Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase 4 & Beyond (and a chance to change your vote)

otm

i am tempted to grab a random issue of OHotMU and start making a list of origin stories that don't explicitly hinge on trauma (Wundarr the Aquarian came to mind immediately) but i really should be doing something productive...

I am specifically talking about the MCU implementation of these characters.

Iron Man: was blown up by his own company’s weapons and had to invent something to keep shrapnel out of his heart
Captain America: was locked in ice for 70 years, losing all of his friends and the love of his life
Thor: his brother betrayed and tried to kill him
Hulk: became Hulk (yes this is shaky)
Hawkeye: pretty clean origin but then gets put through the wringer in the movies by having Quicksilver die in front of him, then having his whole family blipped out of existence, then having his best friend sacrifice herself for him
Black Widow: sterilized as part of her assassin training
Winter Soldier: physically mutilated, rebuilt by Nazis into a brainwashed super soldier, murders Iron Man’s parents
Black Panther: father murder in front of him
Scarlet Witch: parents killed by Stark tech, brother killed by Ultron, lover killed by Thanos
Vision: relatively clean origin, although he was intended to be the murderous new chassis for Ultron, but then killed by his lover, brought back from the dead, then killed by Ultron
Falcon: secret agent with flying backpack, relatively clean origin
War Machine: clean origin, accidentally paralyzed by Vision during Civil War
Ant Man: incarcerated for Robin Hooding, divorced during incarceration and stripped of parental rights
Spider Man: indirectly got his uncle killed
Star Lord: father murdered his mother
Gamora: father was Thanos
Rocket: tortured into existence in a lab
Groot: clean origin as far as we know
Drax: family murdered by Thanos
Mantis: held hostage by Ego
Dr Strange: lost surgical use of his hands in a car accident
Shuri: clean origin, almost lost her brother and had to flee Wakanda
Okoye: clean origin, chose to serve an unstable usurper, boyfriend tried to kill the rightful king
Captain Marvel: kidnapped and brainwashed into helping oppressors
Pepper Potts: clean origin, tortured several times due to association with Stark
Nebula: father was Thanos

I’m not specifically arguing that all of these scenarios are created equal; I’m arguing that there is more than enough suffering to go around in the MCU and that while I’d argue that Wanda is a strong contender for getting the worst of it, the baggage being brought to the table here is much less MCU-driven and more mapping shitty comics events onto the MCU iterations, which is understandable but possibly also unfair.

I immediately thought of Ironheart as a character driven by her genius rather than trauma to build an armored suit and become a hero and then I remembered the heaps of trauma (dad, stepdad, and best friend all gunned down in drive-by shootings) so...welp

lol, I keep thinking 'happy-go-lucky' is the key here, so...Amadeus Cho? Oh, shit, no, parents killed, whoops.

well i appreciate your diligence to write all that out! i could nitpick some of those - if it follows the comics at all (and given that Yelena Belova is on the way, it likely will) Black Widow's MCU La Femme Nikita Red Room experience offers a lot worse than sterilization, Gamora and Nebula were tortured and forced to kill things by their father as a child - but I think we're a lot closer to agreeing on this than not.

I'll refine my point then to say not that "women in the MCU deal with unfair trauma" but that the TYPE of trauma they experience disproportionately leans into dehumanization and othering and loss of independence and that sort of storytelling has a long history in superhero entertainment as intentionally titillating and misogynist and just being lazy.

If you'd like to extend the idea that loss of control and independence is dehumanization, the other character that gets this the worst is Rocket, suggesting a fairly uneasy analogue the more you think about it.

"Who will we treat with more human dignity in our storytelling origins: the greatest spy in history or the raccoon?"

for reasonably happy-go-lucky non-traumatized marvel heroes, i would point you to my early post with Kamala Khan and Squirrel Girl and Moon Girl... all of whom are recently reiterated characters written and/or drawn and/or reimagined by women, so that may tell you something too.

Secret War really took a big dump on Kamala Khan’s momentum. Thought the first dozen issues of that series were great before they started shoehorning her into crossovers and teams.

Some other examples of prominent female characters whose origin isn’t defined by trauma – but whom have appeared only marginally, or not yet appeared, in the MCU – include Bobbi Morse, Jennifer Walters, and Kate Bishop*.

(*in my understanding, she was revealed to be an assault survivor sometime after her introduction, but that fact doesn’t play a large role in her character later.)

btw in case you thought that brutalization of women as lazy plot device was solely a marvel thing, may i introduce the non-Eltingville Comic Book, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Role Playing Club members of our audience to the idea of the "Woman in the Refrigerator":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators

https://www.lby3.com/wir/women.html

Bobbi Morse is in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and IIRC they are in pre-production on a She-Hulk series

that’s why I said “marginally or not yet”

I really liked this episode. Scarlet Witch was always a big favorite of mine as a kid, so I liked the dive into her backstory. I thought it was an unexpectedly touching portrayal of grief, at least from the MCU.

