Board 8 > MCU General 10 - I Am Groot

(+) Yeah! (+)

Iron Man I knew about because he had action figures that were easy to get. But he was nowhere near Spiderman levels of popularity I would say

Also, maybe time for everyone to let things go and break bread. We're talking about comics and their media like... we're all nerds. No need for any attacks.

Y'all do know the song Iron Man is not based on the Marvel character, right?

Fun fact: the original title of the song was Iron Bloke but thankfully we don't live in the timeline where that ended up sticking

Johnbobb posted...

Fun fact: the original title of the song was Iron Bloke but thankfully we don't live in the timeline where that ended up sticking

Man that timeline would have been way better.

Johnbobb posted...

Y'all do know the song Iron Man is not based on the Marvel character, right?

Oh look another Wikipedia troll coming to prove his point

the black sabbath appreciation squad is disgusting

If we are going anecdotal now I'll share my experience as a casual comic book fan who loved the 90s Marvel cartoons and occasionally played heroclix.

I knew Ant Man for having silly Ant powers and slapping his wife. I knew he was an Avenger and could change size.

I knew Shang Chi only because I had his heroclix which just told me he looked like Liu Kang and was just a fighter.

Mr_Lasastryke posted...

uh

scarletspeed7 posted...

Maybe not all of them - if you're, say, a diehard DC guy, maybe not.

Here's the problem with me personally, I'm way more of a DC nut and have read much less Marvel comics. I'm still quite familiar with their history and characters though, and I have spent a lot of time talking/observing conversations about Marvel stories. I was plenty aware of who Ant-Man was before even heavily getting into comics. And yet with all of that, I still had never heard of Shang-Chi before his movie. And I still don't know a whole lot about him since he's basically just Iron Fist with cultural sensitivity (this is not a bad thing do not mistake what I'm saying plz).

I didn't say ALL comic book readers were unaware of him, but proportionally you'd still get many of them saying they didn't know who Shang-Chi was while naturally they would know Ant-Man.

I'm getting really bored of this argument now though since it seems to be going around in circles as is typical for the internet. I'm out.

Maniac64 posted...

I knew Shang Chi only because I had his heroclix which just told me he looked like Liu Kang and was just a fighter.

Yesss

This is the main exposure I had to Shang Chi too

Coincidentally I just realized The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had the same director as the first Blade. Mostly on remembering the Nostalgia Critic cracking a joke at his and writer David S. Goyer's expense about them being "people we thought would be comic book gods" with posters for League and Batman v. Superman showing up on screen.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Coincidentally I just realized The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had the same director as the first Blade. Mostly on remembering the Nostalgia Critic

I thought this topic couldn't get even worse but here we are.

You can always count on LMS to deliver

Speaking of cool coincidences, did you know the first episode of the Orville had the same composer as Homeward Bound? Pretty interesting to think about.

HanOfTheNekos posted...

Speaking of cool coincidences, did you know the first episode of the Orville had the same composer as Homeward Bound? Pretty interesting to think about.

get the heck out of here this is MCU only talk

Thor 4 drops on D+ on September 8th!

At least what I brought up is related to Marvel. That was supposed to be an addendum to the realization that Disney owns the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.

What's funny is DC technically owned League of Extraordinary Gentlemen first.

Oh yeah huh.

I thought that was why you said this LMS

LinkMarioSamus posted...

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which funnily enough is now owned by Disney).

Since it was originally a DC product and because of movie license shenanigans it's owned by Disney now. Which is indeed hilarious!

It's because I was likening The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to The Avengers. For that matter the Snipes Blade movies are owned by Warner Bros. IIRC.

Heck, Disney technically owns the 1966 Batman movie.

Lopen posted...

Yesss

This is the main exposure I had to Shang Chi too

woah other heroclix people no way

it definitely exposed me to a lot of more obscure characters

Aecioo posted...

Oh look another Wikipedia troll coming to prove his point

the black sabbath appreciation squad is disgusting

Wait a minute. This sounds like rock and/or roll!

