted about the liturgy, especially the plague of darkness, which seems to offend the patron of travelers-by-night.
Billy brings Teddy, and they’re both happy to be there, but they don’t sit near Wanda – he just can’t deal sometimes and neither can she.
This – not Christmas, not any other day of the year – is the one day nobody starts shit. After all. We have literally seen God in the Marvel Context and He’s LITERALLY JEWISH.
(full disclosure: I may have been hoping someone would go there)
Attempts to retell the Pesach story descending into actual physical brawls over whether Moses was a mutant, tho.
This is Elijah’s favorite seder. He actually drinks his entire cup of wine.
(Someone tell me the invisible dude who travels around the world to every fucking Pesach dinner party isn’t a mutant. I will fight you.)
Billy would be THRILLED to go to a seder with all these superheroes! So! Happy!!! But also he’s a HUGE NERD, so he keeps doing stuff like accidentally magicking all the haggadot into Hamilton versions.
Tommy is booooored it is so long and slowwww. (Actually, do we know if Tommy considers himself Jewish? Grandpa Magneto would totally consider him Jewish though.) Pietro has to keep zipping across the room and kick him to keep him from nodding off.
Y’know, just…why not all the Young Avengers coming to the Maximoff seder? Obvs Teddy comes with Billy, both to the mutant seder and to the Kaplans’ seder. David would probably come anyway since he knows All The Mutants, and it becomes his job to poke Tommy. America, should, theoretically, have no idea what’s going on, but she does come from a dimension created by Billy, so who knows? Kate grabs a seat by Bucky Barnes, of course. Noh-Varr thinks the singing is great and casually eats tons of maror. Loki…like, they are literally a god from another religion and also obsessed with bacon, lbr they are probably never invited again.
ALSO: When Bucky gets a pickup via arm-magnetizing, Nat is just like “oh, nice,” and hops on his back
now I want a story where soulmate identifying marks come in a range of common colors and patterns, so even if it’s super unlikely you’ll ever meet an exact match, you might find you click better with people whose marks are most similar to yours. they’d end up being more like astrological signs than anything– ‘oh, I see you are a blue squiggly line! well, better steer clear of green zigzags, you know what they say’ and Tinder would just be pictures of marks that you swipe through.
Okay, this seems like the SIM setup that provokes the least possible teleological uncertainty about the universe. Sign me up.
But I feel like I would inevitably end up writing the story about the people who weren’t SUPPOSED to match but do … .>.>
i dreamt about a children’s book last night that holds up surprisingly well for something that came out of the nonsense jumble of concepts my dreams throw at me
it’s called “The Cutest Most Precious Little Girl In All The World”, and it’s about a little girl (whose head is never seen, always just out of frame or obscured by something in the foreground) who’s annoyed with being called “cute”. she doesn’t want to be cute! she wants to be tough and scary!
there’s a series of increasingly outlandish patronizing events surrounding her- first her parents doting, then her whole extended family fawning, then random strangers forming crowds, then the president showing up and giving her the official title, then she’s forced to go on tour or something
anyway eventually she gets fed up with all this and runs away! and… somehow, the dream didn’t specify, but let’s assume she went to NASA and stole a rocket- she ends up on an alien spaceship, with a bunch of big scary green things
the aliens immediately freak out, having never seen anything so utterly terrifying in their entire lives, and the book ends with the little girl gleefully chasing the terrified extraterrestrials around their ship as they run around in a panic
I’ve been having a lot of conflicted
feelings. It’s definitely one of those situations where, yes, the
original Strange was white! But to think about what they could have
done with this character…
So imagine. An Asian med
student. A Chinese guy getting mocked for being one of a thousand
Chinese students, for thinking he’s going to be special. A Filipino guy
getting laughed at and told to scrub the floors because that’s all he’s
good for, doesn’t he know that he’d have to struggle to make nurse? An Indian guy, keeping his head down and getting the work
done while people make Apu accents at him. Imagine the work he puts into
forcing his ethnicity behind him. He stops speaking Mandarin at home.
He starts throwing his mama’s pancit in the trash when she makes him
take leftovers, instead of saving it for later. He learns to love
hamburgers, ignoring his great-grandma’s ghost in the back of his head
and her horror at him consuming beef.
