Marvel Phase 4 Reviews

I hope you'll forgive a lack of video content this month, i'm having a bit of computer trouble.

I'll have it solved by next time but for now i hope you enjoy reading words on a screen, because i have no choice but to focus my vast authorial powers into some high quality text posts, woven from only the finest of literary silks and standing proudly atop centuries of esteemed journalistic pedigree, which means nothing but i like the way it sounds.

So how's about some good old fashioned, honest to Crom reviews? Real reviews, not even fake ones like usual. I'm embracing my role as a critic. A terrible fate, I know. But as my hero, The Nostalgia Critic says, the review must go on. Maybe it's not the same without my dulcet, lavender narration, but if you concentrate really hard you can sort of imagine it. No wait, stop. You're imagining it wrong, i would never say it like that.

Anyways, i've been watching some Marvel shit, so without further a-doo-doo i present the...

Boring Disney Capeshit Chronicles

Wanda Vision

Like all of you, i love getting pandered to, and WandaVision is a rare treat of a show that panders both to my sensibilities as a huge comic book nerd, and a huge TV nerd. All the homages to different decades in sitcom storytelling were clever and well done, right up until the end when it turned into a generic, retarded, flying superhero battle.

The MCU is at its best when taking its cues from the source material and this show does a great job at that. It takes inspiration from the excellent Tom King Vision series, while also inching Wanda closer to her more unstable characterization as seen in Avengers Disassembled and House of M. This is wise on both fronts. Vision is more interesting when his humanity is able to shine through, there's a reason this old panel remains so enduring and iconic.

As for Wanda, the comics figured out long ago that she's a lot more dynamic and interesting as a character when she's a grieving basket case irresponsibly fucking up the world with her scary powers than she ever was as just another team player. There's a lot of storytelling potential that comes with the movies getting on board with this characterization, as she was one of the MCU's blander characters up to this point, without much to do but stand around and make silly hand gestures.

The writing here manages to very smoothly incorporate the events of the MCU in such a way that makes you realize "oh yeah, i guess she has been through a lot". In all the action and chaos of the movies, certain character beats inevitably end up in the background, but having them brought up again and made to mean something later on enriches the entire universe.

It's important to have the little things matter as much as the big things and that's why a character focused series like this was a pretty smart idea in between all the big-ass Lord of The Rings battles.

The show does a great job of fleshing out its main characters, Wanda in particular. She's effectively taken from being a secondary Avenger, to the more complex, sympathetic, and slightly terrifying character she is in the comics, and it leaves you with the sense she'll be a much bigger deal going forward.

It was a wise decision by Marvel to do a lower stakes, more character focused show. WandaVision commendably takes the time to explore its characters, and give them space to develop. At least until it all turns into a stupid fucking goddamn idiotic flying Chronicle fight at the end, where Wanda's incredible and mysterious powers are reduced to shooting Dragonball Z beams out of her hands.

I don't know who the hell wrote that last episode but i hope they're in prison somewhere. Sure, Vision defeating Nega-Vision with a logic debate is pretty based, but that in no way makes up for the sheer stupidity of ending a somewhat subversive and mature series with a paint by numbers basic bitch superhero smackdown quidditch match between differently colored hadoukens.

Also, the bait and switch with Pietro made me mad. Really mad. So mad i don't even want to dwell on it here or else i'll shit myself from strenuous yelling. You bring in the cool guy that everybody likes from the Fox movies, and then at the last second you say he was a fraud? YOU'RE the fraud, Marvel. Don't jerk me around like that, the character deserves better. I say that on behalf of all us oldschool, diehard Quicksilver fans. There are dozens of us, dozens!

Rating: B

Falcon and Winter Soldier

Surprising absolutely no one, the two most boring guys in the entire MCU have come together to star in the most boring possible show that has ever been conceived, let alone actually made. I'm shocked it got made at all without the entire crew falling asleep.

Look, Bucky's an okay character. He's got a metal arm which is pretty neat, and in the comics when he was Captain America for a while, he had a gun which was pretty rad.

Falcon is... well he's nothing. He's captain America's black friend who flies and that's fine. There are plenty of stories you can tell about Captain America's black friend who flies without calling him the new Captain America which will never, ever, be of interest to anyone. Anybody who claims to want to see that is lying, and the same goes for Bucky.

The Winter Soldier is cool as The Winter Soldier, and The Falcon is... decent as The Falcon. Neither one of them needs to "don the mantle", which is very transparently just Marvel's attempt to keep their cash cow movie universe going while getting around the reality of aging actors and also garnering fake progressive points any way they can, be it by the addition of melanin, estrogen, or some form of gayness.

