#mcu crit

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

What gets me about the Stucky poll is that everyone is going on about history but the thing about history is that today will be tomorrow's history and in 10 years people will be calling Gentlebeard and OFMD more broadly "historically important representation" and will consider whatever Stucky was a blip in a broader subculture that spawned from what I believe future critics will be considered some of the worst movies ever created by a major studio.

Like yes it is an AO3 bracket but hIsToRiCaLlY this show revitalized the rom com. What did Captain America: The Winter Soldier do other than be a main stream unnoteworthy inoffensive Disney sponsored emotionless shell of the great Jewish art it filched all its ideas off of. The cinema landscape would be better off without it.

Anyway much respect to anyone who was writing Stucky based off the comic books before Disney got a hold of them and nothing to say to anyone else other than sorry you'll never get to see your guys kiss. I'll get to see mine fuck in HD in like a month maximum.

[chaoticke-rambles]

I've been watching What If...? with my dad because he's invested and I like watching things with him and it's. hmm. I'm not going to talk about plot, or the fact that there's a non-zero chance my dad picked up on the queer (lol) when I was complaining they can't make Hela not goth. Instead, what's been standing out to me is how many of these ministories are like. Focused on women and/or minority characters.

Like, the one episode is about a new character named Kahori who's an indigenous woman of the Mohawk nation in the 1500s who gets supercharged by the tesseract and stops colonialism by beating up the Spanish. Great concept, and it was mostly in the Mohawk language in collaboration with Mohawk creators, which was really cool. I think that's a cool story for them to have told. However, I'm also a little annoyed that the only place we can really get stories like these is in What If...? The MCU is such a cultural juggernaut, and yet they are only recently starting to tell stories led by women and minorities. And the fact that What If...? is adding so much complexity to women and letting people who aren't allowed to be focal characters take the stage is frustrating to me.

Because, on the one hand, it's good that we get these stories, and that there are a few episodes discussing female friendship and trying to show minority perspectives that really haven't been seen in the rest of the MCU. But on the other hand, it's really highlighting how pathetic a lot of the rest of the Marvel properties are at things like having two women onscreen at once and giving them motivations besides "hot and deadly." Marvel is willing to tell these stories, but only in the What If...? world where they're not going to be taken seriously and will absolutely have no effect on the wider MCU. They get to wave at these stories and be like "See? We can do it!" without having to actually commit to anything.

And it's really frustrating to watch.

Elseworlds style stories are great for exploring concepts like "what if everyone was a vampire" and "zombies." and "what if Superman landed in Soviet Russia" and the fact that Marvel's idea of a wild, world-breaking thing to do that would not be sustainable in the main universe is women being real people is, uh, not a great look

[420technoblazeit]

Yeah I just thought it was funny how they acted like that was enough for gender fluid loki, like I tend to be more forgiving when it comes to stuff being shown or not for bi/pan rep especially for a show that only has 1 season sometimes a character mentioning it is all you can probably fit sometimes.

But the fact that they tried to claim loko is genderfluid while 'that' is the only reference to it is hilarious

the mcu will literally do ANYTHING to fence sit on representation it's so predictable. they show a file for 0.5 seconds that labels loki's sex as fluid and dont talk about it in the show just so ppl can go oh but it's just because he's a shapeshifter obviously!

which is weird bc being genderfluid is a big part of comic loki's identity and ties into his arc of reinventing himself and proving everyone wrong when they say he can't change as a person. i dont usually read comics but i follow loki's current line pretty closely bc i really like how well they write his gender fluidity and grey morality.

at this point just dont address the genderfluid thing if you're going to promise he'll be trans in this iteration and then refuse to work it into the writing. it's really frustrating to have this incredibly transparent pandering with no actual substance in the show

[cherrybombfangirl]

J and P from the fandom ask game? - ✨ Enc

Fandom Asks~

J - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr

Oooh, probably Lockwood and Co.? My brother recommended it to me but then someone I follow posted about it a bunch and I got into it and now I’m really hoping Netflix will greenlight Season 2

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)

Marvel Cinematic Universe AU where Tony Stark is actually held accountable for all his bullshit and also none of the other character’s identities are erased- I do not appreciate the MCU for what it did to say the least and I would like an AU where we get proper representation and Tony’s behavior isn’t excused or romanticized- but hey, that’s what fanfiction is for, right? That’s all I can really think of, 😅.

