#some mcu criticism

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Gay ships getting screwed over by homophobic producers/writers as soon as they get wind of it is nothing new, but what has been done to stucky really is uniquely cruel. 

I’ve never heard of a gay ship having one member’s importance to the other simply... written out of the show/film? (Has this been done?) 

Never heard of a gay ship having decades of important source material about them deliberately sabotaged just to spite a  gay ship (that wasn’t even canonically gay or ever going to be so, anyway?) 

Or having the (heterosexual-ising) female character literally put into the male character’s canon place, using his gay-inspiring scenes, with any other ship. 

I’ve never heard of an actor’s brilliant performance, which made certain lines iconic; whose skill as an actor is the very reason they’re iconic...  simply being taken away from him and credited to an untalented actress who never said them. 

Just to damage an un-canon gay ship?! 

Imagine they brought out new Trek shows with Kirk and Spock and said ‘anyway, Spock never meant anything to Kirk, every Spirk thing he said was actually said to/about his new wife Spacky (Woman who joined the Hating-Vulcans Society and hired guys to torture Spock) and here’s a flashback to Spacky as Kirk’s Chief Science Officer all those years. Also we will be buying up other media and editing all tie-ins to reflect that they are nOT GAY.’ 

It’s unprecedentedly monstrous.

[alwida10]

After the … horrible*cough* … most deep and tragic, but certainly not satisfying conclusion of the Loki series, I would like to randomly cite one of the writers of Thor (2011) with a random advise for aspiring and established script writers. 🙂

That’s all. 🙂

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

first the pirate poll drama and now the stucky fans are frothing at the mouth lmao. literally i think everyone just hates the ofmd fandom bc they want what we have (queer queer romance written by a diverse writers room that actually cares about the characters and the story they're telling)

[humandisastertonystark]

So...let me get this straight again once and for all because I can't believe this isn't just a very, very bad fever dream.

After horribly killing him off in Infinity War, they decide to bring him back as a complete caricature of himself, basically making him an incompetent bumbling fool, to let their insufferable Mary Sue shine who shits all over him with the rest of the other characters for a whole damn season and then they reward him, after all this unnecessary additional torment, with the responsibility to fix the mess caused by Mary Sue, holding the timelines together for all eternity, doomed to be alone forever...something they also made him say he is the most scared of, multiple times.

How very fucking lovely

I can't believe I'm actually saying this but I wish he would've just stayed dead after IW

Also I hope everyone responsible for this, steps on Legos multiple times a day for the rest of their lifes

[mumblesplash]

mcu and mcu-adjacent writers who acknowledge sleipnir’s backstory but try to spin it so the original myth was ‘a misunderstanding’ or change it into something more palatable are fucking cowards. loki is that horse’s biological mother and if you can’t face that you don’t have what it takes

[brightnote]

Whoa look at this leaked Secret Invasion script from a deleted scene!

damn seriously the writing on this show was rough. Also, wow they cut so much stuff? The foreshadowing in this scene is wild.

I can’t believe Maria died for Operation Glasses.

[thetimelordbatgirl]

The fact that MCU has set the standard for quantity over quality and people just lap it up and even call DC bad just because they not announcing ten-twenty projects at SDCC, really is a concern for how much of a impact the MCU has on films and how people view films and ignore the behind the scenes process it takes to make all these films/shows. 

[demigodofhoolemere]

Marvel: This character from this other thing is also gonna be in this thing and this thing which means you have to watch this thing and also this other thing to understand them and also these individual movies are building up to the plot of the next Avengers team up which will lead into this thing and this thing which will have this character and this plot thread which means you’ll also have to watch this thing and—

Me:

[rainbowsuitcase]

Takes that made me log off TikTok tonight and finally go to sleep:

1. It's not okay to ship Clint and Natasha because Clint is married with kids

2. It's not okay to ship Steve and Bucky because they're literally brothers

3. If the ship doesn’t work in canon, it’s not a good ship

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

They just don't get it, do they...

Joe: "I think that the type of story that unfolded in the phases that we worked on [was] a very specific kind of story that wrapped itself up in those phases and now it’s time for a new story, and I think that’s the direction that Marvel’s headed in. They’re telling you a very different story, a very new story and I think the audience just needs to be patient with the redirection because you can’t keep telling the same story over and over or you lose the audience."

I don't want to be patient. I want to be hooked up now, right now. I don't want to be told to wait 4 or 5 years so that all the stuff being released now will make sense. I want to care about this now because it's the only way I'm going to stick around for the next 4 or 5 years.

