German Shepherd babysitting the Dobermans 

(Source)

Man why were their take cropped

@wisestbitchinalbion

Tail cropping is a very normal thing for dogs with thick, muscular tails (and thin whippy ones), and unlike a lot of ear cropping, serves a legitimate health purpose. Dogs with those sorts of tails *repeatedly* injure them when wagging their tails - banging them against walls, furniture, and people. This causes, at the very least, frequent bruising, and depending on how enthusiastic a wagger the dog is, and what they’re hitting, can escalate to multiple breaks in the tail and even degloving (where the skin gets stripped off). This, understandably, leads to a lot of trauma for said doggo. So most breeds with that sort of tail have cropping it as a near-standard (still optional but VERY common) surgery, usually done when the pup is VERY young.

Don’t grieve, Admiral.

This entire damn scene KILLS me. I mean, it starts when Kirk calls to congratulate Scotty for getting them TF out there, and gets Bones and that *wrecked* ‘better get down here. better hurry’. Kirk takes a glance around the bridge, sees Spock’s empty chair, and instantly BOOKS IT. Because he added two and two and got four that fast.

And then he gets there and ... it had to have been Bones that organized it in advance, because of them all, Bones seemed to be the most clued in to the whole Kirk and Spock thing ... it takes Bones, Scotty, and some random Engineer dude to STOP KIRK FROM JOINING SPOCK. And then *points up* THAT happens and I just ... ouch.

This entire movie - but especially this scene - is one of the few times that Shatner’s tendency to over-act *sold* the impact of what was going on, rather than make it seem stupid and campy as hell.

Bullshit that even Loki's fans say after the series

Fans: Loki grew up in stable environment and he is just spoiled narcissist

Loki:

Fans: Loki killed Frigga

Frigga:

Fans: Loki killed 80 people in 3 days & he enjoyed it

Loki:

Fans: Loki never cared about anyone but himself before series

Loki:

Fans: Loki went through a big character development in series because he doesnt want the throne

Loki 10 years ago:

ALL OF THIS!!!!!

The horrifying part is that, PER CANON the *only* thing we even SUSPECT Loki did *in his right mind* was letting the Jotuns into the Vault. But even THAT, insofar as I’m aware, can be questioned, because we never SEE him do it. He just takes credit for it with Laufey. It may have been confirmed somewhere, but if so, I’ve not seen it or heard about it.

Literally everything else he’s done in the movies has been AFTER getting the mindscrew from hell (the discovery that he’s Jotun), then torture, mind control, and all KINDS of further fuckery.

And even out his damn mind, he fought tooth and nail to keep collateral damage and civilian casualties as low as he could.

The Destroyer? Contrary to Fury’s claims, wrecks ONE STREET and it didn’t look like there was even one civilian casualty. And most of the property damage was thanks to Thor using a fucking tornado.

Avengers? HAH. Sit there and tell me someone with Loki’s brains and charisma couldn’t have played that ENTIRE DAMN INVASION completely differently if he’d ACTUALLY wanted to conquer Earth. And that ‘80 people in three days’ crack was probably the collapse of the PEGASUS facility - something Loki had ZERO control over. Yeah, he directly killed some folks there, but, like, half a dozen or so. Not eighty.

it doesn’t make the Destroyer attack or his other actions *right*, but goddamn. When your brain is scrambled six ways from Sunday, you’ve CANONICALLY tried to commit SUICIDE, been tortured and etc, it damn sure EXPLAINS why you’re doing what you’re doing.

You saved the ship…You saved us all. Don’t you remember?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it til I die. These two were so in love with each other it’s nuts. Kirk literally CANNOT shut off the bedroom eyes when he’s looking at Spock, both in the show and the movies. The both of them do some CRAZY ASS SHIT, both in the TV show and, god help us all, in the movies, to save/protect each other. 

THEY FUCKING MAKE OUT IN FRONT OF GOD AND EVERYONE IN TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. Think I’m lying? It’s fucking CANON that Vulcan hands are sensitive as hell telepathically speaking. It’s also CANON that couples ‘kiss’ by touching the first two fingers of their hands together. And after Spock gets his brain rearranged by V’ger, he GRABS KIRK’S HAND and Kirk not only takes it but folds his other hand over the back of Spock’s while they have a deep discussion about FEELINGS. I CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP.

And then, in Search for Spock THIS happens. Spock’s got a spectacular case of, at the very least ‘fried brain’ going on here, probably amnesia ... and the first fucking thing he remembers is KIRK. He gives every single one of the rest of the crew he’s spent years of his life with blank stares like he’s never seen them before in his life, has this little chat with Kirk and you can SEE the lightbulb go off over his head as he *remembers* Kirk.

