One of my favorite beats in the original Civil War miniseries is this aside where the government is shown training a team of second-string superheroes for permanent deployment in, like, Montana or something, one of the rectangular states, and they talk about how they're planning to code-name them after members of the Olympian pantheon. At which point someone says, wait, isn't the Olympian pantheon like objectively real? Aren't those names taken? And they go, yeah, but literally the only one of them who gives a shit about any of this is Hercules, and Hercules sided with Cap, so he's got absolutely no legal recourse here even if he understands enough about copyright law to be insulted by this. Which, outside the immediate joke about Hercules in particular, really does gesture at something interesting undergirding the legitimacy of superhero titles- in a superhero setting with more than a handful of superhumans, the "legitimate" holder of a given superhero name is going to be whoever's best able to work the legal system and the media. Peter Parker is Spider-Man because great-power-great-responsibility Blah Blah Blah. But he's also Spider-Man by consensus.
Magneto’s power gives him options that are unavailable to most Mutants. It would also make him a kingmaker if not the king, whether he wants it or not. Who could defy him in a separatist enclave aboard Asteroid M except another Omega? Since no one could, then who would dare?
Previously I discussed why X-Men as a setting is fundamentally pessimistic as a necessity according to the creative choices made. It is an essay in 5 parts:
1,2,3,4,5
This is a new series analyzing how experience and social status influences Mutant outlooks on the assimilation vs separatism/supremacy question.
A mile wide asteroid is not a very big place. Doing a bit of back of the envelope math, that works out to a volume of about 2.2 million cubic meters. Which is an impressive number to be sure.
For comparison the ISS has a pressurized volume of about 1,000 cubic meters and an inhabitable volume of 388 cubic meters. That supports 7 people usually. That works out to about 1 person per 143 cubic meters.
Following the same ratio, Asteroid M could probably support a population of 15,384. Where things get fuzzy is that the amount of personal space Asteroid M residents seem to enjoy, such as lavish reception halls complete with Sentinel scrap thrones, is much higher than your average astronaut. Asteroid M is also theoretically fully self-sustaining whereas the ISS needs periodic resupply and provision of spare parts. On the other hand, Asteroid M also was built with salvaged alien tech from the Savage Lands so that might even things out quite a bit.
Just over 15,000 people is the population of a large town trapped inside a machine that provides them with the essentials of life in an environment that would otherwise kill them within 30 seconds, absent special powers or survival gear.
We don’t have to work very hard to imagine the damage that could be wrought by just a handful of Omega tier Mutants deciding to cut loose inside Asteroid M’s walls. The boss fight with Bastion is a pretty excellent example. The damage to structural integrity and essential systems can add up very fast. I forget the specifics, but Asteroid M also had to be abandoned previously due to damage that made it at risk of becoming uninhabitable in the wake of Cortez’s coup against Magneto.
Accountability for Omegas and Protections for the Mutants Who Don’t Have Cool or Awesome Powers
This leads into a question of how an insular Mutant state could govern itself. Realistically the only answer to a Bad Omega tier Mutant is a Good Omega tier Mutant. Yeah, I don’t really like the implications of that analogy either.
The alternative is large numbers of lowertier Mutants or Humans with sufficient firepower or technological doodads but we’ve seen time and again that this winds up being a Zapp Brannigan strategy. It can work, but it costs a lot of lives and material. I wouldn’t personally be overly eager to sign up to be part of a special task force whose objective is to try to slip a power suppression collar on Magneto.
TAS/’97 never really elaborate on what sort of society Magneto was planning to create and how it would be organized, constitutionally speaking. Notably Genosha was setting up a constitutional monarchy prior to the Wild Sentinel attack. It was also notable that of the known members of the executive council, the majority were Mutants with extremely formidable powers. The presence of Moira MacTaggert in some capacity and Callisto represent at least gestures towards the idea of egalitarianism and informed decision making, but the presence of Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost, both known Mutant Supremacists and unapologetically hierarchical, does not instill confidence.
