#mcu critique

[splendidlyselfish05]

So are we just going to pretend that what Jean Grey did here wasn't sexual assault? She kissed him and he only kissed her back because he thought that she was MJ. Just because Peter extended empathy towards her at the end doesn't mean that he's not a victim, and I am NOT falling for the "found family" propaganda between these two. And don't play the "she's a minor!!" card, I'm a minor as well and I still think that what she did was bullshit.

[gregxb]

Doctor Doom Is Not a Shortcut

I keep seeing people get excited about the idea of introducing Doctor Doom as the centerpiece of a massive Doomsday or Secret Wars style crossover right out of the gate, and I just do not think that works. Not for this character.

Doom is not a plug and play big bad. He is not Thanos where you can build him up in the background and then unleash him as a force of nature. Doom is deeply personal. He is ego, intellect, pride, insecurity, and conviction all wrapped together. If you skip the groundwork, you are not adapting Doom. You are reducing him to a guy in armor with a god complex, and that is the least interesting version of him.

If I were structuring this, I would take a slower, more deliberate approach.

First, you introduce Doom in a Fantastic Four sequel. Not a cameo, not a tease. A full introduction. Establish his rivalry with Reed Richards because that is the core of the character. That jealousy, that need to prove he is the superior mind, that inability to accept that Reed might actually be better. Without that, you are missing the spine of Doom entirely.

Second, you put him in a Doctor Strange sequel and adapt Triumph and Torment. This is where you actually meet Doom the man. His code. His sense of honor. His relationship with his mother. His willingness to work with Strange toward a common goal while still being completely and unapologetically Doom. This is where the audience starts to understand him, not just fear him.

Then, and only then, do you do your big crossover. Whether you call it Doomsday, Secret Wars, whatever. At that point, Doom is not being introduced. He is arriving. The audience understands why he believes he should be in control. They might even agree with him a little, which is exactly where you want them.

Because that is what makes Doom work. He is not just a villain to defeat. He is a perspective to wrestle with.

And then there is the casting idea that keeps floating around. Tying Doom to Robert Downey Jr. and linking him back to Tony Stark is a terrible idea. It is a disservice to the character and it reeks of desperation.

Doom does not need Stark’s shadow to be relevant. Doom is bigger than that. Making him a variant, a legacy echo, or anything that ties him back to Stark immediately undercuts his identity. Instead of Victor Von Doom, you get “what if Tony went bad,” and that is not even remotely the same thing. It shrinks the character at the exact moment you should be establishing how large he is.

It also signals a lack of confidence. Doom should be able to carry himself on presence alone. If the instinct is to lean on nostalgia casting to prop him up, then the character is already being mishandled.

Marvel might feel pressure to rush into a massive event to steady the ship, and I get that. But Doom is not the character you rush. He is the character you build around.

If you do it right, he is not a one movie villain. He is the center of an entire era. If you do it wrong, you burn one of the best villains in comics for a short term pop and spend the next ten years wishing you had taken your time.

[willofdpeople]

Before I go on this rant, I'd like to remind you all that Loki is now the best version of himself. I don't like the way there, I don't like what they did with the character, but it is what it is. So, I gotta ask,

What About Thor?

Loki sacrificed his entire life to sitting at the end of time. Wouldn't he be sad to know he'll never get a chance to see Thor, ever? Thor will never know he's alive, that he's the reason his timeline isn't spaghetti? And Loki will never get a chance to say goodbye.

Last time he saw Thor was this:

Is this where this relationship is left off? As opposed to what the show would have you believe, Thor is one of, if not the most significant relationship Loki has. And that's where you're abandoning it? You're not gonna give it a passing nod before Loki's going to spend the rest of his life alone?

[cryptovalid]

The Centrist Politics of the MCU

One of the most central themes of the MCU is its attitude towards authority and violence. It’s a very interesting topic, but I think it’s worth discussing the pattern.

Long story short, the MCU is all about using the aesthetics of revolution, while undercutting the substance of it. It is uniquely effective at marketing the idea of rejecting authority, while also reinforcing the status quo.

Captain America is depicted as defying orders in almost every property he’s in. Carol Danvers frames her entire character arc around questioning authority. Thanos and Kang are specifically framed as genocidal despots that justify their actions by claiming to protect the people. Ultimately, this is even Hydra’s justification. 