Everyone involved with Trek can claim these two were just friends until they’re blue in the face, but the evidence to the contrary is numerous and really goddamned blatant.

All of this. Just all of it. But I must add this.

TONY STARK DID NOT TRY TO KILL STEVE ROGERS AND BUCKY BARNES.

Iron Man is lethal as fuck. The armaments on that thing, and the amount of boom they bring to the party, are terrifying IN THE FIRST ITERATION. By which, I mean the one with fucking flamethrowers that was made from bomb parts. After that, each iteration just got more and more terrifyingly, efficiently lethal. By the time of that whole mess in Siberia, Iron Man was fully capable of laying a fair-sized army waste SOLO.

And Tony Stark has shown, repeatedly, that he has ZERO compunctions with deploying those armaments in order to take an enemy down.

I can guarantee you that, Supersoldiers be damned, if Tony Stark had legitimately wanted those two dead, they’d have been nothing but bloody smears in the rubble precisely three seconds after he made that call. Neither one of them has *anything* that would let them survive Iron Man’s armaments.

Loki gets accused of being selfish but actually he is other-oriented to a fault. He is desperate for outside approval and validation.

As far as I can remember, we don’t see him do anything unambiguously and purely selfish even once in the entire series.

In Thor 2011 he tries to delay the coronation for the good of Asgard to stop a warmonger taking the throne (Thor’s same motivation in Ragnarok btw - tho a milder version since he doesn’t intend to kill Thor or stop his condition permanently). He doesn’t want the throne for himself, and indeed his plan is so complicated largely because he is unwilling to kill or harm Thor or permanently remove him from the line of succession. (And of course his plan backfires with disastrous results for him). And then after he learns the truth of his heritage he has a suicidal breakdown and is just desperate to regain some scrap of Odin’s approval since his whole identity and life have been shown to be a lie and Odin has told him the purpose he took him for has been obviated.

His invasion of NYC to get the Tesseract is carried out on Thanos’s orders after Loki has been brainwashed and tortured so he’s clearly not benefitting there. 

In Dark World he fights (and ultimately sacrifices himself) to save the world, avenge his mother, and protect Thor and Jane. And he does the same again in Ragnarok, and very nearly dies while saving Asgard by raising Surtur. 

And of course in Infinity War he gives his life in Thor’s place. 

Even the play he has commissioned in Ragnarok serves the concrete purpose of undoing centuries of Odin’s lies and deprogramming Asgard’s violently xenophobic attitudes towards the Jotnar, so it can’t be counted as a purely indolent and self serving pursuit. 

I suppose defeating and replacing Odin might be the closest thing. But he is driven to that by the fact that Odin would have imprisoned (or quite possibly killed) him otherwise. And indeed he might have also retaliated against Thor. Plus he has nowhere else to go because Thanos is hunting him. Still, it is a more self interested moment than anything else we see. Loki finally stands up to his tormentor - the man who used him and lied to him, the man who imprisoned him right after he’d escaped Thanos’s torture, and who would have killed him outright if he had the chance - and takes something for himself while still showing far more mercy than he himself was ever given. 

Let’s not forget though that

1. Odin had been growing increasingly unfit to rule for a while - when he talks to Laufey, Laufey says, “Allfather, you look weary,” in a tone suggesting this creates an opening for Jotunheim to wage successful war on Asgard. Odin seems to have realized this himself since the opening scene has him in the ambivalent process of handing over the throne to Thor, but then the conflict over how to respond to the Jotuns in the vault happens, he changes his mind, and then several whole-ass movies pass where he just sits on the throne while growing increasingly tired and confused. In TDW, his plan for how to deal with the dark elves is for all Asgardians including himself to die fighting them in a battle he admits is pointless, and he refuses to consider any other options. Deposing him is reasonable when considering the good of Asgard.

2. The first thing Loki does after deposing Odin is to offer the throne to Thor. It seems to me like he knows Thor is more ready to rule now, but that Odin is too old-man-bullheaded to see it, so he essentially arranges for Odin to pass the throne on to Thor this way. When Thor says no, there’s no obvious other successor to pick, and if he just abandoned the throne, probably a civil war would break out over its vacancy.

If we believe Loki when he says he never wanted the throne, this is simply another action taken primarily for the sake of other people.

Oh for sure. These are excellent additions. Loki keeps accidentally and unexpectedly getting stuck with the throne. (And then he still somehow gets blamed for “stealing” it). 

Yes! Kinda the same way he keeps almost dying from suicide attempts or protecting his loved ones in battle, and then gets blamed for “faking his death”.

It’s true and you should say it.

