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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Yeah I would've much preferred if they went with the Tragic Villain route (but ultimately still fundamentally wrong), rather than the Heel–Face Turn route. That was not earned at all.
You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the midI hate that "Walker DID NOTHING WRONG" is a valid takeaway from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. But. Like. They forgot to actually write a resolution to his conflict. He just stops sucking and abruptly becomes a good guy because reasons, so you absolutely can infer that he was always a good guy and that nothing he did was inappropriate.
The series does plenty of implying that Walker is a problem. Sam and Bucky openly talk about what a problem he is. But the closest thing they actually wrote to a payoff of all the tension and build-up is Sam and Bucky mugging him for the shield - which the show suggests is only going to make him worse before he suddenly whips around and is the Bestest Guy Ever.
(I mean, he also executed a defeated and surrendering person, but the show ultimately takes his side on that and kills all of them off. So far as the writers were concerned, the Flag-Smashers are basically orcs. Chaotic Evil monsters who must be exterminated, every last one.)
So "Walker did nothing wrong and everyone just made a big hubbub about it because they didn't like him" is a valid interpretation of the show. And I hate it. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is such a fucking mess thematically.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I'd say John Walker was a short-tempered and flawed guy, who became a short-tempered and flawed guy when he became a Super-soldier.
The only thing is that he killed a person who was surrendering, but the John Walker without powers could very well have done the same.
*2. I would say it's the opposite, the show wanted to show us the Flag smashers as tragic figures, and Walker as a class of Hate Sink.
In other words, Falcon did his best to talk to Karli and resolve things peacefully, while he was rude to John, every time he wanted to say hello.
Edited by JoLuRo075 on Mar 22nd 2022 at 10:18:25 AM
Well, the Super-Soldier formula enhances everything. Good and Bad.
We know Walker wasn't proud of what he did, and saw becoming Cap as a way to do some real good.
So I guess it's a question of if you think he had any good in him at all, and that the formula boosted that enough that in the moment, he let that side of him take control, or if you think that all the worse parts of him are much stronger.
I can buy that many believe the latter. John definitely needed something more to convince people he would make the choice he did in the finale. I think they focused so much on trying to line him up with his comic book self (jackass, but well meaning jackass who will do the right thing when it counts) that they didn't think about whether people would buy into it, or if it fit the story they were telling.
One Strip! One Strip!I still suspect something happened that got lost in the COVID reshoots. There is a very glaring jumbling of transition for basically every character between episode 4 and 6 that feels like something must've gotten Thanos-snapped out of the story (and we know the show was originally meant to be eight episodes long, not six). The ship-rebuilding scene was well-done (because that was one of the things shot near the beginning of filming and thus mostly intact) but it does feel like it got popped in rather awkwardly with the events leading up to it feeling missing somehow.
Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 22nd 2022 at 4:17:00 AM
Pfft, superheroes don't answer for crimes they commit. If they did, several Avengers would be in prison right now. They've done much worse things than an extrajudicial murder.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 22nd 2022 at 10:28:28 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
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I agree. I believe a producer or somebody said that the show didn't have much issues with COVID affecting the story, but everyone's character arcs just jumps randomly at the end to a conclusion. Some of that build up was definitely left out.
Edited by Hawkeye86 on Mar 22nd 2022 at 1:45:48 PM
You and I remember Budapest very differentlyHonestly, Karli seems to me to be the worst managed character than John.
John Walker was a flawed person that we had to see as a flawed person.
While Karli was a person who committed a lot of horrendous acts, who we had to see as a kind of tragic villain.
Those things were supposed to be handled by the Sokovia accords, which was ruined by the fact that the representative was Thaddeus "I'm going to start a battle in a university that's full of people" Ross.
Edited by JoLuRo075 on Mar 22nd 2022 at 10:53:47 AM
I agree that every character is mishandled (partly due COVID, I'm figuring) but I don't think there's a character in the MCU more incoherent than Walker. He literally goes from a obviously sinister scene in Episode 5 to being a bantering dashing hero in Episode 6 with 0 in-between. It's madness. Karli is practically shakespearean compared to his development.
