Imaginary Worlds - Reporting on Capes, Cowls, Threats and Menaces

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

In superhero stories, the public is usually there to be saved by the heroes or killed by the villains. But as a journalist, I always wonder if these people are well informed enough about the threats t...o their lives, and who is protecting them. I talk with Maya Phillips of The New York Times, James Queally of The Los Angeles Times, and freelance reporter Sean Kelly about a range of fictional journalists from Lois Lane to Peter Parker, and whether their portrayals affect the way we view the news media in the real world. Plus, Petra Mayer of NPR, and journalist Liz Publika discuss why Spider Jerusalem is a model comic book reporter, even if he’s completely gonzo. And actress Mallory Kasdan reads the fanfiction story, “Can I Quote You on This” by Wix from Archive of Our Own about what happens when a more realistic journalist interviews The Avengers. Today’s episode includes minor spoilers for Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Daredevil, Superman and Lois, The Flash, and the graphic novel Watchmen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:47 Do what moves you. Live passionately. Drink responsibly. Copyright 2024. Bacardi, its trade dress and the bat device are trademarks of Bacardi and Company Limited. Rum 40% alcohol by volume. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.
Starting point is 00:01:03 I'm Eric Malinsky. a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and a heads up, today's episode will contain spoilers for several superhero movies and TV shows. If you want to double check first what they are, I put a list of them in the show notes. In a superhero movie or TV show, the general public is usually just fodder to be killed by the villains or saved by the heroes. But as a journalist, I always wonder, how well informed are these people about the threats to their lives? I thought about this a lot when I was watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Starting point is 00:01:39 The show is about Sam Wilson becoming the new Captain America. And the most dramatic moment isn't a fight. When will the government make you Captain America? It's a speech that Sam gives to a powerful group of politicians, which is broadcast live on TV around the country. Look, you people have just as much power as an insane god or a misguided teenager. The question you have to ask yourself is, how are you going to use it? Maya Phillips writes about comic books and pop culture for The New York Times. And she says it's no coincidence that this series explored the relationship between the Avengers, the public and the media more than many other Marvel properties.
Starting point is 00:02:20 Because obviously a big part of that storyline is about kind of the perception of heroes and the perception of America and like who gets to wear that that I mean literally wear that costume. hero. And like that goes back to presentation of black people in the media and how terrible that tends to be and how terrible our country tends to be with black people. Another thing I noticed is that in that speech, Sam refers to Thanos as an insane god. So clearly everybody knows why half the population disappeared. But they don't seem to know how the Avengers brought everyone back or what happened to Steve Rogers. So how do they know what they know? Did some of the Avengers do interviews? Which ones? And what did they say? Who knows?
Starting point is 00:03:19 There aren't many journalist characters in the MCU. The first one that I think of is Christine Everhart. She published a critical piece about Tony Stark in the first Iron Man movie, but she's better known for sleeping with Tony at the beginning of the movie and getting dissed by Pepper Potts. You must be the famous Pepper Potts. Indeed I am. After all these years, Tony still has you picking up the dry cleaning.
Starting point is 00:03:44 I do anything and everything that Mr. Stark requires, including occasionally taking out the trash. Now the subject of superheroes and journalists is near and dear to my heart. When I worked at WNYC, especially when I was doing stories for the newsroom, I used to fantasize about meeting a superhero on the rooftop and getting an exclusive interview. In fact, in 2013, I produced a radio drama where my friend Mallory Kasdan played a fictional public radio reporter who gets an interview with a high-tech vigilante called The Troll, who uses an invisibility cloaking device. Hello? I'm right here. Oh my god, you scared me.
Starting point is 00:04:27 How can those men see you? They have heat-seeking goggles. I need you to be my emissary, to fill in the blanks for New Yorkers. They need to know I'm looking out for them. Dude, I can't be your press agent. You and I are very similar. We take down the bosses.
Starting point is 00:04:42 We afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted. I don't afflict or comfort and comfort the afflicted. I don't afflict or comfort anyone except my cat. I trust you. That audio drama is already a time capsule because in 2013, before Gamergate had happened, I didn't realize how toxic trolls were and how much they were going to disrupt the whole ecosystem of journalism, of fact-based journalism. What hasn't changed is that superheroes are still the dominant form of media entertainment. So I think it's worth exploring how journalists are portrayed in these stories and whether that affects the way people see journalists in the real world.
