Note: This morning, I woke up to the sad news that Stan Lee has passed away. In memory of everything wonderful that he created, I quickly wrote this fic as tribute to all of his many cameos in the MCU.
Words: 1k
You can find the rest of my fics here: Masterlist
“I know that guy,” Steve said, walking backwards towards Tony’s computer console to get a better look at the face on the screen. He frowned at the white haired man in front of him, trying to place the face. “One of the veterans from the VA, right? The Excelsior man who couldn’t hold his liquor. I think I got him fired from the Smithsonian, too. Accidentally, of course.”
“Tony, I’ve told you to get your pasty ass outside now before I… No way, is that him?” Rhodey strode in to the lab, his leg braces doing nothing to slow him down. His annoyance towards Tony for wasting time sitting around faded into something so much lighter when he saw the computer screen. A huge smile crossed his face as he clapped his hand on his best friend’s shoulder. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
Steve looked between the men in confusion. Tony had buried his head in his hands in a highly ineffective way to avoid Rhodey’s taunting, an unmistakable redness spreading up the back of his neck in embarrassment. Recognising Steve’s confusion, and always happy to retell the story to new ears, Rhodey explained how a seemingly unimportant Fed-Ex delivery man had become his personal hero. In a perfect imitation, he said, “Are you Tony Stank?”
“Mr Stark, are you coming or… Oh hey! That’s Gary.”
Tony spun his chair around to face Peter, one eyebrow raised in his patented mixture of amusement and intrigue. He didn’t say anything when Peter jumped up on to the worktop, swinging his legs around like a kid. He just smiled fondly and asked, “You know him too?”
“Sure! He drives my school bus. And, uh, he shouted at me one time when I tried to stop a dude from breaking in to their own car. I kinda woke up the whole neighbourhood with the alarm. It wasn’t my fault, though! How was I supposed to know it was his car?”
“This guy gets around,” Rhodey said, nodding in approval. “Why you looking at his file, Tones? In fact, why does he even have a file?”
“That man cut my hair!” Thor said, bursting in to the lab in a flurry. He had merely been walking past on his way to meet Banner in the training room (to decide whether he or Hulk was the strongest Avenger) when the god had caught sight of the face that haunted his dreams.
Pointing at Thor, and then gesturing around the circle to each of them, Tony said, “That’s why. You know I’m good with faces. I kept seeing him around so had FRIDAY look into it. Turns out he’s been watching us all for a while now.”
“What for? Is he a threat?” Steve tensed at Tony’s side and began flicking through the literal hundreds of images of this man, taken everywhere around the globe. There was one from a less than legal poker club in South Korea. A file from a mental institute. Press photos. Even a few from back in the 40s with him as an Army Officer. Rhodey had been right; this man, whoever he was, had certainly been around.
Tony shook his head, knowing that that wasn’t the case. “He was an informant.”
“To who? How do you know?” Steve asked, at the same time that Peter said, “Was?”
Taking the questions in turn, Tony said, “Well, I asked him. Obviously. Saw him at a charity ball a few months ago and asked if he was following us. He figured I wouldn’t believe him so told me everything. After the shit we’ve dealt with, immortal, non interfering aliens that watch our every move almost seemed like a normal day. And yeah, Pete. I’m sorry. He – Gary, you said? – won’t be around anymore.”
The kid’s face dropped as he realised what Tony was saying. “He died?”
“That’s what all the reports are saying. FRIDAY is running searches now. Every single one of his aliases is being marked on file as deceased. She reckons that he became a part of some many people’s lives that there are over fifty different funerals being held for him this week.”
“You don’t sound convinced, Tones,” Rhodey pointed out, more than a little confused by his friend’s behaviour. Tony had dealt with his fair share of loss and death. He never acted this way when he heard news of someone’s passing. Normally, his coping mechanism included a lot of alcohol and a few weeks alone in the lab with a new project. Seeing him so calm, almost nonchalant, even towards the death of someone he didn’t know all too well, just wasn’t right at all.
“Oh, I know he didn’t die. He told me everything, remember? His job here is done. Now that Thanos is gone, the Watchers – those immortal alien people – don’t care so much about us anymore. They’re pulling him off of Earth and taking him somewhere else.”
It was clear that Rhodey was beginning to doubt his friend’s sanity but Tony assured him that he wasn’t in fact completely crazy. “He told me the exact date and time that he was leaving and it matches the details on every death certificate around the world. He’s still alive, honey bear. He’s just got other things to do now.”
