as spectacular as across the spiderverse is, im gonna be real mad if the third movie just validates miles decision to say 'um actually i'm the protagonist so i'm going to do whatever i want, fuck the multiverse and the hundreds of people telling me i'm not the center of it'

i'm just. really sick of this convention where the hero gets to ignore everyone and everything because they have a FEELING and then they get to retroactively be right. miguel can be wrong, that doesn't bother me, but miles has absolutely no reason to suspect that. he's risking thousands of lives on the basis of 'NUH UH' and that is not the same fucking thing as moral fortitude

Oh thank God, someone else that didn't like Ragnorak. I *despised* that movie for how it just threw out years of characterization, motivations, and style for the sake of juvenile comedy. Why the hell would you hire a man to direct the third movie in a trilogy and the whatever movie in a connected universe ***that didn't like the first two?***

I weep for how Thor, Loki, and Bruce Banner were just absolutely trashed with that movie.

-whitleyschn33

Friend, saaaame! I don't usually talk about this on main, but I hated that movie so much. I'm gonna be ranting about it under the keep reading, but please nobody from the MCU fandom come to debate with me about these things. I obviously will be very critical of Thor Ragnarok, and keep in mind, I haven't seen it since I watched it in theaters in 2017 and also have not watched Love and Thunger.

The first two Thor movies (and the first Avengers, which is crucial to Thor and Loki) were full of problems and were pretty campy, but there was a lot I liked about them too, specifically the characters of Thor and Loki and their dynamics with each other, the potential in the Warriors Three and Sif, and the fantasy-based sci-fi world they were partially set in and also because I love mythology.

Not only did they completely change the setting of the series from 'fantasy based sci-fi heavily centered around Norse mythology' to 'just sci-fi that sometimes reminds you that this is technically involving Norse gods but that part doesn't really matter,' and not only did they change the vibes from 'comedic and action driven but also dramatic series heavily involving complicated and nuanced relationships' to 'just an action comedy with the same kind of jokes you've heard a million times and have long gotten sick of,' but....You're right, they trashed characters to get there.

Thor was one of my favorite characters, because despite the fact that I thought that the movies fumbled and mishandled things, Thor as a character had understandable growth that improved his character without changing it too drastically. In Thor 1, he learned not to be such a hothead, to be more peaceful than aggressive, and he learned some humility and to not be such an asshole. Also he suffered a supposed loss that was believably horrible for him that probably drove these lessons home all the more. In Avengers 1, Thor is still a bit of a hothead and still definitely likes a fight (I'm specifically thinking about the time when he went to fight Tony for the first time in the forest and looked at Loki like he was making sure Loki was watching and Loki looked back with this look like 'yeah bro I am watching lol this will be fun.') But despite clearly having some of the same qualities he had before, Thor had learned lessons and so he was more thoughtful, he clearly made an effort to get along with people, and where he once would've just yelled at Loki to know his place, he tried to have at least two meaningful conversations with him. And that carried into Thor 2, as well. Thor became a more careful, humble person who gave chances and saw good things in others. Thor Ragnarok threw that aside to make him basically Star Lord 2.0, an obnoxious smug asshole. And I can't get over the fact that he used the taser on Loki. One of my friends got angry at me for 'double standards' when I protested about that, because I liked Loki despite him doing bad things, but Thor is the protagonist hero who I'm supposed to root for, not the gray-morality wildcard sometimes-villain! Thor became basically a more tired version of who he was at the start of Thor 1, and I was so sad.

Sif was just???? Completely missing???? At least they acknowledged Jane's existence, but I kept waiting for Sif and they just pretended like she hadn't ever existed. The addition of Valkyrie was nice, but it's like they decided they could only have one powerful woman in the series. In my opinion, sidelining Sif was unforgivable. As for the Warriors Three, they killed like all of them and we never even see Thor react if I remember correctly! These were his very best friends and they got murdered and the movie didn't even let the audience take a moment to process that! The movie really read like the person who was making the movie actively hated the other Thor movies and was doing whatever they could to make Ragnarok bear next to no resemblance to the other movies in the series.

The rock guy was not funny, point blank period. He was some people's favorite character, but I thought he was just, pointless. Just the joke machine for their tired unfunny jokes. Hulk was kind of just as pointless and unfunny, and though Bruce had some of the only somewhat funny lines, he also was different from how he had been in Avengers, and again... What was the point of his character being there? I didn't like the Gamemaster or whoever Jeff Goldblum was, I thought that plotline could've been interesting, but instead was just... Boring and didn't matter. Odin was badly done too, and the way that Loki having been impersonating him ended up just not mattering either was so vexing. What else? Oh yeah, Hela was just as badly done as the villain in Dark World was, if not more so. I could deal with him being pointless and not getting a lot of depth, because what I really cared about was the sibling dynamic between Thor and Loki, but Hela should have been involved in that sibling dynamic, and they were too busy with their pointless otherworld drama that didn't matter to actually pay attention to her. What we got was a villain that was really built up but that we all knew wasn't gonna actually matter at the end of the movie, just like the villain in Dark World.

