#Did... did they just nuke Wanda's character in this movie? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mdccanon · 2 years

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I love your breakdowns of “problematic” media because you listen to both sides of an issue and can find good in media, even if there are flaws. My morality-obsessed OCD ass really needs commentary like that lol. (and yes, this is the MCU Wanda fan anon. Thank you for indulging my questions 😁)

No problem. I want to discuss these things. And I especially love talking about problematic characters because they are real people and bring up real issues.

I made a post about how Magneto is right, but that doesn't change that he's a war criminal. Because, news flash, to be a head of state for any number of years will eventually require breaking international laws and either hoping no one catches you or using political/military/economic pressure to make the international community look the other way.

Magneto made a country and stole nukes so that his country could be on the same military level as the First World countries. Xavier said it was wrong because "that will make them more afraid of you." Good. That's the point. Racist people will wipe you out no matter how nice, how smart, how friendly, or how helpful you are. (which they DID in the comics, they committed genocide on the people of Genosha) The Greeks said it best 2,300 years ago: You cannot win a war appealing to the humanity of your aggressors or shaming them to their allies.

So... I love talking about balancing moral, spiritual, and political ethics.

Oh, and PS again on how comics are written and why there is probably so much disconnect between even comic readers and how the MCU operates.... Most people don't really consider how poorly written/disjointed the endings and beginnings of comic stories are.

"The character dies at the end of this first story. Yay, character is resurrected in the second story. Uh oh, turns out that last storyline was a clone who didn't know they were a clone; this third storyline features the real character. Oops, that last storyline was actually a Doombot who didn't know they were a bot, so this fourth story is the real character; and it ends with the character having amnesia, so that the fifth storyline can have a clean slate." That's comics. And if it isn't that, its "It was an alternate dimension."

But we love the stories because we remember the middle of them.

And if the MCU wants to use these storylines but not use these contrivances, the MCU world has to be VERY forgiving and tolerant, starting with the very first movie. Tony Stark WAS a secret identity in the comics. MCU set the tone by Tony being an open superhero that the world just... let's him do it... with no consequences... for his international vigilantism...

So, most complaints audience members have about a character getting off easy in the MCU is because in the comic equivalent:

Steve died at the end of Civil War. When he came back, Tony was the last thing on his mind. (But let's also mention the whole "Steve was frozen in ice/ Bucky is the Winter Soldier" so that every unsuccessful storyline from the 40s-60s can be ret-conned into a Captain America successor and the government rewriting Steve's childhood Bucky into a kid sidekick--the real Bucky was always an adult!)

Ultron erased the Avengers' memories that he ever existed and he came back by brainwashing someone to build him an upgraded body.

Scarlet Witch and Namor get amnesia at the end of half of their major storylines.

Outrageous and mysterious characters can go without backstories for DECADES and then writers plot twist-retcon them to be the future version of some random kid already in the story or a couple that hasn't had a child yet. (Hela, Rachel Summers, Nathan Grey and Nathan Summers--the same person from two alternate futures, Valerie Richards von Doom, Nathaniel Richards)

Reed Richards invents something revolutionary and then loses it because he never makes prototypes, backups or blueprints for his inventions.

Doom gets away by always having a Doombot be the fall-guy.

Loki DOES die repeatedly and that's how he gets away with everything. Thor can't punish a new reincarnation for an old one's crimes.

Black Panther, Namor, and Doom get away with a lot by claiming diplomatic immunity in ways that it DOES NOT work.

If you have a psychic mutant on your team, you are guaranteed to escape without consequences.

So, the next time you feel Wanda got away with kidnapping 3,000 people because she's white, remember that Steve Rogers sunk three helicarriers in the Potomac and outed all of HYDRA and them seeking revenge against him was addressed in the stylish opener to Age of Ultron and never brought up again.

Also, a baby Celestial's entire torso is sticking out of the Pacific Ocean and not only did that somehow not create devastating tsunamis that would have crashed into every shoreline across the Ring of Fire, but according to the official MCU timeline, Far From Home/No Way Home, Multiverse of Madness, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, and Ms. Marvel have ALL occurred after the plot of Eternals, in that order. With MK/SH/MM happening TWO YEARS after Eternals. And NO ONE has mentioned it. Baby Celestial. Poking out of the ocean. The Celestial's daddy hovered above the entire planet for, like, ten minutes. No one has mentioned it.

80% of the accountability or continuity you'd think any character or plot point should have, never happens in the comics. Likewise, if you really, really look at the MCU, its the same for their plot points and characters. It would feel a touch hypocritical for ME to complain about it now, when I grew up on a Spider-Man cartoon that I still consider a national treasure and in it, when Peter finally marries Mary-Jane, it's revealed to be a water-clone made by Hyrdoman and he kidnapped Mary Jane weeks ago. In the comics, when Peter finally marries Mary Jane, Peter sells his marriage to the Devil himself to bring his ELDERLY Aunt May back to life -- which is a double-reset.

When I want complex ideas and well-crafted writing, I read literature made for adults. Or, at least stand-all graphic novels.

#wanda maximoff #wandavision #multiverse of madness #the mcu

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roseunspindle · 2 years

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Marvel Cinematic Universe

Phase One:

Iron Man - I thought it was fun the first couple times I watched it, but when I went back and realized Tony is pretty much the same guy, the same guy who just blames others and never really takes responsibility for his own actions or inactions and also is very “this is the way I said it has to be, so it has to be this way” I ended up not enjoying it anymore.

The Incredible Hulk - Still enjoy this one, though dear god can we set General Ross on fire? Can he not comprehend that that is an actual person he’s hunting? Also, how many injuries are in fact his fault in this movie?

Iron Man 2 - I liked this one less already then if you go with the above arguments for why I don’t like one anymore yeah, fell down.

Thor - a very good introduction movie to Thor, great acting, (also we got Darcy for the first time!) If only any of the other movies kept this same characterization for all the Asgardians.

Captain America: The First Avenger - My favorite of all the Avengers movies!

Marvels the Avengers - very good, would have been great if Tony didn’t do half or more of Loki’s work for him in splitting the team by being an ass.

Phase Two:

Iron Man 3 - I just couldn’t ever get through it, it was so much... Tony...

Thor: The Dark World - I actually kinda thought this was boring? Our main villain has no real personality and he’s not really allowed to even build a sense of menace. Odin seems to be a different character, Loki leaning so hard into that “oh poor me, I caused all my problems and killed lots of people and now there are consequences for my actions...”

Captain America: The Winter Solider - Really liked the friendship and back and forth between Steve and Natasha, and we get a new friend for Steve and he seems like a calm put together guy. Loved the Winter Soldier scenes and the flash backs. The main issue was Hydra...like, it just didn’t make sense? The best spy agency ever never noticed they were Hydra? It was weird, and downloading all the info onto the web? Not good, how many people were endangered by that?

Guardians of the Galaxy - very fun, (yes I cried over Groot). Rocket being a good guy and saving people as best he could, the locations. A good movie.

Avengers: Age of Ultron - I kinda hate this movie? It had good scenes, like Bruce telling Wanda (after she took his control away) that he could kill her and not change a shade. I genuinely don’t really get Thors subplot? Also Tony making a murderbot, (and emotionally manipulating Bruce) then wondering why no one will trust him when he wants to make another one... Also confused why at the party they were being unimpressed with Rhodey? He was doing a good job and wanted to share a cool story? I actually liked Wanda and Pietro and their backstory, but since it never goes anywhere. (good on steve for pointing out to hill that he did the same thing when he was a young man as they did for his country.) Also where did Bruce/Natasha come from?

Ant-Man - a very fun movie again, that last fight on the toy train? XD Scott is great, and I liked that he and his ex-wife’s hubby managed to find a place of relatability.

Phase Three:

Captain America: Civil War - Steve: this thing takes away our and everyone’s freedoms and I am dealing with the death of one of the first people who ever believed in me, and wanting to rescue and rehabilitate my other friend who was captured and brainwashed for decades. Tony: we need to be controlled, I mean we made a murderbot and new york was damaged - Steve: you made a murderbot, the rest of us just had to help fight it, then you got mad at us for wanting to stop you from making a second potential murderbot, and the government and shield were the ones that caused a lot of the new york fiasco, especially the firing a nuke at the place? (random reveal with very good footage of possibly bucky killing tony’s parents) I have to kill that guy now even though we just showed that this man has framed bucky for shit before! also you trying to defend your oldest friend who you just got back, that hurts my feelings a lot so now I’m mad at you. Totally letting everyone get thrown into supermax, including puttting a shock collar on a human girl. T’challa... I don’t like his actions but I understand them? The Visions and Wanda romance seemed sort of... out of nowhere. like most of the romances. Tony why are you blackmailing that child into a war zone!?

Doctor Strange (only watched it once) - not bad, I mean, strange wins by being annoying, which I approve of. His supposed girlfriend was just, they could have had them just be friends... it was weird?

Guardians of the Galaxy 2: I liked the continued family dynamics, with worrying how they fit together and being pushy to see how much their bonds would stand up to. though Yondu felt forced as his previous actions in the first movie didn’t quite match him in this movie... (at least he was being punished for sending so very many children to their deaths).

Spider-man: Homecoming - Wow, just, the spiderman parts with peter and his friends was great. The parts with tony and happy completely letting this child down and abandoning him, never taking him seriously or even responding to half his calls? Of course he would go to try to stop the villain (once again brought about by Tony) taking peter suit (that he enabled with a murdermode!?) making him go home in those clothes just to humiliate him? My rage levels were rising.

Thor: Ragnarok - a goodish movie, though I really didn’t like Valkyrie (Not a fan of slavers) um, Thor has a new personality again, as does Odin. Mad at Bruce and Hulk (I think if we’d ever gotten another movie to explore Bruce it would be better?) like a funish watch but not really much there.

Black Panther - awesome! T-challa trying to use and move forward with the things he had learned in the last film, Shuri and T’challa’s whole sibling vibe I was adoring. (open toed shoes in my lab?) Nakia is probably the most fleshed out love interest besides Pepper and Peggy. Which is nice, Okoye was so badass, and I love that for her, her duty to her king is absolute, but she did still break it a bit by aiding Shuri, Nakia, and Ramonda but was like, this dude is my king now, if my oaths mean anything, I still have to obey him.

Avengers: Infinity War (tony still being a useless ass) It was good, (Rocket and Bucky’s arm XD) Steve and Thor being bros. But the way it goes, especially killing off Gamora? Thanos just fell a bit flat for me. the vanishings at the end were bad, wondering who would go.

Ant-man and Wasp - Still need to watch

Captain Marvel - Still need to watch

Avengers: Endgame - Still need to watch (i mean, I know tony finally dies)

Spider-Man: Far From Home - haven’t watched but the synopsis reads like Tony still fucking up peoples live from beyond the grave...

