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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Nobody claimed that those people are reasonable.
No amount of good writing or diversity's gonna fix that mess.
Edited by HailMuffins on Feb 28th 2019 at 10:07:44 AM
Wow, with a few exceptions I’d have said (with less venom) that was what Marvel had done. “Middling popcorn flicks” describes most of their movies (all the Thor movies, all the Iron Man movies, both the GOTG movies, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, etc). Entertaining, but minimal depth.
Of the about 20 movies they’re made, there are only a handful of exceptions to this (the exceptions include Winter Soldier, Civil War, and Black Panther.)
Edited by Galadriel on Feb 28th 2019 at 8:28:19 AM
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Running the numbers I've estimated that I enjoy a majority of MCU movies, but yeah, only a minority I can consider truly, truly great.
How much I'm willing to put up with a movie's lack of true depth depends on my mood and the movie itself, I guess.
Edited by AyyItsMidnight on Feb 28th 2019 at 6:00:32 AM
Self-serious autistic trans gal who loves rock/metal and animation with all her heart. (she/her)The ironic thing about The Last Jedi is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to shake up the formula by subverting a lot of the tropes we've come to expect from the Star Wars universe, only to be met by massive backlash from fans who wanted their formulaic entertainment, thank you very much. This, naturally, intersected with the people who don't want girl cooties in their masculine power fantasies and gave us a double dose of people complaining on the Internet. note
It's like trying to publish a Call of Duty game in which Middle-Eastern people aren't all terrorists. The target audience for that franchise just doesn't know how to handle entertainment that doesn't confirm its biases.
Marvel's genius is that it's been slowly playing with its tropes for quite a few films, building up the expectation that the audience will have its biases shaken up a bit each time. This is good because it allows people to establish a certain comfort level with the idea that they aren't getting formulaic movies, so they don't get all shocked and outraged about it.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 28th 2019 at 9:10:35 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The SWEU has done every possible trope with every possible character, basically. It's unfair to hold that up as a standard, since only a small fraction of the audience has managed to read all of that material. Truly there are no one hundred percent original ideas, but there are gradations between "strictly formula" and "completely novel", and even these vary depending on the context.
If anything irritates me more than fans complaining that TLJ didn't give them their comfortable formulaic entertainment, it's people who've read every EU book and have somehow arrived at the belief that the films are obligated to conform to them (or that the films borrowing from the EU, deliberately or otherwise, is either a validation of their beliefs or proof that they are unoriginal).
If I hear one more person talking about Mara Jade or the Yuuzhan Vong (or however that's spelled) in the context of the film continuity, I'm going to start frothing at the mouth.
Anyway, the point of that digression was to say that originality in mainstream media is not uniformly good or bad, and that defying audience expectations by introducing original ideas is not always universally acclaimed — far from it, in fact.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 28th 2019 at 9:26:55 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Home Movies had one of my favorite quotes on that idea.
“It’s an alternative!”
“Yeah, an alternative to good!”
People need to remember that subvertion of expectations is not, in and of itself, a good thing.
Tropes Are Tools, and people, both here and elsewhere, keep forgetting this.
Yeah, but calling the Star Wars franchise "creatively bankrupt" is patently wrong given what happened with TLJ. Objectively, Disney tried changing the formula in that film. It didn't work (for a variety of reasons), but that's not the same thing as not trying.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"There’s also the bit where Disney unveiled plans to do a wide range of movies with a variety of genres, and Star Wars fans revolted because “every film has to be an event” or some such nonsense.
The fandom has always had a nasty habit of wanting new things insofar as they’re identical to the things they already know, and balking at creativity in general. But once that avenue of complaint stopped being viable they switched to others, some quite unsavory, that still match the actual overall reason: they’re a very traditionally minded bunch, and they don’t like change. People have been saying that about the Star Wars fan base for decades, it’s just that only now is the national spotlight shone on it.
This is the same problem Marvel currently faces. It’s traditionalism: people look for any legitimate-sounding argument they can find to deflect from the fact, but that’s ultimately what it is. A dislike of change. A dislike of hearing about how the way things used to be wasn’t great. A dislike of people actively trying to change those things into something new.
Hoo boy, the pre-release hatedom for Wonder Woman was all over the place. There were fanboys blowing their tops over the Alamo Drafthouse offering women-only screenings, backlash from the setting being moved to World War I, complaints about Gadot and Jenkins as “inexperienced”, anti-semitism (never mind that Superman himself is a Jewish creation), and so on. And Gadot did push back:
And then when the movie was successful, there was a movement to claim Zach Snyder was responsible for its quality, not Jenkins. This all was not that long ago.
And the biggest irony is, for all the assertions that it was “promoting the rise of feminism”, “Wonder Woman” ended up making a fortune for the Koch Brothers
, who primarily fund conservative and anti-feminist causes.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 28th 2019 at 8:26:51 AM
To be fair, I CAN see why Gadot's includement was received controversially in certain parts of the Middle East (specifically, Lebanon and Palestine), as she was a part of the Israeli military. Doesn't justify the blatant anti-semitism off course.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianThe complaint about Gadot not being big enough to play Wonder Woman was always nonsensical given that a) WW is rarely ever depicted as being muscular and b) this complaint never comes up when it comes to other actresses playing super heroines. Especially ones playing characters with super strength or who employ close quarters combat. Where were the complaints about Melissa Benoist or Scarlett Johansson being too skinny to play Supergirl and Black Widow?
Edited by windleopard on Feb 28th 2019 at 9:12:22 AM
Every young person in Israel serves in the military at one point (unless they are hyper religious). It's the law. They always made too much out of her military service, in both directions, since she never was at the front or anything like this, she basically did her basic training and I think she wasn't even trained for battle. In fact, her military service shows that she is not overly religious, so that should have been a point for her, not against her, except that the states in the middle east just hate Israel.
and yes, the attacks on her was ridiculous. I was and am critical of her ability as an actress, but the way she was build should have NEVER been an issue. I mean, have you seen Lynda Carter? Hardly a muscle package, is she?
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Actually, there are people who are still complaining about Scarlett Johannson being Black Widow, because she is "too small" and doesn't do her own stunts.
Edited by Swanpride on Feb 28th 2019 at 10:10:20 AM
