So Marvel’s out here ripping off smaller artists now

https://twitter.com/midiankai/status/1580902267460366336

They edited it just enough that it isn’t immediately obvious, especially to non-artists, so here’s some replies pointing out the proof:

Honestly, I’m glad I stopped watching their shows and films months ago, becuase between this and how they treat their CGI artists, it’s pretty clear that they don’t value artists in any way, shape or form whatsoever. Incredibly disappointing.

and now Ravonna and Miss Minutes are gonna get up to something from the end of time and we're gonna have to deal with people going "ugh Sylvie's such a selfish idiot for not killing her when she had the chance" while simultaneously having to deal with people continuing to complain that "Sylvie's such a selfish idiot for killing He Who Remains when she had the chance" and I'm not emotionally prepared for that

The #GirlBoss movement in the MCU is extremely pseudo-feminist.

I could be totally off-base with this, but has anybody else noticed that here lately the mcu has had a slight pattern of making a few female characters ridiculously overpowered as well as turbo-hyped by the narrative and marketing…

This specifically includes Wanda, Carol Danvers, and Sylvie.

I’m in particular talking about how all 3 of them had far less time for character exploration and strength build-up than the majority of the other more powerful heroes, had fairly bland and uncreative personalities compared to the other more powerful heroes (Wanda was coddled by the narrative and not allowed to have any ownership in her wrongdoings which would’ve made her more complex, Carol was a victim of the “having the same arrogant attitude as the douchebro male characters is all it takes to make a Strong Female Character(TM)” writers’ mentality, and Sylvie with mary sue-ed to hell), and were generally made more about the cool powers and ‘oooh such a badass’ moments and the aesthetic than the actual depth.

My point is… they’re all so shallow and performative. It’s like the (mostly male) writers looked at the female character and scoffed and said “ok there’s no way this lady’s gonna become a fan fave on her own- we have to help her. We have to give her a boost. I have zero faith in women being able to gain popularity by their own merit (because who’d be interested in a woman, ammiright?), so we can’t just give her a compelling backstory and let that be it. We have to make sure she has the most tragic backstory of anyone on screen at any given time, and we have to make sure the audience knows it! We can’t just give her a specific set of powers and depict them in an interesting and unique way. We have to make her stronger than any other character she’s going to share screen time with and we have to have her flaunt her powers every ten minutes to remind the audience how strong she is! We can’t just make her intelligent in her own way and give her witty banter with the male characters. We have to make sure she makes them look like idiots and condescends them as frequently as possible so the audience knows it! We can’t just flesh out her morals and let her get things wrong sometimes. We have to make it so she’s always in the right and the audience should always be on her side! And even when she does something wrong, we have to make sure the audience knows that it wasn’t really her fault and she still has the moral high ground! That’s the only way we’ll ever get people to like her as much as the main male characters!!”

It’s just…. This is just rank with a lack of confidence in women. They approach the idea of having women front and center with equal parts skepticism and greed. They’re so out of touch with what women want in superhero films and just what women want in general. They fall into the trap of thinking feminists want everyone to know that girls are actually superior to guys, when in reality we just want to be treated with the respect and humanity and agency guys have always been treated with.

And by creating these female characters the way they do (making sure they’re not equal but decidedly better than the male ones, making sure they’re nearly infallible strength-wise, making sure they’re never allowed to be held accountable for mistakes) they literally defeat that whole point. They’re being extremely counterproductive to what feminists are actually trying to do, because they aren’t actually interested giving women genuinely good representation- they’re just interested in pandering to Twitter stans and casual female fans who form their opinions based on a first glance and girls who are so starved for rep that they’ll praise movie-makers for serving up rank crumbs.

They give us female representation but not really, just like they give us queer representation but not really, and like they give us poc representation but oftentimes not really…. Because (surprise surprise) the multi-billion dollar corporation does not actually give a shit about minority issues.

