I didn't see it that way myself (I don't even remember that joke).
Eh. Like I said, Whedon ain't worth it.
Anyway, here's a MV of Save The City using clips of The Avengers (2012):
I mean if it came from Tony that would actually make sense, Tony is a jackass so of course he gets his jollies mocking his teammates.
But Nat, discounting the joke itself her making it makes absolutely no sense and her familiarity to him doesn’t justify it unless she included herself in the joke as well ribbing in a self-deprecating manor.
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."Star Wars - in comparison - ran into the same problem with the "nobody" thing. TLJ felt the need to canonize the nasty "Rey is a nobody" backlash that came from caustic fans slamming the character for not being related to their favorite characters, specifically so film could try and go "she's a nobody, but she doesn't have to be a somebody to be a hero, so shut up."
But that didn't work. All it really did was establish that, in-universe, people considered Rey a nobody, and more troubling that coming from humble beginnings meant you were a nobody in the Star Wars universe, etc. The conversation shifted from "does being from humble beginnings make Rey a nobody" to "Rey's a nobody, but should she be?" when neither question really should've been validated anyway. Which led to TROS making it worse by going "of course' Rey's not a nobody, look she's related to this guy" and... oof.
All of which could've been avoided if they'd just let the dumb meme continue to be a meme and not actually put it in their canon story. Canonizing memes for the sake of discrediting memes is a bad idea. Ignoring memes if they don't actually line up with the story is better.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 27th 2021 at 6:42:29 AM
Man, that music video just makes me feel weirder about Rogers.
See, I feel super weird about the musical because, like, the Battle of New York was less than a decade ago. An alien invasion split the sky open, wreaking catastrophic damage upon a major metropolitan population center, killing a bunch of people and nearly inflicting so much more harm.
So it feels weird to see a jazzy, upbeat musical about the Battle of New York because that was basically MCU 9/11.
But while that feels weird to think of, it's actually not unprecedented. There is, in fact, a Broadway musical that's sort of about 9/11. It's called "Come From Away" and tells the story of a Canadian town who took in thousands of travelers that became stranded in their town after the 9/11 attacks resulted in the closing of American airspace.
So it feels weird to see a big Broadway performance about New York being blown up by aliens less than a decade after said event, but it's not so unbelievable as it seems.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Are we talking about the joke where she asks his doctor:
"You sure he's going to be okay? Pretending to need this guy really brings the team together."
Right after he was fairly badly injured? To me, that's Nat expressing her concern that her friend was injured.
My read on the Whedon movies was never that Hawkeye was useless, but rather that he was professional and didn't need handling or manipulation (and wasn't suited to handling or manipulation of others) and so got less focus.
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Upbeat media about terrible events is one of the ways writers and audiences cope with those events (especially when there's a political message to be had over it, and the whole dramatic as a symbol is a thing we've been seeing in a lot of MCU stories recently), so it makes sense.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 27th 2021 at 6:51:45 AM
The Star Spangled Man With A Plan is a prime example of how to allude to a character’s pop culture reputation (namely Captain America being perceived as a dorky propaganda mouthpiece) then subverting it and having the character prove their own worth. Meta-narrative isn’t inherently bad, it’s risky but can pay off with a deeper respect for the character if it’s used for more than to reference a meme.
Side-note: Technically it has been over a decade since the Battle Of New York. Battle of New York was in 2012, Hawkeye is set in 2024, so that'd be 12 years after those events.
What fascinates me about Rogers: The Musical is the hypothetical behind-the-scenes of it. I'm imagining the production company debating if it's tasteful to depict the Battle of NY and the controversy around it, some boycotts. And then there's the fact it's a musical about a guy who's a armed forces project called "Captain America", so the Pentagon would likely try to have a say in the musical. Hell, maybe they'd even encourage it given the recent debacle where the Pentagon-sponsored captain america murdered a guy in cold-blood on live television and then was hauled to a senate trial. Pentagon just like "Rush this musical out of the door as fast as possible, we need to distract people from the fact our hand-picked successor for Cap was a colossal disaster."
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I don't think the MCU's done with Clint. I know there was some speculation that this would be Clint's Passing the Torch swan song, and would end with Clint acknowledging Kate as a better hero than he's ever been and giving her his name and all that.
But that's not what happened. Kate's reward wasn't "Becoming the TRUE Hawkeye, the hero Clint should have been," or something. It was acknowledgment from Clint as his partner and equal. The show sets up Kate as a character, but doesn't actually retire Clint as a character. So we'll probably see him around some more.
