#age of ultron

HAS SHE BEEN FUCKING VISIONS REANIMATED C O R P S E ?!?

wifi-passworcl:

I accidentally yelled ‘HOLY FUCKING SHIT’ when vision picked up Thor’s hammer and then a random guy in the theater was like ‘language’ and everyone in the theater started laughing

redantsunderneath:

abigailnussbaum:

sophiamcdougall:

abigailnussbaum:

knightinironarmor:

tony “fucked up with ultron and got away with it” oh my god really. really

tony is subscribing to the system of accountability devised in response to ultron. tony is taking whatever consequence is thrown at him. literally says it, “we need to be put in check, whatever form that takes, i’m game.” good god he’s not coming up with any of this shit, he’s just literally not in a position to argue against it EXACTLY BECAUSE ULTRON

i don’t see anyone saying wanda “got away” with anything for not walking into a prison cell after ultron so why in the fuck do people expect that from tony. y'all fucking know that if someone had approached tony and told him he needs to be held accountable, and he’d said “fuck no that’s unfair and i’m gonna run out of this place,” you’d be ripping him to shreds. wtf. stop with the blame game it is literally so stupid

“ don’t see anyone saying wanda “got away” with anything for not walking into a prison cell after ultron“

Uh. Hi?

I’ve been complaining about the lack of consequences for Wanda since Ultron came out.  So have tons of other people.  Trust me, no one is unclear on the fact that a woman who sided first with Hydra and then with a psychotic, homicidal AI in her quest for revenge on Tony Stark, and who along the way sicced an unstoppable killing machine onto a city of a quarter-million people, belongs in jail.  (Though, having said that, let’s not pretend there isn’t a bit of false equivalence going on here, when you’re comparing a lone orphan from an impoverished, war-torn country to a billionaire who is capable of telling congress to kiss his ass without that even being the highlight of his day.)

But the thing is, the fact that Wanda belongs in jail, alongside Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Phil Coulson, and probably a whole bunch of other Agents of SHIELD characters at this point (because I stopped watching on the second or third time they decided that the rule of law and human rights didn’t matter, so I don’t know how many criminal things they’ve done since then) doesn’t change the fact that so does Tony.  And saying that what he’s doing in Civil War is a response to his fuck-up in Ultron, well, you know, that might actually be true, but that doesn’t make it right.  I mean, we are all clear on the fact that this isn’t how a civilized world should run, right?  If you screw up badly enough that you nearly destroy the planet, you don’t get to assume the authority of fixing the loophole that allowed you to do that.  That job should be left to people who haven’t proven themselves to be as unfit for the task as you have.

One of my problems with the MCU (and with superhero stories in general) is that they seem to designate some characters as good guys, and having done so it doesn’t matter how often those people screw up or how much damage they cause.  They’re still considered good guys, and it’s still left to them to pick up the pieces.  Nick Fury is a pretty classic example, but the idea that Tony Stark should be allowed to rewrite the laws of the world in order to prevent something like Ultron from happening again feels like taking that approach to its ludicrous extreme.  Hey, you know what would have prevented Ultron from happening, Tony?  If you hadn’t created him.  If you hadn’t demonstrated the profound arrogance and lack of judgment that should render you unfit for any future public role.  Realistically, the fact that they haven’t can only mean one thing - that Tony is so rich, and so connected, that the consequences of his actions can never touch him.

And look, I’m not saying Steve is much better.  The fact that he’s willing to work with Fury and Tony, and that he hired Wanda as an Avenger, speak very poorly to his judgment and sense of justice.  By this point, I’m struggling to think of a single character in Civil War (barring the new ones, of course) that I would entrust with designing the system of laws that would govern the behavior and rights of superheroes, because most of them either belong in jail, or in front of a judge to explain why they shouldn’t go to jail.  I have to believe that there are people in the world of the MCU that haven’t made those kinds of mistakes, and who can be trusted to steer it more wisely than this bunch of hooligans.  And if there aren’t, then perhaps it’s time to admit that this world isn’t heroic, but a horrifying dystopia.

