#The story has gotten further and further away from slapstick ideas of a dude trying to avoid getting dicked down

[tiralja]

Ok, I have to scream about this somewhere but nobody I know cares about trashy trasmigration bls so! Here we go!

You ever read something with such a stupid cracky premise that there is no way yhat you can take it seriously? Like a 35yr old dude getting thrown into his students smutty bl book about a world that has holy relics that are dildos and whos main character exists just to get fucked by all the characters there? Like one of those really smutty ones, with love interests that crossed the line between pushy and outright abusive sometime last century? Exept this isn't that main character. The MC's supposed to be this longhaired twinky pretty boi and instead they get this muscly teacher who has and will punch the main leads face in if they don't start behaving soon.

So it's one of those stories, where the new main character changes the plot, charms the main leads and has to complete a stupid quest (it's those gd dildo relics, they were stolen and he has to find them) and it's all fun and games!

Until it's very much not.

It's only been like 30 chapters but so far we have gotten:

A long flashback into the original MC's timeline and seen a glimpse of how had it actually was for him (real gd bad, holy shit that's some graphic whump)

Good old race inequality (this is a fantasy setting, some races in there are treated p damn bad)

Both of the current main characters companions getting slowly worse over time as the main character doesn't allow them to fuck him (one of them is also very gd unstable and has tried to get into his pants multiple times, including that time he made an obedient clone of the MC, fucked it on top of his sleeping body and then when that wasn't satisfying enough woke the man himself up so the clode could finish on his face. This man is certifiably insane) and hints that they also have bad backstories them both.

Add to all that that apparently the original MC also exist int this world, has stolen a legendary sword, is going around killing hordes of demons and also knows the current MC by name.

This is just!!!!!

I love it when the story you start reading for crack takes you by the scruff of your neck and trows you right into the deep end of some actually really interesting plot and characters!

Like, what is that psychos deal, how long untill the sweet seeming companion completely cracks, and most importantly, what the hell is up with the original main character?

[askmerriauthor]

I remember you railing against BvS pretty hard before. Have you seen Justice League yet?

I actually did get to see it just the other evening, yes.  Movie review and writing talk after the jump, because spoilers.

To its credit, JL is a far better movie than BvS.  That’s a very low bar to set, I admit, but the point stands.  That doesn’t mean it was a good movie though.

When I saw BvS I walked out of the theater thinking “Meh, it was boring but whatever”, only to become more and more angry about it from a writing standpoint as I mulled it over in my head in the following days.  JL garnered the same initial response but - despite my dwelling and pondering and scrutinizing - has not advanced any further than that same “meh”.  It’s a passable movie with plenty of problems (both in production and in performance) at best and just plain ol’ boring at worst.  The most generous I can be with the movie is to say that it had a lot of good ideas with very poor execution.

The basic thrust of the movie is that Batman feels guilty about the shenanigans he was up to in BvS and wants to make good by forming the Justice League to deal with threats now that Supes is dead.  The world has been getting progressively shittier since that event as society falls into a sort of existential dread afterward, contributed wholly to their iconic hero biting it.  Which is somehow what the baddie of the film - a shmoe named Steppenwolf - needs to enact his evil plan of evil bad death doom nasty bad.

Y’know, completely ignoring the fact that Supes was depicted as a severely divisive public figure in BvS that a bulk of the population actively hated, including the US government at large.

Anyway.  There’s a nonsense non-story about Steppenwolf needing to collect the three magical macguffins to destroy the world and the heroes need to join forces to stop him.  Honestly though?  Steppenwolf, as a villain, was utterly pointless.  He had no character, no involvement with the heroes, and spent the bulk of his time on screen only briefly popping in via teleportation and back out again.  He goes through the film collecting the magical macguffins, but for all the difference he makes himself, they could have just spared the character animation budget and made the macguffins naturally gravitate toward one another on their own.

Also - really movie?  Steppenwolf?  Really?  Of all the characters associated with Darkseid, we’re starting with freakin’ STEPPENWOLF?  I admit someone like Granny Goodness would have been a bit much for this movie, but we couldn’t have at least gotten Kalibak?

ANYWAY.  So the Justice League is put together from a ragtag bunch of misfits who overcome staggering odds, learning to be a team in the process.  Superman is brought back from the dead (because of course he is), Steppenwolf is defeated, and everything is hunky dory until the next movie.  Which apparently is going to involve the Legion of Doom rather than Darkseid if the after-credit stinger is to be believed, which just goes to show DC has absolutely not learned their lesson about trying to retroactively introduce characters in a big franchise.

I mean, seriously, who are we going to get in that movie?  Deathstroke apparently.  Solomon Grundy?  Cheetah?  Captain Cold?  Gorilla Grodd?  The general viewing public doesn’t know who the usual array of Legion of Doom’ers are and aren’t going to give one flying flip about seeing them shoe-horned together.  Especially not after the cluster that was Suicide Squad doing the exact same damn thing.

AN-NEE-WAY.  Justice League has a lot of trouble with its pacing and tone, with a clear breaking point happening halfway through the film when Superman is brought back to life.  In reviewing my thoughts on the movie, I keep coming back to that spot being where things really begin to unravel on the whole.  Writing wise, the movie has a hard time keeping itself steady as it constantly waffles between trying to be gritty and dour one moment, then playful and slapstick the next.  Apparently the film was handed over from Zack Snyder to Joss Whedon halfway through production which would certainly explain quite a lot, but doesn’t do much to excuse the final product.

We have a big ensemble cast to work with that the movie makes no effort to endear us to, on top of them being very contrary to previous depictions where the big three are concerned.  Bats, Supes, and Diana don’t act like they did in their previous movies at all.  Bats bounces between being  grim to actually cracking jokes and being the butt of a few himself, Supes spends half his time just sort of being there looking bewildered and the other half being incredibly smarmy, and Diana (along with the Amazons as a whole) had any-and-all character granted by her own movie violently siphoned out of her until she was a bland cardboard cutout.