*gestures wildly at all of the above*

The only legitimate instance of Loki doing something purely out of self-interest that I can think of is making off with the Tesseract in Endgame. That’s it. The rest of the time, his actions are either 1) entirely other-centred or 2) dually-motivated (i.e., they’re for the benefit of both himself and others). The fact that he is seen as, at worst, a vicious psychopath who delights in causing others misery and at best, someone who operates based purely on his own whims with no thought to how his actions will affect others, will never not be simultaneously hilarious and depressing to me.

Arguably, even Loki making off with the Tesseract in Endgame (if you’re referring to that one alternate timeline where Stark collapses etc) isn’t self-serving. Because Loki knows Thanos is coming. He knows Thanos wants the Tesseract. If Loki fucks off to ‘anywhere but where Thanos is’ ... Thanos can’t, you know, get his hands on the Tesseract. Which stymies or delays his plans.

1.16 “The Galileo Seven” STAR TREK (1966–1969)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. There is literally NO heterosexual explanation for this. At All. This is straight up ‘I am flirting my ass off because I wanna get laid’, folks. The arm around the shoulders, the LEAN IN. The LOOK on Kirk’s face. This is not two friends being bros, people. This is two people who are fixing to bang like a screen door in a hurricane. And NO ONE will ever convince me otherwise.

my father said to me once that one of the things he deeply regretted was not putting music on for his father while he was fading away. he told me that grandpa would just sit in his old armchair in the quiet, and not until after he’d passed did my dad think of how he could have played of his favorite classical music tapes for him so grandpa could listen to something while he still could. i was very young when this happened and not much older when my dad told me this, but it always stuck with me as something important.

my mother died at home in a hospice cot, slowly shutting down over the course of about a week. when she had stopped responding, i remembered what dad told me about wishing he’d played music for grandpa, and i put the radio on her favorite country music station and kept it on for her until she died.

daddy died in hospital. no cassette players, no decent radios. the day after he was brought in, i thought again of what he told me, and i bought a little portable bluetooth speaker. even though he never woke up, was never aware, i played music for him too.

there’s no real significance to sharing this, not really. my motivation is selfish, again: i just want to hope that someone might think of this when their loved one is stuck in silence somehow, and maybe they’ll play music for them, and they won’t have to regret not doing so. i want to hope it helps someone. and i want to hope that someone will remember my dad with me, even in just a “story i read on the internet” way.

Hey, OP, you actually might have done a very significant thing for your parents indeed. Hearing is the last sense to go when someone is passing away. It’s why palliative care doctors tell patients’ relatives to continue speaking even if the patient stops responding. So even if your mother and father could not wake or respond to you or those around you, they perhaps could have heard the music they so loved, and perhaps were comforted. So what you did wasn’t selfish at all, and I’m sorry for jumping on to your post, but it’s likely that playing music for your parents as they passed away did much more for them than you might have known at the time.

A major thing that happens at the end of life is a profound lack of energy, a soul-deep exhaustion - it is simply too overwhelmingly tiring to speak, or even open your eyes. Part of the reason sound is the last sense to go is because you don’t need to work for it; you don’t need to struggle to force your eyes open or to reach out and touch something.

Studies of people in the last days of life have shown more brain activity in response to family talking than to staff members talking, so it’s not only hearing but /recognition/ that is still present, though comprehension is debated.

So talk to your loved ones, even when they can’t respond. Play their favourite music, prattle on about your day or your new puppy or your favourite memories of them.

They hear you, and they love you, even if they can’t respond.

Totally agreed. I have no medical expertise at all, but my grandfather lived with us for the last few years of his life. The day he died, it happened suddenly, with no warning (we found out later he likely blew a major blood vessel whilst pushing to evacuate his bowels, which we didn’t even know was a thing that could happen)

At any rate, he went down and went down FAST. Literally within about a minute he went from being alive, active, and responsive to ... very much NOT.

Needless to say, my mom and I freaked a bit. Me more than her. She had to hold it together by force, because she was his medical power of attorney and had to Deal With Shit when the ambulance and cops came (cops here come automatically when it’s made clear a death is imminent on a 911 call, even if the person dying is dying of old age).

I managed to keep it mostly together by pretending grandpa wasn’t, you know, dying right in front of me. While also more or less begging him to keep breathing almost non-stop.

What kind of fucks me up to this day (and will for a while to come) is ... HE DID. Despite being beyond even the ability to open his eyes, every goddamned time ‘breathe, grandpa’ came out my damn mouth, HE DID. When I had to go quiet while they did the stethoscope thing ... he STOPPED. The minute I started up again, he responded.

They absolutely can hear you, no matter how far gone you think they are or the doctors say they are. They can absolutely hear you.

"The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals. Anyone with that serum is inherently on that path."

Zemo was right about this.

They've been experimenting on people with that serum for decades.