Phase Four - can’t really watch most of them as i think you need to see a lot of the tv shows which I can’t do cause nothing gets released on dvd anymore

#marvel cinematic universe

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nightcoremoon · 2 years

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I rewatched iron man recently.

I am flabbergasted by how fucking phenomenal his character arc was over the course of the 9 movies.

(IM1, IM2, Avengers, IM3, Age of Ultron, Civil War, Infinity War, Spiderman, and finally Endgame, I don’t think I missed any of them)

quick recap. rich spoiled bratty pretentious asshole responsible for the rich and powerful (the ten rings) oppressing the ethnic minorities of the world (like the sokovians and afghans and PRESUMABLY armenians and ukrainians too) through weaponry- STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM! that’s already incorrect. stark’s weapons were intended by him to be used by AND ONLY BY the US military, which in the real world would be BAD but in the fictional comic book universe full of eldritch monsters, space aliens, and norse gods, financed by The Mouse, we can clearly assume that it’s noble intentions because Obviously The US Military Which Stopped HITLER Are The Good Guys, Okay?™️ because it’s fiction. anyway, to recap, Stark made the designs for the weapons that the US military uses to Protect The World From Devastation and so on. he did it because he has DADDY ISSUES and wanted to be just as good as Howard Stark was made up to be to replace the love and affection Howard ACTUALLY gave to Popsicle Rogers, who is ALSO a WMD used by the US military. wow golly gee whiz it’s almost like there’s depth of characterization among a team of a dozen amazing directors (and also joss whedon was there too). so that’s Tony Stark. genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.

except uh oh what’s that I smell? CAPITALISM???

stane was the one who was selling Stark weaponry to the ten rings, WITHOUT TONY’S KNOWLEDGE!!! stane is the reason why wanda & pietro joined hydra. stane is the reason why the multiverse is fracturing. everything is stane’s fault. so it’s a very good thing he died to death.

so when tony realized that the nukes he was making were killing innocent people,

HE STOPS MAKING NUKES.

but stane keeps doing it anyway because he’s a liar, a thief, and a fucking pig for profiting off of genocide.

so tony BECOMES the nuke, and he spends his life and limbs fighting for freedom in sokovia and afghanistan, not by standing idly by like the us military were doing, watching it happen from the sidelines. tony had the great power and the great responsibility and he single handedly saved gulmira from extermination. he took a traumatic experience that would break anyone, and he turned it around and made it his drive and ambition. he wanted to save innocent lives. he was willing to throw away his life and his love and all of his money for this. but there’s one problem. he’s still a spoiled fucking brat.

iron man 2 hits him like a sack of bricks and his life falls apart and he almost fucking dies because the ten rings is pissed that he dared to stand against them and stop their genocides. luckily shield saves his ass so he’s like ok fine I’ll work with you in the avengers initiative which operates separately from the us military to directly intervene with foreign policy. except oh wait a second SHIELD IS JUST A VEHICLE FOR HYDRA’S SCHEMES. WHOOPSIE DOODLE, ITS ALMOST LIKE HAVING A PMC CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT IS A BAD IDEA, IT’S ALMOST LIKE THE POINT OF CAPTAIN AMERICA IS THAT FASCISM IS BAD BUT NEEDS TO BE FOUGHT THE CORRECT WAY and not just governmenting at it. wow it’s almost like all of the films are cohesively tied together by characterization, theme, and- oh yeah- plot.

ok ok ok avengers 1 happens and he’s like ok yeah I can vibe with this. oh wait my daddy issues make me dislike steve, my arrogance and ego make me dislike thor, and my obsession with direct physical conflict makes me dislike banner. tony is still an asshole but he wants to do good, as evident by the fact that he STEERS THE NUKE INTO SPACE TO SAVE THE LIVES OF MILLIONS OF NEW YORKERS AT THE EXPENSE OF HIS OWN LIFE. YAY MORE TRAUMA.

iron man 3 happened and… shane black isn’t a great director. lethal weapon is a great movie, last action hero is a great movie, predator is one of the best movies ever made, but he didn’t direct those. he wrote two and acted in one. the predator was atrocious. iron man 3 was… ok. I liked it but it was definitely a massive disappointment and probably the weakest movie with iron man in it. but that was necessary. tony stark died, and finally lost all of the things that made him a flawed character. he became a hero through one last traumatic event. and that made the rest of the movies make sense given the continuity. except they never touched on pepper’s powers again. 😡

anyway we hit age of ultron and see that hydra is still being evil nazi bastards but at least shield is free of them (hey it’s a good thing that natasha exists and is a good… person, if not a good character... because male writers). tony has a positive rapport with his buddies. everything is great. except oh no his trauma lottery and wanda’s mind control giving him even more trauma made him finally snap. there’s fucking aliens man. there’s gods. there’s eldritch monsters. there’s who knows what’s out there. maybe even someone who wants to genocide half the universe and there’s be nobody there to stop him!!! WE DON’T KNOW WHAT’S OUT THERE! so we have to press the Big Red Button™️. and activate ultron. except OOPSIE DOODLE, SENTIENT SELF-AWARE AI CAN’T NOT GO CORRUPT AND EVIL, YOU STUPID BASTARD. tony done fucked up. but hey at least they saved the world, they just had to dropkick sokovia into the sun. also we adopted wanda into the avengers. there is no possible way that this can be a bad idea or go wrong.

adopting wanda was a bad idea that went very wrong. she killed a bunch of innocent people because she’s a dumbass kid as filled to the brim with trauma as tony himself; she fucked up. but you know who else fucked up and killed innocent people? tony goddamn stark. he is just a foil for wanda on her path to becoming… sigh. a supervillain. I guess. god, what a huge waste of potential. anyway whatever the US government is mad and now that shield can’t interfere with them anymore they have gone mad with power. this is an ideological clusterfuck that fucked up what the movies previously established as the status quo concerning who was good and who was evil but that’s a good thing because it’s important to muddy the waters of ethics when it comes to political dramas because all politics is unethical and immoral. or amoral. whatever. the point is, tony agreed with them and thinks that the avengers are just another dangerous nuke that can’t just be used willy nilly. wanda is just the jericho missile but way more dangerous. she’s a ticking time bomb. the avengers need to be regulated. stopped. moderated. controlled. prevented from hurting people. you can’t just let a PMC interfere with foreign policy and expect things to always be hunky dory. especially when the PMC is best friends with a known terrorist. he was brainwashed by commies but regardless, barnes was a threat. steve was like no my boyfriend is innocent of blowing up the king of wakanda it was actually zemo! so steve is willing to fight the entire government over this. tony knows the government will kill steve so he wants to stop him and turn in barnes for the greater good at the expense of one man. tony would’ve gotten barnes the best lawyer and gotten him assigned to a facility and not prison, but steve was blinded by his attachment to the one thing left from his past that was still alive now that peggy was dead (and sloppy seconds sharon just wasn’t good enough to sate him). one problem. barnes killed tony’s parents. tony bluescreens. not only is steve going to throw away everything they ever worked together for, for one man, it’s for the man who killed his beloved mom and the dad he was always so desperate for the approval of. tony makes the biggest fuckup of his life because he was weak, because he is flawed, because he is human. because he is a well written character.

so we can add betrayal to the list of trauma, just in time for him to become the adopted father to spiderman. he wants to keep this dumbass kid safe because there’s nothing else left in his life anymore. his body is broken, his mind is broken, his life’s work is in shambles, and he’s just trying to do the best he can with the time and resources he has left after the government takes over. tony has given up on the greater good and is focusing instead on the people directly impacting his own life. and that’s okay. I think tony has done enough for the world at this point in time. he saved new york, he saved america, and he has saved the literal entire world. he deserves a hero’s respite, and to pass the mantel. and this would have been a perfect sendoff so he could go spend the rest of his days in peace, knowing that he did enough. he accomplished his mission. now the united states government has the power and resources they need to protect the world from evil invaders. …right?

thanos and crew then show up to try to kill literally half the universe for no good goddamn reason other than he is a power-mad megalomaniacal tyrant with a huge god complex. the biggest threat the universe has ever and will ever see. ronin and the kree were nothing, defeatable by a dude from the 1980s and a lady with magic fists. dormammu was nothing, beaten by a sarcastic doctor. the ten rings essentially fell apart on their own hubris and inability to factor in Florida Man. hydra was dead five times over. ragnarok happened already. everything else was manageable, but the infinity stones are the most powerful items in the universe ALONE. and thanos was on the warpath to getting all six of them at once. like the dragon balls but less… bad. (I don’t like dragon ball z)

every single thing that happened in tony’s life lead up to the moment that he could have- should have- called steve the MOMENT banner told him that asgard was destroyed. steve could have prepared wakanda faster, or contacted fury WHO WOULD HAVE CONTACTED CAROL WHO WOULD HAVE BEATEN THANOS’ ASS IN. shuri could have had the few extra minutes she’d have needed to prevent the snap. vision could have survived. wanda could have NOT gone evil. the only casualties could have been the asgardians and gamora: but no. tony decided to take care of things himself. and strange got kidnapped. and peter went along with him. so quill drax mantis and nebula managed to be in exactly the right amount of people to FUCK UP ROYALLY. quill is directly responsible for not controlling his anger, mantis is directly responsible for not waiting to interrogate him until AFTER the gauntlet was removed. but ultimately the reason why thanos was there was for the time stone. why was the time stone there? because strange was there. why was strange there? why, because he got kidnapped. why did he get kidnapped? because it was only him, wong, tony, a combat-useless banner, and peter. alternatively what could have happened, what should have happened, is tony calls steve and tells him shit’s fucked, THEN STRANGE OR WONG OPENS A PORTAL TO HIS LOCATION, so then rather than four people in a fighting force, they could’ve also had steve, natasha, sam, WANDA AND VISION. but tony was salty that steve betrayed him. tony was hurt. tony was upset. tony’s emotional fragility and fallibility because his downfall. he was no longer an emotionless asshole. he opened his heart, and it was stabbed. mercilessly. tony fucked up, and it caused a domino effect that ruined the last vestiges of his ability to give a shit anymore. he saw half the universe die. he saw his adoptive son die in his arms, apologizing and crying because he thought that he failed and it was his fault. but it wasn’t peter’s fault.

it was tony’s fault. and he knew it.

and now he was stranded in the middle of space.

luckily carol exists and pressed the “I fixed it” button.

tony comes back and is PISSED at steve (because he still has that pride and he can’t admit that it was his fault). he decides, fuck it. the apocalypse happened. I give up. I’m gonna marry the love of my life and have a baby and make the most of my life because fuck helping people. he helped them enough. why should he give up his happiness for them when they don’t even appreciate him? never mind all of New York owes their lives to him, never mind all of America owes their lives to him, never mind all of the Afghans and Sokovians who revere him. never mind the entire fucking world probably owes him a debt of gratitude (except for all the nitpicky assholes), tony isn’t thinking of that right now. he’s still thinking of steve, one of his best friends, LITERALLY STABBING HIM IN THE HEART, WITH THE SYMBOL OF THE LOVE HIS FATHER NEVER GAVE HIM, TO PROTECT THE MAN WHO KILLED TONY’S PARENTS. he’s bitter and angry, and honestly? he has a right to those feelings.

