anyone wanna hear my rant about how marvel basically destroyed media literacy
ok so. little anecdote before i start
back when guardians of the galaxy came out i went and watched it. bear in mind this was the first marvel movie i watched since thor. the first one. so naturally, when the credits rolled, i got up. immediately, the entire theatre started laughing at me and taunting me for missing the post credits scene. which was. you know. very fun for an autistic kid with massive social anxiety but i digress
my point is that, in order to consume marvel content, you have to have watched literally everything that came before the film you want to watch. there are lists and arguments and timelines consisting of i don’t know how many movies so the barrier of entry is *massive*. it’s so self selecting because literally only people who are committed will sit down to watch all of this stuff and god forbid you’re a casual who just wants to watch the one movie.
now i don’t have a problem with movie franchises or even movies that lean on other previous movies for an overarching narrative. but the marvel movies are exhausting mainly for these reasons:
1) they are blatantly a money making scheme. on a certain level, all movies are, naturally, but the marvel movies have such a disdain for their audience, for the people these characters are for and for the characters themselves that they will completely kill any given character’s arc - thor ragnarok did so much character development for thor and it was immediately undone the very next movie. characters are not allowed to have a consistent narrative or a satisfying ending and god forbid you’re someone who is invested in a character
2) marvel doesn’t trust its audience to put things together. everything is explained and explained again, we are on movie #4567 of collect the action hero without thought nor care for their arcs or their feelings or the things that make them themselves - the blatant whitewashing, the ableism in the treatment of characters like hawkeye, to name a few. it feels like most of the writers consider their average audience to be too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held
3) their spoiler culture. i don’t know if marvel introduced the idea that spoilers are a unique evil but GOD can it go die in a fire. not giving your actors full scripts, costumes, sets or context to play off of and then laughing at those *stupid* actors for being upset about that? the notion that the only reason to watch a movie is for the plot? i don’t know about you, but if a spoiler can ruin your movie, it’s a fucking shit movie. even movies like gone girl or rebecca, which hinge upon their plot twists, are enjoyable EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN SPOILED. this enables marvel to withhold pay from actors because they are not aware how big a role they’re playing. A PLOT TWIST SHOULD BE HINTED AT! if a few of your viewers figure it out that’s a good thing!!! a plot twist is not something that hits you out of nowhere with no hints or no possibility to figure it out by yourself! there is no merit whatsoever in punishing your audience for figuring out your plot twist (cough wandavision cough)
4) the way marvel has monopolised superhero movies. it’s not a strict monopoly, but marvel has managed to become synonymous with superhero movies and sets the standard for the way they are consumed. there are so many people whose media diet consists almost exclusively of marvel movies or movies like them, which teaches them to just accept what is thrown at them in disdain. so when they are shown a movie that doesn’t spell everything out, that is artistic or queer or up for interpretation, they get angry at the movie for not holding their hand. when you only know a very specific sort of media that never lets you think for yourself and that just keeps churning out more and more derivative content (i watched the last spiderman movie when my bf was here. not only did you need to watch ALL THE MARVEL MOVIES BEFORE, you also had to watch BOTH SPIDERMAN FRANCHISES in order to understand what the fuck is going on) that gatekeeps people who are NOT ENTERTAINED BY THIS BULLSHIT and creates a self reinforcing bubble
5) the way the movies broke apart and sanitised so many of their characters under the guise of expanding their appeal - in the most blatant example i can think of, they made PETER PARKER AT LEAST MIDDLE CLASS AND TIED HIS ORIGIN EXPLICITLY TO TONY STARK. like that is not the point. the people who write the characters don’t care about them and it shows and it is so, so exhausting.
marvel paved the way for massive, long series that get more and more difficult to enter as you go, unneccesary plot twists that literally gut punch you because you cannot have seen them coming, spoiler culture as it exists today while teaching their viewers that it’s okay to never ever have to think critically about media, just buy the next ticket for iron man 545 and no matter what we show you in it, you’re gonna be happy because it’s MARVEL
as a writer it legitimately makes me want to CRY
to the people in the notes saying i didn’t bring up capitalism i have a whole point on the money aspect. but yes, this is in outgrowth of capitalism and profit maximisation. fuck capitalism
Yeah, I pretty much dropped the series after Civil War turned out to be a colossal disappointment.