First, the Red Skull injected the serum to himself and it resulted with the face of his skin burning off since the serum wasn't perfected yet. He didn't even mind it, and despite going against the orders of Hitler, he continued his work with the Tesseract until Steve took it with him when he buried his jet into water.

The second experiment was Steve. It was a shocking choice since the US wanted someone big and strong for the experiment, and not a sick, skinny guy like Steve. But as we all know, Erskine especially wanted Steve because he was a good man, not a perfect soldier. Since the serum enhances what is already within, Steve was able to come out of the experiment with no side effects. And he was the only one who didn't get corrupt.

The third one was Bucky. Now his case was a bit different than the others. He got injected without his permission. They had already started to use him as a test subject when he was captured by HYDRA before Steve rescued him from the facility in 1943. Later, when he fell from the train he was able to survive thanks to the serum. But there were side effects since his memories had been wiped out, and the serum increased his aggression as well. (for example, his brutality in fighting) Also, even with the serum, HYDRA couldn't save his arm.

The fourth was Isaiah Bradley. He got the serum, just like the rest of them, and was sent to Korea to take down the Winter Soldier. He failed his mission but was able to almost rip his whole arm off. Then, they imprisoned him for 30 years because he was a super soldier. He was experimented on both by the US Government and HYDRA at the same time. We don't know much about his side effects but I don't think he survived all of that with no damage. Later, the CIA got his blood samples and Nagel used them to make more serum with it.

Fifth experiment: In 1991 HYDRA assassinated Howard Stark in order to create more super soldiers and start the Winter Soldier Program (which I always wondered, where the hell did Howard get these from? CIA? Did I miss that part? Someone enlighten me, please.) Now, these subjects were stronger than Bucky because HYDRA didn't use Vita Radiation (Howard Stark used this to stimulate growth and also "stabilize" according to Peggy Carter) But these new serum made the soldiers even more aggressive and they weren't easy to control. So when one of them attacked a HYDRA agent, the others followed him but they were brainwashed and frozen in the end, just like Bucky. After Zemo found out about Siberia, he killed them all in their sleep.

Sixth experiment: There was a new experiment in 2001 under Ross's command. They basically added Gamma Radiation along with the serum (hey Bruce Banner!). After that failed attempt, they injected Emil Blonsky a variant serum with Banner's blood in it. Long story short, the side effects were huge and not pretty. He turned into the Abomination.

Seventh, you'd think they would learn their lesson but no. HYDRA created a new serum in 2013. This time it was mixed with Extremist, Gamma Radiation, and the Chitauri technology. As if they worked perfectly before. They called it the Centipede Project. (Agents of Shield fans would know more about it.)

Eighth was the Flag Smashers. They injected the serum themselves. There are 8 injected Flag Smashers in total. Karli in this case doesn't care about who she kills as long as it serves her ideology. She's blinded by her ambition and she's not afraid to get her hands bloody because she knows she is doing the right thing. Her followers believe that she's leading them to freedom. To a world that has no boundaries, a free world where there are no countries to separate people from each other. No governments. No patriotism. One world. One people.

The Ninth, we've seen it coming. John Walker managed to take one of the serums before Baron Zemo crushed them all, and he used it to inject himself. We'll see the rest of the side effects in the upcoming episodes but I think we all know he's definitely not the next Steve Rogers.

Now, why did I list all of these? Back in 2016, I could never imagine myself agreeing with Baron Zemo but he is right folks. There hasn't been another Steve Rogers. He was the only successful experiment. The others were either corrupted by the nature of the serum, or they were blinded by the power that comes with it. Or they were just not the right choice.

Walker is a great example of this. He was given the title of Captain America because he was a brilliant soldier. Not because he had a good heart. He was the exact kind of guy that the government would want to have on their side. He was the captain of the football team in high school, then became the first person in American history to receive Three Medals of Honor and he had an incredible military career. This guy was a born leader.

And yet, since the beginning of the show, he's been struggling to fit the perfect image that the people want. The perfect Captain America the US Government wants him to be. He knows he can't be the next Steve Rogers and that has been eating him up ever since. He didn't have the serum which made him vulnerable since he was basically a normal soldier. He wanted to have Bucky and Sam on his side as his wingmen. His enemies weren't scared of him. His ego was crushed from the beginning. He wanted to be in control. He didn't just want to be respected, he wanted to be afraid. He was desperate for more power and it blinded him. He is one of the supremacists Zemo was talking about.

Lemar was the last straw. And he finally gave in. He took all of his anger from Nico. He didn't care that he was killing him, it probably wasn't the first time he got his hands bloody as he mentioned about the ways that they used back in his day of service, earlier in the episode.

When he was standing in that square holding the shield which was covered in blood, it made me think of all the other experiments that the United States is responsible for. Honestly, they started this nightmare, and just because they got lucky with Steve Rogers (thanks to Dr. Erskine) they kept pushing to get another perfect super soldier.

