one of the things that really bothers me about modern franchises, and in particular over the last 5 years or so, is their refusal to commit. what i mean here when i say this is that it's not uncommon for a major franchise to make a decision, whether about the plot or the characters, that should have had huge, world-changing consequences... and then just never address that again or worse, immediately go back and undo it. and i'm gonna pick on star wars and the mcu here because those are the two big franchises i'm into at the moment (and i think they're kind of the worst at this), but i don't want you to walk away from this thinking that this is solely a disney thing. i've seen this happen with game of thrones and supernatural and plenty of other non-disney franchises. spoilers ahead, you've been warned:

in ant-man & the wasp quantumania, scott and hope make the life-altering decision to stay behind in the quantum realm and defeat kang instead of going through the portal to return to their world. this should have been a huge meta decision for the mcu, and when i first saw it in theaters, my immediate thought was wow, what is this going to mean for the mcu going forward? are we going to get a movie/miniseries about scott and hope helping to rebuild the quantum realm? how are cassie, janet, and hank going to react to the losses of their loved ones (in some cases, for the second time)? is cassie going to become the "first" young avenger because she has to take her father's place among the team lineup (and i only say first because as of this moment, none of the other young avengers introduced to the franchise are official avengers yet)? except nope, because less than 2 minutes later, cassie had fixed the portal that had broken way back at the beginning of the movie and brought scott and hope back.

and it felt like such a cheat. i was so disappointed in that theater, not as someone who was invested in these characters on a personal level (because yay, cassie gets her dad back!), but as someone who has spent years investing themselves in the story of the mcu. what was the point of wasting screentime on scott and hope accepting their new lives in the quantum realm if it was just going to immediately be undone? the entire scene could have been cut to scott and hope making it back bare seconds before the portal closed and it would have had the same emotional impact. there was nothing added by making scott and hope (and us) think that there was no way back only to rip the rug out from under us and go "gotcha! you really thought we were gonna give this movie a sad ending? haha! you're so dumb!"

and this isn't the first time the mcu has done this. one of the biggest complaints about endgame was the decision to set it five years in the future with no consideration for how that would actually change the setting of the mcu. characters were brought back to the exact place they disappeared from with no consideration for how things might have changed in the interim five years (like planes that weren't in the air anymore, buildings no longer standing, even just something as simple as a chair being unoccupied). and then the mcu didn't even really have the courage to address how this would have shaped the world other than a few jokes and making the bad guys in the falcon and the winter soldier people who cared about how the world had screwed them over during the blip.

and things like this happen over and over and over again. the accords are put into place in civil war, but by the time we get to she-hulk, they're gone with no explanation because, as best as i can tell, the writers didn't want to have to deal with the worldbuilding that went into the accords. gamora is killed in infinity war, but heaven forbid quill not have an emotional investment in a film he appears for maybe 10 minutes in so now she's back in endgame. steve got to go live in the past with his ex-girlfriend (which is in itself a refusal to commit after the mcu both gave her a different husband and had the woman herself tell him to move on) but we need to establish that messing with timelines is bad because that's what the entire next phase hinges on so actually his ending was predestined and it's only everyone else who can't change time. whoever took this entire town and also wanda hostage and forced them to live out a sitcom fantasy is bad and needs to be stopped but wait, it's actually wanda and she can't be the bad guy yet, we need her for doctor strange 2, so actually everyone's going to defend her now and say that no one else could ever possibly understand her grief. thor has decided to accept responsibility as king of asgard, but we can't use him for any more movies if he's stuck in asgard, so actually he's decided to pass it on to someone whose entire leadership capability is developed offscreen. i could list more examples but this is making me angry, so let's move on to star wars instead.

with star wars, i look at first the oft-quoted meme, "somehow palpatine has returned." yeah, i shouldn't really need to go into detail on how that counts as a refusal to commit but. the last jedi was a study in how johnson refused to commit to anything that abrams had laid down in the force awakens, but rise of skywalker was almost like abrams had looked at the franchise and said "screw you for taking it away from me, i'm going to come up with the most bullshit stuff just to spite you for doing that in the first place. and i'm going to start by undoing the most important plot point of the first trilogy: the emperor dies." and yeah, disney's kind of tried to salvage this by dropping hints into the bad batch and the mandalorian about cloning, but that only really works if you're watching the franchise chronologically and not considering that both of those series came out after rise of skywalker.

