*blows up moon* “How do you like that, Obama?!”
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 10th 2021 at 9:39:19 AM
I may be the odd man out to say that WandaVision was the weakest out of the three, simply because sometimes it just tried to be more than it is without truly delivering. And because of the inconsistent messages.
I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that the final episodes were heavily restricted by COVID measures.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian![]()
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Wandavision kinda faceplanted, yes, but I found that Falcon and Winter Soldier was trying to cover too many topics at once and ended up doing all of them poorly, combined with trying desperately to avoid going into any meaningful detail about the mid-blip status quo.
It also helps that most of Wandavision and Loki were actually fun. I looked forward to watching them, Falcon and Winter Soldier was okay, but I mostly watched it out of obligation.
Yeah, nothing really beats F & WS underestimating the gravity of its message, completely losing that message towards the end, and actively having a conclusion that undercuts the rest of the story as delivered. Supposedly the last two were due to losing two episodes in the middle of the season, but the first thing would've been a problem no matter what.
Falcon actually feels like a throwback to the days of the Iron Man movies. It has an almost Techno-Thriller vibe to it. Overall, I like it. Message-wise, it has a few hiccups though I do think it has some very good stuff in it.
Wanda Vision sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. It's not a superhero story, really. And I don't mean that in the sense that it's a hybrid between the superhero genre and another genre (like Captain America 2 being called a political thriller), I mean "if you're looking for superhero action, look elsewhere".
It's more in the purview of something like X-Files, Control, or the SCP Foundation (Actually was in an SCP-themed tabletop RPG with virtually the same plot, before the show came out). Calling it surreal horror would be an overstatement, but "Supernatural Surrealism" is probably right.
Leviticus 19:34For me, Winter Solider was just simple, cool-to-watch Superhero fun with sympathetic characters, villains included.
Loki was also a nice Story, with very deep characters studies.
Whereas WandaVision could've just used some of the good old 'Sometimes less is more' advice.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianYeah. Between the three FAWS being dumb superhero action makes it the best one in my book, even if it underminds its own message. Loki was better about its message but was dragged down by focsing too hard on its plot in the end. And this show just stopped being fun for me by the Halloween episode, if not earlier. Only reason I finished it was because I felt obligated to.
My opinion has always been that this show utterly demolishes Loki and TFATW put together, but the preference for the latter two among a great deal of the general public never really surprised me. Wandavision is a product that genuinely surprised me as far as Disneeyplus bets go. Compared to most superhero fair, in both films and tvs, it is incredibly bold, experimental and wordy on a level comparable or even beyond even the boldest superhero shows up to this point (by which I mean the netflix shows). I never really thought Disney would go for something this off-kilter out of the gate with their serialized MCU offerings.
On the other hand, it being this off-kilter (and yet not off-kilter enough, with the more traditional climax) would always alienate people. TFATW is political thriller super-soldier crowd-pleasing shenanigans while trying to grapple with some surface-level themes (and failing miserably if you ask me) and Loki is a fandom darling having wacky adventures in a psychodellic trip through dimensions. They both are a lot more traditional and crowd-pleasing while still trying to graps at some higher themes (but both obviously much more shallow in this regard than Wandavision). Wandavision was always fated to be comparatively niche since it's basically a surrealistic psychological domestic drama with a superhero cape.
Wandavision is so far the odd man out of the Disney+ shows, being significantly bolder than any of the other three (and Hawkeye is its extreme opposite, being really just a fun romp action comedy). I really hope future Disney plus shows bring back the experimental spirit of it (Moon Knight in particular could really go with this, given the surrealistic run of Jeff Lemire that I adore) but I wouldn't hold my breath over it.
Edited by Gaon on Dec 12th 2021 at 8:50:40 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I haven't watched Loki—I doubt I ever really will—but between Wanda Vision and TFATWS, I definitely prefer Wanda Vision. I think it stumbled towards the end (ending this series that was notable for being notably very unlike traditional MCU fare with a very traditional and cliche 3rd act CGI fight was really not it) but overall I had much more fun watching this show than I had with TFATWS, and I just think TFATWS screwed up its ending even worse.
When we're done, there won't be anything left.The sitcom homages go a long way to making The Hollywood Establishment (tm) favor the show (Hollywood likes stuff about Old Hollywood, the nostalgia is part of the splash appeal of films like La La Land and Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood), but having just dragged myself through Loki, and agreeing that the CGI Kamehameha-off finale was lame, I also agree WV is the show I'd rank at the top.
Mainly because it was a character-driven narrative that experimented with genres rather than just be what we expect from the MCU. I don't believe it was really great TV (Emmys 2021 war flashbacks), but it's definitely the one I'm most likely to rewatch.