It’s all the fallout of decisions outside the text (I mean, obviously –just commenting on how narrative logic and moral logic have come to feel so mismatched). They wanted Ultron as a big-name baddie, but they didn’t want to include Hank Pym. So Tony, as the remaining AI-building scientist, had to be Ultron’s creator, never mind that this action was not at all congruous with the state of his character at the end of Iron Man 3. But they also recognised that audiences didn’t want an Avengersfilm to be crushingly dark and filled with guilt and angst (and perhaps also that a film about a big evil robot couldn’tbe those things to the extent that a comic could). So  Tony suffers only moderate emotional fallout, and no apparent external consequences. And that’s a big part of why the film, despite being comprised of individually entertaining moments, feels so emotionally unengaging – the characters don’t even have control of their moods, let alone their actions.

Honestly, at this point I think the only way forward, for both audience and filmmakers is to handwave it, all “ehh, something a bit like that happened but let us not dwell on the specifics.” In fairness this is what comics do all the time 

I think this is true as far as it goes - the process of creating Ultron was clearly a horrible mess, and the movie itself was created more to act as a bridge to Civil WarandInfinity War than as a work in its own right.  But that still doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, nobody at Marvel was able to see what they had created, and what they were saying with it.  They honestly didn’t see anything wrong with having Tony make a mistake so huge that it almost ended all life on Earth, and still end the movie a figure of authority and respect.  And that, I think, is not just about bad planning or prioritizing the big picture over character continuity.  It’s about a messed-up mentality that, as I said above, designates some characters as good guys no matter what they do.

So while I agree that it might be best to pretend Ultron never happened (inasmuch as that’s possible, because I’m not sure the MCU is doing that in any meaningful way), I think the seeds of this problem are everywhere.  You can see them in the fact that Nick Fury is still accorded respect by people like Steve and Natasha.  Or that Maria Hill was able to seamlessly transition to the private sector.  Or in the very premise of Agents of SHIELD, which holds that the same people who failed to notice, in some cases for decades, that half of their colleagues were working for Hydra, should now be entrusted with the task of bringing Hydra down.  More and more, the MCU feels like a world where there are no consequences for some people, and where being bad at your job doesn’t mean you won’t still be allowed - encouraged, even - to keep doing it.

Is there a term that means “the lack of exercising variable focus and strategic suspension of disbelief due to a fixated set of concerns, resulting in an inability to enjoy or understand art/entertainment that relies on tension between ideas or themes that extend outside of a narrow window of concerns?”  TV tropes doesn’t say anything…

Superhero stories truck in the ethics of power but peer through a lens of personal agency, community, etc. By convention, you have to hand wave away some aspect of “why isn’t such-and-such in jail” because if not you’d have to resort to short cuts at best/movies that are 90% pedantic explanation at worst in order to keep the narrative engine going and make your point.  There is something interesting here about morality as taught by the “necessary” conventions of comic book stories (the secret identity thing, too, is… fraught, but the Marvel Studios movies don’t go there much) but to get what this stuff is staying, you have to pull back a bit and treat the details as extensions of the story that is being told.  And at that level, keeping your eyes on Tony in AoU vs. Civil War poses a different problem – they are making a reduced version of the same movie again.

The from-40,000-feet story of Age of Ultron (you can read my full argument here) is that Tony is concerned with the safety of a world he feels responsible for (consistent with where he is at the end of IM3, IMO) and, as an entirely male effort, tries to harness forces he does not understand by technological means to create “progeny” that will protect everyone by controlling the situation with his values hard wired… Ultron is the techno-nanny state, rational determinism, whatever. Tony must learn that this is the wrong way, one of control and predetermination poisoned by our own traumas, in order to allow the birth of the better future.  The Avengers must be exposed to American heartland generative values to enable the creation of better “child” (the Vision), conceived in a female derived techno womb, spewed to life by male energy, and containing a spark of divine (the role of Jarvis’ mental patterns is too much to add to this sentence).   This “future,” perhaps more enlightened than we, can do the correct thing which is make decisions for itself, that me must trust and which hopefully can destroy the confines of the authoritarian/traditional we created.  The elder generation’s role is to teach and step aside.  Whedon’s argument isn’t just against fascism, but also helicopter parenting.