And I can't wait to see how they'll clear all this shit since the people all around the world are going to see how imperfect their new Captain America really is.

Ah. But ... did they, indeed, get lucky with Steve Rogers? At least the MCU version?

Think about it.

MCU Steve Rogers was specifically shown to be willing to repeatedly lie in order to enlist. Had he been discovered by people who gave a damn about the law, he’dve got thrown in jail for that nonsense.

He refused, in other words, to take ‘no’ for an answer, even when ‘no’ was a reasonable, sane response. He disdained the other ‘help the war effort’ type jobs he *could* have done States-side without even being in the Army.

Also, yes, he claimed to hate bullies, but ... the only example we are shown is him picking a fight with some random guy that was whinging about the pre-movie reels at the movie theater. That’s not a bully, folks. That was a guy whose opinion Steve didn’t like.

Once is chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.

Azzanno.

Steve, who had all of, what, *goes to look it up* Ok, IF his boot camp lasted the full time, he’dve had a whopping six weeks of training. All done when he was a five foot tall, ninety pound bit of fluff. Yet he decided he knew better than someone with probably literal decades of experience in the field (Colonel Phillips).

Again and again and again, Steve is shown to respect no opinion but his own, regardless of whether he is right or wrong.

Either every word that comes out of Steve’s mouth is gospel, or you’re an enemy to be eliminated/worked around, and that state of affairs was set in stone LONG before he even got the Serum, never mind all the malarkey that happened afterwards.

It’s just that, in the movies, Steve is framed as a HERO. And thus, all his actions are Good and Right and Just, whereas everyone else is not. Put literally any other damn name to Steve’s actions, and they would, at the very least, get side-eyed VERY strongly. Many of them would see the person responsible named a supervillain. Seriously. Try it. Go through the MCU movies in which Steve appears and put ... hell, since he’s framed against Steve anyway 90% of the time ... put Tony Stark in Steve’s place and watch how fast it changes how the sequence of events come off.

TL; DR: At least in the MCU, the Serum, across the board, has been a resounding failure at anything except creating bad guys.

“Ship means something you want to see happen.” Bitch, no it don’t. This weird-ass modern culture of lobbying show-runners to make your ship canon didn’t emerge until the advent of social media. (And recent social media like twitter, not shit-you-forgot-existed like MySpace.) Shipping and fandom in general have been around much longer, so you can stop acting like “this is the way it has always been uwu” right the fuck now.

Until relatively recently, most fans I’ve known have been perfectly okay with their ships never being canon. I, personally, would be actively offended if certain ships of mine became canon. That is not why I ship them. What I want from canon and what I want from fandom are often entirely different things that only intersect on the margins.That is why fanworks are called “transformative” ffs.

This exactly.

I’m so glad someone said this. A lot of my fav ships I specifically have no desire to see become canon, especially since they’re often in shows that don’t really do much with romance and I PREFER them that way. Shipping and fan fiction are separate things for me.

“What I want from canon and what I want from fandom are often entirely different things”

shipping isn’t always romantic idealization either which is an annoying recent mindset in fandoms, mainly its liking the dynamic of two characters and wanting to explore it in fanwork whether it be for sappy cute reasons or horrible awful unhealthy reasons, whatever is appealing/interesting to you about the pair.

Sometimes a ship has nothing to do with rationality, sanity, or the two people in question even being able to get along.

Sometimes, it’s just us the fans going ‘LOL. These two together = mayhem, chaos, blood and tears and I AM HERE FOR IT’.

Sometimes, we just want to watch the world burn, and *these two* would TOTALLY be the ones to start it burning.

regardless of your opinion of loki, what odin did to him in the mcu is fucking inexcusable.

like that’s such an awful, manipulative thing to do to a child, to raise him DESPISING the race, the culture, he came from, and then fucking lift the curtain like ooh! surprise! your brother’s blood is hot and he wants to murder you and your kind ‘cause guess what! you’re one of those disgusting frost giants!

LIKE.. nothing will ever make that alright, or fine, or in any way excusable. AND I’M SORRY, BUT FRIGGA ISN’T SOMEHOW NOT COMPLICIT IN THIS.

frigga was ??? in other ways obviously very loving and very accepting of loki’s differences, but she held that secret away from him too, and it doesn’t make it okay just because she was, in other aspects, not a terrible mother

So much this. So, so much. Also.

Even if Jotuns hadn’t been spoken of/treated like utter shit, Loki was set up to fail.

He’s Jotun. He’s an entire different goddamned SPECIES than Asgardians. And he was clearly expected to be the ideal Asgardian, and given ten different shades of shit when he inevitably failed.