The groups directly influenced by Xavier’s teachings seem to be the only organizations that don’t have an implicit power based hierarchy. In this way Mutants seem not to have surpassed Human organization and Human concepts of justice. This is something I’d like to think Xavier recognized, especially the further down his path of separatism and domination Magneto went, which is why in theory, if not in practice, Xavier was willing to work inside of Human institutions.
Flawed as they are and unreceptive to Mutants, well designed Human institutions are designed to disaggregate power and regulate how authority is used when it is necessary for an individual to have wide latitude and vast resources at their disposal. This often does not work as well as might be desired, but history is full of examples where being unable to alter the course of an absolute ruler once they’d set their mind to something proves disastrous.
As such, the X-Men working to contain and disrupt the activities of Mutants who are too powerful for traditional Sapiens authorities to deal with practically is probably the most potent statement pro-coexistence Mutants can make about their ability to be folded into existing society and institutions and their willingness to be held to the same standards as baseline Humans.
It's a statement that Mutants who use their powers destructively can be confronted and brought to justice by a force of Mutants willing to be bound by and enforce rules and norms of Human society. In doing so, they declare themselves to be Humans who have mutant powers, rather than something else entirely.
Next: No matter how many times we save the world, it just seems to get in jeopardy again. Also when we save it, you hate us more for some reason.
Personal experiences can bestow a fundamentally sunny disposition about Mutant assimilation in Human society. They can also inspire the bleakest despair and a level of skepticism about unilateral disarmament.
Previously I discussed why X-Men as a setting is fundamentally pessimistic as a necessity according to the creative choices made. It is an essay in 5 parts:
1,2,3,4,5
This is a new series analyzing how experience and social status influences Mutant outlooks on the assimilation vs separatism/supremacy question.
It should not surprise us at all that the Morlocks and Magneto have very different opinions from Xavier about who should regulate their behavior and how. Once he’s confronted with how little protection his wealth affords him, even Sunspot becomes a convert to Magneto’s way of thinking.
When you’ve had a bad experience with someone claiming to be on your side and then contradicting literally every value you thought you shared, it makes a person calloused against appeals to a shared set of values or the innate goodness of humanity.
For a real life example, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is a repudiation of the Soviet Union under Stalin, even though Orwell was no fan of extreme inequality and the violence used by elites to protect that inequality in market driven societies. Orwell was motivated to revisit the idea of whether the USSR was a true reflection of his values due to his personal sense of betrayal when the Soviet Union declined to intervene in the Spanish civil war against the Nazi allied regime.
We ought not to be surprised when impoverished visible Mutants find it difficult to imagine having a seat at the table when they can’t even get a seat at the table masquerading as Sapiens.
Xavier’s access to power is always depicted as somewhat tenuous and his relationships with Presidents are transactional. Regardless of their personal feelings and long term visions, the leaders Charles interacts with are primarily focused on day to day crisis management. These leaders are ultimately accountable to the overwhelming majority of the population that does not have special abilities and those who are fearful of Mutants and those who are supportive of Mutants vote and contribute to political campaigns.
Xavier isn’t even visibly mutated. The tendency for Humans to perceive Morlocks as hideously disfigured denies them any comfort in mainstream society. Their very appearance reminds Humans that something has gone amiss in the gene pool and that something may not bode well for baselines in the long run.
Magneto’s experiences as a Sapien minority on the wrong side of the boot has made him deeply skeptical of power beyond his own. A Holocaust survivor, Magneto doesn’t need to imagine what the worst case scenario is for Human - Mutant relations.
Like Orwell, he is not easily swayed by appeals to common values or shared interest. For Magneto, trust is earned and the tests to earn it are not easy. As a consequence of his experiences, Magneto has adopted an attitude that only the people that are imminently facing the same type of threats can truly understand each other and be relied upon.