Karli's actually kind of a funny thing where the show is so inept at its own themes that the finale ends up accidentally proving her right in a lot of regards (e.g. her argument that Sam is naive for thinking that they won't be uncerimoniously executed the moment they surrender, which is exactly what happens but Sam just does not give a shit).
PS: Westfield isn't remotely comparable.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Sam suffers from the same problem that Matt runs into in the Netflix DareDevil series: He's supposed to be The Paragon, but part of being The Paragon is that your unyielding moral stance is supposed to influence the way the story fucking goes. The Paragon is meant to inspire people both in and out of universe. The lines he draws in the sand are supposed to ultimately be rewarded.
Instead, Sam and Matt exist in a story where their politics and the story's politics are directly at odds with one another. They wind up being naive idiots who stand around spouting platitudes while all the murderers around them solve the plot, because the writer apparently doesn't actually believe that their ideologies can work.
TFATWS directly pits Sam and Zemo against each other ideologically. And Zemo wins that argument. The Flag-Smashers are thoroughly exterminated, every last one. Sam tries to appeal to Karli and is consistently rebuked, until another villain shows up to take Karli out and save Sam from the consequences of his foolish naivety.
The show goes out of its way to tell us that Sam is a goddamn fool for believing that people can be better. And that's not how you write a Captain America story. Remember Steve's dramatic speech to S.H.I.E.L.D. about giving everything for what's right near the end of Winter Soldier? Tonally, TFATWS (and Netflix DD) are like if that speech ended with the non-Hydra S.H.I.E.L.D. officers storming the room and arresting him. Because fuck you, Steve; there is no better nature to appeal to!
Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 22nd 2022 at 11:35:47 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I think the only parts of Falcon & Winter that works for me is the scenes of fixing the boat and with Ishrah Bradley. Everything else kind of made me embarrassed to have shown it to my girlfriend.
Oh that line where Sam reminds people he's a social worker, because I like reminding people he's a social worker.
Isaiah Bradley was fantastic in a way that ultimately wound up hilarious. Like, the ending is so proud of Sam proving Isaiah wrong. And all the people watching the show are like, "Did he, though?"
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
There was one guy I used to follow online who was really pissed at how Bradley got an entire area in the Smithsonian dedicated to explaining his story including how his death was faked, even though he specifically wanted to be left alone out of fear of his life being put at risk.
Edited by MatthewWayne on Mar 22nd 2022 at 12:01:29 PM
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."TFATWS was a show with political elements that either didn't fully realize that fact, or decided to only treat them at an extremely surface level only. I think Karli and the other Flag Smashers getting killed was more about the MCU not wanting a bunch of Super-Soldiers in prison, just waiting to bust out for a future appearance and was less about how that action affected the plot of the show we were actually watching.
You and I remember Budapest very differentlyDid it include the part where his death was faked? I thought it was an acknowledgement of the experiments that were done on him prior to that, though it's admittedly not very clear.
Pretty sure that was Spellman, but he's got a history of being a Lying Creator taking the fall for Disney as damage control (not entirely his fault but still), and we know of at least one character who went from being in 4 episodes to 0.5. IIRC he also said the deleted subplot was not related to COVID, but again, see Lying Creator.
Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 22nd 2022 at 3:10:22 PM
I checked the source I had, and the quote tweet he did seems to have been deleted. So I can't tell for sure.
But just by including information about him for the general public to know about him would definitely put the government back on his case. Sure, they might not arrest him again, but the fact that he's still a super soldier definitely puts him at risk, no?
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."That depends on your philosophy. Some people are very adamant about the whole "the ends don't justify the means" thing. As they see it, the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined entirely by the action itself, not by what it accomplishes.
That only goes so far though. Like, if you choose not to retaliate against someone who is actively trying to kill you or others and is never going to stop, the "morally correct" action to not fight back starts to border on stupidity after a bit. At least that's how I see it.

You could write a master's thesis about how mishandled Walker's arc was.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."