The whole comparison between League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Avengers doesn't make sense. They're both super teams, but League isn't the end product of a shared universe. The closest thing to this pre Avengers is more like, I don't know, Godzilla films, the Russell T. Davies Dr. Who seasons or Jay and Silent Bob or something.

Yeah I wasn't thinking of the shared universe idea, more the general premise of the story.

I happened to land on Infinity War on FX tonight and I haven't been able to stop watching it. It's essentially the perfect MCU movie. Maybe part of the reason Phase 4 is struggling a bit is it's getting compared to this gold standard, and only No Way Home measures up.

Yeah IW is the best one. The thing about Phase 4 is that I'm pretty sure most people aren't expecting every movie to be IW/Endgame quality now. They just want there to be some tension/build up to something else. Hence why, in my anecdotal experience, the most well-received stuff seemed to be whatever was building to the multiverse storyline (mostly Loki and MoM). Even though I personally still think Hawkeye is the best Phase 4 production, because if I was running things, the next big project would've been New/Young Avengers against a smaller-scale global threat instead of the multiverse arc.

It's wild to me they're setting up Young Avengers but then they'll all be in their mid-20s by the time they get around to filming it. It makes no sense to me, and it feels like leaving money on the table for something easy.

While I don't know if multiverse makes the most sense from a storytelling perspective as an arc right now, if you want to have the most fun with the crossover appeal it's important to do it now. Alfred Molina is 69 now. Willem Dafoe is 67. Patrick Stewart is 82. You don't want people to age out of viably being able to be brought back to play these parts you're throwing em in. You can recast (first class Xavier is still spry) but recasting removes the point in some ways too.

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

It's wild to me they're setting up Young Avengers but then they'll all be in their mid-20s by the time they get around to filming it. It makes no sense to me, and it feels like leaving money on the table for something easy.

I can imagine this killed the Power Pack plans

well, that and being Power Pack

shulk ep2 hours away hype

GuessMyUserName posted...

I can imagine this killed the Power Pack plans

well, that and being Power Pack

anything based on the idea that the characters involved have to be children is just not going to work well

like if you start out with 10 year-old PP kids, theyre going to be 16 by the time you film Power Pack 3: Bedtime and only two years will have gone by in universe. its a mess. The gaps between individual character/team projects are just too big.

GuessMyUserName posted...

shulk ep2 hours away hype

I'm really feeling it

Let's not lose our heads, though!

oh geez 8 minutes shorter than last week :(

awh it's still gettin' some good lols outta me, Jen's great as is her bestie

Bruce: "I'm a *completely* different person now, literally"



*edit* oh god the other headlines in the Fresh Jobs article

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/3/9/AAN7AaAADmZ7.jpg

I actually don't know what to draw attention to more: the Wolverine or the Eternals reference

lol finally Mark Linn-Baker joins the MCU

now when is Bronson Pinchot getting in here

I was really impressed with episode 2. Maslany is fantastic, the plot is compelling, and I think the writing has done a good job of being funny without trying too hard. I feel like they're handling the whole 'woman in the workplace' theme with deft hands, too. I'm excited for where this series is going.

If people are bitching about the fourth wall breaking I have to assume it's because they're super Deadpool fans, "only mah deadpool can break the fourth walls!"

As a Deadpool fan I have no issue with She-Hulk breaking the 4th wall. If anything I just want the two characters to meet now and break it together

They ought to do a segment where it seems like she's breaking the 4th wall and she's actually talking to Deadpool

I meant super Deadpool fans, the literally obsessed ones. But I do hope as well that he gets to meet She-Hulk after his introduction into the MCU for some fun team fourth wall breaks. Never seen anything like that before.

However it's still odd to think about Ryan Reynolds in the MCU. I can't even imagine how they're gonna implement him.

CassandraCain posted...

If people are bitching about the fourth wall breaking I have to assume it's because they're super Deadpool fans, "only mah deadpool can break the fourth walls!"

At this rate I'm ready to file off half the complaints aimed at Phase 4 as just "go away leftist politics", and from people who likely don't care much about Marvel in the first place.

