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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
While I'll acknowledge a up front that I'm a tad biased against prequelsnote , with Captain Marvel taking place in the 90's I'm not sure if it's the right move to have another movie take place in a similar timeframe so quickly.
In addition Marvel has shown a willingness to tell smaller scale stories on the big screen even in the "modern" MCU setting. So you can just have a spy-thriller set after Infinity War where the story makes it clear that calling in Carol Danvers and obliterating the problem with the fury of a thousand suns would just make things worse.
It would be fairly straightforward to create a situation where Black Widow is investigating something (I'm personally hoping for AIM, under new management that brings them more in line with their comic-book counterparts), and by the time it becomes apparent how serious the Evil Plan is, she either doesn't have time to call in the big guns or she doesn't have the means to do so.
Aren't we just assuming it's Monica? I don't recall them stating it definitively.
Oh God! Natural light!Pics of Avengers 4 set, featuring
Ant-Man and Cap in his Avengers 1 suit, despite the former taking place long after the latter. Possible Time Stone shenanigans? Or a bit of meta humor?
I'm guessing the Time Stone makes the character blip around their personal timelines or something.
Kind of like the Time Crash episode of Justice League Unlimited, where the characters would become older or younger at a moments notice, would cease to exist or reexist at random, or would even be replaced by alternate universe versions of themselves.
Which, I gotta admit, would be a pretty awesome way to pull a Continuity Cameo. Imagine the Time Stone going haywire, and for a moment, just a moment, Bucky or Sam is wearing a Captain America suit, Peter disappears and Miles Morales appears instead, or War Machine is replaced by Iron Patriot ( who turns out to be Norman Osborn).
Joking about that last one, but it's still a neat idea.
You could even use it to cameo characters who probably aren't ever going to show up in the MCU and aren't all that relevant overall, but would be cool to see for a brief moment, kind of like how GOTG showed us a blip of Eson the Searcher while giving us the more important exposition about the Power Stone. Like, the timestream goes wonky, and for a second we see Spider-Man 2099 or something.
Another entirely joking idea: someone uses the Time or Soul Stone during the darkest hour, and we get every single character who died so the main characters can learn lessons or be better people or whatever. Like, Yinsen, Erskine, Peggy, Peter Quill's mom, Uncle Ben, Odin and/or Frigga, T'Chaka, Mar'Vell probably, and the Ancient One all show up drinking coffee and delivering a trite "go get em" speech or something, as well as Hank Pym who keeps complaining that he's not actually dead.
edited 10th Jan '18 10:15:03 PM by KnownUnknown
I have a couple of reasons why I am strongly against a prequel for Black Widow:
1. As a general rule, I hate to go backwards with a character. Captain America and Captain Marvel both being prequels was perfectly okay because those were the first introductions we got to the character. Filling the blanks of the MCU this way works perfectly fine. But taking a character we already know that well and then go back to explain how he ended up being the character he or she was later on is rarely interesting, especially if said character already developed further from this point.
2. In this case it would be particularly questionable because Black Widow is the kind of character I really don't want to know in that much detail. Having a kind of mysterious past is part of the appeal of the character.
3. And then we have to consider what it would actually mean to explore her past for the kind of story the writers can tell. They basically have two choices, to either show her being used and abused by the Red Room until she encounters a helpful male character who sees more in her, or you show her being the puppet for Shield, never really questioning her orders. NONE of those scenarios are particularly empowering, and I think that those who clamour for a Black Widow movie want her to be the heroine of the piece instead of getting another narrative in which some woman has to free herself from oppression or claiming her place in the world. There is nothing wrong with those kinds of narrative, but outside of Ao S, those are practically the only kinds of narrative and/or arcs the female characters got in the MCU so far. I for my part really, really want to see a woman just kicking ass.
"Having a kind of mysterious past is part of the appeal of the character"
Which it only work so far before mysterious past become just vague and stupid, I dont care about black widow past anymore because it was never deliver in any way,shape of form.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"It's sort of the problem that Wolverine's "lost memories" started to have in the comics for me. They constantly brought it up, and teased learning more about it, but the would pull back at the last minute. And you can get away with that for a while, but eventually it just gets old and tiresome. It starts to feel like you don't actually have a set backstory for the character and are trying to hide that fact.
So either really go into it/flesh it out, or stop mentioning it and move on already. Also showing what Natasha was like as a person before Hawkeye "saved her" could potentially be an interesting contrast to who she is now. Heck you could even do both, have the main story set in present-day, but tied into her past somehow and do flashbacks or something.