To the extent that this is a fair and accurate sentiment, taken to an extreme it can be very isolating and leave one with few allies and even fewer people whose insights might be trusted when they contradict Magneto’s own instincts. This becomes a serious problem when Cortez worms his way into Magneto’s inner circle or Magneto rationalizes the fate of Mutants trapped on an Earth incapable of using modern technology as expediting evolution.
Yet, cynic that he is, life as an island is hard and even Magneto is not immune to the occasional savvy operator figuring out how to earn and abuse his trust, like Cortez.
Next up: Power level as privilege. What happens when a cranky Omega isn’t trapped in here with you, you are trapped with them….
X-Men: It gets worse before it gets worse, no good deed….
We’re back where we started: this setting has no theory of change. It can’t. It’s a showcase of struggle and cautionary tales.
Previously I discussed why X-Men as a setting is fundamentally pessimistic as a necessity according to the creative choices made. It is an essay in 5 parts:
1,2,3,4,5
This is a new series analyzing how experience and social status influences Mutant outlooks on the assimilation vs separatism/supremacy question.
To return to the theme of the intrinsic pessimism of the X-Men setting, the X-Men’s efforts to protect lives from belligerent Mutants are often overlooked as regular Sapiens react more strongly to the original inciting event, the fact that the X-Men had to intervene at all, rather than recognizing the X-Men’s role in damage control.
Ominously, X-Men ‘97 ends with President Kelly, an already fair weather friend of Mutants, at risk of losing reelection to Grayden Creed, the once disgraced Friends of Humanity leader, last seen “catching up” with father, Sabertooth. It's unclear if Kelly is taking heat because of his pro or anti-Mutant stances, or whether he handled the Magneto crisis too aggressively or not aggressively enough (where have we heard this one before?) and it’s not entirely beyond thinking that Creed has had a change of heart.
But let's get real. This is this setting. Kelly is likely being blamed for being too soft on Mutants in the wake of the Magneto crisis, the usual suspects have engaged in widespread gaslighting about the origin and nature of the Prime Sentinels and have shifted the emphasis away from Magneto losing his temper after two massive scale pogroms against Mutants and more towards Magneto having killed electricity (and thousands of people in cars, trains, planes, on life support etc.) and whose asteroid nearly destroyed all life on Earth (after Kelly ordered it nuked.)
The X-Men risked everything to save the world after a handful of Humans with inordinate power almost destroyed it trying to preempt and retaliate against inordinately powerful Mutants, many are presumed dead, and their reward is one of their worst enemies may wind up seizing power.
I’ve articulated why the X-Men setting prefers stasis over progress, and escalating catastrophe over the status quo, but boy, does the messaging around this get under my skin. It's not unrealistic, but as an old school Star Trek fan, it bums me out and alarms me. Maybe the Trekkie in me is too hypersensitive and sees doomerism in the media equivalent of a primal scream on behalf of those perpetually treading water for acceptance.
Evolving beyond your core conceits: risks and rewards.
Allowing a setting to grow while remaining recognizable and accessible to the audience is difficult. Too much of the wrong kind of changes can make a setting unusable for the themes and storytelling devices it started off with. It is, however, possible to grow without cheating the heroes of earned victories and without wholly divesting from core themes.
This is part 4 in a series of discussions about the pessimism of the X-Men setting, its origins, its consequences, and whether that’s even a fair assessment.
Part 1 laid out some of the core conceits of the setting.
Part 2 discusses theories of historical change.
Part 3 is about the messiness of allegories.
It's difficult to evolve beyond a setting’s original conceit without having to become something radically different, even unrecognizable.
I’m one of the people who started to lose interest when Stargate SG-1 moved beyond Earth as scrappy underdogs and essentially became a superpower, while still somehow being able to hide the entire program. Also it turns out that SG-1, regardless of the roster, always seemed to be exactly the right people in exactly the right place.
Committing to the bit has risks too.
