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Welcome to the main discussion thread for the Marvel Cinematic Universe! This pinned post is here to establish some basic guidelines. All of the Media Forum rules still apply.

  • This thread is for talking about the live-action films, TV shows, animated works, and related content that use the Marvel brand, currently owned by Disney.
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    Original post 
Since Thor and now Captain America came out this year, I wanted to get what Tropers thought of the concept and execution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general. Personally I love the idea and wonder why this idea hasn't been seriously tried before. It sorta seems to me like the DCAU in movie form (And well, ummm, with Marvel), and really 'gets' the comic book feel of a shared universe while not being completely alienating.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM

TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#75576: Oct 16th 2017 at 7:34:00 PM

Sure, but in the MCU, he's a devoted warrior of K'un Lun who has repeatedly browbeaten Danny for not being dedicated enough to destroying The Hand. The idea that he would suddenly, without any reason or development, be working with The Hand is completely ridiculous.

Like, I'm sure it will be explained in the new season, and I'm just as sure that it will be an unsatisfying explanation because it would take a whole season's worth of development just to make sense of this swerve for either Davos's or Joy's character.

edited 16th Oct '17 7:34:52 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#75577: Oct 16th 2017 at 7:34:46 PM

Oh definitely, just was wondering if you knew who he was from the comics.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75578: Oct 16th 2017 at 7:44:56 PM

"The only thing I'm selling is peanuts." You know that guy is going to call the police as soon as Claire tells him to flee. This is New York City post-9/11 and a brown-skinned person just lit two tanks of kerosene on fire. FOX News is going to be calling this a terrorist attack by midnight.

Fox might try, but generally speaking New York's pretty good about being a lot more multicultural than that. Again, you don't really live your whole life in New York without being able to tell the difference between a Hispanic person, a Middle Eastern person, a South Asian person, and so on and so forth.

Also, that guy was older. He was probably selling to same peanuts back in the '80s, and it's probably not the first time he's seen small-scale shit blow up at street level. He might just take his money and keep his mouth shut.

And I think Ward's change of heart actually makes quite a bit of sense. He always wanted to get out from under Harold's shadow, and he only finally did by killing the guy. Of course Harold immediately came back from the dead because this is comics, but you can't overrate that kind of catharsis. Part of why Ward is a bad guy is because his father told him he had to be and even the one person Ward actually cared about, his sister, openly told him that his ruthlessness at business is the one thing she actually *admires* about him, and it's never even been him pulling the strings.

Ward looks like a cold-blooded weasel-snake in a suit, but he's actually very loyal, or at least he wants to be. When he finally thinks he's escaped from Harold, he transfers that loyalty to Joy. When Joy's not available, he looks to Danny. All he wants is someone to take the burden of leadership away from him, because he's in no way ready for that responsibility, because he doesn't trust himself because he assumes he is and always will be his father's son.

Ward's the one thing that really worked for me in the whole show. I eventually liked Harold quite a bit, and he's very skilled at getting under people's skin, but he's just making things up as he goes along. His luck runs out when he runs out of people to throw under the bus.

As for that scene with Joy and Davos...as soon as anyone starts listening to Madame Gao, they're screwed. Gao doesn't need them to trust her to make Davos into her champion or to use Joy's knowledge of Rand's inner workings or business in general to her advantage, she just needs them to hate Danny. Which, y'know, is hardly even hard.

edited 16th Oct '17 9:09:16 PM by Unsung

Anomalocaris20 from Sagittarius A* Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: Love blinded me (with science!)
#75579: Oct 16th 2017 at 7:47:18 PM

I liked that scene where Ward and Harold are at the hospital and Harold is getting annoyed with one of the guys in the waiting room who keeps coughing, and eventually starts imitating his cough. It's just so petty yet hilarious coming from an undead billionaire corporate schemer.

You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#75580: Oct 16th 2017 at 7:59:30 PM

We don't even know if Davos is in league with Gao yet...he might simply want revenge on Danny and Gao is listening in because she is always informed about important developments like this.

Anyway, I agree, Ward is the best thing which came out of the show. I really enjoyed his screwed up character. And I quite like to see Hogarth actually acting as a lawyer. I also enjoyed Danny's and Colleen's romance in a "oh those teenagers really don't know what they are doing" kind of way (and yes, I know that neither of them are teenagers, but emotionally, they are quite stunted). And I enjoyed Harold...he is no Killgrave, but he is a way more entertaining villain than diamondback. Even the Hand isn't quite as bad is it is in Daredevil.