…Alright, so I agree that it’s ridiculous for modern MCU movies to basically require homework, but I find pretty much every other complaint here to be excessive. They’re all problems that exist in Marvel movies, but they are also all problems that have existed in varying degrees across media for ages - the fact that you act like Marvel invented “spoiler culture” tells me you probably weren’t around for “Snape Kills Dumbledore,” for example.
Before I get into it, I want to be clear: you’re allowed to dislike what you want to dislike. Criticism of media is not only valid, but essential. If you disagree with anything I say, that’s totally fine! A lot of this is subjective. But I happen to enjoy Marvel movies and TV shows (in general), and it’s frustrating to me that people can practically say “it’s Stan Lee’s fault that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened” and everyone will applaud because popular thing bad.
So.
1) “It’s a money making scheme!”
Most movies are. I don’t think this is actually your argument for this paragraph, but it’s the first sentence, so I’ll use it as a header here.
What I suspect is that your frustration is with some perceived lack of soul - the characters you like change between iterations, like they’re puppets instead of people, gears turning in some grand money machine. And it’s particularly galling because sometimes those characters ARE used by one person with a particularly strong vision, and then when they show up in someone else’s work they’re completely different. And as much as it’s okay to be frustrated like that… isn’t it kind of unreasonable to expect a character to be written exactly the same by 5 or 6 different people?
If your problem is the fact that a character is being written by 5 or 6 different people at all then that’s a different issue, and I don’t think it’s one that can be solved in the bounds of a connected media setting. And subjectively, I think that having that sort of connected cinematic universe is better than not having it - it allows for stories to be told that we wouldn’t be able to pull off otherwise. Outside the medium of film, Brandon Sanderson is doing something similar with his Cosmere setting, and even he needs to branch out and let other authors in to fill the space. The validity of connected media is its own discussion (I think it’s a very good thing) but
2) “Marvel doesn’t trust its audience to understand plotlines!”
I don’t actually know what you’re getting at here, because you didn’t give any examples…? Also in the very next paragraph you complain that Wandavision didn’t foreshadow its twists, which tells me maybe you… didn’t understand the plotline?
Later in the paragraph you complain about ableism and whitewashing… neither of which are really connected to plotlines at all, but I do think they’re more valid criticisms, especially of earlier Marvel properties. I’m a straight, white, cis man with no visible and/or restrictive disabilities so I’m not the right person to talk about this issue - I like that they’re able to make movies that aren’t targeted toward me in particular, with an extra emphasis on lived experiences in cultures I’m not part of, and I like that they put some effort into things like the Hawkeye TV series with the protagonist’s developing deafness and his interactions with a fully-deaf antagonist, but (and I’m saying this unironically) it also means I’m not correct to judge whether they are enough.
Either way, not sure what it has to do with the writers “considering their audience too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held.” And at the risk of whataboutism… Marvel is one of the only groups in this space that seems to even be trying to improve.
3) “Marvel’s spoiler culture has gone too far!”
I agree that it was insane for them to go to those lengths in Infinity War/Endgame, though I’d argue that in those cases they were trying to do something new - it was a cultural event, a full year where Infinity War’s shocking ending was in the social consciousness, a full year where people were waiting to see how it would resolve, and if someone had come out 6 months in and said “they win but Tony Stark dies for real,” it would have taken the impact out of that experience.
This single extenuating circumstance aside, I agree that it would be crazy to keep up that spoiler paranoia… but they aren’t. Spiderman 3 had its Garfield/Macguire cameos spoiled years in advance. The full plot of Dr Strange 2 is available online. Hell, we know there have recently been test screenings of Thor 4, which means it’s probably not hard to find someone out there who could go into detail about how that’s going to look.