so what happens five years later? scott lang- ironically enough the only other man who ever fought with the ten rings and won- shows up with a plan to save everyone. to reverse the snap. to bring back to life half of the entire goddamn universe. all they need to do is a time travel heist. okay, tony says, but I don’t have the technology to do that and I’m not gonna waste my life on this because I have a family now. good luck with whatever on your own bitches~ he said like a liar as he thought about the plan. because deep down tony will do anything he can to bring those people back to life. it’s the right thing to do. it’s all he knows how to do. his conscience won’t leave him alone and he wants to help. he wants to care. he does it. he comes up with the technology. he helps to recover the infinity stones from their places in the past. he does his part. natasha dies for it, nebula gets fucked for it, and frigga stays dead knowing her fate is coming. but that’s okay. oh wait it’s not okay, a different thanos from their own timeline shows up WHICH SHOULD BY ITS OWN LOGIC MEAN THAT THANOS NEVER DID THE SNAP IN THE FIRST PLACE BUT WHATEVER I’m still mad about that plot hole but anyway, they all fight. and they’re about to win. and tony has the gauntlet. but wait.

oh.

oh no.

this isn’t fair! I have a life now! I have a family! I have to give my life now? like, for real? for real for real? after all this work, after how far I’ve come, after sacrificing so much… then as he said once before a long time ago.

I. Am. Iron Man.

and tony sacrifices his life to save- not just yinsen. not just pepper and coulson. not just gulmira. not just sokovia. not just the world. not just half of the universe. because that thanos is dead. and he would never live. the thanos who snapped away half the universe succeeded and lived peacefully. and died when thor chopped his head off. THIS thanos is an earlier version, blessed and cursed with the gift of knowledge. he isn’t looking to save the universe- he’s looking to commit genocide against all the dissenters. he’s going to do to the entire universe what the ten rings were doing in afghanistan. thematically it’s all connected. tony goes from giving his life for one person to a couple dozen people to a couple thousand to a couple million to numbers unfathomable by the human mind. tony gives his life to save more people than he could ever count. it’s not an especially difficult feat. most humans would probably do that if they saw definitive proof that their actions would win out. but tony had the most to lose, and the most reason to refuse, and the most rights by any account to say no. but he did it anyway.

the rich pampered spoiled brat, the traumatized kid who never felt daddy’s love, the arrogant asshole with a PMC in his back pocket, the alcoholic hermit, the loving father

the hero to end all heroes

tony

goddamn

stark

the franchise started with him hammering away in that little cave in afghanistan. and that’s the sound that plays at the end of endgame.

I’ve got ISSUES and PROBLEMS and GRIPS about a lot of infinity war and endgame. the way it treated its female characters. the way it spit in the face of a lot of plot lines especially thor barnes gamora natasha wanda steve and a whole lot and set them all on a path to unfulfilling story developments. how poorly the time travel was handled. nearly everything that the mcu crapped out afterwards.

but the tony stark chronicles remain a highlight of CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT in all of fiction to me.

robert downey jr did amazing work and he expressed dedication to his craft and made a graceful exit and then just quietly did his own thing to the point that I don’t even know what he’s up to. more sherlock hopefully.

I think this portrayal of iron man has got to be one of my favorite long term character studies, full stop.

fuck disney and fuck marvel oversaturation but I will defend the constitution of tony stark’s characterization. because he wasn’t a perfect man. he was flawed. he made mistakes. he was ~problematic~. but that’s good. characters don’t have to be mary sues to be enjoyable. they don’t have to be literally jesus to become beloved.

they don’t have to be perfect for me to like them.

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burning-chi-thunderfoot · 2 years

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MoM Spoiler Talk

So, I’ve only seen a few leaks so far, gonna see the movie soon hopefully... but God... I had so many issues with the Illuminati sequence.

They felt so incompetent and underwhelming. They set themselves up to act as a safeguard against multiversal threats, yet just had zero contingencies in place for an omega + level threat? Just them in a big ass hall...

I was genuinely ready for Wanda to wipe them out. But they felt so weak and feeble, rather than Wanda feeling incredibly, overwhelmingly powerful.

I mean, we have Maria (Captain Marvel) getting killed (???), or at least knocked the fuck out by a statue falling on her...?

She has the same powerset as the woman who nonchalantly flew head first into these:

Not to mention flew through exploding Kree warheads like they were nothing and yet... a statue? A statue did her in.

Really? Ffs.

What are set up as some of the smartest, wisest and most powerful humans in their universe, all sat down and set their minds towards protecting the whole multiverse and yet it just felt like they had absolutely jack shit in their backpocket.

I mean... Reed, the smartest man in the universe, literally told Wanda exactly how to defeat Black Bolt.

They really whipped out Stewart, Atwell, Mount, Lynch and Krasinski to just make them look like dogshit... the way they just attack her one at a time... no reaction to their comrades dying, just busting out quips, it all felt so... lame, hoakey and superfluous.

Oh and... was that the actual Captain Carter we know or a different variant???

And probably the worst thing was... I mean, did they just kind of nuke WandaVision? Wanda seems stone cold evil.

Really, really cruel, and I’m sorry but not in a way I can get behind at all... honestly malignant. Hope there’s more context in the movie. A lot of people had argued for it, but I really never saw Wanda as close to being this truly callous.

I think that this take on her will be extremely divisive...

#Wtf?#Please tell me there is some serious context #Did... did they just nuke Wanda's character in this movie?#MoM Spoilers #MCU Spoilers #Wanda here feels like such a non-sequitur from WV #I know there's a lot of debate around her morality #but this felt like a way deeper low than anything we've seen from her.#How does she come back from this?#Seeing that happen to them AND it being Wanda doing it gave me that nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach #Reminds me of when Sandman made Peter explode from the inside out #Bit of a ramble #Maybe there's something I'm missing but from what I've read I don't think so #Hope Krasinski returns in the sacred timeline #Bit tarnished now though #Not a good start #Scarlet Witch #Captain Carter #Reed Richards #Captain Marvel #Professor X #Black Bolt #MCU #Marvel #Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

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tony-is-visions-father · 2 years

Text

Ok so I seen someone just lie and say Tony Stark did the good things he did bc he was evil? And sad? Then the person says that Wanda did the bad things she did bc she was good? And sad? Like I’m sorry did we watch the same movies? Like it’s public knowledge that Tony Stark did the things he did bc he wanted to be better his whole character development was to do better and to be hold accountable for the things he did good and bad like watch the damn movies and you see that!!!! Evil people try to find a was to do something with the least amount of collateral damage? Evil people fly an nuke into an wormhole that they might not even come back from? Evil people go out of there way at the cost of their life when they can just as easily pay someone to do it for them and just take the credit? Evil people actually show regret for people dying rather its by his hand or not? Evil people go and help bring half the universe back at the cost of his family? And good people join a nazi organization? Good people mind control someone to go an rampage through a whole town? Good people mess with someone’s mind bringing up there pstd? Good people mind control a whole town until she couldn’t possibly live in the illusion that she created? Good people don’t even apologize to the people she hurt? Good people don’t show any remorse for the people she killed and when she did it was like for 5 minutes then it was just easily swept away? Good people hunt down a child to torture and murder? Good people try to take a mother from her children? Good people try to take children from their mother? Good people take a father form his children? No I don’t think so!!!!

#dr.strange and the multiverse of madness spoilers #multiverse of madness spoilers #pro tony stark #tony stark defense squad #tony stark deserves better #tony stark #team iron man #anti wanda maximoff #anti wanda #anti wanda stans #anti wandavision #anti scarlet witch #how dumb are you #anti mcu wanda

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luna-rainbow · 3 years

Note

I wish Steve called out Tony in CACW for dehumanizing his teammates (not just Wanda, but indirectly Hulk and Thor, because the way Tony handles Wanda would make it seem to Steve like Tony agrees with Thaddeus Ross likening Hulk and Thor to nukes).

Alright, disclaimer first, I do still like Tony (especially IM movies) as a character. I would never want to meet him in person, but there is a sort of fun in watching a trainwreck because you're wondering whether he's going to stay on the rails or go thundering down the embankment in a flaming heap.

But what Tony Stans need to realise is that Tony is a fantasy. He's the teenager who never grew up. Nigh in his 40s (then 50s), he's still rebelling against the rules in life. He's the guy who ran away from his adult responsibilities because he had the money and brains to until it socked him straight in the face. He's the rich kid who got away with never playing nice because he owned the game. He's never had to learn empathy because he's never needed to emotionally invest to get what he wanted.

He is a fantasy for all our inner petulant and selfish child who doesn't want to grow up.

But unless you've got Tony's wealth, prestige, brains and white boy privilege behind you, you will never get away with the shit he does. He plays into all the fairytales about self-made billionaires like Bezos, the fantasy that if you work hard enough you could live the dream -- and in Tony's case this is the parallel idea that he is a "self-made" superhero, the only one of the human Avengers who isn't reliant on outside power.

Except, like the fantasies about self-made billionaires, this ignores the tremendous resources he had at his disposal -- from his upbringing, his education, the researchers who worked alongside him, the wealth that meant not only did he not have to worry about his bills or even getting his research grants/materials, he didn't even have to try and source anything himself. He had a secretary and an AI and a whole company of staff to do his legwork for him. Tony is the definition of privilege and his "self-made hero" is built on the foundation of his privilege.

This is not to minimise the fact that Tony is a genius, but a genius who has to scrape from paycheque to paycheque is not the genius who could hop on a private jet to Afghanistan after a party -- hence the incredible difference between Bruce and Tony, not only professionally but also how other people perceive and interact with them.

This is all a very long-winded way to say that yes, while Tony might be good fun, he's not the paragon of goodness. The earlier IM films at least try to address that, and gave Tony an actual maturation journey where he learns, belatedly and with great pain, all the obligations and harshness of adulthood. That was Tony's hero journey. Later directors, unfortunately, are happy to regress him back into a man child.

There are multiple incidences throughout the ensemble movies where Tony needs to have been called out for his problematic behaviour and choices. Unfortunately the plot validates his morally sketchy choices, and the only emotional pain he is allowed to have is self-focused - rather than, as in his earlier movies, one where he learns empathy and love and trust.

#anti tony stark #cacw #asks

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dizzydancingdreamer · 3 years

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Snapchat Memories and Dead People | The Avengers

Hey my lovelies. As per usual, I can only write when I'm in crises.