I wish someone had said this to Doctor Strange’s arrogant ass every time he insisted Billy and Tommy weren’t real to Wanda’s face

Remember when Taika said thor 4 shouldn't even be made....he was right lol

me when taika first said that: oh he’s just being cheeky

me now: oh

Oh people are still pretending that marvel is actually good? I thought y'all were over this by now.

Loki is a frost giant whom Odin found as a toddler in a temple - we never learnt how he got there and why and why was he so small and who was his morther,etc.

Bucky and Rebecca were separated as kids but nobody mentions her and the possibility he can have living relatives and that he isnt alone as his show presented. There is also a hint he and Nat knew each other before. Nobody ever touched that.

Gotta love the effort Marvel writers put into backstories of male victims.

i don’t think I can watch Spider-Man normally now knowing my bestie has senses of the divine that are tingling because she’s riverdales guardian angel and one of the souls of the town is dying like what does Spider-Man have against that? he climbs walls like a spider and has to make his webs? pathetic

A Mountain of Salt

reviewing the new thor movie, lifted from my messages in a thorki discord i’m in

So, my absence from this discord quite neatly shows the fact that I am *so done* with Marvel shit at this point. The characters I love are either dead or so different from how they started that they might as well be dead, the fandom is generally feral, the ship's popularity just ain't what it used to be, etc. etc. And in the meantime, I have found another dalliance. Yes, I am cheating on my fandom and OTP (scandalous!) and in doing so, I've come to the conclusion that Marvel tries and pathetically fails to make Pirates of The Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Every fucking time. Think about it--there's a plot, for one, the humor works so well (perhaps because it's actually funny shit, the actors who deliver it do it well, and there's again that lil plot, solid characters, solid dialogue to carry it), the pacing is great, so many memorable characters, romance that's compelling, sick costumes, the fucking SCORE, oh. and the effects (mostly) don't look like dogshit. The movies are fun and light, but they're actually compelling despite that.

Also, the idea of Jack Sparrow, that crazy little rogue, messing around with (emotionally) constipated Commodore James Norrington is hot as fuck!

But the movie. Oh the movie. I had the terrible misfortune of actually seeing it and during my watch, I decided to make a tally of the things I liked and the things I didn't. I was trying to be generous. /Anything/ that I felt didn't suck went on my Like tally, and I decided to /not/ add a tally for every instance that shit was out of character, made no sense, was acted poorly, etc. Even so, It ended up being like. 12 to 37 or something.

The thing that broke my heart the most was Thor's character (obviously.) Straight up. I do not know that man. A pure stranger. Don't know him from dick. Who the fuck was THAT? and why in the world was he playing comic relief for this own fucking movie? Only in the end(-ish) did I recognize him--y'know, the scene where he was telling off Zeus. He was responsible, giving a shit, looking to take care of something bigger than himself and willing to be brave and bold to do so. That was a cool, like, two minutes, though. Everything else had him portrayed as a fucking buffoon, self-centered, idiotic, insecure. And the Jane romance. Hm. That's for another paragraph.

Surprisingly, I didn't mind Jane much at all. The scenes that earned the most Likes and the least amount of dislikes were solo Jane scenes. Natalie actually seemed to commit to this movie in ways she didn't in the first two Thor's, which was nice. Her scenes had emotional grounding and though the way they treated cancer in the movie was a bit iffy, I think she played it well enough. But yeah. The romance. First off, when the fuck did this even happen? Maybe I've been doing too much self-preservation in not studying the MCU timeline, but this long romance doesn't seem to fit ANYWHERE. The two have less sexual tension than a pair of spoons, perhaps better than previous movies, but still. The romance made no sense, the degree to which Thor was hung up on it made no sense, the idea that Thor had never really loved anyone except for Jane made no sense, either. Her loss had no weight (or not much) for me because I couldn't realistically believe in how deeply they loved each other. Made no fucking sense at all. And Thor not wanting her to die in battle and all? weird. Asgardians see death differently than Western humans, so why are they treating it in the way they do?