I didn't need Thanos in every single movie in Phases 2 and 3 to care about the movies, I watched them for the simple reason that I cared about those characters, the movies were focused on them and their independent stories (for the most part, at least) and those films were helping expand the world-building and the universe while only focusing on Thanos in the post-credit scenes or through one or two lines during the movie. Marvel made me care about them.

Now, everything is Kang. Everything is the multiverse. We keep getting movies and series where the title characters are sidelined in order to introduce new, younger characters who have no complexity whatsoever and are only shown so that certain fans can have their cameos or to hype up a Young Avengers movie that won't be coming any time soon. The old characters are either laughed at, mocked, have their personalities completely retconned or the characters that made their previous movies interesting are scrapped completely (looking at you, Quantumania).

That's not mentioning reading interview after interview with scriptwriters who openly admit they never watched the previous movies/series their characters have been in because apparently professionalism is not "cool" these days.

If they're losing the audience and Quantunmania flopped epically is because they're taking us for granted, and the sheer reality of it all is that the audience is far more intelligent than we're led to believe.

So, nope. Patience is not gonna do it. Either they start accepting criticism and realize the way they're doing things now is not working or Quantumania is not going to be the last movie to not even earn enough to be profitable.

[silverpen-and-paper]

my thoughts on lokius

[loki season 1 spoilers!]

season 2 is coming out in a few days (!!) and so i decided i’d write out my thoughts on lokius before it’s released. as a disclaimer, this is critical of the series, but not completely series-negative.

if lokius becomes canon in s2, i genuinely want to be happy about it. it would be amazing steps in queer rep for marvel to have a canonical lgbtq couple as the focus of the show (and i say this as a queer person myself).

but the way mobius and loki’s relationship was written seems to be only thought-out on the surface level (which is the case for a lot of the things in the show), and a lot of aspects of their relationship aren’t so great when you look deeper into it. i understand why people don’t notice and/or don’t want to acknowledge it — i was extremely enthusiastic about the ship, and i didn’t notice the problems either. to those looking at lokius with the most positive light, they have an amazing dynamic and are adorable and wholesome and all great things. so i get the hype, i really do (tbh, i shipped it so hard that several months ago when the problems were pointed out to me it ruined my week).

but even with how much i loved it, i didn’t want to just ignore any potential problems. so i distanced myself from the ship for a few weeks until i was in a better headspace to gather my thoughts.

first i’ll start with what was intended:

mobius is obviously intended to be a very kind and understanding character. whether or not the writers wanted it to come across as platonic or romantic, they wanted him to care deeply about loki. like loki said though: “no one good is ever truly good, and no one bad is ever truly bad.” the writers did give mobius at least one major flaw and a character arc, in that he believed in the goodness of the tva too much, but by the end of s1, he was all for taking it down . 

you can see his flaw in the way he treats loki early on. sylvie’s been killing minutemen and stealing reset charges from the tva for a long time, and he wants loki’s help in finding her, so mobius does what the tva expects: he uses what he knows about loki to get them (somewhat) on the tva’s side. unfortunately, that happens to be psychologically breaking loki. compared to outright pruning from existence, which most of the tva seems to prefer, it’s no wonder he thinks this is the better option. (the fact that the show portrays this as a “therapy session” is a whole problem in itself, but i won’t get into that.)

things like this that mobius does early in the series can be explained by his faith in the tva’s mission. he didn’t agree with most of their methods, and he didn’t realize that even his actions (viewed by the tva as too merciful) were still significantly harmful, but he believed the tva ultimately worked for the good and safety of the entire universe. it’s not an excuse, but it could be forgiven in his later character arc when he realizes that he was wrong, regrets his actions, apologizes, and learns.

but then there’s the part when he puts loki in the memory cell.

i really, really hate that marvel did that. they easily could have had a very similar memory cell situation without having mobius be the one to put loki in there. (mobius could have left the room in anger, and then the guards or ravonna throw loki in there without mobius’ knowledge, for one example.) but instead, whoever wrote that plot point apparently didn’t understand how bad that was, and so it is, unfortunately, canon. 

you might be inclined to say that it wasn’t that bad. because actions in fantastical situations can make things harder to distinguish, i’ll put a real-world comparison: one partner puts the second partner somewhere they KNOW that the second will get repeatedly both physically and verbally attacked. they do this simply because they think that they’ve been cheated on. even if they had been cheated on, that in no way excuses beating up the second partner, directly or indirectly.

hopefully you can recognize that as obvious abuse. even if the abuser later deeply regrets it and rescues their partner, the fact that they did it in the first place NEEDS to be addressed. i don’t know what exactly could repair a relationship after that, but brushing it under the rug and ignoring it won’t help. (and this is still abuse with a platonic reading of the relationship.)

if marvel hadn’t done that (and had handled mobius’ arc better in general) then there would be far less problems with the lokius ship. but since they did, us as fans have to figure out where to go from here, whether that’s writing or reading fix-it-fics or simply acknowledging that the problems exist.

hopefully the people running s2 are more competent and have figured something out to fix this. i really hope that’s the case. but it is marvel.

