i went to the local shakespeare festival (and by local, i mean on the other end of the state) and during the day i convinced my mother to go hiking with me because we were in the center of like four national parks
so we end up hiking this trail that sort of jack-knifes down the mountain and I end up climbing partway up a tree on the edge of the trail to see further out, so my smartass mother asks “legolas, what do your elf eyes see?”
and i, in my smarmy glory, go “they’re taking the hobbits to isengard!”
which is funny enough as is, but then the entire mountainside of hikers hidden in the trees goes “THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD-GARD-GARD-GARD-GARD! THE HOBBITS, THE HOBBITS, THE HOBBITS, THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD, TO ISENGARD!”
and that’s how an entire hiking trail of people who never actually saw one another convinced my mother i’m some sort of meme-summoning mountain troll
Everyone has a reaper. The further away it is, the longer you have left to live. Every day it inches a little bit closer, but it is always there. Except yours, which disappeared three weeks ago
I pulled over to the side of the highway, legs aching from sitting so long. I was in the middle of nowhere, and I’d driven hours to get here.
I steeled myself and turned off the car.
Everyone’s born with one. A reaper. People say nobody’s reaper looks the same, like everyone’s personal terrifying snowflake of death. No one knows for certain, though, because you can only see your own reaper.
Very little is actually known about them. It’s hard to study something you can never touch.
The car door slammed shut more loudly than I’d intended. Now that the engine was off, the only other sounds were the wind softly trickling through the brown grass and the soles of my sneakers on the pavement.
For miles around me, there was only grassland, flat, empty. I turned, round and round, searching.
And saw nothing.
When you’re born, your reaper is far away. From that moment, it starts to move closer. Sometimes it’s slow, not even an inch over years. Sometimes you look up, and it’s standing face to face with you.
The things you do can affect how quickly it moves. My grandfather confessed that his reaper started moving faster the day he first smoked a cigarette. Drunks report getting behind the wheel of their cars only to see their reaper sitting beside them.
They say you never touch your reaper until the day you die.
My reaper disappeared about three weeks ago.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened. It isn’t close enough to always be in the same room with me, and it isn’t like I’m constantly checking to see how close it is.
But I usually do catch glimpses of it in the hallways of my office, lingering near the doorway while I wait in line at the coffee shop, watching as I get in my car in the morning. And one day, I just…didn’t.
It was gone.
It. When did I start calling it “It?” Not it, him. He. My reaper’s not an it. He.
Was it my parents or a teacher who first told me to stop calling him a him? Don’t personify it. Don’t give death that kind of power in your life. Your reaper is not a person. Your reaper does not have a gender. Your reaper does not have a name.
When did I start listening to them? When did I lose his name?
I spent the first few days in denial. I just wasn’t looking in the right places, I told myself. Just because I didn’t see it (him) didn’t mean it was gone.
But I didn’t see it (him him him) anywhere. Not in the grocery store parking lot, not in the stairs of my apartment building, not in the long dusty stacks of the library.
So I turned to the internet.
Reaper Disappeared
My reaper is gone
I can’t see my reaper
What does it mean if I can’t find my reaper
I found all sorts of articles and forums on reapers. People freaking out because their reaper was moving faster, people trying to figure out why their reaper was farther away, people arguing over what it meant if their reaper’s appearance changed.
No one claimed their reaper had suddenly just disappeared.
Reapers aren’t people.
My mother was firm.
Reapers don’t have names.
She told me over and over until I learned to stop talking about it.
Until I started to doubt what I had heard.
Reapers never talk.
But that didn’t mean I forgot.
There wasn’t anyone I could talk to. How would I even start? What did this even mean if he was gone?
Had I discovered the cure for death? Was I going to live forever?
Or was I simply going to have to walk through life not knowing when death would come for me?
One way or another, I had to be certain he was gone.
I got into my car and started driving.
I couldn’t see anything but brown grass and broken concrete.