“Will he ever come back?” Peter asked, his eyes sparkling as he flicked through the pictures with Steve.
“I doubt it, kid. Not in our lifetime, anyway. Why?”
Peter shrugged, grabbing his backpack from the floor and jumping off the worktop. “It’s not important. It’s just that I won a bet and he owes me a hot dog.”
Later that evening, when Peter returned home from the game (Tony really had gotten them the best seats), there was a box waiting for him on the side. He took it to his room and opened it up to find a slightly squashed hot dog inside. There was also a badly written note, which read: I didn’t forget. See you round, Spidey. Excelsior.
nerds are like “ugh mr mime is so creepy in the detective pikachu trailer” like they expected a cute mr mime??? mr mime. mr mime???? live action mr mime being a terrifying imp is the most accurate pokemon in the trailer why are y’all shocked.
CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta
My favorite part of CNN suing for Jim Acosta’s First Amendment rights are all the MAGAts (who love to come to the defense of someone being fired for their bigotry, screaming FIRST AMENDMENT) saying Jim can still report whatever he wants so CNN is wrong.
If an employer wants to fire you for something you said – they can do that. You can still freely say what you want, just not while working for them.
If the US government wants to fire you (or restrict your access) for something you said, that’s against the 1st.And that’s just freedom of speech. Freedom of the Press (also in the First) says the government cannot interfere. The White House saying “I don’t like you, you can’t come here anymore” is directly counter to that.
I don’t even like cable news, but I’m finna put on CNN alllll day (muted, of course, because I value my sanity).
CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta
Millennials are treating pets like ‘their firstborn child,’ and it’s reportedly causing problems for some of the best-known pet food brands
good job, guys, we’re killing the shitty pet food industry this time. it can’t POSSIBLY be that we just recognized Gravy Train or Kibbles and Bits for being piss poor food choices; no, we’re just treating our pets too nicely.
I like the implication that it’s a common and acceptable practice to feed shitty pet food to your SECOND born child
this is the good bubbles of anti-hellsite
reblog and your dashboard will be protected from drama and bad discourse in 2017
So after the many many posts mourning the passing of Stan Lee earlier today I’ve started seeing an inevitable wave of backlash about how he actually wasn’t a good person and we shouldn’t be mourning them. And these posts are par for the course when a celebrity dies because no one is all good or all bad, and that’s fine. And Stan Lee was human, he was a person with a complicated life and a complicated legacy, and I’m not here to whitewash any of that. However, I’d like to refute a couple of the points I’ve seen people making.
The first is that Stan Lee sexually harassed nurses who were taking care of him. This story came from the Daily Mail, which is not a credible news source. The original story does not name any of the nurses who supposedly came forward with the story, or their employer, and the legitimacy of this story is pretty shaky. I’m not saying it categorically isn’t true, but I am saying that we should take stories from the newspaper that ran a headline about the discovery of the “gay gene” with a grain of salt.
The second is that Stan Lee was told that Andrew Garfield wanted to play Peter Parker as bisexual, and as retaliation forced Sony to only depict Peter Parker as straight and white. This isn’t quite true. There is a contract from 2011 that lists mandatory character traits for Spider-Man, and in that list is included that Spider-Man is “not a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual).” Whether Stan Lee himself personally was involved in writing up this contract is pretty doubtful seeing as his role in the company was fairly limited by that point (and that’s not to mention the fact that in his later years he was being abused and manipulated by the people closest to him), but he did mention it in an interview with Newsarama. What he specifically said was, “I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way, but we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that (…) I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly, But again, I don’t see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once they’ve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes (…) It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that,” he said. “Latino characters should stay Latino. The Black Panther should certainly not be Swiss. I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.”
And while your mileage may vary on how much you agree with him there, it’s a far cry from him cruelly declaring Peter Parker having a boyfriend would be an affront before God and man and an insult to his authorial intent or whatever. Also, I think the original post that started this story was about Andrew Garfield saying something while doing press for Amazing Spiderman 2 and Stan Lee writing the contract as a result, but the contract is from 2011 and the first Amazing Spiderman came out in 2012, so the timeline doesn’t work. I could be misremembering the post though. There’s also this implied narrative that Andrew Garfield got axed for saying his Peter Parker was bi, but uh, no. No, they cancelled the franchise because Amazing Spiderman 2 bombed at the box office.