Today I woke up and was assaulted by Snapchat with a video of someone I miss laughing; someone whom I know I will never hear laugh again. I think I've watched the video about a hundred times. It's the stupidest fucking video. But the laugh isn't stupid. It's just heartbreaking and fleeting— like the video— and it feels like when the snap memory disappears then he will too and I needed to do something with my thoughts to keep from feeling like I'm going to disappear too.

I hate Snapchat, and I hate missing him, and I hate death, and I hope you all like this piece.

Synopsis: Peter with a camera is either the best or worst thing to ever happen //OR// Snapchat is run by the devil himself

Characters: Peter Parker, James Rhodes, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Wanda Maximoff, Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes (mentioned: Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Vision, Steve Rogers)

Warnings: Angst, mentions of death (nothing graphic), general spoilers of the movies (duh), feelings

Word count: 1.1k

They’re Avengers.

They’re the toughest of the tough.

They’re Earth’s mightiest heroes.

And they’re all huddled around Peter Parker— a teenager, sixteen, just barely an Avenger himself— because he’s the one with a Snapchat and so he’s the one with the video of Tony laughing.

It’s nothing professional— just a flimsily shot picture much too zoomed in and shaking in Peter’s unsteady hands— but he’s there and somehow his laugh is so clear that it’s like it’s coming from right next to them. It’s like Tony’s there too, laughing once more over whatever it is Rhodey had said. They can’t remember anymore— not even Rhodey himself. But they— Earth’s mightiest heroes— are all sure for one long moment that if they turn around then they’ll see Tony, death be damned.

So they don’t turn around— because death be damned or not they don’t want him to leave again.

“That laugh used to drive me mental in the labs. Could never think when he was around.” Bruce doesn’t finish his thought— now he can’t even go back in to get his research because it’s too quiet.

“It was even worse in the air. I’ve never heard another person laugh while getting nuked at.” Rhodey adds. He leaves out the part where he hasn’t flown since he died because he’s afraid of the silence.

Everyone else just hums because the video has restarted and Tony’s laugh is like a command— listen to me while you still can.

They do. For once, they do.

After the fifth loop, Rhodey breaks the reverence. “You got anymore videos, kid?”

Peter does. Peter has a lot of them.

The next video is worse— it’s better. They’re not sure what it is but it’s Clint who talks first this time. After all, it's only fitting when it’s his best friend on the screen this time.

“Kid is that—” he can’t even finish his thought— he doesn’t think he ever had one.

His eyes are locked on the flashes of red hair that twirl and twirl and twirl across the screen. It’s like flames lapping at the camera, so close that Clint takes a breath that is echoed through every other person next to him. He feels like he’s going to get burned— he feels like he’s dead too. Dead people can’t be burned, though, and his entire body is definitely on fire. How the Parker boy had managed to capture one of the rare moments of Natasha dancing he has no idea but he’s never been more willing to pay a teenager for his phone.

“Yeah.” Peter’s voice is airy, not quite as rough as Clint’s, still lost all the same. “This was at the movie marathon we had last summer. Well— five summers ago, I guess.”

No one answers when he trails off. They’re all too busy thinking about time. Too busy thinking about death. They’re Earth’s mightiest heroes and not even they can stop either of the two. They all may as well be sixteen too because that’s how they feel. Scared and tired and sixteen.

Peter— scared and tired and actually sixteen— swipes to the next video.

“So the woman turns the turkey into a cat and the audience laughs? That is funny?”

Wanda flinches so hard that she bumps into Sam. The soldier doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t either. Usually she would apologize but not today. She can’t find it in herself to say sorry these days, not when he’s alive and Vis isn’t. It has nothing to do with Sam— nothing to do with her— everything to do with how little she cares about the minor inconveniences of life when all she’s done is obsess over the major inconvenience of death.

“Yes, essentially. It’s easier if you don’t think about it.” Wanda mouths over her own words as they come— she remembers that day vividly.

It’s all she thinks about sometimes.

“What shall I do instead?��

By this point her heart has stopped— the only thing keeping her upright is the love of her life captured on the tiny screen of Peter’s Iphone. She didn’t even hear him taking the video when it happened. She had been too engrossed in Bewitched and in the man next to her. Some people have tried to tell her that he wasn’t a man but the facts are there. The facts being death. He’s dead and only living things can die so he was alive and he was a man and—

Holy shit why is she thinking about this right now!

“Laugh, Vis. You should laugh!”

Wanda walks away. She runs away. Because it doesn’t take being a witch or woman or alive to remember what’s coming next and she doesn’t think she can handle hearing him laugh. She can’t decide if this is an inconvenience of life or of death— or if she’s just a coward. Someone will hear Vis laugh today but it won’t be her.

Peter swipes again and this time it’s not a video.

It’s a picture.

It’s Bucky Barnes. But Bucky Barnes isn’t dead. He should be. By all means Bucky Barnes should be dead. As dead as his best friend, Steve Rogers, is. But he’s not— clearly. A lot of things that should be, aren’t, though. Like how if Peter had only held his thumb down longer then Bucky could have heard Steve tell him it’ll be alright again. It should be a video.

But it’s not a video— it’s a picture, one of Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers with a timestamp of two months ago sitting in the top corner. They’re hugging and if Bucky squints he can see Bruce in the background. Even if he couldn’t see Bruce he would know that moment anywhere. He will always remember the day Steve left, and then came back, and then died. Well, no, he died a few weeks later. But he may as well have died that day.

Bucky didn’t die that day either but he feels like he did so he may as well have too. He may as well be back in Austria with how little he still understands of the world and of Steve Rogers. And of photographs that should be videos. He’s one hundred and six, in a thirty year old body, but no better than a sixteen year old with an okay camera and quiet footsteps.

It’s not Peter’s fault, though, so he pats his shoulders with a huff. “Good shot, kid.”

Maybe it’s better it wasn’t a video anyway, because no matter how many times he hears it he knows that it won’t be alright.

Lies are still lies when they’re told by Earth’s mightiest heroes.

Death is still death— death is still unstoppable— when it comes to the toughest of the tough.

And even the Avengers get Snapchat memories at the worst possible time.

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whetstonefires · 4 years

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mcu ethics bad

The thing is that, while I was angry at Tony during Age of Ultron, particularly when he rode over Bruce’s compunctions about building a giant combat super-robot and pressured him into the project like a very very bad friend who happened to also be wrong...

...and when he equipped Hulkbuster armor and fought the Hulk in the middle of a city rather than attempting de-escalation or attempting to haul the Hulk out into the giant adjacent desert....

(And my suspension of disbelief snapped like a frayed cable when he brought down a skyscraper that had had no time to be evacuated on a street full of fleeing people and the only reason we were given to believe he hadn’t just cold-bloodedly created massive civilian casualties was that he told his AI to find the impossible magic angle where doing this wouldn’t kill anyone...)

While I was angry with him then, and unspeakably relieved that he recognized his own damage and retired at the end, haha psych, I was revolted by him during Civil War.

It’s supposed to make us sympathize with a character more, spending so much time with them, getting into their heads, being shown their emotional drives and reactions to things, and we spent so much time with Tony during that film, understanding his point of view. And...I did understand him. He’s not complicated. I even sympathized with his emotional state.

But in the context of his actions, throughout the film, I gazed into that understanding the way I did into Kylo Ren’s face in the seconds after he first unmasked. I see you, I know you, everything you are is written here, and the lines of your shame and self-revulsion are so thick upon you, and you should be ashamed but your self-destruction does not expiate or justify one jot of the harm you do.

Because everything Tony did in Civil War came from a place of selfishness. He was selfish all throughout that movie down to his very spine.

And selfishness isn’t itself necessarily bad--you need a little, to get through life, you have the right to your own portion of it. Your boundaries and your needs. But the type of selfishness that is forcing other people pay dearly for your emotional comfort and sense of control: no.

That is tyranny. That is not acceptable.

And you know how I know he was being selfish? Because his motive for pushing the Sokovia Accords was his personal guilt for the destruction of Sokovia.

But the Accords didn’t address that at all! They were tangential to the issue! None of the terms of the Accords would have saved Sokovia--in fact, the existence of them could easily have prevented the evacuation and harm-reduction the Avengers managed there, without saving a single soul.

The Ultron crisis was something Tony did, not as Iron Man but as Tony Stark, with Bruce Banner’s help, and which Wanda as criminal fugitive later helped exacerbate, and which all the other Avengers were involved in only to mitigate harm.

Legislation, or...treaties, idk, the UN isn’t actually empowered to pass laws so who knows what this thing was...aimed at preventing another Sokovia would mandate constant ethical oversight of billionaire science man’s mad science. At the very least! He never has to run things by ethics boards because he’s self-funded, at the very least let’s invent a mechanism to make up for that.

That would address the actual Sokovia issue, both in terms of risks and in terms of Tony’s personal guilt feelings.

But no one suggests that! It’s not even on the table! Because no one, certainly not any government, can tell Tony Stark what to do unless he lets them, that’s been a clear matter of record since Iron Man 2.

And because no one writing this legal instrument of whatever description was actually motivated by wanting to avoid another Sokovia, or even another ‘Wanda tries to neutralize a suicide bomber but merely gives him a different, smaller victim pool’ incident.

They didn’t care! They blatantly didn’t care! The entire thing was a ghoulish use of the dead to gain enough political leverage over the Avengers to put a leash on them!

(Which might not be a bad thing in principle, everything needs its checks, but when the last quasi-governmental organization you worked for turned out to be Nazis who were only prevented from staging a mass slaughter of undesireables by the skin of your teeth, I think you’re well within your rights to be very choosy about who you agree to obey, and to be firmly against pledging your honor to follow people whose first move was dishonest coercive tactics.

Actually you’re well within your rights to demand to negotiate the terms of even a much less sweeping contract, even without the Nazis. The whole approach to this thing stank to high heaven.

The fact that it was written by the UN like a treaty, expected to be signed by private individuals like a contract, and then enforced like a law except not because 1) laws are for everyone 2) if you break a law you get a trial not extrajudicial incarceration and 3) being pressured to consent to a restriction and then punished for refusing consent is hypocritical circular logic and in fact police corruption at its finest, all continues to show it was a bullshit nonsense franken-document.)

The whole movie is people ghoulishly using the dead to manipulate Tony into making bad decisions in response to his emotional pain. That’s. The plot of the film.

Then Zemo staged T’Chaka’s assassination and framed Bucky for it to raise the tension, ramp up the pressure, and prevent any sitting-down and talking reasonably through this, which might have allowed for the recognition of how extremely bullshit the entire concept was.

Tony was being used. Tony was a tool of bad people for most of that movie, and while Zemo banked on using his wrath for it, the politicos were leaning on his guilt.

And there’s honestly little I hold in deeper scorn than going out and hurting other people to assuage your own guilt and treating this as having the moral high ground. No. You don’t have the moral high ground on account of your guilt motivation. You have it if the actions you took were just, or at least could reasonably be assumed to have been so at the time.

