Web Crush Wednesdays: Are They Gay?

I’m not sure where I first stumbled upon the Are They Gay? web series, but I’m sure glad I did. This series provides a funny, inclusive, and informative analysis of various slash ships that starts and ends with asking the titular question: are these two people gay? It features a wide variety of pairings including mlm and wlw slash ships, and is a great primer to the history and background of certain ships in addition to ultimately offering an answer to that pressing question.

Fanfiction Fridays: miles to go before i sleep by Avelera

“I thought you might come here,” the target said. “You saw the exhibit?”

It was his turn to hesitate, but after a moment he nodded

“So you know now? That you’re Bucky Barnes?”

He realized he was shaking his head violently and stopped himself. “We share a face,” he said, a truth even he could acknowledge. There had been more too, a creeping sense of vertigo when he looked at the photos, a split-second where he could remember being on the other side of the camera. But they were only flashes, and could well be only his imagination. Still, he had to admit that the threat model for all of this being an elaborate trap was too high to be realistic. The evidence would have taken decades to plant, and he had always been too careful with his own face. Unless those who kept him had done this. He dismissed the possibility, acknowledging the far simpler possibility that there was a man with a face much like his.

The target nodded, not pushing further, laying out silence like a path at his feet.

“A face, that’s all,” he continued, and that anxious feeling, like something was crawling around inside him and trying to escape, rose again in his throat. He started walking.

The target stepped in front of him. Not stopping him, he could easily walk around, but he found himself arrested. “Where will you go now?”

“Away,” he said. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, though the word Brooklyn rattled at the back of his head, snatching at his attention like movement seen out of the corner of a sniper scope.

“You can stay with me, if you like.”

While the actual comic that Captain America: The Winter Soldier was based on is ten years old now, the success of the movie has skyrocketed the Marvel fandom back into the spotlight. If you’ve been around the fandom part of Tumblr at all recently, you know it’s impossible to escape the gifsets, fanart, and headcanons, and more impossible to not notice the obsession fans have developed for all things James Buchanan Barnes.

And given the tragic and legendary nature of the friendship between Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers, it goes without saying that the two of them also make a very popular slash ship. Some fans see the two of them as having been in a relationship during their pre-WWII days, or as lovers during the war; some fans imagine that their feelings were unrequited, and presumed doomed until Bucky turned out to be not-dead. In any case, the Stucky bug has bitten MCU fandom hard, and some excellent fanworks have appeared in the weeks since the movie premiered.