Me Watching Thunderbolts:

the way counselor sounds close to therapist meaning dex is already imprinting on matt as his new north star oh this is so deliciously fucked up

The combination of watching thunderbolts* and it being my last day of school had me sobbing in the cinema in a corpse bride costume

I swear you could hear it in his voice how much he didn’t want to do that again- how he didn’t want to be used as a weapon again

WILSON BETHEL as BENJAMIN POINDEXTER Daredevil: Born Again (2025) 1.09

A robber has the connotations of armed robbery, it eludes to violence to meet a need. No, I don’t agree with that. But a thief, that’s something else entirely. A thief is skilled, patient and creative, there is an art to his crime. The robber wishes he was a thief.

Feeling insane about this

“Ai makes art accessible” mfs back in the stone ages were drawing on the walls of caves with soot and rocks ART HAS ALWAYS BEEN ACCESSIBLE

I truly feel that the MCU robbed us of Bucky content. The way he was just pushed to the wayside after Civil War has always bugged me. He was such a vital character to Roger’s trilogy, but was never treated as such. He deserved his own show or movie about his time as the Winter Soldier, and what he went through under Hydra. The fact that we never really got to see him and Steve interact after Civil War also irritates me to no end.

Marvel really wasted a character with so much potential to explore the darker themes around the earlier MCU phases.

Friend and I were bored in school so I decided to pull up Umberto Eco’s 14 points for a fascist country and see how many of them apply to American right now

Here are the points:

-"The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

-"The rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

-"The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

-"Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

-"Fear of difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

-"Appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

-"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

-Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

-"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

-"Contempt for the weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

-"Everybody is educated to become a hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

-"Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality".

-"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".

-"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

We decided that 10/14 of the points could be used to describe America right now and, keep in mind, this is from an outsiders perspective, neither of us live in the US this is mainly what we’ve seen on the news and social media. History is repeating itself and it’s fucking terrifying

I love the contrast of born again and the original series’s title sequences. In the original opening, everything that was important to Matt i.e. the church, justice, New York is made from this dripping red ‘blood’ and in return all of these things lead to the literal creation of Daredevil. In born again’s opening, all those things important to Matt/Daredevil; the church, justice, Nelson, Murdock and Page are shown in concrete form with cracks and pieces falling off before they are destroyed and from that rubble of everything important to him, Daredevil is remade he is born again. The difference between something fluid being for creation and something solid and hard for the destruction

The new title sequence basically tells us how the show is gonna play out and what’s gonna happen with stunning visuals that mirror the originals title sequence. I know this is a pretty surface level analysis and isn’t anything groundbreaking I just thought it was pretty cool

I can't believe the horse is back in the fucking hospital