Sulagna Misra’s previous work for The Toast can be found here. Note: This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.
There’s a lot one could say about Avengers: Age of Ultron, but the thought that struck me most often during my 10:30 AM screening was, Why does this feel like bad fanfic?
I turned to my friends in the crowded theater and whispered, “This is bad, right? This is bad writing?” They agreed, laughing at my eagerness to condemn the film, but I was genuinely puzzled. I had enjoyed the first Avengers movie, and everyone and their dog knows how much I loved Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But the feeling I had about Avengers: Age of Ultron was very specific: not only was I disappointed, I couldn’t believe how disappointed I was.
Where was the fun, the wit? There was a romance between two very good-looking people with a ton of angst and some pining thrown in; how was there no heat? And if you’re going to have fight sequences that look like literal trash, why weren’t there more funny quips during? In Age of Ultron, the Avengers did what so many fans most wanted them to do: they hung out like pals and made jokes and acted silly. But their jokes fell flat for me.
It didn’t help that the movie was riddled with cognitive dissonance. Do these people exist in an alternate universe in which a man who creates an all-powerful omniscient murderous AI is brushed off with a “boys will be boys”? Joss Whedon has publicly pointed out that he and Marvel tussled over various parts of the script, and maybe that is what drove what was previously a winning formula straight into the ground.
After the movie, I was reminded of a set of tweets from Juliet Kahn about female fandom that began with this one:
God, the media we have does not deserve the passion it gets from female fandom. Y’all have no idea how magical it is.
— Juliet Kahn (@prynnette) April 22, 2015
duh. But while Mark Ruffalo can play dorky, he’s decidedly confused and conflicted in this film, and not in the endearing terrible-but-fun sensitive boy way. Annoyed by what I’d seen in the film, I was sure I could find better, sweeter fic of the couple. Done, with a lovely subtlety, over coffee dates. Multiple times. 
Then there’s Black Widow’s whole storyline. Juliet hit on this too:
I was obsessed with giving the scraps of female characters I got a real story, and I was NOT alone. — Juliet Kahn (@prynnette) April 22, 2015
Comics in particular have never come close to matching the heights fanfic writers have hit w/ their female characters.
— Juliet Kahn (@prynnette) April 22, 2015
Like, there’s a lot of good work out there right now but very little of it is willing to give women real interior lives
— Juliet Kahn (@prynnette) April 22, 2015
Age of Ultron Bruce Banner has done nothing to earn her trust or interest — at least, not that we are allowed to see — in the way Clint Barton, Sam Wilson, Nick Fury, and Steve Rogers have all had to do before she will speak candidly with them. With Natasha, Bruce remains passive (not submissive — passive) in the face of her advances, not even reacting when she mentions her infertility. Based on her past characterization, I wondered if Natasha was opening up to him as emotional leverage, as she did with Loki. She does actually emotionally manipulate Bruce later, by distracting him with a kiss and a declaration of her affections before forcing him to become the Hulk without his consent, so I don’t think this is an entirely unfair assumption. The way Natasha talks about her infertility have been discussed elsewhere and all over the Internet, but I was particularly struck by how inappropriate the conversations seemed given her relationship with Bruce. The characters aren’t even together, so speaking about fertility and possible children seems rather incongruous. And the fact that they would both assume a romantic relationship was impossible because one or both of them couldn’t have biological children is a depressingly heteronormative assumption.
We have these dude writers getting gigs writing women and quite frankly few of them are as good as the teen girl A03 greats, okay — Juliet Kahn (@prynnette) April 22, 2015
Once you get a woman writing about Marvel women, she proves to be loads better at it than the writers of this movie. Agent Carter, a show executive-produced by Tara Butters, depicted the horror and legacy of Black Widow-like training with a subtlety and sharpness, focusing on a woman who’d been through the same. Dottie is not viewed a “monster” because she was forcibly sterilized; instead, the horror of her character comes from how she represses and defuses painful leftover childhood abuses — being a little girl forced to kill other little girls — and grows up to murder people, often and easily. This incongruence in character development between film and TV characters who have similar background experiences is par for the course with Marvel, which makes a show of trying to hew to consistency that usually comes to naught. I’ve read countless Black Widow fanfics that explore her character much better than the film did, and if you’re reading this post, you may have too. (Please, please link in the comments!)
Since seeing Age of Ultron I’ve discussed the movie with friends, and while we do talk about bad things in this movie – there’s so much to discuss – we are more interested in filling in those narrative gaps with something stronger, better, more real. That’s where the concept of head canons come in: fandom can take these flawed tales and create richer and more authentic versions of these stories.
Here at The Toast, Nikki has already told you about the loveliness that is Dr. Helen Cho, and why her existence matters so much. And come on: you can’t tell me that a doctor who can literally print new body parts for the injured wouldn’t be able to pick up Thor’s hammer with ease? Head canon: Dr. Cho could flip Mjolnir up in the air and catch it before any of those dudes could make a move! Head canon: Human sunshine Sam Wilson could lift it, too.
Heck, head canon: Black Widow just wanted to try on heteronormativity for a time and was actually all ¯_(ツ)_/¯ after the last scene of the movie. Or maybe, head canon: Bruce Banner is really conflicted because he as Bruce is dating Natasha, but he as The Hulk is actually dating Hawkeye. Maybe Natasha babysits the traitor baby, maybe the Avengers love hanging out with Hawkeye’s too-cute kids, maybe Tony got the talking-to he more than deserved. Heck, maybe Dr. Cho was just into Thor because she wanted to pepper him with questions about Dr. Jane Foster, physicist extraordinaire. A friend of mine told me she’d already written a version of Age of Ultron exploring the actual political ramifications of superheroes, rather than dismissing notions of national sovereignty and international relations altogether. (As someone who has actually studied this, I have a lot of opinions on that aspect of the film.)
Teen girls imagining what it be like if Ginny and Luna dated, what it would be like if Captain America were bi and in love w/ Sam Wilson
— Juliet Kahn (@prynnette) April 22, 2015
(Sidenote: I don’t know what she means by “if.” These are both clearly true.)