And Tony fucking knew they weren’t. He didn’t even last to the end of the movie before recognizing that he’d been manipulated and fucked up, and doubling back.

That he then walked into a different manipulation, turned on a dime, and had to be stopped from doing a murder doesn’t unwrite that.

And it drives me nuts that people will say Tony was acting out of principle while Steve was acting out of personal attachment. Because sure, the Bucky thing was important, was the reason he was walking forward against all opposition instead of standing still to argue, but it wasn’t the reason Steve said no, while...

Tony wasn’t acting out of principle. Tony isn’t...very good at having principles. That’s not even a criticism or condemnation, it’s just how he functions. Since Iron Man he’s been substituting good intentions and emotional investment, which has worked out to varying degrees. It works best for huge, difficult, very straightforward decisions like ‘ride the nuke through the portal and save my hometown.’ It works less well for nuanced situations.

Tony was, as usual, acting out of emotion. And some awful shitheads who’d figured out where his levers were had calculated how to jiggle his emotion switches in the right places to make him do exactly what they wanted.

And you can tell he wasn’t acting out of principle because, for example, someone who was trying to get the superhero community under outside control for the sake of harm mitigation...

...well, firstly wouldn’t have chosen to stage a massive battle? But it’s possible someone in the UN specifically told him to do that, and in theory they at the very least signed off on it, presumably for its PR value of making Captain America look deranged and violent since it’s a deranged decision from every other angle, so yay, he can pass that responsibility up the chain and not have to angst about it, as promised.

But I was going to say would not have approached a minor who (this timeline takes pains to show us) had no prior experience of battle or even, somehow, serious violent crime, to recruit him to go be a government child soldier on another continent, without his guardian’s knowledge or consent. There were overtones of blackmail in Tony’s approach, before it turned out Peter was such a big fan he didn’t need that. What the fuck frankly.

That is not the action of someone who wants to start doing things by the letter, scaling the violence down, keeping within the law and putting the power of decisionmaking in other people’s hands because he’s realized he can’t trust his own.

And frankly even if he did act like that I wouldn’t necessarily support his choices, in particular his snap decision to behave coercively toward other Avengers with vastly less social power and security than he has.

And that’s the other thing! Everything about ‘Tony + Accords BFFs’ rings so hollow because he has never thought rules applied to him, and he knows perfectly well the entire time he’s fighting to force this surrender of agency down other people’s throats that he is going to be practically immune.

This man was technically a terrorist, proabably the most prolific single terrorist in world history until his rogue android exceeded his body count, but he was immune to prosecution because he was in tight with the United States military-industrial complex and basically untouchable due to his status within capitalism, and pursuing their international goals anyway. In the time between Iron Man and Iron Man II he was basically a one-man upgrade of the US drone program, and so good at it that the crest of blood he carved through the Middle East allowed him to announce he had ‘privatized world peace.’

(You are never going to get a world peace worth anything on the basis of a giant flying gun, okay.)

He went to war as a private individual, against non-state actors who were not directly threatening him, which is very much defined as ‘mass murder’ in all domestic and international law, and the US army in response sued him for control of his weapon. And lost! Lost.

No one attempted to press charges. No one. Because Tony Stark is above all that. And he knows it.

And like. I’m willing to accept the mass murder under the heading of ‘superheroing’ within the terms of this setting! Even if, after his vengeance rampage on his specific kidnappers, this violence was kept strictly off-screen for a reason. I did that! I bent that far! Genre convention!

But this history is kind of vitally important to any analysis of what he thought he was doing, and what he actually was doing, when he decided to become the iron gauntlet of the Sokovia Accords.

The currently active member of the Avengers who needed muzzling most was very manifestly Iron Man, and he knew even as he jammed the muzzle on all his comrades to make himself feel better that it would affect him the least, even if he didn’t finally retire for real this time. You don’t force Tony Stark. Not if you want anything out of it but blown up. You persuade him.

And once you have...oh, look at what he can do.

#hoc est meum #mcu #tony stark critical #i am so angry with this man and i will never stop #i throw salt #an ocean of it

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teamcapwasrightandishouldsayit · 2 years

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I posted 15,179 times in 2021

554 posts created (4%)

14625 posts reblogged (96%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 26.4 posts.

I added 1,489 tags in 2021

#some shady guy in rayban sunglasses - 342 posts

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Longest Tag: 138 characters

#my first thought was that someone was. phobic? of a series of thoughts‚ images‚ and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep??

My Top Posts in 2021

i'm onto something here

52 notes • Posted 2021-06-10 13:19:55 GMT

A BIT OF A STIR WHERE

54 notes • Posted 2021-06-11 01:02:31 GMT

In theory they wanted us to believe both teams were right to a degree and wrong to a degree regarding the accords HOWEVER team Cap was clearly right. While I do agree avengers should suffer consequences for their actions I don't mean the actions where they save the planet from aliens or from n*zis spreading a deadly virus( so on and so on) but while doing so they do some damage because a) they are not actually all mighty b) that would be fucking impossible. Dumbest thing I saw in the accords video is when they mention the battle of NY when governments plan was to nuke the city (also carrying the nuke only moment I liked tony) which would without a doubt wipe out both people in NY and I think I don't need to talk about effects of radiation on people and nature. I also think that if they fuck smth up where they are direct cause of the damage like Tony was in sokovia they shouldn't be collectively punished. The one responsible for it should suffer consequences, not the rest who went to clean up what tony did. They shouldn't be under the control of government and UN and get only called up when they want them because as we saw governments are corrupted and infiltrated by n*zis(as shown in TWS), they don't have good response to a catastrophe (again battle of NY) and their late response was to nuke the city. UN controlling them is no better because we don't know in the films how UN responded to anything but they had some shitty decisions in real life. To already cross out "small countries don't like Americans interfering" which is correct but they don't like American government and their troops interfering and accords do nothing about that (also like half of the Avengers aren't even American) (I am from a small country to make it clear). Now regarding bucky - he was hunted down based on a blurry photo, when he was taken he wasn't allowed a lawyer and was put in that contraption - which one is illegal other is inhumane. Team Cap was thrown in top security prison without a trial, without even a possibility to defend themselves and they weren't given the right to have a lawyer which again illegal. Steve was also the only one who actually read the accords and while we don't know what they are about in the movie because Russos suck and they like to suck on rdj's/Tony's dick for some reason we do have comic books to judge from. They are violation of human rights. To conclude avengers should suffer consequences for their actions if they are directly the ones who caused it (like Tony with Ultron) however not as a group but individually. Steve never said they shouldn't suffer consequences he simply said that they shouldn't be under a strict control by corrupt organisations and governments. Not to mention tony didn't feel guilty for blowing up a whole country but for killing ONE American child. He had the audacity to call Wanda weapon of mass destruction when he's the one who actually, by himself not other avengers, produced weapons of mass destruction and used them. Team iron man is also bullshit - peter didn't know what he was doing there(let's not forget that Tony a 50yo blackmailed, gaslighted, and mocked a 15yo to join him in a fight he had no business fighting in and then took him to another country that's on another continent without telling or asking Peters legal guardian) , Nat switched sides, vision is a mf robot, t'challa didn't care about the accords he just wanted bucky, Rhodey literally said he was wrong in IW.

now i know how kip feels when discourse invites itself into their home

60 notes • Posted 2021-06-10 19:39:05 GMT

had a. lu dream. that all the links got their names because someone asked them to mame their adventures. and it was a dream but it got me because it means-

-time may be the least subtle secret keeper ever. ocarina of time? really?

-twilight thinks of midna first and foremost before picking twilight princess, this man is a simp

-warriors just thinks "there was a war. we were in hyrule. a lot of people fought. boom. hyrule warriors. like it works but a little low effort there

-four? no notes here. four swords adventures is fine, it works, perhaps a bit on the nose but what can you do

-wind, again, no real notes here, it's a pretty solid name, maybe a little vague but if he was naming his own adventures that makes sense, take notes time

-wild... my beloved. was thinking not only of how post-apocalyptic his hyrule is. but he might've also named it after how, after 100 years, he could metaphorically and literally breathe again

-legend, for all his display of ego, broadly makes his entire life story into the legend of zelda

-hyrule. where do i start here. he's based on the og zelda games right? which didn't have names? and legend is already legend of zelda. so my man just went "my adventure? idk. happened in hyrule though" and you know what i respect that

-finally, sky thinks of fi telling him to raise the master sword "skyward" and names his entire adventure after her, and i can't handle that

212 notes • Posted 2021-07-19 15:55:40 GMT

88320 notes • Posted 2021-03-09 03:54:09 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #of course that's the top post #what else would it be #long post #i may not have a spotify wrapped but i have this

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wandasimpathizer · 4 years

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I’ve talked about this quite a bit with some of my friends and various family members who probably looked like I was crazy. *Following gifs are not mine*

No one, and I mean no one deserves Wanda Maximoff. For four movies we see her struggle and fight with everything she has to make a place for herself, to achieve and gain something that has eluded her for years: peace. She and her brother volunteer for Strucker’s experiments, and maybe they do it for revenge on any and all people that hurt them, but (and no one can fight me on this) their endgame, their deep-under-the-surface reason is for peace. They’re not after world piece or maybe not even peace within Sokovia, but peace within themselves. Where they don’t have fight like hell every day just to barely survive and have to do it all over again the next day.

Her powers are unparalleled. No one has powers like hers, especially to her knowledge, and she has to learn to control them all on her own, with her only source of “encouragement” being HYDRA and Strucker. She is trained and raised to be a weapon without anyone telling her that that’s wrong, and I speculate that she doesn’t even know it. When the Avengers show up and attack the base, she’s fueled not only for her hatred for them (primarily because of Tony) but also because of whatever anti-Avengers propaganda was most likely drilled into her head by Strucker and other HYDRA operatives.

She and her brother side with Ultron because he promises them the peace that they seek. He assures them that he’s meant to save humanity and the world by getting rid of terrorists, like the Avengers. Wanda’s skeptical (of course she is, she’s heard that promise before) and not being able to see into Ultron’s head doesn’t help, but she forces down her worries, maybe even her fears, because this is what she wants more than anything. It won’t fix what happened, it won’t bring back her parents, but she won’t have to lose anyone else.

Or so she thinks.

Wanda is not evil. She was a misguided, angry little girl in pain. She lost her parents at the tender age of ten to a bomb manufactured under the name of a man who flies around trying to help people and save the world. Imagine the hypocrisy of that. Ultron destroys her home and kills her brother, her protector, her friend, the only blood family she has left on this earth, and once again she loses everything she loves to the hands of Tony Stark.