Maybe if I could just see a little bit farther, I thought as I scrambled on top of my car. I perched on top of it uncertainly, scanning the horizon for any sign.
I started to scream.
Where are you and Why are you doing this and Please, I can’t take this and I don’t understand, please.
Please.
I don’t want to live forever.
I don’t want to watch everyone die.
I don’t want to be alone.
Please, don’t let me be alone.
I whimpered the last ones into my knees, curled up on the ground beside my car, then whispered the name I heard him say so many years ago.
“Isa, please.”
After a few minutes I calmed myself, swallowing deep breaths of air. I unfolded my body and went to stand up.
Isa was standing over me.
“Sorry about that,” he said as I recoiled, falling back against the car.
“You’re talking,” I stated dumbly.
“Well, yes. That shouldn’t come as a total surprise. We have spoken before.”
“You said one word to me when I was a kid,” I replied indignantly, fear turning to anger, “And my mom sent me to a child psychologist because I kept insisting you talked. And where have you been? Reapers aren’t just supposed to disappear!”
He shrugged. “There was something I had to take care of, sorry.” He smiled a bit ruefully. That was something else reapers weren’t supposed to do, and it must have shown in my face.
He crouched down beside me, ignoring how I flinched backwards.
“Look, there are some things we need to discuss.” He held out his hand, “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
I stared at his hand. “Look, I know I don’t want to live forever and all, but…that doesn’t mean I want to die right now or anything.”
“You’re not going to die,” Isa said, mouth twitching upwards, “Not for a good while, not if I can help it. Most of what you think you know about us is wrong, okay?”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t be afraid of you?” I hedged.
He shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant at all. But you can trust me.”
“That’s…not very comforting,” I muttered. He waited, patiently, hand outstretched.
“Ah, what the hell,” I said, and I took Isa’s hand.
i would absolutely read a novel that started this way
Oh I totally 100% agree with this. Like i get that they had to be kinda on the fence about it bc the concept of getting people to choose a side is what drove the marketing campaign, but from the way they were talking i was like hmm will i be swayed? Instead I walked into the room 100% Team Cap and somehow left the cinema even more Team Cap than before I saw the movie. I’d put this under a read more but it’s 3am and I’m on mobile so apologies, bc it’s gonna be long. I have a lot of things to say on this topic.
There was nothing morally ambiguous about it. There was no “both sides were right and wrong and it’s hard to choose”, like that mentality makes no sense to me. Or rather it does make sense, but I wish it didn’t.
Steve’s stance in this movie regarding the accords was about taking responsibility for your own actions. About having the power to choose only to use their enhanced abilities to help and do good. About owning the consequences of their actions if they choose to help. It was about not handing those consequences off to someone else. It was about not allowing people with agendas to potentially send them into a situation where they’re using there abilities to hurt rather than help. Which given what happened with SHIELD, you can’t exactly blame him for.
Tony’s stance regarding the accords was one that was much more driven by ego – something that drives a large amount of his decisions throughout the MCU at large as well as the rest of this film, as noted by Natasha. Tony felt guilty. He knew his choice to create Ultron against the suggestion of basically everyone is what led to the events in Sokovia. On top of that he gets cornered by a grieving mother who says she also blames him for the death of her son in Sokovia. Tony doesn’t want that guilt. He wants someone else to make the decisions for him. He wants someone else to say “yes you can be here” and “no you can’t go there” because that way, when things go well and they save the day with little to no casualties they get to be the heroes, they get the press. And we know Tony loves to be the showman, he loves the attention, bc as previously mentioned – he’s driven by ego. However when things do go wrong, he can appease his conscience by saying “I didn’t choose to be here, you gave me the order to be here, that choice was yours, that responsibility is on your shoulders.” – He wants the glory with none of the responsibility. He also wants the accords to cut down his workload so Pepper will come back to him. He literally says that. Tony stans are super quick to call Steve selfish for helping Bucky, but conveniently ignore the fact Tony says that Pepper left him bc he was spending too much time focused on the suits and being Iron Man, and he hoped the accords would give him a medium between the two so he could fix that.