The best part of head canons is that they don’t have to complement one another. You can suggest Katniss is queer while also heralding a straight female character who doesn’t have to be feminine. And yes, ultimately I wish there was better representation of all these films; I wish that so badly. But sometimes head canons can even be a way of correcting these gaps and grievances, a way to salve our wounds with the stories we so deeply need:
So: what are your favorite head canons and fanfictions? Personally, I’m going to finish this excellent fic about the Avengers writing a video game about themselves, and then, you know, maybe a Sam Wilson/Helen Cho fanfic is in my future.
Tags: comics, fandom, head canons, movies, sulagna misra, the avengers, yes please all the helen cho/sam wilson fanfic
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Thank you for this article! I saw Ultron last night for the first time, and I tried to focus on the experience of watching the movie, but I kept thinking, “This is a fanfic written by someone who really, really passionately ‘shipped Bruce/Natasha, but she didn’t want to get hate from any Clintasha fans, and that’s why she spent such a long time detailing Hawkeye’s idyllic life on a farm with his family.”
a) yes, yes, yes, ALL OF THIS, fan culture can be so transformative and lovely
b) SERIOUSLY, why can’t the “real stuff” ever match up to what fans produce? i feel similarly when i see terrible official graphics and posters when i know there are hundreds of fanartists posting better stuff on tumblr for free.
c) conveniently, i published something about one of my favorite headcanons on this very site, and it is my current refuge from the nightmare that is the reality of Game of Thrones, so this piece is very well timed [weeps, rages] http://the-toast.net/2013/10/25/femslash-friday-s…
Thank you so much for reposting that link; I’ve re-read it today just to help ameliorate last night’s episode. Also, one of the commenters introduced me to the idea of Arya/Sarella, which I find very intriguing.
Damnit, I just realized, several hours after commenting, that that post is a year and a half old.
I loved that Sansa/Brienne piece so much! It’s absolutely my headcanon now. (The GoT that exists in my head is pretty completely divorced from the both the show and the books, at this point. I’ve stopped watching so they can’t damage it.)
I loved your Sansa/Brienne essay, and I still love it. The series is nowhere near as good.
I keep telling myself to stop reading AoU stuff because it just makes me sad and angry all over again but it’s like picking a scab, god damn it. I can’t stop reading articles about how bad it was and how it all went wrong and GOD NOW I’M BLEEDING AGAIN.
ETA: Thank goodness for Mad Max.
I finished watching Mad Max and immediately wanted to go read fan fiction about it – because I feel like it would complement it so well! Watch the movie for all the explosions, Charlize Theron’s badasssery and Tom Hardy’s wordless mumbles, then read the fiction for the character development and actually take a moment to breath and say “wait, what the HELL is going on here?”
I liked Age of Ultron…the bigger issue is why they used Tony Stark instead Henry Pym . Especially with Ant Man coming! But they did not let him off the hook in SHIELD. But anyway, I don’t thank goodness for Mad Max…it was OK, but it seemed more like a fan fic version of Road Warrior than the real thing to me.
[surveys forest of browser tabs]
Welp, that’s it for my work today.
I enjoyed AoU, but I can absolutely see where the elements of this critique are coming from. Fandom can be such a healing balm.
I love the fact that fandom, and its relationship to the stories it focuses on, are discussed as frankly and seriously as they are here. Not only does it give me new things to read/explore in the context of my own fandoms, it gives us the opportunity to take it seriously enough to actually analyze the way fans interact with media, as well as each other.
That said, I have absolutely been spoiled by fandom, and based on what my sister told me about Age of Ultron, I don’t think I’ll be seeing it.
Yes. So much this. Thank you for this. Fandom has pretty much ruined me for established universes, and I feel like a lot of my disappointment for AoU also stems from how much better fanfics I read that movie.
It’s also weird when you see the actual movies with someone who DOESN’T read fanfic or interact with fandom and isn’t getting why certain things are bothering you, haha…
I love this article, but I hate that I am supposed to be working instead of devoting the rest of the afternoon to clicking on all of the links.
This. Will be back later with links, and to collect more links.
Sulagna, your fannish posts are one of my favorite things on my favorite site.
There’s a kind of looseness to fanfiction that I always think is interesting. It’s not just that it’s sort of open to these simultaneous paradoxical interpretations of a story (though it is that), but also a lot of times I get the feeling that, you know that some of these scenes or relationships in fan-fiction are open-ended; they don’t have a clear beginning or an end, we just sort of jump into the middle of this ongoing story, and it reaches a kind of arbitrary point and then stops and moves on.
It’s like a particularly hidebound story like AoU (and I think that, for whatever else this movie is, it is 100% structured in a pretty traditional way) automatically creates these whorls of incomplete alternative narratives, and then fan-writers jump in and start coloring them all in, kind of solidifying all of the hypothetical narratives implied by their absence in the main narrative.
It seems weird, I think, but only from a very modern perspective; it’s only once we’ve got things like copyright and publishing houses to defend it that we end up with canonical interpretations of fiction — back in the Olde Dayes, multiple interpretations of the same character from story or folklore or what have you were actually pretty common, and contradictory interpretations I don’t think were especially weird. The Greeks rewrote the details of their own myths all the time in order to make interesting plays out of them.
Oh, Ms Misra, you’re wonderful. My favorite part of any given fandom is almost never the work itself, but the world that has sprung up around it with headcanons and extended worlds that take on lives of their own. The Harry Potter books are okay at best, with major problematic elements in the text, but the fan works? The tumblrs dedicated to talking about what Magical America is like, and how muggleborn witches and wizards deal with the fact that their technology vastly outperforms ACTUAL MAGIC? That is where my heart lies.
Do you have links handy to any of these HP tumblrs? The bulk of my HP fandom took place on HP centric websites like Mugglenet and the Sugar Quill and now I don’t know where to get my fix and I desperately want to read about muggleborns and technology and magic.
seconding!