Starting point is 00:05:20 And I discovered I'm not the only journalist who's wondered about this. We'll hear more from them after the break. p.m. with alerts. Voila! I won't be getting carried away and staying out till 2. That's stop-loss orders on Kraken. An easy way to plan ahead. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, made with natural caffeine. They come in two So in working on this episode, I talked with several reporters who are comic book fans. And the journalist character that kept coming up, the character that they felt truly represented the best type of journalist,
Starting point is 00:06:30 was Ben Urich. And if you just said, who? Then you probably have not read many Daredevil or Spider-Man comics. James Quealy is a big Marvel Comics fan. He's also a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Urich was definitely my personal superhero as a kid. He's just kind of the ink-stained wretch, and it's kind of the older model of reporter that I think a lot of, at least my professors, either were or aspired to be. So yeah, he just kind of became that lionized journalist character,
Starting point is 00:07:00 almost the same way I feel like maybe, hopefully hopefully a lot of maybe service members look at Captain America or something. James's favorite storyline from the comics was in the early 2000s. A tabloid revealed Daredevil's secret identity. And this tabloid is a rival of the Daily Bugle, which is run by J. Jonah Jameson. Jameson is so mad that he got scooped. He calls all of his reporters into his office, including Ben Urich and Peter Parker. And he adds up all their salaries and he's screaming at them as to how did he spend this much money to lose this story to this tabloid. And I think Urich, somewhere in the argument, tells them he knows who Daredevil is and he always has, but he won't give him up because he's a source. Daredevil is, and he always has, but he won't give him up because he's a source. And frankly, he gives him access to way more important stories than just the splashy, what I guess now we would call clickbait, who is Daredevil? But that cuts you off from however many more important stories
Starting point is 00:07:57 you're going to get about Hell's Kitchen or criminal justice or whatever else knowing a superhero would get you. And I think Jameson threatens to fire him if he doesn't cough up his ID and he refuses and he walks out of the room. I mean, frankly, these were some of the first media ethics lessons I think I got before I went to college. But characters like Ben Urich get more respect in the comics. And this is a spoiler for the Daredevil series on Netflix. But I'm so mad they did this, I don't mind spoiling a bad plot choice. Anyway, in the first season of Daredevil, they killed off Ben Urich because he got too close to exposing the villain, Wilson Fisk. You know how many times people threaten me,
Starting point is 00:08:38 get me to keep my mouth shut. I am not here to threaten you. I'm here to kill you. shut. I am not here to threaten you. I'm here to kill you. Maya Phillips was happy that they had cast a black actor to play Yurik until that scene. I was so upset about that first. And, you know, of course, part of that me being upset is like, I'm like, oh, here's like the one black character in the show and he's awesome and you're going to kill him? Really, guys? To add insult to injury, they gave Yurek's office to Karen Page, the occasional love interest of Daredevil, who had no experience in journalism. If you want to camp out in here, it's all yours.
Starting point is 00:09:21 Are you serious? I'm very serious. She does become a good reporter eventually, but... I was so annoyed by that. I was like, okay, I didn't study journalism and do all those freaking internships and fact-checking and all of that to see Karen Page just walk on in and get a job. Okay, that was personal rage right there. Okay, that was very, that was personal rage right there.
Starting point is 00:09:53 I assume the writers decided that they could kill off Ben Urich because they didn't see him as a well-known character. In other words, he's not Lois Lane. Now, I've always liked Lois Lane. And she's been kicking ass lately. Like in the 2020 graphic novel, Lois Lane, Enemy of the People, and in the new CW show, Superman and Lois, where, again, spoiler alert, in the second episode, she quits the Daily Planet because her new boss compromised her journalistic integrity. You rewrote my story. I merely corrected what was wrong.
Starting point is 00:10:25 So just to confirm, we can't do any actual reporting here anymore, correct? But there have been countless versions of Lois Lane over the last 80-something years. And the journalist Sean Kelly thinks that for much of that time, Lois embodied some of the worst stereotypes of journalists. There's the fact that, you know, like most of her stories are about Superman while she is very clearly in love with and has a complicated relationship with Superman. And that's well before she knew who he was and married him. Right, right. You know, and once she knew who he was and was married to him,
Starting point is 00:11:01 she probably should have stepped back, you know, for her own sake, even if nobody else knew that she was married to Superman. She knew, and her sense of journalistic ethics should have had her back off a bit. Unfortunately, Lois is not an outlier. On The Flash, Iris West is a reporter who covers The Flash, gets saved by him a lot, and eventually marries him. Even the reporter April O'Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles gets in a relationship with a superhero. But it's a human one. Whenever Maya Phillips sees this trope,
Starting point is 00:11:33 she cringes. Oh, God, yes, yes. Makes me so sad to see, like, as a journalist. It, like, really bothers me a lot now to be, like, watching this and be like, no, you shouldn't be doing that. Think about the other women in your field. But Sean says when it comes to conflicts of interest, the worst offender is Clark Kent. It's actually it's one of the most unethical things about Clark Kent as a person, because, you know, Superman is a very honest guy and a very upstanding guy.
