Marvel Cinematic Universe

His disability is shooting lasers at people unless he's wearing his glassess

right

It be like that sometimes.

You'd think that the two guys running around claiming to be pagan gods would get more heat than mutants if that were the case.

Hydra Steve gave a well deserved "Reason You Suck" Speech to a comatose Tony and the superhero community as a whole for treating normal humans as bigots for the crime of reacting negatively to dangerous superpowers and aliens. Of course, it's undercut by the fact he's a Nazi.

Edited by windleopard on Dec 2nd 2019 at 9:09:30 AM

Hey, you try finding a job when your eyes constantly shoot murder-beams of pure destruction that can't be turned off without blinding you.

The Xavier School gave Scott the tools and support network he needs to live a normal life. It's inspiring!

Maybe they should do an x ray on scot's head to find out what's producing the ray and stop it?

His eyes are portals to the punch dimension

Not much to be done there

And all it cost him was his emotional development and possibility of a sane and happy life. Great trade off.

So 2019 is about done. Best MCU film of the decade?

Edited by Mizerous on Dec 2nd 2019 at 3:25:35 PM

let me get my time machine

Box office take says Avengers: Endgame.

Tomato score says Black Panther.

Me says Guardians 2 and Black Panther.

> So 2029 is about done. Best MCU film of the decade?

catwoman and green lantern

-runs away-

seriously though,Infinity War and Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Edited by Ultimatum on Dec 2nd 2019 at 8:20:35 PM

In this day and age of far right resurgence, I HIGHLY disagree.

Trask's well meaning mentality is what led to concentration camps in America, genocide of Uyghurs in China, and Palestine being an opened prison. It needs to drilled that "in the name of safety" always backfired towards the those not privileged

You can’t make him a one-dimensional bad guy. If the problem is the racism, then the natural arc is for him to overcome it and try to destroy his creation. To show that what he’s done is wrong. And the people who stay in that racist line of thinking, they’re the bad guys.

We don't need Trask as another evil business man in the pool of evil business men the MCU has already.

I've never bought into the explanation for average people in the Marvel Universe making such a big distinction between mutants and people who got their powers from another source. That's not really how bigots' minds work.

Like, how many Islamophobes have you heard of who go, "I'm fine with Shia Muslims, but those dirty rotten Sunnis have gotta go"? Heck, there are plenty of Sikhs who have been attacked by angry Islamophobes who either didn't know, didn't understand, or didn't care about the differences between Sikhism and Islam.

Or how many racists have you heard of who are only prejudiced against one race, and not against others who have a similar skin tone? Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese people may see a lot of ethnic differences between each other, but a white American racist is just going to lump them all together.

Or take a look at ableism. If someone has a prejudice against blind people, is it likely to matter to them whether a person was born blind or lost their sight due to an accident later in life? Doesn't seem very probable to me.

Now, there are people who would see the distinction between "got powers from an accident or experiment" and "got powers from the X-gene" as a meaningful distinction. Those would be people who did get powers from an accident or experiment, and want to insist that they're still good and normal, by emphasizing how they're a completely different sort of thing from those filthy muties. But I don't see that attitude taking off with the non-powered populace.

(And that's not even getting into the fact that, without a DNA test, you can't tell whether a powered person is a mutant or not, and angry mobs don't tend to wait around for lab results to come back.)

I think Guardians 2 will always be my favorite.

The problem with making Trask generically evil is that most people who do evil aren't really like that. They're multi-faceted and almost always have certain sympathetic qualities or ambitions. By making someone card carryingly and obviously evil it's easy for people to distance themselves from the character. Because it's unrecognizable as a person.

I think it's the wisest thing the Nostalgia Critic ever said. It was during his review of the Lorax. He stressed the point that by making the antagonist a cartoon supervillain rather than a guy who just wanted to run a successful business, it disincentivises people from putting themselves in the villains' shoes, and from realizing the harm they might be causing, even if that harm is mostly unintentional. They'll just think "Well, I'm not a cartoon supervillain, so I have nothing to worry about."

That's also why I wish Biggering had been used in that movie instead of How Bad Can I be?

Edited by GNinja on Dec 2nd 2019 at 10:11:48 AM

I admit that I'm not overly familiar with Trask and the Sentinels, but to me, this is sounding like the problem with verisimilitude vs "realism" and also a bit of framing.

The thing is, for the most part, what people find compelling in stories is not necessarily what's "real", but what feels real, and is interesting. The former informs the latter of course but a lot of people don't seem to understand that they're not the same thing.

Because unlike good stories, reality does not have the obligation of being emotionally satisfying, coherent, and meaningful. It simply is, whether we like it or not. Yes in real life people are multifaceted and have layers. Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian and really liked animals, for example. He was, in the end, simply a man. And I do think it's important to show those qualities sometimes because we need to understand that "normal" people are capable of doing extremely horrible things too, but with that being said there has to be an understanding that those qualities merely serve to ground them and make them believable, not to imply that there is a moral grayness where there is none.

Furthermore, sometimes bad people don't have a sympathetic backstory and moral complexities that make them a fascinating figure like many great villains. They're simply shitty people who are ugly on the inside and have no gravitas.

Finally, a compelling villain doesn't necessarily have to be sympathetic or have redeeming qualities. Guillermo del Toro's movies (like Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water) show that very well.

The Lorax was just a badly written and risible film. The problem with the "villain" was that he was totally uninteresting and a joke, not necessarily that he didn't give a shit about the harm he was causing. Executives in real life frequently don't either.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Dec 2nd 2019 at 6:28:01 AM

Given this

I'm inclined to side with NoName here. Our media needs to be reinforcing the idea that this shit is unacceptable. The depiction of Nazis does not need nuance.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 2nd 2019 at 3:25:17 AM

Then your main villain is Gyrich, not Trask. Gyrich is a self-hating racist (because his daddy’s a mutant) who founded a hate group on the principles of family and getting rid of those people. Trask is someone convinced there’s a threat and freaks out when he realizes what he created. You can do both.

I would suggest a new villain like Arcade representing a childish destructive form of oppressing mutants. Unlike Trask he simply finds mutants as pets in a zoo. Why think better of an animal meant for your entertainment or amusement.

Edited by Mizerous on Dec 2nd 2019 at 5:36:43 AM

I'm not talking about making a character like that Grey. By all means, show how horrifying what they're doing actually is. I'm talking about writing the character so there's a believable throughline in their thought process that leads to them believing the things that they do. Something more than "this person was born rotten." You don't always need to do this, but I think it helps when you're trying to make a piece of fiction that's instructive.

If you make a piece of fiction saying that "All people who believe in X are evil." That just unites people against the concept of X and anything related to it. That's not really giving the people who might be close to believing X a reason to reconsider. Because from their perspective the portrayal is so cartoonish that they see none of themselves in it. There's an idea in philosophy called Error Theory. It states that one of the most convincing ways to change someone's mind isn't just to demonstrate that their posititon is logically invalid. It can be prudent to also explain how someone in good faith could've come to that belief in the first place.

Edited by GNinja on Dec 2nd 2019 at 10:53:03 AM

"Pushover Media Critic: I would imagine something like that would go:

Announcement: "All mutants are banned from sports, because some of them have super-strength or some other ability that could help them cheat!""

In fact something similar happens in a Spider-girl comic.

In the school there are two female athletes, a human named Davida Kirby and a mutant named Nancy.

Davida is very jealous of Nancy, because Nancy plays basketball better.

So when she discovers Nancy is a mutant, she accuses her of a cheater, even when Nancy has only mental and non-physical powers.