But you know what? All of that sucked, but I could get over it... If they'd put effort into writing Thor and Loki's relationship. It was literally my favorite thing about the MCU. I could talk for hours about how I think that having different directors and writers for the movies messed with Loki's character because I don't think there was communication there for a clear story (despite the fact that I headcanoned up my own reasonings,) but Loki - love him or hate him - is a nuanced character with a lot of tragedy surrounding him and his story. Despite the fact that there was a lot of comedy in the other movies, Thor and Loki's relationship was one that was by and large treated with the nuance it deserved. At the end of Thor the Dark World, they had been working together, they'd gotten to a better place, and Thor literally verbalized that a lot of the devaluing of Loki had been bad and he thought Loki actually had been a better option for king than he had been iirc, and Loki used his Odin disguise to give Thor the affection and approval of the father he clearly loved who had been acting horrible through the whole movie. And not only did the next movie trample all over all that work to make the relationship more shallow, but they didn't take anything seriously. I knew I was gonna hate that movie the moment I saw the stupid play scene where Loki was disguised as Odin. Loki was protective of and ashamed of his heritage as a Frost Giant because he'd been raised to believe they were monsters, and that heritage wasn't just common knowledge, and it definitely isn't something Loki would just throw around in a jokey play about how great he is.

It's clear to me that they literally did not care about the nuance, either in Loki's character, or in his relationship with Thor, or in his heritage... It just sucked. The whole movie felt like a hate mail letter to the last two, rather than a love letter. It felt like they were actively trying to make it clear that they hated the other Thor movies and needed to change the characters drastically in order to avoid hating them too. It made me give up on the entirety of the MCU and I haven't seen anything from it since. I didn't want another Guardians of the Galaxy unfunny comedy with more nothing characters who say interchangeable one-liners. I wanted another Thor movie that actually put work into at the very least this one sibling relationship and treated at least these two characters as more important than big colorful action scenes and jokes I could find in an amateur open mic comedy night act put on by a sixteen year old boy. I watched that movie with my little sister (who loves Loki but loves Thor even more, while I loved Thor but loved Loki even more,) and a group of about five or six others. Me and my little sister hated it, but the others adored it and said we were just too critical.

So... Yeah. Sorry for going off on a tangent, but I've been steaming about how much I hate this movie for like five years now. XD

So I love that scene with Jackson and Madi and I’m glad that FINALLY someone called out what Bellamy did (in getting Madi to take the Flame) as wrong. No to mention Jackson being the one to do it makes total sense.

But.

Is anyone ever going to acknowledge that Clarke (and Bellamy, and Monty by association) actually did something bad to make “saving Clarke” a necessity?

Clarke wasn’t some innocent, packed off to prison and awaiting execution because Blodreina was bored.

Clarke (and Bellamy, and Monty by association) murdered Cooper in cold blood. They actively chose to end her life as a move in their game against Octavia. They didn’t have to do it. They could have chosen other ways- such as the “hey, how about we TALK to Octavia and see why she’s like this” move that I’ve always espoused but no one did, or “actually Madi’s only 12 and I’d really rather not she fight in this war” or even “hey we’ll take the worms in if we can get our people out at the same time” and then shedding them somewhere along the way if they didn’t want to go through with it. Whatever. There were options. Lots of them.

I’m sick of people pretending as if Octavia didn’t have a Very Legitimate Reason for locking Clarke up. Clarke was a guest of Wonkru, a society with laws, and she killed someone. She broke the law. This has consequences. So let’s stop pretending that Clarke was hard done by the awful awful Blodreina and acknowledge that the person responsible for putting Clarke in danger was Clarke herself.

After joining tumblr, my dream of becoming a published writer is forever broken and ruined. It may be drastic but I cannot imagine a future in which I'm a happy writer, knowing that what a large amount of people think is that you can't write about a gay character if you're not gay yourself, you cannot have a poc character if you're not poc yourself etc. It's frustrating and sad. That's what tumblr taught, along with simultaneously complaining all the day about the lack of rep

anon, let me tell you something first and foremost: tumblr is not a good audience when it comes to original fiction and if that’s what you want to do, delete tumblr from your perspectives.