Starting point is 00:12:09 But he lies in articles all the time because he writes articles that feature Superman and he's making stuff up for them, which is not really like him in any other way. But when he's in his journalism career of all places, he makes stuff up a lot. But when he's in his journalism career, of all places, he makes stuff up a lot. That must run in the family, because on the Supergirl TV show, Cara Danvers, who is Supergirl, faked an interview with herself for the media outlet that she worked for. And Shauna's also bothered by the way the job itself is portrayed. Comic book authors, when they're writing journalism, just assume that it's kind of like writing a story and that like the amount of research they would have to do for that is, you know, maybe they have to talk to some people. But like usually Lois's like approach to writing stories involves breaking into some place and like sneaking around until someone tries to kill her. And then the story has revealed itself.
Starting point is 00:13:01 You know, some people may say, OK, fine, all good points. But I mean, come on, this is about a guy from another planet who looks exactly like a human and can fly and all this other stuff. Like, why would anyone actually be influenced by a portrayal of Lois Lane and think that that resembles real reporters? Well, I mean, it's not only like one of the most prominent examples of reporting, like there aren't really any other TV shows out there about reporters. And, you know, at the movie level, it's like you have to go back to maybe all the president's men or Spotlight, you know, very, very rare examples of true stories about journalism. For the most part, like Lois and Clark are kind of it in a lot of media. Like that's most of what
Starting point is 00:13:44 people are seeing of how reporters are portrayed. And it's also because it's usually a kid-friendly story. It's one of the earliest portrayals people get. You know, people watch, you know, like the Christopher Reeve Superman movie when they're like six years old. And that's hard to sway people away from. We do live in a time
Starting point is 00:14:02 when there is so much cynicism about the news media. A lot of people have fallen for propaganda that's supposed to be the real truth. The general perception of reporters is that they're, you know, rich, they're coastal elites, you know, they live in metropolis, they have, you know, they have good salaries, they're star reporters, they have tons of autonomy, the editors never know what they're doing. They can just go out. They find somebody they don't like, whether it's Lex Luthor or Morgan Edge or whatever, and they write a big old takedown.
Starting point is 00:14:34 They throw the story together in first person. It gets onto the front page with no editorial review, no fact-checking. I think it's funny because, you know, it's in that environment. It's with that kind of baseline perception that, you know, you know how reporters are that, you know, we've seen this surge in alternative sources of news. You know, they're all pushing against this idea that isn't true. Well, there are some other reporter characters. Like, what do you think about Peter Parker taking pictures of Spider-Man, not revealing his conflict of interest, and then selling them to a paper that vilifies him?
Starting point is 00:15:09 In a lot of ways, I feel like that's more realistic because he is constantly on the verge of getting evicted. You know, like he is grossly underpaid. He's not actually staffed at the newspaper a lot of the time. He's just, you know, freelancing this stuff out. You know, very much a gig economy kind of worker. Like that, that's a better portrayal. And Peter Parker's boss, J. Jonah Jameson, has always been used as a critique of what we now call fake news.
Starting point is 00:15:37 I'll give you $300. That's a standard freelance fee. Tear up page one, run that photo instead. Deadline? Spider-Man, hero or menace? Exclusive Daily Bugle photos. Menace? He was protecting that armor. I'll tell you what, Atticus. You take the pictures, I'll make up the headlines, okay? All right?
Starting point is 00:15:51 That okay with you? Yes, sir. Goody. And the character has been updated as the media changes. Like in the recent Spider-Man video games, Jameson has become an unhinged podcaster. Sometimes he's a threatening menace, and sometimes he's a menacing threat. But come on, how can you menace someone without also being a threat?
