I just want the Guardians movies and Thor if it's still going in the wacky outer space direction. Marvel's cosmic stuff is absolutely batshit. Capeshit that could be air brushed onto a 70s guy van is great.
The first GOTG and Thor: Ragnarok are by far the best capeshit Marvel has ever produced. Black Panther was good too, but mostly because of Killmonger.
Westerns were the original capeshit. Before we had superheros beating up poor people, westerns had gunslingers killing natives, fighting outlaws, and defending the property of land owners.
I’d argue that spaghetti westerns were better at portraying the west than stuff like John Ford’s westerns.
I quite liked the first Captain America, since it took a decent amount of jabs at the military recruiting complex and I support Nazi punching in any film that has less than 20 min of Winston Churchill screentime.
Honestly I'm surprised my cap in mcu. I didn't read his comics or watch or know shit about him before they started the movies and stuff so I always assumed he was just straight boot licker propoganda and sometimes he is but I do like seeing his dissallussionment with america throughout the series and how he of all people ends up running from the gov.
What if we give billionare superpower, allow them to use military grade armor and technology, to still be a billionare during the day, but with a double identity put a mask at night and brutalize poor people who had to resort to petty crime because economic injustice and corruption?
Don't worry though, our billionare capitalist superheroes, or even working class superheroes who brutalize these poor people don't kill. They just leave them with broken ribs and internal organ damage in a country where healthcare is not free, so the poor people would be even more straddled with debt, on top of going to prison. They had it coming, shouldn't be poor and do crime in the first place.
"What if we gave cops superpowers" was done in Falcon and Winter Soldier and
spoiler
the guy already murdered an unarmed guy in a fit of rage.
The show still does the lib "your worldview is correct but you're methods are bad" thing but it's not completely awful which makes it better than most.
Honestly a brilliant character moment because it's so realistic to what a person like that in a situation like that would actually do.
That whole last episode was a ride and a half.
(I think it's just gonna end up being Budget Homelander tho)
Came at the right time to cause God damn was I bored with the other episodes.
Idk if I'd say unarmed as he was also had the syrum (right or was what's her name holding out?) But that's irrelevelt to your point.
I think he maybe did but at that point they both had the serum so it was even at that point.
Have you ever seen the twitter thread that compares Taylor to Hillary Clinton? I'm scared of presenting good books to too many libs.
Hahahaha I have not. Depending on your opinion of both women, comparing Taylor to Hilldawg can either be cringe or funny. Hillary would probably fit much more to Ward's protagonist:
spoiler
___::: Victoria is much more likely to justify herself through law and legitimate channels. She is much more confident and ambitious (not in the reluctant way Taylor limited herself too). I do think it's funny twitter libs thought comparing Hillary Clinton to a crime lord who seizes power through any means she deems necessary was a good thing. I haven't finished Ward quite yet, so no endgame spoilerinos. But what have you thought about that?
This is the thread I haven't finished Ward either, still on X.4. I actually dropped it and got more invested in Pale , by the same author. Its set in the same universe as Pact, which is my favorite paranormal/modern fantasy setting by far. But you don't need to read Pact to check on Pale, they are completely independent stories.
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The issue with the thread apart from the obvious lib shit is that, if Scion is Trump, then Taylor isn't Hillary. Teacher would be Hillary, as he is trying to "fight" Scion using the establishment that lead him to power, but only to attain power for himself in a plausibly more malicious way. What Taylor did doesn't fit in electoralism in any shape or form. She jailbroke her own brain, ruining her own life and pushing mankind to disarray to defeat an evil at all costs. In this same metaphor, she would be more akin to a Violent Revolution than any electoral option, as she refused to concede.
Oh I loved Pact, my favorite magic system/world building for an Urban fantasy. I even attempted a reread on it, though on the 2nd time I don't think I got much farther than Toronto. Will definitely get to Pale once I finish Ward. Twig didn't do it for me, but it was also the first WB book I read as it was coming out. I prefer to read them when they're all finished personally. I fell off track with Ward several times.
I stopped reading partway through and need to get back to it. Is the sequel good?
imho the sequel is much less endearing with a worse protagonist(first chapter spoiler:)
spoiler
She's a cop
but still very interesting. A friend of mine absolutelly loved it, so tastes may vary. I find that best story from the author is Pact. Its a work of genius, ridiculously creative and well-thought. If you like we paranormal stuff and symbolism in the slightest, I think you'll enjoy it. https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/bonds-1-1/
That's a good insight. Makes sense to me, I've always gotten super-bored watching police procedurals - even funny ones like Psych. And that was long before I hated cops. I can't stand to watch MCU movies, I just get bored af.
I'll never be more angry than when I got tricked into watching Lucifer because I thought it was a show about the devil running a nightclub but actually it's a show about FUCKING COPS???