And the *only* way Frigga isn’t in trouble right along with Odin is if Odin pulled some sort of shit with her. Like, threatened to kill her family if she didn’t obey him, or, given there IS magic when it comes to Asgard’s throne, he could have made some sort of magically-backed royal decree that she literally couldn’t break. And I can TOTALLY see Odin being EXACTLY that sort of asshole.

But that’d be the only way/reason Frigga doesn’t get in trouble, and unfortunately, it’s not outright stated (or really even hinted) that Odin did in fact do something like that.

The only person in the royal family who gets any kind of pass on how they treat Loki is Thor. Because Thor was raised in that poison himself, and was only a couple years older than Loki at most. Yet he loved Loki fiercely. He alone mourned Loki in T1. The outtakes from T1 also show that while Thor did open his gob and insert his foot on the regular where Loki was concerned, he also spoke in his defense. Which, given the environment he was raised in, is a goddamned miracle.

Crazy Ideas 22

Yes. All of this, just yes. But I must add:

1) SHE COULD READ MINDS. I will (severely reluctantly) grant that when they joined, they didn’t know the people they joined were HYDRA. But once Wanda was able to read minds? All excuses about not knowing are null and void.

2) In emphasis because it needs it: SHE HAS MINDFUCK POWERS. That she has trained well enough, even as of AOU, nevermind WV, to use on people without melting their brains or whatever AND successfully get what she wants out of the mindfuckery.

She was trained in this by HYDRA. There is absolutely no way in hell she has never once left someone a mindless husk, driven them to suicide, or driven them irrevocably insane. Deliberately. At HYDRA’s request. While knowing they were, in fact, HYDRA. Because again, she could READ MINDS. Let’s not even discuss how many people she’s done that to ‘accidentally’. For a given value of said word. *disgusted snort*

STAR TREK (2009) dir. J.J. Abrams

I just ... Kirk looks SUCH a combination of tired as fuck and pissed off in that middle gif.

I wonder how many times he’s heard about The Almighty Saint George Kirk. How much of a fucking *bludgeon* it must feel like to constantly hear about his heroism etc.

I mean, what George did was important as fuck, but ... damn. Growing up in that shadow must have been *something else*. Add in a canonically absent/nelectful mother and abusive ... stepfather? Uncle? Whatever. And yikes.

No wonder this boy had enough rage in him to fuel a Starship. Pike’s probably *really* lucky that he’s a Starfleet Captain here ‘cause I have to think punching him in the face was crossing Kirk’s mind.

Reminder

Loki does not “betray” his family over and over (despite what a certain actor and his director buddy seem to think). 

He was betrayed BY them. 

Betrayed by Odin, who kidnapped him, lied to him, and raised him to hate his own race. 

Betrayed by Frigga, who went along with Odin’s deception and was more concerned with keeping the peace than in standing up for her emotionally vulnerable son.

Betrayed by Thor, who treated him as a servant and belittled him in front of their peers, refused to listen to him, and never asked once for Loki’s point of view, or what happened to him. 

As a child, he was quiet, curious, and bright, NOT obsessed with stabbing (he’d never been obsessed with stabbing). 

People like to forget that Loki’s behavior from the vault scene in Thor 1 through the rest of his MCU run is the result of a huge mental breakdown from which he had NO ONE to turn to. To say nothing of a 1000+ years of being ostracized. He deeply loved his family and wanted nothing more than to make them proud. Which, you know, would be really hard to do if he betrayed them constantly. Then he finds out his entire life, and his place in the family, is a lie. And it breaks him. His actions from then on are a departure from his usual conduct, not the norm. Yes, he can be cunning, manipulative, and ruthless, but it’s not his default. Watch the deleted scenes from Thor to get a sense of how he was before the truth came out.

Yes, he was guilty of ruining Thor’s coronation. But Thor was in no way shape or form ready for the throne, so Loki dealt with it in the only way he knew would work. Why? I have to imagine Loki knows he’ll be dismissed if he speaks up himself, and he’ll just be labelled as jealous or untrustworthy (as we saw with the W3 and Sif). He probably learned long ago that resorting to subterfuge was the only way to get his points across, no one listens when he makes a point himself. He never intended for the fallout to be Thor getting banished.

Also, Thor is not a cuddly golden retriever or whatever people are saying these days. He was a bully, and he more or less stayed a bully. 

It’s super weird to me how fanon seems to view MCU Thor and Loki as polar opposite from their actual MCU canon personalities. 

👏👏👏👏👏

Instant reblog, because YES.

Loki was treated like such shit by the entirety of Asgard. All for the crime of being *different*. He didn’t glorify war. He didn’t prefer punching enemies in the face, bloodshed and ‘glorious battle’ and a ‘warrior’s death’. 

