Discussion Comicbook / CivilWar

In the third case, the only arguable point is which side was "good" and which side "bad", but it is a fact that there were two sides, and that those characters move from one side to the other

Personal like/dislike of the storyline is different from facts that can be supported in the story proper. Now, "Writers Are Stupid"...I agree, that is an extreme opinion. However, "Pro-Registration Is Evil" is a fact that can be supported by incidents in the main story, as written by Mark Millar.

Yes, because superheroes have never fought in populated areas before. And certainly not the guys who were actually doing the training.

The sad fact of the matter was that Nitro is basically a result of invoking Fridge Logic into superhero stories. The New Warriors started the fight nowhere close to the school and, if I remember correct, Nitro had recently gotten a power upgrade that none of them could have known about. The idea that the New Warriors should be blamed because they attacked a guy who can explode is like arguing that the Hulkbusters are to blame for attacking a guy who—on his worst day—has demonstrated the ability to cause seismic events across continents.

Superheroes usually fight in populated areas because they're responding to a crisis. They're reacting and on the defensive.

That was not the case here. These villains were hiding out. If the heroes had left them alone, they would have spent the rest of the morning hiding out.

Now, I'm not saying they shouldn't have tried to find a way to bring these guys to justice and I'm not saying they're entirely accountable for what happened.

But look at the situation. They were filming a reality television show. Like most "reality" shows in real life these days, they were engineering a live event to get ratings. Hence, they hunted down supervillains and attacked them without giving much thought to when and where they would be engaging them. These were villains who's powers lend themselves to collateral damage (at least Nitro's do). Whether they knew about Nitro's new power level or not, they had to know from experience that these kinds of fights result in unintended damage.

They may not have blown up the bus, they may have been unaware of the power upgrade Nitro had gotten, but they started a superpowered fight in a suburb to try to bolster their ratings. They did this for personal gain. And a bunch of innocent children died.

That's why Completely Missing The Point doesn't fit. There is a case to be made for holding Speedball's crew at some fault. People weren't arguing about Nitro's role because that was a given. Condemning supervillainy is obvious and agreed upon. It doesn't need to be debated. But condemning the negligence of irresponsible superheroes is more controversial. That's why it was given all the attention, because that was the part that needed to be debated.

The problem with that entire argument, again, is that superheroes have attacked supervillains in well-populated areas. Hell, the Avengers themselves have tracked down supervillains to the middle of Manhattan and attempted to fight them. They fought Korvac in the middle of a house. Not to mention, they knew where the Masters of Evil were then. When you're dealing with superpowered individuals, how do you know what they're going to do next? If they hadn't tried to fight them in Stamford, what else could have happened between now and the next time the Master of Evil showed up? (Answer: It's later revealed in Wolverine that Nitro was going to blow up a populated area anyway, because Damage Control had paid him to do so.)

The problem is, blaming the New Warriors for being "irresponsible" doesn't wash. Remember, Nitro tried to run, and Namorita barely caught up to him and tried to get him to surrender. Unless you had a teleporter on your team, there was no way that battle was going to end well in any sort of populated area, but if they'd waited too long, it would have been to late anyway.

How does it not "wash"? They started a fight for the benefit of a TV show. Kids died.

Whether or not you're ultimately right about the facts of the situation, it looks bad to the general public in the Marvel Universe. Its not a case of missing the point. At worst, its a case of not yet having all the facts. Its not missing the point when the public looks at this situation and says "You know what? Heroes should probably be trained and held to some kind of standards if they're going to fight crime."

I think part of the reason it doesn't wash is because far worse has happened in Marvel. Sometimes on cosmic scales, which of course isn't necessarily going to affect a great deal of the American population, but many of which has happened on US soil and on far greater scales. Someone on the page actually brought up Kang's invasion and subsequent slaughter of several thousand people (at least) who populated Washington DC. Now while I personally did not see this storyline, if it did happen, then this leads more credence to teh theory that this issue seemed forced. After all. Kang is far more powerful than Nitro was believed to be at the time. One troper points out, and rightfully so, that Nitro wasn't able to kill Daredevil at ten feet prior to this storyline. And unlike The Thing (whom Nitro had also run into well before Civil War), DD has very little in the way of protection against that kind of power.

So I presume the general thought behind the idea not washing boils down to the question "if Kang invading and slaughtering a good percentage of DC's population didn't cause a registration act, why did Stamford?"

Of course, I may well be wrong in my interpretation of King Zeal's comment. ^^;;

My apologies. At the time I wasn't aware of the discussion page. I was still new to the place, and I wasn't trying to cast doubt on it. I was genuinely curious as to who she was meant to be an expy of. I'm STILL not sure to this day since it was never mentioned.

There are some people out there who like Civil War. One of my friends is one of those people.

Because, if you follow mostly the main storyline and ignore the Author Tract side issues of other writers who decided to tell before showing, its a logical story. This is basically what would happen if we had superheroes in the real world.

