there is a tendency with history, i think, because we’re so far removed from it, to kind of forget that all of the people were people
a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words “this is very high” 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries… milennia… ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying “i was here”. a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.
every human being across history has said “i was here. i lived. i loved. i made something. i laughed. i cried. please do not forget me”
most of us are not important enough that we will be remembered by name for more than a few decades. we are not kings or queens or great military leaders or innovators or influential artists, musicians, authors.
but all of us, every one, has a deep primal need to persist. we leave handprints on the wall, scratch our names into stones, carve initials into a tree, mark our growth as children on a wall, bury little time capsules. write in the margins of a book. hide notes behind the wallpaper.
reaching out into the future to some unknown human long after we’re gone to say
“hello, you. i was here, once”
here i re-wrote it as a poem to fit your tag
Somewhere far away from me And impossibly long ago, now A mother holds her child up high To leave a handprint on the wall
A man I will never meet Climbs a rock for fun He writes a message on the stone And he says “this is very high”
Somebody, once Cooked a meal and burned it Took the pot to the land outside their house And buried the evidence
An Egyptian king Thousands of years before my birth Wore a shirt embroidered with little ducks And kept it, lovingly, in a chest
In a prison cell within a tower A man stretches out through centuries And marks off the days of his sentence As lines on the wall
A long-forgotten monk Labours over a manuscript by candlelight And writes in the margins He is bored, and he has a hangover
They leave pieces of themselves behind And they say
“I was here I was here please do not forget me I was alive and I loved and I got sick I had a favourite animal
I was here. Do you love me? I love you”
Yes, I do. I hold your life between my hands And I see it, and I love you
I scratch my name into a rock On a tree, I carve my initials And the initials of someone I love So very much
I bury a box in my garden And I write in the margins I reach into the future To somebody I do not know
A stranger who will never know me
“Hello, you” I say “I was here, once. I loved and I got sick and I had a favourite colour
Me: Bruce is a valuable and essential part of the Avengers with or without the Hulk
The Avengers and everyone else on this hellsite:
In the comics when he was given safety, security and like, resources, he was starting to rival even Stark tech. Only thing holding him back was the fact he was a fugitive, and thus Bruce was like Tony stuck in a cave but without any box of scraps.
Banner’s genius is so freaking underplayed. And when he was given those 3 conditions in AoU the only scientific contributions he apparently ever made were helping Tony create the Hulkbuster and an evil robot. Like damn Whedon, at least drop a line like about him working on a new radiation scrubber that would immediately clear Chernobyl and Fukushima or something before Tony starts a chain of events that lands Banner in space and leaves those projects unfinished.
But nope Bruce is relegated to a bumbling underachiever who only helps by being angry.
People are enjoying WandaVision and that’s cool but seeing it described unironically as “weird” and groundbreaking, an experiment which could not have been greenlit in any previous era of television or filmmaking, is profoundly depressing. Some of you have never watched anything but MCU movies and it shows.
I have not been able to stop thinking about this thread all day.
The pitch meetings were like, “you know the Lotus Eater episode which is a staple of sci-fi storytelling, for example Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s ‘Normal Again’ and Smallville’s ‘Labyrinth’, as well as forming the basis for movies such as The Truman Show and The Matrix? What if that, but it’s a whole series and we combine it with a series of sitcom pastiches which is also a television staple. Also, there’s superheroes. And because we’ve successfully monopolised entertainment to the point where it’s almost impossible to consume any mainstream media which doesn’t have our fingerprints on it and this is very slightly different from our typical formula people will call it genius avant-garde television storytelling the likes of which have never been seen before.”
laura’s endless list of favourites ● ships ➼ leopold fitz & jemma simmons “The universe can’t stop us. ‘Cause we’ve crossed galaxies, we’ve travelled through time, we’ve survived the bottom of the Atlantic, just so we could be together. Now, a love like that - that is stronger than any curse. And you and I are unstoppable together. I don’t want to live another day without you.”