The problem with this attempt to trick us out of our money is two-fold. For one thing, no, it's not a mantle, it's a character. A specific character. Steve Rogers is what makes the captain America identity interesting, not the other way around. Same goes for Peter Parker and Spider-man. Sorry, Miles Morales fans, but in the words of an internet legend, woo woo woo, you know it.

The other problem is that shoehorning minority characters into established roles is yet another example of "representation" being fueled by shallow, dumbshit, moronic fucking backwards logic that only achieves the opposite of what it thinks it does.

The Falcon is The Falcon, he's his own character, an original black superhero character. Making him the new Captain America just robs the world of The Falcon and replaces him with an inferior, fake Captain America that everyone can tell is inferior and fake. If anything it's the opposite of representation, by removing black characters from their own identities to "carry a mantle" that doesn't need carrying, you've essentially made the MCU less black.

I've heard the show gets even more obnoxiously faux-woke by the end, with Anthony Mackie all but pointing his weird chin directly at the screen and telling the audience how racist they are. I wouldn't know because i stopped watching after 3 episodes. I literally could not continue, it was too fucking boring, it was making me flatline.

Falcon and Winter Soldier gets an F-

Loki

Loki the character is a complicated man, a man of contradictions, you never really know what's going on with that guy. Fittingly, Loki the show is also contradictory, simultaneously being sort of good while also being a bit of a craptastic snoozefest.

Loki had a whole character arc in the movies, which revolved around him getting his ass kicked until he wasn't evil anymore, mostly out of a desire to stop getting his ass kicked, but then he accidentally got his ass kicked even harder by Thanos for not being evil enough, this guy just can't catch a break. Imagine being served death by ass kicking not once, but multiple times. We philosophers have a word for that, Mondays.

That character arc has to be repeated here, in order to catch up this earlier-in-the-timeline mostly jerkass Loki to his slightly less jerkass dead future self. It accomplishes this by ramping up the ass kickings and humiliation to an absurd, borderline insufferable degree.

I've never liked what a complete and utter bitch-boi Loki has always been in the MCU. You can't even say he's been nerfed in this series because he started out perma-nerfed ever since the first Avengers movie, by which i mean the movie The Avengers, not The First Avenger, which is actually the first Captain America movie.

Avengers 1 was his big villain movie. Accurate to the comics, Loki was the threat that brought the Avengers together in the first place, but even then he was taking orders from Thanos, getting blown up by Hawkeye, and being reduced to the Hulk's incredible punchline.

These movies are so committed to humiliating Loki they can't even be consistent about his powers. This dude is a God, even without his badass magicks and sorceries he should be able to swat people around like flies, but he doesn't. He's a frost giant, but it's not until What If that we see him remember to use any icy powers at all. Come on, man. My man should have had a Rukia Kuchiki icy sword by Thor 2. Maybe if he did, that flick would have been a little more memorable.

This show takes the assassination even further by devoting half the series to Loki getting his ass kicked and humiliated by a chick Loki, he's actually been made even more pussified than the literal pussified version of himself. The only bright spot in this woke nightmare is that she totally wants to get banged by him, so i'll allow it.

The best part of this show is not even the show itself but what it sets up. The introduction of Kang, who isn't outright referred to as Kang but fuck you it's Kang, is very cool, and does a fine job of setting him up as a Thanos level threat. Then it does a decent little reveal at the end where it's like "oh no watch out for the multiverse", and i'm like... yeah, okay.

I guess what i'm saying here is the show was... good? But for some reason that i can't quite put my finger on, i disagree with myself. At least i think i do. Some part of me wants to say i enjoyed Loki, but a smarter and more rational part of me is pretty sure that's a lie.

Rating: C-

Black Widow

I didn't see this one, it looks lame and it costs 30 dollars, which they will get from me over my dead body. Theaters are open but i snuck into Free Guy instead, because i'm a free guy and i do whatever i want, which usually amounts to watching movies for free. Seriously, you can just walk right in, try it. They're not paid enough to stop you. I've seen Fast 9, Boss Baby 2, some crappy Conjuring movie, all for free. It's great.

Rating:  i don't care/10

What If?

The What If comics were cool as hell back in the day, my personal favorite was always issue #100, "The Greatest Secret of The Marvel Universe REVEALED"  Wherein Mr. Sinister blows Rogue and Gambit's minds by showing them a bunch of Marvel comics, including the very issue currently being read, as if it were the 90s X-men version of 100 Years of Solitude, in other words the superior version.