Phase 4 is basically Disney-era Star Wars. Lots of good criticisms can be made of both and yet so many of the ones that are made are in the worst faith. I dunno if this is an anti-Disney thing or just that these franchises are so big they make easy targets.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

At this rate I'm ready to file off half the complaints aimed at Phase 4 as just "go away leftist politics", and from people who likely don't care much about Marvel in the first place.

Actually at this point I'm pretty sure you've done this with all complaints about anything

It's not really a good idea

LinkMarioSamus posted...

At this rate I'm ready to file off half the complaints aimed at Phase 4 as just "go away leftist politics", and from people who likely don't care much about Marvel in the first place.

Phase 4 is basically Disney-era Star Wars. Lots of good criticisms can be made of both and yet so many of the ones that are made are in the worst faith. I dunno if this is an anti-Disney thing or just that these franchises are so big they make easy targets.

you're the best

I'm just tired of this crowd putting up a hissy fit at every little thing Marvel does now. Again I did not mean to say the only people who don't like Phase 4 are bigots, holy heck.

Yeah I'm still not used to this guys. Before it seemed like Star Wars got the brunt of this but now I'm convinced at least 40% of criticism directed towards even the sequel trilogy is borne of varying degrees of bigotry, to say nothing of Phase 4. I just really loathe how this taints the discourse surrounding generally flawed works to such an extent.

"this crowd"

almost none of those people are here and we don't really want to engage with that crowd so you're not accomplishing anything worthwhile by bringing them up

What taints the discourse is you constantly bringing this up unprompted

CoolCly posted...

So I saw Multiverse of Madness.

Great movie, lots of really cool action, the horror bend was fantastic with a lot of crazy shit. Doctor Strange himself was maybe the best he's been in the entire MCU. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It ruined the MCU forever and I hate it. I'll never forgive this movie.

So anyways going back to this post I made

SPOILERS FOR MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS AND WANDAVISION

This really comes down to Wanda. If you look at this movie in isolation, she's phenomenal. An extremely creative and unstoppable movie monster, probably one of the best villains / obstacles in a Marvel movie to date. That scene attacking the temple where she climbs out of the mirror? She fit into Sam Raimi's style beautifully, it's like she was meant for this.

....Except, she wasn't. Her motivation of wanting to help her kids wasn't too fleshed out other than basic mothers instinct, but if you haven't seen WandaVision its probably good enough to just be like "ok yeah this was probably established in WandaVision" and accept it as is. But.... this wasn't really established in her show at all - in fact, the opposite was established. She did do some pretty monstrous things in the way she used the town - she was in essence a villain that abused the people of Westview. This is partly justified in showing that this was a grief mechanism that she was going through and her powers mostly did this on auto pilot to give her what she needed to grieve, so she wasn't fully aware of the harm she was putting through. We do see that she kinda did know, which puts a lot of culpability on her. In the end, though, when she's truly faced with what she's done, she does recognize that this is wrong and she can't continue to do this - and chooses the ultimate sacrifice of essentially killing her two kids and this version of Vision in order to release the towns people. The journey along the way with her new family was fantastic, and that last scene with Vision in the living room was incredibly touching. I'd say WandaVision was borderline a masterpiece except for a few glaring problems

a) the side stuff with Rambeau, Kat Dennings, and Agent Woo were great to begin with, but that sideplot got worse and worse with the SWORD leader guy to the end that all these characters felt extremely tacked on. The SWORD guy being like "WANDA IS BAD" and the trio being like "no she's good actually!" felt very contrived on both sides.

b) Agatha was wonderful in a lot of ways but their fight ends up falling a bit flat

c) Wanda flies off after releasing the town as if she can just pretend she didn't hold them all hostage as a supervillain. Yeah, she gave up her children and Vis, but this doesn't feel like taking responsibility, it felt like running away.