And as I said, spoiler culture is nothing new. I agree that a good movie is still good even if you know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t craft a movie to be enjoyed a certain way on that first viewing. When the last few Harry Potter books came out, they were full of major character deaths, and at midnight releases you’d occasionally have people buying the book, skipping to the end, and ruining it for everyone in line. When Game of Thrones was airing, people who read the books knew the Red Wedding was about to happen, and I guarantee that the experience was different for TV-only viewers. Hell, there’s a niche example with Ocarina of Time, which released in the 90s, and yet somehow Dan Avidan of Game Grumps didn’t know Sheik was Zelda… and his live, for-real reaction was caught on video here. There is value in allowing people to experience things spoiler-free, and it gets harder and harder in the age of social media.
4) “Marvel has monopolized superhero movies!”
Yeah.Because they’re the only people who seem to know how to make them good.
Sony recently released a movie about Morbius, a villain from the Spider-Man franchise. It was a complete fucking mess. None of the characters have realistic motivations. Stuff just happens for plot convenience. There are entire action scenes where you can’t tell what’s happening because the CGI obscures the characters’ actions and decisions. Previously they made two Venom movies, which were better-received, but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who said Venom was their favorite superhero movie.
On the DC side of things, you have a bunch of Superman stuff where the focus is on how haaaard it is to be the only person in the world who matters, how you can’t let yourself help people because then they’ll relyyyy on you… and then you have 3 or 4 different Batman series, which tend to be stronger movies but also incidentally tend not to be part of cinematic universes. As far as the DCEU goes, the only stuff that was well-received almost across the board was James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, James Gunn’s Peacemaker series, and the Justice League Snyder Cut - the first two being basically Marvel properties in DC clothing, and the latter being practically an Auteur piece by a guy who finally managed to convince Sony execs that his movie would be better without their input. To rephrase, the best DC movies are the ones that were made without DC execs having much say in the matter; they hired James Gunn to do the James Gunn things he demonstrated at Marvel, and they caved under pressure from fans to let Zack Snyder throw money at his Ayn Rand wish-fulfillment magnum opus (which, admittedly, was beautiful to look at even if I took issue with a lot of the subject matter).
The reason Marvel has monopolized superhero movies is because they have a pattern that works - treat the character like a human being who happens to have special talents and/or a higher calling, allow your directors to express themselves, and then once all’s said and done sprinkle in some cameos and promises that there’s this other thing that the audience should get excited about. It’s formulaic, it produces a lot of stuff that is just acceptable, but it’s reliable - not every MCU movie is a world-shaking hit, but it’s been a while since there was one that was actively bad.
5) “They made their characters bland under the guise of expanding their appeal!”
Okay, but literally the only character you mention is Spider-Man, who was kind of a special case. In his own stories, he’s a normal guy who occasionally gets involved in things that are way bigger than he is, but in the MCU he showed up in Civil War - he literally started out by being defined by a guy who gets involved in big things, subbing in Tony Stark for Uncle Ben (because his introduction to the MCU didn’t allow for an Uncle Ben arc), and then they… realized they’d made a mistake, and at the end of his most recent movie he ended up with no money, no connections, no safety net, just a desire to do good and a set of superpowers that gave him the ability to accomplish it. Which is to say, Spider-Man in the MCU is now Spider-Man from the comics.
Other than that, the characters have - at least in their introductions - been pretty loyal to their source material, as far as I can tell. Tony Stark was an irresponsible alcoholic playboy, driven to superheroism by a need to redeem himself. Steve Rogers was a good-hearted kid who was granted the power to stand up to bullies. Thor was a larger-than-life braggart who needed a dose of humility from time to time.
Hell, if you want to see evidence that they’re willing to branch out with their characters, look no further than Moon Knight, which opens with an everyman struggling to live his life while being disrupted when an action hero takes over his body and then leaves him to pick up the pieces. (I’m not confident it will stay at this level of quality, as every single Marvel TV show so far has had a promising opening and a weak-ass ending, but that’s a different discussion!)