and then there's the mandalorian, my sweet summer child, who is, in my opinion, the worst at backtracking their plot points. i'm not entirely convinced that any of the higher ups for this show really knew what they were doing when they started working on it and i'm not convinced that they know what they're doing now. yeah, there's the tie-in to the last season of clone wars, but the mandalorian has managed to walk back pretty much every single major plot point it's had. din is this legendary warrior who can't be beat, but no one will watch this show if he defeats everyone too early, so he's constantly getting beat up (tbf, sometimes some of the fights he loses makes sense like the krayt dragon and the mudhorn, but a lot of them don't. at all). moff gideon is dead, no wait no he's not, now he's imprisoned, no wait no he's not, now he's definitely dead, you can totally believe us this time guys. grogu can use the force and must be placed with the jedi, but wait, the only person still actively teaching the way of the jedi is luke and all of his students will be brutally murdered ten years from now, and we can't have that, everyone will be mad at us for killing off such a cute character and no one will buy baby yoda dolls (and also we have to set up luke's character degradation from hopeful, believes-in-love cinnamon roll to "i'm going to kill my nephew") so in between seasons let's have grogu decide to go back to din (and don't even get me started on how frustrating it is that a casual mandalorian watcher also had to watch book of boba fett to understand why grogu is back). din has the darksaber now which makes him king of mandalore, that's totally going to be important and what the entire series has been building up to, right? wrong! he might have spent the first two seasons making connections, learning about the world outside his sheltered upbringing, and demonstrating the various qualities that would make for a good leader, but the entire third season will be about din realizing that actually he's super unworthy and the darksaber should actually go to someone who... saw an animal in the water.

and it's really, really frustrating as a viewer! because how am i supposed to get invested in any of these plot decisions when they almost always get reversed? why should i care that mj and ned have forgotten peter when ant-man 3 has shown me that they'll remember him the next time they're all on screen together? why should i care that tech is dead when half of the last season of clone wars was about how echo was actually alive? if none of these decisions have any permanence, then where are the emotional stakes? why should i watch your movie if all you're going to tell me is that nothing matters?

have a future Donnie

not entirely happy with the armor but this is an initial concept so it works lmao

Iron Turtle anyone???

Irondad fic ideas #122

Peter is always reluctant to let Tony buy him things. It's a point that they argue about constantly (not in an angst way, but not in a joking way either). Every time Tony tries to spend money on him, Peter struggles to accept it and argues that it's too much. Especially when it's for something he just wants rather than needs.

One day, after trying and failing to get Peter to accept some gift, Tony finally gets him to see his side like this:

Tony: What if you had $100, and you saw someone who was hungry and you could just buy them a meal. Wouldn't you do it?

Peter: Well yeah, but-

Tony: What you had $1000 and your best friend Ted was cold and you could just buy him a coat. Even a $400 coat. It'd keep him warm every winter for years. Wouldn't you?

Peter: Yes-

Tony: If you had infinite money and you could just get May jewelry she wanted or just get MJ the art supplies she'd been saving for-

Peter: Okay, yes, I get it

Tony: Kid, you'd spend your last dollar on a stranger. I couldn't spend all of my money in a lifetime if I tried. And I've tried. If you had the kind of money I do, you'd be spending it on everyone you love, all the time. Can't you let me do the same?

Was kinda interesting watching Aquaman 2 do that thing Hollywood movies do where a villain barks orders in an non-English language to signal to the American audience that they're foreign and scary, except this time the actress doing it was speaking portuguese so I actually understood everything she was saying and it was just weird and abrupt. I guess they just told her to translate and say the lines in her own language but didn't direct her how to adapt the dialogue accordingly, so she ends up just telling the henchmen to pick up a guy in a very stilted formal factual manner while everything's exploding around them, that was kinda funny.

Rhodey looks up to see Tony looking at him, an indescribable look on his face. It's been a long time since he hasn't been able to read Tony's expressions, and it makes his insides twist.

Tony looks so frail in his hospital bed, skin gaunt and sunken in, wires all around him. But his eyes, his eyes have hardened, like he saw something out there in the sand that he can never unsee.

For the rest of his life, Rhodey will never forgive himself for allowing Tony to ride without him.

"Do you need anything?" He asks, instead of giving voice to his thoughts, "Water? The nurse said that Dr. Cho will be coming back soon to check up on you. Make sure you're responding to the medication well."

Tony blinks at him, acknowledging his words, but giving no response. Without meaning to, Rhodey's eyes shift to his chest, to the thing that's glowing there. 'An arc reactor', Tony had called it, whispering it into his ear before exhaustion had taken over, 'Like the one that powers the Malibu Warehouse.'

It's beautiful in a morbid sort of way, the blue light. In the dark hospital room, it illuminates Tony's features, catching on his sharpest edges. It makes him look like a work of art.