now, I’ll go and say a lot of unpopular things before addressing your concerns, but here we go:

people on tumblr don’t read. or better: either they read fanfic which then they decide to consider the same thing as published writing, and like... while there’s a lot of fic that’s better than some published writing technically, the fact that they say it about classics or stuff they’re supposed to study in school shows that they have no idea of the basic difference in between the two media... or they read YA that gets hailed as the Next Best Thing In Literature when at most it’s a good YA and at worst it’s mediocre stuff that looks revolutionary because they haven’t read the fifteen other things that YA has taken inspiration from. at most they read harry potter when they were kids and never moved on from it, as showed by the fact that it’s 2019 and I still have to see people arguing about sn/ape being BAD OR GOOD when he’s the standard gray archetype, and if you can only think of sn/ape when you think about a gray character and you still haven’t made sense of his moralities or lack thereof, then you haven’t read anything else; (never mind that once I read writing advice like SORT YOUR CHARACTERS INTO HOGWARTS HOUSES LIKE FFS SOME OF US HAVEN’T READ HP THAT’S NOT A UNIVERSAL ADVICE FOR CREATING A CHARACTER’S BACKGROUND)

as people on tumblr don’t read, their understanding of how you write or anything else related to the craft is pretty much useless - like, the only thing each single writing manual agrees on is that if you want to be a writer you have to read a lot, because how are you going to deconstruct tropes (to say one) if you don’t know how those tropes work? or how are you going to play into them if you don’t know how they work regardless? I can’t write a tolkien deconstruction if I haven’t read all of tolkien’s writings back to back ten times at least, I can’t write a good novel about vietnam veterans in the early eighties if I don’t read all the history books on the topic I can find and at least ten tomes about how war-related ptsd in veterans works and possibly a lot of books written by vets themselves. I can’t write a stephen king deconstruction if I haven’t read stephen king back to back ten times either. which shows they think original novels are like fanfic - like, I personally have researched the shit out of things for fanfic, but I wouldn’t ask anyone to do it for a thing they do for free. like, if I see badly researched italian reinassance AU fic I won’t gaf if the author just wrote it based on the anglosaxon tv shows about the borgias around because I can’t expect them to read ten books about the topic to write a thing they don’t get paid for and that just people in fandom most likely will touch, but if it’s a published author that gets paid for it I’ll expect that at least they’ll do some research if they want to write stuff somewhat realistically. people on tumblr think that writing a novel requires the same effort as fanfic, as in, not much when it comes to background work, which is ridiculous, because that’s the difference - with fanfic, unless I write a detailed AU or smth, the author already did that work for me. I just have to expand on it and trying to understand the characters. like, it’s nowhere near the same thing;

which means that people have gone with this concept that ‘you can’t write X if you’re not X’, which is honestly ridiculous and counter-productive because it shoots down any chance that you, as an author, might actually understand what people who aren’t from your background feel like. also, I personally think that if you want to do that and you want to be good at it you need to a) find a way to relate to your characters that goes beyond your differences, b) talk to people from the category you don’t belong to. now, if I had to write a 50k short romance novel about two guys falling for each other at a record shop without too much drama happening, I’d probably just write it myself, some people who are actually guys into guys, ask them to read it, tell me if I fucked it up, get them to explain me how I fucked it up and run it by them until I’m done, but admittedly I don’t need research to find out how people run a record shop. if I had to write a story set in europe but idk there’s a zombie plague and one of the protagonists is a black american tourist I’d go ask someone who is black and american and possibly from the area I decided that person is from to give me background info on how I could write this person etc. and then run it by them after I’m done. if another of the protagonists is idk polish (because there’s not many polish people in mainstream european fiction outside of polish authors), I’d find a polish person to do the same thing and run it by them etc., because I’m not a black american nor a polish person but I still want to write those characters etc. but I mean, let’s say it’s the zombie apocalypse - can I make sure people connect with both of them because they’re surrounded by zombies and as all human beings in existence they don’t want to die? most likely I can. meanwhile I’ll have learned a lot of things about both categories because I talked to people belonging to them;

or, let’s say I want to write some story with a large cast where I decide that for the purposes of it straight character falls for a trans character and it ends well because fuck that I want people to be happy. I’m not trans, but I do know people who are. I’ll definitely talk to them running stuff and ask if thing X is offensive or not etc. because of course I’m not so I can’t know for sure, maybe I’ll stick with the straight POV or maybe not but I’ll definitely run it by them to make sure the thing is actually well-planned/not in poor taste, and meanwhile I’ll have learned a lot about the topic that I might not have known before, which is good because it means I know more about experiences I don’t have which is, guess what, how the entire point of writing stories is. you want people to empathize and feel for characters that might be not the same as them, that’s exactly your damned job, but if you don’t do it yourself first how do you assume others will?