That Tony, in Civil War, needs to learn that an authoritarian/controlling approach is wrong (as it must be… Captain America is on the other side) is a small, uncomplicated aspect of his lesson learned in the prior film.  That Captain America knows that this isn’t right is a rehash too.  At least we have Spider-Man to stand in for the misguided but searching soul of America/the west (that’s new!) and there is no obvious parental model (the child rearing metaphor appears subtracted).  AoU is a bloated, lopsided mess of a movie, but thematically uninteresting it is not.  Civil Wars promises to be more straightforward (if just as bloated).

It seems a bit questionable to, on the one hand, say (with perfect accuracy) that superehero stories are told through the lens of personal agency, and on the other hand, that fixating on the implications of their events for individuals, and how those individuals develop, is beside the point and undercuts one’s ability to enjoy them.  Or, to put it another way: it is trivially obvious that the MCU wants me to enjoy its movies by becoming invested in its characters as individuals, not as placeholders for forces or themes.  The very selling point of Civil War is the conflict between Tony and Steve, who in himself represents American exceptionalism, overcoming any potential objections we might have to it by embodying it in a sympathetic, attractive package.  So I don’t think it’s beyond the scope of the genre to point out that Age of Ultron has Tony behave in highly unsympathetic ways, and doesn’t do the necessary work to return him to a point where the viewer can not only continue to sympathize with him, but see him as someone who is entitled to call the shots for all of humanity.

Nor do I see that reading Ultron as a conflict between different methods of control and oversight negates my criticism of the film, or of how it handles Tony.  What does it mean, for example, to say that Tony “needs to learn” that his approach with Ultron is incorrect?  Does he need to learn this lesson on the backs of the people of Johannesburg and Sokovia?  Does the fact of his having learned that lesson negate their deaths, and thus make it OK that he suffers no consequences for them?  You might say that I’m once again missing the point, because the destruction caused by Ultron is merely a metaphorical representation of the damage caused by the nanny-statism it represents.  But once again the MCU itself seems to think otherwise, because the premise of Civil War is that there is blowback for all that destruction - just not for Tony.  It’s all very well and good to say that Ultron is trying to make a point about Tony’s unhealthy fixation on control and total oversight, but the way in which it chooses to make that point - by having Tony nearly destroy the world - is deeply flawed.

(I might also add that when it comes to Civil War, I’m actually fairly sympathetic to the argument for registration - while allowing, obviously, for the way that the film is going to tilt the scales by having the bodies pushing for registration be just this side of fascistic.  So I’m rooting against your prediction that Civil War is merely going to recapitulate Ultron, if for no other reason than that if we’re really intended to see Ultron and superhero registration as functionally the same, then the MCU’s politics are even more reductive than I thought they were.)

keleren:

abigailnussbaum:

sophiamcdougall:

abigailnussbaum:

knightinironarmor:

tony “fucked up with ultron and got away with it” oh my god really. really

tony is subscribing to the system of accountability devised in response to ultron. tony is taking whatever consequence is thrown at him. literally says it, “we need to be put in check, whatever form that takes, i’m game.” good god he’s not coming up with any of this shit, he’s just literally not in a position to argue against it EXACTLY BECAUSE ULTRON

i don’t see anyone saying wanda “got away” with anything for not walking into a prison cell after ultron so why in the fuck do people expect that from tony. y'all fucking know that if someone had approached tony and told him he needs to be held accountable, and he’d said “fuck no that’s unfair and i’m gonna run out of this place,” you’d be ripping him to shreds. wtf. stop with the blame game it is literally so stupid

“ don’t see anyone saying wanda “got away” with anything for not walking into a prison cell after ultron“

Uh. Hi?