But, come on, "that line" was neither the greatest example of screenwriting in modern history, nor was it an example of how "terrible" the writing is "always" in the MCU. Can we maybe have a piece of pop culture that is not immediately shoved to the most ridiculous ends of hyperbole? Both positions, which were all over Twitter this weekend, are embarrassing.

agreed. it was a nice line but unfortunately completely contradicts the comforting thing that Vision says immediately prior, something like 'it can't ALL be sadness.' well, if grief is love persevering, and it can't all be sadness, i guess love doesn't really last! SORT IT OUT, VISION

I mean... it doesn't work that way, at least not in my experience

The underlying point and what resonated so hard with people is that grief is a painful manifestation of love, and it's helpful to get through that pain to remember that it is a manifestation of love. The fact that that pain fades doesn't directly mean that the love does; it means that over time, the love become less immediately painful. The two statements are absolutely in support of each other, not in contradiction.

ty for expressing that DJP. i was trying to figure out a good way to say it, but you nailed it

haha DJP no i agree, i was just being needlessly argumentative by taking a cartoonishly literal interpretation of this show's dialogue, per tradition

lol well-played

What is ILX if not literalness persevering?

pic.twitter.com/IbzjnqKrsH

— Gabe Delahaye (@gabedelahaye) February 28, 2021

Okay lmao

i've seen a million of those and that's the only good one, well done

I saw that one, but idgi, guessing because I'm not familiar with the Vanessa Bayer source material.

Jon, it’s this skit from Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xS9Y_mjTjc

Thanks! Haha, should have assumed it came from that show, seems to be the breeding ground for 85% of memes on twitter right now. I haven't watched it yet, one of those shows where I feel like I missed the moment and it can never possibly live up to the hype.

I would ignore the hype tbh, it’s just funny

Also with a lot of good visual candy, as evidenced by its reuse in memes

On a separate point - and one that likely deserves an essay if one hasn't already been written - given that Kirby/Lee were doing Douglas Sirk-style hypermelodrama romance comics long before they repurposed much of that angst into the Avengers and X-Men should indicate just how baked-in to the formula this glurge is. People have been bitching about too much of it being in the books for over sixty years, why should now be any different?

I can't even tell where the quote is from

the second result was this edifying article, though

that quote is from my lengthy and de-spoilered post upthread.

the hiding tags work! I wonder if they googleproof

You don’t have time to watch one damn show on Disney plus and suddenly you have no idea what anyone is ever arguing about on Twitter anymore.

— Dewayne Perkins (@DewaynePerkins) February 28, 2021

that vanessa beyer skit on that show was easily the funniest thing on the show and also one of the funniest things I've seen in the past 25 years

it's my favorite part of the show and also a pavlovian trigger for me to post the aunty donna ellen sketch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5FGOaz__W0

that vanessa beyer skit on that show was easily the funniest thing on the show and also one of the funniest things I've seen in the past 25 years

I sincerely feel the book LEAN IN should be about Vanessa Bayer's performance in that sketch and not some Facebook shit

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/kathryn-hahn-steals-the-show-again

ok that finale left me an emotional mess and that’s the first time I’ve been able to say that about an MCU thing after 22 movies and several series

Wanda!!

This was good. I had a confident guess about a mid-credits scene which of course didn't happen.

As a library worker I must protest some collateral damage.

Note that there's a bot mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene... The mid-credits one is just a set-up for Captain Marvel 2, but the post-credits one is way more significant for this series.

As for the episode itself, it was kinda meh. They didn't do anything wrong, and the emotional beats worked, but again everything happened just as I had expected. The real Vision is restored. Monica becomes Spectrum. Agatha isn't shown to be truly evil, she doesn't die, and they're setting her up to become sort of a trickster mentor for Wanda. Tommy and Billy didn't actually disappear with the illusion either, and we're probably gonna see them in Young Avengers, if not Dr. Strange 2. So yeah, it was competently done, but not much originality or surprises, just lining everyone up with their comic counteparts and setting up future movies and series.

The biggest surprise for me was that Pietro turned out to be just random Westview dude. How'd he get the super speed, then? Is Agnes powerful enough to just casually give people superpowers? And him looking like Quicksilver from the X-Men movies was just a meta joke and nothing else?

Well his "man cave" looked very much to me like the basement he lives in in Days Of Future Past, I'd be more confident but can't be arsed looking at DOFP to check.

Sure, but he can't be this universe's counterpart of the X-Men universe's Pietro Maximoff, because there already was one who died. So even if the man cave was supposed to look similar, I don't see any signifigance to that?

It reinforces (to me) that it was exactly just a meta joke and nothing else. Very much fanwank.

thought the series was fine as something to look at during a pandemic or whatever, especially when it was "what is going on" type thing, but the last 3 or so episodes were awful, with this final one being incredibly stupid, imo

Well, I suppose I liked the final scene with Wanda and Vision (how many times is she going to see him die?), but we thought this finale was pretty bad. There was a point early one where I thought, man, this is like watching some Disney show, and ... well.

I quite liked it.

This ruled

agnes's husband ralph is gonna be confused