The most memorable moments are certainly the deathly Karaoke and death by ice cream scoop.

And the show has a decent number of female characters, something it has over both Daredevil (where Karen is still the only female of note after two seasons unless you count Claire, who barely gets any screen-time) and Luke Cage (which has a few more, but they barely get the opportunity to interact with each other). It was nice to see Claire having a female friend for a change.

Also, one detail I did appreciate is that they set up the nut seller from the last episode in the very first episode.

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75581: Oct 16th 2017 at 8:11:40 PM

I wouldn't mind Daredevil having a few more female characters, but you're not going to tell me the female characters it does have put it behind Iron Fist. Karen's very nearly the deuteragonist of Daredevil, a show which doesn't have very many recurring characters at all, but still makes room for Vanessa (even if she's mostly an appendage to Fisk by the end of the season, she doesn't start out that way, and the way she makes that choice feels believable) and Madame Gao (who doesn't get the most screen time, but is still one of the highlights of season 1 and is the only member of Fisk's crime ring who isn't dead or in prison by the end of the season.

They ruined Elektra, though. I will admit that. But Karen was still really coming into her own by the end of Season 2.

Iron Fist might have had more prominent female characters in the main cast cast, but they hardly got to do anything. Colleen's the same kind of phantom limb Vanessa is only for the hero instead of the villain, Joy's kept in the dark the whole season, and Claire gets to be the Only Sane Woman but no one actually listens to her. And I still consider it a crime that Hogarth wasn't a major force in Danny' reclaiming his company. She's an Iron Fist character originally, and this was her moment, maybe even a reason for Joy to be around, the two of them fighting in the boardroom while Danny's off punchkicking random strangers in the vague hope that one of them knows something of value.

edited 16th Oct '17 8:13:51 PM by Unsung

Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#75582: Oct 16th 2017 at 8:18:22 PM

[up] I can't stand Karen. My problem with her is that she is a deeply flawed character but in her case the show wants to suggest to me that her actions are understandable and charming. Whatever one thinks about Danny, at least his actions had consequences and nobody has so far suggested that him leaving Kun-Lun unprotected wasn't a questionable choice. But Karen gets an on-screen absolution for doing something which got Urich killed because she is a f... zealot! And her so called romance with Matt is terrible from start to finish, before you even take the whole love triangle with Elektra into account.

I also didn't enjoy Vanessa because I don't really got why she is so okay with dating a criminal. I just didn't get a grip on her as a character.

Outside of Claire the only female character I like in Daredevil (who doesn't die and is a recurring character) is Marcy, and she is barely around.

edited 16th Oct '17 8:20:18 PM by Swanpride

Discar Since: Jun, 2009
#75583: Oct 16th 2017 at 8:24:33 PM

Tobias, looking over your liveblogging of Iron Fist, I've come up with one major change I'd have made to the series, and I'm curious what you think of it (I already had a million changes to make to the series, both major and minor, but this one is new): K'un L'un should have intentionally sent Danny out to fight the Hand in New York.

In this scenario, a lot of things work better. Instead of Danny schizophrenically jumping between unexplained goals, he has one goal from the start: Destroy the Hand. He wanted control of Rand because K'un L'un found out that the Hand was infiltrating the company (via their external army, the Chaste), and it seemed like destiny that their new Iron Fist was the heir of Rand. Once he gets control, he pretty just abandons the company while he goes gallivanting off on his adventures because he doesn't know anything about running a company, and thinks he can solve all the problems by fighting the Hand. This will also make the attack on K'un L'un at the end more poignant; instead of being an asshole who abandoned his post and suddenly cares about it again, he's a soldier who was ordered away from his post, only to come back and find that his bosses made a poor strategic decision to send him away. This lets us care about his resulting angst more.

Thoughts?

Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.
Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75584: Oct 16th 2017 at 8:27:14 PM

[up][up]Yeah, she fucked up by taking Ben to see Fisk's mom. That was ultimately the thing that Fisk killed Ben for, but really, anything they were doing might have led to the same outcome. I don't think it was an unreasonable lead to follow, or that Karen could have known at the time that she was drawing a straight line between that and Fisk coming after Ben in person to kill him with his bare hands.

They were always in mortal danger from the moment they embarked on this whole investigation, from before Karen was even introduced in the show's first episode. Ben knew the risks and tried to warn Karen away for that very reason, and Karen's biggest mistake is misleading him as to why they went to that care home in the first place, so that he couldn't take steps to cover their asses. But the risk was real from the beginning, when you're putting criminals who've already killed more than once on the defensive, and I don't think Karen's any more of a zealot about getting the truth and exposing this city-spanning crime ring than Ben himself.