Which, if Thor, Sif, and the Three were anything to go by in the first Thor movie, basically amounted to the Asgardian version of ‘suicide by cop’. Because not a one of them had anything even remotely resembling a plan when it came to combat. Unless ‘hit/stab it. If it doesn’t go down, do it harder’ is an actual plan. Which it totally isn’t.

Loki preferred honeyed/poisoned words, daggers in the dark (literally and metaphorically) and long-range magical badassery. Which, it should be noted, kept both him and those he allied with ALIVE. He thinks. He plans. And for this, he is condemned.

Heimdall at least makes a tiny bit of sense. Given his ‘all seeing’ shtick, he HAS to have known Loki’s true origins, so him being a fucker to Loki makes a tad bit of sense, given Asgard’s attitude re: Jotuns.

But then I side-eye the fuck out of Odin. Again. Because he’s the fucker that brought a Jotun kid to Asgard to raise. Loki was *going* to find out the truth at some point. There’s no hiding THAT for the entirety of Loki’s life. And while completely eliminating prejudice and bigotry might be beyond Odin’s capabilities, he COULD have come down like the wrath of the Norns on anyone he caught mouthing off, which would have severely reduced that nonsense.

Yet he not only ignored that shite, he encouraged it. The bastard flat out stood there and presented Jotuns as murderous bastards to Loki, in the guise of telling him and Thor about the war. Which, fuck you very much, Odin.

this is simply the greatest video i have ever seen

I’m going to reblog this a million times so be it

#i love how they give up on the dumb gimmick and just make her do increasingly inane trick shots

Reminded of that time the xkcd guy was trying to research what sports equipment would be most effective for destroying enemy drones in flight and he looked up a bunch of stats about pro tennis player accuracy against stationary targets like 40 feet away, and figured that a really high level tennis pro might be able to hit the drone in 5-7 shots if they had the time and even then probably wouldn’t do enough damage to disrupt it more than momentarily.

And then Serena volunteered to test this theory and just, killed it instantly.

i see people saying shit like “she’s the best woman player” nah fam she’s the best one out there

Technically it took her three tries, but that’s still far less than what xkcd expected.

Personally, my favorite moment of this vid is just before the trick shots start - the guys actually manage to get the ball back over the net, get all excited, and then INSTANTLY SCATTER LIKE STARTLED CHICKENS when Serena returns the shot.

Fucking tell me, Loki wasn’t tortured prior to his arrival to Midgard. Shield agents, at the end of the day, are still humans and they had no chance to cause even an ounce of pain to get this kind of reaction.

Before you @ me, travelling via a portal doesn’t put a strain on anyone’s body and we’ve seen that many times.

Loki looks like he’s ready to collapse. He looks so ill. I wonder why Thanos had to torture him or if not torture deprive him of food before he invaded Midgard(Loki also looks malnourished and dehydrated) It most definitely is that Loki got this kind of treatment because he refused to do Thanos’s bidding. It could be that Thanos kept him around because he’s one of the only people who knows the ways of Midgardians. We can clearly see Loki has been brainwashed so badly here.

You can see it hurts him to sit down, he grinds his teeth (gif 3) and afterwards, his leg and hands are shaking (gif 4). It looks almost violent too, so… that’s definitely what someone who isn’t in pain does 😉 (p.s he’s definitely in pain)

I wonder if the Loki series will explore this or if they’ll walk all this back Ragnarok-style. :-/

I don’t have the gif handy, but there’s another moment in this scene where he actually doubles over and stumbles; and Barton has to give him a hand to get back to standing; or close to it. According to the creators; this and his arrival was actually initially supposed to be much much worse than even this (and worse than the view we had in the end credits scene where he looks downright bad and is sporting an infection even. There is concept art out there for his arrival that is even more disturbing.)

Tom has said as well that after viewing that scene alone it disturbed him how bad he looked; and that was likely at the beginning of his torture. Remember also with that and how they’ve said most films actually take place around the RL time of their release in mind; and you’re forced to realize that Thanos likely had him for roughly the whole year between the end of Thor and the beginning of Avengers when he made this appearance.

Given how he looks there, it’s safe I think to say that Thanos and gang snatched him up pretty fast. Which makes sense when you remember they know two particularly powerful stones are on Earth at that time (Space and Time) and probably weren’t willing to risk one of their longer running loyalists: hence the torture/contrrol and conditioning, as well as the reinforcement of it through his communication with The Other.

There are a lot of signs he’s fighting it hard though. Tony’s toss through the window on an angled building, missing teh slope AND all of the cranes below or more is the most obvious (that math is impossible to do on a whim without figuring it before hand, which eh had ample time to figure out since he got to the penthouse first: ask any engineer or mathematician the odds.. they aren’t just low.. it’s next to impossible to do that and have the subject survive as Stark did.)  Another in that scene is the fact that the second suit was building in the penthouse, which again he had time to check and make sure was clear: and would VERY likely have noticed that kind of machinery running in the walls.

