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CAKE’S TOP 10 FUCK UPS IN THE MCU

As everyone knows, I freakin’ love the Marvel Cinematic Universe and will gladly gush about my babies to any and all who will listen. That doesn’t mean, however, that I won’t call Feige and Marvel on the carpet when they do stupid stuff … and in a universe that spans over a decade with so many movies and writers and actors and directors, mistakes are bound to happen.

So here’s my off-the-top-of-my-head-list of things the MCU has fucked up. As always, these are my opinions and you are free to disagree with me. Some of these are very personal (*cough* Clint *cough*) while others are fairly universal. Enjoy at your own leisure!

10. The Five Year “Blip” that deprived the audience

I get it. They wanted to show the Avengers dealing with loss, make some changes to characters, and really ratchet up the emotional stakes of the plot. To give us an older Steve Rogers, Tony with a family, and Hulk/Bruce who’s come to terms with himself. But the five-year gap between the snap and the return of the “blipped” creates more problems than it solves. All of Spiderman’s friends blipped except the new M.J. love interest dude? What are the odds? People didn’t move on with new lovers/spouses? Awkward. The sudden influx of 50% more people didn’t throw the whole world into chaos? (a mention about fundraisers in Far from Home isn’t enough, folks)

And let’s talk about rushed storytelling in those five years. If you jump the plot forward, we miss a satisfactory conclusion of Bruce’s story (oh, yeah, he’s both now!), a lovely completion of Tony’s growth into content father & husband, a serious look into Thor and Steve and Natasha’s different depression arcs. There were so many other ways to do the same thing (I mean, six months would work, honestly); the blip deprived us of way too much.

9. Killing off Pietro and keeping him dead

Of all the characters who’ve died and stayed dead (and there are not that many main ones; they even figured out how to get Gamora back), Whedon’s decision to kill Pietro rankles, especially now that Wandavision is on the horizon. As a central comic book character in both the Avengers and X-men series, Pietro serves as a balance for his sister’s excesses (which I certainly hope to see in the Disney+ show) and as a bridge between the two franchises. Now that Marvel has the X-men in hand again, Pietro would make a great way to bring them together, draw Magneto into the Avengers’ sphere and the Avengers into the X-men’s bubble of influence. He’d also be a touchstone for Wanda as she goes through the loss of Vision and what will surely be her own descent into madness with the upcoming Dr. Strange movie. It’s also a waste of talent (Aaron Taylor Johnson’s got some serious acting chops) as well as a missing link to the Young Avengers through his nephews Billy and Tommy (the latter another speedster).

8. The Villian-A-Movie formula for most flicks

Thanos and Loki aside, most of the MCU movies use a formula where the villain dies and/or is brought to justice at the end. Sometimes, it doesn’t bother me …honestly, Vanko in Iron Man 2? The Dark Elves in Thor 2? Darren Cross in Antman? Were they fleshed out enough to really be a threat to our heroes or just cyphers thrown in to give the heroes something to react against? … but for a really fascinating, well-drawn villain like Killmonger or Vulture, it’s a crime to cut short their development because the hero has to win. Don’t get me wrong; I love Killmonger’s final lines … I cry every damn time … and I like the prison tag scene in Homecoming, but those characters are wasted by only being on our screens for such a small time. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t formula … either we seem to get flat, one-dimensional bad guys or we get too little time with the fascinating ones … which brings us to …

7. The Humanization and Tragic Backstory of Thanos

I’m going political here, so be warned. Why, of all the possible villains to give a daughter he appears to love and a tragic “my planet didn’t listen to me” spiel, did they pick Thanos? Mr. Despot, Genocidal Dictator who kills millions without hesitation? Who spouts absurd theories that sound like something Jordan Peterson or Richard Spenser would say? A guy who believes it’s his way or the highway and by highway, he means mass murder?

Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? I don’t. Are we supposed to believe he loves Gamora, the little girl whose mother he killed in front of her then later sacrificed for his own desires? I don’t. Is he supposed to invoke any of those Old European White Guys we’ve been force-fed in history classes, the ones that cared only about their own power as they raped and pillaged their way across other people’s lands? ‘Cause that only makes me hate him more.

I could say I wonder how they got this so wrong, why Killmonger dies and Thanos gets a huge story arc, but I know exactly why. Representation at all levels of the movie biz matters, folks.

6. Ronin: A Case of Too Quick and Too Little

Dealing with a massive undertaking like the MCU, there’s bound to be plots & characters from the comics that people love and want to include but there’s just not enough time to do well (see villain point made above). Ronin is an example of a name that got lots of fans excited but failed to materialize as anything more than a couple of quick but cool fight scenes, a blink and you’ll miss it scenario that left a lot of us feeling unsatisfied. After those first glimpses in Endgame trailers, the quotes from the Russos and others about how much they love Clint Barton as the ninja assassin, the follow-through was … well, let’s just say it didn’t live up to the hype, shall we?

The problem with tossing in characters and details like Ronin is that it takes them off the playing board for future movies/shows, constraining the portrayals from now on as “Clint’s blip breakdown” rather than the rich history of Ronin could have had.

5. Where Have All the Women Gone? – Peggy Carter, Sharon Carter, Jane Foster, Pepper Potts, Janet Van Dyne, et al

Let’s see if I’ve got this.