Karen and Matt have never made a good or healthy couple, but the more I see of the show, the more I think that that's the point, and they know exactly how toxic they both are for each other, but they just can't stop caring. I don't know if they're really in love so much as they recognize the same kind of damage in each other. But note that it's really not even a contest between Karen and Elektra for Matt— the moment Elektra shows up, he pretty much forgets all about Karen. I don't think that shows him in a particularly heroic light, and I don't think it's meant to.

[up]So...The Chaste and the Hand aren't mortal enemies in this idea? Gut reaction, I do think this framing would give the show a better reason to actually examine Danny's relationship with K'un-Lun rather than sticking it in a corner and ignoring it for nine episodes.

edited 16th Oct '17 9:22:56 PM by Unsung

Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#75585: Oct 16th 2017 at 8:40:26 PM

Karen and Matt have never made a good or healthy couple, but the more I see of the show, the more I think that that's the point, and they know exactly how toxic they both are for each other, but they just can't stop caring. I don't know if they're really in love so much as they recognize the same kind of damage in each other.

I thought you were talking about Elektra there for a moment because that sounds a lot more like her relationship with Matt than Matt's relationship with Karen.

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75586: Oct 16th 2017 at 8:47:22 PM

Matt and Elektra have basically the same thing going, taken up about a hundred degrees, with the added difference that Elektra doesn't *care* about how fucked up they both are, and in fact that's the part she embraces fully. What Matt wants to do for Elektra, Karen wants to do for Matt— to pull them out of that darkness. But Karen doesn't really even know Matt all that well, not the kind of deep, immediate understanding Matt and Elektra seem to have.

edited 16th Oct '17 9:24:53 PM by Unsung

PushoverMediaCritic I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out. from the Italy of America Since: Jul, 2015 Relationship Status: watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out.
#75587: Oct 16th 2017 at 9:00:24 PM

Something I've said about Iron Fist is that it feels like the last episode felt shoved onto the end when that one episode could've been Iron Fist Season 2. Episode 12 ends with fights against Bakuto and Davos that are both emotionally charged for the characters and would've worked fine as an ending for the season. The Harold stuff felt really rushed and disconnected, and I think would've worked better if it were a whole season by itself.

On the Black Panther song... I dunno. I'm not a fan of the rap genre, but I thought a song about a revolution perfectly fit a movie about a bunch of assholes trying to dethrone T'Chala.

Discar Since: Jun, 2009
#75588: Oct 16th 2017 at 9:15:34 PM

So...The Chaste and the Hand aren't mortal enemies in this idea?

Sorry, slightly ambiguous wording. The Chaste are K'un L'un's external army, and in this scenario, once the pass opened they arrived in the Heavenly City to give an update on the outside world, including the detail about the Hand infiltrating Rand.

Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.
Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75589: Oct 16th 2017 at 9:20:17 PM

...That seems obvious now that I'm reading it again, my bad.

Punisher286 Since: Jan, 2016
#75590: Oct 16th 2017 at 11:27:59 PM

Yeah that ending scene with Joy and Davos was so stupid, especially given their actions very recently. But then again the writers didn't know what to do with Joy all season and had her bouncing around randomly, so her ending scene being crap shouldn't surprise me I guess.

And I agree with that the show taking the cowards way out by killing off Harold while also conveniently letting Danny keep his own hands clean, was annoying.

Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#75591: Oct 17th 2017 at 3:17:40 AM

Fisk might or might not have killed Urich, but one of the first things we learn about Urich is that he NEVER involved the families of the people he took down and that this was one of the reasons various crime bosses respected him to a certain level. Fisk himself says that he was aware of Urich snooping around, but didn't want to kill a good man. Urich died because Karen tricked him to cross a line, and I could accept this, if not for the show giving her absolution for her actions in the end and in a way praising her by letting her take over his job.

Anyway, I am optimistic about the second season of Iron Fist. There is a lot one can do with what was set up so far in the hands of a competent show runner.

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75592: Oct 17th 2017 at 3:54:47 AM

What, better that she wallow in misery forever over something she can't change? Karen taking over Ben's job was a way of honouring him (though I wish the show told us what happened to Doris, and on a meta level I wish that both her actress and Vondie Curtis-Hall were still on the show). Among his last acts are trying to keep Fisk from going after Karen, covering for her, saying he acted alone. I think he would have been glad to know someone was still out there trying to fight the good fight.