What if functions as Marvel's Twilight Zone, where anything goes, but there's a balance to that premise which must be strived for.

The best ones know to reign themselves in just enough that they at least start out with some kind of internal logic. You can't just have something totally out of left field and random happen to set things off, the timeline has to branch out in some way that makes sense to begin with.

There needs to be a seemingly minor deviation at some key point in the established continuity, the unforeseen consequences of which spiral outward into some totally insane, balls to the wall permutations of fate for the characters we love.

To give an example of what I'm talking about, you can't just do "What if the Hulk had explosive diarrhea and died?", that's lazy, and it gives away the ending. There's no story there, just a pointless mental image.

It has to be something more subtle and innocuous, like "What if The Absorbing Man finally won a fight?". Then you can have The Hulk knocking Crusher Creel into a milk truck which causes him to turn into milk, and then The Hulk drinks him, forgetting that he's in his 30s now and therefore lactose intolerant, which then causes him to have explosive diarrhea and die, and in the last panel you can show Creel reconstituting himself out of the Hulks shit and walking away the smelly, poopy victor.

Say, did i just make the same exact point 4 different ways in a row? Wow, that was redundant. And so was that extra sentence calling it redundant. And so is this sentence calling further attention to the increasing redundancy of it all. My bad. I guess we're in a "what if i forgot how to write good?".

See what i mean? It should be "write well".

Of the three episodes posted so far, the first one drops the ball on this simple concept the hardest. We're told that Peggy Carter opting to stay in the lab for Steve Rogers' Super Soldier transformation somehow results in the lab being attacked and her having to take the serum herself. Now maybe i missed something here, i don't know cause i don't feel like going back and watching it again, but i fail to see the through line. What difference does it make what room Peggy Carter is standing in? How does that affect whether or not the lab gets attacked? Again, maybe there's something i missed that ties it together and makes it all make sense, but i'm pretty sure it either didn't, or i don't care.

This episode sucks. Luckily i watched it last because the premise sounded so intrinsically boring i skipped to the more interesting ones. If i had watched this one first i might not have kept going, because it's just as boring as it sounds. Marvel seems to have forgotten that Steve Rogers himself is the only person who ever gave a shit about Peggy Carter to begin with, so it's a bit of a slog watching her run around being Captain Not-America and rolling her eyes at basic Hollywood workplace sexism tropes that were stale by the Jurassic period and have about as much place in a WW2 story as poop in a toaster.

Episode 2 is a lot more fun. The premise of "What if Black Panther was Star Lord" sounds at first to be just as random and nonsensical, but only because it saves the explanation of where the timeline diverged for later in the episode. Yondu and the Reavers goofed up and grabbed the wrong kid because something something Wakanda, alright good enough.

This is Chadblack Bossman's last performance as Black Panther, unless he pulls a Tupac and comes back as a hologram, or to be less racially on the nose, rises from his grave like the Altered Beast. It's a rather wholesome sendoff, especially considering the episode's overall tone.

Personally i find the character of T'Challa to be a terrifically boring Gary Stu, and this episode leans into that, hard. This probably would have come off annoying but the fact of his passing imbues it all with a more self-aware and celebratory feeling.

So beloved is T'Challa in this timeline, and so utterly competent in the role of Star-Lord, that those who began as adversaries to Peter Quill are instead the most loyal of friends, up to and including Thanos himself, whose unshakable conviction to dispassionate genocide is swept under the rug as having been simply out-debated by T'challa at some point. It's completely ridiculous, but works in this context.

The 3rd and as of now most recent episode goes back to Phase One to focus on a mystery assassin picking off future avengers before they ever get the chance to avenge. If they do a sequel to this one it should be "Who Avenges The Avengers?" I know that doesn't quite fit the "What If..." naming scheme, but hey, neither does "The Greatest Secret In The Marvel Universe REVEALED" and as i mentioned that's the coolest one of all.

In summary, What If the show is pretty good. For some reason i assumed it would be ass, but it isn't. The animation is cool, the episodes are mostly interesting and funny, and they got all the voice talent back from the movies with their Mouse money, even the dead ones.

Best of all, Loki not only remembers to use icy powers, but also literally swats a dude around like a fly, which i've been asking for ever since that Loki review a few paragraphs up.

I give it a B+ so far.

Alright, that's enough opinions for one post. Maybe I'll do DC next, but till then...