The X-Files solved and then had to unsolve its core mystery multiple times, becoming ever more convoluted in an effort to ensure its gnostic pursuit of ever deeper mysteries did indeed have even more arcane conspiracies hiding behind the busted ones.
Core characters evolved in Supernatural, but after a few repetitions of the Winchester brothers gaining and then losing access to resources and networks of allies, it almost became a bit of a joke that everything always led back to the two living out of motels. Yet while the situation of the Winchesters wasn’t allowed to change much, the threat of each season had to be ever more cosmic. This ultimately resulted in a direct and extremely meta confrontation with the very force that ensured their lives always defaulted back to misery and watching any progress they made fall through their fingers.
The conceit of Star Trek’s Federation is that our contemporary flaws can be resolved, but to model solving its allegories for contemporary societal issues it has to periodically discover new -isms that have emerged within it that the Federation has rationalized away.
Augment proscriptions are rationalized as protecting the egalitarian nature of the Federation and preventing the rise of superior beings with superior ambition, fully sentient artificial intelligence had a rocky road to recognition, people struggle with fully recognizing XBs as fellow victims of the Borg Collective rather than conflating them with the destruction and horror the Borg have perpetuated.
There have been enough repetitions of the storyline that there is something rotten in the Federation that needs to be confronted and opposed that many (not I) feel like the Federation has undergone a very cynical deconstruction in the streaming era (although it would probably be more correct to say it started with DS9.) Which is part of why the “Magneto was right” discourse began to alarm me, because I associate it with the increased sense in the Trek fandom that the Federation is both rotten at its core and too naive to survive without the rot.
Kudos to Star Trek Discovery though for reliably shifting away from the “edgier” darker tone it began with and embracing the idealism of the TNG era. I realize there are those who look at a dark and fearful world full of war and revanchism and find it childish for fiction to be aggressively sunny, but I enjoy having a few things to watch here and there that stimulate my mind but don’t leave me drained and morose when the credits roll. I don’t mind good pessimism, but I never felt like Discovery was doing more than gesturing at more mature, emotionally and ethically complex themes in its early seasons. It's still not doing more than gesturing, but in my opinion it's no longer pretending to be more than thoughtful camp.
The Expanse novel-verse is one of the rare examples I can think of a setting that resolved one of its core conflicts, but still managed to be an effective vehicle for storytelling about many of the same themes. By the end of the original six book series, Earth and Mars are on the path to reconciliation and the Belters have won statehood and the means to prosperity.
The sequel trilogy introduces a new nemesis that partly resets the setting, but critically the reset doesn’t put the Belters back under the boot of the Inners or restart the original cycle of violence. In many ways, Earth and Mars get a dose of what it’s like on the receiving end of imperialism.
In this way, the writers could still speak about war, cycles of violence, paranoia, various forms of oppression, and the difficult moral dilemmas of gray zone conflict but without victims becoming oppressors or having all of their gains rolled back.
Did you forget this was an article about X-Men, bub?
Which brings us back to X-Men.
Because X-Men is a setting dedicated to storytelling about oppression, a critical thing to remember is that things are not going to get better in any lasting way.
Not because the message you are supposed to take away is that nothing can ever be better and trying to disrupt violence and humanize oppressed people is self defeating, but because showcasing oppression and the fight against it without it ever actually being resolved is its raison d’etre.
Unlike the Expanse novels, the X-Men is not a closed storyline with a limited number of authors tightly controlling it. While specific iterations of X-Men could, in theory, make progress against the core human vs mutant conflict without rolling it back in a devastating way, there is an expectation that X-Men more broadly is a bit like Coke or Pepsi: consistency and recognition across all “products” is a baked in assumption. X-Men without the mutant vs human conflict could drift away from the otherwise very low barrier to entry for the audience.
The last installment will discuss how X-Men '97 does leave the door open to some things getting better even though the general state of affairs seems poised to get pretty bad.
or: Am I out of touch? Or is it the children James Gunn who is wrong?