Of course fanworks are often better/more interesting/more diverse/more welcoming/have a wider range of stories than the canon works they come from– they get to sidestep the scarcity problems entirely.
Thank you for that link! It perfectly covers why I struggle to answer when people ask if this or that portrayal of a woman in fiction “is feminist.” –> It’s impossible for any one work to bear that burden
YESSSSS. Natasha who unsuccessfully woos Bruce Banner and brings up inability to have kids in the way that she did is not the version of Natasha I personally am most interested in. But she’s not NOT feminist. There are women who are upset about not being able to have kids, there are women who maybe don’t want kids but are upset the choice was made for them, there are women who think their inability or lack of interest in procreation makes them a monster.
And the world is a big place, so maybe there’s even a non-fictional woman who thinks she’s a monster for some reason that doesn’t relate to having children (for example, being an assassin), but has had a poorly edited conversation that was open to being interpreted some other way.
The world is complicated and strange and all of those women ought to have a fictional story they can relate to. But Canon MCU Natasha can only be so many things at a time.
I saw Age of Ultron a couple of days ago and I had pretty low expectations, but it was still so confusingly bad. I mean, bad movies get made all the time, but HOW did that bizarre farm interlude end up being such a big part of the film????
Fandom’s ability to take a clumsy/sexist/heteronormative narrative and make it into a million different, more richly imagined stories and worlds is one of the things I love most about it. I actually think fanfic writers can be pretty terrible at female characters too, but maybe this is because I mainly hang out in dudeslash fandom. I do think people pay in fandom pay a lot more attention to female characters than they used to!
My favourite Natasha fic is ‘love is for children and other lies’ (http://archiveofourown.org/works/575215) which is SO much more nuanced and interesting than her AoU storyline, which I am trying not to think too hard about because it was so weirdly handled.
The thing about the farm interlude — Joss Whedon actually fought for it, to have it included against the studio executives’ wishes — and the thing about it is that structurally it’s a good choice: it gives a break in the action, it’s the low point before the climactic sequence, it opens up some room to add emotional stakes into the later events. So I understand why he put it there, but it’s so mechanical, it’s like someone had a spreadsheet of “What is Act 4 Supposed to Look Like” and then just started checking off boxes.
Yeah, making space for character interaction seems like a good idea, but by this point in the franchise most of the Avengers have developed a lot during the earlier movies and an idea like “our heroes are all pining for a rural domestic life” just doesn’t jibe with what we know about most of them, especially considering where Winter Soldier left off with Steve and Natasha.
Obviously if you have different writers and directors they’re gonna have different takes on the characters, but I really struggled to buy Whedon’s versions of the Avengers in AoU in a way I didn’t in the first Avengers movie.
I think there’s also a plot function there — that kind of pre-climax quiet space that you need in order to stop a movie like this from feeling like someone put your head in a box with a strobe light and bunch of action figures and then just shook it for two hours.
But it’s also true that there were a lot of different ways to go about that. I kind of feel like giving them the opportunity to all go off into different places might have worked better, now that I think on it.
Yeah, totally – it makes sense when you describe it as important to the structure of the movie, but I agree with you that it feels like just checking off boxes. Or to me it was kind of like Whedon was treating the characters like blank slates when most of them already come with a lot of their own baggage.
Ignoring everyone else’s writing on and interpretation of the characters feels like something Whedon does a lot, actually.
It also seems weird that Clint would reveal his family’s location this casually, after going to so much trouble to keep it secret.
Also the part where Clint said, “Fury helped me set this up years ago” makes it sound like Nick Fury actually provided him with a wife and family, in addition to the farmhouse.
I’m assuming Natasha already knew about it (considering the daughter was wondering if she’d come as well), and I can imagine him telling the others at some point, this just pushed the date forward.
This fic is making my heart hurt in the best way, thank you
Yay, I’m adore this fic writer so I’m always happy to rec her to others 😀
I LOVE ‘Love is for Children’. I’ve reread those fics when my anxiety is flaring and I feel fragile.
Just. Perfect. <3
AGREE AGREE AGREE SO HARD. Ugh you hit so well on so many of the things that disappointed/pissed me off about AoU and Black Widow’s storyline in particular. I hated, HATED, that Tony was not held to more consequences for creating A MURDERBOT THAT ALMOST DESTROYED THE WORLD JESUS CHRIST (also if Ultron was really everywhere in the internet I feel like he maybe could’ve destroyed the world a lot more easily than lifting up an entire goddamn city and trying to smash it back down like a meteor??? Nuclear bombs aren’t the only way to blow it all up dude; if you can infect EVERY COMPUTER IN THE WORLD you can crash planes, cut off electricity, etc….but I digress.) Everyone really shrugged that off in a way that made no sense for their characters and sense of morality/duty. I was flabbergasted, for example, that it took so little convincing for Bruce to go along with it, especially the SECOND TIME when they created the Vision. Thousands of people died because of Ultron, and Tony just drives off in the end in his sports car like, *shrug*. So yeah, really fucking hated that.
Also hated the Bruce/Nat storyline – not the idea of it necessarily, I feel it could’ve been done well, but how it was actually written and played out. I think you nailed it especially here: “Instead of the character complexity we see in some previous movies – that emotional elusiveness and quiet manipulation – Black Widow is suddenly, inexplicably, open about her emotions. And while she has also opened up in past movies, in Age of Ultron Bruce Banner has done nothing to earn her trust or interest — at least, not that we are allowed to see — in the way Clint Barton, Sam Wilson, Nick Fury, and Steve Rogers have all had to do before she will speak candidly with them.”
Black Widow’s defining characteristic (in my opinion) is that we never know who she really is or how she really feels, and it is heavily implied that in many ways, she doesn’t either. In CA:TWS in particular it was made clear that she is constantly creating and re-creating herself to adapt to the circumstances she finds herself in, which I think is really the compelling and fascinating thing about her. She isn’t tied to a particular idea of herself or what she is supposed to be, as a hero, as a woman, as anything – she is clearly trying to escape/make up for being the cold-blooded assassin she used to be, but she is willing to do anything for the greater good and make tough choices others wouldn’t (as in at the end of CA:TWS when she uploaded all of SHIELD’s files to the internet). She is comfortable with being many different people and things, and part of that is that she isn’t able to trust people easily with her true emotions or reactions.
