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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Which is not a good thing (well, the Champions are a good thing, but young heroes completely losing faith in their predecessors is not).
That lack of faith in older heroes may come back to bite them at some point.
One Strip! One Strip!Let's You and Him Fight isn't very exciting if the stakes are low. Like, Iron Man and Cap can just have a friendly sparring match, nothing on the line, any time a writer wants them to. But it will never match the tension of Captain America: Civil War's third act.
The stakes are what make the fight worth showing to an audience. Without stakes, it's just empty action.
Even anime tends to realize this, because tournament arcs usually do have stakes. Dragon Ball, the ur-example, had three tournament arcs.
- In the first arc, the central stake was that if Goku actually wins this thing, it will go to his head and make his lose interest in martial arts. For the sake of his own discipline, he needs to be humbled. This is a problem because Goku is an immensely powerful super-being of seemingly unparalleled capability, so his mentor enters the tournament in disguise in the hopes of actually doing the impossible and beating Goku.
- In the second arc, a rival school enters the tournament. They're bad people who cheat and aspire to become assassins. Goku will have to defeat them despite their cheating, and his mentor wants to use the opportunity to redeem them and make them good people.
- In the third arc, literal Satan enters the tournament to use it as an opportunity to murder Goku.
For a tournament arc, these kind of stakes are important. Without stakes, it's just people fighting each other over nothing. That's not a very good story.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 6th 2019 at 4:30:08 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Reminds me of that bit from Civil War 1 where Tony has the nerve to give the whole “we will heroically end this conflict so that this never happens again” spiel to Goliath’s mother - Goliath’s death being largely his fault - in response to her complaining that instead of getting a proper burial her son was being craned into a ditch.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Oct 6th 2019 at 3:31:34 AM
The classy thing to do would have been to use Pym Particles to shrink the corpse back to normal size. What with Hank Pym himself being a Pro-Reg and all.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.What if the snap had erased the other half of all life?
- Strange, Wanda, Panther, Wasp, Peter, Drax - Groot, Quill, Mantis (?), Falcon, Bucky, Fury, Maria Hill, Shuri, Hank, Janet Thanos because let's face it, as if he'd have included himself on the losing side of the equation.
- REMEMBER THE FALLEN
- Stark, Rogers, Widow, Thor, Valkyrie, Okoye, Wong, Hawkeye, Banner, Danvers, Pepper, Scott, Nebula, Rocket, War Machine,
- STILL DEAD NO MATTER WHAT
- Gamora, Vision, Logan, Ultron, etc.
What would that version of Endgame have looked like act-by-act?
I'M MR. MEESEEKS, LOOK AT ME!A thought just occurred to me, something that could potentially come up in the next Doctor Strange movie: would Dormammu have been affected by that "erase half of all life" thing? If so, what would be the effect of a cosmic entity who's basically an entire dimension and exists outside of time vanishing into dust be like?
Oh, and re: hero vs. hero fights: those are a Marvel Comics staple, always have been since their very first crossover between the Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner. It's just those fights used to last only a single issue and not have any lasting consequences, not take up half a year's worth of stories and leave numerous beloved characters dead.
Edited by RavenWilder on Oct 6th 2019 at 4:01:32 AM
Actually, there's something else that occurred to me. What if, when the Snap went off, instead of disintegration everyone faces like a big encompassing flash of light and everyone in each half finds everyone in the other half is gone. So basically two different simultaneous realities and canons and we cut back and forth between the two perspectives as they each deal with half the universe just...disappearing like that. I imagine trying to snap everyone back into one reality would uh, not pan out as well as desired.
Self-serious autistic trans gal who loves rock/metal and animation with all her heart. (she/her)Edited by alliterator on Oct 6th 2019 at 5:04:38 AM
In addition to this, the conflict in Civil War I was a result of a decades old status quo of tensions between superheroes and the government/civilians. By contrast, relying on precognitives for help has never been a source f controversy in the Marvel Universe. The X-Men have relied on at least three different precogs (Blindfold, Layla Miller and Destiny) and one of Spider-Man's allies is a precog named Madame Web. The irony of Carol's stance in Civil War 2 is that she had her life indirectly and unintentionally ruined by one of the aforementioned precogs.
In fact, I remember Tom Breevort said in an interview that he believed Carol's stance made the most sense but since they felt there was no drama in her just simply being unambiguously right they turned her faction into a bunch of puppy-kicking fascists. Which is what they also did to the pro-reg side in Civil War 1. A major problem with Marvel's events in recent years is their inability to understand that both sides can have a point without both being detestable people.
Edited by windleopard on Oct 7th 2019 at 12:19:27 PM
Yeah that's kind of a big problem.
Like Tony & Carol are supposed to be headlining comics as MC's so why would ya wanna turn them into Super Hitler?
Are we supposed to keep thinking of them as heroes after they've done horrible things with no remorse?
Edited by slimcoder on Oct 7th 2019 at 12:26:46 PM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."I guess they figured the verbal and physical beatdowns he got afterwards were supposed to make up for it. Subsequent writers have really been playing up Tony's mental issues since Civil War.
It didn't help that in the main book Tony was portrayed a lot more sympathetically while in other titles that tied into the event he was far more cruel.
Part of the issue is also that superheroes are written by superhero writers. These are not people whose talent lies in weaving complex gray-and-gray morality stories. These are people who write stories about good guys beating up bad guys. That's why one side of the conflict inevitably winds up being Nazis, even if they weren't supposed to be Nazis and were actually meant to be right.
People don't sign up to write Spider-Man or Captain America because they want the character to be standing around having philosophical debates. They sign up to write Spider-Man or Captain America so that he can beat up bad guys.
When the premise of Civil War was being deliberated in the writers' room, J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote Amazing Spider-Man at the time, was quoted as asking, "So Iron Man is a supervillain now?" And that pretty much wound up being the mindset behind the first Civil War event. Because that's how superhero writers write superheroes.
Captain America: Civil War benefit, I think, from having a creative team that works in the film industry. Film, as a medium, has a lot more experience with writing complex plots about fallible characters, none of whom are entirely meant to be right.
Superhero comics aren't that story. In superhero comics, the superhero's meant to be right. That's the point of writing a superhero, and it's why purely hero v. hero conflicts tend not to go well in comic books, but can demonstrably be done much better in film.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 7th 2019 at 6:37:50 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

If you want to show hero vs. hero fights, “charity tournament” is a much better idea than “poorly constructed conflict that makes everyone look bad” or “alien superbeing forces gladatorial games”.
Because of the low stakes, they wouldn’t be going all-out, but the answer to “who would win?” is always “the author’s favourite”, so that’s okay. It would still let you showcase heroes using their powers against each other in creative ways.
Edited by Galadriel on Oct 6th 2019 at 6:15:46 AM