The biggest problem I have with Supergirl is that I don't understand what kind of superhero movie I am supposed to view it as. Were the expectations set by Superman fair and the humor just didn't work on me? Is it actually something that really is intended to be more introspective and moody like the Snyderverse films?
It does bug me a bit when I can't figure out what the right lens is to view a film through because I genuinely want to be generous. I don't want to be the person who just completely doesn't understand the intentions and themes of a film that isn't trying to be opaque and subjective - and I don't think Supergirl was trying to be on the same level as Ridley Scott's Prometheus when it comes to finding signal amidst the noise, Supergirl is fairly loud about its themes....it just seems to do nothing whatsoever to actually validate those themes. Which may be a problem that I overlooked in the much glossier, and jokey Superman.
Spoilers ahead
Was this meant to read as an action comedy or am I just a snob?
I did not find Supergirl to be a silly or frivolous film. Subjectively, it felt like there were far, far fewer jokes overall compared to Superman and I only remember one or two that really landed with me. Maybe there was more there there and its just not my brand of humor, but it was infinitely less slapstick than Superman, aside from Kara's drunken brawl. I sort of get the impression that Lobo was meant to provide more comic relief, but if so he didn't exactly have me in stitches. If this was an intentional choice instead of me just not getting it, then that is itself an interesting contrast with Superman that does in some ways add more contrast to Kara and Clark and their outlooks.
So I do understand the framing here that Kara is a mess and while aspects of her messiness may be funny, this is ultimately a person who is dealing with a lot of very serious baggage. Same with her newly orphaned sidekick on a revenge quest. In a lot of ways, a lot of goofy antics would undermine the gravitas of this being a space fantasy redemption and vengeance story: that is, after all, among the common complaints of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace or Taika Waititi's Thor films. Yet all of this somberness is undermined by the most aggravating trope this film deploys:
Space Barbarians
This is incredibly, incredibly subjective but I'm so over this trope. Brutish body modification enthusiasts who are barely more eloquent than the Reavers of Firefly and sometimes, maybe, sort of follow some kind of internally consistent code of honor but only when it suits them. Krem and his gang are offhandedly referred to as having a "male only society" and, fine, whatever, they're hardly the first group like this in sci-fi, fantasy, comics, or mythology - hell the Romans celebrated the mass kidnapping of women from neighboring areas after their (semi-mythological) founding by runaway slaves, exiles, and other people of predominantly "lower" social status led to a major gender imbalance.
There's at least a way to tell this story where the Romans are scrappy underdogs who turn to wretched villainy to ensure the long term survival of their society. Krem's Ravagers...wait that was Guardians of the Galaxy....Krem's Reavers...nope that was Firefly...Krem's Venari Ral...nope that's Starfleet Academy...hang on I'll get this right....Krem's Beltalodas nope, that's the Expanse.....okay its...wait for it....The Brigands!
The Brigands.
A completely legally distinct group from Marvel's Ravagers or any of the aforementioned groups.
Disney in The Mandalorian and Skeleton Crew at least played cutesy with it and had its Space Pirates be evocative of cheesy pirates. The Expanse tries to make its pirates sophisticated and allegorical by having the Outer Planets Alliance be an exploited underclass cobbling together their forces with salvage and use savage tactics because they themselves are the victims of generations of dehumanization by Earth and Mars.
The Brigands fly spaceships but pee in buckets.
I know that this film seems to be trying to lean into the idea that this is a film capturing a much darker and more gritty side of DC...in a bio humor sense, even demonstrating that Kryptonians do in fact pee, but there's establishing our heroine has gone kind of feral and antisocial and then there's a space pirate on a space ship peeing into a bucket. A film that can't decide if its Guardians of the Galaxy or John Wick feels like an alarmingly unserious platform to vaguely gesture towards Boko Haram.