Which is why it was so aggravating that they jumped right into giving her feels for and emotional openness with Bruce. In the first Avengers movie, the last meaningful one-on-one interaction she had with Bruce was when he was CHASING HER AND ALMOST KILLING HER AS THE HULK. How are we suddenly supposed to buy it when she’s all flirty and into him and soothing him with that weird “lullaby”? He did not earn that with her, at all. The movie resorted to telling us that they had feelings for each other (as in multiple other characters, like Cap and Clint’s wife, stating it bluntly) rather than showing the relationship naturally developing. And that scene where they were all flirty at the party and she’s talking about “a man done me wrong” made me cringe, both because of how awkward and stilted the dialogue was (and you know it’s bad when actors like Johansson and Ruffalo can’t make it work), and because yeah, he did do you wrong when HE ALMOST FUCKING KILLED YOU, JESUS. So it is never made clear why Bruce, of all people, would have earned Nat’s trust other than her thinking he’s a charming dork and finding it interesting that he’s not a fighter like her other friends. Seriously, that is not enough to earn the openness/affection of a woman like her, a woman who once said “love is for children,” and who is committed above all else to atoning for her past wrongs and doing so by putting the unique skills of manipulation, subterfuge, disguise, etc. that she was forced to develop to the best possible use.
And yeah, totally agreed on how inappropriate it was for them to be discussing kids, for crying out loud. I can totally buy Natasha mourning her inability to have children, but like you said they weren’t even in a RELATIONSHIP at that point. I was also stunned that she would even consider for a second actually running away with him. Again, how the fuck had he earned her even thinking about that? They had barely discussed the future or the implications of that; they had really barely even gotten to know each other as people at that point. And we’re supposed to believe she would give up the most important thing in her life, all of the work she was doing to save the world and make up for her past, for Bruce because she likes how dorky and sweet he is? Fuck no. Natasha is made of better stuff than that. She is infinitely more complicated than that.
Also, addendum to this ridiculously long comment: There were a couple of other ugly moments that really felt wrong to me. Tony joking about prima nocta? Come the fuck on, how did no one consider the terrible implications of that? And I really didn’t like the part where Bruce was threatening Wanda, being all, “give me a reason, I don’t need to be the Hulk to kill you” – of course he’s angry and he has every right to be, but that just felt so terribly discordant with the kind person he’s supposed to be when he’s Bruce, not the Hulk.
Just ugh, there was a LOT wrong with this movie, and I’m definitely going to need to come up with some head canons of my own to get past it.
I haven’t commented about this movie much, so here’s my first chance to say: I am 99.9% certain that the ‘prima nocta’ riff was SOMEone’s response to the backlash about a particular line in the first Avengers movie, and I bet I don’t even have to say which line I’m referring to here (which is good, because GAH).
I must have blinked and missed that Bruce moment, am I’m glad I did because what what what? Bruce “Warm Fuzzies” Banner threatened a woman? Dafuq.
Consider how much of AOU was made up out of checklists and hugely compressed film shorthand, I bet I blinked and missed a lot of things…
What’s worse about the prima nocta line is that when they released the first teasers of the film, Tony doesn’t say that–he says he will be fair but firmly cruel. So they actually went back and added it in. Not much different to how Whedon was jokingly gloating about how his greatest achievement with the first Avengers is getting the line mewling quim out to the masses.
TL:DR: FEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLIINNNNNNGSSSSSSSS
My headcanon is that Natasha isn’t really emotionally open here. She’s opening up a little bit – she really has a bit of a crush on Bruce, and she’s open to pursuing it – but she’s falling back on her training when it comes to actually pursuing a relationship. She forces a conversation into awkward levels of over-the-top flirtiness, she practically stalks Bruce to get more alone time with him, she tells him what she thinks he wants to hear even if it goes against what she later seems to want (let’s run away!) or is painful for her to talk about (I’m sterile!). None of this makes sense as the actions of Natasha pursuing her first genuine romantic relationship, but all of it could plausibly have been taught as part of Seduction 101 in the Red Room.
She does like Bruce, but it’s just a crush, and all the stuff that looks like her being really open with him is actually her not being able to be truly open.
I’m still working on a theory for why she doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Regeneration Cradle could probably reverse the graduation ceremony. I mean, she’s not stupid, definitely she could figure that out. So really the question is why she’s ignoring it. Maybe she figures she’ll ask about it after she figures out romantic relationships, if she ever finds someone she wants to have kids with. And perhaps the graduation ceremony was standing in for her entire childhood, in her dream, rather than just for itself. It makes a good symbol because it’s the one thing she hasn’t been able to start reversing yet. She hasn’t even thought about reversing it, much, because the Regen Cradle and its possibilities are very new.
YES YES THANK YOU FOR PUTTING THIS INTO WORDS! Also I got some really icky vibes from the whole ‘lullaby’ thing, considering how the Hulk is a huge, angry, uncontrollable man who destroys everything, and the only person who can ‘change’ him is his love interest. Just… I can’t help but feel really uncomfortable at the domestic violence parallels.
I wish Tony Stark did Hulk lullaby. He has friend chemistry with Bruce Banner and would have to step out of his suit in the field to talk Hulk down.
Natasha is best friends with Clint. If she cares about not being able to have kids she might not be able to talk to him about how she feels because he has kids and it can be awkward to talk to your friends with kids about stuff like that. Maybe she’d talk to Cap about it while they are at the house and Cap would empathize because he can’t have kids with Peggy.
I saw a comment somewhere that said Banner would be afraid of having kids because of fear of turning in to the Hulk with them. Maybe he’d mention it to Tony, but Tony wouldn’t notice until something reminds him of the conversation and he realizes what it was really about.
Do you one better with full-team lullaby? http://scifigrl47.tumblr.com/post/22447587650/ave…
(Seriously, this was running through my head for the WHOLE MOVIE.)