I know he's technically retired, professionally. But he's been professionally retired since Age of Ultron. The MCU keeps finding reasons to bring him out of retirement, and I wouldn't expect that to change so long as the actor's willing to keep coming back.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I rather enjoyed this series (then again, I enjoyed most of the Phase IV series so far). Nice combination of action and fun, and it was nice to see Yelena again (especially since it seems replacement Black Widow is developing the same relationship with replacement Hawkeye as their predecessors).
One point that troubles me a bit though was how the show kept going back and forth on the Tracksuit Mafia status - one second they were Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains, the next they were mooks to be slaughtered by the dozen. The owl bit particularly annoyed me on that regard, as it was a moment clearly played for laughs, but which involved the two main characters, who had been going on grand speeches on what a hero was, react with complete apathy to people condemned to A Fate Worse Than Death. What Measure Is a Mook? indeed...
Apart from that I'm mildly peeved that actors from the Netflix shows keep popping up in the MCU while none from AoS do, even though I know this has zero chances of happening, but this is irrelevant.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.Yeah, the tone is really weird in that regard, because usually if you want your heroes to go on killing sprees, you don't humanize the faceless goons.
Okey Dokey!I still think the shrunk Tracksuits will show up someday as the world's smallst thieves, bro.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."That entire bit is a weird one, as humans aren’t meant to normally be able to survive the shrinking process, that’s why Ant Man has a suit.
Firing a Pym Particle at someone should kill them.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranYeah, that bit made the whole bit with the shrunken Tracksuits more disturbing, if anything.
But again, it's all about the branding and how it's presented. This phenomenon has happened before in the MCU, by the way. For example, the lighter tone of Thor: Ragnarok completely drowned out the implications of Valkyrie being a slave trader and the Hulk totally enjoying the killing of unwilling slave gladiators who fought him in the arena (who are somehow shown, primarily through Korg, to be bunch of joyful guys rather than terrified knowing their inevitable fate should they fight the Hulk).
Or in how Clint's supposed bad deed is just a number, namely "5 years of a killing spree" without any explicit depiction of extreme violence (aside from that Endgame scene, which is not much more violent than your average MCU fight scene), not to mention the general tone of Hawkeye is pretty light-hearted.
Edited by dmcreif on Jan 5th 2022 at 1:13:45 PM
Okey Dokey!Ant Man 2 kind of opened the gates there by having it that you could just be in a shrinking vehicle and be just fine
Maybe they were specially made but it’s a precedent
Forever liveblogging the AvengersI don't think it has ever been stated in the films that shrinking a human without protection would kill them, and, in fact, we see ants being constantly enlarged without any apparent trouble. So maybe Pym refined his particles over time so that people will only need a suit if they plan on changing sizes frequently over a short period of time.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.It's basically stated in film one as to why the Ant-Man suit is vaccuum sealed and has its own oxygen supply, but in subsequent films they shrink people without suits semi-regularly and nobody dies. It's the same with the (also stated in film one) tidbit of the Pym Particles shrinking things but retaining their mass (hence small scott being able to rumble with full-grown people), which is ignored in the very same movie (Hank carrying a shrunk tank in a keychain, which would weight a ridiculous amount).
Pym Particles just work however the Hell they want in both comics and the MCU. I've basically rolled with "Pym Particles have In-Universe variable and volatile properties and thus its effects can be changed depending how they're manipulated" as a way to bridge those gaps of logic.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Yeah, but why did she say it? Why are there jokes about Hawkeye being useless in the film in the first place? Why is it a topic that the writers chose to have actually come up between the actual characters, even in jest?
Nat is affecationate towards Hawkeye, but the audience isn't Nat. They're going to see a "Hawkeye's useless" joke and take it as a "Hawkeye's useless" joke, because, at the end of the day, it is a "Hawkeye's useless" joke.
Which only serves to make the inclusion of the line more nonsensical, not less.
It's worth remembering how extremely fan referential Whedon's Avengers movies were. He was often subverting or lampooning for the sake of a joke, or a wink, or a nod regardless of whether it really fit what the characters were doing (see also: the "he's adopted" joke). Given his style, and the fact that "Hawkeye's useless" was kind of a meme at the time, his usage of it as a Running Gag is pretty standard for him.
He was basically giving a wink to the meme, even though it actually existing in-universe didn't make an awful lot of sense.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 27th 2021 at 6:29:36 AM