The Brigands are designed to be offputting and entirely unsympathetic so that its completely fine when a few of them die as collateral damage when they fail to kill Kara and co. and Lobo gleefully kills them by the truckload. In this I'm reminded of a discussion on the lives of henchmen in media that I thought went something along the lines of "Whose deaths matter?" but I cannot now relocate the essay, book or YouTube video I lifted this concept from (I believe it name checked John Scalzi's "Red Shirts.)
Krem is likewise created in such a way as to duplicate the Problem of Evil in superhero media. IE the infamous thought experiment used to dunk on deontological morality by demonstrating that every time Batman has an opportunity to kill the Joker and refuses to, he is passively refusing to prevent the Joker from killing more people - which he almost certainly will do. Therefore in a consequentialist paradigm, the responsibility for the Joker's future murders are shared, at least in part, by Batman as his enabler.
Intriguingly, Kara's arguments against Ruthye killing Krem are very similar to that of Batman: vengeance won't offer peace, murder will change who you are for the worse. Kara demonstrating that she does believe in a version of Clark's morality but then acting as a kind of sin eater for Ruthye could have been an interesting twist ending if not for Kara executing Krem seeming to be entirely inconsequential. If you grasp enough straws, you could perhaps argue that this is the moment where Kara decides she does in fact need connection and more specifically Clark's idealism specifically because she just killed a man and is seemingly totally fine with it.
But I think that is straw grasping.
I think two things are true with no real relationship between the two: Kara executed Krem and didn't express any real shame or regret in doing it AND THEN decided it was time to stop self medicating and get on with things, with the adventure she just undertook probably having had more to do with getting her off the fence than any issues with having killed someone.
I'm not saying that in empirical reality, she should feel bad - I leave that to you and your conscience, but in the reality of this film we are led to believe that Kara at least thinks she should say that killing Krem would be bad for Ruthye. The implication being that she either knows this from prior experience or believes this to be true for other reasons, and then kills Krem anyway - not even bothering to rationalize it: whether through there being no viable way to contain Krem and/or little hope for his rehabilitation.
Unlike the Joker, Krem definitely won't be killing for fun in the future and that should be enough for this audience member. Yet again the lack of any real introspection on this choice to reconcile it with Kara's preaching at Ruthye feels like a giant oversight if its not a deliberate choice to throw a twist in at the end as a sort of "surprise! Kara was wrong, killing for the right reasons is fine, she should have killed Krem much earlier and if she had that Space African family would still be alive. Lobo was the hero we actually needed and wanted."
Maybe I'm going to fully into the Dweeb Side as the world seems to shed any pretense of continuing to revere Enlightenment values, but it felt weird and bad even though this was fully constructed in such a way, plot wise, that Kara has no other choice from a consequentialist lens but to kill a disarmed man at her mercy in order to prevent him from future mass murder.
But then that's probably because I never sat and really thought about the implications of Superman all that closely because it was so successful at covering up anything that might make me uncomfortable with a well timed, well executed joke: something I'll be reconsidering in a post coming to a wall near you in the near future.
Supergirl: When does "Live Action" become a cartoon?
A relatively spoiler free rumination on my own idiosyncratic issues with taking superheroes out of the modern Earth setting, as in Supergirl, but then also can probably be extrapolated to why a few other settings bug me.
Something I have come to realize about how I engage with fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero media is that the more detached from normal, everyday Planet Earth it is the harder it becomes to grasp "the rules." I have realized this about myself that I am the type of fan who tends to gravitate more towards setting and scenario than characters and their personal journeys. I am not indifferent to characters, whether they have personality traits I find endearing, annoying, or annoying but understandable under the circumstances etc, is part of how I feel about setting and the nuts and bolts of how a story is told.
However, I still tend to think about characters more in terms of what their emotions and reactions tell me about the universe, the situation at hand, and the stakes. This is where I think there is the potential for at least some of the griping about the unseriousness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or some of streaming era Star Trek to be in good faith, presuming its coming from people who are even less likely than me to become parasocially invested in specific characters. Essentially if you are reliant on the characters to set expectations for how to feel about a given situation and the tone of how the characters conduct themselves conflicts with other information you're given, that creates confusing stakes.