I did not know that existed, thank you.
(am Sheila, finally made an account for comments)
I completely understand all the arguments that there’s only so much you can do in a 2-hour movie and you have to carefully ration your plot points, character development, etc- but the specific characters to which Whedon gave focus, and the way he did so, show a clear bias to nerdy white heterobros, and that is not my movie. When women have to eke out little bitty shreds of female character development from such a juggernaut franchise, it’s no surprise that we turn to our own creators regardless of canon.
ahh so, some of my fav fics that either fill in canon or diverge from it in a v satisfying way:
natasha & the winter soldier: florilegium (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2105979)
bucky & steve & natasha: almond, clavicle, orchid (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1459930)
and then there’s this amazing fic about sharon: men do not live only by fighting evils (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1529300)
i also want a lot of fic about the only thing i liked in AOU: the vision!!! i wonder if anyone’s started writing really good fic about the vision yet…
Those are SO GOOD and definitely my Sharon headcanon.
Love this, Sulagna. Age of Ultron was SO absurd (as we have discussed) AND YET I want to see it AGAIN and that is 100% because of Dr. Helen Cho. If you hurry up and write a beautiful Sam/Helen fic for me, though, maybe I can avoid spending another twelve bucks on this ridiculous movie.
It’s still hard for me to talk about this movie with anything even close to rationality. I felt heartbroken when I walked out of that theater. And I felt like I was being STUPID for being so heartbroken. It was awful.
Thank you for this. <3 It makes me feel better knowing that I’m not the only one.
The stupid feeling was also tempered by a vague sense of guilt because – look, I think this movie was appallingly sexist, this was the thing that finally unhooked me from the Joss Whedon train and I ain’t looking back, and that is a perfectly reasonable reason for me to be upset by. But what they did to Natasha and Clint here, after two movies of pretty beautiful buildup, after I felt like Avengers was the first action movie I’d ever seen where they wrote The Girl On The Team as finally the perfect balance of being a capable amazing human and ALSO a love interest where her sole plotline wasn’t the love interest…. yeah, my heart was a tiny bit broken from a shipper perspective, too, and I keep feeling like I need to be defensive about that. Like every time I mention the fact that there were plenty of other things that HURT ME about this movie, people are still just going to distill my argument down to “oh, she’s just an emotional girl who’s upset because the people she WANTED to kiss didn’t kiss.”
I’ve been preaching the anti-Joss gospel since Firefly (which was the first thing of his I saw). I have to admit to some small amount of satisfaction that he showed his (true) ass in AoU, but it sucks that the fandom had to suffer for it. You can join me in thinking that the A and U in Age of Ultron actually stands for Alternate Universe and that the Russo brothers will somehow manage to salvage/retcon this mess.
I’m only rarely to be found doing any shipping at all, and yet, they put all that effort into the relationship with Clint and Natasha… only to swerve abruptly at the start of this one and say, nah, Nat’s got the hots for Bruce? Oh and Clint’s been a married papa all this time? The phrase “out of left field” doesn’t begin to cover it. I spent the whole movie periodically going, “Huh. So they’re still trying to sell this. I’m… pretty sure I can’t buy it, sorry.”
IOW it’s not just you, and your POV is wholly valid here.
Augh, this is why I come to The Toast. Women being nice to other women. Women validating other women. I wish I could hug you all.
Hah! Well, I’m not a woman, so I’ll only accept the zen hugs if they’re still on offer once that’s cleared up. *wry grin*
Oh, my apologies! YOU CAN STILL HAVE A HUG, I STILL APPRECIATE THE VALIDATION. <3
Dude I wholeheartedly agree and I think you are 100% valid in feeling mad about AoU not only from an overall movie = sexist perspective but definitely from a shipper perspective too. I’m not a Clintasha fan – I like Clint and Nat being BFFs a lot more just cause you don’t often see deep, meaningful male/female platonic friendships, and because I honestly can’t see her with any of the Avengers – but dang, if they were gonna make ANYONE an outright romantic interest for Natasha, it damn well should’ve been Clint after everything that went into building that relationship (especially in the FIRST Avengers – dear God Whedon what the fuck were you thinking???). So yeah, I think it’s totally okay to feel hurt by this movie, to feel hurt for all the narrative and character development potential it completely wasted, and you’re not being stupid or “just an emotional girl” to feel that way *hugs*
I actually liked AoU when I saw it this weekend – I feel like all these things should have bothered me more, but honestly, they didn’t at all. I’m not sure why that is. Bruce/Natasha worked for me – clearly, her remorse/feeling of being a monster is more about all the people she killed when she was an assassin, and not about being sterilized, right? considering that’s been a clear guiding line of her character from the beginning? – because I can see what she would see in him, mostly as she told us. Not the “girls like dorks” part, the part where she talks about how he’s not a fighter, that he actively tries to get away from a fight, even though he could win them all, and tries to do good instead. She’s spent most of her life fighting and around fighters, and all of her friends are fighters – Clint, Steve, etc., – and I can see the appeal in wanting something else that can still understand what she does. Obviously, time has passed since the first Avengers, so I’m willing to believe that they’re all closer now. And that she’s the kind of person who would go for what she wants rather than waiting to be picked up. (Interestingly, Bruce seems more like the love interest here.)
I also liked her interactions with Clint’s wife (they’re genuine friends, it seems, and the wife isn’t doing any bullshit jealously moves), and the farmhouse stuff in general. I really liked that Clint was kind of a “normal” family man, a Dad who likes to do projects around the house, and not Deeply Tortured in some way. I’m not sure what that says about me, but it worked. My favorite part was the afterparty, though, where everyone (including Maria Hill) were sitting around bullshitting. There was a sort of easy camaraderie that I think helped me accept the rest of it. I believed that they were friends.
Elizabeth Olsen’s “Eastern European” accent is dreadful, though, as much as I’m looking forwards to seeing more of her character. Pick a country, get an accent coach, make it a little more specific.