She’s only a secondary character, so we barely see into the inner workings of her mind, but--and this is just my speculation--it seems to me, that is nearly impossible for Wanda to walk away from the events at the end of Age of Ultron with no mental issues whatsoever. I speculate that at the very least she has depression (from the loss of her brother, but also the loss of her parents) and maybe PTSD (again, from the bomb that killed her parents, and the fight in Sokovia against Ultron). Since we don’t see her get help (if she does) or deal with any mental disorders (including anyone, except for Tony’s disorders are addressed), it’s hard to say exactly what she has, if anything, and how she’s doing. The most I can do is assume that all and all, she’s not doing great, or at least not as great as she looks.

In Civil War, Wanda looks fine. She’s learning how to be an Avenger, learning from Steve and Natasha, she looks like she’s gaining some confidence, which is a big step considering that she seemed to lose some during the fight with Ultron probably a year prior. We don’t know if she’s been on any missions before Lagos, but given that Steve and Natasha keep drilling her on what to look out for and testing her, she probably hasn’t been on many.

Then Rumlow’s bomb goes off and Steve is stuck in the blast zone, surrounded by a crowd of people. Wanda acts on instinct, doing what she was taught to do, which is to protect civilians at all cost (that’s their job, right?), and she lifts the bomb (and Rumlow) with her powers away from the civilians. It’s easy to see how difficult it is for her to try to contain the blast, doing so is probably painful for her, and she accidentally slips, and the bomb goes off in a building killing eleven people.

Now, while eleven people killed is a lot, it’s not as bad as a whole marketplace full of them. She feels like she did bad, that she’s a murderer, and while she was responsible for those eleven people killed, Wanda saved more people than she killed, her friend and teammate included. The confidence she was starting to gain? Once again, she’s lost it. Her name is plastered on every news station, some people calling her a monster, some calling her a terrorist, some are calling her arrest, and she’s agreeing with each and every one of them. She has lost all faith in herself and her abilities and the only person to make her feel better is Steve, who tells her that it’s okay to make mistakes that it’s impossible to save everyone.

He doesn’t let her beat herself up about this because Steve fought in a war--WWII. He’s speaking from personal experience, from the point of view of a soldier. Steve would love to be able to save everyone, but it’s not practical. He wanted to save Bucky on the train, but if he had, his whole team could’ve been put at risk, not to mention so many other innocent people that would’ve been affected had they not done their job. To save millions of people, he sacrificed himself and crashed that plane into the ice. Steve knows what she’s going through and he sympathizes with her, and she maybe is even starting to feel better. Until Secretary Ross shows up with the Accord.

The Accords that seem to primarily be targeted at someone like her, an enhanced individual. Ross--without tact or sympathy--addresses Wanda’s failings and nightmares, showing video footage of both Sokovia and Lagos, and then stands in front of her, comparing--mostly Bruce Thor--powered people to “a couple of 30 megaton nukes” (even Tony compares her to something dangerous, rather than a person, calling her “a weapon of mass destruction”.) She’s faced with an impossible decision: either sign away her rights or retire. She doesn’t know what will happen to her if she retires. She’s scared and she’s hurting, and the arguing between her friends, her family, is damaging her already damaged mental health.

She looks up at them and says “You’re saying they’ll come for me.” It’s not a question, it’s a statement. She already knows how she’s looked at in the eyes of this country. Vision promises that they’d protect her, but can he really promise that? I don’t think she believes that. She’s conflicted and sad, and doesn’t put up much of a fight when Tony puts her on house arrest (without her knowledge). When Vision explains that she can’t leave the compound because of other people’s safety instead of her own, she doesn’t fight him. She just looks defeated, and she remains so until Clint comes to get her out.

At first she turns away from him and hides herself. She listening to what they’re saying about her on the news, what maybe some of her teammates are saying and reflects it back at Clint saying “I’ve caused enough problems.” She looks at herself and sees a troublemaker, a nuisance, a terrorist, rather than a kid trying her best to be and do good. And Clint--loveable, papa Clint--refuses to listen to her self-deprecating sorry attempt at a refusal. He sees her for who she is, and makes her see it too, albeit kind of harshly, and reignites some of her lost confidence.

For the first time in a while she stands up for herself, pushing Vision into the floor gritting out perhaps one of the greatest lines of dialogue to come out of these movies, “I can’t control their fear, only my own.” Wanda stops being afraid of herself and chooses to fight for her rights and herself with Steve in Germany. Even when it’s incredibly clear that she will be reprimanded harshly for what she chose to partake in, she doesn’t care.

In return, she is treated inhumanely. She is targeted by Ross and those in the Raft, fitted with a straight jacket and shock collar. She is seen and treated as a monster, and when the shot cuts to her and once more she looks defeated. In fact, she looks hollow. Like a shell and she’s not even there. She’s alone and her worst fears have been realized.

We don’t see what her life is like after she’s rescued by Steve until Infinity War. She is in Edinburgh with Vision, and for the first time ever, we see her happy. Genuinely happy. She’s smiling, she’s without a care in the world, and she’s allowing herself to be happy with Vision. Until the Black Order show up. Vision is injured, we see her stand to fight them, placing herself between Vision and Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive.

Arriving at the compound and meeting up with Rhodey and Bruce, they all learn of Thanos and his quest for the stones, suddenly, just like the rest of her life, she’s forced to lose something she loves. Choosing not to sacrifice Vision may be selfish, but she’s allowed to be selfish. Vision is all she has left in this world that loves her for who she is. He isn’t afraid of her or her powers, and sees the beauty in it. Vision has always seen the good in her and he’s the one thing that makes her happy, so she holds on to him for as long as she can.

They look for another way, head to Wakanda and try to take the stone out before destroying it. The battle breaks out and she’s kept away from it, protecting Vision and keeping ready to destroy the stone the second it’s out. She’s something we haven’t really seen and it’s determined. When she enters the battle, defending Natasha and Okoye, she’s sure of herself and her abilities, and doesn’t falter. She’s not timid and scared like in Civil War.

But all that comes crashing down again once Thanos arrives and she’s forced to do the one thing that will destroy her. She doesn’t want to, she keeps refusing him, but there’s no time and no more options. Looking at Vision, with tears rolling down her cheeks and her bottom lip trembling, she turns her powers onto Vision.

The powers that took so long for her to love. The powers that made her do horrible things. The powers that made everyone including herself see her as a monster. The powers born from hate, that seem to destroy more than build. The powers that only one person saw beauty in, were now being used to kill the last bit of love in her life.

And when it’s done, when she’s destroyed the stone, when she’s doubled over in grief and hatred for herself, she is forced to witness the love of her life come back to her, only to be killed again in front of her, his lifeless gray body thrown to the ground like he was nothing.

She doesn’t fight anymore. Everything was drained out of her, and when Thanos snaps, and she starts turning to dust, when everyone around is looking in confusion, fear, or pain, she looks up from Vision’s body with relief.

When her death comes, she’s grateful because anything, even death, is better than being alone. She’ll be reunited with her family, her parents, her brother, and she won’t have to be alone anymore.

Now Endgame, I think we can agree, was a huge mess. But when Bruce brings everyone back, and they all come through the portals, ready to take on Thanos, I think that scene was just *chef kiss*

Wanda’s coming back from the snap with the events of Infinity War still feeling pretty fresh. It didn’t feel like five years to her, and in fact, to her, it probably feels as though she lost Vision only hours ago. So when she faces off 2014 Thanos, she’s angry.

Not only is she feeling the loss of Vision, but she also comes to learn that she lost Natasha as well. Natasha, a person who probably meant a great deal to her, maybe a considered part of her family, someone who always tried to protect her and taught her how to survive in this world. She’s gone, having sacrificed herself to bring Wanda (and the rest of the fallen) back, and Wanda never got to say goodbye. Then, in an act that completely went against his entire character, Steve disappears into the past when returning the stones to live his life with Peggy, and she loses Steve as well, someone who always believed in her and believed the best in her from the beginning, even in Ultron. They leave her to deal with her grief ALONE.

And now I come to WandaVision, her show premiering on Disney+ at some point. And while I can’t say for certain how it will end up, going based on how Marvel has treated this particular character and with how the premise of the show looks, I can only guess that whatever is left of Wanda’s crumbled and incredibly damaged mental health is going to be blown to smithereens, sending her into a downward spiral of madness.

I (and many others, too many to name and give credit to, but I’m giving it) speculate that in the show, Wanda creates her own happiness, giving her the life she wants and wishes she had with Vision (marriage, kids, etc.) and eventually loses touch with reality, thus, it's them fucking with her already damaged and shitty mental state even more when something snaps her back to reality. Again, can’t say for sure that that’s what will happen, but one can guess. I sincerely hope that Wanda’s mental health will stop getting kicked around like a hacky sack, but I really doubt that she’ll be shown mercy. Since her first moment on screen when she was included in the MCU, Marvel has taken every opportunity to tear her down in every way. They make her lose everything and everyone she’s ever loved, while simultaneously creating situations that cause her character to be torn down, leaving her to question everything about her and what she does.

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calliopechild · 4 years

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This is an old thought I’ve been kicking around since Infinity War, but I’d really like to survey those who are all ‘Steve & co. got so many people killed when they should have just killed Vision from the beginning’ (people with agency who made their own choice to fight and were following T’Challa, not Steve, but I guess accuracy isn’t important when people just want to blame everything possible on a character they don’t like), and ask how many of them would have supported the decision to try and remove the Mind Stone if someone else had made it. Tony is the guy who goes ‘I would just cut the wire,’ who responded to JARVIS telling him he could only support X number of people by figuring out a way to surpass that number, so if people think he would’ve been in the ‘kill Vision and let’s move on’ camp, I can’t say I agree. (Plus, Vision is all that’s left of JARVIS. Did people forget that? ‘Cause I guarantee you that Tony didn't.) Or if the Mind Stone wasn’t stuck in Vision, but instead stuck in Tony or Peter or Bruce or whoever, would the prevailing sentiment still have been ‘pull the trigger’?

Now yes, killing Vision could have prevented Thanos getting the Mind Stone...except that nothing they did on Earth would have changed Thanos getting the Time Stone on Titan. They could have destroyed the Mind Stone, and Thanos still would have showed up and undone it, just like he did in the movie. I’m genuinely wondering how many people are in the ‘Vision should have died’ camp because they genuinely disagree with the ethics of one life vs. many thing, and how much of it is just anti-Steve sentiment. I mean, if Tony had been in Vision’s place and asked them to kill him, and Steve had gone ‘okay, sure,’ and done it without even trying to save him, people would have lost their shit.