22nd - 24th century Star Trek deals in fairly abstract problems in a semi-distant future setting, but it features Humans and Aliens who can be assumed to be near 21st century human baseline in their physical and mental attributes, if perhaps a bit more "evolved" in terms of their inner discipline and social - emotional intelligence. When someone is exceptional, its generally called out: Vulcans possess intense mental discipline and exceptional logical thinking but are bad at social cues because they've eschewed emotion. They are also physically stronger than Humans. But not ludicrously so. So how they interact with their environments tells you a lot about their universe, its rules, the constraints the characters are under, and how to understand peril.
I like superhero stories but not in a space opera context: never really have. I think this absence of context is why putting superheroes in space opera settings has always rubbed me the wrong way. I have a deficit of whatever it is that lets me detach from reality and just appreciate the spectacle or be entirely satisfied with character arcs alone. Modern Earth works as a setting for superhero stories because when the superhero shrugs off bullets, that's a clear, unambiguous statement of how tough they are. When a supe lasers a car in half, that's a clear, unambiguous statement of how powerful that ability is.
Putting a superhero into a sci-fi or fantasy setting means that you have a being who defies nature interacting with people and objects that defy easy categorization too. Although sprinkling in a bunch of people who appear to be stock sapiens wearing conventional leather brandishing axes and gunpowder firearms does help a bit with providing the audience (me) with handholds while at the same time aggravating me due to how unimaginative it is. Antman Quantumania was at least a visually imaginative film even though it had the problem of everything being rather abstract and lacking in handholds to grasp the rules of the setting.
Maybe I can't pleased when it comes to Supes in Space, although I did like the Guardians of the Galaxy films even though by my own schema, it should pose suspension of disbelief issues. GOTG is extremely unserious and plays fast and loose with its own internal physics, you have a mishmash of different kinds of aliens and technologies so there's no real consistency to anything. It has another thing I absolutely despise which I'll go off on in a bit and at length, but in the end no single gripe or even the assemblage of gripes is a deal breaker. Perhaps its because even though it is technically a superhero film, there's an upper limit on how implausible the characters are with Gamora and Drax peaking at vaguely "super soldier" levels rather than "demigod."
I have a similar preference for the way Force users are presented in the Star Wars original trilogy for similar reasons but I won't deny that there could be some "old man shouts at clouds" there too since I'm pretentious enough to write 3k words explaining my frustrations with Supergirl but not pretentious enough to act like I'm immune to nostalgia. I also liked Masters of the Universe (2026) but there again I didn't have expectations that the setting would make sense, I understood that I was there to experience a celebration of action figure oriented imaginative play.
It could also just be that I didn't like how the space opera tropes were utilized. I wrote a lot about the utilization of Space Barbarians (TM) and the contradictory way the film moralized about the deaths of evildoers. That's coming shortly. Needs maybe one more editing pass and a shot of courage to release it into the world: it feels real weird to be a really big fan of Captain Marvel and to really, really not like Supergirl for reasons other than Marvel / DC partisanship. Although the longer I sit on it, the more I realize that my own thoughts aren't particularly original: the non-cavemen also really didn't like it either.
This is not an official numbered entry in my weekly worldbuilding series. I broke my streak a couple weeks back because I ran into a creative funk, and out of the queued posts at the same time. The funk is still sort of hanging around me. I just can't think of a series of good weekly worldbuilding topics let alone one. There's still posts in my drafts about dating, religion, and social media, but all those feel too big to tackle now. That's kind of why they started fermenting in the first place.
So, do any of my writeblr friends have suggestions? Any people who I haven't met yet who are curious about the world of #plot armadillo. Is there something you want to know? Do I just need to figure out what kind of social media site would be around? My ask box is open if you want to stay anonymous for any reason.
(If I do decide to make anything on those topics it probably won't go up until next Wednesday.)