He skips going after Fury with the mind stone in that first scene: allowing the Avengers to be activated, and having seen first hand in New Mexico during Thor that at the very least SHIELD likely has -some- relationship with his brother after the events on Midgard between Thor, Sif and the warriors three all having been there to put down the Vault guardian. (Barton himself could fight the control early on too, to an extent: this is shown/talked about in a deleted scene where they briefly talk about how Fury got out unscathed.)

There’s a bunch of little things like that, that had huge impact on the path of the story and subtly display he was put to the events of the New York invasion unwillingly: or at the least that he was tortured and beaten down until he was just willing enough between that and the mind stone for the coercion to take; even with a little out-world supervision from The Other.

Anywho, I could go on about this subject for an age…. but Imma stop there for now! XD Getting a bit long as is.

no torture actually 😋😋😋

This is just someone who was happily traipsing through sanctuary and decided to make a deal of his own free will where Thanos handed over an Infinity Stone and kindly asked him to express-post the Tesseract back 🥰🥰🥰

And this entire scene is just hot girl sh*t 😍😍😍

there’s also never the mind stone glowing when in use to support any claims of it influencing Loki’s behaviour, or any proof it influences that at all because it never happened when the Avengers were in the room 😌😌😌

(/s)

Also also - how Loki looked when he first dropped into the PEGASUS facility. He was pale as fuck, sweaty, and had black bags under his eyes big enough to hide a jet in.

I’ve seen it posited - and given both the visual evidence and Thanos’ *canon* heinous cruelty when it comes to torture (via *that scene* with Nebula, Jesus Fuck I’ve never seen the movie, just the ((no sound)) *clips* and that shit gives me nightmares) it’s entirely possible Loki was was put in a hot box or otherwise tortured with heat (which, given he’s actually Jotun, not Asgardian ... quadruple yikes). This on top of whatever other ‘delights’ Thanos would have cooked up.

Then there’s the FACT that the only way to get out from under the mind control is to be knocked unconscious. Which carries the horrifying implication of long-term sleep deprivation where Loki is concerned.

Also cubed - The *entirety* of Loki’s invasion plan was a GINORMOUS clue he wasn’t doing the invasion of his own free will. Think about it. Asgard is a warrior society, and unlike most of them, Loki has a goddamned brain and USES IT. He knows warfare tactics.

And yet. He made AS MUCH NOISE AS POSSIBLE coming to Earth. I mean, seriously. Even if there was no way for the portal itself to be less attention getting ... Loki could have SO EASILY played the ‘injured and confused as fuck accidental traveller’ card and schnookered the entirety of SHIELD until he’d recovered enough to do his thing. Instead he started a fight, killed a bunch of people directly and indirectly and mind-whammied at least three people, more or less *ensuring* SHIELD was gonna be on his ass nonstop from then on.

And then there’s the *entirety* of Stuttgart. You’re telling me that Loki, of all people, couldn’t have gotten into that vault and snagged the Iridium without needing an assist? Really? And again, he stopped for a bit of attention-grabbing theater by strolling out into the street and making a bunch of folks kneel. What the hell was the point of that other than to draw more attention to himself and what he was doing, thereby inciting more people to TRY TO STOP HIM.

Then there’s the final portal. It’s explicitly stated in the movie that with the iridium, Loki could have made the portal any damn size he wanted. So why the fuck did he make it only barely big enough for a Leviathan to get through? He could have had that damn thing open big enough to let the entire army through in one go. And again, he put the damn thing over a city with a *known* hero presence (Iron Man being the biggest name at the time) and a shitload of people *right there* who would be capable, ready and willing to defend the area (cops, a shitload of military and ex-military folks not to mention a few million plain civilian New Yorkers who every last one would have gone ‘oh, fuck no, and also, fuck you. IN THE FACE’) when he could have opened the portal somewhere a lot less populated and a lot more easily defended (on his part).

Last but not least, there’s Loki’s failure to mind-control Tony Stark. Given he had info on Steve and Bruce and Nat, it follows that he had info on Tony from Clint. SHIELD knew about the arc reactor in his chest. Even if Clint didn’t know the nitty-gritty details, he’d know there was a ‘thing’ sitting *on Tony’s skin* that prevented skin contact over the heart. And even if he didn’t, Loki FELT AND HEARD the scepter hit something definitely *not* skin. But his second attempt, he touched almost exactly the same spot (a difference of a few millimeters at most).

But yeah, Loki was the sole mastermind behind the invasion and wanted to subjugate Earth. Sure.