I…. also enjoyed the movie? There were parts that were clunky and parts that were too Whedony but I still enjoyed it. And the flip side of this is that it can make fandom a deeply alienating place to be. I had to take a break from Tumblr and Twitter because the discourse was starting to make me feel like a freak, a patriarchal dupe, or a fool for having fun and wanting to write fic about Clint and Laura and Aunt Natasha on the farm.
(Fandom can be great; fandom can also be incredibly toxic and treat characters far worse than the source material. But that’s a bit beyond the scope of this piece.)
Yup. I enjoyed the movie. I mean, I think that Avengers1 and CA:tWS were fundamentally better films, and there were plenty of bits that didn’t really work well at all, and bits I didn’t personally love. There was plenty of stuff that just plain pulled me out of the moment (prima nocta, sure, but also the bit where Natasha slides her motorcycle under the tractor trailer and they…. I don’t know, didn’t really show the money shot I was expecting there? I don’t know, I’ve only seen it once.)
But all of that said, I went in knowing it was going to be a bit of a mess given what the requirements were (where it had to start, where it had to end, how many people were in it, etc), so given how many moments of SQUEE I had (sciencebros, Helen Cho, the hammer ongoing joke, Natasha and Clint’s wife being obviously close, “I’m glad you asked that, because I wanted to take this time to explain my evil plan.”, and a whole lot of the production/costume design elements), I walked out pretty happy.
Although I realize that at least some of the reason for that is that despite my personal femaleness, I don’t identify with Natasha very much, so I wasn’t very invested in her story line to begin with.
I had completely forgotten about the evil plan line!! That was so fantastic. Really all the things you listed as positives were great. I also had fun seeing Ultron, and I think I may enjoy the movie more on a second viewing. In my heart I was still hoping for this movie to live up to the original Avengers, which is such a high bar to set. But there were a lot of scenes and lines in the movie I really liked.
Fandom decides on things VERY quickly these days, and is pretty quick to shut out differing opinions if they don’t get in at the same immediate moment- I just saw it this weekend because I was vacationing with my family, and opinions are already set. Which kind of sucks because it tends to set up a sense that the right-thinking people are all going to interpret things in the way Fandom has already decided, and you have issues if you see it differently. After all, Fandom is on the side of good, right? (I’m not saying fandom was “better” at this in previous eras, it’s just that consensus arrives very quickly now.)
And things tend to be a bit all or nothing as well- either it’s on a pedestal or complete trash. Somehow Avengers 1 got on the pedestal (I watched it recently, and I am not sure why to be honest) so it had nothing to do but fall. And the only option is the trashcan.
I’m not sure if I’m alone in just…not buying ANY of the romances as presented in any of the Marvel films I’ve seen? There never seems to be any heat there at all. Maybe it’s just a superhero movie thing? I just remember the bit when thor is finally revealed as SuperThor and Natalie Portman has to say ‘it’s a gooood look’ and I just withered and died on the inside and I can’t articulate why. :/
the only one that works is Steve/Sam Wilson, tbh
Although I totally got Natalie Portman being into Thor, because well, he spends a lot of that movie in a really tight T-shirt. I don’t entirely buy it on Thor’s side, though.
I do get why she’s into him – it’s just that through the whole film he’s dressed like the Yankee Candles Mountain Lodge candle, and then he dresses up in this ridiculous cape and circles thing and like really? You prefer that? To each one’s…own? I guess?
I also do not buy it on Thor’s side (I think the fact that Natalie Portman is absent from all the other films doesn’t help), like maybe he feels like he led her on, but hey, she’s only human, she’ll die in like, fifty years, he’s just gonna wait it out.
Well, she is a bit of a nerd, maybe that whole LARP look works for her.
Haha, right? Like this is kind of a fun fling for Thor, because what is a human lifespan? Nothing, really.
I think part of it is…and I don’t want to try to sound gross here so I am treading delicately…but part of it is that these PG Marvel movies are kind of uniquely sexless when it comes to action movies. There doesn’t seem to be any heat between the characters because they’re purposefully not directed in any way to have heat, because (with the exception of that one reporter that Tony Stark sleeps with in Iron Man) the Marvel Cinematic Universe is actually a universe in wihch no one has or even seems to think about sex at all.
It’s weird because I think I remember in the 80s when every action movie had a sort of obligatory sex scene, whether it was warranted or not, and when I was twelve I thought those scenes were boring and wanted to skip them, but now that I’m an adult…I kind of feel weird that they’re missing?
But, Steve/Peggy!??!!!!!???!!!
(Also I like Tony/Pepper, but only in _Avengers_ & _IM3_, because I really disliked the first two Iron Man movies.)
This was wonderful, thank you. I am new to the Avengers and super fascinated with superhero theory. And I am ALL about Captain’s bi-ness. There are many forms of attraction – sexual, intimate, and both – and there is such a an attraction that needs to be explored with Stark and Banner, Stark and the Captain, and the Captain and Falcon.
I totally thought there’d be larger consequences for Tony. It’s not even just Ultron, the twins’ vendetta against the avengers is because of Stark Industries. But for some reason Wanda listens to Cap and Hawkeye for like thirty seconds and decides to join them without even mentioning Stark once?
I don’t know, maybe they didn’t want to focus on Stark’s problems too much since this isn’t Iron Man 4, but then couldn’t they have given the twins a different backstory? Despite being the better parts of the movie their storyline was all over the place.
Discussing this movie is often frustrating because a lot of new stuff was obviously simply there to pave way for the Civil War movie and the two(!) vs.Thanos movies. For all I know Wanda has a heartbreaking confrontation scene with Tony Stark in Civil War.
The second movie of a trilogy is often the best of the series since it can just focus on making a fun movie without the burden of introducing the characters/setting or finishing up everything, but this one just seemed to be setting up the characters for the big final. Downside of having built up a huge comic book movie franchise I guess. It was like an awkward comic book crossover event, except in movie form.