Now, going into MoM - we have a Wanda who was extremely grief stricken after losing Vision to Thanos (and also practically killing him herself) and creates mini universe using other people to live out her dream life. She realizes this is wrong and that she has to move on from her grief, and that hurting these townspeople for her idyllic life is not okay. (It's very clear that her sitcom Vision would never have been okay with letting this continue and she would have had to force him to play along like everyone else, but I do think this was an inherent realization on her own part rather than just being pushed to this choice by Vis). So this Wanda releases the hex and Vis and her children disappear. Then she flies off with the darkhold and researches a possible way to find her family again.

So we get into MoM- and what is Wanda like - she's dark and twisted by the Darkhold, and she's driven solely by the goal of finding her boys. She wants to take her place as their mother - so she wants to use America to go to another universe to find some kids to adopt. She's willing to do whatever it takes to do this, and that really does mean "whatever.".

1) she sent monsters to other dimensions to capture America so she could kill America and take her powers. We know that these monsters killed at least one other version of Doctor Strange - so even though we don't know it's her right then - we now know that she was willing to kill basically anyone in another universe if they get in her way. later, we see her kill all those heroes in the other universe with only slight annoyance. she may not even see them as people

2) she kills many sorcerer's in Kamar Taj. These people certainly aren't bad guys, but they aren't even really neutral - the would probably generally be considered protectors of the world and it's people. They may have even fought in the final battle against Thanos. She's murdering a bunch of good guys here. She made some small attempt at "come on guys, just hand her over so I don't have to kill you all" so it wasn't without second thought.... but that thought was dismissed pretty quickly. She is fine murdering a whole lot of good people to get what she wants.

3) When asked what she would do to the Wanda that is already the mother to her children... she hesitates to answer. Because the answer is she is going to murder that Wanda and take her place. She is going to kill the mother of these two boys so she can have her perfect fantasy life with them.

4) When Wong asks why she's going to all these lengths when she probably could have just gotten America to help her do this the right way..... she just says that she needs to take America's powers for herself JUST IN CASE anything ever might go wrong in the future..... what if her boys get sick??? she might need to go to another universe to find the answer, so she needs this power at her finger tips! This is pure megalomania - she's not doing this killing because its just the absolutely way to get what she wants - which would have already been very bad. She's doing it just because she might as well go 10 extra miles. This character is pure evil.

So - how does this jive with how WandaVision left her? The Wanda that let her two actual children and the love of her life fade away so that a town of random people can move on with their lives. Would that Wanda have done ANY of this? HELL NO. That Wanda would be fighting tooth and nail against this Wanda. It's a completely different person.

Going back to my complaints about WandaVision - complaint B really has no relevance here. In complaint A - the side characters steadfastly saying "Wanda is a hero! we can trust her to do the right thing!" look REALLY ****ING STUPID now. The SWORD guy was basically right to take the shot at her at every opportunity. She was doing bad things then, and then went on to do MUCH MUCH WORSE things now. Problem C really bugged me when WandaVision ended, but everyone I talked to basically said "this will probably be addressed in Multiverse of Madness, don't worry about it". Holy **** is this the opposite. They didn't just not address the fact that she left out facing any repercussions for her actions - they destroy the credibility she had just earned by returning the town back to normal. The continuity from WandaVision to MoM is just not there - and further stains what was an otherwise phenomenal show.

But how did we get here? Why did Wanda have such a dramatic change? Well - the movie's excuse is that the Darkhold corrupts things, so shes bad now! Really? Does anybody actually accept this? You can take any character with emotional growth and nuance and just say "well they had possession of an evil thing in between movies so they are bad now". Doctor Strange has his third eye now - I guess next movie it will be totally fine for him to go on murder sprees - that's just who he is now. The Darkhold isn't a valid excuse - it's just all that there is to cover up this gigantic hole in storytelling.

What *REALLY* caused this is production timing. MoM went into production with this idea of making Wanda the villain, and at the time they clearly did not know how well WandaVision was going to turn out and how cathartic and endearing her story of grief would be. WandaVision *could* have gone a different way and ended with Wanda on a more villainous path - the pieces were all there. That may be why they ended it the way they did with her leaving. But that's really not at all the story they told or the person they built her up to be. The reason there is such a gigantic disconnect between MoM and WandaVision is because they took two completely different approaches to writing her and did not put in the time and effort to get these lined up.