I’ve been complaining about the lack of consequences for Wanda since Ultron came out.  So have tons of other people.  Trust me, no one is unclear on the fact that a woman who sided first with Hydra and then with a psychotic, homicidal AI in her quest for revenge on Tony Stark, and who along the way sicced an unstoppable killing machine onto a city of a quarter-million people, belongs in jail.  (Though, having said that, let’s not pretend there isn’t a bit of false equivalence going on here, when you’re comparing a lone orphan from an impoverished, war-torn country to a billionaire who is capable of telling congress to kiss his ass without that even being the highlight of his day.)

But the thing is, the fact that Wanda belongs in jail, alongside Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Phil Coulson, and probably a whole bunch of other Agents of SHIELD characters at this point (because I stopped watching on the second or third time they decided that the rule of law and human rights didn’t matter, so I don’t know how many criminal things they’ve done since then) doesn’t change the fact that so does Tony.  And saying that what he’s doing in Civil War is a response to his fuck-up in Ultron, well, you know, that might actually be true, but that doesn’t make it right.  I mean, we are all clear on the fact that this isn’t how a civilized world should run, right?  If you screw up badly enough that you nearly destroy the planet, you don’t get to assume the authority of fixing the loophole that allowed you to do that.  That job should be left to people who haven’t proven themselves to be as unfit for the task as you have.

One of my problems with the MCU (and with superhero stories in general) is that they seem to designate some characters as good guys, and having done so it doesn’t matter how often those people screw up or how much damage they cause.  They’re still considered good guys, and it’s still left to them to pick up the pieces.  Nick Fury is a pretty classic example, but the idea that Tony Stark should be allowed to rewrite the laws of the world in order to prevent something like Ultron from happening again feels like taking that approach to its ludicrous extreme.  Hey, you know what would have prevented Ultron from happening, Tony?  If you hadn’t created him.  If you hadn’t demonstrated the profound arrogance and lack of judgment that should render you unfit for any future public role.  Realistically, the fact that they haven’t can only mean one thing - that Tony is so rich, and so connected, that the consequences of his actions can never touch him.

And look, I’m not saying Steve is much better.  The fact that he’s willing to work with Fury and Tony, and that he hired Wanda as an Avenger, speak very poorly to his judgment and sense of justice.  By this point, I’m struggling to think of a single character in Civil War (barring the new ones, of course) that I would entrust with designing the system of laws that would govern the behavior and rights of superheroes, because most of them either belong in jail, or in front of a judge to explain why they shouldn’t go to jail.  I have to believe that there are people in the world of the MCU that haven’t made those kinds of mistakes, and who can be trusted to steer it more wisely than this bunch of hooligans.  And if there aren’t, then perhaps it’s time to admit that this world isn’t heroic, but a horrifying dystopia.

It’s all the fallout of decisions outside the text (I mean, obviously –just commenting on how narrative logic and moral logic have come to feel so mismatched). They wanted Ultron as a big-name baddie, but they didn’t want to include Hank Pym. So Tony, as the remaining AI-building scientist, had to be Ultron’s creator, never mind that this action was not at all congruous with the state of his character at the end of Iron Man 3. But they also recognised that audiences didn’t want an Avengersfilm to be crushingly dark and filled with guilt and angst (and perhaps also that a film about a big evil robot couldn’tbe those things to the extent that a comic could). So  Tony suffers only moderate emotional fallout, and no apparent external consequences. And that’s a big part of why the film, despite being comprised of individually entertaining moments, feels so emotionally unengaging – the characters don’t even have control of their moods, let alone their actions.

Honestly, at this point I think the only way forward, for both audience and filmmakers is to handwave it, all “ehh, something a bit like that happened but let us not dwell on the specifics.” In fairness this is what comics do all the time 

I think this is true as far as it goes - the process of creating Ultron was clearly a horrible mess, and the movie itself was created more to act as a bridge to Civil WarandInfinity War than as a work in its own right.  But that still doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, nobody at Marvel was able to see what they had created, and what they were saying with it.  They honestly didn’t see anything wrong with having Tony make a mistake so huge that it almost ended all life on Earth, and still end the movie a figure of authority and respect.  And that, I think, is not just about bad planning or prioritizing the big picture over character continuity.  It’s about a messed-up mentality that, as I said above, designates some characters as good guys no matter what they do.

