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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
The mass produced Judas bullets not working right seems to support my think that it was just a way to con some money out of the cops rather than a real attempt to kill Luke.
Forever liveblogging the AvengersIt might just be a consequence of being cheaply made. That was the point of them, after all. Like I noted in my blurb, a Judas Bullet logically has to be a complex piece of machinery. Shrinking it down makes the parts more brittle, increasing the likelihood that its inner workings will fail when it slams into an object at 1,700 mph.
Meanwhile, trying to squeeze 100 bullets out the material for one means each Judas 2.0 bullet barely has a trace of the Chitauri metal that's so crucial to even making this work in the first place.
edited 8th Sep '17 7:27:06 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Some rumors about Hawkeye in Avengers 4
. It's being claimed that he uses his Ronin identity in the film.
My brother and I were laughing for a good 2 minutes or so because we couldn't believe how ridiculous it looked. Suffice to say it's one reason among many why it's hard for me to take him seriously.
One of the problems that I have with Diamondback's cartoonish nature is that it makes it rather hard to buy that this guy could have stayed in the shadows for so long and built a massive criminal enterprise with no one noticing.
He's seem too psychotic/unstable for that. Now Cottonmouth, Mariah, heck even Shades, yeah I could buy them doing it. But not him.
That is the central problem of his character.
He's far to unstable and theatrical for this role of "shadowy mastermind". He flies off the handle at the tiniest of things and is overall rather Ax-Crazy to a point it's hard to guess how he built such a vast criminal empire.
Like, Tobias has gone at length about Fisk, but Fisk is the very picture of self-restraint compared to Diamondback.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Contary to what some have been saying I also don't think his personal connection to Luke was a bad idea. The whole illegimate child of a black preacher/cain and abel biblical thing going on fits in pretty well with the themes of the show IMO. It's everything else about Diamondback (his overly cartoonish demeanor, the fact that he gets out of situations that he shouldn't, etc) that falls flat for me.
Does he have a vast criminal empire? He's staffed by like three guys and he acquired two of them while in Harlem. When Shades and Cornell were talking about him, he seemed like this great higher-level crimelord under whose purview Cornell operated, but since Diamondback's arrival, all of that build-up went flying out the window.
Since his arrival, he carries himself as a solo operator, just sorta getting by with whatever mooks happen to come to him on-the-spot and making everything up as he goes along. He's more hitman than crime boss. The only thing that really indicates any kind of supply network is that he's in possession of Judas Bullets, and even he seems to be struggling to keep a stock of them.
When Shades was showing them off to Cornell as what Diamondback could do for him, the implication was that Diamondback's the supplier, the man in control, the guy with all the deadly super-bullets that Cornell can go beg for. But then Diamondback shows up and he's got, like, four because it's just as hard for him to get his hands on them as it as for Cornell.
In short, Diamondback's not bad, but he's not what we were promised. We were promised a mob boss. We got an unfunded, understaffed, and wildly erratic wild-card mercenary instead.
As archetypes go, Diamondback is the kind of character who should be working for Cornell, not sending his one and only employee to make threats about how he and his complete lack of resources are totally going to move in on his turf.
edited 8th Sep '17 11:08:57 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The problem that I have with the "personal connection" thing, aside from it being rushed, underdeveloped, and shoe-horned in to try and give him a "connection" to Luke, is that once again it goes against the themes of the show. It isn't about Luke personally, and not about his past (aside from maybe his relationship with his dead wife). It's about Luke wanting to protect Harlem. And Cottonmouth/Mariah/Shades fit better as villains because they are more tangible threats to Harlem.
Making it suddenly about Luke's childhood or whatever was just, lame imo.
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I agree with this.
It's why I keep saying that Diamondback would be a better villain if he kept to what was promised. A bigger, badder crime boss to whom Cornell owed some measure of fealty. The early episodes imply this through the character of Shades, who shows up as an outreach from Diamondback.
That Shades is even here at all freaks Cornell out. It very firmly establishes the hierarchy that Cottonmouth may be a big fish in a little pond, but the bigger pond belongs to Diamondback. Cornell even assumes initially that Shades is here to replace him. It's very strongly indicated that Cornell is both loyal to and fearful of Diamondback.
Diamondback's the Bigger Bad throughout the first half of the series, lurking in the background. It's a great point of intrigue; as Luke's rivalry with Cornell gets more and more personal, he becomes more and more invested in the idea that taking down Cornell specifically will save Harlem, never realizing that even Cornell is just a cog in a larger machine.
This is the Diamondback we should have gotten. I love his personality, personally. I would love to see Diamondback standing on a pulpit, reading Bible verses to a mob of dozens of henchmen, nobody really caring but everyone just sorta following along because nobody interrupts Diamondback when he's sermonizing.
He's got the personality we could reasonably expect for Bigger, Crazier, Deadlier Cottonmouth to be. But he doesn't have the archetype. He doesn't have the resources. He doesn't fulfill the role he was built up to have. And there's that stupid personal connection making it all about Luke instead of Harlem.
That hurts the show. And it hurts the themes, because it means Misty was right all along. Luke Cage is a threat to Harlem. This violence is happening to Harlem just because Luke's in it. These people are dying for a petty squabble between two brothers who couldn't be arsed to take it somewhere else. And that's just awful writing.
Diamondback could be an amazing Kingpin if they'd just bothered to write him as one.
edited 8th Sep '17 11:28:21 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
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] I agree.
What made the Cottonmouth vs Luke rivalry interesting was the battle for Harlem's soul. This is best seen in Pop's funeral, when both Cottonmouth and Luke give heartfelt speeches about what they believe about Harlem, clarifying how they're both essentially dueling for the soul of Harlem.
I've long stood by my statement Diamondback would have been a far more fitting character as The Dragon to Cottonmouth.
edited 8th Sep '17 11:46:54 AM by Gaon
"All you Fascists bound to lose."That was definitely the more interesting conflict for me. And I was instantly invested in Mariah stepping in for Cornell in a way I never was with Diamondback. The battle for Harlem between Luke and Stokes, then Luke and Mariah— but also the battle between Mariah and herself, with Shades giving voice to the ghost of Mama Mabel.
edited 8th Sep '17 12:20:16 PM by Unsung
The main problem is that the backstory is terrible set up. They drop the whole "I am your brother" thing like it is supposed to be a bomb shell, but we don't even know who this guy is at this point. We only learn later how Luke knows him and then we spend half an episode to watch Luke figuring out what everyone with two brain cells has realized at this point, that he is Luke's half-brother. The whole thing feels tacked on and largely like filler. Everything fits so well into the themes of the show, only Diamondback seems to be mostly there so that Luke has some sort of powerful guy to punch (and no, I am not looking forward to see him back again with real superpowers).
I mean the whole "sins of the father" and "preaching one thing while doing another" hypocrisy idea isn't an inherently bad one. You can make that an interesting conflict. It just didn't fit here, that's not what the season was about until they try to just shove it in there near the end.
You want to do that sort of angle, alright. But save it for later where it fits better.
Yeah it could be as simple as an ideological/philosophical divide. For example, Batman/Joker or Captain America/Red Skull work as archenemies because they're two sides of the same coin, and the polar opposites of each other ideologically.
On the Netflix stuff, Daredevil and Kingpin work because they're far more similar than Matt would like to admit, and there's an interest compare and contrast to be had between them.

Given Daredevil's senses are sometimes shown as being too sensitive, to the point where the sense overload can be debilitating, he might want to make his costume block sensory input so that it's not bothering him as much.
Still, though, I preferred his Season 1 Dread Pirate Roberts look, myself.