TL;DR: Your complaints are valid, but it’s totally unfair to say exclusively a Marvel problem. Most of your points are either wholly untrue or only point to exceptions-with-good-reasons within the MCU, and they all generally point to problems with media as a whole - there’s an inherent conflict between fan-loyalty and broad accessibility, between artistic merit and financial viability. Marvel is a big obvious target because they consistently make financial successes, but the problems you lay out are symptoms evident in Marvel properties, but not caused by Marvel in any capacity, and pretending it’s the case means people are going to be way less likely to address the problem effectively.
It isn’t Marvel. It is capitalism. Punishing Marvel somehow won’t make the problem go away, especially when your main complaint appears to be that they’re making the movies broadly appealing.
Soooo@ask-spiderpool’s mod’s been posting fic lately and this one in particular grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me violently until I broke all my usual art MO’s and drew an angsty styelized Peter Parker’s no good very bad emotional crisis metaphor with the most dramatic lighting I’ve done in … maybe years?
Shout out to me switching to pro-create for this one and mimicking sci’s style LESS
For context, everyone is after an ancient stone tablet (the same one from the classic Stan Lee storyline) that will grant it’s user immense power even over life and death.
When creating the formula to imbue someone with this power Peter considers how the power could be used to bring back Uncle Ben, Captain Stacy and Gwen. When Hammerhead (temporarily) obtains this power he offers Spidey the chance to restore them to life.
What I want to talk about is who Spidey and Hammerhead don’t mention, namely Mary Jane.
You see this storyline is distinctly set when MJ was presumed dead after a plane crash. Thus a No. prize is demanded to address why Peter wouldn’t consider resurrecting his wife!
This is my attempt at reconciling the issue.
The first thing to bear in mind is that this three part mini-series was released towards the end of the era where MJ was believed dead. Specifically issue #1 came out the very same month we learned MJ was in fact alive and issue #3 was released after she’d definitively returned.
So clearly this was an editorial issue. When the first issue came out MJ was dead when the last was out she was alive again. Not only might it have been weird to reference her as dead when she was very much alive but given the controversy surrounding her death Marvel were probably in damage control mode and wanted to move on as quickly as possible. It’s telling that MJ’s fake death was rarely if ever mentioned again in any story after Mackie left the titles.
Additionally Ben, George and Gwen form the ‘iconic trio’ of dead Spidey supporting characters as their deaths were easily the most iconic and integral to the Spider-Man mythos. Given how the story (as evidence by the art style) was trying to recall the halcyon ‘good old days’, it makes a thematic sense to emphasis those three and not list every Jo or Jane Blo who’s died in the Spider books.
From an in-universe POV Peter didn’t just omit MJ but numerous other loved ones who’d died. Ned Leeds. Lance Bannon. Nathan Lebunsky. Ben Reilly. Baby May and of course Harry Osborn. All of them weren’t even referenced.
Does this demonstrate how callous Peter is for only caring about those three dead people?
I think the more likely explanation, as hinted at by the story itself, is that Spidey was less concerned about people who’d died but more people who died because of him.
Whilst we can debate technicalities, the fact is that Peter honestly was far more directly involved in the deaths of those three people than any of his other loved ones. He will never know if MJ would’ve still caught her deadly flight even if he didn’t miss her before she left. He knows enough about the Osborns to see that Harry was thoroughly screwed up regardless of anything he did. Ben Reilly was a hero like him and literally did what Peter would have done in the same situation, wherein he gave his life to save Peter from a murder attempt. Peter couldn’t truly have done anything to have prevented that sans knocking out the Goblin. Even then he wallped Norman with everything he had short of a killing blow so there really wasn’t anything he could do. Similarly lance Bannon and Ned Leeds were murdered by third parties Peter never knew about.
In contrast Peter’s selfishness actively facilitated Ben’s death. His carelessness snapped Gwen’s neck. And whilst George gave his life to save a child, the child was endangered due to Peter sending Doc Ock’s arms out of control.
So I think this scene is ultimately about Peter wanting to undo mistakes that caused him to lose loved ones rather than wholesale play God and restore his loved ones altogether. In other words it is about Peter’s guilt, which obviously weighs heavily upon him.
I feel this is an important addition. He saves so many people on a regular basis that this just keeps happening. And he feels so much for his uncle that the answer is always the same.