The result is that she's fantastic as a monster in MoM individually, but does not have any consistency with WandaVision - the connection is just straight up broken.

At this point, I have to ask. Why doesn't anybody seem to care about this? Is everybody just turning off their brain and enjoying these movies as dumb popcorn flicks? Quite frankly - that's never how I've seen the Marvel movies. I've always been very impressed individually with each movie but more importantly the consistency in the world building, character arcs, and power levels as characters show up in all kinds of different places. It's one of my favourite things to see in fiction when they do this well. Which is a bit funny considering one of the only people I've seen criticize this Wanda problem so heavily is Brandon Sanderson on his Intentionally Blank podcast - and he's known for essentially having an MCU of his own in how all his novels are connected....

Anyways - Wanda and Vision have always been a bit derided by fans of the movies- Age of Ultron, Civil War, and Endgame all had people saying "I don't care about these guys, they barely had any time at all". But I never felt that way. I always liked their little bit pieces in the story - I liked that the MCU would spare just a bit of time to have these smaller characters that aren't the main focus of the story - we can just check in with them now and then in different properties to see how they've changed or grown. That's one of the strongest aspects of the MCU - that makes it such a cut above basically any other franchise, and why everything in Infinity War / Endgame was so meaningful. It wasn't just mindless action with a bunch of action figures I know the names of - these characters all mean something to me after seeing everything gone through.

But if the MCU is just going to throw anything this in the trash now - what's the point of continuing to care? It's dipping further and further into multiverse shenanigans which inherently creates a risk of "none of this matters", but they are showing in many ways that they don't really care at all anymore.

Any individual movie in the past had flaws you could point to, but I think Phase 4 movies and the shows have been much worse. It seems clear to me that they are pushing these projects out, and where before I always felt they were doing their best and there were just a few aspects that weren't quite up to par despite best efforts, now I feel like it's more like "just make it good enough and don't worry about the parts that are bad". In Black Widow, they really do not care at all in maintaining believability that Natasha could survive any of that (plus the villain was garbage). In Falcon and the Winter Soldier, they just have such dumb stuff like having them bust Zemo out of prison immediately for no reason after trying nothing - it seems like they just don't care about maintaining a semblance of continuity.

WandaVision was nearly perfect except for a few glaring issues they could have fixed if they just took a bit more time ironing them out. TFATWS, Loki, and Hawkeye are swimming with issues despite the parts that are good. Is this the way that most projects are gonna go?

No Way Home was awesome, so I'll probably catch individual movies that catch my eye, but continuing to follow every project and seeing how it all ties together - this seems to be something I just shouldn't care about anymore.

So anyway. Multiverse of Madness. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It ruined the MCU forever and I hate it.

CoolCly posted...

What *REALLY* caused this is production timing. MoM went into production with this idea of making Wanda the villain, and at the time they clearly did not know how well WandaVision was going to turn out and how cathartic and endearing her story of grief would be. WandaVision *could* have gone a different way and ended with Wanda on a more villainous path - the pieces were all there. That may be why they ended it the way they did with her leaving. But that's really not at all the story they told or the person they built her up to be. The reason there is such a gigantic disconnect between MoM and WandaVision is because they took two completely different approaches to writing her and did not put in the time and effort to get these lined up.

At this point, I have to ask. Why doesn't anybody seem to care about this?

Many people (myself included) raised this point. I'd say the supposed mischaracterization of Wanda is one of the major complaints (second only to maybe turning the Illuminati into jobbers).

it seems like they just don't care about maintaining a semblance of continuity.

That's what happens when you go from well-established characters in a straightforward series of movies to adding even more movies per year with multiple tv shows all featuring less well-known characters.Things are being written and worked on at the same time with only a loose idea of a bigger picture, as opposed to earlier Phases when everything had a single end point (endgame).