Starting point is 00:16:12 And for those grammar Nazis among you who say I'm being redundant, it's called art. I'm a wordsmith. It's a rhetorical device. Smith, it's a rhetorical device. And James Quealy says in the recent comics, Jameson left the Daily Bugle to start a website called Threats and Menaces. That is only doing, you know, clips, sound bites, just real fast, like superhero fight, look, clickbait,
Starting point is 00:16:40 and with not really much in the way of fact-checking. And that is destroying the bugle on page views and subscriptions. It's clearly the more successful of the two outlets. So I think it is a nice little jab at just the general public news illiteracy. Like no matter what error we're in, Jameson has been, whether intentionally or not, like an interesting portrait of some kind of fatal flaw in my business. like an interesting portrait of some kind of fatal flaw in my business. But James thinks the most interesting storyline about the media and trustworthiness was in the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. The comics take place in an alternate timeline where superheroes have changed the politics of the Cold War. And once again, spoiler alert, in the story, one of these so-called heroes stages a
Starting point is 00:17:27 catastrophe with a giant creature that kills millions of people. And he does it because he thinks that this tragedy will bring the U.S. and the Soviet Union together and stop them from fighting each other. When one of the Watchmen discovers the plan, he gives the information to a right-wing newspaper, which only exists in the comics, called the New Frontiersmen. And they publish the truth, but no one believes them. Considering Watchmen was published well before we were in the situation we are now in reality, there are so many publications that could stand in for the Frontiersmen now. And that in that situation i don't know what my gut reaction would be upon seeing that news story like if you have established
Starting point is 00:18:09 yourself as an unshakable ideologue of a publication what happens when you actually get the real important critical story why would anyone believe you yeah that ending just kills me every time it's like the boy who cried wolf situation, you know? It feels so relevant to like what's happened in the last couple years. Again, Maya Phillips. And I will say this happens with the times too. In the opposite respect that it's like sometimes, you know, the times is criticized for trying to be so objective, which of course is impossible. Objectivity is an impossible ideal.
Starting point is 00:18:49 And in doing so, it may sound like at times it's supporting ideas that are very much not based in fact, when it's actually just like trying to humor both sides of the political spectrum. The question of objectivity is one of the biggest debates in journalism right now. And objectivity has been the gold standard for a long time. But historically, that was not always the case. So lately, a lot of journalists have been trying to be more transparent about where they come from so news consumers can evaluate them better. Otherwise, the whole idea of fact-based journalism can be undermined if any bias is revealed, whether it's intentional or not.
Starting point is 00:19:37 This issue has been explored a lot in indie comics. Like, James really appreciated these two characters in a sci-fi comic book series called Saga. The characters are reporters and they're also a gay couple from an alien planet where same-sex relationships are taboo. And as reporters, they're covering the main storyline in the comics, which is another forbidden relationship that involves two sides of an intergalactic war. Their experience, their lived experience of being in this kind of, you know, band romantic affair helps them lend, I think, more sympathy, more empathy, and ultimately be more understanding of the piece they're trying to write and the focus of their story. And that
Starting point is 00:20:19 is something that I feel like gets frowned upon sometimes in the real world. You know, if you, I, a lot of times my father was a police officer and I cover criminal justice. So there are people that no matter what, think that's a bad thing, that I'm going to be automatically overly sympathetic to police, which is if anyone has ever read anything I've written is not even remotely true. That I think improves my work. And I think it improved the same situation played out there. And I don't think it's automatically a problem as a lot of people might see it as. The question of objectivity is also at the heart of Transmetropolitan, which ran on the
Starting point is 00:20:56 Vertigo Comics imprint from 1997 to 2002. The main character is a columnist named Spider Jerusalem. He looks a lot like Hunter S. Thompson, the real-life journalist who is very eccentric. And like Hunter S. Thompson, Spider is bald, wears funky sunglasses, and he often has a cigarette dangling from his mouth. But the character of Spider Jerusalem lives in a futuristic city that looks like a cross between Blade Runner and the Fifth Element. Petra Mayer works at NPR, and she is one of the many journalists out there who are Spider Jerusalem fans. We certainly look up to him because everybody wishes they had that kind of power, right? Like the first major sequence of Transmed is him sitting on that rooftop, tapping out his column about the police riot, and he sends it out into the ether and the power of
Starting point is 00:21:48 his voice causes this outcry and the police back down. And like, who actually gets to see that happen, right? And transmetropolitan comics have had a resurgence lately. Petra discovered this when she went to Comic-Con and cosplayed as Spider Jerusalem. The first time she did it, in 2014. Nobody knew who I was. But then she dressed up as Spider again in 2018. And boy, did everybody recognize Spider then. I even found another Spider. And so, gosh, what changed in the world between the first time I did it and the second that people would recognize and want to read about a crusading journalist. Hmm. The first big storyline in the comics is a presidential election between a populist bully that Spider calls the Beast and a slippery candidate that Spider calls the Smiler.