I believe destroying the Mind Stone earlier would’ve been the smarter choice, absolutely; I was sitting in the theater during IW going “look I get why you don't want to, but it’s more logical.” But I also know that I wouldn’t have looked at any of the characters the same way if they hadn’t at least tried to find another alternative. If it’s just that people don’t care about Vision as a character because he was poorly developed, I’m right there with you. The only real emotional impact for me re: his death was his interactions with Wanda, because holy shit someone having to kill the person they love is hard to watch; other than that, there was no real emotional investment in his character/death for me. But like...android or not, he is still a form of life. I’ve seen people more upset about U and Dum-E getting destroyed, but when it comes to Vision, a sentient being with consciousness and life? Bruce even said that Vision wasn’t just the stone anymore, that there was part of him besides that, “maybe even the best parts.” Canonically acknowledged personhood, and yet I’ve seen comments saying that they should have just ‘killed the walking toaster’ and that Wanda ‘can buy a new vibrator.’ I mean, holy shit, guys, what the hell. If someone is the partner of a character you hate, they automatically don't matter and it’s fine if they die?

And yes, you can argue that it is a matter of respecting Vision’s choice, but if that’s the case, does that mean Hulk shouldn’t have tried to catch Tony in the first Avengers movie? Tony thought he was going to die when he chose to fly the nuke into the wormhole; he accepted that and made the choice anyway, so should Hulk have just let him hit the ground? Steve and Natasha were risking lives in by not closing the portal as soon as Tony went through it with the nuke, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that they should have closed it as soon as Tony went through. Every second it was open meant the chance for more Chitauri soldiers or ships to come through who could kill more civilians; that was another case of ‘one life vs. many,’ but I have never seen anyone say keeping the portal open was the wrong choice ethically. Steve was willing to die to take down the helicarriers in CA: TWS; should Bucky have respected his choice and just let him drown? Should Sam and Nat and Maria have just left Steve on the bank of the river? (Yes, Maria listened to Steve’s choice and detonated the carriers--because unlike in the situation with Vision, there was no alternative and no time to try and find one.) If someone makes a sacrifice, you should respect that, yes, but if you can solve the problem without making the sacrifice, why wouldn’t you even try to do so?

And this doesn’t even touch on the biggest point: even if they had destroyed the stone and killed Vision, that’s...not going to stop the alien army? They already knew the Stone was on Earth/in Wakanda. I mean, what were the good guys supposed to do, send a message to Squidward and friends and be like ‘hey, we destroyed the stone, sorry, you guys will have to go home now’? Thanos’ lapdogs wouldn’t have believed them, and even if they did, they probably would’ve attacked anyway because they clearly don’t have a problem with rampant slaughter just for giggles, as evidenced by what they did on the ship full of Asgardian refugees.

Tl;dr: would sacrificing Vision to keep the stone out of Thanos’ hands have been the more logical option? Yes. But if they’d just thrown one of their own under the bus without even trying to find an alternative, they wouldn’t be the people--the heroes--we’d fallen in love with over the past ten years.

#like i'm not even a big vision fan #partly because i don't think they fleshed him out as much as he could've been (pun not intended)#but the number of people who are all 'um just kill him'#when i can GUARANTEE you they'd insist on finding another way if it was a character they liked in vision's place #kinda blows my mind #if i'd been in vision's place i would've been like 'please just kill me' too bc i wouldn't want anyone going to war for me #and honestly i remember sitting in the theater and part of me going 'i mean...if he's volunteering...'#but again if they hadn't even TRIED?#i probably wouldn't be able to look at them the same #sorry for not using fandom tags but this is just a rant/thought ramble #and i don't have the energy for any Discourse(TM)#will probably delete later

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samcentral · 5 years

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a defense of endgame, supported by trashing it

great movies aren’t great because of the plot. they’re great because of the character arcs.

final battle bullshit:

1. strange could’ve just split thanos in half with a portal. but that would’ve been unsatisfying

2. captain marvel could’ve energy blasted him into dust. but again, boring.

3. tony could’ve made nanobots crawl up thanos’ nose and destroy his brain from the inside. too gorey.

4. tony could’ve just stolen ONE of the stones and given it to thor to use. doesn’t complete tony’s arc.

5. strange could have portaled all the wakandans on top of the chitauri to take them by surprise. too amusing and would take away from the seriousness.

6. evacuate the avengers along with the stones and then fuckin nuke the aliens and shoot missiles at the ones who pursue evac. too ironic and doesnt develop characters.

7. use ranged attacks to pick them off, keeping them at a distance with shields while the beefy avengers distract thanos. they did this to an extent but its not realistic for a whole battle.

8. build shields, radars, and alarms around avengers compound to prevent the whole blowing up fiasco. takes away from the main issue in the story (past thanos).

9. unleash goose

10. scott gives thanos a giant shot of cyanide while he’s monologuing. again, unsatisfying (but the purple bastard would deserve it).

11. strange portals everyone away and stark satellites deploy nerve gas (horrible and not a disney ending)

12. give clint the high ground and a fuckton of arrows. but he was emotionally compromised.

13. find thanos’ resonant frequency and blast it at him. too gorey

14. throw a shrinky disc thing at him and then have scott step on him. too humorous for a serious ending

15. throw a shrinky disc thing at the gauntlet so its easier to hide and transport and so he can’t fit it on his hand. again, too funny for the mood.

my point is there’s a lot they could’ve done but ultimately they wanted a good story and not a logical one.

as for the steve rogers thing.

keep in mind he’s had five more years of life we didn’t get to see on screen. five years of living without bucky and sam and vision and wanda, knowing that they’re gone because of his failure.

“i don’t know what i’m gonna do if it doesn’t”

i dont quite understand why this is the case, as he’s been living relatively happily these past five years. but if he’s referring to the hope of getting his best friends back, then why would he leave them behind to “try some of that life?”

it’s very possible that in his time off-screen, he changed (as people do). think about it; that’s a LOT of time to live without someone. it’s longer than he HAD bucky. so it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that he misses bucky, but that he’s moved on. steve has a big heart and wants to mend the damage that was done, but that doesn’t change what he went through and thus the person he is now. 2023 steve rogers wants a normal life with love.

now all the stucky shippers are super mad now cuz bucky’s back and theyre in love. but hear me out—marvel’s not about to make an existing character gay/bi. the minute they “ruin” endgame for the conservatives, their profits go DOWN. making an avenger gay? much less CAPTAIN AMERICA?? yeah, no. they’re not gonna do that shit.

so fulfilling steve’s wishes while still completing his character arc? peggy. unfortunately this opens up some weird-ass shit that i doubt the russos considered (he dated peggy’s niece and made out with her, he knows the exact date and cause of peggy’s death, etc).

so idk how i feel about the whole thing

#happyb33ps op #endgame spoilers #avengers 4 #avengers endgame #steve rogers #tony stark

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pass-the-bechdel · 5 years

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Episode Quality:

Exciting and full of strong fodder for discussion and debate; by the same token, potentially frustrating.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha directs comments to Wanda in Nigeria, but Wanda addresses her response to the team as a whole.

Female characters:

Wanda Maximoff.

Natasha Romanov.

Maria Stark.

Mrs Spencer.

Sharon Carter.

Mrs Zemo.

Aunt May.

Male characters:

James Buchanan Barnes.

Steve Rogers.

Sam Wilson.

Brock Rumlow.

Howard Stark.

Tony Stark.

T’Chaka.

Vision.

Thaddeus Ross.

James Rhodes.

Helmut Zemo.

T’Challa.

Everett Ross.

Peter Parker.

Clint Barton.

Scott Lang.

OTHER NOTES:

My immediate thought on the concept of the Avengers being directed by a United Nations panel is the Rwandan genocide; follow from that, any number of other major atrocities that have taken place while the rest of the world sat back umm-ing and aah-ing over whether or not they should intervene. Anyone who knows a speck of history should be very reticent about the idea of being shackled by such political whims.

Ross refers to the unknown locations of Thor and Bruce Banner as being like ‘misplacing a couple of megaton nukes’, as if they’re objects and not autonomous sentient beings who can go where they please without having to declare their intentions, and that should really be the first major red flag to everyone that this guy ain’t on the level.

Vision’s equation about causality is a false equivalence, and an irrelevant one anyway, since oversight doesn’t do anything to hamper his theory about strength inviting challenge. You’re not actually reducing your strength, you’re just making yourself less able to meet those challenges as they come. I feel like Vision should be a Hell of a lot smarter than this absence of logic (also, looking at the threats themselves in previous films, the only ones which can be considered ‘strength inviting challenge’ issues in which the actions of any Avenger characters have ‘bred catastrophe’ are the Iron Man films, and Age of Ultron, all of which are examples of Tony’s hubris coming back to bite him, specifically. The conflict of every other film stems from either 1) trouble predating Iron Man (most of it SHIELD/Hydra related), or 2) other-worldly overspill where Earth becomes the battleground for something uninvited (Asgardian and/or infinity stone bullshit). And even when Tony is the one creating his own demons, he usually doesn’t do so actively through his Iron Man tech or persona (Obadiah Stane’s villainy is what led to Iron Man’s creation, not the other way around; yes, Tony’s grandstanding did directly invite competition in Iron Man 2, but he didn’t make an adversary out of Ivan Vanko, that was his father’s legacy; and Tony’s particular cruelty may have incited Aldritch Killian, but that event predated the creation of Iron Man by nine years, so it’s not a response to that strength. Only Ultron was genuinely a catastrophic consequence of Tony’s (and Bruce’s) abuse of power, but hobbling the Avengers’ ability to operate does nothing to prevent that sort of thing from happening again, it just stymies their ability to halt the onslaught after it begins. You solve that one with legislation limiting what anyone can recklessly create and unleash (which includes Vision himself, incidentally)).

And see, Steve is right; the Sokovia Accords just shift the blame when things go wrong, functionally it makes the Avengers less accountable for their actions by allowing them to play the ‘just following orders’ game. And the point he makes about the panel still being run by people with agendas is exactly what I’m talking about in that first dot point; when decisions are being made on a political basis instead of according to need, you get atrocities, and any person working for the United Nations is a political agent by default. Sokovia is actually a great example of the kind of place that falls through the cracks on the political stage, as it was noted to be ‘nowhere special’, i.e. not politically valuable, and therefore unlikely to receive a swift response from powerful nations who have no vested interests in the good of the country.

Tony’s argument here is extremely personal and emotion-driven; it’s all his own guilt about Ultron and Sokovia and his decision to stop manufacturing weapons, etc, and none of that is relevant to the rest of the team’s situation or their choices. He’s also utterly oblivious to his own privilege here, in that it’s super easy for him to handwave the particulars of the Accords, because he’s a filthy-rich white American whose main ‘thing’ is new technologies, which are not being restricted at all by these Accords; he has the luxury of just signing on and hoping to negotiate amendments later (and also, of having the resources to be able to thwart anything he disagrees with and just do what he wants regardless if he decides he’s right). He’s not taking a moment to consider what the Accords really mean for those members of the team with powers they can’t just ‘put down’, who don’t have the kinds of options and opportunities he has, up to and including the bargaining power to have the Accords ‘fixed up’ later. I really do my best to see both sides of this situation because there IS merit in the idea of the Accords, but no one in favour of it makes a good argument for it and it’s really frustrating.

