Variously Backup

keith-in-shibari:

Keith and Lance going their separate ways after the war. Lance dating Allura for a while before they drift apart, mutually. Keith rushing through relationships, fueled by an unexplainable desperation; a need that keeps him up at night. Lance dating girl after girl, taking his time to look quietly into their eyes and looking for something, never finding it. Keith losing hope he’s meant to be with someone, but still being unable to make himself stop trying. Lance having his bi crisis and his midlife crisis at once, new hope pushing him onward despite having his heart broken countless times. Keith and Lance both signing up for a blind date and encountering each other in shock. Keith being surprised to see Lance on a mlm meet up, Lance being surprised to see Keith willingly go on a blind date. The coincidence and general weirdness of the situation make them laugh and strike up an easy conversation about old times. The talk shifts into the present and they both go quieter, realizing the years and the changes. Lance scratching his scuff awkwardly. Keith tightening his ponytail and clearing his throat. The talk starts up again, hesitantly, like they’re feeling their way in blindness, relearning an old place. Different but still the same. They share these accidental, curious glances that make nervous butterflies soar in their stomachs – almost a forgotten feeling. And beneath it, something that’s always been there, churning deep and slow and steady. They’ve both been oblivious idiots. Now, they’re older, wiser, still idiots, but they finally understand.

jewish-privilege:

missfortune1977:

missfortune1977:

So after the many many posts mourning the passing of Stan Lee earlier today I’ve started seeing an inevitable wave of backlash about how he actually wasn’t a good person and we shouldn’t be mourning them. And these posts are par for the course when a celebrity dies because no one is all good or all bad, and that’s fine. And Stan Lee was human, he was a person with a complicated life and a complicated legacy, and I’m not here to whitewash any of that. However, I’d like to refute a couple of the points I’ve seen people making.

The first is that Stan Lee sexually harassed nurses who were taking care of him. This story came from the Daily Mail, which is not a credible news source. The original story does not name any of the nurses who supposedly came forward with the story, or their employer, and the legitimacy of this story is pretty shaky. I’m not saying it categorically isn’t true, but I am saying that we should take stories from the newspaper that ran a headline about the discovery of the “gay gene” with a grain of salt.

The second is that Stan Lee was told that Andrew Garfield wanted to play Peter Parker as bisexual, and as retaliation forced Sony to only depict Peter Parker as straight and white. This isn’t quite true. There is a contract from 2011 that lists mandatory character traits for Spider-Man, and in that list is included that Spider-Man is “not a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual).” Whether Stan Lee himself personally was involved in writing up this contract is pretty doubtful seeing as his role in the company was fairly limited by that point (and that’s not to mention the fact that in his later years he was being abused and manipulated by the people closest to him), but he did mention it in an interview with Newsarama. What he specifically said was, “I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way, but we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that (…) I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly, But again, I don’t see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once they’ve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes (…) It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that,” he said. “Latino characters should stay Latino. The Black Panther should certainly not be Swiss. I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.”

And while your mileage may vary on how much you agree with him there, it’s a far cry from him cruelly declaring Peter Parker having a boyfriend would be an affront before God and man and an insult to his authorial intent or whatever. Also, I think the original post that started this story was about Andrew Garfield saying something while doing press for Amazing Spiderman 2 and Stan Lee writing the contract as a result, but the contract is from 2011 and the first Amazing Spiderman came out in 2012, so the timeline doesn’t work. I could be misremembering the post though. There’s also this implied narrative that Andrew Garfield got axed for saying his Peter Parker was bi, but uh, no. No, they cancelled the franchise because Amazing Spiderman 2 bombed at the box office.

Now, to wrap it up, was Stan Lee a good and perfect man? No. His legacy is very much a mixed bag, especially when it comes to his relationship with his long-time co-creator Jack Kirby (although that’s a whole other suitcase to unpack some other time). I would like to point out, however, that the posts praising him aren’t all just blindly hero-worshipping him and being willfully ignorant. When someone you admire dies it’s natural to forget about the bad parts of them for a bit and get a little misty eyed, and not everyone’s gonna be totally objective about this man that they never met but who represents something important to them. I think that speaks more to the way we interact with celebrity as a culture than it does about the way Marvel fans see Stan Lee frankly. And hey, we gain nothing by pretending that Stan Lee wasn’t an important figure in comic book history, one who co-created the first black character in mainstream comics just two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, who fought the Comic Code Authority censors to use comics to tackle heavy subject matter, who helped bring legitimacy to the art form and humanity to its characters. So as long as I’ve got you here I’m gonna leave you with his thoughts on racism in 1968, words that feel just as relevant today:

“Racism and bigotry are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them, is to expose them — to reveal from the insidious evil they really are.”

May his memory be a blessing.

Alright, I’ve gotten a lot of notes and messages informing me that the Daily Mail story wasn’t the only instance of sexual misconduct allegations against Stan Lee. I was genuinely not aware of these other allegations when I made the post, and I probably wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to defend him if I had realized how pervasive these allegations were. It was never my intention to gloss over these allegations or discredit the accusers. I’m not sure how I missed these stories when they first came out, but I’ll be researching them later when I have the chance and I encourage you to do the same and draw your own conclusions. I apologize for getting snippy or defensive with a few people in the notes, that wasn’t cool of me.

I’ve also seen some weird erasure of his Jewishness vis a vis him allegedly being okay with Steve Rogers being part of Hydra. The argument boiled down to Lee shouldn’t have said Hydra!Cap was okay because Captain America was created by two Jewish men specifically to fight the Nazis. While that is correct, to couch it as if Stan Lee was Goy Goyische McGoy and not Stanley Martin Lieber from West End Avenue where he lived with his Romanian Jewish immigrant parents who fled from a country that hadn’t yet emancipated the Jews who had lived there since the 1300s was…let’s go with irritating.