Starting point is 00:22:38 And the public trusts Spider, not because he's impartial. They know he's opinionated. He's also usually high, and sometimes he zaps people that he doesn't like with a bowled disruptor gun. But I think that no matter how nuts Spider is, he does get at something that's essential to journalism, which is the telling of stories that you wouldn't have otherwise heard. stories that you wouldn't have otherwise heard. And we actually see Spider do his job of investigative journalism, whether it's digging into a candidate's past or hitting the streets and talking to people. Like in one issue, he meets a woman who was cryogenically frozen in the 20th century, but the future shock was more than she could bear. And there's no support system to help people like her. So now she's homeless. That also kind of ties into what I think about Spider, the humanity at his core and his desire to find the people in this overwhelming swirl of the city and tell their story. It's like she is just this one singular, incredibly unimportant person.
Starting point is 00:23:41 But when Spider crosses paths with her, you find out that she has this crazy rich backstory and this poignancy to her life. And yeah, it makes me cry. Even though the comics were drawn when the internet was just coming into our homes, they foreshadow a time where digital screens are everywhere. And I can only imagine that if you actually lived there, you would go insane from overstimulation. So having his voice and his concentration or his focus on the actual human beings that live in this place, I think that's pretty important. I think it's better for him to be, for the comic book to be set in the future, because if it was set in present day, maybe we would be too invested to take his message more seriously. That is Liz Publica. She was inspired to become a journalist when she read Transmetropolitan in high school. By that point, Liz had been living in the U.S. for about 10 years. She was born in
Starting point is 00:24:40 the Soviet Union, and she thinks that experience gives her a unique perspective on why it's important to have characters like this. There is yellow journalism. There are people who are writing, you know, in order to be inflammatory, in order to create conflict, in order to create a story when there isn't one. But the majority of journalists just want to inform you of information. In the Soviet Union, I'm sure that there are a lot of
Starting point is 00:25:05 people who know this, and even in modern day Russia, there are people who are risking their lives to get us the information that maybe some powers don't want you to have. And that's extremely valuable. That is something that is so incredibly necessary that it's very difficult to kind of be okay with how dismissive people have become of quality information and of the people who risk their lives to get that information to them. But in the last few years, we all learned a disturbing truth about the writer who created Spider Jerusalem. His name is Warren Ellis, and over 60 women have come forward with stories of unwanted sexual advances. He also had affairs with many of his female fans. His predatory behavior brings up similar issues around
Starting point is 00:25:58 how we evaluate the people who create the media that we consume. people who create the media that we consume. I'm not like very eager to go and support him. But did this make me a better person? Did this make me think about, you know, did his work make me think about society in a better way? Did it make me more motivated to be an honest journalist? Did it make me more observant of the society around me? Did it make me think more about the way that I want to be active in the society to which I belong. I never liked Warren Ellis. I've always liked, you know, Spider Jerusalem. That's who I identified with.
Starting point is 00:26:34 But Spider Jerusalem is not a household name. There are no movie or TV adaptations, probably because there are no heroes in his world. So how could superhero stories do better in portraying journalists? Well, first of all, Maya Phillips says they have to break the mold. The journalists fall on one extreme or the other of that, that they're either praising this hero and fawning over them without actually examining it even further. Because I say this as a critic, like you can examine something critically,
Starting point is 00:27:09 but not also be just like fawning over it. It doesn't have to be propaganda. Or the opposite extreme is like the Jonah Jameson, like without even thinking about it, just like totally shooting down these heroes. Like there is a middle path there. And here's where I think the fans are ahead of the game. At the beginning of the episode, I mentioned a reporter character named Christine Everhart, who appeared briefly in the Iron Man movies. She also appeared in a couple of viral videos that Marvel put out, which were literally fake news. I'm Christine Everhart. This week on a special edition of Newsfront,
Starting point is 00:27:45 the world the hero leaves behind. But on the fan fiction website, Archive of Our Own, the fans have turned Christine into a major character, and they have proven that there is a desire to see journalists ask tough questions of powerful people, even if they're people that we like. My favorite one of these stories is called, Can I Quote You on This? It's by a writer who goes by the name Wix. And this fan fiction story takes place after the movie Age of Ultron. Christine Everhart is sent to the Avengers headquarters to do a puff piece. But when she notices that Tony Stark is not in a publicity photo of the team, she starts asking questions, as any good reporter should.