Now, to wrap it up, was Stan Lee a good and perfect man? No. His legacy is very much a mixed bag, especially when it comes to his relationship with his long-time co-creator Jack Kirby (although that’s a whole other suitcase to unpack some other time). I would like to point out, however, that the posts praising him aren’t all just blindly hero-worshipping him and being willfully ignorant. When someone you admire dies it’s natural to forget about the bad parts of them for a bit and get a little misty eyed, and not everyone’s gonna be totally objective about this man that they never met but who represents something important to them. I think that speaks more to the way we interact with celebrity as a culture than it does about the way Marvel fans see Stan Lee frankly. And hey, we gain nothing by pretending that Stan Lee wasn’t an important figure in comic book history, one who co-created the first black character in mainstream comics just two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, who fought the Comic Code Authority censors to use comics to tackle heavy subject matter, who helped bring legitimacy to the art form and humanity to its characters. So as long as I’ve got you here I’m gonna leave you with his thoughts on racism in 1968, words that feel just as relevant today:
May his memory be a blessing.
Alright, I’ve gotten a lot of notes and messages informing me that the Daily Mail story wasn’t the only instance of sexual misconduct allegations against Stan Lee. I was genuinely not aware of these other allegations when I made the post, and I probably wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to defend him if I had realized how pervasive these allegations were. It was never my intention to gloss over these allegations or discredit the accusers. I’m not sure how I missed these stories when they first came out, but I’ll be researching them later when I have the chance and I encourage you to do the same and draw your own conclusions. I apologize for getting snippy or defensive with a few people in the notes, that wasn’t cool of me.
I’ve also seen some weird erasure of his Jewishness vis a vis him allegedly being okay with Steve Rogers being part of Hydra. The argument boiled down to Lee shouldn’t have said Hydra!Cap was okay because Captain America was created by two Jewish men specifically to fight the Nazis. While that is correct, to couch it as if Stan Lee was Goy Goyische McGoy and not Stanley Martin Lieber from West End Avenue where he lived with his Romanian Jewish immigrant parents who fled from a country that hadn’t yet emancipated the Jews who had lived there since the 1300s was…let’s go with irritating.
Why do they want us dead so badly
stfu this price on food will keep me alive when I’m starving and putting quarters together to maybe stay alive until my next shift.
rich people: why is unhealthy food so cheap? don’t they know we have no self-control and will eat this until it causes health problems?
poor people: oh, thank god, something i can afford.
Five bucks can buy you so much more though if you take more than five minutes to prepare it.
Umm.
Idk where you’re buying groceries, but $5 doesn’t get me anything.Lol they want u to live on salted pasta and nothing else. XDDD God forbid people want something cheap that TASTES good.
Like- if u have more than $5 u can buy lots of things in bulk and per serving it’s cheaper. But for just straight $5??? Fuck outta here. $5 is like the cost of one spice at a grocery store ffs
Yeah for just straight $5 I could maybe buy a bag of rice and a jar of peanut butter, and that’s honestly less complete nutrition than that fast food, which at least has some vegetables in it, some meat, etc.
Rich people don’t get that being poor actually costs money. Terry Pratchett summed it up pretty well in one of the Discworld books:
“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
In fact, it’s such a good example that one widely used term to describe this socioeconomic bullshit is literally ‘Vime’s Boots’
You know, there’s a lot I knew intellectually about the 1930s that I have a whole different take on now I’m reading up on it out of school. I knew about the Fireside Chats and I knew that they were an incredibly effective communication tool for Roosevelt – they were basically mass-marketing his presidency – but I didn’t think about how fucking bananas the first national ones were.
Like, we’re in the depths of the Depression, the ecology of the MIDDLE OF THE COUNTRY is falling apart, and in March 1933 there’s a run on like…every bank everywhere, and Roosevelt shuts down All The Banks for over a week. (He calls this a Banking Holiday which is just….such a stroke of genius and at the same time such a hilarious misnomer, I can’t even.)
And then he goes on the radio in mid-March. And you don’t know what the shit is going on, all you know is the President’s supposed to be on the radio, maybe you don’t even know that, you’re just hanging out listening to the radio and BAM. THE PRESIDENT. What the fuck. Is he going to close the entire country? Is this the end of life as we know it?
But no. What he does is, essentially, deliver a TEDtalk on the economy.
He talks for less than 15 minutes, explaining in simple words without any rhetoric what happened to the banks, what his plan is, and what you can expect as banks begin to reopen. He talks about how baseless fear over the incompetence of a small minority of bankers drove the problem, and how it’s your job not to give in to mass hysteria but to be smart and leave your money in the bank. He sounds confident and friendly and at the end of it you’re like, okay. I get it now.
What a mother fucking roller coaster.
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