ponett town @ponett - Tumblr Blog

Convenient links:

@slarpg - Blog for my game Super Lesbian Animal RPG, available on Steam and itch! Read the free prologue comic here, or get the soundtrack here!!

@thankskenpenders - My Sonic blog

My art tag, and also my art-only blog @ponettplus

External links: personal website, formal blog for my writing, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Bluesky, Fur Affinity, Twitch, Backloggd, Letterboxd

whenlovetriestoleave

angel's egg (1985) dir. mamoru oshii

#angel's egg #scenery

ventussolder

BIG fan of this subtitle gag

#hlvrai #rtvs

shetheyslain

Dahling you simply must read this book! It’s all about this devious little caterpillar who simply gorges himself on all manner of divine things

mochamokat

hot bean barista

#anthro #suggestive

spitblaze

finally some realism in video games

#baroque

magicfriend1000000000000000

i keep hearing people throw the term "mcu dialogue" around for stuff for even mildly sardonic, wry or tongue in cheek humor that doesn't land for them, to where as a term it's basically lost its meaning to me. in your opinion, what qualifies as "mcu dialogue" and what is it that makes it uniquely bad?

I assume this is in reference to some posts I made on Bluesky about overused critical buzzwords and/or the post where I said the new Rayman Legends remake adds "MCU dialogue." The phrase has absolutely been overused to the point that it's often thrown around where it doesn't apply—people will use it to complain about anything they don't like that has jokes in the script—but I do think it's at least sometimes a useful point of critical reference. It's referring to an identifiable style of writing used in a massively popular and influential franchise that spans dozens of movies, after all.

One of the defining traits of "MCU dialogue" or "Whedonesque dialogue" is having lots of quippy banter and one-liners. And this can of course be done well, but it's often done very poorly. I think to me bad "MCU dialogue" is quippy and gives off the air of comedy without actually having actual jokes. (Again, it is crucially important to me that there is a difference between this stuff and the concept of comic relief as a whole.) At its worst you get the stock "he's right behind me isn't he?" "sooooo that just happened" "they fly now? they fly now" type dialogue that gives off a slightly flippant, sarcastic, joke-adjacent tone without actually being funny. You see this a lot in genre fiction that's afraid it'll lose the lowest common denominator audience if it takes itself too seriously, so it undercuts itself with a vague air of humor. The MCU did not invent this style of dialogue, and there are definitely some MCU movies that pull off comic relief better than their imitators, but given they've been so dominant in pop culture for almost 20 years they're just an easy face to attach to a style people are getting tired of in genre fiction.

The Rayman Legends Retold trailer gives us a good example of this with the bit where Rayman's like "It's four against one! You don't stand a chance!" and then it cuts to a roaring monster and then he's like "Maybe he stands a LITTLE bit of a chance." This is just total screenwriting 101 filler joke stuff, just having the characters say a cliche for the sake of saying something even though it's not actually funny. The scene gains nothing compared to if it was a completely silent exchange—which it WAS in the original version of the game! But the data says quips make a story go down easier, so now there's a quip.

For further reading I'll just refer to Austin Walker's post on the subject of "MCU dialogue" from back when Forspoken was the example people were talking about. That gets into more of the issue of genre stories using this type of smirking dialogue in an attempt to prove they're "in on the joke" to broader audiences and undercutting their own storytelling in the process.

#anon #ask