I would love to see a Ninjago AU where Kai kept it a secret that Lloyd was the green ninja cuz he’s a little kid

Thanks!

[m--rtyr]

I think marvel should’ve spent more time establishing god characters in films before introducing a character like Gorr so that more time could be spent developing him + more emotional response when gods that got skrunklied get brutalised.

But maybe that’s just my opinion

[evilkitten3]

my only regret is saying "let the frosty boys in" instead of "crack one open with the cold boys"

Loki did not try to “steal” the throne in thor 2011. If his plan had succeeded as intended Odin would have intervened long before they reached Laufey’s keep and brought them back to Asgard. He would then have realized Thor was still too reckless to take the throne and would have delayed his ascension. War would have been averted. Thor would have been chastened and had time to grow and mature before eventually taking the throne. The End.

That was the extent of Loki’s plan. The events of the movie are the result of things going catastrophically off the rails. He never planned to be on the throne at all, even temporarily. 

[punkeropercyjackson]

People always be forgetting Percy Jackson is canonically an anarchist with a strong sense of community who prioritizes minority kids and was an eco-activist in high school to make Percy more palpable and i'm not comfortable with that

[shannonsketches]

Maybe I’m just poisoned by industry experience but from my point of view the tragedy of the tournament of power Toei vs Toriyama depictions is that in the manga it’s very clear from the beginning that it’s really fucked up and wrong to put so much emphasis on Strong Guy Market Value that you’re willing to throw away anything that isn’t Masculine and Superheroey enough to entertain such a shallow point of view, even though it’s obvious that everything around that Shallow Hypermasculine Superhero Trope is very clearly more interesting and has much more story to tell, just by the character designs alone.

My theory is mostly based on the repeated frustration Toriyama always had for the way Goku is portrayed in the anime and other media as a Superman type, and the way Toei always overrides the vibe of his world as darker and gritter action-drama than he built it; And Goku spends the entire tournament in the manga chasing Jiren and trying to get Jiren’s attention and being desperate to be validated by Jiren, and in the end it’s not Goku who beats him. It’s the people you forgot about, who used clever storytelling while you were focused on Muscular Dudes Punching Muscular Dudes Real Hard, and the resolution was that all of those other worlds matter, and deserve to exist — even the hypermasculine superhero ones — because they all have value as stories and if you expand your perspective past the shallow parts you’ll see there’s more to those worlds than Hypermasculine Strong Guy’s Super Basic Super Hero Backstory About His Father Figure Dying (especially when hypermasculine strong guy remembers he’s part of a larger and very interesting cast, and he’s not the only character on the show…hint…? Toei?? Hint hint? Beuller?)

And I feel like Toei got that outline from Toriyama and went “Neat we get to make Goku EVEN MORE SUPERMAN!!”

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

ok so i was actually kinda surprised to find that looking at the ao3 stats and adjusting for how long ofmd’s existed (a year and a half) vs how long the stucky fandom’s been around (coming up on a decade), not only is gentlebeard on par with stucky but it actually beats stucky for amount of fics written. but i’m making a prediction now just based on how i’ve observed fandoms to work: i do think the gentlebeard popularity will peter out faster than stucky did

i’m not saying bc i think gentlebeard is worse or the ofmd fandom is weak or anything, i’m saying this bc in fandom it seems like the white masc queerbait ships* have like, an absurd amount of longevity that goes way beyond the general fandom surrounding whatever media said white masc queerbait ship hails from. im thinking abt the protagonist/rival ship from the TERF wizard series that nobody decent talks about in public anymore. before we all cut jkr out of our lives, people were still churning out fics abt the main character and that racist blond kid pretty regularly. and another example, we have those scientists from pacific rim that are more popular than any of the main characters from that movie. it’s been years and the newt/hermann fandom is still going strong.