Who tells someone that a close beloved friend is dead in a fucking text message??? The real villain of this film.

It goes without saying but I’m gonna say it anyway: it’s very hypocritical of T’Challa to support the Accords while also donning his super-suit and taking matters in foreign countries into his own hands. All of the destruction that occurs in Romania after Bucky escapes from his apartment building is because of T’Challa’s involvement (because he was trying to commit a literal murder!), and that kinda gets glossed straight over here.

Tony falls for Ross’ trick by referring to Wanda as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in the process of his efforts to justify her internment. It’s all really solid writing, really, vernacular choices that highlight the dehumanisation at the rotten core of the Accords and how good people can be suckered into it without realising until it’s too late (even when things like, say, denial of legal representation should definitely be red-flagging up the wazoo right now). But honestly, it’s such a wild leap from ‘Wanda can’t go on missions anymore’ to ‘we’re going to forcibly deny her the ability to go out in public’. Keep trying to tell yourself that’s not a fucked up situation, Tony.

Steve Rogers holding down a fucking helicopter is just...peak Captain America and I’m so glad.

The part where Tony recruits an actual child who is not involved in this situation at all, spiriting him away to another continent to fight supersoldiers, that’s just...beyond, honestly. I hate this as an introduction for Spiderman because it’s so wildly irresponsible of Tony, it’s an unforgivable thing to do. He’s a kid. This has nothing to do with him. This is where Tony officially loses me in this movie. You can take your self-righteous attempts at justifying your actions and shove ‘em, buddy. You’re actively endangering a child.

We really don’t need Steve to kiss someone every Cap movie. We didn’t need him weirdly mackin’ on his recently-deceased ex-love’s niece. Seriously.

Spiderman’s particular brand of quipping while fighting really irritates me, also. It’s altogether a big no from me on the Spiderman front.

Still love Ant-Man, though. He’s delightful. I also enjoy Hawkeye so much more here than I have in the Avengers films.

C’mon, T’Challa. You can’t attack and attempt to kill a guy outright and then play the ‘you must be guilty because you ran away’ schtick. Do a brain about it.

See, everyone else knows why they’re there and what they’re fighting for, they know the stakes. Scott is the only one on Cap’s side who isn’t already part of the situation anyway, but he’s read in on why he’s being asked to get involved and he’s a grown adult person making an informed decision. Peter doesn’t have that, he’s there fighting because Tony said so, and that’s just fucked up.

Heavy sigh. And here we go with the emotional Tony thing. Yeah, he just saw how his parents were killed by the Winter Soldier. That’s rough. It’s really rough. But he doesn’t just have an immediate emotional outburst, he has a sustained homicidal rage, which includes not only trying to kill Bucky, but also beating the Hell outta Steve, who, y’know, did not kill Tony’s parents. The fight scene lasts way too long and involves too much opportunity for cooler thought to prevail (both in problem-solving and in conversational moments), and someone whose emotions can send them reeling so completely out of control - even when they actively know they’ve been manipulated into it! Zemo literally just told you to your face that this was his plan! - someone with so little impulse control should never be given the power to make decisions for others or wield anything over them. This is all just a really, really great case for why Tony is ill-equipped to be an Avenger at all.

Watching Bucky digging the repulsor out of Iron Man’s chest with his metal hand is...so exciting. Rest in peace, awesome metal arm.

Zemo’s just a regular human, but he gets locked up under utterly inhumane circumstances. Again, the Accords involved a deal with a pretty insidious devil, and they didn’t actually have to prove that Steve’s position was the correct one to such a strong degree (we could have had a more nuanced conversation about the subject of accountability if the two sides were more evenly presented), but damn, the red flags, guys. It shouldn’t have taken Tony until he was horrified seeing his friends in the raft prison to finally clue in.

Ok, so, I know I already played the ‘I’m pregnant’ card to explain away my meandering commentary for Ant-Man, but it’s still true and only getting more significant as time goes on, so I regret to announce that - despite having looked forward to disassembling this movie since I started on this Marvel adventure - we’re now only a day out from publication and I haven’t written anything yet. I know, the deadline isn’t exactly set in stone and I could just hold off publishing until I’m ready, but that’s a slippery slope and if I start telling myself to just ‘get to it when you get to it’, who the fuck knows when it’ll happen. This isn’t supposed to be stressful, so I’m just gonna ramble a bit and see what comes out. There’s a thing wriggling in my guts and I have a house to paint. I’m doing my best.

First things first: my stance re: Accords is that the best method of oversight is the one which emphasises accountability, rather than permission (with acknowledgment that this is a fictional universe with threats and powers which do not reflect the real world). The kinds of issues our Avenger characters get involved with are typically of the sort which has to be nipped in the bud right-quick before it becomes untenable, and also not infrequently, the types of problems which do not offer them bountiful evidence to present to a board for evaluation before they get the ok to counter it. Faffing about with diplomacy and bureaucratic carrying-on is a great way to, say, allow Hydra to launch the Insight helicarriers and wipe out all dissenters to their rule before you have the chance to stop them, or (if Zemo’s apparent plan with the Winter Soldiers had been his real plan after all), to be stuck mopping up the global damage as an elite death squad roams around destabilising governments. I’m not a supporter of the adage ‘it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission’ in the real world, but in a comic book universe, with the supervillains and the world domination and the plots which consistently include chronic time-sensitive action and little if any concrete evidence? The Sokovia Accords are woefully inadequate. By all means, the Avengers should be answerable to someone, and being required to submit reports justifying their actions (and face disciplinary measures or even criminal charges if they cannot explain themselves to a satisfactory degree) is a completely reasonable thing to convene a United Nations panel to oversee. Maybe Tony can hop down off his high horse and face actual consequences for the Ultron fiasco. That’s fine with me, and it’s a logical thing for the world to clamour for. Shifting responsibility to a panel of UN politicians who will then no doubt be reticent to send the Avengers into anything pre-emptively (or within any kind of useful time frame) for fear of backlash is a terrible solution, and even more so when you’re being pushed into it without any time to evaluate and amend the original document before it becomes law.

(It’s worth noting that the person most likely to appreciate how easily the UN panel could be hijacked by political machinations not in the interest of the public good is Steve, owing to his personal role in uncovering and thwarting Hydra’s plans; Sam was roped into the Avenging world through that event, and thus it’s unsurprising that he would have the same concern chief in mind when refusing to sign. While Natasha does sign on to the Accords, she explicitly does not do so because she thinks the Accords are a good idea; she’s playing the political game and ‘reading the terrain’, as she says, and that’s consistent with her character. Tony being impulsive and dangerously emotion-driven is also unfortunately consistent, as is his self-righteousness about imposing his will on others to assuage his own guilt. Vision really has no excuse for being so bad at logicking his way to signing the Accords, but it’s no surprise to me that the most clear-headed staunch Accords supporter would be Rhodey, since following orders from others and unquestioning trust in your governing body is dead-on character for him as a career military man. I think he’s categorically wrong, yes, but I’m not mad at Rhodey for being a True Believer any more than I am at Natasha for being mercurial; both are in-character choices and ones which involve evaluative thought processes, and while ‘in-character’ may still be in play for Tony, evaluative thought processes are not, and that does make me mad. As I’ve noted before, he tends to work as a likable character despite his MANY flaws when he’s in his own movies, because acknowledging those foibles and working to fix them is a core part of his personal arcs in each Iron Man film; it was an essential quality missing in Age of Ultron, and one which made a monster of the character which I AM glad this movie is addressing with fallout; still, there’s a lack of tangible self-reflection and making amends from Tony in this movie, alongside some of his worst personal decisions, and I sincerely do not love him by the end of it.)

The good thing is, despite a few lazy elements - Vision! You tool! - and despite some very frustrating decisions, the central dilemma of the film is a strong and nuanced conversation-starter (and perhaps, argument-inducer). Even though the specific scenario and the people involved (Ross (both of them) and the floating Guantanamo, et al.) skews the narrative definitively against the Accords by the end, there is still fodder there for an intelligent debate about the merits of the concept if not the execution. And, most importantly, Steve’s position on the matter is the MCU’s Captain America to a T - a political story about the appreciable and essential difference between doing one’s duty to a concept, vs adherence to a moral code. Disobedience is a core part of Steve Rogers’ dilemmas - not that disobedience IS the dilemma for him, but that it is at odds with the patriotic good-ol’-boy image he is expected to inhabit from outside. Every Captain America film carries with it the idea that to do the highest good can mean rejecting everything that the people and institutions around you try to insist is right; refusing to play a role that has been prescribed to you; always making the choice for yourself, by your ethos, no matter how hard it is. Refusing to compromise when you see the compromise as an evil; planting yourself like a tree, and saying ‘No. You move’ (a great way of keeping Peggy’s influence alive and moving in the plot, by the way, and a key demonstration of how she and Steve met on the same wavelength. Lots of strong details in this movie, tbh).

My primary complaint, however, is that this is also too much like an Avengers film; nearly all of the other major characters are there, and Tony especially gets a LOT of screen time, and since Cap and his films are my uncontested faves I am pretty salty about having to share the stage for his last outing. The tone and the subject matter are still totally on-brand, but the focus is split, and that’s particularly annoying for what it leaves behind. While Bucky is made central to the drive of the plot, Steve finally being reunited with him, bringing him in, getting the cathartic other side to what was so exquisitely set up in The Winter Soldier, it falls by the wayside a bit and comes off underdone. Sam is certainly there, being wonderful as always, but he doesn’t get a lot to actively influence, he’s mostly just That Other Guy, and it’s a real shame since he was a highlight among super-stiff competition in his introductory film. The touch of Peggy that shines through the film is poignant, but Sharon Carter gets the bad end of the stick with under-developed characterisation and a very ill-advised zero-chemistry attempt to stir a speck of romance in a story with no room for it, and altogether, the kinds of quiet character moments which added so much depth to The Winter Soldier are very much lacking here. We’ve got so many other characters on deck already, plus the introduction of two new major players (T’Challa has a solid, sombre presence which suits the film, and even his hypocrisy fits snugly into the plot so as not to be a barb against him, but as I’ve mentioned already, I am squarely against Peter Parker’s squeaky excessive comic-relief inclusion and the dire implications it has for Tony Stark’s moral compass), and we’re already spending so much time on beefing up Tony’s side of the Civil War. I don’t personally think the movie is bloated, overlong, or incoherent, but it definitely wanders close to all three and I wouldn’t be inclined to argue very strenuously with anyone who wanted to denounce it on any of those fronts. It has a lot going on, not quite too much for an ensemble movie, but more than it should as a story with a single character’s name in the title. I’m still mostly-satisfied by it, and consider it one of the stronger MCU films to date, but as a third Captain America, specifically? A bit of a let-down.

#Marvel Cinematic Universe #Captain America: Civil War #Bechdel Test #female representation #MCU #Captain America #Civil War

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