I read somewhere that Tony Stark in this movie really was a bonafide supervillain. It’s just that he’s an Avenger and, thus, one of the good guys (of course, all you have to do is pick up a comic and realize that being an Avenger and a supervillain is not mutually exclusive). It’s not that I want the movies to become all about Tony, but seriously, couldn’t he actually have to face the fact that his original intention of having peace-enforcing robots all over the world is actually super evil-sounding?
Hey, could you provide an attribution for that ficlet about lifting Thor’s hammer? I clicked on it but just got the screenshot image.
It looks like it’s from here.
There was so much of this movie that disappointed me, from Hawkeye’s home life (not that I mind him being married with kids, but where the heck did this come from?) to the whole clumsy way Hulktasha was handled. If you can’t figure out a way for your romantic subplot to not come out of nowhere in a 2 hour movie, maybe you need to reconsider whether the romantic subplot works at all.
As for headcanons, I could go all day, but I’ll limit myself to: Captain America is the bisexual superhero we deserve, Bucky knits socks as part of his PTSD therapy (introduced by Sam), Darcy Lewis can pick up the damn hammer.
I absolutely love the Harry Potter headcanon blogs that have popped up all over Tumblr (and I run one myself). It’s so freeing to explore parts of the fictional world that don’t get addressed in the stories themselves, and to run with ideas that people have come up with to explain or reconcile things.
I love these as well. Dirgewithoutmusic is my favorite, want to recommend some other good ones to me?
Oh yes! Obviously there’s the classic Lives and Lies of Wizards, which is what got me started with the whole HP headcanon thing. I also love The Lethifold Witch and The Post-Modern Potter Compendium. I adore Wizard History which is on hiatus until early June, but is really excellent. And, if you should be so inclined, my blog is Flourish and Blotts Stories.
There’s a ton more if you’re still looking for recommendations! I seem to follow more and more each week.
Thank you for posting this! I’m super excited to check all of these out.
I am so weirdly conflicted about AoU. When people I’m with criticise it, I’m all “but no! It was aaamazing! I’ve been shipping Bruce/Nat 5ever! Scarlet Witch! The stuff with the hammer! Yaaayyy!!” but when people are 100% enthusiastic about it, I’m all “Uhmm actually, that whole sterilisation thing? And it was hella obvious that the original cut was an hour longer? The whole thing was a mess!”
I’m starting to think that, instead of watching it as New Canon, I slotted it straight into the Decent Fanfic section of my brain. I’m taking the pieces I like and obsessing over them, and ignoring the rest (slash hoping the directors cut will make things suck less? Maybe?)
I liked all of this except for the embedded tweets, which seem to imply that it’s just teenaged girls writing this fic. Which, all power to teenaged girl fanfiction writers, is simply not true.
Good point! I just see that demographic ignored the most, but some of my favorite fanfic has been by men and non binary people as well, of all ages.
And also, since your formulation of “teenaged girls… men and non binary people of all ages” still sort of ignores them, adult women.
In my experience, it’s not that teenaged girls are ignored as a core demographic of fanfiction writers, but the opposite — the fact that some teenagers (male and female identified, but mostly girls) write fanfiction is used as an excuse to ignore all fanfiction as childish nonsense. When, in fact, if you know anything about fan culture, you know there’s a significant percentage of adult women among fanfiction’s best writers, some of whom are also published novelists or nonfiction writers.
Well, I figured it was a given since I am personally a grown woman, mention a few grown women, and imply that I write fan fiction myself throughout this piece about fan culture but I guess I still come across as uninformed about fan culture!
There’s been this weird pedestaling of teen girls lately- like they can do no wrong, everything they do and say is perfect, but that still sets them apart as some pure Other. Grown women aren’t as good, and obviously know better than to think any of this matters.
That’s a good point, although I think the reverse is true as well. So often teen fangirls are mocked and treated with extreme condescension and disgust. You can’t really win as a woman, young or grown.
Although I really want to hear more on your thoughts on this subject, actually. Why do think people do it? Who is doing it? Etc.
I enjoyed the movie, I thought it was great fun. The Natasha thing was not handled well. I am willing to accept Bruce/Natasha – but I need fanfic to help make me believe it, to fill in the gap, and to wrangle the sterilization thing until it’s not terrible. It… that whole conversation was hella heteronormative from the start, like, hi, Bruce? You assume Natasha Goddamn Romanov wants two point five kids and a white picket fence? You think that’s the only valid way to be, and if you can’t have that you might as well vanish into the ether? I think they were trying to have Natasha get across that she wasn’t normal either, that that narrative didn’t fit her either, and that’s OK, we can find our own way to be, we can do it together, but they kind of left off the bit at the end. I also think it would have worked better if she had talked about the part of the initiation that involved killing one of the other girls, not just the sterilization bit.
I adored Helen Cho. I adored Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch (mostly Scarlet Witch). I adored Thor and Tony fighting about who has the smartest girlfriend. I adored the teamwork they showed, and the goofing off. Now I need fanfic to fill in the gaps, to give me more of the quiet moments and the introspection.
Also: Helen Cho/Scarlet Witch, who’s with me?
YES. It’s not the fact it mattered to her, it’s the way it was TAKEN FOR GRANTED that it was so important to her.
Oh, and the lullaby thing had weird mommy vibes.
The whole thing was bizarre, I don’t exactly understand how it worked? Like…Natasha is many things. A calming presence is not really one of them.
This has inspired me to realize that my personal AoU headcanon is that Natasha loves the Hulk, but she’s meh about Bruce Banner. The Hulk vibes with her inner traumatized child, but she has done much more work on integrating. She’s trying to get Banner to trust her so they can have a talk about him not being so angry at the Hulk, and maybe giving the big guy some cookies or a hug sometimes. This explains why she talks about being sterilized; he brings up not being able to have kids and she’s trying to show him that she can relate. It also explains why she’s bummed that he runs away alone.
Anyway, that’s what I’m going with when I watch it again.