and i say “newt/hermann fandom” intentionally, bc that’s the thing that i think actually gives these ships their longevity: when there are fans who are primarily invested in a piece of media because of a noncanonical masc4masc queerbait ship, they’re not really fans of the media itself. i mean, some of them might be, but if they are then that’s in addition to being fans of this alternate queer interpretation of the media in question. they’re a fan of the fandom mass hallucination that the fans collectively and collaboratively invented of a romantic/sexual/homoerotic relationship between two guys who on-screen might hug like once or twice (or sometimes even never)

and i’m pretty sure the reason this sort of fandom phenomenon tends to have so much longevity is bc the fans have already created this whole extensive romantic storyline using what is often some pretty minimal canonical material to work with. so when the movie franchise or the tv show ends and the shippers no longer have any new canonical material to work with, they can keep going for years because really, they were already making shit up from the start.

so compared to that, gentlebeard is way different bc everything the fans might have invented on our own the show pretty much already did for us, and anything the show didn’t do yet is probably coming for us this season (or in s3, fingers crossed). i’ve mentioned before how a lot of fanfiction seems to fall on a spectrum between “fix” and “expand,” and by the end of ofmd i doubt there’s gonna be a whole lot that gentlebeard fans feel like they need to “fix.” versus stucky, where there’s so much that needs to be fixed that you might as well just throw the whole canon out.

i don't really mean any of this as a criticism or an attack on fans of queerbait ships like this, im just pointing out fandom trends that i've noticed. i myself have been deeply invested in stucky, newmann, and the gay wizard boys at different points in my life. like there is something very fun abt putting on slash goggles and making queer content out of nothing. personally though, now that we're in an age where we're getting canon queer content, im not so engaged in a lot of the ships i used to care so much about, but i don't think it's inherently wrong** for people to still enjoy some classic fandom queerbait ships. it's just a very different thing from enjoying canonical queer ships like gentlebeard

*im using “queerbait ships” loosely to include popular gay ships in media that was never in a million years going to make these characters gay.

**a clarifying point: i don't think it's inherently wrong, however there are a lot of problematic elements to this kind of fandom activity, namely the way a lot of these queerbait ships will dominate a fandom while other characters who are important in canon get completely sidelined (and yes, the sidelined characters are often women/poc). also, less importantly, when people's primary media consumption revolves around strip mining canon for shipping content, this absolutely destroys their media literacy and critical thinking. again, im not saying this to attack ppl who engage in fandom primarily through fic/art of noncanonical gay ships, i myself have done the same thing. but i think ppl who do should also make a conscious effort to also engage with fan content that centers women/poc, or at the very least need to be aware of the issues around this kind of fandom activity.

[crazy-mist-magicky-hazel]

the mcu-ification of percy jackson is real and I hate it.

[erenfox]

At this point I feel as if Disney has ruined everything. Look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Endgame. Apart from some rare gems name any movie or show which didn't have some dumbass trope everyone yawns over.

Look at the Percy Jackson show. The actors are good for their age, don't get me wrong, but the screenwriting? The characters have basically no personality. The directing? Too rushed and too slow at times. The plot changes? THEY WERE SO DAM IRRITATING ISTG. The lighting? Half the time I had to squint my already bad eyes to witness what the hell was going on. And this was meant to be faithful to the books.

Heck, forget about MCU or PJO, just look at the recent Disney shows or movies; you'll know what I mean. ESPECIALLY THE LIVE ACTIONS OML-

It's heartbreaking because these are the things not just me, but several other people grew up with, and look how most of it is butchered now.

[cosmicstretch]

fell to my knees in despair when they announced the dr doom casting

[icyxmischief]

[2/2] TVA Loki's personality and behavior is like some weird combination of his Ragnarok characterization and the earlier films, and it doesn't always come across well, especially when taking into account that this is immediately following the battle for New York. On top of that, there's the feeling that Loki was side-lined. He's not in the movies anymore, and they clearly don't want him to have a higher place in the MCU. Plus, again, there's the way they treated his fanbase. It feels cheap.

^^^^^^^ yeah

[sampilled]

i think maybe if i watched supernatural earlier i would be more of a deangirl but his character type is so done to death in this post buffy world that i just cant help but find him sooooo boring and whiny and its really not his fault that i was into the mcu first but goodddddd

[thequeenkida]

I will forever be disappointed we got the TVA show as opposed to a show ACTUALLY about Loki. He's such an interesting character and you have him setting up future MCU projects (which he probably won't even be part of.)

[werewolfpngs]

neverafter would have been so good if it was good and that actively makes me sad but stormlight is like…..it would have been so bad if it was good. if the stormlight archive was good what would i complain about on here.