And then there’s Steve and Bucky. I cannot physically wrap my head around the idea that people call Steve’s actions in this movie selfish. Especially given where Bucky ends up at the end of this movie. Steve’s actions were not dictated by the simple fact he wanted his friend back. They were dictated by the fact that no one else was trying to help him. No one else believed there was any world in which Bucky was innocent. No one else was trying to look out for him. And when has Steve ever done anything but look out for the little guy, the underdog? Even when he was the little guy, he was still looking out for anyone without someone in their corner. Had Steve made any choices different to the ones he had, Bucky would have died. Had he let someone else go to Bucharest to get him, Bucky would have been shot on sight, despite not being guilty. The government laughed at the idea of even giving Bucky a lawyer, they’d already decided his guilt, so had Steve handed Bucky over when Tony demanded, Bucky would have been given a trial by people that had decided his fate and already believed him a traitor to his country. He wasn’t being selfish, he was trying to save a life that no one else thought was worth saving.
Tony was so caught up in his stance being right, he didn’t even register that Steve had stopped even fighting about the Accords. When they met at the airport Tony was still there about the accords and about bringing them in, and he would not back down from that. Steve wasn’t there about that. And he told Tony this. He told him that Bucky hadn’t been the one behind the UN attack. He told him who actually was. He told him about the other soldiers in Siberia. He told him about Zemo travelling there and the danger posed if he activated 5 Winter Soldiers. He told him that he needed to get there before that happened. Steve was trying to do his job as an Avenger, to help people. Tony was too caught up in his own need to be right to realise that. Tony was willing to let all that shit happen rather than admit he was wrong.
And then at the end. When Zemo plays the video of The Winter Soldier killing his parents. Tony stans try and justify his reaction by saying it was instinctive. That he reacted to seeing the guy who killed his parents in front of him. But Tony stans just see what they want to see instead of what was actually there. Tony’s reaction was not to Bucky. His reaction was to Steve. He saw the video and he didn’t react. He asked Steve if he’d known, and when Steve says he hadn’t known it was him, he asks him again. And when Steve admits he had known, that’s when Tony reacts. That’s when Tony goes for Bucky. Which the writers have said was Tony recognising Bucky was the thing Steve loved most, and wanting to take it from him to hurt him for not telling him. He knows it wasn’t Bucky that killed his parents, he acknowledges it more than once, but he doesn’t care.
And Tony gets away with it. He gets excused for it. He breaks the rules of the accords he was so strongly in support of, and he gets off scot free. Meanwhile Sam and Clint and Scott and Wanda are locked in an underground prison cell. And it’s because Tony is the epitome of both White Male Privilege and Money Can’t Buy Everything But It Can Buy Anything. He’s rich, he’s powerful, he’s white, he’s male, and that means he does shitty things and gets away with it. He doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of his actions because his consequences are never so severe he can’t buy his way out.
You remember in Captain America: The First Avenger, Erskine says to Steve “A strong man, who has known power all his life may lose respect for that power. But a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion”? Apply that to Tony and Steve in this movie because it explains the way they behave perfectly. Tony is the first man described. He grew up in wealth, he grew up in a powerful family with a powerful name, he always had privilege, and now in this film he wants to use that privilege to pass off the responsibility that comes with his power. Steve is the second guy. Who was the little guy, who had to fight for everything he got. Who lived majority of his life as the little guy, and even with his bigger body and new abilities, still has the mindset of the little guy. Still knows and remembers all too well what it was like not to have any sort of power at all, and how important it is to use that power to help the best way you can. And knows you have to be respectful of everything that comes with that power, including taking responsibility for it.
That was longer than i thought it would be so tl;dr – i agree, there was a HUGE disconnect between the marketing of it vs the reality of it in the film.
I May or May Not be Steve Rogers 