So while I agree that it might be best to pretend Ultron never happened (inasmuch as that’s possible, because I’m not sure the MCU is doing that in any meaningful way), I think the seeds of this problem are everywhere.  You can see them in the fact that Nick Fury is still accorded respect by people like Steve and Natasha.  Or that Maria Hill was able to seamlessly transition to the private sector.  Or in the very premise of Agents of SHIELD, which holds that the same people who failed to notice, in some cases for decades, that half of their colleagues were working for Hydra, should now be entrusted with the task of bringing Hydra down.  More and more, the MCU feels like a world where there are no consequences for some people, and where being bad at your job doesn’t mean you won’t still be allowed - encouraged, even - to keep doing it.

These problems remain persistent in the superhero genre, or at least these kinds of stories that come out of DC and Marvel with their bloated continuities and character rosters. In a way, DC and Marvel parallel elements of episodic television where whatever peripeteia that begins the plot must be undone and everything returned to the status quo afterwards, much like an episode of Friendsbut with more explosions and mutants. With Marvel and DC, these kinds of reversals and status quo resets may be spread out, but the rampant continuity-wide reboots both companies have been doing over the last few decades merely represents a persistent refusal to allow narrative consequences. 

Of course, Marvel and DC aren’t the only folks doing this practice, but it points to the reality that the content controllers care about the commodity rather than narrative. (Big shocker, of course.) If their characters cannot participate to make money because they quite literally should be in jail and wind up in jail, then those characters no longer serve a purpose as far as the companies care. Writers (under executive direction) cannot or will not also make decisions to have a newcharacter be the mistaken mastermind who creates, for example, Ultron: instead, existing characters deform to accommodate the marketing decisions that inform the narrative.

Now, within the setting, I can see a suggestion that authorities have few options with whom to replace Stark and others without opening the door to more Hydra agents or who would be able to deal with new problems (like the return of the Chitauri but in a more militarily organized and dangerous manner or a similar threat). However, that kind of thinking merely reinforces the reading @abigailnussbaum offers that, if you’ve been marked “a good guy,” you’re free from real consequences (and mustbe the one to confront the “bad guy” who will easily outmaneuver the incompetent or normallycompetent authorities).

From a broader perspective, I think the problem is that once superheroes show up in a setting, that setting should deform and change and adapt in order to make sense, and the setting is likely to change in very radical and likely uncomfortable ways (Miraclemancomes to mind as a more sustained example). But DC and Marvel like to maintain the otherwise mundane setting but with superheroes added, but such a setting only remains that way until a big enough narrative upset occurs.

I’d say that there are multiple issues here.  The fact that most superhero narratives, even those that take place in a shared universe, like to assume that nothing in their world changes except for the addition of superheroes (and alien invasions, and weird technologies, and people randomly developing powers, etc., etc.) can be extremely frustrating, but my sense is that this is actually something that Civil War is coming to address.  That the world has had enough of superheroes solving their problems by throwing large objects at other large objects over population centers, and is reacting in ways that are not always wise or democratic.  My problem with this is more that I don’t trust the movie to recognize what the problems it’s talking about actually are, since the MCU as a whole has yet to acknowledge how many of its characters have done things that should put them beyond the pale of civilized, much less heroic, behavior.

But beyond that, there is the problem of consequences, and there I think the dilemma is less clear-cut than you present.  It would have been possible for Ultron to actually make Tony feel the consequences of its actions in ways that wouldn’t have required him to spend the rest of his life in prison.  What if the film had ended with Tony in handcuffs?  The fact is, he’s a billionaire with political connections, so the odds of him going to prison for life would be rather slim, and Civil War could have started with him being offered his freedom if he could persuade Steve and the others to accede to the government’s demand to control over their abilities.  But it would have been an indication that the MCU is aware of the gravity of what Tony has done, and recognizes that cleaning up the mess you made is in no way the same thing as redemption.