(sidenote: from things that tom hiddleston and owen wilson have said in interviews i’ve seen, i don’t think they noticed the problems either. maybe they have background context of things that aren’t in the official show but they accepted them as canon. or they just didn’t notice, like is the case with many fans.)

[amarriageoftrueminds]

(another) Thing that annoys me about the Cap movies: 

We never got to see the scene where Steve & Co found out about the torture and mind-control used on Bucky. 

Because that should’ve been super important!

It would have vindicated Steve’s faith in him, proved Bucky’s victimhood and innocence, and turned Nat and Sam 100% around on whether or not Bucky was worth helping (whether or not it was worth them apparently wasting years of their lives helping Steve to find him). 

They’re supposed to have been: 

A) hunting down the remains of Hydra for years, 

B) familiarising themselves with all the Hydra info Nat dumped at the end of of CATWS, and 

C) hunting for Bucky-related information specifically amongst all that. 

Meaning they absolutely cannot have avoided finding, for example, all the places Bucky was tortured in, the specialised enhanced torture equipment (impossible to mistake for that used on a non-supersoldier), cells he was held in, all the specialised physical restraints, tailored for an enhanced person with a cyborg arm, documentation of his torture, witness testimony from surviving Hydra mooks at the Triskelion, etc., and seeing it firsthand. 

And for some of that time, they know Hydra had access to a magic mind-control stick, courtesy of Loki, and an enhanced person who can control minds (Wanda). 

So even if Steve didn’t find evidence of Bucky’s mind-control early on in his search, he and Natasha definitely do know that mind-control is possible (especially Natasha, given her roots in the Red Room and the fact that her bff was mind-controlled.)

Even if you ignored Nat and Sam’s personal backstories, which preclude both of them from being dismissive of a victim (a veteran who suffered a fall, a mind-controlled Russian ‘assassin’), it doesn’t make sense for Nat and Sam to still be trying to suggest Steve step back from helping Bucky, the way they do in CW. 

They cannot still be ignorant of what was done to Bucky, when they have been specifically investigating what was done to Bucky, and all that information has to have been impossible for them to avoid! 

Instead of which, the movie just skips right over the reveal to Steve and Sam of the mind control (going straight from ‘scene of mind-control’ to ‘scene of Steve being skeptical (which he shouldn’t and wouldn’t be)’ to ‘scene of talking about trigger words already’). Casually implying that either Steve and Sam already knew about it, or that Bucky has just explained it to them... 

But only off-camera. 

And yet, Sam is still salty and scornful of Bucky’s innocence (even when they have just seen mind-control happening, Bucky is suffering amnesia of WS acts in front of him, apparently just told him about mind-control, and then proves that he has his pre-war memories). 

So they imply the content of skipped scenes but then have characters act in ways that are... irrational, given the skipped content?? 

Makes no damn sense! 

[stromuprisahat]

About five minutes in Thor: Love and Thunder (because apparently I've decided to suffer today), and I already can't wait to see another article treating Taika Waititi as some sort of native inhabitants's icon, showing it to evil white western corporations, 'cause re-introducing Thor as ripped, cool white saviour of poor helpless peaceful inhabitants, robbed of their foolish fake religion turns my stomach in a way I'm rather certain it wasn't intended to.

[buckymilf]

Bucky's profile on the disney cruise

yes you read that right, they're calling him hydra agent and totally affiliating him with hydra

now open the door Kevin feige, we just want to talk...

[crypticpatterns]

mcu phases 1-3 be like here's an interconnected universe with standalone movies that are all building up to epic crossovers that pay off the pieces we set up in previous movies! except the crossover movies will completely ignore all character arcs from the standalones and any plot continuity we don't like will be thrown away. wait, why aren't you invested in our characters? why don't you like the conclusions to their arcs?? surely ignoring all coherence in character arcs and story elements that weren't convenient hasn't had any negative consequences on audience engagement and interest in our franchise!

[comradekarin]

maybe this is just ,, a knee jerk reaction to not having nice things centered predominantly on people of color, but whenever i see writers include white characters as the main focuses in their fics or have a white person be the love interest for a black panther character (and it’ll be that classic white girl that defies their authority and is “sassy” and “passionate”) im not gasping in surprise im just like