Welcome

Welcome to Feather Dusters at 400 Yards, my blog about the British television series The Avengers. There’s a lot of cool stuff to explore in this groundbreaking series that spanned the entire decade of the 1960s: the characters, the performances, scene and episode analysis, technical aspects of the production, and more. Plus there are pages for Avengers fanfiction, music videos, and fan art! Links to audio versions of my blogs and fanfic are available on the podcasts page. So click on a tag or a category or something in the navigation menu, or just keep scrolling, and explore along with me.

Please also read the comments policy before commenting on anything I write. This policy is strictly enforced. Thanks!

A Bloglet About Telepaths

In “Too Many Christmas Trees,” there’s a scene where Emma opens a bunch of Christmas cards for Steed. All of the cards are from women (including from Cathy), and there’s subtext that these women have all had some kind of relationship with Steed in the past, including sexual relationships (Steed: ”mmm … Carlotta….”)

But what if those cards were fake? (Well, maybe except for the one from Cathy, but even that one might have been.) What if Jeremy was actually the one to create and send the cards to make it look like Steed was fooling around, and then planted the suggestion in Steed’s mind that these were all women he had been with in the past?

I just find it really suspicious that all of a sudden there are a bunch of indications that Steed might be messing around behind Emma’s back, and that all of these hints are put in places where Emma is going to encounter them, and that they’re all put there at the same time that there’s this telepath dude that wants Emma for himself and is willing to manipulate both her mind and Steed’s to get what he wants.

Steed’s Neurodivergence in “The Master Minds”

The Season 4 episode “The Master Minds” centers on a group of geniuses who meet for retreats where they learn new things and take exams for fun and generally get to pal around with people who are on their own level. The problem is that the group, called RANSACK, has been created by some other geniuses who hypnotize the  folks at the retreat to make them do things like steal state secrets and advanced military hardware.

Steed is called in to the case when Sir Clive Todd is found shot in the head inside a top-secret vault, where he apparently was helping to steal sensitive documents. Sir Clive and his accomplices got into the vault by disguising themselves as Horse Guards, but when Sir Clive accidentally sets off the alarm, the leader of the group commands the third member of the party to shoot Sir Clive, whereupon the other two men leave their accomplice for dead.

Headcanons and Homosexuality

So yesterday someone posted this meme about Steed and Mrs Peel on tumblr:

[image description: Black and white photo of Patrick Macnee as John Steed and Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. Superimposed on the picture is a screenshot of a tumblr post that reads “lesbian/gay man besties is so fun like we’re best friends we’re married we’re the same person we’re siblings we’re each other’s grandparents. what’s not to get.” /end description]

This elicited a collective “um, wut” response from the Avengers fandom, the end result of which was the original poster accusing us of homophobia and blocking at least some of us.

This isn’t the first instance of this sort of thing. People post “teehee Steed gay” or “teehee Emma lesbian” stuff and then are shocked to find that the actual fandom doesn’t accept their headcanon, so they start calling names and then take their marbles and go home, unwilling to learn that homophobia has nothing to do with fans rejecting that headcanon.

So in honor of this latest Blessed Event, I’m reposting a couple of screeds I wrote on tumblr in response to the gay Steed/lesbian Emma headcanon.

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PSA: Warning About the New Tumblr Post+

If any of you are on tumblr and create fan content there, please beware of the new post+ feature, which allows users to monetize their blogs by selling subscriptions.

Tumblr is actively saying that this is a great way to support fan content creators, but it is anything but. Monetizing fan content will get you sued eight ways to Sunday, and the TOS for this new service explicitly says that you will not be protected, either by tumblr or by the third-party company who is managing post+.

Just stay tf away from post+. It’s a bad and dangerous idea.