I would also add that there’s a difference between feeling no consequences for acts that are mistaken or ill-judged, and feeling no consequences for acts that are stupid or incompetent, and the latter is a great deal more frustrating.  On Agents of SHIELD, for example, nearly every single person who has ever worked for or with Phil Coulson has betrayed him, disobeyed him, or turned out to have been working for someone else, and yet no one seems to question whether a man like this should be trusted with running an intelligence organization.  There’s a similar problem with Nick Fury, a man who failed to notice that his greatest enemies had infiltrated the organization he had been running for decades.  Beyond the fact that the MCU designated certain people as good guys, it also designates certain people as competent, regardless of how often they fail or screw up, and the fact that these people keep being handed more and more power is one of the ways in which the films’ world seems like a dystopia.

sophiamcdougall:

abigailnussbaum:

knightinironarmor:

tony “fucked up with ultron and got away with it” oh my god really. really

tony is subscribing to the system of accountability devised in response to ultron. tony is taking whatever consequence is thrown at him. literally says it, “we need to be put in check, whatever form that takes, i’m game.” good god he’s not coming up with any of this shit, he’s just literally not in a position to argue against it EXACTLY BECAUSE ULTRON

i don’t see anyone saying wanda “got away” with anything for not walking into a prison cell after ultron so why in the fuck do people expect that from tony. y'all fucking know that if someone had approached tony and told him he needs to be held accountable, and he’d said “fuck no that’s unfair and i’m gonna run out of this place,” you’d be ripping him to shreds. wtf. stop with the blame game it is literally so stupid

“ don’t see anyone saying wanda “got away” with anything for not walking into a prison cell after ultron“

Uh. Hi?

I’ve been complaining about the lack of consequences for Wanda since Ultron came out.  So have tons of other people.  Trust me, no one is unclear on the fact that a woman who sided first with Hydra and then with a psychotic, homicidal AI in her quest for revenge on Tony Stark, and who along the way sicced an unstoppable killing machine onto a city of a quarter-million people, belongs in jail.  (Though, having said that, let’s not pretend there isn’t a bit of false equivalence going on here, when you’re comparing a lone orphan from an impoverished, war-torn country to a billionaire who is capable of telling congress to kiss his ass without that even being the highlight of his day.)

But the thing is, the fact that Wanda belongs in jail, alongside Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Phil Coulson, and probably a whole bunch of other Agents of SHIELD characters at this point (because I stopped watching on the second or third time they decided that the rule of law and human rights didn’t matter, so I don’t know how many criminal things they’ve done since then) doesn’t change the fact that so does Tony.  And saying that what he’s doing in Civil War is a response to his fuck-up in Ultron, well, you know, that might actually be true, but that doesn’t make it right.  I mean, we are all clear on the fact that this isn’t how a civilized world should run, right?  If you screw up badly enough that you nearly destroy the planet, you don’t get to assume the authority of fixing the loophole that allowed you to do that.  That job should be left to people who haven’t proven themselves to be as unfit for the task as you have.

One of my problems with the MCU (and with superhero stories in general) is that they seem to designate some characters as good guys, and having done so it doesn’t matter how often those people screw up or how much damage they cause.  They’re still considered good guys, and it’s still left to them to pick up the pieces.  Nick Fury is a pretty classic example, but the idea that Tony Stark should be allowed to rewrite the laws of the world in order to prevent something like Ultron from happening again feels like taking that approach to its ludicrous extreme.  Hey, you know what would have prevented Ultron from happening, Tony?  If you hadn’t created him.  If you hadn’t demonstrated the profound arrogance and lack of judgment that should render you unfit for any future public role.  Realistically, the fact that they haven’t can only mean one thing - that Tony is so rich, and so connected, that the consequences of his actions can never touch him.

And look, I’m not saying Steve is much better.  The fact that he’s willing to work with Fury and Tony, and that he hired Wanda as an Avenger, speak very poorly to his judgment and sense of justice.  By this point, I’m struggling to think of a single character in Civil War (barring the new ones, of course) that I would entrust with designing the system of laws that would govern the behavior and rights of superheroes, because most of them either belong in jail, or in front of a judge to explain why they shouldn’t go to jail.  I have to believe that there are people in the world of the MCU that haven’t made those kinds of mistakes, and who can be trusted to steer it more wisely than this bunch of hooligans.  And if there aren’t, then perhaps it’s time to admit that this world isn’t heroic, but a horrifying dystopia.