The negative reaction comes from fans who, whether they'll admit it or not, don't want this much realism in their stories (and there's nothing wrong with that, its all taste.)

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. The main storyline WASN'T logical. Maybe the CONCEPT, when applied to the real world(i.e. superheroes recieving training) would be(and even then, I don't think it would be simple), but the story itself(i.e. the main book by Millar) seem to have a huge Author Tract of its' own...i.e. the government is bad, Anti-Reg is good. Being the cornerstone of the whole crossover, it makes sense that this was the reason why the other writers wrote the Pro-Regs in a negative light.

And again, logical? When friends who have served in wars with each other suddenly start fighting at the drop of a hat(Cap and Ironman)? When the Pro-Reg seem to escalate the battle with the Anti-Regs unnecessarily(building clones, building prisons, setting traps) as opposed to simply showing the benefits of registration(after all, the Anti-Regs weren't threats to public safety)? And lets' not even go there with how stupid the whole plot's beginning was...a SUPERVILLIAN blows up a school, and yet SUPERHEROES are the only ones to blame?

This wasn't the drop of a hat. This had been building for years. The Muggles were always uncomfortable with superheroes, especially mutants.

The humans living in this universe don't really know who the good and bad guys are as a general population. Some of them have encountered some of the good guys and bad guys themselves but apart from that they have to rely on the press (and as we've seen from Spiderman, the press doesn't always correctly label the good guys and bad guys either.)

To add to the confusion, there are plenty of times heroes have gone rogue or villains reformed, sometimes its doppelgangers, robots, possessions, but most of the American public in the Marvel Universe would tell you at the end of the day that they don't know how much of that is true and how much isn't. They just know that there are a lot of people running around unidentified with powers getting in fights taking things, causing damage, or at best making morally questionable calls. There are a few they feel pretty confident in like the Fantastic Four and usually the Avengers but thats a small group out of the thousands of people running around with powers.

And the two aformentioned groups ARE already public. FF's identities are public knowledge and the Avengers had, until shortly before this event, been registered with the UN. So why shouldn't they all right? That's how the public would feel.

Tony saw that there were already rumblings in the works about a superhuman registration act. He believed that if he didn't take the lead as a connected man in both the political and superhero communities, that something worse would have come down the pipe. He was trying to do damage control.

What didn't make sense was Captain America's reaction. He went rogue immediately. What was Tony supposed to do?

It was not "building for years, etc." All the things you've posted so far are things mentioned in interviews of the creators, or from various reviewers of the crossover. The reason why the things you've posted doesn't work is that...well, the Marvel Universe is a fictional universe that has existed for nearly fifty to sixty years now. The trait of the public being uncomfortable with superhumans is a well-known staple of the Marvel Comics, but is has never been to the level you're implying at all.

Humans in the MU seem to have a basic working knowledge of the good and bad guys...thus, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers are universally adored, and even Spiderman is respected do a degree. If anything, confusion(for the reader) arises from how can a human tell the difference between a mutant and a superhuman...why treat Mister Fantastic with respect while hating Cyclops, simply because of the circumstances of his birth?

CIVIL WAR failed because of continuity and the lack of logic.

Continuity in the sense that(1). Masked superhumans battling supervillains has always been the case, from the 1960s origins of the universe(and even before then, in the Timely/Atlas eras) to now; (2). There have been various Superhuman/Mutant Registration Acts over the years, one even shot down by Reed Richards, with good reasons. Just take a look at Wikipedia for examples. (3). Nitro's murderous explosion is minor in comparison to the hundreds of supervillain attacks that had claimed lives before then, from Kang's attack on Washington, D.C., Magneto's attack on NY in Planet X...thousands more.

So why now? Why should both readers in the real world and fictional humans in the MU suddenly worry about superhumans being unmasked, trained for the government, held accountable, etc.? Mark Millar's story doesn't even try to convince the reader on the sudden necessity of government regulation of superhumans...and to be honest, he couldn't anyway. The traditions and tropes of superhero fiction are too set in stone. The police and government entities are often seen as cumbersome and weak, thus an outside force has to exist to battle the superhuman threat.

And logic and CIVIL WAR? Man. Besides the obvious of NITRO, a superVILLIAN, causing the horror but being ignored, ruining the concept before it is even out of the gate, we have Ironman simply focusing on capturing Cap and crew, who aren't even THREATS to the populace. And my goodness, let's not even get on the pointless use of clones, interdimensional jails, and "Cape Killers" to capture non-threats.

Please don't argue about Tony doing "damage-control". A badly-written story is a badly written story, and it is pointless to argue about illogical characterization.

I was going to respond to your points point by point because some of them are worth responding to but when you say "don't talk to me about 'damage control.' A bad story is a bad story." I see that there's really no point in discussing this with you.

Actually, I completely misread it, so yeah remove it. Please.

I wasn't really thinking at the time. See, I knew that Tony was Director of SHIELD, but the writing made it seem like Miriam Sharpe was going to be involved with it, and I didn't think about it at all after that.

Yeah.