As for the rest of the characters... Darcy's little cameo felt genuine but not spectacular, Valkyrie was fine (I am biased because I am very gay about her), Korg was fine but seemed like fanservice if we consider Taika and his desire to be on-screen a fan, Zeus was a little too buffoon-y for me to get behind (also the accent seemed. In some way uncouth to me, but whatever), fuck those fucking GOATS OMG, and Gorr. At times the acting was a little /too/ funky for my tastes, but hey, I have to respect a blunder in the name of making a character seem /full/. He looked cool, badass, and dare I say a little sexy. However, given the fate of his daughter, y'know the thing that started his whole villainy, it didn't make sense to me that he'd be terrorizing children. But what do I know? On the topic of children, I feel like TW does like to portray the strength of children in his movies which is cool! That is good! People often overlook children as human beings, indeed, but lol I do not care. Not remotely. I have no interest in seeing an army of children (which sounds troubling, but I guess makes sense in as much as they are Asgardians. But if that's the case, why are they all absolutely clueless vis-a-vis battle? Where did that pillar of Asgardian culture go?) and let's be real, realistically one of them would've karked it in the fray, but none of them did.

Before entirely abandoning the ideas of Gorr and of children, I have to address Love. Silly fucking tie-in for the title. Silly fucking tie-in for one of the main themes of the movie, and ham-fisted at that. And ah, I don't feel great shitting on a child, but I remember watching the movie and thinking "God, this child actor really sucks. Wooden and all." Because kids /can/ be good at acting, they really can. Then I learned that Love was portrayed by Chris Hemsworth's kid and it all made sense. Like, nepotism sucks but it can be worked with. There are some very talented nepotism babies, but this kid was not one of them. This movie and all the shit around it has honestly put me off CH entirely. Like, he seems like a douche. And how everyone is treating this movie like Grown Ups in which bad actor guy who always gets a hot wife or whatever used shooting as a means to take a vacation with his buddies. Not cool.

I was confused to see New Asgard and how it was portrayed. I mean. The Asgardians were always a proud (if not straight-up arrogant) people but yet they've made their whole existence into being a Disney park (hm...) and somehow have none of the same values or tendencies as OG-Asgard. Very strange. I know imperialism and capitalism are buddies, but they are not the same, y'know?

The vfx for the final battle in the shadow realm or whatever the fuck it was called actually looked pretty cool. Like with the b&w, the intense highlights and shadows. Sort of comic-booky look. Not sure if that was intentional or just a product of Too Much Fucking CGI, though. The battle lost its flavor once the kids entered the fray, but I guess the movie did sort of turn out to be Thor 4: More Thor(s) than Ever Before. Eternity looked cool, I appreciated the parallels it drew from the desert in which Love bit it, but damn. People are bad at wishing for shit! Surely the wish could've been "I wish I and my daughter were alive and well, having the life I always wanted" or some shit instead of "I wish my daughter wasn't dead anymore." Like, what are the limitations of this wish? Might as well give it a go, no? Because Gorr didn't /just/ want his daughter to be alive, he wanted to be alive /with her/.

And Thor as a single dad. No. Nah. My face was screwed into some ridiculous grimace the whole time that shit played out. Thor has indeed become more responsible (only to then become irresponsible and then responsible again and then irresponsible and then responsible again and then...) but I wouldn't say it was ever in such a fatherly way. I also don't care to see family/parenthood in anything (my own personal hang ups, I understand), especially not in a superhero movie. And I don't think it particularly jives with the greater MCU so they'll probably have to unwrite it somehow.

Yeah, this movie was not only a personal nightmare, but it was also just a huge brainfuck in general. I wish that I could've been the one to reach Eternity first so I could make it so that it never existed or conversely, didn't suck major fucking nuts. The end.

thor 1 & 2 use to b my favorite marvel movies, and the cliff hanger at the end of thor 2 was so insane to me, i was looking forward to the next movie so hard and then it was just. like so bad :/

Yeah...