Freedom vs. Authoritarianism is often framed as a tension between ethics and security. And on a dramatic level, this works. It gives heroes a nice internal conflict and character arc, and can be repeated for every single threat. 

The problem is that the MCU consistently frames the authoritarian as both sincere and ultimately correct. And it consistently frames actual soldiers like Sam, Carol and Steve as agents of critical resistance.

Thanos’ plan is a good example: at multiple junctures, heroes call out the cruelty of his actions. But they never question whether or not his belief that eradicating half of all life would solve food shortages is true, or whether he believes it. The characters all take for granted that this really would prevent starvation.

In reality, of course, this idea is called Malthusianism and is fundamentally incorrect. It is also a cynically convenient justification for policies that hurt and kill marginalised and poor communities.  

Meanwhile, freedom fighters are repeatedly depicted as both insincere and naive. Often, their causes are so appealing that the movie makes them wanton killers for no reason just to give the protagonists reasons to oppose their plans. Imagine what Killmonger would be like if he didn’t kill any defenseless women, for instance. Imagine if Karli Morgenthau just really believed refugees should be treated better and didn’t randomly blow people up to make a point.

This would immediately make their goals extremely difficult to argue against. Killmonger is presented as an indiscriminate killer and manipulator, and Karli as a misguided idealist whose actions endanger people rather than save them. Unlike Thanos, they are depicted as being incorrect or deceitful.

In the recent Loki season 1 finale, we see another example of a mass murderer and despot who seems to truly believe there is no better way, and it seems like the story is set to vindicate his beliefs.

The villains in the MCU are generally either autoritarians who understand the way the world really works and are willing to do seemingly immoral things to achieve truly good ends, or they are revolutionaries who are naive or selfish in some way. 

A similar dynamic is present in the heroes of the MCU, particularly in Tony Stark. He is all about creating weapons of mass destruction. He seeks control. He does this with the Hydra carriers, he does this with Ultron, and he does this with EDITH. In all three cases, his weapons clearly put the power to spy on and murder people in the hands of a very small group of people. In all three cases, the weapons fall into ‘the wrong hands’ within weeks of completion, causing massive casualties. He blackmails Peter, a teenager, into fighting for him against Captain America, and then gives thim the responsibility to control deadly, powerful weapons with no oversight. And not once does this cause Tony Stark or anyone else to question whether or not this is generally a good idea. Whether there is such a thing as ‘the right hands’. Time and time again, the MCU vindicates the idea that Tony Stark’s arms race is at worst a zero sum game, but mostly a necessary thing. It does a lot of work to make Tony Stark into a martyr, whose paranoia saved the world.

This leads to an incredibly centrist worldview. Yes, dictatorships are bad. government overreach is bad. But if people are good, you can trust them with the ultimate power to spy on and murder people.  Meanwhile, revolution sounds good, but it’s never realistic or sincere. 

These are not openly stated beliefs of characters, but they are constantly reinforced by the narrative. It’s pro-status quo. Legitimate concerns are made unpalatable by having unreasonable, naive assholes voice them. And incorrect bullshit is presented as a sincerely held belief by smart people who can’t afford to be moral. Your moral compas as a viewer is being manipulated.

The narrative is manipulated to make the MCU marketable to all demographics and not to offend any government that could subsidize or ban it. 

This is why you will never see an anarchist in these movies that is both smart and sincere: because their arguments would endanger the interests of the Disney corporation itself. But at the same time, its heroes will be ‘rebels’ in that they will resist ‘authority’ when it tells them what to do (purely as metaphor of course, this will have no direct bearing on actual controversy) while also mostly being unsupervised unaccountable paramilitary operatives. Anyone who seeks to change the status quo pro-actively is going to be either deceitful or incorrect.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Disney narratives are bad or not worth following, but it does feel important to keep track of the values and worldview that the MCU reinforces.  

[catgirlmagneto]

xmen in the mcu is very very bad BUT if they give me some decent rogue and gambit…. they’ll graduate to only very bad

[maddipinkkitty]

Them: Speak up for what you believe in!

Me: Valkyrie deserves her own film! And so does Shuri!

Them:

Me: AND ANOTHER THING! SCARLET WITCH WENT ONE ON ONE WITH THANOS AND STILL GETS LIKE FIVE SECONDS OF SCREENTIME!

