My only complaint is that it's coming out in late 2024. That was the best way to do that reveal lmao

 

Presumably this was posted in response to the above trailer, because it just showed up in my subscriptions:

 

While most of She-Hulk has been a miss for me, the final two episodes with Daredevil were actually quite fun. The K.E.V.I.N. thing was great, even if it was directly ripping off 1000x other shows that do meta wall breakers.

Something to watch when nothing else is on I think.

 

I enjoyed it in general. More than a few of the other marvel shows.

 

She hulk is the worst mcu property bar none.

Watching She-hulk is like letting someone pop a squat on your face and then they let out a putrid, watery diarrhea straight into your mouth.

Even its ending, which was supposed to be "woah, so random and quirky and meta" was nothing but a pile of cold pig shit.

It accomplished absolutely nothing.

I hate that I spent 30 minutes of my life watching this. I could have been doing cocaine or sharing needles with heroin addicts instead

 

Just saw Werewolf by Night. Was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. My only gripe, it was too short. Could easily have been a 90 minute movie. Wouldn't mind a few more of this.

 

She-Hulk thoughts:

Spoiler: Review

In terms of She-Hulk, I really wanted to like it, the 4th wall breaking stuff is in theory right up my alley, but I felt that the show was very inconsistent with its tone, storyline, and themes. The final thing of Jen breaking through Disney+ is classic She-Hulk nonsense and is honestly the sort of thing I wanted to see way more of, but the show didn't really indicate from the start that it was that sort of show -- meaning that it seems to come out of nowhere.

The real issue is that they were trying to comment on the nature of the cookie cutter action heavy MCU endings and wanted to subvert that with a more grounded, interesting resolution, but then they skipped the resolution entirely and just did a "And they all lived happily ever after" jump which felt completely pointless and left me wondering what the point of the show really was -- it seemed like the theme was "Jen ignoring the toxic sexist fans online and reclaiming her story". But I already know that those sexist idiots are idiots, I felt like the show wasn't clever or funny enough in its trolling to avoid feeling preachy, and Jen only reclaimed her story offscreen, meaning I couldn't ultimately connect with the story. I liked the Wong/Madisynn stuff the best and I thought the Daredevil bits worked pretty well too. Otherwise it was a real miss for me.

 

Well...

 

Since this is Halloween Werewolf by Night was my choice of the movie and it was really good. How they handled it makes me believe that they can do Blade really well. It definitely could be longer, but it used it's time well and I already want more of the main characters. Especially two monster bothers, Jack and Ted. Their relationship was the best part.

 

Went to see Wakanda Forever last night and it was... pretty good. The tribute to Chadwick Boseman was lovely. Shuri's journey was, if not exactly fun, at least understandable given her grief. I also appreciated how the ending left the story with more places to go.

However, it has really served to drive home one of my biggest misgivings with the current state of Marvel: Once again, there is not a single (non-authoritarian) governmental leadership or organisation which is not presented uniformly badly. It is a theme which is being repeated over and over now. I am honestly sick of it.

Spoiler: Whinging

So we are presented with a world in which other nations are constantly trying to get ahold of vibranium.

Now, given the multitudinous uses vibranium is shown to have, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. It is apparently capable of massively accelerating technological advancements in a great many areas but, of course, this being Marvel, the only use that anyone even bothers mentioning is weapons. And, also of course, the way those other nations go about trying to get that vibranium is through shadowy black ops and political intimidation. Because of course.

So Wakanda, the nation that only a few years ago geared up to wage a war against the entire world, lectures the rest of the world about them not being worthy of trust. Nice. An authoritarian regime, which is only held in check by the whims of its current absolute ruler, lectures the democratic governments of the world that they are not to be trusted, and it is presented in such a way that Wakanda is obviously in the right. Can you really blame the world's nations for wanting to try to level the playing field? What if the next ruler is not so temperate? Oh, shit, here comes Shuri! It's okay though, I'm sure she'll get through whatever crisis hits in Black Panther 3 and become a proper enlightened philosopher queen.

But, of course, power in the hands of the democratically elected, or the legally sanctioned is, in the world of Marvel, always a bad thing. Even the sole example of a power for (mostly) good stemming from the established world order, SHIELD, was shown to have been corrupted from the inside. Does this strike anyone else as a pretty unpleasant social commentary?

The only ones to trust are billionaires, self-made heroes, and the genetically gifted. All we pathetic normies can do is hitch our wagon to those paragons of morality and justice, because any attempt to protect ourselves collectively is automatically doomed to corruption, either by power-seeking arseholes, or amoral psychopaths. Fuck me, but that's a bleak view.