That the new breed of criminals like Fisk have no respect for the old ways and won't shy away from killing innocents and family members is established in Ben's very first scene. Fisk is the kind of man who would order apartments bombed just so he could kick people out of their homes, after all, so I don't think he would have done them the courtesy of not killing them if they hadn't paid Marlene a visit. It might have been the tipping point, but by that point in the season, anything at all might have set Fisk off. And backing off the investigation entirely might have saved Ben's life, it's true, but if it meant Fisk never went down for his crimes, would that really have been worth it? More importantly, would that be what Ben would have wanted? Let people like Fisk intimidate you into giving up and they've already won.

If you can't forgive Karen for her role in Ben's death, fair enough, but that happened because she didn't know better, not because of some deep character flaw. People make mistakes, and between the guilt of Ben's death and the ordeal she's already been through, I think Karen's suffered more than enough.

comicwriter Since: Sep, 2011
#75593: Oct 17th 2017 at 4:18:36 AM

Watching the trailer made me think of something. Did they ever specify how Howard got the vibranium for Steve's shield in the first Captain America movie? Because one of the plot points in the early comic appearances of Wakanda is that they made a bunch of money by selling comically small amounts of vibranium for ridiculous prices since they were the sole suppliers.

I'm kinda amused by the idea of Stark spending a fortune to get some and finding out they only gave him enough to make a frisbee out of.

Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#75594: Oct 17th 2017 at 4:35:10 AM

[up][up] The question is not if I am able to forgive her or not, the problem is that the show puts in the scene with Vera in which it absolves Karen of her role in the whole mess. And then Karen never learns anything from her experience, she keeps just pushing and pushing and putting herself in danger while doing so while the show keeps suggesting that this is an admirable quality. And in a way it is, but I think her zealot tendencies should be questioned once in a while.

The thing with Karen is that every time I start to warm up to her they do something which reminds me why she annoys me so much.

windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#75595: Oct 17th 2017 at 4:44:32 AM

"You know you weren't given this gift so you could commit murder." Yes, he was. He was totally given this gift so he could commit murder. His role is to guard K'un Lun from those who might threaten it. He's not endowed with the power to punch steel doors off their hinges so that he could ask people politely to turn back. There is an expectation that when enemy forces arrive to threaten the heavenly city, Danny will f*cking kill them.

Well they are right about the murder thing since killing invaders isn't murder but self defense. There's a bit of a difference.

Unsung it's a living from a tenement of clay Since: Jun, 2016
it's a living
#75596: Oct 17th 2017 at 5:17:38 AM

[up][up]I think she learns that you need to be a little zealous to be a reporter. I don't think that's the wrong lesson to learn, all things considered. Fisk's the actual murderer here, and he's clearly unstable, so Ben and Karen and Foggy and Matt and Vera could have all been snuffed out for any number of reasons. If you're going to be a police officer or a crime reporter, these are the risks you take.

[up][up][up]Makes me wish Agent Carter was still a thing. I'd wouldn't mind seeing that story.

edited 17th Oct '17 5:25:36 AM by Unsung

TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#75597: Oct 17th 2017 at 6:05:46 AM

Tobias, looking over your liveblogging of Iron Fist, I've come up with one major change I'd have made to the series, and I'm curious what you think of it (I already had a million changes to make to the series, both major and minor, but this one is new): K'un L'un should have intentionally sent Danny out to fight the Hand in New York.

I like it. This would have given Danny an actual motivation and goal, which his character was sorely lacking.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
AdricDePsycho Rock on, Gold Dust Woman from Never Going Back Again Since: Oct, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
#75598: Oct 17th 2017 at 8:28:30 AM

I'm surprised you never mentioned the shitty fight scene editing.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#75599: Oct 17th 2017 at 8:39:38 AM

I've got a pretty strong tolerance for shitty fight scene editing. It's the choreography I tend to pay attention to. I still can't get over Danny pulling off an effective kick on Harold that sent him sprawling across the ground, and then immediately turning around and running away so that Harold could get back up with his gun and the ominous threats could resume.

Rarely have I seen a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment take the form of fight choreography, but that's what this was. Danny might as well have been giggling as he fled. I think I would have preferred it if he was giggling; at least it would have added some comedy to what is otherwise an atrociously awful moment in staging this climax.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
DS9guy Since: Jan, 2001
#75600: Oct 17th 2017 at 9:27:49 AM

I wonder why the night sky was glowing purple in the Black Panther trailer.

edited 17th Oct '17 9:28:28 AM by DS9guy


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