LogFAQs > #937140853

I think I've spent a combined total of like 10 hours over the last 2 days listening to random pirate chanties on YouTube. I'm pretty sure the madness has started to set in.



The Wave Master posted...

My point is that clearly the film isn't for us, but I see the target they were aiming for, and it misses for us, but not for her.

I don't really mind that, as much as I always feel like I'm kind of taking crazy pills when people overpraise something that felt mediocre at best, not based on the objective quality as much as because of the social politics involved.

Same deal with Wonder Woman - people praised that movie like it was the greatest superhero movie ever made, and I was like, are you insane? That shit was pure mediocrity, and only really felt better than it actually was if you were comparing it to the movies that immediately preceded it in the DCU.

Make that exact same movie, but with a male lead, and the perception of the film would be MUCH more negative. Or at least much more apathetic.

I get the whole "We need more representative movies" thing, and I can see why someone might get more out of a film if they can relate to the main character (even if I've literally never had that experience from a film as a white male). But is it too much to ask for a GOOD representative movie?

I think Black Panther nailed the balance of social politics while still being a strong film in and of itself. I don't think Captain Marvel did.

(Then again, I'm still bitter that they used Carol "dull as dishwater" Danvers instead of space lesbian or black woman made out of laser beams, so I was likely always going to have a negative opinion of the movie.)



The Wave Master posted...

I personally don't like the choices made in Captain Marvel, but I'm not going to call her Captain Msrysue, and be a jerk. It's like calling Black Pnther, "Negro Cat."

I'd disagree 112%, because calling her Mary Sue isn't about her gender as much as it is about the writing.

Mary Sue is a very specific criticism, which says a lot about how a character is written in the setting. It's not even necessarily gender-specific (hence why some people will use "Mary Stu" when talking about male characters in the same sense). It's usually used in the context of a character who almost seems like a glorified self-insert fanfic character (which is where the term originally came from), where the moment they show up the entire universe effectively starts to worship them.

And while I wouldn't go so far as to say Carol is a Mary Sue, there are definitely tendencies there where I can see why someone might start thinking that way. Making her suddenly the entire reason why the Avengers are called the Avengers certainly doesn't help, especially because it's so unnecessary, is blatant retconning, and seems to be a thing solely to justify trying to make her the central focus of the universe in the future.

Actually, that's my biggest problem with the movie, honestly. It retcons a BUNCH of things, and in almost every case, the retcon is both unnecessary, and adds absolutely nothing of value (or outright detracts from or contradicts previous things). I'd have hated them doing that even if it wasn't Carol Danvers - make the lead character a cis het white male and I'd keep in the parts about the callsign being Avenger, bringing in the Tesseract, and the whole Fury/cat thing, and I'd still be calling bullshit.

Black Panther's biggest problem, by comparison, was that he was the least interesting character in his own movie. Pretty much everyone else other than maybe Martin Freeman was more interesting than T'Challa. But that's always a risk you run with more serious, stoic characters.

Carol's problem isn't that she's a woman. It's that she's a boring woman.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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