#constructive complaining

[tyrannuspitch]

probably my final thoughts on rogers: the musical:

as i've mentioned in my tags a few time, i first watched the play in a terrible bootleg recording that i could barely see, and only later realised there was a much better version, which i flipped through and rewatched some major scenes in. i think the main effect of being unable to see was making it even less enjoyable for me than it might have been otherwise, but i did miss some significant details this way, and among them was the race-bending or race-blind casting of the avengers.

the avengers ensemble only show up as cameos/chorus members, and four of them are racebent: loki is black, hulk is black, hawkeye is east or southeast asian and iron man is (i think) south asian or middle eastern. (i can't find a cast list for the ensemble anywhere and even a good recording is still someone far away on stage in harsh lighting, so i'm sorry i have to guess 😬).

as with a lot of raceblind casting, this has... hm... implications?

for one thing, we have the classic "diverse ensemble with white hero" problem. as the "save the city" song goes on, it positions steve more and more as basically the leader of the avengers and the other avengers as begging for his help, which with a diverse avengers team and a white ~Captain America~ comes across pretty explicitly white savioury.

for another thing, their choice of who to make black is um. troubling. loki and hulk??? a rage monster and a villain who was previously white-supremacist coded???

and i feel like loki's casting is especially unfortunate because thor is still the whitest of white guys. and like... god idk how to say this because yes i can talk all day about loki's backstory being all about space racism. but if you want to relate that space racism to real-world racism, you have to handle it very very very delicately. you can't just throw it out there. which is not to say you can never have a non-white loki, but unless you're going to do a LOT of work, thor and loki should be the same race. otherwise you're invoking huge amounts of dehumanising baggage on a non-white villain basically uncritically and it just! looks! bad!

but of course they're not even trying to do it well. this is the captain america propaganda show and replacing themes critical of racism with themes of "trad white guy saves the world, sometimes from an evil black guy" works just fine for them. also they call aggressively white thor a god uncritically but whatever, that ship has sailed, i'm fine, i'm calm, i am not going to bite anyone 🙃

also as i say i am guessing here, but if iron man is middle eastern that's just kind of darkly funny at this point. diversity win, the guy who made a fortune war profiteering is from one of the countries he blew up. jesus christ.

[tyrannuspitch]

i've definitely reblogged that last post before but i love when fanartists make avengers!nyc look sort of, idk, gothic (genre) or post-apocalyptic... i know there's some emotional power to "normal, mundane city getting destroyed" but even so i find the aesthetics of the battle in the film so bland. and even if you want it to feel like a familiar world to begin with, imagine the power of that subtly changing as the battle goes on and the mcu as a whole crosses the line irreversibly into science fiction... and you don't have to make nyc Not Look Like NYC to achieve any of this. lighting, camera angles, colour grading, use of elements like smoke and rubble, all of these could do so much more for how the city and the battle feels. imo. yes i know this is my asgardian bias showing (of course the fantasy fan wants things to be more fantasy) but am i actually wrong

[tyrannuspitch]

recent mcu thoughts, entirely uninformed bc i'm just an outside observer at this point bc they haven't made a film i've enjoyed in almost thirteen years

i know it's a very very comic book thing (and it's also probably a fake reddit fanboy thing to complain about) but i really don't think moviegoers actually want to see The Mantle Passed On as much as the studio thinks they do. like yes in individual cases it might be powerful or whatever but when you're doing that in every franchise it just feels like you have a universe filled with knockoffs and it's like the cheapest and most underwhelming kind of sequel. or like when the whole main cast of a tv show quits but they try to keep it going with a New Generation even though obviously no one is going to enjoy that. like... drawing this comparison from the start is basically just setting them up for failure, bc the best they can hope to be is Like The Other Guy in which case why aren't we just seeing the other guy

the one movie which i've seen which gets this RIGHT is spiderverse and the thing about spiderverse is that it's about miles from the start. it's not a sequel to a peter parker film. if it was that would almost certainly drag it down a lot. they trust that we know spiderman as a concept and then they say they're doing something new with it, but its only baggage is basically genre expectation. not several other movies in the exact same series dragging behind it

a while ago i saw a youtuber with the hot take that the mcu isn't really cinema, just a very slow and badly structured tv show, and he really has a point lol

[tyrannuspitch]

okay. reflecting on lokasaga. unpopular opinions coming up.

i wasn't huge on AoA when i first read it, and now i've actually read it in the intended order (ie, having read JiM and YA directly beforehand) i still think it's my least favourite installment in this arc. i don't think it's bad, per se, but... hmm.

