#ww1984

[heartistic-blog]

watching WW1984

[breeze-blocks]

ISFP vs ENFJ

[breeze-blocks]

[abrahamlincolnscat]

I had a vision

[netherfeildren]

i have something to say about him 🤨🤨🤨

[diaaatv]

Demons by Doja Cat is Max Lord’s song idc.

[screamsviakeyboard]

There's something weird about the DC movies. Specifically WW 1984 and The Flash. Both movies have pretty clear morals to their climaxes, and those morals are basically "don't hope too much or try to change things." Which are weird ones to have in anything, but especially mind boggling to have in superhero media.

Wonder Woman 1984

So, for those who don't know, WW1984's villain is a dude who fuses with a magical wishgranting rock, but, when you make a wish on the rock, you have to give up the thing you value most in exchange (the rock doesn't tell you this ahead of time). So the dude goes around granting wishes until he gets access to every screen on the planet and gets everyone to make a wish on him so he can take their most valued things. In order for Wonder Woman to beat him, she shows him that this is hurting his son (by destroying the world) and he convinces everyone to renounce their wishes. The day is saved, and WW can go try and move on from her dead boyfriend or whatever.

Now, the thing is, the guy who was granting the wishes wasn't actually doing anything. He was absorbing power from the people who were making wishes, but he wasn't using that for any purpose. What was destroying the world was the wishes themselves. Every single person who makes a wish on screen wishes for bad shit. Like there's a lady who wishes for someone to die and then the dude just drops dead. Shit's fucked up.

What this means is that the thing causing the danger isn't an evil villain; he's only creating the opportunity. What's to blame for the oncoming end of the world are the wishes of humanity. It is, in effect, bad to wish for things, not because you might get your shit sucked out by an evil rock, but because your wish might come true. It is only by not wishing for things that you can help Wonder Woman save the world.

The Flash (spoilers, if you care)

This one's about Flash trying to change the past. Time travel, woo. He goes back in time to save his mom from being murdered, and he actually succeeds, but he gets knocked out of the time travel and realizes that as a result of his actions all the super heroes are MIA and Zod (evil general superman) is about to invade.

Flash meets up with himself from this time and gets the band back together, with Batman and Supergirl because Superman didn't arrive in this timeline. Then they go to fight Zod. Montage, music plays, big battle scene, until, they lose. Supergirl and Batman die, so the Flashes need to go back to the past to try and save the day.

Then they fail. And it's kind of interesting, I guess, because we're trained to expect the heroes to succeed at this sort of thing. Then they go back in time again to try and save the day, only to fail again, and again, and again.

Our flash explains to the new flash that this is because this is fated to happen. Zod wins and the planet is destroyed, there's nothing they can do about it. The other flash refuses to listen and keeps trying to save the day until he threatens the fabric of time and space and an evil monster appears.

The twist is that the monster is the other flash, after countless attempts to change the outcome, he's become unrecognizable and now he's here to stop our Flash from stopping him from saving the day. He tries to kill our Flash, but the other Flash takes the hit, dying in the process and erasing his future self from existence.

Our Flash realizes what he has to do, he goes to unchange the past, and then he returns to the present, where his mom's still dead, but at least his dad isn't in prison anymore.

Once again, the Big Problem, isn't the villain. Zod's an obstacle, sure, but the thing threatening to destroy all of existence isn't him, it's the fact that Other Flash wants to save the day. If he just gave up, then all solvable problems would be solved. And it's by giving up on, uh, having a living mother, that our Flash does save the day in the end.

So you can see my problem with this

The moral of the story is that some things can't be changed, and if you try to fix them, you'll only hurt yourself and others. The moral of the story is that if you wish for things, you'll wish for something wrong and selfish, so you need to not wish. These are morals, kinda, if you squint at them, but they suck. They're depressing and hopeless.

And they're especially bad in a Superhero Movie.

The whole point is to reach for what's impossible. We're here to watch larger than life figures prevail against impossible odds and save the world. We're here to change the things that can't be changed, and to wish for a brighter world. These morals are practically antithetical to the genre they're presented in. And if you're, like, writing fucking Watchmen, then sure, that's fine, but when you're writing blockbuster bright and colorful superhero movies—when Watchmen's already come out, when we've got more evil supermen than we have fingers and one of them's already appeared in your own universe—what're you even doing?

These are for kids, man. And the kids in us if we're lucky. Let 'em hope.

[violetmuses]

Should I? 🖊