Although it did give me access to a fantastic bit of:
"Yea there's this show called Lucifer, it's about the personified embodiment of all evil abusing their powers to ruin people's lives.... And then she teams up with the devil and they solve crimes and shit like that."
Is fringe considered a police procedural? They work for the FBI but weird shit happens but I don't know
Only good semi police procedural I've seen was limitless and it was cancelled too soon.
not only that they should just be bankrolled by fucking stark or something give me at least a scene where the falcon goes to a pawnshop and tries to sell his dumb wings to pay rent
every marvel movie people of other countries should be terrified of captain america not because he is a bad person but just out of the implied fear of someone calling themselves that
As cool as that was, Falcon is very much being framed as the acceptable centrist among violent killers. While the show acknowledges that Karli and her people have a legitimate axe to grind, they're quietly avoiding pointing out that any lives of oppressors lost in their struggle are casualties in the Flagsmashers' acts of sef-defense against social murder; The system that is already oppressing and killing their people.
any lives of oppressors lost in their struggle are casualties in the Flagsmashers’ acts of sef-defense against social murder.
You only get to assert this once you have won the war. If you lose you were an unhinged terrorist the whole time and deserved being put down like a dog. Dems the breaks.
Eh. I mean, any revolution is just as much a war of propaganda as it is a physical war. Sure the media's going to tear into you the entire time (16 negative WP Bernie articles in a single night, anyone?), but an organized effort of brigading to expose and undermine the media's inherent bias needs to be a part of building dual power. That's one of the reasons I frown when people pass off any revolutionary acts of violence as just adventurism, you need those efforts to hold up as models for people that your brigading should be taking advantage of. Normalize, normalize, normalize. Heighten the contradictions and hold up alternatives. People need heroes and role models so they can shape their goals and see the possibilities.
The problem is propaganda is decentralized you no longer have only one or two narratives to choose from anymore. Weather your a radical Maoist , a weird k hive person, a lolbratarian, or a neo nazi someone somewhere is telling you exactly what you wanna hear.
Well yeah, but we don't choose shit. We generally follow the path of least resistance which is how we fall into pipelines. But we can also take advantage of same sort of techniques that social media companies are using to create these echo chambers. I've talked about this before, but for years I was running thousands of random facebook pages that would gradually introduce subversive concepts congruent within the pages' themes. And that was a very basic, "dumb" way of doing it. People are putting their entire life online and companies are using that data to manipulate their behavior, part of the fight needs to be organize and use that data in a manner that undermines those pipelines in a way that frees people.
Yeah. It becomes evident in season 2. It is just cynical
that's what happens to captain america after his dad gets cucked by the sitting prime minister of pakistan
I've been watching these with a socialist eye now, I noticed how much the Marvel movies (and other properties) talk about "the job." "This is the job." "It's all part of the job." Usually this is reference to hard choices and death.
I think that's part of why modern superheroes feel so much like cops. I liked it when superheros actually had other identities and jobs. By turning the superheroism into "the job" it justifies what they do without question. They are the superheros, it's their job. Gone are the days when superheros wore masks because they were supposed to be anonymous. Comic books were always problematic, but at least they used to have the message that anyone can be a hero. Now it's so cynical, the message is "leave things to the superheroes it's their job." Our job is to watch and consoom and hope they make the right decision. A very scary parallel to why people trust Bill Gates and Elon Musk to "save the world" instead of governments.
Invincible has been good so far and I love the almost scooby doo style animation like what Harley Quinn did. Seems to be going a Boys route with the gore and corrupted "heros" aspect while also having a lot of the regular kid spiderman parts. It's very gory at times but feels less edgy (not that I dislike the edge in the boys)
I like it too, and my favorite part is that I find that it's one of the best uses of gore in anything I've ever seen. I remember feeling like the first episode was kinda lukewarm and just vaguely interesting, until the last scene:
spoiler
The whole episode is, like you said, kind of Scooby Doo-ish, just your typical tepid animated X-Men violence, no blood, low stakes, nobody's really going to die unless it's a very special episode Then Omni-Man arrives and slaughters everyone in excruciating detail, and the show just kind of grabs your attention. This happens very often in later episodes, and the result is that the more extreme violence has a very strong shit just got real feel. Whenever blood starts spraying all over the place, you start paying very close attention, because you know that it's no longer just a superhero sparring match, but true violence. Contrast this with The Boys, which, while certainly a very good show, has the violence turned up to 100% from the very beginning, which kind of dampens the effect in a way.
I don't really know how to explain it in more accurate terms, but I find that the violence in Invincible is simply much more impactful than in most other stuff I watch.
i watched the first episode and 1) the animation kinda threw me off and 2) it was complete run of the mill super hero startup shit. young guy finds his powers.
like at the very least there should be some info in the first episode that things aren't so bland and cut and dry.
like I know things will change, but from an objective story-writing perspective, it was an incredible weak episode imo.
I did like The Boys, so hopefully Invincible picks up.