It’s all the fallout of decisions outside the text (I mean, obviously –just commenting on how narrative logic and moral logic have come to feel so mismatched). They wanted Ultron as a big-name baddie, but they didn’t want to include Hank Pym. So Tony, as the remaining AI-building scientist, had to be Ultron’s creator, never mind that this action was not at all congruous with the state of his character at the end of Iron Man 3. But they also recognised that audiences didn’t want an Avengersfilm to be crushingly dark and filled with guilt and angst (and perhaps also that a film about a big evil robot couldn’tbe those things to the extent that a comic could). So  Tony suffers only moderate emotional fallout, and no apparent external consequences. And that’s a big part of why the film, despite being comprised of individually entertaining moments, feels so emotionally unengaging – the characters don’t even have control of their moods, let alone their actions.

Honestly, at this point I think the only way forward, for both audience and filmmakers is to handwave it, all “ehh, something a bit like that happened but let us not dwell on the specifics.” In fairness this is what comics do all the time 

I think this is true as far as it goes - the process of creating Ultron was clearly a horrible mess, and the movie itself was created more to act as a bridge to Civil WarandInfinity War than as a work in its own right.  But that still doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, nobody at Marvel was able to see what they had created, and what they were saying with it.  They honestly didn’t see anything wrong with having Tony make a mistake so huge that it almost ended all life on Earth, and still end the movie a figure of authority and respect.  And that, I think, is not just about bad planning or prioritizing the big picture over character continuity.  It’s about a messed-up mentality that, as I said above, designates some characters as good guys no matter what they do.

So while I agree that it might be best to pretend Ultron never happened (inasmuch as that’s possible, because I’m not sure the MCU is doing that in any meaningful way), I think the seeds of this problem are everywhere.  You can see them in the fact that Nick Fury is still accorded respect by people like Steve and Natasha.  Or that Maria Hill was able to seamlessly transition to the private sector.  Or in the very premise of Agents of SHIELD, which holds that the same people who failed to notice, in some cases for decades, that half of their colleagues were working for Hydra, should now be entrusted with the task of bringing Hydra down.  More and more, the MCU feels like a world where there are no consequences for some people, and where being bad at your job doesn’t mean you won’t still be allowed - encouraged, even - to keep doing it.

There are plenty of comic characters that I met once, and then I decided I wanted to know more about them. Many others I encountered once or twice, but didn’t really care. But one group stands out from all the rest: I never want to read another comic featuring them, because I believe nothing else can match the unintentional hilarity of the thing. I am talking about… the british guys in Avengers Assemble #15 AU.

American media talking about Britain is always an odd but highly formulaic thing to see. Trying to make a beefeater smile, driving on the wrong side of the road, Minis sure are tiny cars, yada yada yada, you know the drill.

(In case you don’t, actually:)

Evidently, whoever was in charge of creating the newest generation of Marvel’s super-heroes thought this was as boring and idiotic as I did, and so they decided: “We’re gonna watch ALL THE BBC, and we’re going to create some heroes that really reflect the modern England… in the most clichéd way possible!”

My encounter with them was during their Age of Ultron tie-in (short story: Robot apocalypse; Wolverine travels back in time to kill someone to stop it; it doesn’t work so he does it again; okay story, could have been done in maybe three issues too without loosing anything), where they are working together with Captain Marvel to try and help people who are being attacked by robots. Evidently this issue was meant as a starting-on point for many people, and it makes sure to introduce each character in detail. And the characters are:

• A 1980’s home computer enthusiast! The british home computer scene back then was varied but ultimately had no chance of persisting against the US market power. The only lasting influence it has had on computers today is that ARM, designers of CPUs for smartphones and the like, came out of that scene. But since sites like PC Gamer,The Register and presumably the BBC, too, often wax nostalgic about the time, sure, why not, he gets to be a super-hero.