Trek fandom may not have actually invented slash (if what they say about Victorian Holmes/Watson shippers is true), but they invented the term, and Trek is full of ships–and there have been implications that occasionally the producers and showrunners of the various outposts of the franchise have retroactively heterosexualized one or both members of a popular ship. Just in DS9, you’ve got Garak/Bashir, Bashir/O’Brien, Odo/Quark, Kira/Jadzia, and Kira/Mirror-Kira, just to state the more prominent ones. (I’m especially amused/irritated that Kira, who presented as a soft butch for most of the series (and whose mirror counterpart is canon bi), ended up with three guys over the course of the series–four, if you count the fling with the mirror-version of the one who died–and the last one was Odo, the shapeshifter, who could be literally genderfluid if he chose to.)
This makes me want to search out Grimm fanfiction where the women aren’t treated like afterthoughts. I love Grimm, but the practically fridged Juliette and made Adalind evil and then not evil, but a total wuss and Rosalie is just there as support and although they did give her a history she has no purpose other than to make potions and save the lives of the men. And don’t even get me started on the constant cliched character, Theresa Rubel (Trubel).
This makes me want to search out Grimm fanfiction where the women aren't treated like afterthoughts. I love Grimm, but the practically fridged Juliette and made Adalind evil and then not evil, but a total wuss and Rosalie is just there as support and although they did give her a history she has no purpose other than to make potions and save the lives of the men. And don't even get me started on the constant cliched character, Theresa Rubel (Trubel).
I’m a winterwidow fan…from comicverse not movie verse…the idea of her and Bruce just creeps me out to no ends….doesn’t she know they can not have sex?
In Age of Ultron, the Avengers did what so many fans most wanted them to do: they hung out like pals and made jokes and acted silly. But their jokes fell flat for me.
That was my experience of the movie; I felt like a lot of the dialogue was being phoned in, possibly because what the characters were saying vs. what the characters were doing vs. what the characters’ personalities have been established as being up until now made no sense. Tony and Bruce create a genocidal robot? ‘Oh, well, no biggie!’ Like, sorry, Bruce, but at this point I think that the Hulk is less of an issue than the fact that you HELPED MAKE A MURDERBOT. It didn’t fit for Tony’s character (he destroys the suits in IM3 but then goes on to make MORE suits, scarier suits, suits that try to destroy humanity?), didn’t really fit for Bruce’s character and the fact that NO ONE even suggests that they should maybe suffer some consequences for that is absurd.
I feel like the tone they were trying to establish (fun superhero movie!) doesn’t really work with Ultron, as presented in this film. I usually don’t like it when superhero movies get too dark, but this needed to be darker, or at least, it needed to take itself more seriously.
Also, Bruce/Natasha? What Bruce/Natasha? Oh, that time that they stood in Hawkeye’s kids’ room talking about Hostess cupcakes? Because that’s what they were doing. They were having a casual conversation about how Hostess is superior to Little Debbies. The kind of casual conversation that work friends have. Because that’s all their relationship could possibly be expected to have evolved into at this point. Work friends.
In Age of Ultron, the Avengers did what so many fans most wanted them to do: they hung out like pals and made jokes and acted silly. But their jokes fell flat for me.
That was my experience of the movie; I felt like a lot of the dialogue was being phoned in, possibly because what the characters were saying vs. what the characters were doing vs. what the characters' personalities have been established as being up until now made no sense. Tony and Bruce create a genocidal robot? 'Oh, well, no biggie!' Like, sorry, Bruce, but at this point I think that the Hulk is less of an issue than the fact that you HELPED MAKE A MURDERBOT. It didn't fit for Tony's character (he destroys the suits in IM3 but then goes on to make MORE suits, scarier suits, suits that try to destroy humanity?), didn't really fit for Bruce's character and the fact that NO ONE even suggests that they should maybe suffer some consequences for that is absurd.
I feel like the tone they were trying to establish (fun superhero movie!) doesn't really work with Ultron, as presented in this film. I usually don't like it when superhero movies get too dark, but this needed to be darker, or at least, it needed to take itself more seriously.
Also, Bruce/Natasha? What Bruce/Natasha? Oh, that time that they stood in Hawkeye's kids' room talking about Hostess cupcakes? Because that's what they were doing. They were having a casual conversation about how Hostess is superior to Little Debbies. The kind of casual conversation that work friends have. Because that's all their relationship could possibly be expected to have evolved into at this point. Work friends.
I read somewhere that Tony Stark in this movie really was a bonafide supervillain. It's just that he's an Avenger and, thus, one of the good guys (of course, all you have to do is pick up a comic and realize that being an Avenger and a supervillain is not mutually exclusive). It's not that I want the movies to become all about Tony, but seriously, couldn't he actually have to face the fact that his original intention of having peace-enforcing robots all over the world is actually super evil-sounding?
The whole thing was bizarre, I don't exactly understand how it worked? Like…Natasha is many things. A calming presence is not really one of them.
Honestly I feel the same way about the original Avengers movie. I started liking it a lot more once I saw all the adorable fan art.
Honestly I feel the same way about the original Avengers movie. I started liking it a lot more once I saw all the adorable fan art.
Scarlet Witch survived a bombing, and then survived experiments which killed THOUSANDS. The probability of beating such odds is so tiny as to be completely impossible.
Ultron even says that he could not understand how they survived the experiments, then when Quicksilver says about the bomb, he then says “now I understand”. Ultron is an AI, he is unlikely to believe in luck. He realized that Wanda diffused the bomb and manipulated matter/probability, and likely did the same with the Hydra experiments. She also likely ensured her brother’s survival, this is given extra weight by his powers having a very clear limit, whereas she has no limit and keeps getting more and more powerful, suggesting she is the truly attuned one.
Wanda is a total, glorious, mystery, hilariously underestimated by the likes of Maria Hill and Tony Stark, her powers innate and not dependent on any McGuffin infinity stone or arc reactor. She’s an introvert and loner, the one who hates parties, who only really currently has common ground with Cap and Vision, and who is the most earnest and serious Avenger by far.
I LIKE this.
I LOVE 'Love is for Children'. I've reread those fics when my anxiety is flaring and I feel fragile.
Just. Perfect. <3
Capitao America
Capitao America