snowflake challenge 2026 - day 3

[tielan]

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

A rewrite from 2021, updated for 2026.

Dear Maria,

You appeared in the opening scene of a movie whose precedents I hadn’t paid much attention to. Oh, I’d watched them, enjoyed them, but they were popcorn films, full of action and heroics of characters I liked watching but didn’t really hit it off with.

And then there was this woman who, from the start, had the willingness to challenge her boss: asking Fury if this was really necessary, but also being willing to knuckle down when he gave the order. It showed that you had your own set of thoughts, but you knew when you could push it forward and when you had to do what authority said. Most people don't get that - superheroes and their stans surely do not. You realised that something was wrong when Loki escaped the facility, and didn't freeze when Fury told you Barton had been turned.

Did anyone but me realise that you survived a shootout with Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye, while he was gunning for you? These were not bullets upon which was scribed "to whom it may concern" they were ones which should have had your name on it.

Not one of them hit you. Not. One.

There are not a lot of people who can claim they survived a shootout with Clint Barton, and I'm fairly sure the others either had superpowers (cf. Quicksilver) or he wasn't really trying to kill them (cf. CA: CW). And then on top of all that, you survived a high-speed car chase in a collapsing tunnel, trying to shoot Barton while driving backwards.

All this happens even before the movie title ‘The Avengers’ comes up on the screen in dramatic black and grey, by the way. What an entrance!

I loved your snarkiness (‘he turns’), your roll of the eyes at Tony Stark, the way that none of the Avengers questioned your right to be standing by the table talking with them about how to deal with Loki. I loved your shooting skills, and the way you tensely watched Stark reroute the nuke away from the city.

Through the rest of the movie series, you do amazing things.

Rescuing Captain America, the Black Widow, and the Falcon on a day when they're one television crew in a helicopter away from public execution by infiltrating a team of machismo-hyped thugs with nothing more than a helmet and a stun wand? Preparing for the destruction of a superweapon that you've worked at for two years and going up against your boss, because you've discovered it's been co-opted by enemies within? Making the hard choice of several billion people or shooting down Captain America - a friend that you call by name? Knowing exactly where a handgun is stashed in Stark's lounge and how to get your hands on it when a murderbot attacks? Picking pieces of glass out of your feet while discussing the possibility of having lost the nuclear codes?

So damn good.

And yet I will always mourn that the storyline that introduced you in the comcis left you out entirely. I will always mourn that what should have been a story about the responsibility and accountability of those with power towards those without into a little boy game of "here's my team, there's your team, now they fiiiiiight!"

I loved you as a character and as an archetype. Someone with a sense of duty and a sense of humour, someone who could give orders and take them, someone who could criticise superheroes and still remain friends with them. A bevy of contradictions, and yet quite whole when the pieces were put together.

Four years after the Marvel Cinematic Universe removed all possibility of questioning the role of power's use and power's misuse and the consequences of both, you're still my favourite character throughout all the fandoms I've known.

Sam had the gung-ho girl power with a gun, Faith had the 'fuck you and the authority you rode in on' attitude, Teyla kept her counsel and chose her moments, while Mako fired all cylinders beneath the steel housing of control and discipline and respect.

But you? You're the mature woman making the choices that she doesn't want to make, but which matter. You're the woman who knows she's making the choices that matter, and perhaps terrified beneath an ice-cool exterior, but you're making them anyway. You're the 'weakest' link in a narrative landscape that is littered with the bodies of superheroes, supervillains, and victims - and you were none of them: just a woman in the complicated modern world trying to work out how to take one step forward and make it all work to protect those who needed protecting without wrecking everything in the process.

By the time we met you, you were already the woman you needed to be for all the things that you had to do. And what you didn't know - like how to manage superheroes - you learned.

I loved that you were a fully formed, grown woman; familiar with what she could do, willing to admit to what she couldn't, willing to do what must be done. I still do.

2026

They refrigerated you in a side bit of canon, the existence of which literally nobody references because it was just that bad. Five years later, I still don't have words for the degree of rage and disappointment I feel.

There's a part of me that thinks we're in the present day situation we are because we laid all our money on "heroes" and not enough on the people with a little bit of power and authority changing their mind when confronted with the possibility that The Thing they intended to use for good has ended up being co-opted by the bad. If the only people perceived to have agency are those with Great Power, then where does that leave the rest of us?

Not to mention: how much difference would it have made if a woman was allowed to be competent without being sexually interesting (to the rest of the characters, I mean)? If a woman's capability was highlighted without someone wanting to bed her? If a woman was not just shown making pragmatic decisions, but in-canon applauded for it.

I'm writing an expy of you - have been for the last five years. Someone ordinary in the midst of extraordinary. Doing the job. Making decisions when they come to you, and then being willing to flip on that decision when new information comes to light. It's entirely possible that she will sink, just as you did, simply because we have no longer hold space in our literature litanies for someone asking the hard questions and making the hard choices. We want the easy right and moral wrong, the obvious Nazis, the big turning-point moments. Not the messiness of humanity somewhere in the middle, looking at all the complications and trying to work out how to keep world security running.

Thanks to you and fangirling you, I learned a lot about myself, about the world, about the kinds of people in fandom and what they're willing to see and not-see, what they're willing to invest in - and what they're going to discard because it's too difficult. It's not comfortable, maybe, but it sure has been enlightening.

I wish they'd seen you with those eyes, Maria. I wish this society had the eyes with which to see you.

But thank you for those years when you inspired me.

Comments

[kat_lair]

This is a lovely, reflective piece of meta.

[kore]

Aww, I love how you love Maria. And I love your 2026 update and how you're writing your own Maria, too.