  

  Speaking of killer-robots in London: You can’t do that without making one specific joke, and the writer of this comic knew it, so this joke gets made right on the very first page.

  

• Next is “Excalibur”, a doctor who wields the sword Excalibur (love the creative naming here), which in this version has healing powers. I guess it makes sense; after all, in english myth, Excalibur is the sword that marks a king, and according to another lasting british myth that’s been trying to emigrate to New Zealand, “a king’s hands are healer’s hands”. Or something.

  Oh yeah, and the sword connects with all the other magical artifacts in the British Museum to boost its power. This begs the question: If someone has the task to write a typical british story, and they end up with something that could serve as a generic Doctor Who script, did they fail due to plagiarism, or really succeed?

  

  Excalibur aka Dr. Faiza Hussain is also I think the very first female muslim super-hero in the Marvel universe, predating Ms Marvel - although at least in this issue, she doesn’t get the personality. It’s odd that someone at an american company, producing stories set in the US, apparently thought that a british muslim super-hero was an easier sell or a more obvious choice than an american muslim super-hero.

  

  Also, the NHS gets name checked. Remember kids: The NHS is not just one example of many similar systems across most of the world with its drawbacks and problems as well as benefits. No, it’s the most important crowning human achievement, something that british people like so much that they generally spend all day reminding each other of it. Or so it seems from the US, apparently. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the US is the one country that does not have such a system, but feels generally free to ignore the experience of other countries in this regard? Who knows.

• The next to get shown in detail is a girl whose super-power is that she can “Kick It Like Beckham”. At this point, I kind of thought they were just kidding.

  

• Then we have the Black Knight. They resisted the opportunity to do any flesh-wound related jokes. No, instead, this is one of the people whose superpower is closely connected to an evil dark side… a dark side that is marked by hating chavs. At this point, I was certain they were just kidding.

  

• I’ve saved the best for last. Captain Britain is… completely generic. Standard flying brick, with the one gimmick that his powers scale with his ego.

  

  In some ways, I almost think he’s the most stupid one. All the others try to represent something british. They do it in a way that isn’t exactly perfect, but they try. Cap, though, is largely just Captain America with a different flag, and that won’t fly*. Steve Rogers is in many ways a very american power fantasy with a twist. He’s a soldier in a country that loves and reveres soldiers without question, and his main attribute is great physical power. There are other layers, such as the fact that he tends to be very liberal as opposed to “my country right or wrong”, but those are details.

  If you look at the classic british power fantasies, you’ll notice that they’re different, and in particular not soldiers. They don’t dislike the military either, but they all generally operate alone with no backup possible, and favor cunning and talking over straight-up full force assault. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. America coming in and winning through brute force is reasonable, because they have all the brute force.

  

  Source: Nextwave #11

  The UK does not have that kind of place in the world anymore, and their heroes reflect this by winning from really more of an underdog position.

  But okay, it could be worse. He still wears the flag, and I fully accept “powered by ego” as a head canon about James Bond. As long as they don’t do something terribly stupid, like an interventionist “Kapitän Schweiz” or a military-style “Hauptmann Deutschland”, we're… wait, what? They did?

  

  Source: Mighty Avengers #4. In case you’re wondering, no, none of that grammar is even close to correct.

  Well, crap. Although we’ve seen him exactly once, as far as I can recall, so I’m just gonna pretend he isn’t canon.

So this is the british Marvel crew. Of course, all of them get their powers from magic, because the birthplace of modern technology and engineering is all about that instead of, err, technology and engineering. (Although looking at some of the plumbing I’ve seen e.g. in Scotland, I sometimes get the impression that it was the birthplace of technology, but not where it grew up). This issue does not mention that their team name is MI13, but I guess this won’t come as a huge surprise with all the rest considered. Not featured, presumably due to missing space: Anything like british humor. It’s all kind of bizarre, and I love it for that. I guess if I ever read more with these guys, I’d see they have more depth than just their stereotypes… but that doesn’t sound like fun at all.

*) I do not believe in apologizing for puns.

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can you imagine it?

redraw of some art i did two years ago of something that was missing from steve’s nightmare sequence scene in aou