Those movies were so interesting to me, too. Loki used to be one of my main favorite characters. I was also excited for a continuation of Thor: The Dark World -- seeing what Loki did with the throne, what he did with Odin, how Thor would respond to him being alive... The fandom had so many cool theories and ideas. But then Thor: Ragnarok happened, and not only did he do nothing with it, but he was also turned into an underpowered joke.

Silliness and humor are all nice and fun, if that's what you started out with. But the first two Thor movies (and the first Avengers one) were much more serious and dark in tonality, which Thor: Ragnarok fully ignored. And tbh, this is one of the main reasons why I've been off the Marvel train for a while. They used to take themselves a bit more seriously, once upon a time. I'll die on a hill screaming about how good Captain America: The Winter Soldier is, as a movie. But then they started to make their films according to a formula that we're all tired of by now: quirky one liners and funny goofs, colorful and flashy aesthetics, cool action scenes and one-dimensional characterization that's easy to digest. It all feels like a product. The choices behind the movies for the past... 7 years? feel entirely motivated by money, and it's turned Marvel so deeply soulless it's depressing.

Same with Thor and Loki. Fun, colorful and goofy sells. Nevermind who they were before, and nevermind that they've become caricatures of themselves.

wow. and thought tr!thor was bad. the destruction of his character is complete. whoever that is in the "thor" 4 trailer is not thor. not going to even bother watching the movie.

Way ahead of you. I have no plans to watch it and haven't watched the trailers at all. Only know what I haven't been able to avoid on my dash.

So uh. What'd they do now? Do I even wanna know?

okay but the audacity to say that Jennifer Walters is better at controlling her hulkiness that Bruce because she's a woman. Bruce's whole life is just trauma after trauma, and they're really trying to go "but hey, at least he's never been mansplained :)"? no, the reason she's better at controlling her hulkiness is that it works differently. it was presumably a much smaller dose of gamma radiation, and she has no alter ego — which is the crux of Bruce's problem. not to mention the fact that Bruce figured out how to control turning into the Hulk before the first Avengers movie, which they seem to have conveniently forgotten to make Jen's ability to control it more impressive. honestly I just think She Hulk would be so much better if Bruce wasn't in it, because they're clearly trying to make him look worse to make Jen look better :/

Wanda fan: It was so wrong how Agatha wanted to take Wanda’s powers from her!

me, after seeing the events of WV & MoM unfold:

Genuinely the only reason White Vision didn’t show up either in Multiverse itself or in the credits scenes is because neither Sam Raimi nor Michael Waldron watched WandaVision. It makes zero sense for him to have not even been mentioned, especially since in his last appearance he was given all his memories back and said “I am the Vision” before disappearing. WHERE IS HE?

Took the kiddos to the new Thor movie… (yeah yeah yeah I know, but it was the only one they wanted to watch that they hadn’t seen already)

Phew. Did not enjoy that much. What a mess. I don’t even know what Marvel is doing anymore. And I know a lot of people who weren’t big fans of Ragnarok also didn’t like Love and Thunder, but guys, I loved Ragnarok and I still thought this one was boring as hell. Too bad.

Man if you had told me like ten years ago that there would be movies and tv shows with Kid Loki, Ms Marvel, She Hulk, and even Lady Goddamned Thor, and if you told me *I wouldn’t like any of them*, I wouldn’t believe you, ten-years-ago-me would have been nothing but absolutely thrilled at the prospect. Siiiiigh

i'm sorry to report that thor is the punchline of every joke in this movie :( it's like they WANT to ruin him :(

I'm disappointed & sad to hear that but tbh I can't even muster the slightest bit of surprise anymore

and honestly as someone who is a BIG fan of Thor, these kind of jokes kinda feel like marvel pulling me aside and going "haha we don't take this character seriously because Space Vikings are ridiculous and you know that, right? Space Vikings are ridiculous and anyone who takes them seriously is ridiculous. YOU are ridiculous for seriously caring about this character"

if all this comes off as bitter it's bc I am lmao