Black Widow doesn't have a mysterious past. She has a loosely-established past. There are no real mysteries to her identity. She was with the Red Room, then she did some awful shit. S.H.I.E.L.D. sent Hawkeye to take her out, and instead, he decided to recruit her because he saw potential.
That's not mysterious. It just leaves a lot of details to the imagination which is honestly for the best. Do you really need those details filled in? Will you sleep better at night having actually seen Nat pry a loving father away from his children and stab out his throat while his daughter screams in despair and horror? Will that endear you more to the character?
Right now, Nat's crimes are safely in the realm of backstory where nobody has to emotionally engage them directly and have their impression of the character warped as a result. There is nothing good that can come of prequeling her.
edited 11th Jan '18 12:18:58 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.There's nothing saying a prequel has to be a dark origin story prequel exploring her terrible past in explicit and tearjerking detail.
I was thinking more of a SHIELD focused prequel, kind of like the equivalent of a Bottle Episode, involving a single mission or operation that turns out to be something big - think something like Dredd. Even if it is a prequel about the circumstances of her Heel Turn, there's little reason to go into further detail about her murky past unless her murky past is the actual plot - and again, it doesn't have to be: a deuteragonist secret agent movie where she and Hawkeye are working for opposite ends, only to realize that they should be on the same side.
Maybe it's because I've been watching (and playing) a lot of secret agent fiction recently, wherein characters with complicated histories enter and exit the plot in all manner of roles but primarily introduce complexities to the overarching plotline rather than themselves (because what's important about their backstories is that they're complicated, not what precisely those complications are), that... I dunno, assuming that a Widow prequel has no choice but to be a lurid, tragedy exploring affair about her upbringing seems uncreative.
edited 11th Jan '18 12:32:28 PM by KnownUnknown
Yeah, you could always watch Red Sparrow for that. But I'd still like to see when Natalia met Hawkeye, that particular mission. This doesn't have to go full-on Stale Beer and Murder by Ice Pick in a Cheap Hotel Room levels of bleak or anything, but I do think the underlying guilt of the character is part of what makes her compelling on the occasions she's allowed to fully, y'know, compel. A modern-day story punctuated by flashbacks seems like a good way of getting the point across while still leaving room for the somewhat lighter tone of the MCU overall.
edited 11th Jan '18 12:36:57 PM by Unsung
I mean constantly bringing up a character's "dark past" that they feel the need to redeem themselves for, and then not ever really showing any of it, does kind of feel like trying to have your cake and eat it to.
I kind of WANT to emotionally engage with, for it not to be "safely" consigned to anything. Because it's inherently NOT a safe character traits. And if you're going to make it so freaking important, and keep bringing it up, then actually do something with it.
Yeah why not show some of the stuff that Natasha feels the need to make up for? It makes it all the more impressive how far she's come in many ways.
edited 11th Jan '18 12:38:33 PM by Punisher286
There's no need to even constantly bring it up. The only movie to do so previously is the first Avengers. Winter Soldier has her as "vaguely complicated" - she did morally ambiguous things, but it's only important in the present because she discovers that her desire to do those things for good reasons was a lie. The second Avengers had her primarily concerned with being infertile. Civil War writes her more as a surprisingly idealistic ambassador who put her spy life behind her.
It's important because it establishes what kind of person she is and where she comes from, but it's backstory. Even in a prequel, there isn't much need to keep it from being backstory. In fact, the lure to explain everything is one of the classic mistakes prequels tend to make.
edited 11th Jan '18 12:38:07 PM by KnownUnknown

God, if I never hear about Budapest again, it'll be too soon.
The arguments that raged in the wake of the film's release killed any and all enjoyment there was to be had out of the Budapest line. It prompted massive discussions about what must have occurred in Budapest for Nat to equate the invasion to it, with many suspecting that there must have been another alien invasion that Nat and Clint thwarted. And the speculations about why Clint would remember it differently ran wild as well, talking about how he was mind-controlled or brainwashed or maybe had amnesia.
The line itself was clearly just a funny gag, with Nat making an awkward attempt at Casual Danger Dialogue that Clint snarkily dismisses. But it launched so many Epileptic Trees from people taking it way too seriously.
Then the comics ran with those Epileptic Trees and had a whole arc about Budapest where Hawkeye was forced to do secret super-black ops missions for S.H.I.E.L.D. and they erased all his memories at the end of them so he'd remember them differently....
Yeah, f*ck Budapest. The joke is dead and I hope to God it never comes up again.
Also, while I'm at it, f*ck the words "red in her ledger" as applied to Black Widow. That's been completely run into the ground too.
edited 10th Jan '18 8:15:42 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.