Clint Barton: Avenger
Dress update: just gave blood and then deconstructed and moved 38 PCs and monitors and chairs and things across three floors. Mood: Amazonian.
How unfortunate is it that my parents had to literally force me to wear beautiful parts of my culture because I was afraid of being ostracized, but Selena Gomez can take aspects of the clothing I grew up with and make money off of them? How unfortunate is it that South Asian immigrants and South Asian Americans are Otherized every single day for the way they look, talk, and dress, but Urban Outfitters continues to commodify and make a profit off the sale of bindis – as made popular by American pop stars?
[..] My bindi is not a way for you to present yourself as being friendly to South Asian culture while exotifying it. My bindi is from my mother, put in my drawer because it is another mark of my internalized Otherness, on top of my brown skin. My bindi is tainted by Western celebrities trying to be “cultural” or “bohemian” or “tribal.” My bindi is not just a piece of plastic, my bindi is not for sale, and my bindi is not for you.
“
| — | Anisha Ahuja, “Selena Gomez, What Are You Doing?” (feminspire.com) |
phantominatus replied to your photo: Of all the weird shit I attempt to pass off as…
plus it’s totally see through
Heh, it’s not actually as bad as that photo makes it look- there’s an opaque mini dress layer under most of it, then the lower skirt is see through. It is slashed at both sides though so professionality watch still puts it pretty low on the scale…
Of all the weird shit I attempt to pass off as work wear, I think this is probably the weirdest by some distance.
(“I’m doing a weird thing with my leg to show how the skirt works but instead it just looks extra strange” the title of my autobiography)
If I send you messages or asks or emails or tweets where I spell everything wrong, it’s probably because Android has started mistaking my clumsy typos and jovial disregard for punctuatiom for my actually wanting to write like an incoherent bastard.
Notes for a half-formed thing about Uncanny X-force volume #1 because I re-read it AGAIN
And like the best superhero comics I’ve read, its clearly about family. It’s about self-determination and choosing your way and like, that’s not a subtle theme to it at all but it does it so very well. These damaged people doing a clandestine, emotionless kill squad who are actually all desperately reliant on each other (of course) and who need to keep these exposed bits of themselves more of a secret than the kill squad, to a significant extent.
Its Dethlok, at the end, when he loves everything and it’s Genocide wanting to carry on his the legacy of his father against his mother’s wishes and it’s Fantomex calling Wolverine ‘Dad’ in a mocking tone all the way through, before Logan has to confront that in the final arc. It’s Fantomex being a weird sort of parent, Psylocke before that being an even weirder one (and then accidentally birthing a sort of X-Force full-grown baby with the life seed) and it’s all of their tender fucked-up-ness to each other. Wade constantly talks about relationships to things- his cat, the homeless guy he pretended was god, etc. It’s the nuclear family environment of the World and the reflection of family in the En Sabur Nuh fanclub of Akkaba. It’s everything Betsy hates; her family is too painful for her so she is particularly enthused by intense, non-familial love and she has some shades of not knowing how to love someone without fucking them because that would make them more like Brian and the painful areas that have no noniceptors to shut down and keep them out.
And like, that panel where Betsy is shutting off bits of Logan’s brain to stop the pain and she tells him to stay calm; that feels like the central part of it. All about attempts to lance the pain that are more about trying to create an illusion that they can. And lots of fronting about cold emotionlessness while not cashing their mercenary cheques and having to have a fucking Dethlok act as your emotional intermediary; congratulations, you have achieved family status.
And it’s flipping the bird to your biological family, even if you don’t 100% mean it but circumstances have forced you to be the bravely fucked up one, even if the replacement family you’be assembled is just as bad, even if it costs you your sadness. And it’s about looking at a kid who can say no when you didn’t and your own kid choosing not to and having to assess them and measure up your failings against biolfluid and Ultimatum. And someone making sure to take a teenager porno mags because they know it must have been fucked up for the kid to have to watch them be tortured. It’s about awkward hugs and unwillingly learning what you can never forget.
And wanting to fuck Fantomex, that’s definitely part of it.
Basically talk to me about Uncanny X-Force, you guys.