all these people who think you can’t write a gay character if you’re not gay are the same people who think that if you’re a straight woman you can’t write about two men being in love/fucking but you should be able to do it about f/f pairings because since you’re a woman then you have to guess how that works out of that, which shows that they have no idea of how anything works - like I argued with half of tumblr on this topic so whatever, but as a straight woman I think I have more aesthetic tastes in common with a gay man since we both want to fuck men and we both are familiar with handling that equipment, so I’d find it easier to write about that rather than about the contrary as I don’t generally find women attractive in that sense except for like two very specific people who are not a very common aesthetic in general. but like, assuming that in virtue of being a woman then you have to know how it feels to be attracted to women while you can’t possibly do 2+2 about how gay men are into each other when technically you’re into men yourself shows exactly how these people have No Idea Whatsoever of how attraction works, never mind how empathizing with someone else works, never mind of how writing things with research behind it goes;

also, assuming that if you’re X then you can’t understand Y is extremely damaging because it means you can never understand other people’s struggles and that’s......... worrying? I mean, it’s an incredibly dangerous (and calvinist) position to say that if someone is X and so doesn’t know how it feels to have a specific kind of issue then they can’t get it not even intellectually. idk, I’m straight so I can’t possibly understand or relate to why would lgbt+ people want to marry and adopt kids/have their children recognized/have the same rights as I do? are we serious? so if idk I wanted to try and change some bigot’s mind about it when I see that they’re just parroting bullshit and they haven’t thought about it I shouldn’t even try because they’re a bigot and they’ll never understand or change their mind? so people who used to be bigots, then found out their kids or their kids’s friends were lgbt+, listened to them, realized they were bigots and are now allies/supporters couldn’t have done that because at some point they used to be bigots? how the hell do you want people to change or to be an activist or change the world if you don’t believe that people can change themselves or worse that you don’t believe that people coming from any background can’t understand people coming from another background? that’s not how it works. I mean guys ffs I read a bunch of nonfiction lately about endemic poverty in the center of the US out of personal interest and I’m as far from the US and any of those situations as it goes (I’m not a veteran, I never was not taught to read and write even if I finished high school, I never lost 90% of what I had after getting sick, I never needed to hop on a train illegally to go places, I never had to sell my own plasma to buy lunch, I never needed to live in a tent when I was going to middle school after my parents had to move to a totally different state and I never had to go live in a trailer after my house was sold by a bank before I couldn’t pay off my loan, I don’t have a five year old child that won’t be insured because she was born with a pre-existing medical condition), and like... I cried while reading some of them? because I could envision it and I felt like the system failed them and I hate reading about people being failed by a system that should support them, and I swear I’m not a US person who comes from that background whatsoever. I could probably write you a full novel about how immigrants in Italy have it like shit whether they’re legal or not because I worked in the field for two years and one of my oldest friends has immigrant parents and she was born here and she can’t use her ID to travel in europe only because she still doesn’t have a citizenship and she’s been waiting for years to get it. I’m not an immigrant in italy but I’ve known enough, seen enough and heard enough from them that I could most likely do it and it wouldn’t be badly researched. like, you can’t tell people to not tell stories if they want to do it with respect and not wanting to make it about themselves only. that’s bad writing. but if you care about the people you’re giving rep to then you should try imvho;

now: I suppose that you’re belonging to categories that are Not Minorities given how the ask is worded. (same as me more or less unless you consider atheists a minority but nvm that.) there’s a lot of writers around that are Not Minorities and most get published more than people who are actually minorities. people saying that you can’t write X if you’re not X and X = minority are pretty much telling you that you shouldn’t use your spotlight to give people rep when you could and you could do it reasonably well if you do your research and talk to those minorities. so they’re basically going against everyone’s interests because you could learn things and become a better person and make sure your readers empathize with your characters and more rep is always good esp. if well-done. I personally think that people should write about what they want - there’s topics I wouldn’t feel comfortable touching because idk if I could do that well and things I really wouldn’t want to write about so I most likely never will -, but that they should also go for what they want if it’s what they believe they can do. so if you feel like you want to write gay characters or whatever go for it and then find yourself a sensitivity reader or ten before you send your book around instead of worrying about what kids on tumblr who are still arguing about snape’s morality and think that writing the divine comedy is the same as self-insert fanfic think, because they will never create shit for anyone, you might. and you’ll have automatically done more than people who complain about everything but wouldn’t produce one single piece of fiction themselves and wouldn’t most likely waste ten minutes of their life researching the fiction they want to write.

tldr: if you want to write professionally, influence people and give the world good stories, don’t give a fuck about what tumblr says because it’s people who most likely will never read your books anyway unless you want to write the next YA saga that has the same six archetypes of characters in which then the only slightly problematic white cishet dude will be without further ado compared to sn/ape and everyone is going to get sorted into hogwarts houses and people will fight about that rather than giving a damn about whatever message you wanted to pass. don’t give a damn about tumblr and do your thing anon, no one deserves to have any perspective ruined because of this hellsite’s opinions on anything. ;)