Introduce a female character as a love interest for hot male superhero. Maybe play up her strengths, make her a badass, intelligent, and hot too. Don’t give her a lead role … and if you do, put her in a network show without any support and let the network effectively kill it … but do make her attractive enough that guys want to fuck her and women want to be her. Then drop her as if she never existed, just don’t bring her back at all (Darcy) or toss of a line about them breaking up (Jane) or let her die so there can be man pain at the funeral (Peggy).

Numerous sources say that the only reason we had Pepper Potts in Avengers was at Robert Downey Jr’s insistence. Hell, they killed off Natasha as a sacrifice play, so why would we expect them to care about Janet Van Dyne who literally is a founding team member in the comic books?

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

4. LGBTQIA Bait and Switch by Disney et al

First thing queer fans of Marvel need to know is that those headlines you see mean jack shit. Oh yeah, we have gay people in our movies, Disney touts. Gonna be a bisexual in an MCU film real soon! Right there, see him? Third bystander on the left? He’s trans!

Look, I probably have a deeper understanding of what Feige and the Russos and Taiki are facing when it comes to getting a queer character past Disney execs because I study pop culture. The notion that putting a homosexual character in a film will make homosexuality more prevalent is an old, old, old evil that is deeply wound around our Western ideals of childhood, repressed sexuality, and puritanical roots. It’s fucking wrong, and the face it was so damn difficult to let Joe Russo use a male pronoun for his snapped spouse in Endgame needs to change. This shitty bait-n-switch where they promise and promote it only to be a tiny flicker of celluloid moment is the worse kind of pandering and condescending garbage. It’s high fucking time we got off this hobby horse that’s destroyed so many lives and psyches, and we’re beyond ready to hold these executives and others accountable when they pretend to care but only really want to make boatloads of money kowtowing to outdated racist and sexist beliefs.

3. The Character Assassination of Clint Barton

Speaking of hobby horses, as a fan of Hawkeye, the denuding of Clint’s comic personality to make him the stable family man of the group is one of the worst writing decisions of the MCU. Yes, I know they went more with the Ultimates universe, but even there Clint is a smart-mouthed asshole who jumps off buildings and likes being the center of attention. From Whedon’s choice to put Clint under Loki’s thrall (he appears in the first Avengers movie for just under 13 minutes) to the Russos dropping his part in CA:WS to Whedon giving him a family in AOU for his main storyline to being absent entirely in Infinity War and the shitty short Ronin stint in Endgame, we were robbed of the funny, sarcastic little shit who could have been so much more.

And speaking of AOU …

2. Bruce and Natasha’s Ill-fated Romantic Arc

Look, I want Bruce and Natasha to be happy as much as the next person and they damn well deserve to be loved. But shoehorning in a romance that seemingly comes from nowhere and even contradicts some chemistry/hints of pairings from other movies (Clintasha, I’m talking about you) isn’t the way to do it. Add to the sudden appearance of the romance the ham-handed writing … he falls face first in her boobs, for God’s sake, Joss … and the sun’s going down “Natasha civilizes the beast” repetition, and it’s fast on its way to squicky territory.

But that cringeworthy, gender-stereotyped discussion about how they’re both monsters? Sure, it can be read as Nat saying she’s a monster because of being the Black Widow and all the terrible things she’s done over the years, but Whedon had to go and add the part about forced sterilization (forced being the imperative word there, the part of Nat’s story that makes her NOT a monster but a terrified girl not given a choice over her own body). That one conversation takes us into “Oh, hell, no, we are NOT going there” anger. Poorly written and conceived, it’s one of the worst, head-scratching decisions anyone made in the MCU.

1. Old Man Steve Rogers

I want to state for the record that I fucking adore Steve and Peggy. Yes, I can easily see her as the love of his life and understand his utter loss at not spending his life with her. Peggy Carter deserves all the good things. If Steve had been stranded in the past, only enough PYM particles to send Tony back to his family, I would have been fine … nay … I would have rejoiced to think of Steve and Peggy together and thought the whole “we never saw her husband” a clever twist.

Alas, it was not so. Instead, we get a convoluted mess of time travel (don’t get me started. I have flow charts and diagrams to explain why we can’t have BOTH Loki disappearing with the tesseract not affecting the main timeline AND Steve going back and reappearing in the main timeline because te two contradict each other) and dangling threads everywhere. Did Steve watch Sharon grow up? Did Steve get squicked out watching her grow up? Did Steve warn Peggy about HYDRA? About the importance of Hank Pym’s work? About not trusting Obediah Stane? Did he look up Nick Fury?

But I’ll argue the biggest of all fuck-ups is the absolute negation of the Steve/Bucky plotline that had developed over the course of three Cap movies and Infinity War. Can the Russos and Feige and the others involved have not noticed the deep and abiding connection between the two men that they themselves put on the screen? ‘Til the end of the line? Oh, did you really mean until I have a time machine and can go back to change my life? Even if we take the latent homoerotic subtones that may or may not be present out of the equation, going back in time and leaving his best pal, his buddy, his Bucky, the guy he had when he had nothing makes no freakin’ sense. Somewhere, in their rush to bring the era to a close and decide how to send Chris Evans off in the sunset, they fell back into the stereotype of “man marries and that’s the end of anything interesting in his life to write about.”

Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall for a while and reread Fraction’s Hawkeye run.

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