Given that we just had such a great Wonder Woman standalone movie, this version of Diana really grates on my by comparison.  She’s dull, isn’t proactive, and spends the film needing to be goaded into being a hero by Batman of all people.  Bats is constantly lecturing and advising her on how to be a hero, a leader, how to not lock herself away from the world and others… y’know, stuff that Batman classically has trouble with himself and it REALLY SHOULD BE DIANA TEACHING HIM THAT SHIT SINCE SHE ALREADY DID ALL THAT IN HER OWN DAMN MOVIE AND BEING A RECLUSIVE UNTRUSTWORTHY ASS IS LITERALLY BATMAN’S ENTIRE M.O. IN THIS FRANCHISE.

Flash was fun though.  I enjoyed his presence and jokes, which felt a bit more natural since he is such a young character compared to the rest.  Cyborg was just sort of there as a plot device - dude literally just grows new powers and plucks meta-information out of nowhere whenever the plot needs him to.  Thor - I mean Drax - I mean Aquaman was… well, he was there.  Yep.  He sure did take up screen real estate without actually having any useful contributions to the story, setting, theme, or conflict resolution.

This may just be my own personal sense of humor at play, but there was a gag I really wish they’d gone for with Flash.  After he’s first introduced and the movie is half-assedly explaining his powers, he points out that using his superspeed burns tons of calories, so he’s always famished and is constantly snacking.  “I’m like a blackhole for snacks.  A snack-hole.” he says, while chowing down on an entire pizza himself as he walks.  It’s a fun notion that is never used in the movie beyond that.  At most he says “I’m hungry” about 45 minutes later and is told to go have nosh off-screen, but that’s it.  Since Flash is constantly zipping around from moment to moment, I really wanted to see him always eating whenever he’s not doing something important.  Like, every scene should have him munching on something different.  He’ll be chowing down on this big burrito in the background as the camera slightly pans away to someone talking, and then when it pans back he’s got a tub of Ben & Jerry’s under his arm.  Or in any scene where he has to stand still for more than 10 seconds, each time the camera cuts back to him, there’s increasingly large and varied stacks of discarded food containers scattered around him.

Or, hell, just have him share his snacks with the others.  It would’ve been super cute for him to offer Diana some ice cream and have her be genuinely delighted in return.

Except, y’know, that would require Diana to actually have character in this movie…

The strongest scene in the entire movie to me (and certainly to a bulk of the audience for how vocal a reaction it got in the theater) was right after Supes is resurrected.  He’s all addle-brained and violent because he’s still grave-groggy, so he starts fighting the League members.  As he’s being dogpiled by the rest, Flash kicks into superspeed and starts running around him.  The movie shows the rest of the world freezing in place from Flash’s point of view… until Supes’ eyes start tracking Flash’s movement ever so slowly.  That single point made for a fantastic “OH SHIT” moment that nothing else in the film managed to hit quite as well.  Unfortunate on the whole, but I will give points for that one, if nothing else.

Supes actually tries to fight Flash with both of them going at superspeed, which is a neat bit as well.  It’s clear in watching how they’re moving that Supes is indeed slower, but only just, and it’s more because Flash is so startled that anyone can begin to keep up with him - along with his own inexperience - that Supes takes him out pretty quickly.  The same can’t be said for the big bad of the film.  Steppenwolf is effectively invincible to everything the entire movie, including the heroes.  Attacks literally bounce off him without him even realizing they landed in the first place.  The League members do their best to fight him and will, from time to time, manage to put him through a wall or stagger him before he knocks them through several buildings himself.  But because everyone is pretty much the same level of invulnerable, the fights become pointless because they’re just knocking each other around through papier-mâché set pieces without effect.

But then Supes shows up and instantly trivializes whatever threat Steppenwolf was supposed to have.  It’s played like Awakened Neo verses the Agents in the first Matrix movie, right down to the whole “leaning casually away from a mega-punch” move.  Supes casually walks all over this villain without any effort whatsoever, actually leaves the fight entirely for a few minutes to go save a building full of civilians (by literally picking up the entire apartment complex over his head and flying away with it, because all effort at gritty realism is long gone), and then comes back to derisively snark “Is this guy still bothering you?” at the rest of the group.  And y’know what?  Even with all that, the heroes don’t even kill off the bad guy.  He gets swarmed by his own mindless Parademons for absolutely no good reason, because apparently suddenly a bunch of canon fodder minions that even Batman can take out in a toe-to-toe fight are powerful enough to overwhelm Steppenwolf?

The movie’s writing falls prey to two very common problems the comics suffer from, and it is purely a fault of the writers.  You’ll often hear people say “Superman is a boring character - he’s got unlimited power so he’s impossible to write good stories for”, which is the hallmark of an unimaginative writer.  The other common problem is many writers’ fondness for hoisting Batman up on a pedestal as this amazing genius who can do no wrong.  We get both here.  Batman is the driving force behind everything that happens and all other characters’ motivations, and yet is so vastly outclassed by their power at the same time that the movie struggles to find anything for him to do.  Superman is so beyond powerful that he makes the rest of the movie and its entire cast obsolete - he can do anything in this version through brute force alone, so how is there any danger or conflict?  He literally stops the destruction of the world by using brute strength to pull apart the three macguffins with his bare hands.

So… yeah.  Justice League has a lot of problems if you look at it any harder than just “open eyes, turn off brain, eat popcorn”.  If you can do those steps, it’s a passable bit of brainless fluff and flashy special effects.  And it’s still a superior film to BvS by a vast margin.