the next big Marvel villain is gonna be named “Killworker” or something and his catchphrase is gonna be “workers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains” and he’s gonna slit a child’s throat as he says it
In case people don’t get this, Marvel movies are propaganda where they present the hero as a billionaire in the right (Tony Stark), against a working class person who’s been done wrong by said billionaire - except they have the working class villain’s understandable motives be derailed/de-valued by having them act monstrously in their pursuit.
Literally every single iron man villain was rich. You could say maybe whiplash was not but he was 100% incredibly well connected and not struggling in the slightest financially. His motivation also had nothing to do with “working class” anything, it was smth to do with his dad dying or some shit.
Actually now that I think about about it, the only mcu movie that has this trope is Far from Home. And obviously Falcon and the Winter soldier. Literally no other major marvel venture that I can think of has a working class villain fighting a billionaire. If you can find more thats great, but its still a very small amount compared to the major marvel properties that do not have it. No phase 1 or 2 movie has a villain as described above.
I dont even fucking like Marvel movies. But this is fucking insane. Are you actually trying to say that Marvel movies are fucking propaganda? To say what? Rich ppl good poor ppl bad?
Holy shit the fucking reach on this post from tumblr leftists to seem cool and counterculture. They are fucking simplistic superhero stories. They rarely ever get complex and have only had 2 working class villains fighting billionaires.
Please for the love of god, go outside. You have tumblr brainworms if you honestly think Iron Man, a movie series where a billionaire fights two other billionaires and an accomplished engineer is somehow “propaganda” to accomplish some vague goal of convincing the public that poor people are bad??
On one hand I get where OP is coming from, but this makes a pretty damn solid point.
see, the MCU isn’t some kind of vague “rich people good” propaganda. That doesn’t make any sense.
The problem is that it’s military propaganda.
Pretty funny to call out a simplistic post by claiming that Marvel has simplistic stories, as if it’s radical to argue that biggest-budget movie franchise in history has cultural reach and is not politically neutral but a reflection of the system that made it.
Anyway. Yes, the MCU is military propaganda and this has been talked enough about that it doesn’t really need elaboration, but the US military exists to serve its economic (capitalistic) interests and vice versa. It’s all interconnected.
The point isn’t that the MCU is, specifically, propaganda for rich people and against poor people. The point is that the MCU, and honestly Western media at large to a greater or lesser extent, frequently gives its antagonists the colours and trappings of real-life historical movements that are critical of the status quo that dictates the production of these movies, and this influences how we see those movements.
Even if the antagonists are fictional and their motives are divorced from the people and movements they echo, their depiction on screen shapes people’s perception of and reaction to those movements.
If you like, a more obvious example is Amon from Legend of Korra. A villain who talks openly about equality for all, denigrates the perceived unjust systemic power of the benders (which almost all the main characters are), and whose posters are blatantly inspired by various early 20th century pro-worker posters. Unsurprisingly, it is never actually explored in full whether his movement had some basis to it and the topic is dropped even before he’s defeated because it turns out he was only using the workers to his own ends (sound familiar?)
Marvel’s stories are also often part of a broader trend wherein the villains or antagonists are established as being at least partially motivated by injustice. Hell, the hyenas in The Lion King just want access to better land where they’re not starving all the time. It could serve as an interesting reflection of how the politically disenfranchised and oppressed can turn towards fascism (in the face of Scar, represented by very obvious visual allegory), except that across three movies, their plight is, IIRC, never talked of again and we never examine how the supposedly just rule of the lions has led to this situation for them in the first place.
So no, it is not Marvel specifically doing this by any means. But Marvel is very much worth being talked about because no other franchise has a budget quite this big, a reach quite this big, is created in part in collaboration with the actual IRL US military, and produced and owned by one of the biggest corporations (Disney).
Also, you’re kidding yourself if you think the popularity of Tony Stark has nothing to do with the ease with which Elon Musk has elevated himself to a very similar position of wacky billionaire inventor with inexplicably good PR.