Then again, Rhodey might be biased. Even when he hated him, he's always thought that Tony was the most beautiful person he'd ever seen.

"A kiss," Tony says, in a raspy voice, so softly that Rhodey almost misses it, "I want a kiss."

There's a second where Rhodey pauses. It isn't that he hasn't kissed Tony before, lord knows they've done worse things when they were young and stupid and drunk, but over the years - they'd come to a sort of agreement. An unspoken one, where they agreed that what they had, being Tony and Rhodey was more important than the temporary high that an orgasm could give them.

And yet -

"Okay," he says, walking over and running his fingers lightly through Tony's hair, "I can do that. I can give you a kiss."

His hand falls down to Tony's cheeks, thumb slightly touching his chapped lips. There was a bleeder earlier, that Rhodey dabbed away with the edge of his uniform, despite Tony's weak attempts to bat him away.

"Kiss," Tony says again, louder this time, "I want you to kiss me. Just once."

Rhodey would kiss him a thousand times over, if he thought he was allowed. He would never stop kissing Tony, not until the day he died.

But he doesn't say that. He just bends down, careful of the tubes wrapped around Tony, keeping him alive, and presses their lips together, just as Tony asked him too.

fin

it is So Weird how working on my comic makes me feel like i have more free time. and gives me more free time. logically, working on 3 comic pages a week would mean i have Less Time. but no. despite everything, i'm getting more done and able to use my time better now that i'm working on comic pages again. what the hell is up with that.

it's so funny to me when i see people talk about the mcu like "oughhh they should have used [x] character's theme in the soundtrack in the 5 second scene they appeared in" like you really think the mcu soundtracks are cohesive enough across movies to be able to incorporate motifs and themes in a meaningful way. you really think that. lol. lmao, even.

the "mandoverse" will now disrespectfully be referred to as the mandovirus on this blog henceforth

xenoblade 1 is interesting because when I first played it I had really mixed feelings. mostly I think because it had been slightly overhyped for me. there were so many videos with masterpiece in the description and people saying it was their favorite.

there was a lot that first turned me off during the story (namely the way it handled its female characters made me frustrated at multiple points) and also how they handled the revenge arc because I have very very specific taste in revenge arcs and I just dont think it landed for me. 

I think I appreciate it a lot more now that im fully deep into the series. I do like a lot about it, from its gameplay to its environment to a lot of the little cast interactions, to just shulk existing. yeah. yeah its alright

Iron Man 2.0 #7 by Nick Spencer, Ariel Olivetti, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Matthew Wilson, and Joe Caramagna

The Immortal Weapons taking some much-needed naps.

If Tony Stark was real in our reality

all the villains he " "created" " would be, like:

- oil tycoon pissed that Stark has made renewable energy free for the whole state of NY and has plans to expand the tech to other states, countries, the world

- CEO of a predatory student loan company enraged by Stark making college widely affordable through an endless supply of scholarships

- corrupt politician whose career is over after his dirty laundry gets aired - in a leak that can't be traced to Stark Industries.. but also can't not be traced to it

------

Tony: attempts to make the world a better place with the power he has

Literally all the people who benefit from the world being a bad place:  time to break out the tights and commit crimes???

Captain, did you like DC or Marvel??

is this about the villains post. is that what this is.

i liked the marvel movies and the dc cartoons. not really sure why, ig the mcu (not mark variant) was just more my cup of movie-tea and vice versa. (i don't think i ever really read comics bc they were too expensive to keep up with at the time, so i never picked up the habit.)

dc-wise i watched like... the batman animated series? plus the og teen titans everyone talks about, stuff like that. also watched one specific spiderman cartoon but i can't remember which one.

oh and the toby maguire spiderman trilogy. can't remember who owned it at the time but it's some good shit.

(haven't seen across the spiderverse yet btw but i loved the first one and am going to see it soon—so no spoilers! o7)

not super big into marvel these days and i haven't really kept up, but tony stark still makes me cry a little. rare hero favorite for kid me lmao

my very quiet, very agatha christie-loving, historical romance, mark twain, anne of green gables, call of the wild-type mother just told me out of the blue that she watches the mcu infinity saga when she’s “feeling down” as her comfort movies and that she’s watched endgame three times this month and “especially black panther” and i….. what?

Concept for a hilarious and extremely chaotic but also excellent 2024 language goal: Watch Goenkale and Pobol y Cwm simultaneously

the dilemma of appreciating the continuity of tony's suit throughout the movies vs. really missing tony's older suits before they were a cgi nightmare

Been sitting in my files and figured I'd Free It

Thinking of highlighting my Disastrous Trio More..... Putting a excitable goddess, dubious chemist, and normal man in the same room..