Civil War II is best summed up with this image◊. Sure, Amazing Spider-Man is supposed to be wracked with the enormity of the decision to choose a side... but come on, he's clearly facepalming.
The plot is that there's a new Inhuman named Ulysses who gets visions of the future. His visions are explicitly of the most probably future but they're not guaranteed, and so Iron Man decrees that under absolutely no circumstances must anybody listen to Ulysses or act on his visions in any way, on the off-chance that at some point in the future he might possibly have a vision about a hero going evil (because it's not like that's ever happened), and somehow convinces half of America's superpeople to support him. Opposing this, Captain Marvel, with the backing of SHIELD, immediately launches a program of arrest without corroborating evidence and imprisonment without trial to which Judge Dredd would object, and somehow gets the other half of America's superpeople to support her. Around this conflict are a group of tie-in stories in which various heroes interact with Ulysses, all of whom manage to have an experience that serves to reinforce their prior opinions and decisions; not one person actually reconsiders their position on the use of his gift. (Well, Amazing Spider-Man comes to a reasoned, nuanced conclusion, but this never comes up in the main story). Oh, and at the end the entire source of conflict is written out, rendering the entire thing a destructive shaggy dog story.
Oh, but it gets worse. The writers attempt to use Ulysses as a straight-up metaphor for profiling, but this well-intentioned effort completely fails. Ulysses' supernatural connection to the fabric of the universe itself means that his visions are more akin to a cop getting a tip-off that somebody is going to commit a crime, and the heroes repeatedly catch people red-handed based on his information. Captain Marvel even brings up this exact analogy, but when Iron Man brings up a perfectly valid question of how certain one has to be to act on a tip-off, Captain Marvel dismisses him completely and flies off, and the narrative promptly goes back to comparing magic knowledge to profiling as the 'heroes' fight big destructive battles over whether it's right to take action to avoid the chance of big destructive actions.
Just... everybody involved is an absolute moron. I get that reasoned discussion makes for a dull comic, but there are ways to have exciting adventures without making the characters special. Like, maybe they have to team up against a supervillain?
Well this was an idiot plot.
Civil War II is best summed up with this image
◊. Sure, Amazing Spider-Man is supposed to be wracked with the enormity of the decision to choose a side... but come on, he's clearly facepalming.
The plot is that there's a new Inhuman named Ulysses who gets visions of the future. His visions are explicitly of the most probably future but they're not guaranteed, and so Iron Man decrees that under absolutely no circumstances must anybody listen to Ulysses or act on his visions in any way, on the off-chance that at some point in the future he might possibly have a vision about a hero going evil (because it's not like that's ever happened), and somehow convinces half of America's superpeople to support him. Opposing this, Captain Marvel, with the backing of SHIELD, immediately launches a program of arrest without corroborating evidence and imprisonment without trial to which Judge Dredd would object, and somehow gets the other half of America's superpeople to support her. Around this conflict are a group of tie-in stories in which various heroes interact with Ulysses, all of whom manage to have an experience that serves to reinforce their prior opinions and decisions; not one person actually reconsiders their position on the use of his gift. (Well, Amazing Spider-Man comes to a reasoned, nuanced conclusion, but this never comes up in the main story). Oh, and at the end the entire source of conflict is written out, rendering the entire thing a destructive shaggy dog story.
Oh, but it gets worse. The writers attempt to use Ulysses as a straight-up metaphor for profiling, but this well-intentioned effort completely fails. Ulysses' supernatural connection to the fabric of the universe itself means that his visions are more akin to a cop getting a tip-off that somebody is going to commit a crime, and the heroes repeatedly catch people red-handed based on his information. Captain Marvel even brings up this exact analogy, but when Iron Man brings up a perfectly valid question of how certain one has to be to act on a tip-off, Captain Marvel dismisses him completely and flies off, and the narrative promptly goes back to comparing magic knowledge to profiling as the 'heroes' fight big destructive battles over whether it's right to take action to avoid the chance of big destructive actions.
Just... everybody involved is an absolute moron. I get that reasoned discussion makes for a dull comic, but there are ways to have exciting adventures without making the characters special. Like, maybe they have to team up against a supervillain?