i have some disorganised complainy thoughts about shared universes
i LOVE. love love love shared universes. i love that we live in a world where sometimes blorbo from show 1 makes a cameo on show 2.
i remember yearning for it 20 years ago, when the first spiderman came out in 2002. i remember thinking then that it would be so fucking cool if they could do team-up films.
and i remember going absolutely feral in the cinema in 2012 when the avengers assembled for the first time.
there has been an inherent problem from day one with these films, and indeed the entire concept. and its that in order for each installment to have any kind of emotional anchor, they have to have stuff for all the characters to do. and instead of putting major character developments on the backburner for the team-up, they give them important shit to do.
which is why you can’t just go from iron man 2 to iron man 3. tony has ptsd from what happened to him in avengers, and if you missed that film, you miss out.
you can’t go from guardians of the galaxy vol. 2 directly to the next one, bc a LOT of shit happened to those guys in infinity war and endgame. you miss out.
you cannot go directly from s2 of daredevil to s3 without watching defenders. it absolutely does NOT make sense, and you miss out.
and now, you cannot go from the end of s2 of mandalorian directly to s3. you gotta watch book of boba fett or you. miss. out.
i feel like a good writer could give the characters something to do that didnt have anything to do with their main character/plot focus, and save all the important emotional bits for their own show.
on the other hand, these stories are being produced by people who assume they have their audience. the audience is absolutely gonna watch whatever they make in order to get the whole story.
and i know that’s what they think. Russell T Davies, the showrunner of doctor who, talked about it in a commentary once, about how he was worried if people would turn off during the series 3 ep Utopia bc it featured the return of Captain Jack Harkness, who had been missing since series 1, and gone on to be in his own show. And he talked about how difficult it was to create a sense of completion for Torchwood since none of the interesting questions about Jack were going to get answered in that show, because they were Doctor Who questions. (re: Jack’s immortality and how it came to pass)
But they conclude that the audience will hang in there for both shows because they want the story.
i don’t know what point i have here, apart from that it’s annoying. bc theyre mostly right. i did go watch tbobf to get that chunk of mando’s story.
i just skipped ahead to his bits. bc idgaf.