Starting point is 00:28:33 Here is the actress Mallory Kasdan reading a section of that story. Tony's a consultant with the Avengers, Steve clarifies. He's not an official Avengers member. A consultant, she asks, as she glances in Tony's direction. So, Mr. Stark is not part of the Avengers lineup? He didn't pass the entrance exams. Clint laughs, and she turns her attention back to them. Entrance exam? What did that look like? She asks. An entrance exam will sound good in print.
Starting point is 00:29:05 Proof, I guess, that you're not all just adding members lackadaisically. There was rigorous psychological profiling, Natasha Romanoff says. And how did that go? Did Tony go into S.H.I.E.L.D., get tested by the best of the best? Christine doesn't mention how S.H.I.E.L.D. was technically a fanatical order bent on world domination. So really, them saying that Iron Man needed to go far away was probably a point in his favor rather than out of it. I was sent into Stark Industries to oversee Tony in his natural habitat and report back. Sent in, Christine says. So you were spying on him. I was profiling him, Natasha corrects, and Christine nods slowly. I went into Stark Industries and poised myself in a position that would attract his attention.
Starting point is 00:29:48 And when I was in his inner circle, I observed his behaviors and reactions to the situation at hand. What situation? The whiplash event. Well, shouldn't Tony have been accepted based on his response time and success rate at the expo? Christine asks. There were no lives lost, and the area was contained. He was erratic during the entire event, and a loose cannon. You remember the birthday party, Natasha asks, and Christine frowns. Where he got drunk in the suit?
Starting point is 00:30:17 Christine asks, and Natasha makes a there-you-go movement with her hand. But even drunk in this suit, Tony didn't attack or assault anyone. He behaved the same way he would have if he'd just been wearing a normal three-piece suit. He destroyed his house, Natasha tries to remind her, but Christine was there, and that's not entirely what she would say about what happened. Did the others get an exam? Steve is Captain America, Natasha says, like that somehow gives him a Hail Mary. Clint and I were S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Sam proved himself during the Washington incident. When you broke into a government facility and stole government property, Christine thinks to herself, and attacked a threat you
Starting point is 00:30:55 didn't inform outside parties of, who could have assisted on American soil? Thor is Thor. Natasha says it with a smile, and Christine doesn't try to point anything out with that statement. It'd be far too easy. Vision was approved by Thor's hammer, and Wanda was rehabilitated. Good God. Okay, so let's recap real quick, just to make sure I've got this all down correctly.
Starting point is 00:31:18 She says as she looks at her page. There is an entrance exam that apparently only Tony Stark has to undergo, an exam done by a government agency that had and has no real authority that ended up being Hydra in disguise. There were a lot of good people in S.H.I.E.L.D. too who didn't know about Hydra, Steve interjects, and Christine holds up her hand to silence him as she continues. An exam that was done honeypot style during an event where, and correct me if I'm wrong, the subject was under heightened stress and severe palladium poisoning, which could impair response times and reactions, and yet despite these problems, managed to save half a city with no civilian casualties, and you're telling me he somehow failed? Natasha seems to realize that she
Starting point is 00:32:02 shouldn't answer that question for the first time today, and Christine looks at Tony. Tony, what did the report say? Classic narcissist and that I'm not a team player. Are you kidding me right now? Christine asks and glances at them. Okay, ignoring all of that, please inform me of how your rigorous psychological profiling admitted Wanda Maximoff onto the team.
Starting point is 00:32:26 That's inside information. I'll bet it is. I think this interview is over, Ms. Everhart, Clint says firmly, and she slowly closes her notebook. On my website, I put a link to the original full-length story from Archive of Our Own. Also, if you want to learn more about Archive of Our Own, I interviewed one of their founders, Francesca Coppa, in 2018.
Starting point is 00:32:56 I also put the radio drama that I did from eight years ago on my site as well. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Maya Phillips, Sean Kelly, James Quealy, Petra Mayer, Liz Publica, Mallory Kasdan, and Wix for giving us permission to adapt their story. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media.
Starting point is 00:33:29 That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode.
Starting point is 00:33:45 And there was so much more that we covered in all those conversations that I just couldn't fit into this episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

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