[willofdpeople]

Before Loki was kidnapped to the TVA, he was just getting arrested for genocide. He was at his most villainous self.

(I'm gonna burn through this next point because that's not the point I'm trying to make, I'm just adding context, sorry in advance): The first thing the Loki series does is showing him a video to make him a sympathetic protagonist, and it seemed to work.

So essentially, their starting point is a Loki who is still semi a good guy but still isn't cooperative in the slightest. Not, you know, the guy who just sent an army of aliens to murder a bunch of people and conquer the earth. So, I have to question,

Why Is Loki Taken From Avengers, and Not Where We Left Off?

By the end of Thor: Ragnarok, Loki's arc is in a much different place to where it was in New York. He's a different person, while still being himself. Because we saw distinct sides of him, and he even did good.

But his arc was not done. He was clearly doing good for vanity reasons, rather than morality, to at least some extent.

Not to mention his Jötunn heritage that he was taught to hate from childhood.

There was still so much to do. So much to explore with this Loki. But...

There was no need for this. He could have easily survived (very easily, to the point where it's goofy). We've already seen Loki redeem himself, now, there's more. He's not perfect, he's not done. Why not pull Loki to the TVA without undoing his arc? Let's just keep going, the path isn't over.

(He would want to escape rather he was his NYC self or not. His motivation could still be "I just need to get out of here" -> "there's a real problem I need to fix". The series will be different, but not that different).

Which bring me to my next point: The TVA is the perfect starting point for the continuation of Loki's arc from Ragnarok.

Consider: Doing things for validation & admiration -> going to a place isolated from your life. This would also enhance the symbolism of Loki sitting alone. He wanted a throne for validation (vanity), and now he chose a throne no one will know exists, because he wants to help (morality).

In addition, there's no magic in the TVA. There was an opportunity to kick off a journey to self acceptance, to force him to look in the mirror until he likes what he sees.

The show starts with 2012 Loki, but wants 2017 Loki. And rightfully so, because his character wasn't finished. He had so much more to do. I wish Loki hadn't died, his series would be better for it.

[cryptovalid]

The weird politics of the Blip

The more the MCU fleshes out the events after Avengers: Endgame, but especially in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the less sense the geopolitics of the MCU makes to me. In this essay I will be sharing my perspectives on politics in the MCU. If you’re not interested in that sort of thing, don’t feel obligated to engage. Also, by the very nature of this essay it will involve spoilers for the MCU and discussions of topics like state violence and terrorism, so consider this a trigger warning.

It’s an understatement to say that the world would change radically if half the population would randomly disintegrate, and I understand that speculating on the consequences of those people coming back after five years is no simple task. There might even be story considerations I am unaware of.

But the idea that the world’s governments would immediately start forcibly removing people from the homes they lived in for five years, to accommodate people who were declared dead five years ago sounds really strange to me. Let’s explore this.

If you were the survivor of a disaster that cut the world’s population in half, what would this look like to you? You’ve presumably went through a lot of hardship and trauma in the years following. You’ve sold some of the things belonging to your deceased loved ones, or bought stuff from other people in a similar situation. You may have relocated, started a new family. Grieved.

And suddenly those people you literally saw turn to dust in front of you just appear again, like nothing happened? Literally in the same befuddled state in which they died. 

And I have to stress: they died. there is no way to suggest that a person can be atomized and still be alive.

So why would you even trust that this was the same person? In a very real sense, it’s an identical copy of your deceased loved one. Similar to teleportation, this should cause us to wonder if they were truly resurrected, or merely cloned. What kinds of rights do they have, being legally deceased? Would we even know if these were impostors, if the situation changed them somehow?

I’m not saying there’s no answer to these questions, just that people should disagree on this. People would have high-minded philosophical, scientific and religious debates. Conspiracy theories and fistfights. This is by far the most world-changing event ever recorded. It should have massive ethical, political and spiritual implications.

And what I think we should think about is that these people who returned have nothing. They have no memory or lived experience to prepare them for this different world, all of their material possessions belong to someone else now, and by definition, all political, economic and military power is held by those who stayed, who now have a material conflict of interest, because if they acknowledge that you are the same person and deserving of the things you had 5 years ago, they have to give it back. Even without the administrative nightmare this would represent, the returned have nothing. Even their work experience is practically meaningless, especially in high-paying jobs. 