i think i find ewing's writing kind of cold. all the more so with gillen's for contrast. that's not a moral judgement - i don't mean it's cruel - but it's very abstract, and (for me) not very emotionally engaging or even authentic. loki's redemption in AoA is ultimately more like a clever, well-reasoned argument than an emotional journey. they learn, intellectually, how to change, and then they kind of just... do it. offscreen. and then they tell their alternative self how they did it.

i know it isn't meant to be that way. i know a lot of people find AoA profoundly moving. but for me, personally, it's just not quite... enough. i feel like i'm being cheated out of catharsis with wordplay.

i know this is partly about my taste. i am and always have been an angst lover. i like my protagonists morally grey and my happy endings bittersweet. maybe i am simply not the audience for a redemption arc at all. but idk. i do also think there's something to my criticism. especially since i think AoA literally is meant to end on a grey and bittersweet note... but it just doesn't quite ring true.

[tyrannuspitch]

the problem with the state of thor opinions is that people think they can just jump straight into advanced studies (thor's characterisation) without going through the prerequisites (loki's characterisation) and therefore they don't understand fundamental concepts of the entire thor franchise. like how odin is the fucking villain

[tyrannuspitch]

people sometimes criticise TDW for not doing enough for thor's character, and like, i get that the way he was directed was a little toned-down, but just in terms of story? there is actually a lot going on there. his ending may look similar to his T1 ending on the surface, but if you think about what he's saying it actually promises a very fresh direction for the character... which we just never get to see. so really, i think it's actually AOU that drops the ball.

like - thor loses his mother; thor almost reconciles with his brother and then loses him for a second time; thor is betrayed by his father and seems to be becoming disillusioned with the throne as a whole.

imagine a version of AOU that actually dealt with the implications of all this. grief, rage, moral turmoil... trust issues or even paranoia after a second member of thor's family has tried to kill him... the confusion and despair of having the greater part of his identity and worldview uprooted... i do approve of AOU just on the level that i think thor would try to bury all this and pretend he's fine, and that he might succeed for a little while - but the story should still end up breaking through his walls.

imagine if we got to see thor break down at this point - not as totally as in endgame, but enough that he can't keep playing a straightforward hero role. imagine if we actually saw his relationship with jane break down. imagine watching the avengers realise how little they actually know about this man, how much he's hidden from them, and how dangerous he could be. and i know i'm the villainous thor guy but i don't actually necessarily mean to argue for villain!thor here - i just want to see some real conflict between him and the planet he's chosen to run to from his feelings. especially since thor is implied to be beginning to recognise asgardian imperialism as the evil it is, and this planet has been a target of that many times before. and especially since the question of who thor is is one that thor can't answer any more than jane or the avengers can...

[tyrannuspitch]

the thor movies just really do not belong in the mcu and mcu brand synergy draining their lifeblood was the problem From The Beginning. sometimes i can't tell if this is really true or if it's just my bias as a thor stan who doesn't give a shit about anything else in the mcu and i would think the same of any other subfranchise if i'd happened to imprint on it, but then i hear how the average mcu fan perceives thor versus how i and other thor fans perceive him and i'm like yeah this is straight up irreconcilable. the history of mcu thor is the story of a bunch of producers futilely whacking a square peg against a round hole for four movies straight until the fifth where they finally jam it in by shattering the peg into splinters. and then everyone's like yaaaay we finally fixed that stupid peg no-one liked! everyone loves it now! and then they all act confused when they can't just scoop up those splinters to fit them into any successive holes

[tyrannuspitch]

but what if ragnarok was good. what if it was a tragedy. what if the death of a planet, even one that was the heart of a brutal empire, held the weight it deserved.

what if thor was noble and flawed and morally grey and he had to confront his flaws and crimes and asgard's twisted ideology and he really did begin to change but his change came too late to save his people, the very people he had committed all those horrors to protect.

and what if loki was finally vindicated in seeing the horror of asgard for what it is, but its destruction brought no relief. what if he and thor could finally recognise one another as fellow victims of odin, but only at the cost of odin himself. what if loki could only begin to heal by bringing about the end of the world, and he and thor could only be brothers again when no-one else remained.

and what if hela was just as tragic and complicated as her brothers. what if her death was not a victory but one more horror they failed to prevent. what if all that saved the sons of odin from their father's fate was each other, and hela, who never got to have a sibling, didn't know how to let them save her.