It has echoes of the populist rhetoric being spouted by right-wing fucktards the world over. Drain the swamp!

 

Indeed, I'm really tired of the "benevolent dictator" angle that is promoted here, although Marvel is hardly the only ones doing this sort of thing. The whole idea that the leader of Wakanda must fight someone to the death means they're a good modern leader makes no sense -- just fighting to be the Black Panther would be another thing.

 

@Steelbadger

I'm being reductionist on purpose when I say "who cares?" Do you need pro-democratic social commentary from the MCU? Does anyone? MCU is for superheroes punching villains and cracking jokes. If they stumble into a theme beyond this superficial (superficial =/= bad) purpose of entertaining, like when Thanos was the protagonist of Infinity War and I didn't see that coming, that's cool, but I don't take my worldview from superhero movies and, come on, you don't either.

 

More depth and sound commentary adds to the overall quality of the film, which adds entertainment value imo. Maybe it’s just me but comic book content has more to offer than just pretty colors and big explosions.

 

I honestly don't know what to say to this except:

1. Are we meant to pretend that media does not influence our opinions and how we perceive the world? I thought this was a pretty well-established fact, even among well-educated and informed consumers. If not, I guess someone should tell all advertisers, and all propaganda makers that what they're doing is pointless. There isn't some magic pixie dust that exists in deliberate propaganda that lets it influence people, and not in other media.
2. That influence is not of the form of 'I watched a movie, now I think a strong-man dictator sounds like a good idea', that's an absurd expectation. The way this works, as has been demonstrated by psychological research time and time again, is through the creation and enforcement of a sense of consensus. The sad fact is that the majority of our non-consciously considered perceptions (which form the bulk of most peoples' opinions) are significantly influenced by consensus and not the strength of the facts. If you can get a completely factless position repeated by a large number of different sources, you can convince people that there is a consensus, even without a need for any substantial proof. Just the headlines are enough.

But this is getting away from my point. I wasn't saying that Marvel has some kind of moral requirement to defend democracy or anything like that (although... what was that saying? With great power comes great...?). All I was saying was that I personally am getting frustrated with their blind repetition of a message which I personally find distasteful. Even if that repetition is unintentional, it still exists, and I can still dislike it.

Imagine instead that every Marvel movie had a secondary antagonist who was gay/black/a woman/jewish and never showed us any representations of that archetype which was positive. You may be confident that it wouldn't influence your worldview. But are you confident that it would not reinforce the worldview of the mouth-breathing racist next door? Or the teenager from down the street with the largely-absent parental figures?

Perhaps they don't think about these things, but I find that simple fact to be annoying too. Just look back through my recent thoughts on Marvel, for how I'm still trying to find anything resembling a 'statement' from their movies. A movie without anything to say can be fun, but a movie with something to say can be both fun and meaningful. Marvel has (mostly) got the fun flashy lights thing nailed. Maybe they should try for something more now.

 

I feel like the shitty government level leadership in marvel (and all superhero shit) is similar to the shitty or absent adults in children's books. It's to give the heroes space to do their thing and room to grow.

BUT you often see that in these kids books the adults show up later on and start to pull their weight too. Once the heroes have had their space to grow. I feel like once marvel reached the point of global conflicts and humanity vs the space aliens it would really make sense for the adults to start showing up.

 

I see your point, although I don't think that mouth-breathing racists take their racism from Marvel movies of all things. Racists are produced by a gauntlet of other, more powerful and more immediate influences than movies.

 

I dont think you're supposed to side with monarchy over democracy, but rather with isiolationists over imperalist powers. Like they outright have Everett Ross call out the US government for what they would have done if they had been in Wakanda's position.

Anyway I enjoyed the movie a lot, it made me suprisingly care for Shuri when before this movie I really found her presence more annoying than anything. Narmor was also well done, though I dislike how his people are portrayed as peers to Wakanda despite their short history of only 500 years compared to the 10.000 years Wakanda has mined and developed Vibranium.

I couldn't have cared less about Ironheart, since she felt really tacked on, but it's understandable from a marketing standpoint why they'd use this movie to promote/introduce her.

 

Bob Iger is back as Disney CEO. Someone will probably write DisneyWar 2 about it.

 

Good. Chapek was floundering hard from day 1.

 

Watched Wakanda Forever on D+.

Felt it was a pretty weak. The send-off to T'challa was nice, but the rest of the movie was a snooze.

I just give zero fucks about Shuri tbh.