What would happen if Steve Jobs somehow magically returned, having no idea what Apple had been doing in the last couple of years, and demanded to be put back in charge of Apple? It’s not exactly an easy ‘yes’, is it? The world’s power balance would be forever shifted. 

I’m not saying everybody would be unsympathetic to the plight of the people who unblipped. But I am saying there would be a massive movement or series of movements opposed to giving them back their stuff. And I’m saying that movement would not only be popular but also backed by every powerful business interest and government.

Because realistically, the unblipped would be the refugees. They are the ones who would have lost everything, fighting an uphill legal battle to even be recognized as alive and as the same person they were 5 years ago. They would be the ones in camps, waiting for supplies.

Ironically, they would be the ones most hurt by the status quo returning to normal, as there is no way to keep massive famines and shortages from happening in this situation without international coordination. 

So why did the MCU decide on the opposite idea? There are two arguments I can think of: one narrative, and one political. On a narrative level, speculating on a changed world is complicated and risky. If Marvel wants to make stories relevant to us in our world, they have to more or less get back to a status quo we would recognize before it would complicate their properties going forward.

The second reason, I think, is that to truly explore a world like this is radical and potentially a liability for Disney, both in terms of their audience and their relationship with the US military.

Of course any real discussion on policy in this situation requires the heroes to at least pay lip service to a political opinion, which could cost them a lot of fans. We are talking about the legitimacy of borders, of private ownership. Any examination of the edge cases will cause people to have Strong Opinions of their own. In a crisis like this, can people squat in empty houses? Do these people have human rights and refugee status, and how should those be protected in the real world? Can any state justly displace people and if not, are these people allowed to disobey the government or even fight them?

Since the US military subsidizes Marvel’s use of military hardware, it has script approval. So that can also explain why they can’t make the US government the bad guy or present a truly different world where the US military is rightfully no longer in control. 

Who can legitimately deprive people of things they need to survive in a crisis like this? What’s more important: the right to own a house and keep it empty if we so choose, or the right to live in a house? 

If we get too deeply into it, Karly’s position (in theory) seems very compelling, like Erik Killmonger’s before her. And so, they have to make her (like him) a hypocrite who goes too far, so it doesn’t seem like the MCU is advocating violence against the state. 

Karly’s ideology is muddled by the writers because the violence she performs has no chance of actually achieving her goals of global solidarity. It feels tacked on to make her less sympathetic. Realistically, someone like Karli would be holding political rallies, sit-ins. Writing op-eds, staging marches and organizing her community into self-sufficiency. Possibly getting into fights with the cops during evictions or protests. If you read Falcon and the Winter Soldier as a kind of allegory for American politics, then Walker represents Trump, Sam represents Obama, and Karly represents... whatever conservatives think socialism/BLM is?

So it feels like FatWS is trying to thread the needle: Nationalism is bad, but so is statelessness. A state should have integrity, and benevolence. And it can have those things, if represented by the right people. Then, the violence is just and measured. It’s barely even violence at all.

I’m kidding of course, the kinds of solutions the MCU offers are basically ‘Co-Intelpro, PMC’s and neighbourhood watches... but run by morally perfect people’. It’s the way a propagandist would represent clandestine domestic espoinage or police brutality: Sam and Bucky would never kill anybody defenseless, and they would never interfere with legitimate polical movements. Because the writers create a perfect world where it’s always clear what everybody’s intention is before the fighting starts, and non-lethal violence is a reliable default option, no more morally problematic than some rough-housing by rambunctious kids.

I know I can trust Sam and Bucky because the writers would never give them realistic implicit biases in a way that would endanger their moral character. They are perfect because they are not real.

The robots, aliens and wizards are not the only unrealistic thing about the MCU. we have to be aware of how artificial the politics are, even if we want to suspend our disbelief. Or else we end up trusting politicians when they embrace a fundamentally immoral status quo, and let thousands die to maintain it (I know, a WILD hypothetical that will surely never come true, but worth keeping an eye out for.)  

The politics that a blip would realistically set in motion are so different from our own, that it would call into question the legitimacy of private ownership and the state. In order to avoid upsetting its fans and its financiers, the MCU has to return to a status quo where those political realities can be taken for granted.