He finishes med
school, gets his residencies behind him, and he was right all along– he
is astoundingly skilled. A marvel. Hopeless patients thrive under his
hands. But is he going to be recognized for that? Well, I mean, he’s
Asian. He’s not special, they’re just meticulous like that. So the
recognition comes, sure, but people make jokes, even his friends, about
Surgeon Level: Asian. And the ego and the anger build up, like nacre on
a pearl, layer after layer of contempt as he gets better and better at
his skills. Contempt for the people around him. Contempt for the people
who made him. Contempt for the people he saves. Contempt, all of it,
for himself, for that nineteen-year-old pitching his mama’s pancit in
the garbage before going to bed.
And then the accident
happens. And he’s an out-of-work Asian dude. No more the protection of
his title, and everyday shit–people pulling their eyes at him or making
small dick jokes, people doing racist accents and calling him any of a
thousand slurs–hurt a lot more when he can’t say I’m a doctor.
I’m above them. Because all the work he did, he’s never going
to escape the color of his skin.
And a relative, his mom,
his auntie, seeing the darkness growing deeper and deeper in him, says
“Stephen. You need to go home for a while and get away from this.
Rest.” And he thinks about “home.” He’s second or third generation
American, this is his home, but the children of immigrants all know the
longing for a place where we fit. Where our eyes aren’t out of place and
our skin isn’t remarked upon, where we never have to hear “Where are
you from?” He thinks about being five years old, his hand–broken now,
aching–small in his mother’s as she walked him down a bright street.
He smells adobo at random, out of nowhere, another ghost calling to him.
He thinks about when things were simpler, and despite his contempt for
himself, for his mother’s people and his roots, he books a plane ticket.
And
the plane is full of people speaking the language he’s stopped speaking
to his mother, the language he was never really steady in anyway. And
something about it is comforting, and that scares him. Everything he
worked so hard to be, all in threads at the sound of the young mother
five rows ahead of him singing softly in Tagalog to her little boy.
He’s
been so angry and so sick in himself for the months since the accident
that relaxing feels wrong. But the air here smells right–the second he
steps off the plane it’s like he fills up a pair of lungs that have
been gasping for a decade. How stressful it is, to feel better and hate
yourself for feeling better.
He walks the roads his mama
took him on thirty years ago, and they’re busier than they were, the
cars are louder, but the sameness of it all is dizzying. He checks the
paper his mother gave him, the names and the addresses, and loathing
himself he goes to an acupuncturist, to a reiki master, to practitioner
after practitioner, and he hates them. I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor, these people are all quacks and
fucking idiots. he thinks, but his heart is in rags and his
hands are twisted on each other like the nightmares of an arthritic, and
so he goes.
Imagine, when he finally finds the Ancient
One. Imagine that the Ancient One has his great-grandmother’s eyes, that
the language the Ancient One speaks is the one Strange learned at his
mama’s knee and threw away. Imagine that the Ancient One–female or
male–is dark of skin, wears their traditional clothing as casually as
Strange wears a T-shirt, offers Strange a bowl of adobo and the steam rising off of it it smells just like it always did…
Imagine
Strange coming full circle, back to his roots, back to the place in
himself that he’s ignored and beaten down for all these years. Imagine
him looking at the history that belongs to him and claiming it. Imagine
him being still, yes, American. But honest to himself. No longer
fighting to be white, no longer fighting to play by the rules of white
people, recognizing that there’s power where he came from and it belongs
to him. Imagine what it it feels like, to have that sudden knowledge
opening inside your chest, to have the shame over your dark skin and
your narrow wrists and your almond eyes washed away by certainty and
confidence and a clean pride that bears no resemblance to the ego of the
master surgeon.
Having grown up in DC, statues of various dead guys on horses are basically background radiation, or they were before I became Hamilton trash and started noticing them again. Now it’s like every time I turn around there’s a Founding Father looking at me like I personally disappointed him, and it’s getting a little unnerving.
Although: as a result, I sort of want to write a magical realism thing where that can really happen. Where if you do something they would have disagreed with strongly enough, the statues climb down off their columns and lumber down Mass Ave to the Russell Building or the Capitol, where they stand on the sidewalk, arms crossed, glaring into the window of whoever’s just introduced legislation that offended them. They don’t speak, or attack anyone, or damage anything– well, they do tend to bump their heads on low-handing streetlights, sometimes, but that doesn’t count. Mostly they just stand there, mournful, accusing, for everyone to see.
