Some Friday Encouragement

The book you hold in your hands was never supposed to happen.

Thus opens the official Afterword at the end of the compiled, hardback edition of the Captain America: Winter Solider comics, written by one Ed Brubaker. If Bucky Barnes is your favorite character in the MCU, take a second to thank Ed for that, because his comics are the basis of the terrifying, tragic, beautifully conceived character from the films. 

The Afterword continues:

There are several truths in Marvel Comics, or unwritten rules, if you will. And one of them was, no matter what else you did, Uncle Ben, Gwen Stacy…and Bucky Barnes all stayed dead.

I won’t transcribe the entire note here, but it’s most definitely worth a read. In it, Brubaker goes on to explain that, as a child, Bucky was his favorite, and that he was never satisfied with the explanation of his death. Decades later, as an adult writer, when given the chance to helm a Captain America comic run, he brought Bucky back.

I read his comics several years ago, and I remember being floored to read his Afterword. This man, once a fan just like us, never got over his dissatisfaction, and when he had the chance, he did something about it. Creatively, brilliantly. He took the staid old idea that sidekicks are merely props for main characters, without a life – or fans – of their own, and he toppled it right over. What an icon. Thank you, Mr. Brubaker, for this character whom I adore. 

Thank you also, sir, for the single line that would launch me down the path of my own beloved Nikita Baskin, and his journey: “…But we Russians…we have nothing but our winter.”

I’d always wanted to write about the Romanovs, but it was a nebulous idea. I didn’t know where to start, or how to incorporate it into anything. And then this line acted as a point of clarity. Oh, I thought. Oh.

This post isn’t about my stories.

Except…it is.

Because creatives aren’t born in a vacuum, full of nothing but their own, pristine ideas. And stories are born from half-love…and half-spite. For everything you love and want to emulate, there’s something you loved that pissed you off, that changed, that went in a bad direction, that you want to fix. 

I saw a NYT bestselling author on Twitter just days after the end of GoT talking about how uncomfortable he was with the idea of “fixing” media. He intimated that we shouldn’t challenge art, only accept it. I guess he wants art put under glass, never to be touched or examined. 

Gotta call bullshit on that.

Art begets other art. (Plagiarism is a whole other issue, and as a victim of it, I’m not condoning it in any way, shape, or form.) Fix-it fanfic is about creators taking the characters they love, and giving them the endings they felt they deserved; or it’s about exploring other options. Stories don’t have just one ending; fiction isn’t real life. Someone sits down at a word processor and decides the ending. And if people don’t like that ending, they’re free to imagine alternates. Every book ever written is a what-if scenario. Don’t like “fixing” media? I’m sorry, that’s literally every book ever written. Someone taking an idea they liked, and “fixing” the end. Putting his or her own spin on it. 

I’ve always said, and I’ll say again: Every story’s already been told, and Shakespeare has done it better than all of us. 

But in the vast and wild world of contemporary fiction-creation, there’s room for the half-loving, half-bitter people like me who want to tell stories that please us – that please people like us. 

I spent my teen years/early twenties thinking I had to adhere to particular rules. I studied lots; it made me a better writer. But now? Now I can look at something, and snort, and go “yeah, right,” and I can write something that satisfies in a way that the other thing didn’t. 

Warning: I’m about to segue awkwardly:

When I was a kid, I used to spend one week every summer with my riding instructor at horse camp. It was so fun. All of us students spent the week grooming and riding her horses, and then we’d tag along and groom for her Pan-Am gold-medal trainer, and hang out and rub elbows with Olympians all week, and it was SO COOL. (I once got to polo-wrap Impressario, who is horse royalty, and I’m still starstruck about it.) One year, there was a very high-handed male trainer, whose name I shall withhold, let’s call him T, in town, and the older girls and my trainer all had lessons with him. My trainer’s horse was young, goofy, and still learning how to be a dressage horse. I watched a lesson in which T demanded she execute movements too advanced for the horse (named Tango, if you can believe it). He wanted a degree of collection more suitable for a ten or eleven-year-old horse, and not for this green youngling. My trainer, when she left the arena, was in tears. “He wasn’t ready,” she told me. “He’s just a baby, and he can’t do that.” She was incredibly upset. I said, “Why did you do it, then?” And she said, “Because he told me to.”

“He doesn’t own your horse,” I told her.

“Yeah, but he’s…”

And I, apparently a rebel that early, said, “It’s not his horse so he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care if he hurts him, or traumatizes him. Screw him. I would have left the arena and told him to go piss up a rope. You should have told him off.”

She responded that T was too important, and famous, and special, and expensive to have said that to.

I said, “I don’t care. He wouldn’t hurt my horse. Screw him.” 

She looked stunned. I fed Tango extra carrots, groomed him well, told him he was a good boy. I wanted to throttle T for scaring him. 

I mean…don’t come for my babies. 

I’ve gotten off topic, obviously. But my point is: pick and choose. Take the good, leave the bad.

You can learn from this trainer, while advocating for your horse. Take his advice, and do what you will with it. Just like…

Content creators can inspire and encourage you…but you don’t have to stick to the script. You can hand-pick what you love about something, and weave it into an entirely different narrative. You can fix things. You can correct that wrongs that hurt you. Fiction is nothing more than one person’s idea laid down on a piece of paper. I love fiction; I worship at its altar. But it isn’t set in stone; isn’t infallible. If a story bugs you, go fix it. 

All those stories full of unexplored subtext? Go explore them.

Stories in which secondary characters are props? Go make them central protagonists. 

Someone tells you no? Find a way around it. 

Be confident and cocky enough to say, “Alright,” and go make your own stories better. Smarter. Steamier. More satisfying. 

The best revenge is living writing well. 

I am…devastated…by what happened in Avengers: Endgame. I can’t believe the studio that gave me Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Thor: Ragnarok, and Black Panther gave me this mess. 

But.

Am I expected to accept what four men came up with as an adequate conclusion of decades of comic history? Do I have to approve of a director/writing duo’s canon as the ultimate canon? 

Nope, I don’t. I’m not unhappy because I don’t care; I’m unhappy because I care so much. Because I love this broad, vast cast of characters, and because they were shoved over in favor of spectacle. I’ve had males in my life tell me that I’m unintelligent if I didn’t enjoy Endgame. And yet, when I question them on time-travel specifics, they tell me, “who knows, don’t think about it too much.”

I’m an author. It’s my job to think about stories too much. And I don’t need anyone’s permission to write stories that matter. 

So please, take heart, creators: we can do what we want. And someone will thank us for it.