I was amused that all three shows kinda struggled with the ending, funnily enough. Loki struggled the least, but the fact its climactic episode is a very misfired comedic version of its Big Bad essentially having to sit down and explain the plot to the audience for 40 minutes was a pretty questionable choice, pacing-wise.
Hope this was just whiplash of COVID-19 and Hawkeye manages to buck the trend.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."True, but what I think caught my eye is that they fail in differerent ways. Wandavision struggles with a kinda tacked on too traditional third act (a problem also found in BW and Shang Chi). TFWATW doesn't, its problem is that its third act completely mutilates the themes it was addressing and makes dumb creative choices, while Loki's is if anything just a pacing problem where they ended up back-loading so much exposition that it composes effectively the entire climactic episode.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."TFATWS is the only show that I've come to despise due to its complete bungling of its messages and themes and severe mishandling of its characters. In the end, I found the politics that TFATWS tried to sell absolutely odious Enlightened Centrist (tm) nonsense.
Edited by Nightwire on Dec 12th 2021 at 10:11:57 AM
TFATWS has a really severe problem where it can't actually meaningfully explain why the villains are bad on philosophical merits and has to manufacture a reason for why the Flagsmashers suddenly go super violent and off the rails that doesn't address their actual points or goals in any meaningful way.
The closest we get is "a world without borders would be nice, but it doesn't work that way after the Blip ended" which...holy shit, that is an unintentionally horrifying piece of worldbuilding that no one involved with the MCU wants to address. It kinda implies that during the Blip, national borders stopped mattering and people really did try and come together to make it through, and when everyone returned from the Blip, the people returning forced the world back to the old status quo, not caring about how it fucked over everyone who hadn't disappeared. But the show can't actually meaningfully address that because "national borders are a hindrance and insisting on the modern capitalist status quo is net harmful for humanity" is a far left position that TFATWS is completely incapable of refuting, so it just tries to ignore it. (Also, Madripoor is an utterly baffling caricature of Singapore/Hong Kong that's clearly been created with zero understanding of what Indonesia is actually like)
Wandavision at least was willing to show that the actual return was terrifying for most people and it handled character nuance mostly pretty well. We understand why Wanda doesn't want the Hex to go away, but we also understand why the Hex is an unambiguously bad thing.
Goddamn, the blip worldbuilding is really messing with me now. The way it's ended up being framed means that there's no real way to avoid the issue that half of the world's population was horribly traumatized, had to live for five years desperately trying to pick the pieces up, and then all the vanished people come back, fine and dandy, and demand things go back to the way it was before they left. People make jokes about like, what it would be like to have been blipped and come back to find your spouse married to someone else, but the return would be really traumatizing for a lot of people who weren't blipped because it's five years of tragedy and grief and suddenly you're confronted with like almost four billion people who are angry you moved their things.
Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2021 at 9:45:59 AM
I wouldn't say that exactly. Some of the stated cultural movements were good, but it was also established that grief and trauma were effectively crippling the planet and the birthrate had dropped to an extremely low number.
Thanos was fixated on resources and didn't care in the slightest about the psychology of the situation, assuming people would just bounce back and establish a resource-plentiful paradise or whatever. There's also the question of cascade failure where cutting the population of one part of a biosphere can lead to the rest of it collapsing almost completely.
I also have to note that there's zero indication Thanos ever bothered to check back in with the planets he attacked. Like, showing up at a random planet, murdering a random half the population and leaving isn't gonna lead to a paradise. It's either going to break the culture completely or lead to them rebuilding on a war footing to go after the lunatic who tried to genocide them. Note that Thanos apparently didn't bother going after advanced cultures until he was actively going after the Infinity Stones. Like, you think his plan would have worked on the Sovereign? They'd just pour literally all of their resources into trying to kill him.
It is actually extremely frustrating that nothing in the MCU wants to address the many enormous flaws in Thanos' plan, despite a lot of them being blindingly obvious.
Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2021 at 10:59:59 AM
None of the cultural movements were only possible with a reduced population.
Rather it’s like the current and forever pandemic and employee concessions like work at home or stronger social safety nets were always possible and it took dire circumstances for those in power to begrudgingly allow them
And just like TFATWS as soon as it looks like things are back to normal they tried to roll it all back
So teal deer, it’s not about Thanos really
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TFATWS was the most superhero-y, I'd say, of the three. The heroes had some stuff they were going through, which is where the personal themes and emotional connections of the story came from. But also there was a bad guy doing a Bad Guy Thing who needed to be thwarted, which was by and large unrelated to the stuff the heroes were going through.
"Spider-Man is in a difficult transitional period of his life and needs to figure out how he's going to adapt to having his girlfriend live with him. But also Doctor Octopus is trying to blow up the moon, so let's do something about that." That sort of thing.
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