Sometimes lawmakers can talk them around, convince them they’re not actually betraying the political ideals of their predecessors. Politicians who are good at this tend to have much, much longer careers than the ones who aren’t. Politicians who piss off the wrong statues seldom get reelected.
George Washington rarely budges, and when he does it’s front-page news, nationwide. Madison’s always been easier to talk around than most. Hamilton spend more time off his plinth than on it, but he cools off fast. Jefferson holds grudges, to the point that hardly anyone worries too much about making him mad.
It’s not just politicians, either, and they don’t always come to life in anger. Joan of Arc’s bronze horse will shiver to life in Malcolm X Park, sometimes, and carry her off to join protest marches, when she thinks their cause is just. Gandhi walked with Iraq War protestors. The Spirit of American Womanhood, outside Constitution Hall, danced on the day that Roe v. Wade was decided, and when Obergefell vs. Hodge went through, Eleanor Roosevelt taught a clumsy Lindy to Baron von Steuben.
Lincoln has only risen from his seat once since he was put there in 1922, and that was to nod in solemn approval at LBJ from the White House lawn.
Some cities rarely put up statues, and many have taken theirs down. Paris has a great many artists and writers memorialized, and curiously few politicians. In London, during the Blitz, Nelson shinned down his column to help dig people out of collapsed buildings, until he was broken to pieces himself; he stands atop the column again today, reassembled, but has never moved since. In the last moths of the Soviet Union, a desperate Communist Party had the statues of Moscow chained in place. These days, Monument Avenue in Richmond is punctuated with a long series of empty plinths and bare columns.
But DC keeps theirs, and keeps building more.
now i want a story about what precipitated the removal of the Richmond statues. ‘Cause don’t get me wrong, those guys were pretty much all flaming bags of dicks, but this is Richmond after all. Was watching them disapprove of civil rights legislation in front of God and journalists and everybody finally too much for the governor?
Imagine this for a second: you’re a kid in a wheelchair.
It’s pretty isolating. You love reading, but every book you read has a hero who can walk. After a while, you start to get the message: only kids without disabilities are allowed to have adventures. Because of your condition, you’ll never be able to have a story worth reading.
Now imagine you discover a book about a kid in a wheelchair.
It’s fantastic. All of a sudden, there’s someone like you who gets to go on awesome adventures. Maybe your story actually is worth telling after all!
But then the hero gets their greatest wish granted: their legs are fixed and they rise from their wheelchair, healthy and strong.
And there you are, the reader, still stuck in your wheelchair.
Your legs will never be fixed.
You will never be granted that magical wish.
And the character who used to just be like you is now something you can never be. The writer has decided that their story is only worth telling if they end up magically abled.
But you will never end up magically abled. So what does this tell you?
Your story will never be worth telling.
Now do you understand?
Disabled people do not need to be “cured” for their stories to be worth telling, they do not need to hate themselves or their disabilities for their stories to be worth telling. DISABLED PEOPLE ARE REAL MULTI-FACETED, MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PEOPLE AND THEIR STORIES ARE WORTH TELLING!!!
Character with psychosomatic paralysis who gets over it just in time to walk down the aisle for her wedding/graduation/etc is a trope that needs to be set on fire.
(what I want: a romance novel with a character who uses a wheelchair sometimes, who gets her dress made specifically for to look amazing in her wheelchair, and who then feels good enough to walk down the aisle
and doesn’t
because she cannot count on the duration of feeling good enough to walk for extended periods of time
her dress was made to accommodate her chair and would look silly standing AND she’d lose the nifty custom train and
the point where it’s an hour before your wedding and you don’t actually NEED another dress but you COULD wear a different dress is not the time to choose a different dress
and maybe her mom is like “I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING WOULD BE OK YOU SHOULD’VE LISTENED” and she is like, “I’m wheeling down the aisle and I changed the cake to the cake I ACTUALLY WANTED without telling you OH LOOK TIME FOR MOTHER OF THE BRIDE TO TAKE HER PLACE”
and her spouse gets on one knee for her wedding kiss and it’s beautiful and perfect and the maid of honor runs interference with mom for the the entire reception because THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE FOR)
Kimchi and Justice 